When George Floyd was killed, policing and diversity changes came. Five years later, is that change at risk?

Yahoo

22-05-2025

Police violence had been captured on video before. But the video of George Floyd's final nine minutes of life was different.
It captured Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, dying as Derick Chauvin, a White Minneapolis police officer, held him down with his knee on Floyd's neck. Video captured Floyd pleading for his mother, as onlookers were pleading for his life.
Usually homicides by police officers involve a firearm, with the incidents captured over in a matter of seconds, minutes at most, said Reggie Moore, the Medical College of Wisconsin's director of violence prevention policy and engagement.
'This was a slow and methodical murder that would shake any caring individual to their core,' Moore said. 'Thankfully, millions across the globe, from all walks of life, were not only shaken but inspired to take to the streets and demand change.'
Chanting Floyd's dying words, 'I can't breathe,' and "Black Lives Matter," thousands took to the streets of Milwaukee, at one point closing a section of Interstate 43, encircling a law enforcement building in Racine and setting it on fire.
In Madison, long a liberal bastion for rallies, police began deploying tear gas, night-after-night, as crowds turned their anger to destruction, smashing windows and vandalizing businesses along State Street, tearing down two iconic statues on Capitol grounds and assaulting state Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee.
Signaling a need to maintain safety, control crowds and protect businesses from looting, more than 1,400 Wisconsin National Guard troops were deployed to Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Racine and Kenosha,
The rallies in the United States were replicated overseas, with thousands marching in cities like London, Berlin and Toronto.
Not even the new, fast-spreading COVID-19 virus could keep people away from rallies. Millions took to the streets, masked, to decry racial injustices and hold Chauvin accountable.
These forces were colliding with a presidential campaign already underway: President Donald Trump's first administration saw protests as a need for police crackdowns. Presidential candidate Joe Biden reached out to Floyd's family and said the moment was a call to social reckoning.
Biden won and soon signed executive orders aimed at advancing equity, civil rights and racial justice.
Now, five years after Floyd's death on May 25, 2020, Trump is back. A jackhammer was taken to the words "Black Lives Matter,' removing the phrase on the boulevard leading to the White House. Under the Trump administration, diversity, equity and inclusion policies are systematically losing funding and are viewed as no longer relevant.
'I ended all of the lawless, so-called diversity, equity and inclusion bullshit all across the entire federal government and the private sector,' Trump said at an April 29 rally in Michigan that marked his 100th day in office.
The public is skeptical the period after Floyd created meaningful improvements for Black Americans, according to the Pew Research Center. In May, the organization released results of a survey that found 72% of respondents did not feel the focus on race after Floyd's killing led to improvements.
And those who did feel progress was made fear it could be lost.
'Those battles won't stay won,' said William Sulton, a defense attorney and president of the American Civil Liberties Union Wisconsin. "You have to continue to talk about these issues because there can be a rollback, and that's what we're experiencing, a major rollback in gains that were made in 2020."
Changes to police reforms have been swift during the first five months of Trump's second term.
Five days prior to the five-year anniversary of Floyd's death the U.S. Department of Justice announced its plans to drop police-accountability agreements with Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, where Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by police officers.
The move abandons Biden-era attempts to reshape law enforcement in cities with high-profile killings by officers.
Trump has deleted a federal database of police misconduct incidents, overturned executive orders signed by Biden, and canceled funding for programs or agencies that existed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
In April, Trump issued an executive order directing the attorney general to use all legal remedies against state and local officials who engage in diversity, equity and inclusion policies in law enforcement, and he has done the same in "virtually all aspects of federal government.'
Earlier this year, the president called DEI a 'tyranny' on the federal government, public sector and military.
'Our country will be woke no longer,' Trump said during a joint address to Congress in March.
The corporate sector has followed Trump's lead.
Wisconsin-based Kohl's Corp. dropped the term DEI from its annual report, replacing it with 'inclusion and belonging.' Harley-Davidson, a Milwaukee-based company, also backed away from diversity initiatives.
Many in Trump's party support the changes.
'The words diversity, equity and inclusion, they all sound good, but what results from that mentality?' said state Rep. Bob Donovan, R-Greenfield. 'I wholeheartedly support merit-based promotions and hiring.'
Tanya McLean is executive director of Leaders of Kenosha, a group that advocates for social and restorative justice and equal access to resources for Black residents of Kenosha and Wisconsin.
It's been her experience that police are receptive to the idea of more diversity within the force. Police departments in Kenosha, Madison and Milwaukee became more diverse in the years since Floyd's murder, records show.
Although the Trump agenda calls for rollback, local governments have passed laws already that 'reduced negative police encounters,' said Sulton, the state ACLU official.
Sulton said he's optimistic that DEI policies and policing reforms he advocates for will remain. That's because people are simply putting in the work.
'You're going to have swings from Democrats being in power to swings of Republicans being in power, which is why I think it's important for people stay on the job every day,' he said.
The Floyd protests led to change across every sector, but no profession came under more scrutiny and change than law enforcement.
Underscoring it all was the way police engaged with people of color, with Floyd's murder underscoring what many believed to be indicative of racial bias.
'Defund the police' became a common refrain, alongside "re-envision policing," as people advocated for funding to go to communities directly and for dollars to be funneled to things meant to prevent crime, rather than to police departments responding to it.
Policy changes soon followed.
Milwaukee's Fire and Police Commission passed policies that tightened use-of-force, banned chokeholds and banned no-knock warrants.
Three months after Floyd was killed, police in Kenosha shot Jacob Blake, Black man, in the back as he got into a car. A neighbor caught the incident on video, which went viral. Blake's shooting, which left him paralyzed, reignited protests and led to body cameras being mandated for Kenosha police officers.
In Madison, police adopted dozens of changes after undergoing an external review through University of Pennsylvania.
Fred Royal, a former president of the local NAACP, called the Fire and Police Commission's changes part of one of the 'most progressive use-of-force policies currently being employed or discussed' when they occurred.
"All of these different processes got us to where we are now," said Milwaukee activist Vaun Mayes, who organized one of the first protests in the city in 2020. "Clearly we're not where we want to be completely."
At the state level, bills were passed that banned chokeholds in most instances, required reporting of no-knock warrants (a response to Breonna Taylor's death in Louisville, Kentucky), and tracked use-of-force incidents.
Wisconsin's legislative changes were 'in the middle' for states that did make changes, said Brandon Garrett, a law professor at Duke University and director of its Wilson Center for Science and Justice.
The Wilson Center tracked police reform changes nationally in the years that followed Floyd's death. He cited Colorado as a state that took more steps than Wisconsin by removing qualified immunity for police officers accused of wrongdoing.
'You don't want to make policy because of one case and one incident,' Garrett said. '(But it was) a catalyst to reexamine some kind of policies that people had known for a long time weren't great.'
While the emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion at the federal level didn't see real backlash until Trump's second term, the pushback came swiftly in Wisconsin, due in large part to GOP control of the Legislature.
Take the passage of Act 12 in 2023.
Milwaukee was on the brink of a fiscal crisis. Lawmakers agreed to help out the state's largest city, but the help came with stipulations: among those were DEI restrictions and policing requirements.
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said at the time the city's fiscal situation was effectively used to strip away DEI efforts made by the city.
The law prohibited Milwaukee from using tax money to fund 'any position for which the principal duties consist of promoting individuals or groups on the basis of their race, color, ancestry, national origin, or sexual orientation."
It also prohibited local governments in Wisconsin from using preferences in hiring or contracting.
"Milwaukee's fiscal cliff opened the door to Republican demands that would have never passed muster for me or at the city's Common Council," Johnson said in 2023. "No matter how loudly I said no, the steamroller of political reality moved forward."
When Wisconsin Act 12 passed, it came with hefty stipulations on policing in the city as well.
The Fire and Police Commission lost the power to create policy for the departments, with that responsibility moving to the chiefs of both departments. Act 12 also dictated the oversight commission have two members from lists provided by the police and firefighter unions.
The current executive director of the Fire and Police Commission previously told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the law's FPC provisions were passed in backlash to policy changes.
"Where the board diverged from what the Police Department and, more importantly, the police union wanted ... that's what led to the Act 12 changes," director Leon Todd said in late February.
The ACLU's Sulton said DEI and policy backtracking was a direct result of conservative backlash.
'I think (Trump) and the Republicans, even before summer of 2020, really resisted and took steps to undo anything that would address past discrimination and current discrimination,' he said.
Changes to law enforcement policies have taken hold in Milwaukee. Nate Hamilton continues pushing for more.
Hamilton is the brother of Dontre Hamilton, whom Milwaukee police shot and killed in 2014 after they responded to a report of a sleeping man in a public park downtown. Police officers were fired, but ultimately not charged in the incident. It sparked years of activism for him and his family.
Hamilton now is chair of a city commission meant to offer community input on police reform. The group helped craft the the Milwaukee Police Department's community policing policy and is working with the department on updating it.
Hamilton is optimistic progress will continue, in part, because the department has improved the way it listens to the community under Police Chief Jeffrey Norman.
'We just need to stay steady. We don't need to overwhelm the system,' he said.
McLean, executive director of the advocacy group Leaders of Kenosha, said it seems as though the country is in an endless cycle of police killings that may not get a lot of attention but continue to happen.
She believes the best way forward is open communication with law enforcement and lawmakers.
"The powers that be need to be addressing the root causes of why and how we got here," she said. "That is most important and that work still needs to continue. Those conversations still need to be had.'
Dr. Christopher Ford, an emergency medicine doctor in Milwaukee, was doing his residency in Minneapolis when a police officer was found not guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of Philando Castile.
Castile was killed by a police officer in a Minneapolis suburb in 2016, four years before Floyd.
Castile, 32, was in the car with his girlfriend and her 4-year-old son. Talk quickly circulated in the media regarding what he had done — was he intoxicated, how did he provoke the officer?
The questions about Castile's alcohol consumption were enough to make Ford, now 39, change his own behavior. He quit drinking.
He added it to the list of behaviors to alter when encountered by police — don't make any sudden movements, show your hands, if you have a weapon, have a permit — that his grandfather had taught his dad and both had taught him.
'I can't have any wiggle room when I am out or that could happen to me,' said Ford, who identifies as African American.
For all that has changed since Floyd, and for all that has been rolled back, some things haven't changed at all.
Ford says he speaks to his two sons, ages 5 and 7, every day the same way his father and grandfather did to him. Unfortunately, that is the way it is, he said.
'That's something that my kids are going to have to live with for the rest of their lives," Ford said. "The society that they grow up in sees them differently than mom and dad does."
David Clarey is a public safety reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He can be reached at [e-mail].
Drake Bentley is a general assignment and breaking news reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He can be reached at [e-mail].
Jessica Van Egeren is a general assignment reporter and assistant breaking news editor with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She can be reached at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Will changes driven by George Floyd's murder five years ago stay?