Since George Floyd's murder, police killings keep rising, not falling

Boston Globe

25-05-2025

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Among them was Frank Tyson, an unarmed Black man in Canton, Ohio, who uttered Floyd's famous words last year before dying when he was wrestled to the ground in a bar by police officers. This happened even though police departments nationwide, especially after Floyd's murder, have known about the dangers of asphyxiation when keeping a suspect in the prone position. (Two officers were charged with homicide in Tyson's death.)
Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes as he gasped for air, was convicted and sentenced to prison, along with three other officers who were on the scene. But even as the number of police killings has risen in the years since, it has remained exceedingly rare for officers to be charged with crimes for those deaths.
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Last year, for example, 16 officers were charged with either murder or manslaughter in a fatal shooting, the same number as in 2020, according to data tracked by Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Stinson said that given 'all of the promise of five years ago, in terms of the promises of police reform, from where I sit, the reality is that policing hasn't changed.'
A mural depicting George Floyd at the spot he was killed five years ago by a police officer's knee on his neck, in Minneapolis on April 19.
JOSHUA RASHAAD MCFADDEN/NYT
Experts say it is difficult to draw definitive answers from the data about why police killings continue to rise without an analysis of the circumstances of each case. But they have plenty of theories about what may have contributed to the problem.
An increasing number of guns in circulation heightens the chances of deadly encounters. A backlash against the police reform movement in conservative states may have empowered police in those places. And the decline in public trust in the police after Floyd's murder may have led to more deadly encounters.
'Public perception of policing can matter here,' said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is a law professor at the University of South Carolina and frequently testifies about use-of-force policies in criminal trials of officers. 'When police are viewed as more legitimate, folks are more likely to comply. When police are viewed as less legitimate, people are less likely to comply and more likely to resist, and that can increase the rates of violence.'
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While answers may be elusive, here are some of the underlying trends that might explain the shifting nature of police violence in the United States.
A growing divide in where people are getting killed by police
After Floyd's killing, many Democratic-run states and cities made more robust changes to policing. And culturally, in more-liberal states, there were much louder calls for police to be reined in.
This might help explain why there is a growing divide in where people are being killed by police. In more-liberal states, the rate has stabilized, but in more-conservative ones, the numbers have risen.
If measured over the past 10 years, since the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 sparked wide-scale protests, fatal police shootings in more-Democratic states have declined 15% on a population-adjusted basis, with the rate holding relatively steady since Floyd's death.
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But in Republican-leaning states, they have risen 23%. And within those redder states, exurbs and rural areas, which tend to be more conservative than cities, have the highest rates of police killings.
Fewer people who are killed by police are unarmed
Even as police killings have risen in the years since the killing of Floyd, killings of unarmed people have become less frequent.
The numbers have fluctuated over the years, but have dropped significantly since 2015, when 152 people killed by police were unarmed. In 2020, that number was 95, and last year, it dropped to 53. The number of people killed while wielding replica weapons, fake guns that look like the real thing, has also dropped.
Still, experts were split on why the drop may have occurred and how much weight to give the data. They said it was one of several statistics that would benefit from a more comprehensive national database of police use of force.
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Some suggested the decrease in the number of unarmed people being killed could be a natural outcome in a country where a large percentage of people own guns. It is difficult to evaluate gun ownership in the United States, but polls have shown that more than 40% of adults report having a gun in their household.
'In a world in which we are awash in guns, and getting more awash, that's what's going to happen,' said Barry Friedman, a professor at New York University's law school who specializes in policing.
Others were more skeptical.
Protesters and residents watched as police in riot gear walk down a residential street in St. Paul, Minn., in May 2020.
John Minchillo/Associated Press
Justin Nix, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, said he hoped that the data was a reflection of improvements in policing and training, but that he was hesitant to draw any conclusions. That's in part because of how rare police killings of unarmed people are and the fluctuating number of cases where it is unclear whether the person who was killed had a weapon.
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Nix, whose focus is on criminology and criminal justice, said the difficulty in interpreting the data was indicative of a larger problem, which is that data on police force and killings remains sparse. For example, he noted, there is little data on police shootings in which a person is not killed. One study estimated that there were roughly 800 such nonfatal shootings each year.
The outlook for policing oversight
Despite the rising overall number of police killings, legislators across the country have rolled back several attempts to reduce police violence.
In Washington state, lawmakers passed an initiative last year that rolled back a law, passed in 2021, that had imposed limits on when the police could chase suspects in their cars. This year, Alabama enacted a new law seeking to make it harder to prosecute or sue police officers. Oregon in 2022 loosened the standard for when police could use tear gas after tightening regulations just a year earlier.
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The federal government, under the Trump administration, has also pulled back from holding law enforcement agencies accountable.
This past week, the Justice Department said it would no longer investigate or oversee nearly two dozen police departments that were accused of civil rights violations, including in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky. And in April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at 'unleashing' law enforcement, including by directing the U.S. attorney general to 'provide legal resources' to defend police officers accused of wrongdoing.
This article originally appeared in
.