The police killing of George Floyd five years ago was 2,000 miles away in Minneapolis, but the Bay Area heavily felt its influence, where simmering frustration over police violence spilled out into the streets in cities like San Jose and Oakland.
National media shone an unexpected and harsh spotlight on San Jose, aided by viral video clips of violent police crowd control measures – depicting officers battering protesters with bean bags, hard foam rounds and tear gas – that had city leaders denouncing the tactics and pledging swift reform.
Across the country, the seeds of a national reckoning on police use of force were planted. But the activists, and community and civic leaders who sought to capitalize on the moment say what sprouted has been uneven at best.
Perhaps most telling, just this past week, the U.S. Department of Justice sought to terminate federal consent decrees aimed at police reform in cities, including Minneapolis, where former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder after pressing his knee onto a prone Floyd’s neck on May 25, 2020, while arresting him for an accusation of using a counterfeit $20 bill. Chauvin is currently serving a 22-year prison sentence.
Oakland, for instance, reduced police funding increases for a year after the protests. And while the city initially pumped an extra $17 million into the city’s Department of Violence Prevention – an agency that works to address the social drivers of violence in the community – its funding has been slashed amid a deep budget crisis.
Jackie Byers, who helped lead the Black Organizing Project in its bid to abolish the Oakland Unified School District’s police department in the wake of the 2020 protests, is unbowed by the slowing political momentum for police reform.
“When you have these wins, you shift things – you’re going to have a reaction from the forces that gained from people being afraid,” Byers said. “If we understand history, then we understand that whenever we have these wins, there’s always going to be these forces that try to push back on these things. We can’t expect that the institutions that have benefited from people being marginalized or oppressed are going to – without pressure – continue to keep up the good work.”
Policies that sprang from or were energized by the summer of 2020 have provided some markers of lasting effects, including broader reforms such as a state ban on police chokeholds, laws to decertify problem officers and expand public access to disciplinary records, and legislation to limit the use of munitions to quell protests.
In Oakland, the city’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force recommended dozens of ways the city could improve policing, and while many were never enacted, it did lead to the creation of MACRO, a program aimed at reducing police calls for those experiencing mental health crises.
“There absolutely was a backlash,” said Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, a former Oakland City Council president and co-chair of the task force. “And with the backlash, it did impact the momentum that we had. At the same time, we saw real gains.”
A similar task force formed in San Jose, but many of its members resigned in its infancy to make a point to the city after asserting the group was created as political cover rather than a genuine catalyst for sorely needed reforms brought to the national forefront by Floyd’s death.
“There has been a lot of, two steps forward, three steps back. I personally have never believed that the government was going to do it with all of its humanity and all of its flaws. It was never going to get the thing done for us. It was never going to bring us to true safety,” said Derrick Sanderlin, a San Jose activist who was seriously injured by police during the first day of the city’s protests.
“I think that was kind of the vibe that people got when they were out on the street, is that no one was coming except for us,” Sanderlin said. “I think that feeling is still the same.”
Raj Jayadev, co-founder of the South Bay civil rights group Silicon Valley De-Bug, said those truly seeking reforms were never hinging their hopes on a government savior.
“I think the lesson is, don’t give the power of a ground-up movement to a political class that didn’t deserve it to begin with,” he said. “The racial justice people were marching for on the streets, that’s not going to be where that vision of racial justice is going to come from.”
Sanderlin’s injury reflects some of the most notable fallout from the 2020 protests, through the litany of lawsuits filed against police and city governments for serious injuries from officers who in many cases were admittedly minimally trained in the less-lethal gun launchers they were deployed to use. Even at demonstrations in suburban Walnut Creek, police were criticized for a response marred most visibly by officers siccing dogs on protesters.
One man was merely watching the protests in downtown San Jose when he lost his eye to one of the police projectiles. Sanderlin, who once helped conduct bias training for new police officers, recently reached a legal settlement with the city after he was shot with a projectile in the groin by an officer while trying to calm tensions between a crowd and a police line.
All told, San Jose is expected to pay at least $5 million in settlements or verdict rewards stemming from 2020 protest lawsuits. The San Jose Police Department declined to comment for this story, citing the litigation.
“It’s not going to take away all of the feelings I had from the street to the hospital bed, but it … has taught me that they can say what they like, but we hold their feet to the fire,” Sanderlin said of police. “I hope that our settlement, I hope at least part of it can be the planting of some seeds of something new that will continue to push the city to act right, because we just know they won’t.”
In Oakland, Tosh Sears was injured during the 2020 protests when he was hit by a rubber police bullet as he turned to leave when Alameda County sheriff’s deputies and Oakland police officers began using tear gas to disperse the crowd. He and another demonstrator shared a $250,000 settlement with Oakland and the county, which secured numerous reforms from both agencies in how they handle future protesters, after accusing sheriff’s deputies of using tactics in Oakland that the city’s police force was banned from employing, including the use of rubber bullets.
Today, Sears sees the churn at the top of Oakland police force as an ongoing problem. “We don’t see reform – we don’t see nothing worse, but we just see more of police doing nothing,” Sears said. “I don’t see any kind of progress.”
Rachel Lederman, senior counsel with the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund – who has litigated several lawsuits borne from the Bay Area protests – lauded the impact that lawsuit settlements, injunctions and trial verdicts across the country have had on restricting how aggressively police can act against demonstrators.
But she lamented a legislative carve-out in California that allows munitions and tear gas to still be used when it’s “objectively reasonable” to protect people from death or serious bodily injury: “That’s open to interpretation and can be the exception that swallows the rule,” she said.
Walter Wilson, a longtime South Bay community leader, led the mass resignation from San Jose’s post-Floyd public safety task force, which later reconvened. The protests helped galvanize political leadership to support more Black community investment, he said, pointing to the public dollars committed to the Silicon Valley African American Cultural Center, a major housing, community, arts and social services hub set to open in 2027 in San Jose. Wilson serves as project director.
It’s an example, he said, of leaders navigating a political climate where public-facing diversity efforts have come under federal scrutiny.
“What they’re saying almost to a person, is, we can take this stuff off, but that’s not going to stop us from conducting ourselves in the way we know which is right, which is making sure we are inclusive and we have diversity,” Wilson said. “We don’t need to say it to do it.”
Jayadev is paying particular attention to younger generations and how the scars they gained will help them take the torch of political activism.
“You would see people downtown, young people downtown, grabbing a megaphone, or standing on top of that rock at City Hall, and think, wow, am I looking at that generation and those people that are going to be leaders that not just get activated, but are going to lead us to this new place that we only dreamed about?”