This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 5, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When local governments attempt to make progress in some area of policy,

like criminal justice, state governments sometimes preempt those

local governments by prohibiting that behavior. Rachel Barco is a professor of

law at NYU School of Law and author of prisonersers and Politics, breaking the cycle of mass incarceration.

We talked about preemption and what that means for criminal justice reform.

In the past year, I'm speaking to you from just outside of Louisville, Kentucky, my hometown for many years, and we've watched the Brianna Taylor case come and go and all of the twists and turns associated with that and of course I'm sure

Minneapolis has had a similar experience that I haven't followed quite as

closely but how do cities react when the demand is very strong for some sort of criminal justice reform and the capital far away isn't interested in acting?

What real flexibility do cities have to engage in reform?

It depends. It depends on whether they think they'll get pushback from the state.

It depends whether they think there's enough local appetite to do things.

So we're seeing a variety of responses to things from pretty big efforts to lower the funding that's

given to a local police department to trying to get the

state to pass broader reforms that would apply statewide to policing practices.

So it's really a range of things but you know I think what we're starting to see now is some

tension between local communities that want to go further in defunding their police in shifting budgets to

social services and state-level actors who don't want to see that happen and at

the end of the day that the state is probably going to win those

battles. Just to give you a reasonably local example, the city of Louisville essentially ended the use of

no-knock warrants even though these warrants don't appear to be all

...