Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
No justice until we root out racists within police
Us-born writer and broadcaster
THE guilty verdict on all counts against former policeman Derek Chauvin was not a done deal.
You can tell by the way the nation let out a sigh of collective relief.
Even after the horrendous video of George Floyd’s murder was played over and over, broken down and examined, there was still doubt that a guilty verdict would be reached.
The National Guard in various states were on standby. They were on standby not to protect the citizens, but to control them.
It would never have crossed their minds nor the minds of their superiors that they were there for any other reason.
If the jury had found Chauvin not guilty, no one knew for sure what would happen.
No one had a crystal ball.
But the National Guard, the state police and the local police were ready to roll.
Ever since the Defense Department off-loaded its surplus kit to the various police jurisdictions around the country, the police have become more military, and more militarised.
Some are trained to be “first responders”, to assume that their call-out is about aiding a person.
Most are trained to assume confrontation and, if something goes wrong, they are usually not held to account.
George Floyd got justice. But the list of those who did not is long. The victims are mainly African American. And they are mainly male.
The Chauvin defence lawyer even tried to invoke the image of the dangerous black man by saying over and over that George Floyd was “big”.
He wanted us to believe that George Floyd was a wild beast, that he had no human insides, that his cry of pain was a lie, and that his death did not matter.
It mattered a lot.
To millions of people.
Here in the UK, I have two friends in the Metropolitan police: one a black woman and the other a white gay man.
They love being in the police because, for them, it is about service.
That they had to police during the Black Lives Matter protests when they understood why the people were out there in the street was devastating.
But their big problems are with fellow officers, men usually, who see everyone else as “out there”.
This verdict was a watershed because it was unusual.
Unless we have law to rein in bad cops; law that roots out the systemic racism of police departments; law that gives space to good cops – men and women – to do good, then there was justice indeed for George Floyd, but not for the rest of us.
Not yet.