On April 20, a verdict was rendered: Derek Chauvin, guilty on all three counts for the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May of last year.
Floyd’s family — and, by extension, Black America — saw the system hold a police officer accountable for killing a Black person. The verdict is a modicum of justice at best, and an anomaly at worst.
Sadly, the work of fighting police brutality is far from over.
While we continue to hope for justice concerning the murders of Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo, Anthony Thompson Jr. and Ma’Khia Bryant, we’ve yet to receive it. As an educator, I find that what makes these murders particularly tragic is the ages of the victims: 20, 13, 17 and 16, respectively.
What can we do to keep these police killings from happening? What can we do to ensure justice is delivered when it does?
In my senior thesis in college, I concluded that working from within institutions can yield incremental changes while working through a social movement can yield far-reaching and sometimes immediate changes.
These two approaches — within the existing systems vs. taking to the streets — are worth comparing as we ponder how to focus our efforts to protect Black lives.
An argument can be made for working within the system. Public policy measures can be put in place to address police brutality and misconduct. There is proposed legislation in Congress to curtail excessive force, curb racial bias, end qualified immunity, and implement national policing standards. States and individual cities have also established policies to reform policing.
But congressional legislation may continue to stall due to the lack of concern on the part of congressional Republicans, ensuring the inconsistency with which justice is dispensed to Black people by police and the courts.
It certainly helps to have Black people in positions of authority, but there is only so much they can do. Institutions like government, schools, police and the courts are what Drs. Glenn Bracey of Villanova University and Wendy Moore of Texas A&M call white institutional spaces. These are spaces whereby the racial worldview common to white people is at the foundation of how institutions are established, structured and maintained.
Even as our nation grows more diverse, the vast majority of people who pass laws and determine who goes to jail are white, a 2020 New York Times investigation found. Black government officials can’t change that overnight. Maybe a better route is a social movement led by the people.
Such movements present their own challenges. Black Lives Matter, for instance, has been infiltrated by law enforcement, government officials and white supremacists who incite violence and dissension to cast the protests in a negative light.
Nevertheless, the impact of movement activism is real ... and measurable.
A study tracked more than 1,600 Black Lives Matter protests across the nation with nearly 350,000 protesters, finding a 15% to 20% reduction in the use of lethal force by police officers in places where protests occurred. That’s roughly 300 fewer police homicides over a five-year period due to the adoption under pressure of such policies as body-worn cameras and community-policing initiatives.
I don’t believe disengaging from work within the government is wise. We must use all of the tools we have to achieve racial justice and end police brutality. Chauvin’s conviction occurred because he was clearly guilty, but also because of the social movement that George Floyd’s murder helped create.
As for those souls whose killers weren’t held accountable, maybe it’s because not enough people said their names loud enough for the world to not ignore them.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Rann Miller is director of Anti-Bias Initiatives and Education for a school district in Southern New Jersey. This column was produced for The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service.
