Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2

Five years ago a police officer tried to stop Derek Chauvin from murdering George Floyd. Why didn’t he try harder? Get ad-free episodes to Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin http://apple.co/pushkin Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus https://www.pushkin.fm/join-pushkin See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask Chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at ChatGPT.com.

• 0:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  We spend hours deciding what to buy, but there's a split-second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit buy now? Agentic commerce is testing that moment more than ever. And that's where PayPal comes in. With 25 years of checkouts, 400 million consumer accounts globally, and the benefit of purchase and seller protection, all of which make sure wherever a purchase starts, it ends with trust. Built for payments, growth, and agentic. PayPal Open: Built for All Business. Visit PayPalOpen.com.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Purchase and seller protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply. See PayPal.com/risk-management for details.

• 1:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. Your social media feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, and so much more. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated host Trace Dominguez talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  May 31st, 2020. Six days after the death of George Floyd. A small group of people gather in a room somewhere in downtown Minneapolis.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  So, okay, so, let's just, we're gonna try to run this like we typically run these, right? I'm just gonna identify everybody in the room here for the record, okay?

• 2:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Two investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, one FBI agent, two attorneys, and the first police officer to arrive at the scene at the corner of 38th and Chicago that day, Thomas Lane. He's there to give a statement about what happened. If you've ever watched videos of the death of George Floyd, Lane is the tall one, 6'7", right next to Derek Chauvin, restraining Floyd's legs.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  I guess just tell us in your own words, with as much detail as possible, what happened from your perspective.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Okay. We were dispatched to a forgery and progress report at the Cub Foods. I believe in the call notes it said that the suspect was still on scene in a Mercedes. We drove to the call, we didn't activate our lights and sirens, just because I believe we're relatively close. We got there and entered the building, entered Cub Foods, the business. There's a staff member there that said, you know, "They're still here." He goes, he was holding a bill, and he goes, "They gave me this, it's a Big 20." He pointed across the street, and they're like, "He's in the car over there, you know, go get him before he drives off." So I said, you know, and he started walking out, and I was like, you know, "Just head

• 3:49Speaker 04

  back in, we'll take care of it."

• 3:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Lane and his partner, Alexander King, walk across the street to the parked Mercedes. There are two men in the front seats. Lane knocks on the window with his flashlight. The men turn and see the officers.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  They both started kind of digging underneath the seat, what looked like they were reaching for something. And I said that to King, I said, "They're moving around quite a bit," as I was coming across the street.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Um, I walked up to the driver's side of the vehicle. I knocked on the glass. Um, and the driver was sitting with his hand down below the seat, kind of leaning forward like this. And I said, let me see your other hand. And I directed him, let me see your other hand. Um, he didn't do that. And he was just, you know, oh, it's no big deal or whatever. And he kept his hand down there. Um, and he just glanced back. So I took my gun out. And, you know, and I said, let me see your, your other fucking hand. Put your hand up. Um, gave commands to do that. Uh, I'm not sure how many. I think they gave a few. Um, and I don't know why, but he quickly went like this, like pulled his hand out real fast. And I kind of like took a step back and was like, Jesus, you know, what are you doing?

• 5:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is part two of our examination of Derek Chauvin's murder of George Floyd. In this episode, I want to look at the case from a different perspective. Through the eyes of the first police officer to approach George Floyd, Thomas Lane, who at the time had been a fully fledged member of the Minneapolis Police Department for only four days.

• 5:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  May 25th, 2020 was Memorial Day, a lovely Minneapolis summer evening. People are outside, walking about. It's just after 8:00 PM when Lane and his partner pull up to the Cup Foods on the corner of 38th and Chicago. Lane pulls Floyd out of his car, handcuffs him, sits him on the sidewalk, takes his information, then walks Floyd over to the squad car and puts him in the backseat. Only Floyd doesn't want to get in the backseat, so Lane and his partner King try to force him into it.

• 6:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  Then, a second squad car pulls up. Derek Chauvin gets out. Floyd is struggling so much with Lane and King that he cuts his mouth. Badly enough that Lane calls an ambulance. Lane thinks Floyd is on drugs. He's acting erratically, and they found a glass pipe on him when they searched him. They decide to keep him restrained so he can't move or hurt himself anymore. They call EMS a second time and upgrade their request to code three, the most urgent level. Life-threatening. Immediate response. Lights and sirens. So far, all of this is nothing out of the ordinary.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  So was there more to calling the paramedics than just checking his mouth?

• 7:02Speaker 04

  I think that I had mentioned that, you know, this could be possibly excited delirium or something.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 7:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  Excited delirium is something that Lane must have learned about at the police academy, a state of extreme agitation, aggression, and distress. It's not an officially recognized clinical diagnosis. Listen.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  That was the other thing for stepping it up, because he might be in medical distress.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Were you getting a sense that Mr. Floyd was having a medical emergency?

• 7:32Speaker 04

  Um.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  I mean, hindsight, but at the time?

• 7:37Speaker 04

  I, yeah, I thought maybe that something was going on.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Um, but you thought he was passing out?

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  Chauvin puts his knee on Floyd's neck. Lane turns to Chauvin and shares his concern. This man's not doing well.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  And you articulated that?

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Okay, and how was that suggestion received by your partners?

• 7:59Speaker 04

  Um, they, no one, yeah, they said, just, this is fine.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Who said that?

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Chauvin said, this is, we're just gonna hold him here until EMS arrives.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  So.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  And I suggested, you know, with excited delirium, you know, maybe we should roll him on his side just to, you know, if he's, like, I think it's something I had previously learned at a previous job where if you roll on his side for a recovery position or something.

• 8:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  In the video of the Floyd arrest, you can hear Lane make his case to Chauvin. He says, "You want him on his side?", meaning, "Should we roll him over so he can breathe?"

• 8:35Speaker 04

  Roll him on his side?

• 8:43Speaker 04

  I just worry about the excited delirium or whatever.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  That's probably what the ambulance is coming.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  Okay, that's close.

• 8:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  You want him on his side? No, he's staying put where we got him. Okay, just worry about the excited delirium or whatever. That's why we got the ambulance coming. Okay, I suppose. A minute later, Lane says, "I think he's passing out." Meaning, "Floyd's in trouble. Let's get off him." Nothing happens. A minute after that, Lane says once again, "Want to roll him on his side?" As in, "He shouldn't be on his stomach."

• 9:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  Lane is trying to do the right thing. He understands the gravity of the situation. But the crucial thing here is the way Lane sets out to convince Chauvin. He doesn't make a declarative statement. "We should put him on his side." He has to be on his side. He asks a question. He softens it. "Should we?" "Should we put him on his side?" He mentions excited delirium. He's concerned about Floyd's safety. But he undercuts that concern with words that soften his alarm. "I just worry about excited delirium or whatever." And then finally, after Chauvin shuts him down, "Okay, I suppose." Passive-aggressive agreement.

• 10:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  Sociologists call this mitigated speech. One of the greatest causes of plane crashes for years was mitigated speech in a cockpit. The first officer would see something dangerous and try to let the captain know. But he would do it in such a mitigated way that the captain wouldn't take the new information seriously. I wrote about one of those cases in my book, "Outliers." It involved a 1982 Air Florida flight out of Washington, DC. It was a snowy day. The plane had been in line for takeoff for an unusually long time. And the first officer thinks the plane has a dangerous amount of ice on its wings and should go back for de-icing. Listen to how he tries to convince his superior officer, the captain.

• 10:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  Look how the ice is just hanging on this back back there. See that? The captain says nothing. The first officer tries again. See all those icicles on the back there and everything? The captain ignores him. The first officer tries a third time. Boy, this is a losing battle here, trying to de-ice those things. Gives you a false sense of security, that's all that does.

• 11:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  Nothing. The plane is inching to the front of the line. Let's check those wing tops again, since we've been sitting here a while. The first officer starts with a hint. Look at that ice. Then a question. See those icicles? Then a suggestion. Let's check those wing tops. Each time, he's removing one layer of mitigation, getting closer and closer to what is really on his mind, which is that he's terrified. But only at the very end, does he finally get there. It's just after takeoff, as the plane plunges into the Potomac.

• 12:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  We're going down, Larry. And the captain says, "I know it."

• 12:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  Thomas Lane is in exactly the same position as that first officer on the plane. Both of them understand the gravity of the situation they're in. The plane has ice. The man on the ground is in trouble. But they have a superior who is fixated, who doesn't see what is happening, who is either incapable of processing any new information, or doesn't want to. And neither of the subordinates feel they can just come out and say, "No!" Because they're subordinates.

• 12:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  The state investigator questioning Lane about what happened that Memorial Day picked up on this very thing.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  You obviously bring it up, so it's clearly something you're thinking about. What prevented you from just kind of taking charge of that? And making the call?

• 13:00Speaker 04

  I was basically going off Officer Chauvin's experience and what he was saying, like this is, we're gonna hold here until you and I thrive.

• 13:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  Lane had been a police officer for four days. Then, he reveals another crucial fact. Listen.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Well, you had contact with him before the space flight.

• 13:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  Him, meaning Chauvin.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  You want me to get into this?

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  Okay, so um he was one of the other training officers in the precinct that I worked in um so I had interaction with Chauvin before um to the incident and uh you know he took me and taught me how to handle certain calls.

• 13:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  He had given me guidance on how to handle certain calls, he says.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Correct, I'm wrong, but you sounded like you used him as a resource during your 10-day evaluation.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was a few calls where um I was with another training officer and he um could give me advice on how to best handle a call, best handle a situation.

• 14:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  Thomas Lane's problem wasn't just that he had only been on the force for four days, that he was a rookie, and Chauvin was a 19-year veteran. It's that Lane knew Chauvin. He went to Chauvin for advice. How do you defy someone in that position?

• 14:30Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers, you can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 15:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  We spend hours researching products online and deciding what to buy, but there's a split-second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit the buy now button? The way we discover and compare things is evolving, happening faster and influenced by new forms of intelligent advice. But the underlying trust question doesn't go away. If anything, it's more important than ever. That's where PayPal comes in. For more than 25 years, they've been a trusted way to pay. And now PayPal can make the agentic era of commerce work for merchants, letting them maintain control of their brand, their customer relationships. So even as the way we shop changes, the moment that matters most still feels familiar and deeply dependable.

• 15:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  PayPal is built for all business. Get started at paypal.com/business. Purchase and sell protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply. See paypal.com/risk-management for details.

• 16:10Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 16:24Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 16:35Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 16:41Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 16:46Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 17:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  Not long ago, a retired Chicago police officer named Jerry Finnegan gave an interview to the Dog Walk Podcast, hosted by Eddie from Barstool Sports.

• 17:20Speaker 09

  I mean, honestly, Eddie, I loved, I loved that job. There isn't a day that goes by, I'm 61, and there's not a day that goes by that I'd say, fuck, I'd like to be out there, you know, fucking chasing these bad dudes.

• 17:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  Finnegan is fit, close cropped hair. I don't think a cop movie has ever been made that didn't include someone who looks and sounds just like Jerry Finnegan.

• 17:40Speaker 09

  The fucking adrenaline was just incredible. And, you know, I used to say it was like you would have ringside tickets to the greatest show on earth.

• 17:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Eddie and Finnegan talked for almost an hour. Finnegan was promoting his new podcast, the magnificently titled Finnegan's Take: Reminiscences from his years on the force. And at some point, Finnegan starts to speculate about why his path to promotion was so often blocked by his boss.

• 18:08Speaker 09

  I didn't know it at the time, Eddie, but I was, I had the most complaints in the city. Is that why he next to you? Probably. Yeah. Yeah, probably.

• 18:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  Wait. Chicago police officers are ranked by their complaints? The way pop music singles are ranked on the billboard charts? Yes, they are. The rankings are compiled by an organization called the Citizens Police Data Project. Their website consists of a searchable online database of 250,000 complaints lodged against members of the CPD from 1988 to 2018. And what you learn from looking at the list is that the distribution of problematic police officers within the Chicago Police Department is not uniform. Those quarter of a million complaints are not evenly sprinkled across all the many thousands of officers in the database.

• 19:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  A few cops have a lot of complaints, but the majority have almost none. If you made a graph out of the whole Chicago Police Department, there would be a long low line stretching as far as the eye could see, hovering just above the horizontal axis until the very end, when the line would suddenly jump. As the statisticians would say, the distribution of complaints has a fat tail. And who stands at the very fattest part of the tail? Jerry Finnegan, recipient of a grand total of 175 complaints.

• 19:39Speaker 09

  Do you remember the war, the day that you decide to go on the take, so to speak? Yeah. Can you get into that one? Sure, sure. We, we came into a house in the 11th district, chased a guy in there with a gun and searching around, found some dope that was bagged up, kept searching and found a paper bag with money. There were about eight of us and took the money out of there and then split it up. And then, I don't know, was nervous about it, but after it was over, I was thinking, fuck it, it's dope money. I'm not, I'm not taking it from, you know, your grandmother.

• 20:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  Finnegan ended up doing 10 years in prison for tax evasion and planning a murder-for-hire plot against a fellow officer. He also cost the city over a million dollars in legal settlements, which, given his position as the Lex Luthor of rogue Chicago police officers, shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Problems with fat tails turn out to be everywhere. Here's another one. New York City has 2,500 automated cameras, which in 2023 handed out seven million speeding tickets. But are those tickets evenly distributed across all the city's drivers?

• 20:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  No, there's a fat tail. There were 186 drivers who got more than 100 tickets in one year. That's an average of one ticket every three to four days. Superspeeders. Most of us get a ticket and slow down next time. We take the hint. Not the superspeeders. On average, that group of 186 each had $11,000 in unpaid traffic fines.

• 21:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  In my last book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, I had a whole chapter on COVID. You know what COVID was? Fat tail. Most of us, when we were infected with COVID, admitted such a small amount of virus that we didn't pose that much of a danger to others. But there are a very small number of people who, for reasons we don't entirely understand, when they have COVID, produce a massive amount of virus. Superspreaders. Those are the ones who cause outbreaks. I could go on. The lesson of New York's superspeeders and COVID's superspreaders is that before you figure out how to solve a problem, you have to ask yourself, am I dealing with a skinny-tail distribution where everyone plays a roughly equal part in contributing

• 22:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  to the issue? Or do I have a fat-tail distribution where my problem is a very small number of very rotten apples? The world's problems are divided into fat tails and skinny tails. And policing is most definitely fat tail.

• 22:28Speaker 10

  I mean, even you mentioned George Floyd. In Chicago, we had the Laquan McDonald shooting where he was murdered 16 times. He was shot by the cops. And those cops were in the top 6% of the police force. They'd been involved in payouts from the city for misconduct and use of force and tens of millions of dollars before the shooting.

• 22:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's Andrew Papakristos, a criminologist at Northwestern University. If you're a regular listener, you've heard him on this podcast before. He's talking about a police officer named Jason Van Dyke, another member of the Chicago Police Department use-of-force Peloton, who shot a teenager, Laquan McDonald, 16 times for no apparent reason.

• 23:12Speaker 10

  So if you had gotten rid of this small percentage or done something different besides shuffle them around, not only would you have saved lives, you would have saved tens of millions of dollars. You would have saved all of the trauma associated with Laquan McDonald's shooting, the unrest in the city, how it layered into these things.

• 23:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's not just, though, that the officers at the very edge of the distribution do more bad things than anyone else. It's that, and this is crucial, they lead others, people who wouldn't otherwise be in the fat tail, to do bad things as well.

• 23:45Speaker 10

  There are a bunch of studies, ours included, that show my bad behavior as a police officer is actually affected by the bad behavior of my partners. So over time, I'm going to look more like you.

• 23:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is called network spillover. And Papakristos was part of a group of criminologists who used the Citizens Police Data Project to figure out exactly how large this spillover effect is. They looked at that mountain of data and grouped all of the officers in networks, drawing lines between the people who worked together. They found that if there was no one in your network who received a use-of-force complaint, then your chance of getting a use-of-force complaint was minimal. But if you had even a modest number of aggressive officers in your circle, your chances of being accused of violence went up by 26%, which is massive.

• 24:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  And this is the problem with Derek Chauvin. He's in the Minneapolis Police Department's fat tail. He was the poster child for the Minneapolis fat tail. He had a mountain of complaints. And because he's a training officer, a 19-year veteran, the senior officer in nearly every crime scene he arrives at, he spills over into his network. If Chauvin had never shown up that night, if the second squad car never got called, if the whole incident was managed entirely by Lane and his partner, George Floyd would have lived. Thomas Lane would have rolled him over. There would have been no national eruption of pain and outrage. You wouldn't even know the name George Floyd.

• 25:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  But Chauvin shows up. That's the core of the problem on the corner of 38th and Chicago.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  I think anyone who sits through all of that evidence, you know, they hear the couple of times that Officer Lane talks about potentially rolling him over.

• 25:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's Manda Surtich, one of the US attorneys who prosecuted Lane. She knows the evidence well, and specifically the role Lane and his partner Alexander King played that day.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  I think he's actually the one who announces when George Floyd passes out, as though he's passing out.

• 26:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 05

  And then he's sitting right there next to King when King twice says, "I can't find a pulse." And they both continue to restrain him for more than two minutes after they know he doesn't have a pulse. I think that's the point where, I mean, it just becomes unacceptable not to intervene. Every, you know, it doesn't take any sort of training whatsoever, as the, you know, the witnesses on scene demonstrated. It doesn't take any training, or even more than a few years on the earth, to recognize that he needs medical assistance and you can't have someone beating on his neck.

• 26:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Lane ended up spending two and a half years in federal prison for his part in Floyd's death. Surtich and her colleagues felt that he bore at least some portion of the blame. I understand their argument, although I have to say, I do not agree with it. A rookie cop, on his fourth day on the force, tries to right a wrong and fails because his superior officer is a bad apple. Can we really blame him? Haven't all of us in other situations done a version of the same act of mitigated speech? Are you sure we should do that? That's a little much, don't you think? Is that really safe?

• 27:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  But where I hope we can all agree is on the broader lesson here. One bad apple can infect the whole barrel. The fat tail matters, which is why the first step in any attempt to fix a problem with a fat tail distribution is to get rid of the fat tail. Target: the superspeeders. Contain the superspreaders. Get rid of Jerry Finnegan. Stop Derek Chauvin before he kills someone, not afterwards. Right? If only it were that simple.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 28:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  We spend hours researching products online and deciding what to buy, but there's a split-second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit the buy now button? The way we discover and compare things is evolving, happening faster and influenced by new forms of intelligent advice. But the underlying trust question doesn't go away. If anything, it's more important than ever. That's where PayPal comes in. For more than 25 years, they've been a trusted way to pay. And now PayPal can make the agentic era of commerce work for merchants, letting them maintain control of their brand, their customer relationships. So even as the way we shop changes, the moment that matters most

• 29:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  still feels familiar and deeply dependable. PayPal is built for all business. Get started at paypal.com/business. Purchase and sell our protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply. See paypal.com/risk-management for details.

• 29:52Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 30:07Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 30:18Speaker 06

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 30:23Speaker 08

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 30:29Speaker 06

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 30:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  In the fevered days after Floyd died, there were hundreds of people on the streets of Minneapolis. Peaceful protests turned into riots and looting. Buildings were burned. Hundreds of millions of dollars of damage was done. And one night, the crowd came calling for Jacob Frye, the mayor of Minneapolis.

• 31:16Speaker 11

  There was a group of about 2,000 people that came to my home. And they demanded that I come out and talk to them. And I certainly was not in the habit of avoiding my position on the topic. And so my wife, who was seven months pregnant or so, said, "Yeah, get out there and just tell them the truth."

• 31:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  Frye was 39 at the time. He'd been elected mayor three years earlier.

• 31:44Speaker 11

  I have security or anything. I walked out there. They called me up to the front and asked if I would defund the police. And at the time, this was a very new phrase. And so I asked them what they meant by it. And they say, "Well, why don't you get rid of the police?" It was pretty clear. And I said, "No." And I got shamed and booed.

• 32:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  In the footage of the demonstration that played on the evening news, you can see the mayor walking stiffly through the crowd, wearing a mask that says, "I can't breathe."

• 32:24Speaker 11

  I mean, it was like Game of Thrones style, walking through a ton of people that were throwing things at me and spitting on me. But I was certain I did the right thing. There was no question in my mind that refusing to defund the police was the right thing to do.

• 32:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  Frye was following the logic of the fat tail. Yes, there may have been frustration with law enforcement at large. But if the problem is a small number of bad apples, then what sense is there in upending the whole institution? What you should be doing is cutting off the fat tail. The crowds outside chanted, "Defund the police." But in response, Fry started making a different argument. This is what the mayor said at one of the first of the many press conferences he gave after the death of George Floyd. "Unless we are willing to tackle the elephant in the room, which is the police union, there won't be a culture shift in the department." Could you talk a little bit more about that in the context of Minneapolis?

• 33:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  When you said that, what did you mean?

• 33:26Speaker 11

  So here's basically what happened over several decades with this collective bargaining agreement. The raises were limited in exchange for giving over to the police federation quite a bit of managerial authority. And so, the practice largely was, let's keep people's property taxes down so that you don't have these magnificent increases in wage. And in exchange for that, the chief will hand over authorities that should so obviously be with the chief.

• 34:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  The issue Fry is talking about, the police federation, or the union, having more authority than it should, has become a common complaint in many other cities as well.

• 34:17Speaker 12

  Everyone thinks that a police chief should just get rid of bad cops.

• 34:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's Daniel Oates. He started his career in the 1980s in the NYPD and rose to be chief of four separate big-city police departments. After George Floyd was killed, he wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post. You can be forgiven if you missed it. It was a pretty technical analysis of law enforcement collective bargaining agreements.

• 34:42Speaker 12

  What I tried to explain in that Post article is that we, as a democracy, in all the societies in which I worked, the four major cities in which I worked, the voters created inhibitors to the police chief.

• 34:58Speaker 12

  Simply firing someone who deserves to be fired.

• 35:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  At one point in his career, Oates was chief of police in Aurora, Colorado, a mid-sized suburb of Denver. He had 650 officers in his department. In his more than eight years as chief, there were 16 he wanted to fire. That was his fat tail. A very small number of his officers were proving to be a problem. They were violent, they had drinking problems. He caught them lying on their field reports, on and on. He negotiated complicated severance agreements with 12 of the 16. They agreed to leave the Aurora PD, but with a clean record, so it was possible for them to get a job somewhere else.

• 35:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  The remaining four, he fired, but then in three of those cases, his decision was reversed on appeal. So of the 16 bad apples who he thought were not worthy of a role in law enforcement, he succeeded in removing one. The problem is that many police union contracts are full of provisions that hamper internal investigations of wrongdoing. In a normal criminal investigation, the police question any suspect as soon as possible. But in investigations of allegations against officers, many unions delay that first round of questioning for days, if not weeks, long enough for stories to be straightened out.

• 36:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  And before that first interview in some cities, the police department has to hand over all of its evidence and witnesses in advance to the defendant's attorney, a practice that would be highly unusual in a standard criminal investigation. Daniel Oates says that he ran into this problem when he was called in to clean up the Miami Beach Police Department.

• 36:49Speaker 12

  So as you can imagine, once you pour over all the evidence with your attorney, you understand what management has and what management can prove, and you can tailor your answers to questions so as to avoid the worst possible sanction. Effectively...

• 37:08Speaker 13

  If necessary, you know, if to save your job, you can lie because you know management can't disprove the law.

• 37:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  Did they, did they change that provision in your time there?

• 37:19Speaker 13

  No, no, it's still state law and law.

• 37:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  How much did that in the end frustrate your ability to improve the quality of policing in Miami Beach?

• 37:27Speaker 13

  It makes it extremely challenging.

• 37:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  A small number of officers betray the standards of the profession, but unions protect that fat tail. It's not the 95% of honest, hardworking police officers who need an extra few weeks to get their story straight, or who require advanced access to all the evidence and witnesses against them. Jerry Finnegan needs all those things. Derek Chauvin needs all those things. Somehow, a system intended to serve the interests of the many in the thin tail has ended up serving the interests of the crooked few in the fat tail.

• 38:07Speaker 13

  I can tell you this, that nobody despises bad cops more than good cops.

• 38:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's Kathleen O'Toole. She ran both the Seattle and Boston Police Departments.

• 38:17Speaker 13

  When I fired people, inevitably, I received countless messages from other police officers who said, "Well, chief, that should have happened 10 years ago."

• 38:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Now, suppose, even given all these impediments, a police chief does manage to terminate a problematic officer. The fight isn't over. There is one final impediment, maybe the biggest of all. The officer has the right of appeal. In many cases, the accused officer is allowed to restart the entire process from scratch, only this time not with an impartial judge, but with an arbitrator that the union plays a role in choosing. With the result, well, you can guess. A law professor in Chicago named Stephen Russian recently made a list of how often a fired police officer gets reinstated on appeal in most big American cities.

• 39:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Ready? Miami-Dade, 37%. Oklahoma City, 40%. Phoenix, 40%. Washington DC, 45%. Philadelphia, 62%. Denver, 67%. And finally, the grand prize winner, San Antonio, 70%. And where did this exact scenario play out? Minneapolis, in the years leading up to the death of George Floyd.

• 39:45Speaker 11

  There are more than a few instances when we have terminated someone. It works its way up through that arbitration, and the arbitration then overturns the decision that we made. How does that feel for a chief who's making tough calls? You make the tough call, you spend a ton of attorney time litigating a case, and then you ultimately lose, that person comes back on. How does that help culture? Because that same person is going to talk to all the other officers, saying, hey, I did this thing, I got off. This whole concept of a chief making a decision to terminate or discipline and having that decision overturned is detrimental to that chief's ability to run a police department and shift the culture. They gotta be able to set the tone.

• 40:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Jacob Fry had firsthand evidence of what happens when you can't set the tone. Derek Chauvin. He didn't suddenly emerge as a bad apple on the night of May 25th, 2020. He'd been a bad apple for a long time. You heard the tape in the last episode. In 2017, he beat a kid over the head with a flashlight, opening a wound that required stitches, then put him in a chokehold, threw him on the ground, and put his knee on his neck, while the boy sobbed in pain, all for no reason. That was his trademark move. The other officers didn't say anything, they just walked silently out of the room. So the bad apple stayed in the barrel for three more years, until he comes across George

• 41:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  Floyd on the corner of 38th and Chicago, and puts his knee on his neck, and just stays there, even after Floyd has stopped breathing.

• 41:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  And Thomas Lane tries to get him to stop multiple times, but then he just gives up and sits there on Floyd's dead body, just like Derek Chauvin.

• 41:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Nadaf-Haferi. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking, Sam Rusak. Mastering by Jake Gorski. Production support from Luke Lemaire. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and El Hafe, credit cone. I'm Malcolm Gaba.

• 42:19Malcolm Gladwell?

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