Five years ago a police officer tried to stop Derek Chauvin from murdering George Floyd. Why didn’t he try harder? 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/plusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What happened six days after George Floyd's death?
Six days after the death of George Floyd.
Chapter 2: Who was present during the investigation?
A small group of people gather in a room somewhere in downtown Minneapolis.
So, okay, so let's just, we're going to try to run this like we typically run these, right? I'm just going to identify everybody in the room here for the record, okay?
Two investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, one FBI agent, two attorneys, and the first police officer to arrive at the scene at the corner of 38th and Chicago that day, Thomas Lane. He's there to give a statement about what happened.
If you've ever watched videos of the death of George Floyd, Lane is the tall one, 6'7", right next to Derek Chauvin, restraining Floyd's legs.
Chapter 3: What was Thomas Lane's perspective on the arrest?
I guess just tell us in your own words with as much detail as possible what happened from your perspective.
Okay. We were dispatched to a forgery and progress report at the Tough Foods.
I believe in the call notes it said that the suspect was still on scene in a Mercedes. We drove to the call. We didn't activate our lights and sirens just because I believe we were relatively close and We got there and entered the building, entered Cup Boots of Business. There's a staff member there that said, you know, they're still here.
He goes, he was holding a bill and he goes, they gave me this. It's a big 20. He pointed across the street and they're like, he's in the car over there. You know, go get him before he drives off. So I said, you know, and he started walking out. I was like, you know, just head back in. We'll take care of it.
Lane and his partner, Alexander King, walk across the street to the parked Mercedes. There are two men in the front seats. Lane knocks on the window with his flashlight. The men turn and see the officers.
They all started kind of digging underneath the seat. It looked like they were reaching for something. And I said that to King. I said, they're moving around quite a bit as I was coming across the street. I walked up to the driver's side of the vehicle, I knocked on the glass, and the driver was sitting with his hand down below the seat, kind of leaning forward like this.
And I said, let me see your other hand. And I directed him, let me see your other hand. He didn't do that. And he was just, you know, oh, it's no big deal or whatever. And he kept his hand on there. And he just glanced back, so I took my gun out and I said, let me see your other fucking hand. Put your hand up. Gave commands to do that. I'm not sure how many, I think they gave a few.
And I don't know why, but he quickly went like this, like pulled his hand out real fast. And I kind of like took a step back and was like, Jesus, what are you doing?
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to revisionist history, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is part two of our examination of Derek Chauvin's murder of George Floyd. In this episode, I want to look at the case from a different perspective.
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Chapter 4: What is excited delirium, and how is it relevant?
Excited delirium is something that Lane must have learned about at the police academy, a state of extreme agitation, aggression, and distress. It's not an officially recognized clinical diagnosis. Listen.
That was the other thing for stepping it up, because he might be in medical distress.
Were you getting a sense that Mr. Floyd was having a medical emergency? I mean, obviously in hindsight, but at the time.
Yeah, I felt maybe that something was going on.
But you thought he was passing out? Yeah.
Chauvin puts his knee on Floyd's neck. Lane turns to Chauvin and shares his concern. This man's not doing well.
And you articulated that? Yeah. Okay, and how was that suggestion received by your partners?
They, no one, yeah, they said just, this is fine.
Who's going to say that?
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Chapter 5: How did Thomas Lane communicate concerns to Chauvin?
Then a suggestion. Let's check those wingtops. Each time, he's removing one layer of mitigation, getting closer and closer to what is really on his mind, which is that he's terrified. But only at the very end does he finally get there. It's just after takeoff, as the plane plunges into the Potomac. We're going down, Larry. And the captain says, I know it.
Thomas Lane is in exactly the same position as that first officer on the plane. Both of them understand the gravity of the situation they're in. The plane has ice. The man on the ground is in trouble. But they have a superior who is fixated, who doesn't see what is happening, who is either incapable of processing any new information or doesn't want to.
And neither of the subordinates feel they can just come out and say, no, because they're subordinates. The state investigator questioning Lane about what happened that Memorial Day picked up on this very thing.
You obviously bring it up, so it's clearly something you're thinking about. What prevented you from just kind of taking charge of that and making the call?
I was basically going off Officer Chauvin's experiencing what he was saying, like, this is, we're going to hold here until the end, that's right.
Lane had been a police officer for four days. Then he reveals another crucial fact. Listen.
Well, you had contact with him before the state, right?
Him, meaning Chauvin.
I had, uh, you want me to get into that? Okay, so, um, he was one of the other training officers in the precinct that I worked in. Um, so I had interaction with Chauvin before
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Lane face as a rookie officer?
Can you get into that one? Sure, sure. We came into a house in the 11th District, chased a guy in there with a gun and searching around, found some dope that was bagged up, kept searching and found a paper bag with money. There were about eight of us and took the money out of there and then split it up. And then, I don't know, was nervous about it.
But after it was over, I was thinking, fuck it, it's dope money. I'm not taking it from, you know, your grandmother, right?
Finnegan ended up doing 10 years in prison for tax evasion and planning a murder-for-hire plot against a fellow officer. He also cost the city over a million dollars in legal settlements, which, given his position as the Lex Luthor of rogue Chicago police officers, shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Problems with fat tails turn out to be everywhere. Here's another one.
New York City has 2,500 automated cameras, which in 2023 handed out 7 million speeding tickets. But are those tickets evenly distributed across all the city's drivers? No. There's a fat tail. There were 186 drivers who got more than 100 tickets in one year. That's an average of one ticket every three to four days. Superspeeders. Most of us get a ticket and slow down next time.
We take the hint, not the superspeeders. On average, that group of 186 each had $11,000 in unpaid traffic fines. In my last book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, I had a whole chapter on COVID. You know what COVID was? Fat tail. Most of us, when we were infected with COVID, emitted such a small amount of virus that we didn't pose that much of a danger to others.
But there are a very small number of people who, for reasons we don't entirely understand, when they have COVID, produce a massive amount of virus. Superspreaders. Those are the ones who cause outbreaks. I could go on.
The lesson of New York's super speeders and COVID's super spreaders is that before you figure out how to solve a problem, you have to ask yourself, am I dealing with a skinny tail distribution where everyone plays a roughly equal part in contributing to the issue? Or do I have a fat tail distribution where my problem is a very small number of very rotten apples?
The world's problems are divided into fat tales and skinny tales. And policing is most definitely fat tale.
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Chapter 7: How can police culture affect decision-making?
I mean, even you mentioned George Floyd. In Chicago, we had the Laquan McDonald scandal. shooting where he was murdered 16 times. He was shot by the cops. And those cops were in the top 6% of the police force. They've been involved in payouts from the city for misconduct and use of force and tens of millions of dollars before the shooting.
That's Andrew Papachristos, a criminologist at Northwestern University. If you're a regular listener, you've heard him on this podcast before. He's talking about a police officer named Jason Van Dyke, another member of the Chicago Police Department Use of Force Peloton, who shot a teenager, Laquan McDonald, 16 times for no apparent reason.
So if you had gotten rid of this small percentage or done something different besides shuffle them around, not only would you have saved lives, you would have saved tens of millions of dollars. You would have saved all of the trauma associated with Laquan McDonald's shooting, the unrest in the city, how it layered into these things.
It's not just, though, that the officers at the very edge of the distribution do more bad things than anyone else. It's that, and this is crucial, they lead others, people who wouldn't otherwise be in the fat tail, to do bad things as well.
There are a bunch of studies, ours included, that show my bad behavior as a police officer is actually affected by the bad behavior of my partners. So over time, I'm going to look more like you.
This is called network spillover. And Papa Christos was part of a group of criminologists who used the Citizens Police Data Project to figure out exactly how large this spillover effect is. They looked at that mountain of data and grouped all of the officers in networks, drawing lines between the people who worked together.
They found that if there was no one in your network who received a use of force complaint, then your chance of getting a use of force complaint was minimal. But if you had even a modest number of aggressive officers in your circle, your chances of being accused of violence went up by 26%, which is massive. And this is the problem with Derek Chauvin.
He's in the Minneapolis Police Department's fat tail. He was the poster child for the Minneapolis fat tail. He had a mountain of complaints. And because he's a training officer, a 19-year veteran, the senior officer in nearly every crime scene he arrives at, he spills over into his network.
If Chauvin had never shown up that night, if the second squad car never got called, if the whole incident was managed entirely by Lane and his partner, George Floyd would have lived. Thomas Lane would have rolled him over. There would have been no national eruption of pain and outrage. You wouldn't even know the name George Floyd. But Chauvin shows up.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of complaint distributions in police departments?
That's Amanda Sertich, one of the U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Lane. She knows the evidence well, and specifically the role Lane and his partner Alexander King played that day.
I think he's actually the one who announces when George Floyd passes out and says, oh, he's passing out. And then he's sitting right there next to King when King twice says, I can't find a pulse. And they both continue to restrain him for more than two minutes after they know he doesn't have a pulse. I think that's the point where... I mean, it just becomes unacceptable not to intervene.
It doesn't take any sort of training whatsoever, as the witnesses on scene demonstrated. It doesn't take any training or even more than a few years on the earth to recognize that he needs medical assistance and you can't have someone kneeling on his neck.
Lane ended up spending two and a half years in federal prison for his part in Floyd's death. Sertich and her colleagues felt that he bore at least some portion of the blame. I understand their argument, although I have to say I do not agree with it. A rookie cop on his fourth day on the force tries to right a wrong and fails because his superior officer is a bad apple. Can we really blame him?
Haven't all of us, in other situations, done a version of the same act of mitigated speech? Are you sure we should do that? That's a little much, don't you think? Is that really safe? But where I hope we can all agree is on the broader lesson here. One bad apple can infect the whole barrel. The fat tail matters.
Which is why the first step in any attempt to fix a problem with a fat tail distribution is to get rid of the fat tail. Target the super speeders. Contain the super spreaders. Get rid of Jerry Finnegan. Stop Derek Chauvin before he kills someone. Not afterwards. Right? if only it were that simple. In the fever days after Floyd died, there were hundreds of people on the streets of Minneapolis.
Peaceful protests turned into riots and lootings. Buildings were burned. Hundreds of millions of dollars of damage was done. And one night, the crowd came calling for Jacob Fry, the mayor of Minneapolis.
There was a group of about 2,000 people that came to my home. And they demanded that I come out and talk to them. And I certainly was not in the habit of avoiding my position on the topic. And so my wife, who was seven months pregnant or so, said, yeah, I could get out there and just tell him the truth.
Fry was 39 at the time. He'd been elected mayor three years earlier.
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