The photo of Santa Cruz Police Chief Andrew Mills — formerly the top cop here in Eureka — kneeling with the city’s mayor amongst protesters during a gathering prompted by the death of George Floyd has received widespread attention, providing a hopeful image to a horrified nation. 

On Tuesday night, MSNBC host Brian Williams invited Mills on his nightly show The 11th Hour to talk about the experience. 

“It felt right,” Mills told Williams. “I’d already determined in my mind that I wanted to take a knee to show my stance of what we need to do in policing to get things back on track.” Watch the whole segment with Mills in the clip above. 

Mills, still a beloved figure to many in Humboldt, was Eureka’s Chief of Police for roughly four years, from 2013 to 2017, and is credited with reshaping the department into a more community service-minded entity. In his last year on the job, some controversy arose over his decision to call into question whether a Humboldt Bay Fire employee should be allowed to wear a “Black Lives Matter” lapel pin. 

“We are as apolitical as possible,” Mills said at the time despite his decision to wear a “Police Lives Matter” bracelet.

Read more from the Outpost about that saga here.