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Transcript

“Protest works.” · Pod Save America

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: I'm Jon Lovett.
• 0:23
  Speaker 3: I'm Tommy Vitor.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: On today's pod, Tommy talks with LA District Attorney candidate
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: George Gascon about what progressive criminal justice reform looks like.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: Before that, we'll talk about what kind of progress on
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: police reform might come from these protests, the establishment Republicans
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: and military leaders who are abandoning Donald Trump, and how
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: Friday's surprising jobs report might affect the 2020 campaign. But first, Lovett,
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: how was the show this weekend?
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: We had a very good Love It or Leave It.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Talked to Osita Wanevu from the New Republic. Talked to DeRay.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: We talked about everything from defunding the police and the
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: goals of defunding the police all the way to what
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: police reforms can help right now. We listened to some protesters.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Made fun of Lea Michele one time. That's it. That's
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: the show.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Okay, we'll take it. Also, if you haven't yet adopted
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: a swing state through votesaveamerica.com, it's not too late. We
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: are still in awe that more than 16,000 of you
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: joined us live for the first training session last week. Tommy,
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: you were one of the special guests. You want to
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: say a word about that?
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: I was. I have to say, you guys know me
• 1:26
  Speaker 3: quite well. I'm not a person who tends to emote.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: It was like one of the most overwhelming things to
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: see 16,000 people spent an hour on a Thursday night
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: to get trained to be a digital organizer because they
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: care this much about the country in the midst of
• 1:40
  Speaker 3: a pandemic, in the midst of the protests, with all
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: that's going on. It was incredible. Please come be a
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: part of it. You will feel good if you are
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: involved in this election and you will feel good if
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: you're trained and participating. And there is a community of
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: people who will be there with you in a time
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: when we're all so isolated. So check it out. It
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: was incredible. I can't wait to do it again.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: I'll be the special guest at the training that we're
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: having this Thursday, which is all about storytelling for organizers.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: So check it out. Hope to see you there. All right,
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: let's get to the news. For the second weekend in
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: a row, protesters took to the streets of big cities
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: and small towns across America and around the world in
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: a massive demonstration against police brutality and systemic racism. There
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: are over 10,000 people in cities like Washington and Los Angeles.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: This weekend's protests were met with a much smaller and
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: less militarized law enforcement presence. Curfews were lifted and wouldn't
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: you know, there was less violence and chaos. Trump spent
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: the weekend angrily tweeting from inside the giant wall he
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: had built around the White House, downplaying the size of
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: the protests and lobbing insults at Joe Biden, Barack Obama, D.C.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: Mayor Muriel Bowser, Bob Mueller, Colin Powell and George Floyd,
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: sharing a tweet which said the fact that he's been
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: held up as a martyr is, quote, sickening. The next day,
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: the White House said that the president may soon deliver
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: a speech on race and unity. So tune in for that.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: So let's put Trump aside for a second because I
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: do want to start by focusing on the protesters and
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: activists who've led this movement. In what ways do you
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: guys think they've already succeeded? Tommy, why don't we start
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: with you? Okay.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: So I think these protests have been overwhelmingly successful. And
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: there's a bunch of different parts of that. So I mean,
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: A lot of people have woken up to the fact
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: that police violence and brutality is rampant. You know, it's
• 3:33
  Speaker 3: not just a few bad cops. It's not just a
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: few bad police forces. I mean, you're seeing these videos
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: of abuse from L.A. to New York to Buffalo, and
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: it shocks the conscience. And I think that's woken a
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: lot of folks up. You're also seeing protests everywhere. I mean,
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: in 2014, it was focused on Ferguson. You're not just
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: seeing protests in, you know, majority African-American cities. You're seeing
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: people protesting in like tiny towns all across the country.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: They are literally ubiquitous. And public sentiment is on the
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: right side. The Wall Street Journal found that by two
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: to one margin, voters are more troubled by police actions
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: and killing George Floyd than they are about protest violence.
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: And I think that's good because it's helping people dismiss
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: bad faith arguments that pop up at these times, right?
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: Like Colin Kaepernick's protest was pretty lonely. It was like
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: him and a few others. But that discussion was quickly
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: stolen from him and made about the anthem and disrespecting
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: the flag or the U.S. military. despite the fact that
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: the guy who told Kaepernick to kneel and not sit
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: on the bench was a former Green Beret. It was
• 4:32
  Speaker 3: like guidance from a service member. So this time it
• 4:35
  Speaker 3: feels more focused. And then, you know, lastly, it's like
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: I think the movement is broadening. It is a multiracial,
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: multigenerational protest movement. We're seeing Republicans like Mitt Romney was
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: out there this weekend. The Republican district attorney in Franklin County, Pennsylvania,
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: put out a statement saying Black Lives Matter. And he
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: also said that he was specifically wrong to once reject
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: that term and say all lives matter. So lawmakers moving.
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: Mayor Garcetti here in L.A. announced a bunch of reforms.
• 5:03
  Speaker 3: So it's been a dramatic shift in a short period
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: of time.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: Love it. I don't think I've seen a shift this
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: dramatic and quick in public opinion and public sentiment on
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: any issue whatsoever. maybe since sort of the gay marriage debate.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: I mean, just in the span of a couple weeks,
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: seeing vast majority of Americans siding with protesters supporting Black
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: Lives Matter, the Black Lives Matter movement, believing systemic racism
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: and police brutality are serious major problems, supporting major reforms
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: to police departments. What other successes have you seen? What
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: are your thoughts been watching this over the weekend?
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it is remarkable how quickly I think this is clarified.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: The debate around police brutality, police accountability, and larger questions
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: about systemic racism. It is true that there's been this
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: sea change over the course of two weeks, but I
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: do think it's worth saying that this is a culmination
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: of a movement that was slowly gaining attention of Americans
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: after each of these police killings that slowly over time
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: began first with Black Lives Matter and now with this
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: incredible outpouring of grow in part because at each step
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: we've realized, you know, something that, you know, we've talked
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: about on the show that, that, that killings haven't decreased,
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: that even some of these reforms haven't had the effect
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: that they wanted them to, that sort of bigger systemic
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: changes were needed. And I'll just say for me, like
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: just watching it unfold, I think that there are things that,
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: you know, but in a lot of ways you don't
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: internalize or they don't become central to how you think
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: about politics. And, and I, and what I found striking
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: in just the past two weeks is how central the
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: police are to conversations about a host of other issues,
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: whether the police are the cause of or a symptom
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: of these deeper problems, systemic racism, also our failure to
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: take care of people with mental health and addiction issues,
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: our failure to invest in schools and public parks and
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: social welfare and social workers. And that what really is
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: to me happening is we're having a very overdue conversation
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: led by protesters who are sort of fed up because
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: police violence and police brutality are the tip of the spear.
• 7:20
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: It's interesting listening to, um, positive the people last week,
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: DeRay was saying that, you know, when he first started
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: caring about this issue and working on this issue, a
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: lot of people said to him, why are you picking
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: sort of police brutality? Isn't that sort of a niche
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: issue in the context of larger criminal justice reform? And
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: he said, well, like when people end up in jail
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: and up in prison, end up stuck in the criminal
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: justice system, how do you think they get there? Encounter
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: with the police is almost always how someone enters the
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: criminal justice system. And like so many movements, as you
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: point out, Lovett, this was one that was started by
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: a lot of activists and organizers who felt very lonely
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: for a long time. And then there is a spark
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: that makes it grow almost exponentially overnight. And now you
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: see some of the big protests on Friday were about,
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: it would have been Breonna Taylor's 27th birthday. And that
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: was a case that when it happened, there were activists
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: and organizers protesting, but it didn't sort of spark what
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: we saw over the last couple of weeks. So these
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: things build and build and build, and then suddenly something changes.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: There was also a lot of, I think, progress on
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: the ground, tangible progress that we've seen over the last
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: couple of weeks in you know, from, I'll go from
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: small to bigger, you know, there's officers who've been caught
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: using excessive force are getting suspended, fired, investigated, and charged
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: faster than they've been in the past. Cities have banned
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: police from using chokeholds, tear gas, and other types of
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: excessive force. LA and New York have announced they'll be
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: redirecting some funding from police departments to job programs, healthcare,
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: and other social services. Long-running movements to remove Confederate statues
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: have finally forced action in places like Richmond, Virginia. And
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: then On Sunday, and we'll talk about this in a second,
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: the Minneapolis City Council announced that they'll be disbanding their
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: current police force and basically rebuilding it from scratch over
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: the next year.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: We should also add, too, that I do think it's
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: worth pointing out that it's because of protests that charges
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: were filed in the George Floyd case that the Breonna
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Taylor case has been reopened. So there are clear signs
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: that in really acute, directed ways, the protests are working
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: while also starting this larger conversation around policy.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: So let's talk about what comes next. In Congress, Democrats
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: today introduced the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: would require law enforcement agencies to report data on the
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: use of force, create a national registry to track police misconduct,
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: ban chokeholds, and mandate bias training. These reforms mirror much
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: of what Joe Biden laid out over the weekend in
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: an LA Times op-ed. He also called for a police
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: oversight commission in his first 100 days, ending the transfer
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: of weapons of war to local police and a national
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: use of force standard. Many activists have long believed that
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: to truly end police violence, cities should consider defunding or
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: disbanding their police forces altogether and replacing them with a
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: new system of public safety. which, as we just mentioned,
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: is exactly what a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: Council pledged to do on Sunday. Trump has already tweeted
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: several times about how Joe Biden and the radical left
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: Democrats want to defund the police. And even though that
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: Biden hasn't proposed defunding, and in fact, he came out
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: against defunding the police in a statement through his spokesman today,
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: the Trump campaign and Republicans now want to use this
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: as a wedge issue in the election. I kind of
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: want to take this in two different parts. Let's get
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: to the politics in a second. Let's just talk about
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: sort of the substance of the argument around defunding or
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: disbanding police forces. Tommy, you want to talk about that
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: argument a little bit?
• 10:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: I mean, look, I think the conversation about defunding the
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: police exists on a continuum and there's different versions from
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: different folks. But like at its essence, I think we
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: are talking about dramatically rethinking how we approach public safety
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: and emergency response. So that means evaluating the jobs you
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: ask police to do, whether that work is effective, whether
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: it's not, and then reallocating funds accordingly. So some data
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: points that are relevant, like the Washington Post over the
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: weekend reported a study that shows that there's no significant
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: correlation between changes in state and local police spending and
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: overall or violent crime rates. So given that, it does
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: seem to make a lot of sense to rethink spending.
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: And then Part of this conversation is that departments have
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: proven to just be ineffective, right? I mean, you just
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: mentioned Minneapolis. In 2019, Minneapolis police only cleared 56% of
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: cases where a person was killed. In 2018, their clearance
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: rate for rape was just 22%. So this is a
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: taxpayer-funded department that is not serving the community in any way.
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: So should we talk about dramatically changing it? The other
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: thing I think people are talking a lot about is
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: is the role of mental illness or disability and how
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: those cases are responded to. So half of people killed
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: by police have a disability or a mental health issue.
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: Those calls should be answered by highly trained mental health
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: professionals and not armed police. And then sort of more broadly,
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: like if 5% of arrests in America are for violent crime,
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: does it make sense for basically 100% of responders who
• 12:19
  Speaker 3: are police officers to be heavily armed? Probably not. And
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: so- That's a piece of it. Part of it is
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: that I think for a lot of communities in this country,
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: they just believe that the institution of these police departments,
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: they're just fundamentally broken. Like there's historians who compellingly argue
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: that police forces were founded primarily to enforce racial segregation
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: and not enforce laws. It was not about justice. And
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: it is certainly true that for centuries in this country,
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: African-Americans could not turn to the police and for justice
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: in matters involving crimes committed by white people. In fact,
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: they were often complicit in those crimes, the police were.
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: And today, like the African-American community has a fundamentally different
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: relationship with the police than most white Americans do, right?
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: I mean, I don't think any of the three of
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: us were sat down by our parents to have a
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: talk about how to interact with police if we're pulled over,
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: because it's not a thing that is really discussed in
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: white communities. So I think there are activists who are
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: thinking like, this is a fundamentally broken, flawed institution at
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: its core. We should think about how we reconstitute it
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: to deal with the problems that police are supposed to
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: respond to, but in a way that's more effective.
• 13:30
  Speaker 4: Love it.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: You guys talked about this on your show. What do
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: you think?
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, look, I think what Tommy said is right.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: You step back and you say, all right, we closed
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: asylums and mental hospitals because they were hellholes and mistreating
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: people and abusive. And we replaced it with basically nothing.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: We didn't do anything to help people in the long
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: run with mental illness. We didn't put the resources in
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: it that were necessary. So it became a police problem.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: We have a rising homeless problem across the country. We
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: don't put the resources in it that are necessary. We
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: respond with police. The same about addiction and drug abuse.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: All the evidence is clear, right? That if someone has
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: an addiction, if someone is struggling with drugs, that treatment
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: and not punishment is the answer for them. Not only
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: is it more effective, it's less expensive, it's more humane.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: And we don't do that. We respond with police.
• 14:21
  Speaker 5: Why?
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: Because over the course of 30 years, in part because
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: of rising crime from the 60s into the 90s, in
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: part because it was embraced not just by Republicans, but
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: by Democrats, we shifted our resources towards police and we
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: sort of sucked the resources away from social services and
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: all the rest. And so we're in this situation where
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: saying something that's obvious and true is seen as radical, right?
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: Saying that we should reimagine what the police do. Saying
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: defund the police is radical when actually when you dig
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: into it, it's saying, here are the problems that police
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: aren't solving. Here's what all the experts say we should do.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Here's what our budgets actually look like. Can't we actually
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: have an honest conversation about it? And it is seen
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: as radical because these structures have been in place for
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: so long because the hierarchies are so entrenched, whether it's
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: political or whether it's in terms of our government and
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: the role police play in budgets and in local politics.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: And also in our culture, there is no law and
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: order special housing unit, right? Our shows are about how
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: tough and good cops are. Our shows are about how
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: the police come in to solve all of our problems.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: And so I think what's interesting is you have the
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: conversation being set by these protest movements calling for something
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: that sounds radical when you dig into the actual questions
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: that they're raising, the answers are actually not radical. They're
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: honest and reflect the evidence. And what you will see
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: over time, I think, is that these radical sounding solutions
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: become more and more mainstream as Democratic politicians don't necessarily
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: embrace the phrase defund the police, but embrace the larger
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: vision of reimagining the role of police and reimagining the
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: relationship between people and their government.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think before you get into slogans. You have
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: to step back and ask a couple larger questions, which
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: is what is the purpose of law enforcement? What do
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: we want from law enforcement, right? We want a police
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: force that doesn't commit violence, but stops violence. You want
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: a police force that gives every citizen in the community
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: equal protection under the law. We do not have that
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: right now. We have not had that for a long time.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: So you look at the story of the Minneapolis Police Department.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: They have tried a number of reforms with this city council,
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: with this mayor. They have tried trainings for bias and de-escalation.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: They have a diverse police department. They have body cameras.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: They have community policing. Every time they have tried further reforms,
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: tried to redirect some proposed budget increases... to fund a
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: new Office of Violence Prevention. Every time they've tried to
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: do that, a lot of reforms have been blocked by
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: the police department and their union. Steve Fletcher was one
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: of the Minneapolis City Council members. He was writing this
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: in Time Magazine this week. Police chief, who they think
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: is a good reformer, has fired officers only to have
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: his decisions overturned and those officers reinstated by arbitration. After
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: they cut money from the police budget in Minneapolis, officers
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: retaliated by not responding to 911 calls in certain wards
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: of the Minneapolis City Council people who decided to vote
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: to cut their budget. And so from the perspective of
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: the Minneapolis City Council, you think, we've tried everything else.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: And the police department feels like they are unaccountable to
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: the people they're supposed to serve. What else are we
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: to do? but at least try to stop the power
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: of the police union from blocking these reforms. And there
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: is a model for this, right? In Camden, New Jersey,
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: which had the fifth highest murder rate in the nation,
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: in 2013, the police department was disbanded by the city.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: It was restructured as a county police department. They actually
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: had more officers at first throughout the county, but they
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: had lower pay and benefits. They were trained to use
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: handcuffs and handguns as a last resort. Not only body cameras,
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: but they had GPS tracking devices on them. There was
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: community policing, stricter use of force rules. And since then,
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: reports of excessive force have dropped 95%. And violent crime
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: is also way down in Camden. So they got both.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: They had less excessive force and less crime. They showed
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: it's possible. Now, I think the tough part here is
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: it is a very local issue because different cities and
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: different police departments will need different reforms. So it's not
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: like a one size fits all thing. And you hear
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: the Minneapolis City Council saying this too. They're like, we
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: don't know what replaces it yet. We have to have
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: these conversations with the community. But at the very least,
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: they're down that path.
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: But I do think it's the impunity that you described
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: that has, I think, led this country to erupt at
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: several times, right? Like now it's watching George Floyd be murdered.
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: And in 92, it was the cops who beat up
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: Rodney King getting away with it. And when you step
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: back and think about it, right, like Richard Nixon very
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: famously said, well, when the president does it, that means
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: it's not illegal. Trump has expressed similar sentiments. We all
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: flip out about it. But that kind of impunity happens
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: every day with police officers in a lot of communities.
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: And beyond the brutality we've seen in videos, nothing about
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: arresting someone requires you to beat the shit out of
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: them and grind their face into the concrete and smash
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: their limbs with a baton. But yet we're watching... Police
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: in Buffalo shove a 75 year old man to the
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: ground and do nothing as he starts to bleed out
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: and then lie about what happened. Like if I can
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: be charged with filing a false police reports, where's the
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: accountability when the park police brazenly lie to journalists about
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: using tear gas on protesters. So I think part of
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: this is like, we give police so much leeway when
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: it comes to using force and lethal force, because it's
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: a dangerous job, but we need to fix that. We
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: need to right size that because what we're seeing is, is,
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: dramatic abuses of that power and people stepping up and saying,
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: this doesn't make sense. We should not tear gas citizens.
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: We shouldn't shoot people with rubber bullets. We don't have
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: to do that. It's making it worse.
• 20:22
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: I mean, I do think too, a lot of what
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: we're seeing is this is the unaccountability. This is the
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: aggressiveness that wasn't a bug, but a feature when this
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: was put in place in many cases by a white
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: majority that didn't ever have to fear that this would
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: come for them. what we are seeing is that aggressiveness,
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: that brutality taken as a part of the job, that
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: that is what it means for police to do their
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: job in part because of so long a culture, a
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: culture that basically rewarded, rewarded, uh, politicians, rewarded police chiefs,
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: rewarded cities that invested in police and largely look the
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: other way. You know, Keith Ellison talked about this, uh,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: this morning on what a day he talked about the
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: fact that, um, It's not just that the rules meant
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: that police weren't accountable. It meant there are also juries,
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: grand juries, ordinary citizens who have been trained to just
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: defer to the police, assume the police are telling the truth.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: But what we have seen, as Tommy pointed out over
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: the past two weeks, is just how often that is irresponsible,
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: just how often police are lying, even when caught on camera.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: And I think that that is shocking to a lot
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: of people, myself included, who haven't always been paying attention.
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: All right, so let's talk about the politics of this.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: We just spoke about sort of the rapid shift in
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: public opinion in favor of protesters, in favor of Black
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: Lives Matter, in favor of systemic police reforms. No one
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: so far has polled defund the police or polled abolish
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: the police. But YouGov from last weekend decided to poll,
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: do you favor various police reforms? And, you know, banning chokeholds,
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: body cameras, training to deescalate conflicts all got like 70, 80,
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: 90 percent, hugely popular. Then they said, do you support
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: cutting funding to police departments? So just cutting funding. Only
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: 16 percent of all voters said they support any cuts
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: in funding for police departments. That includes 16 percent of Democrats,
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: 21 percent of 18 to 29 year olds and 33
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: percent of black Americans.
• 22:27
  Speaker 4: So.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: I think for those of us who have been paying
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: close attention to the protests, who've been reading a lot
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: of these very thoughtful pieces about police reform over the
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: last weeks, I think what we're saying, it makes sense.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: You can see why police need such sweeping reform. Of course,
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: for a lot of Americans, and of course these numbers
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: may change and probably will change, I imagine, over the
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: coming weeks, but they're still pretty low. And you saw
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: Biden come out today and say, you know, he's not
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: for defunding the police. And so far, no. A lot
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: of elected Democrats, I saw Cory Booker, Karen Bass, a
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: lot of the people who worked on this, Hakeem Jeffries,
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: a lot of people who worked on the bill that
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: they co-sponsored, the bill that they introduced today, also said
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: that they they don't support defunding the police. And, you know,
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: Republicans are out there saying they're Trump and the Republicans
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: are salivating about using this as a wedge issue against Democrats.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: What do you think about the politics of this issue, Tommy?
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, look, I don't know yet. I mean,
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: so look, there's sort of like a near term. Let's
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: talk about the politics of success or failure. So in
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: the near term, like there's a big piece of this
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: that's about the budget because all these cities are going
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: to deal with huge shortfalls thanks to the coronavirus. And
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: you're seeing everywhere that every component, like agencies are getting
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: gutted except for the police. And people are asking why,
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: like why are we gutting school budgets and not police funding?
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: So in L.A., In April, Mayor Garcetti had proposed furloughs
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: for 15,000 city employees, but not for the police. In fact,
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: he offered to give them a 7% increase in spending
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: for the LAPD. Since the protests have started, Garcetti has
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: reversed course and said he will now direct $ 250 million
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: to youth jobs, health initiatives, peace centers to heal trauma
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: and help those who are dealing with discrimination. That will
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: be partly funded by $ 150 million that was previously allocated
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: to the LAPD. That is like head snapping political change
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: for Los Angeles. Because in 1993, after the Rodney King riots,
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: LA elected a Republican mayor who promised to hire 3000
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: more cops to bring the force up to 10,000 officers,
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: which is about where it is now. And so that's
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: remarkable progress. Like that's political success, no matter how you
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: measure it. I do think that like broadly, there's going
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: to be an inside game and an outside game where
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: activists who are marching and protesting are going to have
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: to keep pushing people like Joe Biden, to do more
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: if they believe that's what's necessary. I also think there's
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: a political imperative to more clearly define the policy and
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: then tell a story about how that will make America
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: a better, safer world. And so, you know, I don't
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: think that we are immediately going to see Joe Biden
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: say we should defund the police. But I do think
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: like the amount of progress that's been made in even
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: just the small amount of time since Ferguson in 2014,
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: is incredible. And so three years from now, we might
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: be having an entirely different conversation.
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: Lovett, what do you think?
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, police budgets were sacrosanct. They're not going
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: to be sacrosanct anymore. This is going to be a
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: big part of the political fight. And I think that
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: that's a victory. You know, it does remind me a
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: bit of the debate around Abolish ICE, in that activists
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: and some candidates, but mostly activists, embrace this term Abolish ICE.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: Democrats don't embrace the term. Republicans try to tar Democrats
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: with the term anyway. And all the while, the conversation
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: led because of this provocative and, you know, maximalist phrase
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: leads to a debate about, well, what should these reforms
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: look like? Well, it turns out, you know what, there
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: are huge problems in ICE and huge reforms are needed.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: And maybe this department should be broken up in certain
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: way and its functions devolve to other agencies so it
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: doesn't have this noxious, toxic culture. So I see the
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: same thing playing out with defund the police in that,
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: you know, Kamala Harris writes, she and Cory Booker on
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: the Senate side introduced this bill. She was asked by
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: Meghan McCain this morning, the mayor of Minneapolis refused to
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: say defund the police. I'm going to ask you the
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: same question as protesters did. Do you support defunding police?
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: And she didn't answer it, yes or no. She explained
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: why we need to reimagine the role of police in
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: our lives. And she gave a pretty cogent answer. I
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: don't know if it will satisfy activists ultimately, but it
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: is so clear how much the conversation from the streets
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: has trickled down into a much more progressive vision for
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: what is possible in governing.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, two points for me on this. One, very much
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: agreeing with what Tommy said, is I think sometimes we
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: forget to separate the role of activists and politicians. You know,
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: politicians will do what is broadly popular, or at least
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: if it's not broadly popular, it's in the 40s, in
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: the high 40s, right? So like you would not expect
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: Joe Biden to come out for defunding the police or
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: a lot of people who have to run in a
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: purple state, a red state in competitive districts. I listened
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: to Ezra Klein interview Ta-Nehisi Coates on his podcast this week,
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: and everyone should go listen. It's a fascinating and fantastic conversation.
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: And he said like, yeah, I don't expect Joe Biden
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: to say defund the police, but I really hope that
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: the people around Joe Biden are reading all the thoughtful
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: takes about defunding police so that Energy and those ideas
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: bleed into his policymaking in some way. That's what you
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: can hope. So then the question is, how do the
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: activists tell a story about defunding the police that becomes
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: broadly popular? Um, Anat Shanker-Osorio, who I had on The Wilderness,
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: who's just an expert on messaging, you know, she was
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: tweeting about this weekend and she said, sometimes we fall
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: back on negative framing what we don't want and we
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: forget to tell sort of the positive side of the story.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: And it's not just if we just talk about defunding
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: the police and we don't talk about what we want
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: to replace that with, sort of the positive things we're
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: looking for, we kind of fall short. Data for Progress,
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: our friends at Data for Progress, did a poll over
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: the weekend and And they tested, do you support or
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: oppose a new agency of first responders like emergency medical
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: services of firefighters to deal with issues related to addiction
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: or mental illness that need to be remedied but do
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: not need police? 68% of the people they asked support
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: that kind of agency, which is the exact kind of
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: agency that some of these cities like Camden and possibly
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: Minneapolis might create to sort of supplement or to sort
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: of shrink the role of traditional policing. So I do
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: think it's incumbent on activists and all of us who
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: want to see major structural police reforms to tell a
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: story and paint a very clear vision of a world
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: where our tax dollars are not funding police violence, but
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: funding public safety that is equitably distributed to everyone in
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: the community. That's what I would suggest. So let's talk
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: about how Trump's response to the last few weeks is
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: affecting his bid for reelection. New CNN poll out today
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: finds Trump losing to Biden 55-41, the biggest margin yet
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: in Trump's lowest approval since the beginning of last year.
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that even...
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: some Republican Party leaders won't be voting for Trump in 2020,
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: including their last two presidential nominees, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush.
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: Times also reported that former Republican leaders like the former
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner won't say how they'll vote.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: And some Republicans who are already disinclined to support Mr.
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: Trump are weighing whether to go beyond backing a third
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: party contender to openly endorse Mr. Biden. A number of
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: military leaders who served in Republican administrations, including Trump's former
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: defense secretary and chief of staff, have broken with the
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: president in the last week. And over the weekend, former
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: Secretary of State Colin Powell told Jake Tapper he'll be
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: voting for Biden, saying this about Donald Trump.
• 30:21
  Speaker 6: And so we're not a country of just a president.
• 30:23
  Speaker 6: We have a Congress. We have a Supreme Court. But
• 30:26
  Speaker 6: most of all, we have the people of the United States,
• 30:28
  Speaker 6: the ones who vote, the ones who vote him in
• 30:31
  Speaker 6: and the ones who vote him out. I couldn't vote
• 30:33
  Speaker 6: for him in 96, and I certainly cannot in any
• 30:35
  Speaker 6: way support President Trump this year.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, I know you didn't vote for him in 2016.
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: I assume.
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: Based on the fact that you approved Joe Biden when
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: then-Senator Obama picked him to be his running mate in 2008,
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: I assume you're going to be voting for Joe Biden?
• 30:55
  Speaker 6: I'm very close to Joe Biden on a social matter
• 30:58
  Speaker 6: and on a political matter. I've worked with him for 35,
• 31:01
  Speaker 6: 40 years, and he is now the candidate, and I
• 31:04
  Speaker 6: will be voting for him.
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: Colin Powell is riding with Biden. How much how much
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: does any of this matter? And do you think some
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: of these endorsements or anti endorsements carry more weight than others?
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think Paul Ryan refusing to say who
• 31:19
  Speaker 3: he'll vote for is just it's it's worthless. It's pathetic.
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: It's chef's kiss, Paul Ryan. You know, I do think
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: like George Trump. W. Bush, Mitt Romney, that's significant. I
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: think General Mattis's broadside against Trump actually was pretty significant
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: for a few reasons. I mean, first of all, like
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: the D.C. pundit class reveres him like no other. So
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: it got a ton of attention. It will continue to. Second,
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: I think it will move opinions within the military itself
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: and give others the courage to speak out. And that
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: to me is what matters. Like I People in politics
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: talk a lot about permission structures. If you see people
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: who are in your party who you respect, who you
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: may have voted for previously saying they can't go with
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: Trump this time, they're going to go for Biden. I
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: do think that helps you get permission internally to switch
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: parties as well for a vote. I do find myself
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: quite frustrated in some cases that it took this long.
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: I think Trump's response to Charlottesville told you everything you
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: needed to know about how racist and divisive he is.
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: And so reading Mattis's comments about Trump recently, I felt
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: like they could have been written the day after Charlottesville.
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: But we're about building coalitions. We're about peeling off soft
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: Trump voters. So this stuff could be incredibly meaningful on
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: the margins. And I think you're seeing it in these
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: polls like everyone listening should know as much as you
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: hate Donald Trump. Fifty five percent of the country voting
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: for any one human being is unheard of. Jesus Christ
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: himself probably couldn't crack 54. So like we're in a
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: weird reality right now. It's going to shrink, but it's
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: a big deal.
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: Love it. What do you think?
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: I wish Mattis would do it on television and stop
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: doing it in the Atlantic. This is a culture that
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: doesn't read, so that doesn't do as much for me.
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: That's what we were saying last week. Although, the Lincoln
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: Project this morning finally did a VO of his Atlantic piece.
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: I was like, we need a good voice over here.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: And you know what? I'm glad Mitt Romney is out
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: there saying Black Lives Matter. It's worth remembering that we
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: have one Republican saying Black Lives Matter. We have uh,
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: many more, uh, saying, uh, uh, how, how much Trump
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: worries them in private. And then we have the vast
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: majority standing behind him. Um, I would like to see
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: Mitt Romney, uh, not be so cute and write in
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: Ann's name. You know, this is a choice. We have
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: a choice. Do you want to be part of, do
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: you want to help us make this choice or not?
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: I'm not interested in Republicans who write in other people's name.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: It's a, it's evading responsibility, uh, not taking responsibility. And
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: so like, I, I'm not going to, give people points
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: for doing less than the bare minimum of helping to
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: remove Donald Trump, because there's only one person that you
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: can vote for to help remove Donald Trump. That said,
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: I think it's a good thing. I am very reluctant
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: to start saying something feels different, something feels different. Is
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: this the end? Is this the end? A, it's prognostication.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. We still have to all do our job.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: And B, we've seen versions of this in the past.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: And it hasn't been the end for Trump yet. He's
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: not ended. And there have been many times where it
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: seemed like the end was around the corner. We can
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: remove him in November. These, I think, are good and
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: hopeful signs. And I just want to know that this
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: wasn't a nadir and a low point from which Trump
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: slowly crawled back and actually the beginning of the actual end.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I think good for Mitt Romney, you know,
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: and it doesn't we were talking about this earlier. It
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: doesn't like. negate all the bad positions Romney has taken
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: throughout the course of his life or all the things
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: he said that we've disagreed with over the course of
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: his life. Like people can change, they can grow, and
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: then sometimes they can do things that are bad and
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: sometimes they can do things that are good. Like, you know,
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: there's like a raging debate about this. I don't think
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: it's that complicated to me. I give Mitt Romney a
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: little extra credit because he is the one Republican who
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: voted to impeach the president when he had a chance.
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: So he actually took an action. that meant something as well.
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: I do agree, Lovett, that the writing in the third
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: party or writing in the name thing, I get why
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: they're doing it, but we're trying to send a signal
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: to voters, many of whom in 2016 may have helped
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: cost Hillary the election by either leaving the presidential thing
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: blank on their ballot or voting for a third party,
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: whether it was, you know, the Greens or whether it
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: was the Libertarians or whatever. And we want to send
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: the message to everyone that if you want Donald Trump
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: out of office, it is a choice between two people.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: And so to the extent that leaders let everyone know
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: that it's a choice between two people, I think that's important.
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: You know, I'm with Tommy that it's all about a
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: permission structure. I think there's two kinds of swing voters
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: in this election. There's people who are like, you get
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: a lot of college educated white males who, you know,
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: they voted for Trump in 16. A lot of them
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: voted for Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan in 18 or Tony
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: Evers in Wisconsin in 18. And they're still not sure
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: if they're going to do it, vote for Joe Biden.
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: And I think for those voters, seeing military leaders, seeing
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: Republicans say it's okay to vote for Joe Biden could
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: actually have an influence. There's a whole bunch of other
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: voters who don't know if they're going to participate in
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: the political process at all because they think institutions have
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: fucked them over for their whole lives and they don't
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: trust them. I don't think George W. Bush or Mitt
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: Romney is going to mean much to them.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: This is not for them.
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: This is not for them. But not everyone's the same.
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: Not all swing voters have the same beliefs and values.
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: Not all swing voters are going to be motivated by
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: the same thing.
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: I think Mitt Romney deserves credit for marching. I think
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: he deserves credit for voting for impeachment. It's also just
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: worth remembering that Mitt Romney's dad, George Romney, marched in
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: favor of civil rights in the late 60s. Nixon tapped
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: George Romney to run HUD and basically drove him out
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: of the administration because George Romney refused to stop enforcing
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: fair housing laws. So, you know, I think he has
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: a history of this kind of activism in his family.
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: It doesn't mean I regret kicking his ass in the
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: 2012 election. I find all this chatter on Twitter that
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: he was horribly mistreated to be a touch overstated. It
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: was a presidential campaign.
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: I don't remember the Romney campaign. I don't remember the
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: Romney campaign putting on a pair of white gloves. and
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: showing up at the boxing match. It was a fight.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: There was a political fight. Yeah.
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: I remember sitting in my office in the NSC and
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: reading a blistering press release from the Romney campaign on
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: the night of the Benghazi attacks, as there's still massive
• 37:56
  Speaker 3: protests outside of embassies and feeling like that was a
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: touch outrageous. But here we are. I want to focus
• 38:01
  Speaker 3: on the current and good for him for these books.
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: I don't. I'm ready.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: I want to fight old wounds. That's what I want
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: to do.
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: It's just worth noting, as one of you just did,
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: about the weird, weird times we're in politically. That we
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: may go forward in November with a coalition that includes
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and George W. Bush and
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: Mitt Romney. What the fuck is happening right now? That
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: is a big, rowdy, very diverse, crazily weird coalition of
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: people who are going to be voting in the election.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: I'm just going to say this, too. All right, right here,
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: right now. All right, George W. Bush, maybe he puts
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: out an ad saying he supports Joe Biden. And we
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: don't say much about it. All right, the day after
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: that election, we're back to saying, fuck George W.
• 38:50
  Speaker 3: Bush.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: I'm not doing it now, but fuck George W.
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: Bush.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: Just between us, I'm saying really quiet, really quiet, but
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: fuck him.
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: This is a very weird political moment. Obviously, as you said, John,
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: my only hope for an admonition for folks is like,
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: Let's all just have a little grace for each other
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: in terms of what we choose to believe in and
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: how we all choose to conduct activism. You're allowed to
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: believe what you believe. You're allowed to fight for progress
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: and change how you want to do it. Everyone chill
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: the fuck out with browbeating people who 99% agree with you.
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: I don't know. I think we could train our energies
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: towards a cost.
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: And even if, even if you don't want to be graceful,
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: like Tommy so nicely suggests, just from a raw political standpoint,
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: you know, movements are built by addition. Just to welcome
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: people in. That's how you fucking win.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: Can I make one other, one other observation just about,
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: about Biden too? Do you remember the episode and how
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: there's now everyone from, as you said, George W. Bush
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: to AOC? Do you remember the Seinfeld where Elaine and
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: Jerry want to get with a couple that just broke up?
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: There's a couple. They're both attracted to the members of
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: the couple. And they're both attracted to the members of
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: the couple. And they basically are like, here's our plan. First,
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: we're going to be there for you. And then we're
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: just there.
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: I was looking for the connection back to this.
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: Biden's there for us. And then he's just going to
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: be there. That's how you build this giant coalition from
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: basically all ends of the political structure. First, he's just
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: there for us. Then he's there.
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: And that's how you know that that segment is over.
• 40:33
  Speaker 5: All right.
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: So we've talked before about how the one political strength
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: that's keeping Trump in the race is that voters tend
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: to trust him over Biden on managing the economy. President
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: clearly thought he could build on this advantage last Friday
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: when we received a better than expected jobs report. Economists
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: had predicted unemployment rise to 20% in May, but instead
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: it fell to 13.3% and we added 2.5 million jobs.
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: During a speech in the Rose Garden, Trump celebrated this
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: news and said the following.
• 40:59
  Speaker 5: Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying there's
• 41:02
  Speaker 5: a great thing that's happening for our country. There's a
• 41:04
  Speaker 5: great day for him. It's a great day for everybody.
• 41:08
  Speaker 5: There's a great day for everybody. There's a great, great day.
• 41:12
  Speaker 5: In terms of equality.
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: That fucking guy, man. Let's start with the numbers themselves. Tommy,
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: what are economists saying about why they were better than expected?
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: So, John, I just want our readers to know that
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: we don't have readers, listeners, to know that I barely
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: understand this. People are talking about how there was a
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: misclassification error in the BLS data, which means the unemployment
• 41:35
  Speaker 3: rate would have been about 3% higher, so about 16.3%.
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: Some people who are classified as temporarily unemployed or misclassified
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: as absent, like you would be on, say, jury duty.
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: I don't really care about fighting about that. I was
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: a big it was a big Twitter dust up on
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: Friday that I did my best to mute. But I
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: do think like big picture, like people are still suffering
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: a lot. I think the Republican Party is going to
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: create massive problems for itself if they use this job report.
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: as an excuse for not doing more to help people
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: who are hurting as a result of the pandemic. So
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: that's kind of like the democratic eye on the prize
• 42:13
  Speaker 3: here versus, you know, unskew the BLS or whatever the
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: debate was on Friday.
• 42:19
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: Love it.
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: You know, controversial out there, political opinion. You tell me
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: what you think you shouldn't celebrate. You shouldn't celebrate double
• 42:26
  Speaker 2: digit unemployment.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: No, I, you know, look, I, I remember John, you
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: remember years ago, In the White House.
• 42:35
  Speaker 4: Years. Years. Years.
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: Any good jobs report, you had to go and get
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: a chain and you had to make sure that you
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: hit yourself back on the back five times, ten times,
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: to make sure you understood inside of the speech that
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: even though you were pointing to progress on the economy,
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: how hard things were for many people. And I'm being
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: glib about it, but it was taken as an article
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: of faith, backed up by polling, backed up by evidence,
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: that that Barack Obama, President Barack Obama, did not want
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: to be out there celebrating these numbers, which were far
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: lower and better than the current numbers Trump is celebrating,
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: for fear that he would seem out of touch and
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: unable to relate to the real pain that people are feeling,
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: in part because anytime Barack Obama said anything approaching what
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: Donald Trump has been saying, he would have been pilloried.
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: He would have been mocked mercilessly by Republicans claiming he
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: was out of touch. So I continue to believe that
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: that is good politics and that you know, Larry Kudlow
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: in his fucking, uh, we have a clip. Oh, play,
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: play the clip.
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: This is how Larry Kudlow, um, uh, responded to the news.
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: America is coming back.
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: 3 million new jobs, lower unemployment rate, furloughed temporary layoffs, going.
• 43:52
  Speaker 4: Back to work.
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: Green shoots popping up everywhere.
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: Stocks are soaring.
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: POTUS policies are working. Stay with the winners. Trump, and
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: Pence and me, the best is yet to come.
• 44:10
  Speaker 4: Wow.
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: It's just, it's, um, it's hard for you to hear.
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: It's hard for you to hear in the audio, but the,
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: but the pinstripes on his suit are made of cocaine.
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: The look, the, the Kudlow, a green room creature in his,
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: you know, wide-lapelled shirt and jacket out there saying that
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: everything is okay is preposterous. And this little debate about
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: whether the unemployment rate is 13% or 16%, these are
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: some of the worst jobs numbers in history, in a century.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: There's no getting around it. There's no talking their way
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: out of it. They can't get past it.
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: Look, the flip side of your point, the flip side
• 44:50
  Speaker 3: of my original point is that Trump taught me that
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: economic sentiment and how you feel about the economy is
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: totally partisan, right? I mean, like the economy had barely changed.
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: Donald Trump becomes president and suddenly a bunch of Republicans
• 45:01
  Speaker 3: feel great about the economy because Trump is now in charge.
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: So that irrationality behind that voter sentiment was surprising to me.
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: Maybe that was naive. Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe I'm
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: gonna get well-actualied off of all social media. But like,
• 45:15
  Speaker 3: that was shocking to me because you guys were right.
• 45:17
  Speaker 4: We.
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: Like Lovett said, like every Barack Obama statement was as
• 45:23
  Speaker 3: hedged and measured as possible about a good jobs report,
• 45:26
  Speaker 3: in part because the underlying data suggested that people still
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: weren't feeling things. being better in their own lives.
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: I'll just add one small point, which is Tommy's right
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: that there is partisanship in terms of how the economy
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: is viewed, but it actually isn't total. There's data on
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: this and it shows that when your party is in charge,
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: you are more likely to say the economy is doing well.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: That's true of Democrats and Republicans. It is just more
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: true of Republicans that they are more likely to take
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: a partisan view, but it's not total. Reality still exists.
• 45:55
  Speaker 4: That's all.
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, no, I I completely agree. I think that
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: polarization now, because it's so extreme, takes care of about
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: 90 percent of what what Tommy's talking about. I think
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: there were always this segment of voters and we saw
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: this popping up in our own polling and other people's
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: polls that like the only thing that's keeping Trump alive
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: is people who disapprove of his job as president. But
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: they think he's good on the economy and they might
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: approve in the economy. So I think for those people,
• 46:23
  Speaker 2: you know, you need to message the right way, message
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: this the right way. What would have made me nervous
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: from a political standpoint is if Trump came out. I
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: can't really imagine him doing this, but said like, look,
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: this is better than expected, but we have so much
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: more work to do to bring this economy back. And
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: I'm going to be fighting for a new package in
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: Congress and all this kind of stuff. That would have
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: made me nervous because it would have looked like he's
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: fighting for people. Instead, it was a big fucking celebration.
• 46:46
  Speaker 2: Republicans in Congress are like, all right, now we can
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: pump the brakes on the next stimulus package. Trump is like, oh,
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: I'm going to ask for more, but I'm going to
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: ask for a payroll tax cut, which no one really wants.
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: And I think it is what he did right there.
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: It was a huge political opportunity for Democrats because basically
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: Trump has now decided he is running as the candidate
• 47:08
  Speaker 2: of the status quo in an election where like record
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: numbers of people think the country's on the wrong track.
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: The virus is gone. The economy's back. Nothing's wrong. There's
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: no social unrest or racial. Everything is fine. The great
• 47:25
  Speaker 2: American comeback has begun. You know, keep America great, which
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: I guess now, according to The Washington Post, they might
• 47:33
  Speaker 2: ditch that slogan. They might need a new slogan because
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: America doesn't seem that great to anyone right now.
• 47:37
  Speaker 3: They're buying whiteboards by the bulk over at the White House.
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So, like, I think that is a huge risk
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: for him. He was he got to run as a
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: change candidate in 2016. And now he's running as the
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: candidate of the status quo by like celebrating this. And
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: I don't know. Look, he can try. You know, he's
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: going to try to say already that like Joe Biden's
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: been in Washington forever and he's ineffective. And, you know,
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: he could get some traction with that message.
• 48:03
  Speaker 4: But.
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: It's in Trump to celebrate everything and say everything is
• 48:08
  Speaker 2: fine all the time. It's not in Trump to say
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: like things are bad and I'm going to fix it
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: while he's the president.
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: He's incapable.
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: And I think that's a real danger. Yeah, he's incapable.
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: He said that George fucking Floyd, it's like the jobs numbers.
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: We just went right by it. The man is incapable
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: of expressing any other emotion than celebration of himself. That's it.
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: That's all he's got. He is without empathy. The job
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: has done what it has done to every American president,
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: which is take their worst qualities and make them worse.
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: And that's what we've got. And it's been on display.
• 48:38
  Speaker 2: That's all. That is correct.
• 48:40
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 48:41
  Speaker 2: When we come back, we'll have Tommy's interview with LA
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: District Attorney candidate, George Gascon.
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: George Gascon is a candidate for district attorney here in
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: Los Angeles. He's also a former DA in San Francisco
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: and our guest today on Pod Save America. George, thank
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: you so much for joining the show.
• 49:06
  Speaker 4: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: So just right at the top here, full disclosure for listeners,
• 49:12
  Speaker 3: I have donated to your campaign, so I am hardly impartial,
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: but I don't think they look to me for that.
• 49:18
  Speaker 3: So anyway, I thought I should say it. So George,
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: a lot of our audience is in LA, but most
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: of them are not. So I was hoping we could
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: start with some basics about the job itself. What decisions
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: does a district attorney make? And in particular, for listeners
• 49:36
  Speaker 3: that are you know, horrified by videos of police brutality.
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: What actions could you take if you're elected to address
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: that problem, to stop that violence?
• 49:47
  Speaker 4: Of course. I mean, the first thing that you can
• 49:48
  Speaker 4: do is ensure that you're taking a transparent and a
• 49:54
  Speaker 4: biased look at police behavior when there is criminal conduct
• 49:58
  Speaker 4: by police that you're going to hold them accountable and
• 50:00
  Speaker 4: you're going to prosecute. And that's really important. I think
• 50:04
  Speaker 4: looking the other way, as a current district attorney has
• 50:06
  Speaker 4: done very often, emboldens police. And I think the problem
• 50:10
  Speaker 4: that we have nationally is that prosecutors generally, for a
• 50:13
  Speaker 4: variety of reasons, including pressure from police unions and the
• 50:17
  Speaker 4: difficulty of making cases against the police, are often not
• 50:24
  Speaker 4: being assertive. And I think that we have created a
• 50:26
  Speaker 4: culture in policing in this country for police use force
• 50:29
  Speaker 4: because they can, not because they should. And they can
• 50:33
  Speaker 4: because you know prosecutors are often not holding them accountable
• 50:37
  Speaker 4: the second thing that you have to do is you
• 50:38
  Speaker 4: also modify behavior and policing by the way you Prosecute
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: your cases. So for instance, I have been very outspoken
• 50:46
  Speaker 4: about what I think is the overly broad Curfews that
• 50:50
  Speaker 4: have been imposed around LA County and then the use
• 50:53
  Speaker 4: of the curfew as a tool to go out and
• 50:55
  Speaker 4: arrest and you know quite frankly sometimes use force against
• 50:58
  Speaker 4: peaceful demonstrators and the DA should make it very clear
• 51:02
  Speaker 4: that none of those cases will be prosecuted. And if
• 51:04
  Speaker 4: you make that unequivocally clear, that also sends a message
• 51:08
  Speaker 4: to the police. If you're going to do that, you're
• 51:10
  Speaker 4: going to be standing alone because we're not going to
• 51:12
  Speaker 4: support you. Obviously, if you have somebody committing other crimes,
• 51:16
  Speaker 4: they're harming other people, they're burning buildings down, they're looting,
• 51:19
  Speaker 4: that's a different story. And then you have to use
• 51:22
  Speaker 4: proportionality and you have to evaluate each case on their own.
• 51:25
  Speaker 4: But I think when you're talking about Peaceful demonstrators, which
• 51:29
  Speaker 4: we have seen throughout the nation and certainly right here
• 51:32
  Speaker 4: in LA County, being, you know, having force being used
• 51:35
  Speaker 4: upon them, having put into plastic handcuffs, having been held
• 51:40
  Speaker 4: in what I consider extremely dangerous conditions given the pandemic
• 51:44
  Speaker 4: that we have, exposing hundreds if not thousands of people.
• 51:49
  Speaker 4: to what potentially could be the death penalty for either
• 51:51
  Speaker 4: them or someone else. I think that that has to stop.
• 51:54
  Speaker 4: And a way to stop that is simply by the
• 51:55
  Speaker 4: prosecutor come out very openly, unequivocally, and saying, I will
• 51:59
  Speaker 4: not prosecute this case under any condition. Unfortunately, our prosecutor
• 52:04
  Speaker 4: hasn't done that. And that continues to be a problem.
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So for listeners, I mean, you came up in
• 52:12
  Speaker 3: this system as a beat cop. So you have real
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: on-the-ground experience policing communities. I've also heard you talk about
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: how growing up, your parents were terrified of the police.
• 52:22
  Speaker 3: You said one time that if there was a cop
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: behind your mom when she was driving, she might pull
• 52:27
  Speaker 3: over or ask your father to pull over. So you
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: viewed this from different perspectives. There are some people, particularly
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: communities of color, who feel like the systemic problems with
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: the police go so deep that the forces should be
• 52:42
  Speaker 3: defunded or disbanded and we should essentially start over. Do
• 52:46
  Speaker 3: you agree with those calls to defund or disband police departments?
• 52:50
  Speaker 4: You know, I agree with the anger that is driving this.
• 52:53
  Speaker 4: And I often tell people that if we were redesigning
• 52:57
  Speaker 4: our entire criminal justice system from the ground up, police
• 53:01
  Speaker 4: departments would not look the way they look today. So
• 53:03
  Speaker 4: to that end, I think that we need to start
• 53:07
  Speaker 4: shifting funding away from the traditional policing and putting more
• 53:12
  Speaker 4: money in services that I believe actually not only increase
• 53:15
  Speaker 4: community safety, but actually create a more sustainable community. So
• 53:18
  Speaker 4: mental health services, intervention workers, both gang intervention workers, social workers.
• 53:23
  Speaker 4: There are so many calls that police are required to respond.
• 53:28
  Speaker 4: on a regular basis that we would be much better
• 53:30
  Speaker 4: off if we took the gun and the bash away
• 53:33
  Speaker 4: and we had a medical professional or a social professional
• 53:36
  Speaker 4: responding to those calls. Additionally, creating a vehicle to divert
• 53:42
  Speaker 4: people even before they get into the system and giving
• 53:45
  Speaker 4: them the medical assistance and social assistance that they need
• 53:49
  Speaker 4: is likely actually to not only increase public safety, but
• 53:53
  Speaker 4: reduce a lot of the needs for funding that we
• 53:57
  Speaker 4: have today that go unmet because we can reduce the
• 54:00
  Speaker 4: footprint of jails and criminal justice system and put that
• 54:03
  Speaker 4: money into other services that are more likely to create
• 54:07
  Speaker 4: a much better community. So to the end, that I
• 54:11
  Speaker 4: have said before all this, the need to, as we
• 54:14
  Speaker 4: reduce the footprint of the criminal justice system, that money
• 54:17
  Speaker 4: needs to be shifted into mental health services, social services, education,
• 54:21
  Speaker 4: and other services that are likely to create a more sustainable,
• 54:25
  Speaker 4: a safer community. We need to start doing this. Quite frankly,
• 54:29
  Speaker 4: I used to say that six months ago, got no
• 54:31
  Speaker 4: traction at all. Right now we're talking about people wanting
• 54:34
  Speaker 4: to completely defund the police department. I don't think we
• 54:36
  Speaker 4: can afford to completely defund the police department, but we
• 54:39
  Speaker 4: can certainly begin to start taking a lot of money
• 54:42
  Speaker 4: away and putting that money into the services that are
• 54:45
  Speaker 4: going to be much more sustainable and a much better
• 54:48
  Speaker 4: fit for what we need.
• 54:50
  Speaker 3: So to that end, do you support Mayor Garcetti's proposal
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: to direct $ 250 million towards youth jobs, health, these peace centers,
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: and partially fund it by cutting $ 150 million from the
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: LAPD budget. Does that make sense?
• 55:05
  Speaker 4: That makes sense. I think it's actually extremely conservative. I
• 55:09
  Speaker 4: think that the LAPD budget could take even a bigger cut. Look,
• 55:14
  Speaker 4: the mayor just gave the LAPD about a 7% bump
• 55:19
  Speaker 4: that he was going to keep. So really what we're
• 55:22
  Speaker 4: talking about by taking this money away still keeps LAPD
• 55:25
  Speaker 4: at the funding levels that they were a few months ago, right,
• 55:28
  Speaker 4: pre-fiscal year 2021. In LA, the fiscal year is July
• 55:33
  Speaker 4: to June 30th. So quite frankly, what I see given
• 55:37
  Speaker 4: back or taken away, it's almost token because it really
• 55:41
  Speaker 4: doesn't alter the operations at all. All it's doing is
• 55:44
  Speaker 4: taking pay raises away which I don't think that we
• 55:47
  Speaker 4: should have gone forward with given that every other city
• 55:50
  Speaker 4: worker was asked to take a 10% cut. So I
• 55:54
  Speaker 4: think we have to go deeper than what is being proposed.
• 55:57
  Speaker 4: I think that we need to start moving away from
• 55:59
  Speaker 4: being fearful that as we start shifting funding away somehow,
• 56:05
  Speaker 4: you know, we're going to be less safe. The reality
• 56:07
  Speaker 4: is we're not. I think, you know, we have to
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: really start pushing back on police union political pressure. I mean,
• 56:14
  Speaker 4: you still see it In the last few days, maybe
• 56:18
  Speaker 4: not as openly, but there's so much pressure that goes
• 56:21
  Speaker 4: by unions to make sure that, you know, funding is
• 56:25
  Speaker 4: going to continue to some level. So if not, the
• 56:27
  Speaker 4: world's going to fall apart. Guess what? The world is
• 56:29
  Speaker 4: not going to fall apart. And in fact, we were
• 56:30
  Speaker 4: probably going to be a better world if we start
• 56:33
  Speaker 4: shifting some of the funding to the service of the
• 56:35
  Speaker 4: mayor's talking about that.
• 56:37
  Speaker 3: So to that end, this show is probably listened to
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: by a bunch of political junkies or people who are
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: trying to influence people, you know, as organizers. How do
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: they fight back on those arguments? The people who say, oh,
• 56:49
  Speaker 3: you cut 150 million from the LAPD budget. There's going
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: to be fewer cops on the street. There's going to
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: be higher crime.
• 56:55
  Speaker 4: I mean.
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: Even just the increased scrutiny of police activity after 2014
• 57:00
  Speaker 3: had people blaming crime on the Ferguson effect and claiming
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: that cops were being handcuffed and that may have led
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: to an increase in crime. How do you combat those arguments?
• 57:11
  Speaker 4: Look, I think that there's two ways that we combat
• 57:14
  Speaker 4: that argument. Number one is in the case of L.A.,
• 57:17
  Speaker 4: really taking that phone away is just simply keeping the
• 57:19
  Speaker 4: status quo. There's not any less officer. It's just simply
• 57:22
  Speaker 4: not giving the officer a pay raise, which I'm not sure.
• 57:26
  Speaker 4: that given the economic scenario where everybody else is taking
• 57:30
  Speaker 4: significant deep cuts, that we should give a pay raise
• 57:33
  Speaker 4: to the police department. The police department needs to be
• 57:35
  Speaker 4: part of our community. And you know what? You're a
• 57:38
  Speaker 4: public servant, and I think that you have to adjust
• 57:40
  Speaker 4: to the realities. And the reality right now is that
• 57:42
  Speaker 4: we're all suffering, and that suffering should be across the board.
• 57:49
  Speaker 4: The next thing that we have to do Is that
• 57:51
  Speaker 4: we really actually have to reduce this the presence of
• 57:55
  Speaker 4: policing in many communities? I think actually over policing in
• 57:57
  Speaker 4: many communities creates more problems than not look I saw
• 58:02
  Speaker 4: demonstrations in the last few days that actually became violent
• 58:06
  Speaker 4: when the police showed up They were peaceful until until
• 58:10
  Speaker 4: there was police presence. So evaluate and And you know,
• 58:13
  Speaker 4: we need professional police police officers and managers and understand
• 58:16
  Speaker 4: that sometimes your presence actually is going to race The anxiety,
• 58:21
  Speaker 4: and maybe you're better, especially given the context of the
• 58:24
  Speaker 4: current situation, sometimes it's better just to back off a little.
• 58:28
  Speaker 4: And if you're going to approach, do it in a
• 58:30
  Speaker 4: way that it's not with all the right gear and
• 58:33
  Speaker 4: all the things that actually increase tensions do not reduce tensions.
• 58:38
  Speaker 4: So I... At the same time, you know, we got
• 58:41
  Speaker 4: to make sure that, you know, if police goes into
• 58:43
  Speaker 4: a work slowdown, you know, they work for us, right?
• 58:45
  Speaker 4: And they work for mayors and city councils and boards
• 58:48
  Speaker 4: of supervisors. And if you see that there is a
• 58:51
  Speaker 4: decrease of desirable policing levels, then you start holding them
• 58:56
  Speaker 4: accountable accordingly. You know, policing should not be in a vacuum.
• 59:00
  Speaker 4: It would be like having the armed forces be in
• 59:02
  Speaker 4: a vacuum, you know, without Congress and without the president.
• 59:05
  Speaker 4: No reference to the current I could be another White
• 59:09
  Speaker 4: House editor saying, But, you know, just in general, we
• 59:12
  Speaker 4: want police forces. We want the military to respond to
• 59:17
  Speaker 4: civilian authority on that. So sometimes we're losing that and
• 59:22
  Speaker 4: we get intimidated and we're actually being coerced into allowing
• 59:26
  Speaker 4: police to do whatever they want to do.
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: So in preparing for this interview, I talked to someone
• 59:32
  Speaker 3: who was a critic of yours in San Francisco, who
• 59:34
  Speaker 3: argued that your office sort of essentially gave up on
• 59:39
  Speaker 3: prosecuting crimes like car break-ins or low-level drug offenses. And
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: that led to a poorer quality of life for residents
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: of San Francisco. What do you say to that critic?
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: And how, you know, bigger picture, do you balance these
• 59:53
  Speaker 3: long-term needed reforms with with the immediate term demands from
• 59:57
  Speaker 3: residents to stop theft, for example?
• 59:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, look, that's the police narrative. Here's what
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 4: happened in San Francisco. I was one of the co-sponsors
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 4: of Prop 47, which was one of the major criminal
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 4: justice reform efforts dealing with the war on drugs, right,
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 4: and really brought some sanity to reducing some of the
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 4: felony consequences for drug possession, for personal use, and wound
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 4: up putting hundreds of millions of dollars, over $ 500 million
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 4: back into our communities. Police departments were against this, and
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 4: they basically, in many places, went into a work slowdown.
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 4: San Francisco really went into a work slowdown. Here's where
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 4: I'm going with this. Car burglaries were not covered by
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 4: Prop 47. But during the next four years after Prop 47,
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 4: or three and a half years, until an initiative for
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 4: police came up, there were about 81,000 car break-ins and
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 4: there were 11 arrests. Which, by the way, all 11
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 4: arrests were filed on and were prosecuted. But when you
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 4: have 81,000 cases and 11 arrests, it's not the failure
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 4: to prosecute. It's a failure for the police to do
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 4: their work But they were very good at shifting the
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 4: narrative and saying that the DA was not prosecuting these
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 4: cases or they were now misdemeanors, so we had less
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 4: of a tool, which neither one was true. Not only
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 4: were we prosecuting the very few cases, 11 of them
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 4: that came up, but more importantly, when a new chief
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 4: of police came on board and he said, you know,
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 4: we're going to do our work, we saw immediately a
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 4: 17% reduction in property crimes. Including car break-ins and now
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 4: we when I left we had two years in the
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 4: road of reductions so that narrative is precisely the narrative
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 4: that the police wants people to hear is the fear-mongering
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 4: and is sometimes the Manipulation of things but you know,
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 4: just simply getting into the work slow down Unfortunately in
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 4: San Francisco like in many other communities. There's not a
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 4: strong enough leadership in cutting in County or city government
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 4: to to look at the police and say, wait a minute, 81,000 cases,
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 4: 11 arrests. You're not doing your job. And if you
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 4: don't do your job, I'm going to start taking action, right?
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 4: You have the purse strings. You control who the chief
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 4: of police is. They worked for you. They worked for us, right?
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 4: It should not be the other way around. But it's
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 4: very hard to push back in that narrative because people
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 4: just buy it. You know, a cop shows up to
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 4: the scene. Look, I mean, in 2014, the Police Officer
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 4: Association in San Francisco laid out somewhere around $ 400, 000 in
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 4: radio ads right after Prop 47. And the radio ad,
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 4: I'm not quoting it exactly, but I'm going to paraphrase it.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 4: And basically, it was every morning, morning drive, If your
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 4: car gets broken into or if you're a victim of
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 4: a crime, call San Francisco police. We will be there
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 4: to serve you. But don't expect District Attorney Gascon to
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 4: do anything about it. And then they went out for
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 4: about three and a half years to go into a
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 4: work slowdown.
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So it seems like a very purposeful stoppage there.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 4: Absolutely.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: Got it. So I want to switch gears a little
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 3: bit because there's so many important issues that the role
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 3: would cover and that you've worked on. The United States
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 3: has 5%, I think, of the global population, but 25%
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 3: of the prison population. Clearly, that is a problem. What
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 3: kinds of policies do you want to put in place
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 3: to reduce mass incarceration and reduce the insane number of
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 3: people we have locked up in jails right now?
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah, look, when I became the district attorney, our jail
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 4: was in 2011, our jail was full every day. And
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 4: within a year, we were able to lower our jail
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 4: population by 30 to 40 percent on a daily basis.
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 4: And crime did not go up. By the way, violent
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 4: crime in San Francisco continued to go down through this
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 4: entire period, whereas, again, Lake County went up by 30
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 4: percent in the county, 50 percent in the city, with
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 4: a DA that incarcerates at rates that are 70 percent
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 4: higher than anybody else in the state. We also had
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 4: the lowest number of prison commitments. In fact, we had
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 4: in 2015, 2016, there was a group of researchers that
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 4: came to San Francisco and said if every county in
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 4: America took the same steps that San Francisco did, we
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 4: would end mass incarceration in this country in a year's time.
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 4: So what you have to do is we have to
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 4: begin to move away from using incarceration as a first
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 4: level of response to any problem. is starting with pretrial
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 4: detention at our jails, which in the case of LA County,
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 4: about 50% of the people are in pretrial detention. By
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 4: the way, San Francisco too, even the numbers were a
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 4: lot lower and we were able to decarcerate. We still
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 4: had a problem because we still go to Montebello and
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 4: many other reasons that people are held, even if before
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 4: the DA takes a look at it, you know, the
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 4: DA has 48 hours, so people are in jail for
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 4: 48 hours before the DA may take a look at it.
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 4: So that population and the thought process The people that
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 4: are committing non-serious, non-violent offenses have to be booked and
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 4: have to be kept in jail, either because they cannot
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 4: afford bail or because they don't have an attorney that
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 4: comes out right away. We need to stop that. The
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 4: next thing that we have to do, which I have
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 4: pledged to absolutely do in L.A., and we started to
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 4: do that in San Francisco as I continue my journey
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 4: understanding the work, We have to go back to what
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 4: we used to do before this craziness of about three
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 4: decades ago that we kept adding more enhancements and more
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 4: prison enhancements and punishment to the point that you can
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 4: have a person that commits a crime and the base
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 4: offense may be, let's say, five years, but because of
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 4: gang enhancements and other enhancements, they may end up in
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 4: prison for 15 or 20 years. And we often see now,
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 4: as LA is a perfect example, where people are being
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 4: placed on the gang files, And the officers are fraudulently
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 4: putting people, young people of color, in gang files, which
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 4: then create the vehicle for the gang enhancement, which automatically
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 4: multiplies a sentence if there were to be a sentence.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 4: So we have to move away from what we call
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 4: status enhancements, because that is driving incarceration in this country.
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 4: And California led the way with three strikes in 2017.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 4: you know, gang enhancements and, you know, felon with a
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 4: gun and just all kinds of things that they're applying
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 4: often by prosecutors, first of all, to coerce a plea agreement.
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 4: The plea always being a sentence that will be so
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 4: much less if it weren't for the enhancements or people
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 4: go to trial and they end up, you know, running
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 4: a risk of going from the potential of a, you know,
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 4: low period of incarceration to go into prison for 25, 20, 25,
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 4: 30 years. We have to move away from that.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 3: Last question that's sort of related, which is you oppose
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 3: the death penalty. I was hoping you could explain why.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 3: And then, you know, obviously the death penalty is the
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 3: most severe example of the use of force by the state.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 3: But I think a lot of people have been shocked
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: by the fact that police have been tear gassing, pepper spraying,
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 3: shooting with rubber bullets, citizens. I mean, do you think
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 3: those tools are appropriate for crowd control?
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 4: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And I have, I tell you,
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 4: that I was brokenhearted seeing some of the images that
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 4: we have seen in TVs, on the Internet, you know,
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 4: rubber bullets, which, you know, the business are called, you know,
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 4: foam rubber baton rounds. First of all, they're not intended
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 4: to be shot directly at anyone and in the upper
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 4: torso area, which I saw a lot of that. They
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 4: are meant to be skipped on the ground. so that
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 4: they hit the ground first to lose some of the momentum,
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 4: and then they're supposed to hopefully hit in the lower,
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 4: you know, below the waist. We have seen contrary to that.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 4: They're never intended to be for peaceful demonstrators. They're not
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 4: a crowd control moving tool, just like a baton should
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 4: not be a crowd control moving tool or tear gas.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 4: So things are really, when you have a crowd, exhausted
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 4: all the other possibilities, and you have actual violence going on.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 4: And we have seen those tools used not in those scenarios.
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 4: And that, to me, is very problematic. And I think
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 4: that we need to hold people accountable for that. But
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 4: going to the death penalty, which you asked earlier, why
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 4: am I opposed to the death penalty? I'm going to
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 4: tell you my personal reason, but then I'm going to
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 4: give you a whole host of reasons why we should
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 4: all be opposed. I am opposed to the death penalty
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 4: because I think it's immoral. Now, it's a moral why
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 4: because it's being disproportionately applied for people and people of color.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 4: Let's take L.A. County.
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 5: L.A.
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 4: County, the state of California, has the biggest death row
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 4: in the country, roughly 750 people. About a third of
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 4: those come from L.A. County. Under the current district attorney,
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 4: 22 people just in the last eight years have been
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 4: placed on death row, and all but one are people
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 4: of color. You cannot tell me that in a county
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 4: of 10.5 million people, where the African-American population is less
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 4: than 5%, but they make up the majority of the
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 4: people in that world. So there's a problem with proportionality
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 4: and the morality of that. Number two, it doesn't help
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 4: public safety. It doesn't deter crime. When people are committing
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 4: a crime that allegedly could be worth the death penalty
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 4: under the current law, They're not thinking, if I get caught,
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 4: I may be facing death row. That's not how we
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 4: as human beings work. First of all, it's too remote.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 4: There's too many things. You're just not thinking of that.
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 4: So it's not a deterrent. It's immoral and disproportionately applied.
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 4: And then I'm going to go to the third major reason.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 4: It is so expensive. You know, an execution in the
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 4: state of California currently would cost around $ 340 million to
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 4: execute one person. It's crazy. Yeah, it is crazy. People
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 4: on death row, the cost of keeping people on death
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 4: row is so many more times than if you put
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 4: people within the regular population. Most of the people on
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 4: death row, by the way, about 50% went in with
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 4: a mental health problem, which also brings other ethical considerations
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 4: So we have someone that may have committed a serious crime.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 4: I'm assuming that they did, right? But they're mentally ill, right?
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 4: And I forgot one other thing that I should have
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 4: mentioned at the very beginning, which brings to the power
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 4: of immorality. We don't always get it right. We know
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 4: that people get wrongfully convicted. And the death penalty is irreversible.
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 4: So if we convict someone to death row, and we
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 4: know that there have been innocent people in this country
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 4: have been executed. We have had people in the state
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 4: that have gotten out of death row that were wrongfully convicted.
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 4: And 20 years, 30 years later, they have been able
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 4: to finally gain their freedom. So you've got an issue
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 4: of proportionality. You've got an issue of wrongful convictions and
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 4: the potential for an innocent person to be executed, which
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 4: go to the morality of this. You got an issue
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 4: of it doesn't serve any public safety purpose. It doesn't
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 4: deter crime. And then it's so expensive. We can buy
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 4: so much more public safety and so many other things
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 4: with a penalty that doesn't have any applicability, in my opinion,
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 4: in modern society.
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think I saw, might have been on
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 3: your website, that California has spent more than $ 5 billion
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 3: with a B since 1978 prosecuting death penalty cases in
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 3: and maintaining a death row that currently houses 737 inmates.
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 3: What the fuck are we doing? Excuse my language.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 4: No, no, no. Listen, you know what? I generally won't
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 4: say this in the air, but yeah, what the fuck
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 4: are we doing? It's a good question because it doesn't
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 4: make any sense.
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 3: Last question. So there's a lot of people who have
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 3: been marching, who have been donating, who care deeply about
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 3: criminal justice reform, who care deeply about reducing mass incarceration
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: and How can they get involved in your campaign if
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 3: they're in this area and help you out? And are
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 3: there other people running for DA seats across the country
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 3: that they should check out if they want a more
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 3: progressive policies implemented everywhere?
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 4: Totally. So as to my campaign, you can go on
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 4: our website, georgegascon.org, and you can see their volunteering opportunities,
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 4: their policy papers that you can read up. There are
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 4: statements that you can use if you yourself wanted to
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 4: go out and talk to people as to why you're
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 4: supporting this. There are volunteer opportunities. As to other DAs,
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 4: there are. There's Kim Gardner in St.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 2: Louis.
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 4: There's Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore. There are many others. I
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 4: believe there are 10 of us right now. They're running countrywide,
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 4: all deserving of attention, especially if it's close to the
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 4: place where you live. But even, you know, as Senator
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 4: Bernie Sanders says, you know, just donate $ 10, $ 1 each.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 4: If we get, you know, several million people that did
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 4: $ 1 each to all of us, it would certainly go
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 4: a long way because we're all facing the same things.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 4: We're facing police units coming after you. In my case,
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 4: we're in the primary. local police unions put $ 2. 1 million
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 4: against me. They have pledged. Yeah, they have pledged now
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 4: for the general election to put between $ 4 and $ 5
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 4: million against me, right? So in a market like LA,
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 4: by the way, which is the largest county in the country, 10.5
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 4: million people, fighting that kind of money in order to
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 4: communicate is going to take, you know, the pushback. We're
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 4: going to have to have the people power, which means,
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 4: you know, donating $ 1, $ 10, what you can, but also people...
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 4: being willing to volunteer, to engage, whether it's in social media.
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 4: We know that with COVID, we may not be able
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 4: to be door knocking in October, November, but we can
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 4: certainly engage in the phones, we can engage in social media.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 4: We're putting a very robust volunteer operation here. But if
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 4: you're closer, if you're in the St. Louis area, if
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 4: you're in the Baltimore area, you have great progressive district
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 4: attorneys that need your help. And I strongly encourage you
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 4: because the other component to this is that criminal justice
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 4: reform really needs to start with electing DAs that are
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 4: going to do the right things, right? And if you
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 4: consider that the district attorneys in the major urban centers
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 4: in this country really are the ones that drive mass incarceration,
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 4: are the ones that can drive reform. Obviously, LA is
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 4: just this huge monster. LA is bigger than over 30
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 4: states with 10 and a half million people. So we
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 4: drive the dialogue at rates that nobody else does. But you,
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 4: I strongly encourage you that this speaks to your heart.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 4: Or if you know people that are in those areas there,
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 4: please donate. Please help those DAs. You can look at
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 4: the website. Senator Sanders, he actually listed all 10 of
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 4: us There's a lot of ways to engage here. It's
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 4: great to go out there and, you know, engage in
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 4: civil disobedience and exercise your First Amendment rights. But remember,
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 4: at the end of the day, if you got a
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 4: VA that is not going to follow through, you can
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 4: continue to do that until, you know, until health reasons over.
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 4: But you're not going to get much impact other than that.
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 3: Amen to that. Thank you so much for doing the show.
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 3: I hope everyone will check out your website and just,
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 3: you know, look, whether or not you can vote in L.A.,
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 3: get educated on these issues. Think about finding a more
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 3: progressive DA to run where you live. But we have
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 3: to focus locally first. So I'm so grateful for your time.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 4: Thank you so much, you guys.
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 2: Thanks to George Gascon for joining us today. And we
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 2: will talk to you later.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: Bye, everybody.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 2: Bye. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked Media.
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 2: The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 2: Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 2: Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Katie Long,
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 2: Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Reston, and Elisa Gutierrez for production support.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 3: And to our
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 2: Digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim,
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 2: who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.