BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse, and you're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
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LUSE: This week, we're connecting the dots between culture wars, hot takes and basketball. I know, I know, how are all these things connected? Well, we're going to find out with Gene Demby, co-host of NPR's Code Switch, and Maitreyi Anantharaman, who covers the WNBA for Defector. Gene, Maitreyi, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.
GENE DEMBY, BYLINE: What's good with you, Brittany? It's so good to be here.
MAITREYI ANANTHARAMAN: Thanks for having me, Brittany.
LUSE: Oh, it's so good to have you both. OK. So you're both WNBA fans, right?
DEMBY: Mm-hmm.
LUSE: Well, a lot has been happening in the league lately. So I want to know in one word, how do you feel about the WNBA's seemingly sudden popularity?
ANANTHARAMAN: Overwhelmed.
LUSE: Gene, what about you?
DEMBY: Salty, probably.
LUSE: Salty. Well, those are two very good words. Overwhelmed and salty. We'll get into why you chose those words, but I'm going to throw another word into the mix - dismayed.
DEMBY: OK.
LUSE: And not for the reason you think, OK? I'm thrilled the WNBA is getting more and more popular. I am one of those recent converts. And I'm not alone. More than 400,000 people attended women's basketball games in May, as I did, and half of them were sellouts. That makes this past May the highest turnout for the league in over two decades.
DEMBY: Wow.
LUSE: I mean, the WNBA is officially having a moment. But with that great viewership, apparently comes some growing pain.
ANANTHARAMAN: Indeed.
LUSE: Let's take a look at the player of the moment right now. Indiana Fever rookie and No. 1 draft pick, Caitlin Clark. After finishing her college run as the highest-scoring college basketball player ever, Caitlin, like many rookies, is adjusting to life in the big leagues and has been on the receiving end of some intense fouls. The latest incident that had everyone clutching their pearls was between Caitlin and Chicago Sky player Chennedy Carter. Carter fouled Caitlin, and the media frenzy that ensued afterwards has been just wild to watch. I've seen WNBA players get called catty...
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BILL MAHER: Women are catty, even the ones on her own team.
LUSE: ...Jealous...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: She's getting knocked down for just no - I mean, this is just a form of jealousy, it looks like.
LUSE: ...Bullies...
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GILBERT ARENAS: She's a bullier, right? No one feels sorry for the bullier.
LUSE: ...And even a congressman weighed in, saying there was, quote, "excessive physical targeting." Maitreyi, Gene, what do you think of these reactions?
ANANTHARAMAN: Again, overwhelming to sort of consume this. And I don't blame anyone who's come to women's basketball lately. Like, welcome. Join the club. It's fun here. But I think when you're in that position, you do need some of that context. Chennedy Carter is also a player with this really specific history in the WNBA, who has, I think, struggled to get along with teammates, who's kind of a known, like, fiery player. Does that mean every player in the WNBA is like that?
LUSE: Right.
ANANTHARAMAN: No, I don't think so. So I think it helps to have that grounding in the league's history in some of the stories and some of the people who've been playing in this league for a while. And so I hesitate as someone who's in the WNBA media to come across, like, a gatekeeper - right? - to say, you know, no, you have to go to the library and read all these books before you can join. But when it gets to the point that we have congressmen sending letters to the commissioner asking her to investigate this, I think maybe we need to all calm down and take a little bit of a breather.
DEMBY: And just to piggyback on Maitreyi said. You have this player, Caitlin Clark, who went to the University of Iowa, she's a white woman, and she played on, you know, we've got to say, like, a mostly white team. She can hoop. I want to make that absolutely clear. She is cold.
LUSE: Yeah, she's a great player.
DEMBY: She's a fantastic player. But she brought this giant fan base of people who rock with her and weren't necessarily WNBA fans. And now they're in the league, and I think there are fans who like her for a bunch of reasons, you know, fandoms are always really complex, who are suddenly creating friction for a bunch of other reasons that are not just about basketball with the sort of established WNBA fan base. I think there's several layers of ideological and social dynamics that are playing out in the Caitlin Clark discourse.
So if you look at the partisan lean of different fan bases for different major sports. To the right, you have the PGA, you have NASCAR, you have college football. And somewhere in the middle is, like, baseball, the NFL and college basketball, right? But to the left, the most Democratic-leaning, interestingly enough, was the WWE (laughter). But the most Democratic-leaning sports fan base was the WNBA, like, by a comfortable distance.
LUSE: Yeah, I mean, Gene, you touched on some of the ideological touchpoints there. But I'd love to hear more, especially from you, Maitreyi, about some of these social dynamics that are cropping up. I mean, Caitlin Clark is a good player, for sure. We all agree on this. But it just seems like people are handling her (laughter) with caution. Maitreyi, why do you think people are trying to handle or handling Caitlin Clark with kid gloves? What do you think that's about?
ANANTHARAMAN: It's funny because if you've watched Caitlin Clark in college or even in the professionals, like, you know she's, like, a real competitor. You know that she's a hooper. She likes this. She likes trash-talking. I think she likes when people guard her tough because if people are, you know, picking you up from 94 feet, that means they're scared of you. That means they respect you, right? It's a sign of respect. She gets guarded like that because of the reign she has, because of her basketball ability.
DEMBY: You know, part of what Caitlin Clark is experiencing is this very real difficulty spike. Like, when she was in college, she probably went up against another all-American at her position that she had the guard or had to guard her maybe once a month in college. But in the pros, in the W, that's every night. Like, the floor of how good someone is is so much higher. I think that so much of the discourse is almost like, in defense of her, has been, like, kind of anti-basketball, like, disrespectful to the game of basketball to treat her with these kind of kid gloves.
ANANTHARAMAN: I think this sort of has a lot to do with people coming into this with some other kind of culture war agenda, and they feel like, OK, she's an easy way I can sort of launder some of my takes about the WNBA. This league sucked until she came around. This league was not worth watching until she came around. This league was too Black, was too lesbian before she came around. And so it's a lot of those notions that people had about the WNBA, and now they're sort of being laundered through her.
DEMBY: A lot of people are tuning into this league. It's still like their ability to appreciate the league is really conditional in Caitlin Clark because she, again, to Maitreyi's point, is a straight, white lady. Like, she fulfills those conditions. And there's all this attention that Caitlin Clark has brought to the league that I think is important, right? Like, people have started to talk about the problem with the WNBA's pay structure with the travel arrangements because they were like, damn, Caitlin Clark is making, like, nothing in the league. But they should have been paying attention to that when Brittney Griner was getting locked up in Russia to make ends meet.
LUSE: You know, we had a conversation actually about the WNBA's roots last year, last season, and one of the things that we were unpacking in that conversation was how at the league's dawn, that idea of, like, this very straight, this very safe-seeming image, somebody like a Caitlin Clark, that was the type of player that the league wanted to promote.
DEMBY: It was almost like they used to talk about the league as if it was almost like a social good, you know what I mean? It was like, oh, isn't it wonderful that the ladies are playing basketball? And it's like, no, these are hoopers. Market them like hoopers. And I think part of what you're seeing in the popularity of the WNBA, which by the way, was up, it's obviously exploded this year. Eyeballs on the league have been increasing consistently over the last couple of years, has been because they started treating them like hoopers. Like, they started talking about the sport like a sport.
LUSE: So we've been talking about the response from some of these new viewers and new people who are becoming WNBA fans and getting invested in the league. But it's not just new fans coming to the WNBA party. It's also some big talking heads. We have to unpack how some of the biggest names in sports media have been reacting to all this. I want to talk about this viral clip of basketball analyst Monica McNutt, who covers the WNBA, and Stephen A. Smith, who hosts "First Take" on ESPN. They're on "First Take," and they're discussing the Caitlin Clark-Chennedy Carter drama and got into a disagreement.
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STEPHEN A SMITH: Who talks about the WNBA, who talks about women - who talks about women's sports more than "First Take?"
MONICA MCNUTT: Stephen A, respectfully, with your platform, you could have been doing this three years ago if you wanted to.
LUSE: Maitreyi, you've been covering the WNBA for a while. What did you think about this interaction? Do you think it's fair to say these big commentators are dropping in at the 11th hour? And if they keep doing it, how do you think it'll change the WNBA and its coverage?
ANANTHARAMAN: Yeah. To be fair, I don't know that they talk about men's sports anymore intelligently. So, you know, maybe this...
LUSE: (Laughter) Burn.
ANANTHARAMAN: ...Is true equality...
DEMBY: Absolutely.
ANANTHARAMAN: ...At last, that we're getting the insane Stephen A hot takes about women's basketball also.
LUSE: That's true equality.
ANANTHARAMAN: I know. I had a lot of respect for Monica McNutt in that moment. Thought she raised a good point about how a lot of this media attention just sort of seems to be opportunist. I sort of doubt the sincerity of some of these takes. And I think if you're just leaping into the middle and raising the temperature and raising the volume all the way up, I kind of hate that they're the ones setting the agenda for what gets talked about in women's basketball, and I think they're missing a lot of context. For example, the Chennedy Carter incident, I think a lot of people painted this as WNBA vets, Black woman out to get Caitlin Clark. They hate her.
I think there's maybe a good opportunity for a conversation about officiating in the WNBA, which has actually frustrated me and which affects many Black stars, too. I've been watching A'ja Wilson, who is an MVP in this league, the best player in the league right now, I think. And I really hate the whistle she gets. She gets, like, beat up all the time. And so I think it actually helps to just take a step back to look around the rest of the league and see that, you know, not everything is the world versus Caitlin Clark.
DEMBY: There's so many people who grew up with the NBA - right? - and the NFL. But they, like...
LUSE: Right.
DEMBY: ...They know all the lore of those leagues. Even if they didn't see those people play, like, they've heard old heads like waxing on - I remember back in the day when Larry Bird was cooking, you know what I mean? Like, there's more of a sense, even when, like, you're young, this is part of a larger history, right? And I think for the W, there's this just wave of new fans who have none of that history. There's some real opportunity for storytelling that the sort of Steven As of the world and that the "First Takes" of the world could be doing.
LUSE: Well, at the end of the day, I think we all want to see real hoopers play real ball. Well, despite the drama, or maybe in some cases, because of it, I will be seated for these games. But, Gene, Maitreyi, I have learned so much here. Thank you both so much.
ANANTHARAMAN: Thanks for having me.
DEMBY: Thank you so much.
LUSE: And as a thank you, I'd like to teach you something by playing a game with you both. Can you stick around for a little bit longer?
DEMBY: Absolutely.
ANANTHARAMAN: Sure.
LUSE: All right. We'll be right back with a little game I like to call But Did You Know?
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LUSE: Stick around.
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LUSE: All right, all right. We're going to play a little game I like to call But Did You Know?
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LUSE: Here's how it works. I'm going to share a story that's been making headlines. And as I give you some background on the story, I'll also ask you trivia related to it. But don't worry - it's all multiple choice. And the first one to blurt out the right answer gets a point. The person with the most points wins, and their prize is, as always, bragging rights.
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LUSE: Are y'all ready?
DEMBY: Absolutely. Let's do it.
ANANTHARAMAN: Yeah, sounds great.
LUSE: All right, all right. See, this is what I'm talking - we have sports fans in here today. So we got some real competitors.
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LUSE: All right. All right, all right. Let's get into the drama. Last month, the beauty pageant world got seriously shaken. Miss USA and Miss Teen USA both stepped down. And now the organization that runs both competitions is under scrutiny. But there is a brand-new pageant vying to take its place, and this pageant just had its first competition this year. What is its name?
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LUSE: Is it A, Miss Anime USA, which is for cosplay; B, Miss AI, short for artificial intelligence, obviously; or C, Miss Glam for beauty influencers?
DEMBY: They all seem successful - all seem plausible.
ANANTHARAMAN: Yeah, unfortunately plausible. I'm going to go with Miss AI.
DEMBY: Yeah. I want to say Miss AI, too.
LUSE: The answer is B...
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LUSE: ...Miss AI. Miss AI could be on the horizon. You do not have to be human to enter the Miss AI competition.
DEMBY: It's so funny. So we are moving from, like, basically impossible beauty standards to (laughter)...
GENE DEMBY AND BRITTANY LUSE: ... Literally impossible beauty standards.
LUSE: Yes, exactly. Actually, this pageant occurred, and NPR covered the pageant and said that this first year's finalists are exactly the young, buxom and thin girls you think they'd be. Onto our next question. So beauty queens are always standing for things like world peace. Are AI beauty queens the same? Which of these roles is on the resume of one of the Miss AI finalists?
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LUSE: Is it A, brand ambassador for an ocean conservation fund; B, content creator for PETA's new AI vertical; or C, marketing strategist for the first annual AI Pride parade?
DEMBY: Oh, my God. Pride parade.
LUSE: Gene says C. Maitreyi, what say you?
ANANTHARAMAN: I'm going to say A, ocean.
LUSE: And the answer is A.
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ANANTHARAMAN: Oh. I'm on a roll here.
LUSE: The AI model built by the French team is a brand ambassador for the ocean conservation fund Oceanopolis Acts, to which I ask both of you, what does an AI beauty queen do as brand ambassador for a real-world ocean?
DEMBY: Yeah. How does that even work?
ANANTHARAMAN: I don't know what real brand ambassadors do besides posting things. So...
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ANANTHARAMAN: ...Maybe just more posts.
LUSE: I don't know. Y'all's guess is as good as mine. But if anyone out there does know the answer, we are all dying to know. Please (laughter) let us know. All right. To recap the score, Maitreyi, you are at two points. Gene, you are at zero points, thus bringing us to the last round. Without further ado, the final question. All right. So the winner of Miss AI gets more than just bragging rights. She gets a prize, unlike you both. I'm sorry. No prize for y'all.
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LUSE: But Miss AI does get a prize. So for our final question, what does the winner of Miss AI win?
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LUSE: Is it A, $5,000; B, a Cybertruck; or C, a day off?
DEMBY: What?
ANANTHARAMAN: Cybertruck sounds so fake, but that's what I thought about the first one. I'm just going to say the money.
LUSE: All right. Maitreyi says the money. She says A, $5,000. Gene, what say you?
DEMBY: C. I mean, none of these make - what?
LUSE: (Laughter) Gene, you say a day off. Well, Gene, you might need to take the day off after this devastating blow because the answer is...
DEMBY: (Laughter).
ANANTHARAMAN: Oh.
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LUSE: ...A, $5,000.
ANANTHARAMAN: Welcome to the league, Gene.
LUSE: (Laughter) Welcome to...
ANANTHARAMAN: Welcome to the league.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
LUSE: Sometimes, you know, the game giveth, the game taketh away. But yes, the answer is A, $5,000, which is not what either of y'all are getting today.
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LUSE: But the money for this Miss AI pageant winner goes to the creator of the winning Miss AI. Now, for comparison's sake, Miss USA is said to earn a six-figure salary, and she gets a car and an apartment, which sounds like the complete "Barbie" set to me, honestly. But Miss USA does have to do a little more than, like, spin her processors or be told what to do by a human with, like, a phone or a (laughter) computer or whatever. So - I don't know - is that a win for humans or AI?
ANANTHARAMAN: I don't know. It seems like they're getting sold short here. Maybe Miss AIs should unionize and try to get a little bit more...
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ANANTHARAMAN: ...Prize money.
LUSE: You know what? Maitreyi, appreciate the fact that in the midst of your incredible triumph today on But Did You Know, you're still thinking about the workers' rights of our AI queens...
DEMBY: Yeah. Listen...
LUSE: ...Out there.
DEMBY: I mean, solidarity for three-armed women.
LUSE: (Laughter) All right. Well, that is it for this week's edition of But Did You Know? Congrats to Maitreyi on your win.
ANANTHARAMAN: Thank you.
LUSE: Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. And Maitreyi, Gene, thank you both so much for joining me today.
ANANTHARAMAN: This was great. Yeah. Thanks so much.
DEMBY: This was so much fun. Appreciate you, Brittany.
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LUSE: All right, that was NPR's Gene Demby and Defector's Maitreyi Anantharaman. I'm going to take a quick break, and when I get back, summer is upon us. And now more than ever, I wonder why in the world is all the deodorant locked up in the stores. We're following the line between basic necessities and retail fear-mongering.
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LUSE: Stick around.
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LUSE: What have been some of the things that you've seen locked up in stores?
ABDALLAH FAYYAD: Oh, I mean, I've seen almost everything locked up from deodorant to laundry detergent is always a big one.
NICOLE LEWIS: The most interesting thing I've seen recently was dishwashing detergent pods.
FAYYAD: Even some snacks, including the nicer nuts like pistachios, have been locked up.
LUSE: That's Vox policy correspondent Abdallah Fayyad and The Marshall Project's engagement editor Nicole Lewis. And they're here to answer my big questions this week - why is all the deodorant locked up, and what's the shoplifting panic really about? As you heard, there's a new trend at drug stores - thick, plastic barriers between you and a lot of everyday products like deodorant, toothpaste, detergent. These necessities are basically behind bars, and I need an employee to free them. I don't know about you, but I find these deodorant jails incredibly annoying. But it's not just an inconvenience to everyday shoppers. It's actually tied to a much bigger panic about shoplifting. And while shoplifting is very much a real thing, some of the fears that led to these locked-up products are built on very shaky ground, and it's also connected to a broader movement to roll back more progressive policies around minor crimes. So to separate panic from fact and illuminate the systems behind them all, I'm joined by Nicole and Abdallah.
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LUSE: Nicole, Abdallah, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.
LEWIS: Thanks. Good to be here.
FAYYAD: Thanks for having us.
LUSE: Oh, my gosh. My pleasure. OK, so the deodorant is locked up. But is that something people are actually worried about? Like, would you say they're freaked out about shoplifting right now? Nicole, let's start with you.
LEWIS: Yeah, I mean, I would. I would say that there has been a retail theft panic. There has been this concerted media focus, I think, on putting chief executives on air and then really sounding the alarm to say, hey, this is a huge problem for us. We're losing money left and right.
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DOUG MCMILLON: Theft is an issue. It's higher than what it's historically been. If that's not corrected over time, prices will be higher...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Right.
MCMILLON: ...And/or stores will close.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: And how much of that...
LEWIS: And by and large, those statements go completely unchallenged.
LUSE: Didn't the former CEO of Home Depot compare shoplifting to COVID?
LEWIS: (Laughter) Yes.
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BOB NARDELLI: But today, this thing is an epidemic. It's spreading faster than COVID, Steve.
LEWIS: The other thing to say is that there are a handful of viral videos of what we call, like, a smash-and-grab. So when several people come into a store and it's...
LUSE: Right, right.
LEWIS: ...Pure chaos, and they steal a bunch of stuff, right? And so those videos also circulate, and they're really enough to generate this sense of, like, oh, my God, this problem is out of hand with no more underlying information behind it.
LUSE: Abdallah, how does this match up with what you've learned?
FAYYAD: I mean, I think there's been a huge overreaction. I think a big part of it is a result of the virality of these videos of people shoplifting. But what I would add to that is statistics numbers by the National Retail Federation way inflating the inventory losses of businesses...
LUSE: Oh.
FAYYAD: ...Due to shoplifting by billions of dollars. Eventually...
LUSE: Oh.
FAYYAD: ...The record was corrected, but, you know, a lot of these arguments were fueling this idea that there are deeper societal problems, and the shoplifting pandemic, as some people called it, was kind of a window into that cultural decay, if you want to see it that way.
LUSE: So what do we actually know about shoplifting rates?
LEWIS: So we know a couple of things. I'd say the most recent data comes from the Council on Criminal Justice. And they took a look at what we call NIBRS data. So that's incident report data - right? - and so that's self-reported. And when we look at that data over the last several years, starting with 2020, if you take New York City out of the 24 metropolitan areas that they looked at, if you take this big city and you just put it to the side, that actually incidences of shoplifting decreased by about 7%.
LUSE: Wow. Wow. That's a huge difference.
LEWIS: Correct - direct contradiction to the notion that this is a pandemic. If you keep New York in, the picture looks slightly different. It did go up. So really what we could say is New York seems to have an issue with shoplifting, right?
LUSE: (Laughter).
LEWIS: The other thing, though, that I want to say is that - and this, you know, can really get into the data weeds of things - this is NIBRS data. This is not actually FBI crime data. Actually, most police departments are not really categorizing or tracking shoplifting as its own segment of retail crime.
LUSE: Oh.
FAYYAD: The FBI's database is actually deeply, deeply flawed. Not all police departments have to report to it. Some of the largest departments in the country, including the LAPD, do not report their crime statistics to the FBI. You know, that's...
LUSE: Wow.
FAYYAD: ...One lesson out of all of this is that, you know, we can get a sense from all this data if there's an increase, if there's a decrease. But as to the extent of those increases or decreases, there's really a lot we don't know in real time.
LUSE: You know, it's really interesting that there's this panic, but we don't have the data to show it on a wider scale or the data presented is just wrong. You know, as we said, the National Retail Federation, which is a lobbying group that represents the interests of retailers, they had to retract some of the massive numbers it was coming up with for how much organized retail theft was actually happening. And that makes me think of another situation with Walgreens. They said they were closing a bunch of stores in San Francisco because of rampant shoplifting.
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UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR: Back here in San Francisco, where five Walgreen stores around the city will be soon closing their doors for good. Brazen robberies, like this one, have become an epidemic.
LUSE: But later it was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle that the data didn't really support that. Those stores all had less than two reported shoplifting incidents per month on average. But then also Walgreens coincidentally said in an SEC filing that they were looking to close 200 stores anyway to save money.
In a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle, Walgreens maintained that shoplifting in their San Francisco stores is higher than the national average. But on an earnings call last year, a Walgreens exec said, to quote, "maybe we cried too much about shoplifting." So intentional or not, how might it benefit retailers to use inflated claims about shoplifting?
LEWIS: Yeah. I think this is really the question to be asking, truly. If you can make stuff flying off your shelves a public problem, a problem that needs to be solved and can only be solved in their estimation by law enforcement, then the money that actually gets spent on dealing with that, it's taxpayer money. So I think part of the logic - right? - around a panic like this, intentional or not, is that if you can get the public to pay for it, like, why wouldn't you, right?
LUSE: Right.
FAYYAD: It's such a confounding question right now why, you know, a lot of these businesses are interested in making it seem like their stores are less safe. You know, it's also confounding why they would spend so much money on locking up their products and making it harder for customers to buy them. I think they're just creating more friction and making people less likely to buy things.
LUSE: You know, I can't lie. It's also confounding to me, too. But talking more about public solutions to shoplifting problems, how have politicians responded to this panic about shoplifting?
LEWIS: Yeah, not well. I mean, politicians here - oh, my goodness. Shoplifting, organized crime is out of control. We've got to crack down, right? The NRF actually has model legislation. Like, they have thought about (laughter) what they want to see happen here. And it's two things. They're really campaigning and arguing for states to basically lower the threshold by which stealing becomes a felony. The other big thing that they want is to actually make organized retail theft a crime category. Lawmakers have to decide what's a crime. Like, we don't just all wake up and the book of crimes is, like, written for us, right? They...
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LEWIS: That's not how it works. So the NRF really wants lawmakers to add a statute that designates organized retail theft. And that is when you're shoplifting for personal gain and not personal need. So if I steal the deodorant, and I use it 'cause I'm stinky and sweaty, that's something different. But if I gave it to you or sell it to you because you're stinky and sweaty, I could potentially be charged with this other crime category.
LUSE: Right. So what makes it organized crime is the intent to sell it. It doesn't have to be boosting it off the back of a truck Tony Soprano style.
FAYYAD: You know, organized crime rings, I don't know how broad of a problem that is. But I do know that the first reaction to the shoplifting panic came during COVID, when we saw a lot of crimes of need - people stealing diapers, people stealing baby formula. These were crimes of desperation.
LUSE: So I know for a few years in major cities, there were pushes for more progressive policies, supported by left-leaning DAs and politicians like Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. It sounds like some of those efforts have sort of rolled back. Why do you think that is? Abdallah, I'd love to hear from you about that.
FAYYAD: I think that's kind of one of the casualties of this era that we're in. And you saw this, like you mentioned, in San Francisco. You saw this in Boston, with prosecutors kind of declining to prosecute certain crimes that included petty theft because there were such disparate outcomes as to who was getting arrested and who was getting sent to prison over some low-level crimes. And the results of those policies were very promising actually, and they seemed to have been working very well. But they were also deeply unpopular in some parts of the right. And so when the pandemic hit, and then there was an uptick in crime, that movement against progressive criminal justice reforms jumped and seized on that data to say, we have a real problem. You know, and now you're seeing policies be much harsher, eliminating parole eligibility for a lot of people, even in Louisiana, trying 17-year-olds as adults. So we're going back to this kind of tough-on-crime era. And I think a certain part of our politics, we're just waiting for this moment to cease.
LUSE: So it sounds like some lawmakers were eager to rollback these policies, but there's also, like, a broader public reaction to consider as well. Chesa Boudin, who we just mentioned, you know, was a more progressive DA in San Francisco. But he was recalled by a public vote back in 2022. It kind of seems like the public also has an appetite for these harsher policies.
FAYYAD: Right. Exactly. When you ask people how bad crime is in America, 63% of Americans will say crime is a very or extremely serious problem. But if you ask them how crime is in their neighborhoods, only 17% say crime is a very serious or extremely serious problem locally. Now, none of that is to say that crime doesn't exist.
LUSE: Sure.
FAYYAD: I'm not trying to downplay or minimize that crime does happen. But there is a huge gap between reality and public perception. And that's because crime is such a mainstay in our politics. There's a constant drumbeat from politicians that say, crime is bad. I'm going to be elected into office and deal with it. I'm going to bring down crime.
And law-and-order campaigns oftentimes are on Republican sides. But you also see a lot of Democrats engaging in law-and-order campaigns as well, including Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City. And at the end of the day, that kind of rhetoric and those kinds of campaigns often result in a lot of shortsighted policy.
LUSE: That makes me think of something that you, Nicole, shared with my producer. You see it as a reaction in part to the Black Lives Matter movement. Can you say more about how locked-up toothpaste might be a reaction to the 2020 protests?
LEWIS: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that this is an - a really interesting thread to pull on because if you remember, in many different cities - right? - there was this moment where we could see some of the protests, like, tip over into a certain kind of lawlessness - right? - looting. And it's not to say that the actual legitimate protest is the same as the kind of looting and shoplifting that happened after. I don't want to conflate those two things. But it meant that there was a spotlight and a moment in which people were watching and potentially horrified by what they were seeing.
And what I always notice is that there's a share of the American public who believes that they need to defend private property and property in general with violence. And that's where we get the Kyle Rittenhouses, right? This is all coming out of this moment of protest.
LUSE: Right. He killed two people, and he claimed it was in service of protecting private property, even though the owner of that property testified that they didn't ask him to do any of that. But to your point, people were really intense about the sanctity of property.
LEWIS: In Philadelphia, the Inquirer ran an unbelievable headline - "Buildings Matter, Too." Do we remember this, right? So...
LUSE: Oh, right.
LEWIS: So in a cultural moment in which people were responding to the murder of someone by the hands of the police, to try to put building values on the same order of magnitude, of importance, is really tone-deaf.
LUSE: Right. So talking more about the idea of, quote-unquote, "protection" and who people think they need to protect their property from, I have to ask, who's getting prosecuted more by these new shoplifting policies?
LEWIS: So this is a question - right? - that we can't actually answer, just like we were saying before in terms of data being poorly kept, unclear, the categories aren't clear. But there are some things we do know. So I'll tell you what I do know.
LUSE: OK.
LEWIS: What we know about the system is that it is extraordinarily biased, right? It over-indexes on people of color and poor people. So we - for pretty much anything. We can see that. But what I found was Texas had actually implemented organized retail theft statutes - right? - in some places. And it allowed law enforcement to make this decision when they were responding to these calls about when to describe the crime - right? - as organized or just shoplifting. It should come as no surprise that Black people were twice as likely to be charged with this higher category than the lower one.
If you go down this road of coming up with new categories and making one more harsh than the other, and then also leaving it up to law enforcement to just decide when they should be applied, they actually charge Black people and people of color more harshly.
LUSE: You know, I also want to note, as we're talking about this, Black people are less likely to shoplift than white people. But famously, lots of Black people have had the repeated experience of being followed around in stores, myself included. There's an idea of who shoplifts and who doesn't that's still very pervasive.
LEWIS: Absolutely. I mean, I think, Abdallah, you really framed this extremely well - right? - right at the start. What we're really looking at when we think about any kind of moral panic - but particularly the moment I think we're in now - is this, I think, pretty pervasive sense of fear in America of the criminal element, let's just say. And I think you cannot extract the notion of race. The history of this country is inextricably linked with those feelings.
FAYYAD: Yeah. I mean, I think that's exactly it. I mean, when we were talking about law-and-order campaigns earlier, law-and-order campaigns are campaigns full of dog whistles. The racism of those campaigns is often very clear, sometimes explicit. We hear it in Donald Trump's rhetoric about crime-infested cities like Baltimore and D.C. Race is such a big component in creating this abstract idea of crime in America because in the American psyche, crime is kind of an urban phenomenon. The negative stereotypes around cities are very closely tied to a lot of negative stereotypes about Black and brown people.
LUSE: We spent so much time in this conversation talking about crime panics. And crime panics are something that have shown up time and time again in the U.S. over the last century. And so I would love to know from both of you, why do crime panics work, and for who?
LEWIS: I think fear is very motivating, right? I think that, like, fear of the unknown, fear of the other, all the racism that's sort of imbued and embedded in our society - it's very easy to kind of whip people into a panic.
I think the other side of it is that we have a really broken discourse on crime and how we solve it. And I think this panic really shows us that there's been a limited conversation in terms of, like, how do you actually prevent these things? What about poverty and drug addiction?
The panic is really nice and tidy because we're saying there's an enemy. It's scary. They're bad. And I have a solution - send them to prison, right? It's just, like, psychologically, I think, very neat. But underneath it, it doesn't function. It doesn't really do much - right? - in terms of deterrence, in terms of limiting crime.
FAYYAD: You know, this isn't to say that it doesn't exist and Americans shouldn't be worried about crime. It can be a serious problem. America - famously more violent than peer countries, and we see more crime here than in peer countries. You know, there is a problem, but a lot of how we talk about it is more fearmongering than solutions oriented.
LEWIS: And can I say one other thing?
LUSE: Sure.
LEWIS: This is more of, like, a thought that I always have about it. So I grew up in D.C., and my family has lived there for many, many years, right? And so I remember a feature of my childhood being my grandmother and my mom and uncle all telling me stories about times that they were mugged on their doorstep - right? - in D.C in the '80s and early '90s, when there was, like, a crime problem. And so this was something that they all experienced.
Now, fast-forward to me living and growing up in the city. I never had an experience like that. I have actually never been victimized by any kind of crime. I've lived in New York for 15 years, right? I've just not had that experience.
LUSE: Yeah.
LEWIS: But now think about what that does, what that actually means in terms of how they're going to respond versus how I'm going to respond or even understand your baseline level of safety in public places.
LUSE: Right. Right.
LEWIS: So I do think there is a little bit of a generational nerve that is easily touched on because there's a whole segment of people who did live through high-crime eras of the '70s, '80s and '90s because fear is not necessarily a super rational response that can hijack your ability to really make decisions, right?
I keep thinking, like, there's a whole segment of voters out there who have never actually moved on from the narrative that Abdallah is talking about, when we thought about cities as high crime and very segregated. Every city I've lived in is extremely expensive (laughter) and - right?
LUSE: (Laughter).
LEWIS: And really nice and full of coffee shops (laughter). It's not - but we have not been able to shake, I think, that, like, deep, embodied notion of discomfort or lack of safety, right? And I don't say this to gloss over the way that racism really does function, right? It's embedded in all of this. But I really think about my parents and the fact that they have fundamentally had a completely different experience of public space and public safety than I have because we are different generations.
And so I wonder if again we could step back and have a better conversation, one that attends to some of the social issues, lived experience that we actually might be able to get to better solutions.
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LUSE: Well, Nicole, Abdallah, this has been an incredible conversation. Thank you both so much. I really appreciate it.
FAYYAD: Thanks for having us.
LEWIS: Thank you.
LUSE: Thanks again to Nicole Lewis from The Marshall Project and Abdallah Fayyad from Vox.
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LUSE: This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...
BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.
ALEXIS WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Alexis Williams.
LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.
COREY ANTONIO ROSE, BYLINE: Corey Antonio Rose.
LUSE: This episode was edited by...
JESSICA PLACZEK, BYLINE: Jessica Placzek.
LUSE: Engineering support came from...
TIFFANY VERA CASTRO, BYLINE: Tiffany Vera Castro.
LUSE: We had fact-checking help from...
WILL CHASE, BYLINE: Will Chase.
LUSE: Our executive producer is...
VERALYN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Veralyn Williams.
LUSE: Our VP of programming is...
YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.
LUSE: All right. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon.
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