Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1

Speaker 1 Pushkin

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Speaker 23 On my last trip to London, I had dinner at my favorite spot in Clerkenwell.

Speaker 4 It's been in continuous operation for something like 150 years, which means it predates automobiles, radios, and the zipper.

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Speaker 20 May 25th, 2020, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Speaker 29 Early evening.

Speaker 36 A 911 dispatcher makes a call.

Speaker 37 3:30 as you describe the only available audio sector to cup, food, and from Chicago 3759 Chicago. On 38th, they are reporting that there's a person who used a counter fit fill as a business.

Speaker 7 The dispatcher is Jenna Scurry, seven years on the job.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 36 38th in Chicago.

Speaker 42 Suspect at a grocery store.

Speaker 37 Suspect is a black male, six foot or taller, sitting on the hood of a blue Mercedes. License slave boy, Robert John Hero, she says he possibly knocks the floor.

Speaker 23 She sends a squad car to the scene, looks up, and realizes the city has a fixed camera on that corner of 38th and Chicago, so she has a live video feed up on one of the screens.

Speaker 23 She sees the officers try to put the suspect in the back of one of the squad cars. She looks away.

Speaker 31 When she looks back, he's on the ground, handcuffed, face down.

Speaker 20 One officer kneeling on his neck.

Speaker 23 The suspect is George Floyd. The officer on top of him is Derek Chauvin.

Speaker 23 She looks away again,

Speaker 20 takes another call.

Speaker 20 At the criminal trial the following year, arising from the events that day in 2020, Scurry was the first witness called by the prosecution.

Speaker 4 And she relived the events of that evening step by step.

Speaker 49 At some point, then, did you go back to this?

Speaker 49 How did it appear at that time when you went back to it?

Speaker 50 It had not changed.

Speaker 49 And what do you mean by that?

Speaker 50 They were still on the ground. The whole situation was still the same.

Speaker 49 Do you recall approximately how long that was?

Speaker 50 No, it was long enough.

Speaker 50 It was long enough that I could look back multiple times.

Speaker 49 And so when you did look back, still on the ground, like like depicted here essentially.

Speaker 29 Correct.

Speaker 26 And

Speaker 49 what did you think about this when you looked back and saw that it hadn't changed?

Speaker 50 I first asked if the screens had frozen.

Speaker 31 My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

Speaker 23 Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Speaker 45 I'm guessing you watched the bystander videos of what happened that night during the fevered COVID summer of 2020.

Speaker 30 I know I did.

Speaker 31 I knew the villain.

Speaker 34 I knew the victim.

Speaker 39 I thought that's all I needed to know.

Speaker 53 But then I ran across the George Floyd video again not long ago, by chance.

Speaker 53 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.

Speaker 53 And I realized I didn't understand what was happening, what Chauvin was doing, what the other police officers on the scene were thinking, which made me wonder if somehow the first time around, I had missed the lesson of the case.

Speaker 40 So over the next two episodes, I'm going to do a close reading of what happened to George Floyd.

Speaker 40 An unfamiliar reading, starting with the perspective of the very first person to see things unfold in real time, Janice Gurry.

Speaker 44 Because before 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 911 dispatcher who had seen a thousand crime scenes in her career, to stop and stare at the video feed in disbelief.

Speaker 20 As in,

Speaker 34 this can't be real.

Speaker 40 The screen must be frozen.

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Speaker 38 The year is 776 BC.

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Speaker 43 Hey there, Malcolm Gladwell here.

Speaker 21 I was just in London, and I spent most of my time doing what I love most there, walking, miles and miles.

Speaker 24 Through Clerkenwell and Covent Garden and Shoreditch, stopping for espresso, thinking, writing, hanging out in Proof Rock Coffee, my favorite coffee shop in the city.

Speaker 23 Then I had dinner at my favorite restaurant in Clerkenwell.

Speaker 21 It's been open for about 150 years.

Speaker 44 You can feel the history in the floorboards.

Speaker 26 That's what I love about traveling.

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Speaker 49 Did you find that it had frozen?

Speaker 50 No.

Speaker 50 Well, I was told that it was not frozen.

Speaker 49 Did you see the screen change yourself?

Speaker 50 Yes, I saw the person's moving.

Speaker 49 So what did you start thinking at that point?

Speaker 50 Something might be wrong.

Speaker 49 Wrong with what? What are you thinking?

Speaker 50 It was a gut instinct of

Speaker 50 in the incident something's not going right,

Speaker 50 whether it be

Speaker 50 they needed more assistance

Speaker 25 or if

Speaker 50 There were there just something wasn't right. I don't know how to explain it.
It was a gut instinct to tell me that now we can be concerned.

Speaker 49 And what did you decide to do?

Speaker 50 I took that instinct and I called the sergeant.

Speaker 49 Have you ever, in your career before, called a sergeant for something like this? Multiple.

Speaker 50 For an incident like this.

Speaker 51 Right.

Speaker 50 To be exact? No.

Speaker 44 In the beginning, there was nothing extraordinary about the situation unfolding on the corner of 38th and Chicago.

Speaker 58 A man passes a counterfeit $20 bill.

Speaker 29 The clerk calls 911.

Speaker 36 The suspect hasn't run.

Speaker 61 He's sitting in his car across the street.

Speaker 36 He isn't armed.

Speaker 23 He isn't hostile.

Speaker 55 He seems like he's high.

Speaker 7 Two officers approach him and tell him to get out of the car.

Speaker 28 He pleads and complains, more like a scared child than a grown man.

Speaker 23 He talks about his mom.

Speaker 36 He finally gets out.

Speaker 15 The officers handcuff him.

Speaker 31 They ask him his name.

Speaker 3 He says it's George Floyd.

Speaker 61 They lead him over to the squad car.

Speaker 31 But he doesn't want to get in the back seat.

Speaker 47 He says he's claustrophobic.

Speaker 58 He's having trouble breathing.

Speaker 61 He struggles and squirms, and because he's a big man, well over six feet and 200 pounds, it makes things difficult.

Speaker 7 In the struggle, he cuts his mouth.

Speaker 24 One of the officers calls for an ambulance.

Speaker 23 A second squad car arrives.

Speaker 21 There are now four police officers on the scene and one handcuffed suspect.

Speaker 27 Clearly unhappy, but deferential.

Speaker 16 We know from the body camp footage that by this point he has used the words, sorry and please 57 times.

Speaker 1 Leave, man.

Speaker 29 That's Floyd.

Speaker 61 Is he going to jail?

Speaker 18 That's Derek Chauvin.

Speaker 55 He's one of the two officers in the second squad cart that just pulled up.

Speaker 1 He's under arrest right now for forgery.

Speaker 1 For what?

Speaker 1 Leave, man.

Speaker 1 I can't fucking breathe. Come on out.
Look at you. Thank you.
Thank you.

Speaker 31 Get him on the ground, Chauvin says.

Speaker 7 As the senior officer present, he's taking control of the situation.

Speaker 31 He wants Floyd in the prone position, face down, hands cuffed behind his back.

Speaker 14 He then puts one of his knees on the side of Floyd's neck and the other between Floyd's shoulder blades,

Speaker 36 a technique sometimes used with non-compliant subjects.

Speaker 14 Chauvin says, we'll hold him until the ambulance shows up.

Speaker 47 Floyd says, let me stand.

Speaker 55 Chauvin says, no.

Speaker 53 So what does Chauvin do next? Chauvin doesn't move.

Speaker 38 Chauvin just sits there.

Speaker 42 He's frozen.

Speaker 14 Right around this time, an off-duty firefighter named Genevieve Hanson was out for a walk, happens upon the scene, identifies herself as a firefighter, a trained first responder.

Speaker 50 I was pretty focused on

Speaker 50 trying to get the officers to let me help.

Speaker 49 And how were you doing that? Trying to get the officers to focus on you and get help?

Speaker 51 I think

Speaker 50 in my memory, I tried different tactics of

Speaker 50 calm and reasoning.

Speaker 50 I tried to be assertive.

Speaker 50 I pled and was desperate.

Speaker 23 Hansen testified at Chauvin's trial.

Speaker 49 In terms of

Speaker 49 his face when you're first there,

Speaker 49 or even the rest of him, What is it that you saw that made you concerned about his medical needs?

Speaker 50 I was really concerned about, I thought his face looked puffy and swollen, which would happen if you were putting a grown man's weight on someone's neck.

Speaker 50 I noticed some fluid coming from what looked like George Foot's body. And in a lot of cases, we see a patient

Speaker 50 release their bladder when they die.

Speaker 50 I can't tell you exactly where the fluid was coming from, but that's where my mind went.

Speaker 50 He wasn't moving. He was being restrained, but he wasn't moving.

Speaker 20 Later at the trial, a police surgeon named Bill Smock walked the jury through the videotape of Floyd's final moments, pointing out all the mounting warning signs.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 25 Yes, I'd like to know what is it showing us?

Speaker 27 Why is that significant?

Speaker 63 This is very important because it's showing what Mr. Floyd is doing 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 22 Smock breaks down Floyd's final minutes frame by frame.

Speaker 25 Let's look at another

Speaker 25 segment.

Speaker 25 Brent, if we can go to start at 2021.

Speaker 1 You will

Speaker 63 hear his voice get weaker and weaker.

Speaker 63 You will see his lose facial expression.

Speaker 63 You will hear him make

Speaker 63 sounds of trying to breathe as we get closer. He then goes unconscious.

Speaker 63 You will then see in the next section he has what's called an anoxic seizure. That's a fancy word for his brain is going without oxygen, very low.

Speaker 63 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 an anoxic seizure further on down the line.

Speaker 58 Clear warning signs.

Speaker 39 Clear red flags.

Speaker 3 Not to mention Genevieve Hansen and other bystanders are just a few feet away, shouting at him to get off Floyd.

Speaker 44 And then another voice joins that chorus.

Speaker 32 It's one of the other officers.

Speaker 22 He says, should we roll him on his side?

Speaker 43 Rolling him on his side is what's known as the recovery position.

Speaker 53 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 in Minneapolis at the time.

Speaker 53 But the city's use of force training explicitly stated that the technique was only supposed to be used briefly and and on someone, quote, exhibiting active aggression, unquote.

Speaker 9 It's dangerous.

Speaker 3 It's hard to breathe.

Speaker 36 I tried it.

Speaker 30 I had a friend put me in that position.

Speaker 16 It's scary.

Speaker 55 So when the subject calms down, you're supposed to roll them over.

Speaker 23 That's what the fellow officer is saying.

Speaker 29 We have to roll them over.

Speaker 55 But Chauvin says, no.

Speaker 30 He says, that's why we've got the ambulance coming.

Speaker 55 He's not reacting to anything. This is what so alarms Jenna Scurry when she looks back up at the scene.

Speaker 59 She's expecting things to have resolved themselves.

Speaker 41 Things should have happened.

Speaker 15 But nothing's happened.

Speaker 23 All she sees is Chauvin up on the screen, sitting on Floyd's neck, his hand casually in his pocket, his face impassive.

Speaker 47 He's frozen.

Speaker 7 Or, to use a term favored by psychologists, He's fixated.

Speaker 56 Fixation is simply going down the wrong and getting stuck on that path.

Speaker 29 That's Gary Klein.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 24 For Klein, one of the most revealing case studies in fixation was the actions of the Israeli intelligence chief, Eli Zera, in the weeks leading up to the Yom Kippur War between Egypt and Israel in 1973.

Speaker 56 He had what was called, called, now called in Israel, a conception.

Speaker 56 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.

Speaker 56 And he held on to that belief until about two hours before the attack. But his subordinates were seeing all these counterindicators.

Speaker 56 They were seeing the Egyptians moving troops and changing configurations at the border, all these signs that indicate indicate an attack is imminent. And Zara said, this is just a training exercise.

Speaker 56 But then the subordinates showed there was no sign of training going on. So this was just a cover story.
And Zara refused to pass their concerns on hire.

Speaker 56 And then the attack occurred. So he was fixated and he wouldn't budge.

Speaker 7 The fixated decision maker cannot accept new information.

Speaker 53 Every time new information arises that challenges his original conception, he explains it away.

Speaker 31 Klein once did a big project at Johns Hopkins University Hospital looking at how physicians made diagnoses.

Speaker 30 And he found that the most experienced doctors were acutely aware of their own tendency towards fixation.

Speaker 59 It was a constant battle.

Speaker 56 I watched one examination where the attending physician, this is the first observation I made,

Speaker 56 the attending physician is examining the person. The person is describing

Speaker 56 his condition and seems pretty straightforward. And

Speaker 56 at a certain point, he says, what's this on your back? Well, it turned out he had had surgery

Speaker 56 to repair some heart defect. This hadn't been in his history.
And the physician said, wait a minute. Let's start over.

Speaker 56 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 didn't have this other possibility.

Speaker 38 Did he end up changing his diagnosis?

Speaker 35 Oh, yes.

Speaker 56 Yes, they found a much more serious problem that the resident and some of the nurses had missed.

Speaker 30 Fighting fixation means being willing to throw away all the work you've done in making sense of a complicated situation and saying,

Speaker 41 let's start over.

Speaker 23 This is what Chauvin doesn't do. He never says to himself, let's start over.

Speaker 56 Derek Chauvin, he had a script for how to handle people who were larger and intimidating. And that's as far as he ever got.

Speaker 29 You can't be...

Speaker 38 Is it fair to say you can't be a police officer if you're not willing to revisit your script?

Speaker 56 You can't be an effective police officer if you are stuck on your script.

Speaker 21 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 in fact 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 a recovery position dude i've been doing this for 19 years back off

Speaker 23 the crowd that has gathered around Floyd and the four officers is becoming more and more vocal.

Speaker 29 But Chauvin isn't moving.

Speaker 1 He's not responsive right now, bro.

Speaker 1 No, bro, look at him. He's not responsive right now, bro.

Speaker 1 Check his pulse.

Speaker 1 Check his pulse. Check his pulse, Kyle.

Speaker 23 Check his pulse. Check his pulse.

Speaker 32 One of the other cops at the scene says to the officer sitting behind Chauvin, I can't find one.

Speaker 42 Floyd is dead.

Speaker 45 And still, Chauvin doesn't move.

Speaker 46 He will remain on Floyd's neck for another three minutes, even after the ambulance arrives.

Speaker 44 Years from now, when university professors teach courses on decision sciences, they will play this video as a textbook example of fixation.

Speaker 38 But why is Chauvin fixated?

Speaker 23 What psychological mechanism could describe why he would just sit there?

Speaker 31 In the aftermath of the murder, it was said again and again that Chauvin is a racist.

Speaker 41 But calling someone racist is a description, not an explanation.

Speaker 36 Why is Chauvin stuck on his script?

Speaker 3 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

Speaker 10 T-Mobile knows all about that.

Speaker 9 They're now the best network, according to the experts at OoCla Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Super Mobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

Speaker 21 With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

Speaker 6 With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

Speaker 57 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 5 And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

Speaker 6 That's your business, Supercharged.

Speaker 11 Learn more at supermobile.com.

Speaker 9 Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

Speaker 12 where you can see the sky.

Speaker 6 Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Speaker 43 Hey there, Malcolm Glabo here.

Speaker 21 I was just in London, and I spent most of my time doing what I love most there, walking, miles and miles.

Speaker 24 Through Clerkenwell and Covent Garden and Shoreditch, stopping for Espresso, thinking, writing, hanging out in Proofrock Coffee, my favorite coffee shop in the city.

Speaker 23 Then I had dinner at my favorite restaurant in Clerkenwell.

Speaker 21 It's been open for about 150 years.

Speaker 44 You can feel the history in the floorboards.

Speaker 26 That's what I love about traveling.

Speaker 3 It slows you down and gets you out of your usual rhythm. And if you're looking to switch up your everyday routine, consider hosting your home on Airbnb while you're away.

Speaker 61 It's an easy way to earn a little extra and offer someone else a meaningful stay.

Speaker 31 Your home might be worth more than you think.

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Speaker 14 One of the most influential ideas to emerge in social psychology in recent years is something called hostile intention attribution, a theory arising out of the work of Ken Dodge.

Speaker 25 For me, a very poignant event in my own thinking was that as a clinical psychologist, I was seeing a

Speaker 25 highly aggressive teenager in a state psychiatric hospital.

Speaker 24 That's Dodge, who teaches at Duke University.

Speaker 25 And the boy's name was Rocky.

Speaker 25 I came up to his ward one day, approached him from behind to say hello, 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.

Speaker 25 And in a nanosecond, he stopped and said, oh, my, you can't be too careful around here.

Speaker 25 And, you know, he was making a decision that

Speaker 25 in that moment, that somebody touching him on the back shoulder might be a threat, and he responded. That was his mindset.

Speaker 23 Rocky could have interpreted that touch on the shoulder in any number of ways.

Speaker 61 He could have ignored it, shrugged it off, or assumed it was an invitation for affection and turned and smiled.

Speaker 23 But he didn't. He chose to focus on it and to assume that Dodge had a hostile intent.

Speaker 14 That's hostile intent attribution.

Speaker 22 The pattern of interpreting everything as a threat.

Speaker 23 You can look at someone like that kid Rocky and offer an organic explanation of his behavior.

Speaker 61 He's a bad seed.

Speaker 27 He's wired wrong.

Speaker 23 But Dodge wants us to look at problematic behavior as a developmental problem as well.

Speaker 36 Somewhere along the way, someone's personal experience left them unprepared to make proper sense of the world.

Speaker 44 A very small child, for example, does not understand the distinction between an intentional act and an accident.

Speaker 30 That's something you learn.

Speaker 23 You gradually figure out that actions can come with any number of different explanations.

Speaker 25 I remember going to the pediatrician at age four and being deathly afraid of getting a shot, right?

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 But I do think that it's a socialization of benign intent that early life is about rather than the socialization of hostile intent.

Speaker 23 After talking to Dodge, I began to observe my own kids more closely.

Speaker 12 They're both preschoolers, two years apart.

Speaker 55 The big one loves to manhandle her little sister, and most of the time, that interaction is greeted with laughter.

Speaker 61 But sometimes, if my eldest goes too far, her sister cries.

Speaker 23 And I realized that what they are doing is, to use Dodge's phrase, learning how to make accurate attributions of each other's behavior.

Speaker 23 When the big sister's push is too aggressive, the little one learns, that seems to have a different intention from what we were doing before.

Speaker 47 She's learning the difference between fighting and playing.

Speaker 47 And when the little one cries out instead of laughing, the big one learns, oh, if I want to keep playing, I have to make sure that my actions are accurately interpreted.

Speaker 21 She's learning how to rein in her aggression.

Speaker 47 That kind of feedback loop is a crucial part of a child's socialization.

Speaker 27 But in the case of the boy Rocky, what Dodge realized was that that process of socialization, of learning how to accurately distinguish between a hostile touch and a playful touch, had been disrupted.

Speaker 25 I remember interviewing a 10-year-old kid who told me about when he was four or five,

Speaker 25 the family that he lived in at that time, his father, stepfather,

Speaker 25 would come home every night from work and he learned how to minimize the likelihood that he was going to get beaten up that night by smelling whether his father had alcohol in his breath, whether his father had a mean look,

Speaker 25 whether his father called him into the kitchen with his belt already undone, put it on the kitchen table. He was learning all four years old and he's learning all these signals.

Speaker 25 And he could describe them to me in great detail. So

Speaker 25 I think an early 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 44 If your father is violent 60% of the time and loving 40% 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.

Speaker 36 But when you take that assumption into the real world, onto playgrounds, into classrooms, into the workplace, it doesn't work.

Speaker 61 It makes you a bully, a pariah.

Speaker 55 It makes even routine interactions deeply problematic.

Speaker 23 And nowhere is this dysfunction more problematic than policing, of course.

Speaker 36 Because if you are a police officer whose early life and experience has left them impaired in that way, who as a result makes hostile attributions all the time, then how can you be a police officer?

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 30 And the one thing Rocky can't be is a police officer.

Speaker 31 Because being good at that job relies, maybe 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.

Speaker 55 Between someone who is struggling because they can't breathe and someone who is struggling because they are resisting arrest.

Speaker 36 Between someone who says, I'm going to die because they're trying to trick you and someone who says, I'm going to die because they are in fact going to die.

Speaker 31 If you can't do that, then you can only interpret the world one way.

Speaker 10 Then, in the middle of a fast-developing situation when there is new information coming in all the time, you have only one way to interpret it.

Speaker 29 A threat.

Speaker 28 In the course of the investigation into the death of George Floyd, a second case came to light.

Speaker 36 It happened in 2017, three years earlier.

Speaker 31 A woman calls 911.

Speaker 23 She says her son has assaulted her.

Speaker 31 The police arrive, Talk to the woman at length.

Speaker 7 She says her son is down the hall in his room.

Speaker 31 In the body cam footage, you can see the officers walk down the hallway.

Speaker 61 The boy is on the floor of his bedroom, on the phone.

Speaker 4 He's 14.

Speaker 20 The lead officer in the group is lean, in his 40s, with a passive demeanor.

Speaker 34 It's Derek Chauvin.

Speaker 30 The officers enter the room.

Speaker 27 Tell him he's under arrest.

Speaker 60 He says his mom was drunk.

Speaker 26 He gets up reluctantly.

Speaker 60 His voice is is calm.

Speaker 30 He doesn't act out.

Speaker 21 He's not aggressive.

Speaker 53 He says his mother had done this before, called the police when she's the one who has a problem.

Speaker 28 That's why his uncle left the house, he says.

Speaker 53 He seems genuinely confused as to why he should be the one under arrest.

Speaker 15 He's a teenager.

Speaker 65 John, don't you come on here?

Speaker 29 That's Chauvin.

Speaker 65 Won't you stand up for me?

Speaker 65 I'm fine. Don't you're under arrest, so stand up.
I'm not under arrest. Yeah, you are.
Stand up. My mom is drunk.

Speaker 1 You can call me a brother.

Speaker 65 Stand up. She assaulted me.
Stand up.

Speaker 65 I'm not going to ask you any more time.

Speaker 56 You can't arrest me.

Speaker 65 Stand up. Ask my sister.
Stand up. I'm not going to ask you again.
You can't touch me in my own house. Stand up.
You can't touch me in my own house. Get up now.

Speaker 24 Chauvin moves towards him.

Speaker 14 Starts beating the boy over the head with his flashlight, opening a 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 to much, much worse.

Speaker 14 I didn't hear, I didn't hurt her!

Speaker 14 Mom, stop!

Speaker 1 I didn't kill my dandelion!

Speaker 31 Then his mother enters the room.

Speaker 31 Chauvin crouches down next to the prone boy and puts his knee on the boy's neck.

Speaker 41 Then, he just sits there.

Speaker 3 There are at least six officers at the scene.

Speaker 29 At this point, most of them have filed out of the room, as if they can't stomach what's happening.

Speaker 31 One of the remaining officers turns his body cam to the wall.

Speaker 31 Chauvin keeps his knee on the boy's neck for 15 minutes.

Speaker 61 Even after the paramedics arrive and the boy explains to them that he blacked out after he was choked and that his ear is bleeding, Chauvin remains on the boy's neck, frozen.

Speaker 44 The boy is eventually rescued and he's finally able to get up and walk away.

Speaker 19 I have watched that body cam footage more times than I can count.

Speaker 43 And every time I find myself crying at the end, in a way that I never did with George Floyd.

Speaker 24 Not because it's worse than George Floyd, because of course it isn't, but because it's about a boy.

Speaker 16 And it was all recorded on tape years before it happened again.

Speaker 31 A former U.S. attorney named Amanda Sertich examined the video while prosecuting Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.

Speaker 66 I would say the two most striking things about what's depicted in the 2017 video are:

Speaker 66 first, that

Speaker 66 the

Speaker 66 minor doesn't act out in any physical way whatsoever.

Speaker 66 The other striking thing about the video that I think is much more visceral is how obvious it is that it's a child being assaulted. And

Speaker 66 when former Officer Chauvin has that really strong strike on his head with the flashlight,

Speaker 66 there's that pause that any parent who has a kid will recognize

Speaker 66 right after a kid gets really hurt. And then the minor says, ow, you're hurting me, and begins to cry and sound very much like the child that he is.

Speaker 66 And he continues to cry in the same way over 15 minutes intermittently.

Speaker 45 There's another reason I found that tape so heartbreaking.

Speaker 36 Something that I did not expect myself to feel, and something I cannot entirely explain.

Speaker 32 I felt an overwhelming wave of pity for Derek Chauvin, a man who sees every action as a threat, who cannot tell the difference between fear and aggression, who looks at a boy on his phone, in his bedroom, and sees a monster.

Speaker 45 That is a dark, joyless place for anyone to find themselves imprisoned.

Speaker 31 And by what tragic failure of administration did a man who showed on videotape that he cannot do the single most important thing that a police officer needs to do to be a police officer, remain on the force

Speaker 20 for three more years

Speaker 45 until he killed someone in cold blood.

Speaker 38 That's next week.

Speaker 53 Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Nadaf Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shikurji.
Fact-checking by Sam Russik.

Speaker 53 Engineering, Nina Bird Lawrence, Mixing and Mastering on this episode by Jake Gorski. Production support from Luke Lamond.

Speaker 23 Thank you to Mikal Leibowich.

Speaker 7 Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Speaker 41 Special thanks to Sarah Nix and El Hafe, Greta Cohn.

Speaker 53 I'm Malcolm Gabo.

Speaker 54 Get ad-free episodes of Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts.
or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

Speaker 54 Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows.

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Speaker 67 Why are TSA rules so confusing?

Speaker 62 You got a hoodie, you want to take it off!

Speaker 25 I'm Manny. I'm Noah.
This is Devin.

Speaker 67 And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming at me? Well, I can't expect what to do.

Speaker 67 Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it.

Speaker 53 You know, lock him up.

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Speaker 65 No such thing.

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