TAMPA, Fla. — Immediately following the death of George Floyd, emotions were high and people took to the streets in cities around the world to make their voices heard. There were hundreds of protests throughout Florida.
Demands were made for changes in policies and policing through their protests, and two local filmmakers said they knew they needed to capture it all.
Jaabar Edmond and Cranstan Cumberbatch own DreamMakerz Productions. They film movies and shows in the Tampa Bay area. After the death of George Floyd, they took their cameras to the streets.
“It wasn’t easy. It was some tough nights. It was some pepper spray and rubber bullets flying, it wasn’t a cakewalk. This wasn’t the easiest assignment,” Edmond said.
After watching the horrifying video of a police officer placing his knee on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes and 29 seconds, killing him, the filmmaking duo knew they had to continue their work, despite pushback.
“It was just like capturing of what happened to George Floyd. It’s providing the evidence to whatever happens because there was even an issue of whether or not the protests were going to be peaceful or not. And we had the evidence,” Cumberbatch said.
They said they used that evidence meeting with leaders that helped sparked change in their city.
“Body cameras. Body cameras weren’t normal here then five or six years ago. That was something we were fighting for. And after George Floyd, that money got allocated,” said Edmond.
This year also marks five years since the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act was first introduced. The bill would create a national registry of police misconduct, ban racial and religious profiling by law enforcement and eliminate qualified immunity for law enforcement. But it never passed. Instead, former President Joe Biden signed an executive order to overhaul policing.
It’s something defense attorney Ben Crump is very familiar with — he represented George Floyd’s family after his death.
“I was very hopeful that we could finally get systemic police reform in America to work on implicit biases and to have a database that kept track of the instances of police excessive force and police brutality, and so when you think of that coupled with the efforts to have more force on diversity, equity and inclusion, you really believed that we were going to have a sea of change and for a moment in time it was,” Crump said.
For months, Crump encouraged protestors to keep fighting for what they thought was right.
“Everyday, I’m getting up and I am not going to accept it,” he said. “I’m going to fight against it and that’s what I encourage everybody to do to stand up to the enemies of equality and say, 'No, America. We’re better than this. We are better than this!'”
Sadly, he says his work fighting for victims of racial violence has continued since the death of George Floyd.
“You know, I pray every day that we can close down the police brutality division of my law firm. That is my fervent prayer,” Crump said. “I pray so hard that I won’t have to pray with broken-hearted parents, whether it’s the parents of Trayvon Martin, or Breonna Taylor, or Tyre Nichols, Sandra Massey, George Floyd…you know, the list goes on and on and on and I just think about my hero, Thurgood Marshall. He said the reason you got to keep fighting so hard is to try to prevent so many lynchings in his day and what I’m fighting is try to prevent so many hashtags in our day of our children being taken from this earth far too soon.”
It’s a hope shared by Edmond and Cumberbatch, inspired by George Floyd, a catalyst for change.
“For the world to be stopped in that moment and that happens to him and what happens to him leads to everything else that surpasses from that one incident. Icon. He will forever be an icon,” Cumberbatch said.
