On CNN Friday, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter laid into police unions for attacking calls for public accountability and shielding bad officers from oversight.
"We just learned today, Mayor, former police officer Derek Chauvin could still receive his pension even if he's convicted in George Floyd's murder," said anchor Wolf Blitzer. "Does that sound like justice to you?"
"Of course it doesn't sound like justice to me," said Carter. "And this digs right into the fact that our police unions, those police union contracts across the country, have just protected officers despite really whatever they do ... every person, every member of humanity I know, can look at that video and say it's profoundly wrong, and yet we see the president of the Minneapolis police union mad that you won't call [Floyd] a violent criminal. We see police unions across the country saying, you guys are treating police like animals or like dogs, things like that that we heard out of New York. It's just a real shame."
"I know a little bit about the labor union movements, enough to know that they were built to protect people like George Floyd," said Carter. "And if we have a union, and a union contract, and union stewards working to try to cover up or to try to shield someone for brutally taking a working class American's life like that, that's an a real distortion of what the meaning of those unions were for in the first place."
Watch below:
