Chicago Justice Podcast
The Chicago Justice Podcast challenges the stories we're told about crime, public safety, and justice. Instead of accepting headlines, political talking points, or conventional wisdom at face value, we dig deeper to uncover what the data, research, and lived experiences actually reveal.
Each episode features candid conversations with journalists, researchers, advocates, policymakers, and people working to transform the justice system from within. Together, we examine the policies, institutions, and power structures that shape who is criminalized, who is protected, and who is left behind.
From policing and police accountability to gun violence, surveillance, incarceration, public records, government transparency, and criminal justice reform, we explore the complex issues driving today's debates about safety and justice. Some conversations are uncomfortable. Others are infuriating. All of them are necessary.
Grounded in evidence, accountability, and a commitment to challenging dominant narratives, The Chicago Justice Podcast goes beyond sound bites to expose how systems really work and whose interests they serve.
If you're ready to question assumptions, confront hard truths, and explore what real justice and public safety could look like, this podcast is for you.
Chicago Justice Podcast
Beyond Qualified Immunity: How Police Avoid Accountability
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode, we sit down with Joanna C. Schwartz, UCLA law professor and author of Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, to unpack the hidden systems that protect police from consequences.
We go beyond the headlines about qualified immunity to explore what really blocks accountability:
- Why most police misconduct lawsuits fail before trial
- How courts, police departments, and legal rules work together to “shield” officers
- The surprising truth about who actually pays when lawsuits succeed
- Why internal discipline systems rarely deliver justice
- What reforms could actually change the system
Grounded in real cases, data, and decades of research, Schwartz reveals a reality most people never see: accountability doesn’t just break down in court—it fails at every stage.
If you care about policing, civil rights, or how legal systems actually work in practice, this conversation is essential listening.
Shows New York City paid out more than $117 million last year to settle police misconduct lawsuits. The largest settlements went to two men wrongfully convicted of killing a French tourist in the 80s. In all, nearly $800 million in payouts were made over the last seven years.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to the Chicago Justice Project. I'm your host, Tracy Sisco. I'm also Executive Director of the Chicago Justice Project and an adjunct professor in the Department of Justice, Law, Criminology, and Security at American University. So today we are talking with Professor Joanna Schwartz, who is the Honorable Harry Pregerson, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law in Los Angeles, California. She's also author of Shielded, How the Police Became Untouchable, published in 2022. Our attention this week is in Los Angeles. So is it possible to police the police in the U.S.? Yes. But to what degree that policing of the police actually makes a difference is debatable. Has the system improved? Sure. Do those improvements, have those improvements, create a system where we now have a deterrence effect? I don't really know. Unions, departments, officers decry how unfair the accountability systems are. All of them, all over the country. Somehow simultaneously, the data shows it holds almost no one accountable for anything. Yet, according to the police and their unions and their departments and their supporters, it holds everyone accountable unfairly, always unfairly. So our discussion with Professor Swartz covers qualified immunity, internal affairs, criminal prosecution, civilian review boards. All of which add up to a lot of people trying to do really good. There's certainly discussions to be had about how much good these systems are. I think real evaluations of their work and which systems are best from looking at their internal data and records and the police violence statistics and all of that, and police shootings and police violence would really be qualified before we could actually answer what is actually working or where it might be working. Anyways, we discuss all of this for Professor Swartz. So let's get to the conversation. Joanna Swartz, thank you so much for jumping on our podcast. We really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so I we're gonna start at the litigation side. And so I think Americans have been pushed into a way of thinking that says I've been injured, or if I'm ever injured by the police, I will sue, I will get a bunch of money, and that will create change. And what we've seen, and we've seen in Chicago, um, Chicago paid out $300 million in civil suits last year related to policing, a hundred million or so so far this year. Is that even when the rarity is that they get a big case and you get a big settlement and it makes it all the way through, or you get a big judgment, it so rarely results in meaningful systemic change to how the dark how the department operates. In Chicago, like I said, 300 million last year, no calls for any reform related to policing, just more cops. How do you reconcile the fact that we have these huge payouts and we have all the stuff that makes the news, yet little change actually occurs?
SPEAKER_03So I think there's uh a couple a couple of things going on um uh with the description that you've that you've given. First, as far as the desire to sue um goes, I would say that of course every person who brings a lawsuit has their own interests and motivations. But I think often what people want is some sort of change. The goal is not to get rich quick, uh, it may be to get compensation. But time and time again, uh, when you speak to people who are thinking about bringing a lawsuit, what they really want is to have the officer fired or to have some sort of change to prevent something from happening like it happened to them again. And one real uh tragedy of our current system is that filing a lawsuit is really one of the only ways, and often the only way, for a person to bring their mistreatment or wrongdoing to public attention to try to get some sort of change as a result, some sort of redress. So part of the reason people are going to lawsuits is because there's not other alternatives that are readily available to them. And then the cases themselves, as you said, they can result in millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars if you're talking about the Chicago uh police department. And it doesn't seem like there's any change that happens. And so why is that? So a couple of reasons that lawsuits, I don't think, have the impact that they should or that they could, or that they're expected to. Um, one is that individual officers uh rarely have any skin in the game at all. They may not know the first thing about the lawsuit brought against them, and except in really extraordinary cases, they pay nothing out of their pockets to resolve these cases. Uh, the police department also doesn't have much skin in the game. In Chicago, money to satisfy settlements and judgments does come from the Chicago Police Department's budget. But when they exceed that litigation budget, which they do every year, they can just go back to Chicago City Council and get more money. And what I've under come to understand is that when the Chicago Police Department comes back for more money to fund their litigation, that money is pulled from the crevices of the city budget away from the least politically powerful people in the city. So I spoke to a person who used to represent the city in these civil rights cases, and he said when lawsuits went up, lead paint testing went down. And that was the kind of trade that's being made. A third reason is that these suits, as much as they make headlines for how much money we're we're talking about being spent every year, they're really just a drop in the bucket of the city of Chicago's budget. If you compare lawsuit payouts in any city to the cost of the police department in that city, um the amount paid in lawsuits against those officers is going to be a drop in the bucket as compared to the police department's budget itself. So those are all reasons that lawsuits don't tend to have the impact that you think they would. But I will say there are examples and cases where advocates creatively have used litigation to reveal information that didn't previously exist, to focus attention on problems that has escaped attention. In the past, there have been officers fired or disciplined as a result. And so it does happen. It does happen, but it requires a lot of creative advocacy, and it's not the kind of direct relationship you would expect with a lawsuit payout necessarily inspiring a city to figure out how to prevent that thing from happening in the future.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that that is absolutely true. Okay, so can you give us a brief explanation of the legal doctrine of qualified immunity? But also I want you to talk about, and you you touched upon it a little bit in your previous answer. Why the basis for why people think we need it? Right? This idea of cops going broke from these lawsuits, why that thinking is flawed.
SPEAKER_03Well, so qualified immunity, uh, a term that is thrown around a lot, um, but not often understood, is a particular legal rule, a legal protection that was created by the Supreme Court to protect government officers, including police officers, but not only, when they're sued for money damages. So this is not about criminal cases, um, but it's it's when a lawsuit is brought against an officer to get money from them. The Supreme Court has said that there is this qualified immunity. And what that means has shifted over time. It's gotten more and more difficult to overcome over time. Uh it started as sort of a good faith defense. If an officer thought they were following the law and it turns out they weren't, uh, then they would have this qualified immunity. And it has turned into a defense that, according to the Supreme Court, requires that an officer get qualified immunity unless the person suing can find a prior court case with nearly identical facts holding that conduct unconstitutional. Um, and as your question uh suggested, there are a lot of justifications the Supreme Court has given, and other defenders of qualified immunity have given for why we need this protection and why it needs to get stronger and stronger and stronger. One common argument is that otherwise officers would be bankrupted for split-second uh mistakes made while on the job. Another is that lawsuits, uh frivolous lawsuits, um, distract and burden uh officers, and qualified immunity protects against those burdens. Qualified immunity has also been talked about as necessary for notice that you know the officer has to be on notice that their conduct was wrong in order to be held responsible for it. And I have spent uh the past decade or so examining those justifications for qualified immunity empirically, and I find that none of them hold water. Uh, the the most dramatic um counter evidence concerns officers with legal responsibility. So I have done a study looking at jurisdictions across the country and found that 99.98% of dollars paid are paid by local governments and insurers. So that leaves 0.02% of those damages are paid by officers. In two jurisdictions, Cleveland and New York City. And uh officers are not going bankrupt with those $2,000 payouts. Um, and to the extent that they're required to pay anything, it has nothing to do with qualified immunity, but instead local government's decisions that they should have to contribute to a settlement because they've violated policy or law. Also looked at this idea that qualified immunity is necessary to save time and burdens and distractions of litigation. And the research there is a little more complicated to describe, but the short uh the short, long and short of it is that I found that qualified immunity rarely spares officers from discovery or trial. And in fact, it can add to the time and complexity and expense of litigating these cases. Um, and finally, officers aren't actually trained about the facts and holdings of the cases that can overcome qualified immunity. So the idea that there needs to be a prior court case with virtually identical facts to put an officer on notice is a fantasy because officers aren't actually reading those facts and holdings of those cases. Um and so their existence or absence um really is should be, I think, irrelevant to their liability. And instead the question should be whether the conduct was unconstitutional.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the idea that it has they have to find a matching case is just so obscene. So let's turn to prosecutors. You know, you have cases like Derek Shauvin and the George Floyd murder, who was actually prosecuted and was actually convicted. Right? But he's he's basically that case is the exception that proves the rule. Uh that it's virtually impossible for to get a prosecutor to prosecute an officer, uh for especially for at least it has been in our experience, uh, for brutality or um it's conduct that isn't like overt corruption that they the feds caught on videotape or something. And then it seems like there's an added layer to the complexity of it's hard to get juries sometimes to convict officers. So I would like you to talk about that a little bit because it seems You got a chicken and egg there. Is it the prosecutor not prosecuting enough, or is it juries not convicting officers? So prosecutors like, why am I gonna go through the political turmoil of ruining on the relationship with the police or prosecuting the cop that I know the juries aren't gonna hold accountable? So what do you what are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_03Sure, and you know, I again I think that in each of these individual cases, there are different um there are different calculations going on, but it is true that the best evidence suggests that fewer than 2% of police who kill people uh are have any criminal charges entered against them, brought against them, and and a smaller number are actually convicted. Derek Chauvin is definitely the exception that proves the rule. And there are other exceptions as well. Um I think that uh the cases where you see criminal prosecutions tend to be ones where um there has been a lot of focus and attention given to the case, um, or the case is one involving uh, you know, sexual assault, um uh, you know, which is seen as beyond the pale and and fully outside of the officer's official duties. And I think there's a couple reasons. As you said, what part of it has to do with the prosecutor, and I think part of it has to do with juries. Um, prosecutors have uh different paths that they take toward um uh bringing criminal charges. Sometimes they need to present it to a grand jury, sometimes they can make the decision on their own. But no matter the circumstance, um, there's a general view that prosecutors are hesitant to prosecute officers who they often rely upon to get criminal convictions in other cases. Um, and there's a fear that those officers will no longer help the prosecutor, or that you know the officers in that department um won't uh will will revolt. And so there is um, and then there's also just a uh a sense of of camaraderie and and same teeness that I think can can influence those decisions. But you're also right that there's uh a jury, the juries play a role as well, and there have been many cases, notable cases, where uh prosecutions have gone forward, but there has been a finding of no guilt or a hung jury, um, even in cases that have very, very strong evidence. And I think that part of that has to do with a very long-standing trust and reliance in law enforcement. Uh, law enforcement officers have been um among sort of the top three trusted professions uh for a long time, according to Pugh's uh surveys. And there was a dip um in those numbers in 2020 after George Floyd's murder, and as um medical first responders were taking uh playing such an important role, they they jumped to uh third place. Um, but I think that generally speaking, there is a tremendous amount of trust uh that continues in law enforcement that makes these criminal prosecutions more difficult.
SPEAKER_02Okay, I want to talk next about the role unions and police departments themselves, any many officers in their seeming what I call addiction, protecting the worst among them. Regardless of how much it hurts their own agency, their own union membership, or the fellow officers. You know, if you look at New Orleans, for example, 900 officers, they would fight in general, no matter how bad one officer is, if he's doing something that's anyone thinks in the union, the department officers thinks it's remotely related to their job, no matter just about how bad it is, they will circle the wagons and fight for them to the death, despite the fact that it's actually hurting their membership. It's the union's membership, it's actually hurting the average officers. It's making their work conditions worse because they're the way they're seen by the public, their relationship when I'm minorities communities keeps plummeting. And they all know who's the worst officers. No one wants to ride with them, but they will do nothing to get rid of them, right? So they will sacrifice the entire department's relationship with the community to save these one-off guys. In Chicago, it was um uh it was the guy who killed Lequan McDonald, and the union was like, we're gonna give him a job, and this is all there's he's getting railroaded. And the murder was it was caught on video, it was plain as day. Everyone could see, but it didn't make a difference how bad they were. They were gonna sacrifice their officers' street, the their work safety and being on the street and their relationship with communities to protect that one horrible officer. I mean, I have you seen this in their your research, and how do you what do you think about I think that every I think that I could offer examples for every uh everything you just said.
SPEAKER_03I think there is very good evidence that uh you know it's 20% of the officers who who cause 80% of the problems, just as there is sort of in every aspect of our of our lives. And uh, and I also agree that that uh unions have been very, very, very focused on um protecting their officers really without um exception. And and one other um example of this is that unions have negotiated for decreased transparency and accountability of all of their officers. So in union negotiations with local governments, they have traded away increased salaries for decreased transparency and uh negotiated for things like having officers' uh personnel files or the complaints against them scrubbed after three years, uh creating 24-hour or 48-hour barriers until they are questioned after an officer-involved shooting, the ability to review video uh before being investigated, all sorts of arbitration and review uh abilities when there is some sort of discipline that's meted out against them. And those are the kinds of protections that are forward-looking. They're not protecting an individual who's been uh charged with doing something wrong, but they are forward-looking protections uh against those officers who would benefit from them who tend to be the ones who are that 20% who are engaging in 80% of the problems. Um, and I can't possibly get into the psychology of of that or understand what that psychology is, except to say that um, you know, I think that there's a general sense of um skepticism uh that the complaints and claims of of wrongdoing and unconstitutional conduct and excessive force have any merit. I I think that there was one exception to that, which was George Floyd's murder, where uh law enforcement folks came out in um really unprecedented numbers, uh law enforcement heads to c to criticize um Derek Chauvin's conduct. But you know, uh the vast, vast, vast majority of the time the view that is publicly stated by law enforcement is that they're officers and by union representatives is that officers have done nothing wrong.
SPEAKER_01Back to Shauvin, he was a field training officer.
SPEAKER_02Right? He had had a long history of complaints and bad behavior. Right. And that Minneapolis Police Department and the Union covered up for him. What happened as a result? George Floyd is murdered. Two rookie cops in their first week or something like that on the job are in lose their jobs, their pensions, and are imprisoned. And his partner's imprisoned. And the department and city are rocked by protests.
SPEAKER_01All because they circled the wagons in unison to protect a bad cop that they knew was bad. How do we alter that? Change that, impact that? Because it doesn't seem like, yes, they they threw Chauvin to the Wolves once it was out and they could not contain it. But I haven't seen in recent years, anyways, I haven't seen any evidence of a major change in American policing at all.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think that it may be that i i it is too um it is asking too much to ask to see one, you know, one dramatic change. Um I do think that there are things that are happening, that there are changes that are happening, there are improvements that are happening that are small and slow and and subtle. Um but you know, if you talk to, I'm here in Los Angeles, um, and if you talk to people um like like you know Connie Rice, who's been here since uh the time of the rampart you know scandal, she would say there's still plenty to criticize about the LAPD, but they're a lot more professional than they were back in the 90s. Um and there are you know changes that that happen. Um but you know, there is no there is no dramatic silver bullet or you know, magic wand or um single change that is is going to happen. I mean, there are, you know, now in hundreds of departments limits on no not warrants and limits on chokeholds, and um, you know, are they always followed? Of course not. Uh, but you know, do they, you know, is that a step in a better direction? I think so. Um, so you know, there, you know, and and training is better than it was. Is training going to solve our problems? Absolutely not. You know, there's alternate defense, there's alternate responders um being experimented with. Uh, you know, will that abolish the police? No. Uh, but these are these are individual changes, um, incremental changes that I do think shouldn't be overlooked just because they aren't complete fixes.
SPEAKER_02I agree with you, and I try to tell my students, and they're like, no, and I'm like, yes, it is so much better. I'm like, in the 80s, the Chicago Police Department had a guy in the 70s and 80s, John Burge, that was torturing people with electric shock. And then I did a lecture on what he did. I go, this was it. This was what the CPD was doing, and there were all kinds of people involved in that and letting it happen. So things have gotten better. Um, they've nowhere near, obviously, I think we both agree they're no, they haven't gone far enough. I want to turn a little bit to civilian review and like the police reaction to it, or reaction to any like oversight. So I'm going to use Chicago as an example here. OW Wilson took over the Chicago Police Department in 1960. In 61, it created like an internal affairs, not internal affairs, but like an like kind of uh kind of like an internal affairs oversight, uh uh investigate civilian complaints. That office from 61 to 75 was reorganized or renamed four times because of misconduct internally and incompetence and public sentiment. And the last one in 75 was called the Office of Professional Standards. And the Office of Professional Standards lasted till 2007. Um they became more transparent and they would talk a lot more in community meetings and stuff. IPRA was thought to be incompetent in 2016, so they placed it with the Office of Civilian Oversight for Police Accountability or Citizen Oversight for Police Accountability. I was involved in drafting that legislation. Throughout all those years, if you were to ask the police and the police unions and the police officers, they sustain way too many complaints against officers. And you ask them, how many, how many do they sustain? 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 percent is the answer you get from all ranks of the department. I'm here to tell you, I've looked at the data, they've never really sustained regularly the numbers anywhere from like 1% to 3 or 4%. The highest it's ever gotten in Chicago was like an eight-month or 10-month period when IPRA had a backlog of sustained cases, it got to almost 10%. But it was only if you looked at the number of cases they had let out of IPRA during that period of time. What do you think is behind the thinking in these departments where they think oversight is so onious and so hard for them, and so everyone hates them, and the civilians that are investigating them hate them, and it's all everything's all bad, and we all hate, and it has no reflection in reality whatsoever when you when you actually look at the data.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, that reminds me of the fact that officers and law enforcement uh supporters and union reps and defense attorneys say that officers will be bankrupted without qualified immunity. There's no basis for that. And just like there's no basis for the notion that these independent that that independent review board um sustains 50, 60, 70, 80 percent of the claims. And it gets me wondering whether the the people who are saying this uh truly uh know that they are saying things that aren't true or they're being told things um that they believe that are not true. Um, if you tell someone that they're going to be bankrupted from a lawsuit, that's what they're going to believe, and that's what they're going to fear. And they're likely going to trust the person who runs their union or the person who defends them in litigation over a law professor from Los Angeles uh sitting in her office. And so I I appreciate that. Um, but there's simply no evidence to support the other view, and the same is true about IPRA and and other kinds of civilian oversight. The the thing that I would say about civilian oversight is that um I think that there's always this real tension, which is uh there's an interest in having it be truly independent, um, but then that conflicts with the need to get information and get, you know, have some say in what the police um are doing. If they you know, there's always questions about whether the oversight should have subpoena power, whether they should be able to make recommendations about discipline, whether those recommendations, what kind of weight those recommendations carry. And all of that is balancing, you know, how much the agency is inside, how much it's outside, how independent it is, what its budget is. Uh, and I think that um, you know, there are some examples of those agencies working better than than others, but it's just a perpetual dance um between these two seemingly incompatible uh interests. And it's one of those reasons why I think litigation ends up remaining something very uh important because it is a source of information that is truly independent. Um there's no question that a lawyer asked that taking a deposition is going to try to get all the information that they can out of the arresting officer about what happened in that case. Um you just can't be sure uh that that will actually happen, whether for lack of motivation or for lack of resources, um, when you're looking at these independent agencies. I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, but it, you know, some of these challenges are are why I continue to think that litigation is so important.
SPEAKER_02Now, the first three years of my organization in Chicago, during that time, Alana, who was running the independent police review authority, left. And she had hired a guy from the DEA, and his name escapes me right now as her second in charge, and he moved up and he was took over the leadership of the organization. We would meet this group of activists, the ACLU, the Public Defender's Office, we would meet with the head of IPRA twice a year, and we'd send questions ahead of time, like a packet of like 30, 40, 50 questions, and like, bring us answers. And Alana was always very cool with it. And she would sit there for two hours and answer them for us, and we'd have discussions. He came one time his first time, and he got bothered by some of the questions. He's like, you know, I can just leave here. And I was I was stunned. And I was like, You're running an organization that's supposed to hold monthly meetings with the public in all kinds of communities throughout the city. You think this is hard? And he got really abrasive. I'm like, you know what? Why don't you leave? We'll follow you out, and we're gonna go to CBS News across the street. I'm friends with Pam Zekman, an investigative reporter. I'll go knock on the door and we can go talk to her about you leaving because you're you're upset about having to answer questions that you saw in advance a couple weeks ahead of time. And it was like dead silence in the room. And I was like, that's not really the real the proactive response from someone running a civilian police accountability organization who's not being yelled at at a community meeting, which is what's going to happen, because people get mad about things that happen in our community. That isn't his responsibility, but you're gonna get yelled at. That's what dealing with the public is like sometimes. And I was just shocked, and you wouldn't believe it, but the the Ipres numbers plummeted during his time, and he ended up getting fired as part of the uh Lakan McDonald murder and failure to discipline uh Jason Van Dyke, who was the murderer. I bring that up because I started being an activist in 1996 around this work, police accountability work, police transparency in Chicago. And we were thinking, God, how great would it be to get a civilian-run organization to get it outside the police department? That'll be the answer. And then with IPRA, and they took all the employees they had from the CPD into their office, we were like, oh, you know what? We need to get rid of the employees. That's the problem. We'll create this other organization called COPA, Civilian Office of Police Accountability, but they'll hire their own staff and re-interview everyone and hire new staff, and that'll be it. Not have things improved? Yes. Has it been the solution? Not really.
SPEAKER_04I don't think there is a solution, though. I mean, yeah.
SPEAKER_01No, I agree. I think that's part of the problem.
SPEAKER_02I will say, I'm gonna um I have one more question. I want to bring up some of the things you've talked about about even better way uh forward. I want to talk about transparency before I get there, though. We have sued in Chicago, in DC, in Maryland, we have sued police departments, sheriff's offices, prosecutors, and corrections. We have a cross region of the country, jurisdiction, agency type.
SPEAKER_01They're all the same. They all lie.
SPEAKER_02The FOIA responses and open record responses are hilarious. They're so bad, they don't even try to hide the fact that they're lying. They get into court and they lie and they continue to lie. We are four years into a lawsuit with the District of Columbia seeking access to emails that the department here, Metropolitan Police Department, got from outside agencies seeking uh access to gang data from their gang database. Four years we have spent in court. I have pro bono lawyers, thank God. But the district had to spend half a million dollars, uh, if not a million dollars, defending this case, because they don't want to give us emails that agencies from around the country have sent them for gang data. Is there any hope they're ever going to be meaningfully transparent? And isn't that to some extent the bridge that they have to cross to really build public trust in what they're doing?
SPEAKER_03I do think transparency is is really important. Um and uh and that it is it is an important bridge, um, not because it changes behavior automatically, but because it creates the opportunity for people who are outside the system to use that information and analyze it and sort of show back to the department and to the local government and to the public of what's happening. Um and it is the revelation of data, of information that has um dramatically changed so many, you know, that has been a cause for so many changes. You talk about LaCroix McDonald. What what changed about Laquan McDonald uh had been murdered, you know, more than a year uh before there was any widespread political uh action taken as a result. What happened? Jamie Calvin and Craig Futterman filed a lawsuit of a public records request to get the video uh from the store um that had recorded the shooting and was and got the judge to make it public. And that the revelation of that video is what changed the political ecosystem in Chicago. It's information, transparency that creates the political pressures to push for change. And perhaps it's for that very reason that when there is information that feels um powerful or politically sensitive, there's all sorts of efforts paid to try to prevent that information from coming out. Uh, I'm I'm working on a uh study right now that is um the replication of a study I did um more than 10 years ago looking at how often police officers pay settlements and judgments against them. And 15 years ago, I submitted these requests. Um and uh, I can't put a precise uh figure on it, but I will say looking at the requests, responses from back then and from now, departments are a whole lot less eager to give me the information that I'm seeking. And uh so my response rate is um, you know, about two-thirds of what it was last time. And I have to think that that's a recognition that there now that there wasn't maybe 10, 15 years ago, that there is political consequence from sharing this information. Um, so I I think it it is uh hugely important, and that's why people fight about it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, in our lawsuit against the district here in DC, the Metropolitan Police Department, it was over their gang database, and we originally, as part of asking for the MEAS, we also asked for their gang data and their database. We asked for the data, de-identified. And they ignored us and gave us the runaround, so we sued. And in the time we were waiting for the hearing, there was a city council hearing, district council here in DC, and the superintendent has to testify, chief of police has to testify, and they're sworn. Unlike in Chicago, they're not sworn, here they are. Superintendent got up and said, We have decided to uh eliminate gang associates from the database. Uh when we forage it, they were in the database, give us that. Deleted 1700 people from 3600 around 3600 to around 1900. They deleted 1700 people rather than to give us the data about their from the database on them. And that had it had all because they have to revalidate them every five years, the validation reasons are in the data. So they released, they deleted 47% of their gang database rather than give it up.
SPEAKER_03That means that 47% of their debt gang database is no longer in the gang database, which is right.
SPEAKER_02So for us, huge victory. Yeah, huge victory. But I'm like, that is such a tell that your practices around gang data and validation and collection were horrible. No, that data was pivotal to you. It was helpful to you. You know why? Because you spent the last 17 years collecting it. You wouldn't have just erased it for no reason. So you erased it because there was stuff in there and it was sensitive, and you didn't want to give it up. I I that was a great win for us, but it it just was telling when I got the number, and I'm like, oh my god, what happened to the other 1700? I want to go over a couple front-end solutions and I'll let you go. And we agree so much on this, and I tell people this all the time: limiting unnecessary police contacts. I think we need to get police out of everything we possibly can, and only have them deal with and go to and respond to things that we need police officers to do that they're highly trained and effective at doing. And everything else has to be left to civil society outside the police department to handle. Um, I know in the book you talk about mental health and everything. I've read your book quite a while ago, but I have gone back to it prepping for this interview, and I was super happy to find that and find that in some of the other stuff you wrote, because I think that's vitally important, and I'm not sure. Why do you think police fight that so much?
SPEAKER_03Well, I I think that the to the extent that there is a fight, it's around the budget. Um, I think that at least in Los Angeles, I don't know how things are in Chicago or in DC, Los Angeles Police Union a couple of years back issued some sort of proclamation where they said they wanted to be out of the business of responding to people in mental health crisis and responding after car accidents when there was no, you know, there was no threat of of harm and responding to homeless, you know, homeless issues or you know, other things like that. That I think that that there's there's a lot of police officials who would say that that's not what they're trained to do, that they shouldn't be responsible for all of those kinds of things. And I see, and I've I've argued that that's a place of interest convergence that should be taken advantage of. You know, it's a place where abolitionists and the LA police union would agree. And they might not agree on everything, but they if they can agree on that, that that's worth taking um advantage of. I think where the disagreement comes in is really about the budget. And this, you know, the concern, the police department does not want to decrease the budget. What they're saying is we don't have enough money to do what we need to do, so we shouldn't do all of this other stuff, and we should be able to spend all the money that we currently use on the crime fighting stuff. So I think that's where the debate comes around. In my uh imagined uh world, if I had, you know, if I had a say um in making these kinds of changes, I would push for some experimentation um and pilot projects and the like, and really be serious and disciplined about what the cost benefits are, um, and measured, you know, not just in police cars, but also in ER visits and you know, jail capacity and all sorts of things, and really figure out what the economic costs and benefits are of these kinds of alternative systems. But I think they're hugely important. Um, Barry Friedman, a professor at NYU, has written an article called Disaggregating the Police Function, which I think is such a great way of thinking about it. You know, if you think about all the different things that police are tasked to do. And you put it in sort of a pie chart. Now think about which of those things police are the best trained and equipped to do, and give the things that they aren't uh so well trained and equipped to do to other entities.
SPEAKER_02Ryan, I try I've tried to say for years, I'm like, where they have a badge, a gun, a nightstick, now a taser or uh pepper spray. They're not social workers. They're not trained to be them. Maybe they should be better trained in those things, right? And you know, you you talk about de-escalation too, and that's de-escalation training. They obviously need that, and then we'll fully support that. But we need to just have them do what they're best doing. And unfortunately, they all too often are put in situations where they're not going to win.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Right. At the same time, you give them you given them a gun that they're carrying into the situation.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_02Right. Which makes the it heightens the the the intensity of the situation because they rightfully so to some extent are worried that if they ever lose that, they're dead.
SPEAKER_03Um I mean, fire, you know, my my uh my cousin is retired fire firefighter, and you know, he's talked about the fact that he had to go into situations all the time that were situations that that fire or police might have been called to respond to. Um and you know, fire uh firefighters don't have weapons with them. You know, they don't have I suppose they have an axe or something, but they don't have a gun, they don't have a taser, and they come into situations like car accidents, like people who are going through mental health crises, all sorts of things, um and uh and respond without weapons.
SPEAKER_02Right, and it can be done. You talk about it, you know, cahoots has been out there forever. I've heard people that come back to me and say, Well, where's it actually worked? Uh and they'd get hurt, they'd get hurt. I'm like, well, haven't they haven't gotten hurt and there aren't any serious injuries to a cahoots person since it opened in like I think 88 or 89. So, like, no, we have an example.
SPEAKER_03There are 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, and there's different ways of thinking about this all. But the policing project at MYU and the um organization at Georgetown Law that Christy Lopez um uh runs are are thinking about these alternate responders and having conferences and having law enforcement officials come and you know, talking about demonstration projects. And I do think that there is this interest and not just among activists, among law enforcement as well. But it takes money and it takes coordination, and um, we are in our law enforcement world entirely bottom up. And so to get something like this to take root, you've got to have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of law enforcement agencies deciding that it's the right kind of thing to do, and then getting their local government to pass whatever initiative means it has to happen. So it's this bureaucratic mess to get anything to take hold.
SPEAKER_02Right, and it's the politics also. You have to get the politics. And we live in a world now where even our crime is going down, like in 22 through 25, crime's going down. One terrible crime happens, it's all a lie, you don't know, and it's not happening whenever. No, no. Terrible things can still happen while crime plummets, right? Like there used to be 200 murders, now we're down to 100. You know what? Those hundred people who got murdered, it still sucks for them and their families. Crime is going down, maybe the police are doing things better. I mean, it's more likely a national thing, but let's say the police are doing it better. It still sucks for those hundred people in the family, but how do you rate what the police have done or the criminal justice system has done? Crime's going down, we should be happy with that. Can we make adjustments? Sure. But it's too much. I think the politics, the local politics among the politicians is also a huge problem to getting a lot of this stuff implemented, right? They just have a political perspective that you must meet everything with force and policing, and that's the way to do it. Once again, if they're pro-police, they're hurting the police. Why do cops want to go handle dealing with a home trying to get a homeless person away from the front door of an apartment building? If they can send other people who are trained at it and better at it. They don't want to deal with that. Right? Um, yeah, it's so very frustrating. All right, everyone, go pick up Shielded, How Police Became Untouchable. It's an amazing book. Go look at uh Professor Schwartz's writings, they're amazing. I found a kindred spirit here because we agree on so much of uh of what needs to be done and the flaws on each level, and they all play a part and they all need to be rehabbed to some degree to get us going forward. I agree that we the changes have come, it's hard to see. Um, and in our social media world, they're harder and harder to see every day. Unfortunately, everything is. I live in DC and I see it all the time here. All right, uh, Professor Swartz, thank you so much. We really appreciate the time.
unknownAbsolutely.
SPEAKER_04Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02Unfortunately, for all of us, political will to reshape policing and police accountability is still not there. Violence is always exploited for personal and political gain. Whether it's the media, the police, leadership, prosecutors, judges, courts, corrections, local city council or county board, governors, mayors, senators, congresspeople, the president. It is always exploited. It's hard to get the exploiters to reduce their ability to exploit. Having strong, effective police accountability will have impact on violence and crime in the city. Hard to when those things are going down, it's hard for the exploiters to exploit. As we talked about in the conversation with Professor Swartz, New York has paid last year paid out over a hundred million dollars in civil settlements and judgments related to policing. Chicago? Well, that's pretty easy to sum up. Nothing. If protests in 2020 and the payouts in 2025 don't move the needle significantly, it's hard to imagine what Thank you all for being with us. We really appreciate it. Like, subscribe, share with your friends. All of that helps our mission, helps get our voice out. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next week.