Derek Chauvin was sentenced yesterday to 22.5 years in prison for murdering George Floyd.*
[NPR article]
In the evening, I took a wobbly video––holding my phone on my handlebars––as I biked home**.
A crowd had gathered earlier to hear the sentence, but by the time I biked through––after 8 p.m.––the square was almost empty.
I'm biking east, so you can see my shadow on the street as the sun sets behind me. (You can also see that though the city forced the square open to motor vehicles earlier this month, it's quite an obstacle course.)
The whole 1-min. video makes me seasick, so first I'll post two short clips.
PART I (13 seconds) Biking into the Square
The graffiti on the concrete barriers reads:
SACRED SPACE . . . GFS [George Floyd Square]
#WINSTON SMITH Was Assassinated"
[Amazingly, the latest Black man to be murdered by security forces shares a name with the main character of George Orwell's 1984: Winston Smith.]
WE KEEP US SAFE
PART II (14 seconds) Biking up to the statue of a fist and the waving Black Liberation flag in the intersection
The graffiti on the surface of the street includes a list of demands for justice.
The billboard to the left is a picture of George Floyd with the word
REMEMBER.
If you can stand the wobbling, here's the whole 1-minute video.
* Chauvin deserved the max sentence (40 years), but it's sure not nothing.
I celebrate the historic victory––it's practically miraculous a cop got
anything at all, much less ten years more than the minimum.
Chauvin is forty-five––he could get out on parole when he is sixty (my age) after serving two-thirds of his sentence.
I like what the Rev. Al Sharpton said [NYT] about Chauvin's sentence:
“We got more than we thought only because we have been disappointed so many times before."BELOW: Improvised barriers two days later, on May 27, 2020.
This is my favorite thing: That someone on their own initiative dragged that chair out there is one for my Humanity Is Not All Bad file [now 22 posts].
