This is America: Is criminal justice reform possible?
January 12, 2023
As the trial for former police officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd, criminal reform advocates and Black communities are watching with great interest to see if police will be held accountable for misconduct and unnecessary use of deadly force. After a suburban Minneapolis police officer shot Duante Wright to death, pressure continues to mount on police agencies to reimagine the roles of their officers.
Dr. Howard Henderson, director of CJR, told Defender Network, "With this televised trial, we get a chance to see how the system treats and responds to one of their own that has committed a crime against a Black man. There are facts in this case that we’ve never seen before. We see officers testifying. We have a full video that showed what happened just before George Floyd was murdered. And what happened just after."