Zooming out to a panoramic view, the absurdity of the gatherings in George Floyd Plaza seems obvious. Half a nation and many in the world are rejoicing that a man has been convicted of murder. He’s a white man who murdered a Black man. He’s a white cop, an officially designated protector of the citizenry. A bystander invited the world to watch the execution of a Black man on a city street for attempting to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. Did he even know it was counterfeit? It’s like revolutionary France in “Les Miserables”,  where the poor are sentenced to die by being ignored or imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread. In the US, it is the punishment for standing on a street corner with a couple of buddies. Perhaps a better word than absurdity is revolting.

Cop shows often have a line like “we just arrest them, the jury decides.” Not in Minneapolis. There a cop can be judge, jury and executioner, as shown by the police murder of Daunte Wright during the Chauvin trial. Fortunately, not this one time. This one time, the jury and the judge rendered a verdict on the officer’s conduct. We Black Americans take solace in even the tiniest step. This is the only white cop to be convicted of murdering a Black man while on duty in the state of Minnesota ever. There was a Black cop convicted of murdering a white woman in Minneapolis. The fact that he is Black is significant; the bias in society that Black men are expendable extends to law enforcement officers too. 

About 1000 people are fatally shot by the police each year, according to a Washington Post database. There have been over 800 police shootings in the country so far this year; only 6 cases have been prosecuted. What’s clear from the data is that African Americans make up over 50% of the victims but only 13% of the population. Note also, the database includes only fatal shootings, not injuries or other causes of death. George Floyd is not included here. Unfortunately, good data in this area is scarce because federal reporting from law enforcement agencies is voluntary. Another study found that between 2015-2019, 104 officers were arrested for murder or manslaughter for a shooting while on duty. Only 4 officers were convicted of murder with an average sentence of 12 years. Eighteen were convicted of manslaughter. Forty-five were not convicted. These numbers mean that a significant number of those arrested were not prosecuted. 

For the most part, the cases that get widespread attention are those where the victim is killed, most often by shooting but there is Eric Garner, the victim of a choke hold and of course George Floyd. But there are hundreds of others annually who are injured, like Jacob Blake now paralyzed after being shot in the back by an officer holding his T-shirt.

Still, the conviction in the George Floyd murder is an historic moment. But it means very little for progress in criminal justice. It doesn’t assert that BlackLiveMatters as a general rule. One of the purported cornerstones of this country is the rule of law. We all make a social contract to abide by the law and when violated, to be punished.  We like to believe that our laws are both just* and fair*. As with most things in America, the asterisks mark the exceptions. From its very beginnings, the law in this country has been for white people; Black people weren’t even considered people. Nor were native Americans. Since then, the “less thans” expanded to include brown and yellow skinned people as well. Laws are only as good as their enforcement, by law enforcement officers, prosecutors, judges and juries. The fact that the laws have been written to favorite white groups is augmented by differential enforcement, a subject too broad to discuss here.

There are unique features to the Chauvin trial that are probably associated with that unique outcome. One is the composition of the jury, remarkably diverse for race, age and occupation. Most jurors were under 50 years old, unusual in a system that relies heavily on retired citizens to fill jury boxes. There were a couple of professionals in their ranks. Another feature is that the thin blue line was smashed. In fact, Minneapolis PD, including the chief, went out of its way to deny that Chauvin represented the department. The department disavowed him as an outlier. Unaddressed were the policies and procedures that allowed Chauvin to flourish, because the department wasn’t on trial, the officer was. He was after all a training officer who was teaching his trainees how to act that fateful day. Hopefully, now awaiting trial themselves, they learned what not to do although if justice prevails, they won’t have an opportunity to use their new knowledge in any police department ever again.

And certainly, BLM demonstrations and the discussions around racial justice have changed the prism through which many citizens have begun to view law enforcement. White jurors are no longer convinced that voting to convict a policeman will make their community less safe; minority jurors have seen how police actually make them less safe. This is particularly true in Minneapolis, where the discussion around shifting resources to alternatives to armed officers for particular functions has been ongoing for years. The general population has become increasingly aware that policing in this country is neither fair nor just but disparately applied. The Jan 6 insurrectionists were not thrown on the ground and handcuffed. Paul Manafort was not slammed against a wall and rousted from his home; he was allowed to turn himself in on his own time, in a suit and tie. And these people are traitors to the country, not people with broken tail lights or passing a $20 counterfeit bill.

While Chauvin’s conviction is probably not the beginning of a national trend, hopefully it will spark the beginning of local, state and national discussions about public safety. Law enforcement officers come in all varieties of uniforms, local county sheriffs, small town police, urban police, marshalls, highway patrols, etc. Judges, it turns out, also come with all kinds of credentials. There are county magistrates who, in smaller locations, are generally not lawyers and have no training in the law. There are elected judges, who are not required to be lawyers, just popular with the few voters who cast ballots in their election. At the highest level, there are federal judges, appointed by the Chief Executive and approved by the Senate. And then there is the Supreme Court, the pinnacle of the system that is mistakenly perceived as objective but throughout the major portion of its history has prioritized business and economic interests over individuals. Despite this hodgepodge of entities, they are all imbued with a concept of public safety that imagines boogey-men (and women) who are nonwhite.

In many districts, law enforcement is in the hands of an individual who works solo or runs a department in any way he pleases. Sheriff Arpaio is a perfect example; even when a federal court ordered him to cease his racial profiling and stealing money and property from Hispanics in his Arizona district, he defied the ruling and persisted. It’s no accident that a suspected terrorist in New Jersey engaged in a shootout with police is merely wounded when a Black man leaning against a car window with his hands in the air without a weapon is shot dead. Was the shooter thinking the same thing as the helicopter cop who characterized that man as a “bad dude.” Terence Crutcher was in fact a wholly compliant gentle giant. What are cops thinking when they hesitate to shoot a man actively shooting at them but are quick to shoot a man in his back as he’s running away because the cop thinks he might have a weapon when none is evident? Similarly, a white man who killed several Black people after praying with them in their church is taken to Burger King to eat before being taken to the station but a Black man walking away from several cops is shot dead in the back in a hail of bullets? The lame excuse that each case must be judged on its merits can’t account for the number of cases of white men who are actively killing victims and yet are arrested unscathed compared to the number of Black men who are shot and killed because the police feel threatened when they are holding a gun against a single individual without a weapon. Even after taking fire, the cops just seem more relaxed when dealing with armed people who look like them than they are with unarmed people who don’t. Officer Chauvin appeared extraordinarily composed and relaxed as he choked Mr Floyd to death.

The task ahead is to design a system of public safety that will keep all citizens safe. The country has never had this ideal in mind. Policing was initially designed to restrict the movement of enslaved Blacks. Anyone with brown skin was presumed enslaved and had to demonstrate otherwise. Authority to seize Black people was extended to every white person. By the 19th century, the focus remained on descendants of the enslaved in the South but in northern urban centers, the police who primarily served the wealthy, often used their power to prey on the poor. Corruption and false convictions of the poor were the rule of the day. 

Fast forwarding to the 1960s when LBJ sought to include African Americans in civil and economic society. Within his decisions about the Great Society was the nidus to transform policing into an assault on primarily urban segregated communities across the country. In those years, crime fighting shifted to crime prevention. Crime was theorized to be concentrated in Black youth, somehow predisposed to crime, not by the economic desolation in their communities but by a congenital predisposition. Not so mysteriously, this is a racist trope that sailed over the Atlantic with Black bodies when they were dragged onshore. An initial decision as part of the Great Society to invest in poor communities, where poor always means Black, became a decision to invest in monitoring, policing and jailing Black youth, enlarging the prisons to hold them and upgrading weaponry to assist in the effort.

The war on drugs brought an even more intense invasion to Black communities aimed at the users and small time dealers, not the suppliers. Crack, introduced through Reagan’s Iran-Contra program that used the profits from the drug trade to support Nicaraguan rebels and interdict arms in El Salvador that then secretly supplied arms to Iran in a complicated web of intrigue. Law enforcement militarized its weapons and tactics, prisons expanded into a private industry. Militarized equipment then expanded exponentially as the surplus from Iraq/Afghanistan wars dumped old equipment into police departments through grants and giveaways.

In the meantime, drug use among whites has always been higher than people of color, but their neighborhoods and college campuses were not only spared from scrutiny and raids but also patrols. Living in primarily segregated communities, they could identify a criminal as someone who didn’t belong there by virtue of skin color, but white on white crime seems to escape police notice. The police have no crime prevention programs there as if white youth don’t commit crimes even as the opioid epidemic rages on. Cops so seldom respond when called that most people don’t report theft except for insurance purposes because stolen goods are almost never recovered. White neighborhoods understand this and have taken on their own public safety: gated communities, restricted access and security cameras and guards.

Police departments have evolved new strategies for crowd control as well. America began as a nation of protesters. 2020 showed that the police vision of crowd control- helmets, shields, tear gas, rubber bullets, military regalia, humvies, tanks- in essence military weapons they use to violently attack demonstrators is anything but peaceful. Those scenes are reminiscent of the brutality shown to Russian demonstrators marching peacefully for Alexi Navalny. Russian laws prohibit demonstrations; the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and assembly. Violence by police against lawful demonstrations often provokes more widespread personal injuries and property damage. These forces are most often mobilized against demonstrations that are majority nonwhite. They were missing in Michigan where the demonstrators were more heavily armed than law enforcement. They were missing in Charlottesville, when a Nazi flag carrying crowd shouting an anti-Semitic chant marched across the UVA campus. They were missing when the MAGA rally decamped for the insurrection at the Capitol building. Clearly, law enforcement appears to have a problem with assessing risks when it looks through a colored lens.   

The scope of police responsibilities has expanded further. Departments folded their war on Black communities into local government revenue generation, making traffic infractions into the excuse to ratchet up the number of encounters they had with people of color, now on the road outside their communities. Confrontational authorities humiliate and insult victims, searching vehicles without provocation. Resistance often leads to additional charges, arrest and either injury or death. Recently, a stop in Virginia for an expired tag became the opportunity for 2 white deputies, guns drawn, to insult, bully and finally mace an active duty Black soldier with his hands extended through the window as he had been instructed. In video from the officer’s body cam, that officer is later seen subtly threatening the victim not to tell anyone, so the victim doesn’t get in trouble with his military command. The crime and the cover-up. wisely, the soldier filed a civil suit against the department, town government and the 2 officers, the aggressive macer now fired.

After institutions that housed the mentally ill and the handicapped closed, the number of unhoused and mentally ill has exploded as the number of services has shrunk to infinitesimal. Managing this population has fallen to police without training on how to cope with people in crisis. In addition, police have moved into the schools, creating an early tributary into the school to prison pipeline. Even more recently, immigration enforcement has received added emphasis in police departments across the country, not simply in southern border states. 

The failure of the current approach to public safety is very clear. Crime rates have fallen significantly since the 90s, but police case closures have not improved proportionately. Only 25% of reported crimes are solved by arrest. Only 5% of arrests are for violent crimes, 80% are for low-level offenses. The case closure rate for major crimes, murders and burglaries varies from 25-50% over the different jurisdictions. Nationally, police cleared about 60% of murders last year. The clearance rate was lower for aggravated assault 50%, rape, 33% and robbery, 30%. Only 18% of larcenies/thefts, 14% of burglaries and 14% of motor vehicle thefts were cleared. The vast accumulation of “cold cases”, serial murders and rapes are testimony to the poor state of policing. The tendency of police to railroad suspects into confessions, plea bargains and close cases with circumstantial evidence which has resulted in the imprisonment of innocent people contributes to further crimes. Simply put, the criminal is free to commit more crimes when the innocent go to jail. 

It’s pretty clear that what is being done is not working. To summarize, policing as it’s working today neither effectively prevents nor solves crimes as the principal part of their workload has shifted to traffic enforcement and mediating disputes. People do not feel safe in the US and they shouldn’t. Points made in this all too brief summary should be augmented by additional historical exploration to begin to formulate a basis for re-envisioning a new American ideal of public safety. Potential considerations include resolving whether the objective of the justice system is punishment or rehabilitation. How are rehabilitation programs carried out, through education and skills training, treatment of  addiction, PTSD, anger management or solitary confinement and disregard for basic prisoner needs?  Must all convictions result in incarceration or can many instead involve community service with home residence that is supported by adequate resources to live in the community? Is investment in education, business development, skills training, opportunities for higher wage employment, access to fresh produce in neighborhood grocery stores and pharmacies, access to healthcare a better approach to crime prevention than stop and frisk, arrests for low level crimes, fines and extended prison sentences? Does eliminating child poverty lead to better educational outcomes and lower violence in communities? Would a different approach to the availability of illegal drugs actually diminish the supply and break the influence of drug, sex and undocumented immigrant trafficking since the arrest of low and medium level dealers has failed so miserably. These objectives must be made retrospective to change the lives of the presently incarcerated and on parole.

But in the interim because people are dying today, the possibilities for tweaking the system are vast if, and this is a big if, the modifications are revisited as a vision for the ideal evolves. My next blog post will explore some of these ideas.

On April 28, 1936, just before his trial for attempted assault, Lint Shaw, a 45 year old Black farmer, is shot to death by a mob of 40 white men in Colbert Georgia.