Derek Chauvin ‘absolutely’ violated policy, Minneapolis police chief says. 

The chief of the Minneapolis Police Department testified on Monday that Derek Chauvin had “absolutely” violated department policies when he knelt on George Floyd for more than nine minutes in May.

Chief Medaria Arradondo said in court that Mr. Chauvin had failed to follow policies on de-escalation, use-of-force and the duty to render aid to people who need it.

“I absolutely agree that violates our policy,” Chief Arradondo said in response to a prosecutor’s question about Mr. Chauvin’s actions. “That is not part of our policy; that is not what we teach.”

The chief said that Mr. Chauvin’s actions might have been reasonable in the “first few seconds” to subdue Mr. Floyd, but that much of his actions had violated policies.

“Once Mr. Floyd had stopped resisting, and certainly once he was in distress and trying to verbalize that, that should have stopped,” Chief Arradondo said.

Chief Arradondo, who became the city’s first Black police chief when he took over in 2017, fired Mr. Chauvin and three other officers involved in the arrest within a day of Mr. Floyd’s death. He publicly called Mr. Floyd’s death a “murder” the next month.

From the witness stand on Monday, Chief Arradondo recounted that he had first learned about the bystander video of the officers’ arrest when a community member sent him a message on May 25, just before midnight.

“Chief, have you seen the video of your officer choking and killing that man at 38th and Chicago?” the message said, referring to the intersection where Mr. Floyd was arrested, according to Mr. Arradondo, who said he remembered the message “almost verbatim.”