Floyd verdict won't remove blocks to police accountability

The guilty verdicts in the George Floyd murder case felt like a watershed moment to many Americans. President Biden called the verdicts a “giant step toward justice.” But pervasive legal roadblocks to police accountability remain firmly in place.

Most police officers who violate citizens’ rights get away with it because the law is heavily stacked in their favor, legal experts say. None of those legal roadblocks was removed by the guilty verdicts against Derek Chauvin.

Qualified immunity. Willful intent. Objective reasonableness. The Law Enforcement Bill of Rights. Union arbitration. Closed misconduct records. An ineffective and closed national database of police misconduct. “Wandering cops” who misbehave and move to a new department where they offend again.

All are escape hatches that allow abusive officers to keep their badges despite sexual assaults, excessive force, false reports, cover-ups and perjury.

In the Chauvin trial, Minnesota required the jury to apply the tough “objective reasonableness” standard that makes it hard to convict officers. That standard requires a judge or jury to see the police action “from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene.” They can’t second-guess a decision made in the heat of the moment.

That objective reasonableness standard comes from the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision Graham v. Connor. What many people don’t realize is that states and municipalities can adopt new use of force standards that hold police to a higher standard of conduct. A few jurisdictions have done that in the past year but not many.

“There has been change since Ferguson but some of the fundamentals remain stuck,” says David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and expert on police.

One thing states and cities can do is “raise the bar for the use of force,” he said in an interview. “What people forget is that the Supreme Court set a minimum standard for the protection of citizens from state action by police. While states can’t give citizens less protection, they can create more. In the last year we’ve seen some movement in that direction.”

As long as the objective reasonableness standard remains in place, says Harris, few officers will be convicted. “At the end of the trial, the jury is told the officer feared for his life, the suspect was reaching for a gun and don’t second guess him,” says Harris. “And it takes only one person to hang the jury.”