The white supremacy-based policing system in the United States, under which minorities have been subject to unjust treatment for years, needs to be addressed, Jeanne Mirer, the president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), told Sputnik
GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 08th June, 2020) The white supremacy-based policing system in the United States, under which minorities have been subject to unjust treatment for years, needs to be addressed, Jeanne Mirer, the president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), told Sputnik.
The United States has been facing violent anti-racism protests and riots since last week following the death of an African American man, George Floyd, in police custody. A video of the arrest showed a white police officer pressing his knee onto Floyd's neck for at least eight minutes while the African American man lied handcuffed on his stomach, repeatedly saying he could not breathe. Floyd's case is yet another such incident when an unarmed black US citizen died in police custody in recent years � other notable deaths that sparked public outrage include Eric Garner, who died in July 2014 from a chokehold applied by a New York City police officer, and Michael Brown, who was fatally shot six times by a white police officer in Missouri in 2014.
"The US law enforcement for many years has been based on the system of white supremacy, and current ongoing systemic racism is coming from the fact that the police have always been used to make things comfortable for white Americans ... There's a whole concept of policing that has to be addressed, which is making the world comfortable for white people in the United States. That's the way in which white privilege has manifested itself in terms of policing," Mirer said.
The lawyer said that other areas were affected by white supremacy, too.
"It's just like right now what we're doing with, you know, making black and brown [people] go to dangerous work sites for all the essential services, like meat packing and things like that, where they're paid very little and they're subject to a lot of dangers," Mirer explained.
The IADL president recalled that she had represented a lot of African-American police officers in Detroit and they were focused on protecting the community.
"They had a different mindset than a lot of police who feel that they're there to just beat up the community to keep them in fear and in line," she argued.
Mirer suggested that one of the reasons why the public reacted in such a way to Floyd's death was the shocking video of the police officer kneeling on him.
"In this case, because the tape was so visceral, it traumatized a good portion of the American public, to see the police officer do this in virtually cold blood just sparked a kind of reaction that other instances haven't. Maybe Rodney King [violently beaten by Los Angeles police officers during his arrest in 1991] did because of the video of his beating, but this was killing and him begging for his life, it was traumatizing. So I think that made a difference with some of the other [cases]. It really laid bare what had he been existing for a long time. It's this sense of entitlement of the police officers to do what they want with black bodies," Mirer said.
The IADL president addressed the recent attacks by police on journalists during the ongoing George Floyd protests � dozens of press workers, including a Sputnik producer, Nicole Roussell, and a RIA Novosti correspondent, Mikhail Turgiyev, have been injured while reporting on the ongoing civil unrest in the US. A CNN crew was detained while providing live coverage of the protests. According to Mirer, the fact that police feel threatened by the media exposing their violent behavior is one of the reasons behind the abuse of journalists during the anti-racism demonstrations.
"Part of the reason is that the police feel exposed. Everybody has a camera now, and so it's like they can't hide behind. And they just don't want the exposure. Also, [US President Donald] Trump refers to the press as fake news whenever it says something that he doesn't like, so there's some hostility to the journalists. But we've seen that a lot. If you don't want a bad story to come out, who do you go after? The people who were, who are reporting on it," the lawyer said.
Amid the escalated riots, troops from the National Guard have been deployed to multiple cities to aid law enforcement officers, and Trump has even threatened to deploy the military to tackle the issue. Mirer said Trump's call violated both the Insurrection Act, the Federal law that allows the president to deploy military and National Guard within the country in special circumstances, and the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits the US military from conducting civilian law enforcement activities beyond military bases.
"He [Trump] doesn't have control, the states really control the National Guard. But his call is a violation, to call protests an insurrection is very dangerous, to ask your military to be in the streets is a violation ... He has no right to do that," Mirer said.
The lawyer expressed hope that demonstrations would result in "at least the path to some more systemic change" of policing in the US.
Addressing charges against the police officers behind the killing of Floyd, Mirer said that the victim's family should seek "the charges that will be provable, because if you overcharge somebody and then you can't make it out, then they can get away."
The charges against Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Floyd's neck during the arrest, were elevated to second-degree murder on Wednesday, and the three other officers involved in the incident were arrested and charged with aiding and abetting murder. Mirer said that the charges were "probably the right ones."
