There’s hope for racial justice in America. But it comes from the people – not the courts
On Tuesday afternoon, a jury confirmed what many of us have known to be true for the better part of a year: the former Minneapolis police department officer Derek Chauvin was guilty of murdering George Floyd.
On Wednesday morning, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced a justice department patternor-practice investigation to determine if the Minneapolis police department’s general operating norms are unlawful and unconstitutional, in violation of the rights of the citizens they police.
Both of these legal decisions have been hailed as important civil rights victories. Shortly after it was announced, CNN’s Van Jones called the justice department investigation “a very big deal”; the former federal civil rights prosecutor Jared Fishman called it “hugely significant”.
As for Chauvin’s guilty verdict, which literally made news around the world, George Floyd’s loved ones quite understandably celebrated and expressed relief with the decision, and pointed towards it as a hopeful signal of a potentially more just future. Darnella Frazier – the heroic then 17year-old whose recording of Chauvin’s murder of Mr Floyd served as critical evidence in the trial and disproved the lies embedded in the Minneapolis police department’s initial fabricated report of the killing – wrote on Facebook: “George Floyd we did it!! justice has been served.” Ms Frazier spoke for many people across the globe when she saw justice in the outcome.
And yet, as the news of Chauvin’s conviction spread, so too did a parallel story: 20 minutes before the guilty verdict had come down in Minneapolis, police in Columbus, Ohio, had shot dead 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. Ms Bryant, a Black child, is at least the 65th person killed by police in the United States since Chauvin’s trial began late last month; as the New York Timesreported, as of last weekend, police were killing an average of three people a day throughout the course of the trial.
Mariame Kaba, one of the most visionary thinkers about and organizers against the prison-police-industrial-complex in the United States, has often said that “hope is a discipline”. Hopehere is not synonymous with optimism, but is rather an everyday practice and a philosophy of living – “believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change”.
I refer here to Kaba’s philosophy of hope because it is so hard to see the news of the police killing another child and not feel hopeless. This is especially true when thinking about the killing of Ms Bryant alongside last month’s police killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago; we are literally talking about children being killed by the police. The constancy of police violence in this country can seem as overwhelming in its ubiquity and intractability as it is cruel and devastating in its particulars.
But in spite of that evidence, there are reasons for hope, even though they are not necessarily the reasons currently making headlines. A single guilty verdict or a single justice department investigation do not in and of themselves have the capacity to topple and replace violently oppressive systems that are generations in the making. I am glad that Mr Floyd’s family can feel greater peace today than they did before the verdict was read; but I
needn’t look further than the supposedly “landmark” and “historic” 2018 murder conviction of the former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald, paired with the brutal killing of Adam Toledo last month, to know that these types of verdicts don’t have a strong record of transformational potential. Meanwhile, the justice department initiated two dozen investigations into assorted municipal police departments during the Obama years, none of which resulted in meaningful changes to the operational norms of those departments.
The real transformative hope to be found here, as I see it, lies not within the system –not in convictions that affirm its supposed “justice” or functionality, nor in the glacial temerity of the office of the nation’s “top cop” – but in those doing the work to oppose that system entirely and working toward alternatives to it.
Much of the broadcast media and the American public alike have questioned and panned demands to defund the police that emerged amid last summer’s protests. But at the center of the argument is a logical conclusion: less money for police and fewer police means a decreased likelihood of adults like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and children like Ma’Khia Bryant and Adam Toledo, encountering and being killed by police. And it might surprise people to know that, according to the research group Disrupting Criminalization, those protests have resulted in close to a billion dollars being divested from police departments across the country, some (though sadly not nearly enough) of which has been reinvested directly into communities in nonpunitive, nourishing forms. In many cities across the country, communitybased violence prevention teams work to reduce violent harm within the communities, working beyond the bounds of municipal police departments that not only routinely fail to prevent harm, but often actively inflict it.
What I mean to say here is that we should be fiercely protective of our hopes and expectations when it comes to the criminal punishment system’s occasional reaches toward individualized and particularized demonstrations of “justice”. Prosecutors for the state of Minnesota explicitly said in their closing arguments against Derek Chauvin that the policewere not on trial here, but rather that a uniquely bad7/ former police officer was. Chauvin’s defense team countered, in part, that their client was not guilty by virtue of the fact that he was simply doing what he had been trained to do. There is truth in both arguments: Derek Chauvin is and was a vicious arbiter of violence, and that ultimately resulted in his murdering of George Floyd. By the same token, Chauvin worked so comfortably inside the confines of his training that his employing department saw fit to allow him to train rookie officers to do the job the same way he did. Derek Chauvin the police officer was not an exception among other police officers, but a standard bearer. He only became exceptional when he was prosecuted and convicted for murder.
In a different way, the same is true of the justice department’s targeting of Minneapolis for the patternor-practice investigation. Just as Derek Chauvin was cast as a uniquely bad apple over the course of his murder trial, one who did not reflect a rot within the larger barrel, the Minneapolis police department now comes under scrutiny as somehow uniquely bad, uniquely de serving of and requiring federal intervention. The reality, of course, is that just as Chauvin was doing a version of something that police do all the time during his ultimately fatal engagement with George Floyd, the Minneapolis police department operates in much the same way that police departments all across the country generally operate. The dozens of police killings that have unfolded over the span of the past month were not confined to Minneapolis; they took place everywhere.
When the court sentences Derek Chauvin, if and when the DoJ orders Minneapolis into a consent decree to force police “reform” (as is the usual outcome of these pattern-or-practice investigations) – these will be hailed as markers of “justice”. But we should be careful, for they serve another purpose, whether intentionally or not. These legal decisions, targeting one former police officer who reflects the general nature of his former profession or a city whose police department reflects the general nature of American policing writ large, are also ways by which the criminal punishment system atomizes and particularizes a problem that is entirely generalizable. Prosecutors made clear that policing was not on trial; Derek Chauvin was. Merrick Garland has made it clear that policing is not the subject of the DoJ investigation; one police department among the 18,000 we have in the United States is.
This is why it is important to find hope in the right places. While I don’t find hope in one man’s conviction or one city’s scapegoating for a nationwide problem, I do find it in multitudes elsewhere. I find it in particular inside the justice work that people are doing all the time in community after community everywhere: in the mutual aid organizations, the violence prevention groups, the Movement for Black Lives organizers and the many groups who are in solidarity with them. Their work and commitments are where the hope is, because what they are fighting for is literally a better world for all people. And that – far more than one former cop being punished by a system that gladly employed him in its service for 20 years, and now happily points to his punishment as an example of its own inherent justness – is worthy of our hope.
Simon Balto is assistant professor of African American history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power
Hope here is not synonymous with optimism, but is rather an everyday practice and a philosophy of living