Behind the Bastards - Behind the Police: How Police Unions Made Cops Even Deadlier

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

If you thought police were deadly up till this point, wait until you hear about what unionization did to the U.S. police (hint: it got a hell of a lot of the rest of us killed.)FOOTNOTES: The History of Policing in the United States Study finds misconduct spreads among police officers like contagion The End of Policing  How Police Unions Became Such Powerful Opponents to Reform Efforts The unjust power of police unions How Police Unions Enable and Conceal Abuses of Power Minneapolis Police Union President Allegedly Wore a “White Power Patch” and Made Racist Remarks Police chiefs are often forced to put officers fired for misconduct back on the streets How a 50-year-old study was misconstrued to create destructive broken-windows policing In New York, major crime complaints fell when cops took a break from ‘proactive policing’ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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It was an incredible amount of money. You knew the painting was fake? Um... Listen to Art Fraud starting February 1st on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Mini Driver, and on my podcast, Mini Questions, I ask trailblazers across different disciplines the same seven questions. Questions about the inflection points in their life, what they like least about themselves, and what relationship has defined love for them. This season, I'm coming back with new trailblazers, like Blondie vocalist Debbie Harry, journalist and television host Jeremy Klopp,

editor-in-chief of Insta Magazine, Laura Brown, and creative juggernaut, Goldie. Join me as we continue this exploration on Season 2 of Mini Questions, on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Look for your children's eyes, and you will discover the true magic of a forest. Find a forest near you, and start exploring at DiscoverTheForest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of iHeart Radio. Now I am become pod, the destroyer of casts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. This is Robert Evans trying a new style of introduction. This is actually Behind the Police, our special mini-series, and Behind the Bastards.

We talk about history's greatest bastards, American police. Back with me for part five of this six-part series is my co-host, Jason Petty. Better known as the hip-hop artist propaganda. Jason, how you doing, man? So, man, eating dried mangoes and listening to old DJ scratch. And I hope that, like, I hope, you know, I'm sorry guys, I'm back, man. I'm here again. Thank God. Learning all the variants. Yeah, you're the first guest we've had for three straight weeks.

Look here. What do you think? Man, I'm getting, am I hitting Billy Wayne like zone? You're hitting propaganda zone. I like that, man. My own zone. The P zone. Yeah, like those calzone things that they used to make at Pizza Hut. I think it was Pizza Hut. The Pzone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those were good as hell. Yo, can I, quick joke about, quick joke, not quick joke. Quick story about calzones. Absolutely. And we can move on there. So my homeboy, Joseph Solomon. He's probably one of the most gorgeous men I've ever met.

And he's a caramel six foot six, like soul singer, poet. It's ridiculous. It's not fair. You know, you ever meet the guy where it's like, it's just not fair. You shouldn't be. Yes. No one should be this beautiful. So that's Joe, right? Joe lives in Atlanta.

He was ordering this pizza or he went to the spot, you know, it was during the quarantine. He wanted a calzone. And, you know, first of all, it's, it's Atlanta, you know, this let's be real, this, this, this chocolate city. These black people, right? And the whole shop was black people and he tries to get a calzone and he could tell based on the way that the lady was looking at him,

that she ain't know what a calzone was, right? So, so he, but she still was like, pressed a few buttons on the screen and then you could see her look back at the home. He's like, Hey, Hey, what's the, right? And they kind of whisper it back and forth. You could tell somebody must have Googled a calzone. And then he finally gets it.

And then stupid him didn't open the box till he got home. And he opened the box and it was just a pizza folded in half. I mean, that is essentially right. That's the funny part. I was like, that is a calzone. But that was, he was like, you just folded a small pizza in half. What else do you want? I mean, really, you know what?

Isn't like a calzone prop. The American policing. Yes. The evolution of American policing in the 1900s is not very much like a folded pizza. Thanks. Unfortunate. Thank the Lord above.

What if that's how we handled law enforcement? What if when you had two feuding gangs, the government just sent calzones over and we're like, Hey guys. Yo, if you tried calzones, some calzones, a little bit of barbecue, a couple of things. You know what I'm saying? It's like everybody just sit down. Let's just have some calzone and some hotlings.

I think a good 70% of the problems of law enforcement, like instead of tear gassing a bunch of protesters, what if the state provided calzones? I'd be with it. Yeah. And it's cheaper too. I bet we'd save money on tear gas and such because you can buy, you can feed a lot of people calzone calzones for the price of hundreds

of tear gas canisters. Let me tell you something. And you know, it's less to clean up. You know what I mean? It's easier on the environment. Create more jobs. Create more jobs. Look, we just pods over.

Thanks very much, guys. Yeah. You know. Look forward to our new behind the calzone series. Behind the calzone. Once this idea of ours goes horribly wrong in a year. Yeah. The calzone shot a kid.

No one had ever seen anything like it. Belting with a calzone from a calzone. Yeah. All right. And we'd have to deal. Okay. So yeah. Sorry.

Last week we dug into the really the very racist roots of U.S. policing, the KKK, Jim Crow, lynching and the death penalty. And in doing so, we kind of took a break from the broader history of how police have evolved in this country and focused on like the enabling of white supremacy and the suppression of black people as an integral part of the justice system. And today we're going to kind of peel back out again to discuss how the broader system of policing evolved in the U.S. over the last century to

bring us to where we are now, which is, you know, police stopping random people for no reason, doing horrific violence to them and then being shielded from consequences by police unions. So that's what we're going to explain today. Okay. Cool. Yeah. There it is.

This will be fun. We're going to talk a lot about police unions and a lot about stop and frisk and broken windows. Okay. Yeah. Those two stop and frisk gets to like my life. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So to get to that point, we have to, you know, zoom back a bit to the start of the 20th century. By the time this nation started entering, you know, what most people would call the modern era, most police departments were de facto the enforcement arm of organized crime in the words of one scholar. So cops existed.

We talked about this in episode two. Cops existed as muscle for criminal, for like gang leaders and stuff. Yeah. And police departments engaged in constant election fraud because their jobs were generally tied to the position of local political bosses who were also gangsters. Okay. And during this period, this is like Tammany Hall and shit. Yeah.

And during this period, police drew salaries, but there was no such thing as overtime and their salaries were generally shit. So instead they took a lot of bribes. Dr. Gary Potter, who's a historian of law enforcement insists that it's actually wrong to call the police in this period corrupt. He writes, quote, they were in fact primary instruments for the creation of corruption in the first place. So like the police aren't corrupt, the police create corruption in this period,

which is an interesting, but I think really important distinction to make. That is meta, bro. Like I actually took a second like, dang, I need to lean back from that one for a little bit. Like that is profound. Yeah. Yeah. Gary Potter doesn't mince fucking words.

At all. Yeah. So in the early 1900s, police departments in major cities, particularly in the eastern seaboard, but also Chicago, because Chicago is a Midwestern city, but we all kind of lump it in with the east coast. We all do it. Yeah. Even Chicago does sometimes when they're lazy, like deal with the Chicago.

You should have moved further east if you wanted to not. I was like, do you have? Yeah. Do you get snowed in from a tundra? You're on the east coast, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

So yeah, police departments in major cities in the eastern seaboard in the early 1900 did a bit more than just provide muscle for gangsters and crack the heads of labor organizers. They also got into the business because no one else was going to do it of what we'd call social welfare. It was kind of their job to take care of the homeless and the critically ill. And they weren't good at this, but police in Boston, New York and other cities sheltered homeless people in precincts.

They emptied public toilets and they kept track of the infected during epidemics. Now, since again, these men were at the time hired gangsters. They were not renowned for taking to these tasks with a great deal of empathy, but nobody else really gave a shit. They didn't give a shit either, but they were kind of the people you gave the bad jobs to. Again, not a lot of respect for law enforcement in this period. So they're like, we need somebody to like pull the homeless people off the street so

they don't freeze to death, have the cops do it. Yeah. So it was prohibition that finally tipped law enforcement over the edge, like over the edge of creators of corruption to so outwardly criminal that the state had to like that the federal government had to do something about them. The sheer scale of corruption unleashed by prohibition and like the era of speakeasies and gangsters turned police departments into, you know, whatever they'd been before a complete mockery of law and order and federal authorities pushed reform and investigatory commissions

that had to look into a variety of different scandals. Dr. Potter lays out just a few examples of police crime that inspired the creation of commissions. Quote, number one, the formation of a prostitution syndicate by Los Angeles Mayor Arthur Harper, police chief Edward Kearns and a local organized crime figure combined with subsequent instructions to the police to harass the syndicates competitors in the prostitution industry. Number two, the assassination of organized crime figure Arthur Rothstein by police Lieutenant Charles Becker, head of the NYPD's vice squad.

And number three, a dispute between the mayor and district attorney of Philadelphia, each of whom controlled rival gambling syndicates and each of whom used loyal factions of police to harass the other. So like these are just a couple of examples of the sort of behavior police departments are engaging in at the time where they're, they're, they're just, they're even like more criminal than a lot of the criminal syndicates. Um, yeah. Yeah.

And another investigative commission that was set up during this period was the Linux committee, which was formed to look into the charges of police extortion in New York. It found that promotion within the NYPD in the early 1900s was based entirely on direct bribes paid by officers to the department of promotion to sergeant cost $1,600, a promotion to captain cost $15,000. All of these scant. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. He would just pay to get promoted in the police. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's just so crazy that like, I mean, as much as you want to believe that like throughout the course of time, we have gotten somehow in some way better at being the species we are, it's just, I just, the more you know of history, the more you're

like, no, we've kind of been a plateaued. We've kind of just always been like this, you know? And that's the part that just like, you know, because, because I'm thinking about like, I'm still hanging on the word on the, on the phrase of like, it created the corruption because I'm going, well, I mean, you don't pay him a lot. I am incentivized. Like, like you're just hoping these people would somehow not have the same corrupted soul as the rest of the people, but they just people, and they're going to find the path

of least resistance, the quickest way to get a buck, and the best way to like push other people down for their own success. I don't know why you think putting a badge on their chest go make them any different. So when you hear this stuff like this, I'm just like, God, dog, was it? Were we ever? Have we ever done good things? No. Well, yeah, you know, there's, there's a, I forget who the name of the individual who

it was, but there, I believe it was a Holocaust survivor and he wrote something to the, he had a quote that was something along the lines of in like any given period of time, like 10% of people are genuinely good, 10% of people are total monsters and about 80% could kind of go either way, depending on like where it's seen, how it seems the wind is blowing. And like if the wind is, you know, blowing in the way that like, if, if everyone in charge is literally running a criminal syndicate of like prostitution and, and like, and probably a lot of forced prostitution and like gambling and like murder for hire and all this stuff. If that's everybody, then yeah, that's what you get involved with.

Like then like, okay, well, I'll find some way to make money within the system. Yeah. It's the ocean. It's the ocean. So you just kind of like do it because that's, I mean, you got to swim. Yeah. You got to swim. Yeah.

So the current committee of 1913 investigated NYPD collusion and gambling and prostitution. The Seabury committee in 1931 also looked into the NYPD, this time into the broader system of bosses and bribery for political positions that was the core of why New York law enforcement sucked. Each of these commissions made changes, but right up until the 1950s, there were still regular inquiries into police involvement with gambling, prostitution and organized crime. And I cannot exaggerate how many of these committees were focused on the NYPD. Like one way to look at the 20th century is the federal government fighting tooth and

nail to stop New York police from being just a criminal enterprise. Like that took decades of battling. Yeah. Not metaphorically, not as a way to understand what's happening. No, seriously, they're just pimps with badges. Yeah. It's just what they actually are. And while I was Googling around, I wanted to kind of come up with another example or

two like the direct one of the NYPD, you know, being pimps or whatnot in the early 1900s. And it was actually a hard because there were so many cases of them in the 21st century doing the exact same thing. For example, while I was Googling around on this, I came across a 2018 story about a retired NYPD detective who ran a $2 million brothel ring using active cops as muscle and his inside knowledge of how department undercovers did prostitution stings in order to avoid getting busted. He knew that like undercovers weren't allowed to show their genitals to prostitutes, so he

would make all of the johns strip naked and like let themselves get fondled before starting the transaction because that helped him avoid getting busted by the NYPD. Yeah. There were seven active duty officers who worked for his prostitution ring. One of them was actually willing to work for free in exchange for discounts with his favorite prostitute. And 2018 is when that gets busted. Just regular scumbags.

It's awesome. Regular dudes just being normal scumbags. Yeah. It's like someone decided like, okay, let's take 10% of the normal scumbag population and make them immune to being punished if they shoot someone. Yes. Wow. So, yeah, while the federal government was fighting to make the NYPD a modestly less

criminal enterprise, a major revolution had started to overtake law enforcement nationwide and it started on the west coast. Luminaries in that part of the country began to wonder if perhaps police officers ought not be trained professionals instead of drunken gangsters. And the first real apostle of this gospel was a dude named August Vollmer. He was the very first police chief of Berkeley, California, and he served from 1909 to 1931. And this guy is about the best cop you're going to find in U.S. history. Okay.

Yeah. He did have like his early history. He was in part of like the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, but he was like a gunboat. He worked on like a gunboat. Like I'm sure he was part of the U.S. crimes in the Philippines, but he wasn't. It's not like a case with John Burge. Like I have no evidence that he was like running secret prisons and torturing people. He was just a soldier who fought in a bad war.

And then he became the police chief in Berkeley. And when he took the job, Berkeley police were just as corrupt as New York police. August only had a sixth grade education, but he knew enough to immediately ban the receipt of gifts and bribes for his officers. Like that was the first thing he did was like, obviously you can't take bribes anymore. This is so easy. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Again, sixth grade education. Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, we got to stop doing this. We should probably not do that, huh? Just gangsters. Yeah.

What if we tried to do the job, guys? Yeah. What if we treated it like a job? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he was, he's really, it's baffling the number of firsts this guy is responsible for in law enforcement.

He was the first police chief to put cops on bicycles in 1910. He was the first police chief to put cops on motorcycles in 1911. His officers received the very first radios in their squad cars. Vulner's department created the first centralized police record system. And he was the first chief in the United States to push his officers to use blood, fiber and soil analysis to solve crimes. He was one of the first chiefs to use fingerprinting. Vulner was also the first chief to require college degrees of his officers.

He was one of the first police chiefs to hire black cops, although not the first. But he was the very first police chief to hire female officers in 1919. August was also the first police chief in the U.S. to explicitly ban the use of the third degree, and he was a lifetime opponent of capital punishment. He was notorious and fairly unique among lawmen in this period for believing that communists had a right to organize and state their views without being beaten into bloody polks. Look at this guy. Yeah.

He's the best cop we're going to talk about. Yeah. I am like, I am impressed, bro. Like, you know, you see him riding by in his little like big, big front wheel, little back wheel. Silly, silly police car. Silly bike. Yeah, like the old school, old-timey Victorian bike, but he's a cop.

That guy used to salute like, hey, what's up, officer? Yeah. Yeah. He was trying. Yeah. At least you're trying. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, he was also one of the very first, like, people anywhere to teach classes in criminal justice, essentially like helping to invent that field of higher education. Like he was one of the first people to be like, we should probably have college classes that help people do this thing that's a job. And one of his students was a dude named O.W. Wilson, and O.W. Wilson went on to become the police chief of Fullerton. He was also the police chief of, Jesus, somewhere in the fucking Midwest, I forget where else he was the police chief.

Fullerton, California? Yeah. Fullerton, California. Okay. Yeah. And he was also the superintendent of the Chicago PD at one point. So he's a very influential, like running police departments guy. And he wrote a book called Police Administration in 1943.

And this was sort of a reaction to how most cops in big cities were drunken gangsters. And it basically O.W. Wilson, you know, who is the protege of Valmer is like, we need to professionalize police departments nationwide. And Wilson wanted police departments to be centralized and reformed along military style lines. This helped departments to keep a closer eye on their officers and stop them from, you know, just selling bootleg liquor or whatever. Yeah.

So you can see the logic in what Wilson was trying to do. It makes sense. Yeah. It makes sense. But it didn't work. Or it didn't work well. Yeah. For one thing, his drive towards centralization created powerful, unaccountable, authoritarian

police bureaucracies that were both unaccountable to the public and to the officers that worked there. Racist and sexist hiring practices were never reformed. And so these dictatorial police bureaucrats were basically just white dudes. Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice in Nebraska, notes that quote, a half century of professionalization had created police departments that were vast bureaucracies inward looking and isolated from the public and defensive in the face of any criticism, which does not sound familiar at all.

No. Yeah. Can't win. Can't win with these guys, man. Yeah. Every time you want it, like I want to be like, oh, yeah, well, that's good. Oh, well, there it is. It never quite works out, right?

No. Like they always seem to keep sucking even when you deal with what you think are the problems, which maybe hints that the problem is at the root of what we have police for as opposed to them needing bicycles, which not that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember one of my elementary school teachers used to say, hey, if every place you touch

on your body hurts, your finger's probably broken. So that's what I just think about. I'm just like, maybe your finger's broken, guys. Maybe the finger's broken. Yeah. Good, good, good way to describe that. Never forgot that. So, what's worse is that Wilson, like his mentor, mentor Volmer, both of whom I think

had good intentions, had seized upon the idea that police should focus on crime prevention rather than just investigation. Now, this was not a new idea. And again, you can see the logic in trying to prevent crime. But the way that it worked out in the real world is that these new professional centralized police departments suddenly started devoting a lot more time to sending cops out on patrol to stop and search people at random. Most of these people were members of the dangerous classes, which at that point were mostly racial

minorities in the United States, you know, the Irish weren't really being oppressed no more. But yeah. Bring that back. Yeah. As we've discussed, police had always worked to corral and control the movement and freedom of non-white people. Wilson's reforms helped to dress that up as crime prevention.

So now the cops aren't out there to keep, you know, black people in line. They're there to patrol for criminal behavior, in which they do the same thing. But it's harder to complain about if you're a white liberal. He's got some better codes. Yeah. Exactly. Better codes. Yeah.

And I don't think that was Wilson's intent, but that's what happened. Now actual police officers weren't much happier than the general public with these reforms. The resentment at their unaccountable distant and all powerful bosses helped to inspire a growing movement to unionize police departments. Now police in many cities had long sought the benefits of unionization, but since a huge part of their literal job was busting unions and murdering union organizers, this was a tough needle to thread. Hey, guys, a little conflicted here.

Yeah. Are we, aren't we killing these people for the same thing we think is a good idea for out? Oh, yeah. Well, fuck it. Yeah. So cops in some cities started to form fraternal associations in order to try to gain some of the same benefits of unions while also not feeling like complete hypocrites for murdering

union. Yes. Yeah. This did not work out well forever. These fraternal organizations just didn't, associations just didn't do what unions do. The first department to seek straight up unionization was the Cleveland police in 1897. They petitioned the American Federation of Labor, whose president Samuel Gompers turned them down, stating, it is not within the province of the trade union movement to especially

organize policemen, nor more than to organize militiamen, as both policemen and militiamen are often controlled by forces inimical to the leg movement. So like, it's not our job. Like you kill us. We're not going to let you join us to get more money to kill us. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, wait, you want me to help you be better at stopping us?

Yeah. No. No. Yeah. No, sir. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like buying oil from countries you're at war with.

Sorry. Yeah, or like partnering with Nazis over single payer health care and ignoring the fact that they're also in favor of Nazi shit because like, what if we work to know, don't work together with no one to kill you. Yeah. You don't want to do that. Don't work with them ever. Even if they're right about one thing, like cops are right, workers should unionize.

But that's like, still, still, yeah, there's still problems. So cops continued to seek the benefits of union membership, even whilst violently suppressing unions. In 1919, Boston's police asked the AFL for a charter, angry at, among other things, the fact that they had to pay for their own uniforms. The commissioner told them that they couldn't unionize and the AFL wasn't exactly a big fan either. But when they unionized anyway, 19 union organizers were fired and the police went on strike.

This is the first police strike with nearly 1500 officers off the job. The people of Boston took the opportunity to loot the ever loving shit out of their city. And I would suggest we look at this less as a sign of human nature and more of a sign of Bostonian nature. Yeah, that's how I was going to say it. This sounds really Boston-y. That sounds real Boston. Yeah, we'll talk about another time when this happened later and there wasn't mass looting.

So I'm going to write this up to Boston. Now this all prompted Governor Calvin Coolidge to declare that no public safety workers could strike anywhere, anytime, and his hard stance on this is part of what helped him become president later. Wait, wait, wait. He's saying, nope. What was his position then when he said that? Public safety workers should never be able to strike.

No, was he? No, I'm saying what was the office he held? Oh, he was the governor. He was the governor at that point. So wait. So he was saying, y'all not allowed to strike. And I'm like, okay, that's stupid because that's the definition of striking is like, so even the proclam, that's like the emancipation proclamation.

I'm like, oh, you finna set free the slaves in the states that are rebelling like you, what? Huh? So I'm just sorry. Just him making the proclamation just like sounded so stupid. I'm like, that's striking means we not listening to you. Anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. But there's also the question of whether or not the government can stop a strike. Like if a bunch of JCPenney's workers or whatever are unionized and they go on strike, the federal government can't do anything about that. But it's why like when the fucking air traffic controllers would not strike. Like they're like, no, we will criminally punish these people because their jobs are like, we can't have a society without their jobs. So we can't let them strike.

Okay. That's the idea. I'm not defending that, but that's the justification. Now I get it. Okay. So it's not as, it's not as preposterous as I first thought. Okay. It is not.

Like there's an, I don't necessarily agree with it, but there's an argument to be made that like, okay, well, but if all of the EMTs go on strike, people will die. But also like, I don't necessarily, I'm not saying that I don't think EMT should be able to strike. I'm saying it's different than just like miners going on strike or whatever. It's totally, that's what I'm saying. It's like, I, I, I at least, I don't necessarily condone it, but at least it's not, it's not a ridiculous statement.

It is a, it is a thing that we should have debated as a nation. Yes. Yeah. Cause it is different. So yeah, the Coolidge's stance was more or less the last word on police unions and police striking in particular until the 1950s and the professionalization of police departments. These years were the heyday for unions elsewhere in the country and cops watched jealously as the now aging workers, they'd spent years teargassing, reaped to the benefits of collective

bargaining. Fraternal orders proved incapable of gaining officers, the wages and benefits that they thought they deserved. So in the early 1960s, police started engaging in slowdowns starting in New York by 19. And this is where they, they wouldn't strike, but they wouldn't do most of the things cops are supposed to do. So they would, you know, they were saying like, if the people are getting murdered, we'll step in there.

But like, we're not going to stop petty crime. So they're still on strike now to say, yeah, we'll talk about that in a little bit, Sophie, because this happens real recently. By 1964, they had, you know, pissed off the people in charge, the people with money by not enforcing like minor bullshit enough that the mayor and the police commissioner willing to go to the table in exchange for giving up any right to strike. The patrolman's benevolent association was made a union. It was given the ability to act as a collective bargaining agent for the city police upon becoming

a full union. The PBA moved immediately to what would become its true purpose, protecting cops from any kind of account. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

And Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Welcome to CSI On Trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ability for their own actions. In 1966, the new mayor of New York sat down with the Congress for Racial Equality, who had some serious complaints about police misconduct towards black New Yorkers.

The mayor agreed to add four civilian members to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which had previously consisted of three cops. The PBA fought this viciously, holding a 5,000-member picket line in opposition to the idea of giving civilians any say in how their police functioned. I'm going to quote next from an article in The New Yorker. The PBA then organized a public referendum aimed at eliminating the board. It put up posters showing a young white woman exiting a subway and heading onto a dark, deserted street.

The civilian review board must be stopped, the poster read, her life, your life may depend on it. Here we go. A police officer must not hesitate. If he does, the security and safety of your family may be jeopardized. You see what they're arguing there. I see exactly what they're arguing. If you let civilians watch what we do, we might not kill the dangerous, non-white people

threatening white women. Yeah, yeah. That's what they're saying. There's the weapon. There's the weapon. There's the goat. There's the tool kit. Yeah.

But our but we have to protect our women. Yeah. Yeah. 1966. Yeah. Yeah. You like that? I was like, we have to bring women.

I enjoyed that. You know what else I enjoy, Robert? You know what won't protect white? No. No. OK. Shit. That was a bad way to lead him.

That was horrible. You know what supports police accountability and things that we can have safe subways without unaccountable heavily armed maniacs. Man. The products. Mr. Dohoso. Yeah. They all, all of heads.

The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is a podcast about deception, greed, and forgery in the art world. You knew the painting was fake. Um. Listen to Art Fraud starting February 1st on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Conquer your New Year's resolution to be more productive with the Before Breakfast podcast. In each Bite Size Daily episode, Time Management and Productivity Expert Laura Vanderkam teaches you how to make the most of your time, both at work and at home. These are the practical suggestions you need to get more done with your day. Just as lifting weights keeps our bodies strong as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron. Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to check out Drink Champs, your number one music podcast on the Black Effect

Podcast Network. Hosts N-O-R-E and DJ E-F-N sat down with artist and icon, Yay, which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos, and I don't want to have to be the villain. But when I went and did the Donda thing, Yay returned, and everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader. Check out Drink Champs' conversation with Yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

favorite shows. We're back! It's good to know, as a side note, it's good to know that these abysmal transitions are actually natural. Like, it's not a stick, you're not trying to be aloof. You're really doing this. Yeah. I decided long ago never to learn how to do fully half of my job.

It's to maintain authenticity, right? Yeah, that's exactly it. It's to maintain authenticity. That's how I justify not learning how to do large portions of my job. Yeah, it's called brand. It's brand protection. I get it. Exactly.

It's just like if you find, like, E-Cola in your meat, it's like, listen, it's organic, okay? You don't use pesticides. Yeah. You might, you might get botulism, but you know. Organic botulism. It's organic. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So yeah, when we last left off, the New York City police in 1966 had put up some real racy posters arguing about why they shouldn't let civilians tell them not to murder people. And as the vote on whether or not to establish this review board approached the PBA's President John Cassis declared, I'm sick and tired of giving into minority groups with their whims and gripes and shouting. Oh, man.

Yeah. Real real. What's happening? Physically. Yeah. I physically responded to that. Yeah. Yeah.

Y'all always complaining. Yeah. You don't like us shooting you. Yeah. You want some say in whether or not we shoot you with the bullets you help buy. Yes. Can I just do my job? That's literally all we're asking is just that you do your job. Yeah.

Please. Yes. Yeah. Please. So around the country, cops elsewhere saw how good a job the NYPD had done at winning better pay for themselves and sticking a thumb in the eye of those pesky minorities who felt like someone should stop them from. Yeah.

Police unionization spread throughout the continent and over the years, police unions bargained for a hell of a lot more than just increased wages. Starting in New York, but spreading quickly over the nation, many police union contracts began requiring departments to erase officer disciplinary records after a set period of time. And this kind of gets to the chief problem of police unions. They act in the interest of officers and obviously unions are supposed to act into the interest of workers.

But a lot of times because of the kind of people who become police officers, the interest of the officers means acting against the interests of general society. So if, for example, a miner or a grocery store employee or any other kind of worker really gets more money, that might be against the interests of the people who own stock in the company, you know, of the capital holding class, of the people who, you know, the executives at the top who have to take pay cuts, you can argue that's against their interest. But they don't, if somebody who works, like they're not able to, like the fucking a union representing grocery store employees, doesn't make it impossible for you to tell which grocery

store employees are stabbing people because grocery store employees don't do that. And when they do, they tend to go to prison and stop working at the, nobody, the unions don't rush in to be like, no, no, no, you have to keep employing this man. All he did was stab three people. Yeah, I'm like, that's the union doesn't protect you from being, from sucking at your job. Right. I mean, it does a little bit.

Like that's, that's a fair argument that like unions keep people sometimes like teachers who are bad at teaching stay on. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Fair, fair enough. But like the point going back to your analogy, I'm like, you can't just lick the apples and then be like, yo, my union protects me because I got a right to lick the apples.

And I'm like, no, you know, I don't know why. That's not your function. Like, you know, I think, and just going back to the police, I'm like, you know what, dude, you have a hard job. You should be paid well. You're right. You should be paid well. You have a hard job.

But what is not your job is being another gang in our neighborhoods and terrorizing people in the color. That's not your job. Yeah. You should not be protected for doing that. That's what unions protect them for. Instead of just being like, oh, well, we're workers too, and we should be able to advocate for higher pay.

They're like, and also if we beat someone, we should be able to hide that from the public. That's what happens almost immediately with you don't get to, you know, that's not one of your perks. OK. Yeah. Yeah. That's the biggest perk. So yeah, a 2017 Reuters special report on police union contracts in 82 US cities found

that most departments are now required to erase officer disciplinary records after a set period of time. Sometimes officers' records are purged every six months, 18 cities expunged suspensions in three years or less. Reuters found that nearly half of police union contracts guaranteed officers accused of bad behavior the right to see their entire investigative file, including witness statements made against them. What is there?

What I wonder what their defense for that is, because we know exactly what you're doing, but what's their argument for that? You know, you know, you shouldn't, you shouldn't know it's not fair for anyone to be charged with a crime without, you know, getting to see the claims made by their accusers, unless those people are charging the police are being charged by the police of a crime. And then there's actually all sorts of ways we have to hide that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. The dissonance is cognitive. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah, few developments in US policing have had quite the impact that unionization has had.

Bob Gilzo, uh, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Victoria, took to Twitter at the end of this May when the uprising started to give a summary of some of his still unpublished research on the impact of police bargaining rights on the killing of civilians. And he noted, quote, what are we finding so far? The introduction of access to collective bargaining drives a modest decline in policy employment and increase in compensation with no meaningful impacts on total crime, violent crime, property crime or officers killed in the line of duty. What does change?

We find a substantial increase in police killings of civilians over the medium to long run. So there is, uh, we will continue. There's a lot more evidence than just that, that, that, that unionization specifically leads to more police killings of civilians. Now, Gilzo goes on to note that the overwhelming majority of these added deaths are non-white people. Okay. Yep.

I mean, yeah. Yeah. If access to a union simply shifted the marginal decision for officers to shoot in risky situations, you would expect to see increases in killings of both whites and non-whites, but that is not what we're finding at all. Rather, and with the caveat that this is still very early work, it looks like collective bargaining rights are being used to protect the ability of officers to discriminate and the disproportionate use of force against the non-white population.

Again, a big part of this issue is that white supremacy is baked into the very soul of U.S. policing. Although police unions didn't come into the picture until a hundred years after slavery ended, a lot of the cops, most of the cops working in the police at that time, were racist as hell. And so police unions immediately turned to the task of enshrining and protecting racial violence from law enforcement, and that has remained a part of them ever since. Other research has consistently borne out similar conclusions.

A 2018 University of Oxford study, if the hundred largest American cities, found that protections in police contracts were directly and positively correlated with police violence against citizens. A 2019 University of Chicago study found that when collective bargaining rights were given to Florida sheriff's deputies, it led to a 40% statewide increase in violent misconduct by deputies. God. 40%. 40%?

God. Yeah. Okay, it's the stuff that you can intuit and know. And then when you see the actual numbers, it's still like you still throw up in your mouth a little. You know? Yeah. It's like, that's why I keep trying to say it's like, yeah, I mean, I know that.

But now that I'm looking at it on paper or listening to someone go, no, here it is, no, you're right. God, dawg, it's still just so infuriating and exhausting that despite all these receipts that you're showing, we still have to explain to people that there's a problem. Yeah. If a new type of hybrid engine came out and we found out a year in that it led to a 40% increase in vehicle explosions during like vendor benders, not only would that product be pulled from the market.

People would probably go to jail. I'll just say, yeah, they would get prosecuted. Whoever made that. Yeah. It would be a problem. Four out of 10 people going, die. Yeah. When we drive this thing, yeah, nah.

Yeah. We would at least try. Yeah. At least try. Yeah. Yeah. So much of the violence caused by police unions can be blamed on the fact that they make it as hard as possible to fire dangerously unhinged and violent officers.

And I'm going to quote again from the New Yorker here. Other studies revealed that many existing mechanisms for disciplining police are toothless. WBEZ, a Chicago radio station, found that between 2007 and 2015, Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority investigated 400 shootings by police and deemed the officers justified in all but two incidents. Since 2012, when Minneapolis replaced its civilian review board with an office of the police misconduct review, the public has filed more than 2,600 misconduct complaints, yet only 12 resulted in a police officer being punished.

The most severe penalty, a 40-hour suspension. When the St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewed appeals involving terminations from 2014 to 2019, I'm sorry, 40-hour suspension? Yes. Yeah, yeah. 2,600 misund... Yeah. When the St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewed appeals involving terminations from 2014 to 2019, it

discovered that arbitrators ruled in favor of the discharged police and correction officers and ordered them reinstated 46% of the time. Non-law enforcement workers were reinstated at a similar rate. And again, that's the point that, like, normal unions do work this way as well, but they're not representing people who have the right to shoot people. Yes. For those demanding more accountability, a large obstacle is that disciplinary actions are often overturned if an arbitrator finds that the penalty in the department meted out

is tougher than it was in a similar previous case, no matter if the penalty in the previous case was far too lenient. Dude. Yeah. So, where's the, like, the trope, like, because I'm thinking, I'm thinking the movie trope of, like, Pulaski, badge and gun. Like the chief is like, give me your badge and gun. Your own leave.

Right? And then, but the guy's such one tough cop, but he still investigates the crime. I'm like, it don't sound like, I don't know where y'all got that from, because it sound to me like, you know what I'm saying, cop, I'm rambling. But I'm trying to just, like, where did, so where did that come from? Then where's the, like, you know what I mean? This is actually what we're getting into, because it turns out that it is accurate that a lot of the times police chiefs hate and try to fire their worst and most dangerous

officers, and police unions make that impossible. That's actually what we're getting into right now. Oh, okay. Yeah. Somebody, I'm leaning into it. Okay. Yeah. And again, this is like, like, I'm sure that there are fucking people in unions who work

at tire factories or whatever who are bad at their jobs, get fired and the union gives them their job back, and like, that probably is a pain in the ass for some of the people they work around. But again, they don't carry a gun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The tire guy ain't gonna shoot me.

He ain't gonna put his knee on my neck. Yeah. Which isn't to say that, like, there aren't some problems with other unions, but like, it's totally a problem with the police. Yes. Yeah. So the Washington Post put together a great article about this in 2017, noting them in the last 11 years, 1,881 officers had been fired from the nation's largest police departments,

and 451 of those officers had successfully appealed and gotten their jobs back. Those 451 included an officer who raped a 19-year-old in his patrol car, an officer who challenged a handcuffed man to a fistfight for his freedom, and of course, a cop who shot an unarmed man to death. Yeah. What? We got it. We got to get this guy back on the street.

Yeah. We got another chance to win that fistfight. Yeah. I'm like, there's the tragically disgusting, and then there's the preposterous. You challenged the guy. Like, he got on handcuffed. A handcuffed man to a fight for his freedom. You want to box him?

Yeah. You nerd. Yeah. If you weren't so deadly, you know what I'm saying? I wish I could just be like, you're a nerd, man. Yeah. And part of me is like, I would kind of like to get into a fistfight with a cop in that situation, but I know that if you start losing, you're going to shoot me.

That's it. You can't win. Yeah. Yeah. There's no winning that fight. Yes. One of my favorite stories in this really, really wonderful Washington Post article is the 2012 tale of Boston police officer Baltazar Tate de Rosa.

In 2003, de Rosa's cousin was ambushed by a masked gunman and murdered in what was probably a gang-related crime. In 2005, de Rosa called in sick for his overnight shift. He went out to a nightclub, the Copa Grande Oasis, instead with a dude named Carlos Dapina, who was his cousin and the brother of his cousin who got murdered. While at the club, both men encountered Jose Lopez, a gang member who was a suspect in the murder of de Rosa's cousin. Carlos wound up murdering Jose Lopez using his off-duty cop cousin as a getaway driver.

So de Rosa, who took the night off, claimed to be sick and went and got wasted at a nightclub with his cousin. When his cousin murders a guy, acts as the getaway driver. And obviously when this is found out, he gets placed on administrative leave and he's charged with being an accessory to murder. He was acquitted of that crime, but he was fired from the department when the investigation revealed that he'd actually been arrested with his cousin at that club before due to a drunk and disorderly conduct.

So again, they find it like, okay, maybe this guy didn't know he was being the getaway driver in a murder that his cousin committed, but he knew that he was repeatedly getting drunk at the club while he should have been working and like we should fire him for that. He lied about it to us. So de Rosa appealed the firing and 2012 he was reinstated with $50,000 in lost pay in overtime. He is currently a Boston bike patrol officer. Wait, that boy got the money back?

Yeah, of course. They always get the money back. Oh my, that, oh, dog, he got the money back. That one's a fun one because at least like the guy that they murdered sounded like a piece of shit to whatever. Yeah. Like, look, man, this again, you just gangbanging and like, yeah, that is the most that is that story that's during the summer of 2020.

Some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys is the FBI. You got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman, join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast funny because it's the most like spot on any inner city USA anywhere story, right? That's like, that's me. Like if let's just say I'm working stiff, you know, I still taught high school. I'm just going to go chill with one of my cousins because that's my cousin. We're all from South Central LA, right? My cousin gets into static with somebody else. What am I going to not help him?

That's my cousin. You know what I'm saying? So like, okay, yeah, maybe I lose my job. You know, but like, I just like, I, you know, I mean, well, that's my cousin, man. Like, I'm going to, you know what I'm saying? Like I'm going to help, I'm going to help scrap with my cousin, you know, and then I'm supposed to think of you any different because you got a badge, right? No, you just like the rest of us.

You're going to do ratchet shit because you ratchet like all of us. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. In 2007, Fort Worth police officer Jesus Jesse Banda Jr. stalked his ex-girlfriend to a party, saw her with another man and used a police, like called into police dispatch to check on the plates of the man she was with fraudulently claiming that he had like

stopped the guy or whatever. So he found the address of the dude that his ex-girlfriend was going out with. And several days later, he showed up at the man's house at night and shot the car up with his 12 gauge. The department couldn't prove he'd committed the crime, but they were able to show that he lied about why he had called in the man's license plate like a night or two before his car got shot up. Yeah.

So the police chief did the give me your badge and gun thing. And he put Banda on unpaid suspension. And while he was suspended and under investigation, he was ordered not to represent himself as a police officer. So like you're handing in your badge and gun. We're going to investigate you. You are not getting paid. And if you tell anyone you're a police officer to try to get, you know, the benefits police

officers get like you're breaking the fucking law right now. So Banda went out and represented himself as a police officer. Of course he did. He and some friends were pulled over by another Fort Worth cop while they were drunk in a limousine. Said cop had watched the people in the back of the limo, including Banda, pass beer up to the driver. So again, real hard to get in trouble for drinking in a limousine.

This fucking dude finds a way. How you passed it to the driver here, drink this, bro. Yeah. What the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah. What are you doing, man? Yeah. Yeah.

So when he asked Banda to step out of the car, Banda handed over his police credentials and pretended to be an officer in good standing. Despite all this, the union had Banda's back and they fought for him. He was reinstated and awarded a year of back pay. So again, the police chief is like, I don't want this fucking guy in my department. And the union's like, you are going to take him back and you're going to pay him for the time when he was getting drunk in limousines. Officer Banda had been back on the force for one month before he was fired again for

again, misrepresenting himself during a traffic stop. He is currently he was reinstated by the union. He is currently a detective. And thanks to his union, the people of Fort Worth have to brave the streets of their town knowing a guy who uses department resources to hunt down the boyfriends of his ex partners is out there with the power to arrest whoever and apparent immunity to the consequences of any illegal actions he takes. So that's good.

Oh, this is. Congrats, Fort Worth. Wow. Fort Worth. This is great. Good job, Fort Worth. In 2014, 17 year old one, yeah, yeah, that thing, oh, that thing, thing, yeah, that is not the note.

That's embarrassing. That thing, that thing, that thing, that thing, Robert doesn't get it, but there we go. I don't. But we're going to go to products now. Yes. I'm Jake Halbert, host of Deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We controlled the courts.

We controlled absolutely everything. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy.

He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool pigeon. He looked like what he was or at. I can say with all certainty, I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire on the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Roxanne Gay, host of the Roxanne Gay Agenda.

The Bad Feminist Podcast of Your Dreams. Now what is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, you might ask? Well, it's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind and that could be anything. Every week I will be in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say. We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing in books and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics.

I started show with a recommendation. Really, I'm just going to share with you a movie or a book or maybe some music or a comedy set, something that I really want you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well. Listen to the Luminary Original Podcast, the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the Bad Feminist Podcast of Your Dreams, every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I call the Union Hall, I say it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King.

On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed. Right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade, oh, we found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King.

One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. You can listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we started talking about carne asada fries, which I am normally very happy with my decision to live in the Pacific Northwest. But whenever somebody says carne asada, I long for Southern California.

Oh, it's nothing to eat. Yeah. So I could go for some carne asada fries, but we're going to we have to talk about police unions instead. Yes. So, yeah. So let's let's talk about Juan McDonald. So yeah, in 2014, 17-year-old Juan McDonald was murdered by Chicago police officer Jason

Van Dyke. The media furor around this launched an investigation which revealed that Officer Van Dyke had previously been the subject of repeated complaints. The report noted that a code of silence about misconduct was baked into labor agreements between police unions and the city, and that this ensured that nothing had been done about Officer Van Dyke before he killed a child. Van Dyke was eventually convicted of second degree murder and 16 accounts of aggravated battery with a firearm.

16 is the number of times he shot him. Van Dyke was found not guilty of any official misconduct, though, so he was guilty of murder, but not guilty of improperly behaving as a police officer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Square that circle. You did murder somebody and you're going to go to prison for it, but you also didn't

break the rules of your job. But you got that. Yeah. But your job's fine. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. What do we do with that one?

Yeah. Ironically, given their role in murdering the shit out of unions for close to 100 years, police might be the most successful example of unionization in the US history, not in terms of, like, benefits to society or benefit to the profession of policing, but at least in terms of the sheer amount of power that they wield. They protect their offices, boy. They protect their offices, boy. Jesus.

Yeah. Yes. Labor historian Joseph McCartney notes they have more clout than other public sector unions like the teachers and sanitation workers because they have often been able to command the political support of Republicans. That's given them a huge advantage. Police unions are one fortunate area where we have a single human being who embodies all of the evil that these institutions represent and do.

And when I talk about a single human being who embodies the evil police unions, there's no one else I could be talking about but Lieutenant Bob Crowell, head of the Minneapolis Police Union. Yeah. President of the Minneapolis Police Union. Bob has, of course, appealed the firing of Derek Chauvin and the other three cops who murdered George Floyd saying that they were fired without due process. And this is something of a pattern for him.

In 2015, when two white MPD officers shot 24-year-old Jamar Clark in the head while he was handcuffed on the ground, Crowell went on TV to talk about Clark's violent criminal past and declare BLM a terrorist organization. Yeah. Crowell has a real thing for declaring people he disagrees with of being terrorists. He did the same thing to U.S. Representative Keith Ellison, a black Muslim congressman who pushed for criminal justice reform. That fun detail came out in a lawsuit filed by the current MPD police chief.

According to Mother Jones, the lawsuit accused Crowell of wearing a motorcycle jacket with a white power patch sewed into the fabric and said he had a history of discriminatory attitudes and conduct. He has told reporters he was part of the City Heat Motorcycle Club, some of whose members have been described by the Anti-Defamation League as displaying white supremacist symbols. Bob Crowell joined the MPD back in 1989, and in his years on the force, there were 20 or more internal affairs complaints made against him. We don't know how many compli-

It's 20. Yeah. We actually don't know how many it was because of all the shit I've been explaining. They purge records. But at least 20. What a job. We do know. Yeah.

It's crazy. What a job. Can you have 20 on record? Yeah. Imagine. I'm going to, like, imagine, I'm reading you what I'm going to tell you next. And imagine that, like, he worked as a baker or, like, as a computer programmer. Yeah.

Everybody replace cop with doughnut maker. Yeah. Sanitation worker. Sanitation worker. Yes. In 2004, he was suspended for using excessive force. And in 1995, he was accused of beating, choking, and kicking a biracial 15-year-old while shouting racial slurs.

What the f- What the f- Yeah. Bob Crowell. In 2004, when Crowell was off duty, someone leaving a bar bumped his backpack against Crowell's car. Bob and another off-duty officer got out and beat the piss out of this guy. When his friends came to help, they beat the shit out of his friends, too.

Bob was suspended for 20 days for this. It's, it's cartoonish, like, this is cartoon level, yes. The Minneapolis police knew all of this when they elected Bob Crowell to be their union president by a two-to-one margin. Bob won because the citizens of Minneapolis had just elected a reform-minded police chief. She told the New York Times, I believe Bob Crowell was elected out of fear. We are the only ones that support you and your community that doesn't support you. Your police chief is trying to get you fired.

You see what I'm building to here. Police unions allow the cops to deliberately short-circuit the democratic process. This is part of why bringing in better police chiefs and voting in reform-minded mayors almost never actually does a damn thing when it comes to like, performing the police. Yes. Because the unions are still there and they stonewall anything from happening. When Kim Garner was elected DA of St. Louis in 2016, she promised to fight police violence on behalf of her citizens.

One of the ways she proposed to do this was by establishing an independent oversight board to investigate abuses by police. Like the PBA in New York more than a half-century earlier, the police union in St. Louis set right to work killing this oversight board. They went to lawmakers one by one and whatever they said stopped the matter from even coming to a vote. According to the New York Times, quote, around the same time, a lawyer for the union waged a legal fight to limit the ability of the prosecutor's office to investigate police misconduct.

The following year, a leader of the union said Ms. Gardner should be removed by force or by choice. Wow. Wow. Wow. That's cool. Can you chat? Can you just?

Wow. It's like, I just, it's, it's comic book level power, like, and I just imagine like, you know, in every comic book when the, when the bad guy goes like, I feel the power, like, I feel like that's just, that's must be what it's like to where you're like, after a while just, you just know you can get away with it. And anybody that comes in to try to stop you, you got the power to remove like it just, God, Doug, like it must be intoxicating. It must, it's got to be a drug.

Like it's got to be a drug. It is a drug. Yeah. Yeah. It is, it is, it is. And if you've ever, I mean, I don't know, have you, have you never, have you never pistol whipped a guy? Never.

Because it is great. Oh my God. Oh my God. Pistol whipping a dude. It's like, it's like a, it's like that first slice of cherry pie on a birthday. Yeah. Yeah. That's how it's like.

Yeah. No wonder they want to protect it. I get it. I get it. You're like, this is super fun. Now, it's terrible. I've been in enough like fist fights to know I don't like them. Yeah.

And I've been in enough to be like, I don't like them because of the pain, but I also don't like them because you just walk away like, even if it's just like that dude's a freaking scumbag and he deserved it. You're still like, I don't, you know, I don't want to do this. I'll feel good about it. Yeah. Yeah. You still walk away like, man, I'll feel good about it.

Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. And I was, I was joking about pistol whips. Of course. But I, I do wonder. If we couldn't succeed in police abolition, what if we just made it legal for everyone to own grenade launchers and tear gas grenades and rubber bullets and then the crowd of protesters

could confront the police on an even like, would they enjoy being riot cops? Yeah. Yeah. If they were having getting flashbang back, I can, I can tell you, I've seen some protesters throw like mortars, like fireworks back at police who were shooting grenades at them and they don't seem to like it. No. Yeah.

You would think. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah, if, if the way that police unions respond when elected officials try to restrict the powers and rights of the police sounds kind of like how the mob works, you're not the only person to think that way. Back in Minneapolis, city councilman Steve Fletcher noted that once he started pushing

to freeze the MPD from hiring new officers, the police stopped responding as quickly to 911 calls made by his constituents. He called it a little bit like a protection racket. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly what it is. Steve. That's exactly what it is.

Public enemy used to have a song called 911 is a joke, you know, and it's, and, and, and like people think they would, they're just like, what is, what are they talking about? No, you don't understand that they don't have to come when we call. Yeah. You could decide like this, I'm just not going to go over there. Yeah. It's, it's funny because of the protests in Portland and stuff. And like, I know a lot of people who have been the victims of crimes in Portland, I've

been the victims of crimes, thankfully not here, but in other cities and like, it always takes a hell of a long time for the police to respond. Yeah. But when the protests here wound up in the neighborhood where the mayor's mansion is, and so like they were surrounded by mansions and people started shining lasers in windows and like setting off smoke bombs, the police were fucking right there. Really quick. They got there so fucking quick.

That's crazy, man, you guys are response time so much better today. Wow. You guys are, you guys are really on the ball when this neighborhood, this specific neighborhood gets fucked with. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, we'll talk a little bit more about police unions later. For now, there's another major subject we've got to pivot to, broken windows policing.

Yeah. And this is, you've heard of broken windows, right? Bro, this is the one that like when, this is the stuff you're getting into that like our like dads and big brothers and cousins would sit us down and say, Hey, this is how it works. You need to protect yourself. They was explaining this stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, in 2012, a teenager named Alvin Cruz was stopped by police and searched. This was not unusual for Cruz. It had happened to him numerous times before and the officers searching him. This was in New York, by the way. And the officers searching him never explained why they were doing it. But this time, because he was just fucking tired of being hassled so many times by the

police, Alvin secretly recorded the encounter and he caught on tape. The officers response when he asked him why he was being stopped. The cop told him for being a fucking mutt, you know that another officer twisted his arm behind his back after this and shouted, dude, I'm going to break your fucking arm and then I'm going to punch you in the fucking face. This tape went real viral and it was cited in the ruling of a federal judge later that year when the judge ruled that the NYPD's stop and frisk policy was unconstitutional and racially discriminatory.

Yeah. Stop and frisk is not a policy unique to New York. But as we've learned, the NYPD tend to be trailblazers. This tactic involves basically stopping random people, virtually all of whom are black or Hispanic and searching them for contraband with little to no cause. Stop and frisk was justified by the best minds available to 1980s law enforcement. James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Do you know anything about either of these guys?

Not personally, except for the other reason why I can't walk home with a friend. Yeah. Kid. You're going to learn some not surprising stuff about them. But yeah. In 1982, Wilson and Kelling published an article in The Atlantic that became the foundation of what we now know as broken windows policing. Probably the most single most influential article in the history of law enforcement.

Their chief argument was boiled down in this sentence. If a window in a building is broken and left unrepared, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. Yeah. So in order to keep crime down and keep neighborhoods nice, they argued, all violations of public order have to be sternly punished and prosecuted. Searching random black and Latino kids and occasionally beating the shit out of them is just the price we pay for making sure those kids don't have spray paint on them or whatever,

you know, or aren't going to sell a little bit of weed or something like, because any small criminal violation will inevitably lead to the total destruction of the neighborhood. So we have to police this little shit as harshly as possible. Yeah. Now, Wilson and Kelling's new theory of policing was presented as scientific backed up by the latest data, but that was a complete sham. There was only a single piece of hard evidence behind their theory, and they didn't interpret it the way the actual researchers who did the study interpreted it.

And that single piece of evidence was a 1969 study by every psych student's favorite problematic researcher, Philip Zimbardo. Yeah. Hell yeah. Oh, I fucking love me some Zimbardo. Come on. Let's go. He was like, there's a lot of real good criticisms of Philip Zimbardo, but his work is never

boring. He's always like, I want to fucking do some weird, I'm going to make a prison and staff it with teenagers. This guy, there's a few people that make it into your history books that you're just like, how, why are we studying him? I would love to drink with Philip Zimbardo. Like as someone who is critical of virtually all of his research, he sounds fun. Yeah.

Yeah. He still sounds like he'd be a fun him. So this particular 1969 study by Zimbardo had been inspired by the 1968 riots and uprisings. Obviously, like Zimbardo had just like watched the entire country convulsed by something that was in a lot of ways, even more, like even more serious than what we're seeing right now. And he was like, I should probably do some science about that shit. So he was frustrated, particularly that conservatives blamed vandalism on individual criminality.

So conservatives were blaming like vandalism during protests on the criminal nature of individual protesters. And he thought this was wrong. He thought that vandalism had more to do with crowd mentality than individual characteristics. So in order to test his hypothesis, he and his team got two Oldsmobiles and they parked one in the South Bronx and the other in Palo Alto, California. They surveilled both cars and they watched what happened to them. Now Zimbardo, because he was a little bit racist, expected the Oldsmobile in the Bronx

would be swiftly vandalized and torn apart. And he was right. But he was surprised that the first vandals were a white, well-dressed family and not black teenagers. Yes. Yeah. Still. Which is not.

Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, because like, and I'm saying this completely anecdotally, it's because when you black and brown, you already know, they're going to blame me anyway. So I can't, no, I'm not going to touch that. You know what's going to happen? Like they come over here and kill us.

Mm-hmm. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, he was surprised by this, but he felt that his central hypothesis was supported. The lack of community cohesion, this is his conclusion. The lack of community cohesion in the Bronx produced a sense of anonymity, which gave people permission to commit acts of vandalism.

He wrote conditions that create social inequality and put some people outside of the conventional reward structure of the society, make them indifferent to its sanctions, laws and implicit norms. Hmm. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. That's quite a sentence.

That is quite a sentence. So, like, yeah, that happens to the Oldsmobile in Harlem or not Harlem in the Bronx and the Oldsmobile he parked in Palo Alto suffered a somewhat different fate according to the Washington Post. Quote, after a week-long, unremarkable stakeout, Zimbardo's drove the car to the Stanford campus, where his research team aimed to prime vandalism by taking a sledgehammer to its windows. Upon discovering that this was stimulating and pleasurable, Zimbardo and his graduate students got carried away.

As Zimbardo described it, one student jumped on the roof and began stomping it in. Two were pulling the door from its hinges. Another hammered away at the hood and motor while the last one broke all the glass he could find. The passersby. The passersby the study had intended to observe had turned into spectators and only joined in after the car was already wrecked. Zimbardo's conclusions were the stuff of liberal criminology.

Anyone, even Stanford researchers, could be lured into vandalism and this was particularly true in places like the Bronx with heightened social inequalities. For Zimbardo, what happened in the Bronx and at Stanford suggested that crowd mentality, social inequalities and community anonymity could prompt good citizens to act destructively. This was no radical critique. It was an indictment of law and order politics that viewed vandalism as a senseless, unpardonable act. In a line that could have been lifted directly out of the countless riot reports published

in the late 1960s, Zimbardo asserted, vandalism is rebellion with a cause. Which so. I can get by. Yeah. Yeah. I can't speak to the accuracy of Zimbardo's conclusions about the Bronx, particularly like his attitudes about community there. Yeah.

Also, it was not a place he understood very well. Yeah. And he was clearly a man with some biases. But I can't argue with his conclusions about Palo Alto because in part of what I saw in riot night in Portland, which was the night after the third precinct in Minneapolis burned, I know that like, you know, people rioted in fucking Portland, they fucked up the justice center and like lit it on fire and they destroyed like, they damaged a lot of the luxury shopping district and looted it.

Yeah. And it was blamed on like anti-foe white anarchist kids, but like, I was there. It was a pretty fucking broad cross-section of the Portland population who was, you can tell I've seen enough people break windows. You can tell when someone knows how to break a window and when someone is breaking a window for the first time, a lot of first time window, a lot of experienced window breakers in that crowd. Don't get me wrong.

A lot of first time window breakers. You just got taken in by the moment. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. So yeah, I think that that's probably accurate that like most vandalism that happens in times like these is not the result of people who are, as a lot of folks like to portray them,

inherently criminal. Not that I even feel comfortable like judging people on that basis. But I think most of that kind of vandalism is just like, oh, fuck it, I can get away with this now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm angry and like, I feel like this is an option now.

Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. Now, so yeah, the Oldsmobile study was actually not very influential initially and it sort of languished in the anals of academic history for a decade and a half until Wilson and Kelling, the guys who'd wrote that Atlantic article on the broken windows theory until they came across it. So they didn't listen to anything Zimbardo had actually said about crowd mentality and

community anonymity, they kind of ignored all of the actual conclusions in the study and took from it only the fact that, quote, one unrepair broken window is a signal that no one cares. And so breaking more windows costs nothing. Yeah. So both of these guys cite the Zimbardo theory as the entire academic basis of their theory on crime, the Zimbardo study, but they actually interpreted it in a way that ran completely at odds to the person conducting the study's own conclusions.

And I'm going to quote from the Washington Post again, their misleading recap of Zimbardo's study not only conflated the Stanford and Palo Alto experiments, but so distorted the order of events that it routed readers away from Zimbardo's conclusions. In their version, the car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week, then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in with a conveniently neglected dimension was that the researchers themselves had laid waste to the car. Yeah.

Admitting this crucial detail, Wilson and Kelling manipulated Zimbardo's experiment to draw a straight line between one broken window and a thousand broken windows. This enabled them to claim that all it took was a broken window to transform stayed Palo Alto into the Bronx, where no one cared. The problem is it wasn't a broken window that enticed onlookers to join the fray. It was the spectacle of faculty and students destroying an Oldsmobile in the middle of Stanford's campus. Yeah.

I was like, that's not, like, that's not what did it. Yeah. They were like, oh, that professor's fucking up. You want to come fuck up the car? Yeah. It seems like it's cool now. Yeah. Like 99% of people, if they, if someone's like, hey, it's actually, there's a car, people

are fucking up and it's okay. It's perfectly legal. Do you want to fuck up a car a little bit? Most people are going to be like, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's so intuitive and if I just see like a smashed window on a car, that's not going to make me go, I'm going to smash that dude's window too. I'm going to be like, oh, that fool's backpack I stole in like, I'm going to think, you know, I'm saying, poor guy, like it's not going to go.

Oh, nobody cares on this street. Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time in the Bay Area, I never go to San Francisco and don't see at least one car with a smashed out window. And I never see all of the windows around that car smashed. In fact, it's usually in a nice neighborhood still. It's just a thing they do in San Francisco. They fuck up car windows and steal shit inside cars. Don't do stuff in your car in San Francisco.

That's not my lesson. They don't break everything. Yeah. That was my lesson was like, hey, dude, don't leave your backpack in the car. Moral of the story. Don't leave your backpack in the car. Yeah. Don't leave your team in San Francisco.

Never leave anything. And by the way, when I had my car broken into in San Francisco, I was parked directly in front of the Mission Police Precinct, like went into reported and the officer said, what do you want us to do about it? Right? Every once in a while, Touche Cop, Touche Copper, every once in a while they'll nail it. Like it was once, I remember when I was same, like my, my freaking speakers and amp got stolen out of my car and it's kind of the same thing to cop was like, what, what you

want me to do, man? Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, Touche. I mean, you know what I want you to do is when I talk about police abolition, not be like, who are you going to call if someone robs you? Because here we are. Because look it.

I called someone. Someone robbed you. And you just told me you're not going to do that. Dang. Yeah. Yes. So I first read that article about like the, how the broken windows policing guys had like fucked up Zimbardo's study years before I came across like the basics of or years

after I'd come across the basics of broken windows policing theory during I took criminal justice for a while in college. I wanted to be in law enforcement at one point. And reading that kind of like dissection of this foundational theory and modern law enforcement was pretty shocking and impactful to me. But I didn't know half the real story until I read Alex Vitalli's The End of Policing this year. Vitalli points out that the core of broken windows theory is the idea that people have

latent destructive traits that are unleashed without constant pressure from authority to conform and behave. Vitalli writes, quote, the emergence of this theory in 1982 is tied to a larger arc of urban neo-conservative thinking going back to the 1960s. Wilson's former mentor and collaborator, Edward Banfield, a close associate of neoliberal economist Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, parented many of the ideas that came to make up the new conservative consensus on cities. Banfield's big work was the 1970 book, The Unheavenly City, which is basically an extended

argument that poor people, and this is me now, not Vitalli, the Unheavenly City is an extended argument that poor people can't be helped and so welfare programs are a waste of money. Here's a quote from Banfield's book. And this is again like the mentor of Wilson, the guy who is one of the main architect, one of the two architects of the broken windows theory. So here's what he writes. Though he has more leisure than almost anyone, the indifference apathy, if one prefers, of

the lower class person is such that he seldom makes even the simplest repairs to the place that he lives in. He is not troubled by dirt or dilapidation, and he does not mind the inadequacy of public facilities such as schools, parks, hospitals, and libraries. Indeed, where such things exist, he may destroy them by carelessness or even by vandalism. Oh my gosh, I'm so mad right now. Yeah, it makes you really angry, doesn't it? Yeah, it's just what dislike, what do you know about being poor?

Yeah, go in any poor person's house. They have fixed more of their own shit than you know how to, buddy. Yes, there's that. I've always put like the broken window, stop and frisk, and then like kind of the like gang injunctions and street sweepers. Like, I've always kind of like in my head without any actual research, like lump them all together under the like, the theory that you just presented, which is that like ultimately we don't care about our neighborhoods unless we have authoritative powers that keep us

in line. Like, I've kind of lumped it under that thought and that that's that's what law enforcement thinks about us. You know what I'm saying? Like that it's still the broken window thing. So when the gang injunctions, I don't know if we're even going to cover that, but like I've always kind of seen them because they were all around. It was all that 80s and 90s like policing that turned me into the like policing don't

work, you know, activist that I am now is like under that sort of thinking. I don't know if they are together, but it's but him, the statement you just said, the ideas again saying that like, ultimately, your animals unless we keep you in line. Yes. It just all makes sense now. That's clearly how you think of us. Yes. Yes.

And it will become clearer where all of yeah, yeah. So Banfield basically thought that cities ought to be abandoned because they were just inherently criminal places. And his protege Wilson took a different tact, arguing that cities had been great once and could be halted in their decline and made great again. If only the cause of that decline were properly recognized, Wilson identified liberal politicians and of course, the moral failings of black communities as the clause of urban decline. Vitaly writes that Wilson, quote, argued that liberals had unwittingly unleashed urban chaos

by undermining the formal social control mechanisms that made city living possible by supporting the more radical demands of the later urban expressions of the civil rights movement. They had so weakened the police, teachers and other government forces of behavioral regulation that chaos came to reign. Wilson following Banfield believed strongly that there were profound limits on what the government could do to help the poor. Financial investment in them would be squandered. New services would go unused or be destroyed.

They would continue in their slothful and destructive ways. Since the root of the problem was either an essentially moral or cultural failure or a lack of external controls to regulate inherently destructive or human urges, the solution had to take the form of punitive social control mechanisms to restore order and neighborhood stability. Wilson's views were informed by a borderline racism that emerged as a mix of biological and cultural explanations for the inferiority of poor blacks. Yeah.

Yeah. God, sorry. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Just like the religious right and like, you know, you know, I grew up a church boy, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, a lot of that stuff still serves me well, but like, I'm just thinking about like just that like, that like white Western evangelical like, well, like, okay, the breakdown of the family. It's like, there's no dads in the homes and that's the problem and like in the black community, your fathers are missing. So yeah, I have no direction and just hearing all that stuff, you know, from these people

that are supposed to be taking care of your soul, like how just how and then when you get get of age and you realize, nah, I think y'all just racist. Like when it kind of like clicks, just the the like crisis of like faith that you have at that moment where you're just like, I don't I can't I'm actually not welcome here. I thought I was welcome here. I'm not welcome here. Anyway, go on. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So back to Wilson a little bit because this next part's important. No, no, no, no, no. Wilson coauthored the book Crime and Human Nature with Richard Hernstein, which argued that there were important biological determinants of criminality. While race was not one of the core determinants, language about IQ and body type opened the door to a kind of socio biology that led Hernstein to coauthor the openly racist The

Bell Curve with Charles Murray, who was also a close associate of Wilson. So the Bell Curve, if you're not aware, is a thoroughly discredited book about IQ and race that is earned a place of honor on every racist bookshelf. Yes. Wilson is friends with both of the authors of that and works on a book with one of the authors of that. This is the guy who co-invents broken windows theory of policing, like that's that's where he's swimming in.

That's his fucking sea. Yeah. And it's so like hearing it all together. It's so clear, you know, it's so obvious, you know, coupled with my own just experience and just like, oh my God, it's hearing it all together. It's just like, yes, yes. Yes. So I'm not crazy.

You really do think this about us? Got it. Yep. Yeah. So the broken windows theory gave ideological cover to people who wanted to empower the US police to interfere more directly in the daily lives of more particularly non white people. Prevention of crime had been the goal since the days of Volmer.

But what that meant had changed. Now poverty and social disorganization were seen as the results of crime, not the causes, and thus the best way to reform society was to repeatedly punish people for minor criminal behavior. Vitaly goes on. Broken windows policing is at root a deeply conservative attempt to shift the burden of responsibility for declining living conditions onto the poor themselves and to argue that the solution to all social ills is increasingly aggressive, invasive and restrictive forms

of policing that involve more arrests, more harassment and ultimately more violence. Wow. So the solution to poverty ain't jobs. No. It's punishment. Yeah. You got to stop them from breaking, breaking windows in their neighborhood by arresting them for weed or whatever.

Yeah. Yo, the nuance that like, like, like snatched that out the sky. The nuance of saying, I'm going to try to say it like, like, like the quote said, which it was like, like the cause that the cause of crime was not the poverty. The cause of poverty was the crime. And that's the part where I'm just like, there's your mistake. There it is. Right.

Um, if, if, if you've ever heard the term like, like a crime of survival, then like you understand what, what we talking about here, where it's just like you have that completely backwards. You know what I'm saying? If, if you, if you think that the, the, the cause of the poverty is the crime rather than saying the cause of the crime is the poverty, yeah, that is like that fundamental switch. Everything will start making sense now when you, when you understand that like the laws are the crime, the law is probably unjust already.

So this act of survival shouldn't be a crime in the first place because it's an act of survival. Right. But when you understand it as just an act of survival, right, then the idea of punishing a person for trying to survive seems preposterous because it is. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

So, um, one example of the violence caused by broken windows policing would be the famous and the, the tragic death of Eric Garner. If you've forgotten, um, I know you haven't, but you at home, Garner was busted for selling cigarettes illegally. He was choked to death by officers and his famous cry, I can't breathe has probably become the most powerful slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yeah. Um, just kind of sums everything up.

Yeah. Uh, you might be surprised to learn that Garner's arrested not come as the result of like an individual officer just sort of like rolling around the neighborhood and spotting a guy breaking the law and choosing to do something. It was actually ordered by the top brass because the local business owners had complained about Garner's illegal cigarette sales, harming their own businesses. So we kind of parking back to episode two here where we're talking about like the police are formed to protect.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's good for you to point out like what the crime was. It's, if you don't know this, it's a Lucy. It's when you just sell an individual cigarette, which is like apparently a capital crime. Yes. Yeah. It's a perfectly normal thing in a lot of the world.

Everywhere in the world. Like you, you got $10 for a pack of cigarettes, so you're just trying to bum one of them. You're going to walk around be like, can I bum a cigarette? Or I'll sell you one for a dollar. Like this is a listening, listening to me guys. That's a crime. Yeah. That is a crime.

Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? Like, yeah. Yeah. You go to fucking Bosnia, you order a coffee, you'll get a cigarette with your coffee. But like, yeah, you do that here, you're, you're breaking the law. Yeah. Yeah. So, make cigarettes mandatory, I think is the right, the right way to solve this problem.

It's easy, right? Yeah. So, the NYPD dispatched a sizeable force to bust Garner, a plainclothes unit and two sergeants with a uniformed backup. And the best case scenario from sending cops after him was that he would be stopped temporarily from selling Lucy's. Eric had a long history of getting busted for petty crimes and going to jail. No sentence had dissuaded him from continuing to do this.

So there was no chance of anything happening, but temporarily having this guy in jail instead of selling loose cigarettes. That was the best case scenario. Yeah. Or just like, go to another block, like, all right, yeah, this guy don't like me in front of his store. I'm just going to go down the street. Not really hard.

No bodies. Yeah. There was no cigarettes, man. Yeah. There was no way for any meaningful public good to be gained by this interaction. And again, the pot, the worst case scenario, which happened is that Garner died, which is what happened. Yeah.

Now, the NYPD instituted more use of force training for patrol officers after Garner's death so that the next guy the state sent armament after for the crime of selling loose cigarettes would be less likely to get murdered. But that didn't really, doesn't really solve anything. As Alex Fatali notes, quote, such training ignores two important factors in Garner's death. The first is the officer's casual disregard for his well-being, ignoring his cries of I can't breathe.

And there's seemingly indifferent reaction to his near-lifelessness while awaiting an ambulance. So this is a problem of values and seems to go to the heart of the claim that for too many police, black lives don't matter. The second is broken window-style policing, which targets low-level infractions for intensive invasive and aggressive enforcement. Yeah. Now, the death of Garner caused a flurry of national condemnation of the NYPD and a

conflict between the department and Mayor Bill de Blasio. As you'll recall, the NYPD can't strike over this sort of thing, but they were angry that the mayor hadn't enthusiastically backed them when some of their own had committed murder. So they launched a slowdown, which is basically a diet version of a strike, is what we talked about a little bit earlier. For seven weeks, the New York police only went out in pairs, only left their squad cars if they felt it was absolutely necessary, and they avoided all proactive policing measures. This means that, for the first time in decades, the NYPD stopped fucking with people who committed

petty crimes and misdemeanors. The slowdown ended eventually, but researchers wanted to learn what impact it might have actually had on crime in the city. Their study, published in the Nature Journal Human Behavior, was based on Foyed Komp stat reports from 2013 to 2016. These reports include weekly activity for each NYPD precinct for all arrests and criminal activity. The study found that, not surprisingly, the rate of criminal summonses and stop-and-frisks

and arrests had declined massively during the slowdown. This is what you'd expect because cops weren't doing that sort of work. But the researchers also found that civilian complaints of major crimes fell between three and six percent during the same period. Civilians reported 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries, and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. The drop in violent crime actually continued for several months after the slowdown, leading to an estimated 2,100 fewer major crime complaints.

The study authors noted, quote, In their efforts to increase civilian compliance, certain policing tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious criminal activity. The implications for understanding policing in a democratic society should not be understated. The researchers directly addressed broken windows policing and the stop-and-frisk style public order policing tactics introduced as a result of that theory, quote. Our results imply not only that these tactics fail at their stated objective of reducing major legal violations, but also that the initial deployment of proactive policing can

inspire additional crimes that later provide justification for further increasing police crimes, summonses, and so forth. So so so what you're saying is them not doing what they were doing actually helped. Yeah. If you had a DA who came in and said violent crime and like complaints about major crimes by civilians dropped between three and six percent during my tenure, you could run for fucking state office, federal office on that shit, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So we'll show you, I'll show you guys how much you need us. Actually, you were the problem. Oh, actually, things actually seem a lot better. Actually, it's fine. You know what? Just keep going. Keep slowing down, guys.

You know, I wanted a single cigarette the other day. I bought it and nobody got choked. You know, yeah. It was fine. Yeah. Everything seems like it's actually okay. Seems like it's actually okay. Dude.

Yeah. I would love to somehow or another try to invoke just the empathy and emotions of what like stopping frisk did psychologically, you know, as a young man, you know, or just as a person in that sort of context and environment. And of course, you know, obviously that, you know, Bloomberg didn't last in the, in the no, it was a joke anyway. You know what I'm saying? But like, um, so, so there was no way I could have voted for him because I know what psychologically

what stopping frisk and like all that stuff did to us. But like, just, I just think, think about what we're saying here is you can get stopped and searched for nothing for the possibility that you might be doing something. Yeah. And like, it's just so moving about freely, you know, I brought up again earlier like because the LA version of that was like the gang injunctions. So if you were, if, if you and two of your friends happen to be walking home from basketball practice and your clothes kind of match, that's a gang, right?

So no matter what, if there's more than one of you, you're in a gang. So yeah, and there's, and there's a, there's a, there's a gang uptick. So like, let's just say you do commit a petty crime or you were involved with a committee with a petty crime. If you were with someone that was either in the, in the system as a gang member, or it was more than one of you, you can get the gang upcharge. So that just adds five years, right? Even if something only took six, even if it was like a petty crime and it was only like

six to eight months probation, if you get the gang uptick is five years, right? So it was dudes that like disappeared off the streets until we were in college because of this stuff. And so they, they came out of prison gangsters. They didn't go in gangsters that came out, you know, so like I, I, I'm ranting, but like, like please understand the psychological like part of that. Yeah. Shit.

You just, yeah, you just like, just the, the, I mean, I'm a full grown man. I paid freaking property taxes. I'm working on a damn home loan right now. And I still, whenever I just hear that, whoop, whoop, my body still just kind of like, yeah. Like that's the fucking thing to me is like, like we talk such a fucking good game in this country about what freedom is. Yeah. And if you live in a country where a huge percentage, if not most cause fucking white

people feel this way when they hear the whoop, whoop of the police siren, everyone's scared of them. Everyone feels it. Yeah. If you've got this unaccountable group of armed people who can fuck up your day and possibly the rest of your life at any moment for no reason, even if you haven't done something wrong and experienced no consequences, if that's built into your system, you're not free.

Yes. Yes, whatever nebulous concept freedom is. That's not it. It's not it. Yeah. Go back to the script. Yeah. Or is there any more left?

The script is done. This is what we had for today. Okay. Yeah. We're going to talk about the Texas Rangers some, which will be fun, and the militarization of police. We're going to talk about the TV show Cops. Yeah.

And that'll be it for our little series, which is going to leave out just so much stuff, but doing the best we can over here. And I hope I'm going to say this on record that like, man, what you've done for the cause by doing this, you and Sophie, like, man, y'all done put, y'all done put stones and slingshots, boy, by like, this is just seven to 10 hours of receipts that, you know what I'm saying? Like, man, we appreciate this work. I know I'm a part of it, but I appreciate y'all for doing this.

I mean, I think it's like, you know, it came at a certain point, like during covering the protests where like things were starting to die down in part because like people were getting exhausted and in part because the police got in trouble for all of the violence. And it was like, what's the next thing to do? It's make sure everybody, like you want to, you want to keep people, people have to be angry about this for a long time if it's going to change, right? This is like, this is, this is a long fight. This is not going.

It's not going to like, no one's going to like, like in order to get one police department taken down in Minneapolis, and it hasn't yet happened, but it looks like it's going to happen. They had to burn a precinct like it was hard to get that far. Yeah. Yeah. They, they, they fought like, they fought like motherfuckers to take that down. And that's just not going to happen nationwide.

And, but I, we still need to stop this. And the only way to do that is to get enough people angry long enough that they wear them down. This is not like a, it's not as simple as a vote in better people and anyone who says that like, okay, well, the real way to fix this is vote is lying to you. Voting is one part of the effort. And the only way voting works is if there is like clearly enough rage and, and anger and, and, and activity in the street that it necessitates action, that number one, local

governments are scared by the number of people out in the streets and realize that we're all going to lose our fucking jobs if we don't do something. There you go. Yeah. And also physically exhausting the police as a part of it, running out their fucking budgets as a part of it, making them realize that they are not making it, making it not pleasurable to be an officer because people don't view you positively is a part of it for all of, like all of this is a part of it.

Getting rid of cops was, I think a bigger part of it than a lot of people realize. And I, my hope with this is that it, it helps keep people angry enough to stay in the fight and make the changes happen. There it is. You ever heard of Carl von Klauswitz? No. Klauswitz was a German military. He's like a, he was a general, but he was also like a, like he wrote a lot about strategy.

He was very influential in the field of like thinking about how to, to conduct war. And Klauswitz had a definition of war that is not all, not, not everyone agrees with it, but I find it really compelling. He defined war as the continuation of politics through other means. Whoa. And police have been talking about how there's a war on police for a very long time. And I think that the actual falling number over 40 years, you know, the number of police officers killed and wounded in the line of duty has continually fallen.

I don't think it's accurate in like the literal sense, but I do think you can look at what the police have been doing and stop and frisk is a big part of it as a war on the people of this country and responding in kind, it's not, it's not a sitting in the trenches with a rifle. It's not necessarily even on our side of things. It's not a, it's not a doing violence to human beings war, but it's, it's not dissimilar from the kind of war that like the Russian government has been attempting to carry out in places like Ukraine and Georgia.

It is a, it is a very complicated conflict, but it is a, it is a conflict. And yeah, I hope that this is, has provided some, some additional munitions. Yes. And it has. Good on you. Well, prop, you want to plug your plugables before we roll out? I do. This is a, this is prop hip hop over here, a website and Instagram and all those things

are prop hip hop.com. There's cups and t-shirts and music and other podcasts that I'm a part of. And I am, don't have anything else to plug because I'm reliving my teen years in my head right now. Shit. Yeah. And I am very happy to be a part of this. I am very happy to be here.

That's another reference that Sophie appreciate, but you won't know what I'm talking about. I don't. I didn't get that at all. It's all good. It's coming to America, man. Oh shit. Oh, okay. I remember.

Yeah. Okay. So look, here's, at some point, Chris, Daniel, whoever doing this, do not cut this part out. At some point when all this shit is over, Sophie and I, we're going to spend one to two days. At least. And I am just going to indoctrinate you in all of just black culture references, urban

culture references that you should know. And I just like, and you would appreciate, you know what I'm saying? I'm just like, I need you to know these jokes. I think that's a great idea, actually. Yes. We can, I mean, I know I need to, I've been told for a while, I need to watch, do the right thing. I think that's it.

Correct. Yeah. I think that's the other. There's the one that's about the, the fucking, like the fast food joint or something and like, um, there's a, I don't even know where you're going with it. I'm so groupie. Yeah. Wait.

What's that? Yeah. You got to do Harlem Nights. You got to watch. You got to watch. Do the right thing. You need to see soul food. You got to see the color purple.

You got to see Friday. Like it's, it's a lot of, we got to catch you up, man. Cause. Oh yeah. And I feel like you'd appreciate all these. Yeah. I think the right thing is the one that I was thinking about. That's the one at the pizza shop.

Yeah. Yeah. The pizza shop. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do the right thing. Yep. Okay.

Okay. All right. You need to know who radio Rahim is. Yeah. You got to know this stuff. We will do this. All right. But first we're going to go away and come back on Thursday.

Yes. Talk about the police for like another 90 minutes. So buckle, buckle up for that. Lads and ladies. Uh, boyos and non-binary. Oh. I don't, there's not enough good slang yet. It hasn't caught up to changes in our cultural conversations.

We'll work it out. You can just, you can just send the podcast. We can end the podcast. All right. It's done. All right. Oh boy. There's a thread about wanting to hear me rap on the Reddit.

That's probably a bad idea. Oh, that's happening, bro. Oh no. Listen. Behind the police is a production of I heart radio. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to check out drink champs, your number one music podcast

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