The latest reminder that police officers around the country routinely deny Black people their constitutional rights comes from the U.S. Justice Department. This time, it’s about Minneapolis, Miss., the site of a police officer’s video-recorded murder of resident George Floyd.
More than three years after Floyd’s brutal death and the global protest movement that sprang from it, a June 2023 Justice Department report found that Minneapolis police use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force in their interactions with civilians, and they discriminate against Black people.
The report echoes Justice Department findings, released in March 2023, about police misconduct in Louisville, Ky., where officers killed Breonna Taylor during an unlawful search of her home in March 2020, and about police in Ferguson, Missouri, in a report released in March 2015. An officer shot and killed Michael Brown, who was unarmed, during a 2014 encounter.
A screenshot of a video shows former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck as Floyd cries out in pain, stating that he can’t breathe. 23 ABC News – KERO
The Justice Department found that Minneapolis police also discriminate against Native Americans; routinely use excessive force, including “unreasonable use of tasers”; violate the rights of citizens exercising their First Amendment right to free speech; participate in racially discriminatory stops against Black people and Native Americans; and discriminate against people with serious mental illnesses.
As a geographer and scholar of African American studies, I’ve written about racist policing for The Conversation before. So, I struggled to find a new way to examine the topic this time around. And that led me to the enduring question: Why is racial discrimination by police so common in the United States?
Policing in Black and White
Justice Department reports, complaints from citizens and dozens of academic studies painfully point to racial discrimination by police as a common practice.
The evidence is overwhelming. Countless studies have shown that Black people are routinely stopped by police and live in racially segregated communities that police heavily monitor. These conditions have led to Black people being overrepresented in arrests for violent crime that