What A Day - Extreme Cop Makeover

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

Democrats in Congress introduced the Justice In Policing Act yesterday, which includes a ban on chokeholds, a ban on no-knock warrants, and makes it easier to prosecute police officers. Plus, what New York's legislature is doing to reform policing in their state.Guest-host Dylan Marron fills in for Akilah Hughes. He shares lessons from his podcast “Conversations With People Who Hate Me," on how to have important discussions with people who disagree with you.And in headlines: Governor Andy Beshear to provide free health insurance for black Kentuckians, Chuck E. Cheese could file for bankruptcy, and Chris Cuomo shows ass on IG.Check out Dylan's podcast: dylanmarron.com/podcast

it's tuesday june 9th i'm gideon resnick and i'm dylan maron filling in for akilah hughes and this is what a day asking for your support in our effort to stop the help from trending on netflix yes we love viola we love octavia they're all wonderful in it but this is perhaps not the movie that america needs right now. Yeah, I'm worried about the possibility of a Green Book resurgence here as a result of this. Oh, it's coming. On today's show, we'll talk about how to approach potentially difficult or tense conversations about gestures at all of this with Dylan. Very excited about that. And then some headlines. But first, the latest. So we saw more

political responses yesterday to the ongoing protests against police brutality. Let's begin with the bill congressional Democrats introduced yesterday. Yeah, so we talked a little bit about the contents of this on yesterday's show. But now that we have this bill, we can kind of go through a little bit more of the detail of what is actually in it. It is officially called the Justice in Policing Act. Two of the kind of big stipulations in it would be banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants, which were used in the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, respectively. It would change the federal criminal code to make it easier to prosecute officers instead of having to prove that an officer, quote, willfully violated someone's constitutional rights under this bill. The

standard would be if actions were done with, quote, reckless disregard for the person's rights. So that's kind of supposed to make the prosecutions easier in these cases. For the first time in history, it would make lynching a federal hate crime, which is amazing that that has taken so long. It would create a federal registry for misconduct complaints and disciplinary actions against officers and limit the transfer of military grade equipment to police departments, among other things. So many of these things are reforms that activists have been calling for for many decades. But the bill does not address reducing police budgets, which is a major and growing demand from activists as well, and a push that's been successful in a number of cities so far.

Right. Okay. So and where do things go from here with the bill? That's a great question. So currently, it has more than 200 Democratic co-sponsors in the House and Senate. So that means we can assume it's going to pass in the House, but it's going to meet some resistance from Republicans in the Senate who, through all of this, haven't exactly clarified what it is that they want to see done here. And then as for Trump, on Monday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany didn't say whether the president liked this bill overall, but she did kind of strangely point out one particular thing that he did not like, which is the provision that targets what's known as

qualified immunity that shields police officers from civil lawsuits. And overall, we know that Trump and his administration have continued to promote so-called law and order. And while they say they condemn the killing of Floyd, they deny that there is a systemic issue at play, which is contrary to what the evidence says and what we all know and can see with our eyes. But to your question and my long-winded way of answering it for now with this bill, the next step is going to be hearings. They're set to begin on Wednesday, and Floyd's brother is actually expected to testify. Now, I just want to shift back to what we're seeing at the local level. There are a few things in the works in New York State. So, Gideon, can you take us through some of the bills that the state legislature is working on?

It's all moving very fast right now. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a large package of bills that they're looking at. One is a bill that also bans chokeholds, which has particular tragic residents in New York, given the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014. And at that time, chokeholds were against New York Police Department policy. But this law is intended to go further by making it a felony and making that the case statewide, not just in New York City. So the legislature passed this measure yesterday, and Governor Cuomo has said that he's going to sign it into law. But there's still some skepticism

that this would actually change behavior of officers, though. And then two, they're also expected to pass a bill that would repeal a 1970s era law known as 50A, which prohibits the release of personnel records for police officers without permission from the officer or a judge. Now, those officers are not likely to say, here are all of my personnel records for your perusal. And 50A was also an issue in that Garner case because the officer who killed him, Daniel Pantaleo, had tons of misconduct complaints that were kept secret for quite some time. And as in other states across the country, the power of police unions and politicians deference to them and reliance on their campaign donations in some cases has prevented bills like

this from being passed. And so I think there was one more thing that had less to do with like the police themselves and more to do with phone calls to the police. Can you explain that one? That's right. Yeah. And it's also pertaining to another recent news story. So that last bill that's being considered would give people a quote, private right of action. They believe that someone called the police on them because of their race, gender or nationality. So this comes after another high profile racist incident last month, in which, as we all know, a white woman in Central Park called the police and falsely, not to mention dangerously, said that Christian Cooper, a white woman in Central Park called the police and falsely, not to mention dangerously, said that Christian Cooper, a black man who was birding there, was threatening her.

So we're going to continue to track how this is all progressing around the country, but that is the latest we have for you for now. All right, so as we've been talking about, there are conversations drawing attention to police violence and systemic racism, as well as policy debates about how to make changes therein. All of those have accelerated massively in the past few weeks. On a macro scale, the broad national conversation is difficult at times. There is, of course, the right versus left. And then also, as you zoom in, there are differences of opinion about the best way to push for change on the left. Does it require defunding, abolition, reform, or some combination? There also might be some lack of understanding on what all of those terms mean in practice. And while all of that is taking place, there are also some really challenging

conversations happening at a micro and personal level between family, friends, and acquaintances. So Dylan, some easy topics to tackle here, but this is what we want to talk about today. Great, let's do it. Okay, so you have a long-running podcast called Conversations with People Who Hate Me, in which, for those who don't know, you facilitate conversations between people who have fought online, been vicious towards each other in some cases. So how are you thinking about these difficult and important conversations people are grappling with right now? Yeah, I mean, so this is hard. I think there are a lot of difficult conversations happening in text threads and in living rooms and in the DMs right now all across America. And kind of just to briefly talk about social media a

little, I think it can be, social media can be a really difficult space to get rules because sometimes you get equally contradictory rules, right? In one single scroll, you could see someone saying you should do X and then you scroll down one more and it's like, absolutely don't ever do X. You should only be doing Y. And it is so confusing. So I think a lot of that confusion centers around like, what is good allyship, right? Like good allies should be doing this. Good allies should be doing this. Sometimes I've been saying good allies should completely shut up and just be donating money. And then in the same scroll, I see that good allies should be the only ones speaking up. And we don't care about your donations. Donations do nothing. Right.

So this is a kind of difficult place to kind of get your cues. But I think overall, the consensus Right. I think sometimes when you say let's have difficult conversations, critics of conversations, the field of conversations, automatically think that you're having, you know, heart-to-heart fireside chats with the most egregious and hateful person. And that is, of course, not the case. It's about starting with where you're most comfortable. And, you know, Gideon, I want to be clear about something. I very much do believe in conversation. I've, in fact, spent the last three years of my life having difficult political conversations. But I also want to be clear that we are not going to simply talk our way out of this mess, you know, and be best our way out of this mess. Because saying, you know, like, let's be kind to each other. Let's just talk. That is absolutely an incredible part of the puzzle, right? It's not everything. I firmly believe that it's a start. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great point that like, you shouldn't be thinking that one thing necessarily replaces another when you're looking at something as insanely complicated as solving

what we all know is wrong in the United States. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But for somebody who does want to jumpstart this and have this conversation with somebody they disagree with, what are some things to keep in mind going into the trenches there? Yeah. So I would say the very first thing to do is to move the conversation offline. Twitter absolutely has its uses. There are some amazing, it's an amazing way to disseminate information very fast. But is it the best place to have nuanced conversations? I don't think so. So I have found that the phone call is like this radical forgotten space for these conversations and go into it with the right expectations. You cannot cover everything. You are going to want to cover everything. Right when you set

in to these hard conversations, you are going to want to pick up on every single piece of policy and society and culture that you disagree on with this person. I get that. I get that impulse. I call it like the everything storm. You want to keep that everything storm at bay by focusing on one specific thing to talk about. Now, it's funny, a lot of times people assume or people automatically call conversations across the divide, they call it debate. And I think that's because we have so few, so little language for what conversations with people we disagree with can look like. So just to be clear, I think debate certainly has its uses. But I also think I don't choose debate. That's not my preferred method of communication because I think debate is gamified conversation. It teaches us that there's a winner and loser at the end of a

conversation. It's like very American if you think about it to think that we've turned it into that. But, yeah, we think there's a winner and loser. And some of these topics are just way too complicated to assign a winner and loser. And also I would ask what does a winner of a difficult conversation actually do? Does it actually change the person's mind or does it just humiliate them and they just want to go find better talking points? So what I recommend doing instead is focusing on the person's why, right? Kind of digging into why they feel a certain way, why they are, what were the circumstances that led to them, you know, believing what they believe? And that actually proves to be an incredibly fertile ground for continuing the conversation. And to the point of this like notion of winning and like gamifying stuff, you know, we are both folks of the online realm, as it's been referred to by no one up until this moment.

No, yeah, it's you. That's me. That's TM trademarked. And a lot of that has to do with this instinct to shame and sort of get dunks off. And it feels really good to do that. But I mean, do you think that in the framework of what you're talking about and thinking through there's there's a place for doing that? You know, it's funny, I, I certainly get why dunks are so thrilling to see online, especially when you are like morally opposed to the person you see being dunked upon. It can feel so good. It can feel

like a cleansing for yourself. But I think the bigger question we have to ask ourselves is, does that lead to actual change? And which is ideally what I think people are after. And, you know, this is a very boring answer. But I actually find that like the most certain path to change is radical empathy and bringing radical empathy into these conversations is what I have found to be the most crucial tool to get these conversations off the ground. And, you know, I think what I urge people to do, because I speak certainly to, I facilitate conversations among like very like-minded people who have subtle disagreements that rip them apart. But I also on my podcast do speak

to people who think very differently from me. And I will say that it can be really, really disorienting to be empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with. And so, you know, in the course of making my podcast and thinking about the work, you know, I've come up with a helpful mantra for myself, which is this idea that empathy is not endorsement. You know, just because you are empathizing with someone who you really just don't see eye to eye on at all, whose worldview just like hurts you. It is, I think, important to realize that just because you're empathizing with them doesn't co-sign that. It just means that you're acknowledging their humanity. And again,

that's important. That's important to keep the conversation going. Well, Dylan, thank you so much again for helping us think about this and giving us some tools to even try to grapple with this. And for people that want to follow more of your work on it, check out Dylan's podcast. It is Conversations with People Who Hate Me.

He's also a person of online, like I said, so you can find him online if you're so inclined. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. In COVID-19 news, two new studies have revealed how much shutdown orders curb the spread of the infection. One found that these measures prevented 60 million infections in the U.S. and 285 million in China. The second study estimated that 3.1 million lives in European countries were saved by lockdowns as well. All that, and I also learned the exact number of movies I can stream on Criterion Collection before I become utterly intolerable. I have arrived there.

And another update. Yesterday, in a very confusing statement, the World Health Organization said it is very rare for asymptomatic people to spread the virus. Health experts chimed in to clarify that there are many ways for COVID-19 to present, and whether you're asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, or have mild symptoms, you can still spread it. So they continue to recommend wearing face masks when in public. And Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear announced he'll commit to providing health insurance for every Black resident in the state. In his daily update yesterday, Beshear cited the glaring racial inequalities in the health

care system that result in Black people in Kentucky dying from coronavirus at twice the rate of white people. Referring to the racial disparity, he said, quote, it shouldn't have taken this pandemic or these demonstrations for us to commit to ending it, end quote. Details about the plan have not yet been released, but Bashir said he aims for everyone to be on Medicare or Medicaid if they don't have private insurance. Kentucky has seen over 11,000 cases of coronavirus over the course of the pandemic. Right on. CNN host Chris Cuomo is known for his famous brother's bit with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. But now, folks,

he has got a new act. It is accidentally showing his nude ass on his wife's Instagram live. Cuomo's wife, whose name is Christina Cuomo, or Girl Chris Cuomo for short around these parts, was streaming herself doing yoga in their Hamptons home. Boy Chris showed up in the background, facing away from camera, standing outside for some reason, and enjoying some unrated Cuomo primetime. The video was broadcast around May 27th,

but taken down shortly after, presumably because someone noticed the ripe Italian peach that's featured midway through. The incident made headlines yesterday when fearless reporters at Page Six dug it up. They say they're still working to, quote, confirm it is the news anchor's distinguished derriere. I love the idea that it's

perhaps not, you know, and there was an intruder and they just found out. A random butt. Yeah, random butt. Well, the pizza parlor, segue to, the pizza parlor slash child germ emporium, Chuck E. Cheese, has experienced some predictable setbacks under COVID-19. And now they're reportedly in talks with lenders to raise money to avoid bankruptcy. This obviously comes just as I saved up just enough tickets to get a really big Nerf gun, and I am so angry that I can barely contain myself.

Chuck E. Cheese has suspended their operations when the pandemic began, though many restaurants are still open for takeout in case, you know, Gideon, maybe your comfort food is arcade pizza. That's not bad. Their business, it is. Their business model depends on kids jamming sticky buttons and crowding together in a pit. So the company's future will depend on whether that's something parents want in our new socially distanced world. We're all rooting for our favorite singing rat, Chuck E. Cheese, who kid you not i have to tell you this his um full legal name and this is 100 true is charles entertainment cheese

look it up please look it up i i take your word for it and i also love your word for it and your passion about it thank Thank you. Thank you. And those are the headlines. Okay, before we go, a reminder to our listeners in Georgia, South Carolina, West Virginia, North Dakota, and Nevada, you all have local primary elections taking place today. Make sure you vote and do it safely. And for everyone else, if you haven't already, head over to votesaveamerica.com to get registered to vote or check your registration and voting dates in your area. That is all for today.

If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, give us your spare arcade tickets and tell your friends to listen. And if you are into reading and not just the official biography of Charles Entertainment Cheese like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter, so check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Dylan Maron. I'm Gideon Resnick. And enjoy your arcade pizza.

That was kind of it, right? Yeah. I love. What a Day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tun is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long.

Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka.