So, there was recently a guilty verdict on all counts of the police officer who murdered George Floyd. I consider that a good thing (though it still doesn’t bring him back, nor does it instantly solve the systematic problems). There have been a lot of high-profile killings by police officers which have been very controversial. Almost all of them have been completely acquitted or even not charged in the first place, which many find frustrating, but it is true that there are a lot of question marks in those cases.
But not this one. Not only is it landmark in that the police officer who killed an unarmed person was actually convicted of murder, but it’s also noteworthy in that it was extremely obvious. There is high-definition footage of him kneeling on the already-subdued (and therefore not a threat) victim’s neck, begging for air, for nine minutes until he asphyxiates and dies. There is no world in which this is proper police procedure, nor any world where doing so is necessary in order to protect the life of the police officer or anyone else. There’s grey area why a police officer might fatally shoot an unarmed suspect who might be running toward them. There is no grey area why a police officer needs to kill a suspect who is already prone and cuffed.
Which is probably why there was such an easy conviction. But what is awful is that this conviction is still regarded as controversial. This should be something everyone, on the Right, on the Left, and everywhere else, should agree on. And yet there is a significant, admittedly minority, movement in parts of the Right that wants to make a victim out of the murderer. You can find any kind of idiot you want on the internet, but this isn’t just 4chan or some darkened corner of Reddit. We have Tucker Carlson, a cable TV pundit who gets sky-high ratings, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a member of Congress, both using their very big, influential soapboxes to defend this convicted murderer.
Why this is particularly worrisome to me is that we’ve reached the point where “murdering people is okay” (or at least “murdering black people is okay” or “the police murdering people is okay”) is now a political opinion. A minority opinion, sure, but it has very “legitimate” representation now. The step between something crazies in the YouTube comments believe and something top Republican influencers and members of Congress believe is a huge one. What will happen if this form of conservatism becomes more popular? What if it becomes the default? I never would have expected Trumpism to become the default form of American conservatism just a few years ago, but here we are. I’m a little worried about what the next form will be.
I’m late to this convo, I know. But I saw it, read it, and had some thoughts.
The only question I had at first during the trial was whether the officer would convince the jury that the killing was unintentional. I don’t know how anyone could kneel on someone’s neck while they’re helpless and begging for air while a nearby EMT tells you he can’t breath and then claim their death was unintentional. But for argument sake, maybe he could have convinced enough people he wasn’t trying to kill George Floyd. Until very recently I thought that intention to kill was required to be convicted of any degree of murder, and that if it wasn’t intentional, the most you could get was manslaughter. But eventually I learned that wasn’t the case. In addition to second-degree manslaughter, he was convicted of second-degree murder and third-degree murder, neither of which requires the killer to have intentionally killed the victim. Second degree means to unintentionally kill someone while committing a felony, and third degree means to perpetrate a depraved and eminently dangerous act, and the grounds for all three were abundantly proven in court. So maybe, maybe some people think he shouldn’t have been found guilty of murder because they don’t understand the legal definition of murder. But for the people you mentioned, that would seem unlikely to be the case, or very irresponsible if it is the case.
The only other potential “doubt” I can think of, which the defense desperately clung to, was the presence of drugs in George Floyd’s system, which as I understand it they tried to say contributed to his death. But honestly, that didn’t hold any water for me. Even if he drank poison and was going to die from it anyway (and I’m not saying the level of drugs in his system comes even close to that), the officer would still be guilty of murder because he was the one who ended his life. And again, the evidence makes it abundantly clear that the officer’s actions were what caused his death.
I don’t know of course, but perhaps some on the far-right have conflated the conviction with a tacit approval of the rioting and unrest that followed George Floyd’s death. But we need to be able to separate the issues and take a nuanced approach. And I acknowledge that believing the officer really is guilty while also disapproving of rioting doesn’t seem to require that much “nuance.” But politics has become so monolithic in our discourse: it comes across as all-or-nothing. That needs to change, because neither side has a corner on truth and justice. How do we change it? We can start by acknowledging that murder is murder, regardless of how much the case might be associated with a given movement or party that one views as “political.”