One year after George Floyd's death: stranded police reform and a spike in violence

On the day he was going to die, May 25, 2020, George Floyd went to buy tobacco at a store he frequented in Minneapolis, at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue.

He had woken up as a completely anonymous man, a 46-year-old black man with a troubled life, full of ups and downs, falls and resurrections, drug problems, some time in jail, the desire to get ahead, to fight.

But that May 25, the last of his life, was part of the dark times.

He had been left without a job due to the pandemic.

He had used again.

A clerk called the police because he had paid him with a fake $ 20 bill.

More information

• Divisions Shake Black Lives Matter

• Former cop Chauvin, convicted of killing George Floyd, calls for a new trial

By night, Floyd's agony and death under the knee of a white policeman, a trance of more than nine minutes on video, had already swept across the United States. The protests broke out throughout the country and, in a few days, crossed borders. Within a few weeks, it was clear that the largest mobilization against racism since the death of Martin Luther King, half a century ago, has just begun. Police departments began to change regulations, companies revised their regulations, the Pentagon took action against the tributes to the symbols of slave America in its facilities.

This Tuesday marks a year since the brutal arrest and death of Floyd at the hands of agent Derek Chauvin, the case that caused a national catharsis and laid the basis for promoting profound changes in the police and justice. In the historic trial last April, Chauvin was convicted of the three counts of reckless manslaughter for which he was charged, a tough and infrequent decision for on-duty police officers, highly protected by law, in what was clear that it was a inflection point. Floyd is now naming a police reform law that must be debated in Congress. And there is now a president in the White House, Joe Biden, who speaks bluntly of "systemic racism" in the United States.

But the violence in the streets did not stop growing in the big cities in the 2020 of the pandemic and the calls to subtract funds and powers from the police departments, a vindication of the most radical sectors of the Democratic Party and the Black Lives movement Matter (Black lives matter), has come face to face with this reality. In Minneapolis, where it all began, a third of the officers (200 uniformed) have resigned or tried to leave since the incident.

The head of the department, the African-American Medaria Arredondo, has denounced a cut of 8 million [about 6.5 million euros] in the budget decided in December, within the policy to invest in services and alternatives to the police force. "We cannot do this alone," he complained at a press conference this week. In Los Angeles, where local politicians had agreed to reduce the budget by 8% after the

, the green light has just been given to the hiring of another 250 agents to respond to the increase in violence, since the number of murders it has increased 36% in one year. New York suffered nearly 500 homicides in 2020, the highest in 10 years.

The pressure on justice has also grown. Just a week before Chauvin's trial began, a young black man named Daunte Wright was killed trying to get out of a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, a suburb of Minneapolis, because, according to the police chief, the white agent trying to arrest him mistook the stun gun for the real one. The prosecutor who had taken over the case, Pete Orput, just dropped it. Orput has charged the police, Kim Potter, with a crime of reckless manslaughter and protests by activists, who claimed the charge of murder, reached the doors of his house. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced Friday that his office would take over and review the charges.

This Tuesday demonstrations are expected in the street in memory of Floyd. Biden, who will host his family in the White House, has called on Congress to speed up police reform. The new law includes the creation of a police misconduct registry and the prohibition of some restraint techniques such as the drowning that killed Floyd. He has succeeded in the House of Representatives, with a Democratic majority, but he needs the support of the Republicans in the Senate. The root causes for which a black man is more likely than a white man to die in police custody, exclusion and inequality, remain in force.