By Sam Ozer-Staton

Long before the conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the future of American policing was at the center of the national discourse. But Tuesday’s guilty verdict — on all three counts — poses new questions for the institution of policing. Most fundamentally, will the verdict spur real change?

In recent days, there has been no shortage of words written about that question. The New York Times’s David Leonhardt wrote an accessible explainer of the policy changes being implemented by state and local governments across the country. The reforms, which are substantive if not radical, mainly fall under two buckets: limiting police use of force (like banning so-called “neck restraints'') and creating additional mechanisms for accountability (like requiring officers to wear body cameras).

Others, like Mark Berman and Kimberly Kindy at The Washington Post, have written about whether the fact of Chauvin’s guilty verdict will incentivize individual prosecutors to bring charges against police officers who act unlawfully.