Iconoclastic Opinions: Israel Shamir*

Belarus in turmoil. Photo of demonstrators distributed by CNN. Mostly members of the upper middle class, and carefully selecting white as their distinctive color to signify purity and innocence. It's all cynically contrived, even if many of the participants scarcely realize it, or fathom the ugly consequences they are helping unleash. This is a TGP annotated version of the original.  It’s not over yet, but can Lukashenko survive the storm? Ever since the presidential elections of 8/9/2020, Belarus has experienced fitful waves of protests. The protesters claim the elections were rigged, just as the pussy-hat ladies accused Trump in 2016. The protests are presented to the world through the magnifying glass of the global fake news machine. There are dozens of media channels, all elaborating on the theme of election rigging and protest suppression. But Belarusian suppression is not something to write home about. The crowds aren’t big, for Belarusians are quite civil and obedient folk, they even wait for the green light (a rare quality in the East). Despite provocateurs and Soros-trained revolutionaries, there are few wounded, much less than your average confrontation between globalist protesters and local police, whether they be called Gilets Jaunes or Black Lives Matter. One protester tried to throw a hand grenade into police ranks; by his own miscalculation the grenade exploded in his hand and he died of his wounds. This incident is already being presented by the mass media as “mass murder” and even “genocide”. EU ambassadors came to place flowers at the place of his martyrdom. This latest media hero is being turned into the new George Floyd, an apt comparison because the unfortunate Belarusian Bomber also had a rich criminal record. They are now producing a BLM sticker where the B is for Belarus. Should this be called “cultural misappropriation” or is this a “violation of terms of use”? Youtube would give it an automatic copyright strike. The presidents of Poland and Lithuania offered their mediation implying that Lukashenko should step down. It is hardly a tempting offer. In 2014, the then Ukrainian president accepted the European offer of mediation and in a few days he was forced to flee to Russia. Lukashenko is made of sterner stuff; his policemen succeeded in putting the protests down, and the protests weren’t that strong anyway. It is still too early to bet whether the colour revolution will definitely fail or win. What is the cause of the protests, beyond complaints that life is unfair? Who is financing and organizing these demonstrations? Well-endowed Belarus has a few suitors. The NATO enemies of Russia want to move their tanks within shooting range of Smolensk; Poland wants to regain its old dependency (Belarus was under the Poles for hundreds of years). Russia wants to swallow Belarus, and Papa Lukashenko is too tough for them to chew. An additional hazard to Belarus sovereignty is the murky and mighty body that has organized the worldwide over-reaction to coronavirus and forced billions of people into detention. Lukashenko is the hero who reject all demands for lockdown; Belarus remained calm and free in the midst of global hysteria. Belarusians enjoyed football games while the rest of the world ducked and covered. Easter time, Belarus churches remained open and mass was celebrated. On May 9, VE day, Belarusians had their Victory Parade, while even the steely-eyed Putin was forced to cancel. Such disobedience to the global regime had to be punished. Like Fidel Castro, Papa Lukashenko has ruled his country for generations now. He has been re-elected every five years since 1994 when he, the youngest politician in Europe, defeated the incumbent Prime Minister in open election. Even now, at a spritely 65, his stature remains uneclipsed. His results in Minsk, the capital city, were over 60%; his main competitor received 15%, while for the whole country he received about 80% of the vote, an impressive result. Too impressive, his enemies say. In any case, there is no doubt he carried the majority of his countrymen. Belarus is a mono-ethnic state, with very little diversity; there are no strong political parties, no powerful and independent media, no oligarchs, no super-rich. It is still very Soviet-like, but a very neat, clean, modern, well repaired version (the USSR was quite shabby). Another difference: no party politics. While the Soviets were always ruled by the official Communist party, Lukashenko has no party. He doesn’t like parties because they separate people. He wants people to be united – and it works. There is no significant opposition party. The opposition says, “AGL [Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko] go away, you ruled for too long time, we are tired of you”. A sane citizen will not vote for people who have no agenda beyond power lust. Being tired of a president is not really a good argument. After the first exit poll, “rigged elections” became the battle cry of the opposition. Like the Clintonites, who could not believe that anybody would vote for Trump, the opposition in Belarus could not imagine why people would vote for this ancient (65 yo) fossil. Indeed such claims are the staple food of modern politics; there is hardly a country on the globe where election results are not disputed. The claims are always that the results were falsified, or the people misled, or the elected president didn’t deserve being elected; or he was voted in by racist rednecks; or Russia swung the polls. The reasons why election results should not be recognised is limited only by the human imagination. AGL’s latest election victory was officially recognised by countries around the world. He was congratulated by the presidents of China, Russia, Turkey as well as by the Moscow Patriarch Kyril (Belarus Church is an integral part of Russian Orthodox Church). The opposition is trying to stimulate interest in regime change by following Gene Sharp’s textbooks: heat it up with attacks on police, then cool it down with girls dressed in white sharing flowers and posing with those same cops. It is the carrot and the stick. Point and counterpoint. Freedom Fighter and Martyr. The technique has worked successfully in many countries, and probably will be tried this November in the US. Belarus shows us what “foreign meddling in elections” really looks like. It is not placing a few ads on Facebook. It is training hundreds of young men in the arcane arts of inner-city warfare: how to mix Molotov cocktails; car-ramming 101; cross-border infiltration; how to smuggle cash; recruiting and paying merceneries; how to run a 24-hour crisis centre from abroad; where and how to assault police; how to prepare and run a scripted colour revolution – this is how foreign interference influences Belarus elections. What do the protesters want beyond the removal of AGL? It turns out they do have an agenda: they want to make it easy to hire and fire workers, to end trade union protection and state labour laws; to end price regulation. These are the usual neoliberal ideas, but here is the most important: they plan to privatise and sell the country’s assets. But here their unified front collapses: the Pro-Western opposition wants to sell Belarus to Western investors, while the Pro-Russian opposition wants it to be sold to the Russian oligarchs. These assets are rich and plentiful. 80 per cent of all industry and agriculture remain in public property, more than in any other European state. Belarus is the last surviving remnant of the Soviet Union, the last Soviet Socialist republic. The USSR was based on state ownership of the means of production; that is, factories, research, industry and agriculture. In the Russian Federation, these national heirlooms were privatised by Boris Yeltsin and given away to a few oligarchs. Not so in Belarus. Their industry is still publically owned; their farms still belong to local farmer cooperatives and not to globalist agro holdings. Belarus is still quite wealthy; its industry has been modernised, and so has their agriculture. They produce and export a lot of everything, mainly to neighbouring Russia. Europe has little interest in Belarusian lorries and sausages because they have their own lorries and sausages to sell, but Russia buys them because they prefer them and know they are a good value for the money. Belarus’ dairy, furniture and fashion continue to be popular in Russia. Belarus inherited two huge refineries, one in Mozyr and another in Novopolotsk, capable of turning raw oil and gas into ready products. Russia produces raw oil and gas, Belarus refines it; they should be able to make a good profit working together. But the Russian oligarchs behind Gazprom weren’t satisfied with their usual take, so they created an intermediary company based in Lithuania; the company “buys” Russian gas and then “sells” it to Belarus. The Belarusian payments are redirected offshore to the oligarchs’ bank accounts. Some of it eventually reaches Russian state coffers, but much goes astray. Gazprom kept raising the price of oil delivered to Belarus refineries until this ostensible ally was being charged more than the hostile states of Ukraine and Germany. In response, Belarus switched to refining Norwegian and Saudi oil: it was cheaper than Russian oil. Now they refine American oil. Belarus has since decided to cut off Gazprom’s intermediary company, and Belarusian police are now investigating the siphoning-off of Russian state funds to offshore accounts. The Russian oligarchs are very unhappy about all this; they are now bankrolling the Belarus protests and funding a shrill campaign against AGL in Russian media and social networks. President Putin has a different game in mind. He would like to see Belarus joining Russia as its constituent republic. He does not care much for AGL (who stood up to the corona hysteria even better than himself), but neither does he want to be led by his oligarchs. That’s why he expressed his support during the elections and congratulated AGL with his victory. But Russian media continues to play against Lukashenko, whether it is by the media lords’ demand or because of their desire to echo their Western brethren. All oligarchs, East and West, would like to destroy the last remnant of the USSR and erase all possibility of learning from it. This is what the elections and the attempted regime change is all about at the bottom line. They are annoyed by the successes of AGL’s Belarus. If you think socialism is not a successful strategy in economics, consider Belarus and think again. For a time, at least until 2015, the Belarus economy was the fastest growing one in Europe; its GDP grew 10% a year. After the terrible collapse of 1991, Belarus was the first to rebound (by 2002), while Russia lagged behind until 2006. Just look at the evidence: (1) the totally unnecessary destruction of the USSR resulted in a complete economic recovery in just 16 years for partially-privatised Russia; (2) state-owned Belorus was able to bounce back within 12 years; (3) the totally privatized Ukraine was never able to recover. Even now their economy is 65% of what it was in the last Soviet year of 1990. You can see in the below graph of the Russian (light grey) and Belarus GDP (solid line) between 1990 and 2018, that good old Belarus has managed quite well under AGL. There, salaries grew faster than labour productivity (as opposed to, say, the US or UK where labour productivity grew while salaries stagnated); there was (and is) practically no unemployment in Belarus. After 2015 Belarus stagnated, and this was closely connected to the stagnating Russian economy, but still they managed fine. One of Belarus’ secrets of success is that Belarus has practically no corruption. I was told by a friendly Russian businessmen that it is almost impossible to bribe a Belarusian official (as opposed to Russia where officials are legendarily corrupt). They told me that the Belarus KGB (they retained the brand name) is always vigilant, always fighting corruption. They have a transparent banking system, and the average Belarusian citizens’ support of the anti-corruption ethos makes a Belarusian official very, very reluctant to accept a bribe. (It has to be paid into a European bank in another country, and it is not an easy thing to arrange in the present climate). As a post-Soviet state, Belarus is quite strict. The country is so clean because AGL is known for prowling the streets personally. If he discovers some garbage lying around, he calls out the local mayor and forces him to clean it right away. He has more than a touch of Lee Kuan Yew (LKY), the legendary Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990. Perhaps AGL will also serve as long as LKY (31 years!), meanwhile he has 26 years under his belt. Another mark of strictness is a special tax that non-working persons are obliged to pay. It is heir to the Soviet Parasite Tax. A non-working person can be even tried and sentenced. Belarusian socialism is not a haven for welfare abusers. The average tax in Belarus is 30%, unless one works remotely in the IT industry. Computer-savvy Belarus has 75,000 IT consultants, engineers and technicians who work for companies located in the EU, Russia and the US. If the average salary in Belarus is about $500 per month, the IT specialists earn over $2500 and pay only 7% tax. I suspect that AGL wants to make it cheaper to pay the tax than to evade it. One would think these guys would be happy, but they are not. Many of them joined the protests. They want a more liberal society, and this is natural. The US wants to bring Lukashenko over to its side; and wily AGL is ready to play along. Now he processes American oil in his refineries. AGL wants to stay friendly with everybody, and his new close friend is China. In Belarus, the men in power say their country will become the Chinese hub in Europe. Belarus is very, very close to Russia, but it is also afraid of being engulfed and devoured by this friendly giant. If the pressure upon AGL keeps increasing he may have to decide to get off the fence and join Russia. The US knows this and tries not to push him too far, but Russians are smart enough to encourage the protests with exactly this goal in mind. Will Lukashenko liberalise his state? Is it possible at all, without surrendering all their hard-won social achievements? I am not so sure. Perhaps as long as imperialist powers ply their trade there may be no way to create a liberal socialist state. That was the conclusion of Vladimir Lenin: he wrote that the liberal stage would be reached when there are no predators laying in wait. He was quick to smash the Krostadt revolt. The workers of Belarus must understand what will happen to them if the rebels achieve victory. Their industries will be sold and dismantled so it can’t compete against the globalists’ preferred vendors, as has already happened in Russia, Poland and Latvia. The terrible example of the Ukraine should keep them out of the revolt. But will it? Such differences may have to be solved by force, if protesters will not accept the democratic vote. If it is only force that neoliberals will accept, then force it must be. Force may have to decide whether or not Belarusian socialism will survive. After all, colour revolutions are not doomed to succeed – they have failed in many countries. In case of a pro-Western coup, Russia is likely to intervene, as she is permitted by the CSTO treaty. But Russia is not in favour of socialism, in Minsk or elsewhere. My advice to the US administration is to capitalize on their success in Venezuela. When the US wasn’t happy with Venezuela’s president, Mr Maduro, they didn’t bother with elections but instead they chose (“recognised”) a certain Mr Juan Guaido, a rather junior member of the opposition. They assigned to him the assets of Venezuela, including all the gold the country carelessly kept in the Bank of England; they took over the Venezuelan embassies and gave them to Mr Guaido, and the man gratefully signed a contract promising millions to US-based mercenaries for kidnapping the actual president and enthroning Guaido. Now the West is dissatisfied with the Belarus presidential elections. The Belarusians stubbornly reconfirmed their president Mr Alexander G Lukashenko (AGL) into his position, and he is himself a stubborn guy who refuses to sell his country’s assets and invite in the NATO tanks. My advice to US leaders is to re-use Mr Guaido; recognise him as the new President of Belarus, and have it done with. Why pretend that sellouts are different because they sell different countries? Guaido has proven his devotion to Uncle Sam; he already has experience at being a “recognised” un-elected president. Long live President Guaido of Belarus! P.S. Re Beirut. Some people suggest “mini nukes”. I doubt it, for Israel and the US do not possess the required technology, as I’ve been told by a Russian physicist. Only the USSR had the mini-nuke technology; Russia inherited a few; new ones weren’t manufactured for years. The problem is that mini-nukes are made of californium and suchlike isotopes, and can be produced only in the course of large-scale military grade plutonium production as its byproduct. Israel never produced that much plutonium, and the US uses a different process altogether. So I advise taking the “mini nuke” revelations with a grain of salt. Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net This article was first published at The Unz Review.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Israel Shamir is unclassifiable. Some might call him a "journalistic provocateur".  His assertions often look outrageous, but on inspection prove to be grounded in fact, albeit at times capriciously interpreted. A complicated man of obvious brilliance, he has earned the invective of Israel by denouncing Tel Aviv's crimes in no uncertain terms. Of Jewish parentage, he denies allegiance to Judaism or Jewishness in general, which makes him in the opinion of many zionists, a "self-hating Jew". His Wikipedia page, clearly doctored by the usual Western/Israeli agents, is a long series of innuendos and outright vituperations. His views could be seen generally as conservative (reflecting much of mainstream Russian opinion, which also tends to lean now toward conservatism, especially after the re-enthroning of the Orthodox Church in the nation's life) , but many of his exposés have a sharp left slant. Despite this fact, like many rightwingers in the US and abroad, he has a rather visceral antipathy for the BLM protests, seeing them monochromatically as vehicles for looting, riots and destruction. This tendency is clear in the way he characterizes (dismisses, might be more appropriate) the ugliness of George Floyd's murder by the MPD police, claiming that the man was an habitual criminal with a long rap sheet. Excusing the disgusting racist biases of the American police by reference to the putative criminal records of Black victims is a longstanding tactic of police apologists, but, the net effect is to plant doubt and, perhaps unwittingly, remind everyone that social truths are seldom black and white (no pun intended). Since Shamir brings it up, below we reproduce the SNOPES entry on George Floyd's criminal record. We don't particularly trust SNOPES, regarding it, as we do the growing army of "fake news" hunters, as one more instrument of the corporate establishment's hybrid war/ propaganda machinery to contain dissident thought. But some things stick out, so have a look and draw your own conclusions. This report is in our view very well written, packing  a considerable number of valuable materials. SNOPES zeroes in on something we mentioned earlier: 

For decades, corners of the internet and journalists have highlighted the criminal records of non-white people killed by authorities or caught in viral videos, no matter the relevancy of the rap sheets...More similar to the case of Floyd are the above-mentioned examples of Sterling and Martin, Black men who died at the hands of police and a neighborhood watch volunteer, respectively, and whose histories were trotted out in news stories after they died, seemingly as part of an effort to deny them martyrdom...Advocates for police reform say the pattern puts unjust blame on victims of police violence and distracts the public from the most important issue at the center of these incidents: Officers too often resort to violence when dealing with citizens, especially if they are Black, indigenous, or people of color.

So Shamir is clearly indulging in that vice when he brings up Floyd's criminal past, and that, we think, is not very kosher. Still all is writings are worth reading, as Shamir is nothing if not a born iconoclast.  

[bg_collapse view="button-orange" color="#4a4949" expand_text="SNOPES entry on George Floyd criminal record" collapse_text="Show Less" ]

Snopes also has in-depth reporting on the background of Derek Chauvin, one of four former police officers charged in the case surrounding George Floyd’s death. Read that report here.

Background Check: Investigating George Floyd’s Criminal Record

The question of past arrests often surfaces among people who want to rationalize police officers' actions when Black men are killed in custody.

As cities worldwide erupted in protests over the death of George Floyd — a Black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes in Minneapolis — the leader of that city’s police federation sent the below-displayed emailto union members. In it, he criticized journalists’ and politicians’ portrayal of the man whose death had sparked a global reckoning over racism in policing.

“What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd,” said Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) Lt. Bob Kroll, who represents more than 800 police officers. “The media will not air this.”

The June 1, 2020, letter by Kroll, whom Snopes could not reach for this report, inspired a wave of claims online about Floyd’s alleged arrests and incarcerations before his death — mostly among people who seemed to be searching for evidence that either the actions by the Minneapolis police officer who choked Floyd were justified, or memorials to honor him were unnecessary.

Among the most popular claims were those by the right-wing commentator Candace Owens, who, in a roughly 18-minute video that’s been viewed more than 6 million times, made several accusations about Floyd’s past and the events that led to his death. She said:

No one thinks that he should have died in his arrest, but what I find despicable to be is that everyone is pretending that this man lived a heroic lifestyle when he didn’t. …I refuse to accept the narrative that this person is a martyr or should be lifted up in the black community. …He has a rap sheet that is long, that is dangerous. He is an example of a violent criminal his entire life — up until the very last moment.” 

She claimed reporters had wrongly interpreted Floyd’s death to the public by purposefully omitting details about his past unlawful behavior, and she falsely and inappropriately called police brutality a “myth” and part of some nefarious scheme by news media to polarize Americans before the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

That video, as well as misleading photographs, memes like the one displayed below, and sensationalized tabloid stories about Floyd’s past, prompted numerous inquiries to Snopes from people wondering if he had indeed served time in jail or prison before his death at age 46.

The claims in this meme are a mixture of true and false, as we’ll document below. In brief, the alleged crimes and time periods are mostly accurate, with the caveat that Floyd was convicted of theft in 1998, not armed robbery. But the following information makes other aspects of the post misleading: Not all the crimes resulted in prison time, but rather jail sentences; no evidence suggests a woman involved in the 2007 charge was pregnant; it’s an exaggeration of toxicology results to claim Floyd “was high on meth” when he was choked by a cop, and there’s no proof that Floyd was “getting ready to drive a car” before his fatal encounter with police other than the fact that officers say they approached him as he sat in the driver’s seat of a vehicle.

What follows is everything we know about crimes committed by Floyd — who was born in North Carolina, lived most of his life in Houston and moved to Minneapolis in 2014 — based on court records and police accounts to fulfill those requests. Additionally, this report explores the following:

• Did Floyd’s past arrests and incarcerations have any effect on police officers’ actions during the 911 call that led to his death?
• Was he “high on meth” when he was choked by the Minneapolis cop and died, like the above-displayed meme claims?
• How will Floyd’s criminal record and autopsy toxicology results play a role in the murder trials for the police officers charged in his death?
• Why do some people draw attention to the criminal histories of non-white people killed by police?

We should note at the outset that attorney Ben Crump, who represents Floyd’s family, did not respond to Snopes’ multiple requests for comment, and when we reached an MPD spokesman by phone for this report, he requested an email interview but did not complete it.

Also, we should make clear that four officers involved in Floyd’s death, including the cop who knelt on his neck, were fired from MPD and have been criminally charged (details below).

Police Arrested Floyd a Total of 9 Times, Mostly on Drug and Theft Charges

According to court records in Harris County, which encompasses Floyd’s hometown of Houston, authorities arrested him on nine separate occasions between 1997 and 2007, mostly on drug and theft charges that resulted in months-long jail sentences.

But before we get into the specifics of those cases, first, some biographical details, per The Associated Press (AP): Floyd was the son of a single mother, who moved to Houston from North Carolina when he was a toddler so she could find work. They settled in what’s called “Cuney Homes,” a low-income public housing complex of more than 500 apartments in the city’s predominately Black Third Ward. As a teen, Floyd was a star football and basketball player for Jake Yates High School, and later he played basketball for two years at a Florida community college. After that, in 1995, he spent one year at Texas A&M University in Kingsville before returning to his mother’s Cuney apartment in Houston to find jobs in construction and security.

Another piece of important context while exploring how, and under what circumstances, police arrested Floyd in the late 1990s and early 2000s when he lived in Cuney Homes: On multiple occasions, police would make sweeps through the complex and end up detaining a large number of men, including Floyd, a neighborhood friend named Tiffany Cofield told the AP. Additionally, Texas has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, per the Prison Policy Initiative, and several studies show authorities are way more likely to target Black Texans for arrests than white residents.

As to the details of Floyd’s arrests, the first occurred on Aug. 2, 1997, when he was almost 23 years old. According to prosecutors, police in that case caught him delivering less than one gram of cocaine to someone else, so they sentenced him to about six months in jail. Then, the following year, authorities arrested and charged Floyd with theft on two separate occasions (on Sept. 25, 1998, and Dec. 9, 1998), sentencing him to a total of 10 months and 10 days in jail.

Then, about three years later (on Aug. 29, 2001), Floyd was sentenced to 15 days in jail for “failure to identify to a police officer,” court documents say. In other words, he allegedly didn’t give his name, address or birth date to a cop who was arresting him for reasons that are unknown (the court records don’t say why police were questioning him in the first place) and requesting that personal information.

Between 2002 and 2005, police arrested and charged Floyd for another four crimes: for having less than one gram of cocaine on him (on Oct. 29, 2002); for criminal trespassing (on Jan. 3, 2003); for intending to give less than one gram of cocaine to someone else (on Feb. 6, 2004); and for again having less than one gram of cocaine in his possession (on Dec. 15, 2005). He was sentenced to about 30 months in jail, total, for those crimes.

Lastly, in 2007, authorities arrested and charged Floyd with his most serious crime: aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon.

According to police officers’ probable-cause statement, which is often the basis of prosecutors’ case against suspects, the incident (on Aug. 9, 2007) unfolded like this: Two adults, Aracely Henriquez and Angel Negrete, and a toddler were in a home when they heard a knock at the front door. When Henriquez looked out the window, she saw a man “dressed in a blue uniform” who said “he was with the water department.” But when she opened the door, she realized the man was telling a lie and she tried shutting him out. Then, the statement reads:

However, this male held the door open and prevented her from doing so. At this time, a black Ford Explorer pulled up in front of the Complainants’ residence and five other black males exited this vehicle and proceeded to the front door. The largest of these suspects forced his way into the residence, placed a pistol against the complainant’s abdomen, and forced her into the living room area of the residence. This large suspect then proceeded to search the residence while another armed suspect guarded the complainant, who was struck in the head and side areas by this second armed suspect with his pistol after she screamed for help. As the suspects looked through the residence, they demanded to know where the drugs and money were and Complaint Henriquez advised them that there were no such things in the residence. The suspects then took some jewelry along with the complainant’s cell phone before they fled the scene in the black Ford Explorer.

About three months later, investigators in the Houston Police Department narcotics unit “came across this vehicle during one of the their respective investigations and identified the following subjects as occupants of this vehicle at the time of their investigation: George Floyd (Driver)…,” the statement reads.

At 6-foot-7, Floyd was identified as the “the largest” of the six suspects who arrived at the home in the Ford Explorer and had pushed a pistol against Henriquez’ abdomen before looking for items to steal. (Nothing in the court documents suggests she was pregnant at the time of the robbery, contrary to what memes and Owens later claimed.) He pleaded guilty in 2009 and was sentenced to five years in prison. He was paroled in January 2013, when he was almost 40 years old.

We Don’t Know If MPD Officers Knew of Floyd’s Past Arrests and Incarcerations

But to fully explore this, we’ll lay out what happened on May 25, 2020. Around 8 p.m., someone inside a South Minneapolis convenience store called police to report that a man had used a $20 counterfeit bill to buy cigarettes, and then he ran outside to a vehicle parked nearby. The caller did not identify Floyd by name, according to the 911 transcript.

But here are some details about that call we learned after Floyd’s death: The owner of the store, Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, told NPR that clerks are trained to let management know when someone uses counterfeit money, and the workers try to handle the crime themselves without cops, unless things escalate to violence. But in Floyd’s case, Abumayyaleh said a teenage clerk who had only been employed for six months called 911, essentially implying the worker had not fully understood their protocol. Additionally, the owner said Floyd had been a regular customer for about a year, and he never caused any issues.

According to court documents, two MPD officers — Thomas Lane and J. A. Kueng —responded to the 911 call and, after talking to people inside the store, went to find Floyd in a parked vehicle nearby.

As Lane began speaking with Floyd, who was sitting in the driver’s seat of the vehicle, the officer pulled his gun out and instructed Floyd to show his hands. Floyd complied with the order, whereupon the officer holstered his gun. Then, Lane ordered Floyd out of the car and “put his hands on Floyd, and pulled him out of the car,” and handcuffed him, according to prosecutors. Then, charging documents state:

Mr. Floyd walked with Lane to the sidewalk and sat on the ground at Lane’s direction. When Mr. Floyd sat down he said “thank you man” and was calm. In a conversation that lasted just under two minutes, Lane asked Mr. Floyd for his name and identification. Lane asked Mr. Floyd if he was “on anything” and noted there was foam at the edges of his mouth. Lane explained that he was arresting Mr. Floyd for passing counterfeit currency.

At 8:14 p.m., Officers Lane and Kueng stood Mr. Floyd up and attempted to walk Mr. Floyd to their squad car. As the officers tried to put Mr. Floyd in their squad car, Mr. Floyd stiffened up and fell to the ground. Mr. Floyd told the officers that he was not resisting but did not want to get in the back seat and was claustrophobic.

At that point, two other officers — Derek Chauvin and Tou Thao — arrived at the scene and tried again to get Floyd into a squad car. While they attempted to do so, he began asserting that he could not breathe. Then, according to criminal charges against Chauvin, the officer pulled Floyd out of the squad car and “Mr. Floyd went to the ground face down and still handcuffed.” The complaint continues:

Officer Kueng held Mr. Floyd’s back and Officer Lane held his legs. Officer Chauvin placed his left knee in the area of Mr. Floyd’s head and neck. Mr. Floyd said, ‘I can’t breathe’ multiple times and repeatedly said, ‘Mama’ and ‘please,’ as well. At one point, Mr. Floyd said ‘I’m about to die.’

Footage from the officers’ body cameras and a bystander’s cellphone showed Chauvin kept Floyd pinned to the ground and knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes, including for nearly three minutes after Floyd became non-responsive.

Then, per emergency medical technicians’ and fire department personnel’s accounts of the incident, medics loaded Floyd into an ambulance, where they used a mechanical chest compression device on Floyd, though he did not regain a pulse and his condition did not change. 

It’s unclear whether at any point before or during the call the MPD officers knew of Floyd’s past arrests in Texas and, if so, whether that information at all influenced how they acted, consciously or subconsciously. MPD spokespeople did not respond to Snopes’ questions about the officers’ prior knowledge of Floyd before the call from the convenience store, nor did the department answer whether officers in general adjust their responses to 911 calls, or how they approach suspects, based on the criminal records of people involved.

Charging documents, police records and other court filings that lay out Floyd’s criminal history are all publicly available via the Harris County District Clerk online database. Additionally, according to MPD’s policy and procedure manual, which outlines everything from how officers should dress on the job to use-of-force guidelines, officers use a computerized dispatch system to handle 911 calls and often rely on computers in their squad cars to look up and document information.

All of that said, MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo said on June 10, 2020: “There is nothing in that call that should have resulted in the outcome with Mr. Floyd’s death.”

It’s an Exaggeration of Toxicology Findings To Claim Floyd Was ‘High on Meth’ When He Died

In response to one of Owens’ claims  — “George Floyd at the time of his arrest was high on fentanyl and he was high on methamphetamine” — as well as assertions by social media users who seemed to be in search of proof for why the MPD officers acted the way they did, here we unpack the results of Floyd’s autopsy report.

The claim is two-pronged: that Floyd had meth in his system and that he was high on the drug when Chauvin knelt on his neck, choking him.

Firstly, on May 29, 2020, court documents revealed the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s investigation into Floyd’s death showed “no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxiation,” and that “potential intoxicants” and preexisting cardiovascular disease “likely contributed to his death.” (Note: Coronary artery disease and hypertension typically increase patients’ risk of stroke and heart attack over years, not minutes, and asphyxia, or suffocation, does not always leave physical signs, according to doctors.)

Two days later, the county released a statement that attributed Floyd’s cause of death to “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression” — which essentially means he died because his heart and lungs stopped while he was being restrained by police. That announcement came just hours after Floyd’s family released findings of a separate, private autopsy that determined Floyd had indeed died from a combination of Chauvin’s knee on his neck and pressure on his back from other the officers. (A copy of that autopsy with all of its details has not been made public.)

According to the county’s postmortem toxicology screening, which is summarized below and was performed one day after Floyd’s death, he was intoxicated with fentanyl and had recently used methamphetamines (as well as other substances) before Chauvin choked him.

More Specifically, Floyd tested positive for 11 ng/mL of fentanyl — which is a synthetic opioid pain reliever — and 19 ng/mL of methamphetamine, or meth, though it’s unclear by what method the intoxicants got into his bloodstream or for what reasons.

But more complex is proving whether “he was high” at the time of his fatal encounter with police. While everyone’s reaction to and tolerance for such drugs varies, and the effects of mixing drugs can be totally unpredictable, lab technicians say fentanyl slowly leaves users’ systems, mostly via urination, over the course of three days from when they first shot up. Additionally, they consider “the presence of fentanyl above 0.20 ng/mL” — which is significantly less than the amount found in Floyd’s system — to be “a strong indicator that the patient has used fentanyl,” according to Mayo Clinic Laboratories. 

For methamphetamines, which are typically smoked or injected, users feel an instant euphoria, and then the tapering effects of the drug last anywhere from eight to 24 hours. After that initial “rush,” the amount of meth reduces in their bloodstreams and tests for the drug can be positive for up to five days. Per the University of Rochester Medical Center, the amount of methamphetamines found in Floyd’s bloodstream (19 ng/mL or .019 mg/L) is “within the range” of some patients’ “therapeutic or prescribed use” of the drug.

Also, Hennepin County medical examiners stated Floyd’s blood levels made it seem like he had “recently” used meth in the past, not that he was peaking on a high from it, and the county investigators did not list the drugs as Floyd’s cause of death, but rather as “significant conditions” that influenced how he died. For those reasons and considering the amount of methamphetamines detected in Floyd’s toxicology report, it’s an exaggeration of the scientific evidence to claim Floyd “was high on meth” before police choked him — though his bloodstream did test positive for the drug.

But while making that analysis, it is important to consider the insight of a group of emergency room doctors and psychiatrists, who in the wake of Floyd’s death wrote in the Scientific American: “When Black people are killed by police, their character and even their anatomy is turned into justification for their killer’s exoneration. It’s a well-honed tactic.”

Furthermore, a letter on behalf of thousands of Black doctors and health care workers in America titled “The ‘Collective Black Physicians’ Statement’ on the death of Mr. George Floyd” stated:

Any mention of potential intoxicants of which Mr. Floyd may have been under the influence is meritless at this stage of the physical autopsy examination. In a medicolegal autopsy, the results of a urinary toxicology screen are often inaccurate. All substances must be detected and confirmed in blood and/or particular organs before it can be said that an individual was intoxicated and that death is a complication of that toxicity.

Floyd’s Rap Sheet and Toxicology Results Are Likely To Play a Role in Officers’ Murder Trials

We can credit history for our conclusion on this point. For example, during the murder trial of George Zimmerman — who, though not a police officer, was eventually acquitted of homicide charges in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, in 2012 — reports of Martin’s alleged truancy and petty crimes made news headlines. Similarly, people called attention to the arrest record of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by a white police officer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2016, as his surviving relatives filed a wrongful death lawsuit against police and the city (which remains ongoing as of this writing).

In the latest high-profile case of deadly use of force by police, all four officers — Lane, Kueng, Chauvin and Thao — were fired from MPD the day after Floyd’s controversial killing and were criminally charged.

For 19-year MPD veteran Chauvin, 44, who faces the most severe charges of the four men, Hennepin County prosecutors initially charged him with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. But in early June, after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz requested the state’s Attorney General Keith Ellison to take over the case, Ellison upgraded those charges so the ex-MPD officer now faces a more severe charge of second-degree murder, in addition to the original charges brought forth by county prosecutors. (Read that latest complaint here.) He made his first court appearance on June 8, 2020, which was mostly procedural, and was held on $1.25 million bail.

Meanwhile, Thao, Kueng and Lane face charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder while committing a felony, and with aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s killing. (You can read the full charges against Thao here; Kueng here, and Lane here.) They made their first court appearances on June 4, 2020, where a judge set bail for each of them at $750,000 if they agreed to certain conditions, such as leaving law enforcement work and avoiding contact with Floyd’s family. One week later, Lane, 37, posted that amount and was freed from Hennepin County jail, and his attorney told the Star Tribune he was planning to file a motion to dismiss the charges.

As of this report, all four officers were scheduled to make their next court appearance June 29, 2020, and no court proceedings have focused on Floyd’s criminal history or drug use, with the exception of the charging documents that mention Hennepin County’s autopsy report and toxicology findings.

Why People Draw Attention to Criminal Histories of Black Men Who Die in Police Custody

For decades, corners of the internet and journalists have highlighted the criminal records of non-white people killed by authorities or caught in viral videos, no matter the relevancy of the rap sheets.

One of the uglier examples is the case of Charles Ramsey, a self-described “scary looking black dude” who helped rescue Amanda Berry, a Cleveland woman who had been kidnapped and held hostage for years in a home near Ramsey’s, in 2013. His interviewsabout the rescue spread like wildfire online, but then a local TV station aired a story on his criminal past (it was later removed and the station apologized).

More similar to the case of Floyd are the above-mentioned examples of Sterling and Martin, Black men who died at the hands of police and a neighborhood watch volunteer, respectively, and whose histories were trotted out in news stories after they died, seemingly as part of an effort to deny them martyrdom. 

Advocates for police reform say the pattern puts unjust blame on victims of police violence and distracts the public from the most important issue at the center of these incidents: Officers too often resort to violence when dealing with citizens, especially if they are Black, indigenous, or people of color.

Kevin O Cokley, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies police brutality against Black Americans, explained the psychology behind the media pattern in an email to Snopes. Of people calling attention to Floyd’s criminal past, specifically, he wrote:

It fits into what psychologists have called the just-world hypothesis, which is a cognitive bias where people believe that the world is just and orderly, and people get what they deserve. It is difficult for people to believe that bad things can happen to good people or to people who don’t deserve it. This is because if people know that these things do happen, they have to decide whether they want to do something about it or sit by silently knowing that there is injustice happening around them.

Furthermore, his colleague Richard Reddick, an associate dean in the university’s College of Education, told us in a phone interview the claims about Floyd were also a product of the era’s highly polarized media environment, compounded by years of problematic storytelling by politicians and reporters that portrays Black men only as “criminal entities” instead of nuanced people. He said:

This is something that Black men are subject to quite a bit — not often seen as complex, whole human beings, who have done wonderful things and not so great things in their lives, but simply a criminal. … This is something that seems to be very specific to Black men who are ex-judiciously murdered; we have to find a rationale, or excuse, or justification for it, no matter what it was.

In other words, he said, shifting the public narrative away from police officers’ actions and onto Floyd’s criminal history is a reoccurring communication strategy “that’s intended to make us not see him as a victim, to dehumanize him, and to make him a caricature.” People can subscribe to the “he had it coming” trope so they don’t have to feel sorry for the victim of police brutality and can deny police responsibility for their actions, Reddick said. He added:

I don’t trust the motivations of the folks bringing this forward. … Of course they’re asking, ‘Why isn’t [Floyd’s criminal history] covered in the major media?’ And it’s because it’s not relevant to this kind of story. What happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis has nothing to do with what happened to him, what he did, in 2007.

To that point, Reddick said Floyd’s past arrests and incarcerations may justifiably appear in “wholesome portraits” about Floyd’s life (such as this AP story), while O Cokley said the news media should not include the background in its stories about Floyd because it “has no relevance to the officer’s behavior,” and because “there is no standardization of the inclusion of background information on stories involving victims of police misconduct.” Reddick summed up the phenomenon like this:

We shouldn’t conflate the complexity of a person’s life with an event that ended with their life being lost — those moments and that time is relevant, but not a criminal conviction from years prior because this is supposedly a country where, when you’ve served your sentence, you’re now able to go rebuild your life, as what he was trying to do.

In January 2013, after Floyd was paroled for the aggravated robbery, people who knew him said he returned to Houston’s Third Ward “with his head on right.” He organized events with local pastors, served as a mentor for people living in his public housing complex, and was affectionately called “Big Floyd” or “the O.G.” (original gangster) as a title of respect for someone who’d learned from his experiences. Then in 2014, Floyd, a father of five, decided to move to Minneapolis to find a new job and start a new chapter.

“The world knows George Floyd, I know Perry Jr.,” said Kathleen McGee, his aunt (in reference to her nickname for Floyd), at his funeral on June 9, 2020. “He was a pesky little rascal, but we all loved him.”

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