The spirit of George Floyd is never far from Bridgette Stewart, an anti-violence activist from a group, Agape Movement, that tends George Floyd Square in Minneapolis.
But it came rushing back to Stewart earlier this month when another black man, Jordan Neely, died in circumstances eerily similar to Floyd’s. Homeless and mentally ill, Neely was threatening passengers on a New York City subway car when a white former Marine put him in a chokehold that eventually caused his death. As with Floyd, the episode was captured on mobile phone video and caused an instant uproar.
“What happened in New York with Jordan, all that did was rip the Band-Aid off and expose an open wound,” Stewart said.
Floyd’s death, three years ago on Thursday, horrified a world suddenly confronted by the stark fact of police brutality against black men. It ushered the Black Lives Matter movement into the mainstream and galvanised calls for police reform.
But since Floyd’s death the public mood has shifted in unexpected ways, with rising crime and disorder in many big cities stoking fear and upending discussions about policing and public safety. That changed mood was evident in the polarised reaction to Neely’s death.
Many branded the man blamed for his death, Daniel Penny, as a dangerous vigilante in a city where poor black men can be killed with impunity, and demanded justice. Others have held Penny up as a hero stepping into a lawless void left by a police force made hesitant by the blowback from Floyd’s murder.
“We’re still divided,” said Richard Aborn, a former prosecutor who is president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, a non-partisan group devoted to criminal justice reform, arguing that Floyd’s killing had shattered a consensus about policing that has not yet been rebuilt. He despaired that the public debate was often reduced to binary choices: either adding more police or defunding the police and spending more on social services.
“We don’t have the ability to ask more nuanced questions about public safety,” he said.
That division runs through Washington, where a police reform bill named for Floyd and championed by the Biden administration is all but dead. It failed to pass the previous Congress and has not even been reintroduced in the current one. Among other changes, it would strip police officers of the legal immunity that has shielded them from civil lawsuits.
In spite of the apparent similarities, Aborn and others warn against drawing too close comparisons between the Floyd and Neely cases. Floyd was killed by a police officer while Neely died at the hands of a bystander who claims to have been protecting fellow passengers. Neely had a record of mental illness and violent behaviour, including the assault of a 67-year-old woman as she was exiting the subway.
Penny has pleaded not guilty to manslaughter and insisted that he had no racial animus. He was charged 11 days after the incident following a public outcry over the seemingly indifferent reaction by New York’s mayor and local prosecutors. Legal experts say the case may turn on as yet unknown details about what preceded the altercation.
In the meantime, though, those inflamed by Floyd’s death are coming to grips with a changed atmosphere in which fear of crime appears to be more potent than calls for police reform.
That fear was evident in the four congressional seats that New York Democrats lost in November’s midterm elections, in which Republicans labelled them as soft on crime. It also fuelled the unexpectedly stiff challenge that Lee Zeldin, a conservative congressman from Long Island, posed to the state’s governor Kathy Hochul. Zeldin polled particularly strong in and around the New York suburbs.
Sensing Democrats’ vulnerability on matters of law and order, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee decamped to New York City last month to stage an unusual hearing to consider “victims of violent crime in Manhattan”. The subtext of the hearing was that Democratic policies, including bail reform, were to blame for innocents being thrown on to subway tracks and other mayhem.
“The Democrats are in a difficult position,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran political strategist. “Republicans won elections in New York because people are feeling unsafe . . . Crime and disorder are the issue — not abortion.”
That extends to black adults, too. Almost three-quarters of those surveyed told Pew Research Center last year that funding for police departments should stay the same or increase.
Josh Parker, senior counsel at the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project, acknowledged that there was now public appetite for only limited measures, like restrictions on chokeholds, as opposed to the sweeping changes activists sought in 2020.
“We still are seeing plenty of proposals on policing reform,” Parker said. “But unfortunately, the majority of those bills are Band-Aids.”
Hawk Newsome, the co-founder of New York City’s Black Lives Matter chapter, observed: “The same black people here in New York who were out marching saying ‘black lives matter’, turned around and elected a cop as the mayor.”
That mayor, Eric Adams, is a black former police captain who has presented himself as uniquely capable of containing rising crime without resorting to abusive — often racist — policing. That is, he could honour the legacy of Floyd while addressing public fears of violence on the subway and elsewhere in the city.
It has not been an easy balance. Adams was pilloried by progressives when he urged restraint following Neely’s death. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused him of “demonising” the poor, while students at The City University of New York turned their backs to the mayor while he delivered a commencement address. Adams later moderated his tone, calling Neely’s death “a tragedy that never should have happened”.
The debate is now broadening beyond policing to encompass longstanding social issues vexing New York and its mayor, including the city’s housing crisis and the failures of its mental health system. Neely had been in and out of treatment for years.
In Minneapolis, activists are also focusing on deeper issues of poverty and inequality that they believe underlay Floyd’s death. So far, Stewart, the anti-violence activist, is not hopeful about their progress. She points to the scarred intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue where Floyd was murdered, and which city officials have pledged to redevelop.
“I think as a whole society has forgotten it because everyone is dealing with their own day to day issues, from inflation to job cuts to the price of gas,” she said. “We are still in the same place that we were three years ago.”