Today is the anniversary of the death of George Floyd and America is still grappling with police reform and ongoing violence.
If it wasn’t for that ten minute cell phone video taken by high school
student Darnella Frazier the world would be none the wiser of what happened. How
policeman Derek Chauvin held him down and took his
life as he begged to be able to breathe. He deserved better!
Millions of people were outraged and it didn’t take long,
once that video was published on social media, for many hundreds of people from
Minneapolis around America and around the world to see how Black Americans can,
and often are, treated. It galvanised people to demonstrate in the streets and
also prompted a crisis for law enforcement and also deepened divisions in an
already racially divided country. The Black Lives Matter movement was born.
It
was the straw that broke the camels back. People could now see...in the
words of that old and meaningful Marvin Gaye song...”What's going on” what indeed is going on. Words
that were written fifty or so years ago and still have as much meaning today as
they did back then. Maybe even more so!
I have seen so many videos on YouTube of how Black Americans are treated in
the U.S. Just driving and pulled over. They are even frightened to reach for the
seat belt release in case the police thought they were reaching for a gun and
just what the end result could be and sometimes is. If I was a black man in
America I would be on guard, frightened, all the time if I were pulled over by
the police.
Also the amount of guns that many people carry, to someone like me from Australia, just seems mind boggling and dangerous but surely "the horse has bolted" now in the hope of any long term gun reform. Surely there's too many guns out there. The police are in a very, very, difficult position.
Something that was not always visible in America had a light shone on it
and that video taken on the spur of the moment caused awareness like never before
of what was happening. Elected leaders on all sides had to confront the issue of
how policing was carried out and how that power can sometimes be abused.
President Biden is today meeting with Floyd’s family and he urged lawmakers
in his joint address to Congress to send the policing reform bill to his desk to
sign into law.
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