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Kai Wright: This year marks a decade since the emergence of what's become known as the Movement for Black Lives. Obviously, racial justice activism existed long before an unarmed 17-year-old boy, Trayvon Martin was killed by a gun-toting vigilante. When a court of law declared that man did not commit murder, something changed. A focus on the value of black life became central. What's happened in the decades since?

I'm Kai Wright and we've partnered with our friends at the New Yorker Radio Hour to wrestle with that question. I'll talk with a group of people who have been working on police reform in varying ways over the past 10 years, and I'll check in with a youth organizer in New York whose own life was changed when Trayvon Martin was killed and this movement emerged. She'll tell me about what she's witnessed among young people who experienced a similar transformation as hers from now following George Floyd's murder.

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André: When you hear the name, George Floyd, what does that mean to you?

Student 1: A Black man whose life was taken unprovoked.

Student 2: I think it represents a social movement and something that's inspired a lot of people and sparked a lot of change in many people's lives.

Student 3: It's an empowering name. When that event happened, it shocked the whole world. I feel like it pushed us to be better, pushed us to be more demanding as a culture.

Student 4: I think George Floyd is more than just a name of a person now. I think it's more of like something that happened in our society.

Student 5: George Floyd's just one example of many people out there of countless names that I think have been forgotten.

Student 6: I really wish that we could remember all the names of victims to police brutality so they don't just become another statistic.

Student 7: It means a lot because it's been happening for decades and decades and decades and centuries actually.

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Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show. This year, 2023, marks 10 years since the Movement for Black Lives emerged in the long wake of Trayvon Martin's Killing and the impunity that law granted his killer. Our friends at the New Yorker Radio Hour have been looking back and asking what has shifted in the politics and culture around police violence in those 10 years.

As part of that effort, I joined their show this week to lead a conversation about police reform. From a policy perspective, what if anything has changed? We'll share that conversation later this hour but first I also want to share a conversation I had with a young racial justice organizer whose life was fundamentally altered by the Movement for Black Lives. Chelsea Miller was one of the lead organizers of the protests that erupted here in New York City in 2020 following George Floyd's murder.

We met her as part of our Martin Luther King Jr Day broadcast from the Apollo Theater and I spoke to her again this spring. That's the discussion I'm going to share with you now. We talked right after she had an encounter with some middle school students that really shook her and I asked her to tell me that story.

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Hi, and welcome back to the show, Chelsea.

Chelsea Miller: Hi, Kai. Thank you for having me. I'm definitely excited to be back.

Kai Wright: You had, as I understand, an experience recently while talking to young people that was thought-provoking for you. Can you tell me that story? Tell me what happened.

Chelsea Miller: In February, I actually went to a school in New York and delivered a keynote focused on, of course, Black History Month but I think a larger conversation about the state of our current movement as it stands and what does racial justice look like, and how do we reimagine equity? How do we reimagine our futures?

Once the keynote was over, went to one of the classrooms, and the students naturally had questions and wanted to know about activism and social change and how they can be a part of so many of these conversations and really, I think just a curiosity for learning more about the history and what does this mean for their futures? One of the questions that I asked them was, how many of you know about George Floyd? All of their hands went up.

Then I asked, how many of you know about Trayvon Martin? Not a single hand was raised. That was a moment, of course, disbelief naturally for me but then I had to think about it and I think that we all have to think about it. Say, why is it that in a classroom full of middle schoolers, they don't know about Trayvon Martin and then it hit me. Trayvon Martin was 10 years ago.

Barack Obama: To the parents of Trayvon Martin, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.

Chelsea Miller: If we're talking about why a bunch of 13-year-olds wouldn't know about Trayvon Martin, whereas that was such a defining moment in my life and my journey, and understanding how we show up in this world. For them, George Floyd was their Trayvon Martin. I think that it's important for us to think about the history of our movements and honestly where we are as a country and the fact that we are reaching a generation that is losing so much of the history, even if it is recent history. What does that mean for the past 400 years that we have to reckon with?

Kai Wright: When I heard this story the first time, there's just so many things in it that caused me both emotional and intellectual confusion that I don't know, I'm going to just try to wrestle with you for a minute. Why'd you ask them that? What was on your mind and heart when you asked it?

Chelsea Miller: Because I am looking at students in a lot of ways. I am young. I'm in my mid-20s now, but I started my work in high school. I can remember the core memories that changed my life and my trajectory of how I see the world. When I asked them that, it was more so for connection. It was more so for the-- "You guys know Trayvon Martin's name and I was basically your age when I lived it." That was the direction that I was going in when I asked about George Floyd and then getting to Trayvon Martin because I was trying to connect that bridge between the 13-year-old version of myself and there was that curiosity that came on their face because they didn't know about him. They wanted to, but they didn't.

Kai Wright: How did they respond when you told them who Trayvon Martin was? What are some of the responses that happened in the room?

Chelsea Miller: They were shocked. They were curious. They wanted to know more and I told them essentially the story of what happened.

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Kai Wright: This is what happened. On the night of February 26th, 2012, a 17-year-old Black boy named Trayvon Martin was walking home from a convenient store in Sanford, Florida. He was a high school student in Miami, and he was in Sanford visiting his father and his father's fiance. He'd gone to the store to buy some juice and a bag of Skittles.

George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old man who was in charge of the neighborhood patrol, saw Trayvon and decided he was suspicious. Zimmerman called the police, who told him to leave the boy alone, and instead, he took his gun and he stalked the 17-year-old child. I have always admired the fact that Trayvon confronted this depraved stalker when he realized he was being followed but Zimmerman, he shot and killed the boy on the spot.

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Skittles and the hoodie Trayvon wore that night, became cultural symbols in the national protest movement that followed. George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder. He pled self-defense under Florida's Stand Your Ground law and a jury found him not guilty. Three Black women launched the Black Lives Matter movement in response and Chelsea Miller has never been the same.

Chelsea Miller: I'll never forget my teacher, who literally set aside time, it was my history teacher, she set aside time before class. I was only, I think about one of three Black students in the class and was like, "How are you guys feeling? We need to talk about this." All of those things that happen that--

First of all, to this day, literally, I love this, this teacher, Mrs. [unintelligible 00:09:20], if you're listening. I also think that for me, it was important to realize that classrooms should be places for us to talk about the issues that are happening in our world that will define their leadership and define their journey. We have responsibility to bring that into how they see the world and how they talk about it because they care a lot but if there aren't safe spaces to have these discussions, then what?

Kai Wright: When you say you'll never forget that moment, can you just describe-- Do you remember how you felt and why you felt that way when your teacher was like, "Let's talk about this." Do you remember what your emotional response was?

Chelsea Miller: I was so sad because I didn't fully understand it yet, but also keeping in mind that my teacher was not Black. She's not a Black woman. For me, that was also powerful because you have to keep in mind that in a lot of our school settings, you'd be surprised how many Black students are being taught by, of course, non-Black teachers. It's a certain level of trust that happens when educators see their students.

I don't mean when it's time for a test, I don't mean when it's time for state exams, I don't mean when it's time to submit your homework or talk about whatever you're learning about in the classroom, talking about when you feel seen and all that you are by a teacher. That's what happened in that moment when she said, "We're going to pause because it is not business as usual and I know that you guys have questions and are feeling confused and I want to give space to honor that."

Kai Wright: Here's to teachers. How important of a moment was that for your life, and now look at all the things you've done. Here's to teachers. Coming back to your experience recently talking to those middle schoolers about Trayvon Martin, what did it make you think about your own journey, and the decades since that time?

Chelsea Miller: For so many Black people, we don't get to navigate our childhoods in ways that are completely free. We are always feeling attached to something, responsible for something, like stories that are connected to us. In a way, it made me think about the past 10 years, right, if not more, of my own work and coming-of-age story, and this realization that it's like, we don't afford our young people in this world to live truly, in a way that speaks to all of who they are because whether or not we realize it, this world puts limits on them. I think that in a lot of ways when we talk about our history, it's to get to a point where we start claiming those narratives for ourselves and using it as our strengths.

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Kai Wright: It's Notes from America, I'm talking with youth organizer, Chelsea Miller, who helped lead the protests that erupted in response to George Floyd's murder three years ago on Memorial Day. Coming up, Chelsea and I wrestled with how and why we can find strength in remembering the names and the stories of George Floyd, and Trayvon Martin, and the depressingly long list of other Black lives that have been taken in acts of anti-Black violence. I asked her about my own growing uncertainty with this particular political act. Stay with us.

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Rahima: Hi, everyone. My name is Rahima, and I help produce the show. I want to remind you that if you have questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Here's how. First, you can email us. The address is notes@wnyc.org. Second, you can send us a voice message. Go to notesfromamerica.org and click on the green button that says Start Recording. Finally, you can reach us on Twitter and Instagram. The handle for both is @noteswithkai. However you want to reach us, we'd love to hear from you and maybe use your message on the show. All right. Thanks. Talk to you soon.

Kai Wright: Welcome back. It's Notes from America, I'm Kai Wright, and I'm talking with youth organizer Chelsea Miller. We first met Chelsea during our Martin Luther King Jr. Day event at the Apollo Theater here in Harlem this winter. Recently, she told her team about an interesting experience she had, while talking with a class of middle school students, she discovered that they'd never heard of Trayvon Martin, which really shook her.

Trayvon's death in 2012, and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, and not only gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, it ignited Chelsea's personal desire to become a youth activist. I told Chelsea that I too, was of course, deeply, deeply affected by Trayvon Martin's killing, but in a little different way because by that point, this was already a crushingly familiar tale to me.

When Trayvon Martin happened, was like, I think the turning moment of exhaustion for me. I remember how exhausted and over it all I felt by that point. Immediately the first thing that comes to mind is like, for you, it was a starting point, it's almost where I started to lock up and be unable to continue to respond a decade ago. For these young people you're talking to had never even heard of it. I don't have a question here other than that's the immediate thing I came to and I just want to put that to you and see what it sparks.

Chelsea Miller: It sparks a certain level of, I wouldn't even say frustration, but it's more so I think a responsibility that we have and I think the weight of that. If we're talking about, for me, thinking about Trayvon Martin, and when it happened, I was still very young, I couldn't go out and protest, I couldn't really do anything, because I needed parental approval and at the time, my mum was like, "No way." [chuckles] For me, I just think about how defining that was in my life and how it shaped me.

When we asked, and I remember, when we had our sit down at the Apollo, and you said, "What is the legacy of 2020?" I told you, I was like, "I think that we aren't going to be able to measure it for another 10 years," because think about all of the young people who witnessed that who are now mobilized. When we're talking about George Floyd 2020, we won't see fully the impact and legacy of that for years.

For me, it's like, okay, in that interim, as they are still being shaped by the story, and so deeply impacted by it, how are we creating stories? How are we telling narratives? How are we building the infrastructure to support them as they come of age? We're talking about a huge population of young people who are waiting, and are ready to take on the baton, and what is the foundation that we're setting for them? For me, it's just like, we have work to do.

Kai Wright: We're thinking about this conversation in the context of remembering and memorializing. Another thing that really, I had complicated feelings and thoughts about when I heard this story is part of me, Chelsea, when I heard they didn't know who Trayvon Martin was, was like, "Good." Was like, "Good that they don't have that trauma. They don't have that Black death to remember," I have such a long line of Black death to remember. I don't feel good, but part of me was like, "I'm glad they don't."

Chelsea Miller: Yes, I get it. I get why you feel that way. They have the legacy of that to reckon with even if they don't know his name. I think that that is the most difficult part to essentially just process. As much as we want to protect them from what this world looks like and the troops of our systems that have failed us time and time again, I think we have to understand that they are seeing it. Even if they can't name it, even if they don't know the origin, even if they're still struggling to process it internally and see how they fit in the world, they are feeling every single aspect of what it means to navigate this world and their Blackness.

It's important for them to know that before there was a George Floyd, there was a Trayvon Martin. Before there was a Trayvon Martin, there was an Emmett Till, before, before, before, before, before, so that they don't feel alone when they're going through these things and they know that there are generations that have come before them that have so much to teach them. Also a legacy even beyond just trauma, but of resistance, of joy, of all of these things that have existed historically. That they are part of that tradition.

I think that in a lot of ways, that is something that can empower them. I think it's one of those things where you just think about the experience of being a teenager and how lonely and isolating and feeling as though adults don't understand you. No one understands you. The world doesn't understand you. I think there's a missing piece of how we tie generations together through a shared history even beyond the trauma that I think is worth talking about.

Kai Wright: When you talk about the legacy of resistance and joy, that shifted something for me in thinking about these memories. How do we memorialize that? Do you see us memorializing that? How would we memorialize that?

Chelsea Miller: I think that we memorialize it by remembering that yes, Trayvon Martin is no longer here but his mom is, and she is a fighter. We talk about even Emmett Till and the way that his mother showed up for him. We're talking about mothers of the movement. We're talking about even Eric Garner's mom, just so many mothers who have shown up. I think that from a legacy standpoint, their legacy still live on, and the young people who they've inspired and the changes that are being created. Not even looking at it from a policy and systemic lens because we know that it's going to take so much more.

If we're talking about the energy and the ways that people's minds have shifted and the ways that communities have come together, and the ways that we have completely transformed how we see ourselves outside of these systems, I absolutely think that's worth memorializing. I think it starts with telling the stories. I think it starts with telling the nuances of the stories to talk about our power and our creativity and the ways that we've existed and shifted culture even in the midst of all of these things.

To me, that is a powerful story that we can carry on of movements, of protests, but also of the fun of the celebration. I'm excited for that aspect of our storytelling to really take hold into our future generations so that not only is there a sense of pride but an understanding of our humanity as a whole.

Kai Wright: Do you feel any complexity in the way we have focused on these individuals and their names and their moment of death as the starting point for all that incredible mobilization you're talking about? I guess that's what I'm wrestling with when I think about those middle school kids you spoke with, like focusing on these moments of death. Am I being articulate here? I'm trying to figure out--

Chelsea Miller: Yes. I know. Absolutely. I think an answer to that when I say their stories and their names, I don't mean their deaths. I mean their lives. I mean their legacy. I mean the people who love them. I mean, the ways in which their community showed up for them. I mean, the little things. I don't mean the nine minutes of the choke holds or the criminalizing of who they are, the criminalizing of their bodies. I don't mean any of that. I literally mean their stories, their names because they were given their names when they were born, and is the same names that we say. I think that there's an element here of how do we remember our people.

Also thinking about the legacy of slavery. When we were taken, we were stripped of our names, we were stripped of our identities, we were stripped of belonging. We had to redefine that. When I say their names and their stories, it's because that is their birthright. Their names are their birthright. We say their names because there's power in that and carrying that on so that they aren't forgotten, and those stories aren't forgotten because we know historically that the greatest way that we were conditioned was in removing those stories from us. Now that we have that, we should fight for that.

When I think about the '60s and the fact that there weren't iPhones that you could take out and use to record, and so a lot of the information was passed down through inter-community and that storytelling aspect. When you talk about even what took place during the slave trade, and you talk about what took place when slaves came here, the Underground Railroad, all of that was through stories. Stories that we had to hold onto to believe.

A lot of that history within our communities is so critical to how we define our own narratives and how we shape them, and how we pass that on to next generations. If we forgot Emmett Till's name, Emmett Till sparked the Civil Rights Movement. The relentless work of his mother to shift the way that the world saw her son. All of that ties into storytelling.

Kai Wright: That's right.

Chelsea Miller: When I think about Trayvon Martin, when I think about George Floyd and the legacy of George Floyd, I want to ensure-- I think we all have a responsibility to ensure that we are tying the way that we speak about them, that we're tying the way that we speak about memorializing into larger conversations of our liberation that again, exist even outside of the trauma because Black people, Black children deserve rest. We deserve joy. We deserve all of those things and it's important to show in our history that we have had all of those things in spite of.

Kai Wright: For yourself, do you remember when and how it dawned on you like, oh, remembering these individual human beings and how they lived, this is an important political act for me?

Chelsea Miller: It dawned on me in 2020. The reason that I say that is because I remember just being home and watching the way the media was talking about George Floyd. As I saw that, let's investigate his priors and does he have a record and is he even a great father and all these questions that were being asked when in that moment, what was the most important thing was the fact that he was a man who deserved to live. It was that simple. Somehow in the midst of these conversations, the true story was being missed. If we allowed that to continue, then we would lose the battle before it even got to the courtroom.

We would lose because as much as we want to say that the way that we see the world doesn't matter once we enter a judicial and legal system, we know that is a lie. As much as you want to protect a jury and make sure that there is no bias at all once you enter the courtroom, we know that that is a lie. We know it's a lie because we've seen the way in which our criminal system has failed Black folks time and time again.

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Kai Wright: Stories matter. Given that I asked Chelsea about the public narrative surrounding Jordan Neely, yet another black person killed in public in senseless circumstances. He was choked to death on a New York City subway train by a passenger who felt threatened. Neely was a performer who was living on the streets, struggling with mental health and shouting on that train that he needed help. I mentioned to Chelsea that relative to previous stories, it seemed to me like the narrative around Neely's death shifted quickly from questions about what he did to bring it on himself to who he was as a human being. I asked how she felt about the narrative.

Chelsea Miller: I would say that it has been a battle, even though it seems as though we have gotten to a point where there's a lot of corrective work that's happening around how we speak about him and how we speak about what took place. The reality is that there is still a huge influx that is pushing back against that. It saddens me the fact that we have to fight so hard for him to be seen as human. It's so interesting because, in one aspect, we know the playbook. We've seen it so many times but in another aspect, we also have to realize that the playbook has worked so many times and that is the frustrating part. It's also one of those things where you'd be surprised how many folks who rallied behind George Floyd are quiet about Jordan Neely.

Kai Wright: Oh, really, you feel that?

Chelsea Miller: It's like a certain level in which, "I'll advocate for this, but did they say he did so-and-so a couple of days prior. I think I'm going to be quiet on this one." I think what we fail to realize is that we are not solely advocating for individuals. We are advocating for larger problems that must be addressed. Otherwise, there's always going to be a name, there's always going to be an individual. It's frustrating. I think that there's a huge challenge in who our communities show up for and why.

I also think that there's another element here that a lot of people don't realize that in 2020, the world shut down. Because the world shut down, a lot of people were paying attention in ways that historically they haven't before. The challenge of organizing for Jordan Neely three years later is that the world is on full throttle. What happens when you are in the midst of protest for someone that others may not deem as worthy when the capitalist engine is on full throttle? Do you think that the folks who maybe had some time or were thinking about and reckoning with even their own humanity during a pandemic is thinking about someone who was homeless experiencing mental illness on New York City Subways? It's not the same anymore.

I think there's also an element of you shut down a bridge as a protester. These things happened in 2020 where protestors were shutting down bridges across the country. It was okay at the time. When I say it was okay at the time, I don't mean that arrests didn't happen. I'm talking about the public imaginary of what protest looks like for so many folks who believe in advocating for Black lives. They were rallying that on. What happens now when you believe in fighting for Black lives, but you're on your way to work and a bridge gets shut down? Are you still able to show up for that movement in the same way you were able to show up for it in the comfort of your home or now is it too personal?

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Kai Wright: Chelsea Miller is co-founder of Freedom March NYC, a youth-led civil rights organization that emerged as a key player in the global protests that followed George Floyd's murder. 10 years ago when the man who killed Trayvon Martin was acquitted on murder charges, Chelsea was just a middle school kid, but the movement touched her in fundamental ways and shaped the rest of her life. This week, we are partnering with our friends at the New Yorker Radio Hour to look back on the decades since that particular movement began. Coming up, I'll share a conversation I had on the Radio Hour about police reform over the past decade. What if anything has changed? That's next.

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It’s Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. 10 years into the movement that emerged following Trayvon Martin's horrific killing, there's a simple question you could ask. Has there been any measurable change in addressing police violence and abuse? The answer is not simple. There have been many, many efforts at fixing this problem, but we're going to dig into three specific areas of reform. Transparency, accountability, and just tracking the problem. We gathered three experts who come at these challenges from slightly different angles. Anya Bidwell is an attorney for the Institute for Justice.

Mike White is a professor of criminology at Arizona State University. Samuel Sinyangwe is the founder of Mapping Police Violence and Police Scorecard. Samuel was in his 20s working at a nonprofit that focused on economic and social equality when Trayvon Martin was killed. He was used to having access to all kinds of data in his work. When he decided to shift his attention to addressing police violence, he did it by building a national database to actually track the scale of the problem. I asked him what overall he's found in his data since then.

Samuel Sinyangwe: Over the past 10 years, say from 2013 through the present, what we can say is that police kill about 1200 people every single year. That didn't start when the national conversation became focused on police violence. It's something that has happened at a remarkably regular and constant pace about 1050 and 1,250 people.

Kai Wright: It is a remarkable number.

Samuel Sinyangwe: Absolutely. It's about more than three people every single day. What we also know when we unpack the data is how deeply systemic this issue is. We have a system of 18,000 different law enforcement agencies. Each with their own set of policies and practices, their own department culture. Some have more or less funding, more or fewer employees. That constellation of 18,000 agencies every single year kills a similar number of people.

The patterns are remarkably similar year after year as well. Black people are about three times more likely to be killed than white people per population. Latinos killed between 1.5 and two times at higher rate than white people per population. Native Americans also killed as similar rate as Black people, so again, much higher than white people.

Kai Wright: I want to get Anya and Professor White into this part of the conversation too. Anya, you were nodding fiercely as Samuel described the state of the data, how bad the data was and has been. What is the lived consequences of that? What does that mean for the work you do not having information like that?

Anya Bidwell: Justice Brandeis once famously said that sunlight is the best of disinfectants, and transparency really is extremely important in those types of situations. I don't think it's surprising that in many controversial topics, we don't have good data. For example, Second Amendment and the use of guns, that's another area where it's very hard to actually find the data. For us as lawyers, it is much easier to file complaints, file class action lawsuits, have allegations in the complaint that are packed by data. That's a much stronger lawsuit that can take you much further, even though there still will be other doctrines that we'll talk about that will still make it difficult.

Kai Wright: Professor Mike, why is that the case? Why don't we have a centralized system for collecting data from the federal government?

Mike White: There is an effort now to create a national-level use of force database. The FBI is leading that effort. It started, I believe in 2019. It is voluntary. One thing I think we do need to keep in mind is that each year there are more than 50 million encounters between police officers and community members across the United States. More than 50 million. The vast majority, vast majority of those encounters begin and end peacefully. Not all of those police killings are excessive, inappropriate, unlawful uses of force.

Kai Wright: With that context in mind, Samuel, there's been a decade of activism and greater public conversation about this at minimum. There's been a decade of someone like yourself saying, "Well, let's track this." Is there anything that we can point to in your data that says, okay, well this is getting better, or no?

Samuel Sinyangwe: As Michael said, this is something that-- Policing is much broader than those 1200 incidents. There are between 6 and 10 million arrests made every single year. We do see some important shifts in terms of overall police contact and enforcement over the past decade. Particularly, there's been a substantial reduction in arrests, particularly arrests for lower-level nonviolent offenses. This is important because when we consider 6 to 10 million arrests, that's a lot of people.

If you have an arrest record, that impacts your ability to get a job, it impacts your ability to get housing. It impacts a range of opportunities for you. It often results in incarceration, which has its own negative health effects. Reductions in arrests overall, particularly for low-level offenses across the country over the past decade they were accelerated during the pandemic, but have really been concentrated in some of the largest cities in the country.

Joe Biden: We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police. It's to fund the police.

Samuel Sinyangwe: So much of that money is focused on stops and arrests. Police activity and enforcement really targeted towards low-level nonviolent issues that are often associated with crimes of poverty, issues of mental health, and substance use. Drug possession, loitering, or vagrancy of trespassing. Crimes associated with sex work, prostitution arrests, et cetera, have seen substantial declines across the country. The cities that have made the largest reductions in arrests, particularly for low-level offenses have also seen some reductions in police shootings, both fatal and non-fatal. There are fewer incidents that often escalate--

Kai Wright: There's fewer opportunities to engage in the first place.

Samuel Sinyangwe: Exactly.

Kai Wright: Speaking of the number of arrests and just the volume of engagement with police departments, one of the things that has come up in the years since the Black Lives Matter movement became part of the political conversation is body cameras. Professor Mike, can we start with you because you have studied this issue? What actually were body cameras supposed to do? What was the argument behind body cameras?

Mike White: Many departments simply did it as a show of transparency. I can't tell you how many press conferences I saw of chiefs of police announcing the start of a body-worn camera program and saying we're doing this because we've got nothing to hide.

Speaker 3: January 1st, 800 body cameras will be dispersed among officers.

Mike White: Simply, I don't want to be the next Ferguson. Then there was some early evidence that suggested if you deployed cameras, you would see reductions in use of force and complaints. There were a handful of studies that came out in 2013 '14, '15 that showed that. I think those were the primary drivers of the adoption.

Kai Wright: From all of those different vantage points of people who said, "This is a good idea for me," what have we learned?

Mike White: It depends on which outcome you're focused on. The studies on use of force are much more mixed. Again, about 30 studies, and only half of those studies show a reduction in use of force after cameras are deployed. For me, the big takeaway is that you're not going to see one story. The starting point of police department is extraordinarily important. Is it a department in trouble and this is why they're deploying cameras or is the department professional and they're respectful in their contacts with community members, they hold their officers accountable and this is just one more thing they're doing to maintain that level of professionalism? I think--

Kai Wright: To spell out, what is the distinction there in terms of what happens then? If it matters, which makes sense to me, it matters, how they come into it. How do the outcomes vary based on whether they come into it?

Mike White: If a department is in trouble. For example, the Rio Alto Police Department in California was the first to not only deploy cameras but to rigorously study those cameras and they showed immediate significant reductions in use of force. That department was in significant trouble. There was some discussion about whether that department was going to get shut down by the Rio Alto City Council. You have a reformed chief come in who does a bunch of things including deploying the cameras.

Compare that to the Washington DC Metro Police Department when they did their study, they didn't document any impact on use of force. The DC Metro Police Department had been under consent decree for a decade before they deployed cameras. The consent decree that was in place, the federal monitor required significant organizational change and improvement over a period of 10 years. Not surprisingly, they don't see a big reduction in use of force because all of the things that happened over the prior decade, that department was in a much better place organizationally when they deployed cameras versus a department like Rio Alto.

Kai Wright: Of course, we know that even with cameras, accountability for officers who behaved recklessly or deliberately abused people can be very hard to get. I guess the fundamental question behind all of this is that if the goal is to simultaneously reduce crime, keep the public safe, and keep officers safe in their work, can you do all three of those things?

Anya Bidwell: Yes. As long as we have the system of checks and balances that operates properly. For example, in my field, when it comes to people being able to sue and as a result, keep government officials accountable, it's great when courts are the ones that are looking at whether the law was violated and then ordering a remedy for the individual. Then it is absolutely up to the political legislative branches to look at whether there need to be some protections implemented through laws that would protect police officers, for example. If everybody does what they're supposed to do, then we can actually have a win-win-win situation.

Mike White: I think Anya is right. I think the structures are there to deliver on all three of those. The principles of police accountability are well known. That starts with good recruitment and selection of officers, train them properly, supervise them, hold them accountable when they make mistakes. We've known that for decades. If you're the chief of police, you have to deliver on that.

Kai Wright: Samuel, what about you? Is that a fair framing?

Samuel Sinyangwe: I think one of the things that's most interesting about this issue is that when we look from the perspective of officer safety, the use of force incidents are situations where officers are often injured as well. The number one form of police contact in the United States is traffic stop. If you travel outside the United States, there are many, many countries, whether it's South Korea or Italy, where you could drive for hours and hours and never see a police officer on the roads. They have a completely different system where in many cases they have automated enforcement.

They don't find it necessary for somebody with a gun to intervene in your life for running a stop sign or having a broken taillight, or having an air freshener hanging from your rearview mirror. At the end of the day, there are a range of different alternative approaches to some of these issues, many of which are now being piloted and scaled up successfully. Data is starting to come in from some of these approaches, like in San Francisco, where they're sending mental health professionals to crisis calls instead of the police. They're doing the same thing in Portland. In New York, they announced a program although it hasn't really scaled.

Again, I think there's a win-win here, where by finding and funding and scaling alternatives that can successfully intervene and resolve and de-escalate situations without the need for police, fundamentally, addressing the underlying root cause issues that are continuing to perpetuate this issue.

Kai Wright: Also, for all three of you as we wrap up, what do you think the movement for Black lives over the past let's call it a decade has done that other social movements before that didn't do that shifted a conversation around policing or awareness of policing? The answer maybe could be nothing. Do you think something different happened in the course of this movement from the perspective of somebody doing the work Anya?

Anya Bidwell: I think, yes. The movement has been very effective in communicating its ideas. It's also been helped by the time and place of this moment. It's not only body cameras, but it's also citizens with phones being able to record what's happening. For example, with George Floyd, what really resonated is that video where people were just-- they stopped what they were doing, and they watched this horrible thing happen. Nobody had to tell them that. They saw it for themselves. That's a really, really important part of the change in our thinking.

To that effect, there's actually a very important case that is trying to get up to the Supreme Court right now and that's whether police officers can prevent you as a citizen from recording their interaction with a suspect. That could very much affect that. I do think that BLM has been an incredibly effective messenger and also this place and time is helping the message to go further.

Kai Wright: Professor Mike.

Mike White: Yes, I agree. Because of all the other things that have been happening, it's hard to disentangle and say that Black Lives Matter is responsible for this or that, but I agree with Anya. I think they've provided a very powerful, consistent, collective voice that demands attention. I know chiefs of police that view Black Lives Matter as valuable partners now.

Kai Wright: Samuel, thinking back to you as that 24-year-old who saw George Zimmerman getting acquitted and thinking, "Oh, man, this could have been me," the movement that has grown up since then and I want to be clear, I'm not talking about Black Lives Matter, the organization, I mean the larger movement for Black lives in this conversation. What about that was a fundamental shift, if you saw one, in the work of reforming police?

Samuel Sinyangwe: I think that over the past decade, there has been a fundamental shift in the conversation, such that now it has become almost undeniable that police violence is real, that it is disproportionately impacting Black and brown communities, especially Black communities. This is something that is bigger than any one, two or three "bad apple officers" or one, two or three problematic police departments. This is an issue that is much closer to home than I think many people especially people in communities in power and privilege were aware of and were willing to admit a decade ago that this is something that is happening in your city, in your state, not just on TV in Minneapolis.

The shift in the conversation has produced some real tangible seeds of progress. Not wholesale shifted, I think the bottom line indicator of how many people are being harmed or killed by the police, but I do think that there have been some important seeds of progress that set us up for the next phase of the conversation.

Kai Wright: We will have to leave it with that. All three of you, thank you for your work and thank you for this conversation.

Samuel Sinyangwe: Thank you.

Mike White: Thank you very much.

Anya Bidwell: Thanks very much.

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Kai Wright: Notes from America is a production of WNYC Studios. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and on Instagram @noteswithkai. You can hear a longer version of this conversation at the New Yorker Radio Hour. Check them out also wherever you get your podcast.

Special thanks to KalaLea at the Radio Hour for producing our police reform segment. Mike Kutchman was our engineer this week. The music as always by Jared Paul. Our team also includes Karen Frillman, Suzanne Gaber, Regina de Heer, Rahima Nasa, and Lindsay Foster Thomas. André Robert Lee is our executive producer. I'm Kai Wright. Thanks for joining us.

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