Category: United States

The best book on the failure of liberal urban policy is Fred Siegel’s The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities. Siegel devotes much analysis to the “riot ideology” whereby organized violence (or the threat thereof) is used to intimidate officials into doing the bidding of “community leaders.”

What we are witnessing in the trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin is how the “riot ideology” impacts law enforcement. Because George Floyd was black, and because Officer Chauvin is white, there is no presumption of innocence. Chauvin’s guilt is assumed as a fact, and if he is not convicted, the verdict will be regarded as an injustice — “systemic racism” — as a pretext for a riot, much the same way the verdict in the Rodney King case inspired the Los Angeles riot of 1992.

From the standpoint of law enforcement, this is a lose-lose proposition. Either officers are effectively prohibited from enforcing the law — because cops face legal jeopardy if they attempt to apprehend a suspect who resists arrest — or else the city is destroyed by violence. This is “democracy” as mob rule, where the criminal element holds the entire community hostage with the assistance of “civil rights” activists (e.g., Ben Crump) and the liberal media. The narrative of racial “injustice” requires that certain inconvenient facts be made to disappear.

It should be obvious, for example, that Officer Chauvin and other members of the Minneapolis police were not just randomly killing black people to advance some “white supremacist” ideology. When cops were called to the Cup Foods store last May to deal with a counterfeiting case, they did not murder every black person present at the store. George Floyd was in the company of two black accomplices, Morries Lester Hall and Shawanda Renee Hill, both of whom had criminal records, but neither of whom was harmed by the police. How can “systemic racism” explain this?

Body camera footage from Officer Thomas Lane, one of the first two cops to arrive on the scene, shows George Floyd’s erratic behavior:

 

Floyd’s movement inside the SUV caused Lane to fear he might be reaching for a handgun, so he ordered Floyd at gunpoint to put both hands on the wheel, while he radioed for backup. Lane then told Floyd to put his hands on top of his head and step out of the vehicle (1:02 in the video). It took about 30 seconds to get Floyd to exit the vehicle, then another 30 seconds to get him handcuffed. After that, Lane leaves Floyd to his partner, Officer Alexander Keung, while Lane deals with Hall and Hill. Things take a turn for the worse when Lane and Keung try to put Floyd in the back of their squad car:

Lane: What, are you on something right now?
Floyd: No, nothing.
Kueng: Because you are acting a little erratic.
Lane: [leading Floyd to the car] Let’s go. Let’s go.
Floyd: I’m scared, man.
Lane: Let’s go.
Kueng: You got foam around your mouth, too?
Floyd: Yes, I was just hooping earlier.

We are told that “hooping” is slang for “putting drugs in the anus, resulting in a quick and intense high.” Is that how George Floyd got a dose of fentanyl that was three times the lethal level?

Floyd refused to sit in the squad car, saying he was “claustrophobic” and his resistance — Floyd was 6-foot-4 and 220 pounds — made it impossible. It was at Floyd’s request that the officers put him on the ground instead, but not before he had said seven times “I can’t breathe.”

 

The activist narrative insists these facts be ignored. They call it “victim blaming” when critics point to Floyd’s behavior, and assert, “Derek Chauvin is on trial, not George Floyd.” But you see that (a) there never would have been a trial if Floyd had simply gotten in the back of the squad car, (b) Floyd’s erratic behavior is evidence of the severity of his fentanyl overdose, and (c) how are cops supposed to deal with a drug-crazed giant who refuses to cooperate with his arrest?

Do we or don’t we want to enforce the law? That is the real question, and what sort of answer do we get if this question is reduced to the eight-minute video of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck?

Too little consideration is being given to the larger social consequences of permitting the Black Lives Matter narrative to prevail, not just in this specific case, but in the general matter of how placing unreasonable limits on law enforcement will allow crime to proliferate. What happens if “social justice” makes it impossible for cops to do their jobs? Well, in Minnesota, the number of handgun permits increased last year to 96,554, up from 51,404 in 2019 — a one-year increase of 88%.

If cops can’t protect you — and Black Lives Matter is about destroying law-enforcement in America — you’ll have to protect yourself.

Liberal are not likely to be happy with the result.

 

Most people seem to believe that Derek Chauvin is going to be found guilty, simply because of the emotional content of the testimony, and I suppose they’re right. Today, the prosecution called George Floyd’s girlfriend as a witness, and she boo-hooed during most of her testimony, which was characterized in the media as being about her and her boyfriend’s “struggle with addiction.” Excuse me if my eyes just rolled out of my head, but where was all this sympathy for drug users back when I was a teenage dope fiend? If I had gotten myself killed by cops while being arrested back in the day, I’m pretty sure nobody would have rioted on my behalf. Just another dead teenage dopehead — so what?

The emotional components of this trial, with George Floyd turned into a martyr for “social justice,” and Derek Chauvin treated as a symbol of “systemic racism,” may well indeed suffice to produce a guilty verdict, but on the other hand, maybe facts still matter. And the fact is that George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose, with three times the lethal level of fentanyl in his system. It was obvious to Chauvin and the other cops on the scene that Floyd was under the influence of something, but they had no way of knowing that he had swallowed enough fentanyl to kill himself. However much emotion is generated by the video of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck, that’s not what killed him.

But let’s talk about something else that’s quite relevant to this case, namely, what was George Floyd doing at that store?

You can click here to read a detailed timeline of events. The fact is that George Floyd arrived at that store in the company of two career criminals, Morries Lester Hall and Shawanda Renee Hill. Early media accounts of Floyd’s death described Hill as Floyd’s girlfriend, even though he had another girlfriend, Courteney Ross, who was the one who testified at the trial today. Both Hill and Hall had records:

Morries Lester Hall (42) would flee Minneapolis two days after the incident and hitchhike to Houston, Texas, where he was originally from. He had outstanding warrants for his arrest in Minnesota. He had a previous arrest record and convictions in Minnesota for first-degree felony assault, burglary, aggravated robbery, and multiple domestic assault charges between 2012 and 2018. He would be detained in Houston and interrogated by Minneapolis investigators there pending extradition. He also had a criminal history in Texas. He was wanted for being a felon in possession of a firearm. . . .
Shawanda Renee Hill (45) . . . had a previous arrest record and convictions for check forgery, felony theft, disorderly conduct, solicitation for prostitution, and stalking and domestic abuse between 1997 and 2016.

Courteney Ross testified that she believed Hall and Hill were supplying Floyd with drugs. They also had evidently involved him in attempting to pass counterfeit currency, which was why the cops were there.

This wasn’t made clear in the media accounts of the events leading up to Floyd’s death. What happened was that Floyd and Hall went into the store while Hill waited outside in the SUV Floyd was driving. Floyd bought a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 while Hall attempted to buy some electronic equipment with more counterfeit $20s. The clerk who dealt with Hall spotted the counterfeit and refused the purchase. Then the store manager, realizing Floyd had entered the store with Hall, asked the clerk at the tobacco counter to check the $20 Floyd had given him, and learned that it was also counterfeit.

Then two store employees, seeing Floyd still outside leaning on the hood of the SUV, go out to confront him, demanding he return the cigarettes and the change he’d gotten. Floyd refuses. The two employees go back inside the store, then return with a third employee. Again, Floyd refuses to return the cigarettes and the change. One of the employees takes down the tag number of the SUV, and then they go back inside the store. It’s now about 8 p.m., roughly 15 minutes after Floyd first entered the store. At 8:01, one of the employees calls 911:

Operator: 911 what’s the address of the emergency?
Caller: This is ah 3759 Chicago AV.
Operator: How can I help you?
Caller: Um someone comes our store and give us fake bills and we realize it before he left the store, and we ran back outside, they was sitting on their car. We tell them to give us their phone, put their (inaudible) thing back and everything and he was also drunk and everything and return to give us our cigarettes back and so he can, so he can go home but he doesn’t want to do that, and he’s sitting on his car cause he is awfully drunk and he’s not in control of himself.
Operator: Okay, what type of vehicle does he have?
Caller: And…. um he’s got a vehicle that is ah…ah he got a vehicle that is ah…one second let me see if I can see the license. The driver license is BRJ026.
Operator: Okay, what color is it?
Caller: It’s a blue color. It’s a blue van.
Operator: Blue van?
Caller: Yes, van.
Operator: Alright blue van, gotcha. Is it out front or is it on 38th ST?
Caller: Ah it’s on 38th ST.
Operator: On 38th ST. So, this guy gave a counterfeit bill, has your cigarettes, and he’s under the influence of something?
Caller: Something like that, yes. He is not acting right.

You see that the store employee mentioned Floyd’s intoxication — he was “not in control of himself . . . not acting right.” As it turned out, he had taken fake Percocet tablets that were actually a mixture of fentanyl and methamphetamine. This was the garbage dope Hall was apparently dealing, and also, it seems, running a counterfeit cash operation.

Possession of counterfeit currency is a federal crime that can get you up to 15 years in prison. A lot of people, upon hearing that the cops were called on Floyd because of a fake $20 were like, “They killed him for $20,” but several other fake $20s were found in the SUV, and there hasn’t been much reporting on the investigation of that crime, but this incident might have been the tip of an iceberg of a much larger conspiracy. Somebody in Minneapolis was circulating counterfeit currency, and the role of Morries Hall in this crime cannot be ignored.

Of course, the underlying crime — the reason the cops were there — is being ignored by the media, who are promoting the narrative that the real crime was Derek Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck, despite the evidence from the toxicology report that Floyd was already dying of an overdose (and complaining “I can’t breathe”) before the cops put him on the ground. The reason they put him on the ground was because he refused to get in back of the squad car, and they decided to call for EMS because he appeared to be in a state of “excited delirium” which we now know was due to his drug overdose. But the emotional nature of the testimony at the trial is intended to cancel out these known facts, to make the jurors convict Chauvin of murder even though it was the fentanyl that killed Floyd who was, by the way, a criminal:

Between 1997 and 2005, he was convicted of eight crimes. He served four years in prison after accepting a plea bargain for a 2007 aggravated robbery in a home invasion.

That’s nine crimes total, that we know of, before he tried to pass counterfeit currency that day and — oh, by the way, another crime — possession of the illegal narcotics that killed him.

Please explain to me how dopehead criminals became secular saints in our culture. When did this happen? Because as I say, when I was a teenage dopehead, nobody treated me like a saint, and if I had died of an overdose with a cop’s knee on my neck, no one would have rioted.

Maybe I was being oppressed, but was too stoned to know it. Also, I’m pretty sure I saw Excited Delirium open for Cheap Trick in 1979.