That the LAPD is confidently deploying this public relations tactic nearly three years after George Floyd’s death is a grim reflection of how little has changed.
THE LOS ANGELES Police Department is pushing the narrative that Keenan Anderson — a 31-year-old Black teacher, who LAPD cops held down and repeatedly tased as he begged for his life — is responsible for his own death.
Preliminary toxicology tests, performed on Anderson’s body by the police department itself, found traces of cannabinoids and cocaine metabolite in his system – results that in no way mitigate the extreme violence inflicted on Anderson by the police ahead of his January 3 death.
The drug tests were not released as part of an official autopsy; the Los Angeles County coroner’s office is still investigating Anderson’s death and has not yet ruled on its exact medical cause. Instead, the LAPD conducted its own drug tests and announced the results in an unambiguous effort to denigrate and blame its victim, the third man of color killed by the department in the few short weeks of 2023 alone
There’s nothing surprising about this sort of police practice. The idea that drug possession or use by Black people creates grounds enough to warrant police violence, even deadly violence, has undergirded half a century of U.S. policing. Cops from the department that murdered George Floyd attempted to blame his death on the fentanyl found present in his system, too, but thankfully without success.
If Anderson’s official autopsy undermines police claims that drugs played a role in his death, it would be a relief, but not a victory. Instead, the very willingness of the LAPD to release its toxicology report speaks to a much broader problem: the certain confidence in the public’s willingness to demonize and blame Black victims. If such racist narratives around drugs weren’t readily available, the police department wouldn’t have bothered releasing the toxicology results at all.
That the LAPD is confidently deploying this public relations tactic nearly three years after Floyd’s death is a grim reflection of how little has changed.
This should come as no surprise, either: The uprisings that followed Floyd’s murder were met with harsh state repression in the streets, aided by disavowals and dismissals across the media and political mainstream. The Democratic lawmakers who knelt ludicrously in kente cloth to signal their anti-racist credentials are the same leaders who have rejected every serious attempt to reckon with the racist violence that defines U.S. policing.
The reality of U.S. policing persists as a continuous, unrepentant, and reform-resistant threat to Black lives.
Calls to defund the police were deemed electorally radioactive, demands to abolish the police derided as delusional, police budgets further swelled, and impunity has continued to reign.
Police killed 1,176 people in 2022 — more killings than in any of the last 10 years. And while racial justice organizers and abolitionists continue to fight, the mass rebellions of 2020 were aggressively drained of political potency by an array of counterinsurgent forces, from mass arrests, media demonization, and, crucially, the complete and cowardly abandonment by liberal politicians on the city, state, and federal levels.
I don’t doubt pollsters’ findings, that voters in 2020 were turned off by the term “defund,” but I’m not interested in relitigating debates around electoral slogans. What matters is that the reality of U.S. policing persists as a continuous, unrepentant, and reform-resistant threat to Black lives.(From the intercept)