I had had a thread on this question in GQ a couple of weeks ago but that was only asking about the legal aspect of the matter.
I would like to ask what fellow Dopers think is the best thing to do (moral, social, practical, ethical) should one see the George Floyd situation happening again - where a cop is putting someone at imminent risk of death (kneeing their neck, or any other such action that jeopardizes life) - and where the cop cannot be verbally dissuaded; won’t stop for anything.
The obvious, but most dicey, course of action seems to be to just physically yank the cop off of the guy’s neck, and let the legal consequences sort themselves out later. But are there any other alternatives?
Film it (or livestream it), draw the attention of other bystanders to it, and demand that he stop. That’s likely the legal extent of what you can do. Physically assaulting the police officer may solve the immediate problem but may get you killed or assaulted (and will at the very least get you arrested) while not preventing the officer from resuming his abuse of the original suspect.
I’ve heard that sometimes police officers object to being filmed, even forcing witnesses to delete the videos or even destroying the phone. So there are apps, like this one from the ACLU that automatically upload the video to servers.
Usually, if I’m seeing a police officer get hands on with someone, I’m leaving the area immediately. But let’s imagine that for whatever reason, i stay. Further, let’s imagine that I can tell from where i am that the person the officers are arresting is having a medical emergency.
Call 911. Ask for Fire/EMS. Tell them the location, tell them what medical emergency is occurring. Be specific and involved about the symptoms the person is having, e,g.: respiratory arrest for however many minutes, cyanotic appearance, convulsions, decorticate posturing, etc… Whatever the guy the cops are arresting is suffering enough that the OP is contemplating tackling the officers.
Call 911. Ask to have a police supervisor sent to the scene. Be specific as to why.
If you are medically trained, and feel like getting involved—I’m not sure I’d want to invite the liability, but that will depend on your specific situation—maybe calmly addressing an officer as to your specific concerns, and how you can fix them, ensuring their arrestee doesn’t die on them, might be helpful. Be professional, calm, but direct. For God’s sake, keep your hands where the officers can see them.
E.g., “Sir, I’m a paramedic. Your man is cyanotic and has been in respiratory arrest for one minute thirty seconds. If this continues, he’ll die. Do you want my assistance to treat this man?” Etc…
I’ve been around cops getting physical only a few times. In all instances, I was hustling myself and my girlfriend out of the area as fast as possible.
Rushing a cop making an arrest, good, bad or indifferent is total foolishness. Good way to get killed and perhaps legally. Making a lot of noise is a good idea and also to record what’s going on. But ultimately we can’t forget that there was a crime being committed in the first place, so you don’t want to be perceived as an accomplice, helping with the getaway (and perhaps while dead).
If by “in the first place”, you mean before Chauvin started murdering Floyd, then no, we don’t actually know that there was a crime being committed. And certainly, nobody on the scene at the time knew that.
Floyd was allegedly passing off a counterfeit bill. True, he was never convicted of it but then when the cops are called all they’re going on is allegations anyway. Of course, that doesn’t justify a 9 minute fatal neck-sitting.
Who is talking about rushing a cop making an arrest? I’ve actually heard praise for the person who filmed the murder of George Floyd for the way it was done.
There is no satisfactory answer to this question. You can try to be a hero by truing to stop a cop from committing murder. It quite likely winds up with you dead or at best arrested. You can sit and watch to be witness to murder – and film if you can – hoping that justice for the murderer later prevails, but in most cases it never does. Worse yet, you have to live with the guilt of having let a man die when you could have intervened.
I object to this characterization of George Floyd’s actions. George Floyd, by the weight of the evidence, was the victim of a crime in that he received a counterfeit $20 bill that he did not detect… That counterfeit was only detected only when he spent his money by the store clerk. I can almost guarantee you that if I, as an educated middle-aged, middle-class white guy with no criminal record “passed” a counterfeit $20 bill in the same way as George Floyd, police would not have tried to violently arrest me in that manner without additional evidence. I suspect they would have asked me where I got the bill so they could perhaps figure out who the actual criminal was. George Floyd wasn’t give the same respect.
I’ll throw in an opposing opinion to the general consensus of don’t physically interfere, not that I’m saying I personally would. In the case of seeing someone hijack the plane you are on, we generally advise everyone to rush the hijacker, even if they get hurt/killed in the process, since we now have an example of how many more people may get hurt of they are left to do their thing. Why morally should a slow, deliberate, public execution be tolerated just because the perpetrator is wearing a certain uniform?
And yes you’ll almost certainly be arrested for doing so. But, you can be arrested for all kinds of stuff and later be released with no further consequences. Had someone pulled Chauvin off George and got arrested by his partners while Chauvin jumped right back on and killed George, do you really think that person would be charged with a crime when the court determined that Chauvin did in fact commit murder?
And that may very well be. Floyd had a sketchy past so no doubt that entered into the situation. Who knows, Floyd may have ended up totally exonerated had this played out the way it should. But if someone appears to be passing off a counterfeit bill no doubt the cops are going to be called regardless of who it is.
Recording the incident is, in fact, intervening. There’s the hope that the cops, on realizing that they’re on camera, will stop their misdeeds for fear of the consequences. That’s even more possible now, now that a cop has in fact gotten convicted on the basis of such recordings.
It’s not a form of intervention that’s guaranteed to work, of course. Certainly it didn’t work in the Floyd case. But it probably is more likely to work than, say, trying to body-slam the violent guy with the gun.
In the aftermath of 9/11, this is the standard advice (fight back against anyone who hijacks your aircraft) - not because of the damage hijackers may do by using your aircraft as a weapon, but because you very likely have nothing to lose and everything to gain by fighting back, and you very likely have everything to lose by not fighting back.
The situation is different when you are a bystander watching a cop slowly execute someone. You are not personally in mortal peril if you choose to do nothing. If you try to intervene, you are at risk of potentially fatal consequences and severe legal consequences for yourself.
It’s reasonable to argue that assaulting a murderous cop can get you killed. I don’t understand the argument that you can get arrested. So what? Isn’t that acceptable price for potentially saving a life?
But here’s the thing - once bystanders physically intervene, the police will perceive everything they do after that point, up to and including killing the intervenors and continuing to kill the original victim, as legally justified. And they might even be right (in a legal sense, not in a moral sense).
So physical intervention is likely to result only in an even worse situation, with more death and more damage.
Just about everyone these days has a video camera in their pocket. With the ability to not only record video, but to transmit it in real time to cloud storage, where it is out of reach of anyone who would like to seize and destroy it.
That (plus making a bunch of noise, if that seems like a good way to go) is a bystander’s best (and perhaps only) option.
. Get it on video and backed up to the cloud.