Derek Chauvin & Steele

Hey all,

This morning I received this email from someone who watched “What Killed Michael Brown?” I’m copying and pasting what the individual wrote:

I just finished watching the documentary film What Killed Michael Brown? and loved it. I agreed with Shelby Steele’s many insights in the film. Except for one part. Toward the end of the film, Steele says, "George Floyd was the victim of indisputable police brutality." He’s wrong, just 100% wrong. Watch “The Fall of Minneapolis” and you will see how he is wrong. Glenn Loury and John McWhorter agree with this documentary and with the fact that Chauvin did not murder Floyd, nor was he wrong in any way during the ordeal. Coleman Hughes agrees, too. Chauvin did everything by the book and should be exonerated. You need to change Steele’s line — a black mark on an otherwise excellent documentary - and put the new version back out there.

This is not the first time I have received a letter like this one. When we first released “What Killed Michael Brown?” in 2020, a woman who was a mother of a Colorado police officer wrote an impassioned letter saying that Chauvin got a bad rap. I wrote back, politely disagreeing with her.

Since then, I have received about 25 emails over the years making the same point and they increased in intensity after Candace Owens released her amateurish defense of Chauvin, which was followed up by “The Fall of Minneapolis.” What fascinated me was the need by these folks to find Chauvin innocent and also the anger that was directed at me for not jumping on the bandwagon. (We Steeles don’t jump on any bandwagon.) We made a film that documented the facts on the ground in Ferguson and we earned the conclusion that Officer Darren Wilson had done what he had to do because “he feared for his life,” as my father says in the film. Why didn’t these people not believed that we applied the same due diligence to Chauvin?

I watched “The Fall of Minneapolis” and I did not come to the same conclusion as others did.

While there were many interesting moments in “The Fall of Minneapolis” it was mostly background for me and amounted to case-building that was not effective enough to change my mind. Here’s why. The fatal flaw in that film was that they never examined the original 9 minute video that shows Floyd dying while in police custody.

For me, this is a failure as a filmmaker. You can't talk about the Pope without talking about Catholicism. And if you’re going to make a case that Chauvin was unfairly treated then you have to put those 9 minutes on the table. Otherwise, you open yourself up to charges of not being credible.

It was during these 9 minutes that a younger cop asked if Chauvin if they should ease up. Chauvin didn’t. Later, the same young cop repeated the question again and Chauvin remained statuesque. There is no dispute that Floyd had fatal amounts of drugs in his system and may have died on his own.

However, it is also true that Floyd was in police custody and that an officer’s core job is to protect and serve — a form of public trust, a standard that must be kept exceedingly high. The reality is that Chauvin did not respond to the life leaving the body beneath him as bystanders screamed that he was dying/dead. The lack of empathy in Chauvin’s face was striking and he bears responsibility for how he acted in that moment. I have spoken with officers who have said they would never have behaved the way Chauvin did and that hiding behind training manuals is not an excuse for failing to recognize the humanity of the situation.

One officer said very simply that no two situations are ever the same and that is why individual judgment is paramount and often comes into play. Chauvin’s individual judgment to do what he did was on full display that moment.

All of this happened. It's real. It’s on tape.

When we made “What Killed Michael Brown?” we did not shy away from showing Michael Brown's dead body on that boiling hot asphalt. (When I was filming shots the day before the 4th anniversary, I could not keep my knee on the ground more than 30 seconds before the heat was too much.) We showed that ugly footage right upfront and we went right at it and addressed it head on. This made our film human and complex. And most of all it did not change our overall argument.

That is why the failure of the filmmakers behind “The Fall of Minneapolis” to address the nine minute sequence that shook the world was so glaring and led me to be suspicious of the film’s conclusions.

There were also several claims that this documentary provided new footage of Floyd’s arrest and this was simply not true. I saw the extended footage of Floyd’s arrest while editing “What Killed Michael Brown?” — it was available then — and that is why I had no issues with my father making his statement that "George Floyd was the victim of indisputable police brutality."

It is important to note that we did not absolve Floyd of any responsibility in choosing a path in life that led to his death. At the same time, we would be remiss if we did not hold Chauvin responsible for his job and his sacred duty to "protect and serve." He did not protect. He defied.

I don’t believe I’m overstepping when I say that every single one of us would not wish such nonchalance from the arm of our government toward our loved one, even a derelict human on the verge of death.

In any case, this battle over exonerating Chauvin does not change our larger point: that like what happened in Ferguson, the Left would seek to exploit Floyd's death for its enormous reservoir of power, and they did. Chauvin has every right to appeal his sentence and he should. But the world ran away with the optics — the optics, not the facts — that arose out of Floyd’s death, just like Michael Brown’s, and that is the true battle before us.

We stand by our film 100%.

All my best,

Eli

PS, some of you complained that you were not able to access the t-shirt link in the previous email so I’m reposting here in hopes that solves the problem. If not, please reply to this email: