Shooting Herself Through the Mouth While Her Hands Were Cuffed Behind Her Back, Virginia Police Said
Throughout Trial Over George Floyd's Death, Killings by Police Mount
Since testimony in Derek Chauvin's trial began on March 29, more than three people a day have died at the hands of law enforcement.
Protesters marching in the wake of the death of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man who was killed by the police in Brooklyn Center, Minn. Credit... Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
MINNEAPOLIS — Just seven hours before prosecutors opened their case against Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd, a Chicago officer chased down a 13-year-old boy in a West Side alley and fatally shot him as he turned with his hands up.
One day later, at a hotel in Jacksonville, Fla., officers fatally shot a 32-year-old man, who, the police say, grabbed one of their Tasers. The day after that, as an eyewitness to Mr. Floyd's death broke down in a Minneapolis courtroom while recounting what he saw, a 40-year-old mentally ill man who said he was being harassed by voices was killed in Claremont, N.H., in a shootout with the state police.
On every day that followed, all the way through the close of testimony, another person was killed by the police somewhere in the United States.
The trial has forced a traumatized country to relive the gruesome death of Mr. Floyd beneath Mr. Chauvin's knee. But even as Americans continue to process that case — and anxiously wait for a verdict — new cases of people killed by the police mount unabated.
Video
transcript
transcript
From Rodney King to George Floyd: Reliving the Scars of Police Violence
The murder trial of Derek Chauvin is at the center of a national reckoning on race and policing. But cycles of protests over systemic racism and policing are not new. We watched the trial with the families of Rodney King, Oscar Grant and Stephon Clark to see this moment in history through their eyes.
-
"May it please the court. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, good morning. The video evidence, I think, will be very helpful and meaningful to you because you can see it for yourself without lawyer talk, lawyer spin, lawyer anything. You can see it for yourself." "Please. Please. I can't breathe. Please, man. Please somebody help me. Please. I'm about to die in this thing." "Oh my God." "What did he say?" "He said, I'm about to die. Oh my God." "While watching the George Floyd trial, I noticed the differences and the importance of footage." "This corner —" "When Stephon was murdered, we only had the officers' footage. We only had their point of view." "Hey, show your hands." "You know, when my son was killed being on the platform, there was several bystanders that filmed. And had it not been for the cameras, we wouldn't even be here today because they would have probably said it was justified." "Bro, with your feet on his head, man. You knee on his neck." "He's pushing harder." "Yeah." "I cannot breathe." "A little bit more. Right here." "I don't watch the footage of my dad's incident because it's torture." "You see the officers giving a trove of blows to his body?" "Yes." "To his arms, to his torso, to his legs." "Here it is 30 years later, nothing has changed." "Now who are you going to believe? The defendants or your own eyes?" "I am watching the George Floyd case with my best friend, Tiffany, at her home." "Oh my gosh." "Wow." "And he's still on his neck." "Today was the first time I watched the entire video of George Floyd, and it definitely made me think about my dad begging for his life screaming." "Check his pulse. Check his pulse." "His daughter was the same age I was when my dad was beaten." "My name is Lora Dene King. I'm the middle child of Rodney Glen King." "The world saw the videotape." "We thought the video showed excessive force and unnecessary force." "With that videotape, if they had two eyes and they weren't blind, you could see that it was excessive force." "The defense tried to dilute the impact of the tape by dissecting it, frame by frame, in an effort to show that King was a threat to the officers." "He kind of gave out like a bear-like yell, like a wounded animal. If he had grabbed my officer, it would have been a death grip. If he had grabbed the weapon, he would have had numerous targets." "He didn't grab anybody during these events, did he?" "No sir, he did not." "He couldn't walk. He had 50 broken bones. His skull was permanently fractured. He had permanent brain damage. My dad was never the same after that. You know, and everybody just considered him to be normal. I think if that happened to anybody, they wouldn't be normal ever again." "This doesn't just affect the person it happened to. It also affects all those people who are out there watching it. They're all affected forever." "I was desperate to help." "I was just kind of emotional, and I went to the African-American that was standing there on the curb. And I was just like, they're not going to help them." "Oh my God." "This man, he witnessed another African-American man getting his life taken. The nine-year-old speaker on the trial." "Good morning, [inaudible]." "Good morning." "Which one is you?" "Just so happened to be walking down the street. She will never forget that for the rest of her life." "You ultimately ended up posting your video to social media, right?" "Correct." "And it went viral?" "Correct." "It changed your life, right?" "The girl who filmed George Floyd, the fact that there was nothing she can do to save his life." "It's been nights, I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more." "That's something that will haunt her like George Holliday, who captured my dad's video." "Without George Holliday, these four officers might not be on trial." "He just wanted to test this new camera he had. Like, oh let me take — he stood there shaking, terrified. And he still suffers to this day because that was the right thing to do." "What could he have done to deserve that?" "If I was to see George Floyd's daughter today, I wish there was something I can say. But it's not easy. It's not easy at all. Because I'm sure she's watched that videotape. And that's something that carries in your mental every everyday, just like my dad's video tape." "For the jury, a difficult decision ahead, knowing that to acquit the four officers could ignite this city." "Not guilty of —" Chanting: "No justice, no peace. No justice, no peace." "And damage to the city of Los Angeles running into billions of dollars." "That's what I'm saying. The police, they don't pay a cent for this trial. So my mother and I, we was watching the George Floyd's trial. And it brought back so many memories of my son Oscar's case. Oscar's last picture in his cellphone was of the officer who shot him." "My name is Wanda Johnson. I'm the mother of Oscar Grant." "Grant was shot once in the back as he lay face down on the train station's platform." "He was unarmed." "The 27-year-old officer has said he thought he had drawn his Taser gun —" "— but accidentally pulled out his handgun instead." "And the incident was captured on cellphone video." "Video speaks for themselves. And the jury will see that and make the correct decision." "We knew that we would have a very hard time winning in the court systems because the judicial system was not made for everyone in the society." "As the situation went on, the crowd began to grow and grow." "Oh my goodness, the same playbook that they used for what happened with Oscar, they used the same thing for George Floyd. Oh, there was a crowd of angry mob people." "They were behind them. There were people across the street, people yelling." "We don't know if they were going to attack us. I thought about the young man testifying in George Floyd's case." "You grew angrier and angrier." "Calling the police on the police." "911, what's the address of the emergency?" "How do you have somebody investigate those that they work with? Of course you're going to find that they're going to believe the people that they work with quicker than they will believe the citizens who are filing the complaint." "Would you like to speak with those sergeants?" "Yeah, I'd like to. He was unresponsive. He wasn't resisting arrest or any of this." "OK, one second." "Murderers, bro. Y'all are just murderers, bro." "You know, when we was going to jury trial for Oscar, they would ask questions like, 'Do you know anybody who went to jail? Do you know anybody who had an encounter with the police?' And as soon as the person said that, they would strike them from being a juror, right? Having a jury that consists of different backgrounds, it could help with the decision-making of innocent or guilty." "The 27-year-old officer —" "— pleaded not guilty to the murder charge." "His trial had been moved to Los Angeles over concerns of racial tension and intense media scrutiny." "Everybody, let's just pray for one minute." "Father God, we come to you and your son named Jesus Christ. Father, we ask the people that see this —" "Every time I come to my mom's house, I'm reminded that my son was killed here." "My name is Sequette Clark. I'm the mother of Stephon Clark." "22-year-old Stephon Clark was fatally shot while running from police." "Clark was see evading authorities after allegedly smashing a car window." "He was shot eight times in his grandmother's backyard." "Police apparently thinking he was holding a gun, now say it was a cellphone." "Out of fear for their own lives, they fired their service weapon." "And following the incident, officers manually muted their body cameras at times." "Move over this way." "As we watched the George Floyd trial, I invited particular members of my family because you can't address something in the community or the city or the nation until you address it at home with the family." "When Mr. Floyd was in distress, Mr. Chauvin wouldn't help him, didn't help him." "So that's just how they left my boy out there. They handcuffed him after he was dead." "Excessive force." "Excessive force and lethal force after the fact of death. I felt saddened, heavy, drained. I felt as if I was a slave 400 years ago. Just hearing how he was dead, seeing how he was dead. And then to turn around and hear the defense's attempt to bring up the fact that we should not focus on the —" "— 9 minutes and 29 seconds —" "— that it took to kill George Floyd. But we should focus on what went on ahead of that. Anything that does not deal directly with the murder of George Floyd is irrelevant in my opinion." "He's 6 to 6 and a half feet tall. You did not know that he had taken heroin. Mr. Floyd did use a counterfeit $20 bill to purchase a pack of cigarettes. Mr. Floyd put drugs in his mouth." "Poppa's already dead. George Floyd is already dead." "That's right. That's right." "So now you're resurrecting him just to kill him all over again." "Basically." "Defame him in order to justify the wrongdoing of your officers, reminded me exactly of what the district attorney did to Stephon." "The cellphone examination revealed a domestic violence incident that happened with the mother of his children. Texts and phone calls showing that he was seeking drugs and a photograph of his hand holding 10 Xanax pills." "What was on his cellphone has zero to do with the actions of the police officers at the time of his homicide. I feel like it's a bittersweet thing that's happening watching the George Floyd trial. Because I'm optimistic that this is a piece of justice for the death of my son." "We might not be here. They're going to get him. They're going to get him." "Was a crime committed? The answer to that question is no. And as a result, we will not charge these officers with any criminal liability related to the shooting death or the use of force of Stephon Clark." "April 14, 1991: King fights emotional and physical scars. So this is basically a photo album book of my dad's newspaper articles since he's been in the news. Years and years and years. You throw someone to the wolves and you expect them to be normal. You know, there's no such thing as normal after that. And then, can you imagine how many Rodney Kings there is that never got videotaped? There's plenty of them." "I would have prayed and hoped that Oscar's trial would have been televised because America has to really look in the mirror and say, 'Are all people being treated equally?'" "There was excessive use of force against George Floyd —" "We're not focused on the videotape, his toxicology, his heart condition. We're focused on the fact that several people witnessed this man get murdered." "You can see it with our own eyes. It's crazy." "People don't realize what it does to your family. It's bigger than just a trial and this officer. We never get to see them again. We never get to smell them again and kiss them again. Our lives are completely affected forever."
Since testimony began on March 29, at least 64 people have died at the hands of law enforcement nationwide, with Black and Latino people representing more than half of the dead. As of Saturday, the average was more than three killings a day.
The deaths, culled by The New York Times from gun violence databases, news media accounts and law enforcement releases, offer a snapshot of policing in America in this moment. They testify not only to the danger and desperation that police officers confront daily, but also to the split-second choices and missteps by members of law enforcement that can escalate workaday arrests into fatalities.
Image
Image
They are the result of domestic violence calls, traffic stops gone awry, standoffs and chases. The victims often behave erratically, some suffering from mental illness, and the sight of anything resembling a weapon causes things to escalate quickly.
And their fallout has been wrenchingly familiar, from the graphic videos that so often emerge to the protests that so often descend into scuffles between law enforcement and demonstrators on streets filled with tear gas. Just as one community confronts one killing, another happens.
Across the spectrum, from community activists to law enforcement personnel, there is emotional and mental exhaustion — and the feeling that the nation cannot get this right.
"How many more losses must we mourn?" Miski Noor, the co-executive director of the Minneapolis-based activist group Black Visions, said in a statement after the killing of Daunte Wright, 20, during a recent traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minn.
The pain of George Floyd's death "is still scarred into our minds and yet history continues to repeat itself," the statement continued. "Our community has reached its breaking point."
This past week the mayor of Chicago called for calm as "excruciating" body camera footage was released in the police killing of the 13-year-old, Adam Toledo. The shaky video shows a police officer, responding to a call of shots fired, chasing a boy with what appears to be a gun down an alley at night in a predominantly Latino neighborhood.
"Stop right now!" the officer screams while cursing. "Hands. Show me your hands. Drop it. Drop it." A single shot fells the boy as he turns, lifting his hands.
Image
Image
Other recent lethal force incidents have rocked communities large and small: Michael Leon Hughes, 32, a Black man shot to death on March 30 after, the police say, he used a Taser on a Jacksonville police officer responding to a domestic dispute in a motel; Iremamber Sykap, 16, a Pacific Islander killed on April 5 as he fled from the Honolulu police in a stolen Honda Civic; and Anthony Thompson Jr., 17, a Black teenager in Knoxville, Tenn., killed by the police on April 12 in a high school bathroom after reports that a student had brought a gun onto campus.
All of those killings and many more occurred as testimony in the Minneapolis trial unfolded, though few attracted as much national attention as the shooting of Mr. Wright less than 10 miles from the courthouse where Mr. Chauvin stood trial. Protests erupted in Brooklyn Center after a veteran police officer fatally shot Mr. Wright, saying she mistook her gun for her Taser, as he attempted to flee during a traffic stop.
Abigail Cerra, a Minneapolis civil rights lawyer and a member of the Minneapolis Police Conduct Oversight Commission, said it was unclear why the officers stopped him for an expired registration, an issue for many drivers in the state during the coronavirus pandemic.
But two aspects of the case, she said, were infuriatingly familiar: that Mr. Wright was Black, and that the police tasked with delivering him safely to the courts, where violations of the law are supposed to be adjudicated, effectively delivered a death sentence.
"It's just another example of a nothing offense escalated to lethality," Ms. Cerra said.
Image
Image
Though many of these killings have a familiar ring, it is unfair to blame them all on law enforcement, said Patrick Yoes, a retired sheriff's office captain and president of the national Fraternal Order of Police.
"In a lot of cities it has to do with people feeling hopeless," he said. "It's poverty, it's a failing education system. It's all of these things that are vitally important to stability of a community."
That instability often places officers in situations in which they confront individuals who may be dangerous and noncompliant, he said. Part of the reason society has been unable to prevent deadly encounters between law enforcement and the community is that some people are unwilling to discuss the real challenges of crime that officers sometimes encounter, he said.
"There's just so many factors that people have already made up their minds and they think that law enforcement is based off of race," said Mr. Yoes, who is white.
Federal and state laws generally hold that officers are justified in using lethal force as long as they have a "reasonable" fear of "imminent" injury or death for themselves or another person. And jurors tend not to second-guess what might be "reasonable" force in the moment.
Of the 64 fatal encounters compiled by The Times for the past three weeks, at least 42 involved people accused of wielding firearms. More than a dozen involved confrontations with people who were mentally ill or in the throes of a breakdown. And at least 10 arose as the police responded to reports of domestic violence.
Image
Image
Some dispute the notion that danger, rather than bias, is more likely to drive a law enforcement officer's reactions.
"What I see sometimes is in these encounters with people of color, there is a different aggression," said Ron Johnson, a retired Missouri State Highway Patrol captain who led the police response in Ferguson, Mo., after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014.
"This adrenaline starts going out of the roof," added Mr. Johnson, who is Black. "And why? It's because we don't have these experiences and these understandings of each other. And in some cases, it's about humanity. We don't see them in the same human way that we see ourselves."
Since at least 2013, with a slight dip because of the pandemic, about 1,100 people have been killed each year by law enforcement officers, according to databases compiled by Mapping Police Violence, a research and advocacy group that examines all such killings, including non-gun-related deaths such as Mr. Floyd's. The Washington Post, whose numbers are limited to police shootings, reflect a similarly flat trend line.
Nearly all of the victims since March 29 have been men, with Black or Latino people substantially overrepresented — a pattern that reflects broader criminal justice research. And most were under 30. Four were teenagers.
Philip Stinson, a professor in the criminal justice program at Bowling Green State University who studies civilian killings by members of law enforcement, said the most striking aspect of the statistics on lethal police force is how little the numbers have changed in the decade or two since researchers began to comprehensively track them.
Even as cellphone videos and body cameras make it harder to hide human error and abuses of authority by law enforcement — and even as social media amplifies public outrage — only about 1.1 percent of officers who kill civilians are charged with murder or manslaughter, Dr. Stinson said.
Image
Image
Since the beginning of 2005, he said, 140 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers — such as police officers, deputy sheriffs and state troopers — have been arrested on charges of murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting. Of those, 44 have been convicted of a crime resulting from the incident, in most cases for a lesser offense.
That could be because many of the shootings are legally justified, or also, as Dr. Stinson believes, because the legal system and laws themselves are overly deferential to the police. That deference, he added, protects the status quo in the more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country.
"All law enforcement is local," he said. "Culture eats policy, as the saying goes, and we have a police subculture whose core elements in many places include a fear of Black people."
Dr. Stinson cited the now-infamous traffic stop of a uniformed Army medic who was held at gunpoint and doused with pepper spray by the police in Windsor, Va., a rural town near Norfolk. The encounter, which occurred in December, was brought to light this month after Caron Nazario, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, filed a federal lawsuit.
Body camera footage shows members of the Windsor Police Department threatening and attacking Lieutenant Nazario, who is Black and Latino, after stopping him because he had not yet put permanent license plates on his new Chevrolet Tahoe.
The footage underscores the extent to which police culture has resisted change in much of the country, Dr. Stinson said.
"We only know about this one because he has a lawyer, they filed a civil lawsuit and they were able to get recordings they could release," he said.
Image
Image
For many victims of police violence and their families, however, there is no video evidence to rely on.
Daly City, Calif., police officers were not wearing body cameras when they got into a struggle with Roger Allen, 44, as he sat in a car idled with a flat tire on April 7. The officers say that Mr. Allen had what appeared to be a gun on his lap, according to Stephen M. Wagstaffe, the San Mateo County district attorney, who is investigating the case. It turned out to be a pellet gun, but an officer fired a fatal bullet to Mr. Allen's chest during the fracas.
Now Talika Fletcher, 30, said she was struggling to come to terms with the fact that her older brother, who was like a father figure, had joined the grim tally of Black men who died at the hands of law enforcement.
"I never thought in a million years that my brother would be a hashtag," she said.
She has little faith that the dynamic between Black men and law enforcement will be any better once her 14-month-old son, Prince, grows up.
"The cycle," she said, "it's not going change."
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Shooting Herself Through the Mouth While Her Hands Were Cuffed Behind Her Back, Virginia Police Said
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/us/police-shootings-killings.html