How Police Unions Made Cops Even Deadlier

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
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

(00:23):
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

(00:44):
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 guests we've had for three straight weeks
or for two straight weeks. I think, man, I like
I'm getting in my hitting like Billy Wayne like like
like I mean you're hitting, you're hitting Propaganda zone. I

(01:06):
like that, man, my own zone like zone. Yeah, like
those 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 I quick joke about quick joke, not quick Joe,
quick story about cow zones. Absolutely, and we can move

(01:27):
on there. So my homeboy Jose 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
a Joe, right. Um, Joe lives in Atlanta. He was

(01:49):
ordering this pizza or he went to the spot, you know,
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, it's chocolate. Say these black people, right, and
the whole shop with 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

(02:09):
she didn't know what the cow zone was, right, So
so he but 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 right,
and they kind of whispered back and forth. You could
tell somebody must to google the cow zone, and then
he finally gets it, and then stupid him didn't open

(02:29):
the box till he got home, and he opened the
box and it was just a pizza folded in half.
I mean that is essentially that's the body 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,

(02:56):
the evolution of American policing in the nineteen hundreds is
not very much like a folded pizza. Uh, thanks, unfortunate,
Thank the Lord 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,

(03:16):
if you zones some cow zones, a little bit of barbecue,
a couple of you know what I'm saying. It's like, everybody,
just sit down, let's just have some cow zones, some
high links. I think a good of 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,

(03:38):
and it's cheaper too. I bet we'd save money on
tear gas and such because you can 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

(04:02):
new behind the cow Zone series. 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, Helton 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

(04:23):
US policing, the KKK, Jim Crow lynching and 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

(04:43):
last century to bring us to where we are now,
which is, you know, police stopping random people for no reason,
doing horrific violence to them, uh, and then being shielded
from consequences by police unions. So that's what we're going
to explain today. Okay, who yeah, there it is. This
will be fun. We're gonna talk a lot about police
unions and a lot about a stop and frisk and

(05:05):
broken windows. Okay, yeah, so those two stopping frisk gets
to like my life. Yeah yeah. So 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

(05:28):
of one scholar, So cops existed. We talked about this
in the episode two. Cops existed as muscle 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

(05:49):
no such thing as overtime, and their salaries were generally shipped,
so instead they took a lot 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

(06:12):
interesting but I think really important distinction to make. Actually
took a second, like yeah, dang, yeah, I need to
lean back from that one for a little bit like that.
That is profound. Yeah, yeah, Garry 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,

(06:34):
but also Chicago, because Chicago is a Midwestern city, but
we all kind of lump 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 was 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

(06:56):
more than just provide muscle for gangsters 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 their 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

(07:17):
track of the infected during epidemics. Now, 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. They don't freeze to death.

(07:39):
Half the cops do it. Yeah, 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

(07:59):
error of speakeasies and gangsters turned police departments into, you know,
whatever they had been before, a complete mockery of law
and order, and federal authorities 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 a prostitution syndicate by Los Angeles Mayor

(08:21):
Arthur Harper, police Chief Edward 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, head of the NYPD's vice Squad and
number three a dispute between the Mayor and District Attorney
of Philadelphia, each of whom controlled rival gambling syndicates, and

(08:43):
each of whom used loyal 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 stigative commission that was said up during this
period was the Linux Committee, which was formed to look

(09:03):
into the charges of police extortion in New York. It
found that promotion within the NYPD in the early nineteen
hundreds was based entirely on direct bribes paid by officers
to the Department of Promotion to sergeant cost six a
promotion to captain it cost fifteen thousand dollars. All of
these scampers and many Yeah. Yeah, he would just pay
to get promoted in the police. Yeah. It's just it's

(09:24):
just so crazy that, like, I mean, as much as
you want 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

(09:47):
always been like this, you know. And that's the part
that just 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 them a lot, You're I

(10:08):
am incynivized. You're like, like, you're just hoping these people
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

(10:30):
push other people down for their own success. I don't
know why you think putting a badge on a chest
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, yeah,
you know, there's there's a I forget who the name
of the individual who it was, but there I believe

(10:51):
it was a Holocaust survivor and he wrote something to
the He had a quote that was something along 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 could kind of go either
way depending on where it's seeing how it seems the
wind is blowing, um and like if the wind is

(11:11):
you know, blowing in the way that like if if
everyone in charge is literally running a 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, we'll
all find some way to make money within the system.
It's the ocean. It's still so you just kind of

(11:34):
like do it because that's I mean, you gotta swim, Yeah,
you gotta swim. Yeah. So uh. The current Committee of
nineteen investigated in YPD collusion and gambling in 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

(11:57):
York law enforcement sucked. Each of these commissions made changes,
but right up unto 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

(12:18):
criminal enterprise. Like that took 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 a direct one of the NYPD, you know,

(12:40):
being pimps or whatnot in the early nineteen hundreds. And
it was actually 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 copses muscle and his inside knowledge of
how department undercovers did prostitution stings in order to avoid

(13:01):
getting busted. He knew that like undercovers weren't allowed to
show their genitals to prostitutes, so he would make all
of the johns strip naked and like 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.

(13:22):
One of them was actually willing to work for free
in exchange for discounts with his favorite prostitutes. So again,
two eighteen is when that gets busted. Regular scumbag. It's awesome,
regular dudes just being normal scumbags. Yeah, it's like someone decided, like, okay,

(13:45):
let's take ten percent of the normal scumbag population and
make them immune to being punished if they shoot someone. Yes,
uh so yeah, Well, 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

(14:05):
started on the West Coast. Luminaries in you know that
part of the country began to wonder 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

(14:27):
guy is about the best cop you're 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

(14:49):
and torturing people. Like he 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 just as 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, obviously you can't take bribes that anymore. Yeah, yeah,

(15:12):
yeah again sixth grade education said oh yeah, well, we
gotta stop doing this that. Huh what if what if
we weren't just gangsters? Yeah, I tried to do the job, guys. Yeah,
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

(15:33):
the first police chief to put cops on bicycles in
nineteen ten. 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.

(15:54):
He was one of the first chiefs to use fingerprinting
of Valmer was 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 officers 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

(16:17):
of capital punishment. Um. He was notorious and fairly unique
among law men in this period for believing that communists
had a right to organize and state their views without
being beaten into bloody pols. This guy, yeah, he's the
best cop we're going to talk about. Like, I am impressed, bro.
Like you you see him riding by in his little

(16:37):
like big big front wheel, little chilly, silly police car,
silly bike, 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,
he was trying, yeah, at least trying. Yeah. And now
he was also one of the very first, like people

(16:58):
anywhere to teach class as in criminal justice, essentially like
helping to invent 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 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

(17:20):
the Midwest. I forget where where else he was the
police chief, and he was in California, California. Um 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

(17:40):
cities were drunken gangsters. Um And it basically O. W. Wilson,
you know, who is the protege of Valmer is like,
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
in their officers and stop them from, you know, just

(18:00):
selling bootleg liquor or whatever. So you can see the
logic and what Wilson was trying to do, right, it
makes it makes sense, It makes sense, but it didn't work.
Um 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

(18:21):
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 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

(18:41):
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, 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

(19:03):
at the root of what we have police for, um,
as opposed to them neeting bicycles, which when not that Yeah, yeah, my,
my my, I remember one of my my elementary school
teacher used to say, hey, if every place you touch
on your body, hurts. Your finger is probably broken. So
that's why I just think about I'm just like, maybe

(19:24):
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, 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

(19:44):
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. Most of these people are members of
the dangerous classes, which at that point were mostly racial
minorities in the United States. You know, the Irish weren't

(20:06):
really being oppressed no more. But bring that back. 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. 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 liberal. We's

(20:29):
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 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

(20:50):
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 con lifted here. Yeah, are we are we
killing these people for the 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

(21:12):
in order to try to gain some of the same
benefits of unions while also not feeling like complete hypocrites.
For the unions. Yeah, this did not work out well forever.
These fraternal organizations just didn't associations just didn't do what
unions do. The first department to seek straight up unionization
was the Cleveland police in eighteen ninety seven. Uh, they

(21:33):
petitioned 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 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

(21:55):
more money to kill us. Yeah yeah, yeah, you want
me to hell, you be better at stopping us. Yeah, no, no, sir. Yeah.
It's kind of like buying oil from countries you're at
war with and I'm sorry, yeah, or like partnering with

(22:18):
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 you,
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 one thing, like cops are right workers should unionize,
but that's like still still yeah, still problems. Yes, So

(22:41):
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
unionize in the a f L was an exactly a
big fan either um. But when they unionized anyway, nineteen
union organizers were fired and the police went on strike.

(23:02):
This is the first police strike with nearly officers off
the job. The people of Boston took the opportunity to
loot 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
Bostonian nature. Uh yeah, that sound 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

(23:23):
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
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 stri

(23:45):
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'ah not allowed to strike, and
I'm like, yeah, okay, that's stupid because that's the definition
of striking is like so even the property, that's like
the amounts of pace of acclamation. I'm like, oh, you've
fen a set free to slaves in the states that
are rebelling, Like you what ha. So I'm just sorry.

(24:07):
Just him making the proclamation just like sounded so stupid.
I'm like, that's striking means we're not listening to you. Yeah. Yeah.
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

(24:29):
traffic controllers were 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 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

(24:50):
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, I don't necessarily not
saying that I don't think he should be able to strike.
I'm saying it's different than just like miners going on
striker way, That's what I'm saying. It's like, at least
I don't necessarily cold, don't it. But at least it's
not it's not a ridiculous statement. It is a it

(25:11):
is a thing that we should have debated as a nation. Um, yeah,
because it is different. So yeah, Coolidge's stance was more
or less the last word on police unions and police
striking in particular 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

(25:33):
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
slow downs, starting in 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

(25:54):
are getting murdered, will step in there. But like, we're
not going to stop petty crime now. Yeah, we'll talk
about that in a little bit, Sophie, because 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

(26:17):
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 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

(26:40):
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 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. I'm going to quote next from an article

(27:02):
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 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 upon it. Here we go. A police
officer must not hesitate. If he does, the security and

(27:25):
safety of your family maybe jeopardize. You. See what they're
arguing there is Yeah, yeah, if if you 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 goat, there's the tool. Kid,
but are but we have to protect our women. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(27:52):
yeah like that. I enjoyed that. You know what else
I enjoy Robert, You know what I won't TechEd white No, No, okay,
um ship that was a bad way to lead this.
You know what supports police accountability um and things that
we can have safe subways without unaccountable heavily armed maniacs. Product.

(28:18):
So yeah, they all all of 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

(28:39):
not it's 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 eactly it. It's to

(29:00):
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 bac is um, but

(29:23):
organic baculum. It's organic. Yea, 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

(29:47):
of giving into minority groups with their whims and gripes
and shouting oh man, yeah 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? Can I just do my job? That's

(30:11):
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 it
winning better pay for themselves and sticking a thumb in
the eye of those pesky minorities who felt like someone
should stop them from Yeah. Uh. Police unionization spread throughout

(30:35):
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 act in the interest of officers, and obviously unions
are supposed to act into the interests of workers, but

(30:58):
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 other kind of worker really gets more money. That

(31:21):
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
they're not able to like the fucking A union representing

(31:41):
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 into be like no, no, no,
you have to keep employing this man all he did
with stab three people, Like yeah, I'm like that the

(32:02):
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
and then be like, yo, my union protects me because

(32:25):
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,
you have a hard job. But what is not your

(32:45):
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 pay.
They're like, and also if we beat someone, we should
be able to hide that from the public. Um, that's

(33:05):
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. A two thousand seventeen Reuters
special report on police union contracts and eighty two U
S cities found that most departments are now required to
a race officer disciplinary records after a set period of time.
Sometimes officers records are purged every six months. Eighteen cities

(33:29):
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 what their defense for that is, because we know
exactly what you're doing. But what what's their argument for that?

(33:50):
You know, 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 all sorts of ways we have to
hide that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, dissonance is cognitive yeah, so

(34:16):
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 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

(34:38):
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 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,

(35:00):
So there is we will continue. There's a lot more
evidence than just that that that the unionization specifically leads
to more police killings of civilians. Now, Guilso goes on
to note that the overwhelming majority of these added deaths
are non white people. Okay, yep, I mean yeah. Quote,

(35:20):
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 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

(35:43):
big part of this issue is that white supremacy is
baked into the very soul of you as policing. So
even though police unions didn't come into the picture until
a hundred years after slavery ended, 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 detecting racial violence from
law and enforcement, and that has remained a part of

(36:03):
them ever since. Other research is consistently borne out similar conclusions.
Two eighteen University of Oxford study if the hundred largest
American cities found that protections and police contracts were directly
and positively correlated with police violence against citizens. Two thou
nineteen University of Chicago study found that when collective bargaining

(36:23):
rights were given to Florida sheriff's deputies, it led to
a forty statewide increase in violent misconduct by deputies. Got forty.
When Okay, it's the stuff that you that you can
into it, into it and know, and then when you

(36:45):
see the actual numbers it's still like you still throw
up in your mouth a little, you know, Okay, it's
like you like that's why I keep trying to say.
It's like, yeah, I mean I know that, But now
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

(37:09):
despite all these receipts that you're you're showing, we still
have to explain to people that there's a problem. Yeah.
If if a new type of if a new type
of hybrid engine came out and we found out a
year in that it led to at increase in vehicle
explosions during like vendor benders, not only would that product

(37:31):
be pulled from the market, people would probably go to
jail because they would get prosecuted. Whoever would problem four
out of ten people gond when we drive this thing? Yeah,
we would at least try at least try yeah. Yeah.
So much of the violets caused by police unions could

(37:52):
be blamed on the fact that they make it as
hard as possible to fire dangerously unhinged and violet officers.
And I'm gonna go it again from The New Yorker here.
Other studies revealed that many existing mechanisms for disciplining police
are toothless. W b Eazy, a Chicago radio station, found
that between two thousand seven and two thousand fifteen, Chicago's
independent Police Review Authority investigated four hundred shootings by police

(38:13):
and deemed the officers justified in all but two incidents.
Since two thousand twelve, when Minneapolis replaced at civilian Review
Board with an Office of the Police Misconduct Review, the
public has filed more than misconduct complaints, yet only twelve
resulted in a police officer being punished. The most severe
penalty a forty hours suspension. When the Saint Paul Pioneer
Press reviewed appeals involving terminations, suspension, yes, misunder Yeah. When

(38:42):
the St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewed appeals involving terminations from
two thousand fourteen to two thousand nineteen, it discovered that
arbitrators 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. Yes, for those

(39:04):
demanding more accountability, A large obstacle is that disciplinary actions
are often overturned if an arbitrator finds that the penalty
in 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

(39:28):
the chief is like, give me your bedge and gun,
you're 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's

(39:50):
the like? Yeah, yeah, you know, if this is actually
what we're getting into, Because it turns out that it
is accurate that a lot of the times, UH police
chief 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,

(40:13):
And again this is like, like I'm sure that there
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, yeah,
guy ain't gonna shoot me. You ain't gonna put his

(40:33):
knee on my neck. Yeah, Which is 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 them in the last eleven years,
one thousand, eight hundred and eighty one officers had been
fired from the nation's largest police departments, and four hundred

(40:53):
and fifty one of those officers had successfully appealed and
gotten their jobs back. There's four hundred and fifty one
included an officer who in 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.

(41:15):
Got to give him another chance to win that fist fight. Yeah.
I'm like, there's the like tragically disgusting, and then there's
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. I wish I

(41:37):
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. You can't. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
there's no winning that fight. Yes. Um. One of my
favorite stories in this this really really wonderful Washington Post
article is the two thou twelve tale of Boston East

(42:00):
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 and two
thousand five, de Rosa 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 the club, both men encountered Jose Lopez, a

(42:22):
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, a guy acts as the getaway driver,
and obviously, when this is found out, he gets placed
on administrative leave and he's charged with being an accessory

(42:44):
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 in a
murder that his cousins committed, but he knew that he
was repeatedly getting drunk at the club while he should

(43:05):
have been working, and like we should fire him for
that he lied about to us. Um So do 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 got at least money back.

(43:28):
That one's a 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 gang banging, 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

(43:52):
like that's me. Like, 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 his 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,

(44:12):
you know, but like I just like, you know, I mean,
that was my cousin. Man, Like I'm gonna you know
what I'm saying, Like I'm gonna help. I'm gonna help
scrap with my cousin, you know. Um. And then I
was supposed to think of you any different because you
got a badge, right, No, you just like the rest
of us. You're gonna do ratchet ship because you ratchet

(44:32):
like all of us. Yeah, point exactly, Yeah, exactly. In
two thousand and seven, fort Worth police officer y sus
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

(44:53):
address of the dude that his ex girlfriend was going
out with, and several days later he showed up at
the man's house at night and shot the are 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 give
me your badge and gun thing, and he put Banda

(45:15):
on unpaid suspension um And while he was suspended and
under investigation, he was ordered not to represent himself as
a police officer. So like 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

(45:35):
officer of Coorseiately, he and some friends were pulled over
by another Fort Worth cople 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
at a limousine. This fucking dude finds a way. We
passed into the river. What are you doing man? Yeah? Yeah, yeah.

(45:59):
So when he asked Banda to step out of the car,
band to hand it 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.

(46:23):
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

(46:46):
actions he takes. So that's good. Congrats Fort Worth. His
great good job for two year old. Yeah, yeah, oh
thing thing, Yeah that is not the note. That's embarrassing
that that thing. I don't But we're going to go

(47:14):
to products. Now we're back, and we started talking about
Carney a soda fries, which I am normally very happy
with my decision to live in the Pacific Northwest, but
whenever somebody says Carney Asada, I longed for southern California. Yeah,

(47:39):
so I could go for some Carney fries. 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 two thousand and fourteen, seventeen year
old Kwan McDonald was murdered by Chicago police officer Jason

(47:59):
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 officer Van Dyke before he
killed a child. Van Dyke was eventually convicted of second

(48:20):
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 we're gonna go to prison for it.

(48:42):
But you also didn't break the rules of your job. Yeah,
but job's fine. Yeah, wow, 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 in terms of like benefits to

(49:04):
society or benefit to the profession of policing, but at
least in terms of the sheer amount of power that
they wield. The Jesus 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 support of Republicans. That's given them

(49:26):
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 of police unions, there's no one else I could
be talking about but Lieutenant Bob Kroll, head of the
Minneapolis Police Union. Yeah, president of the Minneapolis Police Union.

(49:49):
Bob has of course appealed the firing of Derek Chavin
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. And two thousand fifteen,
when to white MPD officers shot twenty four year old
Jamark Clark in the head while he was handcuffed on
the ground, Krol went on TV to talk about Clark's
violent criminal past and declare BLM a terrorist organization. Krol

(50:12):
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 Kroll of wearing a motorcycle
jacket with a white power patch sewed into the fabric,

(50:33):
and said he had a history of discriminatory attitudes and conduct.
He has told reporters who 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 MPD back in nineteen eighty nine,
and in his years on the force there were twenty
or more internal affairs complaints made against him. We don't

(50:53):
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, Yeah, Jo, 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 like he worked as a baker or like,

(51:15):
like as a computer programmer. Everybody replaced cop with donut maker. Yeah.
Sanitation worker, sanitation worker. In nineteen ninety four, he was
suspended for using excessive force in In nineteen nine five,
he was accused of beating, choking, and kicking a biracial
fifteen year old while shouting racial slurs. Yeah, Bob Roll.

(51:39):
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 days for this. It's it's cartoonish like,
like this is cartoon own level. Yes, the Minneapolis the

(52:04):
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 believe Bob Crowle was elected out
of fear. We're the only ones that support Your community
doesn't support you. Your police chief is trying to get
you fired. You see what I'm building to here. Police

(52:26):
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 damn thing when it comes to the police. Yeah,
because the unions are still there and they stonewall anything
from happening. When Kim Garner was elected d A of St.
Louis in two thousand sixteen, she promised to fight police

(52:49):
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
in New York more than a half century. Early year,
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.

(53:11):
Around the same time, a lawyer for the union waged
a legal fight to live it the ability of the
prosecutor's office to investigate police misconduct. The following year, a
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

(53:36):
book level power. Like and I just imagine, like you know,
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

(53:59):
you can it away with it, and anybody that comes
in to try to stop you, you got the power
to remove. Like it just got 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

(54:21):
have you never? Have you never pistol whipped a guy?
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. 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

(54:45):
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, oh, you know, I'll feel

(55:06):
good about it. Yeah, you still walk away like man,
all feel good about it? Yeah? Anyway, Yeah, and I
was I was joking about pistols, 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

(55:27):
the police on it even like, would they enjoy being
riot cops? Yeah? 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 of them, and they don't seem to like it. No, Yeah,
it's crazy, huh, one would think, right, yeah, so um yeah,

(55:51):
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

(56:13):
by his constituents. He called it a little bit like
a protection racket. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what it is, Steve,
exactly what it is. We're looking. And he used to
have 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 they don't have to come when

(56:36):
we call. Ye, 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 protests here wound

(56:59):
up in the neighborhood of 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 quick man,
you guys. Response times today, Wow, you guys, are you
guys are really on the ball when this neighborhood, this

(57:19):
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

(57:40):
stuff you're getting into that like our like dads 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, yeah. Um. In
two thousand twelve, a teenager named Alvin Cruz was stopped
by police and searched. This was not unusual for Cruise,

(58:02):
that had happened to 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.

(58:24):
You know that. 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

(58:47):
not a policy 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.

(59:08):
Do you know what't even about either of these guys? Uh,
not personally, except for they're the 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 nineteen
eighty two, Wilson and Kelling published an article in the
Atlantic that became the foundation of what we now know

(59:29):
as 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
the building is broken and left unrepaired, all the rest
of the windows will soon be broken. Yeah. So, in
order to keep crime down and keep neighborhoods nice, they argued,
all violations of public order have to be sternly punished

(59:49):
and prosecuted. 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, 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

(01:00:12):
new 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 researchers 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,

(01:00:39):
love me some Zimbardo. 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 weird
I'm gonna make a prison and staff it with teenagers.
This guy, there's a few people that making into your
history books that you're just like, how why are we
studying him? I would love to drink with Philip Zimbardo. Like,

(01:01:02):
as someone who is critical of virtually all of his research,
he sounds fun. Yeah, yeah, still sounds 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

(01:01:22):
like even more 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

(01:01:44):
that vandalism had more 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 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.

(01:02:07):
And he was right, but he was surprised that the
first vandals were a white, well dressed family and not
black teenagers. Um. Yeah, still, 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

(01:02:31):
can't Now, 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. He wrote, conditions that create

(01:02:54):
social inequality and put some people outside of the conventional
rewards structure of the society, make them in different to
its sanctions, laws and implicit norms. Mm 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 the old mobile he parked

(01:03:15):
in Palo Alto suffered a a somewhat different fate. According
to the Washington Post quote, after a week long unremarkable
steak out, Zimbardo'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 graduate students got carried away.

(01:03:37):
As Zimbardo described it, one student jumped on the roof
and began stomping it. In two we're pulling out the
door from its hinges. Another 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 turned into spectators and only

(01:03:58):
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 is 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 anonymity could prompt good

(01:04:19):
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 which so yeah, yeah, yeah,

(01:04:42):
I I can't. I can't speak to the accuracy of
Zimbardo'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 in part of what I
saw in riot night in Portland, which was the night

(01:05:03):
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 I was there,
it was a pretty fucking broad cross section of the population.

(01:05:25):
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. He
just got taken in by the moment. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Yeah,

(01:05:46):
so yeah. 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 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

(01:06:07):
this now, yeah 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,

(01:06:28):
until they came 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 both of these guys cite the Zimbardo

(01:06:52):
theory as the entire academic basis of their theory on crime.
H the Zimbardo study, but they actually interpreted it in
a way that ran come 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 the order of events that it routed

(01:07:13):
readers away from Zimbardo's conclusions. In their version, the car
and Palo 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 to draw a straight line between one

(01:07:34):
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 fray. It was the
spectacle of faculty and students destroying an oldsmobile in the
middle of Stanford's campus. Like yes, no one did it. Yeah,

(01:07:56):
they're like, oh, that professor's sucking up, 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, it's

(01:08:16):
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. I'm gonna
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

(01:08:37):
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 fun
up car windows and stealership 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

(01:08:58):
backpack in the car. It is a meme in San Francisco.
Never leave anything any 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 into report it and the officer said, what
do you want us to do about it? Right? Okay,

(01:09:19):
tost cot copper. Everyone wasn't while they're nail, they'll nail it.
Like it was one I remember now 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,
I'm like, touche. I mean, you know what I want
you to do is when I talk about police abolition,

(01:09:41):
not be like, who are you going to call if
someone robs you? Because here we are, because it's not
and you just told me you're not going to do that. Dang. Yeah. Um.
So I first read that article about like the how
the broken windows police and 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

(01:10:03):
broken windows policing theory during I I took criminal justice
for a while in college. I wanted to be in
law enforcement at one point um, and reading 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
Fatalities The End of Policing this year. Fatality points out

(01:10:24):
that 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 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,

(01:10:45):
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 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

(01:11:05):
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 architects, one of the two architects of the
broken Windows theory. So here's what it writes. Although he
has more leisure than almost anyone, the indifference apathy, if
one prefers of the lower class person, is such that

(01:11:27):
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 them by carelessness
or even by vandalism. Oh my gosh, right now, yeah,

(01:11:48):
it makes you realize. Yeah, it's just what justlike what
do you know about being poor? Go in 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, stopping
frisk and then like kind of the like gang in
junctions and street sweepers, like I've always kind of like

(01:12:11):
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 care about our
neighborhoods unless we have authoritative powers that keep us in line.

(01:12:32):
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 I the gang in junctions, will
I don't know if if we're if we're even gonna
cover that. But like I've always kind of seen them
because they were all around. It was all that eighties
and nineties like policing that that that turned me into

(01:12:54):
the like policing don't work, you know activists that I am.
Now it's like under that sort of thinking. I know,
if they aught 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 in line. Yes,
it's just all makes sense. Now that's clearly how you

(01:13:15):
think of us. Yes, yes, and it will become clearer
where all of yeah, yeah, so uh. Banfield basically thought
that cities ought to be abandoned 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 decline and made great again
because if only the cause of that decline were properly recognized.

(01:13:38):
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. By supporting the more radical
demands of the later urban expressions of the civil rights

(01:13:59):
movement that it's 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. They would continue in their slothful
and destructive ways. Since the root of the problem was

(01:14:21):
either an essentially moral or cultural failure or a lack
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 racism that emerged as a mix
of biological and cultural explanations for the inferiority of poor blacks. Wilson, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(01:14:48):
thoughts like just like the religious right, and like yeah,
you know, you know, I'm I'm I grew up with
church boy, you know what I'm saying, Like I still
got a lot of stuff still serves me well, but
like I'm just thinking about out 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. And like in the

(01:15:10):
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 of you,
So like how just how? And then when you get
get of age and you realize not, I think y'all
just racist, like when it kind of like clicks, just
the like crisis of like faith that you have at

(01:15:33):
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 not welcome here anyway, going yeah, yeah, So back
to Wilson a little bit, because this is the next
part is important. No 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

(01:15:55):
while race was not one of the core determinants, language
about i Q and body type opened the door to
a kind of sociobiology that led Hernstein to co author
the openly 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

(01:16:19):
is friends with both of the authors of that, and
works on a book with one of the authors of that.
This is the guy who co inventced 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,

(01:16:42):
oh my god, it all its hearing it all together,
it's just like, yes, yes, 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 want to empower were the US police to interfere
more directly in the daily lives of more, particularly non

(01:17:04):
white people. Prevention of crime had been the goal since
the days of Volmer, but 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 it root?

(01:17:25):
A deeply conservative attempt to shift the burden of responsibility
for declining living conditions onto 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've gotta

(01:17:49):
stop him from breaking breaking windows in their neighborhood by
arresting them for weed or whatever. Yeah. Yo. The nuance
that like like like sna match 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

(01:18:12):
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

(01:18:33):
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

(01:18:55):
sense now when you when you understand that, like the
laws are the crime, the laws probably unjust already. So
this act of survival shouldn't be a crime in the
first place because it's an active survival, right. But when
you understand it as just an act of survival, right,
then the idea of punishing a person for trying to
survive seems preposterous because it yes, yeah so um. One

(01:19:23):
example of the violence caused by broken 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

(01:19:43):
everything up. Uh. You might be surprised to learn that
Garner's 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 Gardners illegal
cigarette sales harming their own businesses. So kind of back

(01:20:04):
to episode two 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 it is
a perfectly normal thing in a lot of the world

(01:20:25):
everywhere in the world. 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
bum a cigarette 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,

(01:20:45):
you'll get a cigarette with your coffee. 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

(01:21:06):
the best case scenario from sending 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,

(01:21:27):
or just like go 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 nobodies. Yeah,
there was no garrets 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

(01:21:49):
NYPD instituted 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. As Alex
Vitali 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

(01:22:12):
and they're seemingly 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 windows style policing, which targets low level in
fractions for intensive, invasive and aggressive enforcement. Now, the death
of Garner caused a flurry of national condemnation of the

(01:22:34):
NYPD and a conflict between the department and Mayor build
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

(01:22:54):
their squad cars if they felt it was absolutely necessary,
and they avoided all proactive policing measures. 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

(01:23:16):
Foyed CompStat reports from two thousand and thirteen to two
thousand and sixteen. These reports include weekly activity for each
NYPD precinct for all the rests and criminal 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

(01:23:38):
that civilian complaints of major crimes fell between three and
six percent during the same period. Civilians 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 plants. The study authors noted,

(01:24:02):
quote in their efforts to increase civilian compliance, certain policing
tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious 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
in first style public order policing tactics introduced as a
result of that theory. Quote. Our results imply not only

(01:24:24):
that these tactics fail at their stated objective of reducing
major legal violations, but also 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

(01:24:46):
what they were doing actually helped. Yeah, if you had
a DA 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 running for fucking
state office, the general office on that ship, right, yeah. Yeah,
And it's like, oh, we'll show you. I'll show you, guys,

(01:25:08):
how much you need us. Actually you are the problem. No, Actually,
things actually seem a lot better. Actually 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, it's actually okay.
It seems like it's actually okay, dude. Yeah. I would

(01:25:30):
love to somehow or another try to invoke just the
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.

(01:25:53):
And of course you know obviously that you know, Bloomberg
didn't last in the in the he it was a
joke anyway, 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 it'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

(01:26:14):
is you can get stopped and searched for nothing for
the possibility that you might be doing something. So like
it's just so moving about freely. You know, I brought
up again earlier, like because the the l a version
of that was like the gang injunctions. So if you

(01:26:37):
were if if you and two of your friends happened
to be walking home from basketball practice in your clothes
kind of match, that's a gag, right, So no matter what,
if there's more than one of you, you're in a gang.
So 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

(01:26:59):
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,
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

(01:27:22):
it was dudes that like disappeared off the streets. We
didn't until we were in college because of this stuff.
And so they came out of prison gangsters. They didn't
go in gangsters that came out, you know. So like
I I'm ranting, but like like please understand the psychological

(01:27:43):
like part of that. Yeah, shit good you just you
just like just the I mean, I'm a full grown man.
I paid freaking property taxes, I'm working on a damn
home loan right now, and I still whenever I just

(01:28:03):
hear that whoa, whoa, my body is still just kind
of like 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 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

(01:28:24):
the woolp of the police st everyone 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, 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

(01:28:46):
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 exist
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 serious which is

(01:29:08):
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 Sophie, Like, man,
y'all don't put yah, don't put stones and slingshots, boy by,
Like this is just seven to ten hours of receipts

(01:29:32):
that you know what I'm saying, Like, man, we appreciate
this work. I know. I'm a part of But I
appreciate y'all for doing this. I mean, I think it's like,
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

(01:29:53):
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
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

(01:30:14):
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. Yeah, yeah, they
they they fought like they fought 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,

(01:30:36):
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 is one part of the effort. And
the only way voting works is if there is like
clearly enough rage and and anger and um and and

(01:30:58):
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 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

(01:31:19):
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 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,

(01:31:43):
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 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

(01:32:04):
the continuation of politics through other means. Um. And police
have been talking about how there's a war on police
for a very 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

(01:32:25):
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 a 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

(01:32:47):
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 is has provided some some additional munitions. Yes,
and it has good on you. Well, prop you want

(01:33:08):
to plug your plug doubles before we roll out? I do.
This is uh, this is prop hip hop over here. Uh,
website and Instagram and all those things are prop hip
hop dot com. Um, there's cups and T shirts and
music uh in other podcasts that I'm part of. Um,

(01:33:33):
and I am don't have anything else to plug because
I'm reliving my teen years in my head right now. Shit. Yeah,
and I am very happy to be a part of this.
I'm very happy to be heard. That's another reference that
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

(01:33:55):
all good. It's coming to America, man, oh shit, Oh okay, yeah, 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
spend one to two days at least, and I am

(01:34:17):
just going to indoctrinate you in all of just black
culture references, urban 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
these jokes. I think that's a great idea. Actually, yeah

(01:34:38):
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, Yeah,

(01:34:59):
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 color purple, you gotta see Friday
at We got to catch you up, man, because yeah,
and I feel like you'd appreciate all these Yeah, No,
do the right thing is the one that I was
thinking about. That's the one at the pizza shop. Yeah,
the pizza shop, Yeah, the right Yeah. Okay, okay, all right,

(01:35:21):
you need to know the radio. Rahim is, yeah, you
got to know this stuff. We will 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 non binarios. And there's not enough good slang yet.

(01:35:45):
It hasn't caught up to changes in our cultural conversation.
We can end the podcast alright, alright, Oh boy, there's
a threat about wanting to hear me wrap on the
at it. That's probably a bad idea. Oh that's happening.
Brom Behind the Police is a production of I Heart Radio.

(01:36:10):
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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