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About That George Floyd Death
I am watching some online streams from the “protests” in Minneapolis. The situation involves mounted police, buildings burning, teargas, and strike teams. You can call it a riot and this is the second night.
The people are upset about George Floyd being killed by police. The cops responded to alleged forging and George ended up face down on the ground with a cops knee on his neck. There is video that shows him begging for his life as succumbs. The cops have been fired and Trump has vowed a swift investigation. Protests are starting in other cities. Some rednecks are in a video “armed” up and looking to stop looting. This seems like a big deal as the country is on edge from the 60 days of house arrest. Add in record unemployment and who knows what is going to happen.
I am also listening to the police scanner. There are reports of shots fired and now the Dollar Tree is on fire. It is weird to see protesters wearing COVID masks.
This is a horrible problem as many Blacks feel like cops are an occupying force and we should all be sensitive to government oppression these days. Cities have set rules of engagement that allow these escalations and cities are going to have to fix things, because it is bad for the citizenry and bad for the police and bad for America.
Published in General
I think back to a recent post suggesting law enforcement should be returned to a peacekeeping role, that a free people need not be policed. It’s not such a terrible idea.
I think that we are going to have to have a real conversation about policing.
In any place or time where we are asking other humans to use violence on behalf of the community, there will be human error. We need there to be an understanding that this human error is not inherently criminal or unjust. So we need responses to these things between “nothing to see here” and “all cops are racist baby murderers.”
And that there are ways to deal with human error in official violence dealing between, nothing and murder charges.
Not clear what you mean.
Minneapolis is rioting again, just like when that cop shot, though the door of his cruiser, the white woman who called 911. He too was immediately fired.
Except he wasn’t, and there were no riots. I think the cop (the first Minneapolis PD officer from Somalia, don’t ya know) stayed on the force at least until an indictment was handed sown 8 months later.
Minneapolis needs some Roof Koreans.
I thought of that incident too, and wonder whether the city of Minneapolis is not—ahem—doing such a great job when it comes to hiring the right people and/or training officers in defensive tactics/use of force? Both these incidents would suggest that to me, though of course, it’s going to be subsumed under the heading of “racism.”
Show of hands: Who here believes that Minneapolis hasn’t put its police officers through
endless hours ofImplicit Bias Training?I understand that you’re likely being facetious about the bias training, but something is missing. Although it’s important for all of the facts to come out, I’m having a really hard time seeing this as anything other than gross negligence by between one and four officers. In an era when police conduct (real or imagined) is so scrutinized, I’m mystified that four officers would be involved in this.
The victim was white. Not a problem . . .
Does anyone have a link to a complete video showing how Floyd got from upright against the building wall to 15 feet away on the ground behind the SUV?
all the gleeful media reports show video with such a huge gap and assert it clearly demonstrates Floyd wasn’t resisting arrest. That should set off any BS detector.
The police there are incompetent. That is clear. There is no hold in the world that involves putting your knee on someone’s neck. None.
Firing is not good enough answer. As to the riots? Well now, the police are unable to do anything there either. Also shows their total and utter lack of ability.
Cops are, by their nature, empowered with the monopoly on violence. Thanks to the profusion of cell phones and cameras, we today we now see how often the power is abused. The police are not here to serve and protect. They are here to shake down otherwise law abiding citizens who are not doing anything really wrong, while they let actual criminals run around. Don’t Call 911 if there is an intruder, certainly not in that city, because some poorly trained cop will gun you down because he is afraid for his life. And if your place of business is being destroyed, don’t call anyone, because they won’t intervene.
And if the police burst into your home with a no-knock warrant in the middle of the night and you shoot one has your home is invaded, you go to prison, even though they had the wrong house. The cop kills you by mistake? Oh well.
I have moved from “believe the police” to “the police are lying to protect themselves” as the default. The police across this nation have brought this upon themselves with their repeated abuse of power.
I’d like to know if the police there have bodycams. More often than not, they show citizens acting like jerks, baiting the cops to do something. Other times, the cameras are mysteriously “forgotten” to be turned on and an incident occurs. Well? Is there video?
Clearly a thorough investigation into the death needs to happen. The video is difficult to watch. There are many questions. If Floyd was aggressively resisting arrest there was still a moment as evidenced in the video, that he became at least more subdued and was handcuffed as the officer pressed his knee onto his neck but no guarantee that he wouldn’t still struggle, so I posed the following question to Jack Dunphy on Twitter:
I anticipate and hope that Jack (@jackdunphy) will weigh in on the incident with an article or post on Ricochet in the coming days. And my guess is that @jameslileks will as well.
It is hard to understand. I have seen some comment that he was resisting arrest but no details. Personally, I am for letting the black neighborhoods police themselves and see what happens. I would not be a white cop in a Democrat city for anything. I have read that the LAPD is seeing lots of their trainees move to smaller (probably Republican) cities soon after probation is completed.
Oh, me too!
I’m facetious about the bias training—if Colorado game wardens have to do a two hour block of bias training every year, my guess is that the Wokeratti in Minneapolis have required at least that much of their officers.
I am completely serious, on the other hand, when questioning their hiring or training practices. Once someone is down and no longer resisting, you’re supposed to get him in cuffs and sit him up, since lying prone with hands behind one’s back is hazardous to anyone’s health.
I’ve seen cops perform hands-on arrests many, many times with more resistant subjects than the guy in the video appears to be. I’ve never seen anyone do anything remotely like this. If I was looking into the question of why this man died, I’d be looking for defects in their hiring and defensive tactics/use of force training, not lurking racial bias.
It’s not that I think it impossible that the officer is a bigot. Perhaps he is (and if so, why is Minneapolis hiring and retaining bigots?) but racial bias is not the sine qua non for a bad use of deadly force. I’m willing to believe that Officer Noor did not have a deep-seated bias against Australian women. But he was (IMHO) poorly vetted and poorly trained.
If you can stand to wade through the whole fight and arrest of this guy in Tulsa, you’ll see how quickly, after handcuffs are on, the officers pop the dude up on his bum and then stand him up. And he was someone who clearly was willing (and, until they got the gun away from him, able) to kill them.
TMZ obtained video that shows he was cuffed and then walked with the officers to their car on the other side of the street. Somehow he ended up on the ground (did he lay down to resist getting in the car? Was he pushed?). At any rate, not sure how kneeling on his neck was supposed to help the situation.
And now people are calling looting and theft “protest”?
Do we actually know anything for certain yet? No, I don’t think we do.
Cause of death? autopsy results? Underlying medical condition of the man who died? Or any prior criminal history? Officer sworn testimony? Prior officer misconduct? Witness testimony?
Over the past few years I have learned not to take anything, including video/audio at face value. I remember the doctored audio in the Trayvon Martin case, edited both to attract more views and clicks, and to inflame the community. Video in this case? Emotional impact for sure, but I have no idea of what probative value it has.
I have also learned that the race or ethnicity (and perceived victim-group status) of both the person who died and the person who caused that death are more important than the hard facts. So black on black murder in Chicago? Hey, no big deal! Illegal immigrant (an approved victim group, previously deported multiple times) shoots and kills Kate Steinle in broad daylight with a stolen gun? A mere trifle, and acquitted by a San Francisco jury. White cop kills black kid in Ferguson? Press spins up the “hands up don’t shoot” myth (endlessly repeated by celebrities and the Congessional Black Caucus). And remember all the whites rioting in Minneapolis over a Somali cop shooting a white woman? Me neither.
When the narrative of endless racial injustice combines with cynical tactic of “never letting a crisis to to waste” then objective truth is another victim.
So I’m suspending any judgement on this case pending the outcome of a thorough investigation.
I saw something in a comment thread yesterday that this is a well known martial arts technique for subduing someone but that it is indeed deadly dangerous if done wrong. This is all far outside my area of expertise, so take it with more than a grain of salt.
It’s a local matter. The race-baiting of media and politicians is a national issue. Constitutional protections from excessive police powers is a national issue. But this case is not.
A cop somewhere in America allegedly abused his authority. That’s for the city to investigate and, if guilty, punish. If the city systemically fails to uphold justice, that’s for the local state to correct. The US President has nothing to do with it and should offer nothing but hope that truth and justice are forthcoming.
Rioting is the bigger problem. Riots (as opposed to peaceful, non-disruptive gatherings) should be crushed. Every person throwing rocks at people, blocking streets, terrorizing storefronts, publicly promoting violence, and so on should be arrested and prosecuted. If local leaders accept riots as if they were lawful protests, it doesn’t seem a good place to live.
Most of the videos we see on the internet are very incomplete, starting well after the start of the incident. And in fact that is a standard practice of the Left: start a confrontation, initiating violence or provoking a response, and then putting on the internet only the reaction of their target while claiming to be innocent victims of that target.
That would seem to be a wise choice and I’m attempting to do the same–with full knowledge that these incidents are frequently not what they initially seem. However, the window of justification for this incident, based on what we already know, appears to be very narrow.
Sure, but when the person you are trying to subdue is already in handcuffs, you could find a better way, especially when you have multiple officers and only one perpetrator.
I forget who tweeted it about 5 years or so ago, but, slightly modified to fix the verb tense:
“What I miss most about the Obama era is all the racial healing”.
I didn’t know that. You’d think that handcuffs plus leg restraints (if not the hobble straps that Jack Dunphy mentions earlier in this thread, then zip ties) would be sufficient.
You sure got that right, and I wish that there was more legal accountability both for news network and social media.
I remember the selectively edited CNN video of the Covington Catholic students, which became part of the multimillion dollar defamation suit by Nicholas Sandemann against CNN, which CNN recently settled. The settlement amount is undisclosed, but I sincerely hope it was enough to damage both CNN’s finances and its egos. It’s a start, and a legal precedent.
I am very confused. They walk him over to another cruiser and the video ends. But that other cruiser does not appear to be positioned where the cruiser was in the original death video.
OK. the cruiser is in the same place but Floyd’s position changes. When the TMZ video ends, Floyd is at the left rear of the cruiser. But then he is at the right rear when the cop’s knee is on his neck:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minneapolis-police-george-floyd-died-officer-kneeling-neck-arrest/
Definitely some gaps that need to be filled. I would assume he was resisting getting in the car, but he is in handcuffs and there are four officers . . . kneeling on his neck was probably not the best option.
Yeah, one has to wonder why the TMZ video ends where it does. Unfortunately, a Park Police cop car pulls in and obscures the video. At the very end, you can see the heads of Mr. Floyd and the two officers, and it appears that Mr. Floyd’s head bobs instead of getting in to the open door of the (other) cop car. This actually indicates that he is resisting getting into the cop car, but most of the view is obscured.
Then the video ends, with no explanation. Here’s another version, apparently from a local Fox station, which identifies this view as being from the “Dragon Wok” (a restaurant, I presume). The Fox video shows the end at time stamp 20:38:57.
The TMZ video is better in a way, because it zooms in on the relevant area.
At the end of the Dragon Wok video, Mr. Floyd and the officers are on the sidewalk on the driver side of the cop car. The later videos, of the cop kneeling on his neck, show him on the other side of the vehicle. How does he get there?
From the camera angle, it seems likely that the Dragon Wok would show at least part of the events that led to Mr. Floyd being pinned to the ground, on the opposite side of the cop car. But it is cut. Why?
But he may have had a bias against women in general. Was he Muslim?
Maybe he wasn’t thinking enough like a Starfleet Officer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HSJtJZLyls&t=91
This is our obligatory two minutes of hate. No one is defending the murderer.