‘Let’s do what’s right’: George Floyd’s sister calls on Congress to pass police law
As Bridgett Floyd watched the three guilty verdicts, called one after another, at the conclusion of the Derek Chauvin murder trial this week, she thought of her beloved older brother George Floyd.
“All I could do was just scream and jump up and down,” she told the Guardian. “You know. It was like a weight being lifted off my shoulders.”
As Chauvin, the white former Minneapolis police officer who held his knee on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, was placed into handcuffs and led out of court, she recalls with calm focus how it felt to watch.
“Do you want my honest opinion?” she said in her first print interview since the landmark verdict on Tuesday. “I wanted them to put those handcuffs on his arm as tight as he had those cuffs on my brother, so he can feel how my brother feel, to have some cuffs on your arms … gripping tighter and tighter and tighter as you move.
“An officer arresting an officer. We have nearly, or never seen that. Not even nothing close to it.”
Bridgett Floyd, George Floyd’s younger sister, could not be in Minneapolis when the guilty verdict was read. She had watched unrest in the city over the previous week, following the police shooting of 20 year-old Daunte Wright, who was killed in a suburb of the city as the trial took place, and decided to stay away. Instead, she travelled to a family member’s home in North Carolina and watched live on TV with her two children as the jury’s decision was read aloud in front of the world.
She described the verdict as a “big step” for racial justice but acknowledged the vast inequities and racism in America’s criminal justice system cannot be solved by a single case. She said the decision was a vindication for families in countless other cases of fatal police force against Black Americans that never made it to trial.
“That’s a very big step that they [the jury] took yesterday. But that’s the right way to do things. That’s the way things are supposed to be done. And it shouldn’t have took an officer on a man’s neck, my brother’s neck, for nine minutes and 29 seconds for them to be convicted. That’s ridiculous. But I will say it’s a step forward. And we are not giving up. We are going to keep fighting.”
Observing the proceedings in court brought unimaginable trauma for the Floyd family. Bridgett was present for parts of the trial, including the opening, but has never watched the video of her brother’s death.
“It was very hard for me to watch the trial, because that was the evidence [the video] that they kept going to,” she said over Zoom a day after the verdict. “Many times I had to mute the TV, or turn the TV off, or walk out the courtroom, or walk out the family room.
“I just can’t seem to process hearing my brother cry for help like that. I’m not ready for that. As bad as I want to watch it. As bad as I want to see. Mentally, I’m not ready.”
She had spent some of her time during the trial distracting herself by volunteering at local food drop-offs in Minneapolis as well as continuing her work as the founder of the George Floyd Memorial Foundation, a civil rights and social justice non-profit.
But hearing the defence arguments, where Chauvin’s use of fatal force was described by an expert witness as objectively reasonable, where another witness suggested Floyd could have been killed by exhaust fumes, and where a 2019 arrest was brought up essentially to bring George Floyd’s character into question, was especially hard.
“It was very belittling,” she said of the defence’s case. “Like how dare you … we all knew the truth. It made me very mad, of course. I was talking to the TV out loud when those statements and
comments were being made.”
Bridgett Floyd became a national civil rights figure in the aftermath of her brother’s murder in May 2020, she addressed thousands during a rally to commemorate the March on Washington in August last year and has delivered forceful speeches in memory of George Floyd as the trial commenced.
Following the verdict, she demanded that Republicans in the US Senate should vote to enact the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, sweeping reform legislation that many hope could help lead to broader change among the United States’ 18,000 police departments.
The legislation has been voted through the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, but is likely to face staunch opposition in the Senate, where Democrats and Republicans hold 50 seats each. On Wednesday, Joe Biden urged Congress to vote the legislation through.
“My message to them [Senate Republicans] is let’s do what’s right. Officers have been getting away with this for far too long. They’re supposed to protect and serve our country, and yet you see every other day, killings – not just shootings – killings from the police force.”
Bridgett Floyd said she had a message for politicians in Washington: “It could be your loved one that the police attack one day. And you could have been the one to make that change. And you bypassed it, like it was nothing … Let’s do what’s right, while we have the chance right in front of our eyes, let’s do what’s right and hold these policemen accountable for their actions.”
The Chauvin murder trial saw many of the bystanders who watched George Floyd’s death deliver vivid and powerful testimony. Some, including the teenager Darnella Frazier who recorded the video of Floyd’s death, expressed survivor’s guilt on the stand.
“It’s been nights I’ve stayed up apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting and not saving his life,” she told the court during the first week of the trial. “But it’s not what I should have done, it’s what he [Chauvin] should have done.”
Bridgett Floyd also had a direct message for Frazier, now 18: “What she doesn’t understand or what she doesn’t know from me, is that that video, that one video – her taking the time out of her day to record – got us justice, got us a guilty verdict.”
With the trial ended, Floyd has more space to think about her brother’s legacy and what his life and death meant to the world.
“I want him to be remembered as the person he was, which was a loving, generous, kind, gentle giant. He meant no harm to nobody,” she said.
“I’m going to keep his name alive by running this foundation, the George Floyd Memorial foundation … Because that is what they will remember, his name is what they will not ever forget. And I will continue to be the change, be the legacy and be his voice.”