Gym Jordan was on MTP this morning babbling about how law enforcement has been weaponized, but only when it comes to conservatives being investigated.  He’s all over the “weaponized” FBI trying to protect school board members whose lives are being threatened, but completely blind to the tsunami of blatant law breaking on his own side.  When Chuck Todd brought up the fact that the NY Assistant US Attorney, Charles McGonigal, has been charged with taking money from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, Jordan stated he was going to investigate that, but brushed Todd off when he pointed out that Paul Manafort was Deripaska’s primary contact between the TFG campaign and the Russians.  He wants to investigate the Steele dossier, but is not interested in investigating whether the US Attorney’s office in NY was suppressing the dossier and leaking other stories to the press intended to damage Hillary during the 2016.  The new conservative House majority has only a few goals for this term – cementing in their own power, hamstringing the federal government, and exacting revenge for TFG’s loss in 2020.  That’s it, period.  They don’t give a flying shit about their country or their constituents; their only tools are retribution and disinformation.

When asked about the George Floyd act and reforming policing in the US, Jordan took the usual position of conservatives today, saying that the US government has no role in policing reform and that it must be handled at “state and local levels”.  This is the strategy now followed by most Republicans who shirk responsibility to avoid being blamed for the consequences.  It’s also the SCOTUS’s normal response to all issues of privacy, individual rights, civil rights, and voting rights.  The Court, under Roberts, has now taken the position of taking no position on critical issues like privacy, gun safety laws, campaign finance, radical gerrymandering, and systemic voter suppression, punting all those issues to the state level which in 35 states is under the iron fisted control of minority Republicans cemented into power by…wait for it…radical gerrymandering and voter suppression.  The Court has also gone so far as drawing the idiotic conclusions that money doesn’t corrupt and that magically the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed.

At the state level, DeSantis and Abbott are the poster children for shirking their duty.  They both habitually override local county and city officials who are trying to protect their own citizens by grabbing power at the state level to hamstring them, but then take no responsibility for massive failures like the 2021 Texas power failure that killed 700 Texans.  By keep a “free market” ideology where free markets don’t exist, they avoid blame when their own constituents suffer from their negligence.  By hiding behind idiotic libertarian ideology that has never worked anywhere on the planet, they can blame faceless villains rather than doing their goddam jobs to improve the lives of their constituents.

This is the biggest fraud that’s been committed against the American people, but they retain power through two strategies – using disinformation to blame non-existent bogeymen for their own failures, and radical gerrymandering that creates a base of voters who believe their destructionist rhetoric and bullshit.  AND, it’s getting worse, not better.

The verdict of the jury in the Derek Chauvin murder trial has just been published, and it’s guilty on all three counts.  I believe this verdict is appropriate especially since Chauvin showed reckless disregard of George Floyd’s life as it drained away under his knee.  This trial is not just one trial of one murder.  It was hopefully a turning point in policing and our own culture that has accepted for far too many years inequality according to skin color and economic status.  This sordid story should change the conversation in America about race and the police.  How we respond to it will determine the direction of that change.

The pictures are all over Facebook and other social media. That’s right folks, they’re doing it again. Daunte Wright is barely buried in the ground and people are trying to bury him again. I wish I had saved the Facebook posts but they have been taken down. I wonder why.

For those that don’t want to click on the link, they’ve found Daunte Wright in pictures with guns. So, obviously he must have been a bad guy. They did the same thing with George Floyd and countless others before them.

Let’s ignore the hypocrisy for the moment of people that have no qualms about openly carrying huge firearms raising a stink about a black man taking a picture with his gun. I think we are far beyond the racist double standards at this point. The implications are much simpler than that.

See, Wright was a bad guy. How do we know he was a bad guy? Well, he’s dressed like a gang banger with his gun. See, he’s threatening. So obviously it’s not a bad thing that he was shot. That’s just one more dangerous criminal off the streets. The beauty of the Facebook memes is they don’t even have to say that. If you get the racist code you are already thinking it.

The problem is two-fold. First, the reasoning only works if the officers knew all this at the time. They didn’t know who Wright was when they pulled him over. Even when they looked him up they only knew he had an outstanding warrant. They did not see a gun on the scene. Cops are supposed to assess the situation at hand. They wouldn’t have had the benefit of seeing those pictures beforehand and even if they did it wouldn’t have helped them properly assess that particular situation.

Of course, that leads nicely into the second problem. How do we know he was a bad guy? Do pictures with a gun indicate that definitively? If only there was some kind of mechanism like a court with judges and a jury that could help us determine that. That’s what’s supposed to happen. They aren’t supposed to be gunned down by the police when they are unarmed.

I’m a little more than sick and tired of the postgame chicanery from the right. They’ll post numbers of how many white people are killed by cops. They’ll post how many of them are unarmed. Even if we took those numbers at face value it doesn’t excuse any of it. It just makes the point come through with more force.

If we want to get to the bottom of this thing we can’t scour the inter webs trying to find anything to make the victims look guilty. We need to figure out why those officers went through the steps they did. Racism is surely involved on some level but maybe it wasn’t the key factor here. Maybe this would have happened regardless. Either way, we need to take a good long look at procedures and what they lead to. A postgame picture can’t erase the shame or tragedy of this event or make the officers any less guilty.

Written by Elizabeth Moon –

In a Court TV segment of the trial of Derek Chauvin, Barry Brod, a “use of force” expert witness, insisted that Chauvin did not apply deadly force.  He said if only Floyd had been “compliant” he could have rested “comfortably” with his hands behind his back, and blamed his death on his lack of compliance and attempts to resist arrest.  This reveals that Brod does not understand the mechanics of human respiration, especially “weighted” prone position.

The pertinent facts:

• The human brain demands more oxygen and glucose than any other organ in the body.  That’s why it’s also the organ that signals us when we’re short of oxygen–that says BREATHE MORE when the oxygen level drops.
• We have no other biological warning of lowered blood oxygen.  So when someone says “I can’t breathe,” it means their brain has detected a drop in oxygen that, if it continues to drop, will kill them. Normal oxygen saturation is 95-100%.  Below 95%, normal body functions, including brain functions, start to suffer from lack of oxygen.  Below 88%, the situation becomes dangerous and below that, signals the need for immediate transfer to a hospital for emergency treatment.  Permanent disability or death will follow if not.
• Many conditions can cause lowered oxygen levels: heart disease, lung disease, stroke, COVID-19, etc., but the one of interest right now is an outside force: someone forced to assume lying down position (either supine or more commonly these days prone) with extra weight pressing on their rib cage making it impossible to breathe and restore normal oxygenation.

This condition occurs during police take-downs, and is defended by police with the all-too-common belief that if someone can say “I can’t breathe,” that means they are breathing effectively, and are just lying.  Most police do not have advanced life-saving skills beyond (maybe) CPR; they’ve probably heard that in triage situations, the person screaming has an open airway and is less critical than the silent one who doesn’t.  But an open upper airway does not guarantee effective breathing–it’s just one requirement.  The other is the ability to free movement of the ribcage and upper abdomen, so their movement can pull air into the lungs and push it out. Immobilization of  this breathing apparatus kills just as surely as a strangler’s cord around the neck.

Being forced to lie prone without the use of extremities to assist in lifting the rib cage with each breath, coupled with enough weight on the back, makes it impossible to breathe. The prisoner saying “I can’t breathe” or “You’re killing me” is right.  The demand for compliance (“just don’t move–relax”) is functionally a demand to accept being crushed to death, the kind of agonizing slow death George Floyd suffered. A few centuries back, “peine forte et dure” was a fairly common method of torture and execution: tie someone down on a hard surface with arms and legs spread wide and start putting stones on their chest until they confessed or died.

Police have repeatedly shown that they are not capable of stopping short of killing prisoners when they have them face down on the ground. They interpret any movement, including struggles to breathe, as “resisting arrest” and put more weight on, making the hypoxia worse. More than one person, in different jurisdictions, has died from being forced face down to the ground, with too much weight on their back.

The only way to avoid more unnecessary and brutal deaths is to change how police treat their prisoners.  That will require changes in the law, forcing police to take legal responsibility for the lives of their prisoners, and changes in police training, so they know less lethal takedowns.  It’s really simple.  If someone says “I can’t breathe” get the weight off their backs immediately. Turn them on their side. That frees the rib cage and diaphragm to function normally.

I have a longer and more detailed form of this which explains the multiple ways pressure can cause lack of oxygen in the blood and thus death, in simpler terms than the books I learned it from.  If anyone still has questions, I’d be glad to email the longer form.

We usually don’t like to do these around here, but I thought I would tell a personal story as a way of getting around to my thoughts on the Minnesota police shooting. So, please bare with me as I try to be as brief as possible.

One night in January I went to pick up my daughter from the skating rink. It was the weekend right before the freeze, so I was dressed in sweat pants and a hoodie. The officer on duty asked me whether I saw anyone looking inside of cars and attempting to open them. I told him I didn’t and proceeded to go inside to pick her up.

I walked to back of the rink looking for her and did not see her. When I turned around there was the officer. He asked me why I was looking in the back of cars. I told him I was there to pick up my daughter and had not looked in the back of cars. He then grabbed me by the arm and forced me outside. On the way out I saw her and identified her. He collected my license and made me wait outside.

As we were walking out he pulled me to back of my car and gave me a field sobriety test. It was cold and windy and he had me do the rapid eye test and walk heel/toe for several feet. Needless to say I didn’t pass his little test. I offered to take a breathalyzer as I don’t drink. He couldn’t accommodate that. So, my wife had to come up and drive my daughter home. He finally returned my license and let me go.

So, what’s the point of this story? As I told the officer’s supervisor the next week, as a teacher I have gone through extensive training on student restraint. I have never had to restrain a student in 24 years of teaching. Why? I interact with them in such a way where it hasn’t become necessary to do it. The officer never had to restrain me. I posed no threat and never refused to follow any commands or evaded any questions. The situation obviously didn’t call for that and everyone would have been better off without him being heavy handed.

We can talk about qualified immunity, choke holds, and military style weapons in the hands of police. Those are all worthwhile topics, but the question here is a more basic one. Why was it necessary to taser him in the first place? That was her goal was it not? Why? Many of these instances happen because of racism and there is no denying that. They also happen because officers often have a superiority complex that causes them to escalate situations that don’t need to be escalated. Those two explanations are also not mutually exclusive.

Police reform is obviously going to be harder than passing a few laws. Yes, we should ban choke holds. Yes, we should ban no knock warrants. Yes, we should scale back qualified immunity. Yes, police shouldn’t be outfitted as if they are taking out an Afghan terror cell. More important than all of those things we have to rethink what the goal of policing is and who should be fulfilling that goal.

The blue lives matter crowd will pounce on this victim because he had a bench warrant for a misdemeanor gun charge. It’s as if the value of life is somehow altered by the presence of a criminal record. Did he have a gun in sight in the vehicle? Was he threatening the officer in any way? Is there a way this officer could have approached the situation that would have guaranteed her safety and the safety of the victim? In most cases the answer is yes.

I was a lot happier as a teacher when I discovered that I could exercise more control over my classes when I made the educational experience more collaborative. My students trust that I won’t hurt them. So, they don’t threaten to hurt me. It’s amazing how much a little cooperation helps. As long as police hope to keep a stronghold over us they will continue to get the same results as they have been getting.

US Army officer brutalized by police in Virginia.  This has just got to stop.