Jake Tapper resurrects original police statement on the George Floyd murder

(Image credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

published 20 April 2021

With the dust settled — for now — on the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who on Tuesday was convicted of murdering George Floyd, several journalists, including CNN's Jake Tapper, resurrected the original Minneapolis Police Department statement regarding Floyd's death last May.

The vague press release said only that a man had a "medical incident" during an arrest, officers called an ambulance, and the suspect died at a hospital. "At no time were weapons of any type used by anyone involved in this incident," the statement reads. There was no mention of Chauvin pressing his knee into Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes.

Some commentators said re-reading the statement nearly a year later "hits hard," while others cited it as an example of why readers should be skeptical of initial police statements on police-involved incidents. "This fabricated police story might have become the official account of George Floyd's death if concerned citizens had not intervened and recorded the police," Tapper's colleague Keith Boykin tweeted.

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.

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