Journalist Libor Jany was working a holiday shift when he received a cryptic text message from a police spokesperson about a press conference outside city hall.
“Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and realised that the suspect was suffering a medical distress,” John Elder of Minneapolis police told reporters. “Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin county medical center where he died a short time later.”
Jany, a reporter at the Star Tribune newspaper, raised unanswered questions about the incident on Twitter. One of his followers pointed him to a video that showed a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd.
Jany recalls in Police on Trial, a new Frontline documentary: “It took me a second to sort of process what I was watching. You realise that there’s far more to this case than they initially let on. It raised a lot of doubts or questions in a lot of people’s minds of how many other incidents in the past had been shaped or sanitised by the cops?”
The days when reporters took police at their word, treating their version of events as definitive, are over. Last week, after a teenager carrying a semi-automatic rifle killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, law enforcement officials gave a series of false, misleading and contradictory accounts before admitting they made “the wrong decision” by not breaching the classrooms sooner.
A day after the Uvalde massacre, America mourned the second anniversary of the death of Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man murdered by a white police officer who kneeled on his neck for nine minutes as Floyd said, “I can’t breathe,” more than 20 times.
The atrocity, captured on mobile phone video, touched off protests in America and worldwide against police brutality and racial injustice during a summer already convulsed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Mike Shum, director of Police on Trial, who was in Minneapolis at the time, recalls: “It was shocking because I remember feeling a degree of unity through the pandemic where everyone was saying, ‘We’re going to face this together,’ and yet, when this happened, people were saying that this was a big slap in the face, the racial inequities clearly coming out. It was a tipping point.”
Almost a year later, a jury found police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering Floyd after fellow officers and even a police chief took the stand to testify against him. Joe Biden observed last week: “I don’t know any good cop who likes a bad cop.” Chauvin was sentenced to 22-and-a-half years in prison.
Chauvin had been a “bad cop” for a long time. Star Tribune reporters found that there had been at least two dozen complaints against him over 18 years; all but two of them were dismissed without any disciplinary measures.
The reporters also teamed up with Frontline to interview people who never filed complaints and uncovered film footage of Chauvin’s aggressive use of force against them. In one clip, Chauvin pins a Black female suspect to the ground with his knee and she cries: “Can you get off my neck?”
The never-before-seen videos highlight how Minneapolis police failed to act on warning signs about Chauvin’s misconduct. Police on Trial also contains interviews with former senior police officers who say they faced repercussions for speaking out about problems within the department.
Speaking from his apartment in St Paul, Minnesota, Shum, 37, observes: “This type of behaviour that he had been exhibiting, his degree of use of force, had been going on for quite some time and was approved by his supervisors.
“If that wasn’t held to account, what were the issues of holding people accountable within the department? It was both shocking but also not surprising to the extent that there is a culture in place in this department that makes it hard to hold each other accountable.
“You had good cops trying to do good work. But one bad officer amidst a number of good officers? It’s not that clear and simple because you’d hope that the accountability allows for those good officers to say something. When they don’t it makes it worse and, when they do, it makes it hard for them too. So it’s a strange conundrum, at least in that department, to address those systemic issues.”
The Minnesota department of human rights has found that the city’s police engaged in a pattern of racial discrimination over the past decade. Police efforts to win back public trust suffered a fresh setback in February when an officer shot dead Amir Locke, 22, in an apartment during a “no-knock” raid and faced no criminal charges.
The film-makers gained rare access to ride along with rank-and-file officers such as William Gregory, who had recently been accused of punching a teenager in the face (the city eventually settled out of court). Gregory says, “to me it was just a job before George Floyd. You came in, you answered your call and then you went home. But now people treat us like we are truly the enemy.”
Shum adds: “To what extent reform is operating in a way that changes how the police department’s interacting with the community, I’m not entirely sure there’s been enough changes, or at least ones that make it feel meaningful. Since the death of Amir Locke, there is a sort of ripple effect of trauma that’s emanated from George Floyd’s killing.”
The same question nags nationally two years on: after all the hope and energy and sense of possibility, how much has truly changed? As the Black Lives Matter signs that dotted front gardens two summers ago begin to shrivel, and the national consciousness is constantly distracted by crises from Uvalde to Ukraine, was this yet another false dawn?
Police shot and killed at least 1,055 people last year – a record, according to a count by the Washington Post. Momentum stalled after Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. And there is a rightwing backlash against the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in schools.
Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer, tweeted on last week’s anniversary, “2 years later & Black people still can’t breathe. George Floyd’s brutal death sparked an unprecedented outpouring of outrage and pledges for change worldwide, & we CANNOT stop fighting now. We must continue to make our voices heard. Our lives depend on it. #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd.”
One of the most striking scenes in Police on Trial shows Jacob Frey, the young Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, confronted by protesters on 6 June 2020. A woman with a microphone asks him, “Yes or no, will you commit to defunding the Minneapolis police department?” She then tells the crowd: “He’s up for re-election next year and if he says no, guess what the fuck we’re gonna do next year!”
Frey, wearing face mask, T-shirt and jeans, replies, “I do not support the full abolition of the police.” The crowd erupts in fury. Someone shouts, “Get the fuck out of here!” A plastic bottle is thrown at Frey. There are boos and chants of “Go home, Jacob, go home!” and “Shame!” The mayor walks through the baying crowd in what one reporter likens to a scene from the TV drama Game of Thrones.
Shum recalls, “When I saw that material I thought, this is kind of an unbelievable sight: the mayor is getting booed off this street by protesters. I don’t know that this would be happening in other cities right now.
“The unimaginable aspect of it was very clear and moreover, the next day, when you have city council members vowing to end the police, I would say that is where the germination of the documentary was in play. It’s not just this one moment: we’re going to see something happen here in the city that I think a lot of other cities could learn from.”
But last November Frey was re-elected and more than 56% of Minneapolis residents rejected a ballot proposal that would have in effect replaced the police department with a public safety department that emphasised public health. Nationally, with crime on the rise, the phrase “defund the police” has come to be seen by centrist Democrats as counterproductive and a symbol of progressive overreach.
Shum comments: “As much as the measure failed, there was still 40% yes, which is a significant percentage of the population. That’s something that has been lost in some ways: there’s still a lot of people who are looking to dismantle the department.
“And yet I think what’s clear from the polls that we did with Star Tribune, as well as the election, is this is a complicated issue that’s tough for people to just have a clear sense of what should be done to ‘solve’ this issue of public safety.”
Shum sought to capture this complexity in his film. “I was intrigued by showing that struggle because it’s not a simple conversation to have and it’s important for every city to constantly keep figuring this out. If there’s any takeaway for audiences here in Minneapolis and St Paul, it’s that the struggle shouldn’t end. It’s an important thing to keep coming back to – a larger conversation around public safety.”
• Police on Trial airs on PBS on 31 May and will be available to stream on PBS.org/frontline, YouTube and in the PBS Video App
