George Floyd’s Killing: A Catalyst for Change, and for Crime

O ne year ago today, Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd until the latter man lost his pulse and ultimately died. Coming after two months of lockdown and many decades’ worth of tension between black communities and the police, the incident set off a chain of explosive reactions.

The case has been, at once, a story in itself, a major contributor to a nationwide rise in the murder rate, and the impetus for policy responses across the country.

The story itself has largely, but far from entirely, played out. Chauvin has had very few defenders among use-of-force experts, and he was found guilty on all presented charges. As our Andrew McCarthy has explained, two of the three counts Chauvin faced were a bit of a stretch — but the manslaughter charge, at minimum, fit what he did. The man will likely spend many years in prison. Separately, Minneapolis reached a $27 million settlement with Floyd’s family. A lot of justice has already been done.

Still to be handled, however, are Chauvin’s sentencing, the trial of the other three officers on the scene, federal civil-rights charges against all four officers, and any subsequent appeals. These proceedings lack the trial-of-the-year newsworthiness of Chauvin’s prosecution. But they raise important questions of justice: When should junior officers, including rookies, face prosecution for failing to stop a senior officer’s bad behavior during an arrest? What purpose do federal charges even serve when a state has already prosecuted the wrongdoer aggressively and successfully?

And the killing will reverberate long after all the legal matters conclude. The act triggered a wave of justified protests — that far too often spilled over into rioting, and pushed the country into another wave of violent crime as police backed off of enforcement.

The riots did immense damage, destroying property and killing people who never became household names. More broadly — from Minneapolis to New York to Los Angeles — police activity declined and serious violence rose. By May, 2020 was already not off to a good start in terms of homicides in big American cities, but killings shot up especially dramatically after Floyd’s death.

Homicides have remained high into the current year. In 32 cities with data, the first quarter of 2021 saw 24 percent more killings than the same period in 2020, and 49 percent more than the same period in 2019. Liberals are starting to get antsy that high crime could drive voters back to the right, endangering Democratic chances in general and soft-on-crime reform initiatives in particular.

And speaking of public policy, police reform has had a year in the sun across every level of government. The difficult balance is to hold police accountable as they use violence on our behalf — without hamstringing them as they charge into danger to protect us.

First came the calls to “defund the police,” followed by a debate over what “defund” actually meant and, ultimately, relatively little action when it came to reducing police budgets. Joe Biden, who is perhaps not quite as much of a bumbling idiot as we conservatives sometimes assume, renounced the slogan during his campaign. Minneapolis quickly retreated from its plan to disband its department. And given the aforementioned wave of violence, calls to add police are very much part of the conversation right now, with, for example, Los Angeles restoring money it previously cut.

A number of other, more serious ideas also made their mark, however. The legal doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which in many cases makes it impossible to sue cops in federal court for violating civilians’ constitutional rights, has come under sustained assault. Some states have moved to allow these cases in state court instead, with no qualified-immunity defense available, and there’s even talk of federal reforms to the underlying statute. Some Republicans have suggested making it easier to sue departments rather than individual officers, which makes some sense because departments typically “indemnify” officers anyhow.

Other states are adjusting the legal standards concerning when, exactly, a police killing is considered justified. Even before the Floyd incident, California hammered out some changes to its outdated laws on this matter, negotiating a bill so politically astute that police groups dropped their opposition while Black Lives Matter dropped its support. The law seems to have made little difference outside a couple of individual cases, which many expected from the start. It still allows police to use lethal force when they reasonably believe it’s necessary to defend life or limb, though it also gives prosecutors some leeway to second-guess a cop’s approach to a situation leading up to a shooting.

Of course, changing these standards is a high-stakes game. When cops have to make decisions quickly under pressure, and when they respond reasonably to a threat, we should not invite prosecutors and juries to think up every possible way a bad outcome might, in retrospect, have been avoided. More aggressive proposals in this vein deserve very careful scrutiny, as do future cases involving the California law itself.

There have been a raft of other measures, too, in states and localities throughout the country. These include body cameras, bans on chokeholds or other neck restraints (sometimes even when deadly force is authorized), changes to the process of tracking and “decertifying” bad cops, limitations on the use of pepper spray on protesters, requirements for officers to intervene when other cops cross the line, and having non-law-enforcement personnel handle some duties normally assigned to the police. Some of these efforts are common sense, others risky experiments we must track carefully.

Policing is overwhelmingly handled at the state and local level, but the federal government also has an “in” here, both because federal constitutional rights are at stake (as noted above in the discussion of qualified immunity) and because police departments often rely on assorted federal grants. Last year, Republican senator Tim Scott put forth a reasonable if limited bill that the Democrats essentially rejected out of hand, while Republicans also rejected the Democrats’ far more-sweeping plans.

This year, negotiations are apparently going a little better. (Lawmakers initially hoped to have something ready by today; as of this writing, this appears unlikely.) Judging from Scott’s bill and current reports about lawmakers’ discussions, both parties could probably agree to limit chokeholds, restrict “no-knock” warrants, and make some changes to qualified immunity.

Justice was done in the Chauvin trial, and this horrifying incident has led to a wide array of policy changes that could, on balance, perhaps improve American policing. But it has also contributed to a murder wave, driven police to back off at the time they’re needed most, and made policing far less attractive as a profession.

Are we on a path to a better place, or is this past year, like the year after Ferguson, just one iteration among many in a pattern of racially charged policing incidents, riots, and nationwide crime waves?