On 25 May, George Floyd, a 49-year-old African American man, died during his arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A video captured by a bystander showed a police officer keeping his knee on Floyd’s throat for nearly nine minutes, as Floyd expressed his distress and subsequently fell unconscious. The incident intensified tensions between police and the local community, which saw Floyd as the latest victim in a pattern of police violence against people of colour. The outrage culminated in demonstrations and unrest spreading nationwide on an even larger scale than the 2014 Ferguson unrest, the last major series of protests and riots that erupted over the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old African-American man by a police officer in Missouri.
While the demonstration condemning Floyd’s death began peacefully on 26 May, the protests spiralled into clashes with police by the end of the day, with riot police using tear gas and stun grenades in an attempt to disperse protesters. Following demonstrations, multiple establishments, including the 3rd Police Precinct and a nearby Target store, were torched, vandalised or looted in the ensuing unrest overnight, while outrage over Floyd’s death simultaneously spread to other cities. By early June, both solidarity demonstrations and violence were seen in nearly every major city across the country, including Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, Portland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco, while rallies were also held abroad in cities as far as Montreal, Toronto, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam and Rio de Janeiro. The National Guard was called up in over 10 states, while local officials suspended public transport and imposed overnight curfews, which many protesters defied.
While racial tension and police brutality are familiar elements that drove previous large-scale protests, there are also new factors that inflame tensions. Despite the unrest continuing for a week, there has been no call for peace from the White House. In a call with governors, President Donald Trump instead called on governors to “dominate” protesters with a hardline response, encouraging clashes to continue. While previous high-profile deaths spurred calls for police reform and the Black Lives Matter movement against systemic racism and violence against people of colour, the lack of action being taken to defuse the tension driving the current unrest undermines the little progress that was made in an effort to prevent another instance of police brutality from being repeated.
The outrage over the death of George Floyd showed how one incident can catalyse unrest across the country by intensifying underlying social tensions. In a matter of days, large-scale rallies were held in nearly every US state. The movement that began peacefully escalated to a level that left local officials and police in every major city struggling to contain the unrest and restore calm. The recent protests underscore widespread distrust in government institutions on a local and national level, despite body cameras and other results of limited police reform that have been implemented since 2014. Calling for an end to the violence without a plan to address its cause, officials proved ill-prepared and ineffective in curbing the violence and regaining the public’s trust. The George Floyd protests are the latest – and unlikely to be the last – episode in the history of the country being gripped by violence sparked by police brutality against people of colour.