SIO436: They're Retconning George Floyd's Murder, but Radley Balko Is Fighting Back

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 436. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and today I've a tough one for you, but going to be talking about George Floyd, but going to want to hear this because some folks are retconning George Floyd. This point, nothing surprises me because the right seems to worship worship murderers, you because it really triggers the left and the people who are against murdering black people. It really, really triggers us for them to worship people who do murder black people.

What a world, what a world we live in. Anyway, so like I said, tough tough, topic. A documentary put out called The Fall of Minneapolis. Something that's you know it's pretty well produced it's probably going to convince a lot of people and it is making its way from the far right to closer to mainstream and it tries to rewrite history such that Derek Chauvin is actually the victim here Matt Walsh says the Derek Chaudvin case will go down as one of the greatest injustices in the history of the American court system.

Someone who is probably the coolest named guest I've ever had, Radley Balko, journalist who's worked from several outlets, but now is on The Substack is called The Watch. Has written a long series series debunking this documentary, and it's excellent work, and it's such important work. So we're going to talk about some of the claims in it. You know why they're wrong, and some other stuff as well. Obviously, we're talking about really tough stuff here. So you know, be warned.

Know that I have a hard time with it, as I think you'll be able to tell. It's It's absolutely not okay for people to be retconning this, and I think you need to know about it, and you need to shut it down if you see it, because it is, truly despicable. Yet, here we are. And yet these efforts are often successful with a significant chunk of our population.

So we're going to get Get on over to Radley Balco before we do that, of course, I'll encourage you to go to patreon.com/seriouspod. If you'd like to support the show, get the bonus stuff, lose the ads, all that good stuff. Won't have to hear this very brief ad break right now before the interview. So thank you to all who pledge at patreon dot com slash serious pot. I'm joined by Radley Balco. How are you doing today?

0:02:27 Radley: Thanks for having me on. Well,

0:02:28 Thomas: Oh, thank you so much for coming on. This is, uh, is like some of the most unpleasant stuff I've, also, the work you're doing is so important and so critical here. I just, I can't wait to talk about it, but it's all so like... I don't know about you, but I, when I spend too much time around, you you know, an awful public killing that someone did in front of people. I get so like just depressed. I can't, I, are you okay? What's it like spending so much time around this very, very awful thing?

0:02:53 Radley: I've been covering this beat for 20 years so, you know, on some level you learn how to kind of adjust and deal with it. Know, I will say in this case it has the disadvantage of, you know, some of the people that I criticized in the series have pretty large and loyal following. So in addition to sort of the heavy subject matter, it's also dodging, offline for a while uh which is actually pretty healthy a healthy thing to do anyways

0:02:56 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Inadvertently a therapy or something, that's a plus. I, you mentioned you've been doing this for 20 years. You want to talk a little bit about, you know, this beat and how you got on it and a little bit about your background so people know who they're listening to?

0:03:29 Radley: Sure, so Let's sort of known I wanted to be a writer and a journalist. Took I a job with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in D.C. my mid -20s and sort of hitchhiked on my way onto journalism from there, where I worked for Reason Magazine, which is a libertarian monthly magazine, where I covered the criminal justice system, did a lot of investigative reporting. There, I went to Huffington Post and the Washington Post.

And then I've been an independent journalist for about the last year and four months or so. I got onto this beat because while I was at the Cato Institute, part of my beat as a policy analyst was the war and and civil liberties. And I think I mostly got interested in this stuff because I kept reading about these cases where a lot of no -knock drug raids where police would get the wrong house or somebody would get killed in the crossfire.

And the way it was handled inevitably was very sort of dismissive of the people who were getting shot and killed or terrorized or otherwise injured or emotionally in these raids. And it just made me mad. It made

0:04:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:04:35 Radley: Me angry and it It made me sort of want to go into a line of work where, you know, I could be writing about this stuff on a regular basis and trying to, shed you light on on these tactics. And from there, it was kind of a short ride to covering the criminal justice system more broadly.

0:04:47 Thomas: Yeah. That's interesting. So, look, cards on the table. My lefty audience, probably not super big fans of libertarians. Not,

0:04:54 Radley: Yeah, No, I understand. We haven't given people, I think, I friend mean, of mine once used to say that biggest the downside to living in a libertarian society would be living with other libertarians. Um, you know, I've, I've felt that especially hard during the Trump years where I think Uh, people who You know, I'm a libertarian because I, I, power is corruptive and

0:05:11 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, right. I was going lead in like taking a genuinely libertarian view when it comes to some of this police overreach and that kind of thing is a real place I think of commonality on the left and libertarians could be sometimes but I've noticed, you disappointing the times when some libertarians kind of reveal their priorities a little bit by not caring too much about just massive overreaches of government power and police least power because the right is doing Them. And

0:05:39 Radley: Yeah. Just deciding that you hate you racial justice movement or social justice People more than you hate police abuse or misconduct, which unfortunately is another position you also often see libertarians staking out.

0:05:43 Thomas: Right. Right, right. So I watched this documentary. You can call it that. And, and the very first thing, and obviously we're not going scene by I seen, but right away, am I crazy to notice the quote? I don't think I saw it in your article. So I just want to see if I'm crazy. The way they did this quote in the beginning where it said like George Floyd's quote unquote murder. And I was like, are you quote unquote in murder? And then it did the quote so that it was like oh, I forget the exact, grammatic you thing it is, but where it was that was a split quote so oh, it was kind of, you couldn't tell if they were quote unquoteing murder because of, trying to say it wasn't a murder or or because it's just part of the incomplete quote that then they finish toward the end. Am I crazy? Did they, like, that seemed very intentional. It was the way they started the whole thing off.

0:06:29 Radley: Well, I mean, it's clear from the documentary that that people who made it don't think Floyd was murdered, so, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the intent there at all. Um, I point out in the, in the series, there are lots of other points in throughout the documentary where they kind of show a, uh, document and zero in on a portion of the document that they think is damning to the state's case against Chauvin, but in couple of places, they accidentally left in the portions of the document that actually undermine their own argument. Just saying, I wouldn't put it past them because there's a lot of deceptive editing that goes, that went on there.

0:07:02 Thomas: I Yeah, so things about your coverage and about from what I I remember on it too, was it did feel like this was one where, you fascists were kind of taking the L a little bit, you Know, they're like, well, all right, well this guy sucks, but police should still blah, blah, You know, like it did kind of have that feeling of, the most part, not everybody, but for the Most part, it felt like even a lot of police, a lot Of conservatives were willing to concede like, all Right. Well, this guy, sure. There's the bad apple. He's a bad apple kind of thing. My memory of that accurate that it really did feel like this was a different case for a moment where pretty much, I don't know, it felt like conservatives were willing to admit, yeah, maybe this is a one bad apple situation.

0:07:47 Radley: Did feel that way for, I would say, probably a few weeks. I can tell you, having these for a long time, these types of cases, there was kind of a sense of just waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the first people to start peeling off. Of course, we did see that. But yeah, I mean, at first, First, I remember at one point at Twitter, I made some sort of offhand comment about, you police officer sort of being upset at how Derek Chauvin was being treated. And I remember getting a lot of flack from kind of center right people who were sort of arguing like, oh, you Know, every every good cop denounces what Chauvins did, like no cop would ever defend. And, you know, where are we now? Now we are at the place where, not you just, you cops and other law enforcement groups, but far right groups, middle right groups. Libertarianish groups are now defending what Chauvin did.

0:07:57 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah. Right.

0:08:23 Thomas: Unbelievable.

0:08:36 Thomas: And So here's the thing. I watched this documentary and like again, I said, I This stuff's really hard for me, honestly. So it's something where I haven't kept up with the details. I remember I covered it at the time on opening arguments because I think when, at least when the sentence came down, because it was the kind of thing where that pretty rare, right? I mean, to get a police officer on this kind of thing. Know if you want to take second to talk about that, but it felt like this was maybe a step forward in terms of actual accountability because it felt like a rare sentence get.

0:09:07 Radley: Yeah, there are a lot of things that were rare about the George Floyd case. One is that, protests you that it inspired were the largest civil rights protests in U.S. history. If you go by number of people, number of protests, the length of time they lasted. They also really moved the needle on public opinion about everything from racism and policing to systemic racism more generally to police brutality, police abuse, police accountability. I mean, everything moved substantially when it comes to public opinion.

And then finally, it also really inspired some substantive change, really at the federal level where it got subsumed into political squabbling, but at the state and local level, we saw real reforms across the country in way that I've never seen, you know, in my 20 years on this beat. You know, I think in all those ways, we had real reform, real substantive change, real, you knows, society was certainly being moved in a given direction.

And that, of course, you known, spurred kind of larger talk and conversations about race in general and systemic racism outside of policing. Then it also inspired, I more, it gave prosecutors the political cover they needed to prosecute cops in some of these more egregious cases. Know, the percentage of police officers who kill someone who are prosecuted in any way is, you know,

0:09:15 Thomas: Yeah. Wow. Yeah,

0:10:20 Radley: Vanishing, it's vanishingly rare.

0:10:22 Thomas: That's what I meant. It's depressing how rare it is.

0:10:26 Radley: And, you know, a lot of Chauvin sort of defenders on the right have said that he was, you know, singled out and was treated, you differently. And they're actually right about that. He was, but he was treated differently in the sense that Floyd's death was investigated and prosecuted. Well, first it was investigated in the way that all police in custody deaths should be investigated, but too few are. He was treated differently, in the sense he was actually held to law. The law was actually applied to him, which usually doesn't happen.

0:10:54 Radley: So, you know, he was treated differently in the sense that he was, yeah, yeah. He was treated the way he should have been treated as opposed to the way police are typically treated in these cases.

0:10:53 Thomas: Yeah. I can can understand his confusion. Yeah. Yeah, it's so sad. And so I was a sense I had where, you that sentence, know 20, what 20 plus years, there it was a moment where I felt like, okay, is he being, because they made the argument that like, maybe it was part of his training and it was like, is he being punished too much for like, what's actually a systemic problem? And then we're just doing this kind of scapegoat thing where we think it's fixed, but we're juste getting one guy and maybe, maybe he didn't deserve it. And then, we did the coverage of the sentence and we went through it all and it's like, oh no, okay, no, he definitely deserved it. But it's been some years and so, kind I of had forgotten some of those details.

0:11:36 Radley: Yeah.

0:11:37 Thomas: Go.

0:11:37 Radley: So I mean, look, I mean I think there's an argument to be made that sentence was, you long for what he did. I think there's argument to me made that the Minneapolis Police Department had a habit of not disciplining cops at all, including for very similar behavior. So in that sense, you could say that maybe he was singled out.

There's also an argument to be made that the felony murder law under which he was prosecuted is a little janky and it's a bit unusual in that it allows a simple assault to be charged as a murder if the person dies. But all of these things are applied to everyone one who goes through the justice system. He was not singled out in the sense that he held to a higher standard than other people.

Another person, just last December, a guy was prosecuted in Minnesota under the same felony murder law because he punched somebody in the face and that person hit their head as they fell and died. That person didn't intend to to kill the person they punched either. They just intended to punch him. It is the same law that everybody else had to face.

0:12:30 Thomas: Right. Yeah. That Sounds honestly like less of a crime than what Chauvin did, though, like when you look at the details, but yeah, I take your point though.

0:12:43 Radley: No, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think there arguments to be made. Unfortunately, the people who are defending him aren't making those arguments. They're saying that he was scapegoated, that Floyd died because of his own, you know, drug use or his own heart problem and that Chauvin had nothing to do with it. Just excusing Chaufin for, you actions that we could talk about that I think really are inexcusable. This documentary is trying to do is they're trying to make it impossible for any police officer to be prosecuted for the same kinds of things that Chaudvin did. They want, they're arguing that that, this positional asphyxia, this idea of, you pressure on somebody's back until they can't breathe anymore and eventually die of suffocation. But that isn't a real thing. And what's going to happen is that police are going to continue to use that if this argument prevails, which means more people are goingto die who didn't have to die. And I think that's where this documentary, the people promoting it, really become dangerous and destructive.

0:12:44 Thomas: Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

0:13:37 Thomas: Absolutely, I mean, I, it's so heartless and cruel, and so, so I watched it having, you know, again, not refresh on the facts, now I've done enough work around right-wing misinformation to already know, like, well, this, this is bullshit. And I have a few guesses as to why, but even, still, like, even though I was like, nah, this is probably bullshit, even still, I was a little bit shocked at how directly bullshit it is, to the point where I did notice, like, they, their own, let's maybe talk about some of the claims, you, I guess one major one is that this is kind of part of his training.

Like, this was in the training and they lied in the trial by saying it wasn't in the the training. And even what they did in the documentary, they flashed up a thing about the maximal restraint, whatever it is. And they left in the part where it said like, yeah, they're going to apply a hobble. You know, it was really quick. I didn't pause it and read it. But even again, not having read anything, I just watched the documentary first before checking out your articles.

Even then I was like, wait, well, that sounds like you're supposed to do it to apply some sort of thing and then be done with it. And yet they don't show you in the documentary, but as the real facts were, once you refresh is he he just kneeled directly on his neck for nine minutes and I know there's much more to it. Maybe you can, you broaden that out for us on that first claim.

0:14:08 Radley: Yep.

0:14:47 Radley: So their argument was that this maximal restraint technique is what Chauvin was doing to Floyd and that this is a thing that MPD had taught. Therefore, if it's a technique that was taught, then how could Chauvin possibly be guilty of a crime? The problem with that is what Chauzin was doing for Floyd was not the maximal restraint technique and it was nothing like it.

Looks superficially like it if you take a still photo of him while he's doing it, and this is exactly what the defense did and what the documentary does. Juxtapose a photo of of on Floyd to a photo of an officer in a training slide whose knee is on the neck of, you know, a suspect who's in the prone position.

Is there's also text on that slide and the text cautions police officers to be that who are, you know are involved in a struggle with police or during a contentious arrest are vulnerable to, you know, having a heart attack. Also says explicitly that as soon as possible, police officers are supposed to roll a suspect over into the, what they call the recovery position, which is on your side so that you can breathe.

0:15:48 Thomas: That seems important. That seems really important. I mean, it's almost like, yeah, our method is for baptism is you dunk someone underwater and then you pull them back up and then they're, they're baptized. And then this guy held someone underwater for nine minutes. Like, look at this still photo. I'm doing the same thing.

0:15:50 Radley: So right. So a great analogy. Yeah. Yeah, right? That's a, that's actually a really good analogy because I mean, that is basically what it is. I mean they say you can use this technique, unique, but you're supposed to use light to moderate pressure and only long enough to apply a hobble, which is this restraint device, after which you immediately roll the person over. Well, what did Floyd do? Or what did Chauvin do? Sorry. He knelt on Floyd for nine minutes, never rolled him in the recovery position, never put on a hobBLE. And then even after an officer told him that he couldn't find a pulse, and then after Floyd went limp unconscious, and conscious, stayed on his back for another three minutes.

0:16:37 Radley: Now, documentary makes a big deal out of the fact that they claimed that Chauvin wasn't on Floyd's neck for the entire nine minutes. It doesn't matter. Positional asphyxia, and this is what the state claimed killed Floyd, and it's what a pulmonologist claimed, and it is actually a very common method of death in police custody. Positional asphyXia doesn't require your airways to be constricted. Asphyxia means you are in a position where it's impossible for you to expand your diaphragm in order to take deep breaths. And so what the pulmonologist testified, though, is that because of all this pressure on Floyd's back, combined with the fact that he was handcuffed and on his stomach, meant that he couldn't expand his diaphragm, so he could only take shallow breaths. And the problem with shallow breaths is you don't move air deep enough into your lungs to exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide, so your oxygen levels drop and your carbon dioxide dioxide level soar, which very quickly becomes toxic. And that's what they think killed Floyd. Documentary doesn't get into any of this.

0:16:36 Thomas: So horrible.

0:17:31 Thomas: No.

0:17:31 Radley: The claim is that you because know, because at one point Chauvin had pressure on Floyd's back and on his neck, then it couldn't have been a choke, but it wasn't a choke. Nobody ever argued it was a choke at

0:17:39 Thomas: Yeah. Don't remember. Yeah. It's so frustrating. I mean, this is, I think what really, again, me after watching the documentary and reading some of your articles, the fact that you snapped me right back into like, oh no, never mind, fuck this guy, is the fact, like, he he kept doing it and doing it in people were pleading with him, hey, like he's, he's done, like he died, but can you stop now? And he says what, he's staying where he is or something, yeah.

0:18:03 Radley: One point. The, of the officers, a guy who had barely been on the force for any time at all, but clearly had just had training about positional asphyxia says to him, something effective, like, like, hey, should we roll him over? I'm just worried about excited delirium or whatever, which is a misnomer. But clearly, he understood that Floyd is having difficulty breathing and that you're supposed to roll the person over. And yeah, Chauvin says, no, he's going to stay where he is. He says, EMS, the emergency services are on the way. So he just going to stay on him that way. Not that a police should listen to every bystander, whatever they yell But you had multiple people saying, hey, he can't breathe. He can't breathe. He had one of his own officers say he couldn't find a pulse. And then Floyd himself went underneath limp him, which, you know, it's difficult to conceive of a scenario where Chauvin wouldn't know that Floyd had lost consciousness underneath him.

0:18:54 Thomas: Well, To me, look, I'm a big fan of police cards on the the table, but like that is so absolutely heartless and despicable to me. Like, I don't know how you do, like, that. I get why you get that sentence if you know you're literally killing a man from under you. It's one thing if something could be an accident, like I get in in this line of work there's going to be things that maybe are beyond your control, like, I, you know. And and Floyd was acting erratic, and he he didn't talk about that part of it. Um, you said something like, he worried he was dangerous, but he didn't really hit anybody or do, that was something I was surprised at too. I didn't quite remember, you what that level of threat was. He was definitely erratic, but did he do anything violent?

0:19:34 Radley: Was, no, he was scared, clearly. He was claustrophobic. Worried He, that he was going to, well, he worried that it was going going to die. At one point when they put him in the SUV, I think he may have inadvertently kicked one of the officers because he was sort of struggling because he felt claustrophobic. Yeah, I mean, he was not a violent threat. And all of the MPD trainers, brass, general police trainers who testified at the trial said there was no evidence that he was a threat to any of the police officers. He was an inconvenience, sure, because they were trying to arrest him and he didn't want to go in with them. And, you know, I'm sure they had other things they would rather have been doing, but that is an excuse to use, you know, unnecessary force on someone. You

0:20:04 Thomas: Yeah, exactly.

0:20:15 Thomas: Gosh. So I used to be a bit conservative. I was raised conservative, and I do remember in the process, and now pretty far left, but I remember in that transition process, there a thing that happens where in any of these cases, in any these police murders, essentially, people on the left get details wrong. And there are people who want to kind of rewrite stuff a little bit to make the most sympathetic victim story.

I don't know if they do it consciously or what, or I don't know, Who knows? And that used to really bother me. Fine to make stuff up, but that used to really affect my view of what was going on. And I think what really changed it was just the entire approach that police in our country take, the entire stance that they have, this aggressive, must -dominate -everyone -at -all -times stance, because they're unwilling to accept even even like that someone could be a danger.

I get that people have guns. It's a super gunny country. I get it. This guy didn't have a gun, you know? And it's like, do know if this is something you've gone into, but what do you think should have happened here? Like, what do YOU think should've been the approach?

0:21:21 Radley: Know, I mean, at some point he was accused of passing a fake $50 bill. I mean we don't know that he knew that the bill was fake. We don't know where he got it from. I mean it was really necessary to arrest him that day. T necessarily think it was. Could also have, you know waited him out. Know you didn't need that that massive police presence. You touch on something that I think is pretty important, which is a lot of times the initial narrative that we get after one of these incidents turns out to be wrong. In some cases, it turns out to directly what actually happened directly contradicts the initial narrator, as we in Ferguson with Michael Brown.

The you see a protest like we saw in Ferguson, like we saw in Baltimore after Freddie Gray and Cleveland after, I Tamir Rice, right, after Elijah McClain, Minneapolis after George Floyd. When you see these kinds of protests, it's, you know, it is rarely just about the incident that precipitated them. Them. In Ferguson, you know, we now know that there was this kind racist system where you had over 90 municipalities in St. Louis County, which were the result of kind of white flight from the suburbs. White people would sort of move to get away from black people and form a new town. Black people would move into the town, white people Would move one town over or start a new Town. So you've got these little postage stamp towns and all throughout St. Louis County.

Well, all these little towns have their own town council. They have their own police department. And in the poorer towns, almost all of the city revenue comes from fines and fees. So in the poor places, that meant that the police, basically their job was not to protect people. The county police tended to do most of the murder investigations and serious crime stuff. Meant thatthe sole purpose of a lot of these police officers in these small towns towns was to extract fines from people.

And so you had some of these towns where arrest warrant. If you got one of these fines and you didn't show up in court, you'd get an arrest warranty. And some of those towns there were 5, 10, I think the most I found was 12 times as many arrest warrants as there were residents of these towns.

0:21:35 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, Oh, my God.

0:23:20 Radley: You Just got this, you sort of despair and multi-generational poverty that was created by this kind of predatory system. Also was a system that kind of pit police officers against the people they were supposed to be serving, because it encouraged police to treat people like walking ATMs. I mean, I think in some places, the police, when they got their paycheck, in cases, they got a note from the city council, you know, telling them that their paycheck was dependent on how many fines they could write.

So that's what people were protesting, um, the fact that, you know, Michael Brown's death didn't happen the way it was originally portrayed. You Wilson, um, police officer who killed Brown, you deserved to sort of have his case adjudicated, he deserved to have the investigation that cleared his name, but that doesn't undermine the protest, it doesn't underline why people were out there, why people are angry, they're out there and they're angry because of the system that had been preying on them for, you know, generations.

Um, and this is true everywhere, and I wrote about this in Minneapolis, the DOJ report on the abuse and racism and use of force shootings by the Minneapolis Police Department, I would encourage your listeners to read it. It's easy to find. It's easier to read. It is jaw-dropping. I mean, it is, you know, the systemic abuse that was going on, the callous disregard for the people who live in Minneapolis, you, racial profiling.

0:23:20 Thomas: And was this as a result of this? Sorry, I don't know what this report is.

0:24:37 Radley: Yeah, the GOJ launched an investigation into MPD after George Floyd's death, and this is what they found. And this is, we've seen this. We saw this in Cleveland after Tamir Rice. We saw it in Baltimore after Freddie Gray. We sold in Ferguson and all these cases, after these protests, the DOJ conducted an extensive investigation and they found, in all these places where the, where we saw big protests, they found, you know, a market, you knows, systemic, pretty awing pattern of abuse, cover up, lack of transparency in all these police departments. Performance and, you, of the time, the death of somebody like George Floyd or Michael Brown or Freddie Gray, you, not the, the main reason why people are out protesting, that was kind of the spark that lit the fuse, but, you know, what happens is people look at these incidents, uh, and they think, particularly if you're black or in some cases Latino, you look, they look at these incidents and they think, that could have been me.

0:25:26 Radley: Right, that could have been my brother, that could, I've had an interaction like that with the police, and I think most of us, uh, know, know, white people, we look at a white person who gets killed by cops in a, you know, unjust way. We think, oh man, that sucks for that person. Right. But we don't, we don't have that same visceral sort of connection. And, you know, I always hear, like, why doesn't anybody protest when, when cops kill white people? Well, that's why?

0:25:26 Thomas: Yeah, exactly.

0:25:47 Radley: Because white people aren't out protesting because we donT feel that same visceral connection to the, the incident.

0:25:47 Thomas: It really Isn't. I think I've talked about that before, too, too. I don't have a sense that that could be me or my kids, really. Because so much to it. Also just the background conditions. And even take everything else about the police violence aside, just the ground socioeconomic conditions, there's a reason that people in certain communities are going to be on a bit more of a hair trigger for some.

Because, like, if you're, you, in abject poverty because of the systemic injustice, like a lot more of a reason to worry that that could be you next. You know, these communities are over policed, and it's so much to it. And what's still shocking to me is the way that you can tell from the documentary, you can tell that they think it's all just because of this, to the point where, like, they frame it, the first officer to arrest George Floyd was black.

It's like a big reveal they do. And it's like, what's your point, man? Like, they really think, like, oh, if everyone, if all these lefties knew that, then it would be, oh whoops, we didn't know the guy who was part of the murder was black, that definitely changes everything.

It's, it's inability to see the systemic stuff and to see it as more than one discrete event, um, don't get it because we're all talking about it like we, all, we all make these points every time, I guess they just don't hear them. Yeah.

0:27:06 Radley: And the thing is, I mean, there's a big misunderstanding about what systemic racism I mean, you know, the right, they caricaturize it to mean when you say that policing is systemically racist, they say you're you saying every police officer is racist, even the black ones? And the answer is no, of course not. I'm saying the opposite of that. I am saying systemic racism means it has nothing to do with the personal prejudice or bias of individual actors. It is the system overall. So, yeah, I mean, of course, black police officers can work in a systemically racist system. I've Interviewed black police officials who tell me that policing is systemically racists. I'm interviewed lots and lots of them. You know, that, that is a, it's a complete red herring. And the fact that, yes, one of the officers who, you, arrested Floyd was black, means, means nothing. You know, the Washington Post had a really good piece, which I think turned into a book that won a Pulitzer Prize, on Floyd's sort of life and his history of interactions with police. And it's really eye opening.

You know, we keep hearing of, you now, what a so -called bug Floyd was, or that he was a lifetime addict and had all these, this record of petty crimes and a couple more serious crimes. But when you read that history, you know, you see how somebody in Floyd's position in life, how difficult it is to actually sort of get yourself on track, because, you

0:27:36 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:28:21 Radley: Know, once you're on the radar, police, they're going to, they start targeting you, you're known to police the neighborhood. And it's like, you, to impossible to get yourself going again, because you're constantly being targeted, you're constantly being pulled over.

Your, your, about poverty is a good one, I mean, for you and I, you know, we get pulled over because we have a broken tail light, we're like, oh, I should have fixed that, so, like, you know, we paid the ticket and we go and get it fixed.

If you're somebody who's barely getting by and you have a broke tail light, it's broken, not because you didn't notice, it's because you can't afford to replace it, uh, but you still need your car because we're a car driven society, and you've got to, you know, take your kids to child care, you've gotta get to your job, um, that person gets pulled over, they're gonna be a lot more angry about it because it's not that they, they didn't want to fix it.

It's that they couldn't afford it. And now they've got a fine on top of that. And so they're going to be a little cranky. And so, you, the start, that interaction with the police officer is going to be fraught, or

0:29:08 Thomas: Do this amazing thing where we take poor people and, and, them money for being poor, and we're like, that'll fix it, that'll teach you to be poor if we find you, or make you, you know, it's like, how are you supposed to get out of that?

0:29:18 Radley: Suspend your driver's license. Yeah.

0:29:19 Thomas: Yeah. And then you can't go get, work you to actually make money to do things better. Do want to talk about a couple more of the claims in the documentary? What do you think's the, maybe the next most important one to talk about? Already went through your debunking of this, the fact that this was not in his training. We talked about that. What would you say is the next one that people should know about?

0:29:40 Radley: The things the documentary tries to focus on is, really you try to claim that the medical examiner in the case, this guy, Andrew Baker, was intimidated. They even go so far as to sort of imply that the FBI may have intervened and forced him to change his diagnosis. One of the claims they make that's really just egregiously wrong and shows that they don't really understand how death investigations work is they say that the word "homicide" never appears in the autopsy report. First of all, that's just not true.

What happened was the medical medical examiner explicitly did a straight up autopsy, just a science -based sort of medical autopsy, recorded all of his observations and findings. He then watched the videos and he told the prosecutors, and he said at trial that he intentionally did not watch the videos of Floyd's death before doing the autopsy because he didn't want to bias his conclusions, which is actually very smart in the way you're supposed to do it. Does the original autopsy, he reaches determination on what's called cause of death. Right So cause of depth is, the it's the medical condition that that you die um, he used to use a a somewhat vague description, I think it was some something like cardiopulmonary arrest caused by law enforcement compression and something else, um

0:29:47 Thomas: Oh yeah. Yeah, sure.

0:30:53 Thomas: Oh, even before watching the video, he already said that?

0:30:55 Radley: Well, from compression, I think, yeah. Say, what he doesn' issue is what they call the manner of death. And so in the US, a medical examiner does cause of death, which is the medical determination, then manner of depth, which has kind of a more legalistic determination. So cause of depth will be like cardiac arrest, loss of blood, blunt force trauma, manner of death is where you say this is a homicide, a suicide, negligence, undetermined, natural causes. Causes. So he issues the autopsy with the cause of death, then he watches the videos and gets all the appropriate sort of context. He then issues a to the report which lists the manner of death, and that says homicide, and that is part of the official autopsy report. Just because it was issued later does mean it's not part of the autopsy report. It is. So when the documentary claims that the word homicide never appears in the autopisy report, court, it's either a lie, they're either knowingly trying to mislead viewers, or they are just ignorant of how the death investigation system works, which also doesn't speak very highly of them.

0:30:57 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

0:31:54 Thomas: Wow, that's a big one. They do really make it out to be some massive conspiracy to put a guy away because they're all scared of the rioters, I guess, um

0:32:04 Radley: That's really what they're pushing. And they're pushing this idea that, I mean, one thing that the documentary really tries to do is make you empathize with the police officers. And yeah, I watch some of the protests in Minnesota, And I'm sure there were good officers at MPD who were to a lot of abuse during the protest, mostly probably verbal but still a lot of abuse. A hard job. I feel bad for them.

0:32:27 Thomas: Didn't see that anyone died. I'm pretty sure they would have made a big fucking deal about it if any of them died, and I didn's see that in the document, even in their own documentary, so I

0:32:32 Radley: But doesn't show you talk about is the DOJ report talking about the all abuse that Minneapolis police officers had heaped on residents of the city leading up to the death of George Floyd. Clearly, I don't think every officer is guilty of that, but if you're going to show the rage and anger directed at the police, I think it's important to also show where that rage and anchor comes from. The documentary doesn't try to do that. And I don't know, the documentary was produced by a former police officer and a journalist who's the wife of the president, former president of the Minneapolis Police Union, and then this far right website called Alpha News. So, yeah, there's just no real claim to objectivity here, but I also think that doesn't give you a reason to just sort of outright lie to viewers.

0:32:48 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:33:23 Thomas: Let's talk about a few more ofthe claims, um, did say something about a peer -reviewed journal, I remember seeing that, and the peer -previewed journal, a study in there or some sort of writing in there went over the autopsy and said it's just riddled with errors. Did you happen to research that?

0:33:36 Radley: So I looked up that article and it's written by a psychiatrist who if you go, if you look at his work has strangely seems to focus a lot on work that's, I think you could safely call anti -trans. He also has done a lot of writing about conversion therapy therapy in positive way.

0:33:54 Thomas: Like in the pro, okay.

0:33:56 Radley: Yeah. In a positive sense.

0:33:57 Thomas: Well, that's who I go to for my autopsy critiques for sure.

0:33:58 Radley: Yeah, right. And the journal that they cite, it's not listed in any of the indexes of sort of reputable medical journals out there. The experts that I consulted when researching my series had never heard of it. It's a fairly obscure journal. So I mean, it may or may not be peer reviewed. I don't know, but it's definitely pretty obscure and not not particularly well known, well.

0:34:23 Thomas: That as far as you really bothered with that or did you get into like the, whatever the paper said?

0:34:28 Radley: I mean the paper basically, uh, this rare condition that that the the author thinks actually killed George Floyd. And there are a number of things wrong with that. First, the the that I consulted said that they don't think Floyd had this particular condition, um, what the author things. Uh, they also said that the errors that the author pointed out or claimed were in the official autopsy and Floyd were only errors in the sense that if you were looking for this particular rare condition, these are tests that you would have done.

They errors in sense that it's something that every autopsy should have done, but also a concept in law called eggshell theory, and this is that you accept your victim as you find them. For example, if I'm a bouncer are at a bar and you're a customer and you piss me off for some reason, and I punch you in the face, but I don't realize that you're hemophiliac or you suffer from some sort of condition where a punch could be fatal and you die, I'm still charged murder. I can't say, well, wait, he had this condition. I didn't know that a punch was going to kill him.

The law doesn't give you that kind of break. Even if Floyd did have this particular condition, the only way it would exempt Chauvin from criminal liability is if you argue that this condition just coincidentally caused Floyd to have a heart attack at the precise time that Chauzin was on his back, and two were completely unrelated, which seems pretty unlikely. They

0:35:04 Thomas: Yeah, No kidding. Well, well, what about the the drugs? I mean, I would say one place the documentary is pretty effective is in showing, like, oh, he had a previous arrest a year or something before that went very similar to how this went in terms of his, his, you manner, and he actually in that arrest, he tried to swallow drugs, I think it was, okay, at least that's what the documentary says. Says at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if that's completely bullshit, but that's what the documentary says. And are they suggesting that did that happen in this arrest? Are they suggesting he swallowed something to hide it, or

0:36:23 Radley: They certainly implied that. There's no evidence of it. A lot of people in defending Chauvin have claimed that Floyd had fatal levels of fentanyl in his system. He didn't. He had a level that could potentially be fatal if you are somebody who's never taken opioids before. I'm thinking about opioids, though, is that we, you use them regularly, you build up a tolerance for

0:36:43 Thomas: Wasn't Brett Farve on like ridiculous amounts of painkillers, but because he was so old, he's still playing quarterback in the NFL? Hell, he was out in amounts that I'm sure would have killed you or I like easily, yeah.

0:36:53 Radley: And people who suffer from chronic pain, you know, will be taking 40 or 50 opiate tablets a day. And, you know, only thing they notice is if they stop taking them, the pain comes back. They don't get high from it. So you can build up a massive tolerance to opioids. And so Floyd has acknowledged that he has had a drug problem for a long time. If you look at his actual fentanyl opioid levels in his blood, actually brought somebody from the crime lab that tested his blood in, and he compared Floyd's fentanyl levels to other people whose blood that same crime lab had tested. And what he found was, uh, his fentanyl levels were substantially lower than people whose blood had been tested because they'd been pulled over for DWI, uh, driving while on opioids, but had not died. So his, His, his were substantially lower than the people who were driving while intoxicated on opioids but who did not have an overdose that ended in death. When you look at people who actually died, um, his levels were very, very, very substantially lower, right?

0:36:58 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah.

0:37:50 Radley: If I remember right, I think it's like 60 or 70% lower. The other thing is the most of the fentanyl in Floyd's system was a compound called norfentanil, which is what your body produces after it's metabolized fentanyl. And the reason why that's significant is because when you have an overdose, it's before your body metabolizes a drug. Once it's been metabolized, it, you know, it's less likely to cause harm. And here again, the toxicologist from the lab compared Floyd's fentanyl to norfentanyl ratio to DWI people and people who had overdose deaths.

And it was about a 10th of people who had overdose deaths, so there's just, there's no evidence that he was suffering from a drug overdose. You also can just look at his behavior in the video. An opioid overdose, basically you get lethargic, you get slow, you gets sleepy, and you eventually just sort of drift off and die. Floyd was animated. He was anxious. He was talking, you know, he was protesting, he was filibustering. Those are not indications of somebody who's in the midst of an opioid overdose. They did find meth in his system, but it was a very small, it was, well below an amount that would have caused any harm.

0:37:51 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

0:38:55 Thomas: Right, right. And also, he's a big guy. Doesn't some impact on how these drugs might affect you at certain doses?

0:39:03 Radley: But that would be probably, I think that would be factored into the blood, the ratio, yeah.

0:39:05 Thomas: Until the... Okay, gotcha. Gotcha.

0:39:09 Radley: So that's, yeah, well,

0:39:09 Thomas: Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay, there's so much more to talk about in the documentary. I could But do three, four hours on this. While don't you talk about some of the folks you've interacted with over this? Right away, in first the article, the first part of this, you referenced Brett Weinstein, who's somebody that I've with way back when. I've been tracking for a while. Can't stand that guy. There's also Coleman Hughes. I know there's a lot there. Where would you like to go? Who

0:39:33 Radley: I mean, the point of the series was that when when this documentary first sort of appeared on my radar, it was being promoted by law enforcement groups and then very far-right personalities like Matt and Tucker Carlson. Producers were soon on Fox News pretty regularly. Megyn Kelly had them on her show. Yeah, I kind of just dismissed it. I mean, there's no point, at the, I know from my perspective anyway, it's kind of a waste of time for me to try to debunk Tucker Carlson because it's just a fire hose of bullshit that you're you're never going to effectively cut off, um, then I started seeing it appear on more kind of center-right and I guess what you might call heterodox outlets, um, so like, you know, Weinstein was somebody who tweeted about it and, uh, tweeted out Tucker, uh, Carlson's, um, show where he discusses it and claims that, you know, this proves I was right all along or something like that, um

0:39:47 Thomas: Right. Sure, yeah. Yeah. He's so full of himself. God,

0:40:29 Radley: No, it's, yeah, uh, but then I saw it on, um, uh, Glenn Loury's podcast who, you know, I think is, is a, um, I'm sure he and I don't agree on a lot, but, you know, I respect his intellectual integrity, John McWhorter was on there with him and they were discussing it, um, the Fifth Column podcast, which I've since, uh, gotten a massive, like, angry pushback about, because, like I said, in the piece, in a different piece that they had amplified the claims in the documentary, I still stand by that.

I think they did. Um, but these are all kind of, you know, more respected, less kind of fever swamp outlets. Um, and when they started picking it up and running with it, I, you know, then I was like, okay, I'm, uh, is my beat. You know, I am in a eugenic neat position where I can kind of pick this apart and explain why it's wrong. And then it was when I really saw Coleman Hughes's column in the Free Press, which is Bari Weiss's publication, you know, and they positioned themselves as, you know, kind of the heterodox voice that pushes against, you know, false narratives, and now that they position themselves as like the skeptics

0:41:13 Thomas: Mm -hmm. Yeah.

0:41:30 Radley: That you can trust. You know, Hughes just bit, you know, on the documentary's claims hook, line, and sinker. I mean, it's extremely reverential treatment of it. And it was also just wrong. It's wrong in multiple places. It regurgitates the documentary's claims without any skepticism or analysis, really. He claims he did a bunch of research and that researched his column and didn't just rely on the documentary. But I mean he didn't have any criticism for the documentary anywhere in his column. Uh, all he did was, was, um, its claims. So I kind of used his column as a lens through which to kind of analyze the documentary as a whole. And, it's been interesting. His, his reaction and the reaction of Bari Weiss have been, um... Not to... In fact, Coleman has explicitly said he, he take anything back. He doesn't think he got anything wrong at all. And if anything, I think at one point he said, if anything, he didn't realize how right he was all along.

0:42:26 Radley: And Instead, their response was to invite... come on their podcast and debate them, which I think is, you know, that is not, when someone accuses your publication of factual errors and errors by omission and misleading readers, you either issue a correction or retraction, or you explain why you don't think a correction or retraction is necessary, um, come on my podcast and debate me is not, uh, it's not a good response or not an appropriate response. I think, um, you know, I think, most for the most part, the responses to to the series overall has been really encouraging and positive. I think I've heard from a lot of people who, you know, heard about the documentary through one of these more kind of respectable, respectable outlets, and, um, we're grateful that somebody kind of explained why the documentary was wrong, because a lot of people don't, aren't immersed in this stuff, you

0:42:26 Thomas: Yeah, sure. Yeah, debate doesn't really seem like a good place for that.

0:43:14 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:14 Radley: Know, they, they consume information about an event like George Floyd through kind of their trusted podcast or their trusted columnist, um, and you know, if you have a certain political proclivity, and because you trust, trust somebody on certain issues, that doesn't always mean that person has the right perspective to give you kind of the full story on issues where they're less knowledgeable, have less expertise.

0:43:39 Thomas: Also, a lot of people want to lie about it. I know you seem to be tiptoeing around that. A lot of people would like to just lie about this.

0:43:42 Radley: You're being, yeah, I'm being diplomatic. You know, I mean, look, I don't think Coleman Hughes lied.

0:43:49 Thomas: I said it. You didn't say it. It's okay. I'll take the heat.

0:43:51 Radley: I don't think Coleman Hughes lied. I think he, I think he saw a documentary that reinforced a lot of his prior biases and wanted to write a quick column and didn't exercise any skepticism. Think now he's probably engaging in some mistruths and refusing to admit he's wrong. I certainly don't think he set out to deceive people. I think he was duped.

0:44:17 Thomas: Well, you talked about how he referenced the manual but didn't post a a link to it. And that seemed to, you seem to think that was pretty dishonest. I don't believe these people anymore. I've done too much coverage of them. I think it's part of a, a very targeted anti-woke campaign, anti-left, whatever you want to call it, whatever the word is that they're doing lately. And it, it, the patterns are so consistent, you know, you mentioned how it started with all the usual right-wing sources and that's, that's absolutely true, but so often And that's what happens. I mean, it filters up through this pipeline.

0:44:22 Radley: True.

0:44:47 Thomas: And then, you know, often this like sort of farm system for bullshit where it's like certain stuff. That's a little too Alex Jonesy. They're not going to take it. But certain other stuff is enough for it to like filter up through that kind intellectual dark web, anti-woke, whatever you want to call it. Heterodox, I guess that is what they try to call it now, which is weird because I don't know what the precise definition of that is, but it seems to always come from one direction to my mind. But anyway, I see it as very intentional. I mean, it doesn't take long of tracking this stuff to see that it's a very consistent pattern of ideological... you don't have to agree, it's okay. Okay.

0:44:47 Radley: No, I think there's no question about that. And I think that there are people who aren't good faith. Approach is to assume good faith until someone shows you reason to think otherwise. But that doesn't mean I have to agree agree with sort of the underlying principles that are that behind it, um, or behind the arguments that you're making. But look, I mean, from my perspective as somebody, you know, has specialized knowledge that I've gained over the years from covering this beat, when a documentary like, you know, something like The Fall of Minneapolis comes along, you're always kind of making this calculation in your head of, you don't want to give it attention that it doesn't deserve, so, so as long as it's on those kind of far right sites, you know, it's sort of like, is it really, really worth taking my time to pick this apart.

The Free Press and some of these other outlets, they're kind of bellwethers for me when I see them start to reiterate some of these claims. And I think, all right, this is about to go mainstream. Maybe it's worth taking the time to give this more skepticism. Whether or not they're acting in good faith or not, I think it's kind of beside the point.

0:45:30 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Sure.

0:46:20 Radley: I think their audience believes they're they're acting in good faith. And so that's why I think, you know, at some point it's, it's important to, mount a response.

0:46:21 Thomas: Yeah, right. I think it, guess I, I'm just saying that maybe not, you know, about your approach or anything, but I think people should be more skeptical of a source once they show this kind of consistent bias, you know? Like, just going into it. Maybe don't take their word for some stuff, but, but no, that's, yeah, has been so fascinating. I know there's, we barely even touched on all this stuff that we could touch on. The whole element of the police reform that I'd love to talk about. We're kind of out of time. Is there any anything, content wise, any substantive final words on the documentary or anything that you want to give to people.

0:46:38 Radley: Yep. I agree.

0:46:57 Radley: Like you said, I mean I think we could talk about this for another two hours, but, you know, I'd encourage people to read it, read the series. Long, but I think it, you know, easy to read, um, just takes a little while but I really lay all this out in, uh, you show my work, um, I think is important, uh,

0:47:06 Thomas: Yeah, incredibly readable. It really is. Will I link it for sure. And it's very well done. As usual, I always give people the chance to plug anything they want to at the end of the show. So in addition to that series, which is excellent, where do you want point people?

0:47:25 Radley: Just the the website or my newsletter, that the, where the series appeared, um, which is it's called The Watch, but it's just radleybalco.substack.com. Um, I make all of my content free to the public because I'm a journalist and I want people to to read my work. But I do, you make my living off of subscriptions. So basically people subscribe just because they want to support the work. You know, you don't get any exclusive access or anything, but you know if people want to check it out and they think the work is important or they're willing to subscribe, I'd appreciate that because that helps me continue to do this stuff.

0:47:56 Thomas: Absolutely. I would highly recommend that. I hope to speak to you more. This is important work. And there really is, not just saying that, There really is so much more we want to cover. I know Lydia had like pages of stuff that she can't wait to talk to you about maybe someday or get you on for. So thank you

0:48:10 Radley: Yeah, yeah. I'd be happy to do it again.

0:48:11 Thomas: You so much for taking the time.

0:48:13 Radley: Okay, thanks. Take care.