On Wednesday, after days of protests against the police killing of George Floyd, Minnesota AG Keith Ellison upgraded former officer Derek Chauvin’s charge from second to third degree murder, and issued new charges against the other three officers involved in his death. Speaking in a tweet, the attorney representing Floyd’s family said they were “deeply gratified” by the decision.
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But the ambitions of Black Lives Matter protesters extend beyond justice for one man’s family, and the systemic issues that allowed for the murder of Floyd and so many others remain where they were a week and a half ago.
Speaking on Boston Public Radio Thursday about what real reform might look like was Andrea Cabral, former Suffolk County Sheriff and Secretary of Public Safety.
Cabral began by speaking broadly to what she described as the "institutional response" to protests against police brutality.
“These protests are looked at as mini revolutions, or insurrections of some kind,” she said. “And that is because the fundamental belief that the right to decide who gets what rights, the right to decide who lives or dies, is vested in white males in particular.
“We really need to think about the genesis of this when we start talking about how these things get negotiated and why there’s so much delay,” she added.
Read More: US Legislatures Slow To Pass Laws Limiting Use Of Force
Cabral also spoke on issues with police unions, which she described as having too much authority over how and whether officers are disciplined.
"Unions, in their genesis, in their creation, are good things,” she prefaced. "Over time they develop power by, in my view, the failure of executive management... to hold the line.
“Where I really think they go wrong,” she said, "is when they fail to call out the least among them… which is why an entire department gets tagged with the behavior of a certain number in the department. Because they have a responsibility to, internally, to make sure that they’re doing the job well and to call out those in their ranks that are not doing the job well.
“There is no incentive to do that,” she said.
Andrea Cabral is the former Suffolk County Sheriff, former Secretary of Public Safety, and the CEO of Ascend.
