Sandara Park: On Politics: Defund or Reform the Police?

June 9, 2020

By Giovanni Russonello

Good morning and welcome to On Politics, a daily political analysis of the 2020 elections based on reporting by New York Times journalists.

Protesters demand a law enforcement restart, but Biden and the Democrats back reform — while Trump backs, well, the police. It’s Tuesday, and this is your politics tip sheet.

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Where things stand

Defund, or just reform? That is the question now at the heart of this moment. Protesters, along with progressive elected officials around the country, are demanding that police departments be defunded, disbanded and replaced by a newly anti-racist system of public safety and justice. In Minneapolis, there are already signs that such a drastic change could soon occur.
Proponents of a more moderate approach support new measures to exert oversight over police departments and regulate the use of force, but not break up the departments. Democratic leaders in the House backed this approach yesterday when they unveiled a sweeping police-overhaul bill amid fanfare on Capitol Hill. The bill would make it easier to prosecute officers accused of wrongdoing and would put new restrictions on the use of force.
Where does all this leave Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president? Just a few weeks ago, he was still adamantly defending his support for the 1994 crime bill — a law that put 100,000 new police officers on the street, and spent nearly $10 billion on prisons.
Biden’s campaign will probably walk a fine line on matters of policing, as he works to shore up support on the left while courting moderate voters. Yesterday, he threw his support firmly behind the more moderate reformers. “No, I don’t support defunding the police,” he told CBS News, in a similar statement to the one that recently got Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis booed out of a rally. “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness,” Biden said.
It’s clear what side President Trump is on. “There won’t be defunding, there won’t be dismantling of our police, and there is not going to be any disbanding of our police,” he declared on Monday. He spoke alongside law enforcement officials and top members of his administration, including state attorneys general, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and officials from some police departments. “You’ll see some horrible things like we witnessed recently, but 99 — I say 99.9, but let’s go with 99 percent of them — are great, great people,” Trump said of the police.

But polls suggest that Trump’s hard-line stance over the past two weeks has not particularly helped him. In a CNN poll released yesterday, just 38 percent of the country approved of his job performance, his lowest marks since January 2019 — even as the country proceeds with a cautious economic reopening. And only 31 percent said they liked how he was handling race relations — roughly on par with past results to this question, and an indication that even some of Trump’s supporters are uncomfortable with his positions on racial issues.
According to a new analysis by Nate Cohn of The Upshot, Biden’s lead is up across the board, putting him in a stronger position than any presidential challenger since Bill Clinton in summer 1992. Looking only at the most reliable recent polls conducted by live telephone interviewers, Nate found that Biden is now ahead of Trump by an average of 10 percentage points. That’s a four-point increase compared with polls from the previous month.

Amassing by the thousands to march and chant, often densely packed in groups, sometimes embracing, protesters haven’t shown an abundance of caution about the coronavirus. Still, hundreds of public health and disease experts last week signed an open letter arguing that protests were justified, despite the pandemic, because “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19.” They called the protests “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people in the United States.”
And for all of those who are worried about mass gatherings contributing to virus transmission, some (relatively) good news arrived yesterday from the World Health Organization. In an analysis based on data obtained through contact tracing, the organization announced that infected people who don’t develop symptoms rarely transmit the virus to others.
No, this doesn’t mean that social distancing is unnecessary — nor that marchers aren’t frequently passing the virus to one another. Experts still say that people who will eventually develop symptoms can in fact become contagious before those symptoms begin to show.

Photo of the day

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Demonstrators in Jackson Heights, Queens, yesterday called for defunding the New York Police Department and investing in schools.

The story behind all these ‘outside agitators’

You’ve almost certainly heard it by now: The protests are mostly peaceful, and when they’re not, it’s the work of unseemly provocateurs, seeking to either undermine the movement (right-wingers) or glom onto it from the outside (antifa).

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To our reporter Jacey Fortin, that idea sounded a bit too easy, so she dug into the history of the civil rights movement, where she found countless examples of this type of claim being used against anti-Jim Crow activists in the 1960s.

Jacey was kind enough to answer a few questions about the phenomenon, and how it’s playing out today.

Hi Jacey. You write in your piece that the trope of the “outside agitator” has been in circulation since at least the civil rights movement of the 1960s. How did the authorities utilize that claim to curtail the movement?

First, I think attributing unrest to roving provocateurs aims to disconnect it from the actual experiences of constituents. In 1965, Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County, Ala., sought to draw that line when he said he was sure that “the local people” would settle down once the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. left the state.

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Second, it changes the legal context. It’s usually up to states and localities to handle allegations of property damage or violence, but interstate travel can bring federal laws into the picture and justify a harsher response, or surveillance. Attorney General William P. Barr tapped into this idea last month when he warned that it was a violation of federal law to cross state lines “to incite or participate in violent rioting,” and that the F.B.I. would enforce those laws.

In recent weeks, many people who said they supported “peaceful” protesters — often, liberals — argued that demonstrators destroying property and using confrontational tactics were in fact “agitators,” who didn’t really belong to the movement. Did you find that that’s generally true? Or, in its own way, does that argument serve to sideline a key part of the protesters’ message? Just as important, does it obscure the level of urgency and radicalism inherent to their demands?

Protesters have disagreed over which tactics are acceptable. Vandalism and looting can call attention to a cause, and they definitely speak to the urgency you mentioned. They can also distract from the peaceful demonstrations and concrete demands that organizers have been working on for years.

So I think there’s room for complexity and specificity. It’s possible to acknowledge that some protesters can hurt a movement or bring harm to black neighborhoods or black-owned businesses — and to call those people out — without resorting to broad-brush conclusions about the legitimacy of a movement whose roots go back generations.

We’ve seen a groundswell of public support for the current protest movement. Would you say that the “agitator” argument is losing its edge, or is it still something many people believe?

Well, I haven’t conducted a national poll on this one! But you covered this issue last week and found — is it weird if I quote you? — that “never before in the history of modern polling have Americans expressed such widespread agreement that racial discrimination plays a role in policing.”

I think this speaks less to the efficacy of the “agitator” argument, and more to the work that activists and organizers have been doing for a very long time to build connections between people experiencing similar things in different places. As the historian Robin D.G. Kelley put it in our conversation for this story, “If this is a national movement and an international movement, at what point are there really outside agitators?”

And now for something else …

What happens when QAnon, a sprawling pro-Trump conspiracy theory, is amplified by people with real political power? Listen to “Rabbit Hole,” our narrative audio series with the tech columnist Kevin Roose.

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