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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our presidential election series "30 Issues in 30 Days," or in a run of 8 days in a row, focusing on racial justice issues facing Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and all of America. Now it's 30 Issues in 30 Days, Issue 17. Defund, Reform, Support the Police. What does any of it mean? We know that "Defund the police" signs could be seen at some of the protests this summer. President Trump is using that phrase as a weapon against Joe Biden.

President Donald Trump: There won't be defunding, there won't be dismantling of our police.

Brian: Biden has responded like this.

Joe Biden: No, I don't support defunding the police. I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness, and in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.

Brian: In fact, here's Biden in an NBC News town hall going further.

Biden: I'm the only one who's talked about increasing police budgets when your husband goes on a call, that in fact is a 911 call, is better if he or she has with them a psychologist or psychiatrist with him, someone who knows how to deal with someone who is not all there. There's a lot of things we should be doing. In addition to that, also I'm proposing that we spend a significant more money on community policing. The reason it worked, my son used to be an attorney general in the state of Delaware. The idea is, you get the police, you get the law enforcement together with the community, so they know one another, because that kid walking across the street with a hoodie on may be the next poet laureate.

Brian: Biden wants to tie some Police Department funding to standards of behavior, as he said in the first clip, but also increase funding for programs he sees as constructive, like he said in the second clip. Now, about the phrase "Defund the police," a couple of references before we talk to our guests. Civil rights leader, the Reverend Al Sharpton has said in a few places recently that he sees the term "Defund the police" as something being flung around mostly, but what he calls "Latte liberals." Here's part of what he said on this show on September 30. After listing many specific reforms, he would very much like to see police departments make. He then added this.

Rev. AI Sharpton: There are those that say, "No, we don't need any policing at all." What I talked about the "Latte liberal," that may be good for those that live in communities that are not inundated with crime, and that are not facing communities where their gun is easily available, even though there's no gun manufacturing plants or bullet manufacturing plants there. You can sit back in safe environments, sipping a latte talk in theory, those on the ground that have to deal with the reality can afford to embrace those kind of theories. It is the height of being stressed out when you are living in communities where you are afraid of the cops and the robbers.

Brian: Reverend Al Sharpton here in September. One person, not a "Latte liberal," who does use the term "Defund the police," is New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a YouTube Calling show recently, she gave a caller this example of how it doesn't mean no police officers, but it could mean things like this.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: One thing that I did today, I announced that this week I'm joining with Representatives Mark Takano, who he himself is a former veteran, and Representative Chuy Garcia in introducing a national ban on tear gas. This gets a little bit out your question because we want to make sure that no police department in the United States deploys tear gas, which is a chemical weapon banned in war, against our own people.

Brian: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Defund, Reform, Support the Police, with me now on WNYC Race and Justice editor Jami Floyd and Georgetown Law Professor MSNBC legal analyst and former criminal prosecutor Paul Butler, who is also author of the book Chokehold Policing Black Men. Hi, Jamie and Paul, thanks for doing this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jami Floyd: Hello.

Paul Butler: Hey, Brian.

Brian: Jami, I'll let the listeners in on a little behind-the-scenes chatter between us. You suggested that you and Paul come on together because you're both attorneys interested in racial justice. You in journalism now, Paul in academia now, and a former prosecutor, but you have somewhat different takes on the term and the movement to defund the police. Would you just talk about what that means to you, Jami, and maybe engage Paul for some of the dialogue that you too have had before on this?

Jami: We're friends, and we go way back. We've known each other, I would say, for a couple of decades. It's always fun to talk with Paul about these critically important issues because every time I have a conversation with Paul, I learn something, and so will the listeners too. In my view, "Defund the police" is a critically important conversation. The question is, what does it really mean? I hear it as a plea of last resort. If the police cannot stop killing people, Black people in particular, we need fewer police officers on the streets and in our communities. That's where the call to "Defund the police" comes from. It's also a good hashtag, a good poster at a protest, a good slogan. I hear it also as a statement of principles. The country needs to shift money away from surveillance and punishment, militarization, and towards fostering a more just, equitable, healthy, and safe society. The call to defund the police does raise, for me, serious questions about how it would really work. Does defunding the police lead to dismantling the force to, and what would take its place? Who would you call if you are in trouble, if you defund the police? Where would the money go instead? What are some of the legal reforms that would change policing, and does the legal as well as the cultural change really take hold over time? We've had those same questions about things like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act for decades. Paul, I've cued up some questions for you. Have at it.

Paul: How about just starting with my membership in the Jami Floyd fan club? We do go way back and, may I respect for how you've gotten the word out about these issues for many, many years. I'm thrilled that you're on this new race and justice, because it's the perfect fit for this moment, including "Defund the police." It's a slogan, and it means different things to different people. Some other hardcore, say "Defund the police" means "Defund the police," and they're thinking about W. E. B. Du Bois and his ideas about abolition democracy. He said, for abolition to work, we have to eradicate the institutions and practices that are rooted in white supremacy. US police departments are one of those, they grew out of slave patrols. What "Defund the police" means to me, and I think to many others, is, it recognizes that shifting resources, the community programs for violence prevention, for mental health treatment, providing housing. That's a better use of resources than the billions of dollars, upwards of 100 billions of dollars that are now spent on law enforcement. It doesn't mean that the police come off the streets tomorrow. Think about it as a reallocation of resources.

Brian: Jami, want to keep going?

Jami: I do agree, of course, that the US has an extremely high budget commitment to guns, warplanes, armored vehicles, detention facilities, courts, jails, prisons, drones, patrols, Ocasio-Cortez referring to all of that, law and order tear gas, employing the weapons of war on our own citizens. Paul is correct, starting all the way back in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to recapture and return enslaved people during the Civil War and then during Reconstruction, to track down enslaved people, and that included here. We like to think we were immune from it on the Eastern seaboard, but no, it was very much a part of the work here in New York law enforcement, to remove that historical routing in white supremacy, I think, is key, and that requires a deconstruction of the discriminatory fashion, a discriminatory impact of our law and order systems. As Paul says, we have an equally extremely low budget commitment to mental health, food support, aid for teenage parents, help for the homeless, working families, daycare, health care, safe housing. Very often progressive law enforcement advocates and police chiefs even will say, "We don't want to be in the business of, say, domestic violence resolution or mental health intervention." I could go on, but we do underfund those social programs while overfunding the prison industrial complex and the criminal justice system. At the same time, Brian and Paul, I think you know, there are those who would abolish police departments altogether. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, and I underscore that I share the surname Floyd. I feel this case, this moment in time very deeply. There were calls, on the part of activists in Minneapolis and certainly by Black Lives Matter, to completely defund the police and to abolish the police departments. There are those who would see us go that far. We have to wrangle with what the phrase means, but also what reform means for all of us as citizens moving forward as we seek to create that more perfect union.

Brian: Paul, I've seen you use the word "abolition" in other interviews and your writing with respect to your position on prisons. Can you explain what prison abolition refers to, and do you say police abolition too?

Paul: Prison abolition does not mean that everybody who's locked up comes home tomorrow. Think of it as a process of gradual decarceration. Very attendant to public safety, but with the idea that, when people don't need to be caged, it's not in our best interest to lock them up. It's also part of this reconstruction project. Prisons by and large now are for poor people, they're for Black and Latinx people. What I think the abolition movement and "Defund the police" have in common is, one, I love that they're Black Feminist Projects, so both abolition and "Defund the police" are now being promoted by the movement for Black Lives, which was begun by three women of color. Academics and activists like Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore have promoted these, because again, what they're recognizing is, when we look at how policing and incarceration work in the United States, one in 1000 Black men and boys are going to be killed by the police. We have more African Americans in the criminal legal process today than we had slaves in 1850. For a lot of folks, these programs, these institutions, they're not consistent with our safety and our freedom. As of policy matter, 9 out of 10 calls the police get are for non-violent encounters. Now often, having people with guns in clubs and the power to arrest show up makes things worse, not better. When people call the police because of their problems in a relationship or a beef between neighbors, and because of a mental health crisis or someone who's suffering from addiction or homelessness, how many people with guns and pepper spray and batons and handcuffs? Again, it just doesn't help the situation.

Brian: Those are the easy cases in a certain respect to say, "Let's do that differently." What about when there's an actual violent crime? What about when there's a murder or a shooting that's non-fatal or an assault, or those things seem to be about to happen? What should people do now in the ideal scenario that you're laying out for things were better? Paul, you want to take that?

Paul: Sure. It's a great question. They should work to prevent. We should work to prevent those situations from happening, because the reality is the police don't solve most crimes. I think most people understand that if they call 911 and say that their iPhone was stolen, the cops are not going to find your iPhone, they're probably not even going to look. Sadly, this is the case for most crimes. The police don't solve 70% of rapes, they don't solve 70% of robberies, and you mentioned murder. The cops don't solve around 40% of murder. What "Defund the police" asked is, are there ways to get communities and families safe, that actually work better, that have better clearance rates than the police do? Study after study has found that if you put the money in prevention rather than responding after the fact, and prevention means housing, it means health care. That means jobs. That means anti-racist practices. Those work better. Work better, not pie in the sky. Kumbaya. Work better means that people live. People live free. They're not victims of crime in the way that they are in the current regime.

Jami: Yet, I don't disagree with a thing that Paul said, and yet we're both attorneys and we like case studies. That's how you study things. In law school, you look at the case. In Minneapolis, the city where we watched police choke the life out of George Floyd. The City Council, I think with the greatest of intentions, pledged to "Defund the police." They were receiving phone calls. Of course, as Paul has so rightly mentioned, Miski Noor and Black Visions Collective were advocating for "100%, no more police officers." Black Lives Matter had made its statement calling for the defunding of police. The City Council there made its pledge with a lot of pressure from the general public to defund that police department. Thereafter, they received calls from the same citizenry, "Why isn't anyone coming when I call 911? I am calling the police. They're not coming." A Gallup poll taken. Polls are what they are, right? We have to take that into account. A Gallup poll, that was taken of 40,000 Americans in July, demonstrated that Black Americans still want some police presence in their neighborhoods. It took a poll of Black, white, and other Americans. They found that 61% of Black Americans said they'd like police to spend the same amount of time in their communities. 20% answered that they'd like to see more police, and just 19% said they would like to see the police defunded entirely. Now the poll, I have to emphasize, did say that 18% of African Americans, only 18%, said they felt very confident that the police would treat them with courtesy, dignity, and respect during an interaction. Whereas, 56% of white Americans said they would feel treated with courtesy, dignity, and respect. That demonstrates a great gap in terms of being treated with respect by the police when stopped, but in terms of defund, I'm not sure that African Americans want to see at least the full defunding of the police.

Brian: To bring this back to the presidential race, Paul, where do you see Biden and for that matter, Trump and the Republican bill to change police department's relationships with communities that Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has introduced, on the scale of what you two have been talking about this morning? We played at the beginning, included two clips of Biden in which he said, he doesn't believe in defunding the police, but he does believe in conditioning a certain amount of federal aid on decency. He used that word and he meant standards of behavior by police departments. He said he also believes in more funding for police departments if it's for the kind of thing that could increase neighborhood policing, relationship-oriented policing, having mental health workers ride with the police to mental health calls, not just law enforcement people. How do you see the politics of the actual moment with the actual candidates in the actual bills right now, Paul, since you were an MSNBC legal analyst had as well, maybe you want to put that one on for this.

Paul: The politics are that both Biden and Trump are, I guess, defunding the police. Their fight is about who's against it more. Biden says Trump's really in favor of the defunding the police because his budget takes away money from departments that support the police. Really, I think if you look at the platforms or statements, the Democrats talk about criminal justice reform, Republicans talk about defending the police. Democrats talk about systemic racism, and Republican say there are no systemic problems, but rather just a few bad apple costs. If we think about police reform as being about transparency and accountability in a police department, I think that both platforms take steps in the direction of transparency of, for example, not allowing bad cops to skip from one department to another. In terms of accountability, one of the main differences has to do with qualified immunity, which is basically when police officers are sued, there are successful defenses. You can't sue me, I'm a cop. Democrats thinks that that needs to be reformed, and Republicans are okay with that. In terms of accountability, holding officers who abuse their positions responsible. The Democrat platform seems to go further than the Republican's.

Brian: Jami, same question for last word.

Jami: Yes, I first met Paul back in the 1990s when we were living in Dick Wolf's America and Law and Order, the longest-running program on national television had created this, I think, detrimental hagiography around police and prosecutors, which is in part why Americans largely oppose reducing spending on policing. I think, Brian and Paul, we've come a long way toward thinking critically about policing, now Americans do by and large support supplementing policing efforts with additional social services. Since you asked a question about the election, Democrats who embrace the call to defund the police risk alienating some voters whose support will be critical in the national movement against police violence in this law-and-order Trumpism, but you have to have courage to do the right thing when we recognize that our policing has become overmilitarized and isn't serving our fundamental values as Americans. I will finish, Brian, since Paul started us out with Du Bois, I recently read, re-read, re-read probably for the third time, The Souls of Black Folk. I'm going to paraphrase a little bit, but Du Bois said something along the lines of, we don't know what kind of society we would replace this one with, but this one really needs to be replaced. It needs to be better. We have to go through the experience of revolution and to discover the better society, we have to be in a constant state of evolution and revolution. That's what our policing structure requires, evolution and a bit of revolution.

Brian: That's a good way to end. Listeners, that's Issue 17 in our "30 Issues in 30 Days" election series, where we are in a run of 8 days in a row within the 30 days, looking at racial justice issues as issues in the presidential campaign. Tomorrow, it'll be Issue 18, "Trump, Biden and racial justice in the suburbs." We thank our guests for today. Georgetown law professor, MSNBC legal analyst, and former criminal prosecutor, Paul Butler, who was also author of the book, Chokehold: Policing Black Men. I see, Paul, that your book got some love from the LA Lakers so you can now say, blurbed by world champions.

Paul: The champions of the world, always an honor to be on with you and Jami, Brian. Thank you so much for having me.

Brian: WNYC legal editor and race and justice editor, Jami Floyd. Let me tell you all that, tonight and tomorrow night at eight o'clock, Jami and I will co-host an evening wrap-up of Amy Coney Barrett's testimony, which is going on today. We will watch the hearing so you don't have to. Okay, kidding. Maybe you want to watch them, but we have them streaming live at wnyc.org, if you do, but Jami and I will play highlights and have analysis and take your calls at eight o'clock tonight and tomorrow night, here on WNYC. Jami, long day, talk to you then.

Jami: See you then, Brian.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Coming up next, we'll have highlights from this morning's Amy Coney Barrett testimony so far. Stay with us.

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