It has been almost three years since the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests and started what became a national reckoning on race and on police and their relationship with communities of color. The recent killing of Tyre Nichols, which resulted in second-degree murder charges against five Memphis police officers, however, showed both that the problems are far from being resolved and that the country’s reactions may also have shifted, said a group of Kennedy School experts who on Monday. The panelists included: Cornell William Brooks, a professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice, director of the William Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at the Center for Public Leadership, and the former president and CEO of the NAACPP; Yanilda MarÃa González, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, whose research focuses policing, state violence, and democracy with a special focus on Latin America; and Sandra Susan Smith, the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice and director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, whose recent work has focused on the consequences of pretrial detention. , interim director of the Institute of Politics, moderated the conversation. The panelists’ responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
On the difference in the public reaction to the murder of Tyre Nichols compared to that of George Floyd:
Yanilda Gonzalez: “I want to share three points. The first is that the case emerged shortly after aggregate data on police killings. Tyre Nichols was one of some 1,100 or so cases that happened over the past year. I think that this could be one of the unintended consequences of counting: It becomes easier for us to see these killings as a number, in some respects, normalized, as part of our reality. A second element that I think is important, as you know, is the race of the officers [the officers charged in the Nichols case are Black]. The third: there was some element of cynicism.â€
Sandra Susan Smith: “It occurs to me that the response to the George Floyd murder was itself the anomaly, not