In the Wake of Rebellion: George Floyd Is Still Dead

In the Wake of Rebellion

George Floyd Is Still Dead

As far as I'm concerned, they could burn this bitch to the ground. And it still wouldn't be enough. And they are lucky that what Black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.

In June twenty twenty, for a moment, anything seemed possible in Minneapolis. In the midst of a deadly global pandemic, much of the country had gone on "lockdown," radically reorienting work, family, and community life. We had witnessed a horrific murder committed by a police officer, filmed by a teenager and broadcast to the world. The largest protests in the country's recorded history erupted, spreading the Black Lives Matter rallying cry across the globe. The Minneapolis Police Department had tried to implement the police reform playbook, and yet, George Floyd was still dead, the city still burned. If the department could not be reformed, perhaps then it must be reimagined. In the wake of the rebellion, nine city council members took to the stage at Powderhorn Park, festooned with giant letters that read "DEFUND POLICE." Standing next to activists fighting for police abolition, the elected officials pledged to "begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department," developing "a new transformative model for cultivating safety." Media headlines across the country blared that the city was poised to "end," "dismantle," or "abolish" its police force.

That process of dismantling, however, would quickly become a tedious, contentious, and years-long political struggle over amending the Minneapolis city charter to change the section on the MPD, a protected department in the city's governing document. Advocates would argue for striking out all of the text on the MPD (including the provisions about a mandatory minimum number of officers and the mayor's executive control), replacing it with a description of a new department oriented around holistic public safety (which could include the police). And, because of the mayor's opposition, to pass this charter amendment the council members would need the support of a majority of city voters.

This proposal to "end" the MPD faced the expected opposition, as downtown business interests sided with the mayor, police chief, and officers union in deriding the "radical" proposal. But it was not simply the mayor's bloc opposing the charter initiative. Indeed, on this particular issue, downtown business leaders, the police union, and some Black community leaders, including a few prominent radical anti-police-violence activists, agreed: the charter amendment to end the MPD was a dangerous path for Minneapolis. As a Star Tribune article in July twenty twenty blared: "Egregious, grotesque, absurd, crazy, ridiculous. These are a handful of the words that some local African American leaders are using to rebuke the Minneapolis City Council's moves toward dismantling the Police Department, even as they demand an overhaul of law enforcement."

Though these groups' critiques of the proposal varied, a core through-line was the idea that city council members had been led astray by abolitionist activists, who did not represent the interests of many (Black) city residents or their ideas about safety in the City of Lakes. These critics included Nekima Levy Armstrong, former president of the Minneapolis NAACP and arguably the most high-profile organizer associated with BLM in the city, whose interruption of the Northside community forum opened chapter three. After the vote on the charter amendment in twenty twenty-one, Levy Armstrong would pen a castigating New York Times op-ed, concluding: "We expected a well-thought-out, evidence-based, comprehensive plan to remake our police department. Instead, what we got was progressive posturing." Echoing the findings reported in the previous chapter, Levy Armstrong explained that police violence and community violence had to be addressed together: "Black lives need to be valued not just when unjustly taken by the police, but when we are alive and demanding our right to be heard, to breathe, to live in safe neighborhoods and to enjoy the full benefits of our status as American citizens." They needed, in other words, responsive police protection.

To understand how and why such disparate groups came to share opposition to the charter amendment, in this chapter we finally return to the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath, culminating in the historic election of November twenty twenty-one. As we'll see, the divide across activist coalitions, and between activists, city leaders, and residents, witnessed in earlier years had by twenty twenty ruptured, producing starkly different ideas about safety. As a result, while the fires that blazed a path through the city reshaped Minneapolis politics, much stood unchanged in the ashes of rebellion.

The Murder of George Floyd

Heading into May twenty twenty, Minneapolis was weeks into a "lockdown" designed to slow the spread of the new COVID-nineteen pandemic. In Minnesota, as across the country, Black Americans faced higher viral exposure in the workplace and mortality rates. These statistics prompted a flood of media stories about the burdens of structural racism and Black Americans' disproportionate exposure to premature death. And as spring turned to summer, a new slate of racist violence across the country reignited the BLM movement that had flagged during the Trump presidency, in part because many Americans were increasingly glued to their screens while stuck at home. In early May, video emerged of some of the last moments of Ahmaud Arbery's life, murdered by three white men who saw him jogging in Georgia. Early on May twenty-five, a white woman called the cops on birdwatcher Christian Cooper in New York's Central Park. By that night, George Floyd had been murdered. And the unrest his murder prompted would spotlight media attention toward the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, two months earlier. Together, these cases precipitated a national reckoning about race in America.

George Perry Floyd Jr. was a forty-six-year-old Black man with a life story that all too clearly illustrated the toxic combination of racism and poverty in America. Floyd grew up poor in Houston's Third Ward projects. Entering high school tall and broad-shouldered, Floyd excelled at both basketball and football, eventually landing a college scholarship. But he struggled with the academics, ill-equipped to succeed off the field, and was eventually pushed out without a diploma. Floyd turned to side hustles and a budding rap career under the stage name "Big Floyd." But by then, he had begun a disastrous relationship with illicit substances, eventually spending more than a decade moving in and out of jails and prisons as his addiction ebbed and flowed and the legal system found reasons to stop, search, and punish men who looked like him.

In twenty fourteen he moved to Minneapolis, part of an effort to "get right" for his young daughter back in Houston. Here, he worked a series of jobs, including as a truck driver and club bouncer, but the COVID-nineteen pandemic disrupted what little stability he'd found. On Memorial Day, twenty twenty, Floyd was spending time with a friend who dealt drugs. Both were using that day, getting high and running errands before a barbeque. Just before dusk, they stopped by Cup Foods, a small convenience store at the corner of thirty-eighth and Chicago that Floyd visited often, where his friend was picking up a computer tablet (the store was known for selling cheap used electronics, as well as a site for drug deals). Cup Foods sat at the intersection of several multiracial neighborhoods in South Minneapolis, some more gentrified than others. Though neighbors knew that the block was part of the local Bloods gang's territory, by twenty twenty the same corner boasted an art gallery and an upscale coffee shop I often visited.

Floyd went into Cup Foods to buy cigarettes as his friend talked to the staff about the tablet. And that's where the day turned. The teenage cashier, a recent immigrant from West Africa, noticed the twenty-dollar bill that Floyd had used looked counterfeit. After checking with the store manager, he was instructed to go out with a coworker to ask Floyd, now in a parked car across the street, to return the cigarettes. But by then, Floyd was starting to nod off, and he was unresponsive to the clerk's request. Instructed to call nine one one, the teen told the call-taker that Floyd seemed "awfully drunk" and had used a counterfeit bill. Police were dispatched. Two rookie officers, both less than a week out of their on-the-job training period, arrived first: Thomas Lane, a thirty-seven-year-old white man, and J. Alexander Kueng, a twenty-six-year-old biracial man. Both had been hired under the promise of a "guardian" model of policing, holding bachelor's degrees in sociology and later telling reporters that they had joined the force to help people. As shown on officers' body camera footage, by the time they arrived, Floyd was sitting in the driver's seat of the car. After tapping on the window with his baton and not getting an immediate response to see Floyd's hands, Lane drew his weapon. Floyd put his hands up, though, and Lane reholstered his gun to pull Floyd out of the vehicle. The officers then cuffed Floyd, moving him to the sidewalk in front of the store for questioning.

Instead of resolving the conflict there, perhaps asking him to return the cigarettes or provide other funds and have someone sober drive the car home, the officers decided to arrest him for the attempted forgery. That meant getting him in their squad car. But Floyd was scared and claustrophobic, in part from his earlier stints behind bars. As officers attempted to shove him into the backseat, Floyd flailed and begged. It was during this tussle that Officer Derek Chauvin-a white man, nineteen-year veteran of the department, and Kueng's recent field training officer-arrived on the scene with Officer Tou Thao, a thirty-four-year-old Hmong American man. Chauvin pulled the struggling Floyd out of the squad car, bringing him to the ground and pinning him down with the weight of his body. As Floyd repeatedly called out-"I can't breathe!" "Mama!" "Don't kill me!"- Chauvin held him firmly on the pavement, face-down. Soon, Floyd lost consciousness, and Lane twice asked whether they should roll him to his side (a far safer position for breathing). But Chauvin resisted, telling the rookie that they were waiting for the ambulance. By the time that ambulance arrived, Chauvin's knee had been on top of Floyd for more than nine minutes, causing irreparable fatal damage.

As officers pinned him for those nine minutes, an increasingly distraught crowd gathered. The witnesses started filming and shouting at officers, with Officer Thao holding them at a distance and issuing derisive dismissals ("Don't do drugs, kids"). A teenage girl named Darnella Frazier captured the indelible cell phone footage that shook the world. In it, plain as day, was a white police officer, seemingly indifferent, kneeling on the neck of a Black man as he lay dying. As Floyd stopped breathing, witnesses demanded officers look for a pulse. An off-duty firefighter pleaded with officers to let her assist the clearly dying man. A martial arts expert who saw in Chauvin's actions a "blood choke" told the officer he was "trapping" Floyd's breathing. "Get off of his fucking neck," he yelled. But their pleas seemed not to register with officers, even after they tried and failed to find Floyd's pulse. Chauvin remained in place, kneeling on Floyd, until paramedics arrived and made him move so they could load the man onto a stretcher and into their rig. Unresponsive, Floyd was declared dead at the hospital.

In the overnight hours between May twenty-five and May twenty-six, two different reports of what happened at thirty-eighth and Chicago were released online. On the one hand was the MPD's press release, which reported that Floyd's death was the result of an unspecified "medical incident." And on the other, Frazier's video, which would by morning go viral, its visual evidence directly contradicting the MPD's account. By then, the name George Floyd had begun to take on a new life. No longer just a man who had moved to Minneapolis to turn his life around and unabashedly declared "I love you!" to friends and family, Floyd was now a local, national, and international symbol of the horrors of structural racism and the urgent need for change.