How many police officers were killed during the 2020 George Floyd protests?
Executive summary
There is no credible evidence that a wave of police officers were killed by protesters during the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations; fact‑checking organizations and contemporary reporting show a small number of deaths occurred in the protests’ vicinity — including a federal courthouse security officer and a retired St. Louis police captain — but many widely circulated claims that “several” or “six” officers were killed were false or misleading [1] [2] [3].
1. What the question really asks and the reporting puzzle
The question seeks a clear tally of police fatalities “during the 2020 George Floyd protests,” but contemporary coverage blurred categories — active-duty police, retired officers, private security, and civilians killed near demonstrations were often lumped together — producing inflated or ambiguous counts that required later fact-checking [3] [1].
2. What independent fact-checkers and major outlets found
Fact-checkers concluded that claims of multiple officers killed in connection with the protests were inaccurate: Reuters flagged social posts claiming six officers had died as false because the pictured officers had died months earlier and not in protest-related incidents [1], and Snopes compiled rumors and found only one clear instance of a man killed while protecting property during unrest — retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn — while several other cited deaths were unrelated or misattributed [2]. PolitiFact likewise traced some high-profile items (including the death of a federal courthouse security officer near an Oakland protest) to specific incidents that were not evidence of an organized campaign of protesters killing on-duty officers [3].
3. The confirmed fatalities that are often cited and their contexts
Reporting established a small number of law‑enforcement or security personnel deaths temporally close to protests: a security officer shot at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland when demonstrators were nearby (reported in news coverage and tracked by PolitiFact) and retired officer David Dorn, who was shot during looting after demonstrations in St. Louis [3] [2]. Researchers and outlets that compiled broader death tallies noted dozens of deaths overall in the weeks after Floyd’s murder, but most were civilians and many were violent crimes in the vicinity rather than proven killings by protesters of police [4] [5].
4. Where numbers diverge and why
Some early reports and partisan claims inflated the number of police fatalities by conflating unrelated deaths, recycling earlier police fatalities from months before, or failing to distinguish active-duty officers from retired personnel and private security [1] [3]. Political actors and commentators amplified counts of injured officers and occasional lethal attacks to argue for a narrative of organized anti‑police violence, even as datasets like ACLED and crowd researchers emphasized that the overwhelming majority of demonstrations were peaceful and that many deaths linked to the period involved non‑protest criminality [5] [6] [7].
5. Bottom line answer
No sustained, verified pattern of police officers being killed by protesters during the George Floyd demonstrations was documented; the reality is that only a very small number of law‑enforcement or security personnel deaths occurred in the protests’ timeframe and locations (for example the Oakland federal building security officer and retired officer David Dorn), while broader claims that multiple on‑duty police were killed have been debunked by fact‑checkers [3] [2] [1]. Reports that aggregated civilian deaths, preexisting police deaths, and unrelated killings created the misleading impression that many officers were slain in direct connection to the protests [4] [8].