Some Thoughts on the Chauvin Verdict

 

Now that it’s been a few days, here are some thoughts on the Chauvin verdict (he was the former Minneapolis police officer who was recently found guilty of murdering George Floyd in May 2020).

 

·      First of all, this verdict is a good thing. Is it the best thing? Hardly. But sometimes a minimally decent small response to vast injustice is a better thing that not having even that.

·      There’s a lot of digital ink being spilled about whether this is “justice” or “accountability.” Or whether “the system worked.” Of course it depends on what you mean by those terms, but I tend to agree with people who are saying that true justice would be if George Floyd were still alive. Or Breonna Taylor. Or Ahmaud Arbery. Or Daunte Wright. Or Ma’Khia Bryant. Or Andrew Brown. Or so many others.

·      While I understand why the prosecution went with the strategy they did (it was a winning strategy, after all), in the long term I worry that getting the police to turn on one of their own will forestall the deeper, more systemic inquiry into police departments as organizations and policing as an institution that we so desperately need. It looks like the Federal Justice Department is doing an inquiry into the Minneapolis Police Department, which may be a small start.

·      It’s worrying that it took this much to get a conviction: a clear video of the slow murder of a human being seen by millions, cops willing to turn on one of their own, a summer of constant worldwide protest during a pandemic, the beginnings (hopefully) of a societal sea change on the issue, etc. Hopefully this will be the drop that begins a flood of fairness and justice, but I worry that it has set the bar too high.

·      What if instead of asking, “Under what conditions is it acceptable for police to kill people?” we asked, “Why do police have to kill people at all?”

·      While I have no sympathy for Chauvin’s actions and I think his conviction is important as a step toward a less hypocritical society, I do suspect at a deeper level that the model of retributive justice is itself part of the problem. After all, part of why police murder people is because they often see themselves as punishing criminals (and Blackness and criminality are intimately linked in the minds of many white people). Nobody has all the answers for what a truly restorative model of justice would look like, but the retributive model is literally killing people so it’s worth doing some serious thinking about alternatives. (For what it’s worth, I’m philosophically on board with eventual police abolition, but that is a long term goal; it seems far-fetched, but police as we know them are a relatively recent invention in the last few hundred years, so there’s no historical necessity in their continuation into the future—what has been made can be unmade).

·      I hope one of those larger cultural shifts will include rethinking assumptions about police, criminality, the drug war, and race forged so carefully in America beginning during the Reagan era (see Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow for a thorough study of this phenomenon). Think about how TV cop shows reinforce the idea that police should break the rules for the greater good, to protect the public from the nefarious (and frequently racialized) criminal element. Think about how treating drug addiction as a criminal problem rather than a medical problem has given the US the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Think about how impossible it is for national politicians to be elected without being “tough on crime,” who exactly they are tough on in these calculations, and the thinly veiled white supremacist connotations of the whole “law and order” mindset from Reagan to Trump and beyond (and yes, many mainstream Democrats, too). Think about how our entire criminal justice system in America revolves around violence and punishment and retribution, how it encourages us to see our neighbors as enemies. What if instead we aimed for true public safety and working toward a healthy society and the public good for all Americans?

·      While I’m not ready for full despair, I’m also not ready for full optimism. We still have a long way to go as a country, especially for white people. We need to change our attitudes, and change policies. 

·      I worry about the white people in my original home of Minnesota (especially the Twin Cities), who are often smug about being progressive and not being racist like white folks down South while living in segregated communities with a long history of racism in a state with numerous high profile police murders of Black people. White Minnesotans do not get credit for ending racism. The South has its issues, but so does the North. This is a national issue, and this is not the time for white Minnesotans and white Americans to pat themselves on the back and get complacent.

·      As upset as this whole tragedy has made me, I admit I don’t fully understand what this sort of racial trauma is like for millions of Black Americans. It’s not just high profile killings that get hashtags and visits from Rev. Al Sharpton, it’s the killings that don’t get national media coverage, not to mention mass incarceration and daily harassment. There are wounds in the Black American psyche that I doubt one conviction can do much to heal. I doubt one jury's decision can mend the fractured two-ness of double-consciousness for African Americans that W. E. B. Du Bois discussed over 100 years ago. Yet is this the beginning of deeper healing? Or a small aberration along the way to more of the same?

·      We should remember that the bystanders are forever traumatized by this as well, including the teenager who filmed Floyd’s murder and the 9-year-old who witnessed it and bravely testified in court.

·      My condolences to George Floyd’s family and friends. While the rest of us talk about systemic racism and hashtags and cultural attitudes toward policing, they lost a loved one whom they will never see again.