An analysis shows how little has changed for Black victims of police violence in America. Five years ago today, George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed Black man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, in Minneapolis. The harrowing footage of the murder—in which Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes after a nearby store clerk alleged he tried to purchase cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill—sparked nationwide protests over police brutality against Black people, and the persistence of anti-Black racism more broadly. Chauvin was found guilty on all charges in the case and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison; three other officers who were also on the scene and failed to get Floyd help as he struggled to breathe were found guilty of federal civil rights violations and sentenced from 30 to 42 months in prison. But a new report from the New York Times, coupled with recent actions from the Trump administration, suggests that whatever progress appeared to come in the wake of Floyd’s murder was not lasting. A New York Times analysis published Saturday, based on data from the Washington Post and the database Mapping Police Violence, found that the number of police killings nationwide has risen every year since 2020—with Black people constituting a disproportionate number of the victims. Last year, for example, there were a total of 1,226 people killed by police, an 18 percent increase from 2019, the Times found. While most of the victims killed by police reportedly were armed, some, like Floyd, were not. Last year, 53 unarmed people were killed by police, compared to 95 in 2020, according to the Times analysis. Over the past decade, Black people have been killed by police at more than two times the rate of white people. (Native Americans were the racial group with the highest rate of police killings, according to the Times data.) The rates of police killings were higher—and have increased since 2020—in the redder states that President Donald Trump won in the last election; the bluer states that former Vice President Kamala Harris won, on the other hand, saw stabilized rates of police killings since 2020. The actions of the Trump administration do not inspire confidence that those numbers will decrease anytime soon. This week, the Department of Justice announced it was dismissing lawsuits and consent decrees against police departments in Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered, and in Louisville, Kentucky, where police killed Breonna Taylor in March 2020.
via mother jones: Report: Police Killings Rose in the Five Years After George Floyd’s Murder