George Floyd (Episode #32)

I need to preface what I’m sharing in this episode/post with the fact that typically I don’t publicly share my political views, and I keep my thoughts and feelings to myself on social issues. But last night, when I stumbled across a video on Facebook showing the fate of George Floyd, I was disturbed and angered. I fell asleep and woke up this morning with George and his plight on my mind, and I couldn’t keep quiet on this one ... so here goes ... "Please, please ... I can’t breathe man ... Your knee is in my neck, I can’t breathe ... Momma, Momma ... I’m through ... My stomach hurt, my neck hurt, everything hurt ... I need some water or something ... Please ... I can’t breath officer ... They gone kill me ..." And they did. Four men dressed in police uniforms killed George Floyd in broad daylight, on a city street filled with people joining their pleas with his for help. I struggle to call them police and I struggle to call them men. Who do you call for help, when the police need to be policed? When the video starts, George is already lying on the ground with his hands cuffed behind him, and one of the officers, Derek Chauvin, is kneeling on George with one of his knees on his neck. George as well as bystanders can be heard begging the police officer to take his knee off of George’s neck. While George’s cries and moans grow weaker, the protests of the crowd grow louder, but to no avail. Chauvin continues to kneel on George’s neck. There were two other officers next to Chauvin who all appear to be holding George down, and another officer doing crowd control. The two officers who you can clearly see in the video, Chauvin, the officer with his knee on George's neck, and Tou Thao, the officer doing crowd control, showed no compassion or sense of humanity when George was begging for help. Essentially, begging for his life. At around 4:04 of the video I saw, George stops moving. For the entire four minutes of the video to this point, George and the bystanders have been begging for the officers to show some mercy and get off of George, who is lying on the ground, handcuffed and and being held down by three officers. Not resisting. Just struggling to breathe. Just calling for his momma and begging for his life. Yet, the police ignore George’s pleas and that of the bystanders around them. From around 4:04 to 6:43, when the paramedics arrive, George is lying completely still on the ground while bystanders are begging for the police to check his pulse. With one bystander overheard to say, ‘Did they just kill him?’ One paramedic can be seen checking George’s pulse and then heading back to the ambulance to get a stretcher. Then George, who is still handcuffed, is manhandled onto the stretcher with very little care given to his neck or spine, which is what you would normally expect to see. If there was even a hint of a pulse when the paramedic checked him, you would expect them to start CPR right there on the scene. But they didn’t. He was just put onto the stretcher. They didn’t even bother to strap him down. At around 8:09 in the video, where you can briefly see George lying on his back on the stretcher, it doesn’t look like he’s breathing. (more)