George Floyd
Charles Jordan
George Floyd had Covid-19, only one of his problems. He must have had a problem with money because he was trying to pay for something in a store with a counterfeit $20 bill. The owner noticed that and called the police. The police came and arrested him.
As they tried to put him in the back seat of the police car, Mr. Floyd seemed to think that they were going to kill him. It seemed so irrational to the police that they discussed whether he was high on drugs. According to a blood test he was, on fentanyl and metamphetamines. He struggled, banging his head against his surroundings in the police car so they police took him outside and restrained him, finally using a standard technique of pressure to his breathing by means of a knee on the back of his neck. One of the policemen stated that they had to take him out of the car to keep him from hurting himself.
The restraint technique works by robbing the suspect of his ability to breathe if he struggles. It is a standard non-lethal method of control. Normally when the suspect realizes that he can breathe when he doesn’t struggle, he stops struggling. Pretty standard stuff, but the policeman doesn’t believe the suspect has Covid-19, a pulmonary disease, as the suspect keeps saying, thinking it a ploy to get them away from him. Using a breath robbing technique on a suspect with a respiratory disease like Covid-19 is perhaps somewhat risky if he actually has it. It exposes the policemen to a theoretically deadly disease. If he had known about the infection, he probably wouldn’t have touched him. I don’t know what the guidelines are for handling someone who you know has Covid-19.
This scenario is another example of the difficulty of a policeman’s job. He has to make a split second decision on the state of being of a suspect of a crime who says he has Covid-19, who acts like he’s high on drugs, is beating his head against the police car, calling for his mother (maybe he is a mental case, not on drugs, although apparently they knew each other incidentally much earlier in life.), and is struggling mentally and physically to find a way to keep from going to jail.
He knows that police have guns. No way is he going to go quietly, even if going quietly would have clearly been the best decision. Better to have your breath constricted than to get shot. Another possibility for the police, of course, would been to let him go, stating that he had Covid-19 and find him later, but if you find him later why would anything be different? What is he going to learn from this interaction but that if you struggle enough the police will let you go. The whole idea of trying to arrest someone with Covid-19 is disconcerting.
Handling anyone with breath suppression techniques will cause them to think or say “I can’t breathe.” If they can breathe easily, it’s not working. Such techniques - which I assume have been used by most policemen since it is a standard - allow some breathing if you stop struggling. The goal is to stop the struggling without killing the suspect and that’s what normally happens. If the suspect has Covid - 19 and the policeman doesn’t know it, he may not realize the danger he is putting the suspect in. In this case, it may have made all the difference between control and death.
Strike one - attention due to suspicion of criminal activity, Strike two - struggling against authority, Strike three - he has Covid-19 and has trouble breathing.
Given the equipment and training and numerical superiority, the policeman always has a feeling of superiority. He feels that his is the good guy with right on his side, and the suspect is the bad guy. If the “human” policeman feels that he is the good guy simply because he is white-skinned, not just because he is enforcing the good guy laws, he is the only one who knows and we will find it hard to tell. And it’s not good enough to dig up something he said 10 years ago to conclude that he was killing the suspect because of his ethnic group.
One thing is for sure, George Floyd wasn’t a hero and didn’t want to be a representative of Black people everywhere. He just probably wanted to get some money (in change for his fake $20) to get some more drugs? And there was no report that he had a mask on due to his Covid-19. He was just a bad citizen with bad luck.
