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Mr. Chauvin was convicted and that seems just— he bears full responsibility for Mr. Floyd’s death as far as I can tell. There are other cases where responsibility is not nearly as clear-cut. How should police respond when they are confronted with belligerent, or incoherent or threatening, or violent, or possibly armed suspects? Americans are well-armed, you have to assume that possibility. How police DO respond these days is with lethal force. This is a tragic state of affairs, and alternative procedures need to be looked at for people being apprehended for petty crimes — no one should get shot in the back running away from a drunk driving stop. But while there are cases when cooperative or innocent or just plain bewildered/high people are unjustly killed, it’s rare. Sickening but rare. Point is, if you want to get shot by the cops, go ahead and defy them, threaten them, race off in your car at high speed, attack them or reach for your gun or knife—I don’t care what color you are it will not end well. Act like a gangster and it will not end well.

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An unfortunately little known case of police completely disregarding life is the death of Daniel Shaver. It maters not if he was white or black. The circumstances are the important point here. Police got a report that he was waving a rifle out a window. Instead of arriving and calling the room and engaging in a discussion they sent a swat team up yelling inconsistent orders that were nearly impossible to follow then saying, as he begged them not to shoot him, if you don't follow my orders I will shoot you. The sergeant effectively said, putting your hands in a position inconsistent with my orders is a capital offence. Had they called the room, SWAT team on site, from the lobby they would have heard Daniel explain it was a pellet gun used in his pest control work. He was very sorry and wasn't thinking. They could have asked him to come out of the room without the gun. In todays world it would have taken 2 minutes to confirm he worked for Walmart and maybe looked at his Facebook page or otherwise confirmed his story and treated him with respect. He was white. If this had been a black employee the entire world would have seen this video and there would have been riots when the shooter was acquitted. As it turned out the shooter is getting a 2500 a month "pension" subsidy and works in another field. The sergeant was rewarded with early retirement. The only hope I have is that Brailsford, the shooter, really does have PTSD and same for the sergeant and they see the two little Shaver daughters in their nightmares every night. The police MUST have better training and better de-escalation skills and better culture to stop the killings of citizens. Fair warning, you can't un-see the shooting if you watch the video

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver

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I just have one minor criticism of this otherwise very enlightening article, with the words:

"... while cops are more likely to rough up and verbally abuse black people, they are not more likely to kill them. These facts lead to a conclusion ... that George Floyd did not die because he was black. "

While I haven't bothered to look up the (probably Latin) name for it, I'm pretty sure this is an example of some type of fallacy of informal logic. Hopefully you can see it, Professor McWhorter.

Otherwise, thanks or the excellent work you do!

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Do not go along with that ride John. Truth matters.

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Love the swing at Pevear and Volkonsky!

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This has been reality for the past decade or so.

40 out of 100 people lethally attacking cops are black.

25 out of 100 people killed by cops are black.

People who believe systemic racial bias in police use of force are after reading this are in denial or moronic. Or they may simply be obstinate. And yes, you can trust the numbers, because it's those numbers used to "prove" we have a police brutality and racism problem.

People will say, "Ah, but 13 out of 100 people in this country are black. That's 2.5 times the rate of whites." John McWhorter even points out that stat. But who points out that 50 out of 100 people in this country are men, but they're 95 out of 100 people killed by cops. Where's the hash-tag #MaleLivesMatter when that statistically indicates men are 20 times more likely to be killed by a cop than a woman? But we do have a hashtag of #SayHerName for the 1-2 unarmed black women out of 1,000 people shot and killed every year by cops. (Nevermind the 4-6 unarmed white women killled. The data is here: https://tinyurl.com/http-blm-sayhername-myths )

We can recognize that due to a myriad of factors -- historical racism being one of them -- that black people, currently and not forever, live a life where they’re 5 times more likely to kill a cop and 8 times more likely to kill another human, taken as an aggregate average. But because the media and our world refuses to face that intolerable reality, we'll continue to perpetrate myths like "systemic racism." #NotAllCops #NotAllBlackPeople

SOURCES:

37% of cops are killed by black suspects (2010-2019, 199 out of 537 were black; “white” includes Hispanic):

https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/tables/table-42.xls

39% of cops assaulted and injured by knife or firearm were by black offenders (2012-2016).

https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2016/officers-assaulted/tables/table-120.xls

25% killed by police are black; 50% white; 20% hispanic; 5% other (approx)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

From 2007-2016 an average of 2,150 firearm assaults on police per year (10% injury rate) SOURCE: https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2016/officers-assaulted/tables/table-75.xls

BONUS: NOTE HOW THE MEDIA FOOLS YOU.

In 2015, The Washington Post actually reported 43% of police killers are black. They did this once, and and only once. This article was sublimely published (Washington Post publishes 1000+ articles a week), and I’ve never seen it referenced by The Washington Post, New York Times, or any other major outlet since. But it exists. From this Washington Post article: "There were 511 officers killed in felonious incidents and 540 offenders from 2004 to 2013, according to FBI reports. Among the total offenders, 52 percent were white, and 43 percent were black."

Again, you actually have an anti-white bias -- which researchers from Dr. Fryer to Dr. Cesario have found -- when the percentages are that far off from the lethal force returned (around 25% overall, 30-35% when "unarmed").

Note when it comes to who kills police, Washington Post switches from per capita proportions to “raw numbers” to say this inflammatory and ridiculous statement: “There are no simple conclusions or trends that can be gleaned from the database alone, but it provides context that based on the raw numbers, officers are no more likely to be killed by black offenders than white offenders.”

SOURCE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/01/09/are-black-or-white-offenders-more-likely-to-kill-police/

STUDIES SHOWING ANTI-WHITE BIAS IN SHOOTINGS (2 out of at least 10 showing no bias in fatal outcomes):

http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399 (Roland Fryer at Harvard: “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force”)

See also Fryer’s 2018 follow-up article to the same study titled “Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings” where he reiterates that “blacks are 27.4% less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics” https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fryer_police_aer.pdf

Published Apr 2019 in the Journal of Political Economy (JPE): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701423

A 2018 study titled “Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016” (by Joseph Cesario, David Johnson, and William Terrill) concluded was the following: “We find little evidence within these data for systematic anti-Black disparity in fatal police deadly force decisions.”

Additionally, the authors analyzed unarmed and not aggressing person shot by police, and concluded no proven racial bias: “Overall, the data provide little evidence of systematic anti-Black disparity in officers’ decisions to shoot unarmed, nonaggressing citizens. Officers either showed no meaningful disparity in either direction or, if anything, an overall pattern of anti-White disparity.”

SOURCE: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618775108

FULL PAPER: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_a5fc6189326849fab031bc3fedae7c3d.pdf

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"However much fentanyl or meth Floyd had in him that night, no one will seriously argue that Floyd was about to keel over that night on his own."

Are you saying that there is no amount of fentanyl that could have killed Floyd within 10 minutes of ingesting it, absent the cop's knee?

It's hard to take such a claim seriously.

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What all of you are overlooking is that the charge of "murder" in this case, in the state of Minnesota, is NOT murder as most of us think of it--that is, the intentional killing of a human with malice aforethought.

Rather, it is more like what we would think of as manslaughter--the killing of one human by another with intentional indifference, or with negligence. '

So, Chauvin is NOT charged with murder at all, in the way we assume he is.

Further, the presumption of innocence goes as follows: a citizen is presumed innocent UNLESS proven guilty. Not UNTIL--which presupposes the outcome. UNLESS, which presupposes innocence; which is as it should be.

For all of you so certain of guilt when you have not heard the facts--shame on you. *I* have been in the position of having a son accused and presumed guilty without the benefit of anyone hearing any evidence. It is a horrifying and terrifying prospect--your neighbors crying for summary judgement and execution.

Every single one of us could end up in that position--whereupon we would fervently hope for the presumption of our innocence.

So shame on you all--and that includes you, Mr. McWhorter. We have a constitution. Let us adhere to it, uncomfortable as that may be.

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"Federal judge tosses excessive force suit against five Dallas officers in Tony Timpa case.......

The responding officers mocked the 32-year-old as he screamed for his life, with one officer’s knee pinned in his back for about 14 minutes as he lay face down in the grass, according to court records. They joked after he became unresponsive that he was going to be late for school, the lawsuit says."

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/courts/2020/07/07/federal-judge-tosses-excessive-force-suit-against-five-dallas-officers-in-tony-timpa-case/

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First, credit where it is due: Once again, John, you are going out on that limb, and I (many of us) are VERY grateful to see you there, ie, someone with a public voice speaking truth to power about race when so few will do so, at a time when we so desperately need a huge course correction to the woke madness infecting our nation. That said, while I largely agree with and appreciate this piece, I disagree on a couple of points.

(1) I think you err when you cite only poverty as a cause of disproportional black crime, leading to a higher number of police confrontations with black people. Why is there post civil rights decades-long disproportional black-African-American poverty? And does poverty necessitate that AAs commit so much crime? Those are questions that need to be asked, and then answered seriously beyond the woke go-to, the MUST go-to of: "Duh! Because of the evils of historical racism, which continue to this day to such a great extent, as shown in racist police brutality (Evidence? George Floyd!) and structural racism. As long as these conditions exist we are stuck with no way out, UNLESS..." Enter BLM, White Fragility, et al with their "solutions", which will ultimately just be endless actions that keep them as leaders and power-holders of The Movement, a futile Groundhog Day (the movie) of deadening repetition to "keep grievance alive!"

(2) You float the notion that maybe we just have to ride out this national upheaval fueled by a movement of false narratives because it could, maybe, finally get us to a better place in spite of its toxicity, a place where police brutality is greatly reduced to the good of all humans. Even if that very wishful thought were to manifest, what price in the larger picture are we paying along the way? Because right now I see a lot of bad things happening on this ride. Those are outcomes already proven. It seems to me, to accept the ride is to accept ever more of these divisive and destructive societal outcomes, and that does not bode well.

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Volokhonsky and Peaver are execrable translators? I enjoyed their translations of Dostoevsky, I don’t speak Russian, and I had never read those books before. Is there another translator I could read for comparison?

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Mr. Mcwhorter has provided evidence that not all killings of black people by cops are motivated by racism, but he has not proved one way or other that Chauvin did not kill George Floyd because he is a racist. Mcwhorter has not reviewed or analyzed Chauvin's past actions, especially his record as a cop to determine if Chauvin killed George Floyd because of racist motivations. If one does not buy as I do not that all social interactions are racist in part, every killing by a cop has to be analyzed by itself in order to determine if the killing is motivated by racism.

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I can't imagine I'm right and John's wrong here, but I *think* an unwarranted apostrophe or two have snuck in to these sentences: "Say Chauvin gets what he deserves, and it is part of a gradual reform of the cops’ getting away with the murder of just people, as opposed to black people" and here: "But to me, the tragedy of George Floyd may be redeemed by pointing us past a problem with the cops’ murdering too many human beings." I'm trying to make "getting away" and "murdering" possessive in my headbone, but it's not cooperating. Likely not an error but a typo on John's part.

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Adolph Reed, Jr., as I understand it, criticizes antiracist activists as limiting their potential success by being race reductionists instead of approaching things from a class perspective. Interestingly, if he is right then George Floyd may be a victim of this ineffectiveness. Roland Fryer's work seems to support this conclusion. If poor white lives mattered instead of being privileged, then...

Maybe this case will lead to the turning point. But maybe future social scientists will conclude that the tide could have been turned with Timpa? Or even much sooner?

I'm thinking Thomas Sowell might have an opinion about this.

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I agree with Ladyhawk's comment. If you read Andrew Branca's daily updates in "Legal Insurrection" you will get an entirely different perspective than what media headlines tell you. Branca's reporting is not a "right" or "wrong" perspective. He is, though, pointing out whenever bias crops up in this case. (I am an attorney too and I am reserving my judgment on the case until the trial is over. )

For example, the media reported at length that Mr. Floyd cried Mama Mama while on the ground. We have been led to believe by the media (and the silence of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison for the past year) that Mr. Floyd was calling out for his mother who had died several years earlier -- certainly eliciting public sympathy. It was not until Chauvin's attorney, Eric Nelson, cross-examined Chauvin's "fiance" Courteney Ross that we learned George Floyd called HER mama as a nickname and she was denoted as Mama in his cellphone. When I read about Ross' testimony in the Boston Globe and other media, zero reference to Ross as Mama.

BTW, the State has 10-12 attorneys on the team going against Eric Nelson who is the only attorney for the defense. These 10-12 attorneys are not part of the District Attorney's office. They are high level outside counsel brought in at tax payers expense.

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