QPP 38: Rosa Brooks on “Tangled Up In Blue”

Rosa Brooks is the author of “Tangled Up In Blue: Policing the American City.”

Audio:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/43953260

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Transcript:

[00:00:04] Hello and welcome back to Quality Policing. I am Peter Moskos and I am here today with Rosa Brooks. Rosa recently written a book, Tangled Up In Blue: Policing the American City, published by Penguin.

[00:00:23] And I read it last week or two weeks ago and was like, wow.

[00:00:29] Well, first of all, I have to admit, I’m very partial to the subgenre of literature of people who become police officers for the purpose of writing books about it. So, I mean, I went into it biased. I would really be sort of, I don’t know, petty of me to to criticize this, a book that’s in this field because there are so few of them. That said, I was pleased that I am honestly able to say it’s a it’s a very good book and a needed book at this time.

[00:01:01] You know, it has some parallels to my Cop in the Hood book.

[00:01:04] But honestly, Cop in the Hood is now 20 years old. At least the research is. I’m afraid this book will take over.

[00:01:12] My book is being assigned in classrooms, but perhaps with some good reason we can build them up as a package that would be good for the ages. First person perspectives. Yeah.

[00:01:23] Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for joining me, Rosa. And I also will say that when I started reading the book somewhere early on, I remember shouting to my wife, Rosa Brooks, as Barbara Ehrenreich daughter, because when I was in grad school, I mean, Barbara Ehrenreich, almost a cult hero status from her, Nickeled and Dimed and other books. And so I was also thrilled to be reading the book of of the child, of some of an author I respect, especially because my own father was a respected military sociologist and wrote lots of books. A lot of people know me saying, Oh, are you Charlie, son? Yes, I am. So I felt some instant sort of solidarity on those on those two fronts.

[00:02:11] So the book, I’ll give a brief and probably poor summary and then you can explain it because presumably most people haven’t read it, but hopefully they will. Tangled Up in Blue is the name.

[00:02:21] And you are a professor at Georgetown Law School and you became a reserve police officer in Washington, D.C.. It’s a unusual it’s an unusual. I don’t even know what the word is.

[00:02:41] The concept of a reserve police officer. Many police departments have some volunteer component to it in New York, has auxiliary police, but usually those volunteer components, like the New York Observer police, they have a uniform, they wear uniform, but they don’t have a gun. They don’t receive firearms training and they’re not doing. What they look, they’re in a uniform and they’re on the street, they’re doing real police work, but they’re not real cops, they’re not answering calls, they’re expected to handle parade details and certain crowd control events. But kind of the lighter side of police work is what they do reserve police officers in D.C. And I think it’s the only so know there are others.

[00:03:21] Note that right now the difference is the D.C. reserve police officers have full police powers, can make arrests, etc. all the same powers that that full time sworn officers have. It is a weird program. Every time I think about it, I think I can’t believe this exists. You know that there are volunteer unpaid cops who get to go out and actually be real cops is crazy. That said, L.A., I think, has the same program or very similar program. And there are some other cities that have such programs, although, as you say, they’re they’re rare. The more typical model is to have some kind of auxiliary reserves, either to have reserves who are like the military or reserves. They’re simply part time, but they’re paid or to have volunteer positions that are part time unpaid but that don’t have full police powers.

[00:04:09] So that is what you became in D.C. You answered calls, you arrested people and you did the job of a patrol officer. What led you into this?

[00:04:23] You know, curiosity, curiosity, probably more than any other single factor, it’s not the case that I did this to write a book about it. I did this and then retroactively, retroactively, at some point a year and a half or so into it, decided I would write a book about it.

[00:04:44] And it’s actually it’s a much cleaner, better story to say. You know, I wanted to write a book about policing. And so I did this so that I could write this book and have it be a better informed book, at least in the world, that that I and probably you, Peter, inhabit in academia and sort of policy circles and liberal media circles. Everybody gets it if you do this to write a book about it. In fact, I did it just because I thought it sounded interesting. I was curious and I was bored and I had a sabbatical year and I’d heard about the program back in 2011, the reserve program. And at the time I thought, wow, that’s so strange. How interesting would be so fascinating to do that. And my kids were little at the time and I just couldn’t I couldn’t imagine that level of time commitment.

[00:05:33] And then every year I kind of thought about it a little bit. And then in 20. 15 to 16, I had a sabbatical and of course, I had completely screwed up the time, and you’re supposed to use your sabbaticals in academia to write a book. I had just finished a book, and so I had the sabbatical and I had no project and basically nothing to do. And I thought about this again and I thought, well, I’ve got a year off. Maybe I’ll do this wacky thing and become a reserve police officer. And everybody thought I was nuts and my mother was very displeased and my husband thought I was crazy. Everybody thought I was crazy, but just plain curiosity propelled me into it. Honestly, more than anything else, I can give you all these sort of retroactive justifications of why this actually made sense.

[00:06:20] That sort of kind of pulled up, but the truth is I just was curious, and so were you taking notes at the time when you were doing this work, you know?

[00:06:32] I mean, yes, partly because obviously I was a recruit going through the police academy.

[00:06:37] You’re taking notes because you’re just taking notes. You know, you’ve got to you’re going to be taking tests. So you’re taking notes. And and I also just because I’m well, as a subset of curiosity, I’m nosy and and generally a busybody and so on. And so when I heard something that struck me as particularly interesting or outrageous or surprising, I would tend to write that down, too, even if it wasn’t going to be on the exam. So so I was taking notes. Wasn’t until much later that I started taking notes, thinking, well, I’m going to write about this, so I should really take detailed notes. Honestly, I think this book would have been very hard to write were it not for the fact that we have body worn cameras. And so I was able to review by one camera footage, not obviously from the police academy or from sort of casual interactions, but at least from the the calls I went on, not in every instance. Sometimes when there was no no offense report, the footage had been deleted by the time I thought, oh, I should go check that. But but I would say about two thirds of the episodes that I write about in the book, I was able to go and look at the the BWC footage and check the check.

[00:07:54] My recollection and in terms of you mentioned in the book, heard lots of good things. You mentioned in the book that I could relate to. But you mentioned that there’s no plot and police patrol. And I went and said, and you make the point and I’ve made the same point, that one of the reasons cop TV shows and movies tend to be unrealistic is they’re always focusing on detectives. I mean, they might be idealistic for other reasons, too, but police officers all start on patrol and that’s the bulk of the job. And yet, actually, end of watch, a movie shows patrol and actually does a good job.

[00:08:30] It’s a not a great movie, but if you take out all the plot and actually does a great job of showing police culture, I once edited a good parts version, which is about 15 minutes of everything that doesn’t involve the plot, but there’s no structure, there’s no narrative thread to patrol. So, I mean, it’s something I faced in writing my book, but I had the advantage that it is an academic book.

[00:08:55] But how do you write a book that, you know that has no plot and also where you have to have some obligation to preserve the people you’re writing to preserve the anonymity of the people you’re writing?

[00:09:05] It was it was a really difficult challenge. And I wrestled with it and I had a whole bunch of different theories of how this book was going to work that I abandoned along the way.

[00:09:20] You know, at one point, first first I thought, OK, I’m going to write a kind of more traditionally academic book. I’m going to write the masterpiece of, you know, everything, every possible comment and critique of policing. I will write about that. And then I will use my experiences just as the occasional anecdote here and there to make it less boring.

[00:09:42] And then I realized. I’m not a scholar in criminal justice, that’s not my field, my field is actually international law and national security law, human rights. And I really would No. One, take me a couple of years to learn enough to be credible writing that book. So then I thought, OK, fine, I’m going to write a book where it’s going to be more of the just the stories of what I did and saw. But I’m going to alternate chapters.

[00:10:10] I’m going to have, you know, a chapter that talks about race and policing, and then I’m going to have a chapter that sort of stories that relate to that and then a chapter on, you know, I don’t know, you know, use of force and policing and then all of a chapter. And I tried to write that it didn’t work. It was boring and messy. And I didn’t have enough to say in the other chapters.

[00:10:31] And finally I realized that to the extent that I felt like I did have something to contribute, it was what you started with.

[00:10:42] It was it was that we live in a world in which it’s incredibly politically polarized. Everybody knows this. And and it’s particularly polarized on policing issues that when you talk to people typically either you find particularly on the political right, people say, you know, cops are underappreciated heroes and I won’t hear a word against them. And that on the left you hear their brutal racist thugs. And I won’t hear a word in their favor. And if you speak in their favor, then you, too, are siding with the brutal racist thugs. And that what I thought in that in that world where it’s so hard to kind of.

[00:11:24] Get people to talk to each other.

[00:11:26] Or even just grapple with the fact that reality is a lot more complicated than those kind of polar oppositions would suggest. I thought, you know, maybe what I can contribute is just the personal story of who I am. I came from a very left wing background. I am a classic member of the liberal academic elite.

[00:11:48] And I went and did this. And I’m just going to as much as I can show, not tell and just tell you tell you what I saw and let you know, let you to you, the reader, to the greatest extent possible. Draw your own conclusions, but I hope that the conclusions most people will draw from the book is that it’s a lot more complicated than these sort of simplistic stereotypes and slogans on both sides of the political debate.

[00:12:15] I think one of the things that I thought was reading the book is because you do present. I don’t even like to see both sides because that implies there are just two sides to this issue. But you present maybe perspectives from people on different sides. And I thought, wow, this is nuanced and subtle and will just get crap because it’ll piss off everybody because they they’ll just sort of selectively read the other side. There’s one one. Let me read a short paragraph here, because I thought this actually exemplifies what you’re talking about. And you say, make no mistake, although the flaws in the U.S. criminal justice system are real and numerous and racism, racism and poverty play a major role in who ends up in prison and who does not. The existence of violent crime is not a right wing myth dreamed up to justify the incarceration of minorities and the poor. Crime is real, and the misery, pain and fear engendered by violent crime are visited most often on the very same demographic groups who are disproportionately likely to end up incarcerated. And you say it’s easy to forget this, especially if you’re white, affluent and lucky enough to live in a neighborhood with very little crime.

[00:13:25] I really like that paragraph. That one made it to my notes. And I imagine, again, you present a lot of nuance and also a lot of the ideological ideological spread on some political spectrum in that in those few sentences there.

[00:13:44] And you you address issues related that I think need to be addressed and aren’t. And one of them is simply racial disparity. A lot of the criticism now of police is about racial disparity in the outcomes of police action, and that needs attention. And when it reflects bias, it needs to be addressed.

[00:14:02] And this is sort of a statement that I want you to consider a question, but I don’t know how we deal with issues of violent crime in America without dealing with racial disparity when we don’t even have the language to talk about these issues much of the time. And I don’t know. Do you what are your thoughts on that?

[00:14:23] No, it is it’s terrifically difficult. And I think it sort of gets harder every day in the sense because the political climate is not becoming less polarized. Right. It’s really hard to talk about it. And, you know, I have a colleague and friend, Paul Butler, who also teaches at Georgetown Law. And Paul is African-American and a former prosecutor who now is sort of full of remorse for his time as a prosecutor and has written a wonderful book, came out a couple of years ago called Chokehold Policing Black Men. And most of the book is is about the ways in which the criminal justice system reflects deep rooted racism. And it’s very powerful and very painful to read in a lot of ways. And Paul also has a chapter in that book where he where he basically starts. He’s got a chapter on violence within black communities, particularly violence committed by black males. And he basically starts off the chapter and says, everybody, all my friends told me not to include this chapter, you know, because it plays right. There’s so many stereotypes out there, so many incredibly pernicious, malignant stereotypes about black men as somehow inherently violent or. Well, that’s just the way it is. And and that if you say, well, you know, there are a disproportionate number of violent crimes committed by black males, that even saying that will be either read as.

[00:15:57] Playing into those pernicious stereotypes or as though or will be used by those who want to to provide those stereotypes and Paul I think very bravely basically said. Yeah, I’m worried about that, but I do think that we we the black community, we black males, this is obviously me speaking, you know, talking about what Paul says in his book. And I do urge anyone listening who hasn’t read Paul Butler’s book, Choke to to read it, because I think we have to talk about this. And it’s a really hard conversation to have. And I don’t think it says, you know, needless to say, anything to do with some kind of inherent criminality or anything.

[00:16:41] You know, I think you can trace this to back to the legacy, the toxic legacy of slavery and racial discrimination in this country. But, you know, here we are. It is what it is. And we have to find a way to talk about it. And that was very brave of Paul, I think, to to do that and to to say that. And I think it sort of reflects how difficult it is to have that conversation in a way that isn’t read, as you know. Oh, you know, it’s another right winger saying something racist. You know, it’s our political culture is not one that makes it easy to have those conversations. But but I do think we have to have them. And I think there I think there is. And there should be a way to have them that does not play into some kind of a centralistic theories of different races. And, you know, that acknowledges that that the roots of crime also lie in a a system that is so deeply shaped by race and class based discrimination. But but it’s hard. And I do think, you know, I mean, yeah, when I you know, obviously you and I both we teach young people that young people you teach at John Jay may be slightly more grounded and in real life than the students I teach. I don’t mean to generalize about them. Obviously, they come from a very wide range of backgrounds. But but the conversations that I have sometimes when I talk to my my students and some of my colleagues who are very critical policing know often, rightly so. They it’s almost as if they do think that violent crime is fictional and just aren’t really willing to grapple with what I said in that passage. You quote, which is it’s very real. It it’s devastating to individuals and to keeping and to communities. And that’s part of why the whole debate about the funding in abolishing the police is so complicated, because for all that, we can talk about evidence that’s out there of police abuses and systemic racism in policing, we can also talk about the ways in which impoverished communities and communities of color are underserved by police and, you know, don’t necessarily want no police, but one better and different police.

[00:19:12] You know, there’s I mean, it’s almost a cliche to say a high crime. Minority communities are both overpoliced and under police. But there’s a great bit of truth to that. I mean, you know, polls consistently show that black Americans want more police more than white Americans do. They also want better policing.

[00:19:30] You know, that’s not that complicated. But a lot of people don’t seem to understand that. It’s interesting. In my undergraduate students, they are almost all black or Hispanic, mostly Hispanic and almost all immigrants or children of immigrants, as do they mostly want to go into law enforcement careers or the ones that I teach there, some selection bias there at the School of Criminal Justice.

[00:19:59] And I’m teaching police related classes. So I wouldn’t not say most want to, but but many are interested in that, for my school does a great job and upward social mobility. And a big part of that is because some to many become police officers. But a lot they’re basically trying to break into America’s working class.

[00:20:20] They come from families that have never had a job that have, you know, benefits, much less a pension or something like that. So, you know, of course, I know what happens to some students. I don’t know what happens to most of the students after they graduate. What you know, a lot of them are striving for for for stable work. And often that’s government work. But that’s that’s that’s a big a big step up. And my students, a lot of them, because of their class background, there’s a huge range and ability, but a lot of them are really, you know, had they even conceived of applying to fancy Ivy League schools, they probably could have gotten in, or at least they should have based on their brains.

[00:21:06] But simply, you know, they went to community college and then shifted to a four year. Public university that I teach at and I’m simply, you know, the path that they saw is realistic. And the irony I point out is they say, well, we can never afford the schools. I’m like, it would be cheaper because they have so much more money and they give you financial aid much more than a public school is able to.

[00:21:27] But it’s they are in these communities that are affected by violent crime. And again, you know, because of the reasons you said and their historical reasons and the systemic racism and the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, for whatever reason, it’s very easy for a lot of Americans to simply live in a practically violence free world. That’s not to discount domestic violence and other kinds of violence.

[00:21:53] The idea that most people simply don’t know anybody who has been shot and for a lot of people in a lot of neighborhoods, it is inconceivable to imagine not knowing anybody that has been shot. The horrible statistic from my book, which for a while Baltimore was getting better and now it’s not. But for men in the district of police, the Eastern District, and it’s the same for the Western district, more than 10 percent of men are murdered in their lifetime. It’s it’s inconceivable. And these are these are all African-American men. It’s hard to have other types of reform and progress and investment when you don’t have basic public security. Yeah, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition to to to why it is improving. And when crime goes up, population go down, people flee it. You can to some extent run away from violence. And as you mentioned, it’s the trauma. I’m Kotlowitz wrote about this. Well, I forget the title of his most recent book about Chicago and the amount of violence.

[00:23:01] Just Peter Peter Epps book Bleeding Out Compstat that I’m sorry, you know, that if you there’s this is just a sort of triage approach.

[00:23:13] If you miss how just devastating gun violence is going on in so many communities, if you can’t address that, it’s so hard to address so many other issues that that are related to that.

[00:23:27] Yeah, it’s a tough one. So I’m curious to shift to the idea of police reform.

[00:23:36] I guess part of it is I mean, there is the foundational root of whether policing is perhaps like America, a noble ideal that, you know, often doesn’t live up to its ideal and has flaws, but is a good concept, which I think is the history of, you know, this is the Robert Peel model that came to New York in 1845 and it was called the new police. And I mention that because it was a very specific break, a conscious break. It wasn’t an evolution. It was an invention on this idea of having police to patrol and prevent crime and arrest offenders and also deal with riots and mobs.

[00:24:11] That was part of it, too, on the sort of more recent and it’s not a new theory, but it’s gotten a lot of traction recently.

[00:24:21] More on the Michelle Alexander new Jim Crow model. And then Jill Lepore wrote what I think is a horrible article in The New Yorker about police history that says police are descendants of slave catchers and basically the the muscle behind racist white supremacy and are inherently an impressive force. If you buy that model. And there’s some truth to it, though, I don’t buy it.

[00:24:43] I don’t think it’s historically correct, but I don’t think it’s either or right. It could be both. And yeah.

[00:24:49] And you can certainly find evidence to support both.

[00:24:54] But if you think police are evil oppressors, often in race based on never, I asked in class, it doesn’t get enough attention on all these matters. And I agree 100 percent agree that he should then you should want to abolish the police and set up alternative structures and, you know, liberate society. I worry about that foundational root of reform because I see, you know, who can be against reform. Well, maybe I can, because it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be good reform. So what does reform mean to you and how do you make sure that you can?

[00:25:26] We don’t talk about reform any more or we talk about police transformation and we talk about reimagining public safety. Thank you very much. Yes, which is which is you know, I mean, I say that somewhat cynically, but but I actually don’t think it’s such a terrible thing to say. You know, we’ve got some terminology that has too much baggage. You know, let’s let’s try to break away from that terminology. So, you know, I well, a couple of things. One is just going back to something you said about class. I do agree. I think that in America, obviously, race and class are deeply bound together in all kinds of complicated ways. It’s hard to talk about policing and class without also talking about race and the other way around. But one of the things that I challenge my students with, you know, I came to this project and set of experiences, having spent some years as a know, human rights researcher working for groups like Human Rights Watch. And I can tell you that although we often, you know, when we when we when we talk about how what’s wrong with policing in America, we often will compare it to things like, well, you know, the Scandinavian the Nordic police are so much better than the Canadians are so much better. It’s true in all kinds of ways. Yeah. And could we learn from that in all kinds of ways? Sure. It was their society. Right. You know, but but when you look at police in many other societies around the world, you actually see very similar kinds of problems related to violence, related to corruption that you see in the United States. And these are societies that are much more homogeneous or where the social cleavages are along lines other than race there along class lines or ethnicity or religion. And and often immigration is a bigger issue than immigration. Sure. You know, but but police violence in Brazil, police violence in Kenya, you know that that there’s horrific police brutality, horrific police related corruption in many, many societies around the world in which the greatest countries in Brazil and Jamaica and I mean. Yeah, yeah. And and and so I you know, I challenge my students to say if we see almost identical patterns of problems and abuses in society where the cleavages are not about race, maybe that should make us think that the the issues to think about really do have to do with order maintenance and power differences, socioeconomic power differences generally, which in the United States of America map very closely, but not perfectly onto race and all kinds of ways.

[00:28:13] But, you know, maybe the driver is is at least partially different. And that doesn’t. And I think that’s again, that’s a hard conversation to have because then people are you minimizing racism? I don’t think it is minimizing racism to say it’s because of racism that in the United States, those socioeconomic and power differences map so closely onto race. But it does, I think, change a little bit how you think about the root causes of the problems related to policing and how you think of the potential solutions that if instead of seeing policing as. First and foremost and most powerfully designed to designed and operating to buttress white supremacy, if you think of policing in general, cross culturally as designed and operating to maintain the advantages of elites against whoever is not part of the elites, then I think it opens the aperture a little bit and lets you bring in some growth potential avenues for change that you may miss if you’re thinking of it solely through the race lens. So.

[00:29:21] So, yeah, I mean, what’s so interesting when you say because I mean, I never thought I would become more sympathetic to old fashioned Marxist perspective of class oppression, but I do think perhaps not that race can or should be ignored and should be in America to such a dominant factor. But it’s not the only factor. And we seem to have in the past few years moved from race being an issue to being the issue.

[00:29:47] And I worry about the present, you know, and I think there, too. It’s not either or. It’s both. And it’s not is it race? Is it versus is it class? It’s it’s a race and it’s class. And they’re bound up together and they’re bound up together in some ways that we see in virtually every society. They’re also bound up together in some ways that are unique to the American historical experience. And we need to be able to do tangle and excavate that as much as possible.

[00:30:18] And, you know, one of the things I worry about is if the political left. And if we don’t talk about class and if we don’t talk about lower case law and order, not Trumpy and Law and Order, but the basic, I would say human right to public safety, that I think is a function that should be provided by the government. If the left doesn’t talk about that, we’re those issues to the right. And there’s no reason that public safety and a certain form of class structural oppression should not be the firm domain of the left. I mean, I do think that’s part of the problem.

[00:31:02] But all this theory and I find it fascinating and you do, too, it’s so far removed from a cop answering a call for service. Yeah.

[00:31:11] And while in a way not everyone does it well, but anyone can talk about theory. You can do that. You know, I can do that here in my basement in Queens without leaving the house during covid. But police have to deal with the cards as they’re dealt. Whatever the causes are, the causes on a day to day basis of a police officer are. I don’t want to say irrelevant, because I do think they matter, but they’re not the top concern. All right.

[00:31:42] So police officers in very profound ways. Yes, they come in wanting to help people, but they also come in thinking this is a job, this is my job, and this is the way my job works. My job works. The way my job works is that I sit in my car and something comes over the radio and the dispatcher says, go to this address for this issue. And so I go. And then they my job means write this report or make this arrest or you know, and it’s yes, there’s this vast, murky, complex system that lies behind it, including many, many injustices that lie behind it. But for yeah, for that officer, it’s sort of well, gosh, this is just my job. And that’s you know, I didn’t make the system and complaining is in police officer’s DNA.

[00:32:37] But there is it’s interesting to me how police very is not without some justification, see themselves as the victims, which outsiders never see cops as. Partly it’s because they get that call for service, you know, investigate. They don’t know what. They’re eight times out of ten. You don’t know what the issue is. Cops don’t determine the time and place of these calls. They’re not they’re not in control of the situation.

[00:33:05] Yeah. And they don’t know what they’re stepping into. And then, of course, you combine that with just general bureaucracy. You’re working at least in a big city, you’re working and always some dysfunctional organization that somehow but the show can’t stop. The show always goes on and it can wear on you. You also mentioned this book. And I you know, I looked for this in my book. I don’t know if it’s in there. I feel it was. But some early on when I was actually I think it was later. But one of the cops, it was one of my many field trainers, which I like to talk about a little bit, too. But he said I’m. He said he told me, he said, you’re not a real cop, and I said, what do you mean? And he said, Well, you’re a real cop.

[00:33:47] I mean, you’re out there, you’re a cop, you’re getting paid, you’re doing the job, but you can quit.

[00:33:52] Yeah, you have an exit strategy.

[00:33:54] He defined as why it was different. He said, I am stuck here. I can’t quit when I know people can say, well, sure, you can quit. Well, yes and no. I mean, yes, we all have choices. But he probably had I don’t know, I’m guessing seven years on he invested, which the outside world doesn’t know what that means.

[00:34:11] But if you’re just starting to, you can receive a pension. Well, you know, he’s got a house and a mortgage and a family, and he has no job experience. He has no college. He can’t get another job or at least one that can, you know, pay. The mortgage is stuck there. And if and if the job turned sour on him, he’s kind of doomed. And he knew that.

[00:34:34] And that is a difference. Yeah, I was. And as were you when things were boring or unpleasant in the police academy, I could I could slip mentally into my I’m a fly on the wall. I’m just observing this craziness. And that was a luxury I always had as a cop. And any day I if I wanted to, I could just simply walk away.

[00:34:54] And it’s a heavy ask to a lot of people.

[00:34:56] Well, it’s it’s I mean, it’s one of the paradoxes of policing is that on the one hand, as critics of policing note, as part of their justified demands for greater accountability from police, police have incredible power, right.

[00:35:15] That we give police officers, you know, badges, guns, handcuffs, the power to deprive others of their freedom or their lives. And we rightly say, hey, when you have such awesome power, damn right we’re going to be scrutinizing you. Yes. You know, get over it. At the same time, from the perspective of a patrol officer, you know, low, low guys on the totem pole working within these extremely hierarchical bureaucracies in which, you know, you don’t talk to the lieutenant, you talk to your fellow patrol officers and the sergeant. If you even try to talk to the lieutenant, you bypass the chain of command and you’re in big trouble. You don’t say yes. But I would like to know whether this really makes the community safer. And I have a few critiques to offer of how the department does business. You know, you shut up and follow orders and and you’re operating within a system that you feel very keenly would happily, happily toss to you to the wolves any second if you become annoying or a problem. And there’s this thicket of bureaucratic rules and regulations that are completely contradictory some of the time, each of which, you know, some some situation occurs which makes the higher ups say now we need to prohibit that or require this. And it’s constantly changing and they don’t go back and see if this contradicts some other previous directive half the time. And so you’re operating in a world where you’re thinking, oh, boy, I’m getting so many contradictory instructions that no matter what I do, I will be doing something wrong, which in turn means that if I do anything that annoys the powers that be within my department, they will be able to throw me to the wolves with no problem because they will be able to find the various things I did wrong. And this is not we’re not talking about abuses here. We’re not talking about brutality, et cetera. We’re talking about even the best. Cops are always doing something wrong. And so they feel extremely powerless.

[00:37:14] And that paradox of simultaneously enjoying this incredible power and yet within their own organizations, feeling so utterly powerless I think is hard for people to understand. I was having conversations just yesterday with a guy who is a police abolitionist.

[00:37:31] He thinks we shouldn’t have police, but he’s also a former union organizer. And he said one thing that he really wrestles with is sort of recognizing that that police are also workers going back to the class issue, their workers operating in a pretty crappy system. And, you know, he the analogy he used was during his time as a union organizer, how do you talk to coal miners about climate change and the need for clean energy? You know, you can talk all you want about why it’s better for everybody in the long run. But in the short run, these are people who are going to lose their jobs and their and their livelihoods and and they don’t have other good choices. And, you know, grappling with those tensions, I think, is something we have to do if we want to talk about changing policing. But it makes it extraordinarily difficult.

[00:38:19] My P. I mean, that will surprise nobody to hear I’m not a police abolitionist, but I relates more to I mean, abolitionists, I mean, I think it’s crazy, kooky and morally wrong. But at a less extreme level, the defund movement and I mean, it’s rooted in police abolition. I think, you know, that part of it has that foundation, which is what scares me about it.

[00:38:44] Not the most. Supporters of defund want to support abolition, but it does have that foundation. It would be very easy to to know when we should reduce policing, which is when demand for police goes down. It is not my professional field, mental health or homeless issues or any social work aspect. So, you know, I don’t necessarily know what the solutions are. I mean, I professionally, I focus on policing and crime reduction, and that’s what I try and do. But I would be all for these other systems. I know it can be done better because many European countries and Canada do it better. They have different gun policy. They have different drug laws. All these things come together. Those are heavy lifts. And, you know, I sort of leave that to others for a little bit. I try to, you know, bite off small bits so that I can actually chew. Yeah. If we had a better society, we’d have less violence. And we perhaps need fewer cops, but we have to get there first. There’s a lot of putting the cart before the horse here, I think, and the, you know, policing budgets in DC as per capita, maybe the largest, but certainly one of the largest police departments per capita in America. East Coast cities tend to have more cops than West Coast cities also, as a rule of thumb.

[00:40:06] Police departments generally get about three to six percent of spending based on city and state spending. That means of money spent in the city from the city and state about, you know, let’s say five percent or less, but four or five percent goes to policing.

[00:40:21] It’s not a huge I mean, it’s expensive, but it’s not a huge chunk of the budget. Part of what we we could fund from the other 95 percent of the budget or God forbid, we could raise taxes and simply fund these programs. But where are these programs that work?

[00:40:37] I’m a I’m figure that a lot of reformers would be quite happy to defend police without these other programs because they simply don’t like police.

[00:40:44] Yeah, I mean, so.

[00:40:49] Let me give let me let me give a characterization of police abolitionists that that.

[00:40:57] I don’t know if they would actually agree with I’m not a police abolitionist either, but. But but.

[00:41:03] Some of the conversations I’ve had with people who do consider themselves police abolitionists, you know, what they end up saying is, look, we know you can’t just abolish the police department tomorrow. Very bad things would happen. But we think that if you don’t ask for something impossible tomorrow, you won’t get anything tomorrow. And if we ask that, that let’s be can imagine a society in which police, as currently constituted don’t exist, in which we might have some armed people paid by the states. We probably would, but they would be it would be fewer they would be more specialized. They would be trained in a radically different way. And they wouldn’t do quite a lot of things that police today do. And we recognize that getting to that point will take many, many years, maybe many, many decades. But the police abolition phrase doesn’t actually mean that the police department down tomorrow. It really means let us work towards that future vision in which public safety is created through a very different kind of system. And I think that is I don’t like the language. I wouldn’t pick that language. Abolition, I think, often do very consciously link it to the legacy of racism and see this as a sort of morally, morally powerful way to talk about it. That being said, you know, I do think for all I sort of said it kind of lightly earlier, that a project of let’s reimagine what public safety could look like is a is a really important project, not because we’re going to get there tomorrow or even in 10 years, but but because I think it’s the old you know, you don’t know where you’re going. It’s very hard to know which of the many possible incremental changes are worth making, you know, which move you towards the far away goal and which may be divert you from that. And I do think that that the conversation that says, OK, and here is where I do think you also get tremendous common ground actually between police and police critics. Yeah. You say to a cop, defund the police. They look at you and they say, excuse me, have you seen our station? Have you seen my vehicle? Have you seen my equipment? Are you out of your mind? I already have too few resources to do what you people told me to do. Drop dead. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.

[00:43:28] On the other hand, if you ask the same cop, tell me about the things that you do that you don’t think you should have to do because you weren’t trained to do it. You don’t want to do it. You think it’s a diversion from the things that you do know how to do. And tell me also about the things that you really wish. There were some some better services so that the guy who you bring to the emergency psychiatric clinic tonight because he’s wandering around waving a knife in the middle of traffic, isn’t back out again the next day. And so you’ve got this revolving, you know, what do you wish the city had in terms of mental health? What do you once you get to that conversation, I think you actually open up a lot of space for people to say, yeah, you know, here are some problems that whatever we call them, we’re going to need armed, trained people to handle, probably, you know, in perpetuity.

[00:44:18] Here are some other problems that actually, you know, if we had the funding, we could potentially have people other than police doing tomorrow or a year from now to sell cops on the idea that, hey, you wouldn’t you shouldn’t have to deal with mental health issues. You should not have to deal with homeless issues to a greater extent. You should hopefully not have to deal with domestic issues. The problem is, of course, we can’t we don’t that is revisioning society, but what like New York and San Francisco that have money and political will and spend a lot of money on these issues and not only are the problems being solved, they even seem to be getting at an add in human incompetence and, you know, the chaos, the friction, the fog of war, if you will.

[00:45:08] And, yeah, it’s very, very hard to get there. But brought it to me. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth having those conversations about. You know, is there a completely different way to imagine accomplishing the tasks that we all think need to be accomplished? Can we have a conversation together about what those tasks are? Can we have a conversation about whether you go back to the military analogy, whenever somebody says, well, how big should the defense budget be? Is it too big? Is it too small? I think what you’re really asking the wrong question. You know, the question is, what do you want the military to do? Because, you know, otherwise too big, too small is just meaningless. And once we figure out what we wanted to do, then maybe it’s too big, maybe it’s too small, maybe it’s the right size. But we’re investing in the wrong things and we need to recalibrate investments within. And I think it’s the same set of questions that that is a really healthy set of questions to be asking. Are we investing in the right capabilities? Is this the right agency or people to build those capabilities in? Or would it be better to invest instead in some other group of people who may not exist right now, who may need to be trained, recruited, etc.? Maybe it’s going to take two decades. I think having that conversation is really important. And although I agree that the defund and abolish language often shuts it down or leads into very sort of simplistic kinds of changes that ultimately end up backfiring and actually then reducing support for those very same movements and cities that have defunded.

[00:46:41] And I’m thinking of New York, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, I guess L.A. and Austin as well. You know, it’s quite reasonable to say, you know, maybe the NYPD budget is too big, I think, you know, reasonable people can have that discussion, but then you can say, OK, let’s make a plan where we’re going to aim for, you know, whatever percent reduction over five years. You tell us the best way to get there. But that wasn’t done. The cuts were often very vindictive. It’s tough to cut the police department quickly because, as you know, it’s so much of the expenses labor and that’s can quickly be changed.

[00:47:14] And so usually what gets cut are the parts that reformers tend to advocate more for, which is the idea of the priorities, the training programs, the you know, yeah, that’s the easy it’s easier to cut the training programs that maybe we really need than to get rid of a thousand people jobs. Right?

[00:47:31] Yeah. And throwing more money at I mean, look, but police departments can squander money like the best of government bureaucracies. It is what matters, as you said, is how the money is spent. What what are you doing with it? And certainly it might be possible to do more with less sometimes. But it’s like but the solutions probably will cost money. I guess a part of this is a broader debate that we’ve always seem to assume that, you know, we have to that it’s a fix some.

[00:47:58] I mean, I would like to pay more taxes and get better services for it personally.

[00:48:02] And if I have a feeling, the answer actually may vary from place to place. Right. I mean, it may be that in, you know, one city there’s enough money. It’s just a question of spending in a smarter way. In another city, it may be that there’s not enough money and others say there may be too much. So I I think that’s one of the hardest things, obviously, about policing, is that it’s so decentralized.

[00:48:26] It is very hard to make generalizations from city to city, state to state.

[00:48:32] But very few people say here’s a school that’s underperforming, let’s cut its money so it before performs better. Like the devil’s always in the details that.

[00:48:41] Yeah, yeah. But you know what? You know what I was thinking about just the other day, you know, reading about the twenty seven million dollar settlement in the civil case arising out of George Floyds killing. So the city of Minneapolis agreed to pay twenty seven million dollars to George Floyd’s family. And you know, I don’t for one moment begrudge George Floyd surviving relatives that money.

[00:49:06] But I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that the article I was reading about this noted that, you know, the city of Minneapolis is also really committed to, you know, funding changes to improve policing and defend the police.

[00:49:19] And and so they’ve taken seven point seven million out of the police budget to put into other kinds of social services in the city. And I thought, OK, but it turned out they had 27 million sitting around that they could afford to give in the settlement to George Floyd’s family. But they decided they could only afford seven point seven million for social services that aren’t policing. And the only way to get that was to take it out of the police budget.

[00:49:44] You know, this doesn’t seem like a great way to any government worker will tell you that there is money.

[00:49:52] The question is priorities like to say the city is even bankrupt, cities are not bankrupt. There’s money that they they can find it when they they need to.

[00:49:59] Part of what frustrates me when I think of many things frustrate me about people, taxpayers having to pay for police misconduct. But in in Baltimore in 2015, after Freddie Gray died in a police van, the he paid his family, I believe, eight million dollars. He wasn’t the first guy to die in a police van. And Baltimore probably has about 20 transportation vans. At most. Well, probably, but anyway, you could replace that whole fleet, part of the problem was, is simply the design of that van.

[00:50:39] We’re still using a motorized version of a 19th century paddy wagon to transport prisoners. And I want to say a lot of cities in Amsterdam where I’ve spent I’ve lived there and done a lot of police research there and my brother lives there anyway, have a lot of ties to Amsterdam, including police research. But I’ve seen a police transport van that looked like, you know, it had people were seated forward in seats that, you know, that you couldn’t get whiplash. And it was kind of a cross between a some hotel van and like a roller coaster, because I was able to you could restrain people as well. But the point is, nobody was going to die in that van through accident or intentional misconduct. Passengers were going to get to their destination safely. Baltimore could have bought up. But, you know, two dozen of these vans for eight million dollars, they still haven’t.

[00:51:34] So it could happen again.

[00:51:36] One of the great mysteries to me, and I just don’t know enough about this to feel like I have an informed view.

[00:51:42] But but.

[00:51:44] Cities around the country pay out so much money in settlements and court ordered damages as a result of police misconduct, real, real egregious police misconduct. It’s sort of stunning to me that. Cities don’t tend to go OK, well, I’m at the insurance companies, they tend to be self-insured well, so it varies, right? So it’s sort of stunning to me, though, that the kind of cost, the hard call cost benefit analysis of. Huh. You know, maybe we should invest up front in how to more effectively prevent these kind of things rather than waiting for the inevitable and then paying out these these vast sums in settlements of damages that I know, kind of as I said, I don’t I I’m not enough of an expert on it to really feel like I would predict if I took the money spent on those lawsuits and transfer it to the police department budget entirely and said, OK, here’s the money that we are paying.

[00:52:46] It’s on you. Now, I bet you police departments would find a way to reduce the spending on lawsuits if it was coming out of their budget because it’d be accountability at that level system. There is no system and that, yeah, the lawyers are doing one thing, the accountants are doing another and cops are doing a third. Speaking of that system, can we talk a bit about the role of prosecutors in all of us? I feel that you have to sort of under known parts when the police, while they want to have, don’t understand the role of a dispatcher. And it’s really important.

[00:53:20] And I believe they’re somebody now writing a book about being a dispatcher and I’m looking forward to it. But that is an unknown and very important role and probably won’t get into that.

[00:53:29] But prosecution and the cooperation that police have with prosecutors is essential and controls a lot of how police act on the street. How did you see that role from?

[00:53:44] You know, I was almost going to say the opposite. I do think that that people don’t think enough about the role of prosecutors, that a lot of many of the critiques that people have of policing and of police actions in some ways really should be critiques of prosecutors, critiques of judges, critiques of the legislatures who pass the often quite stupid laws criminalizing really trivial offenses or turning things that used to be misdemeanors and felonies and so on. I think I think all of that is true. But one of the things that really struck me, at least in D.C., and this may be very different in other cities, I’m going back to the it’s so hard to generalize because policing can be quite different from place to place is the total lack of a feedback loop between prosecutors and police.

[00:54:29] So it’s no papering as the term used in the book. Yeah.

[00:54:32] So if you’re a cop in D.C., you know, and you make you make arrests and let’s say you’ve made 10 arrests over whatever whatever period of time it is, you will unless you are called to testify, you will never find out what happened to those cases.

[00:54:50] No one will. Always curious as a cop, I want them to know what happened to these. So, I mean, you could find out. Right. But you would have to take it upon yourself to track it down.

[00:54:59] Nobody will automatically come back to you and say, oh, hey, listen, of those 10 arrests that you made, you know, two of the people pled guilty and were sentenced to such and such. You know, two of the people. The trial is going forward. You’ll be called to testify at some future point. Two of the people, you know, the judge dismissed it at such an earlier stage that you won’t be called to testify. But we wanted to prosecute, but it didn’t work out. Judge dismissed it. And the other people, we just thought that they were, you know, two of the cases. We thought that, boy, they sound like a really bad person who should be prosecuted. But you’re such a crappy writer and your knowledge of the law is so poor that you neglected to establish probable cause. So we had to let them go. And two of the cases you would establish probable cause. But there were such picayune, stupid things that we thought would be a waste of public money to even bother to prosecute. So we just let them go again. If you heard that, then you as an officer might think, oh, OK, the lessons I have here include I need to learn to write better. I need to understand probable cause better. And I should stop arresting people for the following kinds of completely trivial offenses because prosecutors may just let them go. And it may be a maybe or at least we should talk about that. Right. At least I should call them up and say, let’s have a conversation. Here’s why I made the arrest. OK, well, here’s why I just let them go. Let’s discuss. But in DC, that doesn’t happen. And so it’s a patrol officer behavior doesn’t necessarily it’s not necessarily impacted by prosecutorial decisions, for better or for worse and usually for worse. Usually for worse.

[00:56:36] And Baltimore, we didn’t meet with a representative of the state attorney’s office who could and would provide feedback. And I you know, one of my skills as a cop was I was a pretty good writer.

[00:56:46] My report writing was, you know, one end of academics have and yes, I was playing to my strengths on that kind of thing. But it’s also the role of the sergeant. There’s police supervision that should matter as well. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely, but there’s always going to be some conflict, the system, as you know, it’s not designed to be efficient. It shouldn’t be designed to be fair.

[00:57:08] I don’t know if it achieves that either. But efficiency is never the goal with the prosecutor, of course, has a different legal standard. They need to win cases on a beyond reasonable doubt level where police can arrest somebody on a probable cause level, which is a much lower standard. So there’s always going to be some, you know, difference there, whether it was a good arrest because they had probable cause. And cops say, look, it’s not my job to prosecute the case, but maybe it should be. Not even it’s not the cop’s job. It is the cop’s job to build a good case.

[00:57:40] If you want that person prosecuted and you do see cops sometimes say, you know, whatever, I’m you know, the my job is to I do my job.

[00:57:49] I don’t care what you do.

[00:57:50] Yeah. The prosecutor then if the prosecutors never I mean, prosecutors put their total immunity when they say something is decriminalized or they’re not prosecuting. It’s an interesting sort of fiat over the legislative process. But it puts cops in a weird position where a law is still on the books.

[00:58:08] And I didn’t even know it, that the prosecutors aren’t prosecuting it. I’ve made a policy decision that we’re not going to do it. Yeah, maybe it wouldn’t change their behavior. Maybe it would, but it certainly can’t if they don’t know.

[00:58:19] I’ve heard from a few sources that I believe reliable sources that the in New York, they’re cops are no longer going to arrest people with crack or over 50, which is a fascinating, awesome. I’m trying to wonder if that’s actually being put in writing anywhere. But like, weird rules like that can be made. And I don’t know who that comes from. I’m turning 50, by the way, in September.

[00:58:41] So, yeah, no, I was just pass, you know, many years ago when I was a law student, I worked in the Manhattan DA’s office for a summer. And, you know, the Manhattan DA’s office at the time, it basically said we’re not going to prosecute cases involving possession of small amounts of drugs. We’re just not you know, we’re supposed to we’re not.

[00:59:02] And, you know, I think that was probably right to do that.

[00:59:06] But but I think I think, you know, yes, it sort of raises issues of, well, who do you hold accountable if you’re a taxpayer and you think that’s right or wrong?

[00:59:14] You know, one of the big differences in Dutch drug policy is not just the policy, but the way it works out, which is the process. And I think this is common for Europe. I don’t know other countries that well, but the prosecutors and the police are part of the same team. And when they’re equivalent of the prosecutor says, you know, we’re not going to prosecute this, the police fall in line because it’s like it’s not some separate organization that that’s not your boss.

[00:59:40] You know, I mean, it’s an issue that I talk about with my law students. You taught criminal procedure a couple of times. And to take just a really basic example, the exclusionary rule. Right. The you know, if you illegal if you violate the Fourth Amendment in obtaining this evidence that the evidence with riddled with exceptions, et cetera, but that the general rule is that you won’t be able to use that evidence in the trial if it was illegally obtained.

[01:00:10] And the presumption of virtually every court opinion on the subject from the Supreme Court on down is that this isn’t a this is a deterrent. It deters police from violating the Fourth Amendment because, you know, if you violate the Fourth Amendment, then you’re not going to be able to convict the person you arrest or you’re going to be less likely to. So therefore, don’t violate the Fourth Amendment. That would that logic makes perfect sense in the abstract. But if the police never find out that their Fourth Amendment violation led to this case not being able to go forward or create a difficulties, then it’s going have no impact on police behavior whatsoever. Then it’s just going to be an academic thing that I hear at the police academy or don’t violate First Amendment because this could happen. But it will never actually make an individual police officer think, oh, I better do something different. And even if police know about that, if their salary and their promotions are not affected by the number of cases in which they are violating the Fourth Amendment, which messed up the subsequent criminal case, then they might know it, but not care. It won’t change their behavior. So so the link that lawyers assume that judges assume between the exclusionary rule and police behavior in many cases may not exist. In fact, and we don’t tend to think about that. And this is something I’ve said to my students. So I urge to go on police ride along. And so I said that if you care about fixing what you think is broken in the criminal justice system, you have to understand policing on a much more granular level, because only then can you figure out if these assumptions that we make about the link between legal decisions and police behavior on the ground, that link may or may not be there.

[01:02:00] Hmm, that’s interesting. I don’t want to. Maybe go on for another five or 10 minutes, if that’s all right with you. It’s been fascinating, but I think it’s been an hour now. Do you think there was a link between so last year? And, you know, this is a topic that’s dear to my heart, which leads to violence prevention. And I like to plug my violence reduction project, which, of course, you’re welcome to contribute to.

[01:02:32] But it’s a quality policing that.

[01:02:33] Com and I’m speaking to Rosa Brooks, the author of Tangled Up in Blue Policing. The American city last year saw a huge increase in murder in America. And not everyone, most cities might be give or take. We don’t know yet. Nationwide, it might be a 25 percent increase, which is twice as large as the previous largest increase, which was in 1968.

[01:02:55] I believe there were a lot more people shot and a lot more people killed. Do you think some and I’ll let you define the term, but for shorthand, do you think that the policing contributed to that?

[01:03:08] Oh, I don’t know, I have no idea. I mean, one, I only have questions I wonder. So so on the one hand, one theory I’ve heard is that it’s covid related. What does that mean? I mean, I know. I mean, I don’t think it’s I mean but it could mean a bunch of different things. Right. Or all of these it could mean anything from because of fears of getting covid that that a lot of routine police interaction, including the nonenforcement related police citizen contacts, went away.

[01:03:41] And there’s certainly some truth to that.

[01:03:43] I think I mean, you need some truth to that and that that could be a cause of more crime. You know, this goes back to, you know, is there a link between policing and crime reduction set of questions that you were grappling with at the beginning of your career? And if so, what is it and how do we establish it? And so, you know, that’s one theory. Another theory would be that the same reasons that we’ve seen an increase in complaints of anxiety and depression nationwide, that that trauma, the link between mental health issues and violence is is real.

[01:04:19] And that if you have a entire worldwide population at this point that is experiencing greater levels of mental health problems, that you’re going to see an increase in violence as a result. So so it could be those things as well. Let me push.

[01:04:33] I have no idea if it is better to push back on that second one a bit, because partly I find it a bit patronizing that some people are having a bad day, so they go and shoot someone. No, no. A lot of people have bad days. Most people.

[01:04:47] Well, but the kind of people whose bad days are more likely to lead them to shoot people are having more bad days.

[01:04:54] That that’s, I think, a better way to phrase it.

[01:04:57] But it should you know, there’s a global pandemic. But the rise in violence, I believe, has not been seen in Europe and has not been seen in Canada.

[01:05:06] And and I think that at least in some cities, the while last year saw the steepest uptick in enormous gun homicides that certainly in DC homicides have been going up for the last several years, pre pandemic as well. I don’t know. I mean, I’m inclined to resist any sort of nationwide explanation going back again. Policing is local. No, I agree. But it’s so local that it’s really hard. I have no idea basically the answer what has caused it. And I’m not convinced that anybody really interesting.

[01:05:48] OK, perhaps the last question, how I like asking this question, because to a broad range range of fields, how did you deal with the trauma you saw on the job? Did you have any. Copsey, a lot of things that most people outside of victims and EMS workers and doctors don’t see.

[01:06:11] Yeah, you know, I think I was in a better position to not be overly affected by it than, say, your average twenty three year old new new officer right out of the academy, partly just because, you know, as you get older, you feel you see more bad stuff inherently and you you get more sense of perspective. And partly because I did spend a big chunk of my career in writing about researching and interviewing people who who had been the victims of, you know, really horrific atrocities at the sort of, you know, ethnic cleansing, genocide, you know, deliberate policies of mutilations and torture and and. And everything on down, right? And so, you know, so for better or for worse. Bad as things are in parts of D.C., it’s not as bad as they are in many other places.

[01:07:22] Lobar when genocide is the bar. But I also think there’s a gender piece of this. I think that if you’re female, it’s culturally acceptable to say to your friends, your family, your colleagues, wow, that was just really distressing, wasn’t it? You know, I’m really upset about that. That really that really bothered me. I feel just I can’t stop thinking about it. If you’re a girl, you can say that and people will kind of go, yeah, that’s really tough. If you’re a guy in macho police culture, it’s still very hard to say that. I think so. I think, you know, being female meant that the the pressures to hold it all in as opposed to saying I am just brokenhearted by what I just saw or learned about, you know, I think they are different for men and for women. And that’s that’s actually a way in which there are many ways in which I think policing is much harder for women, harder on women. But that’s a way in which perhaps it’s perhaps a little bit easier for women.

[01:08:18] And if we ever talk again, I’d love to. There are so many issues we haven’t covered, for instance, like gender and policing seems like an obvious one.

[01:08:25] Perhaps next time the I would start with my limited experience. I find cops talking about trauma a lot. I mean, some of the guys I worked with are mostly retired now. I would say, you know, a lot of them are damaged goods. Yeah.

[01:08:44] I mean, they’re still functioning, you know, but there is some psychological damage to doing, I believe, to doing that job where at least where I did it. If you’re there for for four decades, I didn’t find I don’t know, I I’m trying to think of cops.

[01:09:00] I can think of a lot of cops telling me these issues. Maybe, you know, about things that affected them on the job and maybe, I don’t know, maybe I’m an empathetic soul. And they just told me about them. But but that said, it’s one thing to tell me, but that’s different than actually trying to get professional help where they might take away your police powers, talking about it, talking about it with their sergeant or lieutenant and or, you know.

[01:09:21] Yeah, I do.

[01:09:22] I mean, I do think, you know, more generally, we do know that there is a link between trauma and abusive behavior.

[01:09:32] And that link exists, whether we look at it on the individual level of traumatized people are more likely to engage in domestic violence. It’s also, you know, there are also enough studies suggesting that cops who have experienced a tremendous amount of trauma are more likely to use violence themselves. And and and in poor communities with a lot of crime, a lot of the people live in those communities are pretty traumatized because of the violence they see day in and day out and the fear that in genders and that, too, is correlated with not necessarily having the best set of reactions when when a challenge arises. And so, you know, I do think that when you when you have a situation as you as you very often have where, you know, traumatized residents, traumatized cops are interacting in a fast moving, scary situation, you know, nobody’s in a great place to make good decisions.

[01:10:33] As a friend of mine who grew up where he policed in the Eastern District said, we all drink from the same well. And I think there’s some better wisdom in that. I would love to keep going, but I think I think for the sake of everyone, we should call well enough alone.

[01:10:51] And I think it happens when you get to academics talking together, we can just go on and on and on.

[01:10:58] Well, I do like talking about this stuff, and it’s it’s fascinating to hear what you have to say about it. And for those who want to hear more, they should read your book, Tangled Up in Blue.

[01:11:07] You have to read it. They just have to buy it.

[01:11:10] I’d prefer them to read my book and I’d like them to read it. But buying it, I would settle for just playing it. I got like a buck per book. It’s not enough to come out enough to quit my day job. Somebody else. I admire your friends. It’s a fabulous book, Tangled Up In Blue: Policing in the American City.

[01:11:26] And I am Peter Moskos and I’m here with Rosa Brooks. And this has been a quality policing. Thanks for listening.