Police officers are more accountable but has ‘white empathy’ hit a wall?
The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis three years ago sparked global outrage and triggered a renewed push for reform of US policing powers.
In a video that would go viral, Derek Chauvin was filmed on 25 May 2020 kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, resulting in the unarmed African American man’s death.
Three years on, Black Americans are “still more than twice as likely to be killed by police as white Americans”, said The Hill. “Much has changed since Floyd’s killing”, the news site said, but that “startling” statistic “underscores how much hasn’t changed all the same”.
Here The Week takes a look at how America has changed in the three years since Floyd’s murder.
Have police become more accountable?
“Perhaps the biggest shift” has “come in efforts to hold police more accountable when people are killed in their custody or as a result of their actions”, said The Hill.
In contrast to the days when police “repeatedly” avoided jail time for their conduct in the killings of Black people such as Rodney King and Trayvon Martin, those involved in Floyd’s case were charged and convicted.
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Officers have also been charged in relation to other killings, including in Memphis, where five officers involved in the beating of Tyre Nichols have been fired and charged with murder.
What policy changes have there been?
On the second anniversary of Floyd’s murder, President Joe Biden signed an executive order which he said would usher in the “most significant police reform in decades” and deliver police accountability and reform “that is real and lasting”.
He was joined at the White House for the signing ceremony by the family of Floyd, and relatives of Breonna Taylor, who was killed when police executed a no-knock warrant at her Louisville apartment in 2020, said the Daily Mirror.
There has been a “raft of policy changes” at the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) since Floyd’s killing in the city, including a ban on no-knock warrants, reported Minneapolis Public Radio.
This is “a potentially meaningful policy change that will reduce the likelihood of really dangerous encounters that the MPD was historically using almost entirely against communities of color and particularly Black people”, law professor Rachel Moran told the broadcaster.
Has public opinion changed?
To a measurable degree, yes. Floyd’s killing and other high-profile police abuses recorded on people’s phones “led many people who hadn’t been directly impacted by discrimination to question the status quo”, said Minnesota Public Radio.
A Gallup poll in 2022 found that more than 80% of Americans want police officers to face legal action for abuse of power or unnecessary harm while 78% support community-based alternatives such as violence intervention programmes.
However, a significantly smaller number supported calls to “defund the police”. Just 35% of Americans said they wanted to reduce the budget of police departments to fund social programmes instead.
Nevertheless, a Vox/Data for Progress poll in the wake of Floyd’s death found that “large majorities of likely voters” supported such police reform ideas as mandatory use of body cameras, collecting better data on use of force, and banning choke holds, reported Time magazine.
What about reparations?
Several states are offering restitution or repayment payments, with at least 19 cities across the United States agreeing to pay out more than $80 million (£65 million) in settlements to protesters injured by police during 2020 racial justice protests.
Justin Hansford, a professor at Howard University School of Law and executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, told The Guardian that the total number of settlements was “unprecedented”.
The California Reparations Task Force is considering a series of proposals for reparations for Black Americans, including for mass incarceration of Black Americans and over-policing in Black communities, said The Hill.
What hasn’t changed?
However, there is still widespread frustration that more hasn’t changed legislatively and in public sentiment.
“Proponents of federal actions” including banning choke holds and “changing the so-called qualified immunity protections for law enforcement still await meaningful signs of change”, Eyewitness News reported.
“The wave of white empathy seems to have hit a wall,” wrote Ja’han Jones for The ReidOut Bllog on MSNBC.
He argued that “corporate leaders have been exposed for their empty promises of racial equity, federal legislation designed to prevent police misconduct has faltered, and, anecdotally speaking, a lot of white folks seem to have lost their capacity for anti-racist outrage”. As he said: “Complicity and complacency require much less effort.”
