A Turning Point
THE COMING ERA OF POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY
by Marcus Johnson
DEREK CHAUVIN KNELT ON GEORGE FLOYD’S neck for nine minutes. It took a Minnesota jury just 11 hours to reach a verdict. When Chauvin was found guilty on all three counts, of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, it was a watershed moment for the police accountability movement—one that represents the dawn of a new era in American policing.
The Chauvin murder trial was perhaps the highest-profile criminal case against a police officer accused of killing an unarmed Black man. The trial began after a summer of some of the largest protests against police brutality in American history. And the case was not isolated; Floyd’s death was one of a string of highly publicized incidents in which white police officers shot unarmed Black men.
Nor was the Chauvin guilty verdict a forgone conclusion. There was considerable angst in our community that Chauvin would be found innocent; historically, police in the United States have rarely been convicted of manslaughter or murder, thanks to systemic bias that favors police accounts of events, close relationships between local prosecutors and police departments and the more general difficulty
