Keeping Us Safe, Beyond Policing (with Dr. Phil Goff and Zach Norris)

Baratunde builds off the last episode of his previous podcast, We’re Having a Moment. He speaks with two esteemed guests, Dr. Phil Goff, who works directly with police departments around the country, and Zach Norris, who works with communities, about ways we can reclaim public safety that don’t always need to involve the police.

Show Notes + Links

Find Phil @DrPhilGoff and visit Center for Policing Equity and @policingequity on social media.

Find Zach @zachwnorris and at zachnorris.com. Visit Ella Baker Center, and @ellabakercenter on social media. Also grab his book, We Keep Us Safe here.

Find this episode, a transcript, show notes and more at howtocitizen.com. Please rate and review this podcast and share feedback at [e-mail]. Use #howtocitizen on social media. 

For this episode, here is what you can do.

INTERNAL ACTIONS

It starts with you. Explore your own relationship to feeling safe and living among your neighbors. Answer some of the following questions for yourself AND in discussion with at least one other member of your community.

1. What do you need to feel safe in your community?
2. What makes you feel unsafe in your community?
3. How do you get to know your neighbors?
4. When was the last time you made eye contact with someone in your neighborhood?
5. When was the last time you talked to one of your neighbors?
6. What can neighbors do to keep each other safe?
7. Has a neighbor ever made you feel unsafe? What happened and what would have made it better?

Don’t look away. Get educated on how policing works where you live.

1. How much of your city and county budget go to police. What percentage is this of the total? What rank is police expenditure among top spending categories?
2. Who runs law enforcement in your area? City? County? Sheriff? Chief? Who has hire/fire authority? 
3. What is your most local access to law enforcement? Where is the nearest station or precinct? 
4. Who is already working on public safety issues where you live? 
5. Identify who is responsible for and makes public safety decisions where you live and find out which positions get voted in. 
6. When is the next election for these positions in your community and who is running?

Good neighbors don’t just call the cops. Know who you call instead of the police.

1. Create a resource you can keep on hand or enter into your phone that looks like this great example from DSMNTL IG account for Washington, DC. 
2. Bonus: Create these alternative number guides physically and digitally and share them widely with your neighbors, local businesses, and online. 

 

EXTERNAL ACTIONS

Work with local groups to help get new policies enacted that we know work.

• Read Dr. Phil Goff’s Center for Policing Equity Roadmap for Exploring New Models of Funding Public Safety. It’s been requested by over 950 communities, and now people locally are starting to implement the roadmap themselves.
• Lend your voice to CampaignZero by supporting its nation-wide campaign to end police violence. You can track state legislation o

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to How to Citizen with Baritude Day, a show
where we reimagine the word citizen as a verb, reclaim
it from those who weaponized it, and remind ourselves how
to wield our collective power. I'm Baritune Day. Like a

(00:26):
healthy democracy, this show is stronger with your participation, and
we have a number of ways for you to do
that in public. Use the hashtag how to Citizen when
you post about the show on social media, and I'll
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send feedback and ideas to comments at how to citizen

(00:47):
dot com, and if you've taken the actions we recommend
at the end of each episode, share those with us
by emailing action at how to citizen dot com. We've
been moved by which you shared from the episode so
far and look forward to more into building future episodes
with you and your actions. Now a word on how

(01:07):
we make this show. We've record most of these shows
live in Zoom with a studio audience, cameras on chat
room lit up, and we take questions from you for
our guests. I'd love to have you joined for future taping.
Visit how does citizen dot com and join my email
list for the invites and my amazing weekly emails. I'm

(01:28):
the best emailer while I love the live audience. Don't worry.
I'll catch up with just you on the other side
of this conversation where I'll give you some really specific
ways to citizen for this episode. In the meantime, I'm
going to hand the mic to myself as I set
up the conversation with our amazing guests. I have been

(01:53):
thinking about this word normal a lot lately. What does
normal mean? You know, normal is this state of things
that we get used to, and normal can change. So,
for example, I don't think as normal to have fifteen
different streaming platforms vying for access to my wallet and
my attention. I think that is very abnormal. But someone

(02:16):
just coming into the world today says, okay, Grandpa, thanks
for complaining. This is how it is. Stop your whining.
In the United States, we have grown accustomed to a
lot of normal that feels pretty abnormal if you start
to look at it a different way. And nowhere is
this clearer than in the area of public safety, and

(02:39):
in particular the area of policing. We exist in a
moment right now of pandemic and uprising and revolution centered
around so much of this issue of policing. And it
has become normal in this country to spend a hundred
billion dollars a year on law enforcement. It has become
normal for school police departments to have grenade launchers, you know,

(03:02):
in case the kids get out of hand. It has
become normal for the number one budget item and many
of our cities to be going to the police department,
making all of us residents, by default, by mathematical law,
residents of a police state. But a challenge has emerged
from this moment to change that normal, to do something different,

(03:26):
to defund the police. And I know when I first
heard that, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
What are we talking about here? This sounds like madness?
What about crime? I literally I was like, what about crime?
What about murders? What all the bad things? And there's
an answer to that, an answer we're going to explore
far beyond the slogans in this show. We can spend

(03:50):
our money in many different ways. We can make the
public safe without calling on a relatively unaccountable man with
a gun to try to resolve a situation. And I
wanted to have that discussion. I wanted to explore this
range of options. Are we're gonna have any police at all?
It sounds a little crazy. What about the cops that

(04:11):
are already there, like some of them are good people,
But also what about social workers and people who actually
know how to solve some of the problems of homelessness
that we are burdening these police officers with. And what
about the risk to communities who were so overburdened with
exposure to law enforcement for whom they are not protecting
and serving but doing something much more dastardly. I can't

(04:33):
do that discussion on my own, and I knew two
people I wanted to do it with, and we're gonna
get the benefit of their genius and their brilliance in
this episode. The first is Dr Philip at Tiba Golf.
He's the co founder and CEO of the Center for
Policing Equity. This is the world's largest think tank and
action tank focused exclusively on race and policing. It's like

(04:57):
he built an organization designed or where we are right now. Also,
as if that's not enough, He's a professor of African
American Studies in Psychology at Yale University. His team at
CPE uses data science and partnerships with law enforcement agencies
and communities to reduce racial bias in policing. Joining Dr

(05:20):
Phil Goff will be Zach Norris, executive director of the
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Zack's also the author
of a book made for this moment called We Keep
Us Safe, Building secure, just and inclusive Communities. He's the
co founder of Restore Oakland, a community advocacy and training
center that will empower Bay Area community members to transform

(05:43):
local economic and justice systems and make a safe and
secure future possible for themselves and their families. That's the
formal introduction. The informal introduction is I have known these
brothers for twenty five years. We're in the same year
from Harvard, and I have seen them do this work
their entire adult lives. They've devoted it so much to

(06:04):
liberation to improvement in very different ways. I am excited
to welcome you, Phil. I'm excited to welcome m Zack. Um. Phil.
I've had such insight into your work. I've literally like
been hanging out with police chiefs and you in the
same room at the same time. And so I'll give
you an opportunity to expand briefly on just how you

(06:25):
describe what your work is, because I see you doing
the data science thing, working in communities, trying to stop
police from killing black and brown people in a very
scientific way, and we're in a moment where it's like
defund the police, and yet you're also working with police.
So can you describe your work so that we can
understand that better? Sure, and I know that I'm skipping ahead,

(06:48):
but there's no there's no way to prevent me from
doing that. I'm genetically predisposed. Um. When we hear people
talking about defund the police, I just want to want
to say, I've been hearing police talking about defund the
police using very for language for years. There's no police
chief that works with us that doesn't think it's a
terrible idea to send law enforcement um to deal with

(07:10):
drug overdoses, Like why would imagine the gun help with
that situation? But I mean, the longest sort of what
it is that we do at CPE, I mean you
said it basically exactly, that we work between communities and
law enforcement to help on the inside of law enforcement
making them less racist and less deadly. And then on
the outside, so that communities are empowered to make decisions

(07:30):
about where they want law enforcement to go. And just
as importantly, especially in this moment where they don't want
law enforcement to go, the sort of key value add
the thing that we do that other people hadn't been doing.
We don't just calculate disparities, right, So let's say black
people are four times more likely get beat up by
the cops than white people, which is roughly right nationally. Right,

(07:51):
if we imagine there's racism and policing, why on earth
would we not imagine that there's racism and housing and
education um and unemployment and in health care, all of
which happens before any contact with police. So that four
to one number, that's some police, it's some poverty, it's
some other forms of racism. And I want to hold
police accountable for the things that they do, right, I

(08:12):
don't want to make them accountable for all the things
they don't do, like we do for everything else. We
make them accountable for all public health, for all education
outs So we pro we use science to give them
back a measure of justice, not just a measure of crime.
And that allows communities to hold them accountable and in
doing that, we've also essentially created the algorithm that says
and here is where we no longer need them. So

(08:35):
in this moment when people are talking about defunding, my
hope is we're gonna end up talking a lot more
about investing funding blackness. Right, But if we need a
roadmap for how to do this and not have to
worry so much that violence is just going to become
the second pandemic in this phase, there are ways to
measure that too, because there's a lot of policing that
has nothing to do with violence, has nothing really to

(08:58):
do with the fastest route to public safety. And to
the degree that there's good news in the middle of
the space, there is no responsible police chief who won't
tell you that to their face. Zack, I want to
give you a similar opportunity to break down where you
fit into all this. What is the work that you're
doing through Ella Baker and through and particularly through the

(09:19):
store Oakland. Yeah, I appreciate that. At the al Baker Center,
we advocate for books not bars, jobs not jails, housing
and healthcare not handcuffs agenda, So we very much like alliteration,
and we also like um funding a social safety net.
We've seen too much investment in what we call a

(09:41):
punishment drag net, and we want to actual safety net
to be supported. I mean, if COVID nineteen shows anything,
it shows that public safety actually starts with public health. UM.
For so long we've said, you know, public health issues
need public health solutions. We never thought we would need
to say that as it relates to global pandemic. Right,

(10:04):
but leave it to this president to use a global
pandemic as just another excuse to blame, shame, scapegoat marginalized communities,
people of color, and so that is that has a
long history in this country, and we have been fighting
since the mid nineties when it was not popular to
do criminal justice reform or anything along those lines, to

(10:28):
really advocate for UM, the funding of blackness, the funding
of communities of color, the funding of dignity and low
income communities and communities of color across the country. Break
down what restore Oakland is and what you've tried to
design in that. Yeah, for so long, we have been
pushing for resources to be shifted away from sheriff's departments,

(10:52):
probation departments, police departments, UM prisons, and towards community based
supports for people who are navigating issues of homelessness, drug use, um,
mental health issues, etcetera. And we finally found some success
about five years ago. We moved Alameda County to move
about ten million dollars away from the Sheriff and Probation

(11:15):
Department towards basically community stuff to support people who are
navigating the jail system. Now, what we found is a
lot of the same nonprofit agencies were getting the funding
who we're good at putting together an RFP, but we're
not good at actually providing people with a job or

(11:36):
doing restorative or transformative justice. They had no felt community connection.
And so we're like, people need visual aids, sometimes government
need visual aige. We decided, hey, let's create Restore Oakland
to actually show what we mean by community safety. It's
an eighteen thousand square foot building that houses restorative justice,

(11:57):
one of the first dedicated spaces for restored justice in
the country. Much like you wouldn't just go to a
courtroom and have a sandwich or have a beer, we
think restorative justice should be held in a kind of
sacro sanc manner to help hold people accountable while still
holding them in community. And that is within Restore Oakland,
a restaurant run by formally incarcerated folks and others who

(12:19):
have been locked out of opportunity, and nonprofit organizations that
are fighting to hold not just community members accountable, but
also elected officials accountable to our vision of books not bars,
and jobs not jails. So all of those things come
together and Restore Oakland, and you can imagine it almost
as if it's like the first solar panel when it
comes to public safety in our mind right, because how

(12:41):
would you imagine a new energy future if you hadn't
seen solar panels and wind turbines and those things. And
so much of our imagination has come to be dominated
by shows like Law and Order and Cops. And also,
you know orange is the new Black. That we think
of prisons as really the architecture of public safety, and

(13:02):
we're trying to shift that in people's mind by actually
providing this visual aid that sounds beautiful. It sounds like
you built Wakonda, and okay, we tried. I'm still trying
to get a shout out from my brother, Ryan Coogler,
who also went to buy high school. Shout out, Ryan,
if you could come to Restore I'll clearly to appreciate it. Well,

(13:23):
I'm sure he's gonna hear that, because everybody's gonna hear
this podcast. I wanna give you an opportunity to define
a term that you dropped a few times in there,
which not everyone is familiar with. You said, restorative justice.
What does that mean? Yeah, So, restorative justice is a
process for individuals, for communities, and for nations. And on

(13:45):
the level of individuals, it's the person who has caused harm,
the person who has been harmed sitting together in a circle,
surrounded by the people that support them. And what happens
is an accountability plan is developed so that person has
to make an ends for the harm that they have caused. Um,
it's amazing because it reduces recidivism rates, meaning people are

(14:06):
much less likely to get back in trouble again. Victims
report much higher satisfaction rates because they can see the accountability.
They know, here are the steps this person is taking
to right this wrong. And it's amazing for democracy as well,
because all those people who are in that secondary circle
surrounding the hard person and the person who's caused harm

(14:27):
really have to actually ask what could I have done
to prevent this? And what can I do to make
it right? So it's really building this kind of community
accountability muscle that I think is absolutely critical in this
moment because we got politicians that are running wild, and
if we don't really have this practice of like holding

(14:48):
people accountable in a way that isn't you know, just
um like exile exile right, because you can't be answerable
to someone if you can't actually hear them or be
an interface with them. And we've relied on a punishment
system that actually short circuits accountability rather than engenders it.

(15:09):
And and that's what restorative justice is really all about,
you know, thank you for that. When I think about
the way we do policing in this country, I reminded
of my first visit to a jail in this country,
which is Rikers Island in New York City, and it
was just a few years ago, and it stood out
to me because it is a massive complex, about ten

(15:32):
thousand people there at the time that I visited, and
I had lived in New York for a decade and
had no idea. It is like that Game of Thrones
north of the Wall area that we are allowed to
forget a part of ourselves, you know, a part of
our society, our neighbors, and these were people who hadn't
even been convicted of a crime. They were waiting for trial,

(15:52):
you know, because they didn't have bail money or something.
So thank you for breaking that down, Thank you for
reminding us. I think that with the comunity can have
a role in accountability and in achieving public safety. Paint
me a picture, Phil, when we do public safety right
in this country, How is it different from the way

(16:14):
we do it now, especially given your proximity to law enforcement,
your partnership with them. What does it feel like? You
talked about that, like we don't do it right, and
that's just not quite accurate. In this country, we absolutely
do it right, just not where we're thinking about it,
because you're thinking about it, like where you live in
l A. We definitely don't do it right there, or
where I live in New York, we don't do it

(16:35):
like I mean, they don't do it at all in
some places of where exact lives in England, right, But
there is this wonderful place, not Wakonda, but it feels
mythical where when somebody loses their job, they have money
and they have you know, retraining community colleges, they can
go to um When they have a mental health crisis,
there are counselors they can talk to. When there's a breakup,

(16:56):
they got couches they can serve all and they got
friends who can support that marriage. When their kids acting wild,
they have a community from call in an aunt or
a or a grandmother who can talk to them, a
neighbor who can take a man to teach them a trade.
And when law enforcements called, it's called to deal with
the most vulnerable or the most serious, and it is
not too severe or too lenient because it's aligned with

(17:17):
community values. And you're looking at me like all confused.
They place. You may have driven through this place. I
want to I want to take my time to pronounce
the word right. I think it's called the suburbs. Is
that how the suburbs? Yeah? So I know it was
a long walk to get the punch line of that joke.
I feel like it was worth it. It's also a

(17:38):
long walk to the suburbs because really, exactly these public
frands that doesn't get there, which we five design. They
didn't want the folks who are living in the inner
city to get out anyway. It's kind of like a cage,
like they meant to do it that way, both on
meta and in their schools. But this is not the point.
The point is we do this right. Imagine a community
of fifty people, we all know each other, and there's
a sheriff and the sheriff just beat the hell out

(18:00):
of the kids for petty thefts. Well, the fifty is
gonna get together, We're gonna get a new sheriff because
that's not how you treat kids. Now, imagine the sheriff
lets the kids run wild and kids are burning down homes. Well,
we don't get together as fifty people, we don't get
a new sheriff, because that's not how we treat owns.
The problem in larger cities and in some of the
rural areas, and in fact that some of those suburbs

(18:21):
when outsiders come in like folks and get out, is
that we untether right the issue of severity and protection
and we just campaign on we just message around protection
because we refused to see the humanity of the people
who cause those harms. So in smaller communities that have resources,

(18:46):
there's hell to pay if you were too severe on
somebody's child. But in communities where the parents of the
children who are most likely to cause harms don't have
any power. There are no checks on the authority to
administer punishment. And that's what I'm talking about when I'm
talking about how we do public safety right. Right, there's

(19:08):
no reason for massive military policing in suburbs where they
have control over their law enforcement, they wouldn't stand for it.
But in systems where power is concentrated among elites and
where those who are most vulnerable to underground economies and
to the violence of poverty instead of in addition to

(19:28):
the violence of street crime. In those kinds of places,
policing is not just to keep everybody safe. Is protect
one group of citizens against another. And when you set
up policing like that, we have accountability. Police would get
punished every time that the people who have power are
upset with what they do. But that's a different kind
of accountability than democratic accountability. And so I want us

(19:51):
to be specific. Let's not act like we don't know
how to do public safety right in America and like
it's just it's this unfathomable thing. We do it all
the time, we drive through it on the way to
the place where we want to get stuff fixed, right,
So it's not mythical, it's practical. We can hold it.
The difficulty is both remembering that these are part of
the same country hard if you travel back and forth,

(20:12):
and then the price of the ticket from where we
are to where we're going, because that change is real
and painful, and there is the place where people are
reasonably concerned about violence, and that's part of the conversation
we absolutely have to have right now. I mean, I
remember reading this book about the opioid crisis and reading
I think it was about Burlington, Vermont and the police

(20:34):
chief there was coordinating with the hospitals, encouraging them to
use methodone or whatever it is to step folks down
from the addiction. He was saying, no, don't do this,
you know, law enforcement thing. Here's the public health thing.
As I understand that, and I was like, my mind
was blown. I was like, what in the how is

(20:56):
the police chief, like, you know, coordinating with hospital systems
in a way that actually promotes a public health response.
But to Phil's point, I mean, it's real that being said, like,
we live in a country that is profoundly racist, right,
and so when what I often say is like, how
could we think of taking care of public safety if

(21:19):
we haven't taken care of the public and we are
coming to be a majority people of color nation and
we are not taking care of that majority of people. Um,
and I just feel like we have to call the
question of the larger system as a whole and understand
that police chiefs have some say so, but also there

(21:42):
is this huge problem. And to Phil's point, like, let's
not make it all the police problem, but let's still
address the larger problem. We went from a country that said,
you know, the only good Indian is a dead Indian,
as during our westward expansion, to neoliberal governance over the
past forty fifty years that have said the only good

(22:04):
government is death government. And I know that sounds hard,
but I'm honestly believe that if recession after recession, you
only fund policing in prisons, the very thing that if
recession after recession, we've seen twenty three new prisons in
California built just one new university. Fifty three cents of
every federal dollar goes to military. As you said, Barratunity,

(22:26):
the lion's share of resources on the city level goes
to police, departments, sheriffs. You talked about sheriffs. The sheriffs
are the most powerful political entities in many municipalities. And
so the very things that accelerate the morbidity of black
and brown people are the things that have been recession
proof over the past forty fifty years. And that's not

(22:47):
including what you know Reverend Barbera calls the death measures
on the d L. So every half million people who
don't have health insurance, people will die, seven hundred people
dying a day from mount nutrition and poverty. Right, And
so we have funded governance that is allowing and COVID
nineteen and these are all pre COVID numbers. COVID nineteen

(23:10):
is exposing this in a different way. And I think
that there's a reckoning with governance that isn't actually supporting
and sustaining life. That is about policing, but it's also
much larger than it can I can I just add
back on because my mans shout at out Brandon del Poso,
who's the former chief and reliant um that is not

(23:30):
just the outlier, that isn't what he wins awards from
other chiefs. Right in the same way that Scott Thompson,
who led the transition of Camden's dissolution and then rebuilding
a police department. Not that that's a model, not that
that's remotely close to perfect, but Scott talks about all
the time, I'd rather have a boys and growth club
than ten officers. This is now mainstream within law enforcement,
and was ten years ago. They were saying, like, you

(23:53):
guys want us to do everything, We can't do everything right.
You can't be like, I'm gonna stop street crime and
I do hair like. That's not a thing that enforcement
can do. And what that means is either you reckon
with the violence of poverty being something that cannot be
handled with the badge and a gun, or you have
decided that all you want to fund is punishment, and

(24:14):
law enforcement gets that on some really deep level at
the top, not all the rank and file, not all
the sheriffs, not all the rural folks. So it's not
the full profession by any means, and not the union's heads,
who are often not representative of the rank and file
that they're supposed to represent. But there is a class
of law enforcement who's been saying now for decades, get
us out of the places where you couldn't possibly train

(24:36):
us to be shrink the size of what you're investing
here and give it to someplace else. They don't like
the idea of their budgets really shrinking because they already
feel too stretched. They will get okay with it when
they no longer get asked to be responsive to all
of these other columns. And if they don't get okay
with it, that's okay too. You've both talked about the

(25:04):
power of a smaller group of people to get the
outcomes that feel more humane and more just and what
we would all want for ourselves. I'm looking for examples.
Can you share something about what people have been able
to accomplish in this arena that could give people like
me and anyone who's listening a bit more faith in
ourselves to change the direction of all that. Yeah, I mean,

(25:26):
the first thing I'll say is, like the sky will
now fall, we can actually close prisons and increase public safety.
And I have an example to prove it. When I
first came out law school, I worked as an organizer
with the Ala Baker Center, talking with families of incarcerated
youth and young people were being isolated twenty three hours

(25:48):
a day for weeks and months on end, Families driving
two fifty miles just to see their kids, only to
be told they couldn't visit because they had on the
wrong color pair of pants or because their kid was
on lock down. Unsurprisingly, giving these conditions, three out of
four young people were being re arrested within like a year.
And the state was spending over a hundred and fifty

(26:09):
thousand dollars per year per young person on this system.
And so parents and grandparents and others said, we need
to close these youth prisons down, um, and this is
not you know, five years ago, this was turn of
the century youth super predator time period. I personally was like,
I don't know we can do that, but I had

(26:31):
the good sense to listen to my elders. We organized,
We got what started as a dozen families became over
a thousand families. We went to the capitol in Sacramento.
We were persistent and insistent. We brought those statistics to them,
and the recession helped also, and over a ten year period,
we closed five of eight youth prisons, and guess what,

(26:54):
Youth crime continued to decline during that same period as
we were closing down youth prisons. Now, the Nerve California
wants to close the remaining three youth prisons um and
we want to ensure that that is done right. But
it shows that we can actually do something different. We
can do something different not only when it comes to

(27:14):
non violent offenses, but also quite frankly, when it comes
to violence as well. I'll stop there, but I want
to speak more about kind of violence and the possibility
of taking a public health approach as it relates to
that as well. I will just say, like, never doubt
that a small group of people, as Margaret Mead or

(27:35):
somebody said, can make a huge difference, right because, like,
nobody believed that this group of moms and grandmothers who
were derided as the welfare queens, who were believed to
be the problem, could have made this change, and in
coordination with the Youth Justice Coalition and amazing organizations, we

(27:57):
were able to shut these youth prisons down and increase
public safety through that process. I really appreciate you sharing
that story and reminding us, you know, I think there's
a model of change that a lot of us digest,
which says, well, we got to get a billionaire. We
did our own like Mec warrior, you know, to come
in and fight on our behalf in this battle. And

(28:20):
you're like, these are moms and grandmothers. I'm sure a
lot of Latin X and Black moms and grandmothers who
people in the State House and Sacramento are used to
regularly not having to pay attention to because they don't
pay a lot of property tax and they don't necessarily
vote regularly because they don't give to campaigns because they
can't afford to show up. And to be clear, that
was part of the strategy because just by going to

(28:43):
the capital and showing up and saying we are desperately
trying to support our children and grandchildren, we were pushing
back on decades and centuries of misinformation and structural racism
and just racism, as Ebrahm KNDy reminds us, to just
just call it racism. And so, you know, so much

(29:04):
of the de humanization comes from separating families, and we
were pushing back against that very intentionally. Bill, do you
have a story of the power of people in some
of these communities you're working with potentially to actually achieve
a different outcome, a better outcome for more Yeah, I
think that. I mean, when we work in communities, that's
all that we accumulate is we accumulate stories of people

(29:28):
being more powerful than the systems that the rest of
the world feels like define them. Um. I think that
there's a really popular one that everyone has access to. UM.
But I think it's easy to forget in this moment,
which is at the height of the stop question. Fris
regime and NYPD, for every one hundred thousand black males
between the age of sixteen and thirty five, they were

(29:50):
stopping a hundred and eighty nine thousand a year. That's okay,
So mathematically they were stopping brothers twice or five times. Yeah,
so you would get stop multiple times per year if
you were in that age and raise demographic. That's I'm
not a mathematician, but wait, I am a mathetician. So

(30:11):
that's too many that the definition of that is just
too damn many times. And the explanation was, well, this
is what we have to do because crime is so
out of control in those neighborhoods. So then they stopped
because the court said stop, and crime continued to go down,
violence continue to go down, and they said, well, you
wait for it. You make us keep doing this, and

(30:32):
it's gonna go back up again. So now what we
see is as murders go up across the country, everybody saying, well,
see we told you so, come on, man, you don't
get an eight year window to decide that eventually, like
something ablet's take up. And that's what that's sort of
the moment that we're in. The thing I actually want
to point to though, because that's the example of look,
we don't have to be doing policing this way. That's

(30:54):
an easy example of that. There are two things I
want to point to that give me hope right now.
One is the Community Navigators program actually in Minneapolis. And
here's why it gives me hope. So you and I
we talked about this, but it's it's usually not for
camera that One of the things that I'm most passionate
about in my job is dealing with the survivors of

(31:15):
sexual assault, the survivors of the most intimate forms of
violence and the second worst thing, and for some of them,
even the worst thing that happens to folks who are
survivors is they have to explain to somebody, no, I
didn't want it. Yeah, we had had a relationship at
this time. I was clear. I think I was clear.
Why does it matter what I'm wearing? It doesn't matter
how much I was drinking. Those are the questions of

(31:37):
the person who's supposed to protect you. Was taking your
reports into the state can advocate on your behalf. It
is such a violence, the things we put people through,
So why do it. You can send social workers whose
job it is to connect people to the services. They're
gonna make them whole as people first and say when
you're ready, and that might not be today, I can

(31:58):
take a report, will be the legal report. But before
we have to do any of that, how are you doing?
What do you need? Are you talking to somebody about it?
How's your support? So the response to crime, the response
to violence, doesn't need someone armed for violence, and that
basic recognition that policing doesn't have to show up whenever

(32:18):
there's the trace of violence, especially violence has already left
the scene. That allows us to imagine a more humane
response to the people who were experiencing violence, who are
survivors of it. So that's the first thing that makes
me hopeful, and that that inspires me because that's people
saying people should be responsive to this. The second thing is,

(32:38):
so the Monday after Minneapolis City Council said all right,
we're disbanding the police department, the charity counsel comes out
and says, hey, would you mind if we tap y'all
to be one of people who helps do this. There
was five minutes before Rachel Maddow and she was gonna
go on right before me, and I was like, I
guess okay, by and then she went on and said,
by the way, we're going to do this, Rachel Maddow

(32:59):
asked me. I was like, yeah, if you're gonna do
that thing that they said, that's how that's a great
negotiating tactic you're in now. That's how he got to
be chairley Council. So that week we got nine fifty
calls from different cities, and there was chiefs and community
members and mayors and city councils all saying, we want
to be responsive to this moment because we get we've
been doing public safety wrong. But how so we started

(33:21):
putting together a roadmap, and the road map is not
this is what to do. The road map is do
this and then you'll be better positioned to make an
informed decision. It's literally who's calling for police? What services
are people calling for? Where are they going when they're
on their own? What neighborhoods are blinded by crime, and
which ones are blinded by police surveillance but not crime.

(33:43):
Those are the places where you should be investing resources.
And you do those four steps and all of a
sudden you have a map of Okay, this is what
they do and where they go. Do we want them
to do that? Considering that in some of these communities
it's less than ten percent of the time that they're
spent is on els at all, that allows for some
reasonable response And the thing that makes me excited. We

(34:05):
unveiled this with the Obama Foundation a couple of weeks ago.
I did it live last week on the TV. We've
had dozens of cities and we're not waiting for you
all to come in. These things like things we can do,
we're doing them. And they're like, oh, now that I
see the numbers, we have things to do so that
instead of waiting around, there's a roadmap to go. Because

(34:25):
of course it's going to take time, but everybody should
also be reasonably expected to be tired of waiting. Four
hundred plus years for this right so that people want
to pick it up, that they're taking it and running it.
That's exciting to me. What's a way in that you've
seen work that's someone who's not a full time activist
or full time in this work it can do to

(34:45):
be a part of this to help make public safety
more public and more on the safety. Yeah. Um, the
first thing I would say is I wanna lift up
that we can actually respond to violence and a public
health way. Also, I want to lift up the work
of Devone Bogan in Richmond. Richmond had one of the

(35:06):
highest per capital murder rates around two thousand and five.
He came in, developed a mentorship program and supported these
thirty young men who the police believed were responsible for
some seventy of the crime, and over I think an
eight year period helped reduce homicides by some seventy And
it was profoundly simple in the sense that he was like,

(35:28):
what do my children need? What do my adolescent children need?
And basically designed a fellowship program around that to provide
them with monthly stiplings, positive mentorship, and travel opportunities. And
as these young men were invested in, as they saw
themselves as part of the solution, rather than being derided

(35:49):
as part of the problem. They really helped usher in
a wave of peace in the city of Richmond. The
work he does is now called Advanced Peace UM. And
that wasn't just instrumental for them, that was instrumental for
moms and grandmothers who was trying to go to the
park down the street, for shopkeepers who wanted to keep
their businesses open. And this didn't come through primarily a

(36:12):
law enforcement response, but really just asking people who were
believed to be responsible for the violence in a city,
what needs to be done? Who do you have beef with?
How do we resolve those issues? And it had a
tremendous impact and effect. And so some of what we're
saying that people can be doing in this moment is

(36:33):
just be good neighbors. Understand that when someone comes through
your community who maybe you don't recognize, maybe the first
thing if there are darker skin color than you don't
call the police. Don't do that. Don't be that neighbor.
And one of the ways in which we're promoting this
kind of different ethos around community safety is through an

(36:57):
event we call Night Out for Safety and Liberation every
year since the eighties, police have done this event called
National Night Out, which I think has the right spirit
behind it. I'm gonna be real. It has the right spirit,
which is, you know, community members reclaiming safety. But I
think too often police bring a very narrow definition of

(37:19):
what community members should do to promote safety. They say,
you're the eyes and ears of the police, and if
you see something, say something which results in George Zimmerman
murdering Trayvon Mark, it results in the kinds of calls
that you know, this woman did too call the police
on this bird watcher. It is that kind of culture
of suspicion that I think we need to move away from.

(37:42):
And so Night Out for Safety and Liberation is an
opportunity for people to reclaim community safety in a more
holistic way, to recognize that we have hearts, we have hands,
we have minds, we have a lot of things that
we can do to contribute to community safety. And this
year it will be on October six. There's some thirty
cities participated last year, and it's growing every year. So

(38:04):
we're really encouraging folks, especially especially in this year when
the two visions of safety are on such full display
that he keeps us safe lie of Donald Trump, which
is quite frankly, an abusive lie. It's the lie that says,
only trust me, even while you're doing the dirt and
causing the harm scapegoats entire communities and individuals. We reject

(38:29):
that lie. We believe that we keep us safe, that
all of us contribute to community safety, and that's the
vision we're bringing with Night Out for Safety and Liberation.
So one of the things that people can do is
just contribute and get involved in that event. We're gonna

(38:54):
go to questions. First up, we have Sarah Hughes. Where
are you in and what's your question? I'm in Rochester,
New York, and I wanted to ask a question about
the basic design structures within our society being fundamentally hierarchical,
and if that is something that you think may have
contributed to power and balances because it's designed in a

(39:17):
way that aggregates power at the top. I'm curious to
know to what extent you think that is a factor,
and also in what ways this conversation might be informed
by reimagining the models. So I'll go ahead and hit
that one first. Um. Yes, also, yes, I don't know
if that's enough specificity for you. Um, So I'll expand

(39:39):
just a little bit. It just it wouldn't make sense
for law enforcement to continue to engage in these behaviors
if there weren't people who said, yeah, that's about right right.
And let's keep in mind that in many communities nine
one one is a larger driver of contact between law
enforcement and communities that are officer initiated, which means that
law enforcement ends up serving as the personal racism concierge

(40:00):
um for Karen's all over the world. If it weren't okay,
it wouldn't be that way. So the question is how
many people are okay with it and what levels of
power to the folks who aren't okay with it have
to pull Because clearly there are communities that say that
we've had enough. I think pretty much everybody who's in
the audience here is that we've had enough, but we're
not enough to get that done at least we haven't been.

(40:22):
So that means we change tactics, change strategies, We have
a different approach to how them to leverage our power,
which is why we see folks out in the streets
six seventy days in a row, unprecedented in US history.
That's a way of engaging in democracy, and we put
pressure on the people who do feel that discomfort only
when we put pressure there. But remember that the Dick

(40:44):
Wolf Show is not law. It's law and work. And
the ordered part is the problem. Because if I am
empowered to keep order, and my idea of order is
the social hierarchy as it stands, I'm allowed to use
force when you step out of line. And that's the
that's the gospel truth for law enforcement, right, is that

(41:04):
they're also order enforcement. So again, yes, real quick, because
it's racism, but it's also patriarchy. We live in a
society that undervalues taking care of people, and all of
the caring profession, from teaching to health care to so
many other things that actually are about safety are underfunded
and under resource and that is as a result of

(41:27):
that form of human hierarchy. Thank you, Zack. That's a
great addition. Um and creating more of a culture of
care is something that we should do. So thank you, Sarah,
Thank you Phil, Thank you Zack. Next up, Jesse Fable, Well,
let us know where you are and then what's your
question you're topic. I'm in Minneapolis, so it's it's been
a whirlwind, but been engaged, been excited, and there's a

(41:48):
lot of work from organizations like Reclaim the Block about
changing the city charter, taking the police off, putting community
safety and violence prevention in. And I'm wondering what all
of you I think, is this the appropriate first step?
Is this necessary for change to even happen? Where is
it pretty mature? So as a scientist, as one of

(42:12):
the nation's leading experts on these issues, it's really important
for me to say clearly, I have no idea. I
don't know what the right next steps are because I
have a sense of what the goal is. Everybody wants
to live in a community where no one has to
call the police, right. Police want to live in that community.
They understand that that's their job to put themselves out

(42:32):
of business in a certain kind of way, though that's
not how they're run. They understand concepts of that's their job.
And everybody understands that we should have more options when
we're in crisis than just imagine a gun, right or
imagine a gun an ambulance for a fire truck. Like
we understand that, but how do we get there? I
don't know what I will say is it's both incumbent

(42:53):
upon us to move quickly and not to rush. Four
d plus years worth of oppression deserves a plan, like
you should put a plan in place, and it should
be one that's based both in something you can communicate
clearly and message clearly with it with a community and
that's got some kind of evidence nearby, but it won't
be evidence on what's worked because we've not done this before.
We've not managed to change across what I would encourage

(43:16):
folks to do in terms of as we move through
these processes, it's okay to demand. So how are you
going to deal with violence? Right? How are you going
to deal with the current staffing issues that you've got,
and how are you gonna know that? On the other
side of this, you have given to these vulnerable communities
a definition of public safety that they agree with, because

(43:37):
if they don't feel safe, guess who's not calling the cops.
And in a neighborhood where no one wants to call
the cops, that is a great place to crime. Right.
If I wanted to crime, I would crime in places
where no one wanted to report crime, and that means
everybody is less safe. In the same way that you
have these small communities that can't social distance and now
everybody's sick, right, the social networks that spread violence are

(44:00):
literally the exact same. We have these small communities where
they can't get out of the crimes trap and the
violence trap, and it spreads. Suicide spreads that way, done
violent spreads that way. Virus spreads that way. We could
be using these same systems to trace back the virus
to identify the folks most at risk for other kinds
of violence. We don't. You can demand that, and that's

(44:21):
the best we're gonna do. Make sure that they're tracking
it enough so that they can say we did this
and we messed up, because otherwise they're going to claim
that they want and the other side's gonna claim they
lost either way. And I would just say, don't keep
doing the same allocation or misallocation of resources, especially in
the context of a coming depression due to COVID. We

(44:43):
see municipality still giving the line share of their resources
to sheriff's department, rather than understanding we're gonna have a
ton of homeless people, We're gonna have people who are hungry,
and we need to actually this is the rainy day.
We need to fund people's survival. The other thing I'd
add is like Crises Act in California is an act
to create sort of a pilot program for a different

(45:06):
form of response to emergencies that people would be able
to call upon and in those communities where people don't
feel safe calling the police would have a different access
and resource that has to be funded and scaled and publicized.
How people know about it. Rabbi Jenny coming up next.

(45:26):
I think it's the first time I've ever had a
rabbi call into the show. I feel so special. Rabbi Jenny,
let us know where you are and what's your question.
I'm calling in from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and my
question is for community leaders like myself, what do we
do in situations where we need support in terms of security.

(45:52):
Because the Jewish community, I know, the Muslim community, and
I'm sure there are other communities, we're constantly under various
kinds of threats and we need help to protect ourselves.
But at the same time, don't want to be complicit
with the police structure. Also, we don't want to put

(46:15):
our members of color under any kind of threat to
either themselves physically or emotionally when they come into the
communities and if they see police officers, whether they're in
uniform or not. So my question is, how can we
provide adequate security for our members without getting into this

(46:39):
complicit relationship. It's a fantastic question. And the model that
I might turn to is the way that schools have
started to remove law enforcement because they're also concerned They
got outside of folks who are not in the school,
particularly concerns about gang affiliation. So what do you do? Well,
they some have hired private secure already, and it turns

(47:00):
out that does a lot of the same things that
law enforcement does. Right, someone said, well, we'll keep the
law enforcement, will push them further out. That means that
they're further away from the violence when it happens. But
there are models in Phoenix and in Detroit and in
Houston where what they do is they make outreach to
the very folks they're concerned about committing acts of violence,
and they say, what is it that we need to

(47:21):
do to make sure that you are safe as you
approach our community. And they talk to the folks who
are the targets and say, who are you afraid of
and they build a bridge where the folks who are
most aligned with that violence, folks who are most concerned
about having violence done, they're essentially community interrupters of that violence.
And so it's a kind of radical love where you're

(47:42):
doing outreach two groups where you've got concerned the violence
is happening, like you stet folks up as protection but
from community. Now that can happen in places where the
violence is fists and clubs and knives. It's much harder
when you have organizations that are dedicated to the termination
of the group of people inside the building. There are

(48:03):
not radical anti high schoolers in the way that there
are radical anti semites, right, So that model doesn't work everywhere.
But knowing your enemy, as so many people who are
survivors of violence already do, is often the right model
in the context of anti Semitism or anti blackness for
churches that are concerned about that. I don't know that

(48:24):
there's a model that I love that solves it, in
part because we have just so many guns, and it's
so very difficult to protect against guns without armor and
guns of your own. And this is a place where
many people do end up going back to a form
of law enforcement, which is off duty. They're working at
the behest of the folks local, but there's not a

(48:45):
perfect solve. Which is part of the work that frankly
Zach has been doing so well for so long is
building these bridges between these areas. But we don't solve
mass incarceration without talking about violence, and we don't solve
the problems of violence without talking about access to guns.
These are the same issue. So for you, I would
say again in my most full throated from my chef voice,
I don't know, but there are models of community violence

(49:09):
interruption that, depending on where the threats are coming from,
you might want to invest. Again, I'm happy to talk
to you offline on that, and I want to acknowledge
and appreciate you name in the gun issue, Phil The
United States is a nation of guns, populated with a
few people as well. And I think there is a
lurking truth around this whole conversation of public safety and

(49:31):
policing that guns are a major player in the fear
that is often cited, not unreasonably by law enforcement officers,
fear for my life. You know, you look at the
distribution of calls for police and maybe four or five
percent or explicitly violence in the headline. Then it's like

(49:51):
traffic stop is a domestic dispute, but a gun could
be anywhere, you know. So it's like, well, if any
interaction is potentially a violent interaction, And I guess I
understand why you need a grenade, maybe not a grenade
launch that still feels a little whild, but like a shield.
And so I don't have an answer either, but I
do think they're intertwined. As you said, they're connected, and
to create the public safety we want, we're going to

(50:13):
also have to contend with our long term addiction and
obsession with this wild easy access to firearms, which has
made us all less safe and a culture of violence.
If we're being really you know, I think we exists
in a country that has glorified violence in different ways,
and it's about shifting that culture in addition to shifting

(50:37):
the actual availability of guns, you know. And I'm looking
at the time. I know Barntona is gonna have the
last word, but I'm gonna go ahead and take this
little hand off here because I think this is one
of the central issues moving forward. I talked about it before.
You can't solve massa carceration without dealing with violence, because
most folks are not who are in prisons and jails
are not low level nonviolent drug arrests. Like, that's just

(50:59):
not the reality of who's being put into cages. If
we don't deal with how we think about violence, then
all we're gonna have. We have a bunch of platitudes,
a bunch of incremental elements on our entire penal system.
But anybody does something that gets categorized as violent, by
the way, breaking into a home where there isn't anybody
that gets categorized as violent, right, that's gonna be how
we get caught up and how we fail to meet

(51:20):
this moment. So like, if I'm thinking about what I
want everybody who's listening and watching and here with us
in real time or later to be doing, I think
the most important thing is don't look away. We have
just begun to scratch the surface, and the only way
to the light through one of these moments is through
a pile of bodies. There will be another and another
and another. And if we get discouraged or dispirited in

(51:40):
this moment with just this, that we weren't worthy of
the journey and if we're trying to make a more
perfect union, if this is a national or even if
this is a spiritual journey for individuals, we can't look away.
I remember very clearly Alton Sterling killed Baton Rouge, groups
of people who loved him, who cared for him. I
still get text messages every two to three weeks from folks. Right,

(52:03):
that's four years later talking about the cameras one away,
But I'm not done. When Gwen Carr and Sabrina Fulton
talk about their loved ones they lost to police violence.
The second most painful moment after hearing that news was
when the cameras turned away, and we didn't sustain the
efforts to get ourselves educated and to be ready for
the next one. So we're showing up like we're brand

(52:24):
new to this, when as a nation, we're not brand
new to this. This is every couple of days. It's
just every thirty or so years we decided to care
and decided to say that this is going to be
the time. We've now heard that every single time. And
I want to remind us into immediately after what happened
in the uprising in l A, we got the ninety
four Crime Bill, in two years later. We got Trump right.

(52:48):
In the late sixties when the police reform was the thing,
as was prisident jail reform. We don't keep that when
we talked about some rights moment, but it was a
major thing. You know what we got nixing. These moments
are immediately followed by regressions of great moral vulgarity in
this nation's history. And if we look away now, if
we don't get ourselves mostly prepared for what's next, I

(53:11):
am very concerned that we will see the same thing
I'm your six years after furtherisson. Thank you for that,
Phil Zack. Is there anything you want to offer up
for people to do to be constructive, to be committed
on this moral journey? I appreciate the question. Cornell West
said that you know, justice is what love looks like

(53:31):
in public, and Stevie Wonder said love is in need
of love today and saying it so beautifully. And I
just know that the hearts of the folks on this
call who have called in want to see a nation
that is just and that is beautiful and that is loving.
And part of that, I think is resetting our priorities.

(53:52):
And I know that money doesn't move everything, but we
do need a reset of our values through our budgets
and to actually fund the things that keep us safe, food, clothes, shelter, etcetera.
So much of the violence often stems from people not
having enough, and that's not all forms of violence, but

(54:13):
that is a critical aspect of it. And I think
we can do better to take care of the public
and therefore to take care of public safety. I've been
dreaming of this conversation for a while and I want
to thank Zack Nora's Dr Phil Goff. I appreciate you
as a friend, as a citizen, as a brother. Thank

(54:34):
you for for what you both have been doing, and
thanks for giving so generously of your perspective in your time.
Just now I feel charged. I think I feel motivated
and a little immobile at the same time. They're the wave.
Phil talked about this pattern and his ask of us
to don't look away the idea that he's still in
communication with previous involuntary martyrs or the family is thereof

(55:01):
It's very humbling and very emotional and very real thing.
Zach said, public safety starts with public health, and nowhere
could that and should that be more clear than in
the middle of a pandemic. Our moral values are our
budget documents, as revealing of our morality is made clear.

(55:21):
We have prioritized certain choices over others. We have prioritized
riot shields of a face shields and gas masks of nine.
We have prioritized arrests over stopping the spread and arresting
the course of a virus. We have prioritized punishment and
that form of pain overhealing and true accountability. And we've

(55:45):
often done it in the name of victims who are
nowhere present in the form of justice that we have
practiced most of the time, there are hints. Phil reminded
us that the suburbs show us a little window, a
little more wakanda, a glimpse of what is possible. But
even there there is unrest in the spirit, and is

(56:05):
not entirely the vision that we want. And Zach reminded
us that the most dismissed can often be at the
center of change. The mothers and the grandmothers who are
so easily overlooked might have more power when they show up.
Maybe they even doubted their power in the moment. But
now we have evidence to show the closure of youth

(56:27):
detension centers and prisons in the state of California as
crime continued to fall. And I am deeply humbled by
the acknowledgement and the role of guns and all of this.
I don't pretend that this is easy, that you just
flip a switch. You take the money from the cops
and you put it into the counselors and shazam new

(56:47):
great society, instant society. No no, no, no no. It's
taken a long time to create this perverse structure that
we're living in calling public safety. It's gonna take a
while to unravel it, and guns will need to be
a part of that unraveling. And so I asked that
we contend with that, that we not look away from

(57:08):
that either, and then we not look away from each other. Um,
there is there is great promise in this moment. There's
great work ahead. There's more tears that are gonna come.
And the good news is there's more of us that
have yet to really step into the ring. And so

(57:29):
I am hardened by the idea that if more of
us did that, we get more done. Hey you, it's
me again, It's just us, And I want to say
we are living in a dark time in so many ways,
especially in the area of policing, punishment, and public safety.

(57:53):
Yet there is good news closed youth prisons in California,
reallocation of resources for sexual salt survivors in Minneapolis, the
end of stopping frisk techniques in New York City, and
the creation of restorative justice models we want to fund,
not just bad policing models we want to defund. If

(58:13):
you have examples of positive, non punitive public safety in
your community, send them to us at comments at how
to citizen dot com. On a personal note, I am
so happy to have had that conversation with Zach and Phil.
At the same time, I have known them both since
we were college freshmen in and I'm amazed at what

(58:36):
they've helped create in the world. I consider them both
to be model citizens. Now it's your term. In each episode,
we share things you can do internally and externally to
strengthen your citizen practice. Don't worry about remembering all the details.
We post them on how to citizen dot com for
this episode keeping us safe. Beyond policing, here's what you

(59:00):
can do for internal actions. Now. These are things that
help you become more aware, more empathetic, more knowledgeable and
are a key step in how to citizen before you
go trapes and off into the world telling other folks
what to do. Here are some options for internal actions.
It starts with you, so we want you to explore

(59:21):
your own relationship to feeling safe and living among your neighbors.
Here are a set of questions you can answer. What
do you need to feel safe in your community? What
makes you feel unsafe in your community? How do you
get to know your neighbors? When was the last time
you even made eye contact with a neighbor? Has a
neighbor ever made you feel unsafe? What happened and what

(59:43):
would have made it better? Another option for internal actions,
and we're channeling Dr Phil Goff here, don't look away.
Get educated on how policing works where you live. Here's
a set of things you should find out. How much
of your city and county budget go to the police.

(01:00:04):
What percentage of this would rank? Is this for all
the spending? Who actually runs law enforcement in your area?
Is it a commissioner, a chief, a sheriff who pays
their bills? What's your most local access to law enforcement?
Do you even know where the closest precinct is? And
who's already working on addressing the challenges in this area

(01:00:25):
where you live. Identify who's responsible for and makes public
safety decisions where you live, and find out which positions
get voted on. Lastly, in this area, when is the
next election for these positions in your community, who's running,
who aligns with your values? And the final option on

(01:00:47):
internal actions. This comes from Zach. Inspired by Zach Good Neighbors,
don't just call the cops. Know who you can call
instead of the police. Create resource, a list of numbers
you can keep on hand or enter into your phone.
We have a great example in the show notes of
this for non police resources to intervene in certain public

(01:01:11):
safety challenges. As a bonus, you could create these alternative
guides physically and digitally and share them with your neighbors,
local businesses, and even beyond. Now for some external actions,
we've got three groups that you can work with, take
their lead, and lend your assistance to their efforts to

(01:01:35):
keep us safer. Dr Phil Goff's Center for Policing Equity
has published a roadmap for exploring new models of funding
public safety. It's been requested by over nine hundred fifty
cities across the country. It's a great starting point in
his organization has high credibility with law enforcement and with

(01:01:55):
community activists, So check that out and find out if
your community is mind up. Lend your voice to Campaign Zero,
another effort to fix what's broken and policing in our country.
Support its nationwide campaign to end police Violence. They have
a tool right on their website where you can track
legislation and see where your state sits in that progress bar.

(01:02:20):
And the last external group is what Zach mentioned. You
can join or create an event as part of the
Night Out for Safety and Liberation. That data is October
six this year. And if you don't feel comfortable going
out physically, there are online ways to also support this effort.
There's even a discussion guide that you can run with
your family, your community, your company about what safety means

(01:02:44):
for your community. Lastly, there's a an app and a
tool built by the American Civil Liberties Union that encourages
us to be supportive bystanders and report on police interactions.
The a c LU has made this easy their mobile
Justice app. Justice seems to depend more and more on

(01:03:05):
bystanders recording interactions. It's how we know so much of
what is wrong again, check the show notes for all
these details, or you can, you know, scroll back and
play this again. If you'd rather have me say it
out loud to you, I could understand that. We are
so grateful to Zach Norris and Dr Phil Goff for
helping us expand our definition of public safety. Visit Policing

(01:03:29):
Equity dot org to explore Phil's organization, or at Policing
Equity on social media, and you can find him on
Twitter at Dr Phil Goff. That's two f's. For Zach's work,
visit Ella Baker Center dot org or at Ella Baker
Center on social media. He's Zach W. Norris. That's z

(01:03:50):
A C h W n O R R I S
on Twitter and is at Zach Norris dot com. I
also encourage you to read his book, We Keep Us Safe,
and we even have an online bookshop where you can
buy it and books by all of our guests. So again,
check the show notes or our website at how to
Citizen dot com, where we post the episodes, we post

(01:04:14):
a transcript and all of these resources and more. If
you liked what you've heard here, please share the show,
leave a review, sign up for my newsletter at how
to citizen dot com, where I will announce upcoming live
tapings and more from audience members like you. How To

(01:04:34):
Citizen with Barrattune Day as a production of I Heart
Radio podcast executive produced by Miles Gray, Nick Stump, Elizabeth
Stewart and barrattune Day Thurston, Produced by Joel Smith, Edited
by Justin Smith. Powered by you