This post was originally published on this site
In the two and a half weeks since George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, was killed in police custody, the US has entered its most sustained evaluation of law enforcement in years. In Minneapolis, a veto-proof majority of city councilors pledged to abolish the city’s existing police department and start again. Camden, New Jersey—which took a similar step in 2012—is having a media moment as a possible case study, and broader calls to “defund the police,” previously dismissed as a niche concern, are echoing in mainstream coverage.
The centrality of law enforcement to American popular culture is being questioned; this week, the police reality shows Cops and Live P.D. were canceled—the latter despite high ratings and a recent long-term renewal—amid concerns about the narratives and perspectives that they promote. Yesterday, Amazon imposed a one-year moratorium on police use of its facial-recognition software. Democrats in Congress are pushing a package of police reforms, and their Republican colleagues (for now, at least) have left the door open to some kind of bill; even President Trump, who has been more reticent and has pushed an aggressive “LAW & ORDER” message, is reportedly mulling an executive order that would offer a “framework” for legislative reform. Previous tipping points have come to nothing, but they also haven’t involved the massive swings in public sentiment that we’ve seen since Floyd’s killing. “I’ve never seen opinion shift this fast or deeply,” the Republican pollster Frank Luntz said this week. “This is big. This is ‘Beatles on
Read more here: https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/police_reform_media_george_floyd.php