Will case lead to change?
Chauvin trial spurs debate over future prosecutions of police
Tuesday’s guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd swfitly raised a new debate: Will the conviction embolden more prosecutions of cops for shootings and other alleged misconduct, or create undue faith in a broken system that still can’t deliver justice?
John Burris, the Oakland civil rights attorney who has represented plaintiffs in dozens of lawsuits alleging excessive force by law enforcement, sees a particular opening for the Chauvin case to spur change among district attorneys who must decide whether to bring charges against officers.
“I am hopeful that this prosecution will let other DA’s know that you can win these cases,” Burris said. “Prosecutors can hold police officers accountable — if you have the political will to do so.”
But others took a more skeptical view: George Galvis, executive director of the Oakland
organization Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, said he was concerned the conviction would let lawmakers and others responsible for broader changes mistakenly conclude that “the system is working.”
“Verdicts are just measures of individual accountability,” Galvis said. “I just fear that it’s not going to lead to the broader, more institutional change that we need.”
Many of the pushes for overhauling policing that emerged in the weeks after Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes during an arrest last May have by now shifted to messier debates over legislation and policy changes at the state and local level. A slate of police reform bills is now before California’s state Legislature, which passed only a handful of more limited measures in the wake of last summer’s massive protests.
Floyd’s death was exceptional in the way Chauvin’s conduct drew widespread condemnation — including from many law enforcement leaders and police unions, which typically defend officers.
“This incident is an affirmation that we must hold officers accountable when their actions are found to be unlawful and inconsistent with training,” the Peace Officers Research Association of California, which represents nearly 80,000 of the state’s police officers, wrote in a statement following the verdict Tuesday.
There is no consensus between police and activists on what that accountability might look like. And the same goes for a long list of other system changes — overhauling police tactics, strengthening civilian oversight and shifting responsibility for traffic enforcement and mental health calls to unarmed civilians — that many reform proponents say are needed to end abuses. It’s unlikely Chauvin’s conviction will change that.
Tifanei Ressl-Moyer, a Thurgood Marshall fellow at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, said she is concerned “there are so many ways the system is going to replicate the injustices.”
“Justice would be George still being alive, and an end to all violent policing of Black people,” Ressl-Moyer said.
The vast majority of police shootings and other deaths at the hands of law enforcement are found to be lawful, and district attorneys only file criminal charges in a small fraction of cases.
An analysis by The Washington Post found that prosecutors charged officers in 44 cases from 2015 through the fall of 2020, when the United States averaged about 1,000 deadly police shootings each year; the officers were convicted just under half of the time, often on reduced charges.
It’s no different here. Police in the Bay Area killed 110 people between 2015 and last summer, an analysis by this news organization found; none of the incidents has led to criminal charges.
Laws give officers broad authority to use deadly force, and jurors are often inclined to trust police, all of which can make it harder to win convictions.
But the work of Minnesota prosecutors who tried Chauvin also provides a road map for trying officers, said Cristine Soto DeBerry, executive director of the Prosecutors Alliance, a group of progressive district attorneys that includes Contra Costa County’s Diana Becton and San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin.
“Any time there’s a conviction in a case like this, it helps prosecutors evaluate how to proceed on their own cases,” Soto DeBerry said. “There have been so few of these cases — it’s been very hard to develop the expertise.”
In California, those prosecutors have recently been given expanded authority to do so.
A 2019 law that changed the state’s use-of-force standard also gave prosecutors the authority to charge officers for unnecessarily escalating encounters with the public that led to deadly force, even if the force itself was found to be justified.
Another law passed last year puts California’s attorney general in charge of investigating fatal police shootings of unarmed civilians, taking the decision out of local district attorneys’ hands and, supporters say, ensuring politics and conflicts of interest don’t cloud the decision. Newly appointed Attorney General Rob Bonta was one of the bill’s co-authors as an assemblyman and has pushed for other police reform legislation.
“It could make it more likely that more people pursue charges — but that is almost always a question of local politics,” David Ball, criminal law professor at Santa Clara University, said of the Chauvin verdict. “What is the priority of the prosecutor, to only charge cases they know they can win? Or is it important to charge someone even if we lose, because we are sending a message and using the court system to try and find out what happened?”