The Logic of the George Floyd Debate

What got lost between Coleman Hughes and Radley Balko

Last month,

Coleman Hughes

wrote an essay on George Floyd for

The Free Press

in which he argued that Derek Chauvin is not a murderer, but a scapegoat. After reading it, I posted the following comment on Notes and X:

Read Coleman Hughes’s rundown of what really happened to George Floyd. We saw cities burned, police departments gutted, and people murdered over this event.

Americans were wringing their hands in guilt as the “racial reckoning,” a phrase suggesting this was all justified, ripped through cities. Some have yet to recover, and may not for decades.

Meanwhile, guess who suffers most? Black people in poor neighborhoods. And who profits most? Black people who led the movement. It was a black-on-black crime in which the criminals convinced us they were the victims even as they wiped the blood from their knives.

A few people replied to question whether anything but positivity and progress has resulted from the George Floyd protests. Yes, the very same protests that spread to over 2,000 cities and towns in over 60 countries, involving up to 26 million people, making it the largest protest in U.S. history—and leading to 19 deaths, 14,000 arrests, and $1 billion to $2 billion in damages caused by arson, vandalism, and looting.

Other readers responded to share an essay by

Radley Balko

, in which he disagrees with Hughes’s assessment. It’s interesting to hear from Balko on the subject. His book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, is the definitive text on police militarization in the United States. But there’s a problem with his argument. In his essay, he rejects the notion, as argued by Hughes, that Chauvin placing his knee on Floyd’s neck “could not have been criminal assault because the Minneapolis Police Department has trained its officers … to use that very technique.”

Balko says this is “false” and “not only incorrect,” but that the documentary this claim is based on “engages in deceptive editing and convenient omissions to push it. In other words, the documentary is lying.” To be clear, the alleged lie is that the MPD trained officers to use the knee-to-the-neck submission. Here is what Hughes wrote:

Central to proving the first element—felony assault—was the question: Why did Chauvin have his knee on Floydʼs neck and shoulder blade in the first place? If it was an “improvised position,” as an MPD inspector testified at the trial, then it plausibly constituted felony assault. But if it was a hold that Chauvin, along with the entire MPD, was trained to do in precisely this kind of situation, then it becomes far harder to argue it was assault.

According to the documentary and documents I have reviewed, the move was indeed a standard hold, called the Maximal Restraint Technique (MRT), which the MPD trained its officers to use “in situations where handcuffed subjects are combative and still pose a threat to themselves, officers, or others, or could cause significant damage to property if not properly restrained,” according to the official MPD use-of-force manual.

Balko replies that the MPD taught the submission hold, but only so that officers would have enough time to administer a hobble restraint device, which leaves an individual essentially hog-tied. Balko adds:

This is a problem for Chauvin, because he never used a hobble on Floyd … So even if we concede that the hold Chauvin used on Floyd is the MRT described in the manual (it isn’t), it was only supposed to be used briefly, and only to incapacitate a suspect long enough to use a device that Chauvin never used. The MRT was not intended -- and neither Chauvin nor anyone else was ever trained in it -- for use on a handcuffed, prone suspect for nine minutes.

Second, the very first point in the MPD policy manual’s discussion of MRT states that it “shall only be used in situations where handcuffed subjects are combative and still pose a threat to themselves, officers or others, or could cause significant damage to property if not properly restrained.”

See the problem? Chauvin may have used the technique in a way that was never intended, applying it to someone who was not resisting and failing to administer a hobble, but this is irrelevant to the question of whether he learned that technique from the MPD. Remember, this is the key passage in Hughes’s argument:

If it was an “improvised position” … then it plausibly constituted felony assault. But if it was a hold that Chauvin, along with the entire MPD, was trained to do in precisely this kind of situation, then it becomes far harder to argue it was assault.

The MRT was not something Chauvin improvised. It was not something he came up with on his own. It was, in fact, a hold that Chauvin, along with the entire MPD, was trained to use. That is not false. Nor is it a lie. But Balko is right that officers were not trained to use the technique “in precisely this kind of situation.”

So Balko is right to challenge Hughes’s argument, but he challenges the wrong part and reaches the wrong conclusion. It would have been better to correct Hughes on the word “precisely.” That may seem like a trivial detail for an essay, but these things matter. As the architect and designer Charles Eames once said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Or in this case, the crime.