Week two of the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murder and manslaughter in causing the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, is underway in downtown Minneapolis. So far, it has been remarkable for the way the blue wall of silence appears to be crumbling before our eyes.
“If Chauvin would have tortured George Floyd with his knee to his neck and Floyd would have survived, not one of these police, chief included, would be testifying against Chauvin or even admonish him. He would still have his job as a Minneapolis police officer.”
This wall of silence is the much-discussed protective fortress said to keep police officers, who typically wear blue uniforms, from testifying against one another.
The bystander video of Chauvin kneeling cooly, perhaps even passively, on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd repeatedly says he cannot breathe sparked a revolution in Minneapolis and around the world.
The video was captured by Darnella Frazier, a teenager who happened to be present when Floyd was pinned, in a prone position, by Chauvin and two other officers. It has been shown repeatedly at Chauvin’s trial, along with footage taken from the officers’ body cameras and other sources.
Frazier testified during the first week of the trial, along with her young cousin, who was also at the scene. Like many other witnesses, they described the grief and trauma they experienced during and after the incident, in which Floyd gasped for his last breaths under Chauvin’s knee while they stood helplessly nearby.
The prosecution has now moved the trial into a more technical phase by calling several law enforcement officers to the witness stand, including, on Monday, Minneapolis Chief of Police Medaria Arradondo. These witnesses have clearly made a clean break from the blue wall; but that doesn’t mean they are leading the way to the sort of systemic change that the killing of Floyd and others shows is needed.
Arradondo is Minneapolis’s first Black police chief, born and raised in this city. Rather than embody the most toxic, self-preserving aspects of policing, Arradondo put his career at risk in 2007 by filing a lawsuit, along with several other Black officers, against the Minneapolis Police Department, alleging racial discrimination.
The city settled with the officers in that case, and Arrandondo went on to become chief in 2017.
In the tumultuous days and months after Floyd’s death, Arradondo acted decisively. He wasted no time in firing Chauvin and the three other officers who were at the scene, and he did not hesitate in referring to what happened as murder.
In this way, Arradondo is perhaps building a new blue wall—one that seeks to hold officers accountable for their own actions on the job.
If an officer gets out of line and uses excessive force, then, viewing Arradondo’s recent actions as a precedent, perhaps they will be cut off from direct, departmental support. (It must be noted, however, that Chauvin’s legal fees in this case are being paid for through a legal defense fund maintained by the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association.)
Or maybe the fact that Chauvin got caught on film made him a pariah that Arradondo and his fellow law enforcement officers and officials have decided to cut loose for the sake of the policing profession.
This is an analysis offered by D.A. Bullock, a Minneapolis activist and artist who has been closely tracking the Chauvin trial.
“Think about what you are applauding,” Bullock wrote on Facebook after Arradondo testified for the prosecution on April 5.
“If Chauvin would have tortured George Floyd with his knee to his neck (as he had done to another Black man three weeks before) and Floyd would have survived,” Bullock wrote, “not one of these police, chief included, would be testifying against Chauvin or even admonish him. He would still have his job as a Minneapolis police officer.”
Bullock also suggests that the collective condemnation of Chauvin is being driven by the presence of Frazier’s bystander video, rather than an actual line in the sand regarding Chauvin’s actions.
This is a painful perspective to grapple with, in light of all the turmoil and trauma visited on Minneapolis since Floyd died underneath Chauvin’s knee. We need hope. We need a reason to believe that this case, and Floyd’s brutal death, will mark a turning point.
Arradondo is not promising anything as simple as that, of course. He has spoken sharply about Chauvin, and immediately fired him from the police force. But the chief has also gotten on board with an effort, driven by Minneapolis’s civic and political elites, to apply a “bad apples” approach to police reform efforts.
Since Floyd’s death and the uprising it inspired, elected officials and residents in Minneapolis have been debating how to reform the city’s troubled police department.
While the majority of the nine-member Minneapolis City Council voted to entirely disband the city’s police department shortly after Floyd was killed, this action has been caught up in procedural red tape ever since.
Still, the very suggestion that the city would remake its community safety services into an entirely new entity appeared to have struck fear into the hearts of many, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who is Arradondo’s boss.
Frey and Arradondo have both aligned themselves with the Minneapolis Foundation, a wealthy, private philanthropic group led by former Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak. After Floyd’s death, Rybak, Frey, and Arradondo appeared to sidestep calls to abolish the city’s police force by promising to partner with Benchmark Analytics.
This private, Chicago-based firm sells software programs that promise to identify problematic police officers and weed them out, presumably. It is a selective approach, not a path toward deeper, more community-driven reform.
And so, the blue wall may be crumbling around Chauvin, but it remains possible that his peers have decided to sacrifice him in order to maintain control over the conversation around policing, in Minneapolis and elsewhere.