September 3, 2021 • 56 mins
A.J. Ali is a veteran, activist and documentary filmmaker who wrote and directed the 2017 documentary ‘Walking While Black: L.O.V.E Is The Answer’, which has spurred the L.O.V.E is the answer police training program that is being implemented in police stations around the country. David and A.J. spoke about methods that police can use to improve community relations and the progress thats been made since the George Floyd killings.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm David Grosso, and you're listening to follow the Profit.
We're gonna unpack a really difficult conversation. I'm talking about
crime and policing, which is a hot button political issue
these days. That's all we hear about on the news
(00:20):
as crime goes up and distrust and police is at
an all time high. So my guess a J. L. E.
He's a veteran author and director of a documentary which
preceded this whole awakening and the Black Lives Matter movement,
and it was called Walking while Black Love is the Answer,
and he really doubles down on the idea that love
(00:41):
is the answer to many of the problems that persist
in communities across the country. So we're gonna talk about
the root causes of police brutality, how to modernize policing,
and how to make sure that police and communities could
get along and get the job done. How are you doing,
(01:02):
a j Hey, how are you? Thank you so much
for having me on. So the number one bumper sticker
I see these days is the the American flag with
the blue line, Blue Lives batter and I see a
lot of BLM bumper stickers as well. You made this
movie a few years ago. How did you have insight
(01:23):
into that this would be the biggest issue of our time?
Oh well, I didn't, David, I didn't. I had no
idea that obviously all these things we're gonna be taking place.
But um, when I was harassed, profiled, harassed, target for
harassment for over a year, that was back in time frame,
(01:46):
and so there were reports of things happening, but they
weren't all over the news every day, you know, like
it is these days. But back then, when it happened
to me, uh for the umpteenth time, uh, this this
particular time, I thought I was going to die on
the side of the road. And and I thought, you know,
I can't do this anymore. And you know, somebody's got
(02:08):
to do something about it. And I thought, well, might
as well be me, And and so I decided to
tell the story of what was happening. And you know,
and of course we all know what has unfolded over
the past several years, and um, yeah, it's it's a big,
big problem and we and we need solutions. Can you
tell me specifically what happened to you, just any of
(02:29):
the stories? Yeah, yeah, sure, So, Um, the incident June
of twelve. I was I was taking a walk in
my own community and I was stopped by young Howard
County police officer. This is in Maryland, right between Baltimore
and Washington. And his first words to me were what
(02:50):
are you doing here? And then it went downhill from there.
It didn't take him long to accuse me of breaking
in the homes and so forth, and and so that's
how that incident UH started to unfold. One officer UH
then turned into three a little while later. And the
only thing that saved me was I had the ability
(03:11):
to call my attorney and have him on speaker phone,
and they backed off from the intentions that they had.
So how do we fix this problem? Because, you know,
policing and community relations seem to be at the forefront
of concerns these days, and we have these two you know,
(03:32):
opposing views that you know, policing needs no reform, right
and in fact, defunding the police has made things worse.
Or we have what you're telling us, which is, you know,
policing needs heavy reform. So how do we begin to
initiate the changes that we need amidst a very divided
(03:53):
country on this issue? Yeah, you know, at the end
of the day, everybody wants to go home to their
at least safe, right, So how do we how do
we get to that point where where all of us
can can be out in society and do the things
that we love to do and not be challenged for
it because of the color of the of our skin
(04:13):
or or even you know what kind of uniform we're wearing. Um,
we all have to do a better job of seeing
the humanity in the other the other person, right, if
we're honest, we all have biases, and unfortunately, those biases
you know, get out of control with people sometimes. And
(04:35):
if it's someone that's got a badge and a gun
and the ability to take someone's freedom or someone's life. Um,
if that person is not healthy mentally and emotionally, if
they're carrying around racist baggage, and and they're not challenged
uh to to do better, to understand people uh more
(05:01):
in a deeper way, you know, then that's that's a
recipe for disaster. And there's a lot of people in
communities as well who are hurting, they're in pain, they're
they're they've been traumatized by various things in life and
and so there, you know, there's some people that are
in the community of hurting people as well. So so
so the movie and the book that you've made is
(05:23):
titled Walking while Black. Love as an acronym, So what
does love stand for? Yeah, So the the love acronym
is UH to learn about people, and then the OH
is to open your heart to their needs. The V
is to volunteer yourself to be part of the solution,
and the E is to empower others. So these are
(05:47):
four action steps. It's not some you know, just warm,
mushy feeling. It's about putting love into action every day
with the people that are in your life. So, how
do we begin to rebuild trust in the police? And
it's it's actually so much more more murky than it
(06:09):
used to be, right, because police there's a lot of
minority communities who now wear the uniform. Right, there's a
lot of UH communities that you know, have high crime rates,
so they need police. So how do we begin to
reconcile all these different things, right, the lack of trust
on one side, the fear on the other, the long
(06:30):
held prejudices of some people who wear the badge. How
do we begin to rebuild trust between these disparate communities. Well,
you know, a lot of people, unfortunately, they lean on
things like pr campaigns and national night out events and
even coffee with a cop. Now there's nothing wrong with
(06:50):
those things, with those events, but those are moments, right,
and many times those moments are used to trot out
the community service officers, the people that are trained heavily
on putting on a good face for the police department,
for the for the community. Uh. And then meanwhile, there's
other officers that are running around doing bad things, same day,
(07:12):
same time, same community. But they're they're not the ones
that are designated as community resource officers, so they're you know,
they're just doing their thing. So the when it comes
down to it, we've got to go down to the
cellular level and teach people how to police with empathy.
And quite frankly, everyone in society has got to be
(07:35):
taught these same lessons because, uh, it's not just a
problem with with the police treating people poorly. People are
treating people poorly period. Right. What gets the headlines is
when a police officer does something bad, and especially nowadays, um,
you know, and we've got to we've got to see
(07:56):
past the obvious and get down to, uh, you know
what really are the root causes are of these issues,
and none of us are taught how to love our
neighbor in school. Um, David, I don't know if you
if you've ever had a class in elementary school, high school,
or anywhere else, college, wherever. Have you had a class
(08:16):
specifically on teaching you how to love your neighbor at church,
but not really in a public or private school. Yeah? Yeah,
And that's that's see, that's part of the problem. We're learning.
We're learning a lot of things, but we're not learning
the basics. And the basics when it comes to this
(08:37):
is how do I treat someone who's different than me?
How do I treat someone who maybe I don't you know,
I don't relate to them, you know in some way. Well,
the first step is to learn about a person, and
we go on with those other three steps. Open our heart,
volunteer to be part of the solution, empower others to
the same. We we've got to learn how to love people,
(08:58):
and that's that's our mission. You know. I had a
choice to make when when I was targeted for harassment
after I reported the initial incident to internal affairs, human
rights counsel and then double a CP. And and when
I did that, things got worse, much worse. I was
being followed, stop, got threats. So I had to make
(09:19):
a choice. Do I hate back, do I treat them
worse right? Do I meet force with force? Or do
I tap into something that's going to change everything? And
that was the decision that I made. And I can
only speak for myself. I know that that was a
good decision. I know that it worked. I know that
lives have been changed as a result. Uh. And you know,
(09:43):
I recommend it for for everyone. Because everywhere we take
this program, everywhere we teach people how to love. Things
are getting better. So we hear a lot of defund
the police. Tell me about that. What are your general
feelings on defunding the police. I don't believe that the
police should be defunded. I believe that resources should be
(10:06):
reallocated in some instances. But do we need the police
and do we need them to be strong? Absolutely? Uh,
there's a lot of bad people out there or you know,
people doing bad things, you know, and and so we
need the police. When uh, someone tries to break into
my home, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna call my
(10:29):
neighbor or my cousin. I want to be able to
call the police. We're trying to handle situations like this,
but we need them to do their job. And I
don't think that their job is to be social workers.
And I don't think that, uh they're I don't think
their job is um to do a many of the
(10:49):
things that they're that they're being forced to do. Now.
I think that we should give more money to groups
that are doing the work in the communities, that are
keep in the communities together, and let the police do
what they do best, which should be to maintain order
and peace. They should be peace officers. And we've gotten
(11:13):
away from that in many communities, and and and some
of it is because we've put too much on their shoulders.
And we've got to do better as a society of
of dividing up that those money, those moneys, that those
resources and giving them to the groups that actually can
do things that can prevent crime. So we're we're putting
(11:34):
too much on their shoulders, asking them to do too
many things, and you know this is what we get
as a result. Yeah, it's very interesting you say that,
because I would agree as well, because crime is expensive.
This podcast is of course called follow the Profit. And
you know, poor communities are expensive for everyone, especially for
(11:54):
the people who live there and for the governments that
run them, because crime causes all sorts of economic glosses.
And I agree with you. Teachers are another profession that
we ask them to do too much. We're asking them
to heal society when really they're just caught in the
middle of a storm right there. So how do we
make cops do their job, empower them to do a
(12:16):
better job. What are some ways besides teaching them love
that we can make sure that cops are keeping community
safe and not eroding trust in the very communities where
they work. Yeah, so it starts with that, you know.
That's that's the first step is they're very rarely given
any empathy based training. There's a lot of tactical training,
(12:40):
but if you look at how many hours are spent
on on actually treating people with respect and and having
empathy and relating to the community, you you might find
four hours, you might find a day of training in
a year. Another thing is that police go through a
mental evalue ouation when they get hired, but they may
(13:02):
not go through another one for the next five years. Meanwhile,
they've had dozens or hundreds of traumatic incidents that have
changed the way that they view the world and the
way that they view the people that they're serving. So
we we've got to do a much much better job
with a kind of training that we're offering. Uh, there's
(13:22):
there's other things that you know, once you get into
the once you get to the training part and you've
done that, then you've got to reinforce that with actions,
right because if you if you don't use it, you'll
lose it. Right. So if you learn these principles, then
you got to put them into action. So what we're
doing is we're setting up opportunities for peace officers and
(13:45):
communities to do things together. For example, in Yiden, Pennsylvania,
just outside of Philadelphia. Uh, Chachi, that's the name of
the chief there, Anthony Poparo. He goes by Chachi. He
became the first police chief in the country to oh
been what we call a love garden. That's a concept
that we created where we get police, peace officers and
(14:08):
the rest of the community to come together to plant
fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices and as they're growing
those things, they're also growing relationships and when they when
the food comes, they're going to give that food away
to people in the community that need it. And there's
many communities that are that have a lot of people
(14:28):
who are food insecure, right And so I'll give you
an example in Compton, California, the Sheriff's office has a
youth center there and they have a garden and the
deputies and the young people grow food together and they
give over ten thousand pounds of food away to elderly
(14:48):
people in that community every year. Uh. That makes a
big difference. So love gardens. That's That's one thing. We've
got a big event on September sevent called Love is
the Answer Day where groups of people, peace officers and
community members are gonna be painting murals about putting love
into action in the community. And they're also going to
(15:09):
be doing other things. But that event is designed to
get people together for a special moment that builds into
a movement in their community. So when those murals are up,
they've got a reminder, a visual reminder of the beauty
that can be created when we come together. There's other
things that we're doing as well. We're teaching people to
become mentors. We've got a mentoring circle training program that
(15:33):
we've just launched where we're gonna have peace officers and
other community members mentoring returning citizens and young people and
even having young people, college students and even some high
school students mentoring peace officers, teaching them what it what
it means to be a public servant from their perspective.
(15:53):
So we're doing some things that are bringing people together
and helping them to do life together so that they
learn and about each other and they can open their
hearts to each other and they can be of service
to each other. So what is a peace officer? How
(16:16):
does that work? So this is kind of like a
different profession. So this is a third party between the
you know, community member and the police and the police officer.
What do they do? Well, Actually, a peace officer is
a police officer. But see, we're not seeing a lot
of that at least on the news. You know, we've
got to look for for that. A peace officer, uh
(16:39):
is a is a police officer, but the it's the
same job, different term. Now, if you if you talk
to someone who's in the profession, if they tell you
they're a peace officer that will give you a hint
at at how they're approaching the job. Um, so you
know that that's the term that we should go back
(16:59):
to it. One time that was that was it peace officer,
and we've gone into a different direction. And so every
police officer should be striving to be a peace officer,
someone who is is helping to bring peace to the community,
not adding to the tension and the violence in the trauma.
(17:21):
So you're suggesting that empathy is a way that police
officers can better understand the communities where they are policing.
Oh absolutely, Oh yeah, yeah. I mean empathy is the
is the key, and we can't we can't get there
without training, especially in policing. We all need it, we
all need more of it. I mean we see it
(17:43):
on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, we see it everywhere, right, We
see it in the news. We see how people are
treating each other with with all that's going on, with
all the divisions that are happening with through COVID and
politics and war, you name it, we're not seeing a
lot of empathy in general, and and and so there
(18:03):
has been a gap. We've just not been taught how
to love our neighbor. It all comes back to that,
and and and in policing especially, and you mentioned education
teaching as well. There's not enough of it in teaching.
There's got to be just more empathy in general. And
(18:23):
we've got to take a step back ask ourselves, how
do we treat that person that cut us off? Do
we retaliate with road rage? How do we treat that
person that you know that maybe gave us a dirty look? Right?
I'm not saying let people walk all over you, but
(18:43):
I am saying, and this is coming from a veteran
who served in the Military Air Force at a nuclear
missile base, right, the value of peace to us was
paramount because with us at our base, it was worst
case scenario. If things got to the point where we
had to go to go to war, it was it
(19:08):
was gonna be nasty. Right, So we knew that we
had to do everything we we we possibly could to
protect peace. That was the number one priority. With all
that firepower we had nuclear weapons, Our number one priority
was peace. It was finding ways to to love people.
(19:29):
And so we've got to take a step back and
evaluate where we are and and be honest with ourselves
and and learn these lessons that that we're going to
help us to be better human beings, treat people with
more humanity. That's across the board. That's why, you know,
I spend my days reaching out to two people in
(19:53):
law enforcement and activists with with social justice groups and
ministries and companies and and other groups and bringing people
together to teach them these things in the same space.
Not cops in one room and students in another. But
we're bringing them together to have these tough discussions in
(20:15):
safe spaces. And that's what's needed. And we've got to
do the work. If we don't do the work, it's
not gonna happen on its own. And it's you know,
it's not it's not a sexy sound bite for radio
or television or podcasts. You know, this whole thing about
bringing people together. You know, this whole society is based
on conflict on you know, hits on videos. And if
(20:39):
I were to post a video of somebody beating someone
with a baseball bat, I'd get ten million views. But
if I post a video next to it talking about
loving somebody and and and how do you how do
you find a way to love your neighbor? Be lucky
to get a thousand views. Right, we've got to go
away from what's what's popular in pop culture. It's getting ratings,
(21:01):
and we've got to go back to values and in
the simple things, you know, and be willing to put
in the time and effort and work to make it happen.
Because there are no overnight solutions with where we're at.
We've got to put in the work and the time
to make things better. So how do cops receive your work,
(21:24):
because they're seeing pretty low morale these days with the
whole defund police movement. Yeah, yeah, you know. Um, we've
been at this for nine years now. Um. It took
about seven years, maybe seven and a half years to
start getting calls back. And in the past two years,
I've been invited to participate uh in in in law
(21:49):
enforcement organizations. UH, first as a guest, and then I
was invited to join the International Association of Chiefs of Police,
which is a rare honor for a civilian. I'm on
their Crime Prevention Committee that have regular uh interactions with
leaders of that organization. In fact, the the the executive director,
(22:11):
Terry Cunningham. Uh, he's in my film, uh and he's
he's in there talking about what it's gonna take for
the for the policing profession to do a better job.
And not everybody like that. You know, everybody wasn't on
board with what he said, but he's stuck by that
message and he's opened the door to people like me
to come in and help make things better. Um. You know,
(22:34):
I also serve on a couple of committees for the
n double A CP. I'm on a crime prevention committee
for the for the state of California, the California Crime
Prevention Officers Association. So so we're we're getting the response.
We're getting chiefs and sheriffs and even district attorneys calling
(22:54):
us now every day saying, hey, how can you help us?
And uh. In one town, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the district
attorney there, Matt Weintrobe, he took on Love as the
Answer as a program at the beginning of last year
and he has been working it and he's seen amazing
(23:16):
things happen. Out of the forty police departments in his community,
about thirty five of them now are totally on board
with Love as the Answer. They're teaching that to their officers.
That's their mantra. Now they're they're using that in that
in that county. And at the end of the year,
Matt and I we were both awarded UH Awards from
(23:38):
the Bucks County Bar Association for the difference that had
been made in that community. People's lives are changing there
and people are growing closer as a result of his
work and in the work of the Peace Center in
Bucks County that has facilitated a lot of the events there. So, um,
when when law enforcement leaders learn about the work that
(24:00):
we're doing and the difference that we're making, they're now
starting to call us. And that's a good feeling to
know that our reputation is such that they respect the
work that we're doing and they're actually bringing us in
because they are many of them now are looking for
ways to do their job better. That's a good sign.
(24:20):
So what specific policy changes are you advocating for and policing, UH.
You know, the biggest policy change that I'm navigating for
is for every officer in every interaction to treat that
the people that they're dealing with with love. Now, all right,
(24:40):
somebody's gonna say, man, you're crazy. If somebody's coming at
you with a with a knife, you're gonna love them. Well,
I'll give you the words of Chief Melvin Russell, forty
years with the Baltimore Police Department. Melvin may have to
apprehend someone, may have to take somebody down sickally, right,
(25:01):
but he's he's not going to do it like that
person's an enemy. He's gonna do it like that person
that's his brother or his sister, or his mother or
his father. And so he he policed with love. Right.
He didn't use unnecessary force, he didn't antagonized people, he
(25:23):
didn't drop f bombs every other word. Right, He didn't escalate,
he de escalated. He treated people like he would want
to be treated. He treated people with love. And so
I would walk around the streets of Baltimore with with
mel and some some guys would come up to him
and and hug him and you know, um just love
(25:45):
on him, right, and then they'd leave and then he
tell me, yeah, that guy just spent you know, six
years in prison for for for murder. You know that
this other dude you know is dealing drugs currently. Right,
But they had such respect for him because even the
people that he arrested, he showed him love. And when
they and when they come back and see him, they
(26:07):
will respect him as a man, as a person because
of the humanity. You know, we got past the good
guy bad guy thing cops and Robert thing. You know,
we got down to the humanity level. So you know
it's possible, it's proven, it works. You know, it can happen.
And you can police, you can be a peace officer.
(26:29):
You can do that job and do it well and
and treat people respect and love and and and they
will treat you with that respect and love back. We
got to do it over and over and over and over.
We've got to commit to it and not waver from it,
you know, and and just all too often the results
(26:49):
that people want they want him overnight because that's you know,
their their term in office is going to be up
in six months and they want to look good. So
you know, they got to get everything straight right then
and there. Right, But we've got to make decisions with
a long term perspective, not about what's it gonna do
in the next hour or day, but how's it going
to change things a month from now, six months from now,
(27:12):
two years from now. We've got to be committed to
the long haul. So that's it. But crime is surging
right now. I don't feel particularly safe in a lot
of big cities. I mean it's gotten markedly worse under
COVID and obviously that has you know, dramatic consequences for
(27:33):
many communities. How do we fight crime with love? Because
sometimes it is adversarial, right, Sometimes my safety is in danger,
your safety is in danger, and cops feel a lot
of danger too. Absolutely, Yeah, I mean there is a
lot of crime out there. But again, I'm gonna come
back to it. You know, we can't solve things overnight.
(27:55):
We can't arrest our way out of this, we can't
just break down more doors. Right, We've got to uh
put this into action if we ever want to see
any lasting change. And so you can be a peace
officer and do your job and do it with love
(28:16):
and be highly effective. Um, you know, who's who's who's
out there committing crimes? Why are they doing it? What
got them to that point? What what's lacking in their
reservoir that needs to be filled up? Right? Those are
the questions that we have to ask. How can we
help people to be their best? And and I'm gonna
(28:39):
go back to Mel. Mel was doing some work with
Ray Lewis, the former Baltimore Raven Hall of Famer. And
they went into communities in Baltimore and sat down with
people that were actively involved in gang activity, and they
asked them, is this what you want to be doing
(29:01):
with your life? And they were honest with them, and
and and and the many of the guys said, no,
I'd rather be doing such and such, but no one
will give me a chance. And so I'm gonna do
what I got to do to put food on the table.
And so Mel and Ray and others that that that
(29:21):
we're working with them set out to help find those opportunities.
And they worked with institutions like Johns Hopkins and others
and got people jobs, got people training, got people to
get out of that life right. And there needs to
be much more of that. We need to be willing
to to to to go out on a limb and
(29:43):
speak to someone who we might not ordinarily speak with
and say, brother or sister, how can I help you?
How can I be there for you? What what are you?
And I asked this too, I asked this of of
young people in particular that come to our workshops. I
have them come up to the in the room and
I say, tell everyone here what you want your life
(30:04):
to be like in five years, and then tell tell
everyone here how they can help you get there. And
when young people do that, and then you see the
arms of business leaders and peace officers and and and
pastors and rabbis and others, they raise their arms and
they say, I'm here to help. I'll stand by you,
(30:27):
I'll be there for you for these next five years.
That's what it's all about. It's about people coming together,
about being there for each other, giving people to training
and the jobs and the options and the care and
the love that they need so if they don't have
to resort to crime to put food on the table.
You know, at the end of the day, everyone's got
(30:48):
to eat, everyone's got to have a place to stay,
everyone's got to be able to take care of their families.
And if we don't give people the opportunities to do
it legally, they're gonna find some way to do it otherwise.
And so we have to do a much better job. Again,
we're putting too much on the police. We've got to
find a way to love our neighbor so that they
(31:09):
don't have to resort to doing things that are gonna
land them in trouble. So a lot of this is economic.
At the root of all of this is that people
need to put food on the table. How do we
help them do that in these areas that have high crime,
because high crime tends to scare away capital and investment.
It does exactly the opposite of what we want in
(31:29):
these areas. Yeah, David, you're right, and and you know
it comes back to the premise of your show, right, Uh,
you know, yeah, a lot of things revolve around economics.
Most things revolve around economics. I mean, the number one
reason why marriages break up is financial, right, And but
you know what's driving that. Sometimes it's driven by poor health.
(31:52):
Someone gets sick. You know, my wife had a cancer battle.
We lost everything during that time. Um, Fortunately we didn't
lose our relationship. We found a way to stay together
and keep loving each other and fight through that. Right.
But yeah, everything comes back to this this notion of okay,
we've we've got to have our basic needs met. And
(32:13):
so in a in a capitalistic society, it's dog eat dog,
you know, And a lot of times people aren't caring
about the next person. And then somehow and I don't
want to make this about politics, but you know, if
someone does something good for someone or wants to help
someone out, then then being called a socialist. Well, if
(32:33):
that's what you want to call me for helping someone out, Okay,
you know, fine, call me whatever you want, but I'm
gonna love my neighbor. Right. We have got to take
away the stigma of being nice and being caring. You know,
it's it's not about machismo. It's not about about taking
someone else down so that you can rise up. If
(32:56):
I can help five or ten people to rise up,
guarantee they're gonna be there for me when I need them.
I've experienced that in real life, so I know that
it works. You know, if I treat people like crap,
they're not gonna be there for me if I need them.
And so we've we've got to understand as a society
that we are all Ohannah Hawaiian for family, an extended family. David,
(33:22):
now that we've met, I'm gonna treat you like you're
my brother. You know, if you need something, if you
need the shirt off my back, it's yours. You know,
I'm gonna be there for you now if you're if
you're messing up and coming to my house and stealing
things off myself, then I'm gonna have to treat you
with some tough love. You know. I'm gonna have to,
you know, evaluate that and figure out a different way
(33:44):
to you know, I'm not gonna put myself and my
family in danger, but I'm gonna try to find a
way to be there for you. And if I can't
help you, I'm gonna help you get the help that
you need. We've got to be there for each other.
You know. If someone down the street is hurting to
the extent that they're they've got to find a way
to make ends meet. If we don't help them collectively,
(34:08):
then they're gonna break into one of our homes and
take what we've got so that they can feel whole.
And we've got to understand that we've got to do
a better job as a society to love our neighbor
or else nothing will change. So let's talk about police unions,
(34:34):
because police unions are often in the news because, as
we know, it only takes one bad apple to spoil
the bunch. Right, most cops are good, they're just doing
their job, but a lot of times there are bad cops,
and when they lose their job in one municipality, they
just hop over to the next one. How do we
change that to make sure that, you know, everyone's trying
(34:55):
to follow the rules that govern their profession, which we
all have to do quite frankly. Yeah, that's that's true. Uh,
you know that that's an area where legislation is required.
All too often. Uh, there's a there's a bad cop,
uh that gets gets released, maybe doesn't even get fired
(35:16):
or charged, you know, just gets let go or is
allowed to retire or leave, and then they get hired
down the street next same county, or next county, down
next state. People are hopping around all the time. Why
because the unions have done such a good job at
protecting bad cops, right that. Yeah, that that that bunch
(35:38):
has become spoiled. And so we're seeing a lot of movement,
a lot of people moving around because they do something wrong.
And what should happen is they should have to And
this is coming from from me. I don't know if
there's any legislation out there about it, but I really
would like to see peace officers have to carry the
(35:59):
same kind of malpractice insurance that doctors have to carry
If a doctor messes up and loses their insurance, they
don't practice, They're done right. And so the same thing
should have to to be for a peace officer. They
should have to carry malpractice insurance and if they mess up,
(36:19):
there's a price to pay. And no longer are the
taxpayers paying it, but it's coming out of the funds
they are generated from the peace officers that are paying
these premiums to keep their insurance intact. And if that
were to happen, the unions will take a different stance,
and and and no longer would people be allowed to
(36:40):
move around because everyone's rates would be affected, their their
their livelihood right that the money coming out of their
household to the insurance company is going to go up.
So everyone in policing would be looking for ways to
make policing better and not making exc uses for bad policing.
(37:03):
So that's that's one step. Now there's also, you know,
other things that should be done in legislation. If you're
if you're a cop and you're doing the wrong thing,
you're you should be put into a national database where
everyone has access to it. And unfortunately a lot of
these records have sealed and and and people aren't able
to find out that that that new officer just came
(37:25):
to town. He's there because he busted somebody's head in
the next county over, and and the other department said,
you got to go find other job somewhere else. Well,
that person shouldn't be in that profession. And there needs
to be uh, a national standard, a national standard that
that it forces these bad cops out of the profession
(37:46):
and into something that they're more suited to do. I mean,
I'd be amiss not to mention the war on drugs,
right because we charge a lot of our cops with
doing the local work on the war on drugs, which
of course is failing. Miserable play. What would you if
you could wave a magic wand aj what would you
do in that area? Mm hmm. Well, you know, first
(38:07):
of all, I think uh, uh, cannabis, you know, should
be legalized everywhere. I don't think there should be a
single person in jail or prison for use of it.
And uh, everyone who's in for it should be released,
let them go back to their families, you know. Um,
(38:29):
that should be done. And then uh, you know this,
this war on drugs is really a war on black people.
Let's call it what it is. That's what it's been,
you know, and so that that's got to stop. There's
a great organization out there called LEAP that is in Washington,
d C. And it's made up of mostly former law
enforcement officials, and these folks do a great job of
(38:53):
advocating for the uh, you know, that war on drugs
to to end and UH and for our priority priorities
to to be uh spent on on on better things.
So what do you think about the current administration's approach
to crime, because you know, Joe Biden was one of
(39:15):
the authors of the crime bill that has received a
lot of flak ever since. Yeah, you know, he has
admitted that he was wrong, and UM, I you know,
I think it's too early to tell. Um, he's early
in his administration. There's been a lot thrown on him,
a lot of things, a lot of messages that he's
(39:36):
had to clean up. Um, you know, he's he's got
the hardest job in politics right now. UM. So I
think it's too early to tell. But I'm hoping that, um,
that he and his administration will do a good job
of of bringing people together and addressing these issues in
a way that they need to be addressed. I actually
(39:58):
mailed the president cop of my book Loves the Answer,
and you know, I just thought, you know, maybe maybe
he'd see it. Maybe not, probably not right. But I
got a letter from him just a week ago. Uh,
and that was that was a cool thing with what
he said in there about hey, let's write the next
chapter of America together. And uh, my my hope is
(40:20):
that he and others in the administration will take to
heart some of the things that we say in the book,
things that can be done, things that can be done
by them to make things better. And and uh, you know,
really place a greater priority on this whole notion of
teaching people how to love each other. And it starts
at the top. Now when as far as that's concerned
(40:43):
empathy and caring and showing people that you love him,
I think he's done a pretty good job of that
so far. I think that's just his nature. And I
hope that it catches on and I hope that you know,
more people decide that's a great way to live, because
it is really is what made you decide to respond
(41:05):
with love and empathy instead of hate. Because we see
a lot of people who have bad experiences and it
just embitters them for life. Right, What made you? What
inspired you to work with community policing instead of fighting
it and calling to defund the police. Yeah. So at first,
um I was, you know, I was black lives matter
(41:28):
before black lives matter. Um I, I was calling for uh,
every cop to be fired, you know, I was. I
was running around saying, hey, you know, maybe all cops
are bad. And then it was Melvin Melvin Russell who
reminded me that not all cops are bad, and in fact,
(41:51):
many are really really good people doing an extraordinarily difficult
job in extraordinarily difficult crimes. And so for the year
and a half of my journey through uh the the
end of and then even into I was feeling that way.
(42:15):
And Uh, it all changed for me after I took
a fifty state journey. It's kind of a walk about.
I wanted to get my life back. I was in
such a dark place from what had been happening with
the police harassment. And I decided I'm going to go
and and and just see the country and do what
I do what I love to do, which is golf.
(42:38):
I golfed in all fifty states, a crowdfunded. It started
with five d bucks and made my way from Florida
the Hawaiian a hundred one days. And when I got there,
I was on a beach Kailu, a beach on Oahu,
and I felt that the trade winds blowing and I
was in the water, and I felt this in my heart.
(43:00):
Love is the answer. If you want to do things,
if you want to change things, if you want to
make things better, you gotta do it with love. You
can't do it with hate. You gotta let that go.
And at that moment, with tears streaming down my eyes,
I let all that go, all the frustration, all the hate,
all the fear, all the darkness, and that that's the
(43:23):
moment that I've made a decision. It was September, my birthday,
birthday that I made that decision. And I made that decision,
I said to myself, no matter what, I'm gonna hold
to this and and and I've done that ever since.
And guess what, Love has not let me down. It
(43:45):
has led to the start of a movement that is
now going around the world. And if you haven't heard
about it yet, you heard about it now and you
will hear more about it. There are people all over
the United States and now people all over all over
the world that are adopting love is the answer as
their as their mantra, and they're saying the pledge to
(44:07):
themselves and they're putting it into action every day, and
I'm seeing things change. I'm getting the stories. The stories
are pouring in to us on a daily basis about
people deciding to choose love. Love is the most powerful
force in the universe. It is. If that weren't the case,
(44:28):
this this, this world would have been burned up a
long time ago because there is a lot of hate.
But you see what happens when when someone is is
in is in dire need, and then someone else will
start to go fund me and the next next day
a hundred thousand dollars has been raised for that family.
(44:49):
You see things like that all the time. That's love
in action. What would happen if all of us put
that front and center. It's how we're gonna live our life.
We're gonna live it with love. You know, sometimes it's
gotta be tough love. It's not all warm and mushy, right,
But what if we did that, What if we tried
(45:10):
that out for just a month, I bet everything would change.
And so what I'm asking people to do is on
septem love is the answer day. Do just that. Find someone,
treat them with love, see what happens. Test it out
for yourself. So let's talk about prisons, because prisons are
(45:31):
a big part of crime in the United States right.
A lot of times we take young people who have
their whole lives ahead of them and give them a
quite extensive rap sheet and incarcerate them and they come
out hardened. Is there any way your message of love
can be you know, parlayed into a better, you know,
criminal justice system. Absolutely, We've gotta take love to the
(45:54):
prisons too. We gotta teach guards and wardens and and
and others who work there the love is the answer principles.
You know, when when someone gets sentenced to jail or prison, Um,
they shouldn't be cast out of society. There's still part
of society. We we should still treat them with respect.
(46:17):
I know that firsthand. My father spent time in prison,
My my brother spent time in prison, My brother in
law spent time in prison. You know, Um, these are
people that that I knew that had a lot of
good inside him. And you know, and and my my
brother in law is still alive. He's out now, um,
(46:40):
but he's he's had a really really hard time from
the from the system and all the red tape. He's
shared stories with me about how, uh, you know, he'll
get a call at two am and if he doesn't
pick up because he's sleep, he gets in trouble. And
(47:04):
and so we gotta figure out a way to treat
people with a little more respect when they're in prison
or probation or parole um people who are in are
they getting what they need to to live a better life?
Are they are they receiving any kind of training, Are
(47:24):
they being treated with respect? Are they being given opportunities?
And I've heard stories of you know, folks who are
in prison. They get pulled out out of prison for
the day to go fight a fire that they've been
trained to fight. They get paid maybe five cents. Meanwhile,
they're charged three dollars a minute for a phone call.
(47:45):
Right they get out of prison, they try to find
a job. They've been trained to fight fires, but no
one will hire them because they've got a record. What's
the sense and stuff like that, Right, So we've got
to set people up for success, not failure. There's a
reason why recidivism rates are so high. It's meant to
(48:06):
be that way to feed a prison system that is
a for profit business for the most part. There are
shareholders expecting beds to be filled so that they can
make money. That's not sane. That's the dark side of capitalism, right.
(48:26):
We need to do a much better job of bringing
love into spaces like that, rehabilitation spaces. That's what they
should be, but they're not. And so we've got to
bring love into those settings as well. That's how things
will change. Yeah, this whole reintegration angle too, is really
(48:47):
important to this whole conversation, right, because if we have
hardened criminals, right, and we continue to harden them, because
every time they do get out of jail and try
to reintegrate into regular life, they can't find jobs. We've
it it nearly impossible for them to thrive, and it's
just a ticking time bomb and only a matter of
time before they resort to crime again to survive. So
(49:08):
how do how how do we do we need laws
that you know, help train people. You know, we do
have a massive labor shortage these days. Can't we find
ways to put these people back to work to ensure
that they feel belonging in today's world. Absolutely, you know
that that should be priority number one. There are millions
(49:29):
of people that have a hard time getting legal work
because they've got a record. Now they've they've they've served
their time. That should be the end of it, right,
that should be They should be able to vote, they
should be able to work, they should be able to
do everything that everyone else should be able to do.
That's a you know, that's just that's just the right
(49:52):
thing to do, and that's what's gonna change a lot
of things if we if we get around to doing that.
Have you seen progres us since you know, we saw
the video of George Floyd And what type of progress
have you seen? Man? I'll tell you what. Um Seeing
people of all races come out flooding streets saying black
(50:18):
lives matter. That was the first for me. All Right,
I'm fifty seven years old, right, it took fifty six
years of my life to see that in America. Think
about that simple black lives matter. I mean, it's a
(50:40):
simple statement. I'm not talking about the the organization. I'm
talking about those words that are so inflammatory for some reason,
so many people hate here in those words black lives matter.
I'm a black man. It took fifty six years of
my life to hear those words being said by masses
(51:05):
of people, and it was amazing and it was beautiful.
And now people need to live that out. A lot
of companies made promises that they're not keeping. A lot
of companies, y'all know who you are? Committed a million,
five million, ten million, a hundred million. Where's the money?
(51:25):
You know, if you haven't written those checks, you need to.
You need to keep your promise. If you said black
lives matter verbally or put a poster up, or or
put it on spray paint on the plywood of of
your shop that you boarded up, you should mean it
now too, not just when you thought your building was
(51:47):
going to get looted. You know, you can't just use
that statement as an insurance policy. You got to live
it out. And so you know, look, I I I
believe that that a lot of people meant when they
said it. But now is the time where you got
(52:08):
to live it out. We've got to keep pressing. None
of us are free until we're all free. And you know,
if you think that you're immune to the things that
that black people are experiencing just because you're not black. Um,
(52:30):
your day will come, you know when when you you're
gonna sit there and you're gonna say, I wish I
had treated somebody better. I wish i'd love somebody more
so that, uh, you know, whatever has come to you
wouldn't come to you. You know, I'll give you one
example of that. Um, there are white people who have
(52:54):
had their loved ones abused by police too. And I
know some who who didn't care about any of the
instances that they saw happening to black people because it
was happening to black people wouldn't happening to me. But
then it happened to their kid, you know, and and
(53:14):
then they got it. Oh wow, all right. It's could
be taken away in a heartbeat, just by somebody having
a bad day who wanted to take out something on
somebody else. So we gotta we gotta find a way
to love the other, treat people who don't look like
us or think like us better, because if we don't,
(53:37):
you know, the things that we're watching happening happening to
the other, they're gonna wind not happening to us, and
there's gonna be nobody there to save us if we
do that. We got to learn how to love each other.
I guess the what I always think of when I
think of policing is that they're supposed to work for us,
the biggest line item in most city budgets, right, They're
(53:59):
supposed to keep safe, And unfortunately a lot of our
interactions with police are inherently negative. So hopefully as time
goes on, we can improve that relationship because we're all
looking for the same thing. We're all looking for safer communities,
we're all looking for a better relationship with the people
who police us, and we're all looking ultimately not to
(54:20):
have bloated departments that don't do what we pay them
to do. So I appreciate the work that you're doing. Uh,
you approach it from a much different angle than maybe
many of the people who are listening to the show.
But I think love is something we all understand a j.
So on that note, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Police
(54:47):
funding is the second largest category of government spending. If
you could believe that, after schooling education, we spend a
whopping a hundred and ninety two thousand dollars per police
officer every year, or when you factor in local, state,
and federal spending, and policing is radically outdated for today's world.
(55:07):
Not only are we seeing calls across many corners of
society for change right and heartbreaking videos that go viral online,
but there's a lot of low morale among police officers.
We have extremism on either side that wants to protect
police officers at all costs and on the other side
wants to defund the police. In reality, we need a
(55:30):
balance conversation about what needs to change and what is
presently working, and quite frankly, there isn't a lot that's
working right now. Most cops are good cops, but the
bad cops, just like we said in the show when
Apple Spoils the Bunch, And a lot of this has
to do with unions, right, public sector unions, police unions.
We need to reform to ensure that police departments are
(55:51):
not protecting bad police officers. And really, until those hard
changes take place, we're never going to see any change
with policing. And we spend so much on policing yet
crime is exploding, so it doesn't work. No matter whether
you're left wing or right wing. Policing needs to change.
It needs to work for us. We can never forget
(56:13):
that police departments work for us, the people, the taxpayers,
the ones who are funding their entire profession. Um David
Grosso for Follow the Profit. If you enjoyed this podcast,
give us a review so that others can learn about
this podcast. Give us five stars. If you liked it,
I'd like to think my hard working staff who always
makes sure this happens every single week. Follow the Profit
(56:37):
is a production a gain Which three sixty and I
Heart Radio. For more podcasts, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Part of
the ging wik
I'm David Grosso, and you're listening to follow the Profit.
We're gonna unpack a really difficult conversation. I'm talking about
crime and policing, which is a hot button political issue
these days. That's all we hear about on the news
(00:20):
as crime goes up and distrust and police is at
an all time high. So my guess a J. L. E.
He's a veteran author and director of a documentary which
preceded this whole awakening and the Black Lives Matter movement,
and it was called Walking while Black Love is the Answer,
and he really doubles down on the idea that love
(00:41):
is the answer to many of the problems that persist
in communities across the country. So we're gonna talk about
the root causes of police brutality, how to modernize policing,
and how to make sure that police and communities could
get along and get the job done. How are you doing,
(01:02):
a j Hey, how are you? Thank you so much
for having me on. So the number one bumper sticker
I see these days is the the American flag with
the blue line, Blue Lives batter and I see a
lot of BLM bumper stickers as well. You made this
movie a few years ago. How did you have insight
(01:23):
into that this would be the biggest issue of our time?
Oh well, I didn't, David, I didn't. I had no
idea that obviously all these things we're gonna be taking place.
But um, when I was harassed, profiled, harassed, target for
harassment for over a year, that was back in time frame,
(01:46):
and so there were reports of things happening, but they
weren't all over the news every day, you know, like
it is these days. But back then, when it happened
to me, uh for the umpteenth time, uh, this this
particular time, I thought I was going to die on
the side of the road. And and I thought, you know,
I can't do this anymore. And you know, somebody's got
(02:08):
to do something about it. And I thought, well, might
as well be me, And and so I decided to
tell the story of what was happening. And you know,
and of course we all know what has unfolded over
the past several years, and um, yeah, it's it's a big,
big problem and we and we need solutions. Can you
tell me specifically what happened to you, just any of
(02:29):
the stories? Yeah, yeah, sure, So, Um, the incident June
of twelve. I was I was taking a walk in
my own community and I was stopped by young Howard
County police officer. This is in Maryland, right between Baltimore
and Washington. And his first words to me were what
(02:50):
are you doing here? And then it went downhill from there.
It didn't take him long to accuse me of breaking
in the homes and so forth, and and so that's
how that incident UH started to unfold. One officer UH
then turned into three a little while later. And the
only thing that saved me was I had the ability
(03:11):
to call my attorney and have him on speaker phone,
and they backed off from the intentions that they had.
So how do we fix this problem? Because, you know,
policing and community relations seem to be at the forefront
of concerns these days, and we have these two you know,
(03:32):
opposing views that you know, policing needs no reform, right
and in fact, defunding the police has made things worse.
Or we have what you're telling us, which is, you know,
policing needs heavy reform. So how do we begin to
initiate the changes that we need amidst a very divided
(03:53):
country on this issue? Yeah, you know, at the end
of the day, everybody wants to go home to their
at least safe, right, So how do we how do
we get to that point where where all of us
can can be out in society and do the things
that we love to do and not be challenged for
it because of the color of the of our skin
(04:13):
or or even you know what kind of uniform we're wearing. Um,
we all have to do a better job of seeing
the humanity in the other the other person, right, if
we're honest, we all have biases, and unfortunately, those biases
you know, get out of control with people sometimes. And
(04:35):
if it's someone that's got a badge and a gun
and the ability to take someone's freedom or someone's life. Um,
if that person is not healthy mentally and emotionally, if
they're carrying around racist baggage, and and they're not challenged
uh to to do better, to understand people uh more
(05:01):
in a deeper way, you know, then that's that's a
recipe for disaster. And there's a lot of people in
communities as well who are hurting, they're in pain, they're
they're they've been traumatized by various things in life and
and so there, you know, there's some people that are
in the community of hurting people as well. So so
so the movie and the book that you've made is
(05:23):
titled Walking while Black. Love as an acronym, So what
does love stand for? Yeah, So the the love acronym
is UH to learn about people, and then the OH
is to open your heart to their needs. The V
is to volunteer yourself to be part of the solution,
and the E is to empower others. So these are
(05:47):
four action steps. It's not some you know, just warm,
mushy feeling. It's about putting love into action every day
with the people that are in your life. So, how
do we begin to rebuild trust in the police? And
it's it's actually so much more more murky than it
(06:09):
used to be, right, because police there's a lot of
minority communities who now wear the uniform. Right, there's a
lot of UH communities that you know, have high crime rates,
so they need police. So how do we begin to
reconcile all these different things, right, the lack of trust
on one side, the fear on the other, the long
(06:30):
held prejudices of some people who wear the badge. How
do we begin to rebuild trust between these disparate communities. Well,
you know, a lot of people, unfortunately, they lean on
things like pr campaigns and national night out events and
even coffee with a cop. Now there's nothing wrong with
(06:50):
those things, with those events, but those are moments, right,
and many times those moments are used to trot out
the community service officers, the people that are trained heavily
on putting on a good face for the police department,
for the for the community. Uh. And then meanwhile, there's
other officers that are running around doing bad things, same day,
(07:12):
same time, same community. But they're they're not the ones
that are designated as community resource officers, so they're you know,
they're just doing their thing. So the when it comes
down to it, we've got to go down to the
cellular level and teach people how to police with empathy.
And quite frankly, everyone in society has got to be
(07:35):
taught these same lessons because, uh, it's not just a
problem with with the police treating people poorly. People are
treating people poorly period. Right. What gets the headlines is
when a police officer does something bad, and especially nowadays, um,
you know, and we've got to we've got to see
(07:56):
past the obvious and get down to, uh, you know
what really are the root causes are of these issues,
and none of us are taught how to love our
neighbor in school. Um, David, I don't know if you
if you've ever had a class in elementary school, high school,
or anywhere else, college, wherever. Have you had a class
(08:16):
specifically on teaching you how to love your neighbor at church,
but not really in a public or private school. Yeah? Yeah,
And that's that's see, that's part of the problem. We're learning.
We're learning a lot of things, but we're not learning
the basics. And the basics when it comes to this
(08:37):
is how do I treat someone who's different than me?
How do I treat someone who maybe I don't you know,
I don't relate to them, you know in some way. Well,
the first step is to learn about a person, and
we go on with those other three steps. Open our heart,
volunteer to be part of the solution, empower others to
the same. We we've got to learn how to love people,
(08:58):
and that's that's our mission. You know. I had a
choice to make when when I was targeted for harassment
after I reported the initial incident to internal affairs, human
rights counsel and then double a CP. And and when
I did that, things got worse, much worse. I was
being followed, stop, got threats. So I had to make
(09:19):
a choice. Do I hate back, do I treat them
worse right? Do I meet force with force? Or do
I tap into something that's going to change everything? And
that was the decision that I made. And I can
only speak for myself. I know that that was a
good decision. I know that it worked. I know that
lives have been changed as a result. Uh. And you know,
(09:43):
I recommend it for for everyone. Because everywhere we take
this program, everywhere we teach people how to love. Things
are getting better. So we hear a lot of defund
the police. Tell me about that. What are your general
feelings on defunding the police. I don't believe that the
police should be defunded. I believe that resources should be
(10:06):
reallocated in some instances. But do we need the police
and do we need them to be strong? Absolutely? Uh,
there's a lot of bad people out there or you know,
people doing bad things, you know, and and so we
need the police. When uh, someone tries to break into
my home, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna call my
(10:29):
neighbor or my cousin. I want to be able to
call the police. We're trying to handle situations like this,
but we need them to do their job. And I
don't think that their job is to be social workers.
And I don't think that, uh they're I don't think
their job is um to do a many of the
(10:49):
things that they're that they're being forced to do. Now.
I think that we should give more money to groups
that are doing the work in the communities, that are
keep in the communities together, and let the police do
what they do best, which should be to maintain order
and peace. They should be peace officers. And we've gotten
(11:13):
away from that in many communities, and and and some
of it is because we've put too much on their shoulders.
And we've got to do better as a society of
of dividing up that those money, those moneys, that those
resources and giving them to the groups that actually can
do things that can prevent crime. So we're we're putting
(11:34):
too much on their shoulders, asking them to do too
many things, and you know this is what we get
as a result. Yeah, it's very interesting you say that,
because I would agree as well, because crime is expensive.
This podcast is of course called follow the Profit. And
you know, poor communities are expensive for everyone, especially for
(11:54):
the people who live there and for the governments that
run them, because crime causes all sorts of economic glosses.
And I agree with you. Teachers are another profession that
we ask them to do too much. We're asking them
to heal society when really they're just caught in the
middle of a storm right there. So how do we
make cops do their job, empower them to do a
(12:16):
better job. What are some ways besides teaching them love
that we can make sure that cops are keeping community
safe and not eroding trust in the very communities where
they work. Yeah, so it starts with that, you know.
That's that's the first step is they're very rarely given
any empathy based training. There's a lot of tactical training,
(12:40):
but if you look at how many hours are spent
on on actually treating people with respect and and having
empathy and relating to the community, you you might find
four hours, you might find a day of training in
a year. Another thing is that police go through a
mental evalue ouation when they get hired, but they may
(13:02):
not go through another one for the next five years. Meanwhile,
they've had dozens or hundreds of traumatic incidents that have
changed the way that they view the world and the
way that they view the people that they're serving. So
we we've got to do a much much better job
with a kind of training that we're offering. Uh, there's
(13:22):
there's other things that you know, once you get into
the once you get to the training part and you've
done that, then you've got to reinforce that with actions,
right because if you if you don't use it, you'll
lose it. Right. So if you learn these principles, then
you got to put them into action. So what we're
doing is we're setting up opportunities for peace officers and
(13:45):
communities to do things together. For example, in Yiden, Pennsylvania,
just outside of Philadelphia. Uh, Chachi, that's the name of
the chief there, Anthony Poparo. He goes by Chachi. He
became the first police chief in the country to oh
been what we call a love garden. That's a concept
that we created where we get police, peace officers and
(14:08):
the rest of the community to come together to plant
fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices and as they're growing
those things, they're also growing relationships and when they when
the food comes, they're going to give that food away
to people in the community that need it. And there's
many communities that are that have a lot of people
(14:28):
who are food insecure, right And so I'll give you
an example in Compton, California, the Sheriff's office has a
youth center there and they have a garden and the
deputies and the young people grow food together and they
give over ten thousand pounds of food away to elderly
(14:48):
people in that community every year. Uh. That makes a
big difference. So love gardens. That's That's one thing. We've
got a big event on September sevent called Love is
the Answer Day where groups of people, peace officers and
community members are gonna be painting murals about putting love
into action in the community. And they're also going to
(15:09):
be doing other things. But that event is designed to
get people together for a special moment that builds into
a movement in their community. So when those murals are up,
they've got a reminder, a visual reminder of the beauty
that can be created when we come together. There's other
things that we're doing as well. We're teaching people to
become mentors. We've got a mentoring circle training program that
(15:33):
we've just launched where we're gonna have peace officers and
other community members mentoring returning citizens and young people and
even having young people, college students and even some high
school students mentoring peace officers, teaching them what it what
it means to be a public servant from their perspective.
(15:53):
So we're doing some things that are bringing people together
and helping them to do life together so that they
learn and about each other and they can open their
hearts to each other and they can be of service
to each other. So what is a peace officer? How
(16:16):
does that work? So this is kind of like a
different profession. So this is a third party between the
you know, community member and the police and the police officer.
What do they do? Well, Actually, a peace officer is
a police officer. But see, we're not seeing a lot
of that at least on the news. You know, we've
got to look for for that. A peace officer, uh
(16:39):
is a is a police officer, but the it's the
same job, different term. Now, if you if you talk
to someone who's in the profession, if they tell you
they're a peace officer that will give you a hint
at at how they're approaching the job. Um, so you
know that that's the term that we should go back
(16:59):
to it. One time that was that was it peace officer,
and we've gone into a different direction. And so every
police officer should be striving to be a peace officer,
someone who is is helping to bring peace to the community,
not adding to the tension and the violence in the trauma.
(17:21):
So you're suggesting that empathy is a way that police
officers can better understand the communities where they are policing.
Oh absolutely, Oh yeah, yeah. I mean empathy is the
is the key, and we can't we can't get there
without training, especially in policing. We all need it, we
all need more of it. I mean we see it
(17:43):
on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, we see it everywhere, right, We
see it in the news. We see how people are
treating each other with with all that's going on, with
all the divisions that are happening with through COVID and
politics and war, you name it, we're not seeing a
lot of empathy in general, and and and so there
(18:03):
has been a gap. We've just not been taught how
to love our neighbor. It all comes back to that,
and and and in policing especially, and you mentioned education
teaching as well. There's not enough of it in teaching.
There's got to be just more empathy in general. And
(18:23):
we've got to take a step back ask ourselves, how
do we treat that person that cut us off? Do
we retaliate with road rage? How do we treat that
person that you know that maybe gave us a dirty look? Right?
I'm not saying let people walk all over you, but
(18:43):
I am saying, and this is coming from a veteran
who served in the Military Air Force at a nuclear
missile base, right, the value of peace to us was
paramount because with us at our base, it was worst
case scenario. If things got to the point where we
had to go to go to war, it was it
(19:08):
was gonna be nasty. Right, So we knew that we
had to do everything we we we possibly could to
protect peace. That was the number one priority. With all
that firepower we had nuclear weapons, Our number one priority
was peace. It was finding ways to to love people.
(19:29):
And so we've got to take a step back and
evaluate where we are and and be honest with ourselves
and and learn these lessons that that we're going to
help us to be better human beings, treat people with
more humanity. That's across the board. That's why, you know,
I spend my days reaching out to two people in
(19:53):
law enforcement and activists with with social justice groups and
ministries and companies and and other groups and bringing people
together to teach them these things in the same space.
Not cops in one room and students in another. But
we're bringing them together to have these tough discussions in
(20:15):
safe spaces. And that's what's needed. And we've got to
do the work. If we don't do the work, it's
not gonna happen on its own. And it's you know,
it's not it's not a sexy sound bite for radio
or television or podcasts. You know, this whole thing about
bringing people together. You know, this whole society is based
on conflict on you know, hits on videos. And if
(20:39):
I were to post a video of somebody beating someone
with a baseball bat, I'd get ten million views. But
if I post a video next to it talking about
loving somebody and and and how do you how do
you find a way to love your neighbor? Be lucky
to get a thousand views. Right, we've got to go
away from what's what's popular in pop culture. It's getting ratings,
(21:01):
and we've got to go back to values and in
the simple things, you know, and be willing to put
in the time and effort and work to make it happen.
Because there are no overnight solutions with where we're at.
We've got to put in the work and the time
to make things better. So how do cops receive your work,
(21:24):
because they're seeing pretty low morale these days with the
whole defund police movement. Yeah, yeah, you know. Um, we've
been at this for nine years now. Um. It took
about seven years, maybe seven and a half years to
start getting calls back. And in the past two years,
I've been invited to participate uh in in in law
(21:49):
enforcement organizations. UH, first as a guest, and then I
was invited to join the International Association of Chiefs of Police,
which is a rare honor for a civilian. I'm on
their Crime Prevention Committee that have regular uh interactions with
leaders of that organization. In fact, the the the executive director,
(22:11):
Terry Cunningham. Uh, he's in my film, uh and he's
he's in there talking about what it's gonna take for
the for the policing profession to do a better job.
And not everybody like that. You know, everybody wasn't on
board with what he said, but he's stuck by that
message and he's opened the door to people like me
to come in and help make things better. Um. You know,
(22:34):
I also serve on a couple of committees for the
n double A CP. I'm on a crime prevention committee
for the for the state of California, the California Crime
Prevention Officers Association. So so we're we're getting the response.
We're getting chiefs and sheriffs and even district attorneys calling
(22:54):
us now every day saying, hey, how can you help us?
And uh. In one town, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the district
attorney there, Matt Weintrobe, he took on Love as the
Answer as a program at the beginning of last year
and he has been working it and he's seen amazing
(23:16):
things happen. Out of the forty police departments in his community,
about thirty five of them now are totally on board
with Love as the Answer. They're teaching that to their officers.
That's their mantra. Now they're they're using that in that
in that county. And at the end of the year,
Matt and I we were both awarded UH Awards from
(23:38):
the Bucks County Bar Association for the difference that had
been made in that community. People's lives are changing there
and people are growing closer as a result of his
work and in the work of the Peace Center in
Bucks County that has facilitated a lot of the events there. So, um,
when when law enforcement leaders learn about the work that
(24:00):
we're doing and the difference that we're making, they're now
starting to call us. And that's a good feeling to
know that our reputation is such that they respect the
work that we're doing and they're actually bringing us in
because they are many of them now are looking for
ways to do their job better. That's a good sign.
(24:20):
So what specific policy changes are you advocating for and policing, UH.
You know, the biggest policy change that I'm navigating for
is for every officer in every interaction to treat that
the people that they're dealing with with love. Now, all right,
(24:40):
somebody's gonna say, man, you're crazy. If somebody's coming at
you with a with a knife, you're gonna love them. Well,
I'll give you the words of Chief Melvin Russell, forty
years with the Baltimore Police Department. Melvin may have to
apprehend someone, may have to take somebody down sickally, right,
(25:01):
but he's he's not going to do it like that
person's an enemy. He's gonna do it like that person
that's his brother or his sister, or his mother or
his father. And so he he policed with love. Right.
He didn't use unnecessary force, he didn't antagonized people, he
(25:23):
didn't drop f bombs every other word. Right, He didn't escalate,
he de escalated. He treated people like he would want
to be treated. He treated people with love. And so
I would walk around the streets of Baltimore with with
mel and some some guys would come up to him
and and hug him and you know, um just love
(25:45):
on him, right, and then they'd leave and then he
tell me, yeah, that guy just spent you know, six
years in prison for for for murder. You know that
this other dude you know is dealing drugs currently. Right,
But they had such respect for him because even the
people that he arrested, he showed him love. And when
they and when they come back and see him, they
(26:07):
will respect him as a man, as a person because
of the humanity. You know, we got past the good
guy bad guy thing cops and Robert thing. You know,
we got down to the humanity level. So you know
it's possible, it's proven, it works. You know, it can happen.
And you can police, you can be a peace officer.
(26:29):
You can do that job and do it well and
and treat people respect and love and and and they
will treat you with that respect and love back. We
got to do it over and over and over and over.
We've got to commit to it and not waver from it,
you know, and and just all too often the results
(26:49):
that people want they want him overnight because that's you know,
their their term in office is going to be up
in six months and they want to look good. So
you know, they got to get everything straight right then
and there. Right, But we've got to make decisions with
a long term perspective, not about what's it gonna do
in the next hour or day, but how's it going
to change things a month from now, six months from now,
(27:12):
two years from now. We've got to be committed to
the long haul. So that's it. But crime is surging
right now. I don't feel particularly safe in a lot
of big cities. I mean it's gotten markedly worse under
COVID and obviously that has you know, dramatic consequences for
(27:33):
many communities. How do we fight crime with love? Because
sometimes it is adversarial, right, Sometimes my safety is in danger,
your safety is in danger, and cops feel a lot
of danger too. Absolutely, Yeah, I mean there is a
lot of crime out there. But again, I'm gonna come
back to it. You know, we can't solve things overnight.
(27:55):
We can't arrest our way out of this, we can't
just break down more doors. Right, We've got to uh
put this into action if we ever want to see
any lasting change. And so you can be a peace
officer and do your job and do it with love
(28:16):
and be highly effective. Um, you know, who's who's who's
out there committing crimes? Why are they doing it? What
got them to that point? What what's lacking in their
reservoir that needs to be filled up? Right? Those are
the questions that we have to ask. How can we
help people to be their best? And and I'm gonna
(28:39):
go back to Mel. Mel was doing some work with
Ray Lewis, the former Baltimore Raven Hall of Famer. And
they went into communities in Baltimore and sat down with
people that were actively involved in gang activity, and they
asked them, is this what you want to be doing
(29:01):
with your life? And they were honest with them, and
and and and the many of the guys said, no,
I'd rather be doing such and such, but no one
will give me a chance. And so I'm gonna do
what I got to do to put food on the table.
And so Mel and Ray and others that that that
(29:21):
we're working with them set out to help find those opportunities.
And they worked with institutions like Johns Hopkins and others
and got people jobs, got people training, got people to
get out of that life right. And there needs to
be much more of that. We need to be willing
to to to to go out on a limb and
(29:43):
speak to someone who we might not ordinarily speak with
and say, brother or sister, how can I help you?
How can I be there for you? What what are you?
And I asked this too, I asked this of of
young people in particular that come to our workshops. I
have them come up to the in the room and
I say, tell everyone here what you want your life
(30:04):
to be like in five years, and then tell tell
everyone here how they can help you get there. And
when young people do that, and then you see the
arms of business leaders and peace officers and and and
pastors and rabbis and others, they raise their arms and
they say, I'm here to help. I'll stand by you,
(30:27):
I'll be there for you for these next five years.
That's what it's all about. It's about people coming together,
about being there for each other, giving people to training
and the jobs and the options and the care and
the love that they need so if they don't have
to resort to crime to put food on the table.
You know, at the end of the day, everyone's got
(30:48):
to eat, everyone's got to have a place to stay,
everyone's got to be able to take care of their families.
And if we don't give people the opportunities to do
it legally, they're gonna find some way to do it otherwise.
And so we have to do a much better job. Again,
we're putting too much on the police. We've got to
find a way to love our neighbor so that they
(31:09):
don't have to resort to doing things that are gonna
land them in trouble. So a lot of this is economic.
At the root of all of this is that people
need to put food on the table. How do we
help them do that in these areas that have high crime,
because high crime tends to scare away capital and investment.
It does exactly the opposite of what we want in
(31:29):
these areas. Yeah, David, you're right, and and you know
it comes back to the premise of your show, right, Uh,
you know, yeah, a lot of things revolve around economics.
Most things revolve around economics. I mean, the number one
reason why marriages break up is financial, right, And but
you know what's driving that. Sometimes it's driven by poor health.
(31:52):
Someone gets sick. You know, my wife had a cancer battle.
We lost everything during that time. Um, Fortunately we didn't
lose our relationship. We found a way to stay together
and keep loving each other and fight through that. Right.
But yeah, everything comes back to this this notion of okay,
we've we've got to have our basic needs met. And
(32:13):
so in a in a capitalistic society, it's dog eat dog,
you know, And a lot of times people aren't caring
about the next person. And then somehow and I don't
want to make this about politics, but you know, if
someone does something good for someone or wants to help
someone out, then then being called a socialist. Well, if
(32:33):
that's what you want to call me for helping someone out, Okay,
you know, fine, call me whatever you want, but I'm
gonna love my neighbor. Right. We have got to take
away the stigma of being nice and being caring. You know,
it's it's not about machismo. It's not about about taking
someone else down so that you can rise up. If
(32:56):
I can help five or ten people to rise up,
guarantee they're gonna be there for me when I need them.
I've experienced that in real life, so I know that
it works. You know, if I treat people like crap,
they're not gonna be there for me if I need them.
And so we've we've got to understand as a society
that we are all Ohannah Hawaiian for family, an extended family. David,
(33:22):
now that we've met, I'm gonna treat you like you're
my brother. You know, if you need something, if you
need the shirt off my back, it's yours. You know,
I'm gonna be there for you now if you're if
you're messing up and coming to my house and stealing
things off myself, then I'm gonna have to treat you
with some tough love. You know. I'm gonna have to,
you know, evaluate that and figure out a different way
(33:44):
to you know, I'm not gonna put myself and my
family in danger, but I'm gonna try to find a
way to be there for you. And if I can't
help you, I'm gonna help you get the help that
you need. We've got to be there for each other.
You know. If someone down the street is hurting to
the extent that they're they've got to find a way
to make ends meet. If we don't help them collectively,
(34:08):
then they're gonna break into one of our homes and
take what we've got so that they can feel whole.
And we've got to understand that we've got to do
a better job as a society to love our neighbor
or else nothing will change. So let's talk about police unions,
(34:34):
because police unions are often in the news because, as
we know, it only takes one bad apple to spoil
the bunch. Right, most cops are good, they're just doing
their job, but a lot of times there are bad cops,
and when they lose their job in one municipality, they
just hop over to the next one. How do we
change that to make sure that, you know, everyone's trying
(34:55):
to follow the rules that govern their profession, which we
all have to do quite frankly. Yeah, that's that's true. Uh,
you know that that's an area where legislation is required.
All too often. Uh, there's a there's a bad cop,
uh that gets gets released, maybe doesn't even get fired
(35:16):
or charged, you know, just gets let go or is
allowed to retire or leave, and then they get hired
down the street next same county, or next county, down
next state. People are hopping around all the time. Why
because the unions have done such a good job at
protecting bad cops, right that. Yeah, that that that bunch
(35:38):
has become spoiled. And so we're seeing a lot of movement,
a lot of people moving around because they do something wrong.
And what should happen is they should have to And
this is coming from from me. I don't know if
there's any legislation out there about it, but I really
would like to see peace officers have to carry the
(35:59):
same kind of malpractice insurance that doctors have to carry
If a doctor messes up and loses their insurance, they
don't practice, They're done right. And so the same thing
should have to to be for a peace officer. They
should have to carry malpractice insurance and if they mess up,
(36:19):
there's a price to pay. And no longer are the
taxpayers paying it, but it's coming out of the funds
they are generated from the peace officers that are paying
these premiums to keep their insurance intact. And if that
were to happen, the unions will take a different stance,
and and and no longer would people be allowed to
(36:40):
move around because everyone's rates would be affected, their their
their livelihood right that the money coming out of their
household to the insurance company is going to go up.
So everyone in policing would be looking for ways to
make policing better and not making exc uses for bad policing.
(37:03):
So that's that's one step. Now there's also, you know,
other things that should be done in legislation. If you're
if you're a cop and you're doing the wrong thing,
you're you should be put into a national database where
everyone has access to it. And unfortunately a lot of
these records have sealed and and and people aren't able
to find out that that that new officer just came
(37:25):
to town. He's there because he busted somebody's head in
the next county over, and and the other department said,
you got to go find other job somewhere else. Well,
that person shouldn't be in that profession. And there needs
to be uh, a national standard, a national standard that
that it forces these bad cops out of the profession
(37:46):
and into something that they're more suited to do. I mean,
I'd be amiss not to mention the war on drugs,
right because we charge a lot of our cops with
doing the local work on the war on drugs, which
of course is failing. Miserable play. What would you if
you could wave a magic wand aj what would you
do in that area? Mm hmm. Well, you know, first
(38:07):
of all, I think uh, uh, cannabis, you know, should
be legalized everywhere. I don't think there should be a
single person in jail or prison for use of it.
And uh, everyone who's in for it should be released,
let them go back to their families, you know. Um,
(38:29):
that should be done. And then uh, you know this,
this war on drugs is really a war on black people.
Let's call it what it is. That's what it's been,
you know, and so that that's got to stop. There's
a great organization out there called LEAP that is in Washington,
d C. And it's made up of mostly former law
enforcement officials, and these folks do a great job of
(38:53):
advocating for the uh, you know, that war on drugs
to to end and UH and for our priority priorities
to to be uh spent on on on better things.
So what do you think about the current administration's approach
to crime, because you know, Joe Biden was one of
(39:15):
the authors of the crime bill that has received a
lot of flak ever since. Yeah, you know, he has
admitted that he was wrong, and UM, I you know,
I think it's too early to tell. Um, he's early
in his administration. There's been a lot thrown on him,
a lot of things, a lot of messages that he's
(39:36):
had to clean up. Um, you know, he's he's got
the hardest job in politics right now. UM. So I
think it's too early to tell. But I'm hoping that, um,
that he and his administration will do a good job
of of bringing people together and addressing these issues in
a way that they need to be addressed. I actually
(39:58):
mailed the president cop of my book Loves the Answer,
and you know, I just thought, you know, maybe maybe
he'd see it. Maybe not, probably not right. But I
got a letter from him just a week ago. Uh,
and that was that was a cool thing with what
he said in there about hey, let's write the next
chapter of America together. And uh, my my hope is
(40:20):
that he and others in the administration will take to
heart some of the things that we say in the book,
things that can be done, things that can be done
by them to make things better. And and uh, you know,
really place a greater priority on this whole notion of
teaching people how to love each other. And it starts
at the top. Now when as far as that's concerned
(40:43):
empathy and caring and showing people that you love him,
I think he's done a pretty good job of that
so far. I think that's just his nature. And I
hope that it catches on and I hope that you know,
more people decide that's a great way to live, because
it is really is what made you decide to respond
(41:05):
with love and empathy instead of hate. Because we see
a lot of people who have bad experiences and it
just embitters them for life. Right, What made you? What
inspired you to work with community policing instead of fighting
it and calling to defund the police. Yeah. So at first,
um I was, you know, I was black lives matter
(41:28):
before black lives matter. Um I, I was calling for uh,
every cop to be fired, you know, I was. I
was running around saying, hey, you know, maybe all cops
are bad. And then it was Melvin Melvin Russell who
reminded me that not all cops are bad, and in fact,
(41:51):
many are really really good people doing an extraordinarily difficult
job in extraordinarily difficult crimes. And so for the year
and a half of my journey through uh the the
end of and then even into I was feeling that way.
(42:15):
And Uh, it all changed for me after I took
a fifty state journey. It's kind of a walk about.
I wanted to get my life back. I was in
such a dark place from what had been happening with
the police harassment. And I decided I'm going to go
and and and just see the country and do what
I do what I love to do, which is golf.
(42:38):
I golfed in all fifty states, a crowdfunded. It started
with five d bucks and made my way from Florida
the Hawaiian a hundred one days. And when I got there,
I was on a beach Kailu, a beach on Oahu,
and I felt that the trade winds blowing and I
was in the water, and I felt this in my heart.
(43:00):
Love is the answer. If you want to do things,
if you want to change things, if you want to
make things better, you gotta do it with love. You
can't do it with hate. You gotta let that go.
And at that moment, with tears streaming down my eyes,
I let all that go, all the frustration, all the hate,
all the fear, all the darkness, and that that's the
(43:23):
moment that I've made a decision. It was September, my birthday,
birthday that I made that decision. And I made that decision,
I said to myself, no matter what, I'm gonna hold
to this and and and I've done that ever since.
And guess what, Love has not let me down. It
(43:45):
has led to the start of a movement that is
now going around the world. And if you haven't heard
about it yet, you heard about it now and you
will hear more about it. There are people all over
the United States and now people all over all over
the world that are adopting love is the answer as
their as their mantra, and they're saying the pledge to
(44:07):
themselves and they're putting it into action every day, and
I'm seeing things change. I'm getting the stories. The stories
are pouring in to us on a daily basis about
people deciding to choose love. Love is the most powerful
force in the universe. It is. If that weren't the case,
(44:28):
this this, this world would have been burned up a
long time ago because there is a lot of hate.
But you see what happens when when someone is is
in is in dire need, and then someone else will
start to go fund me and the next next day
a hundred thousand dollars has been raised for that family.
(44:49):
You see things like that all the time. That's love
in action. What would happen if all of us put
that front and center. It's how we're gonna live our life.
We're gonna live it with love. You know, sometimes it's
gotta be tough love. It's not all warm and mushy, right,
But what if we did that, What if we tried
(45:10):
that out for just a month, I bet everything would change.
And so what I'm asking people to do is on
septem love is the answer day. Do just that. Find someone,
treat them with love, see what happens. Test it out
for yourself. So let's talk about prisons, because prisons are
(45:31):
a big part of crime in the United States right.
A lot of times we take young people who have
their whole lives ahead of them and give them a
quite extensive rap sheet and incarcerate them and they come
out hardened. Is there any way your message of love
can be you know, parlayed into a better, you know,
criminal justice system. Absolutely, We've gotta take love to the
(45:54):
prisons too. We gotta teach guards and wardens and and
and others who work there the love is the answer principles.
You know, when when someone gets sentenced to jail or prison, Um,
they shouldn't be cast out of society. There's still part
of society. We we should still treat them with respect.
(46:17):
I know that firsthand. My father spent time in prison,
My my brother spent time in prison, My brother in
law spent time in prison. You know, Um, these are
people that that I knew that had a lot of
good inside him. And you know, and and my my
brother in law is still alive. He's out now, um,
(46:40):
but he's he's had a really really hard time from
the from the system and all the red tape. He's
shared stories with me about how, uh, you know, he'll
get a call at two am and if he doesn't
pick up because he's sleep, he gets in trouble. And
(47:04):
and so we gotta figure out a way to treat
people with a little more respect when they're in prison
or probation or parole um people who are in are
they getting what they need to to live a better life?
Are they are they receiving any kind of training, Are
(47:24):
they being treated with respect? Are they being given opportunities?
And I've heard stories of you know, folks who are
in prison. They get pulled out out of prison for
the day to go fight a fire that they've been
trained to fight. They get paid maybe five cents. Meanwhile,
they're charged three dollars a minute for a phone call.
(47:45):
Right they get out of prison, they try to find
a job. They've been trained to fight fires, but no
one will hire them because they've got a record. What's
the sense and stuff like that, Right, So we've got
to set people up for success, not failure. There's a
reason why recidivism rates are so high. It's meant to
(48:06):
be that way to feed a prison system that is
a for profit business for the most part. There are
shareholders expecting beds to be filled so that they can
make money. That's not sane. That's the dark side of capitalism, right.
(48:26):
We need to do a much better job of bringing
love into spaces like that, rehabilitation spaces. That's what they
should be, but they're not. And so we've got to
bring love into those settings as well. That's how things
will change. Yeah, this whole reintegration angle too, is really
(48:47):
important to this whole conversation, right, because if we have
hardened criminals, right, and we continue to harden them, because
every time they do get out of jail and try
to reintegrate into regular life, they can't find jobs. We've
it it nearly impossible for them to thrive, and it's
just a ticking time bomb and only a matter of
time before they resort to crime again to survive. So
(49:08):
how do how how do we do we need laws
that you know, help train people. You know, we do
have a massive labor shortage these days. Can't we find
ways to put these people back to work to ensure
that they feel belonging in today's world. Absolutely, you know
that that should be priority number one. There are millions
(49:29):
of people that have a hard time getting legal work
because they've got a record. Now they've they've they've served
their time. That should be the end of it, right,
that should be They should be able to vote, they
should be able to work, they should be able to
do everything that everyone else should be able to do.
That's a you know, that's just that's just the right
(49:52):
thing to do, and that's what's gonna change a lot
of things if we if we get around to doing that.
Have you seen progres us since you know, we saw
the video of George Floyd And what type of progress
have you seen? Man? I'll tell you what. Um Seeing
people of all races come out flooding streets saying black
(50:18):
lives matter. That was the first for me. All Right,
I'm fifty seven years old, right, it took fifty six
years of my life to see that in America. Think
about that simple black lives matter. I mean, it's a
(50:40):
simple statement. I'm not talking about the the organization. I'm
talking about those words that are so inflammatory for some reason,
so many people hate here in those words black lives matter.
I'm a black man. It took fifty six years of
my life to hear those words being said by masses
(51:05):
of people, and it was amazing and it was beautiful.
And now people need to live that out. A lot
of companies made promises that they're not keeping. A lot
of companies, y'all know who you are? Committed a million,
five million, ten million, a hundred million. Where's the money?
(51:25):
You know, if you haven't written those checks, you need to.
You need to keep your promise. If you said black
lives matter verbally or put a poster up, or or
put it on spray paint on the plywood of of
your shop that you boarded up, you should mean it
now too, not just when you thought your building was
(51:47):
going to get looted. You know, you can't just use
that statement as an insurance policy. You got to live
it out. And so you know, look, I I I
believe that that a lot of people meant when they
said it. But now is the time where you got
(52:08):
to live it out. We've got to keep pressing. None
of us are free until we're all free. And you know,
if you think that you're immune to the things that
that black people are experiencing just because you're not black. Um,
(52:30):
your day will come, you know when when you you're
gonna sit there and you're gonna say, I wish I
had treated somebody better. I wish i'd love somebody more
so that, uh, you know, whatever has come to you
wouldn't come to you. You know, I'll give you one
example of that. Um, there are white people who have
(52:54):
had their loved ones abused by police too. And I
know some who who didn't care about any of the
instances that they saw happening to black people because it
was happening to black people wouldn't happening to me. But
then it happened to their kid, you know, and and
(53:14):
then they got it. Oh wow, all right. It's could
be taken away in a heartbeat, just by somebody having
a bad day who wanted to take out something on
somebody else. So we gotta we gotta find a way
to love the other, treat people who don't look like
us or think like us better, because if we don't,
(53:37):
you know, the things that we're watching happening happening to
the other, they're gonna wind not happening to us, and
there's gonna be nobody there to save us if we
do that. We got to learn how to love each other.
I guess the what I always think of when I
think of policing is that they're supposed to work for us,
the biggest line item in most city budgets, right, They're
(53:59):
supposed to keep safe, And unfortunately a lot of our
interactions with police are inherently negative. So hopefully as time
goes on, we can improve that relationship because we're all
looking for the same thing. We're all looking for safer communities,
we're all looking for a better relationship with the people
who police us, and we're all looking ultimately not to
(54:20):
have bloated departments that don't do what we pay them
to do. So I appreciate the work that you're doing. Uh,
you approach it from a much different angle than maybe
many of the people who are listening to the show.
But I think love is something we all understand a j.
So on that note, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Police
(54:47):
funding is the second largest category of government spending. If
you could believe that, after schooling education, we spend a
whopping a hundred and ninety two thousand dollars per police
officer every year, or when you factor in local, state,
and federal spending, and policing is radically outdated for today's world.
(55:07):
Not only are we seeing calls across many corners of
society for change right and heartbreaking videos that go viral online,
but there's a lot of low morale among police officers.
We have extremism on either side that wants to protect
police officers at all costs and on the other side
wants to defund the police. In reality, we need a
(55:30):
balance conversation about what needs to change and what is
presently working, and quite frankly, there isn't a lot that's
working right now. Most cops are good cops, but the
bad cops, just like we said in the show when
Apple Spoils the Bunch, And a lot of this has
to do with unions, right, public sector unions, police unions.
We need to reform to ensure that police departments are
(55:51):
not protecting bad police officers. And really, until those hard
changes take place, we're never going to see any change
with policing. And we spend so much on policing yet
crime is exploding, so it doesn't work. No matter whether
you're left wing or right wing. Policing needs to change.
It needs to work for us. We can never forget
(56:13):
that police departments work for us, the people, the taxpayers,
the ones who are funding their entire profession. Um David
Grosso for Follow the Profit. If you enjoyed this podcast,
give us a review so that others can learn about
this podcast. Give us five stars. If you liked it,
I'd like to think my hard working staff who always
makes sure this happens every single week. Follow the Profit
(56:37):
is a production a gain Which three sixty and I
Heart Radio. For more podcasts, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Part of
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