If Derek Chauvin's intent was to restrain George Floyd, he accomplished that as soon as Mr. Floyd was on the pavement. If he thought he needed to kneel on Mr. Floyd's neck to "teach him a lesson" - as if this experience could have taught Mr. Floyd anything he didn't already know about the dangers Black people face when they are arrested …
If Derek Chauvin's intent was to restrain George Floyd, he accomplished that as soon as Mr. Floyd was on the pavement. If he thought he needed to kneel on Mr. Floyd's neck to "teach him a lesson" - as if this experience could have taught Mr. Floyd anything he didn't already know about the dangers Black people face when they are arrested in our country - that too he had already accomplished in less than a minute. The remaining 7 or 8 minutes of Chauvin's kneeling on Mr. Floyd's neck was deliberate torture, and when this continued past Mr. Floyd's calls for help as he breathed his final breaths, when this grown man was in his last waking moments, thinking of and then calling out for his mother as he died unnecessarily and unjustly, what was Chauvin thinking and feeling? Obviously, only he knows, but judging from the expression on his face he was not worried about or even much interested in the fact that he was snuffing out a human life with an act of wanton violence, under the eyes of horrified onlookers. That no one intervened physically to throw officer Chauvin off his victim is a testament to the justifiable fear of the police shared by many Americans, especially People of Color.
Of course Derek Chauvin has a right to be represented by a competent lawyer who will try however he can to prove his client's innocence or at least that there were mitigating factors and that Mr. Floyd died from a combination of traces of illicit drugs in his blood and pre-existing health problems, not from the physical stress and damage caused by a police officer kneeling on his neck. Our Constitution (6th Amendment) guarantees the right to counsel.
At least in this case, an instance of unprovoked police violence was witnessed by multiple bystanders, captured on several smart phones and shown to all Americans in all its horror. There was no way to simply pass it off as an accident or a case of the police reacting in self-defense or out of fear that a "suspect" was armed and intended to commit violence. The prosecutor had little choice but to bring this to trial. And now we will find out if our Constitution and our laws are worth the paper they are printed on.
It's interesting that the defense is trying to blame Floyd's drug use or pre-existing conditions, since one of the general precepts of criminal law is that you have to "take your victim as you find him." I remember that the exemplar case from English Common Law is where a robber hit his victim on the head, only to discover that the victim had an unusually thin skull, so the blow killed him. But the victim's weakness was considered irrelevant to the robber's culpability; I have no duty to be sufficiently robust to withstand your criminal assault.
I have been thinking the same thing. It’s like withholding insulin for a diabetic and then saying she died from diabetes. The drugs and heart condition would not have killed him had Chauvin not knelt on his airway for nine minutes.
Curiously, I spotted an earlier post where your spell-checker inserted "education" instead of "execution," and I was going to return to quip that you were correct in both instances. But now I can't find the erroneous-but-amusing earlier version -- how did you get rid of it? I've never found a way to edit my posts.
Thanks for the tip to you and to TPJ (Camb MA) below. I'm slowly learning to stop the headlong rush to post, breathe deeply, then proofread. As for automatic spellcheck, I've disabled it everwhere possible ever since a text I once sent to a collegue about flaws in the penal system went terribly wrong. I'd rather make my own embarrassing mistakes, thank you very much.
Spellcheck can be useful - especially in a second language - but it should not be the factory default, so to speak. Anyway, half the fun in English is inventing new words.
As Shelly says: the other police officers could have intervened. They would not have been endangered by doing so, unlike the bystanders who were undoubtedly terrified that the other cops would open fire on them were they to actually try to prevent Mr. Floyd's murder. But these people who swore oaths to serve and protect the citizens of Minneapolis instead decide that this was fine. They were even, as I recall the reports (I cannot watch the video) joking and laughing while Mr. Floyd begged for his life. And died.
I have to admit that I have wondered if, in so many of these police-committing-murder situations, the men (and they are almost always men) in question don't wake up thinking "I think I want to kill someone today." It's the ultimate cynical thought experiment, but I cannot stop myself from going there. I had a beloved uncle by marriage who was a cop (and eventually captain) in a very rough New Jersey city, during the volatile 1960s and 1970s. He did not keep arsenals in the house. His service revolver was kept under lock and key. He and my aunt were not convinced that violence and arming themselves to the teeth were strategies to maintain the safety of their environment in the working-class and diverse city in which they lived and where they worked. He was probably politically very conservative but I never ever heard him refer disrespectfully to any of the people he swore to serve and protect. He was a credit to the police force he joined and the city he served.
In contrast, a family friend, who was a journalist for a major newspaper, was almost killed by cops in Chicago in 1968 during the DNC, even though his press pass was visible and he was surrounded by other fellow members of the press. He was singled out because he was Black.
This is not a story about "bad apples" as the Right loves to claim when they are caught doing execrable things. It is about acculturation, systemic racism, and the apparent glorification of violence as the only mechanism the police are encouraged to use when they "serve and protect." In Chicago--and nowadays pretty much everywhere--the decision was to demonize a population that was vulnerable and conveniently disenfranchised in order to assuage the toxic masculinity of horrible specimens like Richard Daly--or Frank Rizzo, or Rudy Giuliani, or (name your favorite awful mayor).
I agree completely and thanks for so articulately describing the situation. I would only add that the way in which policing is done in the U.S. is a direct outgrowth from slave patrols, pitting lower class white men against Black people, who are to be considered more ignorant, more violent, bestial, and in need of control. 450 years, and very little has changed.
Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, who both fits and breaks the pattern. Not a chest-thumping bully; a bland, competent Black technocrat who still presided over the most shockingly horrible race massacre: wiping out the MOVE community through aerial firebombing. It utterly disregarded human life and destroyed whole city blocks in the process.
You have nailed it, Shelly. It was Chauvin's swagger, looking directly at the cameras trained on him, confident that nothing would happen to him, that make this so clearly an act of murder.
Derek Chauvin lynched George Floyd. We must not shy away from this fact. Last year David Blight, author of "Race and Reunion" on post-Civil War America, stated that it was a torture-murder. That is a key hallmark of lynching, along with some kind of accusation, and the denial of due process. It was a public spectacle too, a common if not universal aspect of lynching. Call this terrible crime by its proper name, and punish the criminals accordingly.
I believe you are right, Shelly, the larger intent of Derek Chauvin was to conduct an impromptu (but tragically familiar) lynching, the traditional display of white supremacy in America, and his intended audience was not only passersby, many no doubt local residents, but his younger police assistants, arguably his accomplices. The "Look mom, no hands," ease with which Chauvin killed the helpless Mr. Floyd is truly atrocious.
Agreed. Chauvin was purposely killing George Floyd to deliver a brutal, ruthless, public "lesson". I fervently hope the jury delivers the essential countermanding social lesson we so deeply need, by convicting Chauvin of murder and hate crimes.
Although I don't disagree that Chauvin's whiteness has something to do with his behaving with what he assumed would be impunity, but I think there is an intersection in this case - and in all cases of police brutality - with police supremacy. There were non-white officers working with Chauvin that day who aided and abetted him. Every time I see a Blue Lives Matter bumper sticker or hear that there is extra outrage when a police officer is killed (as though their lives matter MORE than anyone else's?) I feel the same frisson of horror that I feel every time I review the names of their victims. There is a deep problem with policing itself that draws and/or creates the Chauvins of this world. Those who wash out during police academy are not the psychopaths and sociopaths, it's the overly empathetic. And yes, I know that does not apply to every single police officer or even every department in the world. I'm talking about the big picture, the need for social control that those in power crave more and more - and the ways they use policing to achieve it.
If Derek Chauvin's intent was to restrain George Floyd, he accomplished that as soon as Mr. Floyd was on the pavement. If he thought he needed to kneel on Mr. Floyd's neck to "teach him a lesson" - as if this experience could have taught Mr. Floyd anything he didn't already know about the dangers Black people face when they are arrested in our country - that too he had already accomplished in less than a minute. The remaining 7 or 8 minutes of Chauvin's kneeling on Mr. Floyd's neck was deliberate torture, and when this continued past Mr. Floyd's calls for help as he breathed his final breaths, when this grown man was in his last waking moments, thinking of and then calling out for his mother as he died unnecessarily and unjustly, what was Chauvin thinking and feeling? Obviously, only he knows, but judging from the expression on his face he was not worried about or even much interested in the fact that he was snuffing out a human life with an act of wanton violence, under the eyes of horrified onlookers. That no one intervened physically to throw officer Chauvin off his victim is a testament to the justifiable fear of the police shared by many Americans, especially People of Color.
Of course Derek Chauvin has a right to be represented by a competent lawyer who will try however he can to prove his client's innocence or at least that there were mitigating factors and that Mr. Floyd died from a combination of traces of illicit drugs in his blood and pre-existing health problems, not from the physical stress and damage caused by a police officer kneeling on his neck. Our Constitution (6th Amendment) guarantees the right to counsel.
At least in this case, an instance of unprovoked police violence was witnessed by multiple bystanders, captured on several smart phones and shown to all Americans in all its horror. There was no way to simply pass it off as an accident or a case of the police reacting in self-defense or out of fear that a "suspect" was armed and intended to commit violence. The prosecutor had little choice but to bring this to trial. And now we will find out if our Constitution and our laws are worth the paper they are printed on.
It's interesting that the defense is trying to blame Floyd's drug use or pre-existing conditions, since one of the general precepts of criminal law is that you have to "take your victim as you find him." I remember that the exemplar case from English Common Law is where a robber hit his victim on the head, only to discover that the victim had an unusually thin skull, so the blow killed him. But the victim's weakness was considered irrelevant to the robber's culpability; I have no duty to be sufficiently robust to withstand your criminal assault.
I have been thinking the same thing. It’s like withholding insulin for a diabetic and then saying she died from diabetes. The drugs and heart condition would not have killed him had Chauvin not knelt on his airway for nine minutes.
And, in the US, the penalty for prior or even present drug use is not public execution.
Curiously, I spotted an earlier post where your spell-checker inserted "education" instead of "execution," and I was going to return to quip that you were correct in both instances. But now I can't find the erroneous-but-amusing earlier version -- how did you get rid of it? I've never found a way to edit my posts.
Highlight; delete; open new comment; copy/paste; edit to your heart's delight.
Oh yeah, why didn't I think of that? Duuuuuh.
It was just a quick delete when I had (first of the day) temper tantrum at spell-check.
Thanks for the tip to you and to TPJ (Camb MA) below. I'm slowly learning to stop the headlong rush to post, breathe deeply, then proofread. As for automatic spellcheck, I've disabled it everwhere possible ever since a text I once sent to a collegue about flaws in the penal system went terribly wrong. I'd rather make my own embarrassing mistakes, thank you very much.
Spellcheck can be useful - especially in a second language - but it should not be the factory default, so to speak. Anyway, half the fun in English is inventing new words.
Do hope the Minneapolis prosecutor remembers that case.
As Shelly says: the other police officers could have intervened. They would not have been endangered by doing so, unlike the bystanders who were undoubtedly terrified that the other cops would open fire on them were they to actually try to prevent Mr. Floyd's murder. But these people who swore oaths to serve and protect the citizens of Minneapolis instead decide that this was fine. They were even, as I recall the reports (I cannot watch the video) joking and laughing while Mr. Floyd begged for his life. And died.
I have to admit that I have wondered if, in so many of these police-committing-murder situations, the men (and they are almost always men) in question don't wake up thinking "I think I want to kill someone today." It's the ultimate cynical thought experiment, but I cannot stop myself from going there. I had a beloved uncle by marriage who was a cop (and eventually captain) in a very rough New Jersey city, during the volatile 1960s and 1970s. He did not keep arsenals in the house. His service revolver was kept under lock and key. He and my aunt were not convinced that violence and arming themselves to the teeth were strategies to maintain the safety of their environment in the working-class and diverse city in which they lived and where they worked. He was probably politically very conservative but I never ever heard him refer disrespectfully to any of the people he swore to serve and protect. He was a credit to the police force he joined and the city he served.
In contrast, a family friend, who was a journalist for a major newspaper, was almost killed by cops in Chicago in 1968 during the DNC, even though his press pass was visible and he was surrounded by other fellow members of the press. He was singled out because he was Black.
This is not a story about "bad apples" as the Right loves to claim when they are caught doing execrable things. It is about acculturation, systemic racism, and the apparent glorification of violence as the only mechanism the police are encouraged to use when they "serve and protect." In Chicago--and nowadays pretty much everywhere--the decision was to demonize a population that was vulnerable and conveniently disenfranchised in order to assuage the toxic masculinity of horrible specimens like Richard Daly--or Frank Rizzo, or Rudy Giuliani, or (name your favorite awful mayor).
I agree completely and thanks for so articulately describing the situation. I would only add that the way in which policing is done in the U.S. is a direct outgrowth from slave patrols, pitting lower class white men against Black people, who are to be considered more ignorant, more violent, bestial, and in need of control. 450 years, and very little has changed.
Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, who both fits and breaks the pattern. Not a chest-thumping bully; a bland, competent Black technocrat who still presided over the most shockingly horrible race massacre: wiping out the MOVE community through aerial firebombing. It utterly disregarded human life and destroyed whole city blocks in the process.
You have nailed it, Shelly. It was Chauvin's swagger, looking directly at the cameras trained on him, confident that nothing would happen to him, that make this so clearly an act of murder.
Derek Chauvin lynched George Floyd. We must not shy away from this fact. Last year David Blight, author of "Race and Reunion" on post-Civil War America, stated that it was a torture-murder. That is a key hallmark of lynching, along with some kind of accusation, and the denial of due process. It was a public spectacle too, a common if not universal aspect of lynching. Call this terrible crime by its proper name, and punish the criminals accordingly.
P Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown
I Wells, Southern Horrors
I believe you are right, Shelly, the larger intent of Derek Chauvin was to conduct an impromptu (but tragically familiar) lynching, the traditional display of white supremacy in America, and his intended audience was not only passersby, many no doubt local residents, but his younger police assistants, arguably his accomplices. The "Look mom, no hands," ease with which Chauvin killed the helpless Mr. Floyd is truly atrocious.
Yes. You are right. A lynching. I feel sick.
Agreed. Chauvin was purposely killing George Floyd to deliver a brutal, ruthless, public "lesson". I fervently hope the jury delivers the essential countermanding social lesson we so deeply need, by convicting Chauvin of murder and hate crimes.
I wonder if Chauvin is a psychopath or sociopath. I am not a mental health professional. Based on this WebMD definition, psychopath seems like a better fit. https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/features/sociopath-psychopath-difference
Although I don't disagree that Chauvin's whiteness has something to do with his behaving with what he assumed would be impunity, but I think there is an intersection in this case - and in all cases of police brutality - with police supremacy. There were non-white officers working with Chauvin that day who aided and abetted him. Every time I see a Blue Lives Matter bumper sticker or hear that there is extra outrage when a police officer is killed (as though their lives matter MORE than anyone else's?) I feel the same frisson of horror that I feel every time I review the names of their victims. There is a deep problem with policing itself that draws and/or creates the Chauvins of this world. Those who wash out during police academy are not the psychopaths and sociopaths, it's the overly empathetic. And yes, I know that does not apply to every single police officer or even every department in the world. I'm talking about the big picture, the need for social control that those in power crave more and more - and the ways they use policing to achieve it.
Exactly