A bad officer can just laugh'

[alisawhite123]

Instead, he was just the latest victim of systematic failings, entrenched interests,

militaristic police training methods, and toothless oversight mechanisms that have plagued Minneapolis, and many other US police departments, for decades.

While violent, racist officers are undoubtedly a few bad apples, the system that is supposed to police them is itself, according to critics, rotten to the core.

On Saturday, dozens of demonstrators made their views plain to the mayor of Minneapolis: booing him out of the protest when he refused to promise to defund the police.

"The source of the problem is there is just no accountability, " David Bicking of the Minneapolis-based Communities United Against Police Brutality [CUAP] campaign group, told The Daily Telegraph.

"People here say they're going to file a complaint and a bad officer can just laugh at them. We have so little discipline it's a joke

"That leads directly to Derek Chauvin. It’s why he thought he could keep his knee on someone's neck, in front of a crowd, knowing he's being videoed. It comes from a culture of impunity, that 'I can do anything I want to do' and there are no consequences. "