In May 2020, the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd sparked the largest wave of civil unrest in U.S. history. An estimated twenty-three million people took to the streets, calling for the reformation, defunding, disarming, or even abolition of police departments. Protesters pointed to policing’s disproportionate targeting of black and brown communities, its role in creating the world’s largest carceral state, and its increasing reliance on military weapons and tactics. Defenders of law enforcement countered that a militarized police force is necessary to regulating the most heavily armed civilian population on earth. These defenders claimed that racism is not endemic to American policing, and that defunding departments would be catastrophic for the very marginalized communities that the protesters sought to support.
In the years that followed, state and local governments across the country considered major reforms, with some increasing budgets for housing and addiction programs and creating unarmed response teams to handle non-violent mental-health emergencies. At the same time, officer recruitment flagged, and the ranks of police departments in some of the largest metropolitan areas shrank. But the effect of these changes has been hard to measure: In New Orleans, where the number of sworn officers decreased by about 20 percent in the two years after Floyd’s death, violent crime increased, and its murder rate became the highest in the country. In Minneapolis, however, where the size of the department has fallen by around 40 percent, the number of homicides has plummeted.
These discrepancies, which were further complicated by varying local responses to the pandemic, appear to suggest no clear path forward. What have we learned in the four years since George Floyd’s murder? Which reforms have proved most successful in reducing violence, both on the part of police officers and among the communities they serve? And what, if anything, can be done to fix law enforcement in the United States?
by Ras Baraka, Rosa Brooks, Barry Friedman, Christy E. Lopez, Tracey L. Meares, Brian O’Hara, Patrick Sharkey, Harper's | Read more:
In the years that followed, state and local governments across the country considered major reforms, with some increasing budgets for housing and addiction programs and creating unarmed response teams to handle non-violent mental-health emergencies. At the same time, officer recruitment flagged, and the ranks of police departments in some of the largest metropolitan areas shrank. But the effect of these changes has been hard to measure: In New Orleans, where the number of sworn officers decreased by about 20 percent in the two years after Floyd’s death, violent crime increased, and its murder rate became the highest in the country. In Minneapolis, however, where the size of the department has fallen by around 40 percent, the number of homicides has plummeted.
These discrepancies, which were further complicated by varying local responses to the pandemic, appear to suggest no clear path forward. What have we learned in the four years since George Floyd’s murder? Which reforms have proved most successful in reducing violence, both on the part of police officers and among the communities they serve? And what, if anything, can be done to fix law enforcement in the United States?
by Ras Baraka, Rosa Brooks, Barry Friedman, Christy E. Lopez, Tracey L. Meares, Brian O’Hara, Patrick Sharkey, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Collages by Mike McQuade. Source images: Police officers in combat uniform © Kostya Pazyuk/Alamy; Black Lives Matter protester © Edwin Remsberg/Alamy; Minneapolis © Superstock/Alamy
