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In Minnesota, the bail fund that gained national prominence during the George Floyd protests is stepping back from its once core mission of paying bail. In Alabama, lawmakers passed the “Back the Blue” law expanding legal immunity for police officers, just a few years after an onslaught of thousands of proposed state bills aimed at increasing police accountability. In West Virginia, new legislation permits officers to fulfill part of their mandatory training within public schools, just a few years removed from a nationwide push to remove police from educational settings altogether.
These are just a handful of events from the past week that, viewed together, seem to paint a picture of national retreat from the intense political momentum that police and justice reform efforts held five years ago.
This is not an especially fresh observation. Indeed, tracking rollbacks and backlash from the 2020 highwater mark for justice reform enthusiasm has been a recurring theme of this newsletter for years. But on the last day of national “Police Week,” and the eve of the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, it’s worth taking stock of some of the latest developments in criminal justice, and what they may say about the landscape ahead.
A recent pair of non-convictions in high-profile killings of black men during traffic stops has struck many as proof-positive of the end of the police reform moment. Last week, a Tennessee trial jury acquitted three former Memphis police officers of murder and other charges in the 2023 beating death of Tyre Nichols. All three had previously been convicted of federal crimes and face federal prison sentences, but they have now been cleared of the most serious charges against them. Two days later, a Michigan jury deadlocked on second-degree murder for the officer who fatally shot Patrick Lyoya during a 2022 struggle in Grand Rapids, leading to a mistrial. It’s unclear if prosecutors will refile charges.
Whether these verdicts reflect a shift in how juries view cases against police officers is difficult to say. Prosecutions for on-duty killings have remained rare throughout the recent years of policing upheavals, and convictions even rarer. In 2022, Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip Stinson noted that an apparent uptick in prosecutions post-2020 was likely not statistically significant. “From where I sit, in terms of police misconduct, in terms of police crime, nothing has really changed,” Stinson told me this week.
The picture is clearer for civilian oversight boards. A popular reform goal in 2020, they are increasingly running into political headwinds. Last month in New York, the State Supreme Court stripped the Rochester Police Accountability Board of its investigatory power. The body already lacked disciplinary authority, meaning that, according to WXXI News, the only thing it can do now is “review and recommend changes to department policy.”
In Baltimore, Maryland, the county’s Police Accountability Board — created in 2022 as part of a statewide reform push — is in the midst of an “identity crisis” over whether board members are even legally entitled to read citizen complaints, let alone act on them, reports the Baltimore Banner.
A citizen review subcommittee in Champaign, Illinois, operates with similarly narrow authority, lacking the power to initiate its own inquiries or enforce disciplinary outcomes. “They take the name and the kinds of things we’ve argued for, and they say that they’re going to implement it, they slow walk it, and then when they do, it has none of the power that we were advocating for,” Sundiata Cha-Jua, a local professor and activist, told Illinois Public Media.
Amid calls for prosecutions of officers and increased community oversight of departments, many 2020-era reform advocates also pushed for federal investigations and consent decrees to compel system-level change across entire departments. That strategy is now under threat as the Trump administration has moved to terminate multiple existing consent decrees and generally take the Department of Justice out of the business of guiding police reform.
In cities where consent decrees remain active, many are now in limbo. In New Orleans, a sudden exodus of DOJ attorneys has thrown the future of the city’s decade-long oversight agreement in doubt, just as it enters its “sustainment period” on the path to ending federal oversight. In Minneapolis, meanwhile, where a consent decree was announced nearly a year ago, initial negotiations are stalled, and some local observers expect the Trump administration to withdraw before a formal agreement can be reached.
The federal reform landscape has also been shaken by dramatic schisms in the Trump administration’s funding priorities. According to data analyzed by the Council on Criminal Justice, the administration has terminated about half a billion dollars in grant funding, mostly to nonprofits and local governments for programs targeting violent crime, domestic violence, and civilian co-responder teams. In turn, last week, the Department of Justice’s COPS office announced $156 million in funding for agencies to hire new or rehire existing career law enforcement officers.
But after a week marked by apparent setbacks to police accountability efforts, some advocates are celebrating one development. In a unanimous decision Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled in Barnes v. Felix that courts must consider the full context of police use-of-force incidents, not just the immediate moment of threat.
The immediate outcome of the decision is that the family of a Black man killed by police during a traffic stop can continue to pursue a civil rights lawsuit against the officer who shot him. Law360 reports that the decision “broadens legal protections for civilians and could open new avenues for holding officers accountable for split-second decisions they make during encounters.”
But the decision creates a neutral rule, and it also means that officers could be allowed more latitude to explain away seemingly rash split-second decisions by appealing to context. In a legal climate where juries and judges are often hesitant to second-guess the subjective claims of police, it could paradoxically make convictions against officers more difficult to obtain. That’s what Stinson, the Bowling Green State criminologist, forecasts will ultimately occur. “I think it's going to, in many respects, quite often benefit the police.”
