After working in law enforcement with the FBI for 25 years, I often find myself defending police officers who are getting tarred and feathered by the public for an offense gone viral. For example, I wrote that Amber Guyger was perhaps guilty of manslaughter but not murder, defended Steven Mattson after he killed a black man (who had charged at Mattson with a knife), and said that Daniel Pantaleo (the officer at the center of the Eric Garner case) shouldn’t be fired. All too often, the mob misses the nuances of a case that help explain an officer’s actions. But don’t ask me to defend the actions of the Minneapolis police officer who applied his knee to the neck of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man who lay face down on a Minneapolis roadway and begged for relief from the pressure. I will not defend that officer — because there is no excuse for his actions.
Floyd had a right to breathe. He also had a right to exist. And yes, his life mattered.
Police say that Floyd matched the description of a suspect in a forgery case. Yes, the video shows him being defiant and resisting arrest. Neither of those crimes should have resulted in a death sentence. Another video, filmed by a bystander, captures some eight agonizing minutes in which Floyd pleads to have a white police officer’s knee removed from his neck and utters the sadly ubiquitous phrase, “I can’t breathe.” He posed no threat to himself, the arresting officers, or anyone else at this point. In law enforcement terms, Floyd was “safely in custody.”
After being removed from the scene by ambulance, Floyd, 46, a resident of the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, was later pronounced dead at 9:25 p.m. on Monday. The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis issued a statement that read in part: “Now is not the time to rush to judgement and immediately condemn our officers.” The Minneapolis Police Department, however, took swift action on Tuesday, firing four of the officers involved in the apprehension.
While I cannot speak to the decision as it relates to each of the four who were terminated, after viewing the videos numerous times and discussing officer actions with fellow law enforcement professional colleagues, I can speak to the conduct of the officer whose knee was very likely the weapon that caused Floyd’s death. So here I will apply a quarter-century of law enforcement experience (much of it spent on federal task forces that partnered with local police departments) to provide insight on reckless police actions.
It pains me to criticize those in law enforcement. I understand down to the granular level how dangerous and terribly difficult the job can be. It is a thankless and unforgiving pursuit. Mistakes that occur in a nanosecond can result in your own funeral. Often, when you show up to perform the job you idealistically swore an oath to do, you’re playing an away game where the fans, the referees, and the Monday morning quarterbacks instinctually view you as the villain.
But none of that matters here. What matters is that a man died in police custody, a seemingly preventable death. Police actions may ultimately prove to have been the cause. Yes, the police officers deserve due process. Yes, we should certainly await a full accounting of the facts. Yes, we need to see the yet-to-be-released police body camera footage. And yes, we need to trust the process — mostly because the FBI has announced it is conducting an investigation into “whether the Minneapolis Police Department officers involved willfully deprived the individual of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
Jason Johnson, a retired deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department and the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, tells me that U.S. law enforcement officers have some 250 million interactions with the public every single year. The number of interactions that result in applied use-of-force is minimal. The number of interactions that result in fatal use-of-force is even more infinitesimal. And the ones that raise questions about police brutality or abuse of use-of-force guidelines are but a handful. Sometimes, the media narrative can distort this.
Police work requires expertise in combatives. While much of the job is related to communication and non-physical human interaction, a police officer must always stand ready to put their hands on someone in defense of life and limb — and also, when necessary, to deprive them of their liberty, in order to effectuate a meeting with our justice system. We are, after all, a society predicated on the rule of law. It is those very encounters, the ones that engender placing someone under arrest, that can be the most precarious. These collisions are also what demand a separation between us and those we are directed to take into custody. We are armed instruments of the state afforded the provision of being able to take a life — a sober responsibility demanding maturity, judgment, and an appreciation for the attendant gravity and its consequences.
But the allowance of applicable use-of-force comes with attached responsibilities. On the continuum between a stern lecture and taking a life, law enforcement must always meet force (or non-compliance) with one incremental level above the civilian’s resistance or aggression. We may never escalate a situation whereby the police must serve as the catalyst for de-escalation.
It is what civil society relies upon. Just as when the bell rings at the conclusion of a round of boxing or MMA fighting, fighters dutifully drop hands and move to their respective corners. The adrenaline and controlled, violent fury exerted during the round immediately dissipates. It has to. It must. Anything else is a free-for-all and anarchy.
So it is with policing. No matter how violent the struggle is during apprehension, once the subject is controlled and in custody, everything gets ratcheted back. Police are not deployed to effect judgment, apply punitive redress, or to exact revenge. But they are indeed fallible human beings. And a few who remain unfit to wear the shield sometimes ignore the bell that ends the round.
That is what I believe happened in Minneapolis on Monday. The police officer seen in the video with his knee pressed firmly into Floyd’s neck was very likely angry. He was angry that Floyd did not initially comply with lawful commands. He was angry that he was forced to exert himself to apprehend Floyd. He was angry with the gathered crowd who yelled and jeered at the officers, making his job harder than it should have been. He was likely angry that Floyd didn’t appear to respect him or the badge he wore.
None of that matters. None of it will ultimately spare this police officer, as well as the others who were complicit in not intervening to spare Floyd from continuous and ultimately fatal torture, from a day of reckoning by grand jury, be it local or federal. There simply exists no righteous explanation for such demonstrated callous indifference to human life. The law enforcement profession is much better than what we witnessed in Minneapolis. I am saddened. I feel ashamed.
Floyd had a right to breathe. He also had a right to exist. And yes, his life mattered. The officer at the center of this case failed to protect those rights.
James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John’s University. Gagliano is a member of the board of directors of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.
