One day after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd, the Biden Justice Department announced it …
One day after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd, the Biden Justice Department announced it has opened a civil investigation of « systemic » issues in the Minneapolis Police Department. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the guilty verdict Tuesday in the death of the 46-year-old black man « does not address potentially systemic policing issues in Minneapolis, » a city run by Democrats for the past six decades. Garland didn’t use the term « systemic racism, » but President Biden did Tuesday in his remarks on the Chauvin verdict. Biden said the Chauvin case ‘ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism » that is « stain on our nation’s soul — the knee on the neck of justice for black Americans — profound fear and trauma, the pain, the exhaustion that black and brown Americans experience every single day. » The attorney general, in an interview Tuesday with ABC News, declared racism is an « American problem » and the nation does « not yet have equal justice under the law. » On Wednesday, Garland told reporters he was « announcing that the Justice Department has opened a civil investigation to determine whether the Minneapolis police department engages in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional or unlawful policing. » He said the investigation will be staffed by attorneys from the Justice Department’s civil rights division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota. Garland said the probe will determine whether the MPD « engages in a pattern or practice of using excessive force » and assess its « current systems of accountability » for accused officers. The Justice Deptartment, he vowed, « will be unwavering in its pursuit of equal justice under law. » Obama-Holder DOJ probed Philadelphia, Ferguson A similar investigation, of the Philadelphia Police Department, was conducted in 2015 by the Justice Department under President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. The probe found white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. That finding has been confirmed by many national studies. In 2016, for example, a Washington State University study found that police officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects, the Washington Post reported. Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald, in a presentation last August, showed that the claim that « policing in the U.S. is lethally racist » is provably false, presenting three types of evidence: the raw numbers, individual high-profile cases and academic research, WND reported. « A police officer is up to 30 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer, » she said, citing analyses by mainstream researchers of available data. Holder’s Justice Department also investigated the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
