George Floyd's Murder and the Police Reform Laws That Followed

The call that brought police to the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis on the evening of May 25, 2020, was about a twenty-dollar bill. A clerk at Cup Foods thought a customer had paid with a counterfeit note and phoned it in, the kind of complaint that police departments field thousands of times a year and that usually ends with a report nobody reads. This one ended with George Floyd, a 46-year-old father who had moved to Minneapolis from Houston for a fresh start, face down on the pavement beside a squad car while officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes. A seventeen-year-old named Darnella Frazier, who had walked to the store with her young cousin, stood on the sidewalk and recorded it on her phone. Her video is the reason the world did not have to take anyone's word for what happened, and it is the hinge on which the next six years of American policing law turned.

In short: George Floyd's murder set off the largest protests in modern American history and a wave of state laws on chokeholds, use of force, police records and officer decertification. A federal bill passed the House twice but died in the Senate, and much of what Washington later did by executive order was reversed in 2025, leaving states and cities as the main places where the changes held.

Nine minutes on a phone screen

It is worth remembering how the first official account read. The Minneapolis Police Department's initial statement described a man who resisted and then appeared to suffer medical distress. It said nothing about a knee. By the next morning, Frazier's video had made that statement impossible to defend, and the city fired all four officers involved within a day.

What followed in the streets is well documented. Protests spread from Minneapolis to hundreds of cities and then to other countries, in a pandemic, with millions of people marching over the following weeks. Polling firms found that support for the Black Lives Matter movement rose sharply that spring. Some protests turned destructive, and a Minneapolis police precinct building was burned. Both things are part of the record, and both shaped the politics that followed.

The criminal cases moved more slowly but reached clear endings. In April 2021, a Hennepin County jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to twenty-two and a half years. He later pleaded guilty to federal civil-rights charges. The three other officers were convicted in federal court in 2022 of violating Floyd's civil rights, and their state cases on aiding and abetting charges ended with two guilty pleas and one conviction by a judge. Frazier received a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize board in 2021 for her courage in recording the murder.

Those verdicts mattered. Convictions of police officers for on-duty killings are rare, and the Chauvin trial showed that a jury would hold an officer accountable when the evidence was undeniable. But prosecutions punish one case at a time. The protesters were asking for something larger: rules that would make the next killing less likely.

What the marchers asked for, and what "defund" did to the argument

The demands that came out of the protests were more varied than the slogans suggested. Some activists wanted to shrink police budgets and move money into mental-health response, housing and youth programs. Some wanted police abolished altogether. Many more wanted specific limits: bans on chokeholds and neck restraints, duties for officers to intervene when a colleague uses excessive force, open disciplinary records, independent investigations of police killings and an end to no-knock warrants after the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville that March.

The phrase that traveled furthest was "defund the police." It meant different things to different people, from modest budget shifts to abolition, and that ambiguity became a liability. Opponents used it to paint every reform as an attempt to leave neighborhoods unprotected. Polls showed that the slogan was unpopular even among many Black voters who strongly supported accountability measures. Democratic candidates in swing districts spent the 2020 and 2022 campaigns explaining what they did not mean.

This is a place where progressives made their own work harder. The underlying ideas, like sending trained crisis counselors instead of armed officers to some mental-health calls, often polled well. Wrapped in a slogan that sounded like an end to public safety, they became easy to defeat. When Minneapolis voters were asked in November 2021 whether to replace the police department with a new public-safety agency, they said no. The lesson many organizers drew is not that accountability is unpopular, but that the people most exposed to both crime and police violence want both problems taken seriously at once.

The state laws that passed

Congress did not deliver a law. Statehouses did, and quickly.

Minnesota's legislature passed a police accountability package in July 2020 that banned chokeholds and neck restraints in most circumstances, required officers to intervene and report when a colleague used excessive force, and banned so-called warrior-style training that teaches officers to see every encounter as a fight. Colorado passed one of the broadest laws in the country in June 2020, requiring body cameras statewide, limiting the use of force, banning chokeholds and creating a state-law claim against officers without qualified immunity as a defense.

New York repealed Section 50-a of its Civil Rights Law, a provision that had kept police disciplinary records secret for decades, in June 2020. Massachusetts passed a law at the end of 2020 that created a state commission to certify officers and strip certification from those who commit serious misconduct, so a fired officer cannot simply be hired by the next town over. California followed in 2021 with its own decertification law. Maryland's legislature in 2021 repealed the state's Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights, which had given officers special procedural protections in discipline cases, overriding Governor Larry Hogan's veto. Louisville passed Breonna's Law, banning no-knock warrants in the city, in June 2020. Illinois passed a sweeping criminal justice law in early 2021 that, among other things, ended cash bail; that part took effect in 2023 after a court fight.

The details varied enormously, and the list above is far from complete. Many states adopted some version of a chokehold ban, a duty to intervene, a requirement for body cameras or a system for tracking officers who are fired for misconduct. Some measures were narrow. Some were later amended, as in Washington, where legislators loosened 2021 limits on vehicle pursuits after police and some prosecutors argued that they were letting suspects flee. That back-and-forth is normal lawmaking, and it is worth tracking rather than mourning.

The federal bill that passed the House twice

In Washington, the House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act on June 25, 2020. It would have banned chokeholds and no-knock warrants in federal drug cases, created a national registry of police misconduct, required data collection on use of force, tied federal grants to state reforms, lowered the intent standard for federal criminal prosecution of officers and narrowed qualified immunity for law enforcement.

The Senate's Republican majority had its own proposal, the JUSTICE Act, written by Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the chamber. It relied more on data collection and incentives and left qualified immunity alone. When it came to the floor that June, Democrats blocked it, arguing that it was too weak to build on. In the same month, President Trump signed an executive order encouraging departments to adopt credentialing standards and limit chokeholds except where deadly force was allowed.

After Democrats took the Senate in 2021, the House passed the Floyd bill again in March of that year. Senator Scott, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Representative Karen Bass of California began months of negotiations, hoping to find a version that could clear the sixty-vote filibuster threshold. They reported progress through the summer. The talks collapsed in September 2021. The main sticking points were qualified immunity and the standard for prosecuting officers, the two provisions police unions most strongly opposed.

It is fair to ask whether Democrats should have taken a smaller deal. Some reform advocates argued at the time that a law banning chokeholds and building a misconduct database, without touching immunity, would have saved lives and could have been expanded later. Others argued that a bill without accountability teeth would let Congress declare victory and move on. Both concerns were real. What is not in dispute is the result: no federal policing law came out of the moment.

What executive orders gave and took away

On the second anniversary of the murder, May 25, 2022, President Biden signed an executive order that applied to federal law enforcement agencies, which he could control directly. It restricted chokeholds and no-knock entries for federal agents, required body cameras for some federal officers, and created a national database of misconduct by federal officers. It also used federal grants to nudge state and local departments in the same direction.

Executive orders can be undone by the next president, and in January 2025 that is what happened: President Trump's administration rescinded the Biden order among a large batch of revoked directives. That spring the Justice Department moved to drop the consent decree cases it had brought against the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments after investigations that found patterns of unconstitutional policing in both cities. Those investigations had been among the most detailed federal reviews of any police force, and the reports remain public.

Minneapolis did not depend only on Washington. The city had separately entered into a court-enforced agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, which had conducted its own investigation and found a pattern of race discrimination by the police department. That state agreement remains the main outside check on the department. It is a small, telling example of the larger pattern: when federal oversight came and went, state law carried more of the weight.

What remained by 2026

Six years on, here is an honest summary of where things stand.

The state laws mostly held. Chokehold bans, duties to intervene and decertification systems remain on the books in many states, sometimes amended. Officer decertification in particular has expanded quietly, and its value grows over time, because it stops what researchers call the wandering officer, someone fired in one department who resurfaces in another.

The federal framework did not. There is no national use-of-force standard, no national misconduct registry covering state and local officers, and no change to qualified immunity in federal civil-rights suits. Federal pattern-or-practice oversight of local departments has retreated.

The politics changed too. Crime rose sharply in 2020, including the largest one-year increase in homicides in modern national records, and then fell substantially in the years after, with violent crime dropping in many cities by 2024 and 2025. Arguments about whether reforms caused the rise or helped the decline continue, and most researchers caution that national trends moved together in cities with very different policies. Anyone claiming a simple causal story in either direction is selling something.

And the deaths did not stop. In January 2023, Memphis officers beat Tyre Nichols after a traffic stop, and he died three days later. The officers were Black; the unit they belonged to was disbanded. The case showed that policing problems are about systems, training and culture as much as any individual's prejudice.

Neighbors, not enemies

The people who live on the corner where George Floyd died still call it George Floyd Square. It has been a memorial, a gathering place, a point of conflict over reopening the intersection to traffic and a neighborhood where people need both safe streets and police they can trust. All of those things are true at once, and that is the point.

Most police officers, most Black residents, most suburban parents and most people who marched in 2020 agree on more than the arguments suggest. Nobody wants officers to kneel on a handcuffed man's neck. Nobody wants a fired officer rehired next door. Nobody wants a mental-health crisis to end in a shooting when a trained counselor could have ended it in a conversation. The laws that held after 2020 are mostly built on that shared ground, and some of them passed with votes from both parties in purple states.

The federal bill can come back. Democrats will hold both chambers when the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027, and police reform is likely to be on the list of proposals. Whether anything passes, with a president who can veto it, is a question the record cannot answer yet. What the record does show is that the fastest, most durable change came from statehouses where people who had marched kept showing up after the marches ended.

What you can do

• Find out which reforms your own state passed after 2020, and which are being rolled back. Enter your address on the representatives page to get your state legislators' names, phone numbers and contact forms, along with their latest votes, and ask them directly where your state stands on decertification and use-of-force rules.
• Watch for police reform in the next Congress. The Congress votes and bills page shows the bills moving and how members voted, and the bills both parties passed together page is a good reminder that some justice measures do clear with bipartisan votes.
• Connect with local groups working on accountability and community safety. The organizations directory lists justice reform, civil-rights and legal aid nonprofits in every state.
• Read deeper on racial justice for current reporting on policing, civil rights and the cases still moving through courts.