Minneapolis police chief says Floyd’s death was a murder

MINNEAPOLIS — Derek Chauvin and Tou Thao — two of the officers involved in killing George Floyd May 25 — both took department training on preventing suffocating people being restrained face down, the Minneapolis Police Department confirmed.

In one of his most forceful comments yet on Floyd’s killing, Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo issued a statement Monday night, saying “Chauvin knew what he was doing.”

“Mr. George Floyd’s tragic death was not due to a lack of training — the training was there,” he said. “This was murder — it wasn’t a lack of training. This is why I took swift action regarding the involved officers’ employment with MPD,” Arradondo said.

While a number of significant public officials in Minnesota, including Gov. Tim Walz, have started calling Floyd’s killing murder, this is believed to be the first such public statement by the police chief.

Arradondo released his statement late Monday in response to public records requests for specific training records after questions were raised about whether the Minneapolis Police Department ever fulfilled a promise in a 2013 settlement to require all sworn officers to undergo training on the dangers of positional asphyxia.

Arradondo said that the MPD “went beyond the requirements” of the settlement. It not only provided the training, he said, but changed its policies in 2014 to “explicitly require moving an arrestee from a prone position to a recovery position when the maximal restraint technique is used and require continuous monitoring of an arrestee’s condition.”

He went on to say that the MPD continues to emphasize training on the tactics: “There is simply no way that any competent officer in MPD would be unaware of the need to get an arrestee into a recovery position so that he or she can breathe freely.”