Even after George Floyd appears to lose consciousness, Derek Chauvin keeps his knee on the 46-year-old’s neck. Chauvin, and at least three other Minneapolis police officers, ignore Floyd’s repeated pleas for help. “I can’t breathe,” Floyd tells the police; he calls for his mother; he agrees to get into the police car if the police will just get off him. After his limp body is loaded into an ambulance, paramedics report George Floyd’s heart isn’t beating. He is pronounced dead at the hospital.
Floyd’s final moments, captured by witnesses who begged Chauvin to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck, are horrifying.
His last moments are also tragically familiar.
We know — frequently only because of video evidence — that police in Colorado and across America can use excessive force with deadly results. We’ve seen police fire their weapons into the backs of fleeing suspects. We’ve seen law enforcement use Tasers and tear gas on restrained individuals. We’ve seen sheriff’s deputies and police officers kneel on prone suspects long after they’ve stopped resisting or passed out.
Just last month, shocking video was released showing the son of a former Georgia law enforcement officer shooting and killing Ahmaud Arbery, a young man out for a run in broad daylight.
The victims are disproportionally black and Hispanic men. And long before everyone carried a video camera in their pockets, the killers of these men often escaped justice.
Today, there is hope for justice. Chauvin has been arrested and charged with murder, and two men have been charged with murder in the death of Arbery. The outcomes of these cases will be critical. The blind eye the justice system has turned toward victims of police brutality in America has allowed a few police and vigilantes to act as jury, judge and executioner. If more of these uniformed killers were in jail for their actions, perhaps these rogue police officers wouldn’t feel empowered to kill again.
There is hope for change. Around the world, hundreds of thousands of people are peacefully protesting, calling for reforms that can prevent police brutality and vigilante justice.
But there is also cause for great despair.
Senseless deaths in Georgia and Minnesota have been met with senseless violence in cities across America. At night, Denver has turned into a place of danger and destruction. Buildings have been vandalized and police say they are being attacked by organized groups trying to provoke a reaction from officers.
This must stop. Yes, non-violent protest is tragically slow, but it is also righteous and sustainable. Harming innocent property owners, destroying public buildings and monuments, and endangering innocent lives are also acts of evil, regardless of how the crimes were provoked.
We won’t pretend to know who it is throwing rocks, wielding knives and detonating homemade explosives in downtown Denver. We’ve heard reports that they are leftist anarchist and anti-fascist groups. We’ve heard reports that they are right-wing, nut-jobs trying to incite a race war. We’ve heard reports that it’s some strange combination of the two.
But even if the bricks were being lobbed by the mothers of black men, brokenhearted and desperate to make the world a safer place for their children, the violence would be a mistake.
For all of her problems, for all of her flaws, America is trudging toward good. We believe, and we think most Americans believe, that we are a long way from the justifiable use of force against America’s government. We are a long way from calling for the violent overthrow of our establishments. We are a long way from anarchy.
Most police officers are hard-working and honest. Most care deeply about the communities they work in and most use force judiciously. Many desperately want criminal justice reform and better use-of-force policies in their departments.
These men and women deserve to go home at night to their families just as George Floyd deserved to go home to his family.
“What hurts the most is that people don’t think we are angry too,” Murphy Robinson, Denver’s executive director of the Department of Public Safety, told us on Monday. “Cops are angry about this. They know and they feel as though this should have never happened.”
Robinson, who is a former police officer, has been on the front lines of the protests downtown when they have become violent and he is urging Coloradans to stay home.
Given reports from Robinson and others that protests during the day have been peaceful, we hope at the very least that Coloradans will respect Denver’s 9 p.m. curfew and go home after a day of exercising their constitutional right to protest.
But we also recognize that we are still in the middle of an unprecedented public health crisis — one that has already disproportionately impacted minority communities in Colorado and globally. In the light of the potential for harming themselves and our health care workers, we urge protesters to join us in finding alternative outlets for our anger and frustration.
Colorado lawmakers should — this month — address the many shortcomings in Colorado law dealing with the use of deadly force by law enforcement officers. For example, in August police shot De’Von Bailey, a 19-year-old from Colorado Springs, in the back as he ran from the police.
According to Colorado law, an officer is justified in using deadly physical force in several circumstances, including “to effect an arrest, or to prevent the escape from custody, of a person whom he reasonably believes: Has committed or attempted to commit a felony involving the use or threatened use of a deadly weapon.” Bailey had a gun in his shorts that he had been accused of using in a mugging. But police discovered the gun only after Bailey had been shot several times in the back. We think Colorado officers should exercise a higher standard than “reasonably believes” for using deadly force. No one was charged with a crime in regard to Bailey’s death.
The entire statute needs to be revisited and improved.
Again, we call for police departments across the state to emulate Denver’s model of external oversight. We urge the state to look at creating a standard procedure that sends all criminal proceedings against police to a grand jury run by a district attorney outside of the county where the event occurred.
And across America, political leaders need to find a way to break the protections put in place by police unions that are keeping bad officers and deputies on the force despite repeated warning signs. In March, the Colorado Supreme Court refused to review a lower-court ruling that effectively reinstated two police officers who were fired years ago for lying about their use of force during an incident that was caught on tape. The officers received 11 years worth of back pay. It made a mockery of honest law enforcement officers across this state and Denver’s police union must work to ensure it never happens again.
These changes will not come without continued, sustained pressure on elected and appointed officials. The time for change was decades ago, but America and Colorado can take steps today that will perhaps someday save a life.
George Floyd’s final moments were captured by onlookers who refused to simply walk away from the horror unfolding before them. None of us should be able to walk away from those videos unchanged. All of us should be calling for a better world.
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