On Monday, MN police officer Derek Chauvin was caught on video kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, while Floyd repeatedly complained he couldn’t breathe. Floyd died after the incident.
In 2006 Amy Klobuchar, then a Hennepin County district attorney failed to file charges against Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin for multiple violent incidents he was allegedly involved in.
The Guardian reports – Chauvin, who joined the force in 2001, had already been involved in several incidents, according to a database by Minneapolis’ Communities United Against Police Brutality.
Chauvin was one of five officers who were placed on leave after they shot and wounded an indigenous man in 2011, the Daily Beast reported. Later that year, officers had been responding to a domestic violence call, and Chauvin claimed that the man reached for his gun. The man was shot (not by Chauvin, but by a different officer) and wounded. Authorities later determined that the officers had acted “appropriately”.
Although Klobuchar was the Hennepin county attorney at the time of an October 2006 police shooting involving Chauvin, she did not prosecute and instead the case went to a grand jury that declined to charge the officers with wrongdoing in 2008.
According to the Daily Beast – Chauvin received 10 complaints about his conduct during a 19-year career with city law enforcement before he was fired Tuesday over his role in Floyd’s death. Ira Toles, a Minneapolis resident, told The Daily Beast Chauvin was the same officer who “tried to kill me” during a domestic violence call in 2008. Chauvin shot Toles and left a permanent hole in his stomach.
Yahoo News reports – Ex-Minneapolis police officer Derick Chauvin saw at least 10 conduct complaints during his 19-year tenure before he was fired Tuesday, according to a database that documents complaints against police. In particular, he was involved in the shooting death of a man who had stabbed other people before attacking police, as well as some other undisclosed complaints. Klobuchar did not prosecute Chauvin and other officers involved for the first death, which occurred in October 2006 while she was running for Senate. The case was under investigation when Klobuchar took office in the Senate in Jan. 2007, and later went to a grand jury, which declined to charge the officers. Chauvin was later placed on leave when he and other officers shot and wounded a Native American man in 2011.
As The Washington Post noted in March, Klobuchar “declined to bring charges in more than two dozen cases in which people were killed in encounters with police” as Hennepin County attorney. Instead, she “aggressively prosecuted smaller offenses” that “have been criticized for their disproportionate effect on poor and minority communities,” the Post continues.
The former Democrat presidential candidate potential VP pick for Biden, Senator Amy Klobuchar is going to have a very difficult time explaining her way out of this one, especially while journalists are doing everything in their power to tie Floyd’s death to President Trump, in a city that’s been run by radical Democrats for decades.
