Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: The Corps Are Problem Problems. I'm Robert Evans. This is
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, normally a podcast about the worst people
Speaker 1: in all of history, and it still is. But this
Speaker 1: is the last of our six episode mini series Behind
Speaker 1: the Police. Um. That introduction started out rough, but it
Speaker 1: came together in the end. Um much like the Police,
Speaker 1: except for well no, not really. Uh. My guest uh
Speaker 1: with this episode, as with all of the others, is
Speaker 1: Jason Petty, better known as the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason,
Speaker 1: how are you doing? What's up? I'm breathing thin air
Speaker 1: because I'm on the road. But let's hope that this
Speaker 1: isn't the end of the police story and it does
Speaker 1: turn out okay. Yeah, yeah, I think that I think
Speaker 1: they might pull it together in the last the last quarter.
Speaker 1: He yeah, Let's let's just hope the last quarter isn't
Speaker 1: the year four thousand. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I haven't been
Speaker 1: checking the news in months, so I I don't know,
Speaker 1: um how how how the police are nowadays? I assume
Speaker 1: everybody's happy with them, yeah, or they're sticking to brand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so um boy, Jason. As as I finished, this up.
Speaker 1: It became incredibly clear to me how much I was
Speaker 1: going to have to leave out of this of this series,
Speaker 1: Like not just the fact that we're not really talking
Speaker 1: about federal law enforcement, the FBI, the d e A,
Speaker 1: the A t F UM, just because I wanted to
Speaker 1: focus on like, you know, cops, like normal straight up
Speaker 1: specifically cops. Yeah, in your neighborhood cops. Um. There's but
Speaker 1: there's like so much like we're not going to talk
Speaker 1: much about the civil rights movement just because a lot
Speaker 1: of what the police did then was just kind of
Speaker 1: like the same tactics that we already talked about them
Speaker 1: doing in previous periods. Um, we're not going to talk
Speaker 1: a lot about like the LGBT movement violence against them.
Speaker 1: We're not going to talk about the Green movement and
Speaker 1: the suppression of that, um, just because I already wrote
Speaker 1: sixteen pages for today. Yeah, so we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about what I think is the right last subject
Speaker 1: to end on a series that is inevitably not going
Speaker 1: to cover everything that it would have been good to cover, um,
Speaker 1: and that is the militarization of American police. UM. Yes,
Speaker 1: so that's where we're where we're going to today, and
Speaker 1: it's important. It's important to note I'm gonna throw this
Speaker 1: in there that like all the pieces that he's talking about,
Speaker 1: like remember, those are like lived experiences, So it's a
Speaker 1: piled on history that emotionally and psychologically all of us
Speaker 1: who have lived through it like, no, it's there. But
Speaker 1: good god, if there's no way to actually cover all
Speaker 1: of it in a podcast, you know what I'm saying. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, if we'd had another dozen episodes, yeah, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't have had to leave out much like we would
Speaker 1: have had to leave out a lot, but we would
Speaker 1: have been able to give broad coverage of all of
Speaker 1: the things. But like, yeah, there's just this isn't going
Speaker 1: to be you know, we had to had to stop somewhere.
Speaker 1: So militarization, I think does kind of make sense, um
Speaker 1: to to focus on in our last episode because it's
Speaker 1: kind of the biggest aspect of where we are right now,
Speaker 1: um in terms of like why the why the ship
Speaker 1: that's happening right now is happening, Like a lot of
Speaker 1: it has to do with militarization and obviously the foundational
Speaker 1: issues of racism that we're behind policing contributed to UM.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna talk about all that, UM. But to
Speaker 1: start us off today, we are going to get into
Speaker 1: one of the aspects of the U S law enforcement
Speaker 1: that we have thus far failed to cover it enough
Speaker 1: to tail US policing and indigenous people's UM. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because this is really where we get to the very
Speaker 1: start of militarized police in the United States. When people
Speaker 1: talk about use that term today, militarized police, they're generally
Speaker 1: referring to equipment. Right the transition of cops the friendly
Speaker 1: Andy Griffith style lawman who wore like maybe a gun
Speaker 1: on his hip and a pair of handcuffs, to like
Speaker 1: the guys wearing heavy body armor in a tool belt
Speaker 1: with like five different weapons on it. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: police tanks and grenade launchers and are fifteen. And when
Speaker 1: people talk about that stuff, they kind of see militarization
Speaker 1: as a new and worrying trend because the cops they
Speaker 1: grew up with didn't look like that. UM. And that's
Speaker 1: a part of police militarization. UM. And it is a
Speaker 1: new part of police military Well, it's not even really
Speaker 1: a new part of it. It's worrying, but it's not new. UM.
Speaker 1: So it's the most visually like, yeah, identifiable. You know,
Speaker 1: somebody can get their brain around that. Like we say
Speaker 1: there's a problem with militarization. You could go, yeah, logically speaking,
Speaker 1: I am not an enemy and surgeon, so I don't
Speaker 1: understand what the grenade launcher for. Yeah, I didn't an
Speaker 1: y yeah, yeah, you didn't used to on a daily basis.
Speaker 1: See dudes in like the middle of Los Angeles who
Speaker 1: looked like they could have walked out of downtown, right,
Speaker 1: and now you do, um yeah, yeah, Camo, Like, how
Speaker 1: is it? What do you expect to happen in the Yeah,
Speaker 1: the fucking I was at a cop right the other day,
Speaker 1: were like there were like a bunch of rapid response
Speaker 1: guys and fucking uh and fucking like rural camo and
Speaker 1: it was like, what are you. We're in the middle
Speaker 1: of that in front of the Portland's Justice Center. What
Speaker 1: do you think is going to happen? You're gonna bland in.
Speaker 1: You need to be wearing some like cut off dickies,
Speaker 1: wearing some sort of coffee stain on your shirt, get
Speaker 1: some really tight jeans and a flannel shirt. If you
Speaker 1: want a camouflage into Portland, like what do you fucking
Speaker 1: play that wouldn't even camouflage you in the goddamn woods?
Speaker 1: Thank you so um yeah. In episode two of this
Speaker 1: mini series, we talked about how the Philadelphia State Police
Speaker 1: were formed in direct imitation of the Philippine Constabulary, a
Speaker 1: colonial police force the U S form to suppress the
Speaker 1: natives of a conquered land, and such colonial police forces
Speaker 1: were really common among like imperial powers during the period
Speaker 1: of colonialism, or at least the period where colonialism was
Speaker 1: kind of openly embraced by everyone. Um So, all of
Speaker 1: the big European nations did this ship and you know,
Speaker 1: the US did as well, the most influential example of
Speaker 1: such a force in American history though, because like you know,
Speaker 1: the British had a whole bunch of different ones. They're
Speaker 1: probably the best at it. So did the French, show,
Speaker 1: so did the Germans, um, and so did the United States.
Speaker 1: But since we didn't have the as as extensive and
Speaker 1: overseas empire as as those European nations did, a lot
Speaker 1: of our colonial policing forces were actually like deployed right
Speaker 1: here at home, you know, kind of in frontier areas
Speaker 1: that weren't states yet. And the most influential example of
Speaker 1: such a force in American history is probably the Texas Rangers,
Speaker 1: who were formed officially in eighteen thirty five. So we're
Speaker 1: talking about the Rangers today, baby, not the not the
Speaker 1: not the sports team there, broadly George Bushy's team. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're whatever we're talking about. What working about the sport
Speaker 1: or the Rangers. Robert their baseball right, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: I'm so proud Texas. I was like, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no no, it's Texas. So he knows that answer. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1: So I used to tease my Texas own boys to
Speaker 1: be like, I know, y'all go to the Alamo every year,
Speaker 1: and I was like, at my DJ I traveled with
Speaker 1: it from Texas. I was like, hey, you know, y'all
Speaker 1: lost the Alimo, right, He was like, I didn't realize
Speaker 1: it until college because every year, like y'all lost. Anyway,
Speaker 1: go on, So the Range, speaking of the Alamo and such,
Speaker 1: the Rangers started out kind of in the period where
Speaker 1: Texas was doing its own thing, uh and not yet
Speaker 1: part of the United States, and they were initially kind
Speaker 1: of just a small, irregular band of hired tufts whose
Speaker 1: job was to protect newly settled white families out on
Speaker 1: the frontier. UH. This put them in constant conflict with
Speaker 1: local and native tribes, the Cherokee and the Comanche primarily,
Speaker 1: and it also pit them against the Mexican population in
Speaker 1: the area. The Texas Rangers quickly evolved into one of
Speaker 1: the most formidable forces for protecting whiteness on the American frontier.
Speaker 1: When non white people were accused of robbing or attacking
Speaker 1: white settlers, the Rangers acted as designated vigilantes to see
Speaker 1: that justice was done. And because we're talking about Texas
Speaker 1: in the period we're talking about, we're actually talking about
Speaker 1: like what is today Texas, Oklahoma, parts of New Mexico
Speaker 1: and even some Colorado. I think, um, like it's that
Speaker 1: whole region and and a lot of this is like
Speaker 1: Comanche who were like, this is there where they've been
Speaker 1: living for a while, um, and the the colode they
Speaker 1: started having conflicts with settlers, and settlers would murder them.
Speaker 1: They would murder settlers, and the Texas Rangers would be
Speaker 1: they act a lot as like scouts and stuff for
Speaker 1: like hunting down these bands and leading militias to them
Speaker 1: and stuff. And that's kind of like they're kind of
Speaker 1: like special forces in this period. And I just can't
Speaker 1: just throwing it in, like I just think, like the
Speaker 1: the social interaction, just the humanity of the moment. Of
Speaker 1: course it's tents, of course, it's like, uh, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of like bigger forces of like colonialism and frontiersm
Speaker 1: and all these things happening, but just the human interaction
Speaker 1: of saying, you're just waking up, gonna make a cup
Speaker 1: of coffee, step out of your house and someone's building
Speaker 1: a house in your lawn. Yeah, and they looked at
Speaker 1: you like you crazy. It's just like yeah, what what
Speaker 1: like what do you what are you doing? Man? What
Speaker 1: do you well? And it's one of those I don't
Speaker 1: want to I'm talking about my ass a little bit
Speaker 1: now because it's been a long time since I read
Speaker 1: I've read like one good book about what happened to
Speaker 1: like the conflict between the Comanches and the the the
Speaker 1: white settlers in this period. But if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 1: like they were living somewhere else and yeah, we kicked
Speaker 1: them out of it, uh, and so they wound up
Speaker 1: kind of in you know, the the Broad Texas region,
Speaker 1: and then we were like okay, but not here either
Speaker 1: like it was it was the to yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very frustrating history. So white settlers quickly learned how
Speaker 1: to use the Texas Rangers is like a mercenary force
Speaker 1: um and not just against and well not just against
Speaker 1: like indigenous peoples. It became very common for white men
Speaker 1: to raid cattle from Mexican ranches, uh, and then the
Speaker 1: Mexicans would steal their cattle back, and so the white
Speaker 1: folks would call in the Texas Rangers to retrieve their
Speaker 1: stolen property um. And you know, the Texas Rangers would
Speaker 1: murder people during these like raids to retrieve property like
Speaker 1: cattle they had owned and had been stolen from them
Speaker 1: and that they'd taken back. As a rule in sort
Speaker 1: of the Texas Republic period and the early period of statehood,
Speaker 1: when non whites resisted the Rangers in any way, they
Speaker 1: could be killed, arrested, or tortured. So the Texas Rangers
Speaker 1: go from being kind of this like quasi military scouting
Speaker 1: force like a counterinsurgency um force, to like acting as
Speaker 1: kind of a law force for for defending whiteness on
Speaker 1: the frontier um. And over the course of several decades,
Speaker 1: the Texas Rangers acted as the tip of a spear
Speaker 1: that gradually drove most indigenous people's out of Texas, often
Speaker 1: very violently. For much of the eighteen hundreds, the Rangers
Speaker 1: were yeah again like counterinsurgency was kind of their their bag,
Speaker 1: and they worked with the militia or the military as
Speaker 1: basically special forces. The Comanche Wars were a brutal series
Speaker 1: of conflicts that crossed the line and too outrighte ethnic
Speaker 1: cleansing on a number of occasions, and the Texas Rangers
Speaker 1: were very heavily involved. One of these ethnic cleansing moments
Speaker 1: would be the Red Fork massacre of eighteen forty, when
Speaker 1: a team of Texas Volunteer Rangers surrounded a Commanche village
Speaker 1: whose men were all outrating. Rather than attempt to arrest
Speaker 1: the women, children, and elderly inside, the rangers surrounded the
Speaker 1: camp and opened fire. When their rifles ran out of ammunition,
Speaker 1: they closed in with pistols to execute the survivors. Some
Speaker 1: hundred and forty Comanches were gunned down, and probably another
Speaker 1: hundred and forty at least died later from exposure. Their
Speaker 1: horses were stolen to pay the rangers now this was
Speaker 1: an act of genocide. UM. And it was also a
Speaker 1: pretty such a fundamentally military endeavor. UM. But as the
Speaker 1: and that's that's generally when you're we're talking about like
Speaker 1: the the kind of cutting edge of the genocide against
Speaker 1: the Native Americans, the intentional parts of it, UM, we
Speaker 1: are often talking about a military endeavor, like policing plays
Speaker 1: a role, but it's it's a lot of like the U. S.
Speaker 1: Military UM, and the rangers move into a different part
Speaker 1: of the country. But like when you get into like
Speaker 1: the Little Big Horn and General Custer stand that was
Speaker 1: a military move too, and in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: the ingredients were the same also in the sense that
Speaker 1: like this is where the cron nation lives. Uh, now
Speaker 1: we actually but we only live here because y'all made
Speaker 1: us live here. And then you discover gold in the
Speaker 1: Black Hills and now you want our land again and
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, so just it's like obviously in a Little
Speaker 1: Big Horn, it's because they grossly underestimated, um sitting bowl.
Speaker 1: But uh but that but that but that continual like
Speaker 1: um like fake diplomacy, which was really a militarized ethnic
Speaker 1: cleansing from what I know from the first tour I
Speaker 1: ever did was twenty seven Native American Reservations, so first
Speaker 1: tour as a as an artist. So when you start
Speaker 1: talking to them about the way that they see these things,
Speaker 1: they were, Yeah, it's in their mind it's always been
Speaker 1: an act of military. Yeah. Yeah, And that's that's part
Speaker 1: of I guess why we haven't kind of gone into
Speaker 1: that aspect as much, um and one of one of
Speaker 1: the just because like it's it's less of a policing
Speaker 1: thing and more of a military thing. Although those lines blur,
Speaker 1: and they blur especially with the Texas Rangers because while
Speaker 1: the Rangers kind of our start out as as a
Speaker 1: quasi military force, as the eighteen hundreds turned into the
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds and kind of the frontier fades, the Rangers
Speaker 1: transitioned into a law enforcement agency and they become they're
Speaker 1: broadly similar to the U. S. Marshals like today, that's
Speaker 1: kind of like more or less where they land, um,
Speaker 1: and they're but they're like this weird Texas state law
Speaker 1: enforcement agency that kind of resembles in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways more of like a FED type agency than it
Speaker 1: does you know, a beat cop, but their their law
Speaker 1: enforcement now, so they and they still exist. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: still exist. They go from being like okay, not like uh,
Speaker 1: it's not like Queen Elizabeth, like they actually do no
Speaker 1: no no. If you fly into um, if you fly
Speaker 1: into love Field Airport today in Dallas, which is the
Speaker 1: airport you want to fly into and out of in
Speaker 1: Dallas because DFW was a goddamn nightmare. There's a statue.
Speaker 1: There's a statue of like a dude, a cowboy looking
Speaker 1: dude with a six gun on his hip. That's like
Speaker 1: a statue of the Texas Rangers. And I think it's
Speaker 1: like the words written on under one Ranger, one Riot,
Speaker 1: which is their motto. And we'll be talking about where
Speaker 1: where that motto really comes from now. But they're no,
Speaker 1: they're still around. There's still a law enforcement agency in Texas.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's the they kind of transition from being
Speaker 1: a military guerrilla warfare unit to being like the law
Speaker 1: um and and as a side note, as a side note,
Speaker 1: I still don't know what a U. S. Marshal does
Speaker 1: except for fly on a plane. You know a lot
Speaker 1: of that's true. Yeah, the movie US Marshals, I think
Speaker 1: is perfectly accurate. Just watched watched the movie US marshals
Speaker 1: with Robert Downey Jr. And uh and Tommy Lee Jones.
Speaker 1: And I think that's a hundred percent right. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was like, so this is unnecessary. Your whole job
Speaker 1: is unnecessary, Okay, go so Um. The new Texas Rangers
Speaker 1: as law enforcement, um didn't act as like military scouts anymore,
Speaker 1: but they still enforced white supremacy at the barrel of
Speaker 1: a gun. In nineteen eighteen, at a place called Poor Veneer,
Speaker 1: Texas Rangers gunned down fifteen unarmed Mexican people and drove
Speaker 1: their families across the border into Mexico. I found a
Speaker 1: fun article on the Rangers in the Texas Observer, which
Speaker 1: is a great news source on Texas. They do like
Speaker 1: really big journalism. Uh. And they interviewed historian and professor
Speaker 1: Monica Martinez about the history of the Texas Rangers. Uh.
Speaker 1: The article notes quote martinez Is research posits the height
Speaker 1: of Texas Ranger violence against mex Sickens to have occurred
Speaker 1: from nineteen fifteen to nineteen nineteen. Some three hundred ethnic
Speaker 1: Mexicans were murdered between nineteen fifteen and nineteen sixteen alone.
Speaker 1: These dates coincided with the reign of not only the
Speaker 1: disgraced Governor James poff Ferguson, but also, starting in nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: the oft venerated William P. Hobby. Martinez is appropriately unsparing
Speaker 1: in the detailing of hobbies consistently anti Hispanic, anti double
Speaker 1: a CP agenda. In short, he used the Rangers as
Speaker 1: his own personal goon squad and instigating intimidation tactics against minorities.
Speaker 1: Hobby presided over an era that, according to Martinez, saw
Speaker 1: the widespread practice of executing landowning Hispanic men to force
Speaker 1: the sale of their land by their widows through threats
Speaker 1: of physical violence. Much yeah, much the same Hobby from
Speaker 1: the Houston Airport. Yeah wait, same guy, Yeah I think so, yes, yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: George Billson. Then there's Hobby. That's that's like, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: Houston's love Field, you know what I'm saying. Yeah their
Speaker 1: other airport. Yeah yeah yeah. Have said violence aided and embedded,
Speaker 1: if not directly perpetrated by the Rangers with the state
Speaker 1: official state consent, Powerful US political elites like Hobby made
Speaker 1: sure that any serious investigation of Ranger crimes through official
Speaker 1: legal channels would be doomed to failure. Now yeah, that
Speaker 1: is just just straight up ethnic cleansing again, like like
Speaker 1: there's still ethnically cleansing people. Um. And obviously I didn't
Speaker 1: learn any of that in Texas history classes. I learned
Speaker 1: about them fighting the Comanche, but it was it was
Speaker 1: framed as like, well, they were, you know, both two
Speaker 1: sides in a war and they both did bad things. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now uh, it turns out that and this is I
Speaker 1: also didn't learn in middle school. It turns out that
Speaker 1: the Texas Mexican border was kind of prior to this
Speaker 1: point where the Texas Rangers come in and start murdering landloaders,
Speaker 1: it was a semi autonomous region because it was both
Speaker 1: too remote and too close to Mexico to really be
Speaker 1: controlled by any central government. So people on the border
Speaker 1: from both countries would travel freely and like cross the
Speaker 1: border kind of without even noticing it was there. They
Speaker 1: built communities together, they had families together, they traded together, um.
Speaker 1: And this was great for them, but it was really
Speaker 1: bad for rich people and racests who lived many hundreds
Speaker 1: of miles away. So the Texas Rangers were sent in
Speaker 1: to secure the border, and this was like the first
Speaker 1: time the border was really secure and again they did
Speaker 1: this by executing people who owned land near the border
Speaker 1: and handing their stuff actually Mexican people who own land
Speaker 1: in the border, and handing their stuff over to white people. Um.
Speaker 1: The dead were portrayed as bandits and criminals, and heavily
Speaker 1: armed Rangers would pose for photographs with their bodies. By
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen, the sheer scale of the violence and forced
Speaker 1: to state legislative hearing on extra judicial killings by the Rangers.
Speaker 1: This hearing resulted in no formal charges, and the detailed
Speaker 1: record of the Texas Rangers mass murder spree was sealed
Speaker 1: for fifty years so as to not tarnish their record
Speaker 1: as tex and heroes. Yeah, I bet, I bet. Also,
Speaker 1: also there's parts of El Paso that are still like that.
Speaker 1: Then you still can't tell where the border is and
Speaker 1: isn't where there's a there's a high school down there.
Speaker 1: I know because the kid came to a show where
Speaker 1: the football field is in Mexico. Yeah, and then but
Speaker 1: the rest of the school is in Texas, so nobody
Speaker 1: really knows where. We really don't know where it is.
Speaker 1: But yeah, anyway, I just thought that's interesting that, like
Speaker 1: to this day that like it's important for us to
Speaker 1: all remember that borders are made up. They're not Yeah,
Speaker 1: we made them up. You know. They're just by pain.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, maybe it's not They're not real and they're
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, enforced by pain is a good way to yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh So. The Texas Rangers went well into the twentieth
Speaker 1: century acting as a colonial police force. They didn't stop
Speaker 1: in nineteen um and Alex Fatali, author of the end
Speaker 1: of policing rights quote. In the sixties and seventies, local
Speaker 1: and state elites used Rangers to suppress the political and
Speaker 1: economic rights of Mexican Americans and played a central role
Speaker 1: in subverting farm worker movements by shutting down meetings, intimidating supporters,
Speaker 1: and arresting and brutalizing picketers and union leaders. There were
Speaker 1: also frequent they called in to intimidate Mexican Americans out
Speaker 1: of voting in local elections. Most Latinos were subject to
Speaker 1: a kind of wan crow like it's a Jim Crow's thing,
Speaker 1: in which they were denied the right to vote and
Speaker 1: barred from private and public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants,
Speaker 1: bus station waiting rooms, public pools, and bathrooms. This is
Speaker 1: what that statue in love Field is referring to when
Speaker 1: it says one Ranger, one riot, that's the riot is
Speaker 1: the is is Mexicans being like, what if we had
Speaker 1: the right to vote in Texas? Ranger's saying, what if
Speaker 1: we shot you? You still have to say to yourself,
Speaker 1: like if it's so you, like everybody's a situation is
Speaker 1: so unique. But like as a as a Texan Mexican
Speaker 1: where you never moved, your house, never moved, it's just
Speaker 1: the land up under you became Texas and then everybody
Speaker 1: acting like you ain't puposed to be here, that you
Speaker 1: ain't got right. So he was like, I I've never left.
Speaker 1: I don't understand how I don't have rights in land.
Speaker 1: I never left. Yeah, you're the new guys. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just the mind bender of that. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty cool and good. So the Rangers were eventually
Speaker 1: beaten back to an extent in the early nineteen sixties
Speaker 1: when Tahanos began to organize in a significant way. They
Speaker 1: set up voter drives and fought literally fought in some
Speaker 1: points to get leaders elected on the local city council
Speaker 1: of a small town called Crystal City. This whole operation
Speaker 1: exploded into a big fight with Rangers cracking skulls and
Speaker 1: trying to break up rallies. Um. But this time they're victims.
Speaker 1: Attracted the attention of the press, The Rangers eventually were
Speaker 1: forced to back down by public opinion, and the ta
Speaker 1: Haanos won both the election and major civil rights concessions
Speaker 1: from the white majority you know, all across Texas, and
Speaker 1: things started to get better. Obviously they're still not perfect
Speaker 1: or even great, but they got better. Um. Today, the
Speaker 1: Texas Rangers are sort of just like a weird Texan
Speaker 1: variant of the U. S. Marshals. They do a lot
Speaker 1: of unsolved crime investigations like cold case murder or as
Speaker 1: they investigate serial killers. UM. They also act as kind
Speaker 1: of like they're supposed to be kind of a watchdog
Speaker 1: for the police because they investigate officer involved shootings, and
Speaker 1: of course they do border security UM. And the fact
Speaker 1: that they have a I don't know enough about how
Speaker 1: they do today to know how problematic they are and
Speaker 1: sort of currently in the vein of the rest of
Speaker 1: law enforcement. I will say they have a very positive
Speaker 1: reputation among just Texans UM. And this is not due
Speaker 1: to anything they actually do, but is owed largely to
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties TV show Walker Texas Ranger, in which
Speaker 1: Chuck Norris assume because Norris. Yeah, Chuck Norris basically erased
Speaker 1: the Centurion and change long history of ethnic cleansing and genocide,
Speaker 1: um by doing enough roundhouse kicks while wearing a bad
Speaker 1: join Us chest that people are like, ah, they're okay.
Speaker 1: Now punched a bear. Look at at me? Punched a bear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got to be a good guy. Uh yeah. And
Speaker 1: in sort of in following this arc of like committing genocide,
Speaker 1: acting as like a military force of ethnic cleansing and
Speaker 1: like like mass murder to suppress minorities, and then getting
Speaker 1: whitewashed by a TV show with Chuck Norris, the Texas
Speaker 1: Rangers kind of perfectly encapsulated a lot of law enforcement
Speaker 1: history in this country. That is the most acinct sentence.
Speaker 1: Is the most scinct sentence we've done this whole series. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they protested all six they participated in at least two genocides.
Speaker 1: But then Chuck Norris started kicking all right, spinning roundhouse kid. Uh.
Speaker 1: Also also as a native Californian who married a first
Speaker 1: Gin Mexican woman from Southern Mexico. I will go to
Speaker 1: my grave that I am not a fan of tex
Speaker 1: mex food in that case, so is terrible. Oh no,
Speaker 1: that's the only thing I'll fight for about Texas is
Speaker 1: text Max. Hey, man, Hey, I'll take your fajitas. They're great,
Speaker 1: but you can lead a case fucking Calimex putting fish
Speaker 1: in everything. Come on, yeah, I mean it's actually all
Speaker 1: pretty incredible compared to the burritos we get up here
Speaker 1: in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, don't call those burritos. You know,
Speaker 1: they're not They're not burritos. Somebody put Keen Waw in
Speaker 1: one of them. I was just you, what are you? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a rap. Come on, don't call this a fucking burrito.
Speaker 1: So in our last episode of the series, we talked
Speaker 1: about August Volmer. You remember Valmer, like the the good,
Speaker 1: the best cop that we're we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the series. Yeah. Um, probably the most influential police chief
Speaker 1: in US history. Volmer was a big advocate of what
Speaker 1: is called like the professional model of policing, of like
Speaker 1: what a police force should be. Um. He believed that
Speaker 1: police officers should be trained professionals with college degrees and
Speaker 1: when he thought trained professional, he was not thinking about killing, right, Like,
Speaker 1: their ability to handle a gun and shoot people was
Speaker 1: kind of low on Volmer's list of what cops should
Speaker 1: be fessional at um. He focused on the number one
Speaker 1: their ability to kind of scientifically solve crimes um and
Speaker 1: their ability to interface with and be parts of communities. Um.
Speaker 1: And these are both still things. Yeah, broadly, there's still problematic.
Speaker 1: One of the things we won't get into enough is
Speaker 1: that number one, like a lot of police science fingerprinting
Speaker 1: and stuff works a lot less well than than they
Speaker 1: say it does, so like and ship like yeah, like
Speaker 1: like there's a lot of problems with that. And there's
Speaker 1: also people who argue that community policing doesn't like is
Speaker 1: better than you know, maybe what we're doing now, but
Speaker 1: doesn't really work all that well. Like there's arguments to
Speaker 1: be made. We're not going to get into them enough.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be saying that. Like his attitude
Speaker 1: was perfect, but I think it was less problematic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: was he like the like the precursor to like c
Speaker 1: S I Miami, you know, like yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: you gotta like scientifically solve these crimes and that everything
Speaker 1: that has a science degree in forensics is unimaginably gorgeous,
Speaker 1: and they work in a lab that is looks more
Speaker 1: like a club. Yeah, yeah, it's really all. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: really well it. Yeah. Volmer is the guy who advocates
Speaker 1: for like sexy, brilliant um doctor cops who like, yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's kind of his vision. Yes, oh my god,
Speaker 1: an incredible shape with abs, like like how do they
Speaker 1: get abs that nice? And also do police work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Volmer, that's Volmer's attitude. That's kind of the professional
Speaker 1: model of policing. But Volmer was not the only person
Speaker 1: with a vision of what policing should be, and there
Speaker 1: was a you know, in the nineteen twenties in particular,
Speaker 1: a competing model of policing started to evolve. Now, if
Speaker 1: you remember your high school history courses, you'll know that
Speaker 1: the period from like eighteen seventy seven to eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: five is referred to broadly as the Gilded Age, and
Speaker 1: this was a time of massive wealth inequality, a period
Speaker 1: that saw the USA's first multi millionaires rise alongside a
Speaker 1: devin stating series of economic recessions and depressions. Um the
Speaker 1: Gilded Age was a time of intense political polarization. Political
Speaker 1: parties got like at each other's throats in a way
Speaker 1: they really hadn't been, you know, you know, prior to
Speaker 1: the Civil War, which I guess hadn't been that long ago.
Speaker 1: So let's not pretend that hasn't always been an aspect
Speaker 1: of our politics. But yeah, uh, And around the turn
Speaker 1: of the century, um, the Gilded Age kind of gave
Speaker 1: way to what's called the progressive era. And progressive today
Speaker 1: is the term we broadly used for just like folks
Speaker 1: on the left, but back then it meant something different,
Speaker 1: and like, progressives of this era kind of had things
Speaker 1: in common with both our modern left and right. Um,
Speaker 1: some of the values they had in common with, like
Speaker 1: today's lefties, would be sort of a rejection of conservative
Speaker 1: individualism in favor of more collective attitudes towards the common good.
Speaker 1: Progressives wanted to use state power to do things like
Speaker 1: help lower class individuals, workers, immigrants, you know, the urban poor.
Speaker 1: They stood against the greed of unchecked capitalism and the
Speaker 1: corruption of a system of party bosses that had dominated
Speaker 1: urban politics and US cities during the Gilded Age. And
Speaker 1: the progressives weren't really they progressive was a political orientation,
Speaker 1: but they didn't really care about They weren't like super
Speaker 1: into parties. Like a lot of the progressive air was
Speaker 1: kind of a rejection of where party politics had led
Speaker 1: things in the Gilded Age. That's a factor in this too.
Speaker 1: And when you when you read what I just read,
Speaker 1: the progressives kind of sound like lefties, but that's not
Speaker 1: all they were. Many progressives also held deeply conservative attitudes
Speaker 1: towards religion and acceptable social behavior. Progressives were by and
Speaker 1: large a homogeneous, middle class, white Protestant group. Um. They
Speaker 1: achewed political parties in favor of local informal organizations like
Speaker 1: the Anti Saloon League. And as that last bit, Mike KEYU,
Speaker 1: we are in on a whole lot of Uh, Progressives
Speaker 1: were very jazzed about prohibition. Um. And it's also progressives
Speaker 1: that also, you know, as an aside that brings us
Speaker 1: like early race science, um, for for some reasons we're
Speaker 1: going to get into. So the progressives are a mix
Speaker 1: of left and right and problematic as all hell like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's also it's also a good lesson for the modern thinker,
Speaker 1: the younger thinker to remember that like even our terms
Speaker 1: left and right are so malleable, and they haven't always
Speaker 1: meant the same thing that you can like find it.
Speaker 1: So like George Bush seen you're talking about climate change,
Speaker 1: because the talking points can vary in these just like
Speaker 1: borders are made up terms and they are very malluable.
Speaker 1: So even just jumping into this time with a vocabulary
Speaker 1: list that you think you know in seeing that like nah,
Speaker 1: you'd like those are also malleable too, is like super good.
Speaker 1: That's so, which is one reason why I love this
Speaker 1: this part of American history and politics. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: it's like it's fascinating. Um, it's very because they're like
Speaker 1: part of why they get into race science is that
Speaker 1: like this idea that again we kind of think of
Speaker 1: as broadly positive today, those of this idea that like, okay,
Speaker 1: the poor, it's like we should use the government state
Speaker 1: resources to help deal with things like homelessness and poverty. Um.
Speaker 1: But the way a lot of progressives take that, it's like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: let's figure out the root causes of homelessness and Proverty point,
Speaker 1: it seems like certain races of people are more likely
Speaker 1: to be homeless, you're impoverished. Maybe part of what the
Speaker 1: government should be doing to solve this problem is sterilized them.
Speaker 1: That's that's where the thought process goes. It's just like
Speaker 1: has a weird sharp left? Yeah, there's there's obviously there
Speaker 1: are certain things I think the government ought to be
Speaker 1: doing that it shouldn't. But let's never forget that when
Speaker 1: you start talking about the government ought to do this
Speaker 1: or that, that can go badly too. Which doesn't mean
Speaker 1: we shouldn't try to solve problems, but let's all keep
Speaker 1: that in our fucking head. Let's remember yes, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: So have you ever read Justice by um Michael Sandow?
Speaker 1: Oh no, I have not. Yeah, this is a good one, um.
Speaker 1: And it's a complete tangent knowing that you have forty
Speaker 1: five more pages to read. But it is important to know,
Speaker 1: like what he talked about, what the basic premises, like
Speaker 1: you're what you see as just, um, and how you
Speaker 1: define what justice is? If if you can answer that question,
Speaker 1: it could tell me where you're probably gonna land historically
Speaker 1: and politically, Like, for example, if you think just means
Speaker 1: the greatest good for all, so everybody looks at like
Speaker 1: what's the greater good? How can the most amount of
Speaker 1: people see the most amount of flourishing you're probably gonna
Speaker 1: lean more liberal and progressive. Right. Uh, if you're like, no,
Speaker 1: justice means leave me alone to figure out how I
Speaker 1: want to make things happen. It is unjust for you
Speaker 1: to limit my liberties. Well that's like libertarian and you know,
Speaker 1: moving into that area where like justice means lead me alone, right,
Speaker 1: you don't get to tell me how to do things.
Speaker 1: But if you're like, justice means there is a right
Speaker 1: way to do stuff, and that right way we all
Speaker 1: need to fall in line. And that's more a conservative lean.
Speaker 1: So if you say that that's that, then that makes
Speaker 1: a just society. So if you look at things like that,
Speaker 1: then when you jump into this region, you're going they're
Speaker 1: answering the question how do we make how do we
Speaker 1: make a just society? But their solution was, well, you know,
Speaker 1: brown people suck, so they shouldn't have the more children. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's complex, complex period to talk about um and yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, you know what doesn't support eugenics prop Well,
Speaker 1: hopefully the products and services that yeah advertise on this place.
Speaker 1: That's our that's our one line. Sophie calls every advertiser
Speaker 1: and and just says the word eugenics and kind of
Speaker 1: like that way. Yeah. Have you ever measured a brain? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Do you do? You take skull measurements? Yes? Um, all right,
Speaker 1: here's some ads. We're back, We're back, And I just
Speaker 1: I hope to god that was not an ad for
Speaker 1: a company that sells calibers. Um, tell me you're not
Speaker 1: selling calibers. Yeah, yeah, Sophie, I mean, these calibers are
Speaker 1: just off with the promo code. Bastards. On a personal note,
Speaker 1: On a personal note, I remember the first time I
Speaker 1: saw some of those like phrenology, like like manuals and drawings.
Speaker 1: I was just a visual artist, so I was like, dude,
Speaker 1: that's so cool, and I wanted to buy one of
Speaker 1: those old ones. And then then then my father looked
Speaker 1: at me and was like, boy, if you don't get
Speaker 1: that out my house, it's a funny moment anyway. So um,
Speaker 1: all right, So we were talking about the progressives and
Speaker 1: particularly the fact that they get they get a whole
Speaker 1: hog and the motherfucking prohibition. Uh. And I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: next from a paper by Ellen Leichtman, an associate professor
Speaker 1: from Eastern Kentucky University that's about early police militarization. She
Speaker 1: starts by kind of talking about the genesis of a
Speaker 1: lot of progressive thought. So she's talking about progressives here.
Speaker 1: As the city's grew, many of them began to yearn
Speaker 1: for a small town pass that had existed mostly in
Speaker 1: their imaginations. These towns were conceptualized as homogeneous villages where
Speaker 1: everyone knew everyone else and looked after each other. While
Speaker 1: small town still existed throughout the country, Progressives bemoan the
Speaker 1: fact that these traits could not be transferred to urban living. Actually,
Speaker 1: many of these traits could be found in urban immigrant neighborhoods,
Speaker 1: but progressives could not transfer their idealized image of small
Speaker 1: town living to a foreign environment. The small towns they
Speaker 1: had envisioned were based on Anglo Saxon Protestant ethics and culture,
Speaker 1: not the Catholic, Italian and Irish, Eastern European, Jewish and
Speaker 1: other customs of the immigrant neighborhoods, which did not hold
Speaker 1: with many of the Sumptuary laws, especially that of Prohibition.
Speaker 1: So dear to the progressives, hearts. So they they're they're big,
Speaker 1: family oriented people, but the actual like the people who
Speaker 1: are really living the kind of family oriented small towns
Speaker 1: sort of life within the big cities. Are these immigrants
Speaker 1: and they drink and progressives hate that. Um So progressives
Speaker 1: get their way on prohibitions starting January seventeenth, nineteen twenty.
Speaker 1: But it didn't go well, and the first two years
Speaker 1: of prohibition saw overall crime increase by twenty four percent nationwide.
Speaker 1: This included a thirteen percent increase in homicide and at
Speaker 1: increase in assault and battery. Most of this violence was
Speaker 1: driven by the in worsemen of prohibition. One study that
Speaker 1: compared South Carolina counties that did and did not enforce
Speaker 1: prohibition found that enforcement led to a thirty to sixt
Speaker 1: increase in homicides. Yeah, a lot of people get killed
Speaker 1: when you prohibit drugs arbitrarily. It turns out this is
Speaker 1: a lesson maybe we should have learned. Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's at some point somebody needs to go ahead and
Speaker 1: go in and explain how there was really no scientific
Speaker 1: reasoning behind prohibition, just snop political power. People just didn't
Speaker 1: like alcohol and wanted the state to stop something they
Speaker 1: didn't like from happening. Uh So, Yeah, the increase massive
Speaker 1: increase in violence as a result of prohibition infuriated a
Speaker 1: lot of progressives, and rather than recognize that prohibition was
Speaker 1: maybe a bad idea. A lot of them started pushing
Speaker 1: hard to use state power to put an end to
Speaker 1: bootlegging in an organized fashion, and this is what led
Speaker 1: to the first major challenge to August Vollmer's Like professional
Speaker 1: model of of police, many progressives began to push for
Speaker 1: an alternate idea, a military model of a police force.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote again from Professor Lakeman, well, there
Speaker 1: was substantial overlap between the professional and military models, and
Speaker 1: that both insisted that the police be autonomous, be subject
Speaker 1: to physical requirements, and used the latest technology to defeat crime.
Speaker 1: There was a difference in focus. For the military model.
Speaker 1: The city and its police represented the nation and its
Speaker 1: standing army. People who broke the law were equated to
Speaker 1: enemies of the state, not citizens, and became person and
Speaker 1: on grata in their own country. To fight these adversaries,
Speaker 1: the uniformed branch of the police and the detectives the
Speaker 1: non uniformed branch, were equated to different services of the military.
Speaker 1: Illegal behavior was seen as an attack on the American
Speaker 1: way of life. To save the country, the police had
Speaker 1: to engage in a war on crime. Needless to say,
Speaker 1: many cities began recruiting military men to run their departments,
Speaker 1: and Jason, one of these military men, was a fellow
Speaker 1: You and I discussed kind of off handedly in one
Speaker 1: of the first episodes of the series. You remember when
Speaker 1: I read you that quote from Marine Corps Major J. L.
Speaker 1: Smedley Butler. Yes, Smithley, Yeah, Now, that quote was from
Speaker 1: kind of after he woke up a bit um and
Speaker 1: started to realize some problems with earlier aspects of his career. Um.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen twenty four he was still a Marine
Speaker 1: Corps general in the city of Philadelphia elected Freeland Kendrick
Speaker 1: mayor on a law and order platform. Kendrick, a Republican,
Speaker 1: was livid that his city had more speakeasies than perhaps
Speaker 1: any other area in the country. The city of Brotherly
Speaker 1: Love had estimated eight thousands of legal bars in liquor
Speaker 1: stores in nineteen because it's Philly. You know, it's fucking Philly, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Philly is always on brand, So yes. Mark Kendrick decided
Speaker 1: that a military man and a military model were needed
Speaker 1: to reform the Philadelphia p D into something that could
Speaker 1: tackle the problem of vice, and he chose Marine Brigadier
Speaker 1: General Smedley Darlington Butler to be the new director of
Speaker 1: public Safety. And again, Butler was still in the military
Speaker 1: at this point. He had to get like a special
Speaker 1: a special like leave from the Marine courts so that
Speaker 1: he could go be the director of public safety in Philadelphia. UM.
Speaker 1: So he's still a general. He's still in the military
Speaker 1: as he takes over a police force. UM. Now at
Speaker 1: age forty two in nineteen forty two, General Butler had
Speaker 1: survived fourteen campaigns and expeditions over twenty two years of service.
Speaker 1: He had joined the military illegally as a literal child
Speaker 1: after lying about his age in order to fight in
Speaker 1: the Philippines. UM. During his time fighting for capitalism in
Speaker 1: his own you know, that's how he framed it. Later,
Speaker 1: Butler had earned the nicknames Old gimlet Ie, Hell's Devil Butler,
Speaker 1: the fighting Quaker, and old duck boards. Like he had
Speaker 1: a lot of nicknames. Fighting Quaker, Yeah, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a good nickname. That's a tattoo bro y, and he
Speaker 1: gets the nickname waker. Like old duckboards are like wood
Speaker 1: boards they would put down and like trench fighting because
Speaker 1: it was like muddy, so that you would be able
Speaker 1: to walk and like basically there during World War One,
Speaker 1: there was this fight where like everything was fucking muddy
Speaker 1: as ship and they needed to get boards into place,
Speaker 1: and Butler, who was like I think a general still
Speaker 1: at this point, just picks up a funckload of boards
Speaker 1: and like runs into the battlefield to like set them down,
Speaker 1: and like he he's he won two medals of Honor
Speaker 1: and he wanted to yeah, and he wanted Distinguished Service Cross,
Speaker 1: which is like the British like award, like their Medal
Speaker 1: of Honor. Like he he wins two of our medals
Speaker 1: of honor and like the British equivalent or inside their
Speaker 1: British to the French equivalent, like he's he's he's not
Speaker 1: just like an officer who like commands troops in battle
Speaker 1: from like a safe position like like Smedley Butler, whatever
Speaker 1: else you want to say about him, it's a fucking
Speaker 1: terrifying badass. Um like he was. He was just like
Speaker 1: one of these guys with like a contempt for his
Speaker 1: own safety and battle. Um. Yeah, man, hey, does you
Speaker 1: know any kids like that when you were like in
Speaker 1: Texas growing up, where he's just a kid that you
Speaker 1: were just like this guy yeah, is dangerous and doesn't
Speaker 1: care about his body, but I'm my friend. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: those are good people to have be friends with. Um
Speaker 1: outside of certain situations. Yeah yeah, yeah. So but that's
Speaker 1: that's Smedley Butler at this period. So he's kind of
Speaker 1: a legend. He's still a general and he gets made
Speaker 1: the director of public safety in Philadelphia. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: Butler himself was a progressive UM. And he he was
Speaker 1: also a drinker, like not a heavy one, but he
Speaker 1: drank um. So he didn't like prohibition, but he was progressive, progressive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was kind of his belief that even bad laws
Speaker 1: had to be enforced for the sake of public good.
Speaker 1: And upon taking off, as he stated, I do not
Speaker 1: care whether the state laws or city ordinances are right
Speaker 1: or wrong. From January seven, they are going to be enforced.
Speaker 1: So like that's his attitudes like that, And that's such
Speaker 1: a military Yes, it is. Yeah. When you when you
Speaker 1: said earlier, like I've never heard that train of thought
Speaker 1: put in the order that you put it when you
Speaker 1: were like, Um, an act of crime is an act
Speaker 1: against the state. Therefore you are no longer a citizen.
Speaker 1: You are now an enemy combatant. I've never heard that
Speaker 1: train of logic because I never understood how if you're policeman,
Speaker 1: how you like, who are you fighting? Like you're fighting
Speaker 1: the people you're supposed to protect? Like, I don't get it.
Speaker 1: That sentence finally at least made me be able to
Speaker 1: follow the logic. I just wanted to go back and
Speaker 1: point that out. Yeah, and this is this is one
Speaker 1: of the things that we're seeing in Philadelphia right now
Speaker 1: is like the the first time where so obviously you've
Speaker 1: had uh, um, you've had the police being used to
Speaker 1: suppress segments of the American the dangerous classes, right, um,
Speaker 1: and this like primarily black and brown people. In this
Speaker 1: period of time, what we start to see happening with
Speaker 1: the militarization of the Philadelphia police is kind of the
Speaker 1: first time the police are at war with everyone in
Speaker 1: the city like that that because you know, white people broadly, um,
Speaker 1: if they weren't members of a dangerous racial group, um
Speaker 1: could see the police's protectors in this period. And that
Speaker 1: starts to change in Philly because in Philly, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they they this is the first time like the police
Speaker 1: like again, and the police in the twenties are heavily
Speaker 1: corrupt and a lot of them are criminals, but they're
Speaker 1: not is an organized force. They're not going to war
Speaker 1: with the city. This is the first time that really
Speaker 1: happens that because like you were selling drugs now, yeah,
Speaker 1: just calls nine yeah yeah yeah. Um. So. Butler gave
Speaker 1: his first address to the Philly p D in a
Speaker 1: uniform he had designed for himself, complete with a cape,
Speaker 1: which is a flex like yeah, yeah, if you got
Speaker 1: if you got that many medals on the from multiple countries,
Speaker 1: you could wear a cape. You get to wear a cape.
Speaker 1: Yeah fuck it, yeah, ok. Yeah. He demanded the police
Speaker 1: stopped making bribes, and he told them that while the
Speaker 1: rest of the city might see them as just a
Speaker 1: bunch of corrupt gangsters, he saw them as soldiers, like
Speaker 1: the Marines he'd spent years commanding in battle, and that's
Speaker 1: what he planned to turn them into. So Butler launched
Speaker 1: an immediate series of raids on bootleggers and speakeasy's changing
Speaker 1: city policy by not informing the mayor first, I think
Speaker 1: in part because he knew the mayor knew some of
Speaker 1: these people and had been protecting them. And in a
Speaker 1: matter of days, Butler's police closed down nine hundred illegal
Speaker 1: bars now. At the same time as he cracked down,
Speaker 1: General Butler began the process of transforming the Philadelphia Police
Speaker 1: into a military force. He created a new squad of
Speaker 1: three hundred officers whose job was to spy on their
Speaker 1: fellow cops. These men would be the teeth behind Butler's
Speaker 1: admonition that Philly cops had to stop taking bribes. Another
Speaker 1: of Butler's first steps was to abolish the Police Training
Speaker 1: School see Volmer August Volmer. When it educated professionals with
Speaker 1: like degrees in criminal justice, who like approached crime from
Speaker 1: a scientific standpoint, General Butler thought that was bullshit. He
Speaker 1: thought that cops, like soldiers, learned best in the field.
Speaker 1: Um and before his term, police training had taken more
Speaker 1: than three months. Butler's new policies sent the cops that
Speaker 1: on the street almost immediately gave them like a booklet
Speaker 1: that outlined their duties and was just like, you'll figure
Speaker 1: it out once you're on the street. When you talk
Speaker 1: about binary thinking, yeah, you either a get trained for
Speaker 1: three months or be get a little pamphlet. Get a
Speaker 1: little pamphlet it, Yeah, go crack some heads. You'll learn quick.
Speaker 1: You'll figure it out, Like there, maybe they're somewhere in
Speaker 1: between there, maybe we could pull a little bit of
Speaker 1: his little bit of that. Just those my two options, yep,
Speaker 1: and it's it's like so, the one thing that's interesting
Speaker 1: is that Butler didn't actually cancel all training. There was
Speaker 1: exactly one area where police still trained because he thought
Speaker 1: it was important, and it was in the use of firearms. Um.
Speaker 1: He had realized early on that most cops barely knew
Speaker 1: how to use their weapons, and even fewer ever fired them.
Speaker 1: Butler thought this was a problem because he again, he's
Speaker 1: treating them as soldiers. So he mandated two weeks of
Speaker 1: marksmanship training, which was the only training his cops received.
Speaker 1: He also, rather bafflingly, decided to arm the fire department
Speaker 1: with forty five caliber revolvers, which, yeah, he gave. He
Speaker 1: gave all the firefighters guns, and he required them to
Speaker 1: wear their guns off duty. Um well, they had arresting powers.
Speaker 1: Firefighters could arrest people in those days, so he was like,
Speaker 1: when you're off, you're all auxiliary cops, and you need
Speaker 1: to carry guns in case you have to shoot some people. Basically,
Speaker 1: he viewed all public safety employees as soldiers who might
Speaker 1: potentially get called in to fight a war against the
Speaker 1: criminals within their city, and since every criminal was now
Speaker 1: the same as a foreign combatant, Butler started applying the
Speaker 1: same counterinsurgency tactics he'd learned in the Philippines and throughout
Speaker 1: Latin America. He announced that he would give a promotion
Speaker 1: to the first officer to kill a bandit. The bandit
Speaker 1: in question did not have to be committing a violent crime.
Speaker 1: If he had a revolver in hand or on his
Speaker 1: body while he was being chased, that was fair game
Speaker 1: for the Philadelphia p D. From Professor Lichtmann's paper quote.
Speaker 1: Butler took this further and stated that like soldiers, those
Speaker 1: police who killed criminals should not be called upon to
Speaker 1: either defend themselves or to contribute to their defense. A
Speaker 1: policeman who shoots a bandit is serving his city exactly
Speaker 1: as a soldier when firing at his country's enemies. Butler
Speaker 1: said he saw no difference in context between the role
Speaker 1: of the soldier and that of a police officer. That's bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not great, I mean, and we we wound up
Speaker 1: nationwide with the same ruling. Butler made that it's cool
Speaker 1: to shoot people running away. It was like in the
Speaker 1: eighties of the early nineties where the it was like
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court ruled that if you a police officer
Speaker 1: can shoot you, even if you're not actively threatening them,
Speaker 1: if you're trying to get away from an arrest, Like,
Speaker 1: that's a thing that could happen. It's why cops get
Speaker 1: to shoot so many people in the back. Um, it's
Speaker 1: it's fine. So Butler saw no reason why his soldier
Speaker 1: cops shouldn't have access to the latest in military grade weaponry.
Speaker 1: He ordered several customized armored cars to enable his officers
Speaker 1: to get into motorized gunfights with bootleggers. Rather than holding
Speaker 1: two men as with a normal police car, these armored
Speaker 1: buggies held four officers. The rear seats were set up
Speaker 1: back to back with the front seats so that the
Speaker 1: men in the bat could shoot directly at bandits without
Speaker 1: needing to turn around. Every man in the car would
Speaker 1: carry a rifle, a sot off shotgun, and a revolver.
Speaker 1: And if you want to, if you want, I can't
Speaker 1: imagine a gesture that shows more contempt for the people
Speaker 1: into living in the city then firing a shot off
Speaker 1: shotgun from a moving vehicle. That's a drive by. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't understand what drive by? Yeah, it's that's so reckless.
Speaker 1: Just what do you like? This is a sawt off shotguns,
Speaker 1: not accurate and more than like fifteen feet in a
Speaker 1: good situation, and you're just shooting it from a car
Speaker 1: moving one at that It's fucking nuts. Yeah, yeah, fuck it?
Speaker 1: Yeah and again like one Sorry I didn't even note
Speaker 1: this at the start. One of Butler's like requirements when
Speaker 1: he took the job, because he was used to being
Speaker 1: a military officer in a foreign war zone, was that
Speaker 1: no one questioned anything he did, like the city, not
Speaker 1: like he'd basically be unaccountable. And they were like, shure, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of wars. I
Speaker 1: for the first time, uh, in a little personal news,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I have shot big. This is my first
Speaker 1: positive experience with guns this weekend that we're recording this.
Speaker 1: Every other experience has been terrifying and life threatening. This
Speaker 1: is the first time I've ever seen a gun in
Speaker 1: a very recreational place. And I walk away with two
Speaker 1: really real thoughts, which is, you must anyone holding these
Speaker 1: has to have a deep respect for the deadly power
Speaker 1: in their hands, Like, how do you not revere this
Speaker 1: thing like you feel it's power holding it? And then secondly,
Speaker 1: what has to click off in your brain to be
Speaker 1: able to point this at another human, like even recklessly
Speaker 1: or with joy or just to not think about that.
Speaker 1: I'm like some about your soul turned off because I
Speaker 1: just couldn't. I've kneeled in front of a fifty cow,
Speaker 1: which is crazy, but also held held to a R
Speaker 1: fifteen now shooting it felt like the most powerful thing
Speaker 1: I did in my life. I'm not gonna lie to you,
Speaker 1: I screamed and howled. I was a redneck. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna lie. I went, WHOA, I'm not gonna lie. But
Speaker 1: I thought to myself, how could you point this at
Speaker 1: a person? Yeah? It's yeah, I mean it it Um.
Speaker 1: There's a lot too, There's a lot to say about
Speaker 1: like what what is emotionally involved in that? And like
Speaker 1: I have, I have, unfortunately been in a couple of situations,
Speaker 1: fortunately never where I had to point my gun at
Speaker 1: a person, but where I had a gun and somebody
Speaker 1: was doing something violent with a weapon in their hand,
Speaker 1: and it was like a there was like this thought
Speaker 1: process of like where's my line gonna be yes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's what I'm saying, Like, you still have all
Speaker 1: your faculties. I believe you're a fully developed human. So
Speaker 1: you thought to yourself, there is a cost to this,
Speaker 1: you know, and I don't know if this juice is
Speaker 1: worth the squeeze. So what you're telling me is you
Speaker 1: put four dudes and just say, shoot wildly into the city, Yes,
Speaker 1: to stop people with a couple of gallons of rum. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty pretty wild. Um. So, Butler divided Philadelphia up
Speaker 1: like a war zone with interlocking zones of control. Um that,
Speaker 1: like different patrols were set for and every patrol would
Speaker 1: have like set routes that they were supposed to travel
Speaker 1: in the event that they had to like intercept people.
Speaker 1: There were convoys of armored vehicles, and he even set
Speaker 1: up a number of military style outposts to allow for
Speaker 1: better monitoring that were fortified like fortresses within Philadelphia that
Speaker 1: we're able to act as like outposts that there we
Speaker 1: call them fobs, forward operating bases today in Afghanistan, Like
Speaker 1: what he did in Philadelphia is exactly the same tactically
Speaker 1: as what the US does an Afghanistan today. Like that's
Speaker 1: how he divided Philly up for his police force. Um,
Speaker 1: because he's he was like, he was good at prosecuting
Speaker 1: an insurgency. He knew what he he knew his business. Um,
Speaker 1: and that's what he did to Philadelphia because it was
Speaker 1: a military model police force. Now under Smedley Butler, the
Speaker 1: entirety of Philadelphia's urban infrastructure was actually turned to the
Speaker 1: cause of prosecuting his war on crime. He used the
Speaker 1: street lights to broadcast blink codes to officers about what
Speaker 1: crimes were taking place where. So he would basically do
Speaker 1: like not semaphore, Um, what's it called? Like like like yeah,
Speaker 1: he would blink the street lights and morse code to
Speaker 1: so officers could see like, oh, there's a crime taking
Speaker 1: place in this street. Um. Yeah. He had four huge
Speaker 1: searchlights and like a big basically fucking billboard set up
Speaker 1: in city hall. Uh that would like display the license
Speaker 1: plates of cars of that like bandit vehicles that were
Speaker 1: in the area. Um like yeah, it's like some fucking
Speaker 1: big brother shiit Smedley's tactics were very successful in closing
Speaker 1: down a huge number of philip Alfhia speakeasies, but they
Speaker 1: were not successful and actually winning the war for prohibition.
Speaker 1: For one thing, a ton of officers drank, and so
Speaker 1: did many of the mayor's wealthy backers. These same men
Speaker 1: and women had a lot of business interests in upper
Speaker 1: class clubs and restaurants that had been serving alcohol illegally
Speaker 1: prior to Butler, but were forced to shut down due
Speaker 1: to his raids. He refused to treat the favorite watering
Speaker 1: holes of the wealthy any differently than hole in the
Speaker 1: wall slum speakeasies, and this caused increasing problems for the
Speaker 1: mayor who had hired him Yeah It's Yeah, Professor Lichtman Rights.
Speaker 1: In an attempt to divert what he saw as an
Speaker 1: imminent disaster, he asked Butler to meet with these men
Speaker 1: and women, believing Butler could outline his plans and get
Speaker 1: their cooperation. But Butler was too brusque and did not
Speaker 1: handle the situation well. Instead of coming to some sort
Speaker 1: of compromise with these business people, he approached them as
Speaker 1: if he were a general and informed that them that
Speaker 1: he intended to install a special squad of undercover detectives
Speaker 1: dressed in full evening attire to police these establishments. This
Speaker 1: began a two year battle between Butler and the hospitality industry.
Speaker 1: But there must have assumed that either the public would
Speaker 1: support these laws or that he that he could enforce
Speaker 1: them against public opinion. What he learned was what many
Speaker 1: occupying armies learned. It is often the oppressed that prevail culturally.
Speaker 1: Those arrested for liquor and fractions came before magistrates who
Speaker 1: released them for lack of evidence. When Butler began padlocking
Speaker 1: the establishments of persistent liquor violators, judges rejected his arguments
Speaker 1: and allowed the places to reopen. He also came to
Speaker 1: the realization that many policemen were in league with bootleggers,
Speaker 1: and regular citizens had their own bathroom stills. Most Philadelphians
Speaker 1: did not want prohibition and did everything in their power
Speaker 1: to thwart it. So yeah, look, and and this lesson,
Speaker 1: this motif is so clear and so repeated everywhere that
Speaker 1: like you're just you're just holding onto power. And when
Speaker 1: you hold onto power, even with ridiculous laws, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to use violence, and people are going to turn
Speaker 1: against you because it's stupid. Yes, it's it's stupid. And
Speaker 1: and it's like Butler is good at running an insurgency
Speaker 1: the way our military has always run insurgencies, and if
Speaker 1: you have studied the history of our military and insurgencies,
Speaker 1: we almost always loose. Yeah, like we don't have a
Speaker 1: great batting record when it got to fighting insurgents. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we come home. People think we come home
Speaker 1: like we did this country of favor and the whole
Speaker 1: country looking at us like no, no, you know. It's
Speaker 1: interesting because the the U. S. Mility, the modern U. S.
Speaker 1: Military is incredible at combat training, at like training people
Speaker 1: to fight in gunfights, and all of our training is
Speaker 1: cribbed and descended from German military training that started out
Speaker 1: at the end of World War One, um and like
Speaker 1: into World War Two. Out trucks tactic is like the
Speaker 1: name of the kind of techniques, and the German military
Speaker 1: world War one and two was hands like not even brilliant,
Speaker 1: no fucking competition in their ability to train people to
Speaker 1: fight and gunfights. Yeah, historically speak heads and shoulders. The
Speaker 1: German military was above everybody and they lost both wars,
Speaker 1: which maybe is a lesson about the actual value in
Speaker 1: a broad sense of having your truth to be real
Speaker 1: fucking good at gunfights doesn't matter if you fail at
Speaker 1: the other ship. And that's what Butler fails at um
Speaker 1: is understanding the broader dimensions of the conflict he's got
Speaker 1: himself into, and he gets let go from his job
Speaker 1: running the Philadelphia Police After just two years. Most of
Speaker 1: the changes he had instituted reverted back to the way
Speaker 1: things had been before. Philadelphia continued drinking, and eventually the
Speaker 1: whole country got over this absurd attempt to ban a
Speaker 1: widely used intoxicant. Now, during this period, a number of
Speaker 1: other cities did try the same military model police force
Speaker 1: tactics as Philadelphia, putting like military men in charge of
Speaker 1: their police. General Francis Green, you know in New York,
Speaker 1: Colonel James Everington in Los Angeles, Major Mattellas Funkhauser in Chicago,
Speaker 1: one of the best names I've ever heard. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this is something we try. We try militarized police during
Speaker 1: Prohibition a lot of the country, and it doesn't work. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: there are aspects of police militarization that get adopted in
Speaker 1: this period that kind of stay. For one thing, police
Speaker 1: nationwide begin adopting more military style weapons during this period,
Speaker 1: picking up automatic rifles because the gangsters have Tommy guns
Speaker 1: and b A r s. You know. Um, that's the
Speaker 1: kind of ship that Bonnie and Clyde and you know
Speaker 1: my cousin, pretty boy Floyd, or packing as machine guns,
Speaker 1: so cops get machine guns too. Uh. In general, though
Speaker 1: the military model of policing pursued by progressives in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties and thirties seemed to have died out with prohibition,
Speaker 1: the professional model espoused by Volmer was obviously superior. For
Speaker 1: a few decades. From the war years up until the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, the story of the US police was the
Speaker 1: story of growing professionalism and centralization. This was obviously an
Speaker 1: uneven an imperfect process, but most Americans probably would have
Speaker 1: assumed that professionalization and the professional model was pretty successful
Speaker 1: during this period of time. A good example would be
Speaker 1: law enforcement success in putting an into lynching as a
Speaker 1: widespread phenomenon. Now, as we talked about that was not
Speaker 1: did not actually happen the way that it was into.
Speaker 1: But you gotta think about how like white people at
Speaker 1: the time, when oh, people aren't getting lunched anymore, we
Speaker 1: fixed it. Yeah, you know people. Yeah, it's like disive
Speaker 1: occasion where it's like, well, crime dropped, yeah yeah, where yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen fifty four, the TV show Dragnet first
Speaker 1: hit the airwaves, and Dragnet was probably the first TV
Speaker 1: show about modern law enforcement that or I think it
Speaker 1: was actually um it was probably the first TV show
Speaker 1: about modern law enforcement that deliberately set out to be realistic.
Speaker 1: Every episode opened with the disclaimer that the cases in
Speaker 1: the series were all real, only the names had been
Speaker 1: changed to protect the innocent. Uh. The creator was a
Speaker 1: guy named Jack Webb, and he was also the star
Speaker 1: of the show. He was he was Officer Friday UM
Speaker 1: and he partnered with the l a p D from
Speaker 1: the very beginning of the series is the very first
Speaker 1: time that ever happens, and partnering with the l a
Speaker 1: p D brings the production of Dragnet a ton of benefits.
Speaker 1: Number when they were allowed to film anywhere they wanted
Speaker 1: to in the city, Their crew got access to police
Speaker 1: vehicles and police gear without paying for it. The department
Speaker 1: would even loan them real cops to use his extras
Speaker 1: on the show. All this saved the network just a fortune. Um.
Speaker 1: The only cost was that Dragonette scripts had to be
Speaker 1: approved by the l a p D before they could
Speaker 1: be filmed. Oh wow, whole episodes were scrapped on the
Speaker 1: basis that the police didn't think they portrayed policing in
Speaker 1: a positive enough light. So obviously Dragnet is not going
Speaker 1: to deal with problems in the l a p D.
Speaker 1: It's not going to deal with an equality, you know,
Speaker 1: in in in enforcement and stuff. Dragnet, you know, legitimately
Speaker 1: broke new ground for American television. It was the first
Speaker 1: show to actually depict black and Hispanic cops. But it
Speaker 1: also failed to mention that the l a p D
Speaker 1: was segregated. Um. Yeah, yeah. There were very few instances
Speaker 1: of cops on Dragnet actually firing their guns, but whenever
Speaker 1: they did, those cops were shown to be calm and
Speaker 1: emotionally stable in the moment. Nobody ever fired in panic
Speaker 1: on dragnet Um and the show helped shape a generate
Speaker 1: sation's attitudes towards law enforcement, portraying the ideal scientific, professionalized,
Speaker 1: vulmer police working almost flawlessly. Right, the police are just
Speaker 1: the facts, is Friday's right? Yeah, I was gonna the
Speaker 1: fact Dragnet is the showing like the ideal of the
Speaker 1: professionalized police. That's what's depicted in dragnet Um And the
Speaker 1: l a p D has a vested interest in wanting
Speaker 1: to make sure that gets depicted. Obviously, So Dragnet was
Speaker 1: so good for the l a p d s image
Speaker 1: and reputation that in nineteen fifty five, the commissioner of
Speaker 1: the California Highway Patrol demanded his Public Affairs division get
Speaker 1: us a show like Dragnet. Highway Patrol had its first
Speaker 1: season later that year. Yeah, so the Highway Patrol show
Speaker 1: launches next. And of course, the FBI gets their own
Speaker 1: version of this treatment in nineteen sixty five with the
Speaker 1: creatively named TV series The FBI. All of these shows
Speaker 1: push an idealized image of what law enforcement was and
Speaker 1: claimed that their fiction was very close to fact. Now
Speaker 1: to the extent that people bought into this myth. It
Speaker 1: started to puncture in nineteen sixty four as the Civil
Speaker 1: Rights movement took to the streets and US police responded
Speaker 1: by turning fire hoses and dogs on demonstrators. Many of
Speaker 1: the yeah, yeah, it's on TV. That shuts it down.
Speaker 1: Oh we didn't see this part of it on TV.
Speaker 1: Um this These people don't seem to be interested in
Speaker 1: the facts. They seem to be interested in sicking dogs
Speaker 1: on folks. Yes, yeah, that that didn't make it into
Speaker 1: dragnet so and most of the protests. Many of the
Speaker 1: protests and what we're called riots during this period were
Speaker 1: sparked one way or another by police brutality. The police
Speaker 1: tear gassed masses of young activists at the nineteen six
Speaker 1: Chicago DNC and from sixty seven to sixty eight there
Speaker 1: were two hundred and ninety two mass demonstrations on a
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty three college campuses, most were in opposition
Speaker 1: to the Vietnam War. By the end of nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: vivid images of battered civil rights protesters, clouds of gas,
Speaker 1: and the corpses of those students at Kent State had
Speaker 1: very significantly reduced public up union of law enforcement. Probably
Speaker 1: it's lowest EBB up till the present moment. Like my
Speaker 1: my grandpa was a lifetime military man, fought in World
Speaker 1: War two in Korea, was like managing a hospital on Okinawa,
Speaker 1: on a military base in Japan when Kent State happens
Speaker 1: and was like very pro the Vietnam War, and he
Speaker 1: was fucking furious about Kent State because like like like
Speaker 1: that was the thing that Kent State lost. Even like
Speaker 1: a lot of like pretty conservative milit because they were like,
Speaker 1: you know that, that's not what the militaries for. We're
Speaker 1: not supposed to shoot kids with signs on college campuses. Um. Like,
Speaker 1: people get real pissed at law enforcement in this period
Speaker 1: of time. Uh. And in nineteen sixty eight, in order
Speaker 1: to address the collapsing faith in law enforcement nationwide, the
Speaker 1: US Congress passes the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which,
Speaker 1: among other things, pumped a shipload of federal dollars into
Speaker 1: what Dr Gary Potter, who you'll remember from other episodes,
Speaker 1: we've talked about calls rather cosmetic police community relations programs,
Speaker 1: which were mostly media focused attempts to improve the police image.
Speaker 1: So this is when you start getting like really advanced
Speaker 1: public affairs departments and police departments hiring pr agencies to
Speaker 1: help them reform their image. And a lot of the
Speaker 1: effort in reforming police images was still landed on Hollywood.
Speaker 1: And of course in this period, Dragnet gets brought back
Speaker 1: for another three seasons, running from nineteen sixty seven to
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. And the years that Dragnet comes back is
Speaker 1: not There's no coincidence there, right, Yeah, So propaganda did
Speaker 1: not protect the police from the economic downturns of the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, and cities nationwide started making massive cuts to
Speaker 1: police and other municipal workers just because the economy fell apart.
Speaker 1: And you know, part of this isn't a show about
Speaker 1: the economy, but a big part of what happens is
Speaker 1: like the US had started exporting a lot of manufacturing jobs,
Speaker 1: had been like this is like the first This is
Speaker 1: when we start to see the hollowing out of this
Speaker 1: middle class and of like these good union jobs that
Speaker 1: had persisted for decades since the end of the war
Speaker 1: and the seventy is this all falls to ship. Um,
Speaker 1: you start getting eaten alive economically by like Japan and
Speaker 1: other countries, and it's it's you know, this is when
Speaker 1: like services start to be cut nationwide, and one of
Speaker 1: the services that gets cut is policing. Um out of
Speaker 1: necessity of services. Yeah you know what services won't be cut?
Speaker 1: Yeah that was good. You know, who doesn't hollow out
Speaker 1: the American middle class? Actually who hollows out there will? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there we go, brod services, We're back, so um police
Speaker 1: departments in this period, you know, budgets get cut, municipal
Speaker 1: workers get cut, and a lot of the blame, like
Speaker 1: as these cities who in a lot of cases like
Speaker 1: their budgets got fucked not just because the economy was
Speaker 1: bad because of like massive corruption, but they blame it
Speaker 1: on union workers. And of course police are some of
Speaker 1: the union workers in this period, so they get some
Speaker 1: big gass cuts and out of necessity because their budgets
Speaker 1: are being trimmed. UM police departments nationwide embark on a
Speaker 1: process called tailorization, which is tailorization had doesn't just happen
Speaker 1: to the police. It's like a scientific optimization of of
Speaker 1: of of of an organization, right, it's attempting to cut
Speaker 1: manpower and reduce costs without cutting efficiency. UM officers started
Speaker 1: going from two cop to one cop per patrol car
Speaker 1: nine on one lines, and computers became more widespread and
Speaker 1: put control of the police UH is centralized more so
Speaker 1: police administrators gain more power. Civilian employees are also brought
Speaker 1: in to do jobs that had been done by police
Speaker 1: employees in order to reduce the number of highly paid
Speaker 1: union workers. So this is tailorization. And while all this
Speaker 1: is happening inside the US, the Cold War is also
Speaker 1: happening outside of the US, so inside the country professionalism
Speaker 1: is kind of like the professional model of police are
Speaker 1: still dominant, and they're also like that becomes even more
Speaker 1: powerful an ideas as the number of police are cut
Speaker 1: and they have to get more efficient to try to
Speaker 1: do the same work. So that's what's happening in the US.
Speaker 1: Outside the US, though, international policing is having something very
Speaker 1: different happened to it. And this is as a result
Speaker 1: of the Cold War. So as the Cold War really
Speaker 1: starts to kick off, our government finds itself trying to
Speaker 1: prop up friendly states all around the world, you know,
Speaker 1: anti communist states, particularly in Latin America and Southeast Asia,
Speaker 1: and we go, Yeah, this proved problematic because a lot
Speaker 1: of these regimes were corrupt in brutal, and people didn't
Speaker 1: really like living underneath them. And as a rule, our
Speaker 1: government responded to that by pouring money into training foreign
Speaker 1: police to murder dissidents, because that works a lot better
Speaker 1: than training the army in a lot of cases. Um. So,
Speaker 1: from nineteen sixty two to nineteen seventy four, the US
Speaker 1: government operated the Office of Public Safety, an agency that
Speaker 1: worked closely with the CIA to train police and nations
Speaker 1: racked by conflict due to the Cold war. These nations
Speaker 1: included South Vietnam, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. Tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of people were tortured or killed by various
Speaker 1: police departments, who received over two million dollars in US
Speaker 1: aid for firearm and equipment. And I'm gonna quote now
Speaker 1: from an article in the Age before you get there.
Speaker 1: There's there's one that's off the papers, which I know
Speaker 1: you haven't done an episode on, but like there's there's
Speaker 1: the Nicaragua one that both they wasn't supposed to be
Speaker 1: spending money on, which is the B line. Y'all. Look, look,
Speaker 1: I'm excited, but I don't want to remove I don't
Speaker 1: want to ruin the reveal. But what he taught about
Speaker 1: right now leads directly to the crack attack and the
Speaker 1: war on drugs. But yeah, and I hope we're gonna
Speaker 1: get to that. No, we're not not nearly, because I
Speaker 1: I I don't want to half asked that one, like,
Speaker 1: because there's there's so much. Yeah, well we will, we
Speaker 1: will do. We will get into that, we'll dip in
Speaker 1: because because it's all tied in, it's the beginning of it.
Speaker 1: Even this like pr stuff I grew up with the
Speaker 1: DARE program, you know, the drug abuse what a what
Speaker 1: A car pulled up with the sirens at my elementary
Speaker 1: school to try to convince me that this cop is cool.
Speaker 1: You don't say it, yeah, but yeah. Anyway, we were
Speaker 1: paying for wars and we got paid in crack. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So um yeah. The CIA and you know, the US
Speaker 1: government starts training cops and all of these countries to
Speaker 1: suppress uh, you know, primarily left wing like political movements.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote now from an article in the
Speaker 1: Asia Pacific Journal by scholar Jeremy Kazmarov, who's like one
Speaker 1: of the top like people studying this particular phenomenon. Quote.
Speaker 1: During the mid nineteen sixties, the director of United States
Speaker 1: Agency of International Development USA David Bell, commented in congressional
Speaker 1: testimony that the police are the most sensitive point of
Speaker 1: contact between the government and people close to the focal
Speaker 1: points of unrest, and more acceptable than the army as
Speaker 1: keepers of order over long periods of time. The police
Speaker 1: are frequently better trained and equipped than the military to
Speaker 1: deal with minor forms of violence, conspiracy, and subversion. Robert W.
Speaker 1: U Comber, who served as the National Security Council Advisor
Speaker 1: to President John F. Kennedy further stress that the police
Speaker 1: were more valuable than special forces and our global counter
Speaker 1: insurgency efforts, and particularly useful in fighting urban insurrections. We
Speaker 1: get more from the police in terms of preventative medicine
Speaker 1: than from any single U S program, he said. They
Speaker 1: are cost effective while not going for fancy military hardware.
Speaker 1: They provide the first line of defense against demonstrations, riots,
Speaker 1: and local insurrections. Only when the situation gets out of hand,
Speaker 1: as in South Vietnam, does the military have to be
Speaker 1: called in. So again, that's that's the police. The police
Speaker 1: are especially as Vietnam goes badly in other countries, we
Speaker 1: increasingly see if you if you train the police to
Speaker 1: stop this ship before there's a strong left wing movement,
Speaker 1: you don't have a Vietnam which you then lose. Right,
Speaker 1: That's that's what yeah, So that's internationally what the US
Speaker 1: is doing to other police agencies, as our police agencies,
Speaker 1: you know, pull back from the militarization of the twenties
Speaker 1: and thirties and towards professionalism. We we push militarization in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways outside of the United States, some
Speaker 1: Americans were involved in training more than a million foreign
Speaker 1: police officers during this time. Now, many of those cops
Speaker 1: did fail in their duties, which is part of why
Speaker 1: South Vietnam is no longer a country and why Iran
Speaker 1: does not have a shot anymore. Um, but the suppression
Speaker 1: tactics taught by US police educators were successful in many
Speaker 1: other nations. Like, it does not always fail. We are
Speaker 1: not always bad at training these people to brutally stop
Speaker 1: left wing uprising. It works a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: And when the office is they're like, oh wait, real quick,
Speaker 1: this is like the perfect time to like take like
Speaker 1: a take a take a slice from like the hood
Speaker 1: politics way a way of thinking things, thinking of things
Speaker 1: because sometimes like using these terms can they're so lofty
Speaker 1: and big if you don't know history or military politics,
Speaker 1: like it's hard to understand them. It's this moment in
Speaker 1: history is so like it's so simple because it's just
Speaker 1: eighth grade. So like you, you're you and this you
Speaker 1: and this other boy or girl are beefing, but y'all
Speaker 1: never actually fight. You just keep bringing other kids around
Speaker 1: the fight. So by and I'm proving my side of
Speaker 1: the playground is better because this kid from who I
Speaker 1: propped up and trained and gave a rock through at
Speaker 1: another kid who's got a rock that's on your side
Speaker 1: of the playground. And that's proven that I'm hard. But
Speaker 1: it's really they fighting a fight that me and you
Speaker 1: are supposed to fight. But we got sense enough to
Speaker 1: know we've probably been I fight this fight, so I'm
Speaker 1: gonna let you fight it. Really, that's the Cold War
Speaker 1: is you're you're going, I'm gonna go get my little
Speaker 1: homeboy to funk up yo, little homeboy. That's that's that's
Speaker 1: the Cold War. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, um so yeah,
Speaker 1: uh so yeah, we we we have we we spend
Speaker 1: fucking a decade or more training all these foreign police
Speaker 1: agencies to act as yeah, counter insurgery. Yeah, our little
Speaker 1: homeboys to act as counterinsurgency forces. Uh And when the
Speaker 1: Office for Public Safety closes in nineteen seventy four, these
Speaker 1: police trainers needed still needed work. Like these guys who'd
Speaker 1: spent more than a decade training foreign cops, and they
Speaker 1: find more work. And it's inside of the United States.
Speaker 1: It's this time alex fatality rights in the end of
Speaker 1: policing quote. Many of the trainers moved in large numbers
Speaker 1: into law enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Agency FBI and
Speaker 1: numerous local and state police forces, bringing with them a
Speaker 1: more militarized vision of policing steeped in Cold War imperatives
Speaker 1: of suppressing social movements through counter intelligence, militarized riot suppression techniques,
Speaker 1: and heavy handed crime control. Now in the middle of
Speaker 1: this period, like right before that office closes, really like
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, so a couple of years before,
Speaker 1: we stopped training the police, you know, foreign police in
Speaker 1: this kind of organized way. Uh, not that we stop entirely,
Speaker 1: but like the way we had been, you know, we're
Speaker 1: even less of it. A night teen seventy one, Richard
Speaker 1: Millhouse Nixon declared drug abuse public Enemy number one. Soon
Speaker 1: after that declaration, US press began to discuss a new
Speaker 1: war on drugs. Now, this war was launched just as
Speaker 1: the US war in Vietnam started to finally end, and spoilers,
Speaker 1: it wasn't any more successful. Nixon's goal, though, had never
Speaker 1: actually been to stop drug use. He started the war
Speaker 1: on drugs because he wanted to win the support of
Speaker 1: southern white voters who had gone Democratic for generations. These
Speaker 1: people were furious about segregation, and they were pushing back
Speaker 1: at the success of desegregation. Um, they considered civil rights
Speaker 1: marchers to have been just looters and rioters. But the
Speaker 1: week LBJ administration had failed to murder these people. Professor
Speaker 1: in legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains quote posters and political
Speaker 1: strategists that found that thinly veiled promises to get tough
Speaker 1: on them, a group suddenly not so defined by race,
Speaker 1: was enormously successful in persuading poor and working class whites
Speaker 1: did effect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and joined
Speaker 1: the Republican Party in droves. Ultimately, this backlash against the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement was occurring at precisely the same moment
Speaker 1: that there was economic collapse in communities of color, inner
Speaker 1: city communities across America. And of course, again we're talking
Speaker 1: about the seventies. We're going at a period where the
Speaker 1: economy contracts massively and it hits black inner city communities
Speaker 1: worse than anyone else. Um. And what is the number
Speaker 1: one predictor of crime, particularly property crime. It's poverty. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and and we're there's even like a a tie to
Speaker 1: that moment now of how changing the language from we
Speaker 1: just hate black people too. We're having a war on drugs. Um,
Speaker 1: we're the fact that we call weed marijuana. It's just
Speaker 1: it's just the Spanish word for cannabis. But that's marketing
Speaker 1: because you because if we already hate Mexicans as a
Speaker 1: nation and you use this drug and you just refer
Speaker 1: to it by Spanish name, now it seems more evil.
Speaker 1: It was just it was a racist marketing that we
Speaker 1: call cannabis marijuana. Just and that's Nixon. I just want
Speaker 1: John note Nixon did debt anyway. Yeah, yeah, um so yeah.
Speaker 1: The backlash against the success of the civil rights movement
Speaker 1: reaches its height kind of just as unemployment in the
Speaker 1: inner city peaks and the consequences of the industrialization and
Speaker 1: globalization hit the US economy, so crime sores and suddenly
Speaker 1: a shipload of people find themselves impoverished and desperate without options,
Speaker 1: and the war on drugs gives the government a way
Speaker 1: to take huge numbers of these people, primarily these black
Speaker 1: and brown people, off the street and satisfy white voters
Speaker 1: that they're doing something about crime. Now, drug use was
Speaker 1: actually falling when Nixon made his announcement, and it had
Speaker 1: been falling for years. Drug abuse but blaming drugs rather
Speaker 1: than unregulated capitalism, hollowing out the American middle class, and
Speaker 1: exchange for corporate profits worked a lot better from a
Speaker 1: messaging standpoint for the Republican president in nineteen yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eight two, Ronald Reagan doubled down declaring an
Speaker 1: official war on drugs, even though only three percent of
Speaker 1: Americans at the time considered drug abuse to be the
Speaker 1: nation's most pressing issue. Since the existing tailorized US police
Speaker 1: were ill equipped to fight a war, President Reagan had
Speaker 1: to start pouring tens of millions of dollars of federal
Speaker 1: funds into turning law enforcement into an army. Now, the
Speaker 1: broad trend, so this occurs. Reagan starts pumping all this
Speaker 1: money in as these these guys who had been these
Speaker 1: US guys who have been training foreign military forces over
Speaker 1: seas start coming back to the country and training cops.
Speaker 1: So there's a number of things kind of happening at
Speaker 1: the same time that lead to and are are a
Speaker 1: part of police militarization. Um. Now, the broad trend that
Speaker 1: occurs throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties as a result
Speaker 1: of all this is that US police nationwide turn away
Speaker 1: from the professional model and towards a military model, not
Speaker 1: a different in a military model pretty similar to the
Speaker 1: one that General Butler proposed to defeat Bootleg in Philadelphia. UM.
Speaker 1: This process was not smooth or uniform, and it was
Speaker 1: not all due to the War on drugs. The Watts
Speaker 1: Rebellion of nineteen sixty five was a major inciting incident
Speaker 1: for the militarization of US police. And the short story,
Speaker 1: the almost criminally short story of the Watts Rebellion is this,
Speaker 1: a black motorist was was pulled over, um and like
Speaker 1: there was a confrontation began with the police. Conmmunity members
Speaker 1: confronted the cops as like this guy was getting arrested,
Speaker 1: and a fight ensued. Um one of the cops I
Speaker 1: injured a pregnant woman, or at least people in the
Speaker 1: crowd believed that a cop had injured a pregnant woman
Speaker 1: and kind of rage over this whole incident boils over
Speaker 1: and like acts as a match stick. So like obviously
Speaker 1: the l A p d had been hideously racist for
Speaker 1: a long time. One of the things that happens when
Speaker 1: Jim crow Win's is that the police chief of l
Speaker 1: A starts deliberately courting Southern police officers who are like,
Speaker 1: this is history. Yeah, if you're if you're pissed about
Speaker 1: Jim Crow ending, come to Los Angeles, will let you
Speaker 1: beat the ship out of black people making this stuff up.
Speaker 1: I couldn't. I thought we brought this up before and
Speaker 1: one of the older episodes we didn't get into it,
Speaker 1: or we didn't get into it though. Yeah, did I
Speaker 1: tell you all my watch riot story? No? No, no,
Speaker 1: please do. This is a good time for it. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good time for it. So it was during
Speaker 1: the La Riots. Is how my story starts. Um, my grandmother,
Speaker 1: you know l A Rites was you know Florence and Normandy. Right.
Speaker 1: Grandmother lived off Florence Engage, so it's just a few
Speaker 1: more blocks to the east. Um, my father calls my
Speaker 1: grandmother and she said, and he says, like, hey, why
Speaker 1: don't you come stay with us? We were living like
Speaker 1: maybe a fifteen minutes east, right, So he says, why
Speaker 1: don't you come stay with us? You're out of like
Speaker 1: the hotspot of South Central. And my grandmother says, if
Speaker 1: I'm lying, I'm flying. She says, baby, unless there's tanks
Speaker 1: coming down this street. I ain't going nowhere this house
Speaker 1: and I and I went my Grandma's a gangster. That's
Speaker 1: the hardest thing I ever heard in my life. Right,
Speaker 1: and then but my parents looked at each other and
Speaker 1: I was like, tanks, she's hard they go. She lived
Speaker 1: in the Watts Riots, and like history came alive. There's like, yo,
Speaker 1: she she lived through the Wats Riots. That's what she's
Speaker 1: referring to. Tanks came down our streets. I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: because I thought the La Riots was the end of
Speaker 1: the world, you know what I'm saying, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a preteen during its time, so I was like,
Speaker 1: this is the end of the world. Grandma was like, no, baby,
Speaker 1: tanks come down these streets anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And that's
Speaker 1: like the Watts Riot is is fucking wild. Um So,
Speaker 1: like there's a ton of anger, uh and like black
Speaker 1: and Hispanic communities towards the l A p D. An
Speaker 1: other thing that's happening is like the lap is also separately,
Speaker 1: but but at the same time horrifically suppressing the the
Speaker 1: Chicano Liberation movement, which is like the like Mexicans and
Speaker 1: Latinos in l a UM and like at one point
Speaker 1: murders a journalist who's like drinking at a bar by
Speaker 1: shooting him in the back of the head with a
Speaker 1: tear gas grenade. Hunter Thompson actually one of his best
Speaker 1: pieces of investigative journalism about all of that, and in fact,
Speaker 1: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Yeah, oh yeah, shit, yeah,
Speaker 1: happened in my neighborhood. I live in Boile Heights, like ship,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that happened neighborhood. Yeah yeah, Ruben Salazar and
Speaker 1: like so if you like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
Speaker 1: like the funny, silly Hunter Thompson movie, we all know
Speaker 1: the actual genesis of that. The real thing that happened
Speaker 1: that he was actually writing about was one of the
Speaker 1: leaders at the Chicano Liberation movement was this guy Oscar
Speaker 1: at Costa, who was Hunter's lawyer, and he like the
Speaker 1: reason that he and Hunter Thompson drove to Las Vegas
Speaker 1: is that they needed to have a conversation about what
Speaker 1: the l a p d Was doing to murder Hispanic
Speaker 1: activists in Los Angeles. And the only place that wouldn't
Speaker 1: be bugged would be a fucking a convertible car with
Speaker 1: the top down driving through the desert in New Mexico
Speaker 1: or not New Mexico, and uh yeah, you know, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about. Like that's that's what fear
Speaker 1: and loathing is. Is like this is all tied up
Speaker 1: in this so like all of this ship fucking explodes
Speaker 1: um into into anger at the or like into the
Speaker 1: Watts riots in in nineteen sixty five. And like the
Speaker 1: stuff that happened with Ruben Salazar and stuff was like
Speaker 1: five years after this, but like all of these this
Speaker 1: like racism and stuff is still happening. So like the
Speaker 1: this fight winds up just kind of for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: being the thing that ignites all of the anger in
Speaker 1: in this part of Los Angeles, and it's the Watts
Speaker 1: riots is what most history text will call it. The
Speaker 1: Uprising is another thing you'll hear that I think is
Speaker 1: probably more accurate. And the uprising included a shipload of
Speaker 1: angry black folks breaking into gun stores, um, getting guns
Speaker 1: and then sniping at l A p D officers. This
Speaker 1: is a thing that happens, and it the cops flip
Speaker 1: the funk out about it. Um, the police chief gets
Speaker 1: on television and compares what's happening and Watts to what
Speaker 1: the insurgency in Vietnam. He compares the rioters to the
Speaker 1: Viet Cong, and he states that a paramilitary response is
Speaker 1: the only thing possible. The Governor Pat Brown announces that
Speaker 1: the l a p d was quote dealing with guerillas
Speaker 1: fighting with gangsters. Um, the National Guard are called in
Speaker 1: and the uprising was brutally suppressed. And you know, generally
Speaker 1: when you hear because this is a key movement in
Speaker 1: the militarization of police, and generally when it's talked about,
Speaker 1: you will hear about like the person writing about it
Speaker 1: will pivot from like rioters looting guns and sniping at
Speaker 1: the l a p d h to like the National
Speaker 1: Guard coming in to kind of make the case that
Speaker 1: the l a p d was just overwhelmed by armed citizens.
Speaker 1: This is not what happened. Um. Only three sworn personnel
Speaker 1: were killed during the Watts riots. One was an l
Speaker 1: A firefighter who died in a structure fire, one was
Speaker 1: that Los Angeles Sheriff's deputy who was shot by another
Speaker 1: deputy when that deputy accidentally fired his shotgun and during
Speaker 1: a clash with rioters. And another was another Los Angeles
Speaker 1: police officer who was shot by another one of his
Speaker 1: fellow cops accidentally during a fight with rioters. No Los
Speaker 1: Angeles police were killed by by rioters with guns. Um Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the l a p D killed twenty three, mostly black
Speaker 1: people during the Watts Riots. The National Guard killed seven. Um.
Speaker 1: So again, the image of the Watts Riots is that
Speaker 1: like these writers, which is so heavily armed that like
Speaker 1: it inspired the militarization of police because cops needed more
Speaker 1: weapons and tactical teams in order to deal with such threats.
Speaker 1: The reality is that like the fucking no no, no
Speaker 1: no cops even got killed by by rioters. Like it's
Speaker 1: it's definitely accurate to say that like the l A
Speaker 1: Police had been like more uh more militant, I think
Speaker 1: than other police departments, but not like, not like a
Speaker 1: tactical way, just in a way of seeing themselves as fighting.
Speaker 1: They saw themselves as fighting and is fighting a war
Speaker 1: against the non white population of the city that was
Speaker 1: the l A p D in this period. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: there's this idea of like returning to the America they remember,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, and the Watts riots kind of scare cops
Speaker 1: around the country into all adopting a lot more paramility
Speaker 1: Harry tactics in order to defend themselves from the people
Speaker 1: they're supposed to be protecting. Now, the Watts riots are
Speaker 1: like one of the one of two things that will
Speaker 1: be generally cited as the justification behind the creation of
Speaker 1: the very first SWAT teams, which you know means special
Speaker 1: weapons and tactics. Another major inciting incident for the creation
Speaker 1: of the SWAT teams was the nineteen sixty six U T.
Speaker 1: Austin clock tower sniper Charles Whitman, who killed sixteen people um.
Speaker 1: The basic idea was that police were easily overwhelmed by
Speaker 1: snipers and other dangerous criminals. Like cops just couldn't handle
Speaker 1: these threats, and so specialized warrior cops were necessary to
Speaker 1: handle these incidents. So SWAT teams took off as a
Speaker 1: concept in the late nineteen sixties, and before long every
Speaker 1: department in America was fighting to get a SWAT team
Speaker 1: of their own, whether or not they needed one. Today,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of police agencies serving populations of fifty
Speaker 1: thousand or more in the United States have some form
Speaker 1: of SWAT team. Nationwide, SWAT teams are deployed tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of times per year and since these teams were
Speaker 1: formed and exist to handle ex extraordinary situations of exceptional danger,
Speaker 1: you might picture these tens of thousands of SWAT raids
Speaker 1: as like pulse pounding gunfights against really dangerous people. And
Speaker 1: if that, yeah, if if that's the picture in your head,
Speaker 1: you are wrong. Most states very deliberately do not provide
Speaker 1: US with statistics for their SWAT deployments. Maryland is one
Speaker 1: of two that does, and in Maryland, of SWAT raids
Speaker 1: are just for serving search warrants. Half of those warrants
Speaker 1: are for non violent drug crimes, and one third of
Speaker 1: those raids result in no arrests, So a third of
Speaker 1: the time when SWAT teams go out, they don't even
Speaker 1: get to arrest anybody. Now, almost all of the SWAT
Speaker 1: raids in Maryland at least are for drug crimes. Utah
Speaker 1: is the only other state that requires police agencies to
Speaker 1: report on SWAT deployment, and the first batch of numbers
Speaker 1: that they released in two thousand thirteen showed that eighty
Speaker 1: three percent of their SWAT deployments were serving search warrants
Speaker 1: for drug crimes. Less than five percent of deployments were
Speaker 1: too violent crimes. In process A K a the sort
Speaker 1: of thing swat teams were formed to deal with. Just
Speaker 1: three of the states reported five and fifty nine raids.
Speaker 1: Half a percent turned up illegal firearms. Now half I
Speaker 1: bring all this half a percent. Yeah, I bring all
Speaker 1: this up because when I talk about the possibility of
Speaker 1: police abolition with people, one of the first things they
Speaker 1: will generally bring up is, like, who will protect us
Speaker 1: from all of like the violent madmen. They're pictually like
Speaker 1: cartel guys and stuff gangsters. And of course those people
Speaker 1: do exist. There's very dangerous criminals in this country who
Speaker 1: are heavily armed. That that's that's that is a thing
Speaker 1: that exists, but it is not the scale of problem
Speaker 1: that you think it is. Um and like it's also
Speaker 1: people will talk about, like, who's protect us from mass shooters?
Speaker 1: And I would ask, can anyone listening to this podcast
Speaker 1: name a mass shooter who's been stopped by a squat team.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess not that it hasn't happened. If you did,
Speaker 1: you can find a couple of cases where swat teams
Speaker 1: stopped a shooting in progress that can be defined as
Speaker 1: a mass shooting. But you have to really rack your
Speaker 1: brain to think of a situation where it did happen,
Speaker 1: or to think of a situation where the cops successfully
Speaker 1: stopped a mass shooting, as opposed to like what happened
Speaker 1: during the Parkland shooting where the officer I think drove
Speaker 1: his car into a ditch. Like yeah, like they're not
Speaker 1: good at this, or you can't think about the Virginia
Speaker 1: Tech shooting. We're swat teams were posted up outside the buildings,
Speaker 1: but we're scared to enter while the shooter was killing people, um,
Speaker 1: get it? Or or even saying this if like big
Speaker 1: drug cartels, these drug bosses are like such a problem,
Speaker 1: I would ask that person, Hey, do you know any
Speaker 1: do you know any drug drug cartel bosses? Okay, you
Speaker 1: never met one? All right? Word, do you know anybody
Speaker 1: that's like stolen some soda out of a out of
Speaker 1: a liquor store. Yeah, we know a lot of those.
Speaker 1: So what I'm saying is maybe you you're saying this
Speaker 1: is a big problem, but you don't know nobody that
Speaker 1: had done that, But we ought installed something out of
Speaker 1: a out of a liquor store, So maybe there's more
Speaker 1: problems there, and maybe you don't need to be specially
Speaker 1: trained for that. Yeah, maybe we can solve people jack
Speaker 1: and shipped from liquor stores to the extent that that's
Speaker 1: a problem without Yes, machine guns, maybe snipers are necessary
Speaker 1: for this. Yeah. I walked into the room. I walked
Speaker 1: into the room. Uh, and my daughter was with a
Speaker 1: hammer and a shoe, and I was like, the hell
Speaker 1: are you doing. She's standing on one side of the room.
Speaker 1: The other side of the room was a daddy long
Speaker 1: leg just a spider. And I'm like, what you got
Speaker 1: a hammer for? And she's like, I gotta kill this spider.
Speaker 1: M hmm. And I have a deep distrust for anything
Speaker 1: with eight legs or six legs. I get it. But
Speaker 1: a hammer, baby, Harry yesterday, the swiffer is fine. Don't
Speaker 1: so when you put a hole on this wall, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be honest with you, prob I have my
Speaker 1: Air fifteen right here next to the table in case
Speaker 1: I see a spider, which you know there's a lot
Speaker 1: of Yeah, that's an issue. Yeah, yeah, that's what That's
Speaker 1: what the police say. Um that that is also what
Speaker 1: my neighbors say. You know what is Yeah, yeah, what
Speaker 1: the police say is accurate. That's exactly what you mean.
Speaker 1: Find me to show you the spider bite that I
Speaker 1: got that sent me to the hospital. Next the hammer day. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's different. Let's talk about speaking of hammers, because I
Speaker 1: actually have a number of hammer analogies coming up here.
Speaker 1: So um yeah yeah. So again, the point of all
Speaker 1: these statistics, to the extent that we have them, is
Speaker 1: that it really looks like swat teams are actually kind
Speaker 1: of ship at fighting, the one kind of crime that
Speaker 1: expired their existence in the first place. Because again, you
Speaker 1: actually have an easier time finding cases of people with
Speaker 1: concealed handguns stopping shootings than you will swat team stopping
Speaker 1: shootings like mass shootings in progress, like our traditional like,
Speaker 1: and that doesn't happen often either, Like you Usually, mass
Speaker 1: shooters get to do whatever they're gonna do and then
Speaker 1: shoot themselves or whatever turn themselves in like they generally
Speaker 1: don't get stopped. Um, but you you will. You'll have
Speaker 1: trouble finding swat teams taking out these guys because it's
Speaker 1: usually over it before they can scramble um now. Well,
Speaker 1: which is not to say that there's no place for them,
Speaker 1: because I think any society as large as ours, you're
Speaker 1: gonna need to have some rapid response units, but we're
Speaker 1: not using them for that, and there's way too many
Speaker 1: of them now. While state data on SWAT deployments is lacking,
Speaker 1: I did find a fascinating report by two researchers, David
Speaker 1: Klinger and Jeff Rojack, using funds provided by the Department
Speaker 1: of Justice. In two thousand eight, they analyzed thousands of
Speaker 1: SWAT raids nationwide, and what they found was fascinating. Out
Speaker 1: of tens of thousands of deployments they analyzed, SWAT officers
Speaker 1: only fired their weapons in three hundred and forty two incidents.
Speaker 1: Those officers shot two hundred citizens, killing one hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty nine of them. In seventy of these shootings, fewer
Speaker 1: than ten rounds were used. Now, this suggests that military
Speaker 1: grade weaponry may not be neces sary for SWAT teams,
Speaker 1: since again, you don't need it. Yeah, they're not getting
Speaker 1: into gunfights. They sometimes they shoot people, but like and
Speaker 1: a lot of the time those a lot of those
Speaker 1: guys who died were wounded by SWAT and then killed themselves. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's yeah. Meanwhile, during this same span of time,
Speaker 1: SWAT officers had thirty nine accidental discharges, so shot two
Speaker 1: hundred citizens and accidentally fired their own weapons thirty nine times.
Speaker 1: This means that accidental gunfire. We're looking at three forty
Speaker 1: two um incidences where SWAT officers fired, and thirty nine
Speaker 1: of those are accidents. That's not an insignificant percentage of
Speaker 1: all SWAT weapons discharges. Like that's that's that's noteworthy. The
Speaker 1: study authors right quote. This data indicates that something is
Speaker 1: substantially amiss with the way that at least some SWAT
Speaker 1: officers handled their weapons and strongly suggests that this problem
Speaker 1: is rooted in training. That more than one in tent
Speaker 1: of the incidents and would to those who are supposed
Speaker 1: to be the most highly trained officers in their agency
Speaker 1: fired shots involved accidental discharges is simply unacceptable in our minds.
Speaker 1: Among the aforementioned hundred thirty nine citizens who died after
Speaker 1: being struck by SWAT gunfire were two who fatally shot
Speaker 1: themselves after being hit by SWAT bullets. In addition to
Speaker 1: these two, we have firm data that three d seventy
Speaker 1: nine other individuals killed themselves in situations in which they
Speaker 1: were not shot by SWAT officers. It is thus clear
Speaker 1: that in the current data that it is more likely
Speaker 1: citizen will take their own lives during SWAT operations than
Speaker 1: be killed by SWAT officers by a margin of more
Speaker 1: than two point five to one point five. Finally, the
Speaker 1: data indicate that nearly one in four citizens struck by
Speaker 1: SWAT gunfire wished to be shot, as respondents classified their
Speaker 1: actions as indicating they wish to commit suicide by cop.
Speaker 1: If respondents classifications are correct, this indicates that an even
Speaker 1: higher portion of the citizen deaths and SWAT operations involved
Speaker 1: individuals who wished to die. Thatt cent of the SWAT
Speaker 1: officers struck by gunfire and the current day were shot
Speaker 1: by fellow officers. Suggests that while the most substantial threat
Speaker 1: officers face comes from armed suspects, the prospect of fratricide
Speaker 1: looms large and tactical operations. So you're more likely to
Speaker 1: get shot by your homeboy. Not more likely, but pretty likely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: about when when SWAT officers are shot. More than one
Speaker 1: intent of SWAT cops who get shot are shot by
Speaker 1: their own guys, and one in ten times when SWAT
Speaker 1: officers shoot, they're shooting negligently without meaning to fire. So
Speaker 1: again the whole elite SWAT team thing. There are some
Speaker 1: well trained SWAT teams out there. It's also real fucking
Speaker 1: easy to to just give guys military grade weaponry, call
Speaker 1: him a SWAT team, and then they funk up. But
Speaker 1: more than anything, SWAT teams don't get into a lot
Speaker 1: of serious gunfights on a nationwide level. Um, and most
Speaker 1: of the people they encounter who are seriously armed like
Speaker 1: our fucking want to kill themselves. Yeah, they to die,
Speaker 1: which is maybe suggests that a SWAT team isn't the
Speaker 1: thing to bring to that person. They shouldn't go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe just a dude who's a good therapist having a
Speaker 1: conversation would have better odds of resolving this without gunfire.
Speaker 1: Better chance. Yeah yeah, yeah. So the conclusions here are
Speaker 1: pretty clear. Number one, swat teams virtually never do these
Speaker 1: sort of work there portrayed doing in movies and tv
Speaker 1: I directly engaging dangerous bad guys. And number two, swat
Speaker 1: teams kind of suck at their job regularly shooting people
Speaker 1: and each other by accident. And perhaps no story illustrates
Speaker 1: the second point better than the case of Wanas Thnava.
Speaker 1: Uh now, good job, man, Yeah, I'm doing my best.
Speaker 1: Heere and on Wanas sold a small amount of methamphetamine
Speaker 1: UH to a confidential informant um or bought a yea
Speaker 1: so sold a small amount of methamphetamine too a confidential
Speaker 1: informant um. Several hours later, on the morning of the
Speaker 1: seven man swat team from the Cornelia, Georgia Police Department
Speaker 1: carried out a raid on wannass home. Now. Because Wanas
Speaker 1: had a previous weapons charge on his record, officers were
Speaker 1: given a no knock warrant. They broke through Wannas's door
Speaker 1: with a battering ram and as they were pushing the
Speaker 1: door in, they noticed there was resistance behind the door
Speaker 1: and this led that what the officers in the swat
Speaker 1: team to believe that they're like someone had barricaded the door,
Speaker 1: so they tossed a flash bang in. Now, it turned
Speaker 1: out that the thing that had actually been against the
Speaker 1: door was the playpen where wannass nineteen month old child
Speaker 1: was sleeping. UH. The flash bang ignited the nineteen month
Speaker 1: old child, burning it badly and tearing the child's face
Speaker 1: and chest open um. The kid was put into a
Speaker 1: coma and very very nearly died. The swat and was
Speaker 1: you know, suffered permanent injury as a result of the
Speaker 1: police flash bang igniting it. The swat team found only
Speaker 1: a small amount of meth residue in the home and
Speaker 1: no wet weapons. No arrests were made. When the Bonus
Speaker 1: EVA sued, a local prosecutor threatened to charge them for
Speaker 1: their child's in reese. In the end, no officers were
Speaker 1: indicted for horrifically maiming a small child. I found one
Speaker 1: CNN article that interviewed the sheriff in charge of the
Speaker 1: swat team, a guy named Tarrell. Quote in hindsight, Tarrell said,
Speaker 1: at the time, officers would have conducted the raid differently
Speaker 1: had they known there was a child inside the home,
Speaker 1: but there was no sign of children during the alleged
Speaker 1: drug purchase that prompted the raid. We might have gone
Speaker 1: in through a side door, he said, We would not
Speaker 1: have used a flash bang like and defense. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: interesting to me because it shows it it never occurs
Speaker 1: to this guy that like, maybe maybe a dude selling
Speaker 1: a small amount of meths, maybe sending in an army
Speaker 1: to funk with that guy, and that army having grenades
Speaker 1: and battering rams. Maybe that's inherently reckless in a bad
Speaker 1: way to deal with. Again, a small amount of meth
Speaker 1: being sold. Yeah, and it's just it kind of feels
Speaker 1: like to me, like, if I'm this wat guy, I
Speaker 1: feel a little insulted. Yeah, you think I'm so incompetent.
Speaker 1: That has got to be nineteen of us with with
Speaker 1: sucking fifty cows to come get this one dude that
Speaker 1: just sold a little men imposedly most get like, you
Speaker 1: think I'm that weak that I can't just Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's fucking It's the problem with militarization in general, which
Speaker 1: is that like it. It means that you're going to
Speaker 1: have a military situation if the police are going it's
Speaker 1: fucking Waco. When you start the conversation with tanks and
Speaker 1: machine guns and snipers, You're not going to end it
Speaker 1: in a good way. You're going to end it by
Speaker 1: burning seventy children alive. Because that's this is so how
Speaker 1: that works. This is so true in every area of
Speaker 1: your life. If you're in any sort of relationship, whether
Speaker 1: it's a monogamous one or a romantic or a or
Speaker 1: a friendship or a sibling, if you come in guns ablazing,
Speaker 1: it's just not gonna work. No, this is your Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is exactly why I was able to improve a
Speaker 1: lot of my personal relationships propped when I stopped having
Speaker 1: the b A T. F Um show with tanks to
Speaker 1: support me. You know that that really was was a
Speaker 1: game changer for me. Um. I imagine, man, a lot
Speaker 1: less of my friends get burnt to death in in
Speaker 1: basement compounds outside of Waco. Now, yeah, yeah, that's good man,
Speaker 1: because I live and learn, and because I really like
Speaker 1: the reference in here, Robert, just a Waco reference in everywhere.
Speaker 1: Hey Man, talk about talk about Waco. Talk about a rebranding.
Speaker 1: Boy has gotten Yeah, yeah, I mean it was now
Speaker 1: the Home and Garden TV Network. That's we have some
Speaker 1: sort of oversized initial letter in your room and uh,
Speaker 1: a refurbished wood panel. We have a farmhouse store and
Speaker 1: a farmhouse sink and yeah, and you admire Joanna Gaines
Speaker 1: there it is build an empire. She built it. She
Speaker 1: built an empire out of a city that was known
Speaker 1: for burning seventy babies. Well, I don't understand most of
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here, but you know what I
Speaker 1: do understand is that we're gonna we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: another kind of Waco type thing where a bunch of
Speaker 1: children get burned by militarized police. At the end of this,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be fun. Um all right, fun is the
Speaker 1: wrong word anyway, So like the the the again, like
Speaker 1: the point here is that like the worst case scenario
Speaker 1: of like what happened with Wantas and his family without
Speaker 1: the police is that like, oh, these parents might be
Speaker 1: selling small amounts of meth amphetamine and that maybe isn't
Speaker 1: great for a kid, and that this is a problem
Speaker 1: that does need a solution to it. Um. But the
Speaker 1: solution that they got a grenade burning their child alive.
Speaker 1: It was worse than probably anything that would have happened
Speaker 1: if they'd just been left selling math right, like or
Speaker 1: just or take fifteen minutes more to do just a
Speaker 1: little bit of investigation on the guy and be like,
Speaker 1: oh he's a parent, Yeah, it's it's it's always that
Speaker 1: like with way Go, like there was there was a problem,
Speaker 1: David Koresh was doing some fucked up ship. You could
Speaker 1: have just arrested him and not burned like those kids,
Speaker 1: whatever they were going through under Koresh, getting burnt alive
Speaker 1: was worse for them. Absolutely. The police made it worse.
Speaker 1: And it's because militarized police are a hammer and we've
Speaker 1: got a hammer. Every single problem looks like a nail,
Speaker 1: and like, if that hammer is a hammer in the
Speaker 1: hands of a cop, it's specifically going to be used
Speaker 1: to hammer the faces of black people. Um, because that's
Speaker 1: how cops work. As we've previously discussed, I've had a
Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen study published by the National Academy of Sciences.
Speaker 1: It uses a geo coded census of SWAT team deployments
Speaker 1: in Maryland and shows that quote, militarized police units are
Speaker 1: more often deployed in communities with large shares of African
Speaker 1: American residents, even after controlling for local crime rates. Further,
Speaker 1: using nationwide panel data on local police militarization, I demonstrate
Speaker 1: that militarized policing fails to enhance officers safety or reduce
Speaker 1: local crime. So after controlling for variables like local crime rates,
Speaker 1: the author of the study calculated that for every ten
Speaker 1: percent increase in the black population of a zip code,
Speaker 1: there is a ten percent increase in the likelihood of
Speaker 1: that zip code experiencing a SWAT raid now and again.
Speaker 1: He also showed that swat raids and SWAT teams don't
Speaker 1: reduce violent crime, so they're they're they're kind of what
Speaker 1: you're seeing here. Sure looks like they're just being used
Speaker 1: vindictively against black people, you know, whether or not there's
Speaker 1: intention behind it. That's how the data really looks now. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A Washington Post write up of the research notes telling
Speaker 1: Lee Uh he found no statistically significant change in the
Speaker 1: killings of police officers, which were too infrequent to measure,
Speaker 1: or assaults on police officers. So again, part of the
Speaker 1: justification of SWAT teams is that, like, police are in
Speaker 1: so much danger that we need special, heavily armored police.
Speaker 1: And it's like, actually, when SWAT teams are used all
Speaker 1: the time, cops still get killed with the same right,
Speaker 1: it has no impact. Yeah, so SWAT raids also get
Speaker 1: just so many dogs killed. My so so many dogs
Speaker 1: getting killed by fucking swat teams. If you want to
Speaker 1: know what swat teams love to you most, it's it's
Speaker 1: shoots some goddamn dogs. Um, it's impossible to to separate
Speaker 1: the number of dogs killed by swat from the number
Speaker 1: of dogs killed by regular cops serving the same kinds
Speaker 1: of search warrants, because again, regular cops regularly serve the
Speaker 1: exact same kind of search warrants swat cops serve, which
Speaker 1: maybe suggests that why do we have swat teams? If
Speaker 1: yea also but yeah, um either way, a shipload of
Speaker 1: fucking dogs get killed when police serve warrants, and a
Speaker 1: lot of those warrants are served tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: them are served by swat teams. Um. We will never
Speaker 1: know how many dogs get killed exactly um by police
Speaker 1: in this country. But in two thousands sixteen, one Justice
Speaker 1: Department expert called the police shooting of dogs and epidemic.
Speaker 1: It is estimated that cops shoot twenty five dogs in
Speaker 1: this country every single day, and some estimates range as
Speaker 1: high as five hundred dogs per day. It is very
Speaker 1: likely that police use their guns to shoot dogs more
Speaker 1: than they use their guns for any other purpose nationwide.
Speaker 1: Why because they fucking I mean, you know, I've actually
Speaker 1: talked to some cops about this, um and including I
Speaker 1: talked to a cop who had to who was in
Speaker 1: a justified shoot of a dog, a dog that like
Speaker 1: maimed her to the point that her life has never
Speaker 1: been the same since. Like, obviously the dog is tearing
Speaker 1: you apart. Yeah, you're gonna shoot that dog. Um, Like
Speaker 1: I've talked to some police about this and like one
Speaker 1: theorious why it happens so much without like there are
Speaker 1: some justife, like a lot of like sometimes fucking people
Speaker 1: who have dog fighting rings get rated and like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're gonna shoot some of those dogs because they're just
Speaker 1: like they've been broken and they're dangerous. Um. But also
Speaker 1: a lot of cops are terrified of dogs. And if
Speaker 1: cops are terrified, they get to shoot UM. So even
Speaker 1: in situations where there's no life exactly a lot of
Speaker 1: the time, probably most of the time, there's no justification
Speaker 1: for the animals. That's that's that's yeah, yeah, and one
Speaker 1: out of fight training makes you scared, and that's what
Speaker 1: I want to get into. The training makes you scared.
Speaker 1: And in one out of five of these incidents of
Speaker 1: a police dog shootings, a child was either in the
Speaker 1: direct line of fire or standing nearby, and one horrifying
Speaker 1: to Thus, in fifteen case, a four year old girl
Speaker 1: was shot in the leg by a police officer who
Speaker 1: was trying to shoot her dog. UM. And this dog
Speaker 1: was not threatening this police officer necessarily UM. Thus the
Speaker 1: officer felt threatened, like he felt like he might get bit,
Speaker 1: and even fear of a minor injury um is enough
Speaker 1: to make an officer completely immune to any consequences for
Speaker 1: shooting a dog. Meanwhile, I should note people who kill
Speaker 1: police dogs regularly face longer sentences than child molest us.
Speaker 1: You'll go away for life if you shoot a police dog. Um.
Speaker 1: But police can imagine. Yeah, can you imagine having the
Speaker 1: right to slap the ship out of somebody because you
Speaker 1: think they might slap you. Yeah, it's pretty pretty crazy,
Speaker 1: pretty bad. So this may seem like it's getting a
Speaker 1: little bit off the topic of police militarization, but it
Speaker 1: really is not. A lot of times when liberals talk
Speaker 1: about reforming police, they discussed the need for more police training,
Speaker 1: but police actually go through a shipload of training. Like
Speaker 1: there's there's a bunch of billboards or like placards them
Speaker 1: going in a protest that like talked about how much
Speaker 1: less cops training cops need than like hairstylists, And that's true,
Speaker 1: but that's true for how much cops training. Cops need
Speaker 1: to get on the street. They take a lot of
Speaker 1: training after becoming cops, and a lot of that training
Speaker 1: makes them more dangerous as cops. Um. And this is
Speaker 1: part of the problem we talk about like needing to
Speaker 1: train police more. Over the last twenty years, police training
Speaker 1: has become increasingly paramilitary, with military veterans like Lieutenant Colonel
Speaker 1: David Grossman and companies like Close Quarters Battle CQB providing
Speaker 1: training that deliberately bills itself as military style and refers
Speaker 1: to officers as warriors, all while convincing them that they
Speaker 1: are in more danger than cops have ever faced. From
Speaker 1: the end of policing. Quote Sef Stoughton, a former police
Speaker 1: officer turned law professors, shows how officers are repeatedly exposed
Speaker 1: to scenarios in which seemingly innocuous interactions with the public,
Speaker 1: such as traffic stops, turned deadly. The endlessly repeated point
Speaker 1: is that any encounter can turn deadly in a split second.
Speaker 1: Of officers don't remain ready to use lethal force at
Speaker 1: any moment. So take the case of John Crawford, an
Speaker 1: African American man shot to death by a police officer
Speaker 1: in Walmart and Ohio. Crawford had picked up an air
Speaker 1: gun off the shelf and was carrying it around the
Speaker 1: store while shopping. Another shopper called nine one one to
Speaker 1: report a man with a gun in the store. The
Speaker 1: stores video camera shows that one of the responding officers
Speaker 1: shot without warning while Crawford was talking on the phone.
Speaker 1: In Ohio, it is legal to carry a gun openly,
Speaker 1: but the officer had been trained to use deadly force
Speaker 1: upon seeing a gun. Similarly, in South Carolina, a state
Speaker 1: trooper drove up to a young man in his car
Speaker 1: at a gas station and asked him for his driver's license.
Speaker 1: He leaned into the car to comply, and the officers
Speaker 1: shot him without warning. See Unexpected movement shoot. This is
Speaker 1: again what you get with more police training. This is
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, The training makes you scared. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: more training is not the solution because this is what
Speaker 1: the training does. Yeah, you could argue maybe different training
Speaker 1: is the solution, but you also still have tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of cops who already have this ship in their heads.
Speaker 1: What do you do with them? If they're still on
Speaker 1: the force, how do you how do you cleanse that
Speaker 1: from them? Are you confident you can? Now? Modern police
Speaker 1: US cops are equipped with military grid weaponry, but not
Speaker 1: with military grade training. They're told that their own safety
Speaker 1: is their number one concern and anything they do to
Speaker 1: protect themselves is justified. We have essentially raised and equipped
Speaker 1: a military, told them that they are at war every
Speaker 1: day with the people of this country, and then sent
Speaker 1: them out to the streets with a license to kill
Speaker 1: if they feel scared for any reason. And this is
Speaker 1: not a simple right versus left issue. After Democrat Michael
Speaker 1: Ducacus was defeated in nineteen eighty eight for being soft
Speaker 1: on crime via a super racist ad, Democrats pivoted to Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Willie Horton ad. Democrats pivoted to endorsing right wing
Speaker 1: law and order politics. Bill Clinton's nine Crime Bill added
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of police nationwide and expanded the drug war,
Speaker 1: And in fact, it wasn't until Clinton's second term that
Speaker 1: widespread police militarization was even made stable. In nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: a bunch of heavily armed and armored gunmen try to
Speaker 1: rob some businesses and get into a big gunfight with
Speaker 1: Los Angeles cops. Is the North Hollywood shoot out? Um? Yeah,
Speaker 1: police side arms were incapable of piercing their armor, and
Speaker 1: cops had to borrow high caliber rifles from a nearby
Speaker 1: gun store. When the National Defense Authorization Act was passed
Speaker 1: later that year, it included the ten thirty three Program,
Speaker 1: a provision that allowed law enforcement agencies to acquire military hardware.
Speaker 1: Between nineteen ninety seven and two thousand fourteen, five point
Speaker 1: one billion dollars in material was transferred from the Department
Speaker 1: of Defense to local law enforcement. Now near the end
Speaker 1: of his time in office, President Obama attempted to belatedly
Speaker 1: halt this massive transfer of military armaments to police, but
Speaker 1: President Trump reversed that and accelerated the transfer of military
Speaker 1: weapons to cops. And this is why in a ten
Speaker 1: year period, forty nine m wraps mine resistant patrol vehicles
Speaker 1: were handed out to police departments in Florida alone. Many
Speaker 1: of these went to lightly populated rural counties like Baker
Speaker 1: population seven thousand. In Ohio, the Department of Natural Resources
Speaker 1: received two hundred and forty fully automatic rifles. The Los
Speaker 1: Angeles County Sheriff's Department got seven hundred and sixty eight
Speaker 1: fully automatic rifles. By the way, I found all of
Speaker 1: this in a Forbes breakdown, which notes that US cops
Speaker 1: also received more than six thousand bayonets between two thousand
Speaker 1: six and two thousand seventeen. What do you need six
Speaker 1: like our millets? Our soldiers don't even fucking use bayonets
Speaker 1: anymore because they're useless and modern. They weren't even that
Speaker 1: useful when bayonets were actually used in combat. Um So,
Speaker 1: remember the study that showed SWAT teams were more likely
Speaker 1: to be deployed in black neighborhoods. Well, it also found
Speaker 1: that quote seeing militarized police and news reports made diminish
Speaker 1: police reputation in the mass public. And this is you
Speaker 1: know there's that news story about like the the l
Speaker 1: A school police having an m wrap. These are the tanks,
Speaker 1: Like they're not really tanks, but they're huge armored trucks.
Speaker 1: And I have a story about huge armored trucks prop
Speaker 1: because when I was in Moses, most of the people
Speaker 1: I was inbedded with were the Iraqi me and they
Speaker 1: mostly drove a mix of like technicals which are just
Speaker 1: like Toyota trucks with guns in the bed uh and
Speaker 1: old U s military hum vs. They didn't have a
Speaker 1: whole lot of heavy military vehicles. The only time you
Speaker 1: saw US police in the places, or the US cops
Speaker 1: or not cops. Sorry. The only time you say US
Speaker 1: soldiers in the places where I was was when they
Speaker 1: were rolling around in em wraps and usually be a
Speaker 1: patrol of like three of these gigantic I can't exaggerate
Speaker 1: how fucking big an im wrap looks there. They are
Speaker 1: nightmarishly large vehicles, and they look like The first time
Speaker 1: I remember seeing one is I'm on the out, like
Speaker 1: maybe a quarter of a mile back from the front line,
Speaker 1: and I'm like literally sitting and smoking a cigarette with
Speaker 1: um my photographer and some friends on a pile of rubble,
Speaker 1: like listening to a gunfight occur in the distance, and
Speaker 1: there's like little kids running around and stuff, trying to
Speaker 1: sell us things and whatnot. Like we all stopped for
Speaker 1: a second as this US patrol rolls by, and these
Speaker 1: three giant m wraps, And the first thing I think
Speaker 1: of when I see them up close and personal for
Speaker 1: the first time is like, these look like a T eighties.
Speaker 1: That's what these are is these are these are the
Speaker 1: These are the fucking Imperial Stormtroopers T eight You can't
Speaker 1: see the human beings inside, you can't see people. It
Speaker 1: is just this. It's this, this physical manifestation of the
Speaker 1: violent power of the state. That's what it felt like.
Speaker 1: And that's what I could see. These little Iraqi kids
Speaker 1: on the ground, like we're seeing that that was what
Speaker 1: a U. S. Soldier was to them, was like was
Speaker 1: was a fucking machine. And that's what seeing these in
Speaker 1: the hands of cops makes you think about cops, Like
Speaker 1: police want to wonder, like why people don't like them
Speaker 1: or expect them anymore. It's because we see you as
Speaker 1: pieces of an armed machine and nobody likes Yeah, you
Speaker 1: rolled up like the Sith Lord, like you look like
Speaker 1: you look like Darth Vader, like you you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, you look like stormtroopers. We don't
Speaker 1: like stormtroopers. No, they're not the good guys. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: I could go on and on about like the insane
Speaker 1: weaponry cops are given these days, and I could list
Speaker 1: repeated anecdotes about how often they badly misuse it. But
Speaker 1: I think the most important point to end on for
Speaker 1: this episode and for this series is how fucking much
Speaker 1: we spend on militarized police for how fucking little we get.
Speaker 1: The Minneapolis Police Department takes up thirty five percent of
Speaker 1: the city's general fund, The Chicago p D are thirty
Speaker 1: seven percent of their city's budget. Atlanta and Detroit police
Speaker 1: come in and about thirty percent. The l A p
Speaker 1: D is a quarter of Los Angeles's budget. Many cities
Speaker 1: spend up to of their municipal budgets on their police department,
Speaker 1: making the basically making like a lot of cities in
Speaker 1: the US are basically like small armies with towns attached
Speaker 1: to them. Up until the nineteen eighties, the U. S
Speaker 1: Government spent about as much money on criminal justice as
Speaker 1: we did on cash welfare, on like welfare programs that deliberately,
Speaker 1: like directly hand out like aid to people um. Up
Speaker 1: until the nineteen eighties, Yeah, about equal what we spent
Speaker 1: on law enforcement we spent on welfare. In the decades since,
Speaker 1: welfare spending has declined and police funding has word, Today
Speaker 1: we spend more than twice as much money on law
Speaker 1: and order as we do on social welfare, and we
Speaker 1: get very little for our money. For all the weapons
Speaker 1: really buy our cops, the vast majority of police officers
Speaker 1: will never fire a weapon in the line of duty.
Speaker 1: For all that police not once, not once. For all
Speaker 1: that police advocates talk about dangerous criminals, most police officers
Speaker 1: make no more than one felony arrest per year. And
Speaker 1: when it comes to the question of how good police
Speaker 1: are it actually solving crimes. About forty percent of murders
Speaker 1: go unsolved, only about fifty three percent of aggravated assaults
Speaker 1: are solved, less than thirty percent of robberies are solved,
Speaker 1: and only about of automobile thefts are solved. The FBI's
Speaker 1: Uniform Crime Reports says that thirty percent of rapes are solved,
Speaker 1: but that number doesn't really tell the whole story. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from the Guardian for this one because again,
Speaker 1: this is like the reason I bring this up is that,
Speaker 1: like that's one of the number one things. Like people
Speaker 1: who will argue about like police abolition, other folks will say, like, well,
Speaker 1: who are you gonna call if you're getting raped? Let's
Speaker 1: talk about how good police do in solving rapes. Not
Speaker 1: only that, I hear the argument like, no, they need
Speaker 1: more money, they are underfunded, and I'm like, actually they're
Speaker 1: more funded than every other program. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: significantly more. I'm gonna quote from the Guardian for this
Speaker 1: one quote. The fact is that the police never investigate
Speaker 1: most sexual violence because most sexual violence goes and reported.
Speaker 1: According to the Rape and Incest National Network or RAIN,
Speaker 1: a little less than twenty of sexual assaults are reported
Speaker 1: to police, significantly less than other violent crimes. The reasons
Speaker 1: are myriad, but an often cited one is a distrust
Speaker 1: and fear of the police, which obviously is increased by militarization.
Speaker 1: One survey of sexual assault survivors found that of those
Speaker 1: who chose not to report, fiftcent feared that the police
Speaker 1: could not or would not do anything to help. An
Speaker 1: additional seven percent did not want to expose their attacker
Speaker 1: to the police. A two thousand eighteen study of the Austin,
Speaker 1: Texas Police Department found that officers tasked with investigating sexual
Speaker 1: assaults could not read lab reports on DNA evidence and
Speaker 1: often lacked a basic understanding of email anatomy. I have
Speaker 1: to google. I listen to fucking this, I have to
Speaker 1: google stuff like labia MAJORA one officer sex. That guy
Speaker 1: shouldn't be investigating sex cribes, shouldn't beating sex crib ever.
Speaker 1: But but rather than paying for him to learn what
Speaker 1: evolva is, big home, he got a bayonet. Oh, I'll
Speaker 1: bet he knows how to use a machine gun. All
Speaker 1: of the parts of a machine gun. So sometimes police
Speaker 1: failures to investigate sexual violence look like the result of
Speaker 1: not just stupidity, but of outright duplicity. One study of
Speaker 1: the New York Police Department discovered that it was knowingly
Speaker 1: under counting rapes and its public figures, using a deliberately
Speaker 1: strict definition of rape in order to shrink the number
Speaker 1: of reported cases in New York. An inquiry into the
Speaker 1: NYPD found that it's Special Victims Division to be grossly dysfunctional,
Speaker 1: with officers instructed to simply not investigate misdemeanor sexual assault cases.
Speaker 1: First of all, the fact that that's a thing, a
Speaker 1: misdemeanor sexual assault is already a problem. Now you're not
Speaker 1: gonna investigate. Uh yeah, well, and like, this is actually
Speaker 1: kind of a pattern with the NYPD, and I assume
Speaker 1: other departments of like, so they're under counting rape and
Speaker 1: its public figures, so it seems like they solve more
Speaker 1: rapes than they do. There was a study that came
Speaker 1: out about how often the NYPD hits when they shoot
Speaker 1: people with their firearms, right, which is something you want
Speaker 1: to know, especially since the NYPD is considered to be
Speaker 1: one of the best trained police departments in the country,
Speaker 1: and the NYPD was very proud of the fact that
Speaker 1: they had a thirty percent hit rate um in gunfights, um,
Speaker 1: which is actually, like, I mean, I'm gonna be honest
Speaker 1: with you, people very rarely hit when they are shooting
Speaker 1: at each other in a gunfight because it's stressful. Is
Speaker 1: a lot of fucking business. It's very hard to be accurate,
Speaker 1: not to fit. But like that was their their number was, like,
Speaker 1: we hit thirty percent of the time when we just
Speaker 1: charge our weapons in like a a violent situation. But
Speaker 1: then people who analyze the NYPD data found that the
Speaker 1: NYPD was only hitting because they were including police officers
Speaker 1: sewic sides as one shot stops. Wait, they were, they
Speaker 1: were they were goofing their own numbers by including their suicides.
Speaker 1: Is like, I mean, yeah, they're they're basically saying, like
Speaker 1: that cop took a dangerous man off the streets himself.
Speaker 1: It counts, It counts. Yeah, It's pretty pretty wild. So
Speaker 1: conservative estimates suggest that US police have two d thousand
Speaker 1: untested rape kits in their possession nationwide. Rain's best estimate
Speaker 1: is that only about four point six percent of sexual
Speaker 1: assaults ever lead to an arrest, and less than one
Speaker 1: percent are ever referred to police by prosecutors. So if
Speaker 1: you are raped, and you refuse to talk to the cops,
Speaker 1: your odds of getting justice are more or less the
Speaker 1: same as someone who dials and nine one one right away.
Speaker 1: She's And then, of course there's the fact that cops
Speaker 1: commit just a shipload of rape. Bowling Green State University,
Speaker 1: you know you're gonna get these I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: when you're talking about rape, I was like, they're not
Speaker 1: reporting them because they're doing it. They are doing a
Speaker 1: lot of them. Yeah. Bowling Green State University documented at
Speaker 1: least four undered in five rapes by the officers on
Speaker 1: duty between two thousand five and two thirteen. That is
Speaker 1: an offer an average of forty five per year. They
Speaker 1: also documented six and thirty six instances of forcible fondling.
Speaker 1: These numbers are only a fraction of the real total,
Speaker 1: since most sexual assaults are never reported and most rapists
Speaker 1: have at least five victims over the course of their career.
Speaker 1: The CNN article I found about this investigation into cop
Speaker 1: rape includes one of the most horrifying lines I have
Speaker 1: ever read. In an article, quote about half of the
Speaker 1: victims their children, researchers say Stenson, one of the researchers,
Speaker 1: has gotten accustomed to hearing his research assistants proclaimed during
Speaker 1: their work, Oh my god, it's another fourteen year old.
Speaker 1: Oh again, yeah, yeah, that I have a guttural physical
Speaker 1: response to that. Yeah. So. One of the first arguments
Speaker 1: you'll get against police abolition is again some version of
Speaker 1: the question, without cops, who's who you're gonna call if
Speaker 1: you know, rape or whatever, if X crime happens to you.
Speaker 1: The second argument is usually that even if the cops
Speaker 1: aren't necessary great at solving crimes, they prevent violence and
Speaker 1: crime by their presence in areas. And Alex Vitali, the
Speaker 1: author of the End of Policing, strikes back at that
Speaker 1: claim quote it is largely a liberal fantasy that the
Speaker 1: police exists to protect us from the bad guys. As
Speaker 1: the veteran police scholar David Bailey argues, the police do
Speaker 1: not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept
Speaker 1: secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it,
Speaker 1: but the public does not know it. Yet. The police
Speaker 1: pretend that they are society's best defense against crime and
Speaker 1: continually argue that they if they are given more resources,
Speaker 1: especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime.
Speaker 1: This is a myth, and he is very right when
Speaker 1: he says that a lot of data backs this argument up.
Speaker 1: The raw number of police in this country has declined
Speaker 1: for the last five years straight, and the rate of
Speaker 1: police officers per one thousand residents in the United States
Speaker 1: has been dropping for twenty years. You know what else
Speaker 1: has been dropping for twenty years? Prop? What the crime rate?
Speaker 1: The crime rate? Yeah, the police lost twenty three thousand
Speaker 1: net officers nationwide from two thousand and sixteen, with no
Speaker 1: corresponding surgeon crime. Now, despite the fact that crime has
Speaker 1: dropped saidly for twenty years, most Americans believe that crime
Speaker 1: rates have increased throughout their lifetimes. Why are people like that?
Speaker 1: Why are people like that? I have an answer for you, prop, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a fucking answer for you. Are you ready
Speaker 1: for this? Are you ready to talk about Hollywood again? Yes?
Speaker 1: Because yeah a lot. Yeah. You know, like when you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: you know what you know what prevents crime jobs? Yeah? Resources,
Speaker 1: It's just easy giving people heroin if they're addicted, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe laws that shouldn't be laws, like and making
Speaker 1: sure that the person handing them that heroin says, Hey,
Speaker 1: there's some doctors or some professionals over here if you
Speaker 1: want to stop this, like we can. We can help
Speaker 1: you out with this, but nobody's gonna fuck you up
Speaker 1: for doing this. Here's a couch. Yeah. It turns out
Speaker 1: that actually objectively works better and every single place that works. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So the answer to why people think that police are
Speaker 1: just absolutely critical and holding back a tide of violence
Speaker 1: has a lot to do with the TV show Dragnet
Speaker 1: and its descendants. In the fall of two thousand nineteen,
Speaker 1: more than six percent of primetime dramas on TV were
Speaker 1: about police, crime and the legal system. Many of these shows,
Speaker 1: like Cops and Live p D worked directly with law
Speaker 1: enforcement and receive approval from departments for every episode they aired,
Speaker 1: the same way Dragnet did. That's Cops. Cops got like
Speaker 1: the the cops sign off on every episode of Cops,
Speaker 1: which is why that show doesn't show. There's a wonderful
Speaker 1: podcast you should all listen to after this called Running
Speaker 1: from Cops um and it it is a show, a
Speaker 1: podcast about the TV show Cops and about live TV
Speaker 1: And it's one of the things that they showcases in
Speaker 1: the very first episode of Cops, like they got access
Speaker 1: to the unaired footage that was shot for that episode
Speaker 1: of Cops, and like it showed that in the in
Speaker 1: this episode of Cops, like it showed the like busting
Speaker 1: this like family and like taking the kid, and like
Speaker 1: the the female officer who took the kid was like,
Speaker 1: it's okay, we're gonna get you to a safe place tonight.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have an ice warm bed and toys and stuff.
Speaker 1: And in the part that wasn't aired, she took that
Speaker 1: child to like the place that she was supposed to
Speaker 1: take this kid after arresting the kid's parents and they
Speaker 1: just put the kid in basically a cell because they
Speaker 1: didn't have a better or any toys. And like the
Speaker 1: lady cop is like in tears and like enraged when
Speaker 1: she realizes how fucked up the situation is. That didn't
Speaker 1: aar on Cops. Like no, um, so again, watch Running
Speaker 1: from Cops. It's a great or listen to it. It's
Speaker 1: a great fucking podcast. Um. But one of the things
Speaker 1: they did on Running from Cops is they tried to analyze,
Speaker 1: like they watched eight episodes of the show, um and
Speaker 1: like analyzed the race of all of the people involved, analyzed,
Speaker 1: um the kind of crimes they're arrested for, and like
Speaker 1: put together data on like the world as presented by
Speaker 1: Cops as opposed to the actual world, and how crime
Speaker 1: actually works in our real world. Um, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from from an article written by one of the
Speaker 1: guys behind Running from Cops. Now, what we discovered was that,
Speaker 1: contrary to early press predictions, the world portrayed on Cops
Speaker 1: is not like the real world. There are about four
Speaker 1: times more violent crimes and cops than in reality, and
Speaker 1: three times more drug arrests and about ten times more
Speaker 1: arrests for sex work. The cops on the show are also,
Speaker 1: statistically speaking, extremely good at their jobs. Segments on the
Speaker 1: show in and arrest eighty four point four percent of
Speaker 1: the time. That number reflects a change over time from
Speaker 1: back in ninete to and the most recent season. In
Speaker 1: Cops World, law enforcement officers are so effective it's basically
Speaker 1: a given that a crime will end in an arrest. Now,
Speaker 1: that's interesting to me. Um, there's a lot that's interesting
Speaker 1: to me, including Like, one of the things they find
Speaker 1: in the show is that early on Cops like showed
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot more non white people getting arrested,
Speaker 1: and like the double a CP complained and Cops fixed
Speaker 1: the problem and switched over to showing mostly white criminals.
Speaker 1: And part of yeah, part of how they did it
Speaker 1: was by just filming in Portland, Oregon. That's hilarious. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that. Yeah, but I didn't know, Like, wow,
Speaker 1: it seems the black people no more y. Yeah, they did.
Speaker 1: They did fix that particular problem. Um and you know,
Speaker 1: I gotta give it to him. Moving to Portland's a
Speaker 1: smart way to do that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So most
Speaker 1: people who even like most fans of Cops williganala is
Speaker 1: that the show has always been, you know, kind of trashy,
Speaker 1: but even lea yeah, and and like you would have
Speaker 1: found a lot more people who'd be willing to argue
Speaker 1: that Cops was harmful back before this most recent uprising.
Speaker 1: Then you would get to argue that there was a
Speaker 1: harm and shows like for example, Law and Order. But
Speaker 1: even shows like Law and Order contribute to our distorted
Speaker 1: cultural beliefs about the police. Now, obviously Law and Order
Speaker 1: doesn't push the militarized police angle. This is Law and
Speaker 1: Orders very much like a tribute to like Volmer's idea
Speaker 1: of the police as scientists. Um. Yeah, but it's still
Speaker 1: has a negative effect at Robert Thompson, a professor at
Speaker 1: Syracuse University who studies television and pop culture, noted in
Speaker 1: an interview with a Desiree News, quote, the very thing
Speaker 1: that keeps law and order going is the idea that
Speaker 1: they keep showing this efficient process over and over. Law
Speaker 1: and order gives, at least in part, some feel for
Speaker 1: this being an efficiently well oiled machine. And it just isn't.
Speaker 1: We already went through the statistics of how few crimes
Speaker 1: the police solved, because again, most of these scientific policing
Speaker 1: methods don't work nearly as well as as there they
Speaker 1: TV portrays them as yeah now. Color of Change released
Speaker 1: a report in January of this year based on a
Speaker 1: study of twenty six scripted crime dramas. It found that quote,
Speaker 1: these shows rendered racism invisible and dismissed any need for
Speaker 1: police accountability. They made a legal destructive and racist practices
Speaker 1: within the criminal justice system seem acceptable, justifiable, and necessary,
Speaker 1: even heroic. The study noted that of the writers for
Speaker 1: these shows were white men, only nine percent were black. Now,
Speaker 1: in the mediate aftermath of George Floyd's murder and this
Speaker 1: whole uprising thing, both Cops and Life p D were canceled,
Speaker 1: and I I really think most people don't get what
Speaker 1: a big victory it is to have fucking cops off
Speaker 1: the air. Um. Yeah, I think they'll understand a little
Speaker 1: better after this. It does seem likely that other police
Speaker 1: procedurals will wind up dying out rather soon. And everyone
Speaker 1: has their favorite We've all we've all enjoyed some cop dramas,
Speaker 1: um I and I and I will say, I don't
Speaker 1: think that the wire is a part of the problem.
Speaker 1: I think they actually did a real good job of
Speaker 1: making everybody see, like Jesus Christ, policing's fucked. It just
Speaker 1: wasn't enough. Yeah. Um, there's a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: Brooklyn nine nine. I know a lot of people who
Speaker 1: love Brooklyn nine nine, and I know a lot of
Speaker 1: Brooklyn nine fans are apprehensive and like a little bit
Speaker 1: guilty right now and wondering, like, is there a way
Speaker 1: to like fix this show, to make it like not
Speaker 1: contribute to the problem, and like, you know, the show does.
Speaker 1: The show does has leaned in at a few points
Speaker 1: to some problems in policing in a way that most
Speaker 1: police dramas don't. Um. And it is one of those
Speaker 1: things where like, I think a lot of oaks will
Speaker 1: argue that, like there's a room for escapism and that
Speaker 1: this stuff isn't really harmful, but but it it just is.
Speaker 1: There is a lot of documentation about how it is harmful.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from just one piece of this documentation,
Speaker 1: an article in Pacific Standard magazine quote. Crime dramas are
Speaker 1: consistently ranked among the most watched shows by Nielsen Media,
Speaker 1: according to the authors. What's more, as many as forty
Speaker 1: percent of Americans believe that such shows are somewhat or
Speaker 1: very true to real life. So to find out how
Speaker 1: the simplistic portrayal of police officers on television might influence
Speaker 1: public opinion of the profession, researchers from St. John Fisher
Speaker 1: College and Wayne State University first had to analyze how
Speaker 1: popular crime shows portray police work. The researchers also surveyed
Speaker 1: a nationally representative sample of over two thousand Americans. They
Speaker 1: found that those who watched crime shows view police as
Speaker 1: better behaved, more successful at combating crime, and relatively responsible
Speaker 1: in their use of force than those who don't. Yes,
Speaker 1: if you want to know why there's so many back
Speaker 1: the blue folks. It's these shows that we all have
Speaker 1: some we in joy, but they're part of the problem.
Speaker 1: You may just gonna say the one for me is first,
Speaker 1: that's the one that gets me the most because it
Speaker 1: always takes place in like Memphis, in the deepest of
Speaker 1: the Section eight projects, and the way that like I know,
Speaker 1: our people are portrayed where it's like, again, it's not
Speaker 1: like crime don't exist, but this the way that you're
Speaker 1: painting this is so basic, so binary, and so easy
Speaker 1: that like I tried to watch it. I tried to
Speaker 1: get into it because I had a friend that liked it,
Speaker 1: So I tried to get into it, and I was
Speaker 1: like I can't, I can't. I can't even finish this.
Speaker 1: I don't have anything else. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's
Speaker 1: like it's just hurtful. It's really hurt because you know
Speaker 1: it's not real. You know what I'm saying, But you're
Speaker 1: telling me this is like a uh reality show and
Speaker 1: it's not real, And like just given by few Americans
Speaker 1: have an experience with violent crime, and how even how
Speaker 1: an even smaller chunk of those Americans actually have the
Speaker 1: police do something about the thing that they suffer. That's
Speaker 1: a tiny fraction of us. When people say what about
Speaker 1: you know, and then they list their things that we
Speaker 1: need the police for, most of them aren't thinking about
Speaker 1: a real thing that's happened to them, our friend. They're
Speaker 1: thinking about something they saw on TV like that that
Speaker 1: like like they wouldn't say that, but that's what's actually
Speaker 1: going on. Um. Yes, yeah. The militarization of US police
Speaker 1: started from a mix of fear over specific incidents of
Speaker 1: shocking violence uh and and cruel calculus by soulless politicians.
Speaker 1: But part of why it has been allowed to continue
Speaker 1: for so long, and why American voters traditionally react very
Speaker 1: negatively to the idea of cutting police funds, is that
Speaker 1: decades of Hollywood depictions of law enforcement have convinced many
Speaker 1: of us that the police are completely necessary to save
Speaker 1: us from a constant, imminent threat of violence and barbarism.
Speaker 1: The weight of pro cop cultural inertia is only increased
Speaker 1: by the fact that a decent number of the seven
Speaker 1: cops in our country do useful in good things from
Speaker 1: time to time, like that there are like most cops
Speaker 1: on the force will have a period where that even
Speaker 1: cops who are critical later will it will be able
Speaker 1: to point to individual things they did that we're good. Um,
Speaker 1: the question is not whether or not cops ever do
Speaker 1: things that are good. It's whether or not it's worth
Speaker 1: the cost, whether or not the benefits we gain from
Speaker 1: having police Number one can be gained from something that's
Speaker 1: not the police, and number two are worth the price
Speaker 1: of having police. Hollywood has spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: and made a lot of money showing us what we
Speaker 1: get from law enforcement at its best, and again the
Speaker 1: statistics show that they are lying about what we get
Speaker 1: from law enforcement. So perhaps we should spend more time
Speaker 1: as a culture thinking about what law enforcement costs us.
Speaker 1: And I think my best way of doing this is
Speaker 1: always an anecdotal example, you know, because we do talk
Speaker 1: about the statistics. We talked about the broad problem. The
Speaker 1: broad The broad problem is that a thousand people a
Speaker 1: year are killed by US police, many of them in
Speaker 1: shady circumstances, many of them, most of them without real
Speaker 1: investigations that are are open to the public taking play.
Speaker 1: And that that number is, for example, more than die
Speaker 1: have died in every school shooting in American history. Every year,
Speaker 1: the police kill more people than school shooters have ever killed,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, like like people like people flip out about
Speaker 1: a R fifteens And I'm not saying you're wrong to
Speaker 1: be scared or frightened about the easy availability of air fifteens.
Speaker 1: Like four Americans every year are killed by long guns
Speaker 1: that are air fifteens are similar weapons the police kill
Speaker 1: a thousand. You're not saying one's not not saying one's
Speaker 1: not a problem, but like does it suck? Yeah, Well
Speaker 1: if we're gonna yeah anyway, it's it's an issue. Um.
Speaker 1: But I think that when it comes to getting people
Speaker 1: to really emotionally understand the cost of police, individual horrific
Speaker 1: anecdotes are are the thing that drives it home to people. Um,
Speaker 1: And that's certainly what the police do. Individual anecdotes of
Speaker 1: cops doing good to talk about why we need them.
Speaker 1: So we might as well respond in kind. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to respond in kind by talking about something that
Speaker 1: happened in Philadelphia in nineteen five, the move bombing. It's so,
Speaker 1: have you heard of the move bombing? I have? Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had a feeling. Yeah. Move was a strange organization
Speaker 1: that we're not going to get into a lot of
Speaker 1: detail about. It was founded by a guy named John Africa,
Speaker 1: and every member of move took on Africa as a surname.
Speaker 1: They were not all black, actually it was a mixed
Speaker 1: race organization. There were hard to pin down ideologically, but
Speaker 1: it would be fair to say that they expressed a
Speaker 1: deep hatred of technology. Um They did some like protests
Speaker 1: at zoos against animal cruelty, They ate natural diet. They
Speaker 1: They're like a hard group to pin down. They did
Speaker 1: a lot of shouting into bullhorns though. Um So. The
Speaker 1: organization briefly wound up squatting in Powellton Village in West Philly.
Speaker 1: Um And they kind of fortified a house they were
Speaker 1: squatting in there, and they they've piste off a lot
Speaker 1: of their neighbors by regularly brandishing firearms and shouting at
Speaker 1: the neighborhood through a megaphone. They eventually were raided by
Speaker 1: the FEDS, who found a bunch of guns and pipe bombs.
Speaker 1: Police barricaded several blocks around the compound and basically laid
Speaker 1: siege to it for fifty six days. This all came
Speaker 1: to ahead when the cops moved into forcibly evict them.
Speaker 1: There was a gun battle and a cop was killed,
Speaker 1: while sixteen other officers and firefighters were injured. Eventually, the
Speaker 1: MOVE people all surrendered and the cops beat the ever
Speaker 1: loving ship out of one of them, a guy who
Speaker 1: had not taken part in the gunfight, but who had
Speaker 1: been on the bullhorn heckling them. They just beat the
Speaker 1: piss out of this kid in broad daylight. Um Nine
Speaker 1: of the members of Move were convicted of third degree
Speaker 1: murder and sent to prison after this, so Move was
Speaker 1: not taken out though as an organization continued. They moved
Speaker 1: on and set up a new base on Osage Avenue,
Speaker 1: which was a middle class black neighborhood that was doing
Speaker 1: really well. It's kind of like a Black Wall Street situation, right,
Speaker 1: Like Osage Avenue is like doing well, and Move moves
Speaker 1: in and they were out there welcome pretty quickly because
Speaker 1: they again turned their house into a fortified bunker, like
Speaker 1: they build a literal bunker on top. They yelled at
Speaker 1: a lot of people through bullhorns. They're not physically harming people,
Speaker 1: but they're like kind of annoying people, and like people
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood don't know what to do, but called
Speaker 1: the city, and the city calls the police, and the
Speaker 1: police do what the police do, which is s late
Speaker 1: the situation into another siege. In May, uh, Philadelphia brings
Speaker 1: in five militarized officers armed with flak jacket, swat gear,
Speaker 1: fifty caliber machine guns, and an anti tank rifle. The
Speaker 1: cops move in to serve arrest warrants on folks that
Speaker 1: they believe were living in the compound, and they estimated
Speaker 1: six adults and twelve children were inside. The movers opened
Speaker 1: fire on these militarized police, and the police responded with
Speaker 1: just an insane torrent of wild gun fire, pouring ten
Speaker 1: thousand rounds into the building in ninety minutes. Now, thankfully,
Speaker 1: the police had evacuated most of the neighborhood, telling everyone
Speaker 1: they'd be able to come back home quickly. But they're
Speaker 1: just firing wildly into the neighborhood. Swat team's next try
Speaker 1: blowing holes in the sides of the building, but nothing
Speaker 1: worked to breach the compound because the move folks had
Speaker 1: really done a good job before. Yeah, they were good
Speaker 1: at this ship. Um. The police began lobbying Mayor Good,
Speaker 1: the first black mayor of Philadelphia, for the go ahead
Speaker 1: to drop a bomb they built on the compound, and
Speaker 1: after hours of ferocious gunfire. The mayor greed, so the
Speaker 1: police drop a bomb on this building in Philadelphia, an
Speaker 1: Osage Avenue, and it fails to crack the bunker that
Speaker 1: Move had built atop their house, and it doesn't in
Speaker 1: the stalemate, but it did start a fire that spread
Speaker 1: very quickly to the roofs of other homes clustered around
Speaker 1: the Move building. The police commissioner ordered firefighters to stand down,
Speaker 1: later telling the city commission I communicated that I would
Speaker 1: like to let the fire burn. In forty five minutes,
Speaker 1: three more homes on the black were burning. Then the
Speaker 1: roof of the Move house collapsed. The police did not
Speaker 1: allow firefighters in until more than ninety minutes had passed
Speaker 1: and the entire north side of Osage Avenue was burning.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from an NPR article on what
Speaker 1: happened next. Philadelphia streets are famously narrow, which made it
Speaker 1: easy for the fire to leap from burning trees on
Speaker 1: the north side to even more homes on the south side.
Speaker 1: From there, the flames spilled over to the homes behind
Speaker 1: six two to one Ossage to Pine Street. By evening,
Speaker 1: three rows of homes were completely on fire, a conflagration
Speaker 1: so large that the flames could be seen from planes
Speaker 1: landing at Philadelphia International Airport more than six miles away.
Speaker 1: The smoke was visible across the city. By the time
Speaker 1: firefighters brought the fire under control a little before midnight,
Speaker 1: sixty houses on the once tidy block had been completely destroyed.
Speaker 1: Two and fifty people were suddenly shockingly without homes. It
Speaker 1: was the worst residential fire in the city's history. In
Speaker 1: the end, eleven people died in that fire on Osage Avenue,
Speaker 1: including five children. Weeks passed before the police were able
Speaker 1: to identify their remains. This is what I mean when
Speaker 1: I'm talking about Sorry, yeah, I was like, this is
Speaker 1: the story I was referring to in the first episode
Speaker 1: about like a bomb being dropped on Americans. It turns
Speaker 1: out that's a long Yeah, there's a lot of parallels
Speaker 1: between this and Tulsa, But you know, Tulsa, it was
Speaker 1: a mob of random citizens. The move bombing was mostly
Speaker 1: white police um and the organization moved. That was part
Speaker 1: of what I'm talking about. Counting the cost here. Move
Speaker 1: was a problem. They caused real issues for their neighbors,
Speaker 1: and their neighbors problems should not be discounted like they
Speaker 1: they they their neighbors had a serious issue with these
Speaker 1: people that needed to be dealt with, and they called
Speaker 1: the city to help them deal with it, and the
Speaker 1: city brought the police. In any any reasonable society would
Speaker 1: have need to have a way to deal something with
Speaker 1: like a bunch of people fortifying a building in a
Speaker 1: neighborhood and shouting at everyone in a bullhorn until they
Speaker 1: can't sleep. That's a problem. That's a problem that merits
Speaker 1: a solution. The solution the police brought to this problem
Speaker 1: was to burn down the entire neighborhood. Yeah, that's not
Speaker 1: that didn't need to happen. You didn't have to do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this there there were ways to deal with these people,
Speaker 1: because again, the members of Move never went out murdering
Speaker 1: people at random. That was not what they did. They
Speaker 1: they they problematics and they were annoying, and yeah, they
Speaker 1: weren't just killing strangers. That police did that. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: Philadelphia police did succeed in dealing with the issue of
Speaker 1: the Move organization. They did not harangue neighbors on loudspeakers
Speaker 1: anymore after this, and whatever possibly illegal weapons they may
Speaker 1: have had on the property were incinerated along with sixties
Speaker 1: something black homes and businesses. You could argue that some
Speaker 1: problems of law and order were solved by bombing the
Speaker 1: move compound. The question is like was the price worth it?
Speaker 1: And that's broadly the question we need to be asking
Speaker 1: and answering about our police. Is the cost worth it? Guys?
Speaker 1: You know what would wipe out your COVID nineteen? You
Speaker 1: could drink the bleach. You're right, it will end it.
Speaker 1: I'm like, you will die. Yeah. Did you ever listen
Speaker 1: to Chris Christofferson prop? Yeah? Yeah? Do you ever listen
Speaker 1: to a song The Laws for Protection of the People? No?
Speaker 1: If you'd like that song, it's a good example of
Speaker 1: like early country, you know, now country, there's like a
Speaker 1: lot of popular country is like very kind of reflectively patriotic,
Speaker 1: procop military. Old country was like it was like punk
Speaker 1: music but played differently, right um, And Chris Christofferson embodies
Speaker 1: that in a lot of ways. And The Law Is
Speaker 1: for Protection of the People is a song about cops,
Speaker 1: and it's like they're like the first verses about like
Speaker 1: a drunk guy that like falls down drunk on the
Speaker 1: sidewalk and the six squad cars you know, come streaming
Speaker 1: to the rescue to haul them off to jail. And
Speaker 1: the refrain of the song is because the laws for
Speaker 1: protection of the people rules or rules, and anyone can
Speaker 1: see we don't need no drunks like Billy Dalton is
Speaker 1: the name of the drunk scaring decent folks like you
Speaker 1: and me. And the second verses about a hippie who
Speaker 1: like a bunch of brave cops come surround and like
Speaker 1: beat down and shave his head forcibly. And you know
Speaker 1: there's another version of that refrain, and then the last
Speaker 1: verse is, um uh, so, thank your lucky stars, you've
Speaker 1: got protection. Walk the line and never mind the cost.
Speaker 1: Don't think of who them lawman was protecting when they
Speaker 1: nailed the Savior to the cross. But Chris Christofferson bringing
Speaker 1: at home? Yeah, bring it at home. Hey, you know
Speaker 1: what Precius Saver crooked justice system awesome hunt awesome, trumped
Speaker 1: up charges. Yep, So mind the cost is I guess
Speaker 1: the end message I want to have for this podcast? Yes,
Speaker 1: like this was the Lord's work. Robert whatever, you what
Speaker 1: if you wind up agreeing with us or not about
Speaker 1: what should be done with the police. When you think
Speaker 1: about what should be done with the police, think about
Speaker 1: what the price you're paying for them is and ask
Speaker 1: is it worth it? Yes? Do you protect your children
Speaker 1: by strapping them to their bed and barbed buying the door,
Speaker 1: or do you protect your children by loving them and
Speaker 1: caring for them and teaching them better ways to take
Speaker 1: care of themselves and their fellow neighbors. Yeah? Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it's people get aspects of this, Like people get aspects
Speaker 1: of this when like folks who are pro gun talk
Speaker 1: to liberals about like, oh, you know, people should defend
Speaker 1: themselves and like always carry a gun, and a lot
Speaker 1: of liberals will like rightly point out, like it sounds
Speaker 1: like a miserable world if everyone has to have a
Speaker 1: gun at them at all times. I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: like that vision of the world. But it's like, but
Speaker 1: do you support their being police who always have a
Speaker 1: shipload of weapons on them, who walk around with like
Speaker 1: five different weapons that are potentially lethal on their belt
Speaker 1: at any given time, Like that's part of it. I agree,
Speaker 1: it's better if there aren't a ton of weapons all
Speaker 1: over the place all of the time in the public sphere. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's deal with that problem, and let's recognize that it
Speaker 1: really starts with police in our society. Um, let's just
Speaker 1: be honest. Yeah, yep, yeah, that was a lot of words.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of works. Yeah, yes, and my facts.
Speaker 1: Do care about your feelings, props. So how are you feeling? Man?
Speaker 1: That was great? I like that, Thank you. I am
Speaker 1: feeling disgusting. Uh. I'm a little tired, but I'm also
Speaker 1: a little hopeful because of the response we've been getting
Speaker 1: from this pod. Good, very hopeful. Yeah, yeah, it has
Speaker 1: been a great response. It's good to be hopeful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: be hopeful. Defund the man. Um, there's better ideas. We
Speaker 1: can we can come up with a better idea, guys, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can, we can, we can, we can. We can
Speaker 1: come up with so many better ideas. Um, for example,
Speaker 1: what if we just what if we replaced all of
Speaker 1: our cops with like, you know those dogs that they
Speaker 1: have in the mountains somewhere in Europe that have liquor
Speaker 1: around their necks. Those are raun Well, let's try that.
Speaker 1: Let's just fill the streets with those dogs. Those are
Speaker 1: so rad it'll work. Maybe. Yeah, if if if a
Speaker 1: if a husky walked up with up to me and
Speaker 1: had whiskey on his neck, I would be like, this
Speaker 1: is the coolest husky I've ever met in my life.
Speaker 1: I will stop whatever crime I'm doing because I just
Speaker 1: want to see this dog with whiskey. Yeah, and like
Speaker 1: a bunch of huge, well trained dogs everywhere, probably gonna
Speaker 1: stop more rapes than the cops, I'll tell you what,
Speaker 1: because everybody scared it dogs except for Sophie. Except for Sophie. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well well jinks ye oh blood time. Yeah, I kind
Speaker 1: of do that. Yeah, profit pop dot com where I
Speaker 1: don't sell weapons. Um, that's good, and I challenge you
Speaker 1: to think of better ways to organize the world. And
Speaker 1: I sell coffee stuff. Um, I do music and poetry
Speaker 1: and that's all of the things are at prop hip
Speaker 1: hop yeah dot com, And I do not sell weapons yet,
Speaker 1: but when I moved to my compound in Ohio, I'll
Speaker 1: start legally manufacturing sought off shotguns. Um, so that the
Speaker 1: the the a t F will will finally raid me.
Speaker 1: Um you know that's the that was that was a
Speaker 1: ruby Ridge think. Yeah, I actually really think you gotta
Speaker 1: market there, I do, I do. You could start branding
Speaker 1: some weapons, yeah, Uncle Robert's legal homemade shotguns. Yes, I
Speaker 1: just couldn't into something. I couldn't repeatedly Waco in this
Speaker 1: episode without dropping a Ruby Ridge in there. Um, so
Speaker 1: it's not fair, that's no. And it's not fair that
Speaker 1: we talked about Waco all the time but not the
Speaker 1: move bombing, because like they're both cases of like out
Speaker 1: of control militarized police burning children to death. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah because those black people. Yeah, it's sucked up. Yeah
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. Find a way to make the move bombing
Speaker 1: Waco again. I don't know what the that's not a
Speaker 1: good moral. Um, they need a Netflix series where they
Speaker 1: hire a sexy guy to be John Africa. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: they could play like or something. Yeah yeah yeah, haven't
Speaker 1: haven't have a Blue S concerts. They're being bombed. Just
Speaker 1: throw that in there for no reason, unnecessary. That was
Speaker 1: the wildest thing about the Waco show was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so you guys are just you guys just turning David
Speaker 1: Koresh into a rock star. Alright, Like what that's a stance.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And now I want to see the fucking
Speaker 1: I want to see them like do a Jim Jones
Speaker 1: mini series. He turned him into like a stand up comedian.
Speaker 1: He's just hilariousous. That's why we all go. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: we cast David Chappelle's Jim Jones. Fuck it, No one
Speaker 1: gives a ship? Where Netflix? Oh Lord, all right? Podcast
Speaker 1: is out. This podcast has to stop. Go to fund
Speaker 1: your local police. Behind the Police is a production of
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