MINNEAPOLIS (CN) — The second week of testimony in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial started slowly on Monday morning with a lengthy series of motion hearings and the sober testimony of the doctor who pronounced George Floyd dead, but ramped up when Minneapolis’ chief of police took the stand and roundly condemned the former officer’s treatment of the deceased Black man.
Prosecutors walked Police Chief Medaria Arradondo through a lengthy discussion of his career with the Minneapolis Police Department and the department’s structure and policies before asking specifically about the night of May 25, 2020, when Floyd died after his arrest for spending a counterfeit $20 bill.
Arradondo, Minneapolis’ first Black police chief and a 32-year veteran of the department, fired Chauvin and the three other officers involved in Floyd’s deadly May 2020 arrest in the immediate aftermath of the incident and the protests that followed. The chief, commonly known as “Rondo” around Minneapolis, condemned Floyd’s death as a murder last June. Doing so in court would run afoul of rules restricting potentially prejudicial testimony, but he still had harsh words for the former officer Monday afternoon.
“Mr. George Floyd’s tragic death was not the result of a lack of training – the training was there. Chauvin knew what he was doing,” Arradondo said in a statement in June. “I agree with Attorney General Ellison: what happened to Mr. Floyd was murder.” Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office took over the prosecution of Chauvin early in June, adding second-degree murder to the list of charges against the former officer and charging three other officers involved in Floyd’s arrest with aiding and abetting.
In court, Arradondo was more detailed and more tempered. “Once Mr. Floyd had stopped resisting, and certainly once he was in distress and trying to verbalize that, that should’ve stopped,” he said.
He added that in the first few seconds of restraining Floyd, while officers were struggling to get him in and out of a squad car, their conduct could be considered reasonable. “But… to continue to apply that level of force to a person proned-out, handcuffed behind their back -- that in no way, shape or form is anything that is by policy, it is not part of our training, and it is certainly not part of our ethics and values,” he testified.
Arradondo, who first became an interim chief in 2017 and was appointed to the job permanently later that year, waxed philosophical before walking through his lengthy career in the Minneapolis Police Department with prompting from Schleicher.
“To serve with compassion, to me, means to understand and to authentically accept that we see our neighbor as ourselves,” he said, reflecting on the department’s motto, which reads “to protect with courage and serve with compassion.”
“We value one another,” the chief continued. "We see our community as necessary for our existence.”
He returned to that motif throughout Monday morning’s testimony.
“Of all the things that we do as police officers for the Minneapolis Police Department,” he said, “it is my firm belief that the one single incident we will be judged forever on is the use of force. So while it is important that our officers go home at the end of their shift, it’s also important that our community members can go home too.”
On cross-examination, Chauvin’s attorney Eric Nelson sought to poke holes and exceptions in Arradondo’s statements.
“Would you agree that all of the MPD policies related to the use of force, emergency medical response, emergency treatment-- all of these policies are situation dependent?” he asked.