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Black America Web
26-05-2025
- Black America Web
George Floyd Remembered On 5th Anniversary Of His Death
George Floyd, a resident of Minneapolis, Minn., lost his life at the hands of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who knelt on Floyd's neck for nine minutes. On the fifth anniversary of his death, many on social media are honoring George Floyd's life. On this day (May 25) five years ago, George Floyd was arrested after a store clerk at Cup Food alerted the police that Floyd used a counterfeit $20 bill inside the establishment. Officers J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane arrived on the scene shortly after 8:00 PM local time. The officers approached Floyd's SUV and ordered him to show his hands before pulling him out of the vehicle. Chauvin and Officer Tou Thao arrived next, making it a total of four officers on Floyd. The officers pulled Floyd out of the backseat of a squad car with Kueng, Lane, and Chauvin physically holding down Floyd. Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck, who repeatedly said he couldn't breathe, and was suffering from an anxiety attack, according to onlookers. The officers ignored Floyd's complaints about his discomfort, with Thao, who kept bystanders at bay, reportedly telling folks, 'This is why you don't do drugs, kids.' The observers noticed that Floyd was no longer moving, and officers discovered that he no longer had a pulse. Witnesses say that the officers did nothing to attempt to revive Floyd as he was lying face down on the pavement. The death of George Floyd sparked citywide demonstrations and protests around the nation, calling for the arrest of the four officers. Floyd's murder bolstered the 'Defund The Police' movement, and tensions between police officers and Black and other minority groups grew as a result. Chauvin was later charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, and was sentenced to 22 and a half years. Chauvin pleaded guilty to federal charges of violating Floyd's civil rights for ignoring his pleas for help, not administering medical care, and for using extreme measures to subdue him. The other three officers faced similar charges. Lane pleaded guilty to state level charges of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter and sewas ntenced to three years to be served alongside a 2 and a half year federal sentence. Kueng pleaded guilty to the same charge and was sentenced to 3 and a half years in state prison to be served with his 2 and a half year federal sentence. Thao waived his right to a trial but was later found guilty of aiding and abetting manslaughter and sentenced to almost five years in prison. Naturally, right-wing trolls and MAGA enthusiasts are pushing the theory that Floyd overdosed on drugs instead of focusing on the charges that the officers actually pleaded guilty to. If these tough-guy officers believed they didn't commit a crime, protests and folks calling for their heads wouldn't have made them fold. It didn't stop them from killing a Black man in broad daylight, right? On X, George Floyd's name is one of the top trending topics. We've got those reactions listed below. — Photo: The Washington Post / Getty George Floyd Remembered On 5th Anniversary Of His Death was originally published on Black America Web Featured Video CLOSE
The Guardian
24-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Critics say the movement to defund the police failed. But Austin and Seattle are seeing progress
After George Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, protesters who swarmed the streets across the US shouted the refrain: 'Defund the police.' An idea that was once viewed as radical – to redirect money from law enforcement to other city departments and social services – became a rallying cry overnight. As a result of continued pressure, dozens of jurisdictions throughout the nation promised to reduce their police budgets. While most of them backtracked and increased law enforcement funding in the next year or two, several cities changed policies or added new public safety and homeless services departments. Milwaukee is one city where leaders diverted money to social programs that had a lasting impact: funding from the police department went toward affordable housing and youth programming. After 2020 Seattle invested part of its police funding into participatory budgeting, a process in which the public votes on how to spend a portion of the city's finances. A few years later, inspired by calls for alternatives to policing from Black and brown organizers, Seattle leaders launched a third public safety department that responds to mental health crises. And Austin has increasingly invested more money in its homeless services since the city diverted millions of dollars from the 2021 police budget to go toward permanent supportive housing instead. Political organizers the Guardian spoke to said the abolitionist dream of divesting from police and reinvesting in social services is a long journey full of valleys. Backlash followed the 2020 protests, and public sentiment toward the movement quickly shifted. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 27% of respondents said greater attention to racial inequality in the US improved Black people's lives, compared with 52% who said it would lead to positive changes in 2020. Though the success stories of the defund movement are not always clear, the groups behind it say they helped move the needle forward in sparking conversations about city priorities and reimagining what public safety looks like. They hope the Trump administration's commitment to capital punishment and increasing law enforcement will inspire people to again envision alternatives to policing. 'If spending money on policing were an effective way to deter crime, then the United States would be the safest country on the planet that has ever existed and it is nowhere near that,' said Marcus Board, an associate professor of political science at Howard University. 'Meanwhile, healthcare suffers, childcare suffers, elder care suffers, public spaces are going away.' Instead of recognizing that people need a social safety net, he said, society punishes people for their hardships as if it's the key to transformation. But the punishment also robs people of their agency. 'That's a world that will constantly suffer unless people step up to do something,' Board said, 'which is why it's so important to remember the movement for Black lives'. In the spring of 2019, Devin Anderson was tabling on police reform in Metcalfe Park in Milwaukee when an older Black woman approached him. Anderson, the campaign and membership director of the non-profit African American Roundtable, showed her a pie chart that revealed that 46% of the city's general fund went toward the police department. Shocked by the figure, the woman told Anderson that she wanted to see more money spent on opportunities for youth, as she feared that boredom would drive her grandson to get into trouble that summer. 'That is a politicizing moment. Even if people do believe in police and policing, they don't think it should be getting that much money,' Anderson said. 'On a larger scale, what does it mean as a society when close to 50% of the money we spend has to go to police and policing, and it can't go to make real investments into things that people want to see?' Anderson and his team compiled the information that they gathered from tabling and listening sessions and formulated a list of community desires, including more youth programming, affordable housing and violence prevention. And then on Juneteenth that year, the African American Roundtable, which focuses on providing political education to the public, launched the campaign LiberateMKE to try to convince city leaders to divest $25m from the Milwaukee police department (MPD) and reinvest it in social programs instead. The campaign organizers attended budget hearings, spoke with city leaders about the need for reduced police spending and sent out email campaigns in which they encouraged residents to put pressure on their elected officials to invest more in social services. A few months later, the campaign was somewhat successful: in Milwaukee's 2020 adopted budget, the city diverted some $1.27m from the MPD to go toward housing and community services, and to increase the hourly wages for a summer jobs for youth program. Some of the diverted money also went toward affordable quality housing and a non-police violence prevention program, in which local residents were trained to de-escalate conflicts that had a high likelihood of resulting in shootings in their neighborhoods. In the city's 2021 adopted budget, there was also an approximately $2m reduction in police funding, which the city's comptroller, Bill Christianson, said reflected a smaller number of police officers, and that Anderson sees as a legacy of the group's advocacy work. Austin's promise to cut its police funding worked for some time. The 2021 police budget went from $434.5m to $292.9m and some of the funds were invested into housing, healthcare, family and mental health services. But city leaders reversed course and increased the police budget to $443m the following year. However, the impact from calls to invest in social services remains. After 2020, $6.5m that was diverted from the police budget went toward housing and services for unhoused people. Renovations for Bungalows at Century Park, an apartment community for the chronically unhoused that opened up last year, were included in that budget. The residents pay for their apartments with housing vouchers or payment assistance and are meant to stay in their units long term, possibly for five or 10 years, said the director of Austin's homeless strategy office, David Gray. 'To go from that into a safe, secure room where you can store your stuff safely, where you can sleep peacefully, and where you can meet with a case manager on site or get healthcare on site or job training on site, it's a night and day difference,' Gray said. While demands to invest in housing and services existed before Floyd's death, the calls to defund the police that followed helped push discussions forward. Budget trends in recent years show that city leaders have listened to the community's request for greater attention to the homelessness crisis. In Austin's most recent point-in-time count of unhoused people from January, volunteers and providers recorded 1,577 unsheltered and 1,661 sheltered people – the first time that the count showed more people sheltered than unsheltered. In the past five years, the city's homelessness services appropriations have increased from $39.7m in 2020 to a proposed $118.1m in 2025. According to the city's financial services data from 2024, the proportion of funding for homeless services that comes from the city's operating budget has increased, from 49.7% in the 2023 fiscal year to 57.5% in the 2025 fiscal year. 'In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests this summer, we made a significant cut to policing dollars and reinvested that in things like this,' Austin city councilmember Gregorio Casar told the Appeal in 2021. 'That's the only reason we're able to do this.' Black and brown-led groups such as the policy organizing non-profit King County Equity Now and the Decriminalize Seattle coalition called on Seattle officials to establish a non-police crisis response unit. They presented the Seattle city council with a blueprint on how to divest from the police and reallocate funding to alternatives to law enforcement. Organizers also called for a participatory budgeting process, in which the public would envision how to spend some of the city's budget. And Seattle leaders listened to some of their demands: some $10.2m was diverted from the city's police department to fund the participatory budgeting process's overall $28.3m reserve in Seattle's 2021 adopted budget. Representatives from Seattle's office of civil rights said that the funding from the police department came from unfulfilled positions and that the money would have returned to the city's general fund if it were unused. City leaders also looked to cities such as Eugene, Oregon, that had successfully launched non-police crisis response units to envision a third public safety department for Seattle. Launched in 2023, Seattle's community-assisted response and engagement (Care) department is a 30-person unit consisting of 24 first responders who address calls throughout the city. Care operates 10 hours a day from noon until 10pm, with the top priority calls being for suicides and overdoses. In the last 16 months, Care has responded to more than 4,000 calls. The Seattle 911 dispatch was also transferred from the Seattle police department to the Care department. When Care's chief, Amy Barden, speaks to community members who have used the service, she said they relay to her that 'it's just a relief to feel like I can call 911, and get a different response' outside of the police. She knows that some health and social service providers avoid calling the police when their clients are experiencing mental health crises. 'They just don't think it's going to be useful in the circumstance, and that it can be stress inducing, no matter how skilled that officer is,' Barden said. 'So it's been a very popular movement across the board.' Still, Barden views Care, police and the fire departments as working together as a team, and added that she 'will not support divestment in the fire or police departments', she said. 'Relative to the 911 data, we desperately need more of everything.' In 2024, participants in the participatory budgeting process – originating from the Black Lives Matter movement – voted to fund the Care department with an additional $2m to increase the number of the team's behavioral and mental health specialists. The organizers that helped push the city to create a third department say that Seattle can serve as an example for the rest of the nation. 'It showcases the stronger need for us to always have these kinds of approaches to our work, particularly when we're talking about doing work that's supposed to benefit specific folks,' TraeAnna Holiday, the former media director of King County Equity Now, said. 'It's important for folks to be engaged and for them to have a vehicle that allows them to be involved when so many people are focused on survival.' The protesters who took to the streets in opposition to law enforcement violence in 2020 were a catalyst for action, but the movement was ultimately led by organizers who worked for years to create safer and healthier communities. The defund movement was sometimes demonized because there wasn't a unified talking point on what communities would invest in outside of policing, said Hiram Rivera, the executive director of the Community Resource Hub for Safety & Accountability, a non-profit that trains communities on the basics of organizing. During the mass protests, Rivera said: 'Traditional organizing wasn't happening at the community level; they weren't able to build strong enough campaigns to either win the divestments or to be able to withstand the blowback when the pendulum swung in the opposite direction.' Currently, Rivera said that the abolitionist movement is in a state of reflection on the past five years and assessing what they have the capacity to build, particularly given the federal attacks on non-profit organizations. Rivera said that state bills have also made it challenging to divert funding from police departments since 2020. In May 2021, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, signed a law penalizing cities for defunding their police budgets. And in Milwaukee, the African American Roundtable plans to end its LiberateMKE campaign over the next year due to an increasingly inhospitable landscape for defunding the police, Anderson said. A 2023 state funding law called Act 12 allowed Milwaukee to implement a 2% sales tax and jurisdictions are provided with additional state aid for law enforcement and fire protection, among other departments. But the city will lose part of its state funding if it does not maintain its number of police officers at the same amount as the previous year. In light of the Trump administration's recent executive order on 'strengthening and unleashing America's law enforcement', the Advancement Project's deputy executive director, Carmen Daugherty, said she is hopeful that the public will demand community-based solutions. A 26-year-old civil rights organization that focuses on movement lawyering, the Advancement Project has helped grassroots groups pressure their cities to invest more in social services by analyzing city budgets, creating surveys and white papers, and launching campaigns. 'This administration is saying we need more policing, more military grade-style weapons in our communities to make us safe,' Daugherty said. 'Once again, we'll hopefully see that upswing and recognition in the spotlight on what these community groups have been saying since pre-2020, but really galvanized in 2020, that there's more we can do. There's smarter solutions to public safety.' For organizers in the Black-led Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) coalition, they seek to dispel what they consider a false narrative that the rallying call around invest-divest didn't work. The defund movement helped catapult the model from the advocacy space into the national dialogue, said M4BL's interim senior director of communications, Chelsea Fuller. Every day for the past five years, she said an article about defunding has been published, or a politician has debated its merits. 'These types of changes in our communities very rarely happen overnight,' Fuller said. Movements take several years, or decades to accomplish significant change. 'It's not over. Five years in the legacy of movement work and liberatory work is a blip on the radar.'
Fox News
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
The Left Trades Law Enforcement For Statues
As seen on Gutfeld!, Greg makes fun of the latest statue erected in Times Square. Plus, Greg calls out the left for supporting BLM and Defund The Police amidst the recent surge in crime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit James Laverty
New York Post
06-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Duh! Study shows ‘defund the police' resulted in more killings
According to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a police group that tracks crime levels, murders rose 44% from 2019 to 2021 across 70 of America's largest cities. But then something happened – big city murders fell dramatically from their peak from over 9,600 in 2021 to 6,900 in 2024 – a 39% decline. What explains the dramatic rise and equally shocking reversal? Policing – first the lack thereof and then its return. Our new study of 15 major cities including New York City, Chicago, Austin, Portland and Minneapolis found that murders spiked in the wake of the summer 2020 unrest as police pulled back – making fewer stops and arrests. When policing rebounded in these cities, murders declined dramatically. Across the 15 cities with a combined population of 27 million and a disproportion share of violent crime, police stops and arrests dropped 40% after May 2020, but have since risen –up 37% from their recent lows in 2021 and 2022. Meanwhile, homicides fell 32% from their recent highs. That more policing would cut crime is not only commonsense, it is borne out by numerous academic studies showing proactive policing reduces violent crime. But our study finds recent murder declines are linked to a 're-policing effect.' As arrests and stops rose, homicides declined rapidly. Those cities where policing levels remain low, murder rates remain near highs. Post-George Floyd de-policing – when demoralized, debilitated, and depleted police forces step back from aggressive anti-crime activities fearing political, professional, or personal consequences for doing their jobs – exacerbated the growing violent and serious crime problem. The Defund The Police movement and the officials espousing anti-police sentiments sent a clear message to frontline officers: don't bother. Big city murders saw a 39% decline from their peak of over 9,600 in 2021 to 6,900 in 2024. James Keivom Emboldened criminals stepped into the vacuum and mayhem ensued. By 2021, the CDC recorded over 26,000 homicides nationwide – 7,000 'excess' killings compared to 2019 levels – and more than half of those additional homicides occurred in the 70 largest cities. As the public recoiled at the growing carnage, many local and state officials who had previously supported the 'Defund the Police' agenda and espoused anti-law enforcement sentiments reversed course while others met with electoral defeat. These shifts in opinion and policy resulted in re-policing that empowered law enforcement to crack down on crime through proactive policing. Cops began to make arrests and stops at increasing rates—and murders fell. Big cities murders are back to 2019 totals – thanks to the police. The Big Apple's experience is telling. Murders rose 44% from May 2020 to February 2022 as arrests declined. When NYPD began to re-police – arrests climbed 95% from 2021 to 2024 — murders dropped. Other big (and violent) cities saw the same effect. In New Orleans, which was slow to re-police, murders fell by half from their heights when stops and searches returned to Pre-Floyd levels. Elsewhere, cities like Austin, Minneapolis, and Portland fully embraced 'defund the police' and the anti-cop rhetoric of 2020 and killings skyrocketed as police activity plummeted. After experiencing eye-popping murder spikes, each city has pulled back from the brink. The mayor of Portland has renounced his prior support for police defunding while in Minneapolis voters rejected a ballot measure to abolish the police department in 2021. In those three jurisdictions, re-policing has been slower but steady and murders are falling but remain elevated – suggesting re-policing has a proportionate impact on homicides. Outliers remain. In Dallas and Philadelphia, arrests have ticked up as murders fell but killings had been rising prior to 2020. In the city of Brotherly Love, homicides had risen by 50% from 2015 to 2019 after voters elected an anti-police mayor in 2016 and Soros DA Larry Krasner in 2017. Dallas murders spiked 2019 after a Soros DA took office causing the governor to send in the state police – twice – to quell the violence. Baltimore is a peculiar case, having its 'Floyd' moment five years prior to the summer of 2020 – and the resulting de-policing and homicide spike. Murders rose 65% after the 2015 Freddie Gray incident and remained high for the next eight years. Then the progressive prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, was replaced by a tough-on-crime DA. As police arrests rose again in 2022, murder rates tumbled to record lows. Every one of the 15 cities has seen its homicide numbers drop since 2021—except Seattle. It is also the only city that did not see any increase in police enforcement. Seattle police make 60% fewer stops than they did in 2019 while the murder rate is 50% higher. The city's experience provides a useful, if tragic, counterfactual, which proves the impact of re-policing on murders. After the disastrous and bloody Defund the Police experiment in de-policing, cops are back on the streets and murders are down. The re-policing effect is real: more policing means less murder. Jason Johnson, former deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, is the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF). Sean Kennedy is LELDF policy director.
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Seattle city council approves resolution to cut ties with 'Defund the Police' movement
Seattle's city council unanimously approved a resolution on Tuesday to end any commitments to defund the police. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, the slogan and movement to "Defund the Police" swept the country. Yet in the wake of a reported rise in crime in multiple cities across the country, politicians, even in Democratic Party strongholds, have sought to distance themselves from the idea. Last week, Rob Saka spoke with fellow members of Seattle City Council's public safety committee about his recently introduced Resolution 32167, to recognize work to improve public safety. The councilmember said at the time, "This resolution reverses any prior commitment or pledge by past councils to defund or abolish the police. We know that these statements were routinely cited by departing police personnel as a reason for leaving. We also know that they are very divisive." Defund The Police 'Isn't Dead,' It's Just Taken New Form With Massive Implications: Retired Police Chief He made headlines again at the city council meeting this week. Read On The Fox News App "'Defund' is dead if this passes, that's the headline!" Saka said at Tuesday's meeting shortly before the final vote where the bill was passed unanimously by the city council. Local news outlet, the Everett Post, reported that next, "Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison will submit the last remaining Seattle Police Department policies to a federal monitor for review." "This legislation allows us to collectively heal from the shameful legacy of 'Defund' and, importantly, officially pivot towards a diversified response model that communities so desperately need," Saka added in his speech before the vote. Saka recalled the irony of how the council that voiced support for the "Defund the Police" movement in 2020 had no Black members at the time. Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture "Ironically, at the time those 'Defund' commitments and pledges were made in the city of Seattle, there were zero, zero Black or African-American, African-descent councilmembers serving in the council at the time," he said mocking the idea that such commitments were made in the best interests of Black Americans like himself. "I didn't benefit from that," he said. "No communities that I'm involved with benefited from that. It hurt all communities!" He reiterated his point and declared, "As a Black man, I'll say, look, Black and Brown communities, we don't need White saviors." After saying that the Black community is both capable of speaking for itself and not a monolith, Saka argued that the commitment to the "Defund the Police" movement had been made after "people cherry-picked specific voices and specific perspectives from our Black community here in Seattle and held it up as 'the perspective.'" "It's not," he said. "Wasn't then, it's not true now."Original article source: Seattle city council approves resolution to cut ties with 'Defund the Police' movement
