George Floyd protests: We're not waiting for color-blind justice any more

From a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed frustration with the advice of his white, Southern colleagues of the cloth. “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ … We have waited for more than 340 years,” King wrote in a letter.

If MLK was exhausted in 1963, the patience of others desperate for color-blind justice is surely at an end by now. That exasperation exploded in protest and violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

Days after Floyd’s recorded execution, Minnesota officials held a news conference. U.S. attorney Erica MacDonald offered heartfelt sympathy and promised a “robust and meticulous” investigation. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman explained that his job was to prove fired policeman Derek Chauvin had committed a crime, although “there is other evidence that does not support a criminal charge.”

'I can't breathe': For black America, a long wait to breathe

A day later, prosecutors did indeed charge Chauvin — who had planted his knee on Floyd’s neck — with crimes, but that was a bit late for the wearied masses who feared yet another cop would get away with murder. A police precinct already had been set aflame, businesses had been torched and a suspected looter had been killed, as mourners demanded justice in Floyd’s name — and as atrocity arsonists, drawn to the conflict as moths to a flame, twisted legitimate grievance into mayhem.

Trump, who has a history of condoning violence toward racial minorities and famously told policemen they should rough up suspects, apparently recognized Headley as a kindred spirit.

Shortly after taking office, Trump’s former Attorney General Jeff Sessions initiated a review of police reform agreements with an eye toward reducing federal interference. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page noted, “The impact of Sessions' position is being felt at a time when another police shooting of an unarmed black man has been making national headlines.” The reference was to Stephon Clark, who was killed by Sacramento cops for carrying a cellphone they apparently mistook for a gun.

Sessions’ closing act at the Justice Department, before his ejection for bowing insufficiently low before Trump, was to pen a memo making it more difficult to obtain consent decrees to reduce police violence.

That black communities are routinely policed harshly is not news to any informed American. The 1960s' riots were disproportionately instigated by perceived acts of police brutality. Indeed, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders concluded, “Negroes firmly believe that policy brutality and harassment occur repeatedly in Negro neighborhoods. … In nearly every city surveyed, the commission heard complaints of harassment of interracial couples, dispersal of social street gatherings, and the stopping of Negroes on foot or in cars without obvious basis.”

Studies of stop-and-frisk policies have shown that innocent black and Latino men are likely to be hassled by police. In a 2013 decision declaring the policy unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin concluded that blacks and Latinos were disproportionately stopped, even in areas with low crime. She also criticized the New York Police Department’s “unwritten policy of targeting ‘the right people’ for stops. In practice, the policy encourages the targeting of young black and Hispanic men.”

The lack of accountability for blatant police bias is undergirded by court decisions dating to the Jim Crow era. A key Supreme Court decision, Pierson v. Ray of 1967, revolved around a group of black and white clergymen on a civil rights prayer pilgrimage. Their journey took them to a segregated coffee shop in a bus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi, where they were arrested for trying to dine together. Citing an 1871 statute known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, passed to protect plaintiffs against racial terrorism, the preachers protested their conviction. The Supreme Court sided with the segregationists — or, to be more precise, with the authorities who enforced segregation. As long as cops and judges believed the law was valid, their actions were fine, concluded Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority. Justice William Douglas, the sole dissenter, argued that it was ridiculous to protect public officials “no matter how outrageous their conduct.”

Law and disorder: Police act like laws don't apply to them because of 'qualified immunity.' They're right.

Through a series of court decisions too elaborate to unpack here, Warren’s thinking ultimately resulted in a doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which makes it virtually impossible to hold a cop accountable for murder without a direct precedent finding equivalent behavior illegal.

In the Boston College Law Review last year, Marcus Nemeth argued that the doctrine “shields law enforcement officers who utilize excessive force against ordinary American citizens.” He called for “the court that created this confusing and messy line of case law” to “finally clean up after itself.” Last week, The New York Times also called for rethinking qualified immunity.

That would be a good beginning. But what we really need is a rethinking of our entire history of race and justice with an eye toward figuring out why America so consistently fails to live up to its own ideals.

Ellis Cose, author of "Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU’s 100-Year Fight for Rights in America" and "The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America," both due this year, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @EllisCose

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: George Floyd's death due to long history of police bias and brutality