He Fired the Cops Who Murdered George Floyd. This Is His Story

Medaria Rondo Arradondo, Word in Black

In an excerpt from his new book, Chief Medaria “Rondo” Arradondo shares why he knows police reform is necessary and possible.

Any person who wears a uniform and badge in any police department in this country should know the history of this profession. My uncle Darren was certainly aware of it in 1992 when he refused to get into a squad car, by himself, with the white officer who had just called him the N-word. We don’t have to reach back to our great-grandparents’ era to find incidents of police killings of Black people that sparked outrage. In our lifetimes, many incidents have affirmed the deep-rooted distrust that some Black people in our country have toward the policing profession, whether or not an officer’s use of deadly force was deemed justified by the courts. George Floyd was preceded by Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and others, nationally.

His death was preceded by Philando Castile, Jamar Clark, and others, in Minnesota. Not only did Derek Chauvin crush George Floyd under his knee for more than nine minutes, three other officers at the scene failed to stop him.

It’s also true that there are examples of police officers who protected Black students during school desegregation nationally or, in Minneapolis, protected Arthur and Edith Lee from a white mob just eleven years after the lynchings in Duluth and some thirty years before the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. History is layered and multifaceted. It does not always supply easy answers, but it is imperative that we learn from it. As a nation, we must be willing to have difficult conversations about the dynamics of race and policing. 

Read more to understand how this is impacting history.

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