As most already know, the Chauvin trial has come to pass, and he has been found guilty of all charges against him in the death of George Floyd.
Now, the media is feverishly asking how this verdict will change policing, and what issues in policing are to be addressed in the wake of this historic trial.
To my mind, there are plenty of issues with policing, such as the use of force and its justification, race relations, mental health, etc., but there is the issue of what the police respond to: criminality.
There is also behaviour conditional upon encountering the police that gets people into trouble, that otherwise could have been avoided.
If you do not run from the cops, you will not get chased.
If you do not resist arrest, you will not be restrained.
If you do not commit crimes, you will not be detained.
And yet we see time and again black men, in particular, do exactly all of these things. What are cops supposed to do? Shirk their duty and let the criminal off easy? Surely not.
In the case of Floyd, the cops were not called on him because of some fake $20 bill being shown in the attempt of a transaction. They were called to deal with theft. Floyd had ‘paid’ for his cigarettes and banana with a fake $20 bill, and when confronted by multiple store employees to return to the store and pay up, he refused. It was after repeated attempts at this that the store manager had an employee call the cops on him.
Floyd was found with his drug dealer in the car, as well as a female friend, and he swallowed some homemade drugs (speedballs, which were a mixture of meth and fentanyl) – he had done the same thing in a previous 2019 arrest. Floyd was detained and cuffed, resisted arrest, was put on the ground, and got the knee.
We all saw Chauvin with his knee on the neck and back of Floyd, and we saw Floyd go from being an active, belligerent person resisting arrest to being unresponsive. We very well could have watched Floyd die right there.
So, we’re told the issue is policing: use of force and a callous indifference to human life – perhaps even to a racist degree.
In the Chauvin case, I think the issue is more specific than ‘policing’. The issue is ‘causation’. Did Chauvin CAUSE Floyd’s death, and was his involvement in that death criminal beyond a reasonable doubt?
The state and its witnesses argued, successively, that Floyd was killed by a ‘blood choke’ by Chauvin’s knee cutting off Floyd’s blood supply to his brain, by a ‘respiratory choke’ by Chauvin’s knee cutting off Floyd’s air supply (a totally different thing), and by positional asphyxia-induced compression of Floyd’s chest and airways (yet another different thing).
The medical examiner who performed the autopsy stated that the cause of death was cardio-pulmonary arrest, and another medical witness who reviewed the medical records said that ‘if they had found Floyd at home, dead, then she’d conclude it was an overdose’ – both witnesses stating that Floyd’s heart was a major culprit.
To Floyd’s heart, it had substantial blockage of his major coronary arteries. Thus, his heart was unusually vulnerable to any further restriction in blood flow and oxygen supply, as well as abruptly increased demand for blood. Floyd also had severe hypertension, with the resultant enlarged heart, making the heart exceptionally vulnerable under stressful conditions – this is compounded by the aforementioned blockages.
Floyd was an acknowledged drug addict and user of both meth and fentanyl, as well as other drugs. In the case of cardiovascular health, meth makes one vulnerable to heart failure, especially under stressful circumstances.
In the case of fentanyl, its a reasonable inference that the amount of the drug found in Floyd’s system, three times the standard lethal limit, also contributed to Floyd’s death.
For what it’s worth, I think that had Floyd not resisted arrest and had gotten into the squad car he likely would have died that day anyway. In fact, I think that Floyd’s drug dealer is the real culprit here – but he knows better and pled the 5th so as to not incriminate himself in 3rd degree murder charges… Curious how the state didn’t grant him immunity to testify, isn’t it? I guess it isn’t.
All of this, and more, is to be considered in one’s own deliberation of this case in the quiet of their own mind, and I cannot reasonably conclude that Chauvin’s conduct created a foreseeable risk of 'deadly force harm' to Floyd. After all, though we’re privileged to have all this information to mull over, Chauvin, as well as many other cops in similar situations, would be making such assessments in the total absence of Floyd’s seriously damaged physiology and toxicology.
Should cops be expected to do as such? Surely not.
Now, yes, the police are to be held to a higher standard, but they shouldn’t be sacrificial lambs that get tossed to the wolves. Other cops, good cops, will get the message and leave the force because they have the justified feeling that when things get racially controversial, the department will not have their back.
That said, there have been/are issues with unconditional deference to the police, and the Yak-like herding cops will do around one of their own. But there is also the problem of unjustified, dogmatic scepticism and cynicism directed towards police officers. As I stated above, there are serious issues with criminality. Floyd was a criminal. Did he deserve to die? No. But as I think, the cause of his death lies with himself and his drug dealer.
That said, even though I think the issues involving Floyd’s death are specific and complicated, there are also more expansive moral issues ‘we’ – and let’s be honest, its ‘white people’ – must face.
We’re expected to soberly assess these situations and disown the bad guys, even ‘our own’ guys. We’re told not to be tribal and to engage in our higher ideals of justice, while also being told that the imposition of those standards is a continuation of the legacies of white supremacy.
I have no problem assessing the facts and deliberating on the guilt/innocence of the parties involved, but it smacks of foul play when we are also told not to speak honestly about the criminality of the parties involved if they happen to be ‘racialised’, ‘marginalised’, ‘BIPOC’, etc. Last time I checked, such people are humans and are therefore moral agents, and they should be scrutinised as such. Unless we want to have different standards for these groups… And we’re seeing this already begin to play out in the cases of Sergeant Pentland, Officer Nicholas Reardon, as well as others.
It's this lopsided distortion of justice, presumption of innocence, and reasonable doubt that I fear will be promoted by this trial, and its message will play itself out in the lives of citizens across racial lines.
