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Houston police received additional pay to incarcerate black men.
– Federal grants provided perverse incentives. The overtime money was distributed based on the number of arrests, fines and calls. There were a lot of drugs in Houston and the police officers needed money for overtime, so they scoured those neighborhoods and made simple arrests. They often picked up the same people over and over again.
He tells former Houston Police Chief Clarence O’Neal Bradford in a lengthy and comprehensive article in the Washington Post about the culture that shaped George Floyd and many other black Americans who grew up in the Third Ward neighborhood of Houston, Texas. This is one of several ghettos in the city where family income is low and crime is high.
“Being a Texas police officer was in the eyes of many people like a black man joining the Ku Klux Klan,” former Houston Police Chief Charles A. McClelland, Jr. said in the same article.
The two former Houston police chiefs tried to combat prejudice and unnecessary violence, but felt they were only partially successful. Something has changed, but many believe that racism and discrimination still prevail in many police districts in the United States.
George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police on May 25 of this year. The former police officer charged with the murder has been released on bail.
Has tried to reform the police
Former Police Chief McClelland Jr. says that when he was on patrol in Houston, police often overreacted in meetings with minorities. The reason he describes is that they did not understand minority culture and felt a greater danger when encountering minorities than when confronting “their own”.
While police cracked down on petty crime in Houston’s Third Ward minority areas, where George Floyd grew up, they were less able to investigate serious crimes like homicide in the same areas, said Scott Henson, Innocence Project in Texas.
Black lives matter
The police assassination of George Floyd accelerated the Black Lives Matter movement and sparked great discussions about the relationship between police and minorities, not only in the United States, but also here in Norway. This summer, thousands of people demonstrated in front of the Storting, and Prime Minister Erna Solberg said so-called ethnic profiling also takes place in Norway.
The Washington Post article shows several differences, but perhaps also some similarities to Norwegian conditions.
First, black men in the United States are more likely to be stopped by the police than any other group in the United States. Meetings are also more likely to turn into violence. It showed a survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2015.
It stopped many more times than others
The consequence is that minor offenses, for which others are not prosecuted, lead to punitive measures. For example, this group has been severely punished for substance abuse, rather than receiving treatment. Regular problems with the police and the courts make it more difficult to find work.
McClelland Jr. says police previously worked on the theory that the more arrests they made, the better, and that long prison terms would scare young offenders and lead law-abiding lives. He says that they did not understand the negative consequences of such a method. Many black Americans have never been able to adjust to society because they began adulthood in prison. George Floyd was among them.
In Norway, we imprison young people to a small extent, even though the police want more compulsory treatment for the most criminal young people.
Read: Police want more closed doors for young offenders
19 police charges
George Floyd was searched 19 times by the police, that is, detained by the police. Also, there are all times that are not recorded. Among other things, he was jailed one night because his little brother was arrested on suspicion of stealing a car parked in the neighborhood. Floyd asked the police to take him away. They both went to jail. Both were released the next day.
Simultaneously with the harsh treatment of minorities, the police received conditional sentences for murder and violation of human rights. In the late 1990s, the police district came under fire for racism and dubious policing.
George Floyd was 23 years old in 1996 when he received his first sentence: ten months in prison for selling less than a gram of cocaine. When he came out, he was several hundred dollars in debt to the court.
– Then he stopped in the street. I couldn’t get an education, I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a place to live, so what do you do then? asks James Douglas of the Houston NAACP (an organization that fights against discrimination and for equal human rights) rhetorically. He is the lead law professor for the Houston NAACP.
Acknowledge escaping punishment
Floyd struggled to find a permanent job. Several times he was arrested and jailed for little things like walking on other people’s property and not identifying with the police. Rather than deny criminal guilt and go through trial, he admitted and escaped with a lesser sentence. Acknowledging guilt, even for things that were not done, was a common way for blacks to escape longer sentences, Alex Bunin, who heads the Harris County Office of the Public Defender, told WP.
In 2002, he received his second drug conviction. Then he complained of depression and voices in his head. He had lost his father, had trouble sleeping and used drugs. The court found that he tried to escape punishment by declaring that he was not sane and did not believe him.
In 2004, he received another ten months in prison for selling drugs. A police officer, who claimed to have seen Floyd sell drugs in 2004, is under investigation for using false information in other criminal cases.
– What are we doing?
One of the judges who started to change the system was John Creuzot in Dallas. He says that he once visited a classroom with black children. Almost all of the students had visited a relative in prison.
– That’s when I realized it. What are we doing? tells WP.
He began sending convicts to treatment programs and imposing punishments based on the evidence and risk factors of the convicts. The change gave him the nickname “Let them go-Creuzot” with the police.
Since then, Texas has changed the way they treat petty crime and is still working on it.
– It has improved, but there is a lot left when you have cops who kill people, says Texas policy Senfronia Thompson (D).
Fields with outdated methods
George Floyd never acknowledged the most serious case for which he was convicted. The main evidence against him came from an investigative method that is now being discarded.
They robbed a lady in her house. The thieves fled in a car in which Floyd was arrested a few weeks later. It wasn’t his car. Investigators showed a photo of him to the victim who they thought was him.
Today, this type of photographic confrontation will be carried out by police officers who do not know who the suspect is, in order to prevent the victim from being influenced by the police in the selection. The suspect must also be shown to the victim along with other people, so the victim must point out the suspect from a group with several people.
Floyd risked decades in prison for robbery, but agreed to a plea deal to serve five years for robbery, rather than risk a longer sentence at trial.
In recent years
Many black men in Houston have been treated for substance abuse problems in Minnesota. Floyd toured yours in 2017 in an effort to have a better life.
In Minneapolis, he had several small jobs, while also trying to get a driver’s license so he could operate larger vehicles commercially and be drug free. That year he was stopped by the police in an uninsured car. He was fined $ 283, but was unable to pay. This escalated to higher fines and court hearings, as well as the loss of a regular driver’s license, rather than focusing on work and rehab.
In 2019 he again had a drug problem and was arrested by the police. He was under the influence of drugs and was driving without a valid driver’s license. He admitted to having substance abuse problems and was not punished.
In early 2020, Floyd was pulled over several times in a car without a driver’s license and under the influence of drugs. He received fines of several hundred dollars.
On May 25, the police were called because Floyd allegedly used a fake bill to pay and because he was drunk. It is said that he was restless and could not relax when the police arrested him. Three policemen pushed him to the ground. One of them had his knee on Floyd’s neck for several minutes as he yelled that he couldn’t breathe. Then he was dead.
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