Use-of-force experts say George Floyd's arrest was 'horrific' and 'blatantly inconsistent with good police procedure'

• Use-of-force experts have criticized the police actions that preceded George Floyd's death, calling the maneuver used on his neck dangerous and unnecessary.
• Floyd died Monday after an arrest in which a Minneapolis police officer was recorded kneeling on his neck for eight minutes.
• Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was seen on the video repeatedly telling the officer "I can't breathe" before he became unresponsive, and the officer kept kneeling on his neck.
• His death has sparked nationwide protests, in which demonstrators are calling for the officers involved in Floyd's arrest to be charged with murder.

Use-of-force experts have criticized the police actions that preceded George Floyd's death, calling the incident "horrific" and criticizing the knee-on-neck maneuver an officer used to hold him down.

Floyd, 46, died Monday after being subdued by a Minneapolis police officer who was seen on video putting his knee on his neck for about eight minutes. Floyd could be heard in the video repeatedly telling the officers "I can't breathe" before he became unresponsive. His death has sparked nationwide protests from demonstrators calling for officers involved to be charged with murder.

"It was horrific," Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is now an associate professor at the University of South Carolina Law School, told Insider of watching the video of Floyd's death. "It was infuriating because the officers' actions were just blatantly inconsistent with good police procedure. In short, they were not doing what policing is."

In Minneapolis, police officers are still allowed to de-escalate a situation by putting a knee on a suspect's neck under the department's use-of-force policy, but only officers who have been trained on how to do so without putting direct pressure on the suspect's airway are allowed to use the move, according to the department's policy handbook.

'Either these officers were grossly incompetent or they very callously disregarded what they knew they should have been doing in that situation,' one use-of-force expert says

After a family received a $3 million payout from Minneapolis in 2013 following the death of a David Smith, young black man who the police shot with a stun gun and held on the ground with a knee on his back for four minutes, all Minneapolis police officers were supposed to be retrained on how to restrain suspects, according to a 2013 Minneapolis Star Tribune article.

Four police officers were fired after Floyd's death. Two of them, Derek Chauvin and Tou Thao, started working for the police force before 2013, when the retraining was said to have taken place, and both have a history of use of force. Chauvin was the officer filmed kneeling on Floyd's neck.

Stoughton, who cowrote the book "Evaluating Police Uses of Force," said the officers involved in Floyd's death should have known better.

"Either these officers were grossly incompetent or they very callously disregarded what they knew they should have been doing in that situation," he told Insider. "I don't know which one it is. I don't know if they're just incompetent or if they intentionally flouted the rules, but either one of those things is serious."

John G. Peters, the president of the Henderson, Nevada-based Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, a police training organization, and George Kirkham, a former police officer who is a professor emeritus at the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University, told Insider they were surprised by the same two things when they watched the video of Floyd: They asked first why Chauvin had his knee on Floyd's neck and, second, why Chauvin's hand was in his pant's pocket.

"I put hands in my pocket when I'm going shopping or something," Kirkham said, adding that he was horrified by the action. "Most of it is a casual kind of thing, and you can hear [Floyd] begging, begging, telling him, 'I can't breathe, I can't breathe.'"

Experts describe the decision to put a knee on Floyd's neck as dangerous

Peters said putting a knee on someone's neck was "inherently dangerous" because it could damage vertebrae or reduce the blood flow to a person's brain by compressing the carotid artery that runs up the side of the neck. He also said the officer had numerous alternatives.

"You could use your hands to hold him down on the back. You could put a knee across part of the shoulder blade area if it were needed," Peters said. "But when he said 'I can't breathe,' that's when officers need to transition from law enforcement to medical-emergency protocols and get him up and get him medical assistance because at that point he becomes a patient."

Peters called the Minneapolis police's decision to still allow knee-on-neck holds "draconian," and he urged officers to notice when something became a medical emergency.

"I think either the officers were trained and they forgot they were trained and disregarded their training, or they weren't possibly trained about it," he said. "But in today's world, particularly given all the arrest-related deaths where people have said, 'I can't breathe' — and there's a number of them around the country — you can't ignore that."

He also criticized nearby officers for not getting involved, something Stoughton and Kirkham said could come down to police culture.

"There's a strong cultural resistance to doing anything that can be seen as criticizing another officer, but it's cowardice," Stoughton said. "It's absolutely essential because it not only may have saved Mr. Floyd's life, but it also could have protected Officer Chauvin from making a career-ending mistake."

"It's very, very important not to allow — and this may be what the problem is up there in Minneapolis — an informal police culture, a delinquent kind of a police subculture to exist where people do whatever they want," Kirkham added, calling Floyd's death a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

Protests have broken out nationwide over Floyd's death

Chauvin pinned Floyd to the ground after the police were called to the scene when a grocery-store employee reported someone using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes. Surveillance video of the moments before shows Floyd didn't resist arrest.

The FBI, state, and city authorities are investigating the incident.

Floyd's death has sparked mass protests in Minneapolis, where demonstrators have taken to the streets to call for the officers to face charges and for the end of police brutality. Protests have also broken out elsewhere in the US.

"Passing a $20 bill should not get you the death penalty," Peters said of Floyd's death. "It just shouldn't."

• Read more:
• 'I can't breathe': 4 Minneapolis police officers were fired following their involvement in a black man's death after a cop knelt on his neck for 8 minutes
• New video appears to show police forcing George Floyd out of his car moments before an officer knelt on his neck for 8 minutes
• Photos show thousands of protesters demanding justice in Minneapolis after police killed George Floyd
• Most Minnesota law enforcement agencies ban the neck-pinning maneuver used against George Floyd — but it's still allowed in Minneapolis