During the summer of 2020, the United States witnessed nation-wide protests against police brutality after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis police. At the time, the potential for change felt massive. Through the protests and other channels of activism, millions of people sent a clear message that the fundamental nature of American policing needed to change. Two and a half years later, after the recent killings of Tyre Nichols and Sayed Faisal, it appears that there have been only very minimal changes in American law enforcement. Since 2020, U.S. Congress has attempted to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act multiple times, only for it to stall in the U.S. Senate. While the implementation of reforms slowed, the state of policing worsened. In 2022, American law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people, which represented a record high in the years since organizations have started officially tracking killings by the police. It is clear that the efforts undertaken so far to reform the police have not been particularly effective in curbing police violence and discriminatory actions. If American elected officials are serious about stopping the epidemic of police violence, it is going to require bolder ideas, such as reducing departmental budgets and ending qualified immunity for police officers.

Many of the solutions that elected officials who support the Black Lives Matter movement have proposed are relatively humdrum compared to the scale of massive police violence. One policy that became popular in mainstream circles and was heavily pushed by Barack Obama’s administration in the mid-2010s was the mandated use of body cameras for police officers. The Memphis Police Department, the same department responsible for the death of Tyre Nichols, began implementing the widespread use of body cameras among their officers in 2016. While the use of body cameras has led to some rare instances of accountability for unlawful actions taken by police, only 14 percent of deadly police shootings since 2015 have had accessible footage from a body camera. The officers who killed Tyre Nichols were wearing body cameras, and other police footage from an overhead camera known as a SkyCop camera showed the overhead footage of the killing and demonstrated, most clearly, its brutality. Although body cameras have provided benefits in a small number of instances, they do not do enough to prevent violence by police.

Another solution that was widely touted was diversity training for police officers. However, it is difficult to imagine that diversity training would have any serious positive impact on an institution that has its origins in apprehending escaped slaves. The problem with incremental policies, such as body cameras and diversity training, is that they treat police violence as a phenomenon that occurs on an individual rather than a systemic level.

Despite the lack of real changes in American policing, there are concrete steps policymakers can take to limit police violence. One widely known policy that emerged from the protests in 2020 was to defund police departments and redistribute that funding to other areas, such as investing more in public schools or creating affordable housing. Despite the fact that intuitively, defunding the police would seem to increase rates of crime, evidence proves the opposite is true. When the New York Police Department reduced the use of a “proactive policing” policy that cut down on arrests for low-level offenses, the city witnessed a decline in the rates of crime. Defunding is also a serious measure that would represent an actual consequence for many police departments’ flagrantly unethical practices. Some of the billions that big-city police departments receive should go toward alternative programs that would lower crime by creating better living conditions. Although calls for defunding were a central part of the efforts to change policing, many American cities witnessed the opposite, with a vast majority of police departments receiving increased funding in the time after the protests. Despite nominally supporting the calls for change, President Biden urged cities to funnel excess COVID-19 relief funds into police departments.

Many advocates have also called for an end to “qualified immunity,” which is a legal doctrine that protects police officers from federal civil rights lawsuits. In many cases, a civil rights lawsuit is the only avenue for accountability for victims of police violence, and qualified immunity prevents any form of federal legal consequences for police officers. Police officers rarely face lawsuits for misconduct, and removing qualified immunity represents an actual opportunity for those wronged by law enforcement to achieve some measure of justice. Just as importantly, it acts as a serious mechanism to hold police officers accountable. Defunding the police and ending qualified immunity are both solutions that address the problems present in American policing as systemic rather than individual, which is why they have serious potential to create change. However, only New Mexico and Colorado have actually banned qualified immunity. Implementing policies such as defunding the police and ending qualified immunity is often difficult. Neither, especially defunding the police, is particularly popular among voters. But they and other steps are entirely necessary to truly change the violent and unequal nature of American policing.

It is easy to look back on the BLM protests during the summer of 2020 and feel pessimistic. It truly felt like a moment where American policing could finally fundamentally change as millions of people voiced their discontent, but then not much truly changed. The protests eventually lost steam, and the rate of police killings did not slow down in the slightest. More than two years later, the country is once again reckoning with the fallout of yet another cruel murder of a black man by law enforcement. But despite the undoubtedly bleak outlook, there are solutions to ending police violence. What is now necessary is for those in power to have the will and impetus to implement them.

Theodore Brita is a junior majoring in political science.