Seth Stoughton is a professor at the University of South Carolina, specializing in criminology and criminal justice, co-author of the book Evaluating Police Uses of Force (NYU Press, 2020, untranslated). In April, he was heard as an expert in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of the murder of George Floyd.
A year after the death of George Floyd, suffocated under the knee of a white police officer on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis (Minnesota), and the unprecedented demonstrations that it unleashed across the United States against police violence and racism, have police practices changed?
It is difficult to have an overall view of the reforms undertaken over the past year in the some twelve thousand police services under the towns or counties and the thousands of agencies at the federal or state level. But there are changes in training and use of force, especially in immobilization techniques. [étranglement, plaquage].
In places, it is the very culture of the police which is undergoing changes: the wall of silence, this “blue wall”, the color of police uniforms, which often prevented the recognition and treatment of the bad guys. practices, cracks. Many services are committed to putting in place rules obliging police officers to prevent inappropriate behavior by their colleagues.
In some cities, police are now trained to shoot in the legs rather than the head or chest, as is usually the case. Such a change may seem small, but for the American police, this development is spectacular, because the practice of « shoot to stop » was until now taken for granted. In other cities, police have improved their interactions with the public.
Was the Floyd case and the ensuing trial a turning point?
One thing is certain: they have drawn the attention of public opinion to police practices towards African Americans; heightened the awareness of part of the population, particularly white people, of the need to change some of these practices; sparked debate; awakened an appetite for reform. Activists and elected officials are now focused on these problems. This is important because we must not make the mistake of thinking that the police services will reform themselves.
As such, we can say that the Floyd affair, through its media coverage, had an enormous impact and constitutes an important step. All of this might have happened without it – a single case is never enough to drive political change – but it has accelerated the movement towards professionalization of the police.
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