The Broader Truth Of The George Floyd Murder Is Painful, Obvious, And Almost Completely Ignored
Until we understand this fact profoundly we are simply living between police lynchings.
by Rich Herschlag
There was a great deal of rejoicing immediately following the verdict in the George Floyd murder trial. I steered away from it much the same way I couldn’t force myself to watch the full nine-minute murder of Mr. Floyd. Justice was served in some microcosmic way, but something essential to the entire opprobrium was getting lost.
As I waited for the post-verdict smoke to clear, I fully expected someone or perhaps many people to make what seemed to me like an obvious and critical point. That point was implicitly underscored and grotesquely amplified when a CBS poll reported that 25 percent of Americans believe the jury reached the wrong verdict. A CNN poll had the number at 16 percent. A USA Today poll had it at 29 percent. Somewhere I found a poll that put a floor beneath the insanity—13 percent.
As someone who takes pride in putting himself in someone else’s shoes, these polls confirmed what I had feared while at the same time baffling me. In the context of the murder I witnessed in segments, the public opinion riddle is harder for me to solve than a Rubik’s Cube while blindfolded and hungover. I could take the easy way out and contend Republicans are brainwashed, but the CBS poll revealed a robust 10 percent of Democrats disagreed with the verdict. I could, alternatively, prod myself to the conclusion that racism independent of party drives the entire equation, yet that same CBS poll reported 7 percent of Black Americans disagreed with the verdict. Read that again. Let it sink in.
Here’s where the elephant in the room shoots someone. In 2019 there were 697,195 full time law enforcement officers employed in the United States. These men and women did not come from Denmark, Jupiter, or the nebulae. They were drawn from the American population. Applying the most flattering polling results as per the above regarding American empathy for a man having his trachea crushed for nine minutes, if 13 percent of police recruits are of a similar mind, then roughly 90,635 minus Derek Chauvin are still potentially capable of committing or at least ignoring a similar murderous act. That is an army of weaponized, fully licensed sociopaths equivalent to the population of Fargo, North Dakota—fanned out across our cities, suburbs, and rural areas—who given the right circumstances are mentally prepared to torturously drain the life of an alleged traffic offender, bootleg cigarette salesman, or someone suspected of passing a bogus 20 dollar bill.
Please don’t misunderstand me. There are other dark forces at work and various partial solutions swirling about. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 is packed with some of the most sensible, practical law enforcement reforms a think tank of reasonable policy wonks could ever compile. From outlawing chokeholds to requiring body cameras to creating a national registry of officers violating standards of excessive force, the bill reads like a non-violent wish list from every law abiding US citizen ever profiled, harassed, and beaten by those anointed to protect and serve. The problem is, after all is said and done American police officers are Americans.
What logic do we have working for us to expect the psychological composition of law enforcement to be radically different from our own? We log millions of hours of Mortal Kombat. We commit domestic violence at dizzying rates. We shoot millions of harmless animals for sport rather than for food. We are often poised for a death match at the scene of a fender bender. Not all of us. Not anywhere close to half. But a much, much larger percentage of us than can probably name the capital of Florida, Floridians included. Broadly speaking, the sociopath police officers out there who could torture George Floyd to death or watch the same while swiping through TikTok videos are us and we are them. Until we understand this fact profoundly we are simply living between police lynchings.
I have spent much of my life trying to reconcile my natural empathy with the gruff American male I am supposed to be. Around age ten I managed to disgust myself blowing up ant hills with firecrackers and vowed never to do anything like it again. At age 22, a connoisseur of steaks and burgers, I turned vegetarian after months of sporadic slaughterhouse research and moral pondering. By my 30s I was the dad who spotted a bat hovering over his daughter’s crib and found a way to capture and release the flying mammal into the wild rather than smashing it to bits with a 5-iron.
I often remind myself that human beings are far more precious than the animals I cherish and have interceded numerous times on behalf of strangers stranded on highways, scrounging for a meal, or being smacked around by other strangers. It’s been a long hard road pretending I’m at least somewhere on the outer reaches of the Gandhi spectrum, and my failures along the way haunt me. But there is within me and within a majority of Americans a desire to be humane that for a sizable subset is not merely dormant but which I believe is not even part of their emotional lexicon. Three were given a badge and a Glock since you started reading this essay.
I don’t consider empathy with only the most obvious victims to be sufficient. From time to time I have put myself in the shoes of those who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice while he waved a toy pistol; who riddled Breonna Taylor with bullets as she slept in her bed; who shot Daunte Wright point blank in the chest after supposedly reaching for a Taser. The first officer perhaps thought the toy gun was real. The next officer should never have been issued a no-knock warrant. The third officer may have panicked. In so many of these tragedies there is possibly an intractable combination of confusion, incompetence, racial profiling, poor management, and simply being in the wrong situation.
While it is incumbent upon us to spend ample time in self-inflicted discomfort attempting to sort out these horrific events, the George Floyd execution was categorically different. In the Floyd case, a long, slow, excruciating lynching is caught on multiple cameras and yet millions of Americans still couldn’t see their way clear to a manslaughter conviction. If America is an experiment in justice, the George Floyd lynching is the control group.
If you ask your average Trumper about Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine, most won’t clearly remember it but the rest will tell you Michael Moore is a knee-jerk leftist radical who wants to take away everyone’s guns. But those who bothered to watch discovered nothing of the kind. In Bowling, Moore found that Detroit had rates of gun ownership comparable to Canadian cities just across Lake Erie. Yet the murder and gun violence rates in Detroit were many times higher. Conclusion? While mass gun ownership itself can drive violence, the consciousness of those pulling the trigger is behind much of the problem. That’s largely where we are with police brutality today—with American brutality today—and for some reason few people anywhere on the political cross-section ever acknowledge it.
We wanted a police force that looked like us, and we sort of got it. A new, improved national police force where less than one percent found the Floyd execution to be something other than murder would require vetting much more exacting than anything conceived of to date here in the land of the free. Yet that is exactly what must be done. Requiring as we do now merely that these police recruits be like us, act like us, react like us, and think like us will only get us to the next government sanctioned street execution. Until we probe the deep roots of the American penchant for violence and begin to reverse it, the police must be better than us. Far better.
Read an excerpt from this week’s Members Only piece:
Panicked GOP Bans American History
If history is written by the winners, then Republicans have, without question, lost.
by Justin Rosario
Desperation is never a good look. When a man in his 50s squeezes himself into a pair of jeans two sizes too small, buys a sports car, and tries to pick up women half his age, it is sad. Trying to recapture your “glory days” is a tacit, if not explicit, admission that you really believe you are a failure.
Today’s Republican Party is that kind of failure.
From their war on Critical Race Theory and the New York Times’ “1619 Project” to their renewed efforts to teach propaganda in public schools, the GOP is desperate to recapture that special magic of the Father Knows Best 1950s when everyone knew that America was perfect just the way it was: white men in power, women in the kitchen, and everyone else completely invisible.
The Lost Cause...Lost
Once upon a time, racist white conservatives infected millions of students with their “Lost Cause” propaganda. For decades, public schools taught a deeply twisted version of American history in which enslaved people were happy, even grateful to be in chains. When I explained this to my girls, Anastasia and Lila, they were insulted. Lila’s mouth actually dropped open in shock that anyone would be so horrible.
The point of these nauseating lies was twofold. First, to support white supremacy. Of course Whites have to be in a dominant position over Blacks. It’s the White Man’s Burden to take care of their lessers. Therefore, Whites should have all of the power and money. It’s really for the best.
Second, to absolve the South of their crimes. They tortured, raped, and murdered enslaved Black people for generations. The North is hardly innocent of this but when the time came to end the atrocity that was slavery, the white racist conservatives of the South tried to destroy the United States of America. That history needed to be erased at all costs.
But after their early successes with the Lost Cause and sanitizing most of American history, the right has been steadily losing this fight. As marginalized groups clawed their way to a seat at the table, they have also, step by step, been forcing America to shed its whitewashed past.
Here are just a few of the things many Americans now understand to be true (in no particular order):
Christopher Columbus was not a heroic explorer. He was a genocidal slaver.
The Civil War was not about “States’ Rights”, but explicitly about perpetuating slavery, the most morally indefesnsible institution known to man.
Lynchings occurred by the thousands and were still regularly occurring just 70 years ago.
We kidnapped tens of thousands of Native American children, forbade them to speak their languages, wear their traditional clothing, or practice their religions.
We put almost 120,000 American citizens in concentration camps for the crime of being Japanese.
Entire Black communities were burned to the ground by white mobs.
Black families were denied loans, mortgages, and scholarships for generations while White families were showered with money.
Forced sterilization (aka “eugenics”) continued into the 1980s. Mostly performed on women. Mostly on WOC. The Nazis literally got the idea from us.
The overwhelming majority of this was not taught in school, even college, and the list goes on forever. We have a deeply violent and disturbing past even as we (some of us, most of us?) keep striving to be better.
That most schools no longer teach openly white supremacist propaganda disturbs the right. Worse, they’re not even teaching a “neutral” version of history. They’re teaching actual history. That’s a problem if everything you believe in relies on children being indoctrinated early.
The hysterical backlash from racist white conservatives has been as total as it has been predictable. We’re seeing the manifestation of this white panic in a growing Republican effort to reshape education again…
This is an excerpt of today’s Members Only piece. Continue reading here and get a 2 month free trial on a Banter Membership!:
We cannot change the nature of Americans. What we can do is a better job of screening police applicants and applying harsher penalties to the actual perpetrators and their accomplices. If the upcoming trial of Chauvin’s buddies results in substantial sentences, maybe those practicing the blue code of silence will think twice before letting a fellow officer who is clearly a psychopath, commit murder.
You are a good man Rick Herschlag. Wish we had more like you.