2012 is marked as the beginning of the Black Lives Matter Movement due to the public’s outrage of Trayvon Martin’s murder. In February of that year, seventeen-year-old Trayvon was walking home from the store, completely unarmed when he was identified as a ‘suspicious person’ by neighborhood watch officer George Zimmerman and shot in the back of the head.

Outrage bubbled in Trayvon’s Florida hometown and quickly spread nationwide as Black Americans expressed their community’s heartbreak surrounding anti-black racism to the rest of America. Reaching out to the Black community for support, grief-stricken Patrisee Cullor and Alicia Garza developed the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on Facebook. It swept the nation as Black Americans and allies expressed their grief of Trayvon’s murder as a rallying cry to end police brutality. The #BlackLivesMatter movement gained even more traction following George Zimmerman’s trial. Despite his charge of second-degree murder, Zimmerman was not found guilty and was acquitted of all charges. 

Although Zimmerman himself was not a police officer, the Black community took the failure to prosecute Zimmerman as a blatant disregard for Black lives everywhere. Through continued use of #BlackLivesMatter, a global movement was launched to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes” in defense of Black lives. 

This activism that launched the Black Lives Matter movement forced America to pay attention to the multitude of crimes against Black Americans through police brutality. For this reason, we have included the murder of Trayvon Martin in our analysis of “publicized” (featuring high media coverage and public engagement) police brutality incidents in America. As the most nationally publicized police brutality incident, Trayvon's murder in 2012 marks the beginning of the inconsistent history of public engagement surrounding the modern Black Lives Matter movement.

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From slave abuse to lynching and police brutality, there have been thousands of murder cases against Black people at the hands of police and government officials. While still acknowledging these lost lives and their families, we have chosen a sample of these incidents to focus on in our data and analysis.