Images of George Floyd dying as he was suffocated by a police officer’s knee for more than nine minutes on May 25, 2020, shocked the US — and the rest of the world. In the following weeks, thousands of people went to protest, in several cities, so that cases like that would not happen again and to ask for changes in public safety.
Two years later, however, few changes have taken place, and police lethality remains at similar levels. In 2021, 1,054 citizens were killed by public security agents in the US, according to a survey by The Washington Post. Since 2015, that number is close to 1,000 a year. On average, there are almost three deaths a day.
As a comparison, Brazil had 6,133 police deaths in 2021, or 17 deaths a day on average, according to data from the Violence Monitor.
In the US, the death of blacks by the police remains more frequent, and the chance of one of them being killed is twice as high as that of a white person. Last year, 38 African Americans were killed per million, compared to 15 whites per million, according to Washington Post data. Overall, most victims are male, aged between 25 and 35.
After Floyd’s death, at least 25 of the 50 US states passed some kind of police reform, but in varying degrees and models. Minnesota and New York, for example, banned the use of suffocation agents and created more internal affairs.
On the other hand, some regions, especially those where the legislature is dominated by Republicans, such as Iowa and Oklahoma, have gone in the opposite direction and sought ways to make it more difficult to monitor the use of force by agents and increase legal protection for them.
“Security officers risk their lives to keep us safe. It is our duty to minimize the risks so that more officers can return home safely,” said Republican Jarad Klein, an Iowa State Representative, in defending the law, passed in 2021. , which extended the legal immunity of guards.
“States have responded in very different ways. Police violence is a national issue that needs national measures,” says Menaka Philips, a professor at Tulane University and a researcher on violence.
Policing in the US is divided among more than 18,000 entities, with municipal, regional and state departments, which can adopt their own rules to decide how to act. The lack of integration makes it difficult to form a framework with the real scale of police violence because local bodies are not obliged to pass on data related to this issue to the federal government.
A study published in the Lancet journal, carried out by the GBD, a group of health researchers, estimates that 17,000 of the approximately 30,000 deaths committed by police between 1980 and 2018 were not included in the data from the NVSS, the national death registry. The additional deaths were found in counts made by civil entities, based on their own surveys, based, for example, on news from local newspapers.
Weeks after Floyd’s death, then-President Donald Trump issued an executive order that provided for the creation of a new national database of police violence, but the idea did not advance.
The measure also mandated that local law enforcement should change procedures, such as banning chokeholds, to receive extra federal funding. The order, however, was ineffective, for having criteria considered shallow. There was more focus on changing the terms written in regulations than on meeting case reduction targets.
In 2021, President Joe Biden defended a bill, dubbed the George Floyd Act, which passed the House and got stuck in the Senate. The proposal reinforces punishments for police officers in cases of misconduct, limits the use of force by agents and proposes the creation of a national database on the performance of police officers, to prevent an agent fired in one city from returning to duty in another. .
In January, another failed attempt: the White House was preparing an executive order with changes in the way the police acted, restricting the use of gunfire and breaking and entering into homes and vetoing the use of stun bombs, but the draft of the project was leaked and generated criticism from agents and right-wing activists, who saw it as an attempt to reduce the power and resources of the police. Under pressure, Biden abandoned the idea.
The president advocates that policing be more integrated into communities, but rejects one of the banners that emerged post-Floyd, the “defund the police”. The proposal, championed by progressives such as Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calls for governments to spend less on policing and more on social actions.
“Defunding is not about creating a vacuum in legitimate security concerns. It’s about reorienting how we spend money to protect communities. What we see is a policing system that treats communities, especially those of color, as a potential target.” rather than beneficiaries of the public safety service,” says Philips. “Changing that involves taking money from buying weapons and military equipment and spending it on initiatives like health care, education, social services and infrastructure, to name a few.”
For Biden, however, the answer “is not to defund the police, it’s to fund the police,” as he said in his State of the Union address in March and at a ceremony at the White House on May 13. The American leader even recommended that local governments use the money from the federal aid package for the pandemic to strengthen local security and said that at least US$ 10 billion would have already been used in this way.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also stated that “defund the police” was dead, offensive and not representative of the Democratic Party’s view, in a sign that the party’s leadership wants to keep the matter away from the midterms. elections that will renew Congress and 36 state governments in November.
The rise in crime in the US in the last year also encourages politicians to return to defending the law and order discourse, which favors more incisive police actions. In November 2021, for example, Democrat Eric Adams was elected mayor of New York with a promise to strengthen the fight against crime.
A Pew Research Center survey showed that most Americans want more money for public safety. In September 2021, 47% of respondents said they supported the idea – this percentage was 31% in 2020. The share that says they want fewer resources for the police dropped from 26% to 15% in the same period.
At the same time, concern about crime grew: 61% said they considered violence a major problem in September 2021. In June 2020, it was 41%.
For Philips, the participation of black and other minority voters in November will be essential for changes to take place, but the actions to make it difficult for these groups to vote, which have taken place in several states in recent months, are a complicating factor. “Efforts to pressure local authorities to implement training and demilitarization and increase accountability remain crucial.”
