Today, Explained - Did anyone defund the police?

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

In June, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council stood onstage at a community rally and pledged to dismantle the police. Council member Alondra Cano returns to explain why it’s taking so long. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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. 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. 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. 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. Back in June, I spoke with Minneapolis City Council Member 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. 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. This ain't going to happen overnight. This ain't going to happen tomorrow.

We need everybody's voices included. Councilmember Cano, back in June, you and your colleagues pledged to dismantle the police. Is it fair to say it hasn't happened yet? I would say no. I think that we have seen

some pretty significant action taken over the last four months. 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. 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. 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? 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. Has that been part of the confusion in Minneapolis for people who expected something that they're maybe not going to see anymore? I don't really identify with the confusion. I don't see that in my district. 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. This isn't something new. We did it two years ago and we continue to move along that path since then, I think perhaps what's happening is that we

are now diving into the details of what does that transition look like. 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 a rest this year because that's the moment that we're in. 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. 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. 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. 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. But the Minneapolis Police Department is still very much functional and very much still receiving a hundred million plus dollars in funding annually. 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. 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 two paths, either city council action again, like we've just done, or if the voters of Minneapolis would like to go out and get 10,000 or more signatures to put the question in the ballot, that's how that would come back again. 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. How do you feel about that assessment? I think that's a misguided assessment. It's probably based on somebody who doesn't know how city politics and city policy works. It took us about three or four years to approve the $15 minimum wage ordinance. 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. So these kinds of initiatives

take healthy time. That doesn't mean that they're not important. That actually means that we're investing due diligence and systems a new public safety system in four months. It doesn't feel sincere. 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. 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. 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. 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. Do you think other cities and states

can learn something from what you've gone through? Absolutely. Absolutely. I often tell other council members, you do not want to be the city where George Floyd was killed. You don't want to wait until that moment to come up with a plan. 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. So my advice to other cities that are grappling with similar questions is it's fine to talk about what you don't want. You don't want officers, you don't want the policing system, but I think what's more valuable and more strategic and more important is that you double down on what you want. 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. Okay. Council Member McConnell, I really appreciate your time. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you.

Bye-bye. After the break, how police reform is going in the rest of the country. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money 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, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained.

Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Minneapolis wasn't the only city that pledged serious police reform this summer. There were similar calls in major cities across the country from New York to Seattle. Simone Weichselbaum, you cover law enforcement in the United States for the Marshall Project. How is this looking across the country? Well, every city is unique and every city is different. And I think that changes the conversation. If you recall in May and June, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, people wanted to see immediate results. 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.

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. 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. Some cities in Texas want to defund and dismantle police departments in our state. We cannot let this happen in Texas. So that's another lesson

when we talk about police reform. Sometimes it doesn't matter what cities want. Sometimes states have to get involved. Sometimes the feds have to get involved. 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. So no one, be it Minneapolis, Austin, Portland, Seattle, everything from juvenile justice initiatives to picking up drug dealers off the street. 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. 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. 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. But critics will say that's funny math. Number one, what was decided was sort of to hit pause when it comes to hiring new cops. We're not going to have an academy class for a while. And when it comes to school safety officers, a really expensive part in the policing budget, 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, and it would have to

be proven along the way that it would work. 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 years. 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. That law was passed.

It's called 50A. Your New York listeners will know what I'm talking about. 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. So again, just because you have alignment from Democratic lawmakers and the public to make changes in policing doesn't mean the story's over. 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? There's a organization called the National Council of State Legislatures. I hope I didn't botch that. NCSL for the acronym. And it's an organization that watches state bills, state legislation for many topics, including policing. 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, and about only 10% thus far has actually passed. But when you really start digging into what these 500 or so bills have been on, it runs across the gamut. Well, another thing which I found interesting in states like Colorado and Connecticut is this

idea of intervening. 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. And I think that's a very important change in police reform because it's sort of weeding out this culture of the blue wall of silence. 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. So what I'm actually looking into right now is police liability. 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, 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. So I thought what happened in Phoenix was actually pretty interesting. You did have push from activists to cut the budget. And instead, what the city decided to do was to grow the police accountability budget from about $400,000 to about $3 million. 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. And then across the pond,

so to speak, in Texas, in Houston, Texas, where Art Avasado is the Houston police chief, and he's also president of the Major City Chiefs Association, which is a collection of about 80 big city police chiefs. 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. And actually in Houston, Texas, it grew by a bit. So again, you have policing and whether or not we should defund them is very unique to city and city and state to state. Well, I think we can safely imagine what happens when you increase a police budget. There'll be more cops, more resources. But what happens when you cut one? Does that mean just the direct opposite, fewer cops, fewer resources? Great question. So what we found, and we really dug into Memphis and Chicago,

is number one, what gets cut are specialized programs. So programs that work with kids, programs that work on building relationships with the community. What's not cut is patrol. And what we actually found was an opposite effect. 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. And we found academic studies that showed that tired cops, exhausted cops,

lead to basically crappier police behavior. So I think what people start really demanding to defund the police, what you really need to understand is you're never going to defund patrol cops. What you're actually going to cut are specialized units, cops who deal with the homeless, cops who deal with mental health. 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. ill. Let's have more social workers working in those fields and let more cops go back to patrol. 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. But my understanding of defund the police is that that is exactly what people are asking for. They're asking for more community services.

They're asking for peace officers. 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. Is that message getting through? Like, rethink your budgets, more community services, less policing of people. Well, I think people are forgetting the defund movement occurred in another crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. 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. The L.A. police chief had talked about, you know, I'm about to lose money.

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. So it's not like police budgets were going to balloon

and go out of control. 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. And I think if it wasn't for the death of George Floyd, that's what we would have seen. 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. 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.

But of course, we saw the outcry and the frustration this summer and it's still ongoing today. 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. We're in an economic downturn right now, right? Like, we have no idea when the economy is going to bounce back. Of course, there are going to be budget cuts. There has to be budget cuts. And beyond the budgets, I mean, what's your sense of how much has really changed in attitudes within police departments?

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. Well, in addition to the state reforms that we had talked about earlier in Colorado and Connecticut, but something did happen earlier this month. A Black man named Jonathan Price, 31 years old, was very popular in his hometown.

He was on the football team. He worked for the city public works department. And he also had a personal training business. He had tried to break up a fight between a man and a woman. Eventually, they took it outside and someone called the police. And a 22-year-old white cop rolled up to the scene. And instead of breaking up the fight. Three 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.

He shot and killed a good Samaritan, Mr. Price. Wolf City PD has only said that the officer is now on paid administrative leave. 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. And perhaps this is my New York journalist bias, I wouldn't expect much to be done with the cop. I was extremely surprised this week when Texas Department of Public Safety, who investigates shootings across the state, pushed to have the officer arrested. Texas police officer is facing murder charges in the shooting death of a Black man who was

reportedly trying to break up a fight. Now this 22-year-old cop has been charged with murder and is being held in jail on a million-dollar bond. Again, this is more or less rural Texas, a young white police officer held in jail for murdering a 31-year-old Black man. Would that have happened two years ago? I highly doubt it. You can find Simone Weichselbaum's reporting at themarshallproject.org.

I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained. Before we go, a plug for a podcast from our friends at Worldly. 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. 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.

Understanding the story hinges on the historical context, and our colleagues spell it out for you today. Find that episode of Worldly wherever you find this.