Officers who kill Black people are rarely arrested or charged

Evidence

In the days after the killing, a viral video of the murder sparked widespread outrage, and yet none of the officers responsible for Floyd’s death were arrested or faced criminal charges—a pattern that felt, to many in Minneapolis and beyond, painfully familiar. Nationwide, police officers are rarely arrested or charged when they kill, and Black people are significantly more likely to be killed by the police than white people. Public attention to this issue had been growing since 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, igniting a major uprising in Ferguson and protests from coast to coast. Wilson was never criminally charged for that killing. Two years later, in Falcon Heights, less than ten miles from where Floyd was killed, a thirty-two-year-old Black man named Philando Castile was shot and killed during a traffic stop. No officers were found guilty of any wrongdoing, even though that tragedy was livestreamed on social media and provoked a national outcry. And just two months before Floyd’s death, a twenty-six-year-old Black woman named Breonna Taylor was killed in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment when white plainclothes officers, searching for evidence against a suspected drug dealer, broke into her apartment in the middle of the night with a battering ram and sprayed her home with bullets. Again, no officers were held accountable for the killing. All of these killings were officially justified, according to law enforcement and public officials, by fear—fear of Black people who were viewed as threats by the police. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 339

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader 1619 reframing thesis that police violence is rooted in an origin story where Black people are perpetual threats.