A new documentary reveals the body camera footage that was hidden from the public.
In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek sits down with Emmy Award-winning reporter Liz Collin, author of “They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and the Death of George Floyd” and producer of the new narrative-busting documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis.” Ms. Collin breaks down what really happened the day George Floyd died, what the media left out, and what evidence was withheld at the trial.
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.
By Jan Jekielek and Jeff Minick