Revisionist History - Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Five years ago the entire world watched Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd. What did we miss? Get ad-free episodes to Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows.  Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkinSubscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus For more from Dr. Gary Klein, check out his Masterclass in Practical Decision Making.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. May 25th, 2020. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Early evening. A 911 dispatcher is Jenna Scurry, seven years on the job. She's in a big room with multiple computer screens and televisions running live video feeds from around the city. The details from the call come over her screen. 38th and Chicago. Suspect at a grocery store. She sends a squad car to the scene,

looks up, and realizes the city has a fixed camera on that corner of 38th and Chicago, so she has a live video feed up on one of the screens. She sees the officers try to put the suspect in the back of one of the squad cars. She looks away. When she looks back, he's on the ground, handcuffed, face down.

One officer kneeling on his neck. The suspect is George Floyd. The officer on top of him is Derek Chauvin. She looks away again, takes another call. At the criminal trial the following year, arising from the events that day in 2020, Scurry was the first witness called by the prosecution. And she relived the events of that evening, step by step. At some point then, did you go back to this? How did it appear at that time when you went back to it?

It had not changed. And what do you mean by that? They were still on the ground. How did it appear at that time when you went back to it? It had not changed. And what do you mean by that? They were still on the ground. The whole situation was still in the same. Do you recall approximately how long that was? No, it was long enough. It was long enough that I could look back multiple times.

And so when you did look back, still on the ground, like depicted here essentially. Correct. And what did you think about this when you look back and saw that it hadn't changed? I first asked if the screens had frozen. Thank you. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm guessing you watched the bystander videos of what happened that night during the fevered COVID summer of 2020. I know I did.

I knew the villain. I knew the victim. I thought that's all I needed to know. But then I ran across the George Floyd video again not long ago, by chance. One of those serendipitous internet moments, and watched it for the first time in years, far from the intense emotions of the first time I saw it. And I realized I didn't understand what was happening, what Shulvin was doing, what the other police officers on the scene were thinking.

Which made me wonder if somehow the first time around I had missed the lesson of the case. So over the next two episodes, I'm going to do a close reading of what happened to George Floyd. An unfamiliar reading, starting with the perspective of the very first person to see things unfold in real time, Jenna Scurry. Because before George Floyd stopped breathing, before the angry crowd gathered,

before the scene turned into tragedy, she could see Derek Chauvin behaving so strangely that it led her, a 911 dispatcher who had seen a thousand crime scenes in her career, to stop and stare at the video feed in disbelief. As in, this can't be real. The screen must be frozen. The screen must be frozen. Did you find that it had frozen?

No. Well, I was told that it was not frozen. Did you see the screen change yourself? Yes, I saw the person's moving. So what did you start thinking at that point? Something might be wrong. Wrong with what? What are you thinking? It was a gut instinct of.

In the incident, something's not going right. Whether it be. They needed more assistance or if. There were there just something wasn't right. I don't know how to explain it. It was a gut instinct to tell me that now we can be concerned. And what did you decide to do? I took that instinct and I called the sergeant.

Have you ever in your career before called a sergeant for something like this? For an incident like this to be exact? No. In the beginning, there was nothing extraordinary about the situation unfolding on the corner of 38th and Chicago. A man passes a counterfeit $20 bill. The clerk calls 911. The suspect hasn't run. He's sitting in his car across the street.

He isn't armed. He isn't hostile. He seems like he's high. Two officers approach him and tell him to get out of the car. He pleads and complains, more like a scared child than a grown man. He talks about his mom. He finally gets out. The officers handcuff him. They ask him his name. He says, it's George Floyd. They lead him over to the squad car. But he doesn't want to get in the back seat. He says, it's George Floyd. They lead him over to the squad car. But he doesn't want to get in the back seat. He says he's claustrophobic. He's having trouble breathing. He struggles and

squirms. And because he's a big man, well over six feet and 200 pounds, it makes things difficult. In the struggle, he cuts his mouth. One of the officers calls for an ambulance. A second squad car arrives. There are now four police officers on the scene and one handcuffed suspect. Clearly unhappy, but deferential. We know from the body cam footage that by this point he has used the words sorry and please 57 times.

Please, man. That's Floyd. sorry and please 57 times. That's Floyd. Is he going to jail? That's Derek Chauvin. He's one of the two officers in the second squad card that just pulled up. He's under arrest right now for forgery. What's going on? Take him out. For what? Come on out. Okay, so we figure out what's going on. Ford is what? Let's take him out and just... For what? Leave me! I can't fucking breathe!

Come on out! Look at you, thank you. Thank you. Get him down to the ground. Ah! On the ground! On the ground! Get him on the ground, Chauvin says.

As the senior officer present, he's taking control of the situation. He wants Floyd in the prone position, face down, hands cuffed behind his back. He then puts one of his knees on the side of Floyd's neck and the other between Floyd's shoulder blades, a technique sometimes used with non-compliant subjects. Um... Oh, I can't breathe, man. Please.

All right. Please let me stand. No. Chauvin says, we'll hold him until the ambulance shows up. Floyd says, let me stand. Chauvin says, no. So what does Chauvin do next? Chauvin doesn't move.

Chauvin just sits there. He's frozen. Right around this time, an off-duty firefighter named Genevieve Hanson was out for a walk, happens upon the scene, identifies herself as a firefighter, a trained first responder. I was pretty focused on trying to get the officers to let me help. And how are you doing that? Trying to get the officers to focus on you and get help. I think in my memory, I tried different tactics of calm and reasoning.

I tried to be assertive. I pled and was desperate. Hanson testified at Chauvin's trial. In terms of his face when you were first there, or even the rest of him, what is it that you saw that made you concerned about his medical needs? I was really concerned about, I thought his face looked puffy and swollen, which would happen if you were putting a grown man's weight on someone's neck. I noticed some fluid coming from what looked like George Floyd's body. And in a lot of cases, we see a patient release their bladder when they die. I can't tell you exactly where the fluid was coming from, but that's where my mind went.

He wasn't moving. He was being restrained, but he wasn't moving. Later at the trial, a police surgeon named Bill Smock walked the jury through the videotape of Floyd's final moments, pointing out all the mounting warning signs. What I want you to also watch for is what is his right arm doing as this progresses. You will see him pushing against the tire.

You'll see his right arm, his elbow pushing against. Yes, I'd like to know what is it showing us? Why is that significant? This is very important because it's showing what Mr. Floyd is doing to try and breathe, to get his rights out of his chest up off of the pavement so that he can bring in air. Smart breaks down Floyd's final minutes frame by frame. Let's look at another segment. Brad, if we can go to start at 2021.

You will hear his voice get weaker and weaker. You will see his loose facial expression. You will hear him make sounds of trying to breathe as we get closer. He then goes unconscious. You will then see in the next section, he has what's called an anoxic seizure. That's a fancy word for his brain is going without oxygen, very low, his legs shake, but you

will actually see and you can hear the handcuffs shake and you'll see the body camera shake when he has an anoxic seizure further on down the line. Clear warning signs, clear red flags, not to mention Genevieve Hansen and other bystanders are just a few feet away, shouting at him to get off Floyd. And then another voice joins that chorus. It's one of the other officers.

He says, should we roll him on his side? Rolling him on his side is what's known as the recovery position. Having someone prone on the hard ground with their hands cuffed and with a knee on their neck and in the middle of their back was acceptable practice in Minneapolis at the time. But the city's use of force training explicitly stated the technique was only supposed to be used briefly and on someone quote exhibiting active aggression unquote. It's dangerous. It's hard to breathe. I tried it. I had a friend put me in that position. It's scary. So when the subject calms down you're supposed to roll them over. That's what the fellow officer is saying.

We have to roll them over. But Chauvin says, no. He says, that's why we've got the ambulance coming. He's not reacting to anything. This is what so alarms Jenna Scurry when she looks back up at the scene. She's expecting things to have resolved themselves. Things should have happened. But nothing's happened.

All she sees is Chauvin, up on the screen, sitting on Floyd's neck, his hand casually in his pocket, his face impassive. He's frozen. Or, to use a term favored by psychologists. He's fixated. Fixation is something going down the wrong path and getting stuck on that path. That's Gary Klein. He consults with governments, armies, and hospitals on how to make better decisions under pressure and wrote the classic Sources of Power, one of my favorite books ever. For Klein, one of the most revealing case studies in fixation was the actions

of the Israeli intelligence chief, Eli Zerah, in the weeks leading up to the Yom Kippur war between Egypt and Israel in 1973. He had what was now called an Israel conception. His conception was Egypt will never attack us until they have air superiority, and they don't have air superiority, and we have nothing to worry about. And he held on to that belief until about two hours before the attack.

But his subordinates were seeing all these counter indicators. They're seeing the Egyptians moving troops and changing configurations at the border, all these signs that indicate an attack is imminent. And Zahra said, this is just a training exercise. But then the subordinates showed there was no sign of training going on. So this was just a cover story. And Zahra refused to pass their concerns on hire. And then the attack occurred. So he was fixated and he wouldn't budge.

The fixated decision maker cannot accept new information. Every time new information arises that challenges his original conception, he explains it away. Klein once did a big project at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, looking at how physicians made diagnoses, and he found that the most experienced doctors were acutely aware of their own tendency towards fixation. It was a constant battle. I watched one examination where the attending physician, this is the first observation I made. where the attending physician, this is the first observation I made,

the attending physician is examining the person, the person is describing his condition and seems pretty straightforward. And at a certain point he says, what's this on your back? Well, it turned out he had had surgery surgery for to repair some heart defect. This hadn't been in his history. And the physician said, wait a minute, let's start over. And he started the whole exam over because he was aware that there might have been implications in what he did that he didn't see because he didn't have this other possibility. Did he end up changing his diagnosis? Oh yes. Yes, they found a much more serious problem that the residents and some of the

nurses had missed. Fighting fixation means being willing to throw away all the work you've done in making sense of a complicated situation and saying, let's start over. This is what Chauvin doesn't do. He never says to himself, let's start over. Derek Chauvin, he had a script for how to handle people who were larger and intimidating, and that's as far as he ever got. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

You can't be, is it fair to say you can't be a police officer if you're not willing to revisit your script? You can't be an effective police officer if you are stuck on your script. Floyd is trying to raise his chest off the ground? Oh, that's because he's still resisting arrest. Some lady says she's a firefighter. Is she really?

In fact, when Genevieve Hansen moves closer, she'll then goes for his mace. Floyd's voice starts to falter about time. Maybe he's finally gonna stop complaining. One of his fellow officers says, "'Put him in the recovery position.' Dude, I've been doing this for 19 years, back off. The crowd that has gathered around Floyd

and the four officers is becoming more and more vocal. But Chauvin isn't moving. He's not responsive right now, bro. I'm not responsible. No, bro, look at him. He's not responsive right now, bro. I'm not responsible. Bro, are you serious? He's not responding right now, bro. Are you serious? He's not doing anything to you.

Let me see your pulse. Is he breathing right now? Check his pulse. Check his pulse. Check his pulse, Ty. Check his pulse. Check his pulse. Check his pulse. One of the other cops at the scene says to the officer sitting behind Chauvin, I can't find one. Floyd is dead and still Chauvin doesn't move.

He will remain on Floyd's neck for another three minutes, even after the ambulance arrives. Years from now, when university professors teach courses on decision sciences, they will play this video as a textbook example of fixation. But why is Chauvin fixated? What psychological mechanism could describe why he would just sit there? In the aftermath of the murder, it was said again and again that Chauvin is a racist.

But calling someone racist is a description, not an explanation. Why is Chauvin stuck on his script? One of the most influential ideas to emerge in social psychology in recent years is something called hostile intention attribution, a theory arising out of the work of Ken Dodge. For me, a very poignant event in my own thinking was that as a clinical psychologist, I was seeing a highly aggressive teenager in a state psychiatric hospital. That's Dodge, who teaches at Duke University. And the boy's name was Rocky. I came up to his ward one day, approached him from behind to say hello,

was trying to establish a relationship with him, touched him on the shoulder from behind, and he turned around and punched me in the gut. In a nanosecond, he stopped and said, oh my, you can't be too careful around here. He was making a decision that in that moment that somebody touching him on the back shoulder might be a threat.

And he responded. That was his mindset. Rocky could have interpreted that touch on the shoulder in any number of ways. He could have ignored it, shrugged it off, or assumed it was an invitation for affection and turned and smiled. But he didn't. He chose to focus on it and to assume that Dodge had a hostile intent.

That's hostile intent attribution, the pattern of interpreting everything as a threat. You can look at someone like that kid Rocky and offer an organic explanation of his behavior. He's a bad seed. He's wired wrong. But Dodge wants us to look at problematic behavior as a developmental problem as well. Somewhere along the way, someone's personal experience left them unprepared to make proper sense of the world. A very small child, for example, does not understand the distinction between an intentional act and an accident. That's something you learn. You gradually figure out that actions can come with any number of different explanations.

I remember going to the pediatrician at age four and being definitely afraid of getting a shot, right? But my parents and everybody certainly quickly told me that doctor was not trying to be mean to me, right? And I had to learn that. But I do think that it's a socialization of benign intent that early life is about rather than the socialization of hostile intent. After talking to Dodge,

I began to observe my own kids more closely. They're both preschoolers, two years apart. The big one loves to manhandle her little sister, and most of the time, that interaction is greeted with laughter. But sometimes, if my eldest goes too far, her sister cries. And I realize that what they are doing is to use Dodge's phrase, learning

how to make accurate attributions of each other's behavior. When the big sister's push is too aggressive, the little one learns, that seems to have a different intention from what we were doing before. She's learning the difference between fighting and playing. And when the little one cries out instead of laughing, the big one learns, oh if I want to keep playing I have to make sure that my

actions are accurately interpreted. She's learning how to reign in her aggression. That kind of feedback loop is a crucial part of a child's socialization. But in the case of the boy Rocky, what Dodge realized was that that process of socialization, of learning how to accurately distinguish between a hostile touch and a playful touch, had been disrupted. I remember interviewing a 10-year-old kid who told me about when he was four or five, the family that he lived in at that time, his father, stepfather, would come home every night from work and he learned how to minimize the likelihood that he was going to get beaten

up that night by smelling whether his father had alcohol in his breath, whether his father had a mean look, whether his father called him into the kitchen with his belt already undone, put it on the kitchen table. He was learning all these, he's four years old and he's learning all these signals and he could describe them to me in great detail. So I think an early life of threat, personal physical threat, there may be others as well, is one way that it would be very adaptive to develop a defensive mindset and to assume a hostile intent from another person. If your father is violent 60% of the time and loving 40% of the time and you can't tell in the moment

which direction he's going to go, then it makes logical sense for your own physical safety just to assume that your father is always going to be hostile. But when you take that assumption into the real world, onto playgrounds, into classrooms, into the workplace, it doesn't work. It makes you a bully, a pariah. It makes even routine interactions deeply problematic. And nowhere is this dysfunction more problematic than policing, of course.

Because if you are a police officer whose early life and experience has left them impaired in that way, who as a result makes hostile attributions all the time. Then how can you be a police officer? I don't know what Chauvin's upbringing was like, but I know when I saw the tape again after talking to Dodge, I wondered if Chauvin wasn't just someone like Rocky all grown up. And the one thing Rocky can't be is a police officer,

because being good at that job relies maybe more than almost any other profession on being able to distinguish in the heat of a moment between a hostile act and an ambiguous act, between someone who is struggling because they can't breathe and someone who is struggling because they're't breathe, and someone who is struggling because they are resisting arrest. Between someone who says, I'm going to die because they're trying to trick you, and someone who says, I'm going to die because they are in fact going to die.

If you can't do that, then you can only interpret the world one way. Then in the middle of a fast-evolving situation, when there is new information coming in all the time, you have only one way to interpret it. A threat. In the course of the investigation into the death of George Floyd, a second case came to light. It happened in 2017, three years earlier. A woman calls 911. She says her son has assaulted her. The police arrive, talk to the woman at length. She says her son is down the hall in his room. In the body cam footage, you can see the officers walk down the hallway. The boy is on the

floor of his bedroom on the phone. He's 14. The lead officer in the group is lean in his 40s with a passive demeanor. It's Derek Chauvin. The officers enter the room, tell him he's under arrest. He says his mom was drunk. He gets up reluctantly. His voice is calm. He doesn't act out. He's not aggressive. He says his mother had done this before, called the police when she's the one who has a problem. That's why his uncle left the house, he says. He seems genuinely confused as to why he should be the one under arrest. He's a teenager.

John, why don't you come on here? That's Chauvin. All right, is you're right there. I'm fine. Won't you stand up for me? No. I'm fine. Nope. You're under arrest. So stand up. I'm not under arrest.

Yeah, you are. Stand up. My mom is drunk. You can call her brother. Stand up. She assaulted me. Stand up. Go downstairs. I'm not gonna ask you any more time Stand up. That's my sister stand up. I'm not gonna ask you in again

Stand up get up now Chauvin moves towards him starts beating the boy over the head with his flashlight Opening a wound over his ear that will require stitches, puts him in a chokehold, throws him to the ground, and then things go from bad to much, much worse. Then his mother enters the room. Put your hands up. Teaser? Teaser. I'm gonna kill my son. Mama, I'm gonna kill my son. Then his mother enters the room. I hurt my son. Please don't. You gotta tell me.

Please do not kill my son. Please. Please. Do not kill my son. Mama, you're an imposter. Chauvin crouches down next to the prone boy and puts his knee on the boy's neck. Then he just sits there. There are at least six officers at the scene. At this point, most of them have filed out of the room as if they can't stomach what's happening. One of the remaining officers turns his body cam to the wall. Chauvin keeps his knee on the boy's neck for 15 minutes.

Even after the paramedics arrive, and the boy explains to them that he blacked out after he was choked, and that his ear is bleeding, Chauvin remains on the boy's neck, frozen. The boy is eventually rescued, and he's finally able to get up and walk away. I have watched that body cam footage more times than I can count, and every time I find myself crying at the end, in a way that I never did with George Floyd. Not because it's worse than George Floyd, because of course it isn't, but because it's about a boy. And it was all recorded on tape, years before it happened again.

A former US attorney named Amanda Sertich examined the video while prosecuting Chauvin for murder. for murder. I would say the two most striking things about what's depicted in the 2017 video are first that the minor doesn't act out in any physical way whatsoever. The other striking thing about the video that I think is much more visceral is how obvious it is that it's a child being assaulted. And when former officer Sheldon has that really strong strike on his head with the flashlight, um, there's that pause that any parent who has a kid will recognize right after a kid gets really hurt.

And then the minor says, Al, you're hurting me, and begins to cry and sound very much like the child that he is. And he continues to cry in the same way over 15 minutes, intermittently. over 15 minutes intermittently. There's another reason I found that tape so heartbreaking. Something that I did not expect myself to feel and something I cannot entirely explain. I felt an overwhelming wave of pity for Derek Chauvin. A man who sees every action as a threat, who cannot tell the difference between fear and aggression, who looks at a boy on his phone in his bedroom and sees a monster.

That is a dark, joyless place for anyone to find themselves imprisoned. And by what tragic failure of administration did a man who showed on videotape that he cannot do the single most important thing that a police officer needs to do to be a police officer remain on the force for three more years until he killed someone in cold blood? That's next week. Revisionist History is produced by Nina Byrd Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Nadaf Haferi. Our editor is Karen Shakerjee.

Fact checking by Sam Russek. Engineering, Nina Byrd Lawrence. Mixing and mastering on this episode by Jake Gorski. Production support from Lou Plemond. Thank you to Mikal Libowicz. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and El Hafe Greta Cohn. I'm Malcolm Smith, special thanks to Sarah Nix and El Jefe, Greta Cohn.

I'm Malcolm Gabba.