Like the rest of the nation, I did not know George Floyd existed until he did not. I did not know about neck-pinning, either — and I was a cop reporter for two decades.
Yet among some police departments, neck-pinning remains a practiced “non-lethal” method of subduing suspects. Like the choke hold. Or stun gun. Or pepper spray. Or rubber bullets.
I have more than a few questions about what happened to Floyd. Like how he went from being handcuffed and sitting against a building wall to laying handcuffed precisely out of view of a police dash cam as Officer Derek Chauvin choked him out for at least seven minutes.
Did Chauvin think Floyd would charge him like a bull and use his skull as a deadly weapon? Is that compliance procedure standard for forgery suspects? Why did none of the fellow officers suggest Floyd had been amply debilitated?
When I was on the cop beat, an officer once demonstrated how effective — and painful — a simple pair of cuffs are at getting you to submit. With a subtle flick of the wrist, he showed me, you can be brought to your knees for fear of your hands snapping off your forearms. When someone dons the bracelets, they can do little within the geometry of pain besides wince. What possibly elevated the threat during that arrest?
Perhaps answers will emerge from Chauvin’s third-degree murder trial, though I doubt it. If the recent spate of racially-fueled incidents — from Floyd to the Hunger Games killing of Ahmaud Arbery to Amy Cooper’s panicked false police report against bird-watcher Christian Cooper — has proven anything, it’s that video surveillance does not curb behavior. :strip_exif(true):strip_icc(true):no_upscale(true):quality(65)/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-gmg.s3.amazonaws.com/public/ZD4NEBOE6FDLTNBKHFMVQZYEHI.jpg)
And with a morally corrosive president who dog whistles that “thug” “looting leads to shooting,” that behavior isn’t likely to change. If anything, Trump’s last political maneuver may be to gin up his base into a Civil War 2.0 — now gluten-free!
I’m tired of our impotent condemnations of racism and empty demands for wholesale changes to the way we behave. The mealy-mouthed calls for sensitivity training. When our highest elected official is a racist pederast, do we really expect his yokel fanbase to somehow wise up? Make some specific calls for change, or get off the pot.
And, yeah, this is directed at you, asshole.
Here’s my call for change: A federal law that mandates that any law enforcement officer authorized to employ “non-lethal force” must experience it in training first.
Want to employ a neck-pin? You must first have a 250-pound training commander kneeling on your windpipe.
A choke-hold? Time for a chin up on a billy club.
A taser? Brace for the bolt. Same with Mace, rubber bullets and flash bangs. We’ll see if our definition of “non-lethal” changes.
Shit, expand the tactic to include our military. Before you can waterboard a state enemy, you’ve gotta try the bathwater first. How long do you think Dick Cheney’s heart would last in the drip? Would he still consider it not to be torture?
None of this may have changed Floyd’s fate. But maybe one of those cops would have said enough. We clearly need to become familiar with the taste of the medicine we dole out.
Enough with the fucking lip service. The only way we’re going to move the needle is by stepping on the goddamned gas.
