Five years after George Floyd: A look at policing under a new administration

By Tashi McQueen
Afro
https://afro.com/

“Policing continues to go through pendulum swings,” said Andre McGregor, CEO and co-founder of Force Metrics. “2020 was a time when the community wanted to have better transparency and understanding of how policing is happening in their communities. I think the pendulum had swung in a way that increased victimization.”

Calls to defund the police increased after the killing of George Floyd and roughly a dozen cities, including Austin, Texas and Los Angeles, pledged to decrease police funding and reinvest the money into community services such as violence prevention. However, in several cities, these efforts were later reduced or reversed.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan policy institute, in the year after the death of Floyd, over 20 states including Maryland, passed legislation that addressed use of force, the duty for officers to intervene in instances of police misconduct, reporting requirements or officer decertification.

But now, in 2025, there has been a reversal of much of the progress made.

With the 47th president in office, members of the new administration have moved to roll back consent decrees and further empower and protect local law enforcement throughout the country. Experts say the future of policing could dramatically shift.

“I believe that the administration plays a large role in determining the temperature, essentially, of the environment in which law enforcement performs their duties,” said Jeff Wenniger, founder and CEO of Law Enforcement Consultants. “Under the prior administration, the focus was on de-escalation, accountability and transparency.”

Wenninger said, under the new administration, he’s seeing a shift with emphasis on law and order, and a hyperfocus on the militarization of law enforcement and the president shifting away from federal oversight of local law enforcement agencies, which include consent decrees.

“That’s concerning to me, because I worked 33 years in law enforcement, primarily with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), and I was there when we were under our own consent decree,” said Wenninger. “It took us 10 years to get out from under it. The LAPD needed a consent decree, and it implemented the management best practices to ensure that the department was policing in a constitutional manner.”

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, while Black Americans only make up 13 percent of the country, they experience 21 percent of police encounters and are around three times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than White Americans.