George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police rocked nearly every facet of American life: entertainment, academia, politics, corporate culture, and even conversations at the dinner table.
One year after the tragedy felt around the world, the law enforcement community is still grappling with the fallout that has thrown the future of policing into uncertainty.
Other nonpartisan institutions are still navigating the aftermath of the appalling encounter and its meaning for society.
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Protests over Floyd’s murder broke out within days of his fatal brush with former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020, and spread to virtually every major city in the country. Nearly half of all U.S. counties saw a protest last summer. Additionally, as many as 26 million people said they participated in one of the demonstrations, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
With the marches came a summer of unrest.
Property Claim Services, an insurance company that analyzes data, estimated that violence from the protests in multiple cities would cost more than $1 billion in covered losses, “marking it as the costliest civil disorder in U.S. history,” according to the Insurance Information Institute.
Police were often on the front lines of the protests, which were focused nominally on police brutality but came to represent a movement, Black Lives Matter, that sought to deal with racial inequality across all levels of society.
By the end of the summer, public perception of police had plummeted. A Gallup poll published in August 2020 found that confidence in the police had fallen below 50% for the first time in nearly three decades.
One of the demands of protest organizers, that cities “defund the police,” became a reality in several places last year.
In Portland, for example, the city slashed $16 million from its police bureau in June, even as violence continued to course through its streets.
In Seattle, the police department faced a $46 million cut to its budget heading into the fiscal year 2021.
And in New York City, the mayor announced a $1 billion reduction in the police department’s budget last summer.
Cuts to police budgets around the country came amid pressure from activists and, simultaneously, a rise in violent crime rates.
But they also led to charges of hypocrisy against prominent progressive lawmakers who promoted “defund the police” rhetoric while relying on hired security to protect themselves, as discussions about the role of law enforcement grew increasingly partisan on both sides of the aisle.
On the right, some conservatives balked at liberal cities’ reliance on police to enforce COVID-19 restrictions while stripping funds.
“New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, applauded the city’s decision to cut $1 billion from the police department budget while deploying thousands of officers to aggressively enforce the state’s social distancing rules with fines and arrests,” the Heritage Foundation noted in August 2020.
On the left, liberals questioned why police departments dispatched officers to deal with some issues, such as mental health crises, that they were often ill-prepared to handle. Instead, they argued some law enforcement funding should be redirected to things such as addiction and mental health services.
The debate gave rise on Capitol Hill to a push for police reform, which the Biden administration seems unlikely to secure before the May 25 deadline President Joe Biden set earlier this year.
Democrats in June blocked a reform proposal from GOP Sen. Tim Scott over concerns it did not go far enough to change policing tactics.
While House Democrats passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in February, lawmakers are still negotiating the fine points of a potential compromise that could bring to life some of the changes that activists spent months marching in the streets to achieve.
Sticking points include how to handle qualified immunity, or legal protection extended to individual police officers in civil court. Reform talks also turned to bans on certain kinds of potentially lethal uses of force, such as chokeholds, and the federal government’s role in telling local police departments how to train their officers.
Police departments were not the only institutions swept up in the politicization that followed the Black Lives Matter movement. While Floyd’s death inspired a necessary national conversation about racial injustice, it also drew other institutions into the political arena in ways that risked perceptions of their neutrality.
The height of protests over the summer, for example, occurred during lockdowns in states that sharply curtailed what businesses and individuals could do to contain the pandemic.
However, many public health officials cheered on the mass gatherings of people in the name of equality even though the gatherings violated social distancing guidance promoted by those same experts — undermining confidence, among some people, in whether the recommendations were purely science-based.
GOP Sen. Pat Toomey sent a series of letters this week to Federal Reserve Banks in Boston, Atlanta, and Minneapolis questioning why those banks used Floyd’s death to justify a focus on racial policies.
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“Under your leadership, the Minneapolis Fed increasingly has focused on politically-charged causes, like racial justice activism, that are wholly unrelated to the Federal Reserve’s statutory mandate,” Toomey wrote in one of the letters.
