MINNEAPOLIS — Sunday will mark five years since George Floyd died underneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.
Selwyn Jones, Floyd’s uncle, on Friday reflected on this — and about how his nephew’s death outside a grocery store in Minneapolis that Monday evening left its mark on the nation as well as himself.
“I look at this as the day that changed the modern way that people were policing ... the modern way of how people had to show accountability,” Jones said, referring to the racial reckoning in the U.S. after millions saw footage of Floyd’s killing.
In the cellphone video — captured by teenager Darnella Frazier and uploaded to Facebook — former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, was shown pinning Floyd to the ground with his knee. Prosecutors said Chauvin stayed in this position for nine minutes and 29 seconds.
Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, repeatedly cried that he couldn’t breathe — echoing the words of Eric Garner, who died in a police chokehold in July 2014 on Staten Island, New York. Those words became a rallying cry for a wave of protests that swept across the country in the summer of 2020.
The video also proved to be critical evidence in the case that ended with a conviction against Chauvin for murder and manslaughter in 2021. The ex-officer appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, which rejected his bid in 2023. Three other police officers were convicted in 2022 of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care.
The large-scale protests of 2020 have long subsided, but Jones said his own work is not over. He co-founded a nonprofit group, Justice 929, aimed at dismantling systemic racial injustice.
“I've been trying to impact the world in every possible scenario … since my nephew’s death,” Jones said. “It’s important to me that nobody else has to go through the mental trauma that our family, that a lot of other families have to go through.
“How many George Floyds were there before there was my nephew?” he said.
“There was a certain level of empathy, pity and shame for seeing the same atrocity happen again,” Jones said during an interview Friday, reliving the experience nearly five years ago of watching the video of Floyd’s death.
Jones said that he initially did not know his nephew was the man who was killed. His sister called to tell him.
“That level of empathy and pity went from 'why don’t they stop?' to 'I’ve got to find a way to make them stop,'" Jones recalled.
Since its launch, the Justice 929 organization has tried to tackle a number of issues that include supporting families of those who have experienced police brutality and domestic violence, helping others who were wrongfully convicted, assisting people who are homeless, working with youth to improve mental health, fighting to reduce gun violence and lending a hand in missing-persons cases. It is a broad list of goals because Jones sees many of the issues as interconnected.
A former NFL cornerback, Jones also partnered with others to help develop the MYTH app, launching this summer, to record police encounters and send footage plus the user’s GPS coordinates to emergency contacts.
The Justice Department said Wednesday it is seeking to drop police-reform agreements, called consent decrees, that President Joe Biden’s administration made with police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, following Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s deaths.
“Overbroad police consent decrees divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department said in a statement.
The settlements had called for overhauls of the departments’ training and use-of-force policies under court supervision.
The Trump administration also announced that it was retracting findings of its investigations into six other police departments: Phoenix; Trenton, New Jersey; Memphis; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City; and the Louisiana State Police.
When asked about the Justice Department’s actions, Jones said, “Where's the benefit for people of color? Where's the benefit for marginalized people? Because those are the ones that get racially profiled. Those are the ones that get repeatedly stopped.”
But even if the consent decree with the Justice Department is dismissed by a federal judge, city officials in Minneapolis have said they are committed to implementing police reforms.
“Our independent monitor has lauded the meaningful progress we’ve made under the state settlement agreement, and the public can count on clear, measurable proof that our reforms are moving forward,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a statement.
Jones was already in Minneapolis on Friday morning ahead of several commemorative events scheduled for the weekend.
“As far as celebrating his life, he still had life to live,” Jones said, remembering his nephew as a jokster and with a beautiful smile. “So this isn't a celebration to me. This is an opportunity to continue to impact others.”
There was a “Night of Honor” gala and concert planned for Friday, a daylong community festival Saturday and several events Sunday, including a candlelight vigil at George Floyd Square — the intersection where Floyd was murdered that city officials renamed for him on the two-year anniversary.
The square was also the site of a moment of silence organized by activist and local leaders Friday afternoon.
