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Notes -
Glenn and John have responded to Radley Balko, who has been attempting to discredit the documentary The Fall of Minneapolis. Balko has thus far written two articles, [1] and [2], and a third is planned. Balko has an obnoxious writing style, so I made a summary of the main arguments with the help of ChatGPT (free version):
In previous videos, Glenn and John reacted to TFOM and interviewed the filmmakers. I'm sure none of this is news to many people here. I'm hoping to elicit some discussion and also to check my understanding of what happened when Floyd died. My current thinking is:
Chauvin's actions that day, while not sanctioned in the training manual, were perhaps not unusual within the MPD. I strongly suspect that he kept Floyd in that position simply because it had worked for him in the past and he hadn't been corrected.
With high confidence, Chauvin meaningfully contributed to Floyd's death.
Floyd's drug use, including any drugs he may have taken immediately prior to his death, probably made him more fragile than he otherwise would have been, but I find it unlikely that the drugs alone alone killed him.
I find it implausible that any of the officers acted with malice.
Convicting Chauvin of manslaughter or second degree unintentional murder, but not third degree murder, would have made more sense.
There was a Metaculus question for the Chauvin trial. At the time, the community was divided on whether he would be convicted of anything. This gives us a sense of how surprising the reaction to Floyd's death was. Have we been able to make sense of it since then? Decades from now, will anybody care? Or will none of it matter in the grand scheme of things, especially compared to the pandemic?
I only briefly perused one of the Balko posts (and haven't watched any of the videos he's responding to). I wanted to skip to the bit about the departmental training manual. I found the post very confused and focused on a further step of tying up a suspect, at which point you'd need to do various things like put them on their side, monitor them medically, etc. The post seemed to simply not understand that most of what it was citing wasn't relevant unless you had tied up the suspect.
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