Editorial: After so many police outrages, Floyd killing a further indictment of attitudes on race

With what confidence Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneels on the neck of George Floyd, long after the handcuffed man has stopped moving, stopped pleading for his life. With what confidence Chauvin stares into the cellphone cameras video recording Floyd's suffering - and then silence. With what confidence, what nonchalance, what sneering disregard, he ignores minute after minute after minute of earnest pleas from witnesses for Floyd's life.

All while three fellow officers stand by and watch, equally distant, equally unmoved by either the unresponsive body face down in the street or the bystanders begging and clamoring for mercy, for human decency, toward a man they do not know.

How can such a horror continue to happen in an American city today?

How can one police officer, let alone four, coldly brutalize a subdued prisoner in broad daylight with no apparent concern for their actions or the predictable aftermath?

There is in our country a great need to understand the stresses and challenges police face on the street. There is a need for conversations and understanding of a difficult and often disagreeable job.

But anyone who watches the casual indifference of Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd outside the Cub Foods store must acknowledge that those conversations cannot take place meaningfully so long as police departments tolerate an environment in which officers feel justified, if not empowered, to abuse the powers society gives them.

Do all police departments tolerate such an environment? No doubt most strive not to. Across the country, departments are working harder to hire more broadly, improve training and drum out bad actors. Even the Minneapolis Police Department insists it does not foster such misbehavior. The four officers were fired. Chauvin has been arrested and charged with murder.

And yet this happened.

Another unarmed, subdued, nonthreatening black man killed by a white police officer in an aching litany that just will not go away.

Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Freddie Gray. Alton Sterling. Terrence Crutcher. Walter Scott. Eric Harris. Tamir Rice, age 12. The list goes on. And, as if to add punctuation to the apparent deafness on this crisis, it includes two other names in or near Minneapolis itself - Jamar Clark and Philandro Castile.

The convulsions in Minneapolis following Floyd's death are deplorable. Uncontrolled street violence from which even a police station is not secure will not instill the conversations that need to happen, nor train the focus of those conversations where it needs to be trained - on the preparation and behavior of police, the management of police departments and, perhaps above all, the distinctions of race in our society at large that even after so many years of upheaval and advance still show an unacceptable and inexplicable disregard for minorities - black men, in particular.

But they will surely continue to occur until those conversations bear fruit. The issue here is not how much we tolerate misbehavior following an outrage. The issue is what we are going to do about the outrage.

The helpless pleas of George Floyd and the callous stare of Derek Chauvin expose the inadequacy of our resolve to answer that question.