Sentence does not remedy deep-rooted racism: China Daily editorial

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced on Friday to 22 and a half years in prison for the murder of George Floyd, whose death in May last year led to the biggest protests against racial injustice in the United States in decades.

The sentence is one of the longest prison terms ever given to a police officer in the US for the killing of a black person. It is also a rare case in which an officer has been charged and convicted of brutality or other misconduct against a black person.

Police shootings, the cause of the overwhelming majority of deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers in the US, have taken about 1,000 American lives a year since 2005.

But officers have been charged in fewer than nine of those cases a year, or less than 1 percent, according to data compiled by Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University. Only 11 nonfederal law officers, including Chauvin, have been convicted of murder for on-duty deaths over the past 16 years.

Given what Chauvin did to Floyd — "in cold blood with a knee on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds execution-style in broad daylight", and the fact that the sentence fell short of the 30 years prosecutors had requested, and Chauvin could be released on parole after serving two-thirds of his sentence, or about 15 years — it is hard to celebrate the conviction and sentence as a victory for justice.

There is still a long way to go for the US to address its deep-rooted institutional racism. Despite some gains in improving police accountability since the Black Lives Matter movement last year, structural police reforms aimed at putting an end to violence by police officers during law enforcement have been elusive.

Last year, 1,127 people in the US were killed by police and this year has so far seen no clear signs of progress in reducing the number of people killed by police, according to Campaign Zero. Black people still remain the most likely victims, accounting for 28 percent of the police killings while only accounting for 13 percent of the population.

"Real justice in America will be black men and black women and people of color who will not have to fear being killed by the police just because of the color of their skin," as Floyd family attorney Ben Crump said after the sentence.

Before that day comes, the US government should act to put its own house in order and stop pointing an accusing finger at other countries.