Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Now I Am Become Pod the Destroyer of Casts. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to Behind the Bastards. This is Robert Evans trying
Speaker 1: to trying a new style of introduction. This is actually
Speaker 1: Behind the Police, our special mini series and Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards we talk about history's greatest bastards, American Police. Back
Speaker 1: with me for part five of this six part series
Speaker 1: is my co host Jason Petty, better known as the
Speaker 1: hip hop artist Propaganda. Jason, How you doing man? So
Speaker 1: man even dried mangoes and listening to old DJ Scratch
Speaker 1: and I hope that like I hope, I'm sorry, guys,
Speaker 1: I'm back man, I'm here again. Thanks God all the variants. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're the first guests we've had for three straight weeks
Speaker 1: or for two straight weeks. I think, man, I like
Speaker 1: I'm getting in my hitting like Billy Wayne like like
Speaker 1: like I mean you're hitting, you're hitting Propaganda zone. I
Speaker 1: like that, man, my own zone like zone. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: those like those like those cow zone things that they
Speaker 1: used to make a pizza I think it was pizza
Speaker 1: Hut the zone Yeah yeah, yeah, those were good. Yeah, Yo,
Speaker 1: can I quick joke about quick joke, not quick Joe,
Speaker 1: quick story about cow zones. Absolutely, and we can move
Speaker 1: on there. So my homeboy Jose with Solomon. He's probably
Speaker 1: one of the most gorgeous men I've ever met. And
Speaker 1: uh he's a carmel six ft six like soul singer, poet.
Speaker 1: It's ridiculous. It's not fair. You know, you never meet
Speaker 1: the guy where it's like, it's just not fair. You
Speaker 1: shouldn't be No one should be this beautiful. So that's
Speaker 1: a Joe, right. Um, Joe lives in Atlanta. He was
Speaker 1: ordering this pizza or he went to the spot, you know,
Speaker 1: during the quarantine, wanted a cow zone. And you know,
Speaker 1: first of all, it's it's Atlanta, you know this, let's
Speaker 1: be real, it's chocolate. Say these black people, right, and
Speaker 1: the whole shop with black people. And he tries to
Speaker 1: get a cow zone and he could tell, based on
Speaker 1: the way that the lady was looking at him that
Speaker 1: she didn't know what the cow zone was, right, So
Speaker 1: so he but she still was like pressed a few
Speaker 1: buttons on the screen and then you could see her
Speaker 1: look back at the home. He's like, hey, hey, what's right,
Speaker 1: and they kind of whispered back and forth. You could
Speaker 1: tell somebody must to google the cow zone, and then
Speaker 1: he finally gets it, and then stupid him didn't open
Speaker 1: the box till he got home, and he opened the
Speaker 1: box and it was just a pizza folded in half.
Speaker 1: I mean that is essentially that's the body part. I
Speaker 1: was like, that is a cow zone. But that he
Speaker 1: was like, you just folded a small pizza and half.
Speaker 1: What else do you want? I mean, really, you know
Speaker 1: what isn't like a cow zone? Prop the American policing, Yes,
Speaker 1: the evolution of American policing in the nineteen hundreds is
Speaker 1: not very much like a folded pizza. Uh, thanks, unfortunate,
Speaker 1: Thank the Lord above. What if that's how we handled
Speaker 1: law enforcement. What if when you had two feuding gangs,
Speaker 1: the government just sent cow zones over and we're like, hey, guys, yo,
Speaker 1: if you zones some cow zones, a little bit of barbecue,
Speaker 1: a couple of you know what I'm saying. It's like, everybody,
Speaker 1: just sit down, let's just have some cow zones, some
Speaker 1: high links. I think a good of the problems of
Speaker 1: law enforcement, Like, instead of tear gassing a bunch of protesters,
Speaker 1: what if the state provided cow zones, I'd bewitted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's cheaper too. I bet we'd save money on
Speaker 1: tear gas and such because you can buy you can
Speaker 1: feed a lot of people cow zones cal zones for
Speaker 1: the price of hundreds of tear gas canisters. Let me
Speaker 1: tell you something. And you know, it's less to clean up,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, It's easier on the environment,
Speaker 1: create more jobs, creates more jobs. Look, we just pods over.
Speaker 1: Thanks very much, guys. You know, look forward to our
Speaker 1: new behind the cow Zone series. Behind this idea of
Speaker 1: ours goes horribly wrong in a year. Yeah, the cow
Speaker 1: zone shot a kid. No one had ever seen anything
Speaker 1: like it, Helton with a cow zone from a cow zone,
Speaker 1: and we'd have to deal. Okay. So yeah, last week
Speaker 1: we dug into the really the very racist roots of
Speaker 1: US policing, the KKK, Jim Crow lynching and the death penalty,
Speaker 1: and in doing so, we kind of took a break
Speaker 1: from the broader history of how police have evolved in
Speaker 1: this country and focused on like the enabling of white
Speaker 1: supremacy in the suppression of black people as an integral
Speaker 1: part of the justice system. And today we're going to
Speaker 1: kind of peel back out again to discuss how the
Speaker 1: broader system of police evolved in the US over the
Speaker 1: last century to bring us to where we are now,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, police stopping random people for no reason,
Speaker 1: doing horrific violence to them, uh, and then being shielded
Speaker 1: from consequences by police unions. So that's what we're going
Speaker 1: to explain today. Okay, who yeah, there it is. This
Speaker 1: will be fun. We're gonna talk a lot about police
Speaker 1: unions and a lot about a stop and frisk and
Speaker 1: broken windows. Okay, yeah, so those two stopping frisk gets
Speaker 1: to like my life. Yeah yeah. So to get to
Speaker 1: that point, we have to, you know, zoom back a
Speaker 1: bit to the start of the twentieth century. By the
Speaker 1: time this nation started entering you know what most people
Speaker 1: would call the modern era, most police departments were de
Speaker 1: facto the enforcement arm of organized crime, in the words
Speaker 1: of one scholar, So cops existed. We talked about this
Speaker 1: in the episode two. Cops existed as muscle for for
Speaker 1: criminal for like gang leaders and stuff. Police departments engaged
Speaker 1: in constant election fraud because their jobs were generally tied
Speaker 1: to the position of local political bosses who are also gangsters.
Speaker 1: And during this period. This is like Tammany Hall and Ship.
Speaker 1: And during this period police drew salaries, but there was
Speaker 1: no such thing as overtime, and their salaries were generally shipped,
Speaker 1: so instead they took a lot of bribes. Dr. Gary Potter,
Speaker 1: who's a historian of law enforcement, insists that it's actually
Speaker 1: wrong to call the police in this period corrupt. He writes, quote,
Speaker 1: they were in fact primary instruments for the creation of
Speaker 1: corruption in the first place. So like the police aren't corrupt,
Speaker 1: the police create corruption in this period, which is an
Speaker 1: interesting but I think really important distinction to make. Actually
Speaker 1: took a second, like yeah, dang, yeah, I need to
Speaker 1: lean back from that one for a little bit like that.
Speaker 1: That is profound. Yeah, yeah, Garry Potter doesn't mince fucking
Speaker 1: words at all. Yeah. So, in the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: police departments in major major cities, particularly in the Eastern Seaboard,
Speaker 1: but also Chicago, because Chicago is a Midwestern city, but
Speaker 1: we all kind of lump it in with the East Coast.
Speaker 1: We all do it, even Chicago does sometimes when they're lazy,
Speaker 1: like deal with the Chicago. You should have moved further
Speaker 1: east if you wanted to, not was like, do you
Speaker 1: have do you get snowed in from a tunja? You're
Speaker 1: on the East coast, bro, Yeah, yeah, thank you so
Speaker 1: uh yeah, police apartments in major cities in the Eastern
Speaker 1: Seaboard in the early nineteen hundred, uh did a bit
Speaker 1: more than just provide muscle for gangsters and crack the
Speaker 1: heads of labor organizers. UM. They also got into the
Speaker 1: business because no one else was going to do it,
Speaker 1: of what we'd call social welfare. UM. It was kind
Speaker 1: of their job to take care of the homeless and
Speaker 1: the critically ill. And they weren't good at this. But
Speaker 1: police in Boston, New York and other cities sheltered homeless
Speaker 1: people in precincts, They emptied public toilets, and they kept
Speaker 1: track of the infected during epidemics. Now, since again these
Speaker 1: men were at the time hired gangsters, they were not
Speaker 1: renowned for taking to these tasks with a great deal
Speaker 1: of empathy. But nobody else really gave a ship. They
Speaker 1: didn't give a sh it either, but they were kind
Speaker 1: of the people you gave the bad jobs to. Again,
Speaker 1: not a lot of respect for law enforcement in this period,
Speaker 1: so they're like, we need somebody to like pull the
Speaker 1: homeless people off the streets. They don't freeze to death.
Speaker 1: Half the cops do it. Yeah, So it was prohibition
Speaker 1: that finally tipped law enforcement over the edge, uh like,
Speaker 1: over the edge of of of creators of corruption to
Speaker 1: um so outwardly criminal that the state had to like
Speaker 1: that the federal government had to do something about. The
Speaker 1: sheer scale of corruption unleashed by prohibition, and like the
Speaker 1: error of speakeasies and gangsters turned police departments into, you know,
Speaker 1: whatever they had been before, a complete mockery of law
Speaker 1: and order, and federal authorities pushed reform and investigatory commissions
Speaker 1: that had to look into a variety of different scandals.
Speaker 1: Dr Potter lays out just a few examples of police
Speaker 1: crime that inspired the creation of commissions. Quote number one,
Speaker 1: the formation of a prostitution syndicate by Los Angeles Mayor
Speaker 1: Arthur Harper, police Chief Edward Kerns and a local organized
Speaker 1: crime figure, combined with subsequent instructions to the police to
Speaker 1: harass the syndicates competitors in the prostitution industry. Number two
Speaker 1: the assassination of organized crime figure Arthur Rothstein by police
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Charles Becker, head of the NYPD's vice Squad and
Speaker 1: number three a dispute between the Mayor and District Attorney
Speaker 1: of Philadelphia, each of whom controlled rival gambling syndicates, and
Speaker 1: each of whom used loyal factions of police to harass
Speaker 1: the other. So, like, these are just a couple of
Speaker 1: examples of the sort of behavior police departments are engaging
Speaker 1: in at the time where they're they're they're just they're
Speaker 1: even like more criminal than a lot of the criminal syndicates. Um. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And another stigative commission that was said up during this
Speaker 1: period was the Linux Committee, which was formed to look
Speaker 1: into the charges of police extortion in New York. It
Speaker 1: found that promotion within the NYPD in the early nineteen
Speaker 1: hundreds was based entirely on direct bribes paid by officers
Speaker 1: to the Department of Promotion to sergeant cost six a
Speaker 1: promotion to captain it cost fifteen thousand dollars. All of
Speaker 1: these scampers and many Yeah. Yeah, he would just pay
Speaker 1: to get promoted in the police. Yeah. It's just it's
Speaker 1: just so crazy that, like, I mean, as much as
Speaker 1: you want to believe that like, throughout the course of
Speaker 1: time we have gotten somehow, in some way better at
Speaker 1: being the species we are. It's just I just the
Speaker 1: more you know of history, the more you're like, no,
Speaker 1: we've kind of been a plateaued. We've kind of just
Speaker 1: always been like this, you know. And that's the part
Speaker 1: that just like no. But because because I'm thinking about like,
Speaker 1: I'm still hanging on the word on the on the
Speaker 1: phrase of like it created the collection, because I'm going, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, you don't pay them a lot, You're I
Speaker 1: am incynivized. You're like, like, you're just hoping these people
Speaker 1: would somehow not have the same corrupted soul as the
Speaker 1: rest of the people. But they just people, and they're
Speaker 1: gonna find the path of least resistance, the quickest way
Speaker 1: to get a buck, and the best way to like
Speaker 1: push other people down for their own success. I don't
Speaker 1: know why you think putting a badge on a chest
Speaker 1: gonna make them any different. So when you hear this
Speaker 1: stuff like this, I'm just like, God, dog, it was it?
Speaker 1: Were we ever have we ever done good things? Well? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's a I forget who the name
Speaker 1: of the individual who it was, but there I believe
Speaker 1: it was a Holocaust survivor and he wrote something to
Speaker 1: the He had a quote that was something along lines
Speaker 1: of and like any given period of time, like ten
Speaker 1: percent of people are genuinely good, ten percent of people
Speaker 1: are total monsters, and about could kind of go either
Speaker 1: way depending on where it's seeing how it seems the
Speaker 1: wind is blowing, um and like if the wind is
Speaker 1: you know, blowing in the way that like if if
Speaker 1: everyone in charge is literally running a criminal syndicate of
Speaker 1: like prostitution and and like and probably a lot of
Speaker 1: forced prostitution and like gambling and like murder for higher
Speaker 1: and all this stuff, if that's everybody, then yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what you get involved with. Like then like okay, we'll
Speaker 1: all find some way to make money within the system.
Speaker 1: It's the ocean. It's still so you just kind of
Speaker 1: like do it because that's I mean, you gotta swim, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta swim. Yeah. So uh. The current Committee of
Speaker 1: nineteen investigated in YPD collusion and gambling in prostitution. The
Speaker 1: Seabury Committee in nineteen thirty one also looked into the NYPD,
Speaker 1: this time into the broader system of bosses and bribery
Speaker 1: for political positions. That was the core of why New
Speaker 1: York law enforcement sucked. Each of these commissions made changes,
Speaker 1: but right up unto the nineteen fifties, there were still
Speaker 1: regular inquiries into police involvement with gambling, prostitution, and organized crime.
Speaker 1: And I cannot exaggerate how many of these committees were
Speaker 1: focused on the NYPD. Like, one way to look at
Speaker 1: the twentieth century is the federal government fighting tooth and
Speaker 1: nail to stop New York Police from being just a
Speaker 1: criminal enterprise. Like that took decades of battling. Yeah, not metaphorically,
Speaker 1: not as a way to understand what's happening. No, seriously,
Speaker 1: they're just no, they're pimps with badges. Yeah, that's just
Speaker 1: what they actually are. And while I was googling around,
Speaker 1: I wanted to kind of come up with another example
Speaker 1: or two, like a direct one of the NYPD, you know,
Speaker 1: being pimps or whatnot in the early nineteen hundreds. And
Speaker 1: it was actually hard because there were so many cases
Speaker 1: of them in the twenty first century doing the exact
Speaker 1: same thing. For example, I was googling around on this,
Speaker 1: I came across the two thousand eighteen story about a
Speaker 1: retired NYPD detective who ran a two million dollar broadle
Speaker 1: ring using active copses muscle and his inside knowledge of
Speaker 1: how department undercovers did prostitution stings in order to avoid
Speaker 1: getting busted. He knew that like undercovers weren't allowed to
Speaker 1: show their genitals to prostitutes, so he would make all
Speaker 1: of the johns strip naked and like let themselves get
Speaker 1: fondled before starting the transaction. Um, because that helped him
Speaker 1: avoid getting busted by the NYPD. UM. Yeah, there were
Speaker 1: seven active duty officers who worked for his prostitution ring. Um.
Speaker 1: One of them was actually willing to work for free
Speaker 1: in exchange for discounts with his favorite prostitutes. So again,
Speaker 1: two eighteen is when that gets busted. Regular scumbag. It's awesome,
Speaker 1: regular dudes just being normal scumbags. Yeah, it's like someone decided, like, okay,
Speaker 1: let's take ten percent of the normal scumbag population and
Speaker 1: make them immune to being punished if they shoot someone. Yes,
Speaker 1: uh so yeah, Well, the federal government was fighting to
Speaker 1: make the NYPD a modestly less criminal enterprise. A major
Speaker 1: revolution had started to overtake law enforcement nationwide, and it
Speaker 1: started on the West Coast. Luminaries in you know that
Speaker 1: part of the country began to wonder if perhaps police
Speaker 1: officers ought not be trained professionals instead of drunken gangsters.
Speaker 1: And the the first real apostle of this gospel was
Speaker 1: a dude named August Volmer. He was the very first
Speaker 1: police chief of Berkeley, California, and he served from nineteen
Speaker 1: o nine to nineteen thirty one. Um. And this, this
Speaker 1: guy is about the best cop you're gonna find in
Speaker 1: US history. Um. From yeah, from every he did have,
Speaker 1: Like his early history, he was in part of like
Speaker 1: the U. S occupation of the Philippines, but he was
Speaker 1: like a like a gun boat he worked on like
Speaker 1: a gunboat. Like I'm sure he like he was part of,
Speaker 1: you know, the US crimes in the Philippines, but he wasn't.
Speaker 1: It's not like a case with John Burge, Like I
Speaker 1: have no evidence that he was like running secret prisons
Speaker 1: and torturing people. Like he was just a soldier who
Speaker 1: fought in a bad war. Um. And then he became
Speaker 1: the police chief in Berkeley. And when he took the job,
Speaker 1: Berkeley police were just as corrupt as New York police.
Speaker 1: August only had a sixth grade education, but he knew
Speaker 1: enough to immediately ban the receipt of gifts and bribes
Speaker 1: for his officers, Like that was the first thing he did.
Speaker 1: Was like, obviously you can't take bribes that anymore. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah again sixth grade education said oh yeah, well, we
Speaker 1: gotta stop doing this that. Huh what if what if
Speaker 1: we weren't just gangsters? Yeah, I tried to do the job, guys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what if we treated it like a job? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: he was He's really it's baffling the number of first
Speaker 1: this guy is responsible for in law enforcement. He was
Speaker 1: the first police chief to put cops on bicycles in
Speaker 1: nineteen ten. He was the first police chief to put
Speaker 1: cops on motorcycles in nineteen eleven. His officers received the
Speaker 1: very first radios and their squad cars. Vulmer's apartment created
Speaker 1: the first centralized police record system, and he was the
Speaker 1: first chief in the United States to push his officers
Speaker 1: to use blood, fiber and soil analysis to solve crimes.
Speaker 1: He was one of the first chiefs to use fingerprinting
Speaker 1: of Valmer was also the first chief to require college
Speaker 1: degrees of his officers. He was one of the first
Speaker 1: police chiefs to hire black cops, although not the first,
Speaker 1: but he was the very first police chief to hire
Speaker 1: female officers in nineteen nineteen. August was also the first
Speaker 1: police chief in the US to explicitly banned the use
Speaker 1: of the third degree, and he was a lifetime opponent
Speaker 1: of capital punishment. Um. He was notorious and fairly unique
Speaker 1: among law men in this period for believing that communists
Speaker 1: had a right to organize and state their views without
Speaker 1: being beaten into bloody pols. This guy, yeah, he's the
Speaker 1: best cop we're going to talk about. Like, I am impressed, bro.
Speaker 1: Like you you see him riding by in his little
Speaker 1: like big big front wheel, little chilly, silly police car,
Speaker 1: silly bike, you know what I'm saying, Like the old school,
Speaker 1: old timey victorian bike. But he's a cop. And that
Speaker 1: guy you salute, like, hey, what's up, officer? You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was trying, yeah, at least trying. Yeah. And now
Speaker 1: he was also one of the very first, like people
Speaker 1: anywhere to teach class as in criminal justice, essentially like
Speaker 1: helping to invent that field of higher education. Like, he
Speaker 1: was one of the first people to be like, we
Speaker 1: should probably have college classes that help people do do
Speaker 1: this thing. That's the job. Um. And one of his
Speaker 1: students was a dude named O. W. Wilson, and O. W.
Speaker 1: Wilson went on to become the police chief of Fullerton.
Speaker 1: He was also the police chief of Jesus somewhere in
Speaker 1: the Midwest. I forget where where else he was the
Speaker 1: police chief, and he was in California, California. Um And
Speaker 1: he was also the superintendent of the Chicago p D
Speaker 1: at one point, so he was a very influential like
Speaker 1: running police departments, Guy um And he wrote a book
Speaker 1: called Police Administration in nineteen forty three, and this was
Speaker 1: sort of a reaction to how most cops in big
Speaker 1: cities were drunken gangsters. Um And it basically O. W. Wilson,
Speaker 1: you know, who is the protege of Valmer is like,
Speaker 1: we need to professionalize police departments nationwide. Um and Wilson
Speaker 1: wanted police departments to be centralized and reformed along military
Speaker 1: style lines. This helped departments to keep a closer eye
Speaker 1: in their officers and stop them from, you know, just
Speaker 1: selling bootleg liquor or whatever. So you can see the
Speaker 1: logic and what Wilson was trying to do, right, it
Speaker 1: makes it makes sense, It makes sense, but it didn't work.
Speaker 1: Um Or it didn't work well, yeah, For one thing,
Speaker 1: his drive towards centralization created powerful, unaccountable, authoritarian police bureaucracies
Speaker 1: that were both unaccountable to the public and to the
Speaker 1: officers that worked there. Racist and sexist hiring practices were
Speaker 1: never reformed, and so these dictatorial police bureaucrats were basically
Speaker 1: just white dudes. Um. Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal
Speaker 1: justice in Nebraska, notes that quote a half century of
Speaker 1: professionalization had created police departments that were vast bureaucracies, inward
Speaker 1: looking and isolated from the public and defensive in the
Speaker 1: face of any criticism, which does not sound familiar at all. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't win with these guys, like yeah, every time
Speaker 1: you wanted like I want to be like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: what's good? Oh well, there it is. It never quite
Speaker 1: works out right, like they always seem to keep sucking,
Speaker 1: even when you deal with what you think are the
Speaker 1: the the problems, which maybe hints that the problem is
Speaker 1: at the root of what we have police for, um,
Speaker 1: as opposed to them neeting bicycles, which when not that Yeah, yeah, my,
Speaker 1: my my, I remember one of my my elementary school
Speaker 1: teacher used to say, hey, if every place you touch
Speaker 1: on your body, hurts. Your finger is probably broken. So
Speaker 1: that's why I just think about I'm just like, maybe
Speaker 1: your fingers broken, guys, maybe the finger is broken. Yeah, good, good,
Speaker 1: good way to describe that. Never forgot that, Ms Deirfield.
Speaker 1: So um, what's worse is that Wilson, like his mentor
Speaker 1: mentor volmer Um, both of whom I think had good intentions,
Speaker 1: had seized upon the idea that police should focus on
Speaker 1: crime prevention rather than just investigation. Now this was not
Speaker 1: a new idea, and again you can see the logic
Speaker 1: and trying to prevent crime, but the way that it
Speaker 1: worked out in the real world is that these new professional,
Speaker 1: centralized police departments suddenly started devoting a lot more time
Speaker 1: to sending cops out on patrol to stop and search
Speaker 1: people at random. Most of these people are members of
Speaker 1: the dangerous classes, which at that point were mostly racial
Speaker 1: minorities in the United States. You know, the Irish weren't
Speaker 1: really being oppressed no more. But bring that back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed, police had always worked to corral and
Speaker 1: control the movement and freedom of non white people. Wilson's
Speaker 1: reforms helped to dress that up as crime prevention. So
Speaker 1: now the cops aren't out there to keep you know,
Speaker 1: black people in line. They're there to patrol for criminal behavior,
Speaker 1: which in which they do the same thing. But it's
Speaker 1: harder to complain about if you're a white liberal. We's
Speaker 1: got some better codes, yeah, exactly, better codes. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I don't think that was Wilson's intent, but that's what happened. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: actual police officers weren't much happier than the general public
Speaker 1: with these reforms. Their resentment at their unaccountable, distant, and
Speaker 1: all powerful bosses helped to inspire a growing movement to
Speaker 1: unionize police departments. Now, police in many cities had long
Speaker 1: sought the benefits of unionization, but since a huge part
Speaker 1: of their literal job was busting unions and murdering union organizers,
Speaker 1: this was a tough needle to thread. It's a little
Speaker 1: a little con lifted here. Yeah, are we are we
Speaker 1: killing these people for the same thing we think is
Speaker 1: a good idea for Oh yeah, well fuck it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So cops in some cities started to form fraternal associations
Speaker 1: in order to try to gain some of the same
Speaker 1: benefits of unions while also not feeling like complete hypocrites.
Speaker 1: For the unions. Yeah, this did not work out well forever.
Speaker 1: These fraternal organizations just didn't associations just didn't do what
Speaker 1: unions do. The first department to seek straight up unionization
Speaker 1: was the Cleveland police in eighteen ninety seven. Uh, they
Speaker 1: petitioned the American Federation of Labor, whose president Samuel Gompers
Speaker 1: turned them down, stating it is not within the province
Speaker 1: of the trade union movement to especially organized policemen, nor
Speaker 1: more than to organize militiamen, as both policemen and militiamen
Speaker 1: are often controlled by forces in imical to the labor movement.
Speaker 1: So like, it's not our job, like you kill us.
Speaker 1: We're not going to let you join us to make
Speaker 1: more money to kill us. Yeah yeah, yeah, you want
Speaker 1: me to hell, you be better at stopping us. Yeah, no, no, sir. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like buying oil from countries you're at
Speaker 1: war with and I'm sorry, yeah, or like partnering with
Speaker 1: Nazis over single payer healthcare and ignoring the fact that
Speaker 1: they're also in favor of Nazi ship because like what
Speaker 1: if we worked and no, don't work together with you,
Speaker 1: No want to kill you. Yeah, you don't want to
Speaker 1: do that don't work with them. Ever, even if they're
Speaker 1: right about one thing, like cops are right workers should unionize,
Speaker 1: but that's like still still yeah, still problems. Yes, So
Speaker 1: cops continued to seek the benefits of union membership even
Speaker 1: whilst violently suppressing unions. In nineteen nineteen, Boston's police asked
Speaker 1: the a f L for a charter, angry at, among
Speaker 1: other things, the fact that they had to pay for
Speaker 1: their own uniforms. The commissioner told them that they couldn't
Speaker 1: unionize in the a f L was an exactly a
Speaker 1: big fan either um. But when they unionized anyway, nineteen
Speaker 1: union organizers were fired and the police went on strike.
Speaker 1: This is the first police strike with nearly officers off
Speaker 1: the job. The people of Boston took the opportunity to
Speaker 1: loot the ever loving ship out of their city. And
Speaker 1: I would suggest we look at this less as a
Speaker 1: sign of human nature and more of a sign of
Speaker 1: Bostonian nature. Uh yeah, that sound like I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: this sounds really Boston. That sounds real Boston. Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about another time when this happened later and there
Speaker 1: wasn't mass looting. So I'm going to write this up
Speaker 1: to Boston. Um. Now, this all prompted Governor Calvin Coolidge
Speaker 1: to declare that no public safety workers could strike anywhere, anytime,
Speaker 1: and his hard stance on this as part of what
Speaker 1: helped him become president. Later. Wait, he's saying, nope, what
Speaker 1: was he What was his position then when he said
Speaker 1: the public safety workers should never be able to stri
Speaker 1: was he? No? I'm saying what was the office he hilled? Oh,
Speaker 1: he was the governor. He was the government. Point. So wait,
Speaker 1: so he was saying, y'ah not allowed to strike, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, okay, that's stupid because that's the definition
Speaker 1: of striking is like so even the property, that's like
Speaker 1: the amounts of pace of acclamation. I'm like, oh, you've
Speaker 1: fen a set free to slaves in the states that
Speaker 1: are rebelling, Like you what ha. So I'm just sorry.
Speaker 1: Just him making the proclamation just like sounded so stupid.
Speaker 1: I'm like, that's striking means we're not listening to you. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But there's also the question of whether or not the
Speaker 1: government can stop a strike. Like if a bunch of J. C.
Speaker 1: Penny's workers or whatever unionized and they go on strike,
Speaker 1: there's the federal government can't do anything about that. But
Speaker 1: it's why like when um, when the fucking uh air
Speaker 1: traffic controllers were like, no, we we will criminally punish
Speaker 1: these people because their jobs are like, we can't have
Speaker 1: a society without their jobs, so we can't let them strike.
Speaker 1: That's the idea. I'm not defending that, but that's the justification.
Speaker 1: So it's not as it's not as preposterous as I
Speaker 1: first thought. Okay, it is not like there's an I
Speaker 1: don't necessarily agree with it, but there's an argument to
Speaker 1: be made that like, okay, well but if all of
Speaker 1: the e m t s go on strike, um, people
Speaker 1: will die. But also like I, I don't necessarily not
Speaker 1: saying that I don't think he should be able to strike.
Speaker 1: I'm saying it's different than just like miners going on
Speaker 1: striker way, That's what I'm saying. It's like, at least
Speaker 1: I don't necessarily cold, don't it. But at least it's
Speaker 1: not it's not a ridiculous statement. It is a it
Speaker 1: is a thing that we should have debated as a nation. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: because it is different. So yeah, Coolidge's stance was more
Speaker 1: or less the last word on police unions and police
Speaker 1: striking in particular until the nineteen fifties and the professionalization
Speaker 1: of police departments. These years were the heyday for unions
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the country, and cops watched jealously as the
Speaker 1: now aging workers they'd spent years tear gassing reap to
Speaker 1: the benefits of collective bargating fraternal orders proved incapable of
Speaker 1: gaining officers the wages and benefits that they thought they deserved.
Speaker 1: So in the early nineteen sixties, police started engaging in
Speaker 1: slow downs, starting in New York by nineteen and this
Speaker 1: is where they wouldn't strike, but they wouldn't do most
Speaker 1: of the things cops are supposed to do. So they
Speaker 1: would you know, they were saying, like if the people
Speaker 1: are getting murdered, will step in there. But like, we're
Speaker 1: not going to stop petty crime now. Yeah, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about that in a little bit, Sophie, because this happens
Speaker 1: real recently. Um. By nineteen sixty four, they had, you know,
Speaker 1: piste off the people in charge, the people with money,
Speaker 1: UM by not enforcing like minor bullshit enough that the
Speaker 1: mayor and the police commissioner were willing to go to
Speaker 1: the table in exchange for giving up any right to strike,
Speaker 1: the Patrolman's Benevolent Association was made a union. It was
Speaker 1: given the ability to act as a collective bargaining agent
Speaker 1: for the city police. Upon becoming a full union, the
Speaker 1: p b A moved immediately to what would become its
Speaker 1: true purpose, protecting cops from any kind of accountability for
Speaker 1: their own actions. In nineteen sixty six, the new mayor
Speaker 1: of New York sat down with the Congress for Racial Equality,
Speaker 1: who had some serious complaints about police misconduct towards black
Speaker 1: New Yorkers. The mayor agreed to add four civilian members
Speaker 1: to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which had previously consisted
Speaker 1: of three cops. The p b A fought this viciously,
Speaker 1: holding a five thousand member picket line in opposition to
Speaker 1: the idea of giving civilians any say and how their
Speaker 1: police functioned. I'm going to quote next from an article
Speaker 1: in The New Yorker. The p b A then organized
Speaker 1: a public referendum aimed at eliminating the board. It put
Speaker 1: up posters showing a young white woman exiting a subway
Speaker 1: and heading onto a dark, deserted street. The Civilian Review
Speaker 1: Board must be stopped the poster read her life, your
Speaker 1: life may depend upon it. Here we go. A police
Speaker 1: officer must not hesitate. If he does, the security and
Speaker 1: safety of your family maybe jeopardize. You. See what they're
Speaker 1: arguing there is Yeah, yeah, if if you let civilians
Speaker 1: watch what we do, we might not kill the dangerous
Speaker 1: non white people threatening white women fast. Like that's what
Speaker 1: that's that's what they're saying. Yeah, there's the weapon, there's
Speaker 1: the weapon, there's there's the goat, there's the tool. Kid,
Speaker 1: but are but we have to protect our women. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah like that. I enjoyed that. You know what else
Speaker 1: I enjoy Robert, You know what I won't TechEd white No, No, okay,
Speaker 1: um ship that was a bad way to lead this.
Speaker 1: You know what supports police accountability um and things that
Speaker 1: we can have safe subways without unaccountable heavily armed maniacs. Product.
Speaker 1: So yeah, they all all of we're back. It's good
Speaker 1: to know as a side, No, it's good to know
Speaker 1: that these like abysmal transitions are actually natural. Like it's
Speaker 1: not it's not a stick. You're not like trying to
Speaker 1: be you know aloof yeah, you're really you're really doing this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I decided long ago never to learn how to
Speaker 1: do fully half of my job. Um, it's the it's
Speaker 1: to maintain authenticity, right, yeah, that's eactly it. It's to
Speaker 1: maintain authenticity. That's how I justify not learning how to
Speaker 1: do large portions of my job. Yeah, it's called it's
Speaker 1: called brand it's brand protection. I get it, exactly. It's
Speaker 1: just like if you find like icola in your meat.
Speaker 1: It's like, listen, it's organic. Okay, we don't use pesticides.
Speaker 1: Yeah you might, you might get bac is um, but
Speaker 1: organic baculum. It's organic. Yea, yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. So Yeah,
Speaker 1: when we last left off, the New York City Police
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty six had put up some real racy
Speaker 1: posters um arguing about why they shouldn't let civilians tell
Speaker 1: them not to murder people, and as the vote on
Speaker 1: whether or not to establish this review board approached, the
Speaker 1: PBA's president, John cassisse Um declared, I'm sick and tired
Speaker 1: of giving into minority groups with their whims and gripes
Speaker 1: and shouting oh man, yeah real physically, yeah, I physically
Speaker 1: responded to that. Yeah. Yeah, y'all always complaining, Yeah that
Speaker 1: you don't like us shooting you. You want some saying
Speaker 1: whether or not we shoot you with the bullets you
Speaker 1: help buy? Yes? Can I just do my job? That's
Speaker 1: literally all we're asking is just that you do your job?
Speaker 1: Yeah please? Yeah? Please? Um so around the country cops elsewhere.
Speaker 1: So how good a job the NYPD had done it
Speaker 1: winning better pay for themselves and sticking a thumb in
Speaker 1: the eye of those pesky minorities who felt like someone
Speaker 1: should stop them from Yeah. Uh. Police unionization spread throughout
Speaker 1: the continents, and over the years, police unions bargained for
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot more than just increased wages.
Speaker 1: Starting in New York but spreading quickly over the nation,
Speaker 1: many police union contracts began requiring departments to a race
Speaker 1: officer disciplinary records after a set period of time. And
Speaker 1: this kind of gets to the chief problem of police unions.
Speaker 1: They act in the interest of officers, and obviously unions
Speaker 1: are supposed to act into the interests of workers, but
Speaker 1: a lot of times, because of the kind of people
Speaker 1: who become police officers, uh, the interests of the officers
Speaker 1: means acting against the interests of general society. So, if
Speaker 1: for example, a minor or a grocery store employee or uh,
Speaker 1: any other kind of worker really gets more money. That
Speaker 1: might be against the interests of the people who own
Speaker 1: stock in the company, you know, of the capital holding
Speaker 1: class of like like of of the people who you know,
Speaker 1: the the executives at the top, who have to take
Speaker 1: pay cuts. You can argue that's against their interest, um,
Speaker 1: but they don't. If a if somebody who works like
Speaker 1: they're not able to like the fucking A union representing
Speaker 1: grocery store employees doesn't make it impossible for you to
Speaker 1: tell which grocery store employees are stabbing people, because grocery
Speaker 1: store employees don't do that, and when they do, they
Speaker 1: tend to go to prison and stop working at the
Speaker 1: nobody nobody. The unions don't rush into be like no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you have to keep employing this man all he did
Speaker 1: with stab three people, Like yeah, I'm like that the
Speaker 1: union doesn't protect you from being from sucking at your job, right,
Speaker 1: I mean it does a little bit, Like that's a
Speaker 1: that's a fair argument that like unions keep people sometimes
Speaker 1: like teachers who are bad at teaching stay on. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: fair fair enough. But like the point going back to
Speaker 1: your analogy. I'm like, you can't just lick the apples
Speaker 1: and then be like, yo, my union protects me because
Speaker 1: I got a right to lick the apples. And I'm like, no, you,
Speaker 1: I don't know why. That's not your function, like you know,
Speaker 1: I think, And just going back to the police, I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know what, dude, you have a hard job. You
Speaker 1: should be paid. Well, you're right, you should be paid. Well,
Speaker 1: you have a hard job. But what is not your
Speaker 1: job is being another gang in our neighborhoods and terrorizing
Speaker 1: people to color. That's not your job. You should not
Speaker 1: be protected for doing that. That's what unions protect them for.
Speaker 1: Instead of just being like, oh, well, we're workers too,
Speaker 1: and we should be able to advocate for higher pay.
Speaker 1: They're like, and also if we beat someone, we should
Speaker 1: be able to hide that from the public. Um, that's
Speaker 1: what happens almost immediately with you don't get to you don't.
Speaker 1: That's not one of your perks. Okay, yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the biggest perk. So yeah. A two thousand seventeen Reuters
Speaker 1: special report on police union contracts and eighty two U
Speaker 1: S cities found that most departments are now required to
Speaker 1: a race officer disciplinary records after a set period of time.
Speaker 1: Sometimes officers records are purged every six months. Eighteen cities
Speaker 1: expunge suspensions in three years or less. Reuters found that
Speaker 1: nearly half a police union contracts guaranteed officers accused of
Speaker 1: bad behavior the right to see their entire investigative file,
Speaker 1: including witness statements made against them. What their what I
Speaker 1: wonder what their defense for that is, because we know
Speaker 1: exactly what you're doing. But what what's their argument for that?
Speaker 1: You know, you know, you shouldn't uh, you shouldn't know.
Speaker 1: It's not fair for anyone to be charged with a
Speaker 1: crime without you know, getting to see the claims made
Speaker 1: by their accusers unless those people are charging the police,
Speaker 1: are being charged by the police of a crime, and
Speaker 1: then there's actually all sorts of ways we have to
Speaker 1: hide that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, dissonance is cognitive yeah, so
Speaker 1: um yeah. Few developments in US policing have had quite
Speaker 1: the impact that unionization has had. Dr Rob Gilzoh, an
Speaker 1: assistant professor of economics at the University of Victoria, took
Speaker 1: to Twitter at the end of this May when the
Speaker 1: uprising started to give a summary of some of his
Speaker 1: still unpublished research on the impact of police bargaining rights
Speaker 1: on the killing of civilians, and he noted, quote, what
Speaker 1: are we finding so far? The introduction of access to
Speaker 1: collective bargaining drives a modest declient in policy, employment and
Speaker 1: increase in compensation, with no meaningful impacts on total crime,
Speaker 1: violent crime, property crime, or officers killed in the line
Speaker 1: of duty. What does change? We find a substantial increase
Speaker 1: in police killings of civilians over the medium to long run,
Speaker 1: So there is we will continue. There's a lot more
Speaker 1: evidence than just that that that the unionization specifically leads
Speaker 1: to more police killings of civilians. Now, Guilso goes on
Speaker 1: to note that the overwhelming majority of these added deaths
Speaker 1: are non white people. Okay, yep, I mean yeah. Quote,
Speaker 1: if access to a union simply shifted the marginal decision
Speaker 1: for officers to shoot in risky situations, you would expect
Speaker 1: to see increases in killings of both whites and non whites.
Speaker 1: But that is not what we're finding at all. Rather,
Speaker 1: and with the caveat that this is still very early work,
Speaker 1: it looks like collective bargaining rights are being used to
Speaker 1: protect the ability of officers to discriminate and the disproportionate
Speaker 1: use of force against the non white population. Again, a
Speaker 1: big part of this issue is that white supremacy is
Speaker 1: baked into the very soul of you as policing. So
Speaker 1: even though police unions didn't come into the picture until
Speaker 1: a hundred years after slavery ended, a lot of the cops,
Speaker 1: most of the cops working in the police at that time,
Speaker 1: were racist as hell, and so police unions immediately turned
Speaker 1: to the task of enshrining and detecting racial violence from
Speaker 1: law and enforcement, and that has remained a part of
Speaker 1: them ever since. Other research is consistently borne out similar conclusions.
Speaker 1: Two eighteen University of Oxford study if the hundred largest
Speaker 1: American cities found that protections and police contracts were directly
Speaker 1: and positively correlated with police violence against citizens. Two thou
Speaker 1: nineteen University of Chicago study found that when collective bargaining
Speaker 1: rights were given to Florida sheriff's deputies, it led to
Speaker 1: a forty statewide increase in violent misconduct by deputies. Got forty.
Speaker 1: When Okay, it's the stuff that you that you can
Speaker 1: into it, into it and know, and then when you
Speaker 1: see the actual numbers it's still like you still throw
Speaker 1: up in your mouth a little, you know, Okay, it's
Speaker 1: like you like that's why I keep trying to say.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, I mean I know that, But now
Speaker 1: that I'm looking at it on paper or listening to
Speaker 1: someone go no, here, here, it is No, You're right,
Speaker 1: got dog, It's still just so infuriating and exhausting that
Speaker 1: despite all these receipts that you're you're showing, we still
Speaker 1: have to explain to people that there's a problem. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If if a new type of if a new type
Speaker 1: of hybrid engine came out and we found out a
Speaker 1: year in that it led to at increase in vehicle
Speaker 1: explosions during like vendor benders, not only would that product
Speaker 1: be pulled from the market, people would probably go to
Speaker 1: jail because they would get prosecuted. Whoever would problem four
Speaker 1: out of ten people gond when we drive this thing? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we would at least try at least try yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So much of the violets caused by police unions could
Speaker 1: be blamed on the fact that they make it as
Speaker 1: hard as possible to fire dangerously unhinged and violet officers.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna go it again from The New Yorker here.
Speaker 1: Other studies revealed that many existing mechanisms for disciplining police
Speaker 1: are toothless. W b Eazy, a Chicago radio station, found
Speaker 1: that between two thousand seven and two thousand fifteen, Chicago's
Speaker 1: independent Police Review Authority investigated four hundred shootings by police
Speaker 1: and deemed the officers justified in all but two incidents.
Speaker 1: Since two thousand twelve, when Minneapolis replaced at civilian Review
Speaker 1: Board with an Office of the Police Misconduct Review, the
Speaker 1: public has filed more than misconduct complaints, yet only twelve
Speaker 1: resulted in a police officer being punished. The most severe
Speaker 1: penalty a forty hours suspension. When the Saint Paul Pioneer
Speaker 1: Press reviewed appeals involving terminations, suspension, yes, misunder Yeah. When
Speaker 1: the St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewed appeals involving terminations from
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen to two thousand nineteen, it discovered that
Speaker 1: arbitrators ruled in favor of the discharged police and correction
Speaker 1: officers and ordered them reinstated forty six percent of the time.
Speaker 1: Non law enforcement workers were reinstated at a similar rate.
Speaker 1: And again that's the point that like normal unions do
Speaker 1: work this way as well, but they're not representing people
Speaker 1: who have the right to shoot people. Yes, for those
Speaker 1: demanding more accountability, A large obstacle is that disciplinary actions
Speaker 1: are often overturned if an arbitrator finds that the penalty
Speaker 1: in the department meeted out is tougher than it wasn't
Speaker 1: a similar previous case, no matter if the penalty in
Speaker 1: the previous case was far too lenient. Dude, So where's
Speaker 1: the like the trope like, because I'm thinking I'm thinking
Speaker 1: the movie trope of like Pulaski badge and gun, like
Speaker 1: the chief is like, give me your bedge and gun,
Speaker 1: you're on leave right and then but the guys such
Speaker 1: one tough cop, but he still investigates the crime. I'm like,
Speaker 1: it don't sound like I don't know where y'all got
Speaker 1: that from, because it sound to me like you know,
Speaker 1: I'm said, I'm rambling, but I'm trying to just like
Speaker 1: where did so where did that come from? Then where's
Speaker 1: the like? Yeah, yeah, you know, if this is actually
Speaker 1: what we're getting into, Because it turns out that it
Speaker 1: is accurate that a lot of the times, UH police
Speaker 1: chief hate and try to fire their worst than most
Speaker 1: dangerous officers and police unions make that impossible. That's actually
Speaker 1: right now, Yeah, I'm I'm leaning into it, okay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And again this is like, like I'm sure that there
Speaker 1: are fucking people in unions who work at tire factories
Speaker 1: or whatever who are bad at their jobs get fired
Speaker 1: and the union gives them their job back, and like
Speaker 1: that probably is a pain in the ask for some
Speaker 1: of the people they work around, but again they don't Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: guy ain't gonna shoot me. You ain't gonna put his
Speaker 1: knee on my neck. Yeah, Which is to say that,
Speaker 1: like there aren't some problems with other unions, but like
Speaker 1: it's really a problem with the police. Um. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: the Washington Post put together a great article about this
Speaker 1: in two thousand seventeen, noting them in the last eleven years,
Speaker 1: one thousand, eight hundred and eighty one officers had been
Speaker 1: fired from the nation's largest police departments, and four hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty one of those officers had successfully appealed and
Speaker 1: gotten their jobs back. There's four hundred and fifty one
Speaker 1: included an officer who in nineteen year old in his
Speaker 1: patrol car, an officer who challenged a handcuffed man to
Speaker 1: a fist fight for his freedom, and of course a
Speaker 1: cop who shot an unarmed man to death. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: we gotta we gotta get this guy back on the street.
Speaker 1: Got to give him another chance to win that fist fight. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm like, there's the like tragically disgusting, and then there's
Speaker 1: the preposterous, like you just you challenged the guy like
Speaker 1: he got on handcuffs, handcuffed man to a fight to
Speaker 1: box him, Like yeah, you nerd, Like, yeah, you weren't
Speaker 1: so deadly, you know what I'm saying. I wish I
Speaker 1: could just be like you're a nerd man. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: like part of me is like I would kind of
Speaker 1: like to get into a fist fight with a cop
Speaker 1: in that situation, but I know that if you start losing,
Speaker 1: you're going to shoot me. You can't. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no winning that fight. Yes. Um. One of my
Speaker 1: favorite stories in this this really really wonderful Washington Post
Speaker 1: article is the two thou twelve tale of Boston East
Speaker 1: officer Baltazar Tate de Rosa. In two thousand three, de
Speaker 1: Rosa's cousin was ambushed by a masked gunman and murdered
Speaker 1: and what was probably a gang related crime and two
Speaker 1: thousand five, de Rosa cauld and sick for his overnight shift,
Speaker 1: he went out to a nightclub, the Copa Grand Oasis
Speaker 1: instead with a dude named Carlos Topina, who was his
Speaker 1: cousin and the brother of his cousin who got murdered.
Speaker 1: While at the club, both men encountered Jose Lopez, a
Speaker 1: gang member who was a suspect in the murder of
Speaker 1: De Rosa's cousin. Carlos round up murdering Jose Lopez using
Speaker 1: his off duty cop cousin as a getaway driver. So
Speaker 1: de Rosa, who took the night off claiming to be
Speaker 1: sick and went and got wasted a nightclub with his cousin.
Speaker 1: When his cousin murders, a guy acts as the getaway driver,
Speaker 1: and obviously, when this is found out, he gets placed
Speaker 1: on administrative leave and he's charged with being an accessory
Speaker 1: to murder. Um. He was acquitted of that crime, but
Speaker 1: he was fired from the department when the investigation revealed
Speaker 1: that he had actually been arrested with his cousin at
Speaker 1: that club before due to a drunken disorderly conduct um.
Speaker 1: So again they find out like okay, maybe this guy
Speaker 1: didn't know he was being the getaway driver in a
Speaker 1: murder that his cousins committed, but he knew that he
Speaker 1: was repeatedly getting drunk at the club while he should
Speaker 1: have been working, and like we should fire him for
Speaker 1: that he lied about to us. Um So do Rosa
Speaker 1: appealed the firing and two thousand twelve he was reinstated
Speaker 1: with fifty dollars in lost pay in overtime. He is
Speaker 1: currently a Boston Bike Patrol officer. That boy got the
Speaker 1: money back. Yeah, of course they always get the money back.
Speaker 1: Oh my, that oh dog got at least money back.
Speaker 1: That one's a fun one because at least like the
Speaker 1: guy that they murdered sounded like a piece of ship
Speaker 1: too whatever, because it's just like look man, this again
Speaker 1: you just gang banging, and like that is the most
Speaker 1: that that story that's funny because it's the most like
Speaker 1: spot on any inner city USA anywhere story, Right, That's
Speaker 1: like that's me. Like, if let's just say I'm working stiff.
Speaker 1: You know, I still taught high school. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: go chill with one of my cousins because that's my cousin.
Speaker 1: We're all from South Central l a. Right, my cousin
Speaker 1: gets in his static with somebody else. What am I
Speaker 1: gonna not help him as my cousin, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. So like, Okay, yeah, maybe I lose my job,
Speaker 1: you know, but like I just like, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: that was my cousin. Man, Like I'm gonna you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, Like I'm gonna help. I'm gonna help
Speaker 1: scrap with my cousin, you know. Um. And then I
Speaker 1: was supposed to think of you any different because you
Speaker 1: got a badge, right, No, you just like the rest
Speaker 1: of us. You're gonna do ratchet ship because you ratchet
Speaker 1: like all of us. Yeah, point exactly, Yeah, exactly. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven, fort Worth police officer y sus
Speaker 1: Jesse Banda Jr. Stalked his ex girlfriend to a party,
Speaker 1: saw her with another man, and used a police like
Speaker 1: called into police dispatch to check on the plates of
Speaker 1: the man she was with, fraudulently claiming that he had
Speaker 1: like stopped the guy or whatever. So he found the
Speaker 1: address of the dude that his ex girlfriend was going
Speaker 1: out with, and several days later he showed up at
Speaker 1: the man's house at night and shot the are up
Speaker 1: with his twelve gage. The department couldn't prove he'd committed
Speaker 1: the crime, but they were able to show that he
Speaker 1: lied about why he had called in the man's license
Speaker 1: plate like a night or two before his car got
Speaker 1: shot up. Yeah, so the police chief did the give
Speaker 1: me your badge and gun thing, and he put Banda
Speaker 1: on unpaid suspension um And while he was suspended and
Speaker 1: under investigation, he was ordered not to represent himself as
Speaker 1: a police officer. So like you're handing in your badge
Speaker 1: and gun, we're going to investigate you. You are not
Speaker 1: getting paid and if you tell anyone you're a police
Speaker 1: officer to try to get you know, the benefits police
Speaker 1: officers get, Like you're breaking the fucking law right now.
Speaker 1: So Banda went out and represented himself as a police
Speaker 1: officer of Coorseiately, he and some friends were pulled over
Speaker 1: by another Fort Worth cople They were drunk in a limousine.
Speaker 1: Said cop had watched the people in the back of
Speaker 1: the limo, including Banda, pass beer up to the driver.
Speaker 1: So again, real hard to get in trouble for drinking
Speaker 1: at a limousine. This fucking dude finds a way. We
Speaker 1: passed into the river. What are you doing man? Yeah? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So when he asked Banda to step out of the car,
Speaker 1: band to hand it over his police credentials and pretended
Speaker 1: to be an officer in good standing. Despite all this,
Speaker 1: the union had Banda's back and they fought for him.
Speaker 1: He was reinstated and awarded a year of back pay.
Speaker 1: So again the police chief is like, I don't what
Speaker 1: this fucking guy in my department, and the unions like
Speaker 1: you are going to take him back and you're gonna
Speaker 1: pay him for the time when he was getting drunken limousines.
Speaker 1: Officer Banda had been back on the force for one
Speaker 1: month before he was fired again for again misrepresenting himself
Speaker 1: during a traffic stop. He is currently he was reinstated
Speaker 1: by the union. He is currently a detective and thanks
Speaker 1: to his union, the people of Fort Worth have to
Speaker 1: brave the streets of their town knowing a guy who
Speaker 1: uses department resources to hunt down the boyfriends of his
Speaker 1: ex partners is out there with the power to arrest
Speaker 1: whoever and apparent immunity to the consequences of any illegal
Speaker 1: actions he takes. So that's good. Congrats Fort Worth. His
Speaker 1: great good job for two year old. Yeah, yeah, oh
Speaker 1: thing thing, Yeah that is not the note. That's embarrassing
Speaker 1: that that thing. I don't But we're going to go
Speaker 1: to products. Now we're back, and we started talking about
Speaker 1: Carney a soda fries, which I am normally very happy
Speaker 1: with my decision to live in the Pacific Northwest, but
Speaker 1: whenever somebody says Carney Asada, I longed for southern California. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I could go for some Carney fries. But we're
Speaker 1: gonna we have to talk about police unions instead. So,
Speaker 1: um yeah, so let's let's talk about uh Kwan McDonald.
Speaker 1: Um so yeah. In two thousand and fourteen, seventeen year
Speaker 1: old Kwan McDonald was murdered by Chicago police officer Jason
Speaker 1: Van Dyke. The media fewer around this launched an investigation
Speaker 1: which revealed that officer Van Dyke had previously been the
Speaker 1: subject of repeated complaints. The report noted that a code
Speaker 1: of silence about misconduct was baked into labor agreements between
Speaker 1: police unions in the city, and that this ensured that
Speaker 1: nothing had been done about officer Van Dyke before he
Speaker 1: killed a child. Van Dyke was eventually convicted of second
Speaker 1: degree murder in sixteen accounts of aggravated battery with a firearm.
Speaker 1: Sixteen is the number of times he shot him. Um
Speaker 1: Van Dyke was found not guilty of any official misconduct,
Speaker 1: though it was guilty of murder, but not guilty of
Speaker 1: improperly behaving as a police officer. Yeah. Yeah, yes, where
Speaker 1: did murder somebody and we're gonna go to prison for it.
Speaker 1: But you also didn't break the rules of your job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but job's fine. Yeah, wow, Yeah, what do we do
Speaker 1: with that one? Yeah. Ironically, given their role in murdering
Speaker 1: the ship out of unions for close to a hundred years,
Speaker 1: police might be the most successful example of unionization in
Speaker 1: the US history, not in terms of like benefits to
Speaker 1: society or benefit to the profession of policing, but at
Speaker 1: least in terms of the sheer amount of power that
Speaker 1: they wield. The Jesus Labor historian Joseph McCartin notes they
Speaker 1: have more cloud than other public sector unions like the
Speaker 1: teachers and sanitation workers, because they have often been able
Speaker 1: to command the political support of Republicans. That's given them
Speaker 1: a huge advantage. Police unions are one fortunate area where
Speaker 1: we have a single human being who embodies all of
Speaker 1: the evil that these institutions represent and do. And when
Speaker 1: I talk about a single human being who embodies the
Speaker 1: evil of police unions, there's no one else I could
Speaker 1: be talking about but Lieutenant Bob Kroll, head of the
Speaker 1: Minneapolis Police Union. Yeah, president of the Minneapolis Police Union.
Speaker 1: Bob has of course appealed the firing of Derek Chavin
Speaker 1: and the other three cops who murdered George Floyd, saying
Speaker 1: that they were fired without due process um and this
Speaker 1: is something of a pattern for him. And two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: when to white MPD officers shot twenty four year old
Speaker 1: Jamark Clark in the head while he was handcuffed on
Speaker 1: the ground, Krol went on TV to talk about Clark's
Speaker 1: violent criminal past and declare BLM a terrorist organization. Krol
Speaker 1: has a real thing for declaring people he disagrees with
Speaker 1: of being terrorists. He did the same thing to US
Speaker 1: Representative Keith Ellison, a black Muslim congressman who pushed for
Speaker 1: criminal justice reform. That fun detail came out in a
Speaker 1: lawsuit filed by the current IMPD police chief. According to
Speaker 1: Mother Jones, the lawsuit accused Kroll of wearing a motorcycle
Speaker 1: jacket with a white power patch sewed into the fabric,
Speaker 1: and said he had a history of discriminatory attitudes and conduct.
Speaker 1: He has told reporters who was part of the City
Speaker 1: Heat motorcycle Club, some of whose members have been described
Speaker 1: by the Anti Defamation League is displaying white supremacist symbols.
Speaker 1: Bob Crow joined the MPD back in nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: and in his years on the force there were twenty
Speaker 1: or more internal affairs complaints made against him. We don't
Speaker 1: know how yeah, minimum. We actually don't know how many
Speaker 1: it was because of all the ship I've been explaining.
Speaker 1: They purge records, but at least twenty, Yeah, Jo, can
Speaker 1: you have twenty on record? Yeah? Imagine I'm gonna like
Speaker 1: imagine I'm reading what I'm going to tell you next,
Speaker 1: and imagine that like he worked as a baker or like,
Speaker 1: like as a computer programmer. Everybody replaced cop with donut maker. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sanitation worker, sanitation worker. In nineteen ninety four, he was
Speaker 1: suspended for using excessive force in In nineteen nine five,
Speaker 1: he was accused of beating, choking, and kicking a biracial
Speaker 1: fifteen year old while shouting racial slurs. Yeah, Bob Roll.
Speaker 1: In two thousand four, when Kroll was off duty, someone
Speaker 1: leaving a bar bumped his backpack against Kroll's car. Bob
Speaker 1: and another off duty officer got out and beat the
Speaker 1: piss out of this guy. When his friends came to help,
Speaker 1: they beat the ship out of his friends too. Bob
Speaker 1: was suspended for twenty days for this. It's it's cartoonish like,
Speaker 1: like this is cartoon own level. Yes, the Minneapolis the
Speaker 1: Minneapolis police knew all of this when they elected Bob
Speaker 1: Crowl to be their union president by a two to
Speaker 1: one margin. Bob one because the citizens of Minneapolis had
Speaker 1: just elected a reform minded police chief. She told The
Speaker 1: New York Times. I believe Bob Crowle was elected out
Speaker 1: of fear. We're the only ones that support Your community
Speaker 1: doesn't support you. Your police chief is trying to get
Speaker 1: you fired. You see what I'm building to here. Police
Speaker 1: unions allow the cops to deliberately short circuit the democratic process.
Speaker 1: This is part of why bringing in better police chiefs
Speaker 1: and voting in reform minded mayors almost never actually does
Speaker 1: a damn thing when it comes to the police. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the unions are still there and they stonewall anything
Speaker 1: from happening. When Kim Garner was elected d A of St.
Speaker 1: Louis in two thousand sixteen, she promised to fight police
Speaker 1: violence on behalf of her citizens. One of the way
Speaker 1: she proposed to do this was by establishing an independent
Speaker 1: oversight board to investigate abuses by police, like the PBA
Speaker 1: in New York more than a half century. Early year,
Speaker 1: the police union in St. Louis set right to work
Speaker 1: killing this oversight board. They went to lawmakers one by one,
Speaker 1: and whatever they said stopped the matter from even coming
Speaker 1: to a vote. According to the New York Times quote.
Speaker 1: Around the same time, a lawyer for the union waged
Speaker 1: a legal fight to live it the ability of the
Speaker 1: prosecutor's office to investigate police misconduct. The following year, a
Speaker 1: leader of the union said Miss Gardner should be removed
Speaker 1: by force or by choice. Wow, that's cool, can you chack?
Speaker 1: Can you just It's like, I just it's it's comic
Speaker 1: book level power. Like and I just imagine, like you know,
Speaker 1: in in every comic book when the when the bad
Speaker 1: guy goes, like I feel the power, Like I feel
Speaker 1: like that's just death must be what it's like to
Speaker 1: where you're like, after a while, just you just know
Speaker 1: you can it away with it, and anybody that comes
Speaker 1: in to try to stop you, you got the power
Speaker 1: to remove. Like it just got dog like. It must
Speaker 1: be intoxicating, it must it's got to be a drug.
Speaker 1: Like it's got to be a drug. Yeah, yeah, it is,
Speaker 1: it is. It is. They're high on fucking power. And
Speaker 1: if you've ever I mean I don't know, have you
Speaker 1: have you never? Have you never pistol whipped a guy?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Oh my god, pistol whipping a dude.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like it's like that first slice of
Speaker 1: cherry pie on a birthday. Yeah, that's how it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no wonder they want to protect it. I get it.
Speaker 1: I get it. You're like, this is super fun now, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's terrible. I've been in enough like fist fights to
Speaker 1: know I don't like them. Yeah, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: And I've been in enough to be like, I don't
Speaker 1: like him because of the pain, but I also don't
Speaker 1: like him because you just walk away. Like even if
Speaker 1: it's just like that dude's a freaking scumbag and he
Speaker 1: deserved it, you're still like, oh, you know, I'll feel
Speaker 1: good about it. Yeah, you still walk away like man,
Speaker 1: all feel good about it? Yeah? Anyway, Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: was I was joking about pistols, of course. But I
Speaker 1: do wonder. I do wonder if we can succeed in
Speaker 1: police abolition. What if we just made it legal for
Speaker 1: everyone to own grenade launchers and tear gas gardades and
Speaker 1: rubber bullets, and then the crowd of protesters could confront
Speaker 1: the police on it even like, would they enjoy being
Speaker 1: riot cops? Yeah? If they were having getting flash banged back?
Speaker 1: I can. I can tell you I've seen some protesters
Speaker 1: throw like mortars, like fireworks back at police who are
Speaker 1: shooting grenades of them, and they don't seem to like it. No, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's crazy, huh, one would think, right, yeah, so um yeah,
Speaker 1: if if the way that police unions respond when elected
Speaker 1: officials try to restrict the powers and rights of the
Speaker 1: police sounds kind of like how the mob works, You're
Speaker 1: not the only person to think that way. Back in Minneapolis,
Speaker 1: city councilman Steve Fletcher noted that once he started pushing
Speaker 1: to freeze the MPD from hiring new officers, the police
Speaker 1: stopped responding as quickly to nine one one calls made
Speaker 1: by his constituents. He called it a little bit like
Speaker 1: a protection racket. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what it is, Steve,
Speaker 1: exactly what it is. We're looking. And he used to
Speaker 1: have a song called nine one one is a joke
Speaker 1: and it's and and and like people think they were
Speaker 1: They're like, what is what are they talking about? No,
Speaker 1: you don't understand that they don't have to come when
Speaker 1: we call. Ye, you could decide like this, I'm just
Speaker 1: not gonna go over there. Yeah, And it's it's funny
Speaker 1: because of the protests in Portland and stuff, like, I
Speaker 1: know a lot of people who have been the victims
Speaker 1: of crimes in Portland. I've been the victims of crimes,
Speaker 1: thankfully not here, but in other cities. And like it
Speaker 1: always takes a hell of a long time for the
Speaker 1: police to respond. Um. But when the protests here wound
Speaker 1: up in the neighborhood of the mayor's mansion is and
Speaker 1: so like they were surrounded by mansions and people started
Speaker 1: shining lasers and windows and like sitting off smoke bombs.
Speaker 1: The police were fucking right there there, so fucking quick man,
Speaker 1: you guys. Response times today, Wow, you guys, are you
Speaker 1: guys are really on the ball when this neighborhood, this
Speaker 1: specific neighborhood gets sucked with Yeah yeah. So um. We'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about police unions later. For now,
Speaker 1: there's another major subject. We've got a pivot to broken
Speaker 1: windows policing. Yeah, but this is you've heard of broken windows, right, bro?
Speaker 1: This is the one that like when this is the
Speaker 1: stuff you're getting into that like our like dads and
Speaker 1: big brothers and cousins would sit us down and say, hey,
Speaker 1: this is how it works. You need to protect yourself.
Speaker 1: They was explaining this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um. In
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve, a teenager named Alvin Cruz was stopped
Speaker 1: by police and searched. This was not unusual for Cruise,
Speaker 1: that had happened to him numerous times before, and the
Speaker 1: officers searching him this was in New York, by the way,
Speaker 1: and the officers searching him never explained why they were
Speaker 1: doing it, but this time because he was just fucking
Speaker 1: tired of being hassled so many him by the police,
Speaker 1: Alvin secretly recorded the encounter, and he caught on tape
Speaker 1: the officer's response when he asked him why he was
Speaker 1: being stopped, the cop told him for being a fucking mutt.
Speaker 1: You know that. Another officer twisted his arm behind his
Speaker 1: back after this and shouted, dude, I'm gonna break your
Speaker 1: fucking arm and then I'm gonna punch you in the
Speaker 1: fucking face. This tape went real viral, and it was
Speaker 1: cited in the ruling of a federal judge later that
Speaker 1: year um when the judge ruled that the NYPDS stopping
Speaker 1: frisk policy was unconstitutional and racially discriminatory. Stopping frisk is
Speaker 1: not a policy unique to New York, but as we've learned,
Speaker 1: the NYPD tend to be trailblazers. This tactic involves basically
Speaker 1: stopping random people, virtually all of whom were black or Hispanic,
Speaker 1: and searching them for contraband with little to no cause.
Speaker 1: Stopping frisk was justified by the best minds available to
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties law enforcement, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling.
Speaker 1: Do you know what't even about either of these guys? Uh,
Speaker 1: not personally, except for they're the reason why I can't
Speaker 1: walk home with a friend. Yes, kid, you're gonna learn
Speaker 1: some not surprising stuff about them, but yeah, In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two, Wilson and Kelling published an article in the
Speaker 1: Atlantic that became the foundation of what we now know
Speaker 1: as broken windows policing, probably the most single most influential
Speaker 1: article in the history of law enforcement. Their chief argument
Speaker 1: was boiled down in this sentence. If a window in
Speaker 1: the building is broken and left unrepaired, all the rest
Speaker 1: of the windows will soon be broken. Yeah. So, in
Speaker 1: order to keep crime down and keep neighborhoods nice, they argued,
Speaker 1: all violations of public order have to be sternly punished
Speaker 1: and prosecuted. Searching random black and Latino kids and occasionally
Speaker 1: beating the ship out of them is just the price
Speaker 1: we pay for making sure those kids don't have spray
Speaker 1: paint on them or whatever. You know, aren't going to
Speaker 1: sell a little bit of weed or something like. Because
Speaker 1: any small criminal violation will inevitably lead to the total
Speaker 1: destruction of the neighborhood. So we have to police this
Speaker 1: little ship as harshly as possible. Now. Wilson and Kelling's
Speaker 1: new theory of policing was presented as scientific, backed up
Speaker 1: by the latest data, but that was a complete sham.
Speaker 1: There was only a single piece of hard evidence behind
Speaker 1: their theory, and they didn't interpret it the way that
Speaker 1: the actual researchers who did the study um interpreted it.
Speaker 1: And that single piece of evidence was a nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: nine study by every psych student's favorite problematic researcher, Philip Zimbardo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: love me some Zimbardo. He was like, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of real good criticisms of Philip Zimbardo, but his work
Speaker 1: is never boring. Like I want to do some weird
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make a prison and staff it with teenagers.
Speaker 1: This guy, there's a few people that making into your
Speaker 1: history books that you're just like, how why are we
Speaker 1: studying him? I would love to drink with Philip Zimbardo. Like,
Speaker 1: as someone who is critical of virtually all of his research,
Speaker 1: he sounds fun. Yeah, yeah, still sounds Yeah. So this
Speaker 1: particular nineteen sixty nine study by Zimbardo had been inspired
Speaker 1: by the nineteen sixty eight riots and uprisings, obviously, like
Speaker 1: Zimbardo had just like watched the entire country convulsed by
Speaker 1: something that was in a lot of ways even more
Speaker 1: like even more serious than what we're seeing right now. Um,
Speaker 1: And he was like, I should probably do some science
Speaker 1: about that. Ship. Um. So he was frustrated, particularly that
Speaker 1: conservatives blamed vandalism on individual criminality. So vandal considers were
Speaker 1: blaming like vandalism during protest on the criminal nature of
Speaker 1: individual protesters, and he thought this was wrong. He thought
Speaker 1: that vandalism had more to do with crowd mentality than
Speaker 1: individual characteristics. So in order to test his hypothesis, he
Speaker 1: and his team parked got two Oldsmobiles and they parked
Speaker 1: one in the South Bronx and the other in Palo Alto, California.
Speaker 1: They surveilled both cars and they watched happened to them. Now. Zimbardo,
Speaker 1: because he was a little bit racist, expected the Oldsmobile
Speaker 1: and the Bronx would be swiftly vandalized and torn apart.
Speaker 1: And he was right, but he was surprised that the
Speaker 1: first vandals were a white, well dressed family and not
Speaker 1: black teenagers. Um. Yeah, still, which is not go ahead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was going to say, because like and I'm saying
Speaker 1: it's completely anecdotally. It's because when you black and brown,
Speaker 1: you already know they're gonna blame me anyway. So I
Speaker 1: can't Now, I'm not going to touch that. You know
Speaker 1: what's gonna happen, like they come over and kill us,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, so yeah. He
Speaker 1: was surprised by this, but he felt that his central
Speaker 1: hypothesis was supported um the lack of community cohesion. This
Speaker 1: is his conclusion. The lack of community cohesion and the
Speaker 1: Bronx produced a sense of anonymity which gave people permission
Speaker 1: to commit acts of vandalism. He wrote, conditions that create
Speaker 1: social inequality and put some people outside of the conventional
Speaker 1: rewards structure of the society, make them in different to
Speaker 1: its sanctions, laws and implicit norms. Mm hmm, yeah, yeah, sentence,
Speaker 1: That is quite a sentence. So like, yeah, that happens
Speaker 1: to the old mobile and Harlem um or not Harlem
Speaker 1: in the bronx Um and the old mobile he parked
Speaker 1: in Palo Alto suffered a a somewhat different fate. According
Speaker 1: to the Washington Post quote, after a week long unremarkable
Speaker 1: steak out, Zimbardo's drove the car to the Stanford campus,
Speaker 1: where his research team aimed to prime vandalism by taking
Speaker 1: a sledgehammer to its windows. Upon discovering that this was
Speaker 1: stimulating and pleasurable, Zimbardo and his graduate students got carried away.
Speaker 1: As Zimbardo described it, one student jumped on the roof
Speaker 1: and began stomping it. In two we're pulling out the
Speaker 1: door from its hinges. Another hammered away at the hood
Speaker 1: and motor, while the last one broke called the glass
Speaker 1: he could find the passers. The passers by the study
Speaker 1: had intended to observe, had turned into spectators and only
Speaker 1: joined in after the car was already wrecked. Zimbardo's conclusions
Speaker 1: were the stuff of liberal criminology. Anyone, even Stanford researchers,
Speaker 1: could be lured into vandalism, and this is particularly true
Speaker 1: in places like the Bronx with heightened social inequalities. For Zimbardo,
Speaker 1: what happened in the Bronx and at Stanford suggested that
Speaker 1: crowd mentality, social inequalities, and community anonymity could prompt good
Speaker 1: citizens to act destructively. This was no radical critique. It
Speaker 1: was an indictment of law and order politics that viewed
Speaker 1: vandalism as a senseless, unpardonable act. In a line that
Speaker 1: could have been lifted directly out of the countless riot
Speaker 1: reports published in the late nineteen sixties, Zimbardo asserted vandalism
Speaker 1: is rebellion with a cause, m which so yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I can't. I can't speak to the accuracy of
Speaker 1: Zimbardo's conclusions about the Bronx, particularly like his his attitudes
Speaker 1: about community there. Also, it was not a place he
Speaker 1: understood very well. Um, and he was clearly a manned
Speaker 1: with some biases. Uh. But I can't argue with his
Speaker 1: conclusions about Palo Alto because in part of what I
Speaker 1: saw in riot night in Portland, which was the night
Speaker 1: after the Third Precinct in Minneapolis burned. Um, I know that,
Speaker 1: like you know, people rioted in Portland. They fucked up
Speaker 1: the Justice Center and like lit it on fire and
Speaker 1: they destroyed like they damaged a lot of the luxury
Speaker 1: shopping district and looted it and it was blamed on
Speaker 1: like antifo white anarchist kids. But like I was there,
Speaker 1: it was a pretty fucking broad cross section of the population.
Speaker 1: Who was You can tell. I've seen enough people break windows.
Speaker 1: You can tell when someone knows how to break a window,
Speaker 1: and when someone is breaking a window for the first time,
Speaker 1: A lot of first time window a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of experienced window breakers in that crowd. Don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, a lot of first time window breakers. He
Speaker 1: just got taken in by the moment. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah. I I think that that's probably accurate that,
Speaker 1: like most vandalism that happens in times like these, is
Speaker 1: not the result of people who are as a lot
Speaker 1: of folks, I could portray them inherently criminal. Um, not
Speaker 1: that I even comfortable like judging people on that basis,
Speaker 1: but I think most of that kind of vandalism is
Speaker 1: just like, oh, fuck it, I can get away with
Speaker 1: this now, yeah I want to like yeah, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: angry and like I feel like this is an option.
Speaker 1: Now let's do it. Yeah now, um so yeah. The
Speaker 1: Oldsmobile study was actually not very influential initially, and it's
Speaker 1: sort of languished in the annals of academic history for
Speaker 1: a decade and a half until Wilson and Kelling, the
Speaker 1: guys who wrote that Atlantic article in the Broken Windows theory,
Speaker 1: until they came across it. So they didn't listen to
Speaker 1: anything Zimbardo had actually said about crowd mentality and community
Speaker 1: and anonymity. They kind of ignored all of the actual
Speaker 1: conclusions in the study um and took from it only
Speaker 1: the fact that quote, one unrepaired broken window is a
Speaker 1: signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows
Speaker 1: costs nothing. So both of these guys cite the Zimbardo
Speaker 1: theory as the entire academic basis of their theory on crime.
Speaker 1: H the Zimbardo study, but they actually interpreted it in
Speaker 1: a way that ran come completely at odds to the
Speaker 1: person conducting the studies own conclusions. And I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: from the Washington Post again. Their misleading recap of Zimbardo's
Speaker 1: study not only conflated the Stanford and Palo Alto experiments,
Speaker 1: but so distorted the order of events that it routed
Speaker 1: readers away from Zimbardo's conclusions. In their version, the car
Speaker 1: and Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week,
Speaker 1: then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon
Speaker 1: passers by were joining in. Where they conveniently neglected to
Speaker 1: mention was that the researchers themselves had laid waste to
Speaker 1: the car. By admitting this crucial detail, Wilson and Kelly
Speaker 1: manipulated Zimbardo's experiment to draw a straight line between one
Speaker 1: broken window and a thousand broken windows. This enabled them
Speaker 1: to claim that all it took was a broken window
Speaker 1: to transform staid Palo Alto into the Bronx where no
Speaker 1: one cared. The problem is it wasn't a broken window
Speaker 1: that enticed onlookers to join the fray. It was the
Speaker 1: spectacle of faculty and students destroying an oldsmobile in the
Speaker 1: middle of Stanford's campus. Like yes, no one did it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, that professor's sucking up, Like yeah, it
Speaker 1: seems like it's cool. Now let's do Yeah. Like people
Speaker 1: if they if someone's like, hey, it's actually there's a
Speaker 1: car people are sucking up and it's okay, it's perfectly legal.
Speaker 1: Do you want to funk up a car a little bit?
Speaker 1: Most people are gonna be like yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's so intuitive. And if I just see like a
Speaker 1: smashed window on a car, that's not gonna make me
Speaker 1: go I'm gonna smash that dude's window too. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be like, oh, that fool's backpack I've stolen, Like I'm
Speaker 1: gonna think, you know what I'm saying, poor guy, Like,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna go. Oh, nobody cares on this street.
Speaker 1: Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time in
Speaker 1: the Bay Area. I never go to San Francisco and
Speaker 1: don't see at least one car with a smashed out window.
Speaker 1: And I never see all of the windows around that
Speaker 1: car smashed. In fact, it's usually in a nice neighborhood. Still,
Speaker 1: it's just the thing they do in Sanford they fun
Speaker 1: up car windows and stealership inside cars. Don't do stuff
Speaker 1: in your car. In San Francisco, they don't break everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was my lesson was like, hey, dude, don't leave
Speaker 1: your backpack in the car. The story, don't leave your
Speaker 1: backpack in the car. It is a meme in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Never leave anything any And by the way, when I
Speaker 1: had my car broken into in San Francisco, I was
Speaker 1: parked directly in front of the Mission Police precincts. Like,
Speaker 1: we went into report it and the officer said, what
Speaker 1: do you want us to do about it? Right? Okay,
Speaker 1: tost cot copper. Everyone wasn't while they're nail, they'll nail it.
Speaker 1: Like it was one I remember now saying like my
Speaker 1: uh my freaking speakers and amp got stolen out of
Speaker 1: my car. And it's kind of the same thing. That
Speaker 1: cop was like, what what you want me to do man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm like, touche. I mean, you know what I want
Speaker 1: you to do is when I talk about police abolition,
Speaker 1: not be like, who are you going to call if
Speaker 1: someone robs you? Because here we are, because it's not
Speaker 1: and you just told me you're not going to do that. Dang. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So I first read that article about like the how
Speaker 1: the broken windows police and guys had like fucked up
Speaker 1: Zimbardo's study years before I came across like the basics
Speaker 1: of or years after I'd come across the basics of
Speaker 1: broken windows policing theory during I I took criminal justice
Speaker 1: for a while in college. I wanted to be in
Speaker 1: law enforcement at one point um, and reading that kind
Speaker 1: of like dissection of this foundational theory and modern law
Speaker 1: enforcement was pretty shocking and impactful to me. But I
Speaker 1: didn't know half the real story until I read Alex
Speaker 1: Fatalities The End of Policing this year. Fatality points out
Speaker 1: that the core of broken windows theory is the idea
Speaker 1: that people have latent destructive traits that are unleashed without
Speaker 1: constant pressure from authority to conform and behave. Fatality writes, quote,
Speaker 1: the emergence of this theory in nineteen eight two is
Speaker 1: tied to a larger arc of urban neo conservative thinking
Speaker 1: going back to the nineteen sixties. Wilson's former mentor and collaborator,
Speaker 1: Edward Banfield, a close associate of neoliberal economist Milton Friedman
Speaker 1: at the University of Chicago, parented many of the ideas
Speaker 1: that came to make up the new conservative consensus on cities.
Speaker 1: Banfield's big work was the nineteen seventy book The Unheavenly City,
Speaker 1: which is basically an extended argument that poor people and
Speaker 1: this is me now not vitality. The Unheavenly City is
Speaker 1: an extended argument that poor people can't be helped and
Speaker 1: so welfare programs are a waste of money. Here's a
Speaker 1: quote from Banfield's book, and this is again like the
Speaker 1: mentor of of Wilson, the guy who is one of
Speaker 1: the main architects, one of the two architects of the
Speaker 1: broken Windows theory. So here's what it writes. Although he
Speaker 1: has more leisure than almost anyone, the indifference apathy, if
Speaker 1: one prefers of the lower class person, is such that
Speaker 1: he seldom makes even the simplest repairs to the place
Speaker 1: that he lives. In he is not troubled by dirt
Speaker 1: or dilapidation, and he does not mind the inadequacy of
Speaker 1: public facilities such as schools, parks, hospitals, and libraries. Indeed,
Speaker 1: where such things exist, he may destroy them by carelessness
Speaker 1: or even by vandalism. Oh my gosh, right now, yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes you realize. Yeah, it's just what justlike what
Speaker 1: do you know about being poor? Go in any poor
Speaker 1: person's house. They have fixed more of their own ship
Speaker 1: than you know how to. But like, yes, there's that
Speaker 1: I've always put like the like broken window, uh, stopping
Speaker 1: frisk and then like kind of the like gang in
Speaker 1: junctions and street sweepers, like I've always kind of like
Speaker 1: in my head without any actual research, like lumped them
Speaker 1: all together under the like the theory that you just presented,
Speaker 1: which is that like, ultimately we don't care about our
Speaker 1: neighborhoods unless we have authoritative powers that keep us in line.
Speaker 1: Like I've kind of lumped it under that thought and
Speaker 1: that that's that's what law enforcement thinks about us, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, Like that, it's still the broken
Speaker 1: window thing. So when I the gang in junctions, will
Speaker 1: I don't know if if we're if we're even gonna
Speaker 1: cover that. But like I've always kind of seen them
Speaker 1: because they were all around. It was all that eighties
Speaker 1: and nineties like policing that that that turned me into
Speaker 1: the like policing don't work, you know activists that I am.
Speaker 1: Now it's like under that sort of thinking. I know,
Speaker 1: if they aught together, but it's but him the statement
Speaker 1: you just said, the idea of again saying that like
Speaker 1: ultimately your animals unless we keep you in line. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's just all makes sense. Now that's clearly how you
Speaker 1: think of us. Yes, yes, and it will become clearer
Speaker 1: where all of yeah, yeah, so uh. Banfield basically thought
Speaker 1: that cities ought to be abandoned because they were just
Speaker 1: inherently criminal places. Um and his protege Wilson, took a
Speaker 1: different tax, arguing that cities had been great once and
Speaker 1: could be halted in their decline and made great again
Speaker 1: because if only the cause of that decline were properly recognized.
Speaker 1: Wilson identified liberal politicians and of course, the moral failings
Speaker 1: of black communities, as the chief clause of urban decline.
Speaker 1: Vitality writes that Wilson quote argued that liberals had unwittingly
Speaker 1: unleashed urban chaos by undermining the formal social control mechanisms
Speaker 1: that made city living possible. By supporting the more radical
Speaker 1: demands of the later urban expressions of the civil rights
Speaker 1: movement that it's so weakened the police, teachers, and other
Speaker 1: government forces of behavioral regulation that chaos came to rain. Wilson,
Speaker 1: following Banfield, believed strongly that there were profound limits on
Speaker 1: what the government could do to help the poor. Financial
Speaker 1: investment in them would be squandered, new services would go
Speaker 1: unused or be destroyed. They would continue in their slothful
Speaker 1: and destructive ways. Since the root of the problem was
Speaker 1: either an essentially moral or cultural failure or a lack
Speaker 1: of external controls to regulate inherently destructive human urges, the
Speaker 1: solution had to take the form of punitive social control
Speaker 1: mechanisms to restore order and neighborhood stability. Wilson's views were
Speaker 1: informed by a borderline racism that emerged as a mix
Speaker 1: of biological and cultural explanations for the inferiority of poor blacks. Wilson, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: thoughts like just like the religious right, and like yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, I'm I'm I grew up with
Speaker 1: church boy, you know what I'm saying, Like I still
Speaker 1: got a lot of stuff still serves me well, but
Speaker 1: like I'm just thinking about out like just that, like
Speaker 1: that like why Western evangelical, Like well, like okay, the
Speaker 1: breakdown of the family. It's like there's no dad's in
Speaker 1: the homes and that's the problem. And like in the
Speaker 1: black community, your fathers are missing, so y'all have no
Speaker 1: direction and just hearing all that stuff, you know from
Speaker 1: these people that are supposed to be taking care of you,
Speaker 1: So like how just how? And then when you get
Speaker 1: get of age and you realize not, I think y'all
Speaker 1: just racist, like when it kind of like clicks, just
Speaker 1: the like crisis of like faith that you have at
Speaker 1: that moment where you're just like I don't, I can't.
Speaker 1: I'm actually not welcome here. I thought I was welcome here.
Speaker 1: I'm not welcome here anyway, going yeah, yeah, So back
Speaker 1: to Wilson a little bit, because this is the next
Speaker 1: part is important. No no no, no, no no. Um. Wilson
Speaker 1: co authored the book Crime and Human Nature with Richard Hernstein,
Speaker 1: which argued that there were important biological determinants of criminality
Speaker 1: while race was not one of the core determinants, language
Speaker 1: about i Q and body type opened the door to
Speaker 1: a kind of sociobiology that led Hernstein to co author
Speaker 1: the openly racist The Bell Curve with Charles Murray, who
Speaker 1: was also a close associate of Wilson. So The Bell Curve,
Speaker 1: if you're not aware, is a thoroughly to credit discredited
Speaker 1: book about i Q and race that has earned a
Speaker 1: place of honor in every racist bookshelf. And so Wilson
Speaker 1: is friends with both of the authors of that, and
Speaker 1: works on a book with one of the authors of that.
Speaker 1: This is the guy who co inventced broken windows theory
Speaker 1: of policing. Like, that's that's where he's swimming in. That's
Speaker 1: his fucking sea. Yeah, And it's so like hearing it
Speaker 1: all together, it's so clear, you know, it's so obvious,
Speaker 1: you know, coupled with my own just experience, and just like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, it all its hearing it all together,
Speaker 1: it's just like, yes, yes, that's so, I'm not crazy.
Speaker 1: You really do think this about us, got it? Yep? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the broken windows theory gave ideological cover to people
Speaker 1: who want to empower were the US police to interfere
Speaker 1: more directly in the daily lives of more, particularly non
Speaker 1: white people. Prevention of crime had been the goal since
Speaker 1: the days of Volmer, but what that mint had changed
Speaker 1: Now Poverty and social disorganization were seen as the results
Speaker 1: of crime, not the causes, and thus the best way
Speaker 1: to reform society was to repeatedly punish people from minor
Speaker 1: criminal behavior. Vitality goes on broken windows policing? Is it root?
Speaker 1: A deeply conservative attempt to shift the burden of responsibility
Speaker 1: for declining living conditions onto the poor themselves, and to
Speaker 1: argue that the solution to all social ills is increasingly aggressive,
Speaker 1: invasive and restrictive forms of policing that involved more arrests,
Speaker 1: more harassment, and ultimately more violence. Wow, so the solution
Speaker 1: of poverty ain't jobs, No, it's punishment. Yeah, you've gotta
Speaker 1: stop him from breaking breaking windows in their neighborhood by
Speaker 1: arresting them for weed or whatever. Yeah. Yo. The nuance
Speaker 1: that like like like sna match that out the sky.
Speaker 1: The nuance of saying I'm gonna try to say it
Speaker 1: like you like like the quote said, which he was
Speaker 1: like like the cause that the cause of crime was
Speaker 1: not the poverty, the cause of poverty was the crime.
Speaker 1: And that's the part where I'm just like, there's your
Speaker 1: mistake there, it is, right, Um, if if if you've
Speaker 1: ever heard the term like like a crime of survival,
Speaker 1: then like you understand what we're talking about here where
Speaker 1: it's just like you're you have that completely backwards, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. If if you if you think
Speaker 1: that the the cause of the poverty is the crime,
Speaker 1: rather than saying the cause of the crime is the poverty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is like that fundamental switch. Everything will start making
Speaker 1: sense now when you when you understand that, like the
Speaker 1: laws are the crime, the laws probably unjust already. So
Speaker 1: this act of survival shouldn't be a crime in the
Speaker 1: first place because it's an active survival, right. But when
Speaker 1: you understand it as just an act of survival, right,
Speaker 1: then the idea of punishing a person for trying to
Speaker 1: survive seems preposterous because it yes, yeah so um. One
Speaker 1: example of the violence caused by broken windows policing would
Speaker 1: be the famous and the tragic death of Eric Garner.
Speaker 1: If you've forgotten, um, I know you haven't, but at
Speaker 1: home Garner was busted for selling cigarettes illegally, he was
Speaker 1: choked to death by officers, and his famous cry I
Speaker 1: can't breathe has probably become the most powerful slogan of
Speaker 1: the Black Lives Matter movement. Um just kind of sums
Speaker 1: everything up. Uh. You might be surprised to learn that
Speaker 1: Garner's arrested not come as the result of like an
Speaker 1: individual officer just sort of like rolling around the neighborhood
Speaker 1: and spotting a guy breaking the law and choosing to
Speaker 1: do something. It was actually ordered by the top brass
Speaker 1: because the local business owners had complained about Gardners illegal
Speaker 1: cigarette sales harming their own businesses. So kind of back
Speaker 1: to episode two here where we're talking about like the
Speaker 1: police are formed to protect Yeah, yeah, and it's good
Speaker 1: for you to point out like what the crime was.
Speaker 1: It's yes, if you don't know this, it's a lucy.
Speaker 1: It's when you just sell an individual cigarette, which is
Speaker 1: like apparently a capital crime. Yes, yeah, and it is
Speaker 1: a perfectly normal thing in a lot of the world
Speaker 1: everywhere in the world. Like you you got ten dollars
Speaker 1: for a pack of cigarettes, so you're just trying to
Speaker 1: bum one of them. You're gonna walk around be like
Speaker 1: bum a cigarette or I'll sell you one for a
Speaker 1: dollar like that. This is a listen and listen to me. Guys,
Speaker 1: that's a crime. Yeah, you to say how ridiculous that
Speaker 1: sounds like you gotta fucking bosnia. You order a coffee,
Speaker 1: you'll get a cigarette with your coffee. But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you do that here, you're you're breaking the law. Yeah, Uh,
Speaker 1: make cigarettes mandatory. I think is the right, the right
Speaker 1: way to solve this problem. It's it's easy, right, So
Speaker 1: the NYPD dispatched a sizeable force to bust Garner, a
Speaker 1: plane closes unit and two sergeants with uniformed backup, and
Speaker 1: the best case scenario from sending cops after him was
Speaker 1: that he would be stopped temporarily from selling Lucy's. Eric
Speaker 1: had a long history of getting busted for petty crimes
Speaker 1: and going to jail. No sentence had dissuaded him from
Speaker 1: continuing to do this, um, so there was no chance
Speaker 1: of anything happening. But temporarily having this guy in jail
Speaker 1: instead of selling loose cigarettes, that was the best case scenario. Yea,
Speaker 1: or just like go to another block, like all right,
Speaker 1: this guy don't like me in front of his store,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna go down the street, not really hard nobodies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was no garrets man. There was no way for
Speaker 1: any meaningful public good to be gained by this interaction.
Speaker 1: And again the pot the worst case scenario which happened
Speaker 1: is that Garner died, which is what happened. Now. The
Speaker 1: NYPD instituted more use of force training for its patrol
Speaker 1: officers after Garner's death, so that the next guy the
Speaker 1: state sent armed men after for the crime of selling
Speaker 1: loose cigarettes would be less likely to get murdered. Um,
Speaker 1: but that didn't really doesn't really solve anything. As Alex
Speaker 1: Vitali notes, quote, such training ignores two important factors in
Speaker 1: Garner's death. The first is the officer's casual disregard for
Speaker 1: his well being, ignoring his cries of I can't breathe
Speaker 1: and they're seemingly indifferent reaction to his near lifelessness while
Speaker 1: awaiting an ambulance. This is a problem of values and
Speaker 1: seems to go to the heart of the claim that
Speaker 1: for too many police, black lives don't matter. The second
Speaker 1: is broken windows style policing, which targets low level in
Speaker 1: fractions for intensive, invasive and aggressive enforcement. Now, the death
Speaker 1: of Garner caused a flurry of national condemnation of the
Speaker 1: NYPD and a conflict between the department and Mayor build
Speaker 1: a Blasio. As you'll recall, the NYPD can't strike over
Speaker 1: this sort of thing, but they were angry that the
Speaker 1: mayor hadn't enthusiastically backed them when some of their own
Speaker 1: had committed murder. So they launched a slowdown, which is
Speaker 1: basically a diet version of a strike. Is what we
Speaker 1: talked about a little bit earlier. For seven weeks, the
Speaker 1: New York Police only went out in pairs, only left
Speaker 1: their squad cars if they felt it was absolutely necessary,
Speaker 1: and they avoided all proactive policing measures. This means that
Speaker 1: for the first time in decades, the NYPD stopped fucking
Speaker 1: with people who committed petty crimes and misdemeanors. The slowdown
Speaker 1: ended eventually, but researchers wanted to learn what impact it
Speaker 1: might have actually had on crime in the city. Their study,
Speaker 1: published in the Nature Journal Human Behavior, was based on
Speaker 1: Foyed CompStat reports from two thousand and thirteen to two
Speaker 1: thousand and sixteen. These reports include weekly activity for each
Speaker 1: NYPD precinct for all the rests and criminal activity. The
Speaker 1: study found that, not surprisingly, the rate of criminal summons
Speaker 1: is and stopping frisks and arrests had declined massively during
Speaker 1: the slowdown. This is what you'd expect because cops weren't
Speaker 1: doing that sort of work. But the researchers also found
Speaker 1: that civilian complaints of major crimes fell between three and
Speaker 1: six percent during the same period. Civilians reported forty three
Speaker 1: fewer felony assaults, forty fewer burglaries, and forty fewer acts
Speaker 1: of grand larceny. The drop in violent crime actually continued
Speaker 1: for several months after the slowdown, leading to an estimated
Speaker 1: twenty one hundred fewer major crime plants. The study authors noted,
Speaker 1: quote in their efforts to increase civilian compliance, certain policing
Speaker 1: tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious criminal activity. The implications
Speaker 1: for understanding policing and a democratic society should not be understated.
Speaker 1: The researchers directly addressed broken windows policing and the stop
Speaker 1: in first style public order policing tactics introduced as a
Speaker 1: result of that theory. Quote. Our results imply not only
Speaker 1: that these tactics fail at their stated objective of reducing
Speaker 1: major legal violations, but also that the initial deployment of
Speaker 1: proactive policing can inspire additional crimes that later provide justification
Speaker 1: for further increasing police stops, summons is and so forth.
Speaker 1: So so, so what you're saying is them not doing
Speaker 1: what they were doing actually helped. Yeah, if you had
Speaker 1: a DA who came in and said violent crime and like,
Speaker 1: complaints about major crimes by civilians dropped between three and
Speaker 1: six percent during my tenure, you could running for fucking
Speaker 1: state office, the general office on that ship, right, yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's like, oh, we'll show you. I'll show you, guys,
Speaker 1: how much you need us. Actually you are the problem. No, Actually,
Speaker 1: things actually seem a lot better. Actually it's fine, you
Speaker 1: know what, keep going, keep slowing down, guys. You know,
Speaker 1: I wanted a single cigarette the other day. I bought it.
Speaker 1: Nobody got choked. Yeah, it was fine. Everything, it's actually okay.
Speaker 1: It seems like it's actually okay, dude. Yeah. I would
Speaker 1: love to somehow or another try to invoke just the
Speaker 1: empathy and emotions of what like stopping frisk did psychologically,
Speaker 1: you know, as a young man, you know, or just
Speaker 1: just as a person in that sort of context and environment.
Speaker 1: And of course you know obviously that you know, Bloomberg
Speaker 1: didn't last in the in the he it was a
Speaker 1: joke anyway, you know what I'm saying. But like, um, so,
Speaker 1: so there was no way I could have ever voted
Speaker 1: for him because I know it's psychologically what stopping frisk
Speaker 1: and like all that stuff did to us. But like,
Speaker 1: just I just think, think about what we're saying here
Speaker 1: is you can get stopped and searched for nothing for
Speaker 1: the possibility that you might be doing something. So like
Speaker 1: it's just so moving about freely. You know, I brought
Speaker 1: up again earlier, like because the the l a version
Speaker 1: of that was like the gang injunctions. So if you
Speaker 1: were if if you and two of your friends happened
Speaker 1: to be walking home from basketball practice in your clothes
Speaker 1: kind of match, that's a gag, right, So no matter what,
Speaker 1: if there's more than one of you, you're in a gang.
Speaker 1: So and and there's and there's a there's a there's
Speaker 1: a gang uptick. So like let's just say you do
Speaker 1: commit a petty crime or you were involved with a
Speaker 1: committing with a petty crime, if you were with someone
Speaker 1: that was either in the in the system as a
Speaker 1: gang member or it was more than one of you,
Speaker 1: you can get the gang up charge. So that just
Speaker 1: adds five years, right, even if something only took six
Speaker 1: even if it was like a petty crime and it
Speaker 1: was only like six to eight months probation, if you
Speaker 1: get the gang uptick is five years, right. So I
Speaker 1: it was dudes that like disappeared off the streets. We
Speaker 1: didn't until we were in college because of this stuff.
Speaker 1: And so they came out of prison gangsters. They didn't
Speaker 1: go in gangsters that came out, you know. So like
Speaker 1: I I'm ranting, but like like please understand the psychological
Speaker 1: like part of that. Yeah, shit good you just you
Speaker 1: just like just the I mean, I'm a full grown man.
Speaker 1: I paid freaking property taxes, I'm working on a damn
Speaker 1: home loan right now, and I still whenever I just
Speaker 1: hear that whoa, whoa, my body is still just kind
Speaker 1: of like uh yeah, Like that's the fucking thing to me,
Speaker 1: is like, like we talked such a fucking good game
Speaker 1: in this country about what freedom is, and if you
Speaker 1: live in a country, we're a huge percentage, if not most,
Speaker 1: because fucking white people feel this way when they hear
Speaker 1: the woolp of the police st everyone scared of them.
Speaker 1: If you've got this unaccountable group of armed people who
Speaker 1: can funk up your day and possibly the rest of
Speaker 1: your life at any moment for no reason, even if
Speaker 1: you haven't done something wrong and experience no consequences. If
Speaker 1: that's built into your system, you're not free. Whatever nebulous
Speaker 1: concept freedom is, that's not it. It's not it. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: go back to the script. Yeah, the script is, the
Speaker 1: script is done. This is this is what we had
Speaker 1: for today. Um. Yeah, we're gonna talk about the exist
Speaker 1: Rangers some which will be fun, and the militarization of police.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about the TV show Cops. Yeah, that'll
Speaker 1: be That'll be it for a little serious which is
Speaker 1: going to leave out just so much stuff, but doing
Speaker 1: doing the best we can over here. Man, I hope.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say this on record that like, man, what
Speaker 1: you've done for the cause by doing this you and Sophie, Like, man,
Speaker 1: y'all don't put yah, don't put stones and slingshots, boy by,
Speaker 1: Like this is just seven to ten hours of receipts
Speaker 1: that you know what I'm saying, Like, man, we appreciate
Speaker 1: this work. I know. I'm a part of But I
Speaker 1: appreciate y'all for doing this. I mean, I think it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it came at a certain point, like during
Speaker 1: covering the protests, where like things were starting to die down,
Speaker 1: in part because like people were getting exhausted, in part
Speaker 1: because the police got in trouble for all of the violence,
Speaker 1: and it was like, what's the next thing to do.
Speaker 1: It's make sure everybody like you want to you want
Speaker 1: to keep people. People have to be angry about this
Speaker 1: for a long time if it's going to change, right,
Speaker 1: this is like, this is this is a long fight.
Speaker 1: This is not going We're not gonna like, no one's
Speaker 1: gonna like, like, in order to get one police department
Speaker 1: taken down in Minneapolis, and it hasn't yet happened, but
Speaker 1: it looks like it's going to happen, they had to
Speaker 1: burn a precinct. Like it was hard. Yeah, yeah, they
Speaker 1: they they fought like they fought like motherfucker's just to
Speaker 1: take that down. Um, and that's just not going to
Speaker 1: happen nationwide. And but I we still need to stop this,
Speaker 1: and the only way to do that is to get
Speaker 1: enough people angry long enough that they wear them down.
Speaker 1: This is not like, it's not as simple as a
Speaker 1: vote in better people, And anyone who says that, like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: the real way to fix this is vote is lying
Speaker 1: to you. Voting is one part of the effort. And
Speaker 1: the only way voting works is if there is like
Speaker 1: clearly enough rage and and anger and um and and
Speaker 1: activity in the street that it necessitates action. That number one,
Speaker 1: local governments are scared by the number of people out
Speaker 1: in the streets and realize that we're all gonna lose
Speaker 1: our fucking jobs if we don't do something. Um and also,
Speaker 1: physically exhausting the police is a part of it. Um
Speaker 1: running out there fucking budgets is a part of it.
Speaker 1: Making them realize that they are not making it. Making
Speaker 1: it not pleasurable to be an officer because people don't
Speaker 1: view you positively is a part of it. For all
Speaker 1: of like, all of this is a part of it.
Speaker 1: Getting rid of cops was I think a bigger part
Speaker 1: of it than a lot of people realize. And I
Speaker 1: my hope with this is that it it helps keep
Speaker 1: people angry enough to stay in the fight and make
Speaker 1: the changes happen. You ever heard of Carl von Klauswitz,
Speaker 1: No Klauswitz was a German military he's like a he
Speaker 1: was a general, but he was also like a like.
Speaker 1: He wrote a lot about strategy. He was He's very
Speaker 1: influential in the field of like thinking about how to
Speaker 1: to conduct war. And Klauswitz had a definition of war
Speaker 1: that is not all not not everyone agrees with it,
Speaker 1: but I find it really compelling. He defined war as
Speaker 1: the continuation of politics through other means. Um. And police
Speaker 1: have been talking about how there's a war on police
Speaker 1: for a very long time, and I think that the
Speaker 1: actual falling number over forty years, you know, the number
Speaker 1: of police officers killed and wounded the line of duty
Speaker 1: is continually fallen. Um. I don't think it's accurate in
Speaker 1: like the literal sense, but I do think you can
Speaker 1: look at what the police have been doing and stopping
Speaker 1: frisk is a big part of it as a war
Speaker 1: on the people of this country and responding in kind.
Speaker 1: It's not it's not a sitting in the trenches with
Speaker 1: a rifle. It's not necessarily even on our side of things,
Speaker 1: it's not a it's not a doing violence to human
Speaker 1: beings war, but it's it's not dissimilar from the kind
Speaker 1: of war that like the Russian government has been attempting
Speaker 1: to carry out in places like Ukraine and Georgia. It
Speaker 1: is a it is a very complicated conflict, but it
Speaker 1: is a it is a conflict. UM. And yeah, I
Speaker 1: hope that this is has provided some some additional munitions. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it has good on you. Well, prop you want
Speaker 1: to plug your plug doubles before we roll out? I do.
Speaker 1: This is uh, this is prop hip hop over here. Uh,
Speaker 1: website and Instagram and all those things are prop hip
Speaker 1: hop dot com. Um, there's cups and T shirts and
Speaker 1: music uh in other podcasts that I'm part of. Um,
Speaker 1: and I am don't have anything else to plug because
Speaker 1: I'm reliving my teen years in my head right now. Shit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I am very happy to be a part of this.
Speaker 1: I'm very happy to be heard. That's another reference that
Speaker 1: Sophie appreciate that you won't know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: I I don't. I didn't get that at all. It's
Speaker 1: all good. It's coming to America, man, oh shit, Oh okay, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So at some point, Chris Daniel, whoever doing this, do
Speaker 1: not cut this part out. At some point when all
Speaker 1: this ship is over Sophie and I. We're going to
Speaker 1: spend one to two days at least, and I am
Speaker 1: just going to indoctrinate you in all of just black
Speaker 1: culture references, urban culture references that you should know. And
Speaker 1: I just like, and you would appreciate, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. I'm just like, I need you to know
Speaker 1: these jokes. I think that's a great idea. Actually, yeah
Speaker 1: we can. I mean, I know I need to. I've
Speaker 1: been told for a while I need to watch do
Speaker 1: the right thing. I think that's it correct. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then there's the other there's the one that's about
Speaker 1: the fucking like the fast food joint or something, and like, um,
Speaker 1: I don't even know where you're going, Okay, maybe yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta do Harlem Nights. You gotta watch, you gotta
Speaker 1: watch do the right thing. You need to see soul food,
Speaker 1: you gotta see the color purple, you gotta see Friday
Speaker 1: at We got to catch you up, man, because yeah,
Speaker 1: and I feel like you'd appreciate all these Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: do the right thing is the one that I was
Speaker 1: thinking about. That's the one at the pizza shop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the pizza shop, Yeah, the right Yeah. Okay, okay, all right,
Speaker 1: you need to know the radio. Rahim is, yeah, you
Speaker 1: got to know this stuff. We will do this all right,
Speaker 1: but first we're going to go away and come back
Speaker 1: on Thursday. Talk about the police for like another ninety minutes.
Speaker 1: So buckle buckle up for that. Lads and ladies, boyos
Speaker 1: and non binarios. And there's not enough good slang yet.
Speaker 1: It hasn't caught up to changes in our cultural conversation.
Speaker 1: We can end the podcast alright, alright, Oh boy, there's
Speaker 1: a threat about wanting to hear me wrap on the
Speaker 1: at it. That's probably a bad idea. Oh that's happening.
Speaker 1: Brom Behind the Police is a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i
Speaker 1: heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.