Behind the Police: How Police Unions Made Cops Even Deadlier

Episode Transcript
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(01:55):
Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio.
Now I Am become pod the Destroyer of casts. Welcome
back to Behind the Bastards. This is Robert Evans trying
to trying a new style of introduction. This is actually
Behind the Police, our special mini series and Behind the

(02:15):
Bastards we talk about history's greatest bastards, American Police. Back
with me for part five of this six part series
is my co host Jason Petty, better known as the
hip hop artist Propaganda. Jason, how you doing man? So
man even dried mangoes and listening to old DJ Scratch

(02:36):
and I hope that like I hope, I'm sorry, guys,
I'm back man, I'm here again. Thanks God, all the variants. Yeah,
you're the first guest we've had for three straight weeks
or for two straight weeks. I think, Man, I like
I'm getting am I hitting like Billy Wayne like like like,
I mean you're hitting, You're hitting propaganda zone. I like that, man,

(02:59):
my own zone like zone. Yeah, like those like those
cow zone things that they used to make a pizza
I think it was pizza hut the zone. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
those were good. Yeah. Yo, can quick joke about quick
joke not quick Joe, quick story about cow zones? Absolutely,
and we can move on there. So my homeboy Jose

(03:20):
with Solomon. He's probably one of the most gorgeous men
I've ever met. And uh he's a carmel six ft
six like soul singer poet. It's ridiculous. It's not fair.
You know, you never meet the guy where it's like,
it's just not fair. You shouldn't be No one should
be this beautiful. So that's Joe, right, Um, Joe lives
in Atlanta. He was ordering this pizza or he went

(03:42):
to this spot. You know it's during the quarantine. Wanted
a cow zone and you know, first of all, it's
it's Atlanta. You know this let's be real, this this
chocolate city. He's black people, right, and the whole shop
was black people. And he tries to get a cow
zone and he could tell, based on the way that
the lady was looking at him that she didn't know
what a cow zone was, right, So so he but

(04:05):
she still was like pressed a few buttons on the
screen and then you could see her look back at
the home. He's like, hey, hey, what's the right and
they kind of whisper it back and forth. You could
tell somebody must to google to cow zone. And then
he finally gets it, and then stupid him didn't open
the box till he got home. And he opened the
box and it was just a pizza fold that in half.

(04:28):
I mean, that is essentially that's the buddy part. I
was like, that is a cow zone, but that he
was like, you just folded a small pizza and half.
What else do you want? I mean, really, you know
what isn't like a cow zone? Prop the American policing, Yes,
the evolution of American policing in the nineteen hundreds is

(04:53):
not very much like a folded pizza. Uh thanks, unfortunate,
Thank the Lord of above. What if that's how we
handled law enforcement. What if when you had two feuding gangs,
the government just sent cow zones over and we're like, hey, guys, yo,
if you tried zones, some cow zones, a little bit
of barbecue, a couple of you know what I'm saying,

(05:14):
It's like, everybody, just sit down, Let's just have some
cow zones and some high links. I think a good
the problems of law enforcement. Like, instead of tear gassing
a bunch of protesters, what if the state provided cow zones,
I'd bewitted. Yeah, and it's cheaper too, I bet we'd
save money on tear gas and such because you can

(05:34):
buy you can feed a lot of people cow zones,
cal zones for the price of hundreds of tear gas canisters.
Let me tell you something. And you know, it's less
to clean up, you know what I mean, It's easier
on the environment, create more jobs, creates more jobs. Look,
we just pods over. Thanks very much, guys. You know,
look forward to our new behind the cow Zone series.

(05:55):
Behind this idea of ours goes horribly wrong in a year. Yeah,
the cow zone shot a kid. No one had ever
seen anything like it. Helted with a cow zone from
a cow zone and we'd have to deal. Okay. So yeah,
last week we dug into the really the very racist
roots of US policing, the KKK, Jim Crow lynching, and

(06:17):
the death penalty, and in doing so, we kind of
took a break from the broader history of how police
have evolved in this country and focused on like the
enabling of white supremacy in the suppression of black people
as an integral part of the justice system. And today
we're going to kind of peel back out again to
discuss how the broader system of police evolved in the
US over the last century to bring us to where
we are now, which is, you know, police stopping random

(06:40):
people for no reason, doing horrific violence to them h
and then being shielded from consequences by police unions. So
that's what we're going to explain today. Okay, cool, Yeah,
there it is. This will be fun. We're gonna talk
a lot about police unions and a lot about stop
and frisk and broken windows. Okay, yeah, so those two
stobbing frizz gets to like my life. Yeah yeah. So

(07:05):
to get to that point, we have to you know,
zoom back a bit to the start of the twentieth century.
By the time this nation started entering, you know what
most people would call the modern era, most police departments
were de facto the enforcement arm of organized crime. In
the words of one scholar, so cops existed. We talked
about this in an episode two. Cops existed as muscle

(07:25):
for for criminal for like gang leaders and stuff. Police
departments engaged in constant election fraud because their jobs were
generally tied to the position of local political bosses who
are also gangsters. And during this period this is like
Tammany Hall and ship. And during this period, police drew salaries,
but there was no such thing as overtime, and their
salaries were generally shipped, so instead they took a lot

(07:45):
of bribes. Dr. Gary Potter, who's a historian of law enforcement,
insists that it's actually wrong to call the police in
this period corrupt. He writes, quote, they were in fact
primary instruments for the creation of corruption in the first place.
So like, the police aren't corrupt, the police create corruption
in this period, which is an interesting but I think
really important distinction to make me like actually took a second,

(08:09):
like yeah, dang, yeah, I need to lean back from
that one. For a little bit like that. That is profound. Yeah, yeah,
Potter doesn't mince fucking words at all. Yeah. So, in
the early nineteen hundreds, police departments in major major cities,
particularly in the Eastern Seaboard, but also Chicago, because Chicago
is a Midwestern city, but we all kind of lump

(08:29):
it in with the East Coast. We all do it,
even Chicago does sometimes when they're lazy, like deal with
the Chicago You should have moved further east if you
wanted to not be like do you have do you
get snowed in from a tunja? You're on the East Coast? Bro? Yeah, yeah,
thank you. So. Uh yeah, police apartments in major cities
in the Eastern Seaboard in the early nineteen hundred, uh
did a bit more than just provide muscle for gangsters

(08:50):
and crack the heads of labor organizers. Um. They also
got into the business because no one else was going
to do it, of what we'd call social welfare. Um.
It was kind of the job to take care of
the homeless and the critically ill. And they weren't good
at this, but police in Boston, New York and other
cities sheltered homeless people in precincts, they emptied public toilets,
and they kept track of the infected during epidemics. Now,

(09:11):
since again these men were at the time hired gangsters,
they were not renowned for taking to these tasks with
a great deal of empathy. But nobody else really gave
a ship. They didn't give a sh it either, But
they were kind of the people you gave the bad
jobs to. Again, not a lot of respect for law
enforcement in this period, so they're like, we need somebody
to like pull the homeless people off the streets so
they don't freeze to death. Have the cops do it? Yeah,

(09:32):
So it was prohibition that finally tipped law enforcement over
the edge, uh like over the edge of of of
creators of corruption to um so outwardly criminal that the
state had to like that the federal government had to
do something about the sheer scale of corruption unleashed by prohibition,
and like the era of speakeasies and gangsters turned police

(09:54):
departments into, you know, whatever they had been before, a
complete mockery of law and order and federal authority is
pushed reform and investigatory commissions that had to look into
a variety of different scandals Dr Potter lays out just
a few examples of police crime that inspired the creation
of commissions. Quote number one, the formation of our prostitution
syndicate by Los Angeles Mayor Arthur Harper, police Chief Edward

(10:15):
Kerns and a local organized crime figure, combined with subsequent
instructions to the police to harass the syndicates competitors in
the prostitution industry. Number two the assassination of organized crime
figure Arthur Rothstein by police Lieutenant Charles Becker ahead of
the NYPDS Vice Squad. And number three a dispute between
the Mayor and District Attorney of Philadelphia, each of whom
controlled rival gambling syndicates, and each of whom used loyal

(10:35):
factions of police to harass the other. So like, these
are just a couple of examples of the sort of
behavior police departments are engaging in at the time where
they're they're they're just they're even like more criminal than
a lot of the criminal syndicates. Um, yeah, yeah. And
another investigative commission that said up during this period with
a LINUX Committee, which was formed to look into the
charges of police extortion in New York. It found that

(10:58):
promotion within the NYPD and the early I and hundreds
was based entirely on direct bribes paid by officers to
the Department of Promotion to sergeant cost six, promotion to
captain cost fifteen thousand dollars, all of these scamper and
many Yeah. Yeah, he would just pay to get promoted
in the police. Yeah. Yeah. It's just it's just so
crazy that, like, I mean, as much as you want

(11:21):
to believe that like, throughout the course of time we
have gotten somehow, in some way better at being the
species we are, it's just I just the more you
know of history, the more you're like, no, we've kind
of been a plateaued. We've kind of just always been
like this, you know. And that's the part that just

(11:43):
like no, but because because I'm thinking about like I'm
still hanging on the word on the on the phrase
of like it created the collection, because I'm going, well,
I mean, you don't pay him a lot, You're i
am incentivized. You're like, like you're just hoping these people

(12:06):
would somehow not have the same corrupted soul as the
rest of the people. But they just people, and they're
gonna find the path of least resistance. The quickest way
to get a buck and the best way to like
push other people down for their own success. I don't
know why you think putting a badge on a chess

(12:27):
gonna make them any different. So when you hear this
stuff like this, I'm just like, God, dog, it was it?
Were we ever? Have we ever done good things? Well? Yeah,
you know, there's there's a I forget who the name
of the individual who it was, but there I believe
it was a Holocaust survivor and he wrote something to
the He had a quote that was something along the

(12:47):
lines of and like any given period of time, like
ten percent of people are genuinely good, ten percent of
people are total monsters, and about eight percent could kind
of go either way, depend on where it's seeing how
it seems the wind is blowing, um and like if
the wind is, you know, blowing in the way that
like if if everyone in charge is literally running a

(13:08):
criminal syndicate of like prostitution and and like and probably
a lot of forced prostitution and like gambling and like
murder for higher and all this stuff, if that's everybody,
then yeah, that's what you get involved with. Like then
like okay, well I'll find some way to make money
within the system. It's the ocean. It's still so you
just kind of like do it because that's I mean,

(13:28):
you gotta swim, Yeah, you gotta swim. Yeah. So uh.
The current Committee of nineteen thirteen investigated in hypd collusion
and gambling and prostitution. The Seabury Committee in nineteen thirty
one also looked into the NYPD, this time into the
broader system of bosses and bribery for political positions that
was the core of why New York law enforcement sucked.

(13:50):
Each of these commissions made changes, but right up until
the nineteen fifties there were still regular inquiries into police
involvement with gambling, prostitution, and organized crime. And I cannot
exaggerate how many of these committees were focused on the NYPD. Like,
one way to look at the twentieth century is the
federal government fighting tooth and nail to stop New York
police from being just a criminal enterprise like that took

(14:13):
decades of battling. Yeah, not metaphorically, not as a way
to understand what's happening. No, seriously, they're just no, they're
pimps with badges. Yeah, that's just what they actually are,
And while I was googling around, I wanted to kind
of come up with another example or two, like the
direct one of the NYPD, you know, being pimps or
whatnot in the early nineteen hundreds. And it was actually

(14:35):
hard because there were so many cases of them in
the twenty first century doing the exact same thing. For example,
I was googling around on this I came across the
two thousand eighteen story about a retired NYPD detective who
ran a two million dollar broadle ring using active cops,
his muscle, and his inside knowledge of how department undercovers
did prostitution stings. In order to avoid getting busted. He
knew that like undercovers, weren't allowed to show their genitals

(14:57):
to prostitutes, so he would make all of the johns
strip naked and let themselves get fondled before starting the transaction. Um,
because that helped him avoid getting busted by the NYPD. UM. Yeah,
there were seven active duty officers who worked for his
prostitution ring. UM. One of them was actually willing to
work for free in exchange for discounts with his favorite prostitute.

(15:18):
So again, two eighteen is when that gets busted. Regular scumbags.
It's awesome, regular dudes just being normal scumbags. Yeah. It's
like someone decided, like, Okay, let's take ten percent of
the normal scumbag population and make them immune to being

(15:41):
punished if they shoot someone. Yes, uh so. Yeah. While
the federal government was fighting to make the NYPD a
modestly less criminal enterprise, a major revolution had started to
overtake law enforcement nationwide, and it started on the West Coast.
Luminaries in that part of the country began to wonder

(16:01):
if perhaps police officers ought not be trained professionals instead
of drunken gangsters. And the the first real apostle of
this gospel was a dude named August Volmer. He was
the very first police chief of Berkeley, California, and he
served from nineteen o nine to nineteen thirty one. Um
and this, this guy is about the best cop you're

(16:21):
gonna find in US history. Um from yeah, from every
he did have, Like his early history, he was in
part of like the U. S occupation of the Philippines.
But he was like a like a gun boat he
worked on like a gunboat. Like I'm sure he like
he was part of, you know, the US crimes in
the Philippines. But he wasn't. It's not like a case
with John Burge, Like I have no evidence that he
was like running secret prisons and torturing people. Like he

(16:42):
was just a soldier who fought in a bad war. Um.
And then he became the police chief in Berkeley, and
when he took the job, Berkeley police were justice corrupt
as New York police. August only had a sixth grade education,
but he knew enough to immediately ban the receipt of
gifts and bribes for his officers, Like that was the
first thing he did, was like, viously, you can't take
bribes anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, again sixth grade education said

(17:06):
oh yeah, well we gotta stop doing this. Probably not
do that. Huh what if what if we weren't just gangsters? Yeah?
I tried to do the job guys. Yeah what what
if we treated it like a job. Yeah, And he was.
He's really it's baffling the number of first this guy
is responsible for in law enforcement. He was the first
police chief to put cops on bicycles in nineteen ten.

(17:28):
He was the first police chief to put cops on
motorcycles in nineteen eleven. His officers received the very first
radios and their squad cars. Vulmer's apartment created the first
centralized police record system, and he was the first chief
in the United States to push his officers to use blood,
fiber and soil analysis to solve crimes. He was one
of the first chiefs to use fingerprinting of Volmer was

(17:49):
also the first chief to require college degrees of his officers.
He was one of the first police chiefs to hire
black cops, although not the first, but he was the
very first police chief to hire female off posers in
nineteen nineteen August was also the first police chief in
the US to explicitly banned the use of the third degree,
and he was a lifetime opponent of capital punishment. Um.

(18:11):
He was notorious and fairly unique among lawmen in this
period for believing that communists had a right to organize
and state their views without being beaten into bloody pulse.
This guy, Yeah, he's the best cop we're going to
talk about. Like, I am impressed, bro. Like you know,
you see him ride by in his little like big
big front wheel, little silly silly police car, silly bike.

(18:34):
You know what I'm saying. Like the old school, old
timey Victorian bike. But he's a cop, and that guy
you salute like, hey, what's up, officer? You know, yeah,
trying yeah, at least trying yeah. And now he was
also one of the very first, like people anywhere to
teach classes in criminal justice, essentially like helping to invent

(18:54):
that field of higher education. Like he was one of
the first people to be like, we should probably have
college classes that help people do this thing. That's the job. Um.
And one of his students was a dude named O. W. Wilson.
And O. W. Wilson went on to become the police
chief of Fullerton. He was also the police chief of
Jesus somewhere in the Midwest. I forget where where else
he was the police chief, and he was in California, California. UM.

(19:17):
And he was also the superintendent of the Chicago p
D at one point, so he was a very influential
like running police departments guy. UM. And he wrote a
book called Police Administration in nineteen forty three, and this
was sort of a reaction to how most cops in
big cities were drunken gangsters. UM. And it basically O. W. Wilson,
you know who was the protege of Valmer is like,

(19:38):
we need to professionalize police departments nationwide. Um and Wilson
wanted police departments to be centralized and reformed along military
style lines. This helped departments to keep a closer eye
on their officers and stop them from, you know, just
selling bootleg liquor or whatever. So you can see the
logic and what Wilson was trying to do, right, it
makes it makes sense, Yeah, makes sense. But it didn't work, um,

(20:02):
or it didn't work well. Yeah. For one thing, his
drive towards centralization created powerful, unaccountable, authoritarian police bureaucracies that
were both unaccountable to the public and to the officers
that worked there. Racist and sexist hiring practices were never reformed,
and so these dictatorial police bureaucrats were basically just white dudes. Um.
Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice in Nebraska, notes

(20:25):
that quote, a half century of professionalization had created police
departments that were vast bureaucracies, inward looking and isolated from
the public, and defensive in the face of any criticism,
which does not sound familiar at all. Um, Yeah, I
can't win with these guys, Like, yeah, every time you
wanted like I want to be like, oh yeah, what's good. Oh, well,

(20:45):
there it is. It never quite works out right, like
they always seem to keep sucking, even when you deal
with what you think are the the the problems, which
maybe hints that the problem is at the root of
what we have police for um, as opposed to them
needing bicycles, which not that. Yeah, yeah, my, my my.
I remember one of my my elementary school teacher used

(21:06):
to say, hey, if every place you touch on your
body hurts, your fingers probably broken. So yeah, that's why
I just think about I'm just like, maybe your fingers broken, guys,
maybe the finger is broken. Yeah, good, good, good way
to describe that. Never forgot that, Ms Deirfield. So um,
what's worse is that Wilson, like his mentor mentor volmer Um,

(21:28):
both of whom I think had good intentions, had seized
upon the idea that police should focus on crime prevention
rather than just investigation. Now this was not a new idea,
and again you can see the logic and trying to
prevent crime, but the way that it worked out in
the real world is that these new professional, centralized police
departments suddenly started devoting a lot more time to sending
cops out on patrol to stop and search people at random.

(21:50):
Most of these people were members of the dangerous classes,
which at that point were mostly racial minorities in the
United States. You know, the Irish weren't really being oppressed
no more. But bring that. Yeah. As we've discussed, police
had always worked to corral and control the movement and
freedom of non white people. Wilson's reforms helped to dress
that up as crime prevention. So now the cops aren't
out there to keep you know, black people in line.

(22:12):
They're there to patrol for criminal behavior, which in which
they do the same thing, but it's harder to complain
about if you're a white Liberals got some better codes, yeah, exactly,
better codes. Yeah, And I don't think that was Wilson's intent,
but that's what happened. Um. Now, actual police officers weren't
much happier than the general public with these reforms. Their

(22:33):
resentment at their unaccountable, distant and all powerful bosses helped
to inspire a growing movement to unionize police departments. Now,
police in many cities had long sought the benefits of unionization,
but since a huge part of their literal job was
busting unions and murdering union organizers. This was a tough
needle to thread. It's a little a little conflicted here,
Yeah are we are we killing these people for the

(22:56):
same thing we think is a good idea for Oh yeah,
well fuck it. Yeah. So cops in some cities started
to form fraternal associations in order to try to gain
some of the same benefits of unions while also not
feeling like complete hypocrites for murder unions. Yeah, this did
not work out well forever. These fraternal organizations just didn't.

(23:17):
Associations just didn't do what unions do. The first department
to seek straight up unionization was the Cleveland Police in
eight uh. They petitioned to the American Federation of Labor,
whose president Samuel Gompers turned them down, stating it is
not within the province of the trade union movement to
especially organized policemen, nor more than to organize militiamen, as
both policemen and militiamen are often controlled by forces in

(23:40):
imical to the labor movement. So like, it's not our job,
like you kill us, we're not going to let you
join us to make more money to kill us. Yeah. Yeah,
they're like, yeah, you want me to help you be
better at stopping us? Yeah, no, yeah, no, sir. Yeah,

(24:03):
it's kind of like buying oil from countries you're at
war with and I'm sorry, yeah, or like partnering with
Nazis over single payer healthcare and ignoring the fact that
they're also in favor of Nazi ship because like what
if we worked and no, don't work together with no,
want to kill you. Yeah, you don't want to do that.
Don't work with them ever, even if they're right about

(24:23):
one thing, like cops are right, workers should unionize, but
that's like still still yeah, there's still problems. Yes, So
cops continued to seek the benefits of union membership even
whilst violently suppressing unions. In nineteen nineteen, Boston's police asked
the a f L for a charter, angry at, among
other things, the fact that they had to pay for
their own uniforms. The commissioner told them that they couldn't

(24:46):
unionize in the a f L wasn't exactly a big
fan either, um. But when they unionized anyway, nineteen union
organizers were fired and the police went on strike. This
is the first police strike with nearly fifteen hundred officers
off the job. The people of Boston took the opportunity
salute the ever loving ship out of their city, and
I would suggest we look at this less as a
sign of human nature and more of a sign of

(25:06):
Bostonian nature. Uh. Yeah, that sounds like I was gonna say,
this sounds really Boston. That sounds real Boston. Yeah, we'll
talk about another time when this happened later and there
wasn't mass looting. So I'm going to write this up
to Boston. Um. Now, this all prompted Governor Calvin Coolidge
to declare that no public safety workers could strike anywhere, anytime,
and his hard stance on this as part of what

(25:27):
helped him become president later. Wait, he's saying, nope, what
was he What was his position then when he said
the public safety workers should never be able to stroll?
Was he? No? I'm saying, what was the office he hilled?
Oh he was the governor, he was the government. Point.
So wait, so he was saying, y'are not allowed to strike,
and I'm like, yeah, okay, that's stupid because that's the

(25:47):
definition of striking. Is like, so even the problem that's
like the Emancipation Proclamation. I'm like, oh, you've been a
set free to slaves in the states that are rebelling,
like you what ha, So I'm just sorry just him
make and the proflamation just like sounded so stupid. I'm like,
that's striking means we're not listening to you. Yeah. Yeah.

(26:08):
But there's also the question of whether or not the
government can stop a strike. Like if a bunch of J. C.
Penny's workers or whatever unionized and they go on strike,
there's the federal government can't do anything about that. But
it's why like when um, when the fucking uh air
traffic controllers what like, they're like, no, we we will
criminally punish these people because their jobs are like, we
can't have a society without their jobs, so we can't

(26:30):
let them strike. That's the idea. I'm not defending that,
but that's the justification. So it's not as it's not
as preposterous as I first thought. Okay, it is not
like there's an I don't necessarily agree with it, but
there's an argument to be made that like, okay, well
but if all of the E m T s go
on strike, um, people will die. But also like I
don't necessarily not saying that I don't think he em
should be able to strike and saying it's different than

(26:52):
just like miners going on strike or what. That's what
I'm saying. It's like, at least I don't necessarily condone it,
but at least it's not it's not a ridiculous statement.
It is a it is a thing that we should
have debated as a nation. Um, Yeah, because it is different.
So yeah. The Coolidge's stance was more or less the
last word on police unions and police striking in particular,

(27:14):
until the nineteen fifties and the professionalization of police departments.
These years were the heyday for unions elsewhere in the country,
and cops watched jealously as the now aging workers they'd
spent years tear gassing reap to the benefits of collective
bargating fraternal orders proved incapable of gaining officers the wages
and benefits that they thought they deserved. So in the
early nineteen sixties, police started engaging in slowdowns, starting in

(27:36):
New York by nineteen and this is where they wouldn't strike,
but they wouldn't do most of the things. Cops are
supposed to do so they would, you know, they were saying, like,
if the people are getting murdered, will step in there.
But like we're not going to stop petty crime. Yeah,
we'll talk about that in a little bit, Sophie, because

(27:58):
this happens real recently. Um. By nineteen sixty four, they
had you know, piste off the people in charge, the
people with money, um by not enforcing like minor bullshit
enough that the mayor and the police commissioner were willing
to go to the table. In exchange for giving up
any right to strike, the Patrolman's Benevolent Association was made
a union. It was given the ability to act as

(28:18):
a collective bargaining agent for the city police. Upon becoming
a full union, the p b A moved immediately to
what would become its true purpose, protecting cops from any
kind of accountability for their own actions. In nineteen sixty six,
the new mayor of New York sat down with the
Congress for Racial Equality, who had some serious complaints about
police misconduct towards black New Yorkers. The mayor agreed to

(28:39):
add four civilian members to the Civilian Complaint Review Board,
which had previously consisted of three cops. The p b
A fought this viciously, holding a five thousand member picket
line in opposition to the idea of giving civilians any
say and how their police functioned and going to quote
next from an article in The New Yorker. The p
b A then organized a public referendum aimed at eliminating
the board. It put up posters showing a young white

(29:02):
woman exiting a subway and heading onto a dark, deserted street.
The Civilian Review Board must be stopped. The poster read,
her life, Your life may depend on it. Here we go.
A police officer must not hesitate. If he does, the
security and safety of your family maybe jeopardize. You. See
what they're arguing there is Yeah, yeah, if if you

(29:24):
let civilians watch what we do, we might not kill
the dangerous non white people threatening white women fast like
that's what that's that's what they're saying. Yeah, there's the weapon,
there's the weapon, there's there's the gold, there's the tool. Kid.
But are but we have to protect our women. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
like that, we have to. I enjoyed that. You know

(29:47):
what else I enjoy Robert? You know what won't protect
white No, no, okay, um ship that was a bad
way to lead into this. You know what supports police accountability?
UM and things that we can have safe subways without
unaccountable heavily armed maniacs productor yeah, they all all of

(30:21):
the art world. It is essentially a money laundering business.
The best fakes are still hanging off people's walls. You
know they don't even know or suspect that their fakes.
I'm at like Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed,
and forgery in the art world. You knew the painting
was fake. Um. Listen to Art Fraud starting February one

(30:46):
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Unker your New Year's resolution to
be more productive with the Before Breakfast podcast. In each
bite sized daily episode, time management and productivity expert Laura

(31:09):
vander Camp teaches you how to make the most of
your time, both at work and at home. These are
the practical suggestions you need to get more done with
your day. Just as lifting weights keeps our body strong
as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent
of pumping iron. Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get
your podcasts, make sure to check out Drink Champs, your

(31:32):
number one music podcast. On the Black Effect podcast Network,
hosts n O r E and d J E f
N sat down with artists and icon Yea, which Vulture
called one most significant interviews. I literally had to go
like Thanos and I don't want to have to be
the villain. But when I went and did the Donda thing,
they returned and abody had to sit back and watch

(31:54):
the real leader. Check out Drink Champs conversation with Yea
and many more legendary artists each and every Friday on
the Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. We're back. It's good to know,
as a side, No, it's good to know that these
like abysmal transitions are actually natural. Like it's not it's

(32:17):
not a stick. You're not like trying to be you
know aloof Yeah, you're really you're really doing this. Yeah.
I I decided long ago never to learn how to
do fully half of my job. Um, it's the it's
to maintain authenticity, right, Yeah, that's exactly it. It's to

(32:38):
maintain authenticity. That's how I justify not learning how to
do large portions of my job. Yeah, it's called it's
called brand it's brand protection. I get it, exactly. It's
just like if you find like icola in your meat,
It's like, listen, it's organic. Okay, we don't use pesticides.
Yeah you might, you might get batu is um, but

(33:00):
organic botulism. It's organic. Y Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. So. Yeah.
When we last left off, the New York City Police
in nineteen sixty six had put up some real racy
posters um arguing about why they shouldn't let civilians tell
them not to murder people, and as the vote on
whether or not to establish this review board approached, the
PBA's president, John cassisse Um declared, I'm sick and tired

(33:25):
of giving into minority groups with their whims and gripes
and shouting oh man real physically yeah, I physically responded
to that. Yeah. Yeah, y'all always complaining, yeah that you
don't like us shooting you. You want some saying whether
or not we shoot you with the bullets you help buy? Yes?

(33:47):
Can I just do my job? That's literally all we're
asking is just that you do your job. Yeah, please,
yeah please? Um. So around the country cops elsewhere, So
how good a job the NYPD had done, a winning
better pay for themselves and sticking a thumb in the
eye of those pesky minorities who felt like someone should

(34:08):
stop them from Yeah. Uh. Police unionization spread throughout the continents,
and over the years, police unions bargained for a hell
of a lot more than just increased wages. Starting in
New York but spreading quickly over the nation, many police
union contracts began requiring departments to a race officer disciplinary
records after a set period of time. And this kind
of gets to the chief problem of police unions. They

(34:30):
act in the interest of officers. And obviously unions are
supposed to act into the interests of workers, but a
lot of times because of the kind of people who
become police officers, uh, the interests of the officers means
acting against the interests of general society. So if, for example,
a minor or a grocery store employee, or uh, any

(34:54):
other kind of worker really gets more money, that might
be against the interests of the people who own stock
in the company you know, of the capital holding class
of like like of of the people who you know,
the the executives at the top who have to take
pay cuts. You can argue that's against their interest, um,
but they don't. If a if somebody who works like

(35:14):
they're not able to like the fucking A union representing
grocery store employees doesn't make it impossible for you to
tell which grocery store employees are stabbing people, because grocery
store employees don't do that, and when they do, they
tend to go to prison and stop working at the
nobody nobody. The unions don't rush in to be like no, no, no,

(35:35):
you have to keep employing this man all he did
with stab three people, Like yeah, I'm like that the
union doesn't protect you from being from sucking at your job, right,
I mean it does a little bit, Like that's a
that's a fair argument that like unions keep people sometimes,
like teachers who are bad at teaching stay on. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
fair fair enough. But like the point, going back to
your analogy, I'm like, you can't just lick the apples

(35:58):
and then be like, yo, my union protects me because
I got a right to lick the apples, And I'm like, no, you,
I don't know why that's not your function, like you know,
I think, and just going back to the police, I'm like,
you know what, dude, you have a hard job. You
should be paid. Well, you're right, you should be paid. Well,

(36:19):
you have a hard job. But what is not your
job is being another gang in our neighborhoods and terrorizing
people to color. That's not your job. You should not
be protected for doing that. That's what unions protect them for.
Instead of just being like, oh, well, we're workers too,
and we should be able to advocate for higher paid,
they're like, and also if we beat someone, we should

(36:40):
be able to hide that from the public. Um, that's
what happens almost immediately with you don't get to you don't.
That's not one of your perks. Okay, yeah, yeah, that's
the biggest perk. So yeah. Two thousand seventeen, Reuter's special
report on police union contracts and eight two US cities
found that most departments are now required to a ace

(37:00):
officer disciplinary records after a set period of time. Sometimes
officers records are purged every six months. Eighteen cities expunge
suspensions in three years or less. Reuters found that nearly
half a police union contracts guaranteed officers accused of bad
behavior the right to see their entire investigative file, including
witness statements made against them. What their what I wonder

(37:22):
what their defense for that is, because we know exactly
what you're doing. But what what's their argument for that? Oh,
you know, you shouldn't Uh, you shouldn't know. It's not
fair for anyone to be charged with a crime without
you know, getting to see the claims made by their accusers,
unless those people are charging the police, are being charged
by the police of a crime, and then there's actually

(37:42):
all sorts of ways we have to hide that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
dissonance is cognitive Yeah, so um yeah. Few developments in
US policing have had quite the impact that unionization has had.
Dr rob Gilzoh, an assistant professor of economics at the

(38:04):
University of Victoria, took to Twitter at the end of
this May when the Uprising started to give a summary
of some of his still unpublished research on the impact
of police bargaining rights on the killing of civilians, and
he noted, quote, what are we finding so far? The
introduction of access to collective bargaining drives a modest declient
in policy, employment and increase in compensation. With no meaningful

(38:24):
impacts on total crime, violent crime, property crime, or officers
killed in the line of duty, what does change. We
find a substantial increase in police killings of civilians over
the medium to long run, So there is we will continue.
There's a lot more evidence than just that that that
the mugionization specifically leads to more police killings of civilians. Now,

(38:46):
Guilso goes on to note that the overwhelming majority of
these added deaths are non white people. Okay, yep, I
mean yeah. Quote, if access to a union simply shifted
the marginal decision for officers to shoot in risky situations,
you would expect to see increases in killings of both
whites and non whites. But that is not what we're

(39:07):
finding at all. Rather, and with the caveat that this
is still very early work, it looks like collective bargaining
rights are being used to protect the ability of officers
to discriminate and the disproportionate use of force against the
non white population. Again, a big part of this issue
is that white supremacy is baked into the very soul
of u AS policing. So even though police unions didn't
come into the picture until a hundred years after slavery ended,

(39:29):
A lot of the cops, most of the cops working
in the police at that time were racist as hell,
and so police unions immediately turned to the task of
enshrining and protecting racial violence from law and enforcement, and
that has remained a part of them ever since. Other
research is consistently borne out similar conclusions. A two thou
eighteen University of Oxford study if the hundred largest American

(39:49):
cities found that protections and police contracts were directly and
positively correlated with police violence against citizens. A two thousand
nineteen University of Chicago study found that when collective bargaining
rights were given to Florida sheriff's deputies, it led to
a statewide increase in violent misconduct by deputies. Got dot. God,

(40:15):
when okay, it's the stuff that you that you can
into it, into it and know, and then when you
see the actual numbers, it's still like you still throw
up in your mouth a little, you know, because it's
like you're like, that's why I keep trying to say.
It's like, yeah, I mean I know that, but now

(40:35):
that I'm looking at it on paper or listening to
someone go no, here, here it is no, you're right,
got dog. It's still just so infuriating and exhausting that
despite all these receipts that you're you're showing, we still
have to explain to people that there's a problem. If
if a new type of if a new type of

(40:57):
hybrid engine came out, and we found out year in
that it led to at increase in vehicle explosions during
like vendor benders, not only would that product be pulled
from the market, people would probably go to jail, They
would get prosecuted. Whoever, four out of ten people gone

(41:19):
down when we drive this thing. Yeah yeah, we would
at least try, at least try yeah. Yeah. So much
of the violets caused by police unions can be blamed
on the fact that they make it as hard as
possible to fire dangerously unhinged and violent officers. And I'm
gonna quite again from the New Yorker here. Other studies
revealed that many existing mechanisms for disciplining police are toothless

(41:42):
w b Easy, a Chicago radio station, found that between
two thousand seven and two thousand fifteen, Chicago's Independent Police
Review Authority investigated four shootings by police and deemed the
officers justified in all but two incidents. Since two thousand twelve,
when Minneapolis replaced its Civilian Review Board with an Office
of the Police Misconduct Review, the public is filed more
than misconduct complaints, yet only twelve resulted in a police

(42:04):
officer being punished. The most severe penalty a forty hours suspension.
When the St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewed appeals involving terminations suspension, Yes, yeah,
When the St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewed appeals involving terminations
from two fourteen to two nineteen, it discovered that arbitrators

(42:26):
ruled in favor of the discharged police and correction officers
and ordered them reinstated forty six percent of the time.
Non law enforcement workers were reinstated at a similar rate.
And again that's the point that like normal unions do
work this way as well, but they're not representing people
who have the right to shoot people. For those demanding
more accountability, a large obstacle is that disciplinary actions are
often overturned if an arbitrator finds that the penalty in

(42:48):
the department meeted out is tougher than it wasn't. A
similar previous case, no matter if the penalty in the
previous case was far too lenient. Dude, So where's the
like the trope like, because I'm thinking I'm thinking the
movie trope of like Pulaski badge and gun, like the
chief is like, give me your badge and gun, you're

(43:08):
on leave, right and then but the guys such one
tough cop, but he still investigates the crime. I'm like,
it don't sound like I don't know where y'all got
that from, because it sound to me like, you know,
I'm said, I'm rambling, but I'm trying to just like
where did so where did that come from? Then? Where
is the like? Yeah, yeah, you know, if this is

(43:30):
actually what we're getting into, because it turns out that
it is accurate that a lot of the times police
chiefs hate and try to fire their worst than most
dangerous officers, and police unions make that impossible. That's actually
right now. Yeah, I'm I'm leaning into it, okay. Yeah,
and again this is like, like I'm sure that there

(43:52):
are fucking people in unions who work at tire factories
or whatever who are bad at their jobs, get fired
and the union gives them their job back and like
that probably is a pain in the ask for some
of the people they work around. But again they don't
Yeah yeah, yeah, guy ain't gonna shoot me. You ain't
gonna put his knee on my nick. Yeah, which is

(44:12):
to say that, like there aren't some problems with other unions,
but like it's really a problem with the police. Um. Yeah.
So the Washington Post put together a great article about
this in two thousand seventeen, noting that in the last
eleven years, one thou hundred and eighty one officers had
been fired from the nation's largest police departments, and four
hundred and fifty one of those officers had successfully appealed

(44:33):
and gotten their jobs back. There's four hundred and fifty
one included an officer who raped a nineteen year old
in his patrol car, an officer who challenged a handcuffed
man to a fist fight for his freedom, and of course,
a cop who shot an unarmed man to death. Yeah,
what we gotta we gotta get this guy back on
the street. I gotta give him another chance to win

(44:54):
that fist fight. Yeah. I'm like, there's the like tragically disgusting,
and then they is the preposterous like you just you
challenged the guy like he got on handcuffs, handcuffed man
to a fight to box him, Like yeah, you nerd,
Like yeah, you weren't so deadly, you know what I'm saying.

(45:14):
I wish I could just be like you're a nerd man. Yeah,
And like part of me is like I would kind
of like to get into a fist fight with a
cop in that situation, but I know that if you
start losing, you're going to shoot me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
there's no winning that fight. Y um. One of my
favorite stories in this this really really wonderful Washington Post article,

(45:35):
is the two thousand twelve tale of Boston police officer
Baltazar Tate de Rosa. In two thousand three, de Rosa's
cousin was ambushed by a masked gunman and murdered and
what was probably a gang related crime. In two thousand five,
DeRosa cauld and sick for his overnight shift. He went
out to a nightclub, the Copa Grand Oasis instead with
a dude named Carlos Topina, who was his cousin and
the brother of his cousin who got murdered. While at

(45:57):
the club. Both men encountered Jose Lopez, at gang member
who was a suspect in the murder of De Rosa's cousin,
Carlos round up murdering Jose Lopez using his off duty
cop cousin as a getaway driver. So de Rosa, who
took the night off claiming to be sick and went
and got wasted a nightclub with his cousin. When his
cousin murders, the guy acts as the getaway driver, and obviously,
when this is found out, he gets placed on administrative

(46:19):
leave and he's charged with being an accessory to murder. Um.
He was acquitted of that crime, but he was fired
from the department when the investigation revealed that he had
actually been arrested with his cousin at that club before
due to a drunken disorderly conduct um. So again they
find out like, okay, maybe this guy didn't know he
was being the getaway driver and a murder that his
cousins admitted, but he knew that he was repeatedly getting

(46:40):
drunk at the club while he should have been working,
and like we should fire him for that he lied
about to us um. So de Rosa appealed the firing
and two thousand twelve, he was reinstated with fifty dollars
in lost pay in overtime. He is currently a Boston
Bike Patrol officer. That boy got the money back. Yeah,
of course they always get the money back. Oh my,
that oh dog, at least money back. That one's a

(47:06):
fun one because at least like the guy that they
murdered sounded like a piece of ship too whatever, because
it's just like, look, man, this again, you just gangbanging,
and like that is the most that that story that's
funny because it's the most like spot on any inner
city USA anywhere story, Right, That's like that's me. Like

(47:30):
if let's just say I'm working stiff. You know, I
still taught high school. I'm just gonna go chill with
one of my cousins because that's my cousin. We're all
from South central l A. Right, my cousin gets in
the static with somebody else, what am I gonna not
help him as my cousin, you know what I'm saying.
So like, Okay, yeah, maybe I lose my job, you know,

(47:51):
but like I just like, you know, I mean, that's
my cousin. Man, Like I'm gonna you know what I'm
saying like I'm gonna help, I'm gonna help scrape with
my cousin, you know. Um. And then I was supposed
to think of you any different because you've got a badge, right, No,
you just like the rest of us. You're gonna do
ratchet ship because you ratchet like all of us. Yeah,

(48:11):
point exactly, Yeah, exactly. In two thousand seven, fort Worth
police officer Jesus jesse Banda Jr. Stalked his ex girlfriend
to a party, saw her with another man, and used
a police like called into police dispatch to check on
the plates of the man she was with, fraudulently claiming
that he had like stopped the guy or whatever. So
he found the address of the dude that his ex

(48:32):
girlfriend was going out with, and several days later he
showed up at the man's house at night and shot
the car up with his twelve gage. The department couldn't
prove he'd committed the crime, but they were able to
show that he lied about why he had called in
the man's license plate like a night or two before
his car got shot up. Yeah, So the police chief
did the gimme your badge and gun thing and he
put Banda on unpaid suspension UM and while he was

(48:55):
suspended and under investigation, he was ordered not to represent
himself as a police officer. So you're handing in your
badge and gun, we're going to investigate you. You are
not getting paid and if you tell anyone you're a
police officer to try to get you know, the benefits
police officers get, like you're breaking the fucking law right now.
So Banda went out and represented himself as a police
officer of Coorseiately, he and some friends were pulled over

(49:15):
by another Fort Worth couple. They were drunk in a limousine.
Said cop had watched the people in the back of
the limo, including Banda, pass beer up to the driver.
So again, real hard to get in trouble for drinking
in a a limousine. This fucking dude finds a way. We
passed into the wrong with you. What are you doing man, Yeah?
Yeah yeah. So when he asked Banda to step out

(49:38):
of the car, Banda handed over his police credentials and
pretended to be an officer in good standing. Despite all this,
the union had Banda's back and they fought for him.
He was reinstated and awarded a year of back pay.
So again the police chief is like, I don't what
this fucking guy in my department, and the unions like
you are going to take him back and you're gonna
pay him for the time when he was getting drunken limousines.

(50:01):
Officer Banda had been back on the force for one
month before he was fired again for again misrepresenting himself
during a traffic stop. He is currently he was reinstated
by the union. He is currently a detective and thanks
to his union, the people of Fort Worth have to
brave the streets of their town knowing a guy who
uses department resources to hunt down the boyfriends of his
ex partners is out there with the power to arrest
whoever and apparent immunity to the consequences of any illegal

(50:23):
actions he takes. So that's good. Congrats fort Worth, his
great good job for Worth. Yeah yeah, oh yeah, that
is not the note. That's embarrassing. That that thing. I

(50:50):
don't But we're going to go to products now. Yes,
I'm Jakelbern, host of deep Cover. Our new season is
about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We
controlled the courts, we controlled absolutely everything. He brobed judges
and even helped a hit man walk free, until one

(51:13):
day when he started talking with the FBI and promised
that he could take the mob down. I've spent the
past year trying to figure out why he flipped and
what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was
too good to be true. There's got to be something
wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks
like a little scum, big lawyer, stool Pidgeon. He looked
like what he was or at. I can say with

(51:35):
all certainty I think he's a hero because he didn't
have to do what he did, and he did it anyway.
The moment I put the wire around the first time,
my life was over. If it ever got out, they
would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to deep Cover
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. This is Roxanne Gay, host of

(51:57):
the Roxanne Gay Agenda, The Badroom in his podcast of
Your Dreams. Now, what is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, you
might ask, Well, it's a podcast where I'm going to
speak my mind about what's on my mind, and that
could be anything. Every week I will be in conversation
with an interesting person who has something to say. We're

(52:18):
going to talk about feminism, race, writing in books, and art, food,
pop culture, and yes, politics. I started show with a recommendation. Really,
I'm just going to share with you a movie or
a book, or maybe some music or a comedy set,
something that I really want you to be aware of
and maybe engage with as well. Listen to the Luminary

(52:40):
original podcast, The Roxanne Gay Agenda, The Bad Feminist Podcast
of Your Dreams, every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I call
the Union Hall as its male life and Death. I
thank these peeps of planning to kill Dr King. On

(53:03):
April four, Dr Martin Luther King was shot and killed
in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested.
He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest
of his life in prison. Case closed right, James L.
Ray was upon for the official story. The authorities would

(53:23):
parade all we found a gun the James L. Ray
bought in Birmingham that killed Dr King, Except it wasn't
the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems
that came out when I got the ray case was
that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned,
did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes.

(53:45):
The first episodes are available now. Listen on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back, and we started talking about corneis out of Rise,
which I'm normally very happy with my decision to live
in the Pacific Northwest, but whenever somebody says carne Asada,

(54:09):
I longed for southern California. Yeah, so I could go
for some carne fris, but we're gonna we have to
talk about police unions instead. So, um yeah, So let's
let's talk about uh Kwan McDonald. Um so yeah. In

(54:29):
two thousand and fourteen, seventeen year old Kwan McDonald was
murdered by Chicago police officer Jason van Dyke. The media
fewer around this launched an investigation, which revealed that officer
Van Dyke had previously been the subject of repeated complaints.
The report noted that a code of silence about misconduct
was baked into labor agreements between police unions in the city,
and that this ensured that nothing had been done about

(54:51):
Officer Van Dyke before he killed a child. Van Dyke
was eventually convicted of second degree murder in sixteen accounts
of aggravated battery with a firearm. Sixteen is the number
of times he shot him um. Van Dyke was found
not guilty of any official misconduct, though it was guilty
of murder, but not guilty of improperly behaving as a
police officer. Yeah, yeah, yes, where did murder somebody and

(55:15):
we're gonna go to prison for it. But you also
didn't break the rules of your job. Yeah, but job's fine.
Yeah wow, m yeah, what do we do with that one? Yeah. Ironically,
given their role in murdering the ship out of unions
for close to a hundred years, police might be the
most successful example of unionization in the US history, not

(55:38):
in terms of like benefits to society or benefit to
the profession of policing, but at least in terms of
the sheer amount of power that they wield they j yes.
Labor historian Joseph McCartin notes they have more cloud than
other public sector unions like the teachers and sanitation workers,
because they have often been able to command the political

(56:00):
word of Republicans. That's given them a huge advantage. Police
unions are one fortunate area where we have a single
human being who embodies all of the evil that these
institutions represent and do. And when I talk about a
single human being who embodies the evil police unions, there's
no one else I could be talking about but Lieutenant
Bob Kroll, head of the Minneapolis Police Union. Yeah, president

(56:23):
of the Minneapolis Police Union. Bob has of course appealed
the firing of Derek Chauvan and the other three cops
who murdered George Floyd, saying that they were fired without
due process um and this is something of a pattern
for him. In two thousand fifteen, when two white MPD
officers shot twenty four year old Jamar Clark in the
head while he was handcuffed on the ground, Karl went
on TV to talk about Clark's violent criminal past and

(56:44):
declare BLM a terrorist organization. Krol has a real thing
for declaring people he disagrees with of being terrorists. He
did the same thing to US Representative Keith Ellison, a
black Muslim congressman who pushed for criminal justice reform. That
fun detail came out in a lawsuit filed by the
current IMPD police chief. According to Mother Jones, the lawsuit
accused Croll of wearing a motorcycle jacket with a white

(57:06):
power patch sewed into the fabric and said he had
a history of discriminatory attitudes and conduct. He has told
reporters he was part of the City Heat motorcycle Club,
some of whose members have been described by the Anti
Defamation League is displaying white supremacist symbols. Bob Crow joined
the IMPD back in nineteen nine, and in his years
on the force there were twenty or more internal affairs

(57:27):
complaints made against him. We don't know how Yeah minimum.
We actually don't know how many it was because of
all the ship I've been explaining. They purge records, but
at least twenty we do. Yeah, can you have twenty
on record? Yeah? Imagine I'm gonna like imagine I'm reading
what I'm going to tell you next, and imagine that

(57:48):
like he worked as a baker, or like like as
a computer programmer. Everybody replaced cop with donut maker. Yeah,
sanitation worker, sanitation worker. In nineteen four, he was suspended
for using excessive force. In in nineteen he was accused
of beating, choking, and kicking a biracial fifteen year old

(58:09):
while shouting racial slurs Bob Kroll in two thousand four,
when Kroll was off duty, someone leaving a bar bumped
his backpack against Kroll's car. Bob and another off duty
officer got out and beat the piss out of this guy.
When his friends came to help, they beat the ship
out of his friends too. Bob was suspended for twenty

(58:29):
days for this. It's it's cartoonish like, like this is
cartoon level. Yes. The Minnieappolos the Minneapolis police knew all
of this when they elected Bob Crowl to be their
union president by a two to one margin. Bob one
because the citizens of Minneapolis had just elected a reform
minded police chief. She told The New York Times. I

(58:51):
believe Bob crow was elected out of fear. We are
the only ones that support you. Your community doesn't support you.
Your police chief is trying to get you fired. You
see what I'm build in to hear. Police unions allow
the cops to deliberately short circuit the democratic process. This
is part of why bringing in better police chiefs and
voting in reform minded mayors almost never actually does a

(59:11):
damn thing when it comes to the police. Yeah, because
the unions are still there and they stone wall anything
from happening. When Kim Garner was elected d A of St.
Louis in two thousand sixteen, she promised to fight police
violence on behalf of her citizens. One of the way
she proposed to do this was by establishing an independent
oversight board to investigate abuses by police, like the PBA

(59:33):
in New York more than a half century earlier. The
police union in St. Louis set right to work killing
this oversight board. They went to lawmakers one by one,
and whatever they said stopped the matter from even coming
to a vote, According to the New York Times quote.
Around the same time, a lawyer for the union waged
a legal fight to live at the ability of the
Prosecutor's office to investigate police misconduct. The following year, a

(59:54):
leader of the union said Miss Gardner should be removed
by force or by choice. Wow, that's cool, can you chack?
Can you just It's like, I just it's it's comic
book level power. Like and I just imagine, like you know,

(01:00:17):
in in every comic book, when the when the bad
guy goes like I feel the power, Like I feel
like that's just death. Must be what it's like to
where you're like after a while, just you just know
you can get away with it, and anybody that comes

(01:00:37):
in to try to stop you you got the power
to remove. Like it just god, dog like it must
be intoxicating, it must it's got to be a drug.
Like it's got to be a drug. Yeah, yeah, it is,
it is. It is. They're high on fucking power. And
if you've ever I mean I don't know, have you
have you never? Have you never pistol whip a guy? Never?

(01:00:59):
It is Oh my god, oh my god, pistol whipping
a dude. It's like it's like it's like that first
slice of cherry pie on a birthday. Yeah, that's how it's. Yeah,
no wonder they want to protect it. I get it.
I get it. You're like, this is super fun. Now, Yeah,
it's terrible. I've been in enough like fist fights to

(01:01:20):
know I don't like them. Yeah, you know what I'm saying.
And I've been in enough to be like I don't
like him because of the pain, but I also don't
like him because you just walk away, Like even if
it's just like that dude's a freaking scumbag and he
deserved it. You're still like, don't you know, I'll feel

(01:01:41):
good about it. Yeah, you still walk away like, man,
I'll feel good about it. Yeah. Anyway, Yeah, and I
was I was joking about pistol, of course. But I
do wonder. I do wonder if we can succeed in
police abolition. What if we just made it legal for
everyone to own grenade launchers and tear gas gardades and
rubber bullets, and then the crowd of protesters could confront

(01:02:02):
the police on it even like, would they enjoy being
riot cops? Ye? If they were having getting flash banged back?
I can. I can tell you I've seen some protesters
throw like mortars, like fireworks back at police who are
shooting grenades with them, and they don't seem to like it. No, Yeah,
it's crazy, huh, one would think, right, yeah, so um yeah,

(01:02:26):
if if the way that police unions respond when elected
officials try to restrict the powers and rights of the
police sounds kind of like how the mob works. You're
not the only person to think that way. Back in Minneapolis,
City Councilman Steve Fletcher noted that once he started pushing
to freeze the MPD from hiring new officers, the police
stopped responding as quickly to nine one one calls made

(01:02:48):
by his constituents. He called it a little bit like
a protection racket. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what it is,
Steve exact publicate and be used at a song called
nine one one is a joke and it's and and
and like people think they were They're like, what is
what are they talking about? No, you don't understand that

(01:03:10):
they don't have to come when we call. Yeah, you
could decide like this, I'm just not gonna go over there. Yeah,
And it's it's funny because of the protests in Portland
and stuff, like, I know a lot of people who
have been the victims of crimes in Portland. I've been
the victims of crimes, thankfully not here, but in other cities.
And like it always takes a hell of a long
time for the police to respond. Um. But when the

(01:03:32):
protests here wound up in the neighborhood where the mayor's
mansion is and so like they were surrounded by mansions
and people started shining lasers and windows and like sitting
off smoke bombs. The police were fucking right there there,
so fucking quickzy man, you guys response times today. Wow,
you guys, are you guys are really on the ball

(01:03:53):
when this neighborhood, this specific neighborhood gets sucked with Yeah yeah.
So um, we'll talk a little bit more about police
unions later. For now, there's another major subject. We've got
a pivot to broken windows policing. Yeah, but this is
you've heard of broken windows, right, bro? This is the
one that like when this is the stuff you're getting

(01:04:16):
into that like our like dad's and big brothers and
cousins would sit us down and say, hey, this is
how it works. You need to protect yourself. They was
explaining this stuff. Yeah yeah. Um. In two thousand twelve,
a teenager named Alvin Cruz was stopped by police and searched.
This was not unusual for Cruise that had happened to

(01:04:38):
him numerous times before, and the officers searching him. This
was in New York, by the way, and the officers
searching him never explained why they were doing it, but
this time because he was just fucking tired of being
hassled so many him by the police. Alvin secretly recorded
the encounter, and he caught on tape the officer's response.
When he asked him why he was being stopped. The
cop told him for being a fucking mutt. Un know that.

(01:05:01):
Another officer twisted his arm behind his back after this
and shouted, dude, I'm gonna break your fucking arm and
then I'm gonna punch you in the fucking face. This
tape went real viral, and it was cited in the
ruling of a federal judge later that year, um when
the judge ruled that the nypds stopping frisk policy was
unconstitutional and racially discriminatory. Stopping frisk is not a policy

(01:05:23):
unique to New York, but as we've learned, the NYPD
tend to be trailblazers. This tactic involves basically stopping random people,
virtually all of whom were black or Hispanic, and searching
them for contraband with little to no cause. Stopping frisk
was justified by the best minds available to nineteen eighties
law enforcement, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Do

(01:05:44):
you don't even about either of these guys? Uh, not
personally except for the other reason why I can't walk
home with a friend. Yes, kid, you're gonna learn some
not surprising stuff about them, but yeah. In nine two,
well Son and Kelling published an article in the Atlantic
that became the foundation of what we now know as

(01:06:04):
broken windows policing, probably the most single most influential article
in the history of law enforcement. Their chief argument was
boiled down in this sentence. If a window in a
building is broken and left unrepaired, all the rest of
the windows will soon be broken. So in order to
keep crime down and keep neighborhoods nice, they argued, all
violations of public order have to be sternly punished and prosecuted.

(01:06:26):
Searching random black and Latino kids and occasionally beating the
ship out of them is just the price we pay
for making sure those kids don't have spray paint on
them or whatever you know, or aren't going to sell
a little bit of weed or something like. Because any
small criminal violation will inevitably lead to the total destruction
of the neighborhood, So we have to police this little
ship as harshly as possible. Now. Wilson and Kelling's new

(01:06:47):
theory of policing was presented as scientific, backed up by
the latest data, but that was a complete sham. There
was only a single piece of hard evidence behind their theory,
and they didn't interpret it the way that the actual
reas searchers who did the study um interpreted it. And
that single piece of evidence was a nineteen sixty nine
study by every psych student's favorite problematic researcher, Philip Zimbardo. Yeah,

(01:07:14):
love me some Zimbardo, you know what he was like.
There's a lot of real good criticisms of Philip Zimbardo,
but his work is never boring, Like I want to
do some weere. I'm gonna make a prison and staff
it with teenagers. This guy, there's a few people that
make it into your history books that you're just like,
how why are we studying him? I would love to

(01:07:36):
drink with Phillips Zimbardo. Like, as someone who is critical
of virtually all of his research, he sounds fun. Yeah, yeah,
he still sounds fun. Yeah. So this particular nineteen sixty
nine study by Zimbardo had been inspired by the nineteen
sixty eight riots and uprisings, obviously, like Zimbardo had just
like watched the entire country convulsed by something that was
in a lot of ways even more like even more

(01:07:58):
serious than what we're seeing right now. Um. And he
was like, I should probably do some science about that ship. Um.
So he was frustrated, particularly that conservatives blamed vandalism on
individual criminality. So vandal considers were blaming like vandalism during
protest on the criminal nature of individual protesters, and he
thought this was wrong. He thought that vandalism had more

(01:08:21):
to do with crowd mentality than individual characteristics. So in
order to test his hypothesis, he and his team parked
got two oldsmobiles and they parked one in the South
Bronx and the other in Palo Alto, California. They surveilled
both cars and they watched what happened to them. Now, Zimbardo,
because he was a little bit racist, expected the Oldsmobile
and the Bronx would be swiftly vandalized and torn apart.

(01:08:43):
And he was right, but he was surprised that the
first vandals were a white, well dressed family and not
black teenagers. Um. Yeah, which is not go ahead, Yeah,
I was going to say, because like, and I'm saying
it's completely anecdotally. It's because when you black and brown,
you already know they're gonna blame me anyway, So I can't. Now,

(01:09:07):
I'm not going to touch that. You know what's gonna happen,
Like they come over and kill us, you know what
I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, so yeah. He was surprised by this,
but he felt that his central hypothesis was supported um
the lack of community cohesion. This is his conclusion. The
lack of community cohesion and the Bronx produced a sense
of anonymity which gave people permission to commit acts of vandalism.

(01:09:27):
He wrote, conditions that create social inequality and put some
people outside of the conventional rewards structure of the society,
make them indifferent to its sanctions, laws, and implicit norms.
M hmm, yeah, yeah, sentence, That is quite a sentence.
So like, yeah, that happens to the old mobile and
Harlem um or not Harlem in the bronx Um and

(01:09:49):
the old mobile he parked in Palo Alto suffered a
somewhat different fate. According to the Washington Post quote, after
a week long, unremarkable steak out, Simbardo's drove the car
to the Stanford campus, where his research team aimed to
prime vandalism by taking a sledgehammer to its windows. Upon
discovering that this was stimulating and pleasurable, Zimbardo and his

(01:10:09):
graduate students got carried away. As Zimbardo described it, one
student jumped on the roof and began stomping it in.
Two were pulling out the door from its hinges, an
other hammered away at the hood and motor, while the
last one broke called the glass he could find the passers.
The passers by the study had intended to observe, had

(01:10:31):
turned into spectators and only joined in after the car
was already wrecked. Zimbardo's conclusions were the stuff of liberal criminology. Anyone,
even Stanford researchers, could be lured into vandalism, and this
was particularly true in places like the Bronx with heightened
social inequalities. For Zimbardo, what happened in the Bronx and
at Stanford suggested that crowd mentality, social inequalities, and community

(01:10:52):
anonymity could prompt good citizens to act destructively. This was
no radical critique. It was an indictment of law and
order politics that viewed vandalism as a senseless, unpardonable act
in a line that could have been lifted directly out
of the countless riot reports published in the late nineteen sixties.
Zimbardo asserted vandalism is rebellion with a cause. M hmmm,

(01:11:14):
which so yeah, yeah, yeah. I I can't. I can't
speak to the accuracy of Simbardo's conclusions about the Bronx,
particularly like his his attitudes about community there. Also, it
was not a place he understood very well. Um, and
he was clearly a manned with some biases. Uh. But
I can't argue with his conclusions about Palo Alto because

(01:11:35):
in part of what I saw in riot night in Portland,
which was the night after the Third Precinct in Minneapolis burned. Um,
I know that, like you know, people rioted in Portland.
They fucked up the Justice Center and like lit it
on fire and they destroyed like they damaged a lot
of the luxury shopping district and looted it. And it
was blamed on like antifo white anarchist kids. But like

(01:11:56):
I was there, it was a pretty fucking broad cross
section of the port population. Who was You can tell.
I've seen enough people break windows. You can tell when
someone knows how to break a window, and when someone
is breaking a window for the first time, a lot
of first time window a lot of a lot of
experienced window breakers in that crowd, don't get me wrong,
a lot of first time window breakers. You just got
taken in by the moment. Yeah, yeah, that's good. So yeah,

(01:12:22):
I I think that that's probably accurate that, like most
vandalism that happens in times like these, is not the
result of people who are as a lot of folks,
I could portray them inherently criminal. Um, not that I
even feel comfortable like judging people on that basis, but
I think most of that kind of vandalism is just like, oh,
fuck it, I can get away with this now, yeah

(01:12:42):
I want to like yeah, yeah, I'm angry and like
I feel like this is an option. Now let's do it.
Yeah now, um, so yeah. The Oldsmobile study was actually
not very influential initially, and it's sort of languished in
the annals of academic history for a decade and a
half until Wilson and Kelling, the guys who wrote that
Atlantic article in the Broken Windows theory, until they came

(01:13:04):
across it, So they didn't listen to anything Zimbardo had
actually said about crowd mentality and community and anonymity. They
kind of ignored all of the actual conclusions in the
study um and took from it only the fact that
quote one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no
one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. So

(01:13:26):
both of these guys cite the Zimbardo theory as the
entire academic basis of their theory on crime uh the
Zimbardo study, but they actually interpreted it in a way
that ran completely at odds to the person conducting the
studies own conclusions. And I'm gonna quote from the Washington
Post again. Their misleading recap of Zimbardo's study not only
conflated the Stanford and Palo Alto experiments, but so distorted

(01:13:47):
the order of events that it routed readers away from
Zimbardo's conclusions. In their version, the car and Paolo Alto
sat untouched for more than a week, then Zimbardo smashed
part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon passers by were
joining in. Where they conveniently neglected to mention was that
the researchers themselves had laid waste to the car. By
admitting this crucial detail, Wilson and Kelly manipulated Zimbardo's experiment

(01:14:08):
to draw a straight line between one broken window and
a thousand broken windows. This enabled them to claim that
all it took was a broken window to transform staid
Palo Alto into the Bronx where no one cared. The
problem is it wasn't a broken window that enticed onlookers
to join the freight. It was the spectacle of faculty
and students destroying an oldsmobile in the middle of Stanford's campus. Yeah.

(01:14:28):
I like that's like, yes, that one did it. Yeah.
They're like, oh, that professor's sucking up you Like, yeah,
it seems like it's cool. Now let's do Yeah. Like
people if they if someone's like, hey, it's actually there's
a car people are sucking up and it's okay, it's
perfectly legal. Do you want to funk up a car
a little bit? Most people are gonna be like yeah, yeah, yeah,

(01:14:51):
it's it's so intuitive. And if I just see like
a smashed window on a car, that's not gonna make
me go I'm gonna smash that dude's window too. One
would be like, oh, that fool's backpack I've stolen, Like
I'm gonna think you know what I'm saying, poor guy,
like it's not gonna go Oh, nobody cares on this street.
Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time in
the Bay Area, I never go to San Francisco and

(01:15:13):
don't see at least one car with a smashed out window.
And I never see all of the windows around that
car smashed. In fact, it's usually in a nice neighborhood. Still,
it's just the thing they do. In Sanford, they up
car windows and steelship inside cars. Don't do stuff in
your car. In San Francisco, they don't break everything. Yeah,
that was my lesson was like, hey, dude, don't leave
your backpack in the car. The story, don't leave your

(01:15:33):
backpack in the It is a meme in San Francisco.
Never leave anything in you And by the way, when
I had my car broken into in San Francisco, I
was parked directly in front of the Mission Police precincts. Like,
we went in to report it and the officer said,
what do you want us to do about it? Right?
Every okay, Tott Copper everyone while they'll nail it like

(01:15:59):
it was once. Remember we're not saying like my uh
my freaking speakers and amp got stolen out of my car,
and it's kind of the same thing. That cop was like,
what what you want me to do? Man? Yeah, and
I'm like, touche. I mean you know what I want
you to do is when I talk about police abolition,
not be like, who are you going to call if
someone robs you? Because here we are, because it's not

(01:16:23):
just that day. Um. So I first read that article
about like the how the broken windows policing guys had
like fucked up Zimbardo's study years before I came across
like the basics of or years after I'd come across
the basics of broken windows policing theory during I took
criminal justice for a while in college. I wanted to
be in law enforcement at one point. Um, and reading

(01:16:46):
that kind of like dissection of this foundational theory and
modern law enforcement was pretty shocking and impactful to me.
But I didn't know half the real story until I
read Alex Vitali's The End of Policing this year. Vitality
points out the the core of broken windows theory is
the idea that people have latent destructive traits that are
unleashed without constant pressure from authority. To conform and behave fatality,

(01:17:10):
writes quote. The emergence of this theory in nineteen eight
two is tied to a larger arc of urban neo
conservative thinking going back to the nineteen sixties. Wilson's former
mentor and collaborator, Edward Banfield, a close associate of neoliberal
economist Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, parented many
of the ideas that came to make up the new
conservative consensus on cities. Banfield's big work was the nineteen

(01:17:33):
seventy book The Unheavenly City, which is basically an extended
argument that poor people and this is me now not vitality.
The Unheavenly City is an extended argument that poor people
can't be helped and so welfare programs are a waste
of money. Here's a quote from Banfield's book, and this
is again like the mentor of of Wilson, the guy
who is one of the main architect, one of the
two architects of the broken windows theory. So here's what

(01:17:54):
it writes. Although he has more leisure than almost anyone,
the indifference at a the if one prefers of the
lower class person is such that he seldom makes even
the simplest repairs to the place that he lives in.
He is not troubled by dirt or dilapidation, and he
does not mind the inadequacy of public facilities such as schools, parks, hospitals,
and libraries. Indeed, where such things exist, he may destroy

(01:18:18):
them by carelessness or even by vandalism. Oh my gosh,
mad right now, it makes you realize, Yeah, it's just
what justlike what do you know about being poor? Going
any poor person's house, They have fixed more of their
own ship than you know how to. But like, yes,
there's that I've always put like the like broken window, uh,

(01:18:40):
stopping frisk and then like kind of the like gang
in junctions and street sweepers, like I've always kind of
like in my head without any actual research, like lumped
them all together under the like the theory that you
just presented, which is that like, ultimately, we don't don't

(01:19:00):
care about our neighborhoods unless we have authoritative powers that
keep us in line. Like I've kind of lumped it
under that thought and that that's that's what law enforcement
thinks about us, you know what I'm saying, Like that
it's still the broken window thing. So when the getting
a junctions will I don't know if we're if we're
even gonna cover that, but like I've always kind of

(01:19:21):
seen them because they were all around. It was all
that eighties and nineties like policing that that that turned
me into the like policing don't work, you know, activists
that I am now is like under that sort of thinking.
I don't know if they are together, but it's but
him the statement you just said, the idea of again
saying that like ultimately your animals unless we keep you

(01:19:46):
in line, it just all makes sense. Now that's clearly
how you think of us. Yes, yes, and it will
become clearer where all of the yeah yeah so uh.
Banfield basically thought that cities ought to be a ba
ended because they were just inherently criminal places. Um and
his protege Wilson, took a different tax, arguing that cities
had been great once and could be halted in their

(01:20:08):
decline and made great again because if only the cause
of that decline were properly recognized. Wilson identified liberal politicians
and of course, the moral failings of black communities, as
the chief clause of urban decline. Vitality writes that Wilson
quote argued that liberals had unwittingly unleashed urban chaos by
undermining the formal social control mechanisms that made city living possible.

(01:20:30):
By supporting the more radical demands of the later urban
expressions of the Civil rights movement, they had so weakened
the police, teachers, and other government forces of behavioral regulation
that chaos came to rain. Wilson, following Banfield, believed strongly
that there were profound limits on what the government could
do to help the poor. Financial investment in them would
be squandered, New services would go unused or be destroyed.

(01:20:52):
They would continue in their slothful and destructive ways. Since
the root of the problem was either an essentially moral
or cultural failure or allowed pack of external controls to
regulate inherently destructive human urges, the solution had to take
the form of punitive social control mechanisms to restore order
and neighborhood stability. Wilson's views were informed by a borderline

(01:21:12):
racism that emerged as a mix of biological and cultural
explanations for the inferiority of poor blacks. Wilson, yeah, yeah, yeah,
some thoughts like just like just like the religious right
and like you know, you know, I'm I'm I'm I
grew up a church boy, you know what I'm saying,
Like I still got a lot of stuff still serves

(01:21:33):
me well, but like I'm just thinking about like just that,
like that like why Western evangelical like well, like okay,
the breakdown of the family. It's like there's no dad's
in the homes and that's the problem in like in
the black community. Your fathers are missing, so y'all have
no direction and just hearing all that stuff, you know
from these people that are supposed to be taking care

(01:21:53):
of you. So like how just how And then when
you get get of age and you realize not I
think y'all just raceis like when it kind of like clicks,
just the like crisis of like faith that you have
at that moment where you're just like I don't, I can't.
I'm actually not welcome here. I thought I was welcome here.
I'm and I welcome here anyway. Yeah, So back to

(01:22:18):
Wilson a little bit, because this this next part is important.
No no, no, no no. Um. Wilson co authored the
book Crime and Human Nature with Richard Hernstein, which argued
that there were important biological determinants of criminality, while race
was not one of the core determinants. Language about i
Q and body type open the door to a kind
of sociobiology that led Hernstein to co author the openly

(01:22:40):
racist The Bell Curve with Charles Murray, who was also
a close associate of Wilson. So The Bell Curve, if
you're not aware, is a thoroughly to credit discredited book
about i Q and race that has earned a place
of honor in every racist bookshelf. And so Wilson is
friends with both of the authors of that, and works
on a book with one of the authors of that

(01:23:00):
is the guy who coinventced broken windows theory of policing.
Like that's that's where he's swimming in. That's his fucking sea. Yeah,
And it's so like hearing it all together, it's so clear,
you know, it's so obvious, you know, coupled with my
own just experience, and just like, oh my god, it
all it's hearing it all together. It's just like, yes, yes,

(01:23:22):
that's so, I'm not crazy. You really do think this
about us, got it? Yep? Yeah, So the broken windows
theory gave ideological cover to people who wanted to empower
the US police to interfere more directly in the daily
lives of more, particularly non white people. Prevention of crime
had been the goal since the days of Volmer, but

(01:23:43):
what that mint had changed Now Poverty and social disorganization
were seen as the results of crime, not the causes,
and thus the best way to reform society was to
repeatedly punish people from minor criminal behavior. Vitality goes on
Broken windows policing is root a deeply conservative attempt to
shift the burden of responsibility for declining living conditions onto

(01:24:05):
the poor themselves, and to argue that the solution to
all social ills is increasingly aggressive, invasive, and restrictive forms
of policing that involved more arrests, more harassment, and ultimately
more violence. Wow, so the solution of poverty ain't jobs, No,
it's punishment. Yeah, you gotta stop him from breaking breaking

(01:24:26):
windows in their neighborhood by arresting them for weed or whatever. Yeah. Yo.
The nuance that like like like snatch that out the sky,
the nuance of saying I'm gonna try to say it
like you like like the quote said which he was
like like the cause that the cause of crime was

(01:24:48):
not the poverty. The cause of poverty was the crime.
And that's the part where I'm just like, there's your
mistake there, it is right. Um, if if if you've
ever heard the term like like a crime of survival,
then like you understand what we're talking about here where

(01:25:08):
it's just like you're you have that completely backwards, you
know what I'm saying. If if you if you think
that the the cause of the poverty is the crime
rather than saying the cause of the crime is the poverty. Yeah,
that is like that fundamental switch. Everything will start making

(01:25:30):
sense now when you when you understand that, like the
laws are the crime, the law is probably unjust already.
So this act of survival shouldn't be a crime in
the first place because it's an act of survival. Right.
But when you understand it, that's just an act of survival, right,
then the idea of punishing a person for trying to
survive seems preposterous because it is. Yes, yeah, so, um.

(01:25:58):
One example of the violence caused by open windows policing
would be the famous and the tragic death of Eric Garner.
If you've forgotten, um, I know you haven't, but at home,
Garner was busted for selling cigarettes illegally. He was choked
to death by officers, and his famous cry I can't
breathe has probably become the most powerful slogan of the
Black Lives Matter movement. Um just kind of sums everything up. Uh.

(01:26:20):
You might be surprised to learn that Garners arrested not
come as the result of like an individual officer just
sort of like rolling around the neighborhood and spotting a
guy breaking the law and choosing to do something. It
was actually ordered by the top brass because the local
business owners had complained about Garner's illegal cigarette sales harming
their own businesses. So kind of back to episode two

(01:26:41):
here where we're talking about like the police are formed
to protect Yeah. Yeah, and it's good for you to
point out, like what the crime was. It's Yes, if
you don't know this, it's a lucy it's when you
just sell an individual cigarette, which is like apparently a
capital crime. Yes, yeah, and is a perfectly normal thing
in a lot of the world everywhere in the world.

(01:27:01):
Like you you got ten dollars for a pack of cigarettes,
so you're just trying to bum one of them. You're
gonna walk around be like crette or I'll sell you
one for a dollar like that. This is a listen
and listen to me. Guys, that's a crime. Yeah. You
to say how ridiculous that sounds like you gotta fucking bosnia.
You order a coffee, you'll get a cigarette with your coffee,

(01:27:22):
but like, yeah you do that here, you're you're breaking
the law. Yeah, Uh, make cigarettes mandatory. I think is
the right, the right way to solve this problem. It's
it's easy, right, So the NYPD dispatched a sizeable force
to bust Garner, a plane closes unit and two sergeants
with uniformed backup, and the best case scenario from sending

(01:27:43):
cops after him was that he would be stopped temporarily
from selling Lucy's. Eric had a long history of getting
busted for petty crimes and going to jail. No sentence
had dissuaded him from continuing to do this um, so
there was no chance of anything happening. But temporarily having
this guy in jail instead of selling loose cigarettes, that
was the best case scenario. Yea, or just like go

(01:28:03):
to another block, like all right, this guy don't like
me in front of his store. I'm just gonna go
down the street. Not really hard. Nobody's yeah, there was
no gret Man. There was no way for any meaningful
public good to be gained by this interaction, and again
the pot the worst case scenario which happened is that
Garner died, which is what happened. Now. The NYPD institute

(01:28:26):
more use of force training for its patrol officers after
Garner's death, so that the next guy the state sent
armed men after for the crime of selling loose cigarettes
would be less likely to get murdered. Um, but that
didn't really doesn't really solve anything, is Alex fatally notes
quote such training ignores two important factors in Garner's death.
The first is the officer's casual disregard for his well being,
ignoring his cries of I can't breathe and they're seemingly

(01:28:48):
indifferent reaction to his near lifelessness while awaiting an ambulance.
This is a problem of values and seems to go
to the heart of the claim that for too many police,
black lives don't matter. The second is broken window style policing,
which targets low level and fractions for intensive, invasive and
aggressive enforcement. Now, the death of Gardner caused a flurry
of national condemnation of the NYPD and a conflict between

(01:29:11):
the department and Mayor Billed A. Blasio. As you'll recall,
the NYPD can't strike over this sort of thing, but
they were angry that the mayor hadn't enthusiastically backed them
when some of their own had committed murder. So they
launched a slowdown, which is basically a diet version of
a strike. Is what we talked about a little bit earlier.
For seven weeks, the New York Police only went out
in pairs, only left their squad cars if they felt
it was absolutely necessary, and they avoided all proactive policing measures.

(01:29:35):
This means that for the first time in decades, the
NYPD stopped fucking with people who committed petty crimes and misdemeanors.
The slowdown ended eventually, but researchers wanted to learn what
impact it might have actually had on crime in the city.
Their study, published in the Nature Journal Human Behavior, was
based on Foyed CompStat reports from two thousand and thirteen
to two thousand and sixteen. These reports include weekly activity

(01:29:57):
for each NYPD precinct for all the rests and crim
atal activity. The study found that, not surprisingly, the rate
of criminal summons is and stopping frisks and arrests had
declined massively during the slowdown. This is what you'd expect
because cops weren't doing that sort of work. But the
researchers also found that civilian complaints of major crimes fell
between three and six percent during the same period. Civilians

(01:30:21):
reported forty three fewer felony assaults, forty fewer burglaries, and
forty fewer acts of grand larceny. The drop in violent
crime actually continued for several months after the slowdown, leading
to an estimated twenty one hundred fewer major crime complaints.
The study authors noted, quote, in their efforts to increase
civilian compliance, certain policing tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious

(01:30:44):
criminal activity. The implications for understanding policing and a democratic
society should not be understated. The researchers directly addressed broken
windows policing and the stop and frisk style public order
policing tactics introduced as a result of that theory. Quote.
Our results imply not only that these tactics fail at
their stated objective of reducing major legal violations, but also

(01:31:05):
that the initial deployment of proactive policing can inspire additional
crimes that later provide justification for further increasing police stops,
summons is, and so forth. So so, so what you're
saying is them not doing what they were doing actually helped. Yeah,

(01:31:25):
if you had a d A who came in and
said violent crime and like, complaints about major crimes by
civilians dropped between three and six percent during my tenure,
you could run for fucking state office, the federal office
on that ship, right yeah. Yeah, And it's like, oh,
we'll show you. I'll show you, guys how much you
need as actually you are the problem. No, Actually, things

(01:31:47):
actually seem a lot better. It's fine, you know what,
keep going, keep slowing down, guys. You know, I wanted
a single cigarette the other day. I bought it, nobody
got choked. Yeah, it was fine. Everything like it's actually
it seems like it's actually okay, dude. Yeah, I would
love to somehow or another try to invoke just the

(01:32:13):
empathy and emotions of what like stopping frisk did psychologically.
You know, as a young man, you know, or just
just as a person in that sort of context and environment.
And of course you know obviously that you know, Bloomberg
didn't last in the in the it was a joke anyway,

(01:32:36):
you know what I'm saying. But like, um, so, so
there was no way I could have ever voted for
him because I know what's psychologically what stopping frisk and
like all that stuff did to us. But like, just
I just think, think about what we're saying here is
you can get stopped and searched for nothing for the
possibility that you might be doing something. So like it's

(01:33:02):
just so moving about freely. You know. I brought up
a game earlier, like because the the l A version
of that was like the gang injunctions. So if you
were if if you and two of your friends happened
to be walking home from basketball practice and your clothes
kind of match, that's a gang, right, So no matter what,

(01:33:23):
if there's more than one of you, you're in a gang.
So and and and there's and there's a there's a
there's a gang uptick. So like let's just say you
do commit a petty crime or you were involved with
a committing with a petty crime. If you were with
someone that was either in the in the system as
a gang member, or it was more than one of you,

(01:33:44):
you can get the gang up charge. So that just
adds five years, right, even if something only took six
even if it was like a petty crime and it
was only like six to eight months probation, if you
get the gang uptick is five years, right. So I
it was dudes that like disappeared off the street eats.
I we didn't until we were in college because of
this stuff. So they came out of prison gangsters. They

(01:34:08):
didn't go in gangsters that came out you know. So
like I I'm ranting, but like like please understand the
psychological like part of that. Yeah shit, you just yeah,
you just like just that. I mean, I'm a full

(01:34:30):
grown man. I paid freaking property taxes, I'm working on
a damn home loan right now, and I still whenever
I just hear that whoo whoo, my body is still
just kind of like uh uh yeah, Like that's the
fucking thing to me, is like like we talked such
a fucking good game in this country about what freedom

(01:34:51):
is and if you live in a country, we're a
huge percentage if not most because fucking white people feel
this way when they hear the of the police. Everyone's
scared of them. If you've got this unaccountable group of
armed people who can funk up your day and possibly
the rest of your life at any moment for no reason,

(01:35:12):
even if you haven't done something wrong and experience no consequences.
If that's built into your system, you're not free. Whatever
nebulous concept freedom is, that's not it. It's not it. Yeah, Um,
go back to the script. Yeah, the script is, the
script is done. This is this is what we had
for today. Um. Yeah, we're gonna talk about the Texas

(01:35:35):
Rangers some which will be fun, and the militarization of police.
We're gonna talk about the TV show Cops. Yeah, that'll
be That'll be it for a little series which is
going to leave out just so much stuff, but doing
doing the best we can over here. Man, I hope.
I'm gonna say this on record that like, man, what
you've done for the cause by doing this you and

(01:35:56):
selfie like man ya don't put yah, don't put stones
and slingshots, boy by, Like this is just seven to
ten hours of receipts that you know what I'm saying like, man,
we appreciate this work. I know I'm a part of
appreciate y'all for doing this. I mean, I think it's like,

(01:36:18):
you know, it came at a certain point, like during
covering the protests, where like things were starting to die down,
in part because like people were getting exhausted, in part
because the police got in trouble for all of the violence,
and it was like, what's the next thing to do.
It's make sure everybody like you want to you want
to keep people. People have to be angry about this

(01:36:39):
for a long time if it's going to change, right,
this is like, this is this is a long fight.
This is not going We're not gonna like, no one's
gonna like, like, in order to get one police department
taken down in Minneapolis, and it hasn't yet happened, but
it looks like it's going to happen, they had to
burn a precinct. Like it was hard, had to get
that far. Yeah, they they they fought like they fought

(01:37:03):
like motherfucker's just to take that down. Um, and that's
just not going to happen nationwide. And but I we
still need to stop this, and the only way to
do that is to get enough people angry long enough
that they wear them down. This is not like, it's
not as simple as a vote in better people, And
anyone who says that, like, okay, well, the real way
to fix this is vote is lying to you. Voting

(01:37:24):
is one part of the effort. And the only way
voting works is if there is like clearly enough rage
and anger and um and and activity in the street
that it necessitates action. That number one, local governments are
scared by the number of people out in the streets
and realize that we're all gonna lose our fucking jobs
if we don't do something. Um. And also, physically exhausting

(01:37:46):
the police is a part of it. Um Running out
there fucking budgets is a part of it. Making them
realize that they are not making it. Making it not
pleasurable to be an officer because people don't view you
positively is a part of it. For all of like,
all of this is a part of it. Getting rid
of cops was I think a bigger part of it
than a lot of people realize. And I my hope

(01:38:07):
with this is that it it helps keep people angry
enough to stay in the fight and make the changes happen.
You ever heard of Carl von Klauswitz. No, Klauswitz was
a German military he's like a he was a general,
but he was also like a like. He wrote a
lot about strategy. He was He's very influential in the

(01:38:28):
field of like thinking about how to to conduct war.
And Klauswitz had a definition of war that is not
all not not everyone agrees with it, but I find
it really compelling. He defined war as the continuation of
politics through other means. Um. And police have been talking
about how there's a war on police for a very

(01:38:48):
long time, and I think that the actual falling number
over forty years, you know, the number of police officers
killed and wounded the line of duty is continually fallen. Um.
I don't think it's accurate in like the literal sense,
but I do think you can look at what the
police have been doing and stopping frisk is a big
part of it, as a war on the people of
this country and responding in kind. It's not it's not

(01:39:10):
us sitting in the trenches with a rifle. It's not
necessarily even on our side of things, it's not a
it's not a doing violence to human beings. War, but
it's it's not dissimilar from the kind of war that
like the Russian government has been attempting to carry out
in places like Ukraine and Georgia. It is a it
is a very complicated conflict, but it is a it
is a conflict. UM And Yeah, I hope that this

(01:39:34):
is has provided some some additional munitions. Yes, and it
has good on you. Well, Prop, you want to plug
your plug doubles before we roll out? I do this
is ah, this is proper hip hop over here. Uh.
Website and Instagram and all those things are prop hip
hop dot com. Um, there's and T shirts and music

(01:40:02):
uh in other podcasts that I'm part of. UM and
I am don't have anything else to plug because I'm
reliving my teen years in my head right now. Shit.
And I am very happy to be a part of this.
I'm very happy to be heard. That's another reference that

(01:40:25):
Sophie appreciate that you won't know what I'm talking about.
I I don't. I didn't get that at all. It's
all good. It's coming to America, man, oh shit, Oh okay, okay.
So at some point, Chris Daniel, whoever doing this, do
not cut this part out at some point when all
this ship is over, Sophie and I we're going to

(01:40:48):
spend one to two days at least, and I am
just going to indoctrinate you in all of just black
culture references, isban culture references that you should know. And
I just like, and you would appreciate, you know what
I'm saying. I'm just like, I need you to know

(01:41:09):
these jokes. I think that's a great idea. Actually, yeah,
we can. I mean I know I need to. I've
been told for a while I need to watch do
the right thing. I think that's it correct. Yeah. Yeah,
And then there's the other there's the one that's about
the fucking like the fast food joint or something, and like, um,
I don't even know where you're going, Okay maybe yeah, wait,

(01:41:33):
so yeah, you gotta do Harlem Nights. You gotta watch,
you gotta watch do the right thing. You need to
see soul food, you gotta see the colored Purple, you
gotta see Friday. There's a lot of we gotta catch
you up, man, because yeah, and I feel like you'd
appreciate all these. Yeah, I know, do the right Thing
is the one that I was thinking about. That's the
one at the pizza shop. Yea, yeah, the pizza shop. Yeah,

(01:41:54):
do the right thing. Yeah, okay, okay, all right, you
need to know the radio. Rahim is, Yeah, you gotta
know this stuff. We do this all right, but first
we're going to go away and come back on Thursday.
Talk about the police for like another ninety minutes. So
buckle buckle up for that. Lads and ladies, boyos and

(01:42:14):
non binarios. And there's not enough good slang yet. It
hasn't caught up to changes in our cultural conversation. We
can end the podcast, all right, all right, Oh boy,
there's a threat about wanting to hear me rap on

(01:42:35):
the Reddit. That's probably a bad idea. Oh that's happening, bro.
Behind the Police is a production of I Heeart Radio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Make sure to check out Drink Champs, your number one

(01:42:55):
music podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Host A O.
R E and DJ E f N sat down with
artists and icon yea, which Vulture called one of most
significant interviews. I literally had to go like Danos and
I don't want to have to be the villain. But
when I went and did the Donda thing, they returned
and Abody had to sit back and watch the real leader.

(01:43:18):
Check out drink Champ's conversation with Yea and many more
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Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. This is Roxanne Gay, the host of The
Roxanne Gay Agenda, the back feminist podcast of your dreams.
Each week I talked to an interesting person about feminism, race,

(01:43:40):
writing in books and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics,
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(01:44:00):
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