There are many appalling narratives emerging from the trial of the former police officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd. There is the transference of guilt from the people who killed Floyd to those who watched him die. There is the difference in empathy when a Black person in the inner city is struggling with opioid addiction, compared to when the drug user is a young white person in a suburb or rural America. But what resonated for me was the sense of powerlessness in Floyd begging, to no avail, for his life, and in the powerlessness of the agitated crowd of bystanders and witnesses to intervene. The power in this dynamic was held by the officers, including Chauvin, and it was wielded to a deadly extreme.