Indeed, racial tensions – primarily the riots that tore his adopted hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, apart after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 – were of great importance, Biden said, in shaping his understanding of racial inequality, law enforcement and the value of public service.
Until now it hasn’t been a straight line, not for Biden himself and certainly not for racial advancement. As a senator, Biden set himself up as a Democrat who was tough on crime, leading the kind of legislative initiatives that activists now say the police felt so encouraged in the first place.
Until recently, Biden refused to distance himself from that attitude. After all, it was politically useful to him. When a New York City police officer was shot and murdered in 2014, it was Biden, not his boss Barack Obama, who was sent to attend the funeral.
The killer’s bullet, Biden told mourners in Queens, the target of agents, the city and “hit the soul of the entire nation,” he said, building on his relationship with law enforcement officers and his own family’s experience with grief.
Those in Biden’s job say it is his ability to walk among that crowd – to speak their language – that now allows him to be such an effective voice for racial justice. His motives are not questioned as they would be for any other Democrat. His involvement will not ignite tensions like Obama’s during his presidency. When Obama issued a statement following Michael Brown’s verdict, he pointed out that “there are good people on all sides of this debate … who aren’t just interested in overriding best practices.”
During the 2020 campaign, Biden did not try to level the sides. He tried to use the image of a politician angry about the country’s failure to move forward. His launch pad was Donald Trump’s way of handling the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. But it was Floyd’s death that eventually dominated the campaign conversation and sparked a global police accountability movement.
As the contrast with Trump became clearer – and less than 24 hours after police used tear gas to clear a park so Trump could stand outside St. John’s Church and hold up a Bible – Biden insisted a groundbreaking address in Philadelphia, where he denounced systemic racism and begged Americans to look in the mirror: is this who we are? Is this who we want to be? ” he asked.
He called on Congress to pay a deposit for the “work of a generation” to reduce police violence, fend off the police, and take weapons of war from departments. “It is time to pass legislation that will give real meaning to our constitutional promise of legal protection under the law,” Biden said in Philadelphia, where Obama delivered his own grand speech on race in 2008.
Prior to the speech, Biden met with the mayors of major cities and told them he believes the “blinders have been removed.” “I think this tidal wave is moving,” Biden said.
“I realize we have to do something big, we can do it and everyone will benefit.”
It opened him up to the attacks from Republicans he’d wanted to avoid years earlier while working on crime bills. Some in his own party could not be satisfied either, who wondered how reformed he could actually be if his campaign proposal called for an increase in police funding.
All of that culminated on Tuesday when the jury, reaching a verdict after more than 10 hours of deliberation over two days, found Chauvin guilty of all three counts of second degree unintentional murder, third degree murder, and second degree manslaughter. .
Both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris watched the verdict in the White House’s private dining room along with aides, officials said. The day before, the president had called the Floyd family to say he was praying for them and hoping for a favorable outcome. After the guilty verdicts were passed, he and Harris called again, this time promising they would fight for the passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the criminal justice reform law passed in the House, but not in the Senate.
It’s a promise Biden has made before, but one he’s hard to keep. The White House was focused on other priorities, and Biden recently set aside an important part of its summer promises when the White House confirmed it would not go ahead with organizing its long-planned police control panel.
“Nothing will make it all better, but at least now there is some justice,” Biden said on the phone with the family, of which their lawyer posted a video to Twitter. “We will stick with it until we do it,” he said of the reforms.
The conversation lasted less than four minutes. But it was a unique moment in US history – a president openly guilty of an act of collective relief of an outcome in the criminal justice system.
David Litt, a speech writer for Obama, recalled how his old boss triggered a national incident 12 years ago when he shouted the stupidity of a police officer who arrested a Harvard professor at that professor’s house.
“It’s easy to forget that we were such a different country on these issues in 2009,” Litt said of the infamous Henry Louis Gates incident. And now even conservatives who disagree on today’s verdict must most of them recognize that there is at least one problem. The general perception of how most Americans view these issues has changed completely. ”
It has also changed for Biden. When he went to the cameras hours after the verdict, the president stressed the need for action and called on Americans not to forget Floyd’s last words: “I can’t breathe.”
“This could be a moment of significant change,” he said.
The president pointed out the number of factors – someone to record the murder, a nearly 10-minute video, including police officers testifying against one of their own – that were needed to reach a decision that he said was “ far too much. a lot ‘was. special. “
“To so many people, it seems like a unique and extraordinary convergence of factors was needed … it seems that it was all necessary to give the judiciary a just, just basic accountability,” he said.