I absolutely agree with everything you suggest in your first paragraph, and I’d enjoy a serious debate with you, Alf, but can we do it without the patronising and condescending tone? I am old enough, wise enough, intelligent enough and educated enough to understand all those things.

However, views will always differ, or else there’d be no need for debates.

Our views on Chauvin will never be the same.

To you, he did what he was trained to do and he did his job in a justifiable manner. To me, no matter what he did ten minutes previously, he did not use his training appropriately.

Restraint does not mean kill, yet Chauvin chose to turn it into that. Despite it being clearly evident to him that a man’s life was slowly being drained from him under his knee, Chauvin chose to continue pressing his knee, and the weight of his body, into that man’s neck until he was dead. He could have made the decision to stop at any point during those nine minutes, yet he made the decision to continue. That conscious decision changes his ‘restraint’ into murder. :shrug:

I recognise, however, that life is a matter of perception, so we’ll have to agree to differ on this one, as we will never view it in the same way.