Are We Letting George Floyd’s Other Murderer Get Away? (Hint: It’s the System)
American Policing Sacrificed Derek Chauvin To Save Itself
As the country waited for the jury’s verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, millions of Black Americans had braced for every outcome but conviction. Hearing the judge read the verdict, with bated breath, to learn he was found guilty on every count — for a moment — felt like the justice Black America had been marching, singing, and praying for. Derek Chauvin will be punished for murdering George Floyd. But the system that enabled Chauvin to act without regard for the value of Floyd’s life remains, unscathed. America must avoid falling into the trap of allowing this system to hold a single bad actor accountable while failing to address its own moral bankruptcy which enabled those bad acts.
In the wake of the Chauvin verdict, Americans are left to celebrate an anomaly in our system — a glitch. But this case is an example of the system’s pathology. The elation many Black Americans felt after watching a disgraced Chauvin led out of the courtroom in handcuffs wasn’t necessarily due to the conviction itself; rather, it was how rarely police are convicted in these cases. And that’s if charges are even filed against a police officer who kills. The reason Black Americans are feeling relieved by this verdict is the reason to dismantle the system that made it possible.
Derek Chauvin faced the full prosecutorial power of the State, not because he was a racist cop who murdered an unarmed Black man under authority of law, but because — prosecutors argued — he was not acting under authority of law. As it presented its case against Chauvin, the prosecution stripped him of the white supremacist authority conferred upon him the day he received his badge and donned the uniform. This authority, granted him by an institution born of the codification of Black death at the hands of white authority, can be traced as far back as the first slave codes enacted in 1669. Like the slave codes, the current system carves out an exception to homicide laws for those acting under State authority. But Derek Chauvin was extended no such privilege — and we are to believe he was a single bad actor, an anomaly; a common criminal who just happened to be wearing a uniform and badge that day. The State, with surgical precision, separated Chauvin from the disordered system he represented the day he murdered Floyd. It was the only way to secure Chauvin’s individual accountability under the law.
But what about the system’s accountability for this murder?
Black Americans cannot afford to forget the moral bankruptcy of the institution behind Chauvin’s actions. The police department initially characterized Floyd’s murder as a “medical incident” — Chauvin’s use of force against Floyd was never mentioned. The anomaly in this story is not that the death occurred, or that the police initially lied to cover up Chauvin’s role in said death, but that video of the incident surfaced which was so damning, so clear and convincing, it unmasked the lie that covered Floyd’s murder. Had that video not materialized, the institution’s lie would likely be the narrative, and the truth of Floyd’s death, like so many other deaths before it, would have been lost.
The department’s initial instinct to provide cover for its officer aside, there can be no doubt Chauvin killed Floyd in the presence of cameras and bystanders because he thought he could do so with impunity, cloaked in white supremacist authority. He did so with the understanding that his badge and the authority vested in him by the State gave him the right to do so. He was merely doing what white Americans and their agents had been empowered to do by the State since American chattel slavery’s infancy: to elicit Black submission to white authority by all available means, including death. The anomaly of this story is not that Chauvin expected to be shielded by the State, but that once the world erupted with outrage at this killing, the State sacrificed him to preserve an institution that is diseased at the root. In ensuring Chauvin’s conviction, the State of Minnesota — and, by extension, American policing — secured its own acquittal.
There is little comfort in seeing this murderer held solely accountable for Mr. Floyd’s death. Chauvin is not the only culpable party in this crime. His accomplice was a centuries old system of law and policy that devalues the lives of Black people and excuses the taking of Black lives in the name of white supremacist authority. That system remains, unimpeached by the Chauvin verdict: its façade of legitimacy newly polished. This institution, rooted in the violence of white supremacy cannot be reformed. It must be dismantled and reimagined, or Black Americans will continue to die at its hands.
