Posted May 27, 2025 | by KimS | in 2025 Trump Administration, Civil Rights, DemDaily, Donald Trump, Judicial, State Issues, Trump Administration

DemDaily: Five Years Later

May 27, 2025

Sunday marked five years since the death of George Floyd, a black man killed during an arrest at the hands of a white police officer, as played out on video in painful detail before the eyes of an anguished national audience.

The incident set off protests nationwide and, in the subsequent months, the largest civil rights uprising since the 1968 death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Within days, demonstrations rose up in hundreds of cities across the country, protesting not only Floyd's death but other high-profile killings by white police officers of African Americans Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky; Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia; Eric Garner in New York City; Freddie Gray in Baltimore and others.

On May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a 46-year-old, unarmed African American man, George Floyd, was arrested for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. After being handcuffed, Floyd was pinned facedown on the ground by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, who continued to kneel on Floyd's neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, despite Floyd's repeated cries of "I can't breathe." Floyd lost consciousness and died.

On May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a 46-year-old, unarmed African American man, George Floyd, was arrested for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. After being handcuffed, Floyd was pinned facedown on the ground by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, who continued to kneel on Floyd's neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, despite Floyd's repeated cries of "I can't breathe." Floyd lost consciousness and died.

By June, more than 60 million Americans had been placed under curfews, affecting people in more than 200 US cities and at least 27 states. By then, sympathy demonstrations had also occurred in an estimated 60 countries.

The tragedy of George Floyd's death became a symbol of police brutality and suppression, particularly of African Americans, and, for a period, appeared to serve as an awakening for a country forced to look itself in the mirror and reexamine its record on racial injustice.

Since Floyd's death, more than 1,500 police reform-related bills have been enacted in almost every state. Those include a ban on choke-holds and no-knock warrants, mandatory police body cameras, measures to increase police staffing and mental wellness training, as well as peer intervention training, with officers taught how to police their own.

The public, however, still awaits substantive federal reform. Attempts to enact meaningful change, including the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021, have failed as negotiations on a reform bill between Republicans and Democrats in a narrowly divided House and Senate have repeatedly collapsed.

The likelihood of Congress acting now, however, has all but halted since Donald Trump retook the White House.

In the months following Floyd's murder, dozens of corporations, including Target, Walmart, McDonald’s, Verizon and Google promised to spend $50 billion to bolster diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within their own companies and communities nationwide.

Now all five companies are among the dozens who have succumbed to political pressure -- publicly retreating from those policies and programs amid threats by the Trump administration of withholding federal approval on multi-million-dollar deals, reverse-discrimination lawsuits against companies with race-conscious policies and conservative-led boycotts.

In his all-out war on social justice, the President, vowing to root out “improper ideology,” ordered the elimination of DEI throughout the federal government and has pulled billions in federal research grants from universities that have DEI programs.

In April 2021, a jury found former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd. Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison and three other officers involved in Floyd's murder were charged with aiding and abetting and were sentenced to 3-5.5 years in prison.

In April 2021, a jury found former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd. Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison and three other officers involved in Floyd's murder were charged with aiding and abetting and were sentenced to 3-5.5 years in prison.

On May 21, Trump's Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it was retracting “overbroad police consent decrees...wrongly issued by the Biden administration" in cities with high-profile killings by officers -- most notably, Minneapolis and Louisville.

Other cities where lawsuits and investigations regarding constitutional violations by local police departments will be terminated include Phoenix, Arizona; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and the Louisiana State Police.

In February, the Trump administration deactivated the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), a federal database established in December 2023 to track federal law enforcement officer misconduct.

In the same month, the right-wing American Accountability Foundation published a "DEI Bureaucrat Watch List" of targeted federal workers from health agencies alleged to have committed “DEI offenses,” asking President Trump to fire them. Many worked in programs aimed at improving the health of people of color and other vulnerable Americans. Some had criticized Trump on social media or made donations to Democrats.

Police killed 1,369 people in the United States in 2024, the deadliest year on record.