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When the Fight Is Over, It’s Over
Since I’ve been in the arena, for what it’s worth I’ll comment on the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis. This is the second major incident that indicates there is something wrong with the training model and the hiring model of the Minneapolis Police Department. Every police department and sheriff’s office in the United States should be looking at this incident and assessing their training and hiring model. They should be asking themselves; “Could this happen to us?”
Training is expensive and it should not stop after an officer graduates from the academy. In-service training should continue on a regular basis for officers and supervisors. In-service training is expensive, but the lack of in-service training could cost lives, not just dollars. In-service training also allows trainers to assess a department’s officers on a regular basis.
The hiring process may only produce ten or twenty qualified candidates out of the 500 applicants that began with the written test. Lowering your hiring standards will not improve your department. Some candidates will do well on tests and in training, but will not do well out on the street. FTO’s (Field Training Officers) should weed out candidates that cannot handle the stress, are prone to making poor decisions, and have poor verbal skills. If those shortcomings do not improve during the FTO phase of their training, they will become worse when they start working without direct supervision. If they end up with another officer, especially one that had the same issues in training, it could end in tragedy.
In this incident, fully knowing it was being videoed with bystanders encouraging action, officers stood by as Chauvin put his career at risk. He was in an unsafe, career-threatening situation but his fellow officers let him keep digging a hole instead of saving him.
I haven’t seen video of an officer saying to Chauvin, “Hey we got this. Let’s get him up and in a car.” Chauvin seemed to freeze, and his buddies needed to care for him and in turn care for the arrestee.
I do not understand why Mr. Floyd was not placed in the car on the passenger side rather than walking him around to the driver’s side of the car and placing him face down on the pavement. Once you make an arrest and the sooner you get a suspect in handcuffs and in the back seat it becomes safer for the officer and the suspect.
Published in Policing
I’m as upset by the officers who appeared to stand by as I am by the officer who restrained Mr. Floyd. I definitely agree with your point about ongoing training–not just to protect the perps, but the officers, too. Thanks, as always, Doug.
I’m not a police officer, but it does seem that once the cuffs are on, the next step is to either let him go or cart him off. Neither of those require kneeling on his neck.
Part of the code of chivalry is to guard the honor of your fellow knights. It is not enough to keep your own nose clean. You have to be ready to step in and prevent your fellows from making any obvious mistakes.
Apparently two of the four officers on the scene were noobs, in their probationary period, which might have discouraged them from intervening. But yeah, something seems wrong in Minneapolis.
Glad to see your take on this, my reaction from the start was ” what are those other officers doing????, why are they not stepping in here?”
Doug, thanks for your comments. We non-experts don’t always know how to interpret what we see. I hope you will comment further as the investigation progresses.
Thanks for your perspective
A question I posed to Jack Dunphy on Twitter and his response:
Training is a big cost, and it’s difficult, without adequate price signals, to know how much to spend on it. But that’s the main problem with a command system-style, coercive government monopoly–there is no price signal because there is no competitive free market for the service. The allocation of resources (monies from the tax livestock) isn’t based on satisfying demand, but on some bureaucrat’s wild guess.
One thing I noticed (when I was working the door at a bar in a busy downtown nightclub district) was that cops tend to take a lot more time when they’re “pushing” an arrest – when they know their reason for arresting the guy is pretty thin. They’ll stand around for a while, hoping the guy says or does something stupid to further justify taking him in, or that a witness or accomplice will say something.
I’m betting that’s what happened here – they knew they didn’t have much on the victim, so the senior officers sort of froze, hoping someone would either come up with a good reason for an arrest, or that a superior officer would show up and tell them to let him go.
I have read, maybe from Dunphy, that LAPD cops are leaving for suburban cities (probably with Republican Mayors) after their probationary period. The good cops may be more likely to leave and find better (and safer) jobs in small cities with those remaining perhaps of a lower quality. I know the LAPD got into serious trouble with Affirmative Action hires that led to the Ramparts Scandal.
https://www.cpp.edu/~rrreese/nonfla/RAMPART.HTML
I know that I would not be a cop in a Democrat run big city. My brother-in-law was a Chicago cop and could not make sergeant in spite of a Masters in Public Administration due to affirmative action. No white officers were promoted for years. I told him that he should get a job in a small city as an administrator but he stuck it out. A family friend finally got him off the street into the Coroner’s Office.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/14434.html
Frank was one of the rare guys, like my brother-in-law, who stayed honest in the CPD.
Amen. When we are digging ourselves in a hole, we all need friends to tell us to stop digging. My thanks to all of my friends who have told me to stop digging in my own life.
In Albuquerque, we had hobble straps, along with protocols and extensive training for this sort of incident, since the ’90’s–so over twenty years ago.
I did watch a couple of the videos on this one. I’m usually very much on the pro-cop side. In this case, I cannot see any justification for the cop to be kneeling on this poor guy’s neck.
There are a few videos. There’s one looking across the front of the cop car, where you just see Mr. Floyd’s head with the officer kneeling on his neck, as Mr. Floyd is saying that he can’t breathe. It’s just terrible. There’s another from the other side, showing 2 other cops holding down Mr. Floyd’s body, in addition to the cop kneeling on his neck.
There are at least 2 surveillance camera videos, and they’re cut in a strange way. The first shows the cops taking Mr. Floyd out of his car, a bit forcefully but not much, and directing him to the sidewalk. He does seem to be handcuffed at some point. The second surveillance video (from across a street) shows the cops directing Mr. Floyd toward the cop car, handcuffed, and Mr. Floyd falls down. It’s not clear why. This occurs on the driver side of the cop car, which is adjacent to the sidewalk.
Then the video cuts to Mr. Floyd being on the ground on the other side of the cop car — the passenger side, adjacent to the traffic lanes.
Here’s a video from CBS News:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWzkgKPZWcw
I always wonder about why videos are cut by the news the way that they are. I do not know why they didn’t show the surveillance video from across the street, which would presumably show how Mr. Floyd got from the driver side to the passenger side of the cop car. If there was any resistance, I would expect it to have occurred during that period.
I completely agree with Doug’s confusion in the OP, about why Mr. Floyd ended up on the other side of the cop car. It is strange that the video of this was not shown by CBS News. If anyone has a link to it, I would appreciate it.
Even if Mr. Floyd violently resisted arrest during this time period, I don’t see how it could justify kneeling on his neck the way this cop did. It appears that he was already handcuffed before they even approached the cop car.
This looks very bad to me. I do still want to see the missing part of that surveillance video, though.
Jerks are jerks. An additional eight hours of training is not going to turn a jerk into a non-jerk. Not 16. Not 40. How many hours to fundamentally change a person?
Being a jerk does not prevent a person from following the rules. Assuming he’d been in police work for a while, he should have known protocol. I’ve known jerks and they knew what was allowed and what wasn’t.
We used them as well when necessary.
Wish I had seen this before I posted. but I’ll keep mine up as well in case it adds anything new
Maybe he just liked putting his knee on the neck of someone saying he is having trouble breathing.
I am trying to figure out a justification in my mind to do that to someone who is already subdued. Can’t come up with it. ]\
These officers should roast. They killed a man needlessly. I have no sympathy for them at all.
After all, they would have none for me as is clear.
This is one more example of how the police are dangerous to ordinary citizens. How many do we need before we get some real reform?
Real jerks are absolute experts of walking right up to the line of what is not allowed and going no farther.
I was always taught to be careful around the neck area by experienced Judoka and Chiropractors. They both mentioned the possibility of the general population being much more susceptible to unintended consequences if the restrainer isn’t experienced.
I drove a taxi in Minneapolis 40 years ago. The cops were bad then. Unprofessional, brutal, and non-accountable. Since then the cops have apparently grown worse, the government there has become nutty as hell, and the people have turned into animals. It was a very nice city then, because by and large, the people were decent.
I heard Trey Gowdy interviewed earlier tonight, and thought he made an excellent point. The Charleston, SC police were able to arrest Dylan Roof, who had just killed nine innocent people in cold blood, without killing him. The Minneapolis police killed George Floyd for supposedly trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.
The nutty left wing Minneapolis government can’t control the lawbreaking police, and won’t let the police control the lawbreaking rioters and looters. I blame the people who voted for these horrible politicians. The rot runs deep.
I drove a taxi in Minneapolis 40 years ago. The cops were bad then
There’s a book dying to be written.
Thanks – but it would be pretty boring, unless the writer were to exaggerate. These neighborhoods I read about today being on fire were pretty sleepy back then. The cops didn’t kill too many then, but one could see the culture of impunity already well entrenched in the police force.
The way not to get killed is to attack the police directly it seems. Pass a counterfeit twenty or call 911 and they kill you
I agree, but I think what Doug is saying is that it might weed out the worst of the lot so they they don’t become cops.
I have cops in the family but I have also seen this culture of impunity, even in safe suburbs in Orange County CA. My daughter, when she was 16, got a call one night from a friend who had missed the last bus from the local college in Mission Viejo. He asked if she could pick him up since we lived a half mile from the college. She went out, got her car and drove to the college where he was waiting at the bus stop. As she picked him up, a sheriff’s car pulled in behind her car. It was 10 PM. She did not know if she should drive away so she waited to see what he wanted. Her friend was in the passenger seat.
The deputy walked to her driver side window and told her he was writing her a ticket for parking in the bus stop. She tried to explain but got nowhere and came home later pretty shaken up. She hadn’t been driving that long and it was her first ticket. Those encounters were always videotaped then so I contacted the Sheriff and asked to see the video. At the time, I was on the city traffic commission and knew the deputies assigned to the city. I got the runaround for months and never did get to see the video. I was told the deputy was on the night shift, etc. It was pretty annoying.
The cops are primarily the State’s revenue collection agents. Administering actual justice is a distant third.
And it’s not necessarily because the people who are cops are bad. It’s because that’s how the incentives line up with coercive monopolies.
The deputies name should have been on the ticket, to include either a badge number, or the deputies state certification number. I somewhat curious as to whether the parking cite was a state violation, passed by the state legislature, or was it a local ordinance passed by the county, or city commissioners. Parking cites do not impact insurance rates, they are not moving violations. As far as I know they are not recorded on a drivers DMV history. The only way a ticket or cite can be “fixed” once it has been submitted is if the deputy pays the fine.
The only state mandated parking violations I’m aware of is parking in a handicapped space, perhaps parking, and blocking a fire hydrant might be a state legislated violation.
The deputy could have used some discretion and not issued the cite. Regardless of all that I got my first moving violation about two weeks after I obtained my drivers license as a 16 year-old. I muddled through it without having to see a therapist. :)
I just wanted to see the truth of the encounter. I didn’t care about the ticket except that it traumatized a 16 year old girl who was doing a favor for a friend. My younger son used to get called at night by friends who had been drinking to drive them home.
Cops like to pic on kids.
One night, my father was headed home after delivering a baby. He was in his Camero t-top. The arms were stuck down on the railroad, and after waiting a while, he crossed. A cop followed him over the railroad and pulled him over. He got out, in his scrubs and white coat, and the cop was like “Sorry” and moved on. Dad was so pissed off. He was like “She was just looking to give a teen a ticket”
I am convinced that 90% of traffic stops have nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with revenue and assertion of power.