 I did want to ask Radley and Coleman if you want to weigh in on like what you think of the aftermath of George Floyd's death, particularly its effect on policing. And to kind of tee that up, I want to play an excerpt from the documentary where they have a series of police officers sort of complaining that this is going to demoralize them and make their job harder. So let's play that clip real quick and I'd like to get Radley's reaction first and then have Coleman weigh in. The last call I was ever on was should have been a routine call. It was a simple hit and run. An officer just dispatched to a hit and run call. It didn't take too long before we realized this guy was completely high on drugs. He was huge too. He was probably six, five. I mean he was tall, way bigger than me, probably twice my size. And he's like, I'm not going to jail. And I'm like, okay, well, we got our body cameras on. We got four guys. And I'm thinking, well, this guy's drugged out. And he's like, well, I'm not going to jail. I'm going home. Pretty soon the fight's on. And we're fighting with this guy trying to get him cuffed. We're not hitting him. We're not striking him or anything, but we're going to go to the ground. And I'm thinking to myself, dude, if this guy ODs, if this guy dies in our custody, four white cops, that's 17th in Chicago, 20 blocks from George Floyd, we're going to prison. And I'm looking at these guys and I go, we're going to prison. And I was like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. Radley, will Derek Chauvin's conviction improve policing in America? Has it done so? Or is it going to scare police from doing their jobs as this officer implies? Or is the effect is going to be negligible? I mean, I think in the grand scheme of things, it's going to be negligible. I think Floyd's death and the resulting protests did move the needle on a number of these issues. And it made people more sympathetic to the idea of holding officers more accountable. We did see some real substantive reforms after the summer 2020, including cities and a couple of states banning no-knock raids, banning choke holds. We saw some movement toward police accountability. But as I talk about in the third part of the piece, I mean, a lot of the real substantive reforms we saw were behind the scenes. So for example, California, the legislature passed a prohibition on excited delirium as a cause of death. We saw the last two medical groups that still endorsed excited delirium revoked that endorsement, the National Association of Medical Examiners, and the emergency physicians group. I can't think of the proper name. But you know, I also think that there's been a backlash. I mean, a lot of legislatures, particularly in red states, passed laws restricting the ability, restricting protests, removing criminal and civil liability for people who hit protesters with their cars. We've seen in here in Tennessee, for example, in Nashville, we passed overwhelmingly passed a civilian review board for the police department. The legislature then passed the bill basically overruling that. We've seen that in a lot of states where conservative state legislatures have made it basically sort of rollback reforms passed by cities. As far as, you know, the ability to do their jobs, I mean, look, I think there is something to the so-called Ferguson effect, which is the idea that after big protests, police are more reluctant to sort of proactively police. In some cases, I think that's a good thing. In other cases, it can have detrimental effects. I think it's not particularly a particularly flattering portrayal of police that if they're criticized and if they're held accountable for abuse of force, that they're going to stop doing their jobs and they're going to allow sort of crime to take over cities or in neighborhoods. You know, as for the particular documentary, you know, it's designed to make us feel a lot of sympathy and empathy for MPD officers. And look, I know during the protests, police officers took a lot of abuse, including I'm sure a lot of officers who didn't deserve it and didn't have a long disciplinary record. But what we did see in the DOJ report is that Minneapolis, like a lot of cities that have seen protests, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, Ferguson, there is a long, well-documented history of abuse, of corruption, of not just sort of abuse of force, but also a complete inability to hold the worst actors accountable in these systems. I mean, that DOJ report of Minneapolis was damning. And so, you know, when you read that, you know, you can see where some of that anger came from. And of course, the documentary doesn't, you know, address or try to justify what that report found because there is no justification for it. That doesn't mean that, you know, abuse of particular police officers is or any police officer that matter is justified, but it does mean that there is a real sort of tangible source of the anger that we saw during these protests. And this is a mistake I think we often see from people who defend law enforcement and people sort of vaguely political right is this effort to kind of flatten these protests into the incident that precipitated them. You often see those with Ferguson, when people point out that, you know, hands up, don't shoot was a myth and it was a lie, that that isn't actually what happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson. And, you know, in some sense, they're right. I mean, that encounter did not happen the way it was portrayed. I think Darren Wilson was probably from the evidence that we've seen was unjustly accused and he deserved to be vindicated. But that isn't really what the protests were about in Ferguson. They were about these tiny cities that were imposing, basically treating people like walking ATMs. They were about cities that had, you know, five, six, seven times the number of arrest warrants for people as they did citizens, residents, because these places operated on fines and fees, these little towns. And so people were, there was just this constant confrontation between police and citizens that led to, you know, generational poverty, generational mistrust. And that is what people, that's what people were angry about. And I think when we reduce these incidents, these protests to just the incident that caused them, you know, it does a disservice to the people who, you know, have been suffering from these policies. It also just doesn't solve any problems going forward. And so that, you know, in this case, I think people are wrong about George, how George Floyd died. But I also, you know, there's been this effort to say it was all based on a lie. I mean, when Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter did a podcast episode about this, and the title of that podcast, when they interviewed the makers of documentary was the lie that changed America, right? Now, they both sent back down on that. And Lowry, I thought had a very sort of bumble and admirable, you know, apology and said that he had been duped by the documentary. But, you know, I think it's dangerous to reduce the anger that we see at these protests. I mean, people don't protest because they're mad about one particular death. They're mad, they protest because that particular death resonates with them, right? It resonates with something that they experienced and that people, their friends and family experienced. And so I think we need to take these protests at their whole and look at the resulting reports and journalism investigations that came out and address sort of core issues and not just a particular incident that kicked it all off. Coleman, I know from reading your book, The End of Race Politics in America that you had a fairly negative reaction to what transpired after the death of George Floyd. And I think you raised a lot of valid points in that book, which I recommend. But could you just give us your take on what transpired after this incident in America? I agree with Radley that the reaction to these events is not limited to what happens between one cop and one arrestee, but comes on the heels of decades of abuses, humiliations, large and small, and the accumulated anger that forms between communities and the people who are supposed to protect them. At the same time, it's a massive understatement to say that there's some truth to the Ferguson effect. And what is tragically left out of this conversation is the aftermath of what happens to these communities, which are generally disproportionately black and poor, when the media runs with the racism narrative, which can lead to riots, which can lead to de-policing policies, that while having definitely some benefits also can quite often have the effect of increasing crime. I went to Ferguson in 2019 and there were still businesses, mom and pop shops, some black-owned, that had not returned as a result of the rioting there five years prior, abandoned buildings, and so forth. 2020 represented the single greatest year-over-year increase in the homicide rate in over a hundred years, possibly ever, according to Pew, concentrated in the black community. It is hard for me to understand what is on the opposite side of that ledger as a consequentialist that could be worth that great a loss of life. And the fact that that is left out of the conversation is galling to me, and I think that it's the part of the conversation that does not get emphasized nearly enough. At the height of 2020, Gallup pulled black Americans and asked a simple question, do you want more police, less police, or the same in your neighborhood? Now, if you were listening to the rhetoric in the media, you would have thought probably most black people want less police. In fact, it was only 20%, 60% wanted the same police presence and 20% wanted more. And so what disturbed me was the extent to which that 20% was hijacked and being portrayed as the central thrust of the black community when in fact 80% wanted the same or more police presence. Now, obviously, everyone wants better police, and that's where I fully agree with Radley that these moments can be opportunities for reforms of policies that ought to be reformed. But it seems in the past 10 years, they have almost without exception, verged into a kind of anti-police de-policing, defunding of police, downsizing of police, which has harmed no one more than it has harmed black Americans. I mean, I have several responses to that. He's right about the poll that shows the substantial majority of black people want more police. There are also polls showing that majority of black people have had bad interactions with police that I think it was 35% or 40% had an interaction in which they feared for their life. And it's true that people want more security, they want to feel safe in their neighborhoods, and police, more police is really the only option that they're given. I think we can shrink the police pretty dramatically in ways that have been beneficial. So, for example, the Kahootz program in Eugene, that started in Eugene, Oregon, that's since spread to cities across the country, has been overwhelmingly successful. And this is where instead of sending police when someone's in a mental health crisis, which to me has always just seemed really absurd when somebody's borderline suicidal or having some sort of crisis in the first thing you do is send a heavily armed police team. But instead sending mental health professionals. And what they found is not only do they, this has been overwhelmingly successful in talking these people down, they rarely need to call for police backup. So, we're de-escalating these situations. I think we can remove, you know, police from routine traffic enforcement to cut out some of the most sort of loaded interactions that police have with residents, particularly in marginalized communities, which are these traffic stops, where police are trained to consider every traffic stop a potential threat. And, you know, people in minority communities are taught to be very wary of police in these situations. So, I think there are lots of ways we can shrink the police footprint. I'm not an abolitionist. I do think that abolitionists have done a lot of the work in some of these areas. And I think we should take their ideas seriously. But there also hasn't been an abolition. There hasn't been a defunding. I mean, there are, last I checked, I think there are about a half dozen cities that even decreased funding for police. And both were by very, very small margins. On the vast majority of the country, police funding has increased pretty substantially over the last, well, since George Floyd, but also before. And I mean, I did see this from a survey that shows that they're, and we know in Missouri, in Minneapolis, excuse me, that there was an exodus after George Floyd. Yeah, no, I'm not disputing that people have left law enforcement, but there has been more funding. It's just harder to recruit people. Yeah, issues with incoming cadet classes, right? Like, isn't there a huge problem with recruitment? And then also, sometimes when budgets are slashed, that's sort of one of the first things to go. Yeah, but the very same budgets have actually been slashed. I mean, there has been an exodus. Not totally slashed, but maybe marginally cut. And then it's the recruitment efforts and the training of new officers that is the thing that is frequently first to go. I mean, somebody has cut the rate of the increase in these budgets. Again, but that part of that is downstream of what I'm criticizing. Namely, when you have a culture where literally every fourth person has all cops or bastards in their Tinder bio, I don't think as many young people are going to want to become cops.