MINNEAPOLIS>> Former Police Chief Medaria Arradondo vividly remembers receiving a call about midnight from a community activist. The caller told him to watch a video spreading on social media of a white officer pinning a Black man to the ground, despite his fading pleas of “I can’t breathe.”

The dying man was George Floyd. The officer was Derek Chauvin. And Arradondo was the city’s first Black police chief.

“It was absolutely gut-wrenching,” Arradondo, 58, recalled in an interview before the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s murder.

What he saw conflicted with what his own people had told him about the deadly encounter, and he knew immediately it would mean changes for his department and city. But he acknowledged he didn’t immediately foresee how deeply Floyd’s death would reverberate in the U.S. and around the world.

“I served for 32 years,” he said. “But there’s no doubt May 25th, 2020, is a defining moment for me in my public service career.”

The video shows Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, pinning him to the pavement outside a convenience store where Floyd had tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes. Chauvin maintained the pressure for 91/2 minutes despite pleas from onlookers to stop, even after an off-duty firefighter tried to intervene and another officer said he couldn’t find a pulse.

Arradondo sat for the interview in a public library that was heavily damaged in the unrest that followed Floyd’s death. It’s on Lake Street, a major artery that saw some of the worst destruction, a street that he says still bears “remnants of the pain and anger of what occurred five years ago.”

Just down the block, there’s the empty shell of a police station that was torched during the riots. And within sight is a Target store and a Cub Foods supermarket that were looted. Storefronts remain boarded up. Some businesses were rebuilt, but empty lots sit where others did not.

Arradondo still stands by his and Mayor Jacob Frey’s decision to abandon the 3rd Precinct and let it burn. Protesters breached the building, and police — who were spread thin — didn’t have the resources to hold it. So he ordered his officers to evacuate.

“During the most significant crisis we’ve ever experienced, arguably in the state, when it’s life or death, I’ve got to go on the side of keeping people alive and safe,” he said.

Arradondo subsequently helped launch an overhaul of policing in the city despite a resistant police culture and a powerful officers union. He testified against Chauvin in his 2021 murder trial, a rare breach of the “blue wall” that traditionally protects officers from being held accountable for wrongdoing.

Five years on, Arradondo, who retired in 2022, said he believes law enforcement agencies nationwide have made progress on police accountability — albeit incremental progress — and that police chiefs and sheriffs now move faster to hold officers responsible for egregious misconduct.

Arradondo was promoted to chief in 2017, and his elevation was greeted with hope among local African Americans who affectionately called him “Rondo.” But his department had a reputation for being too quick to use force.