[WSMDiscuss] George Floyd, Cariol Horne, and the Duty to Intervene (Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan)

[Jai Sen]

Thursday, April 22, 2021

The US in movement…, Resistance in movement…, Justice in movement…

[What is transpiring in the US in our times – as people try to come to terms with the extraordinary times they are living through - is, among other things, leading to some quite deep, intense, reflection, which is perhaps of as much interest to outsiders such as myself as it is, I assume, for people who live within US American society.  Here is one more :

Derek Chauvin is going to prison for George Floyd’s murder largely due to the actions and testimony of bystanders, from a nine-year-old girl to the teenager who recorded the crime. Let their courage inspire the national adoption of the duty of police to intervene, rather than aiding and abetting, police brutality.

George Floyd, Cariol Horne, and the Duty to Intervene

Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/4/22/george_floyd_cariol_horne_and_the <https://www.democracynow.org/2021/4/22/george_floyd_cariol_horne_and_the>

As dusk settled over the Minneapolis intersection of 38th and Chicago last Memorial Day, Police Officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck. Handcuffed and gasping for air, Floyd addressed the officer as ‘“Sir.” Floyd said “I can’t breathe” more than 20 times. “Mama, I love you,” he cried. Minutes later, he died. Chauvin kept his knee in place for three more minutes, time during which George Floyd might have been resuscitated. Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, all it took to snuff out George Floyd’s life of 46 years.

The twelve jurors unanimously found Chauvin guilty of 2nd degree murder, 3rd degree murder and manslaughter. It was the first time in Minnesota history that a white police officer had been convicted for killing an African American. George Floyd might be alive today, if any of the other three officers on the scene had intervened. Those three, Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao, will soon face trials of their own for aiding and abetting Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd.

George Floyd’s case was referenced in a recent New York State Supreme Court decision. “Quoting the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘the time is always right to do right,’” New York State Supreme Court Judge Dennis Ward wrote in his order, overturning the 2008 firing of Buffalo Police Officer Cariol Horne.

In 2006, Cariol Horne, an African American Police Officer in Buffalo, New York, responded to a call to assist another officer at an arrest in progress. What happened next turned her life upside down.

“I went to the home of Neal Mack at 707 Walden Avenue,” Cariol Horne said this week on the Democracy Now! news hour. She saw an African American man being brutalized by another officer: “When I went inside of the house, Neal Mack was handcuffed and being punched in the face. So, once we got Neal Mack out of the house, that is when [Police Officer] Gregory Kwiatkowski started choking him. And that’s when I released the chokehold, and then [Kwiatkowski] punched me in the face…So, then I went to the station house, reported it to the chief. An internal investigation started, and I became the target.”

After Horne grabbed Kwiatkowski’s arm to stop him from choking Mack, Kwiatkowski punched Horne so hard that she needed reconstructive surgery. Despite that, after an internal investigation, it was Horne who was fired, not Kwiatkowski. She was just months away from being eligible for her full pension. The job loss as a mother of five, just as the global economic crisis hit, was catastrophic. She ended up homeless, living out of her car. Neal Mack credits Cariol Horne with saving his life. Years later, Kwiatkowski went to prison for beating four handcuffed teenagers.

Horne organized a campaign to pass “Cariol’s Law” in Buffalo, New York. The law codifies the duty to intervene for police officers, whether on- or off-duty, when they see another officer using unreasonable force against a civilian. It also protects those officers who intervene from retaliation. As the protests sparked by George Floyd’s police killing swept the globe, the Buffalo City Council passed Cariol’s Law, and the mayor signed it into law.

The Buffalo law also allowed officers who previously suffered retaliation to seek redress, which Cariol Horne did. She sued and won. Judge Dennis Ward’s order restored her pension with back pay. Referring to George Floyd, Ward wrote, “One of the issues in all of these cases is the role of other officers at the scene and particularly their complicity in failing to intervene to save the life of a person to whom such unreasonable physical force is being applied…To her credit, Officer Horne did not merely stand by, but instead sought to intervene, despite the penalty she ultimately paid for doing so,” Judge Ward wrote in the order. “While the Eric Garners and George Floyds of the world never had a chance for a ‘do over’, at least here the correction can be done.”

The pace of police killings in the U.S., averaging about three per day, has not slowed since the protests erupted after George Floyd’s death. Cariol Horne is pushing for “Cariol’s Law” to be passed in cities and states across the country, as Congress debates the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020,” which would ban chokeholds and establish a duty to intervene for federal police, among other things.

Derek Chauvin is going to prison for George Floyd’s murder largely due to the actions and testimony of bystanders, from a nine-year-old girl to the teenager who recorded the crime. Let their courage inspire the national adoption of the duty of police to intervene, rather than aiding and abetting, police brutality.



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____________________________

Jai Sen

Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of Ottawa

jai.sen at cacim.net <mailto:jai.sen at cacim.net> &  <mailto:jsen at uottawa.ca>jsen at uottawa.ca <mailto:jsen at uottawa.ca>
Now based in Ottawa, Canada, on unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900) and in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325)

Check out something new – including for copies of the first two books below, at a discount, and much more : The Movements of Movements <https://movementsofmovements.net/>
Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?.  New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press.  Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press <http://www.pmpress.org/>; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements <https://movementsofmovements.net/>
Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance.  Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press <http://www.pmpress.org/>; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements <https://movementsofmovements.net/>
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