A case rests, a city does not: Derek Chauvin’s trial

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Lots of China's children live out their youth separated from one or both of their parents as workers have flooded out of villages and into urban centers. We examine the costs and the risks to those hundred million young people. And the consistent flavors of your favorite foods and drinks are guaranteed by highly trained human tasters. It's a slow going job, so engineers are trying to short circuit it by developing electronic tongues that can do the work automatically. But first.

All rise for the jury.

Lawyers made their closing arguments yesterday in the case against Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer.

You can believe your eyes, ladies and gentlemen.

It was what you thought it was. It was what you saw. It was homicide. We have to look at the cause.

Of death to determine. Did Mr. Floyd die exclusively of asphyxia or were there other contributing factors?

Mr. Chauvin's involvement in the death of George Floyd sparked what became a series of global protests against racial violence last summer. Minneapolis remains on edge in large part because of the killing a week ago of Dante Wright, a 20 year old black man, by the city's police. That renewed fury has led to nightly protests.

Say his name.

Dante White.

Say his name.

The sheriff's Office has declared this assembly.

Unlawful under the laws of the state of Minnesota. Ahead of the Chauvin verdict, Minnesota Governor Tim Walls declared a preemptive state of emergency. We cannot allow civil unrest to descend into chaos.

But we also must understand very clearly if we don't listen those communities in pain and those people on the streets, many of whom were arrested for speaking a fundamental truth that we must change.

Or we will be right back here again. George Floyd has become emblematic of a far wider racial justice movement. For many in the Midwest and beyond, the verdict in the case against Derek Chauvin will signal how that movement is progressing.

So the trial of Derek Chauvin has run over the past three weeks.

Adam Roberts is our Midwest correspondent.

It's been a strange scene. Of course, the pandemic is still on. So we've seen lawyers and the judge and the defendant himself wearing face masks and sitting behind plastic screens. We did see Derek Chovan during this case, but we did not hear from him. Have you made a decision today whether you intend to testify or whether you intend to invoke your Fifth Amendment privilege?

I will invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege today.

This has all played out against the backdrop of tension both outside the court, in the streets of Minneapolis, and more widely across America. There's tension because the police in various places have continued to kill young black men.

And what did we hear from the prosecution?

The prosecution lawyers set out a fairly straightforward case, and they claimed that Mr. Chauvin had used excessive and deadly force with no justification. That he put his knees upon his.

Neck and his back, grinding and crushing him until the very breath. No, ladies and gentlemen, until the very life were squeezed out of him.

We saw video footage, both that taken from bystanders and from police body cameras, of what happened on the day that George Floyd died.

Y' all hear me?

Don't do me like that, man. Please. Hard. We can talk.

I am claustrophobic. I'm here working with me. That included, of course, the final words of George Floyd, who can be repeatedly heard to say that he can't breathe and to tell his family that he loves them.

What other moments in the trial stood out for you?

I think the key moment of this trial was the time when the Minneapolis police chief, Medaria Arredondo, testified that his former officer, Derek Chauvin, should have halted his use of force in restraining George Floyd. When it became obvious that Mr. Floyd had stopped resisting.

To continue to apply that level of force to a person proned out, handcuffed behind their back, that in no Way, shape or form is. Anything that is by policy is not part of our training and it is certainly not part of our ethics or our values.

And the prosecution ended its case by calling Philanese Floyd, who described growing up with his older brother and their three other siblings in a housing project in Houston.

It was low income poverty, so we.

Stayed with each other all the time.

Me and George, we grew up together.

Playing video games, how they played video games, how they dreamed about basketball.

George had lines on the wall because.

He will always measure with his height.

Trying to see how tall he is, because he wanted to be taller all the time.

Because this testimony was allowed under a Minnesota doctrine that lets loved ones reminisce to the jury about a crime victim. This is called the spark of life testimony and it's a reminder that we're talking about a case in which a man lost his life.

And what about the defence? How did they make their case?

It's generally felt that it was a weak defence. Mr. Chovan's attorney, Eric Nelson, tried to make the case that Mr. Chovan had done merely what was expected of him as a police officer.

And you will learn that Derek Chauvin.

Did exactly what he had been trained to do over the course of his 19 year career. The defense challenged the prosecution's assertion of the cause of his death, called their own medical expert to the stand. Dr. David Fowler, who was Maryland's chief medical examiner until 2019, testified that Floyd's death was the result of heart disease that apparently made his heart beat erratically.

And let's talk about where this may go now.

So the jury began deliberation on Monday. They've got to consider three different second degree murder, third degree murder or manslaughter. Now, I think if the only conviction were for the lesser charge for manslaughter, that would definitely not placate Mr. Floyd's family and it would surely upset a great number of Black Lives Matter activists and others who would feel that justice had not been done.

And in your view, what's the potential for unrest if that, if that happens.

If there were no conviction on a serious charge for. Mr. Chairman, I think we should brace ourselves for an angry public response. Not only in Minnesota, the National Guard has been called out. I'm speaking to you from Chicago, where the Governor of Illinois has called out the National Guard for this city as well, because there's a widespread sense that tensions have built up here in Chicago. We had the footage released recently of a policeman shooting dead a 13 year old boy, Adam Toledo, the boy was shown in video footage to have been unarmed at the moment of his death. And while the trial was ongoing in Minnesota itself, we had the case of a policewoman shooting dead a black man as he was driving his car. Dwante Wright, she said it was a terrible mistake. She tried to zap him with a Taser and accidentally shot him dead with a gun.

And as for the Chauvin case, what significance do you think a guilty verdict would have?

I think if there were a guilty verdict for a more serious charge such as second or third degree murder, we could hope that there are some reasons to be positive about the American justice system. The combination of there being more footage or video footage of how the police behave. With more prosecutions of police these days, it's far more common now than it was even five or 10 years ago to see the police in court and having to answer for their actions. Those two things together could possibly lead to improved behavior by the police on the back of better training. And so we could dare to hope that this trial becomes a precedent for better behavior in future.

Thanks very much for your time, Adam.

Thank you, Jason.

In the past 40 years, China has experienced the largest wave of internal migration in history. 300 million people have relocated to cities. Often they're workers moving for factory jobs and unable to bring their children with them. Close to 100 million kids, more than one in three in China, have experienced the prolonged absence of at least one parent that profoundly affects children's relationships and development and leaves them at risk of often serious abuse.

The Zhao family is from Leyun village which is in Sichuan Province. It's a pretty long train bus ride and walk up to their mountain village from the provincial capital Chengdu.

Stephanie Studer is a China correspondent for the Economist. She's been recently reporting on the fate of these so called left behind children.

When I was in the village, I met the matriarch of the family, 57 year old grandma Zhao, who is a bean farmer. She spoke to me about her granddaughter who she's taking care of single handedly because both of her parents are off working in Ningbo, a coastal city which is about 1500 kilometers away and indeed haven't seen her for probably much more than about 30 days. All told, she's now six years old. This is a pretty common experience in China. There are 31 million children like Lin who have been separated from both of their parents for extended periods of time.

And why is that so common?

Well, in more than nine out of 10 cases, the principal reason is migration. Most of these Parents are from villages and there are few economic opportunities for them there. And the other big impediment is a system of household registration in China, which is called hukou, and this determines where you can access government funded services such as healthcare and schooling. If your hukou is a rural one, because you were born in a village, then it will be very difficult for you to access similar services in a city. And so for parents, the decision is basically to leave the children behind so that they can go to local school and they earn their higher paid wage.

In coastal towns, which in turn, I guess, is not great for the kids.

Yes, for the children who are left in the care of relatives, often a grandparent, it can be very hard on them. Taking the example of Lin, I heard from her grandmother that in the early days, she was constantly calling for her parents. She missed them an awful lot. The grandmother told me that basically, you know, after a while, those pleas faded. And now when the parents ring to speak to her, she won't take the phone off her grandmother. And when they come back on those rare visits, she doesn't want them to touch her or hug her. And there are new traumas that present themselves as the child grows older. There are surveys that have been run on an annual basis by an NGO based in Beijing that show that in 2019, nine in 10 left behind children said they had suffered from some form of emotional abuse. Six in 10 reported that they had been physically harmed. And shockingly, the surveyors found that almost one in three had been sexually abused.

And as these data come out and these surveys are published, what do the wider public make of them?

There has been a lot of concern and hand wringing in China over the past few years about the plight of these Left behind children. The public is becoming increasingly aware of some of the horrors that they face. And there were two reports in 2015 that caused a national outcry. Four siblings killed themselves by drinking pesticide in Guizhou, one of China's poorest provinces. And then just a few months later, two other siblings nearby were murdered by distant relatives who had been raping the sister, who was a disabled 15 year old. And very quickly after that, within six months, the government published guidelines to protect these Left behind children. Among the policies that stood out was one that called for their numbers to be reduced significantly by the end of last year, and another encouraging local institutions like hospitals and schools to do a better job of reporting any abuse of Left behind children and for villages to monitor their guardianship arrangements. The central government now has a database where it says it has registered many left behind children and it bases that on records that villages must now provide.

But in a sense, that's just accounting for them. Right. They're just numbers in a spreadsheet. What's being done to help these kids?

Well, when I travelled to Loyun village, I wanted to find out more about a scheme called Keep the Children Company, which is being rolled out by the Communist Youth League in the province. And Luyun was one of the first villagers to introduce the scheme in 2015. And the idea is to set up a children's home, which is usually an extra room and a school and a library somewhere where they can do their homework and play chess, meet other children, and to designate mothers in the village to whom children can turn for emotional support or in times of need. This sort of mirrors a broader plan by the central government to ensure that there are villagers who are trained as what they call child welfare directors, who are given the basic tools of a social worker.

And so, on balance, would you say that things are getting better for all these left behind children?

Well, a few things have changed recently, one being the impact of COVID 19. That has actually sent a lot of parents back to their villages. And so for a lot of children, including half of those in Lune, they've now been reunited with their parents for more or less a year. And I did hear that now younger parents are choosing, rather than going to these far flung coastal factory towns, to stay closer to home because there are more job opportunities for them closer to their ancestral villages. And although a lot of left behind children don't get to see their parents more than once or perhaps twice a year, they do now video chat with them regularly. So communication with parents has changed rapidly thanks to technology.

Stephanie, thanks very much for joining us.

Nice speaking to you, Jason.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show notes. Sebastian Michaelis is the head of tea tasting at Tetley, one of Britain's biggest tea makers. His taste buds are so valuable they've been insured for a million pounds. Our job as a taster and blenders of tea is to deliver a uniform product to our consumers so that they know that they're going to have the same experience they had last time and not the dip in quality or anything like that. Mr. Michaelis is vital in ensuring that your tea tastes right and consistent. He understands the aromatic properties of a tea leaf better than almost Anyone in the world. During the high season, when we get.

Loads of teas coming through, you probably taste 200, 250 teeth in a day, something like that.

The question is whether that understanding can be digitized, automated, that is, whether Mr. Michaelis and his fellow experts could be replaced by an electronic tongue.

Taste testing is a pretty unique skill.

Barclay Bram writes for 1843, the economist's sister magazine.

Michaelis has trained for many years to be able to discern very subtle differences in flavor between different batches of tea. For Tetley's, this is very important because tea as an agricultural product is always changing. But Tetley's needs the flavors to always be the same.

So you're speaking of this as a matter of training rather than an innate ability to make these discernments?

Yeah. When I spoke to Michaelis, he said he was good at tasting things, he had an affinity for tea, but he would not consider himself to be a supertaster. It's just that they cultivated this ability over years, and you learn how to arrive at this trained consensus over what is and isn't the appropriate flavor.

So sort of implicit in all of this is the sense that there is this consensus that it is a shared thing. There isn't an absolute. I mean, what is science saying about putting numbers to these flavors?

Well, this is the really difficult thing, even for scientists, which is flavour is the top level of a hierarchy of various elements. So when we say that something has a flavour, it's actually a compound of the texture, the temperature, the smell. But then there is also this entirely subjective realm of memory and association. And because it is such a complex realm, there's a big financial incentive for companies to try and digitize flavors.

So how to go about doing that, digitizing flavors?

So there's a biotech company in Silicon Valley called Aromix, and they are trying to clone the sensors that we have in our brain so that they would be able to then build out a proper reading of exactly which sensor is being fired, at which moment when it is exposed to the chemicals in certain foods or beverages. And with this quantifiable matrix, they believe that you will be able to do the work that Michaelis is doing extremely precisely.

So is the ultimate goal then to essentially create a robot taster that does the same job of these human tasters?

Well, if you think about it from the perspective of these companies, if you had a very quantifiable spectrum, you would be able to test products in vast quantities extremely quickly, and you would be able to create flavor combinations that maybe don't exist in the natural world currently. And then the potential is endless. We could create lettuce leaves that taste like beef burgers. We could create any product that tasted like anything else. Or we could create flavors that don't exist today that we cannot even conceive.

But the question still remains whether the virtual brain sensor data actually equates to human taste. Whether a robot, if you like, could actually taste in the way that humans do.

Exactly. It's definitely true that Aramix's product already has some very interesting applications. It's already being used by a very large lemonade brand to assess whether or not the lemons coming into their factories have gone off. And inevitably, as the years go on and the technology becomes more and more nuanced, there will be ever more use cases. But whether you will ever be able to replace a Michaelis, that depends on our belief in the subjective realm and how important we believe associations like memory are to our perception of flavor. And so at the moment, it still remains to be really the. The last ephemeral thing in the digital age.

Barclay, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and see you back here tomorrow. Sam.