‘THEY EXECUTED my brother in broad daylight. People had to film that. People had to see that,’ Philonise Floyd the brother of George Floyd, killed by US cops, said, wiping tears from his eyes. ‘People pleaded for his life.’
In reaction to the police killing, Minneapolis has erupted with three days and three nights of riots with fierce clashes between outraged protesters and the US police. Police positioned themselves on the roofs of buildings and fired volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowds, while cops on the ground charged the protesters making mass arrests.
On Thursday night, demonstrators forced their way through police lines and burned the police station to the ground. The uprising against the police killers has started to spread across the United States, with marches in LA and in Oakland.
George Floyd died last Monday on May 25 after Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, knelt on Floyd’s neck for at least seven minutes while he was handcuffed and lying face-down on the road, including around four minutes after Floyd stopped moving.
Officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng also helped restrain Floyd, while officer Tou Thao stood nearby to obscure the view of onlookers and cameras.
A video showing Floyd’s last moments alive, as he said: ‘Please, I can’t breathe. Don’t kill me,’ has been seen by millions. The four officers involved were fired the next day. George Floyd’s family have demanded the four police officers implicated in his death face murder charges.
George Floyd’s sister Bridgette Floyd said: ‘I would like for those officers to be charged with murder. Because that’s exactly what they did. They murdered my brother. He was crying for help.’
The horrific case has similarities to that of Eric Garner who died on July 17, 2014, in the New York City borough of Staten Island, after Daniel Pantaleo, a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer, put him in a chokehold while arresting him. Garner can be heard on video footage saying, ‘I can’t breathe’ eleven times before he died.
The police killing of black Americans is a regular occurrence in the US. According to ‘Mapping Police Violence’, a crowdsourced database created by activists, across the United States there were 1,099 people killed in 2019. Black people were 24% of those killed despite being only 13% of the population.
US President Trump yesterday morning tweeted: ‘These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!’
And to show he means business, he has sent in more of the National Guard to do the shooting. However, the USA is not just a horror story for black people. This is a class war not a race war.
There are now more than 40 million unemployed in the USA, of all colours, religions and origins. This 40 million emerged in just months after Trump declared that US capitalism had created millions of jobs, and was now some kind of paradise.
This mass unemployment is the product of a massive collapse of US and European capitalism that has led to a sudden, huge leap in US and European unemployment.
Meanwhile, the Trump regime has so far stood by and watched 103,344 US citizens being slaughtered by the coronavirus, with 1,768,608 cases of the virus – so far. It is no different throughout Europe!
US workers will not stand idly by as Trump threatens to intensify the shootings. Millions of workers in their trade unions will rise up against the police state killers and their political masters, in a struggle for a socialist USA.
In this they will join hands with the workers of Europe and the world to put an end to capitalism and bring in socialism.
Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International all over the planet. Forward to the US and European socialist revolutions! Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!
