When it comes to policing and violence, Ronal Serpas has what might seem like an odd suggestion: Wind the clock back 50 years.

As heated as the public debate around policing is today, years of social unrest had the United States in a similar place in the 1960s. In response, President Lyndon Johnson set up a commission to explore the problems and propose solutions.

His Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, however, looked far beyond policing. It not only resulted in the 911 system and the first-ever crime victimization survey, but it also examined police, prosecution, defense, the courts, and corrections.

Looking at today, “I hoped this would be a bellwether time, when we sat down and had a long think about what we should do as a country,” says Mr. Serpas, a former police chief in New Orleans and Nashville who now teaches criminology at Loyola University New Orleans.

But “we haven’t done that since Johnson,” he adds. “That’s the kind of change we need to think about. Global, large-scale change.”

Not long ago, the push for police reform focused largely on incremental change such as pushing for body-worn cameras and improved training in de-escalation and implicit bias. But the year since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer has changed that. Even with last summer’s push to “defund the police” faltering, reformers have raised their sights.

Amid some signs of progress, activists are less willing to settle, feeling that the way forward is no longer in small steps, but in fundamentally readjusting the balance between police and the communities they serve.

“Police don’t take back communities. Communities take back communities,” says Dominique Alexander of the Next Generation Action Network in Dallas. “That’s not anti-police.”

Bill Haber/AP/FILE

Former New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas, shown at a news conference in May 2013, says he would like the United States to engage in the kind of soul-searching on police reform last seen 50 years ago.

Signs of progress

Mr. Alexander says his views around how policing should be reformed have evolved over the years – but never more so than in this past year. Like many activists, he says his goal is not to “defund” the police but to “fund communities.”

He references a Donald Trump campaign ad from last year depicting a 911 call going to voicemail “due to defunding of the police department.”

“Nobody clapped back on that,” he says. “That type of fearmongering tactic is what has historically been used in this country.”

He’s encouraged by developments during the past year, including Dallas creating a civilian office overseeing police and an Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions, even if they have flaws. And he says the post-George Floyd activism has played a crucial role.

“Those are awesome things, things that are monumental, things that we couldn’t do before,” he says.

Indeed, by some measures, policing has improved in recent years.

Police contacts with the public decreased from 2011 to 2015, with police contacts with Black people nearing the number with white people, according to the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ). Similarly, the disparity between Black and white arrest rates has narrowed over recent decades, particularly for drug offenses, CCJ found.

“That suggests that something has changed in policing. That’s police behavior,” says Nancy La Vigne, executive director of the CCJ Task Force on Policing.

“There has been progress,” she adds. “It’s just not fast enough for many of us.”

18,000

A major challenge for reform is the localized nature of the profession. There are more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S., and about 13,000 of those agencies have fewer than 25 full-time sworn officers, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. When states or cities adopt new policies or reforms – as they have been at a significant rate in recent years – it still falls on the individual agencies to implement and enforce those changes.

The Minneapolis Police Department, for example, adopted a “duty to intervene” policy in 2016 requiring officers to step in when they think a fellow officer is using unjustified force. Yet last summer, three officers stood by as Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of a restrained Mr. Floyd for over nine minutes.

“You can’t pass all those reforms and not address some of the underlying issues that prevent those reforms having their intended impact,” says Dr. La Vigne.

“Each agency has its own culture that needs to be transformed,” she adds. “It’s a huge challenge.”

In the meantime, U.S. police have killed an average of 1,000 people a year since 2015, according to The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning compilation of data. That number is far greater than in other developed countries. For example, in 2019, U.S. police killed 1,099 people. By comparison, Canadian police killed 21 people that year. In England and Wales, three people died in incidents with police.

Laurie Robinson hoped to be part of a U.S. transformation when she helped lead President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing in early 2015. It was six months of work crammed into two months, she says, and final recommendations centered around things like use-of-force policies, de-escalation training, and crisis intervention.

“It was very focused on what changes could be made within police departments by police departments,” says Professor Robinson, a criminologist at George Mason University.

The report didn’t give much attention to accountability measures that can play a big role in changing the culture and behavior of an agency. For example, qualified immunity shields most police officers from personal liability when they use excessive force.

But now there’s “tremendous attention in that area,” says Professor Robinson. She also points to “interesting experimentation” around the country on the subject of having someone besides police respond to low-level calls involving issues like mental illness and substance abuse.

“We have to sort out what needs to be done and who needs to do it. And then hold people accountable for doing it well,” she adds.

“Punishment to care”

Sara Mokuria, a co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality, has been doing some sorting of her own.

LM Otero/AP/File

Sara Mokuria wears a "Defund DPD" mask while putting up a banner before a protest in Dallas, June 19, 2020. She became an activist at age 9, after her father was killed in front of her by police.

Over the years, she says, “my understanding of justice, and my understanding of healing, and my understanding of what solutions are have shifted and changed.”

For a long time, “I thought [only] about how to make [police] less harmful,” she says. But now “there is a possibility to make them obsolete.”

Ms. Mokuria became an activist on a Wednesday night in 1992, after police killed her father in front of her.

Amid a mental health crisis, he had been threatening her mother, Vicki, with a kitchen knife. She called the police, but she was able to get the knife off him and was about to take him on a walk around the neighborhood when the police arrived. He picked up the knife again, and moments later two Dallas police officers had shot him dead.

“He didn’t have to die,” Ms. Mokuria’s mother told The Dallas Morning News the next day. “It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Ms. Mokuria’s immediate thought, as a 9-year-old, was to become a lawyer and put the cops in jail. She wanted to use the system that had killed her father to punish the officers.

In 2013, she helped found Mothers Against Police Brutality, a group that advocates for the families of victims of police violence. And after watching a series of police officers in the Dallas area get prosecuted, and convicted, for killing civilians in recent years, she’s only become more convinced that other solutions, broader changes, are needed.

Whether an officer is convicted or not convicted, and how long a sentence they get, “your loved one is still dead, and the system that killed them is still in place,” she says.

“Healing isn’t attached” to that, she adds. “We want to move from punishment to care.”

Re-imagining the role of police

Such large-scale change is what activists in Dallas, and around the country, are now calling for. They want more oversight of, and accountability for, police from the public and the courts. They want the root causes of crime addressed with social services, not handcuffs. They want America’s use of police to change fundamentally.

But reform advocates are calling for these sweeping changes at a fraught time. Violent crime has been spiking in cities around the country, and policing has never been as politicized as it is now. The us-versus-them narrative being used around police and reform activists, says Mr. Alexander, “is leading towards a major despair.”

Policing has improved in some respects thanks to reforms that Ms. Mokuria and others have pushed for, but it hasn’t been enough, she says. Reforms like those outlined by the 21st Century Policing task force may never be enough. But the fact that more people are coming to that realization feels like progress to some.

“A different understanding of what the role of police are, and the ability for those reforms to change the dynamics, is more widespread,” Ms. Mokuria says. “I didn’t believe that some of what’s happening now could be possible.”

Capital University Law School

Bradley A. Smith, professor of law at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio, served as chairman of the Federal Election Commission. He says declining trust in elections is a serious threat to U.S. democracy.

Bradley A. Smith is a professor of law at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio. An authority on election law and campaign finance, he is a co-author of the casebook “Voting Rights and Election Law” and author of “Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform.”

Between 2000 and 2005, he served as commissioner, vice chairman, and then chairman of the Federal Election Commission, in a seat designated for a Republican. (By law, no more than three of the FEC’s six commissioners can represent one political party.) 

Mr. Smith believes that declining trust in elections is a threat to the nation’s democracy. He says that Democrats are to some extent to blame for this decline, as well as Republicans, and that the problem is so broad and deep that it is unlikely to disappear if former President Donald Trump fades from the political scene.

On the subject of voting rights, Mr. Smith says that casting a ballot in the United States should not be hard, but that it is not necessarily a problem if it causes voters some inconvenience – as long as that inconvenience is not targeted at any particular group.

“It’s not the worst thing in the world to stand in line next to your fellow citizens and think for a minute and look at them before you go in the voting booth,” he says.

This interview is the third installment in a periodic series of conversations with a range of thinkers and workers in the field of democracy, looking at what’s wrong with it, what’s right, and what we can do in the U.S. to strengthen it. The transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

You’ve talked about a loss of faith in elections being a dominant problem in American democracy. Can you expound on that a little bit?

If people don’t have faith in the election results, then you’re pretty much not going to have a democracy. The entire democracy relies on people accepting the results, and then also accepting defeat.

And the point that I have tried to stress – which you know, I get some flak on – is that this is not just a Republican problem. This is a bipartisan problem. It involves Democrats, too.

The reason I think it’s important to make that point is because people think, oh well, this will just go away, or it’s just because of what is called the “big lie” [Mr. Trump’s false claim the election was stolen]. I think it’s a deeper and broader problem. 

How are Democrats involved in this?

It comes in several forms. For example, we’ve seen it in the form of formal objections [in Congress] to the electoral vote count in the last three Republican presidential wins: 2000, 2004, and 2016. 

We see it in polling data of the rank and file of the party. There’s a great deal of polling data that shows the Democratic base is equally skeptical of elections.

For example, one [October 2020 survey] showed that the percentage of Republicans who thought that the election would be stolen by fraudulent mail balloting was very high, somewhere in the 60s. But it was basically identical to the percentage of Democrats who thought the election would be stolen by shenanigans in the Postal Service, that they would refuse to deliver ballots or to return completed ballots.

On the Republican side, it extends down to the rank and file in part because of comments made by leaders at the top. On the Democratic side, I’ve cited comments by Hillary Clinton to the effect that the election was stolen from her. Stacey Abrams continues to make those kinds of claims in Georgia [after losing the 2018 gubernatorial election]. And she’s like a rock star on the Democratic circuit.

Now we’re sitting here, we’re looking at Trump losing and making these comments. And a lot of Republicans believe in this information. But I could just as easily see a scenario where the shoe is simply on the other foot, including as early as a Republican victory in 2024.

But Mrs. Clinton accepted the results of the election. Mr. Trump has not, and has gone very far in that regard. Are these attitudes really equivalent?

No, I don’t think they are exactly equivalent. One of the things I stress is this isn’t an exercise in “whataboutism” or anything. Rather, it’s an attempt to diagnose the scope of a problem in the United States. 

Trump has gone further. Obviously, the events of Jan. 6 went further still.

But all these things are matters of degree. The concern here is deeper. 

I think you’ve also said a lot of the election legislation we’re seeing right now, both in Congress and in the states, is not really aimed at fixing our main problems. Why do you believe that?

I think the big problem here is that we have these dueling narratives. One is that there’s this tremendous amount of fraud in American elections, and the other is that there’s this tremendous vote suppression going on in America. And I think both of those narratives, to put it very bluntly, have almost no grounding in reality.

As a result, I don’t think [current bills] are likely to resolve the problem either way, and they become just part of the ongoing war. The parties, I think, both use what some people know are hysterical claims to gin up their own bases. 

One of the things that you need in election law in particular is a tremendous amount of stability. Because that’s what gives people confidence that we know how the election system works. The rules have been in place for a while. They weren’t made for this election to favor this party or that party. We’ve gotten away from that, and I think that’s a real problem.

That is, by the way, one of the things that I think gives former President Trump’s claims some credence to a lot of people. He says, there was fraud, fraud, fraud. There’s a lot of things I try to convince people were not fraud. They’re not fraud. They weren’t illegal. But they were sort of changing the rules late in the game.

When you have some secretaries of state, like the secretary of state of Michigan, doing things that seem to probably go beyond her authority – mailing out absentee [ballot applications] to everybody – that’s problematic. Even if the courts there uphold that.

Or when you have like in Pennsylvania, where the Pennsylvania Supreme Court made a decision based on the state constitution to allow [mail-in] votes to come in later than the prescribed statutory time.  

It doesn’t make the votes that are cast that way fraudulent. But it does make people suspicious of what’s going on. 

The funny thing is, I think it’s very doubtful that the changes that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered made a difference in who won Pennsylvania. But it’s the kind of thing that gives people a sense that they were cheated out of the election. And once you think you’re kind of cheated in a broad colloquial sense, it’s a very easy step to think you were cheated in a formal, “they committed fraud” sense.

Obviously, a lot of the stuff you’re talking about was done in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the name of safety. That doesn’t excuse it, in your view?

I don’t think a lot of the people who made these changes were trying to behave badly. They thought they were trying to make sure everybody could vote. But I remember Lou Rukeyser, the guy who starred in the old PBS “Wall Street Week” show. When the market would go bad, he would say, “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

I don’t think there was really all that much evidence that a lot of these changes needed to be made for the pandemic. There was sort of this immediate, oh we have to do this, without stopping to really say, well, do we have to do this? Do we have to do all of these things?

And if you change the rules at the last minute, it sows actual confusion. It also sows some distrust.

It’s never been easier to vote in the United States than it is today. That’s the fact, for all the talk of the president about Jim Crow and so on. And that’s irresponsible talk; it’s the kind of thing that builds this up.

Has it really “never been easier to vote”?

Not that long ago, we didn’t have early voting. Provisional ballots are generally a pretty new thing. Literally no state had no-excuse absentee voting until 1980, when California adopted it.

I think voting should be easy, but I don’t think the sole end of election law is to make voting as convenient and easy as possible. I catch a lot of flak for this, too.

I don’t think voting should be hard, but I don’t think it’s a problem if people are inconvenienced to vote, as long as there’s not strong evidence that the inconvenience is targeted, that we’re trying to make sure some people can’t vote.

The average voting time in the United States is about 20 minutes. And people stand in line much longer to go to Disney World and so on. I suspect it’s not the worst thing in the world to stand in line next to your fellow citizens and think for a minute and look at them before you go in the voting booth.

The stories I hear, “Oh, I stood in line five hours.” Well, when were the five-hour lines in Georgia? It was on the first day of early voting because all these people rushed out to vote. In early voting, you don’t have a lot of machines and so forth. It’s like we’re almost defeating ourselves. We’re running in circles.

I personally don’t favor no-fault absentee voting. I favor what we might call “easy excuse” absentee voting. The presumption should be you vote on Election Day. Everybody has the same amount of information, knows the same things about the candidates, and we realize that’s the day we come together to govern ourselves. I think there are some real civic benefits to thinking about voting in that way, rather than thinking merely how do we make it as convenient as possible for people to vote. This is not supposed to be like ordering some takeout. I think it’s a more serious thing than that.

To be clear, you’re not in favor of things that would have a disproportionate effect on any racial group, or other defined group of voters?

Right. And you know of course, that’s one of the problems, is almost everything you do can be found to have some impact on some group of people more than others. But I just think we need to think about it. I don’t think we should have five or six weeks of early voting. But similarly, on some of the things Republicans push, I’m agnostic on things like voter ID. I don’t think there’s much evidence it suppresses turnout. I don’t think there’s much evidence it prevents fraud. People like it, though; it gives them a sense of order in an election.

Won’t the many state election bills sponsored by Republicans cause opponents to lose faith in the integrity of upcoming elections? Kind of the flip side of what you’ve said happened due to changes made by secretaries of state and so forth prior to 2020?

I think when you look at the bills in Texas and Georgia, when you look at them really closely, what actually came out of the state legislative processes in both of these states are really pretty good bills. In many ways they make it easier to vote, take a balanced approach. [Note: The Texas bill passed the state Senate, but the House has been unable to reach quorum since Democratic lawmakers fled the state in an effort to stymie the bill’s passage during a special session this summer.]

Now you take a look at a lot of the bills that were introduced and didn’t go anywhere, in those states and elsewhere – well a lot of them were really extreme. I think really bad.

And if you listen to the rhetoric, you can begin to think these bills really suppress the vote. But I just don’t think they do. Like one thing several states have done is to require absentee ballots to be received a little bit earlier, like nine days before the election instead of five, or something like that.

You remember that one of the big problems some states had – we had this problem here in Ohio – was that the deadline for applying for an absentee ballot was so late that you couldn’t count on getting the absentee ballots out and getting them back in time, even if the voter filled it out the day they got it. So the change isn’t necessarily a bad idea.

To me, my ideal system would be you have absentee balloting, and you have just a couple of days of early voting for people who find out fairly late in the game that they won’t be able to vote on Election Day. But you get into some of these critiques of that kind of change as being voter suppression. I think people are hyping it up for various partisan reasons.

Note: This story has been updated to clarify that Michigan’s secretary of state mailed out absentee ballot applications to all voters.

Dire headlines out of Haiti punctuate the decades since the 1986 fall of the Duvalier family dictatorships: several coups, violent civil unrest, failed elections, apocalyptic natural disasters, and – on July 7 – the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. And always, lament Haitians, the media shorthand the Caribbean nation as “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” Here’s a brief on the complicated factors behind that dark moniker. 

Is there more to the “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere”?

Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, is only a two-hour flight from Miami. Yet the standard of living is far below that of the United States. Less than half of the people have electricity, only 55.4% of rural inhabitants have safe drinking water, and more than half the population lives on less than $2.41 per day, according to the CIA World Factbook and World Bank. 

“[But] Haiti has a very proud history as the second independent nation in the hemisphere and the first and only nation where slaves rose up to overthrow their masters,” says Robert Maguire, a Haiti expert and retired professor at George Washington University.

Africans enslaved in the French colony launched a rebellion in 1791, beating Napoleon’s army. They formally declared independence from France in 1804.

Haiti’s first constitution, written in 1801, stated outright “servitude is therein forever abolished.” It included fundamental rights for all men, regardless of race, that other nations would not adopt until the next century.

Dieu Nalio Chery/AP/File

Haitian students celebrate the 216th anniversary of their national flag in Port-au-Prince in May 2019. The flag was inspired by the French tricolor.

Is Haiti to blame for its challenges? 

Despite Haiti’s proud launch as a nation, the Western world – part of the global economy that still profited from slavery – wasn’t ready to cooperate with the new country. France, the U.S., and Britain refused diplomatic recognition, depriving Haiti of a market for its coffee and sugar exports. 

“Haiti was singled out for punishment ... as a bad example for the rest of the world,” says Mr. Maguire.

Finally relenting, but for a price, France in 1825 demanded an indemnity of 150,000 francs, today’s equivalent of more than $21 billion, says Jean Eddy Saint Paul, founder of the Haitian Studies Institute at the City University of New York. “That money that Haiti paid for the recognition of independence opened the international debt of Haiti.” And, he adds, that debt drained the country of funds needed for foundational infrastructure and investment.

After a hundred years of foreign isolation, the 20th century brought foreign intervention. When the Haitian president was assassinated in 1915, the U.S. invaded and occupied the nation for 19 years, installing leaders and constitutional changes without popular vote. U.S. intervention in Haiti had mixed effects: The U.S. supported the brutal, three-decade dictatorship of the Duvaliers and encouraged foreign investment in export manufacturing. After a popular uprising in 1986 ended Duvalier rule, the U.S. and other nations helped launch Haiti’s first democratic election in 1990. The result was a decisive 67% victory for the populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 

But a democratic vote does not make a democracy: The military overthrew Mr. Aristide within a year, and the U.S. reinstalled him in 1994. Haiti has struggled to gain democratic footing since then, but U.S. and United Nations intervention did little to check political instability, corruption, and the economic devastation of a series of natural disasters.

Mr. Moïse’s presidency was troubled: He failed to instate the legislative check of a new parliament and he ruled past Feb. 7, 2021, which many cited as the end of his five-year term. A group of U.S. human rights clinics issued a statement warning of deteriorating human rights conditions, and Haitian civil society leaders testified before U.S. legislators explaining Mr. Moïse’s consolidation of power. 

“The U.S. should recognize the situation in Haiti today as a struggle by the Haitian people to take ownership of their government and build democracy, not simply a fight between politicians for power,” said Emmanuela Douyon, a Haitian activist, in her testimony.

What is the path forward? 

Breaking patterns of foreign intervention and rule by elites disconnected from the masses – what Mr. Maguire terms the “carousel of failure” – requires tipping the balance of power toward civil society actors who’ve long protested corruption, gangs, and inequality. 

“[Those in power] have legitimacy because they are able to shake the hand of the U.S. ambassador or U.N. representative. That is the only thing that gives the current standing government power. Nothing else. It is not being held by any kind of popular support,” says Mamyrah Prosper, a Haitian professor of international studies at the University of California, Irvine. Leaders are then accountable to foreign powers rather than to their own people, she says.  

The answer, say many, is to let Haitians control their own electoral process. Already, a Commission for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis, representing hundreds of civil society organizations, has plans for what a Haitian-led solution entails.

As when the Duvalier regime collapsed in 1986, says Ms. Prosper, this moment is another “that Haitians are looking to be able to set a new tone for what kind of country that they want.”

David Goldman/AP

Journalists work between plastic barriers in the main press center at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. "This year," Monitor reporter Noah Robertson writes, "covering the Olympics has itself been a sport."

I gave up organized sports after high school, which made it all the more comical, and flattering, when my pre-Olympics COVID-19 tester asked me in what event I was competing at the Games.  

Laughing, I corrected her mistake, telling her I was only going as a journalist. But if I was just a bit taller and skinnier I might make it into the pole vault – as the pole. 

It was only when I arrived in Tokyo days later that I learned she had been on to something. 

This year, covering the Olympics has itself been a sport. I am no athlete, but for two weeks I have been competing, at times, against thousands of journalists, a nonstop schedule, and a slew of safety protocols. 

A mask and lanyard is my uniform. Reporters’ rules come in a so-called playbook. My editors are my coaches. Winning is enduring the abundance of red tape on the path to each event, where I get to watch some of the world’s best athletes (the real ones) perform feats physically impossible for the viewing public. It’s a worthy prize, but a challenging one for this first-time Olympics reporter.

A growing history geek, I entered Tokyo on a red-eye flight from Chicago, with Howard Zinn’s 700-page “People’s History of the United States” and a manila folder nearly as thick, containing documents required by the Japanese government. Immediately, a seemingly endless series of volunteers ushered me through a series of seemingly endless checkpoints. 

Each one required a different combination of my papers. COVID-19 test, passport, activity plan. Activity plan, health card, press credentials. QR code, customs form, passport. ... It was a game of Twister for the fingers.

Having fumbled my documents – and lived up to my high-school nickname of “No Hands Noah” – I made it through the labyrinthine airport and, after many mishaps, to my new home: a shoebox-sized hotel room.

“Is there a closet?” my mother asked when I told her I arrived.

“It is a closet,” I responded.   

Andrew Boyers/Reuters

General view of the Tokyo Big Sight convention center, the Main Press Centre at the Tokyo Games, where the Monitor's reporter began to learn "the rules of the game" for journalists.

When I emerged from the required three-day quarantine, a vampiric stranger to the sun, I spent breakfast deciphering the bus schedule. Media aren’t allowed to take public transportation for the first 14 days in Tokyo. In its place, we must either travel via taxi or an elaborate bus system, with ever-changing schedules that are written in a foreign language – not Japanese but bureaucracy. 

Boarding a bus, I crossed my fingers. In an hour, after one connection, it deposited me at the Main Press Centre, a building as impressive as it is confusing: four pyramids arranged in a square, upside down. 

Fittingly, it’s where my Tokyo experience turned around. There I learned that covering the Olympics may be a competition, but it’s a team sport.

It started as I entered the building, a multistep process at every venue in Tokyo.

1. Sanitize hands.
2. Pull down your mask while scanning your card on a machine that immediately takes the least-flattering photo of your life.
3. Empty your pockets and pass through a metal detector. 
4. Show proof that you registered and received approval to enter the venue.
5. Say arigato. 

Somewhere around step two I abandoned the act that I knew what I was doing, and asked the USA gear-wearing folks beside me for help. They turned out to be the United States Olympic Committee press delegation, a merciful group of veterans who recognized a rookie when they saw one. After repeated trips to their office, I’m still a neophyte. But I know the rules of the game. 

Not everyone has operated with such kindness, but I’m grateful to the many journalists who have. On the bus and in media seating, I’ve met feature writers and regional reporters – some of whom were covering Olympic Games before I was born – who answered basic questions about speaking to athletes and relayed stories from past Games. 

The Minneapolis Star Tribune writer helped me through my first day at gymnastics, showing me where to sit and giving me quick bios on the athletes. An Australian cameraman helped me find the buses amid a frantic exit from the opening ceremony. When I found out the press center’s convenience store wouldn’t take my credit card, an Associated Press producer behind me in line bought me a pack of floss. 

At the U.S. men’s basketball opening game against France July 25, I arrived about an hour early to grab a good seat. I’d spent the day watching women’s gymnastics and was exhausted from little sleep and long bus rides. A basketball superfan, I was here to watch, not report. This was my reward. 

While quickly walking through the arena to grab a pass to the mixed zone – where athletes and media interact – I saw a face down the hallway I instantly recognized: Brian Windhorst, a senior basketball writer for ESPN, who’s covered LeBron James’ entire career. Passing by, I quickly blurted out that he didn’t know who I was but I loved his work. 

Turning around, he looked over and asked me, “What’s your name?”

“Noah Robertson with the CS Monitor,” I said back.

“Hello, Noah!” he kindly returned, as we walked out of earshot.

I was part of the team.

In the last round of the street skating final, Alexis Sablone had a choice. Of the eight finalists last Monday, she ranked near the top. For her upcoming trick she could try something simple, earn near-guaranteed points, and probably leave with a medal. Or she could try something bolder.

Ms. Sablone went for it, attempting a kickflip backside 50-50, a reverse of her signature move. Jumping off a ramp onto a sloping stair ledge – known in skateboarding as a “hubba” – she misplaced her feet and fell to the ground. Receiving zero points for the trick, Ms. Sablone finished in fourth. 

After the match, though, she wasn’t entirely sure what a medal would have meant.

A meticulous competitor and seven-time X Games medalist, Ms. Sablone came to Japan for a medal. But she doesn’t consider skateboarding a sport, at least not like other ones at the Games. At its essence, skating is a form of expression, says Ms. Sablone. Scoring someone’s trick is almost like scoring someone’s voice.

To attract a younger audience, the Olympics added four new sports for Tokyo: skateboarding, sport climbing, surfing, and karate. But for some competitors, the Games present an ethical dilemma. Skateboarding in particular has a distinct countercultural ethos. Joining the Olympics, critics say, may sacrifice part of the sport’s identity.

For these athletes, the Games are a cultural exchange of sorts. Skateboarding can help bring new fans to the Olympics. The Olympics can help show off and diversify skateboarding. Each side has room to benefit, which needn’t come at the cost of authenticity.

Ben Curtis/AP

Alexis Sablone of the United States competes in the women's street skateboarding finals at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, July 26, 2021. Ms. Sablone placed fourth overall.

Skateboarding is so big, now, that “there’s a place for everyone,” Ms. Sablone said. “But it’s very important that the heart of skateboarding doesn’t die. And I don’t think it really ever will.”

New direction

The International Olympic Committee stated its motives clearly when it added a tranche of new sports in 2016. 

“We want to take sport to the youth,” IOC President Thomas Bach said at the time. “With the many options that young people have, we cannot expect any more that they will come automatically to us. We have to go to them.”

In skateboarding, the generational appeal is evident in its athletes. Ms. Sablone, considered an older skateboarder at age 34, competed beside a slate mostly made up of teenagers – a couple of whom still had braces. The three medaling athletes were all in their teens. 

“I made history at 13 years old,” said Rayssa Leal, who earned silver for Brazil at the July 26 event. “I hope I can be at many other Olympic Games.”

Skateboarding’s charisma brings a different competitive atmosphere to the Olympics. Success depends on the ability to fall and get back up, which could be maddening without the support of other skaters.

In her five attempts to land a trick in the street skating final, Margielyn Didal of the Philippines fell multiple times, scraping against the ground in her baggy orange pants. Each time, after a moment, she hopped up and extended a smiling thumbs-up to the crowd. The other skaters applauded. 

“It’s skateboarding; you cheer for everyone, for each other,” she said. “That’s how skateboarders share the love.”

The sport’s characteristic chutzpah was on full display, too. In the July 25 men’s street skating final, U.S. gold medal favorite Nyjah Huston finished seventh after refusing to attempt simple tricks, even after falling multiple times. 

“I would have liked to have landed a couple more tricks out there,” he said after the event. “But it’s still an honor to be out here skating at the Olympics. Still stoked to make the finals and be out skating with all these amazing guys.”  

Next generation

Even as skateboarding marks a shift for the Olympics, this Olympics comes at a moment of change for skateboarding, as well.

When Ms. Sablone came to the sport around the early 2000s, it was hard to find another woman who skated. Historically, skateboarding was heavily male, with a culture sometimes hostile to women’s involvement.

“To be a female skateboarder you kind of have to have thick skin,” she said.

Ben Curtis/AP

Alexis Sablone of the United States performs a trick in the women's street skateboarding finals at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, July 26, 2021. “To be a female skateboarder you kind of have to have thick skin,” she said.

In recent years that’s started to shift, as more women pick up the sport and athletes like Lizzie Armanto, competing in park skateboarding on Aug. 4, gain attention. With a host of role models for the next generation of skateboarders, the Olympics may accelerate the sport’s integration. In Tokyo, the number of male and female skaters is even. 

“Having guys and girls here on the stage is helping to bring some attention to [the sport’s inequality] and is starting to push the industry to change,” Ms. Sablone said.

The Olympic imprimatur, coupled with its spotlight on female athletes, makes competing in Tokyo a worthy bet, she added – one that doesn’t necessarily undercut the sport’s culture. 

This will be her only Games, she says, but not the end of her skateboarding career. She’ll continue walking through the streets near her home in Brooklyn, New York, with an eye for a nice rail to slide down with her board. There will still be nights when she spends hours attempting the same trick, to get it just right. 

She’s already passed the torch to a new generation, she says. It’s in good hands. 

“I’ve seen skateboarding through so many phases and this is ... a historic moment,” said Ms. Sablone. “I’m just glad that I was able to overlap with this.”

Reuters

A cosplay fan poses at a Tencent Games booth during the China Digital Entertainment Expo and Conference in Shanghai July 30.

Some tech whiz really should make a video game out of this. On Tuesday, China’s leaders again took a left swipe at its online gaming industry. They accused the industry of spreading “spiritual opium” among Chinese youth, creating addicts who fail in their academics and other alleged effects.

“No industry or sport should develop at the price of destroying a generation,” stated the Economic Information Daily, a media outlet of the ruling Communist Party. The article demanded new rules to curb what it called “electronic drugs.”

The impact was as swift as a Fortnite shootout in the world’s largest market for video games, home to an estimated 740 million players. The stock price of Chinese gaming giants dropped. Official restrictions on the industry could be around the corner. To head that off, the largest gaming company, Tencent, whose owner is China’s richest person, immediately proposed new measures to restrict the use of its flagship game, Honor of Kings, among children.

China’s leaders have been here before – like many parents worldwide – trying to figure out how to fit video games into their expectations for young people. In 2018, the party imposed a temporary ban on new games. In 2019, it set time limits for young people playing games online. Its paternalistic actions seemed justified after the World Health Organization added “gaming disorder” to its list of official afflictions.

A similar concern is playing out in the International Olympic Committee. In May, after years of declining viewership for its Games and rising calls for the IOC to recognize esports as a type of athletics, the IOC launched the Olympic Virtual Series. The games involve only five sports – baseball, cycling, motor sport, rowing, and sailing – but without any medals. The purpose is to encourage sports participation and “promote the Olympic values.”

The IOC, like China, is trying to find the best in video games. Many games do develop useful skills, such as cooperation, team building, and self-confidence. The opening ceremony of the Tokyo Games included music from video games like Sonic the Hedgehog. What really worries the IOC, however, is that most games are violent, centered around killing rather than kindness. A main goal of the Olympics is to promote peace among peoples and nations.

As many parents have discovered, the key to shielding children from gaming frenzy is to find out what’s missing in their lives – and then fill it with attention and affection. Does a child need to know how to make friends? Would a family discussion of a game put it in perspective? Can (or should) a game be played in real life?

China may be nearing a step-back-and-think moment about video games. Soon after the article appeared in the Economic Information Daily, the China News Service published a piece calling on schools, game developers, parents, and other parties to work together to prevent gaming obsession. For young players, that shared concern might start to fill what’s lacking in their lives.