Can you notice when George Floyd died and depolicing began?

Today, May 25th, is the third anniversary of George Floyd’s death. How’s that whole “racial reckoning” thing working out anyway? It’s starting to look like the harder heads of the Democrat-media industrial complex have decided it’s best to memory-hole their 2020 mania.

The CDC tracks the cause of each death. Above is the weekly number of blacks dying by homicide (red) and motor vehicle accident (blue) by week from 2018 to late 2022. I had Google Sheets insert trend lines for each before and after George Floyd’s death.

After George Floyd’s death, black homicides jumped from a trend line of ~200 to ~300 per week and car crash deaths went up ~45 per week. The CDC only provides weekly data since 2018, but offers the public monthly data since 1999.

The Floyd Effect is the most spectacular thing to happen to homicide and auto accident trends in the 21st century, by far. Getting yourself shot or wrapped around a bridge abutment is usually a very personal thing, but this is the one case of a massive political/cultural change shifting the trends almost overnight across the county.

The Occam’s Razor explanation for why blacks suddenly died so many more Deaths of Exuberance (murders and traffic accidents) immediately after the cops retreated to the donut shop during the triumph of Black Lives Matter in 2020 is that black lives depend upon law and order.

The good news is that the Floyd Effect on blacks appears to be burning out over time. CDC data on external causes of death come with a six-month lag to lessen misjudgments entering the data, so we don’t know yet what has been happening in 2023.

On the other hand, while Hispanics didn’t immediately react to the “racial reckoning,” their behavior then got much worse in 2021.