RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) The way US law enforcement treats different criminal suspects has been on endless display these past few weeks. What is it that makes some of us act with humanity while others do not?
Grinding onwards from day to day and streamed to an anxious worldwide audience is the depressing trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murdering George Floyd. Perhaps less noticed is the habitual thievery and arrest of Sisu, in North Carolina. Seeming at first glance to have absolutely nothing to do with one another, a second look throws some light for this gringo on how we behave as human beings.
Let’s start with Sisu.
You may not have heard of him, but Sisu is a large male stray dog. He was presciently named after a ‘self-deprecating yet comedic water dragon’, called upon to save humanity from a dark force by Raya in the Disney film “Raya and the Last Dragon”.
If Sisu had a police rap sheet, he would rightly be described as a habitual canine kleptomaniac. Sisu had made not only one but five separate efforts to steal a purple stuffed unicorn from a local Dollar General store. Shooed away each time, he always came back for that purple plush unicorn. Perhaps he needed it to help him live up to his name and save humanity.
Not surprisingly, alerted by the otherwise patient Dollar General manager, the local County Animal Control officer, Samantha Lane came to the store to arrest Sisu and lock him up in the animal shelter. She must have a ‘humanity angel’ for she did something very unusual, an act that went wonderfully viral on social media. She generously forked out US$10 from her own pocket so Sisu and his unicorn would not be parted.
As posted on Facebook, here is humanity working at its best “This is what happens when you break into the Dollar General consistently to steal the purple unicorn that you laid claim to but then get animal control called to lock you up for your B & E and larceny, but the officer purchases your item for you and brings it in with you.”
Is it too much to wonder about the cruelty and lack of humanity demonstrated when the police arrested and killed George Floyd in May? One of those officers, Derek Chauvin is being tried on various murder charges in a trial as much about George Floyd’s murder as of police brutality and racism.
George Floyd, a regular and friendly customer at a local grocery store, Cup Foods in Minneapolis, paid for a pack of cigarettes with what the teenage clerk Christopher Martin, suspected was a counterfeit US$20 bill. Following his regular instructions, the clerk demanded the return of the cigarettes and when Floyd, described as appearing “drunk” and “not in control of himself” refused, he called the police who arrived a few minutes later.
Finding Floyd sitting in a car parked around the corner from the store, one of the police officers, Thomas Lane, ordered Floyd to show his hands. Why officer Lane thought it necessary to draw his gun at this point has never been explained but it could hardly be described as a generous humanitarian gesture.
By all accounts, from this point, things got much worse, fast.
According to the prosecutors, Lane “put his hands on Mr. Floyd and pulled him out of the car.” Then Floyd “actively resisted being handcuffed”. It was when officers tried to put Floyd in their squad car that a struggle ensued. Soon Officer Chauvin arrived, and he and other officers tried again to force Floyd into the car.
It was then that Floyd “stiffened up, fell to the ground, and told the officers he was claustrophobic,” according to the police report. Five minutes later, Chauvin pulled Floyd away from the passenger side of the car, causing him to fall to the ground. He lay there, face down, still in handcuffs.
The key piece of evidence in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white police officer charged with murdering George Floyd, a handcuffed and incapacitated black suspect, is a video made by a 17-year-old passerby, Darnella Frazier. Seen now around the world by millions, Derek Chauvin is comfortably kneeling on Floyd`s neck for more than nine minutes. While still conscious, Floyd cries out that he cannot breathe, and bystanders including Genevieve Hansen, a Minneapolis firefighter, and emergency medical technician plead with the officer to stop and offers her expertise to help resuscitate the failing Floyd.
She was ignored and sent away and was one of three witnesses who in frustration at being unable to help, took the unprecedented step of calling the police to help deal with the police.
The video recording is a horror from beginning to end, a document of a total unfeeling lack of compassion from the police officers. Not surprisingly, it has had a deep effect on Darnella Frazier and others who tried to help.
“When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad. I look at my brothers. I look at my cousins, my uncles because they are all Black. I have a Black father, I have a Black brother, I have Black friends, and I look at that and I look at how that could have been one of them,” said Ms. Frazier. “It’s been nights, I’ve stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more, and not physically interacting and not saving his life,”
The small crowd which had gathered at the scene, various onlookers young and old, were herded away, ignored by the police when they cried out for them to stop murdering George Floyd. There was compassion and humanity but no matter what was yelled, the police seemed much more intent on keeping the growing crowd away than from helping the man on the ground.
One after another, those on the scene have said they wished they “could have done more”. “Disbelief and guilt” are what Christopher Martin said he feels, knowing had he ignored the counterfeit bill and paid for the cigarettes out of his own pocket, as North Carolina’s dog catcher had done for Sisu’s purple unicorn, George Floyd would most probably still be alive today.
Sisu didn`t spend long at the shelter. He was adopted (along with his unicorn) the following day.
George Floyd was not so fortunate. He died at the hands of the inhumane and brutal police, but not without the world watching his murder and crying out for justice and for change.