America can breathe. But that first exhale of relief today was like collectively channeling the breath of life Officer Derek Chauvin denied George Floyd on May 25, 2020 – a day that will live in policing infamy.
But I hasten to note that it wasn’t just Blacks who exhaled. Because many white Americans felt the same suffocating anxiety and restive dread Blacks felt as everyone awaited the jury’s verdict.
Like most Americans, you probably spent the eleven hours the jury deliberated watching legal commentators on TV offer all kinds of expert opinion about how the trial played out. This, while conspicuously failing to offer the one opinion you wanted to hear, namely how will the jury verdict read out.
As it happens, I not only previewed their verdict hesitancy but defied it with one of my own in “Chauvin Prosecutors Are No ‘Dream Team.’ But Their Witnesses Are From Central Casting” on April 6:
The O.J. Simpson case showed why it is never wise to predict the outcome of a murder trial, especially one that is racially charged. But no officer has ever delivered that idiomatic final nail in the coffin of a fellow officer at trial as convincingly and authoritatively as Chief Arradondo did in Chauvin’s yesterday. I feel confident the jury’s verdict will vindicate my assertion.
And, during those few hours, after the court announced the jury had reached a verdict and the whole world began waiting with bated breath, I reinforced my prediction in a text to my old college roommate that simply read:
Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!
That’s why I felt none of the anxiety others felt as the jury deliberated.
The former Minneapolis Police officer who kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for over 9 minutes last year was found guilty Tuesday of all three charges against him in one of the most consequential trials of the Black Lives Matter era.
Derek Chauvin, 45, was convicted on charges of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The jury deliberated for more than 10 hours over two days in coming to their decision.
(CNN, April 20, 2021)
The restive dread, however, was another matter. And it did not help to wake up to this headline in The Washington Post:
- Chauvin judge admonishes Rep. Maxine Waters after she said protesters should get ‘confrontational’ if verdict is not guilty
So just imagine the “confrontation” that would have erupted if Chauvin were found not guilty … on any count.
In my April 17 podcast, “American Menace: White Cops Killing Black Men,” I decried Black leaders who seemed more interested in making martyrs of Black men than in saving their lives. Well, here was Congresswoman Waters, on cue, showing that she was more interested in fomenting confrontation with good cops than in seeing this bad cop get convicted.
Thank God the jury proved as divinely empaneled as the prosecutors’ witnesses were divinely situated for this combustible case. Because the way cities were boarding up for riots, and the way media were jonesing for them, rioters would have been forgiven for thinking they were been invited, or goaded, into doing what they do.
But thank God, this verdict quelled even their opportunistic impulses. Except, as the judge duly noted for the record, Auntie Maxine’s incendiary remarks gave Chauvin’s defense lawyer credible fodder to appeal his conviction, which he is bound to do.
Her remarks were clearly ill-advised and untimely. But the court of appeals will not find them so prejudicial as to warrant a new trial.
With that, I shall rest this case with a final word on the abiding, deadly conflict between systemic racism in policing and the cultural imperative of Blacks to resist arrest. Because, sadly, the spate of white cops killing Black folk this week alone, is what we lawyers call prima-facie evidence that this verdict amounts to only one battle won in an ongoing war for social, racial, and criminal justice.
Because, lest we forget, the white cop who was caught on tape shooting Walter Scott in the back six years ago is rotting in jail. That case even allowed me to highlight my own years-long battle in “Clarion Call for Body Cameras to Check Bad Cops,” April 14, 2015. The point is that we won that battle too. Yet it did not prevent Chauvin from kneeing Floyd to death.
Meanwhile, no less a person than President Biden bemoaned in relief that this verdict cannot be the exception. It must be the norm. And, for me, that means enacting legislation to reform police conduct as well as transforming the consciousness of Black men.
Because it is a cultural and existential imperative for Black men to see community policing not only as having socially redeeming value but as their personal responsibility too.
Related commentaries:
Chauvin prosecutors… American menace… Walter Scott… BLM…
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Tuesday, at 8:29 p.m.