The Patriot Post® · Floyd Verdict: 'Systemic Racism' Not Guilty
“If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?” —John Adams (1775)
“After viewing the video of Mr. Floyd’s death, I didn’t need to see additional body-camera recordings to conclude his death would likely be judged as negligent. He was handcuffed, there were three other officers present, and additional officers were on the way. Though Floyd was taken down after resisting arrest and becoming belligerent, once on the ground he appeared compliant, posed little further threat to the officers or bystanders, and indicated he was distressed and having trouble breathing.”
No, that wasn’t “expert witness” testimony in the trial of Officer Derek Chauvin, who was found guilty Tuesday on second- and third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter charges in the death of George Floyd.
Instead, it was the assessment of a former law enforcement officer two weeks after Floyd’s death on 25 May, after reviewing the video of Chauvin keeping Floyd pinned face down to the ground. That former law enforcement officer was me. I wrote that as a lead-in to a comprehensive essay disabusing readers of a rapidly metastasizing lie — the Left’s latest collective race-hustling rally cry of “systemic racism.”
I don’t accept anything propagated by the Leftmedia at face value, and, having spent my early career as a uniformed police officer, I certainly do not accept the media’s hyped “analysis” regarding interracial police-involved shootings. But in this case, it was apparent that Officer Chauvin’s use of a police tactic was a contributing factor in Floyd’s death.
According to the jury verdict, Chauvin’s actions caused Floyd’s death.
Yes, Floyd was an ex-con with a violent criminal history. Yes, he was a habitual drug offender who at the time appeared to be under the influence. Yes, he was a powerfully built 6-foot 5-inch, 225-pound 46-year-old who towered over Chauvin’s 5-foot-9 inch, 140-pound frame. But once subdued, Floyd’s size and demeanor were no longer a primary factor, and they in no sense justified the negligent use of a police tactic. Neither Floyd’s size nor his possible intoxication justify the officer’s actions.
And Floyd’s autopsy led Dr. Andrew Baker, the medical examiner, to conclude his blood contained a “fatal level of fentanyl,” which, combined with other drugs and congestive heart failure, caused Floyd’s lungs to fill with fluid — which is why he could not breathe. And the autopsy memorandum also “revealed no physical evidence suggesting that Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation.” Fact is, Floyd may have died on the scene regardless of whether he was being held on the ground or in the patrol car, but we will never know.
But again, once subdued, Chauvin could have turned Floyd on his side while waiting on paramedics – hindsight being what it is.
This case should go to appeal, but this verdict did not represent justice for Floyd or Chauvin or whether the jury’s verdict can be trusted. I reiterate that I believe Chauvin’s tactic to subdue Floyd was a contributing factor in Floyd’s death, but there was clearly a highly-charged atmosphere surrounding this case which inevitably manifests as jury intimidation.
Recall that as jury selection was underway, the city all but conceded the officer’s guilt by cutting a check to Floyd’s family for a historic $27 million civil settlement. And this case is evocative of mob cases (as in mafia mob cases), in which the jurors are made to know how they had better vote — or else. In this trial, their ultimatum was: convict the cop, or face the riotous mobs. That notwithstanding, the judge did not sequester jurors the weekend prior to deliberation, when the death of another black man in Minneapolis was spawning mob riots.
Even high-profile race-bait hustler Rep. Maxine Waters showed up to stir up the mob, and as a result was roundly rebuked by the Chauvin case judge, Peter Cahill. But he still did not sequester the jury.
Legal analyst Alan Dershowitz, a leftist professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, declared of Waters’ actions: “This violates the separation of powers. It insults the integrity of the independent judiciary, and Congresswoman Waters ought to be ashamed of herself. What she did was disgraceful. What was done to George Floyd by officer Chauvin was questionable, but the verdict is far more questionable, because of the outside influences of people like Al Sharpton and people like Maxine Waters. Their threats and intimidation and hanging the Sword of Damocles over the jury and basically saying, if you don’t convict on the murder charge and all the charges, the cities will burn, the country will be destroyed—seeped into the jury room because the judge made a terrible mistake by not sequestering the jury.”
However, what should be made clear about the verdict is this: The negligent actions of a white police officer, convicted for the death of a black suspect, do not affirm the Left’s fallacious constituent-appeasing assertion of “systemic racism.” Our nation is not a racist dystopia.
In fact, the prosecution never question Chauvin’s racial views. As legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy notes: “If you did not watch the Derek Chauvin trial, but only heard the inflammatory comments spewing out of the White House and the media-Democrat complex, there are things about it you would never know. And you’d be apt to believe the claims that American law enforcement is systemically racist. I watched the trial day in and day out, so let me cut you in on a few basic facts. Not a shred of evidence was introduced at the trial that Derek Chauvin is a racist. None. There was nothing in the weeks of testimony that even hinted at such a thing.”
Even Minnesota’s leftist Attorney General, Keith Ellison, who himself has a long history of provoking racial hatred as an acolyte of fellow Islamist Louis Farrakhan and other black-supremacist haters, admitted: “Hate crimes are crimes where there’s an explicit motive and of bias. We don’t have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd’s race as he did what he did.”
But “systemic racism” is now the Left’s diversionary catch-all claim for any perceived racial disparity in our system of justice.
The claim has its roots in the Zimmerman/Martin race-bait hoax in 2013 and accelerated after the 2014 Michael Brown “hands up, don’t shoot” hoax in Ferguson, Missouri. After Donald Trump’s election, Democrats put their “division and hate political strategy” in high gear.
The Charlottesville riot was the launchpad for the Demos’ riotous hate surrogates, the Marxist so-called “Black Lives Matter” radicals and the “antifa movement” of self-styled “anti-fascist” fascists.
But as soon as the Floyd video went public, race-bait hustlers Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and their legislative branch parrots, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, knew they could place their “systemic racism” bet on this case.
“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” morphed into “I Can’t Breathe!”
Before the jury had returned Tuesday, Biden declared, “I’m praying the [Derek Chauvin] verdict is the right verdict, which is — I think it’s overwhelming, in my view.” Indeed, he was praying, as the Democrats’ “systemic racism” constituent recruitment program depended on a guilty verdict.
After the verdict, Biden addressed the nation, asserting: “The systemic racism is a stain on our nation’s soul. … Such a verdict is also much too rare. For so many people it seems like it took a unique and extraordinary convergence of factors. … In order to deliver real change and reform, we can and we must do more to reduce the likelihood that a tragedy like this will ever happen to occur again. … And this takes acknowledging and confronting head on systemic racism and the racial disparities that exist in policing and in our criminal justice system more broadly.”
Biden is spinning the BIG lie that the Chauvin conviction affirms, beyond a reasonable doubt, that “systemic racism” infests our criminal justice system from top to bottom. But this case was about individual justice, not the Left’s assertion of collective or systemic justice. Biden’s deliberate mischaracterization of this case is very deliberate — but it was a conviction of one individual for negligently causing the death of another individual, and nothing more. Biden’s lie also affirms that all his constituent participation in all the election-year burn-loot-murder riots were justified and their actions vindicated.
For her part, Harris declared, “A measure of justice isn’t the same as equal justice. … We still must reform the system. … America has a long history of systemic racism. Black Americans and black men in particular have been treated throughout the course of our history as less than human.”
The fact is, “Black Americans and black men in particular” — in fact, all black people — have been treated “as less than human.” For generations, they have been systemically enslaved on the Democrat Party’s disgraceful urban poverty plantations, indisputably the direct result of Democrat social policies.
But Democrats invoke “systemic racism” and “racist cops” as smoke-and-mirror diversions to keep their constituents “victimized” and their sympathetic base for those victims growing.
Bottom line: The unavoidable conclusion regarding the conviction of Derek Chauvin is that it was politically motivated to appease the social justice mob. (A well-researched argument by former federal prosecutor TJ Harker, that Chauvin’s conviction was unjust, is posted in two parts here and here.)
So, what’s next? Biden and Harris are using the Floyd case as an inflection point to promote their phony “police reform” agenda, asserting America has a police problem.
And to that end, here is a much-needed reality check on cops and crime…
The fact is, based on the findings of the nation’s leading researcher on crime, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, there is no epidemic of police killing black people.
According to Mac Donald’s exhaustive research: “The Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings showed 14 unarmed Black victims and 25 unarmed white victims in 2019. The number of unarmed Black shooting victims is down 63% from 2015, when the database began. There are about 7,300 Black homicide victims a year. The 14 unarmed victims in fatal police shootings would comprise only 0.2% of that total. Ideally, officers would never take anyone’s life in the course of their duties. But given the number of arrests they make each year (around 10 million) and the number of deadly-weapons attacks on officers (an average of 27 per day in just two-thirds of the nation’s police departments),” there is no evidence of an epidemic of racist police shootings.
That is confirmed by a National Academy of Sciences study that found no such racial link. As Mac Donald concludes: “It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.”
This was the same conclusion reached by former U.S. Attorney General William Barr a month ago: “I think the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that that’s based on race. The fact of the matter is very rare for an unarmed African American to be shot by a white police officer.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley notes: “Police shootings have fallen precipitously since the 1970s. … Empirical studies have found no racial bias in police use of deadly force, and that the racial disparities that do exist stem from racial differences in criminal behavior. The problem isn’t a shortage of data but a race-based narrative that is immune to any data that challenge it.”
Indeed, as Mac Donald notes, “The anti-cop narrative deflects attention away from solving the real criminal-justice problem, which is high rates of black-on-black victimization.” According to the latest data, “Nationally, African Americans between the ages of 10 and 34 die from homicide at 13 times the rate of white Americans.”
Further, the interracial crime disparity has been thoroughly documented. According to the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of criminal victimization, Mac Donald notes: “There were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations … between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent.” This disparity is perhaps better understood by considering that black Americans represent just 13% of our population but perpetrate 90% of violent interracial crimes.
Equally alarming is the fact that, in the latest available data, where victim race was known, there were 4,884 white people murdered and 6,318 black people murdered — and black-on-black assault is much more prevalent than white-on-white. The suspect in 88% of black murders is also black.
This gross racial disparity in criminal assailants is not a new issue, as made clear by a 2015 Harvard study on black-on-black violence. In that study, former Democrat New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted: “Ninety percent of all people killed in our city — and 90 percent of all those who commit the murders and other violent crimes — are black and Hispanic. It is shameful that so many elected officials and editorial writers have been largely silent on these facts.”
Of course, leftists never let “facts” get in the way of their agenda.
And a final quote exemplifying the sheer absurdity of the Democrats’ faux “justice” agenda: After the Floyd case verdict, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared, “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice.”
Allow me to reiterate: The most consequential “systemic racism” in America is the institutionalization of Democrat social policies, which have enslaved poor black citizens on Demo-controlled urban poverty plantations for generations. The Democrat Party platform has, by design, kept poor people in bondage to the welfare state and consequently, is the blueprint for the most enduring racial exploitation architecture in America.
So, what is next for the race-hustling agenda… Democrats will elevate any white police officer involved shooting of a black person to keep the “systemic racism” narrative front and center. The same week as the Chauvin verdict, Biden and company locked on to the justifiable shooting by a white officer of a black teenager who was about to stab another black teenager. Biden implied the officer was racist.
Coming up, recall that the four officers at the scene were also arrested and charged. The charges filed by Minnesota AG Ellison have, intentionally, raised the bar on a successful prosecution very high – meaning some of the officers will plea down to much lower charges if not be acquitted. Thus, Ellison will have achieved his ultimate goal of keeping racial tensions high. And Ellison is getting a PR assist from Biden’s AG, Merrick Garland, who is planning a broad federal probe into Minneapolis PD conduct.
[Update: On this the anniversary of George Floyd’s death, we’re hard-pressed to find a single good outcome from all the riotous outrage. Crime, and disproportionately black-on-black homicide, has surged since Floyd’s death, driven in no small measure by violence fomented by the so-called “Black Lives Matter” radicals. The agenda-driven Leftmedia and Leftist politicians insisted that the riots were “mostly peaceful protests,” ostensibly in the name of eradicating “systemic racism” – both assertions being demonstrable and despicable lies. And, I would draw your attention to the law enforcement officers who have been killed in the line of duty since Floyd’s death. We maintain dedicated End of Watch tribute pages to each of them.]
Update: Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd. Notably, commenting on that sentence, Floyd’s brother, family spokesperson Philonise Floyd, said, “I just want to reiterate: not just black lives matter, all lives matter.” Indeed, all lives matter. No doubt the Chauvin case will be appealed.
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