A Few Words on the George Floyd Killing

No reviews or pop-culture commentary today. I saw this news story yesterday morning and watched the video – I don’t often watch these videos when they circulate, but I watched this one. And I’d like to talk about it a bit.

In the past five years, there have been three highly-publicized Black Lives Matter killings in my state. The first was Jamar Clark in 2015, followed by Philando Castile in 2016, and now George Floyd this week. Each ignited a firestorm in Minnesota, as many have poured out their grief and outrage in the streets and on social media while, often, others have waved away these lives as complicit in their own deaths, deserving their untried executions for the crimes of resisting arrest, having a legal carry permit, and, in Floyd’s case, being suspected of forgery. Thousands upon thousands of words are said, backgrounds are dissected, cases are drawn out, and too often, justice is denied.

In the case of George Floyd, we can at least see that the four officers involved were fired within 24 hours – not placed on a paid leave pending an investigation, fired – but of course, there’s a long way to go yet for any justice for this man’s death. If you work at a donut shop or a law firm or an auto body shop and, over the course of your workday, you murder someone on videotape, you’re not just fired. You’re charged, tried, and sentenced. You serve. Firing these officers should be viewed as nothing more than a first step.

Watching the video of this killing, I thought back to Philando Castile’s shooting, another instance where I did watch the video. There, it’s horrifying how quickly it all takes place. The cop goes from “warning” Castile to killing him so fast that, even if Castile had been endangering the cop’s life, he wouldn’t have had time to comply with any verbal commands before the officer fired into the car that held, not just Castile, but also his girlfriend and her young daughter. As it was, his repeated insistence that he was reaching for his wallet, not his gun, couldn’t match the speed at which that officer of the law shot him. In seconds, he was gone.

I thought of Castile because the killing of George Floyd is a different kind of horrifying. Here, we see horror not in its speed but in its length. That officer had so much time to not kill Flloyd, so much time to make a different choice, to listen to Floyd’s pleas for help (and the pleas from the many bystanders who witnessed the killing) and not end a man’s life. The full video is over 10 minutes long, and for nearly all of that, one of the four officers involved is kneeling on Floyd’s neck. He’s already kneeling when the video begins. He continues as Floyd repeatedly cries that he can’t breathe, as onlookers urge him to let up. He continues when Floyd loses consciousness and the bystanders beg him to check Floyd’s pulse. Even when the ambulance arrives (which one of the officers called,) he stays on Floyd’s neck the entire time the paramedics are unloading the stretcher and their equipment, not getting up until the instant they’re ready to transfer Floyd to the stretcher. Nearly 10 minutes of opportunities to let up, to put Floyd in the squad car, to check his breathing or his pulse after he lost consciousness, to administer CPR. And he just kept kneeling.

I thank everyone who was on that street who stopped, who stood and witnessed that murder while they pleaded with the cops to do the right thing and not kill Floyd. It was horrific to watch on video, and I can’t imagine how horrific it was to see it unfolding in person. How powerless you must have felt, even as you repeatedly tried to intervene to save his life. Thank you for being witnesses, thank you for trying. The last thing George Floyd heard was all of you defending him.

Minneapolis erupted last night. I watched a fair amount of that footage too, as protesters flooded the streets (many of them wearing PPE – as Trevor Noah put it, with racism evidently deemed “an essential service” during the pandemic, protest is as well,) and as the police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. This is a cry that’s been taken up far too many times for far too many people. This city saw it before, with Clark, with Castile, now with Floyd. May the city listen now.