Preface: This article was co-created with ChatGPT.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was accused of using a suspected counterfeit bill at a convenience store in South Minneapolis. The call to police concerned a transaction involving a very small sum of money, the authenticity of which was uncertain. It was not a violent crime, did not involve weapons, and posed no immediate threat to public safety.

In law enforcement practice, situations of this kind are generally classified as low-risk incidents. The appropriate priority is information verification rather than physical control. Standard procedures typically include identifying the individual involved, documenting the transaction, securing the suspected bill, and submitting it to a bank or relevant institution for verification after the fact. If a violation is confirmed, the matter can then proceed through summons or low-risk detention; if not, the incident ends there. Based on publicly available video and post-incident records, there was no objective necessity in this case to force Floyd to the ground, handcuff him, and apply sustained physical pressure.

In practice, however, the encounter did not follow this low-risk pathway. In many U.S. cities, street-level policing has long been organized around a logic of preemptive control rather than situational risk assessment. Once officers are dispatched, incidents that could be handled through communication and delay are often quickly pulled into a coercive enforcement track. This shift is not necessarily driven by behavioral escalation on the part of the individual, but by assumptions about potential risk.

Under this logic, the use of control measures becomes detached from actual conduct. Handcuffs are applied “preventively,” restraint is used to “maintain control,” and escalation responds less to concrete actions than to imagined danger. The result is a sharp mismatch: the legal severity of the incident is minimal, yet the level of physical force rapidly escalates. This gap is not best understood as a momentary lapse in individual judgment, but as a form of institutional path dependence shaped by training and incentives. Officers are rewarded for rapid control of situations, not for deciding that force may be unnecessary in the first place.

Once force is introduced, the original transaction dispute is effectively erased from the legal narrative. Attention shifts away from whether the bill was counterfeit and toward questions of “compliance,” “resistance,” and the continued “need for control.” In this way, enforcement actions generate their own justifications, marginalizing the initial issue. This is where power becomes dangerous: it can redefine the nature of an event through its own exercise.

Video footage and testimony show that when Floyd was ordered out of the vehicle, handcuffed, and restrained, he did not display aggressive behavior or attempt to flee. He repeatedly expressed panic, difficulty breathing, and physical distress. Within policing culture, such statements are often discounted. Training and experience frequently frame complaints of discomfort as delay tactics, performance, or manipulation, rather than as medical warnings requiring immediate response.

The critical moment came when Officer Derek Chauvin placed his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck and maintained pressure for an extended period. Depending on the source, official timelines cite a duration ranging from just over eight minutes to more than nine. A portion of this time occurred after Floyd had become unresponsive. The precise second count is less important than the continuity of the act itself. This was not a brief loss of control, but a prolonged action carried out in public, in the presence of colleagues and bystanders. It indicates that within the officer’s institutional and psychological framework, the behavior did not register as obviously unacceptable at the time.

Bystanders repeatedly warned that Floyd could not breathe and was being killed. Yet civilian voices carry little weight within the internal hierarchy of policing authority. No officer intervened forcefully to stop the restraint, signaling a failure of peer-based accountability at the scene. This collective non-intervention is more structurally significant than any single act of violence, because it shows the system’s inability to correct itself in real time.

Floyd’s death was not the result of a single action in isolation, but the cumulative effect of multiple structural factors: the over-enforcement of low-level offenses, the racialization of perceived bodily threat, the routine dismissal of expressed suffering by compliant individuals, and an internal culture that discourages questioning fellow officers.

In the aftermath, the United States saw a series of measures described as “reforms,” but most addressed procedures, technology, or rhetoric rather than underlying power structures. Body cameras, documentation, and data transparency were once again emphasized, despite the fact that the Floyd incident itself occurred under clear, multi-angle video recording. The presence of cameras did not prevent escalation; it merely facilitated accountability after the fact. Such reforms assume that visibility alone constrains behavior, but police violence does not primarily depend on secrecy—it depends on officers’ confidence that their actions are justified.

De-escalation training, mental health education, and implicit bias courses were expanded nationwide, yet core performance metrics remained unchanged. Officers continued to be rewarded for rapid control, minimizing perceived personal risk, and asserting authority. In this context, training functions largely as moral decoration rather than as a force capable of reshaping decision-making under pressure.

At the level of public discourse, many institutions framed the problem as one of “bad apples,” “procedural error,” or “exceptional misconduct.” This narrative reduces systemic patterns to individual moral failure. Solutions then focus on screening, psychological evaluation, or internal discipline, rather than addressing why so many officers in similar situations make similar choices.

At the federal level, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House of Representatives multiple times but stalled in the Senate due to partisan division, police union opposition, and procedural barriers. Key provisions concerning qualified immunity, national standards on use of force, and redistribution of enforcement responsibility failed to gain sufficient consensus. The result was a form of partial reform—adequate to ease public pressure, but insufficient to alter how authority is exercised.

Within this structure, police remain the primary—and often sole—responders to a wide range of social problems rooted in poverty, mental health crises, addiction, and community disintegration. These issues continue to be managed by an armed system trained around control. As long as this basic premise remains intact, additional cameras, trainings, and statements may change the narrative, but they will not meaningfully alter the probability of outcomes.