How "defund the police" became radioactive

The fading slogan of 2020

0:00What's good, y'all? You were listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. Okay, so think back to the summer of 2020, right? Defund the police. That was everywhere. On protest signs, all over our social media feeds. It was painted on the ground at Black Lives Matter Plaza here in D.C., which, of course, has since been removed. But millions of people took to the streets in what was the largest mass protest in the history of this country. But today, in 2026, with some very closely watched midterm elections just weeks away, policing barely comes up at all among the people running for office.

0:41It's not even top of mind for most voters. And nobody wants to touch the defund slogan. Even politicians on the left, like AOC and Zoran Mamdani, who both once embraced defund, now don't want anything to do with it. There's a councilman that has this saying, woke one was crazy. I know that there are some for whom they still believe in that. I've made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police, that I will not be. But the big questions that folks were asking about policing in America back in 2020, they never went away.

1:14And earlier this month, we were reminded of that once again in New York City. On October 8th, ICE agents shot Oscar Belgao in the neck as they were trying to arrest him. His five-year-old son was in the backseat of that car that Belgao was driving. Belgao is alive. He survived that shooting. But afterwards, Mamdani called to abolish ICE. And we will not back down from the demand that so many, including myself, have put forward time and again.

1:45This is an agency that must be abolished. Protesters filled the streets, but they were not confronting ICE, right? They were clashing with the NYPD. And at a news conference near the scene, standing next to Mayor Mamdani... I am now going to turn it over to our police commissioner, Jessica Tish. Police commissioner Jessica Tish chose to read out Belgao's criminal record. He has two prior arrests in New York City, one for robbery in 2020. We've done some reporting on Coasters before about the close working relationships between ICE, which is deeply unpopular, and local police departments around the country.

2:19And calls to defund the police and to abolish ICE have been twinned for years, like as part of the same project. But Mamdani will say, abolish ICE and not defund the police? So, like, what is going on there?

Talking with Chenjerai Kumanika

2:36What happened? I'm getting into that with a friend of the show, our play cousin, Chenjerai Kumanika. Ten years ago, if y'all been rocking with us that long, you might remember that when we were first starting out as a podcast, Chenj was there on our very first episode. And Chenj has mad jobs. You know, I teach journalism at NYU. I make podcasts and do a lot of my reporting and research through audio documentary. And one of my audio documentaries was called Empire City, and it was an eight-part series about the history of the NYPD.

3:07Now, Chenjerai talked before Belgao's shooting, but a lot of what he said about policing and ICE and Mamdani's relationship with the NYPD speaks directly to that shooting. Because here's the thing, homicides in the United States have dropped sharply all over the country, right? And Chenj argues that the drop in violence actually happened because of some of the things that people calling for defunding the police wanted all along. Things like cities deploying unarmed crisis responders instead of police officers.

3:41And things like new violence prevention programs. So here's my question. Did we maybe sort of defund the police after all? And if the ideas behind it have stuck around and contributed to reducing harm, why is the slogan still so radioactive? If I could get you to go back to 2020 for a second, right?

The practical meaning of defunding

4:08And the slogan, defund the police, was everywhere. Like, how did that hit your ears when you were hearing it back then? When I heard defund the police, I mean, this was in a broader conversation about police accountability, right? I mean, police were killing people at an enormous rate, which continues. I mean, the most recent estimates I've seen about where we're at now is that police have killed 964 people in the U.S. so far in 2026.

4:39Yeah, I've seen those counts on the Mapping Police Violence website. And, you know, that kind of thing was also happening back then. But the conversation that would unfold about policing when someone was killed, whether it was someone like Mike Brown, Walter Scott, who was killed, you know, not far from where I lived in South Carolina at the time, or any of the many, many names we've heard now, it would be about the specific dynamics of the interaction. Did the officer fear for his life or not?

5:10Did this person, were they racist? You know, all these kinds of things. And what bothered me about that was that those conversations blocked out these broader questions about really the main question, which is what causes harm in our society, actually, right? Why is policing the solution? Why is an armed person with a gun the solution to so many social problems? Right. So when I heard the defund thing, suddenly we were in a different conversation. Now we were asking bigger questions, like budget questions.

5:41Why is it so much money going into policing? So I just want to say, I liked the fact that we were talking about funding, because to me, talking about funding is a conversation about what works. And that's very practical. That's something everyone cares about, right? So what was interesting and kind of unfortunate about defund in a way is that to this day, we're now talking about a slogan, right? It's almost like everybody wants us focused on like a bumper sticker as opposed to what people are actually living through and what actually works when it comes to investments in safety, right, and well-being.

6:17Like, you know, defund kind of fused the accountability question, which is tense for folks, into this other question, which is really just a data question. And what I've seen, by the way, in all the polling is that, you know, people may not like a particular slogan. Maybe they don't like defund, right? There's polling that shows that. By and large, the polls are consistently showing that people don't like defunding the police as an abstract concept. As an abstract concept. But I would argue that in some ways, the brief impact of the discussion around defund that just kind of started to bubble before it got shut down

6:53was that it limited the increases, right, in certain cities. It didn't stop increases. And it definitely wasn't like police were all of a sudden didn't have any money. But that was the picture that people who didn't like defund painted. They sort of immediately took these images of people in the streets demanding accountability for these egregious killings and murders. And they were like, these people are going to just completely wipe out your police department. So you were given the imagination of, like, going from whatever you have now to nothing.

7:24That's how people understood defund. Right. I mean, these days, though, even committed lefties, right, who have been critical of policing, who have been supporters of defunding the police, right, AOC. What are you willing to sacrifice to make sure that overfunded police departments are defunded? And Zoran Mamdani have come to the top of mind, right? They've backed away from defund, from that slogan. Are politicians, as you said, are they walking away from actually defunding the police? Or are they walking away from the slogan and the branding?

7:57I mean, look, let me just say this. Political candidates are in a vulnerable position when it comes to this. And I understand why a lot of them are trying to figure out the right messaging. Because policing is a thing that people have very strong feelings about. So if you're a candidate, let's just say they might have reasons to want to back away from what they think people are scared of. And then if you're the mayor or a city or you're like a functioning incumbent politician, police unions, police are a very strong political bloc.

8:27They're like a political force in cities unto themselves, right? Unto themselves. So I understand why someone like Zoran Mamdani is like, I don't want to have an antagonistic relationship with my police force. Not just the fact that they can cause all these problems for him, but also the fact that he's trying to roll out these other programs which are unprecedented and would really actually address, I think, the roots of so much harm. He's talking about addressing, you know, universal child care that is being rolled out. He's talking about housing issues, certain changes he's trying to make in the educational realm.

9:00Like, these are things that when you look at the data of what actually leads in the long run to crime and to harm, it's those bigger things. It's nothing to do really with policing. So Zoran, I think his large program is to address some of those things and not to get into a tangle with the police. So in that way, he's kind of like trying to maneuver around this enormous political force that the NYPD has. But the problem is that Zoran has a police commissioner who really doesn't seem aligned on his agenda. It's continuing many of the worst practices that the NYPD has engaged in and even including things that Zoran on his campaign trail said he would eliminate.

9:39Like, the strategic response group, which is this unit that the NYPD uses, they sort of staff it with police who have problems in other areas and then send them out to police protests. And almost inevitably, they generate violent issues, lawsuits, which are very costly, but more importantly, harm to people. And these, like, documented issues, this is what led someone like Zoran to say, you know what, we need to disband this unit. Like, that's low-hanging fruit here. That's not even really that controversial. But now, the strategic response unit is not disbanded, right? So, the problem is that he's trying to avoid this conversation, but in fact, I think it's something that he can't avoid.

10:15But the larger point that I want to make is that candidates have a reason to avoid this because, you know, in these very close races, they're scared of what people might fear around police. And political incumbents kind of do have to work with police.

Budgets and the post-2020 crime drop

10:28So, you're saying that, one, we never really defunded the police in a literal sense. Like, people, the police departments were not seeing their budgets cut. What we saw was just some limits put on how much those budgets were increasing and that the stuff that may have actually driven down crime was actually stuff that was kind of defund adjacent, right? Was, like, eviction moratoriums and things like that and all these other sort of programs meant to ameliorate the effects of unemployment and poverty.

10:58Is that what you're saying? Absolutely. Like, what we basically saw was a spike in harm and crime in 2020 and 2021. And then, especially starting in 2023, this dramatic drop, right? And, you know, some people are telling you a very simple story about that. What they're saying is that during COVID, there was a retreat in policing, maybe even partially in response to the protests of 2020. Police were just, like, standing down because they're like, oh, well, y'all criticizing us then. Right. They're standing down. Let's see what it looks like when we don't work. Yeah, exactly.

11:29And so then once police kind of got back into the game, into the job, now all of a sudden you're seeing crime drops. So they're taking credit, right, for that crime drop. And there's a Brookings report that talks about this, right? They looked at thousands of police records, right? And they basically say that cities with large numbers of young men that were forced out of work and pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods. It was things like that that actually had more of a contribution to the rising certain kinds of violent crime. I mean, the common story, though, is that defund failed, right?

12:02But you're saying that that didn't actually happen, right? What happened was what worked is keeping police budgets kind of, if not flat, then keeping them from exploding, adding things like non-police responders. But isn't this the kind of stuff that moderates wanted, right? This is the kind of stuff that they were proposing back in 2020. And they were getting sought out for it, for being, like, too reformist and not too radical. No, absolutely. I mean, that absolutely is the story that gets told, is that defund failed and people don't look at what actually occurred, right?

12:33I mean, I think there's different categories of things that contributed to the drop in crime. And one of the big categories is things that didn't have anything to do with policing, right? It had to do with things like, for example, the American Rescue Plan, which put a huge amount of money into local governments to address those conditions. And so that is not totally different than what defund is calling for. I mean, defund isn't necessarily just saying put a whole lot of money into city government, but it is saying that the presence of social services is maybe something you want to think about investing in more than just more policing, more surveillance technology, etc.

13:13But, you know, people have these fears about, well, how do you respond to emergencies, right? Like, this was one of the big fears that gets activated with defund. Right, exactly. Like, what do you do if you can't call the cops? People feel like they have no options to turn to. Right. But you have to remember that there's so many studies that show that less than 3% to 4% of the calls that police get sent to actually even involve violent crime. And then when police go to violent crime, the question you have to ask is, why are they the best equipped? Are they the best equipped to deal with whatever these situations are?

13:46You know, and when you look at places like Baltimore, when you look at places like Chicago and look at the kinds of programs that people are implementing, you see the way people are responding to emergencies. But you also see this other layer, which is just the ways that cities are trying to make themselves more resilient, stronger places that prevent the kind of things that cause people to turn to violence for solutions as a solution. So, it sounds like what you're saying is that defunding the police as a slogan is radioactive. People don't want to touch it.

14:17But the actual policies that are kind of like in this big umbrella that is defunding the police, a lot of them were put into place and a lot of them actually worked. So, like, did we maybe actually defund the police after all? I mean, it's, yeah, it's interesting when you put it like that. I mean, I think that basically we're seeing efforts that show that if we changed how we fund people's well-being and public safety, that actually works. And it's weird that that is happening at the same time that, like, the phrase defund has become, like, so toxic no one wants to touch it at all.

14:51So, I mean, I guess I'm hesitant to say that we are defunding these things because I think there's a lot more that needs to be happening. I mean, police budgets are rising. If you look at, you know, in D.C., the proposal for a $27.7 million increase, most of this going, by the way, to overtime, you know? Part of the problem with overtime is there's a lot of research that shows that when police are on overtime for a long time, the chance of them to having a use of force goes up. I mean, think about it, you know what I mean? Think about you and I, when I'm at work, I don't know about you, but after a certain amount of time at work, I'm incoherent.

15:24I can't even type straight. You know, you dare sure wouldn't want to put me out there with a gun. You know what I mean? So, like, put the money aside. Is that actually smart? Is better policing happening there? No, it's not. You know, and that's just D.C. You tell me what city you want to talk about. Phoenix, $46 million increase on the table. San Diego, $30 million increase. I mean, it's like, if you painted these numbers to people and said, look, are you down with your tax dollars, with everything else that's going on, going to a $30 million increase in police that's mostly going to give them more money and more overtime?

15:56The polling shows that's not very popular. So, I wonder, when I see some of these candidates who are so scared to touch this, why they aren't grounding it in that conversation? Because, to me, that conversation can be a unifier. But it's part of what has gotten a lot of cities into needing more overtime. The fact that, as we know, like, it's hard to recruit cops. More police officers are retiring. Police departments can't replace them. So, we're asking fewer cops to do more of the things that we ask cops to do, and part of this conversation is about maybe we ask cops to do too much in the first place.

16:29But isn't that part of what's happening with these giant spikes in overtime is that there are fewer police officers out there to begin with, and the portfolio of a cop is just so vast, right? They're responding to mental health emergencies. They're responding to noise complaints. They're responding to all these things. Like you said, very few of these things are actually violent crime, but they're responding to all those things, because that is sort of the tool that municipal governments have to deal with adjudicating regular everyday disputes and problems. Yeah, well, we have a philosophy where you want to deal with everything downstream now.

17:01You know, it's funny. I remember there was a police chief in Dallas, and he was, like, complaining. He was like, you know, people want police to do everything. They want us to do this, do that. Not enough mental health funding. Let the cop handle it. Not enough drug addiction funding. Let's give it to the cops. Here in Dallas, we got a loose dog problem. Let's have the cops chase loose dogs. That's too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems. I said to myself, wow, he's making the same argument that defund people are making.

17:35But, right, like, that's what we say. We're like, yeah, no, we don't want you to do all that. We would like you to do less than that, and we would like to put some of those areas in the hands of agencies that had the expertise. And capacities to actually deal with them. So, but just a pushback here, right? We talked about Baltimore, right? Which saw this big drop in homicides. But it didn't actually defund its police department. Like, a lot of these non-responder programs that popped up were not funded with money that would have been otherwise allocated to the cops. It's not police funds that got moved around. They were funded through things like one-time federal COVID grants.

18:09So, can we even use the way those programs worked as a data point for defunding? I hear what you're saying. What you're saying is it's not like someone looked at the budget, took money away from policing, and then put it into these programs, right? To me, what those numbers show is an investment that worked. That funding came externally to the municipal budget. But maybe that points to what needs to happen in the municipal budget next time. The American Rescue Plan funds for that, they drop in a few months, though.

18:41So, like, what happens when that money's all gone? What do you think happens then? Well, I mean, along with the fact that you got Medicaid being cut and a whole bunch of other social supports that people need to sustain their lives, to prevent themselves from falling into various kinds of crisis, you're going to see that escalate. I mean, there's a lot of people in the policy realm who were arguing that, you know, the kind of thing you saw with the American Rescue Plan should have been made permanent. Like, we should figure out ways to extend what was happening.

19:12But, of course, that's, you know, we're under a different kind of governance priority now. But I think that, like, it's important to sort of recognize that that's what's going on. And, you know, what I worry about is that the trend in the way that I see people talking about policing and being scared to even ask these questions, right? Like, again, people don't like the phrase defund. There's a lot of polling. Fine. But the way we've been talking about policing is kind of completely wrong because there's still a lot in this funding conversation that's very unifying, that polls very popular.

19:42Just not the phrase or slogan, defund.

19:47So if politicians won't touch the slogan, defund the police, what do we do with defund? You can always change the name, the bumper sticker, the slogan. We should still keep talking about funding. That's coming up. Stay with us, y'all.

Organizing safety beyond the slogan

20:07Gene, just Gene this week, code switch. I've been talking to Chenjirai Kumanika, who's a longtime friend of the show. He made Empire City, a podcast series about the history of the NYPD. And he's a contributor to Hammer and Hope, a black politics and culture magazine. And just before the break, Chenj was making the case that a lot of what fell under the defund umbrella actually works and has been working. But it's a slogan, defund the police, that nobody really wants. So I asked him, who's actually still claiming it then?

20:40And it turns out some organizers had already moved on from it way back in 2020, including this group that Chenj worked with in Philly. Look, I was part of a group in Philadelphia that was trying to address some of the problems with the Philadelphia police and issues of police accountability around 2020. And, you know, they put out a survey that was called the Safety We Can Feel Survey. And they just asked people, like, all these questions about policing. And people were like, yeah, we're all about moving resources, funding, you know, violence prevention programs, job programs, all these, you know, moving the budget around to prioritize things on the prevention side more so than on the punitive side.

21:18Right. But we also felt like people wanted a positive vision. Right. Like defund is like taking funding away. And then the sort of opponents of criminal justice reform were like, you're going to take all the police away because you're actually saying don't increase the budget so much. Right. I mean, I hate this. It feels bad. I don't want to. That's kind of what we were saying, like, don't increase the budget so much. Is that like it feels like a really radical demand. But the people who were against that were like, you know, defund means no funds, no police, nothing.

21:50You know, they scared you. So we actually had arrived at that in 2020. And you could go online and look at the Safety We Can Feel survey. So I think there's a lot of groups on the ground who had already, in a way, turned away from defund as this big slogan. Are you saying that defund one was crazy? Is that what you're saying?

22:10No way. What I'm saying, right. I mean, what I'm saying is that defund actually made me, as an activist, attend to budgets. You know, like, I was like that. Look, I was much more of a bullhorn guy. You know what I mean? Like, put me on the bullhorn. And I'm speaking for myself. There's lots of activists who were like, I was talking about budgets. But it made me kind of say, oh, no, okay, we actually have to dig into the budget. That's a part of the work you have to do. You've got to look at the budget. How is the money being spent? And you actually have to forge a different vision of how you want the budget to work.

22:44It helped me to understand governance. And so in a weird way, defund made me, like, more of a civic participant. You can always change the name, the bumper sticker, the slogan. That's not important. That's what I think the opponents of criminal justice reform want us to focus on. But I would say this. What we should do, we should still keep talking about funding. You can call it whatever you want, but when you see that there's a $33 million increase proposed for the budget and it's going to go to police overtime and a bunch of surveillance technology, you should ask about whose priority that is.

23:16Whatever you want to call that is fine, but that's what I want people to keep asking. And what's fascinating to me, though, Change, like, about what we're talking about is that, like, we know, like, Black folks in particular have a really long, complicated history. I'm using, that's a euphemism, right? With policing in the United States, right? That's what your series, Empire City, was partly about, like, how policing came to be and how it was about social control of Black folks. You know, you got to see this Gallup poll show that 9 in 10 Black folks believe that policing needs major changes.

23:49If you're in your neighborhood, right, in a Black neighborhood, nobody's going to bat their eye. If you complain about the cops and you hear people say stuff like, we got money for cops, we don't have money for our schools all the time, right? So you would think that Black folks especially might be in favor of defunding the police, but we know that's, like, not the case at all.

Black communities and public safety

24:06So, like, why do you think Black folks, who might be the most amenable to an argument about reigning in the cops, like, why do you think organizers have not been able to bridge that gap? Um, I would push back on the fact that I think organizers haven't been able to bridge that gap. I would say, if you look at the polling on who's willing to think about police accountability in a critical way, Black people poll way higher than everybody else on those numbers. You know, Black folks get used, first of all, in a monolithic way. We're not allowed to have a diversity of opinion on this that everybody else has, right?

24:39And it's like, they'll find a slice of Black people who have said, hey, we're not sure about defund, and they'll turn that into Black people love police. Or, I would say this, too, like, if you're living in a situation, right, where you are feeling intra-community harm, like, the people who are living through that, they're going to turn to whatever. Like, if they think policing is a solution, they'll be like, yes, but that doesn't mean that that's the end of the vision, that you can't come to them and say, hey, wait a minute, let's have a longer-term conversation about what actually will fix this.

25:12And so, when they feel like they've been abandoned and neglected, and they're panicked, and then you say, hey, do you want more policing? They're like, yeah, what we want is an end to violence and harm. So, like, you are, you know, not to turn this back to electoral politics, but you are in organizer spaces, right? Like, among people who identify as abolitionists, how are they feeling in this moment, right? Because I imagine they have to feel very differently in 2026, in these midterm elections, than they did about the sort of universe of possibility that they might have felt in 2020.

25:47Man, you want to talk about it. All right, so I think, like, a lot of people turn to abolition because it was the richest body of research on what actually works. Like, if you look at criminal justice, it tends to be very focused on, like, immediate solutions. Whether we can, like, increase sentences or more cops to arrest people. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of assumptions that we're going to stay within this particular realm of policies that we've lived with that feel like common sense because they've been around for a long time.

26:19But what they're not necessarily asking is a very simple question. I learned this question from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which is, what causes people to turn to violence to solve problems, right? And then what needs to be present in a community to prevent that? It's like, you know, the richest body of work asking those questions comes from abolitionist writings. And abolitionists now are like, they feel like all that's been collapsed into this fear-based, knee-jerk rejection of defund, right? Like, even the idea that defund and abolition are the same thing.

26:52Like, defund is a very specific lens to ask a set of questions about how you're investing your money in a city budget. That's what defund is. But abolition is a way bigger conversation about the roots of harm, why people make these choices, and what needs to be present to sort of figure out a better way. Who doesn't want to have a conversation about how we actually heal some of these harms that are happening in our communities? But it does force you to engage now, on the other side, with what was the purpose of these institutions that got created?

27:28Why did police get created in the first place? You know, like, was the answer like, I want to keep Black folks safe? No. Was it even like, I want to keep the majority of white people safe? Was that the answer? I mean, you can look it up. But, you know, to me, the abolition question does force you to ask those questions. And that's the part I think people may not like, because maybe they feel like it doesn't resonate with how they want to think about what they call law enforcement as, like, this sort of heroic force for good. For sure. On one hand, I feel like there's probably more, like, in terms of raw numbers, probably more abolitionists now than there were before 2020, because more people were exposed to abolition.

28:09Or even just, like, defund arguments, right? Right. But also, it feels like the mainstream political viability of that, the aperture is much smaller than it might have been in 2022. Yeah. I don't know if the political possibility is actually limited.

ICE and surveillance technologies

28:23Huh.

ICE and surveillance technologies

28:24The reason why I'll say that is partially because of ICE. Right? I mean, ICE is unpopular as an institution. It might be popular as an employment program. Right. But it's not as popular as an institution, and that's because, obviously, if you send all these federal agents into people's neighborhoods where maybe they didn't even have a lot of regular police, and now there's these masked agents coming in, taking their neighbors, shooting their neighbors, you know, trying to enter their properties without any kind of warrant, and then being defended, like, that's not popular.

28:54You know, and I think that the resistance that you've seen to ICE, which has been pretty, you know, significant, is an example of people understand that ICE are a kind of police. And I think the other thing that people are starting to see is the ways in which those things are working together. Like, you know, like, one thing that you might have thought you would have seen is at the point when ICE started to just come into communities, if the police are there in communities, you know, to keep the community safe, which is what they say, we have all these documented incidents where ICE are coming in and arresting people without really warrants and all these other things, why did the police not emerge as a force to protect their communities?

29:32You know, like, they're there. They know it's wrong. You know what I mean? They know it's not legal, but why are they not doing that? And there's all kinds of things built in. I think it's an ethical question in terms of their choices, but it's also a structural question. Like, there's things in place that maybe some of them can't do that legally and still hold their jobs. So people see that. People know the police were not there to protect them when ICE was shooting people in their communities and detaining people. And that when you show up to protest, sometimes the ICE and the police are there together. So I think that that's on display for people right now.

30:04Another thing that's really unpopular right now is surveillance technologies and architectures like Flock and some of these other technologies. We just did an episode about this, yeah. Yeah, and I think that, like, you're seeing resistance. I mean, I'm just telling you what I'm seeing resistance against. People that don't like this, people across the political spectrum don't like it. It's not just lefties. Brian DeSantis wants Flock cameras out of Florida, right? Yeah, people understand that their surveillance is a policing technology. So if ICE is unpopular, if the fact that the police can't protect people from ICE is unpopular, if all of these surveillance technologies that are going right to the police where they're taking all your data and also, like, arresting people based on, you know, bad AI, whatever, like, if all that is unpopular, you can't tell me that the public isn't open to a more complicated conversation.

30:53The people who aren't open to it, I think, maybe are like politicians in the Democratic establishment who have certain kinds of donors and maybe some, you know, more emerging politicians who are a little scared of these issues or maybe don't have good advice that they're getting from their consultants on what's actually going on that they should be structuring their messaging around. That's who I think is not ready for the conversation. I wouldn't put this on the public. I wouldn't put it on the Black community. Look, man, I'm sorry. I believe in American people. If you put real facts and information in front of them and are willing to engage into relationships with people, people rise up against BS.

31:29I don't want to get too Pollyannish about it, but I am saying that, like, you see it. You know, Hammer and Hope did a report on ICE, right? We sent Ashley Gilbertson to go report on ICE in different cities, three different cities. And when Ashley came back, said one of the most fascinating thing was not to watch the usual police protesters, but to watch regular suburban moms come out and take on federal agents because they were taking their neighbors. He said that was the most surprising thing. So let's just be clear.

31:59Like, the history of what has happened with the Democratic Party is a history of a party not listening to its base. Because we're talking about police, but the most—I mean, we're way off topic now. But in a way, we're not, because if we're talking about well-being and safety, the thing we should be talking about is health care. So to me, like, it's not that the American public is not ready for a conversation about health care as another example. It's that, you know, politicians won't really respond to what all the data says people want. Like, why are we still in a debate at this phase in the game about Medicare for All, you know, about things like paid family leave?

32:35Who doesn't want that? These are enormously popular. They poll really, really, really well. They poll really well. And they also, by the way, like, the lack of those things become problems that policing is later sent to solve.

32:49Chen Jirai Komunika is a professor of journalism at NYU. He's the host of the Unreleased Subjects podcast. He was the host of the Empire City podcast and is on the editorial board of Hammer and Hope. Thank you, Chen. Appreciate you. Oh, thank y'all. It's very refreshing to have at least this kind of conversation as opposed to the usual. So thank you. And y'all, that is our show. Just a reminder, though, that joining NPR Plus is a great way to support our show and public media. We really need your help right now.

33:19You can listen to every episode sponsored free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org. This episode you're listening to was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Courtney Stein. And our engineer was Kweisi Lee. And we'd be remiss if we did not shut out the rest of the Code Switch Massive, right? That's Christina Kala and Xavier Lopez and Jasmine Romero and Leah Dinella and Dalia Mortada and Barton Girdwood and Yolanda Sanguene and Meyer Dangerfield and B.A. Parker. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all.