Welcome to Hear Me Out. I'm Celeste Headley. We're approaching the third anniversary of George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police.

That tragedy and the protest we witness that ensued in its wake rocked the nation and the world in ways that are still very much palpable today.

Across the nation police reform was talked about seriously and in many places that happened for the first time.

And reforms did happen in some places and for at least a short period of time, but none of that has been enough to end police brutality.

So it's worth asking, is anything enough? Or are we dealing with a system that's just too broken to fix?

Often the police don't do anything to resolve the questions that you call them for and yet we are taught that the police are the only people we can call.

They're the only solution to this problem. Even when we know that they don't solve.

Writer and organizer, Geomar joins us to make the case for abolishing police in just a moment. Stay with us.

Welcome back to Hear Me Out. I'm Celeste Headley.

In some ways it feels like forever ago now, but around this time three years ago, the nation was on edge and it was about to be even more so.

It was the early days of the pandemic and there was still so much that we didn't know about the virus or how it spread.

But on May 25th, 2020, there was another inflection point. A man named George Floyd was murdered during an arrest attempt by the Minneapolis Police Department.

We will not play audio of that arrest, but most likely it's seared into your brain as it isn't to mind.

George Floyd pleading with the officer whose knee is bearing down on his neck for nearly nine minutes, calling for his mother.

Protest spread like wildfire across the country in the days after that and by mid-June, more than 2,000 cities had seen massive protests.

More than 200 had imposed curfews to try to tamp down on the unrest. 30 states had deployed the National Guard.

Property was destroyed. It's really hard to forget.

It is easy to forget though that those protests created some change in the year after George Floyd's murder, at least 17 states imposed bans or restrictions on the use of chokeholds or neck restraints by police.

And yet in spite of those reforms, people are still dying in police custody.

Tyree Nichols death in Memphis has been the most high profile perhaps, but there have been others.

The Washington Post estimates that 182 people have been shot and killed by police in this country over the past year.

The database mapping police violence, which is run by an activist group called campaign zero, estimates that police have killed at least 300 people in the US this year.

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