The protests started in Minneapolis on 26 May, the day after a police officer killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes.
Police officers accused of assaulting or killing black people in the US are seldom punished.
According to the website “Mapping Police Violence”, which collects information from the country’s “three largest, most comprehensive and impartial databases”, black people are three times more likely to be killed by police in the US than white people.
Acts of police violence are not just happening in one part of the country, and they’re not just happening to rioters and looters (which is not to say that violence excuses police brutality, but that officers have been caught, repeatedly, disturbing the peace, rather than keeping it).
These protests, and the response of the police, have shown to the whole of the US that black Americans have been telling the truth about police brutality.
