a majority of the minneapolis city council has promised to dismantle its police department. the move follows the death of an unarmed black man, george floyd, in minneapolis police custody, nearly two weeks ago. nine of the council's 13 members said they would instead create a new system of public safety. large numbers of people are continuing to take part in peaceful protests against police brutality and racism in the us. tens of thousands gathered in cities including washington and new york, as well as small towns across the country. the protests began as an expression of anger over the police killing of george floyd. this thousands of people defied the ban on mass gatherings to join rallies triggered by the killing of george floyd in police custody in the us. in the uk, demonstrators in bristol pulled down a bronze statue of a 17th century slave trader, edward colston, and threw it into the harbour. now on bbc news, dateline london.

hello and welcome to dateline london. i'm carrie gracie. this week. it is nearly two weeks since george floyd's death on a minneapolis street. an unarmed, handcuffed, this is bbc news. non—resisting black man killed by a white police officer. welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. outrage over that death has i'm aaron safir. our top stories: driven a wave of protest across the united states and sympathy marches around the world. council members in minneapolis pledge to dismantle the city's police force following the death in custody there but not, it's worth noting, in authoritarian china. of george floyd. never a country to permit thousands of people public protest itself, continue to take part beijing has instead given ample news coverage to scenes of chaos in peaceful protests against police brutality and racism in the us. in the us, drawing attention huge crowds gather in cities to what it portrays as the hypocrisy

of a government that encourages protest in hong kong and towns across the country. while suppressing it at home. thousands of people across britain take part so clearly the untimely death in more anti—racism protests. in bristol a statue of a 17th of george floyd is being used century slave trader for different messages in different places. my guests.. is torn down and rolled into the river. on socially distanced and in brazil — hundreds of people have screens, henry chu demonstrated there against of the los angeles times and isabel hilton of the website china dialogue. and here in the studio, observing the two metre rule, the bbc‘s clive myrie. welcome to all three of you. now henry, i want to start with you because you are from la, which is a town only too familiar with police brutality and the riots that that triggers, so for you, this must look like a return to a familiar narrative. well, and it's a grim one, unfortunately, in la, we had the riots over the officers who beat rodney king in 1992 and we have to remember that with george floyd, that is only the latest example of police brutality against black people and the violent deaths that many

black people experience because of racism and just in a couple of months before that, there was a black man in georgia who was killed by two white men as he ran through their neighbourhood and a young woman in kentucky who was killed in her own home when detectives broke down the door and came in on a drug raid in which they found nothing, but she died of gunfire, and i think this is a confluence of all the events that have been happening recently. but even though it's the start of a very grim story, i have hopes that this narrative actually will then go on a different trajectory. the protests that we've seen have been nothing like what i've seen in the last few decades, including the rodney king riots, in terms of how sustained they've been, how they have been nationwide,

almost no corner of the us, in terms of major cities, has been untouched, it has also gone around the world and i think this kind of outpouring has now made a difference. there have been polls showing that now white americans are starting to understand more, that there is a systemic racism in law enforcement, and there have already been changes in terms of some of the law enforcement practices across california. a number of police departments have said that they are going to end the practice of chokehold. so, i think there is more hope time for a better outcome than there has been. we'll come back to that hopeful thought in a moment. clive, you've reported on and off from the united states for a quarter of a century. i noticed that will smith, the actor, says that racism is not getting worse, it's getting filmed. in your experience, do you think the availability of mobile phone cameras to bear witness is making a difference? i think it's critical. it has been said that steve jobs has done more for the americanjustice system than any attorney general has

in the last 10—15 years. we had a classic example of that yesterday. a white, 75—year—old man, approached a wall of riot police in buffalo, upstate new york. he wasn't armed, he wasn't threatening. he was pushed over by two of these riot officers. fell on the ground, hit his head, blood pouring from his ear and no one attended to him. now, the police suggested that he tripped. it wasn't until that mobile phone footage came out that showed that he was pushed, that two officers were sanctioned, they've been now taken off the job and in fact, 57 officers have nowjoined in protest these two officers in claiming, in solidarity. what's that about? it shows the disconnect that you have between what the police think they're doing in society and what ordinary people think they are doing. a research centre did a poll three or four years ago that

looked at the question of whether it's just a few rotten apples in police forces that are causing these problems we're seeing on the streets. the overwhelming majority of police officers said, it is just a few rotten apples, there is no problem. the overwhelming majority of the public believe it is completely different. that there is a systemic racism in so that there is a systemic racism in so many police forces. the tragedy of what happened to george floyd is that if there had not been a camera they're filming that white police officer with his knee on his neck, that man could well have simply gone down as another statistic in history rather than the man we know to be george floyd, with a family and children and a back story and a life, because that camera was there to capture that moment. there is no question, in the minds of some, that that police department would have said it was the result of a struggle. there was some issue. cameras have shone a light on this and going back to henry's point,

we're in the middle of lockdown across the world. people are focused. they're not out there working, they're not out there attending to other things, they're at home watching the television with time to think. isabel, you're always thinking. the reverend al sharpton at one of the memorials we've seen for george floyd said, "get your knee off our necks". now, does george floyd's death, does the policing of the protest over his death, does it tell you, given all the thinking that you have done about these issues, does it tell you anything about american policing that you didn't already know? i think technically no, but i certainly agree that the act of filming the stuff is critical and in fact going back to rodney king, what made rodney king a celebrated case was that this was pre—mobile phone for younger viewers, this was 1991,

but there was a man, a resident nearby on a balcony nearby with a video camera and he filmed the beating of rodney king by 14 police officers, a savage beating that put him in hospital. he sent it to a local news station and it was those images, as it is with the current case, that really makes people understand what is happening here. now, we kind of know it intellectually, but knowing it emotionally is a whole different ball game and i think accounts for... it's quite a different crowd at this point, it's not, if you like, an angry black crowd, it's an angry crowd of citizens of all races. the other thing we we probably did know is that there is a tendency of police forces to cover up and defend each other

and that's a strong ethos in the police force, as we've seen from the resignations. but, in terms of how the police perceive it, it's a dangerous job and policemen do get killed and no doubt they feel that they go out every day and face the unknown, but the sheer scale of deaths in the united states is pretty staggering. there's an organisation that tracks police violence which reports that last year, there were 1000 deaths at the hands of police. now that's an average of three per day. some of them may be justified, some of them may have been bad people about to do bad things, but you know, when you see these videos, you have to say that a lot of them simply were not and that police forces have to examine themselves in the way that they deal with this. the other rather staggering statistic is that in six years, up to last year, of the hundreds of policemen involved in civilian deaths, only four were prosecuted and only one was convicted.

going back to rodney king again, what made people particularly angry was the impunity, the fact that four men, four police officers were charged and they were not, in the first round of trials, convicted. so, i think we are at a moment here when this has gone on long enough and people will demand more systemic change. henry, coming back to you, you've reported on policing in the us over the years. what do you think is best practice? it's a very fragmented country when it comes to policing, is there a force that has shown the way how to do it better? well, police forces are made up of humans and humans are flawed and i don't think there's any police force in the us that can be held up as the unsullied ideal at the moment. and what we saw in minneapolis is a reflection of the structural racism that is in the rest of society. it's notjust police forces that have these kinds of unconscious

biases or conscious biases for that matter, in minneapolis, the population of the city is about 20% black but up to about a few years ago, less than 10% of the police force was black and so when you have these structural inequalities and disparities, you are going to see that reflected in practices and so i think some of that grassroots rectification needs to happen in order for police forces to change their tactics, but again, what was encouraging about this round is that after the video came out and the protests began, the number of law enforcement agencies around the country that actually joined in on the condemnation of what happened in minneapolis, of which they should, was quite high, and if we even look back to after the rodney king riots, there was a blue ribbon commission that came up with a report of how to change practices within the lapd,

some of which included community policing so that police officers are much closer to the people on their beat and develop much better relationships with those people. some of those were implemented and even the critics of the lapd would say that there have been good changes over the years, and so my hope is that out of this, we will see more recommendations along that line, best practices that can be held up and shared around the country among these disparate police forces and law enforcement agencies and some good can come of it. clive, let's talk about the reporting of it. you have been involved over the bbc reporting over the past few —— you've been involved over the bbc‘s reporting over the past few days of these events. i am struck by the tendency for when some of the protesting then turns to rioting and then we get a kind of cycle of police repression of that rioting and indeed of peaceful protest, that the underlying issues, the issues we have been talking about, get buried, the underlying question of police brutality against black citizens gets buried. it's difficult to keep the focus on the original problem, isn't it?

it's true, it's that classic of dead cat bounce. drop a dead cat onto the table and everyone‘s looking at the cat and nothing going on around. remember when martin luther king was marching and being arrested and being beaten by the police, he was seen as the most hated man in america at the time, even though it was pretty obvious, to most people, you'd have thought, what he was trying to do. but, he was described as a communist sympathiser, described as an agitator, the fbi, j edgar hoover were on his tail throughout much of his working life towards the end of his life. the emphasis was on him being something that america should not cleave to. to play the man on the ball. exactly. you focus on that, not the actual issues that he is talking about, and we are seeing that throughout what is happening now. the focus amongst some, particularly on the right,

republicans and of course president trump, is to focus on the few, and it has been established that they are few, and some of them are right—wing agitators as well, as well as left—wing agitators, focus on the looting, focus on the $70 trainers that are being taken out of macy's, as opposed to a black man having the life strangled out of him by a white officer's knee. it is the classic way you do not change anything because you are not focusing on what's important, and that primarily has been what is happening, certainly from the perspective of the white house and some in the republican party. isabel, another issue here i suppose that we haven't touched on is that all of this is just at the moment when we have a pandemic which is disproportionately affecting black people in health terms and where the lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus is also disproportionately affecting many ethnic minority communities including black communities. do you think those issues play into what we are saying?

sharon i am sure they do play in, if only in the sense that one crisis opens up the possibility for further crises, in stable societies where people are feeling safe and busy and life goes on, there'sjust less space for protest and anger, there's less need for it. but we are at a really strange moment, as i don't have to tell anyone, notjust the pandemic but before the pandemic, the way politics have gone really since 2016 and perhaps in the lead up to 2016, since the financial crisis, that we've seen this fragmentation of narratives and it's quite true that there is a lot of playing of the man going on in this particular crisis, but if you go onto social media, especially certain right—wing american social media threads, what you see is the victim being demonised.

you know, all kinds of slanderous stuff about his life, or was he on drugs, all these kind of things which are ways of casting doubt on whether or not he deserved to die with a policeman's knee on his neck. so, we have a confusion of narratives, we have people who are feeling deeply insecure, with a pandemic in a society which doesn't have a global health system, so gross health inequalities as well as gross economic inequalities and inequalities of opportunity and i think that this goes beyond the black and minority communities as well, there are a lot of very uneasy people in american society, as there are in other societies, but american society is in this rather acute crisis and i think that that has made it a cause that people have rallied

to because there is a huge amount of anger and frustration that has nowhere to go. and henry, on top of that i suppose, we have a president who behaves slightly differently in these circumstances, instead of seeking and healing, dispersing contention and confrontation, he is doing something different. that's right, and even his two predecessors, ba rack obama and george w bush, had crises during which they addressed the nation and tried to act as the healer, the one who did indeed rally everyone around as the american people as one and we're not seeing that from this president but i don't think we should be surprised, in that you have him going on radio, on conservative radio and talking about the protesters as a very bad group of people and yet on the other hand this is the same president who, a couple of years ago, talked about white supremacists as a group of very fine people. his base does consist

of a large number of white nationalists and he is busy consolidating that base ahead of the election in november. he's also fortifying himself in the white house in a way that we've never seen before by a president and even the perceptions of that speak to the polarisation of society. there are those who would be more on the left and the liberal side who see that this is classic tactic and the retreat of a strongman, one word, strongman. whereas those who are supporting him see this as the fortification of a strong man, someone who is really trying to impose law and order and showing the strength and might he has at his fingertips, which he does as the leader of america and its military. so, what we're seeing is further division and further manifestation of the polarisation that had been going on, even before he became president, he's again in many ways the symptom and not the cause. clive, what about the rest of the american political establishment, we now have a confirmed democratic challenger injoe biden, how

is he facing up to this challenge? it's a good question. i think the leadership of the democratic party have realised that it's simply better to allow donald trump to lay his own land mines and walk straight into them, which seems to be what he is doing. if you look at the polls, joe biden is, in some polls, ten points ahead particularly in some of those key battleground states. he has come out and said a few things, some of them not very good when he talked about the possibility that if you are black and you voted republican, you're not really black. that was a gaffe. but the democratic party, i suspect, going into the election in november, has a lock on the african—american vote which could be very, very important in the final analysis. it was the fact that a lot of african—americans didn't feel that they wanted to come out in 2016 that helped donald trump get over the line.

republicans for their part, certainly in congress, in the senate and the house, while they may have reservations about donald trump's handling not only the pandemic but also of the george floyd incident, while they may have reservations about the way that he has dealt with it, they are still not willing to come out publicly and attack and they do fear, a lot of those who are facing re—election themselves in november, that turning against donald trump could mean that they get booted out themselves. but there is a lot of disquiet within the american political establishment about the handling of this and it could hit donald trump hard come november. i want now to move on to the ways in which the story has resonated around the world. we don't have much time left, so i want to talk about china as it resonates so differently in china than elsewhere. isabel, you follow the so—called wolf warrior diplomats and you follow china's state media. they haven't been so much preoccupied by observing what is happening in the us as deploying it to make

their own argument. can you explain that to us? well, i think it certainly made their day. for those who don't know the emergence of wolf warriors, the expression is taken from a rambo—style chinese movie in which some chinese heroes staged a daring rescue in africa, and pretty much since the beginning of the pandemic, china's normally rather staid diplomats have been behaving a bit like rambo in verbal assaults which have been aimed at the us in particular, but not only, the ambassador in paris managed to offend the whole of france in one of his verbal assaults and the question is, why are they doing this? and it is partly to push back for any blame for this, for the worst global pandemic in a century and it is a way of continuing a fight with the us so of course, riots in the united states and demonstrations and disorder and chaos in the united states are absolutely grist to the chinese

mill and the third leg of the stool, as you say, is hong kong. so one of the leading proponents of wolf warrior style of diplomacy is a man called zhao lijian who is the foreign ministry spokesman. he had suggested that the virus had been brought to wuhan by the us military, so he is very much in that camp and he was absolutely a happy man this week because he could very solemnly, and managing to keep a straight face, lecture the united states about china's grave concern about the situation. he had a slightly unfortunate phrasing which was 'lives of black people are also human lives', slightly unfortunate version of black lives matter, but then talks about the long—running problems of racial discrimination

against minorities in the united states and how much china hope the united states would attend to its domestic difficulties and uphold the rights of minorities according to the un convention on the rights of minorities and this from a country which has a million of its own minorities locked up in camps, in which there have been unpleasant racial incidents with african students in the last couple of weeks and in which, you know, serious violence has been used against peaceful protesters in hong kong. but of course, now that it is happening in the united states, it becomes very very easy for china to say, look, you know, it is hypocrisy to comment on our internal affairs, slightly glossing over the fact that china is commenting on us internal affairs, so i think we are invited to conclude by chinese media that there is an equivalence here and that there is nothing to see in china. and i suppose, henry, obviously you were based in beijing for many years and you covered the hong kong handover, you watched that from beijing. this is, it has been the first week ofjune, which is an incredibly important week in the chinese political

calendar, the anniversary of the june the 11th massacre of the tiananmen square protests and of course the only place that can still mark that publicly is hong kong and now we have this national security legislation coming from hong kong and the criminalisation of any criticism of the national anthem. that's right. and this has all been during the pandemic that this has happened which has given china some cover while other countries are dealing with the infection on their home shores. i think when we were watching the handover happened back in 1997, there were some optimistic talk then that this one country, two systems, would actually have a benign and beneficial effect on mainland china and that somehow hong kong would be the example that the rest of china could emulate and that unfortunately, we are seeing that it is going on precisely the opposite direction. what we have to remember, fo china, is that when the handover happened it was a political and economic event. it ended what they felt

was the humiliation of the hands of the british during the opium wars and hong kong being ceded over to britain as a colony, that was coming finally to an end and also, this economicjewel in the crown which was a thriving financial centre, a huge economic hub, was coming back into their fold. that is no longer quite the case as it was then. i think at the time of the handover, hong kong, even though it was less than 1% of the population, accounted for about 16% of the entire chinese economy. now, we see it is only about 3%. back then, hong kong was the busiest container port in the world and now shanghai has about double the volume. hong kong's importance as an economic centre was far less than before and what has happened instead is that the political question of hong kong has completely taken over and that is where china now now, it is exerting its authority

from beijing and wants to make hong kong like the rest of china rather than the other way round. and we are very fast running out of time but clive, a couple of words from you about what is going on in london, because of course we've seen china has slapped down for london, because of course we've seen china has slapped down borisjohnson in the past week for saying that he would create a path to citizenship for hong kongers, nearly 3 million of them. this makes it difficult to preserve anything of that golden era that the uk government wanted in a post—brexit britain. it does. i mean, as the uk loosens those very close ties that it had with the european union over the last 40—plus years, it is looking for markets outside. and the brexiteers made it clear that those markets are the big markets that are developing over the next 10, 15, 20 years, it is not the european union, so you're looking to brazil, india, you're looking to china, you're looking increasingly to the united states. the problem is that in this moment in history, those countries are run by strongmen and that leaves

a conundrum for the british state. how close can it get to those countries to secure trade, at the same time, lecture them or tell them that there are issues when it comes to human rights that they have to look out for. we could do at least another half—hour on this out of time. thank you all three so much. it's been a fascinating discussion today. that is it for dateline london this week. 00:27:28,105 --> 2147483051:50:28,768 we are back the same time, 2147483051:50:28,768 --> 4294966103:13:29,430 same place next week, goodbye.