Is it so different? On this one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police, the country has still to come to grips with how fine the line is between popular sovereignty and authoritarian crackdown.
Europe’s last dictator, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, on Sunday sent a fighter jet to intercept and force down a commercial airliner carrying a prominent opposition journalist he wished to arrest and who knows what else. But that is another story.
One year after Floyd’s murder that sparked mass protests from coast to coast, former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted of the crime. But little else has changed the overall rot of American democracy and a slide towards authoritarianism.
The now-former president claimed last year that the entire city of Portland was ablaze from ongoing protests. (It was not.) His fellow Republicans and right-wing media alleged entire cities had been destroyed (they had not) along with “our institutions, our civil society.” The now-former president had riot police deploy tear gas and flash bangs to clear peaceful civil rights protesters from Lafayette Park last June so he could stage a photo-op with a bible. (It’s little comfort that he did not wrap himself in a flag that time and carry a cross.) Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas afterwards published a New York Times editorial recommending the president invoke the Insurrection Act to put down the protests.
The election of Joe Biden as president last November seemed to offer a reprieve. Then came the drumbeat of “Stop the Steal” from the outgoing president. Then the storming of the Capitol by his cult of personality. Both reject democracy except as decoration. Then came the burst of election suppression legislation in state after Republican-controlled state. And never-ending, nonsensical and unprofessional election audits designed to do nothing more than create the public perception that democracy cannot be trusted. Oh, and threats against lawmakers.
At ground level, little change is evident one year later. The New York Times last weekend published a series reflecting on the impacts of Floyd’s killing and the deaths of other Black Americans at the hands of police for seemingly minor legal infractions or none at all. “Accountability for Mr. Floyd’s murder is not justice,” wrote Dr. William Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
Zak Cheney-Rice at New York magazine recounts the September 19, 2019 arrest of 6-year-old Kaia Rolle. Kaia and her mother Meralyn Kirkland are immigrants from the Bahamas. Kaia suffers from pediatric obstructive sleep apnea that leaves her prone to falling asleep anywhere, and to irritability and tantrums. Kaia was placed in zip-ties and hauled to Orlando’s Juvenile Assessment Center after a tantrum, mug-shotted and charged with simple battery for kicking a teacher during an outburst. Six years old and terrified.
“They have ruined her life over something that was 100% preventable,” Kirkland said recently. “She’s still a loving child, but she’s not as fun and loving the way she once was. Before, she saw some good in everything, and nothing used to bring her down, but now she has to bring herself out of despair.” The Kaia Rolle Act is working its way through Florida’s legislature. It would prevent the arrest of children 10 and younger.
It should never have happened. We should be better and smarter, but we are not. Charges were dropped, the arresting officer fired, and her record cleared. Meralyn says Kaia experiences night terrors and is in treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder:
The real concern is not Kaia’s reintegration into schools. It’s how her fear of the police manifests “15 years from now — she could have an encounter with a police officer that triggers her.” Kirkland has seen the videos of police slayings flooding social media in recent years. “The police could pull her over for running a STOP sign. And it could cause her to speed off or something that could cause her to be shot.”
Since then there has been a year-plus of pandemic, economic dislocation, political instability, and still more police incidents. Some deadly even after all the publicity surrounding the Floyd killing.
Cheney-Rice observes:
Last year’s outcry, in all its dizzying complexity, marked an American rebellion of unusual scope and intensity that coincided with a confluence of social factors that might never be replicated again. But one year later, even early signs of progress have begun to acquire a sour taste — a federal police-reform bill, now stalled amid partisan disagreement; a wave of cities whose commitment to slashing police budgets fell far short of their rhetoric. Minneapolis public schools severed their relationship with the city’s police department the month after Floyd’s murder — only to replace it with a cadre of “public safety support specialists,” more than half of whom are former police, security, or correction officers.
What, if anything, it will change about everyday policing in the United States is far from apparent. Last year’s fire, and the sense of catastrophe that fed it, was not isolated to that uniquely combustible moment — the pandemic that fueled it, the economic crisis that shaped it, the reviled president who oversaw it — but a constant state of emergency. In recent months, some officials have become more enthusiastic about denouncing death at the hands of law enforcement. We will be tempted, as time passes, to relent and embrace the seeming wisdom of reflexive moderation — even though the reforms they’ve offered will stop neither the killings nor the quieter forms of violence the police inflict. Even what is arguably the farthest-reaching provision of the federal George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — which would end qualified immunity and its protection of officers from civil liability for wrongdoing — is akin to a fire-insurance payout after one’s house has already been burned to ashes.
I wish I had better news.