Today we had the conviction of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer accused of killing a black man, George Floyd, by putting his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes during a routine arrest.
But does this change anything in America for a black man? Maybe not, because a few days before the conviction today another black man in Minneapolis, Daunte Wright, was killed by police woman, Kim Potter, who drew her sidearm thinking that she had drawn her stun gun/taser and shot Wright. She has since resigned from the police force amid an investigation.
Minneapolis is an upper Mid-west state, and not somewhere like Georgia or Alabama where there is real, hard core racism. Or even New York where there is elitism and a lack of empathy for those that are seen as lesser human beings. America has a ways to go.
But that is for America. What about the Caribbean? No doubt people are cheering for Chauvin’s conviction, but are looking the other way, powerless, as their own respective police forces systematically hunt down their own kind like Terminator cyborgs without mercy or feeling.
From Dominica to Jamaica to The Bahamas, the police brutality and extra-judicial killings are sickening in God’s eyes and no one seems to be able to put a stop to it. Like we are a region that is lawless. Like we value human life so very little that another man dead, even if a suspect of another heinous crime, is no big issue. Just turn the whole region into a distressing mass of murder and mayhem. Gangsterism.
So we can crow about Derek Chauvin all we want, but don’t you dare turn your eye from the mess at your own doorstep- a wayward police force that the politicians, community leaders and the church are apparently afraid of.