CNN's New Day
April 15, 2021
7:57 a.m. Eastern
JOHN BERMAN: So the killing of Daunte Wright has reignited calls among some progressive members of Congress to defund or outright dismantle policing in America. Is that the right pathway to reform? John Avlon here with a "Reality Check." John?
JOHN AVLON: There's an overdue reckoning over killings of young black men by police, and there's majority support for significant police reform. But there are also strident slogans from politicians that don't help at all. Like Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib's tweet earlier this week calling for "no more policing." Let's be clear, this is a terrible idea as a matter of politics and practicality. It's an extension of the call to defund the police which Donald Trump used as a cudgel to hit Democrats in the last election despite Joe Biden's disavowal. And many defenders essentially say that "defund the police" should be taken seriously but not literally. After the Trump presidency, I thought that we agreed that words matter. It doesn't even represent the community it seeks to serve. A Gallup poll from August of 2020 found that 80 percent of black Americans want to keep or even increase the amount of police in their neighborhoods. The real issue is what kind of policing they're receiving.
Consider the alleged minor offenses that led to high-profile killings by police in recent years -- Daunte Wright pulled over for expired plates; George Floyd for a counterfeit $20 bill; Walter Scott pulled over for a broken tail light; Eric Garner for selling loose cigarettes; Alton Sterling for selling CDs. These are just a few examples. Now, according to FBI statistics, African American Americans made up 30 percent of arrests for curfew violations or loitering; 29 percent of gambling arrests in 2019 while local studies show they're also far more likely to be arrested for jaywalking. So much for former AG Bill Barr's insistence that there isn't systemic racism in police departments. And this needs to change. But gutting or cutting police departments is not going to achieve some utopia. It'll do the opposite. Instead, there needs to be significant retraining reform. Cops need to focus on de-escalating situations and decriminalizing some victimless misdemeanors could reduce causes of conflict. It helps that some 27 states have decriminalized or even legalized recreational marijuana
considering that black Americans are arrested more than three times as much as whites for possession despite equal usage rates, Congress is at work as well. In 2020, Republican Senator Tim Scott proposed a bill to require reporting standards for use of deadly force and no-knock warrants. Democrats said it didn't go far enough, proposed a ban on chokeholds and racial profiling; a limit on military equipment transfers to the police; and eliminating qualified immunity to protect police officers from lawsuits when they violate a citizen's constitutional rights.
Good people can disagree on the details, but we need to agree on the facts -- like the fact that 991 people have been shot and killed by the police over the past year, according to The Washington Post. We also need to recognize that, despite some fear-fueled appeals, violent crime and property crime have plummeted since the 1990s. And, finally, we should not fall into the trap of demonizing all police officers who do a necessary, difficult, dangerous and often thankless job. We can support the vast majority of good cops while insisting on holding bad cops more accountable, and invest in changing the culture that has led us to this crisis of confidence in the basic promise of equal justice under the law.