We must recall Floyd's death

On this first anniversary of George Floyd’s death, it’s worth remembering the outpouring of grief and resolve and action that followed immediately last May.

The video of Floyd handcuffed and face down under the knee of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin ricocheted around the world, horrifying many and launching protests and marches across Long Island. Police officers and brass including Nassau and Suffolk county police commissioners Patrick Ryder and Geraldine Hart came out against Chauvin’s actions or signaled some solidarity with those expressing outrage at what happened in Minneapolis. There was a national conversation about the history of racial discrimination in America. Laws in New York were changed, banning chokeholds and allowing police disciplinary records to be made public. Police departments all around the country made reforms or promised them. And in April, Chauvin was convicted of murder, an accountability that's been missing in so many cases like this.

But that is not a full picture of this tumultuous year since Floyd took his last breath.

There have also been boisterous counterprotests and counterprogramming. Floyd’s death became a crude political talking point, with the focus turning from the circumstances of his last moments to the relative peacefulness of agonized protesters, to a semantic debate over what was a riot and what was a demonstration. What might have been a full and overdue consideration of American policing turned into tribal defenses for and against law enforcement. Whataboutism replaced honest debating. All the old tropes about crime and social disorder were re-aired.

So much remains so unchanged since Floyd was killed. Just last week, 44-year-old Jesse Bonsignore was shot and killed by a Suffolk County police officer. Early reports indicated that Bonsignore, who was white, had been lying in a parked car in Manorville. The name of the officer has not been released. The details of the encounter are incomplete since there was no body camera footage, one of those reforms that is still mostly forthcoming in Suffolk, making the department an outlier nationally.

Video footage of all kinds has transformed the public perspective on policing, sometimes backing up officers in difficult, split-second decisions and sometimes revealing clear misconduct that in previous eras never came to light. But beyond their utility in court cases and departmental hearings, these videos so often make clear how many of the nation’s social problems end up being handled by police, from mental health episodes to traffic enforcement, petty disputes to violent crime. A public conversation debating the role of police and how exactly police should go about performing their often-difficult jobs is overdue. Some of those debates are still pending here, including proposed legislation in Albany regarding officers’ use of force.

Perhaps those debates and conversations have the best chance of coming to fruition if the memory of Floyd’s gruesome murder is kept fresh. Perhaps a revisiting of our first reactions to what happened in Minneapolis would be a way to keep moving forward on this anniversary, and future ones.

— The editorial board