5 years after George Floyd, did the global reckoning spark any real change?

Within days of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, by a police officer on May 25, 2020, millions around the world poured into the streets.

They demanded justice for him and the countless others whose lives have been impacted or lost due to police violence and racial injustice. 

In Britain, hundreds of thousands defied COVID-19 restrictions to join the country’s largest anti-racism protests since the abolition of slavery, while in Paris, tens of thousands rallied, chanting the name of Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old Black man who died in police custody in 2016. 

Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Canada’s Black Lives Matter movement, said it felt like a Rubicon had been crossed. 

Conversations about systemic racism and policing, once marginalized, suddenly featured on major news outlets across the globe. But five years later, the optimism that many anti-racism advocates said they felt back then has since faded.  

Remi Joseph-Salisbury, an associate professor of sociology at The University of Manchester who specializes in racism and policing, said no meaningful reform has taken place across the UK. 

“There’s been minimal, if any, anti-racist structural change in policing,” he said. “There’s been no major shift in stop-and-search, no major shift in police violence, and no major shift in accountability. Families are still dealing with the horror of losing loved ones to police violence.” 

Joseph-Salisbury said he remembered feeling a sense of hope when he witnessed the mass mobilization across UK cities in 2020, but in hindsight, he said, he was probably naive.

Racial disparities remain stark 

Black people are four times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched by police, according to UK government data. While this marks an improvement from 2019, when Black individuals were nearly 10 times more likely, the racial disparity remains stark. 

In 2022, UK police launched a Police Race Action Plan to improve outcomes for Black individuals interacting with law enforcement. But a year later, an independent review into London’s Metropolitan Police concluded that the force was “institutionally racist, misogynistic, and homophobic.” 

In 2024, Black and ethnic minority officers told the BBC that racism in the force had actually worsened.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who had posted a photo on social media of himself taking a knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in June of 2020 — pledged ahead of the 2024 UK general election to introduce a Race Equality Act to tackle structural racism.

But Joseph-Salisbury said there’s little sign of progress on that front. 

Black communities were hopeful a new Labour government would herald some change but instead, he said, Starmer has purged the party of its more progressive elements, including those with anti-racist commitments. 

Short-lived momentum 

In France, the 2020 protests were among the largest outside of the US and UK. 

Assa Traoré emerged as a leading voice in the movement, demanding justice for her brother Adama Traoré, whose 2016 death in police custody drew comparisons to Floyd. 

Two autopsies and four separate medical examinations have offered conflicting reasons for Adama Traoré’s death. 

Adama Traoré’s family argues that he would not have died if the officers had not pinned him to the ground or provided better assistance after he passed out. 

In 2020, then-Interior Minister Christophe Castaner banned police chokeholds in France and pledged to suspend officers suspected of racism. But the momentum was short-lived. 

In 2021, human rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the French state, alleging systemic discrimination in police identity checks disproportionately targeting Black and Arab people.

One of the deeper challenges in France, according to Nathalie Etoke, a professor of Francophone and Africana studies at the City University of New York, is the country’s refusal to engage with race as a social reality. 

French law prohibits collecting data on race or religion, rooted in the doctrine of laïcité, a form of secular universalism that assumes all citizens are simply French and personal identities like religion or ethnicity shouldn’t define a person’s place in society. 

But that principle ends up erasing real inequalities, Etoke said: “In France, race is supposed to be a thing of the past, but it’s not. When you bring it up, you’re branded a racist.” 

Etoke said that she believes the center-right government of Emmanuel Macron has exacerbated the problem by adopting rhetoric and policies more closely aligned with the far right.

“It’s very difficult to see any kind of progress in police behavior when the political rhetoric is all about law and order, immigration, and radical Islam,” she said. 

Etoke said that she sees the rise of the far right in many countries right now as a backlash, a way of repressing whatever progress they thought was happening.  

“There is a fascist, racist backlash at the moment and it’s not specific to France. The far right is on the rise in the United States, too.” 

Still, Etoke said that she tries to remain optimistic.

“I have to stay hopeful because the people who came before me went through wars, and they still fought for freedom. I have to think about the next generation, she said. “I cannot afford to give people a legacy of despair and hopelessness.”

‘A period of backlash’ 

In Canada, some changes did follow the streetwide protests in 2020. 

Hudson, co-founder of Canada’s Black Lives Matter movement, said that several cities introduced alternative emergency response lines so that mental health crises could be handled by trained professionals instead of the police. 

“If you’re experiencing a mental health crisis, what you need is somebody trained to deal with that,” Hudson said. “What you don’t want is the police showing up.” 

Yet, for Hudson, that early momentum has given way to regression. 

“We’re in a backlash period globally when it comes to anti-Black racism,” she said. “Some of the initiatives that began after Floyd’s death are now being delayed or even abandoned.” 

Hudson said that she believes that part of the problem lies in the disconnect between policymakers and advocates. 

“There was a lot of division over what meaningful change actually looks like,” she said. 

Hudson, a strong proponent of defunding the police, recently published the book, “Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All.” 

“We’re seeing less money going to our schools, to our public infrastructure, to housing, to all of these services that we so desperately need,” she said. “And yet, policing is getting more and more funding and still fails to keep us safe.” Hudson said that she recognizes that her views don’t have much support in political circles in Canada or the US right now. In 2024, the Canadian Parliament approved a 16.3% budget increase for the country’s national police force.