It Took 500 Years to Convict Derek Chauvin

Article

Apr 26

Derek Chauvin’s conviction is an ambivalent movement victory.

For some, it shows that the law will bring justice to Black people under only the most extreme circumstances – it’s a hard-won triumph that should have been a given. For prison abolitionists, another trial and another incarceration serve as a testament to how very thin and dysfunctional our notions of justice are.

However unsatisfying it may be, the verdict is a function of how the movement for Black lives has transformed politics and government. The law is not static, nor is it immune to politics. Prosecutors want to be reelected, judges want to be respected and juries are made up of citizens who often read the news. For a long time, “tough on crime” was the reigning principle of prosecutors; they were more worried about losing an election to someone who claimed they under-incarcerated than they were about warehousing millions of Americans. The reigning common sense in media has been that we should trust those people.

That the media now covers police killings with a modicum of decency is a testament to activists (although the battle is never over). In 2014, the year Darren Wilson walked out of a St. Louis grand jury trial without being indicted, about half of Americans regarded that year’s police killings in St. Louis and New York as isolated incidents, instead of expressions of a larger problem. Today, that number is down to 29%. Organizers have created new political weather. Chauvin’s trial is just one barometer.

To all those who said that riots were a threat to orderly justice, this trial tells a different story. The summer’s uprisings set new terms. The wanton murder of Black people must not be covered up by a complicit legal system anymore. There would be consequences.