A new documentary reveals the body camera footage that was hidden from the public.
Jan Jekielek: You’ve made an astonishing film. You’ve used body cam footage from the police officers involved in the arrest of George Floyd, including Derek Chauvin, that was withheld for a long time. You put it together telling a very different story than the world is aware of. How did you get into this so deeply?
Liz Collin: I like to say this isn’t a story I ever set out to tell. I was a member of the mainstream media for nearly 20 years. I worked about 14 years of that at a CBS station in Minneapolis, where I was an anchor and reporter. At the time this all unfolded on May 25, 2020, I was married and am still married to the former union president of the Minneapolis Police Department.
More than anything, I was troubled as a journalist seeing this unfold, because the media was privy to all of this information. Instead of trying to get at the facts of the case and push back against these narratives that we knew weren’t true, there was this fear that permeated the air in Minneapolis and across the country. You had to go this one way and not bother about facts and what we saw happening with our justice system.
Mr. Jekielek: You knew the day after these traumatic events that something was really off.
Ms. Collin: The very next day, you have the mayor and the chief of police holding multiple press conferences. I knew the chief called in the FBI that very night, just hours after this unfolded. Clearly, I had a unique perspective with my husband’s job. But as a reporter, you have them holding press conferences and saying things like, “Whatever happened at 38th and Chicago with George Floyd isn’t a part of police training. We’ve never seen this maneuver before.” They also said that George Floyd had never been arrested before, which was not true.
But more than anything, it was the body camera footage from 2020 that they hid from the public. That has never happened before in any type of critical incident. 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.
You have George Floyd resistant from the beginning, talking about how he can’t breathe long before Derek Chauvin even arrives on scene.
You have a black officer who arrests George Floyd that day, Alex Kueng. That didn’t fit the narrative, and he'll be the first to tell you that in the film as well. You have Thomas Lane, who calls for an ambulance 36 seconds after George Floyd is placed on the ground. George Floyd himself asks to be placed on the ground because he doesn’t want to get in that squad car. George Floyd is also saying again and again that he didn’t take anything and he’s not on anything. I should also say, regarding this MRT [Maximal Restraint Technique], they make reference to it in the body camera footage as well.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s called maximal restraint technique, correct? MRT is standard usage, and people are trained in it. Then you have footage of the chief of police on the stand saying that that method, which Derek Chauvin used in a textbook way, is not part of what police officers in Minneapolis do. When you saw that, how did you react?
Ms. Collin: I first put a book out about all this called “They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and the Death of George Floyd,” and this film is based on that. I really couldn’t believe how people were so quick to lie, and nobody seemed to want to call them out. The chief of police, under oath, says that MRT is not a part of police training. The head of training, then Inspector Katie Blackwell, says the same thing.
Mr. Jekielek: And there were multiple autopsy reports.
Ms. Collin: You have George Floyd’s autopsy finished within 12 hours of his death. You have no strangulation marks, no asphyxiation, no bruising to the neck. You have three times the lethal limit of fentanyl in George Floyd’s system. George Floyd has a tumor, and 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.
It wasn’t so much what the jury was allowed to see, but what they weren’t allowed to see. We talk about this body camera footage. This is about an 18-minute interaction with George Floyd that day. It’s the 90 seconds at the end that the jury is allowed to see in trial, and that’s it.
Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been in the media for 20 years. How does this investigation compare with others you’ve done?
Ms. Collin: To manipulate a story like this to hide things from the public is a testament to poor leadership where nobody was willing to speak the truth. I’ve never seen corruption at this level before. But I knew that I also had a unique perspective and needed to do something.
I would challenge people to share the film with as many people as possible. Not one mainstream station has yet to reach out for an interview, but that is the state of affairs in the media. But we have to be able to talk about this, and I hope this does change some hearts and minds.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
