Police body-camera footage of George Floyd’s arrest in Minneapolis has been leaked, revealing Floyd was in significant distress — and possibly intoxicated — long before Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck. …
Floyd repeatedly pleads for his life and begs for his mother, asking the cops if they plan to shoot him and insisting that he’s claustrophobic and can’t sit in the police car. The officers attempt to mollify him, promising to roll down the windows, in between asking him if he’s taken any drugs and accusing him of behaving erratically. The clip from Kueng’s bodycam provides an alternate camera angle on police restraining Floyd on the ground – the infamous “I can’t breathe” sequence that shocked the world when it initially surfaced on social media over two months ago.
It’s clear from both clips, however, that Floyd was in distress long before he ended up face-down on the asphalt. Repeatedly insisting he’s “not that kind of guy,” the stricken security guard protests “I can’t breathe” and “I don’t wanna die weird” as the officers attempt to stuff his handcuffed body into the squad car. Floyd even volunteers to lie on the ground instead, though at this point in the arrest the cops struggle to push, pull, and otherwise wrestle him into the vehicle.
Lawyers for the four officers charged with Floyd’s murder have for weeks argued the bodycam footage should be made public, insisting it provides necessary context for the decision to restrain Floyd on the ground using the controversial knee hold. …
Floyd’s ex-girlfriend, a passenger in the car, tells the police he is mentally unstable (“he’s got a thing going on”) regarding police and has been shot before, suggesting his erratic behavior could be a panic attack triggered by cops sticking a gun in his face. …
Officer Lane … can be heard asking if the cops should roll Floyd on his side, stating he is “worried” about “the excited delirium or whatever.” Chauvin can be heard reassuring his colleague that the ambulance is on its way and Floyd is “staying where we’ve got him.”
Jason Whitlock (a black sports journalist):
The videos show police verbally and physically struggling to get Floyd to comply. Floyd appears panicked, disoriented, desperate and totally non-compliant. He complains that he can’t breathe while standing on two feet. He claims his mother just died and that he can’t sit in the back of the police car because he’s claustrophobic. He repeatedly begs the officers not to shoot him. He worms the upper part of his body out of the police car and asks to lay on the ground.
Early on during the encounter, long before the police restrain Floyd on his stomach, a female bystander shouts at Floyd to quit “resisting” and a male bystander pleads with Floyd that he can’t “win.” …
The video does not justify officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. But it does offer context why Chauvin would be reluctant to believe Floyd’s “I can’t breathe” cries. Nearly every word out of Floyd’s mouth was a desperate lie. …
The George Floyd case is not a race crime. No rational person can watch that footage and conclude the police were motivated by Floyd’s black race.
At 3:57, we see Floyd cuffed and standing on the street. An officer says, “Are you on something right now?”
“No, nothing,” says Floyd.
This too was a lie. In fact, the autopsy revealed that Floyd had fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system at the time of his death. The autopsy also found that Floyd, 46, had “severe” heart disease, and that he died of a heart attack. The autopsy ruled that the fentanyl (“fentanyl intoxication”) and the meth might have contributed to his fatal heart attack. The autopsy also called his death a “homicide.” …
That bodycam footage dramatically changes what we thought we knew about this story.
George Floyd did not just resist arrest. He spent at least eight minutes gasping and shrieking and carrying on like a lunatic, all the while refusing frequent, entirely legitimate orders by police. I had been under the impression that they had brutalized him from the beginning, throwing Floyd to the ground and kneeing him in the neck. That’s not remotely what happened. What happened is that these police officers gave Floyd chance after chance to obey. He was high on fentanyl and meth, though he denied twice that he was on anything, but his behavior was completely bizarre. Was it because he was high? Maybe. It might also be because he had four previous criminal convictions, and had done a prison stint for assault and robbery. What brought the cops in Minneapolis out that afternoon was that he was attempting to pass counterfeit bills in a local store. Floyd must have known that given his criminal record, he was going to be in a world of trouble over the fake currency.
The knee-in-the-neck procedure was only deployed by a cop after Floyd’s repeated refusal to comply with police orders simply to get into the police car. One can certainly argue about whether or not the neck restraint is wise and proper, but one cannot argue with the fact that it was permitted under Minneapolis police procedure. …
The new bodycam video shows that Floyd had been actively resisting arrest for at least eight minutes! …
All he had to do was obey the police, who gave him chance after chance after chance. They did not come down on him hard, with the neck restraint, because he was black. They came down on him because he hysterically resisted arrest, for at least eight minutes.
The media’s narrative is false. All the George Floyd riots, all the George Floyd protests, have been based on a lie. That lie, though, has become so fundamental to the left’s narrative that disbelieving it will be impossible for countless people.
In the original cell phone videos which caused the riots, what we see is a cruel cop callously and almost casually snuffing the life out of a defenseless man. But when we consider that he’s actually dying from an overdose, everything changes. The cops have figured out he’s on something really, really bad (PCP? they wonder at one point). He’s expressed difficulty breathing. So: THEY HAVE CALLED FOR AN AMBULANCE.
The reason they look so casually indifferent is because they are, in fact, just killing time while they wait for the ambulance to get there. There’s nothing else they can do for him. Every now and then Chauvin does move around a bit, repositioning his knee: but, on this reading, he does so because he is taking care NOT to obstruct Floyd’s breathing while he maintains the restraint. …
What we have with Floyd is something very much like what happened in Ferguson in 2015. There is a killing of a black man at the hands of the police, apparently. It becomes a cause celebre to advance the BLM movement. But there is a big big difference this time. In 2015, very quickly after the initial eruption, journalists brought to our attention that the underlying facts were in dispute and at least open to multiple interpretations.
As additional information came into the public view, the majority of the public, within a week or two, concluded that, after all, it was a justified police shooting. That happened time and time again during BLM’s first run in 2015-16.
This time, in 2020, it’s different. There were NO mitigating facts, NO suggestions in the media of alternative interpretations. EVEN THOUGH THE TOXICOLOGY STUDY WAS POSTED ON THE INTERNET WITHIN DAYS. I saw that report and I was asking everyone I knew whether they had seen anything in the press explaining what 11 ng of fentanyl meant. Was it a lot or a little? Was it just a trace amount from someone who had used last week?
No one in the press “characterized” a fact in plain view. Time and time again we heard that he had some drugs in his system. But NO ONE said: Oh, by the way, that was a lethal dose of fentanyl in him, and unless he got on Narcan immediately, he was done for.
So the big “political” thing I take away from this episode is that the media ecosystem has changed significantly from 2015.
The autopsy report clearly says that he did NOT die of asphyxiation. There’s apparently something that happens to the eyes in those cases (a doctor friend tells me), and Floyd’s body didn’t have that. Nor was there any damage to the trachea or bruising to the neck. There was a broken rib, but that happened post-mortem during the examination. No, the coroner finds the cause of death to be cardiac arrest. Floyd’s heart stopped, for whatever reason.
Shame this wasn’t made public immediately upon his death. But that would have torpedoed the left’s narrative. Notice that this video was not released by the leftist controlled police bureaucracy, but leaked.
Like in the Trayvon Martyn and “Hands up don’t shoot” cases that BLM pushed before this, the truth was initially suppressed because it contradicts or greatly lessens the left’s narrative. Three times now? Hardly a coincidence. When are we going to learn?
