Death of George Floyd

The death of George Floyd was captured on cell phone video by bystanders and shared on social media in May 2020. The lengthy video depicts his death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer as Floyd tells him he cannot breathe and begs for help. Subsequent coverage of his arrest and death further raised awareness of the event and sparked protests around the world. Individuals as well as organizations such as the Black Lives Matter movement—which formed in 2014 after the deaths of several Black men during encounters with police officers—marched and demonstrated across the United States, many carrying signs with some of Floyd’s last words: “I can’t breathe.” Floyd’s death prompted international examination of racism, in particular institutional racism, and police use of force in the United States. On April 20, 2021, Chauvin was convicted on all three counts that he had been charged with following Floyd's death and, two months later, was sentenced to more than twenty years in prison.

Background

George Perry Floyd Jr. was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His parents, George Perry and Larcenia “Cissy” Floyd, separated when he was young. Cissy Floyd moved with her children to Houston, Texas, in the Cuney Homes public housing complex. Cissy Floyd was active as a member of the resident council, despite the demands of raising her children and some of her grandchildren at times. She helped raise some of her neighbors’ children as well. Floyd was known by his middle name until he outgrew his peers. He was more than six feet tall as a middle school student, and by then his classmates and neighbors knew him as Big Floyd. His friends recalled him as a happy jokester who could lift their spirits.

Floyd was a star athlete at Jack Yates High School, playing both football and basketball, and received a basketball scholarship to attend college. In 1993, he studied at South Florida Community College, which later became South Florida State College. He transferred two years later to Texas A&M University, studying at the Kingsville campus. He did not graduate. Instead, he returned to Texas and started rapping, creating mixtapes. He was arrested and incarcerated, mostly for drug-related offenses, a number of times over the course of almost ten years. Among these was a four-year stint in prison for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, to which he pleaded guilty. He was released in 2013 and soon after became a father to a daughter, Gianna, one of his five children.

Floyd, who was active with his church, decided to move to Minneapolis for a new start and new job through a Christian program active in his community. Floyd worked as a security guard at a homeless shelter and transitional housing facility and as a bouncer at a dance club and restaurant, the El Nuevo Rodeo Club. He returned to Houston briefly in 2018 for his mother’s funeral.

In late April 2020, Floyd was ill and was diagnosed with COVID-19, which was caused by the novel coronavirus that led the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic weeks earlier. He was recovering and feeling better by May, when he left his apartment on Memorial Day.

Overview

Derek Chauvin was a police officer for the city of Minneapolis for more than eighteen years. In that time, he was the subject of eighteen complaints filed with the department’s Internal Affairs office. He was disciplined twice, receiving letters of reprimand in two cases. He also reportedly received oral reprimands in some cases, including for use of derogatory language. Like Floyd, Chauvin sometimes worked security at the El Nuevo Rodeo Club, although accounts differ as to whether they ever worked together.

On May 25, 2020, Floyd was near the Dragon Wok Restaurant at East Thirty-Eighth Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, shortly before 8 p.m. The Washington Post and other media compiled footage from nearby businesses and police body cameras to create a timeline of events that followed.

Floyd and another man allegedly shopped at the Cup Foods Convenience Store, where employees said they purchased several items using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Floyd was sitting in the driver’s seat of a blue Mercedes SUV across the street when employees went over to talk to the men.

At 8:01 p.m. a call about a forgery was made and two police officers arrived a few minutes later. They were inside the convenience store for several minutes, then crossed the street to the blue SUV. At 8:10 p.m., a bystander in a car parked behind the SUV began recording the interaction between the police and the occupants of the SUV. One officer appeared to struggle briefly to get Floyd out of the vehicle, and both officers were holding him when Floyd was handcuffed. A second police car arrived a few minutes later.

Officers walked Floyd across the street to the police car parked in front of the convenience store, where he appeared to fall next to the police car. Officers stood him up and put him against the car door. An interaction that is not visible on cameras took place between Floyd and the officer standing with him, and Floyd became visible on the ground. Within minutes, another squad car arrived carrying officers Derek Chauvin and Tou Thao. They joined the officers with Floyd. At 8:18 p.m., a struggle appeared to take place, reportedly because Floyd refused to get into the police car.

Another camera view appears to show Floyd on the ground with an officer kneeling on his neck. At 8:20 p.m., a bystander, seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier, began to record events. Her video shows Floyd pinned to the ground by Chauvin, as Floyd pleads, “Please, please, I can’t breathe.” Two minutes later, an officer calls for an ambulance. Records show officers first called in as a Code 2, meaning no lights and sirens and all traffic laws are to be obeyed, before they changed to a Code 3, or a medical emergency.

The video shows that onlookers began telling the officers Floyd was unconscious and asked them to check for a pulse at 8:25, nearly five minutes after Frazier began recording. An ambulance arrived at 8:27, and at about 8:28, Chauvin lifted his knee from Floyd’s neck. According to onlookers and the recording, he had been applying pressure to Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds.

Floyd was placed on a stretcher at about 8:29, and the ambulance left at 8:30. The incident report said medics in the ambulance were working on an unresponsive, pulseless male. Emergency department staff at Hennepin Health Care tried to revive Floyd, but he was declared dead at 9:25 p.m.

Derek Chauvin, along with three other officers, was fired from the police department the next day and soon charged with murder. On March 29, 2021, Chauvin's trial began. On April 20, after eleven days of testimony from Frazier, dozens of other bystanders, police officers, and paramedics, the jury pronounced Chauvin guilty on all three charges: second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. The defense team sought a retrial, claiming unfairness due to advance media publicity and alleged juror intimidation, and a hearing on potential juror misconduct. On June 25, Judge Peter Cahill rejected both requests and sentenced Chauvin to twenty-two and a half years in prison—a term ten years longer than recommended by state guidelines but less than the forty-year maximum and the thirty years prosecutors had urged.

Following the verdict, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a wide-scale investigation by the US Justice Department into the use of police force in Minneapolis. Additionally, the four officers involved in Floyd's death were indicted on federal civil-rights charges in May 2021, and in July, three requested separate federal trials from Chauvin's. President Joe Biden commented in support of the verdict, emphasizing the importance of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act—legislation that proposed widespread police reforms—which was passed by the House in June 2020 and again in March 2021 but twice stalled in committee in the Senate.

The anniversary of Floyd's death was marked by marches, public statements, corporate reports on antiracism efforts, and media reflections on the societal impact it had. Biden also met with the Floyd family at the White House.

In December 2021, Chauvin pleaded guilty to the federal civil rights charges leveled against him. After the other three former officers' federal cases went to trial, in February 2022 Thao and J. Alexander Kueng were found guilty of violating Floyd's constitutional right to be free from the use of unreasonable force, and both Kueng and Thomas Lane were convicted of violating Floyd's civil rights in their indifference to his medical needs. Having pleaded guilty in May to the state charge of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter to ensure the dropping of the murder charge, Lane, sentenced in July to two and a half years in prison due to the federal conviction, was beginning to serve this time when his plea deal resulted in a state sentencing of three years in September. Meanwhile, Kueng and Thao received sentences in July of three and three and a half years, respectively, for their federal convictions while long refraining from taking any plea deals in the state case. Also in July, Chauvin was sentenced to serve twenty-one years in federal prison before he went on to file an appeal of the state conviction in September. In October, it was announced that Kueng had ultimately entered a guilty manslaughter plea to have the murder charge dropped, and Thao opted to forego a jury trial in favor of a bench trial and a dismissal of the murder charge upon conviction.

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