George Floyd, Protests, and Rioting (Part 1): What is Not the Core Problem

Over the next few posts, I’m going to share my thoughts on the current crisis in America today that has been sparked by the murder of George Floyd, as well as other issues that, in one form or another, are connected to it. I want to focus on three things: (1) What is not the core problem, (2) What are the real problems and why aren’t they being addressed, and (3) What needs to be done to address those problems, and what we can’t afford to do.

It has become commonplace to see, both in the news and on social media, calls for doing something: We have to do something; we can’t be silent anymore; something must be done. That’s right, but “doing something” should consist more than just joining a hashtag campaign or putting a snappy slogan on your Facebook page. More importantly, before you do anything, you should make sure you know something, have an accurate handle on what is going on, and understand what is and isn’t true. You need to take a hard and uncomfortable look at things. You need to put partisan political bias to the side. You need to talk about specifics. You can’t just deal in hashtags, slogans, and generalities.

I am 50 years old. I remember numerous crises in America over the past 40 years, from the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1978-79, to the LA Riots in 1992, to 9/11, and to the recent demonstrations and riots over the past few years that have been in response to the killing of the likes of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner,  and Michael Brown. Throughout all those crises, I always was confident that America would get through them and that the American people would eventually band together and find a way to make this “a more perfect union.” I had never gotten too worried about any crisis over the past 40 years.

Yet over the past few years, I have become increasingly worried about the state of America. There will always be corrupt politicians, political incompetence, scandals, tragedies, and a certain amount of divisiveness in this country. But I have always felt that we as a people had enough sense to pump the brakes before the country started to really careen out of control and go over a cliff. Over these past few weeks, though, for the first time in my entire life, I have become extremely frightened and worried that America is going to go up in flames within my lifetime. I think that our country’s brakes are completely shot, and I see us approaching a monstrous chasm in the not too distant future. It seems we are living in the middle of William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, first printed in November of 1920:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Now, there is absolutely no denying that America has a horrible history in terms of racism, racial violence, and racial injustice. There is no denying racism still exists, it always will. There also is no denying that there are instances of police brutality, some of it racially motivated, and wherever racially-motivated crimes are committed, no matter who commits them, they must be dealt with—justice must be served.

There is also no denying that there has been almost universal condemnation of the murder of George Floyd. We’ve all seen the video footage. Everyone was outraged. Everyone was demanding that justice be done and that those police officers be arrested and charged. And everyone was happy when the wheels of justice began to turn, and those officers were arrested and charged. Yet sadly, things have just continued to spiral out of control, for wherever peaceful protests emerged throughout the country, violent riots spread like wildfire in virtually every major city and seemed to get worse by the night. The rioters torched low-income housing and destroyed thousands of small businesses (many of which were owned and operated by other black people). In addition, they have killed and injured countless police officers as well as numerous black people who were defending their houses and livelihoods. In the span of just two weeks, there were 50 homicides and 240 shootings in Chicago alone. It has been chaos and anarchy.

And then, predictably, politicians and the media started to do what they do—make things worse. In the past, whenever there was a major national crisis, everyone usually rallied together and at least feigned unity in order to try to address the problem. But not this time. There has been very little attempt to heal the wounds. Instead, partisans are simply digging their knives in deeper and making the wounds worse. As a result, it seems like the body politic is bleeding out. It seems as if some are actually welcome that happening. What is really going on?

Racism, and the Problems that Face Us: What Isn’t the Problem
In this post, I want to make one central point: While there still are obviously deep racial problems in this country that desperately need to be addressed, the current, over-arching narrative that is being pushed by various groups, being embraced by some politicians, and being promoted in the media simply isn’t true. And the more this false narrative is pushed, the more will we as a society continue to be plunged into a kind of madness that will, in fact, destroy us.

The false narrative to which I am referring is the one that is saying that “cops are hunting down black men” and that “whites are committing black genocide.” That simply is not true. Over these past few weeks, as I’ve been watching all these events unfold, I’ve come across a host of stats that completely contradict this false narrative. I could post more, but these will serve as a sample:

• In 2011 in Chicago, 21 black people were killed by the police; In 2015, that number was 7; by contrast, Chicago averages anywhere between 500-700 homicides a year; 70% of those homicides are black on black, and of those homicides, 75% go unsolved.
• In 2014, there were 14,000 homicides in the United States, about 7,000 of them were of black people, and 96% of that 7,000 were black on black.
• In 2015, there were 965 people in the United States shot and killed by the police; 4% of those incidents involved white cops killing unarmed blacks.
• In 2019, there were 1004 people in the United States killed by the police; 40 of those people were unarmed; of those 40, 20 were white and 10 were black; of those 10, 6 of them were still violent and dangerous, and of the remaining 4, charges were brought against the cops in 2 of them.
• In fact, over the past 30 years, the number of black people killed by the police has dropped 70%.

Now, obviously, this is not to say that much of black America doesn’t have the deck stacked against it in a variety of ways. This is not denying this country is still beset with racial problems and racial injustices—those clearly still exist. But we need to be crystal clear that what these statistics clearly show is that the recurring narrative we have been hearing more and more—that cops are out hunting black man and that there is a black genocide going on—is simply false. It is not true at all. The claim does not line up with reality. It is an dangerously hyperbolic and false narrative and anyone who pushes it is either woefully uninformed or is purposely lying. Cops are not going around killing black people. Whites are not committing black genocide.

The real problems go much deeper. That will be the topic of my next post.

For the rest of this post, though, I want to do something that is going to be very uncomfortable to do: take a closer look at the incidents involving the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, and George Floyd. These incidents have been put forth as the primary examples of police brutality and a racist system. If you are like me, chances are you don’t know much more about these cases than what you’ve seen on short news clips. Since these are the cases that have gotten the national spotlight, though, it is important that we make sure we know the specifics as to what happened in each case.

Let me say up front that I am NOT going to be saying that these incidents were justified or that they should be excused. I simply want to make sure we clearly see what happened in each case so we can be in a better, more informed position to assess all of them. I will give a brief summary of each incident, state what the result of each case was, and then give my opinion as to whether or not justice was served, and if not, why it wasn’t.

Trayvon Martin (2012)
Trayvon Martin and his father were visiting his father’s fiancée in Sanford, Florida, in a townhouse complex known as “The Retreat.” In the year prior to the shooting, police had been called 402 times to the complex. There had been 17 burglaries/thefts and one shooting there, and there were dozens of reports of attempted break-ins. George Zimmerman had been picked by the community to be the neighborhood watch program coordinator. On the night of the shooting, Zimmerman called the police at 7:09 pm. While still on the call, Martin started running and Zimmerman ran after him. The police dispatcher told Zimmerman he didn’t need to do that. The call ended at 7:15 pm. The police arrived at 7:17 pm. Within those two minutes, there was an altercation between Martin and Zimmerman and Zimmerman had shot Martin.

The incident soon gained the national spotlight. Unfortunately, the media coverage didn’t do anyone any favors when it aired doctored evidence to the public. NBC edited the audio of Zimmerman’s 911 call to make it sound like the first thing out of Zimmerman’s mouth was that there was a suspicious man, black, walking around the neighborhood, when in reality Zimmerman described Martin’s appearance only after the dispatcher asked him to describe the person. NBC also got hold of the video footage of Zimmerman that night at the police station and purposely blurred out the blood and wounds on his head. Why did they do that? It seems that in their attempt to push a certain narrative that a “white guy” just killed a “black guy” in cold blood, they purposely distorted the evidence they presented to the public.When NBC’s dishonest reporting became known, it poisoned public perception of the entire incident.

Zimmerman ended up being charged with second-degree murder. The case went to trial and he was acquitted of the charge. Many legal experts said the reason why Zimmerman was acquitted was because the evidence did not warrant a second-degree murder charge. Given the evidence, there simply was no way second-degree murder could have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. For the record, first-degree murder is the premediated and intentional killing of another person (i.e. “I hate Jack, he had an affair with my wife. I’m going to his house to murder him”). Second-degree murder is the intentional, but not premeditated, killing of another person (i.e. “I walked into the room, saw Jack in bed with my wife, so I picked up a baseball bat and beat him to death”). Third-degree murder/Manslaughter is essentially the unintentional, unpremeditated killing of another person that nevertheless is the result of a reckless disregard for human life.

To this day, the jury members who acquitted Zimmerman say they felt what he did was wrong. He shouldn’t have keep running after Martin after the dispatcher told him he didn’t need to do that, and his actions did provoke the confrontation. But the evidence (both the angle of the gunshots and the wounds on Zimmerman’s head) indicated that Martin did take Zimmerman to the ground and was on top of him before Zimmerman shot. The reason why justice wasn’t served was because the prosecutor over-charged Zimmerman. He should have been charged and convicted of third-degree murder/manslaughter. But because the prosecutor charged him with something that the evidence simply could not prove, Zimmerman walked away without any punishment for his actions.

Michael Brown (2014)
The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri was the event that sparked horrible riots in Ferguson and really launched the Black Lives Matter movement into the national spotlight. The narrative everyone was told at the time was that Michael Brown and his friend were just walking on the street when a racist cop pulled up and confronted them. It was claimed by a number of witnesses that Brown was on his knees with his hands up and was pleading, “Don’t shoot!” when the cop shot him in the back and killed him. It was this incident that prompted the often-repeated chant, “Hands up! Don’t Shoot!”

President Obama’s Department of Justice came in to do a thorough investigation of the incident and found that, in fact, Brown and his friend had just robbed a store and were walking down the middle of the street when the officer, who had just gotten the dispatch that a robbery had occurred, drove up to Brown and his friend and told them to walk on the sidewalk. At that time Brown rushed the police car and started punching the officer and grabbing for his gun. Brown’s DNA was found in the police car, on the officer’s pants, and on the officer’s gun. During the struggle, the gun went off and then Brown started running away. The officer got out of the car and ordered Brown to stop. At that point, Brown turned around and started to charge the officer again, with his hand in his waistband, as if he might have a gun. At that point the officer shot and killed him. The entire incident happened within 90 seconds.

At no time did Brown drop to his knees, put his hands up, and say, “Don’t shoot.” He was not shot in the back. The witnesses who made those initial claims, when put under oath, admitted they had lied. No charges were made against the officer, and rightly so. The evidence was clear. Brown had robbed a store, the officer was called, Brown then attacked the officer and was subsequently shot. This was not murder. The officer was completely cleared of any wrongdoing. To this day, though, Black Lives Matter still claims on their website that Michael Brown was murdered by a racist cop.

Eric Garner (2014)
The incident involving Eric Garner took place in New York City. The police were called by a local store owner who said Garner was illegally selling single cigarettes without tax stamps. When they showed up to question Garner, he claimed he wasn’t and said he was tired of the police harassing him. At that point, they tried to handcuff Garner and officer Daniel Pantaleo placed his hands on Garner. When Garner began to pull away Pantaleo immediately put Garner in a chokehold and, despite Garner pleading with him that he couldn’t breathe and despite being hand-cuffed, Pantaleo kept up his chokehold. The officers then rolled Garner on his back and Pantaleo continued to lay on top of Garner for seven minutes. Garner was taken to a hospital and was dead within the hour.

A grand jury was convened and no charges at all were filed against Pantaleo, despite the video footage and despite the fact that Pantaleo had seven disciplinary complaints and fourteen individual allegations against him on his record. NYC settled with Garner’s family and paid them $5.9 million. Pantaleo was eventually fired from the police force in 2019.

Was justice done in this case? Absolutely not. Sure, you can’t fault the officers for showing up—they were called to the scene. And if Garner was, in fact, selling single cigarettes, technically he was breaking the law. But I have to ask, “What kind of stupid law is that?” Who were the genius politicians who thought that one up? The injustice in this case begins with a petty an unjust law like that one. But even given that, the actions of Pantaleo were completely unjustified and brutal. No man should ever be choked to death by the police for the “crime” of selling individual cigarettes. At the very least, Pantaleo should have been charged with something; he should have faced some sort of punishment. Now, I suppose we can say that there was a certain amount of justice, in that NYC had to pay $5.9 million to Garner’s family, but in this case, it is clear that a police officer was guilty of an unjustified killing and that officer was not held accountable.

Freddie Gray (2015)
Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore. He was arrested in an area of Baltimore known to have quite a lot of drug deals and violent crime. Three weeks prior to his arrest, the Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby had requested that the police conduct “enhanced” drug enforcement in the problematic areas of the city. What led to his arrest is that upon catching the eye of two officers on bikes, Gray suspiciously took of running.  He was soon apprehended around 8:40 am, and the police van was called. When he was arrested, the officers found that he was carrying a switchblade knife, which was illegal to carry in Baltimore. Later on, the state’s attorney for Baltimore said that the knife was legal under Maryland law, whereas the police task force said the knife was a violation of Baltimore’s city code.

In any case, six officers were involved, and when the officers put Gray in the van, they did not properly secure him in the van. Because of that, at some point on the ride, Gray suffered fatal neck and spinal injuries and was taken to the hospital where, by 9:45 am he was in a coma. He later died. The officers were suspended and later charged with various charges (depending in each officer) that ranged from manslaughter to second-degree “depraved heart” murder. Despite media reports that the officers purposely gave a “rough ride” while Gray was in the van, it was a prosecution witness during one of the trials that testified that he could not say whether or not the ride had been rough. In the end, one officer’s case ended in a mistrial, three others were acquitted, and charges against the two others were dropped because they were found to be completely innocent of the charges. Nevertheless, the city of Baltimore had to pay Gray’s family $6.4 million.

As many prosecuting attorneys and legal analysts said at the time, what made the whole situation worse were the actions of the Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, the one who had wanted more “enhanced” enforcement three weeks prior. Not only did she bring charges against the officers before all the evidence was in, but once all the evidence was laid out, many felt she clearly over-charged. In addition, despite having one of the most experienced homicide prosecutors in Maryland as the chief of her homicide unit, she didn’t ask him to investigate, and she went routinely went before the cameras and practically promised the public of convictions ahead of time.

Was justice served in this case? No, it was not. The reason Gray was arrested and put in the van was because he was carrying a knife that was illegally to carry in Baltimore, even though it was deemed legal in the state of Maryland—that contradiction in the law is a pretty significant problem. But the real problem was that the behavior and rashness of the Baltimore prosecutor essentially torpedoed the whole process by her actions. The officers who didn’t properly secure Gray should have faced some kind of punishment, that is for sure. But when a prosecutor tells the public ahead of time that she’s going to get justice and that the officers would be found guilty, and then over-charges the officers beyond what the evidence can show, and then the officers are acquitted of those charges, that is both setting up a powder keg in the community and then lighting the fuse.

Philando Castile (2016)
In the case of Philando Castile, he was shot in a suburb of Minneapolis by a police officer at point-blank range during a routine traffic stop, while his girlfriend and baby were in the car with him. On top of that, the entire thing was recorded on his girlfriend’s phone. Castile told the officer up front that he had a gun in the glove compartment and that he had a license to carry. Castile volunteered the information. Still, the officer panicked and thought that Castile was reaching for the glove compartment to get the gun, which is an asinine thing to assume—if Castile really wanted to surprise the officer and shoot him, he wouldn’t have told the officer ahead of time that there was a gun in the glove compartment! And so, the officer shot seven times at point blank range at Castile, with his girlfriend sitting right next to him and his baby in the back seat.

The officer was charged with second degree manslaughter (i.e. a person recklessly causes the death of another person), went to trial, and somehow was acquitted. Nevertheless, he was fired from the police and Castile’s family was paid $3.8 million. Was justice done in this case? I certainly don’t think so. It was right not to charge the officer with murder, but certainly reasonable to charge him with second degree manslaughter. The fact that there was even actual video evidence of the entire thing makes it inconceivable to me that that officer was not found guilty of that lesser (and entirely appropriate) charge. Still, even though the officer didn’t get the justice he deserved, the state, as in Eric Garner’s case and Freddie Gray’s case, did, in fact, pay a monetary price for the brutal and unjust actions of one of its officers.

George Floyd (2020)
In the recent incident involving George Floyd, he had bought some cigarettes from a store and was sitting in an SUV with two friends across the street from the store. The store employees thought he had paid with a counterfeit $20 bill, went out to tell him to give the cigarettes back, and when he refused, they called the police. The first two officers arrived, got Floyd out of the car, handcuffed him, and sat him on the sidewalk. They then told him he was under arrest and tried to get him into the police car. Floyd said he was claustrophobic and didn’t want to sit in the police car.

That is when the other two officers drove up and officer Chauvin took over. When they tried to get him in the police car again he resisted getting into the car, and so Chauvin dragged him all the way through the car to the other side and proceeded to put his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds until Floyd died. Despite Floyd’s pleas that he couldn’t breathe, despite him begging the officer not to kill him, and despite numerous eyewitnesses and pleading with Chauvin to take his knee off of Floyd’s neck, Chauvin refused. The most recent reports are telling us that Chauvin and Floyd had both worked security in a nightclub in the past, that Chauvin had a history of getting too physical with people, and that the men had “bumped heads” before.

The entire thing was caught on video, and I don’t know anyone who wasn’t horrified at what happened. Chauvin was arrested a few days later and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Later that charge was amended to include unintentional second-degree murder. The other officers were also charged shortly after with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. We will have to wait and see how this turns out, but I cannot see how justice will have been served if Chauvin is not found guilty.

Conclusion Thus Far
The focus of this initial post has been to assess whether or not the popular narrative that is being propagated today (i.e. that cops, motivated by racism, are going out and hunting black people and that there is a black genocide happening) is true or not. The fact is that narrative simply is not true. Statistics bear this out. The number of times a year police shoot and kill unarmed black men is miniscule.

And as for these six incidents, justice wasn’t served in two of them because over-zealous prosecutors over-charged, and by doing so, torpedoed any chance of real justice; in one instance, the officer was entirely justified because the person, who had just committed a robbery, rushed and attacked him; in one incident, justice wasn’t served because the officer was never even charged; in one incident, justice wasn’t served because although the officer was rightly charged and went to trial, he was acquitted, despite the clear video evidence that showed his reckless behavior. In the final instance, hopefully justice will be done. In any case, even with the four cases in which justice clearly wasn’t done, that hardly is enough to justify the narrative that racist white cops are committing black genocide.

Before we “do something,” we need to clearly see just what the problem is and what the problem isn’t so that what we decide to do actually addresses the real problems and doesn’t inflame and incite even more violence and injustice. And it should be quite obvious that the narrative of racist cops hunting down black people en masse simply is not true. Sadly, though, this is the very narrative that is used to justify the kind of violent rioting we have seen. I’ve heard numerous people say things like, “Well, this is sad to see, no one is excusing it…BUT…can you blame them? Look at how cops are randomly killing black people!”

That simply has to stop. One when says that, not only is one really excusing it, but one is basing that excuse on a provably false narrative. There are very real systematic problems when it comes to black communities, particularly those in the inner cities, and there are very real instances of police brutality and harassment that need to be confronted—but no, our country is not overrun by racist cops who are going out hunting down black men. If we are ever to actually address the very real problems that do exist, we have to fix our eyes on the reality of the situation and stop blindly accepting a provably false narrative that is being used to incite violence, riots, and chaos that result in the death and destruction of even more black lives and black communities.

In my next post, I’ll talk about what I think the real systemic problems are and why they aren’t being addressed. Here’s a clue: spineless and corrupt politicians.