How policing has changed 4 years after George Floyd’s murder

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• Geoff Bennett:

  This past Saturday marked four years since the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis.

  Floyd's killing sparked a global uprising and sweeping promises of racial justice and police reform. But, four years later, there's been some backlash to the changes that were set into motion and in some cases public attitudes have shifted.

  To help assess where things stand now with police reforms, we're joined by Phillip Atiba Solomon. He leads the Center for Policing Equity and is chair of African American studies and a professor of psychology at Yale University.

  Thanks so much for being with us.

  Phillip Atiba Solomon, Center for Policing Equity: Thanks, Geoff.

• Geoff Bennett:

  We know at the federal level the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act has stalled, but at the state and local levels, how much would you say policing has actually changed since May of 2020?

• Phillip Atiba Solomon:

  So, when we talk about policing, we can talk about that at multiple different levels.

  When we talk about it, we can say the culture of policing itself. We can talk about attitudes around policing. But I assume what you mean are the policies that regulate policing.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Mm-hmm.

• Phillip Atiba Solomon:

  And, there, I can say it's kind of a mixed bag, right?

  So we have had some places that looked to literally abolish their entire police department and replace it with departments of public safety and some places that were making more incremental change. Some of the incremental change, like bans on choke holds, new pursuit policies, those have moved forward, and some of the attempts to reduce police budgets have maintained as well.

  But I have to say, post the murder spike in 2021 and 2022, we found ourselves unable to maintain that broad-spread momentum. What we can say, the good news around this is, in multiple municipalities, there are example projects, things that move forward that people are looking at and saying, well, this could be the way that we make good on the moral imperative that came post-George Floyd and the political realities that came in the backlash of that.

  Places like Denver that's had the STAR program, that has replaced law enforcement with mental health response in certain crises, places like Austin, and whole states like Washington state and Connecticut that are set to eliminate low-level traffic enforcement by police.

  So it's a mixed bag. There's some really exciting stuff happening right now, and there's definitely been some backsliding. I don't think that we're done with the analysis of the full consequences of that moment.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, given your point, the degree to which the politics have changed, we have seen conservative states, even some progressive areas, pass these new tough-on-crime laws.

  At this point, are there key structural reforms to policing that are both practical and scalable that you think would be effective?

• Phillip Atiba Solomon:

  Yes, and I just want to reset here, because we're talking about the term reform, and reform has a particular meaning in this context.

  Reform means making the systems we have got better. And there are absolutely some things that we can do that can produce reforms that are laudable and can help ensure public safety, particularly in vulnerable Black and brown communities.

  But there's another thing we got to be working on, which is entirely building up new systems and replacing the ones that we have got. Both/and are necessary. So, for instance, I talked about Washington state and Connecticut looking to ban all low-level traffic enforcement by police. This is because there's no evidence that doing that makes anything any safer.

  Crashes aren't reduced by it, communities don't feel any safer, and, by the way, law enforcement doesn't want to be doing it. That is a kind of reform, right, it's a change in policy, making the systems we have got better, that folks can get behind and hopefully can both improve public safety and the efficiency of collecting whatever enforcement fees we might need. And it gets law enforcement out of the places they don't need to be.

  But we're not going to stop the cycle of seeing the ugliness we saw in the aftermath of the lynching of George Floyd unless we invest upstream so that communities aren't in crisis in the first place. If communities are in crisis, the things that we send in response are never going to be sufficient.

  And I'm glad to hear that we're here when we have got cities like Evanston, Illinois, cities like Ithaca, New York, and Berkeley, California, that are working to increase their spending on the social safety net so that folks don't have to call out for emergency medical, fire, or law enforcement in the first place.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, broadly speaking, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, there were lots of promises and millions of dollars spent on racial justice efforts, on efforts aimed at rethinking policing.

  What's your take on the status of those promises right now?

• Phillip Atiba Solomon:

  Yes, you saw a lot of Twitter activism and political statements that got made, a lot of commitments of money, but those commitments of money didn't always come to fruition.

  There were a lot of corporations that said, we need to do better internally, and we are committed to making sure our communities get the resources they need. And it turns out not as much got spent in that way as we had hoped.

  We had a lot of municipalities saying that we were going to invest in upstream resources to keep people from being in crisis, and we were going to take that from police budgets. But what we know is that police budgets have expanded in that period of time since 2020. They have not shrunk nationwide.

  In fact, there are very few cities where it's shrunk at all. So what I'd say is, as a country, we weren't ready yet again for this moment. It's not that it hasn't happened many times before, but we weren't ready for something on the scale of the moral outrage as what we saw in the aftermath of the lynching of George Floyd. We just weren't ready for it.

  And so we had great ability for acute empathy, and for in-the-moment decisiveness and commitments. But we had not strapped in for the long haul, which is what's necessary to manage a system and reform, alter, replace a system that's $115 billion annually. That's how much we spend on law enforcement.

  It is no less complicated than education or health care, and it's not going to be any easier to give ourselves the kind of systems in public safety that we need than it is in education and health care. The good news, again, the good news is, there was a wakeup call to the country. And there are people who understand that the ways that we have been trying to keep folks safe in crisis, the aftermath of a lack of investment doesn't make sense.

  It's not cost-efficient. It's not equal. It's not just. It's not right. And so a more fulsome consideration, a more fulsome moral conversation has been sticky in this country. And as we get individual municipalities that are winning on some of these issues and demonstrating that new directions can actually keep communities safer, I am optimistic that we're going to see that start to grow.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Phillip Atiba Solomon is chair of African American studies and a professor of psychology at Yale University.

  Thanks so much for being with us. We appreciate it.