We witnessed something good this week. To my mind it was a kind of triumph.
America had been through a horrible time: a gruesome murder on a Minneapolis street, seen on tape nationwide and showing an act that could hardly be mistaken for anything but what it was, the cruel extinguishing of a human life. It shook people. It was followed by civic convulsion—mass protests, riots with innocent people hurt and shop owners burned out. All during a pandemic, with the country in lockdown.
All this has been going on since Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd early in the evening of May 25, 2020, 11 months ago. It was a lot for a country, a people, to take in and process.
This week the verdict. Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.), who has talked in this space about driving while black and legislating while black, summed it up: “George Floyd died because Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck and stopped him from breathing for more than nine minutes. There is no question in my mind that the jury reached the right verdict.” This, he said, should give renewed confidence in the justice system, but bad cops cannot be allowed to define all officers, “the vast majority of whom put on the uniform each day with integrity and servant hearts.”
What did the verdict mean? It meant that black lives matter, George Floyd’s life mattered, the police aren’t above the law, the system worked. It meant a jury of your peers confirmed what your eyes saw. It meant the American nation, which spends so much time putting itself down, retains something that has long distinguished it: a conscience to which an appeal can be made. The entire nation saw that video and did not look away.
There were elements of inspiration. It was a unanimous verdict from a diligent jury that had spent the trial taking notes. Members were varied in every way—race, ethnicity, sex, profession, neighborhood. Relatives of cops, admirers of Black Lives Matter. Their ages spanned from the 20s to the 60s. They came to peaceful and emphatic agreement and spoke with one voice.
The three dozen witnesses were impressive in their earnestness, their seriousness of purpose. The EMT worker, the eyewitnesses, the cops who came forward—the chief of police who said no, Mr. Chauvin wasn’t going by the book, this didn’t have to happen. The girl, 18-year-old Darnella Frazier, who’d held her phone steady to tape what she was seeing, who’d been on her way to the store for a snack. “He was in pain. . . . It seemed he knew it was over for him,” she testified. “He was suffering.”
Excellent citizens who take who they are and what they do seriously. They were inspiring.
And now we’ve got to get the other hard part right. The story shifts to Washington. Congress and the White House are engaged in trying to put together a bill to overhaul and regularize police practices—banning some, limiting no-knock warrants, maybe imposing more liability risk on officers for misconduct. Mr. Scott is the Republican point man. He’s been working on legislation since Floyd’s death, has said he was thwarted by Democrats in the election year, but is trying to forge a bipartisan agreement.
It is important that this be done right. There is a crisis in policing and it’s healthy to acknowledge it.
But what happened the afternoon the Floyd verdict came in is instructive. In Columbus, Ohio, officers responded to a request for help in a family disturbance. A policeman shot a 16-year-old girl, Ma’Khia Bryant, to death. This was followed by uproar and accusation—another black youth killed by the police. But body-camera video showed a more complicated picture. Bryant had a knife in her hand and was attacking another girl. The officer made a split-second decision. It’s under investigation.
If you are a cop you know that in the current atmosphere you are going to be assumed by the press and others to be guilty whatever you do, because the police are the Official Foe now. Everyone talks about the blue wall of silence, but do police officers think anyone reliably has their back?
The most important words spoken in the Columbus altercation were in the 911 call from the house where the fighting began. The voice sounds like that of a young woman. There’s a scream in the background. The caller says someone is “trying to stab us” and “we need a police officer here now.”
People living stressed lives need the police most. It is the police they rely on when things turn bad.
We aren’t being sufficiently sensitive to the position of the police after decades of being accused of reflexive brutality and racism. We should be concerned about demoralization—about officers who will leave, about young people who could have become great cops never joining the force, about early retirements of good men and women. We should be concerned that more policemen will come to see their only priority as protecting the job, the benefits, the pensions for their family, so they’ll quietly slow down, do nothing when they should do something. That they’ll put on the uniform each day not only thinking “I protect the public” but also, “I must protect myself from the public.” Which means they won’t be good at their jobs anymore, and the stressed will suffer.
America swerves too much now, it gets its remedies wrong, it unthinkingly overcorrects. Years ago our great corporations swept internal allegations of abuse under the rug. Now, having been shamed in the press, they have human-resources departments immediately launch investigations on single-source accusations, or vague charges with murky motives, and put careers under clouds. We go from serious reflection on racism to accusing all whites of being privileged oppressors, and force schoolchildren to grapple with societal dilemmas they are incapable of understanding.
We get all tangled up in our desperate attempts to get it right. Washington should realize how demoralized the police are, and how much normal people depend on them.
If I ran the world, we wouldn’t be diverting funds from the police; we’d be spending more to expand and deepen their training—literally lengthen it by a year or two, deepen their patience, their sense of proportion, their knowledge. Because they are so important to us.
Some of our policing problem is connected to a problem that affects everything: They came from us. Our police come from modern America, that jittery, jacked-up, broken place. They don’t really come from health and stability but from families that are fractured and a culture that is crude and violent, from hypermedia and videogames, from a society that doesn’t cohere. They don’t come from something boring and solid like the cop on the beat 50 and 100 years ago did; they don’t come from a world that went out of its way to teach them manners, morals, faith. How to act.
All the cops, and the perps, they came from us.
They need more from us, not less. And good cops need more respect, and gratitude.