According to the Minneapolis StarTribune, last May Ramsey County, Minnesota, officials ordered minority corrections officers away from guarding ex-Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, the man who throttled the life out of George Floyd with his knee, on his arrival and stay at the Ramsey County Jail.
As Chauvin arrived, all officers of color were ordered to a separate floor, and a supervisor forbid a Black sergeant from bringing Chauvin to his cell, solely because of their race, according to the 30-page lawsuit filed in Ramsey County District Court on Tuesday morning.
The purported reason?
"Out of care and concern, and without the comfort of time, I [jail Superintendent Steve Lydon] made a decision to limit exposure to employees of color to a murder suspect who could potentially aggravate those feelings," Lydon reportedly said in a statement given during an internal investigation and provided by the Sheriff's Office to the Star Tribune.
How sensitive of him.
Lydon was temporarily demoted pending an internal investigation by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office, but it’s not clear what, if anything, came of that investigation.
The incident was also supposed to have been investigated at the state level, but:
The lawsuit comes roughly eight months after the same group of officers filed discrimination charges with the state's Department of Human Rights about the incident. The charges were expected to automatically trigger a state investigation, but [Minneapolis attorney Lucas] Kastor told the Star Tribune it never moved forward — and lawyers requested the state close the administrative case so they could pursue legal action in state court.
After his stay at the Ramsey County Jail, Chauvin was transferred to the Hennepin County Jail* and later moved to the Oak Park Heights maximum security prison for security reasons. He was released on one million dollars bail in October, 2020.
* — Minneapolis, where the crime took place, is in Hennepin County, not the adjacent Ramsey County. The three other officers involved were separately booked into Hennepin County Jail. I’m not sure why Chauvin was not also.