Justice or Justification?

If I was murdered by the police, David Fowler would judge it to be suicide

I tried to watch defense witness and medical examiner David Fowler’s testimony with an open mind. He demonstrated what is wrong with justice in America as he went through the pre-existing conditions that could have caused George Floyd to die while Derek Chauvin pinned his neck with a knee.

My problem is not that Fowler is incorrect in his explanations of how the heart operates and how drugs might affect it and the danger of a narrowed carotid artery. It was that I watched Floyd get killed, and now I am watching his defense, or rather, I cannot watch it anymore.

I don’t really care if Floyd might have survived had he been younger and more fit, that is a distraction. It would be like my shooting somebody who died five minutes later, but I get off because the bullet didn’t cause the death. It went straight through without hitting anything vital. The cause of death was the stress of being shot. Not guilty.

This is insanity. We have a nation where half the people believe at least one demonstrably false conspiracy, because they get absorbed in the details which, taken in sum, “add up.” Of course they do. They have been constructed to “add up.” My favorite observation of this phenomenon was by Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who wrote, “I never knew anyone that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.”

There is a reason for this.

We have two brains which work together. The first works in a “Blink.” When we make a snap judgement, the unconscious instantly gets to the heart of the matter, ignoring superficial detail. An easy example is that the earth is flat. It is nonsense, so why debate with someone about it? How do you think they got sucked down that rabbit hole? Insanity recruits gullibility to its cause.

This is what Hume meant, I believe, when he observed that a person of sense does not run after nonsense. Jung said the mind does not alternate between right and wrong, but between sense and nonsense. So the question should be framed in those terms. Is is sensible to handcuff a citizen and put your knee in his neck while he pleads for his life? Is that accepted procedure in America now?

To me, it never makes sense that police officers pull guns on somebody who is not threatening anybody. A citizen has rights, but beyond legal rights, there is common sense. Treat other people in a disrespectful manner and you have a problem, which you would clearly see if you were looking back at yourself through their eyes.

Respect means you look at yourself from the other person’t eyes. It means you are attentive to the beam in your own eye instead of the mote in the other person’s eye. It is super easy to project what you fear into those unlike you. They are the unknown, and into the unknown we tend to project our imagined fears.

In training, the police are taught that a suspect can pull a gun from his waistband and fire in as little as .25 seconds, and get off another shot every .25 seconds. That is faster than the reaction time of the officer waiting to see a gun before firing the first shot (.62 seconds). The officers are trained that this pause is where they get killed, and in training they are shown a lot of gory pictures of dead cops, just like when you go to traffic school you see a lot of pictures of dead drivers. It’s not the most dangerous job, logging is. It’s not even in the top ten, actually.

The trainers are no doubt accurate in their numbers and statistics, as Fowler is accurate in his lectures on the way the heart works and the dangers of an obstruction in the carotid artery. Police training in the use of deadly force reminds me of a comedy skit a friend used to write, about Kid Loco, the Psychic Gunfighter. He’d just shoot somebody and when asked why, he would reply, “Never forget that I am a psychic gunfighter, so I knew he was going for a gun before he did.”

Do the math. If you are a cop and have been trained to shoot first or be killed, and that it will take you twice as long to look for and recognize a gun as to fire your weapon, what are you being taught, really? Shoot first and sort it out later. And that’s what the trial of Chauvin is purportedly doing. They are sorting it all out. Which brings us to the other side of the brain.

It looks at all the evidence and weighs it to check the direct observational knowledge. But there was no gun. There was no threat. There is no reaction time problem. There is a black man dying in the street because a white cop has handcuffed him and is cutting off his air supply with his knee as he begs for his life. So the left brain, given the task of justifying murder, has only a couple of things it can do. It can claim it wasn’t murder, that it was an accident (like Lenny, the officer just pets too hard), or in the absence of any other defense, blame the victim.