There was a window of opportunity for cops following the George Floyd killing. Floyd, suspected of nothing more than passing a fake $20 bill, was killed by Officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis PD. Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd’s neck until he was dead. This act lasted for nearly nine minutes — and for nearly three minutes after Chauvin checked for a pulse and found nothing. Yet he persisted, and none of the three cops around him stopped him.
Chauvin has been criminally charged and is under arrest. We’ll see where that takes us. But the opportunity was there for the rest of the nation’s cops to separate themselves from this “bad apple.” Cop defenders ignore what bad apples do to barrels, but we won’t. Chauvin is a symptom. He is not the disease.
As protests broke out around the nation, law enforcement agencies responded. While a small number attempted to find middle ground with aggrieved citizens, most acted as though they were a law unto themselves in these troubled times.
One site got it completely right — a site that so often offers up hot takes that it is the source of its own meme. Slate, of all places, nailed this call:
Also in today’s criminal justice news, police in Louisville KY – who just watched police in Minneapolis MN arrest a CNN reporter live on-air – say “hold my whiskey” and deliberately shoot a reporter and her cameraman
Photos taken by @PLBarghouty show HuffPost senior reporter Chris Mathias (@letsgomathias), with press badge clearly visible, being taken into custody by the NYPD. Chris was on assignment for HuffPost covering the protests in Brooklyn. pic.twitter.com/EWcWNoFjMW
“You are part of the problem, if not the entire problem.” – MPD officer
Minneapolis Police called our journalist the “entire problem” & threatened he “would get baked” as he filmed them at 31st & Blaisdell after curfew a block away from #GeorgeFloydProtests at the 5th Precinct. pic.twitter.com/K25MIapPcf
I just got hit by a rubber bullet near the bottom of my throat. I had just interviewed a man with my phone at 3rd and Pine and a police officer aimed and shot me in the throat, I saw the bullet bounce onto the street @LAist@kpcc OK, that’s one way to stop me, for a while pic.twitter.com/9C2u5KmscG
— Adolfo Guzman-Lopez (@AGuzmanLopez) June 1, 2020
This should come as no surprise. When the shit goes down, no rights will be respected. The Fourth tends to go first, but the First is often right behind it.
First, we had to deal with the coronavirus and government grabs for power. And this is where we are now: trying to limit a rational response to hundreds of years of racism, manifested as Officer Chauvin’s decision to place his knee on the neck of a black man until long after the man was dead.
The streets are filled with cameras. Cops control most of them. But they can’t control journalists. So, they seek to intimidate them by making it clear their presence isn’t welcomed. The current situation may heighten the response but it has been this way for years. Cops have made it clear — and they’ve been backed by the Commander-in-Chief — the press is the enemy. Journalists record things and those recordings usually make their way to many people — far more than the average internet rando could hope to rope in. If you can’t control the narrative, you can always attempt to control the journalists.
When chaos is on the menu, the cops can still try to maintain control of the reporting. And most of their sins will be forgiven because the situation was unforeseeable. But when it’s happening, we can see it. We can see what they do and how they react. And, because they react badly, every unblinking eye must be closed. The power must remain centralized, and if that means taking a few journalists out, so be it.
(Those of you who’d like to read a transcript, rather than watch this powerful performance by Orlando Jones [possibly for “Dear God, I’m still at work” reasons], can do so here.)
This is the history of black Americans. For a few hundred years, they weren’t even Americans. And even after that — even after the Civil War — black Americans spent a hundred years being shunted to different schools, different neighborhoods, different restrooms, different bus seating, different water fountains. They are not us, this land of opportunity repeatedly stated.
Integration was forced. It was rarely welcomed. Being black still means being an outsider. Four hundred years of subjugation doesn’t just end. This is how the story continues:
A hundred years later. You’re fucked. A hundred years after that. Fucked. A hundred years after you get free, you still getting fucked out a job and shot at by police.
Fucked.
That’s George Floyd. The Minneapolis resident allegedly passed a counterfeit $20 bill at a local store. The penalty was death — delivered extrajudicially by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Officer Chauvin put his knee on the neck of the handcuffed Floyd for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. This continued for more than two minutes after Officer Chauvin had checked Floyd’s pulse and stated he “couldn’t find one.”
A man was dead under Chauvin’s knee and yet he never moved. No one around him moved either. The other three officers at the scene watched Officer Chauvin kill a man, and not a single one of them did anything to prevent this from happening.
The good news is they’ve all been fired. The other news — with the “good” excised — is Officer Chauvin is being criminally charged. That’s only news. Buy your insurance now because it’s almost guaranteed Minneapolis will burn again once a jury has had a shot at this thing.
First, there’s the murder charge. We all want this but there’s little that supports it. It looks like murder, but the state has to prove things it’s probably not going to be able to prove — especially when the people doing the prosecuting aren’t all that interested in prosecuting cops.
Third-degree murder is the most minimal of murder charges and even that might not be enough to drag Officer Chauvin into the crushing wheels of the carceral state. As Scott Greenfield explains, there doesn’t appear to be enough to justify this charge in what’s been seen in multiple videos. It appears Chauvin deployed a restraint technique that’s been given a thumbs up by multiple law enforcement agencies.
Former police officer Derek Chauvin was charged with Murder 3, a not-insignificant charge even if it lacks the panache of Murder 1, with a potential sentence of 25 years in prison. Unlike intentional murder, the mens rea under Minnesota Statutes § 609.195 requires only a “depraved mind.”
609.195 MURDER IN THE THIRD DEGREE.
(a) Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years.
Yet, the complaint filed by the Hennepin County Attorney made almost no effort to assert that the elements of the charge were met, that Chauvin was “perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.”
While the video clearly showed Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck, which was naturally assumed, for obvious reasons, to have been the cause of death, that alone does not suffice to meet the element that it was an “act eminently dangerous.” It’s hardly an undangerous immobilization technique, but it’s also not an uncommon restraint, and is a permissible use of force in Minneapolis. That it’s only supposed to be used to restrain someone actively resisting gives rise to a departmental violation, but doesn’t elevate a lawful use of force to an eminently dangerous act.
If that falls, we’re left with manslaughter. And that probably won’t be enough to convince anyone Chauvin has been punished enough for continuing to use his knee to “restrain” Floyd for almost three minutes after a cop couldn’t detect his pulse.
“I am worried about excited delirium or whatever,” Lane said.
From that, we run into the details of the coroner’s report. These are preliminary, so they will change. But the exonerative text is already in there, ready for deployment by tough-on-crime politicians, media personnel willing to act like PD stenographers, police union officials (and the police union in Minneapolis is one of the worst), and anyone else seeking to justify Chauvin’s actions.
George Floyd didn’t die because Officer Chauvin crushed Floyd’s neck with his knee for almost nine minutes — most of which were spent with Floyd stating he couldn’t breathe. He died because he was going to die, with or without Officer Chauvin’s intercession.
The autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.
George Floyd died of heart disease, you guys. It coincidentally killed him while he was having his neck compressed by a cop who checked his pulse and discovered he was likely already dead and continued to compress his neck for another two minutes. Also peep the “potential intoxicants,” which probably gave George Floyd the superhuman strength he needed to stay alive for seven of those nine minutes before succumbing to “coronary artery disease.”
If Chauvin walks, Minneapolis burns again. Multiple cities burn. Unlike other killings of black men by cops, this has prompted intense protests across the nation. This one — committed in full view of multiple phones and at least one nearby CCTV camera — shows cops do not give a fuck who is watching. They will do what they want to do and roll the dice on a favorable ruling by federal courts.
LET IT BURN. LET IT ALL BURN.
In response to this killing, Minneapolis burned. Looting accompanied the protests, as is often the case. We can argue about the positive/negative effects of looting for as long as you want in the comment threads, but let’s take a look at a couple of facts.
We have had riots in America for years. And looting. Those arguing that the destruction of businesses during these protests is counterproductive need to have their memories refreshed. This nation began with the looting of British ships. A whole offshoot of the “rule of law” party (also the “free speech” party, which is currently headed by someone seeking to directly regulate social media platforms) named itself after protesters who boarded British ships and threw their merchandise overboard.
Even if you decry the the destruction of local businesses which may not have the funds to recover from this unexpected turn of events, you cannot argue with protesters going straight to the source of the problem.
Police precinct set on fire on the third day of demonstrations as the so-called Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul seethed over the shocking police killing of a handcuffed black man
And, as a bonus, the thin blue line between us and chaos being filmed abandoning their posts and leaving us to the chaos they could never protect us from, no matter how many black men they killed.
This is the moment Minneapolis police abandoned, fled the police precinct during the protests for #JusticeForGeorge – minutes later the precinct went up in flames pic.twitter.com/thYDXBThLe
The cops fucked this up. The cops should pay. Unfortunately, it will be taxpayers funding the rebuilding of the Third Precinct station in Minneapolis, but, by all means, burn every cop car, precinct, etc. that stands between black Americans and the respect of their rights.
The message is clear: cops are the problem, not the solution. Burn the shit that means something to them — the stuff that protects them from the people — and see where we all are at the end of the day.
Let’s take the long view. What has this accomplished? Here’s a list of riots sparked by police violence against minorities — one dating back nearly 60 years.
1965: Los Angeles 1967: Newark 1967: Detroit 1968: King assassination 1980: Miami 1992: Los Angeles 2001: Cincinnati 2014: Ferguson 2015: Baltimore 2016: Charlotte
What did that get us? Burning small parts of the system to the ground got us Nixon (who ran on a “tough on crime” platform following the riots in the 1960s) and a immensely-harmful drug war that has done nothing to slow the supply of drugs but has done everything to improve the bottom lines of PDs and prosecutors.
Cops haven’t changed. And they haven’t changed despite having every reason to. Several dozen cop shops are operating under consent decrees with the Department of Justice because they can’t be trusted to not violate rights en masse on their own. The rest are still acting like it’s a war zone out there, cladding themselves in cast-off military gear and equipment even as crime rates remain at historic lows. It’s tough to be a cop out there, say cops, even as unimpeachable data says otherwise to a bunch of impeachable cops.
But let’s just say you’re arguing that riots/protests/looting don’t solve anything. Let’s look at the data again. Here are the years where nothing happened:
Did not attacking cops help then? Did leaving retail outlets intact make policing better? Did a lack of looting force cops to realize their systemic bias was hurting communities? Did all of this non-action bring us to a better place in terms of our relationship with law enforcement? (Those of you who are not minorities can put your hands down. Thanks.)
Short answer: it did not. The boot stamping on a human face forever is the past, present, and future. This image was personified by Officer Chauvin, who placed his knee on the neck of a human being suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill until he died. And continued to perform this inadvertently symbolic move for nearly another three minutes after that.
If it’s going to burn — and it should — it should start with those who have earned the flames. Cop cars are burning. Police stations are burning. Good. There is nothing wrong with this. The cops pretended to fear us whenever it was convenient. They claimed their subjective fear that someone might have a weapon justified every bullet they pumped into a person. Then they did nothing when people carrying actual guns marched on government buildings to demand access to restaurants and haircuts.
Fuck them. If you’re going to cry about the threats separating you from making it home to your family every night, at least be consistent. And if you can’t be consistent, at least restrain yourself from killing non-resistant people in the street in front of several cameras. And for fuck’s sake, if you can’t do that last part, it just means you don’t fear the public and their representatives. It means you think the courts will clear you, if not your own department and union. No public official deserves this much deference, trust, or unearned protection.
YOU OWE US.
That obligation has never changed. The only thing that has changed is the other branches of the government, which have decided — either through QI rulings or deference to police unions — that the public matters less than those sworn to serve it.
This is not me wading into a recent controversy with my eye on harvesting clicks. This is me — and this site — covering the abuses perpetrated by law enforcement agencies for years. There is nothing anomalous about this event. It just shows accountability can’t be brought solely by the mute witnesses of criminal acts by law enforcement officers. We have our cameras pointed at them. They have their own cameras. And yet, they still don’t care.
If this is how they want it, we have the power to give it to them.
Be the god of righteous hellfire. All these years of not setting fire to the possessions of an invading force intent on treating fellow citizens as enemy combatants has done nothing.
