On edge as we all are, it is increasingly disconcerting to watch the clips of the Derek Chauvin trial in Minnesota while even more police-involved deaths and assaults continue to play out across our nation – even one at a school on Monday in Knoxville.
No, the circumstances are not all the same – or even similar – yet they still give us cause for pause. They give us reason to question, again, the training and support that police do or don’t receive. And it is clear that if we don’t begin to focus more on this, we will be short-changing not only ourselves and other citizens, but also police officers.
* There was no excuse for Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to hold his knee on the handcuffed George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes last year – even as Floyd could be heard 27 times saying he couldn’t breathe.
Now Chauvin is on trial for murder. Since Floyd’s death, protests have erupted all over the nation. And with good cause: Those protests, too, demonstrate the clear need for police retraining and reform.
* There was no excuse for another Minnesota police veteran on Monday mistaking her service gun for a Taser and shooting an unarmed Black 20-year-old. For that matter, there was no excuse for pulling him over in a traffic stop for having air fresheners hanging from his rear-view mirror.