We saw George Floyd die on screen. We need to see this too.
The trial of Derek Chauvin wasn’t going to be broadcast. Minnesota trials never are. It took a pandemic and a decision by Judge Peter Cahill to change that over the objections of the prosecution. Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office argued that televising the hearings live might intimidate the witnesses, making them hesitant to testify. A coalition of news outlets, the defense, and, ultimately, Cahill disagreed.
Members of the public usually have the right to observe courtroom proceedings. It’s typically also safe for a crowd to gather peacefully in a courtroom, or in an overflow room with closed-circuit TVs. But we’re not living in normal times, and this is not a normal trial.
In requesting the change to the Minnesota court system’s standard procedures, news outlets argued that “given the enormous public interest in this trial, the limitations imposed by the pandemic, and the options created by modern technology, meaningful access equates to remote access.” Essentially, they said Chauvin’s trial is not just about what happened in Minnesota. It’s about what is happening across America.
Chauvin, a former officer in the Minnesota Police Department, is charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd.
Floyd’s death ignited months of protests and unrest across the country and around the world, and for some, it marked the first time they were moved to take to the streets. The footage that emerged was damning. It was devastating. And it evoked an emotional response in a way that news reports, no matter how hard-hitting or well-edited, sometimes can’t: Chauvin held his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, 29 seconds. We know because we saw it happen. We saw the video.
Or did we? The footage we saw showed Chauvin pinning down Floyd for eight minutes, 46 seconds. That precise span of time, established by a widely circulated video a bystander shot with their phone, has become such a symbol — of the horrors of police brutality in general and of Floyd’s death in particular — that it has its own Wikipedia page filled with examples of politicians, corporations, activists, and entire cities using the number to commemorate Floyd and raise the alarm.
The New York Stock Exchange paused trading for eight minutes, 46 seconds. Google held an eight-minute-and-46-second-long “moment” of silence for its employees. Music streaming services paused special programming. Legislators took a knee. Long stretches of silence are uncomfortable; they spur people into a contemplative state. And while eight minutes, 46 seconds can be a short time, it’s an eternity if you’re staring mortality and brutality in the face.
But it turns out Chauvin forcibly restrained Floyd even longer than most people thought. Prosecutors revealed the full extent of their encounter during the first week of the trial — nine minutes, 29 seconds of Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck — and the revelation was shocking. Reality was worse than the footage.
It is a succinct embodiment of this moment in history that a number drawn from a video — shot on a phone, uploaded to the internet, and seen all over the world by viewers frozen in place by a virus — became such a profound symbol.
Before Cahill’s decision allowed TV cameras into the courtroom for Chauvin’s trial, the situation was already mediated to us through phone cameras and Twitter, through videos of protests and unrest, each one putting a frame around Floyd’s death and the events that followed, each one with a narrative in mind. Every video told a particular part of a story — some spotlighting the size and passion of peaceful crowds, others zooming in on property damage — and as the protests raged on, sometimes those stories conflicted.
But sometimes the stories harmonized. As other video emerged (from nearby security cameras, for instance), journalists worked to widen the frame, to fill in the picture of what happened to Floyd. New angles and voices entered the story; the meaning of the events on May 25 became clearer. We can now witness bystanders screaming, hear what they said, understand their helplessness, and see more clearly how Floyd was treated at the hands of police.
The result is that, while almost none of us were there, it may feel as though we were. That’s not new. We have seen videos of police brutality before, as far back as the beating of Rodney King in 1991. With time and technological advances, such videos have picked up force and clarity. Reading about beatings and brutality is one thing — seeing them happen is something entirely different.
Smartphones have turned citizens into reluctant documentarians. Major catastrophic or violent events are increasingly caught on camera. There’s almost always one snapping nearby, on someone’s phone or within a surveillance system, and from there it’s just one click to virality. Floyd’s death was recorded, but so are those of many others, and they have been for a long time. We’re all everywhere now, seeing everything. And what we’re seeing adds to an increased awareness of systemic racism and injustice.
So it’s a little jarring what we don’t see while watching news footage of Chauvin’s trial. In his ruling that the trial should be televised, Cahill gave strict instructions: Floyd’s family and any witnesses who are minors could not be filmed without their consent. The cameras are not permitted to zoom in on the tables where counsel is seated, meaning no one can shoot close-ups of Chauvin or either set of attorneys. No cameraperson can create meaning by capturing reaction shots during testimony, the way you would in a cinematic courtroom drama.
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Cahill’s rules seem designed to not only protect people in the room but also to buck the genre conventions of courtroom shows and movies. This is not fiction. This is not an action movie or a drama about characters based vaguely on real-life figures. It is not a political battle, and it is not a triumphant story of a scrappy lawyer taking on the establishment. It’s actually happening. Real lives remain at stake; actual justice is in process. Few people are in the room, but we should act like we are.
There’s one more rule: Jurors must be kept off camera completely. This is so important that Cahill ordered a plexiglass partition removed during jury selection because a potential juror’s face was partially reflected in it.
In doing so, Cahill was nodding to the same sentiment the prosecutors expressed in their case against a televised trial: that broadcasting the proceedings to the whole world would not just give access to the public, it would also encourage the kind of harassment that virtually anyone whose face appears on the internet can experience. In a highly politicized and volatile case such as this one — even with the rise in support for Black Lives Matter and a distrust of police that happened in the wake of Floyd’s death — that’s a real, frightening possibility.
Having to balance those objectives — transparency in courtroom proceedings and privacy for those who participate — reflects with crystal clarity the quandary both journalists and the justice system face today. When we’ve all seen the footage and feel like we were there, how do you select an impartial jury? And when the audience isn’t limited to those in the room but expands to include everyone watching the live broadcast — when the whole world can tune in — does that affect the outcome?
High-profile trials have been televised for decades, and many have drawn considerable public interest. Chauvin’s is hardly the first to become a broadcast event. And yet it feels different. Some of that feeling is thanks to the inextricable link between the public interest in this case and smartphones and the internet.
And some may be thanks to audio of the eyewitnesses’ testimony and the footage emerging from the courtroom. There’s power to those images that isn’t captured in text. We have a new framework for listening to these eyewitnesses tell the story, one that has moved away from seeing victims as criminals receiving their just deserts and toward focusing on the injustice of the system around them. This trial proves something simple: No matter how viral a video of police brutality becomes, its power and pain are not diminished.
The most striking images in the first days of the trial came from witnesses who testified and sobbed in court, testifying to feeling guilty that they couldn’t do more to stop the police who held Floyd down. Watching video footage of the arrest and listening as Floyd cried out for his mother in his last moments of life, bystander Charles McMillian broke down in tears on the witness stand.
“I feel helpless,” McMillian told the court, explaining why he was crying. “I don’t have a mama either. I understand him.”
The jury watched the footage, and several were similarly moved. On March 31, the proceedings were halted when one member of the jury, a white woman in her 50s, stood up and left. She felt ill — or had a “stress-related reaction,” as Cahill put it — and later returned.
While it all happened (or hours or days later, on YouTube), we watched. We, the public, could watch the jury watch the videos and break down. Just as we did last summer, we have the opportunity to form opinions about what we’re seeing, based on images and framed by our TVs, phones, and laptops. The televised trial gives us another chance to participate, to fill in our mental pictures of what happened. To decide that we’re part of this story too.
Chauvin’s trial is airing on TV, but it isn’t acting like television. It has no intentional entertainment value. This isn’t the trial of O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony. At every turn so far, Chauvin’s time in court has reminded us as viewers of our involvement, or at least our feelings of involvement, in Floyd’s death.
More broadly, every day of the trial reinforces what some always knew and what some only started to learn last summer: There is something deeply wrong when a man dies like this, and it’s impossible to divorce emotion from logic when evaluating someone’s life. That the only reason a lot of people know about George Floyd at all — the only reason anyone’s watching Derek Chauvin’s trial in the first place — is that we’ve turned into a nation of documentarians, stitching together a narrative that’s much bigger than ourselves.
Floyd’s death represented one breaking point, evidence for some who had turned away before that something was deeply wrong. But for the American public, the weeping witnesses and gut-churning testimony should be further evidence — in a way that no newspaper article or evening news segment could capture — that the story won’t end when the trial is over.
The change comes two weeks earlier than previously scheduled.
President Joe Biden has announced that all adults will become eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine by April 19. The news came as confirmed coronavirus infections continue to rise throughout the US, intensifying pressure to quickly increase the number of vaccinated people to help counter the rise of more infectious coronavirus variants.
“Let me be deadly earnest with you,” Biden said Tuesday at the White House. “We aren’t at the finish line. We still have a lot of work to do. We’re still in a life-and-death race against this virus.”
The new pledge marks a change in Biden’s previous goal to ensure that vaccinations would be available for 90 percent of US adults by April 19, and it’s possible to achieve given the recent increase in vaccinations across the country.
According to CDC figures, more than 108 million Americans — including about 40 percent of all adults and 75 percent of seniors (65 and up) — had received at least one dose as of Tuesday morning. Nearly 63 million people are fully vaccinated. Overall, the country’s vaccination rate is almost five times greater than the world average, according to a CNN analysis, with over 3 million Americans receiving Covid-19 shots every day.
This rate positions the country to meet the administration’s goal of getting 200 million shots in arms by April 30, Biden’s 100th day in office. When the president announced that goal on March 25, 100 million shots had been given in less than two months. If doctors and nurses continue to administer at least 2.5 million shots per day — the seven-day average in late March — the administration would reach its 200-million-shot goal with days to spare.
The president’s pledge to open vaccinations to all adults is largely a symbolic one. All but one state, Hawaii, had already pledged to make vaccines available for all residents 18 and up either on or in advance of the new April 19 deadline. Most recently, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced Tuesday morning that her state’s timeline would be moved up in accordance with the president’s.
But the announcement ensures that every state is held to the same vaccination rules as access opens up. And getting everyone vaccinated as quickly as possible is of growing importance: Covid-19 rates are rising in some parts of the country, particularly in the upper Midwest, and experts continue to warn of a new surge of Covid-19 infections fueled by the spread of variants and loosened restrictions in some states.
The US is facing an uptick in confirmed Covid-19 cases
While increased vaccination rates and eligibility is undisputedly good news, both developments coincide with an uptick in Covid-19 cases that experts worry may soon turn into a fourth wave. On March 14, the country reported a weekly average of less than 53,000 cases per day. That number reached 76,594 cases on April 5, a 20 percent increase from 14 days prior. Deaths are down and hospitalizations remain stagnant, though those numbers typically lag case counts for several weeks before they reflect those increases.
The uptick is believed to be fueled in part by the continued spread of variants that are often more infectious, and sometimes more deadly, than the initial strain of the coronavirus. And part of what drives the national vaccine effort is a race to inoculate the country before additional new variants emerge. Experts are particularly worried about the rise of potential variants with an Eek mutation, which allows a virus to better evade immune responses from vaccines.
According to Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, variants have been found in every US state, although none have had the Eek mutation. Osterholm said on Sunday’s Meet the Press that the B.1.1.7 variant, one believed to be more infectious and deadly and thought to have originated in the United Kingdom, “is almost like having a whole new pandemic descend upon us.” The good news: Vaccines seem to stop its spread.
At the moment, scientists don’t know how widely the new variants are circulating. But as the weeks pass, they’ll likely constitute a higher share of US Covid-19 cases — and a key concern with the B.1.1.7 variant, according to Osterholm, is its impact on children.
“Unlike the previous strains of the virus, we didn’t see children under eighth grade get infected often, or they were not frequently very ill,” Osterholm said on Meet the Press. “They didn’t transmit to the rest of the community. That’s why I was one of those people very strongly supporting reopening in-class learning. B.1.1.7 turns that on its head.”
However, Anthony Fauci — the Biden administration’s chief medical adviser — has said the threat these variants pose, and the threat of a new wave of cases, can be minimized so long as vaccination rates continue to grow unabated.
“As long as we keep vaccinating people efficiently and effectively, I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” Fauci said on MSNBC on Tuesday. “That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to still see increases in cases. Whether it explodes into a real surge or not remains to be seen. I think that the vaccine is going to prevent that from happening.”
It’s easy to lose track of the numbers. But you shouldn’t.
The total number of billionaires exploded over the course of the coronavirus pandemic — and they individually became extraordinarily wealthier during the last 12 months.
That’s according to a new report from Forbes, which does one of the most complete analyses each spring about the state of the billionaire class across the globe. Tracking the net worths of the wealthy is painstaking work that requires sifting through arcane filings — and the end results are not perfect — but the estimates offered by Forbes represent one of the best stabs at covering the scale of income inequality in the world. And while it’s easy to lose track of the numbers or to see the figures as old news — “Billionaires continue to be billionaires” — the scale matters for anyone who wants to get a grasp on how much of a problem wealth inequality truly is.
The world is now home to 2,755 billionaires, a world record and a startling 30 percent increase from Forbes’ accounting last year of the world’s uber-rich. And 86 percent of those billionaires are richer than they were a year ago. The list does paint an exaggerated picture of some of the pandemic gains, because it compares today’s net worths to Forbes’ last analysis in mid-March 2020, when the market had yet to recover from the early pandemic-inspired sell-off.
The pandemic has reinvigorated the debate over inequality, with nations like Argentina adopting a wealth tax and other similar proposals gaining a foothold in the United States. In the US, many Americans have more personal income and savings than they had before the pandemic, thanks in part to unprecedented government stimulus measures. But at the same time, demand for food pantries smashed records and the economy shed about 10 million jobs. Billionaire philanthropists have played center stage in America’s recovery.
Perhaps no statistic better encapsulates the scale of the yawning inequality than that MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Jeff Bezos and one of the wealthiest people in the world, probably gave more money away directly to nonprofits in 2020 than any person has in a single year ever before. Yet because of Amazon’s surging stock price, she actually ended the year richer, Forbes reports.
Forbes finds that the tech set, like Scott, fared particularly well. Six of the world’s 10 richest people made their money in tech, and the total assets controlled by all tech billionaires globally measures $2.5 trillion, far more than any other industry. Neither of those figures include Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is classified by Forbes as in the automotive industry but has ridden Tesla’s extraordinary bull run to become the second richest person in the world.
That’s all to say that the debate over wealth inequality isn’t going anywhere, even when the pandemic fades away. Check out Recode’s recent coverage of how the coronavirus has made America more reliant on billionaires and our exclusive polling on how ordinary Americans feel about these central characters in American society.