9 minutes

9 minutes. I watched, and I still can't understand how you sustain applied violence like that for 9 minutes, without a complete disconnect from normalcy.

9 minutes. Begging, pleading, unable to struggle, and in complete control of 4 officers. I don't give an actual fuck if he was a criminal or not...if he's not an active threat, deadly force is not fucking authorized.

9 minutes. How long is that? I will probably finish writing this post in less time. That's a goddamn eternity in which any reasonable officer had 540 opportunites to take a second and back off to a less violent position. There were 3 officers on him, by the way. One applying pressure over his abdomen. Over his diaphragm, which happens to be a thing we use to fucking breathe. There's a reverse angle a lot of people haven't seen yet, a photo taken from the other side of the street.

9 entire minutes. That's longer than people pay attention, and time to run the commercial break. Modern producers will add a recap after that length of time on any HGTV show. They cannot redecorate this man's death.

9 whole goddamn minutes. To pin a neck for that long, you have to be a fucking sociopath. I grew up with cops, have cop clients, have cop friends. None of them think this was excusable. Hell, my neighbor when I was a kid was a cop who did in fact choke a man to death. That suspect never stopped trying to stab him with the knife, until he was out. The two incidents are apples and platypuses.

9 entire fucking minutes. That was a fucking execution. Note how this one stands out...nobody has brought forth any dirt on him, nobody has printed a story that he was resisting, or overweight, or had underlying conditions. That's because we all saw it for what it was. We all see it for what it is.

We need to remember this for more than 9 fucking minutes. The time for action, for reform, for creating a better path forward is not 9 minutes from now.

It IS now.