Within African-American communities and families, "the talk" too often has been a cautionary tale of how to respond to the police – navigating the precarious relations between citizens and those who are supposed to protect and serve the community. Johnson reflects a talk of existential consequence.
Members of the New York City Police Department’s Community Response Team conduct a raid on a smoke shop in lower Manhattan in 2024.
More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal.
But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for a key part of an aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers.
The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision.
In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor.
The failure involved the Community Response Team, or CRT. A ProPublica investigation last year found that the unit had often sidestepped oversight as it went after so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs. The team’s tactics, including high-speed car chases, and its opaque operations disturbed some NYPD officials, but the unit expanded significantly amid the support of then-Mayor Eric Adams.
The lack of reviews is part of a pattern of the NYPD failing to deliver on its obligations under the long-standing court order. Officers across the department, for instance, have often not documented stops.
The importance of reviews is particularly critical for aggressive teams like the CRT, which has a record of unconstitutional stops. It has also drawn hundreds of civilian complaints since it was created three years ago. More than half of the officers assigned to the team have been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of board data last year. That compares with just a small fraction of NYPD officers overall.
Prior to its latest discovery, the federal monitor had raised alarms about the unit’s behavior. A report last year said that only 59% of stops, searches and frisks by CRT officers were lawful, a far worse rate than the NYPD’s patrol units. Nearly all of the stops involved Black or Hispanic residents.
In a letter to the court, the federal monitor said the newly discovered failure means the monitor’s own figures on the CRT’s rate of compliance with the Constitution is probably wrong. The actual rate, the monitor wrote, is “likely lower” than reported.
The court-appointed monitor, Mylan Denerstein, lambasted the NYPD and its failure to review the stops.
“The failure to audit these stops means unconstitutional stops, frisks and searches went undetected,” Denerstein said in a statement to ProPublica. “This is unacceptable. The City must do more and prevent this from happening.”
In a statement to ProPublica, the NYPD said it moved to fix the issues: “Under Commissioner (Jessica) Tisch the NYPD has taken significant additional steps to increase oversight and accountability. The Monitor and the NYPD identified this error, and the NYPD is working collaboratively with the Monitor to address it.”
For the first two and a half years after the unit was created in 2023, the failure to properly review stops affected just part of the unit, which was led by top brass.
But last fall, the issue became more widespread after the NYPD restructured the CRT to put officers stationed across the city under a central command. The move was intended to increase oversight of the team, which had new commanders. But in the process, stops for the entire unit, which had grown to about 180 officers, went unaudited.
One of the unit’s former commanders, John Chell, defended its record.
“This team really changed the game,” said Chell, who retired as the department’s top uniformed officer last year. “Did we make mistakes? Sure. But we stabilized the city. We did our job.”
Lawmakers and civil rights advocates, however, have long criticized the CRT’s aggressive policing and said the latest reporting failure underscores a need to disband the unit.
“The Community Response Team has operated with too little oversight and caused too much harm,” said state Sen. Jessica Ramos, who has recalled being wrongfully stopped and frisked by the NYPD more than a decade ago. “A unit with this record should not continue.”
Lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, one of the original litigants in the stop-and-frisk case, also called for the CRT to be shuttered.
“These units have a long history of aggressive policing against people of color. There is no basis for them,” said Daniel Lambright, the organization’s director of criminal justice litigation. “They do more harm than good and they need to go.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office in January and pledged during his campaign to reimagine public safety, has endorsed shuttering another unit that has drawn scrutiny for its heavy-handed approach to protests, but his office declined to address the rising calls to disband the CRT.
“We’re aware of issues raised about the Community Response Team, as well as the steps the NYPD has taken to address them,” a mayoral spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica. “The Mamdani administration is committed to improving public safety in a way that meets the needs and values of New Yorkers.”
When it started three years ago, the CRT focused on Adams’ shifting priorities, such as cracking down on illegal motorcycles. The unit roamed the city proactively looking for crime rather than waiting for calls, the same approach once used by one of the NYPD’s most notorious units.
The CRT quickly developed a reputation for brutality. Just months after the unit started, one officer in an unmarked police car spotted a man on a dirtbike and swerved across a yellow line into oncoming traffic, hitting the motorcyclist head-on and sending him flying. The man later died from his injuries. The NYPD said that it punished the officer by taking 13 days of vacation from him.
Department leaders told ProPublica that even they had a hard time overseeing the unit’s work because it was essentially created off the books — a setup that ultimately led to the dropped reviews of stops. Officers who were part of the unit were often not formally assigned to it, meaning their conduct wasn’t properly tracked.
“It was one of those teams where everyone is a ghost,” one former department official told ProPublica last year.
That approach extended to stop-and-frisk.
When the monitor learned about the CRT in the unit’s early days, the NYPD assured the monitor that it would not do many stops. Only later, the monitor noted in a report last year, it discovered the team was “frequently” doing them.
In 2025, the CRT recorded 1,400 stop-and-frisks, according to data from the monitor and the NYPD. More than 900 were not properly reviewed.
Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit was originally published by ProPublica and is republished with permission.
Our country and our politics are at an impasse. Just consider our past four presidents: Obama, Trump, Biden, and back to Trump. The country keeps swinging from one end of the political spectrum to the other with no clear, sustained direction.
Which begs the question: what’s the breakthrough we need to get us out of this impasse and moving in a more hopeful way—together?
Let’s be clear. We must address what’s at the heart of our current dilemma: a crisis of belief—in our institutions, leaders, news media, even in one another. As I work in communities across the country, people are hungry for an alternative path forward, one that enables us to get things done together—not as Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, but as Americans.
Of course, politics is important and necessary. But it is defined by winning at any cost when Americans yearn to come together.
Indeed, more politics can’t get us beyond this impasse. We need something fundamentally different: a civic response. One that calls us to our better selves. Helps us to revive basic underpinnings we’ve lost sight of in society, like belonging, connection, decency, and dignity for all. Offers a sense of possibility and hope. And provides a practical path forward. Only a civic response can restore our belief in one another and our nation.
As to why, we might simply look at our history. Indeed, a number of commentators have compared our current moment to the late 1970s, including the New York Times writer E.J. Dionne in a recent piece.
Political gridlock. A crisis in Iran. Economic stagnation. Widespread distrust in institutions. The parallels are many.
Back then, President Jimmy Carter captured the prevailing mood in his famous “malaise” speech, which came at the end of a 10-day, nationwide listening tour. What he heard bears an eerie resemblance to what I hear Americans saying nearly 50 years later. Here’s just a taste:
Carter concluded, “After listening to the American people, I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.” About this, he was right.
Yet Carter was off in two key ways, which we should keep in mind today. First, he focused incessantly on what was wrong rather than the inherent sense of possibility Americans sought. Second, for all his listening and analysis, his solutions were largely stuck in politics.
As this year’s midterms loom ever closer, and the 2028 presidential race starts to heat up, we’re once again hearing that the only way to solve society’s problems is “more politics,” or “different politics,” or “better politics.” As much as we need to change our politics, they can’t save us.
We need a path forward that is practical, unifying, and transcends political divides. A new civic path. I see this at work every day.
Take Alamance County, NC, one of the most divided communities where I’ve worked across nearly four decades. In just a few short years, they built a new community-based system for transitioning people out of the criminal justice system back into society and unleashed numerous other chain reactions of change in youth wellness, the arts, and other areas.
Or consider two rural counties in Jim Jordan’s Ohio congressional district where I’ve been working. People there have stepped forward to tackle issues of youth, senior care, mental health, homelessness, and addiction by centering people’s shared aspiration for belonging in all of their work.
I have plenty more examples, but here’s the point: This new civic path isn’t a call to simply bridge our divides. Talk alone won’t get us anywhere. We need to build together in our local communities.
As we do this, we can move toward something larger for ourselves and the country—a sense that we are on a common mission to create a better country rooted in a can-do spirit.
Right now, more politics will only yield a deeper impasse. But a new civic path can provide the breakthrough we need.
Rich Harwood is the president and founder of The Harwood Institute.
National Park Service budget cuts are reshaping America’s public lands through underfunding and neglect. Explore how declining park staffing, deferred maintenance, and political inaction threaten national parks, local economies, and public trust in government.
This summer, before dawn, the Liu family from Buffalo will load up their SUV, coffee in hand, bound for a long-planned trip out west. The Grand Canyon has been on their list for years, something to do before the kids get too old and schedules get too tight. They expect crowds. They expect long lines at the entrance. That is part of the deal. In recent years, national parks have drawn more than 325 million visits annually, near record highs.
What they do not expect are shuttered visitor centers and closed trails, not because of weather but because there are not enough staff to maintain them. What they do not see is the budget decision in Washington that made those trade-offs, quietly, indirectly, and without much debate.
The cuts to the National Park Service may look like another line item in a sprawling federal budget. They reveal something deeper about how the country is now governed. Increasingly, public institutions are not dismantled outright. They are allowed to thin out, with fewer resources, less capacity, and lower expectations, until decline begins to feel normal.
This is governing by neglect. Rather than make explicit arguments against shared national resources like our national parks, policymakers sidestep the fight. Congress fails to provide clear direction or sustained investment, and the executive branch makes discretionary decisions about what gets funded, delayed, or scaled back. The result is not a dramatic shift but a steady erosion that shifts costs onto families, especially middle-class and lower-income households, weakens public trust, and leaves institutions with less capacity than they once had.
The erosion of the National Park Service is not the result of a single vote. It often unfolds through quieter mechanisms: continuing resolutions, vague appropriations, and the absence of sustained congressional direction. Instead of passing detailed budgets that specify how funds should be used, Congress relies on stopgap measures that keep funding levels nominally stable while leaving key decisions unresolved. Over the past decade, Congress has passed continuing resolutions in most fiscal years, normalizing short-term budgeting.
That ambiguity matters. When funding lacks specificity, the executive branch gains discretion over how resources are used in practice. Agencies can delay hiring, defer maintenance, or scale back services without formally announcing a cut. The public experiences the consequences, but the policy choice is obscured. The result is a system that rewards inaction. Visible cuts carry political risk; slow decline does not.
In this environment, neglect becomes a governing strategy. It avoids backlash that would come with openly targeting popular institutions like national parks. No one campaigns on closing trails or reducing ranger presence. Yet underfunding produces similar outcomes over time, with fewer services, reduced access, and a gradual decline in quality that is easy to attribute to circumstance rather than policy.
The result is a shift in how these shared resources are managed. Instead of clear legislative priorities backed by stable funding, institutions absorb uncertainty. As that uncertainty compounds, even well-functioning systems begin to look strained or inefficient, conditions that can then be used to justify further retrenchment.
Neglect has one decisive advantage: it is hard to see and even harder to assign blame. Closing a park outright would provoke immediate backlash. Letting it deteriorate, with fewer rangers, longer lines, and reduced hours, rarely does. The experience worsens, but the cause is diffuse.
For lawmakers, this ambiguity is useful. There is no single vote to point to, no clear moment when access was reduced. Funding levels can be defended as stable, even as real capacity declines. Responsibility is spread across committees, agencies, and fiscal cycles, allowing elected officials to claim credit for keeping parks open while avoiding accountability for their gradual erosion.
For the executive branch, discretion fills the gap. When Congress provides limited guidance, agencies make trade-offs behind the scenes, deciding what to staff, what to defer, and what to close temporarily. These choices are framed as operational necessity rather than policy, which further obscures their political origins.
The strain is already visible. The National Park Service has lost roughly 15 to 20 percent of its workforce over the past decade, even as annual visits exceed 325 million. Deferred maintenance has grown past $20 billion. Fewer staff are managing more visitors across an aging infrastructure. The effects show up in everyday ways: shorter hours, closed trails, and parks pushed beyond their limits.
In practice, this approach has become a governing strategy for many Republicans: reducing the size and scope of government without openly cutting programs that remain broadly popular. This pattern is visible in repeated budget proposals that reduce funding for agencies like the National Park Service while avoiding direct votes to eliminate services, allowing capacity to shrink without a clear moment of accountability. Rather than vote to end programs outright, policymakers allow funding and capacity to erode, producing similar outcomes with far less political cost. Institutions are not dismantled; they are allowed to fade, one budget cycle at a time. As the Talking Heads song “Nothing But Flowers” suggests, the hope is that as things fall apart, no one pays attention.
It is easy to see these changes as a problem for vacationers. But the effects reach much further. National parks are not just destinations; they are part of a broader public infrastructure that supports local economies, preserves national heritage, and reflects a shared commitment to collective investment.
Gateway communities depend on park traffic for jobs and revenue. National parks generate tens of billions of dollars annually in visitor spending and support hundreds of thousands of jobs in surrounding regions. When services are reduced, and visitor experiences decline, those local economies feel it quickly, in fewer bookings, shorter stays, and lost income for small businesses. What looks like a budget decision in Washington becomes a pay cut in towns that rely on seasonal tourism.
There is also a quieter loss. National parks are one of the clearest examples of what government can do well: protect common resources, make them accessible, and sustain them over time. When that capacity erodes, public expectations change. Surveys consistently show national parks among the most trusted federal programs, which makes visible strain especially consequential. If even the park system feels unreliable, it reinforces the idea that the government cannot manage complex responsibilities effectively.
That shift matters. As confidence declines, calls for further cuts become easier to make, not because the public has rejected these shared resources, but because weakened performance makes them seem less worth preserving. Underinvestment becomes its own justification, extending far beyond the parks themselves.
When the Liu family arrives at the Grand Canyon, the view will still be there. The scale, the silence, the sense of something enduring. Those do not easily diminish. But the experience around it may feel different. Fewer rangers to guide them, longer waits, and parts of the park just a little less accessible than they should be.
That difference is easy to overlook. It does not announce itself as a policy failure or a political choice. It feels like an inconvenience, like bad timing, like the cost of popularity. But it is something else: the visible edge of a deeper shift in how the country governs its shared resources.
Governing by neglect does not require dramatic decisions. It works slowly, through underinvestment and ambiguity, until decline begins to feel normal. The danger is not only what is lost in places like the national parks. It is what that loss teaches us to accept.
If even the most widely supported institutions can thin out without clear debate or accountability, the same pattern can extend elsewhere. What begins in the parks does not stay there. It becomes a model for how public life is managed, quietly and incrementally, with fewer expectations of what government should provide.
The question is not whether Americans value their national parks. They do. The question is whether the political system still has the capacity, or the will, to sustain them.
Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.
“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something.”John Lewis's words echo across this moment in American life because the responsibility he described no longer rests with parties or politicians. It rests with the people themselves.
Recently, a nurse shared a choice no family should have to make: pay for a needed surgery or replace the failing roof over their heads. That is not just a personal crisis. It is a civic one— a sign of what happens when institutions stop working for the people they were built to serve.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the framers made a wager— not on presidents or parties, but on the people. They argued fiercely, yet built a Constitution rooted in one idea: power must remain with the people, and government exists only by their consent. That principle carried the nation through war, depression, corruption, and conflict because, in every crisis, the people stepped in to correct what institutions alone could not.
The framers believed the people would be the final safeguard when institutions failed. History proves they were right. From colonists resisting British overreach to Frederick Douglass demanding that the nation honor its ideals to the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., change came not from the top down, but from people who acted when government would not. This is why only the people can save the Republic: every safeguard the framers built ultimately depends on them.
As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches, the question is not what the Constitution says. The question is whether the people will still enforce it— and whether they will use their vote, judgment, and voice to preserve the Republic.
Across the country, Americans feel the strain. In red, blue, and purple states, people work harder while falling behind. Costs rise while wages fail to keep pace. Many watch billionaires receive tax advantages while working families feel squeezed.
People continue to share stories of struggle and feeling unheard. A friend on the East Coast captured their frustration best: if the government will not help, what are people supposed to do, and how long are they supposed to wait?
It is the right question. Because if people are waiting for the government alone to fix what they are living through, they may be waiting a long time. The framers never intended for them to wait. They intended for them to act.
Trust has eroded across institutions that once anchored the Republic. Confidence in Congress, the courts, and national leadership has fallen to historic lows. This is not confined to one party. Americans are signaling the same thing: something is not working.
Many Americans feel that when they fight for their own freedoms, new obstacles are placed in their way. Voting- rights battles, redistricting fights, and political retaliation dominate the headlines. And millions watched the Supreme Court's recent voting‑rights decision and saw weakened protections, not strengthened ones.
Across states like Virginia, Tennessee, and Louisiana, rulings and political maneuvers have left people feeling that their voices are being narrowed rather than strengthened. These moments deepen the belief that institutions meant to protect are instead working against them — which is why the vote remains powerful, and why millions may feel compelled to vote beyond party lines to safeguard the Republic.
These moments deepen the belief that institutions meant to protect the people are instead working against them — which is why only the people can save the Republic. And when leaders fail to honor their oaths or protect rights, the framers left one safeguard: the people themselves.
Americans know the First Amendment protects free speech, a free press, and the right to challenge power. Yet many now fear that those protections are weakening.
People see the distance between promise and performance widening—on healthcare, costs, and transparency—and many feel misled and unprotected. What matters now is what people choose to do next. The framers did not design a system in which citizens follow; they designed one in which citizens act.
The people must save the Republic the same way they always have—by acting, not waiting. But their independence is under pressure. Voters are constantly told who to support and how to think by parties, media figures, and movements demanding loyalty. A vote is not loyalty. It is judgment. It belongs to the individual. No president, party, or movement has the right to claim it.
When people surrender their independence—when they vote out of habit, fear, or pressure rather than through evaluation—they weaken the system meant to protect them. And the more people speak independently, the more some leaders try to contain those voices. Many Americans now believe safeguarding the Republic will require collective action, not silence.
Division—especially around race, identity, and party—continues to pull Americans apart when unity is most needed. Division weakens people. And when people are divided, power shifts toward those who benefit from the chaos.
The Constitution begins with three words: “We the People.” Not we, the parties. Not we, the politicians. Not we, the donors. The people. The Republic’s future does not depend on whether leaders change. It depends on whether people reclaim their role as decision makers. It will take all of us, across red, blue, and purple America, acting together as one people to defend the Republic.
Americans still hold the most powerful tool the framers gave them: the ability to choose who represents them— and to remove those who do not. That power is practical. But it only works when it is used.
That means action— not later, but now.
Check voter registration early. Secure any required documentation to vote. No eligible voter should be turned away because they lacked identification that could have been obtained months earlier.
Vote in the primaries, because that is where choices are narrowed. If people want different candidates in November, they must participate before Election Day.
Research candidates. Review your representatives’ voting records. Those records reveal who they serve and whether they deserve another term.
Refuse to let any leader— no matter how persuasive— decide your vote for you. Any leader demanding loyalty without results is not strengthening democracy; they are exploiting it.
There will always be money in politics. There will always be influence, messaging, and competing agendas. But money cannot vote. People do. Wealth can shape the conversation, but it cannot outnumber the public.
No institution corrects itself without pressure. No leader surrenders power without consequence. Change has never come from the top down. It has always come when people decide to act.
“Democracy is not a state. It is an act,” Lewis reminded us. And that act belongs to the people.
Americans continue to share stories of struggle and frustration. They are not asking for perfection. They are asking to matter again in the decisions that shape their lives.
That is where the future of this Republic will be decided. Not in speeches. Not in platforms. Not in promises. But in whether the people— those carrying these burdens and living these realities— choose to act.
The framers’ wager has not expired. It is being tested again in every household choosing between necessities, in every voter deciding whether to think independently, and in every citizen who still believes this Republic is worth saving. When institutions fail, the people remain the final safeguard.
And the future of this nation will not be decided by parties or politicians. It will be decided by people who refuse to remain silent, reclaim their power, and act.
Only the people can save this Republic— not the parties, not the politicians.
Carolyn Goode is a retired educational leader and national advocate for ethical leadership and civic renewal. She writes about democracy, constitutional responsibility, and the role of citizens in strengthening public life.
Some MAGA loyalists have turned on Trump. Why the rest haven’t