The Tribune

With Charlie Harper

Derek Chauvin was convicted late Tuesday afternoon by a Minneapolis jury on charges of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. You might have heard about it.

The trial was extensively covered by mainstream media throughout the United States, and Fox News and other right-leaning media companies did not ignore it either.

For almost the past 11 months, America has been riveted to the story of the death at the hands and knees of a veteran white metropolitan police officer of a troubled, frankly unexceptional black man whose death transformed his life and community in ways that could n

ever have been anticipated.

George Floyd’s name will not be soon forgotten. Murals depicting him as a martyr have appeared across the country. The news of ex-officer Chauvin’s conviction merited banner headlines in major daily newspapers.

Floyd’s death was certainly senseless and Chauvin’s behaviour cannot be satisfactorily nor rationally explained.

So why did the guilty verdicts merit such national attention? Wouldn’t any reasonable person have expected these jury judgments in a case where the prosecution’s facts were so obvious and were backed up not only by highly credible, emotional testimony from responsible witnesses but also by bystanders’ phone videos of the event?

We all know why. It’s tough for prosecutors to get a conviction against police officers accused of violent or even deadly conduct.

According to publicly available statistics, police shoot and kill around 1,000 people in the US every year. Many of these events are clearly justified and involve shootouts with suspects or other obviously aggressive behaviour which makes the outcome seem reasonable.

Police aren’t charged in most of these cases, and convictions are achieved in fewer than half of the incidents that do make it to trial.

This doesn’t mean America is a callous society in which individual rights are widely ignored and police misconduct is universally excused. It does mean that for whatever reason, few police killings result in convictions for the officers involved.

A university professor criminologist offered to reporters some reasons for the collective sign of national relief when the Minneapolis jury returned its guilty verdict this week:

“We’ve seen with other cases where there has been damning video evidence and the prosecution has struggled to win a conviction,” he said. “This case was in no way a slam dunk for the prosecution.”

The prosecutor in this case, Steve Schleicher, acknowledged as much in court. Addressing the jury, he said: “It may be hard for any of you to imagine a police officer doing something like this. Indeed, imagining a police officer committing a crime might be the most difficult thing for you, because that’s just not the way we think about police officers. We trust the police.”

After the jury heard testimony from numerous senior Minneapolis officials including the chief, along with highly credible eye-witnesses, Schleicher made perhaps his most telling point.

“This is not a prosecution of the police. What Chauvin did was not policing.”

President Joe Biden, who has begun to surprise supporters and opponents alike with a stunning, almost completely unexpected gift of finding the right words in reaction to the series of gun-related and other tragedies that presently beset the US, said the following:

“Enough. Enough. Enough of the senseless killings. Such a verdict is also much too rare. For so many people, it seems like it took a unique and extraordinary convergence of factors (to get a guilty verdict).”

Even Trey Gowdy, a former South Carolina congressman who was one of the most annoying of a pack of Republican attack dogs always nipping at Barack Obama’s presidential heels and at those of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, announced on Fox News that Biden’s overall response to the verdict “was pretty reasonable”.

TV and newspapers yesterday were filled with sights and sounds of jubilation and relief, particularly in black communities.

The outpouring of joy – and surprise – reminded some observers of a similar reaction to the 1995 acquittal on murder charges of former football star, actor and Hertz TV pitchman O.J. Simpson in the deaths of his ex-wife and her friend in Los Angeles.

Very few people paying attention – and an estimated 95 million people watched the famous low-speed police chase of Simpson’s white Ford Bronco on television – to the most publicized court case in history thought Simpson was innocent.

That wasn’t the point. In the Simpson case, a prominent, wealthy African American demonstrated that he too could “buy” an acquittal in the American criminal justice system, just as blacks had watched white defendants do all their lives.

Incidentally, Simpson’s defence “Dream Team” included oratorical genius and famous black attorney Johnnie Cochran and Robert Kardashian. The latter, who lived for a while with Priscilla Presley after her divorce from Elvis, also sired Khloe, Kourtney and of course Kim Kardashian, whose reality TV show is now in its 20th and final season.

Neither for the first nor the last time, the line between real life and Hollywood-style drama got pretty blurry.

Simpson was acquitted at a time when few blacks were similarly successful. Now, justice has been served for George Floyd in circumstances where the overwhelming preponderance of evidence supported a legal conclusion that is nonetheless unusual in the context of contemporary America.

Soon enough, attention will turn to general police reform and whether the odds will shift in the future toward blacks involved with police in tense and deadly situations. But Americans will remember George Floyd’s name.

Another moment of shame

The British House of Windsor and Windsor Castle outside London have rightly been the focus of the world’s attention recently with the passing of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

Another Windsor, infinitely less well known, also popped up in the news at around the same time. This Windsor is a small rural crossroads community of 2,626 inhabitants in southeast Virginia. Its slight significance derives from its position at the intersection of one highway connecting Norfolk and Richmond and another linking Hampton Roads and eastern North Carolina. The two roads form an X in Windsor.

Months after the fact, many Americans learned that last December 5 was an eventful night in Windsor, Virginia. On that evening, black and Latino US Army Second Lieutenant Caron Nazario, who is 27-years-old, was pulled over by a Windsor police car. Nazario was dressed in military fatigues.

Nazario, whose prior experience with the police made him apprehensive in this small Southern hamlet, pulled into a brightly lit BP gas station before stopping for the police.

There, he learned his offence was displaying a temporary Virginia licence plate across his back window, not on the rear fender of his SUV. What followed briefly made the national news.

The lead cop, officer Joe Gutierrez, appeared to aggressively question Nazario. Gutierrez’ body camera recorded the incident, as Nazario displayed his hands but was reluctant to get out of the vehicle as ordered.

The result was a mess. Gutierrez seemed to get more agitated as he eventually forced Nazario out of the SUV, onto the pavement and into handcuffs. At one point, Nazario, who was relatively calm and even docile throughout the incident, was pepper-sprayed by the policeman. Ultimately, no charges were filed.

All this didn’t attract too much attention until Nazario filed suit against the town for police misconduct over three months later. Then the pressure ramped up considerably.

The town fired Gutierrez but not his young, also white partner.

As repeatedly replayed on regional television, the incident looks remarkably like it was staged for an episode of a police procedural drama on TV. The actions of both men involved, especially Gutierrez, seem almost unrealistically exaggerated for dramatic effect.

But it all actually happened. The governor, a US Senator, and the state’s Attorney General all soon piled on, demanding inquiries and remedies.

The outcomes of either the trial – if charges are not settled out of court – or the state investigation will probably not attract much attention when they are concluded.

But coming as it did right in the middle of the Derek Chauvin trial in Minnesota and a new outbreak of gun violence across the US, the Windsor incident added more fuel to a growing national conflagration of indignation.

A 19-year-old girl from the town told reporters, oddly echoing Biden: “Enough is enough. America has a racism problem that we can’t sit by and allow to happen anymore.”