George Floyd Anniversary Live Updates: Protestors March in N.Y.

Mayor Eric M. Garcetti agreed to cut $150 million from the police budget, while voters elected a new district attorney, George Gascón, who promised to prosecute cops and send fewer people to prison. As recently as December, the city, facing a budget crunch as well as the racial justice movement, was considering laying off almost a thousand police officers, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Now, as the nation observes the anniversary of Mr. Floyd’s murder, it is a much different story.

Los Angeles, like many big cities, is awash in new guns and continuing violence. Last year, there were 305 homicides, up 36 percent from the prior year, and the highest level in more than a decade.

“The number of guns that are out there is just astonishing,” Chief Michel Moore of the L.A.P.D. said in an interview.

And instead of cutting the police budget, the City Council recently approved an increase, and the department is about to start hiring more officers.

“If you want to abolish the police, you’re talking to the wrong mayor,” Mr. Garcetti recently said in his State of the City address.

To contain the surge in gun violence, the L.A.P.D. is leaning on some of its old habits, having recently deployed an elite unit to South L.A. to stop vehicles for traffic violations in the search of guns and men with warrants. It’s a tactic the department sharply curtailed in recent years after a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed sharp racial inequities in the practice.

“We’re not satisfied, we’re not happy until the whole system is changed — until the corruption, the racism around this country, that’s in the New York City Police Department, is gone. That’s when we’re satisfied,” said the Rev. Kevin McCall, an organizer.

For at least 15 minutes, the group, which included the mayoral candidate Shaun Donovan, blocked the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, a main artery that carries commuters from New Jersey. At one point, the demonstrators knelt for 9 minutes and 29 seconds — the amount of time that Derek Chauvin, the former police officer convicted of murder in Mr. Floyd’s death, knelt on his neck.

The police played recorded messages asking them to clear the road. When they did not, officers handcuffed demonstrators with zip ties and escorted them to a police van. At all times, the group was significantly outnumbered by a large police presence. Officers, some of whom had riot shields and helmets ready, flanked protesters on either side or lined the streets and blocked traffic as the group passed.

Protests against police brutality sprang up across New York City in the days following Mr. Floyd’s killing on Memorial Day last year. As they grew in size and spread across the city in the following days, tension grew between demonstrators and police officers.

The thousands of demonstrators who participated in protests were largely peaceful, though there was looting in some neighborhoods, and skirmishes broke out between participants and the police. In one video that spread across social media, two police cars appeared to drive through a crowd in Brooklyn.

The unrest led Mayor Bill de Blasio to impose a citywide curfew for the first time since World War II. He also defended the police’s response to protests at the time; a city oversight agency has since released a report finding that the Police Department badly mishandled the protests.

“I am going to show my boys these pictures,” said Ms. Richmond, a mother of three. “We all saw the world change last year. This has started to open people’s minds,” but there is more work to be done, she said.

The streets surrounding the store remain closed off, with barriers and gates manned by local activists. On Tuesday morning, small groups of runners and neighborhood residents walked by as Minneapolis prepared to hold vigils and ceremonies honoring Mr. Floyd. Most businesses in the area of the square remained closed. A community garden, art installations and graffiti have taken their place.

Andrea Steele, 43, paused at the square after her morning run. The mental health therapist lives nearby and said she needed to come today. Her clients live in perpetual fear of the police, and it needs to change, she said.

“It was important that they kept this square,” she said. “It was a way for Minneapolis not to forget.”

She agrees with many Black Lives Matter activists that money needs to be reallocated from the police to fund services that better serve the community. But there is no political will for defunding the police, she said.

“We need to make our community safer,” she said, “but I don’t think defunding the police is a solution.”

The poll, which was completed in collaboration with the NORC at the University of Chicago, also revealed that a minority of Americans support reducing the funding of police departments, and that most Black Americans support President Biden’s handling of race relations and policing. Here are some key findings:

• Black and white Americans often have radically different views of racism, policing and discrimination. While 60 percent of Black people said that racism was an “extremely” serious problem in America, just 23 percent of white respondents agreed. Black Americans were also far more likely to report discrimination because of their race in policing as well as in the workplace, in health care and in housing. Of the Black respondents, 60 percent said they were often or sometimes discriminated against by police officers. Seven percent of white people gave the same response.

• More than 70 percent of Black people said police officers who cause injury or death were treated too leniently by the courts. For white respondents, that number jumped from 32 percent in 2015 to 62 percent in June 2020, one month after Mr. Floyd’s death. In the year since, that viewpoint has since waned among white Americans, to 45 percent.

• Most Americans, regardless of race, support various police reform efforts, including mandatory wearing of body cameras and requiring officers to report misconduct by their peers. On the reduction of funding though, support decreased to 35 percent among Black Americans and 16 percent among white Americans. Support for a “complete overhaul” of the criminal justice system faded among Black Americans over the past year, from 57 percent to 48 percent.

Over the past year, America changed — but it is too soon to say how much. Millions of people, in the middle of a pandemic, flooded the streets of big cities and small towns, demanding that the country face up to its long history of racism and police brutality.

State legislatures and city councils approved police reforms, and in some cases took money away from police departments after calls to “defund the police.” National legislation, however, remains stalled; the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act has passed the House, mostly along party lines, but not the Senate.

To mark the first anniversary of Mr. Floyd’s death, President Biden will host the Floyd family at the White House. Before they traveled to Washington, many family members returned to Minneapolis over the weekend.

“It has been a long year. It has been a painful year.” Bridgett Floyd told a crowd on Sunday evening outside the courthouse where Derek Chauvin was recently convicted of murdering her brother.

The anniversary is shaping up not just as a remembrance of Mr. Floyd’s life and legacy, but also as a time to give voice to the many families who have lost loved ones to police violence. As Americans gather throughout the country — in Washington, D.C., in Chicago, in Seattle — their eyes will be turned to Minneapolis.

Beginning at 11 a.m., the Commons, a downtown park, will host an event that will honor Mr. Floyd “through Black culture, art, history and support of local businesses,” according to the George Floyd Memorial Foundation. Throughout the day, people will come together at George Floyd Square, the several blocks around Cup Foods, near where Mr. Floyd was killed. At 8 p.m. there will be a vigil at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul.

The Floyd family was joined in recent days by the relatives of other Black men and boys whose deaths caused outrage — the mother of Eric Garner, the mother of Trayvon Martin, the mother of Oscar Grant, a cousin of Emmett Till. Their presence has helped place Mr. Floyd’s death into the broader context of America’s struggle for equality.

As Deborah Watts, the cousin of Mr. Till, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, told the crowd here on Sunday: “The past is not past until justice is served.”

A video of the killing of Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis — which showed an officer kneeling on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds — sparked the largest racial justice protests in generations and brought a sense of urgency to negotiations over police reform in Congress . The officer at the center of Mr. Floyd’s killing, Derek Chauvin, was convicted last month of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.

But police reform legislation, known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, has languished in Congress, as parties spar over a measure that would alter a legal shield known as qualified immunity that protects police officers in brutality cases. The White House had set its own deadline for Congress to pass the legislation, which Ms. Psaki acknowledged on Monday will not be met.

During his address before a joint session of Congress last month, Mr. Biden, invoking a conversation he had with Mr. Floyd’s young daughter, called on lawmakers to pass legislation by the first anniversary of Mr. Floyd’s death.

When asked during the news conference on Monday about progress on police reform, Ms. Psaki indicated that the White House remained relatively optimistic. Mr. Biden spoke on Friday with Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey and an outspoken proponent of police reform, she said, adding that Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Republicans’ lead negotiator on the issue, also expressed interest in continued talks.

“The president is still very much hopeful that he will be able to sign the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act into law,” she said.