Coleman Hughes and Bari Weiss' Free Press are accused of intellectual dishonesty in the George Floyd case
Radley Balko is incensed that free thinking black people like Coleman Hughes believe The Fall of Minneapolis documentary suggests that Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted.
But what is taking place is not what it appears to be. Balko is not attacking ‘The Fall of Minneapolis’ or Liz Collin or J.C. Chaix. They are merely the set decorations.
Balko does not mince words when sharing how little he cares about ‘far-right white grievance mongers’ or your ‘racist uncle.’ His blunt force attack is due to black voices including
, , but especially who accept the reasonableness of the points made in the documentary.Describing this as a debunking of The Fall of Minneapolis is inaccurate. This is a reflex action to the violation of the orthodoxy by black moderates considering plausible alternative interpretations of the most significant police incident in decades.
The exhausting volume of words and the particular detail paid to some issues inflate his piece to where he fights against the three key points challenged by Coleman Hughes. (Balko claims to contend with only two.) Hughes writes about these in The Free Press:
“The knee-on-the-neck hold was Chauvin’s signature move, as opposed to a standard maneuver practiced by the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). Asphyxiation was the cause of George Floyd’s death. Chauvin received a fair trial by an impartial jury.”
Hughes gets a challenge by Balko on the case for asphyxiation. Despite hundreds of words written, Balko only explains that the autopsy report does not say that asphyxiation was the cause of death, however there is a reason for belief that asphyxiation did end the life of Floyd by physical, positional, and mechanical means caused by the restraint of Officer Chauvin. There also was no visible presence of injury to the airway. Simply put, due to confirmation and cognitive bias on the part of Balko, this invisible evidence exists despite the lack of physical evidence including visible injury or petechiae.
Balko also lists reasons why speech is possible while receiving an inadequate volume of air to support life. Normal respiration is about half a liter of air. The reference he uses to cite is a 2021, post George Floyd, quote from the Annals of Internal Medicine, dismissive of the existence of prior training that specified that if people can speak, that their airway is not obstructed. This has been the American Heart Association first responder training for decades and remained so during the most recent time I attended the required training.
Autopsy and fentanyl
Dr. Andrew Baker performed the autopsy on George Floyd. While the autopsy did not find that there was any apparent damage to Floyd’s airway and as Hughes writes:
‘That autopsy found no evidence of asphyxia. In fact, it found “no life-threatening injuries” whatsoever. What it did find was that Floyd died of “cardiopulmonary arrest”—his heart and lungs stopped working—during “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” The autopsy’s toxicology report also stated that Floyd had a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl in his blood (11 ng/mL), along with small amounts of methamphetamine and morphine.’
In part two, Balko explains tolerance among long-term drug users, but this was nearly four times a fatal dose of 3 nanograms/milliliter. However, he seems to be unaware that that Narcan is a staple in harm reduction centers. Also, 300 very experienced drug users die of overdoses on the sidewalks of San Francisco every year.
Balko, for some reason, provides the ungracious response of Dr. Joye Carter to slight Hughes; to insult him by proxy. He writes:
I also sent Hughes’s column to Joye Carter, the former chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C. Carter was also a consultant for the prosecution during Chauvin’s trial.
“I wish you could give me back the time I spent reading that,” Carter told me. “Who is that author? He strikes me as someone who’s both extremely confident in himself and also extremely naive. There are a lot of assumptions and conclusions in that article that just have no basis in reality.”
What an arrogance-soaked statement. Who would include that? Dr. Carter is a black female who distinguished herself becoming the first African American Chief Medical Examiner in the United States.
Wildly dishonest
Balko accuses Hughes of being ‘wildly dishonest.’ However, if anyone is ‘wildly dishonest,’ it is Balko who glosses over the most basic details of a straightforward arrest. He also questions whether Hughes contacted multiple coroners (as Balko himself did) to validate the information presented in the documentary. (Balko states: “If Hughes spoke with a single forensic pathologist or other subject matter expert for his column, he didn’t mention them.”) Does anyone require further investigation after receiving credible information that makes sense? Does anyone continue looking for a lost item after they have found it?
Balko doesn’t understand that police work is a nonstop rapidly changing risk management project and you often have to do your best until you fully understand the dangers around you. Policy manuals don’t even purport to cover every situation.
The audio and the images from Darnella Frazier’s video have not changed in the last three years. Bystanders ask why don’t you put him in the car. Officers respond, we tried that for five minutes. My first impression of the video was that they were restraining him while waiting for EMS. The blood on his forehead and nose was from self-harm banging his face into the partition. Body worn camera documents the fact that EMS was called and that they were out of the car.
Lack of perspective and false equivalency
Another error that Balko makes, in his theoretical debate with Coleman Hughes is perspective. Balko describes ‘when Chauvin encountered Floyd’ but Chauvin neither initiated the contact nor had any intention of meeting. He came because he was called to help officers on scene. This fact is critical in understanding the lack of equivalency between the roles.
Chauvin is at work, doing his job on a holiday. He lacks the choice of what call to take, and he could have been responding to a noise complaint, stolen property, traffic crash or a trespasser call. Meanwhile, George Floyd has committed a felony and is violently resisting arrest.
This is where the lack of equivalency matters. Balko introduces the legal concept eggshell theory. His examples pose him punching another person, something that would normally result in minor injury, but in his example results in a fatality due to an extraordinary circumstance. But perhaps the actual appropriate legal term is self-induced jeopardy. This would apply to officers shooting into cars because the car is charging them but ultimately because they intentionally stood in front of a vehicle.
The basic facts
Regardless of your feelings for Chauvin, it is necessary to remember some key undisputed facts about his role in the arrest of George Floyd.
First, Chauvin was not the arresting officer.
Second, he responded as back up to assist when two officers couldn’t manage Floyd safely.
Third, after finally getting Floyd in the back of the patrol car, he started hitting his head on the partition, causing self-harm, and that was when EMS was called and Floyd was extracted from the vehicle.
Fourth, the officers discussed MRT and then worked as a team to immobilize the arrestee to both prevent escape or further self-harm until an ambulance arrived.
While Balko did note that the technique was normally used in conjunction with applying a ripp-hobble restraint, he seemingly couldn’t consider was if this trained and authorized technique has value in dynamic situations when ripp-hobble restraints are not immediately available but you have a combative prisoner?
The real issue
Key to understanding what this is - and what it isn’t - is that Derek Chauvin has been convicted and is in prison. In certain respects, it is game over and if you are anti-Chauvin, who cares what anyone thinks? Apart from him receiving an unlikely pardon absolving him of his adjudication of a murder, this should be a closed matter.
Journalists Coleman Hughes and
appear to be causing the correct alarm bells to go off but the real question is why is this issue so dangerous to those on the left?Please keep all our peace officers in your prayers.
References:
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https://deadspin.com/all-the-reasons-bob-kroll-can-go-to-hell-including-his-1843905449
https://www.americanpeaceofficer.com/p/minneapolis-has-fallen?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://rumble.com/v3vyvzv-the-fall-of-minneapolis.html
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-4186
Great article! I have one correction for you. Dr. Andrew Baker was the coroner. If Dr. Andrew Baxter was making the ruling, I would’ve done the right thing.
Sorry to be late to the party but wanted to say I once really enjoyed reading Rise of the Warrior Cop. Still do to some extent. When I first read it I felt it was a great admonition to police agencies not to go crazy with the military gear and warrior attitudes. But since he published that book, it seems he’s become more and more unhinged