Has there been progress toward police reform in the five years since George Floyd’s murder?

Has there been progress toward police reform in the five years since George Floyd’s murder?

Community members active in the movement for racial justice and police accountability in the Twin Cities were asked that question. Responses ranged from yes and no –  to absolutely not. Read on for their views on what’s happening at the state and federal levels, local governance and policing. 

This is part one of a two-part series; next month will focus on what they’d like to see going forward. Comments are excerpts, edited for length and clarity. See full version online.

 

• Nekima Levy Armstrong, civil rights attorney, founder of Racial Justice Network and founder of Dope Roots cannabis and wellness company:

“We have made some progress over the last five years, but I believe that there should be more significant progress at this point if the powers that be were serious about transforming the systems that allowed for and helped facilitate the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.

“It was obviously unprecedented that all four officers were fired, charged and convicted and that the convictions happened both at the state and federal levels. We had never experienced anything like that in our state before. That wouldn’t have happened were it not for the people who were boots on the ground from day one, even before George Floyd was killed.

“We had another unprecedented situation where the governor actually listened to us and moved the prosecution of Derek Chauvin and the other [three] officers from [then] County Attorney Mike Freeman to the [MN] attorney general. That was significant, because instead of getting the same, tired prosecution that we would have gotten – if at all – through Freeman’s office, we got a master class in how to successfully prosecute killer cops.

"The fact that we have been able to help oust some elected officials as well as police leadership over the years is also a sign of progress. The fact that we have some new elected officials who believe in and support police accountability, that is a part of the paradigm shift that's happened.

“Eleven of us filed lawsuits against the city of Minneapolis and the MPD. We had private counsel thanks to the ACLU of Minnesota, and we settled our cases. As a result of that settlement, [former Minneapolis Police Federation leader] Bob Kroll was forced to agree to not serve in a law enforcement position in Hennepin, Anoka and Ramsey counties for 10 years. That’s huge considering his influence on the MPD and metro area police forces.“

• Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB):

“There have been some changes. We were able to get a ban on no knock warrants [2023]. We were able to get a bill in place called Travis’ Law [2021] that requires 911 to send mental health crisis responders instead of law enforcement to most mental health crisis calls, which is really significant because 50% of the people killed by police are in the throes of a mental health crisis at the time. In [2024], a bill passed that bans the use of the term ‘excited delirium,’ and there’s been a ban across the state on neck restraints. They don’t end police brutality as a whole, but they’re modest reforms that I think are valuable.

“At the same time, we in Minneapolis have the Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) consent decree which presents opportunities to make some reforms. One of its main points is that anytime they want to make policy changes in the areas covered by that consent decree, they have to be run by the community. So, the city’s been sending out draft policies, and we’ve done an extensive amount of work giving them pushback and feedback on those policies.

“We are working on an analysis of the U.S. Department of Justice [DOJ] consent decree [on May 21, the DOJ under the Trump administration announced its dismissal of the consent decree]. We don’t think it’s futile. The city has said they’re going to follow it. Well, we’re going to know what’s in it, so we’re going to know whether you’re following it or not. And by the way, we’re going to make you follow it.

"We meet with Effective Law Enforcement for All [ELEFA] on a regular basis, and we tell them what they need to be doing. They come maybe every other month, so they don't hear about things like when John Sawchak shot Davis Moturi and the Minneapolis police sat on it for five days. They sat on it way before that and could have kept him from getting shot.”

• Angela Harrelson, George Floyd’s aunt and co-chair of Rise & Remember:

“I do believe there has been some change. I don’t think there’s been enough to break the system, but definitely enough to shake the system. We’ve got judicial initiatives, there are police initiatives that came out banning chokeholds, neck restraints, mandatory body cams they have to wear, mandatory accountability where if [an officer] sees their partner doing some type abuse of power, they must intervene and report it. And they can’t stop [some] minor traffic violations.”

• KingDemetrius Pendleton, Listen 2 Us Media and Studio:

“Have there been any change after the public murdering and lynching of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin? I would say, absolutely not; if anything, it’s been worse. Prime example: when you think about [provisions] in the George Floyd Act, basically indicating that police officers be held responsible, what we’re seeing is no accountability. Police officers are able to shoot people and kill people and basically come up with this tomfoolery statement indicating that they fear for their life. One of the prime examples, is [what] happened to Sonya Massey [who Deputy Sean Grayson killed in her Illinois home]. Luckily, his partner was recording the whole thing. If that would have not been recorded, that would have been swept under the rug.”

• Levy Armstrong:

“One of the biggest [missed] opportunities was to end qualified immunity for police. The George Floyd case demonstrated the need to end qualified immunity, because cities are the ones that pay the cost of police violence and the unjustified use of deadly force, which winds up impacting taxpayers at the end of the day, and police shouldn’t just be able to walk away scott free.

“At a minimum, Congress should have passed the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, even though many activists around the nation didn’t think it went far enough. It’s still better than what we got, which is the bare minimum.”

 

• Harrelson: “In this political climate, people lost a little hope because they didn’t expect the administration to come down so hard on marginalized communities, Black and Brown people. Banning Black History Month, taking it back, just playing with your feelings. I’ve spoken to some people that feel like second-class citizens – but we always feel like second-class citizens. But I think it makes it much worse, because you feel like you have a leader that don’t support and believe in them.”

• Pendleton: “For Donald Trump to roll back DEI and not only that, Target, based right here in Minnesota, to jump right on the bandwagon… they rolled it back expeditiously. But they did not know that there would be a push back, and they foot traffic would decline expeditiously.

“We also witnessed not one Blue Lives Matter came forward and say anything about Donald Trump pardon all those 1,500 people, including individuals that [assaulted] police officers. I thought they were so ‘back the blue.’ Not one got on social media said [a] thing, so that just let us know how racist our country is and how divided it is.

“Not only that, to see [members of the administration] indicating that maybe we should pardon Derek Chauvin, to make that tomfoolery statement is totally flapdoodle, but… they want to start a race war.

“He’s trying to roll back and tear down Black Lives Matter in Washington, D.C. He thought a lot of Black people was going to come out there so he can cattle them and imprison them and shoot them. But he was dead wrong. A lot of people [are] sitting this out.”

• Levy Armstrong: “A great development, the national federal database that had been signed into law to capture data around police misconduct, use of deadly force, that we could access as the public to look up officers, is now gone under Donald Trump.

“One thing that happened before [2020] was President Barack Obama repealing most of the 1033 program – that recently got overturned by Donald Trump, as well. That is the [program] that allows the military to sell surplus military grade weapons and equipment to local police departments. That, to me, is multiple steps back.”

 

• Riley Bruce, Powderhorn neighbor: “I think that yes, there has been some progress. However, I do not think that that progress has been made manifest in policy.

“The progress that we’ve seen has been in the minds of the people of Minneapolis, both in the relatively small community that is Southeast Minneapolis and more broadly in the minds of people who are not sitting on a whole bunch of capital.

“We can see that change in the way that city council elections have gone. [In] the makeup of the Minneapolis City Council, we’re seeing people who truly have the community’s back coming into office, and who are working to listen to people in the community rather than listen to interests who are just protecting property. We need to focus on the constituents of the city and the things that they're saying, and not the people who may come in for a Twins game occasionally.

“When it comes to [policing], I have also seen the mask come off a little bit of our current mayor, and folks are able to see the way that he has been facilitating and just allowing this to continue. I think that was made the most clear when the Minneapolis police murdered Amir Locke [in 2022]. With all of the conversation around ‘We banned no knock warrants,’ no, actually, we hadn’t banned no knock warrants. The policy changes that were touted weren’t real.

“We have taken a police chief who is a person of color from Minneapolis, removed him from office and replaced him with a White man who is not from Minneapolis. That is truly the extent of the change that I have seen in the MPD. They’re still driving 50 miles an hour down my street with their lights on just to get through lights. They’re still treating people in the community as the enemy rather than as fellow citizens.

"As far as I'm aware, none of the residency statistics have changed; as of the most recent study, greater than 95% of the MPD does not live in Minneapolis.

“I’m not some completely naive person who believes that we’ll be able to abolish the concept of policing tomorrow. It takes changing things at a societal level, and there are other things that we need to fix in our society – we need to get housing for folks, we need to get health care for folks, we need to have avenues for people to get resources. And that takes time and investment. But I’m not seeing those investments. Partially, because of the massive burden that is the current police budget.

"[We’re] a city which requires the city to shoulder payouts for misconduct. You're not going to be able to do other things if the only thing that you can think about is, ‘How do we keep paying our protection money’? It's disheartening that we feel comfort in what is effectively occupation.

"The city council has tried twice to get rid of the Mounted Police unit within the MPD, once toward the end of 2024 [when] council member Latricia Vetaw wanted people to say the names of the police horses who were going to be defunded.

"I've seen community reports that those horses are still out and about in community, at events, with officers on their backs. That’s just part and parcel of the extent to which [the MPD] is just rogue, and the idea that through any mechanism other than their budget that it is possible to control them, I think is misguided, especially in this post factual, post legal world that we currently find ourselves entering.

“You’ve got to follow the money.”

• Christin Crabtree, Ward 9 resident: “Generally speaking, no. There has not been meaningful change. I think there has been plenty of conversation around it. I think there have been some real concerted efforts by both community members and our city council. I have not seen the collaboration or efforts in good faith coming from our administration to make it possible. [The mayor]’s responsible for oversight of our police… under this current mayor, there’s been a lack of transparency, and that was true before the change in government structure that made our strong mayor system. There has been this strategic way of not really picking a side or not helping accomplish things and then celebrating wins that were other people’s work.

“The Behavioral Crisis Response [BCR] team is something that’s been lauded by national media as being transformative and a really powerful change that’s happened in our city. That was led by city staff, many of whom are not even at the city any more, using both data-driven practices and thinking outside of the box in a creative way. I deeply respect that kind of work.

“It was city council that made sure the BCR could function. It was city council that paid for them to have working vans. They didn’t have enough vans initially; the vans they had were falling apart. It requires intentionality.

“Another example would be group violence intervention and violence interrupters and safety ambassadors – all those programs can be part of a public safety ecosystem that goes beyond policing, and all of those programs can be great when they are brought forward in a way that has accountability, transparency, when they are funded and supported. And what we’ve seen, is council will put funding into these kind of programs, and then the administration will not implement them. Or the mayor will wanna implement something, but it’s not funded. So that leads to this gridlock. And it’s really, really frustrating.

“It’s also really frustrating to see the lack of collaboration between these branches of government [and] other jurisdictions. Hennepin County also utilizes group violence intervention programming. They have a really robust RFP and oversight process that leads to higher quality work and then accountability if something goes wrong. And in our city, we don’t have that. We haven’t seen the kind of basic good governance that one would expect. So we’ve had to really center the police as public safety. And public safety is a relationship. It is not something you own. And police are the reaction when something’s gone wrong, and we see pretty consistently that their job is more about protecting property rather than about keeping people safe…

"I have a friend who was distributing food to unhoused neighbors, and the police kicked her off of the private lot that she was pulled up on with these meals and said, ‘You can’t be here.’ She moved off the lot onto the city street to distribute the meals, and they said ‘You can’t be here, either.’ They ended up arresting her. I’m not sure that that’s public safety. What are we doing here? What a waste of resources. We see this in other [cases] as well – whether it’s Davis Moturi or Allison Lussier.

“I’ve seen our police be incredibly disrespectful to elders in our community, putting hands on them, be forceful – and I’m talking within the last year. I’ve seen real questionable treatment of our community members, especially community members who are not White.

“I see our most vulnerable neighbors get blamed for violence when the real cause of violence is disinvestment in people. I see the Community Commission of Police Oversight [CCPO], and I’m not seeing a whole lot of action coming out of that group. Or a lot of transparency.”

• Gross: “The OPCR/CCPO is so dysfunctional. It’s designed to be controlled at every level by the city. It’s designed to give us the exact outcome that we’ve gotten, which is less than half of 1% of complaints have ever resulted in any discipline. They are, I think, 1,400 complaints behind.

“The CCPO, I’ve never seen a more ridiculous outfit in my life. These are people that are supposedly community members, and they are as hostile to the community as they can possibly be. They don't seem to have an attendance requirement of any kind. How these people can just be on there in name only and never show up for anything, never do anything. And the ones that do show up are just openly hostile to the community. That’s one of the main things we don’t like, that both consent decrees seem to bake in the OPCR structure.”

• Crabtree: “I’m seeing political games being played at the expense of human lives. It’s absolutely unacceptable. The council approved funding for violence intervention, the contracts have still not been signed [as of May 15]. Those are the groups specifically in the corridor that would have been East Phillips, where we saw multiple shootings [recently]. Would that have been prevented if these guys were out on the streets and their contract was in effect? I don’t know. But I do know that we would probably see less violence if people’s needs were met. If we had more presence in the community, if people were fed and housed, we would see a lot of that violence dissipate.

“We don’t see that the number of police on the street necessarily correlates with violence statistics. I would question that. Our police are not resourced to respond to certain issues, such as mental health crises, domestic violence, homelessness, and yet they are being assigned to all of those things rather than the people that are actually well trained in those kind of responses. I think that’s an issue as well, and we’re constantly seeing violence and even the killing of young Black and Brown people. That’s unacceptable. Then finger pointing between our police chief and our county attorney that’s not helpful, and it’s dishonest. She can’t try a case if there’s not enough evidence to do it, and then we’re seeing our police not do their diligence to get the evidence required. 

• Gross: “When you’re the chief of the police and you’re more outraged about a burning Third Precinct, but you didn’t get upset about a man getting shot in his freaking front yard, Davis Moturi, and blaming him for getting shot in the neck himself. He called [911] 19 times. And you let the guy that did the shooting sit in his house for five days until everybody shamed [you] into arresting. It’s just unbelievable to me.”

 

Going forward.