Interview with Matt, A Police Officer’s Perspective on the BLM Movement, Hist 150, Spring 2025, Conducted by Cameron Lyon, March 4th, 2025.

Overview:
On May 26, 2020, the rise of a movement titled Black Lives Matter (BLM) was created, sparking protests and riots across the country. This movement marked a pivotal turning point during the pandemic and was inspired by the death of a black male named George Floyd who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis. The shocking footage shared by social media caused thousands of Americans to be outraged by the actions of the police officer. As a result, this event fueled nationwide protests and riots in order to draw attention to systematic racism, police brutality, and the need for reform. One of the most popular and controversial demands for racial justice was the term “defund the police” which stemmed from the belief that police departments are corrupt and racially biased. Members of this movement believed that police departments need a complete overhaul in order to better serve and protect the community with an emphasis on marginalized communities.

The number of protests and riots sparked interest in the U.S. government where they created a federal act after George Floyd. This form of federal legislation was aimed at reforming police tactics such as no-knock warrants, chokehold limitations, as well as other aggressive practices. In response, local police departments across the country implemented their own policy changes during 2020 and 2021 in order to increase accountability and shift priorities toward community engagement. 

Police reforms that have been implemented by local departments are still effective today. Matt, who is a police sergeant, talks about specific policy changes that have been implemented and how they were taught to officers. He gives insight about techniques that were used to foster community engagement and transparency as well as how these policy changes still play a role today.

Biography

I interviewed my father Matt who is a police officer (sergeant) who works in northern Virginia at the Prince William County Police Department. My father was born in Alexandria in 1978 and has always wanted to contribute to his community. Originally wanting to study computer science at George Mason University, he dropped out and worked full-time before he decided to train to become an officer. As a result, he was officially sworn in as a police officer in 2008. Years after he was sworn in, the death of George Floyd which sparked riots under the BLM movement, my father and his police department were affected as a result. Being a white male cop during the push for change in the black community created a struggle for wanting to protect the community while battling the stigma against police officers.  I will be exploring different policies that have been implemented as a result and how it has changed the role of police officers.

Research

After the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of a black male who was killed by a white male cop named George Floyd awakened a set of protests and riots during 2021. Communities all across the United States were affected in some way either positively or negatively as a result. The murder of George Floyd affected public cooperation with police in terms of reporting crime seen in major areas such as Los Angeles and New York City neighborhoods. It was shown that after the murder, crime (violent and property) as well as quality of life increased in New York neighborhoods with most of the effects being in predominantly black areas. In Los Angeles however, quality of life decreased in predominantly white areas highlighting how the murder of George Floyd affected different demographic communities. 

As a result of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) in response to George Floyd sparked the creation of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act which is a federal piece of legislation that is aimed to address systematic racism and excessive policing. Key topics include the banning of chokeholds, “no-knock” warrants, ending racial profiling, and limiting military-grade equipment in police departments. This act also mandates training  in order to improve law enforcement practices to promote transparency and accountability. The purpose of this act is to hold police accountable and reform law enforcement culture in order to empower marginalized communities.

Due to federal pieces of legislation implemented by the government, various states and cities across the nation also created policies following the BLM movement. In response to the “defund the police” movement after the death of George Floyd, 12 cities such as Los Angeles cut police funding. Additionally, 30 states as well as Washington D.C. created legislative reforms that address use of force, officer duty to report misconduct, and policies about law enforcement misconduct reporting and decertification. 

Transcription

[Inaudible] 0:01

Cameron  0:03  

Hello. Today I will be interviewing Matt, who is a sergeant at the Prince William County Police Department. Hi. How are you doing today? 

 

Matt  0:13  

I’m good. Thank you. How are you? 

 

Cameron  0:16  

I’m good. Thank you for asking. I was wondering if we could start off by talking about your early life, you know, what was it like growing up?

 

Matt  0:23  

Sure, nothing too crazy or exciting. I was a typical kid, the oldest of six. I got five younger sisters, liked being outside, liked riding my bike, playing games and sports. All those kinds of things, football, basketball, ran track in high school-really dig that just always active. I loved being active, love being out.

 

Cameron  0:53  

All right, so after high school, did you go to college and what did you plan on studying in college at that time? 

 

Matt  1:00  

So, after high school, I yeah, I went to college, I went to George Mason, I had, I mentioned that I ran track in high school. I thought I was pretty good. I thought maybe I would get a scholarship, you know, had all those dreams to go to college, you know, be an athlete, and got hurt my senior year, and that never came to fruition. So I had to think of a backup plan and I was always into video games and stuff too, as well as, you know, working out and thought I started getting into tinkering with computers and building and stuff like that. So I thought maybe I could do computer science and do that so I ended up majoring in computer science with George Mason and was a commuter student.I worked during the summertime as a lifeguard, and I commuted to school full time doing computer science.

 

Cameron  1:55  

Yeah, and was there any specific event that kind of sparked your interest in wanting to move into the police force?

 

Matt  2:06  

Yeah, I’d never really thought about being a police officer. I didn’t join the police department ’till I was 29 so pretty significant amount of time between, you know, high school and then trying to decide whether, you know, being a police officer is about 10 years in between there, so I had a lot of growing up to do. I, you know, didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was in college, and I liked computer science,did not like the math. You need to do a lot of math to be a computer science major and just kind of fell out of that. I ended up getting a full time job with Fairfax County as an aquatic director and when I got that full time job and was getting money and benefits, kind of thought, well, maybe I’ll just do this instead of college so I ended up dropping out of college doing that. But through that job, I did a lot of things that, that, that I enjoyed. I liked teaching, I was teaching swimming, I was coaching swimming, you know, I was teaching fitness classes while I was at the Rec Center, teaching lifeguards and come to find out, I really liked, I really enjoyed teaching. I really like instructing, I really liked-I just generally liked helping people and yeah, it’s always something that I was passionate about. I always wanted to help and 9/11 happened and I wanted to go into the military, but didn’t end up doing that. Had some, some physical limitations, and didn’t want to, didn’t want to go in, and plus, I was in a really serious relationship, ended up marrying my wife later, at the time, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that by going into the military and going to fight and, you know, with my limitations, I was like, I want to do something I want to serve and I landed on being a law enforcement officer. We were living in Prince William County at the time, and said, you know what this is what I want to do. I thought for months and months and months and went to my wife and said, hey, you know I want to be a police officer, I want to do this. I had signed up, you know, with the police department, and ended up taking a pay cut, and never looked back since. I enjoy what I’m doing and I just always had that in the back of mind of wanting to do more. So law enforcement seemed to fit the bill, and it did.

 

Cameron  4:40  

Right. So you said that you became an officer when you were around 29 so what year was that when you officially got sworn in? 

 

Matt  4:48  

That I was officially sworn in-I believe it was June 17 of 2008 is when I was sworn in.

 

Cameron  4:57  

2008, so it seems like you’ve been well-

 

Matt  4:59  

Was actually 30, yeah, I was actually sorry to cut you off. I was actually 30 when I was.

 

Cameron  5:04  

You’re good.

 

Matt  5:05  

Yeah.

 

Cameron  5:07  

Gotcha. So, you know, you’ve kind of been in the field for a while. Around 2020, the pandemic hit, and then kind of right after that, there were some movements such as BLM, you know, how exactly did your department respond to concerns that were raised by the Black Lives Matter movement?

 

Matt  5:30  

So I’ll say this, our department has a really, really good satisfaction rating from the community. We probably have one of the highest satisfaction ratings in the community. I think it would rival any other police department in the country. Quite frankly, our community satisfaction rate, if I’m not mistaken, is at 98% I mean, that’s unheard of. So that’s basically 98% of the people that filled out the survey or were asked about their law enforcement in their community. Prince William County, favored it and said it was, you know, outstanding, so very high rating. We were already in really good standing with our community but that doesn’t, that doesn’t shy away from the fact that people were starting or thinking about losing theirs, you know, have losing support for police and law enforcement. There were a lot of questions as to, you know, are our police officers going to do the right thing? Will they continue to do the right thing? Can we trust them? Those kind of questions come up and so our community, our department, did a really good job of community outreach. Went to a lot of open events, we had town halls, we had meetings, we had expanded our community outreach program with more officers, and just pretty much had an open door policy. Our senior staff was out in the community and showing their faces, asking questions, we didn’t hide from the problem. We actually, our department went, went at it, head head on, head first. We went right out there, and we’re right next to people and talking. I’m answering questions, showing that we are human and show that, you know, we do care about our community so I think that that helped quite a bit during that time.

 

Cameron  7:12  

Yeah, and you mentioned community outreach, community engagement. You know, what role did that have in shaping policy changes in your department?

 

Matt  7:22  

Pretty good, because you know, by being open in a community, that gives community members an opportunity to actually talk to and see police officers, and not only just see the badge in uniform, but also see that they’re, they’re human beings, right? These men and women in law enforcement are husbands, they’re wives, they’re brothers, they’re sisters, and they’re also, you know, community members. They live in a community too, like myself so seeing that human side of people helps. You know, policies, change I think really being transparent helps so you know some things that you know, what are you doing to train your police officers? What are you doing to help us? We shared a lot of that information, you know, we share a lot of the training things that we do. We have a community, it’s a Community Police Association. We have, it’s basically community members that we call a citizens police academy, sorry, so citizens, police academy, where citizens will go through some type of training, and they meet with different officers, and they actually come out to the academy. They take classes in law enforcement, they do little mini scenarios, and these are just citizens, and it gives them a glimpse, and it gives them another side to kind of see what law enforcement does. It gives them a better understanding, to have a little bit of empathy for, you know, what officers do and what they go through, and also shows them that, hey, we’re not afraid to show you what we do. We want to have an open door policy I think that helped, that helps a lot.

 

Cameron  9:02  

Yeah, it sounds like, you know, the community kind of had a really big impact on your department. However, were there any challenges that your department faced, and were you able to overcome them? If any?

 

Matt  9:14  

Well, yeah, like any department, we’re going to have challenges, but we have to evolve, and we have to adapt to, you know, some big policy changes that came out, not only on the state level and the federal level, but also on our department levels. Things like, you know, tracking use of forces, you know, the amount of times that an officer has to use some type of force to apprehend or detain or arrest an individual. We started tracking those that were a state mandated thing and a federal mandated thing. Basically tracking those, occurrences, and also tracking the amount of interactions with law enforcement and public, implementing some de-escalation training, basically giving officers the ability to separate, create distance, use some communication, use different types of options and tools to be, to basically cool down or de-escalate a situation so got, a lot of that, and we’ve implemented that at our academy. Just being, just being open and frank with people, and just showing that, you know, hey, we’ll follow these procedures and then on the state or on the, sorry, the department level, we had to change some of our general orders and general orders are basically our SOP standards of operations, of how we interact with people and, yeah, so those are, those are just a couple things that we started doing based on policy changes and law changes,

 

Cameron  10:47  

Yeah, so kind of going off of that with a lot of those changes that were happening inside your department. What was the training process like for new and current officers after these policies were implemented?

 

Matt  11:01  

So we partnered, and we kind of went out to the country. There were a lot of different departments that kind of started up some training and some classes to help with, essentially helping a new generation of law enforcement, so to speak. We wanted to put back, I guess we had to put back some trust in the community and just basically show them, hey, we’re humans, and we need to be humans, and we need to treat other humans with respect. It just boils down to respect. One of the biggest trainings that we implemented, that I can say now at the academy, I’m currently now at the academy as one of the training directors for the control tactics unit, we are big on de-escalation training. Teaching officers how to control their feelings and their emotions and how to react appropriately and respond appropriately to the correct level of force, how to communicate effectively, how to talk, body language, our mannerisms, how we interact with individuals. We do that, we also do another form of training, which is peer intervention training. Peer intervention training takes place with a situation where an if an officer is maybe being a little bit too aggressive, or they’re using too much force, peer intervention is a strategy and a technique and also it’s written into law that if another officer sees an officer basically conduct unbecoming, that officer is going to step in and say, hey, hey buddy, maybe you need to step away, maybe you need to cool off. Maybe, you know, let me take over so that we can get them out of that situation and not make it a more volatile one. I would say de-escalation training, and I would also say peer intervention are two of the biggest things that we’ve implemented and used in training for newer officers across the department.

 

Cameron  12:58  

Yeah, and you know, with these new changes, did you receive any kind of support or pushback that you may have observed in your department, internally or externally?

 

Matt  13:11  

With support across the board, you know, we had a lot of support from the community members. We had a lot of support from local and federal government, state government, and we got funding to send people to some of these classes and training. I personally have been to de-escalation training where I am, I’ve already taken de-escalation training, but I can also train and instruct other individuals to do the same kind of training so we have these things in place. We continue to have them in place, and we continue to  grow them and involve them and seek out more training so internally, pretty, well received but like most humans and this goes in, this is in the cop community too. Sometimes people are going to be like, hey, why do we have to change? Why do we need to do something different? It’s really on us and the training staff and other officers to say, hey, look, you know, like anything else, you have to adjust to the times, right? This is good training, this is good information, this is good stuff. It’s all stuff that’s going to help everyone out in the end and that’s really what our goal is, is to help everyone and protect everyone, and just show that you know, we’re just as compassionate as the next person.

 

Cameron  14:25  

Yeah, and how were you able to balance your department’s goals for maintaining safety with your own feelings and opinions?

 

Matt  14:34  

Well, the easy answer to that is, I can have what are the feelings and opinions that I want. However, if it doesn’t align with the department’s vision, with the community’s vision, with the country’s vision, then unfortunately, I’m not in the right line of work, right? I may not like the fact that, you know, we have to do all these training, but in the end. I have to realize it’s for the greater good, and it is. It really is, and if I have to convince, you know, others of that then that’s what I have to do. I have to convince others of that. We have to trust in our leaders, we have to trust in our community that we’re moving in the right direction and I honestly feel that we are. I mean, initially, obviously there’s some pushback even myself. I didn’t want to go to all this new training and do all this new certification. I’m like, I already know how to talk to people, etc, etc, but I’ve gone to several trainings and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot of different techniques and a lot of ways to control feelings, emotions, and how to talk to individuals, and I think it’s really helped, and so it’s on me to push that out to others on the department and other officers, and help them see and understand that, hey, you may not like this training, you may not want to go, but in the end, it’s going to be good. I think it’s good for all of us, and we just have to continue to push in that direction and I think we are, I think we are making strides so it’s just having the right people in the right place and doing the right thing.

 

Cameron  16:10  

Yeah, so with these new changes and these new policy implementations, how do you see the evolving role of police in balancing traditional duties with new and changing expectations?

 

Matt  16:23  

We just gotta look at the end goal. The end goal is public safety. The end goal is creating and fostering a nurturing environment for law enforcement and for our community. They have to know, and they have to trust us. We have to continue to have an open door policy. We have to continue to be transparent. We have to continue to have these conversations with community members and just just show that we have a human side to us. I mean, it just boils down to the you know, basic principles of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” right? We’re not these, these evil guys that run around in cars and just pull people over and lock people up, you know, we’re just as human. We have families just like anybody else so we have to continue to push, you know, push policies and can, we have to continue to evolve, and we can, have to continue to do better. We can’t just settle for we’ve done enough, there’s always the next step, the next chapter. We should always be looking for new things to learn, new things to grow from and be proactive, so I think that answers your question maybe?

 

Cameron  17:38  

Alright-yes it does

 

Cameron  17:40  

So that is all I have for you. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it. 

 

Matt  17:46  

Absolutely. You’re welcome. 

 

Cameron  17:49  

All right, I hope you have a great rest of your day, and thank you again for talking with me.

 

Matt  17:53  

Okay, Thank you. 

Transcription and Technology Process

This interview was conducted and recorded over a Zoom meeting due to Matt currently living in northern Virginia. The audio file was created and converted into an MP3 file. For the interview transcription, I used Otterai to generate the text. I thoroughly reviewed, edited, and fixed any errors made in order to confirm that the dialogue matches the audio. I also edited and removed any pauses made in the transcription. Inaudible as areas of the transcription are stated in brackets.

Bibliography

Brantingham, P. Jeffery, et al., “Changes in public-police cooperation following the murder of George Floyd.” National Library of Medicine, 10 Sep. 2022, 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9802335/ 

[Peer Reviewed ]

“Justice in Policing Act”, House Committee on the Judiciary, https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/issues/issue/?IssueID=14924 

Subramanian, Ram and Leily Arzy, “State Policing Reforms Since George Floyd’s Murder.” Brennan Center for Justice, 21 May 2021, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-policing-reforms-george-floyds-murder