What A Day - What's Next For American Policing

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Derek Chauvin has been found guilty, but it's painfully obvious that the issue of police brutality is bigger than the conviction of one officer for murder. For example, today is the funeral for Daunte Wright, the 20-year-old Black man who was killed by police during a traffic stop near Minneapolis. Plus details are still coming out in Columbus, Ohio, about the police killing of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant, who was shot just minutes after the Chauvin verdict was announced.To discuss the trial in the context of a greater effort to make police accountable, or rethink the role of policy in society altogether, we spoke with the Marshall Project's Jamiles Lartey.And in headlines: widespread protest in Russia against Putin and for Alexei Navalny, Manhattan’s DA will no longer prosecute prostitution, and a time off for vaccination tax credit.Show Notes –Show some love and vote for us as Best News and Politics podcast in the 25th Annual People’s Voice Awards! https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2021/podcasts/general-series/news-politicsFor a transcript of this show, please visit crooked.com/whataday.

It's Thursday, April 22nd. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is What The Day, where we are wishing a happy Earth Day to those who celebrate. Yeah, you don't have to celebrate the Earth, but we recommend you do. Today I'm actually going to celebrate Saturn. I think that that's really not right. On today's show, the latest is all about what's next. The guilty verdicts for Derek Chauvin do not mean that America is closer to making the country safer for people who are black, brown, trans, undocumented, whatever identity that makes them who they are. But it did mean that this one police officer will face punishment for his crimes.

And the news caused a wave of political tremors, though. For example, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced yesterday that the federal government will look into Chauvin's former employer, the Minneapolis Police Department. Today, I am announcing that the Justice Department has opened a civil investigation to determine whether the Minneapolis Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional or unlawful policing. Yeah, and it's possible that out of that investigation, the Minneapolis Police Department

could settle with the feds or enter into what is known as a quote unquote consent decree that forces the department to make strong changes in its use of force policies. And that is on top of the DOJ's current investigation into whether Chauvin violated George Floyd's civil rights. But for people just trying to exist in their own neighborhoods, there's still a lot of mourning and sadness. Today is the funeral for Dante Wright, the 20-year-old black man who was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center. Then over in Columbus, Ohio, details are still coming out about what happened on Tuesday in the police killing of 16-year-old Micaiah Bryant just minutes before the Chauvin verdict was announced. Bryant's mother said that her daughter was the one who called 911 for help,

and yesterday police released the body cam footage of the events as they unfolded. In reaction, hundreds of people staged a sit-in at The Ohio State University, so we'll continue to follow that story. Yeah, it is painfully obvious the issue of police brutality is bigger than the conviction of one officer for murder. So to talk about the Chauvin trial in the context of the greater effort to make police accountable or rethink the role of police in society altogether, we have with us Jamiles Lardy. He's a staff writer at the Marshall Project and has been reporting about policing for years and following the trial since day one. Jamiles, welcome back to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me back. So you've obviously been following the trial and the jury came back pretty quickly after just 10

hours of deliberation. So what did you think when you heard their guilty verdicts? Broadly speaking, I mean, I can't say I was surprised. I thought the prosecution did a, you know, they dropped truckloads of context and experts, you know, and I think they had what some legal scholars and some commentators have called, you know called the mother of all evidence on their side, which was that video of George Floyd's death. And I think maybe that was a little bit hyperbolic. you look at their closing arguments, their closing arguments wasn't, think about this expert that we showed you. Think about that expert. Think about this law that we read to you in great detail. Their argument was, trust your eyes, trust your gut. It looked bad because it was bad. It looked like a crime because it was a crime. So how uncommon is a conviction like this? And you obviously mentioned the fact that there was video evidence that the world had seen. So did it have to do with the attention on the case overall, the evidence, the prosecution, or basically a combination of all of that?

That's a good question. It's pretty uncommon for use of force, for an intentional use of force on the job. I don't have that number in front of me. I apologize, but I believe it's somewhere in the neighborhood of six or seven officers dating back about 10 years, maybe 15 years, actually. I think that number goes back to 2005. So, right, it's extremely uncommon. Generally speaking, when police are prosecuted, it is for, disproportionately, it is for traffic accidents, believe it or not, where they were doing something irresponsible while driving. Or, you know, sometimes police are convicted of crimes that maybe it happened with their service weapon, but they weren't acting as a police officer at that time. You know, so there's a handful of convictions in those cases. But it's exceedingly and vanishingly difficult to convict a police officer for an intentional use of force while on the job of being a police officer. And people were celebrating around the country after the verdict.

But, you know, we should check that emotion because when we last talked in early March, you said if Chauvin was convicted, that doesn't mean justice. Let's take a listen. A single police officer being convicted of a police killing doesn't really set. It's happened before. It happened in the Walter Scott case. The officer, Michael Slager was convicted by a, or well, he accepted a plea deal on federal charges. It didn't change the landscape. It's happened before in other cases, it didn't change the landscape. Like the overwhelming fact remains that the system as it's currently designed is not designed to hold police criminally accountable for killing people while on duty. So, Jamiles, what then would it take for the landscape to change here? So, I would say it depends what you're looking for. I mean, what we can say is that outside of the specific

context of this trial, if we think about this as a post-George Floyd moment, over 30 states have passed more than 140 new police oversight and reform laws, according to an analysis that the New York Times did over the weekend. So 16 of those were bills that explicitly banned the kind of hold that Derek Chauvin had George Floyd in. I leave it to the listener and I leave it to citizens and people who are paying attention to this to decide whether or not that's enough. Right, right. And on the federal level, the U.S. Justice Department announced it is launching this broad investigation into Minneapolis PD, including the policies and tactics that it uses. That's on top of the current DOJ investigation into whether Derek Chauvin violated George Floyd's

civil rights. What does this news signal to you about how the White House is taking this issue of police accountability here? Yeah, and not to be cynical, it doesn't signal a ton to me. Or in the context of if you think about the Biden administration or the Biden Justice Department as somewhat of a continuation of the Obama era Justice Department, you look at the work they did in Ferguson with the Ferguson report, the work they did on other patterns and practices, investigations into other police departments, I would say it's sort of roughly par for the course, right? This is what a Democrat, Democratic-led Department of Justice has done in response to high-profile police violence since at least 2014, right? Since Ferguson.

And then sort of going beyond this trial, a number of communities around the nation have tried making various steps, you were sort of alluding to this, you know, that try to rein in police powers or at least make them more accountable. We were mentioning, you know, language in Minnesota law. We were mentioning, you know, some of those other specific reform efforts around chokeholds. But can you tell us about some of the more ambitious efforts that we've seen here? Yeah, I mean, I think some of the more ambitious efforts, you know, you look to a place like Colorado where they've taken on this question. What they did is they made it possible for citizens to sue an individual police officer for violating their civil rights under state law. You know, a lot of city councils have tried things

that are ambitious or have endeavored to try things that are ambitious, which is to say they've passed things. They've started things. They've had the conversation and we have yet to see the, you know, reap the fruit from the sowing of those seeds. So I think the jury kind of remains out. Like we don't know what the net impact of, you know, all of these cities, for example, that are committing money to have civilian responders or civilian co-responders go to certain mental health calls or certain calls of people facing unhoused people, different efforts like that, I think are ambitious and we just have to see where they wind up, right? I mean, the Minneapolis City Council was very ambitious in essentially declaring it was going to dissolve its police department and that ambition was for naught. So I think we have to keep watching before we can make conclusions about what all of that ambition will get us. One other sort of important lesson among many in all of this is sort of the role of bystanders, particularly in actually monitoring police.

I don't think that we would be in this situation if then 17 year old Darnella Frazier didn't film Floyd's death, share it with the world, correct the narrative first told by police, actually erase that narrative and replace it because that initial statement didn't tell us anything about what actually happened. So how important is it that bystanders keep records on police that go beyond their own reports and even their own body cameras? Yeah, it's obviously invaluable in this case and has been invaluable in other cases. Again, not always in securing a criminal conviction, but even in cases where that didn't happen, obviously we didn't have video of Michael Brown. But think about all of the cases in the aftermath of Ferguson as this movement was reborn and revitalized over and over again. And revitalized feels like such an unfortunate term to use when what we're talking about is Black Death. But so many of these moments that captured national attention, that galvanized people, that pulled people off of the sidelines and pulled them into this

conversation, whether we're talking about Philando Castile or Eric Garner. Walter Scott, the list goes on and on. I'm trying to do the counterfactual exercise in my head of thinking if there had been videos of none of these, how much of all of this would have happened and not happened, how much of this conversation would still have taken place and would not have taken place. And it's hard to imagine the world looking the way that it does now without the, you know, either the emotional resonance of people just seeing things and sort of living in that moment, living in that experience for themselves, or just having it as an evidentiary, right, as just a strictly clinical matter to rebut the narratives of law enforcement. Between the value of those two,

I think it's almost impossible to overstate. Well, Jamiles, thank you so much again for taking the time and being so generous with it. We always appreciate talking to you. Thank you. Yeah, it's been a privilege. Thanks for having me. That was Jamal Zalardi of The Marshall Project talking about the Derek Chauvin trial and what's next for American policing. And that's the latest for now. It's Thursday, WOD Squad, and for today's Tim Check, we're going twice as high as a butterfly in the sky. Reading Rainbow's own LeVar Burton has been announced as a guest host on this season of Jeopardy!

after hundreds of thousands of fans signed a petition calling on the show's producers to hand him the reins. Burton also starred in Roots as Kunta Kinte and Star Trek The Next Generation. He won 13 Emmys and just seems like the perfect guy to ask high-pressure questions about ancient Mesopotamia. There's still no word on who will host permanently when the show begins its next season.

So Giddy, what's your reaction to Burton on Jeopardy? What is this is amazing. Very corny. I promise I'll do it again. I appreciate it. I think it's great. I mean, for one thing, great petition. Actually, like a useful use of the Internet for once.

Totally. And Burton is like, yeah, I mean, synonymous sort of with like when we grew up, and in a way like Jeopardy also was too, and I think it's a perfect fit. And I really do think of the people that they've had so far, he

will almost certainly be like most deserving of taking it over full time. Like, who else is a person that is like a purveyor of knowledge, if not the host of Reading Rainbow? It seems perfect. Right, exactly. I mean, you know, A-Rod,

the other A-Rod, Aaron Rodgers, was fine. You know, he was fine. But that's not what the job is. You know, you got to read with a certain level of condescension while also like having a bit of gravitas yourself. And I feel like,

you know, Alex Trebek had that the continuing tradition would dictate that it's got to be LeVar. Yeah. So you're feeling good about this. You like this? Totally. I think that LeVar Burton has done so much for every culture. He's the best. He I don't know if you've seen him on Community, but he's great as himself, accidentally terrorizing Donald Glover's character, Troy. It's a very, very funny episode. Um, but I, I just, I love him. I think he's so wonderful. And I think that, you know, the fans are right. The hundreds of thousands of people who came out of the woodwork to be like, let us have a better jeopardy. I think they did the right thing. Yeah. It's going to be awesome. Um, I mean, we were joking about ancient Mesopotamia, but honestly, who better to put you at some sort of ease than LeVar Burton?

He's great. He has a great presence, and he's just a calming guy. He just seems like a beautiful soul. Absolutely. Since we were children, he's been there for us, and I think that we should be there for him now and watch him on Jeopardy, so everybody tune in. But just like that, we have checked our temps.

Stay safe. Go twice as high, you know? be like that butterfly in the sky. And we'll be back after some ads. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. with President Vladimir Putin's annual State of the Nation speech, in which he said countries that threaten Russia's security will, quote, regret their deeds. Yikes. He notably did not mention anything about Russia's increased military presence at the Ukrainian border, but that's a headline for another day. Navalny is currently on a hunger strike and was recently transferred to a prison hospital as his physical condition continues to decline. Human rights experts at the UN are calling for his immediate medical evacuation from jail. Manhattan will no longer prosecute prostitution

and unlicensed massage cases. District Attorney Cyrus Vance made the announcement yesterday while also dismissing thousands of prostitution and sex work related cases dating back to the 70s. Manhattan joins a tide of cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia aiming to change the criminal justice system's approach to sex work, which has disproportionately criminalized LGBTQ people of color. Advocates for sex workers say the decision is a step in the right direction, but also point out that the DA's office will continue to prosecute customers of prostitution. They argue that this will continue to push sex work and sex workers underground into less safe environments as compared with true decriminalization, which would make things safer for everyone involved. Biden wants us all to do a Pfizer skip day. He announced a tax credit yesterday that will let small businesses and nonprofits fully offset costs they incur by giving employees paid time

off to get vaccinated. The tax credit covers time off between April 1st and September 30th. Employers will be able to claim up to $500 per day per employee, including days needed to recover from vaccine side effects. So if your reaction to Moderna is a medical-grade desire to ditch work and go surfing, feel free to follow that instinct, my friends. Also in Biden news, today he's expected to announce the U.S.'s intention to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. This pledge will coincide with a virtual climate summit

he's hosting with 40 other world leaders, which is seen as the country's chance to finally reassert itself as being anti-burnt planet. Yes, brave, very brave of us to assert that. This week, Apple shocked the world by inventing Tile, but Apple, their device AirTag debuted on Tuesday, and it's essentially a tracker that can be attached to wallets, keys,

and boyfriend's cars, so their locations can be viewed on Apple devices. I'm going to put it on any man who will then be my boyfriend. Tile has been making the same kind of product since 2012, and it published a statement that accused Apple of using anti-competitive tactics. Specifically, Tile said Apple gave itself an unfair advantage by integrating the AirTag functionality into the Find My app, which is pre-installed on Apple devices. Tile testified to Congress about Apple and Google yesterday, along with representatives for apps like Spotify and Tinder. The hearings focused on the control that Apple and Google exert over developers through their app stores and the commissions they charge for app downloads. Reminder that you can boycott technology by listening to WOD on an old seashell.

Yeah, and look freaking awesome while doing it. That's right. No one's got that cool new phone. That's you out here with the seashell. And those are the headlines. One more thing before we go, in case you missed it, Pod Save the People co-host Kaya Henderson sat down with Oscar-nominated director Shaka King to talk about his film, Judas and the Black Messiah. To listen, check out the episode, Pat Yourself on the Back in the Pod Save the People feed on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, love Earth, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just the history of ancient Mesopotamia

like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And have fun hugging trees today. You know, hugs are back, but mostly for trees. Yeah, we're going slowly here. You know, take your time. Work your way up. Yeah, we're going slowly here. You know, take your time. Work your way up. Yeah. What a Day is a production 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 executive producers are Leo Duran, Akilah Hughes, and me. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.