Grassroots/Hank Kalet

One Guilty Verdict Won’t Fix a Rotten System

Derek Chauvin is going to jail. The Minneapolis police officer, who choked the life out of George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, was convicted and could face decades in prison.

The verdict, which came less than 24 hours after closing statements, seemed obvious from the evidence — a video showing Chauvin kneeling and disregarding Floyd’s pleas as three other officers looked on, and testimony from numerous Minneapolis officers explaining that Floyd’s

actions were unwarranted and excessive.

But we’d been down this road before, with acquittal after acquittal of officers. As the Associated Press reports, just seven police officers have been convicted in excessive force cases in the last 16 years, with just 140 officers being charged. This is despite there being around 1,000 fatal shootings by police every year, according to numerous databases that track police shootings.

Following the April 20 announcement of the verdict, which came after two weeks of testimony, the nation seemed to heave a collective sigh of relief. There there was “jubilation” in Minneapolis, the same AP story dissident, and “People instantly flooded the surrounding streets downtown, running through traffic with banners. Cars blared their horns.” Floyd’s family cheered.

The hope is that this verdict will be a watershed, signaling a new era of accountability. It might even give momentum to real police reform — which must include redirecting large chunks of money from police departments to other services and limiting the mostly unnecessary interactions police have with citizens.

I want to be optimistic, but I’m not. I fear this is more likely to be a footnote — and the news out of Columbus, Ohio, where police shot a Black teen girl to death. According to the Washington Post, police say “the girl had threatened two others with a knife before the shooting.”

But she was 15, in foster care, and armed with a knife and not a gun. Police were called to the scene, according to The Columbus Dispatch, after a “caller reported a female was trying to stab them, then the caller hung up.” While Mayor Andrew Gunther told reporters “the officer took

action to protect another young girl in our community,” the outcome seems extreme. A girl is dead, shot four times by a police officer.

Police supporters — the kind likely to fly the Blue Lives Matter or Thin Blue Line flags — will call this a good shooting, justified by the knife. And legally, they may be correct. But this is not an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern, as the New York Times pointed out in an April 17 analysis: “Since testimony began on March 29, at least 64 people have died at the hands of law enforcement nationwide, with Black and Latino people representing more than half of the dead. As of (April 17), the average was more than three killings a day.”

Most of these deaths go unremarked upon, but the sheer number and frequency erases their individuality, making them both seem shockingly normal and evidence of a deeply ingrained problem. I won’t presume to speak for African Americans, but I know I feel a sense of deja vu with each news report, and I can only imagine (based on what I’ve read and the interviews I’ve done on this over the years) that they feel it much more deeply.

This sense of deja vu, of being caught in a loop, is captured nicely in the Oscar-nominated short, “Two Distant Strangers,” which I watched after the Chauvin verdict was announced. The film, which stars rapper Joey Bada$$ and is directed by Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe, has its flaws, the most glaring of which is that it telegraphs its punches. But its premise — a Black cartoonist is choked to death by police in the street, triggering a Groundhog Day-like circle in which his death is repeated in all the ways we see Black men killed by police — is effective in merging what otherwise are individual fatalities into a single assault. Carter, the cartoonist, becomes every Black man in America. Officer Merk (short for America?), played by Andrew Howard, becomes all police, all of White America.

The film is part of a growing genre — “Fruitvale Station,” the TV show “Woke” — that explore the toll these encounters take on the victims, and on Black and Brown people daily.

We ignore this sense of deja vu at our period. The Chauvin verdict, as Alexandria Ocasio-Ortiz tweeted when the verdict was announced, is not true justice. “That a family had to lose a son, brother and father; that a teenage girl had to film and post a murder, that millions across the country had to organize and march just for George Floyd to be seen and valued is not justice.” It is an indication that the system is rotten, that it needs to be remade.

Hank Kalet is a writer in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@ gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Substack: hankkalet.substack.com

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2021

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