Matt Katz: I'm Matt Katz in for Tanzina Vega. You're listening to The Takeaway. We've been talking about the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis. Floyd's death didn't just spur calls for police reform there but in cities and states across the US. So where do things stand now? Here to walk us through the state of police reform in the US is Jamiles Lartey, a staff writer at The Marshall Project. Jamiles, glad to have you with us.
Jamiles Lartey: Hey, thanks for having me.
Matt: Absolutely. I want to start with the latest from Congress. Last week, the House passed the George Floyd justice in policing act. Is this noteworthy in and of itself, even though it hasn't passed in the Senate yet? What is the significance of just the vote itself and what does the bill do?
Jamiles: Sure. I think that's a yes and no question. On one level, it is a pretty dramatic piece of legislation in terms of addressing policing. On the other hand, it was passed last year in the House and wasn't taken up by the Senate, and it seems fairly unlikely to gain traction in the Senate this session. The Democrats would need to keep the entire party together on this question which isn't a guarantee, and then would need to get 10 Republicans to join them in promoting this bill. It seems like the qualified immunity portion of the bill is going to really just make that impossible.
Matt: The effort to eliminate qualified immunity or to scale it back.
Jamiles: Yes, correct.
Matt: In the weeks and months following the killing of George Floyd, states all over the country rushed to pass their own police reform bills. Do we have a sense of how many of those actually became law?
Jamiles: That's a good question, and I would caution against trying to come up with hard numbers because all of these states are starting from different places in terms of what's the law on the books. Then the laws that were proposed and either passed or failed, all had different components to them. It's difficult or maybe unwise to group them all together and say these are all the places that passed bills.
Colorado probably went the furthest of all the states that were able to pass bills, because they did address this question of qualified immunity. For listeners who may be unfamiliar with the term, that's a legal doctrine that says effectively that government workers can't be held liable for what they do on the job, except in rare circumstances. It's a doctrine that was judicially created in the 1960s and has been slowly but surely expanded by courts in the meanwhile.
Another thing that we see in the laws that have passed in the wake of George Floyd's death is they kind of [unintelligible 00:03:02] a few different varieties. Many states bundled all of these things together, but there are laws that are inspired by the death of Breonna Taylor that address no-knock raids. There are laws that were inspired by the death of George Floyd that often touched on banning chokeholds or carotid restraint, and more generally, many of these laws have endeavored to address broader systemic policing things like qualified immunity, which speaks to the difficulty in holding police officers accountable and I guess in some respects, personally liable for their actions on the job.
Matt: What about defunding the police? Has that call translated into policy or budget moves of any significance anywhere around the country?
Jamiles: I think probably what's more reasonable to say is that the pandemic has had the effect of defunding local government, which has included the police. So many municipalities have seen their tax base really wither and crumble in the loss of sales tax, in all different ways that governments fund themselves. To give you an example, I live in New Orleans and here, our police budget is being cut to the point where officers are under a mandatory, over a month of furlough. They've got to take I think 26 unpaid days off next year just to try to cover some of the budget shortfall.
We're seeing that in cities around the country much more than we're seeing the actual implementation of defund. What we certainly are seeing in a lot of places is experimentation, pilot programs, to use this term, unbundle the police, right? To take some of the activities that police currently do, or some of the situations that police currently respond to and to offload those to civilian agencies, folks who don't carry guns. We have seen a fair degree of that. That is not always necessarily tied to changes in funding, which have to happen as a matter of legislation and have to go through a process.
Matt: What are some of the challenges that those who want more radical changes to police departments are facing? Is it police unions that are the major obstacle?
Jamiles: Police unions are certainly an obstacle, or maybe to be more specific, police union contracts are an obstacle, because there's many changes that have been proposed and that quite honestly a lot of police chiefs would be open to, but the union contract which only comes up every so many years, prevents those types of reforms from being implemented. That's certainly a large piece standing in the way. I think more broadly, what's standing in the way of reforms or of reimagining, or whichever term you want to use, is just the inertia of the system. The system has grown and developed over many, many years to be this way, and it's very hard to turn that kind of thing around.
Matt: Jamiles Lartey is a staff writer at The Marshall Project. Jamiles, thanks very much for joining us. We appreciate it.
Jamiles: Thank you for having me.
Matt: Now, we turn to you. Last year, we heard from many of you, of your participation in the George Floyd protests. Now nearly one year later, as we see the trial for officer Derek Chauvin coming up, we hear from you again on whether you have continued to be involved, and what you hope for in terms of police reform.
Joel: Hey, this is Joel from Bremerton, Washington. I would like to see any officer who is forced to use deadly force removed from his job and never be able to be any type of cop ever again. We just can't have police out there with kill records. I would also like to be able to see a cop's disciplinary record every time there is an incident.
I'm not aware of any tangible police reforms in Texas or at least in Dallas where I live. I'd like to see no-knock warrants banned, chokeholds banned, use of deadly force against unarmed suspects prosecuted, not only banned but prosecuted, the same way that persons not on the police force would be prosecuted. In my opinion, that's murder. That's not self-defense like police would like to claim.
Speaker 1: I'm not aware of any police reform in my own small rural town but in the broader community and nearby municipalities, I would love to see a plan or policy that doesn't automatically send armed officers with weapons drawn to any unusual situation. In many cases, dispatching social workers would be much more effective.
Lou: This is Lou in Falmouth, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. I've been involved with protests against police brutality, especially after George Floyd's and many other murders. I'm still engaged. What I want to see is a major reallocation of funding away from policing to other services and resources that have a much greater long term impact on crime, on civil unrest, the peace, and social-emotional and physical safety and well being.
Simon Benton: This is Simon Benton in Gilbert, Arizona. After the savage killing of George Floyd and others, the reforms I'd like to see are threefold. One, chokehold deaths are homicide, period. Two, no policing of Blacks by whites. There are too many bad apples in uniform. Three, until two is in place, either party should have the right to summon an independent third party to referee the interaction between them.
Vanessa Walker: I am Vanessa Walker of St. Simons Island, Georgia. My 18-year-old daughter and I protested the injustice system in our community in Greene County, Georgia last year. This is where Ahmaud Arbery was shot down by the son of a retired officer of the local district attorney's office. Our demonstrations were peaceful but direct and focused, with twin goals of seeking justice for Arbery's death and accountability of the DA. A diverse group of citizens worked to register new voters, demand justice, and change in the system. We successfully elected a [unintelligible 00:09:57] candidate to defeat the incumbent DA.
I'm relocating to Atlanta with a dream of working with Stacey Abrams to improve voter rights and preserve enfranchisement. With the onslaught of proposed legislation to curtail voting rights, now is a critical time to pay attention and act to keep including all legal voters. To me, this is the clearest path to improved, responsive, and inclusive country for every one of us.
Pam Graber: My name is Pam Graber, I'm calling from Sebastopol, California. Yes, I have attended some protests regarding that brutality. Yes, I am on a white allyship journey. It was inspired by the 28-day exercise found in the book Me and White Supremacy.
Matt Katz: Thank you for calling us. Remember, you can always call into 877-8-MY-TAKE and share your thoughts, or record a voice memo and email it to us at takeawaycallers@gmail.com.
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