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Forgery suspect killed by cop restricting his airway

Derec said:
Toni said:
And unfortunately this is not Minneapolis’s first time at this particular rodeo.
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No. For example, when a burglar shot and wounded two police officers, Minneapolis decided to give his family almost $900k. Just goes to show how anti-police Frey and the city council are.
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That's more a reflection on the jury system. They're afraid the jury will award big bucks if it goes to trial.
 
Derec said:
Police officers are human beings, not RoboCop (and even he was part human). Human beings are not perfect all the time. Even if they did not follow police manual 100% does not mean they are guilty of this man's death. Or that they should be fired.
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Right! So are drunk drivers! Even if they drive drink and run over a pedestrian, it doesn’t mean they are guilty of his death.

Where’s our compassion!
 
Loren Pechtel said:
TSwizzle said:
Derec said:
We don't know what precipitated him being restrained. We do not even know the cause of death. Can't we wait for the autopsy and tox screen to be completed before we assign blame?
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Even if the autopsy shows this man died from something like intoxication, the man was clearly in a lot of distress screaming about how he was having difficulty breathing. There was no need to keep leaning on his neck after he was handcuffed.
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Someone screaming about breathing difficulty isn't really having breathing difficulty, which is no doubt why the cops didn't care. However, that doesn't justify what happened.

What I think we are looking at is a case of the police trying to inflict a bit of extra punishment on someone who was causing trouble--which is decidedly not legal but generally hard to prove. If his actions were a felony then felony murder would apply, otherwise all I see here is negligent homicide. I do not believe there was any intent to do more than inflict pain.
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He wasn't screaming. Or didn't you watch the tape? I don't blame you if you skipped it. It was really rough. Bystanders were begging the officer to get help for the man who was obviously in distress. Oh, btw: he died with the officer's knee on his neck.
 
ruby sparks said:
Toni said:
I see no reason to back away from the statement that it looks like murder. It did to me and to witnesses urging the officer to quit pressing his knee on the man’s neck.
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No, hey. He killed him. It was shocking. I think on reflection that if the discussion veers into murder-not-murder-only-manslaughter or whatever it'll be missing the point. Also, I don't think we can tell if it was racism, so imo that should be left out unless something more comes up to point to that. I'm sticking with shocking, awful killing. That police officer, and quite possibly his co-officer, surely have to face very serious charges over this, and quickly. Let the legal system decide if it was murder, manslaughter or unlawful killing or whatever.
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Yes, this is absolutely outrageous. These cops really earned the name pigs.

I say it all the time, and I'll say it again, the police in the US are pretty much a gang if thugs with the authority of the state.
 
Derec said:
We don't know what precipitated him being restrained. We do not even know the cause of death. Can't we wait for the autopsy and tox screen to be completed before we assign blame?


Well any resistance necessitates some level of force by the police. We do not know how he resisted, so we cannot say for now whether the police acted appropriately.
And as I said, we do not know what caused his death. From the video, it does not appear that the knee compressed the suspect's trachea. He is heard speaking relatively normally, which is inconsistent with his airway being obstructed due to compression. So I would say most likely he died due to acute intoxication, likely by some licit substance such as meth or cocaine, and not really due to him being restrained in the manner we saw in the video.

How much of a shambles does someone’s moral center need to be to gleefully bleat about the potential overreaction of a hashtag in the face of a senseless and callous killing?
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We do not know that he died as a result of what police did. We certainly do not know we acted "callously". As I said, all people like you need to form a conclusion is that the suspect was black.

Why don't we wait until the autopsy and tox screens are done first before "gleefully bleating" about how police killed an innocent black man "callously and senselessly"?
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Nah dude. This video pretty much speaks for itself. You can't put your knee on someone's neck like that unless you are trying to asphyxiate them. It's extremely reasonable to conclude that's what killed him.
 
Derec said:
Angry Floof said:
There's nothing more disgraceful than bootlicking. We all may be in error not having all the facts, but some of us have the humanity not to err on the side of the powerful.
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Who is really powerful? Police officers who get unceremoniously fired just because a suspect dies during arrest even before the autopsy is complete? Or the families of criminals who become millionaires just because their family member dies during an interaction with police?
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The cops, Derec, are you fucking serious? The answer is the cops.

Even if they hadn't killed him this video should be enough to get them fired. Unless you are some base form of bootlicker.
 
Video Of Fatal Arrest Shows Minneapolis Officer Kneeling On George Floyd’s Neck For Several Minutes – WCCO | CBS Minnesota -- some video of that. I'd like to know what those cops' defenders think was going on.

Joaquin Castro on Twitter: "I also hope the #GeorgeFloyd murder will be a wake up call to local officials to challenge police unions during collective bargaining over issues of discipline/conduct.
Democrats on city councils shouldn’t bow to police unions just because they’re part of organized labor." / Twitter

Right-wingers normally hate labor unions, but they seem to like labor unions that are on their side.

Ayanna Pressley on Twitter: "No more brutality. No more murder. No more hashtags.
Just justice.
May it rain down like a mighty river." / Twitter

Seems like a misquote of MLK's “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” from Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.] In turn from Amos 5:24 in the Bible.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Derec said:
Who is really powerful? Police officers who get unceremoniously fired just because a suspect dies during arrest...
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This just exclamates how bitter Derec is on this topic.
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It is like complaining how unfair people are to doctors who's patients die when the doctor severs an artery and ignores the other people in the operating room who insist he do something about it.
 
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "#GeorgeFloyd should be alive. Instead, he was killed as he begged police for his life.
The impunity of police violence is a systemic problem we must face to save lives.
Police brutality is now a leading cause of death for young Black men in the US. The status quo is killing us." / Twitter
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Police shootings are now a leading cause of death for young men *across the board* in the US. For Black men and boys, the risk of being killed by police is *1 in 1,000.*
1 in 1,000. Terrifying and indefensible. https://t.co/HLGXZAVOTp" / Twitter
noting
Police shootings are a leading cause of death for young American men, new research shows - The Washington Post
noting
Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex | PNAS
with abstract
Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police. Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups. Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men.
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Back to the WaPo.

For men of all races with ages 25 - 29, causes of death per 100,000:
  • Accidental death (with car accidents and drug overdoses): 76.6
  • Suicide: 26.7
  • Other homicides: 22.0
  • Heart disease: 7.0
  • Cancer: 6.3
  • Police killings: 1.8
That study did not distinguish those killings later judged to be justified and those that are not. FBI: about 400 - 500 / year, out of the total of 1,000 / year.
For a black man, the risk of being killed by a police officer is about 2.5 times higher than that of a white man. “Our models predict that about 1 in 1,000 black men and boys will be killed by police over the life course,” the authors write.

Police killings account for 1.6 percent of all deaths of black men age 20 to 24, the study found. Among white men, police are responsible for 0.5 percent of all deaths in that age group. A 40-year-old black man has about the same risk of being killed by a police officer as a 20-year-old white man.
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Comparison to economically-similar countries: By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years | US news | The Guardian
Police killings are far more common in the United States than in other advanced democracies. That’s partly because the U.S. has a much higher homicide rate — “25.2 times higher” — than economically similar countries, according to a 2016 study. One of the prime drivers of that difference, research shows, is the nation’s high rate of gun ownership: Americans make up 4 percent of the global population but own nearly half the guns in the world.

The nation’s high rates of violence and gun ownership make many police fearful for their lives, research shows.
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About 100 - 200 cops get killed in the line of duty per year, and their death rate is higher in states with more permissive gun laws.

More than half of those killed by cops had guns with them, and about 20% had mental-health issues. “Austerity in social welfare and public health programs has led to police and prisons becoming catchall responses to social problems,” from the report.
 
As to how people are supposed to protect themselves, there is an alternative. Body armor. Bulletproof vests. Helmets. Like what many cops themselves often wear. Also low-lethality weapons like Tasers. But neither the Left nor the Right seems willing to promote such alternatives.
 
 
He did not have a bodycam on.

There is no judgment call on this, It does not matter if he had just chopped someone's head off or lit a full schoolbus on fire.

This is straight up top level manslaughter at the least,
 
Frey: Arrest, charge officer who knelt on George Floyd's neck before death

Mayor Jacob Frey on Wednesday called for an arrest and charges against the now-fired Minneapolis police officer who knelt on the neck of George Floyd as he pleaded to breathe shortly before his death, in an incident caught on video that drew international outrage.

"There are precedents and protocols sitting in the reserves of institutions just like this one that would give you about a thousand reasons not to do something, not to speak out, not to act so quickly, and I've wrestled with that more than anything else over the last 36 hours, with one fundamental question: Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail?" Frey said in a news conference. "If you had done it or I had done it we would be behind bars right now and I cannot come up with an answer to that question."

The city identified the officers involved as Derek Chauvin, whose knee was on Floyd's neck, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao and J Alexander Kueng. All were fired Tuesday.
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