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| Official White House photo: Shealah Craighead |
"Inmunidad cualificada" (Qualified Immunity) is an article written by Lluís Bassets which appeared in the June 2, 2020 edition of El País, Spain's most widely read newspaper. It is an opinion piece on the murder of George Floyd and its connection with police violence in the USA, racism, and the presidency of Donald Trump. Below is my translation of the article.
Qualified Immunity
Donald Trump and police abuse are two sides of the same coin
The police are trigger-happy because they're protected by the justice system.
It's as simple as that.
Donald Trump isn't to blame for George Floyd's death. Nor is he the prime mover behind the disturbances. But it's no coincidence that Trump is in the White House. Neither are his irresponsible provocations, which incite violence rather than intending to calm protesters, coincidental
The
country torn by a racial divide that brought Trump to the White House is
the same one that over the years has enshrined a system of impunity for
its police force. Racism and abuse of power go hand in hand in both
cases. You can't understand one without the other.
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| Wikimedia |
Law
enforcement officials, from local police officers to federal agents,
are heavily militarized in their formation, training, and deployment
tactics. This is completely logical in a country where the sale,
possession and even public display of assault weapons are considered
constitutionally protected rights.
Firearms
cause as many victims as traffic accidents. There is a tendency
towards disinhibition when using them against defenseless citizens, both
by on duty police officers, as well as by the armed civilians who carry
out mass killings. This, too, is a situation where one thing can't be understood without understanding
the other.
Everything favors the hair
trigger, especially when it comes to shooting at dark-skinned citizens.
In this case, it wasn't shooting, but immobilizing a handcuffed
citizen to death. Statistics on deaths due to police intervention show
that the number of African-Americans killed is five times that of
Whites. Explanations about police force composition, i.e., minorities
tending to be proportionally less represented than Whites, are not
enough. It's also important to consider the strong corporate feel of a
profession affiliated with powerful unions that has the ability to
enforce a special statute called the Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of
Rights. Recognized in 16 states, it protects its members when they are
accused of a crime, by guaranteeing extraordinary limits on
investigation and interrogation.
If it's
difficult to prosecute a police officer, it's even more difficult to
convict one. Organizations that advocate against police violence have
documented systematic deferential behavior of judges and juries toward
accused police officers, along with a lower proportion of guilty verdicts
handed out to them than to others. Since 2005, 78 police officers have
been charged with murder or firearm-related homicide. Only 27 of these have
been convicted and sentenced: 14 by public juries and 13 due to pretrial
guilty pleas. Only one of those individuals was convicted of murder,
and that officer was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
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| Screenshot from original El País article |
In
light of George Floyd's death, it might appear that little has changed
since the bloody days of lynchings and other racist murders in the Deep
South. Not so, if we once again look at the statistics. In the first
decade of this century, the average number of police officers prosecuted
for such crimes was five per year, but now the figure is close to twenty. While the
number of police officers accused of murder is growing, that does not
mean police behavior has worsened or improved, but rather that the means
of documenting their crimes (by video, for example) have increased.
That's what happened in the death of Floyd, who was suffocated by being
held under the knee of a police officer—an immobilization maneuver
widely used in U.S. law enforcement.
Throwing Trump out of office won't be enough to end this particular plague, which is as lethal as covid-19. But one goes with the other.
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