Maybe it shouldn’t take riots for prosecutors to hold murderous cops accountable

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Yesterday a jury convicted Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin of all three charges against him: second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the May 2020 killing of George Floyd.

It took weeks of widespread rioting for prosecutors to bring murder charges against Chauvin, despite clear video from multiple angles showing Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck for nine minutes while Floyd said "I can't breathe” more than 20 times. He also said “They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me.” and “Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I’m dead.” Chauvin continued to kneel on Floyd's neck for two minutes after his colleague said he could not find a pulse.

In the wake of widespread unrest, police in Phoenix and Minneapolis agreed to remove chokeholds from acceptable use of force. The LA DA insisted LAPD stop using chokeholds. Houston Mayor said the same for Houston PD.

Yesterday was a good day. The system worked, once it got started. But it shouldn’t take riots for prosecutors to hold murderous cops accountable.

The entire criminal justice system — from cops to prosecutors to judges to medical examiners to crime labs to forensic investigators to expert witnesses to prisons to bail to the parole system — has for decades operated with near-zero unaccountability and dismal results.

In the wake of the verdict, Amnesty International called for “shrinking the size and scope of law enforcement in daily life, eliminating qualified immunity that creates a barrier to redress for victims of unlawful policing, demilitarizing law enforcement, and enacting strict limits on the use of force altogether.”

The entire criminal justice system operates largely without accountability. In Chauvin’s 19 years on the police force, he racked up 18 complaints of police brutality. Seven were “closed” and resulted in “no discipline." In one instance, Chauvin and five other officers shot and killed a man. In another, he shot a man twice without killing him. Many jurisdictions, including San Francisco, refuse to make police complaint records available to the public. But from what we do know, it’s normal for officers with extensive records of police abuse to remain on the force with no repercussions. And until there’s public accountability, that’s likely to remain the case.

Cops want to be respected and obeyed. But that respect and obedience should result from mutual trust, not blunt force. And that trust must be earned. Getting hired by an opaque, unaccountable police department and given a badge and a gun doesn’t make someone trustworthy. In fact, quite the opposite. Not every cop is bad. But every cop gets up every day and chooses to work for an institution that regularly performs extrajudicial killings with zero outside oversight or accountability. Every cop knows who racks up an average of one use-of-force complaint per year and still keeps their job. Every cop covers for and protects every other cop, no matter how violent or corrupt, a system they describe as the “thin blue line.”

Government is a monopoly on violence. There is no escape.

If anything, someone with a gun and a badge should be held to a higher standard than the average citizen. And yet cops routinely commit rapes, assaults, and murders and face zero consequences. Every police department in the nation has been required for decades by federal law to report how many people they kill every year. Yet there’s never been a year in which even most police departments complied and the federal government has never levied any sanction whatsoever against any police department for non-compliance.

Over the decades the Department of Justice has investigated multiple police departments and found widespread lawlessness, including corruption, brutality, and racial bias. Yet the net result has been nothing more than toothless recommendations the departments freely ignore.

Cops can’t have it both ways. They can’t advocate for a secretive, unaccountable system where they’re allowed to do whatever they want to whomever they want as long as that person doesn’t have the resources to hold them accountable and simultaneously claim the moral high ground and insist that everyone should trust and support them. Trust must be earned.

Yesterday was a good day. But the fight has still only begun.