Revisionist History · Pushkin Industries

Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1

March 13, 2025·33 min·3 clips

Malcolm Gladwell realized he didn't understand what Derek Chauvin was doing when he rewatched the George Floyd video years later.

Malcolm Gladwell opens by stating that when he rewatched the George Floyd video years after the killing, far from the emotional intensity of 2020, he realized he did not understand what he was watching—and that this unfamiliarity was the point of the episode. He begins with Jenna Scurry, a 911 dispatcher with seven years' experience who was monitoring a city camera on 38th and Chicago when the call came in about Floyd. She watched officers attempt to put Floyd in a squad car, looked away, and when she looked back after what felt like an impossible amount of time, nothing had changed: Chauvin was still on Floyd's neck with his hand in his pocket, looking impassive. She asked a colleague if the screen had frozen. She then called her sergeant—something she had never done for an incident like this. Gladwell uses this detail to establish that Chauvin's behavior was not just cruel but clinically strange, recognizable to a trained observer as something had gone wrong. The episode then introduces Gary Klein's concept of fixation from the book Sources of Power: a decision-maker who cannot accept new information and explains away every counter-indicator that challenges their original conception. Klein studied the Israeli intelligence chief Elie Zera, who was so fixated on his conception that Egypt would not attack without air superiority that he dismissed every piece of intelligence suggesting otherwise until two hours before the Yom Kippur War began. Gladwell applies the same framework to Chauvin: Floyd's body language signaling distress was reinterpreted as continued resistance; Genevieve Hansen's firefighter identification was reinterpreted as a potential threat; a fellow officer's suggestion to move Floyd to the recovery position was dismissed. Ken Dodge's hostile intent attribution theory provides a developmental explanation: children of abusive or unpredictable parents learn to default to assuming threat because it is the safest assumption, and this adaptive response becomes maladaptive when carried into adulthood and policing. Gladwell then introduces a 2017 body cam video of Chauvin responding to a call about a 14-year-old boy, who was sitting on his bedroom floor on his phone. Chauvin struck the boy over the head with a flashlight, put him in a chokehold, threw him to the ground, and knelt on his neck for 15 minutes while the boy's mother screamed. The boy was eventually allowed to get up and walk away. Gladwell says he finds himself crying every time he watches this video, not because it is worse than the Floyd video but because of a child. Multiple officers filed out of the room during the incident; one turned his body cam to the wall. Chauvin remained on the force for three more years. The episode is measured in tone, built carefully, and deeply moral without being preachy. Essential for anyone interested in police use of force, decision-making under pressure, or criminal justice. Works well as a standalone episode but rewards listeners who follow the series.

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