A Closer Look at the Legacy of George Floyd’s Death By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/a-closer-look-at-the-legacy-of-george-floyds-death/
It is right to condemn excessive police force. To turn Floyd into a hero of a racialized morality play is inane.
T oday marks one year since the death of George Floyd in police custody — I can never get used to invoking the term “anniversary” in connection with such dark events. There is, as one has come to expect, no shortage of vaporous talk about Floyd’s “legacy.” We should not, however, conflate the man with the event.
Floyd should not have died as he did. For their complicity in his demise, four former Minneapolis police are being held accountable, beginning with Derek Chauvin, who was convicted last month. Still, a stubborn fact remains: Floyd bore significant responsibility for the tragedy that unfolded.
There was probable cause that he committed a crime. He was not profiled or otherwise singled out for harassment by police officers acting on suspicions rooted in “systemic racism.” To the contrary, a local food-store merchant complained to police that Floyd had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. That complaint was based on a report by the young black cashier who handled the transaction and whom Floyd willfully put in an unfair position — either speak up or be personally liable for the store’s loss. Before calling the police, store employees, including the cashier, twice implored Floyd (who was parked outside) to come inside and settle the problem that he had caused. He refused. And although Floyd had serious health issues — e.g., an enlarged heart, hypertension, narrowings in major passages near his aorta, and a recent bout with COVID — he continued to abuse illegal narcotics and was at the time ingesting a potentially deadly combination of fentanyl and methamphetamine.
Floyd was a tragic figure, but not an admirable one. What happened last Memorial Day was not his first run-in with the law — far from it. In the decade beginning in 1997, when he was 23, he was arrested at least nine times. Several of these resulted in criminal convictions, generally for small-time narcotics and theft offenses. The resulting prison stints were usually short. But not all of them.
Floyd’s most serious arrest and conviction was for a violent armed robbery in 2007. He was then 33 years old, a muscular former athlete about six-and-a-half feet tall. According to the complaint filed in the case, he was the biggest of a group of men who forced their way into the home of a woman, against whose stomach Floyd held a gun. Floyd is further said to have searched the apartment while one of his accomplices, who was armed, hit the woman in the head and on her side when she screamed for help. The men asked whether there were drugs and money in the apartment; upon being told there were not, they made off with jewelry and a cellphone. Floyd was eventually arrested and charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. He pleaded guilty in 2009 and was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, serving about four years before being paroled in 2013.
Obviously, that did not end his criminal career. A year before passing the counterfeit bill that led to his fateful police detention, Floyd was arrested but apparently not charged under circumstances in which illegal drugs were found in a car he was in. (Floyd was given medical treatment and released because first responders were concerned about his high blood pressure.)
Of course, Floyd’s extensive and occasionally violent criminal history does not excuse the police use of excessive force in detaining him on May 25, 2020. Personally, having watched the trial closely, I would not have voted to convict Chauvin of murder; I’d have voted to convict him of manslaughter. No, the murder verdict was not irrational, but I disagree with the conclusion that prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt the intent element of second-degree unintentional murder — namely, that any of the police, who called for an ambulance to get Floyd medical assistance, intended to criminally assault him. Even less did the state establish depraved indifference to human life — the mental element of third-degree unintentional homicide and a criminal-law concept I believe is inapplicable to the facts of the Floyd situation.
Floyd violently resisted a lawful arrest, and police are permitted to use superior force to detain a suspect. Other video evidence showed that the police restraint used was not as horrific as the state’s preferred video suggested. Indeed, the state’s most compelling medical expert, pulmonologist Martin Tobin, dismantled the popular narrative that Chauvin choked Floyd to death; the pressure placed on Floyd’s chest, not his neck, was the main contributory factor.
Impressive as Dr. Tobin was in describing how the resulting lung compression caused Floyd to succumb due to low oxygen, I’m unconvinced by his speculation that even a healthy person would have perished from the police restraint. More persuasive was the abundant expert testimony that Floyd’s severe medical problems and dangerous drug ingestion contributed to his death.
As I have noted many times, that does not get the police off the hook. Against their training, they held Floyd down in a prone position for over nine minutes, when he was no longer resisting and gradually became unresponsive and pulseless. This excessive force was a substantial contributory factor in Floyd’s death. That is sufficient to satisfy the causation element in a homicide case. But the evidence of Floyd’s health issues supports the inference that Chauvin and the other police did not believe the restraint they were using on Floyd was life-threatening. To be sure, their concern that he might suddenly recover and start fighting them was unreasonable under the circumstances. Yet, their purpose was to hold him in place until the medical team they’d called arrived, not to injure him seriously (in the sense of criminal assault).
Reasonable minds can differ about whether the police restraint tactics were so unreasonable that the jury was indeed correct to have inferred that Chauvin and his colleagues intended to cause serious injury. Clearly, such a conclusion would be bolstered by the egregious derelictions of duty: The police did not roll Floyd into a side-recovery position to promote breathing, thus flouting their training, which stresses that detainees must not be kept prone for an unduly long time; and the cops failed to provide first aid when Floyd was unresponsive, thus flouting their training to begin CPR when the situation allows for it. (Here, the situation allowed for it: Far from interfering, the crowd of bystanders was encouraging police to assist Floyd, and one, a trained fire department EMT, even offered to do it herself.)
Nevertheless, reasonable minds cannot differ about the fact that Floyd bore significant culpability for the outcome. It should not be controversial to say this, so it is a measure of our lunatic times that doing so is grounds for ostracism (if not worse). Floyd’s criminal misconduct caused the police to be called to the scene. If he had complied with the store’s reasonable requests to settle the counterfeiting problem, there would have been no complaint triggering a police response. If Floyd had simply, peaceably complied with the directions of the cops, there would have been no prone restraint on the street. The restraint was applied because he resisted arrest with so much force that four trained police officers were unable, despite considerable effort, to detain him in the back seat of the squad car. And his drug abuse, particularly in light of his health problems, made him uniquely vulnerable to the stress of an arrest and forcible detention.
It is right to condemn excessive police force. To turn George Floyd into a hero of a racialized morality play is inane.
The racial element is especially noxious. It is nothing but political narrative — now abetted by the happenstance that the first of the four ex-cops to be tried for the death of a black man happens to be white. It is not enough to say that there was no evidence in the case suggesting that Chauvin is a racist or that Floyd’s race — as opposed to his criminal behavior — triggered any of Chauvin’s actions. The blunt fact, the fact the media assiduously resist reporting, is that a young black police officer, Alex Kueng, was one of the first two on the scene. Kueng was already in a physical altercation with Floyd, provoked by Floyd’s forcible resistance, at the time Chauvin arrived. Floyd’s tragedy had nothing to do with racism — not the real kind (again, there is no evidence of racial prejudice) and not even the faux “systemic” kind (again, the cops did not pick Floyd out; they responded to a complaint after Floyd passed phony money to a black cashier).
I fear the real legacy we mark this day is that our constitutional commitment to due process of law has given way to mob justice. Derek Chauvin did not receive a fair trial — which is a different issue from whether he was guilty of murder or manslaughter.
The city of Minneapolis, which was principally responsible for ensuring a fair trial, went out of its way to inflame the jury pool against him. The trial judge failed to take adequate steps to shield the jury from prejudicial publicity. That publicity was stoked by mind-bogglingly inflammatory comments by the notoriously irresponsible California Democrat Maxine Waters (when the jury was about to deliberate) and the notoriously injudicious President Biden (while the jury was deliberating). The Left is subjecting Chauvin’s defense witnesses to a shameful intimidation campaign that is clearly designed to pressure the sentencing judge (and undermine the right of the other three ex-cops to present a defense when they are tried). As Scott Johnson has been reporting at Powerline (see here and here), a federal judge in Minnesota is investigating whether Biden Justice Department officials (or officials in the office of state attorney general Keith Ellison, with whom the DOJ is collaborating) stoked prejudicial publicity by leaking information to the media about the grand-jury investigation of Chauvin and the other ex-cops for federal civil-rights violations. (It is a violation of federal law to disseminate grand-jury information.) There are strong indications that, during voir dire, a juror misled the court by concealing that he had participated in a Washington, D.C., demonstration against police brutality — wearing a Black Lives Matter hat and a T-shirt inscribed with “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” (the name given the demonstration) as he listened to Floyd family members and other speakers. And with all this as background, it bears observing that in a complex three-week trial, freighted with so much expert medical and use-of-force testimony that the trial judge gave the lawyers a long weekend to prepare their full day of summations, the jury convicted Chauvin on all counts at breakneck speed — just a few hours, during which they did not ask to review a single exhibit, hear a word of testimony read back, or seek clarification on any point of law.
The main legacy of George Floyd’s death is societal division exacerbated by surging violent crime. (See these insightful columns by our Robert VerBruggen and the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald.) The Bolshevik Left exploited George Floyd’s death to riot, to assault and kill police, to destroy police department and other government property, to destroy communities and businesses, and to agitate for the defunding of police and evisceration of laws promoting the arrest and detention of violent criminals. Naturally, violent crime has spiked in big cities across the country. As always, moreover, the principal victims of this dystopia are black communities, which need effective policing because their young male members tend to commit crime at disproportionately high rates — and the vast majority of crime is local.
One year later, it would be more apt to speak of a catastrophe than a legacy.
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