Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Tuesday condemned the continued police violence against Black Americans nearly three years after the murder of George Floyd.
In an interview with the Guardian, Omar said that despite the increased focus on police violence, it seems nothing has changed.
“Regardless of the heightened scrutiny and spotlight on state-sanctioned violence onto Black bodies, it still continues to happen at the same rate, if not higher,” Omar said. “We are not in a good place.”
Over the last the last few years, Omar’s district has seen the murder of multiple Black men: Floyd, who was killed in 2020 by police officers kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes; 20-year-old Daunte Wright, who was fatally shot by police in 2021 after being pulled over for having an expired tag and a hanging air freshener; and Amir Locke, who was just 22 years old when Minneapolis police burst into his apartment in a pre-dawn raid and killed him as he slept on the couch.
Omar’s comments come on the heels of a visit by a United Nations human rights group to her district as part of a two-week tour around the nation.
The group is part of a larger human rights panel that was formed after Floyd’s murder. The experts will also visit Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York and will report its findings to the U.N. later this year.
The experts, examining police killings and racism in the criminal justice system, heard testimony from Minneapolis families affected by police violence and from formerly incarcerated citizens who continue to suffer from the trauma of solitary confinement as youths.
Solitary confinement of children is a widespread practice in Minnesota and something Omar is vehemently against.
“The inhumanity of the human rights violations … is baffling,” Omar said. “We have staggering numbers of people who are dying in our prisons and who are living in the most inhumane conditions. We have staggering levels of people struggling with mental health who are being denied access to healthcare that they deserve. We’re seeing people who are being driven to insanity because we seem to lack the compassion of understanding that human beings need interaction.”
According to the U.N.’s own standards, solitary confinement is considered torture and a violation of human rights law. Solitary confinement practices in the U.S. have come under scrutiny in the last few weeks after a 35-year-old man with mental illness was found dead in an Atlanta prison, eaten alive by bed bugs, according to his family.
As deputy chair of the congressional progressive caucus, Omar has frequently called for criminal justice reforms. She has introduced legislation to criminalize violence against protesters, restrict the use of no-knock warrants and investigate police misuse of force.
On Wednesday, the congresswoman will introduce a new House resolution to condemn police brutality worldwide.
The resolution calls for: allocating funds toward mental health programs, counseling and violence prevention; ending the use of militarized equipment and police tactics both at home and overseas; and banning the sales of arms and ammunition to countries with documented human rights violations.
“It’s dangerous to continue to make the same mistakes and invest in systems that are not only broken, but do not serve the needs of the community,” Omar said. “We know what will work and what is needed. Research and data points to all these other interventions being much more meaningful in reducing crime than what we see when we continue to invest just in policing.”