Ho wolly shit! Are you kidding?! In the picture that shows the video, that is a big cop with his knee on a smaller cops's neck. By the looks of it, his knee goes all the way from the base of his skull to the top of his shoulders. What is in between? NECK! The smaller cop isn't a turtle. His neck isn't retracted into his body.
OK, compare the center of the knee to the mouth. The center of the knee is right above the mouth, that would put the knee further back from the mouth, between the mouth and the ear. That is the jaw. If neck is lower than the jaw, so the jaw can hold the weight of the police officer, protecting the neck. I would not want to risk it, but it would work 90% of the time.
The person being held down can help avoid being strangled by slightly shrugging. He does not need to be a turtle to make his neck thin enough to not easily fit a knee over it. In fact, if you shrug as much as you can, and put your chin to your chest, you can have almost no neck to catch.
Alternatively, if the police officer wants to strangle the person on the ground, he can try to work his knee into the neck and around the higher jaw and shoulder bone. Even if he does not want to strangle the person, the police officer can slip and hit the neck.
If he hits the neck from the back, there is still some hope. If he hits the neck from the front, there are going to be major problems very quickly.
I will point out that if you look at George Floyd, you will notice he had a prominent neck. He was a big man, and his neck looks even slightly bigger than he is. That gives the police officer more room to fit his knee in between the head and the body.
If you watch it, you will SEE that having a knee on the neck doesn't cut off your breathing. You would have to be crushing the windpipe to do that. And to do that you would need a knee to the front of somebody's neck. On the side or back won't do it.
The front can cut off breathing. The side reduces blood flow to the brain. The back can push so hard that the ground pushes against front and cuts off breathing. The side can cut off breathing too, if pushed hard enough. The neck is one of our weakest points, and a lot can go wrong.
he was high on meth and fentanyl. He also had coronavirus. He was complaining about having trouble breathing even before they tried to put him into the cop car.
If you punch someone with a heart condition, and they die, it is called manslaughter. Even if they would have died within a few hours anyway, and even if they would not have died without the heart condition. Your punching them triggered the death.
The same is true with Floyd. They took him the way they found him. The autopsy showed damage to the neck, which triggered Floyd's death. He also had underlying health problems.
Worse yet, the police made no attempt to help Floyd, or get him an ambulance.
A cop's job is to arrest suspects. Not let them get away. Whatever it takes to take them into custody is allowed. Even if it means shooting them. Or at least that's the way it should be.
You may believe that is true, but the law disagrees with you. Let me give you an extreme example. Picture a jaywalker, who rather than stopping when the police officer says stop, runs away. Does the police officer have the right to use a machine gun to bring him down?
Police force must be proportional. That means deadly force is only used in self defense or defense of others. It is not used to apprehend someone.