This Time is Just One Time

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Where there is one police brutality case that hits the news, there are 10,000 others that no one hears about.

We’d be fools to think otherwise.

Everything went right to convict Derek Chauvin. Had Darnella Frazier run out of battery on her phone or gotten jostled by another witness or been intimidated by the other officers present, there would have been no video and this case would have gone the way of thousands – police officers’ word against everyone else’s and the police officers would have prevailed.

Had the prosecution stayed local instead of being taken over by the Minnesota Attorney General, Keith Ellison, the chances of conviction would have been hugely reduced. Try as they might to be separate, independent entities, local police and prosecutors know each other by name, chat sports in the hallways, and consider themselves on the same team. Their language, their routines, everything about them is focused on bringing bad guys to justice. But it only really works when the bad guys are ‘others,” not when they’re one of them.

That the jury was diverse meant that the likelihood, the real life experience of police intimidation and violence, was no distant reality for many jurors. Many of them probably knew someone – a cousin, uncle, father, brother – who had been stopped for an air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror, maybe ordered out of the car and handcuffed for reasons never stated, maybe ‘roughed up’ as they say or worse. I can imagine what that would be like but I don’t know, that not being my experience as a white woman. But I get the notion of feeling something strong and true in my gut. I don’t believe everything anyone tells me but I believe these stories. There are too many of them not to be true.

So here we are. Tonight, Derek Chauvin is in a segregated unit of a Minnesota prison. And there are still thousands of police officers and millions of people of color and every day they cross paths somehow. A man passes a counterfeit $20 bill, another has a tail light burned out, a woman calls the police because the neighbors are fighting, a boy sits on a picnic table holding a toy gun, a woman is sleeping in her own bed. One after the other, the cases pile up, the rapid fire mistakes, the snap decisions, the killing decision, the killing privilege.

Not all police officers are bad. And law enforcement is not wholly corrupt. But there is more wrong here than can be explained by the presence of bad apples. Derek Chauvin isn’t a bad apple. He is a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis Police Department. When he put his knee in George Floyd’s neck for 9 and a half minutes, it wasn’t the first time he didn’t give a shit what happened to someone he was trying to arrest. It wasn’t the first time he was brutal. It was just the first time he was turned into a movie star.

He’s not the only one. We’d be fools to think otherwise.