Last month, the entire country watched with bated breath to see whether the cop who murdered George Floyd on camera last May would be found guilty for murder. Derek Chauvin, the officer who murdered George Floyd last year, was found guilty on all counts: second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. While some are praising the verdict for delivering justice and thanking George Floyd for his “sacrifice,” I argue that this is not justice, and it’s barely scratching the surface of accountability.
This verdict provides a false sense of justice as a means of inhibiting abolition or any true, meaningful change to prevent future harm. Justice is not locking up the cop who killed George Floyd. Justice is law enforcement not killing anyone in the first place. Justice is abolishing the institutions that killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, and countless others. Justice is George Floyd being alive, and this verdict does not bring George Floyd back.
George Floyd was not a martyr for civil rights nor did he “sacrifice his life for justice.” He was murdered by the police, and countless Black Americans face the same institutionalized violence every day in this country. 274 people have been shot by the police this year alone. Last month, 20-year-old Daunte Wright was murdered by police during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, not far from Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed last year. Just minutes before the Chauvin verdict was announced in Minneapolis, police shot and killed Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old Black girl in Columbus, OH. These are just a few of the Black Americans killed by police recently. Their deaths are evidence that justice has not been served.
STOP
Demonstrators stage a sit-in at the Ohio State University student union in Columbus on Wednesday. (Maddie McGarvey for The Washington Post)
Black Americans still face violence at the hands of law enforcement every day. This verdict won’t change that and neither will locking up Derek Chauvin. What it will do, however, is subject him to overwhelming trauma and/or violence once incarcerated, which some believe is a well-deserved punishment for his actions. When we see something as egregious as an officer of the law kneeling on the neck of a civilian, we jump to the harshest possible punishment to provide some sense of relief, fairness, and justice- an eye for an eye and all that. Our carceral instincts, so deeply ingrained in us by the U.S. government’s reliance on violent, punitive solutions to crime, tell us that this is real justice. Yet still, harsh punishments and long prison sentences do absolutely nothing to solve the issue of police violence.
I argue that no one deserves to be in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, as Chauvin currently is and likely will be throughout his prison sentence for his own safety. This kind of extensive isolation “manufactures and aggravates mental illness. It has not solved any problems; at best it has maintained them,” says executive director Rick Raemisch of Colorado DOC,. Long-term solitary confinement may trigger new psychiatric symptoms or exacerbate existing ones, including panic attacks, hallucinations, and even self harm or suicide. A 2020 study of solitary confinement units in New York state correctional facilities found suicide rates were five times higher in solitary confinement than the general New York prison population, and self harm was seven times as common in solitary. That being said, the United Nations, New York State Bar Association, and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care consider long-term solitary confinement a “form of torture.”
We can hate what Chauvin did. I sure do. It was a brutal and racist act of state-sanctioned violence that took George Floyd’s life, doing irreparable harm to his family and Black Americans everywhere. But locking him up and subjecting him to the trauma of incarceration is not a solution; it is a bandaid on the literal and figurative bullet wounds created by our current institutions of carceral punishment and racist law enforcement. It reinforces the current pervasive cycle of institutional violence and does absolutely nothing to mend the harm done to George Floyd’s family and Black and Brown communities everywhere.
The Hennepin County District Judge ruled that Chauvin should qualify for a tougher sentence, and Chauvin and the three other officers were indicted by a federal grand jury just last week. The federal charges could elongate Chauvin’s state sentence, and some are praising the Justice Department for finally taking action to curb police violence.
That being said, a guilty verdict, federal charges, and a long sentence does little more than provide a false sense of justice. In the absence of full abolition of police and prisons, police violence will continue to go unchecked and Americans will continue to be subjected to violence once incarcerated. Real justice is the police never taking another Black life, taking another life, and abolition is the only possible avenue to achieve that.