Im not a wise man but if 3 fellas have already restrained a guy and have him on the ground, there is no need to put your knee in someone's neck.
Frankly, yes. First and foremost, a knee placed at the base of the neck is not a killing move. Maybe if you balance on it like a ballerina but as a method of keeping someone still with controlled pressure it's not going to suffocate someone or otherwise do serious harm. Were this not the Internet and being entirely serious, I could demonstrate on you and you would be convinced (and unharmed). So first off, it's not just a question of is it necessary but if doing so is an undue risk - and it isn't. Having established that it's an acceptable method of restraining someone the question actually then becomes what do you gain? And in this case you gain that a powerfully built person isn't going to surge up and attack or flee. You also gain that someone who is behaving crazily and whose friends are literally standing right there making 'he's crazy' gestures about him, isn't going to injure himself by smacking his head against the concrete - a real risk.
Not to PL, but years myself and two friends pranked a fourth friend who thought we were going to kill him. Can't give details without PL'ing more than I'd like but the fourth friend was a fairly big guy (6'1") but so were all of us. He fought like ten tigers. It took all three of us breathing like steam engines to grapple him and drag him to where we wanted. And in fact we gave up on the prank which wasn't very good anyway. Point is, you can do wrestling and MMA like all of us did but when someone actually is crazy or actually fears for their life, you would not believe how strong they are. And Floyd had another three inches on our friend. Keeping the knee on Floyd was the right decision and only appears not because we are in the rare timeline where he died during it.
Frankly, he'd have likely died from any other form of restraint. He was over-exerting himself, had heart problems and had more drugs in him than Los Angeles.
And id call her in the morning.
I am glad to see that chivalry is not dead, as is often reported.
why the fuck couldn't BLM do that with George Floyd.
I genuinely have trouble imagining a worse public figure to become the icon of BLM. A felon junkie deadbeat dad who was high on a cocktail of drugs when he went into a convenience store to buy a banana, of all things, with a counterfeit twenty. It sounds like if 4-chan trolls were trying to come up with a racist caricature, but were having a lazy day.
Well, there's what
@Brahma said which is that there's a selection bias - your options for something like this are going to be drawn from
the more criminally inclined African Americans, not the law-abiding, hard-working ones. Then it's further narrowed by needing it in the right timescale - i.e. an election year. Then it's not always guaranteed to start a fire on your first go anyway. There
was another attempt at this media circus I think a couple of months before but it didn't really take off. I forget who that was.
But if you want another angle on it, you have to consider what outcome is wanted. Is it to show there is excessive brutality by the police or is it create racial division, raise capital (all that BLM money is routed through the DNC's backing ActBlue) and create political momentum? For all of the latter you need something that will drag on and also face sufficient opposition it looks like you're the underdog. Finding Joe Blackman who holds down a steady job, does everything right when confronted by police and yet still gets shot - IF you find such a perfect opportunity - then it will all be over much faster. The Progressives will say "this was an injustice something needs to be done" and most of the Right will say "yes, this WAS an injustice" and then it's over. I mean Breonna Taylor example that was raised. It wasn't clear cut but it was much more supportable case of police wrong-doing than this one. Result? Lots of people agreed with it, the policy on No Knock warrants was changed and her family received, iirc, a generous financial compensation (as much as money can compensate, I guess). Maybe there should be prosecution of the officer involved or not - I don't know - but either way, it's not going to lead to the protacted wildfire that this one does for the very simple reason that right isn't on their side.
When Rosa Parks was picked to be the face of desegregation (over Robert Freeman) African American people were facing an actual double standard and had the goal of changing that. Therefore it made sense to pick their best example. Now there is obviously prejudce in some police forces and it is obvious that some of the BLM supporters are backing BLM because they believe they're helping change it. But it's also pretty obvious that BLM leadership and many BLM supporters just want to shake-down big companies and rally votes for the Democratic elites. So the goal isn't to find a clear-cut case of injustice but to create a protracted public issue that can be capitalised on. Helped by a lot of right thinking people going "Uh, no. I don't think that's really right". Then the fight is on.
I don't think that's wholly true. I think Brahma had most of it covered with the simple fact of selection bias. But still, it's food for thought. Is Antifa-supporting DA Keith Ellison just incompetently seeking good PR when he does things like hide the police footage and throw around 2nd degree murder charges? Or is he competently trying to sow chaos? We have examples of the latter happening, after all - look at Jussie Smollet.
