For a moment, at least, America can stop holding its collective breath.  The jury in the Derek Chauvin case did the right thing and convicted him on all counts for the murder of George Floyd.

But what a sad commentary for America that we all had reasonable doubt – not whether Chauvin was guilty (he clearly was) — but whether a jury in America would hold him accountable for viciously, cynically snuffing out the life of George Floyd with a sinister  smirk on his face, with his hands casually in his pockets, looking at onlookers as if to say I’m killing him right here in front of you, and I’m going to get away with it too, because that’s the way it is here in America, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

Only he didn’t.  Get away with it, that is. Because those one of those onlookers, Darnella Frazier, recorded the torture and murder of George Floyd on her cell phone in a video that went viral, was played on newscasts around the world, and was a centerpiece of Chauvin’s trial. But Chauvin still accomplished his primary goal, killing George Floyd. And that is something that haunts the onlookers who pleaded with Chauvin and his fellow cops to stop killing Floyd.  And it should continue to haunt us as well.

Time will tell if Chauvin’s conviction is just a one off or if we have reached a true turning point in America where white cops can’t smugly assume they can get away with abusing Black Americans. Have we reached a point where society will not tolerate cops’ blatant lies to justify inexcusable brutality after the fact? It may not be that we have, as a society, all of a sudden become morally righteous. Perhaps the biggest change is the ubiquity of cell phones equipped with cameras and recording devices – and a citizenry willing to use them to record and disseminate instances of police abuse.

The value of citizens recording police actions was also demonstrated in the case of former North Charleston (SC) police officer Michael Slager, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for shooting Walter Scott, an unarmed Black man, five times in the back when Scott ran from Slager during a 2015 traffic stop, after Slager had tased him.

In an attempt to justify the shooting, Slager claimed that Scott had charged at him after he stole Slager’s taser. What Slager did not know was that a bystander had recorded the encounter and the video demonstrated that Slager’s story was a total fabrication. Federal Judge Richard Gergel, who this week upheld Slager’s sentence, said “[Defense] Attorneys are advocates, not magicians, and they could not make this damning evidence disappear.”

So the best weapon against a bad cop with a gun or a lethal knee may be a citizen with a cell phone who is willing to use it to record police brutality. However, as Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said about Chauvin’s conviction, “I would not call today’s verdict justice, however, because justice implies true restoration. But it is accountability, which is the first step towards justice, and now the cause of justice is in your hands.”

He was referring to justice being in the citizens’ hands.  Let’s just hope those hands are holding a cell phone – and that the prospect of performing for the cameras and becoming the lead in a viral video that captures their depravity actually stops cops from perpetrating abuse of Black Americans, rather than simply holding them accountable for it.