Minneapolis, Minnesota, America

It’s done. Former MPD Police Officer Derek Chauvin, guilty of all counts of causing George Floyd’s death by placing and pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes while ignoring the pleas of witnesses and Floyd’s cries and pleas of being unable to breathe.

Because of the way Chauvin stole Floyd’s final breaths by utilizing his knee like a dull guillotine and how the video filmed by a young woman bystander’s phone went viral, a jury determined that Chauvin could not escaped unscathed from the charges brought onto him unlike past acquittals of rogue cops abuse of authority and use of excessive force:

1. The nighttime lynching of Rodney King by four cops in Los Angeles
2. The mass shooting killing of Amadou Diallo in front of his apartment building by four cops who unleashed a fusillade of bullets as he pulled out his wallet to identify himself to them the Bronx
3. The strangulation death of Eric Garner in Staten Island by former NYPD cop Daniel Pantaleo, also pinned face down to the pavement and his pleas of being unable to breathe ignored.
4. .The shooting death of Ramarley Graham in the Bronx by a cop who chased him down into his home and shot him in the bathroom over a presumed weed possession.
5. The mass shooting of Breonna Taylor has she laid in bed in her apartment during a no knock warrant based from an informant’s false claim of drugs being stored there.
6. The death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was playing with an air gun in a park, gunned down by a cop who rolled up on him on the grass in a patrol car.
7. The killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by an overtly scared cop who relied on his gun to restrain him and shot him 12 times from his car and then gunned him down on the street.

Surely, the former and disgraced cop was cognizant of these incidents and thought he could get away with it with impunity. This time in Chauvin’s case, justice truly was served. But only because it was too obvious.  And although there are still signs of reform a year after George Floyd’s murder and the ultraviolence committed by police against the protests for him,  the cases against the blue walls of silence, violence and insouciance and the thin blue line still ingrained in police culture and plans for burgeoning police states still exist and persist and must be held to account and what actually should be abolished. But it’s not going to come any sooner with unrealistic demands and extrajudicial retaliatory violence from bad faith actors like protest saboteurs, special interest groups from the commercial and political sectors co-opting and monetizing the movement either.

It’s a new day. But only for the moment.