National Day of Agitation – Five Years Since the Murder of George Floyd

Sunday, May 25 marks 5 years since George Floyd’s murder sparked rebellion across the country and solidarity protests around the world. For many of us who were in the streets at that time, it felt like the police and prison system had finally met their match. Police departments around the country were knocked on their ass by tens of millions of people in nearly every state and the police’ very existence was called into question. By the end of the summer, the conversation had mostly shifted to voting for Democrats, diversity training, and small-scale reforms such as redirecting a percentage of police budgets to social services. Nonprofit organization got a lot of grant money and politicians made a lot of promises they never planned on keeping.

The 2020 uprisings were spontaneous and lacked coordinated, revolutionary leadership. Grifters like Patrisse Cullers and Robin DiAngelo, who became a multimillionaire off of Black Lives Matter, jumped to fill that vacuum, pulling the uprising in a direction that would increase their grant funding, rather than threatening it by being too extreme. The rebellion got driven down the dead-end of electoral politics and charity, and by winter it was over.

2020 made it clear that mass rebellions have the power to shake this country to its core. But in order to have lasting wins, we need a mass movement that’s united on a strategy to fight back outside electoral channels, and that’s led by people who have the biggest stake in ending police brutality, not by people standing to make a buck off of talking endlessly about it while nothing changes.

It has been five years since George Floyd was publicly executed by Derek Chain and what has changed? Lawyers and nonprofits have gotten rich and passed toothless reforms. The movement in the street got co-opted and is non-existent. Every year since, cops have killed and brutalized more people than the year before, and they keep getting away with it. What will it take to put an end to this brutality? A movement in the streets that won’t get sold out, one that brings forward families and people under the gun of police brutality as leaders and won’t settle for less.

Families Demanding Justice is a national network of families and friends of people killed and brutalized by the police. We stand together in the struggle to end police brutality and murders. We support each other while fighting for justice for our loved ones. We insist that the police and law enforcement agents who murdered and brutalized our loved ones be held accountable for their crimes. Police who kill and brutalize should be punished and thrown in prison. We rely on each other first and foremost, the people who are subjected to police brutality and anyone outraged by injustice to wage this fight. We do not rely on the courts, police review boards, government agencies, or politicians to get justice. We will not be preyed on by the grandstanding politicians, grifters and opportunists, or lawyers only looking for fame and fortune. We will speak for ourselves. We will become leaders in this struggle, and we invite anyone who wants justice to join with us in building a movement in the streets to put an end to police killings and brutality once and for all.