Menaabolis – Former Minneapolis police chief Midaria Arradondo clearly recalls a midnight call from a community activist. The caller told him to watch a video spread on social media of a white officer hanging a black man on the ground, despite his faded calls “I cannot breathe.”
The dying man was George Floyd. The officer was Derek Shaovin. Arradondo was the first black police chief in the city.
“It was at all,” Aradundo, 58, was remembered in an interview before the fifth anniversary of Floyd.
What he saw contradicts what his people told about the deadly meeting, and he knew immediately that this means changes in his ministry and his city. But he admitted that he did not expect immediately the extent of the death of Floyd in the United States and around the world.
“I have served for 32 years,” he said. “But there is no doubt that May 25, 2020 is a crucial moment for me in my public service career.”
The video shows Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, as it hangs on the sidewalk outside a store where Floyd tried to use a $ 20 imitator to buy cigarettes. Shofin maintained the pressure for 9/2 minutes despite stopping the spectators, even after a firefighter tried out of the service to intervene and said another officer that he could not find a pulse.
“Pain remains and anger”
Arradondo sat the interview in a public library severely damaged in the disturbances that followed Floyd’s death. It is on Lake Street, a main artery that has witnessed some of the worst destruction, a street that still holds “the remains of pain and anger of what happened five years ago.”
Only below the mass, there is an empty shell for a police station that was burned during riots. Inside the sight, a targeted store and a looted cub supermarket. Store fronts remain up. While some companies were rebuilt, many empty sitting as others did.
Arradondo is still standing alongside his decision and the Jacob Frey mayor to abandon the third area and allow it to burn. The demonstrators violated the building, and the police – who spread – had no resources to keep them. Therefore, his officers ordered the evacuation.
“During the most important crisis we have ever passed, it can be said in the state, when life or death, I must go alongside keeping people alive and safe,” he said.
Police repair
Arradondo later helped launch a comprehensive police reform in the city despite the resistance police culture and the Union of strong officers. He witnessed against Chauvin in the trial of the year 2021, a rare violation of the “Blue Wall” that traditionally protects officers from responsibility for violations.
Five years later, Aradundo, who retired in 2022, said he believed that law enforcement agencies throughout the country have made progress in the police accountability – albeit gradual progress – and that police chiefs and police police are now faster to bear the officers responsible for the terrible misconduct.
Arradondo was upgraded to his boss in 2017, and he received a height of hope among local African Americans who called him “Rondo”. But his administration was a good reputation in the use of force and many were angry at the killing of the black youth in Minnesota and abroad.
Aradundo said he hoped that he had made more changes to the police department before Floyd was killed.
“I would have pressed more strongly and faster to try to dismantle some toxic culture that allowed the lack of accusation in that evening, on May 25, 2020,” he said. “Certainly, I would have been investing more time raising the voices in our society, which was pleading with the police stations for decades to listen to us and change.”
Make modifications
Arradondo just published the book “Chief Rondo: Ensure Justice to kill George Floyd”, which explores leadership, justice, race, the broader police impacts, and work challenges within a defective system. It closes it with a letter dedicated to the daughter of Floyd, Gianna.
“I had no opportunity to meet Gianna, but I wanted to know that, although I was not there in that evening, at this intersection when her father was giving help, I heard him, and I would do everything I could to achieve justice,” he said.
He wanted to say the words that you did not hear from the former four officers who were convicted of their roles on the death of George Floyd:
“I’m sorry. I am sorry because your father takes you.”
