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The 2020 Uprisings, Four Years Later

Derecka Purnell, Elizabeth Hinton, Alex Vitale, and more

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Four years ago, on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, following the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor earlier that year. Shortly after Floyd’s death, the city of Minneapolis—and then cities across the country—erupted in mass protest, igniting the largest protest movement in U.S. history. The uprisings, Elizabeth Hinton writes, were a means “for the oppressed and disenfranchised to express collective solidarity in the face of punitive state forces, exploitative institutions, and calcified ‘democratic’ institutions.”

This week’s reading list gathers pieces from our archive on the 2020 uprisings, the long history of police oppression that ignited them, and visions for change—including an interview with Derecka Purnell on what a police-free world could look like, Melvin Rogers on the “rage and anger” at state violence expressed in the protests, and Alex Reinert on a path to ending qualified immunity. 

We need to reckon with police lies not only as a form of individual misconduct but as a matter of political speech.

nia t. evans

Derecka Purnell discusses her new book Becoming Abolitionists, how she came to join the movement against policing and prisons, and what a just world looks like.

nia t. evans, Derecka Purnell

Effective responses to violence—preventing it, interrupting it, holding people accountable, and helping people heal—already exist. We need to learn from and invest in them.

Amanda Alexander, Danielle Sered

Studying the social world requires more than deference to data—no matter the prestige or sophistication of the tools with which they are parsed.

Lily Hu

A century of failed attempts in Minneapolis.

Michael Brenes

What should “impartiality” mean for jurors in a historically unequal criminal legal system?

Sonali Chakravarti

In many states, legal regimes sanction the predictable murder of innocent black men. Justice will not be served until the law changes.

Joseph Margulies

Sociologist Alex Vitale explains how the U.S. policing crisis begins with politics—the decision to embrace neoliberal austerity and to turn the social problems it creates over to police.

Alex Vitale, Scott Casleton

The moment Floyd’s resistance would become lawful is precisely the moment it is too late.

Lisa Cacho, Jodi Melamed

We need not wait for Congress or the Supreme Court. State attorneys general and city law departments can—and should—lead the charge themselves.

Alex Reinert

In order to achieve lasting change, we must remedy systemic problems across the criminal justice system—not just among police.

Kate Levine, Joanna Schwartz

On Chicago’s decades-long history of police torture.

Gili Kliger

Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists.

Garrett Felber

The rage on display in Minneapolis is not only about police violence. It is also about the country’s utter disregard for the pain of black Americans.

Melvin Rogers

A proper understanding of urban rebellion depends on our ability to interpret it not as a wave of criminality, but as political violence.

Elizabeth Hinton

Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws.

Sarah A. Seo

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