‘They’re trying to George Floyd me’: Killings by U.S. cops rise | Will Bunch Newsletter

Happy New Year... again! I’m back on the case after a vacation week that sort of marked an end to an elongated 2022. While I was off, I received some unexpected great news about my book, After the Ivory Tower Falls. That came just before a date that was planted in my brain way back when I was 8 years old, when my dad brought home The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper LP. On Saturday, it happened. Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?

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Some of Keenan Anderson’s last words were both haunting — and hauntingly familiar.

“Are you trying to George Floyd me?” Anderson — a 31-year-old high school English teacher and an African-American — asked in a panicked voice during an incident that occurred on Jan. 3. He was captured on video saying this after one of the Los Angeles police officers who’d responded to a traffic collision and was now trying with great force to restrain him appeared to be pinning the back of Anderson’s neck with his elbow.

Seconds later, an LAPD officer is seen on body camera video repeatedly zapping Anderson with his Taser as officers tried to force the schoolteacher — now laying on his back in the middle of a road in the seaside neighborhood of Venice — to turn over onto his stomach. A couple of minutes later, cops were loading Anderson into an ambulance. Four and a half hours later, doctors at a nearby hospital pronounced him dead.

The ironies abound. For one thing, it turns out that Anderson was the cousin of one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, Patrisse Cullors. What’s more, Anderson’s verbal callback to Floyd — whose May 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer who’d kneeled on his neck caused millions of Americans to march in protest — is a chilling reminder of what those demonstrators hoped to end. And what hasn’t happened.

Anderson’s death at the hands of the LAPD came just three days after the end of 2022, in which watchdog groups reported that police in America shot and killed more civilians than any year since the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri — when intensive outside monitoring began. The Washington Post’s award-winning database reported that police shootings led to 1,096 U.S. deaths last year — a number that has been not falling but climbing since the Floyd protests. What’s more, experts say there were at least 100 more who died in police custody but — like Anderson’s case in L.A. — not from gunshots.

No other nation does this. The rate of Americans killed by the police is three times higher than our neighbor Canada, five times higher than Australia, and 22 times higher than France. And while the pandemic — linked to social instability, including a spike in homicides — is slowly winding down, there’s no indication that 2023 will be any better. Instead, the new year has already been marked by several disturbing, high-profile deaths involving cops.

In Memphis, five police officers have already been fired in the ongoing investigation into the death of a 29-year-old FedEx employee named Tyre Nichols who was beaten by the officers after a Jan. 7 traffic stop and died three days later from kidney injuries and cardiac arrest. Lawyers for Nichols’ family — allowed to see police body-cam video not yet made public — say he was beaten “like a human piñata” in an episode they compared to the 1991 LAPD assault of Rodney King. Nichols and all five of the fired officers are Black.

In Atlanta, a protest over the fatal shooting by a Georgia state trooper of an environmental activist who went by the name Tortuguita — one of a band of protesters fighting a $90 million facility known as “Cop City” where officers would train on quelling unrest — turned violent on Saturday, with broken windows and a police cruiser set ablaze. Police claim Tortuguita shot and wounded an officer with his own gun before the officer fired back and killed him; activists claim the official account is false.

Wildly disputed facts are typical in such cases. In Los Angeles, officials said Anderson was acting erratically when they responded to the car crash and then repeatedly refused to comply with officers’ commands before the Taser was deployed. Police also pointedly released his toxicology report — showing traces of cocaine and marijuana in his system — at the same time as the body-cam footage. But Anderson’s cousin Cullors said in an Instagram post that he was asking for help from the police and in no way deserved the harm that caused his death.

The facts may be murky, but the numbers don’t lie. Why must an average of three U.S. citizens die at the hands of cops every single day? Like any perfect storm, there is more than one factor. In the nation with the world’s highest rate of firearms ownership — with more guns than people — there are far too many legally justified shootings, in cases where an officer shot an armed citizen who was threatening cops or other civilians.

Critics of anti-police-violence protesters are quick to point to such cases (even if they rarely endorse gun-control measures that might reduce the number of firearms in the streets). But the truth is that hundreds of U.S. killings by cops could be avoided every year if municipalities changed the way they respond to two leading prompts for police violence: traffic stops, and mental-health-related calls.

Researchers say about 10% of U.S. killings by police — often of Black or brown citizens — take place after traffic stops, often for minor offenses such as a mismatched license plate or a broken tail light. Some cities — from Philadelphia to Berkeley, Calif. — have adopted policies to shift enforcement to civilian traffic enforcers or even to red-light cameras, largely to reduce these types of encounters that too often go bad.

Other studies have suggested as many as 25% of those killed by cops in America were suffering from acute mental illness at the time. Again, some major cities, including Denver, have begun experimenting with dispatching more trained mental-health professionals and fewer armed officers on these crisis calls, and are seeing positive results. It’s hard not to think Keenan Anderson would be alive today if skilled professionals had arrived at the scene of his car-crash confusion, rather than the officers who harmed him with a Taser.

The volume of protests we saw in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing likely won’t be seen again, but we shouldn’t stop talking about how to reduce police violence — even in a moment of rising concern over crime that is sometimes justified and sometimes amplified by political or media hysteria. Such a test is coming in May’s high profile mayoral primary here in Philadelphia.

At a forum last week focusing on crime issues, nine Democrats seemed to agree that Philadelphia doesn’t need to dramatically increase its spending on police, as some similar-sized cities are doing. But some candidates — including a key frontrunner in former council member Cherelle Parker — are still hashing out their stance on controversial policing practices such as stop-and-frisk encounters. I can say this: The best candidates will be the ones who have plans to reduce crime and police brutality at the same time. The true leader will be the one who grasps there is too much violence in America — by criminals who shouldn’t have guns, but also by our unchecked police.

Question: Since the Truman years there have been 35 White House chiefs of staff. All of them, including the current and announced next CoS, were men. Any explanation? Indicative of larger issues? What difference has it made? — Via Fletcher McClellan @mcclelef on Twitter

Answer: Actually Fletcher, all 35 have been white men — a kind of appalling record for a job that has only existed since World War II. More than any other administration job, the chief of staff must be someone the president trusts — appearances be damned — and it says something sad about our rigid hierarchies that only white men are granted that trust. I know this wasn’t part of your question, but after a great run of wins for the departing Ron Klain, I have real concerns about President Biden’s pick of Jeff Zients, a corporate millionaire, a health-care profiteer, and a very underwhelming COVID czar during Biden’s first two years. I’m worried Zients will push Biden too far right ahead of the 2024 campaign. Stay tuned.

It’s now practically conventional wisdom that the journalism that may have tipped the 2016 presidential election away from Hillary Clinton and toward the eventual winner Donald Trump was the late October overreaction to what turned out to be a nothingburger development regarding the FBI and Clinton’s emails. But just like Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark, sometimes the biggest stories are the ones that don’t run... or get totally botched.

On Oct. 31, 2016, or just over one week before Election Day, the New York Times published a story by reporters Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers under the headline, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” The impact of this article was quite large, as it defused a growing sense of scandal around the Republican’s alleged ties to Vladimir Putin’s regime. While the extent, and import, of that relationship remains under debate more than six years later, the newspaper’s key findings attributed to unnamed “intelligence sources” have been undercut, to put it kindly. The Times’ sources insisted that any Russian election interference wasn’t intended to help Trump win — except that both the intelligence community and a Senate committee found that Moscow did want Trump. What’s more, special counsel Robert Mueller, probing Russian election interference, indicted 34 individuals and three companies and won nine guilty pleas or convictions. Sounds like a “clear link” to me.

Now, some 75 months later, that story is getting a new look because of a bombshell development. The man who was named special agent in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York shortly before that Times article, a spymaster named Charles McGonigal, was indicted Monday on an array of stunning felony charges. Among them: That McGonigal broke the law after leaving the FBI in working to help a Putin-tied billionaire Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, evade U.S. sanctions. Deripaska is also a key player in that “clear link” between Team Trump and Russia, through his close business relationship with Trump’s mid-2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort. This raises two pressing questions: How far back did McGonigal’s ties to Team Putin go, and was he one of the Times’ “intelligence sources?” The New York Times owes some answers to its readers. I’m not holding my breath.