body-cam footage of George Floyd

It used to be that organizations like the ACLU demanded that police wear body cameras and allow that footage as evidence in court. These days, the ACLU has done a 180 and now largely wants body-cam footage banned—probably because the footage generally serves to incriminate the criminals it depicts. We can't have that, now, can we? Well, it seems that some of the body-cam footage from George Floyd's arrest has now escaped Pandora's box. As they cynically note over at Instapundit, the mainstream media have no interest in allowing any of this footage to become visible to the public. Power Line has the scoop:

Someone leaked police [body-cam] footage of George Floyd’s arrest to the Daily Mail. There are two videos, embedded below. Make of them what you will.

To me, what is most striking is how crazy Floyd was from the beginning. The officers tried to get him out of the vehicle in which he was parked and into their squad car so they could take him to a police station and book him for passing a counterfeit bill. This proved impossible. Floyd, in a highly emotional state, was yelling, “Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!” when there was no prospect of his being shot.

Floyd wouldn’t get into the squad car, saying he was claustrophobic. The officers struggled with him for around ten [minutes but] were never able to get him securely inside the squad car. At one point[,] he tumbled out the opposite door of the squad car, onto the street. The officers, believing correctly that Floyd was high on drugs, called for an ambulance.

Floyd complained of being unable to breathe long before anyone knelt on his neck. (Shortness of breath is a symptom of fentanyl overdose.) He apparently preferred being on the ground to being inside the squad car. One of his companions, his “ex” according to the Daily Mail, made a finger-twirling-next-to-the-temple gesture to explain his mental state.

Read the rest on your own. I was willing to give George Floyd the benefit of the doubt: there's video of him playing the role of a peace activist, advising teens to stay away from drugs, guns, and violence, but it seems that Floyd himself was still having problems with at least two of those things right until his untimely end. Does this absolve Officer Derek Chauvin, the man who knelt on Floyd's neck? Not at all. In all likelihood, Chauvin out-and-out murdered this man. I stand by that conviction until there's definitive proof that I'm wrong. But Floyd shouldn't be mythologized: he was no angel. Of course, saying what should and what shouldn't be now is useless: as advice goes, it comes far too late.