More Than Two Years After George Floyd’s Murder Sparked a Movement, Police Reform Has Stalled. What Happened? – By Jake Pearson (ProPublica) / Oct 24, 2022
George Floyd’s caught-on-camera murder prompted massive social justice and police reform protests. But a spike in violent crime shifted the narrative around public safety
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In the spring of 2020, George Floyd’s caught-on-camera murder by a Minneapolis police officer prompted massive social justice protests across the country. Millions of people marched for law enforcement reform — even Sen. Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican and onetime GOP presidential nominee. Activists pressed policymakers to “defund the police.”
Amid the pressure, elected officials pledged sweeping changes to how officers operate and how they’re overseen.
But two and a half years later, with violent crime increasing across the country, that momentum has seemingly stalled. In Washington, support for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would have created a national police misconduct registry among other measures, withered while lawmakers passed bipartisan legislation to invest in the police. A recent House bill would award local police departments $60 million annually for five years, with few of the kinds of accountability measures for cops that progressives had advocated.
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