Introduction
No other case has captured the public’s attention in recent times, more than the trial and sentencing of Derek Chauvin, a former police officer, for the killing of George Floyd. His imprisonment is a culmination of the fateful events of May 25, 2020, when a routine police response to a 911 call spiraled into an unfortunate manifestation of the influence of racial prejudice on law enforcement. Four officers disregarded department policies in the execution of the arrest (Hill et al., 2020). Notably, Chauvin employed a fatal maneuver that suffocated Floyd and rendered him unconscious. He pinned him to the ground with a knee to his neck for at least eight minutes and did not remove it for more than a minute after paramedics arrived and Floyd had lost consciousness (Hill et al., 2020). While this case is unarguably a textbook example of the brutality, discrimination, and prejudice by police officers against African-Americans, some consider the officer’s resort to force under the circumstances as justifiable. However, from a communication perspective, the fateful outcome was avoidable had the officers embraced a collaborative, rather than confrontational, approach that would have facilitated the de-escalation of the situation.
The Communication Concern in the Chauvin-Floyd Interaction
The underlying concern raised by the interaction between Floyd and Chauvin as well as the other three police officers is that a breakdown of communication before and during the arrest led to the escalation. A further complication derived from the continued violations by the police officers in the form of brutality meted out against the suspect and failure to heed his requests for help (Hill et al., 2020). Unfortunately, the way Chauvin and his colleagues handled Floyd’s arrest is reflective of the typical interplay in communication between law enforcement and suspects within the parameters set by law. Police officers traditionally deploy an authoritative and confrontational, rather than cooperative, approach to communication. According to the cooperative principle, sufficient detail (quantity), candor (quality), relevance (relationship), and non-ambiguity (manner) are imperative (Chen, 2019). As demonstrated below, the quantity and manner maxims of the cooperative principle were absent from the Chauvin-Floyd interaction that, combined with adversarial pragmatic cues, resulted in a communication breakdown.
The failure of effective communication between the officers and the suspect undoubtedly contributed to the unfortunate outcome. As noted, the circumstances are indicative of the absence of the components of the cooperative principle. First, the officers did not provide an adequate level of detail required to execute a proper arrest and, second, ambiguity and excessive confusion underlined the situation. These conclusions are discernible from reports that Floyd had been asleep in the car just before the incident began, and that it had been difficult to rouse him when the police arrived (Dewans & Arango, 2021). It necessarily follows that the suspect woke up dazed, confused, and encountered four police officers shouting commands at him and, therefore, could not possibly fathom what was going on at that moment. Further, the pragmatic information—police commands—coupled with their overall demeanor only antagonized the suspect further considering the history of police encounters with Black people in the US. Accordingly, the entire encounter was confrontational from the onset thereby leaving no chance for the tenets of the cooperative principle to take hold.
Changing the communication and interaction approach by law enforcement agents is the best way to avert similar occurrences in the future and minimize the seeming runway trend of police brutality engulfing the country. There is an urgent need to erase the confrontational mindset that currently prevails among police officers and emphasize the need for soft authority. Accordingly, teaching police officers about the cooperative communication approach and training them on how to apply it in all situations should become a priority. Accordingly, they will have the capacity to approach contentious situations in a way that de-escalates the situation rather than stoke tensions like in Floyd’s case. Officers must also learn to listen to the suspects and anyone in the vicinity. For example, Chauvin failed to listen to Floyd’s protests that he could not breathe and he even ignored the paramedics when they arrived. The outcome would have been different if he had listened to the suspect, the paramedics, and the onlookers.
Conclusion
This discourse contends that the Chauvin-Floyd interaction is an apt example of the inadequacy of the legal parameters that define the communication and interactions between police officers and suspects. The prevailing structures are defective in that, instead of embracing the cooperative approach, they foster an adversarial method that usually results in communication breakdowns that often lead to fatal outcomes. Accordingly, the concern in the present case is that a communication breakdown caused by the officers’ confrontational approach resulted in Floyd’s death. The likelihood of a better outcome would have been higher if the officers had adopted a cooperative approach. The racial bias issue is also inevitable considering that the deployment of these combative strategies usually targets specific ethnic minorities. Accordingly, law enforcement must change their present stance and adopt a cooperative communication approach to minimize and eliminate potentially fatal communication breakdowns between officers and suspects.
References
Chen, Z. (2019). On English conversations from the perspective of cooperative principle and politeness principle. Advances in Social Science, Education, and Humanities Research, 371, 443-447.
Dewan, S., & Arango, T. (2021). In early testimony for the defense, the witness says Chauvin’s force was ‘justified’. The New York Times. Web.
Hill, E., Tiefenthäler, A., Triebert, C., Jordan, D., Willis, H., & Stein, R. (2021). How George Floyd was killed in police custody. The New York Times. Web.