The Verdict

I haven’t written about The Verdict.

For anyone (mostly Your Humble Blogger) reading this at some remove from the events, a police officer has been convicted of murder for killing George Floyd, a black man, while he was in custody, unarmed and immobilized. The killing is not a rare event; criminal conviction in such a killing is.

Many of my friends expressed elation when the verdict was announced. I didn’t feel elated. I honestly have no opinion about whether the officer’s actions constituted second-degree unintentional murder under the law in Minneapolis. I wouldn’t be surprised if the law was written in such a way that it was not. And while I do blame the officer who was convicted for his actions—I certainly don’t think he was ill-treated by the system—I am concerned that the department, after the fact, worked with the defense to separate the killer from the police in the minds of the jury. He wasn't convicted as a police officer who murdered someone in the performance of his so-called duties; he was convicted as a rogue.

Sometime friend of this Tohu Bohu David S. Bernstein put it well on Twitter: “The department can cut the officer loose, call it rogue behavior contrary to how we trained him, and then use a guilty verdict as validation of that. Absolution.”

This is, I think, why I didn't feel elated by the verdict. I felt relieved, mostly because of the (totally justified) riots I expected to follow an acquittal, but not elated the way I thought I would.

Maybe the department will also accept responsibility. That isn’t how I understood the testimony of the police chief, but I didn’t watch it live, I haven’t read the transcript and am certainly no expert.

Almost seven years ago, I wrote in this blog that I wanted my local police chief to call a meeting and tell every officer something like this:

You all know what’s going on in this country. It’s not going to go on here anymore. I have already talked to three officers that have a history, and I’ve put them on desk duty. If you know about any more that shouldn’t be on the street right now, tell me privately and I’ll pull them—and if I find out you didn’t tell me, I will come down on you like a ton of bricks. I am not taking any chances.

Brothers, I have always said that I have your back. And I have always had your back. But I’m telling you this now: if a black man dies in this town at your hands, I will not have your back. I will hang you out to dry. Do not think I will protect you. I will not. I will serve your head up to the prosecutors, I will serve your ass up to the media, and I will serve your nuts up to the fucking mob. You know the thing in movies where the one guy is shoved in the other guy’s face and told “if he dies, you die”? That’s true of every gd-damned black man in this whole fucking town from now on.

Disavowing the guy after the fact seems like a very, very weak version of this, but maybe it’s something. Maybe.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.