Police officers in the United States kill three people a day on average. Last year there were 1,096 homicides. The figures come from analyzes carried out by The Washington Post and The Guardian; the official indicators of the FBI limp, to a large extent, as the local police forces are not obliged to report the actions. In any case, the staggering figure means that US armed agents kill more people in a month than those of England and Wales combined in 20 years, for example.
Most American police fatalities fall during a shootout. But it is the homicides by beatings or by strangulation that – especially if there is a photo or video – cause the most commotion and unleash the greatest clamor, first in the streets of the country and later in its institutions. It happened after the murder of the African-American George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis agent, who plunged his knee into his neck, in May 2020, and it happens again now as a result of the beatings to death, by a group of uniformed men from Memphis by young black man Tire Nichols.
Parliamentarians, lawyers and rights advocates are calling on Congress to take legislative action to curb police brutality. Given the limited scope of the laws and decrees promulgated in recent times in this regard, the lawsuits focus on the recovery of the so-called George Floyd Law of Police Justice. The bill was introduced in Congress almost three years ago, obviously after Floyd’s death, and although the Lower House approved it thanks to the Democratic majority at the time, it later stalled in the Senate.
The ambitious bill would ban strangulation techniques, limit search warrants, strengthen officers’ liability for racism and other civil rights violations, withhold federal funding for local forces that fail to carry out similar reforms, impose a national database of police misconduct, would make lynching a federal crime, limit the sale of military weapons to police, and give the Justice Department the authority to investigate abuses by any police officer.
Tire Nichols’ family lawyer, Ben Crump, was one of many who yesterday called for approval of that project. “We will be ashamed if we do not use this tragedy to finally pass the Floyd law,” Crump said after asking President Joe Biden to pressure Parliament for such a reform: a request that the black caucus of Congress also plans to make live to him.
Democratic senator and chairman of the Upper House Judiciary Committee, Richard Durbin, joined the proposal, but said that the reform should go beyond the Floyd law. The text “is positive but insufficient,” he said, “since we need a national debate on responsible, constitutional and humane police action.”
The general outrage at the images of the fatal beating of Nichols, for which five police officers are accused of murder and a sixth was fired yesterday like his colleagues, may favor the reform in question. But it will be necessary to see if the Republicans, who now hold the majority in the House of Representatives and in their day opposed certain points of the Floyd law, agree to facilitate it. At the moment they do not want to limit the action capacity of the local police because, they say, this would create more insecurity.
But that doesn’t seem easy in a country where a traffic violation can already cost you your life. Especially if you are black, as the statistics also say.
