Derek Chauvin: Officer who murdered George Floyd pleads not guilty in 2017 case of beating Black teen

The former officer has a long record of use of force complaints

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, has pleaded not guilty to using excessive force against another Black person in an unrelated case from 2017. The incident has striking similarities to the killing of Mr Floyd – only this case involves a teenager.

On Thursday, the former officer, who is currently being held in the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Oak Park Heights after being convicted on multiple charges in the Floyd case in April, denied he’d gone overboard during the 2017 arrest of the youth.

The incident began when two officers were called to respond to a domestic incident, where a mother claimed her children had hit her, while her children, including the 14-year-old Black boy at the centre of the case, claimed she was drunk and had assaulted them.

According to a police report Mr Chauvin filed after the arrest, the boy, described as 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, “displayed active resistance to efforts to take him into custody" by "flailing his arms around”, causing the officer to deliver “a few strikes to [the juvenile male] to impact his shoulders and hopefully allow control to be obtained”.

During the Floyd trial, state prosecutors attempted to have this 2017 incident brought into the case as evidence of Chauvin’s past alleged misconduct, but a judge denied their request.

In their filings, the prosecutors said that body camera videos of the 2017 arrest, which haven’t been released, "show a far more violent and forceful treatment of this child than Chauvin describes in his report. The videos show Chauvin’s use of unreasonable force towards this child and complete disdain for his well-being."

They said officers began beating the child seconds after they commanded him to stand up and leave his room.

"Two seconds later, Chauvin grabbed the child’s throat and hit him again in the head with his flashlight," they wrote in court filings. "The child cried out that they were hurting him, and to stop, and called out ‘mom.’"George Floyd famously called out for his mother when Chauvin and three other Minneapolis police officers pinned him to the ground by his neck and chest for more than nine minutes as he cried he couldn’t breathe.

In another similarity with the Floyd case, the indictment against Chauvin says he pinned the boy to the ground, using his body weight to press his “knee on the neck and upper back of Juvenile 1 even after Juvenile 1 was lying prone, handcuffed, and unresisting”, according to court documents, which don’t name the child involved in the incident.

The Independent has reached out to Mr Chauvin’s attorney for comment

On Wednesday, Chauvin, as well as his three fellow former officers the day of George Floyd’s arrest, were arraigned in a separate federal civil rights case, where all four pleaded not guilty to denying Mr Floyd’s civil rights during the arrest that killed him.

Though it was largely kept out of the first George Floyd murder trial, Chauvin himself had a long record of using force, often against people of colour, which continued through the days just before he arrested George Floyd and resulted in 22 complaints or internal investigations over his 19 years on the force, but only one formal instance of discipline. His conviction is believed to be just the second time an on-duty Minnesota police officer has been convicted of murder in the state’s history, and the first time for a white officer.

Many in the city celebrated his conviction in April, but argued more needed to be done to reform the policing system in Minneapolis that allowed Chauvin to rise through the ranks for years and train other officers.

“Now the conviction is not evidence of a working system,” Ebony Chambers, a Black resident of North Minneapolis who volunteers to organize churches and barber shops around social justice issues, told The Independent at the time of the conviction. “A broken clock is right twice a day. The murder of George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Philando Castile, and many more is proof that the system needs to be completely overhauled.”