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      Democrats propose quick reaction force in $2.1bn Capitol security bill

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      House Democrats plan on Wednesday to unveil a $2.1bn supplemental bill to enhance security at the Capitol that will propose creating a quick reaction force to guard against future threats in the wake of the Capitol attack, according to sources familiar with the matter.The proposed bill will also include the construction of a retractable fencing system around the Capitol, the sources said.Rose DeLauro, chair of the House appropriations committee, is expected to unveil the proposal to House Democrats on a caucus call on Wednesday, amid growing calls urging the adoption of recommendations made by a taskforce in the wake of the 6 January insurrection in which a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol.No lawmakers were injured during the attack, but several, such as Senator Mitt Romney and former vice-president Mike Pence had only a narrow escape from attackers looking for them. Meanwhile, nearly 140 officers suffered injuries and one, Brian Sicknick, later died after being assaulted.The proposed bill largely tracks recommendations made by retired Army Lt Gen Russel Honoré, who was appointed by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to examine security shortcomings, as well as critical flaws identified by the US Capitol police inspector general, the sources said.In the report released to House Democratic leaders last month, Honoré made a series of recommendations, including hiring more than 800 US Capitol police officers, the construction of mobile fencing around the Capitol, and an overhaul of the US Capitol police board.“We are trying to take into consideration understanding what happened, how do we account for that and what we need to do to prevent this from happening again,” DeLauro said of the taskforce recommendations after its release last month.The proposed bill, which could be brought to the House floor as early as next week, will also include a provision to reimburse the national guard deployed around the Capitol. The national guard and other security measures post-6 January is costing nearly $2m a week.Its prospects are still uncertain on Capitol Hill, with House Democrats largely going ahead with the security review alone and Republicans yet to indicate what measures, if any, they are willing to embrace.Lawmakers in both parties largely agree on the need for enhanced security but some – Republicans in particular – have been agitating to scale back the barriers encircling the area and troops patrolling the grounds despite lingering threats.“While there may be some worthy recommendations forthcoming, Gen Honoré’s notorious partisan bias calls into question the rationality of appointing him to lead this important security review,” Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, said of the taskforce in March.“It also raises the unacceptable possibility that the speaker desired a certain result: turning the Capitol into a fortress.”The issue has exposed the divide between members of Congress who want the Capitol to return to a sense of normalcy, and the concerns of US Capitol police and a raft of law enforcement agencies tasked with their protection. More

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      ‘She doesn’t want the drama’: anger as Chicago mayor comes up short on police reform

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      On 20 May 2019, the freshly elected Chicago mayor, Lori Lightfoot, delivered her inauguration speech to a jubilant audience.It was imbued with promises of fundamental change – tailored care for blighted neighborhoods, solutions to government corruption and endemic violent crime, an ambitious agenda for tackling deep-rooted faults in the city.“For years they’ve said Chicago ain’t ready for reform. Well, get ready, because reform is here,” Lightfoot, Chicago’s first Black woman and openly gay mayor, and a former federal prosecutor, said.She pledged to reform the Chicago police department, promising to “continue the hard but essential work of forging partnerships between police officers and the community premised on mutual respect, accountability and a recognition that the destinies of police and community are inextricably intertwined”.Police reform seemed like a perfect task for Lightfoot given one of her prior roles of leading the city’s special taskforce on police accountability and reform.She issued a scathing report on the department in 2016, addressing broken trust between police and community and noting: “A painful but necessary reckoning is upon us.”It urged sweeping change and backed a “widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color”.But sweeping change awaits. Almost two years into office, Lightfoot is under fire, accused of back-pedaling on accountability and reform while botching some high-profile cases involving police killing or misconduct.There’s outrage over Chicago police earlier this month killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo after a chase that ended with the boy being shot dead after stopping and putting his hands up as ordered by the pursuing officer.Elizabeth Toledo, Adam’s mother, had not been notified about his death until two days after the shooting, leaving her to think her son was missing. Lightfoot choked up while admitting “we failed Adam”.He was one in a growing record of police killing children across America, with victims disproportionately being Black and Hispanic youth.But the Mapping Police Violence project found that between 2013 and 2021, Chicago police killed more under-18s than any other local law enforcement agency in the country – at least 12.And Lightfoot last December bungled the fallout from an incident that had happened before her mayorship, where Anjanette Young’s home was raided by police who had the wrong address, guns drawn, and she was handcuffed while naked.The mayor admitted she knew about the raid in 2019, contradicting previous claims otherwise, and the city also attempted to block the video release of the raid, Lightfoot later calling the attempt a “mistake”.Activists called for Lightfoot’s resignation in both instances, and all amid a surge in shootings within city communities.Progress on police reform is close to fruitless, leaving activists, many city council members, or aldermen, and Chicagoans distrustful.“I view her as not having fulfilled those campaign promises, because she hasn’t,” said Chicago’s first ward alderman Daniel La Spata, bluntly.Lightfoot succeeded Rahm Emanuel, whose mayorship was controversial on several fronts. Emanuel was accused of an attempted cover-up of the murder of Laquan McDonald, a Black 17-year-old, by Jason Van Dyke, a white officer.McDonald was shot 16 times by Van Dyke in 2014 as he was moving away from the police.Following McDonald’s death, a Department of Justice investigation into Chicago police delivered a blistering report that found an epidemic use of racist, excessive force as well as corruption among officers.The new mayor said in 2019: “I campaigned on change, you voted for change.”But is change coming?“When you’re replacing a mayor like Rahm Emanuel – who in many ways had to leave office because he covered up the murder of Laquan McDonald – and you look at the way that the murder of Adam Toledo has been handled, you begin to see a lot of similarities,” said the 35th ward alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa.For decades, rectifying Chicago’s broken policing system has remained a vital priority.The shooting death of Cedrick Chatman, 17, by officers in 2013, and the 2015 killing of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd made national headlines, as well as McDonald’s murder.And there was “Homan Square”, a notorious interrogation warehouse used by Chicago police, which ignited international outrage after the Guardian reported in 2015 on thousands of people being illegally detained and tortured by police into false confessions.Alongside more well-known travesties, there are also thousands upon thousands of allegations made against Chicago police, according to data from the Citizens Police Data Project, a tool created to publicize allegations of Chicago police abuse, with little result.Lightfoot promised to “implement civilian oversight of CPD”, according to her campaign platform on public safety. And she vowed to produce a civilian oversight board in her first 100 days of office, but it hasn’t happened.She had supported a plan for a local law to create such a board, generated by the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability (GAPA), until she backtracked in October last year.The mayor renounced her support of the GAPA ordinance after claiming activists were unwilling to compromise or “come forward with a proposal that solves … outstanding issues”.But Carlil Pittman, a youth organizer with Southwest Organizing Project, co-founder of the Goodkids Madcity advocacy and a representative of GAPA, described an unproductive environment, saying the mayor would lapse in communication with organizers, cancel public safety committee meetings and refuse to negotiate ordinance policy.“Her words were, ‘If you’re here to negotiate [that] policymaking power be in the hands of this community commission, we can stop this conversation now’. Her exact words? ‘I’m not giving up policymaking powers’,” Pittman told the Guardian.Alderman Rosa called Lightfoot “obstructionist” over civilian oversight of police.Lightfoot, instead, has repeatedly asserted that her own ordinance on civilian oversight is coming.In the meantime, a joint proposal called the empowering communities for public safety ordinance, created by GAPA and the Civilian Police Accountability Council that would lead to a referendum on creating an elected policing oversight body, has gained support among progressives, with many calling for the mayor to support it.Lightfoot has celebrated progress on transparency, including reforms in police union contracts and a creation of guidelines to release materials about police misconduct.However, a proposal requiring Chicago to publish closed complaints against the police dating back to 1994 received her public disapproval.“She doesn’t want any of the drama that comes with the acknowledgment that for years, for decades, [Chicago] police have been operating in a disturbing and disgusting way,” said Trina Reynolds-Tyler, a human rights organizer and the director of data at the Invisible Institute, a journalism production company on Chicago’s Southside focused on holding public bodies to account.In a recently passed $12.8bn budget, Lightfoot allocated $65m to housing and anti-homelessness efforts. She also included $20m in community mental health programs and $1m for a new program to pair police with mental health workers on some emergency calls.Amid calls for reorganization she reduced the police’s eye-popping $1.69bn budget by just $58.9m.Chicago’s population of 2.6 million makes it the third largest US city, but it has the second highest per capita spending on police after New York, according to US News & World Report, and the most officers per capita, according to the Injustice Watch journalism non-profit.Yet many Chicagoans feel underprotected. And the city is still far behind on goals set under yet another indictment of its track record, a court-ordered consent decree to overhaul policing.It was issued in February 2019 but also stemmed from the murder of McDonald, with legal action involving the state attorney general, Black Lives Matter Chicago and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.Last summer, in light of George Floyd’s murder by a white officer in Minneapolis, Lightfoot was part of a group of city mayors who promoted reform while rejecting defunding as a route to transformation.The Guardian contacted Lightfoot’s office about progress of her promised reforms, but they declined to comment.But while Lightfoot’s limited results may seem surprising, a look further back shows a pattern of sidestepping real reform, Reynolds-Tyler argued.In 2002, as chief administrator of the Chicago Office of Professional Standards (OPS), a weak and now defunct police oversight body, Lightfoot rarely managed to get any cases of police misconduct prosecuted, according to the Appeal non-profit site, and backed officers in some highly contentious cases.The outlook is grim, and yet the need for transformation is as great as ever.Alderman Ramirez-Rosa said: “The people of the city of Chicago are crying out for change as it relates to our broken policing system. We owe it to Anjanette Young, we owe it to Laquan McDonald, we owe it to Rekia Boyd, we owe it to Adam Toledo to pass police reform as a first step to ending racist policing.” More

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      Tim Scott ‘hopeful’ deal can be reached with Democrats on US policing reform

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      Tim Scott, the Republican senator leading negotiations with Democrats over police reform, who insisted during his rebuttal to Joe Biden’s address to Congress the US was not a racist country, said on Sunday he was “hopeful” a deal can be reached. Scott, from South Carolina and the only Black Republican in the Senate, said he saw progress in talks which stalled last summer as protests raged following the killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans.“One of the reasons why I’m hopeful is because my friends on the left aren’t looking for the issue, they’re looking for a solution, and the things that I offered last year are more popular this year,” the senator told CBS’s Face the Nation.“The goal isn’t for Republicans or Democrats to win, but for communities to feel safer and our officers to feel respected. If we can accomplish those two major goals, the rest will be history.”The talks are intended to break an impasse over the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House in March but is frozen by the 50-50 split in the Senate.Negotiations have taken on increasing urgency following the high-profile killings of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis and Andrew Brown in North Carolina, Black men shot in their vehicles by officers, killings which sparked outrage.“The country supports this reform and Congress should act,” Biden said on Wednesday during his address on Capitol Hill.I personally understand the pain of being stopped 18 times driving while BlackA panel including Scott, the New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker and Karen Bass, the author of the House bill and a Democrat from California, met on Thursday to discuss key elements including individual liability for officers who abuse their power or otherwise overstep the line.Republicans strongly oppose many of the proposals but Booker said it had been “a promising week”.Scott, a rising star in Republican ranks, said he was well-placed to help steer the discussion.“One of the reasons why I asked to lead this police reform conversation on my side of the House is because I personally understand the pain of being stopped 18 times driving while Black,” he said.“And I have also seen the beauty of when officers go door to door with me on Christmas morning, delivering presents to kids in the most underserved communities. So I think I bring an equilibrium to the conversation.”Scott said he was confident major sticking points in the Senate version of the proposed legislation could be overcome and the bill aligned to that which passed the House.“Think about the [parts] of the two bills that are in common … data collection,” he said. “I think through negotiations and conversations we are closer on no-knock warrants and chokeholds, and then there’s something called Section 1033 that has to do with getting government equipment from the military for local police.“I think we’re making progress there too, so we have literally been able to bring these two bills very close together.”The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, placed no timeline on when a revised version of the bill would get a vote.“We will bring it to the floor when we are ready, and we will be ready when we have a good, strong bipartisan bill,” she said on Thursday. “That is up to the Senate and then we will have it in the House, because it will be a different bill.”On the issue of whether lawsuits could be filed against police departments rather than individual officers, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, said: “We’re moving towards a reasonable solution.”Scott said the issue was “another reason why I’m more optimistic this time”.He said: “We want to make sure the bad apples are punished and we’ve seen that, through the convictions of Michael Slager when he shot Walter Scott in the back to the George Floyd convictions.“Those are promising signs, but the real question is how do we change the culture of policing? I think we do that by making the employer responsible for the actions of the employee.”Others senators in the negotiations include Dick Durbin of Illinois and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, senior figures in their parties.Scott also broke with Republicans who support Donald Trump’s big lie that the presidential election was rigged, saying the party could only move on once it realised “the election is over, Joe Biden is the president of the United States”.On CNN’s State of the Union, Susan Collins, a moderate Republican senator from Maine, appeared to acknowledge Scott’s rising profile.“We are not a party that is led by just one person,” she said. “There are many prominent upcoming younger men and women in our party who hold great promise for leading us.” More

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      Conservatives fear LeBron’s influence, not his imaginary calls to violence

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      Conservatives threw a collective hissy fit over a familiar target last week: LeBron James. The NBA star had tweeted – then deleted – a post about the police killing of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio. The context of the tweet is important.People around the world were on pins and needles, hoping that the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin didn’t go the same way as so many before. Officers such as Sean Williams (John Crawford), Timothy Loehmann (Tamir Rice), Daniel Pantaleo (Eric Garner), Betty Shelby (Terence Crutcher), Jarrett Tonn (Sean Monterrosa), and the six officers who killed Willie McCoy either have not faced charges or were found not guilty after killing Black and Latino men, despite video footage of the shootings. Qualified immunity, the police bill of rights and law enforcement unions dedicated to defending officers right or wrong, means it is a near impossibility to achieve a conviction in such cases. But Chauvin’s killing of George Floyd was different. For the first time in Minnesota state history, a white police officer was found guilty of murdering a Black man. The world let out a collective exhale of relief with the hope that the verdict could be the first step towards complete accountability for police officers. However, that jubilation was very short lived. Minutes after Chauvin’s guilty verdict was announced, news spread about the killing of Ma’Khia Bryant. The timing was devastating and tragic. As a result, LeBron took his angst to Twitter and posted a picture of the officer who shot Ma’Khia, along with the caption: “YOU’RE NEXT #ACCOUNTABILITY” and an hourglass emoji. Anyone with an elementary school level of education could see that LeBron’s tweet was not an incitement to violence. It didn’t say “#GetTheStrap” or “#DoUntoThemAsTheyHaveDoneUntoUs” or “#HideYaKidsHideYaWife” it read “#Accountability”. The outrage from the right followed anyway. “LeBron James should focus on basketball rather than presiding over the destruction of the NBA,” Donald Trump said in a statement. Trump, not noted as a unifying force, continued with the statement: “He may be a great basketball player, but he is doing nothing to bring our Country together!” The hypocrisy kept coming. Trump, of all people, then called LeBron a “racist” even though he had made no mention of the officer’s race in his tweet. The former president’s toadies also chimed in. Republican senator Ted Cruz said LeBron’s tweet was a “call for violence”. Another GOP senator, Tom Cotton, said LeBron’s statement was “disgraceful and dangerous”.If LeBron had made a mistake in posting a photo of the officer, he also made changes to fix it. He deleted the initial post then explained in a subsequent tweet that his demand for accountability should have been read in context. “ANGER does [not do] any of us any good and that includes myself! Gathering all the facts and educating does though! My anger still is here for what happened that lil girl. My sympathy for her family and may justice prevail!”, he wrote. He clarified he wanted to address injustice in America as a whole. “This isn’t about one officer. it’s about the entire system and they always use our words to create more racism,” saying he was “so damn tired of seeing Black people killed by police.” He added: “I am so desperate for more ACCOUNTABILITY.”I’m so damn tired of seeing Black people killed by police. I took the tweet down because its being used to create more hate -This isn’t about one officer.  it’s about the entire system and they always use our words to create more racism. I am so desperate for more ACCOUNTABILITY— LeBron James (@KingJames) April 21, 2021
      So this wasn’t a demand for violence. In fact, allow me to illustrate what inciting violence actually looks like. On 17 April 2020, Trump tweeted his support for armed protests against physical distancing and other Covid-19 measures in three states led by Democratic governors. “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” the then president wrote in capital letters. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”. He followed up with a third tweet: “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”This prompted former acting US assistant attorney general for national security Mary McCord to write that Trump had “incited insurrection” in his own country. It was the start of a campaign by Trump that would end in a mob of his supporters invading the US Capitol.“The timeline [of the Capitol attack] tracks 365 days that built up to that moment. It shows how the president often glorified violence as a tool to confront perceived political enemies. It is no wonder the mob followed through,” said Professor Ryan Goodman, Just Security’s editor-in-chief.Goodman also highlighted Trump’s backing of his supporters in Texas, who just days before November’s presidential election surrounded a Joe Biden campaign bus and nearly forced it off the road.“I LOVE TEXAS,” Trump tweeted at the time, alongside a video of the incident. “These patriots did nothing wrong,” he added when the FBI started an investigation. Just Security also highlighted a string of “Stop the Steal” tweets made by Trump ahead of the US Capitol invasion, in reference to baseless rumors the election was somehow fixed in Biden’s favorThese are real examples of inciting violence. But the same people who are now accusing LeBron of inciting violence were silent at best during the events leading up to the Capitol invasion. An invasion after which a police officer died. Interesting that we didn’t hear much from the Blue Lives Matter crowd condemning Trump after that either. The bottom line is this: the outrage from the right toward LeBron’s tweet is disingenuous, baseless and hypocritical. Conservatives fear him because of his influence. They want to bully LeBron into silence so that they can dominate the narrative with their Back The Blue campaign, no matter what rhetoric. If he wasn’t such a threat, they wouldn’t pay him half as much attention. More

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      US lawmakers ‘making progress’ on police reform – but it’s still early stages

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      In the aftermath of former police officer Derek Chauvin being convicted of murdering George Floyd, it seems like there is momentum for the US Congress to pass some kind of police reform bill.Hearings on policing have been held and point people on both the Democratic and Republican sides are in ongoing talks. By most metrics, Congress is in a comfortable position to pass some kind of bill meant to deter police brutality and prevent another George Floyd or Eric Garner.But this is Congress in 2021. There have been plenty of moments where bipartisanship seemed high and failure seemed remote right before failure became certain. As a result, and despite the intense societal reckoning over racism playing out in America, there are few people who see the passing of meaningful new laws as a guaranteed outcome.Yet people are talking. “I’m optimistic that we’re making progress. I’m confident that I’m going to negotiate with people at the table and no one else,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said during a brief interview on Thursday.Scott’s comments came on a day where there was a flurry of movement among the principal lawmakers who will have to be involved in some kind of compromise bill’s passage. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker led a committee hearing on policing reform. The California congresswoman Karen Bass, who sponsored the ill-fated George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020, engaged in early discussions with Scott and other members of Congress.Scott had met with Bass on Thursday and said those conversations went “well” but wouldn’t elaborate on specifics or sticking points in a compromise bill.Outside of Congress, high-profile lawmakers have called for passage of some kind of policing bill.Convicting the man who murdered George Floyd was just the first step toward accountability. Join me and the @NAACP_LDF in calling your senators to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to save lives. pic.twitter.com/9v5XoFxGfs— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 22, 2021
      Joe Biden has publicly urged Congress to make another attempt at passing a policing reform bill.“George Floyd was murdered almost a year ago,” the president said in remarks from the White House, adding: “It shouldn’t take a whole year to get this done.”Republicans argued that the Democrat bill put too much power and responsibility at the federal level. So Scott, after being appointed as the point-person on crafting a policing reform bill by the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, pushed his own policing reform bill in 2020 only to have Senate Democrats filibuster it. Scott’s bill proposed to use federal grant money to incentivize police departments to use body cameras and tactics for deescalating situations.But by the end of 2020 a policing reform bill looked like it would stay in the legislative graveyard. Republicans refused to sign on to Democrats’ policing bill and Democrats viewed the Republican counteroffer as a non-starter.In March, after Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, the chamber passed the George Floyd Policing Act. But since then it’s faced ongoing opposition from Republicans in the Senate. The legislation bars law enforcement from engaging in racial profiling, prohibits chokeholds and no-knock warrants. It also creates a national police misconduct registry.But in April 2021 it’s too early to say whether this policing reform momentum is on the same trajectory as in 2020. Discussions, according to multiple congressional aides, are very much in the earliest stages.The presence of Scott at the table is important.“McConnell and the conference trust Scott generally, and on this issue especially because of his past work on it,” said a former Senate Republican leadership chief of staff. “If there’s going to be a bipartisan reform bill that actually comes together this year, the conference trusts him to come up with a compromise that the majority of them will be able to support.”Scott has signaled areas of compromise, such as on qualified immunity where responsibility would fall to police departments instead of individual officers.Talks about sticking points aren’t in full swing yet. Congressional leaders are encouraging early bipartisan talks though. All lawmakers will say, though, is that early progress is being made.“Look, I’ve encouraged Senator Booker to talk to Senator Scott and see if they can come up with something. They are making progress. I’m not going to get into the details of their discussions,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer of New York said. “But if we could come up with a strong bill that deals with this systemic bias that’s been in our police forces for far too long, that would be great. So I’ve encouraged them to talk to one another, and their discussions are making some progress.” More

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      Val Demings: officer who shot Ma’Khia Bryant ‘responded as he was trained’

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      Val Demings, a Democratic congresswoman and a former police chief, said on Sunday the officer who fatally shot teenager Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio this week “responded as he was trained to do”.In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Demings spoke about the Columbus officer’s actions and how her time as Orlando police chief informed her perspective on police reform.Ma’Khia, 16, was shot and killed on Tuesday, about 20 minutes before the former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis last year.Franklin county, where Ma’Khia was killed, has one of the highest rates of fatal police shootings in the US. In a departure from protocol, officials released body camera footage soon after Ma’Khia was killed. The video appears to show her swinging a knife at another individual. Officer Nicholas Reardon shoots at Ma’Khia, who falls.One of Ma’Khia’s close friends, Aaliyaha Tucker, told the Columbus Dispatch her friend was funny, kind, helpful and outgoing. “She’ll talk about how beautiful that you are,” Tucker said. “She was just a nice person.”On Saturday, a rally was held in memory of Ma’Khia’s at the Ohio statehouse.On CBS, host John Dickerson asked Demings about Reardon’s conduct, which would still be protected under a police reform bill, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which has passed the US House. The bill would restrain police officers from using excessive force unless a third party was in danger and de-escalation was not possible.“Everybody has the benefit of slowing the video down and seizing the perfect moment,” Demings said. “The officer on the street does not have that ability. He or she has to make those split-second decisions and they’re tough. “But the limited information that I know in viewing the video, it appears that the officer responded as he was trained to do with the main thought of preventing a tragedy and a loss of life of the person who was about to be assaulted.”Dickerson asked what Demings would say to officers who believe they are being scrutinized unfairly because of an increased focus on accountability. She said that when she spoke to officers, she told them to remember their training and that they work with human beings, and to use compassion.“The overwhelming majority of law enforcement officers in this nation are good people who go to work every day to protect and serve our communities,” Demings said. “I remind them of that. Always stand on the right side. Speak up.” More

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      Celebrating Derek Chauvin’s conviction is not enough. We want to live | Derecka Purnell

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      A jury has found Derek Chauvin guilty of all charges against him for killing George Floyd, including unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. A judge remanded Chauvin in custody after the verdict and a cop quickly cuffed the dazed defendant to carry him out of the courtroom. Chauvin will remain in jail until his sentencing hearing in two months.Presidents did what presidents do after the criminal justice system seems to work for the people who it exploits, but this time with a twist. Neither Obama nor Biden considered the verdict justice, but rather accountability and “a step in the right direction”. Obama emphasized eliminating racial bias in policing and implementing concrete reforms for change; Biden explained that the verdict was a giant step forward towards justice in America.There are two fatal flaws with these statements. The first is that reforms cannot fix racial bias in policing because police was formed as a system of racial and economic control, and remains so. As I’ve written before: if Derek Chauvin were the kindest cop in Minnesota and did not have a biased bone in his body, he still would have been able to arrest George Floyd for any number of alleged illegal acts. Because of capitalism, racism and ableism, the darkest and poorest peoples in the United States are relegated to live precarious lives where they do what they can to survive, sometimes including breaking the law. Rather than eliminating the unjust conditions, cities and the federal government send in police to manage the inequality.Additionally, even if we could remove racial bias from police, this would not solve the underlying problems of inequality and exploitation. If it did, then there wouldn’t be so many poor, white people in prison. Last week, I watched a video of three cops arresting and slamming a 73-year-old white woman with dementia who was picking flowers on her way home. She’d forgotten to pay for her groceries at Walmart. Police dislocated her shoulder, and tied her hands and feet like a hog. She repeatedly cried that she wanted to go home and they chuckled at her. If removing racial bias in police is supposed to ensure that that Black people will be treated like white people under the law, then equal protection is completely insufficient for anyone’s freedom and safety.Additionally, we cannot expect cop convictions to save anyone’s lives because prior cop convictions did not even save George Floyd’s life. Thousands of cops have killed more than 10,000 people of all races between 2005 and 2017; only 82 cops have been charged with murder or manslaughter. According to criminologist Phil Stinson, only 19 cops were convicted and mostly on lesser charges in that time period. A judge sentenced former South Carolina cop Michael Slaeger to 20 years in prison in 2017 for shooting Walter Scott several times in the back. A judge sentenced former Chicago PD officer Jason Van Dyke in 2019 to a little over six years in prison for fatally shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times. Despite the increasing convictions, the police nationwide still kill about three people a day. Just a few years ago, Minnesota convicted a cop for a murder while on duty for the first time. Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor was sentenced to about 12 years. Why didn’t all of these convictions save the thousands of people who were killed after them? Why didn’t Chauvin get the message?The celebration of the conviction as “accountability” or “justice” that will send chills down the spines of police simply doesn’t comport with the law, which protects the police’s right not to think before they act. The US supreme court opined in Graham v Connor that cops “are often forced to make split-second judgments – in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving – about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation”. This means that police currently have the constitutional authority to quickly decide when to use force. Every now and then, a conviction will slip through the cracks and people will celebrate, similar to how slave patrols were punished and sometimes sent to prison for their mistreatment of slaves. But, the underlying power to be violent will remain virtually unchanged and many more people will die because of it.Even if we could remove racial bias from police, this would not solve the problems of inequality and exploitationTragically, we witnessed this on Tuesday. As the nation awaited the jury verdict’s reading against Chauvin, a white cop in Columbus, Ohio killed Ma’Khia Bryant, a 15-year-old Black girl. According to Bryant’s family, the teen reportedly called the police for help because older kids were trying to assault her. Police arrived during the altercation and shot Bryant four times.There will be calls for justice for Ma’Khia, just as there were calls for justice in the recent police killings of Daunte Wright in Minnesota and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago. Clearly cops did not get the message about justice because all of these victims were killed in the course of the Chauvin trial. But we will never know what accountability or justice means for George, Daunte, Adam or Ma’Khia because justice requires the participation of the people impacted by it. The dead cannot participate. Convictions only provide relief for the living, and they surely do not save lives. The question is: do we want convictions or do we want to live?If we want to live, then we must continue to join, support and create social movements and protests to end policing. Police abolition is not mere police absence. It is a political commitment and practice to recreate the society that thinks it needs police in the first place. People must avoid repeating the same tired reforms in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act which does not undermine police power, and look to more transformational demands, such as those in the Breathe Act. We need abolition. Organizations like Critical Resistance, the Movement for Black Lives, Dream Defenders and various “defund the police” campaigns across the country are articulating ways to make change. We have to decide whether we have the will and imagination to join them.
      Derecka Purnell is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom More

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      'Accountability, not yet justice': how the US reacted to the Chauvin verdict – video

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      Across many US cities, there were scenes of jubilation after Derek Chauvin was found guilty for the murder of George Floyd. Crowds gathered outside the court room in Minneapolis as well as at the scene of George Floyd’s death. Loud cheering erupted from Floyd’s family members watching in an adjacent courthouse room. But the elation was tinged with wariness and concern that while justice was done for one Black person, it would not be enough by itself

      ‘Just the beginning’: joy and wariness as crowds celebrate Chauvin verdict
      ‘My brother got justice’: George Floyd’s family praises guilty verdict
      ‘The work continues’: Black Americans stress that police reform is still needed More