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June 7, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:07
The Arrest and Death of George Floyd: An Ex-Cop's View
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Hope you're doing well. So I'm here with Nick Dial, who has been, I guess, like a budgie on my ear, whispering me sweet nothings about police procedure and so on.
We had, of course, a conversation about Ahmaud Arbery.
And now, of course, we're going to have a chat with your feedback.
This is going out to subscribers of Free Domain.
And we're going to talk about what happened with George Floyd, what...
What went wrong? What could have been avoided?
What the history is? The legality?
And we'd love to take your questions.
Nick, of course, has been doing a deep dive into this whole case.
So, Nick, if you want to just introduce yourself a little, and I guess we'll start digging into what you've dug up.
Yeah, so my name's Nick Dial.
I started out in the private sector, started doing security with big events like OzFest, private security for rock bands, things like that.
Eventually moved into law enforcement.
I started out as a deputy, went over to a city.
Eventually had to hang it up because I found out I had Crohn's disease and my body just was not going to go along with it.
Made it really hard to work.
So when I left there, I went on and furthered my education.
I got a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice, Homeland Security, and Counterterrorism.
And I've since then gone on to write and I'm an author on various law enforcement websites and whatnot.
You can see things I've done on lawenforcementtoday.com and sites like that.
So in a nutshell, that's who I am.
So good. I always feel relieved to be in the nestling arms of an expert with regards to these matters.
So... Let's just start sort of from a more personal standpoint before we dig into sort of the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts of the case.
When you saw the video and you heard the tales of what had happened with George Floyd and the officers there, what was your first thought?
What was your first reaction? Well, my first reaction was, like, I was horrified, right?
My first reaction watching it is I was...
At first I was puzzled, and I didn't understand what I was seeing exactly.
Although, in contrast, my wife was next to me too when she saw it, and she broke down in tears.
Understandably, the average person obviously has a very emotional response, probably because of being in law enforcement.
When I see something that upsets me, my first tendency is to kind of take a break and go, okay, what's going on?
What are the variables? Find out what I know, don't know, and kind of just go through process elimination.
Old habits die hard, I guess.
So my first reaction was, I don't know why Chauvin is using that type of restraint.
I wasn't familiar with it.
I thought it was...
Odd, because I was never trained that way.
But then I thought, well, maybe I'm looking at this from a biased point of view.
Because if I was never...
Every state has different training standards.
Every department has different training standards.
So then I realized, well, if I'm looking at this in the eyes of someone who's never trained on this sort of thing, it would be easy for me to go, well, what is he doing?
I would never do that.
But if I was never trained that way, of course, I would say that.
So when I started diving into this...
I found out a lot of stuff that I wasn't expecting and I was actually surprised by a lot of what I found.
And so I've gathered a lot of information here that I think may present issues when it goes to court.
So a lot of people think it's very clear cut and dry.
And the reason I thought it would be good to do this video is to try to show people Even when you see something that you think is clear-cut and dry, it's actually very complicated.
And it's not as straightforward as we think.
Well, I mean, I've covered a number of these sort of racially tense crimes before, all the way back to Trayvon Martin and even before that.
And even in the older sort of scenarios that have played out where it's like, you know, white cop and black crime, Man, usually, you can say, okay, well, there's kind of a narrative going on here.
There's got to be something else going on.
When I first saw this video, and of course, the impact of this video, you know, seeing this poor man, you know, crying out for his mother.
He can't breathe. He's dying and so on.
And seeing the man kneeling, Chauvin, kneeling on his neck.
I mean, it's just, it hits you like a ton of bricks.
And I sympathize with everyone who's had to watch this.
You know, I didn't have to, of course, chose to watch Ahmaud Arbery, the attack and the The shooting, and it's wretched stuff to watch.
It's wretched stuff to watch. And I was like, oh, man.
I can't see how this is justified.
But at the same time, you know, if you were just some racist cop, you wanted to kill someone, you could find ways to do it where you're not being filmed.
And, and so I was like, it's almost like a test, like you've ever seen the movie 12 Angry Men, where there's like 11 people on the jury, who are certain that the crime had been committed.
And one guy was like, well, Well, okay, but, and I hate, you know, being that well, okay, but thing, right?
When you see something like this, what looks like a brutal, neck-crushing murder of a black man, and then you say, well, yeah, but, you know, especially if you're a white guy, then, you know, just for those who are listening, we're So, when you are the yes-butt guy, and you really, really feel like a tool.
I mean, I did, for sure. I mean, you kind of got to stand by principle here.
You got to stand on principle. You got to say, okay, innocent until proven guilty.
There may be no good explanation for this, but let's not jump to the conclusion that there isn't, because I don't like lynching.
I don't like lynching of whites or blacks or East Asians.
You name it. We got to get the facts.
And what has been tumbling out?
This has been, like, I hate to say sort of like a plot twist because this was a man's life and it ended in an ugly, ugly fashion.
But man, it's almost like an Agatha Christie story where everyone's 100% and then it's like, okay, well, that's that.
Oh, that's that. Oh, that's that.
Oh, my God, that's that.
And slowly but surely, this certainty gets whittled away from under you and you're left riding a bit of a cloud.
And if that's the process that went for you, what were the major turning points?
And, you know, feel free to share your research here.
What were the major turning points for you that had you begin to reevaluate?
Well, the major...
So, I think what people should realize or they should put their emotions in check and strive to endure...
They should strive for is what makes...
In my opinion, what sets the West apart from a lot of the world is our ability to get to a point where we don't just execute people in the streets or have mob justice.
It's the ability to usually say, all right, we're going to let it play out.
We're going to let it go through the justice system.
We're going to hear all sides.
I mean, that's what makes, in my opinion, the justice setup Oh no, that's more than your opinion, man.
We've got to stand firm on this.
That is the only civilized legal system that takes evidence over eyewitness, that allows you to cross-examine your accusers, that allows you to be defended by a lawyer that has, outside of France, for the most part, innocent until proven guilty.
I think we got, like, that's not a I like vanilla ice cream opinion.
That is civilized law because the mob is almost always, like, wherever the mob is going...
It's a bad place. They're only ever right accidentally, and when they're right, they overrun the right and end up in the wrong again.
So we've got to be able to push back against the mob.
Go ahead, sorry. Well, I was just going to say, probably one of my favorite examples of it is the Boston Massacre, where John Adams stepped up against the angry mob and defended the British soldiers against a lot of angry outcry, but he stood on principle.
And that's where you hear the famous quote, you know, you're in You're entitled to your opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.
Facts are stubborn things.
So I do think facts matter.
And so it's important to look at everything before we just go with absolutes.
So when I was looking into it, One of the issues I look at, I mean, I can make arguments for both sides, but one of the issues I see right now is it's the charges that are being put on them.
I think there's this tendency lately to overcharge, and a lot of people out there that say, no, I want first-degree murder.
I want this. I don't know if they're making the demand because they get caught up in the title of it.
Where they think, well, third degree is not as good as first, so I went first.
Or somehow George Floyd's life is not worth as much if it's not first degree.
Right. And it has nothing to do with that.
It has to do with the charge needs to fit the circumstances surrounding what happened.
So if you can't Pull up the definition of which first or second or third degree murder fits within the context of what happened.
You can't make that fit.
That's not the right charge to do.
And so the risk of overcharging to appease the masses is when it finally gets to the court system and you've got a jury sitting there being told to do everything they can to objectively and honestly consider the charges for the accused.
That's going to weigh heavy on them.
And if those charges don't stick and everyone's expecting it to, you're going to have more angry people.
And then you're going to have claims of corruption.
And it could not have anything to do with corruption.
It's just the fact that it was overcharged.
So when you get into the...
Let's see. For first degree or second degree murder, I was looking through this statute...
And the only section I can find that maybe they're shooting for is it says, causes the death of a human being without intent to affect the death of any person.
However, there's a clause that says while intentionally inflicting or attempting to inflict bodily harm upon the victim, But it has to do when there's an order of protection against the victim.
It says if the person causes this harm, if they're committing a felony offense.
In my opinion, that doesn't really fit with an officer that is responding to a call.
Obviously, the officer's not committing a felony and then hurt somebody in the act of a felony.
I'm going to just paraphrase here, and of course, neither of us are lawyers, but this is sort of a reasonable layperson understanding of...
The law that, I mean, you know, first degree is you plan, you plot, you go in depraved heart, you kill the person, I mean, and that's what you wanted to do, and that's maximum murder, you know, as far as the law goes.
But second degree is, I don't know, hey man, I only meant to torture him, and he died on my torture table.
I mean, that would sort of be an example of you were hurting him in the commission of a crime, and his death occurred, but there's evidence that that wasn't exactly what you wanted to do.
If I go in and rob a store, committing a felony, and I didn't plan to kill somebody, but somebody dies in the process of the crime, according to the statute of Minnesota, it looks like that's where second-degree murder would fit.
So then I pull up third-degree murder, the original charge, and it says, whoever without intent to affect the death of any person causes the death of another person by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and So again,
I'm looking at this going, okay, well, the problem I see here is they're going to have to argue in a court of law to convince a jury beyond a shadow of a doubt that his intention was Was to put this person in grave danger and whatever the depraved mind part, how that falls in, I'm going to argue that.
I don't know, but again, I look at that and I'm kind of like, I don't know, that could be a hard sell because when we start getting into the facts surrounding this, this is all going to come out in the courtroom.
And any defense attorney worth their salt is going to bring all the stuff up that's...
That I've gathered here. So those charges, I'm not sure.
Maybe manslaughter or maybe negligent homicide would be a more plausible charge, but here's the problems I see.
So when it comes to the knee-on-the-neck restraint, I wasn't really familiar with it.
And then I found out it's more predominant around the world than I had any idea.
Of course, I was trained 14 years ago.
So it's been a little while since I was in the game.
However, from what I can tell, most departments in the United States, at least, they don't use the knee on the neck restraint.
A lot of them have shived away from the neck restraint after the Garner case.
And I'll touch on it in a sec because there is research regarding that.
However, the optics of it They don't even want to go into that area.
But what I found out To my surprise is that Minneapolis Department policy and procedure does allow neck restraints.
And that's what bothered me, Nick, when we first heard this and they said, well, you know, they're trained that it could be dangerous or it's inherently dangerous.
And it's like, that's not the same as saying you can't do it, just saying do it, but be careful.
And I think it was 2012, a bunch of Minneapolis cops went over to Israel to get trained in how to restrain people.
And Israel, of course, is pretty rough.
in a pretty rough section of the world.
And so that was my first indication.
They weren't just saying, oh man, you're totally not allowed to do that because that's open and shut, man.
That's just, of course, that's gonna be an open and shut case.
But if he's trained on its lawful use and it's been used over 200 times recently in the Minneapolis Police Department with no fatalities.
So if they're trained in it, if it's allowed, if it's occurred before, they can't be gotten, as far as I understand it, you can't be gotten for something you're trained and allowed to do.
Even if it has negative consequences, you can't be gotten just for that.
Well, here's what's interesting. So if you go into the Minneapolis Policy and Procedure Manual, under the definitions, so they have neck restraint and then they have chokehold, and they differ between the two.
A chokehold, they classify as a deadly force option, and they define that as applying direct pressure to someone's trachea or airway.
Now, when it comes to a neck restraint, The reason they classify that as being different is it's force on the side of the neck.
So the carotid can be both sides, one side.
And here's the kicker that I think is going to be a real issue when it goes to court is in their definition of neck restraint, they list it as a non-deadly force option.
Think about that. If it's listed as a non-deadly force option, and he was trained in this use, does that mean all the officers that were trained in this were told, when you use this, you don't have to worry, it's not deadly.
You are not going to kill the suspect using it.
And that's... That brings up a lot of questions.
Now, it may be, of course, just to point this out, it may be that it's entirely wrong for the police to use this kind of So maybe it is more dangerous than people think.
Again, 230 plus times it's been used recently, just in Minneapolis, no fatalities.
But then it's, you know, to take a sort of silly phrase, it's hate the game, not the player, right?
Then you need to reform the police, you need to make this illegal, you need to stop its use, and you need to retrain the police.
But if it's legal, then they're trained in it.
It's not the officer's fault, then that's a systemic issue, right?
That's a procedural issue which may need to be looked at and solved, but it's going to be hard, I think, to go after the individual officer for that.
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It says my laptop battery is going to die, so let me make sure it's plugged in so we don't get it.
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There we go. So, um, so they define it as compressing one or both sides of the person, neck or leg without applying direct pressure to the trachea or airways, how they define a neck restraint.
It does say only sworn employees who've received the training is allowed to use it.
Um, What's interesting about that, though, is most law enforcement agencies everywhere, so the terminology of non-deadly forces, that's been dropped for the most part.
When you see that, it usually indicates that it's older.
It's an older stat, like statutes written a long time ago because they've updated it to less than lethal for pretty much everything.
Because there's an understanding that every restraint, no matter what you use, has the potential to End in a death.
So as a coverall, they've pretty much dropped that.
So I thought it was interesting that that label was applied to it.
From what I can see here, it was the last update in 2012, which I thought was kind of interesting because I believe that's the same year as the Garner case.
But, excuse me.
So the fact that they have it listed as non-deadly obviously is probably going to get dragged up in court because they're going to argue, I would think, How are you going to hold the officer accountable if he was trained in this and he's told it's not a deadly force option?
And then some people said, well, why did the other officers sit around?
Could be if they were trained the same way and they were all interpreting it the same way, right?
So if they all got trained and told, hey, it's not a deadly force option, And they may have not realized it was actually going to cause a problem because it's not uncommon.
And people should realize this isn't, I'm not saying it's okay.
This isn't a rationalization.
This is just going over the facts and the possibilities.
But officers are very used to people when they get cuffed or whatever to say, I can't breathe.
I'm having a panic attack. It's very common.
So officers are used to saying, hey, look, if you're talking, you can breathe.
I've heard a lot of doctors, and I'm not a doctor, but I've heard a lot of doctors debate this.
I got a very clear message from a doctor saying, yeah, that's the way it is.
If you can talk, if you can talk repeatedly over minutes, then you can breathe.
And, you know, like, I mean, if you can imagine just somebody like a boa constrictor around your neck to the point where you can't even breathe, then there's no way to expel air to make a sentence.
So it's a doctor's opinion.
It seems pretty, pretty emphatic.
But as you point out, people don't know how much...
People that you're arresting are going to lie to you about discomfort.
It's one of these unfortunate things.
It'd be nice if they didn't lie, but officers can't, as far as I understand it, it's not particularly wise or productive to take everything that a prisoner says with utmost seriousness, no matter what.
Well, right. Typically, if they're saying, I'm having a problem, you call me a mess.
You cover your basis.
My understanding is they did call medical.
Pretty quickly, yeah.
Okay, so it's not like they didn't call EMS. So they did do that.
So as hard as it may sound to hear this, it could be that as the restraint was being placed and he's talking, they thought it was a typical...
I can't breathe. Complaining that they hear a lot.
If they were trained and told it wasn't a deadly restraint, they might be thinking, okay, he's going to be okay.
It's not deadly.
He's just complaining.
We do have medical on the way.
He's talking. So he's breathing.
One of the officers in the medical report, I forget.
It doesn't list specifically who said it, but it says one officer said, hey, you can breathe.
You're talking. So they were addressing that.
Now where it gets sticky is He could have been having other complications not related to the restraint.
And that could have caused a sensation of not being able to breathe.
But where this gets complicated is, if that's the issue, then that is separate from the actual restraint used.
That means it wasn't the restraint specifically that was causing the medical crisis.
It was something else. Sorry to interrupt.
That really does seem to be the case, though, right?
I mean, so for me, I'm just sort of imagining sitting on the jury neck.
So for me, it would be like, okay, so did he die from the knee to the neck?
And I'd say, okay, well, what does the autopsy say?
Well, the autopsy says, no asphyxiation, no strangulation.
So the answer to me would be, well, no, he didn't then die from the knee to the neck.
And you say, ah, well, what about the medical examiner that was hired by George Floyd's family?
And he said, yeah, it kind of looks like asphyxiation or whatever, but he said you can't see that on the body.
Like, whatever compression would have occurred that could have caused him to choke out, that will have gone away by the time we do an autopsy and certainly by the time the second examiner dies.
Hired by Floyd's family, got a chance to look at it.
So then we're in a situation where the second examiner is saying, well, it kind of looked like choking to me on the video, and that's not a medical exam.
That's not a doctor looking at physical evidence directly in front of him that he can see.
So then you have the issue that if it wasn't strangulation and it wasn't asphyxiation that caused his death, what was it?
And the answer seems to be a cardiac arrest.
And if that's the case, if the man had basically a heart like a ticking time bomb, no one's going to say that he would have just died anyway that day.
Of course, the stress, the excitement, the physicality of taking on the cops and wrestling with the cops and trying to not get put in the car and all of that.
The guy had 90% blockage on one of his arteries, 70%, 75% blockage on other arteries.
Then I'm going to say, okay, well, if it's a heart attack or a cardiac arrest that George Floyd had...
Then, however brutal the knee to the neck looks, it's a little bit of an unsequitur because it doesn't seem like there was some of the dominoes that caused him to die.
Right. Well, I mean, you've got the eggshell skull decision, which I believe you're familiar with.
I don't think that's a criminal, though.
I think that's for civil, and I don't think that that would take into account an arrest situation.
Right. I wasn't able to find too much as far as...
I don't know if that's going to get thrown up in there.
Officers do have to...
I mean, it's expected for us to take into account any possible health problems a person may be suffering from.
But again, it gets hard because you're dealing with a portion of the population that isn't going to cooperate.
You have to do what you do.
If they go into a crisis, okay, you call medical, which they did.
But then the question is, okay, if...
When you're talking about if you've got heart disease...
Artery disease. You're in a stressful situation.
You're fighting. From what I read in the medical report, he's actively fighting back from going into the vehicle.
So that right there is going to put a lot of stress on his system.
So then you get into the conflict of, okay, is it possible that he would have gone into this medical crisis regardless of how he was restrained?
You mean after the fight?
Right. Sorry to interrupt, but this is the thing too.
So like if I, let's say I've just had some brain surgery or something like that, right?
And I've got stitches, like frankenstitches all over my head, or I say to the cop, hey man, I just had surgery or something like that.
Then that to me is indication that I have a physical issue, right?
And obesity, right?
So that could also be the case, you know, with the guy who – Eric Garner, the guy who was selling the illegal cigarettes out in front of the store, got taken down by a bunch of cuffs.
So obesity, it's like, okay, so this guy could have asthma.
He could have something. But you do – the eggshell defense, I think, does have to have something where you have an indication of the problem.
And as you saw from the videos, George Floyd, you know, a tall, strapping guy, looks super strong.
He was a bouncer. He clearly worked out.
So the idea that his heart was hanging by a thread when he's throwing himself into physical combat with four cops, he's tall, he's very strong, and he looks very healthy.
He's not overweight. He's muscular.
The idea that then is like, yes, but he could still have a heart that's hanging by a thread.
That would apply to everyone.
Everyone that you could possibly deal with.
And I don't see how the cops would have any indication that his heart was hanging by a thread.
Well, I mean, they wouldn't necessarily.
Where it does get complicated, though, is most people don't know what excited delirium is.
And it's a phenomenon that's been...
Recorded all the way back to, I believe, the turn of the century.
It's not well understood, but there's a phenomenon when people are within police custody and they've been fighting.
And there's drugs in their system.
A lot of times it's cocaine, methamphetamine, things like that.
Their body just shuts down and they go into cardiac arrest.
I believe technically they label it as pulmonary cardiac arrest, which just means your lungs and your heart shut down.
And they don't It's not an exact science.
It's something that hasn't been well understood for a long time.
It's almost like crib death, where it's like, okay, we know that somebody died.
We don't really know the cause.
We simply know that the circumstances.
One, the baby was in the crib.
Or two, some guy was fighting with cops or being arrested and kind of freaking out.
And yeah, so there is this...
And you hear them, of course, talking about that with regards to George Floyd and the arrest.
Right. So one of the officers...
Okay, so we're touching on that.
So here's one of the major issues I see with the charges is two of the officers were, one, it was his third shift on the job.
Another, I believe, was his fourth shift on the job.
And Chauvin was the training officer, they called FTOs, for one of the officers.
So they're charging everyone now, but you've got murder charges on guys that literally, I mean, they are fresh.
It's their first week on the job.
They don't know what they're doing. They're looking.
Chauvin was a senior officer.
He had 18 years on.
The next senior officer was Lane, I believe.
Oh, no. I'll have to double check on the name.
But he was on for eight years.
The other two guys...
You're talking like fresh off the boat.
Like they don't know what they're doing.
And you can kind of see that in the video.
I mean, you can kind of see like they're looking like, hey, what are we doing here?
And one of them does in the medical report says, should we turn him on his side?
I'm worried about excited delirium.
And then Chauvin responds, no, that's why we're keeping him on his stomach.
I thought that was interesting. So that shows that they are aware of a potential problem.
And Chauvin, he's going to have to clarify why.
I don't know if this was a training thing or what.
I'm not familiar with keeping him on their stomach.
So it's interesting to find out, well, why did you insist on keeping him on his stomach instead of his side?
Now, if he was going into a cardiac event unrelated to the restraint and it had to do with excited delirium or these other factors and it triggered it, Then it doesn't really matter if he's on his side or sitting.
None of that probably would have helped matters.
You can't cure that kind of situation by turning someone on their side.
That's not a magic wand, right? No.
When someone goes into that mode, yeah, it's not good.
You need EMS, Emergency Medical Services, there.
You need them there. That is the constant conflict that officers always deal with out in the field.
You don't know who you're dealing with.
You don't know their pre-existing conditions.
You don't know if they're right cognitively.
You don't know anything of what you're dealing with.
So it's a balancing act of trying to do things the best you can safely, effectively, all around.
And it's not, as you can see, it's not...
There's no perfect science to it, right?
So what's interesting, though, is when I was researching the use of neck restraints, there was a scientific study done on it in 2012 by some doctors up in Canada.
And there's a police department, I believe, let's see, Calgary Police Department was part of the study.
And What they say is for the first time a scientific research team has used modern technology to confirm how vascular neck restraint works to produce unconsciousness.
And according to them it says the findings emphatically refute assertions that this valuable control technique is inherently dangerous and potentially lethal.
So they're claiming That this medical, scientific study they've conducted absolutely proves it's not inherently dangerous like the media claims and all of the pundits and out there people immediately saying, that's it.
That's what did it. That's what caused the problem.
They pushed back on this in 2012.
And for those interested, it was conducted by a doctor, Mitchell.
There's a whole list of doctors here, and you can pull up the study.
Let's see, I'll give you the title of it.
The title was...
Mechanisms of Loss of Consciousness During Vascular Net Restraint.
So anyone that wants to look it up, they can look that up.
Yeah, well, send me the link.
We'll put it in the show notes below the video and on the podcast link.
Okay. And so in a nutshell, so I'm not reading a huge study here, it basically says, you know, their reason for doing it was to push back on the assumptions and the accusations that were getting thrown around.
And so in conclusion, they say that often with, so here's where it's relevant to this case.
when people die in police custody and a restraint gets pinned as the culprit for the cause of it or the individual whatever their conclusion the study is they say often with such deaths very little evidence gathered at an autopsy points to the cause this being the case forensic investigators are left to examine the proximate event at which occurred immediately prior to the subject's demise
there have been many cases where the mode of restraint as the approximate event is held responsible for the death even when little or no pathological evidence exists to demonstrate a casual relationship Over the past three decades, restraint modalities have been modified, invented, reinvented, and even completely abandoned with virtually no change in the incident of death.
Proximal to police restraint, yet deaths in custody continue to be ascribed to the modality of the restraint, even when the mode is dissimilar from case to case.
So basically they're saying, we keep trying different restraints and different methods to restraint, and people are still dying in custody.
So the reason for the study was to say, look, it's not the neck restraint that's doing this.
It's just people being restrained in police custody, period.
And there's other factors that are causing these deaths to occur.
And that's what really needs to get looked into.
So I thought that was kind of an interesting take on it.
Because after this came out, there was a lot of immediate jump to it was the restraint that killed him, period.
And there's no possible scenario.
And that's just... Two things can be true at once.
Or... It can be bad optics.
It can look to be one way, and it's not.
You know, you've probably seen officers a lot of times use a wrist restraint behind the back.
And a lot of times you'll hear people say, ow, ow, you're breaking my wrist, you're breaking my wrist.
Well, are you really breaking the wrist?
No. To somebody who doesn't know anything about it might look on and go, oh, they're breaking their wrist.
And they could fall to the ground and maybe they do break something and then they would blame the restraint, but it was actually other factors that played a role.
So it's much more complicated and nuanced than people realize.
So let's step through and appreciate that clarification.
So they keep trying to switch out these various restraints to try and lower the incidence of death of those in police custody.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what kind of restraint they use.
The degree of death or the amount of death that occurs remains about the same.
So clearly the kind of restraint is not particularly key.
And that's really, really important for people to understand.
Now, we're going to go just like imaginary journey land here because, of course, we don't have the officer cams for reasons that I have completely past understanding other than the fact that they feel it might prejudice the trial.
So they get the call from the person in the convenience store, and this is really tragic to me, because the people in the convenience store, the woman, I think it was a woman, the clerk in the convenience store went out and said, hey man, just give us the cigarettes back and you can go home.
And that didn't happen, right?
So then they call the cops, and the cops come, and even on the 911 call, of course, you can hear they say, look, he's on something, he's high, he's stoned, he's drunk, I don't know what it is, he's on something.
So the cops come out, and there are three people in the car.
Of course, George Floyd, you tell the people who they call known individuals.
Does that mean known to the police?
Does that mean they figured out who they were?
Do you know what that nomenclature means when they say these were known individuals?
I mean, my first thought is known to the police, probably.
They pulled up a record. They knew who he was.
So they'd run the plate, right?
They'd run the plate coming up to the car?
Could be, yeah. I'm not sure where they got the information from.
The reason that does matter, though, is because as soon as he's identified, and it even could be, I'm not sure, I'd have to get a hold of the police report and find exactly what the information was when they got it and how.
Because even if one of the officers who made contact with him in the vehicle, if he ran his name, date of birth, or did get an ID, and he came up, they're going to know his priors.
So the reason that is of relevance is because if you are dealing with somebody and then you find out that they have a repeat criminal history that includes weapon charges, it's going to put you on a little bit of alert.
A lot of alert. This is so frustrating to me because people are like, well, they always characterize his past mistakes.
It's like, come on, man. Home invasion, jamming your gun into the pregnant belly of a pregnant woman and demanding money, basically a death threat against her by shooting her through her baby.
Come on, that's not a mistake. That's not like an oopsie.
And the man was in his 30s, too.
So it wasn't like he was 17 or something where you could have some impulsivity to excuse it.
But people say to me, well, what does it matter what his history was, you know?
And it's like, it matters.
It matters because if the cops know that history, and again, there are some indications that the lead officer and George Floyd knew each other from working security at this nightclub.
So it does matter though, because if the cops run your name, they run your plate or whatever, and they say, oh my gosh, this guy's got weapons charges, he's got drug charges, they report that he's high on something.
They're going to go on high alert.
That's what I would do.
I can't just approach this like some little old lady ran a stop sign.
This is going to be a potentially difficult situation.
To be fair, if you're going to get into one person's history, you need to get into everyone's history.
It's all relevant.
Let all the facts out on the table.
There's this tendency to want to demonize the person that they think is at fault, but then completely Ignore the history of the person they think is the victim.
And then if any of the history comes out that's not in a good light, they immediately attack the source of the information.
You know, oh, you're trying to, whatever, a character assassination.
It's like, well, look, it does matter.
And they're not mutually exclusive either.
It's not like you can't just say one's evil, one's good.
Both can be not good people too at the same time.
I mean, there's many variables.
So there's a lot of false dichotomies that seem to get thrown around.
Yes, if an officer's dealing with someone, you find out, okay, they've got a criminal history, including weapon charges, yeah, they're going to be on alert.
I mean, if I was dealing, when I was pulling someone over or dealing with someone, and I ran a warrant check, and if I got a warrant back, and it was a felony warrant, the cavalry comes running.
They don't mess around with felony warrants.
So, if it's a felony warrant, you have, it's just standard.
You've got people that hear that on the radio, they're coming to where you are at, because they're going to assume that They're potentially dangerous.
And they're not even going to mess around with that.
So if they know that he's had felonies in the past with weapons and doing things like invasions, if any of that comes up, then yeah, they're going to treat him very cautiously.
And he's a big, towering guy.
So it looks like he can do some damage if he wants to.
And then take into consideration, too, that you've got Two officers that are fresh out of the academy, and this is their first time dealing with the real world on the street.
They're getting a little bit of a reality check and culture shock here.
Like, whoa.
I mean, for a lot of new officers, the first time you deal with stuff like that, you're kind of like, holy crap, this is real.
Things get real quick out there.
Short antidote, I stopped a guy like 2.30 in the morning one time with a headlight out, talking to him.
He was acting kind of fidgety, and you learn to listen to those spidey senses.
And I said, do you have any weapons or anything in the vehicle that could harm you?
He's like, no, no, no. But he's just sweating.
And I'm like... You sure about that?
And he's like, no. And I looked down and right by his right hand, there is a handgun tucked between the console and the seat.
And I immediately just, I stepped back.
Your heart starts pounding, right?
Oh, I had my hand on my weapon, asked him to get out of the vehicle.
It was a.357 Sig.
I mean, I'm like, why didn't you tell me about it?
And he just said, oh, I was nervous.
I forgot. I looked in and everything ran it.
It wasn't stolen. Everything was fine.
I ended up letting him go.
But You know, how quick could that have turned bad?
And not only, you know, I didn't do anything, but hey, someone else may have drawn on them.
Things can escalate from zero to 100 in a split second.
So, yeah, you've got young guys dealing with, you know, somebody with a past.
And... Getting back to the restraint, what I thought was interesting.
So people might say, okay, well, despite everything that's been brought up, is it reasonable for the restraint to have even been used with the way Floyd was acting?
According to the policy, the restraint is not allowed to be used on a passively resistant person.
So I looked into the other definition of what a passive suspect is.
I believe that's called rubber bones.
We used to play that when we were kids, right?
Yeah, so like in the video, if you see him when they're walking him, and he's kind of dragging his feet, and he's not willingly coming along, but he's having to be pulled, that would be like passive resistance.
Active resistance, according to their definition, is a response to police efforts to bring a person into custody or control for detainment or arrest, and that's when the subject engages in active resistance when engaging in physical actions or verbal behavior It's reflecting an intention to make it more difficult for the officers to achieve physical control.
So when they tried to put him in the patrol car, according to the medical report, and he said, no, I don't want to go, and he was pushing back, and they went around the right side and tried.
He wouldn't go. And you can see the whole car rocking back and forth in this.
I mean, this was a tussle.
And then says, I don't want to go in there, and he just drops to the ground like a sack of bricks.
According to this definition, that sounds like active resistance, the way they define it.
So then it's, well, okay, technically, is the restraint allowed at that point?
It looks like yes, but then you're going to get into the debate back and forth of, is that reasonable force, though?
Because he's just on the ground.
Is it reasonable for him to put his knee on the neck like he did?
And that's probably...
That's where it's going to get hashed out.
Well, again, and this is sorry to interrupt, but that's all within the context of there's no indication from what I've read, and I've read quite a bit on this, and of course we could all be wrong about this whole speculation, but there's no indication that the knee to the neck is what killed George Floyd.
So the question of whether he should or should not have been in a restraint to me is, I mean, it's worth having the discussion for sure.
But it's not like one way or the other would have stopped the heart attack or the cardiopulmonary event or whatever it's called.
That's what they really needed to hash out.
And I'm sure when it goes to court, they're going to bring in medical experts on both sides and they need to really come to a determination.
How much of a role did the restraint play?
Because you've got scientific and medical reports saying it wouldn't have caused this.
You've got an original medical report by the county examiners saying This restraint didn't play a role.
You got 200 plus times it was used before without fatalities.
Right. As far as I know, it didn't lead to any fatalities before when it was used.
So you've got a common pattern of use.
And you've got a medical report saying that didn't play a role.
And yet you have these other factors.
And then, of course, there's going to be the second report that the family paid that comes in.
And I know in the report it says, well, this is for information purposes only.
But what I thought was a little frustrating with that report is they say in there that the substances in a system are only for information and it doesn't have anything to do with this death.
Well, how can you say that?
That to me seems way preliminary to make a claim like that because there's way too many factors where, yeah, the substance could play a role.
But here's what I thought was interesting is the second exam They claim he was perfectly healthy.
There was no pre-existing conditions.
So now you've got to figure out, well, who's right and who's wrong?
Because if you have one doctor saying there was no pre-existing conditions, you have another doctor saying there was heart disease, coronary disease, and a 90% blockage and a 70% blockage.
And hypertension and you name it, right?
Yeah, that's a massive conflict between the two.
So to me, that's a...
I don't want to use the word incompetent because I think that's not fair.
That may be too nice a word, in my opinion.
Well, somebody's dropping the ball big time between the two, right?
Because how can they be so far apart?
And on one end, people are going to say, oh, well, the county's just trying to cover for the county, so that's why they're saying that.
And then the other people would say, well, yeah, but he's been paid, so of course he's going to say what his client wants.
But here's the gist of it.
Look, either he had heart disease or he didn't.
Either he had coronary artery disease or he didn't.
So it doesn't seem to me like it should be that hard to figure out which one of the two is more accurate.
Well, I'm sure they filmed and had body scans because they knew this was going to be a big deal.
So I'm sure that they have all of the medical records that are going to survive the deterioration of the body so that this can be independently verified.
And the other thing to remember is that the cops had every reason to believe going in.
And listen, obviously, Nick, correct me where I go astray because, you know, I'm doing this from the comfy philosophy studio here.
But I sort of put myself in the shoes of the cop and I go, okay, so maybe I've run the plates before I go up to the car because this is an unusual situation.
The guy handed over a wet counterfeit bill.
That's not an accident.
That's like, oh my gosh, you know, because...
If you hand a counterfeit bill, I don't see any particular reason why you'd have to be arrested because it could just be without your knowledge, right?
So if you sit there and help the cops and, you know, it's hard to see that it's counterfeit and the ink isn't currently running off your fingers and so on.
It's like, okay. But I think they had reason to believe that he had knowledge of the counterfeit.
So that's number one. Number two, he's on something.
And again, if they run his plates, they see the history of drug use, cocaine use, and so on.
They're going to be like, okay, so it's probably not like he's had a couple of beers.
This guy might be on something.
And That makes it more dangerous than cops, especially if it's something like PCP and so on, give you that strength, that size, that lack of fear, that brutality and so on.
So they're going up to this guy saying, okay, so he probably knowingly passed a counterfeit bill, and if it's wet, it means he might be part of a counterfeit crime gang because he just stepped out, like it came right off the printing press.
Yeah, it sounds like they printed it and see, like, hey, let's see if we can spend it.
Right. So already you've got, you know, maybe part of a counterfeit ring.
That would be my suspicion. Number two, you run the plates.
Okay. History of gun violence and felonies and hardened criminal of many, many years or decades, in fact.
And then you say, okay, well, if he's behind the wheel of a car and he's high or drunk or stoned or something like that, then he's definitely going down, right?
You've got the counterfeit thing.
You've got the he's high or drunk or stoned or something like that.
And he's behind the wheel, which means that you don't actually have to be drunk driving in order to get pulled over for drunk driving, right?
Right.
I mean, you can be in the parking lot just about to go and a cop can stop you and say, hey, man, I'd have to wait till you're doing 120 on the highway in order to stop you for impaired driving or something.
So he already had committed a number of crimes.
One, we know for sure, which was he was intoxicated.
Number two, the passing of the obvious counterfeit bill and so on.
And so then the cops are going to approach him like, OK, we're going to have to arrest this guy because he's behind the wheel and he drove probably there and he was intoxicated.
so we gotta bring him in.
And then he starts to resist arrest actively, and he's a big guy.
You don't know what drugs he's on.
So this idea that they just threw him on the ground and put their knee on his neck with no history of it, and so on.
And as you pointed out, something really struck me about your story earlier, Nick, where you said one of the major issues was the guy lied to you.
Like, as soon as a suspect lies to you, I've got to think the cop's in pretty high alert as well, because it's such a volatile thing to do in a dangerous situation.
And I've had a bit of back and forth, and, you know, we don't know for sure, and now we'll never know for sure because, unfortunately, the man is dead.
But I said, you know, can you really claim to be claustrophobic to get in a car if you were just sitting in a car?
And people say, ah, yes, but the backseat of a cop car is smaller and it's tighter and it's caged, so it's more claustrophobic and so on.
But it's a little tough, I think, for people to say, hey, man, I can't get into a car when you just pulled them out of a car.
No, that to me just sounds like run-of-the-mill not wanting to go along with it.
You'll hear all kinds of stuff.
You'll hear people say, I need my insulin, I'm diabetic, and they're not diabetic.
I mean, it's just very standard.
You just deal with it all the time.
So to me, that just sounds like it was him...
Coming up with a reason of not wanting to build a car.
I mean, yeah, I doubt he's claustrophobic.
Now, if there's any medical documentation on that that comes out, that would be interesting, and I'll stand corrected, but I have my doubts as far as the legitimacy of that, but...
It could also be the panic that's coming from a failing heart and a fading cardiopulmonary system that's manifesting in a panic attack that feels like claustrophobia.
Again, we won't know for sure. It's very common for people to have panic attacks when they're getting arrested.
It's stressful. I'm pretty sure I would.
If you look at a lot of the protesters that are out riding with us, it's funny because I saw a video where this young girl was out there.
She's probably barely 18, you know, getting a dose of the real world.
She's getting hooked up with handcuffs and she starts having a panic attack and freaking out.
And it's like, yeah, you know, for some people, as soon as they feel and hear the cuffs go on, it gets real all of a sudden.
Then they realize, oh, and then they start feeling like I can't breathe and hyperventilate and, you know, they're breathing, but they just all they have, they have this sensation like, I can't breathe, and they freak out.
Well, I remember many years ago in the business world, before I actually had Canadian citizenship, I was driving across to America with a bunch of computer equipment and the guy who was with me was a Chinese national.
And yeah, we got pulled – not pulled out of the car, but we were invited out of the car to have a fairly lengthy discussion with the border guards.
And yeah, I mean it's an elevated situation.
You get a cortisol dump and we weren't doing anything wrong.
We went on our merry way and all of that.
But when you have that kind of encounter, it's pretty rough.
And for George Floyd, who'd been in prison for a number of years, who'd had repeated encounters with the law, I mean this was it for him, man.
It's the same thing that may have occurred with Ahmaud Arbery, right?
So this was it insofar as, okay, maybe he's going to go back and be found to be part of some counterfeiting ring.
And he's high on illegal drugs while operating a motor vehicle.
And it's like, boom, boom, boom.
I mean, this was like the worst day of his life.
The first time I had a real, like...
One of the first calls I had as an officer was a guy at McDonald's with a gun.
I mean, the first time I dealt with something high intensity and I experienced a massive adrenaline dump, I said, shaking.
You know, your body's coming down, you get the shake.
So, on the flip side of that, if you're dealing with an interaction with law enforcement, you're putting up resistance, and you've got Amphetamines in you or whatever else is in you, that has to have some sort of significance on Your nervous system.
Or I don't see how that is not going to be relevant in any way as claimed.
So this is the thing that frustrates me, too, around this.
And it reminds me almost, you know, numerically, it's the same as the Rodney King case, right?
Because you've got George Floyd, and you got two other blacks, a man and a woman, if I remember rightly, in the car, and they there's no incident with them.
So if it's all just racism, why is it that two-thirds of the blacks in the car, there's no problem, no violence, no death, no holds, no nothing like that?
It can't be just race, because otherwise they'd have beat up everyone if they just hated blacks or whatever.
So there is this sort of X factor of, you know, we don't know exactly what happened.
And we know from the police report that the officer who went up asked Floyd something and then drew his gun.
Right.
So we don't know what Floyd said there at that point that the officer drew his gun.
That would be where the body cam would be absolutely essential, amazing, essential to have to find out why did he respond that way?
And I believe the officer that drew his weapon was Lane, which was one of the new officers, I think.
So that would be even more interesting to find out why he drew the gun, because if he drew the gun without any real good reason, that's going to point to being new and maybe a training issue.
But if there's a legit reason, then that opens up a whole other side of things.
So yeah, hopefully that stuff gets released so we can kind of get a better idea.
It would be nice if people could chill and wait for all this to get released before we start tearing down cities, but...
Yeah, that ship may unfortunately have sailed a couple of days ago, if not longer.
Although that does lead into a good, a next point I have is a lot of people want to bring up the past of the officers like Chauvin and I think one of the other guys, let's see, his name is, I'm not sure how you pronounce it.
I think it's Theo or Theo, it's spelled T-H-A-E-A-O. He was on for eight years and Chauvin was on 18 years.
So what I wanted, what I was curious about is, did Chauvin have, An excessive amount of complaints because I've heard that claimed.
So I looked into it and he had 18 complaints, but he's been on for 18 years.
That's about one complaint a year.
Now, the average complaints for an officer, that's going to differ where you are in the country, where you work.
So I don't know if you can really average it out and say, oh, well, the average officer has only...
I don't think that probably would work.
But after the 18 complaints he did have, Only two of them stuck.
So I was like, okay, but then the other officer who was on for eight years, he had six complaints, none stuck, and there's one still pending.
So if I look at... So we got 24 years total...
No, sorry, 26 years total officer time and two complaints that stuck.
Right. So if I look at the other officer and his complaints, he's almost on par with Chauvin.
So... And none of them stuck.
So maybe they work in an area where there's just a lot of complaints.
And what people need to realize about complaints is people complain all the time about everything.
A lot of them are frivolous.
I had two complaints the time I worked.
And to give you an idea, one of them was I stopped a car and the license plate light was out.
I stopped it, was talking to her, ran the information.
She didn't have any insurance. And where I was, you know, you've got to have car insurance.
She got a citation for that, and I told her they'd probably be easy on her if she went ahead and got it and then showed proof of it.
A lot of times, they'll throw it out.
So she said, okay, and thanked me.
Well, an hour later, I'm at the station.
The sergeant says, you have a complaint.
And I'm like, really? And it was the same person.
And what they claimed was, I stopped them because they were Hispanic, and it was race-based, and it wasn't a legal stop.
And there's no reason why they should have got a citation, and their lamp for the license plate works perfectly fine.
So I lied. Well, there's video of the whole thing.
So in the video, you can see that the license plate wasn't working, and it was cordial and everything else.
So it didn't go anywhere because they were like, yeah, all right.
But you get that a lot.
I think it should go somewhere.
I think that the person should be filing a false complaint.
They should be subject to a fine, in my humble opinion, because otherwise you just keep...
Because a lot of these complaints too, it's just like, hey, well, maybe I'll get a settlement.
Maybe I can, you know, Yeah, I mean, if it was easily proven so, maybe they need to do something like that.
And you may remember this better than me, but I believe a few months back, and I don't remember if it was a politician or a Black Lives Matter spokesperson, but somebody got stopped by an officer and Claimed it was racist and they were called racial slurs and this and that.
And the video of it came out.
And in the video, the officer's totally cordial and polite.
And they're like, thank you, officer. And none of that happened at all.
And so, you know, actually, that's why I am a fan of body cams.
Because I feel like it vindicates officers more than anything else for a lot of the claims.
You know, the other time there was a complaint.
I arrested somebody. I arrested a guy for beating up his girlfriend really bad.
He filed a complaint, and the complaint was, I didn't read him as Miranda rights.
Well, I don't have to read you your Miranda rights unless I'm questioning you in a detained situation that can be incriminating.
So people from movies and TV shows, they have this idea that as soon as you get detained, you need to be read your Miranda rights.
No, that's not how it works. So people need to realize that just because there's complaints, it doesn't necessarily mean anything.
It depends on the contacts and everything else.
So... And you get two complaints that stick in 18 years in a high conflict, high crime, you know, high socially fractious environment.
I don't know. I mean, again, I don't know what the averages are.
That doesn't seem crazy high to me.
But again, I'm not an expert in this area.
Well, yeah. And, you know, like a good topic, I know we've talked about in the future, but a good topic that should get hashed out is clarifying the claims being thrown in the media and stuff about Police interactions, use of force, shootings.
Is it really more prevalent in the Black community versus this and that?
And, you know, the numbers often don't support the claims being thrown out there.
And, you know, when you're talking about a country, when you really look into it, you're talking about a nation of 325 million, probably more, but 325 million people And last I checked, I don't even think there's a million officers in the country.
When you look at all of that, that's actually really impressive.
I mean, when you break down the percentages, that's, you know, like 0.0 something something something percent.
I mean, when you look at the totality of shootings or force.
So the hyperbolic rhetoric gets thrown around needs to I think it's more important than ever that facts get brought to the forefront.
If we want to start doing the claims, we need to start having uncomfortable conversations where people don't want to go, but it needs to happen.
No, I get all of that.
We need to talk about crime rates.
We need to talk about family breakdown.
We need to talk about welfare dependency.
We need to talk about thug culture.
We need to talk about bad cultural influences of other kinds and all of that.
And we also need to talk about, you know, as I've talked about on this show before, you know, according to some reports, half of black girls are raped by a black man before they turn 18.
We kind of need to talk about that because it's not something you and I can – that's not institutional like in the white world.
That's something that's occurring within black households.
So there are a lot of conversations that need to occur.
Yeah, I'm happy to talk about racism.
I mean – It's important to have those discussions.
But if that's the only thing that we're talking about, we're just not going to solve the problem.
And the people who are trying to drag us to this one-size-fits-all, it's just institutionalized white racism and cop hatred for blacks and so on, those people do not want to solve the problem.
They just want to inflame tensions.
And we've got to push back against that.
Well, I mean, because you constantly hear...
One thing that frustrates me is I constantly hear the claim...
Statistics get skewed all the time, but you constantly hear the claim, well, there's more of this...
Race in prison and this race or this and that.
You can't just take numbers and then immediately say it's a result of racism.
If we're going to have the conversation, like you said, then we need to have the entire conversation.
The numbers, oftentimes, they're backed by a significant amount of stats.
Actually, it's funny. When I was in the police academy, I always remember this.
When I was in the police academy, there was a Hispanic guy teaching the course.
He kind of laughed about it, but he brought up the FBI statistics regarding crime rates in inner cities and different demographics.
As soon as he brought them up, half of the class stood up and immediately started saying, that's racist.
And the Hispanic instructor started laughing and said, look at you guys.
Look at how you're reacting just based on stats I've said, and you don't even know the context yet.
And man, I was like, whoa.
And it And it's been an ongoing, it continues to be an ongoing problem with the media and activists and everything else.
So we can't tell half the story.
If we're going to do it, then let's tell the whole story and let's stop with the name calling and the finger pointing and the labeling and say, look, if we're going to get into it, let's get into it and let the chips fall where they may, you know?
But that's the only way I can really see hashing this out because it's causing too much division otherwise.
So there's Look, I'm fine being responsible and accountable, but that means everybody.
Okay, so let's...
A couple of questions that have...
So, what kind of restraints have you seen used against intoxicated suspects who are resisting arrest?
Oh, is that a question for me?
Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Take your pick.
Okay. I mean, pretty much all of them.
Just because someone's intoxicated, from what I remember, and if I'm rusty and anyone's out there, or if training's been updated and someone knows that, you can correct me, but from what I recall, I don't ever remember any restraint being restricted simply because somebody's intoxicated.
Because I designed the restraints that I was taught on.
It mainly had to do with wrist restraints, arm locks, having them on the ground.
Everything that I was taught, being intoxicated in no way is going to put them in any more danger than if they're sober.
It can be arm bars.
It can be if they're flat on the ground and you've got them fanned out like an airplane and You know, cuff them up, sit them on their butt.
You can have their arm behind their back and like the typical restraint that you'll see used.
So there's nothing in particular that's used like, you don't say, oh, this suspect's intoxicated, so I resort to this bag of restraints versus a different set.
So there's no differentiation between the two.
Okay, good. Now, questions, of course, that people have around Why did they need to keep their knee on him?
Why not just put your knee on his back?
Why not? Like once he was already cuffed and he was already face down and he wasn't moving around, he wasn't fighting back, why do you need to keep the pressure on the guy?
Why do you need to keep leaning on his back or his neck?
So this is probably a question better for the officers that did it.
Me personally, Like I said before, I wasn't trained that way, so I would have never actually done that.
Here's what's interesting about that question.
A lot of departments around the country wouldn't have used that restraint.
What would be interesting to find out is if it's Proven that other factors resulted in the death, then that potentially means no matter what strength was used in any part of the country with any subset of training, the result may have been the same.
Why would they mean to have done that?
Hypothetically, if somebody potentially was trying to get a hold of a weapon, was trying to bite you, spit on you...
It's not unusual for people with HIV to use spitting as a weapon.
Or even if they don't have HIV to say that they do and use spitting as a weapon, right?
Or to say that they do.
You know, anytime an officer gets poked by a needle or I worked with an officer who we were eating and someone came out from the back kitchen and said, hey, I hate to tell you this, but somebody in the back spit in your burger.
Well, that officer had to go through a bunch of testing for HIV and hepatitis C. So it's a very scary reality that first responders, of all walks, firefighters caught...
You've got to worry about, do you have needles in the pocket?
Do they have a disease that if they bite me, if they spin on me, am I going to get infected?
So I don't know the context surrounding the stop.
I don't know what was said between him and the officer at the window.
That's where the body cam is going to come into play.
Because if they were talking to him and he said, oh, hey, I've got COVID-19 or I've got this or that, They may have been worried that he may spit at him or bite on him.
And that possibly could be a reason why they were so worried about him being face down and not having a chance to be let up and face them.
Well, and even, sorry, and just to point this out, so even if he hadn't tried to weaponize whatever illness he may have claimed to have, they don't want him breathing in their faces, right?
Because it's an airborne illness, right?
Well, I mean, if you go off all the stuff being thrown around in the media the last several months with the pandemic, then no, you wouldn't want that.
Because they weren't wearing masks.
I know a lot of officers right now that are wearing N95 masks.
They didn't have any masks on, not sure why.
And if you look at the Chinese training, their police on how to deal with COVID, they had this goofy system where they were like grabbing the person with these, like a dog catcher type pull and throwing a thing over them.
They were really taking it to the extreme.
So I don't know, were they told to be careful of people and not let them get too close?
It's hard to say. The fact that this happened during a pandemic may very well be part of the equation.
Right, right. Now, here's a question, too, which is, I'm not sure I quite understand the context, but it says, why didn't the cops just tase him once he was down?
But tasing is pretty aggressive, right?
And so I think once he's down, you wouldn't want to tase him.
I mean, it's painful. It doesn't leave a couple of hooks and burns and stuff like that.
So I think tasing him once he's down would be pretty bad.
That's actually a good question because that gets into use.
It's called use of force continuum.
And every department has a use of force continuum policy.
And the way that usually works is there's a scale and the scale escalates based on the response of the suspect.
So if I present to you, it usually goes something like, and sometimes they differ a little, but usually it's officer presence, verbal commands.
Soft hands, and that's like restraints.
Hard hands, that's when you're getting into harder impacts and this and that.
Then you've got less than lethal, and that's baton, pepper spray, taser.
Then you get into lethal, and that's like hard impact strikes, weapons, things like that.
On the use of force continuum, tasers typically less than lethal, right below lethal.
So if you've got somebody detained on the ground, It wouldn't logically make any sense to hit them with a taser because you are escalating the force way up there and it's not relative in response to what they're doing back.
So there are times though, and people shouldn't confuse this, there are times where a taser is used as a compliance tool.
And this is called a drive stun.
That's when they take the cartridge off the front of the taser, they arc it, and they'll hit the person with it, and it's just a quick zap.
And they might do that in the sight or whatever.
And that gives them a jolt to comply.
So if they're fighting and you don't want to come up, sometimes you'll see an officer do that, like, hey, come on.
And they'll be more motivated to get in the vehicle or whatnot.
Now, could they have done that?
Well, but if his heart is already exploding, then, again, the taser is not going to cure the heart attack.
The dry taser is not going to cure the hot attack.
Taser has been through a gamut of controversy.
I've spoken on this on shows about the tasers.
Well, tasers in some have a lot of controversy with suspects and people dying when they get hit with it or they're on substance and they get hit with it.
So the taser is not, especially now, it's not necessarily the first go-to thing because that comes with a whole other host of risks and liabilities.
So, yeah.
But again, what I would do is not going to be the same as what they would do.
Because different training, I can easily sit here and say, I wouldn't have done that.
I wouldn't have put my knee on his neck.
Can I sit here and say that if I was one of those officers who was trained the way they were, and if I had an instructor tell me, hey, you can use this and it's not deadly, and the manual says it's not deadly, and you will not kill them, and they might say they can't breathe, but you are not causing them to be able to not breathe.
If I was told this and instructed this, I may believe the person that trained me and go off to training and think, okay, I'm okay.
That's where it gets kind of tough, right?
Because you don't really know.
It's hard to put yourself in that mindset.
And I can't do an apples-to-apples because I wasn't trained the way a Minneapolis police officer is.
There's another point, too, which I think is very important.
This is from one of the Discord members here.
According to the criminal complaint, Floyd claimed he couldn't breathe before he was even on the ground.
Wouldn't the officers have to assume that he had COVID-19 and treat him as such?
So there's two points to that. Of course, the first is that's a reasonable thing because one of the symptoms of COVID is, you know, you're having trouble breathing, can't breathe.
But the other thing, too, is that if he's complaining that he can't breathe before he's in the knee-to-neck restraint, then the officer would not think that it was the knee-to-neck restraint that was causing him to not be able to breathe because he already said he couldn't breathe before he was in that position.
I mean, yeah, that's possible.
The only thing I struggle with where, you know, I went through a lot of lists where I think they're going to have a challenge with these guys on certain charges.
I mean, on the flip side, though, because I don't want to argue all pro or con, but on the flip side, I mean, the arguments I can see against them would be somebody saying, okay, was the use of force with the restraint reasonable at that time?
Why didn't they just sit him up?
He wasn't I'm sorry to interrupt as well, but also I can imagine, you know, you probably know a lot more about this than I would, but I can certainly see the situation where somebody plays possum until you left them up and then they start attacking you again.
Yeah, that happens. Yeah, absolutely that happens.
Yeah. It's not as straightforward as people think.
When it comes to these guys, if anything was going to happen, I almost feel like this is going to get really hashed out as a policy and procedure issue.
A lot of it's going to fall in the department.
There's going to be a lot of arguments of how are you going to hold them accountable if they were told, if it's listed as a non-deadly restraint, they were trained this way, this and that.
Two of the guys were brand new on the force.
I guess you could argue maybe...
Maybe it was misfeasance or nonfeasance when they should have realized he was in a medical crisis.
But this is where I guess it's going to come down to two sides really hashing it out and what the jury thinks is more convincing.
But... Let's see.
Yeah, just to close off, if there's more, and listen, we're both, I mean, I think, Nick, you and I are both of the opinion that it could very well play out that the offices are liable, that they could turn out that they did have this depraved mindset, it could turn out that they're terrible racists, or these things could come out.
During discovery, they could come out through cross-examination.
So none of this is to indicate that we somehow have some magic get-out-of-jail-free card for these cops, right?
They could have done things that are wrong.
Maybe they weren't trained.
Maybe it was a bad idea to have the newbie cop go up to the dangerous felon in the car who was on drugs and start the interview.
I mean, there could be any number of things that could have them be liable.
Maybe they're going to be guilty of everything they're charged with.
These are just Different perspectives that we need to have to withhold our judgment.
But I know you did a lot of research, so is there stuff that you got to that you wanted to make sure you got out before we close off?
Oh, let's see.
No, I think we pretty much covered all of it.
I mean, yeah, that was really it.
I just thought it was going to be probably problematic with the heavy hand.
It might sound bad to say heavy-handed charges, but they're pretty heavy charges.
Second, third-degree murder. So when you really get into the fact of the training and the policy and all of that, if people think this is going to be...
I guess this is what I'm getting at.
If people think this is going to be a real easy, clear-cut, shutting-out case, you might be sorely disappointed because this is not going to be as simple as people realize.
But here's the thing, too.
Like, maybe it is, as you say, it's going to be pretty open and shut.
You know, maybe one of the officers sent an email saying, I can't wait to go and kill some black guy today.
Like, who knows, right? We'll find out as things go forward.
But here's the thing, too, is that we should also look at the upside of this being more complicated, which is, let's say that it was by the book.
They did obey the laws.
They did follow their training.
And they just happened to encounter a guy who decided to attack them, who was high on drugs, who had a weakened heart and hypertension and a wide variety of other ailments, including COVID.
And his heart just gave out.
And there wasn't really anything they could have done.
It wasn't because of the knee to the neck.
They had called the paramedics.
The paramedics arrived.
They couldn't revive him because remember that, too, right?
They couldn't revive him either.
And so the upside of if it does turn out that it was simply a really, really terrible day, a bad accident, a bad set of coincidences, then we can at least take some comfort that the cops weren't there to kill him.
You know, like, can we not at least be happy that, or at least not happy, can we at least be relieved?
That it was not institutionalized racism, that they weren't there to kill him, that he made some bad decisions.
Maybe they made some bad decisions, but ultimately it was decided by the fact that his heart kind of exploded.
Well, I think there'd be some solace in the...
There'd be some comfort if it were to be able to be determined that, hey, what, this wasn't malice, and it just came down to...
Poor policy and procedure or if they determine it as just, hey, poor training.
And if the result of this comes from a reform in training or procedure or how you handle somebody saying, I can't breathe, this and that.
I mean, if changes are made as a result, then I guess you can say, hey, some good came of it, right?
If that is the perceived good that needs to happen, then okay.
But what needs to stop is the immediate jump To this constant narrative of racism, racism, racism that is not doing our society any favors.
I mean, look at the people that died as a result of all the violence and the rioting.
I mean, it's not solving anything.
So, you know, let's be adults about it and have a nuanced conversation and go over everything and figure out what works and what doesn't work.
And the interesting thing is If changes are made, and then down the road this sort of thing continues to happen as that study pointed out and claimed, then we may have to come to the realization that we don't live in a bubble-wrapped world, and no matter what we do...
Right. Well, I appreciate that, and I appreciate your time today.
It's a real great pleasure to chat with you, and I look forward to people's questions and comments below, and we will try to address them in the future.
Thanks again, Nick. A real pleasure to chat.
Yeah, thanks. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
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