In the last four days, Minneapolis has been on fire, literally and metaphorically. On Monday (5/25), George Floyd was strangled to death by a police officer who placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for a total of seven straight minutes. The officer was white. George Floyd was black. In the wake of the murder, the officer (and three others who were with him) was fired and Police Chief Medaria Arradondo has called for an FBI investigation; to date, no charges have been filed. Protests followed. Those protests soon became two straight evenings of riots; protesters turned from peaceful demonstration to destructive rage, lighting buildings on fire, looting stores, and creating mayhem.
Minneapolis is just one fire burning in the United States, a country that has struggled and sometimes fought tooth-and-nail to preserve its racist history. A history that lives today in the apparent racist SWATing-style attempt against an NYC Central Park bird watcher, the apparent lynching of a black man who was simply jogging, the systemic inequality contributing to a disproportionate number of deaths in black communities from COVID-19, and the rise of anti-Asian racism partly fueled by Trump. Minneapolis has its own unique racist history, from the destruction of the predominately black Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul during the construction of I-94 to the history of racism within the Twin Cities police forces — the same area in which Philando Castile was murdered. And just like the the country it resides in, Minneapolis is burning.
All of this is setup for what will be the inevitable string of arguments to justify the death of George Floyd. Indeed, in the wake of many police shootings of unarmed black men, the stories we’ll see fit into one of a small group of options: he was a criminal; he was doing something illegal (but totally minor) at the time; he lied about something; he tried to run; he reached for a gun; or he resisted arrest. Setting aside the fact that it’s often difficult to know what actually happened — and a dead black man cannot defend himself from accusations — or that most of these are hardly justifications for death (reaching for a gun being an exception only if it’s actually true and not simply claimed without evidence), only one of these is absurd even when it actually occurred: he resisted arrest.
“Resisting arrest” legally refers to someone who deliberately and knowingly attempts to prevent a police officer from conducting a lawful arrest — of themselves or someone else. U.S. states offer variations on this definition and its criminal consequences, and some courts have even ruled that resisting unlawful arrest may not be legal either. A Catch-22 of sorts. Yet, resisting arrest may also appear before the use of force, during the use of force, after the use of force, or even the quite popular “when the police officer needs an excuse for the use of force.” A fourth category might be “when the police offer decides the use of force should proceed directly to the use of lethal force,” as appears to be the case in the murder of George Floyd.
Yet, the legal scholarship and the public’s understanding of “resisting arrest” needs a serious reality check in the form of a biological roadblock: requiring someone to comply in most of these situations is completely antithetical to human nature and denies a basic human physiological function — the fight-or-flight response. And in denying that function, the very idea that one can “resist arrest” — let alone “resist arrest” knowingly in any meaningful way — seems, at best, irrational and utterly absurd.
“Fight-or-flight” is part of the body’s “stress response.” These days, we mostly talk about this response in the context of stress disorders and anxiety, but it applies equally as well to confrontations with police. In short (and super basic), when in danger, your brain’s emotional processing center sends distress signals the brain’s command center. This triggers an automatic response in the body that sends adrenaline into numerous systems, increasing your breathing and heart rate and causing other physiological changes, such as sharpened senses. All of this begins before your conscious responses can fully react — wherein your body’s parasympathetic nervous system might serve as a “brake” provided your ability to control your response to stress hasn’t been compromised. From here, a bit of a battle ensues. While your brain’s emotional processing center goes into overdrive, the logical response center attempts to process the information to determine the seriousness of the danger. In most brains in mildly threatening situations, the logical response center overrides the emotional processing center; in other situations, that response may be hindered or completely stifled by the body’s natural inclination towards “fight-or-flight.” This is sometimes called the amygdala hijack. Obviously, this can compromise decision making.
When people talk about “resisting arrest,” the implication is that altercations with the police are inappropriate situations for allowing this hijacking to occur. After all, they’re police officers; you’re not running away from a very angry bear. But the response to these situations suggests otherwise. Having an officer pin you by the neck with their knee or threaten you with a gun while you are unarmed or beat you with a baton or place you in a choke hold or throw you violently to the concrete … These are all perfectly justifiable reasons to give in to your fight-or-flight response. More importantly, it’s completely illogical and irrational to expect any everyday citizen to react otherwise. We are not trained to suppress our stress-based reactions. Ask yourself if you would allow anyone to throw you onto a concrete sidewalk and place their knee on your neck for seven minutes until you pass out. Would you stay perfectly still? Could you stay perfectly still? Could you stop yourself from resisting? Ask yourself whether you’d still give in if that person ignored your repeated complaints that you can’t breathe or that you’re in extreme pain. Could you do that? Do you think it reasonable to expect you to do so? I didn’t think so.
In almost all “resisting arrest” situations, what we hear are not stories of understanding — except from the black community and its allies. We hear people looking for justification. He resisted, so he deserved to be suffocated to death. He resisted, so the choke hold was acceptable. He resisted, so beating him repeatedly on the head was OK. He resisted, so slamming him to the concrete and holding him down with your knee in the center of his back until his heart gave out from stress was just fine. He resisted officers doing these things, so he deserved the offer to put a bullet through his choice at point blank range. The conversation never considers that maybe our police forces should be better trained in deescalation tactics. Most of you know this deep down because you, like most U.S.-Americans, were raised in a culture that told you violence was a last resort. Yet, for some reason, we don’t apply that same reasoning to the police, who hold the right that almost no American has in almost any situation: they are allowed to kill citizens.
None of this is “fine.” There is no moral justification for this anymore than there is to train children in active shooter drills when other solutions could correct the problem. We may tell children to listen to the police, but we don’t tell them that even perceived acts of defiance may result in violence that puts them at odds with their own biology. Some of them have to learn from their family and friends (or the hard way) that the mere presence of melanin will mean that defiance isn’t even necessary to receive this treatment. Worse, they will learn that far too often, the only choice is to give in to fight-or-flight because death is almost assured either way. Either you die being choked to death on the street over an imagined or largely benign crime or you die getting choked to death or shot to death on the street because you “resisted.” America’s racial Catch-22.
What America needs is an ethical reckoning. We need to recognize that resisting physiological instincts to protect your lives should not be perceived as a crime by default. That the job of the police should be to avoid this response through deescalation. That the police should use violence only as the last resort — and, yes, restraining techniques are violence. That “resisting arrest” is a bullshit crime used far too often to justify police violence and murder. Until we do, we will see these stories again and again. More protests will occur. More cities will burn. And it won’t be the fault of some uppity folk who deserve their lot — yet another bullshit excuse. It’ll be our fault for not doing anything to prevent the deaths of unarmed citizens, too often black, too often just folk like you or I, too often fathers and brothers and friends and nephews, and too often just trying to live without the everyday reminder that their lives are structurally devalued in the society in which they were raised.
