Report: Police killings rose in the five years after George Floyd’s murder

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. (Officials in Minneapolis and Louisville said they would continue working to implement police reforms.) The DOJ also announced it was ending Biden-era investigations into a half dozen other police departments that the prior administration accused of constitutional violations. Civil rights groups said those moves would likely worsen police violence; the ACLU said Trump’s DOJ was sending “a message that the government is willing to look away from harm being inflicted on our communities—even when the harm is plain as day.”

Those shifts come as the Trump administration has also prioritized the abolishment of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, or DEI, across the federal government and beyond.

The current political climate may help explain why more than 70 percent of adults recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center said they do not believe the increased focus on race following Floyd’s murder made Black Americans’ lives better. And the amount of Americans who say they support the Black Lives Matter movement has dropped 15 points since 2020, though a majority—52 percent—still say they are in favor of it, according to Pew.

On Sunday, various Democratic lawmakers commemorated Floyd’s passing on social media, including Minnesotans Gov. Tim Walz and Rep. Ilhan Omar, along with Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rep. Monica McIver (D-N.J.), Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). Crockett, Omar, and McIver called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill first introduced in 2021 that would increase accountability for law enforcement. Its measures include creating a national registry to track police misconduct, limiting no-knock warrants and chokeholds, and requiring training on implicit bias and racial profiling for law enforcement officers. The bill was most recently reintroduced in the House last year by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas), but it failed to get a vote.

Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes sees reasons for hope, despite the limits to the progress of the past five years:

If 2020 was The Awakening, and the last four years have been The Retrenchment, then 2025 may mark the beginning of a new phase: The Reevaluation.

I think the 2020 BLM protests were about bolstering Black social and political power, and despite all of the attacks that effort has endured, Black people aren’t giving up on it any time soon.

In Louisiana, Black voters helped defeat a constitutional amendment that would have made it easier to try children as adults — a move that many viewed as a veiled attempt to deepen mass incarceration.

We’re seeing it in economic protest too, with Black consumers leading boycotts of major corporations like Target, disrupting profit margins and forcing boardroom conversations.

And we’re seeing it in grassroots organizing. Activists like Angela Rye and journalist Joy Reid are crisscrossing the country on the State of the People Power Tour, mobilizing and educating Black communities on how to build lasting political power from the ground up.

So, five years later, when we ask what’s changed, maybe the most honest answer is that we changed; and that might be the most powerful change of all.