Get ready for the next round of George Floyd riots
We all remember the first round. George Floyd died in May 2020. Protests erupted around the nation. Some were peaceful, some more violent. People vowed to end police brutality. Some cities cut police budgets. Others promised to make reforms.
Did the protests, or those changes, do anything to end police brutality?
I went to the Washington Post’s database to check.
Police killed 1,021 people in 2020, as compared to 999 in 2019.
The graph of police shootings in 2020 is almost identical to the last 5 years:
Police killed 17 unarmed black men in 2020, as compared to 13 in 2019, and 22 in 2018.
If “defund the police” was a campaign to save lives, no one was saved.
On the other hand, violent crime did go up in 2020. About 4,900 more people were shot to death, compared to the 4 prior years:
Unlike the police shootings graph, this one has a clear inflection point, right around memorial day. The George Floyd protests started, then more people started to get shot. And the violence didn’t stop.
Shootings went up by 25%, while mass shootings went up by 50%:
Graphing the percentage change shows the timing even more clearly:
I can’t say that the protests directly caused that crime wave, because it’s hard to prove. Some people are saying the violence is clearly linked to BLM protests. The timing is exactly right.
A lot of things happened in 2020, so there are some competing theories. Covid happened. People lost their jobs. People lost their sanity. Prisoners were let out of jail because of covid. Many lockdowns ended around the same time the protests started.
Some explanations are obviously wrong. The New York Times said the lockdowns increased domestic violence. But the violence didn’t start when the lockdowns started, and it didn’t end when the lockdowns ended.
Some people blamed hot summer weather for the uptick in violence. Other years did not have the same summer spike.
Some blamed the bad economy. But recessions don’t typically cause murder — the murder rate went down during the 2008–2009 recession:
Covid spread all over the world. If the pandemic was responsible for all these murders, then you’d expect the murder rate would have gone up similarly in other countries. In Mexico, the murder rate went down by 3%. In Canada, up by 7%. In Brazil, up by 4%. In the UK, up by 7%. In Germany, up by 4%.
In the United States, murders went up by 29%:
That was the biggest increase in the last 50 years.
Many articles blame 2020’s surge in gun sales. Gun sales have spiked as high in the past. Usually it happens after a mass shooting, when gun owners get worried that future purchases will be restricted:
Those past gun sale surges didn’t cause spikes in the national murder rate.
On the other hand, there was a spike in the national murder rate happened after 2014’s BLM protests. There was a sharp increase in St Louis, after the Ferguson protests. Murders spiked in Baltimore, after the Freddie Gray protests.
Both the increase in homicides in 2015 (after Ferguson) and in 2020 (after George Floyd) happened primarily among Black victims:
The simplest explanation is that BLM protests cause an increase in murders.
It’s less clear how that happens. Maybe, police are worried about bad publicity so they spend less time patrolling Black neighborhoods. Crime goes up. Supporting this explanation, we also saw an increase in traffic fatalities in June 2020, primarily among Black drivers. Maybe police were pulling over less Black drivers, more drove recklessly, more people died:
It’s not clear that’s the full explanation. Maybe it’s also related to trust in the police. White people stop calling the police because they think the police are racist. Black people stop calling the police for help because they’re worried that the police might murder them. They’re less likely to help the police identify suspects. I have to think that 24/7 coverage of George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and other tragedies did a lot to make Black people trust the police less.
Violence is getting worse and police violence isn’t getting better.
Why aren’t we talking about this more?
10 million people took to the streets to protest, after George Floyd’s death. Few people are talking about the 4,900 extra murders that happened last year.
Part of the problem is that people don’t understand the scale of each problem.
One poll simply asked people to answer:
“How many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019?”
The right answer is “about 10”.
50% of conservatives guessed the right answer. Less than 20% of liberals did.
Half of the population, across all political orientations, guessed that the problem is substantially larger than it actually is.
More than 40% of liberals think that the police violence problem is 100 times worse than it is. They assume there are 1,000 George Floyd style police murders every year when it’s really closer to 10 unarmed black victims.
I don’t expect average people to memorize the exact statistics.
But, with 24/7 coverage of George Floyd and Jacob Blake, maybe it would be helpful for some news stories to also talk about the scale of the problem.
It’s important to understand the scale, so we can make the right trade-offs.
It’s tragic for police to kill an innocent victim. It’s worth asking how we can lower that number.
Violent crime is also tragic. It kills ~20,000 people every year in America. About half of the victims are young black men. Protesting the police seems to have raised the number of deaths by about 4,000.
And covid, of course, has killed more than 500,000 Americans in the last 12 months. I hesitate to blame the spread of covid on any one thing — Americans have done everything but follow social distancing rules. It’s still fair to say that even one superspreading protest could have caused more than 10 deaths.
Derek Chauvin is under trial for the murder of George Floyd.
If you watched any mainstream news last year, you’d assume that Chauvin is sure to be found guilty. The videos were horrific. The cop holds Floyd down for 9 minutes while Floyd pleads for mercy and then stops breathing.
One betting site gives 60% odds that Chauvin will be acquitted of all murder charges.
Why would he walk free?
It’s worth watching the full bodycam footage of George Floyd’s arrest.
Police spend 10 minutes calmly trying to arrest Floyd. When they get him into the back of the police car, Floyd panics, says he can’t breathe, resists the officers, gets back out of the car, and lays on the ground. That is, he says he can’t breathe, long before the knee to the neck.
Floyd’s autopsy is ambiguous. He has no serious damage to his neck. The report found both fentanyl and methamphetamine in his blood. The fentanyl concentration in his blood (11 ng/mL) is right around the fatal dose for an average person. But the average addict who overdoses has a higher tolerance. Some addicts can survive twice that much. I don’t know what Floyd’s tolerance was. And I don’t know how the combination of meth and fentanyl changes things.
It seems like a strange coincidence, for Floyd to overdose, right at the same time as the police restrained him. That said, Floyd was also stopped by police in 2019, one year prior to his death. During that previous arrest, he ate all the pills in his possession as soon as he got pulled over.
Is it possible that he ate his fentanyl and meth when first approached by police, and overdosed 20 minutes later?
Steven Crowder tried repeating the experiment and had someone kneel on his neck for 9 minutes. He found it uncomfortable but had little trouble breathing.
Did Floyd die from the knee to the neck? From the drugs? From panic and his heart condition? From some combination of all these?
Was the restraint used by cops done by the book? Or should they have been more careful, especially after Floyd lost consciousness? Is pinning him down murder or manslaughter?
I’m not a doctor or a lawyer. I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. The point is that the defense needs only prove there’s a reasonable doubt that Chauvin murdered Floyd. They need only convince one juror to doubt the charges, and then there’s a hung jury.
I think there’s a fair chance Chauvin will be acquitted of all charges.
And I think it’s pretty obvious that leads to more riots. Crime will spike again. And a few hundred more black people will get murdered, as a side effect.
I’d like to hope that we can do something about violence. The answer might not be in defunding the police, but in changing the laws that they enforce.
There’s something wrong with our drug laws in America.
Eric Garner was choked to death by police. Police were harassing him for selling cigarettes. That entire interaction didn’t have to happen, the crime doesn’t even seem worth fighting.
Floyd may have only resisted arrest because he thought he was going to get busted for drugs. Fentanyl is in the US because of the war on drugs. As we try to fight smuggling, drug cartels switch to more potent drugs that are easier to sneak into the country. As the potency goes up, more people overdose.
70,000 Americans are overdosing every year. That’s a problem even larger than violent crime. And much larger than police violence.
When we think about addiction, we usually think answer is to give people help and treatment. I don’t know the best treatment for opiate addiction. Some people think it’s rehab. Others, methadone.
I can tell you that the best answer to addiction isn’t to have a police officer pin you to the ground until you stop breathing.
So, I don’t know how Floyd died. I don’t know if he was brutalized by police or if he overdosed while they pinned him down. Neither one is acceptable. Neither should have happened.
I want us to put more effort into helping people and less into shooting them. I want an honest conversation on what we can fix, what laws we can change, and what the side effects will be.
So far, we haven’t had that conversation. We haven’t come up with any solutions that work. We haven’t cured police violence, we’ve only made crime worse.
Meanwhile, the media sensationalizes every police killing. Repeats the news 24/7 until people are enraged. Omits any surrounding circumstances that might help explain why it happened. People get angry, some riot, some loot, some kill. People destroy their own communities.
Derek Chauvin might get off with no jail time.
The headlines will shout, “killer cop walks free!”. And then the riots will start.
Get ready for it.
