Blackcap Blog

Published at 10:04 on 21 April 2021

Yesterday’s guilty verdicts were not a complete surprise to me, for two reasons:

1. Darnella Frazier’s decision to whip out her cell phone and film nearly ten minutes of George Floyd being strangled to death.
2. The collapse of the so-called Blue Wall. Even the chief of the Minneapolis police testified that what Chauvin did was not justified.

The two are related. Had it been a shorter video (or had there been no video at all), the cops would have been able to argue the standard bullshit of “that clip may look bad, but it takes things out of context and once you know the whole story it’s not really excessive, policing is hard for civilians to understand, blah blah blah.”

Now, while it’s good to see a killer cop finally be held accountable, it is important to understand that at this stage what we have is basically a “dog bites man” story, an exception that proves a general rule. Although I could perceive the above two signs, and the verdict was not a complete surprise, it would also have not been a surprise if the system had failed to hold Chauvin to account, given how poor its overall track record is in this regard.

The guilty verdicts were not a slam-dunk. It would have taken only one different juror, and there would have been an 11–1 hung jury. There is no shortage of right-wing boot-lickers out there bemoaning the verdict, so this is hardly a far-flung scenario.

Where we were was basically an opening, where for once accountability was possible, but it was not highly likely. Where we are is quite similar: this could conceivably form a turning point, but it could just as conceivably prove to be an anomalous blip in a continuing dismal trend.

Where it goes is largely up to us, and by “us” I mean the people in general and not the political class. The latter has always had the power to do something about police brutality, yet until very recently has almost never done much about it. The only reason this was different was that a random teenager, an individual in no particular office of authority, was in the right place at the right time, and made the right decision about filming something despite the personal risks she faced in doing so.

As always, in the words of Frederick Douglass, “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”