Listen to the Silence

A knee across the neck will not (except for very rare circumstances, or circumstances involving deliberate impact, not simple pressure) cause death.  The death in Minneapolis was NOT caused by a knee on the neck.  It was caused by positional asphyxiation.  They are two different things.   They are two very technically different things, and the differences are fairly technical and specific.   But they are also fairly simple - and extremely important.  Because you can say you "accidentally" put a knee on the "wrong part" of the back, and it slipped onto the neck.  You can NOT say that you left a man, face down, chest muscles seized due to skeletal-muscular constriction/positioning, for seven and a half minutes..."accidentally".  One, a knee on the neck, can be claimed to be bad training, or an accident.  The other, positional asphyxiation, is murder.  Plain.   Simple.  Murder.  When you handcuff the hands behind the back of most people (save contortionists,

Minneapolis is Burning.  The city on the lake is on fire, and not just with tension, racial and economic.   It's literally on fire, as police are forced to abandon their stations, and fires go untreated as the sheer press of bodies keeps firefighters and first responders from being able to respond to alarms.  And for the first time, I have to think... maybe this time its' right.  In Minneapolis, an officer committed murder, while wearing the shield and uniform that I've considered sacrosanct for the 40 years of my life.   Before I could pronounce the words to the oath, I considered the badge of an Officer something sacred.  It was up there with the uniform of an Army Officer or a Marine.  You took it, and the oath that came with it, and you bound yourself to a meaning larger than yourself.  Only God, and your brothers (and sisters) could judge what you had done, and be the final arbiter of whether you deserved to be called a good cop, or a disgrace to the badge.  But lately