On June 15, a recorded phone call between a 911 dispatcher and a 911 supervisor was released. While ex-officer Derek Chauvin of Minneapolis police force knelt on the neck of George Floyd, the dispatcher was watching from surveillance footage and expressed concern over the force that was used.
The 911 call
The dispatcher was not identified, but according to the call, the dispatcher called a supervisor to say what she saw over the live footage from a surveillance camera at the intersection where George Floyd was arrested.
The dispatcher said, "You can call me a snitch if you want to, but we have the cameras up for 320's call." The dispatcher continued that she does not know if the police used force or not, but she did mention how she saw that the police got something out of the back of the vehicle and how all of them sat on Floyd.
The supervisor, who was also not identified, promised to find out what was happening. The bystanders in the area recorded the whole incident, and the video quickly went viral and it sparked the Black Lives Matter protest worldwide.
The four officers who were at the scene were fired and all of them have been charged. After the dispatcher talked to the supervisor, the supervisor replied that "takedowns" does not count as an emergency. The dispatcher then said that she has never seen a takedown and the force used on Floyd was "different."
According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the department has a policy that when a police officer uses excessive force, a supervisor is supposed to be notified. Supervisors usually respond to the scene.
The first supervisor on the scene was Sgt. David Pleoger who arrived 40 minutes after the call with the 911 dispatcher ended. It is not clear if Pleoger was the supervisor in the 911 recording.
Additional transcripts
On June 15, the authorities also made two 911 transcripts public and they were from the calls done by bystanders. One bystander said that former officer Chauvin pretty much killed Floyd even though he was not resisting arrest.
The bystander described how Chauvin had his knee on Floyd's neck the whole time. The bystander also said when the ambulance arrived at the scene, Floyd was no longer responsive. Chauvin just stood up and left.
The second 911 call was made by a first responder who was off-duty at that time. The caller said that the police officers did not take a pulse and did not do anything to save Floyd, everything was caught on tape and that the caller was just walking when the incident happened.
Even though the first autopsy report said that Floyd's cause of death was "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression," the video shows that there is something more on his death.
This led to Floyd's family to seek independent autopsy and that was when they got the real reason behind Floyd's death. It showed asphyxiation or suffocation from the pressure on his neck and back. The airflow to his lungs and the blood flow to his brain was cut.
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