Police techniques back in spotlight
Chokeholds, neck restraints under fire after Floyd’s death
In the cellphone video of George Floyd’s death, the arresting officer, Derek Chauvin, keeps a knee pressed on the back of his neck for eight long minutes until Floyd stops speaking or moving.
“You don’t have to sit there with your knee on his neck,” exclaimed a bystander off-camera, addressing the officer in language salted with expletives. “He is enjoying that. You are. You are enjoying that. You could have put him in the car by now.”
For police trainers and criminologists, the episode appears to be a textbook case of why many police departments around the country have sought to ban or at least limit the use of chokeholds or other neck restraints in recent years: The practices have led too often to high-profile deaths.
“It is a technique that we don’t use as much anymore because of the vulnerability,” said Mylan Masson, a former police officer who ran a training program for the Minneapolis police for 15 years until 2016. “We try to stay away from the neck as much as possible.”
The manual of the Minneapolis Police Department states that neck restraints and chokeholds are basically reserved for when an officer feels caught in a life or death situation.
There was no apparent threat of that nature in Floyd’s detention.
Experts viewing the footage suggest that it was more likely a case of “street justice,” when a police officer seeks to punish a suspect by inflicting pain for something done to the officer during the arrest.
“It is teaching someone a lesson, next time you will think twice about what you do,” said Philip Stinson, a former police officer turned criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University.
The full details of what happened have yet to emerge, in particular what police body cameras might show about any altercation between Floyd and Chauvin, 44, a 19-year veteran of the department who has since been fired. Chauvin was arrested and charged Friday with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the case.
Department records indicate, however, that the Minneapolis police have not entirely abandoned the use of neck restraints, even if the method used by Chauvin is no longer part of police training.
The manual for the Minneapolis police calls a chokehold a “deadly force option” and neck restraints a “nondeadly force option.”
Neck restraints involve compressing one or both sides of a person’s neck with an arm or a leg without cutting off the air flow through the trachea. A chokehold is meant to cut off someone’s air supply if the officer feels his life is threatened, the manual says.
The manual further explains that the conscious neck restraint may be used against a subject who is “actively resisting,” while rendering the person unconscious should be limited to someone who is aggressive or “for life saving purposes.”
John Elder, a spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department, did not respond to a query about whether the knee restraint used by Chauvin corresponded to those guidelines.
Criminologists viewing the tape, however, said the knee restraint not only put dangerous pressure on the back of the neck, but that Floyd was kept lying on his stomach for too long. Both positions — the knee on the neck and lying face down — run the risk of cutting off someone’s oxygen supply.
“Keeping Mr. Floyd in the face down position with his hands cuffed behind his back is probably what killed him,” said Seth W. Stoughton, a former police officer who studies policing and is a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law.
Police training started emphasizing avoiding that position about 20 years ago, he said.
In terms of chokeholds, those departments that still allow them usually stress using a kind of wrestling hold, in which the officer wraps his arm around the person’s neck and applies pressure, he said. The idea is to subdue a suspect as quickly as possible in order to get him into a squad car, not to leave him in that possibly deadly position for minute after minute as happened with Floyd.
In addition, applying the knee to the back of the neck rather than to the sides risks killing or seriously injuring someone by cutting off the air supply or damaging the cervical spine and other delicate bones in the neck, Stoughton said.
No department permits such a technique in ordinary circumstances, he and others said.
Many police departments, including that in Minneapolis, stopped teaching the knee restraint technique and also sought to limit the use of chokeholds after the highly publicized death of Eric Garner at the hands of the New York Police Department in 2014.
Garner famously gasped “I can’t breathe” 11 times while lying face down on the sidewalk, a sentence that Floyd also said several times.
In the case of Garner, investigators determined that the officer who wrestled him to the ground was using a forbidden chokehold.
The
medical
examiner ruled Garner’s death a homicide caused by the compression of his neck from a “chokehold” and the compression of his chest held on the ground in a prone position. Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who held Garner in a chokehold, was fired but not charged, inciting protests nationwide.
Many police departments, including that in Minneapolis, modified their policy after that episode.
Carl Takei, a senior staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on police practices, said departments that still allowed chokeholds try to differentiate between cutting off the flow of blood, which renders someone unconscious, and cutting off the flow of oxygen, which is deadly.
“There is still a significant risk that attempting to cut off the flow of blood will also cut off the flow of air,” he said, which is why the ACLU opposes the technique. “Chokeholds should be banned across the board.”
In Minneapolis, the law enforcement training course that Masson directed at Hennepin Technical College stopped teaching the knee restraint technique to aspiring officers around 2014, she said, and veteran officers should have been briefed on stopping as well. She said the changes came after the Garner case.
Instead, she said, students in the two-year degree program required of all prospective officers were taught to apply pressure across the upper back.
Department records, however, show such restraint techniques continued to be used in Minneapolis, although they are sometimes called by different names. In 2012, there were 79 and in 2013, there were 69, That dropped to 40 in 2018 and then was back up to 56 last year. The technique was used against African Americans far more than others, the records show.