1 – TV Crucifixion
They are shot in the head, clubbed to death, burned alive in car crashes. They fall from great heights, dropped off cliffs or skyscrapers to thud against the ground. They are mowed down by machine guns, blown to bits by artillery, gutted in hand-to-hand combat. They are killed by stealth and from ambush and, sometimes, in gunfights at intersections in the dusty streets of Western towns. They are raped and murdered by sinister serial killers, shot in the belly in ravines, drowned and strangled, ripped apart by wild animals, asphyxiated by smoke, trampled by elephants and buffalo, sucked down into quicksand arms flailing overhead as the mud pulls them under. By the time you are thirty, you have seen, perhaps, 100,000 killings on TV. Television and movies are about sex and violence. By age 30, viewers have also seen 100,000 kisses, embraces, instances of copulation, fades to black before the sex begins. But violence is always predominant: murders, torture, threats of torture, combat and killing – whole cities vaporized or melted by phosphorescent bombs, air planes spiraling down to crash, entire planets and solar systems blown up like fire-crackers by Death Stars. This is all fictional mayhem, made up carnage. When someone is actually killed on camera in real time, the familiar images of death on the streets, however, take on a different aspect. One would expect people to be de-sensitized to murder. But, in some ways, the opposite seems true: amidst image-galaxies of fictional slaughter, a real picture of someone being murdered takes on particular force – it’s as if the false images have all contributed some scintilla of their essence to amplify the indisputably real murder committed before our eyes.
As everyone reading this knows, a 46-year old Black man, George Floyd, was murdered in broad daylight on a south Minneapolis street. The murderers were Minneapolis police officers. Floyd, a big man, was drunk and, probably, under the influence of drugs as well. He wanted to buy cigarettes and so entered a convenience store, a place called Cup Foods near the intersection of Lake Street and Minnehaha. Floyd tried to pass a counterfeit 20 dollar bill. The Cup Foods clerk called the Minneapolis police. (Cup Foods is operated by Somali immigrants; the name seems to be a play on words – a prominent Minneapolis grocery chain is called Cub Foods.) Floyd wasn’t hard to find. He was sitting in a car at the grocery’s curbside, apparently in the back seat, with another man behind the wheel and a woman next to him. Several police approached the car and yanked the people out of it. The three suspects were shoved against the wall of a nearby building to await back-up police. All of them were handcuffed with their wrists behind their backs.
A couple of police jerked Floyd up from where he was sitting against the wall. Floyd seemed panicked and hysterical, but didn’t resist arrest. Two of the cops led him away toward another squad car. Floyd seems to have walked voluntarily to that police car. Floyd’s demeanor is cowed and, somewhat, abject – the arrest seems to have sobered him up. He doesn’t show any obvious evidence of intoxication in the surveillance footage (there was a camera outside a restaurant where Floyd was handcuffed) and he walks without staggering.
Something then went wrong. Cut to a shot taken by a cell-phone, a vertical image shaped like the monoliths in 2001. Floyd is now lying with his cheek pressed to the concrete most of his body concealed behind a squad car. A cocky-looking white cop with his sunglasses tipped up over his brow is kneeling with his knee on Floyd’s neck. The cop has his hand in his pocket demonstrating that he is casual, suffering neither fear nor any kind of peril, just engaged in casual activity to which he is largely indifferent. The cop smirks while bystanders suggest that he remove his knee from Floyd’s neck. A woman remarks that Floyd’s nose is bleeding. Floyd wriggles a little but can’t move much. He says that “hurts everywhere”. He calls out several times: “Mama, Mama!” On a couple of occasions, he cries that he “can’t breathe.” The bystanders become more agitated. We don’t see them but their voices can be heard pleading with the cops to let Floyd breathe. The strongest language used against the cops is the phrase “fucking bum”. A man calls the cop a “bum” several times and once says that he is “fucking bum”. No one utters any threats. Several women repeatedly say that the suspect can’t breathe and, then, when Floyd passes out, they assert that it is senseless to continue pinning the man to the ground under the cop’s knee. The officer with his knee of Floyd’s spine taunts him. He says: “Get up, bro, and get into the squad car.” But this isn’t possible. (It may be that this voice comes from a bystander, but that wouldn’t make much sense – on the other hand, nothing about this eight-and-a-half minute video makes any sense.) A stubby little cop with Asian features (he appears to be Hmong or Laotian) imitates the officer with his knee on Floyd’s neck by putting his hand in his pocket. This cop bickers with bystanders, admonishing them “to back off” and “stay back.” With nothing to do, he stands a few yards from Floyd and the cop with the sunglasses cocked up on his forehead who is asphyxiating the Black man. Sometimes, this little fat cop walks in circles. Floyd stops struggling. His eyes go out like a candle extinguished and he doesn’t move at all. The cop with his knee grinding down on Floyd’s neck keeps his hand in his pocket – perhaps, he is jiggling his ballocks or masturbating. Most of Floyd’s body is concealed behind the driver’s side of the squad car. (Another camera angle released later will show two more uniformed police officers crouching with their knees on Floyd’s mid-section and legs.) Floyd is unresponsive for about three minutes while the cop’s knee crushes his neck. A woman’s voice matter-of-factly says that the cop is killing him. An ambulance arrives. The cop takes his knee off Floyd’s body and, limp as a rag doll, the man is tossed onto a gurney. No one attempts any sort of resuscitation.
The whole episode is crystal-clear. There’s no ambiguity about what we are seeing. Duration is important to understanding what the images show. Everything is eerily protracted, as if events occur in nightmarish slow-motion. At first, it doesn’t exactly register as what it is: a snuff film, a movie showing a murder committed in real time. We have seen so many images of people killed on screen that this cell-phone video at first doesn’t seem exactly real. What is different, of course, from the killings shown on TV and in movies is that it is all so completely non-dramatic – one man crushes the life out of another man over a period of about eight minutes. None of the police raise their voices in protest. Instead, they admonish the crowd to “stay back” and let the killing proceed in due course. The spectators are strangely subdued; it’s as if they aren’t exactly clear what they are seeing either, as if they disbelieve their own eyes. But, when the whole thing ends, and Floyd is hauled away dead or dying, the viewer has a sick feeling, a sense of irrevocable harm has been done, not just to Floyd but to everything and everyone.
When the cop taunts Floyd, a person religiously inclined may recall scripture, particularly at Matthew 27:42. In that text, the Chief Priest with the scribes and elders taunts Jesus and says that if Christ is the “King of Israel”, then, he “should come down from the cross now...” This is similar to the cop with his knee of Floyd’s neck derisively ordering him to rise and get into the squad car. Some may protest that this comparison is extravagant. Surely, George Floyd is not Jesus. But scripture tells us that, at the moment of his murder, George Floyd is the equivalent of Christ. At Matthew 25, Christ speaks of the duties owed to “the least of us” – that is, the sick, the naked, those who are hungry and thirsty, and those who are in prison. Jesus says: “Whatever you did not do to the least of these, you did not do to me.” What happened at Lake Street and Minnehaha was a crucifixion filmed on cell-phone. If you are Christian and don’t recognize this, then, there is something wrong with you and your faith.
2 – The Righteous 99.99 percent
Predictably, public officials affiliated with law enforcement decry the murder of George Floyd, all the while weeping crocodile tears for this man’s killing. But this is wholly insincere. These officials regret only that the police were caught red-handed perpetrating this killing. These authorities know that murders of this kind occur all the time and that large numbers of police are complicit in killings of this sort. These murders aren’t documented and, therefore, don’t have any impact on the public conscience.
Someone in the Trump administration says that 99.99 percent of police are good citizens, kindly administrators of justice, who run toward danger when others flee. This rhetoric is falsified by the images of Floyd’s murder. Four cops were involved in killing this man. None of the four protested or, even, suggested that it was wrong to kneel for three minutes on a comatose man’s neck. If 99.99 percent of the cops are virtuous, why did all four officers work together to kill George Floyd? And the rot goes deeper and is more pervasive. The four cops apparently wrote reports falsifying the incident and casting their own murderous conduct in a false light. On the morning after Floyd’s homicide, John Elder, an official with the Minneapolis police, blandly announced that George Floyd had been arrested, suffered a “medical incident”and died at Hennepin County Medical Center – this statement, which obscures the truth of what occurred, was the official version of the incident until the cell-phone video surfaced. In other words, the 99.99 % of righteous cops were quite willing to accept a false and obviously dishonest report relating to the incident – and, indeed, release a false narrative to the public.
Then, the riots ensued and police were filmed pulling bystanders out of cars and beating them with truncheons. Pepper gas was sprayed at peacefully protesting crowds. There were images of lines of cops suddenly bursting open to dispatch wolf-packs of our boys in blue to beat protesters bloody and, then, retreat back behind the blue wall. A column of cops surging down a residential street in Minneapolis orders people watching from their own porch to go inside – when the onlookers hesitate, a cop shouts “light them up!” and fires rounds of rubber bullets at the people standing on their porch. In New York City, cops fighting protesters covered their badges so that they could not be identified. If 99.99 percent of cops are valiant crusaders for justice why were there multiple examples of police brutality and police rioting? And, if 99.99 percent of police are virtuous, why was Philando Castille killed by the Minneapolis cops with a half-dozen more unarmed African-American men, a pattern repeated in every city in this nation? Records show that the Minneapolis police applied choke-holds to, at least, 44 suspects in the last several years. Sulking about the arrests of their brother officers, the cops in the 3rd Precinct hid in their station while the City burned around them and, then, formed a convoy and fled the neighborhood; other police stood around listlessly as the looters and rioters burned whole neighborhoods.
I know police officers from my work representing criminal defendants and investigating police misconduct on behalf of the City where I live. It’s my estimate that about one-third of the police on any given force are bullies, sadists, or irredeemable liars. They are corrupt and vicious and cowardly to boot. About one-third of all cops are “good Germans” – by this I mean, inoffensive themselves but completely unwilling to support any sort of systemic change; these are the men and women who see abuses almost daily and do nothing about them and, in fact, maintain a code of silence about misconduct that they have witnessed. These people do evil by condoning it. And, about one-third of the police that I have known are diligent, truthful, and work zealously (and, even, heroically) to administer justice.
3 – On Violent Protest
The people rioting in the streets have grasped an inconvenient truth. In White America, there is no change unless the property and personal privileges of White people are threatened. The looting and fire-setting isn’t intended to be politically effective. In fact, the looters represent the clearest manifestation that I know of homo ludens. The looters are enjoying a lark, having fun outwitting and outrunning the cops. Make no mistake, they are having a good time. If you were young and fit and had a grievance, be honest, wouldn’t you enjoy spending a few evenings setting fires and stealing things. These riots aren’t motivated by anything but a sense of license and sport. This is a game to those involved in the midnight mayhem.
But I must revert to my initial point, one that seems to contradict what I have just written: an army of ants marching through the forest doesn’t have a destination or objective; the individual ants don’t know, or care, where they are going. Nonetheless, it is an army on the march. The individual actors in the looting that has occurred during the last several days aren’t politically motivated – they are amoral and violent because the ordinary rules of society have been suspended. But, nonetheless, these looters are historical agents. Their conduct will force change that none of the hand-wringing and preaching of the pundits, the pastors, and the community leaders could accomplish. Again, we must understand the nature of complicity that is here revealed. The insect (locust) army of looters, behaving according to naked instinct, is the political arm of those demanding change. The righteous folk calling for change can disavow the looters all they want – but the looters are, in effect, the real agents of change because they pose an actual threat to the society that has created killer-cops; the preachers and sociologists, the professors of African-American studies, all the well-meaning liberals can’t change society. If their pleas and indignation had any traction, we wouldn’t be living in the society that now exists. The brutal fact is that if change occurs, it will happen because White people are frightened.
The commentators on cable news want to see protests. Even the quasi-Fascists on Fox News praise protest. But all of these commentators, broadcasters, reporters and pundits want to see ineffective public protest. They want to see protest that they can assimilate to the status quo. But protest isn’t effective unless it makes people uncomfortable – unless it disturbs the structure of power. A protest doesn’t mean anything unless it disrupts the normal affairs of society, blocks the highways, seriously inconveniences people like me and you, and threatens to erupt into violence. Society won’t be changed by laying wreaths of flowers at the place where George Floyd was murdered. The true agents of change carry Molotov cocktails and the trunks of their cars are full of incendiary fuel – they are on a rampage for the pure sport of it. But, inadvertently, these are the people who are so seriously disrupting the status quo that real change may be possible. One can argue that this change may be in the wrong direction – that is, change in the form of violently repressive backlash. But since when have terrorists hesitated to provoke the authorities into violence? State-sanctioned violence just engenders more terrorism and, in the end, the anarchists profit from the heavy-handed repressive measures that their assaults have triggered. A rational civil society responds to terrorism and rioting by working to change some of the injustices that created the environment in which this unrest arises.
The hypocrisy of the media as to the violence is breathtaking. First, the media luxuriates in colorful images of fires, looting, crowds of people clashing against a back drop of cars burning in the night like torches. The media decries the rioting and praises the protests. But the media, while encouraging violence with its picturesque spectacles of fire and mob, provides a counterpoint of narrative denouncing the very spectacle that we are being sold. (I mean the word “sold” – there are still commercials broadcast at intervals among all this mayhem.) The media and its lackeys want polite, orderly protests – these are the progeny of the same folks who denounced Martin Luther King for civil disobedience that resulted in his followers being beaten, knocked over by pressure-hoses, and beset by vicious dogs. Surely, we can have protest without this violence. But through the violence came change. The people broadcasting these images of rioting want the protests to be placid and low-key, polite and not disturbing to anyone. This profoundly misunderstands the nature of public protest. For a protest to be effective, it must alarm people such as me.
4 – Home Sweet Home
A protest was planned for Austin where I live. I considered attending but was too cowardly. I’m well-known here and it might be imprudent to expose myself to the public at a demonstration. Furthermore, I detest crowds. Every time, I’ve come close to some kind of public demonstration, I am immediately affronted by illogical and idiotic speeches, bizarre proclamations that bear no relation to the truth, gross and dishonest oversimplications of reality that cause me to oppose the very cause that I am supposed to be supporting. I’ve had this experience at political meetings, caucuses and conventions and the like. When I attend a caucus as a good Republican, the sheer idiocy on display forces me into opposition – I end up protesting the thing I came to advocate. When I attend a caucus as a Democrat, there is something oppostional in me that causes me to espouse positions contrary to the official platform. This is painful and I’ve learned to avoid this misery by staying away from public manifestations of outrage or, for that matter, enthusiasm. Every crowd is only a hair’s breadth away from becoming a mob and I don’t want to be present when the rocks are thrown and the tear gas canisters discharged.
But I did walk my dog and, without intending it, came within a few blocks of the protest march in Austin. A crowd of people filled an intersection and chanted “Hand’s up! Don’t shoot!” I heard the chant and saw a ring of police cars with emergency lights ominously spinning around a sort of corral where the demonstrators were located. Then, the crowd began to move and the cop cars sped around the block, accelerating to get ahead of the march so that traffic at the next intersection would not cross through the moving parade of protesters. Some white signs bobbed like flotsam atop the stream of people. At low income housing, two twin towers downtown, a group of disabled people on motorized scooters were gathered at a curb-cut. The people seemed to be arguing.
It was a mild day, with the sun warm but not hot, and cool winds were blowing between the shade trees along the route of the march. I saw some fat blonde girls pushing strollers with half-black toddlers, ambling in the direction of the crowd, another couple girls toting a big sign on which a paragraph of sloppily written prose was scribbled – too much writing really to be legible. The crowd’s route to the City Bandshell wasn’t clear. At one location, a big white house that was formerly the home of a dentist (he practiced out of a ground floor office) and, then, later a lawyer was cordoned-off. Yellow police tape had been stretched around the grassy lawn in front of the house, signaling that people should stay off the block. A couple hundred yards away, a house along the presumed route of the parade displayed a big sign, almost billboard-sized with the odd legend: Color is not a Crime, the lettering next to a big stenciled and spray-painted image of a Black power fist clenched and raised over the sidewalk. I could hear the chant “Hands up. Don’t shoot,” a couple blocks to the West. The parade, apparently, wasn’t going to pass the house where the dentist had once practiced or the sign making the Black Power salute.
On side streets, I saw Black teenagers and young men wearing the uniforms of the Thug Nation – that is, hoodies and pants dropped down low on their hips with baseball caps, these kids shouting obscenities into phones, very loudly as if hoping to induce some kind of rebuke. The young men were slow-walking across the street, indifferent to the approaching cars, challenging the vehicles, it seemed, to threaten them. But the cars simply stopped, a half-block away, to let the kids pass.
In the distance, among the colonnades of shade trees, I heard some shouting and the sirens of police cars.
5 – Covid
An astonishing aspect of all this civil unrest is that the images of protests and rioting have completely supplanted the pandemic story. Before Floyd was murdered, the media’s obsession was the covid virus and the halting efforts underway to return to some kind of crippled normality. Governors declared that people going out in public must wear masks. The media acted as vigilantes, gathering images of unlawful gatherings of people, and, then, broadcasting these pictures accompanied by horror-struck and sanctimonious commentary. Katie Tur, on MSNBC, is a particularly prominent scold. When the Supreme Court in Wisconsin struck down the governor’s decree closing businesses and public places, MSNBC reporters sought out a tavern in some city in that State. The tavern was full of unmasked people drinking and socializing barstool to adjacent barstool. One of the unmasked women in the bar, enjoying a mug of beer, said that she was a nurse – that is, an essential “front-line” worker – and that she didn’t perceive that the bar and its patrons posed any particular risk to her. Katy Tur, of course, was predictably appalled – “I don’t know what that nurse is thinking,” she said through tight, compressed lips.
Then, George Floyd is killed and the media wants people to “peacefully protest” but, of course, this will require abandonment of “responsible social distancing.” So the notion of “social distancing” goes out the window and isn’t really much mentioned when cameras and on-air journalists survey the thousands of people who have taken to the streets. Now, the narrative, as one might say, has shifted. A lot of people are, indeed, wearing masks in these vast processions of protesters, but it’s not clear if the masks are to protect against the covid-19 virus or pepper spray or to conceal identity in the event of violence and looting. The remarkable fact is that the story is now completely changed. A week ago, cell-phone images showing a pool party at Backwater Jack’s, some kind of huge bar near Lake of the Ozark’s were broadcast over and over again. The point was that these young bare-chested college students and bikini-clad girls were behaving in a grossly irresponsible way. They were endangering everyone by wallowing in the vast blue swimming pool in which floating bars were actually bobbing on the water, a whole armada of them to dispense beer and mixed drinks. Someone among these 200 people has tested positive for covid and, so, the entire assembly was condemned as a vicious example of the selfish hedonism of the young.
But, then, protesters mobilized. And overhead, droves hovered over crowds of two or three-thousand people, marching arm in arm toward blue columns of cops and National Guard, also deployed in close ranks and no one said a word about the fact that these assemblies were potentially lethal.
6 – A peculiar Interview
A nice-looking busty woman in her early forties is interviewed. She seems to be Hispanic, with dark hair and eyes; her name is Maya Santamaria The woman tells an odd story. She was previously the proprietor of a bar a few blocks from where Floyd was murdered. The name of the bar was El Nuevo Rodeo Club. Of course, the tavern had to be closed during the corona-virus panic and this sort of enterprise is not sufficiently robust to survive three months of shut-down so the business no longer exists. The woman says that she employed both George Floyd and Derek Chauvin, the cop who crushed Floyd’s neck with his knee, as “security” at the bar. The woman didn’t know if Chauvin and Floyd knew one another, but acknowledged that it was certainly possible. A photograph of Floyd dressed as a door-man at the bar circulates on the Internet. Floyd is a big man standing by the tavern’s front door well-groomed and wearing a natty dark-blue blazer. The woman tells the CNN interviewer that Floyd worked indoors and that Chauvin was outside. She seems to suggest that Chauvin, the White cop moonlighting at the bar, wasn’t very good at de-escalating conflict in the tavern – “the cops were always being called.”
The interview exposes something unsettling. Chauvin and Floyd certainly knew each other, although may never have spoken. (These facts bear on Chauvin’s motives for crushing Floyd’s neck.) What was their actual relationship? Did Chauvin know who he was killing? But there’s another aspect to this story as to the relationship of cops to the community where Floyd was murdered. In effect, the Minneapolis police were running a protection racket at the El Nuevo Rodeo Club. In exchange for this moonlighting, police were undoubtedly tempted into looking the other way with respect to illegal activity in the bar. Presumably, the police might have shut this business down or, at least, harassed it, if they had not been complicit in its operation, on the payroll as it were. I am aware that Twin Cities cops routinely sell their services as hired thugs, that is security, for concerts and dances in the Metro area. In fact, about a third to half of the income that Minneapolis police earn annually comes from this sort of moonlighting. The bar in question here may have had an unsavory reputation if, for no other reason, that it was a hang-out for African-Americans and recent immigrants and, therefore, suspect on racist grounds – the female owner (quite possibly fronting for someone who couldn’t get a liquor license) noted that the club had nights that were intended to attract different Minority clientele – for instance, she mentioned something about a “Caribbean Night” every Tuesday at Club: this attracted Black patrons and we know that Floyd almost always worked that shift.
By and large, Minneapolis cops don’t live in the City that they are supposed “serve and protect.” But the narrative of cops as an occupying, militarized presence is undercut by the notion that many of the police appear to have been employed to provide “protection” to local drinking joints. The story is complex and will become more intricate as additional facts are discovered.
7 – TV cops
TV cops are routinely shown solving cases by threatening cowering suspects with beatings, torture, electrocution or death in the gas chamber, or being “raped bloody” by fellow inmates while in custody. (See, for instance, the episode of Showtimes’ Penny Dreadful – City of Angels broadcast on Sunday May 30, 2020 at the height of the rioting over Floyd’s murder.) The unconstitutional abuse of suspects in custody is glorified as a legitimate way to solve difficult crimes. This is a staple of shows like True Detective and, almost, every network police procedural. Furthermore, TV cops are often portrayed as corrupt, profoundly racist, and brutal. At least fifty times a week, TV shows depict cops intimidating suspects, depriving them of right to counsel, and forcing the accused to waive their right to silence. These shows proclaim that villains can only be apprehended if the cops bend the rules. I know that police watch these shows and, often, endorse the message that they present. Years ago, a law enforcement officer recruited a local doctor to do surveillance on bad guys. I knew the doctor well and the cop to a lesser degree. The police officer’s credo was that the world was full of wicked and unscrupulous villains and that these men could not be apprehended without violating the restrictions imposed on police conduct by the Constitution, restrictions that the cop found counter-productive and arbitrary.
8 – The endless retreat
I am haunted by an image of police and protesters in some city in the United States. I didn’t note where the scene was filmed. In the end, all cities under assault look more or less the same. When the fires are lit and walls breached even familiar landscapes take on an aspect of unreality. Although I was raised in Minneapolis and go there often, I didn’t recognize the barren avenues, the cyclone fences and the empty, debris-strewn lots where the rioting took place. I saw bridges and square buildings and sidewalks onto which walls had collapsed beside burnt-out cars and none of it was recognizable to me. Where was this strange, flame-lit dystopian place? Where were the lakes, the gorge of the Mississippi where waterfalls spurt down into the Father of Waters? The pictures on the screen were anonymous, blasted urban wastelands that could have been anywhere and, so, I didn’t recognize the place where the scene that I am about to describe happened: it might have been St. Paul or Minneapolis or Houston or Chicago or Philadelphia or Cleveland or Denver or Salt Lake City or Los Angeles. It was a place everywhere and nowhere.
A double-line of cops in riot gear face a crowd of protesters on a street where smoke and tear gas clouds are entwined. The protesters advance, sending forth a skirmish line of tall, young African-American men with bandanas on their faces. The young men raise both arms in the air over their heads as the amble forward. The gesture, which is ubiquitous, means “hands up, don’t shoot.” A seething mass of demonstrators behind the young men are also advancing down the avenue. Some of the people are swathed in American flags and banners bearing slogans are tossed upon the crest of the stream of marchers. The store-fronts have already been looted and the plywood panels nailed across windows and doors are spray-painted ACAB (an acronym that means “All Cops Are Bad”). As the demonstrators advance, the columns of cops slowly retreat, the two sides maintaining a distance of about 100 yards between them. The police slowly fall back and the demonstrators, ragged and shaking bottles of water in the air like fists, slowly advance. Sometimes, projectiles are thrown in high arcs to which the police respond by firing canisters of tear-gas. This could go on forever, the protesters pressing forward and the cops falling back, block after block, until the houses and businesses thin, and the slow retreat moves through the suburbs with broad lawns and parks and lakes fringed with evergreens and old elms, the cops in their heavy gear all walking backward and the protesters doggedly advancing, past the cemeteries and the softball fields and the malls like aircraft carriers stranded among little featureless buildings and empty lots on the edge of town, and, then, the cops retreating across the open country where the corn and soybean rows stretch to the horizon. It’s a long march and a long retreat under a sky turbulent with thunderheads.
9 – Names
The Minneapolis police officer who crushed his knee down on George Floyd’s neck is named Derek Chauvin. The plump and ineffectual Asian cop who argued with the bystanders is Tou Thao. The two policemen filmed kneeling on Floyd’s lower back and legs are Thomas Lane and Alexander Kueng.
It’s important to name names.
May 31, 2020
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