QPP 46: Michael Fortner
Audio:
https://www.spreaker.com/episode/44800632
With Peter Moskos and Leon Taylor, CUNY Professor Michael Fortner comes on to discuss his Violence Reduction essay on defund and the diversity of thought and perspective within the Black community.
Unedited Transcript:
[00:00:03] Hello and welcome back to Quality Policing. I am Peter Moskos, and I’m really pleased to be here today with Michael Fortner. Michael is an assistant professor of political science at CUNY Graduate Center. CUNY is part is the umbrella university that I’m a part of at John Jay College of the City University of New York. And he’s also a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, received a B.A. in political science and African-American studies from Emory University and a Ph.D. in government and social policy from Harvard. What what year did you get your Ph.D.?
2010.
2010. OK, so six years behind me, I guess. But we were in different departments. Michael was also a contributor to my Violence Reduction Project, which is a collection of essays on bringing down violence after last year’s unprecedented historic rise of those essays. And this podcast can be found at quality policing dotcom. And we’re also being joined by another special, a special host, Leon Taylor, which some of you may remember as the former co-host of this podcast. Welcome, Liane. All right. So, Michael, let me start by asking you a question. What inspired you to to write the essay you did? Maybe you can just give a brief sort of summary of it. It’s titled From Protest to Problems The Minneapolis Story.
[00:01:44] Right, so first, thank you for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a long time and I have a ton of questions for you. But first, let me talk about the piece that I wrote for you. I’ve been struck by the simplicity of the narrative in elite media and when it comes to police brutality in the United States and the ways in which it is so tethered to the slavery new Jim Crow argument. And my work has been in the complexity of the matter, looking at the world that working and middle class African-Americans have played in the rise of mass incarceration, mass castration, showing how their push for greater public safety in New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s caused them to turn to police and prisons for solutions, whether right or wrong. That’s what they did. And I’ve always felt that that part of the story, you know, hasn’t been sufficiently told. And then to have this racial awakening over policing and still not have the complexity of that story and they’re really bothered me, annoyed me. And so I wanted to write a piece focused on Minneapolis where it happened, where George George Floyd was murdered, where the conflagration began to see what went on. I mean, and how people there, particularly black folks on the ground, interpreted those events and the arguments and the pieces that, you know, drawing from some of the public policy literatures that we know that there are simple and complex causal stories in the policy formation process. And the literature suggests that simple causal stories that links some kind of origin and some kind of outcome are sort of easier to deal with politically. People understand them. You could easily sort of mobilize sort of policy support around them that that sort of simple narrative. Right. In this case wasn’t really working as effectively on the ground in Minneapolis that, in fact, African-Americans in the city had begun to embrace the more complex story, that they understood their situation as being both about overpolicing of their communities, the ways in which they might be subject to state violence and underproduction ways in which they are also subject to violence, subject to crime, and that that part of the narrative, their own story was completely missing. And the product of that is that sort of the Minneapolis politicians in the end were caught off guard because they started this journey by claiming to by promising to dismantle the police. And then by the end of the year, they couldn’t do it and they couldn’t do it because of lack of public support, over 60 percent of it. Around forty nine percent of African-Americans in Minneapolis thought cutting the number of police officers would have a negative outcome. Over 60 percent of African-Americans, over 50 believe that. And that kind of desire for more policing, not less policing, made it very difficult for the politicians in Minneapolis to actually dismantle the police. And in fact, many of them themselves eventually called for more policing to deal with the uptick in violent crime. And so I wrote the piece again to emphasize that we really need to beware of this simple, alluring causal story that roots, that links our current problems back to slavery and misses the nuances of the policing and crime situations in many black neighborhoods.
[00:05:50] Hmm. And do you think that the defund movement is do people not understand or do they not care? And do you think it’s disproportionately white?
[00:06:03] So I think so a couple of things, I think, one, there is a generational divide that there are young people of color who are who are overwhelmingly in support of defunding is I think part of that might be their own experience with policing. That’s very different from the experience that older African-Americans have had over the past two decades. They also have never lived in the the sort of the crime highs of the early 1990s. And so they don’t know what, you know, it’s a crime actually feels like. And so I think that they’re informing the discourse to a large degree. And a lot of white political elites, intellectual elites are sort of uncritically taking that narrative as being the only narrative. And what I’m suggesting is that that narrative is sort of wrong or right. It’s part of it, right. That that we need to take seriously complaints about police brutality, the extent to which there may be overpolicing in these communities. But there is another story there where there are other people who in these communities whose qualm with police is that they’re not there when they need them, that they want police to be more effective in producing more public safety. And I think if we have both of those narratives on the table, I think we can have a more fruitful policy conversation. But I think a lot of white intellectual and political elites are unfamiliar with a part of that story, the story that sort of pro policing and black neighborhoods. And so they easily dismiss it.
[00:07:40] Hmm. That’s a whole overpolicing under policing concept, which I think there’s a fundamental truth to it. I mean, the idea that people want more policing and better policing, we can call that nuanced. It’s not that complicated. Verdonk It shouldn’t be hard to grasp the overpoliced. It’s almost become a cliche, though. I think it got popularized from ghetto. So I thought I might be wrong about that. That’s right. It seems to be when it sort of gained traction. How do you see Can you break it down a bit? What is that when people use that phrase, what are they what are they trying to get out or what are they not getting at?
[00:08:15] So I think they’re getting out. And again, it it is not that complicated for people who are in the communities, but it is complicated when you put it next to the more simple narrative that everything is about slavery. Right. And that narrative says that, well, there’s sort of two main features of it. One is that policing is embedded within the history of slavery and racism. And they sort of talk about police slave patrols and they’re linked to modern policing. And if I
[00:08:49] stop you there because I have a pet peeve of mine, I don’t
[00:08:52] know what what
[00:08:53] is that link and why? How do I know? Partly because I was a New Yorker article. It simply asserted that I’m going to say there is no as in the South, it’s a little more debatable and messy because the police became agents of of, you know, legal Jim Crow, racial segregation. They were part of that system, undoubtedly, and intertwined with it. I’m going to say there’s absolutely no link between slave patrols and police and the new police in the north unless one is purely talking about white supremacy and structure and police being part of it. I mean, in that sense, everything’s part of it. But there is a very distinct creation of policing in America. Right from the London 1829 model. It was called the new police, and they weren’t slave catchers. Damn it. And I think that’s an important right. That’s an important distinction, because if you say police come from slave catching, you’re saying it’s an inherently bad institution and then maybe we should abolish it and start anew. If you’re saying policing were invented somewhat in opposition to that even and it’s a noble idea that has been flawed, but, you know, gets to the fundamental nature of other police as a concept is good or bad. So that’s that’s why I that’s why I could talk about it. So thank you for that.
[00:10:07] But that is that argument has been all I’ve read over the last year everywhere and a lot of publications
[00:10:17] now as a fact. And yet it’s been a fair amount written about police history before these other people cared about it. It’s not a mysterious history. You know, newspaper articles talked about it at the time
[00:10:28] when,
[00:10:29] you know, I went back and it’s a little hard to disprove something. I went to Frederick Douglass newspapers in Rochester and I may have missed it, but, you know, I searched it’s all there in the Library of Congress database. I was like, what does he say about the start of police? I’m curious. He says nothing. Occasionally he refers to police like, you know, it’s not that they didn’t exist because they also started in Rochester, I think in the 1950s. It wasn’t a big deal to him. And I just I find that interesting. You know, not to say this is the you know, this is the south spreading of slavery tentacles into New York State. So I don’t know.
[00:11:02] But but but but the other part and the second element of this argument that you can sort of take this out on it is sort of the new Jim Crow part that sort of sees modern policing and mass incarceration as a response to the civil rights victories of the 1960s. Right. And the argument being that there is this unrelenting racial order that will not be sort of deterred in the United States. And as you have African-Americans achieving meaningful program, you need to do system of social control and this new system of social control that’s policing in prisons. And they come about in this particular moment and they sort of reference Nixon and Reagan. And now Clinton can kind of go right to talk about the ways in which sort of racial power is reproduced in police and prisons. Again, that’s that argument, I think captures to some extent or speaks to what a lot of people in urban centers did experience in terms of police brutality. I think it is true that there were instances in a lot of these urban centers, you know, throughout the 20th century of police brutality. There are also instances of police not being there, which is also what people complained about of that sort of having police around and not having enough policing. And so part of what I’ve been trying to do with my work is to sort of complicate the history and sort of to tell this story that focuses on both, you know, those moments when there are clear instances of state violence, those moments when, you know, police are just courteous to African-Americans. I mean, what are the main complaints? If you look at surveys from the 1960s about police, it’s not that they beat up people. Is that they’re rude and they’re nasty and they curse at you, and it’s not necessarily that they sort of rough you up, although that does show up in some of some of the stories. But their biggest complaint is that they’re never around and that they want more of them to be around to deal with a lot of the crime problems that they were experiencing in cities. And so I think that is the the the meeting of overpolicing and under protection, you know, the condition in which urban communities face a lack of policing as a public good. And then when they do get it, it feels as if it is too punitive, too rough to discourteous.
[00:13:50] Leon, let me bring you into this. What are your thoughts? So listen to sort of reintroduce him. He sees Baltimore born and also Air Force MP and then Baltimore City police officer. We don’t actually know each other from that time. We became friends later, but Leon in particular wanted to join this interview. And I’m happy to have you back here on your thoughts.
[00:14:13] Thank you. No, it’s it is interesting. And what I find is that the uninformed tend to simplify the situation. And it’s a case of, you know, creating a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. I think what’s needed is to have equity in policing. And that is to say that those people that came to Baltimore during into the summer of 2015 for Freddie Gray, right. They were have really abolitionist police abolitionists, but they could afford to be because they didn’t have rampant crime in their neighborhoods. So, yes, they were very vocal and they were very adamant about, you know, controlling the police and the way that everything was scrutinized, prisoner transport was scrutinized, the wagons. I think you wrote a piece also about how that could be improved. The situation that central booking in Baltimore, for instance, you know, those practically. Inhumane conditions, so all these things came into play, but I think the one thing that’s a standard, that’s a standard across the board is that people want policing, they want decent policing. I want the same standard of policing for the Eastern District in Baltimore and that, you know, I don’t know anyone else has in the state. I want that good policing. I want to be addressed respectfully. I want police to respond in a timely manner. I want my family protected. But at the same time, I don’t expect to be overpoliced.
[00:16:02] And how do you then police a violent neighborhood without overpolicing? Isn’t that the dilemma
[00:16:07] need people that understand the community? One of the things that I found out from talking to other former officers is our selection process was slightly different than I believe yours was. I dare say that the polygraph operator didn’t stop the polygraph test when you told him that you didn’t smoke marijuana. That seems to be the one I will point out. Well, I’m just saying, you know, we talk about the perception of, you know, black officers in the community and there are things that we go through simply to be on the street that you weren’t privy to. A certain scrutiny. But what’s what’s needed what’s desperately needed is police that understand the reason behind the criminal activity and that they don’t indict. You know, I think this old term and didinger court, OK, they don’t indict the whole labor. And that is to say, see the entire neighborhood and all the residents to criminal activity because it makes it easy. It makes it very easy. You don’t have to think. You know, the issue that you’re bringing up, Michael, is that this is not a simple problem with the easy solution. If one of the police sounds great, gets everybody excited, yes, we’ll do this. OK, now, what are we going to do about all these homicides? What are we going to do about a Baltimore city where you’ve had an additional 100 citizens? Victims of homicide since Freddie Gray. You know, every year, you know, no one talks about that, you know, there’s no marches, there’s no there’s nothing. It just those people, I guess, don’t fit the narrative. So they’re not important. So I think this is a critical point for me. And that is in the scholarship on this for a long time, crime didn’t matter to crime policy information. In fact, there was sort of an argument that there was sort of no relationship at all between crime and crime policy. Of course, crime, such an important context for crime policy making, even though there may not be a direct sort of causal relationship to the particulars of crime policy making. And I think that’s been incorporated into the broader public discourse about this. And that is a crime. Is it? The issue of social control is the issue. And I think you you you can focus on the social control dynamic only if you sort of dismiss all of the lives that are lost to homicide. You can sort of dismiss the you know, the the social I mean, the other issues that people might bring up. Right. About policing, if you just sort of completely ignore the experience that people in these communities actually deal with. But what I like to say, what crime feels like is completely missing from this conversation. I grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, at the height of the crack epidemic. Right. And, you know, crime was real for me. I know what it felt like to hear gunshots at night. I know what it felt like to walk over crack vials. Right. Like, what does that feel like? I think it’s completely missing from the conversation over policing because people say that crime really isn’t the problem and that if we sort of get rid of policing, all these other solutions will solve themselves. And that’s an interesting empirical question that I’m not sure people in those communities actually want a test. And so one of the things that I’m really struck by this is my question for you is why do you think sort of elite media and now even politicians really sort of ignore the value of black lives when they are taken by other black folk?
[00:20:21] I wonder that all the time, cynically, I think politicians may gain votes from it. The city council people around where I live in northwest Queens aren’t at great risk of violent crime and they can vote for defund and think they’re on the right side of history. It’s a civil rights issue and I don’t know can compensate for having no black friends or something by saying we’re with you on this one. That’s the cynic in me. Some academics, some of them may believe it. I don’t know. I was I had a discussion like July of last year with a Princeton professor who was talking about defunding alternative policing in Brownsville and in east New York. And I said I said, Chief, I didn’t say, Chief, why don’t you start? Why don’t you do it in Princeton first? You’ve got a disproportionately rich white community with a lot of money and no violent crime, basically. Why don’t you go for the low hanging fruit first? Why are you going to impose this experiment and others? It wouldn’t pass IRB approval on human subjects, committee approval. Let’s let’s see it working and then you can impose it on other people. And I was kind of the end of our conversation. I don’t know. I guess because they don’t I think it’s because they don’t have that. Yeah, I think I might have thought you might have hit the nail. And they don’t know what crime is like, the trauma that comes from it and that kind of that impact that it it’s hard to it’s hard to work on improving the community of gunshots are going are going off. You know, it’s a necessary but not sufficient part to improve neighborhood societies. And people need a just a level of public safety. You know what? You know, some of it comes down to and I think it’s important you mentioned it earlier, I think people I used to say this morning, not that I believe unless I just don’t see it as much, too many cops are dicks. The rude cop is a real problem because what a cop is rude to someone who is not used to being treated rudely and does not deserve to be treated rudely. On top of that, they go. If they treat me like that, imagine how they treat a real criminal, you know, exactly the same way. They’re not making a distinction. They treat everyone as rude. That, I think is strangely a very major issue, and if you could improve that level of customer service, I mean politeness, you’re right.
[00:22:56] You’re exactly right. And that’s exactly what it is. You know, is that. We don’t when you don’t have an officer in the community that can relate to the community, you know, I mean, I. It just isn’t an issue, of course, the officer would be polite of the officer, would be motivated to do his or her job because they see themselves and people they’re serving. When you lose that. It almost becomes like the attitude of a peacekeeping mission to Lebanon and the military where we’re an army of occupation. These people don’t want us here. They’re all the same. This whole neighborhood, they can’t find anything worth protecting in the neighborhood if it’s all about making arrests, if it’s all about, you know, finding something. Then missing out on what I feel the real role of a police officer should be and what the role of a police officer is in affluent communities, they are an integral part of a community and valued as. Yes, actually, I might still be able to do it by phone if I could call it in right now, if you like monument. No problem. They got great winds there, I’m telling you, literally, there’s a spot that is so good. I mean, this is something I can to like a 12 o’clock, you know, the dealers and the cops go in, line up, get their wings, come out, eat, and, you know, everyone goes back to work. Really? Our has got to, too, but but but I think that’s another dimension of this, too, is that the framing? And a lot of the the literature is on sort of the war drugs and thinking that all of this is because police are picking up sort of some young, brown or black kid who, you know, is caught with a few ounces of weed on them. And, you know, why are we even policing drugs this way at all? And sort of we just sort of do away with that, then it will be all good. The problem, of course, is that that’s not really the danger to these communities. Right? It’s it’s the homicides. It is the violence. And it’s not that people who are not necessarily, although older people may call it people who maybe smoke weed on their stoop or outside the window. But for the most part, the people want the into the shooting, to the violence, to the death. And I think if there was more understanding of the the death, the field of crime, I think we would have a better policy conversation about what we should be doing about it. That’s that’s exactly what’s needed. I mean, what we need is we don’t need more clergy in the pulpit, we don’t need more politicians on the podium. We need more policy makers and patrol cars. OK, on a Friday like that’s right on my street in Baltimore and places like that where they can actually see what’s going on, they can actually see the dysfunction. When you talk about the funding, the police, well, who are people going to call when the kids don’t go to school, when they’re the domestic, when, you know, Junior’s not taking his medication? I’ve handled all those calls. And the difference is the approach when you are doing it from a perspectival providing a service rather than an occupied territory.
[00:26:53] You know, cops hate getting the my kid won’t go to school call? How did you deal?
[00:26:59] I mean, you know, well, this was this was pre bodycam. So you had options, OK, you have you had a lot of options, one of them would be and again, I found myself. As a more or less. male figure. A father figure and it’s pretty much rent a dad. 911 and you get an officer who you know to come in, and you can make him go to school because he doesn’t want to deal with you because he knows that they have access to you and you’ll come in and straighten things out. And if he doesn’t want to see you again, then he’s going to go to school or do whatever. But again, you have to have a sort of relationship with the people that you work with. If you don’t care one way or the other, they’re not going to call.
But this is, I think, where some of the different conversation could be certainly useful, that is I think part of the issue here is the lack of a robust civil society to provide those services to the community. Right. Strong civic and religious institutions, community organizations that are needed not to fight violent crime, but to provide the kind of services, mentoring other types of of, you know, respond to other types of issues that that that don’t require an armed agent of the state to intervene. And so I do think if we can, we may or may not need to take money from police budgets to do that. But the more we can, I think, empower communities and invest in these communities and the civil society of these communities to solve a lot of these other problems, these social problems on their own terms, I think that will sort of ease some of the pressure in resources and policing.
[00:29:02] Michael, but, you know, my my sociology bullshit detector just went off, not on high, but on low. “Empower communities.” We love empowering communities. Tell me what the hell that means.
[00:29:16] Look, it goes back to the example of, you know, if if, you know, a mother is having an issue with her son, there’s no reason why she should be calling 911. There’s no reason why a police officer should be providing any kind of service in that kind of context. And so the extent to which we can have community organizations or community leaders, churches, whatever, be, respond in those situations where that person won’t need to come in contact with law enforcement in any way. I don’t see why that’s a bad idea. Again, I’m not saying that that’s a solution for the crime problem or the violence problem, but I do think having healthier communities is good on its own terms. It might yield benefits on the policing side by giving residents sort of other resources to handle sort of nonviolent issues.
[00:30:18] Yeah, it might. You know what, I I’m not against that idea professionally. It’s not my I focus on the policing side, so I leave that to others. But so I’m waiting. We’ll know that when that works out. Second, people start attacking people, stop calling police. That’ll be great for these things, set up those systems. But I don’t see anything
[00:30:38] happening to the only words. Where’s the money going to come from? This doesn’t matter if it
[00:30:44] doesn’t have the country five percent it that’s policing.
[00:30:47] This is the people they talk about. Oh, you know, I mean, I’ve lived in Europe. I lived in Europe for 14 years. Different countries. And people will look to, you know, police forces and the Nordic countries to assist us with all this. Well, yeah, because they’ve got social programs that work. You know, it’s not a done based on a tax base, so, for instance, I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. You don’t have those problems here except in very small, isolated pockets. So it’s really not an issue to the people. The police officers, they get the best training, the forces that get the best candidates because they can pay the best salaries are the ones that have the least profit. So these are issues that officer in my neighborhood could not handle at all because he’s never done it. And it’s the sort of thing that, you know, you’re on the street maybe your first month in Baltimore, you’ve handled 10 or 20 social worker calls. It just is just part of the job. That’s that’s the job, as you understand, it is dealing with the minutia of daily life that people can’t handle themselves because they’re ill equipped to deal with it.
[00:31:58] I would also say, yeah, that I, I don’t I think people don’t give police enough credit that it’s kind of amazing how well most cops handle most of these situations. I’m simply from that experience because no one else is coming. What I don’t understand is this magic social worker. I mean,
[00:32:19] they know
[00:32:19] the de-escalation gap that’s going to make everything nice. Like what? What do they have that? I mean, and this is a sincere question and making it sound rhetorical, but what the hell do they have? The cops don’t some people say, well, the simple fact is they don’t have a gun. They’re not putting a gun on the scene. And OK, is that really what it’s all about in a society with, you know, hundreds of millions of guns? Because a lot of those social workers are going to be calling for a cop with a gun because they don’t
[00:32:45] because it’s a murder. But look, I don’t sort of I don’t disagree with your skepticism, but I think we need a lot more evidence to sort of figure out whether certain types of strategies will actually work here. But what I’m saying is, is is not the standard. You know, instead of calling the police, call a social worker issue, what I’m saying is that we need a healthy community issue. And there are a lot of problems, you know, are connected to what Rob Simpson calls sort of the social organization of these communities and repairing those relationships, having sort of more, you know, communities that are sort of more rich, social capital that can communicate and and can, I think, regulate itself and deal with problems on their own, I think is a goal that we should strive.
[00:33:41] I agree. But let me play devil’s advocate.
[00:33:44] Let me do you.
[00:33:46] Or is it an unfair burden to say this is a community problem? You know what? I don’t know everyone who was on my block. If there is some problem, I want to call nine one one and have cops deal with it. If someone shoots No one on my block, that’s not my community. This idea of sort of it’s almost like collective responsibility for individual problems in a community that is already struggling and doesn’t have enough resources. And now we’re saying you have to solve the violence
[00:34:12] problem to talk to about how to. I’m not saying I’m not saying solve the problem. Right. Again, I’m sort of distinguishing between, you know, sort of categories of of of things that police officers currently deal with that they may not need to deal with. And again, going by the example of the mother who may call upon a cop to solve a problem that doesn’t require a cop cop to solve, that could be solved by having more community resources. That’s what I’ll
[00:34:39] answer that no call happens. I mean, the same thing exactly. When somebody is in crisis, B, that mental health, you know, physical, it’s too late, then it doesn’t matter who you call, though. I Dinkins you have to, but you have to get to the problem in front of the system so that people stay on their own so that a mother has the resources, you know, so the daughter goes to school kind of stuff. I would love it. I would love a more European model in that. I just don’t I don’t understand what that has to do with police, quite frankly.
[00:35:09] We saw that. We saw that in the in the Bryant shooting. You know, we saw the exact same thing. And there was this outlaw from from, you know, the the abolitionist community at large. You know, as soon as we get justice, they shoot someone else. Well, I’ll tell you, how do you escalate, you know, a girl swinging a knife at someone else.
[00:35:34] So this is an opportunity to Ohio you’re talking about, right?
[00:35:39] I mean, it’s gone a bit far at that point and at that point to say Black Lives Matter. Well, yeah, there’s two black lives here, OK, there’s more black like this clearly in jeopardy. And if I as an officer, if I take the time to to, you know, to think about the optics of the situation, if I study whether or not I’ve got qualified immunity, how this is going to play out for my career. Do am I actually doing police work? Or my vote or self-preservation and, you know, the only thing you heard on social media and various outlets was police to 15 year old Blacher. What about police saved the life of the woman who was also black, that she was swinging a knife and this was the dilemma. I mean, that we literally saw the crux of this entire dilemma immediately after the Sobhan Bird. We follow it. And it played out as it plays out time and time again. What would happen with that, Brian? Shooting literally is the additional hundred people per year that have died in Baltimore City since Freddie Gray’s accidental death. Except that it was caught on camera and even then as a as a police officer saved the life of a black citizen, which unfortunately was at the expense of another black life, the public wasn’t satisfied.
[00:37:08] That was it. I from a theoretical standpoint, I find that I don’t like to call shootings useful, but it is useful because it frames the debate nicely. This was not a case of I feared for my life. This was not a case of I thought he had a gun, a woman. It wasn’t just that she was welding a knife, a girl. She was actively in the motion of about to stab someone and probably kill or at least severely hurt her. It straight out of a shoot don’t shoot training scenario if we don’t.
[00:37:37] But it’s also an example of of what happens when society fails, a young woman of color over and over and over again. And so for me, that’s what what I say, you know, strengthening civil society. That’s what I’m talking about, of having kind of safeguards and remedies that don’t rely on the police before, you know, situations get to that point. I agree with you. Well, give
[00:38:03] me some specifics. Give me. So you know, if you were if you were king for a day, King Fortner has a nice ring to it. OK, what do we do?
[00:38:14] What do we do in terms of.
[00:38:15] Give me something that’s not just lip service. Give me some concrete, vague policy proposals.
[00:38:21] Right. So, look, I think, you know, investing more in violence interrupters may be an option of having more resources around individuals who can talk to people who may or may not be engaging in violence and calm them down and figure out what kind of resources that they need and find a way to direct resources to to them, I think sort of at least experimenting more with that and providing expanding that capacity to see if it yields results is sort of one thing we could we could definitely do.
[00:38:58] Now, there’s one essay from DeVone on my site was a violence interrupter in Stockton, California, which is, I think worth, worth, worth reading. One of the DeVone Boggan is his name. And one of the things interesting talking about people who have that contact with the street is we initially met for somebody, a third party thought we’re going to be on opposite sides of policing issues. And we weren’t because we both we both kind of understood what was going on in the world. And, you know, I still haven’t met him in person. I wouldn’t say we’re buddy buddy. But anyway, we you know, we’ve we’ve we’ve interacted we’ve been interacted a few times and he contributed to this project. I don’t see our goals at all as mutually exclusive. I do think a little bit too much faith is done on violence interrupters. There have been problems in Baltimore with criminal activity at an abstract level, and I’m willing to sacrifice this if it works. I don’t care about the abstract problem, but I do find something odd about people saying we need more police legitimacy and then setting up parallel structures that are specifically designed to sort of not interact or encourage police legitimacy. But that I can that’s I could give that up for practical benefits. I also, though, wonder I mean, there has been some research. It’s not strong. It’s hard to scale those up.
[00:40:26] Right. So I’m sympathetic. So I think I’m sympathetic to that, although I think this is an opportunity that we can sort of, you know, gather more evidence. I mean, part of what’s difficult, I think, in this conversation is that we don’t have sufficient evidence to see how, you know, these alternative measures actually work and how and whether or not they were skilled at a certain level. But for me, that’s not a reason not to try to invest. I don’t know, or and to sort of see and measure, you know, what’s going on. But I mean, but but for you, it’s a question for you, right? One of the things that comes up in these debates is, is the inability of police officers to actually fix these problems. And so why do you have faith in police as a remedy for violence?
[00:41:19] Apparently, that goes back. You made an allusion to the sort of the attitude in academia, the police and crime aren’t related. And that goes back to people like David Bailey and Michael Tanner and Peter Manning even. And I went into this field in part because of I read those that line of debate that police don’t prevent crime. And it’s a myth. And many sociologists know that secretly it goes back to the 60s Kerner Commission, the Presidential Commission on Crime in large part. And we’re still sort of debating that today. You know, 50 plus years later. I just said, of course, police matter good or bad like this idea that it’s just an illusion and that everything’s because the root cause of society is, you know, I don’t buy that. And I entered grad school in 95 murders in New York. We’re in the process of plummeting. Everyone said it couldn’t happen. It wasn’t happening. It won’t continue to happen. And a lot of that happens from policing. So I said, I mean, if everyone in this field is wrong, if the experts are wrong, it’s probably a good field to get into. And that’s kind of how I picked the policing angle Anemone. I wanted to study something urban because I’m a city boy, so I got into it for that reason. My first police research started actually in Amsterdam, so I saw a model of policing that is different. I wouldn’t say it’s fun. You know, it’s fundamentally different, but it’s a very it’s a different model of policing. And I have that experience as a researcher before I became a cop in Baltimore. So I knew there was another way. The idea I mean, yeah, at my core, I believe policing can prevent violence. I’m not going to say anything, you know, I don’t go beyond that, but that’s enough. We can pick our little niches in the world and trying to make the world a better place if through my, you know, 20 years.
[00:43:04] But do police prevent violence better than something else? So that’s
[00:43:11] yeah. I better I you know, I avoid the word better,
[00:43:16] more effectively than other things. That’s that’s the other part of this debate. Right. That is that OK, even if we accept that police may prevent violence. The question is, can they do it more effectively that other remedies and can they do it with less, other, less, fewer sort of social costs then that other you know,
[00:43:36] I don’t my my my inclination is to say yes, but I don’t know. The point is, I want to see these are these other solutions. I know the policing can work. I don’t know about these other things. And they’re often not mutually exclusive. We can do both. And but I don’t think it can happen without policing. You know, one of the little we don’t have to fix society to have safer streets. I’m just. Well, you know, and that doesn’t mean that poverty and racism are not important. They might be more important, but it’s you know, professionally, it’s not what I deal with. In New York City, when murders went down 70 percent in the 1990s, poverty actually increased. That’s not good. I don’t think that’s why murders went down, by the way, but poverty went up. And so we were able to make safer streets without fixing society. I think that’s good enough. And I’m afraid that if we focus too much on what sociologists call the root causes, we’re going to end up fixing nothing and in fact, go backwards, because we’re saying that policing are not don’t have to be part of the solution. So I’m not disagreeing with you, but I just I, I don’t like that it’s phrased as an alternative to policing. I guess I wanted in addition to YAML, are you going to say,
[00:44:51] oh, I mean, I think that what’s what’s necessary is to have officers who have an understanding of the community they serve. You know, we tend to look at police as a generic entity. I kind of you know, when I talk to people that are from, you know, other countries, friends back in Europe, some of whom are actually doing the job, I tell them that here in the states, police are either here to protect everything the system has afforded to or keep you from acquiring through illegal means, everything the system has denied. And, you know, this is how people see it. There’s there’s a totally different view of law enforcement where I live now compared to where I grew up. Yet I’m the same person. So, you know, I. Yeah. Do I belong here in Montgomery County, one of the richest counties in the country? Yeah, but I also belong in East Baltimore. That’s home, you know, I mean, as a person, I haven’t changed yet. My interactions with the police in both of those areas will be vastly different because of the way I’m perceived. So what do you say to both of you? Why aren’t we having a police and conversation? It would seem to me that that would be easier for the half brother than police or conversation to what’s what’s shaping this debate.
[00:46:28] Some of it, and this is not a complete answer, but I think it gets short shrift to much of the time, some of it I think is a class thing that a class divide that’s growing as much of America becomes more white collar professional. And policing is, with some exceptions and still fundamentally a blue collar job in New York. It’s a lot of immigrants and kids of immigrants basically trying to break into America’s working class. So I think there’s a both a race and class segregation issue that means people don’t understand cops. And when I say people that I don’t mean all people. I mean people who don’t have any not only don’t they know any cops, they don’t know anybody who does. Right. You know, if you go to a hospital, they are you know, the nurses and cops are, you know, often, you know, of the same background in class. So I just want to throw that out there. I think that’s part of it. And then, you know, it’s an easy group to be against, if especially in the cops often are their own worst enemies. When you get you know, the Baltimore’s got a better union had than New York. So I don’t even want a group of police unions. But, boy, police unions say some stupid things and it’s bad. You know, it’s bad for their membership along, you know. You know, you just get the Trump apologists and so on. That certainly doesn’t help the cause. I mean, it is a conservative institution. How, Leon, move to a conservative neighborhood, I guess he means policing so much, I don’t know.
[00:48:00] Well, I will I will say this. The last time I got stopped by my local police department, they call for backup once they found out I was in Baltimore City. Yes. Yes. You see, when you’re when you’re black, the thin blue line, it gets pretty bad. Right. Right, right. Right. To Peter, Why do we why do we have. And I get this question a lot, why why do we have these uprisings, these revolts against police if they are a general, a good for society? What explains the the the rebellion in the streets against police? I think it depends on I guess. I don’t think it’s against the police. I think the police are only simply represent the of the government, the local government, the police are the only ones that are coming, OK? Social workers aren’t coming. Educators aren’t the only people that accommodate the people. The first responders. Are you down? I want one. So we become a proxy for everything that’s wrong in the community. That’s why, you know, you can’t beat City Hall, but you can throw a brick at police. Wow.
[00:49:21] I also think there’s an element in addition to that. I mean, it depends on who’s there. Of course, sometimes it’s it’s a party, sometimes it’s fun. There’s that element as well. Sometimes I think it’s a way to, you know, you know, is a people in a neighborhood pissed off at the way they’ve been treating or so people from other, you know, outlying suburbs coming in to make sort of a political point. I think there’s a different element to all of that. You know, sometimes it’s just a peaceful assembly. Yeah. And then police show up because no one else does. And suddenly, suddenly bottles are thrown. I don’t know what what what’s your take, Michael? You’re the you’re the only real sociologist here as a political
[00:50:10] scientist,
[00:50:12] political scientist, a political science perspective, I guess I’m the only real socialist
[00:50:15] you are aware of. No, I mean, I, I get this question a lot because people say because again, I tell the story where if you if you look at survey evidence, you sort of look at sort of black newspapers during the 60s and 70s. And even later you see this huge wall of support for policing. And it’s not that there are criticisms. They again, they oppose police brutality. And they you know, they hate when cops are rude, but they do see police as part of the solution for the problems in the community. And in fact, they’re they tend to be for the most of the period that I studied, much more concerned about violence and drugs, too. They are about the police. And so but then people say, well, wait a second, we know that there are all these, you know, in history, that we know that there are these all these riots against police brutality. Does that suggest that they’re not, you know, that they’re not happy with police and policing in their communities? And my response is kind of like your response is that they are complicated events and it’s and it’s very difficult to derive from this sort of complicated event, one black perspective, when there could be different moments in that event that represents different perspectives. It’s quite possible that in that, you know, at the because of police might have killed someone. You have in the street a variety of people who are sympathetic to the family, who are concerned about violence, but still feel as if the police are an important presence in these communities. You could also have in that crowd individuals who think police are the enemy and don’t want them in the community. And then later on, they can turn it something else. And so I’m with you in that I think we ought to be analytically careful by reducing these complex events down to sort of one causal story to one black perspective, because it’s really not.
[00:52:27] Do you think it’s relevant that the let me say this is a weird concept. The mainstream far left narrative used to be Marxist. I understood it didn’t really agree with it, but there’s a lot of validity to it. But, you know, class based proletariat, bourgeoisie, the whole the whole Marxist line that has shifted to race based. And it’s interesting that some of the more vehement and intelligent opposition is a critical race. Theory comes from, you know, the the three dozen people still actively involved in the far left Marxist movement in America, Adolph
[00:53:06] Reid and some other really smart people.
[00:53:09] Yeah, but I wonder if that shift is somehow relevant here, but I don’t quite know how to look at what’s happening. Sociologist hat for like ten seconds there, but I think that might have to do with it in a way, race maybe is easier for other for a lot of people to understand in America than class. So, yes.
[00:53:29] So I think that I look, I am befuddled by this question because it’s not just that people have turned to race based explanations for the class explanations, but they they have come to see certain class explanations that conservatives as sort of dangerous almost. And, you know, and I and I still don’t understand how that has happened. And I think it’s a recent phenomenon. Again, you had, you know, Bill Wilson and others talking about class is very interesting and important ways in the 1980s and early 1990s. And that kind of thinking seems to be sort of dangerous now and a lot of places. And I think that does I think it is rooted and I could only I think my hypothesis here is only about sort of white intellectual elite. Some political elite is I don’t think they have enough experience with working class poor whites or working class poor black and brown folk. And I think they understand race academically or they are around as friends that of black professionals. And so they don’t understand the complexities of these communities
[00:54:48] step further and say if one could ignore race, I don’t think there’s any more diverse community than East Baltimore or any so-called ghetto. There is a diversity there and thought political ideology, income. In everything professional status that you won’t see anywhere else, since a lot of that is a legacy of historic segregation because everyone got thrown in the same neighborhood. But my God, there’s a lot of diversity there. And for people to just say to to centralize it by race and no one who has spent any time in that neighborhood, well, I want to say no one, because probably some cops still don’t see it. But you don’t have to spend a lot of time in certain neighborhoods to see that diversity. You know, between the church leaders, you know, I don’t know about Giuliani. I you know, when you arrested Juvenile, you’re stuck with them for hours. And being a Harvard sociologist at the time and just being naturally inquisitive, I would talk to them, the kids. I would ask them questions like, have you ever been outside of Baltimore? You know, have you ever been outside of East Baltimore? Often, by the way, the answer was no. I visited you know, I got a.. On the west side, but their entire life was five blocks and a five block radius was not a good I mean, that’s quite a worldview to have. I would also I. Can you you ever been to church? I’m not really religious myself. Not a single kid I arrested went to church. I don’t quite you know, I’ll leave that what that means for others. But, you know, there’s a there are many different worlds going on. There is my only point. And just to agree with you, people don’t see that.
[00:56:25] But you even said, you know, did you go to church like most white intellectuals would ever ask the question, what happened? So that that would be an important question to raise or that might clarify something that’s that’s going hard. I mean, one of the biggest things, I think, for me is that and again and, you know, these are people who I spent most of my my life with is that sort of both white, politically, intellectually, probably have never been in a home where people say grace over dinner. Right. And small things like that. I think really blind would blind you to the all the ideological and cultural and socioeconomic diversity of these communities. And so I think I’m
[00:57:10] laughing, Michael, because I went to a church where they, you know, pulled the plywood up over the baptismal bathtub.
[00:57:19] Look, you know a lot more than a lot of white folks.
[00:57:25] And I was invited there by a guy I went to the academy with, by the way. Yeah, right.
[00:57:29] Right. I mean, there’s things that people just don’t understand. I mean, if you look at a city like Baltimore, you know, you have the Great Migration from the South and that brought a lot of the southern moors. And, you know, the community. I grew up in the 70s in Baltimore. And I can tell you, I was not worried about Officer Moskos. I was worried about Miss Fortner, because if Miss Fortner caught me on the schoolyard and told me, you know, stop trespassing. Was I going to curse her out? No. All right. because if I did, by the time the streetlights came on OK. And I went up on the porch, the screen door was locked. Michael’s mother was sitting there drinking coffee with mine. I got my ass torn up right in front of your mom. Right. So, you know, that old that adage that I guess has become vogue again. It takes a village. That’s all we knew. The police never had to get involved with a lot of stuff. You know, it just it just wasn’t a thing because you had that shared experience and shared values. Now you introduce drugs into a community, mass incarceration. You take away those community leaders or the male figures. It happens it’s not that much of a stretch to see the social issues that can befall a community, but the real problem is when you have officers who don’t understand that and they police as if, you know, it’s, all things are equal. So if you’re engaged in some activity or if you’re in this community, you must be guilty of something. That’s when the community starts revolting. Because that’s not the case at all.
[00:59:20] So we need more cops to read W.E.B Dubois, I’m talking about Philadelphia, I’m like, how do you how do you get that? Now, let me also say, you know as well as I do that some of the most. Let me just say harsh cops can be cops from that neighborhood because they take things personally. Now, are they just whipping the right ass? Is that the difference or. You know, it kind of there’s a there’s a double edged sword there where you want people to understand the neighbor. You don’t want people who are taking revenge from getting beat up and, you know, high school either.
[00:59:59] This is true. This is this is true. But there has to be an understanding. I mean, one thing that I would do if you know, if it were left with me, I would totally get rid of community. Police told this band, OK, and the reason being is. We don’t have community policing in this neighborhood that I currently live in because every officer is seen as part of the community. They have an obligation to understand the community they serve. While I have that doesn’t work in urban areas, I don’t know. But it seems as if you have to have a specialized unit. And when you have that, it takes all the responsibility of the patrol officer to engage with the public at large. So you don’t know this person other than when he’s with somebody that’s going to not have them or put the cuffs on. You don’t know who the hell that is. He’s just a police. He has no name, they have no personality. You’ve never seen them laugh with kids or talk to old people or would have never seen that part of you, simply the police.
[01:01:05] Can you have community policing went to war on drugs? I don’t know how much they
[01:01:12] throw everything on drugs stays a war on drugs, OK? When it’s a war on people and drug infested communities, then yeah. Then you have issues. OK, let the war on drugs be a real war on drugs, stop them at the source. But of course, now we’re getting into geopolitics and we know that’s not going to happen. So, you know, our country is inundated and our communities are inundated with drugs because everything here is done on the tax base. Those areas that have the financial means for the people to have a drug problem and get private help because they have insurance and you know, the funds to do so, they will do it. I can’t right now, I can’t tell you how many of my neighbors are snort coke right now, OK, but it’s not an issue because if they want to, they can pay for treatment. If they don’t, they can pay for Coke. They don’t have to commit crimes. That’s not the case I’m from.
[01:02:09] In New York, there’s another problem that people from a woman from Cumberland, Maryland, was involved in a murder and then was an attendant on Broadway on the Upper West Side. Anyway, it was an interesting little story. But it’s a magnet when you have in this local tax base, you, New York should not be paying for the problems from rural Pennsylvania and Maryland. And poor communities need a way to pay for things. I mean, that might be the root of the problem is our tax base is all local. So, yeah, schools, courts, police, everything.
[01:02:45] That’s the thing. I mean, you can’t pull the responsibilities. You can’t, you know, say I’m going to be found police without first having an understanding of what police do in that community. OK, what police do they do less counseling here where I live because it’s not needed. So you really don’t need the police to come in and, you know, give you a referral agency or whatever. You know, you don’t need that. You don’t need wraparound services because everyone who has got a computer and if I want to know how to deal with my kid’s drug problem, which was a problem or whatever, I go online and that’s what I do. You know, but too many of these these programs, we throw out a generic situation as if it’s a once asked at all, and the truth of the matter is, no one in power wants to admit how absolutely fucked up things are, OK? They don’t want to do it. So, yes, they will tell you, oh, yes, we’ll be from the police. You know, they’re killing our kids. We’re going to fix the problem. That’s how you end up with three hundred homicides every year in Baltimore City as opposed to. They’re already ridiculous, too. Well, but no one is talking about that.
[01:03:56] Yeah, we probably should wrap up because I know Michael’s got to go. And we’ve been at this for about a little over an hour, which is always a good time to try and wrap things up. Any closing thoughts, Michael? Feel free to say no.
[01:04:14] No, I’m just I’m just grateful to be in conversation with these two brothers right here. This was I benefited from this greatly and I learned a lot. So thank you for having me.
[01:04:26] Yeah. I mean, we should, um, you know, do this again in a couple of months from other stuff to talk about. So I’m Peter Moskos. I’m here with Leon Taylor and Michael Fortner. This is quality policing. You can read more about qualitypolicing.com. And thank you all for listening. And thank you. Thank you for being here, Michael. Thank you.
