Episode 9 - George Floyd and Policing in America

In this week's episode, host Franklin Shelby reviews the case of George Floyd, who was recently killed by Officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department in Minnesota. We take a look at the video of the encounter and the likely next steps in the legal proceedings for the responding officers.

Next, Franklin takes a comprehensive review of policing in America, according to the hard data and trends that have remained consistent for years. We also take the media to task for lying and misrepresenting facts concerning America's police force and covering for violent riots in response to police killings (justified or unjustified).

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on iTunes and leave a rating/review. You can also find out more about the show and its host on twitter at FranklinFOTU and Fate of the Union, searching Fate of the Union on Medium, and at franklinfotu@gmail.com. 

Transcript

In this week’s episode of Fate of the Union we’ll be tackling issues surrounding policing in America and the popularized accusations of racism against blacks. This is in response to the recent police shooting of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Let’s first start with a primer that reviews the case of George Floyd. This from the Altanta Journal Constitution. On Monday night, an employee at a Minneapolis grocery store called police after Floyd allegedly tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. In widely circulated cellphone video of the subsequent arrest, Floyd, who was black, can be seen on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back while Officer Derek Chauvin presses him to the pavement with his knee on Floyd’s neck. The video shows Chauvin, who is white, holding Floyd down for minutes as Floyd complains he can’t breathe. The video ends with paramedics lifting a limp Floyd onto a stretcher and placing him in an ambulance. 

Four officers were fired Tuesday; on Wednesday, Mayor Jacob Frey called for Chauvin to be criminally charged. Frey made no mention of the other three officers, who were also at the scene. On Thursday morning, the U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday morning it has made the federal investigation into George Floyd's death a "top priority."

So, that’s where this currently stands: four officers were fired, and there appears to be an ongoing investigation into Floyd’s death by both state and federal authorities.

This case contains video, which is quite useful in analyzing the case against the responding officers. Many times in the past, videos of police shootings have been published but begin depicting the confrontation between officer and citizen after the physical altercation has started. Thus, the viewer does not see the moments leading up to the engagement between the two subjects. This can pose difficulties in determining what, if any, probable cause the officer had for engaging the citizen.

Here, however, the video is quite long being about eight minutes in length. Also, we can hear Floyd’s voice along with bystanders contemporaneously claiming that Floyd was having trouble breathing. In sum, the video in this case appears to accurately and completely depict the encounter between the Floyd and the officers. Moreover, we also know that the officers were responding to claims that Floyd was allegedly trying to pass of fraudulent bills inside the convenience store. This is relevant in that we know that the officers were not responding to the scene of a violent crime or engaging with someone who had been posing a danger to others. Instead, we seem to have a man who knowingly or not attempting to pay for goods with a fraudulent bill.

I think the available evidence not only justifies the firing of the four officers, but also necessitates an upcoming indictment of Chauvin. Perhaps there will be grand jury proceedings, like those upcoming in the Ahmaud Arbery case, in which the state will determine what charges are the most appropriate. Regardless, all signs indicate that the most likely outcome, for now, is that Chauvin stands trial for a murder charge related to the use of excessive force on George Floyd.

In the wake of the video circulating online, we saw an outcry of many sentiments popularized throughout the political left, and the mainstream media, but I repeat myself. These claims, as I’m sure you are aware, is that George Floyd’s death is symptomatic of a racist police force in America, and a racist criminal justice system more broadly speaking. But what lens should one look at in order to make a solid conclusion regarding these claims? What statistics or cases should be examined in making an assessment as to the truthfulness of these claims?

Let’s start most broadly in the statistics concerning annual deaths per year by police shootings. From there, we can break down the number of police shooting deaths annually by race. Finally, we can examine the number of deaths in the black community resulting from police shootings in a variety of circumstances. From there, we can better ascertain whether the officers in these cases were justified in using deadly force against these black suspects.

The Washington Post has a comprehensive and very user-friendly database that compiles the cases of police shootings in America each year. In 2015, The Washington Post began to log every fatal shooting by an on-duty police officer in the United States.

Within the database, the Post allows users to break down the number of shootings by which state they occurred in, whether the suspect was armed and if so what weapon he or she had on them, whether the suspect was fleeing a crime scene, and importantly for this discussion what race the suspect was. Here, let’s examine the numbers from 2019 since that is obviously the most recent year in which we have a full 12 months of data. Doing so will also allow us to account for any developments in these cases since they occurred.

The Post reports that 1,014 people were shot by on-duty police officers during 2019. As context, it notes “Despite the unpredictable events that lead to fatal shootings, police nationwide have shot and killed almost the same number of people annually — nearly 1,000 — since The Post began its project.” It asserts, correctly I think, that “Probability theory may offer an explanation. It holds that the quantity of rare events in huge populations tends to remain stable absent major societal changes, such as a fundamental shift in police culture or extreme restrictions on gun ownership.

For our purposes let’s first get a breakdown of total police shootings on black suspects for 2019 versus white suspects. Since the broad based theories grounded in the illusory concepts of institutional racism necessarily denotes that the presence of black suspects in these statistics wrongly outnumbers white suspects. 

Generally speaking, although half of the people shot and killed by police are white, black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. This of course does not account for why any given suspect was in a deadly confrontation with the police, but only notes that the deadly confrontation occurred without commentary on what the suspect or officer were doing at the time.

In 2019, 235 blacks were shot by the police. In contrast, 370 whites were shot by police. It must absolutely be stressed that, again, these numbers simply state the number of deaths at the hands of police by race of the suspect. These numbers do not account for conduct of either suspect or officer, nor do they assess determinations of probable cause of criminality by any of the officers involved. Nevertheless, we see that according to representation of each race within the total US population, blacks are overrepresented in these statistics 

However, let’s take a closer look at the 235 deaths in the black community. Within the database, the Post also allows you to further breakdown the numbers to account for the suspect being armed at the time of the deadly encounter with the police. Here, out of the 235 black suspects, 152 of them were armed with a gun; 31 were armed with a knife; 18 were “armed” with a vehicle, meaning they were operating a vehicle in a manner capable of striking and harming others; 5 suspects had a “toy weapon”. This is basically the Tamir Rice case. The individual was in possession of a fake gun, and each case presented its own facts on whether the fake gun realistically appeared to be a genuine weapon and whether it was being used as a decoy to appear as a legitimate weapon as well.

Twelve blacks were shot and killed by police while armed with “other” weapons. A review of the cases included in this category shows that these cases involved suspects handling weapons such as tasers, knives or blades, a blunt object, or any combination of these objects. Eight suspects are listed as “unknown” regarding their possession of a weapon. Since this was unknown at the time of the shooting, and eight instances are not statistically relevant, we will put these aside for the purposes of this exercise.

Finally, we see that a total of nine unarmed blacks were shot and killed by police in 2019. Not 900, or nine thousand. Nine unarmed black people were shot and killed by police over the course of the 365 days in 2019. For further context, there are currently almost 45 million blacks in the U.S., according to the US census website.

This category is relevant because on the off chance one is ever met with a degree of specificity from the institutional racism crowd regarding police shootings, many times there is an emphasis placed on unarmed blacks in particular.

Judging from the numbers, the police shootings of unarmed black people in America for the 2019 calendar year accounted for the deaths of approximately 0.00002% of the black population in the country at large.

The difference of opinion on the subject of blacks killed by police, or more specifically unarmed blacks killed by police, by those on the black lives matter side of the debate and on the opposing side can be summed up by a select few questions. For example, at what point do the number of instances of police shootings of black suspects turn from simply a certain number of events into a nationwide crisis facing the black community? I would submit that the two one hundred thousandths of a percentage of blacks killed by police while unarmed falls drastically short of even a charitable interpretation of what would pose a nationwide threat to the black community. Moreover, a supposedly deadly threat to a population that falls well short of killing one percent of that population, when that population totals some 45 million people across the country, is not a nationwide issue at all.

Also in the wake of the George Floyd shooting were the violent uprisings in Minneapolis in protest of the shooting. While many of the individuals were peacefully protesting, several videos have surfaced showing swaths of blacks in Minneapolis looting stores, especially a Target store. There was also significant damage to other stores and cop cars in the area. Many public figures on the political left were quick to justify these actions, and at most characterize the looting as personally disagreeable but not inexcusable. Officers eventually showed up in riot gear, and started firing tear gas and flash grenades as protesters hurled rocks, water bottles and anything they could get their hands on towards the officers.

Thankfully, during a press conference on Thursday, Minneapolis Council Vice President Andrea Jenkins called for calm and peace and admonished rioters for hurting the “very communities that you say that you are standing up for.”

Jenkins continued, “Today is a sad day for Minneapolis, it’s a sad day for America, it’s a sad day for the world . . .” I want to remind all the people that are in the streets that are protesting: you have every absolute right to be angry, to be upset, to be mad, to express your anger."

“However, you have no right to perpetrate violence and harm on the very communities that you say that you are standing up for. We need peace and calm in our streets, and I am begging you for that calm.”

Frankly, the looting does nothing but distract much of the country from what is otherwise a concrete example of police misconduct with what appears to be a swath of supporting evidence to boot. Further, it shows that even in a case that has produced widespread agreement in the misconduct of the officers, there are still members of the black community who will take advantage of the situation to rob and destroy local businesses.

The riots in Minneapolis in response to what has been established to be a freak occurrence, yet one that has bipartisan support in the view that the officers were breaking the law, is reminiscent of a portion of a debate that Ben Shapiro took part in several years back. I’m sure many of you have heard it but here is the relevant portion. 

[video]

Just as the Baltimore riots were unjustified in light of the black members of the local government and police department, so too here are the Minneapolis riots unjustified in response to this isolated incident that is, as far as the actions to date, being dealt with appropriately by those in power at both the state and federal level.

 [Conclusion]