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The bodycam footage of Henry Nowak was released. Mostly peaceful protests ensue.
A summary of the story (most of this info is in the PDF I'm about to link, feel free to skip this section and read it yourself): Henry Nowak had had a few beers (still under the legal limit), saw the Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, pulled out his phone and started recording, and called out to him a few times "Are you a bad man?", with Digwa replying "I am a bad man." The recording ended shortly after Digwa grabbed Nowak's phone. The judge giving the sentencing said that Nowak was not asking this with hostility in his voice (warning, PDF download); he likely was drawn to ask about it upon seeing the larger of the two knives that Digwa carried. Yes, two knives. Digwa was carrying two ceremonial knives that are permitted to him as a religious article, one of them being a kirpan, an 8 inch one, on a sheath over his waistband.
There is no video record of the struggle after the video ended, but Digwa stabbed Nowak 4 times. The stab to the chest was the fatal one, passing through all of Nowak's clothing and penetrating upwards, between the two uppermost ribs, puncturing a lung and penetrating even deeper to cut a vein behind the collarbone, a wound of 8 cm in depth. There was no apparent injury to Digwa himself, though he claimed his eye had been bruised when the police officers arrived. Digwa took some of his own videos of the dying Nowak after stabbing him, telling him he had not been stabbed. His brother, Gurpreet, made the call to 911. Before the officers arrived, Digwa handed his kirpan to his mother and told her to take it away. He also kept Nowak's phone, and didn't tell the officers he had it. Nobody told the officers that Nowak had been stabbed, certainly not Digwa, who might have been the only one present who would know that.
As shown in the bodycam video, the police arrive for Gurpreet's complaint, briefly listen to Digwa's complaint, and quickly determine that Nowak should be arrested, so they drag his limp body into a better position to be handcuffed. Nowak weakly tells them that he's been stabbed, which the arresting officer impassively denies. The other officers investigate this claim a bit more; the female officer can tell that he's in rough shape, and notes that his pupils aren't even reacting to the light. They tried CPR on him after this, presumably; in the judge's remarks, one officer was horrified to learn of the chest wound after having done chest compressions on him.
So, there's rioting. The BBC doesn't frame it quite as sympathetically as they framed the anti-racism rioting from 6 years ago, though. Which brings us to our George Floyd comparison.
George Floyd was accused of using counterfeit bills. He had been arrested many times before. When they arrested him this time, they knelt on his (neck? upper back?) as he slowly died, claiming, as Henry Nowak had when he died, that he couldn't breathe. The public saw it as an execution of Floyd just because he was black, even though Floyd actually died from the fentanyl in his system, and the kneeling was department protocol (inadvised protocol, if the suspect is having trouble breathing).
In this case, the police presumed guilt of the nearly-dead unarmed man, even as his murderer was still upright and telling all kinds of lies. The public broadly sees this as anti-white bias, paralleling the racial claims from Floyd. Unlike Floyd, Nowak was actually murdered, and he was murdered with a knife that the white members of the public can't even own or carry for self defense. They can't even carry pepper spray. That Digwa as a racial and religious outsider to Britain is also an enhancing factor.
I will interject a brief defense of the police in this case: I took a concealed carry class recently, and I have also watched a few Paul Harrell videos on the subject. In self-defense situations, you want the police on your side. The way to do this is to call them first, before the real attacker does, and establish that you are the injured party, the complainant, and he is the injurer, even if he's lying in a pool of his own blood. Digwa did these things, and hid information from the police, so it's a little more understandable that they made a mistake. In light of the Pakistani rape scandal, however, I also find it understandable if the public doesn't find it understandable, and really do suspect that the police have an anti-white bias. And of course, it's completely unacceptable that they dismissed his claims of being stabbed, especially since he was on the ground when they found him.
For me, there's a lot more meat to these protests than the 2020 BLM protests. If I lived in the UK, I would probably be protesting too (peacefully!). If liberal societies continue along their outgroup-favoritism path, they might find that the post Civil Rights Movement atmosphere, whose protocol they were acting in accordance with, has completely evaporated, and they must forge a new and uncertain path forward. That's the human condition.
The amount of meat has never been an issue. Tony Timpa was just as bad as George Floyd, but Floyd was manufactured into an outrage during an election season by sympathetic media wanting to whip up a race war to discredit the sitting President.
People have noticed the differences, but I need to remind everyone that the difference in coverage is because the official propaganda only ever goes one way: anti-white.
Floyd's optics were the issue and most people being completely ignorant about how chokes are even applied. I wouldn't necessarily want to be in Floyd's position since it'd be painful but there is no positional asphyxiation possible there.
Based on Minneapolis police rules, Chauvin was probably in the clear until Floyd went unconscious ~5 minutes in, at which point he definitely should have gotten off his neck.
It's hard to tell if another officer was holding down his legs, but either way a knee on your neck while lying chest down can very easily restrict your chest from expanding enough to get air. When people OD from fent they usually passively conk out instead of panicking about being unable to breathe.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007159353/george-floyd-arrest-death-video.html
It's not going to take 5 minutes whilst you're actively vocalizing. I don't mind Chauvin getting hit for potential negligence/failure to check on Floyd but I do not believe that that position is a chokehold
It's not a chokehold, but the chest needs to expand to take in fresh air. The amount of breath you need to vocalize is a lot less than the amount needed to get sufficient oxygen into the lungs.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11036158/
The MPD training specifically told officers to put suspects in the recovery position (lying on side) once they were handcuffed to alleviate positional asphyxia.
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He was complaining about being unable to breathe before Chauvin put a knee on his neck.
And being put on your chest and having a weight on your neck/upper back makes breathing a lot harder. Guy had massively clogged arteries and was high, but his blood fent level, especially for a long time addict, did not suggest overdose.
What doomed Chauvin was keeping his knee on well past the point where Floyd was actively resisting. The other cops found Floyd had no pulse and he kept his knee on. Cops are often really dumb.
One of the key points is that we do not know if he was a long time fent addict. We know he was an opioid user, but if he thought he was getting regular stuff and it was cut with fent and that difference killed him, well, that happens tens of thousands of times per year.
I'm no doctor, but his autopsy reported 11 ng/mL of fentanyl and 5.6 ng/mL of norfentanyl (an inactive metabolite of fentanyl). This indicates the dose was recent. He had a habit of doing this (based on a 2019 arrest where he tossed back a handful of percs while in the passenger seat of a car being pulled over for having an invalid plate). And there were meth/fent pill fragments in the car with Floyd's DNA. That being said, opioids via oral route generally take longer to cause an overdose compared to injection, obviously, and the entire arrest took slightly over 20 minutes. And another expert testified that Floyd didn't show the classic signs of overdose. Fent is much stronger than oxy or morphine, but the chemical pathway is identical, so tolerance to one should affect the other.
My assumption would be that he took way more than 11 ng/ml, and that was just how much had metabolized by the time bio-activity stopped. Plus he had multiple other heart/lung health issues and was obviously having the kind of crashout that can make a fat middle-aged man die.
And I'm not a doctor either, but my understanding was that fent was something like 50 times stronger than oxy, processed faster, and there was only a partial carryover for tolerance, which is exactly why "Expected oxy, got fent, ODed and died" is a cliche that happens tens of thousands of times per year.
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And Daniel Shaver was so much worse.
That bodycam video to this day enrages me like no other. I'd bring back Scaphism for that cop.
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Never forget: the cop having "you're fucked" written on the dust cover of his AR-15 was a fact not heard by the jury.
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Another bodycam video I wish I hadn't watched. I can still hear him drunkenly begging the police not to shoot him. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why they didn't just tell him to lie face down and put his hands on his head.
It's something that seems not uncommon in tense, high-stress police interactions. Multiple cops screaming unintelligible and contradictory orders at people. Midwits screaming at individuals with room-temperature IQs. While screaming in tense situations is common, I think it also comes from police "verbal judo" training; which was even discussed in the Chauvin trial. I’m sure being in control is central, but I bet “being authoritative” is a big part of it, and for midwit cops that just turns into yelling.
Shaver taught me that in the unlikely event I get in a situation where I'm being screamed at by multiple cops I'm just gonna kneel with my hands on my head and let them do the rest of the work. They'll probably throw my face into the ground, maybe break my arm, but better than playing death Simon says until they shoot me.
The thing I want the most from police reform is a script for people interacting with police. Figure out the motions/actions a police officer is the most concerned about, figure out how a citizen can make it clear they're NOT doing that, broadly publish it as a best practices and teach it in school, then train the police to be expecting the script at least as a "this person seems to be cooperating".
For example, it seems like traffic stops can get scary because it's hard to tell if someone's reaching for a gun. Maybe the script should be "person being pulled over keeps their hands on the wheel until the officer comes over and can see what they're doing". And now if I'm pulled over, I can do that, the officer knows what to do with it, and my action isn't something he's worried about.
Standardize behavior on both sides as much as we can, and it decreases tension in most situations and makes it easier to see when things might heat up.
I've seen a decent amount of bad cop interactions (as in, the interaction went bad). It often times is,
Cops have different information than suspect, making the cop think the suspect is dangerous
Suspect doesn't know what to do.
Cop interprets innocent thing as bad thing, shoots.
What I think is most practical is a playbook for cops that assumes civilians will sometimes do irrational things but aren't necessarily dangerous. I keep thinking back to Philando Castile. A cop is informed of a situation involving a black guy with a white shirt (in other words, a very broad description). He stops a black man with a white shirt. The man informs him he has a gun and the cop tells him not to reach for it. The problem being that his gun is on his right hip, and his ID is in his right pocket. So how do we prevent this?
Let's say the cop stops Castile, and is informed of the gun. He is told to step out of the car slowly and put his hands on the hood of the car. The cop takes the gun and explains he will return it at the end of the stop if there are no issues. Proceed from there.
At the end of each bad interaction, do a root cause analysis if there is a reasonable way to prevent the issue from happening again. Have a database where districts can compare policies.
I want to target "suspect doesn't know what to do" specifically here: my goal is for the default behavior when interacting with cops to be things that don't worry said cops.
It seems like asking about weapons first before asking them to do anything else makes a lot of sense: Castile can respond before having to get anything, the cop now knows he's got a weapon to worry about but Castile's hands are still clearly visible, and the officer can temporarily disarm him as you mention. But maybe we should have it on the citizen side (or both): if you as a citizen are asked to do something that puts your hand near your own weapon, maybe there should be a standard of not doing that and explaining the problem. That could be an issue right now because from the cop's side you're not complying, but if we make that the norm it'll be less of an issue.
I do wonder if this starts cutting into rights though: obviously from the police side they'd rather you just incriminate yourself of whatever they might get you for, and it's possible the eventual script gets a little too "volunteer information that the police don't necessarily have rights to, or you're considered a threat". But I'd at least like it to be something we're working on, and it seems far more realistic than "defund the police" or "just shoot the gun out of his hands".
My goal is that I think the lion's share should be on the cops. There are about a million cops in the U.S. There are 340 million non-cops. Training 1 million people seems easier, plus just learning something once doesn't mean much until you've put into practice, whereas the cop puts his knowledge into practice every day.
In Castile's case, he did tell the officer he had a gun. The officer still gave him a predictably stupid order to present his ID and not consider the gun. Could Castile have taken a different line and said he couldn't comply? With the benefit of hindsight, sure. But for the crime of not knowing the perfect thing to do, he ends up shot.
Or John Crawford. John holds a BB gun he plans to purchase and starts talking on his cell phone. Someone calls the cops and claims he was waiving a gun around. The cops show up while he's talking on his cell phone and pretty much immediately shoot him. Here's their testimony and here's the video (Sorry, best I can find). He doesn't know cops have been called, he panics and gets shot despite the first thing he does before running is drop the gun.
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I mean near term, the most important thing for anyone to remember is that if he can’t see your hands empty in a situation, he assumes that you have a weapon. If you make a move with your hands into a place where he won’t be able to watch what you are doing with your hands he assumes you are reaching for a weapon.
The most important thing to do when dealing with police is keep your hands where he can see them, Do not have anything in your hands, and do not move your hands to any place that your hands would be hidden from view. So if you’re at a traffic stop, you put your hands either straight up or on the steering wheel, and do not move until the cop is there and can see your hands. Do not reach for your license, your insurance information, your proof of ownership or anything else until the cop can see you and has directly told you to do that. If you need to reach into your glove box, a bad or a purse ask him if it’s okay, or hand over the bag.
The main thing here is that cops are trained from day one with one fact in mind: if you miss the guy going for a weapon, you’re probably going to get seriously injured.
I find it this whole conversation interesting. It wasn't long ago that people online were linking Chris Rock's video How not to get your ass kicked by the police and sagely nodding that black men simply reacted foolishly to policemen, who were lawfully going about their jobs. Various examples were used as illustrations, including the notorious pepper spray incident. The lesson was, don't be an idiot and you have nothing to fear from law enforcement.
In this thread you have presumably right-leaning posters now suggesting that the police departments have some systemic bias against whites (due presumably to political pressure, a sea change in departmental ethos, or similar). I'm not commenting on this specific case or any of the ones mentioned, simply pointing out an odd irony.
It's a pretty common statement that the rise of body cams have just generally revealed that the vast majority of police uses of violence are very much justified
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I seem to recall being literally taught this in my drivers ed class, although admittedly that was a while ago now. In particular, do not go digging in your glove box for proof of insurance.
Although the "don't talk to police" lecture is related, and also worth teaching.
But it would make sense to explicitly teach expectations in schools.
I can imagine some friction around teaching kids not to talk to police, but I like this a lot because it would make the effort pretty politically neutral.
Here's what you should do to make an officer feel as safe as possible in terms of you getting violent... and now here's what an officer is and isn't allowed to do, and here's a detailed description of your rights. Look like you're going for a lawyer, not a gun.
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I wasn't handed a script when I was studying for my driver's permit/license, but this very thing was exactly what was drilled into me as the thing to do when pulled over by the police. Both hands glued to the wheel unless or until instructed otherwise. In general, the fact that you need to always show both your hands, don't reach for something that's hidden, and don't make sudden movements are what I'd consider the basic "script" for interacting with police which I had picked up growing up. I didn't grow up in an environment that had much police interaction, and I haven't had any meaningful interaction with police as an adult, so I can't remember where I picked up this "script," though.
I think I've made a similar post to this in the past. I'm sure I was told about hand placement by someone, but it wasnt officially drilled into me. Ambient culture, context awareness, and (frankly) a baseline of intelligence? The rationale for keeping hands visible at all times just seemed intuitive and sensible.
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We have such scripts. The problem is that they are so degrading to the non-police person that many self-respecting people simply cannot manage to engage in them.
If you think keep your hands visible, voice neutral, and movements slow and deliberate is "so degrading to the non-police person that many self-respecting people simply cannot manage to engage in them" I think it stands to reason that you are part of the problem.
You have to think about the is the context of an honor culture person who perceived their honor to be challenged by the police officer. In this frame, any voluntary act of cooperation is a sign of submission and humiliation. Honor can only be satisfied by defeating the officer or frustrating his activities.
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In past discussion, he has claimed that police officers in his area demand that citizens call them "sir". That definitely is degrading in the casual modern age, where people laugh at you for even calling your coworkers "Mr. Lastname" rather than "Firstname".
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Huh, that's interesting to me, I must have missed them growing up.
I have some vague heuristics (no sudden movements, don't reach for things at your waist) but I was never actually taught them, I just kind of picked them up, often from watching people do very badly by not following them. Details like "would the officer prefer I already have my license and registration ready, or should I just wait until he comes up" I still don't know, and I wouldn't be surprised if different police have different answers.
The degradation aspect in particular is interesting to me, because my interactions with police (even while being in the wrong, albeit for minor things) have generally been as pleasant and respectful as they could be, and I genuinely would like to make their job easier in the future if I can. I'd much rather interact with an officer who's not worried about what I might do, and I respect the job he's doing even if I'd rather not be part of it in the moment. Can you give examples of the kind of thing that people wouldn't do?
I guess a reminder to me that police officers differ: I know you've talked before about the frustrations with NJ cops, and I am in a different state and level of urbanization than that, so it's probably not surprising that I have different experiences.
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Every single hyperlink about "verbal judo" claims it's about using positive language to de-escalate tense situations, not screaming at your opponent.
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