U.S. Supreme Court:  No Systemic Racism

A man is dead.  And when it suits our political purposes we mourn.  Thousands of other men, women, and children die unknown, neglected and forgotten each month.  But today a man is dead.  And the death of George Floyd is convenient for exploitation and partisan games. So does it matter that George Floyd was Black?  The city involved, Minneapolis, is one of the most Left-wing cities in the United States.  The Chief of Police is Black.  The Attorney General is not only Black but was elected over significant controversy.  Yet Minnesota's voters did not hesitate to support a Black man for their Attorney General.  They did not use allegations of sexual abuse as an excuse to vote against a minority.  

The U.S. Supreme Court has actually rejected the idea of "systemic racism"

Does a Black Chief of Police exclude the possibility of racist cops?  Well, when Minneapolis has not elected a Republican Mayor since 1957, the surrounding society from which police officers are drawn will eventually reflect the Left-wing values of the city.  Simply put, during Derek Chauvin's entire lifetime Minneapolis has been run by Democrats, and Leftists at that.  Any racist cop should have been weeded out long ago. A Chief of Police who did not purge his ranks failed.  (Unless social justice warriors are claiming that Democrats are – today – racist?) Those who can bear to watch the video of police officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd's neck for almost 9 minutes and the surrounding news coverage will be horrified.  But they cannot find anything remotely racial or race-related in those deplorable events.  But, those things don't happen to White people, we are told.  Yes, yes, they do.  A White man in Dallas was killed in exactly the same way.  It should never happen.  But it adds insult to injury to pretend such events have any racial component. The U.S. Supreme Court has actually rejected the idea of "systemic racism" in the case of McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279, 107 S. Ct. 1756, 95 L. Ed. 2d 262 (1987).  Attorneys for a convicted robber who was Black and who killed a White police officer during the robbery sought habeas corpus relief from his sentence of the death penalty in Georgia.  His attorneys argued that McCleskey was the victim of (in today's terms) systemic racism under "the Baldus study." Justice Powell wrote:  "This case presents the question whether a complex statistical study that indicates a risk that racial considerations enter into capital sentencing determinations proves that petitioner McCleskey's capital sentence is unconstitutional under the Eighth or Fourteenth Amendment."

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With rare exceptions, social justice warriors have no facts of any actual, widespread racism

The Supreme Court rejected the idea that there is any system because each jury is a separate group of people who serve together only one time and have no coordination among them.  Similarly, prosecutors are not part of a system because they are elected independently and do not coordinate:  "It is also questionable whether any consistent policy can be derived by studying the decisions of prosecutors. The District Attorney is elected by the voters in a particular county. See Ga.Const., Art. 6, § 8, 111. Since decisions whether to prosecute and what to charge necessarily are individualized, and involve infinite factual variations, coordination among district attorney offices across a State would be relatively meaningless. Thus, any inference from statewide statistics to a prosecutorial ‘policy' is of doubtful relevance." By no means should we tolerate actual corruption of law enforcement, prosecutors, or the conduct of trials.  The problem is no evidence of those, yet  social justice warriors want to offer inferences instead.  The Supreme Court said:  "Requiring a prosecutor to rebut a study that analyzes the past conduct of scores of prosecutors is quite different from requiring a prosecutor to rebut a contemporaneous challenge to his own acts. See Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U. S. 79 (1986)." With rare exceptions, social justice warriors have no facts of any actual, widespread racism.  So they want to argue "systemic racism" based on statistics.  We should remember the warnings of Mark Twain "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Police officer Derek Chauvin, flanked by three other officers who prevented intervention by the surrounding crowd, used a technique that is not intended to cause death or permanent injury.  Yet George Floyd cried 16 times that he could not breathe.  One can use that knee technique having no intent to hurt an apprehended suspect.  But the risk of harm is sky high.  So inherently dangerous is the technique that I would as a lawyer (though not a doctor) call it depraved indifference to human life.  Its proper use, at best, would require an advanced understanding of anatomy and medical science and observation of danger signs.  No police officer could have adequate training to use that technique safely ever.

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Chauvin worked as a bouncer at a club where the victim Floyd also worked as a bouncer

Chauvin worked as a bouncer at a club where the victim Floyd also worked as a bouncer.  See, Matt Furber, Audra D.S. Burch and Frances Robles, "George Floyd Worked With Officer Charged in His Death," New York Times, May 30, 2020.   We have heard waffling from the boss, but they worked on the same team doing the same job at the one and only location of the club.  One cannot be a bouncer without talking to other bouncers saying "I threw that guy out don't let him back in" or "Watch out for that guy who is high."  They could not do their job without sharing information with the other bouncers. Chauvin's brazen behavior as the crowd urged him to stop, knowing he was being videotaped quite obviously, ignoring Floyd's chilling cries for help, certainly looks like Chauvin intended to murder Floyd.  In my imagination, it was almost as if Chauvin wanted to silence Floyd because Floyd could testify to something even worse than the videotape of the violent act.  To me it looked like an execution.  Brazenly intentional.  Maybe Chauvin was silencing a witness to some organized crime. But where is the racism?  There isn't any.  There may be premeditated first-degree murder from a grudge among co-workers.  But those who so cravenly exploit this single death to foment a revolution have no facts to go on.  There is no hint of race here.

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800,000 law enforcement officers in the United States

There were over 800,000 law enforcement officers in the United States in 2018 of whom 686,665 are standard police.  In 2019, 1004 people were shot and killed by police making arrests.  That means that approximately 790,000 or 98.75% did not shoot anyone in 2019.  So we are talking about only 1004 deaths of which 235 were identified as Black. A man is dead.  But like a Greek tragedy or Shakesperian play that is only the butterfly wings that in the fanciful fable spark a typhoon thousands of miles away.  We soon understand that the man who died matters not at all to those who would "wave the blood shirt."   In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were shot to death by an 18-year-old student named Gavrilo Princip on the streets of Sarajevo.  But the nations of Europe were already on the brink of war, filled with arrogance and short-sighted historical blindness.   Each nation was over-confident in their new military weapons and ignorant of how the other nation's new military weapons rendered their own military vulnerable.  From the outbreak of World War I, an estimated 20 million died and 21 million were wounded.  Soon, who remembered or cared about Franz? The truth is that life can be hard.  Anyone who believes that other people are doing great is believing a lie.  And the wicked people who stoke that lie have blood on their hands.  Bad experiences for Blacks demand solutions.  But when race-baiters spend over 70 years fanning the flames and telling Blacks they are under attack, with a false message that Whites have it easy, there will be an explosion.