About the George Floyd murder trial

The only person who can tell you why Chauvin refused to give evidence is Chauvin himself.

I can only imagine he did not want to be cross examined by the prosecution.

Chauvin was found guilty, and there will always be people who disagree with that, again you’ll have to ask them.

Your comment about more white people than black people being killed by the police is meaningless, it needs more context.

White people make up a greater percentage of the population than black people so they should score higher in all manner of studies because there are more of them.

What you need to look at is the amount of black people who are victims of police brutality as a proportion of the population.

If white people make up 70% of the population, black people 20% and other groups 10% one would expect, all things being equal, that they would account for 20% of the victims, they don’t.

I found this table that shows how many people (including unarmed people) were shot & killed by police, broken down by year.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585140/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-weapon-carried-2016/

Unarmed, 2017-2021, the figures are: 68, 41, 41, 55, 11

I'm presuming many of those were white people.

I looked up Australian statistics, and came up with this graph



That was over three years, while single year figures in the US are around the 900 mark (see my previous post for link).

When read in conjunction with the Wikipedia stats on officers killed in the line of duty, we see that the situation in the US is much, much more dangerous for US police than Australian Police.

When any group is faced with increased danger (from other people), it is usually more aggressive. The greater the increase in danger faced, the more aggerssion that is shown. This isn't justification - this is an observation of human behaviour across all sectors of humanity (going way beyond just police, to encompass most groupings in humanity). There is no point saying that police (or any group) shouldn't be human - everyone is human, and every group has the same human failings. Just saying to a group (any group) 'it isn't acceptable' never stopped human failings from existing, anywhere. Just education (without addressing the contributing circumstances) only reduces the instances, without stopping them. My point being that to properly address the matter, there needs to be a wholistic response to the issues that cause the increased aggression - as well as better oversight.

Chauvin should have been found guilty. He may also be a product of his environment (which again, is not justification, but recognition that the environment may shape people). Failing to recognise or acknowledge contributing circumstances, and addressing those, is perhaps the main reason many issues keep repeating themselves.