(This post may contain disputed claims. We make no assertions as to the validity of the information presented by our Opinion Columnist. We are an opinion blog, not a traditional news outlet, and this post should be treated as such. Enjoy.)We now have the video of the beginning of the George Floyd arrest, and it turns out this is a far more complicated case than the leftist media claimed. You don’t want to miss this.
The beginning of the arrest of George Floyd is every cop’s nightmare. A man who is large in stature starts acting erratic and resists arrest. He acts so “squirrely” in the very beginning, refusing to show his hands and moving around while in the driver’s seat of a car, the first two cops on the scene rightly draw their weapons.
Police officers do not mess around with where your hands are when they confront a high-risk suspect. Horror stories of agitated suspects pulling out a weapon happen more than most civilians know. If a cop is going to be shot, it happens in those first few seconds after they make their initial contact with a suspect.
The body cameras worn by officers Alex Kueng and Thomas Lane, the first two cops on the scene, show Floyd agitated and uncooperative from the first moment that officers arrive in response to a call from a business owner who accused Floyd of trying to pass off counterfeit bills.
Floyd is in his car when law enforcement first shows up. One of the officers draws his weapon because Floyd is initially hesitant to show his hands.
Once Floyd places his hands on his head, the gun is holstered. After much coaxing, he is eventually removed from his car and taken over to the police cruiser.
Floyd appears to have trouble walking on his way over to the police car. He shouts “ow” and seems to be in pain even though he is only being grabbed by the arm. At this point, seasoned police officers say he is acting like he is on something, and he is paranoid. He is refusing to take their direction.
It is also where we first hear Floyd say: “I can’t breathe.” He is also making other complaints while he is just walking over to the squad car.
Once at the police vehicle, he repeatedly refuses to get inside, saying that he’s “claustrophobic,” though he’d just been sitting in his own car without any apparent difficulty and was extremely reluctant to get out of his own vehicle.
At one point, as officers try to convince him to get in the car, Floyd says he’d rather lay on the ground.
He also says several times that he’s “going to die” and again that he can’t breathe — all before he was on the ground. He ends up on the ground because he either falls or pushes himself out of the other side of the police cruiser as officers struggle to get him inside.
Veteran police officers say this is a high-risk suspect who continues to resist arrest. From that point, the scene unfolds as we all saw on the initial video two months ago.
Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire reports: “While none of this conclusively exonerates the police officers of any and all wrongdoing, but it does establish a few facts that might mitigate their culpability.”
1. George Floyd was not fully cooperative and clearly intoxicated.
2. The officers were calm and reasonable for most of the interaction.
3. George Floyd claimed that he couldn’t breathe and was going to die well before he had a knee on his neck.
4. The officers never did or said a single thing that any reasonable person could construe as racist.
We would add the officers up until that point also proceeded just as most veteran cops would do in similar circumstances. However, no police officers whom we have spoken to advocate for the knee to the neck stance that happened just moments later.
Cops do say this new footage does help those officers for several reasons.
Floyd said he was too claustrophobic to get in the police car and that he might die and couldn’t breathe, even though he’d just been sitting in a car. He was screaming out in pain even though the officers at that point weren’t doing anything that could have caused him physical harm.
We should note that he also said his mom just died even though she’d been dead for two years. The officers wouldn’t have known that latter detail, but the point is that cops hear nonsense like this from suspects all day, every day.
When Floyd was on the ground saying he was going to die, it was no different from what he was saying while he was standing or what he was saying in the car. These facts may not be exculpatory, but they certainly are relevant.
“Also, anyone following the story has known for some time that, according to the medical examiner’s report, Floyd was not strangled to death and did not die from asphyxiation as the media had so confidently declared in the immediate aftermath,” Daily Wire adds.
It was found that Floyd — who had a pre-existing heart condition and three illicit drugs in his system, including fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than morphine and known to cause respiratory distress — died of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restrain, and neck compression.”
Considering this incident lead to the riots and the “defund the police” movement, it would have been more prudent for the leftist media to add a caution to their reporting. As we suspected, there was much more to this arrest than what transpired in the initial videos taken by bystanders.
George Floyd is to be pitied. However, he was a guy on drugs who resisted arrest. Was his death partly his fault for taking the drugs knowing he had a heart issue? The medical examiner says so. We realize that’s not a very politically correct thing to say, but we also have a duty to civil rights icons like Martin Luther King, Jr.
George Floyd was no MLK. The tragedy is that he has been canonized as a saint by the leftwing media who are doing the bidding of Black Lives Matters.
