Why the arrest of Derek Chauvin will never be enough

The American police are being weaponised against innocent black people.

  

 His murder

George Floyd was brutally murdered on the streets on Minneapolis on just an ordinary Monday.  Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George’s neck for a total of nine minutes, he decided to persistently kneel on George’s neck despite several distressed cries of ‘I can’t breathe’. Causing George to die at the scene.

George’s suspected crimes were not at all heinous, he was arrested simply because someone had suspected him of using a counterfeit bill in a grocery store. Shortly after, the footage of George’s death circulated all over the internet and infiltrated platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

National outrage soon followed after the incident, consequently the four police officers have were removed from their positions. The Mayor of Minneapolis Jacob Frey has since called for Chauvin’s arrest and also stated ‘He [George]  would still be alive today if he was a white man’.

The mayor was right, George was killed because of the colour of his skin. 

 The man behind the headlines

George Floyd’s lifelong friends often described him as the ‘gentle giant’. A former bouncer at a downtown Minneapolis restaurant, Floyd earned the name ‘Big Floyd’ due to his towering height. According to the bistro owner Jovanni Tunstrom he described Floyd as ‘always cheerful’.

In his younger years news station KIIIT reported that Floyd may have played American football the for Texas A&M University-Kingsville in the mid-1990s.

Floyd was just an ordinary citizen like any other American. He too was living through the Coronavirus pandemic and had recently been made redundant after the lockdown rules were enforced. By all accounts, George’s death seemed senseless.

 

The police as a weapon 

 

Police brutality against black people is nothing new, it is no American secret. Everyone knows about how black people are disproportionately murdered by the police.

 What comes as a shock, is the blatant weaponisation of the police force by white Americans. There has been so many social media videos of white Americans calling the police on their black counterparts for the most trivial of things. No black person has seemingly been able to escape the phenomenon as even children have been victim to these rogue 911 calls.

 

Amy Cooper has recently become the poster child for this new wave of racial aggression. A video of her surfaced calling the police on Christian Cooper because he had asked her to follow park guidelines. Christian, an avid bird watcher simply informed Amy that her dog should be on a leash in a wooded area of Central Park called The Ramble. Christian stands 6ft away from Amy and does not raise his voice in the slightest. Amy, on the other hand shows no sign of being threatened. She  creeps closer and closer to Christian. Yelling in his face ‘I’m going to tell the police that an African American man is threatening me’.

The call is even more shocking, we see Amy repeatedly shout and emphasize ‘African American’ and shrieks hysterically down the phone, despite Christian still standing 6ft away.

The video also sparked a global response, as in that moment the viewers are left to question themselves… ‘Did Amy hope what happened to George would have happened to Christian?’. All over something as miniscule as putting your dog on a leash.

The Amy Cooper video particularly put shockwaves through my system. Because it showed me that you didn’t have to be a apart of violence to have your life threatened in America. You just simply had to be black.

Although Amy Cooper subsequently lost her job, I still didn’t feel reassured in the slightest. What scared me more was that Christian Cooper wasn’t you average Joe. He was well established, he attended the prestigious Harvard University and was a former editor of Marvel Comics. Yet just in a matter of moments, Christian’s life had been reduced solely by the colour of his skin.

Why won’t Chauvin’s Potential arrest be enough?

The murder of George Floyd is not an isolated incident. The fact of the matter is, sometimes life and death can solely depend on the colour of your skin.

Something has to change.

I decided to start with myself, what could I do to help stop innocent black people from being murdered?

I started to look within my sector, as an aspiring journalist I felt compelled to write about George because I do feel the media has a big role to play in the negative perceptions of black people. 

Even recently, Actor Mark Oosterveen highlighted the issue of black misrepresentation in Twitter a Times article reporting about Britain’s Cocaine use. 

They decided to use Black Drill artists in their headline image, despite 94% of Britain’s Cocaine users being white.

This is not unique, if you just take two minutes out of your day to see how Africa’s response to the Coronavirus Pandemic is being reported. You will see far more coverage on speculative statistics, counting on the ravaging of the continent.

 The media tends to focus far less on the successful Senegalese scientists who have been developing the innovative 10-minute Covid-19 test kit. Which not only has the potential to give people rapid test results but is also cost effective. Their kit could make Coronavirus testing more accessible worldwide.

Although to some headlines such as these seem trivial, they do have the chance to significantly impact black lives. The National Geographic recently reported an estimated  20 million black Americans have been subjected to police traffic stops. Despite statistics showing that Black Americans are no more likely to commit traffic lines.

This isn’t uniquely an American problem either. The Ministry of Justice reports that in the years 2018-19 white people tended to be stopped and searched far less than black people.

The misrepresentation of black people undoubtedly has consequences, something has to change.