Sarah Lahm
A crowd gathers in downtown Minneapolis as the verdict in the Chauvin trial is announced.
Talk is cheap.
This blunt but useful phrase was Ruben Rosario’s response to the news that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has launched a federal investigation into the practices of the Minneapolis Police Department.
The fact that it took misconduct as shockingly callous and public as what happened to Floyd to end Chauvin's police career must remain in the forefront of our collective consciousness.
Rosario is a veteran journalist in the Twin Cities, having worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press for many years as a beat reporter and columnist before retiring in April 2020.
On the morning of April 21, in the intense and emotional aftermath of the guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, Rosario was a guest on a Minnesota Public Radio program hosted by MPR reporter Angela Davis.
Interwoven with the still-shocking news of Chauvin’s conviction were several new strands of relevant information, including Garland’s decision to launch a federal probe into alleged abuses and misconduct by the city’s police officers.
Rosario, however, was not easily swayed by this announcement. The Minneapolis Police Department, he noted on MPR, has faced this kind of scrutiny before.
As recently as 2015, the United States Department of Justice led a similar investigation into how the Minneapolis police operate, and the conclusions were damning.
The Justice Department’s report, along with insights gleaned from court cases, failed legislative attempts to induce police reform, and accountability experts, “all point to a clear pattern,” according to a write-up from The Marshall Project, a site devoted to reporting on criminal justice.
The Marshall Project story was published on May 28, 2020, just days after Floyd died under the weight of former officer Chauvin’s knee. It noted that Chauvin had faced numerous allegations of misconduct in his nineteen years on the Minneapolis police force, which fits with the pattern uncovered by the 2015 Justice Department investigation.
Floyd’s murder, in other words, was no anomaly.
Chauvin had been accused many times of using the same brutal policing tactics that led to Floyd’s death but was allowed to remain on the job. The fact that it took misconduct as shockingly callous and public as what happened to Floyd to end his police career must remain in the forefront of our collective consciousness.
After all, as many observers have pointed out, the Minneapolis Police Department moved quickly to cover up Floyd’s death and paint it as nothing more than accidental, due to a medical emergency suffered by Floyd while he resisted arrest. (The department backtracked on this only when Darnella Frazier’s bystander video came to light.)
This was the exact line of defense used by Chauvin’s lead attorney, Eric Nelson, who tried to convince jurors that Floyd had brought about his own death through drug use and pre-existing health conditions.
Will a new Justice Department investigation change any of this? I don’t know, but there is good reason to be skeptical.
Just as the historic Chauvin verdict was being announced in Minneapolis, reports were emerging that police in Columbus, Ohio, had shot and killed sixteen-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. Body camera footage from the officers involved in her death was released shortly after the incident took place.
This latest deadly encounter with the police reminded me of a recent column from Myron Medcalf, a writer for the Star Tribune and ESPN.
Medcalf appeared with Rosario on Angela Davis’s radio show, to share his own reaction to the verdict in the Chauvin trial. The column I am thinking of, however, was published on April 18, one week after twenty-year-old Daunte Wright was killed by former Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter.
Medcalf describes sitting in his car outside the Brooklyn Center police station, pondering where the line falls between covering incidents such as Wright’s killing and “feeding the world’s fascination with our pain.”
He is a Black journalist, caught between reporting on police killings of people of color and worrying that such coverage may be doing little more than filling, as he put it, a “bottomless cup for the white folks who seem to need a new video every six months to be reminded of racism’s presence and penalty.”
Medcalf frames his column around a conversation he had with Danielle Kilgo, a professor of journalism, diversity, and equality at the University of Minnesota.
Kilgo has studied media coverage of police killings, and she echoed Medcalf’s concerns, wondering just how bad things have to get before people simply break down and say “enough is enough.”
“Our pain is now the car accident on the side of a Minnesota road,” Medcalf wrote. “The mangled sedan is another Black body, another preventable catastrophe.”
The simultaneous killing of Bryant seems to reinforce this exact point. It feels as though we are racing from one traumatic event to another, craning our necks to see the latest deadly use of force or the most recent episode of police brutality.
I am wondering where this leaves us, as we move from relief over the Chauvin verdict to confronting further footage and fallout, such as Bryant’s killing, Daunte Wright’s upcoming funeral, or the police shooting of thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago.
For Medcalf, continuing to highlight the pain endured by people of color is a necessary but burdensome task. Despite the difficulty of doing this work, he writes, there exists a “desire to highlight the damage and fight for solutions and real progress.”
Let’s all remember to back up our capacity for outrage and intrigue with a demand for real progress.