--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The pandemic hasn't done a great job of uniting Americans in common cause. We're divided on basically everything, the masks, the politics, the potential vaccines. But it's worth remembering that there was one event this year where just about everyone for once was on the same page.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Vice President Mike Pence was clear about it at last night's debate. And with regard to George Floyd, there's no excuse for what happened to George Floyd. Justice will be served.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You might have missed the news, but just hours before the debate, we found out that Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed George Floyd, had been released on bail.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are conditions, of course. He has to give up any guns he has. He can't contact George Floyd's family. He has to stay in Minnesota until his trial on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter in March, but his release had us wondering how the movement that sprung up in the wake of his unbelievable indifference was going.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Months later, has anyone had success in defunding the police? We thought we'd start in the same place Derek Chauvin ended George Floyd's life, the city of Minneapolis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Back in June, I spoke with Minneapolis City Council member Alondra Cano.
--:-- Alondra Cano: I encourage all of our officers who are still on duty to continue to do your work with compassion, with respect and love. We're going to need every single human to be a part of this project.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She and eight of her colleagues had just taken a pledge. This council is going to dismantle this police department. Our commitment is to end our city's toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, to end policing as we know it, and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This ain't going to happen overnight. This ain't going to happen tomorrow. We need everybody's voices included.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Councilmember Kano, back in June, you and your colleagues pledged to dismantle the police. Is it fair to say it hasn't happened yet?
--:-- Alondra Cano: I would say no. I think that we have seen some pretty significant action taken over the last four months.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Number one, the council, through a majority vote, redirected $1.1 million from the Minneapolis Police Department budget to increase funding for community-based safety strategies.
--:-- Alondra Cano: Additionally, the council has also approved a preliminary plan for community engagement to ensure that all of the residents in Minneapolis get an opportunity to weigh in on what is a new transformative model for public safety.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What does that look like for each resident? What does it feel like? What are the questions that that safety system should be able to answer?
--:-- Alondra Cano: Some of your colleagues, I guess, since that pledge was taken back in June, have said that they didn't mean that they were literally thinking about defunding the police, that they thought they were sort of signing up for some more symbolic pledge.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Has that been part of the confusion in Minneapolis for people who expected something that they're maybe not going to see anymore?
--:-- Alondra Cano: I don't really identify with the confusion. I don't see that in my district.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it's been pretty clear that the city council has in the past and currently reduced the police budget to increase funding for community-based strategies.
--:-- Alondra Cano: This isn't something new. We did it two years ago and we continue to move along that path since then.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think perhaps what's happening is that we are now diving into the details of what does that transition look like.
--:-- Alondra Cano: And so some activists, for example, didn't believe that we should be conducting arrests this year. And I think most of us as council members agreed that we needed to be able to conduct arrests this year because that's the moment that we're in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Perhaps that's not the moment that we will be in 10 years from now when we've completely reworked some of these systems and really looked at priorities and budgeting to end things like homelessness and poverty.
--:-- Alondra Cano: But at this moment, I think that I sense a clear path of action. We have taken two pretty strong and clear votes on the direction that this conversation is going.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then we will see another opportunity to once again clarify and affirm that trajectory in December when we approve the budget for next year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So just to be clear here, the police have certainly had about a million dollars of their funding redirected to community services, and you have created more opportunities for citizen involvement, citizen feedback.
--:-- Alondra Cano: Yes, if you might remember, the path we had taken was to propose a question to the voters to have our city's constitution or the charter be amended to allow the city council to create a new department of public safety.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the charter commissioners decided that we were going to take more time to seek input on that question, which means that it can't go on the ballot this November, but it is going to be able to go on the ballot next November either through city council action again like we just done or if the voters of Minneapolis would like to go out and get 10 or more signatures to put the question in the ballot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Reporting in The New York Times has assessed the progress you all have made and said that this pledge to defund or, you know, reimagine the police that was taken in June is no closer now to being realized than it was then.
--:-- Alondra Cano: I think that's a misguided assessment. It's probably based on somebody who doesn't know how city politics and city policy works.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It took us about three or four years to approve the $15 minimum wage ordinance.
--:-- Alondra Cano: And so when I was first elected in 2014, that's what we worked on and we were able to pass it three or four years later.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So these kinds of initiatives take healthy time.
--:-- Alondra Cano: That doesn't mean that they're not important. That actually means that we're investing due diligence and systems and budgets into sustaining that new governing structure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think to assume that we would have engaged our entire community and gotten rid of 888 police officers and created a new public safety system in four months, it doesn't feel sincere.
--:-- Alondra Cano: I think we have to be a little bit more grounded in understanding how these systems work and how we as a community engage with one another to make these decisions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think in general, most of us agree that we do need an intentional and thoughtful path towards abolishing our current policing system, which is different than saying there will be no officers and there will be no law enforcement.
--:-- Alondra Cano: So right now we're building an ecosystem that can have a variety of responses to things like opioid overdoses, violence interruption, homelessness, things that police officers themselves acknowledge time and time again that they're not built for, that that's not what their system is built for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You guys kind of early on went a step further than a lot of other places. And now you're in the real work of trying to actualize that pledge.
--:-- Alondra Cano: Do you think other cities and states can learn something from what you've gone through?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Absolutely. Absolutely.
--:-- Alondra Cano: I often tell other council members, you do not want to be the city where George Floyd was killed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You don't want to wait until that moment to come up with a plan.
--:-- Alondra Cano: You don't want to wait until your city burns down to then realize that you should have been putting all of these alternative plans together.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So my advice to other cities that are grappling with similar questions is it's fine to talk about what you don't want.
--:-- Alondra Cano: You don't want officers. You don't want, you know, the policing system.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I think what's more valuable and more strategic and more important is that you double down on what you want.
--:-- Alondra Cano: What things can you invest now that don't depend on negating the reality you don't want so that they can help be the systems that help to carry your city forward in case you are ever found in a horrific situation in the way that Minneapolis found itself four months ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. Council Member McConnell, I really appreciate your time.
--:-- Alondra Cano: Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After the break, how police reform is going in the rest of the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars. But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not anymore, says Built Rewards. Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Well, every city is unique and every city is different. And I think that changes the conversation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you recall in May and June, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, people wanted to see immediate results.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So I find it interesting that the epicenter of the defund movement, Minneapolis, now you have elected leaders saying, hey, this is actually going to be a long-term effort.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So let's look at a city like Austin, Texas. Monumental cuts for the Austin Police Department. The city council approved a budget that cuts about a third of that department's money.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: What I found interesting in September, the governor of Texas actually said, wait, hold up. If places like Austin and cities that have more than a million people living there want to start sort of screwing around with their police department, either defunding it or taking away its powers, the governor now is threatening to put those police departments under state rule.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sometimes it doesn't matter what cities want. Sometimes states have to get involved. Sometimes the feds have to get involved.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Here's something else that we don't really talk about when it comes to defunding. Millions and millions of dollars a year is given from DOJ down to local police departments for everything from juvenile justice initiatives to picking up drug dealers off the street.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So no one, be it Minneapolis, Austin, Portland, Seattle, that said, like, we're going to take very seriously this idea of defunding police has had, like, remarkable, just absolute budget-cutting, overhaul kind of success.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: No, there are too many roadblocks. So New York City, here's an example. We have a progressive mayor. We are now led by more or less a progressive city council. And on paper, yes, it was voted this summer to take about a billion dollars from the NYPD's approximate $6 billion police budget.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We want to shift resources more and more into young people in particular, into youth centers. We want to shift resources more and more into public housing.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: But critics will say that's funny math. Number one, what was decided was sort of hit pause when it comes to hiring new cops. We're not going to have an academy class for a while.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And when it comes to school safety officers, a really expensive part in the policing budget.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: But for now, it's still under the NYPD. But what our mayor did was say, you know what? What we're saying is over the next few years, we would figure out what a transition looks like that is safe and effective.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it would have to be proven along the way that it would work.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Now, again, details still being negotiated. So it's sort of playing around who's going to pay for school safety officers. Did he get rid of them? No. It's more or less who will pay for it in a couple of years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what happened was, and we saw this on the state level, Albany, our state capital, is now led by liberals. Let's have more police accountability. Let's make it easier for journalists like myself and police watchdogs out there to get police records.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: That law was passed. It's called 50A. Your New York listeners will know what I'm talking about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, we covered it on the show. Since then, lawsuits galore from the police union world saying, no, stop it right now. Do not release any more documents.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So again, just because you have alignment from Democratic lawmakers and the public to make changes in policing doesn't mean the story is over.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've been talking about changes to police budgets and even drastic changes to police budgets. What about just changes to policing? What about simple police reform that cities and towns may have pledged to in the wake of the death of George Floyd?
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: There is a organization called the National Council of State Legislatures. I hope I didn't botch that. NCSL for the acronym.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's an organization that watches state bills, state legislation for many topics, including policing.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And overall, since the death of George Floyd, NCSL says there's been about 500 proposed bills on police reform, everything from body cameras to how a cop should be sued in court.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And about only 10 percent thus far has actually passed.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: But when you really start digging into what these 500 or so bills have been on, it runs across the gamut.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, another thing which I found interesting in states like Colorado and Connecticut is this idea of intervening.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Police departments across the country and now state laws like Colorado are now requiring that when a cop sees excessive force going on, A, obviously don't engage in it, but more importantly, you see something and you don't intervene, you'll be held liable too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So now states are starting to attack that, saying, hey, if you don't intervene when you're watching your fellow officer beat the crap out of somebody, you could lose your badge.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So what I'm actually looking into right now is police liability.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's really interesting in Connecticut, if a police officer is sued in court and it's determined in court that they act in a malicious way.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So it's very specific legal language about being malicious and engaging in wanton acts, then that cop, as of 2021, will have to pay for their own lawsuit and any damages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if we recall with cases like the Breonna Taylor, which was about a $12 million settlement, sometimes when cops are sued and families win, that's millions and millions of dollars.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So right now in Connecticut, you have major pushback going on from the police lobbying world and saying, hey, wait a minute, how do you want our cops to pay for that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then you have folks on the other side saying, wait a minute, it's going to be too rare when they actually pay because it's such specific legal language when a court has to decide that a cop more or less messed up and they are responsible for that payout.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Let's talk a bit about the opposite side of this spectrum. I mean, I've been hearing that there are a lot of cities that are committed to increasing their police budgets in this moment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I thought what happened in Phoenix was actually pretty interesting. You did have push from activists to cut the budget.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And instead, what the city decided to do was to grow the police accountability budget from about $400,000 to about $3 million.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Their argument is, number one, we're not going to cut the police budget. But to appease activists, let's give more money to their internal police accountability office, which you could argue wasn't doing such a great job to begin with.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And then across the pond, so to speak, in Texas, in Houston, Texas, where Art Avicato is the Houston police chief.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he's also president of the Major City Chiefs Association, which is a collection of about 80 big city police chiefs.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So in the policing world, art has a lot of political clout. And the police chief there was able to successfully push off any calls to defund or cut the policing budget.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And actually, in Houston, Texas, it grew by a bit.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So again, you have policing and whether or not we should defund them is very unique to city and city and state to state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I think we can safely imagine what happens when you increase a police budget. There'll be more cops, more resources.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: But what happens when you cut one? Does that mean just the direct opposite? Fewer cops? Fewer resources?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Great question So what we found and we really dug into Memphis and Chicago is number one what gets cut are specialized programs.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So programs that work with kids programs that work on building relationships with the community
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's not cut is patrol. And what we actually found was an opposite effect.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Once you start cutting specialized units, they start throwing more work at patrol officers, which then leads to more patrol officers working more overtime, which then leads to more cops getting themselves involved in use of force complaints.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we found academic studies that showed that tired cops, exhausted cops, lead to basically crappier police behavior.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So I think when people start really demanding to defund the police, what you really need to understand is you're never going to defund patrol cops.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What you're actually going to cut are specialized units, cops who deal with the homeless, cops who deal with mental health.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And that's a part of a larger conversation, another term we keep hearing about, reimagining policing, which a lot of police chiefs support reimagining.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's saying, hey, let's not have cops deal with the homeless. Let's not have cops deal with the mentally ill. Let's have more social workers working in those fields and let more cops go back to patrol.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: But until that happens, when you start slashing police budgets, as they did in 2008 and 2009, all you're doing is throwing more work on patrol cops.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But my understanding of defund the police is that that is exactly what people are asking for.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: They're asking for more community services. They're asking for peace officers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're asking for someone who shows up to your car accident, not with a gun, but who's, you know, there to help you.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Is that message getting through? Like, rethink your budgets, more community services, less policing of people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I think people are forgetting the defund movement occurred in another crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So I was working on a story right before the death of George Floyd, examining how were police departments adapting, knowing they are about to lose money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The LA police chief had talked about, you know, I'm about to lose money.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: The Seattle police chief, in an interview with me, talked about getting prepared for budget cuts and ways she was going to do things like with virtual reality, doing training via app and all these interesting ways of marrying technology and police training, preparing for police budget cuts, knowing she had to trim money somehow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's not like police budgets were going to balloon and go out of control.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: What was happening in some cities like New York, they were like, oh, you know, we're about to have budget cuts because of COVID-19. Let's leave the police budget alone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think if it wasn't for the death of George Floyd, that's what we would have seen.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: You would have seen cities smaller than New York saying, oh, no, we have to make budget cuts across all city agencies, as Seattle was preparing to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you would have some cities who maybe lean more to the left and have bigger budgets, like New York saying, you know, leave the police budget alone.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: But of course, we saw the outcry and the frustration this summer, and it's still ongoing today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's sort of too hard to tell because I think it's too easy to say, oh, you know, sooner or later, we're going to defund the police and cut budgets.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: We're in an economic downturn right now, right? Like, we have no idea when the economy is going to bounce back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Of course, they're going to be budget cuts. There has to be budget cuts.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And beyond the budgets, I mean, what's your sense of how much has really changed in attitudes within police departments?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, it's not like this all went away after George Floyd. We still see cases of police brutality, police pushing around peaceful protesters, unwarranted use of lethal force.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Well, in addition to the state reforms that we had talked about earlier in Colorado and Connecticut, but something did happen earlier this month.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A black man named Jonathan Price, 31 years old, was very popular in his hometown.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: He was on the football team. He worked for the city public works department. and he also had a personal training business.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He had tried to break up a fight between a man and a woman. Eventually, they took it outside and someone called the police.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And a 22-year-old white cop rolled up to the scene, and instead of breaking up the fight... Three gunshots went off, and I turned and looked at them, and I said, a cop just shot somebody.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He shot and killed a good Samaritan, Mr. Price.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Wolf City PD has only said that the officer is now on paid administrative leave.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And usually, a Texas shooting of a black man would take weeks and weeks, perhaps months, for any investigations to wrap up, for any announcement to be made.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And perhaps, this is my New York journalist bias, I wouldn't expect much to be done with the cop.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was extremely surprised this week when Texas Department of Public Safety, who investigates shootings across the state, pushed to have the officer arrested.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Texas police officers facing murder charges in the shooting death of a black man who was reportedly trying to break up a fight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now this 22-year-old cop has been charged with murder and is being held in jail on a million-dollar bond.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Again, this is more or less rural Texas, a young white police officer held in jail for murdering a 31-year-old black man.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Would that have happened two years ago?
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: I highly doubt it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find Simone Weichselbaum's reporting at themarshallproject.org.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for them. It's Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before we go, a plug for a podcast from our friends at Worldly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They drop every Thursday, and today they're dedicating their episode to a very important story, the outbreak of violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a mountainous territory about the size of Delaware, populated mostly by Armenians, that's been at the center of a decades-long conflict that's currently flaring up and threatening to draw in Russia and Turkey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Understanding the story hinges on the historical context, and our colleagues spell it out for you today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Find that episode of Worldly wherever you find this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
