The Derek Chauvin Trial

@Mame,

Mame wrote:

Me, too (makes me want to cry). What I really wonder, though, is why they have to shoot to kill. Just shoot his leg or arm out - debilitate the person, but no one dies. It makes so much sense to just neutralize. But that's not happening. So then I wonder, what's REALLY going on? It's just sickening to see people, whomever they are, being killed for no reason. In the back, running away, lying on the ground... there is absolutely NO NEED for this level of violence. I wonder if Armageddon isn't far ahead. I'm so glad I'm the age I'm at and not, say, 10 or 20. And this is not just in the US; it's everywhere, so just know I'm not pointing fingers.

I think people no matter their situation - whether a police officer, driving in a car, have a customer service issue - whatever it is - need to take a chill pill. Think about it - someone makes a mistakes you get ticked off - you say something that person responds in anger (well they just made a mistake) things escalate, anger increases - and increases and one has a gun and then before you know you it - someone makes a grave mistake.

Take a step back when you get angry - take a breathe - think about it - maybe this person had a bad day -- just lost their job - maybe that is why they are reacting the way they are.

don't react in anger - take a breathe - remember this is another human - they are like you - full of imperfections but also of good things.

I remember a good friend and former teacher of my girls - I remember my daughter telling me of an experience she told the class about - she was in line at a store and this woman came in jumped in front of the line and was all rude toward the clerk and so forth - instead of being angry at her - she looked at her and said I am sorry - sorry you are having a bad day ( she said this sincerely) -- the woman turned to her and said you are right I was having a really bad day and she apologized realizing she was taking it out on others.

I think sometimes if you take this tactic and think this is probably a good person in a bad spot right now - have a little caring and sympathy can go a long way

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@Linkat,

Yes... I recently retired from a library which is on a train line. We got a lot of homeless, disturbed, drugged out., users, .. etc. people coming in... to use the bathroom to shoot up or have a nap in the corner. They might not interact with me, but they would with a computer-user or someone who had the newspaper they wanted to read. Or they'd just bump into someone and it would escalate. We are there to help and calm everyone down.

I really can't imagine a life where you'd never know if someone has a weapon (gun). Violence is not as common here. I'd be afraid to walk out the door if I thought I could be under attack at any given moment. For just being there. I don't know how you guys live with it, seriously.

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@Linkat,

Although I agree with you on principle - the inverse side is that it is difficult for people who work in services that face constant emotional abuse and vampirism to do such.

Social workers burn out the quickest of all from what I know, but if you think about it, police officers cop similar emotional trauma from the people they deal with. And no, they shouldn't just harden up - they are normal people, just like everyone else, and it is not normal to be constantly abused, lied to, looked down on, treated with suspicion, being the target of hostility etc etc on a daily basis. There are the people that treat police with courtesy and respect...but anyone who deals with abuse knows just how much abuse can affect any person...particularly if constant. I dare say there is a reason so many police come across as jaded.

Ie. each situation should always be treated on its own merits....even while an abused mind tends to view normal situations in skewed ways. Take a chill pill is good advice that is very difficult for many people (who suffer constant emotional drainage) to follow.

This is of course, a generalisation.

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@longjon,

longjon wrote:

TLDR

I'm not surprised:
- How dare anyone point out that you can't provide any reasoning, and give examples how you don't.
- How dare anyone ask you to provide reasoning.
...I'm not going to read that !!!
Rolling Eyes

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@Mame,

I highly recommend to you a recent movie (won awards at Sundance) called The Public starring Emilio Estevez. Not going to spoil it, but it’s involving a big city public library and homeless people.

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@snood,

Well now I have to see it. Definitely. Am going to google it now. Thanks, Snood.

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@snood,

snood wrote:

I highly recommend to you a recent movie (won awards at Sundance) called The Public starring Emilio Estevez. Not going to spoil it, but it’s involving a big city public library and homeless people.

OKAY, who exactly is the maladjusted a$$hole who thumbs down a movie recommendation? WTF is wrong with you. Congratulations, I noticed.....but the only thing that pops into my head is "Holy Crap, what was his childhood like?" Let me guess, you weren't the last kid picked for Dodge Ball......the last team just wouldn't pick another player.

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@glitterbag,

Same person has been doing it to multiple posts. It appears one person has created multiple accounts to thumb down posts he doesn't like. This is usually done by people who are obsessive in nature.

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@vikorr,

Quote:

I'm not surprised...

Neither am I. The miscreant regularly posts articles and links which actually undermine the point he's trying to make. He doesn't read well and he's not a deep thinker.

Quote:

This is usually done by people who are obsessive in nature.

And petty.

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@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

longjon wrote:
TLDR

I'm not surprised:

He has the same response to road signs.

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I believe that without the video, even with all the eye witnesses, Chauvin would have walked or more likely never been charged. It took the video to get the visceral reaction in the public that led to accountability. I was reading about MLK's "Children's Crusade" in Birmingham. King knew that the police would attack the children. Malcolm X criticized King saying “real men don’t put their children on the firing line” but King knew exactly what would happen and called it “one of the wisest moves we made.” All over the country, people saw the police committing violence against children and it had an impact where all the sit ins and boycotts were just seen as "promoting violence" by the establishment and ignored by the public. I think people have to see what is going on (and even then, there are people who watched the trial and still think Chauvin was guilty of nothing worse than manslaughter if that.)

1 Reply

@Mame,

Mame wrote:

Yes... I recently retired from a library which is on a train line. We got a lot of homeless, disturbed, drugged out., users, .. etc. people coming in... to use the bathroom to shoot up or have a nap in the corner. They might not interact with me, but they would with a computer-user or someone who had the newspaper they wanted to read. Or they'd just bump into someone and it would escalate. We are there to help and calm everyone down.

I really can't imagine a life where you'd never know if someone has a weapon (gun). Violence is not as common here. I'd be afraid to walk out the door if I thought I could be under attack at any given moment. For just being there. I don't know how you guys live with it, seriously.

Ha ha - your library sounds a little bit like where I used to live - the library was not far from a train station and even closer to a men's homeless shelter. It was a beautiful old library - the children's room was a new addition and separated from the rest so it was "safe" from anyone entering other than those with kids or by appearances a parent or teacher gathering stuff for their kids. The old part I loved and would wander through - I would say the homeless tended to stay away from others and not cause problems inside (outside was a bit different)

Anyone you speak of the violence here - I am guessing you mean the good old USA - well it is not all like that - I leave my doors unlocked during the day when I leave - I have never felt like at any given moment someone would pull out a gun and shoot. Although you hear about it a lot - it really is quite rare. Now yes there are some areas that are more dangerous and almost have that feel. But even traveling on public transportation I have not felt unsafe.

For the average American, it is not the "... thought I could be under attack at any given moment. " You are viewing news media which "glorify" these things.

I had a teacher once (while we were learning about news reporting) that pointed out what is in the news is the unusal....for example they do not report that 10 billion people commuted to work safely - they report that a person died in automobile accident - because the billion people getting to work daily is normal and not news reporting worthy.

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@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

Social workers burn out the quickest of all from what I know, but if you think about it, police officers cop similar emotional trauma from the people they deal with. And no, they shouldn't just harden up - they are normal people, just like everyone else, and it is not normal to be constantly abused, lied to, looked down on, treated with suspicion, being the target of hostility etc etc on a daily basis. There are the people that treat police with courtesy and respect...but anyone who deals with abuse knows just how much abuse can affect any person...particularly if constant. I dare say there is a reason so many police come across as jaded.

I do agree with this - I cannot imagine the emotional impact on someone in this field and also their family.

Not sure the way to handle this - but I know it is not allowing police officers to kill someone who is at the time - not a threat. I think if there is a way to change the mentality some how - maybe not to report someone in the traditional sense - but that it would be ok and they would feel safe for a fellow police officer to step in when something like this is going on and say Hey stop you are going too far,

Almost like someone that is over the top emotional instead of getting them in trouble - they get pulled off the street - do something in the office that is less emotionally taxing and help them deal with their emotional stress before sending them out again.

Just the current way is not working.

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@engineer,

MLK III was interviewed on the radio two days ago.

He said that most police are diligent professionals, that Chauvin is part of a tiny minority that tarnishes the whole force.

He also pointed out that this is just a problem that affects black suspects. There isn’t a problem with white suspects being shot for having an air freshener atthe wrong angle or anything like that. So it's not like the police don’t know how to treat the general public.

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Chauvin had been meting out his depraved ‘street justice’ for twenty years. George Floyd died, in part, because the police are not policing their own.

This is a fairly detailed account of the many instances of unnecessary force Chauvin was slapped on the wrist for. Over and over again. For twenty years.

Excerpts:

Quote:

At least twenty-two complaints of misconduct were filed against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin before he would go on to murder George Floyd in front of a Cup Foods store— and the whole world — last year.
...
One of the more vocal complaints came in June 2017 when Chauvin responded to a domestic dispute at the home of Zoya Code, a black woman. Like George Floyd, Ms. Code found herself handcuffed, facedown on the ground, with Chauvin’s knee pressing into her neck:
...
When she pulled away, [Chauvin] pulled her to the ground face first and knelt on her. The two officers then picked her up and carried her outside the house, facedown. There, prosecutors said, Mr. Chauvin knelt on the back of the handcuffed woman “even though she was offering no physical resistance at all”…

https://link.medium.com/OB9O151eFfb

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

He also pointed out that this is just a problem that affects black suspects. There isn’t a problem with white suspects being shot for having an air freshener atthe wrong angle or anything like that. So it's not like the police don’t know how to treat the general public.

This air fresher thing definitely irks me. The police should have more important things to do than pull someone over because of this.

My husband was just in an accident - some guy in a truck side swiped him as he was exiting the highway (freeway depending where you are from) any way it resulted in him going off the rode and thankfully just missing the trees, but totaling the car. Of course the idiot never stopped and where it happened so fast he had just a vague description - I said well they are not going to investigate further for just a car being totaled - if it resulted in serious injury or death then yeah they would - it is not worth their time as there are more important things to investigate.

You think an air fresher would warrant the same sort of attention (which is none).

Oh and when a state trooper showed up - someone called 9-11 - all he did was come over to my husband and ask if he was all right - never checked his license or questioned if he was drunk or anything - (he did of course run the plate and filled an accident report) - but no suspicion whatsoever.

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It still just seems to me that White people - even the well intentioned ones - have an extremely hard time believing that Black people are treated differently by law enforcement than they are. It’s like they see individual cases like (insert any one of dozens of brutalized blacks that made national news), but they somehow just
can’t fathom - can’t accept - that this is longstanding and systemic.

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@snood,

snood wrote:

It still just seems to me that White people - even the well intentioned ones - have an extremely hard time believing that Black people are treated differently by law enforcement than they are. It’s like they see individual cases like (insert any one of dozens of brutalized blacks that made national news), but they somehow just
can’t fathom - can’t accept - that this is longstanding and systemic.

They may have - but I think this case and the many others opens eyes.

Also - from my white perspective - I think some white people just cannot fathom that this is true. In others words it just seems so wrong to treat people differently due to skin color that it cannot be true.

But there are enough instances of this - that you have to see the realty of the situation.

This feeling of incredulous - I can explain with my own daughters. When they were very young - they used to go this library spoken about with Mame - and would rent videos. One of their favorites was The Color of Friendship - an old Disney movie based loosely on a girl that comes from South Africa on a student exchange program to stay with an American family. The kicker - it was during the height of apartheid. The American girl was the daughter of an African American congressman that was fighting apartheid. Whereas the South African girl was the daughter of one of police doing the opposite. The American girl thought she was having a black South African whereas the South African thought the opposite.

I had to explain to my daughters why this was a problem. Being very young and not subject yet to knowing racism. You had to see the shock on their faces. They could not understand or reason why someone would be treated differently never mind so horribly simple because they had different skin color.

Now obviously over simplifying the situation - I think for some white people that is the case - it is shocking to really see how horrible and wrongly someone can be treated because of this. It is wrong and they have not seen this before - naivee I like to think it is -

I can just speak for myself and I am very sorry that people are treated differently this way. It is wrong and acknowledge that this happens. I also am keeping myself in check to try to prevent any of this if I see it or even think it myself.

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Sentencing is set to happen in about two weeks.
The way I understand it, the judge has the authority to make the sentence anywhere from 10-40 years.
It depends on things like - whether he decides that there were aggravating factors, and how much weight to give to the fact that Chauvin has never been convicted before;
It’s just my opinion, but I don’t think this Judge - Peter Cahill - is going to give Chauvin anything but the minimum.

I feel this way because I thought he ruled in favor of defense objections and against prosecution objections pretty consistently.

I think he will give Chauvin the benefit of a doubt about whether or not he acted cruelly or in a depraved way. I think he sees this murder as just a temporary lack of judgement on the part of an otherwise exemplary policeman.

1 Reply

@snood,

I think we will see more than the minimum. Perhaps significantly more. Or, failing that, if it is the minimum for each offence, that the court will order each sentence be served consecutively, rather than congruently. It might be wishful thinking, and we'll know soon enough, but there are aggravating factors, and I think the prosecution quite rightly asked that they be reflected in the sentencing.

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The Derek Chauvin Trial

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