Daunte Wright, 20 years, Afro-American, was killed by the Minneapolis police yesterday afternoon.
According to the police reconstruction, the young man tried to get back in the car after being stopped for an alleged violation of the highway code. The police allegedly put in place the procedures to arrest him but his attempt to get back into his car was fatal: an officer pulled out his gun and shot, killing him. A scene seen too many times in recent years in the United States. The events took place in a peripheral area of the city of Minneapolis, Brooklyn Center.
The boy’s mother told the American media that she herself was on the phone with her son asking her about car insurance (apparently everything was in order) and heard the agents talking. A few moments later the line would have fallen and the woman in an attempt to call back was able to speak only with her son’s girlfriend who confirmed that Daunte had been killed. A bad and not unusual story, already told dozens of times by American reporters in recent times.
As always happens in these cases, the news soon spread around the city and several hundred people gathered in the street to protest. And accidents broke out. Many demonstrators managed to get to the headquarters of the local police department where there were officers in riot gear who used tear gas to disperse them. It should be remembered that the climate in Minneapolis is already hot due to the ongoing trial against the agent Derek Chauvin accused of killing George Floyd last May. The action of the police yesterday does nothing but further heat the spirits and generate clashes. And we must not forget that in recent days a video has gone viral in which a young Afro-descendant soldier was stopped by the police who exclaimed that he was afraid to get out of the car, as requested by the patrol officers, and the same policemen who mocked him by telling him that they had every reason to have any. In short, despite the very serious facts that have been bleeding the country for some time, it seems that there is no way to stop the brutality of the US police, especially that against African Americans.
And the electoral promise of the new president Joe Biden, who had declared his intention to set up a police control commission in the first 100 days of his presidency, also seems to have vanished. Promise he will not keep. As confirmed by Susan Rice, National Security Advisor, who made it known that the White House “Is working with Congress to rapidly implement a meaningful police reform that brings profound and urgent changes” but at the same time “on the basis of close and respectful consultation with partners in the civil rights community, the administration has found that in this moment a police commission would not be the most effective way to keep our attention on the agents high ”. So if on the one hand from Washington they firmly repeat that it is essential to approve the renamed bill on police reform as soon as possible ‘George Floyd Justice in Policing Act‘, on the other hand, under-the-table agreements with police unions and representatives of civil society block the supervisory commission. Not a good figure for Joe Biden who promised a quick change of pace during the election campaign on police violence against African Americans. But it must be said that even the representatives of Black Lives Matter were skeptical about the creation of yet another commission which, according to them, could not achieve results in a short time. So, stop the commission.
For its part Joe Biden Interviewed by the press, he stated that the US “needs every police department in the country to undertake a complete review of their hiring, training of agents and their training practices. And the federal government should give cities and states the tools and resources they need to implement reforms “
Words of circumstance from a president who has already understood that the police attitude towards African Americans will be one of the thorns in the side of his presidency.