F The Police, and then what? A police/justice abolition thread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > F The Police, and then what? A police/justice abolition thread

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Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

Kalit posted:

Oh yea, that is absolutely 1000% abysmal. Our public schooling system is horrifically underfunded and we do need to dump money into it.

It's not easy as "shifting money around", I thought?

Do you see where I'm going with this? It IS that easy. It's lack of understanding and will.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:19

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# ? May 27, 2024 07:40

Butter Activities: May 4, 2018

Kalit posted:

Actually I'm just re-reading my original question and I didn't have "increase the overall budget" in my assumptions. It was just a side note in talking about Portland that I mistyped (and since clarified), but I wanted to expand beyond that.

So would both of you be for spending money on it, as long as it didn't increase the overall budget? Or would you rather still decrease the budget the same amount and have it spent elsewhere in the city's budget?

What?

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:20

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

Every school district everywhere already has to deal with budgets every year for something as important as basic education.

The only reason this is like this is that our society is so broken that it hates teachers and loves the televised and movie ideal of what it thinks cops might sorta be.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:21

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Jaxyon posted:

Just LOL that I have teacher friends going broke to buy supplies for their classes of 8 year olds and cops can't even field a slight reduction in their military cosplay slush fund

Well let's explore this a bit, would you be for increasing the education budget if you had to accept an increase to the police MRAP budget as well, or are you so dogmatic and inflexible that you'd tell 8 year olds they can't get more school supplies in order to punish our boys in blue for wanting an Abrams for Christmas?

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:24

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

VitalSigns posted:

Well let's explore this a bit, would you be for increasing the education budget if you had to accept an increase to the police MRAP budget as well, or are you so dogmatic and inflexible that you'd tell 8 year olds they can't get more school supplies in order to punish our boys in blue for wanting an Abrams for Christmas?

These poor underserved children are having their studytime regularly interrupted by all these gangbangers, so don't think the MRAP budget is essentially education? Right.

*LAPD literally blows up a neighborhood in the background*

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:27

Kalit: Nov 6, 2006; The great thing about the thousands of slaughtered Palestinian children is that they can't pull away when you fondle them or sniff their hair.

That's a Biden success story.

Jaxyon posted:

It's not easy as "shifting money around", I thought?

Do you see where I'm going with this? It IS that easy. It's lack of understanding and will.

I was talking about shifting money around within a department when approvals are needed, if there's enough buy in from the department itself. In the specific case I was talking about, from the mayor and entire city council. The public school system being entirely underfunded isn't even close to the same thing?

Kalit fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Aug 5, 2021

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:34

Yuzenn: Mar 31, 2011; Be weary when you see oppression disguised as progression

The Spirit told me to use discernment and a Smith n Wesson at my discretion

Practice heavy self reflection, avoid self deception
If you lost, get re-direction

Kalit posted:

I was talking about shifting money around within a department when approvals are needed. In the specific case I was talking about, from the mayor and entire city council. The public school system being entirely underfunded isn't even close to the same thing?

Coming from government, moving money around is NOT mechanically difficult - it's just numbers on ledgers. Having the political WILL to defund something to fund something else is a whole another animal but it can happen basically instantaeously. The process of getting approvals/change orders etc is what slows it down.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:36

Kalit: Nov 6, 2006; The great thing about the thousands of slaughtered Palestinian children is that they can't pull away when you fondle them or sniff their hair.

That's a Biden success story.

Yuzenn posted:

Coming from government, moving money around is NOT mechanically difficult - it's just numbers on ledgers. Having the political WILL to defund something to fund something else is a whole another animal but it can happen basically instantaeously. The process of getting approvals/change orders etc is what slows it down.

Thank you for pointing this out as well, I missed that part and just edited it in. I was thinking from the perspective of dumping money into public schools, where they would welcome it with open arms. Mandating money be moved from one area to another area of a department would likely cause internal resistance, especially from the police if it means more oversight.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:39

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

Kalit posted:

I was talking about shifting money around within a department when approvals are needed, if there's enough buy in from the department itself. In the specific case I was talking about, from the mayor and entire city council. The public school system being entirely underfunded isn't even close to the same thing?

If we cared it about as much as we cared about guys in blue pretending to be an old west sheriff but with more steroids and more guns it would have money. People would take form other parts of the budget to fund it.

That's what we have now. Except they're taking from the schools to fund the violent gangs.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:41

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Kalit posted:

I was talking about shifting money around within a department when approvals are needed, if there's enough buy in from the department itself. In the specific case I was talking about, from the mayor and entire city council. The public school system being entirely underfunded isn't even close to the same thing?

ok so your hypothetical is a mayor and city council willing to require bodycams but unwilling to shift money around within the police department to pay for it?

I think I found the problem, and it's not with the people who think it's unnecessary to increase police budgets yet again

E:

Kalit posted:

Mandating money be moved from one area to another area of a department would likely cause internal resistance, especially from the police if it means more oversight.

Hm so reform is impossible as long as the police department exists, you say. Tell me more.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:43

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

Making the case that people should support sensible incremental reforms to address police brutality rather than defunding police by...arguing that it's physically impossible for reformers to shift even a single dollar away from police militarization and toward oversight

VVVV
Sure, Jan

VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Aug 5, 2021

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:51

Kalit: Nov 6, 2006; The great thing about the thousands of slaughtered Palestinian children is that they can't pull away when you fondle them or sniff their hair.

That's a Biden success story.

VitalSigns posted:

Making the case that people should support sensible incremental police reforms to address reforms rather than defunding them by...arguing that it's physically impossible for reformers to shift even a single dollar away from police militarization and toward oversight

I'm not making any case? I asked a question to gain more perspective on it and also explained what had been going on in Minneapolis with the EIS system.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 20:53

eSporks: Jun 10, 2011

Kalit posted:

Thank you for pointing this out as well, I missed that part and just edited it in. I was thinking from the perspective of dumping money into public schools, where they would welcome it with open arms. Mandating money be moved from one area to another area of a department would likely cause internal resistance, especially from the police if it means more oversight.

It would cause internal resistance, and that's why it needs to happen. Anything effectual will cause internal resistance. If its not causing internal resistance, its just keeping up the status quo. This idea that causing internal resistance is either a bad thing, or a barrier will also block any actual solution to our policing issue. Viewing it this way fundamentally ignores the issue, which is how police see their job and purpose in the community, and how police respond to change and oversight.

This argument boils down to "we shouldn't tell the police no, because they might get mad."

# ? Aug 5, 2021 21:15

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

eSporks posted:

It would cause internal resistance, and that's why it needs to happen. Anything effectual will cause internal resistance. If its not causing internal resistance, its just keeping up the status quo. This idea that causing internal resistance is either a bad thing, or a barrier will also block any actual solution to our policing issue. Viewing it this way fundamentally ignores the issue, which is how police see their job and purpose in the community, and how police respond to change and oversight.

This argument boils down to "we shouldn't tell the police no, because they might get mad."

Exactly.

A budget is a moral document.

We're constantly causing internal resistance with teachers and often causing them to quit and sometimes having work shut downs over it.

That's because we as a society do not give the slightest poo poo about education in any real way.

We care about empowering police thugs to kill minorities.

# ? Aug 5, 2021 21:29

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

Sinteres posted:

https://twitter.com/literaryeric/status/1423294550999764992

Hopefully we can get some bodycams and maybe a catchy slogan on this.

# ? Aug 6, 2021 01:47

VitalSigns: Sep 3, 2011

See this is what happens when you defund the police, poor starving cops are forced to turn to a life of petty crime to survive

# ? Aug 6, 2021 01:49

bessantj: Jul 27, 2004

Don't know if this is the best place to ask this but, I was watching an episode of Elementary and Lucy Liu's character says that while "I.A. do put away bad cops they also put away a lot of good ones". It made me laugh because most U.S. cops seem to get away with nearly anything yet in the T.V. shows IA is seen at an enemy. However, I'm in the U.K. so I don't know how IA really works. Is there any true about "putting away good cops" (as close as you can to having a 'good cop' anyway)? Generally how do they work?

# ? Sep 24, 2021 14:18

Butter Activities: May 4, 2018

It�s more that their definition of �good cop� is very different

# ? Sep 24, 2021 15:21

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

bessantj posted:

Don't know if this is the best place to ask this but, I was watching an episode of Elementary and Lucy Liu's character says that while "I.A. do put away bad cops they also put away a lot of good ones". It made me laugh because most U.S. cops seem to get away with nearly anything yet in the T.V. shows IA is seen at an enemy. However, I'm in the U.K. so I don't know how IA really works. Is there any true about "putting away good cops" (as close as you can to having a 'good cop' anyway)? Generally how do they work?

There aren't "good cops" in the same way there aren't "good nazi guards", in that even the ones that aren't out-and-out evil are participating in a monstrously bad system and organization that more or less requires they act in awful ways.

IA is barely a thing in US culture beyond the televised/movie version of them and what you're seeing in cop shows is the same thing that always happens when a privileged group is met with any sort of accountability: They freak the gently caress out and declare it the worst thing in history.

In reality, cops protect cops. Internal investigations are there to lend a veneer of credibility so they don't have any face any real reckoning.

# ? Sep 24, 2021 17:32

CellBlock: Oct 6, 2005; It just don't stop.

Jaxyon posted:

There aren't "good cops" in the same way there aren't "good nazi guards", in that even the ones that aren't out-and-out evil are participating in a monstrously bad system and organization that more or less requires they act in awful ways.

IA is barely a thing in US culture beyond the televised/movie version of them and what you're seeing in cop shows is the same thing that always happens when a privileged group is met with any sort of accountability: They freak the gently caress out and declare it the worst thing in history.

In reality, cops protect cops. Internal investigations are there to lend a veneer of credibility so they don't have any face any real reckoning.

I don't know how IA actually works, but I would imagine there is a decent number of "good cops" (read: cops reporting other cops' misconduct) that get arbitrarily punished because of IA, but that's probably not what the show was talking about.

# ? Sep 24, 2021 17:57

Shooting Blanks: Jun 6, 2007; Real bullets mess up how cool this thing looks.

-Blade

Jaxyon posted:

In reality, cops protect cops. Internal investigations are there to lend a veneer of credibility so they don't have any face any real reckoning.

Basically this. Police unions have backed IA forever because it lets them shield themselves from public scrutiny. The whole "we have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing" bullshit. Even the departments that have civilian oversight boards generally try to render them toothless as rapidly as possible.

# ? Sep 24, 2021 18:50

bessantj: Jul 27, 2004

Alright thanks, that does get a few things clear in my head.

# ? Sep 24, 2021 19:37

Aegis: Apr 28, 2004; The sign kinda says it all.

bessantj posted:

Don't know if this is the best place to ask this but, I was watching an episode of Elementary and Lucy Liu's character says that while "I.A. do put away bad cops they also put away a lot of good ones". It made me laugh because most U.S. cops seem to get away with nearly anything yet in the T.V. shows IA is seen at an enemy. However, I'm in the U.K. so I don't know how IA really works. Is there any true about "putting away good cops" (as close as you can to having a 'good cop' anyway)? Generally how do they work?

Generally, Internal Affairs (IA) is the internal discipline mechanism for a law enforcement agency in the United States (and maybe elsewhere, but I can only speak to the US). Depending on the agency, this may be a dedicated section with permanent personnell/investigators, or it may be done on a more ad hoc basis--for instance, there may be a designated manager in the agency who handles IAs in addition to other duties, or IAs may be carried out by a regular line manager in response to complaints about their direct subordinants.

An IA investigation's main focus is usually on whether the officer in question violated internal policy, whether or not that violation has criminal implications. In fact, far and away most of the allegations that IA deals with are non-criminal disciplinary matters. If evidence to support criminal charges turns up in the course of the investigation, the matter may be referred out for prosecution in addition to whatever internal discipline is being considered.

In addition to the informal collusion you might expect within a law enforcement agency, officers subject to IA investigations benefit from more formal protections in a disciplinary investigation than just about any other sort of employee you might be able to imagine. Since the employer is typically a government agency, officers are entitled to 14th amendment due process protections and to 5th amendment protections against compelled self-incrimination (look up Garrity rights, if you are curious). Moreover, the whole IA process is tightly constrained by collective bargaining agreements with police unions. These typically impose timelines the investigation must be completed within, limitations on investigator access to the officer being investigated (for example, the imfamous "48 hour rule" after officer-involved shootings), rights to union representation in interviews and the like, a right to be placed on paid administrative leave during the investigation, and (as regards non-criminal matters, at least) a right to binding arbitration in the event of economic consequences (termination, suspension, or docked pay). Lastly, many states have police officer or first responder "bill of rights" statutes that impose further constraints on, for instance, the identity of officers under investigation or press access to footage or film that might be implicated in an IA process.

All that is to say that IAs don't "put away" a lot of "good cops" (however you want to construe that). In addition to whatever informal help they might receive from other police, officers that are subject to IAs benefit from procedural safeguards the rest of us can only dream of. If, in light of that, a DA can still prove beyond a reasonable doubt a case to put a police officer in jail, it isn't real likely the officer is a "good one."

The burden of proof is lower for internal discipline, and if your union hates you there are some instances of officers being hung out to dry on relatively chickenshit allegations, but these are dwarfed by the instances of management or arbitrators putting unquestionably bad cops back on the street.

Aegis fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Sep 24, 2021

# ? Sep 24, 2021 20:08

Butter Activities: May 4, 2018

I think anyone who believes IA is putting away good cops would consider Frank Serpico the epitome of a bad cop.

# ? Sep 24, 2021 20:20

bessantj: Jul 27, 2004

Aegis posted:

Generally, Internal Affairs (IA) is the internal discipline mechanism for a law enforcement agency in the United States (and maybe elsewhere, but I can only speak to the US). Depending on the agency, this may be a dedicated section with permanent personnell/investigators, or it may be done on a more ad hoc basis--for instance, there may be a designated manager in the agency who handles IAs in addition to other duties, or IAs may be carried out by a regular line manager in response to complaints about their direct subordinants.

An IA investigation's main focus is usually on whether the officer in question violated internal policy, whether or not that violation has criminal implications. In fact, far and away most of the allegations that IA deals with are non-criminal disciplinary matters. If evidence to support criminal charges turns up in the course of the investigation, the matter may be referred out for prosecution in addition to whatever internal discipline is being considered.

In addition to the informal collusion you might expect within a law enforcement agency, officers subject to IA investigations benefit from more formal protections in a disciplinary investigation than just about any other sort of employee you might be able to imagine. Since the employer is typically a government agency, officers are entitled to 14th amendment due process protections and to 5th amendment protections against compelled self-incrimination (look up Garrity rights, if you are curious). Moreover, the whole IA process is tightly constrained by collective bargaining agreements with police unions. These typically impose timelines the investigation must be completed within, limitations on investigator access to the officer being investigated (for example, the imfamous "48 hour rule" after officer-involved shootings), rights to union representation in interviews and the like, a right to be placed on paid administrative leave during the investigation, and (as regards non-criminal matters, at least) a right to binding arbitration in the event of economic consequences (termination, suspension, or docked pay). Lastly, many states have police officer or first responder "bill of rights" statutes that impose further constraints on, for instance, the identity of officers under investigation or press access to footage or film that might be implicated in an IA process.

All that is to say that IAs don't "put away" a lot of "good cops" (however you want to construe that). In addition to whatever informal help they might receive from other police, officers that are subject to IAs benefit from procedural safeguards the rest of us can only dream of. If, in light of that, a DA can still prove beyond a reasonable doubt a case to put a police officer in jail, it isn't real likely the officer is a "good one."

The burden of proof is lower for internal discipline, and if your union hates you there are some instances of officers being hung out to dry on relatively chickenshit allegations, but these are dwarfed by the instances of management or arbitrators putting unquestionably bad cops back on the street.

Thanks that was very informative.

# ? Sep 24, 2021 20:36

Aegis: Apr 28, 2004; The sign kinda says it all.

Here's another aspect of police discipline that is worth discussing, and that I don't think has been talked about explicitly in this thread yet: the Brady List.

The Brady List gets it's name from Brady v. Maryland (373US 83 (1963), if anyone is interested), which held in short that a defendant is entitled to receive any evidence in posession of the prosecution that is (a) material to the charges against the Defendant, and (b) exculpatory. We call evidence of that type "Brady material."

One form of evidence that can be Brady material is evidence that can be used to impeach (undermine the veracity of) the testimony of prosecution witnesses. Now, because Brady material has to be both (a) material, and (b) exculpatory, the information about prosecution witnesses that Defendants are entitled to receive from the prosecution is somewhat limited in scope. But one thing that Courts have been clear is always Brady material is evidence of a tendency by prosecution witnesses to lie in official proceedings.

That brings us to the Brady List. One of the main jobs of law enforcement officers in criminal prosecutions is to serve as a witness for the state. Even if the officer didn't personally witness the alleged crime, officer testimony is used to establish probable cause for warrants, stops, and arrests, chain of custody for evidence that is being presented at trial, an accounting of the procedures followed during an investigation, and probably a few other things I am forgetting at the moment.

If an officer has a demonstrated tendency to lie, a defense attorney can use that information to undermine the whole prosecution case. To that end, most prosecutor's offices keep a list of officers in their jurisdiction that the office will not call as witnesses because of a demonstrated history of untruthfulness. To be included on that list is to be "Brady-listed."

Getting Brady-listed can have interesting implications for an officer's career. If an officer can't testify in court, there is an argument that they cannot perform one of their core job functions and ought to be laid off. Because it can be so hard to fire an officer for disciplinary reasons and make it stick, sometimes a law enforcement agency will use an officer being Brady-listed as a backdoor way to terminate the officer's employment. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. When it dosn't work, the agency ends up with an officer that they can't fire, but who they also can't use for actual police work. So they end up manning a reception desk or a fingerprint machine, or doing any other damned thing their managers can think of that won't result in them testifying in criminal cases. In some jurisdictions, officersof this type are known as the "Brady Squad."

Another interesting aspect is what this has done to the notion of truth. Whether or not we would agree with it, courts have taken the position that certain kinds of lying by a police officer are not Brady material. For example, being an undercover basically requires lying, but courts don't view undercover work as undermining an officer's overall truthfulness. Similarly, courts generally accept cops bluffing in the course of an interrogation or interview.

At the same time--because various minor forms of lying are pretty common and the stakes of an untruthfulness finding in an official proceeding are so high--IA investigators, agency managers, and police unions have invented all manner of "exaggeration," "venting" and other excuses to avoid reporting every demonstrable untruth to their local prosecutor.

Nevertheless, and again because the stakes are theoretically so high, the specter of Brady and the threat of an untruthfullness finding haunts all manner of internal politicking inside law enforcement agencies.

So there you have it: a rule intended to prevent prosecutors from sitting on evidence favorable to the Defendant has instead killed the notion of truth. And defense attorneys still hardly ever get exculpatory evidence in discovery.

# ? Sep 25, 2021 00:41

Butter Activities: May 4, 2018

I�m curious about the process for actually getting on a Brady list because I�ve never heard of it actually happening. Does it basically require a judge to go out of their way or some sort specific conviction of the cop?

# ? Sep 25, 2021 01:00

Aegis: Apr 28, 2004; The sign kinda says it all.

SMEGMA_MAIL posted:

I�m curious about the process for actually getting on a Brady list because I�ve never heard of it actually happening. Does it basically require a judge to go out of their way or some sort specific conviction of the cop?

The list itself (to the extent that there is a discrete list) is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion--nothing technically forbids prosecutors from calling cops with a documented history of dishonesty as witnesses, the prosecutor is just saying they won't--so what specifically gets a cop on "the list" can differ somewhat.

In general, though, cops get Brady-listed because (a) a judge or magistrate determined that they lied on the stand, so there's a documented history that can't be handwaved away; (b) an investigation determined that they lied (and can't/won't write it off as an exaggeration or whatever); or (c) the prosecutor's office on its own concludes that the cop is a liability and can't be relied on not to wreck their case.

vvv Yup, you've got it right. vvv

Aegis fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Sep 25, 2021

# ? Sep 25, 2021 03:43

Shooting Blanks: Jun 6, 2007; Real bullets mess up how cool this thing looks.

-Blade

SMEGMA_MAIL posted:

I�m curious about the process for actually getting on a Brady list because I�ve never heard of it actually happening. Does it basically require a judge to go out of their way or some sort specific conviction of the cop?

Based on my reading of that post, getting on a Brady list is an entirely informal thing where the prosecutor's office decides that a given officer cannot be put on the stand, and communicates that to the PD, who then has to figure out what to do with the officer because they're now less useful.

That said, Aegis, those are some wildly fascinating posts and I'd love to pick your brain.

# ? Sep 25, 2021 03:44

The Oldest Man: Jul 28, 2003

Shooting Blanks posted:

Basically this. Police unions have backed IA forever because it lets them shield themselves from public scrutiny. The whole "we have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing" bullshit. Even the departments that have civilian oversight boards generally try to render them toothless as rapidly as possible.

Seattle had a recent hat-trick where an Office of the Inspector General auditor resigned and filed a whistleblower complaint after being told verbatim by his boss (both the IG and Deputy IG) that he couldn't call the Seattle Office of Police Accountability out in multiple circumstances, up to and including committing fraud to protect the cops they're supposed to be investigating. That's: the cops, lying -> the Office of Police Accountability, hiding evidence and committing fraud -> the Office of the Inspector General, telling its own staff to shut the gently caress up and make nice with the OPA instead of investigating them when they lie on behalf of the lying cops.

You literally can't reform this poo poo, we've tried, it doesn't work.

The entire article is worth a read (https://southseattleemerald.com/2021/08/09/oig-auditor-resigns-claims-oig-puts-opa-allegiances-over-police-accountability/) to get to grips with just how rotted out the system is, but here are some of my favorite bits.

quote:

�I expressed my shock at the IG�s reaction and relayed I was troubled she was not concerned with the substance of my findings but was only concerned about OPA�s possible reaction if my email was obtained via Public Disclosure Request (PDR),� C�s letter continues. �We proceeded to go back and forth for 45 minutes, during which I repeatedly told the IG I was uncomfortable with being in an oversight position but being unable to provide substantive oversight. As far as I am aware, the IG took no action on the false information in this DCM and a corrected DCM was never published.�

The incident in question here? The cops fabricated a claim of seeing a man with a bunch of molotov cocktails and used that as a pretext to deploy flash and stun grenades, pepper spray, and beatings against a peaceful crowd of demonstrators that included young kids protesting at their their police union building. The OPA helped cover for them, then OIG shut up its own inspector when they determined the OPA was lying on behalf of the cops.

quote:

�I was troubled to see a great deal of the complainant�s personal medical information included in the CCS, none of which was provided by the complainant. In this case, OPA obtained unredacted medical records from a Force Investigation (FIT) file and used this sensitive and protected medical information in the CCS and DCM to discredit and diminish the victim�s injuries. OPA included a two-paragraph analysis of her medical records, including the complainant�s ethanol level, speculation concerning pre-existing medical conditions, and an acute alcohol intoxication diagnosis.

�The IG instructed me to draft a letter to OPA, for her signature, conveying these concerns,� C continues. �However, she [Judge] never signed or sent this letter to OPA. She took no formal action, and it wasn�t until the complainant�s attorney filed a formal complaint with OIG that any action was taken (the complaint is now with SDHR [Seattle Department of Human Resources]). As of the date of this letter, this sensitive medical information remains posted on OPA�s website.�

C includes the draft of the letter to Myerberg, written Jan. 26, 2021. This document is contained within the ethics complaint.

In the quoted section of the ethics complaint above and in the Jan. 26 letter, C is referencing this CCS, in which the OPA appears to attribute the fact that a protester went into cardiac arrest after a police officer hit her in the chest with a blast ball to the level of ethanol in her blood (indicating that she had been drinking). But as in another protester�s case (which the Emerald also recently wrote about), this appears to have been a violation of medical privacy laws.

In this incident, the OPA fraudulently obtained medical records and then blamed a victim of police violence for drinking and causing the cardiac arrest that nearly killed her. The leadership at the OIG shut down investigation of the OPA's criminal actions in both obtaining those records and also failing to hold the cops accountable. So of course, the official record was never changed and is still that the cops did nothing wrong and the victim is to blame.

Good thing I saved this video of the cops hitting her directly in the chest with a grenade so you can see what happened for yourself.

https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1270184140898525185?s=20

Office of Police Accountability, folks.

The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Sep 25, 2021

# ? Sep 25, 2021 08:26

elise the great: May 1, 2012; You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

The poo poo I saw at that SPOG march� the one where they blastballed and maced little kids� haunts me. We showed up, the kiddos started drawing on the street with chalk, the cops played �Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy� over the PA, and within sixty seconds they were beating people and chucking gas canisters right into the group of kids.

The kids had no gas masks� who makes Honeywells that small? One of the kids was in a stroller. They choked and screamed and puked and several of them called frantically for parents as the police flogged the crowd into a stampede with explosives and batons. I have no idea what happened to any of them.

I can�t loving stand it that the pigs who did this, laughing and cheering as they swung batons and tossed explosives, are still armed and protected and walking around our city refusing to get vaccinated. And the OPA says it was totally fine and keeps doubling down on its brazen lies.

Whew I�m mad

# ? Oct 11, 2021 17:23

eSporks: Jun 10, 2011

I wish mainstream media covered protests better. I've tried to explain to so many liberals that the tactics police use cause riots, and they just laugh it off, tell me to stay off social media, and throw me in the same camp as Q believers.

One of the protests I was at, everyone was kneeling in silence for 8 minutes. Cops just charged the crowd and made everyone panic and trip over each other.

If they aren't actively being violent, they are threatening it. Just a giant game of "I'm not touching you" bullshit.

# ? Oct 11, 2021 19:42

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

eSporks posted:

I wish mainstream media covered protests better. I've tried to explain to so many liberals that the tactics police use cause riots, and they just laugh it off, tell me to stay off social media, and throw me in the same camp as Q believers.

One of the protests I was at, everyone was kneeling in silence for 8 minutes. Cops just charged the crowd and made everyone panic and trip over each other.

If they aren't actively being violent, they are threatening it. Just a giant game of "I'm not touching you" bullshit.

Media has a close relationship with cops because people are lazy, overworked, and beholden to a business model that wants to make money over informing people.

You get a lot of clicks and engagement with crime stories and police will feed you those for free. You also have to have a good relationship with them or they will block you out of crime scenes and whatnot.

They're bullies and a gang and if you make them look bad they cut you off.

There was a video a few pages back of some news anchors pointing out how ridiculous it was that LAPD bombed a poor minority neighborhood and the live reporter was there pulling officers over to argue with her coworkers for daring to say something vaguely accurate about police behavior.

# ? Oct 11, 2021 20:22

eSporks: Jun 10, 2011

Oh yeah, I get why media backs cops, I just wish it wasn't that way. MLK was certainly right that the white moderate is the biggest obstacle to reform. It's just amazing the amount of propaganda Americans eat up, and then how irate they get when you point it out to them.

# ? Oct 11, 2021 22:03

The Oldest Man: Jul 28, 2003

eSporks posted:

Oh yeah, I get why media backs cops, I just wish it wasn't that way. MLK was certainly right that the white moderate is the biggest obstacle to reform. It's just amazing the amount of propaganda Americans eat up, and then how irate they get when you point it out to them.

He actually said that the white moderate is the biggest obstacle to freedom and justice.

# ? Oct 13, 2021 07:10

Victar: Nov 8, 2009; Bored? Need something to read while camping Time-Lost Protodrake?

www.vicfanfic.com

eXXon posted this in the US Current Events thread; I believe it is absolutely relevant to this thread and deserves to be read. It's a two-part transcript of an interview on the Ezra Klein Show, about the recent rise of violent crime in the US and problems with US policing.

quote:

EZRA KLEIN: I�m Ezra Klein, and this is �The Ezra Klein Show.�

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hey, it is Ezra. So while I�m on paternity leave, as you know, we�ve got this all-star team of guests, but this week � this is the week I am particularly excited about. Not to overhype it, but Rog� Karma has been with the show since July 2019, a long time now back when I was doing the podcast at Vox.

His official title is staff editor, but there isn�t really a title they can describe how much he contributes to the show. So much of what you think is me being good at my job is Rog� being good at his. So I am very excited to hear what he does with the mic this week.

ROG� KARMA: It�s really hard to overstate just how powerful a force violence can be in people�s lives. Violence, it doesn�t just take lives. It traumatizes children. It destroys community life. It entrenches racial and economic inequality.

But violence isn�t destructive for people�s lives. It can also be catastrophic politically. It can result in the kind of punitive tough-on-crime policies that have devastated Black and Brown communities for decades, and that makes what�s happening right now truly worrying. Last year the United States experienced a nearly 30 percent rise in murder.

That�s the single biggest one-year increase since we started keeping national records way back in 1960. Homicide shot up in basically every major city in the U.S., and they�ve continued to rise well into 2021. And if the state and local races across the country earlier this month were any indication, this violence is going to be a defining issue in future elections.

Patrick Sharkey is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, and I�ve come to think of his 2018 book �Uneasy Peace� as really the book for making sense of this moment. Often this violence is treated as if it came out of nowhere, but Sharkey�s core argument is that the relative peace on American streets on the eve of 2020 was far more fragile and far less stable than is typically understood.
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It�s not just that last year was unprecedented. It�s that American society was already a tinderbox waiting to explode. At the center of Sharkey�s thinking is what I�ve come to refer to as the dual realities of American policing. On the one hand, there�s really robust evidence that police are effective at reducing violent crime. But in Sharkey�s view policing is also an inherently unsustainable way of dealing with violence, one that tends to undermine whatever peace it achieves for many reasons that we discuss here.

The good news is that police aren�t the only institution capable of addressing violence, and this is where Sharkey�s work is truly distinct. He�s done some of the most rigorous empirical analysis showing that community organizations were central to the great crime decline of the 1990s and 2000s, and he�s developed a compelling community-based vision of public safety as a result � one that tries to tackle the problem of violent crime without relying on the tools of state violence to do so.

That last point is an important one. There�s a deeply frustrating tendency in this conversation to downplay either the harms of violent crime or the harms of police brutality depending on your political leanings. The reason I wanted to have Sharkey on the show, among other reasons, is that he starts from the position that individuals, families, communities can only truly flourish when they feel safe, when they feel safe from both violent crime and state violence. And he builds a model of public safety on top of that insight.

So this conversation begins with the current murder spike and the dual realities of American policing. But a huge part of it is about what this alternative public safety model could look like, about what it would mean to try to address violence without relying so heavily on police and about all the thorny difficult questions that that raises.

As always the show email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. My conversation with Patrick Sharkey after the break.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Patrick Sharkey, welcome to the show.

PATRICK SHARKEY: Thanks, Rog�. It�s good to be here with you.

ROG� KARMA: You�ve called violence the fundamental challenge of cities. Tell me about that. Why is violence so fundamental?

PATRICK SHARKEY: What I mean is that the very idea of city life breaks down when public spaces carry the threat of violence when cities are unsafe. So if we think about cities as places where public life is prioritized over private life, where people come together in shared spaces, whether they�re subway cars or playgrounds or theaters or baseball parks � whatever it might be � that idea of shared collective space starts to break down when there is the threat of violence. So people start to retreat from the subways, retreat back to their homes, keep their kids inside. Collective life starts to wither away. So I argue that violence is a fundamental challenge of cities, because nothing about cities can work, the idea of cities doesn�t work as long as people are worried about venturing outside their homes and going into public space.

ROG� KARMA: I think when we normally think of cities, now at least, we think of yuppie urban professionals, sort of, college educated elites, but you specifically focus in your work on how violence affects the most marginalized, on the relationship between violence and inequality. So can you talk to me about what violence and its effects actually look like in people�s lives?

PATRICK SHARKEY: I don�t want to give the impression that I�ve lived it. And if you haven�t lived in a violent environment, I think it�s not possible to fully understand what it�s like to have a family member shot or killed or to live amidst the chaos of police sirens and police tape and blood on the pavement and everything that comes with the horror of violent crime. What I�ve done is I�ve gathered more and more evidence of how violence reverberates around communities, how it affects everyone within communities with its most pernicious consequences on the most disadvantaged segments of the population.

I started down this line of research really because of one study I carried out where I was trying to assess how children are affected when there�s a specific incident of extreme violence in their neighborhood. So this was done with data from Chicago, and I found that children who took a standard test of cognitive skills right after an incident of violence in their neighborhood looked as if they had missed about two years of schooling compared to kids who took the same assessment just before an incident of violence. A homicide had occurred in their neighborhood.

So the impact was so large that I thought it was wrong. So I replicated the study. And the second time I did the study, the impact was even larger than the first time. And that finding now has been replicated in dozens of studies since in different contexts and countries, and the research that�s been done, and it�s kind of built off that finding, shows that violence clearly doesn�t make children less intelligent, but it occupies their minds.

It makes children less able to focus, to concentrate. It affects their school attendance, their sleep, their levels of stress hormones. And it alters their trajectories. So that�s what I started with. I was looking at the consequences of violence for children.

As I did more research, I started to think more broadly and carry out more research on the consequences of violence across entire communities. And what I found is that violence doesn�t just have a direct effect on young people. It undermines community life. It makes families less willing to invest in neighborhoods, less willing to raise kids in a neighborhood. It makes teachers less likely to remain in a school district. It makes business owners less likely to set up shop, so there are fewer jobs available. It makes residents retreat from public spaces like parks, playgrounds, libraries, community centers.

So I�ve said already that urban inequality creates the conditions for violence, but violence amplifies inequality. It undermines community life. It undermines the very idea of city life.

ROG� KARMA: And that makes the current wave of violence even more worrying. In 2020, the United States experienced a 29 percent rise in murder, the single biggest one-year increase since we started keeping national records in 1960. And this increase wasn�t driven by a handful of outliers, right. The number of homicides shot up in basically every major city in the United States. Give me a read of what�s going on here.

PATRICK SHARKEY: There was a huge increase in gun violence, in particular, and I think it will take more research. I hate to say it, but it will take more research to figure out exactly the set of factors that had the biggest impact. But there were a few major shocks that the whole country went through, and the first was obviously the pandemic when the country locked down in March of 2020.

So it wasn�t just about individual hardship or loss of life or sickness that went with Covid-19. It was also that the institutions that provide the foundation of community life started to shut down. I mean schools, but I also mean libraries and community centers and parks and playgrounds in some cases.

These are the institutions, these are the places that bring people together, that bring people out into public space. And again, I�ll say this over and over, but when people retreat into their homes, when they feel like they�re on their own, then communities become vulnerable to rising violence. So there was first the shock of the pandemic. Second was and relatedly was a rise in the prevalence of guns. So more guns were purchased last year than at any point in the history of the country.

And as early as March and April, there�s really good research from people like Jens Ludwig and Jeff Asher showing that police started seizing more and more guns despite fewer arrests in the early months of the pandemic. And so the prevalence of guns creates the conditions for more violence.

And then lastly was the set of protests that spread across the country, the protests against racial injustice and police brutality in response to the murder of George Floyd. And when there is this kind of high profile protests against police brutality, then interactions on the street can start to change in multiple ways. First, police can change their behavior. They can choose not to get involved in incidents where they have any discretion, and that can lead to a rise in violence. But secondly � and this is the important change that I think doesn�t get enough attention � residents can begin to check out. They can stop calling the police for help, to stop providing information, to stop going along with the way things worked before they watched what happened to George Floyd. And so both sets of processes can lead to a rise of violence.

And so all of these processes came together last year, and it�s very difficult to out which were the most important. But they came together, and they resulted in a situation where I think a lot of Americans had the feeling that they were on their own. There was a sense of normlessness, disconnection, what sociologists call anomie that pervaded public life, and I think this created the conditions for violence to start to rise.

ROG� KARMA: One of the possible causes that you didn�t mention, and then I think is important to at least reference here, is that there�s a tendency on the right to blame this spike on blue city governance or police defunding or progressive prosecutors, right. I was just looking at a Morning Consult poll from earlier this year that found that 74 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of independents thought that defunding the police was one of the major factors contributing to the violence increase. So is there any merit to those explanations?

PATRICK SHARKEY: There�s no merit to those explanations for what happened last year. Police budgets had not fallen when violence started to rise last year. And violence rose to equivalent degrees in cities run by Democrats versus cities run by Republicans. So what happened last year was not about defunding the police.

ROG� KARMA: I think there�s a real tendency, both on the left and the right, to view this spike monocausally, to look and say it was the pandemic; it was the lockdowns; it was the protests; it was guns. But something that I think you�re getting at and that I�ve come to see more and more is that a lot of these different drivers of violence seem like symptoms of the same basic disease. You talked about anomie, and I see it as a pretty profound legitimacy crisis for the criminal justice system, especially in the communities most impacted by it. And there�s good evidence to back that up, right.

In 2020, Black Americans trust in the police dipped to an all-time low. According to Gallup, only 19 percent of Black adults said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in police. For the criminal justice system as a whole, that number was just 11 percent. So you started getting at this earlier, but what happens when communities lose faith in those systems?

PATRICK SHARKEY: Yeah, so I rely heavily on the ideas and the work of ethnographers, particularly a researcher named Monica Bell, who has done some of the best work on this exact question. And she uses a term that she calls legal estrangement, and it�s based on her work in Baltimore. And what Monica argues, and what she shows in her work, is that longstanding mistreatment and hostility between police and residents creates this feeling of alienation where many people in low-income communities of color see themselves as outside the purview of the laws, unprotected by the state on their own, not full citizens in their city.

And getting back to the question about what drove the rise of violence last year, I think this was a big part of it. As the institutions of collective life shut down, as after-school programs shut down and schools shut down, a growing sense took hold that people were on their own. And in New York City in the early part of the pandemic, enforcement of social distancing rules was almost entirely focused on people of color. This is a symptom of what was going on.

So millions of people bought guns, and a few months in the pandemic when the nation rose up in protest and police departments responded in lots of places with just brute force, I think that feeling was reinforced. So there is something deeper here that has been growing for a long period of time and has become more visible in the past five or six years that underlies what we saw last year.

ROG� KARMA: Let�s step back and talk about that for a minute. For many people, I think, it felt like this violence came out of nowhere. America went from experiencing its most peaceful era in decades, the product of the great crime decline to a sudden explosion of violence.

But you make a really different argument in your book, that on the eve of 2020 America was essentially a tinderbox waiting to explode. So tell me about that. How would you describe the public safety status quo in America on the eve of 2020?

PATRICK SHARKEY: Well, what I�d say is I wrote my book on the decline of violence from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, and that period, around 2014, was one of the safest years in the history of the country. But it�s a serious mistake to focus exclusively on the benefits of the crime drop when more than 6 million people are under the supervision of the state, whether they�re in jail or prison or probation or parole, when something like one out of five Black men who were born in the late �60s would go to state or federal prison at some point by middle age and one out of 1,000 Black men will be killed by the police.

So there is something missing in talking exclusively about the decline of violence, and the conclusion in the book was that the fall of violence did have its greatest impact on the most disadvantaged communities in the U.S., but the dominant methods that we�ve relied on to deal with violence in this country, which includes aggressive and sometimes violent policing, intensive surveillance targeted toward low-income communities of color and, of course, mass incarceration, these methods have created an enormous amount of harm. They undermine community life, because they remove people from their families, from their neighborhoods. They weaken communities, because young people often don�t feel welcomed in their own neighborhoods. And the dominant actors switch. They become police and parole officers, rather than parents and coaches.

So the core argument, the core conclusion of the book is that the crime drop had enormous benefits that were targeted on the most disadvantaged communities but that the methods that we have relied on for decades to respond not only to violence but to all of the problems that come when you have extreme urban inequality have created this version of uneasy peace, have left us in a situation where we have low levels of violence but no one is content. And it�s fragile and it�s precarious, and we saw that borne out over the past few years.

ROG� KARMA: I want to hold on that, because I think that is a really important idea, this idea that policing is an ultimately unsustainable tool for dealing with crime. It�s also a counterintuitive idea, and so I�m wondering if you can expand on that and particularly talk about some of the mechanisms here. When you say that the methods that we�ve relied on historically to deal with crime in America are unsustainable and produce this sort of fragile uneasy peace, this tinderbox that�s waiting to explode, what are you talking about?

PATRICK SHARKEY: So this goes back decades, and it goes back to the way that in the U.S. we have responded to the broader challenge of urban inequality. There were set of changes that took place in policy decisions going all the way back to the 1940s when urban economies began to deindustrialize and employment opportunities in central cities started to shrink. The federal government made several large scale investments in suburban areas through the highway system, through subsidies for home mortgages. This provided a mechanism for central city residents to leave and to avoid rising property taxes, but it also allowed firms to escape the grip of big city unions to take advantage of a labor force outside the city and land outside the city.

At that moment, central city neighborhoods lost tax revenue. They also lost political influence. Funding for infrastructure collapsed, schools crumbled, parks, playgrounds, public housing complexes were not maintained. Poverty became more concentrated. Joblessness rose.

And when all of these things happen, when central city neighborhoods are abandoned, left on their own, when poverty is concentrated, when institutions start to fall apart. This creates the conditions for violence to rise. So it�s really important to kind of situate the problem of violent crime within this history.

This didn�t come out of nowhere. It�s not a mystery why some neighborhoods are consistently dealing with high levels of violence. These are the neighborhoods that have been areas of disinvestment for decades, areas where institutions are starved of resources, where residents are less likely to come together to solve collective challenges, and as a result, these are the neighborhoods that are vulnerable to violence. So we had this long period of abandonment where resources were extracted from central city neighborhoods, and then we responded with this policy regime of punishment. And I put these two together to describe the dominant approach to dealing with violence over the past 50 years, this dual strategy of abandonment and punishment, which has put us in the situation that we see today.

ROG� KARMA: I think the long-term divestment in predominantly low-income Black and Brown neighborhoods is an incredibly important part of the story here that way too often gets overlooked. And so I want to come back to that. But I think this is where you�ll run into the argument. Sure, it�s great to talk about root causes, but at the end of the day, we need to address the violence happening right now.

And policing is one of the most effective tools we have for doing that. And that�s true, right. The evidence that policing does reduce crime is fairly robust. But you make the argument that at the same time policing reduces violence in the short-term, it can also make communities much more vulnerable to violence in the long-term. Can you talk about those dual realities of policing?

PATRICK SHARKEY: The first thing to say is that there�s a large body of evidence that makes very clear that when you have more police on the street, there is less violence. So police are effective at reducing violence, and that evidence comes from a range of different empirical approaches, usually taking advantage of natural experiments that lead to periods of time where there�s more police on the street or funding that becomes available to bolster police forces. So the empirical work shows very clearly that in a given neighborhood or city, if we add more police to the streets, there will be less crime. But it is not designed to tell us anything about the harm that arises from having more police on the street.

So people like Alyasah Sewell and Amanda Geller and Joscha Legewie have all done really strong work showing how living in an area where there is aggressive policing, where young people are routinely surveilled and stopped by the police weighs on young people�s minds, hurts them in school, leads to psychological distress. In some communities, young people live the lives of as suspects, and it does enormous damage. So there�s a very clear conclusion from the literature that the effects of policing are not only to reduce violence, but they also generate these other consequences.

And what I would say more broadly is that the dominant methods that we�ve relied on to deal with violence, which includes aggressive policing but also includes this broader project of mass incarceration, they run counter to the basic ideals of what it means to be a citizen in the U.S. And they�ve created growing resentment as more and more people have watched the videos of their fellow citizens being killed by police officers and have come to the conclusion that they�re not seen as full citizens of a state. They�re not protected by this institution that is supposedly there to preserve their safety. This was visible all the way back in 2014, when I started writing. A decline of violence that relies on the institutions of punishment, one that does not build stronger communities, one that doesn�t deal with the larger challenges of extreme inequality, is never going to be a sustainable way to create safe but also strong neighborhoods.

ROG� KARMA: And I think this brings us back to the current crime wave, because one thing that happens when that resentment builds up and builds up over time is eventually it just bursts. We saw this in 2014 and �15 in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, and we saw it across the country last year in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. And there�s pretty good evidence from Roland Fryer and others that violence tends to increase in the wake of these protests against police brutality.

And that fact is typically wielded as a way to shift blame for the current violence on protesters, to warn that any efforts to scale back policing will result in huge waves of violence. But you�re making a very different argument, that this pattern is actually an indication that we need a new model for dealing with violence. So can you talk a little bit more about the relationship between protests against police brutality and violence and the conclusions that you draw from that relationship?

PATRICK SHARKEY: The central conclusion that I make is that when we rely on one institution to dominate public space, which we�ve done with law enforcement for the past 50 years, and then that institution, police officers, step back from that role, then it creates a conditions where violence can rise. And so there�s more nuance in what actually happens in the aftermath of high profile protesters. There are shifts in behavior that arise from police, and we saw evidence of these shifts in behavior.

So as gun violence was skyrocketing in New York City, arrests for guns plummeted after the protests where violence really started to spike. So police can choose not to get involved. Police can choose to step back from their role and make a statement either because they�re worried about getting in trouble and being the next viral video or to make a political statement to make the point that, OK, you�re going to protest what we do. We won�t do anymore. We�ll step back. We�ll stop doing our job.

But the second set of processes are equally important, and they involve residents. And in the aftermath of high profile protests when residents have this sense that they are not seen as full citizens of the state, residents sometimes start to check out. They can stop calling the police for help. They can stop providing information to police. So both of these processes can lead to a rise in violence in the aftermath of high profile protests.

This doesn�t mean that protests lead to violence. It means, again, that when we rely on the police to dominate public space and control public spaces by force and then the police step back from that role with no other institutions that step up, then we can see a rise in violence. And that last point, that we don�t have a set of institutions across the country that are ready to step in and play a more central role in controlling violence and in supporting residents, in advocating for their neighbors �

so when I look at this � and we�re going to get to the policy implications, I know. But when I look at the situation that we saw last year, when I look at the rise in violence, it brings me back to this point that this is not really about the police. It is about the absence of another set of institutions in our cities that can play a more central role in looking out over public space, making sure everyone is cared for, advocating for their neighbors. We don�t have an institution that acts on the basis of well-being. We have an institution that we have relied on for a long time that relies on the mechanism of punishment and force. And so that is an unsustainable way to deal with violence.

ROG� KARMA: I think for someone hearing this argument about the costs of modern policing, about the way it sows distrust in communities, the way that it makes communities more vulnerable to violence, the way it creates legal estrangement, the natural response people may be, well, sure, but that�s only true of bad policing, right. When police are doing their jobs correctly, those things shouldn�t happen. And if the problem is restricted to bad policing and bad policing only, then relatively simple things, like making it easier for departments to get rid of bad apples or hiring a wider diversity of officers or making police training better or adopting body cameras, right, that these things can fix the problems of bad policing and ultimately the problems that you�re talking about. So when we�re talking about these costs of policing, the harms that policing imposes, are we talking about policing in general, or are we only talking about, quote, unquote, �bad policing�?

PATRICK SHARKEY: It�s a great question, and I think there are things that can be done to improve policing and to change policing tactics and reduce the number of worst case outcomes. But I will say there�s a bigger issue here. So we have created this completely decentralized institution of law enforcement where there are 18,000 different law enforcement agencies operating mostly independently, mostly from local resources. And we have asked that institution to solve all of the problems that come with concentrated poverty.

This is remarkably unfair to law enforcement. It results in wildly divergent practices of policing, because police officers are asked to deal with a range of problems that go well beyond gun violence but include mental illness, addiction, intimate partner violence, self-harm, the foster care system. Police officers are not trained to deal with all of these challenges, and we don�t provide the supports, meaning social service providers other agencies that can assist with the homeless population, with the mentally ill, with addiction, with substance use.

And as a result, we treat every Department of Justice investigation as if it�s an isolated case, but it�s not. It is about the institution of policing and the spatial structure of inequality in the U.S. It is about the fact that every law enforcement agency operates on its own with its own funding stream that arises from local sources. That is the cause of the extreme inequality that we see in policing across the country.

ROG� KARMA: I think that�s a good bridge to talk about how we address this homicide spike. The leading answer right now, even among liberals it seems, is more policing. Cities are increasing their police budgets. Many lawmakers are pushing for additional officers.

And I think the argument you�ll hear from liberals on this is that, sure, policing is highly imperfect and inflicts all kinds of terrible harms, but the harms of violent crime are worse. Homicides are responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths than policing. And so I think the thinking goes if there is a choice between police violence and violent crime, then policing is ultimately the lesser of two evils, so we should choose it. And so what we�ve been talking about complicates that story. But the question I have for you is that the trade-off that we face?

PATRICK SHARKEY: I think there�s lots of evidence to indicate that it�s not a real trade-off, that it�s not the choice that we have to make. Back in the summer of 2015, I sat down with three graduate students, and we looked at as much data as we could find on what was happening in the places where violence was falling. And we saw the rise in police forces. We saw the rise in incarceration, but we also saw another trend. In the 1990s as violence was falling, nonprofit organizations were forming all over the country, organizations that were formed to deal with violence itself but also to build stronger communities, organizations that were dealing with addiction, mental illness, homelessness, housing.

And what we found is that the growth of nonprofit organizations in the 1990s stands alongside the other changes that we�ve talked about as a central reason for why violence fell. So in a typical city with 100,000 people, every 10 organizations that were formed to build a stronger neighborhood, to deal with the problem of violence reduce violent crime by about 9 percent. And this finding is reinforced by lots of rigorous empirical work evaluating the work of nonprofits using randomized controlled trials, looking at interventions like after-school programming, summer jobs programming. So we now have a body of evidence that makes it very clear that although the police do reduce violence, they are not the only actors that reduce violence. Community organizations mobilized at the local level have an equally or stronger impact on violence, but these organizations just have never been thought of as central actors, central institutions, in the effort to control violence.

ROG� KARMA: I think that causal analysis is really important as a proof of concept, but let�s get specific here in terms of what these alternatives actually look like. My understanding is that there are three main buckets of interventions that have a real track record of reducing violence. The first is basic social service provision, and I think this is a set of interventions that will probably be most familiar to listeners. Things like expanding Medicaid, access to mental health counseling and addiction services, all of these things have been shown to reduce violent crime.

But then there are a set of interventions that we can think of as more community-based. So these are things like violence interruption, cognitive behavioral therapy, summer jobs programs, all of which are examples of community institutions stepping up to engage those most at risk of violence with tools other than force.

And then lastly, there�s this bucket of really sort of counterintuitive interventions where relatively modest changes to the built environment can have shockingly impressive anti-violence effects. So can you just walk me through the sorts of interventions that fit into each of those buckets and the actual evidence behind them?

PATRICK SHARKEY: So there are a bunch of programs and organizations that have been evaluated with randomized controlled trials, and these get all the attention, because this is the gold standard for evaluation research. And so some of the conclusions from that work are things like cognitive behavioral therapy plus after school sports programs like, for instance, and in the Becoming a Man Program running in Chicago reduced arrest for the middle-schoolers who took part by 45 to 50 percent, so just these extraordinary benefits of taking part in this program. Similarly, with summer jobs combined with cognitive behavioral therapy or other youth programming, these programs have been evaluated in both New York and Chicago.

The Chicago version, Sara Heller evaluated and found that it reduced violence by 43 percent over the following 16 months after participation. And then you have a set of experimental programs that have done things like redesign abandoned plots of land or abandoned buildings. So this was a program in Philadelphia where plots of land were again randomly assigned to receive a treatment where they were redesigned and greened. And Charles Brandeis and John McDonnell and others have evaluated this work and found that in higher poverty neighborhoods redesigning abandoned plots of land places that used to signal that an area was not cared for, that was not maintained, when those plots are redesigned violence falls by up to 30 percent.

Improved street lighting around housing developments in New York City, Aaron Chalfin and several co-authors evaluated the siting of improved lighting around housing developments and found that they reduced nighttime felonies by over 30 percent. So this is kind of the evidence for the skeptics. This is the evidence that�s coming from randomized controlled trials.

What I want to make clear is that these are not the only programs out there. There has been work going on for a very long time in neighborhoods across the country that hasn�t been evaluated in the same way but that has generated extremely strong evidence of transformation at the local level. So groups like Save Our Streets in New York or Advance Peace in Richmond, California, the Detroit Justice Center � there are lots of these organizations across the country that have shown over a long period of time that they can play a central role in transforming their neighborhood and providing services and support to residents without the costs of policing.

So this work has been going on for a very long time. It�s just that it�s never been seen as a central approach, as a central strategy to confront violence. And that has to change. These organizations deserve the same funding, the same commitment that the police have received. We�ve just never given it to them.

ROG� KARMA: So I think people hear that list and the size of these effects, and it sounds almost too good to be true. But I think the pushback you�ll get here is: Can they scale? The evidence we�ve been talking about is largely from small, controlled, randomized controlled trials. Most of these interventions have never been tested on anything like a citywide level, and the success of a lot of these best of these programs, like Becoming A Man or READI Chicago or Advance Peace, it seems really tied to the fact that these organizations have incredible leadership, extremely talented staff, that they�re uniquely equipped to deal with the environments that they�re operating in, which is great. But scaling up that kind of success is extremely difficult. So I�m wondering how you think about that challenge moving forward.

PATRICK SHARKEY: I think it is extremely difficult. They can�t scale without years of planning. So there�s absolutely no reason to think that a different set of institutions can emerge and be immediately effective without being given the same commitment and the same resources that we devote to law enforcement.

So in my work, I�ve made the case that we don�t move toward this new model by targeting police budgets, by seeking to exact revenge against the police. When you rely on one institution to deal with the problem of violence and then you try to weaken that institution without first building an alternative set of organizations and institutions that are ready to deal with violence, then you�re going to create a destabilized community. You�re going to see a rise in violence.

So the argument that I make is that we need to seek a better form of policing, and that is very clear. But at the same time, we need to start investing in a new model. We need to start investing in a new set of institutions that over time, with sufficient resources, can begin to play a more central role in looking out over their communities.

ROG� KARMA: I want to talk about a major city that has at least tried to do something like this and with some success I might add. When most people think of New York City�s approach to crime, they think of Rudy Giuliani and Bill Bratton. They think of this really brutal, broken windows, stop and frisk style of policing. But you�ve written about the ways that New York has been taking some pretty significant steps towards a very different model or at least was before the pandemic. So can you talk about how New York�s approach to public safety has changed over the last decade?

PATRICK SHARKEY: So what happened in New York, I think, is crucial to remember, because there were set of changes that took place from the start of the De Blasio administration through 2019 that represent what I think of as really a proof of concept that a different model to create stronger neighborhoods to deal with violence is possible. And it took several different forms in New York. So first it was a lighter touch style of policing and prosecution where the number of arrests plummeted, where stops by police officers basically ended as a central tactic of the NYPD, and more summonses fell and the jail population fell.

So people don�t realize this, but the jail population in New York has fallen to a level where it is closer to the levels in Western Europe than it is to the rest of the country in the U.S. And at the same time, there was a turn toward the community. And again, that took several different forms � the most notable ones being the emergence of what the city called the crisis management system, and secondly, the mayor�s action plan for neighborhood safety, both which focused on building, turning to the strengths of neighborhoods and residents to play a central role in responding to violence. And it�s important to go back and look at the predictions for what was going to happen by people like Ray Kelly, the former commissioner, Rudy Giuliani and others, who argue that if you end stop, question and frisk, violence is going to explode.

Well, when stop, question and frisk ended, violence kept falling. When the jail population declined, violence kept falling. And it fell to record lows all the way until 2019, and it showed very clearly that a different model, a new model that no longer relies on the institutions of punishment can build stronger neighborhoods and it can also reduce violence.

ROG� KARMA: And I think it�s important to point out here that this wasn�t just a small decline in crime, right? Gun violence in New York City declined by around 50 percent between 2011 and 2018. The city experienced what was essentially a second great crime decline at a moment when it was simultaneously scaling back the footprint of its criminal justice system in all the ways that you just mentioned. That�s pretty astounding.

So I want to talk more about what this effort actually looked like. Can you tell me more about two of those institutions you just mentioned, the crisis management system and the mayor�s action plan for neighborhood safety? What did they actually look like on the ground? What were the kinds of problems that those institutions addressed?

PATRICK SHARKEY: They did a range of different activities, but some of the actual programs put into place included interrupters who were out in the community making connections with residents, helping to diffuse conflicts, helping to interrupt patterns of reciprocal violence. But there were another set of actions that I think took on great importance in New York. So one was after a shooting took place in a given neighborhood, the city had these close connections with local leaders and residents and would organize vigils in neighborhoods where a shooting had taken place to make the statement that this is not tolerated in our community, that gun violence is not acceptable, that we will retake public space in our community.

Those kinds of efforts, which involve building trust between the city and residents and local leaders, were part of a broader system of shifts that represented in my mind a turn toward the community. And the mayor�s action plan was another form that this took where Liz Glaser was the director of the Mayor�s Office of criminal justice. And what she did is she dreamed up this program that came to be called NeighborhoodStat, where residents, local leaders, representatives from the city, representatives from law enforcement all came together in the same room to look at data, to look at what was happening in their neighborhood, what was causing problems in their neighborhood, what was leading to violence and then to take steps to deal with it to make sure that the Department of sanitation was accountable for dealing with a pile of trash that had accumulated outside a housing development, to make sure that residents were out recruiting kids to take the summer jobs that were being made available by the city.

So it was a whole set of changes that took place. And in that sense, I think it was a very meaningful shift in responsibility, a move away from the idea that the police were solely responsible for responding to violence and toward the idea that communities and residents should start to play a more central role.

# ? Dec 15, 2021 08:35

Victar: Nov 8, 2009; Bored? Need something to read while camping Time-Lost Protodrake?

www.vicfanfic.com

This is part 2 of the Ezra Klein interview transcript, originally posted by eXXon in the US Current Events thread.

quote:

ROG� KARMA: The New York model we�ve been discussing was undeniably a major improvement over the previous model for public safety in New York, the Rudy Giuliani model, the broken windows policing model. But also, we can�t deny the fact, it had plenty of shortcomings. There were still flagrant abuses. The NYPD is still viewed by many communities as a highly authoritarian, very problematic institution.

And so even though these programs had some success, I think it�s fair to say I don�t think either of us would ultimately choose New York as our ideal model of public safety. But I�m wondering taking that model as a baseline, how would you build on it? What would you change?

Clearly, New York showed that this can work, that you can have both a reduction of crime and a scaling back of the criminal justice system, that communities can be empowered to do this. But I�m wondering where you would take that further and what you would change about it. Give me the Patrick Sharkey vision of public safety here, in an ideal world.

PATRICK SHARKEY: I see the New York model as a proof of concept. So as you say, Rog�, it did not fulfill the kind of lofty ideas of turning toward the community, and it was not sustained to the degree that one would hope. The next step is to take seriously the idea that we as a nation need to invest in a different set of actors. So despite the evidence telling us that local organizations have tremendous capacity to control violence, we�ve never given them the resources, we�ve never given them the commitment to do this job in a sustainable way. We need to move toward a model where we are investing in community organizations in the same way that we�re investing in police departments, and I think that�s the next step.

ROG� KARMA: So what would the role of police be in that vision. And in particular, we�ve talked a lot about violence in this conversation, but police currently do a lot more than just prevent and address violence. So I�m wondering how do you think more broadly about this project of disaggregating or unbundling the current role that police play? And what�s the role that you ultimately see them playing both in this new model and also in the transition period while we move towards it?

PATRICK SHARKEY: Yes, so I differ from a lot of colleagues on this question, but I think police are going to have to continue to play a central role in dealing with violence. And the primary reason why that�s the case is because there are so many guns in circulation in the U.S. There�s somewhere between 300 and 400 million guns in circulation, which means that lots of incidents where the police get involved carry the threat of a shooting, and we don�t have another set of institutions that can deal with the problem of gun violence, or at least we don�t have many institutions that can deal with the problem of gun violence. So I think police are going to have to continue to be a central institution for dealing with gun violence.

What I would argue is that they should move to the background, and police should be called when a gun is involved. They should be called when residents or leaders or outreach workers from an organization request the presence of a police officer. I don�t think patrol should be carried out by police officers. I think patrols should be carried out by advocates in the community, people who are out in public space looking out for the well-being of their neighbors. So this is a very different role for the police, but I think they will continue to be a core institution in our cities.

ROG� KARMA: So as you�re describing this, the way I�m imagining it is moving away from this one size fits all model where policing is the sole institution responsible for responding to everything to maybe something more like a three or four layer approach. And I want to outline what I think that could look like and get your thoughts on it.

So first is an outer layer of individuals who occupy public spaces in the role that police do now, right, violence interrupters, community mediators. A lot of European countries like the U.K. and the Netherlands have what they call peace officers or community support officers, which are basically unarmed public employees that deal with low-level disputes and other issues. And then in the background, you�d have this more like violence prevention layer, cognitive behavioral therapy programs operating with at risk youth, summer jobs programs, teams that are in charge of cleaning up neighborhoods, greening neighborhoods, all of the interventions that we talked about earlier that have been shown to reduce violence.

But then it seems like another part of this would be when there are actually calls for service, when someone calls 9-1-1 that there is another group of individuals of institutions that can respond to nonviolent calls. Something that really shocked me when I started reporting on this issue was that only a fraction of calls for service actually involve violent crime. The vast majority are nonviolent incidents, and so the idea would be you�d have a different set of actors, whether it�s mental health clinicians or social workers or some other set of responders handling those calls.

And then there�s this last layer, which is police, who if I�m understanding correctly their role would be to respond to calls for service for violent crimes, right, for things like shootings, homicide, et cetera. Does that sound like the right sort of way to be thinking about this? I�m just trying to paint a picture for listeners of what this could look like.

PATRICK SHARKEY: Yes, so I think there�s a continuum from where we are now where police dominate public space and respond to most calls for service to a model where the police are entirely absent, and community organizations are responsible for public safety. And I fall somewhere within that continuum where I would make the case that a different set of actors should be the first to be out in public space greeting their neighbors, a different set of actors should be responding to mental health crisis responses, should be providing traffic safety, should be trying to deal with conflicts in public space, providing school security and so forth with the police in the background. Meaning that if a situation becomes dangerous, if a social service provider goes out to a home and is worried that there�s a gun involved, then police are on call and can be asked to come in and help with a call for service. And so in that model police are in the background, but they are still present. So if this is proposed not as an attack on the police but as a call for investment in a new set of institutions, it generally has widespread support among the police officers that I�ve talked to and I think will make the job of law enforcement safer, more fair, less stressful and more effective.

ROG� KARMA: So I think the challenge you�ll get to that vision is that if you really want to deal with violence in a systematic way. You need policing to play a much more outsized, proactive role than what you�ve been describing here. Let�s take New York as an example, because it�s the place we�ve been discussing. When you ask criminologists about what drove down violence in New York City during the 2010s, something they�ll cite is that the NYPD really doubled down on its efforts to deal with violent crime, not through something widespread like stop and frisk but by taking a more surgical, aggressive approach towards the individuals most likely to commit violence.

One example of this is the department�s highly controversial campaign of gang takedowns, in which suspected members of criminal gangs are arrested in highly coordinated raids and prosecuted on conspiracy charges. One recent study by Aaron Chauvin at UPenn and others found that gun violence in and around public housing communities fell by approximately one-third in the first year after a gang takedown. Now these takedowns have long faced criticism from activists and civil rights advocates for things like unfairly targeting too many young men of color, sowing mistrust in communities, even hardening gang ties. And yet the researchers estimate that they explain nearly one-quarter of the decline in gun violence in the city�s public housing communities over the last eight years.

So I�m wondering how you think about that tension. On the one hand, it�s incredible that New York was able to successfully move towards this new public safety model. But at the end of the day, it seems like at least part of its success was built on top of this controversial tactic, and I think that raises the question of whether it�s really feasible to move towards a model of public safety that relegates police to the background or whether that kind of move would ultimately put people in danger and lead to more violence.

PATRICK SHARKEY: It�s a very real tension and a huge challenge. So let me answer this in two ways. First, I�ve talked to community organizers who have worked in New York City for decades who have told me how they worked with the police to make sure they�re focusing only on the tiny number of people who are engaging in gun violence.

And so standing outside these communities, it�s very easy to criticize these kinds of policies like gang takedowns, but residents who live there have a different perspective. And I think there are lots of examples of efforts where residents are playing a more central role in working with the police to actually focus on the problem of gun violence. So that�s one part of the answer.

But secondly, it�s important to be clear that the research done by Aaron and his co-authors � and Aaron is one of the best researchers out there in criminology � but the research that he�s carrying out there gives an estimate of the effect of a gang takedown in comparison to no gang takedown. OK, so that�s the counterfactual that they�re estimating, and that�s inherent. You can�t avoid that. That�s what the research design gives you.

But one could imagine a different counterfactual. Instead of relying on the police raiding of public housing development and arresting people, one could imagine engaging the very small number of people in the development at greatest risk of becoming involved in gun violence giving them intensive support, mental health services, transitional jobs. So this is a model that is actually being implemented, for instance, in the READI program being run in Chicago by a group called the Heartland Alliance, which, again, is a randomized controlled trial that is showing extremely strong results, at least in the preliminary analysis.

So we have had one way of doing things for a long time. And it�s really hard to imagine a different world, a different city where we�re responding to the very real threat of gun violence with some institution other than the police. But I argue that we have to start doing that and think about different models to deal with the same challenge.

ROG� KARMA: So first of all, I will say the early results for the READI program that you just mentioned are pretty amazing. The official evaluation of it is still under way, but one early analysis of the program found an 80 percent reduction in shooting and homicide arrests for participants, which is just astounding. But I think now is the time where we have to bring reality back in and point out that it�s hard enough to build out an alternative model like this in times of relative peace.

But we�re living through a spike in homicides right now. So I think the pushback you�ll get here is we don�t have time to scale up programs like READI. We don�t have time to build out these kinds of alternative institutions like NeighborhoodStat, and we certainly don�t have time or the leverage to pick fights with police unions that would be needed to get some of the stuff done.

So let me put it to you this way. Say I�m a liberal policymaker, mayor of a blue city, for example. I need an answer for how to stop the bleeding tomorrow, not five, 10 years from now. And from that vantage point, policing it may be costly, it may be imperfect, but at least it�s a tool we know well and that we can deploy right now at scale. What would you say to that policymaker?

PATRICK SHARKEY: I would say start that shift right now. When the mayor�s action plan for neighborhood safety in New York City began to be implemented, this was a situation. There was a spike in shootings that took place, and the question was how to respond right now.

And what they did was they opened community center hours for longer periods of time. They reached out to organizations across the city to see who could play a bigger role in being out in public space and talking to young people. And this didn�t happen separate from the police. This happened with the support of the police.

So again, like there are a set of models that have been implemented over time that involve the police that have shown to be effective, have proven to be effective. And some of that involves hotspot policing. Some of that involves what�s called problem-oriented policing. But we�ve never given a different set of actors a chance.

And so again, you know I would pitch this as it is not an argument to reduce police budgets. It is not an argument to scale back police forces right now. It is an argument to begin to build an alternative set of institutions. And it will take time. But much more important than time is resources. And until we devote the resources to that alternative model, I think we are going to turn back to the police and for good reason.

ROG� KARMA: I take your point that we�ve never given these organizations a real chance, but I�m not sure right now people are willing to. And I think a lot of this comes down to how you read the politics of the current moment. And to be frank, it doesn�t look great from my view.

The historical evidence we have here is pretty clear that increases in violence tend to produce a more punitive public. And to some extent it looks like that�s what�s happening right now. A recent Pew survey found that 47 percent of adults say spending on police in their area should be increased up from 31 percent in June 2020. In Minneapolis, voters recently rejected a proposal to replace the police department with the Department of Public Safety. And in elections earlier this month, some moderate pro-police mayoral candidates defeated more progressive opponents, most prominently Eric Adams in New York but also in places like Buffalo and Atlanta and Seattle.

And of course, there are some trends in the opposite direction, right, the re-election of Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, voters in Austin, Texas rejecting a proposal that would have required the city to hire hundreds of more police officers. There was an issue 24 in Cleveland where voters chose to create a civilian review panel for the police department.

So there are some trends in the other direction here, but nothing even remotely close to the kind of transformative investments we�ve been talking about. And so I�m wondering what your read is of the politics of this moment and how you think it affects the viability of a new model for public safety. Because to be frank, I�m worried about this. I�m really worried that the politics here are going to turn and are turning in ways that absolutely take away any momentum we would have had that result in a double downing on police and that take us right back to the very uneasy peace sort of situation that got us into this mess in the first place.

PATRICK SHARKEY: So I think the danger is in thinking about the investments in police forces and the investments in communities as trade-offs, as an either/or choice. And there�s lots of support for investing in a different set of institutions to deal with things like mental health, to deal with addiction. There�s support for relying on a different set of actors to respond to calls for service.

So rather than framing these choices as either/or, I argue that we should continue to fund police departments. And if anything police departments may need additional resources to change the way they do their job. But at the same time, we need to start to build support for community organizations that can begin to play a central role.

ROG� KARMA: I take your point that a lot of this comes down to framing, and it strikes me that looking from the outside the politics of this moment seem incredibly uphill and impossible in many ways. But to your point, I don�t think they have to be. And to add to what you were saying in my reporting on this, I�ve waded through dozens and dozens of public opinion polls on policing, many of which were conducted in the last year and a half.

And when you do that, like a really common pattern emerges. First, if you ask people about abolishing or defunding the police, you consistently get substantial majorities opposed, which explains why even the most progressive candidates are running away from those labels. If you ask people on the other hand about diverting funding from policing to social services, it�s closer but usually you lose by a bit depending on the exact language.

But if you ask people about just investing in alternatives like you�re saying without mentioning police budgets at all, you usually get overwhelming support, bipartisan support. So I think the problem here to your point is that the question of police alternatives has far too often been framed as part of the zero sum story, right, a politics of scarcity. But it really does seem like there�s a positive-sum politics, a politics of abundance that�s at least possible here, a way of like were talking about framing this as a set of investments to reduce pressure on police, to actually help cities and communities address crime more effectively. And again, the polling seems to indicate that can be quite a popular message politically.

PATRICK SHARKEY: I think it can be. And I think you�re right in interpreting those public opinion polls. There is lots of support for funding local community organizations. It�s just we�ve never seen this as a strategy to deal with the problem of violence. And so I argue that we should begin to see these groups as central actors in that effort, and that requires an investment on a much larger scale than what has been proposed. All of the funding that goes to these kinds of organizations is at a level where it leaves them in a position where they are fighting to survive, where residents don�t know if they�re going to be there in 10 years or 20 years. And so it undermines the role that local community organizations can play, and that really has to change if they are going to become central institutions in the effort to control violence.

ROG� KARMA: I think that brings us to one of the key pieces of federal legislation that�s on the table right now at the time that we�re taping this. One component of the Build Back Better Bill currently being negotiated in Congress is a $5 billion � that�s billion with a b � investment in community-based violence prevention, which would ostensibly go towards the kinds of programs and institutions we�ve been talking about. And it seems to me that�s one way out of this politics of scarcity mind-set, right.

If cities don�t have to take from their police budgets in order to fund these alternatives because they are getting federal funding, that is what makes the sort of politics of abundance, this positive sum politics possible. And needless to say that $5 billion is a lot more funding than these kind of interventions have ever seen in the past. So assuming it doesn�t get cut out, which is a very real possibility, what kind of impact do you think that $5 billion could have?

PATRICK SHARKEY: It�s very meaningful, because it is the first time in a very long time that the federal government has proposed an approach to dealing with the problem of violent crime that is not just centered on the police, and $5 billion is not trivial. But here is the reality. It reflects the fact that we are not thinking about these groups in the same way that we�re thinking about law enforcement.

So we spend about $120 billion on the police each year. And again, the organizations doing this work on the ground are fighting for every dollar they get and just trying to stay afloat. So I would make the case that in order to be effective, in order to play a central role in cities across the country, this group of organizations needs the same resources that police departments get.

Like, we should start with that assumption. They should not be expected to be as effective as police departments without the same resources. Until we get to that point, we�re sending the message that these are marginal organizations that aren�t seen as central in the effort to deal with violence.

ROG� KARMA: I think people who believe in the defund the police mission will hear this conversation and be skeptical. Like you said, this is not anywhere near the amount of money that we put in police. And there�s no telling � there�s no guarantee at least that this funding will result in a reduction of police presence that�s nowhere in the bill, right. But I sometimes think about these kind of investments as the back door to defunding.

And the theory here is this: By leading with federal investment, you really sweeten the deal for cities. They can begin to build these alternative institutions and programs without having to touch their local police budgets, because if anything these programs are there to support the police. And so you avoid fights with police unions.

You avoid the political backlash of scaling back policing during a crime wave, and then the theory is that once these programs are up and running and working and succeeding that they�ll build political momentum for themselves, that police will appreciate the fact that they�re dealing with less violence, that residents will appreciate the fact that their communities are safer and other cities maybe will look over and say, hey, like maybe we should try that too. And then a few years down the line, the city government looks around and says, hey, wait a minute. Why do we have so many police officers when crime is so low? Maybe we don�t need this big of a police budget after all. I�m wondering if you find that vision of how these kinds of investments can change the politics compelling?

PATRICK SHARKEY: It�s a possibility. But what I�d say is if you look at � so let�s use the example of New York where there used to be 2,200 murders every year, and then a few years ago, there were less than 300. Over that time period, the police force has just expanded, police budgets expanded, the funding for the corrections system expanded substantially. So there was not this kind of recognition that, OK, this problem is much less severe. Let�s scale back.

And the unions are very strong in New York and elsewhere, and that�s part of the reason why. But there was a widespread sentiment that extracting funding from police departments was not a good decision even in times where violence was lower, even in times where there were other institutions that had stepped up. And to be honest, I would not argue against that.

I have seen police departments that are doing great things. I toured a center for addiction that was created and funded by Kevin Thom who�s a Sheriff in Pennington County in South Dakota who saw people in his district getting arrested night after night and coming in and out of the system over and over. And in a deep red state, he raised funds for an alternative approach to dealing with the problem of addiction and alcoholism in his community and created this amazing center where people get the services they need instead of being arrested.

So I would not be opposed to a scenario where we build up alternative institutions, and the police continue to do their job and continue to have the same levels of funding as long as they�re doing their job differently, as long as they are shifting to the background and playing a secondary role, and community organizations and residents of communities are given the commitment and the capacity and the resources to play the central role in building stronger neighborhoods.

ROG� KARMA: I think a lot of what we�ve been talking about here has been the optimistic take on things, right, the idea that a better politics of public safety is possible, that we don�t have to live in a zero sum world, that we don�t have to operate in a framework of scarcity. And I think that�s certainly true at least on a normative level. But at the same time, my read of the history of the last 50, 60 years of criminal justice politics, it makes me pessimistic. And that�s because it�s not like this is the first time people are asking for these kinds of investments, right.

One of the central themes of James Forman�s �Locking Up Our Own� is the way that the Black community and Black politicians have for decades been asking for these kinds of both/and solutions, not only more police officers but also investments in jobs and poverty alleviation and mental health and addiction services, et cetera. And yet the story he tells in the book is that every single time, they asked for both/and, they were just given more policing and prisons and never really any of those other things. So I�m wondering how you think about that problem. Why do policing and incarceration seem so baked in, so dominant, so sticky as a set of solutions, even when a lot of the evidence points in the other direction?

PATRICK SHARKEY: It�s a really challenging question. And I think the answer is that we started down this road in the late 1960s. So instead of responding to all of the problems that became so visible in the 1960s � and that includes concentrated joblessness but also rising pollution, rising violence, social unrest of many different forms, fiscal distress in cities � so instead of developing a response that asked Americans to come together, to mobilize, to invest to try to solve the problems that come with extreme inequality, we�ve instead gone down this road where we�ve given Americans a whole set of mechanisms to separate themselves from all of the problems that come when you have extreme inequality. That includes investing in highways. That includes exclusionary zoning. That includes the formation of gated communities.

So we have developed what I call a spatial structure of inequality, where there are a whole set of pathways by which Americans can avoid, can separate themselves from the problem of violence and also from the correlates of it, like police violence or aggressive policing. And I think that�s a big part of the explanation. Because we have built up this spatial structure of inequality, it makes it extremely difficult to break down, to take another path, to think about how to bring people together and to mobilize around this problem. And I think that�s a big part of the reason why it has been so persistent over time even as more Americans have seen the worst examples of police violence, even as Americans have become aware of mass incarceration. It is really hard to break down this system of spatial inequality that we�ve built up over time.

ROG� KARMA: I think that point you made about spatial inequality is super important. There was this period in the 1960s I think about a lot when crime rates were beginning to rise. But the prison population in the U.S. was actually going down. And the most convincing explanation I�ve heard as to why that happened was from the late Harvard criminologist Bill Stunts. He used to argue that this divergence occurred, because many of the people who lived in high crime neighborhoods at the time, mostly white immigrant communities like the Irish and Italians, those communities also tended to have political control over their own neighborhoods. They chose the prosecutors. They elected the local Sheriff. They elected the mayor. And the result was that these high crime communities weren�t overpoliced, because the people who were being policed were actually in charge of the policy.

But to your point about spatial inequality, the suburbanization of American cities has really flipped that dynamic. The legal scholar John Pfaff makes this point in his excellent book �Locked In� that criminal justice policy in many urban centers today is disproportionately controlled by white upper class suburban voters who don�t live in the inner city and who don�t face the downsides of the punitive policies that they vote for. And something Pfaff likes to point out is that almost all of the progressive prosecutors in the United States have been elected in cities that don�t really have suburbs or at least don�t really have suburbs that have political influence.

So that seems like a real part of this dynamic you�re talking about, that when the people who are actually the recipients of these policing and incarceration policies, when they aren�t in Democratic control of the response to crime, you just get a much more punitive set of responses, whereas maybe if they were in control, you�d get much more of this balanced holistic approach.

PATRICK SHARKEY: That�s right, and it�s a great point. You can�t deal with this problem jurisdiction by jurisdiction. You have to understand that all of the challenges that we�re talking about are directly intertwined with the larger challenge of spatial inequality. And that�s what John points out in his observation about where progressive prosecution becomes possible. There is this larger challenge of spatial inequality that sustains all of these other problems.

ROG� KARMA: So we�ve been talking a lot about the reasons that this political project of reimagining public safety is going to be a challenge. But I want to end with a vision of what the world could look like if this project succeeds. So can you tell me about your visit to Perth, Australia and what you saw there?

PATRICK SHARKEY: Sure. Yeah, I�d be glad to. So I went to Perth in Western Australia, because I�d been reading about models from different parts of the world where groups have created local institutions other than the police to look out over public space, to de-escalate conflicts, to help people in their community. And I�ve been reading the work of Harry Blagg who�s a researcher at the University of Western Australia and has documented the work of what are outreach patrols or night patrols among Aboriginal groups and Australia groups that have experienced centuries of mistreatment from the state and from the police in that nation.

And to be clear, these are not neighborhood watch groups. This is the first thought that Americans tend to have when I talk about these groups. So we have to get that image out of our heads. These are groups whose central task is to go out in public space, to find people in need, people in difficult circumstances, people at risk of coming into contact with the police and to connect with them, to provide help, to get them the care they need, to reach them before they interact with the police.

And so I went out in Perth in March 2017, I believe, with two remarkable outreach workers, Annie and Rachel. And what struck me first is the professionalism. So everyone on staff was there ahead of time to talk through potential issues, to coordinate schedules. When we started the shift, we met with social service providers. We met with the police to discuss the plans.

And every member of the outreach teams is of Aboriginal descent, which means they have deep ties to the community. They know where teenagers were holding house parties. They knew about feuds going on that night or things to look out for. So what�s important to note is that law enforcement in the U.S. operates with legal authority, but the outreach teams operate on the basis of cultural authority to use the term that Harry Blagg uses. And this becomes manifest when you go out with them.

So their goal was to look out for people in their community, to help people. And it doesn�t always work perfectly. So there was one man who was shirtless and belligerent and drunk out on a public sidewalk, and Annie and Rachel tried to talk to him, but they couldn�t get through. He ended up getting picked up by the police. But then there were other men who were sick. And Annie and Rachel sat with, ask questions, learned about them, ultimately called an ambulance, and waited with them. There were groups of teens who were on the verge of a brawl, and they walked in, spoke to the groups, and broke it up, disperse the groups before they got arrested. There was a woman who didn�t want to go home because she didn�t think she would be safe. They found a safe space for her to sleep.

So I want to be clear that you don�t have to go to Perth to see this in action. There are lots of groups doing this work in the U.S., and this idea has been around for a while. It�s expressed in the foundational literature of the police abolition movement and the movement for Black lives that�s going on in this country.

But what was distinct in Australia is that this group was seen as a core institution for public being and safety. They were professional. They were well-funded. They were well-trained. They had the respect of the community and of law enforcement. They had the commitment of the state behind them.

And I think we have to emphasize that creating safe and strong neighborhoods can�t just be about tearing down what we have, about exacting revenge against the police. It has to be about creating and supporting new institutions to look out over neighborhoods, make sure everyone is cared for, every space is safe, residents get the services they need, no one falls through the cracks. And the Nyoongar Outreach Services provided that model in my mind of what this looks like when a group has the capacity to do this work to help people, rather than punishment. So there�s this idea of switching from warriors to guardians. They were not warriors out on the streets of Perth. They were really advocates for the people of their community.

ROG� KARMA: I think that�s a great place to end. So let me ask you the last question we always ask on the podcast, which is what are three books that have influenced you that you�d recommend to the audience?

PATRICK SHARKEY: Thanks for giving me this chance. So I picked three books that have had a big influence on me at different points of my life. And the first and most relevant to this conversation is a book by Randol Contreras called �The Stick Up Kids,� and it is about a group of the author�s peers in the South Bronx who reached early adulthood at the moment right after crack cocaine had hit its peak, right as the police had started to crack down and the market began to dry up. And it is a beautifully written book that illuminates what I think of as a core idea of sociology, which is how our lives unfold through the interaction of our own decisions in combination with a set of forces that lie outside ourselves. So that is my favorite with apologies to other colleagues who have written great books. That is my favorite book of social science of the past decade, I think.

The second book that I�ll mention is the book that made me want to be a social scientist, . And that�s William Julius Wilson�s book, �The Truly Disadvantaged.� And this was published in 1987, and it was the book that first put forward an explanation for how urban poverty had changed over time. And I read this book in college, and I�m from a family where my parents, kind of, conveyed this idea in my brothers and me that part of what made life meaningful was to work against inequality. And they did that through public education. Well, I read Wilson and thought maybe it�s possible to work and against inequality by understanding it, by trying to explain it in order to confront it. And so �The Truly Disadvantaged� is what first inspired me to go down that road. That�s the second one.

The third is a book going way back. My great high school teacher Mr. Evans, my English teacher assigned Hermann Hesse�s novel �Siddhartha,� which is loosely based on the story of the historical Buddha, and this is a book that I loved and one that I think a lot of teenagers love. But it also opened my eyes to a very different tradition of thought, and it, kind of, led me to explore the ideas from that part of the world. So I�m always grateful to Mr. Evans for assigning that book.

ROG� KARMA: Patrick Sharkey, thanks for coming on the show.

PATRICK SHARKEY: Thanks for having me, Rog�.

ROG� KARMA: �The Ezra Klein Show� is a production of New York Times opinion. It is produced by yours truly, Annie Galvin and Jeff Geld, fact-checking by Andrea L�pez Cruzado and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Jeff Geld and Isaac Jones. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Alison Bruzek.

# ? Dec 15, 2021 08:37

Yuzenn: Mar 31, 2011; Be weary when you see oppression disguised as progression

The Spirit told me to use discernment and a Smith n Wesson at my discretion

Practice heavy self reflection, avoid self deception
If you lost, get re-direction

Long time no post but this is an incredible success story in "units that aren't the police making immense change"

https://twitter.com/dyllyp/status/1506442909893029888

And I bet you this unit costs far less than the equivalent amount of police officer salary/equipment/insurance/lawsuit set asides.

# ? Mar 23, 2022 14:30

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

Yuzenn posted:

Long time no post but this is an incredible success story in "units that aren't the police making immense change"

https://twitter.com/dyllyp/status/1506442909893029888

And I bet you this unit costs far less than the equivalent amount of police officer salary/equipment/insurance/lawsuit set asides.

That's fantastic.

# ? Mar 24, 2022 00:47

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 27, 2024 07:40

The Oldest Man: Jul 28, 2003

Yuzenn posted:

Long time no post but this is an incredible success story in "units that aren't the police making immense change"

https://twitter.com/dyllyp/status/1506442909893029888

And I bet you this unit costs far less than the equivalent amount of police officer salary/equipment/insurance/lawsuit set asides.

Yeah it's actually even funnier than that

quote:

Most of STAR�s calls for service come through Denver 911, where dispatchers are trained to send the STAR van for appropriate needs. But about a third of calls are from Denver police officers who responded to a call and determined it would be better handled by STAR.

�Officers consistently ask when there are going to be more STAR vans,� Sailon said.

# ? Mar 25, 2022 07:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > F The Police, and then what? A police/justice abolition thread

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