Police departments have tried to ban or severely limit the use of chokeholds and neck restraints. But in Minneapolis, a knee pressing on a neck led to a man’s death.
In the cellphone video of George Floyd’s death, the arresting officer, Derek Chauvin, keeps a knee pressed on the back of his neck for about eight minutes until Mr. Floyd stops speaking or moving.
“You don’t have to sit there with your knee on his neck,” exclaimed a bystander off-camera, addressing the officer in language salted with expletives. “He is enjoying that. You are. You are enjoying that. You could have put him in the car by now.”
For police trainers and criminologists, the episode appears to be a textbook case of why many police departments around the country have sought to ban outright or at least limit the use of chokeholds or other neck restraints in recent years: The practices have led too often to high-profile deaths.
“It is a technique that we don’t use as much anymore because of the vulnerability,” said Mylan Masson, a former police officer who ran a training program for the Minneapolis police for 15 years until 2016. “We try to stay away from the neck as much as possible.”
The full details of what happened have yet to emerge, in particular what police body cameras might show about any altercation between Mr. Floyd and Mr. Chauvin, 44, a 19-year veteran of the department who has since been fired. Department records indicate, however, that the Minneapolis police have not entirely abandoned the use of neck restraints, even if the method used by Mr. Chauvin is no longer part of police training.
The manual of the Minneapolis Police Department states that neck restraints and chokeholds are basically reserved for when an officer feels caught in a life-or-death situation. There was no apparent threat of that nature in Mr. Floyd’s detention.
Experts viewing the footage suggest that it was more likely a case of “street justice,” when a police officer seeks to punish a suspect by inflicting pain for something done to the officer during the arrest.
Criminologists viewing the tape said the knee restraint not only put dangerous pressure on the back of the neck, but that Mr. Floyd was kept lying on his stomach for too long. Both positions — the knee on the neck and lying face down — run the risk of cutting off someone’s oxygen supply.
“Keeping Mr. Floyd in the facedown position with his hands cuffed behind his back is probably what killed him,” said Seth W. Stoughton, a former police officer who studies policing and is a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law.
