A toy handgun, untaxed cigarettes, a fake $20 bill. It's often trivial items that lead to the death of black Americans at the hands of police. Read more from aaronlmorrison.
In this June 1, 2020, photo, people gather near the Cup Foods grocery store where George Floyd died in Minneapolis. Floyd was accused of using a fake $20 bill to buy cigarettes from the grocery store. His story is similar to that of other African Americans who died at the hands of police over minor offenses.
In Minnesota, across the nation and around the world, outrage turned into action as protests grew, propelled by the reality that African Americans become martyrs of the Black Lives Matter movement over such trivial activities — in circumstances where their rights are discarded, their liberty deprived, their lives devalued. And where they’re far more likely than whites to die at the hands of police.
A week after Floyd’s death, Miski Noor, an activist with the Twin Cities-based Black Visions Collective, visited the area around Cup Foods, the grocery store at Chicago Avenue and 38th Street where an employee called police to report a man who allegedly bought cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. “We do our community a huge disservice if we continue to focus on the call and not how police officers have a reckless disregard for the lives of black and brown men,” he said.
The Movement for Black Lives is behind a push for local communities to defund police departments nationwide, and reinvest in struggling black communities to address economic inequality and disparities in education and health care. “There’s so many nickel-and-dime laws around that we really have to review what we have, what we need and then get rid of some of these things,” said Rizer, who is white and previously worked as a patrol officer in Washington state and as a federal prosecutor in California.
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