Tears for the trial

Bless Charles McMillan and all the witnesses

Mr. McMillan, neighbor and witness

On Wednesday, as jurors in Derek Chauvin’s Minneapolis murder trial watched body-cam videos of George Floyd’s last moments, witness Charles McMillan, 61, broke down on the stand.

The videos are raw, and they include Floyd, still seated in his vehicle, begging for his life in a way that, if you don’t think “police” and think “worst-case-scenario,” might seem to be an overreaction to being stopped.

But Floyd, a Black man who died with Chauvin pressing his knee on his neck for 9+ minutes, knew, and jurors are left to decide, among other things, why Floyd’s encounter with Minneapolis police that day quickly escalated to an officer pointing his gun at Floyd and yelling, “Get your fucking hands up, right now!”

Floyd was suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill, a crime that would normally net a fine and maybe jail time — if the person who passed the bill did so knowingly. So it was nothing bigger than the suspicion of a fake $20 that brought hell to that corner.

McMillan, who lives in the neighborhood where Floyd was killed, was an eye witness who was driving by that day, and stopped because, he said, he is “nosy.” In some of the early videos from May 25, 2020, you can hear McMillan off-camera counseling a still-alive Floyd, already beneath Chauvin’s knee, to cooperate because “You can’t win.”

We know what that means. I am McMillan’s age, and his sobbing is a reminder that police violence is a boulder dropped into a fragile pond, and the ripples go far beyond the victims and their families. In fact, the judge had to stop the trial at one point on Wednesday while a juror regained composure. Witnesses have spoken through tears, and many have expressed guilt at either not trying harder to physically intervene (though there was no way the police officers would have allowed that), or, in the case of the store clerk who called the police, for involving law enforcement in the first place.

There’s a growing body of research on the trauma inflicted by over-policing in predominantly-Black communities, but there needs to be more. So far, researchers know that police violence has a unique impact on mental health, given that the violence is state-sanctioned, police are armed, police are everywhere, and victims of police violence have limited resources with which to counter the attacks, both in the moment and later, in court. In addition, according to the study, police violence makes those of us who believe in Officer Friendly have to reexamine our deeply-held beliefs, and consider what depravity a badge can hide. According to Bruce G. Link, UC-Riverside sociology/public health professor and one of the study’s authors, like so many other social ills, police violence has a

disproportionate effect on the mental health of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

Some of the witnesses at the Chauvin trial are minors. One witness was 9, the same age as my twin grandchildren. Studies say that the impact of police brutality on young people is both deep and wide. Research from Harvard University says

police killings have a negative and long-lasting impact on the educational and psychological well-being of nearby high schoolers.

In fact, there’s research that says police violence reaches all the way into the womb. One study that looked at 3.9 million California birth records from 2007 to 2016 said

police killings of unarmed blacks substantially decrease the birth weight and gestational age of black infants residing nearby. 

The pain is multiplied over and over again. It reaches back generations, and forward just as far. As we move into the trial’s fourth day, it almost feels like there aren’t enough tears.