What exactly is on trial in Minneapolis right now?
It is not the nation’s justice system. It is not the practice of trial by jury. It is not the Fifth, Sixth, or Seventh amendments to the Constitution. It is not even police operations.
Rather, the trial is of a former police officer, Derek Chauvin. And he is on trial not for his character or his aptitude as a police officer but for the specific, infamous, filmed arrest that ended with George Floyd’s death.
A jury of Chauvin’s peers has been given power to interpret the evidence. It will decide the cause of Floyd’s death and determine culpability. It will decide Chauvin’s fate. But the jurors must do so based on the specific evidence.
To convict Chauvin based on a perceived (but poorly substantiated) trend of police officers improperly killing unarmed black men would be to deny Chauvin and the public justice. It would indulge the toxic idea of collective guilt, which is an idea that wokeism has in common with every noxious racist and otherwise discriminatory idea that has plagued this nation (and others).
Collective guilt would have us blame Chauvin for the abuses or perceived abuses of all police. But Americans, who are known for their elevation of procedure and their sense of justice and fair play, must never embrace the very same attitude that reprehensibly prompts bigots to say of some defendants, “Well, he’s black, so he must have done it.”
It is immoral and a stain on society when, or if, one racial or ethnic group is thought of as a criminal class. But equally heinous is the collective guilt that the Left would ram down the nation’s throat via critical race theory. It is weirdly Old Testament of the party to blame people, generations after the fact, for the sins and crimes of their forebears. Intolerant condemnation is even wider than that; blame for past sins and crimes is attributed to people who had nothing to do with them and who share only a casual resemblance due to skin color.
Collective guilt is just an alternate form of racism.
Culpability, personal guilt, is not hereditary, whether by race, class, gender, or anything else. FBI statistics show that black people commit a disproportionate number of crimes, but the share of black people that actually commits the crimes is minuscule. At its peak last decade, the national incarceration rate was only about 0.5% of the national population. Even assuming that a majority of criminals are free at any given time, this implies that more than 90% of the people within any race are law abiding.
A similar argument can be made about police officers singling out unarmed black people and shooting them. Of the 55 unarmed suspects shot and killed by police in 2020, the Washington Post database of police shootings shows that 18 were black, 24 were white, and eight were Hispanic. That is a disproportionately large number of black people, given their numbers in the population. But the overall number is also nowhere near what is implied by media coverage, which suggests it is an endemic phenomenon. The overwhelming share of police never shoot anyone. Among those who do, the overwhelming number never shoot anyone unarmed.
Guilt is an individual attribute. Decent people reject prejudgment of defendants based on their race. They should also reject it based on whether they have been police officers.
If the jury decides Chauvin caused Floyd’s death, it should rule accordingly. It should not rule based on any hyped-up media narrative about police shootings.
