The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN last Monday, May 25

[Descartes]

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/06/12/george-floyd-criminal-record/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd

"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."

The quote comes from wikipedia, who condensed things; the source for that quote is in the first link, which takes many paragraphs to laboriously lay things out.



So this is our guy.  This is the guy that I'm supposed to be out all night marching in the streets for and demanding justice.  This is the great guy whose death has people crying, screaming, and trembling (and burning and looting.) 

Did he "deserve" to die?  That's not even the question - just like teenagers who trespass in a power facility don't "deserve" to die by electrocution.  It's more a matter of "actions have consequences."

Was Chauvin wrong?  Clearly, and the jury affirmed that.  Am I bothered by his death?  I just can't seem to get myself worked up about it.

It's sad how it worked out for everyone.  At the end of the day Floyd was what I call a taker; he contributed little to society but took an awful lot and did a lot of things that made his community a worse place to live.  He still shouldn't have died that day.  He should have just went back into the system yet again for another round of probation or jail time.

At the end of the day Chauvin was someone who was not a taker; he worked very hard and contributed positively to his community, making it a better place to live.  That doesn't excuse what he did, which was wrong.  He functionally threw his life away with a series of bad decisions.  I'm having trouble getting upset on his behalf, in much the same way I can't muster much outrage on Floyd's.

[Parasaurolophus]

Why are you sad for Chauvin? His actions have had consequences. He was what I call a 'thug'--a serial abuser of his power who delighted in harming the people over whom he had power, who brazenly defrauded his government, and who for decades was allowed to flout the laws he was employed to uphold despite a long litany of complaints which, if directed at anyone who wasn't a police officer, would have resulted in multiple assault charges and convictions.

If he didn't want to go to prison, he shouldn't have murdered someone.

Also, the sentencing for law enforcement officials should be much harsher than for ordinary citizens.

[ergative]

In my mind, Floyd was a big time bullshit artist who knew his way around police confrontations.

Guess he deserved to die, then.

Saying someone's choices contributed to their undesired or tragic outcomes is a long way from saying they "deserved" them. Do smokers "deserve" lung cancer?

When Wile E. Coyote steps off a cliff and suffers the effects of gravity, it's not a question of whether he "deserved" it; the fact is that the outcome was highly predictable based on his choices.

Obviously the law does not say you deserve to die at the hands of another human, certainly not in this case. And in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter if I shed a tear for him or not. Who cares? What seems odd to me is that in less than year, media Floyd has gone from someone we don't know to John Doe with some criminal exploits and incarcerations to Fred MacMurray on My Three Sons.
Candace Owens may overstate things a bit, but she may have a point when she says 'black people are the only demographic in the USA who take the dregs among them and make heroes out of them.' Or as Thomas Sowell would say, someone's given us the idea that black redneck culture is 'the real redneck culture.' White people play along out of guilt.

You seem to think that people are upset about Floyd's death because they believe he is a flawless human being or a hero, but I have never heard anyone say those things about him. Rather, the incident in which Floyd was killed has become symbolic of a wider tendency of police to use excessive and deadly force against people of color while facing few consequences. The excessiveness of the force was obvious and egregious, and the incident was filmed, and so there was great public interest in the incident and in the trial.

If it is "highly predictable" that a law enforcement officer crush you to death for a $20 counterfeit bill, then that's the problem. Regardless of who you are or what you did. Anyone who thinks that George Floyd's past behavior is at all relevant is badly missing the point.

[Sun_Worshiper]

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/06/12/george-floyd-criminal-record/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd

"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."

The quote comes from wikipedia, who condensed things; the source for that quote is in the first link, which takes many paragraphs to laboriously lay things out.



So this is our guy.  This is the guy that I'm supposed to be out all night marching in the streets for and demanding justice.  This is the great guy whose death has people crying, screaming, and trembling (and burning and looting.) 

Did he "deserve" to die?  That's not even the question - just like teenagers who trespass in a power facility don't "deserve" to die by electrocution.  It's more a matter of "actions have consequences."

Was Chauvin wrong?  Clearly, and the jury affirmed that.  Am I bothered by his death?  I just can't seem to get myself worked up about it.

It's sad how it worked out for everyone.  At the end of the day Floyd was what I call a taker; he contributed little to society but took an awful lot and did a lot of things that made his community a worse place to live.  He still shouldn't have died that day.  He should have just went back into the system yet again for another round of probation or jail time.

At the end of the day Chauvin was someone who was not a taker; he worked very hard and contributed positively to his community, making it a better place to live.  That doesn't excuse what he did, which was wrong.  He functionally threw his life away with a series of bad decisions.  I'm having trouble getting upset on his behalf, in much the same way I can't muster much outrage on Floyd's.

Smh at this assessment: "Chauvin was a good guy, he just made a mistake and murdered someone, nothing to be upset about!"

[Descartes]

Why are you sad for Chauvin? His actions have had consequences. He was what I call a 'thug'--a serial abuser of his power who delighted in harming the people over whom he had power, who brazenly defrauded his government, and who for decades was allowed to flout the laws he was employed to uphold despite a long litany of complaints which, if directed at anyone who wasn't a police officer, would have resulted in multiple assault charges and convictions.

If he didn't want to go to prison, he shouldn't have murdered someone.

Also, the sentencing for law enforcement officials should be much harsher than for ordinary citizens.

Call him what you want.  I'd consider Floyd the thug but you can put whatever label you want on someone.  If I were walking alone in downtown Minneapolis after dark and I had a choice between encountering Floyd or Chauvin I'd take Chauvin every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Good cops get complaints.  I don't know if you honestly don't realize this or not but criminals game the complaint system.  People who legally and justifiably got their ass handed to them by a cop go and file a complaint on that cop.  The fact that none were found to have merit matters. 

If you are intellectually honest, what would you say about someone who had 8 previous criminal charges, all of them dismissed or found not guilty?  Would you be saying "Yeah, you can see there's a history there," or would you be saying "They didn't get convicted on those?"

[Parasaurolophus]

Call him what you want.  I'd consider Floyd the thug but you can put whatever label you want on someone.  If I were walking alone in downtown Minneapolis after dark and I had a choice between encountering Floyd or Chauvin I'd take Chauvin every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Good cops get complaints.  I don't know if you honestly don't realize this or not but criminals game the complaint system.  People who legally and justifiably got their ass handed to them by a cop go and file a complaint on that cop.  The fact that none were found to have merit matters. 

If you are intellectually honest, what would you say about someone who had 8 previous criminal charges, all of them dismissed or found not guilty?  Would you be saying "Yeah, you can see there's a history there," or would you be saying "They didn't get convicted on those?"

Believe it or not, getting serious complaints filed against you is not a marker of your skill, effectiveness, or good nature. Especially when filing complaints against people in your occupation is extremely rare, difficult, and usually results in nothing happening as a result. Police conduct review boards are merely internal, and they're notoriously opaque and ineffective--and they mostly deal with complaints from other officers.

Chauvin had eighteen complaints of excessive force from members of the public. He was "disciplined" for two of those. Even the club owner for whom he was a bouncer thinks he was an overly violent thug. He's a violent criminal who couldn't learn a lesson the easy way, who contributed to rotting his police department and souring its relation to the public, and he's a fraudster. He is a menace to society, and it's good that he's been removed. It's just too bad his cancerous rot wasn't cut out before it had a chance to metastasize.

If you want me and others to get all doe-eyed over cops, then you need to be first in line to dispose of the rotten apples before they can spoil the bunch. The more you dig in your heels and refuse to support public accountability for unlawful police conduct, the less supportive I become of any cops, and the more willing I become to scrap the system entirely.

Every single police officer who looked the other way, who let Chauvin get away with his behaviour, is a bad cop. Every. Single. One. They should all be fired, and they should, at minimum, face a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the citizens of Minneapolis. The more blind eyes you turn, the deeper the rot sets in.

[marshwiggle]

If it is "highly predictable" that a law enforcement officer crush you to death for a $20 counterfeit bill, then that's the problem. Regardless of who you are or what you did. Anyone who thinks that George Floyd's past behavior is at all relevant is badly missing the point.

Suppose a first year university student commits plagiarism and gets kicked out of university. Some (many?) may argue that the punishment was excessive, and were the actions of a vindictive administrator. Does that mean that the act of plagiarism is, in  that case, irrelevant?

[Parasaurolophus]

If it is "highly predictable" that a law enforcement officer crush you to death for a $20 counterfeit bill, then that's the problem. Regardless of who you are or what you did. Anyone who thinks that George Floyd's past behavior is at all relevant is badly missing the point.

Suppose a first year university student commits plagiarism and gets kicked out of university. Some (many?) may argue that the punishment was excessive, and were the actions of a vindictive administrator. Does that mean that the act of plagiarism is, in  that case, irrelevant?

Expulsion is a punishment for the offense of violating the academic integrity policy. We can disagree about whether it's proportional, but it's still the officially-sanctioned punishment in this hypothetical scenario.

Being choked to death is not the officially-sanctioned punishment for any crime in the United States, least of all for having a checkered legal history.

[apl68]

At the end of the day Chauvin was someone who was not a taker; he worked very hard and contributed positively to his community, making it a better place to live.  That doesn't excuse what he did, which was wrong.  He functionally threw his life away with a series of bad decisions.  I'm having trouble getting upset on his behalf, in much the same way I can't muster much outrage on Floyd's.

Clearly he DIDN'T make his community a better place to live.  Had he done his job correctly he would have.  But he messed up badly enough to be disciplined at least twice, forming a definite pattern of wrongful behavior, and then murdered a man.  By wrecking trust in law enforcement in his community, he made his community a much worse place to be.  Bad law officers sabotage law enforcement, to the detriment of us all.

There's a famous line in "Star Wars" where Obi-Wan tells Vader "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."  In a bizarre sort of way, Chauvin did this for George Floyd.  Had Chauvin confined himself to anything remotely like reasonable force, Floyd would be still alive, and merely another petty crook whom few had the time of day for.  Now, thanks to Chauvin's actions, he is widely regarded as a martyr.  Another way in which Chauvin has failed to make the world a better place.

[marshwiggle]

If it is "highly predictable" that a law enforcement officer crush you to death for a $20 counterfeit bill, then that's the problem. Regardless of who you are or what you did. Anyone who thinks that George Floyd's past behavior is at all relevant is badly missing the point.

Suppose a first year university student commits plagiarism and gets kicked out of university. Some (many?) may argue that the punishment was excessive, and were the actions of a vindictive administrator. Does that mean that the act of plagiarism is, in  that case, irrelevant?

Expulsion is a punishment for the offense of violating the academic integrity policy. We can disagree about whether it's proportional, but it's still the officially-sanctioned punishment in this hypothetical scenario.

Being choked to death is not the officially-sanctioned punishment for any crime in the United States, least of all for having a checkered legal history.

But being arrested is state-sanctioned for commiting a crime, including passing counterfeit money. Unless you are going to claim that Chauvin was planning to just kill some random civilian, the only reason he was subduing Floyd was because of the latter's criminal activity. So if "Floyd's past behaviour" included the action for which he was arrested, then suggesting it was not "at all relevant" is ridiculous.

[Diogenes]

In my mind, Floyd was a big time bullshit artist who knew his way around police confrontations.

Guess he deserved to die, then.

Saying someone's choices contributed to their undesired or tragic outcomes is a long way from saying they "deserved" them. Do smokers "deserve" lung cancer?

When Wile E. Coyote steps off a cliff and suffers the effects of gravity, it's not a question of whether he "deserved" it; the fact is that the outcome was highly predictable based on his choices.

Bad analogy. The cliff and the tobacco do not have their own agency. They are inanimate objects. Chauvin had his own agency and culpability.

[Diogenes]

Now that's it's over, despite what President Biden says, I don't see it bring America together. Not that we should expect unity, but it would be nice if we could stop the war of words a little.

What it means going forward is where we are anything but united.  Some people see it as a victory for anti-racism and wanted that. Some people see it as a victory for 'anti-racism' and didn't want that (me).
Even if you believe Chauvin acted out of racial animus, the mere mention of the word 'systemic' encourages us to think we need to start seeing police as individually racist. It's escalating rhetoric. I won't do that any more than I will believe comedians are sexual predators because of what I found out about Louis C K.
Police are in the catching bad guys business. As long as they can make it look like that's what they're dedicated to, they're winning. When they abuse their power, we need to say 'hold on a minute. You're not gonna be doing that, long as we pay your salary.' That's all.
The police killing people they didn't need to kill and getting away with it is an American problem that affects all races. 'Black Lives Matter' could be an ally in fighting that if they could admit that. The thing about the protesters is not just that some are violent. It's that many are massively ignorant.
Yes, the jurors could easily have feared for their safety. Maxine Waters said what a lot of people are thinking. Whether or not they heard about her antics is almost immaterial.
In my mind, Floyd was a big time bullshit artist who knew his way around police confrontations. That was old stuff for him. When the police first approached him he did a little dance with his hands. On the steering wheel, off the wheel, in the air, at his side. He knew the cops wanted his hands on the wheel. They said it in plain English.  The purpose was likely to create a distraction so his friend could dispose of the rest of the drugs without being noticed. And the feigned hysteria 'I'm not that kind of guy' etc.
You can't talk about Floyd, his behavior, his history, out of respect for the dead? If you'll pardon the expression, WTF? I pay people to maintain law and order. I read about people like Floyd in the local police log.

You are basing your argument on bad information.
First off, by continually focusing on the one case of Chauvin and claiming that we can't extrapolate to systemic issues, you are actively ignoring the large body of research on the issue. You know this because you've ignored this data when presented to you in other threads such a this https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

Second, you argue that BLM does not care about non-black deaths at the hands of the police. This is patently false and a strawman of them. One can point out the disproportionate violence without making it an either/or situation.

[Parasaurolophus]

But being arrested is state-sanctioned for commiting a crime, including passing counterfeit money. Unless you are going to claim that Chauvin was planning to just kill some random civilian, the only reason he was subduing Floyd was because of the latter's criminal activity. So if "Floyd's past behaviour" included the action for which he was arrested, then suggesting it was not "at all relevant" is ridiculous.

Nobody marched in the streets because he was arrested. They marched because he was murdered as part and parcel of that arrest. You don't get to do anything you like to someone just because you're arresting them. And if you decide to assault them because you like to hurt people under your power and they die as a result, then you're guilty of second-degree murder. And guess what? Chauvin is guilty of second-degree murder.

Once again, the way to win me (and others) over is to actually condemn police violence when it arises, not to bend over backwards to try to excuse it every way you can. If you're willing to go to such lengths here, in this open-and-shut case, what grounds do I have to believe you when you say you're againt police violence in the first place?

None.

[marshwiggle]

Second, you argue that BLM does not care about non-black deaths at the hands of the police. This is patently false and a strawman of them. One can point out the disproportionate violence without making it an either/or situation.

I missed this. Was there a BLM protest about non-black deaths at the hands of police? Or posters of non-black people killed by police?

[Descartes]

Second, you argue that BLM does not care about non-black deaths at the hands of the police. This is patently false and a strawman of them. One can point out the disproportionate violence without making it an either/or situation.

I missed this. Was there a BLM protest about non-black deaths at the hands of police? Or posters of non-black people killed by police?

Look up the Burnsville, MN shooting that occurred during the end of the trial.  The protesters were "heading down there" - until they learned it was a white guy who got shot.  Interest really dissipated after that and it barely made the news.