Research reveals missed opportunities to save George Floyd’s life

The murder of George Floyd could have been avoided if police had responded to the concerns of bystanders, reveals research led by Lancaster University.

George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020.

For the first time, psychologists have analyzed 12 videos recorded on the body-worn cameras of the attending officers, the smartphones of bystanders and local CCTV cameras from 19:55 until 20:42 (CST) on the date of his death.

Their research, published in American Psychologist, examines the range of verbal and physical strategies that bystanders deployed to try and save George Floyd’s life as he lay on the ground being restrained by police.

The research was led by Professor Mark Levine with Dr. Chris Walton and Dr. Richard Philpot from Lancaster University and Dr. Tina Keil from Leibniz Institute for Psychology.

Professor Levine said, “We argue that these bystander interventions create the opportunity for officers to break the pattern of behavior that will lead to murder. We show how bystanders’ interventions were taken up by the police—albeit fleetingly—and that it was a failure of the officers, and not the bystanders, that meant that the lethal trajectory was not averted.”

Four officers were directly involved in the attempted arrest and killing of George Floyd. They were officers Lane and Kueng, who were first on scene and first attempted to arrest and restrain George Floyd, and officers Chauvin and Thao, who arrived on scene at 20:16. Chauvin joined the restraint of George Floyd at 20:18 and began to kneel on Floyd’s neck at approximately 20:19. Officer Thao positioned himself at the rear of the police cruiser, between the sidewalk and his fellow officers and George Floyd.

Researchers created a detailed transcription of the action sequences from the first bystander involvement to the time that George Floyd was transferred to the ambulance stretcher. The transcript was created out of the stitching together of various sources of audio and video footage, including the audio and video feeds from the body camera of officer Lane, synchronized with the feeds from the bodycams of officers Keung and Thao and augmented by mobile phone footage generated by the bystanders Darnella Frazier, Alyssa Funari, and Genevieve Hansen.

Their analysis identified 205 direct verbal interventions from the crowd, with 177 of those aimed at the police, which took the form of:

• Statements, e.g., “He is human.”
• Assessments, e.g., “He’s not responsive right now, bro,” and “Now you’re worse.”
• Questions, e.g.. “Does he have a pulse?” and “What, do you think that’s okay?”
• Orders, e.g., “Check his pulse right now and tell me what it is.”
• Insults, e.g.,”You’re a f***ing p***y ass dude, bro.”

The most frequent forms of verbal intervention were statements that aimed to check on George Floyd’s physical well-being, e.g., from “His nose is bleeding,” to “He cannot breathe,” and also assess the type of restraint being applied, e.g., “Y’ all know that is y’ don’t gotta sit there with your knee on his neck, bro,” and the necessity for it, e.g. “He ain’t even resisting arrest.”

Having opened with an assessment, typically the bystanders used questions before they gave orders in an attempt to create legitimate grounds for the police to change their behavior. Their questioning focused on the well-being of George Floyd, e.g., “Does he have a pulse?” or the legitimacy of the officers’ actions, e.g., “Why’re you kneeing him even more?”.

The analysis reveals that the police officers mostly either ignored or refused to engage with bystanders beyond crowd control. Given this general lack of a response and their shared understanding of George Floyd’s worsening physical state, bystanders either restated or upgraded their assessments, or moved to issuing orders, e.g. ,”GET THE F*** OFF OF HIM.”

However, there were five occasions when Officer Lane did respond. Four out of five of these responses happen after the crowd’s assessments of the welfare of George Floyd or the legitimacy of police actions. Lane either suggests a change to the physical position of George Floyd or offers an assessment of Floyd’s well-being that fits with the concerns of the crowd. The fifth occasion followed an order from Genevieve Hansen to the officers to “check for a pulse,” which Lane followed up with by asking his fellow officers, “You got one?”.

Unfortunately, these interventions were either ignored completely by fellow officers, or rejected explicitly by Chauvin, and were not picked up supportively by the other officer in earshot, Officer Keung. On each occasion, Officer Lane did not repeat his question.

Professor Levine said the most striking thing to note from the analysis is how much bystander intervention occurred and how willing the bystanders were to persevere in circumstances that were both distressing and frustrating.

“Despite their ultimate failure, there are clear indications of ‘critical moments’ where the deadly trajectory could have been changed. In these moments, the officers were asked to reflect on the concerns of the bystanders by one of their own. The failure to save George Floyd’s life results from the inability of the officers to revisit the duty of care that these moments provided.”

Researchers say the analysis of bystander interventions in an unfolding emergency demonstrates how police officers need to be trained to engage in conversational interaction with bystanders around welfare and a duty of care—and not to treat bystanders as a potential threat to be managed.

“One powerful legacy of the sustained, creative and resilient efforts of the bystanders to the George Floyd murder is that they require us to rethink our traditional approaches to how we understand bystander behavior.”