George Floyd anniversary: How his death turned policing into a political battle

George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police rocked nearly every facet of American life: entertainment, academia, politics, corporate culture, and even conversations at the dinner table.

One year after the tragedy felt around the world, the law enforcement community is still grappling with the fallout that has thrown the future of policing into uncertainty.

Other nonpartisan institutions are still navigating the aftermath of the appalling encounter and its meaning for society.

Protests over Floyd’s murder broke out within days of his fatal brush with former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020, and spread to virtually every major city in the country. Nearly half of all U.S. counties saw a protest last summer. Additionally, as many as 26 million people said they participated in one of the demonstrations, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

With the marches came a summer of unrest.

Property Claim Services, an insurance company that analyzes data, estimated that violence from the protests in multiple cities would cost more than $1 billion in covered losses, “marking it as the costliest civil disorder in U.S. history,” according to the Insurance Information Institute.

Police were often on the front lines of the protests, which were focused nominally on police brutality but came to represent a movement, Black Lives Matter, that sought to deal with racial inequality across all levels of society.

By the end of the summer, public perception of police had plummeted. A Gallup poll published in August 2020 found that confidence in the police had fallen below 50% for the first time in nearly three decades.

One of the demands of protest organizers, that cities “defund the police,” became a reality in several places last year.