Hey everyone. I know I’ve been MIA for a long time, but the recent guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin made me come back to weigh in on everything. I’m hoping to get back into regular articles, but I’ll talk about that in a separate post. Possibly a vlog update.
Anyway, we’re here to talk about this scumbag and the path to a truly “just” justice system, so let’s dive right in.
The Good
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Derek Chauvin is the guy who murdered George Floyd about a year ago by kneeling on his neck for like 9 minutes. Obviously the good news is that he was found guilty of all 3 charges against him. This demonstrates, in my opinion, that we as a nation have slowly started to finally hold cops accountable for their violent actions.
I’ll be honest y’all. I didn’t expect him to be found guilty. Perhaps it’s my rampant pessimism about the state of our country, but I really expected him to be acquitted just like seemingly every other murdering cop over the past few years.
But I was wrong. And it’s a great thing. I feel like this is the first bit of good news we’ve had in a long time. And it feels great.
The Bad
Yea come on, we all knew the “good” section was going to be short. Let’s move on to the not-so-good parts about this verdict.
First of all, obviously its bad that George Floyd even had to die in the first place. That’s yet another victim of police brutality to add to the frankly horrific pile of bodies. So there’s that. RIP to him, and all the other victims of unrestrained police violence.
Another negative aspect is the sentencing guidelines surrounding the charges Chauvin was convicted of. I quote:
State sentencing guidelines recommend 12.5 years in prison for a conviction on unintentional second-degree murder for someone with no criminal history. But prosecutors could seek a sentence up to the maximum of 40 years on that count if Cahill determines there were aggravating factors.
https://www.npr.org/sections/trial-over-killing-of-george-floyd/2021/04/20/987777911/court-says-jury-has-reached-verdict-in-derek-chauvins-murder-trial
Will the prosecutors seek the longer sentence? Or will they make some sort of deal? I would hope that given the brutality involved and the fact that Chauvin even now seems confused as to why he’s even in court – much less remorseful for the life he stole – that they would seek the maximum possible sentence. Experience, however, tells me that it’s an open question and we’ll have to see.
I bring up the sentencing because this guy deserves to spend the rest of his worthless life in prison, no parole. The fact that there’s even a chance that he could be released within 15 years is ridiculous – and insulting when you recall that minorities are routinely given substantially longer sentences than whites for the same offenses.
Finally, I suspect that one of the reasons Derek Chauvin was found guilty in the first place is because of the massive wave of protests and people speaking out against police brutality. While this can seem good on the surface, it’s actually very disheartening that there had to be almost a year-long protest and unrest to finally hold 1 police officer accountable for their actions. Hell, even the fucking President had to speak out about it.
Let’s hope that in the future we can just…you know…hold people accountable for murdering people without half the country bursting into flames.
The Ugly
And now we move into the really shit stuff. I’ll preface this by saying that a large part of this section honestly doesn’t have anything to do with the Derek Chauvin verdict itself; rather, it’s going to focus more on pissing on the parade that the neolibs have been throwing for themselves in the wake of the verdict.
So first of all, the ugliest part of this for me is uh….this.
In case you don’t have the time to click that link, Nancy Pelosi had a press conference yesterday after the conviction and during that conference she actually – and I am not joking here – thanked George Floyd for getting killed by the police. Ok, she didn’t use those exact words; what she actually did was thank him for his “sacrifice”. But come on. How tone deaf do you have to be? Even for her this is a new low.
So yea that was infuriating. Really wish she had lost her seat in this past election. But I digress.
Perhaps uglier – from a purely policy perspective – is the fact that, while Derek Chauvin will spend some time in prison and this is still a victory for progress overall, the corrupt system that allowed George Floyd’s murder is still very much in place. And it shows little signs of being broken down any time soon.
Case in point: Eclipsed by the news of the Chauvin verdict was this story about a 16 year old girl who was gunned down by the police because she had a knife which she was using to defend herself from being jumped by other girls. Oh, and she was the one who called the police in the first place. You know. To help protect her from harm. The thing the police are ostensibly supposed to do.
But no, instead she joins the ranks of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and countless others. Sickening.
This shooting just happened, so who knows whether the officers involved will face any charges. I’m not optimistic, even in the wake of the Derek Chauvin story.
Oh and there was also this bit from the Las Vegas Raiders’ owner deciding it was a good idea to tweet “I Can Breathe” after the verdict. Incidentally, “I Can Breathe” was (and is) the counter-slogan being used by racist cops and cop apologists to “fight back” against the “I Can’t Breathe” slogan taken up by many activists in the wake of the George Floyd murder. So, y’know. Bit tone deaf there.
That tweet betrays more than just tone deafness though. While I don’t necessarily believe that the Raiders’ owner is racist or anything, the tweet drips with the kind of neoliberal privilege that makes my stomach heave. Because they’re far from the only ones patting themselves on the back and celebrating the verdict as if this moment has single-handedly ended police brutality.
Put another way, they’re acting like Derek Chauvin was a rogue cop who got punished and that’s it. When in truth, cops like Derek Chauvin are the norm, not the exception. We’ve seen it time and time again, stretching back literal centuries. The police exist to protect wealth and property, not people. The justice system is anything but just when it comes to minorities and the impoverished. One conviction does not magically fix all of that.
Beyond Derek Chauvin
If we really want to progress as a society we need to do some hard things. Foremost amongst them is to overhaul the criminal justice system so that it actually is just, and fair to all, not just the wealthy elite. We need to effectively disband our current police force and re-imagine it. It needs to be cleansed of the thugs and the racists and the generations of inbreeding. Police officers need to be held accountable to the public. Body cams need to be mandatory and unable to be disabled by the officer wearing them.
These are all long-term goals. I fully expect we’ll never see a lot of them come to pass in our lifetimes. But maybe someday our children’s children will be taught that “A policeman is your pal” and have it actually be true.
Maybe.