Can someone explain to me about the George Floyd situation and why this caused the country to divide?

On May 25th, 2020 ,George Floyd bought some stuff at a convenience store in Minneapolis.  The clerk thought that the bill which Floyd used might be counterfeit and the store called the cops.  A group of cops attempted to arrest Floyd who was uncooperative and did not want to be arrested.  Floyd was not fighting with officers in the sense that he was attacking them, but he wasn't being cooperative, for example, he fought their attempts to place him in the squad car.  Ultimately, the cops pinned him to the ground and one of the officers, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck/shoulder area.  He stayed there for almost ten minutes, as Floyd repeatedly cried "I can't breathe" and as bystanders begged him to stop (at least one bystander warned him that kneeling on the neck could cause Floyd to asphyxiate).  He stayed kneeling on his neck for IIRC about a minute after Floyd stopped talking and became unresponsive.   The situation was so disturbing that one of the bystanders called the cops on the cops because he felt he was witnessing a murder.  The 911 operator who took the initial call, and who was watching the situation from a surveillance camera across the street, was so disturbed by what they saw that they informed their supervisor to try and get them to intervene and rein in the police use of force. 

A video of the killing, shot by one of the witnesses, immediately went viral and protests began on the 26th in Minneapolis and in the coming days elsewhere.  It quickly became an immense deal.  One aspect of this was the nature of the video.  Even many people who have seen lots of videos of police violence said they were shocked by this.  Most lethal police violence, both justified and unjustified, is committed with firearms.  So even when there is video, the event happens quickly.  There's an instant of violence and then it's over.  In the Floyd video we saw a man methodically killing another human being over the course of nearly ten minutes.  It was horrific to watch.  As in many police brutality cases, the extreme disparity between the alleged offense, in this case possibly passing counterfeit bills, and the extreme and grotesque levels of violence, made the killing seem shocking.  Finally, I think it went viral in part because it happened during the lockdown.  Lots of people were off of work, off of school, and didn't have anything else to do except see this video and get outraged.  With previous shocking displays of police violence, some people didn't go out and protest because they had lives to live.  But during the pandemic many more people had the free time to go out and protest.  This lead to the biggest social protests in American history (at least in terms of raw number of participants).  The Floyd killing came at the end of a long line of instances of dubious killings by police officers in recent years.  These spawned the "Black Lives Matter" movement to advocate for the safety and autonomy of black people.  In some ways the movement traces itself to the murder of Trayvon Martin, a Florida teenager who was killed not by cops but by a psychopathic, self appointed neighborhood watch member.  In that case the killer seemed to racially profile Martin, an African American teenager who was returning home from the store, as a criminal and ended up killing him.  The initial reluctance of police to fully investigate the crime, let alone charge the offender, set off outrage.  The movement gained even more steam with the death of Michael Brown, a St Louis man who was killed by a cop in what was initially described as a minor encounter (Brown was actually fighting with the officer when he was killed).  That set off major protests.  So did the police murder of Eric Garner, a New York City Man who was strangled to death by a cop after they tried to arrest him for selling bootleg cigarettes.  The cases kept on coming and coming.  In many cases they shared similar characteristics: African American men (and a few women) who were interacting with the police because due to allegations of relatively trivial infractions, cops who responded seemingly too quickly with lethal violence, and often justice systems which seemed indifferent to the suffering and death of black people.  This comes as the US is in the midst of a multi decade decline in crime rates.  US crime rates peaked in the early 1990s and have been going down ever since (2020 saw a spike in murders, but that's probably because of the pandemic and not the start of a long term trend).  As the US has gotten safer, public comfort with aggressive policing tactics has declined.  Going into 2020, much of the public has become more skeptical of police use of force, particularly against black people, and particularly against unarmed people.  So when you have George Floyd, a man accused of passing a phony bill, being essentially strangled to death, people got outraged.

I don't think the case has divided America much.  But you do see some people on the right who are uncomfortable about it.  Part of it stems from their traditional support for the police.  Many conservatives have a pretty positive view about the cops and a much less skeptical view of use of force than the majority of Americans.  Many are also primed, racially, to see black people as criminals and thugs and to believe that a black person, particularly one from an urban background, as deserving what they get if they commit a crime, no matter how trivial that crime may be.  They don't have the same sort of sympathy for a big black guy in the city as they would for a  middle class white suburbanite who was accused of a minor crime like speeding or underage drinking.  They'd never dream of saying that it would be okay to strangle someone like that to death.  But longstanding racial stereotypes about black criminality have primed many people to be extremely sensitive to black lawbreaking and to feel that any sort of tolerance of such could lead to more major wrongdoing.  I think that sense is widespread among many white people of differing political stripes.  The difference is that liberal political and cultural leaders try to fight against these kinds of stereotypes.  Conservative leaders, who have very few constituents who are black, don't spend a lot of time or energy trying to correct these impulses.  For many conservatives,  serious racial discrimination against black people ended in the 60s and 70s with the dismantling of explicitly racist laws.  Many of them now see racial discrimination against white people as more of a problem than discrimination against black people.  This can lead them to be less sympathetic to some of these problems.  At the same time, the protests last summer unnerved some of them.  In a few isolated instances these protests turned into violent riots, including some destruction of property.  This threw some of these conservatives into a state.  They see such unrest, at least when committed by people of color or the left wing, as incredibly dangerous and worry that it could be the harbinger of something worse. At the same time, some of them are put off by the widespread refusal of the cultural medium in the US to see these protests the same way they do.  For most Americans, the violence was an aberration amidst the protests.  For some conservatives it was the central fact of it.  This dichotomy furthers the sense of alienation from the wider culture that some conservatives have, with them worrying that they're becoming strangers in their own country.

About this time last year, a city-owned lot near me...which had been vacant for years... was suddenly full of things like portable K-rail, rolls of chain link, orange cones and flashing traffic lights.... I also noticed trailer-mounted surveillance camera rigs appearing near major intersections and government building...

Friends of mine in other cities from Los Angeles to NYC all said they noticed the same thing around them.  One friend said that stacks of traffic barricades were neatly placed on several corners just outside major retail district...

These are all things you'd expect to need if you had to quickly seal off streets and whole city blocks....or closely monitor foot traffic around key areas... you know... like in response to widespread civil unrest..

The simple fact is that governments were prepared for trouble soon as the original "two week shutdowns" stretched into their 4th and 5th weeks... Why? Because they know that Americans across the spectrum do not take kindly to having their lives totally disrupted and restricted.

By May, the anger was palpable.... street fights, road rage incidents and similar acts skyrocketed in California...and the TV was all too happy to exploit anger with programming that fed that need.

Days after the George Floyd arrest every major police organization in America was quick to denounce Officer Chauvin's conduct...obviously knowing what was brewing....I turned to a friend and said "if CNN talks more about the officer's race than it does this condemnation of his actions, cities will burn by the weekend...

CNN pushed race non-stop for days...and that weekend, cities burned.

As for why, consider this:  What is more profitable for the state and local governments that shut down economies and put as much as a third of their residents out of work.... blaming "racism" and driving a wedge between people... or accepting accountability in making people so angry in the first place?

The country was already divided and him getting killed made things worse. It make the woke crowd go insane. Even though the outrage over his death was justified, riots, defending (or even denying) riots, tearing down statues, going after Native American team names, removing Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, various movies, and falsely accusing silent people of secretly being racist or compliant with police brutality were not. 

Media outlets claimed the protests were mostly peaceful (93%) but it was more like 75% peaceful. It wasn't quite as peaceful as the left claimed it was. The peaceful protesters shouldn't be blamed at all, but those guilty of rioting and looting shouldn't be defended or praised. Those who defending the riots that got mixed in became hypocrites and condemned the storming of the Capitol. They should've condemned both.

Idk it's legit, but I won't be surprised if the lockdowns played a part in the woke crowd and the left overall completely lose their minds and thus the reason why the protests were so massive nationwide. Maybe the protests aren't as massive and maybe actually 93% peaceful if we weren't dealing with Covid.The summer protests destroyed the lockdown argument and proved that if it's safe to protest in person, you can have school, church, and go vote in person. The protests also proved wokeness is a form of mental illness and the woke crowd is a cult.

I hope the guy responsible for Floyd's death is found guilty and stays in jail.