The George Floyd Murder? New Film Questions Assumptions About 2020 Incident

As riots again fill the news, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is in the news as well. Chauvin’s appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court to grant him a new trial based upon the denial by the Minnesota judge who oversaw his trial to change the venue and sequester the jury has been rejected. He is currently appealing yet again on the basis that his attorney did not inform him of a Kansas doctor’s theory about the cause of George Floyd’s death. Many Americans who watched the viral footage of Chauvin kneeling for nine minutes on top of Floyd have assumed that it was obvious that Chauvin was the cause of his death based on what they saw and what the jury decided in the case. Revelations that Chauvin did have a record of misconduct in the past involving excessive force (he was given two reprimands) made it seem obvious that the story Americans were told about this incident had to be true.

Now, however, a haunting and emotional new documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis, raises disturbing questions about the George Floyd story that was used both to convict Chauvin and three fellow officers (as well as justify the riots of 2020) even for those who might have thought the case was cut-and-dried—and closed. Even more so, it exposes just how feckless was the Minnesota leadership that simply allowed those “mostly peaceful protesters” to burn and loot large swaths of a once beautiful city.

Based on Alpha News journalist Liz Collin’s bestseller They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd and directed by Dr. J. C. Chaix, “The Fall of Minneapolis” (available for free on Rumble or at the movie’s website) is an hour and forty-two minutes of intense examination of the evidence in the Floyd case that shows that Chauvin’s recent request for an appeal, based on his lawyer’s failure to inform him of the Kansas doctor’s judgment from the autopsy that Floyd most likely died from a tumor that can cause an adrenaline surge, is not crazy at all.

The movie begins with a silent pan of the scene in what was known in 2020 as the George Floyd Autonomous Zone in Minneapolis. It then pivots to security and body-cam footage of the George Floyd affair. Instead of simply showing those minutes of kneeling on Floyd, this footage shows what led up to those viral minutes and it pauses the film to identify in words what is happening and when the film contradicts the narrative.

 Floyd had tried to pass counterfeit bills in a local store and been acting erratically, which is why police were called. When they arrived, Floyd was outside at the wheel of a car with friends in the passenger and rear seats. Floyd, labeled “visibly drunk” by the store clerk who called 911, was disturbed in the car, not obeying officer Thomas Lane’s commands and shouting nonsensical and false things. One thing he shouted, however, was significant. Long before he was on the ground, Floyd is heard to shout: “I can’t choke [sic]. I can’t breathe.” If his death was caused by Chauvin’s knee choking him, why was he saying this well before (and repeating it) there was any pressure on him?

Along with this detail, we see who arrests him—black officer Alex Kueng. Why was this detail not emphasized in reports of the incident? Though left-wing activists like to claim that even black cops are motivated by white supremacy, this fact would have complicated the story significantly.

But much more was not widely known about this incident. Most people have no idea that thirty-six seconds after Floyd was put on the ground, one officer called for emergency services. Additionally, when the ambulance did arrive after an extremely long time due to miscommunications between emergency services and the fire department, Officer Thomas Lane performed chest compressions on Floyd. If there was evil intent on the officers’ parts, why did they immediately call for medical help and why did they assist in helping him themselves?

The film pivots from this first run through the events that set everything off to a look at what happened next. Through footage interspersed with interviews of former and (at least one) active Minneapolis police officers, viewers are walked through the week of rioting that followed—the fall to which the title refers in part.

Many of these officers, strong men and women, are still visibly shaken by the events they saw. Perhaps even more shaken by the memory of how their city’s leadership not only didn’t support them, but stopped them from fighting back and, in many cases, even trying to stop the violence. One officer notes that though he had been involved in many protests, he thought those days more akin to “wartime” experience. Another describes it as “third world” violence. Pelted by water bottles, rocks, sticks, bricks, hubcaps, and Molotov cocktails, and hearing shots being fired amid what one called “utter chaos,” these officers were told by superiors to “observe and report” as the mobs looted and burned stores and other establishments. As one officer says, “They weren’t doing anything to control the riots. They didn’t let us do our jobs.”

What was perhaps most disturbing was the surrender of the Third Precinct to the mobs. Never before have American police simply turned over a police station to a mob. And yet this is what Minneapolis did. Several officers recall seeing trucks arriving earlier on that day to collect all the memorabilia and equipment from the police station, only realizing later that the decision had been made without informing the Third Precinct’s officers what was happening. When the officers there were told to abandon the station, they were forced to ram a police cruiser through a fence and flee the scene, which one officer said “looked like a zombie movie.”

Even after the riots, chaos reigned in Minneapolis. An already undermanned police department started hemorrhaging officers steadily as the officers realized that nobody had their back. The 2021 trial of Derek Chauvin showed that politicians and even some senior officers, including MPD chief Medaria Arredondo, were also willing to stab them in the back.

Though many assumed Chauvin’s trial was simple, it wasn’t even clear that it should have taken place, especially given the autopsy. Revealing Floyd had three times the amount of fentanyl considered fatal in his system, as well as methamphetamines, and severe hypertension, but without any signs of asphyxia or damage to his neck, Floyd’s autopsy gave no reason to think he was murdered. Later declarations by doctors paid by lawyer Ben Crump contradicted the original autopsy by Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker, but they had not examined the body. In one scene, viewers see the transcript of Hennepin County prosecutor Amy Sweasy’s August 2023 testimony in a different case. There she reveals that Dr. Baker had called her to say he found no evidence of asphyxia, strangulation, or structural damage to Floyd’s neck. “He said to me,” ‘Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?’ And then he said, ‘This is the kind of case that ends careers.’”

One revealing bit of footage shows that when the paramedics arrived and hooked him up to oxygen, the tube was…not connected to the oxygen cannister. Yet two days after meeting with the examining doctor, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison decided to charge Chauvin with second degree murder.

Once it began, the trial was a circus. The city of Minneapolis settled a massive civil suit with George Floyd’s family for $27 million while jurors were being selected and the trial itself was held behind barbed wire and with National Guard soldiers protecting it, thus ensuring that there would be immense pressure on any jury to convict. The film gives many more details, but three actions of Judge Peter Cahill were key. He refused to allow into the court 1) any evidence of George Floyd’s previous drug arrests, 2) any evidence of miscommunications between the fire department and emergency services, and, most importantly, 3) evidence that the technique used by Derek Chauvin, known as Maximum Restraint Technique (MRT) was part of his training.

In an immensely moving interview scene, Chauvin’s mother holds up her son’s training manuals, which clearly have the technique described and illustrated in them. Close-ups of training documents show that it was approved both by the city and the police department. A close-up of the illustration shows that Chauvin was doing exactly what his training had taught him. While Cahill would not allow this into evidence, he did allow questioning of Chief Arredondo about Chauvin’s technique. Arredondo’s testimony that he knew nothing about it is belied not only by the manuals but also the many interviewed officers who all say on camera that they were trained the same way.

This film is powerful and revisionist—but it’s not out of the blue. George Parry, a former federal prosecutor and chief of the police brutality/misconduct office in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, argued in 2020, on the basis of many of the points covered in the movie, that “the proof” of Chauvin’s and his colleagues’ “innocence is undeniable.” He and others who argued in a similar vein were largely ignored at the time. Minnesota’s leaders, from Arredondo to Mayor Jacob Frey to Governor Tim Walz, all lined up to demonize Chauvin and the three other officers in the name of justice. They all allowed Minneapolis to burn and fall. What they unleashed with their cries about “justice” was the reign of injustice in that city.   

Three years later, the understaffed Minneapolis Police Department, which had 892 officers when George Floyd died, now has 512 as of September 2023. Though Frey and Walz ritually intone that crime is down, stats show otherwise. Crime is now rampant everywhere, with carjackings going from 101 in 2019 to 524 in 2022. A report last week showed that according to the city’s own crime dashboard, in seven of eleven categories, 2023 numbers are higher than ever. In fact, the city had already demolished its own prior record for car thefts by September, and with more than a month left in the year, already 7000 cars have been stolen.

As one who lived in the Twin Cities from 2001 to 2022, watching this film about those days of 2020 was very difficult. The first night of the riots, St. Paul, where I lived, also suffered looting and burning. A gas station three blocks from my house and next to the university at which I taught, was burned down. If St. Paul shook, Minneapolis, where those riots went on for four more days, truly did fall. A family living in Minneapolis whose children went to school with my children appealed (successfully) to the community to help them leave their neighborhood, which was plagued by gunfire. When I last went down Lake Street this past summer on a visit, many of the buildings were still rubble.  

What was worst, however, was the sense that the establishment media and the left-wing government were keeping people from asking questions about the truth of this narrative—

body cam footage was kept from the public for months—and using Floyd’s death and the destruction of their city for political ends. Fiat iustitia ruat caelum is an old Latin saying. It means, “Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.” What The Fall of Minneapolis demonstrates so clearly is that though justice was on the lips of these leaders, there was precious little done.

Will Minneapolis and Minnesota come back from their fall? Right now it looks like they will not. Just this weekend, it was reported that, despite the low numbers of officers—and 168 eligible for retirement this year or next—the Minneapolis City Council rejected a $15 million plan for retention and recruitment of new officers. But if the city and state do rise again, it will be because of brave journalists such as Liz Collin at Alpha News who have dared to ask the questions that too many journalists, politicians, and judges did not dare to raise—or allow to be raised. And it will be because of officers such as Sergeant Rich Walker, who says he stayed on the Minneapolis force because “I could not let evil win.”

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.