Video footage from Teplice, Czech Republic is being massively shared through social media of a police intervention against a young Romani man who later died in the ambulance called to the scene.
One of the intervening police officers kneeled for several minutes on the Romani man's neck. The young man later died in the ambulance called to the scene by police.
Police say their intervention was not the cause of death, but that the drugs the Romani man is said to have used were the cause of death. Michal Miko, director of the Romanonet organization, has posted online that what the video shows is, "The height of brutality."
Michal Mižigár, a Romani student of history and Romani Studies who won the Aspen Central Europe Leadership Award in 2019 from the Aspen Institute Central Europe, commented that the footage shows "The Romani Floyd today in Teplice!" Recalling the attack on Romani children at a summer camp run by the Romani musician Ida Kelarová and the death of a Romani man in police custody inside a pizzeria in Žatec, he added: "I feel genuinely powerless and sad. This is not the first case."
"They're smothering him," a woman's voice can be heard to say. "That's their job," a man's voice says, defending the police intervention.
Please remember us in your fight against police brutality. We are often unheard victims. This is not even the first death caused by police kneeling on a Romani person's neck. And never let people tell you only American police are violent and racist.
:romani:
the struggle of the Romani is one that goes forgotten a lot of the time, even in progressive spaces. one of the first victims of the holocaust, and still seen as a 'stateless people'. to this day the same rhetoric and violence is used against them that has been for centuries since they came to Europe. solidarity