New video evidence on George Floyd

The NY Times reports:

MINNEAPOLIS — Almost from the moment George Floyd encountered the police on May 25, with a gun pointed at him, he appeared terrified and emotionally distraught, according to police camera footage that was newly made available for viewing Wednesday at a courthouse in downtown Minneapolis.

Mr. Floyd was visibly shaken, with his head down, and crying, as if he were in the throes of a panic attack, as he put his hands on the steering wheel in response to a frantic order from an officer.

Yes, Floyd was already dying of a fentanyl overdose, along with other medical problems.

At one point, in footage not previously seen, the officers are shown dragging Mr. Floyd to the ground after he resisted being put in the squad car.

So Floyd was resisting arrest.

Once he was on the ground, as Mr. Floyd again said he couldn’t breathe, and asked for water, and begged for his life, Derek Chauvin, the senior officer on the scene, said, in a nonchalant, almost mocking, tone, “takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to say that.”

So Floyd was complaining that he couldn't breathe, long before Chauvin touched his neck.

Mr. Chauvin’s response, uttered with no emotion, was, “uh huh.”

That seems to be the biggest complaint against Chauvin -- that he showed no emotion.

But maybe he was just a professional doing his job. We would not condemn a surgeon who fails to show emotion while a surgery had a bad outcome.

In the lawsuit, Mr. Crump ... said that training materials given to officers in 2014, including Mr. Chauvin and another officer charged in Mr. Floyd’s killing, show an officer placing a knee on the neck of a person who is being arrested and is handcuffed in a prone position, as Mr. Floyd was.

In other words, the police followed the training that they had been given.

Once an ambulance arrived — late, because paramedics had first gone to the wrong location — Mr. Lane went inside and administered chest compressions on Mr. Floyd, whose face appeared bloodied.

So the police quickly figured out that Floyd was having a medical emergency, and called an ambulance. The 8-minute video recording was of Chauvin holding Floyd while waiting for the ambulance. The ambulance would have gotten there sooner, but for a mistake. But the mistake was not the fault of the police.

But even in the ambulance, at first, there appeared to be little sense of urgency, according to the newly seen footage, with minutes passing before anyone tended to Mr. Floyd.

So the police helped the paramedics do chest compressions, and the main complaint is that "there appeared to be little sense of urgency".

This is crazy. You cannot tell from a video whether they had a sense of urgency. Maybe they are disciplined professionals. Showing haste and emotion is not the best way to administer medical care. The best treatments I have received were from physicians and nurses who did not show haste or emotion.

This is the NY Times trying to make the Minneapolis police look bad, and stir up race riots. It only convinces me more that the police are innocent. No one can point to a single thing the police did that was either against recommended procedure, had a racial motivation, or had a harmful effect on Floyd.