What Will Justice Look Like?

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Now that former officer Chauvin has been convicted of murdering George Floyd, many have started to wonder what justice for our communities of color might look like. Surely it would be more than just accountability for such a brutal, prolonged murder, perpetrated in broad daylight on a public street, with police and citizen bystanders watching, filming or futilely objecting. If that kind of badge-wearing killer can’t be brought to justice, who can?

It struck me that Floyd was stopped initially for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill. Let’s unpack that a bit. Unless you are actually making the counterfeit bills, you can’t be punished for passing them—whether under federal or Minnesota law—unless you have “intent to defraud.” That means you have to know what you’re doing.

But the most likely reason for passing a single counterfeit bill is that you don’t know what you’re doing. You just didn’t notice the counterfeit when you got it or when you passed it on. George Floyd, nabbed for passing the bum bill, probably wasn’t aware he might have done anything wrong until after he was arrested. He may still have been confused when he died.

Now let’s switch gears, to another city, another time and another man. You may have read the recent obituary of Vartan Gregorian. He was a prominent white intellectual, of Armenian descent. When he died, he had been a president of universities, a member of New York City’s philanthropic glitterati, and the savior of the City’s famous public library.

But Gregorian wasn’t always prominent and privileged. When he first arrived in the US, he was a refugee, with a place reserved for him at Stanford University and a poor command of English. As he passed through New York City’s airport, he lost his ticket to California. He feared he might lose his place at Stanford if he didn’t arrive on time.

Gregorian explained his problem to a ticket agent. Claiming he had never done anything similar, the agent stamped the ticket envelope and instructed Gregorian to keep it closed and not to get off the plane at an intermediate stop. In short, the ticket clerk gave a break to this dejected refugee, a complete stranger. The result was a distinguished career that earned a full-page obituary in the New York Times.

Now suppose—just suppose—that Officer Chauvin had seen in Floyd a spark of the kind of man that his family saw. Suppose Chavin had wanted to give Floyd a break, just enough to try to determine whether Floyd was guilty of deliberately passing bum bills or only a hapless victim himself.

What would that hypothetical Officer Chauvin have done? Wouldn’t he have asked Floyd some questions about where he got the counterfeit $20 bill? Might he have allowed Floyd to make the complaining merchant whole by giving him a real twenty, and let him go? Might he have avoided an arrest and a murder, and made a friend in the community?

What would have been the harm in trying? Chavin could always arrest Floyd if he thought he was lying or his story didn’t jibe. And if our hypothetical Chauvin didn’t do this, he might be wasting his own time and the time of all the investigators and prosecutors who would have to interview Floyd and investigate him, perhaps only to find there was no case against him.

This, to me, is what “protect and serve” ought to look like. Sure, there are real bad actors in any community, let alone ones that require above-average policing. But doesn’t justice require discretionary judgment—human judgment of the human being accused—before a cop becomes, at least temporarily, the prosecutor, judge, jury and (as in this case) executioner?

Then take Adam Toledo, the thirteen-year old Mexican-American kid gunned down in Chicago, apparently after tossing a gun aside and raising his empty hands? Sure, the cop might have been in the process of drawing his weapon for fear of being shot first. But shouldn’t he, after having seen the kid’s youth (probably not a trained sharpshooter!) and the empty hands, have repressed the reflex to shoot? And isn’t a cop like that the kind that anyone would want protecting his community?

There is, of course, another model of policing. It treats every law as sacrosanct and every infraction as deserving of arrest and punishment. While mayor, Rudy Giuliani claimed to have lowered New York’s crime rate with his “broken windows” or “get tough” approach to law enforcement. But it also led to over-policing and racial profiling, not to mention greater percentage increases in arrests than reported reductions in crimes.

In the military, they have a name for leaders like that. They call them “martinets.” Captain Bligh—a real historical figure portrayed in the film Mutiny on the Bounty—was a good example.

Do we really want to run our cities as Captain Bligh ran his doomed ship? In America? Do we want our neighborhood police to act like an invading army putting down an insurrection? Isn’t that the duty of our National Guard?

When all is said and done, the thing that stands out from the many cases of Black and Brown people who died in police custody is the triviality of what they were arrested for. It’s not just George Floyd and his alleged $20 bum bill. It’s Eric Garner and allegedly selling cigarettes individually. It’s Freddie Gray and allegedly possessing an illegal switchblade—which turned out not to be illegal. It’s Sandra Bland, pulled over for failing to signal a lane change and apparently infuriating the officer by using her cell-phone to record the encounter. It’s Tamir Rice, shot down for carrying a toy gun, after a caller-informant warned that the person seen carrying a gun was “probably a juvenile” and the gun was “probably a fake.”

Couldn’t a simple exercise of good human judgment have avoided all these killings and perhaps most of the arrests? And shouldn’t officers be retained, evaluated and promoted based on the quality of their judgment, not the quickness of their draw?

There are many more cases like these. But of these four, only two—Gray’s and Rice’s—presented even a plausible danger to the public. Why couldn’t Floyd’s and Bland’s cases, and many others, be handled by looking over an ID and writing a ticket requiring a later court appearance or the payment of a fine? Should allegedly passing a single counterfeit bill be treated more seriously than a speeding violation that could endanger the driver and others?

So what will justice look like? As some have observed, it will involve a complete transformation of policing in American cities. First, officers will not physically arrest people for minor offenses. Instead, they will write them tickets, like those for speeding, which require them to appear voluntarily and defend the charges against them. (If they don’t appear, they can be arrested later.) Second, the martinet theory of policing will yield to a humane one. This is America: even if we could, we don’t want to lower the crime rate by resembling the old Soviet Union.

Third and most important, we will encourage cops to use their intelligence, human judgment and contact with people to weed out the truly bad actors, and to leave cases of harmless carelessness and mental illness to unarmed specialists, if need be with armed police standing by. We might even bring walking beat cops back, if only in high-crime areas.

The transformation will be substantial. There will be fewer arrests for trivia. There will be more experts in social work, psychology and mental illness. The will be more written tickets to appear and fewer physical arrests. There will be more discretion and judgment on the parts of individual officers and fewer quotas for arrests, fines and prosecutions.

Maybe officers will be judged by community satisfaction or reductions in the numbers of reported crimes on their beats, rather than the volume of arrests they make or tickets they write. That is, maybe they’ll be judged by outcomes, rather than facile but false measures of “productivity.”

Maybe officers will be encouraged to give the people they serve occasional breaks, and to exercise their human judgment in so doing, taking the risk that some pol with an agenda might later ding them for it. Maybe, if all these things happen, everyone and every community—not just communities of color—will heave a huge sigh of relief.

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