March 13, 2025 • 32 mins
Five years ago the entire world watched Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd. What did we miss?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
May twenty fifth, twenty twenty, Minneapolis, Minnesota, early evening, A
nine one one dispatcher makes a call.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
If you start as the only available audio factor has
helped foods down to Doggle thirty seventy nine Chicadgle on
thirty eighth day, are reporting that there's a person who
will use the owners that still as a business.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
The dispatcher is Jennis Scurry, seven years on the job.
She's in a big room with multiple computer screens and
televisions running live video feeds from around the city. The
details from the call come over her screen. Thirty eighth
in Chicago. Suspect at a grocery store.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Suspect of a black pale sixty four four tollars sitting
on the part of a bloom or Stadius play boy
while we're heresos.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
She sends a squad card to the scene, looks up
and realizes the city has a fixed camera on that
corner of thirty eighth in Chicago, so she has a
live video feed up on one of the screens. She
sees the officers try to put the suspect in the
back of one of the squad cars. She looks away
when she looks back. He's on the ground, handcuffed, face down,
(01:35):
one officer kneeling on his neck. The suspect is George Floyd.
The officer on top of him is Derek Chauvin. She
looks away again, takes another call. At the criminal trial
the following year, arising from the events that day in
(01:57):
twenty twenty, Scurry was the first witness called by the prosecution,
and she relived the events of that evening step by step.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
At some point, then did you go back to this,
how did it appear at that time? When you went
back to it, it had not changed?
Speaker 1 (02:14):
And what do you mean by that?
Speaker 5 (02:16):
They were still on the ground, The whole situation was
still in the scene.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Do you recall approximately how long that was?
Speaker 5 (02:24):
No, it was long enough. It was long enough that
I could look back multiple times.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
And so when you did look back, still on the
ground like depicted here, essentially correct. And what did you
think about us when you look back and saw that
it hadn't changed?
Speaker 5 (02:46):
I first asked if the screens had frozen.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my
podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm guessing you watched
the bystander videos of what happened that night during the
fevered COVID summer of twenty twenty. I know idea, I
knew the villain, I knew the victim. I thought that's
all I needed to know. But then I ran across
(03:16):
the George Floyd video again not long ago, by chance
one of those serendipitous Internet moments, and watched it for
the first time in years, far from the intense emotions
of the first time I saw it, and I realized
I didn't understand what was happening, what Chauvin was doing,
but the other police officers on the scene were thinking,
(03:38):
which made me wonder if somehow, the first time around,
I had missed a lesson of the case. So over
the next two episodes, I'm going to do a close
reading of what happened to George Floyd, an unfamiliar reading,
starting with the perspective of the very first person to
see things unfold in real time, Jennie Curry. Because before
(04:01):
George Floyd stopped breathing, before the angry crowd gathered, before
the scene turned into tragedy, she could see Derek Chauvin
behaving so strangely that It led her, a nine one
one dispatcher who had seen a thousand crime scenes in
her career, to stop and stare at the video feed
(04:23):
in disbelief, as in, this can't be real. The screen
must be frozen.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Did you find that it had frozen?
Speaker 5 (04:39):
No, I was told that it was not frozen.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Did you see the screen change yourself?
Speaker 5 (04:44):
Yes, I saw the person's moving.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
So what did you start thinking at that point?
Speaker 5 (04:49):
Something might be wrong?
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Wrong with what? Or are you thinking?
Speaker 5 (04:54):
Instinct of.
Speaker 6 (04:58):
In the instant, something's not going right, whether it be
they needed more assistance or if there were, they're just
something wasn't right. I don't know how to explain it.
It was a good instinct to tell me that now
we can be concerned.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
And what did you decide to do?
Speaker 5 (05:20):
I took that instinct and I called the sergeant.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Have you ever in your career before called a sergeant
for something like those multiple for an incident like this
to be exact, No.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
In the beginning, there was nothing extraordinary about the situation unfolding.
On the corner of thirty eighth in Chicago, a man
passes a counterfeit twenty dollars bill. The clerk calls nine
to one one. The suspect hasn't run, He's sitting in
his car across the street. He isn't armed, he isn't hostile.
He seems like he's high. Two officers approach him and
(05:57):
tell him to get out of the car. He pleads
and complains, more like a scared child than a grown man.
He talks about his mom. He finally gets out. The
officers handcuff him. They asked him his name. He says
it's George Floyd. They lead him over to the squad car,
but he doesn't want to get in the back seat.
He says he's claustrophobic. He's having trouble breathing. He struggles
(06:21):
and squirms, and because he's a big man, well over
six feet and two hundred pounds, it makes things difficult.
In the struggle, he cuts his mouth. One of the
officers calls for an ambulance. A second squad car arrives.
There are now four police officers on the scene and
one handcuff suspect, clearly unhappy but deferential. We know from
(06:45):
the body camp footage that by this point he has
used the words sorry and please fifty seven times leave.
That's Floyd is he going to jail. That's Derek Chauvin.
He's one of the two officers in a second squad
car that just pulled up.
Speaker 7 (07:06):
He's under a rush right now for forgery. I'll tell
you tell what's going on.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Come on out, get him on the ground. Chauvin says,
as the senior officer president, he's taking control of the situation.
He wants Floyd in the prone position, face down, hands
cuffed behind his back. He then puts one of his
(07:36):
knees on the side of Floyd's neck and the other
between Floyd's shoulder blades, a technique sometimes used with non
compliant subjects.
Speaker 7 (07:52):
Please please let me stay.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
In, Chauvin says, we'll hold him until the ambulance shows up.
Floyd says, let me stand. Chauvin says no. So what
does Chauvin do next? Chauvin doesn't move. Chauvin just sits there.
He's frozen. Right around this time, an off duty firefighter
(08:17):
named Genevieve Hanson was out for a walk. Happens upon
the scene, identifies herself as a firefighter, a trained first responder.
Speaker 8 (08:27):
I was pretty focused on trying to get the officers
to let me.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Help and how are you doing that, trying to get
the officers to focus on your and get help.
Speaker 9 (08:41):
I think in my memory, I tried different tactics of
calm and reasoning. I tried to be assert of, I
pled and was desperate.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Henson testified at Chauven's trial.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
In terms of you know his face when you're first there,
or even the rest of him. What is that you
saw that made you concerned about his medical needs?
Speaker 9 (09:13):
I was really concerned about I thought his face looked
puffy and swollen, which would happen if you are putting
a grown man's weight on someone's neck. I noticed some
fluid coming from what looked like George's foot body, and
(09:34):
in a lot of cases we see a patient.
Speaker 8 (09:39):
Release their bladder when they die.
Speaker 9 (09:42):
I can't tell you exactly where the flood was coming from,
but that's where my mind went.
Speaker 8 (09:50):
He wasn't moving. He was being restrained, but he wasn't moving.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Later at the trial, a police surgeon named Bill Smuck
walked the jury through the videotape of Floyd's final moments,
pointing out all the mounting warning signs.
Speaker 10 (10:09):
What I want you to also watch for is what
is his right arm doing as this progresses? You will
see him pushing against the tire. You'll see his right arm,
his elbow pushing against. Yes, I'd like to know what
is it showing us? Why is that significant? This is
very important because it's showing what mister Floyd is doing
(10:31):
to try and breathe, to get his right side of
his chest up off of the pavement so that he
can bring in air.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Smart breaks down Floyd's final minutes frame by frame.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Let's look at another segment. Brand if we can go
to start at twenty twenty one.
Speaker 10 (10:50):
You will hear his voice gets weaker and weaker. You
will see his los facial expression. You will hear him
make sounds of trying to breathe as we get closer.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
He then goes on.
Speaker 10 (11:10):
He will then see in the next section he has
what's called and anoxuc seizure. That's a fancy word for
his brain is going without oxygen very low. His legs shake,
but you're also you will actually see and you can
hear the handcuff shake, and you'll see the body camera
shake when he has in anox ex seizure.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Further on down the line, clear warning signs, clear red flags,
not to mention Genevieve Henson and other bystanders are just
a few feet away shouting at him to get off Floyd,
and then another voice joins that chorus. It's one of
the other officers. He says, should we roll him on
(11:54):
his side? Rolling him on his side is what's known
as the recovery position. Having someone prone on the hard
ground with their hands cuffed and with a knee on
their neck and in the middle of their back was
acceptable practice Minneapolis at the time, but the city's use
of force training explicitly stated that the technique was only
(12:15):
supposed to be used briefly and on someone quote exhibiting
active aggression unquote. It's dangerous, it's hard to breathe I
tried it. I had a friend put me in that position.
It's scary. So when the subject calms down, you're supposed
to roll them over. That's what the fellow officer is saying.
We have to roll them over. But Chauvin says no.
(12:39):
He says, that's why we've got the ambulance coming. He's
not reacting to anything. This is what so alarms Jenni
scurry when she looks back up at the scene. She's
expecting things to have resolved themselves. Things should have happened,
but nothing's happened. All she sees is Chauvin up on
(13:00):
the screen, sitting on Floyd's neck, his hand casually in
his pocket, his face impassive. He's frozen, or, to use
here's a term favored by psychologists, he's fixated.
Speaker 11 (13:13):
Fixation is simply going down the wrong path and getting
stuck on that path.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
That's Gary Klein. He consults with governments, armies, and hospitals
on how to make better decisions under pressure, and wrote
the classic Sources of Power, one of my favorite books ever.
For Klein, One of the most revealing case studies in
fixation was the actions of the Israeli intelligence chief Elizia
in the weeks leading up to the Yom Kapur War
(13:42):
between Egypt and Israel in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 11 (13:46):
He had what was now called an israel conception. His
conception was, Egypt will never attack us until they have
air superiority, and they don't have air superiority, and we
have nothing to worry about. And he held on to
that belief until about two hours before the attack. But
his subordinates were seeing all these counterindicators they're seeing the
(14:10):
Egyptians moving troops and changing configurations at the border, all
these signs that indicate and the attack is imminent. And
Zarah said, this is just a training exercise. But then
the subordin has showed there was no sign of training
going on, so this was just a cover story. And
(14:30):
Zarah refused to pass their concerns on higher and then
the attack occurred. So he was fixated and he wouldn't budge.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
The fixated decision maker cannot accept new information. Every time
new information arises that challenges his original conception, he explains
it away. Klein Wentz did a big project at Johns
Hopkins University Hospital looking at how physicians made diagnoses, and
he found that the most experienced doctors were acutely aware
(15:02):
of their own tendency towards fixation. It was a constant battle.
Speaker 11 (15:07):
I watched one of Examine Nation where the attending position.
This is the first observation I made. The attending position
is examining the person. The person's describing his condition and
seems pretty straightforward, and at a certain point he says,
(15:28):
what's this on your back? Well, it turned out he
had had surgery to repair some heart defect. This hadn't
been in his history. And the physician said, wait a minute,
let's start over. And he started the whole exam over
because he was aware that there might have been implications
in what he did that he didn't see because he
(15:51):
didn't have this other possibility.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Did he end up changing his diagnosis?
Speaker 11 (15:56):
Oh yes, yes, they found a much more serious problem
that the resident and some of the nurses had missed.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Fighting fixation means being willing to throw away all the
work you've done in making sense of a complicated situation
and saying, let's start over. This is what Chauvin doesn't do.
He never says to himself, let's start over.
Speaker 11 (16:23):
Derek Chaugan, he had a script for how to handle
people who are larger and intimidating, and that's as far
as he ever gots.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
You can't be Is it fair to say you can't
be a police officer if you're not willing to revisit
your script.
Speaker 11 (16:41):
You can't be an effective police officer if you are
stuck on your script.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Floyd is trying to raise his chest off the ground. Oh,
that's because he's still resisting arrest. Some lady says she's
a firefighter. Is she really?
Speaker 1 (16:58):
In fact?
Speaker 2 (16:59):
When Genevieve Hansen moves closer, Show then goes for his mace,
Floyd's voice starts to falter. About time, Maybe he's finally
going to stop complaining. One of his fellow officers says,
put him in the recovery position, dude, I've been doing
this for nineteen years. Back off. The crowd that has
gathered around Floyd in the four officers is becoming more
(17:21):
and more vocal. But Chauvin isn't moving.
Speaker 7 (17:26):
He's not responsive right now. No, bro, look at him.
He's having responsive right now? Is he breathing right now?
Check his book, Check his pulse.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Check his book, check his pulse, Check his pulse. One
of the other cops at the scene says to the
officers sitting behind Chauvin, I can't find one. Floyd is dead,
and still Chauvin doesn't move. He will remain on Floyd's
(18:05):
neck for another three minutes, even after the ambulance arrives.
Years from now, when university professors teach courses on decision sciences,
they will play this video as a textbook example of fixation.
But why is Chauvin fixated? What psychological mechanism could describe
(18:29):
why he would just sit there. In the aftermath of
the murder, it was said again and again that Chauvin
is a racist. But calling someone racist is a description,
not an explanation. Why is Chauvin stuck on his script?
(18:59):
One of the most influential ideas to emerge in social
psychology in recent years is something called hostile intention attribution,
arising out of the work of Ken Dodge.
Speaker 12 (19:12):
For me, a very poignant event in my own thinking
was that as a clinical psychologist, I was seeing a
highly aggressive teenager in a state psychiatric hospital.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
That's Dodge, who teaches at Duke University, and.
Speaker 12 (19:29):
The boy's name was Rocky. I came up to his
ward one day, approached him from behind to say hello.
I was trying to establish a relationship with him. Touched
him on the shoulder from behind, and he turned around
and punched me in the gut, And in a nanosecond
he stopped and said, oh my, you can't be too
(19:50):
careful around here. And you know, he was making a
decision that in that moment that somebody touching him on
the back shoulder might be a threat, and he responded
that was his mindset.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Could have interpreted that touch on the shoulder in any
number of ways. He could have ignored it, shrugged it off,
or assumed it was an invitation for affection and turned
and smiled. But he didn't. He chose to focus on
it and to assume that Dodge had a hostile intent.
That's hostile intent attribution, the pattern of interpreting everything as
(20:34):
a threat. You can look at someone like that kid
Rocky and offer an organic explanation of his behavior. He's
a bad seed, he's wired wrong. But Dodge wants us
to look at problematic behavior as a developmental problem as well.
Somewhere along the way, someone's personal experience left the unprepared
(20:55):
to make proper sense of the world. A very small child,
for example, does not understand the distinction between an intentional
act and an accident. That's something you learn. You gradually
figure out that that actions can come with any number
of different explanations.
Speaker 12 (21:12):
I remember going to the pediatrician at age four and
being definitely afraid of getting a shot right. But my
parents and everybody certainly quickly told me that doctor was
not trying to be mean to me, right, And I
had to learn that. But I do think that it's
a socialization of benign intent that early life is about,
(21:33):
rather than the socialization of hostile intent.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
After talking to Dodge, I began to observe my own
kids more closely. They're both preschoolers two years apart. The
big one loves to man handle her little sister, and
most of the time that interaction is greeted with laughter.
But sometimes if my eldest goes too far, her sister cries,
and I realized that what they're doing is, to use
(21:58):
Dodge's phrase, learning how to make accurate attributions of each
other's behavior. When the big sisters push is too aggressive,
the little one learns that seems to have a different
intention from what we were doing before. She's learning the
difference between fighting and playing. And when the little one
cries out instead of laughing, the big one learns, oh,
(22:21):
if I want to keep playing, I have to make
sure that my actions are accurately interpreted. She's learning how
to reign in her aggression. That kind of feedback loop
is a crucial part of a child's socialization, But in
the case of the boy Rocky, what Dodge realized was
that that process of socialization of learning how to accurately
(22:43):
distinguish between a hostile touch and a playful touch had
been disrupted.
Speaker 12 (22:48):
I remember interviewing a ten year old kid who told
me about when he was four or five, the family
that he lived in at that time. His father stepfather
would come home every night from work, and he learned
how to minimize the likelihood that he was going to
(23:09):
get beaten up that night by smelling whether his father
had alcohol in his breath, whether his father had a
mean look, whether's father called him into the kitchen with
his belt already undone, put it on the kitchen table.
He was learning all He was four years old and
he's learning all these signals, and he could describe them
to me in great detail. So I think in early
(23:32):
life of threat personal physical threat, there may be others
as well. Is one way that it would be very
adaptive to develop a defensive mindset and to assume a
hostile intent from another person.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
If your father is violent sixty percent of the time
and loving forty percent of the time, and you can't
tell in the moment which direction he's going to go,
then it makes logical sense for your own physical safety
just to assume that your father is always going to
be hostile. But when you take that assumption into the
real world as a playground, us into classrooms, into the workplace,
(24:12):
it doesn't work. It makes you a bully, a pariah.
It makes even routine interactions deeply problematic. And nowhere is
this dysfunction more problematic than policing, of course, because if
you are a police officer whose early life and experience
has left them impaired in that way, who, as a result,
(24:34):
makes hostile attributions all the time, then how can you
be a police officer. I don't know what Chauvin's upbringing
was like, but I know when I saw the tape
again after talking to Dodge, I wondered if Chauvin wasn't
just someone like Rocky, all grown up. And the one
thing Rocky can't be is a police officer, because being
(24:58):
good at that job relies may be more than almost
any other profession on being able to distinguish in the
heat of a moment, between a hostile act and an
ambiguous act, between someone who is struggling because they can't
breathe and someone who is struggling because they are resisting arrest,
between someone who says I'm going to die because they're
(25:18):
trying to trick you, and someone who says I'm going
to die because they are in fact going to die.
If you can't do that, then you can only interpret
the world one way. Then, in the middle of a
fast evolving situation, when there is new information coming in
all the time, you have only one way to interpret
(25:39):
it a threat. In the course of the investigation into
the death of George Floyd, a second case came to light.
It happened in twenty seventeen, three years earlier. A woman
calls nine one one. She says her son has assaulted her.
The police arrive talk to the woman at length. She
(26:02):
says her son is down the hall in his room.
In the bodycam footage, you can see the officers walk
down the hallway. The boy is on the floor of
his bedroom on the phone. He's fourteen. The lead officer
in the group is lean in his forties with a
passive demeanor. It's Derek Chauvin. The officers enter the room
(26:24):
tell him he's under arrest. He says his mom was drunk.
He gets up reluctantly. His voice is calm, he doesn't
act out, He's not aggressive. He says his mother had
done this before called the police when she's the one
who has a problem. That's why his uncle left the house,
he says. He seems genuinely confused as to why he
(26:45):
should be the one under arrest. He's a teenager, John,
don't you come on here, that's Chauvin, Alice.
Speaker 13 (26:55):
I'm fine, but you just stand up for me. You're
under ust, so stand up. I'm yeah, you are. Stand
up my mom.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
He's drunk.
Speaker 7 (27:06):
You can quite her.
Speaker 13 (27:08):
Stand up? Fed me, stand up. I'm not gonna I'm
not gonna ask you any more time. You can't arrest me,
stand up, ask my sister. Stand up. I'm not going
to ask you in again.
Speaker 7 (27:19):
You can't stand up. You can't touch me my home.
Get up now.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Chauvin moves towards him, starts beating the boy over the
head with his flashlight, opening a wound over his ear
that will require stitches, puts him in a chokehold, throws
him to the ground, and then things go from bad
too much much worse.
Speaker 7 (27:42):
You get your stomach now, y'all? What I say to y'all, y'all,
(28:04):
I didn't I didn't.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Know.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Then his mother enters the rooman Chauvin crouches down next
to the prone boy and puts his knee on the
boy's neck. Then he just sits there. There are at
(28:38):
least six officers at the scene at this point. Most
of them have filed out of the room as if
they can't stomach what's happening. One of the remaining officers
turns his body cam to the wall. Chauvin keeps his
knee on the boy's neck for fifteen minutes. Even after
the paramedics arrived and the boy explains to them that
(28:59):
he blacked out after he was choked and that his
ear is bleeding, Chauvin remains on the boy's neck, frozen.
The boy is eventually rescued and he's finally able to
get up and walk away. I have watched that bodycam
(29:22):
footage more times than I can count, and every time
I find myself crying at the end in a way
that I never did with George Floyd. Not because it's
worse than George Floyd, because of course it isn't, but
because it's about a boy, and it was all recorded
on tape years before it happened again. A former US
(29:44):
attorney named Amanda Sertich examined the video while prosecuting Chauvin
for the murder of George Floyd.
Speaker 14 (29:51):
I would say the two most striking things about what's
depicted in the twenty seventeen video are first that the
minor doesn't act out in any physical way whatsoever. The
other striking thing about the video that I think is
(30:13):
much more visceral is how obvious it is that it's
a child being assaulted. And when former officer Chauvin has
that really strong strike on his head with the flashlight,
there's that pause that any parent who has a kid
will recognize right after a kid gets really hurt, and
(30:38):
then the miner says, oh, you're hurting me, and begins
to cry and sound very much like the child that
he is, and he continues to cry in the same
way over fifteen minutes, intermittently.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
There's another reason I found that tape so heartbreaking, something
that I did not expect myself to feel, and something
I cannot entirely explain. I felt an overwhelming wave of
pa for Derek Chauvin, a man who sees every action
as a threat, who cannot tell the difference between fear
(31:16):
and aggression, who looks at a boy on his phone
in his bedroom and sees a monster that is a dark,
joyless place for anyone to find themselves imprisoned. And by
what tragic failure of administration did a man who showed
on videotape that he cannot do the single most important
(31:39):
thing that a police officer needs to do to be
a police officer remain on the force for three more
years until he killed someone in cold blood. That's next week.
(32:10):
Revision's History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan,
and ben Na daph Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shakerji.
Fact checking by Sam Russick, Engineering Nina Bird Lawrence, Mixing
and mastering on this episode by Jake Gorsky. Production support
from Luke LeMond. Thank you to mcaul Liebowitch. Our executive
producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and
(32:32):
l Hafe Credit cone I'm Malcolm Bappo. Get add free
episodes of Revision's History by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign
up on the show page on Apple Podcasts, or at
(32:54):
pushkin dot fm slash plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access
ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content
for all Pushkin shows,
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
May twenty fifth, twenty twenty, Minneapolis, Minnesota, early evening, A
nine one one dispatcher makes a call.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
If you start as the only available audio factor has
helped foods down to Doggle thirty seventy nine Chicadgle on
thirty eighth day, are reporting that there's a person who
will use the owners that still as a business.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
The dispatcher is Jennis Scurry, seven years on the job.
She's in a big room with multiple computer screens and
televisions running live video feeds from around the city. The
details from the call come over her screen. Thirty eighth
in Chicago. Suspect at a grocery store.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Suspect of a black pale sixty four four tollars sitting
on the part of a bloom or Stadius play boy
while we're heresos.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
She sends a squad card to the scene, looks up
and realizes the city has a fixed camera on that
corner of thirty eighth in Chicago, so she has a
live video feed up on one of the screens. She
sees the officers try to put the suspect in the
back of one of the squad cars. She looks away
when she looks back. He's on the ground, handcuffed, face down,
(01:35):
one officer kneeling on his neck. The suspect is George Floyd.
The officer on top of him is Derek Chauvin. She
looks away again, takes another call. At the criminal trial
the following year, arising from the events that day in
(01:57):
twenty twenty, Scurry was the first witness called by the prosecution,
and she relived the events of that evening step by step.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
At some point, then did you go back to this,
how did it appear at that time? When you went
back to it, it had not changed?
Speaker 1 (02:14):
And what do you mean by that?
Speaker 5 (02:16):
They were still on the ground, The whole situation was
still in the scene.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Do you recall approximately how long that was?
Speaker 5 (02:24):
No, it was long enough. It was long enough that
I could look back multiple times.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
And so when you did look back, still on the
ground like depicted here, essentially correct. And what did you
think about us when you look back and saw that
it hadn't changed?
Speaker 5 (02:46):
I first asked if the screens had frozen.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my
podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm guessing you watched
the bystander videos of what happened that night during the
fevered COVID summer of twenty twenty. I know idea, I
knew the villain, I knew the victim. I thought that's
all I needed to know. But then I ran across
(03:16):
the George Floyd video again not long ago, by chance
one of those serendipitous Internet moments, and watched it for
the first time in years, far from the intense emotions
of the first time I saw it, and I realized
I didn't understand what was happening, what Chauvin was doing,
but the other police officers on the scene were thinking,
(03:38):
which made me wonder if somehow, the first time around,
I had missed a lesson of the case. So over
the next two episodes, I'm going to do a close
reading of what happened to George Floyd, an unfamiliar reading,
starting with the perspective of the very first person to
see things unfold in real time, Jennie Curry. Because before
(04:01):
George Floyd stopped breathing, before the angry crowd gathered, before
the scene turned into tragedy, she could see Derek Chauvin
behaving so strangely that It led her, a nine one
one dispatcher who had seen a thousand crime scenes in
her career, to stop and stare at the video feed
(04:23):
in disbelief, as in, this can't be real. The screen
must be frozen.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Did you find that it had frozen?
Speaker 5 (04:39):
No, I was told that it was not frozen.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Did you see the screen change yourself?
Speaker 5 (04:44):
Yes, I saw the person's moving.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
So what did you start thinking at that point?
Speaker 5 (04:49):
Something might be wrong?
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Wrong with what? Or are you thinking?
Speaker 5 (04:54):
Instinct of.
Speaker 6 (04:58):
In the instant, something's not going right, whether it be
they needed more assistance or if there were, they're just
something wasn't right. I don't know how to explain it.
It was a good instinct to tell me that now
we can be concerned.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
And what did you decide to do?
Speaker 5 (05:20):
I took that instinct and I called the sergeant.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Have you ever in your career before called a sergeant
for something like those multiple for an incident like this
to be exact, No.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
In the beginning, there was nothing extraordinary about the situation unfolding.
On the corner of thirty eighth in Chicago, a man
passes a counterfeit twenty dollars bill. The clerk calls nine
to one one. The suspect hasn't run, He's sitting in
his car across the street. He isn't armed, he isn't hostile.
He seems like he's high. Two officers approach him and
(05:57):
tell him to get out of the car. He pleads
and complains, more like a scared child than a grown man.
He talks about his mom. He finally gets out. The
officers handcuff him. They asked him his name. He says
it's George Floyd. They lead him over to the squad car,
but he doesn't want to get in the back seat.
He says he's claustrophobic. He's having trouble breathing. He struggles
(06:21):
and squirms, and because he's a big man, well over
six feet and two hundred pounds, it makes things difficult.
In the struggle, he cuts his mouth. One of the
officers calls for an ambulance. A second squad car arrives.
There are now four police officers on the scene and
one handcuff suspect, clearly unhappy but deferential. We know from
(06:45):
the body camp footage that by this point he has
used the words sorry and please fifty seven times leave.
That's Floyd is he going to jail. That's Derek Chauvin.
He's one of the two officers in a second squad
car that just pulled up.
Speaker 7 (07:06):
He's under a rush right now for forgery. I'll tell
you tell what's going on.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Come on out, get him on the ground. Chauvin says,
as the senior officer president, he's taking control of the situation.
He wants Floyd in the prone position, face down, hands
cuffed behind his back. He then puts one of his
(07:36):
knees on the side of Floyd's neck and the other
between Floyd's shoulder blades, a technique sometimes used with non
compliant subjects.
Speaker 7 (07:52):
Please please let me stay.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
In, Chauvin says, we'll hold him until the ambulance shows up.
Floyd says, let me stand. Chauvin says no. So what
does Chauvin do next? Chauvin doesn't move. Chauvin just sits there.
He's frozen. Right around this time, an off duty firefighter
(08:17):
named Genevieve Hanson was out for a walk. Happens upon
the scene, identifies herself as a firefighter, a trained first responder.
Speaker 8 (08:27):
I was pretty focused on trying to get the officers
to let me.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Help and how are you doing that, trying to get
the officers to focus on your and get help.
Speaker 9 (08:41):
I think in my memory, I tried different tactics of
calm and reasoning. I tried to be assert of, I
pled and was desperate.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Henson testified at Chauven's trial.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
In terms of you know his face when you're first there,
or even the rest of him. What is that you
saw that made you concerned about his medical needs?
Speaker 9 (09:13):
I was really concerned about I thought his face looked
puffy and swollen, which would happen if you are putting
a grown man's weight on someone's neck. I noticed some
fluid coming from what looked like George's foot body, and
(09:34):
in a lot of cases we see a patient.
Speaker 8 (09:39):
Release their bladder when they die.
Speaker 9 (09:42):
I can't tell you exactly where the flood was coming from,
but that's where my mind went.
Speaker 8 (09:50):
He wasn't moving. He was being restrained, but he wasn't moving.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Later at the trial, a police surgeon named Bill Smuck
walked the jury through the videotape of Floyd's final moments,
pointing out all the mounting warning signs.
Speaker 10 (10:09):
What I want you to also watch for is what
is his right arm doing as this progresses? You will
see him pushing against the tire. You'll see his right arm,
his elbow pushing against. Yes, I'd like to know what
is it showing us? Why is that significant? This is
very important because it's showing what mister Floyd is doing
(10:31):
to try and breathe, to get his right side of
his chest up off of the pavement so that he
can bring in air.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Smart breaks down Floyd's final minutes frame by frame.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Let's look at another segment. Brand if we can go
to start at twenty twenty one.
Speaker 10 (10:50):
You will hear his voice gets weaker and weaker. You
will see his los facial expression. You will hear him
make sounds of trying to breathe as we get closer.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
He then goes on.
Speaker 10 (11:10):
He will then see in the next section he has
what's called and anoxuc seizure. That's a fancy word for
his brain is going without oxygen very low. His legs shake,
but you're also you will actually see and you can
hear the handcuff shake, and you'll see the body camera
shake when he has in anox ex seizure.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Further on down the line, clear warning signs, clear red flags,
not to mention Genevieve Henson and other bystanders are just
a few feet away shouting at him to get off Floyd,
and then another voice joins that chorus. It's one of
the other officers. He says, should we roll him on
(11:54):
his side? Rolling him on his side is what's known
as the recovery position. Having someone prone on the hard
ground with their hands cuffed and with a knee on
their neck and in the middle of their back was
acceptable practice Minneapolis at the time, but the city's use
of force training explicitly stated that the technique was only
(12:15):
supposed to be used briefly and on someone quote exhibiting
active aggression unquote. It's dangerous, it's hard to breathe I
tried it. I had a friend put me in that position.
It's scary. So when the subject calms down, you're supposed
to roll them over. That's what the fellow officer is saying.
We have to roll them over. But Chauvin says no.
(12:39):
He says, that's why we've got the ambulance coming. He's
not reacting to anything. This is what so alarms Jenni
scurry when she looks back up at the scene. She's
expecting things to have resolved themselves. Things should have happened,
but nothing's happened. All she sees is Chauvin up on
(13:00):
the screen, sitting on Floyd's neck, his hand casually in
his pocket, his face impassive. He's frozen, or, to use
here's a term favored by psychologists, he's fixated.
Speaker 11 (13:13):
Fixation is simply going down the wrong path and getting
stuck on that path.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
That's Gary Klein. He consults with governments, armies, and hospitals
on how to make better decisions under pressure, and wrote
the classic Sources of Power, one of my favorite books ever.
For Klein, One of the most revealing case studies in
fixation was the actions of the Israeli intelligence chief Elizia
in the weeks leading up to the Yom Kapur War
(13:42):
between Egypt and Israel in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 11 (13:46):
He had what was now called an israel conception. His
conception was, Egypt will never attack us until they have
air superiority, and they don't have air superiority, and we
have nothing to worry about. And he held on to
that belief until about two hours before the attack. But
his subordinates were seeing all these counterindicators they're seeing the
(14:10):
Egyptians moving troops and changing configurations at the border, all
these signs that indicate and the attack is imminent. And
Zarah said, this is just a training exercise. But then
the subordin has showed there was no sign of training
going on, so this was just a cover story. And
(14:30):
Zarah refused to pass their concerns on higher and then
the attack occurred. So he was fixated and he wouldn't budge.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
The fixated decision maker cannot accept new information. Every time
new information arises that challenges his original conception, he explains
it away. Klein Wentz did a big project at Johns
Hopkins University Hospital looking at how physicians made diagnoses, and
he found that the most experienced doctors were acutely aware
(15:02):
of their own tendency towards fixation. It was a constant battle.
Speaker 11 (15:07):
I watched one of Examine Nation where the attending position.
This is the first observation I made. The attending position
is examining the person. The person's describing his condition and
seems pretty straightforward, and at a certain point he says,
(15:28):
what's this on your back? Well, it turned out he
had had surgery to repair some heart defect. This hadn't
been in his history. And the physician said, wait a minute,
let's start over. And he started the whole exam over
because he was aware that there might have been implications
in what he did that he didn't see because he
(15:51):
didn't have this other possibility.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Did he end up changing his diagnosis?
Speaker 11 (15:56):
Oh yes, yes, they found a much more serious problem
that the resident and some of the nurses had missed.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Fighting fixation means being willing to throw away all the
work you've done in making sense of a complicated situation
and saying, let's start over. This is what Chauvin doesn't do.
He never says to himself, let's start over.
Speaker 11 (16:23):
Derek Chaugan, he had a script for how to handle
people who are larger and intimidating, and that's as far
as he ever gots.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
You can't be Is it fair to say you can't
be a police officer if you're not willing to revisit
your script.
Speaker 11 (16:41):
You can't be an effective police officer if you are
stuck on your script.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Floyd is trying to raise his chest off the ground. Oh,
that's because he's still resisting arrest. Some lady says she's
a firefighter. Is she really?
Speaker 1 (16:58):
In fact?
Speaker 2 (16:59):
When Genevieve Hansen moves closer, Show then goes for his mace,
Floyd's voice starts to falter. About time, Maybe he's finally
going to stop complaining. One of his fellow officers says,
put him in the recovery position, dude, I've been doing
this for nineteen years. Back off. The crowd that has
gathered around Floyd in the four officers is becoming more
(17:21):
and more vocal. But Chauvin isn't moving.
Speaker 7 (17:26):
He's not responsive right now. No, bro, look at him.
He's having responsive right now? Is he breathing right now?
Check his book, Check his pulse.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Check his book, check his pulse, Check his pulse. One
of the other cops at the scene says to the
officers sitting behind Chauvin, I can't find one. Floyd is dead,
and still Chauvin doesn't move. He will remain on Floyd's
(18:05):
neck for another three minutes, even after the ambulance arrives.
Years from now, when university professors teach courses on decision sciences,
they will play this video as a textbook example of fixation.
But why is Chauvin fixated? What psychological mechanism could describe
(18:29):
why he would just sit there. In the aftermath of
the murder, it was said again and again that Chauvin
is a racist. But calling someone racist is a description,
not an explanation. Why is Chauvin stuck on his script?
(18:59):
One of the most influential ideas to emerge in social
psychology in recent years is something called hostile intention attribution,
arising out of the work of Ken Dodge.
Speaker 12 (19:12):
For me, a very poignant event in my own thinking
was that as a clinical psychologist, I was seeing a
highly aggressive teenager in a state psychiatric hospital.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
That's Dodge, who teaches at Duke University, and.
Speaker 12 (19:29):
The boy's name was Rocky. I came up to his
ward one day, approached him from behind to say hello.
I was trying to establish a relationship with him. Touched
him on the shoulder from behind, and he turned around
and punched me in the gut, And in a nanosecond
he stopped and said, oh my, you can't be too
(19:50):
careful around here. And you know, he was making a
decision that in that moment that somebody touching him on
the back shoulder might be a threat, and he responded
that was his mindset.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Could have interpreted that touch on the shoulder in any
number of ways. He could have ignored it, shrugged it off,
or assumed it was an invitation for affection and turned
and smiled. But he didn't. He chose to focus on
it and to assume that Dodge had a hostile intent.
That's hostile intent attribution, the pattern of interpreting everything as
(20:34):
a threat. You can look at someone like that kid
Rocky and offer an organic explanation of his behavior. He's
a bad seed, he's wired wrong. But Dodge wants us
to look at problematic behavior as a developmental problem as well.
Somewhere along the way, someone's personal experience left the unprepared
(20:55):
to make proper sense of the world. A very small child,
for example, does not understand the distinction between an intentional
act and an accident. That's something you learn. You gradually
figure out that that actions can come with any number
of different explanations.
Speaker 12 (21:12):
I remember going to the pediatrician at age four and
being definitely afraid of getting a shot right. But my
parents and everybody certainly quickly told me that doctor was
not trying to be mean to me, right, And I
had to learn that. But I do think that it's
a socialization of benign intent that early life is about,
(21:33):
rather than the socialization of hostile intent.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
After talking to Dodge, I began to observe my own
kids more closely. They're both preschoolers two years apart. The
big one loves to man handle her little sister, and
most of the time that interaction is greeted with laughter.
But sometimes if my eldest goes too far, her sister cries,
and I realized that what they're doing is, to use
(21:58):
Dodge's phrase, learning how to make accurate attributions of each
other's behavior. When the big sisters push is too aggressive,
the little one learns that seems to have a different
intention from what we were doing before. She's learning the
difference between fighting and playing. And when the little one
cries out instead of laughing, the big one learns, oh,
(22:21):
if I want to keep playing, I have to make
sure that my actions are accurately interpreted. She's learning how
to reign in her aggression. That kind of feedback loop
is a crucial part of a child's socialization, But in
the case of the boy Rocky, what Dodge realized was
that that process of socialization of learning how to accurately
(22:43):
distinguish between a hostile touch and a playful touch had
been disrupted.
Speaker 12 (22:48):
I remember interviewing a ten year old kid who told
me about when he was four or five, the family
that he lived in at that time. His father stepfather
would come home every night from work, and he learned
how to minimize the likelihood that he was going to
(23:09):
get beaten up that night by smelling whether his father
had alcohol in his breath, whether his father had a
mean look, whether's father called him into the kitchen with
his belt already undone, put it on the kitchen table.
He was learning all He was four years old and
he's learning all these signals, and he could describe them
to me in great detail. So I think in early
(23:32):
life of threat personal physical threat, there may be others
as well. Is one way that it would be very
adaptive to develop a defensive mindset and to assume a
hostile intent from another person.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
If your father is violent sixty percent of the time
and loving forty percent of the time, and you can't
tell in the moment which direction he's going to go,
then it makes logical sense for your own physical safety
just to assume that your father is always going to
be hostile. But when you take that assumption into the
real world as a playground, us into classrooms, into the workplace,
(24:12):
it doesn't work. It makes you a bully, a pariah.
It makes even routine interactions deeply problematic. And nowhere is
this dysfunction more problematic than policing, of course, because if
you are a police officer whose early life and experience
has left them impaired in that way, who, as a result,
(24:34):
makes hostile attributions all the time, then how can you
be a police officer. I don't know what Chauvin's upbringing
was like, but I know when I saw the tape
again after talking to Dodge, I wondered if Chauvin wasn't
just someone like Rocky, all grown up. And the one
thing Rocky can't be is a police officer, because being
(24:58):
good at that job relies may be more than almost
any other profession on being able to distinguish in the
heat of a moment, between a hostile act and an
ambiguous act, between someone who is struggling because they can't
breathe and someone who is struggling because they are resisting arrest,
between someone who says I'm going to die because they're
(25:18):
trying to trick you, and someone who says I'm going
to die because they are in fact going to die.
If you can't do that, then you can only interpret
the world one way. Then, in the middle of a
fast evolving situation, when there is new information coming in
all the time, you have only one way to interpret
(25:39):
it a threat. In the course of the investigation into
the death of George Floyd, a second case came to light.
It happened in twenty seventeen, three years earlier. A woman
calls nine one one. She says her son has assaulted her.
The police arrive talk to the woman at length. She
(26:02):
says her son is down the hall in his room.
In the bodycam footage, you can see the officers walk
down the hallway. The boy is on the floor of
his bedroom on the phone. He's fourteen. The lead officer
in the group is lean in his forties with a
passive demeanor. It's Derek Chauvin. The officers enter the room
(26:24):
tell him he's under arrest. He says his mom was drunk.
He gets up reluctantly. His voice is calm, he doesn't
act out, He's not aggressive. He says his mother had
done this before called the police when she's the one
who has a problem. That's why his uncle left the house,
he says. He seems genuinely confused as to why he
(26:45):
should be the one under arrest. He's a teenager, John,
don't you come on here, that's Chauvin, Alice.
Speaker 13 (26:55):
I'm fine, but you just stand up for me. You're
under ust, so stand up. I'm yeah, you are. Stand
up my mom.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
He's drunk.
Speaker 7 (27:06):
You can quite her.
Speaker 13 (27:08):
Stand up? Fed me, stand up. I'm not gonna I'm
not gonna ask you any more time. You can't arrest me,
stand up, ask my sister. Stand up. I'm not going
to ask you in again.
Speaker 7 (27:19):
You can't stand up. You can't touch me my home.
Get up now.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Chauvin moves towards him, starts beating the boy over the
head with his flashlight, opening a wound over his ear
that will require stitches, puts him in a chokehold, throws
him to the ground, and then things go from bad
too much much worse.
Speaker 7 (27:42):
You get your stomach now, y'all? What I say to y'all, y'all,
(28:04):
I didn't I didn't.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Know.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Then his mother enters the rooman Chauvin crouches down next
to the prone boy and puts his knee on the
boy's neck. Then he just sits there. There are at
(28:38):
least six officers at the scene at this point. Most
of them have filed out of the room as if
they can't stomach what's happening. One of the remaining officers
turns his body cam to the wall. Chauvin keeps his
knee on the boy's neck for fifteen minutes. Even after
the paramedics arrived and the boy explains to them that
(28:59):
he blacked out after he was choked and that his
ear is bleeding, Chauvin remains on the boy's neck, frozen.
The boy is eventually rescued and he's finally able to
get up and walk away. I have watched that bodycam
(29:22):
footage more times than I can count, and every time
I find myself crying at the end in a way
that I never did with George Floyd. Not because it's
worse than George Floyd, because of course it isn't, but
because it's about a boy, and it was all recorded
on tape years before it happened again. A former US
(29:44):
attorney named Amanda Sertich examined the video while prosecuting Chauvin
for the murder of George Floyd.
Speaker 14 (29:51):
I would say the two most striking things about what's
depicted in the twenty seventeen video are first that the
minor doesn't act out in any physical way whatsoever. The
other striking thing about the video that I think is
(30:13):
much more visceral is how obvious it is that it's
a child being assaulted. And when former officer Chauvin has
that really strong strike on his head with the flashlight,
there's that pause that any parent who has a kid
will recognize right after a kid gets really hurt, and
(30:38):
then the miner says, oh, you're hurting me, and begins
to cry and sound very much like the child that
he is, and he continues to cry in the same
way over fifteen minutes, intermittently.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
There's another reason I found that tape so heartbreaking, something
that I did not expect myself to feel, and something
I cannot entirely explain. I felt an overwhelming wave of
pa for Derek Chauvin, a man who sees every action
as a threat, who cannot tell the difference between fear
(31:16):
and aggression, who looks at a boy on his phone
in his bedroom and sees a monster that is a dark,
joyless place for anyone to find themselves imprisoned. And by
what tragic failure of administration did a man who showed
on videotape that he cannot do the single most important
(31:39):
thing that a police officer needs to do to be
a police officer remain on the force for three more
years until he killed someone in cold blood. That's next week.
(32:10):
Revision's History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan,
and ben Na daph Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shakerji.
Fact checking by Sam Russick, Engineering Nina Bird Lawrence, Mixing
and mastering on this episode by Jake Gorsky. Production support
from Luke LeMond. Thank you to mcaul Liebowitch. Our executive
producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and
(32:32):
l Hafe Credit cone I'm Malcolm Bappo. Get add free
episodes of Revision's History by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign
up on the show page on Apple Podcasts, or at
(32:54):
pushkin dot fm slash plus. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access
ad free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content
for all Pushkin shows,
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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