Today will be recorded in history as a great day for Black Live Matter and American jurisprudence: former police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all three counts. Chauvin is now a justly convicted murderer.
This is the beginning of a profound correction in the American judicial system, which for decades and centuries has exonerated police who took the lives of innocent black men with impunity. What was different in this case?
It's because the killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin was not only captured on video -- that has happened many times before, with police acquitted, as happened with Rodney King in the 1990s -- but because the murder of George Floyd was conducted in slow, agonizing motion. Sometimes a killing by an officer with a gun happens so quickly that it's difficult to see on a shaky video. Not so so the video recorded by the 17-year-old Darnella Frazier that all of us, including the jury, have seen of Chauvin taking the life out of Floyd with his knee on Floyd's neck. They and we saw the horror of murder in slow motion.
This verdict is the end of this trial, but not the end of the process of holding murderous cops to account, and, even more important, getting them not to kill innocent human beings in the first place. This will require much better hiring and much better training of those who want to wear the badge.
It's good that we now have a President in office who wholeheartedly supports this verdict. I have confidence that Biden and the Democrats in both Houses of Congress will keep applying maximum pressure to move this profound remaking of the police forward in this country.
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