It’s been two years since Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd during a police stop by keeping his knee on Floyd’s neck. What has changed since?

Chauvin’s actions, that continued despite protests from a growing crowd of onlookers, sparked nation-wide protests and pressure for police reform. Since then, Chauvin and three other police officers involved in the stop have been convicted of multiple charges.

Stanford University law professors Ralph Richard Banks and David Sklansky discuss the law, policing, and racism in the US below. Banks is a professor of law at Stanford Law School, the co-founder and faculty director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, and professor, by courtesy, at the School of Education.

Sklansky is a professor of Law and faculty co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. He is the author of A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for Justice (Harvard University Press, 2021).

Q. How should we think about the killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed?

Banks: The killing of George Floyd prompted a nationwide reckoning with racism unlike any in the past half century. It drew attention around the world and soon encompassed issues far beyond the domain of policing.

Q. Did the killing of George Floyd highlight problems with policing or broader problems in American society?

Banks: All of the above. There are lots of different, though related, problems we might connect to the killing of George Floyd. We begin, of course, with the misbehavior of individual police officers. But the problems are not limited to the proverbial few bad apples.

The training that police officers receive (or perhaps more accurately don’t receive) and the rules, both statutory and constitutional, that govern their behavior are in need of reform. These are big challenges due both to on-going disagreement about optimal training and rules and also because of how radically decentralized policing is in American society. With some 18,000 different law enforcement agencies in the United States, attaining widespread adoption of the right policies and practices is no easy matter.

Too, we cannot ignore the fact that policing operates within a society with stark economic inequalities and racial segregation. These features of society limit opportunities for education and employment for African Americans in particular, and contribute to myriad racial disparities, including with respect to crime. Finally, we are a society that is awash in guns. I find it difficult to imagine creating the sort of safe communities we want so long as such weapons are so plentiful.

Read the full article about George Floyd and policing in America by Sharon Driscoll at Futurity.