After the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020, the call from protestors was to defund the police. Since then, media coverage of this debate has waned but the problem of police violence hasn't gone anywhere. Cait interviews reformer Arthur Rizer and "defunder" Alex Vitale to unpack the arguments on both sides.
Interviewees:
Alex Vitale - Author of The End of Policing, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, visiting professor at London South Bank University, coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project.
Arthur Rizer - Conservative criminal justice consultant, adjunct professor at George Mason Law School, former soldier, police officer and federal prosecutor.
Art by: Danielle Khoury
Music by: Lexin Music from Pixabay
Sources:
For background reading and a list of references, visit cantseethewood.com
After the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020, the call from protestors was to defund the police. Since then, media coverage of this debate has waned but the problem of police violence hasn't gone anywhere. Cait interviews reformer Arthur Rizer and "defunder" Alex Vitale to unpack the arguments on both sides.
Interviewees:
Alex Vitale - Author of The End of Policing, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, visiting professor at London South Bank University, coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project.
Arthur Rizer - Conservative criminal justice consultant, adjunct professor at George Mason Law School, former soldier, police officer and federal prosecutor.
Art by: Danielle Khoury
Music by: Lexin Music from Pixabay
Sources:
For background reading and a list of references, visit cantseethewood.com
Cait:
In May, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. The incident lit a match under social and political movements that had for years been calling for the US police to be reformed, shrunk, or even abolished. These calls echoed around the world.
The police are a societal fixture like roads and money and countries, we learn about them as children and accept them as something which might be reshaped or reevaluated, but never vanished. My immediate response to the notion of abolishing the police is to picture an intruder in my home or a terrorist on the train and having no one to call.
But on the other hand, the police are a feature of government. Like most human run institutions, governments are deeply flawed. They can and regularly do screw up economies, embark on pointless and destructive wars, and leave trails of waste, buffoonery and suffering in their wake. Why would we entrust this unreliable group of people with a monopoly on violence? It's a conundrum.
Media attention on police violence comes and goes, but at least for some Americans, policing is undergoing an existential crisis. What should we do with that, both in the US and around the world? It makes sense, I think, at the minimum, to take the opportunity to give the police a good look up and down, or even to take a step further and ask to whom exactly we are giving up our freedom, what we get out of it, and at what cost.
You're listening to Wood for the Trees, the podcast about the messy questions. I'm Cait Macleod. On each episode of Wood for the Trees, I interview experts with different points of view to try to get to the bottom of controversial social and political debates. This series is all about crime, policing and justice. And this is episode one, Defund, Refund, Reform? The Unsolved Problem of Police Violence.
I've got two great experts for you in this episode. They're both professors who are active in public policy on both sides of the pond. One is a leading voice for the defund the police movement, who has appeared on CNN in the Daily Show and been published in the New York Times, the Guardian and Fortune among many others.
The other who you'll meet later is a former cop turned conservative reformer. Just so you know, the interviews in this season took place throughout 2022, so you might hear one or two outdated references. Anyway, let's dive in.
So if you wouldn't mind starting by introducing yourself, please.
Alex:
Hi, my name's Alex Vitale. I'm a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center and a visiting professor at London South Bank University. And I run a public policy shop called the Policing and Social Justice Project that works on developing alternatives to policing in the creation of public safety.
Cait:
So I read your book, the End of Policing which came out in 2017. Can you just describe the central thesis of the book?
Alex: that police reform has been a failed project because it misunderstands the nature of the problem and that what we need to do instead is to begin a process of radically scaling back the role of policing in society and replace it with better alternatives that don't come with all the collateral consequences that are inherent to the policing project.
Cait:
And is this thesis similar to the idea of defunding the police? Would you use that label?
Alex:
That term wasn't around when I wrote this book, or even in the immediate years after I wrote the book. We had language like invest-divest. In other words, divest from our reliance on policing and invest in a variety of community based alternatives. But yes, I would say that defund the police was very much in keeping with the message of my book. And certainly my book became a kind of guide for a lot of people about what this idea of defund the police means.
Cait:
So I think maybe a good place to start is with police shootings, because that's what brought a lot of the problems with US policing into the international limelight. And we heard a lot about these high profile cases, but how prevalent are police shootings of civilians and what are the reasons why they happen?
Alex:
So, let me just say that while this is incredibly important, you know, there's a lot more to talk about than the police killings and efforts to fix policing by reverse engineering solutions to particular police shootings, I think, is a misguided endeavor. So, first of all, we do have a data problem here, which is that the police refuse to record this information and share it with researchers, the FBI etc despite laws requiring that they do so.
So our data on police killings comes in part from independent investigations by journalists and researchers who cull news stories etc because the police refuse to cooperate in the collecting of this data. What seems clear is that for the last many years police have killed around a thousand people a year in the United States under a wide variety of circumstances.
So, you know, about three a day and actually in the last year that number is the highest we've seen in many years. In fact, police killings have made up between 5 and 10% of all homicides in the United States, and in some cities that number has reached 10, 15%.
Some of them are about traffic stops, some of them are about armed robberies, shootouts with police. Some are about what we call suicide by cop, which is someone having a mental health crisis, calls 911 and then displays what either appears to be or is a weapon and hopes that the police will kill them. Between a quarter and a half of all people killed by police in the United States are having a mental health crisis. We don't know the exact number again because police refuse to cooperate in the collecting of this data. But we know that that is a huge part of the problem.
Cait:
I'll just interrupt here to add a stat from Vitale's book where he writes that black teens are up to 21 times more likely than white teens to be killed by police. Although these rates are often proportional to the race of gun offenders and shooting victims in general.
So in the book you say that any effort to make the police more just must address the problems of excessive force, over policing and disrespect for the public. Can you talk about those a little bit more?
Alex:
So, there are these efforts to reform police usually through the lens of what we call procedural justice. And it's clearly the case that there's a lot of procedurally improper policing going on. But that is not to say that all the problems of policing can be reduced to these kinds of procedural errors. A totally lawful, procedurally proper drug arrest is still gonna ruin some person's life for no good reason, right? There's no justice in it, and no amount of reforming narcotics units is gonna fix that in any way. So, there's a tricky dynamic here where people can see that clearly there's improper policing at work and they would like to see more proper policing, but the mistake is in thinking that, you know, a few hours of training, better recruiting, et cetera, are going to produce those desired outcomes.
My argument is that as long as the fundamental mission of policing remains unchanged that the violence and the racial discrimination that goes along with it are built into the model, and that if we don't want warrior-like violent and discriminatory policing, then we need to get rid of the war on drugs and the war on crime, and the war on terror, and the war on gangs, and the war on immigrants, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Cait:
Okay, so you see racism as something that's baked into policing. I think the counter-argument that we often hear to that is that racism in policing is down to just a few bad apples. So what exactly is the role of race and racism in the way the police interact with the public in the US?
Alex:
Well, one of the most sort of ridiculous things we've seen over the last eight years or so from police reformers, quote unquote, is this idea that we can fix the racial disparities in policing with things like implicit bias training that imagine the clearly documented racial disparities in arrests, use of force, et cetera are the result of, you know, unconscious and unintentional individual level bias and that a few hours of training about, you know, the history of slavery are somehow going to fix this. So first of all, we do have a problem of explicit racism in the United States in policing. It's not implicit, it's explicit.
We have police who are members of white supremacist organizations. We have gangs within police departments. We have numerous FBI, local and state investigations underway of police involvement in white supremacists and Christian nationalists militia groups et cetera.
Cait:
This is probably a good time to mention that I won't be fact checking everything you hear in this podcast the research around policing is complex and the journalism can be misleading. A proper fact check could fill several PhDs. What I can tell you is that a quick Google reveals a Reuters article that describes a load of evidence from various sources showing that white supremacist ideology is pervasive in US law enforcement.
Alex:
So, you know, this is obviously not going to be fixed by a few hours of training, but we do also have a problem of institutional racism that is built into the institution of policing.
You know, policing was created to reproduce racial inequality, and this is true around the world, that racial projects were always at the center of the initial origins of policing. Even if we take the London Metropolitan Police in the 1820s, the Irish immigrants that were connected to labor unrest and so-called, you know, disruptive, unruly, and criminal behavior in the streets were racialized, as being racially different from the British population and the crises that lead to the formation of the London Met are understood in racialized terms in that period, and the evidence is even clearer in the States where we see early police forces, especially in the South, created to enforce slavery.
But there's an even bigger problem I would argue. Bigger than explicit bias by individual officers, bigger than institutional racism, there's a problem of structural racism which is the way in which we define the problems of poor non-white communities as problems of "crime" to be managed by policing when better off white, communities' problems don't get defined in those terms. They get defined as social problems to be fixed by investments and social programs, et cetera. This unleashing of things like the war on drugs is an inherently racial project that the police are tasked with enacting and the individual attitudes about race by officers is largely irrelevant. Even when they do their jobs properly, they are reproducing racial inequality in the US.
Cait:
Is it not possible for structures and institutions to evolve with the times? I think, you know, there's a huge number of institutions that have their origins in racial division, schools and universities and the British government. All of these things have these origins and we don't necessarily abandon them. I know change is hard, but is it not something we ought to aspire to?
Alex:
Let's look at it this way. We should use a kind of efficiency model here, right? What is the most efficient way to reduce the harms in terms of racial inequality that come from policing? Is it to continually invest in strategies that have never shown any sign of any success, or should we quit using police to solve our problems? Now, it's politically easy to get more money for more fruitless training. And so we keep doing it because then no one's at fault and we don't have to make any real changes in social relations in society. But we have a political system both in the US and the UK that is hell bent on continuing to make conditions worse in communities of color and paper over the problem with policing.
Cait:
We're talking here about some of the problems that police inflict on communities, but I guess another question is, are they achieving the purpose that they're set up to do? Even if it comes with some harms, I mean, do we know to what extent policing actually reduces crime?
Alex:
So look in, in the absence of any other intervention or infrastructure, does the existence of policing have some broadly protective function? You know, absolutely. Especially for the rich and powerful. In a sense it works for them, but if we get into the details, is policing creating safe societies, safe communities for poor people? Well, the answer has to be no.
Now, can we find a study that showed if we put 50 officers on a street corner, there were fewer muggings on that street corner? Yes, of course. There are a few studies like that, although the results are almost always very thin. these police interventions do not produce radically reduced crime rates, and we have an ocean of studies that have failed to show any kind of linkage between overall police deployment rates and crime rates.
The vast majority of what police do has very little to do with what we think of as serious crime. Here in the United States, estimates are between about 2 and 5% of police time is spent on anything that we think of as serious crime and clearance rates, for serious crimes, are about 10%. The vast majority of serious crime is never reported to the police. That which is reported most is not solved. Many are never even investigated in any meaningful way. Conviction rates are low. So, I would say across the board there's a tendency to grossly overestimate the effectiveness of policing, but to get to the other part of this equation, what about the cost?
Well, there's been a systematic erasure of the cost of policing in our assessments of the utility of policing. Time and time again, studies that claim to show police effectiveness just almost completely bother to measure the cost. They may look at a financial measure of cost, which is often even that is inaccurate, but they never look at the cost in terms of the impacts on those who are policed.
We have a growing body of evidence that shows that these costs are quite intense, they're quite severe, and they affect entire communities in measurable ways. They reduce life expectancy. They create mental health and physical health problems. They place a financial burden on communities. They break up families.
We know that young people that experience policing in their communities perform much less well in school, are more likely to have mental health problems, and thus, ironically, are more likely to act out in schools in ways that are disruptive and then become a justification for more school policing.
Cait:
Unfortunately, I didn't think to ask Vitale whether this body of evidence accounts for the problem of the chicken and the egg. Are disruptive, kids with poor mental health and broken families more likely to commit crime and therefore be policed, or does it go the other way around? Or maybe both?
And what about deterrence? Because I think a lot of people feel that the police presence in their community could somehow, you know, frighten people out of committing crimes.
Alex:
Well, as I said earlier, clearly the existence of policing as an institution provides a kind of vague umbrella that prevents some things from happening. That has to be true. But if we get down to the particulars, it's very hard to see this deterrent effect being very effective. I mean, look, we've put literally millions of people in prison for drugs in the United States and anybody can get any kind of drugs whenever they want them. Every high school kid in America has access to unlimited supplies of drugs.
What prevents them from using and selling drugs is that they just don't wanna have anything to do with it because that's not the kind of person they want to be. The role of the law and police has been completely fruitless. And you know, we see massive fluctuations in violence rates that have nothing to do with how many police there are. These are driven by social phenomena that police have very little influence over.
Cait:
In his book, Vitale runs through a list of reforms that have been suggested to improve US policing. One by one, he explains why he doesn't think much of them. I pressed him on a few, starting with better training for cops.
Alex:
Well, look, the officers involved in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis had been subjected to a huge range of training that was designed in the wake of the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri. They had been given implicit bias training, deescalation training, mindfulness training. You know, it just didn't make any difference. And there are one or two studies that have shown, you know, some mild changes in a short period of time in response to things like deescalation training. But most of the research does not show this. The results are incredibly thin.
Cait:
What about being more discerning about who we have in our police forces, making it a more elite profession, and you know, doing more screening in our recruiting, getting rid of people who misbehave. Would that be helpful?
Alex:
If you really did it, it would be great because you wouldn't have any police anymore and we could use that money on something else. I mean, these attitudes are the norm. It's just the finding of it is the exception, but when we look, we always find it. And of course, not just racism, but misogyny, sexism, homophobia. If you wanna fix problems of racism and misogyny, why would you think that you're gonna start fixing those problems by fixing the police? The best thing you could do is dismantle that institution since it's been one of the primary homes for those ideas.
Cait:
What about having a more racially diverse force? Does that have any impact?
Alex:
Very, very little. First of all, American policing is diverse and pretty much mirrors the demography of the country. About 12% of Americans are African American and about 10, 11% of police are African American. And in most of our big cities a majority of officers now are non-white and much of the leadership is non-white.
The best sort of overall study done showed that for a very small number of very large police departments, they could find some minor improvements with more diversity but for most departments there was no effect and for some departments measures actually got worse. Arrest rates went up, use of force rates went up.
Cait:
What about community policing? People talk about it a lot, but I, I'm not sure I'm a hundred percent clear on what it is and, and how it works.
Alex:
Well, because the people who promote it are not clear, right? It is a catch all slogan that is primarily about public relations. And we see community policing trotted out as a reform in response to a crisis of legitimacy for policing. After there's been a riot or an uprising of some kind, all of a sudden, "don't worry, we're gonna fix it with community policing and we're gonna go to some community meetings and we're gonna walk a few police beats and there, we did community policing". So it's a very vague concept.
Cait:
After this interview, I was still confused, so I looked it up. Community policing is basically the idea that officers should continuously operate in the same area so that they can form relationships with the locals. It's all about collaborating with the community, getting people to participate in making the area safer and focusing on preventing rather than responding to crime. On paper, it sounds pretty good.
Alex:
This is a highly misguided endeavor. First of all, it's all rooted in this idea that the community knows who the good people and the bad people are and then the police are gonna sort that out for them. But these things are much more complicated. You know, the little old church ladies who go to the police meeting and say, I want you to get the bad kids, but quit harassing my grandson. Well, their grandson is also hanging out with those kids and may also be smoking some weed in the park.
But ultimately, the problem is much bigger than this because this idea of turning the problems of poor communities over to police to solve. What tools do police have to solve community problems? Guns, handcuffs, ticket books, pepper spray, night sticks. Right? Do they have access to trauma counseling for youth exposed to violence? Do they have access to high quality mental health services. Do they have access to drug treatment on demand? Do they have access to stable housing? Employment supports for youth? No. They don't have access to any of the things that have actually been shown to make communities safe and healthy places.
Cait:
What about body cameras? Does that help?
No. So, body cameras were sold to us on this idea that they would produce more accountability. What we've found is that it's not producing better policing, but it is producing more surveillance. We had a very high quality experimental study in Washington DC where neighborhoods with similar demographics were paired and one set got body cameras and the other set didn't and at the end of the study, they couldn't find any measure that looked better, not a single variable looked better for the presence of body cameras, but DC said, "well, we don't care. We're getting them for all officers cuz we're using them for evidence collection". All right. So what we've really done is we've expanded police surveillance powers, but we don't have any evidence that they've helped reduce police violence. The officers who killed George Floyd were wearing body cameras.
And then we see that in some cases they're using the body cameras to fraudulently collect evidence, so they're turning the cameras off, planting evidence, then turning the camera on and pretending to find the evidence and using the body camera footage to help prosecute someone. Some of them don't understand how the cameras work and got caught
Cait:
I think in the UK, something that people bring up a lot when they talk about US policing is disarmament because it's very foreign in the UK to think of police arriving at your house with a gun on their hip and it does seem like having a weapon in the room does automatically escalate things a little bit. So to what extent would removing guns help, I know it's not politically very viable, but is it a possible solution?
Alex:
So let's think about it in a slightly different way. I think you're right that it's politically, it's not gonna make sense to think that we're gonna have uniform police without guns anytime soon. So my view is what we should be focusing on is reducing the role of police and replacing it with the kinds of people who don't carry guns. Why do we have armed police in the schools, but no counselors, nurses, teachers' aides, et cetera? Well, let's take these people with guns out and put in some people who can actually help young people.
Cait:
One thing that really surprised me when I started researching this topic was the presence of police in schools. I just didn't know that was a thing. At least according to Vitale's book, over 40% of US schools have police officers assigned to them, and most of those are not just there to deal with crime or security.
They're actually involved in school discipline. For example, in 2020, the New York Times reported that police arrested a six year old who was having a tantrum at school. The strategy Vitale proposes, switching out armed cops for people who don't carry guns, applies to sex work, drugs, and mental health callouts. In each case, he argues public health workers or neighborhood specialists who have relationships with people in the community are a better alternative.
So we've spoken a bit about what doesn't work or what's insufficient. Let's talk a little bit about what it would look like to actually do the proposal that you talk about in the book. How would we deal with various problems under that model?
Alex:
We don't need an unbiased drug war. We need to treat drugs as a public health issue, implement harm reduction strategies, create improved treatment regimes, look at targeted economic development programs to help people find ways of surviving without being part of a black market. And so this is what Portugal is doing. They're extremely happy with the results. Voters in Oregon a few years ago voted to decriminalize low level amounts of all drugs there. We're seeing this growing movement to legalize marijuana and civilization has not collapsed. It's okay. We can just get the police out of the drug business and replace them with better interventions.
We need to get police outta the mental health business. A growing number of cities across the US are doing this. They're creating non-police crisis response teams. The results have been fantastic. They're saving money, they're reducing crime. They're lowering the level of violence. They're providing more services to people.
Let's get police out of the sex work business. Let's get rid of these vice units. And let's decriminalize, treat them like other businesses, et cetera.
The project I run, the Policing and Social Justice Project, has written about gang policing here in New York City and what a misguided endeavor it is and what the alternatives would look like. Public health interventions, targeted economic development, trauma counseling for youth in crisis, hospital based violence interruption programs. I mean, we have a wealth of examples of programs that have been shown to be effective, but need to be scaled up and we need to get policing outta the equation because it just makes a problem worse.
Cait:
So that all sounds great, but it sounds quite expensive. Are police cuts alone enough to fund all of these new services?
Alex:
For the vast majority of them, the answer is yes. Can we solve our homelessness problem off the back of the police budget? No. Can we completely transform education systems off the back of the police budget? No, but we could create entire new infrastructures. In the US local police budgets are 30, 40, sometimes 45% of local budgets. Here in New York City, it's over 10 billion dollars. They are taking up all the money, and that's why the demand from 2020 on was defund the police because that's where the money is and it's being squandered.
Cait:
And I imagine that there's money to be saved by having better interventions that prevent things like drug use.
Alex:
Well, you know, like these mental health crisis teams, the one that's been around the longest in Oregon, has consistently documented saving those communities tens of millions of dollars in reduced police costs, and not to mention reduced emergency room utilization, jail costs et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Cait:
And in this world where we've got all these great programs, what kind of role do you see the police playing? I imagine they're still there in some capacity, even if far reduced, to deal with certain things.
Alex:
Look, we have a massive system of policing and there's no magic switch where tomorrow we could just turn off all police. This is a long term process of developing new infrastructures and dialing back policing. Now, what is left at the end of that? I don't know. We're a long way from having to confront that possibility. What I know is right now there are half a dozen things we could start doing tomorrow that would reduce our reliance on policing and make us safer. So let's start doing that and then we'll see where that leads.
Cait:
So the defund movement, I think had a little bit of a peak as far as the mainstream media goes in 2020 and a lot of budgets were cut. But since then, there's been a lot of talk about an increase in violent crime. I dunno how, consistent all the different statistics are on that. And we have seen some places doing a U-turn and refunding the police or no longer having a defund approach.
So how does that impact the arguments that you're making? Is the movement running outta momentum? Or is this some kind of evidence that the police were preventing crime?
Alex:
So, no, the whole premise of your question is inaccurate. No police departments were defunded in any meaningful way. A few cities said, "well, well, we'll cut this little side program and do this", but, it's like one, 1000th of police budgets was cut. Mostly it was just smoke and mirrors. Nothing was really changed. The changes in crime rates are obviously due to the lockdown and covid and many of them have gone back to where they were before. So this is a complete non-starter.
Cait:
Okay, so I admit I thought this question was gonna be a real killer for Vitale's case. I was under the impression that we're now in the era of refund the police, that defund had lost its momentum. I didn't pluck that notion from thin air. Bloomberg writes "major cities look to refund the police one year after Floyd". The Economist reports "the public wants to refund, not defund the police. In Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed, voters rejected a bid to replace the police with a so-called public safety department. But Vitale argues that the movement to defund is alive and well.
Alex:
The reality is we've basically won the intellectual argument. Everyone
understands now that police should not be in the mental health business. There's a growing understanding that police should not be in schools. About 40 cities have eliminated their school police department since 2020. People are winning elected office as abolitionists, as people who wanna reimagine public safety, including the controller in Los Angeles, won as an abolitionist, and got more votes than any of the candidates for mayor got.
Cait:
And to what extent do you think these problems and solutions that we've discussed are US specific?
Alex:
Uh, not particularly. I mean, I've been spending a lot of time in the UK and Europe talking with people about these issues and it seems pretty similar. The scale can be different, the particulars may be different. We see austerity growing in much of that zone, and then the social problems that result from that austerity get turned over to police to manage. And the police that I know, they're not happy about it. They know they don't have the solution to those problems, that they're the wrong tool, but it's politically convenient to have them manage those problems rather than actually fix them.
Cait:
I find the case to defund the police quite compelling. It's not as radical as it first appears to be. I'd much rather live in a world where we help people change their lives for the better, rather than handcuffing them and throwing them in a cell.
I can also see that an encounter with police can be entirely pointless if the goal is to stop someone from using drugs, sleeping rough, or engaging with crime that represents their only possible form of income, particularly if you don't also address the underlying problem. I can also think of a handful of things that would be better dealt with by non pity specialists.
Taking a report from someone who's experienced a sexual assault, for example, it seems like something you wouldn't wanna do at a police. But it's hard to come around to the idea that everything the police do is at best, pointless and at worst, harmful. It's literally the only phone number we all still have memorized. Surely we must need them for something more than riots and bombs.
I've got other questions too. Are all criminals just good people in need of a little tlc, or is it more complicated than. Are nurses and social workers safe entering some of the situations that police usually deal with? Is the defund approach even politically viable, or is it all a little bit naive?
Hopefully my next guest has some answers.
Arthur:
My name's Arthur Rizer. I started my own consulting firm on criminal justice issues. I'm also an adjunct professor at George Mason Law School. And before that I was a federal prosecutor for just shy 10 years. And I was a civilian police officer for three years and I served in the military and most of my time in the military, I was a military police officer.
Cait:
And how would you characterize your stance when it comes to the debate about police reform? Where do you see yourself standing?
Arthur:
That's an interesting question. So I would say, I'm a center right guy. So, I'm not affiliated with a party. I wouldn't call myself a Republican or a Democrat, but I would call myself a conservative. I think traditionally conservatives kind of come out on the side of being very pro-police. And my approach from being in the criminal justice field for, I guess you can say 25 years, has been pretty developed in a sophisticated way in the sense that I have worked in defense cases, I have been a defendant. I actually spent a night in jail when I was a kid. I have been a cop. I have been a prosecutor.
So that's a very long way of, of saying that I am very forward leaning on police reform. I think there is incredible need for systematic reform in policing, and I think that reform really has to happen at a cultural level.
Most of the things that I've seen on police reform, I know from my research and from my just being a cop can tell you it is not gonna work. We know it's not gonna work because we've tried it before.
I think defund the police is an absurd way of trying to get reform. If any other profession, if I wanted to you know, reform nursing and I started a campaign that was like, "First we're gonna not pay you and then let's talk about reform." That doesn't work.
And so I think we really have to have a conversation about what is the pragmatic approach to making police reform work and actually take foot. Because if we do it through a lens of defund the police or abolish the police, you're kind of dead in the water from the get-go.
Cait:
Let's take a step slightly back. Most people have heard about the murder of George Floyd and protest movements that are a response to police behavior in the US, but not all reformers characterize US policing in the same way. So what in your opinion is wrong with policing at the moment?
Arthur:
So I believe that the real nut of police reform comes down to a cultural issue, and I take that down a step further and say a prestige issue.
And I can just give you a really quick example of what I mean by this. In the 1970s there was a poll of the American people that asked them to rank the prestige, in essence, it's a little more nuanced than that, but the prestige of American government institutions and the military came in dead last. Dead last. And that was because culturally speaking, the military, the Army and the Marines in particular, were broken from Vietnam. They were culturally rotten through and through.
And so what the military did is they developed a systematic approach to increasing the prestige of the military. They did it through an all volunteer force. They did it through professionalizing the non-commissioned officer corps, so the sergeants and things like that., And they really went through, kind of layer by layer and made the most important positions prestigious. And that is something that is absolutely lacking in police force.
In my opinion the most important job in policing is that first line leader, sergeants and field train officers called FTOs. and if you wanna get an example of an FTO in the, in the movie Training Day with Denzel Washington, he is a detective FTO. So I'm talking about the the patrolman FTOs. So you get outta the academy in America and you get into a car almost immediately. And that person is your FTO. They will train you.
And the FTO is the most important position, but it's one of the least prestigious positions. And so you end up in an environment where people who really can't get promoted, people probably, you know, maybe shouldn't be cops anymore, quite frankly, or maybe they could be good cops, but not good FTOs, but they all get kind of... it's kinda like the layer of fat in a cup they stay there, but every single cop has to come up through that system.
I've looked at hundreds of academy manuals, and there's not a single one that says, you know, treat black people poorly, muha ha ha. It just doesn't exist. In fact, most police manuals in academies are drafted by lawyers. They're all the same, by the way. They're all kind of sold by, by a central place. So they're really, really similar. You really see the difference at the FTO level.
And you know, in cities that I've gone to and I've done, you know, tons of ride-alongs, the one kind of thing that I heard over and over and over again is being an FTO is not prestigious, so you ask cops, you know, on the road, you're like, what is the most prestigious job in policing and universally, from LA to Montgomery, Alabama, they say pretty much the same thing. They'll say SWAT or they'll say homicide detective or something that involves kicking doors in, bomb squad, you know, being a canine unit, but never do they say being an FTO or being a patrolman, being that guy or a gal who is that first line in people's lives when they're having complete utter breakdowns when they need help.
And in my opinion, If you want to have excellence in policing, you have to make it prestigious. You will not get excellence in any type of industry, and policing is an industry, if you don't promote excellence at the layers that are critical.
And we know how to do that. You can do it through pay. You can do it through incentive structures. In the army, if you become an army ranger, they give you a different colored beret and people scramble to be army rangers.
And one of my biggest frustrations, in police in America and any UK you'll hear people say, "well, it's only a few bad apples" and that's actually true. There's not hundreds of cops that are dirty. There's not hundreds of cops that are racist. But if you follow that that saying all the way through, it's a few bad Apples ruins the barrel. It only takes a few bad apples to corrupt and rot the culture of an institution. And I think that right there is critical.
I also think, who we recruit to be police officers feeds into the cultural side of things. We don't do this so much anymore, but after 9/11, if you go and look at policing recruitment posters, they all have like SWAT people on it. Is that who you're saying you want to be a cop? I'll never forget this. I was a prosecutor in San Diego and I was sitting on my bed and I was watching TV on my day off, and I saw this commercial with this guy, came out of the water with camouflage on his face, and he had an assault rifle. And I was like, "oh, this is a, you know, a Navy SEAL commercial." And at the end of it it said, "join the best" or something like that, "LA Sheriff's Department".
I was like, "what in the f? What is happening here? That's who you're trying to get to be cops?" because that is what you put out there, says something about your department's desire what they actually want. And if you hire people that have a soldier's mentality, you can't be surprised when they start acting like soldiers. And there's nothing wrong with the soldier mentality, but it belongs on the battlefield. It doesn't belong when you're trying to protect and serve.
You know, something I witnessed all the time you know, maybe a couple times I saw cops go over the line when they came to use use of force, but primarily I saw police, you know, working within the bounds of the law.
But what I did see was kind of a blood thirst mentality. You know, one example was, the cops that I was riding with had to use force to, to get someone under control. And when other cops showed up, they were disappointed that the fight was already over. That's a problem. That's a problem in mentality. That's a problem in culture. That says something about the way the cops view the public that they are serving.
So I think fundamentally those are what I believe are the linchpins to police reform is it's really focusing on the cultural and the prestige side of things.
And when people say, "oh, you can't change culture." You know I'll call bullshit on that. Sorry for, for cursing, but you know, at the end of the day, you know that same poll I told you, 1970, the US Army was dead last. By the 1980s it was near the top. And by the 1990s it was number one and it's never left first place. And they did it through prestige. They did it through making it prestigious to go in that role.
Cait:
Rizer and Vitale seem largely to agree on the problems in US policing, violence, racism, and militarization. What they disagree on is the scale of these problems and whether these things are intrinsic to policing or something that can be changed with the right intervention. Another important difference is that Rizer believes in the fundamental mission of policing.
How do you think the police are impacted by cultural movements that criticize the police? Does it have an impact on how they work day-to-day, their behavior, and is it helpful or harmful?
Arthur:
Hmm. Yeah. So there's this big hoo-ha about something called the Ferguson Effect, where cops just stopped acting and they stopped doing things because they were so afraid of being sued. I think that's actually a pretty, huge problem, right?
Because culturally speaking cops view themselves as us versus them. And when cops see themselves as separate and distinct from the people that they're supposed to be supporting and patrolling and helping, you fundamentally are gonna run into problems.
And one of the things that we have seen in policing as it as it relates to , you know, Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, before that it was abolished the police movements, is that we have seen many, many police officers get into trenches of us versus them. Now leadership has kind of gotten on board in some senses. But the rank and file has kind of doubled down on, the back the blue type of mentality.
Cait:
A fact worth mentioning here is something that happened in Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was murdered. According to The Economist, under the city charter, the Minneapolis Police Department is meant to have at least 730 officers. Before the pandemic, it had around 900. By the middle of 2020, the total had fallen to 626 the lowest in decades because so many cops chose to leave the job But of course policing wasn't the only industry that experienced the so-called great resignation around this time
And do movements like defund the police, make it easier or more difficult to achieve reform?
Arthur:
I mean, for me, someone who actually does this for a living, this is kind of what I do, one of the biggest barriers is... The Defund the Police made things so much harder. It is really difficult to talk to police about legitimate police reform when you have people screaming from the rafters about defunding the police. And you're right when you actually get into the defund the police policy. It's not crazy. There's a lot of really good stuff in there, but the rhetoric is so counterproductive to what we actually need to, to do.
Cait:
Do you think the police are asked to do too much? Are there some aspects of policing that could be, you know, as the defund people do argue for, moved over to social workers or could be automated or, or something like that?
Arthur:
Absolutely, absolutely. So in the US we closed all of our asylums and that's a good thing parades of horror, but did nothing for those people. So cops became social workers. They became the people who would corral, you know, not to be insensitive, but the crazies across our country.
In LA there are whole entire squads dedicated to just homelessness. So 100%. And then, you know, with the drug epidemics we've seen, they have become the managers of drug overdoses. And so absolutely they're being asked to do too much. And I think there's lots of solutions to this.
I think there is an argument for, this is not very popular in many circles, but there's an argument to privatize some services that police do. And I think if you do that smartly And don't incentivize bad behavior through profits , I think that that can go a really long way. I actually think they can solve a lot of problems.
I believe that the co-responder system that we've seen in different jurisdictions where you have a social worker with a police officer is something that shows a lot of promise. I believe that, absolutely, putting more money into social services, could be incredibly beneficial. You know, in, in Florida, the only option that the police have for dealing with someone who's going through a mental health crisis is arrest or something called a Baker Act , which is basically put them into mental health facility. Everybody agrees that arrest is the worst possible solution for people going through a mental health crisis.
But if you Baker Act them, which is what they almost always do, they go to a facility and then they're released a couple days later because there's just not enough beds for these people. And so you, you just have this kind of vicious cycle. And I remember being on a ride with the cop and them specifically saying, "oh, we're gonna go Baker Act this person", before they even got there.
And I said, "well, how do you know you're gonna do that? You haven't even got there." He's like, "Because I've been to this address 10 times. I know exactly what's happening and as long as there's no violence, I know arresting this person is not gonna make things any better." So, a hundred percent we're asking police to do too much.
I think there's a little catch 22 there though, that if, we take responsibilities away from police, we have to take some of their budget away from them to go to other places, and that's a place you always see resistance within police departments. But, you know, that's a political discussion that I think is worth having, but very nuanced and it's very jurisdiction dependent.
Cait:
It's interesting how much overlap there is between Rizer and Vitale here. Rizer agrees with the strategy of transferring police duties to other institutions, but he is cautious when he talks about budget cuts. It's like he's treading a fine line. This is a guy who knows what will and won't fly with police unions. And my take here is that this is where the defund approach comes unstuck. In practical terms.
So I understand that when police use deadly force and kill a civilian, there are lots of different reasons why that happens, but can you say a bit about the underlying causes of those incidents, particularly when it happens inappropriately? Are police breaking the law or breaking protocol, or is there something wrong with those laws and policies themselves?
Arthur:
If you read the law, it's pretty reasonable. You know, police are allowed to use deadly force when they believe that serious bodily harm or, or deadly force is gonna be used against them or someone in their presence. So that's pretty reasonable, , I mean that's pretty universal across the world.
I think a couple of the issues that make United States different is, you know, we just have a lot of guns in the US and, and I don't want to get into a a gun debate, but when you have so many guns, I mean, there are more guns than people in the US, then you are in a situation where every single stop can be your last. Every time I hear people, frankly, in Europe, talk about how violent the police are, I, you know, I, I have to remind them like, "listen, it is a different ballgame over here."
I mean, I worked as a cop in a small town where, you know, sometimes my backup was 15 minutes away and that was good. I mean, there are cops that are working where backup is an hour away. And so I think that fundamentally changes things a little bit.
But going back to your question, if you have a soldiering mentality then you're going to have cops that act like soldiers. I don't think that cops being armed with assault rifles by itself is the problem. It's not the equipment, it's the mentality that I think is the problem.
Because, you know, look, I mean, have you ever been to Germany? Those cops look like they're fricking storm troopers. You go to France. Most police officers in France that I, I saw were carrying sub machine guns on patrol.
So it's not the issue. I looked at one year, I think it was like 2012 and, you know, Germany sparred 90 bullets in the entire year. We'll shoot 90 bullets at one person. So it's not the equipment, it's the mentality and, you know, frankly, there's just a lot of guns and there's a trade off to that.
And there's, you know, racial tensions that we all know about. I'm not sure it plays as big of a, as a role as the media wants us to believe it does, but it definitely plays a role. I mean, there's no doubt about that. You can't have four hundred years of oppression and then act like it just went away overnight. But, I, I think there's a lot of factors that go into that.
Cait:
Can you talk a bit about accountability and the challenges in holding cops accountable when they do misbehave?
So I think in most big cities they have gotten a pretty good grip on this. I think in most, smaller cities and rural areas, they're still struggling with this. So there's a bunch of different things going on. One is the accountability among police officers informally. I was reading somewhere, I think it was Chicago, that a police officer was talking about how hard it was to investigate some of these murders is because the community won't snitch on their local people of their community. And my first response was, "well neither do you. You don't snitch on on bad cops so how do you expect the public to do that. If you are a good cop and you see a bad cop doing something bad and you don't report them, you're no longer a good cop. You're part of the problem at that point.
On the other side of that coin, there are built in protections to cops that indemnify them from bad behavior with no real consequences. Going back to Chicago , there's one of the newspapers out there, tracks every single police officer lawsuit and how much money the city has paid to indemnify those particular officers. And there's people that have had like 11 lawsuits filed against them. At what point does the city say, "okay, enough is enough". So I think police unions play a big role, indemnifying them. And I think there's a, a doctrine called qualified immunity, which basically gives a legal barrier over police, which originally was probably a good thing.
You don't want cops being sued for making a mistake. I think that's a bad policy, but when a police officer does something that is egregious, there shouldn't be any type of barrier protecting them from liability. And I think there is a fundamental difference than screaming at someone during a traffic stop, which is probably not good police behavior, and beating someone up because you thought you were being disrespected which is, in my opinion, you don't get two shots of that. If you are willing to beat someone up, use your badge to cover you, then you're probably one of those bad apples.
But, you know, I'll say in big cities, it's actually on the other side of things. Like there, there are police officers when I was in LA that are just terrified of losing their job over baseless accusations. And I don't know how often that happens, but I can tell you the fear was real. I don't know what the data actually suggests about, you know, the, the impact of that.
Cait:
How helpful are body cams?
Arthur:
I think cameras have really helped police, in two ways. One, I think it prevent police from being violent when violence is not necessary. I think the second thing is, is it protects cops. You know, when somebody says, "you called me the N word, or you beat me up, you slapped me", and it didn't happen. They have evidence.
And I always ask this question, if you go back to the George Floyd incident, what if there wasn't a camera rolling that day? Just think about it. What if there wasn't a camera rolling that day?
There was two officers that were brand new. What would they have walked away? And remember, that officer was that killed George Floyd. He was an FTO. So what would've happened if there was no camera? And not to mention, you know, what the department would've done over the death. What would those two officers that were brand new, one of 'em was on a second day, I think, what would they have walked away with?
What cultural elements would've been soaked into them as far as accountability goes and as far as what's appropriate, what's not appropriate? That is like just a perfect example of how accountability and culture kind of breed cancer within police departments and how we, we have to, we have to gut it out. There's no other choice. You have to find it and remove it with a scalpel. And if the scalpel doesn't work with a hatchet.
Cait:
This is fascinating. Both Rizer and Vitale mention that the officers involved in the murder of George Floyd were wearing body cameras, but they come to completely different conclusions. One says, this is evidence that cameras don't reduce violence. The other says, cameras created accountability. It certainly says something chilling about police culture that Derek Chauvin did what he did knowing that there would be a record.
I mean, how difficult is it when you're in a hostile situation or in a highly charged situation as a policeman, potentially somebody's armed or, or dangerous in some other way, and you need to calm them down and deal with the situation. I mean, how, how tricky is that? How skilled do you need to be to deal with that situation without things escalating?
Arthur:
I think that's an excellent question and it is an incredible skill and many police officers, especially the ones on the road are the ones with the least experience, because the more experience you get you move into other positions. And it is, It is incredibly difficult and there's just like biology. I remember being a cop and chasing people, and by the time I caught them I was super pissed. You know, "you made me chase you". And I absolutely, you know, know that, the adrenaline and all those things kind of come into play and you really feel like beating the crap outta that person. We have been doing a better job at training officers on cooling things down and deescalation techniques.
I actually think cops today, this is a controversial statement, but it's true. We have better cops today than we've ever had. They're better trained. We hire a higher quality group of people. We hold them more accountable than we've ever, ever had. Now, it doesn't mean that there's a, not a tremendous amount of room to grow and to get better, but it is true. We have best police today that we've ever had. I mean, when I got hired, you know, it was like a very quick interview and I was on. I didn't even get interviewed to go into the academy. I just went into the academy. Then they did a background check on me. Now you have to do a polygraph and they call your former employer. And I mean, what, what job do we know of besides like the CIA and MI6 are they doing polygraphs on you? Most police departments do polygraphs on all cops now. In DC they do a psychological test to make sure you're not overly aggressive. They are trying to ensure they get high quality people.
And remember, cops aren't paid crap. They're paid pretty good depending on where you're at. But they're not making, you know, a million bucks. And they have a very stressful, very intense job that, these day and age they get no praise for anymore. I mean, there's a lot of people that just don't like police anymore.
Cait:
I have no doubt that policing can be a very challenging and thankless job. But after George Floyd and so many stories like it, it's concerning to hear that cops now are the best they've ever been. If this is what we get out of huge budgets and unprecedented scrutiny, then it's easy to see why activists are calling for a new approach.
What is the role of police unions when it comes to reforming the laws around policing?
Arthur:
Oh, they're pretty significant. you can't pass a law, you just can't without having, the police unions have input, and in most places, if they're against you, you're not gonna go anywhere. That just, that's just the reality of it.
What I try to do is, is work out beforehand what they're comfortable with and then present it to whoever is gonna sponsor the bill. So a huge, huge impact on what laws are gonna get through, what laws are not gonna get through.
And At a local level, they have huge impact on whether or not cops are gonna get fired. I mean, you have police officers that have killed people, there has been a ruling that it was not a good shoot, and then they get fired and then the union fights for them to get back. That's happened hundreds of time.
Cait:
Police abolitionists argue that the police are inherently problematic and can't be reformed or fixed because the origins of police are in slave patrols and enforcing colonialism. How would you respond to someone making that kind of an argument?
Arthur:
You know, I'm not going to, I, I don't. Let me think about this before I say something I'm gonna regret.
So I think that, that is incredibly naive and when you actually interview inner city, black and white in this country, poor people go to those cities where they're having really serious crime. Baltimore, Chicago, you interview the people and you ask them about policing almost no one says "We want less police." Almost everybody says "we want more police, but we don't wanna be over policed." And there's a fundamental difference between the two.
Yeah, there is roots of policing to slave patrols. Yeah, I, I get that. But you can make that about a million different things. I mean, the ship building roots were about imperialism, so we shouldn't build ships anymore. I mean, that's ridiculous. It is true that there were posses and slave patrols and there are roots, in policing, in kind of maintaining, the elite class.
But I also say for anybody who's ever been a victim of a crime you definitely want someone to call. And that person is gonna be a cop. I would also say that the vast majority of police are people who wanna do a good job. They love their city and they love their community, and they wanna make it safer.
So I would say to those individuals, good luck. Because, the political realities and the country is not with you. You're actually making people, like me, who really want systematic police reform, real police reform, that fundamentally changes the way that that cops operate, you're making our jobs really hard because when you talk about police reform, that's what people think now, is that kind of stuff. So, You're not helping, you're making things worse. And quite frankly, you're wrong.
And I have found, I have no data behind this, this is just, what I have found, the vast majority of people who say things like that are rich and white and have no need for cops.
Cait:
Of course, it's simplistic and probably unhelpful to try and describe the feelings of the average poor or black individual when it comes to police reform. There is data though to show that the vast majority of protestors involved in the protests of the summer of 2020 were white and educated, and we know that the strongest opposition to the proposal to replace the Minneapolis Police Department came from predominantly black neighborhoods. I'm aware, of course, that all three voices in this podcast are white and educated, and both my interviewees are male, so that's food for thought.
Just to look at a couple of the other kind of contrarian arguments about the police, another one that there's no data showing a correlation between the number of policemen in an area and the crime rate. Do you think there's anything to that?
Arthur:
Well I don't really, that, that is a incredibly complex, sentence - and, you know, what area are we talking about an urban area or? You know, but there is data that like cops on spots systems work where you put a cop on a corner and there was less crime on that corner.
Now they may have moved to a different area but, you know, does that mean that crime didn't go down on that corner? Of course it did, but maybe it didn't go down in the neighborhood as a whole. Those types of numbers are so drowned in nuance and in what is actually happening in, in a specific area. It's really hard to give a intelligent response to it.
I will say that there is data that good policing can lower crime. Now, what does good policing look like? I think that the community orient policing, you know, model works really well. I mean, you cannot tell me that the model in LA did not lower crime. LA was one of the most dangerous cities in America, and now it's one of the safest cities in America.
I mean, New York per capita. Even with , the little blit we've seen in violent crime is still person, per person, one of the safest p in America, and it ranks in the safest cities in the world. There's nowhere in New York, you can't really walk around. Part of that is gentrification. Part of that is policing.
It's way too complex to say that more cops don't lower crime. I also think it's ridiculous to say that more cops lower crimes. So I think both are are way over simplifications of an incredibly complex.
Cait:
I guess my question really is about, and you, and you've answered it, but it's very difficult to measure the effects of policing and it's very difficult to measure. Is crime getting worse or better? And why?
Arthur: You know, you look at policing and like comp reports and things like that, those elite police officers, those captains and above, they wanna show a decreasing crime. And so the numbers show a decreasing crime. Right now in the United States, every single Republican I know is saying there's some kind of crazy crime wave happening and there's not. But you cannot convince them otherwise because that is what they're running on. When there is a political or financial reason to skew something, you're gonna skew it. If you are a liberal you wanna show that cops are racist bastards that are running around looking for black people to beat up. And if you are a conservative, you wanna show that there's a war on police and that there is a massive crime wave and we need cops on every corner with assault rifles in order to protect us. And we both know that both of those ideas are ridiculous, but this is the mentality that we're fighting.
Cait:
What's clear to me at the end of all this is that for many of the things they're tasked with, police are a hammer banging on a screw. That's one thing that both cops and defund activists agree on. Another is that most of the reforms tried so far in the US have been fruitless. Clearly we need more non-police strategies to tackle social problems.
What's least clear to me is exactly how much policing is too much. Part of my confusion has to do with the facts. Riser describes a dangerous job in an environment full of guns where every stop could be your last. Vitale, on the other hand, says most of what the police do has nothing to do with serious crime. It's hard to get to grips with what exactly the police are facing and how much good and bad they're really doing when every narrative is politicized.
One way to escape the US politics involved is to step back and look at this debate from an international perspective. Countries with more social services seem to have less crime and gentler policing. But that could be another one of those chicken egg stories. And what about places like my home country, South Africa, where good social services just aren't coming anytime soon.
Violent crime is rife there and by one account, police kill three times as many people per capita than the American police. In a scenario where unemployment and trauma and other social problems are standard, are police your only hope against crime? And is that hope false?
Perhaps, in a less than ideal world, policing is a necessary evil. If that's the case, then perhaps like invasive surgery, we should use policing judiciously and hold those involved to the highest possible standard.
You've been listening to Wood for the Trees with me, Cait Macleod. Big thank you to my guests, Alex Vitale and Arthur Rizer.
Throughout this season, I'll be exploring lots of messy questions around the theme of crime and justice. Policing is the public face of criminal justice, but we can't tackle policing without also thinking about the legal and penal system that surrounds it. I'll be exploring prison reform, drug legalization, and protest policing, but first we'll be jumping into a UK specific topic.
The Prevent Duty is a very controversial requirement on certain authorities in the UK, such as schools, to play an active role in preventing people from becoming terrorists. I'll be talking to Professor John Holmwood, co-chair of the People's Review of Prevent and Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham and Professor Steven Greer, professor of Human Rights at the University of Bristol.
You won't be surprised to hear that they do not exactly agree. Episode two, The Prevent Duty: Countering Terror or Terrorizing the Innocent, drops on the 25th of Jan. You can find it wherever you're listening to this.
If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe? And if you'd like to support the podcast, you can leave a tip at buy me a coffee.com/wood for the trees, there are links to some of the facts I've mentioned in the show notes. For more information, visit cant seethewood.com. or you can get in touch at cait@cantseethewood.com
Thank you so much for listening.