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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 02 2020, @07:30PM   Printer-friendly

African-American George Floyd's death has led to marches, demonstrations, acts of violence, and looting across the USA and in other parts of the world. Emotions are running high. We will not attempt to accuse or defend anyone here. Just attempt to lay out the information we have and offer it up for the community to discuss. Many comments about this incident have been posted to unrelated stories on this site. This is, therefore, an attempt to provide one place on SoylentNews where people are encouraged to discuss it. So as to not derail other stories on the site, I kindly ask you focus those comments here.

Wikipedia has a page about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd (permanent link to the page as it appeared at the time of writing):

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an African-American man, was killed in the Powderhorn community of Minneapolis, Minnesota. While Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down on a city street during an arrest, Derek Chauvin, a white American Minneapolis police officer, kept his knee on the right side of Floyd's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds; according to the criminal complaint against Chauvin, 2 minutes and 53 seconds of that time occurred after Floyd became unresponsive.[3][4][5][6][7] Officers Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas K. Lane participated in Floyd's arrest, with Kueng holding Floyd's back, Lane holding his legs, and Thao looking on and preventing intervention by an onlooker as he stood nearby.[8]:6:24[9][10]

The arrest was made after Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a market.[11] Police said Floyd physically resisted arrest.[12][13] Some media organizations commented that a security camera from a nearby business did not show Floyd resisting.[14][15] The criminal complaint filed later said that based on body camera footage, Floyd repeatedly said he couldn't breathe while standing outside the police car, resisted getting in the car and intentionally fell down.[16][17][18][19] Several bystanders recorded the event on their smartphones, with one video showing Floyd repeating "Please", "I can't breathe", "Mama", and "Don't kill me" being widely circulated on social media platforms and broadcast by the media.[20] While knee-to-neck restraints are allowed in Minnesota under certain circumstances, Chauvin's usage of the technique has been widely criticized by law enforcement experts as excessive.[21][22][23] All four officers were fired the day after the incident.[24]

[...] Charges: Third-degree murder (Chauvin) Second-degree manslaughter (Chauvin)

This has been extensively covered by the media. Some outlets attempt to put their own interpretations on their coverage with their selection of video footage and with their commentary. It is difficult to find a simple video of the incident. Here is one that has coverage from the time of initial encounter of the police the officers with George Floyd up through his being taken away by ambulance. The video is a composite of shots from a restaurant's surveillance camera (Dragon Wok), Officer body cam, and bystander cell phones. YouTube footage: Full George Floyd Available Footage (21:12). If anyone has more complete footage of the arrest, please mention it clearly (with a link) in the comments.

Lastly, this is a hard time for everybody. Pandemic. Lock-down. Unemployment. Fears. Please be mindful of others' circumstances when commenting. We are a community sprung from a time of challenge. Let us continue to be here for one-another during this difficult time. SoylentNews is People.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 02 2020, @11:54PM (4 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday June 02 2020, @11:54PM (#1002502)

    I can't fathom what a person who thinks being anti-murder is "political", is thinking.

    It's really simple: They agree with killing the person in question. The closest most people who think this way get to openly expressing their agreement is a sense of "Guy got killed by a cop? He musta done something!" Usually the reason for that agreement is, in the US at least, either a belief in racism or authoritarianism. Not that any racists or authoritarianists will admit it.

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    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2020, @02:20AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2020, @02:20AM (#1002547)

    Well, I have to admit that I used to think that if some random guy got killed by a cop that he must have done something wrong. Sure, I understood that there were some rogue cops out there, but I guess I wanted to believe that they were the exception and not the rule. I think that what has played a big role in changing my thinking is that we now have so much video evidence that it becomes near impossible to avoid the obvious, that we have a serious chronic problem here.

    I used to think that maybe blacks were exaggerating the problem. Now I'm beginning to think that maybe they weren't being alarmist enough in their denunciations.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 03 2020, @02:44PM (2 children)

      by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday June 03 2020, @02:44PM (#1002733)

      I would read that as your younger self being somewhat authoritarian in outlook, e.g. assuming that because a cop says one thing and a civilian says something else, the cop is necessarily in the right. That's usually not your fault: A lot of kids get taught to obey authority figures (parents, teachers, cops, bosses, commanding officers, etc) before they're old enough to know any better.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2020, @09:45AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2020, @09:45AM (#1003649)

        Community figures.

        Priests, schoolteachers, etc are taught as being 'good' people, rather than teaching us/our children to only trust them within the confines of very specific duties that are part of their job (splashing you with holy water or leading you in prayer, being in a public classroom to teach you, o rpulling you into the hallway to have a discussion about your conduct, but in neither positions case taken into an isolated office away from other people where you can't yell.)

        Most of us are brought up with overtly evil boogeymen and groups of 'good guys' who are beyond reproach, because even when they do bad things it's for good reasons, when in reality the 'good guys' just have better optics, and sometimes the 'bad guys' are actually doing something that is optically bad, morally ambiguous, but cannot be argued against full given the circumstances and reasons for their stance (think about some of the ecoterrorist types in 60s-80s cinema, who were obviously evil, and yet were working on or utilizing 'green' technologies which would have improved the world, but for reasons outside their control could not.) There is a lot of optics, indoctrination, and might makes right forcing intellectually stunted masses to obey and conform, rather than to question and reproach or correct.

      • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday June 05 2020, @10:24AM

        by acid andy (1683) on Friday June 05 2020, @10:24AM (#1003658) Homepage Journal

        I very much agree and a further epiphany for me in adulthood was that even when you reach a point where you tell yourself you know better about these authority figures, even to the point of telling yourself they're more likely corrupt than not, it's likely you still have subconscious biases based on that childhood mental model your brain formed for these people. The realization that they're all regular guys and gals, in many cases less competent and probably just as out of their depth as you or I would be in their roles, and often highly flawed or pathological, is quite profound. From there you can come to a similar realization about corporations and their products and services, that beneath all the marketing and PR, they're just a load of regular guys too, very often with no real clue what they're doing.

        Undoubtedly the sharing of information on the internet is helping to pull the masks off these figures, but it can't instantly fix people's mental models. Many people with never see beyond their own subconscious biases.

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        Consumerism is poison.