Ex-officer charged in death of George Floyd
A white former Minneapolis police officer was charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter Friday after a shocking video of him kneeling for nearly nine minutes on the neck of a black man set off a wave of protests across the country.
The former officer, Derek Chauvin, 44, was taken into custody on charges that carry a combined maximum 35-year sentence. Chauvin kept his knee planted even as the man, George Floyd, told all four officers involved in his arrest that he could not breathe. At times, Floyd begged “please” and cried out “mama,” according to a statement of probable cause released by prosecutors.
“The defendant had his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in total,” the court document said. “Two minutes and
53 seconds of this was after Mr. Floyd was non-responsive.”
Potentially complicating the prosecution of Chauvin, preliminary results from an autopsy found that Floyd, 46, did not appear to have died from strangulation or asphyxiation. “Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease,” prosecutors said, also listing “potential intoxicants.” The combined effects of his conditions and the way police restrained him “likely contributed to his death.”
City officials were urging calm the day after protests turned violent and a police precinct went up in flames. Mayor Jacob Frey imposed an overnight curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. through Monday morning, and Gov. Tim Walz said, while deploying the National Guard, that he wanted to lift up the voices of “those who are expressing rage and anger and those who are demanding justice” and “not those who throw firebombs.”
“I refuse to have it take away the attention from the stain that we need to be working on,” he said. “These are things that have been brewing in this country for 400 years.”
By evening, protests were once again underway in cities across the country. In Atlanta, a demonstration grew tense as hundreds of protesters gathered outside CNN headquarters, some jumping on police cars and setting one on fire. In New York, protesters clashed with police around Barclays Center in Brooklyn. And in Washington, a large crowd gathered and chanted outside the White House, prompting the Secret Service to put the building on lockdown.
President Donald Trump, who previously called the video of Floyd’s death “shocking,” drew criticism for a tweet early Friday that called the protesters “thugs” and said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The comments prompted Twitter to attach a warning to the tweet, saying it violated the company’s rules about “glorifying violence.”
Later in the day, the president declared “law and order will prevail” as protests continued to intensify. “We can’t allow a situation like happened in Minneapolis to descend further into lawless anarchy and chaos,” Trump said during a roundtable event with company executives on opening the country amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Addressing his earlier comments on Twitter, he said, “The looters should not be allowed to drown out the voices of so many peaceful protesters. They hurt so badly what is happening.”
The delay in arresting Chauvin was one factor spurring the demonstrations, but the city’s police force has found itself criticized on all sides. At first it was lambasted for the volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets that left demonstrators dazed, bruised and angry. Then police were denounced for excessive restraint, taking the unusual decision to abandon a police station to protesters who quickly torched it.
The police actions in Minneapolis, in the death of Floyd and the heavy-handed tactics against protesters, have once again surfaced the long and painful history of police brutality against black Americans and revived the kind of protests the nation saw from Ferguson, Mo., to Baltimore several years ago. As parts of Minneapolis burned, protests burst out in various cities including Louisville, Ky.; Phoenix; Denver; New York and Los Angeles.
On Friday, Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer representing Floyd’s family, released a statement calling the arrest of Chauvin “a welcome but overdue step on the road to justice.” But he said the charges did not go far enough.
“We expected a first-degree murder charge. We want a first-degree murder charge. And we want to see the other officers arrested,” said the statement, which was attributed to Floyd’s family and to Crump.
“The pain that the black community feels over this murder and what it reflects about the treatment of black people in America is raw and is spilling out onto streets across America,” the statement said.
It was not clear that charging one officer would still the passions that have incited not just Minneapolis but the entire nation. The Republican and Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary committees both said Friday they were planning to hold hearings on excessive use of force by police and racial violence.
Some lawmakers and criminal justice experts have called the response in Minneapolis inept as state and city officials, hoping to assert some semblance of control over the smoldering streets, have struggled to find the right balance between deploying enough force to stop the demonstrations while not deploying so much as to spur more.
“The response from the police has been inadequate at every level,” said Patricia Torres Ray, the state senator who represents the downtown district where police officers abandoned the 3rd Precinct building even as small businesses burned and residents cowered in their homes. “If they are here to protect my community that is what they need to do,” she said.
Police officers in Minneapolis and other cities have come under increasing criticism for strong-armed tactics like the use of tear gas, military equipment and rubber bullets, repeating actions that devastated other cities like Ferguson in 2014.
“You do not want to have them visibly lining the streets in a protest about police violence, but you should certainly have your resources nearby ready to deploy,” said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who studies policing and is a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law.
Video from the scene and eyewitness accounts depict a cat-and-mouse game that evolved through dusk. Protesters rushed a temporary chain-link fence encircling the precinct parking lot to hurl rocks or burning objects, while officers in protective gear sheltering behind a concrete wall occasionally charged the fence to fire off stun grenades.