Messages on social media claim to show former police officer Derek Chauvin smiling on stage at a Donald Trump rally wearing a “cops for Trump” t-shirt and holding a “law & order, vote Trump” sign.
Derek Chauvin is the Minneapolis police officer who has been named as the officer that knelt on the neck of George Floyd, a black man that subsequently died in hospital after he was arrested by police.
The photo spreading is below.
Despite the photo spreading rapidly on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, the smiling man on stage with Trump is not Derek Chauvin.
The man is police officer Mike Gallagher, from the Bloomington Police Department. We managed to track down a public video of Gallagher in this video where he discusses the challenges of policing during winter weather. The screenshot below of Gallagher compared to the man at the Trump rally reveals it is clearly the same person.
This was also confirmed by Minneapolis police union president Lt. Bob Kroll, who also identified the man in the photos at Mike Gallagher.
As such, we rank this claim false.
Other claims that Chauvin was pictured wearing a “Make Whites Great Again” hat are also false and we discuss them here.
Thanks for reading! But before you go… as part of our latest series of articles on how to earn a little extra cash using the Internet (without getting scammed) we have been looking into how you can earn gift vouchers (like Amazon vouchers) using reward-per-action websites such as SwagBucks. If you are interested we even have our own sign-up code to get you started. Want to learn more? We discuss it here. (Or you can just sign-up here and use code Nonsense70SB when registering.)
Become a Facebook Supporter. For 0.99p (~$1.30) a month you can become a Facebook fan, meaning you get an optional Supporter Badge when you comment on our Facebook posts, as well as discounts on our merchandise. You can subscribe here (cancel anytime.)