Criminal proceedings: America’s spike in violence

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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. Sometimes when your first coup d' etat doesn't work out as planned, you just have to carry out another we take a look at the man behind a messy transition in Mali and what the tumult means for the regional fight against a jihadist insurgency. And for a long time, the Japanese genre of animation called anime was beloved mostly inside the country. But given a global halt to live action filming and the increasing reach of streaming services, anime is now finding far wider audiences. First up, though, After the protests over racism and policing last summer, defund the police became a rallying cry for activists.

Who were pushing for reform our law enforcement and influence. At this moment, we need to be.

Militant and strong and demanding that we defund the police. Because there is minimum asks, we're defunding the NYPD budget by at least $1 billion.

Several cities and states such as Iowa and Colorado, succeeded in passing criminal justice reform, such as banning choke holds.

This bill is a loud and resounding signal from the people of Iowa and its leaders that we are ready and willing to act.

Juan, I am so proud to sign this bill. Now. This legislation specifically contains landmark evidence based.

Reforms that not only this legislation passed with unanimous bipartisan support.

But now violent crime is up across America and the funding and policies of law enforcement agencies are becoming a flashpoint for voters and for politicians.

Well, the increase in violent crime and especially murders is really quite striking, particularly considering the 30 year decline that preceded it.

John Fasman is the Economist's US digital editor.

From 2019 to 2020, homicides were up 33% across the United States. And I reported this story from Atlanta. And there as of mid May, murders were up almost 60% compared to 2020. Also in Atlanta, you have a rise in the number of rapes, of aggravated assaults, of thefts from and of cars. And it's really got people on edge.

And what's the hypothesis for the rise in crime more broadly?

There's no firm proof of what has caused the recent spike. It seems to me that it probably has something to do with the pandemic, which of course closed schools and other institutions. That left a lot of young people with a lot of time in their hands. A lot of people faced economic stresses. There were also the Black Lives Matter protests. And in that case, you had police who might otherwise have been detailed to investigative duties or patrolling high crime neighborhoods. They were dealing with protests. You also had this massive nationwide spike in gun sales. And often, particularly in urban violence, you see shootings sort of go in cycles or spurts. It's worth bearing in mind though, that even with the spike in crime from last year, murders are nowhere near the levels they were at in the early 1990s. So looking at this on a long trend, it's a spike and it needs to be dealt with. But it's not as though we're going back to the battle days of the 80s and 90s.

And so what have the responses by authorities in the round been to these rises in crime?

Well, there have been a few responses. We've seen cities reconsider their stances on defunding the police that they expressed last year. So Minneapolis, where a veto proof majority of the city council voted last year to disband the police department. They're gonna spend $6.4 million to hire new officers. Brandon Scott, who's the mayor of Baltimore, when he was on the city Council, he pushed a measure to cut the police budget by about $22 million. Since taking office as Mayor, he's proposed increasing it by 28 million. In Oakland, California, which has seen a really tragic rise in anti Asian hate crimes. They're going to restore Most of the $29 million that they cut last year. So I don't want to say that there's been a wholesale backing off of reform, but there's been a realization that to deal with a short time crime spike, cities are probably going to need more police officers, more visible police officers, and more policing than a lot of activists would ideally like.

Well, exactly. I mean, how are people on the ground feeling about those sort of u turns on police reform?

Well, crime has a political salience that it really hasn't had since the 1990s. Democrats in New York are choosing a mayoral candidate in just a few weeks. And for liberal Democrats in New York, crime is the second most important issue behind only Covid. And it's also essential that we stop this spike, an increase in crime. One of the frontrunners is Eric Adams, who's a former police officer who has recently defended the use of stop and frisk tactics and is running a real public safety campaign. If you have a police department where you said you can't stop and question that is not a responsible form of policing. So Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was the mayor of Atlanta and was widely touted as the rising star, she's not going to seek a second term, it seems to me, at least in part because of the crime problem in her city. Chase Aboudan, who is the district attorney of San Francisco, is facing a recall campaign in part because of the perception that he's been soft on crime. I hasten to add, it's not as though voters are only electing public safety, crime minded candidates. You also saw Larry Krasner, who is a strongly reformist DA in Philly. We must invest like we never have.

Invested before in a city that never has invested properly in prevention.

He just trounced his opponent, who is backed by police unions. You saw a progressive mayor win in Pittsburgh on a reformist platform. Tishara Jones, who just took over as mayor of St. Louis, is also a reformist. So you're seeing reformist candidates still win, but you're also seeing voters more concerned and probably more worried about crime than they have been in the past decades.

Where does all that fit on the Republican Democrat split, though dealing with crime has always been a divisive issue between the parties.

It has. Republicans love casting Democrats as being soft on crime. You see that most strongly in Georgia where Brian Kemp, who's the Republican Governor running for reelection, he's made Atlanta crime the center of his campaign. Radical movements like the defund the police movement seek to vilify the men and women who leave their families every day and put their lives on the line.

To protect all Georgians.

You've also seen other states propose measures that punish cities that decide to cut their law enforcement budgets. Texas has actually passed a bill allowing them to cut off all state funds to cities that slash police budgets. So one aspect of pitting Republican against Democrat is not just a straight partisan conflict. It's also a way of pitting, in governance and policy terms, conservative states against the liberal cities within those states.

So in light of all this, how to save the gains that had been made in police reform at a time when crime is going up and people have maybe less appetite for less policing.

I think it's worth disentangling two separate strands here. One of them is the push for structural police reforms in the wake of George Floyd's murder. And I think that is still going forward. There's still an appetite to ban chokeholds and to require some measure of. Of civilian oversight that wasn't there before and to crack down on qualified immunity. I think what is mercifully dead and gone is the phrase defund the police. This is certainly borne out in my reporting from high crime communities in Minneapolis and St. Louis and other places. People in those communities don't want less police. They want more accountable police. And I think they probably want more present police a lot of the time. We really need to restore trust between the police and the communities that they police. And so we need a move toward community policing. You need police out on streets, not arresting people, but getting to know neighborhoods, getting to know the people who they're supposed to protect. I think what everybody really wants to avoid is a return to mass incarceration. Remember, the move away from mass incarceration in the past decade in the 2010s was in both Republican and Democratic states. And what really led it in Republican states was the awareness that it's just incredibly expensive to, to lock up huge numbers of people.

As much as it's been an albatross, I suppose the defund the police movement was not just about cutting off the taps, the money to police, but also redirecting it to other kinds of programs. What do you make of the prospects for those?

It's just true that at a time of high crime, Americans tend to reflexively look toward police and prisons because those are the institutions that we've always turned to to deal with crime. But those aren't the only institutions that can effectively reduce violence. There's a wealth of evidence that shows that drug treatment programs, anti violence nonprofits even, there's some evidence that the Philadelphia Horticultural Society, by reclaiming abandoned buildings, by planting trees and flowers and hiring young people to do it, that that also has a measurable effect on violence in those neighborhoods. So reducing violence isn't just the job of the police we but it really is the job of the police and these other institutions. So I think people with both reflexively pro police views and people who might otherwise support defunding the police have to realize that the other side has a point. And if we're going to cut down on violence in American cities, there's a role for both police and non police institutions. That said, I expect things to get worse before they get better. Murders usually rise in the summer and it's early June.

John, thank you very much for your time.

Jason, always a pleasure.

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Assimi Goita was sworn in as the president of Mali yesterday. Colonel Goita led a coup in the West African country two weeks ago. It was the second time in nine months he's overthrown the government. The African Union has suspended Mali's membership and threatened sanctions. France has paused its military support. Its soldiers have been battling Islamist extremists alongside thousands of United nations troops. This second defenestration dims hopes that the country will get a stable civilian leadership anytime soon. And it threatens the security of the wider Sahel region.

Last summer there were prolonged protests against the government of the then president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. And that was one of the causes for Goitre's first coup.

Kenley Salmon is an Africa correspondent for the Economist.

And then after that coup. Eventually, two men, Barn du and Mokdo 1, were appointed President and prime minister respectively, of a transitional government. And the promise was elections were going to be held within 18 months, which would have been February of next year. But then just two weeks ago, Colonel Goita stripped them of their powers, detained them and forced them to resign.

And what's Colonel Gowita's justification for essentially mounting another coup?

Mr. Goite now claims that Endor and Oan had mishandled the transition. He says as well they didn't respect the transitional charter and they didn't consult him about a cabinet reshuffle. That's certainly contested. But of course, removing them at the point of the gun, as Mr. Goiter did, was certainly in breach of the transitional charter. The military, it's worth pointing out, had actually maintained significant power in the transitional government. Colonel Goita himself was the vice president. But when the country's main train union went on strike in May, there was a lot of pressure on that transitional government. And so the president and the prime minister announced that they would name a new cabinet. But when they did so, two of the coup leaders themselves were replaced with other military men. And that alone seemed enough for Mr. Goiter to once again step in and stage another coup.

So certainly before the last coup, there were calls for change, and the change didn't seem unwelcome. What about this time around?

Well, that's right. Last time around, there was certainly some degree of welcome for the coup, particularly from the street protesters who'd been calling for the then president to step down. You know, they hoped that the army would clean up politics and hand back to civilians. This time. It's hard to say for sure, but there's certainly less enthusiasm than last time round. There had been frustration that the army in the intervening months had been dominating more and more the state, and not just the government, but actually spreading their influence into other parts of the state, including appointing military doctors to head major hospitals and things like that. So I think there's more concern this time around with what's happened.

And what about outside Mali? What's the regional response been?

Well, the African Union has suspended Mali's membership. They've also threatened sanctions, but so far not imposed them. The African Union's actually meant to have a no coup policy, but the soldiers in Mali may have had a little more sense of impunity because the Afro Union made a pretty limp response to a couple earlier this year in nearby Chad. And then Ecowas, which is a big player as the regional bloc, also responded fairly. Weakly, it did suspend Mali, but didn't impose sanctions either, even though it did impose sanctions over form after the August coup. And in fact, they seem to have essentially accepted the presidency of Colonel Goitar for the interim period.

Why haven't those regional bodies flexed their muscles more?

Well, I think there's two factors at play here. On the one hand, those blocs are worried about the instability and jihadist threat from places like Mali, and they perhaps hope that military men running the place for a while might deal with that better. And then, of course, these blocs are themselves made up of other presidents and other countries, and not all of them necessarily want too much scrutiny of what they're up to in their own countries either. And so there's a less appetite for tough measures, perhaps because of that.

And what about more widely still, what's the broader international response been?

Well, Western countries have threatened sanctions. America suspended security aid. The World bank has suspended its payments into the country. Mali receives quite a lot of military support from several Western powers. The European Union has a large training mission in Mali. There are about 13,000 UN peacekeepers patrolling in Mali. And most significantly of all, France has operations across the Sahela region of Africa to combat jihadists. President Emmanuel Macron of France has called this coup d' etat within a coup d'. Etat. France initially said this latest coup would not affect its security operations, but last week they announced that they would in fact suspend cooperation with Malian military forces. In practice, this may mean that French forces largely do not leave their bases, though airstrikes are likely to continue. And it's notable that France didn't take this step in response to the last coup. So there's a sense that they are running out of patience with what's happening in Mali. And perhaps some have also suggested this also expresses a concern from France about a growing role for more conservative Muslim voices in the new government. And France wanted to signal its displeasure with that.

So, about that region wide jihadist threat, what does all this mean for Mali's place in fighting it?

The chaos and the political machinations in Bamako are really only likely to benefit the jihadists, particularly a group, jnm, which has close links to Al Qaeda and operates across much of the region. In a previous Coup Back in 2012, separatists and jihadists actually swept towards Bamako, and it was that threat that prompted France to intervene the following year. France has said that it won't resume its assistance in holding back those jihadists until it receives guarantees from the coup's leader of a return to civilian rule in February 2022, the date for the.

Transitional government from the first coup. I mean, what does that timeline look like now?

Outsiders, including France, are clearly pushing heavily for that date to be respected, and Colonel Goiter himself initially claimed that those elections would go ahead in February. But it is certainly hard to believe a man who staged two coups in nine months and already at his swearing in yesterday as president, where he was dressed in full military regalia, he instead spoke of those elections happening in the course of next year.

This new situation offers us the opportunity to put the process of transition back in the direction desired by the people.

And his spokesperson has also suggested that elections are far from certain in February. So I think despite these claims of a transition that's going to end with elections in February 2022, those elections are seeming more unlikely. And even if they do go ahead, the military's role both in running them and possibly having major military figures standing in them, that's surely becoming more likely.

Thanks very much for joining us, Kinley.

Thank you.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondents, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show notes.

It's.

Time to Duel Whether it's the cute little critters of Pokemon or the frenetic fighting of Dragon Ball Z, anime has long influenced culture beyond its native Japan. The animation style is known for its hyper expressive faces and melodramatic storylines, but until recently, anime has mostly been watched outside of Japan by a small and dedicated group of fans, although it was.

Considered a pastime for just the ultra nerdy.

Miki Kobayashi writes about Japan for the Economist.

Japanese animation has rocketed from subculture into.

The mainstream, and just how big has the industry become in 2019?

Anime related revenues from things like TV streaming and gaming rights, live entertainment, cinema tickets and merchandise sales hit around 2.5 trillion yen, or $24 billion. And just under half of the revenue came from overseas, where the anime market has almost quintupled in size over the past decade. And the new film called Demon Mugen Train, which is basically about a young boy who battles bands of demons. This new film rigged in 1940 million during its opening weekend, which broke America's box office record for a foreign language debut.

Not bad numbers for a form of entertainment that was once extremely niche.

Yeah, so most of its history, anime was considered a niche industry outside of Japan. So there were popular series like astro boy from 1963 that sparked the first anime Boom.

There you go, Astro Boy.

And of course, there were other early hits like Doraemon, which is about a big blue robot cat, and Gundam, which is another popular series about big fighting robots. But anime titles were mostly watched by otaku geeky fans of anime and manga. And by manga, I mean the comic versions of anime. But these anime titles, they've crossed over into the mainstream. And a lot of that was driven by more people watching anime content and watching streaming services during the Pandemic.

Just because the streaming services gave them a wider audience.

Yeah. So Netflix and its rivals like Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, they've exposed the global audience to an extensive library of Japanese anime that has existed for decades. And the Pandemic also put many live action shoots on ice, which further increased the appeal of anime to streaming services. So, for example, Netflix says that over 100 million households around the world streamed at least one of its anime titles in 2020, which is 50% more than the year before in 2019. And another reason streaming services are increasingly picking anime films and TV series is that they're relatively cheap to make. So it costs somewhere around $275,000 to a little less than 460,000 per episode to make, rather than the $13 million that is supposedly required to make one episode of the Crown.

So with the supply of this stuff going up, evidently the demand as well, what's the future for anime look like?

Now Netflix is creating its own animated content, as well as buying the distribution rights to classics like the films by the renowned studio Ghibli. And Sony also offered to buy Crunchyroll, which is an anime streaming site with about 100 million registered fans, for $1.2 billion. But of course, there are obstacles to further growth for the anime industry, and one of these obstacles is talent. So the anime industry has historically struggled to nurture animators who are paid extremely low wages to create anime content. And many of these animators move on to other industries for better pay, better opportunities, and so forth. And so the dwindling domestic talent pool could have trouble meeting rising demand from overseas.

And for the people who are not yet anime fans, where to begin? What's your recommendation for a way into this genre?

My all time favorite has been, and I think forever will be my neighbor Totoro, which is a classic by Studio Ghibli. I recently discovered on Netflix a new series called the Way of the Househusband, which is about a retired yakuza, a group of Japanese mafia. And, you know, this former retired yakuza becomes a house husband. It's extremely entertaining and very binge worthy.

Miki, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and we'll see you back here tomorrow.