“Please, please. I can’t breathe,” Floyd rasps out on the smartphone video.
He moans.
A bystander off-screen addresses the officers: “He is human, bro.”
As one officer continues to kneel on Floyd’s neck, his partner turns his back on the scene to motion spectators to step back. Floyd? He’s his partner’s problem.
In the meantime, Floyd has stopped talking. Even under weight of the officer’s knee, he had managed to move his head a bit. Now he moves less and less. Five minutes into the 10-minute video, he is motionless.
“Check for a pulse, please,” a female voice calls from outside the frame.
The officer’s knee remains on Floyd’s neck.
Just over seven minutes into the video, the ambulance arrives. As the EMT begins to work, the officer’s knee remains on Floyd’s neck.
“They just killed that man,” a woman says off-camera.
Six years ago, in 2014, another black man, Eric Garner, pleaded with police officers in New York City who held him in a chokehold, saying “I can’t breathe.” His alleged crime? Selling “loosies” — individual cigarettes — to passersby.
Then he continued: “When you hear someone calling for help, you’re supposed to help. This officer failed in the most basic, human sense.” In fact, he also failed in precisely the way that the NYPD officer failed six years ago. He failed as a police officer.
He betrayed his oath of office. Sworn to serve and protect the people of his city and to uphold the Constitution of the American nation, he instead, heedlessly and without due process of law, deprived a man of his life, denying him both equal protection of law and the very air we all must breathe to live.
How can this happen in a nation of laws?
Well, of course, we are living in a time of unprecedented stress, as a pandemic virus threatens to deprive each of us of the breath of life. But this is no excuse. What happened to Garner in 2014 took place in a time of prosperity and health.
After 40 years in law enforcement, I know that it is possible to do the job with a generous heart, a sound mind, a clean conscience and boundless humanity. I have been honored to lead officers who did all of these things. So I know they can be done. In fact, there is a single manual of instructions that tells you how to do it. It is the United States Constitution. Any department that bases its values and its training on that document — and does so without compromise — will neither produce, hire, nor tolerate officers capable of making the choice to do what was done in New York and Minneapolis.