Today, Explained - Can Congress reform the police?

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

The United States has a policing problem and Congress wants to fix it. Vox’s Li Zhou explains whether the Democrats’ new bill will go anywhere. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today, George Floyd's little brother, Philanise Floyd, testified before Congress. If his death ends up changing the world for the better, and I think it will, then he died as he lived.

It is on you to make sure his death is not in vain. Congress is trying. On Monday, Democrats proposed what they consider a transformative police reform bill. And on today's show, we're going to explain what's in it. But first, we're going to try and figure out why policing in the United States is so problematic. Because it is not this bad everywhere else. Take, for example, England. This is Paul Hirschfield.

He teaches criminal justice at Rutgers in Jersey. But again, we're talking about England for a second, not Jersey. Knife violence is quite common there, I believe. Yet it is extremely rare for police officers in England to use deadly force on knife-wielding suspects. So they have learned to confront those sorts of deadly threats with much less lethal approaches, to put more time and distance between them and the suspect, to learn better skills for de-escalation, to use less lethal

weaponry and equipment for the purpose of subduing those sorts of attackers. The police in England have a greater sense of legitimacy and have more respect from the public precisely because they are putting themselves out there. They are putting their lives on the line by not carrying guns. That demonstrates sort of a sense of honor and sacrifice right there. Paul also told me about Norway because Scandinavia always has some fairy tale to tell, unlike Jersey. Sure. And Norway tends to be sort of the emblem of how to govern humanely and generously.

They're so different than the United States in so many areas, including policing, that it's hard to try to simply extrapolate or apply their policies here. But just the fact that they send their officers to a national police academy for three years. Three years! Yes. Three years, essentially, college for cops stands in stark contrast to the way we train officers here. And just think about how much you can accomplish in three years. Three years! How that could afford time for police officers to study communications and psychology, cultural awareness. Well, of course, you have less diversity there, but there's just so much more you can accomplish in three years.

Three years? Yes, three years. I kind of knew what the answer would be, but I still asked Paul how many people die in police custody in places like England or Norway compared to the United States. You're looking at a handful of cases each year in England. You're lucky if you find one in a year in Norway. Suffice it to say that rates of deadly force in those two countries in particular are extremely low compared to the United States. It's stark. I asked him why that is. to use deadly force is lower in the United States. And number three, our police officers

receive much less training. Hence, training tends to focus more on what they need to survive rather than the various skills and knowledge they might need to reduce their reliance on deadly force. Number one, so many guns. Yes, unfortunately, the biggest explanation for our high rates of deadly force has also been the most intractable of the problems. There is no easy solution to the prevalence of guns in the United States. The rights to own guns is enshrined in the Constitution. And even if we were to ban guns, the guns would still remain accessible. What can happen is, of course, summoning other actors like social workers or health personnel to certain calls, taking armed police presence out of schools. I mean, those are certainly viable options, but disarming the police doesn't seem viable to me.

Number two, all that deadly force you've been hearing about used on Black Americans. It's hard, though, to distinguish between cases of deadly force that are driven by racial bias versus those that are a result of permissive rules and poorly trained police. White people in this country also face a far greater likelihood of being killed by the police. Racism is a hard, it's hard to point to that as being an explanation for why states like Arizona and Montana, you know, have elevated rates of deadly force when there are a few blacks living in those places. The problem of excessive police deadly force, it's a risk that we all face as Americans.

And third, the training. In the United States, the last data I saw from 2013 said that on average, police receive 21 weeks of classroom training. 21 weeks compared to three years is a vast, vast difference. And so naturally, much of the training in the United States focuses on teaching them what they need to survive and enforce the law. And crisis intervention, de-escalation tend to be add-ons, either in in-service training or in sort of one day or two of training at the police academy. Officers in the United States are trained to fear. They are trained to think that

worst-case scenarios that have claimed the lives of other officers could happen to them. Most of them at one point or another probably do encounter an armed suspect. They probably will never encounter somebody who is attempting to kill them. But because that possibility exists, much of police training in the United States is oriented to protecting officers should the worst come to reality. That is a big problem because do we really want officers to treat every situation like it's the worst case possible situation or do we want officers to respond to much more likely or typical scenarios? When you see these cases of unarmed black men being killed, sometimes shot numerous times, much of it has to do with officers seeing a reality and being prepared for a reality that

doesn't match the reality they actually were confronted with. And just how does the content of these trainings differ in the United States and, say, Europe? The approach is much more comprehensive. It's about training well-rounded officers who can not only enforce the law and respond to dangerous situations, but can also communicate with broad groups of people and understand the various sorts of problems that lead to crime. So it's not that they're not getting training in combat and gun use and how to use defensive tactics. They're getting that training too. But overall, the training is much more comprehensive and affords a more balanced perspective where police are able to be public servants and community servants while also protecting themselves. How much of this feels changeable? I mean, you have this moment right now where people are calling to abolish, to defund the police.

There's more attention on this issue maybe than there ever has been before. Do you think there is an opportunity here to extend training periods, to increase requirements to become a police officer, to change the way police officers are using deadly force? I think this presents unprecedented opportunities for change at the local level, county, state level. I wouldn't go as far as to say national level at this point,

but this does present these opportunities. We've already seen it happening in Minneapolis, of course, but also Portland, other places reconsidering policies with respect to deadly forests, because none of these towns and cities want to be the next Minneapolis. So Minneapolis serves as a cautionary tale and will propel many local reforms. But if we are going to produce, if we're going to have the structural changes that are truly needed, that these protesters are really agitating for, that will require change at the state level. And state level changes require more than the support of urban legislators, right, who are responding to these protests. They would require support from rural and suburban legislators as well. Because that's what you really need to allow a majority of legislators to be willing to defy the will of the prosecutors and the police associations and really focus on meeting the needs of the public on this issue. State action is needed, and depending on what state you live in, you might be getting some,

but the federal government wants to do something too. After the break, we'll find out what exactly that is. Thank you. back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month.

And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC Terms and conditions apply. Lizzo, you cover Congress for Vox. Democrats are working on police reform. What are they going to do? Are they going to defund the police like everyone in the streets asking? They can't even do that, can they? That's like a state thing, a local thing. They are responding to the protesters in part, but they are not going so far as to say they support defunding the police. And a big piece of their resistance to that is a fear that the term defunding the police will scare people off during an election year, especially because among many Americans, people are satisfied with the job that their local police officers are doing. What's been interesting is that Democrats have endorsed what is a piece of defunding the police, which is the need to invest more resources in social services like education, like food aid,

that would be more beneficial to society and could help prevent the fundamental causes of inequities and crimes in a way that policing currently does not. But they have been reluctant to actually support the movement and say that they will defund the police. So what are they doing instead? What are they proposing? Instead, what they're proposing is a series of reforms, which I think activists would say are more just trying to address current cracks and breaks in the system rather than fundamentally overhauling it. And these reforms center on a couple of different areas. One of them is on the legal accountability that police would face if they are engaged in misconduct. And so the bill would do away with something called qualified immunity. Another piece of it is addressing the type of force that police are able to use when they are on duty. And so it would ban

the use of chokeholds at the federal level. It would ban the use of what's known as no-knock warrants in the instance of drug cases. And thirdly, it would increase transparency around the data on some of these issues that police departments have seen and require the creation of a national registry that would track police misconduct across states and make it easier to figure out if officers that are associated with wrongdoing move elsewhere. All right, well, let's break these down one by one. So starting with qualified immunity, we've alluded to it a few times on our show already, but for those who don't know, what exactly is that? Yeah, qualified immunity is a legal provision that currently protects all government officials, including police officers, in the case that they are suing was aware that this was a crime when they were committing it.

And I think that's a very high standard to meet and makes it very difficult for people to pursue such charges. How about the chokeholds thing? Obviously, this has been very controversial in New York ever since the death of Eric Garner. And in 2020, many, many years later, the Democrats in Congress are finally saying, we should do something about that. Right. And the idea behind it is that if you make this federal law to bar the use of chokeholds by police, it will make it easier for the DOJ to be able to hold police officers accountable in a case where they might be using this maneuver. I think this type of reform has been questioned by a lot of activists because in New York, when the chokehold was used on Eric Garner, it was actually already banned by the NYPD.

So people are asking, you know, do these bans ultimately work? Because at the end of the day, it's still being used by police who might be using excessive force against people. And what about these no-knock warrants? What are those? They are effectively what they sound like. It enables police officers to enter someone's home without notifying them. Like to just kick down the door? Right, exactly. So it ends up taking a lot of people by surprise. And this was the exact warrant that was used in the case of Breonna Taylor's death when police killed her without warning. And so this law would prevent the use of no-knock warrants at the federal level.

I think what's important to know about both the chokehold ban and the ban on no-knock warrants is that it only applies at the federal level, although the bill would condition funding for state and local law enforcement agencies based on their willingness to adopt similar bans. So that means what, this is mostly for like the FBI and the National Park Police or something? Right, it means that basically the fact that DOJ would have more authority to help in bringing cases against police who have used these maneuvers, but it does limit, I think, their efficacy given how many law enforcement agencies are state and local. Right. Which is to say almost all of them. Right. What about this last big provision in this legislation, this sort of registry to track

misconduct? Tell me a bit more about that and why something like that doesn't already exist. I think it's just been a matter of lack of will and coordination to pull together this type of data. Right now, when you look at how police stations track information at the state and local levels, a lot of that is very much siloed. And so this is an attempt to try to bring all that information together at a national level so people can share it and so that there are less gaps in, you know, bad cops getting new jobs even after they've been disciplined at a particular place. Okay, so sweeping reforms at the federal level, but also big implications for state and local level. We've got, you know, a national registry to track misconduct. We've got no more chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and then an end to qualified immunity, which is a big deal. How likely is it that any of this passes, Leigh? The expectation for the bill is similar to a lot of other legislation that we've seen go through during this divided Congress, which is that since it's been introduced by Democrats and is backed

by Democrats, it will likely pass the House, but it won't make it through the Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans. And also where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he's interested in coming up with the GOP response to everything we've seen in terms of the protests of police brutality and addressing the racial bias in how police treat people. What does that mean? Is there like potential for a sort of House-Senate collaboration here? There could be. I think what we are likely to see from Republicans is going to be a much more pared down version of what Democrats have introduced. Mitt Romney has already said he wants to do a police reform bill, And he said it'll include things like implicit bias training, as well as setting up supervisory boards for police stations to

navigate when they use racial profiling and when they use use of force. I think what you're hearing being talked about among Republicans is just a much smaller set of reforms than what Democrats are interested in doing. So it's entirely possible that we'll have a compromise bill, but it will likely be much narrower than anything we've heard from Democrats so far. But of course, anything that the Senate and House collaborated on would have to make its way to the desk of President Donald Trump, who has been really dog-whistling law and order and bashing Joe Biden and a lot of other progressive leaders for even considering changes to police departments. So is anything that they come up with going to be dead on arrival?

That's one of the biggest questions right now. There's an expectation that Trump will give an address about the protests and about George Floyd's death later this week. And it remains to be seen if he's going to put forth some type of endorsement for additional movement on this. So does anything really feel different here? Does it feel like the Democrats or anyone else in Congress has accomplished anything this week? Fair question. I think what's notable about this, even though, you know, you might categorize some of this stuff as more of a messaging legislation than something that will become reality, is that it does put a stake in the ground for Democrats, especially for what they might want to do if they were to retake power in the Senate this fall. And so that's important. I think,

secondly, it's an important acknowledgement of the work that protesters have been doing. Certainly, what's been proposed is very far from, I think, what a lot of activists are actually interested in and looking for. But it at least indicates that Congress is considering reforms that are much more expansive than anything else that's really been proposed on this front in recent memory. Well, if it goes anywhere, we'll have you back to talk about it, Lee. Thank you. Sounds good. Thanks. You can find Lee's reporting on the Democrats' plan for police at Vox.com. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. It's Today Explained. And one more thing before we go.

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