5 Years After George Floyd: Will We Ever Get True Police Reform?

Despite demands for systemic change, there were missed opportunities after the “racial reckoning” of 2020. We'd better learn from those mistakes if we want lasting change.

Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Los Angeles. July 1, 2020. (Rawpixel/Envato)

Trump is making good on his promise to sic the police on Black America and allow the paddy rollers to run roughshod over us. Trump’s recent executive order on law enforcement brings clarity to policing’s role in a white supremacist fascist regime. Long story short: Trump will allow police to brutalize us with no accountability, provide legal pro bono representation to cops who brutalize, prosecute state and local officials who pursue DEI policies in law enforcement, and unleash the military in the streets against the people.

“When local leaders demonize law enforcement and impose legal and political handcuffs that make aggressively enforcing the law impossible, crime thrives and innocent citizens and small business owners suffer,” Trump said in his order, reflecting his promises to give police broad immunity, and his belief that police should be rough on the public.

Trump’s Justice Department has already reversed President Biden’s directives on police reform and put a freeze on civil rights litigation against problematic police departments with a pattern of abuse. Trump also eliminated the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which does employment background checks on officers with a history of misconduct.

This month marks five years since white police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, erupting into a summer of protest and the largest mass movement in U.S. history. An uprising with revolutionary fervor brewing during the COVID pandemic, the “racial reckoning” of 2020 was pregnant with possibilities that never came to fruition. Project 2025 — the white Christofascist initiative which undergirds Trump 2.0 — is the white backlash against the George Floyd uprising. “Defund the police” became a slur, and social justice protesters were painted as terrorists, rioters and criminals.

Bad leaders, bad laws, and the “racial reckoning” that wasn’t

Despite widespread demands for systemic change and cries for police reform in this white settler colonial state, there were missed opportunities in the aftermath of the racial reckoning. We failed to learn the lessons, but we must learn these things now if we want lasting change.