Here’s what you need to know:
- The shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta adds new fuel to the debate over police use of force.
- Videos detail the sequence of events in the shooting of Rayshard Brooks by the Atlanta police.
- Democrats in Congress say ‘defunding’ the police means rebuilding departments, not ending them.
- Minnesota lawmakers hear emotional pleas on overhauling policing.
- Little has changed since the last major effort to overhaul policing in Minneapolis or elsewhere.
- A rift opens among Asian-Americans over a statement on racism.
- Juneteenth should be a national holiday, a Republican senator says.
The shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta adds new fuel to the debate over police use of force.
As details emerged of what happened when the Atlanta police shot and killed Rayshard Brooks as he fled from them outside a Wendy’s restaurant in Atlanta, lawmakers and leaders drew parallels and contrasts with the other recent police-involved killings of black people that have ignited protests across the nation.
Representative James Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, said on Sunday that he did not believe that lethal force was clearly unnecessary in the police’s encounter with Mr. Brooks, who had dozed off at the wheel of a car while waiting on the restaurant’s drive-through line.
“They’d already patted him down, he had no weapon on him — where did they think he was going to go?” Mr. Clyburn said. “So he’s running away — my goodness, you’ve got his car, you can easily find him. But no, you fire bullets into his back.”
Appearing on the CNN program “State of the Union,” Mr. Clyburn continued, “That is not what you’d call corresponding force. And so I think the mayor is right, this did not call for lethal force.”
Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, said she saw a direct link to the police-involved killings of black people that have sparked protests demanding an overhaul of policing nationwide.
“We need reformation of how police officers do their jobs, how law enforcement does its job, because what happened yesterday to Rayshard Brooks was a function of excessive force,” Ms. Abrams said Sunday on the ABC program “This Week.” “The fact that they were either embarrassed or, you know, panicked led them to murder a man who they knew only had a Taser in his hand.”
However, Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, said on the NBC program “Meet the Press” that he did not think the case was in the same category as other recent killings by the police that have been widely regarded as clearly unjustified.
The body-camera video of the encounter, he said, “is disturbing to watch, but I’m not sure that it’s as clear as what we’ve seen around the country.”
When asked if there should be a federal standard for the use of force, Mr. Scott said it would be “difficult to establish a codified practice,” but added that an effort to find the best existing practices at departments around the country would be helpful.
He added that he wanted to see clearer policies on chokeholds, a contentious restraint method that restricts air flow. Some cities and states have declared outright bans on such tactics in recent weeks.
Videos detail the sequence of events in the shooting of Rayshard Brooks by the Atlanta police.
When Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot outside a Wendy’s restaurant on Friday night, the events were captured on video by security cameras and witnesses to the confrontation.
An analysis of the videos by The New York Times shows that Officer Garrett Rolfe fired a stun gun at Mr. Brooks as he and another officer, Devin Brosnan, tried to take Mr. Brooks into custody. Mr. Brooks got hold of Officer Brosnan’s stun gun, broke away and ran, turning at one point to fire it at Officer Rolfe, who was chasing him. Then Officer Rolfe fired three gunshots at Mr. Brooks.
The shooting left many in the city once again incensed by the death of another black man at the hands of the police — and nervous about the potential for more destructive flare-ups. By Saturday night, protesters had blocked roads and an interstate near the restaurant and had apparently set the restaurant on fire, according to news reports, with the police firing tear gas and flash grenades to try to disperse the crowd.
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta announced on Saturday that the city’s police chief had resigned. Early on Sunday morning, Sgt. John Chafee, a spokesman for the Atlanta Police Department, said Officer Rolfe had been fired and Officer Brosnan put on administrative leave.
Police dashboard and body-camera videos show that Mr. Brooks was compliant and friendly with the officers when they first approached him and for some time after that, and the encounter turned to a struggle when the officers tried to handcuff him.
The police were called to the scene initially because Mr. Brooks had fallen asleep on the drive-through line of the restaurant. The video shows Officer Brosnan waking Mr. Brooks in the driver’s seat of a car and asking him to move the car to a parking space. Officer Brosnan appears to be unsure whether to let Mr. Brooks sleep there or to take further action.
He calls for another police officer, and Officer Rolfe arrives twelve minutes later. Officer Rolfe searches Mr. Brooks and then puts him through a sobriety test, which he fails. Mr. Brooks asks the officers if he can lock his car up under their supervision and walk to his sister’s house, which is a short distance away. “I can just go home,” he says.
Officer Rolfe asks Mr. Brooks to take a breath test for alcohol. Mr. Brooks admits he has been drinking and says, “I don’t want to refuse anything.” When the test is complete, Officer Rolfe tells Mr. Brooks he “has had too much drink to be driving,” and begins to handcuff him; only then is Mr. Brooks seen offering any resistance.
Democrats in Congress say ‘defunding’ the police means rebuilding departments, not ending them.
As protesters coalesce around the movement to “defund the police,” Democratic congressional leaders emphasized on Sunday that their intent was not to cut off funding for police departments, but to thoroughly overhaul them.
“Nobody is going to defund the police — we can restructure the police forces,” said Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 House Democrat, on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “The fact of the matter is that police have a role to play.”
Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, one of the most liberal lawmakers in the House, said she supported dismantling the Minneapolis Police Department after George Floyd, a black man, died in police custody there.
“You can’t really reform a department that is rotten to the root — what you can do is rebuild,” Ms. Omar said on “State of the Union,” noting that half of homicides in Minneapolis go unsolved and that there were reports that the department had destroyed rape kits.
When pressed on whether the police department should be abolished permanently, Ms. Omar said, “Absolutely not.”
“I think that’s really where the conversation is going wrong,” she said, “because no one is saying that the community is not going to be kept safe. No one is saying that crimes will not be investigated. No one is saying that we are not going to have proper response when community members are in danger.
“What we are saying is the current infrastructure that exists as policing in our city should not exist any more,” Ms. Omar said. “And we can’t go about creating a different process with the same infrastructure in place.”
Lawmakers are wrestling with the contours of legislation to overhaul policing and how to reconcile a measure introduced in the House last week with drafts still under discussion in the Senate.
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the lead Republican drafting the legislation in the Senate, said the measures would not get through the Republican-controlled Senate if they included provisions for limiting the qualified immunity that currently protects police officers from lawsuits over what they do on duty.
Democrats have raised similar objections to a proposal to “decertify” bad officers as a substitute for more sweeping changes.
Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, said he supported a national ban on chokeholds, though the legislation still being drafted in the Senate is not expected to have such a prohibition. “Absolutely, we should have that,” he said on ABC. “That was one of the things that we should have engaged in a long time ago.”
Mr. Scott also appeared on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” where he said it would be “difficult” to codify a nationwide standard for use of force by the police. Still, he said, the time when a chokehold was acceptable “had come and gone.”
Minnesota lawmakers hear emotional pleas on overhauling policing.
Activists, legislators and relatives of people hurt and killed in confrontations with the police stared into their phones and laptop cameras through a daylong virtual hearing on Saturday and spoke out about ambitious legislation meant to transform policing and public safety in Minnesota.
It was the emotional first day of debate on a package of measures being proposed by Democratic state legislators in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.
“Here we are again,” said Valerie Castile, whose son, Philando, was shot and killed by a police officer in a St. Paul suburb in 2016, his last moments captured in a grim video. “We as a community don’t have a voice in anything. We need our voices heard.”
Democrats in Minnesota have proposed nearly 20 measures that have been grouped into three bills now beginning to make their way through the divided Legislature.
The bills would ban chokeholds and “warrior training” for police officers, increase oversight and tracking of officers’ use of force and disciplinary records and make Minnesota’s attorney general responsible for prosecuting killings by law enforcement. It would also restore voting rights to thousands of people convicted of felonies.
Many of the proposals are not new, and have been proposed year after year. They have the backing of Minnesota’s Democratic governor and are expected to pass the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives early this week. But the Republicans who control Minnesota’s Senate oppose some parts of the agenda, and have said they planned to stay in session only through the end of next week.
Most of the people testifying on Saturday spoke in favor of the legislation, saying that years of incremental reform efforts had failed people of color.
“We’re ready for actual real concrete changes, transformational changes,” said JaNaé Bates, who works with a coalition of faith groups that seek racial and economic justice. “We’re ready build something new, something different.”
Little has changed since the last major effort to overhaul policing in Minneapolis or elsewhere.
Shaila Dewan in New York:
The Minneapolis Police Department was in many ways a poster child for change: it had two chiefs hailed as reformers, had trained officers on implicit bias, reconciliation and how to treat the public with respect. It had tried to overhaul its early warning system and disciplinary process for officers. It had even, back in 2016, instituted a duty for officers to intervene if they saw other officers doing something wrong.
Last week, it agreed to institute a duty to intervene — again.
As a reporter covering criminal justice, I have seen this over and over: Urgency over a needless death at the hands of the police is funneled into reports on what went wrong. Commissions on how to do better. Policy changes that do not translate into cultural changes.
My colleague Mike Baker, who has been closely following the protests in Seattle, and I were asked to assess what had changed since the last big national reckoning on policing, in 2014, after the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Our findings: not enough.
After Ferguson, one of the biggest problems was the lack of data on use of force by the police and deaths in police custody. But the big national projects launched to track those things have yet to materialize. It is no wonder that protesters today are skeptical of reform measures.
Last week, Valerie Castile, the mother of Philando Castile, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop in a Minneapolis suburb in 2016, participated in a panel discussion. She didn’t mince words about all the working groups she has consulted with over the years: “I think we’ve covered everything you could possibly imagine about what we should do and what we could do, but nothing is being implemented.”
A rift opens among Asian-Americans over a statement on racism.
The Black Lives Matter movement has opened a rift among prominent Asian-Americans in Massachusetts, where members of a state commission disagreed openly about whether their community was complicit in racism against black people.
The disagreement stems from a statement issued on June 4, in which the commission described “the deep roots of anti-Blackness” among Asian-Americans, and said that Asian-Americans “continue to benefit from the ‘model minority’ myth and our historic proximity to white privilege.”
Within a few days, strong dissents began to surface around the statement, which was approved by 13 members of the 20-member commission. Since then, a number of prominent Asian-Americans have objected to the statement, including several of the seven members who did not vote.
Dean A. Tran, a state senator from Fitchburg, issued a rebuttal to the statement, which he called “inflammatory.” He argued that Asian-Americans had not contributed to anti-black racism.
“My family and I were refugees from Vietnam, worked hard day and night, and kept our heads down despite encountering hatred through various forms of prejudice,” he wrote. “We, like many other Asian-Americans, certainly did not benefit from ‘white prejudice.’”
He said that many Asian-Americans “are outraged that a tax-funded state agency would misrepresent the Asian-American community this way.”
The state commission was formed in 2006 to promote the well-being of what has become the fastest-growing minority community in Massachusetts.
Juneteenth should be a national holiday, a Republican senator says.
Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, said on Sunday that he had been in conversations with the White House about making Juneteenth, which marks the date, June 19, 1865, when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, first learned of their freedom, a national holiday. “I think it’s a brilliant idea,” Mr. Scott, the only Republican senator who is black, said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.”
Texas was the last of the former Confederate states where enslaved people heard the news of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, so June 19 has long been celebrated by African Americans as the date when slavery finally ended after the Civil War.
The date hit the headlines recently when President Trump’s re-election campaign scheduled his first rally since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic to be held on June 19 in Tulsa, Okla., the site of an eruption of deadly racist violence in 1921 that destroyed a thriving black business community. After the timing drew widespread criticism, the rally was rescheduled for the following day.
“My understanding is he moved the date once he understood Juneteenth,” Mr. Scott said on “Face the Nation.” “I’m not sure that the planners on his inner-circle team thought about June 19, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and race riots.”
Other Republican allies of Mr. Trump also said in interviews aired Sunday that they had expressed concerns to him about the date of the rally. “My encouragement to the president was to be able to pick a day around it,” Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said on CNN. And Ben Carson, Mr. Trump’s housing secretary, said on the ABC program “This Week” that “it’s probably good to have moved it.”
Reporting was contributed by Ellen Barry, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Malachy Browne, Emily Cochrane, Melina Delkic, Rebecca Halleck, Jack Healy and Christina Kelso. Muyi Xiao contributed research.
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