The public has been able to livestream the murder trial of ex-police officer Derek Chauvin since Monday, as searing video of George Floyd and wrenching testimony from distressed witnesses who watched him die filled the court room and the senses of millions, from Minneapolis to the rest of the world.
As the trial got fully under way, the prosecution showed the jury not only bystander video, with which many were familiar from but also a lot of never-before-seen footage showing various aspects of Floyd’s last afternoon, his arrest and his excruciating death as Chauvin kneeled on his neck last May.
The prosecution has made it clear they will rely on using video of Floyd’s killing as the key tactic in their effort to secure a rare murder conviction of a white police officer for killing a Black person in America.
“Believe your eyes,” prosecutor Jerry Blackwell told the jury during opening arguments on Monday.
For many Minnesotans and Black people across the country, in particular, watching the videos of George Floyd’s final moments, as he begged and pleaded for mercy under the pressure of Chauvin and two other officers pinning him down, has acutely retraumatized them.
The prosecution also warned that, contrary to the long eight minutes and 46 seconds that prosecutors originally said was the length of time Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s neck, further evidence has shown it was actually even longer – nine minutes and 29 seconds.
Some had watched footage at the time, but avoided it since; some had made a point of never watching it, perhaps until now.
“For many, the nine minutes and 29 second [video] was the first time, not just jurors, but many viewers had seen that video in its entirety,” civil rights attorney Areva Martin told the Guardian.
Abdulaziz Mohamed, the president-elect of the student body of the University of Minnesota, was in such disbelief when he first watched the original eight minutes and 46 seconds of bystander video last summer that he rewatched it multiple times and now is seeing it again at the trial.
“To say that it was traumatizing would be the understatement of the year. It’s unnerving. It just seems that we are being traumatized, over and over again,” he said.
“It has to get to a point where we are able to collectively recognize not only trauma, but work to fight against a system that upholds and creates that trauma for us constantly,” Mohamed added.
Chauvin denies the charges of murder and manslaughter and, as the defendant in his criminal trial, has been sitting in the courtroom all week in downtown Minneapolis, too, while footage and stills of him are being shown repeatedly.
Dr Bula Wayessa, assistant professor of African American and African studies at the University of Minnesota, believes that watching the graphic content from the courtroom is important because it gives a wider range of viewers the chance to see what the Black community has experienced, despite its disturbing content.
“I know the trauma will be with us for so many years to come and even for the generation to come,” he said.
Wayessa said, however, that he saw the fear and a hopelessness in his 12-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter after they saw the video while watching television.
He wasn’t emotionally ready to give any explanations, he said.
For Areva Martin, who has been a practicing attorney for over two decades, and is based in Los Angeles, she had to prepare herself to watch.
“I will be watching the trial from gavel to gavel. We will be watching those horrific moments, seconds and minutes when Chauvin is literally squeezing the life out of George. We are going to be watching that over and over again,” she said.
Martin has been watching, she said, both with her attorney hat on and through her Black woman lens.
She understands the trauma people endure when watching and rewatching the videos of Floyd’s death, she said.
“It was heart-wrenching for me as a mother, as a wife, as a sister, as an African American to watch it,” she said.
As the wife to her Black husband and the mother of her Black autistic son, Martin said she fears for the safety of the men in her life.
“For every individual watching, especially if you’re African American, you can’t help but believe that that could be you or your loved one,” she said.
Angi Porter, an attorney who lives in south Minneapolis where Floyd was killed, feels all too close to the events.
She grew up being educated in civil rights history, she said, with her family being involved with the NAACP civil rights organization.
She recalled seeing many pictures of lynching and the infamous images of Emmett Till in the pages of a magazine, and so pointed out it is not abnormal to be exposed to some of the gruesome, racially motivated killings of Black people, via various media outlets throughout history.
“It’s a common experience for Black children to be exposed to horrific images,” Porter said. “I think it is normal as a Black person to have this exposure but I wouldn’t say it’s any less traumatic each time.”
Porter has been watching the trial since jury selection began in early March and applauds the prosecution for sharing videos of Floyd’s death because not all of the jury members had seen the video.
“I, of course, watch that video and still feel my heart break each time,” Porter continued. “That could be my dad, my brother, my cousin, my friends because they are all Black men. That trauma doesn’t go away.”
While some choose to watch the trial or read about it, others would rather avoid the trauma.
“The thought of reliving the trauma of watching [Floyd] be killed over and over again … it’s really overwhelming to think about,” Victoria Millet, an associate in the equal opportunity and affirmative action office, also at the University of Minnesota, said.
“I really try to avoid videos of Black bodies being brutalized.”
She worries that traumatic videos will normalize and desensitize people to the deaths of Black bodies.
“We need this video evidence because I think it sheds light on the atrocities that are happening, but as a Black person, it’s so difficult to see,” said Millet, who lives five blocks away from where Floyd was killed.
Millet’s husband has experienced nightmares from various videos of Black people being killed by police, she said.
“As a Black man in America, it just cannot be healthy for him to walk through a world having those images burned into his head,” she said.
But Millet admitted she also feels a sense of guilt for not watching.
Meanwhile, Chauvin’s defense has been taking what some see as the route of exploiting racially charged tropes, emphasizing earlier how Floyd was under the influence of drugs, was found to have drugs in his system, and whose struggle upon being arrested justified restraint, however unpleasant that was to witness.
They intend to argue that it was the drugs and underlying health conditions that killed Floyd, despite the official autopsy concluding it was homicide.
Areva Martin said that such strategies have been long used when there is a white officer and a Black victim.
“The defense is you have an implicitly large Black male that is out of control because of drugs or alcohol and he is acting in such an erratic [fashion] that they must use extraordinary force to subdue him,” she said.
Millet briefly watched the first day of testimony and then turned the live stream off when the defense started to attack Floyd’s character.
“I thought that was really inappropriate,” she said.
She added: “It’s really shifting the focus about who the trial is about in a way that I don’t think would happen if it were a white victim,” she said.
Some observers expressed that what the world is now watching offers a sliver of insight into the experiences so many Black people have endured with police in America – and that the trial has the potential to hold a white officer accountable for a Black person’s death for the first time in Minnesota’s history.
“In my mind [Chauvin’s] trial is a referendum on policing in America,” Martin said. “To finally say that police officers are not above the law, that they will face the same punishment as everyday citizens.”