The horrible death of George Floyd at the hands of a cop in Minneapolis leaves me mystified by a few things (in addition to being sickened and sad). The image of the cop’s knee on his neck while he’s pressed into the pavement is hard to look at, even if I didn’t know how long it went on or that he died from the ordeal. If that had gone on for a short period while he was brought under control that’s one thing, but 8+ minutes is sadistic.
But there are several things that puzzle or anger me in this case:
First, I was talking with a friend and asked “what are they protesting about?”. “They demand justice for George Floyd” was the answer. I replied, “Well, they’ve fired all the cops on the scene and are working frantically to figure out as quickly as possible what is the most severe charge they can bring against the perpetrator”. Being an ex-cop in prison is really, really bad. Being a white ex-cop in prison is worse. He’s soon going to be the most famous, most hated white ex-cop in history going to prison for 20+ years. And, just BTW, they’re also trying to figure out what charges they can bring against the other cops who were there and did nothing. So, what are they protesting about? If nothing was going to happen to these cops, Hell yes, it’s time to get fired up. So, they’re protesting about justice that is coming as quickly as the powers that be can deliver it? Might as well add women’s suffrage and repeal of prohibition to the tab.
Second, the protests and claims of “institutional racism” started immediately. At that point (even now, I think) we didn’t know what motivated Chauvin. Apparently the two worked together at a bar in the past. It’s possible that this was related to a financial disagreement or over a woman, there are a lot of possibilities. But let’s not wait for the facts! To arms, to arms!!! I really, really, hope that this turns out to be payback over a drug deal where Chauvin got screwed by Floyd. Not that it’ll probably matter. Of course, we’ll never know, but if George Floyd had been white things may have played out exactly the same.
Third, what struck me a little later is that several other officers stood by for 8+ minutes as Chauvin ground his knee into a man’s neck while he was on hard pavement, restrained and under control. I think this is more disconcerting than Chauvin’s behavior. One sadist or psycho or guy who lost if for 8 minutes happens (shouldn’t, but it does), the others who stood by make me shudder. I know that there are plenty of psych experiments that show how malleable people are, how much they tend to go along, etc., but still, seeing this is hard to come to terms with. I admit that this makes me question some of my doubt about the “institutional racism” bit, although it may just be that they stick together, there is an extremely strong bond among cops.
Fourth, if this is institutional racism, Democrats got some ‘splainin’ to do. The Mayor is a Democrat (as have been his predecessors for decades). The Chief of Police he picked is black/Hispanic. The Governor is a Democrat. Not long ago, we had a black Democrat President for 8 years whose Attorney General was a Blacktivist. So, WTF have they been doing about it? The Minneapolis police force is institutionally racist, but the mayor and Chief of Police got nothing to do with it. Give me a fucking break!
And, just BTW, 2-3 years ago in Minnesota a black cop shot a white woman without cause. He was convicted of murder and the city paid millions to her family, just so you know it wasn’t justified. Remember the protests and riots? Cue crickets. And recently in Dallas cops killed a white man in a similar fashion to George Floyd and the audio from their bodycams is brutal.
Next, even if the protestors have good reason to be on the streets, we’ve reached the point where rioters and looters are using them as human shields. I think the protestors should look at the situation now and realize that they’re helping the bad guys. If the protestors stood down for a while (a few days perhaps) the police would be able to handle the rioters and looters much better. Which leads to my next point:
A Hell of a lot of the damage from the rioters and looters falls on black people. The protests typically start among black neighborhoods, near where the incident happened or where the victim lived. A lot of black small businesses have been destroyed. Even the big corporate stores that have been hit are important to the local black communities. The 70-year-old black grandmother who counts on the local Target for everyday products is SOL. And we know from previous riots that there will be economic repercussions for years. Nice work SJWs! Omelettes require broken eggs I suppose.
Finally I note (although it is a nasty schaudenfreude that I try to resist) that most of the mayhem is falling on blue states and very blue cities. I’m not the first to use this line, but these people voted for Social Justice, and now they’re getting it good and hard. The mobs that are rioting and looting don’t seem to have given any credit to the wokeness of NYC or Minneapolis or Apple or Nike, etc. I just wish that someone had gotten them to head over to the neighborhood where the Mayor of Minneapolis lives. That would have been fascinating TV, the US may have run out of popcorn. Would the Mayor have had the police back down if his neighborhood were under assault?
And now the Minneapolis City Council is discussing getting rid of the police force. Where is Franz Kafka when you need him? I had a spirited discussion with another friend who ranted that something must be done, this can never happen again, etc., etc. OK, great, there are hundreds of thousands of cops, how are you going to manage that large a group so that they’re all boy scouts? They have hundreds of millions of interactions with bad guys every year, how are you going to avoid some of those going South? “I don’t know, but something must be done so it never happens again”! Ah well, deep thinking along the lines of “something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this!”
It appears there is no tragedy so sad that people can’t make it far, far worse.
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“…something must be done, this can never happen again, etc., etc.”
I’m not that long in the tooth but was around at the time of the Broadwater Farm trouble, and during the aftermath of the New Cross fire … the Mark Dugan riots. I think you can pretty well guarantee it will happen again.
Civil unrest and rioting is a common enough human behaviour but it is more common in parts of western Europe, especially France, than in the USA.
The UK media however barely mentioned the Bastille Day riots when over 1000 cars were torched, or indeed New Year "celebrations" when a similar number of French vehicles were destroyed. Rioting is not only not unusual in France, it has become the norm. Then of course the Yellow Vests protests also got little attention whilst the UK media almost exclusively ignores disturbances in Germany.
When it comes to race, apparently the USA is uniquely terrible, yet for Jews in France there has never been such a dangerous time since late 1944, that gets no traction at all.
Human beings get angry and riot, but seemingly those that do so in France are mostly ignored whilst those in the USA are much reported on and also lauded by many who should know better.
Anti-Americanism, paradoxically from both within the USA and without, prevents the moral compass of far too many pundits and politicos from ever pointing North. Deeply depressing.
Rioters in France are not Black.
Quite a few are black, but the large majority are brown, being of North African descent.
On institutional racism.
I have no personal or professional knowledge concerning policing in the USA but I do have a solid professional understanding of corporate cultures because my job is fixing broken organisations.
Tim is wrong when he points to the black or American liberal leadership of institutions and says that it indicates that they are unlikely to institutionally racist. It is possible and indeed likely that American police forces are institutionally racist in exactly the way the Metropolitan Police never was (inspite of the Macpherson report). That is because the suppression of the black man post-slavery was a fundamental founding objective of the many of the police forces and continued as explicit political objective until at least the 60s (Jim Crow). It is well known that corporate cultures are very long lasting - indeed, that is the explicit goal of senior leadership.
I agree with Tim that it is very important to distinguish between mere incompetence by individuals (as demonstrated by the Stephen Lawrence enquiry in the UK) which will be present in every organisation and institutional racism.
In the UK we had a similar situation with the Royal Ulster Constabulary part of whose mission was to suppress the openly traitorous Catholic population and were hated by them. The Irish have stopped killing each other so much now so perhaps the Americans could learn something from the peace process.
If we're going to talk of institutional racism, I'd take the starting point right back to when it became obvious that it made better economic sense to import blacks, who were slaves for the whole of their lives and their children after them, instead of whites who merely had to serve out their sentence or indenture.
It made excellent sense to encourage blacks to have contempt for the barefooted redneck, and the whites to loath the blacks who had been imported to replace them, and were fleeing their servitude and had to be tracked down and recaptured before they could rape, rob and murder them.
Indeed I remember reading that on some West Indian islands the local planters felt that someone else should bear the expense of importing white labourers to provide an extra means of keeping their black slaves under control at everyone else's expense. This obviously didn't work out in the long run. But then nothing ever does.
I wonder how much of this, both in the US & Europe, is pressure release after confinement, loss of jobs? Democrat controlled, therefore largely Black, States and neighbourhoods, being most tightly lockdown. Governments did such a good job propagandising the sanctity of lockdown, anyone objecting became an immediate social pariah, heretic, anathema.
The perennial institutional racism is a ‘just cause’ over which to let off the pent up anger and frustration of house arrest and withdrawal of normal life. And on hand the usual bunch of agents provocateurs to make sure things go with a swing, and unemployable elsewhere members of the political class, Lefties applauding from the sidelines, the (notional) Right making placatory mewing noises not wishing to say what they think to avoid attack by the self-righteous.
Candace Owens nails it at 1 minute 40 seconds: https://www.pscp.tv/w/1MYGNklYaYZJw
Coroner found that Floyd had meth and fentanyl in his system and the fattie died of a heart attack while under restraint (knee to the back of the head). (Floyd's family got a second opinion that he was indeed choked to death, but it's the same doc who "consulted" in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner deaths, fishy.) Cop had a long history of being rough. Screams out unprofessional, but not necessarily racist. They ignored Floyd's protests, but he had already refused to go into the cruiser claiming "claustrophobia," see Boy Who Cried Wolf. This is the first I've heard that Floyd and Chauvin knew one another; source?
Don't remember where I heard or read that. I think Floyd was a bouncer at a bar & Chauvin was over him in some capacity. I'll see if I can find anything on that. FWIW, my point here is that racism has been officially declared as the cause without any investigation.
I don't much like to quote CNN but see below (there are many other sources)
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/george-floyd-officer-derek-chauvin-security-club-trnd/index.html#:~:text=Floyd%2C%20who%20Santamaria%20called%20a,club%20for%20almost%2017%20years.
I was impressed that so many articles in the likes of the Guardian contain what must now be an obligatory defence of looting - "capitalism" , "they needed and will have used what they took", "we must put people before property", "don't be distracted" (paraphrased of course).
And every such articles loses a bit more support.
Well, I'm not American , nor do I live there, so I can only go by media reports, and therefore some of the following might be wrong.
Firstly, it's important to realise that groups of people do not act like individuals. They are much more emotional. It's impossible for everyone in the group to be fully informed about everything that is going on, so they act much more on feelings than intellect. If George Floyd had been killed as an isolated incident I suspect it might well have been sensational news around the world, but few outside those who knew him personally would have done anything. But it was not an isolated incident. It was one of so many that most are not famous at all. I think this death triggered much stronger reaction because of the cruel and depraved manner of the killing. In America cops kill about 1000 people a year, but the vast majority are shootings. Those can often be dismissed as a moment of panic, but George Floyd was held down for a long time until he complained he couldn't breathe and bystanders warned the cops to let him up. That was clearly no moment of panic.
Imagine you get every American cop to roll dice, and they all roll six. For any individual, you cannot be sure they're cheating, but overall you can be certain that a lot of cheating has happened. Similarly, despite the enormous number of police killings, it's hard to instantly say that one specific one was deliberate or racist rather than negligent or accidental. You can compare some of the statistics with England and Wales in https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/52890363 where you'll see, unlike America, they are drawn from ten years because the numbers are too small to be reliable in any one year. The manner in which George Floyd was killed, and the fact that it was on video, meant that everyone could immediately point to one case and say that it was representative of thousands more. The other case you menton, that of Justine Damond, was not on video, the cop claimed to have feared he was being ambushed and shot Justine once in the chest. It was only after an investigaton which included interviewing his partner that it was possible to conclude that he did something wrong. And, not quite as you describe, there was some marching in protest, but it was a local one.
Another highly relevant case is that of Stephen Mader and Ronald J Williams Jr. Mader, a cop, confronted Williams, who had a gun, and decided that the correct action was to talk. While he was successfully attempting to deal with the situation, more cops turned up and shot Williams dead. Mader was then fired, subsequently getting compensation for this. See
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6513557/White-cop-fired-REFUSING-shoot-dead-black-suspect.html
and
https://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2018/11/the-case-of-the-cop-who-wouldnt-kill/
Since this was one incident, we don't know if the killer cop was racially motivated (Williams was black), but there was certainly something institutionally bad.
While we might not yet know what motivated Chauvin, institutional racism is obviously a problem. There are five times as many white Americans as black Americans, but cops kill only twice as many white people as black people. As with the dice, you don't need to know which ones are the result of racism to know that it is there.
Moving to your "Fourthly", one of the characteristics of institutional racism is that it is, well, institutional. It is not reliant on any one individual, so it may not be possible to fix by replacing that individual - just as it may not be possible to rescue a failing business merely by changing the CEO. A business will ultimately go bust, but a police force will carry on however bad it is. There's a limit to how much can be changed from the top without support from elsewhere. But it's also not certain that the right person gets put in charge. Often the person elected is the one with fine words, but cannot translate them into effective action. For example, look at sexism in UK political parties. The left is particularly vociferous about sexism, yet the only UK party that has never chosen a female leader is the Labour party. I'm not sure how you can fix this general principle of being elected based on words.
On the point of rioters and looters, I'd like to point out that in a sufficiently large and long lasting group of people there will always arise some sort of way of keeping order, and if you follow the news sufficiently, you'll see that we are beginning to see stories of people who went out to protest but ended up preventing looting or vandalism. Many activists are well aware of how protests can be used as cover, or even how a few protesters can get carried away with their emotions and do something wrong. For example, John Boyega covered that point in the middle of his recent speech:
"It is very, very important that we keep control to this moment and we make this as peaceful as possible.
We make this as peaceful and as organised as possible. Because you know what guys, they want us to mess up. "
I suspect that many Americans would like to see their police operate according to the principles drawn up for the Met in 1829 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles ), but they don't ask for that explicitly because they have never heard of them.
Some interesting points, but the "There are five times as many white Americans as black Americans, but cops kill only twice as many white people as black people" comment is too simplistic. What if blacks are more prone to aggression and violence? Relevance of the MAOA 2R 'Warrior gene' - Blacks: 5.5%, Whites: 0.1%, Asians: 0.0007%.
Indeed; the relevant denominator isn't representation in the total population, but representation in acts of lawbreaking.
Even if you could somehow explain away the difference, there still remains the fact that black Americans would have a legitimate grievance that the police kill far too many of them because the police kill far too many white Americans as well. Purely on the total number, America compares very unfavourably with other countries, including its neighbours Canda and Mexico. And it seems highly implausible that this one area of society is somehow exempt from racism.
Well, the 3R variant is also associated with antisocial behaviour, and that's distributed the other way around 36%/65%/54%, so it's hardly likely to explain much - quite apart from the proportions being wrong. Additionally, studies in the area of behaviour are often of very low quality and rely on self-reporting, which is so unreliable as to be useless.
The actual data, including a study by a black, left-wing Harvard professor show that cops are more likely to shoot a white perp than a black one in similar circumstances. And black Americans are far more likely to commit crimes, including violent ones, than their proportion of the population would support. The difference has been explained away quite thoroughly.
If you would do me a favor, can you define "institutional racism"? Not kidding around here, I hear about it a lot, but it seems like a way to hand wave away any need for evidence.
I'm shocked that we aren't having a heated discussion, including riots, over the sexism angle here. Men are extremely overrepresented in these numbers.
Your "get every American cop to roll dice" analogy tries to show that anecdotes YOU assemble prove that there is a systemic problem, for which you give no proof but spend many words waving off the need for proof. Notoriety of police incidents is not decisive; there is a racial-guilt industry set up to make events like Chauvin/Floyd notorious. When the opposite happens, US networks leave them alone because they don't support their (and your) thesis.
If that's the case, you should be able to cite a few representative examples.
Charles, compare the blanket coverage given to the Floyd death to the (non) reporting of the decades of racist attacks on under age, white (+ some Sikh) girls by moslem men of pakistani origin in the UK.
Could you imagine the outrage if the ethnicities had been reversed?
If you don't see there is a problem, you are part of the problem...
As noted in the article, 2-3 years ago a black cop in Minnesota unlawfully killed a white woman - remember all the media coverage and riots? And cops in Dallas killed a white man in similar fashion to George Floyd, do you know his name?