Monifa Bandele on Reimagining Public Safety / Svante Myrick on Roadblocks to Voting

KPFA - CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin:

Elite media can give the impression that problems wax and wane along with their attention to them. So it is with police brutality. The news media has moved on, yet 2023 saw killings by law enforcement up from the previous year, which was up from the year before that. More than 1,200 people were killed, roughly three people every day, including not just those shot dead but also those fatally shocked by a stun gun, beaten, or restrained to death. Thirty-six percent of those killed were fleeing, and they were disproportionately Black.

Unheard in the news is the hard work of communities to reimagine public safety without punitive policing. We hear about it from Monifa Bandele from the Movement for Black Lives.

Also on the show:

Little research is more important or less acknowledged than Princeton’s (now UCLA’s) Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page 2014 work on the translation of public opinion into public policy. Looking at more than 1,700 policies over 20 years, they concluded that where economic elite views diverged from those of the public — as they would — the public had “zero estimated impact upon policy change, while economic elites are still estimated to have a very large, positive, independent impact.”

Awareness of that fundamental disconnect is always relevant — but maybe especially when it comes to election season, where corporate coverage suggests we have an array of choices. How do we acknowledge flaws in the system while still encouraging people to participate and to fight the roadblocks to voting that we’re seeing right now?

We get at that with Svante Myrick, president of People For the American Way and former mayor of Ithaca, New York.

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