There Is No Justice for the Dead
By: Jacob Gutierrez
Tags: Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, Abolition, Police, Politics

A photo of George Floyd and his daughter Gianna juxtaposed with his murderer’s mugshots

By the time this article is published most people will have heard that the killer (former) cop Derek Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Chauvin may receive a sentence of up to 75 years and George Floyd will remain dead. I must assert that the incarceration of a single agent of the violent state is not what justice looks like; justice looks like the targets of said state, such as Floyd, being alive, well, and unworried about their impending demise at the hand of the state. We cannot achieve justice for George Floyd so long as it is not a possibility to bring him back to life, nor may we achieve justice for Anthony Cano, a boy who was murdered by a Chandler PD officer during a ride-along with his own father, nor for Dion Johnson, a young man murdered by DPS in Phoenix, nor for Aiyana Jones, a 7-year-old girl murdered by SWAT pigs in Detroit, nor for Ma’Khia Bryant, the 16-year-old girl who was killed by police in Columbus on the same day Derek Chauvin was found guilty. There is simply no such thing as justice for a dead man.

Candle-light vigil for James Garcia who was killed by Phoenix police while parked in his own driveway held at the very same driveway. (2020)

There has been a lot of talk about accountability within the realm of politics since the murder of George Floyd. Things are being said, especially by the liberal portion of Americans, such as “Police need to be held accountable for their misconduct,” and, “We’ll vote Biden into office and hold him accountable if he does something wrong.” After the entire existence of this sick system which purveys countless inhuman deeds with impunity one would think the masses would realize that we simply lack the power to hold this system accountable to any of its actions, not just because many of us don’t seem to agree on the meaning of accountability, but because the system itself is not accountable to us. To quote writer, Rubén Angel, on the meaning of the word, “Accountability relates to community restoration and justice achieved through mutual agreements and commitments to growth. One cannot hold murderous systems of oppression ‘accountable.’ We can only abolish them.” There is no way for the violent penal system to restore a life that has been taken, there have been no mutual agreements between the people and the state and there have been no signs that the very system of violence that took the life of George Floyd, as well as countless others, will seize to continue doing so. In fact, since the trial of Derek Chauvin began, police have killed 64 people, averaging 3 per day, including a 13-year-old boy in Chicago named Adam Toledo. To further demonstrate how police are not accountable to anyone let’s take a look at some data. Between the years 2005 and 2019 only 104 “nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers with the general powers of arrest… have been arrested for murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting where the officer shot and killed someone at incidents throughout the United States. Of those 104 officers, to date only 35 have been convicted of a crime resulting from the on-duty shooting (15 by guilty plea, 20 by jury trial, and none convicted by a bench trial).” Of the 35 cops who have been convicted of a crime, only 4 were convicted of murder. In a country where over 1000 people were killed by police in 2019 alone, only 4 were convicted of murder in this 14 year stretch of time between ’05 and ’19. Let that fact sink in; thousands upon thousands of people killed by police year after year and the killers that are legally recognized as murderers are a single digit. And we’re supposed to see it as progress that that single digit just rose by 1? Won’t be me. It should be becoming more clear by the passing of each day that justice and accountability cannot be brought to the past or present in regards to police violence; it can only exist in the future and the only way to ensure that a violent system seizes to commit acts of injustice is to put a permanent end to the system altogether. This is what Angel means when he writes “We can only abolish them.”

March for Breonna Taylor and Dion Johnson led by BLM Phoenix-Metro (2020)

But abolition, in regards to prisons and policing, is much more complicated than simply being rid of a system. Even more important to the process of abolition than a violent institution’s disillusionment is the elimination of the conditions that produce such an institution in the first place. These institutions exist not as a preventative measure but as a response to crime. Really think about what that means; police and prisons do not prevent crime but merely respond to them. If a person is calling the police it is more than likely that a crime has already been committed and prison, obviously, comes long after a crime has been committed. There is no strong evidence to suggest that intensifying this system causes crime to decline. No conclusion has even been able to be drawn about the only significant drop in crime in U.S. history which occurred during the 90’s. While the so-called justice system focuses on punishing the population for committing crimes, abolitionists seek to eliminate the material conditions that produce crime. An example of such conditions is the rampant poverty and lack of dignified work that drives people to participate in the drug trade. The drug trade exists as both a crime and a condition of its own which produces more conditions such as addiction which one may be driven to commit more crimes to keep up with; crimes which may produce more conditions and more crimes and so on and so forth. Various chains of conditions such as this can all be traced to larger conditions like poverty and inequality which prisons and policing only intensify while abolitionists seek to eliminate these conditions as well as the crimes they produce. In summation, it is not possible to achieve justice for those whose lives have been damaged and taken by the american system of policing and the path to achieving justice for the would-be George Floyds of the future is much bigger than the prosecution of individual killer-cops; we cannot rely on the brutal system to keep itself in check anyway. Such justice can only be secured by a complete reimagining of society that does not include police and prisons.