that's exactly right and we see the same kind of misconduct highlighted in cases involving black suspects happening to white people as well. thinking of what happened to george floyd, there's a case that didn't get a lot of media attention that involves a man named tony in dallas, who was held in the prone position with a knee on his back or neck for more -- for maybe 13 minutes before he died. those officers were not prosecuted and i'm not sure what happened to any civil litigation in that case. you know, the idea that only black men in particular who are suffering from police misconduct is misguided. i think it skews the conversation c-span2. >> "washington journal" continues. host: next with us is elie

mystal, justice correspondent for "the nation," with us this morning to discuss the chauvin verdict. how are you this morning? guest: well, how are you? host: doing well. you wrote this, "the chauvin verdict shows the absolute minimum of justice." why do you refer to it that way? guest: look at how difficult it was for us to get this one cop convicted of this one murder. we needed a video that played uninterrupted for 10 minutes of a murder. we needed months of protest and years of activism to put the infrastructure in for the protest. we needed a democratic attorney general who brought and a team of prosecutors to bear. we need a three-week trial.

we needed 10 cops to testify against derek chauvin and needed in controversial medical evidence that chauvin was the factor that killed george floyd to get one cop and that's great, i'm happy, i'm happy that he was brought to justice and happy he's off the streets. i would have preferred that he was taken off the streets after one of the other 18 complaints was lodged against him for excessive violence, but find, -- fine, i'm glad to, but what about the next guy after that? the concept of justice is that it is repeatable and reliable. but that is not what we saw in the derek chauvin trial. we saw a moonshot, a one-off situation where multiple factors coalesced and combined to put us in the situation where we could get justice for george floyd and the others and the others and the others are still waiting

their turn and nothing we saw over the last three weeks gives me any hope that we are any closer to true police reform and accountability. host: in terms of in the courts, aside from the massive undertaking of infrastructure that you talked about, are there lessons learned in that process and the ultimate verdict for other departments and individuals across the country seeking justice in a police involved shooting like this? guest: there, there are. keith ellison, who helped put this together with me, he went after derek chauvin the way that people usually go after goldman sachs. this is the kind of legal firepower that prosecutors bring when they are prosecuting multibillion dollar companies, right? it was a 14 lawyer team. he brought in career prosecutors

and defense attorneys. i think a lot of people saw the amazing close by attorney blackwell. a defense attorney that was brought in specifically for his skills, his trial lawyer skills in the case. behind the scenes we have people like the former acting solicitor general, one of the most argument winners -- someone who has won the most arguments before the court. issues on appeal, it's a 14 lawyer dream team to get this one guy. the lesson here is that if you want to get a cup, you have got to go all out. you can't put this happened to be my attorney on the case. bringing everything to bear on police to be held accountable.

host: in the days after there were more police involved incidents in north carolina, spotsylvania, virginia. your reaction? guest: this proves the point, right? of police haven't changed, the police aren't fair, they are not changing their ways. we don't even count all the people who may have been brutalized or harassed, who may be have been arrested inappropriately. i have a friend on twitter whose neighbor was, was, inappropriately arrested this weekend. the reality is that the police have learned nothing from either the chauvin case or general calls for police reform in general. they are entrenched, they are retrenching.

they don't think that they are the problem. in fact, they are using all of their political firepower that they can to retard the progress of police reform and fighting against the laws that would make them more accountable and they happen to have an entire political party on their side. the george floyd justice in policing act is one avenue of reform, one possibility of reform and you can't find, you can't rub two republicans together who are going to agree that we need some of these changes desperately. so, i don't know that anything we have seen, despite the media attention, again, despite the years of protests and desperation to get some relief from police violence, i don't know that we have seen anything

that says the police are heating that call. host: we will talk a little bit more about those federal efforts, the george floyd policing act, which has passed in the house. we welcome your calls and comments. republicans, it's (202) 748-8001 . democrats, (202) 748-8000. s independent independent -- independents and others, (202) 748-8002. law enforcement and others, (202) 748-8003. i wanted to play a piece put together by "the new york times," the aftermath of the death of george floyd, here's a look at that. [video clip] >> the call is quickly upgraded to code-3, emergency medical assistance. >> hello? [indiscernible] >> by now, another bystander,

17-year-old darnella frazier is filming from a different angle. her footage shows that despite calls for medical help, chauvin keeps floyd pinned down for another seven minutes. we cannot see if the others are still upfront -- still applying pressure. >> what do you want? >> i can't breathe. i can't breathe. >> get up and get in the car. >> i will. i can't move. >> get up and get in the car. >> mama. mama. i can't. >> in the videos he can be heard telling officers that he can't breathe at least 15 times in three minutes. chauvin never takes his knee off of floyd, even as he goes

host: very familiar video with this verdict ever have been reached without that video? guest: no. straight up no. george flied is not the first person to have died after police encounter where the people on the scene told us that death was unnecessary and shouldn't have happened. most of the time people don't pleever the buy standers. i am talking about white people because black people in our communities have been trying to talk about this forever, i'm 42 so i can remember back to rodney king and shawn spell, you know there was a history here of this where black people have said have trade to tell you all how the police treat us in our own communities. it is white people who for the most part did not believe us. now with the advent of the camera phone there are more and more white people starting to

see what plaque people have been talking about this entire time. and yes it's only in the situation like this where the victim is so submissive he is so not a threat and the actions tick so -- is murdered happens over such a long period of time that we had for a moment a majority of white people all right this one cop he has to be held accountable. that nothing happens without that video. and then nothing happens without the months and months of protest. don't forget how important the protests were in bringing this man to justice because the protest not only made him get arrested and charged relatively quickly which i don't think happens without the protests but all that stuff they talk about, i don't know that happens without protest either. i don't know that the entire legal apparatus of the state of minnesota understands how

important it is to bring this cop to justice if we don't have months and months of activism during a pandemic. so it's none of this happens normally. and that's my problem. it should be normal, it should be a normal application of law and justice to hold accountable officers who murder. that should be normal and it's totally not. host: headline from "washington post." this past week the day after the announcement and the verdict the attorney general announcing that the justice department will open a probe of the minneapolis police and possibly other police departments. does that encourage you at all? >> ok, so it is important to have federal oversight of local police forces. i think one of the reasons why we have the problems that we do

with policing is that we don't have one police ssms, we don't even have 50 police systems, we have a bunch of localities and it's kind of doing what they want. so like your level of police treatment, just the standards under which the police operate are going to change would change for me if i drive six blocks north of my house versus if i drive six blocks south of my house. that's two different police districts for me and the third one is -- all those three districts are going to have different standards of what they can do to my body. so we definitely need federal oversight and these pattern and practice they're called investigations that have been open by the attorney general. that's one way to do it. i think that the weakness here is that we see that this is really attorney general specific, right? bill barr and jeff sessions

were about opening and practice investigations into local police forces. in fact jeff sessions ended the practice of doing pattern and practice investigations and refused to enforce the consent decrees, kind of the decisions made by previous pattern and practice investigation. so we can be sure that whatever joe biden, merit garland want to do now to bring mps to heal or at least put a spotlight on the policing practices the minnesota we can be pretty sure that the moment republicans are in power again all of those restrictions come off, all of those rea forms go away. again, one of our problems is the that we have one party who is not just not committed to police reform but actually against getting the police off our necks. host: call next to paul calling

from the u.k. watching this morning on the bmp bbc parliament channel. wveragetsdz the issue of c-span of course and my television. the question i want to z your guest is they -- [inaudible] guest: not even a little bit. the racism -- the racism is systemic. what do we mean by that. it means -- and this is a key point for white people to understand. it's not an issue of one cop or one individual harboring racist thoughts deep in their hearts and seak rhettly i hate black people. that's not what we're talking about. maybe some feel like that but most probably don't and it doesn't matter because the race

ysm is systematic into the system. it comes from buy ases like they see an african american and they assume the that african american is commiting a crime or is being threatening or is doing something untoward. they assume that as part of their kind of -- as when they wake up in the morning that's how they regard, that's how they scan african americans as potentially dangerous, where they scan white americans as probably ok like that's an impolicist factor but then it falls in on itself because you have issues when it comes to economics dirnses in exick opportunities that disproportionately affect african americans, the overpolicing of our communities is a huge thing. so like there are all these other factors that result in racist decisions, right? so it's not exactly -- i think shauven's almost a bad example because to me he seems to be

such an evil -- he has no empathy in him and i almost want to think that he literally is a bad apple. the thing that i'm more concerned about is that you've got so many cops who make these snap decisions. again we've seen it repeatedly since the verdict. cops making snap decisions about whether or not black and brown people are behaving correctly and shooting based on those snap decisions in situations where they wouldn't have shot where i don't believe they would have shot a white person. and that's getting at that problem is not something that i think is going to happen in my lifetime. what i think could happen are different standards on who this cop is going to shoot. so different standards across the board restricting who cops can shoot and why would result in less black deaths even

without changing some of the internal systemic racial factors. host: here in the u.s. bob in illinois good morning. caller: good morning. i have an observation to make and then i would like to ask a question. i live on the south suburb near chicago and there's over 900 shootings so far this year we're going to surpass a thousand in 2016 and 2017 we almost hit a thousand. everybody knows cook county, chicago have been governed over 75 years by democrats. it appears to me nobody seems to care about these young men in these inner cities. they just ravaged -- it's worse than afghanistan or iraq. any how my question is, i'm a follower of alandesh wits. i would like to ask your guest if he were that officer arriving on that scene and saw

a young lady with a knife about to plunge it into the other young lady what would he have done? thank you. guest: ok so let's start with this. chicago is not fallujaha. number two, it seems like we agree that overpolicing and police brootality and police violence does not actually do a lot to stop gun violence because we had this what i would call violent police force all this time and they haven't actually solved the gun problem that last caller alluded to. so what we're doing isn't going to work. i have an idea. let's go get the guns. let's go reform our gun laws so there are less guns on the streets. would the caller agree with that? because that would be more effective than having brutal police on the streets. number three his question about i think he was referring to mack ia bryant who was shot as the verdict was being released. this is a 15-year-old girl in

columbus, ohio body camera footage showed that she had a knife. what i want in that situation is for the officer not to hop out of his car guns blazing which is what he did. if you watch the body camera footage you don't see the officer assess the situation, you don't see him ask the woman to put down the knife. he gets out of the car with his guns drawn. first points it on an older man whose a jerk who i don't understand how the man didn't get arrested. he points the gun at the girl. he's standing scanning for the knife. you know from reports that he was told there was a knife. you can see the cop is scanning for the knife and has predetermined that when he sees the knife whoever has the knife is getting shot. and that's what i don't want. i promise you that if that 15-year-old girl had looked like britney spears or layton measter she wouldn't have been shot like that. he would have given her a second he would have said put

down your knife. there were three other cops on the scene. that cop was the last cop on the scene. there were three other people on the scene who weren't -- who did not see the need to shoot anybody. so when we're talking about -- i'm not talking about perfect victims all the time. george floyd i hate to put it was in many ways a perfect victim. again, he was smidssmissive he was crying out for help he was asking for his mother. what more do you want? george flied was the perfect victim. not every victim is going to be perfect. i'm not sheaing she acted perfectly. what i am saying is that black teenagers shouldn't be shot to debts and it shouldn't be too hard to get most people to agree that if there's anything the police can do to not shoot a black teenager should not do it. i would extend it to not shoot

a teenager. a person. the police should do it. but i can't get people to agree with me on that fundamental point so then they start going into all of these basically victim blaming arguments about how this person or that person in that situation or this situation probablyday serves to be shot to death with no trial no jury and no accountability. host: let's hear from mike, massachusetts. independent line. caller: good morning. i forget who this guest is but i listened the last time you were on and every word you say i am so happy that you're on here and i'm grateful. i'll try to go quick. i wrote this out from the top i think that the issue here is that law enforcement in this country is a good old boys club. that's for sure. we need federal body cams, we need federal external investigations. when these guys commit these

things yo want them to investigate themselves. the idea that's even possible is off the charts insanity. i don't know how anybody can defend that. these guys know it and they run the show in shop in their own houses. and i have so much adrenaline. my experience is that set up, i'm some white guy and i'm not impressed in any way but i've had my fair share of experience with these guys. from being pulled over and having them come in the car and literally rip the keys out of my transmission screaming at me for nothing other than a minor civil traffic violation to when i go to court and they lie to my face in front of the judge. when i go to court and the police chief actively ignores

all my letters for freedom of information act to get simple stuff like a police report so i have to go to court three times. and i'm not some criminal. i'm a six-figure salaried person up here and i -- those kind of were my old days but i've seen it. and i don't think these people are lying and the video camera evidence isn't lying and i have friends who i grew up with in cop families who are corrections facilities officers now and i know how they talk, i know how they view these people that have different skin colors than them that they joke about inspecting their body cavities you know. i know these people. host: we'll let you go there and hear from our guest

guest: thanks for your cal. i think there was two things that you said that i want to bring out. one is the need for better transparency through all of this. the police are notoriously opaque about their own procedures, about their own stats, about their own numbers. we need more transparency throughout the system. look, a cop who has multiple complaints on him about excessive force shouldn't be on the streets. true justice for george floyd would have been taking shaufen off the street before he killed anybody. and we could have done that because we saw in him a profile of a cop who was building his way up to murder. this -- there are a lot of cops this that situation. there are a lot of cops who should be on desk duty if they're on the force at all but the police are nor tort yussly

opaque. in new york like, they're really focused on bringing transparency to the police force, i think that's a huge issue number one. the second thing that mike kind of was speaking to is the culture of policing. and this kind of goes back to your u.k. caller, i don't see how that changes. i don't see how the culture of policing changes in my lifetime. so when you hear like arguments for defund the police or reorganize the funding of police, understand that's where that's coming from. understand that's coming from a position where people are saying you can't reform the culture here. right? they don't want reform, you can't force them to, you can't force them to think differently and behave differently so you have to pull their money and put people who don't think like that on noncriminal duty.

so one of my suggestions, i wrote about this, is that we take armed cops off of traffic duty because they clearly can't handle it. too many violent and deadly encounters start with a broken taillight missed turn signal expired license plate. that's not appropriate for the police. they should lose those privileges. they've proven they can't handle it. instead we need unarmed officers unarm officials handing out minor traffic offenses or as i've argued we could let the robots do it. host: how do you think that culture persists across departments that are certainly multiracial? guest: the race of a cop is cop, right? i don't have a lot of faith or -- yob what the word is -- that

just by putting officers of color on the force you are getting a better officer, a better quality officer, a less racist officer. in my personal experience and in the data i haven't seen it. something about being a cop that makes you think that you can be casual with with people's lives and be casual with people's rights. i understand that you can't have all cops go through some legal training although i don't see why not, i understand that you can't have all cops go through constitutional law training, but the culture is not one of respecting constitutional protections, and that goes across race. so i've been stopped by white cops and black cops and latino cops and i never -- all i see is cop and all they see is black guy. i never feel like because i got stopped from a black cop i'm

less likely to die. no i assume that going to cop and that i have no defense once i'm stopped but my only hope is to be very scared and move very slowly and comply comply comply as they say. i turn on the radio so my classical music station i try to be model minority dude when i pull over regardless of the race of the cop. host: let's go to pennsylvania, good morning. caller: i just want to say that i think you're being a little hard on the police. and maybe if the police want to do something about it they just stop going when somebody is going to be killed and go after . clean up the mess. don't help anybody. that's what you're saying. guest: one, i love this argument.

it's always like if it's going to be hard i'm going too take my ball and go home. that the police are doing us a favor by doing their job that they're paid for out of taxpayer dollars. and we make it too hard from them well then they're not going to help. fine. if you're a cop who is so unsure of how to go into a community of color and not kill anybody by all means stay your behind home. that's what i want. so absolutely if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen where you are burning people. number one. number two, quite frankly i'm not saying that the police have an easy job. it's a hard job. they should have money and training and funding to do their hard job. but they have to do it well. in no other profession is the fact that the job is hard an excuse for doing the job poorly. all right? a surgeon cannot say heart

surgery. no. if you're a heart surgeon you've got to successfully complete heart surgery. and if you fail 20% of the time you'll get to be a heart surgeon. you're fire fighter you can't show up and throw gasoline on it and be i thought it was water. that's not acceptable. the cop who pulled the tazer who pulled the gun and thought it was a tazer that's not an acceptable solution. we don't accept it from anybody else except cops and that's unacceptable to me. host: john next up in parkville, maryland. good morning. caller: good morning. i want to be a little more specific on the conversation that just occurred with your guest because i do think it's important. so i have a question for your guest. how would you define the duty of a police officer?

guest: i think about this constitutionally so i what -- caller: well use the analogy of a heart surgeon. that's why i want to be more specific. a heart surgeon has a duty to practice up to a standard of care. and if something goes wrong and yet he practiced up to the standard of care he is effectively immune from the consequences. if you are a doctor and you see evidence of child abuse you are duty bound to report that. if you do so and you are wrong, you are immune from subsequent action against you. so my question is i think we spend a lot of time on the authority of police officers which i agree is quite broad and but we spend not much time on trying to define what is the duty of a police officer. i think the woman before me was getting to that point a little

inartfully which is how do you -- so i'm going to ask you the question directly how do you define the duty of a police officer? guest: i think i see where you're going. first let me -- look i know a gang of malcolm x lawyers who would agree. doctors can be sued if they make tiss takes. police officers can't because they have qualified immunity. literally the police officers have a legal different standard of when you can sue them for mistake than you do a doctor which is one thing that we should reform. at a general level i think you want me to say that the duty of an office ser to protect and serve the community and i don't have a problem with that as the kind of avenger duty of captain protect and serve. ok, fine that's what they're supposed to do. what those duties are bound by is the u.s. constitution. so the police officer is not

like a private actor they are an agent of the state and as such they must be bound within constitutional limits. so the fourth amendment of the constitution says that we are protected from unreasonable search and seizure. now we've determined seizure to mean shooting people and searches are somewhat self-evident but we haven't defined unreasonable. right now the legal standard is that reasonable is in the eye of the cop. not the reasonable person, not me not the victim not the citizen not the mayor not the governor but reasonableness is defined in the eyes of another cop on the scene. and that has done to me that has done like 90% of the damage because it takes the cop outside of the constitutional box that they're supposed to stay in and lets them kind of act on their own and lets them act based on their own biases fears experience whatever you want to call it. some of that experience is good some is racist some of that

bias is good gut they have a good gut some of that is prejudice. we don't want cops acting on their own outside of constitutional restriction because they are agents of the state. the cop and that's the thing i think i always remember in these mass shootings, in these police shooting situations and i hope some i don't have you do too. that cop represents us. i funded the kneeling on george floyd in that way. these cops are our voice on the streets and when they kill that's on all of us. they must be bound by the constitution, they must be brought to heal within a box of reasonable use of force. and too often too many times we don't see that. host: north carolina, good morning. caller: good morning.

hey, you know i love you to death. i have a couple of things to say. these people they didn't have anything to say when the people ran up in the capital they were hollering about they love cops. but yet that he beat them and ran over top of the capitol. they beat the cops. you didn't hear none of these pink people saying oh blue lives matter. it was all about the sin insurrection. i want to know why that cop about the little 16-year-old girl he jumped out of the car didn't assess the situation seen the knife and shot that little girl. nothing was said before the cop got there. how many of those girls were fighting that one girl with the knife? and that grown man at least 180

pounds kicked that dead girl's head twice. i see why she had a knife. you've got two or more girls on her, a grown man and this cop jumps out of the car and shoots this girl. host: you commented on that shooting in columbus ohio the other day. the day of the verdict. guest: like i said, what i want in that situation is for the cop to assess the situation. not come out of the car guns blazing. he shot that girl within 20 seconds. that's too quick. i wanted him to hesitate. i wanted him to hesitate and figure out what was going on. there were other cops on the scene. yes, it's fast moving but again if that's your job if that's your job you have to do it at a higher qualty. but i want to go back to what the caller said about the insurrection. if you look at what happened on the capitol insurrection one

person was shot by law enforcement and climbing through the window she got shot. one of the things that we see there is a restraint by law enforcement even in the midst of an insurrection. look at how what ashley bab ott was doing at the time where she was tragically killed versus what we see black people doing at the time that they were tragically killed number one. number two, one shot. that officer fired one shot at that woman. unfortunately, it killed her. cops need to be able to justify every single shot they fire. if we go back to michael brown if you look at the michael brown situation, the man shot six times by darren wilson in missouri five years ago, we saw that darren wilson shot him -- the cop shot him six times and forensics say it's the sixth

shot that killed him. so arguably michael brown would have been alive if darren wilson had been satisfied with four shots. this cop that we saw in columbus shot the 16-year-old four times. we don't know which shot killed her but we know he shot four times. maybe he could have gotten awe with shooting once. maybe he could have shot a warning shot. maybe he could have done something other than plug her with four bullets. maybe she could have survived one. that's the flip in mentality that we need to make in this country. the cops are -- the feeling is that the cops are looking for an excuse for reason for situation where it's ok to open fire. it should never be ok to open fire. this is not war. again, we are not in fallujaha. it should never be ok to open fire. one shot should really do all

that you are trying to do. and if you have to be able to jussfiss that one shot and take a second one, i need to hear -- the arch angel gabriel needs to come down and explain why you need two or three or four or six. host: brad, minnesota. caller: good morning. i think that your guest is just kind of off the wall in a race -- you know tell me about george floyd and that's wrong on george floyd's -- he took no responsibility, zero. you know what? i kind of wish that this gentleman here it would have been his wife or his daughter that got pistol whipped by old george floyd while they were pregnant and went to the clink for it. but they don't ever talk about his past george floyd's past. what's even worse is that you're using color in here.

and that's if you really want to look -- guest: why are we looking at the past of the victim? what george floyd doing anything wrong at the time where he was choked out? caller: absolutely. guest: which minute was george floyd commiting this crime that caused him to die during his murder? was he still commiting crimes? caller: george floyd did not listen. resisting arrest. guest: that's a capital offense only for black people. it's a capital offense only for black people. only black people are killed for not listening. host: justice correspondent for the nation magazine has always thanks for joining us south ind.

endeavor connected to the international space station for the second time.