QPP 42: Peter Moskos on Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable Podcast

Rather than me interview somebody else, somebody else is interviewing me! It’s from last year, but still very timely regarding the violence increase and the trial of Derek Chauvin.

Episode:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/44151302

I normally don’t listen my interviews, but I saw this comment on Twitter from Professor Jerry Ratcliffe and was like, “really?” So I listened. I’m not saying it’s all that, but it is a good interview.

I asked Meghan if I could rebroadcast this episode here and she graciously agreed. You should check out her The Unspeakable Podcast. Anyway, since I interview a lot people on my podcast, I thought it might be nice to hear more of what I have to say. I hope you enjoy it.

Transcript:

[00:00:03] Hello and welcome to the Quality Policing podcast. I am Peter Moskos, and today I am going to broadcast another podcast, The Unspeakable podcast with Meghan Daum. And she interviewed me last year and I just listened to it. I don’t normally, but someone told me it was a good interview, so I did listen to it. And you know what? I think it is a good interview. And I talk to a lot of people on this podcast. But here you get to hear me actually talking about many of the similar and current issues relating to policing. So what you’re about to hear is the unspeakable podcast, with gracious permission for me to rebroadcast it here from Meghan down. I hope you enjoy it.

[00:01:00] You have to be able to see that race is a factor in America, not see it as the only factor in these situations. And sometimes it is not a factor at all. But well, if we only report on white cops shooting black people, people will logically think that’s all that happens. And then the problem is seen as one of white cops shooting black people.

[00:01:20] But, you know, we were in a diverse country and police departments. I mean, it’s a weird defense to say cops, you white people, too. It doesn’t necessarily make it better, but it does point to what we might have to do to reduce the number of shootings.

[00:01:36] Hello and welcome to Episode four of The Unspeakable podcast. I’m your host, Meghan Daum. My guest this week is policing and law enforcement expert Peter Moskos. Peter is professor of Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He is the author of three books, including In Defense of Blogging about the excesses of the American Penal System and Cop in the Hood, which was about his time working as a Baltimore City police officer as part of his field work for a Ph.D. in sociology.

[00:02:09] He spoke with me on August 7th from his home in Queens, New York.

[00:02:16] And Peter Moskos, thank you so much for joining me on the Unspeakable podcast. Thanks for having me on. So you have been writing and thinking about topics around policing and law enforcement for a long time now. Almost 20 years, it looks like. Yeah, yeah, 20 years, yeah. So for the better part of the last decade, these names of unarmed black men killed by police or in some cases civilians acting like police have become household names. You’ve got Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, all in 2014. I believe that was kind of an incredible year. Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Orlando Castillo, the list goes on and on. Did you ever think you’d see a summer like the one we’re having now in 2020? What did you imagine the breaking point would be?

[00:03:09] I did not imagine this would happen. I mean, and it’s been a crazy summer. Certainly policing aside, covid has played a role. Exactly. You know what? Who knows? But this things have been building since 2014. Ferguson was was a big turning point. And in many ways, I was thrilled because I’ve been dealing with these issues for almost rolling for 20 years, going back to my policing days in Baltimore. And I’ve been a professor since 2014. I mean, 2004. And I wanted these issues to be part of more part of the public debate. But I don’t necessarily like what’s happened since then and recently, because for a long time these problems were getting better and now I don’t see that anymore. So unfortunately, public awareness hasn’t seem to coincide with with better policy. And that’s I mean, let me so I mean, a very basic thing. When Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, you know, people reporters will call me and say, well, the people who cops shoot a year and we still don’t know that number, but how many people do they kill? And I say, well, we don’t know. And that was frustrating. And, you know, since then and no thanks to the government, but thanks to one specific person at that Fatal Encounters, which is a website and to The Washington Post, you know, people started keeping track of the number of people shot and killed by police. And that seems like a basic bit of data we need to know in order to talk about these issues. And, you know, we’ve only had that now for five years. So that’s an improvement.

[00:04:55] What does defund the police mean to you? So. In New York City, Mayor de Blasio is calling for one billion dollar cut, I think, to the police budget, but defunding means different things to different people.

[00:05:08] So when you hear that phrase, what do you think of I think of it not just in the popular catch phrase of the past, really just a couple of months. It is rooted in police evolution that, you know, I can’t forget that fact. And so when people say, well, you know, we don’t really want to defend police, we want to fund other agencies, that’s great. We’ll fund other agencies. But I think a lot of the advocates, as opposed to just supporters, a lot of the advocates of defend police will be very happy to defend police and have no additional funding for anything else. If that were the choice, some people believe that cops are the problem and not part of the solution. And so the fewer cops, the better. And, you know, that’s a logical. Assumption or logical conclusion, if you see cops as simple agents of state oppression and the armed guards of white supremacy, then, yeah, cops are part of the problem. And if you want a revolution to change everything, you really, you know, defending police would be a place to start on that. But it’s not a new movement and part of the disingenuousness of it. And, you know, this is also where I’ve been very frustrated recently.

[00:06:20] I’ll be honest, I love talking to frustrated people. So you’ve come to the right place.

[00:06:25] I mean, it’s like, you know, because I’ve been dealing with these issues for years and now it’s just amateur hour. And the police reform movement like, oh, good God, you know, everyone’s got an opinion and, you know, some of the opinions are good, but it’s just like, oh, please, we’ve been doing this a long time and we’ve been succeeding. That’s that’s what’s frustrating as things have been getting better, despite what people want to believe and specifically with, well, we can get to that later, but also the defund movement. We do need our social systems, health care systems in America. I’m a firm supporter of that in a sort of classic tax and spend liberal way. I don’t mind paying more taxes. And yes, I believe it will be wasted. But as long as we keep trying and we fix things, we could have a better society. And look, Western Europe does a lot of this better than we do. We know there’s a role model. This is not impossible. It’s a heavy lift, mind you. But it could be done and we need the will to do it. So if that’s what came out of this, that would be great. I mean, mental health care to me is sort of in some I don’t want to say low hanging fruit because that implies it’s easy. But it’s the obvious sort of solution, though, to have the most benefit to people got the mental health care they needed and sometimes even means against their will, everything would be better. And, you know, if you look at situations surrounding police involved fatal shootings, a huge chunk of it are people who are really visibly in mental distress. You know, this isn’t this isn’t a minor issues. This is enough that the reporter at the scene, you know, gets people saying, oh, yeah, he crazy that kind of situation. Cops don’t want to deal with that. And cops certainly don’t want to shoot those people. But we somehow have a society and guns are a big part of it or we put cops in that situation. The thing about defund is we could set up we can make a better society. And then as demand for police goes down, we could have fewer cops. That’s the way to do it. But this whole putting the cart before the horse thing and saying, well, you know, generally police departments get about and it varies a little, but they get about seven percent of total municipal and state funding. So that includes money that the state spends in the city. But it’s about seven percent of what is spent in a city goes to policing. The idea that we have to that we can only improve the world by taking from that seven percent and ignore the other ninety three percent is just absurd to me. I mean, that shows that, you know, it’s it’s an anti policing movement more than it is an improved society movement. And, you know, let’s fix these systems. But the idea that we’re just going to get better policing by putting less money into law enforcement is absurd. And we are seeing the reversal of I mean, that’s why I get frustrated. You know, the increase in shootings and many, if not most cities right now, you know, New York City, it’s double in that. It’s more than double in the past two months and it’s a little less than double the year to date. But this is you know, we’ve just seen twenty years of crime decline disappear literally overnight. Yeah. And that is incorrect. I mean, these are real victims. These are real people getting shot. And a lot of the people who are advocating for this do not live in those neighborhoods are no those victims. And I find that paternalistic. I find it depressing. I find it selfish. People don’t want fewer cops, especially in high crime neighborhoods, especially African-Americans.

[00:09:44] Yeah, that’s what I wanted to ask you about. It seems like the calls to defund the police, abolish the police, whatever it is, are coming from activists. They’re coming from, I suppose, largely white people, although I would suppose I guess some from some black people and the Black Lives Matter movement, some, but I would say disproportionately white. Yes. OK, so what kinds of things do you hear from people in poor and high crime communities about what they want from their police? What kinds of changes do they want? Are they able to even tell you to to articulate what that would look like?

[00:10:19] You know, too many cops are assholes on the street. I mean, I am the first to admit that there is a lack of policing isn’t always going to be polite. And I think that’s important to say, too. It’s not always going to be nonviolent. We have cops to use force and it’s not pretty. But cops bring some of this on themselves just by being jerks to people who they shouldn’t be jerks. If for nothing else, it makes the job of policing harder, even leaving aside the sort of perhaps greater issues of legitimacy and community trust, it behooves cops to police in a way that gets compliance and, you know, being rude to. BP is not a good way to do that. You know, I am actually now find some cops.

[00:10:59] I was a waiter for a long time before I was a cop. And I really believe that working in a fine dining restaurant is excellent training for the a certain mentality needed for police officers. And basically, it’s how to be polite to people you hate.

[00:11:14] Wow. I’ve never heard that that analogy before.

[00:11:18] That’s interesting because there are other things, too, about the show not stopping and multitasking and but that level and customer service is not a phrase that translates to the police world. Well, but but that idea that you still you have to people have to leave. If not happy, it’s not angry and you have to put on an act a bit to to achieve that goal, and if you hire twenty one, twenty two twenty three year old kids who haven’t really had other jobs, that’s a skill. It’s not that they want to necessarily it’s not necessarily that they want to be jerks. They simply don’t have the the people skills. And it’s not something that they get trained in. And you know, as a cop you don’t need to because you you are the person of authority, you know. So it’s it’s like it just it creates problems at that level. So that that is a real sort of focus that police departments could take. But along with that, people still want more policing.

[00:12:12] And I think of a student I had a while back now and she lived in public housing in New York and before, during or after class, she was complaining that cops had treated her rudely in the hallway over a building.

[00:12:27] And she was she was like she was a reverend and, you know, going to school. And I said, well, you know, I guess, you know, you want fewer cops and you’re building them. And she’s like, oh, no, no, I want more because they’ve got to deal with those people down the hall. Those are the people, I’m afraid, of an idea that she wanted more policing and better policing. You could call that nuanced. It’s not that complicated. Right? It sort of is as simple as that. But given the choice between, you know, as police are and as they were treating her, she still wanted more policing because basically she said, I can deal with it like whatever. It was unpleasant. But, you know, I’m a big girl and I got other things to worry about. And they’re serving an essential role here. And that is that essential role part is, you know, we can’t give that up while we’re doing other reform efforts.

[00:13:17] Well, yes. Speaking of the essential role, you’ve said that the whole system of calling nine on one is not the best way to administer police services. And it does seem like the police show up for all kinds of occasions that really don’t require police officers. You know, it’s that the proverbial cat caught in the tree. I guess that was the fire department.

[00:13:38] But you know what I mean? I mean, can you envision a better system? Would this be like social workers showing up on a scene? Are social workers taught how to de-escalate potentially physically violent situations? What would that look like to you?

[00:13:54] I look, if we’re willing to spend more money on that, there’s Koch response or social workers go first. Even it would probably help. But the real solutions have to happen before then so that people aren’t in crisis and nobody gets called because there’s a regular home visit and that you have. That’s the true preventive thing. The question of who responds, you know, New York has for now at least more money than other cities. You know, you can try different things in cities with more money, but the solution is going to cost money. And a lot of cities and municipalities simply don’t have it. So the solution probably is training cops to to use some de-escalation techniques. But it’s not when it works. It’s beautiful. There was a case just, I think two days ago on the one where cops responded to a domestic dispute in Chicago and we’re talking to the man and using de-escalation techniques.

[00:14:45] And then the guy shot the cop. Mm hmm. You want to put a social worker and try that? OK, but at some point, social worker.

[00:14:52] And this is like arming teachers with guns. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s interesting because, you know, my father passed away suddenly in his apartment a couple of years ago, for example, and the paramedics were called. And I think by the time I got to the apartment, there were probably like five cops in the apartment. This was in New York City and they couldn’t have been nicer. And we all just kind of sat around and waited for the coroner to come and they kind of functioned as grief counselors. And it was sort of lovely. But I’m also thinking like, is this the best use of of our police force in New York City?

[00:15:30] Well, first, they had to make sure they didn’t kill them. I mean, that’s really why they were there.

[00:15:34] OK, all right.

[00:15:35] I haven’t been OK at that point. So you’re going to. Yeah, you do need a cop there at that. After that, I mean, yeah. Look, there’s a lot of slack in the police system for when emergencies hit is that they had to use. Nobut so I mean it would be nice if there was, if there was a public grief counselor that could go to death scenes and deal with people. I just again. And why does that have to come from policing or should it come from rising? So we have this system kind of by accident, started in the late sixties. Nineteen sixty eight New York City, I believe. I don’t have my notes in front of me. And the idea was to increase police efficiency, which is a word that I never like to hear when it comes to any part of the criminal justice system, because police and courts and prisons aren’t supposed to be efficient, they’re supposed to be fair and they’re supposed to be effective. But the idea was a cop walking around on the beat can cover Ontari and a cop in a car can cover four times that area, whatever they the bean counters figure it out. And so it’s supposed to save money when it was supposed. To get cops to the scene within three minutes and it was really supposed to end crime as we know it, but instead corresponding with that, and there were other factors going on, too, of course. But, you know, crime went up. We did police the streets in the name of efficiency. And I don’t think policing is ever fully recovered from that. So now we have a system where anybody in theory calls 911 one and cops show up. Now, we need rapid response for ambulances if you’re having a heart attack and certainly. But most policing is not that. And a roughly half of the police department is on patrol, which means waiting around to answer calls for service and that that should change. We need more routine, small level positive interactions between police and the public is good for both sides. It’s good for cops to see people when they’re not having the worst day of their life. It’s good for the public to see cops when they’re not responding to those situations. And you get that by getting cops out of their police cars. And you can only do that if we somehow scale back this 911 one system. There are many things that cops shouldn’t respond to that people call police for. Every cop has gotten the call from parents saying, my kid won’t go to school. That is not a police matter. And at some point, someone has to have the authority to say sorry, but we’re not going to send a cop for that. And some departments do that a little bit. But the problem is front end person, the operator who picks up that call is the lowest paid person in the organization. So he or she is usually she doesn’t get the authority to do anything. And of course, there’ll be some tragic event where you say, sorry, that’s not our business, and then someone will get killed eventually. So, you know, it’s the world isn’t done. Politicians find it easier to basically say no, just always send a cop. But that is where a huge amount of police resources are being wasted when cops could be doing better things.

[00:18:23] OK, so let’s get to part of the reason you’re here. You know why you’re here. There’s an agreed upon narrative at this point in the media and now among the public at large, which is that there is an epidemic of police shootings, of unarmed civilians, especially unarmed black men. But you can also point to statistics, for instance, those published in The Washington Post that show far smaller numbers than most people imagine. I think the Post database showed that 15 unarmed blacks were shot by police in 2013, and that does not include other forms of violence, beating, choking, tasering, etc.. George Floyd was not shot so would not be included in a statistic like that. But there does seem to be a widening gulf between perception and reality when it comes to this subject. So I imagine this is something that frustrates you. And I’m wondering what kind of collateral cultural damage you see being incurred by these misperceptions.

[00:19:21] Well, some of it is as much as we do need to focus on race, some of it is the exclusive focus on race, I think is not just a red herring here, but it is counterproductive. Yes, boxer shot and killed disproportionately. And much of that can be explained through poverty. Just. I mean, this is America. Everything is racially worsening. And we only seem to sort of notice it at the very end of some of it can be explained by disproportionate rates of violent crime and victimhood. Those are very real. And we don’t even have the language to talk about it. But this isn’t the problem is the statistics don’t matter when people see a video. And in a way, to some extent you can say statistics shouldn’t matter when you see an individual case of injustice. It should shock the conscious conscience. But if we want to make it better, we have to focus on what’s actually going on. And it’s just going to be another bad shooting next month. I guarantee it, because it’s a big country, because a thousand people are shot and killed a year and some of those are bad. And so when that happens, we have to be able to hold police departments accountable, hold officers accountable, but more importantly, figure out how to make it not happen. One of the things I’ve noticed since The Washington Post started putting out that data is there are huge regional disparities, greater than racial disparities. You know, you’re far less likely to be killed as a black man in New York by cops than as a white man in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A lot of cities out west, the rates are many times higher in places like Tulsa and Oklahoma City and Albuquerque all comes out as an outlier in the bad sense. And why is that? You know, I don’t know. We don’t know because we’re not looking at it because most of those people getting killed aren’t black. You know, I think there are many reasons gun culture has got to be a part of it. I think fewer cops is probably part of it. But this is all speculation. The kind of drugs, you know, there’s more crystal meth. And that, I think leads to situations that get violent. So different kinds of drugs. But we don’t know. Some of it, though, I think is how cops are trained. Some departments like the NYPD just do it better. Yeah. And instead of saying, well, why don’t we figure out what the. Doing right and see what part of that can be moved to places are doing it worse, we don’t. Instead, we complain know because of the focus on urban policing, we tend to look at departments that do things a little bit better. Part of the problem is that, just so you know, I don’t even know if we know for sure. But there are like seven there’s so many police departments in America and most of them are very small, but, you know, just suburban ones and places that are firmly conservative Republican districts, there’s no accountability.

[00:22:02] Every shooting is ruled justifiable because either they believe it is or, you know, it’s such a small town that the prosecutor was the best man at the police chief’s wedding kind of thing.

[00:22:13] You’ve said that the NYPD is arguably the best police force America has ever seen. What do you mean by that? And since when would you say?

[00:22:21] I would say I guess it’s arguable. I’m not saying it is true in other people’s other other departments do a good job, but you can make for it and you can make the case by looking at any quantifiable measure we want to look at. So number of people, cops, shoot, arrest, declining crime declining until recently, complaints going down, incarceration going down. By all these measures, the NYPD has been doing a great job, you know, really since the mid and early mid 90s. But some of the reform happened earlier in terms of cops shooting people. You know, cops in New York were shooting well over 100 people a year in the early 70s. Every other day, cops would shoot somebody. Last year, I think five people were killed by cops in New York. Last time I checked this year, it’s three. Wow. And this didn’t happen by accident. You know, this happened because people saw it as a problem. And some of it was simply, you know, keeping track of every time cops actually fired their gun. Again, this seems common sense. Now, some of it was instituting policies that later became the standard for Tennessee versus Garner, which again, I mean, dates might be wrong. Off the top of mind, I think was nineteen eighty three. And that’s the Supreme Court. That said, among other things, you can’t shoot a felon in the back just for fleeing unless there’s an actual threat, imminent threat to safety. NYPD implemented that earlier. You know, I worked with a cop who went on the he was a cop longer than I’ve been alive. He came on the Baltimore police force in nineteen, I think 68. And he, of course, had wonderful stories of the old days. But he said, you know, I I shot at a lot of people back then. I never hit any of them. And he said the best part was those no paperwork. All I had to do was buy more ammo. And so that was the world that policing was at in the 60s and, you know, bit by bit, but department by department, that changed. And so now police departments shoot a fraction. And we don’t, of course, have good national data on this. But every city that we can look at, Chicago, tends to be the big cities. We can find this out. But Chicago and New York and Los Angeles see this huge reduction of police shooting people in the 70s and 80s. It goes up a bit in the late 80s because it also is related to violent crimes. As shootings in the city went up, cops were in situations where they shot more. But there’s this long term downward trend, which has been flat, by the way, since since twenty fifteen. It’s remained constant over these past five years. But the point is, we made things a lot better. I don’t think anyone knew about or knows about this. At the same time, by the way, policing became safer. And again, that’s, I think through better training, through the use of body armor. But these are sort of the nuts and bolts nitty gritty part of incremental reform that aren’t very popular these days. But we have been making things better and it all seems to be sort of going out the window now.

[00:25:05] Yeah, I mean, Roland Fryer, who’s an economics professor at Harvard, authored a study back in twenty sixteen that found that when it came to actual police shootings, there is no racial disparity.

[00:25:17] And a lot of conservatives have glommed on to that study and a lot of progressives have poked holes in it. But, you know, one of the things that I found striking from that was, according to his research, in some cases, officers were less likely to shoot at a black suspect than a white suspect. And I think this is from data collected in Houston. Can you explain what’s going on there?

[00:25:40] I can’t speak to the specifics study, but I think you summarize the response pretty well. I’d say the response from the left has been not just picking apart, you know, holes in it, but has been really a full on attack of Roland Fryer because the conclusions don’t fit their narrative. Let me turn it let me use sort of a nonscientific way to demonstrate this when I mean, I see a lot of videos of cops shooting people because unfortunately, it’s sort of part of my job, I guess, to analyze these things. And when you see, like Flandreau Castelar in Minnesota, and it’s just that to me was shocking.

[00:26:17] And partly it’s because I worked in a rough neighborhood with a lot of crime and violence that was one hundred percent African-American, really. Ninety eight percent or something. And if you work in a high crime neighborhood as a cop, you sort of develop a better sense of what? Constitutes legitimate danger or not? You don’t get scared so quickly, you can’t because it just it’s a different environment. So a lot of these bad shootings and this is you know, there’s some selection bias and from my in my perspective, but they seem to happen in places that don’t have a lot of violent crime. And so the cop freaks out because maybe it’s the first time they’ve been in this situation. And then their mind flashes back to the videos. They were shown in the police academies of cops getting ambushed and killed and they overreact and they shoot, shoot when they shouldn’t shoot. So I think that is part of and it’s probably more likely to happen, like the Flandreau Castillo to a black person in a neighborhood with low crime than a white person in a neighborhood with low crime.

[00:27:15] But I think there’s just in neighborhoods that have a high amount of violence that are disproportionately minority. You see cops more restrained. And some of that, I think, is because of what I just described, the sort of interpersonal reactions and the training you get. Some of that is policing in those neighborhoods. And those cities have been held more accountable over the years. I think that matters where, you know, if you know that it’s going to be judged, you’re probably less likely to less likely to shoot. But that gets back again to those regional disparities and we could reduce the number of people cops shoot. But to do that, it’s not going to be through implicit bias training.

[00:27:52] It’s going to be through better policy, better laws and better and better training.

[00:27:57] So I want to talk about cameras for a minute here. So police body cams and the rise of civilians being able to film anything in their midst. So let’s take the first one. How long have we had police body cams there now? Mandatory, right. But how long have they been in existence and how long?

[00:28:14] No, they’re not mandatory over whether they’re in apartments that don’t vary. They’re still very expensive because of the data storage issues. The other companies almost give away the cameras, but then you’ve got to pay for the storage because it’s not just keeping it on a hard drive. You know, you have to keep it in a secure way that’s accessible and will stand up as a chain of the food court. So it’s it’s it’s not easy to do. But they you know, these are for profit companies who make a lot of money off of it.

[00:28:38] But a lot of departments now have body cameras. You know, they’ve dashboard cameras have existed, I guess, since the 90s. OK, and then body cams have really taken off in the past, say, decade. And I mean, it’s an interesting progression because originally it was pushed by, you know, the ACLU and other groups as a way to, you know, finally showing what cops really do and hold police accountable. And then, as it turns out that, you know, most of the time police are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. A lot of those groups are against body cameras because they have actually become a great aid and prosecution because they show the cops side of the story.

[00:29:18] Oh, at some point, you know, I’ve also heard there was a jet when they came out. Cops resisted them with a passion. Now cops support them for. Yeah, there’s also a generational thing where I think if you grow up with, you know, a smartphone, you’re less likely to see a camera’s intrusive. So the other point is, you know, they’re inevitable. You don’t want police to be the only people on the scene that aren’t recording it because a lot of what comes you know, in the old days, I joke, you know, cops, I had to do something bad to get in trouble. Now, cops are often doing what they’re supposed to be doing and getting in trouble. And that’s what they’re supposed to be doing, is using force when they need to. But, you know, you’ll see a cell phone video of twenty seconds of cops trying to get a resisting suspect in handcuffs, which is really difficult. And you don’t see what led up to that. So that’s where the body cams are useful. They do provide potentially greater sort of context. And I went not never the complete story, but more of the complete story. And I think they probably do make cops behave better because they are being recorded.

[00:30:16] So that’s in my mind, it’s win win leather’s you know what what worries me and we have to embrace them. They’re an evidence argument against body cams are pointless because they’re here and they’re here to stay. But I do worry about how it limits police discretion a little bit. It’s harder to cut someone a break if it’s on camera, because if something goes wrong, you don’t have plausible deniability anymore and saying, well, why didn’t you arrest that person when you could have.

[00:30:41] You mean with their supervisors? Yeah, exactly.

[00:30:44] OK, you say, look, just you know, you catch someone with drugs and you just say, get out of here, go home and you throw the drugs down.

[00:30:51] The sewer is right. Something I did. It’s you know, it’s you’re not supposed to do it. But the alternative is arresting the person.

[00:31:00] And, you know, sometimes you’d realize that’s not the best solution to it sort of takes the nuance and and humanity out of the interaction.

[00:31:09] And sometimes people need to be yelled at. And that never looks good on camera. But you think of it this way. When cops are dealing with the public, they’re really only a couple of ways the situation is going to resolve, which is the cop walks away, the person walks away or the person gets arrested. That’s it. It’s just a question of how we get there. And sometimes you need something between walking away in arrest and a stern talking to. Conservatives, but that’s not it’s not in the manual and potentially a cop, you know, God forbid you swear at the person. I mean, there’s such a weird tenderness and a lot of criticism of police in what is a very rough country we live in.

[00:31:51] Right. I mean, what about the fact that civilians are just filming everything all the time? The perception that there are horrific interactions between police and the public every day it is come about because the videos that go viral are the exceptions, but they happen to go viral and we see them. And I think it was Will Smith who said racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed. And that’s kind of true of a lot of things. So do you feel that the sort of viral video phenomenon has played a huge role in our current movement?

[00:32:29] Absolutely, yeah, because it did open up the ugliness of policing to a lot of people who didn’t think it existed.

[00:32:37] And I’m thinking of I’m thinking of white people and safe neighborhoods and suddenly say, oh, my God, is that what’s going on? Well, yeah. And inasmuch as these videos can make things better, again, I say great. But what’s happening is the response from politicians mostly to viral videos is saying the result is let’s have lots less policing. You know, de-escalation training is great and I mean that sincerely. But there are times when it’s not appropriate. Sometimes you got to go in and grab somebody because, you know, there’s a danger when situations prolonged themselves. If you can end the situation by grabbing someone and taking them into custody in five seconds, that might be better than a half hour of de-escalation. When there’s a chance during that half an hour or something goes wrong doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have that training and it doesn’t mean it can’t be effective in other situations. But this idea that we can policing that doesn’t use force, that isn’t hands on that, that demands voluntary compliance from people is absurd, because almost by definition, if there was voluntary compliance, you know, cops probably wouldn’t be there in the first place. There’s an academic from the 70s, guy named Egon Bittner, who talked about police discretion and the role of the function of police in modern society. And he defined police as the agency by which force might have to be used or the threat of force. And this you know, this overlaps well with the defund movement because you can maybe identify situations that don’t involve force or the potential use of force and say police shouldn’t be there. But when force might be needed because other things have failed as the last you know, where the buck stops, I think, have to become a little more accepting of the idea that we do have police because of their ability to use force. And if we don’t want that, you know, come up with some alternative, but if it is a necessity, then we have to be a bit more tolerant when cops do use force. And I’m talking about legal, lawful moral force even. But that’s I think, the issue with these videos. Again, it’s sometimes it’s when cops are doing the right thing that they’re getting in trouble just because it’s ugly.

[00:34:40] Yeah. And actually, I’m thinking now, are there any countries that are known for the cops? Not using force is, I think in the UK. Did they not carry guns? Do they walk around with nightsticks?

[00:34:52] Yeah, most well. And Mace and tasers. Most cops in the UK do not carry guns. They do have an armed response units.

[00:34:58] Irish Guards are unarmed.

[00:35:01] I’m trying to think if there are others, those may be the I mean, like in Sweden, do they have this problem or I was going to go to Sweden. But is it because there are just so many in Sweden? They are. Oh, OK. That would be that’s not part of their PR, but good to know.

[00:35:15] I mean, the difference is, of course, people, the public aren’t carrying as many guns. Right? I mean, that’s when because I’ve done research both in England and the Netherlands with them. And, you know, cops in Amsterdam are all armed. But when they approach someone, they can safely assume that that person does not have a gun. And that’s not you know, there are guns and illegal guns in Holland as well. But in England, they assume and it doesn’t, by the way, I mean, cops use less force. You know, British cops can be pretty rough, too, and partly because they’re not armed. It does change policing. And I think in many ways for the better because, you know, they know that they don’t have that ultimate resort of lethal force if things go wrong. So they have to deal with situations in a slightly different way. But you can’t transplant to a nation where there, you know, hundreds of millions of guns out there and people use them. That’s the big difference.

[00:36:05] Yeah.

[00:36:06] OK, I want to talk about the way the media is reporting on the police, particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter activism around George. It’s killing just today. In fact, we’re recording this on August 7th, there was an article in The New York Times, I don’t know if you saw it, about the damage done by protesters in Seattle and the inability of police to protect civilians and small businesses. Specifically, a group of local business owners are suing.

[00:36:33] City and it was also reported that small businesses are paying private security guards who are officially affiliated with Black Lives Matter to protect their businesses, mostly from white protesters associated with Antifa. So this is remarkable not only for the story in and of itself, but for the fact that it is one of very few stories we’ve seen along these lines. I think Nancy Rahmon in reason has been doing reporting along these lines as well, but it’s certainly the exception and not the rule.

[00:37:05] So what comes into your mind when you read the newspaper? If you still read the newspaper, when you read the news, when you see what’s being reported?

[00:37:13] I still believe in journalism in the newspaper. And just when I give up on The New York Times, they actually come out with a decent story. I haven’t read that story yet. I only summaries of it this morning. You know, what happened in Seattle was interesting because, again, it gets to this idea of police abolition that if we get rid of cops, things will be better. And what you find very quickly is that I mean, this is why police were established in America, was to deal with urban disorder.

[00:37:38] And, you know, the origins of police in America do not, by and large, come from slave catchers. Slave catchers certainly were very real, but no comes from the British model of preventive policing, and it was called the new police. And, you know, the idea of patrolling to prevent crime was a new concept in eighteen forty five New York City.

[00:37:58] So we’ve forgotten that Cassella was a long time ago and we’ve forgotten that because there’s revisionist history now that ignores it. So in Seattle, other organizations will fill the gap, just like they did before we had policing. And those are a combination of social organizations, of neighborhood gangs, of extortion rackets. But there if there is a a vacuum of authority, people are going to fill it. The question is going to fill it. I mean, in Seattle, you know, two unarmed black kids got shot, but it wasn’t by cops, it was by some security. You know, it just the role of policing was filled within weeks and ended up with the same problem, but probably worse because of no training and accountability. This is we don’t want policing to be in private hands any more than we want prisons to be in private hands. This should be a municipal accountable bureaucracy set up by the state to serve the people. I mean, that’s someone’s going to be getting the cost. Also defund if places then have to hire private security. I mean, what what an incredible expense that is. Whatever.

[00:39:04] Actually, this just popped into my head. Whatever happened to the Guardian Angels in New York City?

[00:39:09] Oh, they’re still around. Curtis was yes.

[00:39:12] I saw one once on the subway a few years ago, and I didn’t know if it was like somebody in a costume, you name, but no problem.

[00:39:21] Well, not if that person was alone. That would be odd.

[00:39:23] Now, they were two of them. It was there was a man and a woman, but.

[00:39:26] Yeah, well, you know, what amazes me about and, you know, courteously was, to put it mildly, an interesting character. But so they’ve been around since, I don’t know, eighties. I want to say I saw them in Chicago growing up. They came to Chicago in the late eighties. What amazes me is I’ve never had a major scandal. I mean, Curtis Sliwa, I made some stuff up about other things. But given the fact that they’re not paid and, you know, coming from high risk groups and like, it amazes me that they’ve had, you know, basically three, four decades of scandal free existence.

[00:40:03] I mean, you know, there’s no, you know, the Guardian Angels, as far as I know of, you know, never raped anybody. I’ve never you know, they’ve been I mean, they’re much smaller, but it’s kind of from looking at it from the perspective of a police department where they’re always, you know, scandals and cops behaving stupidly. Right. And I mean, it may be just me not knowing about it, but I’ve kind of been impressed at the discipline that the Guardian Angels have shown over the years.

[00:40:25] And they were and are unarmed. They don’t carry firearms, right?

[00:40:29] Yeah. And they hold people until cops come. Right. And, you know, there was a big, you know, ideological divide about them. I suppose there still is. But they also filled in the 80s of, again, the need that people felt for public order on first on you on the subways of New York City and as police and gradually took over that role in the 90s and crime plummeted. You know, it made the guardian angels a bit superfluous. And, you know, that’s fine.

[00:40:55] I want to understand something about crime in New York City in the 90s, because my understanding was that the reason it went down was because Rudy Giuliani, the mayor, much of that time, was enforcing like, you know, really, really racist policies, that these were policies that were benefiting affluent white people in the city.

[00:41:19] This you know, this Amadou Diallo case, that was a horrible police brutality case. And I remember the news reports where the cops were saying something like, it’s Giuliani time now. And, you know, this is how it’s going to be part of the story I. Believe was apocryphal.

[00:41:34] OK, but that’s so minor compared to the true awkwardness of what happened.

[00:41:37] Yeah, in that case, yes. But overall, like, do you think that the police policies in New York City in the 90s were fair? I mean, definitely made the city safer. But my it’s funny because my understanding is like, you know, middle class white chick was that, well, you know, they’re good for you, but they’re racist and these are hurting minority communities. And, you know, don’t don’t get so excited about it.

[00:42:01] I think a lot about this. My next book is actually an oral history of the crime, dropped from the police perspective, talking to cops who were on the job than to say what, you know, what, if anything happened, how did your job change? I do give Bill Bratton a lot of credit. I don’t like to give Giuliani credit because, you know, he’s batshit crazy and racist. At the time, he was just, I think, racist and wasn’t quite so batshit crazy. But he had I’ll give him credit for appointing Bratton as police commissioner. But Bratton truly turned around that organization.

[00:42:31] And it was, you know, I won’t get into all the details unless you want me to. But at a fundamental level, he said our job is crime prevention. And that sounds obvious coming from a police chief, but it hadn’t been said for decades. And that goes back to the 1968 Kerner Commission on Crime in response to riots that kind of laid out the what is remain. The progressive or liberal idea of the role of police in society is to arrest offenders and we have to fix the root causes to prevent crime. It also coined the phrase the criminal justice system, which is sort of a misnomer because it’s not a system, it’s a bunch of independent systems. But cops sort of begrudgingly gave up their the role of crime prevention and said, fine, if you don’t think that’s our job, we’ll just respond after the fact, pick up the pieces and arrest people who committed a serious crime. A lot of it also was in response to corruption in the NYPD, going back to Serpico and later issues as well. But the idea was, if you were commanding a police precinct, no one really held accountable crime as long as you would a certain clearance rate, as long as you’re making a certain number of arrests based on that. The big thing was to avoid scandal. And so if you could just keep a clean house or keep things, you know, covered until you were somewhere else and then have it explode, you were fine. So Bratton came in and said, no, we’re going to you know, first you said we’re going to bring down murders 15 percent. And everyone said that’s crazy. And he exceeded that goal.

[00:44:00] And he did it by what is now almost a toxic word. But I think it may have to be the phrase may have to be reinvented, but the concept is fabulous, this broken window style of policing.

[00:44:10] Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Yeah. Got a bad reputation.

[00:44:14] Yeah. And it’s you know, when it was on the cover of Time magazine, this is why Bratton got fired, because he was on the cover of Time magazine and not Giuliani and it led to there that led to their split. It pointed out that it was community policing. The idea of broken windows comes very much from Jane Jacobs book and concept of what makes the city work.

[00:44:34] And it involved it says, we’re going to ask that it comes from the bottom up. We’re going to ask the community what what are the problems here? What do you want cops to do?

[00:44:43] And a lot of that was dealing with quality of life, issues of, you know, public urination, of open drug use, of rowdy kids, of things, make reasonable people afraid. That’s when it’s a broken window. It’s not zero tolerance, though. It morphed into that in later years. But that’s not broken windows. It says we as citizens have a right to a civil society. We have a right not to be afraid and walk down the street. And there are actual offenses that we can enforce. And the idea was not to arrest. Everybody needs to change behavior. The idea is to have society start policing itself a little bit better.

[00:45:19] And it worked. I won’t say it’s the entire thing, but, you know, other it’s always complicated. No one knows for sure. But yeah, policing in New York and it spread quickly to which accounts, I think, for some of the nationwide decline. But crime dropped more in New York. And while life may have gotten better for you as a young white woman, it really got better for minorities in high crime neighborhoods.

[00:45:39] I mean, when murder drops 80 percent, that almost exclusively benefits poor black and Hispanic New Yorkers because they are the victims of violent crime, vastly, disproportionately. So those lives that are saved, those are those are real people who were not shot and killed. We’re talking, you know, hundreds well now, actually, thousands of people not killed every year and many thousands of people not shot every year, you know, so murders went down from about twenty two hundred to under three hundred in a recent year. That’s a real decline. And that is what allows the rest of society. You cannot have people cannot succeed, cannot succeed in life. They cannot succeed in school if they live in a neighborhood where there gunshots every day. You can’t do your homework, you can’t have a nice dinner, you can’t go to the bodega. This is the violence is so segregated in America. Because America is so segregated, but the benefits of the crime reduction affect poor people the most, and that is partly what I get. So maybe even worse than frustrated, I get so upset now when you have people who live in safe neighborhoods saying we don’t want policing in other people’s neighborhoods because we think it’s oppressive. Well, first, ask the people, you know, broken windows was opposed from the beginning because it is fundamentally and, you know, it is an aggressive form of policing. It’s putting police on a roll they hadn’t been in before. Yeah, it has a nanny state quality to it, I suppose. Yeah. And that’s why, you know, it needs it needs to be accountable to the people and it needs good leadership to keep it on track. And it did go off track in New York City once. Once you start judging it by stats and saying, you know, all arrests are good, then you’ve it’s no longer broken windows. And people have made the argument that it’s an inevitable consequence. And, you know, I respectfully disagree, but there is a theory of broken windows that is that is an excellent theory that is moral, legal and effective. At some point, you know, the things get bad. And if we’re going to go back to that, but it’s kind of so much easier to keep crime down then than to bring it down. Right. And that’s the worrisome thing right now, that these mass shootings have tripled.

[00:47:46] You know, then you get retaliatory shootings and got the trauma of violence is you know, it just it radiates with such power and goes through the generations.

[00:47:56] And so, yeah.

[00:47:57] Have you had interactions with, say, white antipolice activists where you try to reason with them? Like, how do the conversations go? Have you ever actually sat down with one of them and tried to talk it through?

[00:48:12] Yeah, I have a lot of my friends fit that category. There is some sort of ignorance of the numbers, the big data picture where, you know, people just don’t know where they think, you know. Well, I’ve heard there’s an epidemic of police shootings, so it must be increasing because that’s the definition of an epidemic. Well, it’s not. Oh, OK.

[00:48:32] So I guess that’s partly I try and approach it as a teacher, but partly you can argue with people’s anger and frustration and what they believe is there’s the police coming together. I’m going to get you, man, you know what they believe to be on the right side of history. And so they want to believe a certain narrative. And the media and I don’t like criticizing the media, but it’s hard to in recent years in police coverage or at least, you know, the media has been incredibly biased against police and has fed this narrative, you know, and then, of course, D.C. cops do bad things. And so it’s like, well, you know, I don’t know what to say about that. Well, I’d like to make those situations happen less, which is true. But it just is such a weak argument when someone’s going. This is this is horrible. I am angry at this incident. There’s not much you can say to that.

[00:49:22] Yeah. So speaking of all of this, there’s a medium post from June of this year, a few months ago called Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. It was written by an anonymous poster who calls himself Officer A in a cab. And that would be, I guess, referring to the acronym A Cab. All cops are bastards. I actually had to look that up. I wasn’t really sure when I was a kid. It was all pigs. OK, well, I guess it’s not fair to pigs to to put them in that bucket. So this this article, you know, this writer says he was a police officer in a major metropolitan area in California with a predominantly poor nonwhite population. I’m assuming this is a he notwithstanding his reliance on a lot of locutions we hear coming out of the white privilege arena. He talks about being ashamed of his time in the force, causing hurt, hesitating to write this piece because he doesn’t want to center himself. He makes a number of startling statements and the sum total of which is essentially that even if not all cops are rotten apples, there is such a code of silence around misconduct in the force that they might as well be. So I want to talk to you about this article.

[00:50:38] I don’t know if you read it or not, but there are a couple of lines that really jumped out at me. This writer writes, If you take nothing else away from this essay, I want you to tattoo this on to your brain forever. If a police officer is telling you something, it is probably a lie designed to gain your compliance.

[00:50:56] There’s some truth to that, I don’t know. No, not necessarily even a lie. But I mean, if you have committed a crime or as the suspect, it is generally very good advice to not say anything to a cop. And it’s kind of shocking how rarely people actually follow that advice. Now, I could also say if you committed a crime, I want you to get caught. I mean, that’s the other factor. So, yeah, cops will use tricks and deviousness and probably not on your side, but it’s not universal. There is a point where you’re not a suspect and they just they want information or they want information to clear you. You know, sometimes the. Things can get resolved very quickly. Cops are all very used to people lying to them basically to some degree all of the time. So on the rare occasion when someone actually just tells them the truth. You know, cops can cut you a break some time to what struck me about that arc. First of all, that department is as bad as he says he should out it.

[00:51:50] Yeah. Where do you think it is? What’s your best guess?

[00:51:52] I don’t know California well enough, but probably one of those departments where cops shoot a lot of people. So I only know policing from the departments that I’ve done research on and worked in that police department may exist. Just as he described it, though I’m a little skeptical of many of his claims, but some of it. Yeah. So then we got to fix it. But in the same way that New York City is exceptionally good, unquantifiable measures, other departments are exceptionally bad, and that might be one of them. So let’s figure out what’s going on. The other thing about that article, though, at the end it was just it’s rooted was a it was just an anti capitalistic screed at some point, which I thought was an odd way to frame policing was simply that it’s a tool of capitalism and that’s why we should get rid of cops. So, you know, if you want to take a Marxist or neo Marxist perspective, go right ahead.

[00:52:41] Well, all roads can lead back to that very easily.

[00:52:44] But he kept on getting back to his real opposition. Was capitalism right?

[00:52:49] All roads can lead back to capitalism being the root cause.

[00:52:54] So the other part, though, is there is a small cadre of people and they usually get embraced by anti policing perspectives until the small cadre, you know, that actually they’re the problem. There is a difference between whistleblowing and confessing. And just because you were part of something bad and now or, you know, anonymously admitting it, that actually might just be an indictment of you. Why were you doing this? There are cops who rat out other cops all the time, cops rarely. It’s embarrassing, actually, how frequently cops in New York City are arrested, usually for off duty nonsense. But when cops go to trial, cops aren’t going to go to prison for some cop who did something wrong. They’re not going to. I mean, all cultures and organizations have a certain code of silence, which isn’t necessarily bad policing. It’s there’s probably more of it, but it’s not it’s overblown. This idea that cops never say bad things about other cops, usually cops get caught because they ratted out by another cop. But don’t you don’t don’t quit and then confess and pretend that you’re innocent in society is to blame. Well, he doesn’t pretend he’s innocent. I’ll give him credit for that.

[00:54:05] He writes, The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty. Now, you were a police officer. You went to the police academy, and I want to talk about that, too. But as a way of segueing into that, was that your experience during your training?

[00:54:27] You know, despite a sort of ideological bias I have against that article, as I read it, I was reading going, you know, a lot of what he’s saying is right. The Academy is a great place where things could get better. Yeah, it was. I wrote about that in Cop in the Hood. It was largely a waste of time. I would say that the practical training was good, the gun range, the driving training. And I even thought the legal classes. And, you know, granted, I was a Harvard grad student at the time, so I was perhaps more interested in that. But it was well taught. But you have six months and it is so much of it is a waste and a lot of it is. There’s a video from my kid, probably from the 80s. Every cop knows the name Dinkins and no one else in society does the famous green video. And there are others like it. But but he’s, you know, gets the trademark on the name almost. But Tinkler got I don’t want to get it wrong if he was the cop or the guy who killed the cop. But there was a man who’s acting goofy at a traffic stop and the cop doesn’t perceive the threat quickly enough and the cop gets murdered and it’s caught on, you know, open mic. And it’s it’s brutal. You do need of that. But you also have to put it in perspective. One of the ways that cops have, by the way, I mean, again, this is the nitty gritty that people don’t want to focus on when they can chant slogans. But they’re since that time, there’s these shoot don’t shoot situations. One of the brands is called Fat Fats Fats. And there’s another one, but they’re basically interactive simulations. There’s an operator where you’re given a replica gun and presented with situations and you make decisions and the scene evolves around the decisions you make. And the goal is to not shoot when you don’t have to shoot. The goal is to not shoot people who aren’t threats. And the goal is to also to shoot people who are threat. It’s expensive training because it’s one on one, but it’s shown to be effective. And that’s sort of that’s one of the ways in which you can improve police use of force. But, yeah, there are a lot of snuff films you see in the academy.

[00:56:29] What are the chance? Is of actually a drawing your gun and be shooting somebody if you are a police officer in a major city over the course of your career.

[00:56:40] It depends so much on the city. I did some back of the envelope calculations on this, comparing like Bakersfield and New York City, some of those medium sized cities out west. Over the course of your career, the odds get a little greater than you would like.

[00:56:57] And I can’t remember what they are off the top of my head in New York City, they’re basically zero zero that you’re going to draw your gun at all.

[00:57:05] Know that you’re going to shoot someone, somebody. I probably had my gun out of the holster every other every third day as a cop, by the way, mind you, and pointed at some.

[00:57:15] I want to get to that.

[00:57:15] But OK, so you’re sure you’re going in a vacant building, right?

[00:57:19] OK, so it is like the TV shows, but they have the gun, they’ve got the gun out and they’re kind of going around the corner. The dark corner.

[00:57:27] Yeah. I mean, I pointed a gun at two people and 14 months on the street and I’d say that’s where I police kind of par for the course, you know, didn’t ever. I didn’t. But, you know. Yeah. Even it’s a rare occurrence. I mean, you think of this weather, seven hundred roughly seven hundred thousand cops in America, cops shoot and kill a thousand people, let’s say. And we don’t know how many people cops shooting don’t kill. But let’s let’s say it’s another thousand. So, you know, we’re talking 2000 shootings out of three quarters of a million cops. So in one year, it’s still a rare event.

[00:58:01] There is the case in Dallas of Tony Tempa, who was mentally ill and ended up dead in police custody. Do you know the details of that? What could you say about that?

[00:58:15] I don’t know the details other than it parallels the killing of George Floyd in a very similar way. The difference being that Tony Tempa wasn’t black and it hasn’t been reported on very much.

[00:58:26] It’s been gotten some coverage, but not as much as you might think.

[00:58:30] Well, once you take the race angle out, it doesn’t get traction in the media. And this does influence public perception. So, you know, you have to be able to see that race is a factor in America and not see it as the only factor in these situations. And sometimes it is not a factor at all. But, well, if we only report on white cops shooting black people, people will logically think that’s all that happens. And then the problem is seen as one of white cops shooting black people. But, you know, we were in a diverse country and police departments. I mean, it’s a weird defense to say cops, you white people do. It doesn’t necessarily make it better, but it does point to what we might have to do to reduce the number of shootings or killings in this case. There are we know. So just random people may be interested if you add people killed without guns and that means by hands or taser that once you get a Taser, you know, sometimes people do just die in response to a struggle, but is probably about 10 percent of killings at the hands of police or not with a gun is just so you know, about one hundred a year that fit that category.

[00:59:39] You worked as a police officer while you were doing PhD research. Was that strange? So there you were, Princeton undergrad, master’s degree from Harvard. And you’re you’re on the police force in Baltimore City, is that right?

[00:59:53] Yeah, I went there first and not be a cop and just do research and that the Baltimore Police Department said after I got there that I couldn’t do that anymore. So it was a very unique situation that I was in. I was pretty warmly embraced, I would say. I thought it would be a bigger deal. When I was from Harvard, get my pat answer is, I think to be accepted as a cop and you know, there are three things you’re judged on and if you can pass two of those, you’ll probably be OK. But when I was a cop, if you did your job, that was number one. That was a plus. If you weren’t an asshole, that was a plus. And if you went out drinking after work, that was a plus. And two out of three is fine. But I kind of managed all three. And, you know, everyone has their hustle. Like at some point, a lot of people become most people become cops because it’s a job which isn’t bad. Just, you know, the post office wasn’t hiring. It’s it’s a way for a lot of Americans. And in a place like in New York, for a lot of immigrant Americans to break into America’s working class in other places, it can be a bit more of a white type of, you know, old boys club that there is still is that part to it. But, you know, I did my job and I took professional pride in what I was doing. And everyone knew that I was going to write a book on it. But at some point, if you’re with someone eight hours every workday, they just accept you for who you are, for better or for worse.

[01:01:17] And I was actually going to ask you that very question. What kind of people become cops now? Are the standards too low?

[01:01:24] It would always be better to have higher standards. I mean, this is the other frustrating part about recent events as people, the pool of recruits is going down. That’s not going to improve policing. It’s you know, why would someone want to become a cop right now? Mm hmm. It’s a tough job to recommend part of, you know, when people say, oh, why are cops such crybabies saying they need to be supported to do your job? Well, yes and no. But part of that agreement is that cops do believe that they are on the side of good. They do believe that they are the ones that are speaking for dead people. They’re the ones on the side of victims. And if you take that moral high ground away from policing, it shakes the police officer perspective of their job. A world view. Yeah, policing is going to get worse if we get worse recruits. Now, the question is, how do you get better recruits? One of the would be great if you could just raise the age. I think, you know, I don’t think twenty two year olds are mature enough to be cops. But if you raise the age to twenty five or twenty eight, then how are you going to get you know, people already have careers and so on. Right. At some point if you have, you know, college, it would be good to have more college requirements. Most police departments don’t. But if you have a clean record and a college degree, you can probably get a better paying job than being a police officer. So, you know, at some point you get what you pay for. And I see this is becoming a greater problem in the future because we won’t know it’s a problem until years down the road when bad things happen and, you know, cities pay out settlements and that kind of thing. But we would you want to raise standards, but you still need recruits. And that is the dilemma, really, of any occupation. But it’s it’s more applicable in policing.

[01:03:03] You teach police science and law, is that right?

[01:03:07] I don’t teach law just in the department. It’s an umbrella department. I teach police related classes. I teach active New York City executive cops. And I teach, though I haven’t in a while, unfortunately, because I’m a department chair replaces what I like about the job with committee meetings. But in general, I teach undergrad New York City kids who many of whom are considering a career in law enforcement, but it is a four year liberal arts degrees. So you could do whatever you want.

[01:03:37] Does that mean they want to be cops on the street? Like what do they aspire to do in general? Your students?

[01:03:43] You know, I’m teaching because I’m teaching police related classes. Even if for my college, it’s a bit of a more police focus. The students, I would say half of the students are half of you know, it’s college. You know, they want to get a job after it, but they’re they’re almost exclusively immigrants and kids of immigrants. And generally, it’s the first they want a job where they think they can do good. They’re from the city. They understand the complicated dynamics of race and crime. And New York City, they want to be on the on the right side. But they also they they want a job with benefits. You know, it’s it’s an economic step up. And again, New York is somewhat unique and these factors. But we have almost all the undergrads are minority immigrants and kids of immigrants.

[01:04:31] Back in June, you said in an interview with Ariah Conway on blogging heads that you had no idea what Derek Chauvin was thinking when he was putting his knee on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, two months later. Do you have a better idea?

[01:04:49] No, I still don’t know if there is more. You know, we now have a better sense of the whole scene, but that what happened before doesn’t surprise me. Some sort of instinct. Cop defenders like closely. You know, George Floyd made a lot of bad choices. Yeah, no shit. You know, people police deal with generally made a lot of bad choices in this case often. You know, I. Often I want to see what happened before in this case, it doesn’t really clarify anything for me because it’s still those eight minutes of what the hell are you doing that I’m still baffled. And you should not have been a field trainer, not the field training officers, the cop who takes people out of the academy and basically the clone of himself.

[01:05:31] So what do you imagine will happen in terms of prosecution?

[01:05:35] I think you’ll get convicted on something because I think a crime happened. I worry every time cops are put on trial, not for the sake of the cop. I worry because society tends to want to find great moral and social justice in these trials. And that’s not the way our court system is set up. It’s an individual defendant in this case, the cop on trial for a specific crime. And it’s hard to convict people and it’s really hard to bring the cops in. Usually the defense is a reasonable doubt. The cop of a what a reasonable police officer have been afraid when the cop use lethal force. That’s not going to fly here, because I don’t think the argument was that he was using lethal force. You know, he didn’t shoot them. So this is it makes his defense trickier, to say the least, that he now has to. But I don’t know the you know, it’s going to come down to jurors asking details about specific parts of the legal code in Minnesota, which I’m not an expert in. And it’s going to be messy. I don’t think anyone’s going to be happy because even if he can even if he gets convicted, it won’t be premeditated murder probably. And then some people are going to be upset if he gets acquitted. Boy, it’s going to be ugly. And then there are the other cops involved, the ones who are standing around. I do have, by the way, and this, you know, with a big caveat that I don’t know what they were thinking, but I do have an idea of what I think they were thinking, which is, first of all, this guy was their boss for the previous months.

[01:07:02] I think the one guy was only like two or three days on the job. Is that right?

[01:07:06] Well, but he had been through field training first for the lawyer, initially said he was like three days out of the academy. That turned out not to be true, but I also think so when they’re afraid and they’re trained not to question this guy because he was their trainer, they probably hated him. And I can imagine them going, man, you’re really messing up, but it’s on you now. They didn’t think that George Floyd was going to be killed and that, I hope, might have changed how they reacted. But I can just imagine them when you, you know, just saying you’re getting yourself in trouble here. But you know what? I want you to get in trouble. That might have been going through their mind, but that, unfortunately, in this case was not enough. But it’s going to be tough to convict them of the accomplices of a crime. But it could happen. You know, we convict people for murder who drive getaway car. So but, you know, their personal stories or at least the one one lawyer’s speaking a lot and the other isn’t. But, you know, it’s an African-American guy from Minneapolis and, you know, in theory, becoming a cop for all the right reasons and all that. So it’s he seems to be more of a tragic, a tragic case here. But I mean, yeah, but there should I mean, Floyd was killed and he shouldn’t have been I mean, all the details do sort of have to come down to that. But what also, you know, what makes these protests the post George FOID protest somewhat unique, as in the past, people that protested in the name of accountability and justice. In this case, we have it as much as it can be had in our country in the sense that the cop was arrested and charged. That is what we call justice and might be unsatisfying. But that’s why I worry about protests. I mean, I want to say they don’t have a cause. Of course they have a cause us to end police brutality. But that’s you need specific goals that can be accomplished. You need to know when to say mission accomplished here. And I don’t see that happening any time soon.

[01:08:53] When you’re feeling optimistic, when you’re having one of those days, what do you hope could come out of all of this? What would be the best case scenario? What are you hopeful about, if anything?

[01:09:07] Well, when I’m optimized to be optimistic, I remember those days and I’m thinking about this professionally. So I’m focusing on policing and not greater issues of racial and social justice, but I hope things can get better. But with policing, I hope that we can accomplish productive reform. I think there’s been a reform movement of the past decade that has actually not been changed for the better. There is certainly an opportunity now that we’ve never had to make fundamental changes to policing. The question is, we you know, who is going to advocate for changes that are good? How are they going to happen? It might things might get better. But I mean, ultimately, from a policing perspective, you have to stay focused on the victims of crime. And we’re not going to help the victims of crime with less policing.

[01:09:56] What do you tell your students? What do you think is the most important lesson that you impart to them?

[01:10:01] What is the most important lesson? I don’t have one overarching theme or I mean, it’s not the way I teach. I try and break it up. You know, I want to give them a sense of history and perspective. And in policing, I want to teach them to appreciate, you know, science and data over anecdotes, some statistics. But look, I’m a, you know, quality of academic. I like talking to people. I also want people to understand, you know, the various voices. And we don’t have to all agree on things because you never know if you’re right. You know, I could be wrong about everything. I know that. And I always keep that in the back of my mind. So I try and teach them a little bit of doubt. But I’m trying to impart them with a little bit of knowledge. I’m trying not have my recent pessimism rub off on them. I want to make them more hopeful. Well, that’s that’s pretty much it. You know, I want them to to appreciate learning and reading. And, you know, just as I try and teach them how to write better, you know, these aren’t big picture ideological screeds I have. It’s small, incremental changes.

[01:11:10] That’s the name of the game. Well, Peter Moskos, thank you so much for talking with me on The Unspeakable. I really appreciate your your insights and your time.

[01:11:19] And I appreciate being here. Meghan, thank you.

[01:11:22] That was my interview with policing and law enforcement expert Peter Moskos. You can visit his website at PeterMoskos.com, that’s Moskos, and also find him pretty easily on social media. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Google podcasts. And for more information, you can visit theunspeakablepodcast.com. And you can listen there to tune in next week for another fantastic guest whom I will announce very soon on the website. Thanks for listening. See you next time.