Fear of police violence still looms large three years after George Floyd's murder: San Francisco Chronicle

NEW YORK, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Three years after a white police officer callously knelt on Black man George Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes to make him dead in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the United States is continuing to prove it's better at romanticizing revolutionary change than bringing it to fruition, said an opinion article published by San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday.

"Black and brown people are still being targeted by cops, trigger-happy officers in the U.S. are killing more people, not fewer, and law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area are proving themselves to be hopelessly inept, corrupt or both," said the article.

"The same fight we were fighting before George Floyd's death is the same one we're fighting now," said Addie Kitchen, grandmother of Steven Taylor, a Black man killed by a San Leandro police officer in 2020, almost a month before Floyd's death. "We still see Black and brown men getting killed by police."

Police killings in the country have been on the rise since 2019, peaking in 2022 at 1,238 deaths, a 12.7 percent increase over four years, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research organization that mines information from the Washington Post's database on fatal police shootings, a separate data-tracking site called Fatal Encounters and Google news alerts.

"Nationally, Black people are 2.9 times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and Latinos are 1.3 times more likely to be killed than white people," noted the article.