The Murder of George Floyd
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd — a forty-six-year-old Black man — died in Minneapolis, Minnesota after a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds during an arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store. Bystanders recorded video of the incident, which showed Floyd repeatedly saying "I can't breathe" and calling for his mother before losing consciousness. Three other officers — Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane — were present and did not intervene. Floyd was pronounced dead at a hospital; the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by cardiopulmonary arrest due to law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.
The bystander video spread globally within hours, triggering the largest wave of civil unrest in the United States since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Protests erupted in all fifty states and dozens of countries; the Black Lives Matter movement became the most prominent civil rights movement in a generation. Calls to defund or reform police departments led to significant policy debates in cities across the country. The term "I can't breathe" became a global protest phrase.
Derek Chauvin was tried for murder in spring 2021 in a televised proceeding watched by millions. He was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in April 2021 — one of the rare American criminal cases in which a police officer was convicted for killing a civilian in the line of duty. He was sentenced to twenty-two and a half years in prison. The three other officers were separately tried on state charges and on federal civil rights charges; all were convicted on at least some counts and sentenced to prison.
George Floyd's death triggered significant institutional changes: Minneapolis banned certain police restraint techniques; dozens of states passed police reform legislation; and the United States Congress debated the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House but stalled in the Senate. Floyd became one of the most significant figures in the history of American racial justice activism, his name synonymous with both the persistence of systemic racism and the power of ordinary people with a phone camera to hold institutions accountable.