Police Chief Says Derek Chauvin 'Should Have Stopped' Pinning George Floyd - The New Yo... - 0 views
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The prospect that a police chief would take the witness stand against a fellow officer is exceedingly rare. But there was the chief of the Minneapolis Police Department on Monday, condemning the actions of Derek Chauvin, the officer charged with murdering George Floyd, as wrong by every imaginable measure.
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“To continue to apply that level of force to a person proned out, handcuffed behind their back — that in no way, shape or form is anything that is by policy,” said the chief, Medaria Arradondo. “It is not part of our training. And it is certainly not part of our ethics or our values.”
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Chief Arradondo said Mr. Chauvin’s actions might have been reasonable in the “first few seconds” to get Mr. Floyd “under control.” But, he said, “Once Mr. Floyd had stopped resisting, and certainly once he was in distress and trying to verbalize that, that should have stopped.”
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Chief Arradondo is the highest-ranking public safety employee to testify against Mr. Chauvin, with prosecutors also turning to Genevieve Hansen, an off-duty firefighter who tried to provide medical attention at the scene
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Criminal justice experts said the police chief’s testimony might upend a tendency on the part of juries to give police officers the benefit of the doubt when they make decisions on the job.
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“Generally, you’re thinking that police departments are going to defend their police officers,” said David Schultz, a visiting professor of law at the University of Minnesota. “Getting the police chief to come in and say, ‘This is not what our practices were, these are not our protocols, these are not our standards’ — I have to think that’s got to weigh very heavily on a jury
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Asked to recall his own involvement in the case, Chief Arradondo said he was at home on May 25 when he was informed that a man had been arrested who was not expected to survive. The chief notified the state agency that investigates police use of force, called the mayor and went to his office, where he watched footage of the arrest from a city-owned surveillance camera, which had no sound, was taken from a distance and showed the officers from the back.
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After watching Chief Arradondo’s testimony on Monday, Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer, said she had been the resident who had originally alerted the chief to the video on the night Mr. Floyd died.
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Chief Arradondo joined the Police Department in 1989, an era when, he said on Monday, de-escalation “wasn’t mentioned.” As a lieutenant, he sued his own department for racial discrimination.
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On Monday, the lawyer for Mr. Chauvin argued that force is an unpleasant but necessary part of the job.The lawyer, Eric J. Nelson, began his cross-examination of the chief by asking, “When’s the last time that you’ve actually — I don’t mean to be dismissive, but actually arrested a suspect?”
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Throughout his questioning, Mr. Nelson focused on the proposition that the department’s policies gave officers leeway to decide what was best in the moment: “Ultimately, it’s not an all-inclusive list of considerations for the reasonableness of the use of force, agreed?”Chief Arradondo agreed.
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Mr. Chauvin’s defense is paid for by the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, an organization of unions that has agreed to maintain a legal defense fund to cover all union members who become targets of criminal investigations.
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It was video taken by a bystander, close up, painfully graphic and showing the nine and a half minutes that Mr. Chauvin had his knee on Mr. Floyd. It spread across the internet, setting off protests over racism and police abuse across Minneapolis and in cities across the country.
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“He set a powerful example that police chiefs across the nation should follow when they know that their officers have violated people’s human rights and constitutional rights,” Ms. Armstrong said.