SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Five years ago today, George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer. There was a swift reaction around the world, leading to a summer of protests calling for police reform. Today, that sweeping energy around reimagining and reforming policing has evaporated. According to Gallup, few institutions enjoy higher rates of approval from Americans than the police, even though most people rarely interact with them. Gene Demby from NPR's Code Switch has been looking into the effect of what critics call copaganda (ph), the theory that pro-police messaging stifles attempts to address the problems in American policing. Welcome to the show.
GENE DEMBY, BYLINE: Thank you, Scott.
DETROW: I want to talk about that, but first, I'd like to rewind and go back to 2020 and your reporting in the aftermath of that murder. What was it like?
DEMBY: It was such a strange moment for us. I mean, we're a show about race in America, so we've got a lot of fresh attention, and suddenly found ourselves with a much bigger audience because people were activated around the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, most notably. And we wondered - like, out loud on the show - like, well, why now?
DETROW: Right.
DEMBY: Because, you know, we've been covering police violence as part of our beat for years. There were other cases eerily similar to those that did not spark the kind of reckonings we saw that summer. Interestingly enough, a social scientist we had on at that time told us that large-scale lockdowns are often characterized by mass protests and usually set off by some perceived injustice. And the COVID lockdown, she said, was fertile ground for that kind of reckoning. And so it couldn't have happened before, and it probably couldn't happen now.
DETROW: Right. And here we are five years later. You're still thinking about policing and Code Switch has been reporting on copaganda - what I was talking about before - for an upcoming episode. Explain what that is.
DEMBY: So, like you said, like, most people in this country are not encountering the police in their everyday lives, but Pew Research shows that there's a relationship between how much local crime news Americans consume and how concerned they are about their safety. And so copaganda is this term used by critics of policing to talk about the consistent pro-police messaging in our media - like the way, you know, news organizations tend to defer or default to the police version or framing of events or just, like, our entertainment media that is very, very pro police.
DETROW: How does what we hear about the police affect public opinion toward them? And what exactly do we know about that?
DEMBY: So this is so fascinating to me. So every year, the folks at Pew ask people how they feel about crime. And every year, for the past 25 years, Americans say they feel like crime is going up. What is wild about that is that the opposite is true. Over the last 25 years, crime rates have been pretty consistently but dramatically falling overall. We're talking about violent crime. We're talking about property crime. Since the early '90s, crime has fallen more than 70%. According to the FBI, we're at near historic lows for crime. So if you've grown up in the United States in the 21st century, you've come of age in what might be the safest period on record in the United States.
But Americans just do not feel that way. And concern over crime was a really big issue in the election last year, as we know. So, I mean, what's going on there? I mean, critics of copaganda say that's the link - that if you're really worried about crime and your safety, you're going to be more sympathetic to calls to expand the powers of police, calls for more surveillance, anything that might keep you safe.
DETROW: So let's maybe connect that to how we started this conversation. Has the national discussion around rethinking policing really fully dried up, or is it just being talked about differently? Like, how would you characterize the shift that we've seen?
DEMBY: I mean, it's complicated, right? So when you look at poll numbers from the summer of 2020 - we were just talking about, right? - the height of the protests, the height of the unrest, really large majorities of Americans - like, over 60% - said they thought the police around the country weren't doing a very good job of holding officers accountable for misconduct, of treating people from different racial and ethnic groups equally, of using the right amount of force for each situation. Today, that's no longer even a majority position to those same questions. In fact, those numbers look like they did before 2020.
DETROW: Before 2020, like, there were so many things that happened there, and they just felt like fundamental shifts. Like, I'll never forget seeing Mitt Romney walking down the street, chanting Black Lives Matter. But it's like that never happened.
DEMBY: It's like it never happened. And I talked to a civil rights attorney recently who argued that the energy for rethinking how policing works is still there, but it just depends on how the question gets asked. So if you ask somebody, do you think cities and states should divert more money allocated to the police towards having, you know, mental health professionals step in during somebody's psychiatric crisis, instead of the cops? People tend to say, yeah, that's a good idea. If you frame that same proposal as defunding the police, people say no. But that proposal about reallocation is one of the many ideas that falls under the umbrella of defunding the police, but that defund label has real bad branding.
DETROW: Last question, Gene, you have spent a lot of time over the past five years thinking about the legacy of George Floyd and, more broadly, police reform. What sticks out to you about this moment?
DEMBY: So for all the attention that's been paid to American policing and police violence since George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's names became nationally known, the data show that police are killing more civilians than they were in 2020. So according to the Mapping Police Violence Project, 2024 was the deadliest year since they started collecting data back in 2013 - 1,369 people killed in encounters with the police.
And this is happening at a time when the Trump administration has said it's going to end consent decrees in Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed and in two dozen other cities. So consent decrees are these arrangements that allow federal oversight of police agencies accused of civil rights abuses. And the Justice Department official who oversees these decrees say that they add to crime. It's actually not clear that that's true, but we know that the danger of rising crime is a very common refrain from Republicans and Democrats to calls for police reform. But right now, the numbers show that there is less violence in America and yet more encounters with the police where Americans end up dead.
DETROW: That is NPR's Gene Demby. Thanks so much.
DEMBY: Thank you so much, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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