page_title: History of the United States (2008–present)
section_title: African Americans and law enforcement
hierarchical_section_title: History of the United States (2008–present) / Race / African Americans and law enforcement
caption_attribution_description: English: Protesters overtaking and burning the Minneapolis Police's 3rd Precinct. For more information, please see w:George Floyd protests in Minneapolis–Saint Paul#Loss of the third precinct station.Italiano: Le barricate del terzo distretto di polizia di Minneapolis in fiamme a seguito delle proteste per la morte di George Floyd
context_page_description: The history of the United States from 2008 to the present began with the collapse of the housing bubble, which led to the Great Recession, and helped the Democrats win the presidency in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama, the country's first African-American president. The government issued large loans and enacted economic stimulus packages that aimed to improve the economy. Obama's domestic initiatives also included the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which by means of large reforms to the American healthcare system, created a National Health Insurance program. President Obama eventually withdrew combat troops from Iraq, and shifted the country's efforts in the War on Terror to Afghanistan, where a troop surge was initiated in 2009. In 2010, due to continued public discontent with the economic situation, unemployment, and federal spending, Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives and reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate. In 2011, Obama announced that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces during a covert operation in Pakistan while the Iraq War was declared formally over the same year.
context_section_description: Even after the end of the crack epidemic, there remained a large disparity in crime rates between black people and whites, with black people accounting for 28% of arrests in 2013; over 50% of homicides and robberies where the race of the offender was known were committed by black suspects. As most crime is intraracial, most of their victims were black as well, and crime remained concentrated within black communities. Due to high crime rates, many inner city areas were heavily policed, often by police forces drawn from the population of the greater urban area rather than the local, primarily black, population, resulting in many black people feeling that they were being discriminated against by law enforcement. By 2009, black people accounted for 39.4% of the prison population in the United States. The incarceration rate of black males was over six times higher than that of white males, with a rate of 4,749 per 100,000 U.S. residents.
  In August 2014, Darren Wilson, a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed black man who had robbed a nearby convenience store fifteen minutes earlier. While a grand jury investigation found that Wilson had acted in self-defense after Brown attacked him on two separate occasions, locals hostile to the police claimed that Brown had been gunned down while surrendering. Racial tensions in Ferguson between the mainly black population and mainly white police force led to both peaceful protests and riots, and several buildings were looted and set on fire. In response, the Ferguson Police Department deployed military-grade riot gear and riot control weaponry to disperse crowds and maintain order. Further protests erupted after the death of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old black resident of Staten Island, New York who died after being put in a nineteen-second long chokehold by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo while resisting arrest. Garner was being investigated by the NYPD under suspicion of illegally selling cigarettes. Pantaleo's acquittal by a grand jury in December led to nationwide protests by a movement which came to call itself Black Lives Matter.
  As media coverage of police shootings intensified, protests erupted in the wake of the July 5, 2016 shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the July 6 shooting of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. On July 7, towards the end of one of these protests in Dallas, Texas, Micah Xavier Johnson ambushed and fired upon a group of police officers, killing five officers and injuring nine others. Two civilians were also wounded. Johnson was an Army Reserve Afghan War veteran who was reportedly angry over police shootings of black men and stated that he wanted to kill white people, especially white police officers. Following the shooting, Johnson fled inside a building on the campus of El Centro College. Police followed him there, and a standoff ensued. In the early hours of July 8, police killed Johnson with a bomb attached to a remote control bomb disposal robot. It was the first time U.S. law enforcement used a robot to kill a suspect. The shooting was the deadliest incident for U.S. law enforcement officers since the September 11 attacks in 2001 and saw a massive uprising of public support for U.S. police officers in the form of the Blue Lives Matter movement.
  The George Floyd protests and riots against police brutality that began as local protests in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area of Minnesota before spreading throughout the United States and then worldwide. The protests began in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, in which Minneapolis Police Department officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for over eight minutes—assisted by three other police—after pinning the handcuffed man to the ground during an arrest the previous day. Protests quickly spread across the United States and internationally in support of Black Lives Matter.
  At least twelve major cities declared a curfew on the evening of Saturday, May 30, and as of June 2, governors in 24 
caption: Protesters overtaking and burning the Minneapolis Police's 3rd Precinct
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