Source: Politics<\/p>\n
The guilty verdicts in the Derek Chauvin trial marked a departure for a nation long accustomed to police violence going unpunished.<\/p>\n
Yet if the outcome of the trial was groundbreaking, the political fallout appeared far less so. In the immediate aftermath, there were few signs that the fault lines surrounding issues of racial justice and police accountability have changed. If anything, they were hardened.<\/p>\n
The backdrop will be different going into the midterm election and 2024: Former President Donald Trump, who seized on last year\u2019s protests in his effort to appeal to suburban and rural whites, has been replaced by President Joe Biden, who in a 10-minute address on Tuesday acknowledged systemic racism in America and called it a \u201cstain on our nation\u2019s soul.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet otherwise there\u2019s little evidence that each party\u2019s messaging will change, with Democrats rallying around racial equity measures and expansive police reforms and Republicans prioritizing law and order. The attacks on each are likely to be familiar: Democrats will continue to frame the GOP as a party that is hostile to the interests of people of color while Republicans will continue to portray Democrats as a party of extremists who would \u201cdefund the police.\u201d<\/p>\n
Following the verdict, nearly every Democrat at every level issued statements, many of them heralding a \u201cstep forward\u201d for racial justice while continuing to call for reforms \u2014 a sign of the salience of the issue ahead of the midterm elections and 2024.<\/p>\n
Yet on the Republican side, nearly the opposite was true \u2014 few lawmakers saw a need to weigh in at all. And as it has since George Floyd\u2019s killing last May, the GOP\u2019s messaging remained more focused on the prospect of civil unrest than the police violence that has sparked it.<\/p>\n
For nearly a year \u2014 even as Floyd\u2019s killing shined a light on the recent deaths of dozens of other people of color, including Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and Daunte Wright \u2014 Democrats have clamored for police reform, aligning themselves with their base of Black voters in last year\u2019s elections. Republicans, in an overt appeal to suburban whites, responded to a summer of civil uprisings with calls for law and order.<\/p>\n
In the run-up to the Chauvin verdict, Republican attention remained fixed on the protests against police brutality, marked by the introduction of legislation<\/a> in more than 30 states to constrain protests. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a leading potential 2024 contender, signed a controversial \u201canti-riot\u201d bill<\/a> this week.<\/p>\n After the decision was handed down, DeSantis speculated that the prospect of unrest might have influenced the jury\u2019s decision. \u201cIf that’s something that can potentially happen, where you basically have justice meted out because the jury is scared of what a mob may do \u2014 and again I\u2019m not saying that’s what happened here … [but] that’s completely antithetical to the rule of law.”<\/p>\n \u201cTo think [rioting] is going to influence how the rule of law is applied, would be a total disaster if that idea takes hold,\u201d he said<\/a>.<\/p>\n On Wednesday morning, as Black communities exhaled in relief and talked of the work that remains to be done, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was still talking about the failed effort to censure Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) for telling protesters in Minnesota over the weekend to \u201cstay on the street\u201d and \u201cget more confrontational.\u201d<\/p>\n In an interview with Fox News, he said Democrats had the opportunity to \u201ccondemn this violent rhetoric\u201d and, instead, \u201cthey condoned it, which only makes the House of Representatives and the Justice Department weaker.\u201d<\/p>\n It took Sen. Tim Scott, the GOP\u2019s lone Black senator, who last summer introduced the GOP\u2019s police reform bill, to come anywhere close to pushing the party in a new direction. In a lengthy statement Tuesday, he said that while the verdict \u201cshould give us renewed confidence in the integrity of our justice system, we know there is more work to be done to ensure the bad apples do not define all officers \u2014 the vast majority of whom put on the uniform each day with integrity and servant hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n More typical were the responses of conservatives in Congress and the media framing the verdict as proof the justice system works, and rejecting calls from progressives for comprehensive criminal justice reform as unnecessary.<\/p>\n For the bomb-throwing caucus of the GOP, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia was on Twitter on Tuesday asserting that \u201cDC is completely dead tonight. People stayed in and were scared to go out because of fear of riots.”<\/p>\n She wrote, \u201c#BLM is the strongest terrorist threat in our county.\u201d<\/p>\n Just as the verdict on Tuesday revealed much about the ongoing political resonance of racial justice and policing ahead of the midterm elections, it also suggested how little the shape of the debate is likely to change.<\/p>\n Surveying the political fallout from the verdict, Florida state Rep. Omari Hardy, a Black progressive who has been pushing for legislation that rethinks policing, said, the \u201cverdict doesn\u2019t change a thing. This was not the justice we\u2019ve been marching for. This is justice in the thinnest sense of the word.\u201d<\/p>\n He said, \u201cWe\u2019ve been divided over the value of Black lives for over four centuries, so I\u2019m not surprised it’s a divisive issue. There always have been and always will be people who don’t value Black lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Even during the course of Chauvin\u2019s trial, dozens of people nationwide died at the hands of police<\/a>. And just moments after the verdict was read, there was news of another fatal police shooting:<\/a> 16-year-old, Ma\u2019Khia Bryant.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of relief today, and that\u2019s a positive thing,\u201d said Mike Erlandson, a former chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. \u201cBut about the same time that we take a deep breath, there will be another trial of another police officer.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that concerns about racial justice and the need for police reform will gain more traction in the midterm elections than in the 2020 campaign, a race in which the coronavirus pandemic overshadowed all other issues. Even then, a historic summer of civil unrest reverberated throughout the presidential contest and local races across the country.<\/p>\n Addressing the subject of police violence and protests, Doug Herman, who was a lead mail strategist for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, said, \u201cThis was a big issue in 2020, it\u2019s going to continue to be an issue in 2022.\u201d<\/p>\n Last year, he said, \u201cThe Republican Party had two attacks that they used to some success, which was the Democrats want to defund the police and they\u2019re all socialists.\u201d For Democrats, he said, \u201cWe\u2019ve turned another lap in the reform fight, but we\u2019re still a long way from the end.\u201d<\/p>\n Locally, there did appear to be political movement in the verdict in Minnesota, a critical swing state, where protests gave way to scenes of car horns blaring and activists weeping in relief. Keith Ellison, the state attorney general, called the outcome a \u201cfirst step toward justice.\u201d For Ellison, the former lawmaker who oversaw Chauvin\u2019s prosecution, the verdict was a major victory. And the resolution of the case will come as a relief for Minnesota\u2019s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, who had come under criticism<\/a> from progressives following the killing of Wright and the management of protests in the state.<\/p>\n More broadly, said Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, the finality of a verdict may increase support for police reforms \u2014 and for the candidates who call for them.<\/p>\n \u201cWhoever wants to take the mantle up, I think, will find a receptive audience,\u201d Brodkorb said. \u201cRight now \u2026 the thoughtful discussion on meaningful reforms, the bulk of that is being championed by Democrats.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, Floyd\u2019s death and the protests that followed resulted in cities and states adopting reforms ranging from measures to increase transparency to bans on chokeholds and \u201cno-knock\u201d warrants. Some cities reduced their police department funding<\/a>, as activists called for money to be spent instead on early intervention and other non-policing measures to improve public safety.<\/p>\n Yet the parameters of the debate surrounding those measures have not fundamentally changed.<\/p>\n As the Chauvin trial opened last month, a USA Today\/Ipsos Poll found<\/a> Americans\u2019 support of the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen in the 11 months since Floyd\u2019s death, while trust in law enforcement has increased. More than two-thirds of Americans \u2014 69 percent \u2014 trust police to promote justice and equal treatment of people of all races, up 13 percentage points from last year<\/a>. Meanwhile, half of Americans feel the same way about Black Lives Matter.<\/p>\n In a separate poll this month, by Morning Consult<\/a>, found a decline in the share of Americans who view police violence as a serious problem \u2013 down 10 percentage points from last year, to 69 percent. In both cases, the gulf in views between Black and white Americans is wide.<\/p>\n Rashad Robinson, president of the nonprofit civil rights group Color of Change, said, \u201cI don\u2019t think [the] verdict inherently changes anything.\u201d<\/p>\n Differentiating matters of accountability from concerns about justice, he said the latter \u201ccan\u2019t be served by 12 jurors. It\u2019s going to come from changing the rules, from changing the policies and the practices.\u201d <\/p>\n CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the timing of Elijah McClain and Breonna Taylor’s death. McClain\u2018s death occurred in 2019, after police restrained him with a chokehold; Taylor was fatally shot by police in March 2020.Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Source: Politics The guilty verdicts in the Derek Chauvin trial marked a departure for a nation long accustomed to police violence going unpunished. 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