Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Using Some Officer Discretion
George Floyd apparently tried to pass off a counterfeit $20 bill to buy either food or cigarettes. This was hardly a pivotal moment in the universe of crime. He could be charged with theft by deception, and the $20 amount would be a misdemeanor. A misdemeanor that would probably not merit any jail time, in all likelihood a fine at most.
As a police officer, you could use some discretion by giving Mr. Floyd the opportunity to pay for the item or items with real money. Apparently he had two friends with him. If Mr. Floyd didn’t have the money you could ask his friends to help Mr. Floyd out and pay for the items. Sweeten the deal by telling them the sooner payment is made everyone can be on their way.
Your next step would be to talk to the clerk and propose that if the payment is made the clerk has the option of trespassing Mr. Floyd from the store, an exclusion. Ask the clerk if he really wants to go to court and testify if payment can be made. You don’t need to tell clerk the court calendar is so full that Mr. Floyd will probably never go to trial.
If that fails a simple arrest, a quick run to booking. An Incident Report and Custody Report. This type of arrest should have never ended in death.
Published in Policing
I read early on that the store owner who followed Floyd out told him to just return the cigarettes and he could go. That was before he called 911.
Added: And if Floyd didn’t show ID or in some way resisted getting out of the car, would most police officers skip such discretionary decisions and be more likely to arrest the suspect?
So where are the details that explain what happened? And how it went so horribly wrong?
Passing a counterfeit bill is also a federal felony and, at least in Oregon, a state felony. And you can’t look at the incident in isolation. Nobody forges one bill. To find the forger and major distributors the case will have to be investigated, beginning with interviews of the victim, suspect and witnesses by officers at the scene. Still within the officer’s discretion as to arrest, but a closer call. And there is likely a possibility of a citation in lieu of arrest. But the suspect was reportedly drunk (or high), and at some point became uncooperative. If he is not going to cooperate with the investigation, he is likely going to jail.
Of course this incident should never have resulted in a death. But where exactly it went off the rails is far from clear.
I don’t think it will be clear until a Grand Jury transcript becomes available, and that might not be available until a trial jury is selected, or if the officers ask for a trial by judge.
I didn’t want to go too deep in the weeds but you should confiscate the $20 and log it into the property room and forward a copy of the Incident Report to detectives. You could even call detectives from the scene to see if they want to come out and talk to Floyd, or meet him at the precinct before he is booked.
The details of the actual arrest are still not clear. It was reported that Mr. Floyd was in a squad car at one point, and then removed from the car and placed on the street face down. That’s still not perfectly clear either.
I’ve seen video indicating that Floyd was inserted in the squad car from the passenger side. What is very unclear, and potentially significant, is how he exited the other side and ended up on the street.
Do tell the benefits and drawbacks of this approach.
From the start, knowing nothing, I pity the judge.
WHAT if Floyd was murdered, with intent, because he knew too much about something. Or if the likes of Chauvin wanted this crazy scenario.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
21st Century crime and warfare is complicated with cameras everywhere. Or maybe it’s easier?
The behavior of the officers was odd all the way through. Racism is a possibility, but I think there’s more to it than that, and perhaps race had nothing to do with it at all.
It doesn’t seem to make any difference as far as seeing what actually happened is concerned.
I heard some nitwit apologist describe this as a “white collar crime”.
Floyd complained that he couldn’t be in the back of the police car due to claustrophobia.
Yet, Floyd was in a car when the police arrived. There’s an awful lot going on here that we don’t know about.
I can think of one scenario that explains removing Mr. Floyd from the backseat is that he was placed in the backseat without being handcuffed. The decision was made to arrest him so that meant removing him from the car to handcuff him for the trip to booking. If that is case I would call that a training failure. Perhaps they took him out on the drivers side because a crowd was starting to gather on the sidewalk. He was beginning to resist, and he was placed facedown on the pavement, knee on his neck as the other officers were trying to handcuff him.
I never placed anyone in the backseat without handcuffing them first, and then conducting a thorough search. There is no point in having to do the process twice out on the street. It becomes more dangerous for both the officer, and the suspect.
I don’t know if the MPD would call it a training failure, but the shooting of the yoga instructor and the death of Mr. Floyd are what I would call two epic fails, and preventable.
There has to be a lot more to the story than what has been let out. A lot of things don’t add up. To restrain a man for a $20 dollar fraud is beyond reason.
Doug, there are videos available of these things. Some of your hypotheses are not correct.
Mr. Floyd was handcuffed right after he was removed from his vehicle. He was walked across the sidewalk to a wall, and allowed to sit down for a brief time. He was helped back up, and the officer escorted him across the street to the waiting cop car (the one they tried to put him in — there were eventually 3 cop cars at the scene, at least, but the others arrived later).
Two officers tried to get Mr. Floyd into the back of the cop car, through the rear passenger door. The main video that I’ve seen, apparently filmed from the Dragon Wok restaurant, has its view then obscured by a park police cop car that pulls up. From that point on, you can only see a little bit of their heads. The second Minneapolis PD car arrived, with Ofc. Chauvin and his partner, and they walked over to help get Mr. Floyd in the first cop car. The best copy that I’ve seen of the Dragon Wok video is here, apparently from a local CBS station.
[Cont’d]
In the Dragon Wok video, at about 1:05, there is a split-screen cut to a cell phone video taken from the vehicle parked behind Mr. Floyd’s, and you can see the officers cuff him right after he is taken out of his vehicle.
I’ve seen a snippet of another, better video of the officers trying to get Mr. Floyd into the cop car. You can view it here. It’s probably a surveillance video from Cup Foods, the restaurant/convenience store at which the incident occurred. The cut that I saw was released by an activist named Shaun King, and I’ve been warned that he is not to be trusted. It is only about 15-20 seconds long and significantly edited. This video doesn’t actually show Mr. Floyd, except maybe his feet at the beginning, below the car door. It appears that he is in the back seat of the cop car, and one of the officers seems to be struggling to either push him in, or keep him in.
This second video appears to pan around, but part of the panning reveals a time and date stamp, so I infer that someone has zoomed the view from a larger video.
While Mr. Floyd was apparently in the back seat, Ofc. Chauvin is positioned on the passenger side, with the rear passenger door open. It appears that Ofc. Chauvin’s upper body was actually in the vehicle when the video zooms out to show the action on the passenger side, so he may have been trying to pull Mr. Floyd into the cop car while the other officer tried to push him in from the other side. Mr. Floyd appears to exit from the passenger of the vehicle. It doesn’t look to me as if Ofc. Chauvin pulled him out.
I can’t actually see Mr. Floyd exit from the passenger side on this video, as the view is obscured by the cop car. I infer that he exited from the reaction of the officers, who seem to be grappling with a person exiting from that passenger side door.
From the videos, it is not clear how Mr. Floyd ended up on the ground on the passenger side, meaning that I can’t see the details. The charging document (here), in the statement of probable cause, says: “The defendant [Ofc. Chauvin] pulled Mr. Floyd out of the passenger side of the squad car at 8:19:38 p.m. and Mr. Floyd went to the ground face down and still handcuffed.”
Doug, I’d appreciate your insight after you have a chance to review this additional information, especially the videos. I think that I’ve identified the best ones, at least as of a couple of days ago.
We need some context, but it’s possible there had been a series of bills passed, and the police were looking to leverage Floyd for some info. But, yes, it’s mind-boggling to think a moment in history resulted from a bogus twenty.
Not if he [redacted] you off. But I agree – I think there’s a lot more to it.
The ink was still wet on the counterfeit bill and I don’t believe counterfeiters only print off one piece of currency. This needs to be considered.
In Calif, Wells Fargo Bank in Clearlake was handing out bogus 50 dollar bills.
So it makes sense that someone offering such a forgery up to a cashier should be questioned by authorities. It also indicates that there is no way of knowing if Floyd was guilty of knowingly passing along a forged bill or not.
Our police departments need to be cleaned up. I know that in the Chicagoland metro area, from around 1978 until after 2005, police would routinely stop young women, using their lights and sirens, in the wee hours of the night for some petty offense. (Like a broken tail light, or even a made up “over the speed limit” citation.) Then after the young women were stopped, they would be molested.
It has been stated that 17% of San Francisco’s police force have had more than one domestic disturbance incident at their own residence.
For every bad apple, there have to be at least four or five decent uniformed humans attempting to correctly handle a tough job in horrible situations. However until we as a nation weed out the bad apples from the good, there will be more deaths like the one that Floyd endured.
It would be the difference between 1st degree murder and something else, something lesser.
Given that passing forgeries is a federal offense, I can understand why the store reacted the way it did. Small stores especially can’t afford to lose money to forged bills- they have no choice but to act. There might have been some sympathy for him if they tried to give him a second chance (if the scenario @Flicker mentioned earlier about just returning what he purchased and letting it slide, to paraphrase) but that’s a tough one. We have to wait til we know more