We need more than Relief
The word most people seem to be using to describe their feelings regarding the guilty convictions against George Floyd’s murderer is “relief.” Some people are legitimately happy about it, even celebratory. And there are reactionary crackers who are sobbing racist tears as they lick the boots of the police thugs. But for the majority of people, relief is appropriate. We can’t say that justice was served, but there was an enforcement of accountability that is exceedingly rare in this country, which came as a relief for two different parties fundamentally at odds.
For Black people and those who give a shit about justice, it was a relief to actually see a White killer cop held accountable and convicted for murdering a Black man. That doesn’t happen much. Even in a case like this that should have been open and shut thanks to the widely viewed video of the murder, there was still no guarantee of a conviction. There have been videos of cops assaulting and killing Black people in many cases, and in most of them the cops have either been acquitted or never even had charges filed against them. Politicians, judges, and juries have seen video evidence of cops beating people, shooting them in the back, executing them at point blank range, and still they let the cops off the hook. Infamously, despite widely viewed video evidence of police brutally beating Rodney King in 1991, the cops were acquitted, which led to mass uprisings and riots in LA.
Avoiding such an outcome in this case was a huge relief to the establishment. If Chauvin had been acquitted, despite the videos, the completely one-sided case, and the fact that everyone knew he was guilty, there would have been uprisings and protests and riots to rival those of last summer after Floyd’s murder. The ruling class of the establishment knew that and feared it. Whatever their own feelings and opinions, they needed Floyd’s murderer to go down.
Chauvin was essentially sacrificed. The state and his own department’s leadership turned on him not because it was the right thing to do, but to save themselves. By ensuring he took the fall, they spared themselves civil backlash, and by distancing themselves from him and his actions they sought to protect themselves from guilt by association, and from further scrutiny and challenge to the status quo of policing.
Making the case about one bad guy distracted from the incident being symptomatic of an awful system. The Minneapolis police department knew that Chauvin was a bad guy and they kept him employed. For almost twenty years, he had been racking up complaints for abusive treatment. Victims of his violence cited behaviors mirrored in the murder of George Floyd. He had a documented history of throwing people onto the ground and kneeling on their backs and necks so that they couldn’t breathe. That he didn’t kill anyone before Floyd could be accounted to dumb luck, and he clearly was not adequately disciplined for it. Much of the prosecution’s case was founded less on the fact that Chauvin did something horrible that was not in compliance with department policy. If that were the case, they should have fired him years ago.
The police department’s first response to Chauvin’s murder of Floyd was to defend Chauvin. Their initial statement on the event was a coverup, full of lies which made Floyd sound like an aggressor, the police actions like they were routine and appropriate, and Floyd’s death like it was the result of an unrelated medical condition that killed him despite police intervention rather than because of it. It was only after the video recorded by the heroic Darnella Frazier went viral and everyone could see the truth for themselves and protests began that the police and the rest of the establishment changed their story.
Any member of the establishment, be they police or politicians or anyone in positions of power, who wasn’t fighting for justice before public pressure forced them to, has no right to celebrate or claim victory in this outcome. It was the people, the protesters and activists who were demanding justice from the start who, with the jurors that all voted to convict, deserve full credit. Chauvin’s conviction was not proof that the system works, it was proof that the people need to fight and push the system to force it to work.