QPP 49: Brandon Del Pozo

Del Pozo talks about Washington Square Park, urban disorder, and arresting behavior.

His article in the Daily News.

Audio:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/45296244

Youtube, for those who must:

Uncorrected automated transcript:

[00:00:03] Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to Quality Policing. I am Peter Moskos, and I’m here with Brandon del Pozo, a friend of mine and former police chief of Burlington, Vermont, and former. Oh, I forgot your rank. What was

[00:00:19] Speaker 2 your rank? I was I was a deputy inspector.

[00:00:21] Speaker 1 Deputy inspector. OK, Deputy Inspector of the NYPD. You’re with the NYPD, I believe, for 19 years. And you were the precinct commander of a few precincts, including the 6th Precinct, which covers Greenwich Village, Washington Square Park. I don’t quite know the boundaries, but I appreciate you joining me here. And you may remember Brandon was in the last episode as well with Jeff Asher. This is, in fact, one hour after we stopped recording that one. I am one to talk about the op ed that you wrote in the Daily News, June 11th. Twenty twenty one today is June 13th. Twenty twenty one. And the headline is The Wrong Way to Police Washington Square Park. How Things Got So Bad. Now, you don’t write the headline, but that headlines OK. But the articles is I really enjoyed it, not just because I know you, but because you talk about, I think in some ways important issues that very much relate to say, you know, Jane Jacobs writings on the same neighborhood but 50 years ago and about policing and about public space. So. Instead of me summarizing it, can you sort of what say what you said you wrote?

[00:01:48] Speaker 2 Thanks, Peter, and thanks for your kind words on the article. I know you said in a note I would say something nice anyway as a friend, but I genuinely enjoyed it. So so thanks if you’re looking for it out there in the podcast world that’s available online, if you go rooting around for Washington Square Park and del Pozo or something like that with the Daily

[00:02:05] Speaker 1 News, I should mention, which I’m very bad about doing the website for this podcast, which is quality policing dotcom. I’ll certainly put a link up on there.

[00:02:14] Speaker 2 Great. And in a day or two, I’ll probably put a link on my own website so you can find it. It’s eight hundred fifty words of what you’ll hear about today in the next hour. I was the commander of the West Village for two years that covers from from Houston to 14th Street, from Broadway to the to the Hudson. So Washington Square Park right in the middle of that. This is a neighborhood in a park that people have just a fabled vision of. Right. And people from all over the world want to come to Washington Square Park and live out some fantasy of what they think is a village life. It could be fireworks at 1:00 in the morning. It could be buying weed. It could be reading a book, playing Frisbee, going to NYU and then sitting by the fountain. Not all of that works together all at once. Right. And so the park has rules. And other thing it does is it resets by closing at midnight. It’s close to midnight from time immemorial. The original title I suggested that the Daily News did not take because people who’ve ever written an op ed knows that the newspaper picks the title was You Can’t Police a Park with the pendulum and. The point I was making was not that. Last Saturday, you know, from when this was recorded that the NYPD going in with full force and pepper spray and fisticuffs and clearing the park at 10 p.m. was was the problem. That was part of a much bigger problem, where for weeks and weeks, by all accounts, the NYPD did nothing to enforce any rules in the park that people were, in fact, up until 3:00 in the morning playing music, setting off fireworks, drinking drugs, doing drugs, having sex,

[00:03:48] Speaker 1 and then also what I call them, pop up protests, where a group, a group of the same people, a couple dozen people night after night with. What do those things you’re talking about, but also be a bit more aggressive and in terms of their attitudes towards police? Right.

[00:04:08] Speaker 2 And police are back on their heels. Since I wrote the op ed, I had a few of my former cops contact me from the 6th Precinct saying, listen, when you close the precinct at midnight in

[00:04:20] Speaker 1 the parking

[00:04:21] Speaker 2 lot where you close the park at midnight in twenty twelve, it was a different world. Now people are literally saying if you they turn on their phones and say, make me leave, you have to fight me. This is my park. And there is a chance. I remember I handled Occupy Wall Street and there were people there at midnight saying, who is park our park? And I would say back to them, this is your park. It is yours. I am merely a steward. You own it. Your park closes at midnight. They’d say, it’s our park. Yes, it’s your place, your park, it’s yours. Your park closes at midnight. No, no, it doesn’t. It’s your park. So much so that you’ve elected people to make rules about it. And those people say it closes at midnight. That’s exactly why it’s your park, because you made these rules and they work. They make sense rules. You need a park that we used to say the tenor of the park in the morning is set by what happens there at night and if what happens there at night. And I said this in the op ed and I just alluded to this, if it’s drinking drugs, sex, protest, loud music, by the time the morning comes, it’s going to be urine, feces, use needles, use condoms, homeless encampments. It’s the first people walking their dogs, drinking their coffee, looking to commute through the park. That’s not going to feel like a safe and welcoming place. And you need that breathing room for the park, like I said, to kind of recalibrate. That just wasn’t happening. Right, because NYPD approach to the park as a product of everything that’s been going on in the city politically with policing have become this crazy pendulum where nothing, even to the point where the most permissive NYU professors were like G is like it is. I can’t even sleep anymore. Please, can somebody do something and then the response is to go in with like hundreds of riot cops to clear the place out. That’s and I just saw that is like such a such a bad way to broker the use of public space of such an important public space in New York City, which

[00:06:02] Speaker 1 is do nothing, do nothing. And then over. Overreact or at least what was perceived as an overreaction. Also, I’m George Kelling, when he was alive, used to give an example, actually looked at his broken Windows article and was not on their knees to say this a lot, that the sort of his classic example of bad policing, what happens when you don’t police public order and you don’t do it in a legal, transparent fashion and you don’t do with the support and leadership of the Department of Political and Police leaders is you let a park get out of control. And his example was always bums harassing secretaries at lunch. And and they would complain to their to their to the mayor. And then eventually the mayor would tell the police chief, you know, get those bums out of the park. And and the police chief would relay that order to the officers and then they would go in and use an unplanned, unnecessary force and. And actually, you know, I want to get his story right. He would say the mayor would say it has a problem with bombs in the park and then the police chief would say, get those bombs out of the park. I don’t care how you do it. And then when the shit hit the fan, they would sort of deny accountability. And these problems have to be dealt with before they get to that level of crisis. That was his point.

[00:07:31] Speaker 2 Right. No, that’s a great story by telling and it’s funny, one of the things I think we give short shrift to is that there’s been a big metoo movement and we talk about just women feeling comfortable in the workplace. There’s also when you look, there’s a long history that still goes on. Women feeling very uncomfortable in public spaces. And I know that this is an illustrative example and a deep diving into street harassment, but that’s a prime example of of an uncooperative use of public space where like half the population feels like they’re, you know, one comment or leader or grope away from from being a victim, a legitimate victim of abuse in a public space. Right. And parks are like that. Right. If there’s NYU students, like in tank tops and shorts and heels or whatever, wanting to use Washington Square Park, you don’t want people screaming and leering at them. Someone’s got to be there to broker that use of public space fairly.

[00:08:27] Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, I’m saying that’s not very sincerely. But let me play devil’s advocate first to get sort of the extreme opinion out here and so we can dismiss it. Why should we give a damn what that NYU student thinks? What about why are you picking sides here? What you’re picking? You’re picking the white or Asian right over the over the poor, drug dependent individual who has just as much of a right to that park as anybody.

[00:08:56] Speaker 2 Right. So so so the point is that that works until that works, as long as you’re happy with the with with the way things fall out. Right. As long as you get to point to your version of pluralism. One of the things I talk about in my research is like we live in a pluralistic society. What what Peter didn’t mention in the intro is that, you know, about a year ago I finished my doctorate in political philosophy. What I wrote about was the police and the Democratic state. So. Right. If. If you don’t broker and enforce cooperation in ways that that allows for a plurality of people to safely and comfortably use a park for different reasons, what you’re literally doing is saying that the democratic spaces are owned by the people who get there first, the people who say to the longest, the people who are the most intimidating and the people who are the most disruptive. And if that happens to be the people who you think are victims and they’re reclaiming what was always theirs, like maybe that works for you, but for for that can turn on its on its dime in an instant. You could have maybe some small group of Muslims that want to use Washington Square Park for an afternoon prayer and they go and they face Mecca and pray and then those very same people who are now screaming at the women turn around and go get the heck out of your Muslim. So it’s going to be Muslim epithets. Does the logic still hold or do you now want the police to broker cooperation in a way where we’re protecting the people at prayer? And my answer is, you cannot. Have the test of public space to be who gets there first, who’s the most intimidating, who stays there the longest and was the most disruptive. Right? Because you know who doesn’t suffer from that? The frankly, the wealthy, the the wealthy will say, well, you know, it’s NYU. We’re paying tuition. The park isn’t what we hoped it would be. But we have so many student spaces where we can take advantage of this. The student hall right to the south of the park. And it’s just beautiful atrium. Like they’ll just go there and, you know, he’s not getting in there like the homeless dudes, the wealthy will say. I used to like to take my my weekend stroll after exiting the townhouse in Washington Square Park. I guess it’s going to have to be the Hamptons who really suffers from the most disruptive use of the park are the people who have no choice but to use the park.

[00:11:18] Speaker 1 I hear the commute to the Hamptons can be horrible traffic.

[00:11:21] Speaker 2 It would mean to have the helicopter, you know, how many helicopter landing you have to make, like hover. Well, in your helicopter, while the other guy’s helicopter takes off so you can land like the helicopter. Yeah, it’s terrible,

[00:11:34] Speaker 1 the claiming of public space to me. That, by the way, is a good. Because we do live in a diverse, pluralistic society, you don’t want to impose one persons or one group’s concept of of acceptable, acceptable behavior up to a point. And a good rule of thumb is does one person’s group’s behavior prevent other people from using it? Are they stealing that public space? And if the answer is yes, for the sort of reasons you mentioned, then there’s a problem or it has to be heavy, you know, or it has to be regulated in a cleared way. I mean, you could argue, by the way, that a softball team claims public space at a softball field, and that’s why it’s a permitted process, because when that team is there. Yeah, you actually you’re not allowed to use it. That’s kind of a big deal. Like, of course, we understand whatever people want to play sports and some of them are organized. So we allow that. That is a little, you know, fundamentally different than someone who claims public space because they are mentally insane, because they’re crazy. And also if they themselves angrily,

[00:12:41] Speaker 2 if the sharks and the Jets have a softball team. Right. And they both want to play on that space, like what would the weather permit process does? And you need a permit to have a sound amplification device in Washington Square Park, need a permit to have a meeting of more than ten people, unless I believe it’s an even protest, actually. But don’t quote me on that. But the whole idea of a permitting process is to ensure fair access to a public space. So if the sharks and the Jets have softball teams and there’s no permitting process, the sharks, the Jets literally be battling it out to play softball. And the one that’s the bigger, more intimidating a better armed or gets there first and holds it gets to use the softball field. No, that’s why we have a permit process. That’s why you need a permit process to play music through an amplification device in Washington Square Park for weeks and weeks and weeks that was completely unenforced. DJs were coming in and setting up till 3:00 in the morning. But there is this this. We need our police to impose at least some sort of reasonableness assessment. Like if it’s some loud music on a Friday or Saturday night, you might want to say, you know, OK, person making the noise complaint. You’re in Greenwich Village on a Friday, Saturday night, like you got to deal with this, but like on a Sunday morning or on a Wednesday night. No, that’s a unfair use of the space. Right. So it’s not just like these these codified rigid rules about like like decibels. And no, there’s a lot of common sense about time, place and manner that that and that’s why policing is is hard.

[00:14:09] Speaker 1 And it’s not just noise. I mean, I don’t want to downplay noise. I live in the city. You know, it’s also. Needles, drug, it’s public prostitution, it’s you know, we’re not just talking about just a deejay, though, again, if you live here, you have amplified music. It’s really I mean, I think it’s fair to say at some point you’ve got to turn it off. You know, we went through this for Tompkins Square Park back in. Was that in the 80s or 90s?

[00:14:38] Speaker 2 I think that was the early 90s.

[00:14:40] Speaker 1 Must have been because because that was the area in which things changed. And that was a part that was seen as taken over by certain disruptive groups. And it must have been Giuliani. Right. Who sealed off the park nominally for repairs, which I think I’m sure they did some repairs, but it was basically to clear it out. And there was a bit of a riot and a brawl when they cleared out Tompkins Square Park and then it stayed closed for a while and. You know, reopened, but for the use of all, you know, a lot of this does and you probably I don’t know, you might find her too simplistic, but it’s a level of writing I can understand because I was just a sociology major, not a philosophy major. But, you know, this goes back to Jane Jacobs life of great American cities and this idea of shared public space building on each other. And she talked very much about neighbors and community enforcing certain standards. But her point was standards have to be enforced. And she said, look, in some neighborhoods, every building has a doorman. They can afford it. But those are certain standards being enforced. And policing plays an important role of that in the safety of the sidewalk.

[00:16:00] Speaker 2 Right now, there’s this idea and it’s so interesting that you bring up Jane Jacobs because. Right. One of her things, she so this is a woman who fought like the most powerful real estate and public works by Robert Moses. Yeah, Robert Moses, the power broker, is a great book. Great by God. Pirate Roberts, so yeah, yeah, but anyway,

[00:16:24] Speaker 1 I was going to Photoshop nothing but power broker books behind me, just

[00:16:28] Speaker 2 say no, listen, she you know, they were going to build an elevated highway down 5th Avenue through Washington Square Park, and she fought that off. So she’s not some just meros development.

[00:16:40] Speaker 1 Not that it matters. The elevated highway wasn’t through Washington Square Park. They were going to expand the road through Washington Square Park. The elevated highway was across across lower Manhattan.

[00:16:50] Speaker 2 I don’t know. Thank you, but I wasn’t wrong. And thinking that they were going to decimate Washington Square Park, right?

[00:16:53] Speaker 1 Yeah, as long as they had done other parks in New York.

[00:16:55] Speaker 2 And and she brings up the idea of there she’s not some knee jerk stoolie to the power class, quite to the contrary. And she still brings up the idea that the quarter is important. Where she and I differ a little bit is that she really, really relied on informal social control to get things done. She talked about basically, if you read the beginning of of death and life of great American cities, she talked about Greenwich Village being special in a model because it had a very strong, informal social control. If your kids are out there getting in trouble, the shopkeeper sees them, tells your mom, your mom holds you in by the ear. She does it in front of your neighbors. You feel ashamed. This is like informal regulation where that falls apart a little bit is she was not talking about a very heterogeneous neighborhood. She’s talking about a fairly homogenous West Village. It was predominantly white, predominantly left leaning, predominately autistic. The cultural expectations were basically the same. So I think she’s onto something that you want. Is this this? Type of order, but one of the things that I feel is is in a city, in a neighborhood that’s become as diverse as the West Village has, and especially with trucks, you can’t just let the informal order run it right. In that case, it would, if you’re looking at it, that it would be like a just a lot of fairly if it’s about bullying and getting in that space and seizing it, it’s going to be a certain activist class. Just we’re here. I defy you to make us leave. Go after yourself if you have a problem. This is the First Amendment. And if it’s about like where the police take their cues from, it’s going to be NYU and people who own townhouses. And so I think that the thread, that needle, if you see what I’m getting at, is like one of the hard jobs policing has is to truly enforce pluralism in a much more heterogeneous place than Jane Jacobs lived in when she was writing. I don’t know if you

[00:18:52] Speaker 1 agree with that. That that makes a lot of sense, though. I do. I wonder if the West Village in itself was more diverse in her time in different ways with more blue collar workers. I mean, the doctor

[00:19:01] Speaker 2 was definitely more economically deprived. But the point is the blue collar worker, like everybody, there was no should we reserve this place for Muslim prayer? Should it be hip hop or the symphony? Like there are symphony orchestras in Washington Square Park. There’s also hip hop in Washington Square Park. Right. There’s weed smoking, but also cocaine, cocaine snorting, but also injecting meth and heroin

[00:19:25] Speaker 1 even early to deal with IV drug use problems back then or crystal meth, we’re told. And if they

[00:19:30] Speaker 2 did, it was it was a different whole different type of of of ecology. That’s right.

[00:19:35] Speaker 1 As a former precinct commander there who gave you your marching orders, how much independence did you have?

[00:19:43] Speaker 2 Oh, so no one. I’d like to take this opportunity to say I feel terrible for the rank and file cops that have to be on the on the the to mix my metaphors on the tip of this pendulum, right on the fighting end of the pendulum, like do nothing. The people can use the park for whatever they want. Like don’t bring us scholars from Washington Square and then five, I should say, I have it in there and it

[00:20:07] Speaker 1 I have an unreliable source that with the protests that started post George Floyd, but again continued with a few dozen people with these sort of pop up protests where they try to graffiti up the monument and throw things at cops that cops have been told not to arrest people for such things as breaking a window of a store unless there is an attempt to loot, at least not the first time cops have been told not to arrest people for for tagging in their presence. And the idea that you’re telling cops not to respond to crimes in their presence strikes me as a bad well as bad policy. But so there

[00:20:47] Speaker 2 is. So they don’t know Peter. They don’t always have to make an arrest, but they do have to have the prerogative to respond.

[00:20:54] Speaker 1 But they’re being told not to. That’s a big difference.

[00:20:56] Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah. No, I’m I’m clarifying. Yeah. And I just want to bring out a distinction that that the listener hopefully Kuzin on which it’s one thing for cops to just maniacally arrest everybody teguest in their presence and they shouldn’t do that. But to say you don’t even have the discretion to decide what to do is is antithetical to like just decent policing and

[00:21:19] Speaker 1 city people who sort of criticize police enforcement because of picks on vulnerable or is racially disproportionate to the city’s overall population, which is an absurd denominator. But I’ve talked about that before, but depends on what people are doing. If you. If you don’t enforce those rules, you shift the standard of acceptable behavior, you do move things like the point of enforcement is not to arrest people, it’s to change behavior. It’s to maintain a behavior, to say this is a line you don’t cross and maybe you have to enforce. It wants to say to sort of say, I’m serious about this. But the point is people will respond to that. Arresting is the or else for police. Stop that. You’re misbehaving. Stop that. You know why? Because if you don’t, I’m going to lock you up. If you lose that or else police, if they have no legal authority, they lose their moral authority.

[00:22:19] Speaker 2 Right. So arrest, arrest in my in my book serves to two purposes. One is to in cases where in cases where the government has an interest in adjudicating something about your behavior when when your behavior is worthy of possible sanction. Right. The cops got to bring the people and the evidence to the judge. They do that literally by arrest. Right. By by seizing the person, seizing the evidence, bringing them to the judge. Then the wonderful system does its thing, whole other 17 podcasts. But the other thing that arresting does, when you look at the word arrest like arrest, the root of the word is to stop. Right. And what arrest does is it empowers the police. Not in the case of like when you’re arresting somebody for a past rape, you’re not stopping anything. It’s not an arrest in the root of the word sense. It’s saying that person did something that we’re really interested in learning more about to figure out whether to sanction them. Go. Let’s not look at recidivism. Let’s just look at past accountability. Arrest that we’re talking about today in this podcast in Washington Square Park is is the police power to disassemble a situation that should it be allowed to persist because it’s wrong, unfair or dangerous? Right. And there’s a lot of folks out there saying wrong and unfair. How dare the police say anything about what’s wrong and unfair if you really feel that that the government should have no role in determining what we’re going to have at it. I’m getting out of here, going to a place where the government does get to say that because. What you’re talking about is a place where I don’t want to live because, again, the people because it’s just going to devolve into the most powerful, intimidating getting there first is disruptive people like defining civil space for the rest of us and so would arrest us. Arrest turns off the speakers. Arrest stops the desecration of a monument, arrests, stops, the destruction of property arrests, stops kids on a corner drinking, screaming at women. Hey, I literally watched a kid say once to a woman, I would sell my sister to have a night with you. And I said, like, get off this corner, you can’t be standing on a corner saying that to women, like, no women should have to walk down the street here. You saying that to them, like it in so many levels. And I didn’t arrest them, but I arrested their behavior. Like, that’s that’s that’s important that you want. The problem is we worry it wasn’t unfairly. We worry that like you. Really. Clamped down on that behavior in some communities and on others, like lacrosse burrows, get to say that in college all the time, but then you don’t you know, we can dove into it. But to say that we got to throw the baby out with the bathwater and stop regulating this type of stuff is just a terrible evolution in our in our community.

[00:24:59] Speaker 1 I really like that turn of phrase. Actually, the arresting behavior concept, that’s the police can do that without actually putting handcuffs someone on and legally arresting them. You know, I mean, you know, policing is a verb, but the idea is, yeah, there’s a

[00:25:21] Speaker 2 you know, hey, one more thing before know, because I got to get this because I want to start spreading this idea that you and I could be acolytes of this. The when you replace police with non police to do the same thing where they don’t have is that power of arrest that I just described. And I don’t mean to handcuff, I mean disassembly. So let’s just replace everything I just said with the social worker. So there’s this rambunctious kids on a corner screaming at women saying, get out of here. The women are calling the police, I’m afraid, with my daughter and I to walk down the street. Every time I walk down the street, I get followed for half a block by a guy who smells of liquor saying, I want to sell my sister to fuck you. Can you please do something about this? So we’re not sending the police. They’re terrible. We’re sending the social workers. Social worker gets their. What the police have the power to do under the Law and order city charter to say whether you like it or not, I’m not leaving until we figure out what to do. What we figure out to do might be arresting you. It might be physically moving you and a warning you might be talking to you. It might be it might be procedural justice that would warm the heart of Yale Law School, where I ask about your history and motivations, why you’re doing this. I give you options. We decide, we shake hands. You go, whatever it is. I’m not leaving to

[00:26:26] Speaker 1 explain that process. The entire time

[00:26:29] Speaker 2 I could see like a figure that has certain limits. I was alluding to that in my tone of voice. But being a social worker there, kid says, get out of here right now. I have nothing to say to you. The social good. No, no, no, no, no. Get out of here. You are now violating my rights. You are the government in my face. Leave. That social worker has no recourse under the law, has no recourse under charter, they have nothing to do with that point except leave or just stand there and watch. Literally, the only other thing the social worker can do with the case is fine. You’re welcome to stay here. You get to watch me scream at these women. And then as the social worker stands there and the kid screams, the social worker can do nothing. We’ve got to solve that problem. If we’re going to change the if we’re serious about non police responding to these situations, we have to account for this possibility in some way that that shifts the balance of power back to that woman walking down the street.

[00:27:25] Speaker 1 Well, why the social worker should get to the root cause of why that person is drunk and harassing women.

[00:27:34] Speaker 2 Yes. Yes. We should live in a much more just utopian society than we live in now where people never have to do these things. I agree. We should change the structure of

[00:27:43] Speaker 1 the you know, the problem is, as you can tell from my tone of voice, that doesn’t help the immediate issue of the woman being harassed. But I also find something, you know, sometimes it’s not about. The criminal or the drug addict, how can we help where the homeless person? Well, how can we help them? I don’t know. Again, you know, my focus on policing issues. So I you know, if other people want to deal with those issues, please do they need to be dealt with. But if you have a homeless encampment in the fountain in Washington Square Park, and I don’t believe there is one, I’m saying this hypothetically. Well, it’s an issue about affordable housing. No, actually, no, the only issue is tents in the fountain of Washington Square Park, that it’s not about them, it’s about the public. It’s about everyone else. I feel I mean, also, you know, it’s a lot of the debate, but also, in a way, the way our legal system is set up, it’s the public doesn’t get a voice right.

[00:28:44] Speaker 2 To bring it back to the. The framing that I was using when I was chief of police of Burlington, Vermont, there were homeless encampments in a few places in the city. And where we drew the line was the homeless encampments were in a place where where people traditionally buy rights, like made a lot of shared use of that space. You could have been camped there if they were in more distant parts of the city where like people like I understand this is quote unquote, public space, like no one’s in the back corner of this park. However, we’re not going to tear down that encampment pro forma. We let many of those go for months and months. Some are still going. There’s a place of Sears Lane that was city land. It’s still because no, it was nominally public land, but the public actually wasn’t making it a this claim to use. But we were on the bike when you were 10 feet off the bike path in downtown Burlington by the shore where there’s hundreds and hundreds of people with their dogs, with the children of roller skating, bike riding, that that is legitimately contested space. Like you could not have your encampment there. Same thing with with Washington Square Park. Like if you’re up in Inwood Park in the far reaches and we’re just looking to to bust chops up there for an encampment, you know, or somewhere deep in Central Park where people aren’t jogging or bushwhacking, that’s one thing. But like Washington Square, every inch of that is is legitimately plural space.

[00:30:03] Speaker 1 We are not allowed to camp in Central Park, which always I mean, what I find interesting is even people who say don’t enforce rules or don’t. Still actually believe should we draw the line somewhere? For instance, you know, under de Blasio transit police and at that time homeless outreach, NYPD Homeless Outreach started tolerating. Homeless people in subways. That was a policy change, it wasn’t a real change and it wasn’t a change in homelessness in New York City. It was simply where people used to be ejected for violating rules again. It wasn’t because they were homeless. If if you can sit on the subway, no one knows your housing status. It was specific behavior and that changed. Help was offered. And if people declined help, then, you know, they were let be we don’t allow that in Central Park. So that’s still a line we draw. So in a way, it’s sort of because there are a lot of rich people in the Central Park Conservatory, they don’t tolerate that. So now Washington Square Park is really thoughtful.

[00:31:09] Speaker 2 It’s it’s not. But I’d hate to think it’s just the rich people. You and I tweeted back and forth about homelessness in the subways. The subways, like is like the lifeblood of a working class, pluralist city. Like, you know, there’s a lot of super wealthy folks taking the subway in New York because it’s that type of city. But the subway is like it’s it’s it’s how my mom got to work it. So I got to school. It’s I’ve never I remember visiting New York City from Burlington and taking the subway to my parent’s place down in Bensonhurst, which is now Hispanic and Chinese, used to be Jewish and Italian, like a good working class immigrant neighborhood. I remember just looking around in that subway car, people like literally thigh to thigh, shoulder to shoulder, more diversity and close quarters than like any other place I’d seen anywhere since I left New York. If you don’t feel and this is not just recreation, this is how people get to school. It’s how people get to work. It’s tough. People go to job interviews. It’s OK. People get to the doctor. It’s how people recreate going out for the night. If you don’t feel comfortable in the subway, you don’t feel safe because there’s somebody literally like living next to you under dire conditions. It nothing degrades like the literally it hardens. It’s black in the straining of the metaphors in the arteries of a city. Like subways and subways, and again, they’re not this gilded thing. This thing that anybody who can pay the nominal fee to, and now they stop enforcing that. But like anybody who can pay the nominal fee has access to. To get to work or to get to school, to get on with their life, that space needs to be genuinely welcoming to everybody can be a place where other people just start living.

[00:32:55] Speaker 1 Right. The hardening of the artery metaphor, which I noticed followed up on the lifeblood metaphor, but there’s something there and I don’t know what it is, but certainly the person who is suffering is should be, in a way, the greater concern. But there’s something bad for society when we are basically told to literally step over people in need who have declined help. I don’t think they have the mental capabilities often to do that. But the way our society is, is if. Can you know, can we offer you help and they say, no, I want to be left alone, and so the rest of us are supposed to clamor for people who clearly it’s not humane, it’s not good for them, it’s not good for us.

[00:33:40] Speaker 2 Listen, I remember in nineteen ninety four, ninety five, I was still living in Bensonhurst. I was, I was home from college and I was visiting this hardware store on 13th Avenue in Brooklyn. So the hardware store owner was this Italian family and they were like our daughter and her friends just got into Stuyvesant High School. The high school I went to public school, took a test to get in. I know that they’re looking at the equity of that test. But nonetheless, you take this test, you get in and it’s a great public school. And the parents were like, I we’re not going to let our daughters go to Stuyvesant. And I said, why this is going there changed my life. Look, I never I thought I would be lucky to go to college. You go to Stuyvesant, they one public school free. They tell you if you go here, you can go to any Ivy League school you put your mind to and you can get a good scholarship. And it changed. My view of the world overnight, they is we’re not we don’t want our daughters on the train and I couldn’t tell them, hey, like my I had a I saw people get stabbed on the train. I was robbed in the train and had to fight kids with mace on the train. I saw other people, like a kid tried to rip my gold chain off my neck on the train. I couldn’t say to them in good faith, don’t worry about it. It would say, I’m like, no, I it’s it is a shame that your daughters, as the daughter of a hardware store owner, can’t go to the best high school in New York City because she’s got to take the train because you legitimately with good cause, don’t feel safe. Over the course of four years, she’s going to witness something. Something’s going to happen. Right. That is a huge problem with fairness and equity in a city.

[00:35:13] Speaker 1 What year was that to do so?

[00:35:15] Speaker 2 I forget, like I know I was in college and they were so I want to say like. It was sometime I could have been maybe a senior or something at Stuyvesant, so sometime between ninety two and ninety four.

[00:35:28] Speaker 1 I remember thinking when the the Metro card was introduced, which was around about that time, that there’s no way it’ll work because people you can’t take out your wallet when you’re in the subway.

[00:35:42] Speaker 2 Listen, that was the time where I had, like, you know, two places for money. You had to the wallet that you would give to the mugger with like, you know, it had to plausibly like it had your ID or something that when you looked at it, it was like, this is definitely the dude’s wallet, not the fake wallet. And then you had your wallet with your actual money in it.

[00:35:58] Speaker 1 So rather than two old dudes talking about the the old days, let me get back to Washington Square Park. How do you police that? How do you actually get to the nitty gritty? It’s one thing to say, OK, we’re we’re we’re in agreement. We we’re each other’s choir. We’re preaching to you about the need for order in the park. So you’re. Let me start actually with what worries me about what’s going on now and then, then you can go off that or answer the question. So I don’t I don’t understand. I would prefer if I did know the answers to this, I don’t understand why the curfew was the park closing that is was moved up from 12 to 10. Seems like whatever you’re going to do, you can do it at the traditional hour. You just causing trouble by saying, oh, and we’re coming in two hours earlier. I don’t know if there was good cause for that or not. The other thing is, once you do go in with force because you were to because you didn’t police public order up to now, I don’t know why you have to keep your gains. You have to. But then apparently because it was a New York Post article to people

[00:36:57] Speaker 2 that just went back to the way it was.

[00:36:58] Speaker 1 Right. Yeah. That there was another dance party and it was a party until two people got stabbed. And as reported in the paper, one of the victims who identified himself as psychobilly was uncooperative. Siko Wilson was a psycho. Wilson OK. That, to me, is a. Red flag, the man who identifies himself as Michael Wilson and and is also involved in a stabbing and is uncooperative, he shouldn’t be in the park at 2:00 a.m. if he can’t behave.

[00:37:37] Speaker 2 I mean, no, listen, I don’t want to I said get emotional literally over this idea of I’m not looking to kiss. So I had social workers working in the Burlington Police Department. They were wonderful people. They are of tremendous value to what we did when they dealt with homeless people, when they dealt with people with mental health crises. But they did it alongside the police. So the way we did it was they acted independently. They were out there often by themselves engaging in lieu of the police. But whenever there was a worry of danger or whenever somebody was saying a few, I’m out of here, the police were there to say, no, no, you the social worker can’t stick around whether you like it or not. But I can. We’re now enter the zone where we’re not going anywhere. And when you mess with the social worker, you’re messing with me. So we have to figure that out because the alternatives we’re hearing, we talk about how to police the park or just getting the police out of it. And there’s this there’s this promissory note that social workers have this magic dust that when they sprinkle it on situations gains voluntary compliance, like I call

[00:38:37] Speaker 1 it, the escalation dap. They just learned this magic thing

[00:38:40] Speaker 2 and de-escalation does. Right? Right. You sprinkle it on things. And if they do escalate and and there’s there’s this promissory note that like an unarmed person with an open mind, with a social work, this position will just gain voluntary compliance in ways that the police can’t because of who they are and who the other one is. That’s true. And it’s not that’s not going to be true in a bunch of cases.

[00:39:01] Speaker 1 But let me and I hope you have an answer for this. This is a serious question. What the hell can a social worker do that a cop can?

[00:39:08] Speaker 2 The idea is that social workers have more specific training, they’re specialists that they’re not going to bust up an armed robbery, they’re not going to pursue bank robbers, they’re not going to turn on the infrared camera and the helicopter and look for the kid lost in the park at night. But when it comes to dealing with somebody suffering from addiction and mental illness, they take in like the coursework that allows them to understand behavioral health, allows them to understand addiction, allows them to understand like the way mental health plays out is behavior. And they can communicate in ways, talking ways, appeal to them in ways that no one communicate with them better. Connect better. Right. And number two, they have a better understanding of what treatment the court might not know. Is this is this a person who needs to go to a methadone clinic? Maybe a PCP prescribing buprenorphine is better. Maybe I can bring them to a syringe exchange. Ideally, the social worker understands the typologies enough to know the best referrals. Right. And then because they’re ingrained in that culture, they make the best referrals and they do it from a position of trust, not on the cop. I’ve got to go and do this. You go to jail, but I don’t even have a gun. I’m here just because I care about you and I know I know about addiction. Let me help. Like, that’s the proposition.

[00:40:17] Speaker 1 And did you see that? And it does that that’s the theory was that you did it. Is it true?

[00:40:23] Speaker 2 I think I think it gets you further in a lot of cases than the police have managed to get, especially when dealing with mental health and addiction. But it doesn’t get you all the way. There’s a huge yawning gap between. The added value in certain cases and then the rest of the cases, right, and then we can work to fill that gap, or maybe I’m overstating if you’re if you’re being pushed back, maybe I’m overstating that yawning that gap is the bureaucrat in me also feels like if you’re going to do this separately from the police, you truly don’t understand how complicated that’s going to be in a big city to say we’re going to have the system that dispatch’s police then a parallel system that has nothing to do with the police that also responds to things in law instead of the police in the same geography. Twenty four seven in a walled off way like that is a bureaucratic nightmare. And it’s going to be expensive

[00:41:19] Speaker 1 because also the idea of you’re trying to get willing cooperation. And I think the same voices that would say we don’t want the government or police imposing a sense of morality or or bourgeois behavior on society. What some people want to drink, shoot up and have sex in the park, that is that’s their choice. They want you not to be there because I don’t know. They prefer to have the park to themselves.

[00:41:53] Speaker 2 I mean,

[00:41:54] Speaker 1 the idea that that assault that you’re we’re going to convince them necessarily of of the behavior we want. No, I want to play loud music. This is not this is like you want you don’t. You can ask me and politely and try to get cooperation. But at some point. Yeah. As you say. Yeah, fuck off. I choose this. That is also where I guess what I’m getting at. And I don’t think these are mutually exclusive. And you know, one does not mean you shouldn’t do the other. But there is an element of coercion to police. That’s sort of why we have them going back to Bittner’s concept of the use of force, I’m saying that is not necessarily a bad thing.

[00:42:36] Speaker 2 No, listen, one of the things I have come to realize is that, you know, I’m an independent politically. I’ve tended to vote Democrat in the last several elections, very, very rarely, if ever, vote Republican. And I say that to say, because I’m about to say this, the left wing wants to be just as coercive as the right wing just to achieve different ends like they they want to know, in fact, in some cases even more so, like. I would prefer to keep a fair amount of the money I make, the government is going to tell me I am taking that money, whether you like it or not. If you don’t give it to me, I’m seizing it electronically and taking your assets away. And I’m going to do certain things with it, whether you like it or not, that I think of the things we’re going to do. Like that’s the one of the things about a very social work and social service intensive government is that it is a very, very coercive apparatus. It just coercive in a different way. Like if you you are going to labor and then whether you are said to it or not, the government like, you know, Bill Gates, I’m not giving up my taxes that we’re taking. We’re taking 40 percent of it and 50 percent. And if you don’t give it up, we’re literally the government is coming and seizing it from you and then on the phone. But I want to keep you awake, but I want

[00:43:49] Speaker 1 to keep it away from that part of coercion, which I’m into the political part. I just simply mean I want to play really loud music. I want a car with straight pipes. That sounds like gunfire every time I go down the street, which only started appearing last year just as shootings went up, which is unfortunate. Someone can say that and I can say, I don’t want you to do that at some point.

[00:44:13] Speaker 2 One of us. So here’s the thing. And I wasn’t trying to be clever. Like, the point I’m trying to make is government is inherently coercive and some of the differences is the level at which it’s coercive and the goals of its. So if someone says to you, unlike the right wingers, I’m against coercion. I’m like, no, you just want a different type of you want like front end mega coercion that takes money and does certain things with it. With your proposition that that would mean on the on the bottom end, less coercion in the streets. Right. And ultimately, I’m going to maybe be evasive, but like democracy will play that out. Like if if if people want that street level coercion, where, where the the sex, however, and the drug injector and the loud music player and the homeless and kamper like get to they’re doing everything and we’re not we’re offering them services. They’re refusing to give up freedom. Do it. It’s not your fault. There’s a lot of things going on. Please don’t let us get in the way of, you know, we’re not going to arrest you were coerced you because there’s a lot of antecedent causes to what led to your behavior. And it’s unfair to do that. Like, that’s that’s what put Giuliani in office.

[00:45:25] Speaker 1 Right. I’ve said this and I say this as someone who has literally never voted for a Republican in my life. Well, I did vote for Bloomberg, but

[00:45:34] Speaker 2 when I was 18 years old, I’m sure I voted for,

[00:45:37] Speaker 1 hey, I’m not going to fault you for that. But I actually people say I vote for the best person I actually know. I vote for the party. Oh, I never voted for Republican. I hope I can keep that on. I think I

[00:45:48] Speaker 2 voted for George Bush like this. Probably the last Republican. I’m not not George Bush Jr. like I’m talking about like literally George Bush senior and I was eighteen. Yeah.

[00:46:00] Speaker 1 Well, anyway, well, of course I voted for the Greek.

[00:46:05] Speaker 2 Yeah.

[00:46:06] Speaker 1 I was even old enough to vote. Yes, I was old enough to vote then I think the. But what about the politics, I do worry about this and I say this as a Democrat and Biden is actually pretty good on this, but have we on the moderate left, I’m sort of giving up on the extreme progressive left. Don’t have a lower case law and order policy. If we see that either by just pretending it’s not a problem or, you know, more radically saying police are the problem to be abolished, we see that to the Trumpy and. Right.

[00:46:43] Speaker 2 And that you don’t want them to have control over that. You don’t want them. This is this is a matter of populism. And you don’t want to give them that populist imprimatur not to cut you up. But like right now, as we’re talking in a few days, I think like on Tuesday, a day or two is the is the Democratic primary for the New York City mayor’s race. And the beginning of all this way back when it was like the far left progressives that were leading in the polls after the city got more violent, after the city got more disruptive, after people saw things that alarmed them happening in the streets. The leader, as of two days before of the Democratic primary is a is a former New York City cop. Right. And in that case, yeah, Eric Adams. That’s what will you know, and he’s a reform minded cop. He’s African-American. But I told some other folks in the political sphere like these don’t think that the black community doesn’t value safety, doesn’t value order. It is I’m proud that that a man running for mayor ascended the ranks of the NYPD to become one of its executives. Don’t think that that won’t matter at the polls, especially after a year of dramatically increased shootings in those neighborhoods, dramatically increased gun violence, increased burglaries, increased auto theft, and a worry that like the city’s unable to do the little law and order, things that you just described, like people will will vote and vote with their feet. They will actually vote and put people in office to make the promise to do the coercive things that you just described, Peter.

[00:48:13] Speaker 1 Well, also, I’m thinking I just read this a few days ago, the union that represents school safety agents pointed out explicitly that their union is vastly, disproportionately black and Hispanic and female. And if they don’t, I think blame specifically white progressive, that’s me. But if white progressives get their way, often you don’t send their kids to these schools. If they get their way to get school safety agents out of schools, the social workers that replace them will be disproportionately white. And I thought that was interesting that that union straight up played the race card on that one. But I mean, it was also a policy issue that I think it would be an absurd policy. But I don’t know if we you know, before we we were talking about rich people getting their way in Washington Square Park. And it’s not a you’re right. It’s not just about rich people, but rich people do have more voice. Their voice is heard louder at the levels of policing and politics, undoubtedly. I think that’s just sort of not necessarily good, but that’s just the way it is.

[00:49:18] Speaker 2 No, I mean, I think if you ask me how to police the park, because I know I quickly took us on a detour, you want to police it in a way where I think you can appeal to rules of order and decency, but No. One, they have to respect pluralism, like the noise rules that you enforce on a Monday night are not the ones that you enforce on a Friday night. Right. There will be a time where on one day a year there’s nothing but a huge pillow fight and other people have to deal with the pillow fight. That’s not the day you’re going to just sit and quietly read Chekhov, right. You cannot entirely eradicate redialing dealing from Washington Square Park. It just won’t happen. But that doesn’t mean it should be an open air market where that takes over the space becomes a commercial space for for drug sales. Right. And it has to be done in a way where you don’t feel like you’re being targeted because of some aspect of your identity, like your race or gender or sexual orientation. So it can’t just be like, you know, every time like. We get to play a lot of loud music when it’s the symphony, but then hip hop never gets to be loud like that, can’t be right. Or, you know, the kids playing soccer isn’t allowed, but playing ultimate Frisbee is allowed. You see what I’m saying? Like, so you can’t privilege a conception of the good that that falls out along the lines of race or class. But beyond that, I think I think a lot of that will or won’t pass the smell test. People, even when people are being rambunctious, a lot of times they know what they want to see, what they can get away with, like the kids in the last few weeks, like partying at 2:00 in the morning, like they got it in their head that that was OK. But deep down inside that, like, yeah, I am being super loud and I’m sure I’m keeping people awake. And what do they say? They said, well, it’s just rich people. Like there’s a lot of comments and gothamist, a lot of comments in the paper where the people fighting the response of you’re like driving people insane. It’s 2:00 in the morning. The music is way too loud already in a park surrounded by private homes at 2:00 in the morning. And the the south side is mostly NYU. The north side is private residences and then beyond it a block away. So it’s all private residences. And their answer was, I don’t give a crap. They’re it’s like, OK,

[00:51:34] Speaker 1 so if you were the CEO of the Sixth Precinct. How do you set what? First of all, is it in your authority as the commanding officer of the 6th Precinct, or do you have to follow orders from above or, you know, so what do you what do you do know?

[00:51:53] Speaker 2 It’s that type of place where there’s always going to be a citywide interest in what you’re doing. When I was the commander of the sixth, I brought down some cops from the Bronx, from my prior command, and they were actually excited in this way that like is backward but well intentioned. But like, man, we were busting people’s butts in the Bronx for smoking weed and drinking. And now we’re going to do that to the kids in the West Village. We just NYU students and I supported that. I said if we were under tremendous pressure to be very strict about weed and and beer in the Bronx. If that’s the pressure I dealt with for years, you know, we want to make sure you’re really enforcing that, then we’re going to do it to the kids in the West Village. Kids came in crying like you were smoking a joint in a park in the middle of the day, like and my cops literally said the ones I brought down, we’re glad we’re getting to treat NYU students the way we were. We were asked to treat black people in the Bronx for years. You know what? Like after, after and after not too long, commanders were like, why? Why is there so what’s happening in your precinct? What’s what’s going on with those enforcement numbers? We’re like we’re just doing exactly what we did in the Bronx. And it was like, well, maybe you should revisit that, that maybe B.S. like it was it was infuriating when you so

[00:53:07] Speaker 1 were you cracking down on the Bronx because you had a moral objection to to the marrow, to the marijuana or because you were you worried about more serious crimes?

[00:53:17] Speaker 2 No. So it wasn’t it wasn’t a quota, I will say. But it was you know, they want the guidance was like take a firm hand with this. And nominally, the thought is people coming home at night, like from a long day’s work, don’t need like a vestibule full of marijuana smoke.

[00:53:36] Speaker 1 And they all me where I was going to go next was that what do you do about people who don’t want to walk through a lobby full of marijuana smoke?

[00:53:43] Speaker 2 They deserve that, right? I mean, they deserve not to have to walk through or drunken kids smoking marijuana, screaming at everyone walking through, you know, and and yes, that’s why we hit. So the point is to, like, enforce those things without moderation, to enforce those things, without respect to to any sort of like if you’re up on the rooftops waiting for the kid to light marijuana with his friend on a rooftop like you’re probably which which we would do or on the upper, upper, upper, upper landing right by the roof door with the smokes going out the door. And it’s like a Saturday night. Like that’s not that’s where it went, in my opinion. Too far. Like what? You’re interfering with the other person going to the roof, like what’s the name of the apartment building? And I don’t mean the roof. Like a roof deck. Like if you’re if you’re a listener out there, I mean, like, well, my roof has coöperative rules and my co I’m not talking about like the no trespassing fire alarm public housing rooftop. Right. It that’s where like hunting down the last kid smoking a joint anywhere in a public building is much different than clearing out the vestibule of marijuana smoke. When people come home from work right

[00:54:54] Speaker 1 at the vestibule stuff. And I’ve I’ve said this before. If you don’t if you decriminalize, it means you don’t regulate the point about. Regulation and with drug policy, I point out specifically, you can either regulate informally, but really to regulate legally, you have to legalize it and then you can regulate, regulate it. In many of these issues, the so-called quality of life issues, it seems now we are moving to the sort of worst possible scenario, which is still technically criminal, though that’s changing with marijuana. But we’re basically saying we’re not going to regulate it at all and that that it’s not even the pendulum swinging. It’s it’s the pendulum transporting to the other side. And it’s not necessarily I don’t care if someone smokes weed, I do care if people complain about it. It’s also I’m not against. Here’s the other problem. If you if someone is threatening and harassing somebody else, go back to that proverbial kid on the proverbial mailbox is not letting a woman put a letter in the mailbox. A police officer may not shows up and has heard this for more than one person. Sometimes you got to get people for what you can get them on. You need something to get them on. And if that’s because he’s smoking a joint on the mailbox, well, that’s great. But without that as a again, that you need some legal authority with discretion to make pretextual stops even. Right. But that’s different than know. Well, you know. They always couple white people can drink wine in Central Park. Well, anyone can drink wine in Central Park if they behave, but yeah.

[00:56:46] Speaker 2 Do you worry, though, that like people on a blanket with a picnic basket drinking wine in Central Park in sheetmetal would be treated differently than the two black folks sitting on a bench at the north end of the park drinking a bottle of wine? The cheaper, you know, cheaper wine. I think that’s true, right? I think that’s a problem that like if you’re on sheetmetal, on a blanket with a basket, drinking wine, you know, the court might say, have a great evening. But then on a bench up at 110 Street, you know, maybe, you know, twenty one twenty two year old couple out on a date drinking something much less expensive. You probably get a ticket like I do think that’s a problem. But I do think that’s and that’s what I mean about the fairness test. Right. It’s got to pass what I call the test of public reason. You can’t draw the line in ways that the citizens using the smell test and treat them differently.

[00:57:34] Speaker 1 It isn’t one of the ways to to formulate formalize the smell test is are people complaining about it doesn’t make the public afraid, you know.

[00:57:43] Speaker 2 Sure. Part of that is true right now. If no one’s calling about the couple on the bench on Hundred Street, no one’s calling it the sheetmetal. And it’s something that’s not objectively, you know, either of them get into their car after drinking that bottle, then government gets back involved again, start dry. But up until that point, no.

[00:57:58] Speaker 1 But people in nature are calling about kids in the lobby, partying and smoking weed and all that. But that’s an important difference. Again, it’s not just about the person in their act. It’s about. Shared public and in this case, some public space.

[00:58:12] Speaker 2 Yeah, and so the vestibule by New York City law is a public space by New York state law. Is there any space that a significant number of people have unobstructed access to that none of them own? Persay is a public space,

[00:58:24] Speaker 1 more

[00:58:25] Speaker 2 so by definition.

[00:58:28] Speaker 1 I forgot to know when we started this, but I’m thinking we should maybe end up. Yeah. Anything else you’re dying to know?

[00:58:38] Speaker 2 I know this was a long, meandering conversation, but you could see, like, one of the things we’ve been bad about is, I guess a shameless plug for but in a year approximately would be my book on democratic policing. But I think we’ve talked about a lot of really important democratic principles here. We touched on populism, informal social controls, all forms of social control, pluralism like the government’s authority to coerce what ends it should do. What standards of fairness like I think what gets when we just concentrate on disparity or which is a critical thing to study. But if we if it’s all in terms of that or it’s all in terms of, on the other hand, just crime rates and violence, we lose sight of, like I think we have yet to have the good discussion about, like the democratic contours of policing. Like, really because not even Bitner like Binnaz brilliant. I mean, and Goldstein, all these all these writers and the generations before us are brilliant. None of them really like headed out of the park when it came to what policing is a democracy and vice versa. And how that and how policing actually benefits a pluralist democracy and encourages pluralism. I’d love to see like that. Enter the discussion right now, like when Black Lives Matter sits down with whomever and lists their demands. I want to know like what I would love them to talk about pluralism. Like as Black Lives Matter. We believe in democratic pluralism. We believe that, like there should be pluralistic conceptions of religion, of culture, of of recreation, of education, of expression, and that all of those need to have a footing in our public spaces in a reasonable and respectful way. And one of the things we value is policing that doesn’t trampled upon encourages it. I’d love to start that conversation. I don’t think it started now.

[01:00:25] Speaker 1 And I’ve said about other things, but this applies like we still often don’t have the excuse me. We still often don’t even have the language to talk about these things. But that’s that’s where you come in, whether it’s the grand book, an academic article or the op ed that inspired this on the Daily News about

[01:00:46] Speaker 2 the book, the seven people will read it anyway.

[01:00:51] Speaker 1 Thanks so much, Brandon. It’s been a pleasure. Again, this is I’m Peter Moskos. I’m here with Brandon del Pozo. And there is more information, as always, about quality policing, dot com. And this this has been quality policing. Thanks for listening.

[01:01:09] Speaker 2 Yeah, thanks for having me, Peter. This has been great.