Public Service Announcement: Witness & Testify

Chapter 15 from Trauma Sponges, excerpted/condensed.

In these gloomy days ahead of T2: the Orange Menace, and, worse, the throbbing, unrestrained, ugly glee so many (white) folks are displaying in reclaiming ‘their’ white-washed, racist, ignorant country, I want to share the deepest chapter from TRAUMA SPONGES, about my response to the MPD killing of George Floyd. If states are prohibiting the discussion of slavery for fear of ‘harming’ white minds, & #FDT seems likely to pardon the J6 treasonists, I despair for any true learning from this horror. We must stand tall & speak up vs. the war on fact & truth. (Please share if you want.)

‘THE ASSASSINATION OF GEORGE FLOYD BY THE COWARD DEREK CHAUVIN’

TRUE HORROR STORY: IF DEREK CHAUVIN HAD “MERELY” SHOT GEORGE Floyd, none of this would have happened. None of the subsequent upheaval, not the fumbling gestures at racial justice, no flailing attempts at change and inclusion. The four police officers involved likely would still be employed. Had Chauvin shot Mr. Floyd, it would have been over too fast for witnesses to record it. The usual process would have played out, providing the officers legal cover. The judicial system affords the police extreme discretion and defers to their “expert” perspective. Afraid for my life has been the standard defense in multiple extralegal killings by police. Even in this case, despite the officers’ own footage of a crowd calling out for them to help the man in distress beneath their knees, their defense continued to throw that canard at the jury. For hundreds of dead citizens, the actions of the police have been sanctioned as lawful and correct within the system. No matter what the officers do, the cover-all remains: “It was a split-second decision in a chaotic and dangerous situation, where the officer had to make profound choices while under duress and fear for his life.”

Over and over: The officer was afraid for his life. So he shot the unarmed man in the back. So he shot the man running away from him. So he shot the handcuffed man. So he shot the child. There was a threat, in his expert opinion. So he shot what scared him.

Had Chauvin, or one of the two rookie officers, pulled his gun during the scuffle and fired, claiming afterward that Mr. Floyd was “reaching for my gun,” there might have been protests, but the incident would have transpired so quickly, the standard rhetoric would have sufficed: a split-second decision in a heated struggle. The world would not have seen the murder play out minute by agonizing, immoral minute. The police department’s version would have followed the usual narrative: the officers’ bodycams would show a brief, hectic struggle punctuated with fatal gunshots—had they even released the footage. And that would be it. The notion that Mr. Floyd was senselessly murdered by the police would not have gained traction in mainstream (meaning white) America.

Black people would know, of course.

In the immediate days after Mr. Floyd was killed, then up to and through the trial, Chauvin’s defenders and defense deployed those standard tropes. However, with bodyweight rather than bullet, and slow death rather than immediate, and the videos seen widely, the “split second” decision protected by their underqualified immunity fell apart. Impunity fits better than immunity. Mind you, it only fell apart after the city erupted in flames and mayhem. We (the white we) felt impelled to action only when our comfort was threatened, when our social ramparts were breached. Then we woke up. Briefly.

No matter how egregious the footage in previous cases, that same set of phrases has exonerated umpteen police officers—if the cases even made it past the investigation stage. White America is conditioned to accept that script and shrug. He shouldn’t have resisted.

Let us be clear: The police killed a man, slowly, in front of a crowd of witnesses who did all they could to stop the officers from doing what they were doing—while never physically interfering with them.

The crowd was small, very contained. They beseeched the officers to get off Mr. Floyd, to listen to his cries, to look at him beneath their knees. Neither Officer Chauvin, the senior man, nor Officer Thao, another veteran officer who was nominally maintaining crowd “control,” checked what the bystanders were yelling about. They did not allow any facts to inform their behavior. The fatal process continued without purpose or reason. The officers’ defense suggested that the noise of the crowd caused the officers to lose focus. Blaming the people, who became vocal only after the officers were ignoring Mr. Floyd’s distress and cries for help, is pretty damn DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) of them.

During Chauvin’s state trial, the defense tried to get Firefighter Genevieve Hansen to say that having a loud crowd at a fire scene would impede her ability to do her job. She fell into his trap, insisting that she would ignore all and any distraction, that she would tune out the crowd to do her job. It was a trap either way: blame the crowd for distracting the officers, or back up the officers who ignored the crowd in executing their suspect.

The defense did not ask me this question, unfortunately. Because after twenty- plus years, with fifteen as a supervisor, I could have clarified several points for the defense (well, for the jury).

People yelling is not in and of itself either distracting or threatening to me. I have been on many chaotic scenes; I have worked in agitated crowds; I have been yelled at. … If I am “spraying water on a house” as the defense suggested to Firefighter Hansen, and a group of people start yelling at me, I can listen to them and spray water. But, if people are shouting that I am spraying the wrong house, that the fire is next door, and I do not consider or check their claims, I am doing my job poorly—and failing to serve the public. That analogy works better here.

What evidence did the police have that trumped what the bystanders were saying? Did they know better than the witnesses that Mr. Floyd was not in peril? How? They did not even check his condition.

The police officers did not have any clear plan, no stated goal. It really is as simple as this: the officers ignored Mr. Floyd’s cries and pleas; they held him down in a dangerous fashion, waiting for an ambulance to arrive. The junior officers followed Chauvin’s lead. They did not respond to Mr. Floyd’s cries of distress. They did not follow their own protocols about positioning a person to avoid the fatal dynamic of prone restraint and positional asphyxia. They did not indicate to Dispatch why they requested EMS. They did not address his deteriorating condition (which was caused by their actions).

It is obscenely, maddeningly simple. They knelt on a man until he died.

Past Is Prologue

If the crowd had succeeded in getting the officers to listen to them and to stop killing Mr. Floyd, there would also be no investigation of the police officers’ actions, no discussion of all the things they did prior to Mr. Floyd’s death. Nor would a global focus on racial in/justice and policing have been ignited. Had I been walking by off duty and jumped in, the result would have been the same: Mr. Floyd would likely be alive. I would have been arrested and faced departmental discipline for “interfering with police business” and “assaulting an officer.”

But nothing whatsoever would have been done about the police doing what the police do. Stop: I cannot even write this. They killed the man, the city burned, and what? To this day, there is no apparent review or investigation of the police actions that led to Mr. Floyd’s killing, no apparent training to distinguish between someone “resisting” and someone panicking. No review of the excessive force they deployed rather than patience. Nothing has changed.

Had Ms. Frazier’s video not gone public, the official line on the killing of Mr. Floyd would still be that “a man experienced a medical emergency while being detained. Police called for EMS. The man died at an area hospital.”

I stress this: there would have been no investigation, no arrests, no trial. Another dead Black man. This is the standard procedure. Without the video and the ensuing uproar, the usual plot points would have been struck: neutered and victim-blaming statement by the police, sol emn This was a tragic, unavoidable situation by the mayor, little pressure on the police to investigate themselves, no outside pressure. Everyone played their role: Back the badge; Blue Lives Matter; You don’t know what they were facing, all that rot.

As I revised this chapter in February 2022, while waiting to testify in the federal trial of these officers, the MPD killed another Black man, Amir Locke, while serving a warrant for St. Paul Police, one that was not requested to be a no-knock operation but which MPD insisted on. The first, second, and third official statements by the police chief and mayor were riddled with misleading, dissembling inaccuracies.

How often have we been assured that the video doesn’t tell the whole story? That you cannot know what was actually happening when seeing footage of police killing civilians? And how often does the footage make it clear to reasonable people that it was an avoidable killing? That the police escalated and increased the violence at a scene? The apologists and relativists tried that with Mr. Floyd’s killing: The police bodycam videos will show you what that kid’s phone missed.

Without Ms. Frazier’s video, Genevieve Hansen, the off-duty fire fighter, would have been harassed by the police for being intrusive, whiny, not-knowing-to-keep-her-mouth-shut, a troublemaker. Many firefighters would have taken the same approach toward her, out of a reflexive or deliberate fidelity to the police. I know this because, in the first few days, that was their attitude, toward Firefighter Hansen, and toward me, for speaking out. Except, we did know. We were there.

We saw.

No one in power initially felt any reason to call this a crime. Not the police chief, not the city leaders. Not until the streets filled. Not until the furies erupted, smoke burning eyes and throats. Only after the standard ploys failed and the crowds got loud, angry, and destructive, did the city take action. Should people have politely stayed home and waited for justice? Yeah, right.

Their own body cameras, the multiple security cameras, the city’s street footage, and FFR Hansen’s phone video all confirmed what Ms. Frazier’s video captured: the unthinkable, slow killing of a man crying for help. There was no mystery here, only our societal inability to believe these things happen, and to call them what they are—despite their oc curring again and again. Without the uproar and tumult that arose in response to Ms. Frazier’s documentation of the killing, the other hard- copy videos would have remained unexamined—or hidden from the public. The witnesses on the street, hell, even the paramedics—and me: no one in authority, with the power to do anything, would have asked for our testimony. (This was the dilemma I alluded to in chapter 14, “Thinnest of Margins”: who exactly could I go to with my complaint about police malfeasance? All I would do is put a target on my back.)

I ask you, what should the next crowd do, witnessing the next imminent police killing of a Black man? Trust that the officers learned a lesson from Mr. Floyd’s death? That they know what they’re doing? Wait for them to de-escalate? Write a letter to the editor? If everyone goes to jail but the next George Floyd lives to see another day, isn’t that a fair exchange? What would you have the citizens do?

… There was a similar situation in early May 2020 when a Chauvin-led crew of officers, including both Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng , responded to a domestic disturbance call and assaulted a man. He wasn’t involved in a crime, wasn’t suspicious, wasn’t connected to the 911 call. He walked out of the building and the officers “detained” and “subdued” him. He was simply a resident of the building. … He objected to being assaulted, and the officers used physical force on him, and his brother, both of whom were arrested for ‘resisting’ and interfering with police.

Hours later, both men were released and the charges dropped. The kicker was, none of it merited any follow-up by the police: the officers simply grabbed the first Black man they saw, roughed him up, ignored his rightful confusion and distress. The MPD also did not apologize or address the issue with the wronged citizens—not the individual officers and not the department. Most important, there was nothing in the official police log about this abysmal failure to correctly be peace officers.

Had the MPD taken that botched call seriously, there might have been corrective action or a glimmer of self-reflection by training officer Chauvin in the next few weeks. Someone in the police chain of command might have instructed all officers (or perhaps just those under Chauvin’s watch) that bodily swarming random, nonaggressive citizens is not good policing. And that might have had ripple effects in how officers deal with the public, how they accost people, how they pay attention, on subsequent interactions. Including the “possible forgery” call for an “intoxicated individual” on May 25, 2020.

But maybe not. The issue—systemic and structural— is that they do not have to consider what they do.

Do I need to insert race here? Black male victim and companions; white police officers. I will believe race does not matter when I see Black men treated like white men—and vice versa.

This is where the system, the culture of the Police Department, is dangerous for everyone. Because the police suffer, too. Unintentionally killing the people you are supposed to help is profoundly damaging. Can Black people ever be victims? Presumed criminality is the American default. Rookie Officer Thomas Lane started an investigation of a bogus twenty-dollar bill by sticking his gun in Mr. Floyd’s face.

It is strange, to say the least, to have landed in a worldwide incident. … Civilians who learn of my connection ask about it as if the world had ripped apart from the moment it happened. As if there were riots already when Engine 17 arrived. Or that everyone recognized how horrendous the killing was—and took to the streets immediately.

I want you to keep in mind that none of us (the responders: the medics and my crew) knew what was happening as it happened. The scene was surreal, at the time and on reflection. The odd thing for me was how unlike this scene was from the previous police killings I’d been on. There wasn’t a swarm of additional officers, no backup squads blocking the area, no scene tape up, none of the hectic rapid movements of securing— everything: evidence, the perimeter, witnesses, suspects. Not the pressing arrival of each successive level of supervisor and brass.

None of that.

Just the mystery of where our patient was.

The police were nonchalant; their actions seemed almost mundane. The two officers standing at one corner seemed confused about our arrival, definitely not concerned. The first officer (Tou Thao) can be heard on the body cameras saying, “Someone call for Fire?” And when I got off the rig, he asked, “What are you guys here for?”

I retorted, “They said they needed EMS Code 3 for something,” as I moved past him, toward the store.

“Just EMS, though. Just needed to transport someone high,” he said, without clarifying, giving no sense of gravity. Another officer was nearby. He did not display urgency either. Neither officer told us the ambulance had already left, with an unresponsive patient in critical condition. … The crowd was sparse, pacing the sidewalk, upset, on their phones and yelling at the officers: “Y’all are punks.” “You killed that man.” “Fuck the cops. Y’all are killers.”

But I had nothing to go on: no patient, no information from police. I radioed Dispatch for an update. I still didn’t know the medics had come and gone. Genevieve Hansen popped up as I was scanning the inside of Cup Foods. She was beside herself. Is he all right? I couldn’t see a pulse. I tried to help. The cops wouldn’t let me. I think he’s dead. I think they killed him!

I had no idea what she was talking about, only that she was distraught. Nothing made sense. I was confused and failing to build an understanding from the scene. Again, I had no patient. I didn’t know the ambulance had been called ten minutes before us. Farther into the store, I encountered an MPD officer (J. A. Kueng) speaking to the employees. He told me the ambulance had relocated because of the crowd but gave no indication of the patient’s grave condition. Nothing at all. As he spoke to me, his radio and mine reported from our separate Dispatches that the medics needed us Code 3 at Thirty-sixth and Park Avenue.

We left the store, climbed on the rig, and drove to where the medics had pulled over. Only at that point, from our rig computer, did we glean it was a full arrest. But no other info was given.

Two minutes later, my junior partner and I entered the ambulance, and I gasped. Holy fuck.

Nothing had prepared me for an unresponsive man, intubated, with the LUCAS compression device already in use, the two medics working furiously to get the first IV line established, the stunned officer (Lane) trying to ventilate the patient. This man is fucking dead, I thought as I took over ventilation and attached the O₂ valve. I realized the crowd I had walked through had been yelling, accurately, about a man dying in police custody— or being killed. Their anguish and anger, Genevieve’s disconsolate fury: it clicked.

I’ve been on contentious scenes before. Just because people say someone isn’t breathing doesn’t make it true. In this case, the “untrained” citizen bystanders had the truth, the accurate description—but I hadn’t known that yet. Without a patient, or a victim, we had nothing to go on. The police did not offer us anything. Rewatching the bodycam footage, I am struck by how oblivious all of the officers were to Mr. Floyd’s actual condition (dead). Even Officer Lane in the ambulance, who was new and likely unclear about the absence of magic in reviving the dead. None of them appeared to recognize that they had killed a man.

As we assisted the paramedics trying to revive Mr. Floyd, the implications of the call surged through me. I radioed back to our rig for my other two crew members, Firefighter Steve M. and FMO Tracy T., to return to check on and protect FFR Hansen at the scene. She had been sputtering with anguish and anger, near hysterical, when we spoke inside Cup Foods. I’d had nothing to contextualize what she was saying—same with that small crowd of bystanders I walked through at the outset. They were unified in their distress, their clarity that the police had killed a man before their eyes. Until I saw Mr. Floyd, I had no idea. Even once I saw him, the entire time we worked him, I had no clue what had actually happened.

My concern for FFR Hansen was utterly unrelated to the crowd. Contrary to the police narrative, it was not a dangerous or threatening scene. I was worried that she would be harassed and bullied by the police. I wanted my crew to give her support, to shelter and protect her: if only by their presence, they might deter rogue police intimidation. The lockdown or clampdown or sweep: whatever to call it when police swarm a bad scene of their making. Her distress, now that I had some context, was striking. I wanted familiar faces to be there for her and to witness what might happen next.

Firefighter Hall and I left the STAB room stunned. She was so new and it was all unfamiliar. But I was clear that we’d been on a bad police killing. The glaring contrast between previous death-by-police calls and the eerie nonchalance of the officers on scene when we arrived at Cup Foods has haunted me. [I wrote about some of these in previous chapters.] They had knelt on Mr. Floyd’s lifeless, unresponsive body until the medics lifted him into the ambulance, and none of the officers appeared to recognize anything was amiss. The crowd was anguished. The officers were oblivious. It was like no police scene I’d ever encountered.

The rig picked us up, and we had a quick debriefing. Tracy and Steve had learned nothing from the scene. They had spoken to Genevieve Hansen and encouraged her to come directly to the station, if only for support. None of us, and none of the medics, knew the truth yet. Not what really happened.

I informed my deputy chief of the death-in-custody as well as that FFR Hansen was an off- duty witness. I stated I was worried for Genevieve: the horror she’d witnessed and the potential threat from bullying officers. We returned to our station, and I wrote an official notification through our chain of command to inform the fire chief. I wrote my incident report, choosing my words as deliberately and accurately as I could. I wanted to put words to paper officially, to protect all the witnesses, to prevent another cruel whitewashing. People at work tease me for my verbosity and my vocabulary, but I wrote that report with fierce clarity: I wanted to capture contemporaneous details, accurately convey what I saw and heard— without editorializing— and ensure there was a counter- narrative to the likely police statements about an unruly and aggressive crowd. I did not expect to see my report linked on the New York Times site a few days later (I’m glad I used proper punctuation) and I stand by every word of it. I emailed the paramedics’ supervisors to share my experience working with them, commending them for their hard, good efforts.

I’m trying to express to readers who think they know what happened that in those first hours none of us knew clearly what had happened nor what was about to explode. I anticipated the city’s likely response, how the wheels would turn. I still did not know the actual details. I had heard the scattered cries and shouting of the bystanders and witnesses as we searched for our patient. I had seen the dead man, whom we had worked zealously but futilely. I had a nagging irritation at the dismissive disconnect between the police officers on scene, the bystanders’ anguish, and Mr. Floyd, but I had no idea how egregious the killing had been. How could I?

Did I anticipate the upheaval that was brewing? Did it direct my actions in that first hour or so? No. I was genuinely trying to prevent the usual dishonest game. No one had seen any of the videos from the scene yet. I had no idea who George Floyd was, but I knew he deserved better than what he got, and if no one spoke out, his death would be another “accident.”

Firefighter Hansen came to our station soon afterward and told us what she’d witnessed, how she had tried to intervene to help or get the officers to stop. She was so upset it was heartbreaking. She had several minutes of her own cell phone video. It shows her perspective on the curb and in the street, blocked and challenged by Officer Thao as she cries out for the officers to check Floyd’s condition. The video captures several other witnesses calling for the police to release Mr. Floyd, to let him go, to get him help. George Floyd is partly visible; he is not moving, certainly not fighting. The footage did not show the beginning or the duration of the incident, but it was surreal all the same. The disconnect between the crowd’s perspective, their cries and pleading, and the officers’ silent, stolid, passive restraint.

And then we saw Darnella Frazier’s video.

Remember: everyone on the authorities’ side started out in default mode: police press release, official statements, utter inaction and implicit condoning by police administration.

The machine functions the way it is intended—until a sizable disruption either tears the veil from our collective eyes or jams a monkey wrench in the gears. Ms. Frazier’s cell phone video, uploaded and shared, was that monkey wrench.

I’ve said this wasn’t my first death-by-police call, and it was less disturbing—initially—than the others had been. That first night it was just (another) “unfortunate occurrence,” in the city’s defensive parlance. Because a death by police is too, too customary in America. The script played out in its normal, formulaic manner: the police spokesman spun his li(n)es; there was public outcry in some quarters, silence in many others. People gathered to grieve, to protest a lost life, to voice their fears and furies.

I hope I have sufficiently conveyed how seldom anyone has challenged the police version, how few responders have tried or been able to contradict the official narrative. Darnella Frazier’s video achieved that. So, the actions I took that first evening were gestures against futility. Genuine attempts to protect others, yes—but with no hope there would be actual consequences for the officers. I thought of Genevieve, and Derek and Seth, the paramedics, as well as that small group of people I saw on the street: they all deserved whatever I could do to keep them from getting thrown under the bus. I stuck out my neck because it was the right thing to do.

Ms. Frazier’s uploaded video spread across the city, the country, the world. Blame the quarantine, or Trump’s incessant racist animus, or just admit that too many innocent Black and brown citizens have been killed by the system. The gruesome spectacle of Mr. Floyd’s killing provided the frisson to set it off. Nevertheless, they combusted.

Mainstream society (a.k.a. white folks) got scared to waking—briefly, barely, slightly. Spasms of genuine concern but coming from profound depths of unawareness and unawakeness: It was destined to be too little, too late. As Gil Scott-Heron tells us, “The revolution will be no re-run, brothers. The revolution will be live.”

It is a frail hope, given this country and our policing of nonwhite citizens, that we might prevent another event by better understanding the last event. There were multiple police killings of young Black men here during the trials. Hope seems a paltry delusion.

I keep challenging the false notion that when the paramedics arrived on scene, they knew what they had. The claims that, by the time Engine 17 rolled in, we knew what was going on. Everyone has seen the video now. Everyone “knows” what happened. We should have known. Why didn’t I go right to the ambulance? Why did I go into the store? Why were the medics just sitting there? It was obvious. Right?

No. We knew nothing. We were given nothing. I cannot express how haunting that is.

I stepped into the ambulance and saw Mr. Floyd’s unresponsive body beneath all the resuscitation equipment: that was my first connection to what the witnesses on the street had been saying, what Firefighter Hansen had told us and why she was so upset. The medics had a ten-minute head start on us, which itself is anomalous. We are dispatched together for any serious call. I didn’t understand how they’d accomplished so much if we had been dispatched only a few minutes before.

“What the fuck happened?” I asked the medics, who shook their heads. We discussed it as we worked on Mr. Floyd. The only “information” from the police was “drugs” and “not really fighting much.” Our deduced options were possible heart attack, fatal asthma attack, drug overdose, worked himself into a frenzy and choked? Nothing made sense. If we’d known the police restrained him facedown, arms manacled behind his back, with several officers pressing down and preventing his chest from expanding for air: that would have helped us.

Does that change—would it have altered—the medics’ treatment plan?

Not really. Airway, breathing, circulation: the fundamentals remain. The clock, though: the police handed us a dead man, one whose heart and lungs had stopped several minutes before the ambulance arrived, with police maintaining their deadly weight upon him until the very last. He had been agitated and in a frenzy for ten minutes before hitting the ground, then his panic increased as his ability to breathe or catch a breath was crushed. Eight-plus minutes with their weight upon him, restricting his chest and lungs as he fought to breathe, as he suffocated. Then several more minutes after he stopped breathing: no actions to revive him, no oxygen, no compressions, no release of his crushed lungs. Mr. Floyd was unsavable. He was dead.

It was unimaginable that Mr. Floyd had died how he did. How could the police slowly crush a man to death while he begs for help, while the witnesses beg them to let him breathe? In what world does that happen?

How many marches have we seen, for how many decades? Have any of them provoked actual change to society’s default obtuseness? No. The claims (by white authorities and citizens) that the horror of Mr. Floyd’s killing shocked them into consciousness and action is, frankly, bullshit.

There have been televised killings since Emmett Till’s mother held an open casket funeral to show the world what white people had done to her son. This was not new; it was barely news (at first).

That is how it’s been. How it’s gone. “What’s past is prologue,” for sure. But maybe it would be better to quote James Baldwin and Langston Hughes than Shakespeare when addressing this poisoned American mind. Because, as has been promised, foretold, warned, pleaded against: the fires next time will explode. And that’s what happened.

The city, the powers that be, the authority machine (white people power structure) made an error born of centuries of comfort and convenience predicated on Black endurance, graciousness, self-restraint: the presumption that, because there were not riots after Jamar Clark’s killing by police, there would be no riots this time. The precise fact that there were no riots last time—and there were no changes in policy, policing, politics, perception—almost guaranteed there would be some thing larger, angrier, anguished this time. JFK riffed on MLK when he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Only when white property and lives are challenged does society at large take notice of issues that we have conveniently ignored for generations. Police killings of unarmed, nonthreatening Black men are tragically and typically far too common.

Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor were fresh on the public radar. It was—it is— clear that the killing of Black citizens would continue unabated, with no intervention or correction or justice. If video and public pressure had not occurred, neither of those cases would have received coverage. Had Ms. Frazier not shared her video of George Floyd’s horrific final minutes, Mr. Floyd would have been a statistic, another rendition of A suspect experienced a medical emergency while in police custody. EMS was called. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

We reached the tipping point, the end date of the festering deferred dream.

Our legal system is problematic, unwieldy, and archaic. Even its staunchest defenders say it’s an imperfect process, which is a wildly Caucasian understatement. A system that originated in 1215 with Britain’s Magna Carta seems poorly structured to handle body camera footage. In most courtrooms, only the judge and the lawyers for the two sides are actually speaking the same language, with clear understanding of the game afoot. The witnesses, the jury, the accused? We are less than pawns.

In the trials of the four officers, letting their body camera footage be viewed fully would have clarified whether Mr. Floyd was “resisting” or the crowd was “threatening” the officers. The police, their defense teams, and their defenders leaned heavily on the “threatening crowd distracted the officers” angle. I repeat that the small crowd became vocal only in the course of Mr. Floyd’s slow, anguished death. Someone viewing the bodycam recordings of the officers could see the glaring discrepancy between Mr. Floyd’s consistent, agitated, breathless condition, and how they treated him. How consistent he was in asking for help. How completely they ignored him. I have watched them all, multiple times. They are ghastly. They are unequivocal.

The officers’ lawyers also pushed Mr. Floyd’s drug use, and they lofted “excited delirium” as a “cause” of his death. His agitation, his incoherence and panic, his claustrophobia, his hyperventilation: he was clearly showing some form of altered mentation from the very beginning of Officer Lane’s engagement with him. Their aggression and domineering were against a man telling them he could not breathe, that he was claustrophobic, that he was not resisting. Officer Lane tentatively mentioned it while they were crushing him, but did nothing to protect Mr. Floyd’s respiratory system. Nowhere in the time since May 25, 2020, has the Minneapolis Police Department or the city of Minneapolis acknowledged or addressed this fundamental issue. Chapter 12, “Ketamine or Kill a Man,” addresses the deadly failures of responders to recognize and treat those with altered mentation, and the systemic failure to investigate and legislate change.

So, the defense pushed the “threatening high man” and the “aggressive crowd” narratives.

I remind you it’s a perverse double insult to blame the bystanders for distracting the police and to blame them for not doing more to save Mr. Floyd from the police.

Please remember, there are so many cases in which bystanders are arrested and hurt because the police take their efforts to intervene as threatening. It is the success of our violent, white supremacist system that all Black citizens know as their toxic birthright the perils with which they cross the vast blue line of the police.

Even with the ample video evidence and the rare presence of so much eyewitness detail, the medical experts could not agree on a clear cause of Mr. Floyd’s death. He had existing health issues; he’d had Covid; he was under the influence—but none of those were in the same realm as having been crushed under three men while gasping to breathe.

Derek Chauvin’s overt and symbolic racism became the easy answer. His knee became synecdochical for America’s policing of Black men.

That knee, however, keeps the pressure and focus on the single rogue officer, not the entire system. Officers Thao and Chauvin both had years of excessive force complaints against them—most of which were round-filed rather than investigated or processed. These were not aberrant rogues but established senior officers.

Chauvin’s knee embodying racist policing is a fitting metaphor. It serves as a ghastly, apt embodiment of American police mistreatment of Black citizens, but I don’t think it is scientifically correct that Chauvin killed George Floyd by himself. I quibble because the lone “killer knee” puts the blame on an individual rather than the group of officers, rather than on the system and culture of policing itself.

Mr. Floyd’s plaintive calls for help, mercy, his mother came through an unfractured windpipe. (I have been on a call for a man whose windpipe was crushed by the police. The result is the same: death. The physical and physiological damages are different. I apologize for making such grim distinctions, but they are real.) The weight of the officers on his chest—from neck to haunches—pinning him down and preventing his chest and lungs from rising to move air (causing positional asphyxia) seems more fatal than Chauvin’s knee.

Both/and.

Chauvin is guilty. He is responsible for Mr. Floyd’s death, but his knee seems less the cause than a significant contributing factor. His ill leadership of the officers killed a man whose only fight was to breathe.

The system, the other officers, the Minneapolis Police Department, the city of Minneapolis must not escape their accountability. All four officers failed to protect a man in their custody. All four officers ignored both their duty and a man’s cries for help. Saying “Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd” rather than “Derek Chauvin was in charge and all of them ignored a dying man’s cries for help” allows the others to skate from full legal consequences, and allows the department—its culture, especially—to avoid accountability; if established rules are routinely ignored, that indicts the culture, the system, and the department. (I wrote this chapter before the federal trial of the officers and the state trial of Officers Thao and Kueng. If two to four years feels like a victory for killing a man under the color of law, this was a “victory” for justice. But a symbolic one.)

Note how Chief Arredondo and multiple other administrators were adamant that the individual officers failed, not the system. Painting Chauvin as an anomalous bad apple makes him a scapegoat for the department and the city.

If we are prohibited from attributing systemic or cultural roots to these (not actually rare) incidents, we must find some individual cause, which is pretty ludicrous. The hairsplitting legalisms demand we find some “reason” the officer chose to ignore and violate department policy, common sense, human decency, and do something horrible. That isn’t who we are, people insist after someone does something that is definitely a reflection of their culture and values. Plausible denial has entrenched legal and political currency.

So Officer Chauvin was a lone, rogue agent that day, and the MPD had nothing to do with it?

But wait: There are multiple previous complaints of brutality against him? Has Officer Chauvin been disciplined for any of these previous complaints? Oh, none were substantiated. Actually, most weren’t even investigated? They don’t exist on any official record? There we are.

I have no love for Derek Chauvin, whose many transgressions over his career failed to earn any departmental sanction. I am not saying he was framed or railroaded or unjustly scapegoated. But he was not a lone wolf. He is a bad cop and an embodiment. The department will not police itself, and the city will not force it to.

I have even less love for the department and the city that allowed this to be so. The culture of the Minneapolis Police Department was disallowed as a legal entity for the prosecution: you cannot prosecute an ethos for a crime. This entire tragic fuckery is explicitly a product of the MPD culture. It is a damning indictment of the culture of policing. Yet it remained hidden in plain sight, untouchable, while these men were judged as derelict, rogue individuals for their crimes.

The striking number of abusive officers and recorded violations of policy should make this ploy a laughable failure, but this is the system. Meanwhile, the victim remains dead, killed gratuitously. He will be slandered in the press and courts—standard procedure, to muddy the picture and give the police irrational justification. (They did not know the man’s history when they killed him: how can his previous arrests be relevant?) The witnesses remain traumatized, and, worse, undermined, dismissed, blamed. It is crazy making.

I feel for Officers Kueng and Lane. Truly. They should have been poster boys for a new generation of police. They should have known and done better. They are guilty. They followed the lead of the senior officers, abided by department culture and custom. They were unprepared—no, badly prepared—for this scene, this dynamic. They defaulted to what they were taught: follow the senior guys’ lead, use overwhelming force.

I have written throughout about the noxious prevalence of cultural machismo and systemic obtuseness—yes, in the fire service, but in life, in sports, in family. Men taught to be the wrong sort of men. New guys who get cowed into following the herd, doing what the others do, even if they know it’s wrong: the pressure of social conformity. Or guys so desperate to fit in, acting tough, playing the hard case, that they never learn what they’re supposed to do. Young firefighters who recognize the disconnect between our cultural narrative and the objective facts of science and sociology face this challenge: how to speak up when they have scant practical experience, and the leaders they dare contradict are their bosses, who evaluate them and are supposed to keep them safe and alive? Conversely, macho firefighters who talk shit about every other crew but who tremble with flop sweat when they’re the ones in the smoke and heat: they plunge blindly into bad situations because they cannot admit they are both inexperienced and uncomfortable.

The actions that day of Officers Lane and Kueng can be examined through this duality. Lane knew the right thing to do. He recognized Mr. Floyd’s distress. But he wasn’t empowered to speak up, he’d been trained to defer to the senior man, he was afraid for his position in the pecking order. This might sound simplistic, but it is more plausible than the notion that he was a homicidal maniac. His lack of temerity proved fatal. Officer Kueng represents the other side: he saw and heard the senior man approaching, and he had to show Chauvin that he was tough enough, that he wasn’t a punk. So he upped the physicality, the macho shoving match. He acted blindly and rashly, which started the fatal cascade.

Mr. Floyd was not a king, a prince, a saint. He did not need to be any of those for his life to matter and for his death to be a crime. I wholly understand the need to assert and reclaim a dead man’s value, to make space for him in a society that is so deliberately, comfortably numb. This society, this system, this country has done murderous injustice to nonwhite citizens since its bloody inception. I fiercely recommend Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa’s Pulitzer Prize–winning His Name Is George Floyd, a biography and sociological study of the man in the context of the dismal American system.

Mr. Floyd was a human being who committed a nonviolent transgression worthy of a misdemeanor charge, an apology with proper payment—at worst, being 86’ed from Cup Foods: the issue easily resolved. He was high, possibly drunk, not making clear decisions. Whatever he was on, plus his history with the police, rendered him anxious, claustrophobic, emotionally fragile. But he was not attacking the police and he deserved humane treatment.

Mr. Floyd never fought the officers, never attempted to flee. He begged for his life, over and over. He was trying to comply.

The image of Chauvin kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck while staring into the void contrasted with Colin Kaepernick kneeling to protest the failed promise of the national anthem offers a ripe juxtaposition about America’s cultural and racial dynamics. But the figurative, the metaphoric: these are not the truth of the image. Does that matter? Am I splitting hairs from my comfort as a white man? Yes. And no. Impact over intention holds weight here. I argue that Chauvin’s criminal indifference to Mr. Floyd’s humanity is the truth.

Derek Chauvin did not take glee in killing Mr. Floyd. Chauvin did not kill him intentionally. There was the brutal malice of absolute control, the callous and cruel indifference to the humanity of Mr. Floyd. Chauvin likely thought he was doing a better job than using a Taser or baton. He might have thought he was showing the new guys how to do the job right. They had their man subdued; they were waiting for EMS to check him out before putting him in the cruiser. All standard protocols.

What a damning failure.

I will quote Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival again: A faulty mental model is part of the explanation. . . . You see what you expect to see. You see what makes sense, and what makes sense is what matches the mental model. . . . The word “experienced” often refers to someone who’s gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.

Please hear me: three police officers, with a fourth keeping watch, knelt on a man for nearly ten minutes as he cried for help, begged for his life, pleaded that he could not breathe. The phrase “I can’t breathe” became emblematic for the cruel killing, for police violence, for the knee to the neck of Black America. But Mr. Floyd said “I can’t breathe” almost twenty times before the officers knelt on him. I say this not to undermine the devastating impact and implications of the phrase, nor to diminish its power as emblem, as signifier. I say it to emphasize that the police had all the information they needed from the outset: the first caller stated the man appeared significantly under the influence. They were dealing with someone in crisis, someone who needed treatment, not manhandling and smothering. He cried out in panic. They piled on. He cried out steadily, horribly. The officers ignored it all. His last minutes were spent gasping, begging, pleading. They did not assess his condition, did not provide treatment. He went unconscious and unresponsive, finally, and they did not relent. They killed him by their passive stolidity, ignoring a desperate group of people who saw what the officers would not. It is as horrifically simple as that. They crushed him to death without intending to kill him.

He was not an actual human being beneath them: that seems the only answer.

As the world focused on Thirty-eighth and Chicago in south Minneapolis, and the scene my crew had entered belatedly became infamous and inescapable, I could not shake the question: Would I have been able to do more, had we arrived sooner? Once we saw the videos, and I spoke with Firefighter Hansen, who tried and failed to break through the robotic trance of the police, I could not avoid wondering. Would I have been able to get Chauvin’s attention? Could I have made Thao turn to actually see what he was ignoring? Could I have interrupted their fatal in/action? Could I have saved George Floyd? I don’t think the answer is firmly yes. I have been on similar police scenes before. They do not see anything outside their target. But maybe I could have . . .

But I wasn’t there while it was happening. I didn’t randomly wander into the scene. That is fantasy, a spasm of my own traumatic reaction.

On duty, it is a different story. The officers called for EMS as a protocol, not because they actually recognized Mr. Floyd was in grave distress. Once they radioed for medics, neither of the two senior officers (Chauvin and Thao) actually checked Mr. Floyd’s condition, or listened to his cries of distress (until he spoke no more), or heeded the insistent and consistent pleading from the crowd. Had any of the officers told their Dispatch that they needed EMS for “one having trouble breathing,” we would have been summoned promptly. That is how our system works.

I harp on this throughout this book: Dispatch is not clairvoyant. They cannot infer from a terse, perfunctory request that there is a man’s life in the balance. If any of the officers had said “breathing issues; respiratory distress; SOB”—anything—we would have been added to the call directly and we would have arrived in under three minutes. So rewind that video and look at all the opportunities the officers had to ask for help.

That ten-minute window, from when the officers said “EMS Code 2” and then upped it without explaining why to Code 3, until Engine 17 was dispatched, is the difference between Mr. Floyd’s being alive and his death. If we had been dispatched at the same time as the paramedics, this would have ended differently. Our station is six blocks directly west of Cup Foods. If we had arrived sooner, could we have reversed the respiratory distress? Saved his heart? I don’t know how much damage he had suffered at that point.

More important, could we have stopped the condition that was contributing to his decline (their bodyweight on his cuffed, prone torso)?

Yes.

Yes, we could have. Yes, we would have.

If Fire dispatch had been notified at the same time police dispatchers notified EMS dispatchers, they would have sent us and we would have arrived at 8:23, not 8:33.

George Floyd went unresponsive at 8:25.

We would have arrived in time to stop them from killing him, in time to keep him breathing. This is not fantasy. Nor is it self- aggrandizing. It is fact. Brutal fact.

I will carry that for the rest of my life. We could have intervened had we been dispatched sooner—had the officers given Dispatch any reason for upgrading the call. But they did not. They crushed the life out of George Floyd while we sat in our station six blocks and under three minutes away.

By the time we arrived, nothing could have revived him. The cumulative effects of what killed Mr. Floyd in the custody of those officers were irreversible. The paramedics arrived with scant information, found a wildly unexpected and incoherent scene, and had to put a medical response together on the fly. They did their best, worked hard and fast, but it was futile. Mr. Floyd was dead when they arrived.

For those who are unclear, let me clarify and explain something that has come up multiple times. The paramedics arrived to find an unresponsive man still pinned down by police, with bystanders crying out at the officers’ callous failure to help Mr. Floyd. The medics conferred briefly with Chauvin and decided to move away from the scene, to work without distraction.

But why didn’t they just drive directly to the hospital? Why did they waste time on the street? Why did they pull over and just sit there, waiting for your crew?

The paramedics pulled around the corner as we were heading out of the station, and we missed seeing them by seconds, although we also had no information, and we would not have blindly followed a random ambulance. We do not have rig-to-rig radio communication. The medics were not idling on the curb waiting for us to show up. They were doing multiple crucial things in an attempt to bring Mr. Floyd back to life. Intubation, ventilation, compressions, IV lines, medications.

We arrived at Thirty-eighth and Chicago with no more info than the medics had received: “one with a mouth bleed.” While Firefighter Hall and I walked past several police officers (none of whom gave us any useful information) and through the small crowd, then into Cup Foods, the two medics, with Officer Lane attempting to help, had already started resuscitation efforts on Mr. Floyd. After our initial goose chase, Hall and I joined them, clearing Lane, and took over ventilations and accessory tasks for the medics. Together we worked hard and efficiently.

For hundreds of calls over the past two decades, this has been the case. A fatal cardiac event, a fatally traumatic incident, too much time without breathing, someone down too long: we arrive as fast as we can after we are notified, and we find a body. And people—family, friends, coworkers, strangers—are screaming for us to do something to fix the person. Who is dead.

But you don’t know for sure unless you try.

Both of these are true: George Floyd was dead. We worked him furiously.

The result was the same. Dead is dead. It was futile. It was the right thing to do. We can’t go on. We must go on.

If I am drowning you, it is great that I call 911, but I should also take my foot off your neck and let you come up for air. That seems obvious. But it has not been raised or addressed in the trials or discussions. The officers radioed for EMS but did nothing to address the man’s condition. More to the point, they were the ones creating the dire situation. Where is the review on that?

How do you reform something that is invisible and ubiquitous? How do you reform a system that reflexively erases, denies, buries the very things you are looking to address?

I want to acknowledge what the state and the federal government, represented by the judges in the two cases, seemed to consider moot: the horrendous guilt, shame, anger, and sorrow borne by the witnesses of this killing. The small, fervent, but unthreatening crowd witnessed the officers’ killing of Mr. Floyd. They watched a man die, slowly. They did not force the issue. Because it was surreal and, of course, they knew the risks of stepping into an agitated police scene. That is their birthright as Black citizens. Firefighter Genevieve Hansen, to her credit, stepped off the curb and into the edge of the fray, about the best use of white privilege we have seen in years. Bless her for that.

As the world absorbed the horror afterward and the video and images became iconic, the witnesses carry the weight of their memories and powerless guilt, and are subject to the idiot online amplifications and distortions. It was an unwinnable situation. They must continue their lives with those images—and the sounds of Mr. Floyd’s desperate, dying cries—burned into their psyches.

The paramedics entered late, worked hard and well, yet still are vilified, still are easy targets for the blame machine. And my scrappy young coworker, Genevieve Hansen, must fight the weight of blaming herself for not doing enough, as she continues to respond to our range of EMS calls. She has been tormented by anonymous cowards via email and USPS, and faced recrimination from some police and firefighters. And then there’s the comments section of the videos . . .

These good people are haunted. There is no good path through grief, or guilt, or blame, or any of it. This event has affected each of us in different ways. But those folks on the curb, that motley “crowd” that the police and its defenders smear as the “cause” of the officers’ distraction: how much must they carry, knowing they did all they could, knowing it was never enough?

(with permission of the author and University MN Press; photo credit: Carly Danek)