2020 United States riots
Civil disorder that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, estimated at more than 1 billion dollars insured, possibly over 2 billion, a US record for a riot event.
George Floyd died on May 25, 2020 under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. From the next day, protests turned into riots in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, then spread to dozens of cities into early June. Property Claim Services, the Verisk unit that designates catastrophe events for the US market, treated the period as a single event spanning many states, with an insured cost, which PCS did not publish to the dollar, estimated at more than 1 billion dollars and possibly over 2 billion: the costliest civil disorder in US history, above Los Angeles in 1992 even after adjusting for inflation. The figure matters beyond the statistics. The PCS designation is the reference cedants use to group their claims under a catastrophe treaty. Yet treaties carve riot up with an hours clause, often 72 hours, and sometimes restrict the event to one city or a set radius: a two week national wave can therefore be one event at PCS and several for the cedant, each with its own retention, and the conversation with the reinsurer starts with that split. On the direct side, riot is a named peril of the standard US property policy (riot or civil commotion), seldom excluded. Businesses on Lake Street in Minneapolis were paid within their policy limits, often too low, and business interruption followed only where there was physical damage.
PCS designated a civil disorder event for May 26 to June 8, 2020, with significant losses in more than twenty states, and the Insurance Information Institute cited an estimate of at least 1 billion dollars insured, the highest ever recorded for riots in the United States.
- Verisk, Property Claim Services (PCS), designation of the May and June 2020 riots as a catastrophe event
George Floyd riots, 2020 civil unrest, US riots 2020
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