December 8, 2025 • 42 mins
Here’s something you might not realize: Progressives focus on the harms of over-policing, but Black Americans are more worried about under-policing.
While progressives shout “abolish the police,” most Black Americans don’t want that at all. In fact, they overwhelmingly want *more* effective policing, not less.
There's a lot to unpack.
Click here to support Marie's work and catch up on all the new members-only episodes, which are released weekly.
While progressives shout “abolish the police,” most Black Americans don’t want that at all. In fact, they overwhelmingly want *more* effective policing, not less.
There's a lot to unpack.
Click here to support Marie's work and catch up on all the new members-only episodes, which are released weekly.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
While progressives out of concern for black people are saying
we need to reduce police presence, Black Americans themselves are
saying that they want to see increased police presence. And
that's why I think this whole thing is so complicated. Hello,
(00:22):
and welcome back. I'm your host, Murray Beacham, and on
today's episode, I will walk you through why I cannot
make up my mind about policing. I have been a
vocal critic of the police system, the mass incarceration system,
injustices like police brutality, the death penalty, racial bias and sentencing,
(00:45):
and on and on and on. I think that our
justice system is littered with injustice. And I'm not alone
in that belief. Many of you have come to that conclusion.
You've watched Thirteenth, you've read Just Mercy, maybe we even
read the New Jim Crow, and that probably isn't new
to you. I won't be dwelling on those facts forever
(01:05):
because I think you know them. I think you've read
up on them. I think you've been radicalized already. But
as I'm saying all of this, you're probably thinking, what
do you mean you can't make up your mind? Seems
pretty clearly bad. But here's the thing I wrestle with.
For me, it is a no brainer that policing and
the prison system are full of injustice and terrible practices,
(01:31):
policies prejudice, all of that. It's in desperate need of reform. However,
so many people who share my passion for the documentary Thirteenth,
the book Just Mercy, and the book The New Jim Crow,
and all of the messages that they carry about how
modern policing is so connected to this history of racism
(01:52):
in America. It seems like the solution that most of
this group of thinkers has arrived at is defunding the police, or,
in its most extreme form, abolishing the police altogether. And
that's where I depart. Now. Obviously, I'm not asking for
(02:12):
bloated police budgets and a lack of reform and more
of the same and prisons filling up. That's not what
I mean. But I guess I'm beating around the bush,
to be frank, to be direct, here's my gripe with policing.
Progressives in twenty twenty and the years that followed came
to the conclusion that police budgets need to be slashed
(02:33):
and police departments need to be abolished, but black people
feel very differently. The vast majority of Black people are
not in favor of abolishing the police or even defunding
the police. While progressives out of concern for black people
are saying we need to reduce police presence, Black Americans
(02:55):
themselves are saying that they want to see increased police presence.
While progressives are saying we need to deal with over policing.
Black Americans are more likely to say that we need
to deal with under policing. And that's why I think
this whole thing is so complicated. So let's get into it.
(03:16):
Like I said, I'm sure you're familiar with the argument
that policing and arrests and sentencing and parole is full
of prejudice and full of racism. So I'm not going
to spend forever on that. I've covered that in so
many previous episodes. I just want to give you the
bare bones of the argument. So you're fresh to many
people who are extremely critical of police and policing. They
(03:39):
see police as a descendant of just racist tactics. They
see policing itself as a descendant of slave patrols. This
is how the NAACP explained that point of view, the
origins of modern day policing can be traced back to
the slave patrol. The earliest formal slave patrol was created
(04:00):
in the early seventeen hundreds with one mission to establish
a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the
capacity to apprehend and return runaway slaves to their owners.
Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and
produce desired slave behavior. And so the NAACP takes this position.
(04:21):
Many other racial justice organizations take this position that you
have the slave patrol, and it has to evolve over
the years after the passage of the thirteenth Amendment and
after new policies are introduced, And in this line of thinking,
the slave patrol turned into malicious style groups think of
(04:42):
like neighborhood watch, but way more intense and way more armed.
And those malicious style groups became what we now think
of as police departments. And so in this telling of history,
police departments are at their very core in their essence,
undeniably a racist. In mention, policing is this racist thing
(05:03):
meant to maintain the racial hierarchy and a certain control
through force, through dominance. And I keep calling this a
point of view or a perspective because there are a
lot of academics and scholars who don't agree with this analysis.
They wouldn't say that policing has a direct descendant of
slave patrols. They would say that policing is the natural
(05:24):
thing that's happened in just about every country in the
world to establish and maintain order. If we say that
police departments are just slave patrols, you know, a few
hundred years down the road, what about in all the
countries that have police that never had slave patrols, or
maybe even didn't operate on the system of slavery to
begin with, How did they arrive at policing? Was it racism?
(05:47):
In their case? Many say no, policing is just a
public good, or maybe more accurately, a public necessity. And
many of those people would admit the undeniable facts that
police has been carried out with prejudice and racism throughout
the history of the United States, but they would say
that racism is an issue that affects policing, not an
(06:08):
issue that is core to what policing itself is. I
just want to make that distinction really clear. It's not
that you either think policing involves racism and prejudice or
policing is perfect and police are flawless. In reality, the
two options are policing has been racist and it can't
not be racist, like it is inherently, unfixably racist because
(06:33):
of what it is. I'd say that's the more progressive take,
the abolish the police take. But then in the other camp,
you have people who have said police have always been
racist because people have always been racist, the system of
policing has always been racist, because all of our systems
in America have been racist. But they would describe it
more as like this parasite on policing or a sickness
(06:54):
on policing, or something that just like comes in and
corrupts policing, versus people who's say that we should abolish
the police, say, it's not a few bad apples, it's
the rotten bunch, it's the rotten roots. It's core to
what policing itself is. So those are kind of the
two views. There's also the perspective, this one's from Equal
(07:15):
Justice Initiative, that the death penalty is another example of
something that is a descendant of a very racist thing.
They make the case that the death penalty in America
is a direct descendant of lynching. They explained that in
the past, and I quote, racial terror lynchings gave way
to executions in response to criticism that torturing and killing
(07:36):
black people for cheering audiences was undermining America's image and
moral authority on the world stage. So they basically make
the case that racial terror lynchings were a part of
American culture. People would gather and watch them like there
were picnics. Hundreds of people would gather. Eji has a
whole photo archive of people taking photos with black people
(07:58):
as they were torturing them and before they'd lynch them.
And when you go through the archives, it is unbelievable
that these photos aren't doctored. And this is really real,
and this is something that was so shameless in white
American culture that they would be so bold as to
take all of these photos and leave them for future generations.
(08:19):
Lynching wasn't seen as something that they were ashamed to do,
or something that you did in the dark of night. No,
it was a public spectacle. And that is just how
gross and obvious and overstated hatred of black Americans was,
But then it was said that lynching and all of
this racial terror and racial violence was hurting America's image
(08:42):
as a good place full of good people. So they
changed the form of how lynchings worked to make it
more socially acceptable to do that. They shifted from hanging
people at these huge picnics as children and spectators looked
on and small smiled and cheered, to court ordered executions.
(09:04):
And in the early nineteen hundreds there was this flip
from lynchings being far more deaths than court ordered executions
to lynching started to decrease because court ordered executions were
a fine alternative way to get the job done. Now,
if you say, how could the death penalty be a
descendant of lynching, it's not ray specific. Anyone who commits
(09:25):
a terrible crime gets the death penalty. Well, when we
look to the mid nineteen hundreds, I'm talking nineteen fifty,
black Americans population in the South was about twenty percent,
but Black Americans were about seventy five percent of the
people executed. Then you also have the fact that the
states with the highest rates of lynching are to this
(09:46):
day the states with the most victims of the death penalty.
In nineteen seventy two, the Supreme Court even struck down
the death penalty because they said it looked too much
like vigilante justice and lynch law. That was when it
was proven to the Supreme Court that there's so much
racial bias in terms of who gets sentenced to death,
and it wasn't a matter of who commits the worst
(10:07):
crimes or the most violent crimes. Instead, it had everything
to do with race and poverty. If you were poor
and you couldn't afford a decent attorney, you were way
more likely to be sentenced to death, And if you
were black and in the South, you were way more
likely to be poor. Now I'm kind of getting carried away.
I didn't intend to talk about this part of the
(10:28):
conversation for this long, but that's just the thing. That's
my point. There is nothing I feel more strongly about
when it comes to my passion for racial justice and
equality than reform of the prison system. I could go
on and on about the War on drugs and how
that was this whole racially coded project to incarcerate more
(10:53):
black and brown people, but I bet you know about
that already, and the whole tough on crime rhetoric and
mandatory minimums, in the disparity in crack cocaine versus powder cocaine,
and how in the last like fifty sixty seventy years,
the prison population has skyrocketed in the US, And because
of mandatory minimums and so many people being incarcerated for
(11:16):
nonviolent drug offenses, the average age of prisoners is going
up and up and up because more people are being
sentenced to die in prison. It's not just this temporary
station before you return to society. Instead, it is a
permanent sentence to get very old and die in a
prison cell. And again, I'm always reading up on this
(11:40):
because I'm so convinced that progressives and conservatives could both
have different sensibilities but could share a passion for prison reform.
Conservatives are so concerned about the economy and taxes and spending,
and yet they advocate for increase spending on policing and
prison even though it's like in the billions and far
(12:01):
more than it's ever been. I feel like, by their
own values, this could become their top issue of like
what if we reform the prison system and what if
we realize that elderly people are not likely at all
to commit crimes, and by simply releasing the elderly from prison,
that would have very little risk for an increase in crime,
(12:22):
and it would save a whole lot of money for
tax payer dollars and blah blah blah. Why is that
not a conservative's talking point? I feel like they'd eat
that up. And then from progressives, we talk so much
about like racial equality and bias and privilege, and we're
thinking about it at the inner personal level. We're thinking
about it as we go to our jobs and we
have our friends and we attend our book clubs. But
(12:44):
if we care about racial justice, then I think the
domain we need to be most concerned with is the
prison system, because that is where the most gross and
horrific and permanent life changing injustices are happening, like the
death penalty, and it's racial bias. If there is truth
to this idea that it is a descendant of Lynch law,
(13:05):
then my goodness, we could do with a few less
seminars on privilege and a lot more lobbying and advocating
for changes to that. And even if we just accomplished
a little bit when it comes to mass incarceration, that
might have a greater impact than a whole lot of
things we do to be more anti racist in our
(13:27):
personal interactions and all that. To throw all of our
energy at the injustices happening in the mass incarceration system
would be, I think the most consequential thing we could do.
I hope you hear me clearly that this is not
an issue that I am indifferent about or even something
that I feel detached from. I feel so so strongly
(13:51):
about advocating for the most vulnerable, and that's why I'm
passionate about racial justice work and Equal Justice Initiative really
has opened my eyes to how maybe the most vulnerable
of the most vulnerable are they wrongly incarcerated? Are the
people who have been excessively sentenced? Are the people with
mental health issues who have been put behind bars? Or
(14:14):
the people who could never afford a decent attorney who
were put behind bars? Like talk about marginalization with real
lifelong consequences. I care about this stuff so much. I
just had to preface what I'm about to say next,
because I know it's going to sound wacky and surprising
to progressives who have only ever thought, yeah, we should
(14:35):
defund or abolish the police. I know that me pushing
back on that is going to sound like I'm the
cold hearted conservative who doesn't care about the black community
and the injustices being carried out by police for all time,
and that just couldn't be further from the truth. My
big thing is I want reform, so much reform, and
(14:56):
yet I think that the solution of defunding or in
its most extreme form, abolishing the police was just always
a bit too simple. So let's pivot to the part
that I really want to talk about the whole. Here's
what I can't make up my mind about. I've just
spoken at length with passion, off the top of my
(15:17):
noggin about all of these issues with our prison system
and all of these ways it could be connected to racism,
and so many people who share that perspective then come
to the conclusion, you know what, we need to tear
it down. At the very least, we need to take
out it's funding, so it's not this get rich scheme
for the people who are pulling the strings and the levers.
(15:40):
We need to make sure that there's no one who
stands to benefit from our swelling prison population and putting
more people behind bars. And that's what so much of
the defund the Police movement is about it's about being like,
you know what, we shouldn't have any incentives for police
to make a certain number of arrests because that's led
to corruption. So police should be held accountable for their
(16:02):
actions that they wouldn't themselves be above the law. The
defund the Police movement is also calling for accountability overall,
and a big part of that movement was just realizing
that there was no central database for police brutality or
killings of people who were unarmed. There wasn't a good
(16:23):
national record of that. It was more like each police
department just had their own pretty private, hard to access records.
And so about ten years ago, multiple people kind of
sprang up at the same time and started compiling this
database and tracking the numbers, which is like, oh my gosh,
we didn't do that until twenty sixteen. We didn't know
how many unarmed people were being killed annually by police.
(16:45):
We didn't know if it was increasing or decreasing, or
if it was something that fell along racial lines. We
didn't have the information to assess that that's unthinkable. So
there were so many good things that came from this
increase scrutiny on policing. But what got really popular in
progressive circles was just like, you know, the little infographics
(17:07):
that say policing gets a lot of money, We should
make sure policing gets less money, and then that money
should go toward strengthening the community. It should go toward
more parks, more green spaces, more community resources, maybe a
community center, maybe mentors, guidance counselors, therapists, and the kind
(17:31):
of stuff that supports people and supports young people in
their lives long before they would be in a position
where they would feel that they want to or have to,
turn to crime. And that infographic you read it and
you're like, yeah, totally, it makes a lot of sense.
And if you're like pro defunding the police, you're probably
very frustrated with me for not being more specific about
(17:53):
just like, the police budgets are crazy, bloated, unbelievable, especially
in certain counties, in certain cities, certain states, and it
just completely dwarfs the budget for other things that would
be really beneficial to the community and other things that
would prevent crime and community breakdown rather than just respond
(18:14):
to it. And if that's what you're thinking of, like Marie,
it is a practical, workable solution. Yes, that is so
fair to varying degrees, Like I said, there's this whole
spectrum to varying degrees. I think it is a practical,
very workable solution. If we're talking about adjusting budgets like hello,
that is politics, is it not. But the thing that
(18:34):
I think gets especially out of hand and less reasonable,
less workable is in progressive circles. What started as defund
the police turned into abolish the police, and the premise
of abolished the police was that same idea, we should
give less funding to police officers and more funding to
mental health professionals, guidance counselors supports community officers who are
(18:57):
less focused on like violent tax dicks responding to crime,
and just more people who are there to be a
helpful presence in times of crisis. But abolish the police.
In the minds of some progressives and some activists really
went as far as it sounds, we don't need police
(19:18):
in any capacity. Police are just modern day slave patrols.
Police are the greatest threat to our communities, so we
need to eliminate that threat. We need to eliminate all
of these armed officers who come into our communities that
oftentimes they don't live in and they aren't from, and
they wreak havoc and they do violence, and they can
(19:40):
carry out all of these life changing decisions, maybe do
criminal things themselves with impunity. And so abolish the police
was like, really abolish the police. And when I was
hearing this position, it reminded me so much of the
Black Panthers, and I think a lot of people who
are for abolishing the police, you know, read up on
(20:02):
that era, because the Black Panthers were big on strengthening
their community. You know, they're like, let's get breakfast to
kids before school so kids are well fed, so they're
not distracted by their hunger in schools, they can do
better in school because what happens when kids do well
in school, they grow up into adults with opportunities. It's
that whole like community investment on the front end rather
(20:24):
than responding to community breakdown on the back end. That
was like a Black Panthers thing, and that was also
the mo of abolishing the police. But then Black Panthers
also said, here's how we would do it without police.
We will protect our own communities. And so some black
panthers would be armed, and they'd even think of themselves
(20:44):
as protecting their communities from the police, which was meant
to maintain order by people who are within the community,
and that was seen as preferable to outsiders with uniforms
and badgers. But when I hear that, I'm just like
concerned of the chaos that comes from having well meaning
(21:07):
people who are armed and rogue, you know, like not
formally trained. They aren't equipped to carry out that position.
And obviously it's a huge issue when police are not
trained well, not trained properly, not trained in all of
the methods that can de escalate a crisis situation. The
(21:28):
preparedness of a police officer is really a life and
death issue. But with abolishing the police, so many people
are like, let's get rid of the formal police and
let's just have a makeshift community police into that. I've
always been like, ooh, that sounds scarier to me. But
I also understand the fear of police and just the
(21:49):
complete distrust that they will accomplish anything for the community.
Because circling back to what I was saying at the beginning,
it's the competing views of whether policing itself and systemically policing,
you know, in the whole nation, is something that is poisoned, rotten, unfixably,
inherently flawed, or whether it's something that has been flawed,
(22:13):
it has been broken, but it could be redeemed, reformed, improved.
So obviously people who are for abolishing the police think
the former. But I would have to say, I'm more
in the boat of the latter, and I'm realizing I
haven't even driven home the main thing here, the main
why I can't make up my mind about it, which
(22:36):
is that black people themselves are assumed to believe the
former and are assumed that they want to abolish the
police and defund the police. But so many polls have
revealed that black people by and large feel most strongly
about they're policing needing more support, more training, more funding.
(22:58):
So how about we land the plane we talk about that.
That is a surprising fact. But polls from Pew, polls
from Gallup all reveal the same thing, which is that
black adults generally think policing should be seriously reformed. When polled,
black adults say that policing should be rebuilt, the mass
(23:21):
incarceration system should be reformed, and they also express that
they themselves have a fear of police. But when asked
if they think that the police should receive less funding
or more funding, Black Americans say that policing should receive
more funding. And their great concern, their great fear when
(23:41):
it comes to public safety is not too much policing,
but too little. Here's a study from June twenty twenty
four and I quote on the robustness of Black Americans
support for the police, evidence from a national experiment, and
here's the summary of their findings. Most Black Americans want
(24:01):
to maintain or increase police patrols. Most Black Americans want
to maintain or increase police spending even if crime declines.
Most Black Americans want police patrols and spending even without
new reforms. Most Black Americans want police patrols and spending.
And lastly, Black Americans policing preferences are very strong, and
(24:25):
maybe even stronger than those of other groups. I find
that really surprising and really interesting, and I bet you
do too. I'll even read from the abstract where they
give a little summary of how they came to these conclusions,
and I quote, recent polls reveal a complex picture of
(24:46):
policing attitudes in Black America. Although most Black Americans are
afraid of the police, most also prefer to maintain or
increase local police presence and spending. We tested this experimentally
using a nation wide survey with comparable numbers of black
and non black respondents. We found that Black Americans policing
(25:06):
preferences were robust. If anything, they were more robust than
those of non Black Americans. Most Black Americans said that
even if crime was declining and new police reforms were
not enacted, they would still want to maintain or increase
police patrols in spending. So in this they talk about
how there's a racial divide where it seems that Black
(25:28):
America are the ones who are saying we should abolish
the police, we should defund the police, because Black Americans
are victims of police brutality. But as they talk about
in this study, police brutality is actually less salient, less
relevant than how a person feels about crime and how
a person feels about whether crime is close to home
(25:50):
for them. Black Americans have different anxieties about crime and
more anxieties about crime than white Americans, where white Americans
feel like crime isn't very salient, it's not a very
relevant pressing problem around them in their community. But Black
Americans feel differently. Black Americans are concerned about national crime
(26:10):
and local crime, and because of that, even if they
are afraid of police, they're also afraid of the crime
that the police can be called to respond to. I
remember I stumbled across this when I read about just
the mismatch between white Democrats and progressives and then the
actual desires of the people of color who they believe
(26:33):
they're advocating for. And it was talking about how Black
Americans just have a unique like political ideology because white
Americans tend to be more politically sortid. If a white
American describes themselves as liberal, they are liberal top to bottom,
and if a white American describes themselves as conservative, they
are conservative top to bottom. But Black Americans are just
(26:56):
more ideologically mixed. They seem like they have this uniformity
because the overwhelming majority of Black Americans vote Democrat. But
if you actually look at like ideological issues, even black
Democrats can tend to be really conservative on certain issues
and very liberal on other issues. Even black Republicans who
(27:19):
call themselves a Republican or conservative, they tend to have
more liberal stances on issues of race than people who
are Republicans and not black. So it's just interesting how
there's all of these plot twists and surprising convictions. Surprising
in the sense that if you expect the whole group
to think the same, and if you expect the whole
group because they vote Democrat, to then be very liberal,
(27:42):
you're wrong. You're surprised. And in one of these studies
from a few years ago, they pulled on spending and
they were like, should there be an increase or a
decrease in spending on this? Increase or decrease and spending
on that. And white Americans generally followed their political groups.
It's like a white Democrat would say, increase spending on
(28:02):
schools and decrease spending on a crime. But Black Americans
didn't follow the political groups. They kind of had unique,
unexpected opinions on each issue. And the most significant one
of them was that the overwhelming majority of Black Americans
in that poll that study, I think it was like
eighty four percent or eighty six percent, it was eighty
(28:23):
something percent said that spending on policing and crime should
be increased rather than decreased, And this just shows how
an overly simple narrative. If you care about police brutality,
then you are anti police. You want the police abolished
or at the very least severely defunded, or else you
must be racist or in denial about our country's racist history.
(28:47):
If that's your line of thinking, then the vast majority
of Black Americans don't hold that view that you think
is necessary to support Black Americans. It's a complicated thing,
more complex than we'd like it to be. Now. Probably
the best case study to show this divide and this
difference between how Black Americans view policing and how progressives
(29:08):
view policing is to look at the city of Minneapolis.
I'll read from a little Brookings article titled message from
Minneapolis Reformed the police, but don't defund them, because I
think it sums up the whole situation. Well. Obviously, George
Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, and it became the central
hub for the racial justice protests heard round the world.
(29:34):
Floyd's murder had a huge impact and it really launched
the whole conversation on what we should do about racist policing,
prejudiced policing, or just wrong policing, bad policing. So in Minneapolis,
all across the country, police departments got these new reforms,
(29:55):
many of them which were long overdue, like accountability and
new trainings, and like I said earlier, a national database
to record police murders and police killings. So all of
these reforms were happening, and a big one was the
question of whether police departments should be transitioned into something
other than police, and whether they should be completely defunded
(30:18):
or largely defunded partially defunded. So, of course all of
this happened in Minneapolis. People were paying attention. Now you
would expect that in Minneapolis, because it was where George
Floyd was murdered, people would vote to defund the police.
The police department would be slashed. The results would be
(30:39):
really good, and it would lead to this domino effect
that we see in other areas. But in reality, the
way that other police departments were reformed was more successful
than what they did in Minneapolis. And what they were
going for in Minneapolis was the more radical abolish defund
Approachants weren't about it, Black residents weren't about it, and
(31:03):
it didn't work out. It didn't last It led to
a huge spike in crime and black residents in Minneapolis
speaking out. I think a really powerful quote from one
of those black residents came from a woman who told
a reporter, don't experiment on us, because we're the ones
that are going to be hit the hardest. First. That
(31:23):
was her response to the proposal, which was to turn
the police department into a department of public safety. They
wanted to radically re envision what policing would look like.
And I'll read from the article and I quote. In Minneapolis,
an amendment was proposed to the city charter that would
(31:44):
transform the police department into a Department of public safety.
Although details were sparse, everyone understood that this would mean
a shift of emphasis from armed policing to interventions by
unarmed professionals, psychologists, social workers, and others. The proposed amendment, however,
divided the state's Democrats. Some who were more progressive came
(32:06):
out in favor. Minnesota's two senators opposed it, and so
did the Minneapolis mayor, who was also on the ballot
seeking re election. Early public opinion surveys made it seem
like the amendment would pass, but a September survey of
five hundred African Americans Minneapolis suggested otherwise. Seventy five percent
of African American respondents opposed reducing the size of the
(32:29):
police force, and a minority favored the amendment. And this
is what led one resident, a porter, to say, don't
experiment on us, because we're the ones that are going
to be hit the hardest first. So with this proposal
in Minneapolis, which should be one of the most responsive
cities to police reform and drastic measures, there was a
(32:52):
split along racial lines. White residents and white progressives who
wanted to show support for the black community were more
in favor of this amendment to reduce the size of
the police department than black residents were, and black residents
felt very differently because what occurred was a surge in
violent crime. And I quote, in twenty twenty homicides in
(33:13):
Minneapolis rose by fifty eight percent, and in twenty twenty one,
Minneapolis was on track to record the highest murder rate
in a generation. That backdrop of increased crime explains what
happened in the election. The charter amendment to reduce the
size of the police department and change it to the
Department of Public Safety lost by twelve percentage points. Results
(33:36):
from state and local elections around the country indicate that
most Americans agree defunding the police is not the solution.
So much to consider, so much to chew on. I'm
afraid that you could take any five minutes of this episode,
and in isolation, I'd hear that and I'd go, no, no, no,
that is not representative of my views, because i really
(33:58):
feel like i'ming or playing Devil's advocate. I in no
way want to defend policing as is, or the mass
incarceration system or anything like that, because I could not
feel more strongly about my hopes to see it completely reformed,
reworked in our lifetime. And I would love to see
(34:19):
the prison population in America plummet to reasonable levels. I
would love to see sentencing return to being proportionate to
the crime, rather than this default swing of the gavel
that sentences people to die in prison. I desperately want
to see reform, and yet I'm so intrigued by the
(34:44):
way that Black Americans see the issue differently from so
many progressives and so many white progressives. I think black
Americans see through the slogans of defund the police, abolish
the police the bumper sticker, and they see policing as
an essential function, an essential role that needs to be
(35:05):
fulfilled within the community. But it needs to be done well,
and it hasn't been done well in the past, and
it needs so much reform. But doing away with it
or trying to hollow out the resources is just not
going to be the breakthrough solution that we're waiting for.
I just I feel so mixed up. If you want
(35:28):
to understand my heart behind mass incarceration and policing, watch
the documentary Thirteenth. Read the book Just Mercy, read the
book The New Jim Crow, and please read my new favorite,
which you probably haven't heard of, titled Correction by Ben Austen.
Oh my goodness, it completed my trifecta, and it gave
me a new passion about a different aspect of the
(35:50):
criminal justice system that needs reform, which is the parole
and probation side of things. So I feel so strong
about that. I want nothing that I say about like
I questioned defunding the police. I questioned abolishing the police
to be heard as I offer my blind support to police.
I think a person in uniform can do no wrong.
I think the police have pretty much always been the
(36:12):
good guys, and they just need to lock up more
people get them off the streets. Police do not hear
it that way. That could not be further from the
whole range of thoughts and convictions and feelings in my heart.
But I also think that this is one of those
issues where progressives just charged ahead thinking that they were
(36:33):
really doing something and thinking that they were speaking for
black people and they were being brave, They're being progressive,
you know, like a good ally should be, and they
just totally lost sight of what Black Americans wanted for themselves,
and we got into this deadlocked thing where when the
progressive cause is to defund or abolish the police and
(36:56):
Black Americans want reform and training and radical change, those
are just slightly different aims and they're slightly different missions.
And now they're competing with each other rather than doing
the whole thing where the allies offer their full force
and full support behind the community that's most affected. Like
that just wasn't what happened. And I don't know if
(37:19):
it's because of the power of slogans. We're just competing visions,
radical ideas, competing worldviews, but the whole abolishing the police
versus defunding the police, versus what Black Americans say, which
is we need more funding to police. I think it's
so interesting how there's been such a disconnect and then
we all moved on. And if I had to guess,
maybe you didn't even know about this disconnect, you probably
(37:42):
would have guessed that Black Americans, if asked, would say
we are very concerned about over policing. But instead they
report being concerned by under policing, and they want equal
access to these officers who are supposed to support and
protect the community. That's what they're saying. They feel would
be just quick response times to calls to the police,
(38:06):
trust that when they call, the police will come and
come soon and do what they need them to do.
That's more the concern of a typical Black American, and
it's probably world apart from the wealthy white progressive walking
through a college campus with a little defund the police
pin on their backpack. I think this is one of
(38:26):
those issues where the elites veered from everybody else, and
the question remains of what do we do about this,
What do we do with policing, how do we go
about reform? What should funding look like, what about the
whole community support idea? That's a pretty good idea, right,
probably not the only thing we could rely on, but
(38:47):
certainly not a bad thing in itself. Like, I don't know,
I could go on and on, but I think you
get the idea. Progressives are concerned about over policing. Black
Americans are concerned about under policing. I'm obviously speaking generally.
These are generalizations. Aggressives talk about needing to defund or
(39:07):
abolish the police, and black Americans want increased funding to
the police. And I hope you remember that. I hope
you remember the distinction, and it gives you pause and
it makes you go, hmm. If I've come to a
simple solution for a complex issue that people don't see
eye to eye on, maybe it's not as simple as
it seems. That's all I'm trying to say. I guess
(39:30):
I hope I could teach you something new, make you think.
Thank you so much for listening. I decided to release
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(39:53):
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(41:26):
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I'm excited for what's it. So thanks for listening, Liby
While progressives out of concern for black people are saying
we need to reduce police presence, Black Americans themselves are
saying that they want to see increased police presence. And
that's why I think this whole thing is so complicated. Hello,
(00:22):
and welcome back. I'm your host, Murray Beacham, and on
today's episode, I will walk you through why I cannot
make up my mind about policing. I have been a
vocal critic of the police system, the mass incarceration system,
injustices like police brutality, the death penalty, racial bias and sentencing,
(00:45):
and on and on and on. I think that our
justice system is littered with injustice. And I'm not alone
in that belief. Many of you have come to that conclusion.
You've watched Thirteenth, you've read Just Mercy, maybe we even
read the New Jim Crow, and that probably isn't new
to you. I won't be dwelling on those facts forever
(01:05):
because I think you know them. I think you've read
up on them. I think you've been radicalized already. But
as I'm saying all of this, you're probably thinking, what
do you mean you can't make up your mind? Seems
pretty clearly bad. But here's the thing I wrestle with.
For me, it is a no brainer that policing and
the prison system are full of injustice and terrible practices,
(01:31):
policies prejudice, all of that. It's in desperate need of reform. However,
so many people who share my passion for the documentary Thirteenth,
the book Just Mercy, and the book The New Jim Crow,
and all of the messages that they carry about how
modern policing is so connected to this history of racism
(01:52):
in America. It seems like the solution that most of
this group of thinkers has arrived at is defunding the police, or,
in its most extreme form, abolishing the police altogether. And
that's where I depart. Now. Obviously, I'm not asking for
(02:12):
bloated police budgets and a lack of reform and more
of the same and prisons filling up. That's not what
I mean. But I guess I'm beating around the bush,
to be frank, to be direct, here's my gripe with policing.
Progressives in twenty twenty and the years that followed came
to the conclusion that police budgets need to be slashed
(02:33):
and police departments need to be abolished, but black people
feel very differently. The vast majority of Black people are
not in favor of abolishing the police or even defunding
the police. While progressives out of concern for black people
are saying we need to reduce police presence, Black Americans
(02:55):
themselves are saying that they want to see increased police presence.
While progressives are saying we need to deal with over policing.
Black Americans are more likely to say that we need
to deal with under policing. And that's why I think
this whole thing is so complicated. So let's get into it.
(03:16):
Like I said, I'm sure you're familiar with the argument
that policing and arrests and sentencing and parole is full
of prejudice and full of racism. So I'm not going
to spend forever on that. I've covered that in so
many previous episodes. I just want to give you the
bare bones of the argument. So you're fresh to many
people who are extremely critical of police and policing. They
(03:39):
see police as a descendant of just racist tactics. They
see policing itself as a descendant of slave patrols. This
is how the NAACP explained that point of view, the
origins of modern day policing can be traced back to
the slave patrol. The earliest formal slave patrol was created
(04:00):
in the early seventeen hundreds with one mission to establish
a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the
capacity to apprehend and return runaway slaves to their owners.
Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and
produce desired slave behavior. And so the NAACP takes this position.
(04:21):
Many other racial justice organizations take this position that you
have the slave patrol, and it has to evolve over
the years after the passage of the thirteenth Amendment and
after new policies are introduced, And in this line of thinking,
the slave patrol turned into malicious style groups think of
(04:42):
like neighborhood watch, but way more intense and way more armed.
And those malicious style groups became what we now think
of as police departments. And so in this telling of history,
police departments are at their very core in their essence,
undeniably a racist. In mention, policing is this racist thing
(05:03):
meant to maintain the racial hierarchy and a certain control
through force, through dominance. And I keep calling this a
point of view or a perspective because there are a
lot of academics and scholars who don't agree with this analysis.
They wouldn't say that policing has a direct descendant of
slave patrols. They would say that policing is the natural
(05:24):
thing that's happened in just about every country in the
world to establish and maintain order. If we say that
police departments are just slave patrols, you know, a few
hundred years down the road, what about in all the
countries that have police that never had slave patrols, or
maybe even didn't operate on the system of slavery to
begin with, How did they arrive at policing? Was it racism?
(05:47):
In their case? Many say no, policing is just a
public good, or maybe more accurately, a public necessity. And
many of those people would admit the undeniable facts that
police has been carried out with prejudice and racism throughout
the history of the United States, but they would say
that racism is an issue that affects policing, not an
(06:08):
issue that is core to what policing itself is. I
just want to make that distinction really clear. It's not
that you either think policing involves racism and prejudice or
policing is perfect and police are flawless. In reality, the
two options are policing has been racist and it can't
not be racist, like it is inherently, unfixably racist because
(06:33):
of what it is. I'd say that's the more progressive take,
the abolish the police take. But then in the other camp,
you have people who have said police have always been
racist because people have always been racist, the system of
policing has always been racist, because all of our systems
in America have been racist. But they would describe it
more as like this parasite on policing or a sickness
(06:54):
on policing, or something that just like comes in and
corrupts policing, versus people who's say that we should abolish
the police, say, it's not a few bad apples, it's
the rotten bunch, it's the rotten roots. It's core to
what policing itself is. So those are kind of the
two views. There's also the perspective, this one's from Equal
(07:15):
Justice Initiative, that the death penalty is another example of
something that is a descendant of a very racist thing.
They make the case that the death penalty in America
is a direct descendant of lynching. They explained that in
the past, and I quote, racial terror lynchings gave way
to executions in response to criticism that torturing and killing
(07:36):
black people for cheering audiences was undermining America's image and
moral authority on the world stage. So they basically make
the case that racial terror lynchings were a part of
American culture. People would gather and watch them like there
were picnics. Hundreds of people would gather. Eji has a
whole photo archive of people taking photos with black people
(07:58):
as they were torturing them and before they'd lynch them.
And when you go through the archives, it is unbelievable
that these photos aren't doctored. And this is really real,
and this is something that was so shameless in white
American culture that they would be so bold as to
take all of these photos and leave them for future generations.
(08:19):
Lynching wasn't seen as something that they were ashamed to do,
or something that you did in the dark of night. No,
it was a public spectacle. And that is just how
gross and obvious and overstated hatred of black Americans was,
But then it was said that lynching and all of
this racial terror and racial violence was hurting America's image
(08:42):
as a good place full of good people. So they
changed the form of how lynchings worked to make it
more socially acceptable to do that. They shifted from hanging
people at these huge picnics as children and spectators looked
on and small smiled and cheered, to court ordered executions.
(09:04):
And in the early nineteen hundreds there was this flip
from lynchings being far more deaths than court ordered executions
to lynching started to decrease because court ordered executions were
a fine alternative way to get the job done. Now,
if you say, how could the death penalty be a
descendant of lynching, it's not ray specific. Anyone who commits
(09:25):
a terrible crime gets the death penalty. Well, when we
look to the mid nineteen hundreds, I'm talking nineteen fifty,
black Americans population in the South was about twenty percent,
but Black Americans were about seventy five percent of the
people executed. Then you also have the fact that the
states with the highest rates of lynching are to this
(09:46):
day the states with the most victims of the death penalty.
In nineteen seventy two, the Supreme Court even struck down
the death penalty because they said it looked too much
like vigilante justice and lynch law. That was when it
was proven to the Supreme Court that there's so much
racial bias in terms of who gets sentenced to death,
and it wasn't a matter of who commits the worst
(10:07):
crimes or the most violent crimes. Instead, it had everything
to do with race and poverty. If you were poor
and you couldn't afford a decent attorney, you were way
more likely to be sentenced to death, And if you
were black and in the South, you were way more
likely to be poor. Now I'm kind of getting carried away.
I didn't intend to talk about this part of the
(10:28):
conversation for this long, but that's just the thing. That's
my point. There is nothing I feel more strongly about
when it comes to my passion for racial justice and
equality than reform of the prison system. I could go
on and on about the War on drugs and how
that was this whole racially coded project to incarcerate more
(10:53):
black and brown people, but I bet you know about
that already, and the whole tough on crime rhetoric and
mandatory minimums, in the disparity in crack cocaine versus powder cocaine,
and how in the last like fifty sixty seventy years,
the prison population has skyrocketed in the US, And because
of mandatory minimums and so many people being incarcerated for
(11:16):
nonviolent drug offenses, the average age of prisoners is going
up and up and up because more people are being
sentenced to die in prison. It's not just this temporary
station before you return to society. Instead, it is a
permanent sentence to get very old and die in a
prison cell. And again, I'm always reading up on this
(11:40):
because I'm so convinced that progressives and conservatives could both
have different sensibilities but could share a passion for prison reform.
Conservatives are so concerned about the economy and taxes and spending,
and yet they advocate for increase spending on policing and
prison even though it's like in the billions and far
(12:01):
more than it's ever been. I feel like, by their
own values, this could become their top issue of like
what if we reform the prison system and what if
we realize that elderly people are not likely at all
to commit crimes, and by simply releasing the elderly from prison,
that would have very little risk for an increase in crime,
(12:22):
and it would save a whole lot of money for
tax payer dollars and blah blah blah. Why is that
not a conservative's talking point? I feel like they'd eat
that up. And then from progressives, we talk so much
about like racial equality and bias and privilege, and we're
thinking about it at the inner personal level. We're thinking
about it as we go to our jobs and we
have our friends and we attend our book clubs. But
(12:44):
if we care about racial justice, then I think the
domain we need to be most concerned with is the
prison system, because that is where the most gross and
horrific and permanent life changing injustices are happening, like the
death penalty, and it's racial bias. If there is truth
to this idea that it is a descendant of Lynch law,
(13:05):
then my goodness, we could do with a few less
seminars on privilege and a lot more lobbying and advocating
for changes to that. And even if we just accomplished
a little bit when it comes to mass incarceration, that
might have a greater impact than a whole lot of
things we do to be more anti racist in our
(13:27):
personal interactions and all that. To throw all of our
energy at the injustices happening in the mass incarceration system
would be, I think the most consequential thing we could do.
I hope you hear me clearly that this is not
an issue that I am indifferent about or even something
that I feel detached from. I feel so so strongly
(13:51):
about advocating for the most vulnerable, and that's why I'm
passionate about racial justice work and Equal Justice Initiative really
has opened my eyes to how maybe the most vulnerable
of the most vulnerable are they wrongly incarcerated? Are the
people who have been excessively sentenced? Are the people with
mental health issues who have been put behind bars? Or
(14:14):
the people who could never afford a decent attorney who
were put behind bars? Like talk about marginalization with real
lifelong consequences. I care about this stuff so much. I
just had to preface what I'm about to say next,
because I know it's going to sound wacky and surprising
to progressives who have only ever thought, yeah, we should
(14:35):
defund or abolish the police. I know that me pushing
back on that is going to sound like I'm the
cold hearted conservative who doesn't care about the black community
and the injustices being carried out by police for all time,
and that just couldn't be further from the truth. My
big thing is I want reform, so much reform, and
(14:56):
yet I think that the solution of defunding or in
its most extreme form, abolishing the police was just always
a bit too simple. So let's pivot to the part
that I really want to talk about the whole. Here's
what I can't make up my mind about. I've just
spoken at length with passion, off the top of my
(15:17):
noggin about all of these issues with our prison system
and all of these ways it could be connected to racism,
and so many people who share that perspective then come
to the conclusion, you know what, we need to tear
it down. At the very least, we need to take
out it's funding, so it's not this get rich scheme
for the people who are pulling the strings and the levers.
(15:40):
We need to make sure that there's no one who
stands to benefit from our swelling prison population and putting
more people behind bars. And that's what so much of
the defund the Police movement is about it's about being like,
you know what, we shouldn't have any incentives for police
to make a certain number of arrests because that's led
to corruption. So police should be held accountable for their
(16:02):
actions that they wouldn't themselves be above the law. The
defund the Police movement is also calling for accountability overall,
and a big part of that movement was just realizing
that there was no central database for police brutality or
killings of people who were unarmed. There wasn't a good
(16:23):
national record of that. It was more like each police
department just had their own pretty private, hard to access records.
And so about ten years ago, multiple people kind of
sprang up at the same time and started compiling this
database and tracking the numbers, which is like, oh my gosh,
we didn't do that until twenty sixteen. We didn't know
how many unarmed people were being killed annually by police.
(16:45):
We didn't know if it was increasing or decreasing, or
if it was something that fell along racial lines. We
didn't have the information to assess that that's unthinkable. So
there were so many good things that came from this
increase scrutiny on policing. But what got really popular in
progressive circles was just like, you know, the little infographics
(17:07):
that say policing gets a lot of money, We should
make sure policing gets less money, and then that money
should go toward strengthening the community. It should go toward
more parks, more green spaces, more community resources, maybe a
community center, maybe mentors, guidance counselors, therapists, and the kind
(17:31):
of stuff that supports people and supports young people in
their lives long before they would be in a position
where they would feel that they want to or have to,
turn to crime. And that infographic you read it and
you're like, yeah, totally, it makes a lot of sense.
And if you're like pro defunding the police, you're probably
very frustrated with me for not being more specific about
(17:53):
just like, the police budgets are crazy, bloated, unbelievable, especially
in certain counties, in certain cities, certain states, and it
just completely dwarfs the budget for other things that would
be really beneficial to the community and other things that
would prevent crime and community breakdown rather than just respond
(18:14):
to it. And if that's what you're thinking of, like Marie,
it is a practical, workable solution. Yes, that is so
fair to varying degrees, Like I said, there's this whole
spectrum to varying degrees. I think it is a practical,
very workable solution. If we're talking about adjusting budgets like hello,
that is politics, is it not. But the thing that
(18:34):
I think gets especially out of hand and less reasonable,
less workable is in progressive circles. What started as defund
the police turned into abolish the police, and the premise
of abolished the police was that same idea, we should
give less funding to police officers and more funding to
mental health professionals, guidance counselors supports community officers who are
(18:57):
less focused on like violent tax dicks responding to crime,
and just more people who are there to be a
helpful presence in times of crisis. But abolish the police.
In the minds of some progressives and some activists really
went as far as it sounds, we don't need police
(19:18):
in any capacity. Police are just modern day slave patrols.
Police are the greatest threat to our communities, so we
need to eliminate that threat. We need to eliminate all
of these armed officers who come into our communities that
oftentimes they don't live in and they aren't from, and
they wreak havoc and they do violence, and they can
(19:40):
carry out all of these life changing decisions, maybe do
criminal things themselves with impunity. And so abolish the police
was like, really abolish the police. And when I was
hearing this position, it reminded me so much of the
Black Panthers, and I think a lot of people who
are for abolishing the police, you know, read up on
(20:02):
that era, because the Black Panthers were big on strengthening
their community. You know, they're like, let's get breakfast to
kids before school so kids are well fed, so they're
not distracted by their hunger in schools, they can do
better in school because what happens when kids do well
in school, they grow up into adults with opportunities. It's
that whole like community investment on the front end rather
(20:24):
than responding to community breakdown on the back end. That
was like a Black Panthers thing, and that was also
the mo of abolishing the police. But then Black Panthers
also said, here's how we would do it without police.
We will protect our own communities. And so some black
panthers would be armed, and they'd even think of themselves
(20:44):
as protecting their communities from the police, which was meant
to maintain order by people who are within the community,
and that was seen as preferable to outsiders with uniforms
and badgers. But when I hear that, I'm just like
concerned of the chaos that comes from having well meaning
(21:07):
people who are armed and rogue, you know, like not
formally trained. They aren't equipped to carry out that position.
And obviously it's a huge issue when police are not
trained well, not trained properly, not trained in all of
the methods that can de escalate a crisis situation. The
(21:28):
preparedness of a police officer is really a life and
death issue. But with abolishing the police, so many people
are like, let's get rid of the formal police and
let's just have a makeshift community police into that. I've
always been like, ooh, that sounds scarier to me. But
I also understand the fear of police and just the
(21:49):
complete distrust that they will accomplish anything for the community.
Because circling back to what I was saying at the beginning,
it's the competing views of whether policing itself and systemically policing,
you know, in the whole nation, is something that is poisoned, rotten, unfixably,
inherently flawed, or whether it's something that has been flawed,
(22:13):
it has been broken, but it could be redeemed, reformed, improved.
So obviously people who are for abolishing the police think
the former. But I would have to say, I'm more
in the boat of the latter, and I'm realizing I
haven't even driven home the main thing here, the main
why I can't make up my mind about it, which
(22:36):
is that black people themselves are assumed to believe the
former and are assumed that they want to abolish the
police and defund the police. But so many polls have
revealed that black people by and large feel most strongly
about they're policing needing more support, more training, more funding.
(22:58):
So how about we land the plane we talk about that.
That is a surprising fact. But polls from Pew, polls
from Gallup all reveal the same thing, which is that
black adults generally think policing should be seriously reformed. When polled,
black adults say that policing should be rebuilt, the mass
(23:21):
incarceration system should be reformed, and they also express that
they themselves have a fear of police. But when asked
if they think that the police should receive less funding
or more funding, Black Americans say that policing should receive
more funding. And their great concern, their great fear when
(23:41):
it comes to public safety is not too much policing,
but too little. Here's a study from June twenty twenty
four and I quote on the robustness of Black Americans
support for the police, evidence from a national experiment, and
here's the summary of their findings. Most Black Americans want
(24:01):
to maintain or increase police patrols. Most Black Americans want
to maintain or increase police spending even if crime declines.
Most Black Americans want police patrols and spending even without
new reforms. Most Black Americans want police patrols and spending.
And lastly, Black Americans policing preferences are very strong, and
(24:25):
maybe even stronger than those of other groups. I find
that really surprising and really interesting, and I bet you
do too. I'll even read from the abstract where they
give a little summary of how they came to these conclusions,
and I quote, recent polls reveal a complex picture of
(24:46):
policing attitudes in Black America. Although most Black Americans are
afraid of the police, most also prefer to maintain or
increase local police presence and spending. We tested this experimentally
using a nation wide survey with comparable numbers of black
and non black respondents. We found that Black Americans policing
(25:06):
preferences were robust. If anything, they were more robust than
those of non Black Americans. Most Black Americans said that
even if crime was declining and new police reforms were
not enacted, they would still want to maintain or increase
police patrols in spending. So in this they talk about
how there's a racial divide where it seems that Black
(25:28):
America are the ones who are saying we should abolish
the police, we should defund the police, because Black Americans
are victims of police brutality. But as they talk about
in this study, police brutality is actually less salient, less
relevant than how a person feels about crime and how
a person feels about whether crime is close to home
(25:50):
for them. Black Americans have different anxieties about crime and
more anxieties about crime than white Americans, where white Americans
feel like crime isn't very salient, it's not a very
relevant pressing problem around them in their community. But Black
Americans feel differently. Black Americans are concerned about national crime
(26:10):
and local crime, and because of that, even if they
are afraid of police, they're also afraid of the crime
that the police can be called to respond to. I
remember I stumbled across this when I read about just
the mismatch between white Democrats and progressives and then the
actual desires of the people of color who they believe
(26:33):
they're advocating for. And it was talking about how Black
Americans just have a unique like political ideology because white
Americans tend to be more politically sortid. If a white
American describes themselves as liberal, they are liberal top to bottom,
and if a white American describes themselves as conservative, they
are conservative top to bottom. But Black Americans are just
(26:56):
more ideologically mixed. They seem like they have this uniformity
because the overwhelming majority of Black Americans vote Democrat. But
if you actually look at like ideological issues, even black
Democrats can tend to be really conservative on certain issues
and very liberal on other issues. Even black Republicans who
(27:19):
call themselves a Republican or conservative, they tend to have
more liberal stances on issues of race than people who
are Republicans and not black. So it's just interesting how
there's all of these plot twists and surprising convictions. Surprising
in the sense that if you expect the whole group
to think the same, and if you expect the whole
group because they vote Democrat, to then be very liberal,
(27:42):
you're wrong. You're surprised. And in one of these studies
from a few years ago, they pulled on spending and
they were like, should there be an increase or a
decrease in spending on this? Increase or decrease and spending
on that. And white Americans generally followed their political groups.
It's like a white Democrat would say, increase spending on
(28:02):
schools and decrease spending on a crime. But Black Americans
didn't follow the political groups. They kind of had unique,
unexpected opinions on each issue. And the most significant one
of them was that the overwhelming majority of Black Americans
in that poll that study, I think it was like
eighty four percent or eighty six percent, it was eighty
(28:23):
something percent said that spending on policing and crime should
be increased rather than decreased, And this just shows how
an overly simple narrative. If you care about police brutality,
then you are anti police. You want the police abolished
or at the very least severely defunded, or else you
must be racist or in denial about our country's racist history.
(28:47):
If that's your line of thinking, then the vast majority
of Black Americans don't hold that view that you think
is necessary to support Black Americans. It's a complicated thing,
more complex than we'd like it to be. Now. Probably
the best case study to show this divide and this
difference between how Black Americans view policing and how progressives
(29:08):
view policing is to look at the city of Minneapolis.
I'll read from a little Brookings article titled message from
Minneapolis Reformed the police, but don't defund them, because I
think it sums up the whole situation. Well. Obviously, George
Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, and it became the central
hub for the racial justice protests heard round the world.
(29:34):
Floyd's murder had a huge impact and it really launched
the whole conversation on what we should do about racist policing,
prejudiced policing, or just wrong policing, bad policing. So in Minneapolis,
all across the country, police departments got these new reforms,
(29:55):
many of them which were long overdue, like accountability and
new trainings, and like I said earlier, a national database
to record police murders and police killings. So all of
these reforms were happening, and a big one was the
question of whether police departments should be transitioned into something
other than police, and whether they should be completely defunded
(30:18):
or largely defunded partially defunded. So, of course all of
this happened in Minneapolis. People were paying attention. Now you
would expect that in Minneapolis, because it was where George
Floyd was murdered, people would vote to defund the police.
The police department would be slashed. The results would be
(30:39):
really good, and it would lead to this domino effect
that we see in other areas. But in reality, the
way that other police departments were reformed was more successful
than what they did in Minneapolis. And what they were
going for in Minneapolis was the more radical abolish defund
Approachants weren't about it, Black residents weren't about it, and
(31:03):
it didn't work out. It didn't last It led to
a huge spike in crime and black residents in Minneapolis
speaking out. I think a really powerful quote from one
of those black residents came from a woman who told
a reporter, don't experiment on us, because we're the ones
that are going to be hit the hardest. First. That
(31:23):
was her response to the proposal, which was to turn
the police department into a department of public safety. They
wanted to radically re envision what policing would look like.
And I'll read from the article and I quote. In Minneapolis,
an amendment was proposed to the city charter that would
(31:44):
transform the police department into a Department of public safety.
Although details were sparse, everyone understood that this would mean
a shift of emphasis from armed policing to interventions by
unarmed professionals, psychologists, social workers, and others. The proposed amendment, however,
divided the state's Democrats. Some who were more progressive came
(32:06):
out in favor. Minnesota's two senators opposed it, and so
did the Minneapolis mayor, who was also on the ballot
seeking re election. Early public opinion surveys made it seem
like the amendment would pass, but a September survey of
five hundred African Americans Minneapolis suggested otherwise. Seventy five percent
of African American respondents opposed reducing the size of the
(32:29):
police force, and a minority favored the amendment. And this
is what led one resident, a porter, to say, don't
experiment on us, because we're the ones that are going
to be hit the hardest first. So with this proposal
in Minneapolis, which should be one of the most responsive
cities to police reform and drastic measures, there was a
(32:52):
split along racial lines. White residents and white progressives who
wanted to show support for the black community were more
in favor of this amendment to reduce the size of
the police department than black residents were, and black residents
felt very differently because what occurred was a surge in
violent crime. And I quote, in twenty twenty homicides in
(33:13):
Minneapolis rose by fifty eight percent, and in twenty twenty one,
Minneapolis was on track to record the highest murder rate
in a generation. That backdrop of increased crime explains what
happened in the election. The charter amendment to reduce the
size of the police department and change it to the
Department of Public Safety lost by twelve percentage points. Results
(33:36):
from state and local elections around the country indicate that
most Americans agree defunding the police is not the solution.
So much to consider, so much to chew on. I'm
afraid that you could take any five minutes of this episode,
and in isolation, I'd hear that and I'd go, no, no, no,
that is not representative of my views, because i really
(33:58):
feel like i'ming or playing Devil's advocate. I in no
way want to defend policing as is, or the mass
incarceration system or anything like that, because I could not
feel more strongly about my hopes to see it completely reformed,
reworked in our lifetime. And I would love to see
(34:19):
the prison population in America plummet to reasonable levels. I
would love to see sentencing return to being proportionate to
the crime, rather than this default swing of the gavel
that sentences people to die in prison. I desperately want
to see reform, and yet I'm so intrigued by the
(34:44):
way that Black Americans see the issue differently from so
many progressives and so many white progressives. I think black
Americans see through the slogans of defund the police, abolish
the police the bumper sticker, and they see policing as
an essential function, an essential role that needs to be
(35:05):
fulfilled within the community. But it needs to be done well,
and it hasn't been done well in the past, and
it needs so much reform. But doing away with it
or trying to hollow out the resources is just not
going to be the breakthrough solution that we're waiting for.
I just I feel so mixed up. If you want
(35:28):
to understand my heart behind mass incarceration and policing, watch
the documentary Thirteenth. Read the book Just Mercy, read the
book The New Jim Crow, and please read my new favorite,
which you probably haven't heard of, titled Correction by Ben Austen.
Oh my goodness, it completed my trifecta, and it gave
me a new passion about a different aspect of the
(35:50):
criminal justice system that needs reform, which is the parole
and probation side of things. So I feel so strong
about that. I want nothing that I say about like
I questioned defunding the police. I questioned abolishing the police
to be heard as I offer my blind support to police.
I think a person in uniform can do no wrong.
I think the police have pretty much always been the
(36:12):
good guys, and they just need to lock up more
people get them off the streets. Police do not hear
it that way. That could not be further from the
whole range of thoughts and convictions and feelings in my heart.
But I also think that this is one of those
issues where progressives just charged ahead thinking that they were
(36:33):
really doing something and thinking that they were speaking for
black people and they were being brave, They're being progressive,
you know, like a good ally should be, and they
just totally lost sight of what Black Americans wanted for themselves,
and we got into this deadlocked thing where when the
progressive cause is to defund or abolish the police and
(36:56):
Black Americans want reform and training and radical change, those
are just slightly different aims and they're slightly different missions.
And now they're competing with each other rather than doing
the whole thing where the allies offer their full force
and full support behind the community that's most affected. Like
that just wasn't what happened. And I don't know if
(37:19):
it's because of the power of slogans. We're just competing visions,
radical ideas, competing worldviews, but the whole abolishing the police
versus defunding the police, versus what Black Americans say, which
is we need more funding to police. I think it's
so interesting how there's been such a disconnect and then
we all moved on. And if I had to guess,
maybe you didn't even know about this disconnect, you probably
(37:42):
would have guessed that Black Americans, if asked, would say
we are very concerned about over policing. But instead they
report being concerned by under policing, and they want equal
access to these officers who are supposed to support and
protect the community. That's what they're saying. They feel would
be just quick response times to calls to the police,
(38:06):
trust that when they call, the police will come and
come soon and do what they need them to do.
That's more the concern of a typical Black American, and
it's probably world apart from the wealthy white progressive walking
through a college campus with a little defund the police
pin on their backpack. I think this is one of
(38:26):
those issues where the elites veered from everybody else, and
the question remains of what do we do about this,
What do we do with policing, how do we go
about reform? What should funding look like, what about the
whole community support idea? That's a pretty good idea, right,
probably not the only thing we could rely on, but
(38:47):
certainly not a bad thing in itself. Like, I don't know,
I could go on and on, but I think you
get the idea. Progressives are concerned about over policing. Black
Americans are concerned about under policing. I'm obviously speaking generally.
These are generalizations. Aggressives talk about needing to defund or
(39:07):
abolish the police, and black Americans want increased funding to
the police. And I hope you remember that. I hope
you remember the distinction, and it gives you pause and
it makes you go, hmm. If I've come to a
simple solution for a complex issue that people don't see
eye to eye on, maybe it's not as simple as
it seems. That's all I'm trying to say. I guess
(39:30):
I hope I could teach you something new, make you think.
Thank you so much for listening. I decided to release
this podcast for all listeners, but really every episode of
this podcast is made possible by my paid supporters. If
you listen to my podcasts, if you enjoy my work
and you aren't yet a paid supporter. My simple ask
(39:53):
is that you would consider becoming one. It's what makes
this podcast possible, It's what makes my writing and essays possible.
When you sign up, you get access to an archive
of podcast episodes you haven't been able to listen to,
hundreds of essays that I've written exclusively for supporters, access
to me direct messaging. I really am doing all that
(40:17):
I can to make membership valuable for you and to
truly invite you into the inner circle. When you become
a paid supporter. It seems like something small, it's like
ten bucks, but on my end, it makes a world
of difference. It gives me freedom to create, to put
out unique ideas that don't really fit into a political camp,
(40:40):
to make thoughtful content, and not be concerned about rage
bait and getting eyeballs and turning heads, because instead I'm
just focused on you, this little devoted group of people
in this awesome corner of the Internet who want the
good stuff, who want to be informed and curious and
socially conscious and justice minded. And so if that's you,
(41:04):
I'm sure you're sick of hearing this ask, but I
would love it if you'd become a paid supporter. And
right when I see that you've joined, I will personally
smile at my phone and type you a welcome message
and a thank you and send it your way, because
I really am that grateful. The link to join is
in the show notes. And for all of you who
(41:26):
are paid subscribers, you didn't have to listen to that spiel,
but if you did, it's because you were waiting for
this thank you at the end. I could not do
this without you. I am so grateful for your support,
that you back me up, that you trust my voice,
and that you believe my work and want to see
it in the world. I can't thank you enough, and
(41:47):
I'm excited for what's it. So thanks for listening, Liby
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