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We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption in an American City by Justin Fenton.When​ Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupted across the United States and then the world last year, their target was not Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd. Floyd’s murder resonated so widely because Chauvin’s brutality signified something deeper and more pervasive. The video footage of Floyd’s death offered evidence of both an ideology (white supremacy) and the system that sustains it (racism) at their most fundamental level: state murder. In the following months it sparked debate not just about policing in America, but school curriculums in Britain, the repertoire of the Paris Opéra, St Nicholas’s assistant Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands, and racial disparities in Covid deathrates across the West.To be very clear, this case is called the State of Minnesota versus Derek Chauvin. It is not called the State of Minnesota versus the police ... Make no mistake, this is not a prosecution of the police, it is a prosecution of the defendant, and there’s nothing worse for good police than a bad police who doesn’t follow the rules.You all keep sending me to jail. Send me to jail. Jail is making me worse. You all can’t tell that? I ain’t been on the streets. I been locked up my whole life ... They say I’ve been a substance abuser since I was seventeen. I’ve been locked up since I was nineteen years old, Your Honour. From nineteen to now, I’ve been home for 120 days. The government never offer me no treatment. They never did nothing. They wonder why I still do stuff. You sent me to the same problem. You sent me to Baltimore City Detention Centre, where all that’s going on. And, obviously, I need help. Ain’t nobody can give me a chance to help me.

    
        

                        
                        
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Why every single statue should come down – podcast
Statues of historical figures are lazy, ugly and distort history. From Cecil Rhodes to Rosa Parks, let’s get rid of them all. By Gary Younge with additional reporting by Meghan Tinsley, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Chloe Peacock and Sadia Habib.To listen to the podcast, please click here.
Lewis Hamilton: ‘Everything I’d suppressed came up – I had to speak out’
He’s the most successful driver Formula One has ever seen, and its only Black star. Now Lewis Hamilton has a new mission: to change the sport that made him.As Lewis Hamilton rose through the ranks of competitive go-karting, his father, Anthony, told him: “Always do your talking on the track.” Lewis had a lot to talk about. Bullying and racial taunts were a consistent feature of his childhood in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, a new town 30 miles north of London; his dad taught him the best response was to excel at his sport.
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