After Tyre Nichols killing, a wide majority of Americans favor George Floyd police reform bill

A vigil for Tyre Nichols in Sacramento, Calif., Jan. 30
A vigil for Tyre Nichols in Sacramento, Calif., Jan. 30. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Americans favor every major reform in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — and that even Republicans support the vast majority of them.

Yet the poll also reveals why last month’s brutal killing of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police officers may not be enough to overcome gridlock in Congress, where the bill remains stalled after passing the House in 2021.

According to the survey of 1,585 U.S. adults, which was conducted from Feb. 2 to Feb. 6, the sort of incremental police reform proposed by the George Floyd Act is unequivocally popular.

In fact, the number of Americans who agree that “we need to fix the police by reforming the existing system” (59%) is four and a half times as large as the number who want to “defund and reinvent our approach to public safety” (13%) and three and a half times as large as the number who say "we should not reform or defund the police” (17%).

That consensus extends to the bill’s specific reforms. When Yahoo News and YouGov presented respondents with a list of seven potential policy changes, all seven garnered net positive reactions among Americans overall. Large majorities favor requiring body cameras for police (74%), creating a national police misconduct registry (71%), making it easier to prosecute officers accused of wrongdoing (63%) and banning chokeholds (57%). In each case, only about 10% to 20% of Americans are opposed.

Even when support for an individual reform is lower — 51% for ending qualified immunity, which shields officers from civil lawsuits; 48% for banning no-knock warrants; 44% for limiting military-grade equipment awarded to state and local law enforcement — opposition is lower still (25%, 27% and 30%, respectively).

And while Republicans are generally less supportive of each of these reforms, only reducing police militarization and banning no-knock warrants draw net opposition on the right. On the issue of qualified immunity — the main sticking point in Senate negotiations — slightly more Republicans favor (37%) than oppose (35%) ending it.

A sign in Memphis protesting the killing of Tyre Nichols by police there
A sign in Memphis protesting the killing of Nichols by police there. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Finally, when Americans learn that all of these proposals are included in a bipartisan bill that passed the House in 2021 but has “yet to receive a vote in the Senate,” they say they favor the George Floyd Act by a 2-to-1 majority, 52% to 24%. Among Democrats, support is overwhelming (81% to 6%); among Republicans, opposition is muted (28% favor, 46% oppose, 26% unsure).

Yet the George Floyd Act is unlikely to pass Congress anytime soon — even in the wake of Nichols’s killing. Why?

The fact that Republicans now control the House is one big reason. “I don’t know that there’s any law that can stop that evil that we saw,” GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said after bodycam footage of Nichols’s beating was released.

But the Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggests that waning public urgency is playing a part as well.

That trajectory is nothing new. In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s May 2020 killing, a clear majority of Americans expressed a favorable view of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement (57%); just a third (33%) saw BLM in an unfavorable light. Yet BLM's rating started to decline almost immediately, reaching 44% favorable, 43% unfavorable by September 2020. Across six surveys conducted between September 2020 and October 2021, BLM averaged 44% favorable, 44% unfavorable among all Americans.

A demonstration in Brooklyn, N.Y., against police brutality
A demonstration in Brooklyn, N.Y., against police brutality, June 2020. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

And that’s exactly the same rating BLM received in the latest Yahoo News/YouGov poll, 16 months later.

In other words, Nichols’s killing — as shocking as it was — does not appear to have reversed the post-Floyd trend on race and policing. In June 2020, 60% of Americans agreed that there was “a problem with systemic racism in policing”; by the following May, that number had fallen to 51%. It is still 51% today. When offered a choice, far more Americans now identify “crime” (54%) as a bigger problem than “systemic racism in policing” (32%).

As a result, the reaction to Nichols’s killing seems to differ significantly from the reaction to Floyd’s. In late May 2020, 85% of Americans said they had heard or read about the latter; fewer (71%) say the same today about Nichols. More specifically, just over half (51%) of Americans say they have watched the video of Memphis police officers beating Nichols. In May 2020, 70% had watched video of then-Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, and 74% reported having watched the video two weeks later, in early June.

A recent rally in Boston against the police-involved killing of Tyre Nichols
A recent rally in Boston against Nichols's killing. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

Among Americans who said they watched the respective videos, an identical share — 87% — also said they approved of the decisions (in both Memphis and Minneapolis) to fire the officers involved.

Yet because fewer total Americans have watched the Nichols video, fewer overall now say they approve of the decision to fire the officers in Memphis (75%) than said the same about Minneapolis (83%). Lower awareness seems to have led to less support for decisive action.

By the same token, far fewer Americans say race was at least a minor factor in Nichols’s killing (47%) than said the same about Floyd’s killing (71%). (The number of respondents who described race as a major factor, meanwhile, was 31% and 57%, respectively.) This gap likely reflects the fact that five of the Memphis officers fired for their involvement in Nichols’s killing are black, while Chauvin was white — further complicating efforts to advance systemic reforms.

As the Washington Post recently reported, “The widely viewed videos of the Nichols beating provided fodder for right-wing media ecosystems that routinely blame Black America’s maladies on Black America, and spawned nuanced conversations among Black activists about how systemic racism can manifest in the actions of non-White people.”

An image at the entrance of Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis, Tenn., celebrates the life of Tyre Nichols
An image at the entrance of Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis. (Lucy Garrett/Getty Images)

“What we’ve been screaming from our lungs for years is that the system and the culture of policing trains people’s minds regardless of the color of their skin to behave a certain way,” Jeanelle Austin, who runs the George Floyd Global Memorial in Minnesota, told the Post.

Going forward, those complex dynamics are unlikely to create new momentum for reform. After hearing a description of “the specialized police unit (known as the SCORPION unit) to which the [Memphis] officers belong[ed]” — a unit that was “created a little over a year ago to help address violent crime ‘hot spots’ in the city” and “often operated in unmarked vehicles, making traffic stops, seizing weapons and conducting hundreds of arrests” — a majority of Americans (56%) say they approve of the Memphis Police Department’s decision to disband the unit. Just 23% disapprove.

Yet when asked about such units generally, Americans are far more divided, with just 35% saying police units like SCORPION are a bad idea — and the rest saying they’re a good idea (32%) or that they’re not sure (33%).

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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,585 U.S. adults interviewed online from Feb. 2 to 6, 2023. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Baseline party identification is the respondent’s most recent answer given prior to March 15, 2022, and is weighted to the estimated distribution at that time (32% Democratic, 27% Republican). Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.8%.