Sunday, June 4, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Except for a new label on the pancake box and some empty spaces where Confederate statues used to stand, it’s hard to point to a lot of progress that has been made since George Floyd was murdered.
Three years have passed since Floyd’s life was stolen under the knee of a hateful Minneapolis cop, and we are no more removed from the brutality of police abuse than we were before Floyd’s death.
According to one analysis from the Mapping Police Violence database, the deaths of Black people at the hands of American law enforcement officers have increased every year since Floyd’s murder.
In 2020, the year Floyd was killed, around 1,159 people lost their lives in encounters with the police. Among them, 287 were Black.
The following year saw even more Black Americans killed by police — 305 out of 1,147.
In 2022, U.S. police killed more people than they had in a decade, around 1,197. Black people accounted for 26%, or 313, of those killed.
This year, 61 of the 363 killed by police so far have been Black people.
In fact, some of the most egregious police abuse has happened since Floyd’s death, when departments across the country were preaching reform.
Certainly, no lessons were learned in Memphis, Tenn., where just four months ago, a motorist, Tyre Nichols, was beaten to death by cops who said they had pulled him over for reckless driving.
After trying to flee on foot, Nichols was caught and severely beaten by police. He died three days later. All five cops were fired from the department on Jan. 20.
Floyd, an unarmed Black man, died May 25, 2020, on Memorial Day, when cops were arresting him for allegedly passing a counterfeit bill at a grocery store.
Cellphone video showed one of the white cops, Derek Chauvin, pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while the other officers looked on.
Floyd suffocated after telling his tormentors he could not breathe. Chauvin was convicted of murder.
George Floyd’s death was supposed to be a reckoning, a wake up call to America that something had to change, that this system of injustice and inequality was indeed systemic and not the imagined contrivance of a few opportunistic activists.
In the weeks and months that followed, there were a few concessions. Statues honoring Confederate generals were removed in some locations, and Aunt Jemima’s picture was taken off the pancake box.
But for the most part, disparities between Black and white Americans have increased or remain unchanged, a reality highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic.
An Associated Press report recently showed how the legacy of racism in America has laid the foundation for the health inequities that Black people face.
The symptoms and struggle included high blood pressure, mental health issues, asthma and Alzheimer’s.
There’s a price we pay for being Black.
Floyd paid the ultimate price, so as we memorialize his death, we must recommit ourselves to the reckoning, not just for superficial changes, but changes that really impact people’s lives.
Black lives. Because they matter.
Leonard Greene is a columnist for the New York Daily News.
