The trial for the death of George Floyd begins on Monday

For 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the still police officer Derek Sauvin was kicking the 46-year-old African-American George Floyd on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis. At the same time, another police officer, Alexander Quing, was stepping on Floyd’s feet and a third, Thomas Lane, was handcuffed. On the sidewalk, next to the police vehicle, he was stopped. “Please, I can not breathe,” Floyd begged. Those were his last words.

When George Floyd lost consciousness, the police did not do the slightest thing. Sauvin and the others released him only when the ambulance arrived, two minutes after Quing found that Floyd had no more pulses. His death was later announced by the local hospital. George Floyd was unarmed. According to the report of the competent police department, he looked drunk. Police say they stopped Floyd for a search following a call to a man trying to use a counterfeit $ 20 bill. According to what they say, when he was asked to get out of his car because it matched the descriptions, he “physically resisted the police”. When he finally got out, they threw him down and tried to drag him to the patrol car. Moves that turned out to be fatal. In those last moments, George Floyd was asking for his mother and begging her not to die.

The summer of demonstrations

Floyd’s case is not unique to the United States. His tragic death, however, sparked major solidarity rallies again for the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2014 after the instant death of a shot by Travon Martin, an unarmed African-American teenager. So in the summer of 2020 thousands of people took to the streets of major cities in the US in response to Floyd’s death. Initially it was a peaceful march, but in some cases there were violent incidents with exchanges of gunfire, robberies and vandalism. In many cities at night clashes with the police became routine, with cars on fire. US authorities were on high alert as then-President Trump spoke provocatively of “domestic terrorism”.

Similar mass protests took place in many countries, sparking public debates about racism, police violence and the colonial past: from the United Kingdom and Belgium to France and Germany. According to David Elcott, a professor of sociology at New York University, the reasons for the historic wave of protests following Floyd’s violent death are many: “In many parts of the country there were many reasons for a large section of society to realize that something it goes completely wrong ”. Elkot parallels events with a chemical reaction. “You have a liquid and you first add a drop and then two, three. It does not change anything. “But then, in the fourth drop, the liquid suddenly changes color completely,” he says characteristically.

An additional reason for the outcry was the video, which recorded Floyd’s last moments. “It was scary to watch. And it feels like Sauvin was doing it again, “said Kenneth Nan, a law professor at the University of Florida. The same video shows that Floyd was calm and in no way provocative towards the police.

Will anything change?

The great protests and commemorative marches of George Floyd became the first, difficult summer of the pandemic. This may have intensified their tension, Nan said, because people wanted to get out of their homes on the streets by all means. However, despite the strong protests, which in some parts of the United States reached the limits of the uprising, not much has changed since the police action in the United States. “It simply came to our notice then. In the United States, police officers are trained as if they were at war, “said Nan. But in my opinion it will take time for such a change.

source: Deutsche Welle