The video of George Floyd’s death that emerged on Tuesday is both shocking and distressingly familiar. Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, is lying on the ground as a white police officer pins him to the ground by the neck. We hear Floyd begging the officer to stop, telling him repeatedly: “I cannot breathe.” But the officer does not let up, and his colleagues taunt Floyd as he dies. “You having fun?” one asks. “You a tough guy,” another says. “Tough guy, huh?” After killing Floyd, the officers falsely claimed he had “physically resisted officers,” necessitating their brutal response.
We’ve seen this before, over and over and over again: police officers, usually white, killing black people who pose no threat to their safety. Although we have only recently begun to witness these executions ourselves thanks to smartphones, they are not a new phenomenon. For as long as law enforcement has existed in the United States, white officers have murdered black people. After the Civil War, Congress sought to address the problem by letting victims and their families sue abusive government officials. But the Supreme Court has butchered that law to prevent countless victims of police brutality from seeking justice through one of the only state-sanctioned avenues available to them. At their conference on Thursday, the justices will have an opportunity to begin unraveling the catastrophic case law that allows so many officers—including, apparently, Floyd’s killers—to murder civilians with impunity. The court has an obligation to fix what it broke.
