If you’ve not heard of Gell-Mann Amnesia, it’s a real thing. The term was coined by Michael Crichton and it was named for a renowned physicist who was upset that a news report got it all wrong when writing about a subject in which Dr. Gell-Mann had a great deal of expertise. Nearly simultaneously, he’d mentioned another story in the same outlet on a topic in which he had no expertise – relating that he found that story believable.

The loss of credibility the media outlet suffered didn’t even last a moment.

It may have been Mark Twain – or maybe not – who said “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the paper, you’re misinformed.”

Relying on the idiocy that is corporate media is avoiding the fact that all their stories are suspect because they have a side; they’re not relaying facts, but beliefs, guesses, suppositions and balderdash.

For example, we’re to believe the Minneapolis cop was a racist. Could be. It could also be something else.

Maybe he’s just a badge-heavy SOB. Perhaps he had other issues . . . I wonder, did he have to submit to chem screening after the arrest attempt became a homicide?

If not, why not? If he shot someone, that’d be just one of the many things that would be done.

Sudden custody death is real, it’s not new and it’s something we’ve long dealt with. If he was simply a murderous thug, don’t you think he’d have found another way to scratch that itch – instead of doing it in front of throngs of witnesses? Apparently the other cops present didn’t see a problem – oh, and they may have been ethnically mixed, throwing some shade on the racism trope.

In support of it, media sources say that the object of the exercise had either 15, 10 or four internal investigations with at least one outlet indicating that four complaints were handled by a “civilian” (sic) review board. Those were reported as consisting principally of attitude and language issues – but who really knows? A person at the club where he’d worked off-duty security for many years said he could get very ‘hard core.’

Finally, according to one source, an apparent fact: the allegation of wrongdoing.

“Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease,” said the complaint from the Hennepin County Attorney. “The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.”

Let’s actually look at policing in America now that we disposed of corporate media dumpster fires. I’ve spent the last three days or so looking at online issues of department policy, read the analysis of some on ‘allowed’ training on-duty and off, and listened to folks who always did know a lot about custody deaths.

Generally, if someone wants to kill someone, they find a way to do it and do it with intent. On occasion, death occurs when it wasn’t intended, but tempers got out of hand, one thing led to another and someone died.

This isn’t news, but another day at the office. Sometimes, death is not only not intended, but avoided, but circumstances combine to make the situation untenable and the in-custody person dies. One could say it’s an accident, but we really seem to know enough about custody deaths that there’s some implication that behavior that leads to it can be actionable at criminal law.

I don’t pretend to know what was on the officer’s mind. As to his victim, we at least have something. I talked to a career cop-use of force trainer instructor and all-around good guy yesterday. He said he got the feeling that if Mr. Floyd had fled from the police and ran any distance at all – based only on what we may or may not know from media – they could well have found him down and expired due to preexisting medical maladies.

As to the agencies, where to start? It’s ‘damage control’ in appearance. At worst, it could be deliberate indifference in failing to train officers -- in mechanics of arrest, constitutional limits on uses of force, control & custody, sudden in-custody death syndrome. One could possibly conclude it’s a failure in leadership, conspiring to violate civil rights through laziness and incompetence, and maybe negligent retention. If we test still-active officers of that agency on these topics -- acute exhaustive mania, excited delirium, and threat of sudden custody death – could they pass?

We’ve been telling the bosses about that for more than 30 years. But who needs that when you can allow situations that lead to misery through civil unrest, mob violence and political finger-pointing?

- - Rich Grassi