Chauvin Verdicts’ Impact on Police Killing People of Color

The three guilty verdicts for former Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer, Derek Chauvin, for his public, nine-minute and twenty-nine-second murder of Mr. George Perry Floyd are in, and almost nothing has changed. Minutes before the judge could announce them, 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, a Black female, was killed by a White Columbus, Ohio police officer in her front yard.

Allegedly, she had called the police for protection as she was being assaulted by a group of Black girls. The officer shot her four times within minutes of arriving at the scene, reminiscent of the erringly similar 2014 killing of 12- year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio as he played with a toy gun in a local park.

The prevailing view is that the solution to this epidemic of preventable fatalities is better training of police in how to do their jobs. Many believe that instruction in implicit bias, use of force, and cultural awareness are solutions to a reversal of these ongoing disasters. But race emerges as the key factor.

When White cops encounter White citizens, no matter their level of mental illness, their possession of deadly firearms, and menacing demeanors, they are likely to be apprehended with a minimum of violence or physical struggle. Somehow, police officers’ past preparation appears to be sufficient in those instances.

It is only when White officers come upon people of color, irrespective of their observed behavior, education, personal comportment, and compliant attitudes, that their propensity to respond in an unnecessarily intimidating and violent manner emerges. Race seems to trigger their behavior.

But we must be mindful of the fact that had it not been for the quick thinking and steely tenacity of 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, who filmed the street lynching of George Floyd and posted it on the Internet, there would have been no guilty verdicts and no punishment for Derek Chauvin, who displayed his depraved indifference to the suffering of Mr. Floyd and his power over a Black man, while he kneeled on his neck, with a smirk on his face.

The Minneapolis Police Department had already submitted an internal report that stated that George Floyd died from a medical emergency after they transported him to the hospital. This ‘Big Lie’ was the core of the defense used by Chauvin’s attorney to sow reasonable doubt.

Also, the killing of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black male, 10 miles away in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, at a traffic stop during the trial, likely impacted the guilty verdicts for Derek Chauvin. Officer Kim Potter shot Daunte in the chest – supposedly accidentally – while believing she was reaching for her Taser. A 26-year veteran on the Brooklyn Center police force, it is interesting that she was teaching younger officers how to be good cops during this incident.

Thus, a confluence of external factors, of which the Chauvin jury was aware, probably contributed to their decision-making. These unique realities did not occur in the other cases of White cops killing Blacks and other citizens of color. Therefore, the Chauvin convictions may be isolated outliers in a sea of police impunity from prosecution.

As a nation, Congress needs to pass The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act which would:

The possibility of this legislation reaching the desk of President Biden, who has committed to signing it, appears narrow at this time, and there is still much work to do in bringing a deeply polarized nation together.

The impact of the Chauvin guilty verdicts in lessening White police officers’ widespread killing of ethnic minority citizens will continue to be inadequate until we as a nation accept the fact that the lives of Blacks, Asians, Latinx, and Native Americans matter in a racially changing America. It is not clear that they do, however, as their numbers continue to increase.

Police and ethnic minority community tensions are just a symptom of the difficulty that our nation is facing as it transitions from a majority White to a multi-racial, multi-cultural country. Acknowledging this coming demographic change, the Republicans are laser-focused on suppressing the votes of these groups as they are unwilling to modify their Anglo Saxon-focused political agenda to maintain White power.

This is the conversation that we need to have. Donald Trump recognized White xenophobia and advanced and exploited it, beginning in 2011, and rode it to the White House in 2016. Launching racist screeds against the first African American U.S. President, he stoked the social and economic fears of a segment of White voters who back him. During the last year of his presidency, he repeatedly called for their help and boosted them at his political rallies.

The Chauvin verdicts could unite and energize these groups as they view ethnic minorities and women as “the other.” In the interim, people of color may be in greater danger of being killed by the police as they strike back against those whom they view as overrunning their positions of racial and positional advantage.