Anger on the streets: Flowers, signs and balloons are left on Friday near a makeshift memorial to George Floyd near the spot where he died while in custody of police in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Then came the death of Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, under the knee of of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the Memorial Day.

The death of Floyd served as a trigger for mass protests as the video showing him being pinned to the ground by the knee of the police officer for minutes went viral.

Floyd can be heard saying, ‘I can’t breathe’, but Derek Michael Chauvin, the Minneapolis Police Department officer, won’t take his knee off Floyd’s neck.

The protesters fought with police, burned down vehicles and police precincts and turned the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota’s largest city, into a battleground.

Any leader, with a realistic sense of what his country was going through, should immediately have called for calm and issued reassurances that justice would prevail.

A white father and son were arrested this month in connection with the murder, after protests and a social media storm.

Floyd’s death was sure to light the fuse.

In Washington DC, Secret Service agents had to keep hundreds of protesters away from the White House.

It’s a country that had to fight a civil war to end slavery.

It’s a country where lynching blacks was a public spectacle until early last century.

It’s a country where the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation existed (in some states) until 1960s.

It’s a country where blacks were denied of their voting rights, mostly in southern states, until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.

It’s a country where police violence is still disproportionally targeted against the Black minority and where police officers often get away with their acts against the blacks.

His style might be useful during an election campaign targeted at the political establishment, not when he’s in power and the country is going through serious crises.

He might bring order using force, like police states usually do in times of social unrest.

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