Here in NYC, I can’t imagine the police being called (or responding, if they were to be called). Generally a merchant will simply refuse to accept the bill.
It’s happened to me. I once (unknowingly) tried to pay for a purchase with a twenty-dollar-bill that the merchant refused to accept, saying that it was counterfeit. Upon close examination, I saw that he was right. But it took close examination – I hadn’t noticed before. And who would? Does anyone scrutinize their money that closely? Obviously merchants will, but mostly people don’t check every bill in their wallet.
Also, some googling shows that attempting to pass a counterfeit bill is only a crime if one does it knowingly. For example, I was not committing a crime in the incident I just described.
So it seems quite likely to me that George Floyd was not, in fact, committing a crime when he tried to spend that counterfeit bill.
I’ve seen a very badly done twenty dollar bill that was passed in a dark bar on a busy night. The bill felt wrong, more like cardboard than paper. The bar kept the bill around for training purposes, police were never called.
All you can really do is film the incident, call 911 and tell them that you are witnessing a police officer murdering someone and let the cops know that you are filming it. Now that one police officer has been convicted, perhaps other police officers will think twice before murdering someone in broad daylight. Some of the witnesses to Floyd’s murder testified to how traumatized they were by not being able to stop the murder that they filmed, but they aren’t the ones who committed the murder and they did the best they could against an gang of armed killers.
Yes, a dark bar on a busy night is probably the ideal environment in which to pass a fake bill. And I’ve read that getting the paper right is the biggest problem for counterfeiters.
Also not surprised that the cops were never called. I remember last year, when I first read/saw on television the stories about George Floyd’s death, being surprised that the store had called the cops. Later I learned more details, including that the store personnel had discovered the fake after Floyd had left the store, and had followed him outside to try and recover what they’d sold him, and being even more surprised – I would have thought that a merchant would have written off the cost to them of a pack of smokes and let it go at that point.
Which just made Floyd’s death all the more senseless, of course.
No, it’s not. Although the knowledge that there will be irrefutable evidence of what happened may deter a police officer and keep him from going too far.
However, physical intervention is 100% guaranteed to escalate the situation to a point where it’s completely out of control, and is quite likely to result in more death, including the death of the intervenor.
That’s what it would have taken to save George Floyd. There was one cop murdering him and three others standing watch. You would have had to rush four cops.
My point isn’t some sort of glorious rescue, it’s more the idea that filming is the best anyone can do in that situation. That seems unconscionable to me. How do you live with yourself saying “Oh, some guy just got murdered, and all I did was film it with my cell phone.” Or didn’t even do that and just watched?
And I’m thinking if you call 911, you have a good chance of having your phone or camera taken away from you and the “evidence” destroyed. You’d need to be able to make that call anonymously so you might have to take it to another authority.
The woman who filmed George Floyd’s murder is credited, in part, with the successful prosecution. So sometimes the best thing we can do is to bear witness to a crime and testify about what we saw after.
Yes, they will. If someone physically assaults a police officer, if someone rushes an officer and tries to stop that cop from doing something, that officer will be legally justified in using massive, perhaps even lethal, force to stop that person. The Chauvin verdict didn’t change a thing about that.
I have no doubt that you’d actually do this.
Nonetheless, you’d be just one more death that day if you did.
Witnessing a crime in the middle of its commission, and telling the person who is committing the crime that you are doing so, is the act that is most likely to stop the crime. It’s more likely to do so then you trying to physically intervene.
Sure, perhaps in retrospect, one can say that what was happening to George Floyd was a crime. But standing in front of a uniformed officer, are you prepared to challenge their judgement of the situation? Do you know what is going on? Do you know for sure that the police officer is in the wrong?
I would at least film it and make that absolutely clear to the officers standing around watching him get the life choked out of him. I also think that there’s strength in numbers, so I’d probably try to bring the situation to the attention of anyone in the area.
I the post-Floyd world, I think cops have to know that there might actually, possibly be a limit to what they can get away with. Not that this new reality will register with every officer, but I would have to think that many officers do understand that there’s beginning to be a paradigm shift in terms of how a jury might evaluate their conduct.