Oh that kind of medical distress
The other horror yesterday was the police murder of George Floyd.
Four Minneapolis police officers have been fired after a black man was restrained by the neck and died in custody on Monday night. Bystander video captured a white police officer kneeling on the man’s neck for several minutes, despite the man’s pleas that he could not breathe. The man has been identified as George Floyd by an attorney for his family.
Kneeling on someone’s neck. Wtfffff.
The account from Darnella Frazier, who filmed the now-viral video showing part of the police encounter and said she watched Floyd being suffocated, differs from that of the police, who said Floyd was stopped because he matched the description of a suspect in a forgery case, resisted arrest and then suffered “medical distress.”
Being a suspect in a forgery case does not seem like a sufficient reason to use lethal force, to put it mildly.
In a video she posted on Facebook, Frazier said that she was on her way to see friends on May 25 when she saw Floyd outside of a grocery store on the south side of Minneapolis. Police had him pinned to the ground by his neck, she said. In her telling, Floyd’s face was being pressed so hard against the ground by the officer that his nose was bleeding.
She said she began recording the encounter, and that police kneeled on Floyd’s neck until he stopped moving and then later carried his motionless body away on a stretcher. She later posted the 10-minute video on Facebook.
I’m not going to watch it. I’m a coward.
The video begins with Floyd lying on the ground with a police officer’s knee pressed onto his neck. A voice, seemingly from a bystander, says “You’re going to just sit there with your knee on his neck?”
Floyd can be seen and heard voicing distress and saying repeatedly, “Please. Please. I can’t breathe. Please. I can’t move.” A bystander’s voice can be heard telling police, “You got him down. Let him breathe.”
Minutes later, Floyd appears motionless on the ground. A bystander again addresses police saying, “Bro, he’s not even f—— moving!” Another voice is heard saying, “Get off of his neck!” One person asks, “Did you kill him?”
Floyd’s eyes appear closed and his head lies on the ground. An ambulance arrives and Floyd is loaded onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.
“The police killed him, bro, right in front of everybody,” Frazier said on video posted on Facebook. “He was crying, telling them like, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and everything. They killed this man.”
Four cops have now been fired. A civil rights suit is on the way.
Sadly, I have a bad feeling that:
(1) the civil rights suit will fail because the court will find “qualified immunity” on the grounds that “well, although there is prior clear precedent that cops aren’t allowed to shoot a helpless suspect, or to bash his head into the pavement, there isn’t a published case specifically saying that kneeling on his neck is off-limits, so how could they have known?”
and (2) the union will grieve the termination and the cops will be reinstated with back pay.
Note: I don’t follow this area closely, so this is just pure cynicism on my part and not any kind of informed assessment. (But for reals, “qualified immunity” is a seriously messed-up doctrine, at least as the courts are currently interpreting it, and SCOTUS just passed on a chance to step in and clean it up.)
Oh, gawd.
Worse than that Screechy. The courts will find that there is clear case law that kneeling on the suspects chest is not permitted and that using a choke hold on the suspects neck is not permitted, but no case that says you can’t kneel on the suspects neck. And if someone does find such a case, it would have been a Thursday rather than a Monday.
Qualified immunity is an abomination created by the Courts and it should be torched by the Courts. Sadly, they don’t seem so inclined.
Wow. A lot of people are quick to blame the police for every encounter that goes wrong, so I always watch and try to see if there is a reasonable perspective where the force they used was necessary before drawing conclusions, but this was about as egregious as it gets.
The position they have him in does not look pleasant, and it’s not supposed to be. I actually do not think it is an unreasonable position for subduing someone that is resisting arrest, to hold them down for the few seconds it takes to handcuff them and put them into a squad car.
But what were they doing holding him like that for 5-7 minutes? That is outrageous. Why are all those other cops just lingering around? Why an idiot cop arguing with him and telling him to get up and get into the car as the victim keeps pointing out he can’t get up? Why do they keep holding him down so long?!
It hard to see how there can be another side to this. It looks like he resisted arrest, so the cops got mad, decided to punish him for it, and took it to far. There’s no place for that.
I disagree with the previous posts. I think it’s very likely at least the cop on top of him will be convicted and receive a serious sentence. This is so blatant with no excuse that a split-second decision had to be made or any of the other mitigating factors that are sometimes present.
When did the US decide that death was an acceptable punishment for non-violent crime, mere suspicion of a crime or just looking a bit dodgy?
Oh, I remember. Since the founding of the country.
In reference to my earlier comments about the northeast of England and the miners’ strike: During that strike they sent in mounted police. Can you imagine horses in amongst peacefully protesting men? (And their supporters too until the Government banned flying pickets.)
A friend of mine’s dad got kicked in the head by a horse. He slipped into a vegetative state and eventually the family had to make the heart-wrenching decision to withdraw life-support. The police claimed he had a weapon. He wasn’t a violent man and his friends swear the only thing he had in his hand was a lit cigarette.
Extra-judicial killing needs to be treated much more seriously. The IOPC is way too soft on these problems in the UK. It’s not even clear to me that there is a US federal agency specifically responsible for these cases. I know policing is a right reserved to the states, but how do they do objective oversight? Does the FBI ever get involved?
For Line of Duty fans – AC-12 is fictional but the Met does have the DPS which fulfills a similar role.
Skeletor, I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, but in the last couple of years I’ve seen so many articles about Police misbehaviour, brutality and killings and so very few that have resulted in even a firing actually sticking, let alone murder or wrongful death convictions.
Claire, I did read somewhere that the FBI were investigating this case. Presumably from a civil rights perspective.
Skeletor
Do you really, actually, think that face-on-the-pavement-knee-on-the-neck is an appropriate response to check fraud?
Really?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Chigau,
That isn’t at all what Skeletor said.
What constitutes ‘resisting arrest’? How much violence on the part of the police does it justify? I confess to finding Skeletor’s interest in always trying to be contrary and to find a way to justify what cannot be justified (although of course in this case he came out on the right side of things, being unable to find a hole to pick) curious, and oddly prurient. It also leads him too often into being contrary just for the sake of it, and also, as Rob points out very well, into ignoring any larger picture.
Claire, I recommend Mike Leigh’s film ‘Peterloo’, though doubtless Skeleton would find something to say about that, too.
From today’s Independent:
Now, another video showing Mr Floyd’s final moments appears to contradict a police statement that suggested he had “resisted” arrest before officers forced him to the ground and caused him to lose his breath.
The video, obtained by Fox9, shows two policemen pulling Mr Floyd from his car without any apparent resistance.
Police said they were called to Chicago Avenue South on Monday following reports of attempted forgery with the suspect appearing under the influence.
Footage shows officers handcuffing Mr Floyd, who can be seen in CCTV video obtained by CBS News sitting on the ground in apparent compliance with MPD demands.
***
I hope Skeletor will take this into account, too.
I work with the local police as a volunteer county emergency worker, so I’m often in situations around officers. They are not in the least afraid to use extreme force unless a person is absolutely compliant and respectful, and even then they might. I once watched a 6’8″ tall officer lift a smallish guy off the ground by his neck and slam him into a wall. The guy was robbing a store and came out the back door, where the officer was waiting for him. He could have ordered him to stop, or get on the ground, or anything, but it was clearly his plan to do exactly what he did.
I await Skeletor’s explanation of why that’s quite all right for the few seconds it takes for the officer to get his jollies.
From the ‘Common Dreams’ website:
Minneapolis police officers dressed in riot gear fired rubber bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades into crowds of protesters that gathered late Tuesday to demand justice for the killing of George Floyd after video footage showed a cop kneeling on the back of the man’s neck as he cried out, “I cannot breathe!”
Videos and photos posted to social media show people pouring milk into the eyes of demonstrators affected by tear gas as the chemical substance clouds the air, enveloping the thousands of protesters marching in the streets near the site of Floyd’s killing.
“This is a disgusting display,” said Jeremiah Ellison, a city council member representing Minneapolis Ward 5. “I’m here on the southside, helping people as I can with milk, water, and towels. So far, I have been unable to prevent the police from firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Moments ago, I held a towel to a teenage girl’s head as blood poured from it.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted that “shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at unarmed protesters when there are children present should never be tolerated. Ever.”
“What is happening tonight in our city is shameful,” Omar added. “Police need to exercise restraint, and our community needs space to heal.”
***
One didn’t hear of rubber bullets, tear gas or stun grenades being used at any of the armed demonstrations against staying at home, social distancing and wearing masks mounted outside governors’ houses and state government buildings. The reason for employing such tactics in some cases and not others is obvious and not pretty. The kind of myopic pedantry employed by such as Skeletor to defend the indefensible is in fact a disingenuous evasion of social and political facts.
Jesus, what a fucking disgrace.
From CNN:
On CNN Wednesday, criminal defense attorney Joey Jackson walked through why the Minneapolis police officer responsible for George Floyd’s suffocation death must be prosecuted.
“The police report that was filed, they said that Floyd — their words — physically resisted officers after he got out of the car,” said Burnett (the announcer). “So then you can look at surveillance video, which we have obtained from a nearby restaurant, and it shows an officer escorting Floyd out of the car in handcuffs, Floyd sitting on the sidewalk. So obviously there’s no physical resistance in this video whatsoever. I mean, what do you make of that discrepancy? We just don’t see what they put on the report.”
***
So it seems the poor man was already hand-cuffed when that supposed officer of the law was kneeling on his neck. I haven’t watched the original video, and have no desire to do so even to check things in a properly skeletorial manner, but this suggests that George Floyd wasn’t able to thrash about and use his arms to try and throw his murderer off because with the handcuffs already on, he was powerless to do so.
And now it seems that a real riot has been engendered in Minneapolis as a result of the actions and inactions of the police and the authorities:
“‘Minneapolis is burning’: Protesters and police clashed for a second night in Minneapolis as the former cop who killed George Floyd remains a free man.
“Photos and video from the scene show at least one business burning.”