> Protests have erupted in at least 20 US cities over the death of unarmed black man George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [1]
It's also worth noting that this happened in the space of a day or so, a very quick countrywide expansion. There are supposedly reports that the White House is on lockdown due to the people protesting outside.
let's just say that they have spread beyond the state where this happened. and given that the police is getting ever more brutal, there is no reason for them to stop spreading either.
George Floyd's murder is only the straw that broke the camel's back. This is now about decades of injustice and police officers that stand by silently and enable their peers to abuse and kill and get away with it. Protests have broken out in most major cities.
but that wasn't a campaign year, nor was there a pandemic raging in parallel where at least 100000 people will have died, the majority of them from minorities.
And as a sidenote:
Trump is literally activating terrorist cells in your country -- his tweet was explicitly quoted by this self-ascribed paramilitary goon when coming out with his machinegun to terrorize folks: https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1266509747169005569
Was this happening in 2013? Pretty sure it wasn't.
Trayvon Martin and the wannabe cop actually fought each other. Daniel Shaver had a pellet rifle and reached for his belt. Some other poor fellow had an object in his hand. You can come up with some excuse that makes it a "both sides" case.
George Floyd was arrested and handcuffed by four real cops, calmly complied with every request recorded on video, and still died pleading for his life because one cop strangled him for no reason and the other three did nothing. It's a perfect storm: you can say "no matter how compliant you are, the police will still kill you if you're not white enough" and pro-blue opinion leaders can't counter you with anything except "but look at the looters".
Every major city in the US is having huge protests, and several metropolitan areas are dealing with riots. Trayvon Martin was nothing like this.
You have forty million people unemployed, many of which overlap directly with the demographics most impacted by wealth inequality and police brutality. It's pretty clear that this is going to be more intense than in 2012.
1) There's record unemployment in the US and there's an active pandemic. People are unhappy and the country is a powder keg ready to go off.
2) The footage this time is especially graphic. You can see the officer strangling George Floyd with his knee. You can see the unnervingly satisfied look on his face. You can hear George call out multiple times that he can't breathe. Then, after he stops moving you can watch the officer continue to strangle him for four minutes. You can also see three police officers that stood by and let it happen in the background. There's not much wiggle room here.
> The ME also claimed that the initial autopsy found no evidence that Floyd died of strangulation and traumatic asphyxia after Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes.
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes. Provide evidence contrary to the narrative and get downvoted into oblivion? Isn't it valuable to know all the facts?
I have trouble believing any source that accepts the claim that
> Floyd was then told to step out of the car and handcuffed, and "actively resisted being handcuffed", according to body cam footage obtained the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
edit: yes, I know that maybe he resisted in invisible ways. And yes, I saw him fall over when he was getting in the cop car way up at the top of the screen at the end of the video (partly hidden by the 'watch next!' videos); but is that really sufficient 'active resistance' if you can call it that?
Why is footage always so annoying that the parts like the end are always in some annoyingly difficult angle, or distance, or something? It certainly looks more like he collapsed than tried to escape, but if you made me swear on oath I wouldn't be able to say with absolute certainty what happened at the end.
Even if someone WAS "actively resisting" - which was obviously not what happened in this case as seen in the above video evidence - intentionally strangling someone for 8+ minutes after they they are on the ground under the control of multiple officers is still murder!
Some people seem to believe that "resisting arrest" is a capital offense that the police can punish immediately as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. The police say someone (usually black) "resisted", so fsck due process and execute them? -sigh-
I'm not an expert on medical terminology; there may be a more accurate term to use to describe the cause of death. I'm only using the term in the colloquial sense, which (in my opinion) is a good description of what happened according to the video evidence.
But again, so what? Even if the death was technically caused by some other mechanism, it's still patently manslaughter when someone uses their knee to crush someone's neck for ~4 minutes until they stop moving. When that person continues using their knee to crush someone's neck for an additional ~4 minutes while ignoring the please from multiple bystanders to at least check for a pulse after he stopped moving, that demonstrates the intent and mens rea necessary to upgrade the charge of manslaughter to intentional murder.
The technicalities of a medical report are not relevant. If this was some sort of freak accident, the officer should have stopped what he was doing and checked vital signs. If he didn't intend to kill, the officer should have been very surprised and/or concerned when the person under his knee stopped moving and calling for help.
It might have looked to you as if he was strangling the man with his knee, but he actually wasn't and the cop probably knew he wasn't. Regardless of how things look, what really matters is how are, what really happened. Just like that video of the maga kid being stared down by the native American with the drum.
The source is the coroner's report. It doesn't matter what the rest of the article is stating.
And your video doesn't show what happened up until the time where the cop had his knees one him. There was actually 3 cops on him at that point. How do you think they ended up that way?
There's going to be an independent autopsy organized by the family. To be honest, I'm skeptical of the "we investigated ourselves and found this convenient 'natural cause of death'."
sidenote: if by any miracle he didn't die (though how one can't die when the blood flow to the brain is cut-off?) then the 8 minutes of sadistic torture would have probably not even registered on anybody's radar. In the video it is so obvious that the police guy is immensely enjoying that power trip.
It is puzzling why the society still allows police to apply chockhold, neck pressure, etc. - such actions affecting breathing and circulation are naturally causing involuntary convulsions which police happily interprets as "resisting", and thus they get and use their right to escalate the pressure/hold until the "resisting", ie. the convulsions, stop which frequently means death.
Well, his chest compressed kinda like a how a constrictor (snake) kills its prey, so he could breathe out, but not sufficiently in; and, the leg probably cut off blood flow to his brain, not stopped him from breathing in; but, yes.
( not a doctor... been reading a loooot of Reddit )
The link contains what seems to be a screenshot of the report. That screenshot says the report is preliminary, so I assume they do not want to state the cause in the preliminary findings.
Actually according to the autopsy, his knee on Floyd's neck did not cause his death.
That isn't what the autopsy report said.
The ME also claimed that the initial autopsy found no evidence that Floyd died of strangulation and traumatic asphyxia after Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes.
Correct, he didn't die of strangulation or asphyxia. Someone who can't breathe can't say things like, "I can't breathe." Instead, Floyd died of circulatory insufficiency, subsequent to having a knee pressed on his neck for almost nine minutes.
The medical details are completely irrelevant when it comes to determining responsibility for the outcome. [1] The officer is equally responsible regardless.
> Someone who can't breathe can't say things like, "I can't breathe."
According to the top post on this Reddit thread, written by a self-proclaimed restraint trainer and the major replies to them, this is absolutely, positively not the case:
Apparently this is an old saying and is completely wrong.
edit: to visualize this. One of the steps in death via a python is suffocation. During that process, you could speak many times, all the way until your lungs are out of air, but you'll never get air in your lungs again.
Is having your ability to breathe severely reduced (say 10-20% capacity. Enough to exhale out words) not accurate enough for "I can't breathe" to be true?
My understanding is that he was able to vocalize pleas for help for at least a couple of minutes. I don't know if his situation was directly comparable to being constricted by a python. I'll have to defer to more specialized expertise on that one.
Point being, it doesn't matter in the least what the autopsy report says. He died of having a knee pressed down on his neck.
> He died of having a knee pressed down on his neck.
Agreed. I was making a bit of a side comment about something I've learned through this whole story because I also thought that being able to speak means you're not choking (for example), when apparently that is not true.
Video taken by a bystander,
now seen around the world,
shows a police officer
kneeling on Floyd’s neck
for approximately five
minutes as he struggles,
telling officers he can’t
breathe.
My thinking is that if you can speak for "approximately five minutes" while being strangled, then whatever you subsequently die of is not asphyxiation. I'm certainly open to being corrected on that, but yeah... it's not as if it matters.
As in most things technical, the words are important.
> the initial autopsy found no evidence that Floyd died of strangulation and traumatic asphyxia
Strangulation: "Forensics The act of suffocating a person by constricting the trachea or upper airways"[1]
Traumatic asphyxia: "Cyanotic asphyxia due to trauma; the extravasation of blood into the skin and conjunctivae, produced by a sudden mechanical increase in venous pressure, analogous to the Rumpel-Leede test; common in those who have been hanged and seen occasionally in crush injuries."[2]
So what that initial statement says is that the knee did not directly suffocate him by blocking blood or air flow, nor was Flody's chest crushed.
Keep in mind that breathing when you're face down on the ground can be difficult in itself, especially if you're not thin. And it is made a lot harder by having the upper part of your chest pinned to the ground.
But even if the officer did not pin him to the ground with the knee, and just left him on the ground facing down, they should have checked on him when he said he couldn't breathe and that he was dying. Not doing so would be highly negligent.
It wasn't until Killer Mike's speech in Atlanta that the gravitas of what George Floyd was saying while he was on the ground really hit me.
>When a man yells for his mother, in duress and pain, and she is dead, he is essentially yelling "please God, don't let it happen to me." [0]
I don't know if I'm just so tired and desensitized at this point that the situation didn't register the first time I saw the picture and transcript (I won't watch the video). And I think that's awful.
I think the part you missed is this was not for a bad check. People are upset because he was profiled and falsely accused of writing a bad check. Then ultimately killed using justification of false accusations.
Even being falsely accused is almost irrelevant here. Someone was killed in a police encounter over a bad check, falsely accused or not. It's not like a false accusations of murder or some aggregated assault. It's a case of a bad check.
You'd think a bunch of educated folk would realize that if you can say anything at all, then you absolutely can breathe. Stop spreading this falsehood.
normally perhaps,
It is perfect storm of other factors.
- 40+ Million people are unemployed
- the mental strain of being up indoors
- covid affecting the poorest potion of the population disproportionately
- finally Trump being president and handling the situation in the worst possible way everyday.
Not sure why you are getting down voted here. These are all very valid points, this situation has a lot of variables that make it remarkably different than any other and can encourage the resistance (protests, &c) to continue far longer than standard.
They're being down voted for the last point about Trump. He has nothing to do with this and is only doing a shitty job at [insert issue here] when you swallow the load of his opponents instead of apply critical thought.
I will bite, even if he actually means better than he tweets, his tweets has only added fuel to the fire.
When you are in the public sphere you do not spew out every thought that comes out unfiltered - whether it is trump or musk it damages what they stand for and works against them.
I would expect a president, 3 years in, to be able to communicate to all his constituents with a measure of forethought and attempt to keep in mind that not all of them apply "critical thought".
Sorry about that, did not mean to use a code block. just wanted to make a list.
HN formatting is little confusing.
Personally I prefer explicit markup attributes. i.e. if I want to mark something as code an markup like ``` or {code} or whatever is clearer than inferring tabs for code formatting, this kind of accidental code blocks could be easily avoided.
On a side note I read on mobile all the time, I understand the frustration, but it not poster's fault HN has some poor formatting choices which are not mobile friendly and no preview options, you should direct their feedback towards HN rather than the poster, most of them do not do this intentionally.
HN has already said they will do nothing about it, it’s been this way for years. Therefore the only person people can direct their rage to is the poster.
If you want to make a list, there’s nothing wrong with using new lines, they will work just fine.
Protests like this one happened before covid for similar reasons. While those might be factors, I don't think they're very important ones. I think the fact that there have been several such murders in the past few months is the main reason this is happening.
So you see no chance of fixing the police brutality? Why so?
edit: Wow, those replies. I see now, you guys and gals are going to have this thing for foreseeable feature because you have no interest in fixing it. It's disgusting, tech community apparently hosts some people of high income and no conscience combined with some low analytical skills soaked in a narrative of a pseudo-science.
The police brutality is relatively insignificant (though not acceptable). Every single time it comes up in these cases, the victim was either a stain on ordered society, or an honest mistake (see: Brenna Taylor) which are addressed fairly quickly. These riots are not due to "centuries of oppression" they are just bored and ignorant people lashing out because they have no focus in life other than victimhood and generations of indoctrination that they can't change things otherwise. No amount of justification exists for the behaviors exhibited by these rioters.
We've banned this account for perpetuating flamewar on HN.
"the victim was either a stain on ordered society" is particularly egregious trolling. You can't do that here, and adding a diversionary word like 'either' doesn't help.
US cops work in a dangerous environment; it's actually rather rare to get killed by a cop - much more often suspects (i.e. those who get in altercations with the police) are killed by criminals. So you can't expect police to be gentle in that environment; mistakes / bad apples will happen.
Besides that the framing is all wrong. It's not a racist issue - in any altercation the police are more likely to shoot white criminals than blacks. The problem is blacks have many more encounters with cops. And strong policing is most beneficial to black communities, where there is the most crime.
So the only way to solve the issue is reducing crime, which won't happen quickly.
> The real reason the situation can't improve is the people angry about police brutality are misinformed and don't want to learn.
What information are the people angry about the current situation missing?
> It's not about the reality of the situation; it seems like more of a tribal thing.
This seems needlessly dismissive. The “reality of the situation” is that police brutality needlessly kills people frequently, most of the people who are killed are black, the police involved are rarely held accountable, and nothing has seemed to change for years.
Only about 25% of the people killed by police are black; about 50% are white non-Hispanic.
There's definitely a tribal aspect, and unfortunately most people don't know or don't care about most victims.
That said, if changes inspired by concern for black victims improve the situation for everyone, that would be a good thing. And that seems to be happening, leading to changes like body cameras and perhaps cracks in the blue wall, as more officers seem to be speaking out against it now.
I disagree, I think it's historical context. The KKK used to infiltrate the police throughout the south. The police aided and abetted domestic terrorism against black people. There are people still living who remember this. It's not tribalism to point out that you are being targeted based on your race and being sensitive to that threat. If you want to call out tribalism, call out the group that is targeting others based on race. They are the tribal ones.
I guess the difference is that white people don't care as much when a white person is murdered by a cop. We distance ourselves from it and try to rationalize it.
If you really believe this you are truly ignorant beyond all measure of what it’s like to not be white in this country.
It isn’t just police brutality. It’s the constant mistrust, passive aggressive behavior, assumptions that you’re poor, dumb, hooked on drugs, stealing, out and out racism, and that you’re a threat that either needs to be avoided or needs to be handled with threats and 911 calls.
You should educate yourself. This comment is just shameful.
There is a difference between the hazard (what would happen) vs the risk (what can happen after adding in precautions). Eg, maybe a lot of police would die, but they are wearing body armour so they do not. Compare to forestry workers who are in an environment where they don't need armour at all.
But the stats aren't really relevant here; the issue is that there is a video going around in which official appears to brutally murder someone in cold blood. And a sneaking suspicion that justice won't be served. And a large population suffering under an uncertain non-economy for around 2 months now.
The issue is that there’s a large population suffering under fear and injustice for over a century now. Maybe you’re just now noticing the pleas for it to stop.
> In Saint Paul, a Dollar Tree store and another Target store were looted, and a Wendy's restaurant was set ablaze. [0]
That is also a factor, but I'm going to interpret this as tell-tale signs of a breakdown under economic stress.
I can't see a train of thought that starts with a century of injustice and ends with "therefore I should loot Target". I can very easily see a link from "I can't afford stuff because my job just vanished" to the burning and looting.
I don’t understand what statistics have to do with this.
It might be possible that the quarantine and economic hardships are a factor at play, but the ultimate causative factor is that non-white Americans are tired of both the veiled and bald faced racism and mistreatment that is a daily issue.
The protests aren’t just about cops killing black men; they’re about every single aspect of daily life being made more difficult because of constant racism and abuse.
The number of deaths of police officers on duty has not exceeded 141 for over ten years [1]. Considering every city has cops, I can hardly consider it to be a dangerous jobs. There's almost a million cops on duty[2]. With a yearly chance of death of roughly 1 in 10000, being a cop is probably safer than not being a cop! [3]
Cops in the US receive training to protect their own safety at all costs, even if that may endanger the lives of innocent people around them. If their duty is to protect and serve, they should not be trained and equipped like this. We don't need to fix crime, we need to fix police training, and yes, we have to be willing to increase the risk policeman are exposed to as part of their work.
On a different point, you mention "bad apples will happen". The expression is "a bad apple ruins the bunch". That is to say, if you don't eliminate all the bad apples quickly, the bunch is ruined.
> The number of deaths of police officers on duty has not exceeded 141 for over ten years
My point wasn't that cops gets killed a lot, but that young black men are about 40 times more likely to get killed by criminals then cops. Stronger policing actually makes things safer for dangerous areas.
We do, by making less things crimes. "Resisting arrest" should not be a crime, for example. Should a suspect attack police, we have assault laws to cover this; why do we need another law for "was not absolutely passive while being put in handcuffs"? (Genuinely curious here, happy to hear other perspectives).
Gosh, that sounds awful (both the actions of the police, and the decision of the judge). This failure to hold the police to a high standard is what brings about these situations.
What do you think the police should have done differently in this particular situation (it's an interesting thought exercise)?
Also, if you haven't done it, there's a really sobering mental exercise that you might want to try.
Median police response times in the United States are about ten minutes for violent crimes. 90th percentile is something like an hour.
Don't know the breakdowns beyond that, but I would also imagine that there's a sharp wealth divide in response times.
Imagine that a bunch of large, angry men are trying to break into your home to kill you. Set a timer for ten minutes. Wait. As you do, imagine what's happening, for those ten minutes, because that's how long it will take for police to arrive.
Regarding what the police should have done, I think the Wikipedia article is quite clear:
> 'a call was dispatched to officers on the street as a "Code 2" assignment, although calls of a crime in progress should be given priority and designated as "Code 1."'
> ' This second call was received at 0642 and recorded merely as "investigate the trouble;" it was never dispatched to any police officers. '
The dispatchers failed twice to notify correctly about the situation.
> Also, if you haven't done it, there's a really sobering mental exercise that you might want to try.
I'm not sure what your point is here. For what it's worth, given where I live I don't see how they could break in less than ten minutes (with a key I guess?), and without alerting neighbors in at least 5 adjacent units, who I could ask for help through the window.
Cops are just regular people on a power trip. Soldiers work in far more dangerous situations and have better trigger discipline. In Afghanistan, plenty of times soldiers cannot engage an enemy of military age holding an assault rifle until that enemy aims at the American soldiers. Cops are unprofessional and have no good excuses for their behavior. If soldiers are tried according to the UCMJ for violating rules of engagement, cops should certainly be tried for murder.
If you think that crushing a man's neck was a mistake, how many minutes of crushing his neck would turn that mistake into intentional murder? If you think those three policemen guarding the killer were also bad apples, how many policemen would have to stand guard for it to be a systemic issue? If it's not a good time to protest police murders, when should we?
Candidly, because Team Red and Team Blue are too busy screaming at each other and throwing plates across the room to care about actually fixing problems.
Europeans tried to ban the slave trade as early as 1815:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5039693/f124.image.r
(Congress of Vienna, Act XV)
and the US did eventually get over slavery, so we should be optimistic and believe it may just take them some while longer to get over lynching.
"Get over" is a funny way to describe a war that was bloodier for the United States than WWII was for any Allied power. Please don't lump everyone in with the southern states.
There are loads in between the protests. Eventually the murders pile up and the evidence against the police’s actions is so strong that people collectively snap. If it were merely every other murder, there’d never be a day of peace.
Malachi Ritscher's suicide by self immolation in protest of the Iraq war made a strong impression on me at the time. That was near the end of 2006. It seemed to go unnoticed by most everyone else, though.
The Tunisian revolution worked because the system was overloaded with protests in almost every single region of the country. Contrary to previous localized protests in 2008, that were more contained and effectively suppressed by the regime.
But it is also worth to remember that unarmed protestors rarely "just" overrun the barricades and enter the palace (figuratively). Someone with power (police or military) has to decide that they're OK with letting the protests go through, that is the signal of the end.
--
Obviously my opinion, but I was in Tunis, Tunisia during those times.
The Tunisian Army was impartial (still largely impartial to these days) and would not intervene. They did protect some government buildings so nobody really overrun the palace. What happened is that support for the old dictator become too low and most of his supporters decided to bail on him (many people hates him too).
The Tunisian army was mostly impartial, but there were instances where they actively protected protestors from the police (which gained them a lot of good faith).
And there was this rumor that Ben Ali and his close family were "tricked" by the palace guard and the military to leave the country "temporarily" because protestors were going to be closing in (which never happened).
But that is exactly my point, supporters in key power positions decided that it was too much trouble to keep Ben Ali around.
One of the oddest bits of recent American news was seeing armed protestors occupy a capitol building .. and then leave again, with no shots fired by either side.
I am afraid that this will actually swing the election towards Trump. One of the big reasons for the blue wave in 2018 was the suburbs going Democrat. However, a lot of the people will get scared by the riots and get pushed into voting for “Law and Order”.
Trump was on the ropes politically, but I think this might change the voting calculus.
This is correct. Actual peaceful protests might have had some results, but this intolerable behavior by rioters is only turning many, many people against black people and "anarchists" in general. Could have had a consensus against police violence, but instead the reaction was and is far more harmful. More people's lives have been affected (or lost; see Louisville) as a result of the riots than the initial death.
We've banned that account for breaking the site guidelines egregiously, but it's also not ok to respond to that by breaking the site guidelines yourself. They specifically ask people not to do this (a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls). It helps nothing and only makes the thread even worse.
Perhaps. I don't think it's possible to be too certain about it - 'law and order' may not imply support for Trump, especially if you see him as inflaming tensions. Or it may result in larger voting turnouts in certain areas which may not help Trump at all. Who knows? It seems unpredictable to me, unless there's good precedent for similar events & election results?
Same, I fortunately just saw a senator pledge that he will end the federal 1033 program which provides military weapons to local police departments. That was one of their points.
it’s curious to me that you consider portland to be normally quiet - in the era of W and occupy it was 2nd only to Oakland on the west coast as being somewhat notorious for protest intensity, which was also worn as a badge of pride, and recently there have been several intense clashes between pro- and counter-fascist demonstrations.
Cops were shooting (less-lethal rounds and gas, not live rounds) at unarmed protesters down the road from me in San Jose tonight, not too far from Google's main campus. Plenty of their employees live here and some work here right now due to the pandemic. It feels pretty logical to see violent unrest outside your window and think 'we should probably postpone whatever press events we have planned'
It's the same as when games move their launch dates because other hyped games have a similar launch date, so there is less space for them to actually get any attention. Most recent example would be Factorio moving their launch date as it got to close to Cyberpunk 2077 (https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-349), a game people have been waiting forever for.
Google wants to make sure when they do their announcements, people have "time and space" in their mind and in the media to actually talk about it, as big releases like this is usually mainly a PR effort.
Honestly I think that's just an excuse. And I don't think Google really cares for media attention about this, it's a pretty boring, minor update, unless they have something else up their sleeve.
The thing is it may be minor in the grand scheme of things, but for some exec at Google it matters a lot. And so if it makes sense to move it, they will.
This is more PR than they would get with an actual release. Does anyone care about new adroid updates anymore? I haven't followed anything since lollipop
>whites are 72% of your population but only 370./802 = 46% of those categorized shot by your police.
Aren't the relative rates at which they offend also relevant? for exmaple, blacks are only 13% of the population, but commit half the homicides. Isn't it to be expected that they have more violent interactions with police?
155 comments
[ 332 ms ] story [ 3518 ms ] threadAlso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests
1 - https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/george-floyd-protests-05-30...
It was pretty intense at the time.
but that wasn't a campaign year, nor was there a pandemic raging in parallel where at least 100000 people will have died, the majority of them from minorities.
And as a sidenote:
Trump is literally activating terrorist cells in your country -- his tweet was explicitly quoted by this self-ascribed paramilitary goon when coming out with his machinegun to terrorize folks: https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1266509747169005569
Was this happening in 2013? Pretty sure it wasn't.
George Floyd was arrested and handcuffed by four real cops, calmly complied with every request recorded on video, and still died pleading for his life because one cop strangled him for no reason and the other three did nothing. It's a perfect storm: you can say "no matter how compliant you are, the police will still kill you if you're not white enough" and pro-blue opinion leaders can't counter you with anything except "but look at the looters".
You have forty million people unemployed, many of which overlap directly with the demographics most impacted by wealth inequality and police brutality. It's pretty clear that this is going to be more intense than in 2012.
1) There's record unemployment in the US and there's an active pandemic. People are unhappy and the country is a powder keg ready to go off.
2) The footage this time is especially graphic. You can see the officer strangling George Floyd with his knee. You can see the unnervingly satisfied look on his face. You can hear George call out multiple times that he can't breathe. Then, after he stops moving you can watch the officer continue to strangle him for four minutes. You can also see three police officers that stood by and let it happen in the background. There's not much wiggle room here.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11742264/george-floyd-autopsy-...
> The ME also claimed that the initial autopsy found no evidence that Floyd died of strangulation and traumatic asphyxia after Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes.
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes. Provide evidence contrary to the narrative and get downvoted into oblivion? Isn't it valuable to know all the facts?
> Floyd was then told to step out of the car and handcuffed, and "actively resisted being handcuffed", according to body cam footage obtained the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
When we have video evidence that suggests quite the contrary from a shop nearby: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Tqs06YN_A
edit: yes, I know that maybe he resisted in invisible ways. And yes, I saw him fall over when he was getting in the cop car way up at the top of the screen at the end of the video (partly hidden by the 'watch next!' videos); but is that really sufficient 'active resistance' if you can call it that?
Even if someone WAS "actively resisting" - which was obviously not what happened in this case as seen in the above video evidence - intentionally strangling someone for 8+ minutes after they they are on the ground under the control of multiple officers is still murder!
Some people seem to believe that "resisting arrest" is a capital offense that the police can punish immediately as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. The police say someone (usually black) "resisted", so fsck due process and execute them? -sigh-
That's just it, though. According to the coroner's report, he wasn't strangled.
I'm not an expert on medical terminology; there may be a more accurate term to use to describe the cause of death. I'm only using the term in the colloquial sense, which (in my opinion) is a good description of what happened according to the video evidence.
But again, so what? Even if the death was technically caused by some other mechanism, it's still patently manslaughter when someone uses their knee to crush someone's neck for ~4 minutes until they stop moving. When that person continues using their knee to crush someone's neck for an additional ~4 minutes while ignoring the please from multiple bystanders to at least check for a pulse after he stopped moving, that demonstrates the intent and mens rea necessary to upgrade the charge of manslaughter to intentional murder.
The technicalities of a medical report are not relevant. If this was some sort of freak accident, the officer should have stopped what he was doing and checked vital signs. If he didn't intend to kill, the officer should have been very surprised and/or concerned when the person under his knee stopped moving and calling for help.
And your video doesn't show what happened up until the time where the cop had his knees one him. There was actually 3 cops on him at that point. How do you think they ended up that way?
It is puzzling why the society still allows police to apply chockhold, neck pressure, etc. - such actions affecting breathing and circulation are naturally causing involuntary convulsions which police happily interprets as "resisting", and thus they get and use their right to escalate the pressure/hold until the "resisting", ie. the convulsions, stop which frequently means death.
George Floyd seemed to be alive and walking around before he had his airway closed off.
( not a doctor... been reading a loooot of Reddit )
That isn't what the autopsy report said.
The ME also claimed that the initial autopsy found no evidence that Floyd died of strangulation and traumatic asphyxia after Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes.
Correct, he didn't die of strangulation or asphyxia. Someone who can't breathe can't say things like, "I can't breathe." Instead, Floyd died of circulatory insufficiency, subsequent to having a knee pressed on his neck for almost nine minutes.
The medical details are completely irrelevant when it comes to determining responsibility for the outcome. [1] The officer is equally responsible regardless.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
According to the top post on this Reddit thread, written by a self-proclaimed restraint trainer and the major replies to them, this is absolutely, positively not the case:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/gsdwky/if_you_...
Apparently this is an old saying and is completely wrong.
edit: to visualize this. One of the steps in death via a python is suffocation. During that process, you could speak many times, all the way until your lungs are out of air, but you'll never get air in your lungs again.
Is having your ability to breathe severely reduced (say 10-20% capacity. Enough to exhale out words) not accurate enough for "I can't breathe" to be true?
Point being, it doesn't matter in the least what the autopsy report says. He died of having a knee pressed down on his neck.
Agreed. I was making a bit of a side comment about something I've learned through this whole story because I also thought that being able to speak means you're not choking (for example), when apparently that is not true.
> the initial autopsy found no evidence that Floyd died of strangulation and traumatic asphyxia
Strangulation: "Forensics The act of suffocating a person by constricting the trachea or upper airways"[1]
Traumatic asphyxia: "Cyanotic asphyxia due to trauma; the extravasation of blood into the skin and conjunctivae, produced by a sudden mechanical increase in venous pressure, analogous to the Rumpel-Leede test; common in those who have been hanged and seen occasionally in crush injuries."[2]
So what that initial statement says is that the knee did not directly suffocate him by blocking blood or air flow, nor was Flody's chest crushed.
Keep in mind that breathing when you're face down on the ground can be difficult in itself, especially if you're not thin. And it is made a lot harder by having the upper part of your chest pinned to the ground.
But even if the officer did not pin him to the ground with the knee, and just left him on the ground facing down, they should have checked on him when he said he couldn't breathe and that he was dying. Not doing so would be highly negligent.
[1]: https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/strangulati...
[2]: https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/traumatic+a...
And how he is dead. People are rallying, people are protesting. He is still dead. For a bad check.
>When a man yells for his mother, in duress and pain, and she is dead, he is essentially yelling "please God, don't let it happen to me." [0]
I don't know if I'm just so tired and desensitized at this point that the situation didn't register the first time I saw the picture and transcript (I won't watch the video). And I think that's awful.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxHWVJYXkeU
I think this is a very common story among soldiers who've seen a comrade get killed. People cry out for comfort in their last minutes.
When you are in the public sphere you do not spew out every thought that comes out unfiltered - whether it is trump or musk it damages what they stand for and works against them.
I would expect a president, 3 years in, to be able to communicate to all his constituents with a measure of forethought and attempt to keep in mind that not all of them apply "critical thought".
Personally I prefer explicit markup attributes. i.e. if I want to mark something as code an markup like ``` or {code} or whatever is clearer than inferring tabs for code formatting, this kind of accidental code blocks could be easily avoided.
On a side note I read on mobile all the time, I understand the frustration, but it not poster's fault HN has some poor formatting choices which are not mobile friendly and no preview options, you should direct their feedback towards HN rather than the poster, most of them do not do this intentionally.
If you want to make a list, there’s nothing wrong with using new lines, they will work just fine.
A code block however stimulates rage.
edit: Wow, those replies. I see now, you guys and gals are going to have this thing for foreseeable feature because you have no interest in fixing it. It's disgusting, tech community apparently hosts some people of high income and no conscience combined with some low analytical skills soaked in a narrative of a pseudo-science.
"the victim was either a stain on ordered society" is particularly egregious trolling. You can't do that here, and adding a diversionary word like 'either' doesn't help.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Besides that the framing is all wrong. It's not a racist issue - in any altercation the police are more likely to shoot white criminals than blacks. The problem is blacks have many more encounters with cops. And strong policing is most beneficial to black communities, where there is the most crime.
So the only way to solve the issue is reducing crime, which won't happen quickly.
It's not about the reality of the situation; it seems like more of a tribal thing.
What information are the people angry about the current situation missing?
> It's not about the reality of the situation; it seems like more of a tribal thing.
This seems needlessly dismissive. The “reality of the situation” is that police brutality needlessly kills people frequently, most of the people who are killed are black, the police involved are rarely held accountable, and nothing has seemed to change for years.
Only about 25% of the people killed by police are black; about 50% are white non-Hispanic.
There's definitely a tribal aspect, and unfortunately most people don't know or don't care about most victims.
That said, if changes inspired by concern for black victims improve the situation for everyone, that would be a good thing. And that seems to be happening, leading to changes like body cameras and perhaps cracks in the blue wall, as more officers seem to be speaking out against it now.
I disagree, I think it's historical context. The KKK used to infiltrate the police throughout the south. The police aided and abetted domestic terrorism against black people. There are people still living who remember this. It's not tribalism to point out that you are being targeted based on your race and being sensitive to that threat. If you want to call out tribalism, call out the group that is targeting others based on race. They are the tribal ones.
The historical context may justify the tribalism in some eyes, but it may also blind those eyes to the larger problem that affects everyone.
And in the US population, around 12% of people are black and 70% are white, so black people are overrepresented in police killings.
It isn’t just police brutality. It’s the constant mistrust, passive aggressive behavior, assumptions that you’re poor, dumb, hooked on drugs, stealing, out and out racism, and that you’re a threat that either needs to be avoided or needs to be handled with threats and 911 calls.
You should educate yourself. This comment is just shameful.
I think we are in this current presidential situation bc Hillary Clinton called people "deploarables".
In the US policing doesn’t even make it in the top 20 most dangerous jobs by fatalities [1] or injuries [2].
[1]: https://advisorsmith.com/data/most-dangerous-jobs/ (original source is BLS; this source just did the per-worker math) [2]: https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/snr02_00_2018.xlsx (2018 is the latest data available from BLS)
But the stats aren't really relevant here; the issue is that there is a video going around in which official appears to brutally murder someone in cold blood. And a sneaking suspicion that justice won't be served. And a large population suffering under an uncertain non-economy for around 2 months now.
That is also a factor, but I'm going to interpret this as tell-tale signs of a breakdown under economic stress.
I can't see a train of thought that starts with a century of injustice and ends with "therefore I should loot Target". I can very easily see a link from "I can't afford stuff because my job just vanished" to the burning and looting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Cities_protests#Day_3:_Ma...
But in particular I don't believe that the protestors are worried about police vs forestry fatality statistics.
It might be possible that the quarantine and economic hardships are a factor at play, but the ultimate causative factor is that non-white Americans are tired of both the veiled and bald faced racism and mistreatment that is a daily issue.
The protests aren’t just about cops killing black men; they’re about every single aspect of daily life being made more difficult because of constant racism and abuse.
Cops in the US receive training to protect their own safety at all costs, even if that may endanger the lives of innocent people around them. If their duty is to protect and serve, they should not be trained and equipped like this. We don't need to fix crime, we need to fix police training, and yes, we have to be willing to increase the risk policeman are exposed to as part of their work.
On a different point, you mention "bad apples will happen". The expression is "a bad apple ruins the bunch". That is to say, if you don't eliminate all the bad apples quickly, the bunch is ruined.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/05/08/the-nu...
[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
[3] http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html sorry this data is from 2005, hopefully it's not too different from current
My point wasn't that cops gets killed a lot, but that young black men are about 40 times more likely to get killed by criminals then cops. Stronger policing actually makes things safer for dangerous areas.
It isn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
> We don't need to fix crime,
We do, by making less things crimes. "Resisting arrest" should not be a crime, for example. Should a suspect attack police, we have assault laws to cover this; why do we need another law for "was not absolutely passive while being put in handcuffs"? (Genuinely curious here, happy to hear other perspectives).
Gosh, that sounds awful (both the actions of the police, and the decision of the judge). This failure to hold the police to a high standard is what brings about these situations.
Also, if you haven't done it, there's a really sobering mental exercise that you might want to try.
Median police response times in the United States are about ten minutes for violent crimes. 90th percentile is something like an hour.
Don't know the breakdowns beyond that, but I would also imagine that there's a sharp wealth divide in response times.
Imagine that a bunch of large, angry men are trying to break into your home to kill you. Set a timer for ten minutes. Wait. As you do, imagine what's happening, for those ten minutes, because that's how long it will take for police to arrive.
> 'a call was dispatched to officers on the street as a "Code 2" assignment, although calls of a crime in progress should be given priority and designated as "Code 1."'
> ' This second call was received at 0642 and recorded merely as "investigate the trouble;" it was never dispatched to any police officers. '
The dispatchers failed twice to notify correctly about the situation.
> Also, if you haven't done it, there's a really sobering mental exercise that you might want to try.
I'm not sure what your point is here. For what it's worth, given where I live I don't see how they could break in less than ten minutes (with a key I guess?), and without alerting neighbors in at least 5 adjacent units, who I could ask for help through the window.
If you think that crushing a man's neck was a mistake, how many minutes of crushing his neck would turn that mistake into intentional murder? If you think those three policemen guarding the killer were also bad apples, how many policemen would have to stand guard for it to be a systemic issue? If it's not a good time to protest police murders, when should we?
Yeah, after the single bloodiest war in American history.
"Get over" is a funny way to describe a war that was bloodier for the United States than WWII was for any Allied power. Please don't lump everyone in with the southern states.
World War Two, USSR: at least 20 million in a population of 205 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...), or close to 10%.
World War Two, Poland: about 6 million deaths (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_Pol...) in a population of about 35 million (http://countrystudies.us/poland/27.htm) or over 17%.
The US civil war was bloody for the USA, but not bloodier than WWII for any Allied power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_... has many more countries with a death rate over 2½%.
We know how USA has reacted in the past; it carries on as if nothing happened.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/us/politics/immolation-wh...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/15/david-bu...
I assume there are more examples, that's just first page picks from a cursory google search.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malachi_Ritscher
But it is also worth to remember that unarmed protestors rarely "just" overrun the barricades and enter the palace (figuratively). Someone with power (police or military) has to decide that they're OK with letting the protests go through, that is the signal of the end.
--
Obviously my opinion, but I was in Tunis, Tunisia during those times.
And there was this rumor that Ben Ali and his close family were "tricked" by the palace guard and the military to leave the country "temporarily" because protestors were going to be closing in (which never happened).
But that is exactly my point, supporters in key power positions decided that it was too much trouble to keep Ben Ali around.
Trump was on the ropes politically, but I think this might change the voting calculus.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
[1] https://www.joincampaignzero.org/
Google wants to make sure when they do their announcements, people have "time and space" in their mind and in the media to actually talk about it, as big releases like this is usually mainly a PR effort.
As an Android developer I do, because every update breaks something important (11 will break storage in many apps).
As a user, IDGAF
why is this only ever an issue if the killed person is black?
Aren't the relative rates at which they offend also relevant? for exmaple, blacks are only 13% of the population, but commit half the homicides. Isn't it to be expected that they have more violent interactions with police?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/1968-... "Ultimately, going to the moon was far easier than solving the nation’s racial issues."