(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
At what point can you expect people to lose faith in their government to help them? Is it after the first police killing of a black man? The third? The twentieth? Is it after the federal government abandons its duty — or, even worse, advocates for outright violence — during a global pandemic and historic economic hardship? Or is it after years of systemic neglect?
The city of Minneapolis hit its breaking point this week. On Monday, Derek Chauvin — a white police officer — kneeled on the neck of George Floyd — a black man — while he lay on the ground, handcuffed, pleading that he could not breathe until he could indeed breathe no more.
While Floyd’s killing was the immediate cause of the unrest, it cannot be viewed as an isolated incident. What is happening in Minneapolis right now is the natural endpoint of government leaders failing in their duty, time and time again, to hold their peers accountable and serve the public.
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Let’s start with Chauvin. Before he apprehended George Floyd, Chauvin already had 17 complaints on his record, 16 of which were closed without discipline. Unfortunately, the content of those complaints aren’t public record.
What we do know is that in 2008, while on the force, Chauvin shot another black man in Minneapolis, Ira Toles. According to Toles, Chauvin responded to a domestic violence call at his home, and began beating him without warning. According to Chauvin, Toles reached for his gun. Either way, Chauvin shot Toles, leaving a hole in his stomach.
“He tried to kill me in that bathroom,” Toles told the Daily Beast.
The Minneapolis Police Department authorizes the use of deadly force in the following situations:
To protect the peace officer or another from apparent death or great bodily harm;
To effect the arrest or capture, or prevent the escape, of a person whom the peace officer knows or has reasonable grounds to believe has committed or attempted to commit a felony involving the use or threatened use of deadly force, or
To effect the arrest or capture, or prevent the escape, of a person who the officer knows or has reasonable grounds to believe has committed or attempted to commit a felony if the officer reasonably believes that the person will cause death or great bodily harm if the person’s apprehension is delayed.
Chauvin was responding to a domestic violence call when he shot Ira Toles. He was responding to a “forgery in progress” call when he killed Floyd.
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You would hope, at least, that Chauvin himself is an isolated incident, a bad apple in the pristine bushel of the Minneapolis Police Department. In the absence of official reprimand, you would expect his fellow officers to make him realize the errors of his ways, help him fly by the straight-and-narrow of the police department’s own rules before a life was needlessly lost.
Tou Thao could have intervened. He was the police officer who stood by and looked on as Chauvin dug his knee into Floyd’s neck. In 2014, Thao allegedly punched Lamar Ferguson, a handcuffed black man, so hard he shattered his teeth. The case was settled out of court. Thao was never reprimanded.
J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane could have intervened. They were the two officers that accompanied Chauvin and Thao on the call. Unlike Chauvin and Thao, they did not have any complaints on their record. Yet they didn’t.
Indeed, the rank-and-file of the Minneapolis Police could have intervened in 2015, when Jamar Clark, a black man, was shot and killed by police. Multiple eyewitnesses reported Clark was on the ground and in handcuffs when he was killed.
They could have denounced the 2016 killing of Philando Castile, a black man who was driving in the nearby suburb of Falcon Heights. Castile was pulled over by a St. Anthony police officer during a traffic stop. He informed the officer that he had a gun on him, telling him, “I’m not pulling it out.” The officer shot him seven times, killing Castile on the scene.
They could have spoken out in 2017, when Justine Damond, a white woman, was shot and killed by Minneapolis Police. Damond was barefoot and in her pajamas when she died, having just reported what she believed to be a rape outside her house, going outside in the darkness to approach the police ostensibly there to help her.
They did not. And when the community attempted to meet them halfway — when Minnesota Lynx players wore shirts with Castile’s name on them — Minneapolis Police officers walked out on them. The president of the Minneapolis Police Officers Federation, Lt. Bob Kroll, called Lynx players "unwarranted and reckless" for doing so.
Incidentally, at a 2019 Trump rally, Kroll (who has referred to Black Lives Matter as a “terrorist organization”) said the president “decided to start let [sic] cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of on us.”
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When police fail in their duty, the next line of accountability comes from local elected officials. In 2019, reports surfaced that the officer who killed Philando Castile took a “fear-based training course” — which instructs officers to, among other things, “utilize the “Warrior Spirit” in a practical way so they can WIN hostile confrontations on the street.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey reacted in kind, banning the Minneapolis Police from continuing the training. Kroll, perhaps emboldened by Trump or Frey’s own increases in police funding, ignored the order.
District attorneys have the power to set policy by choosing what cases to prosecute, and which to drop. This includes cases of police officers accused of misusing their power. Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, elects its district attorney. From 1999 to 2007, that attorney was Amy Klobuchar, who did not bring up charges against a single officer who killed a citizen on duty. One of those officers was Derek Chauvin.
Mike Freeman, who both preceded and succeeded Klobuchar as the county’s top prosecutor, made national headlines on Thursday when he declined to immediately press charges on Chauvin. “We have to get this right,” he told the press, as “there is other evidence that does not support a criminal charge.” Just two years earlier, Freeman’s office filed felony charges against 47 men accused of selling small amounts of marijuana. 46 of them were black.
“His office has horrific racial disparity in charging cases,” Mary Moriarty, Hennepin County’s chief public defender, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2018. “All I heard him do was blame others for this.”
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Like 40 million Americans nationwide, the coronavirus left George Floyd without a job. He was a bouncer at a Minneapolis restaurant, known to his peers as “Big Floyd,” when the pandemic hit.
Derek Chauvin could escape. According to public records, he owns a condo in Florida, as well as his home outside Minneapolis city limits. According to FiveThirtyEight, the majority of Minneapolis police officers live outside the city. Perhaps coincidentally, the same is true for Baltimore, which up until this week was the most recent American city to go up in flames.
In 2015, personal finance website WalletHub found Minnesota had the worst disparity of wealth based on race in the nation. That was before the coronavirus — which, per WalletHub, has especially devastatedMinnesota, with unemployment claims rising at the 13th highest rate in the nation since March.
Issues like this are ripe for federal intervention. Yet instead of bolstering our social safety net, increasing worker pay, freezing or controlling rent — or even pretending like any of those things have a remote possibility of happening — the federal government has outright refused to help, instead choosing to bail out corporations.
“When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” the president wrote shortly after midnight on Friday.
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America did not know who George Floyd was before Monday. But it didn’t need to. To be American — to be a person of color in America, especially, is to know that this happened before, and barring any changes, will happen again.
Philando Castile’s killer, Jeronimo Yanez, was found not guilty. Mike Freeman declined to pursue charges on Mark Riggenberg and Dustin Schwarze, the two white officers involved in Jamal Clark’s killing. When justice does come, it comes when a black officer kills a white woman, as it did to Justine Damond’s killer, Mohamed Noor. At the time of writing, Chauvin and Thao have not been arrested or charged with a crime in Floyd’s death. A black and Hispanic CNN reporter, Omar Jimenez, was arrested for covering the protests, however.
This is not endemic to Minneapolis, or the moment. There was no justice for Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling or Eric Garner. Often the opposite happened; officers were not charged with a crime at all, and their departments continued to antagonize and militarize against communities that were often not even their own. Several who protested the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — which did not result in an indictment — have since died mysteriously.
So what do you do when your police, your local government and your federal government not only fail to uphold the rule of law, but actively discriminate against you? The social contract that underpins our Constitution is a two-way street; you give up some of your rights, with the expectation that the state protects the rest of them. When the state breaks that contract, how can you expect the people to follow it?
Politics and Prozac is a sporadically-updated blog about journalism, elections and their consequences. The author, Arya Hodjat, is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland. You can reach him at aryahodjat11@gmail.com, or on Twitter @arya_kidding_me. Until next time.