George Floyd Killing and BLM Protests
George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man, was killed by a Minneapolis police officer on 25 May 2020. Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for over nine minutes while he was handcuffed face down on the street, saying that he could not breathe, and while bystanders begged the officers to stop. The arrest was for allegedly passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. A seventeen-year-old bystander, Darnella Frazier, filmed it on a phone. Without that recording the initial police statement — that a man had died after a medical incident during a police interaction — would have stood. The protests that followed were probably the largest in American history, with estimates of fifteen to twenty-six million participants in over two thousand towns and cities, in the middle of a pandemic. They spread to dozens of countries. Most were peaceful; some involved looting and arson, and the police response included widespread use of tear gas and rubber bullets against demonstrators and journalists. Federal officers cleared Lafayette Square in Washington so that the president could be photographed holding a Bible outside a church. Chauvin was convicted of murder in April 2021 and sentenced to twenty-two and a half years; three other officers were convicted of federal civil rights violations. The measurable policy consequences were modest and uneven — some state-level restrictions on chokeholds and qualified immunity, no federal legislation, and a subsequent political reaction against the movement's slogans. Corporate and institutional commitments made in 2020 were largely wound back within four years. Frazier was awarded a Pulitzer citation in 2021 for the recording. The gap between the scale of the mobilisation and the durability of what it changed is the thing most often argued about since.
- Year: 2020 CE
- Category: Social
