The System
The Chauvin verdict as self-preservation
days of tension in Minneapolis gave way to relief for many, and celebration for some, on April 20, when jurors in the criminal trial of ex-police-officer Derek Chauvin returned with a verdict: guilty, guilty, guilty. The expected protests were forestalled, officers in riot gear stood down, and politicians began to wax poetic on what the outcome said about accountability and sacrifice. George Floyd’s “life will have bettered our city,” tweeted Mayor Jacob Frey. “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice,” said Nancy Pelosi, praising a choice that Floyd did not make, nor likely would have made, when he was tortured to death last spring. The march of death continues, meanwhile. Daunte Wright was killed in neighboring Brooklyn Center nine days before the verdict by Officer Kim Potter, who allegedly mistook her gun for a Taser. Facts are still being gathered about the death of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio. According to her mother, Bryant
had phoned the police to help break up a fight—which she, apparently holding a knife, then joined. She was fatally shot by the police practically as the Chauvin verdict was being announced. The dissonance of these events underscored a theme. More than a legal referendum on Chauvin’s behavior, his trial was a multipronged effort to defend the virtues of policing and to protect the institutional right to mete out needless death. We’ll be here again soon.
The stated goal of Chauvin’s trial was already unusual: to determine if his behavior had been deviant enough to warrant legal consequences. Close to a dozen former and current police officials—mostly from Minneapolis but from elsewhere, too—testified with a resounding “yes” against the former officer, who was recorded on video last year kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes until the 46-year-old Black man died. Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo said Chauvin had violated department policy. MPD inspector Katie Blackwell said the same, as did lieutenants Richard Zimmerman and Johnny Mercil and Sergeant Jody Stiger of the Los Angeles Police Department, among others. Taken together, they made a collective effort to draw a hard line between Chauvin’s conduct and policing by the book—what is permitted by department policy and, in Stiger’s case, national norms. “Totally unnecessary,” said Zimmerman. “If your knee is on a person’s neck, that can kill them.”
This closing of police ranks against, rather than around, a brother in blue is new. But killing people is not typically a problem for American law enforcement, which has killed roughly 1,000 civilians a year, including more than 400 unarmed civilians, by firearms alone since 2015, according to the Washington Post. Their rebuke of Chauvin should not be interpreted as institutional opposition to killing without need. Instead, it is a preservationist response to the questions of legitimacy that arise when an officer gets caught on-camera torturing a handcuffed man to death, sparking some of the largest protests in U.S. history. These questions and the pressure they exert are compounded by growing recognition that such behavior is not unusual. In the years since Eric Garner was recorded on video being choked to death in 2014—his killer, Officer Daniel Pantaleo, avoided legal consequences—the sentiment that police violence is a major problem in the U.S. has come to be shared by roughly half of American adults, while about two-thirds feel the criminal-legal system treats police too leniently. Departments nationwide, and the Minneapolis Police Department in particular, face unprecedented threats to their primacy in the form of budget cuts and even proposals to disband them. Public opinion has never been so aligned against the political aim of law enforcement and its labor unions—namely, to exist outside the realm of public accountability.
Throwing Chauvin under the bus is a good way to reassure people that this system can and does work the way they want it to, that its basis is public service, rather than compliance enforced at gunpoint— even if the thin blue line banner that flew over the Brooklyn Center Police Department building the day after Wright died said otherwise. Chauvin’s prosecutors shared this goal, as they made clear in their closing arguments. “This case is called the State of Minnesota v. Derek Chauvin,” said prosecutor Steven Schleicher. “This case is not called the State of Minnesota v. the
Police. Policing is a noble profession … And there is nothing worse for good police than a bad police [officer], who doesn’t follow the rules, who doesn’t follow procedure, who doesn’t follow training, who ignores the policies of the department and the motto of the department: ‘To protect with courage, to serve with compassion.’” And yet the parameters of acceptable law enforcement are so warped that prosecutors could not expect a conviction on the basis of Chauvin’s having knelt on a man’s neck until he died. They had to make him a rogue, “unreasonable” by the standard established in Graham v. Connor: That if a “reasonable” police officer would have done the same thing under the circumstances, then it is legal.
But what if policing by the book produces the same outcome as the supposed aberration? Not six years ago, officers with the same Minneapolis Police Department killed Jamar Clark, then razed the protest camp established by residents to oppose them. While Chauvin was choking Floyd’s life out last year, several of his fellow
Throwing Chauvin under the bus is a good way to reassure people this system can work the way they want it to.
officers stood by and watched, including Alex Kueng, whose mother described his reason for joining the force to the New York Times thusly: “That’s part of the reason why he wanted to become a police officer—and a Black police officer on top of it—is to bridge that gap in the community, change the narrative between the officers and the Black community.” That’s just one case over a handful of years. Drive a few miles in any direction and the story is similar: the killing of Philando Castile in 2016, Wright’s death last week. Some of the officers followed procedure, and some did not. Needless death followed anyway.
This won’t change with the Chauvin verdict. The mistake made by so many concerned Americans in these strange few years of police scrutiny has been to filter their notions of justice through the same institutions that produced the injustice in the first place. Policing is not a noble profession; it is a profession, plain and simple, that attracts some applicants who behave nobly and others who do not and that often encourages people to be worse versions of themselves—to ignore or justify the brutality of their colleagues, to excuse violence, to reject accountability. Whether there are “good” or “bad” police does not change the fact that their institution’s stock-in-trade is violence. Chauvin awaits sentencing, but officers like him across the country remain a split-second decision away from mowing down someone else they consider a threat to order. This is not a standard, or a system, that has to be maintained. It is not inevitable, nor are the notions of its redemption trafficked by the Nancy Pelosis and Jacob Freys of the world: their fantasies of Floyd as a selfless martyr, rather than a dad who just wanted to get home alive. Nothing has been redeemed here. Chauvin’s former colleagues might have come out in force to rebuke him during his trial, but the result was less justice than an unusually strident effort at self-preservation. And it probably worked.