June 24, 2022 • 27 mins
Part Two, in a two-part documentary follow-up to the audio drama #MATTER, spotlights community driven efforts to uproot and reimagine public safety, joined by some of the nation's leading activists, historians, and thinkers.
This episode is brought to you in collaboration with ONEOPP, a social justice coalition working to end police brutality.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hashtag Matter is a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio and an association with Wolf
at the Door. This episode was brought to you in
collaboration with One Up, a social justice coalition working to
end police brutality, and there's two part documentary follow up
to Hashtag Matter, will consider unexamined repercussions, joined by some
(00:23):
of the nation's leading activists, historians, and thinkers. Maybe by
contextualizing our past, we can better define our future, a
future that includes an exciting new normal where we invest
in resources that build safe communities and healthy kids. Listen up,
your boy poo troll in the building, and this is
(00:43):
context matters. If you haven't listened to the previous episode,
I suggest you go back and listen before moving on here,
because it provides incredibly important historical context that brings us
to the present moment. I always say that I would
love to live in a world where police are like
(01:05):
pay phones. You know, we use them once upon a time,
and now we understand them differently, and we've taken the
phones into our own hands, quite literally, in our pockets.
And that's what I feel like we need to do
with the care and safety um that we have, we
need to it needs to be brought into our communities.
Kendrick Sampson, an actor and activists co founder of Build Power.
(01:30):
Dr Molinadul always talks about you know how when she
first moved to l A, she realized that every morning,
all of these what we would call old heads, elders
would come out and sit on the porch and it
was like clockwork, seven o'clock every day or something like that,
and she couldn't understand what was happening. And finally she asked,
and she said, the elder said, that's when the kids
(01:51):
go to school. That's their safety system, and they sit
and they watch. We don't need cops. What I saw
was a very beautiful, nurturing, airing system that worked. Nobody
was gonna mess with these babies while the elders were watching.
And there are systems like that that we can create.
Even that's happening. I think in Baton Rouge, where there
(02:12):
was a school where forty five dads got together and
and um fights and suspensions and all of that went
way way, way way way down because they knew they
had people that they respected and their dads and such
watching so and they did it in shifts. So and
I'm not saying that everyday people need to take even
more out of their time. We can have those resources.
(02:35):
Those resources now are tied up in astronomical budgets, and
those budgets are forty of all of the resources we
have in our city budgets. The death of Mike Brown
ushered in a new wave of activism, but the protests
themselves demonstrated just how extreme police budgets and militarizations have become.
(03:00):
Historian Elizabeth hit after Michael Brown's murder in two thousand fourteen,
those m wrap armored tanks roaming through the streets of
Ferguson that the Ferguson Police Department had on hand. People
were stunned that local police had these weapons that were
being used at the time in Afghanistan. And people said, oh, well,
this is surplus military transfers from the War on Terror. No,
(03:24):
this militarization has been happening for well over half a century.
It began when Johnson called the War on Crime and
six five in in large part to create a pipeline
where surplus military weapons that like tear gas and m
for carbine rifles and helicopters and armored tanks and and
bulletproof vests, wakie talkies, all kinds of new weapons and
(03:47):
technologies being used in Vietnam, and interventions overseas to local
law enforcement to fight black rebellion At home, Where are
our tax dollars going and how do they reflect what
we value? As a society, author, thinker, and speaker on
issues of identity and race in America in a world
(04:12):
with finite resources, when you're being told but often the
largest chunk of our funds need to go to locking
up people. If your youth, if your teenagers going through
a rough time and shoplifting or experimenting with some drugs,
you expect to be able to call a number and
(04:33):
get help. You expect that whoever they interact with is
going to say, this is a trouble kid who needs help.
You expect that if they are caught shoplifting in the stores,
and we see this in TV all the time, that
the store owner is gonna walk them home and say,
you know what, your kids in trouble, have them show
up on Tuesday and momp the floor for free. You
expect that if someone you love is in mental health crisis,
(04:56):
that you will be able to call a professional who
will come and get them health and safety that they need.
When we say, when my team is in trouble, what
he needs is intervention, What he needs is some guidance.
I need to make sure that whoever is called in
sees the humanity of my child. Instead the person responding
(05:18):
when your kids shoplifts should be trained to kill. That
is not anybody who sees the value in humanity and
our communities want. I think that, you know, there's so
much debate around the language of defund the police. And
I was talking with some friends, some colleagues of mine
who have been heavily involved in this work and in
(05:39):
times just even you know, six years ago, when we
wouldn't say defund the police on a large platform, it
wasn't a debate to have because people were scared of it.
And now this is a debate we're having, which I
think is important and I think is progress. That abolition,
first and foremost is tied to the understanding that our
(06:02):
police system are so called criminal justice system is not
only a descendant, but a continued justification of the idea
that those in power get to decide who has freedom
and who doesn't who is redeemable and who is it
(06:23):
based on the color of their skin, based on their disability,
based on their wealth and resources of their freedom, and
builds a story justifying that defund the police simply says, no,
this is not what I choose my money to go to.
This is not what we should be putting our resources into.
(06:47):
We don't believe that it makes people safer. We don't
believe that it's a way to live. We live in
a world where people who have been denied resources do
desperate things, and as long as those res persons are lacking,
those desperate acts will occur. And so we say, well,
what if we gave those resources, What if people weren't
(07:08):
so desperate. There have to be a lot of different
solutions from different approaches that we try. So one of
the things that we did to address these issues with
create a task Force on the Future of Community Policing.
And this task force was outstanding because it was made
up of all the different stakeholders. We had law enforcement,
(07:31):
we had community activists, we had young people. They held
public meanings across the country. They developed concrete proposals that
every community in America can implement to rebuild trust and
help law enforcement sociologists. Nikki Jones, I think there are
good examples right now of community driven efforts to redefine safety.
(07:56):
To think about non criminalizing ways that the govern can
in fact intervene. Policing is the most coercive way in
which they do that, but there are other ways that
they could provide support and resources. In summer, I thought
critically about how we could use the resources of the
university to provide to those who are on the front
(08:19):
lines of this battle, to to reimagine public safety, to
develop community alternatives. Uh. And so what I've been able
to do over working closely with a community partner to
bring research, expertise and energy of students in service of
building up the life affirming institutions that Abolition calls for
(08:41):
the project not of of of perfecting policing, but but
really strengthening communities and thinking about all the ways that
policy can be used to do that. And so if
I think about Oakland, there's a program where it trains
community members in crisis response. We know one of the
most volatile encounters is when police officers are interacting with
(09:04):
people who are experiencing crisis, particularly mental health crisis. UH.
And so what is it it mean to train a
broader swath of the community to respond to crisis. So
that's a key shift that came from this moment. UH.
And there are reasons why people coalesced around that. One
(09:25):
part is that law enforcement or certainly some law enforcement
officers or leaders agreed that their skills and expertise don't
align with mental health crisis. UH. And we're less resistant
to other people coming in. UM to that space where
you will get more pushback is with the anti violence,
(09:48):
the violence prevention efforts, because fundamentally, the police believe that
that is their domain. And so for me, when you
asked me about reform arms, one of the most important
is to directly confront the violence of policing UH and
(10:08):
to constrain the ability of police to use violence and
to do harm. And that is where the biggest battle
is going to be because when you think about what
police unions are defending, they're not necessarily defending the right
of officers to respond to mental health crisis. They're responding
to defending officers and their ability to use as much
(10:32):
violence as necessary in any encounter. Well, let me just
say that the police union is a lobbying arm of
the police department. That's their function, basically, retired Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey,
she spent twenty years in uniform and patrol on the
Los Angeles Police Department between nine and two thousand and
(10:56):
I know that some unions are stronger than others, are
more pres sive in terms of really going to the
mat for officers, many times errant officers. When you hear
the term the blue wall of silence, really all that
is is you know what the what the kids say
in the street. You know, snitches get stitches, and so
(11:19):
nobody wants to tell on somebody else, generally wholesale, because
when you report misconduct, there's a price to pay, and
that price could be something as simple as just being ostracized,
which is a real thing. It could be something as
serious as not getting back up if you ask for it.
(11:43):
Police chiefs, sheriffs and commissioners could stop all of these
errant behavior yesterday if they had an appetite to do that.
You can't have a Derek Chauvin on a police department
over twenty years or nearly twenty years on the department
with as many personnel complaints as he had years on
(12:06):
the job and not have anything substantively be done to
him administratively to deter that bad behavior. If they wanted to,
they being command staff police chiefs, if they wanted to
stop the behavior, they absolutely could. Many police chiefs will
(12:30):
say that, you know, we can't get rid of these
guys because of the police unions, And that may very
well be true, because officers do have a right to
do process. But what a police officer is not guaranteed
is to work in patrol, to be in the field.
And I know this to be true from a personal
(12:52):
position that if a watch commander, if a captain wants
to take a police officer out of the field, they
can do it. They can tie them to a desk
for their entire career if they so chose. Just as
with anything, if something is allowed to go unchecked, then
(13:12):
it certainly has the potential to become a behemoth. Right,
whether it's crime or whether it's errant officers will return
after this break, we're back. This is context matters. Here
(13:35):
is Kendrick Sampson. So I think that when we're talking
about abolition in the in the world without police, people
hear what we're taking away and not what the vision
is the whole reason that the abolitionist movement exists is
to uproot all of those things that were intended to oppress.
(13:56):
Those systems that were built, that weren't ever held accountable,
They just had a new face. Those things need to
be uprooted. Just like any bad tree or weed that's
causing problems in any other garden. Uh, you uproot that
and you plant good seeds in that in that soil.
You don't hire a violent institution to keep you safe.
(14:17):
You institute systems that are meant for safety. That's it.
I don't think it's really hard. We just have to,
you know, have those conversations, start building that that narrative
infrastructure for that narrative change that precedes culture, that precedes politics,
that builds the infrastructure that we actually need. Me Michael
Larocha t O Show, co founded Build Power to organize
(14:40):
people in the entertainment industry and to utilize their platforms
to shine a light on these incredible, extraordinary stories happening
all the time that we don't hear winds happening all
the time. One of the key tenants to oppression is
to suppress all of that good work. To say that
it's not happening. Hide it. And we're in the epicenter
(15:03):
of the biggest narrative industry, the mecca film and television,
right here in Los Angeles. Why don't we start to
build a program to organize folks. And we wanted to
demystify a lot of those things that people call radical
um that are really just logical solutions two problems that
(15:24):
people have been fighting for for centuries. And we want
to build a powerful community that is dead set on
making this world a much better place, a place that
we dream of where we know that those who are
currently marginalized and targeted can be centered and can thrive.
And now those people that we love, those transfolks, those
(15:48):
people who are um differently abled, who are deaf, blind,
who are elderly kids, you know, black, brown, dark skin, fat,
whatever their bodies look like. They are centered, they are valued,
and they have the resources that they need to have
autonomy over the wellness of their communities. We know that
(16:10):
that world is possible, and we know the people that
are leading that change, and we want to make sure
that we introduced them to and influence Hollywood and all
of the stories that are coming out of Hollywood. Because
they usually perpetuate harm and we want to make sure
that they perpetuate liberation. We have to change that narrative.
We have to change the narratives, and we have to
replace them with narratives that are true. Then you start
(16:32):
to literally build the future that you want to see.
What is the narrative around policing we're intersex race and
how can we reshape it again? Did when we think
of how whiteness is depicted in media, um we get
to see all sorts of whiteness. We get to see
(16:53):
the white charity worker, the white villain, you know, the
complicated white identity. We get to see white children, and
very rarely actually do we get to see black children
being children, being more than a tragedy or a troubled youth.
And it limits the ways in which we view people.
(17:14):
It limits the ways in which black people see themselves,
and absolutely limits the ways in which people who aren't
black see us and what we're capable of and the
range of emotions that we have and also how the
world impacts us. It creates this narrative that the white
experience in the United States is the default experience and
(17:39):
if a cop isn't is a bad cop. Usually they're
depicted as a lazy cop, a cop who isn't willing
to do what it takes to take down the perpetrator,
a coup that isn't willing to, you know, chase down
that evil villain, and not the ways in which bad
policing actually shows itself today, which is um police officers
(18:02):
who are very quick to see any black or brown
person learning their life as a possible threat or danger.
Oh you know, I think one of the most beautiful
things when I'm asked to really think about the future
is acknowledging that if if you actually invest in the
things that prevent crime, if you invest in the things
(18:24):
that build healthy communities, there is no way you can
actually have a police force that functions the way it does.
We have severely under resource sexual educators and rate prices clinics,
we have severely under resource mental health clinics, and you know,
UM suicide hotlines. We have severely under resource job programs
(18:50):
and training programs and schools. Maybe we just say we
take that budget and we put it there when we
take the things off the plate of cops that cops
shouldn't be doing. And I don't know who I don't
know any everyday people who honestly believe that someone trained
to kill needs to be giving you a twenty dollar
(19:10):
ticket when you don't can do a complete stop at
it stops, or that someone trained to kill needs to
be interacting with your child when they steal a pack
of candy from the corner store, or someone trained to
kill needs to be showing up at your door after
you've been sexually assaulted. So if we said we also
wanted to make sure that cops didn't kill people on
(19:35):
mental health checks, then that means that we would have
to have mental health training, that we would have to
have the escalation training. It would mean that we would
need to remove that deadly weapon that often escalates a scene.
It means that, you know, we would have to have
(19:56):
officers who specialize in these areas. More from Sergeant Cheryld Dorsey.
Officers need to be better trained. Officers need to undergo
a psychological evaluation, not just when you're hired, not just
when you're involved in a deadly use of force. But
I just say every two years, because police officers are
(20:16):
exposed daily, particularly patrol officers, every day to something that
is gnarly that could affect you in a way that
could alter your whole core. And police officers don't self report.
They're not gonna come in and ask for help because
(20:37):
it's not sexy, because you'll be hazed, because you'll be teased.
And so you have to compel officers every two years
to come in and crack open their head and just
look inside and if stuff is not working right, if
you can fix it, fix it, and if you can't,
help them onto a profession where their skill set is
(21:00):
better suited. Because every person who wants to be the
police should not be the police. They don't have the temperament.
I do know that here in California, Senator Bradford is
at least trying to have officers in California held accountable
when they do certain things. And and it's just this
side of ending qualified immunity, but it's a great baby step.
(21:22):
We too have an ownus, We have a responsibility. Sheriffs
are elected officials. District attorneys who don't want to prosecute
errant officers are elected officials. Judges who don't want to
give police officers a sentence commiserate with the crime that
they've been convicted of are elected officials, and that just
because someone runs from you, you don't get to shoot them.
(21:44):
I've had many many suspects during my twenty years run
from me. Just because somebody doesn't comply, doesn't come here,
doesn't turn around, says something that you find offensive, does
not give you the right to kill them. I have
been in fights with people, but guess what, I shot
no one in my twenty years. So I'm here to
tell you I've dealt with some of the baddest badass
(22:08):
I shot no one. So there's a way to do
this job. There's a way to take bad guys and
girls to jail, allow them to have their dignity and
survive even in non compliance. We are not to be
the judge, jury, and executioner day in and day out
as we patrol the streets of the city where we're employed.
(22:30):
I don't have a problem speaking truthfully. Um I know,
depending on what I say on any given day may
ruffle the feathers of activists if I'm saying something that
they deem as pro police, or certainly could ruffle the
feathers of the police because I'm giving away company secrets.
But I don't speak the way that I do because
I'm anti police, although I've been accused of that. It's
(22:51):
been a significant amount of my life doing what it
is that I do. I want to make things better,
I want to make things different. And if we don't
admit that there's a problem, that we have nothing to fix.
Nikki Jones, how do you provide safety for that young
person or or a vision that emerges from the needs
(23:12):
of that young person, not from the needs of politicians, uh,
you know, be selected or elected. It's a deep project.
It's a deep project. And so the commitment has to
be to opening up and to thinking differently, and I
think particularly for white people, not exclusively from confronting the
(23:35):
way that your alignment with policing is part of a
racial the racial project of policing. Right, that the policing
is a white institution that is based on protecting in
part white people from the fear right uh, in their
imaginations of black people. That's part of it. Uh. And
(23:56):
so when you say you want more policing, and do
you want more of that? Some people do and that's real,
but some people don't. Uh. And if that's the case,
then they need to confront that and begin working towards
that I think a lot of people have been trying
to figure out what the protests in They are unprecedent
(24:17):
for a lot of us, and one of us in
our lifetime, I haven't seen protesting the United States to
that scale, and it was stunning to see. It was
stunning to see so many people marching for black lives.
It was stunning to see these conversations in the areas
(24:37):
of society that had so long been resistant. What that
will mean for us long term is to be determined.
If we continuously go back to the fact that we're
talking about systems, then that means that will only really
be able to see the effectiveness of these protests when
we see it in the systems. What I would love
(24:59):
is for able to say, what is happening in my town,
in my church, in my school, right what is happening here?
I want people to be curious about why things are
the way they are. How many kids of color in
your school are getting the education they need, are thragning,
(25:22):
how many are being sent to juvenile attention, how many
are being expelled or suspended? How many are being put
into special education when they don't have disabilities right? How
often is this happening in your neighborhood, in your town.
That's the comfort of the conversation of what people to have.
And then I want people to ask, where have I
(25:43):
been made a party to this? Where have I been
taught and incentivized to support this? And how do I stop?
And then for populations of color, especially black people, who
I think have been not only, of course, have we
survived so much for so many generations, but I would
(26:06):
say even this whole discussion has been is so brutal
when you're constantly asked to revisit your own trauma and humanization,
in your own unsafety in the world. I think that
we need to have a lot more conversations about what
healing and looks like and what joy looks like. This
work isn't easy. We may not always get it right.
(26:28):
We may make mistakes along in the way, but if
our intentions are aligned, we can and we will grow
from those mistakes. When we come together to protests, change policy,
and make demands of our leaders. We must always always
nurture the ground we're standing on in the present moment,
remember to celebrate each other, relish all that we're looking
(26:49):
to protect. This episode was brought to You by Shonda
land Audio and collaboration with One Up, a social justice
coalition working to end police brutality. Hashtag Matter is a
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart
Radio and an association with Wolf at the Door. For
more podcasts from shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
(27:11):
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hashtag Matter is a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio and an association with Wolf
at the Door. This episode was brought to you in
collaboration with One Up, a social justice coalition working to
end police brutality, and there's two part documentary follow up
to Hashtag Matter, will consider unexamined repercussions, joined by some
(00:23):
of the nation's leading activists, historians, and thinkers. Maybe by
contextualizing our past, we can better define our future, a
future that includes an exciting new normal where we invest
in resources that build safe communities and healthy kids. Listen up,
your boy poo troll in the building, and this is
(00:43):
context matters. If you haven't listened to the previous episode,
I suggest you go back and listen before moving on here,
because it provides incredibly important historical context that brings us
to the present moment. I always say that I would
love to live in a world where police are like
(01:05):
pay phones. You know, we use them once upon a time,
and now we understand them differently, and we've taken the
phones into our own hands, quite literally, in our pockets.
And that's what I feel like we need to do
with the care and safety um that we have, we
need to it needs to be brought into our communities.
Kendrick Sampson, an actor and activists co founder of Build Power.
(01:30):
Dr Molinadul always talks about you know how when she
first moved to l A, she realized that every morning,
all of these what we would call old heads, elders
would come out and sit on the porch and it
was like clockwork, seven o'clock every day or something like that,
and she couldn't understand what was happening. And finally she asked,
and she said, the elder said, that's when the kids
(01:51):
go to school. That's their safety system, and they sit
and they watch. We don't need cops. What I saw
was a very beautiful, nurturing, airing system that worked. Nobody
was gonna mess with these babies while the elders were watching.
And there are systems like that that we can create.
Even that's happening. I think in Baton Rouge, where there
(02:12):
was a school where forty five dads got together and
and um fights and suspensions and all of that went
way way, way way way down because they knew they
had people that they respected and their dads and such
watching so and they did it in shifts. So and
I'm not saying that everyday people need to take even
more out of their time. We can have those resources.
(02:35):
Those resources now are tied up in astronomical budgets, and
those budgets are forty of all of the resources we
have in our city budgets. The death of Mike Brown
ushered in a new wave of activism, but the protests
themselves demonstrated just how extreme police budgets and militarizations have become.
(03:00):
Historian Elizabeth hit after Michael Brown's murder in two thousand fourteen,
those m wrap armored tanks roaming through the streets of
Ferguson that the Ferguson Police Department had on hand. People
were stunned that local police had these weapons that were
being used at the time in Afghanistan. And people said, oh, well,
this is surplus military transfers from the War on Terror. No,
(03:24):
this militarization has been happening for well over half a century.
It began when Johnson called the War on Crime and
six five in in large part to create a pipeline
where surplus military weapons that like tear gas and m
for carbine rifles and helicopters and armored tanks and and
bulletproof vests, wakie talkies, all kinds of new weapons and
(03:47):
technologies being used in Vietnam, and interventions overseas to local
law enforcement to fight black rebellion At home, Where are
our tax dollars going and how do they reflect what
we value? As a society, author, thinker, and speaker on
issues of identity and race in America in a world
(04:12):
with finite resources, when you're being told but often the
largest chunk of our funds need to go to locking
up people. If your youth, if your teenagers going through
a rough time and shoplifting or experimenting with some drugs,
you expect to be able to call a number and
(04:33):
get help. You expect that whoever they interact with is
going to say, this is a trouble kid who needs help.
You expect that if they are caught shoplifting in the stores,
and we see this in TV all the time, that
the store owner is gonna walk them home and say,
you know what, your kids in trouble, have them show
up on Tuesday and momp the floor for free. You
expect that if someone you love is in mental health crisis,
(04:56):
that you will be able to call a professional who
will come and get them health and safety that they need.
When we say, when my team is in trouble, what
he needs is intervention, What he needs is some guidance.
I need to make sure that whoever is called in
sees the humanity of my child. Instead the person responding
(05:18):
when your kids shoplifts should be trained to kill. That
is not anybody who sees the value in humanity and
our communities want. I think that, you know, there's so
much debate around the language of defund the police. And
I was talking with some friends, some colleagues of mine
who have been heavily involved in this work and in
(05:39):
times just even you know, six years ago, when we
wouldn't say defund the police on a large platform, it
wasn't a debate to have because people were scared of it.
And now this is a debate we're having, which I
think is important and I think is progress. That abolition,
first and foremost is tied to the understanding that our
(06:02):
police system are so called criminal justice system is not
only a descendant, but a continued justification of the idea
that those in power get to decide who has freedom
and who doesn't who is redeemable and who is it
(06:23):
based on the color of their skin, based on their disability,
based on their wealth and resources of their freedom, and
builds a story justifying that defund the police simply says, no,
this is not what I choose my money to go to.
This is not what we should be putting our resources into.
(06:47):
We don't believe that it makes people safer. We don't
believe that it's a way to live. We live in
a world where people who have been denied resources do
desperate things, and as long as those res persons are lacking,
those desperate acts will occur. And so we say, well,
what if we gave those resources, What if people weren't
(07:08):
so desperate. There have to be a lot of different
solutions from different approaches that we try. So one of
the things that we did to address these issues with
create a task Force on the Future of Community Policing.
And this task force was outstanding because it was made
up of all the different stakeholders. We had law enforcement,
(07:31):
we had community activists, we had young people. They held
public meanings across the country. They developed concrete proposals that
every community in America can implement to rebuild trust and
help law enforcement sociologists. Nikki Jones, I think there are
good examples right now of community driven efforts to redefine safety.
(07:56):
To think about non criminalizing ways that the govern can
in fact intervene. Policing is the most coercive way in
which they do that, but there are other ways that
they could provide support and resources. In summer, I thought
critically about how we could use the resources of the
university to provide to those who are on the front
(08:19):
lines of this battle, to to reimagine public safety, to
develop community alternatives. Uh. And so what I've been able
to do over working closely with a community partner to
bring research, expertise and energy of students in service of
building up the life affirming institutions that Abolition calls for
(08:41):
the project not of of of perfecting policing, but but
really strengthening communities and thinking about all the ways that
policy can be used to do that. And so if
I think about Oakland, there's a program where it trains
community members in crisis response. We know one of the
most volatile encounters is when police officers are interacting with
(09:04):
people who are experiencing crisis, particularly mental health crisis. UH.
And so what is it it mean to train a
broader swath of the community to respond to crisis. So
that's a key shift that came from this moment. UH.
And there are reasons why people coalesced around that. One
(09:25):
part is that law enforcement or certainly some law enforcement
officers or leaders agreed that their skills and expertise don't
align with mental health crisis. UH. And we're less resistant
to other people coming in. UM to that space where
you will get more pushback is with the anti violence,
(09:48):
the violence prevention efforts, because fundamentally, the police believe that
that is their domain. And so for me, when you
asked me about reform arms, one of the most important
is to directly confront the violence of policing UH and
(10:08):
to constrain the ability of police to use violence and
to do harm. And that is where the biggest battle
is going to be because when you think about what
police unions are defending, they're not necessarily defending the right
of officers to respond to mental health crisis. They're responding
to defending officers and their ability to use as much
(10:32):
violence as necessary in any encounter. Well, let me just
say that the police union is a lobbying arm of
the police department. That's their function, basically, retired Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey,
she spent twenty years in uniform and patrol on the
Los Angeles Police Department between nine and two thousand and
(10:56):
I know that some unions are stronger than others, are
more pres sive in terms of really going to the
mat for officers, many times errant officers. When you hear
the term the blue wall of silence, really all that
is is you know what the what the kids say
in the street. You know, snitches get stitches, and so
(11:19):
nobody wants to tell on somebody else, generally wholesale, because
when you report misconduct, there's a price to pay, and
that price could be something as simple as just being ostracized,
which is a real thing. It could be something as
serious as not getting back up if you ask for it.
(11:43):
Police chiefs, sheriffs and commissioners could stop all of these
errant behavior yesterday if they had an appetite to do that.
You can't have a Derek Chauvin on a police department
over twenty years or nearly twenty years on the department
with as many personnel complaints as he had years on
(12:06):
the job and not have anything substantively be done to
him administratively to deter that bad behavior. If they wanted to,
they being command staff police chiefs, if they wanted to
stop the behavior, they absolutely could. Many police chiefs will
(12:30):
say that, you know, we can't get rid of these
guys because of the police unions, And that may very
well be true, because officers do have a right to
do process. But what a police officer is not guaranteed
is to work in patrol, to be in the field.
And I know this to be true from a personal
(12:52):
position that if a watch commander, if a captain wants
to take a police officer out of the field, they
can do it. They can tie them to a desk
for their entire career if they so chose. Just as
with anything, if something is allowed to go unchecked, then
(13:12):
it certainly has the potential to become a behemoth. Right,
whether it's crime or whether it's errant officers will return
after this break, we're back. This is context matters. Here
(13:35):
is Kendrick Sampson. So I think that when we're talking
about abolition in the in the world without police, people
hear what we're taking away and not what the vision
is the whole reason that the abolitionist movement exists is
to uproot all of those things that were intended to oppress.
(13:56):
Those systems that were built, that weren't ever held accountable,
They just had a new face. Those things need to
be uprooted. Just like any bad tree or weed that's
causing problems in any other garden. Uh, you uproot that
and you plant good seeds in that in that soil.
You don't hire a violent institution to keep you safe.
(14:17):
You institute systems that are meant for safety. That's it.
I don't think it's really hard. We just have to,
you know, have those conversations, start building that that narrative
infrastructure for that narrative change that precedes culture, that precedes politics,
that builds the infrastructure that we actually need. Me Michael
Larocha t O Show, co founded Build Power to organize
(14:40):
people in the entertainment industry and to utilize their platforms
to shine a light on these incredible, extraordinary stories happening
all the time that we don't hear winds happening all
the time. One of the key tenants to oppression is
to suppress all of that good work. To say that
it's not happening. Hide it. And we're in the epicenter
(15:03):
of the biggest narrative industry, the mecca film and television,
right here in Los Angeles. Why don't we start to
build a program to organize folks. And we wanted to
demystify a lot of those things that people call radical
um that are really just logical solutions two problems that
(15:24):
people have been fighting for for centuries. And we want
to build a powerful community that is dead set on
making this world a much better place, a place that
we dream of where we know that those who are
currently marginalized and targeted can be centered and can thrive.
And now those people that we love, those transfolks, those
(15:48):
people who are um differently abled, who are deaf, blind,
who are elderly kids, you know, black, brown, dark skin, fat,
whatever their bodies look like. They are centered, they are valued,
and they have the resources that they need to have
autonomy over the wellness of their communities. We know that
(16:10):
that world is possible, and we know the people that
are leading that change, and we want to make sure
that we introduced them to and influence Hollywood and all
of the stories that are coming out of Hollywood. Because
they usually perpetuate harm and we want to make sure
that they perpetuate liberation. We have to change that narrative.
We have to change the narratives, and we have to
replace them with narratives that are true. Then you start
(16:32):
to literally build the future that you want to see.
What is the narrative around policing we're intersex race and
how can we reshape it again? Did when we think
of how whiteness is depicted in media, um we get
to see all sorts of whiteness. We get to see
(16:53):
the white charity worker, the white villain, you know, the
complicated white identity. We get to see white children, and
very rarely actually do we get to see black children
being children, being more than a tragedy or a troubled youth.
And it limits the ways in which we view people.
(17:14):
It limits the ways in which black people see themselves,
and absolutely limits the ways in which people who aren't
black see us and what we're capable of and the
range of emotions that we have and also how the
world impacts us. It creates this narrative that the white
experience in the United States is the default experience and
(17:39):
if a cop isn't is a bad cop. Usually they're
depicted as a lazy cop, a cop who isn't willing
to do what it takes to take down the perpetrator,
a coup that isn't willing to, you know, chase down
that evil villain, and not the ways in which bad
policing actually shows itself today, which is um police officers
(18:02):
who are very quick to see any black or brown
person learning their life as a possible threat or danger.
Oh you know, I think one of the most beautiful
things when I'm asked to really think about the future
is acknowledging that if if you actually invest in the
things that prevent crime, if you invest in the things
(18:24):
that build healthy communities, there is no way you can
actually have a police force that functions the way it does.
We have severely under resource sexual educators and rate prices clinics,
we have severely under resource mental health clinics, and you know,
UM suicide hotlines. We have severely under resource job programs
(18:50):
and training programs and schools. Maybe we just say we
take that budget and we put it there when we
take the things off the plate of cops that cops
shouldn't be doing. And I don't know who I don't
know any everyday people who honestly believe that someone trained
to kill needs to be giving you a twenty dollar
(19:10):
ticket when you don't can do a complete stop at
it stops, or that someone trained to kill needs to
be interacting with your child when they steal a pack
of candy from the corner store, or someone trained to
kill needs to be showing up at your door after
you've been sexually assaulted. So if we said we also
wanted to make sure that cops didn't kill people on
(19:35):
mental health checks, then that means that we would have
to have mental health training, that we would have to
have the escalation training. It would mean that we would
need to remove that deadly weapon that often escalates a scene.
It means that, you know, we would have to have
(19:56):
officers who specialize in these areas. More from Sergeant Cheryld Dorsey.
Officers need to be better trained. Officers need to undergo
a psychological evaluation, not just when you're hired, not just
when you're involved in a deadly use of force. But
I just say every two years, because police officers are
(20:16):
exposed daily, particularly patrol officers, every day to something that
is gnarly that could affect you in a way that
could alter your whole core. And police officers don't self report.
They're not gonna come in and ask for help because
(20:37):
it's not sexy, because you'll be hazed, because you'll be teased.
And so you have to compel officers every two years
to come in and crack open their head and just
look inside and if stuff is not working right, if
you can fix it, fix it, and if you can't,
help them onto a profession where their skill set is
(21:00):
better suited. Because every person who wants to be the
police should not be the police. They don't have the temperament.
I do know that here in California, Senator Bradford is
at least trying to have officers in California held accountable
when they do certain things. And and it's just this
side of ending qualified immunity, but it's a great baby step.
(21:22):
We too have an ownus, We have a responsibility. Sheriffs
are elected officials. District attorneys who don't want to prosecute
errant officers are elected officials. Judges who don't want to
give police officers a sentence commiserate with the crime that
they've been convicted of are elected officials, and that just
because someone runs from you, you don't get to shoot them.
(21:44):
I've had many many suspects during my twenty years run
from me. Just because somebody doesn't comply, doesn't come here,
doesn't turn around, says something that you find offensive, does
not give you the right to kill them. I have
been in fights with people, but guess what, I shot
no one in my twenty years. So I'm here to
tell you I've dealt with some of the baddest badass
(22:08):
I shot no one. So there's a way to do
this job. There's a way to take bad guys and
girls to jail, allow them to have their dignity and
survive even in non compliance. We are not to be
the judge, jury, and executioner day in and day out
as we patrol the streets of the city where we're employed.
(22:30):
I don't have a problem speaking truthfully. Um I know,
depending on what I say on any given day may
ruffle the feathers of activists if I'm saying something that
they deem as pro police, or certainly could ruffle the
feathers of the police because I'm giving away company secrets.
But I don't speak the way that I do because
I'm anti police, although I've been accused of that. It's
(22:51):
been a significant amount of my life doing what it
is that I do. I want to make things better,
I want to make things different. And if we don't
admit that there's a problem, that we have nothing to fix.
Nikki Jones, how do you provide safety for that young
person or or a vision that emerges from the needs
(23:12):
of that young person, not from the needs of politicians, uh,
you know, be selected or elected. It's a deep project.
It's a deep project. And so the commitment has to
be to opening up and to thinking differently, and I
think particularly for white people, not exclusively from confronting the
(23:35):
way that your alignment with policing is part of a
racial the racial project of policing. Right, that the policing
is a white institution that is based on protecting in
part white people from the fear right uh, in their
imaginations of black people. That's part of it. Uh. And
(23:56):
so when you say you want more policing, and do
you want more of that? Some people do and that's real,
but some people don't. Uh. And if that's the case,
then they need to confront that and begin working towards
that I think a lot of people have been trying
to figure out what the protests in They are unprecedent
(24:17):
for a lot of us, and one of us in
our lifetime, I haven't seen protesting the United States to
that scale, and it was stunning to see. It was
stunning to see so many people marching for black lives.
It was stunning to see these conversations in the areas
(24:37):
of society that had so long been resistant. What that
will mean for us long term is to be determined.
If we continuously go back to the fact that we're
talking about systems, then that means that will only really
be able to see the effectiveness of these protests when
we see it in the systems. What I would love
(24:59):
is for able to say, what is happening in my town,
in my church, in my school, right what is happening here?
I want people to be curious about why things are
the way they are. How many kids of color in
your school are getting the education they need, are thragning,
(25:22):
how many are being sent to juvenile attention, how many
are being expelled or suspended? How many are being put
into special education when they don't have disabilities right? How
often is this happening in your neighborhood, in your town.
That's the comfort of the conversation of what people to have.
And then I want people to ask, where have I
(25:43):
been made a party to this? Where have I been
taught and incentivized to support this? And how do I stop?
And then for populations of color, especially black people, who
I think have been not only, of course, have we
survived so much for so many generations, but I would
(26:06):
say even this whole discussion has been is so brutal
when you're constantly asked to revisit your own trauma and humanization,
in your own unsafety in the world. I think that
we need to have a lot more conversations about what
healing and looks like and what joy looks like. This
work isn't easy. We may not always get it right.
(26:28):
We may make mistakes along in the way, but if
our intentions are aligned, we can and we will grow
from those mistakes. When we come together to protests, change policy,
and make demands of our leaders. We must always always
nurture the ground we're standing on in the present moment,
remember to celebrate each other, relish all that we're looking
(26:49):
to protect. This episode was brought to You by Shonda
land Audio and collaboration with One Up, a social justice
coalition working to end police brutality. Hashtag Matter is a
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart
Radio and an association with Wolf at the Door. For
more podcasts from shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
(27:11):
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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