Eight non-white corrections officers at a county jail that initially housed Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, say they were barred from guarding Chauvin because of their race, according to the Star Tribune.
The corrections officers, all of whom work at Ramsey County Jail in St. Paul, have alleged that they were ordered to a separate floor while their white colleagues monitored Chauvin, because jail authorities considered them a “liability” around the former officer.
In a discrimination claim filed to the state’s Department of Human rights on Friday, the officers also alleged that surveillance footage shows a white lieutenant at the jail sitting on Chauvin’s bunk and letting him use her cellphone.
When Chauvin was first arrested and booked into Ramsey County Jail on May 29, a Black acting sergeant usually tasked with overseeing the transport of high-profile inmates was allegedly ordered to stop conducting a pat-down on Chauvin and replaced with a white colleague.
In the discrimination filing to the state’s human rights office on Friday, one corrections officer who was moved to a different floor said he believed “the decision to segregate us had been made because we could not be trusted to carry out our work responsibilities professionally around the high-profile inmate — solely because of the color of our skin.”
