Opinion: Don’t whitewash what happened to George Floyd

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On May 25, 2020, my crew was dispatched to a “minor” medical call down the street from our fire station. It was not minor. George Floyd’s murder sparked an uprising and forced a chaotic, brief national reckoning. As the five-year anniversary looms, I dread the retrospectives, the “where are we now” features that will not state where we actually are. I am bracing for ugly.

I’ve been warning folks for months: President Donald Trump will pardon Derek Chauvin.

Last winter and early this spring, people doubted me. Trust me, I warned. Trump will make a grand, gruesome show of pardoning Chauvin, overturning the rare convictions of four Minneapolis police officers.

Now, rumors of that possibility are widely circulating.

I responded to Floyd that night. I worked through the uprising and during the fraught, tender after-times. I testified in both the state and federal trials against Chauvin and the other officers. I wrote a book about the sociology of emergency response. I still work those same streets.

This was not, as Ben Shapiro claimed recently and Elon Musk reiterated, a media-driven witch hunt. George Floyd did not die of a drug overdose. The convictions were not a travesty of justice.

I want to clarify what did happen for those who might have lost the script in the noise and distraction of the past five years. Because as Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

For over nine minutes, the three officers — Derek Chauvin, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, with Tou Thao acting as crowd control — knelt on Floyd as he lay face down, his arms cuffed behind his back, pinning him with their knees and body weight. Floyd was not fighting the officers; he was fighting for his breath. Crushed beneath Chauvin and Lane and Kueng, he suffered prone positional asphyxia.

A small crowd of bystanders recognized Floyd’s anguish and distress, including an off-duty Minneapolis firefighter who tried multiple times to get the officers to allow her to evaluate or treat him. She was rebuffed and threatened by Thao. Floyd went unconscious and unresponsive. None of the officers recognized he had no pulse and was not breathing. They did not check. Even then, eerily, stonily, Chauvin remained perched on Floyd’s neck, kneeling on him as if he were a flight risk.

By the time the two paramedics arrived, having been told only that the police had someone with a “mouth injury” in custody, there would be no reviving Floyd.

By the time a rookie firefighter and I jumped into the ambulance to assist the medics with resuscitation efforts, there would be no miracles. None of us knew what had happened, not until much later. The long minutes of Floyd’s struggle and demise were unfathomable, even to those of us who respond to EMS calls for a living.

If ever there was a valid case of police negligence and officer accountability for killing an unarmed suspect, this was it. Reasonable people saw the excerpted footage from Darnella Frazier’s phone and were repulsed, aghast, heartbroken. It was horrible.

It is true that the officers did not shoot Floyd; they did not break his windpipe with a baton or flashlight. If Chauvin or his charges had listened to the firefighter or any of the crowd, if they had done their duty and checked on the man’s condition, Floyd would not have died.

They killed a man in their custody without intending to kill him. The consequences of their actions weigh more than their intentions. I said at the time that if prosecutors could just let the footage from the officers’ own body cameras play for the jury, the trial would be over by noon.

Consider what has been offered as proof of police innocence (and I’m cutting the fervid, racist calumny): Floyd’s criminal history, his intoxication, his “refusal to comply.” None of these are a death penalty offense — certainly not for summary execution. Let’s say Floyd was drunk, high, panicked, hyperventilating, handcuffed and in custody. Each of those factors puts more responsibility on the police to care for him. Failing to distinguish between active resistance and incoherent panic can be fatal — and was.

Despite the throaty and indulgent claims to the contrary by a vocal minority and right-wing media, the guilty verdict wasn’t a liberal witch hunt or radical-leftist railroading. The officers were not framed. The trials were thorough and fair.

I want to reject the notion that these were bloodthirsty, murderous officers (although both Thao and Chauvin had lengthy histories of complaints against them for excessive use of force), just as I reject the claim that Floyd “should have followed their orders.” There were no explicit orders he disobeyed. Killing someone you’re trying to calm, when the fatal factor is the force of your restraint, is criminal.

There remains the presumption that a trained police officer knows the difference between a threat and a non-threat, that if they take lethal action, there must be a valid reason. This is the capacious logic of the qualified immunity doctrine. There have been so many cases, with video and eyewitnesses, where police shoot and kill a panicked adolescent, a handcuffed man, a man sitting in his car, a man on his back, a man walking away from them, and always, always, we must defer to the officer’s expert opinion that it felt like a life-or-death situation.

Yet we have witnessed the police demonstrating profound restraint when encountering threatening, armed white men. The striking discrepancies need examination. The color of skin appears to be the distinguishing factor between instantly taking aggressive, lethal actions vs. remaining at a distance, open to negotiation, while withstanding verbal and physical threats.

Chauvin did his two rookie officers dirty. Together, they killed a man who was no threat to them. His aggressive, unheeding treatment of a suspect in crisis failed them — and killed Floyd. As I’ve written before, all emergency responders would benefit from better training and improved understanding about people with altered mentation. The drunk and high, sure; but also diabetics, head traumas, dementia and seizure patients, people in psychiatric crisis, the elderly and non-English speakers. There are, sadly, examples of police officers hurting or killing individuals with the above conditions, treating someone who is incapable of responding coherently as a threat. Failure to distinguish is bad public service.

The claim that Chauvin is innocent only resonates within the framework of a contrived white innocence by which both citizens and police abdicate responsibility. Too many white Americans, including this president, have been unable to let go of their anger, inchoate or explicit, that — for once — they could not simply dismiss the police killing of an unarmed Black man. There is no acceptable way to protest America’s deep racial imbalance without aggravating white people who prefer not to think about it. As Beyoncé said, “It’s been said that racism is so American, that when we protest racism, some assume we are protesting America.”

What is central and unspoken in these objections begs the question: Are the police ever guilty of killing someone? Pardoning Chauvin would be a cruel, symbolic gesture, one that reinforces white supremacy while reinforcing the implicit, ugly fact that not all lives matter.

I work a job where for generations, only (straight) white men were allowed to apply. Nonwhite men, and later women of all races, had to fight, sue and endure bias, threats and vicious hostility just to attain the job white guys presumed was their birthright. They do well despite systemic opposition, overt harassment, malicious gossip and the loneliness of being “the only” on a crew. I say without hesitation that many of my most influential mentors, leaders and coworkers have been women and people of color. My career, this profession, would be poorer for their exclusion. Remember this when Trump sullies the next victim’s name, when people like Stephen Miller or JD Vance or Musk crow about freeing “good” cops, about ending DEI, about banning books and history and ideas in the name of protecting “our” kids.

I’ve been chastised for failing to “Back the Blue,” for besmirching the police by speaking out, by testifying. How dare I rat out fellow badged brothers? How dare I go public?

Essentially, I’ve been called a race traitor.

If I must condone abusive, unthinking violence in order to keep my — what? white-man bonafides? my brotherhood badge? — I choose Huck Finn’s path: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”

Jeremy Norton is a firefighter/EMT with the Minneapolis Fire Department. His memoir, “Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response” was a 2024 Minnesota Book Award finalist.

COMING UP

Minnesota Star Tribune Opinion is publishing items each day this week related to the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd.

Tuesday: Minneapolis poet laureate Junauda Petrus presents work commissioned for the anniversary.

Wednesday: The Lake Street corridor is coming back to life.

Thursday: We know how Chauvin killed Floyd, but his motivation remains unclear.

Friday: Black Minnesotans consider how much has changed.

Saturday: People in law enforcement consider the impact on their profession.

Sunday: Minnesota Star Tribune readers discuss the evolution of their thinking and their hopes.