George Floyd’s death under the weight of Derek Chauvin’s knee ought to have been a teaching moment for police officers all around the country to rethink their reflexive resort to force in unruly encounters with civilians, but apparently not. Even with saturation coverage of Chauvin’s trial over the past three weeks, deadly run-ins between police and civilians have continued unabated, according to a compilation by The New York Times.
At
least sixty-four people have died at the hands of police officers nationwide
since testimony began in Chauvin’s trial on March 29, according to the Times’
double-bylined article by reporters John Eligon and Shawn Huber in the
newspaper’s April 18 print edition. More than half of the victims were Black or
Latino, The deaths testify, according to
the reporters, to “the split-second choices and missteps by members of law
enforcement that can escalate workaday arrests into fatalities.”
Too often,
as Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, shows, the cop’ instinctive resort to lethal force
has little if anything to do with keeping the people of their communities safe.
Floyd posed no threat to public safety in the Twin Cities, but he did pose a
threat to Derek Chauvin’s authority. As Chauvin told a police dispatcher while
forcing Floyd onto the ground, “We’ve got to control this guy.”
Caron
Nazario, a uniformed U.S. Army officer, was a victim of the same sort of
bullying behavior by cops on December 5 when two Windsor, Virginia, police
officers stopped him for a supposed traffic violation and pepper sprayed him as
he sat, unarmed, in his vehicle. Nazario drove for a mile toward a well-lit
area with the officers flashing their vehicle’s lights behind him. The officers
grow increasingly angry with Nazario as the in-uniform second lieutenant
explains that he fears for his safety.
Body-camera
video of the episode showing that the officers pointed weapons at Nazario emerged
three months later and went viral as Chauvin’s trial continued in Minneapolis.The video shows
Nazario insistently asking for an explanation of the traffic stop and pleading
with the officers to calm down as their tempers are evidently flaring.
Nazario is shown with his hands, empty, raised
in compliance with the officers’ demands. R.D. Riddle, police chief in the tiny
town in southeastern Virginia, is blaming the entire episode on Nazario’s supposed
failure to comply with the officers’ instructions but also crediting the
officers with de-escalating the confrontation by holstering their firearms in
favor of their tasers.
Riddle has
confirmed that an internal investigationi was instituted after the incident and
one of the officers, Jose Gutierrez, was fired after the review was completed.
The second officer, Daniel Crocker, is still on the job. Nazario has sued both
of the officers in federal court for $1 million in compensatory damages for allegedly
violating his First and Fourth Amendment rights.
A somewhat
similar traffic stop in a Minneapolis suburb ended tragically last week [April
11] with the shooting death of the unarmed driver, twenty-year-old Duante
Wright, at the hands of the veteran Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter.
Potter and two other officers had stopped Wright for expired registration tags
and for an air freshener hanging from his car’s rearview mirror. After
checking, the officers learned that Wright, who was Black, had an arrest
warrant pending for an attempted armed robbery charge two years earlier.
Body camera
video of the encounter shows a scuffle between Wright and the officers as he attempted
to get back into his car. Potter can be heard to say, “I’m going to tase you.”
All but inexplicably, Potter, a 26-year
veteran of the force, draws and fires her firearm instead of her taser—a mistake,
as she later explained. “Oh, shit,” Potter is heard to exclaim. “I shot him.”
Later news coverage showed that the
two weapons differ by weight, appearance, and material, but even so some news
organizations uncovered evidence of more than a dozen similar mistakes over
several years. The Brooklyn Center police chief also told reporters that protocol
calls for officers to carry their firearm on their dominant side and their taser
on the opposite side.
Potter, who is white, resigned
after the episode; so did the police chief. A state court grand jury indicted
Potter three days later [April 14] for second-degree involuntary manslaughter,
defined in Minnesota law as a homicide resulting from “culpable negligence.” The
indictment came after three days of tense demonstrations in the mostly white
suburb.
The debate over police use of force
intensified after video emerged The of the March 29 shooting death of a Black
Chicago teenager, Adam Toledo, at the hands of a Chicago police officer, Eric
Stillman. The video shows the officer chasing the 13-year-old boy down an alley
and ordering him to stop and show his hands. The video appears to show the boy
tossing a handgun onto the ground and raising his hands as instructed just as
the officer fires a fatal shot into the boy’s chest.
Stillman, who had a record of
several use-of-force complaints without discipline, has been placed on
administrative leave pending a full investigation into the episode. Criminal
charges would be difficult, if not impossible, legal observers appeared to
agree, even as law enforcement-minded commentators defended Stillman’s decision
to shoot as he confronted a split-second decision about his own safety.
With the
broad national debate ongoing, Derek Chauvin’s trial reaches a critical
juncture today [April 19] as lawyers present closing arguments before the case
is turned over to the racially mixed jury. Legal experts generally credit the
prosecution with a well-presented case showing that Floyd died from
asphyxiation and that Chauvin’s restraint technique went against police
policies. Chauvin’s defense attorney, Eric Nelson, has fulfilled his ethical obligation
by challenging the prosecution on both premises, but overall the prosecution’s
case appears mostly unshaken.
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