From New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro.

This is The Daily.

Today, the Minneapolis police officer whose tactics led to George Floyd's death had a long record of complaints of misconduct.

My colleague, Shaila Duan, on why he was still patrolling the streets.

It's Tuesday, June 2nd.

Shaila, you have been covering the criminal justice system and the cops for a really long time.

So what were you thinking as you watched the video of George Floyd's death?

Well, at first I didn't actually watch the video.

I read about it and I have seen too many of those videos and it just is too painful.

I knew what I needed to know right then to do my job, which was immediately to find out more about the officers who were involved in the incident and what we knew about them, what we could tell about them.

So we wanted to look immediately to see their work histories and whether they had had problems in the past.

I mean, sometimes it can be really, really difficult to find out the history of an officer, especially if you need to do it quickly.

There's a lot of secrecy around police records.

Sometimes they just like only keep complaints for a certain amount of time.

Sometimes you can't see complaints at all.

So we use a variety of sources of information from civil lawsuits.

That's often a really good way to see details about what happened.

We look at news accounts.

So we just try to pull it from wherever we can find.

Often it's a patchwork.

But Minneapolis is actually unusual in the sense that they have a searchable database online.

And pretty quickly they put out a list of the complaints for each officer involved in the case.

...