George Floyd’s niece made a reference to President Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan during a memorial service honoring the life and legacy of her uncle.
“Someone said, ‘Make America Great Again,’ but when has America ever been great?” Brooke Williams said as she eulogized Floyd on Tuesday in Houston.
Floyd, a black man who lived in Minneapolis, died on May 25 after a white police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes during his arrest. Multiple videos taken at the scene show Floyd didn’t resist arrest and pleaded with the officer, Derek Chauvin, to get off his neck, saying, “I can’t breathe.”
Chauvin, who had more than a dozen complaints regarding excessive use of force filed against him before the incident with Floyd, has been charged with second-degree murder, and the state has launched a civil rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department.
Floyd’s death has sparked a national conversation about systemic racism and how it leads to brutality against minorities at the hands of police officers. Thousands of demonstrators have poured into the streets in America’s largest cities, protesting Floyd’s death and demanding meaningful criminal justice reform.
“That officer showed no remorse while watching my uncle’s soul leave his body,” Williams said. “He begged and pleaded many times just for you to get up, but you just pushed harder. Why must the system be corrupt and broken?”
Floyd’s case, and those like it, have sparked calls for radical change to the way police departments are structured and funded. Several prominent politicians, activists, and protesters have demanded that local governments “defund the police” and scale down the militarization of law enforcement equipment.
On Sunday, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council signed a pledge to dismantle the city police department as it is currently structured and reallocate funding to other areas of the city’s public safety budget.
Trump has called Floyd’s death a “tragedy” but defended what he called “99%” of police officers who do their jobs correctly and do not brutalize people.
Trump has vowed to keep funding levels for law enforcement where they are and demanded local governments maintain order in their streets, at one point threatening to deploy the U.S. military to areas of civil unrest if they fail to do so.
“Laws were already put in place for the African American system to fail,” Floyd’s niece said. “These laws need to be changed. No more hate crimes, please.”
