By Sheena Denny
J.D. Candidate, Mitchell Hamline School of Law, 2022
Continue reading “Minnesota House passes public safety package: Will this be the change communities need?”Tag: Black Lives Matter
The Lynching of George Floyd: Black Theology, Protest, and Racial Justice
The violence of lynching is a blot on our nation’s history that continues to threaten the rule of law in analogous ways today. The May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee-hold of a Minneapolis police officer attests to this. As we interrogate this fiercely racist act of police brutality, and the many preceding it, various lenses can be employed to derive new meanings. James H. Cone, one of the fathers of Black Theology, provides us with an interpretation that we might overlook: the Black Jesus who dies on the cross to overcome the violence experienced by Blacks. As he wrote in his last work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “to understand what the cross means in America, we need to take a look at the lynching tree in this nation’s history.”
Continue reading “The Lynching of George Floyd: Black Theology, Protest, and Racial Justice”Improving Police Officer Accountability in Minnesota: Three Proposed Legislative Reforms
The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May 2020 put the issue of police reform back into the national discussion and made Minnesota, at least during a brief window of time, confront its past on issues of racism and police abuse. The video showing Mr. Floyd pleading for his life while a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck became an unprecedented catalyst for outrage. Even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, massive protests and civil unrest spread from Minneapolis to all over the world.
Nationwide demonstrations and media attention put pressure on policymakers and police departments to make substantial changes. Police reform efforts appeared at every level of government. For instance, the New York Police Department announced that it would disband its notorious plainclothes anti-crime unit. Likewise, a majority of the Minneapolis City Council vowed to “begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department.” By summer’s end, Iowa, Delaware, Utah, and Nevada passed legislation banning choke holds, and Colorado enacted broad changes that could serve as a model for Minnesota and other states. Meanwhile, the United States House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill that “mark[ed] one of the most comprehensive efforts in modern times to re-imagine law enforcement departments across the country.”