Police

Start From The Conclusion, Add Justifications Later: Derek Chauvin Trial Opinions Are All Tribalism

It is such a rare gift to hear someone say, 'I don’t feel like I know enough about this subject to offer an opinion on the matter.'

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(Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

I haven’t previously written about the Derek Chauvin trial. Partly that is because I don’t think another privileged white guy needs to weigh in. Partly it is because there is nothing much to say: we all saw Chauvin murder George Floyd in May 2020, so unless you are one of the many people who for some reason wants to try to explain why you think that was OK, what’s left to write about?

But I’ve lived most of my life in Minnesota, and my brother is a cop in the Twin Cities. It’s hard not to say something now that a verdict has been reached. My contribution is more about all the people I’ve been hearing opinions from than it is about Derek Chauvin and George Floyd though.

It is such a rare gift to hear someone say, “I don’t feel like I know enough about this subject to offer an opinion on the matter.” Alternatively, “I do not have an opinion on this issue,” is also acceptable. I don’t remember the last time I heard either of those statements not originating from my own voice box (the evidence that is the existence of this column notwithstanding, I do occasionally utter each).

Debate is good. The general concept of better ideas rising to the top in reasoned competition is solid. On the other hand, uninformed reactionism is worthless, and that’s pretty much what’s been out there about the Derek Chauvin trial.

Suddenly everyone is an apparent expert on police use of force, or a freewheeling philosopher on the general concept of just deserts. I don’t need to hear one more time about how George Floyd was no saint. The legal standard for whether it is all right for the police to kill someone is not whether that person deserves to die because of past wrongs, in someone’s subjective opinion. I also do not need to hear any more about how George Floyd minimally resisted arrest. Again, this is just a version of thinking it is OK to kill someone due to past wrongs, based on a very recent past wrong. The legal standard is not that once the cops have you down on the ground, it is acceptable for them to kill you as long as you resisted arrest beforehand.

Many people feel a strong need to defend anything a police officer does just because that person has a badge pinned on. I sort of get it from other cops, due to decades of professional cultural indoctrination with this thin blue line garbage, even though logically it doesn’t make much sense for good cops to want to defend bad cops. Despite the fact that I’m a lawyer, you’ll find me pillorying, not defending, the truly bad attorneys out there (personally I’m not even that big a fan of most other sort-of good lawyers). From the layperson, though, the automatic defense of cops (the white ones at least) has become just another toxic manifestation of the tribalism our species was born with, and continues to struggle against to this day.

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I’m not pretending that tribalism doesn’t motivate a lot of the activism on the other side too. There are plenty calling for police reform who think that police killings are never justified. In this particular case though, they have the advantage of being aligned with the objectively right side. I mean come on; you don’t have to kneel on an immobilized guy’s neck for almost 10 minutes.

Litigators are hired guns typically placed in the shitty position of having to accept in advance the ultimate position that the client should win, then filling in the granular reasoning later. I wouldn’t recommend this for general use. If you think law enforcement officers engaged in the difficult job of policing are usually justified in their use of deadly force, do some online sleuthing and find just a couple instances in which you agree that the police went too far. If you believe all police are bastards, well, surely you can find at least one heroic story somewhere that you accept as a truly justified police killing. It shouldn’t take long, and we’d all be better for it.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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