George Floyd verdict: At last a verdict to help repair race relations

Almost 30 years after Los Angeles erupted into five days of rioting upon the acquittal of four police officers for beating a black man, the US has a court verdict that can help to repair rather than exacerbate race relations and build confidence in the justice system.

The vicious attack on Rodney King became the first viral video of police violence before the advent of social media that spread cameraphone footage of George Floyd’s death and spurred street protests nationwide. In both cases there was a public expectation that the police responsible would be found guilty.

“We saw a verdict that told us we couldn’t trust our lying eyes,” said Jody David Armour, a criminal justice and law professor at the University of Southern California, of the King case. “That what we thought was open and shut was really ‘a reasonable expression of police control’ toward a black motorist.”

Derek Chauvin’s conviction suggests that the US criminal justice system has learnt some lessons since 1991. His trial was held before a diverse jury drawn from the area, rather than a predominantly white group from a distant county. The LA riots, in which 63 people died, caught authorities by surprise, as did the summer of violence that followed Floyd’s murder. As a result numerous American cities were prepared for trouble should Chauvin be cleared.

Some argue that the mayhem that can accompany Black Lives Matter protests has become cynical. Civil rights campaigners point to a litany of high-profile failures of justice that has left campaigners feeling powerless.

Anger at police violence towards black Americans was also stoked by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, when the officer faced no charges despite allegations by a friend of Brown that he had his hands up and shouted “don’t shoot”. A review of the case last year found no grounds for charges.

Floyd was not the first black man to die at the hands of police while pleading, “I can’t breathe”. This is what Eric Garner said before he died in a chokehold in 2014 in Staten Island, New York.

Chauvin’s conviction is unlikely to reduce suspicion and fear of the police among the black community. Their anxiety is backed up by statistics: black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police, according to a study at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health.

In 2019 police fatally shot 1004 people. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by officers last year, a ratio that has been stable since 2015. In 2018, the latest year for which such data is available, African-Americans made up 53 per cent of known homicide offenders in the US and committed about 60 per cent of robberies, though they are 13 per cent of the population.

The Times