George Floyd's autopsy came back. It looks suspicious - I don't think a good coroner would speculate about the presence of intoxicants. Either you have the lab results or not. But let's assume it's correct and Floyd didn't die of asphyxiation.

Then it's WORSE. So much worse.

The cop who initiated the pacifying hold on George Floyd did so knowing it would be uncomfortable but probably wouldn't kill him. Probably.

This isn't a rogue cop. He had 3 partners helping him out. They all agreed with what he was doing...

which was applying a modified form of waterboarding to a helpless victim. It *feels* like you're dying, it *feels* like you're being choked to death. But if you can yell out "I can't breathe" you are in fact breathing. From the expression on his face I assume Chauvin knows this.

Eric Garner didn't die from being choked unconscious. It takes four minutes to die from being choked to death. Eric Garner died from bad statistics - of the thousands of victims choked out by cops each year, Eric was the one unlucky enough to have asthma.

The (suspiciously slanted) autopsy report tries to tell the same sad tale. Oh it wasn't the cops' fault that he was torturing his victim in a non-lethal way, it's the victims' bad luck to die of a stress related cardiac event.

Let me explain why this is WORSE.

1) We *know* people have asthma. We know that choking an asthmatic person into unconsciousness has a high risk of triggering a lethal asthma attack
2) Similarly, applying torture to a pacified victim carries with it the risk of triggering a lethal stress related cardiac event

3) During a pacification process, we expect the cop to ignore all pleas for help. His job is to protect himself. This increases the risk of stress-related events to result in death of the victim.

We know all these things ahead of time. We know that if you torture your victim, there's a risk of death. Even without intent, even if you've applied this torture technique dozens of times in the past with no consequences.

There are pacification techniques available that do not put the victim at risk, and do not cause pain or discomfort to the victim if they do not struggle. There are deescalation techniques available so you don't have to pacify in the first place.

We've seen over and over again that white victims get the privilege of having these safer techniques used against them. Systematically black victims do not enjoy this privilege. So statistically, some of them will die.

It's a similar idea to stochastic terrorism - if you say "if you loot, someone will shoot" you're appealing to the person crazy enough in your audience to do it. You don't know who it is, but you know that, given a large enough audience, that person probably exists.

Similarly, torture a certain subclass of victims enough, and some of them will die with statistically predictable certainty.

Chauvin isn't a bad cop. At least, no worse than any other cop. In a way, he was just unlucky. Of all the black victims tortured by cops every year, his victim was the one to die. He was otherwise doing exactly what we've asked him to do - torture black people.

That's what makes this so much worse. Floyd's death is the tip of the iceberg. His was an extreme case of state-sponsored torture being administered nationwide to a specific subset of targets - black people.

Chauvin is guilty of overzealous torture, and maybe bad luck. But Floyd's murder is on us. And until we fix the institutional racism in the criminal justice system, black men like Floyd, whom we encourage our police to torture, are going to keep getting murdered.