About This Case Study

In the summer of 2020, after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, the United States saw the largest protest mobilization in its history — and then a measurable wave of reform: a murder conviction, new state use-of-force statutes, federal pattern-or-practice investigations, consent decrees negotiated over Minneapolis and Louisville, department policies rewritten. Five years later, three organizations sat down to count what remained. The Stanford Center for Racial Justice published a brief on use-of-force regulation (June 2025); The Marshall Project reported on the reforms being rolled back (May 2025); and the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed state policing reforms enacted since the murder. The puzzle is that five years out, the answer to "what changed?" depends entirely on where you look. The federal posture reversed — including the Justice Department's 2025 withdrawal from the consent decrees — while some state statutes and department policies persist. Before it is a political question, it is an accounting problem.

Two concepts organize the accounting. The sociologist and legal scholar Monica Bell calls the condition many poor Black communities occupy legal estrangement — not a deficit of trust waiting to be rebuilt, but a structurally produced sense that the law and its enforcers are not theirs and do not protect them; the frame predicts that reforms aimed at "legitimacy" will underdeliver. The legal scholar Devon Carbado argues that most police violence is legal violence: Fourth Amendment doctrine — consent, pretext, reasonableness — authorizes the encounters that produce the killings, so reforms that never touch doctrine leave the machinery intact. The analytical move is to read the reform ledger as an instrument: to ask what work the enacted-and-reversed record actually does, whose encounters with police it changes, and what it never touched. You will build the ledger from the three reports, check it against the killings data, and then diagnose the arc with both frames.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• Stanford Center for Racial Justice, "The Brief: Five Years After George Floyd, Report on Use of Force Regulation" (June 2025). Read the brief.
• The Marshall Project, "Five Years After George Floyd's Murder, Police Reforms Are Being Rolled Back" (May 2025). Read the report.
• Brennan Center for Justice, "State Policing Reforms Since George Floyd's Murder." Read the report.
• Mapping Police Violence, the national database and dashboard of people killed by police. Explore the database. You will use it in Phase 3 as the outcome data.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on currency: This case study reads a moving target. The three reports capture the ledger as of mid-2025; the rollbacks and rebuilding they describe have continued since. Record the date of every figure you cite and the date you accessed each source, and expect — this is built into the final phase — to add developments the reports could not know.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Where were you in the summer of 2020? Name one police reform you remember being announced, promised, or debated then — national or local — and what you assumed became of it.
• When a wave of reform recedes, how would you tell what it left behind? What would count as evidence that something really changed — a law on the books, a budget line, a number of deaths?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Three Ledger-Keepers (12–15 minutes)

Establish the sources before drawing on them. Skim each of the three reports and note, in a line or two per report: who produced it, what slice of the reform landscape it covers, what method it uses, and its date. The three do not do the same work — one tracks use-of-force policy in detail, one reports nationally on the rollbacks, one surveys state-level legislation — and the differences will matter when their accounts diverge. Resist, for now, any conclusion about success or failure; the analysis comes later.

For groups: Each member takes one report and briefs the others in two minutes: producer, scope, method, date.

Phase 2: Build the Ledger (20–25 minutes)

In your notes, rule three columns — Enacted (2020–2021), Reversed or rolled back (by 2025), and Persists (as of the reports' dates) — and three rows: Federal, State, and City and department. Then fill the grid from the reports:

1. The federal row. From The Marshall Project and the Stanford brief: the pattern-or-practice investigations, the Minneapolis and Louisville consent decrees, and the 2025 withdrawal. What was built at the federal level, and what was pulled back?
2. The state row. From the Brennan Center: use-of-force statutes, decertification measures, transparency requirements. Which kinds of states acted, in what years, and which measures have survived?
3. The city and department row. From the Stanford brief: what changed in departmental use-of-force policy itself — the rules officers operate under — and how much of that change depends on federal posture at all?

The three reports do not carve the world identically; note where they disagree, and where a cell of your ledger stays empty. The gaps and mismatches are part of what you are reading.

For groups: Build one shared ledger. Assign each row to a pair, then walk the full grid together and mark every cell where two reports pull in different directions.

Phase 3: The Outcome Check (10–12 minutes)

The ledger records rules. Mapping Police Violence records outcomes. Pull the national trend of people killed by police from 2020 through the most recent full year, and work through:

• What happened to the number across the reform wave and the rollback? Write the trend down with its dates before interpreting it.
• What can this number establish about the reforms in your ledger — and what can it not? Consider what a national total conceals: variation across states that did and did not act, and what gets counted as a killing in the first place.
• The database itself is a civilian count, compiled because no complete federal count exists. What does it tell you that the outcome data for evaluating public policy has to come from outside the state?

Record the date you pulled every figure; the database updates continuously.

For groups: One member pulls the national trend; the others each pull one state from your ledger's state row. Compare: do the states that legislated look different in the data?

Phase 4: Two Diagnoses (12–15 minutes)

Now bring the two frames from the opening to your ledger:

• Under Bell's legal estrangement, which entries in your ledger could plausibly reduce estrangement — change whether the law protects and belongs to the people it polices — and which are legitimacy-repair of the kind her frame predicts will underdeliver?
• Under Carbado's legal violence, mark every entry in your ledger that touches Fourth Amendment doctrine — the law of consent, pretext, and reasonableness that authorizes the encounters. How many marks did you make? What does the count tell you about what the reform wave was, and was not, about?
• The strain test. Where does each frame fit your ledger well, and where does it strain? Is there anything in the record — an enacted measure, a reversal, a persistence — that neither estrangement nor doctrine explains?
• The ledger, continued. Finally, add one row of your own: one development since the reports' dates, found by your own searching, recorded with its date and source. Does it extend the retrenchment, extend the persistence, or point somewhere neither frame predicted?

For groups: Split the group — half argues the ledger through Bell, half through Carbado — then debate the diagnosis. Add the new row together, agreeing on its date and source.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

Five years out, my ledger shows __________. Reading the arc through legal estrangement and legal violence adds __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly what was enacted, exactly what was reversed, and exactly what your frames could and could not explain.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order. The two artifacts to keep are your ledger and your Phase 4 diagnosis notes — together they are a dated record of the reform arc and of what each frame made visible in it.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 runs as individual briefings; Phases 2 through 4 are collaborative around one shared ledger. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The genre the reform instruments come from: U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. 2015. Read the report (DOJ case page). A pattern-or-practice investigation documenting revenue policing page by page — what federal consent decrees respond to, and what withdrawal walks away from; it appears in the unit's Further Readings.
• The article that grounds the estrangement frame: Bell, Monica C. "Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement." Yale Law Journal 126, no. 7 (2017): 2054–2150. Read the article. Open access, and the source of this case study's prediction about legitimacy-repair; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The doctrine the wave never touched: Carbado, Devon W. Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment. New York: The New Press, 2022. Publisher page. A case-by-case account of the Fourth Amendment law of consent, pretext, and reasonableness — the row your ledger likely left emptiest; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.