Derek Chauvin: Good Riddance To Utter Evil Racist Trash!

By Ron Signore

Yesterday, Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22 ½ years in prison for the murder of George Floyd over a year ago. The high-profile case has been a black eye on America since the moment the event happened.

While there are still appeals and other motions that could happen over time, I consider this a small, very small, victory. Yes, Chauvin should be in jail as expected. Let’s be clear here, no one is really winning. The Floyd family is getting justice in holding and punishing those accountable in the eyes of the law. But what has the impact been since that infamous 9 minutes in 2020?

The right has continued to drive tension-based combat towards the rest of the country, maintaining a directive to broadcast every lost officer, every dirty secret of any African American victims to try and justify police actions, and further incorporate this paranoia of lawlessness falsely perceived by the left politically.

First, updating from past pieces, there is no doubt there is police brutality present in the United States, and I would agree in some factions in certain areas, there is systemic racism. Not every cop is a Derek Chauvin. Not every cop is a murderer, or a racist. I do not want to put false numbers on it, but the number of overall interactions that turn aggressive during police encounters is minimal by percentage. We tend to blow these occurrences out of proportion thanks to the media. I’m not taking away from the brutal and senseless acts that are reported, just the perception that it really is the norm throughout the United States.

Defunding the police may still be alive, or maybe it is repurposing the police? There is a problem with one and not the other. Defunding the police gained notoriety last year during the protests, some turbulent, after Floyd’s death. Let’s say that by percentage less than 5% of interactions with police due to a possible infraction or perception to confirm people are who they say they are and they belong in the place of question. We have three possible outcomes of the interaction; the person is a criminal (legit breaking the law in some way), the police proactively protected and served; 2) the person is innocent of any wrong doing but instead of cooperating to make sure all is positive, they deflect the disrespect onto figures of authority and draw tension to a situation; 3) same situation, except people treat people like people and everyone moves on. Sure, there may be different scenarios and tangents and rabbit holes of why a police officer would even be talking to someone based on the environment…but my point is this, an extreme portion of police officers are not just power hungry aggressive racist murderers by nature/default.

Many bad apples on the force have forced us to become a nation that actually puts our protectors in jeopardy. Officers sometimes have a split second in a tense and dangerous situation to act or make their wife a wife a widow (husband a widower). It is a dangerous job, and one that forces a true good versus evil scenario. The problem is we have let many criminals use the shield of blaming those with a shield for wrongdoing, and because of political perception, we cave in. We need to get back to wins and losses legally like we would see in Law and Order- sometimes the protection of the law allows for someone’s rights to be infringed upon and they go free. Instead, we are seeing an abundance of additional work and investigations over perceptions and complaints filed by known criminals (at least guilty for the crime committed from a police response).

Cops should be punished for going out of bounds. Brutality, violating amendments of people’s rights, protocols et all are examples of misconduct to be held accountable for. But we as a nation cannot fall into the Q trap of putting all cops into some sort of evil category. We need to be better than that. We need to understand and realize the oppression towards minorities for years. We also need to apply common sense towards moving forward. Instead of the increased videos I see where people are thumbing their noses at the police, creating an antagonistic environment like a 3-year-old does to their older sibling, we do need to take a more conservative approach to how we progress. By that I mean conservative family values where you respect those who deserve to be respected. Derek Chauvin deserves no respect. A good friend of mine who is on the beat does. He did not kneel on someone’s neck killing them. He didn’t have any infractions that went against his training, yet he is now put in a position that is almost automatically hostile because people think they know the law and it is okay to instigate the spotlight towards them just to prove a point to a cop.

The friend of mind was the first responding officer on the scene in Indianapolis a few months back when the shooting at the Fed Ex facility happened. He had to navigate through dead bodies and carnage as they hunted the gunman. Now, he has brought to my attention that IMPD has consistently cut budgets over the years he has been on the force, leaving the officers with less than pristine tools for the job. Funding has already put him in a vulnerable spot to do his job for the people he serves. Any further defunding is like showing up to a gun fight with boxing gloves. His life is in situations of constant danger. Good cops like him, and many more I know personally, are getting the crap kicked out of them because some scum bags did some bad things with the power of authority they have. Now every interaction that is already tense adds the element of possible delayed decision making because no one wants to be a public scapegoat for doing their job correctly. They do it wrong, sure, fry them in the public square.

In Daytona Beach earlier this week, an officer was shot in the head while approaching a suspicious character. As it turns out, the suspect is a known militia member, violent and militant. What if I told you the cop was African American and the criminal was white? Are we still set to hold a “defund the police” or “abolish the police,” message? I am not. I want criminals off the streets, correctly caught criminals. I want police to respect that there is a history of hundreds of years of suppression and to proceed with that caution. We never seem to mind when the police get the guy from a hit and run, or the guy who robbed the bank, in fact, we take a deep breath and somehow say “Great.”

Should we re-draw up training for police? Probably. But the one thing we cannot do is prejudicially judge every cop as a racist, every cop as a murderer, or vice versa, we cannot blindly believe all cops are saints. This common sense approach needs to take every situation going forward and hold it on it’s own merit. Believe it or not, I have family and friends on both sides of the law. I support the brothers in blue because I know not every cop is how they are portrayed via the media these days. I support rights guaranteed to people under our constitution and governing laws and the extension to everyone in our criminal justice system. I do not support anarchy. I do not support brutality or wrong doing period- that’s from both sides of the law. Right and wrong, guilty versus innocent and good against evil all need to be common sense in these situations. We cannot, however, confuse faults of not being perfect in as a reason to identify police as villains. We can and should hold them accountable. There is a police for the police called Internal Affairs. If it wreaks of corruption, which in reality IA and the regular force are not usually on the same side, a third party can be brought to the table for investigation. But remember this, there is nothing a cop hates more than a dirty cop.

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