America Wanted a Reckoning Over Racist Policing. Five Years Later, Here’s What Has Happened.

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On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis. The event sparked nationwide protests calling for a reckoning over racist policing. City leaders were promising “to end policing as we know it.”

In the years since, the city of Minneapolis has tried a number of reforms. There was a push to change the city’s charter to eliminate the police department, which failed. But some initiatives have succeeded.

On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Minnesota Public Radio’s Brandt Williams about what policies have changed in Minneapolis since George Floyd’s murder. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Since George Floyd’s murder, has the police force gotten smaller? 

Brandt Williams: The police force has gotten smaller, but not because the council cut funding for them. The budgets for the police department have remained either relatively stable or increased over the years.

Several hundred officers have left since 2020. Many of them retired, but also a lot of them took workers’ compensation claims based on reports of PTSD and left.

The department is in the process of rebuilding. But their decrease in numbers had nothing to do with their budgets being cut.

What would the mayor say has been a success for his effort to restructure policing in the city? 

The mayor’s been very much on board with the Human Rights Department agreement that the city struck in 2023 which mandated certain reforms. When the Minnesota Department of Human Rights opened its investigation and filed this lawsuit, saying the Minneapolis Police Department had violated the civil rights and human rights of communities of color, they immediately mandated some changes like banning chokeholds.

They also mandated that the police chief make discipline decisions publicly available and out there for people to see, to encourage more accountability. But it’s hard to quantify how all these changes have led to either improved police–community relations or a reduction in complaints against police officers.

Those seem like minor improvements, if you ask me.

Yeah, these are very incremental changes. We’ve just surpassed the one-year mark of the monitoring segment of this agreement between the city and the Minnesota Human Rights Department. Now, the independent monitor released a report that shows that the city has made some significant gains in at least complying with these initial parts of the agreement. Again, they’re very incremental. For instance, they have to create better structures for administering support for officers. “Officer wellness” is what they are calling it. And those are structures that had not been there before. So they’re trying to build those, and then they’re going to be evaluated on how well they do with those.

That seems like such a strange metric to me, when the thing that prompted so much talk about reform was the murder of an unarmed Black man. 

Well, that’s just one small part of the agreement. There are many metrics involved in this. But I mean, there are folks who also tell you: “Hurt people hurt people.” And if there are officers who have been doing the type of work where they’re exposed to trauma every day on the job, those officers may also be in need of some help themselves, to prevent them from carrying out biased policing or using excessive force because they themselves have not learned any other way to handle or to react to the stress that they find on the job.

In the midst of all this, is there any reason to believe that relations between police and the local Minneapolis community have improved at all? 

What is hardest to get at is the prevailing community sentiment. We pay attention to the activists and the demonstrators when they come out and say, “Hey, there’s something that we don’t like about what’s happening with the Minneapolis Police Department.” But on the other end, there are people living in neighborhoods throughout the city—I used to live in one of those neighborhoods that had some challenges with crime. Those are people who are not going to show up at demonstrations or at City Hall to speak at a public hearing. They have a bit more nuanced connection with the police department. They need police services. They don’t deny that. These are not people who have called for the abolition of the police. But they want good policing.

Obviously they don’t want to see people being harassed or getting beaten up by police officers for no reason. Getting a handle on how those people are feeling over the years is going to be the real test. And it’s not clear to me so far, and in the reporting that we’ve done, how far people are coming along on that level.

We are seeing major changes in how the police department is responding to certain types of calls. For the last couple of years, the city has instituted a behavioral crisis response team, which is comprised of people who are mental health professionals. They’re not armed, they’re not uniformed. And they respond to these lower-level types of mental health calls, where before it would be police officers going out there; perhaps trying to talk somebody out of a backyard who’s been sitting there, and the neighbors call because they see this person sitting in somebody’s backyard and there’s something going on, and the police come there.

One of the major complaints has been that when police officers arrive, they have guns, they have uniforms that can escalate a situation into something violent. And this behavioral crisis response team has reported positive results. They’ve taken over many of those calls—hundreds of those calls—that police officers would take. That frees up police officers to handle things that are perhaps going to be a little bit more dangerous.

But I’m struck by the fact that that would not have helped in the George Floyd situation, right? Because while he was using drugs at the time, he was called because of shoplifting? 

They thought he had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. It’s hard to say, I mean, in hindsight, whether that would have been a good call for a mental health crisis response team.

Is there a bigger lesson about the Black Lives Matter movement in general from what’s happening in Minneapolis? Because it seems like you’re painting the picture of something that’s long, drawn-out, bitterly fought. 

Like in many cities, Black Lives Matter became more vocal and a larger movement after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. We had another killing of a young black man in 2015 named Jamar Clark [in Minneapolis]. And that really led to larger participation in Black Lives Matter.

And fast-forward to the killing of George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter signs were on lawns everywhere and in windows in all parts of the city. You don’t see as many of those now. There’s definitely been a bit of a pullback. And frankly, some of the protest leaders from back in the day, they’ve burnt out. Many of them have just had to step back. We’ve tried to reach many of them for our coverage five years later. There are people who have told us: “I’m just not in it anymore.”