George Floyd and the ‘duty to intervene’
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2022
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
Three police officers are on trial in Minnesota for their role in George Floyd’s murder. The case centers on their “duty to intervene” in the actions of Derek Chauvin. But some are asking: How do you teach cops to stand up to other cops?
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Former Minneapolis police officers J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas K. Lane and Tou Thao are facing trial on federal charges that they deprived George Floyd of his federal civil rights in the fatal May 2020 arrest. Reporter Holly Bailey has been reporting on the courtroom proceedings — a process that’s played out much differently than in Chauvin’s trial. “It feels like we're really going to get deep into what police officers in Minneapolis are trained to do, and how exactly they are trained,” Bailey says.
In the aftermath of Floyd’s death and Chauvin’s conviction, police departments around the country have been seeking out training in “bystander intervention” — teaching police officers how to speak up when their colleagues are doing something harmful.
“For decades and decades, we've been teaching police officers about intervention, but we've been doing it really badly,” says Jonathan Aronie of the Sheppard Mullin law firm, the co-founder of the Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement Project. “All we do is we give them a PowerPoint and we say, ‘Thou shall intervene,’ as though it's easy. And we've never, ever taught the skills of intervention.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Jerry Clayton is a cop. He's actually the elected sheriff of Washinock County in Michigan. |
| 0:08.7 | And since the summer of 2020, he has spent a lot of time thinking about how cops interact |
| 0:14.6 | with other cops. |
| 0:16.0 | Let's just go back to the George Floyd situation. |
| 0:21.8 | And the images of not Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd's neck, but the other |
| 0:27.7 | officers that were standing around and in everybody's mind include my own if only they had |
| 0:33.7 | an intervene. |
| 0:34.7 | You know who is next? |
| 0:36.7 | You want him, right? |
| 0:37.7 | You think that goes straight? |
| 0:39.7 | Are you serious? |
| 0:41.7 | And you know, then I say, I think many apples has in their policy to intervene. |
| 0:47.1 | So how if you have it in your policy in a situation like that, even with the public |
| 0:51.8 | saying do something that those officers not intervene? |
| 0:55.0 | So check this course. |
| 0:58.8 | Check the many moves yet, bro. |
| 1:03.2 | Sheriff Clayton is one of hundreds of law enforcement officers who've now taken part |
| 1:07.4 | in bystander intervention training. |
| 1:10.3 | Control Davis, a warden outside of New Orleans, he also signed up for this training. |
| 1:15.8 | He wanted to do it essentially because of what he saw from those officers in that video. |
| 1:21.0 | Initially, it angered me because in some of the individuals, you can see possibly they |
| 1:28.7 | know like something is going wrong and is something is happening that's not protocol |
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