Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Policing in U.S. Was Built on Racism & Should Be Put on Trial

A Minnesota jury's conviction of former police officer Derek Chauvin on three counts for murdering George Floyd does not go far enough in dismantling police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, says historian and author Khalil Gibran Muhammad. We know that while the prosecution was performing in such a way to make the case that Derek Chauvin was a rogue actor, the truth is that policing should have been on trial in that case," Muhammad says. We don't have a mechanism in our current system of laws in the way that we treat individual offenses to have that accountability and justice delivered." Muhammad also lays out the racist history of slave patrols that led to U.S. police departments, which he details his book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America."