I didn’t think we’d see a video more explicit than Eric Garner but here we are. There are some striking differences here. First, there was the extended interaction between the police and the witnesses. It went on and on. In the Garner murder, the cops did not interact with witnesses at all. Second, there was no attempt to save Mr. Floyd’s. The arriving medics knew he was expired, and I think the medics and the cops wanted him to stay that way. Third, that’s urine. We see a man pee his pants and die while under the full weight of a law enforcement officer, funded by the city of Minneapolis. And fourth, there wasn’t one instruction from the officers to Mr. Floyd as to what he had to do to make the torture stop. Usually, cops will be brutal, but they will also bark orders. Those orders help protect them from prosecution and lawsuits. Incredible that didn’t happen here. This was murder. It was like the end of Do The Right Thing. It didn’t seem real until everyone noticed that Mr. Floyd had stopped breathing. As the Asian cop (Officer Tou Thao) put it, they tried to get him into their cruiser for 10 minutes, so they were going to snuff the life out of him for 10. This was murder. And I have no expectations of either of these officers ever losing their freedom or their pensions.

We need to demand radical change. We need to show up in numbers and threaten to burn City Hall down. In every city. We need full civilian control of the police. Here in New York. Over where you are. And in the Twin Cities.