Accountability Versus Justice
By Stephanie Pierson
On April 20, 2021, after a three-week trial and 10 hours of deliberation, a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of three criminal charges relating to the murder of George Floyd. After a 10-minute video capturing George Floyd’s final moments surfaced online almost a year earlier in May 2020, protests ignited throughout the United States and the world and lasted for months. Although many people celebrated the verdict and pointed to it as an example of how our criminal justice system still works, Chauvin’s guilty verdict is an act of accountability and not of true justice. True justice requires measures that prevent these atrocities and murders of Black individuals from ever happening.
Since 2015, at least 5,000 people have been shot and killed by the police, and almost 1,000 people have been killed by the police in the past year. In the same weeks as the Chauvin trial, police officers killed many other unarmed individuals, including Daunte Wright and Andrew Brown, Jr.
These are not isolated incidents; instead, they are an indictment of our current policing system, a system that disproportionately targets Black people and other people of color. Chauvin’s conviction represents only one officer being held accountable despite numerous instances of police brutality over the past decade. We lack historical examples of police accountability because few police officers are even charged when they kill an individual due to doctrines like qualified immunity. We should not expect one guilty verdict to stop the cycle of police brutality, especially when the systems that enable and perpetuate police brutality are still in place.
Institutions that uphold white supremacy, like the United States’ current criminal justice and policing system, expect the Black community to be satisfied with the bare minimum and small victories while white supremacy simultaneously continues to choke the Black community and prevent individual and collective flourishing. In the rare instances when accountability is achieved through the criminal justice system, these verdicts often undermine broader efforts for criminal justice reform by reinforcing institutions that are in dire need of restructuring. Many people believe that police brutality can be solved by indicting and convicting “bad apples” instead of focusing on the root causes of police brutality that stem from systemic racism, inadequate training, and absurd power structures between the police and civilians.
Justice would be George Floyd still being alive today. Although we cannot bring him back, we can celebrate the victory of Chauvin’s verdict while also acknowledging that it is only the first step towards true justice.
