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I don't think we can say these comparisons are right. In the George Floyd killing, it was the police who were responsible. In this killing, it was a civilian. Now did the police get the situation utterly wrong? Absolutely. But this is quite different from the police actually killing Nowak.
They underestimated how badly he was stabbed, just as in the Floyd "killing" the police underestimated how fented up Floyd was. Seems pretty close to me. Different motivation, same deal.
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That's a point very much in contention. Floyd responded to his arrest by swallowing a bunch of drugs to avoid possession charges. His tox screen showed more than enough fent to kill a man. He actually had a nearly identical situation 13 months prior, where he was arrested for being a general lowlife criminal, swallowed all his drugs, ODed and nearly died, but in that instance the ambulance arrived in 4 minutes instead of 9 and he was revived.
It is not in contention. Multiple autopsies confirmed George Floyd's death was caused by homicide. A court found the police officer who sat on his neck guilty of second degree murder. You clearly do not like the man, but that doesn't change the facts.
Ultimately, I don't know what best practice for maximizing a fentanyl-overdose patient's chances of survival looks like, but I would be very surprised if it looks like pinning him down in a chokehold, any more than best practice for a stab victim is to try to handcuff him. Whether Floyd died from physical choking or as a result of the drugs he'd ingested doesn't let Chauvin off the moral hook; in Floyd's as in Nowak's case, it would still leave us with officers who wasted time "restraining" an already-dying man instead of trying to save his life.
Why? Every policy is written in blood. How many people going on deranged crashouts would hurt themselves or someone else if they weren't forcibly restrained?
I once called the cops to assist some delirious homeless guy who fell over and cracked his head open on the sidewalk. Do you think the cops should have let Floyd drive away while ODing on fent, which is what he would have done otherwise?
I'll go on the record and say that if I'm ever in a similar state, I would be thankful to be restrained, because I have a bare minimal "deserves to live in a decent society" level of concern for the likelihood that I might accidentally hurt someone else while out of my mind.
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If Nowak had been actively resisting and fleeing arrest, as Floyd was at the time of the start of the restraint, there would be some sort of point you're making. It's not like Floyd was passed out in the gutter when Chauvin rocked up and then Chauvin spontaneously decided to kneel on his upper back.
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Reddit levels of _"nuh-uh!" with nothing to back it up.
The Fall of Minneapolis is an entire documentary, that you can watch for free, about the extensive fuckery around the George Floyd case. While, charitably, there is room to argue about Floyd's cause of death, the idea that any sort of fair process of justice was carried out after the fact is close to laughable at this point. Chauvin being in sentenced to over 20 years is perhaps the most recent and glaring example of a literal political prisoner.
Then you have to layer on the contest of lackdown double-standards from 2020. "Stay home with no exceptions unless you want to murder your whole neighborhood" gave way to "It's not possible to catch COVID at a George Floyd rally" awfully quickly.
The entire George Floyd meta-cycle ought to be studied as one of those particularly shameful mass events in American history. I'd put it up there with, ironically enough, something like the spontaneously lynchings in the South over the first 20 - 30 years of the 20th century.
Yeah I'm sure the position contributed to Floyd's death on some level but I feel it is a rounding error compared to the drug ingestion and it was an appropriate thing to do to a felon actively resisting arrest. I've also yet to see anybody render anybody unconscious via the 'chokehold' that Chauvin was applying which is definitely an uncomfortable position but is not any sort of actual strangulation.
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No, two autopsies found different results. The original one "revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation."
The second autopsy, the "independent" one, was hired by the family, represented by race-baiting huckster Benjamin Crump.
The tox report found Fentanyl 11 ng/ml. 2-3 ng/ml is lethal for someone without a high tolerance
“[Dr. Baker] said that if Mr. Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he would conclude that it was an overdose death,” the memo said.
That's not utterly conclusive, but I think any reasonable person would consider it a reasonable doubt, especially given the unprecedented pressure campaign going on. If you were a medical examiner during the Summer of Love, would you have been willing to send all the people burning cities into a berserk rage by declaring it an OD? At what confidence level?
I've got no doubt that the position and the stress of being arrested contributed somewhat to Floyd dying. But I'm also sure that his diet and existing lifestyle factors also did and nobody from McDonald's went to prison
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