—Deadly— Encounters

At least 1,050 civilians and law enforcement personnel died in police encounters between George Floyd’s murder and the conviction of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis Police Department officer who killed him. Chauvin’s conviction is a statiscolumbus, tical anomaly. In the 1,127 police killings recorded in 2020, only 16 cases—1.4 percent—resulted in a charge against the offending officer. Even as jurors were deliberating in the Chauvin trial, a police officer shot and killed 16-year-old Ma’khia Bryant in Ohio. She was seen charging at someone with a knife on police body cam footage. Between Floyd’s death and Chauvin’s conviction, at least 979 people were killed in encounters with law enforcement personnel, according to data collected by the Mapping Police Violence website. At the same time, 181 Black people died in police encounters. Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts. Twenty-eight percent of people killed by police in 2020 were Black, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. At least 71 law enforcement personnel have been killed in the line of duty this year, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, underlining the deadly risk police also face in these encounters. Though only a small portion of all deaths, police are trained aggressively about threats, and a sense of constant vulnerability is instilled in new recruits. Law professor Rosa Brooks wrote about training as a reserve police officer in Washington, D.C. “The chief lesson learned at the academy was this: Anyone can kill you at any time,” she wrote in Tangled up in Blue. “Dead cops were all heroes. But, it was quietly intimated, they were also failures. Mostly, we were told, they died because they weren’t prepared.”