For many supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, the June 25 sentencing of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to 22.5 years in prison felt like the culmination of a hard struggle. His gruesome, caught-on-video murder of George Floyd sparked millions of people nationally and internationally to speak out on the issue of police violence and accountability.
But it was only one small landmark in a field of raging injustice.
In 2014, following the killing of Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that city became the epicenter for daily protests and dissent. The Black Lives Matter movement, born the year before, came into international focus. The officer who shot and killed Brown was not charged but left the Ferguson police force.
In April 2021, while Chauvin was on trial a few miles away, police pulled over a twenty-year-old Black man named Daunte Wright, purportedly for having air fresheners dangling from his rear-view mirror, which the law deems improper. It was a petty, useless police stop and it predictably spiraled out of control.
The cops discovered an outstanding warrant and removed Wright from the vehicle. At some point, he jumped back into the car and tried pulling away. A police officer can be heard yelling “I’ll tase you!” and “Taser!” before fatally shooting Wright with her handgun. He was unarmed and not posing a threat to anyone. The officer resigned and was charged with second-degree manslaughter; the case is pending.
Or consider the killing of Chinedu Okobi, thirty-six, in San Mateo County, California, in October 2018. Okobi was having a mental health episode in public. He was not armed or harming anyone, but he became apprehensive when swarmed by police officers on the sidewalk. Several police officers surrounded him and used their tasers; Okobi went into cardiac arrest and died. The officers were never charged.
Okobi’s sister, Ebele Okobi, an attorney with Facebook, said her brother was “tortured to death, with absolute impunity.”
Bowling Green State University professor Phil Stinson, in his 2020 book Criminology Explains Police Violence, tabulated that there are between 900 and 1,000 on-duty police killings each year. Of that number, approximately seven officers have been convicted of murder in the United States since 2005. Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites.
These metrics of police shootings are drenched in the toxicity of U.S. racism, which also drives the resistance to change. Victims of police violence are routinely subject to having their character attacked.
George Floyd, for example, was characterized as an opioid addict allegedly passing fake money. Daunte Wright was allegedly involved in a shooting incident long before his murder. Eric Garner was selling stolen cigarettes. In each case, there is always some “no angel” excuse that the right comes up with to supposedly justify a police killing.
Somehow, there has to be another way to ensure public safety.
Right after the guilty verdict in Chauvin’s murder trial, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison kept the focus on accountability, saying, “The work of our generation is to put unaccountable law enforcement behind us.” It is, as goals go, both modest and reasonable.
Professor Farhang Heydari, executive director of the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law, has been pushing a different approach. Heydari’s project is focused on front-end accountability. This is accountability, he tells The Progressive, where “the public has a voice in setting transparent, ethical, and effective policing policies and practices before the police or government act.”
He explains: “The real problem around policing is the rules give officers way too much discretion. It is hard to hold them accountable. Set rules on the front end and make the rules clear.”
For instance, Heydari contends that chokeholds should never be used and all police departments should make this a rule of conduct by their officers. He also believes that “fewer enforcement-related actions by police” is a key part of the solution. There is little evidence that increasing “stops” or “stop and frisks” will lead to a decline in crime, Heydari notes. In fact, more stops might actually increase the likelihood of bad consequences.
In New York City, where Heydari works, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy did not reduce crime. In fact, murders increased in New York City just as the program increased its stops. And after stop and frisk ended, the crime rate dropped.
Camden, New Jersey, one of the cities Heydari has studied, flipped the script on aggressive policing. Even before it began working with the Policing Project, Camden was engaged in front-end accountability through de-escalation work and training. The city has been highly successful in shifting to less confrontation with the public.
“There is no excuse for any police department not to have de-escalation training,” Heydari says.
But Heydari acknowledges that this approach faces major challenges, including that it cannot erase racist beliefs and it doesn’t address the presence of white supremacists within police departments.
My good friend Jelani Cobb, professor of journalism at the Columbia University School of Journalism, thinks front-end accountability is good, but that it also isn’t enough to fix the problem by itself.
“As long as you have a population that is reluctant to convict police officers,” he says, “changes will still be moot.”
Cobb, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has produced two PBS documentaries on policing in Newark, New Jersey, says true accountability will not come unless the federal government, pushed by the public, enforces it. But that is not happening.
According to a Pew Research Center survey last year, the public is not in favor of reduced police funding. In fact, a strong majority of the public believes police officers do “an excellent or good job” protecting the public. As one might expect, Black people are much more likely to be in favor of reform than whites.
Cobb also cites the power of police unions as another impediment to accountability. He notes that, even after the video of Floyd’s murder came to light, Minneapolis police union president Bob Kroll supported Chauvin and the other three officers implicated in Floyd’s death. In a letter, Kroll also referred to the people protesting the killing of Floyd as terrorists and dismissed Floyd as a man with a violent criminal history.
Cobb does see a chance for reform in stronger certification and licensing rules for police officers. As it is now, the standards differ widely from state to state, and there are no uniform rules for when officers are decertified or lose their licenses, and it is often hard to learn whether a given officer’s license or certification has been revoked in another state.
After Chauvin’s conviction, the Policing Project declared on its website, “The problems we face are systemic and structural in nature, ranging from jurisdictions making police the primary responders for many of the nation’s social problems, to the cavalier ways force is used and who is subject to it. Back-end accountability, like criminal prosecutions, is extremely important in bad apple cases, but our problems are systemic, structural, and deep.”
As some of us liked to shout in the 1980s during the student movement against apartheid in South Africa—“A luta continua,” the struggle continues.