Chauvin guilty verdict must lead to real change
From a strictly legal viewpoint, a Minneapolis jury found Derek Chauvin, and not the entire American policing system, guilty of murdering George Floyd.
But in the minds of many Americans, Chauvin’s crime while working as a police officer was simply one more tragic example of the excessive force routinely employed by law enforcement officers in the United States. Excessive force especially wielded against racial minorities. Excessive force that has ignited impassioned protests in the U.S. and around the world.
Floyd, for anyone who still doesn’t know, was a Black man. On Tuesday, the same day Chauvin was held accountable for kneeling on his neck and literally squeezing the life out of him as he begged for mercy last May, police in Ohio shot and killed a Black teenage girl. A day later, a Black man was fatally shot by police in North Carolina as he was served with a search warrant in his car.
While the public needs to know more about these two latest incidents before judging how police handled them, there are clearly too many American civilians dying at the hands of police. And so while there was widespread approval of Chauvin’s multiple convictions, the real test still to come is whether American governments and police departments can excise a social cancer eating away at their country.
As U.S. President Joe Biden declared, Chauvin’s conviction “can be a giant step forward” for the nation in its fight against systemic racism. But as he deliberately added, “It’s not enough.”
Compared to other wealthy, advanced industrial nations, the U.S. is a strange outlier when it comes to police violence — and brutality. In 2020, the country witnessed 1,021 fatal police shootings, up from 999 the previous year. In both years, as in the years before, a disproportionately high percentage of victims were Black or Hispanic.
The state-inflicted carnage on American streets and in American homes is basically unknown in many other parts of the world. In comparison, the most recent data show that in a 12-month span, French police killed 26 civilians, German police 11, Australian police four and British police three.
As for this country, Canadian police killed 34 civilians in the first 11 months of 2020. Considering our population is about a 10th of the size of America’s and that a disproportionate number of those who died at the hands of Canadian police were Indigenous or Black, we have no cause to feel either smug or complacent.
Police in many other countries use deadly force far less often than do ours. Rather than feeling relief, Canadians should watch and learn from what the U.S. does and doesn’t do next.
Fortunately, there is reason for guarded optimism after the states of Maryland, Colorado and New Mexico all passed new laws designed to hold police more accountable for the questionable use of force.
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress has approved the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which aims to combat police misconduct, excessive force and racial profiling in policing. Among other things, it would ban chokeholds, end “qualified immunity” for law enforcement officers and create national standards for policing in an effort to bolster accountability. The problem is that the legislation must still win approval from a least some Republicans in the U.S. Senate. We can only hope their support is forthcoming.
In recent months, a raised fist sculpture and at least two murals have appeared in Minneapolis in memory of George Floyd. New laws that effectively rein in the use of excessive police force would serve as an equally appropriate memorial for him.