Why was George Floyd’s death such a big deal compared to other police killings?

[Crumpets]

A big part of it was when it happened. I remember reading an article during the protests that compared the reaction to George Floyd to the New York blackout in 1977. Unlike other blackouts, there was widespread looting in 1977 because it was happening at a time when the city and country already felt like they were in a time of crisis and there was much less a sense of comradery than in similar incidents in the past.

The US was already at a boiling point last summer, and it wasn't just on the left. If it hadn't been George Floyd, it was going to be something else.

[Crumpets]

In case anyone wonders where the "he was on drugs, the cops did nothing wrong" narrative is coming from:

https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1359676426736332800

[Crumpets]

Also, just going back to my personal reaction to the first week of protests, it wasn't the initial violence at some of the protests that really made this a unique event compared to other anti-racism protests. It was the overwhelming police response to the protests combined with all sorts of other factors that brought a lot of us more slacktivist types out of the woodwork. Like I said in my first post, it wasn't just the left's reaction that was unique, but the reaction of the police to those initial protests played a huge part in the escalation. Once the videos started to proliferate of the force the police were using on even undisputably peaceful protesters, it became less a sense of "I don't really want to go to a protest in the middle of a pandemic" and more "it's my patriotic duty to fight back against this ongoing injustice, or else I'm siding with the oppressors."

And I think you can reasonably make the case (although we'll never know for certain) that the only thing stopping the anti-lockdown protests on the right from becoming the mirror image of the George Floyd protests was the fact that Trump was in the White House and they were confident he'd stay there, while there was much more uncertainty on the left about where America was headed. Once the tables were turned, it only took a matter of weeks before we got the storming of the Capitol.