NEW YORK (AP) – Monifa Bandele became a community organizer in the late 1990s, after New York City police fatally shot a young, unarmed Black immigrant named Amadou Diallo in the Bronx.
In the two decades since, she repeatedly witnessed police reforms that failed to stop Black people from dying at the hands of officers. Some of those reforms are now part of federal legislation being negotiated in the name of George Floyd, the Black man whose murder under the knee of a white Minneapolis officer last year sparked worldwide protests.
For instance, the legislation calls for banning chokeholds, a step already taken by New York City prior to the 2014 death of Eric Garner, who in an encounter with the NYPD uttered the same last words as Floyd: “I can’t breathe.”
As the anniversary of Floyd’s death approaches, some reform supporters say the best way to honor him would be for Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. But many activists warn that some of the proposed reforms have not been enough to stop past police abuses, reflecting a divide within the movement over what would constitute real progress.
“What we’ve come to realize over the past decades is that police departments, with their oversized budgets and their outsized political power, are able to rise above reformist policies,” said Bandele, an organizer with the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of over 150 Black-led advocacy organizations that opposes the Floyd legislation because it does not hit hard enough at systemic racism.