First Thing: can cities live without police? Minneapolis may find out

The largely peaceful protests prompted by the police killing of George Floyd went on across the US and around the world over the weekend, as it emerged that more than 10,000 US protesters have been arrested during the weeks of unrest – many for non-violent offences. In Minneapolis, where Floyd died, the city council has taken a dramatic step towards reform, by declaring their intent to disband the city’s police force and replace it with an alternative system of “public safety”.

The Obama administration introduced or stepped up measures to impose accountability on police forces after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. But, as Ed Pilkington explains, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has allowed those incremental efforts to wither on the vine – which may partially explain the growing support for a more radical solution: “defund the police”.

‘The police are still killing during a pandemic.’ The families of Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant and other black Americans killed by police tell Lois Beckett their anger has been tempered by glimmers of hope in the response to Floyd’s death.

Every overseas war has reshaped policing in the United States, including by filling the ranks of police departments with veterans and pushing surplus materials into their hands.

In the English port city of Bristol, Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston and tipped it into the harbour during a demonstration on Sunday, amid a heated debate about Britain’s legacy of racism, inspired by the protests in the US.

Demonstrations have spread to cities as far afield as Nigeria and Australia. The novelist Ben Okri suggests Floyd’s case has caused worldwide reverberations because his words “I can’t breathe” speak eloquently both to our fears of the coronavirus pandemic and to the implacable nature of institutional racism:

Maybe it should be the phrase that people who are oppressed should use. It should become the mantra of oppression. Maybe every time the police stop you in your car for no other reason than that you are a black man or woman, you should say: ‘I can’t breathe.’