Introduction: Reckoning in the Moment

Introduction: Reckoning in the Moment

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Nine minutes and 29 seconds. That was the amount of time Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee and body weight on top of George Floyd’s neck, ignoring his desperate pleas to breathe. That single act of brutality ended Mr. Floyd’s life and launched a global uprising. A simple, vulgar truth—one policeman’s violence against a human being slipping into unconsciousness and death—could not be contained and ignored: the world became suddenly and painfully aware that such brazen violence perpetrated by some who are sworn to serve and protect was a daily reality, especially for people of color. Worse still, the violence was casual, normal, even routine. Young Black men are 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by police. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to be unarmed when killed during encounters with police. George Floyd’s name has now become part of a legacy of state-sanctioned brutality in the American criminal justice system. But, as stark a picture as that paints, it is incomplete. Filling out this grim story is another ugly truth: police officers who engage in racial violence rarely, if ever, face any criminal consequences for taking a life. In fact, without intense and sustained public pressure, Chauvin would likely have escaped prosecution and gotten away with murder. This time, though, the video footage of George Floyd’s torture and murder awakened a complacent public and splintered the landscape. The world erupted—as it should have—because all of us witnessed firsthand that Black lives are at risk and disposable in America today. People across the nation—and around the globe—took to the streets demanding more than justice-as-usual. That audacious step in the middle of a pandemic made clear that the public was unwilling to let George Floyd’s name become just another trending #hashtag. Rote denunciations of the violence also would not quell public outrage. Political leaders rushed to issue statements condemning Chauvin’s actions, but one former prosecutor’s statements did more harm than good. When Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota publicly decried Chauvin’s brutality and called for charges to be filed, her statements fell flat. Klobuchar had served as District Attorney in Minneapolis, and her record there stood in stark contrast to her belated condemnation. Klobuchar had failed to bring charges against multiple officers involved in shootings during her tenure. When Klobuchar was serving as the DA, relatives of victims of police brutality had asked her to bypass the grand jury process because it had become crystal clear that cases involving police violence rarely led to an indictment. But Klobuchar declined to make any substantive changes. In fact, her track record exposes practices that were overly friendly to police officers and largely inattentive to victims of police violence. Public outcry about impunity for police during her tenure ultimately sank Klobuchar’s chances of becoming Joe Biden’s running mate in the 2020 presidential campaign. More important, prosecutors’ complicity in—and inaction against—police violence has inflicted wounds in communities of color that never healed and were (and even remain) painfully raw. The local and nationwide protests surrounding George Floyd’s death made clear that the city—and this country—needed at long last to reckon with racism and racial violence before life would return to anything like normal. But what made this the moment? Why did George Floyd’s death draw an indelible line in the sand? One possibility was that his death came as the culmination of a series of high profile racialized confrontations. In February, Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was hunted, shot, and killed by three armed white men as he jogged through a South Georgia neighborhood. Local prosecutors initially determined that the behavior of these three men was “perfectly legal.” The case would have ended there, but a video of the chase and shooting surfaced and went viral. New prosecutors from outside the county were brought in to assess the case. Finally, the three men were charged with murder two months after Mr. Arbery’s death. Then, in March, Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician, was fatally shot by three plainclothes Louisville Metro Police Department officers who entered her home on a no-knock search warrant. They had broken into the wrong home. Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, licensed to carry a gun, fired at these intruders. The police fired more than twenty shots, hitting and killing Breonna Taylor, who was unarmed. Prosecutors did not charge any of the officers in her shooting death. Over the next month, a series of incidents revealed white people weaponizing the 911 emergency system to patrol racial boundaries that they wanted enforced. Almost on a weekly basis, there were online accounts of white people calling the police to report Black people doing nothing more than going about their daily lives. And prosecutors took no steps to charge those callers as a way of exercising some control over the broad misuse of the 911 system. That practice reached an inflection point on May 25, 2020, just twelve hours before George Floyd would lose his life. A white woman, Amy Cooper, dubbed “Central Park Karen,” was caught on video falsely claiming that a Black man with the same last name, Christian Cooper, was threatening her. He had actually been bird watching and asked her to leash her dog in compliance with park regulations. The video showed that he was not engaging in anything illegal even as she was calling the police to report “an African American man threatening my life.” Once again, the all-too-familiar pattern emerged. Amy Cooper was not immediately arrested or charged, although the video demonstrated her false accusation and report. It was only after a public outcry that the Manhattan District Attorney filed charges. This series of events one after the other exposed not only this country’s habit of conflating brown and black skin with dangerousness but also prosecutors’ complicity in tolerating and ignoring disturbing incidents. Perhaps the crescendo of events proved too much to ignore. More likely, the reason that George Floyd’s death brought the country to its knees and its senses was this: we all witnessed this murder. Virtually every single household in America watched the footage, filmed by a bystander. As a country, we were just beginning to grapple with the initial wave of COVID-19. More than half the states had issued some sort of stay-at-home order to slow the spread of the pandemic, so millions of Americans were inside homes, becoming bored with the sameness of the days. When that footage became public, it went viral. Black folks felt almost compelled to watch the recording as the latest life lesson. Maybe it is a survival mechanism or just a common acceptance that Mr. Floyd could have been anyone of us. We could see ourselves in his face; we could feel his fear. We have grown up in a country understanding that on any given day it can take less than ten minutes to turn any one of us into a statistic. But, this time, Black people were not the only ones watching. White Americans likewise could not look away. White people do not typically experience these sorts of lethal police encounters. They are immunized by skin color, privilege, and place. And, in ordinary times, the distractions of work or daily activities would likely have drawn their attention away from the video proof. But these were not ordinary times. So, all of us—regardless of race, place, and position—watched. And what we witnessed took our breath away. We watched that officer’s reflexive disdain as he casually kept his hand in his pocket while deliberately pressing his knee into a man who posed no threat. Having witnessed that criminal act, people around the world expected a rapid response from the prosecution. They didn’t get it. The gap in time between Mr. Floyd’s murder and prosecutorial action seemed inexplicable given what we had witnessed with our own eyes. It also seemed wholly unanchored to any reasonable sense of justice. Instead, with each passing day, public protests amped up and public trust in the integrity of the justice process withered. On the morning after the killing, and hours before the video went viral, the Minneapolis Police Department spokesperson released misinformation in a statement titled “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County Attorney, held a press conference to discuss the case three days after the killing. He acknowledged that the video was “horrific and terrible,” but he added “there is other evidence that does not support a criminal charge.” Freeman did not wait for the complete review of the evidence before casting doubt on the guilt of the officers. And, of course, his knee-jerk acceptance of the police version of events would later prove wrong. But it is emblematic of a key issue for prosecutors: their cozy relationship with police departments too often blinds them to the criminal conduct of officers.

Source Publication

Progressive Prosecution: Race and Reform in Criminal Justice

Source Editors/Authors

Kim Taylor-Thompson, Anthony C. Thompson

Publication Date

2022

Introduction: Reckoning in the Moment

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