- In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd cities across the country passed police reform bills banning chokeholds.
- Places like Denver, Eugene, and San Francisco took an additional step by redirecting some police funding toward emergency mental health support.
- However, with the rise in homicides, cities are reverting back to increasing police funding.
Since Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in 2020, policing in the country has largely remained unchanged.
"[Policing is] very hard to change because they've got longstanding policies and procedures, they've got unions, they've got all variety of things that make it difficult to change," Jack McDevitt, professor of the practice in criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern, told, [email protected]. "One thing that's happened that is positive is that police departments are less often in denial that there is a problem."
On May 25, 2020, Floyd was killed after being stopped by Minneapolis police while leaving a convenience store. He was pinned to the ground with a knee on his neck for over eight minutes, resulting in his death. This ignited protests across the country and calls for police reform and a racial reckoning; however, in terms of policies around policing, little has changed.
On the two-year anniversary of George Floyd's murder, President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring new use-of-force rules for federal law enforcement and a registry for federal law enforcement misconduct. The administration has not been successful in passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would have banned chokehold, no-knock warrants, restricted the flow of military weapons to local police departments, and created a federal registry of police misconduct.
Cities initially showed support for changes in policing
In the immediate aftermath of Floyd's murder, cities and counties rushed to pass police reform bills, but those bills created police task forces and largely created bans on things that were either already banned or rarely used.
Places like Denver, Eugene, and San Francisco, took the next step setting aside several million dollars from their annual police budgets and putting it toward mental health crisis support hotlines. The people who will be responding to these hotlines will not be armed with a gun, which is something activists have asked for.
Police budgets across the country are roughly 25% to 40% of the entire municipality budget.
"When we say 'defund,' we mean to move budget line items… [police] do not serve our safety, but we know what serves our safety. We want to see significant reductions in those budgets, and we believe that's possible," Mark-Anthony Johnson, an activist in Los Angeles, told Spectrum News in June 2020.
According to a report published by the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, mental health calls account for a quarter of all 911 calls.
With homicides slowly ticking up since the COVID-19 lockdown was lifted, police budgets have increased. There is also less government emphasis on providing more resources to other preventative services, such as mental health.
Last year police murdered 1,144 people, according to Mapping Police Violence, which was 48 more people than in 2019.
This year, there have already been 219 police murders.
"Reforms have been implemented at a much slower pace than I would have hoped for," activist Jamarhl Crawford, who served on the Boston Police Reform Task Force, told WBUR. "Two years ago, police reform was first and foremost on people's minds, but now I think some of that enthusiasm and fervor has waned."