Cops, a plea: police reform in America

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Today, George Floyd will be laid to rest. His death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer has served as a catalyst for protest far beyond where he lived. Looking back, our obituary's editor reflects on how a big Texas man with an even bigger smile found plenty of work in Minnesota and on how he ultimately found himself beneath a policeman's knee. Looking forward, though Mr. Floyd's legacy is yet to be written, his death may at last be the force for change in policing that thousands upon thousands of deaths before his have not.

George Floyd, President George Floyd, President it.

Might not even have made the Minneapolis local another black man killed in police custody, a scenario that plays out week after week across the country. But the death of George Floyd 15 days ago tapped into an almighty fury. First locally, then nationally, fires burned and.

Protesters took to the streets. Now, internationally, thousands of protesters across the world have shown their support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

As anger has given way to Grieving in America. Street protests are subsiding and talk has turned from the endless cycle of symptoms to treating the disease. Reforming the police Yesterday, Democrats in the House of Representatives put forward a sweeping new bill to start those reforms to crack down on police brutality and to keep tabs on officers who resort to unnecessary force.

The martyrdom of George Floyd gave American experience a moment of national anguish as we grieve for the black Americans killed by police brutality. Today, this moment of national anguish is being transformed into a movement of national action.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi read the names of black men and women who in recent years have died at the hands of police.

Arman, Arbery, Botham, John Terrence, Crutcher, Philando Castle.

She said Congress would not relent until the bill is made into law. It won't be easy. As legislators have started down the road of root and branch reform, another approach is gaining attention.

Our commitment is to do what's necessary.

To keep every single member of our.

Community safe and to tell the truth.

That the Minneapolis police are not doing that.

Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender has committed to dismantling the city's police force altogether. That kind of radical change has become a national talking point. Rallying cry it's also sharply politicized the discussions of reform.

There won't be defunding, there won't be dismantling of our police, and there's not going to be any disbanding of our police.

It's hard to imagine in this moment of nationwide focus on injustice that there won't be some kind of change. But how much? And will it be enough?

There are a number of problems with American policing. One of the biggest ones writ large is the fact that so few officers face consequences for malfeasance. Between 2013 and 2019, police killed around 7,600 some Americans and only 25 officers were convicted.

John Fasman is our Washington correspondent.

Another thing that needs fixing is the sort of systemic racism that many people see in a lot of criminal justice outcomes. From the number of African Americans arrested compared to the number of whites arrested, to the fact that African Americans are likelier to be convicted and serve longer sentences than white Americans, to the fact that they make up about a third of the American prison population, but only 13% of America writ large, there is a lack of accountability when it comes to policing. Most police do not have civilian oversight boards and. And those boards that exist are often quite toothless. And so there's a sense that for a long time police have sort of been above the Law, and I'm sure they wouldn't put it that way. But the story they've always told is that be careful when you try to regulate police, because policing is really about institution and discretion and making split second decisions. And officers can't do their job if someone is looking over their shoulders. And what that has led to is a country in which police officers really face no consequences, who, when they do things that would land other people in jail.

So a bill was introduced yesterday by Democrats in Congress that purports to address some of these issues. What exactly is it trying to do?

So the bill is interesting. Policing in America is local. By and large, there are 65 federal police agencies, but there are 18,000 law enforcement agencies across America and most of them are local. And so I think that's one reason why the federal government has been hesitant to pass legislation regarding police reform. But I think the events we've seen over the past two weeks have impelled Democrats and a lot of Republicans too, to really get off the sidelines and overcome that hesitancy. So the bill does a number of things. It creates a national registry for misconduct complaints so that an agency will know whether an officer they're thinking of hiring has been sacked from another agency. It works toward establishing federal standards for policing the same way there are standards for firefighting. It grants subpoena power to the Justice Department Civil Rights Division for pattern and practice investigations of police departments that may be violating their citizens constitutional rights. It limits the transfer of military weaponry to local police. It requires federal police officers to wear body cams. And it bans choke holds in federal cases. It bans what are called no knock warrants in federal drug cases. That's when officers kick open the door without identifying themselves. And it boosts the federal use of force standard from reasonableness, which is where it is now. Which means that an officer's use of force just has to be considered reasonable, whatever that means, to only allowing it when it's essential to prevent death or serious bodily injury.

And so does this bill represent really transformative, profound change or is this messing around at the margins to your mind?

Well, if it passed in its current form, parts of it would represent really profound change. I think boosting the use of force standards from just whatever a police officer can argue is reasonable to allowing it only when essential to prevent death or serious bodily harm is a really important step. I think that creating this national registry, although it doesn't sound like much, would go a long way toward keeping bad officers from getting rehired somewhere else. I think improving data collection, which the bill also does, would help police work to ameliorate practices that have a disparate impact on non white people by looking at the data rather than by centering a discussion of institutional racism in officers character, which is what often gets those conversations bogged down and off track. And so I think that if this bill passed in its current form, it would represent a profound and welcome change for American policing.

And do you think it will pass?

Given the Democrats have a majority in the House, it will probably pass the House. Whether it comes to the floor in the Senate depends entirely on Mitch McConnell and on Donald Trump. I think the chances of that happening, unfortunately are probably pretty slim. But this is the sort of thing that if Democrats retake the White House and the Senate, this is gonna be a pretty easy thing to pass in the next administration.

And what do you think of the reforms that would be transformative that aren't in this bill?

Well, one huge stumbling block to reform has always been, and unfortunately probably will be again, police unions. These unions benefit from being in a really unusual position politically. Republicans are generally reluctant to criticize law enforcement and Democrats don't want to take on unions. So these unions have tremendous power. And what they have done is when they negotiate police contracts, which they do every two or three years, discipline generally is part of that conversation. So they can do things like, you know, in Chicago, people who are investigating a police shooting can't talk to police for 24 hours, which gives the cops involved with the shooting time to coordinate their stories. Now, exactly how you confront police unions is a difficult question and probably not a federal one. So I think that's one reason why it's not in. But when I think about this bill's passage and this bill's effect, I've got to think about also the stumbling blocks that unions may toss up. And that's one thing this bill hasn't taken account of.

Well, one thing that the bill doesn't mention, that you don't mention that is certainly more and more part of the conversation is this. Defund the police movement.

Defunding and abolition are two things that sort of get lumped together as radical solutions. And they sound radical, but the truth is they're usually closer in practice to something like diverting some share of police budget to non criminal justice interventions and really rethinking how police departments operate. There is a great example of abolition that happened in Camden, New Jersey, which for years was one of America's most violent cities and had a police department that really didn't work very well. And so in 2012, Camden disbanded its police department, fired everyone, and reconstituted it as a countywide police force that patrols in the city of Camden. It hired back most of the officers that it got rid of, but it reconstituted the department with a real focus on accountability, community relations, training. They have, by all accounts, one of the best use of force policies in the country. I've come here to Camden to do.

Something that might have been unthinkable just.

A few years ago, and that's to hold you up as a symbol of.

Promise for the Navy.

And what that has done is, over the past six years, murders in Camden have fallen by more than two thirds, and use of force complaints have fallen from 64 in 2013 to just three last year. So when people talk about abolition, they're not talking about anarchy or getting rid of police departments entirely. They're talking about getting rid of current structures that aren't working and replacing them with ones that do.

But those kind of anarchic associations and so on have made that a really pointed political question, a real political hot potato.

It absolutely has. And I think you may have seen the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Fry, who was really quite good and sort of on the protester side until now, declared during a protest that he didn't want to abolish the police department. And he was jeered off the stage and left in what was really a grim sort of walk of shame.

Shame, shame, shame, shame.

I think the risk for Democrats is that the talk of abolition defunding sounds very scary, and Republicans are going to try to hang it around their necks. They've already tried it. Joe Biden has already come out and said that he doesn't support abolishing the police. He doesn't support defunding the police. You're gonna see more and more of that from Democrats in the days ahead.

But a lot of these reforms, even though the seemingly fairly radical ones don't directly tackle that question around institutional racism, which many people think is the fundamental flaw in America's policing system. Do you think any of this gets at that?

Well, that's a great question. I think that institutional racism in policing is fundamentally a question of practices and behaviors, not character. Which is not to say that there are no racist police officers. It's also not to say that every police officer is a racist. It is to say that the way American policing works has a disparate impact on Americans of color. And so the way to resolve that, I think, is not to say officers must undergo implicit bias training. Officers must not be racist. Officers cannot be racist. All of which may be true, but what this bill does is it frames racist practices with an emphasis on practice, not on the racism. So if you get better data collection, you will know which officers are stopping a disproportionate number of people of color, and you can move them into positions where they don't have the power to do that. You will know what the relationship is between the share of people stopped and the share of people arrested. If your police officers are engaging in what amounts to unconstitutional racial profiling, whether they intend to or mean to or not, or whether it's just the way department practice works, they can stop doing that. So you're right that the bill does not mention institutional racism directly, but it addresses the practices that help institutional racism flourish and thrive.

And so without prejudice, as it were, to this particular bill, then do you think we're at a time, a turning point in American policing? Is this the time when this issue that has come up so many times over the years, will it be addressed?

I have to say, as someone who has written about police and these issues for more than two decades now, I really hope so. Americans took to the streets six years ago protesting roughly the same thing. Don't shoot. Who are we? Mike Brown. Who are we? Mike Brown. They shouldn't have to come out in another six years. The killing of George Floyd was so horrific to watch. It was so unarguably wrong that I think people, I would hope people understand that there is something in the system that needs to change. It needs to change now, and it needs to change quickly.

And you think this is the time or you're just hoping really hard?

I think that there is a critical mass of people of all races that understand there's a problem. And that wasn't the case even as recently as 2014. You didn't have a plurality of white people supporting Black Lives Matter movement, for instance. You do now. My fear is that Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump will block this bill from becoming law. And you will have conservative states where reform doesn't get passed. And you really risk letting this problem fester in a lot of places. I mean, I think in a lot of Democrat led states and cities, you'll see ameliorative action taken. But I worry if this federal bill doesn't take place, you could see some really ugly repeats of the current scene in a few years.

John, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure, Jason, anytime.

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Today, George Floyd will be buried in better times. On a Tuesday, he'd have been at one of his three jobs working on the door at El Nuevo Rodeo, billed as the hottest Mexican venue in Minneapolis.

He was there on Tuesdays because that was often the urban music night, and it was good to have a big genial presence like his on the welcoming everybody and not intimidating the crowd.

Ann Rowe is our obituaries editor.

He had come to Minneapolis from Houston several years before, really, because he wanted to get a job. He'd meant just to come north, maybe get enough money to do a bit more for the women and children in his life still in Houston, and he found that jobs were very plentiful there. The main job George Floyd did in the city was to be a bouncer at the Conga Latin Bistro, and there he was a great favorite with all the regulars. They would love to come up and hug him. Indeed, he would get quite cross with them, apparently, if they didn't give him a hug, and he would eat meals with them, drive them home if they were drunk. He also got a new girlfriend, and life was certainly looking up as a result of that. He thought that he would probably stay in Minnesota. He was torn because Houston was still home and he'd been brought up there. After all, he'd been brought up in the Third Ward, which is almost entirely black. It's a very impoverished part of town. There's a lot of shotgun shacks and pretty rundown public housing. It's got quite a distinguished role, if you like, in black history. It includes the Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church where Martin Luther King preached, and there was quite a good high school where George Floyd actually went and shone at sports. He was especially good at basketball, and he was good at football, good enough that he got into the team which made the final of the Texas State Championship. He got into the Houston music scene, too. When he was there, he was in a backing band for a famous Houston dj, legendary figure called DJ Screw. And things could have been good there, but he was in a very tough neighborhood, and he seems to have got drawn into crime. He got his first conviction for theft with a firearm in the 1980s. From then on, there were quite a string of arrests for low level drug offenses, and he just seemed not to quite be able to get on the straight path. He wasn't cut out for crime, particularly. He did say in a video that he made later that when he got hold of a gun, and so deploying a gun made his knees shake. But actually, in 2007, he got involved in his worst crime of all when he and five other men broke into a woman's house and he held a gun to her stomach and then looked for drugs and money. It got him five years in prison. When he got out of jail, he made as a resolution that he would start a completely new life. He was a member of a church called Resurrection Houston, and he became very active in there. He organized basketball games, games and barbecues and Bible studies. And particularly he was a figure when they did mass baptisms. They would go into the project with the big baptism tub. And he was in charge of pushing in this great big tub, filling it up with water. So he was doing his best to turn his life around before he went to Minneapolis. And his calls to his friends then were full of hopes for the future. But by this spring, things had got a lot cloudier. The pandemic struck him rather hard because both the restaurants where he was working were closed down, obviously because of the virus. His friends said he was often on the phone to them asking what he ought to do. Things were not yet desperate, but then they seemed to take a difficult turn, and he found himself in trouble with the police again. And that was on the fatal night, the night of 25th May. On that evening, he went with two acquaintances to cup Foods to buy cigarettes. And there one of them tried to pay with a $20 bill, which the store clerk thought looked counterfeit. And they went out of the store, and then George Floyd came back in with same $20 bill. And we still don't know. No one seems to know whether it was actually counterfeit. But the counterclock called 91 1, and the squad cars all turned up, and they got a hold of George Floyd, who'd actually gone out of the store at that stage, and they tried to handcuff him. At first he resisted arrest. They managed to. To get the cuffs on him and then he became very calm and quiet. They tried to hustle him into the squad car. He said he was claustrophobic, didn't want to get in there. And at that point he was shoved to the ground and an officer sat on his neck, pressed on his neck for almost nine minutes. And meanwhile he was crying out for. For his mother and crying out that he couldn't breathe and that his neck hurt, his stomach hurt. But the officer showed no compassion whatever until he was quite unconscious, until he was quite limp. In fact, he was limp three minutes before the officer got up. And the terrible irony in this whole story is that the officer who did this outrageous and horrible thing, Derek Chauvin, had been working with him, whether he knew it or not, at the El Nuevo Rodeo on Tuesday nights.

Anne Rowe on George Floyd, who's died aged 46. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. See you back here tomorrow.