Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: May twenty fifth, twenty twenty, Minneapolis, Minnesota, early evening, A
Speaker 2: nine one one dispatcher makes a call.
Speaker 3: If you start as the only available audio factor has
Speaker 3: helped foods down to Doggle thirty seventy nine Chicadgle on
Speaker 3: thirty eighth day, are reporting that there's a person who
Speaker 3: will use the owners that still as a business.
Speaker 2: The dispatcher is Jennis Scurry, seven years on the job.
Speaker 2: She's in a big room with multiple computer screens and
Speaker 2: televisions running live video feeds from around the city. The
Speaker 2: details from the call come over her screen. Thirty eighth
Speaker 2: in Chicago. Suspect at a grocery store.
Speaker 3: Suspect of a black pale sixty four four tollars sitting
Speaker 3: on the part of a bloom or Stadius play boy
Speaker 3: while we're heresos.
Speaker 2: She sends a squad card to the scene, looks up
Speaker 2: and realizes the city has a fixed camera on that
Speaker 2: corner of thirty eighth in Chicago, so she has a
Speaker 2: live video feed up on one of the screens. She
Speaker 2: sees the officers try to put the suspect in the
Speaker 2: back of one of the squad cars. She looks away
Speaker 2: when she looks back. He's on the ground, handcuffed, face down,
Speaker 2: one officer kneeling on his neck. The suspect is George Floyd.
Speaker 2: The officer on top of him is Derek Chauvin. She
Speaker 2: looks away again, takes another call. At the criminal trial
Speaker 2: the following year, arising from the events that day in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, Scurry was the first witness called by the prosecution,
Speaker 2: and she relived the events of that evening step by step.
Speaker 4: At some point, then did you go back to this,
Speaker 4: how did it appear at that time? When you went
Speaker 4: back to it, it had not changed?
Speaker 1: And what do you mean by that?
Speaker 5: They were still on the ground, The whole situation was
Speaker 5: still in the scene.
Speaker 1: Do you recall approximately how long that was?
Speaker 5: No, it was long enough. It was long enough that
Speaker 5: I could look back multiple times.
Speaker 4: And so when you did look back, still on the
Speaker 4: ground like depicted here, essentially correct. And what did you
Speaker 4: think about us when you look back and saw that
Speaker 4: it hadn't changed?
Speaker 5: I first asked if the screens had frozen.
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my
Speaker 2: podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm guessing you watched
Speaker 2: the bystander videos of what happened that night during the
Speaker 2: fevered COVID summer of twenty twenty. I know idea, I
Speaker 2: knew the villain, I knew the victim. I thought that's
Speaker 2: all I needed to know. But then I ran across
Speaker 2: the George Floyd video again not long ago, by chance
Speaker 2: one of those serendipitous Internet moments, and watched it for
Speaker 2: the first time in years, far from the intense emotions
Speaker 2: of the first time I saw it, and I realized
Speaker 2: I didn't understand what was happening, what Chauvin was doing,
Speaker 2: but the other police officers on the scene were thinking,
Speaker 2: which made me wonder if somehow, the first time around,
Speaker 2: I had missed a lesson of the case. So over
Speaker 2: the next two episodes, I'm going to do a close
Speaker 2: reading of what happened to George Floyd, an unfamiliar reading,
Speaker 2: starting with the perspective of the very first person to
Speaker 2: see things unfold in real time, Jennie Curry. Because before
Speaker 2: George Floyd stopped breathing, before the angry crowd gathered, before
Speaker 2: the scene turned into tragedy, she could see Derek Chauvin
Speaker 2: behaving so strangely that It led her, a nine one
Speaker 2: one dispatcher who had seen a thousand crime scenes in
Speaker 2: her career, to stop and stare at the video feed
Speaker 2: in disbelief, as in, this can't be real. The screen
Speaker 2: must be frozen.
Speaker 1: Did you find that it had frozen?
Speaker 5: No, I was told that it was not frozen.
Speaker 1: Did you see the screen change yourself?
Speaker 5: Yes, I saw the person's moving.
Speaker 1: So what did you start thinking at that point?
Speaker 5: Something might be wrong?
Speaker 1: Wrong with what? Or are you thinking?
Speaker 5: Instinct of.
Speaker 6: In the instant, something's not going right, whether it be
Speaker 6: they needed more assistance or if there were, they're just
Speaker 6: something wasn't right. I don't know how to explain it.
Speaker 6: It was a good instinct to tell me that now
Speaker 6: we can be concerned.
Speaker 1: And what did you decide to do?
Speaker 5: I took that instinct and I called the sergeant.
Speaker 4: Have you ever in your career before called a sergeant
Speaker 4: for something like those multiple for an incident like this
Speaker 4: to be exact, No.
Speaker 2: In the beginning, there was nothing extraordinary about the situation unfolding.
Speaker 2: On the corner of thirty eighth in Chicago, a man
Speaker 2: passes a counterfeit twenty dollars bill. The clerk calls nine
Speaker 2: to one one. The suspect hasn't run, He's sitting in
Speaker 2: his car across the street. He isn't armed, he isn't hostile.
Speaker 2: He seems like he's high. Two officers approach him and
Speaker 2: tell him to get out of the car. He pleads
Speaker 2: and complains, more like a scared child than a grown man.
Speaker 2: He talks about his mom. He finally gets out. The
Speaker 2: officers handcuff him. They asked him his name. He says
Speaker 2: it's George Floyd. They lead him over to the squad car,
Speaker 2: but he doesn't want to get in the back seat.
Speaker 2: He says he's claustrophobic. He's having trouble breathing. He struggles
Speaker 2: and squirms, and because he's a big man, well over
Speaker 2: six feet and two hundred pounds, it makes things difficult.
Speaker 2: In the struggle, he cuts his mouth. One of the
Speaker 2: officers calls for an ambulance. A second squad car arrives.
Speaker 2: There are now four police officers on the scene and
Speaker 2: one handcuff suspect, clearly unhappy but deferential. We know from
Speaker 2: the body camp footage that by this point he has
Speaker 2: used the words sorry and please fifty seven times leave.
Speaker 2: That's Floyd is he going to jail. That's Derek Chauvin.
Speaker 2: He's one of the two officers in a second squad
Speaker 2: car that just pulled up.
Speaker 7: He's under a rush right now for forgery. I'll tell
Speaker 7: you tell what's going on.
Speaker 2: Come on out, get him on the ground. Chauvin says,
Speaker 2: as the senior officer president, he's taking control of the situation.
Speaker 2: He wants Floyd in the prone position, face down, hands
Speaker 2: cuffed behind his back. He then puts one of his
Speaker 2: knees on the side of Floyd's neck and the other
Speaker 2: between Floyd's shoulder blades, a technique sometimes used with non
Speaker 2: compliant subjects.
Speaker 7: Please please let me stay.
Speaker 2: In, Chauvin says, we'll hold him until the ambulance shows up.
Speaker 2: Floyd says, let me stand. Chauvin says no. So what
Speaker 2: does Chauvin do next? Chauvin doesn't move. Chauvin just sits there.
Speaker 2: He's frozen. Right around this time, an off duty firefighter
Speaker 2: named Genevieve Hanson was out for a walk. Happens upon
Speaker 2: the scene, identifies herself as a firefighter, a trained first responder.
Speaker 8: I was pretty focused on trying to get the officers
Speaker 8: to let me.
Speaker 4: Help and how are you doing that, trying to get
Speaker 4: the officers to focus on your and get help.
Speaker 9: I think in my memory, I tried different tactics of
Speaker 9: calm and reasoning. I tried to be assert of, I
Speaker 9: pled and was desperate.
Speaker 2: Henson testified at Chauven's trial.
Speaker 4: In terms of you know his face when you're first there,
Speaker 4: or even the rest of him. What is that you
Speaker 4: saw that made you concerned about his medical needs?
Speaker 9: I was really concerned about I thought his face looked
Speaker 9: puffy and swollen, which would happen if you are putting
Speaker 9: a grown man's weight on someone's neck. I noticed some
Speaker 9: fluid coming from what looked like George's foot body, and
Speaker 9: in a lot of cases we see a patient.
Speaker 8: Release their bladder when they die.
Speaker 9: I can't tell you exactly where the flood was coming from,
Speaker 9: but that's where my mind went.
Speaker 8: He wasn't moving. He was being restrained, but he wasn't moving.
Speaker 2: Later at the trial, a police surgeon named Bill Smuck
Speaker 2: walked the jury through the videotape of Floyd's final moments,
Speaker 2: pointing out all the mounting warning signs.
Speaker 10: What I want you to also watch for is what
Speaker 10: is his right arm doing as this progresses? You will
Speaker 10: see him pushing against the tire. You'll see his right arm,
Speaker 10: his elbow pushing against. Yes, I'd like to know what
Speaker 10: is it showing us? Why is that significant? This is
Speaker 10: very important because it's showing what mister Floyd is doing
Speaker 10: to try and breathe, to get his right side of
Speaker 10: his chest up off of the pavement so that he
Speaker 10: can bring in air.
Speaker 2: Smart breaks down Floyd's final minutes frame by frame.
Speaker 1: Let's look at another segment. Brand if we can go
Speaker 1: to start at twenty twenty one.
Speaker 10: You will hear his voice gets weaker and weaker. You
Speaker 10: will see his los facial expression. You will hear him
Speaker 10: make sounds of trying to breathe as we get closer.
Speaker 1: He then goes on.
Speaker 10: He will then see in the next section he has
Speaker 10: what's called and anoxuc seizure. That's a fancy word for
Speaker 10: his brain is going without oxygen very low. His legs shake,
Speaker 10: but you're also you will actually see and you can
Speaker 10: hear the handcuff shake, and you'll see the body camera
Speaker 10: shake when he has in anox ex seizure.
Speaker 2: Further on down the line, clear warning signs, clear red flags,
Speaker 2: not to mention Genevieve Henson and other bystanders are just
Speaker 2: a few feet away shouting at him to get off Floyd,
Speaker 2: and then another voice joins that chorus. It's one of
Speaker 2: the other officers. He says, should we roll him on
Speaker 2: his side? Rolling him on his side is what's known
Speaker 2: as the recovery position. Having someone prone on the hard
Speaker 2: ground with their hands cuffed and with a knee on
Speaker 2: their neck and in the middle of their back was
Speaker 2: acceptable practice Minneapolis at the time, but the city's use
Speaker 2: of force training explicitly stated that the technique was only
Speaker 2: supposed to be used briefly and on someone quote exhibiting
Speaker 2: active aggression unquote. It's dangerous, it's hard to breathe I
Speaker 2: tried it. I had a friend put me in that position.
Speaker 2: It's scary. So when the subject calms down, you're supposed
Speaker 2: to roll them over. That's what the fellow officer is saying.
Speaker 2: We have to roll them over. But Chauvin says no.
Speaker 2: He says, that's why we've got the ambulance coming. He's
Speaker 2: not reacting to anything. This is what so alarms Jenni
Speaker 2: scurry when she looks back up at the scene. She's
Speaker 2: expecting things to have resolved themselves. Things should have happened,
Speaker 2: but nothing's happened. All she sees is Chauvin up on
Speaker 2: the screen, sitting on Floyd's neck, his hand casually in
Speaker 2: his pocket, his face impassive. He's frozen, or, to use
Speaker 2: here's a term favored by psychologists, he's fixated.
Speaker 11: Fixation is simply going down the wrong path and getting
Speaker 11: stuck on that path.
Speaker 2: That's Gary Klein. He consults with governments, armies, and hospitals
Speaker 2: on how to make better decisions under pressure, and wrote
Speaker 2: the classic Sources of Power, one of my favorite books ever.
Speaker 2: For Klein, One of the most revealing case studies in
Speaker 2: fixation was the actions of the Israeli intelligence chief Elizia
Speaker 2: in the weeks leading up to the Yom Kapur War
Speaker 2: between Egypt and Israel in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 11: He had what was now called an israel conception. His
Speaker 11: conception was, Egypt will never attack us until they have
Speaker 11: air superiority, and they don't have air superiority, and we
Speaker 11: have nothing to worry about. And he held on to
Speaker 11: that belief until about two hours before the attack. But
Speaker 11: his subordinates were seeing all these counterindicators they're seeing the
Speaker 11: Egyptians moving troops and changing configurations at the border, all
Speaker 11: these signs that indicate and the attack is imminent. And
Speaker 11: Zarah said, this is just a training exercise. But then
Speaker 11: the subordin has showed there was no sign of training
Speaker 11: going on, so this was just a cover story. And
Speaker 11: Zarah refused to pass their concerns on higher and then
Speaker 11: the attack occurred. So he was fixated and he wouldn't budge.
Speaker 2: The fixated decision maker cannot accept new information. Every time
Speaker 2: new information arises that challenges his original conception, he explains
Speaker 2: it away. Klein Wentz did a big project at Johns
Speaker 2: Hopkins University Hospital looking at how physicians made diagnoses, and
Speaker 2: he found that the most experienced doctors were acutely aware
Speaker 2: of their own tendency towards fixation. It was a constant battle.
Speaker 11: I watched one of Examine Nation where the attending position.
Speaker 11: This is the first observation I made. The attending position
Speaker 11: is examining the person. The person's describing his condition and
Speaker 11: seems pretty straightforward, and at a certain point he says,
Speaker 11: what's this on your back? Well, it turned out he
Speaker 11: had had surgery to repair some heart defect. This hadn't
Speaker 11: been in his history. And the physician said, wait a minute,
Speaker 11: let's start over. And he started the whole exam over
Speaker 11: because he was aware that there might have been implications
Speaker 11: in what he did that he didn't see because he
Speaker 11: didn't have this other possibility.
Speaker 2: Did he end up changing his diagnosis?
Speaker 11: Oh yes, yes, they found a much more serious problem
Speaker 11: that the resident and some of the nurses had missed.
Speaker 2: Fighting fixation means being willing to throw away all the
Speaker 2: work you've done in making sense of a complicated situation
Speaker 2: and saying, let's start over. This is what Chauvin doesn't do.
Speaker 2: He never says to himself, let's start over.
Speaker 11: Derek Chaugan, he had a script for how to handle
Speaker 11: people who are larger and intimidating, and that's as far
Speaker 11: as he ever gots.
Speaker 2: You can't be Is it fair to say you can't
Speaker 2: be a police officer if you're not willing to revisit
Speaker 2: your script.
Speaker 11: You can't be an effective police officer if you are
Speaker 11: stuck on your script.
Speaker 2: Floyd is trying to raise his chest off the ground. Oh,
Speaker 2: that's because he's still resisting arrest. Some lady says she's
Speaker 2: a firefighter. Is she really?
Speaker 1: In fact?
Speaker 2: When Genevieve Hansen moves closer, Show then goes for his mace,
Speaker 2: Floyd's voice starts to falter. About time, Maybe he's finally
Speaker 2: going to stop complaining. One of his fellow officers says,
Speaker 2: put him in the recovery position, dude, I've been doing
Speaker 2: this for nineteen years. Back off. The crowd that has
Speaker 2: gathered around Floyd in the four officers is becoming more
Speaker 2: and more vocal. But Chauvin isn't moving.
Speaker 7: He's not responsive right now. No, bro, look at him.
Speaker 7: He's having responsive right now? Is he breathing right now?
Speaker 7: Check his book, Check his pulse.
Speaker 2: Check his book, check his pulse, Check his pulse. One
Speaker 2: of the other cops at the scene says to the
Speaker 2: officers sitting behind Chauvin, I can't find one. Floyd is dead,
Speaker 2: and still Chauvin doesn't move. He will remain on Floyd's
Speaker 2: neck for another three minutes, even after the ambulance arrives.
Speaker 2: Years from now, when university professors teach courses on decision sciences,
Speaker 2: they will play this video as a textbook example of fixation.
Speaker 2: But why is Chauvin fixated? What psychological mechanism could describe
Speaker 2: why he would just sit there. In the aftermath of
Speaker 2: the murder, it was said again and again that Chauvin
Speaker 2: is a racist. But calling someone racist is a description,
Speaker 2: not an explanation. Why is Chauvin stuck on his script?
Speaker 2: One of the most influential ideas to emerge in social
Speaker 2: psychology in recent years is something called hostile intention attribution,
Speaker 2: arising out of the work of Ken Dodge.
Speaker 12: For me, a very poignant event in my own thinking
Speaker 12: was that as a clinical psychologist, I was seeing a
Speaker 12: highly aggressive teenager in a state psychiatric hospital.
Speaker 2: That's Dodge, who teaches at Duke University, and.
Speaker 12: The boy's name was Rocky. I came up to his
Speaker 12: ward one day, approached him from behind to say hello.
Speaker 12: I was trying to establish a relationship with him. Touched
Speaker 12: him on the shoulder from behind, and he turned around
Speaker 12: and punched me in the gut, And in a nanosecond
Speaker 12: he stopped and said, oh my, you can't be too
Speaker 12: careful around here. And you know, he was making a
Speaker 12: decision that in that moment that somebody touching him on
Speaker 12: the back shoulder might be a threat, and he responded
Speaker 12: that was his mindset.
Speaker 2: Could have interpreted that touch on the shoulder in any
Speaker 2: number of ways. He could have ignored it, shrugged it off,
Speaker 2: or assumed it was an invitation for affection and turned
Speaker 2: and smiled. But he didn't. He chose to focus on
Speaker 2: it and to assume that Dodge had a hostile intent.
Speaker 2: That's hostile intent attribution, the pattern of interpreting everything as
Speaker 2: a threat. You can look at someone like that kid
Speaker 2: Rocky and offer an organic explanation of his behavior. He's
Speaker 2: a bad seed, he's wired wrong. But Dodge wants us
Speaker 2: to look at problematic behavior as a developmental problem as well.
Speaker 2: Somewhere along the way, someone's personal experience left the unprepared
Speaker 2: to make proper sense of the world. A very small child,
Speaker 2: for example, does not understand the distinction between an intentional
Speaker 2: act and an accident. That's something you learn. You gradually
Speaker 2: figure out that that actions can come with any number
Speaker 2: of different explanations.
Speaker 12: I remember going to the pediatrician at age four and
Speaker 12: being definitely afraid of getting a shot right. But my
Speaker 12: parents and everybody certainly quickly told me that doctor was
Speaker 12: not trying to be mean to me, right, And I
Speaker 12: had to learn that. But I do think that it's
Speaker 12: a socialization of benign intent that early life is about,
Speaker 12: rather than the socialization of hostile intent.
Speaker 2: After talking to Dodge, I began to observe my own
Speaker 2: kids more closely. They're both preschoolers two years apart. The
Speaker 2: big one loves to man handle her little sister, and
Speaker 2: most of the time that interaction is greeted with laughter.
Speaker 2: But sometimes if my eldest goes too far, her sister cries,
Speaker 2: and I realized that what they're doing is, to use
Speaker 2: Dodge's phrase, learning how to make accurate attributions of each
Speaker 2: other's behavior. When the big sisters push is too aggressive,
Speaker 2: the little one learns that seems to have a different
Speaker 2: intention from what we were doing before. She's learning the
Speaker 2: difference between fighting and playing. And when the little one
Speaker 2: cries out instead of laughing, the big one learns, oh,
Speaker 2: if I want to keep playing, I have to make
Speaker 2: sure that my actions are accurately interpreted. She's learning how
Speaker 2: to reign in her aggression. That kind of feedback loop
Speaker 2: is a crucial part of a child's socialization, But in
Speaker 2: the case of the boy Rocky, what Dodge realized was
Speaker 2: that that process of socialization of learning how to accurately
Speaker 2: distinguish between a hostile touch and a playful touch had
Speaker 2: been disrupted.
Speaker 12: I remember interviewing a ten year old kid who told
Speaker 12: me about when he was four or five, the family
Speaker 12: that he lived in at that time. His father stepfather
Speaker 12: would come home every night from work, and he learned
Speaker 12: how to minimize the likelihood that he was going to
Speaker 12: get beaten up that night by smelling whether his father
Speaker 12: had alcohol in his breath, whether his father had a
Speaker 12: mean look, whether's father called him into the kitchen with
Speaker 12: his belt already undone, put it on the kitchen table.
Speaker 12: He was learning all He was four years old and
Speaker 12: he's learning all these signals, and he could describe them
Speaker 12: to me in great detail. So I think in early
Speaker 12: life of threat personal physical threat, there may be others
Speaker 12: as well. Is one way that it would be very
Speaker 12: adaptive to develop a defensive mindset and to assume a
Speaker 12: hostile intent from another person.
Speaker 2: If your father is violent sixty percent of the time
Speaker 2: and loving forty percent of the time, and you can't
Speaker 2: tell in the moment which direction he's going to go,
Speaker 2: then it makes logical sense for your own physical safety
Speaker 2: just to assume that your father is always going to
Speaker 2: be hostile. But when you take that assumption into the
Speaker 2: real world as a playground, us into classrooms, into the workplace,
Speaker 2: it doesn't work. It makes you a bully, a pariah.
Speaker 2: It makes even routine interactions deeply problematic. And nowhere is
Speaker 2: this dysfunction more problematic than policing, of course, because if
Speaker 2: you are a police officer whose early life and experience
Speaker 2: has left them impaired in that way, who, as a result,
Speaker 2: makes hostile attributions all the time, then how can you
Speaker 2: be a police officer. I don't know what Chauvin's upbringing
Speaker 2: was like, but I know when I saw the tape
Speaker 2: again after talking to Dodge, I wondered if Chauvin wasn't
Speaker 2: just someone like Rocky, all grown up. And the one
Speaker 2: thing Rocky can't be is a police officer, because being
Speaker 2: good at that job relies may be more than almost
Speaker 2: any other profession on being able to distinguish in the
Speaker 2: heat of a moment, between a hostile act and an
Speaker 2: ambiguous act, between someone who is struggling because they can't
Speaker 2: breathe and someone who is struggling because they are resisting arrest,
Speaker 2: between someone who says I'm going to die because they're
Speaker 2: trying to trick you, and someone who says I'm going
Speaker 2: to die because they are in fact going to die.
Speaker 2: If you can't do that, then you can only interpret
Speaker 2: the world one way. Then, in the middle of a
Speaker 2: fast evolving situation, when there is new information coming in
Speaker 2: all the time, you have only one way to interpret
Speaker 2: it a threat. In the course of the investigation into
Speaker 2: the death of George Floyd, a second case came to light.
Speaker 2: It happened in twenty seventeen, three years earlier. A woman
Speaker 2: calls nine one one. She says her son has assaulted her.
Speaker 2: The police arrive talk to the woman at length. She
Speaker 2: says her son is down the hall in his room.
Speaker 2: In the bodycam footage, you can see the officers walk
Speaker 2: down the hallway. The boy is on the floor of
Speaker 2: his bedroom on the phone. He's fourteen. The lead officer
Speaker 2: in the group is lean in his forties with a
Speaker 2: passive demeanor. It's Derek Chauvin. The officers enter the room
Speaker 2: tell him he's under arrest. He says his mom was drunk.
Speaker 2: He gets up reluctantly. His voice is calm, he doesn't
Speaker 2: act out, He's not aggressive. He says his mother had
Speaker 2: done this before called the police when she's the one
Speaker 2: who has a problem. That's why his uncle left the house,
Speaker 2: he says. He seems genuinely confused as to why he
Speaker 2: should be the one under arrest. He's a teenager, John,
Speaker 2: don't you come on here, that's Chauvin, Alice.
Speaker 13: I'm fine, but you just stand up for me. You're
Speaker 13: under ust, so stand up. I'm yeah, you are. Stand
Speaker 13: up my mom.
Speaker 5: He's drunk.
Speaker 7: You can quite her.
Speaker 13: Stand up? Fed me, stand up. I'm not gonna I'm
Speaker 13: not gonna ask you any more time. You can't arrest me,
Speaker 13: stand up, ask my sister. Stand up. I'm not going
Speaker 13: to ask you in again.
Speaker 7: You can't stand up. You can't touch me my home.
Speaker 7: Get up now.
Speaker 2: Chauvin moves towards him, starts beating the boy over the
Speaker 2: head with his flashlight, opening a wound over his ear
Speaker 2: that will require stitches, puts him in a chokehold, throws
Speaker 2: him to the ground, and then things go from bad
Speaker 2: too much much worse.
Speaker 7: You get your stomach now, y'all? What I say to y'all, y'all,
Speaker 7: I didn't I didn't.
Speaker 3: Know.
Speaker 2: Then his mother enters the rooman Chauvin crouches down next
Speaker 2: to the prone boy and puts his knee on the
Speaker 2: boy's neck. Then he just sits there. There are at
Speaker 2: least six officers at the scene at this point. Most
Speaker 2: of them have filed out of the room as if
Speaker 2: they can't stomach what's happening. One of the remaining officers
Speaker 2: turns his body cam to the wall. Chauvin keeps his
Speaker 2: knee on the boy's neck for fifteen minutes. Even after
Speaker 2: the paramedics arrived and the boy explains to them that
Speaker 2: he blacked out after he was choked and that his
Speaker 2: ear is bleeding, Chauvin remains on the boy's neck, frozen.
Speaker 2: The boy is eventually rescued and he's finally able to
Speaker 2: get up and walk away. I have watched that bodycam
Speaker 2: footage more times than I can count, and every time
Speaker 2: I find myself crying at the end in a way
Speaker 2: that I never did with George Floyd. Not because it's
Speaker 2: worse than George Floyd, because of course it isn't, but
Speaker 2: because it's about a boy, and it was all recorded
Speaker 2: on tape years before it happened again. A former US
Speaker 2: attorney named Amanda Sertich examined the video while prosecuting Chauvin
Speaker 2: for the murder of George Floyd.
Speaker 14: I would say the two most striking things about what's
Speaker 14: depicted in the twenty seventeen video are first that the
Speaker 14: minor doesn't act out in any physical way whatsoever. The
Speaker 14: other striking thing about the video that I think is
Speaker 14: much more visceral is how obvious it is that it's
Speaker 14: a child being assaulted. And when former officer Chauvin has
Speaker 14: that really strong strike on his head with the flashlight,
Speaker 14: there's that pause that any parent who has a kid
Speaker 14: will recognize right after a kid gets really hurt, and
Speaker 14: then the miner says, oh, you're hurting me, and begins
Speaker 14: to cry and sound very much like the child that
Speaker 14: he is, and he continues to cry in the same
Speaker 14: way over fifteen minutes, intermittently.
Speaker 2: There's another reason I found that tape so heartbreaking, something
Speaker 2: that I did not expect myself to feel, and something
Speaker 2: I cannot entirely explain. I felt an overwhelming wave of
Speaker 2: pa for Derek Chauvin, a man who sees every action
Speaker 2: as a threat, who cannot tell the difference between fear
Speaker 2: and aggression, who looks at a boy on his phone
Speaker 2: in his bedroom and sees a monster that is a dark,
Speaker 2: joyless place for anyone to find themselves imprisoned. And by
Speaker 2: what tragic failure of administration did a man who showed
Speaker 2: on videotape that he cannot do the single most important
Speaker 2: thing that a police officer needs to do to be
Speaker 2: a police officer remain on the force for three more
Speaker 2: years until he killed someone in cold blood. That's next week.
Speaker 2: Revision's History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan,
Speaker 2: and ben Na daph Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shakerji.
Speaker 2: Fact checking by Sam Russick, Engineering Nina Bird Lawrence, Mixing
Speaker 2: and mastering on this episode by Jake Gorsky. Production support
Speaker 2: from Luke LeMond. Thank you to mcaul Liebowitch. Our executive
Speaker 2: producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and
Speaker 2: l Hafe Credit cone I'm Malcolm Bappo. Get add free
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