Justice finally served, but not only for George Floyd

Derek Chauvin appears bewildered as a judge reads out the guilty verdicts against him over the death of George Floyd.

What a difference 11 months makes in a man’s countenance when justice finally catches up with him.

Last May, the photographic image of then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin sneering as he pressed his knee into unarmed motorist George Floyd forever and indelibly imprinted itself into the consciousness, the very soul of African-Americans, delivering an excruciating blow.

Yesterday, the televised image of now-convicted murderer Chauvin was of a face bewildered, pupils dilated above the COVID-19 protective mask he wore over his nose and mouth as a judge read the jury’s unanimous, three guilty verdicts.

That announcement unleashed an unbridled joy – not just for African-Americans like me, who all our lives have only known injustice in cases such as these, but also for the millions of our allies across the world, of varying ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, who for months last year stood up, marched, agitated, and loudly declared “Black Lives Matter.”

I was at home when I flicked on CNN and saw the all-caps message screaming from the screen: “VERDICT EXPECTED ANY MOMENT.” That greatly encouraged me that a conviction on at least one count was coming.

I’d watched parts of the trial and the prosecution, spearheaded by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison – an African-American, and first Muslim ever elected to U.S. Congress – resisted the temptation to operate on raw emotion and instead coolly used logic to present an airtight case.

By the definitions of the charges, I thought, any reasonable juror would vote to convict Chauvin.

Nearly 30 years ago, though, our collective hearts had been crushed by another jury verdict involving police officers and an unarmed black man.

That notoriously happened in Simi Valley, California in 1992, when damning videotape evidence looked certain to land four Los Angeles police officers prison time for beating black motorist Rodney King nearly to death after he led them on a high-speed freeway chase.

Instead, acquittals triggered heartbreak, frustration and rage, as days of violent urban uprisings happened across the US, that further soured already rancid race relations and from which it took years to recover.

Something felt different this time, though.

The jury this time saw the grisly, near 10-minute long street execution of a man – arrested on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill in a convenience store – in broad daylight, with several civilian witnesses of various ethnic backgrounds imploring Chauvin to take his knee off Floyd’s neck.

The jury heard Floyd himself on the video footage literally and repeatedly begging for his life, saying he couldn’t breathe and crying out for his mother, before he tragically died. The entire world was a witness, and even in corners of it that lack any kind of black presence, white demonstrators took to the streets to express their outrage.

CNN commentator Van Jones remarked that he knew America’s social consciousness was awakened when protests broke out in Idaho – whose 1.7 million population is less than one per cent black.

But I knew the world’s social consciousness about race and colour was changing the moment I saw protesters carrying a huge “Black Lives Matter” banner in a demonstration in, of all places, Helsinki, Finland, which statistically, is about as black as Idaho.

I decided to exercise at the gym to watch and hear the verdict. At least there, if the verdict didn’t go the way so many millions of us were hoping, I’d be able to work off my angst on an elliptical machine. A few minutes into my workout, with my phone resting on the dashboard and my earbuds in place, I saw the image of a judge sitting on the bench announcing that he was going to read the jury’s findings.

My phone’s feed must have been a little bit behind that of the large, overhead television screens that I couldn’t clearly see, because I never wear my glasses when I’m exercising. Suddenly I heard a loud yell from across the cavernous gym.

“YES!”

That’s when I got a good feeling. I looked over and could make out a white man in a muscle tee-shirt who had walked over from a bench press station, exhorting the verdict. Seconds later, I saw a white woman on a treadmill, clapping in celebration.

When my phone feed caught up and for each of the three times I heard the judge say the word so many millions of us agitating for social justice and an end to US systemic racism; the word that for so long has eluded African-Americans when it has come to white perpetrators of killings — GUILTY — I took my right fist off one of the handles and emphatically clenched and pumped it.

They got it right, I thought. A jury finally – finally – validated out outrage and vindicated the collective brutal and often tragic experience we’ve endured as a people with law enforcement since the 1865 enactment of the so-called Black Codes, which many states adopted to severely restrict African-American rights as a reaction to emancipation from 246 years of slavery.

And no US president, outside of Barack Obama – the first African-American to hold the office – other than Joe Biden, in a nationally televised address, so firmly and decisively acknowledged and condemned not just police racial profiling, and brutality of African-Americans, but the systemic racism that motivates and perpetuates this brutality as “a stain on our nation’s soul.”

Biden, who from his first days of his presidential campaign called members of Floyd’s family to express his condolences and met with other black families who lost relatives to police killings, described the Chauvin verdict as “a giant step towards justice in America,” also acknowledging how difficult the road has been to hold accountable and punish police officers for their misdeeds.

“For so many people, it seems like it took an extraordinary convergence of factors,” Biden said. “Black men in particular, have been treated throughout the course of our history as less than human. Their lives must be valued in our nation. Full stop.”

Make no mistake.

Chauvin’s conviction in no way ends police brutality. Two weeks ago, just a short drive away from the Minneapolis courtroom, a Brooklyn Centre, Minnesota police officer, Kim Potter, shot dead another unarmed black man, Daunte Wright.

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Potter claimed she didn’t know she was holding a gun and not a taser when she killed Wright. She has since resigned and is awaiting a trial on second-degree manslaughter charges.

Elsewhere around the US, there are too many other black and brown men and women to name who have died at police hands, and too few officers have been held accountable, let alone convicted for their actions. The Biden Administration’s appointed US Attorney General, Merrick Garland today announced the US Justice Department will initiate a probe of the Minneapolis Police Department’s practices to determine whether excessive force against civilians has been common practice.

Meaningful police reforms must be enacted at municipal, state, and federal levels. The US Congress last month passed the 2021 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which among other things would outlaw racial profiling, chokeholds, carotid holds, serving arrest warrants without first knocking on doors, establish a national database to register offending officers, and move to strip officers of some legal protections in cases such as Floyd’s.

But while Congress has passed this bill, the US Senate also must pass it before Biden can sign it into law. With the 100-member Senate split 50-50, it makes it extremely difficult to wrangle the necessary 60 Senate votes to move the bill out of discussion and on to the Senate floor for a vote.

This is just one area in which voting rights are so important. The Senate is only deadlocked at 50-50 because of the heroic efforts of Georgia social activist Stacey Abrams, who in the last few years helped register or re-register nearly one million voters, most of whom helped elect to the Senate Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff – the first Black and first Jewish candidates in that state to win those positions. While Republicans continue to demonize Abrams, the Nobel Foundation lauded her within hours after the Minneapolis verdicts, nominating her for a Nobel Peace Prize for “following in Dr, Martin Luther King Jr.’s footsteps in the fight for equality before the law and for civil rights”.

It surprised neither me, nor millions of other black folks that the Republican-led Georgia Legislature quickly moved to pass new legislation to make voting harder, including limiting polling places and even criminalizing providing food and water to people waiting in line to vote.

It’s even less surprising that several other states in which Republicans control legislatures are moving to enact similar laws, aimed at suppressing the black and brown vote.

It’s worth noting that voters elected Ellison, the Minnesota Attorney General, the former Democratic Congressman, who orchestrated the Chauvin prosecution, and Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who used his authority to refer the Chauvin case to Ellison’s office. Registered voters in the US are also automatically entered into jury pools so they may deliberate in potential cases like Chauvin’s and ultimately, render crucial verdicts that may bring about social justice.

Voting rights have a direct correlation to social justice and eradicating the systemic racism bred by centuries-old white supremacy responsible for such evils as the genocide and forced isolation of the indigenous peoples of what would become the US and Alaska, the theft and overthrow and illegal absorption of the internationally recognized Kingdom of Hawai’i, and the abduction of my ancestors from our African motherland and our enslavement.

As I got in my car to leave the gym, I wasn’t only physically exhausted from a cardio workout. I was mentally exhausted from the long wait for justice for Floyd’s murder. Even while feeling relieved for Floyd’s family, I’m still grieving for Wright and countless other black and brown men and women and their families seeking legal remedy for their tragic losses.

Before I started the car, I realized I needed to do something that I’ve subconsciously programmed into my own mind as a means of protection against the possibility of becoming the next black man shot dead by a police officer, in case of being stopped.

I removed my wallet from where I’d stashed it before entering the gym and put it back in my pocket.

A 2016 case taught me. A police officer shot dead another black man, Philando Castile, in the Minneapolis suburb of Falcon Heights, after he told the officer he needed to reach for something in his car to identify himself.

While I’ve never yet personally experienced police brutality at the handful of times I’ve been stopped in my car, eight years ago I was racially profiled and then falsely accused of a crime I couldn’t possibly have committed.

Oddly enough, at the time of the crime – the robbery of a can of motor oil at a hardware store – I was in Melbourne, attending the 2013 AFL grand final at the MCG.

My family had to pool its resources and spend several thousand dollars in legal fees to fight the case the police department had refused to drop even after I presented a small mountain of evidence that confirmed my whereabouts. A judge eventually found me factually innocent of all charges.

I’m one of the fortunate black men who successfully took on law enforcement and got justice – despite my inability to sue the police department because of qualified immunity laws that protect officers, or to recoup the money spent.

The Derek Chauvin guilty verdicts for murdering a black man feel like justice. His sentencing, expected in two months, hopefully will be harsh. But as President Biden said in his remarks, these verdicts are “much too rare.”

Chauvin’s disbelieving facial expression as he was led away in handcuffs even confirmed that. This is a man who, in earning 18 civilian complaints in his 19-year policing career, avoided any meaningful sanction.

But for now, African-Americans – and indeed anyone who values human life – will savour this historic victory that declares police are not above the law. And we’ll continue, with our allies, to demand, not merely hope for, the equity and justice America promises on paper, but still too often fails to deliver.