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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
The PC gave us computing power at.
- [00:02]
Manveer Singh
Home, the Internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere.
- [00:06]
Mike Pesca
Now generative AI lets us communicate with.
- [00:08]
Manveer Singh
Technology in our own language, using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift, a new podcast from Microsoft Azure. I'm your host Susan Ettlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all.
- [00:25]
Mike Pesca
This change with confidence. Please join us, listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:32]
Manveer Singh
This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. From streaming to shopping, prime helps you get more out of your passions. So whether you're a fan of true crime or prefer a nail biting novel from time to time, with services like Prime Video, Amazon Music, and fast free delivery, prime makes it easy to get.
- [00:50]
Mike Pesca
More out of whatever you're into or getting into.
- [00:53]
Manveer Singh
Visit Amazon.com/prime to learn more. This weekend I'll be in Seattle and if you will too, I invite you to the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival. More info and tickets at cascade pbs.org/festival I'll be interviewing Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson for their book Original Sin. The festival doors open at 10. This event with the gist is Saturday at 2:45. Other speakers in the festival overall Al Franken, Jeff Flake, Rick Steves, Amanda Knox and other podcasts beside the gist, Criminal Radio Lab, the Journal, I told you. Lots of ideas and again, Cascade PBS.org Festival it's Tuesday, May 27, 2025. From peach fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. The US Mint has placed its last order for pen, meaning once they run out, no more pennies. Now, change is hard, but this form of change will be easy to move away from. Pennies are but a step above detritus, better than lint, but not by much. The move will save $56 million a year, which on the federal level does not sound like much. But what if I said it will save 5.6 billion pennies? I don't know if it sounds like much, sounds like a hassle rolling all those pennies now. For years I advocated for change, not this change. I advocated against this particular form of change because I have no upon reflection, I have no real causes. I have no specific tangible asks of the government. I have some principles, some abstract asks. I want the government to be just to be efficient, to be a good steward of of the economy and of my taxes. I go B minus DC plus on those. But I didn't ask for any program. I didn't ask for student loan forgiveness. Should they forgive the loan? Lots of tradeoffs, right? Not terribly fair. I didn't ask for legalizing pot. Not that I was against it. I thought it all depends on how you legalized it, not the way New York City did it. I didn't ask for funding for this. I didn't ask for defunding of that. Well, in a way, I asked for one form of defunding, to defund the smallest of funds, the penny. It didn't make sense. It was time for someone to say it. That someone was me. I said it over the years to senators, to governors, to presidential candidates. If you heard those interviews on the show, I played an amalgam of them, a montage recently. The answers generally ranged from somewhat interested to amusement to be amusement. But no one ever did anything. I was anti penny and they thought my issue was penny ante. And then came Donald J. Trump, and he rightly noted that pennies cost three or four pennies to create. So he scrapped them. And now I feel nothing. I mean, this should be the one zinc lining to all of Trump's excesses and chicanery and poor policy decisions, but it is so not worth it. I don't even experience it. And as a saving grace and there within that wave, I'm supposed to point to one droplet and say, ooh, that's a good one. It's as if a person were getting slammed by a monsoon and that person were to say, well, if we reduce this by 10,000 of the force, it would be a nice refreshing spritz. The person would not say that. I would not give a penny for those thoughts. And now all I feel is that I'm in for a penny, but also in for a pounding from the rest of Trumpism. On the show today, five years since George Floyd, where does policing stand? But first, Shamanism, the Timeless Religion is the new book by anthropologist Manveer Singh. He's an assistant professor at UC Davis. He returns to the gist to discuss his new work, in which he spent a decade of immersive field work with the Mentawi people of of Indonesia. Singh gets into how shamanic practices serve both spiritual and social infrastructure. Healing, meditation, celebration, and this is my favorite part. I then press him on his field, overall anthropology, because I have to tell you, I'm not so hyped on sociology. I'm not particularly thrilled by most of the social sciences, but when it comes to anthropology in particular, oh, I don't always feel that I'm going to get the most rigorous and valid analysis. I will probably get some theory and some ideology. And Singh knows where I'm coming from and so we get from him answers and insights. It's all after this with Manveer Singh.
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Mike Pesca
Foreign.
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Manveer Singh
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- [09:55]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, thanks a lot for having me back, Mike.
- [09:57]
Manveer Singh
Tell me about this Indonesian community that you lived with, embedded with, only took a backpack with you to spend some time with.
- [10:07]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, so I first visited them. They're called the Mentawe. I first visited them in 2014 and I have been going back for a decade. So actually I was there this past summer and my assistant and very good friend Rustam, the first summer I went to, he had just had a newborn baby and now this kid is 10 years old, which is kind of mind boggling. But anyway, yeah, so I first had gone there to really investigate whether I could do anthropological fieldwork. So I was a new graduate student and I was interested in studying indigenous law and indigenous religion. And I had read about this island chain off the west coast of Sumatra where they had shamanism and they had local justice courts. And I went there and I discovered a world that has really redirected my life and my interests. That first summer was a struggle as I talk about in the book I got there, I had planned on staying with a community for that summer, becoming ensconced, learning the language and you know, five days in I was like this is impossible. I all of my belongings were covered with fungus. I was exhausted. I was alone. And I ended up convincing myself that a project there was impossible. And I left. But anyway, I changed my mind soon afterwards, and I went back. And while I've been revisiting and spending time with that community and learning the language, the thing that I have consistently been the most fascinated by and spent most of my time investigating has been shamanism. And this institution that turned out to be so important there, I later discovered, has been important in societies around the world and. And still echoes in our. In our own context. So it was those experiences that eventually concluded with this book.
- [12:06]
Manveer Singh
One of your most recent articles in the New Yorker was asking, how much sway does our language have over our thinking? So, well, tell me about language acquisition. Why do you think you'd be good at it? And as you've gone for 10 years, how your understanding of the language opened up your understanding of the culture. And maybe you look back in year 10 saying, I wasn't really understanding anything. In years two through four, your first.
- [12:30]
Mike Pesca
Question was like, did I think I would be good at it? And I don't. I don't know if I had a great sense of how good I would be. And I honestly, that first year and much of the second year kept feeling like this was impossible. Like I'm just being confronted with a wall of uninterpretable. Yeah, language. And. And it. It really felt very daunting. But, you know, I. I'm very interested in culture and religion and law, how people are understanding their spiritual world and their political world. And so if at ever I wanted to make progress in that and have any kind of important insight, I knew I had to learn the language. And so I really prioritized it. Learning the language has been very eye opening. And it has definitely been the case that what I thought was going on in the beginning has totally been transformed in a number of ways. So one, very trivially, if you go back and you look at my first summer, I was keeping a dictionary where I'm literally learning words from children. Like, children would point to something. And it's. I mean, I have a daughter right now, and she's learning language. And it's an interesting parallel where, you know, I would maybe think something meant delicious when it actually meant like give me water or okay, you know, at.
- [13:41]
Manveer Singh
Least it wasn't poisonous.
- [13:43]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah. But another really important aspect of how to learn language and how to learn communication is just like becoming accustomed to an entirely different set of norms. And so there were things in the beginning. So the Mentality are very touchy, and they're very crass. They talk a lot about each other's genitals, literally.
- [14:01]
Manveer Singh
Not sensitive, but they'll squeeze your biceps, for instance.
- [14:04]
Mike Pesca
Yes, exactly. Yeah, they'll squeeze my biceps. They'll massage my arm while I'm sitting there. They'll talk about my penis pretty openly. And so, honestly, in the beginning, there were several times where I thought people were coming on to me and I didn't really know. You know, I'm still also figuring out, like, the sexual norms. And then later, I just realized, okay, no, this is just open and physical and intimate in a way that I was just not ready for or just did not.
- [14:33]
Manveer Singh
But that one great shaman you talk about, he just has a penchant for penis jokes. I mean, which. Which occurs in Western society too, right?
- [14:40]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah.
- [14:41]
Manveer Singh
There's a continuum of people who like penis jokes.
- [14:43]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, there definitely is. There definitely. Yeah. My main friend and assistant Rustam, makes very, very few penis jokes. But there are. There are some who.
- [14:50]
Manveer Singh
There you go.
- [14:51]
Mike Pesca
Really enjoy it. So over the course of the last 10 years, one way I've. I've learned more about what they're meaning to communicate, has just been learning the norms. But there is also definitely a way in which learning the language gives you insight into kind of how they see the world. And so one example is the word sky. The word sky is manua. But then you start to realize that the. The concept of sky and kind of the spirits related to the sky suffuses a lot of how they. How they think about the world. So the word for life is purimanua ayjjat. The word for a dead person is rusa, manua, skywind. You know, there are many ways to talk about dead people, but one of them is skywind. So that's. That's one way, kind of seeing how these concepts metaphorically work in different contexts. Another way that I've really come to appreciate their cultural world by learning the language has just been how much they use metaphor in everyday speech. And so one example is I was sitting at a mediation. So someone had accidentally killed someone else's cow. It was the only cow in a very large distance. It was a huge event. But during the mediation, the mediator talked about talking drums. So in Mentawe, if someone dies or if you find an animal, you beat out a rhythm on a. On a drum that has three tones, like. And that can mean, like, I have a male or, you know, an elderly woman died. It depends on the context. But he said Something like, as we're talking, let's. Let's use the talking drum as an example. When you want to communicate with the talking drum, you cannot only hit one drum. You need to hit several drums. That's the only way you can send a message. In the same way, during this mediation, let's have everyone speak. Not a single person hitting one note. And. And I found that a really striking moment. And. And it was, it was also, I think my language was improving because it. It gave me a better appreciation a. For just like how interesting and rich communication is, but also the ways in which different aspects of their life are understood in. In relation to each other in a way that's very different. You know, if I'm talking about the best way to mediate, I would never think about the tones of an instrument.
- [17:11]
Manveer Singh
Right, right, right.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. Which is only to say, I think the learning the language has really given me insight into a world that. That I otherwise would not have. And I'm incredibly glad that I did that.
- [17:23]
Manveer Singh
Yeah. So there are analogs to a mediation. And the way a mediator, say, in a Western context would talk to the people that the mediator was dealing with might involve direct instruction about literally the tone to use. Right. And that's not so far off like, well, you were using it to mean let us hear voices. But things about tone and things about how to strike the right note. These are words and phrases and metaphors for a reason. Just an observation.
- [17:52]
Mike Pesca
So your point actually just reminds me of one other thing where I think that first summer I appreciated both how different they were, but also how incredibly familiar the social world was. And in many ways the world was more familiar than I had expected. And. And that's one example. But yeah, I. I don't want to overstate difference at the same time, because they are.
- [18:11]
Manveer Singh
That is a through line, through the book about shamanism that you're literally living with and investigating shamans. But you're also seeing how much of an analogy, or not even an analogy, like working in the same way the shamanism, the ideas work in Western society with hedge fund managers or CEOs. But I do want to ask a question or two more about the mentality themselves. How important is shamanism in their life? And do they use it. Is it the thing they first grasp for in lieu of medicine, healing medicine, you know, Western, Western medicine? That's my question.
- [18:44]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So it's incredibly important in their life. I mean, so it's. It's very important for healing. I mean, it's. It's really the central institution in healing. But it. Shamans are also very important as mediators, as kind of spiritual intermediaries. So if you are inaugurating a new house, you might invite in shamans and they'll have a ceremony to essentially acquaint all of the materials of the house with each other in terms of where shamanism exists in relation to Western medicine. So I think that's incredibly variable and it depends on the village. And it's, it's changing so much that I'm. I'm pretty cautious. I think about saying one thing. I will say, so the data that I've collected shows that of the people who go to Shaman ceremonies, 50% also go to the local village health post. A similar number are seeking out herbal remedies on their own. So it's a very kind of like, people are trying lots of things at the same time after illness. But I think the shaman institution or shamanism is very important. I will say something that people have said for discouraging them from using shamans increasingly is how expensive shamans are compared to getting medicine at the village health post. At the same time, they think that medicine at the village health post is far less effective. And so that continues them going to these shamans.
- [20:07]
Manveer Singh
Is there a shaman hmo?
- [20:09]
Mike Pesca
Is there, Is there a shaman hmo? That's an interesting question. I mean, your family is kind of like your hmo. And so far as, like, insurance and risk are distributed through a social network. So when I am calling a shaman, I'm calling on a network to help me kill pigs, you know.
- [20:27]
Manveer Singh
But also. So when you say expensive, the listener might be thinking, oh, in terms of something other than money. And that's true, they require tribute and time and attention and all this, but they also do require money in the. At least the community that you lived in.
- [20:43]
Mike Pesca
Well, so primarily the cost is in sacrificing animals. So I mean, they. If you are someone who doesn't have pigs, you'll have to buy a pig, but they get the main cost. The thing that makes a shaman ceremony so expensive is that if you want a very good treatment, then you have to be sacrificing pigs.
- [21:04]
Manveer Singh
Yeah, yeah. And so I think a Westerner would say, okay, so this explains some of what's going on. Once you make that sacrifice, you have so much riding on the outcome and there is, you know, high suggestibility and the variation, I was going to say on the placebo effect. Right, yeah, but that's not exactly it. I mean, that's not what I'm Gleaning from your book is precisely explains it all.
- [21:29]
Mike Pesca
No, no. Well, I mean, I think so. I'll say when I went there and was thinking about shamanism, I think the first analogy I was thinking about was doctors, and I was thinking about a shamanic healing ceremony as roughly analogous to you going to a doctor after attending a bunch of those healing ceremonies. One thing I'll say is that they feel much more like parties than they do. Like, I mean, so there is a good amount of treatment. But, you know, I'll give you an example. You call a shaman or a bunch of shamans, over the course of the day, they might do some. Some treatments. You might kill some chickens, and then you might sacrifice a pig. You'll invite a lot of family over. The shamans will dance for a long time. They'll enter trance. They will heal you, but at some point they will leave the dance floor. Then your family will get up and start dancing. And then this is no longer for healing you. This is just like, this is a great time. People are drinking coffee, trying to stay up all night. It's an interesting thing because it's. I mean, there are many lessons I've taken from studying shamanism, but one of them is that there are many paradigms for how to heal people. And the degree to which we treat healing as something that is solemn versus celebratory is something that I've noticed is very different in at least this context.
- [22:46]
Manveer Singh
Very interesting. So in an analogy to language acquisition, while one learns a language first, they're essentially translating it to the language they're most comfortable in. And then eventually you start thinking in that language, and it's not a method of translation. You're a trained anthropologist or a young anthropologist at this point. And, you know, not to analogize everything to your experience in the west, but there's still some of that that has to go on. And plus, you're writing to an audience that is not on an island in Indonesia, but, you know, back in. In the west or in the. The academy. So what about that Did. Over time, you begin to see what was going on as lesson and less of an analogy to things that went on in America or in, you know, the exalted places of academia.
- [23:39]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So I think. I think I started thinking about the analogies differently. So I think in the beginning I was like, what kinds of figures are shamans like? Are they like doctors? Should I think about shamanism as a kind of guild? But then with time, I think it became more about, like, what are the dynamics and processes at play and what are the analogies? So just one example is I've thought about, read about, researched a bunch about the initiatory transformation that a shaman undergoes. So in many contexts, to become a shaman you have to go undergo dramatic initiations. You have to often undergo some kind of transformation. So in mental, a big part of the transformation is treating your eyes so that you have new eyes. And something that helped me think about that and has helped me really communicate that is superhero narratives. Where these superhero narratives hinge on an origin myth where a regular person undergoes some fundamental transformation, they come out fundamentally different and changed. And that fundamental transformation is linked to the fact that they have powers normal humans do not. And I think the same dynamic, that of a fundamental essential transformation to make more tenable, this understanding of special powers is at play in shamanism. So that's just. I mean, there are many other of these kinds of examples or analogies that, that I've been thinking about. But I think a major lesson has been less to kind of look for explicit one to one analogies and more to think about shamanism as kind of at the nexus of a lot of psychology and social dynamics that are also play around the world and in other contexts. If that's clear.
- [25:21]
Manveer Singh
The last question I have or the last statement question, I've become really down on anthropology lately. I think there are a few social sciences that just don't have rigor in their statistics. But I read your stuff. I don't mean justice statistics. I mean their worldview and how they do something. And the idea of the ethnography, if it's done in perfectly good faith, could maybe give us some information. But I've just read so many that it's like, all right, you talk to eight people and or 28 people and decided to tell us how the world works. Do you share any of these misgivings about the field of anthropology specifically?
- [25:56]
Mike Pesca
Well, so yeah, I don't know if you're okay. I have so many thoughts on this. Of course, the most, the first one is. I'm not sure how familiar you are with this, but anthropology has been undergoing a schism for decades. I did my PhD at Harvard. At Harvard, the anthropology department split into two departments, anthropology and human Evolutionary Biology. Here at Davis, the anthropology department has two wings, sociocultural and evolutionary. Many departments have split over essentially this question of is anthropology a science or is it a humanities? Is it something where quantitative approaches and cognitive science and evolutionary theory are useful? Or is it something where, you know, we should maybe take a more postmodern approach where we think that any attempt to produce generalizable knowledge is, is ultimately impossible. So I am a part of. I, I think that anthropology can be a science. I, I approach it to the, as a kind of social science, try to allow it to intersect with evolutionary theory, with cognitive science. But I will say among kind of evolutionarily oriented anthropologists, I probably, you know, I am, I still appreciate sociocultural anthropology to a great degree. I still appreciate participant observation, ethnography.
- [27:23]
Manveer Singh
Oh. Oh. So are you, which, which one are you? Which school? At Harvard.
- [27:27]
Mike Pesca
So at Harvard I was, I was in human evolutionary biology. Here at Davis, I'm in the evolutionary wing.
- [27:32]
Manveer Singh
Yeah, that's what I thought. But, but I'm saying. But you're doing, and you're doing a lot of.
- [27:37]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I'm often like the most or one of the most kind of. So anthropology right now has this or the evolutionary wing has these kinds of fieldwork and cultural oriented people. There are fields like cultural evolution associated famously with this figure, Joe Henrik. There's human behavioral ecology. There are like evolutionary psychologists who do field work. But so, yeah, yeah, I would say that anthropology is still trying to define itself. It's undergoing this, this epistemological tension. And I think I am one of the people who thinks that hopefully the future will involve a synthesis where we can really appreciate the power of quantitative methods, about generalizable knowledge about psychology and evolutionary theory, but also continue to really appreciate that putting yourself in a context, learning a lot about it, leads to a lot of insights, not only in your ability to collect a lot of data, but also to, to understand worldviews, to get out of your own worldview. Yeah.
- [28:40]
Manveer Singh
The name of the the book is Shamanism, the Timeless Religion. It's written by Manvir Singh. Thank you so much.
- [28:47]
Mike Pesca
Thanks a lot for having me, Mike. This was a lot of fun.
- [28:58]
Manveer Singh
This episode is brought to you by US Cellular. When it comes to your wireless, other prepaid providers lock you into plans with hidden penalties that hit when least expected. US Cellular prepaid offers a three day grace period if you need extra time to pay. With plans starting at $25 a month. Staying connected has never been better. No hidden fees or surprises. Just the coverage you need at the price you love. Plus you could get a free device like the Samsung Galaxy A16.5G. US Cellular Prepaid Terms apply. Visit uscellular.com for details. Ray Ban meta glasses are powered by Meta AI so you can get real time answers. Hey, Meta, how bougie is Jade Garden?
- [29:37]
Mike Pesca
It's a trendy spot. What's a color that pairs with this top?
- [29:40]
Manveer Singh
Consider dark, earthy colors, charcoal or black. What are some good first date topics? Consider discussing favorite travel destinations or your favorite books. Get suggestions, inspiration and answers from your glasses. Ray Ban Meta Glasses Iconic style meets Meta AI and now the Spiel the fifth anniversary of the killing the murder of George Floyd was on Saturday. We don't seem to have come very far in terms of police reform, but we have poll show reverted to our pre George Floyd opinions of policing. Gallup shows that black adults confidence in their local police force is up 6 percentage points since last year to 64%, which is an additional 3% rise from the year before that. Now white confidence in police is 77%, but the gap between black and white has been cut in half in the last couple of years. Nearly 2/3 of the black community is confident in police and the same percentage says that they're satisfied with policing. Which may seem odd since so little happened in terms of legislative reform from the protests during the summer of 2020. Some bills were passed, chokeholds were banned in many places. A total of four states did away with some or all of qualified immunity. Federally, no legislation was passed. The anniversary, as noted on the news, was mostly muted in their assessments of progress. Here was Shaq Brewster on NBC. Five years of police reform falling short of many demands, but back in the.
- [31:17]
Mike Pesca
Spotlight today and NBC, Shaq Brewster joins.
- [31:21]
Manveer Singh
Me now from Minneapolis. Obviously Shaq, you have done some exhaustive.
- [31:24]
Mike Pesca
Reporting on this topic and despite what.
- [31:26]
Manveer Singh
We just saw in your piece there, there are still a high number of officer involved killings and the political momentum for this reform appears to have shifted to some degree. What can you tell us about that? Yeah, that's a great point that you make.
- [31:38]
Mike Pesca
And that's because if you look at the number of people killed by police, it's higher in 2024 than it was even back in 2020. And yeah, the political momentum has not only shifted, it's almost completely flipped.
- [31:51]
Manveer Singh
It is true the Trump administration was uninterested in the reforms advocated in the wake of the Floyd murder. It's also true they eliminated the consent decrees that local police departments were operating under Louisville, Minneapolis. Further, the Trump administration eliminated a Biden era reporting requirement national law enforcement accountability database. So that means less information, more ignorance. That's never a good thing, especially because the more accurate information there is about the true state of policing, the better it compares to the narrative around policing, or at least the narrative that was in the air in 2020. In the days of Protests, what was called the reckoning. The image of George Floyd and others who were abused or killed by police were everywhere. It seemed that every time a black or brown person was killed by police, and there are a thousand Americans killed by police a year, it made news the day of or after the George Floyd verdict, one Ohio teen was shot by a police officer as she was about to plunge a knife into another girl. And that became a cause for a while. When inebriated homeless man, a Latino in California, was restrained face down. He died. That became a cause. All were portrayed as part of the narrative of police excess. When pollsters asked Americans to estimate how many unarmed black men are killed each year by police, the estimates were generally in the hundreds. If you are a self identified liberal or very liberal, the estimate was 100 or more. Very liberal. The average was almost a thousand. The true answer is that 12, 14, 18, sometimes in the low 20s. That's the number of unarmed black people killed by police every year. It should not be a surprise, but it is to many people that a powerful media narrative can overwhelm facts and statistics. Combined with passion and fear and the heartbreak of seeing something so horrific like what happened to George Floyd. Add in the sociological conditions of the pandemic, it is a recipe for for poor decision making. Now, in other contexts, this is not surprising that a media narrative can be very misleading. During the stranger danger panic of the 80s, high profile cases of abductions were ubiquitous and the fear of child abduction shot through the roof. But let's take something very close to the fear and narrative of police killing black people. And this is black people killing white citizens. For many years, for most of the history of media, especially local news and tabloid media, black faces were plastered all over the news and on local TV to give the impression that white people had much to fear from black assailants. And this happened even during periods of relative safety when crime was down. In 2020, it wasn't a racist narrative getting the public to fear black people. It was what was branded as anti racism to get people to feel the danger du jour, which was cops, cops against black people. Police killings of citizens have in fact been quite consistent over the decades. Since good statistics have been kept doesn't mean they've been consistently good, they've just been consistent. And if you delve through the narratives of what happened, as I have, and I've spent many, many hours, you could see why people or more 1300 some years are killed by police. It's because we're a country of washing guns and the cops are fearful. They're right to be fearful. That's why they killed over 10,000 people in the decade that the Washington Post tracked such killings. Of these 10,000, 4,666 were white, 2,492 were black. The general public was also, by the way, terrible at estimating the race of most victims. They thought more blacks were killed than whites. And they also thought that younger black people were much, much more likely to be killed by police than those over 40. And that's not the case either. But of course, they thought this. That was the narrative. Narratives, ubiquitous media narratives are powerful, especially during pandemics, especially when passion is on the line. And just like with Stranger Danger, it's not that police killing isn't a problem. It's not like there isn't an underlying problem. It's not like things don't need to be, they do. Like, for instance, maintaining that database that the Trump administration scrapped. Things can be improved. Techniques can be improved. More resources can be devoted to improving policing. It's just that during this time, perception veered wildly from the actual facts. And this is one reason why the solutions didn't work, per say. Here. Listen to this interview. This was from over the weekend, L A station, ktla. They were doing their what happened with policing five years hence? And the guest was USC law professor Jody Armour. What do you think? Has there been meaningful change to policing and civil rights protection since then? And what still needs to be done?
- [37:05]
Mike Pesca
Well, there's certainly been in some ways, some retrenchment at that time. You'll recall in November, after the George Floyd marches, the California voters went to the ballot box and voted in George Gascon as a new way of thinking about justice.
- [37:21]
Manveer Singh
Measure J, which is a new way, was dedicated up to a billion dollars.
- [37:25]
Mike Pesca
Of the county's funds to incarceration alternatives.
- [37:31]
Manveer Singh
And there was a real kind of.
- [37:34]
Mike Pesca
Moment when it seemed like we were.
- [37:36]
Manveer Singh
Kind of coming together on a new.
- [37:37]
Mike Pesca
Way of thinking about and reimagining justice.
- [37:40]
Manveer Singh
But you know, a lot of times.
- [37:42]
Mike Pesca
That that kind of politics of solidarity and compassion can give way to a politics of fear. And that politics of fear kind of.
- [37:49]
Manveer Singh
Took over between then and now. Ahmer is entitled to his political opinion, his preferred candidates, but to be held out as an expert, not a partizan, who cited the example of the defeat of George Gascon to illustrate the triumph of fear. His defeat meant fear. One that's pretty much backwards. So let me give all the caveats. The DA doesn't control the murder rate. He's affected by the murder rate. But he has some effect on the murder rate. And the national trends were certainly working against Gascon. The area was elected. 2020 saw an unprecedented rise in murder. There were 355 homicides in the city of Los Angeles. That number had been below 300 for a decade. Then during his first full year, 402 murders never dipped below the pre Gascon levels of 300 for his entire term. Again, certainly not all, not even most Gascon's fault. But he was this progressive prosecutor who didn't want to prosecute crime aggressively. And he inherited or perhaps exacerbated a situation where murders went through the roof. How is a big uptick in murder the triumph of hope over fear? If you were to point to fear, I think you would say people rightly feared what was going on, which is they feared getting murdered more than they had feared in the pre Gascon days. Voting out the DA associated with lawlessness and murder. That is not the embodiment of fear. That is taking some agency to do something about it. This, by the way, is the story of policing in America. Americans want policing to work. They want policing to keep their communities safe. They want to be safe from the police. But mostly they want to be safe and made safe by the police. Who wants this? White Americans, Hispanic Americans and black Americans, Especially black Americans. Studies show fear and dissatisfaction with police can spike based on horrific stories and concentrated media narratives. But the day in, day out safety of neighborhoods over time will assert itself. The largest criticism of police coincided with with the most murderousness in decades. There were experiments with depolicing and defunding. Don't let people tell you this didn't happen. This did happen. And where it happened, it did not go well. I'll read to you from the Brennan center in 2021 titled State of Policing Reform since George Floyd's Murder Subhead. While the past year has seen some victories, transformative changes in policing remains elusive. The Brennan center is the kind of organization that frames defunding as a victory. That's the kind of victories they meant. All right, here's the paragraph. In response to these community led movements, many of which rallied around calls to defund the police, cities and counties began restructuring how local budgets and law enforcement are deployed in service of public safety. For example, Austin, Los Angeles and at least 12 other cities pledged to cut police budgets with plans to reinvest in community programs such as supportive housing, prevention and other services. All right, they named two specific cities there. We already dealt with Los Angeles. Murder went up. How about Austin, their other city that they talked about. All right, here's an article from the Guardian. It's a truly crazy article. Headline. Critics say the movement to defund the police failed, but Austin and Seattle are seeing progress. Here's the quote. Austin's promise to cut its police funding worked for some time. The 2021 police budget went from 434 and a half million to 292.9 million. And some of the funds were invested into housing, health care, family and mental health services. But city leaders reversed course and increased the police budget to 443 million the following year. So by worked for some time, they just meant that funding was cut. They actually did strip funds. Absolutely, that happened. Now let's check on Austin's murder rate. 2019, the baseline 33 murders in the city. 2020, the year of the national murder uptick. 43 murders in the city. 2021, the year of big time defunding. Defunding that the Guardian says worked went from 43 murders to 88 murders. So funding was reduced by a third and murders doubled. This was the story everywhere that dabbled with defunding or just experience. This is mostly what happened, experience de facto defunding. When many, many officers quit. Yes, the budget went down. They were paying fewer officers. So defunding happened. It happened plenty. And when it happened and where it happened, the results were disastrous. All right, let's go to another clip. This is cbs. Their five year look back on the state of policing quoted the chief o' Hara is Minneapolis Chief BRIAN o' Hara. Minneapolis is one of the few major American cities where the violent crime rate has not improved much since since 2020. Police data shows shootings are trending down. O' Hara says the department is doing the best it can, operating with far fewer officers than are needed. I've been standing there with boys, teenagers, men are dead in the street and mom is behind the crime scene tape wailing. And I'm going through my head thinking, we've had so many murders already this week. What happens if someone else dies? We don't have enough homicide investigators. It is true. After their summer of rioting or recrimination, the city went from under 900 officers to 570. That's too few officers. Crime rose by a lot in one survey of 22 police departments. Minneapolis had the second lowest police per citizen ratio and one of the worst upticks in murder. The worst citizen to police ratio, Portland, which had an even higher spike in murder and overall crime than Minneapolis. These are the two textbook examples of the failure of defunding or de facto defunding the police. But as Oharra says, things are getting a bit better. And nationally, they're getting a lot better. Just today, Reason magazine wrote, Could 2025 see the lowest murder rate ever recorded? While it's too early to say for sure, the data are extremely encouraging. It could. It could in fact see that lowest murder rate ever. And that might seem odd, given that the aims of the George Floyd protest largely went unheeded. But I am here to suggest that is exactly why the picture of safety is better today than it has been for a while. Some safety from the police, but much more consequentially safety because of the police. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist. Ashley Khan is the co C bso. Michelle Pesca, she's the main cbso Astro Green. Does our social improve? Do Peru improve? Do Peru In Peru improve? Whatever I say. God bless you and thanks for listening. Oom Peru G Peru do Peru and thanks for listening.