MINNEAPOLIS (CN) — The murder trial of Derek Chauvin moved on to the former police officer’s defense Tuesday morning as attorney Eric Nelson called a rapid-fire series of witnesses, including an use-of-force expert, a woman who was in a car with Floyd before his arrest, and the only police officer at the scene of George Floyd’s deadly arrest who is not facing charges for his death.
Minneapolis Park Police Officer Peter Chang came to 38th and Chicago on May 25, 2020, to assist Minneapolis Police Department officers J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane on a forgery report. Body camera video shown for the first time in court on Tuesday showed Chang’s interactions with Kueng, who told him to keep an eye on Floyd’s friends Shawanda Hill and Morries Hall across the street from Cup Foods.
The body camera footage showed officers’ initial apprehension of Floyd and interactions with Hill and Hall, who stood on the sidewalk across the street for the bulk of Floyd’s arrest and said in the footage that they couldn’t see what was happening. “Can I just see what y’all did to him?” Hill asked Chang at one point. “Why is he going to the hospital?”
Chang, questioned by defense attorney Nelson, confirmed that people seemed to be watching from various points around the intersection and said that he was regularly checking behind him to make sure his colleagues were safe. “I was concerned for the officers’ safety because of the crowd, so I just wanted to be sure that the officers were ok,” he said.
Nelson has worked throughout the trial to depict the crowd of bystanders who filmed and observed Floyd’s arrest, sometimes shouting at Chauvin and his fellow officers, as an unruly mob that distracted or endangered his client.
That idea was reinforced by the defense’s first use-of-force expert, Barry Brodd, a private consultant and 22-year veteran of the Santa Rosa police department. Brodd opined that Chauvin’s use of force against Floyd was appropriate throughout the nine minutes and 29 seconds prosecutors say he was on Floyd’s back or neck, and that the prone restraint of Floyd was not a use of force.
“With Mr. Floyd’s level of resistance — it was objectively reasonable for the officers to use the level of force they were currently using,” he said. At no point did Chauvin and his colleagues use deadly force, he said, and “any resister, handcuffed or not, should go to the ground in a prone control position.”
That position, he said, wasn’t a use of force. There were also other factors justifying it, he said.
"In this situation there were space limitations, Mr. Floyd was butted up against patrol car, there was traffic still driving down the street, there were crowd issues that took the attention of the officers and Mr. Floyd was still somewhat resisting,” Brodd said. “I think those were all valid reasons to keep him in the prone.”
Prosecutor Steve Schleicher took up much of the afternoon with cross-examination of Brodd. Pointing to Brodd’s earlier contention that because the prone restraint doesn’t necessarily cause pain, it was not force, he asked at several points about the times Floyd said that his face, chest or neck hurt or that he couldn’t breathe.
Schleicher also worked to dismantle the hostile-crowd defense with Brodd, at one point pointing to each individual observer in front of Cup Foods and asking if they were, at the time of Floyd’s last gasp of “I can’t breathe,” presenting a threat to the officers.
