[CLIP] The Truth About George Floyd's Death: Liz Collin

For the very first time, you have the mayor, the chief of police, holding multiple press conferences. Also, the chief, I knew, called in the FBI that very night, just hours after this unfolded. Clearly, I had a very unique perspective with my husband's job. But as a reporter, you have them holding press conferences and saying things like this, whatever's happening there at 38th and Chicago with George Floyd, this isn't a part of police training. We've never seen this maneuver before. What I observed was not training that I ever participated in, none that I observed other officers participating in. And just as a reporter, I went to the Minneapolis police Web site, where they've always had their manual online for years. And there are two pages that are mysteriously missing from the manual at that time. And so I knew that something more was at work here. They also said that George Floyd had never been arrested before. Minneapolis police never had anything to do with him. And that was also not true. A year earlier, he was the subject of an undercover drug investigation in 2019. And if you play the body camera footage next to the body camera footage in 2020, they're eerily similar as to what played out. But more than anything, it was the body camera footage from that incident in 2020 that they hid from the public. And that has never happened before in any type of critical incident. This is the point of body cameras on Minneapolis police officers that taxpayers paid for years ago to increase transparency. So again, all of this was hidden and manipulated. And I knew that very early, very early on. And with respect to this body cam footage being withheld, you knew that because your husband was head of the police union, and that's, I guess, some of the first people that get that footage, right? And he knew something was obviously off here too, that the union wasn't allowed to view this. It was ultimately withheld for about two and a half months altogether. And I still think to this day, most people have never seen that entire encounter with George Floyd, which is why we wanted to start the film with just that. Well, why do you think the footage was withheld so long? I think there's so much more to that encounter that people in power didn't want people to know. You have George Floyd who's very resistant from the very beginning. George Floyd is talking about how he can't breathe long before Derek Chauvin even arrives on scene. I'm a black man. I can't breathe. You have a black officer who arrests George Floyd that day. Alex King is black. It didn't fit the narrative. And he'll be the first to tell you that in the film as well. You have also George Floyd who's pulled out of a cramped vehicle at the time, but yet he says he's claustrophobic and can't be put into the back of a squad car. You have Thomas Lane who calls for an ambulance 36 seconds after George Floyd is placed on the ground. And I should say that George Floyd himself asks to be placed on the ground because he does not want to get in the back of that squad. George Floyd is also saying again and again that he didn't take anything. He's not on anything. And I should say also, this MRT, they make reference to it in the body camera footage as well. Let's take him out and just MRE him. So there's a reason that they tried to keep it hidden. So I want to talk about that briefly. That's maximal restraint technique, right? MRT is standard usage. It's in all the manuals. People are trained in it. You have multiple police officers talking about that. And then you have footage of the chief of police on the stand saying that that method, which apparently Derek Chauvin used in a literally textbook way, is not part of what police officers in Minneapolis do. When you saw that, how did you react to that? There was so much of this that I kept saying, they're lying. They are lying. I put a book out first about all this called They're Lying, the Media, the Left, and the Death of George Floyd. And this film is based on that. But I really couldn't believe all along, you know, this dragged out not just for months, but for years, how people were so quickly to lie and then to go along with it. And nobody seemed to want to call them out. So you have the chief of police under oath say that MRT is not a part of police training. I must ask you, is this a trained Minneapolis Police Department defensive tactics technique? It is not. You have the head of training then, Inspector Katie Blackwell, who says the same thing. Is this a trained technique that's by the Minneapolis Police Department when you were overseeing the training unit? It is not. Not just recently. This is training that dates back decades. We found a police training manual from 1993 that specifically talks about MRT. I really think that the trial transpired 10 months after the death of George Floyd, but that really sent a message about the damage that lies can do. Something that's also very stark that not a lot of people know about, but I think an increasing number have more recently, is that there were multiple autopsy reports. I think that's why we wanted to lay this out in the film the way we did, just to give a sense of the timeline. You actually have George Floyd's autopsy finished within 12 hours of his death. George Floyd was a healthy young man. So keep in mind, this is long before any buildings burn in Minneapolis or across the country, for that matter. But then all of a sudden you have the FBI involved in interviews with the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker. You also have prosecutors involved interviewing him multiple times as a week sort of goes by. And again, this is all part of public documentation, as this narrative changes a bit from the original findings 12 hours after his death. And we wanted to go into that a bit. And really the point of the film here, too, isn't so much that this is what you need to think about this. It's more here's all the information that was kept from you, question why it was kept from you. And then you can go ahead and decide for yourself. You have no strangulation marks. There was no asphyxiation, no bruising to the neck. You have three times the lethal limit of fentanyl in George Floyd's system. You have George Floyd who has a tumor that there are still questions as to why more testing wasn't done on that tumor. He has 75 percent blockage in one artery going to his heart. He recently recovered from COVID. We had many medical professionals for the book and film review his medical records and they all describe him really as kind of a ticking time bomb in a way. There's so much going on. However, you have the autopsy, the official autopsy from Dr. Andrew Baker released on the same day that George Floyd's family releases what they call an independent autopsy. And that's what the mainstream media went with. They called it an independent autopsy. But these were two medical examiners bought and paid for essentially by George Floyd's family. And they were released on the exact same day. So one also should perhaps wonder why that was. Did they have direct access to George Floyd's body? No. They did not. It was not an actual official autopsy. The only autopsy with the actual body of George Floyd was conducted by Dr. Andrew Baker. You also have Dr. Andrew Baker who admits, well, basically I should say there's some grand jury testimony that points to this, that he's asked if he faced any pressure to change his autopsy or come to a certain conclusion when it came to his autopsy. And he asks to first consult with his lawyer before he can answer that question under oath as part of that grand jury proceeding, and then comes back two hours later to answer the question. So there's a lot of things that happened that the public wasn't aware of. This is a quote from testimony, it just happens that this is one of the things I pulled that I think you put up on the screen. And Dr. Baker, and I quote, he said to me, Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn't match up with the public narrative that everyone's already decided upon? And then he said, this is the kind of case that ends careers. Yeah, so he's ultimately admitting very early on how much pressure his office is facing. And I also don't think that, I think that that pressure spread all over as part of this justice system. Also within the police department, the public, the media, I think everybody was able to feel that it was certainly palpable at that time. But yeah, you're right, that comes from an actual deposition that recently came to light that talks more about the pressure that they were facing. And in fact, we know now because of those depositions that the two prosecutors who were basically the head of the use of force department, if you will, within the Hennepin County Attorney's Office did not want to charge the three other officers at all. They said morally and ethically, they didn't feel comfortable going forward with charges. And this is when you have the Attorney General of Minnesota sort of swoop in and takes over the case. And he ultimately charges the three other officers with aiding and abetting murder all within that week. Don't forget to subscribe to our Alerts newsletter, and you'll never miss an episode.