{"id":13862,"date":"2023-06-17T02:55:34","date_gmt":"2023-06-17T07:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=13862"},"modified":"2023-06-17T02:55:37","modified_gmt":"2023-06-17T07:55:37","slug":"police-behind-george-floyd-death-violated-constitution-probe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=13862","title":{"rendered":"Police behind George Floyd death violated constitution \u2013 probe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Minneapolis Police Department habitually violated residents\u2019 constitutional rights, particularly minorities, according to the results of a two-year investigation by the US Justice Department published on Friday. The investigation began in 2020, sparked by the now-infamous death in police custody of black suspect George Floyd under the knee of white officer Derek Chauvin.
Suggesting Floyd\u2019s death was far from an anomaly, the Justice Department\u2019s 92-page report alleges a pattern of civil rights violations from habitual use of excessive and often deadly force to systematic discrimination against racial minorities.\u00a0
Even Floyd\u2019s last words were apparently the rule rather than the exception, the investigation found, with numerous documented incidents in which officers allegedly ignored claims by suspects in custody that they could not breathe.
\u201cThe patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible,\u201d\u00a0Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters on Friday.\u00a0
The force routinely violated residents\u2019 First and Fourth Amendment rights, including by retaliating against journalists attempting to document the aforementioned civil rights violations, the report claims. Residents are especially likely to suffer under department policies\u00a0\u201cbased on race and disability,\u201d\u00a0with black and Native American individuals and those with mental health issues singled out for particularly brutal treatment.
Reinforcing the antagonistic relationship between law enforcement and residents, the force refused to discipline its own officers when they were found to be in violation of even its allegedly lax behavioral standards, the report found. Due to the organizational structure of the force, officers inclined to abuses of power of the sort amply documented in the report were able to escape accountability by self-selecting into enabling supervisory relationships.
According to the probe, the department\u2019s pattern of abuses was established years before Floyd\u2019s death \u2013 which was immortalized on cell-phone footage and seen by millions around the world, kicking off a summer of rioting and racial recriminations. Officers deployed\u00a0\u201cdangerous techniques and weapons against people who committed at most a petty offense and sometimes no offense at all,\u201d\u00a0the report states, with merely criticizing the police department sufficing to bring down excessive and sometimes deadly force.
Since Floyd\u2019s death, Minneapolis has banned neck restraints, no-knock warrants, and other controversial tactics. The Justice Department\u2019s report urges a total retraining regarding the use of force, both in terms of when and where it is seen as appropriate and how it is documented. Including racial data in all documentation of police activity is seen as critical to reducing the deleterious effects of systematic discrimination, as is adopting specific policies to deal with\u00a0\u201cpeople with behavioral health issues.\u201d
Rt<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Minneapolis Police Department habitually violated residents\u2019 constitutional rights, particularly minorities, according to the results of a two-year investigation by the US Justice Department published on Friday. The investigation began in 2020, sparked by the now-infamous death in police custody of black suspect George Floyd under the knee of white officer Derek Chauvin.Suggesting Floyd\u2019s death […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13863,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[8594,3160,1237,3546],"class_list":["post-13862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-constitutional","tag-discrimination","tag-police","tag-violations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13864,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13862\/revisions\/13864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}