Dear America,
There's really not much more to say about the murder of George Floyd. The heinous fact of it is so well documented that it's indefensibility cannot be denied. Apparently Floyd did resist being put in the police car for transport--there are reports that he claimed claustrophobia as the cause of his resistance--but regardless of the cause and effect involved, or even the formidability of the resistance, four cops should have been able to overcome it fairly easily, and certainly without killing him. No doubt there will be attempts to rationalize the extremes to which four cops went to subdue Floyd, but given the video, they will be unavailing, or at least they should be. Officer Chauvin will be convicted and sent to prison, which he isn't going to like. The conventional wisdom is that a cop in jail has two choices: solitary confinement on the one hand and suffering the abuse he used to give out on the other. But there is one aspect of this whole tragedy that never gets discussed, and it is at the heart of the problem that Floyd's murder represents.
I've seen the video of the crime several times, and just as it appears in the video, I have read that Chauvin looked right at the person taking it. I have also heard news reports that bystanders were pleading with Chauvin to relent. But not only did he persist, he did so gleefully if the look on his face is reflective of his state of mind. It appears that Chauvin...caught in mid-crime...was not only defiant in his persistence, he appeared to feel that he enjoyed the kind of impunity that seems to be rampant in law enforcement. Many cops apparently feel that they can do as they please and never face punishment. Chauvin, for example, already had something like seventeen complaints against him during his career in Minneapolis, but the worst consequences he suffered were two letters of reprimand. No doubt he thought that he would get no worse than that for abusing Floyd. Even after it was clear from the lack of a pulse that Floyd was dead, Chauvin kept his neck on Floyd's neck for another two minutes or so, in effect posing for the camera that was documenting his malfeasance.
I am convinced that Chauvin was of the belief that cops are immune from legal punishment, and that, even more than racism, is the problem that the case of George Floyd embodies. As long as law enforcement's collective ethos is such as to endow individual policemen with such license as the lack of consequence seems to imbue them with, they will be abusive without compunction. In prior cases--Michael Brown for example--a case could, and has been made that the victim was big enough that he was a threat by definition, and in Brown's and Eric Garner's cases, the size issue was graphically obvious. And in both those cases, the officer that killed the victim could rationally, albeit perhaps not rightfully in at least Garner's case, claim either perception of a threat or inadvertency. In Freddy Grey's case, the defense was also inadvertency though there was evidence that the rough ride he experienced on the way to jail was intentionally inflicted and was what killed him. And there are cases of victims being pulled from cars and shot for no apparent reason, others fleeing cars on foot after being stopped for traffic infractions and being shot as they did so despite the fact that the violation observed by the officer was far from felonious or even serious. In fact, when I was sixteen, I saw a policeman in a car use his door to knock a friend of mine, our student body president, to the pavement and throw him onto the hood for no reason other than that he was waiting with me outside the movie theater for a ride home from my mother. The reason for the abuse wasn't race; he was white. It was shear meanness. That night I wanted to report the incident, but my mother told me to forget about it because in his youth, even her father had seen cops beating a nearly helplessly drunk man into unconsciousness for no apparent reason, and even way back then, it was common knowledge that cops were untouchable when it came to abuse of their authority...even then and from long before as well.
So, until we manage to squelch the belief among the perpetrators of abuse of power--that's what body cams were meant to do, though their effect is yet to be demonstrated--we will continue to have police forces infested with some people who join because they are bullies, sadists, megalomaniacs, sociopaths or just evil. And in my opinion, the only way to make that kind of change is to start not at the bottom, but at the top. Every chief who let Chauvin slide should be in court with him in one way or another, and to make that happen, their liability has to become statutory. You can bet that when police chiefs are made liable for the misconduct of their subordinates, if they knew or should have known that the abuser was not just a bad cop, but a miscreant as well...like Derek Chauvin...these things will stop happening. But not until then.
Your friend,
Mike
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