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TODAY'S HEADLINES:

A veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis city council pledged to disband the city’s police department, following over a week of worldwide protests against police brutality.

Meanwhile, New York City, the hardest-hit region of the U.S., is starting to take baby steps back toward normalcy, beginning phase one of reopening as the coronavirus epidemic begins to subside.

And lastly, New York Times Opinion section editor James Bennett resigned today after admitting that he didn’t even read Senator Tom Cotton’s racist, misleading, and downright dangerous op-ed about deploying troops to police American cities.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

In a historic, almost-unprecedented move, the Minneapolis city council announced on Sunday that it had a veto-proof majority of members pledged to disband the city’s police department.

In a written statement, City Council president Lisa Bender said QUOTE: “It is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety isn’t working for so many of our neighbors. Our efforts at incremental reform have failed.” ENDQUOTE.

Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey said he opposes disbanding the department, which earned him a chorus of boos and jeers on Saturday night. But if the city Council goes through with their plan, it’ll be out of his hands.

The question now is what community safety will look like in the absence of the MPD. The city council hasn’t offered any specifics. Camden, New Jersey, famously disbanded its police force in 2013, but then re-hired most of the officers in a new county-wide organization focused on community policing. It was a big improvement, but definitely shied more on the side of reforming, rather than abolishing, a deeply broken system.

In other words, the organization might change, but a lot of the cops probably aren’t going anywhere.

New York City, after bungling nearly every other aspect of the government response to the protests, is also planning some reform. Mayor Bill de Blasio finally backed down and lifted the city’s arbitrary curfew, and just in time, as he was about to get sued by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Big de Blas also committed to diverting a token amount of funding from the NYPD’s absurd $6 billion budget to social services. He didn’t say how much, but we’re pretty sure it won’t be enough.

What we’re seeing all over, however, is that the direct action of widespread protests is truly making an impact.

NYC Re-Opening

New York City felt the effects of the coronavirus harder than anywhere else in the country, but after 22,000 deaths and more than 200,000 cases, the city is very slowly starting to lift its lockdown restrictions.

On Monday, the city will start phase one of its reopening, which allows construction, manufacturing, and retail to start up again. Retail stores will still operate in a limited capacity -- you probably won’t be able to browse like before, but they’ll do curbside and in-store pickup for most orders.

After initially failing to control the disease’s spread, New York’s leadership has poured money into testing and contact tracing. The New York Times reports that new cases are down to about 500 per day.

Next down the line is phase two, in which New Yorkers will finally be able to get a haircut again, and most offices will open, given social distancing can be enforced.

The problem is the damage has largely already been done. Because the city and state’s leaders failed to get out in front of the disease, New York’s lockdown has been crushing for businesses, axing 885,000 jobs. The city’s economy isn’t expected to really rebound until 2022.

New York Times Editor Resigns

The New York Times Opinion section has been controversial for years, but last week, it finally jumped the shark -- and now the section’s top editor is taking a hike.

James Bennett, the editor of the Times’ Opinion section, resigned on Sunday after his team published a deeply flawed, largely inaccurate, and incredibly racist op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton.

The op-ed, titled quote “Send in the Troops,” endquote sent the Times’ newsroom into a frenzy, seeing as it misused historical comparisons and spread blatant fake news in order to make the case that the U.S. should send in the military to inflict further violence on protesters across the country.

The Times usually has a pretty strict wall between the reporters and journalists in its newsroom and the opinion-havers in Bennett’s section. But the Cotton op-ed was a step too far, sending the newsroom into open revolt, as the Times’ notoriously buttoned-up employees threw down the gloves and started firing back, posting a unified message on Twitter that running the Cotton piece could directly endanger Black staff members.

It turns out, Bennett didn’t even read the op-ed before it was published. His supporters -- the usual cast of conservative big-brains -- are trying to paint this thing as another censorship of right-wing voices scenario. You can sort that one out for yourself, but know that Cotton’s piece claimed that police had quote “borne the brunt” of the violence in the recent unrest, which he blamed on antifa. And it’s not like turning down Cotton’s essay is denying him a platform -- he’s literally a sitting U.S. Senator.

Times Opinion has some great, thoughtful, incisive writers, but it’s also got people like climate change denier Bret Stephens and college-obsessed PC-culture critic Bari Weiss, not to mention the dusty old guard of David Brooks and Thomas Friedman. That’s all to say it’s definitely ripe for a change.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

The ghouls at the White House are still doing what they do best. On Friday, Trump signed a proclamation handing over 5,000 square miles of previously-protected waters off the coast of New England to commercial fisherman. Common Dreams reports that activists are worried the move will put several endangered species and delicate ecosystems at risk.

According to the Seattle Times, a man drove into a crowd of protesters on Sunday evening, then got out and brandished a gun, shooting and wounding a protester who tried to stop him. In the same city, police ran rampant again, covering streets in tear gas just days after they’d promised to stop using it for a month.

Speaking of protesters, one thread to follow is that crowd size is not in any way dying down. Protests in New York City, LA, and several other major cities were absolutely massive today, according to anecdotal reports on social media. It’s hard to estimate crowd size when there are dozens of protests across a city in a single day, but one things’ for sure: they were big.

Cops in Austin, Texas posted pictures of a massive pile of thank-you notes, which they claimed were from quote “several community members to include kindergartners and Austin families.” Endquote. Funnily enough, many of the cards were addressed in the same handwriting, and all of the kindergartens in Texas are still closed because of coronavirus. Since the protests started, the Austin Police Department has shot two people in the head with beanbag rounds.

That’s all for the Majority Report’s AM Quickie today. Stay tuned for the full show this afternoon.

June 8, 2020 - AM Quickie

HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner

WRITER - Jack Crosbie

PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn