I'm Jonathan K. Parton. Welcome to K-Part. May 25th marked the third anniversary of the murder

of George Floyd under the knee of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, a death that

was captured on video and sparked nationwide protests that inspired demonstrations around

the world. Holding that police officer accountable, fell to Minnesota State Attorney General Keith

Ellison, who writes about the case, the aftermath, and his ongoing work to confront police brutality

in his new book, Break the Wheel, ending the cycle of police violence. In this conversation,

first recorded for Washington Post Live on May 24th, Ellison talks about how the murder of George

Floyd fit a horrific pattern in American life, what needs to be done to break it, and how community

trust is essential. The most important law enforcement tool is trust in the community. You break

that, and you've set yourself back, and you've made life easier for people who do commit crimes,

private citizens who commit crimes, and prey on others. You know, they benefit from a poor

relationship between police and community. During the Chauvin proceedings, this was interesting

for me to find out. You filled several notebooks with jot-it-down notes, and this provided the

foundation for Break the Wheel. Was your intention to write a book, or to keep your own record

for history? Well, it was, I used it in the course of trial prep, right? In the course of trial

preparation, there's endless numbers of meetings. We have separate meetings on jury selection,

what the jury question is going to look like. We have separate meetings on the medical case.

I have, we prep the witnesses properly, and we ask them all the questions we need to ask them.

And so I'm keeping notes constantly to make sure I don't forget anything. My thought was to just

make sure that there was nothing that we didn't think of. We didn't want anything in the trial to

be new. We didn't want any surprises. So I kept a lot of notes. I kept a lot of notes, and I

referred back to them when I thought that it would be a good idea to try to set, try to make a

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