With Slow Progress on Federal Level, Police Reform Remains Patchwork Across U.S.
One week ago, people celebrated in the streets of Minneapolis as a judge read the guilty verdicts in the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, convicted of murdering George Floyd.
In the days since, the Justice Department announced it would investigate whether the police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, where Breonna Taylor was killed by police, engage in a "pattern or practice" of discrimination or excessive force.
But even as advocates and family members of those killed by police welcomed those developments, they said the need for structural change to policing has not disappeared — a point underscored, they said, by the police killings of Black people during and since the Chauvin trial in Brooklyn Center, Minn., Columbus, Ohio, and Elizabeth City, N.C.