G'day @silence... I don't doubt that Floyd had a criminal past. In the US social supports are very hard to access and inadequate, harder than Aus although recent years are heading to a similar state of increasing difficulty and so increasing petty crimes and homelessness. This causes intrapersonal anger at the hardness of life and interpersonal anger when others have what the impoverished can only dream of having.
If the man has been able to turn his life around and live 13 years without committing crimes, he's done pretty well given the difficulties of surviving in US.
But the real issue here is why he was stopped by police, and why he was treated so callously as to cause him to die of asphyxia.
Often in Aus, our laws create such difficulties for many people that anger, impoverishment and criminal behaviour are created by laws. Illicit drug laws are often a subject of election campaigns with candidates and Parties wanting to appear "Tough on Drugs". This provokes much anger among younger people who are strip-searched or stopped for no particular reason other than suspicion. If drug use was regulated and controlled without legal sanction then these people could be helped instead of imprisoning them with hard crims and ensuring a recidivism rate of 50% for first time offenders, or over 75% if you're aboriginal.
Yes, as @nursery writes, all lives matter. I agree. Yet if you're black, asian or Muslim in Aus the prejudices and biases of laws will ensure that you have a much higher risk of being imprisoned and labelled as a criminal for the rest of your life. Its much, much worse in the US.
Laws can create criminality. Attitudes within a community can create differences and false social classes which create laws which create criminality.
Changing the attitudes and the laws and reduce alienation and poverty is the most effective means of reducing criminality. Add in education and opportunity to better ones' life and criminality can fade into a distant memory... sometimes its much better to forget the past of a person and see the real human.
