click above for music by Known MPLS at the event commemorating the five-year anniversary since George Floyd was killed

On May 21, Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder hosted an event in North Minneapolis to commemorate the five-year anniversary since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. The prevailing question of the evening was: How far have we come since then as a society, and not?

Tracey Williams-Dillard, publisher of the Spokesman-Recorder, moderated a panel discussion, after a one-on-one conversation with Andre Locke, the father of Amir Locke. His 22-year-old son was killed in 2022, waking up from sleep on a couch, by Minneapolis police after they used a no-knock raid, while in search of a teenager, to break into the apartment he was visiting.

In foreground, moderator Tracey Williams-Dillard. (l-r) Nekima Levy Armstrong, Yohuru Williams, Mary Moriarty, Medaria Arradondo, at a panel discussion commemorating the 5th anniversary since George Floyd’s murder

Remembering the Events of May 25, 2020

The first question Williams-Dillard asked the panelists was to recall their moments during the unfolding of the news of George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020.

Nekima Levy Armstrong recollected the trauma of seeing the look in Derek Chauvin’s eyes as he killed George Floyd, captured in a teenage girl’s video recording. “This wasn’t a situation where an officer feared for his safety and had to make a split-second decision. How often do we hear that, when deadly force is used? But in this instance, it was like looking at a demon looking at us through the camera, with his knee on a Black man’s neck. It is still traumatizing.”

Shortly thereafter, she said, a group of community members went to Minneapolis city hall to share frustrations and concerns. Former police chief Medaria Arradondo — who was also a panelist — listened, said he deliberate about what to do, and would then announce his decision at a press conference. “Typically when police kill someone, there’s a cover-up. The media is used to manipulate the narrative [and initial stories from officers, including to the police chief, indicated George Floyd had died of a medical emergency]. They dig into the background of the victim. The officer might have 30 incidents of police misconduct, but if that person [simply was being pulled over for a] traffic ticket, suddenly they deserve to die. So, in that instance, we didn’t know what the chief was going to do. When he emerged from deliberating, he went to the microphone and said, ‘I am going to fire all four officers involved in killing George Floyd.’ That was an important moment, to send a message.”

Armstrong added that it is toxic culture that allows for indifference that influenced the police officers’ conduct that day. Even with bystanders on the scene pleading for the other police officers to intervene, the system has taught us over history that “we can’t hold people accountable.”

What has changed?

Moriarty indicated that her office has a new policy asking its prosecutors to check implicit bias at every decision point. She reminded the audience that in the sentencing decision of Chauvin, the judge indicated that he did not agree that Black children who witnessed the killing would have been traumatized by it, even though one of the girls was seven years old. She noted, “To justify what white supremacy has done to Black people, you tell yourself that they don’t have the same feelings. That they cannot feel the same way I do. Even in the context of Chauvin being convicted, we have this horrendous order saying these girls didn’t suffer from trauma, even after the judge was asked [by the prosecutor] to revisit that.”

She says she does not think the police department has done enough in five years to improve racial justice and police accountability. Five years ago, Moriarty said, then-chief Arradondo came to the command center to thank officers for helping with mutual aid efforts. An officer from another jurisdiction, who was among the officers who helped in Minneapolis, told her that Minneapolis police officers turned their backs on him. Last year, at a roll call for the 5^th precinct, she asked what officers want from the county attorney; a senior officer yelled and pointed his finger at her, saying, “You need to listen to us, not [new chief] O’Hara.” This happened in front of new recruits. “That’s not leadership — and that is the culture that is in the Minneapolis police department.”

Moriarty said that one of the reasons she ran for Hennepin County attorney was because “we all need to be part of the change. It has to come from the mayor, who is responsible for the police department. It has to come from the Commissioner of Public Safety. It has to come from the county attorney’s office; before I got there, prosecutors would say, ‘we’re not their employers,’ and I don’t agree.”

What has not changed?

Levy Armstrong said Minnesota is often considered “this oasis of progressivism, a land of opportunity, with the best of the best. Minnesota is number one in a lot of categories nationally. But then you look at the flip side of that. And you see that we continue to have some of the worst racial disparities in the country, whether it’s education, the criminalization of Black folks, the Black home ownership rate, the Black unemployment rate, the median household income for Black families and how disparate it is in comparison to white families. That is the reality that set the conditions that led to the police killing of George Floyd.”

She added that there also are “many victims’ names we don’t know, whose faces we haven’t seen, whose stories haven’t been told. Black people, Native people, Latinx people — they know the truth, and we have to speak the truth and continue to challenge the status quo.”

Moriarty recounted the 2024 story of Davis Moturi, a Black man who was regularly harassed by his neighbor. After the neighbor, John Sawchak, shot Moturi in the back of his neck, the case arrived at Moriarty’s office. She discovered that Moturi had called the Minneapolis police multiple times, having been threatened by Sawchak with both a gun and a knife in separate incidents. The police did not submit those cases for charging, and they opted originally to not even arrest Sawchak after he shot Moturi in the back.

Moriarty also shared the story of Allison Lussier, a 47-year-old Indigenous woman who died in 2024. The police decided that she died of a drug overdose and did not call the crime lab, although the medical examiner said she died of a subdural hematoma, which can be caused by head trauma — and Lussier had told police several times, including days before her death, that she was experiencing domestic violence.

She shared these examples, Moriarty said, to point out that “we have a model of policing and not a model of public safety. That’s a historical problem. That’s how we measure structural injustice. If people knew the history, we’d be in a much better position to understand why the war on Blacks and Indigenous people continues.”

Dr. Yohuru Williams, another panelist, spoke out against the disrespect of misogyny after a disruptor in the audience — filming his outburst and audience reaction on his cell phone — interrupted the women-led conversation multiple times, including a six-minute stoppage when audience members and security tried to get him to sit down or leave.

Williams created the University of St. Thomas Racial Justice Initiative. After the conversation resumed, he said: “Beware of reform that doesn’t involve re-imagination. Beware of reform that has metrics that are determined by people who are more invested in mission accomplished rather than the hard work of achieving substantive change.”

He quoted from the Tina Turner song, “We don’t need another hero.”

Out of the ruins
Out from the wreckage
Can’t make the same mistake this time
…

I wonder when we are ever gonna change,
Living under the fear, ’til nothing else remains

We don’t need another hero
…

Looking for something we can rely on
There’s gotta be something better out there
Love and compassion
Their day is coming
All else are castles built in the air

Williams pointed out that, “We need communities united against police brutality. We need people to invest in this work. We need individuals who are making a commitment to reimagining what we can be, not as a police state, but as the bouquet of humanity that Jerry Blackwell talked about,” referring to the prosecuting attorney’s concluding comments at the Chauvin trial about witnesses who spoke up. Flowers can rot on the vine, he said, but they also can “grow anew — you just have to feed and water them. We have to do that work.”

Where do we go from here?

Moriarty said, “If there was a hospital in Hennepin County that had high rates of infection, we would all be saying, ‘What’s going on in that hospital?’ No one would accuse us of being anti-hospital or anti-doctor because we want to figure out what the problem is. We have to get to a point where we can have real conversations, honest conversations, about what is actually happening in the police department, and not get shouted down and called anti-cop simply because we want to make things better.”

Levy Armstrong said, “I think about all those people that have sacrificed in this community, in Selma, in Montgomery, in Birmingham, in Mississippi, where I’m originally from — who paid the price for us to have a semblance of freedom. I feel like in this moment, that’s how we need to think about what we’re up against. Not wallowing in self-pity, not cowering in a corner, not being afraid, but rising up in the spirit of those who came before us, some of whom never tasted freedom, but they believed in the fact that we could be free.”

Levy Armstrong concluded the discussion by saying, in response to Williams-Dillard’s query about what should happen next:

“I think we need to be having conversations like this one, where we can be honest, transparent, speak the truth, and make a commitment that we’re going to challenge the status quo. I am grateful for this community. Even when we were facing the disruption — which many of us expected — people in this community rose up. You didn’t run out of here afraid of the energy that someone was bringing you. You stood firm, because this conversation matters. We are some of the most resilient people in this country. Five years later, much more needs to be done, but the world is now having conversations around police accountability and racial justice. That is a form of progress.”

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