George Floyd Death Anniversary Highlights Persistent Police Abuses

Five years after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, civil rights attorneys in California say systemic police abuses persist and the wave of public pressure for reform that surged in 2020 has since receded—muted by legal setbacks, institutional resistance, and what they describe as a chilling of First Amendment rights.

Attorneys Adanté Pointer and V. James DeSimone—two high-profile civil rights lawyers who have sued law enforcement agencies across California for excessive force—warn that the structural issues which enabled Floyd’s death remain largely unchanged. In separate statements provided this week, the attorneys offered an unvarnished assessment of the post-George Floyd landscape, highlighting the enduring legal protections for police, the rollback of government transparency, and the continued use of dangerous restraint tactics that have resulted in more deaths.

Pointer, co-founder of the Oakland-based firm Pointer & Buelna and a nationally recognized civil rights litigator, said the momentum of 2020’s historic protests has been met with a coordinated effort by governments at every level to suppress public dissent and evade accountability.

“The First Amendment has been under attack since the murder of George Floyd,” Pointer said. “Government actions at all levels seek to limit the ability of people to seek redress of grievances and hold government accountable.”

Pointer cited growing barriers to press access, increased arrests of journalists covering protests, delays in public records access, and a worrying rollback of federal transparency tools—most notably, the Department of Justice’s dismantling of its law enforcement misconduct database. “All of this seems to have had a chilling effect on public demonstrations,” Pointer said. “We’ll have to see how willing people are to renew public calls for police accountability.”

While Derek Chauvin, the officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, remains behind bars, Pointer cautioned that the larger systems that allow police abuse to go unchecked remain firmly in place. “Very little has changed over the past five years. Police are still not de-escalating, unarmed people are still being shot to death or seriously injured, and people in the throes of a mental crisis are still dying because police regularly see them as criminal threats.”

One of the most significant legal barriers to justice, Pointer said, is qualified immunity—a judicial doctrine that shields police officers from civil lawsuits, even when they violate constitutional rights. “Qualified immunity gives officers a free pass,” he said. “They know that even their most unlawful conduct will not result in a lawsuit holding them personally accountable.”

Pointer warned that the doctrine is not applied uniformly across the country, with federal circuit courts interpreting it in vastly different ways. “In the Ninth Circuit, it’s imperfect but doesn’t always block claims. In Florida, it can prevent you from even filing a lawsuit,” he said. “This doctrine is not grounded in the Constitution. It’s judge-made law that has grown stronger over time, especially in politically conservative jurisdictions that increasingly treat police as a protected class.”

He expressed concern that the current U.S. Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, may further entrench the doctrine—potentially undermining civil rights cases across the country. However, he noted one possible opening for reform: “Justice Clarence Thomas has acknowledged that qualified immunity is the product of judge-made law,” Pointer said. “There’s a sliver of hope he might join liberal justices to limit or even eliminate it on the grounds that it violates the 14th Amendment.”

V. James DeSimone, a Los Angeles-based civil rights attorney, said that while George Floyd’s death led to increased scrutiny of police use-of-force tactics, dangerous restraint practices remain widespread—particularly the use of prone positioning and body weight, which can lead to “positional asphyxiation.”

DeSimone pointed to the October 2020 death of Shayne Sutherland, a man who died after Stockton police officers held him face down for over eight minutes while he was handcuffed. “Instead of placing him in a ‘recovery position’ on his side or seated, as recommended by the Department of Justice in 1995, officers kept him pinned to the ground,” DeSimone said. The city ultimately settled the case for $6 million.

But after settling, Stockton adopted new use-of-force policies from Lexipol—a Texas-based private policy provider used by many police departments—which DeSimone says downplay the dangers of such restraints. “Lexipol’s policies claim that terms like ‘positional asphyxia’ and ‘excited delirium’ are controversial and not universally accepted,” he said. “This is dangerously misleading. The U.S. Department of Justice guidelines are clear: once a suspect is handcuffed, they must be turned on their side or seated.”

DeSimone also represented the family of Daniel Rivera, who died in Los Angeles in 2020 after LAPD officers used body weight to hold him face down for more than three minutes following multiple Taser deployments. “Even after being reprimanded, the officers insisted during deposition they did nothing wrong,” he said. The city paid $3.9 million to settle the case.

“Police officers need clear training and enforceable policy guidelines warning them of the dangers of positional asphyxiation,” DeSimone said. “It’s not enough to have vague language. We need explicit guidance based on medical science.”

He also criticized the growing reliance on Lexipol’s policies, which he said are adopted with little transparency or community input. “They’re vague, they lack accountability, and they fail to incorporate lifesaving guidance from federal agencies.”

While some progress has been made—such as the banning of chokeholds in several jurisdictions—DeSimone said a lack of national reporting standards makes it difficult to assess how often dangerous restraint tactics are still being used. “There’s no uniformity in reporting police use-of-force deaths. We don’t even fully know how many George Floyd-type deaths are still occurring.”

As the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s death is marked, both attorneys said they remain concerned that the legal, political, and institutional inertia protecting police misconduct remains intact, and may even be gaining strength in some parts of the country.

DeSimone warned that many activists and communities remain traumatized not just by police killings, but by the violent suppression of protests that followed. “The Black Lives Matter protests are not as prevalent, and that’s due in part to the violent police response,” he said. “Many protestors suffered life-altering injuries. The price for exercising their First Amendment rights was high.”

Still, both attorneys said the fight for accountability must continue. “The current shift towards authoritarianism by federal agencies is motivating activists to renew protests,” DeSimone said. “We need real reform—not just slogans, not just settlements.”

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