Behind the Bastards - Behind the Police: How The Police Declared War On All Of Us

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

For the last episode of Behind the Police, we discuss the history of police militarization in the United States, and where it's led us to today. FOOTNOTES: I'm From Philly. 30 Years Later, I'm Still Trying To Make Sense Of The MOVE Bombing The History of Policing in the United States A New History Tears Down the Myth of the Texas Rangers American Police Training and Political Violence: From the Philippines Conquest to the Killing Fields of Afghanistan and Iraq THE MILITARIZATION OF THE PHILADELPHIA POLICE Militarized policing doesn’t reduce crime and disproportionately hits black communities Multi-Method Study Of Special Weapons and Tactics Teams  The Growing Epidemic of Cops Shooting Family Dogs U.S. spends twice as much on law and order as it does on cash welfare, data show Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation Police officers in the US were charged with more than 400 rapes over a 9-year period 'Who will protect you from rape without police?' More cops. Is it the answer to fighting crime? How shows like ‘Cops’ and ‘Law & Order’ affect our views of the police The Militarization of America's Police: A Brief History Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The cops are problems, problems. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, normally a podcast about the worst people in all of history, and it still is. But this is the last of our six episode mini series, Behind the Police. That introduction started out rough, but it came together in the end, much like the police, except for, well, not really. My guest with this episode, as with all of the others, is Jason Petty, better known as the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason, how are you doing? What's up? I'm breathing thin air because I'm on the road.

But let's hope that this isn't the end of the police story and it does turn out OK. Yeah. Yeah. I think that I think they might pull it together in the last the last quarter. Yeah. Let's just hope that last quarter isn't the year four thousand. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I haven't been checking the news in months, so I don't know how how how how the police are nowadays. I assume everybody's happy with them. Yeah. Or they're sticking to brand. Yeah. So, boy, Jason, as as I finished this up, it became incredibly clear to me how much I was going to have to leave out. Yeah. Of this of this series, like not just the fact that we're not really talking about federal law enforcement, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF. Just because I wanted to focus on, like, you know, cops, like normal straight up specifically cops.

Yeah. In your neighborhood cops. Yeah. There's but there's like so much like we're not going to talk much about the civil rights movement just because a lot of what the police did then was just kind of like the same tactics that we already talked about them doing in previous periods. Yeah. We're not going to talk a lot about like the LGBT movement and violence against them. We're not going to talk about the green movement and the suppression of that just because I already wrote 16 pages for today. Yeah. So we're going to we're going to drive in what I think is the right last subject to end on a series that is inevitably not going to cover everything that it would have been good to cover. And that is the militarization of American police. Yes. So that's where we're where we're going to today. And it's important to it's important to note I'm going to throw this in there like all the pieces that he's talking about like remember those are like lived experiences.

So it's a piled on history that emotionally and psychologically all of us who have lived through it like know it's there. But yeah. Good God. There's no way to actually cover all of it in a podcast. You know what I'm saying. No. I mean if we'd had another dozen episodes. Yeah. We would have had to leave out much. Yeah. Like we would have had to leave out a lot but we would have been able to give broad coverage of all of the things. But like yeah there's just this isn't going to be you know we had to had to stop somewhere. So yeah militarization I think does kind of make sense to to focus on in our last episode because it's kind of the biggest aspect of where we are right now. In terms of like why the why the shit that's happening right now is happening like a lot of it has to do with militarization. And obviously the foundational issues of racism that were behind police and contributed to.

So we're going to talk about all that. But to start us off today we are going to get into one of the aspects of U.S. law enforcement. That we have thus far failed to cover it enough to tail U.S. policing and indigenous peoples. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Because this is really where we get to the very start of militarized police in the United States. When people talk about use that term today militarized police they're generally referring to equipment. Right. The transition of cops from the friendly Andy Griffith style law man who wore like maybe a gun on his hip and a pair of handcuffs. It's like the guys wearing heavy body armor and a tool belt with like five different weapons on it. You know police tanks and grenade launchers and AR 15s. And when people talk about that stuff they kind of see militarization as a new and worrying trend because the cops they grew up with didn't look like that.

And that's a part of police militarization. And it is a new part of police militia. Well it's not even really a new part of it. It's worrying but it's not new. Yeah. But it's the most visually like. Yeah. Identifiable. You know. Yes. Somebody can get their brain around that. Like we say there's a problem with militarization. You could go. Yeah. Logically speaking. I am not an enemy insurgent. So I don't understand. Yeah. Grenade launcher for. Yeah. I didn't use your brain around it. Yeah. Yeah. You didn't use to on a daily basis. See dudes in like the middle of Los Angeles who looked like they could have walked out of downtown Kabul. Right. Yeah. And now you do. And that is easy. Camo bro. Yeah. Yeah. Why are you wearing Camo. Like how is it. What do you expect to happen. Yeah. In the middle of downtown. Yeah. The fucking. I was at a cop right the other day. We're like there were like a bunch of rapid response guys and fucking and fucking like rural Camo. And it was like what are you.

We're in the middle. We're out in front of the Portland Justice Center. What do you think is going to happen. You're going to blend in. You need to be wearing some like cut off dickies wearing some sort of coffee stain on your shirt. Get some really tight jeans and a flannel shirt if you want to camouflage into Portland like what do you what do you fucking play. That wouldn't even camouflage you in the goddamn woods. Thank you. So yeah. In episode two of this mini series we talked about how the Philadelphia State Police were formed in direct imitation of the Philippine Constabulary. A colonial police force the U.S. formed to suppress the natives of a conquered land and such colonial police forces were really common among like imperial powers during the period of colonialism or at least the period where colonialism was kind of openly embraced by everyone. So all of the big European nations did this shit and you know the U.S. did as well.

The most influential example of such a force in American history though because like you know the British had a whole bunch of different countries they were probably the best at it. So did the French. So did the Germans and so did the United States. But since we didn't have as extensive an overseas empire as those European nations did a lot of our colonial policing forces were actually like deployed right here at home kind of in frontier areas that weren't states yet. And the most influential example of such a force in American history is probably the Texas Rangers who were formed officially in 1835. So we're talking about the Rangers today baby. Not the not the not the sports team they're broadly George Bushie's team. Yeah they're whatever we're talking about what what sport or the Rangers Robert. They're baseball right. Oh my God I'm so proud. Wait it is Texas. Well it's Texas. I was like no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no

it's Texas. So he knows that answer. Yes. Yeah so I used to tease my Texas homeboys to be like I know y'all go to the Alamo go to the Alamo every year. And I was like, at my DJ, I travel with him from Texas. I was like, Hey, you know, y'all lost the Alamo, right? He was like, I didn't realize it until college every year. I was like, y'all lost. Anyway, go on. So the range, speaking of the Alamo and such, the Rangers started out kind of in the period where Texas was doing its own thing and not yet part of the United States. And they were initially kind of just a small irregular band of hired toughs whose job was to protect newly settled white families out on the frontier. This put them in constant conflict with local

native tribes, the Cherokee and the Comanche primarily, and it also pit them against the Mexican population in the area. The Texas Rangers quickly evolved into one of the most formidable forces for protecting whiteness on the American frontier. When nonwhite people were accused of robbing or attacking white settlers, the Rangers acted as designated vigilantes to see that justice was done. And because we're talking about Texas in the period we're talking about, we're actually talking about like, what is today Texas, Oklahoma, parts of New Mexico, and even some Colorado, I think, like it's that whole region. And a lot of this is like Comanche, who were like, this is there where they'd been living for a while. And the they started having conflicts with settlers

and settlers would murder them. They would murder settlers and the Texas Rangers would be, they act a lot as like scouts and stuff for like hunting down these bands and leading militias to them and stuff. And that's kind of like, they're kind of like special forces in this period. And I just can't, just throwing it in like, I just think like the, the, the social interaction, just the humanity of the moment, of course it's tense. Of course it's like, there's a lot of like bigger forces of like colonialism and frontierism and all these things happening. But just the human interaction of saying, you're just waking up, going to make a cup of coffee, step out of your house and someone's building a house in your lawn.

Yeah. And they look at you like you crazy. And just like, what, what are you doing, man? Well, and it's one of those, I don't want to, I'm talking at my ass a little bit now because it's been a long time since I read it. I've read like one good book about what happened to like the conflict between the Comanches and the, the, the white settlers in this period. But if I'm not mistaken, like they were living somewhere else and we kicked them out of it. And so they wound up kind of in the, the, the broad Texas region. And then we were like, okay, but not here either. Like it was this too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very frustrating history. So white settlers quickly learned how to use the Texas Rangers as like a mercenary force.

And not just against, well, not just against like indigenous peoples, it became very common for white men to raid cattle from Mexican ranches. And then the Mexicans would steal their cattle back. And so the white folks would call in the Texas Rangers to retrieve their stolen property. And, you know, the Texas Rangers would murder people during these like raids to retrieve property, like cattle they had owned and had been stolen from them and that they'd taken back as a rule in sort of the Texas Republic period and the early period of statehood, when non whites resisted the Rangers in any way, they could be killed, arrested or tortured. So the Texas Rangers go from being kind of this like quasi military scouting force,

like a counterinsurgency force to like acting as kind of a law force for, for defending whiteness on the frontier. And over the course of several decades, the Texas Rangers acted as the tip of a spear that gradually drove most indigenous peoples out of Texas, often very violently. For much of the 1800s, the Rangers were, yeah, again, like counterinsurgency was kind of their, their bag. And they worked with the militia or the military as basically special forces. The Comanche Wars were a brutal series of conflicts that crossed the line into outright ethnic cleansing on a number of occasions. And the Texas Rangers were very heavily involved. One of these ethnic cleansing moments would be the Red Fork Massacre of 1840. When a team of

Texas volunteer Rangers surrounded a Comanche village whose men were all out raiding, rather than attempt to arrest the women, children and elderly inside, the Rangers surrounded the camp and opened fire. When their rifles ran out of ammunition, they closed in with pistols to execute the survivors. Some 140 Comanches were gunned down and probably another 140 at least died later from exposure. Their horses were stolen to pay the Rangers. Now, this was an act of genocide and was also pretty much a fundamentally military endeavor. But as the, and that's, that's generally when you're, we're talking about like the, the kind of cutting edge of the genocide against the Native Americans, the intentional parts of it. We are often talking

about a military endeavor, like policing plays a role, but it's, it's a lot of like the U.S. military and the Rangers are moving to a different part of the country. But like when you get into like the little big horn and general Custer stand, that was a military move too. And in a lot of ways, the ingredients were the same also in the sense that like, this is where the Crow Nation lives. Now we actually, but we only live here because y'all made us live here. And then you discovered gold in the Black Hills and now you want our land again. And yeah. Yeah. So just this like, obviously in, in a little big horn, it's because they, uh, grossly underestimated sitting bowl. But, uh, but the, but that, but that continual like, um,

like fake diplomacy, which was really a militarized ethnic cleansing from what I know from the first tour I ever did was 27 Native American reservations. So first tour as a, as an artist. So when you start talking to them about the way that they see these things, they were, yeah, that's in their mind, it's always been an active military. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that's part of, I guess, why we haven't kind of gone into that aspect as much. Um, and one of, one of, just because like it's, it's less of a policing thing and more of a military thing. Although those lines blur and they blur especially with the Texas Rangers. Cause while the Rangers kind of are, uh, start out as, as a quasi military force, as the 1800s turned into the 1900s and kind of the frontier fades, the Rangers transitioned

into a law enforcement agency and they become, they're broadly similar to the U S marshals. Like today that's kind of like more or less where they land. Um, and they're like this weird Texas state law enforcement agency that kind of resembles in a lot of ways more of like a fed type agency than it does, you know, a beat cop, but they're, they're law enforcement now. So they, and they still exist. Yeah. They still exist. They go from being like, okay, not like, uh, it's not like Queen Elizabeth, like they actually do. No, no, no. Okay. If you fly into, um, if you fly into Lovefield airport today in Dallas, which is the airport you want to fly into and out of in Dallas, because DFW was a goddamn nightmare. There's a statue, there's a statue of like a dude,

a cowboy looking dude with a six gun on his hip. That's like a statue of the Texas Rangers. And I think it's like the words written on it are one ranger, one riot, which is their motto. And we'll be talking about where, where that motto really comes from now, but they're, no, they're still around. There's still a law enforcement agency in Texas. And yeah, that's the, they kind of transitioned from being a military guerrilla warfare unit to being like the law. Um, and as a side note, as a side note, I still don't know what a US Marshall does, except for fly on a plane. You know, if that's true. Yeah. The movie US Marshals, I think is perfectly accurate. Just watch, watch the movie US Marshals with Robert Downey Jr.

and, uh, and Tommy Lee Jones. And I think that's a hundred percent right. Um, yeah, I was like, so this is unnecessary. Your whole job is unnecessary. Okay. Anyway, go on. So, um, the, the new Texas Rangers as law enforcement, um, didn't act as like military scouts anymore, but they still enforced white supremacy at the barrel of a gun in 1918 at a place called Porvenir, Texas Rangers gunned down 15 unarmed Mexican people and drove their families across the border into Mexico. I found a fun article on the Rangers in the Texas Observer, which is a great news source on Texas. They do really good journalism. And they interviewed historian and professor Monica Martinez about the history of the Texas Rangers. Uh, the article

notes quote, Martinez's research posits the height of Texas Ranger violence against Mexicans to have occurred from 1915 to 1919. Some 300 ethnic Mexicans were murdered between 1915 and 1916 alone. These dates coincided with the reign of not only the disgraced governor James Poff Ferguson, but also starting in 1917, the oft venerated William P. Hobby. Martinez is appropriately unsparing and a detailing of hobbies, consistently anti Hispanic, anti NAACP agenda. In short, he used the Rangers as his own personal goon squad and instigating intimidation tactics against minorities. Hobby presided over an era that according to Martinez saw the widespread practice of executing landowning Hispanic men to force the sale of their land by their widows

through threats of physical violence. Much. Yeah. Yeah. Much of the same hobby from the Houston airport. Yeah. Wait, same guy. Uh, yeah, I think so. Yes. Yes. Yes. George Bush. And then there's hobby. That's that's like, yeah, that's Houston's love field. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Their other airport. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Much have said violence aided and abetted if not directly perpetrated by the Rangers with a state official state consent. Powerful US political elites like Hobby made sure that any serious investigation of Ranger crimes through official legal channels would be doomed to failure. Now, yeah, that is just just straight up ethnic cleansing again. Yeah. Like they're still ethnically cleansing people.

And obviously I didn't learn any of that in Texas history classes. I learned about them fighting the Comanche, but it was it was framed as like, well, they were, you know, both two sides in a war and they both did bad things. Yeah. Now, it turns out that in this is I also didn't learn in middle school. It turns out that the Texas Mexican border was kind of prior to this point where the Texas Rangers come in and start murdering landlords. It was a semi autonomous region because it was both too remote and too close to Mexico to really be controlled by any central government. So people on the border from both countries would travel freely and like cross the border kind of without even noticing it was there. They built communities together. They had

families together. They traded together. And this was great for them, but it was really bad for rich people and racists who lived many hundreds of miles away. So the Texas Rangers were sent in to secure the border. And this was like the first time the border was really secure. Here we go. And again, they did this by executing people who owned land near the border and handing their stuff actually Mexican people who owned land near the border and handing their stuff over to white people. The dead were portrayed as bandits and criminals and heavily armed Rangers would pose for photographs with their bodies. By 1919, the sheer scale of the violence had forced a state legislative hearing on extra judicial killings by the Rangers. This hearing resulted in no formal charges and the

detailed record of the Texas Rangers mass murder spree was sealed for 50 years so as to not tarnish their record as Texan heroes. Yeah, I bet. I bet. Yeah. Also, also, there's parts of El Paso that are still like that that you still can't tell where the border is and isn't where there's a there's a high school down there. I know because the kid came to a show where the football field is in Mexico. Yep. And then but the rest of the school is in Texas. So nobody really knows where we really don't know where it is. But yeah, anyway, I just thought that's interesting that like to this day that like it's important for us to all remember that borders are made up. They're not yeah. We made them up, you know, they're just by pain. Yeah. Yeah, maybe it's not they're not real

and they're not. Yeah. Yeah. And forced by pain is a good way to yeah. So the Texas Rangers went well into the 20th century acting as a colonial police force that didn't stop in 1919 and Alex Vitale, author of the end of policing rights, quote, in the 60s and 70s, local and state elites used Rangers to suppress the political and economic rights of Mexican Americans and played a central role in subverting farm worker movements by shutting down meetings, intimidating supporters and arresting and brutalizing picketers and union leaders. They were also frequently called in to intimidate Mexican Americans out of voting and local elections. Most Latinos were subject to a kind of Juan Crow, like it's a Jim Crow's thing, in which they were denied the right to vote and barred

from private and public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants, bus station, waiting rooms, public pools and bathrooms. This is what that statue in Love Field is referring to when it says one ranger, one riot. That's the riot. Is Mexicans being like, what if we had the right to vote? And Texas Rangers saying, what if we shot you? You still have to say to yourself, everybody's situation is so unique. But as a Texan Mexican where you never moved, your house never moved, it's just the land up under you became Texas. And then everybody acting like you ain't supposed to be there. That you ain't got rights. He was like, I've never left. I don't understand how I don't have rights in land. I never left. Yeah, you're the new guys.

Yeah, it's just the mind bender of that. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool and good. So the Rangers were eventually beaten back to an extent in the early 1960s when Tejanos began to organize in a significant way. They set up voter drives and fought literally fought in some points to get leaders elected on the local city council of a small town called Crystal City. This whole operation exploded into a big fight with Rangers cracking skulls and trying to break up rallies. But this time, their victims attracted the attention of the press. The Rangers eventually were forced to back down by public opinion. And the Tejanos won both the election and major civil rights concessions from the white majority, you know, all across Texas. And things started

to get better. Obviously, they're still not perfect or even great, but they got better. Today, the Texas Rangers are sort of just like a weird Texan variant of the U.S. Marshals. They do a lot of unsolved crime investigations like cold case murders. They investigate serial killers. They also act as kind of like they're supposed to be kind of a watchdog for the police because they they investigate officer involved shootings. And of course, they do border security. Yeah. And the fact that they have a I don't know enough about how they do today to know how problematic they are in sort of currently in the vein of the rest of law enforcement, I will say they have a very positive reputation among just Texans. And this is not due to anything

they actually do, but is owed largely to the 1990s TV show Walker, Texas Ranger. That's what I was assuming because of Chuck Norris. Yeah, Chuck Norris basically erased the century and changed long history of ethnic cleansing and genocide by doing enough roundhouse kicks while wearing a badge on his chest that people were like, they're OK now. Because he punched a bear. Look at him. He punched a bear. Yeah. He's got to be a good guy. Yeah. And in sort of in following this arc of like committing genocide, acting as like a military force of ethnic cleansing and like like mass murder to suppress minorities and then getting whitewashed by a TV show with Chuck Norris. The Texas Rangers kind

of perfectly encapsulate a lot of law enforcement history in this country. That is the most succinct sentence. Yeah. This is the most succinct sentence we've done. Yeah. This whole series. Yeah. They participated all six. They participated in at least two genocides, but then Chuck Norris started kicking people and it was all right. Spinning roundhouse kick. Cool stuff. Also, also as a native Californian who married a first gen Mexican woman from southern Mexico, I will go to my grave that I am not a fan of Tex-Mex food and that queso is terrible. Oh, no. That's the only thing I'll fight for about Texas is Tex-Mex. Amen. Hey, I'll take your fajitas. They're great, but you can leave that queso alone. Fucking Cali-Mex putting fish in everything. Come on.

Touche. Yeah. I mean, it's actually all pretty incredible compared to the burritos we get up here in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah. Don't call those burritos. No, they're not. They're not burritos. Somebody put quinoa in one of them. I was just like, what are you? That's a wrap. God damn it. Yeah. That's a wrap. Come on. Yeah. Don't call this a fucking burrito. Yeah. So in our last episode of the series, we talked about August Volmer. You remember Volmer like the best cop that we're going to talk about in the series? The best possible one. Yeah. Probably the most influential police chief in US history. Volmer was a big advocate of what is called like the professional model of policing, of like what a police force should be. He believed that police

officers should be trained professionals with college degrees. And when he thought trained professional, he was not thinking about killing, right? Like their ability to handle a gun and shoot people was kind of low on Volmer's list of what cops should be professional at. He focused on the number one, their ability to kind of scientifically solve crimes and their ability to interface with and be parts of communities. Those are good things. Yeah. Broadly, there's still a problem at it. One of the things we won't get into enough is that number one, like a lot of police science fingerprinting and stuff works a lot less well than they say it does. Yeah. Like there's a lot of problems with that. And there's also people who argue

that community policing doesn't like is better than, you know, maybe what we're doing now, but doesn't really work all that well. Like there's arguments to be made. We're not going to get into them enough. I don't want to be saying that like his attitude was perfect, but I think it was less problematic. Yeah. Was he like the, like the precursor to like CSI Miami, you know, like... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Where you got to like scientifically solve these crimes. And that everybody that has a science degree in forensics is unimaginably gorgeous. Yes. They work in a lab that is looks more like a club. Yeah. Yeah. It's really well lit. Yeah. It's really well lit.

Yeah. Volmer is the guy who advocates for like sexy, brilliant doctor cops who like, yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's that's that's kind of his vision. Perfect shape. Yes. Oh my God. An incredible shape with abs. Like, like how do they get abs that nice and also do police work? I don't get it. Yeah. So Volmer, that's Volmer's attitude. That's kind of the professional model of policing, but Volmer was not the only person with a vision of what policing should be. And there was a, you know, in the 1920s in particular, a competing model of policing started to evolve. Now, if you remember your high school history courses, you'll know that the period from like 1877 to 1895 is referred to broadly as the gilded age. And this was a time of massive wealth

and equality, a period that saw the USA's first multimillionaires rise alongside a devastating series of economic recessions and depressions. The gilded age was a time of intense political polarization. Political parties got like at each other's throats in a way they really hadn't been, you know, you know, prior to the civil war, which I guess hadn't been that long ago. So let's not pretend that hasn't always been an aspect of our politics. But yeah. And around the turn of the century, the gilded age kind of gave way to what's called the progressive era. And progressive today is a term we broadly use for just like folks on the left, but back then it meant something different. And like progressives of this era kind of had things in common with both our modern left and

right. Some of the values they had in common with like today's lefties would be sort of a rejection of conservative individualism in favor of more collective attitudes towards the common good. Progressives wanted to use state power to do things like help lower class individuals, workers, immigrants, you know, the urban poor, they stood against the greed of unchecked capitalism and the corruption of a system of party bosses that had dominated urban politics in US cities during the gilded age. And progressives weren't really, they, progressive was a political orientation, but they didn't really care about, they weren't like super into parties. Like a lot of the progressive era was kind of a rejection of where party politics had led things in the gilded age.

That's a factor in this too. And when you, when you read what I just read, the progressives kind of sound like lefties, but that's not all they were. Many progressives also held deeply conservative attitudes towards religion and acceptable social behavior. Progressives were by and large a homogenous middle class white protestant group. They eschewed political parties in favor of local informal organizations like the anti saloon league. And as that last bit might key in on a whole lot of progressives were very jazzed about prohibition. And it's also progressives that also, you know, as an aside that bring us like early race science for, for some reasons we're going to get into. So the progressives are a mix of left and right and problematic as all hell. Like, yeah, these

are, it's also, it's also a good lesson for the modern thinker, the younger thinker to remember that like, even our terms left and right are so malleable and they haven't always meant the same thing that you can like find clips of like George Bush senior talking about climate change, because the talking points can vary in these just like borders are made up terms and they are very malleable. So even just jumping into this time with a vocabulary list that you think, you know, in seeing that like, nah, dude, like those are also malleable too is like super good. That's so which is one reason why I love this, this part of American history and politics. Yeah. And it's like, it's fascinating. It's very because they're like part of why they get into race science is

that like this idea that again, we kind of think of as broadly positive today, this idea that like, okay, the poor, it's like we should use the government state resources to help deal with things like homelessness and poverty. Yeah. But the way a lot of progressives take that is like, okay, well, let's figure out the root causes of homelessness and poverty. Boy, it seems like certain races of people are more likely to be homeless, you're unproverged, maybe part of what the government should be doing to solve this problem is sterilize them. That's, that's where the thought process goes. It's just, I have a weird sharp left. Yeah. There's, there's obviously, there are certain things I think the government ought to be doing that it shouldn't, but let's

never forget that when you start talking about the government ought to do this or that, that can go badly too, which doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve problems, but let's all keep that in our fucking heads. Let's remember. Yes. Yeah. So have you ever read Justice by Michael Sandow? Oh, no, I have not. Yeah, this is a good one. And it's a complete tangent, knowing that you have 45 more pages to read. But it is important to know like what he talked about. The basic premise is like your, what you see as just, um, and how you define what justice is. If I, if you can answer that question, it could tell me where you're probably going to land historically and politically. Like for example, if you think just means the greatest good for all. So everybody,

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 on the gun badass way, 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, 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 in 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync. 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. He looks at like, what's the greater good? How can the most amount of people see the most amount of flourishing? You're probably going to lean more liberal and progressive, right? If you're like, no, justice means leave me alone to figure out how I want to make things happen. It is unjust for you to limit my liberties. Well, that's like libertarian. And, you know, moving in that area is we're like, justice means leave me alone, right? You don't get to tell me how to do things. But if you're like, justice means there is a right way to do stuff. And that

right way, we all need to fall in line. And that's more a conservative lean. So if you say that that's that, then that makes a justice society. So if you look at things like that, then when you jump into this region, you're going, they're answering the question, how do we make, how do we make a justice society? But their solution was, well, you know, brown people suck, so they shouldn't have no more children. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's complex, a complex period to talk about. And yeah. So yeah, you know what doesn't support eugenics prop? Well, hopefully the products and services that yeah, yeah, advertise on this place. That's our that's our one line. Sophie calls every advertiser and just says the word eugenics and kind of like that

way. Yeah. Have you ever measured a brain? Yeah. Yeah. Do you do you take skull measurements? Yes. All right, here's some ads. But hell is real. We're all trapped here. And there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me, won't you? Listen to the doctor's sex re show every Tuesday on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. So who is the man behind baby beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad and host of finding Rafi, a new podcast from I heart radio and fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the I heart radio app or wherever you get your

podcasts. The gangster Chronicles podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around the underworld. And criminals and entertainers to victims of crime and law enforcement, we cover all facets of the game. Gangster Chronicles podcast doesn't glorify promote illicit activities. We just discussed the ramifications and repercussions of these activities because after all, if you play games to games, you are ultimately rewarded with games to prizes. Our heart radio is number one for podcasts. But don't take our word for it. Find against the Chronicles podcast and I heart radio app or wherever you get your podcast. We're back. We're back. And I just I hope to God that was not an ad for a company that

sells Calipers. Okay, tell me you're not selling Calipers. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, these Calipers are just 20% off with the promo code bastard. So on a personal note, on a personal note, I remember the first time I saw some of those like phrenology, like, yeah, like manuals and drawings. I was just a visual artist. So I was like, dude, that's so cool. And I wanted to buy one of those old ones. And then then then my father looked at me and was like, boy, if you don't get that out my house. It's a funny moment. Yeah. Anyway. So all right. So we're talking about the progressives and particularly the fact that they they get they get whole hog in the motherfucking prohibition. And I'm going to quote next from

a paper by Ellen Leichtman, an associate professor from Eastern Kentucky University. That's about early police militarization. She starts by kind of talking about the genesis of a lot of progressive thought. So she's talking about progressives here. As the cities grew, many of them began to yearn for a small town pass that had existed mostly in their imaginations. These towns were conceptualized as homogenous villages where everyone knew everyone else and looked after each other. While small towns still existed throughout the country, progressives bemoaned the fact that these traits could not be transferred to urban living. Actually, many of these traits could be found in urban immigrant neighborhoods,

but progressives could not transfer their idealized image of small town living to a foreign environment. The small towns they had envisioned were based on Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethics and culture, not the Catholic, Italian and Irish Eastern European Jewish and other customs of the immigrant neighborhoods, which did not hold with many of the sumptuary laws, especially that of prohibition. So dear to the progressives hearts. So they they're they're big family oriented people, but the actual like the people who are really living the kind of family oriented small town sort of life within the big cities are these immigrants and they drink and progressives hate that. So progressives get their way on prohibitions starting January 17th 1920, but it didn't go well

and the first two years of prohibition saw overall crime increase by 24 percent nationwide. This included a 13 percent increase in homicide and a 13 percent increase in assault and battery. Most of this violence was driven by the enforcement of prohibition. One study that compared South Carolina counties that did and did not enforce prohibition found that enforcement led to a 30 to 60 percent increase in homicides. Sheesh. Yeah. A lot of people get killed when you prohibit drugs arbitrarily. It turns out this is the lesson maybe we should learn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's at some point somebody needs to go ahead and go in and explain how there was really no scientific reasoning behind prohibition. Just nope. Political power. People just didn't like alcohol in one of the

state to stop something they didn't like from happening. So yeah. Yeah. The increase massive increase in violence as a result of prohibition infuriated a lot of progressives and rather than recognize that prohibition was maybe a bad idea. A lot of them started pushing hard to use state power to put an end to bootlegging in an organized fashion. And this is what led to the first major challenge to August Volmers like professional model of police. Many progressives began to push for an alternate idea, a military model of a police force. And I'm going to quote again from Professor Leichtman. Well, there was substantial overlap between the professional and military models and that both insisted that the police be autonomous, be subject to physical

requirements and use the latest technology to defeat crime. There was a difference in focus for the military model. The city and its police represented the nation and its standing army. People who broke the law were equated to enemies of the state, not citizens and became persona non grata in their own country. To fight these adversaries, the uniformed branch of the police and the detectives, the non uniformed branch were equated to different services of the military. Illegal behavior was seen as an attack on the American way of life. To save the country, the police had to engage in a war on crime. Needless to say, many cities began recruiting military men to run their departments. And Jason, one of these military men was a fellow you and I

discussed kind of offhandedly in one of the first episodes of the series. You remember when I read you that quote from Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler? Yes, Smedley. Yeah. Now that quote was from kind of after he woke up a bit and started to realize some problems with earlier aspects of his career. But in 1924, he was still a Marine Corps general in the city of Philadelphia elected Freeland Kendrick mayor on a law and order platform. Kendrick, a Republican, was livid that his city had more speakeasies than perhaps any other area in the country. The city of brotherly love had an estimated 8000 illegal bars and liquor stores in 1923 because it's Philly, you know, it's fucking Philly, right? Yes. Stay on brand Philly. Yeah. Yeah. Philly is always on brand. So

Merrick Kendrick decided that a military man and a military model were needed to reform the Philadelphia PD into something that could tackle the problem of vice. And he chose Marine Brigadier General Smedley Darlington Butler to be the new director of public safety. And again, Butler was still in the military at this point. He had to get like a special a special like leave from the Marine Corps so that he could go be the director of public safety in Philadelphia. So he's still a general. He's still in the military as he takes over a police force. Now, at age 42 in 1942, General Butler had survived 14 campaigns and expeditions over 22 years of service. He had joined the military illegally as a literal child after lying about his age in order to fight in the

Philippines. During his time fighting for capitalism and his own, you know, that's how he framed it later. Butler had earned the nicknames Old Gimlet Eye, Hell's Devil Butler, the Fighting Quaker and Old Duckboards. Like he had a lot of nicknames. Yeah. Yo, the Fighting Quaker. Yeah, that's a fucking good nickname. Yeah. That's a tattoo, bro. Yeah. Yes. And he gets the nickname Quaker. Like Old Duckboards are like wood boards they would put down and like trench fighting because it was like muddy so that you would be able to walk. And like, basically during World War One, there was this fight where like everything was fucking muddy as shit and they needed to get boards into place. And Butler, who was like, I think a general still at this point, just picks

up a fuckload of boards and like runs into the battlefield to like set them down. He won two medals of honor. Yeah. And he won a Distinguished Service Cross, which is like a British award, like their medal of honor. Like he wins two of our medals of honor and like the British equivalent or it's either British or the French equivalent. Like he's not just like an officer who like commands troops in battle from like a safe position. Like like Smedley Butler, whatever else you want to say about him is a fucking terrifying badass. Yeah. Like he was just like one of these guys with like a contempt for his own safety in battle. Yeah. Man. Hey, did you know any kids like that when you were like in Texas growing up where you're just a kid

that you were just like, this guy is dangerous and doesn't care about his body, but I'm glad he's my friend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those are good people to be friends with. Yes. Outside of certain situations. Yeah. Yeah. So, but that's that's Smedley Butler at this period. So he's kind of a legend. He's still a general and he gets made the director of public safety in Philadelphia. And, you know, Butler himself was a progressive and he was also a drinker, like not a heavy one, but he drank. So he didn't like prohibition, but he was kind of progressive, progressive. Yeah. It was kind of his belief that even bad laws had to be enforced for the sake of public good. And upon taking off as he stated, I do not care whether the state laws or city ordinances are

right or wrong. From January 7th, they are going to be enforced. So like that's his attitude is like that. And that's such a military. Yeah. Yes, it is. Yeah. When you when you said earlier, like I've never heard that train of thought put in the order that you put it when you were like an act of crime is an act against the state. Therefore, you are no longer a citizen. You are now an enemy combatant. I've never heard that train of logic because I never understood how if you're a policeman, how you like, who are you fighting? I'm like, you're fighting the people you supposed to protect. Like, I don't get it. That sentence finally at least made me be able to follow the logic. I just wanted to go back and point that out. Yeah. And this is this is one

of the things that we're seeing in Philadelphia right now is like the the first time where so obviously you've had you've had the police being used to suppress segments of the American public, the dangerous classes, right? And this like primarily black and brown people in this period of time. What we start to see happening with the militarization of the Philadelphia police is kind of the first time the police are at war with everyone in the city. Like that that because, you know, white people broadly, if they weren't members of a dangerous racial group, could see the police's protectors in this period. And that starts to change in Philly because in Philly, like, yeah, they they this is the first time like the police, like again, and the police in the 20s

are heavily corrupt and a lot of them are criminals, but they're not as an organized force. They're not going to war with the city. This is the first time that really happens. That's crazy because white people are selling drugs now. Y'all just call it moonshine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Butler gave his first address to the Philly PD in a uniform he had designed for himself, complete with a cape, which is a flex. Like, whoa. Yeah. Yeah. Yo, if you got if you got that many medals of honor from multiple countries, you could wear a cape. You get to wear a cape. Yeah, fuck it. Yeah. Yeah. He demanded the police stop making bribes. And he told them that while the rest of the city might see them as just a bunch of corrupt gangsters, he saw them as soldiers,

like the Marines he'd spent years commanding in battle. And that's what he planned to turn them into. So Butler launched an immediate series of raids on bootleggers and speakeasies, changing city policy by not informing the mayor first, I think in part because he knew the mayor knew some of these people and had been protecting them. And in a matter of days, Butler's police closed down 900 illegal bars. Now, at the same time as he cracked down, General Butler began the process of transforming the Philadelphia police into a military force. He created a new squad of 300 officers whose job was to spy on their fellow cops. These men would be the teeth behind Butler's admonition that Philly cops had to stop taking bribes. Another of Butler's first

steps was to abolish the police training school. See, Volmer August Volmer wanted educated professionals with like degrees in criminal justice who like approached crime from a scientific standpoint. General Butler thought that was bullshit. He thought that cops like soldiers learned best in the field. And before his term, police training had taken more than three months. Butler's new policies sent the cops out on the street almost immediately gave them like a booklet that outlined their duties and was just like, you'll figure it out once you're on the street. When you talk about binary thinking, you either A, get trained for three months or B, get a little pamphlet. Get a little pamphlet. Yeah. Go crack some heads. You'll learn quick.

Go crack some heads. You'll figure it out. Y'all ain't thought maybe there's somewhere in between there. Maybe we could pull a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Just those my two options. Yep. And it's like, so one thing that's interesting is that Butler didn't actually cancel all training. There was exactly one area where police still trained because he thought it was important and it was in the use of firearms. He had realized early on that most cops barely knew how to use their weapons and even fewer ever fired them. Butler thought this was a problem because again, he's treating them as soldiers. So he mandated two weeks of marksmanship training, which was the only training his cops received. He also,

rather bafflingly, decided to arm the fire department with 45 caliber revolvers, which yeah, he gave all the firefighters guns and he required them to wear their guns off duty. What? Well, they had arresting powers. Firefighters could arrest people in those days. So he was like, when you're off duty, you're all auxiliary cops and you need to carry guns in case you have to shoot some people. Basically, he viewed all public safety employees as soldiers who might potentially get called into fight a war against the criminals within their city. And since every criminal was now the same as a foreign combatant, Butler started applying the same counter insurgency tactics he'd learned in the Philippines and throughout Latin America. He announced that

he would give a promotion to the first officer to kill a bandit. The bandit in question did not have to be committing a violent crime. If he had a revolver in hand or on his body while he was being chased, that was fair game for the Philadelphia PD. From Professor Lichtman's paper, quote, Butler took this further and stated that like soldiers, those police who killed criminals should not be called upon to either defend themselves or to contribute to their defense. A policeman who shoots a bandit is serving his city exactly as a soldier when firing at his country's enemies. Butler said he saw no difference in context between the role of the soldier and that of a police officer. That's bad. Yeah, it's not great. I mean, and we we wound up nationwide

with the same ruling Butler made that it's cool to shoot people running away. It was like in the the 80s or the early 90s where the Supreme Court ruled that if you a police officer can shoot you even if you're not actively threatening them if you're trying to get away from an arrest like that's the thing that could happen. It's why cops get to shoot so many people in the back. It's it's fine. That's so Butler saw no reason why his soldier cops shouldn't have access to the latest in military grade weaponry. He had ordered several customized armored cars to enable his officers to get into motorized gunfights with bootleggers. Rather than holding two men as with a normal police car, these armored buggies held four officers. The rear seats were set up back

to back with the front seats so that the men in the back could shoot directly at bandits without needing to turn around. Every man in the car would carry a rifle, a shot off shotgun and a revolver. And if you want to if you want, I can't imagine a gesture that shows more contempt for the people just living in the city than firing a shot off shotgun from a moving vehicle. That's a drive by. Yeah, I don't understand what that's a drive by. Yeah, it's that's so reckless. What do you like a son of shotgun is not accurate at more than like 15 feet in a good situation and you're just shooting it from a car. I'm moving one at that. It's fucking nuts. Oh, I just don't understand. Yeah. Yeah, fuck it. Yeah. And again, like one

up. Sorry, I didn't even note this at the start. One of Butler's like requirements when he took the job because he was used to being a military officer in a foreign war zone was that no one questioned anything he did like the city not like he basically be unaccountable and they were like, sure, sure, no problem. Sure, no problem. Yeah, yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of wars. I for the first time in a little personal news, oh, yeah, has have shot big. This is my first positive experience with guns this weekend that we're recording this every other experience has been terrifying and life threatening. This is the first time I've ever seen a gun in a very recreational place. And I walk away with two really real thoughts, which is you must anyone holding

these has to have a deep respect for the deadly power in their hands. Oh, yeah. Like how do you not revere this thing? Like you feel its power holding it. And then secondly, what has to click off in your brain to be able to point this at another human? Like even recklessly or with joy or just to not think about that. I'm like, some about your soul turned off because I just could, I've kneeled in front of a 50 cal, which is crazy. But I also held out held a AR 15. Now shooting, it felt like the most powerful thing I ever did in my life. I'm not gonna lie to you. I screamed and how old I was a redneck. I'm not gonna lie. I went, whoa, not gonna lie. But I thought to myself, how could you point this at a person? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to say about what is

emotionally involved in that. And I have unfortunately been in a couple of situations. Fortunately, never where I had to point my gun at a person, but where I had a gun and somebody was doing something violent with a weapon in their hand. And there was this thought process of like, where's my line going to be? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Like you still have all your faculties. I believe you're a fully developed human. So you thought to yourself, there is a cost to this. Yeah. You know, and I don't know if this juice is worth the squeeze. Yeah. So what you're telling me is you put four dudes in a car. In a car. With a shot off. You don't say. With four shot offs. Shoot wildly into the city. Yes. To stop people with a couple gallons of rum. Yes.

Yeah. It's pretty, pretty wild. So Butler divided Philadelphia up like a war zone with interlocking zones of control that like different patrols were set for and every patrol would have like set routes that they were supposed to travel in the event that they had to like intercept people. There were convoys of armored vehicles. And he even set up a number of military style outposts to allow for better monitoring that were fortified like fortresses within Philadelphia that were able to act as like outpost. We call them fobs forward operating bases today in Afghanistan. Like what he did in Philadelphia is exactly the same tactically as what the US does in Afghanistan today. Like that's how he divided Philly up for his police force.

And because he was like he was good at prosecuting an insurgency. He knew what he knew his business and that's what he did to Philadelphia because it was a military model police force. Now under Smedley Butler, the entirety of Philadelphia's urban infrastructure was actually turned to the cause of prosecuting his war on crime. He used the street lights to broadcast blink codes to officers about what crimes were taking place where. So he would basically do like not semaphore. Or what's it called? Like Morse code. Yeah. He would blink the street lights in Morse code to so officers could see like, oh, there's a crime taking place in this street. Street lights is snitching. Yeah. He had four huge search lights and like a big basically

fucking billboard set up in city hall that would like display the license plates of cars of that like bandit vehicles that were in the area. Like, yeah, it's like some fucking big brother's shit. Smedley's tactics were very successful in closing down a huge number of Philadelphia speakeasies, but they were not successful in actually winning the war for prohibition. For one thing, a ton of officers drank and so did many of the mayor's wealthy backers. These same men and women had a lot of business interests and upper class clubs and restaurants that had been serving alcohol illegally prior to Butler, but were forced to shut down due to his raids. He refused to treat the favorite watering holes of the wealthy any differently than

hole in the wall slum speakeasies. And this caused increasing problems for the mayor who had hired him. Yeah. It's complicated. Yeah. Professor Lichtman writes, in an attempt to divert what he saw as an imminent disaster, he asked Butler to meet with these men and women believing Butler could outline his plans and get their cooperation. But Butler was too brusque and did not handle the situation well. Instead of coming to some sort of compromise with these business people, he approached them as if he were a general and informed them that he intended to install a special squad of undercover detectives dressed in full evening attire to police these establishments. This began a two year battle between Butler and the hospitality industry.

Butler must have assumed that either the public would support these laws or that he could enforce them against public opinion. What he learned was what many occupying armies learned. It is often the oppressed that prevail culturally. Those arrested for liquor infractions came before magistrates who released them for lack of evidence. When Butler began padlocking the establishments of persistent liquor violators, judges rejected his arguments and allowed the places to reopen. He also came to the realization that many policemen were in league with bootleggers and regular citizens had their own bathroom stills. Most Philadelphians did not want prohibition and did everything in their power to thwart it. So, look, and this lesson, this motif is so clear

and so repeated everywhere that you're just holding on to power and when you hold on to power, even with ridiculous laws, you're going to have to use violence and your people are going to turn against you because it's stupid. Yes, it's stupid. And that's like Butler is good at running an insurgency the way our military has always run insurgencies. And if you have studied the history of our military and insurgencies, we almost always lose. We don't have a great batting record when it comes to fighting insurgents. I think we come home. People think we come home like we did this country of favor and the whole country looking at us like, no, no, no. It's interesting because the modern US military is incredible at combat training, at training people to fight in gun

fights. And all of our training is cribbed and descended from German military training that started out at the end of World War One and like into World War Two. Aufdruck's Taktik is like the name of the kind of techniques. And the German military in World War One and Two was hands of like not even brilliant. No fucking competition in their ability to train people to fight in gunfights. Yeah. Yeah. Historically speaking, heads and shoulders the German military was above everybody. And they lost both wars, which maybe is a lesson about the actual value in a broad sense of having your troops be real fucking good at gunfights. Doesn't matter if you fail at the other shit. And that's what Butler fails at, is understanding the broader dimensions of the

conflict he's got himself into. And he gets let go from his job running the Philadelphia police after just two years. Most of the changes he had instituted reverted back to the way things had been before. Philadelphia continued drinking and eventually the whole country got over this absurd attempt to ban a widely used intoxicant. Now, during this period, a number of other cities did try the same military model police force tactics as Philadelphia, putting like military men in charge of their police. General Francis Green, you know, in New York, Colonel James Everington in Los Angeles, Major Metellus Funkhouser in Chicago, one of the best names I've ever heard. Yeah, amazing. Yeah. So this is something we try. We try militarized police during prohibition in a lot of the country,

and it doesn't work. Now, there are aspects of police militarization that get adopted in this period that kind of stay for one thing, police nationwide, begin adopting more military style weapons during this period, picking up automatic rifles, because the gangsters have Tommy guns and BARs, you know, that's the kind of shit that Bonnie and Clyde and you know, my cousin, pretty boy, Floyd are packing is machine guns. So cops get machine guns too. In general, though, the military model of policing pursued by progressives in the 1920s and 30s seemed to have died out with prohibition. The professional model espoused by Volmer was obviously superior. For a few decades from the war years up until the 1960s, the story of the US police was the story

of growing professionalism and centralization. This was obviously an uneven and imperfect process, but most Americans probably would have assumed that professionalization and the professional model was pretty successful during this period of time. A good example would be law enforcement success and putting an end to lynching as a widespread phenomenon. Now, as we talked about, that was not, did not actually happen the way that it was presented. But you got to think about how like white people at the time would go, oh, people aren't getting lynched anymore. We fixed it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, well-meaning white people. Yeah. It's like gentrification where it's like, well, crime dropped in the city. Yeah. Yeah. So in 1954, the TV show Dragnet first hit the

airwaves. And Dragnet was probably the first TV show about modern law enforcement that, or I think it was 1951 actually, was probably the first TV show about modern law enforcement that deliberately set out to be realistic. Every episode opened with the disclaimer that the cases in the series were all real. Only the names had been changed to protect the innocent. The creator was a guy named Jack Webb, and he was also the star of the show. He was officer Friday. And he partnered with the LAPD from the very beginning of the series. This is the very first time that ever happens. And partnering with the LAPD brings the production of Dragnet a ton of benefits. Number one, they were allowed to film anywhere they wanted to in the city.

Their crew got access to police vehicles and police gear without paying for it. The department would even loan them real cops to use as extras on the show. All this saved the network just a fortune. Wow. The only cost was that Dragnet scripts had to be approved by the LAPD before they could be filmed. Oh, wow. Yeah. Whole episodes were scrapped on the basis that the police didn't think they portrayed policing in a positive enough light. So obviously, Dragnet's not going to deal with problems in the LAPD. It's not going to deal with inequality, you know, in enforcement and stuff. Dragnet, you know, legitimately broke new ground for American television. It was the first show to actually depict black and Hispanic cops. But it also

failed to mention that the LAPD was segregated. Yeah. Yeah. There were very few instances of cops on Dragnet actually firing their guns. But whenever they did, those cops were shown to be calm and emotionally stable in the moment. Nobody ever fired in panic on Dragnet. And the show helped shape a generation's attitudes towards law enforcement, portraying the ideal scientific professionalized Volmer police working almost flawlessly, right? The police are just the facts is Friday's catchphrase, right? Yeah. I was going to ask. That's from our show, right? Just the facts. Yeah. Dragnet is the showing like the ideal of the professionalized police. That's what's depicted in Dragnet. And the LAPD has a vested interest in wanting to make sure that gets depicted,

obviously. So Dragnet was so good for the LAPD's image and reputation that in 1955, the commissioner of the California Highway Patrol demanded his public affairs division get us a show like Dragnet. Highway Patrol had its first season later that year. Yeah. So the Highway Patrol show launches next. And of course, the FBI gets their own version of this treatment in 1965 with the creatively named TV series, the FBI. All of these shows push an idealized image of what law enforcement was and claimed that their fiction was very close to fact. Now, to the extent that people bought into this myth, it started to puncture in 1964 as the civil rights movement took to the streets and U.S. police responded by turning fire hoses and dogs on demonstrators. Many of the. Yeah. Yeah.

So like it's on TV that shuts it down or it's like, oh, oh, we didn't see this part of it on TV. This these people don't seem to be interested in the facts. They seem to be interested in sickening dogs on folks. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that didn't make it into Dragnet. So yeah, yeah, like I'll put down a show 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 on the good and bad ass 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 iHeart Radio 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 in 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

In most of the protests, many of the protests and what were called riots during this period were sparked one way or another by police brutality. The police tear-gassed masses of young activists at the 1968 Chicago DNC. And from 67 to 68, there were 292 mass demonstrations on 163 college campuses. Most were in opposition to the Vietnam War. By the end of 1968, vivid images of battered civil rights protesters, clouds of gas and the corpses of those students at Kent State had very significantly reduced public opinion of law enforcement to probably its lowest ebb up till the present moment. My grandpa was a lifetime military man, fought in World War II in Korea, was managing a hospital on Okinawa on a military base in Japan when Kent State happens

and was very pro the Vietnam War. And he was fucking furious about Kent State because that was the thing. Kent State lost even a lot of pretty conservative militants because they were like, you know, that's not what the military is for. We're not supposed to shoot kids with signs on college campuses. Like, people get real pissed at law enforcement in this period of time. And in 1968, in order to address the collapsing faith in law enforcement nationwide, the US Congress passes the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which among other things, pumped a shitload of federal dollars into what Dr. Gary Potter, who you'll remember from other episodes we've talked about, calls rather cosmetic police community relations programs, which were mostly media focused

attempts to improve the police image. So this is when you start getting like really advanced public affairs departments and police departments hiring PR agencies to help them reform their image. And a lot of the effort in reforming police images was still landed on Hollywood. And of course, in this period, Dragnet gets brought back for another three seasons running from 1967 to 1970. And the years that Dragnet comes back is not, there's no coincidence there. No, not at all. Yeah. So propaganda did not protect the police from the economic downturns of the 1970s. And cities nationwide started making massive cuts to police and other municipal workers just because the economy fell apart. And you know, part of, we, this isn't a show about

the economy, but a big part of what happens is like the US had started exporting a lot of manufacturing jobs had been like, this is like the first, this is when we start to see the hollowing out of this middle class and of like these good union jobs that had persisted for decades since the end of the war. In the 70s, this all falls to shit. We start getting eaten alive economically by like Japan and other countries. And it's, you know, it, this is when like services start to be cut nationwide. And one of the services that gets cut is policing out of necessity. Speaking of services. Ooh. Yeah. You know what services won't be cut. Yeah. That was good. Sophie, you know, who doesn't hollow out the American middle class. Actually, who hollows out they

while it's okay. Yeah. Yeah. There we go. Prada services. I'm Colleen Whit. Join me, the host of Eating While Broke podcast. While I eat a meal created by self-made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official princess of Compton, Asia, Kiddink and Asya. This is the professor. We're here on Eating While Broke. And today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to Eating While Broke on the iHeart radio app on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Lethal listeners, take here. Last season on Lethal It, you might remember I came to hollow falls on a mission,

clearing my Aunt Beth's name and making sure justice was finally served. But I hadn't counted on a rash of new murders tearing apart the town. My mission put myself and my friends in danger, though it wasn't all bad. I'm gonna be real if you take. I like you. But now all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm Tig Torres and this is Lethal It. Catch up on season one of the Hitmurder mystery podcast, Lethal It, a Tig Torres mystery out now. And then tune in for all new thrills in season two, dropping weekly starting February 9th. Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to Lethal It 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 over. 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. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Police departments in this period, budgets get cut. Municipal workers get cut. A lot of the blame as these cities, who in a lot of cases, their budgets got fucked not just because the economy was bad because of massive corruption, but they blame it on union workers. Of course, police are some of the union workers in this period, so they get some big-ass cuts. Out of necessity because their budgets are being trimmed, police departments nationwide embark on a process called Taylorization, which isn't just happened with the police. It's like a scientific optimization of an organization, right? It's attempting to cut manpower and reduce costs without cutting

efficiency. Officers started going from two cop to one cop per patrol car. 911 lines and computers became more widespread and control of the police is centralized more. So police administrators gain more power. Civilian employees are also brought in to do jobs that had been done by police employees in order to reduce the number of highly paid union workers. So this is Taylorization. And while all this is happening inside the US, the Cold War is also happening outside of the US. So inside the country, professionalism is kind of like the professional model of police are still dominant. And they're also like that becomes even more powerful. An idea is the number of police are cut and they have to get more efficient to try to do the same work. So that's what's happening

in the US. Outside the US though, international policing is having something very different happen to it. And this is as a result of the Cold War. So as the Cold War really starts to kick off, our government finds itself trying to prop up friendly states all around the world, you know, anti communist states, particularly in Latin America and Southeast Asia. And we go. Yeah, this proved problematic because a lot of these regimes were corrupt and brutal and people didn't really like living underneath them. And as a rule, our government responded to that by pouring money into training foreign police to murder dissidents because that works a lot better than training the army in a lot of cases. Oh boy. So from 1962 to 1974, the US government operated

the Office of Public Safety, an agency that worked closely with the CIA to train police and nations wracked by conflict due to the Cold War. These nations included South Vietnam, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. Tens of thousands of people were tortured or killed by various police departments who received over $200 million in U.S. aid for firearm and equipment. And I'm going to quote now from an article in the before you get there. There's one that's off the papers, which I know you haven't done an episode on, but like there is there is the Nicaragua one that Oh, yes. Yeah, they weren't supposed to be spending money on, which is the B line. Y'all look, look, look, look, look, I'm excited, but I don't want to remove. I don't want to ruin the reveal.

But what he's talking about right now leads directly to the crack attack in the war on drugs. Yes. But yeah, I don't know if we're going to get to that. No, we're not not nearly because I like I don't want to half-ass that one, like because there's there's so much. Yeah, what we will we will do, we will get into that. We'll dip in because yeah, because it's all tied in. It's the beginning of it. Even this like PR stuff. I grew up with the dare program. Yeah, the drug abuse where the cop car pulled up with the sirens at my elementary school to try to convince me that this cop is cool. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. But yeah, anyway, we was paying for wars and we got paid in crack. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, the CIA and, you know, the US government starts

training cops in all of these countries to suppress, you know, primarily left wing, like political movements. And I'm going to quote now from an article in the Asia Pacific Journal by scholar Jeremy Kuzmerov, who's like one of the top like people studying this particular phenomenon, quote, during the mid 1960s, the director of United States Agency of International Development, USA, David Bell, commented in congressional testimony that the police are the most sensitive point of contact between the government and people close to the focal points of unrest and more acceptable than the army is keepers of order over long periods of time. The police are frequently better trained and equipped than the military to deal with minor forms of violence, conspiracy

and subversion. Robert W. Comer, who served as the national security counsel advisor to President John F. Kennedy, further stressed that the police were more valuable than special forces and are global counterinsurgency efforts and particularly useful in fighting urban insurrections. We get more from the police in terms of preventative medicine than from any single US program, he said. They are cost effective while not going for fancy military hardware. They provide the first line of defense against demonstrations, riots and local insurrections. Only when the situation gets out of hand, as in South Vietnam, does the military have to be called in. So, again, that's the police. The police are, especially as Vietnam goes badly in other

countries, we increasingly see if you train the police to stop this shit before there's a strong left wing movement, you don't have a Vietnam, which you then lose, right? That's internationally what the US is doing to other police agencies. As our police agencies pull back from the militarization of the 20s and 30s and towards professionalism, we push militarization in a lot of ways outside of the United States. Some 1500 Americans were involved in training more than a million foreign police officers during this time. Now, many of those cops did fail in their duties, which is part of why South Vietnam is no longer a country and why Iran does not have a shot anymore. But the suppression tactics taught by US police educators were successful in many

other nations. Like it does not always fail. We are not always bad at training these people to brutally stop left-wing uprising. It works a lot of the time. This is the perfect time to take a take a slice from the hood politics way of thinking things, thinking of things. Because sometimes using these terms, they're so lofty and big if you don't know history or military or politics, it's hard to understand them. This moment in history is so simple. It, because it's just eighth grade. So like you, you're, you and this, you and this other boy or girl are beefing, but child never actually fight. You just keep bringing other kids around to fight. So by, and I'm proving my side of the playground is better because this kid from who I propped up

and trained and gave a rock through at another kid who's got a rock that's on your side of the playground. And that's proven that I'm hard, but it's really they fighting a fight that me and you are supposed to fight, but we got sense enough to know we probably been not fight this fight. So I'm going to let you fight it. Really. That's the cold war is you're, you're going, I'm going to go get my little homeboy to fuck up your little homeboy. That's, that's, that's the cold war. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So yeah. So yeah, we, we, we have, we, we spend a fucking a decade or more training all these foreign police agencies to act as like, yeah, counter insurgent, yeah, our little homeboys to act as counter insurgency forces. And when the office for public safety

closes in 1974, these police trainers needed, still needed work, like these guys who'd spent more than a decade training foreign cops and they find more work and it's inside of the United States at this time. Alex Vitale writes in the end of policing quote, many of the trainers moved in large numbers into law enforcement, including the drug enforcement agency, FBI and numerous local and state police forces, bringing with them a more militarized vision of policing steeped in Cold War imperatives of suppressing social movements through counterintelligence, militarized riot suppression techniques and heavy-handed crime control. Now, in the middle of this period, like right before that office closes really,

like in 1971, so a couple years before we stopped training the police, you know, foreign police in this kind of organized way, not that we stop entirely, but like the way we had been, you know, we're doing less of it. In 1971, Richard Milhouse Nixon declared drug abuse public enemy number one. Soon after that declaration, US press began to discuss a new war on drugs. Now, this war was launched just as the US war in Vietnam started to finally end and spoilers, it wasn't any more successful. Nixon's goal, though, had never actually been to stop drug use. He started the war on drugs because he wanted to win the support of southern white voters who had gone democratic for generations. These people were furious about segregation and they were

pushing back at the success of desegregation. They considered civil rights marchers to have been just looters and rioters, but the weak LBJ administration had failed to murder these people. Professor and legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains, quote, Posters and political strategists found that thinly veiled promises to get tough on them, a group suddenly not so defined by race, was enormously successful in persuading poor and working class whites to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party in droves. Ultimately, this backlash against the civil rights movement was occurring at precisely the same moment that there was economic collapse in communities of color, inner city communities

across America. And of course, again, we're talking about the 70s, we're talking about a period where the economy contracts massively and it hits black inner city communities worse than anyone else. And what is the number one predictor of crime, particularly property crime? It's poverty. Yeah. And there's even like a tide of that moment now of how changing the language from we just hate black people to we're having a war on drugs. The fact that we call weed marijuana is just a Spanish word for cannabis. But that's marketing because if we already hate Mexicans as a nation and you use this drug and you just refer to it by its Spanish name, now it seems more evil. It was just it was a racist marketing that we call cannabis marijuana.

And that's Nixon. I just want y'all to know Nixon did that. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, the backlash against the success of the civil rights movement reaches its height kind of just as unemployment in the inner city peaks and the consequences of deindustrialization and globalization hit the US economy. So crime sores and suddenly a shitload of people find themselves impoverished and desperate without options. And the war on drugs gives the government an a way to take huge numbers of these people, primarily these black and brown people off the street and satisfy white voters that they're doing something about crime. Now drug use was actually falling when Nixon made his announcement and it had been falling for years drug abuse.

But blaming drugs rather than unregulated capitalism hollowing out the American middle class in exchange for corporate profits worked a lot better from a messaging standpoint for a Republican president in 1982. Yeah, exactly. In 1982, Ronald Reagan doubled down declaring an official war on drugs, even though only 3% of Americans at the time considered drug abuse to be the nation's most pressing issue. Since the existing Taylorized US police were ill-equipped to fight a war, President Reagan had to start pouring tens of millions of dollars of federal funds into turning law enforcement into an army. Now the broad trend, so this occurs, Reagan starts pumping all this money in as these these guys who had been these US guys who had

been training foreign military forces overseas start coming back to the country and training cops. So there's a number of things kind of happening at the same time that lead to and are a part of police militarization. Now the broad trend that occurs throughout the 1970s and 80s as a result of all this is that US police nationwide turn away from the professional model and towards a military model, not a different and a military model pretty similar to the one that General Butler proposed to defeat bootlegging in Philadelphia. This process was not smooth or uniform and it was not all due to the war on drugs. The Watts Rebellion of 1965 was a major inciting incident for the militarization of US police and the short story, the almost criminally

short story of the Watts Rebellion is this. A black motorist was pulled over and there was a confrontation again with the police. Community members confronted the cops as like this guy was getting arrested and a fight ensued. One of the cops, I injured a pregnant woman or at least people in the crowd believed that a cop had injured a pregnant woman and kind of rage over this whole incident boils over and like acts as a matchstick. So like obviously the LAPD had been hideously racist for a long time. One of the things that happens when Jim Crowe ends is that the police chief of LA starts deliberately courting southern police officers who are like... This is history y'all. Yeah. If you're pissed about Jim Crowe ending, come to Los Angeles.

We'll let you beat the shit out of black people. We're not making this stuff up. Could not. I thought we brought this up before in one of the older episodes. Yeah, we didn't get into it or not. We didn't get into it though. Yeah. Did I tell y'all my Watts Riot story? No, no, no. Please do. This is the good time for it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good time for it. So it was during the LA riots. This is how my story starts. My grandmother, LA riots was Florence and Normandy, right? Yeah. My grandmother lived off Florence and Gage. So it was just a few more blocks to the east. My father calls my grandmother and he says like, hey, why don't you come stay with us? We were living like maybe 15 minutes east, right? So he says, why don't you come stay with us? You're out

of like the hotspot of South Central. And my grandmother says, if I'm lying, I'm flying. She says, baby, unless there's tanks coming down this street, I ain't going nowhere. This is my house. And I went, my grandma's a gangster. That's the hardest thing I've ever heard in my life, right? And then my, but my parents looked at each other and I was like, tanks, she's hard. They go, she lived in the Watts riots. And they, like history came alive. They was like, yo, she, she lived through the Watts riots. That's what she's referring to. Tanks came down our streets. I was like, oh, because I thought the LA riots was the end of the world. You know what I'm saying? Like I, you know, I'm a preteen during the time. So I was like, this is the end of the world. Grandma was like,

no, baby, tanks come down these streets anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like the Watts riot is, is fucking wild. So like there's a ton of anger in like black and Hispanic communities towards the LAPD. Another thing that's happening is like the LAPD is also separately, but, but at the same time, horrifically suppressing the, the Chicano liberation movement, which is like the Mexicans and Latinos in LA. And like at one point murders a journalist who's like drinking at a bar by shooting him in the back of the head with a tear gas grenade. Hunter Thompson actually wrote one of his best pieces of investigative journalism about all of that. And in fact, fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Yeah. Oh yeah. Shit. Yeah. Yeah. Happening in my neighborhood. I

live in Boyle Heights. Like in the shit. Oh yeah. Yeah. That happened in the neighborhood. Yeah. Yeah. Ruben Salazar and like, so if, like fear and loathing in Las Vegas, like the funny, silly Hunter Thompson move we all know, the actual genesis of that, the real thing that happened that he was actually writing about was one of the leaders of the Chicano liberation movement was this guy, Oscar Acosta, who was Hunter's lawyer. And he, like the reason that he and Hunter Thompson drove to Las Vegas is that they needed to have a conversation about what the LAPD was doing to murder Hispanic activists in Los Angeles. And the only place that wouldn't be bugged would be a fucking, a convertible car with the top down driving through the desert in New Mexico.

Yeah. Or not New Mexico. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about. In Nevada. Yeah. That's what fear and loathing is. It's like, this is all tied up in this. So like, all of this shit fucking explodes into anger at the, or like into the Watts riots in 1965. And like the stuff that happened with Ruben Salazar and stuff was like five years after this, but like all of these, this like racism and stuff is still happening. So like this fight winds up just kind of for whatever reason, being the thing that ignites all of the anger in this part of Los Angeles. And it's the Watts riots is what most history texts will call it. The uprising is another thing you'll hear that I think is probably more accurate. And the uprising

included a shitload of angry black folks breaking into gun stores, getting guns and then sniping at LAPD officers. This is a thing that happens and it, the cops flip the fuck out about it. The police chief gets on television and compares what's happening in Watts to what the insurgency in Vietnam. He compares the rioters to the Viet Cong and he states that a paramilitary response is the only thing possible. The governor, Pat Brown announces that the LAPD was quote, dealing with gorillas fighting with gangsters. The National Guard are called in and the uprising was brutally suppressed. And you know, generally when you hear, because this is a key movement in the militarization of police and generally when it's talked about, you will hear about

like the person writing about it will pivot from like rioters, looting guns and sniping at the LAPD to like the National Guard coming in to kind of make the case that the LAPD was just overwhelmed by armed citizens. This is not what happened. Only three sworn personnel were killed during the Watts riots. One was an LA firefighter who died in a structure fire. One was a Los Angeles sheriff's deputy who was shot by another deputy when that deputy accidentally fired his shotgun during a clash with rioters. And another was another Los Angeles police officer who was shot by another one of his fellow cops accidentally during a fight with rioters. No Los Angeles police were killed by rioters with guns. Meanwhile, the LAPD killed 23 mostly black people during

the Watts riots. The National Guard killed seven. So again, the image of the Watts riots is that like these rioters were just so heavily armed that like it inspired the militarization of police because cops needed more weapons and tactical teams in order to deal with such threats. The reality is that like the fucking no cops even got killed by rioters. Like it's definitely accurate to say that like the LA police had been like more militant, I think than other police departments, but not like it, not like a tactical way, just in a way of seeing themselves as fighting. They saw themselves as fighting and is fighting a war against the non white population of the city. That was the LAPD in this period. Yeah, there's this idea of like returning

to the America they remember. Yeah. Yeah. And the Watts riots kind of scare cops around the country into all adopting a lot more paramilitary tactics in order to defend themselves from the people they're supposed to be protecting. Now, the Watts riots are like one of the one of two things that will be generally cited as the justification behind the creation of the very first SWAT teams, which means special weapons and tactics. Another major inciting incident for the creation of the SWAT teams was the 1966 UT Austin clock tower sniper, Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people. The basic idea was that police were easily overwhelmed by snipers and other dangerous criminals like cops just couldn't handle these threats. And so specialized warrior

cops were necessary to handle these incidents. So SWAT teams took off as a concept in the late 1960s. And before long, every department in America was fighting to get a SWAT team of their own, whether or not they needed one. Today, the vast majority of police agencies serving populations of 50,000 or more in the United States have some form of SWAT team. Nationwide SWAT teams are deployed tens of thousands of times per year. And since these teams were formed and exist to handle extraordinary situations of exceptional danger, you might picture these tens of thousands of SWAT raids as like pulse pounding gunfights against really dangerous people. Yeah, if that's the picture in your head, you are wrong. Most states very deliberately do not provide us with statistics

for their SWAT deployments. Maryland is one of two that does. And in Maryland, 90% of SWAT raids are just for serving search warrants. Half of those warrants are for nonviolent drug crimes. And one third of those raids result in no arrests. So a third of the time when SWAT teams go out, they don't even get to arrest anybody. Now, almost all of the SWAT raids in Maryland at least are for drug crimes. Utah is the only other state that requires police agencies to report on SWAT deployment. And the first batch of numbers that they released in 2013 showed that 83% of their SWAT deployments were serving search warrants for drug crimes. Less than 5% of deployments were two violent crimes in process, a.k.a. the sort of things SWAT teams were formed to deal with.

Just three of the states reported 559 raids. Half a percent turned up illegal firearms. Now, I bring all that half a percent. Yeah, I bring all this up because when I talk about the possibility of police abolition with people, one of the first things they will generally bring up is like who will protect us from all of like the violent madmen. They're potentially like cartel guys and stuff, gangsters. And of course, those people do exist. There's very dangerous criminals in this country who are heavily armed. That's that's that is a thing that exists. But it is not the scale of problem that you think it is. And like it's also people will talk about like who will protect us from mass shooters. And I would ask, can anyone listen to this podcast, name a

mass shooter who's been stopped by a SWAT team? I'm going to guess no. Exactly. Not that it hasn't happened. If you dig, you can find a couple of cases where SWAT teams stopped a shooting in progress that can be defined as a mass shooting. But you have to really rack your brain to think of a situation where it did happen or to think of a situation where the cops successfully stopped a mass shooting as opposed to like what happened during the Parkland shooting where the officer, I think drove his car into a ditch. Like, yeah, like they're not good at this. Or you can think about the Virginia Tech shooting where SWAT teams were posted up outside the buildings, but we're scared to enter while the shooter was killing people. Yeah, or, or even saying this,

if like big drug cartels, these drug bosses are like such a problem. I would ask that person, Hey, do you know any? Do you know any drug drug cartel bosses? Yeah, you never met one. All right, word. Do you know anybody that's like, stolen some soda out of a out of a liquor store? Yeah, we know a lot of those. So what I'm saying is maybe you, you saying this is a big problem, but you don't know nobody that done that, but we all done stole some out of out of a liquor store. So maybe there's more problems there. Yeah, maybe you don't need to be specially trained for that. Yeah, maybe we can solve people jack and shit from liquor stores to the extent that that's a problem without yes machine guns. Maybe snipers aren't necessary for this. Yeah, I walked into

the room, I walked into the room and my daughter was with a hammer and a shoe. And I was like, the hell are you doing? She's standing on one side of the room, the other side of the room was a daddy long leg, just a spider. And I'm like, what you got a hammer for? And she's like, I got to kill this spider. I respect it. And I have a deep distrust for anything with eight legs or six legs. I get it. But a hammer, baby. I killed one with the swiffer yesterday. The swiffer is fine. I wish I had a hammer. So I don't. So when you put a hole on his wall, I mean, right, I'm going to be honest with you, problem. I have my air 15 right here next to the table in case I see a spider, which, you know,

there's a lot of not going to lie to you. Yeah, that's an issue. Yeah. Yeah. That's what that's what the police say. That is that is also what my neighbors say. No, what state government says. Yeah. Yeah, what the police say is accurate. That's exactly what you need. Yeah. Yeah. So find me to show you the spider bite that I got that sent me to the hospital next. The hammer is valid. Okay. Okay. That's different. Let's talk about speaking of hammers because I actually have a number of hammer analogies coming up here. So yeah. Yeah. So again, the point of all these statistics to the extent that we have them is that it really looks like SWAT teams are actually kind of shit at fighting the one kind of crime that expired their existence in the

first place. Because again, you actually have an easier time finding cases of people with concealed handguns stopping shootings than you will SWAT teams stopping shootings, like mass shootings in progress, like our traditional like, and that doesn't happen often either. Like usually mass shooters get to do whatever they're going to do and then shoot themselves or whatever, turn themselves in, like they generally don't get stopped. But you will, you'll have trouble finding SWAT teams taking out these guys because it's usually over before they can fucking scramble. But now, well, which is not to say that there's no place for them, because I think any society as large as ours, you're going to need to have some rapid response units, but we're not using them

for that. And there's way too many of them. Now, while state data on SWAT deployments is lacking, I did find a fascinating report by two researchers, David Klinger and Jeff Rojak, using funds provided by the Department of Justice in 2008. They analyzed thousands of SWAT raids nationwide. And what they found was fascinating. Out of tens of thousands of deployments they analyzed, SWAT officers only fired their weapons in 342 incidents. Those officers shot 200 citizens, killing 139 of them. In 75% of these shootings, fewer than 10 rounds were used. Now, this suggests that military grade weaponry may not be necessary for SWAT teams. Since again, you don't need it. Yeah, they're not getting into gunfights. They sometimes they shoot people, but like in a lot of the time,

those a lot of those guys who died were wounded by SWAT and then killed themselves. Yeah, it's it's yeah. Meanwhile, during this same span of time, SWAT officers had 39 accidental discharges. So shot 200 citizens and accidentally fired their own weapons 39 times. This means that accidental gunfire, if we're looking at 342 incidences where SWAT officers fired and 39 of those are accidents, that's not an insignificant percentage of all SWAT weapons discharges. Like that's that's that's noteworthy at all. The study authors write quote, this data indicates that something is substantially amiss with the way that at least some SWAT officers handle their weapons and strongly suggests that this problem is rooted in training,

that more than one in 10 of the incidents in which those who are supposed to be the most highly trained officers in their agency fired shots involved accidental discharges is simply unacceptable in our minds. Among the aforementioned 139 citizens who died after being struck by SWAT gunfire were two who fatally shot themselves after being hit by SWAT bullets. In addition to these two, we have firm data that 379 other individuals killed themselves in situations in which they were not shot by SWAT officers. It is thus clear that in the current data that it is more likely a citizen will take their own lives during SWAT operations than be killed by SWAT officers by a margin of more than 2.5 to 1.5. Finally, the data indicate that nearly

one in four citizens struck by SWAT gunfire wished to be shot as respondents classified their actions as indicating they wish to commit suicide by cop. If respondents classifications are correct, this indicates that an even higher portion of the citizen deaths and SWAT operations involved individuals who wished to die. That 13 percent of the SWAT officers struck by gunfire in the current data were shot by fellow officers suggests that while the most substantial threat officers face comes from armed suspects, the prospect of fratricide looms large in tactical operations. So you more likely to get shot by your homeboy? Not more likely, but pretty likely. Yeah, about 13 percent when SWAT officers are shot more than one in 10 of SWAT cops who get shot

are shot by their own guys. Geez. And one in 10 times when SWAT officers shoot, they're shooting negligently without meaning to fire. So again, the whole elite SWAT team thing, there are some well trained SWAT teams out there. It's also real fucking easy to just give guys military grade weaponry, call them a SWAT team, and then they fuck up. But more than anything, SWAT teams don't get into a lot of serious gunfights on a nationwide level. Yeah. And most of the people they encounter who are seriously armed like are fucking want to kill themselves. Yeah. They want to die, which is maybe suggest that a SWAT team isn't the thing to bring to that person. Maybe they shouldn't go. Yeah. Maybe just a dude who's a good therapist having

a conversation would have better odds of resolving this without gunfire. Better chance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the conclusions here are pretty clear. Number one, SWAT teams virtually never do these sort of work they are portrayed doing in movies and TV, i.e. directly engaging dangerous bad guys. And number two, SWAT teams kind of suck at their job, regularly shooting people and each other by accident. And perhaps no story illustrates the second point better than the case of Juanis Thonetheva. Now, Thonetheva. Good job. Good job, man. Yeah. I'm doing my best here. And on May 27th, Juanis sold a small amount of methamphetamine to a confidential informant, or bought a small yeah. So sold a small amount of methamphetamine to a confidential informant. Several hours later,

on the morning of the 28th, a seven man SWAT team from the Cornelia Georgia Police Department carried out a raid on Juanis's home. Now, because Juanis had a previous weapons charge on his record, officers were given a no knock warrant. They broke through Juanis's door with a battering ram. And as they were pushing the door in, they noticed there was resistance behind the door. And this led that what the officers in the SWAT team to believe that they're like someone had barricaded the door. So they tossed a flashbang in. Now, it turned out that the thing that had actually been against the door was the playpen where Juanis's 19 year month old child was sleeping. The flashbang ignited the 19 month old child, burning it badly and tearing the child's face

and chest open. The kid was put into a coma and very, very nearly died. The SWAT and was, you know, suffered permanent injury as a result of the police flashbang igniting it. The SWAT team found only a small amount of meth residue in the home and no weapons, no arrests were made. When the Thonoseva sued, a local prosecutor threatened to charge them for their child's injuries. In the end, no officers were indicted for horrifically maiming a small child. I found one CNN article that interviewed the sheriff in charge of the SWAT team, a guy named Terrell. Quote, in hindsight, Terrell said at the time officers would have conducted the raid differently had they known there was a child inside the home. But there was no sign of children during the

alleged drug purchase that prompted the raid. We might have gone and through a side door, he said, we would not have used a flashbang. That show defense big homie. Yeah, that's interesting to me because it shows it. It never occurs to this guy that like maybe maybe a dude selling a small amount of meth, maybe sending in an army to fuck with that guy and then army having grenades and battery rams. Maybe that's inherently reckless and a bad way to deal with again, a small amount of meth being sold. Yeah. And it just it kind of feel like to me, like if I'm the SWAT guy, I feel a little insulted. Yeah. You think I'm so incompetent that it's got to be 19 of us with with fucking 50 cows to come get this one dude that just sold

a little meth. I'm supposed to be most scared. Like you think I'm that weak that I can't just. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's fucking it's the problem with militarization in general, which is that like it means that you're going to have a military situation. If the police are with it's fucking Waco. When you start the conversation with tanks and machine guns and snipers, you're not going to end it in a good way. You're going to end it by burning 70 children alive because that's this is how that works. Yeah. This is so true in every area of your life. If you're in any sort of relationship, whether it's monogamous one or romantic or or a friendship or a sibling, if you come in guns

ablazing, yes, it's just not going to work. No, this is your yeah. This is exactly why I was able to improve a lot of my personal relationships propped when I stopped having the BATF show up with tanks to support me. You know that that really was was a game changer for me. I imagine man a lot less of my friends get burnt to death in in basement compounds outside of Waco now. Yeah. Yeah, that's good, man, because I you live and learn. You live and learn because I really like Waco reference in here, Robert. I also have a Waco reference in everywhere. Hey, man, talk about talk about Waco. Talk about a rebranding boy. Yeah. Waco has gotten re-burned. That's for sure. Waco is now the home and garden

TV network. Yeah. Well, some sort of oversized initial letter in your room and a refurbished wood panel. If you have a farmhouse door and a farmhouse sink and yeah, and you admire Joanna Gaines. There it is. She built an empire out of a city that was known for burning 70 babies. Well, I don't understand most of what we're talking about here, but you know what I do understand is that we're going to we're going to talk about another kind of Waco type thing where a bunch of children get burned by militarized police at the end of this. That's going to be fun. All right. Fun is the wrong word. Anyway, so like the again, like the point here is that like the worst case scenario of like what happened with Wannis and his family without the police is that

like, oh, these parents might be selling small amounts of methamphetamine and that maybe isn't great for a kid and that this is a problem that does need a solution to it. But the solution that they got a grenade burning their child alive was worse than probably anything that would have happened if they'd just been left selling meth, right? Or just or take 15 minutes more to do just a little bit of investigation on the guy and be like, oh, he's a parent. Yeah. It's always that. It's like with Waco. Like there was there was problem. David Koresh was doing some fucked up shit. You could have just arrested him and not burned like those kids, whatever they were going through under Koresh, getting burnt alive was worse for them. Absolutely. The police made it

worse and it's because militarized police are a hammer and we've got a hammer. Every single problem looks like a nail and like if that hammer is a hammer in the hands of a cop, it's specifically going to be used to hammer the faces of black people because that's how cops work as we've previously discussed. I found a 2018 study published by the National Academy of Sciences. It uses a geocoded census of SWAT team deployments in Maryland and shows that quote, militarized police units are more often deployed in communities with large shares of African American residents, even after controlling for local crime rates. Further, using nationwide panel data on local police militarization, I demonstrate that militarized policing fails to enhance officer

safety or reduce local crime. So after controlling for variables like local crime rates, the author of the study calculated that for every 10% increase in the black population of a zip code, there is a 10% increase in the likelihood of that zip code experiencing a SWAT raid. Now, and again, he also showed that SWAT raids and SWAT teams don't reduce violent crime. So they're kind of what you're seeing here sure looks like they're just being used vindictively against black people, you know, whether or not there's intention behind it. That's how the data really looks. Now, yeah, yeah, a Washington Post write up of the research notes tellingly, uh, he found no statistically significant change in the killings of police officers,

which were too infrequent to measure or assaults on police officers. So again, part of the justification of SWAT teams is that like, police are in so much danger that we need special heavily armored police. And it's like, actually, when SWAT teams are used all the time, cops still get killed at the same rate. It has no impact. Yeah. Wow. So SWAT raids also get just up. So many dogs killed. So so many dogs getting killed by SWAT teams. If you want to know what SWAT teams love to do most, it's shoot some goddamn dogs. It's impossible to separate the number of dogs killed by SWAT from the number of dogs killed by regular cops serving the same kinds of search warrants, because again, regular cops regularly serve the exact same kind of search

warrants SWAT cops serve, which maybe suggests that why do we have SWAT teams if normal cops consider this? Yeah, also. But yeah, either way, a shitload of fucking dogs get killed when police serve warrants. And a lot of those warrants are served, tens of thousands of them are served by SWAT teams. We will never know how many dogs get killed exactly by police in this country. But in 2016, one Justice Department expert called the police shooting of dogs an epidemic. It is estimated that cops shoot 25 dogs in this country every single day. And some estimates range as high as 500 dogs per day. It is very likely that police use their guns to shoot dogs more than they use their guns for any other purpose nationwide. Why? Because they fucking I mean, you know,

I've actually talked to some cops about this. And including I talked to a cop who had to who was in a justified shoot of a dog, a dog that like maim maimed her to the point that her life has never been the same sense. Like obviously, the dog is tearing you apart. Yeah, you're going to shoot that dog. Like I've talked to some police about this and like one theory is why it happens so much without like there are some just like a lot of like sometimes fucking people who have dog fighting rings get raided. And like, yeah, yeah, you're going to shoot some of those dogs because they're just like they've been broken and they're dangerous. But also, a lot of cops are terrified of dogs. And if cops are terrified, they get to shoot. So even in situations where

there's no fear of my life. Exactly. A lot of the time, probably most of the time, there's no justification for the racist and you made animals. That's that's that's I hate that. Yeah, you scared. Yeah. And one out of your training makes you scared. And that's what I'm about to get into. Yeah. The training makes you scared. Yeah. And one out of five of these incidents of a police dog shootings, a child was either in the direct line of fire or standing nearby. In one horrifying 2015 case, a four year old girl was shot in the leg by a police officer who was trying to shoot her dog. And this dog was not threatening this police officer necessarily. Thus, the officer felt threatened, like he felt like he might get bit. And even fear of a minor

injury is enough to make an officer completely immune to any consequences for shooting a dog. Meanwhile, I should note people who kill police dogs regularly face longer sentences than child molesters. You'll go away for life if you shoot a police dog. Yeah. But police can you imagine? Yeah. Can you imagine having the right to slap the shit out of somebody because you think they might slap you? Yeah. It's pretty, pretty crazy. Yeah. Pretty bad. So this may seem like it's getting a little bit off the topic of police militarization, but it really is not a lot of times when liberals talk about reforming police, they discuss the need for more police training. But police actually go through a shitload of training. Like there's there's a bunch of billboards

that or like placards that have been going on a protest that like talk about how much less cop training cops need than like hairstylists. And that's true. But that's true for how much cops training cops need to get on the street. They take a lot of training after becoming cops. And a lot of that training makes them more dangerous as cops. And this is part of the problem when we talk about like needing to train police more. Over the last 20 years, police training has become increasingly paramilitary with military veterans like Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman and companies like Close Quarters Battle, CQB, providing training that deliberately bills itself as military style and refers to officers as warriors,

all while convincing them that they are in more danger than cops have ever faced. From the end of policing, quote, Seth Stouten, a former police officer turned law professor, shows how officers are repeatedly exposed to scenarios in which seemingly innocuous interactions with the public, such as traffic stops, turned deadly. The endlessly repeated point is that any encounter can turn deadly in a split second if officers don't remain ready to use lethal force at any moment. So take the case of John Crawford, an African American man shot to death by a police officer in a Walmart in Ohio. Crawford had picked up an air gun off the shelf and was carrying it around the store while shopping. Another shopper called 911 to report a man with

a gun in the store. The store's video camera shows that one of the responding officers shot without warning while Crawford was talking on the phone. In Ohio, it is legal to carry a gun openly, but the officer had been trained to use deadly force upon seeing a gun. Similarly, in South Carolina, a state trooper drove up to a young man in his car at a gas station and asked him for his driver's license. He leaned into the car to comply and the officer shot him without warning. See unexpected movement, shoot. This is again what you get with more police training. This is what I'm saying. Yeah. The training makes you scared. Yes. Yeah. More training is not the solution because this is what the training does. Yeah. You could argue maybe different training

is the solution, but you also still have tens of thousands of cops who already have this shit in their heads. What do you do with them? Yeah. They're still on the force. How do you how do you cleanse that from them? Yeah. Are you confident you can? Now, modern police US cops are equipped with military grade weaponry, but not with military grade training. They're told that their own safety is their number one concern and anything they do to protect themselves is justified. We have essentially raised and equipped a military, told them that they are at war every day with the people of this country and then sent them out to the streets with a license to kill if they feel scared for any reason. And this is not a simple right versus left issue. After Democrat Michael Dukakis

was defeated in 1988 for being soft on crime via a super racist ad, Democrats pivoted to, yeah, the Willie Horton ad, Democrats pivoted to endorsing right wing law and order politics. Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill added tens of thousands of police nationwide and expanded the drug war. And in fact, it wasn't until Clinton's second term that widespread police militarization was even made possible. In 1997, a bunch of heavily armed and armored gunmen tried to rob some businesses and get into a big gunfight with Los Angeles cops. This is the North Hollywood shoot out. Yeah. Yeah. Police sidearms were incapable of piercing their armor and cops had to borrow high caliber rifles from a nearby gun store. When the National Defense Authorization Act was

passed later that year, it included the 1033 program, a provision that allowed law enforcement agencies to acquire military hardware. Between 1997 and 2014, $5.1 billion in material was transferred from the Department of Defense to local law enforcement. Now, near the end of his time in office, President Obama attempted to belatedly halt this massive transfer of military armaments to police. But President Trump reversed that and accelerated the transfer of military weapons to cops. And this is why in a 10 year period, 49 MRAPs, mine resistant patrol vehicles, were handed out to police departments in Florida alone. Many of these went to lightly populated rural counties like Baker, population 27,000. In Ohio, the Department of Natural Resources

received 240 fully automatic rifles. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department got 768 fully automatic rifles, by the way. I found all of this in a Forbes breakdown, which notes that U.S. cops also received more than 6,000 bayonets between 2006 and 2017. What do you need 6,000? Like, our milit, our soldiers don't even fucking use bayonets anymore because they're useless in modern. They weren't even that useful when bayonets were actually used in combat. So, remember the study that showed SWAT teams were more likely to be deployed in black neighborhoods? Well, it also found that, quote, seeing militarized police and news reports may diminish police reputation in the mass public. And this is, you know, there's that news story about like the

LA school police having an MRAP. These are the tanks. Like, they're not really tanks, but they're huge armored trucks. And I have a story about huge armored trucks, prop, because when I was in Mosul, most of the people I was embedded with were the Iraqi army, and they mostly drove a mix of like, technicals, which are just like Toyota trucks with guns in the bed, and old U.S. military Humvees. They didn't have a whole lot of heavy military vehicles. The only time you saw U.S. police in the places where, or the U.S. cops, or not cops, sorry, the only time you saw U.S. soldiers in the places where I was was when they were rolling around in MRAPs and usually be a patrol of like three of these gigantic, I can't exaggerate how

fucking big an MRAP looks. They're massive. Yeah. They are nightmarishly large vehicles. And they look like the first time I remember seeing one is I'm on the out, like maybe a quarter of a mile back from the front line. And I'm like literally sitting and smoking a cigarette with my photographer and some friends on a pile of rubble, like listening to a gunfight occur in the distance. And there's like little kids running around and stuff, trying to sell us things and whatnot. And like, we all stop for a second as this U.S. patrol rolls by in these three giant MRAPs. And the first thing I think of when I see them up close and personal for the first time is like, these look like AT-ATs. That's what these are. These are the fucking imperial

stormtroopers, AT-ATs. You can't see the human beings inside. You can't see people. It is just this it's this this physical manifestation of the violent power of the state. That's what it felt like. And that's what I could see these little Iraqi kids on the ground. Like we're seeing that that was what a U.S. soldier was to them was like was was a fucking machine. And yeah, that's what seeing these in the hands of cops makes you think about cops. Like police want to wonder like why people don't like them or respect them anymore. It's because we see you as pieces of an armed machine. And nobody like yeah. You rolled up like the Sith Lord. Like you look like you look like Darth Vader. Like you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah, you look like stormtroopers.

We don't like stormtroopers. No one like stormtroopers. They're not the good guys. No. Yeah. Now I could go on and on about like the insane weaponry cops are given these days and I could list repeated anecdotes about how often they badly misuse it. But I think the most important point to end on for this episode and for this series is how fucking much we spend on militarized police for how fucking little we get. The Minneapolis Police Department takes up 35% of the city's general fund. The Chicago PD are 37% of their city's budget. Atlanta and Detroit police come in at about 30%. The LAPD is a quarter of Los Angeles's budget. Many cities spend up to 40% of their municipal budgets on their police department, making the basically making like a

lot of cities in the U.S. are basically like small armies with towns attached to them. Up until the 1980s, the U.S. government spent about as much money on criminal justice as we did on cash welfare, on like welfare programs that deliberately like directly hand out like aid to people. Up until the 1980s, yeah, about equal what we spent on law enforcement, we spent on welfare. In the decade since, welfare spending has declined and police funding has soared. Today we spend more than twice as much money on law and order as we do on social welfare. And we get very little for our money. For all the weaponry we buy our cops, the vast majority of police officers will never fire a weapon in the line of duty.

For all that police, yeah, not once. Not once. For all that police advocates talk about dangerous criminals, most police officers make no more than one felony arrest per year. And when it comes to the question of how good police are at actually solving crimes, about 40% of murders go unsolved. Only about 53% of aggravated assaults are solved, less than 30% of robberies are solved, and only about 13% of automobile thefts are solved. The FBI's uniform crime report says that 35% of rapes are solved, but that number doesn't really tell the whole story. And I'm going to quote from The Guardian for this one. Because again, this is like the reason I bring this up is that like, that's one of the number one things like people who will argue about

like police abolition, other folks will say like, well, who are you going to call if you're getting raped? Well, let's talk about how good police do at solving rapes. Not working. Not only that, I hear the argument like, no, they need more money. They're underfunded. And I'm like, actually, they're more funded than every other program. Yeah, significantly more. I'm going to quote from The Guardian for this one. Quote, the fact is that the police never investigate most sexual violence because most sexual violence goes unreported. According to the rape and incest national network or RAIN, a little less than 25% of sexual assaults are reported to police, significantly less than other violent crimes. The reasons are myriad, but an often

cited one is a distrust and fear of the police, which obviously is increased by militarization. One survey of sexual assault survivors found that of those who chose not to report, 15% feared that the police could not or would not do anything to help. An additional 7% did not want to expose their attacker to the police. A 2018 study of the Austin, Texas Police Department found that officers tasked with investigating sexual assaults could not read lab reports on DNA evidence and often lacked a basic understanding of female anatomy. I have to Google. Listen to this. I have to Google stuff like Labia Majora, one officer said. That guy shouldn't be investigating sex crimes ever, ever, ever, ever.

But rather than paying for him to learn what a vulva is, big homie got a bayonet. Oh, I'll bet he knows how to use a machine gun. Yeah, I'll bet he knows all of the parts of a machine gun. So sometimes police failures to investigate sexual violence look like the result of not just stupidity, but of outright duplicity. One study of the New York Police Department discovered that it was knowingly undercounting rapes and its public figures using a deliberately strict definition of rape in order to shrink the number of reported cases in New York. An inquiry into the NYPD found that its special victims division to be grossly dysfunctional, with officers instructed to simply not investigate misdemeanor sexual assault cases.

First of all, the fact that that's a thing of misdemeanor sexual assault is already a problem. Now you're not going to investigate. Yeah. Well, and like this is actually kind of a pattern with the NYPD and I assume other departments of like, so they're undercounting rape and its public figures. So it seems like they solve more rapes than they do. There was a study that came out about how often the NYPD hits when they shoot people with their firearms, right? Which is something you want to know, especially since the NYPD is considered to be one of the best trained police departments in the country. And the NYPD was very proud of the fact that they had a 30% hit rate in gunfights. 30%, which is actually like, I mean, I'm going to be honest with you,

people very rarely hit when they are shooting at each other in a gunfight because it's stressful as hell. A lot of fucking messes. It's very hard to be accurate, not to fit, but like that was their number was like, we hit 30% of the time when we discharge our weapons in like a violent situation. But then people who analyzed the NYPD data found that the NYPD was only hitting 30% because they were including police officer suicides as one shot stops. Wait. Oh my God. They were goofing their own numbers by including their suicides. It's just like, I mean, yeah, they're basically saying like that cop took a dangerous man off the streets himself. It counts. It counts. Yeah, it counts. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty wild. So

conservative estimates suggest that US police have 200,000 untested rape kits in their possession nationwide. Rain's best estimate is that only about 4.6% of sexual assaults ever lead to an arrest and less than 1% are ever referred to police by prosecutors. So if you are raped and you refuse to talk to the cops, your odds of getting justice are more or less the same as someone who dials 911 right away. Sheesh. And then of course, there's the fact that cops commit just a shitload of rape. Bowling Green State University doc. Yeah. I didn't know you was going to get that. So I was going to say when you're talking about rape, I was like, they're not reporting them because they're doing it. They are doing a lot of them. Yeah. Bowling Green State University

documented at least 405 rapes by police officers on duty between 2005 and 2013. That is an average of 45 per year. They also documented 636 instances of forcible fondling. These numbers are only a fraction of the real total since most sexual assaults are never reported, and most rapists have at least five victims over the course of their career. The CNN article I found about this investigation into cop rape includes one of the most horrifying lines I've ever read in an article. About half of the victims are children, researchers say. Stinson, one of the researchers, has gotten accustomed to hearing his research assistants proclaim during their work, oh, my God, it's another 14 year old. Again. Yeah. Yeah, that's I have a guttural,

yeah, physical response to that. Yeah. So one of the first arguments you'll get against police abolition is again, some version of the question without cops, who are you going to call if, you know, rape or whatever, if X crime happens to you. The second argument is usually that even if the cops aren't necessarily great at solving crimes, they prevent violence and crime by their presence in areas. And Alex Vitale, the author of the end of policing, strikes back at that claim, quote, it is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys. As the veteran police scholar David Bailey argues, the police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the

public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society's best defense against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth. And he is very right when he says that a lot of data backs this argument up. The raw number of police in this country has declined for the last five years straight. And the rate of police officers per 1000 residents in the United States has been dropping for 20 years. You know what else has been dropping for 20 years, prop? What? The crime rate. The crime rate. Yeah. The police lost 23,000 net officers nationwide from 2013 to 2016 with no corresponding surgeon crime. Now, despite the fact that crime

has dropped steadily for 20 years, most Americans believe that crime rates have increased throughout their lifetimes. Why are people like that? Why are people like that? I have an answer for you, prop. Yeah, I have a fucking answer for you. Are you ready for this? Here we go. Are you ready to talk about Hollywood again? Yes, because of movies. Yeah, a lot. Yeah, yeah. A lot of this has to, you know, like when you're like, okay, you know what, you know what prevents crime? Jobs, yeah, resources, resources. Just easy giving people heroin if they're addicted. You know, maybe, maybe laws that shouldn't be lost. Yeah. Like, and making sure that the person handing them that heroin says, hey, there's some doctors or some professionals over here, if you

want to stop this, like we can help you out with this, but nobody's going to fuck you up for doing this. Here's a couch. Yeah. Yeah. Turns out that actually objectively works better in every single place that tries it. Objectively works. Yeah. Yeah. So the answer to why people think that police are just absolutely critical in holding back a tide of violence has a lot to do with the TV show Dragnet and its descendants. In the fall of 2019, more than 60% of primetime dramas on TV were about police, crime, and the legal system. Many of these shows, like cops and live PD, work directly with law enforcement and receive approval from departments for every episode they aired the same way Dragnet did. That's cops. Cops got like the cops sign off on every episode

of cops, which is why that show doesn't show. There's a wonderful podcast you should all listen to after this called Running from Cops. And it is a show, a podcast about the TV show cops and about live TV. And it's one of the things that they showcase is in the very first episode of cops, like they got access to the unerred footage that was shot for that episode of cops. And like it showed that in this episode of cops, like it showed them like busting this like family and like taking the kid and like the female officer who took the kid was like, it's okay, we're going to get you to a safe place tonight. You're going to have an ice warm bed and toys and stuff. And in the part that wasn't aired, she took that child to like the place that she was supposed to take

this kid after arresting the kid's parents. And they just put the kid in basically a cell because they didn't have a better any toys. And like the lady cop is like in tears and like enraged when she realizes how fucked up the situation is that didn't air on cops. No, no. So again, watch Running from Cops. It's a great or listen to it. It's a great fucking podcast. But one of the things they did on Running from Cops is they tried to analyze, like they watched 800 episodes of the show and like analyze the race of all of the people involved, analyzed the kind of crimes they're arrested for and like put together data on like the world as presented by cops as opposed to the actual world and how crime actually works in our real

world. And I'm going to quote from from an article written by one of the guys behind Running from Cops now. Okay. What we discovered was that contrary to early press predictions, the world portrayed on cops is not like the real world. There are about four times more violent crimes and cops than in reality and three times more drug arrests and about 10 times more arrests for sex work. The cops on the show are also statistically speaking, extremely good at their jobs segments on the show in an arrest 84.4% of the time that number reflects a change of her time from 61% back in 1990 to 95% in the most recent season. In cops world, law enforcement officers are so effective. It's basically a given that a crime will end in an arrest. Now that's interesting

to me. There's a lot that's interesting to me, including like one of the things they find in the show is that early on cops like showed a hell of a lot more non-white people getting arrested and like the NAACP complained and cops fixed the problem and switched over to showing mostly white criminals. That's what I noticed. Yeah. Part of how they did it was by just filming in Portland, Oregon. That's hilarious. I didn't know that. Yeah. But I did know like, wow, it seems they're not showing no black people no more. Yeah. Yeah, they did fix that particular problem. And you know, I got to give it to them. Moving to Portland is a smart way to do that. Yeah. So most people who even like most fans of cops will acknowledge that the show has always

been, you know, kind of trashy. But even least, yeah. And like you would have found a lot more people who'd be willing to argue that cops was harmful back before this most recent uprising, then you would get to argue that there was a harm in shows like, for example, law and order. But even shows like law and order contribute to our distorted cultural beliefs about the police. Now, obviously, law and order doesn't push the militarized police angle. Law and order is very much like a tribute to like Volmer's idea of the police as scientists. Yeah. But it still has a negative effect. Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University who studies television and pop culture, noted in an interview with the Desiree News, quote, the very thing that keeps law and

order going is the idea that they keep showing this efficient process over and over. Law and order gives, at least in part, some feel for this being an efficiently well oiled machine. And it just isn't. We already went through the statistics of how few crimes the police solve. Because again, most of these scientific policing methods don't work nearly as well as their TV portrays them as. Yeah. Now, Color of Change released a report in January of this year based on a study of 26 scripted crime dramas. It found that, quote, these shows rendered racism invisible and dismissed any need for police accountability. They made illegal destructive and racist practices within the criminal justice system seem acceptable, justifiable and necessary, even heroic. The study

noted that 81 percent of the writers for these shows were white men. Only 9 percent were black. Now, in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's murder and this whole uprising thing, both cops and live PD were canceled. And I really think most people don't get what a big victory it is to have fucking cops off the air. That's a huge. Yeah. I think they'll understand a little better after this. It does seem likely that other police procedurals will wind up dying out rather soon. And everyone has their favorite. We've all we've all enjoyed some cop dramas. And I will say, I don't think that the wire is a part of the problem. I think they actually did a real good job of making everybody see like, Jesus Christ, policing's fucked. It just wasn't enough. Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot of, you know, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I know a lot of people who love Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And I know a lot of Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans are apprehensive and like a little bit guilty right now and wondering like, is there a way to like fix the show to make it like not contribute to the problem? And like, you know, the show does the show does has leaned in at a few points to some problems in policing in a way that most police dramas don't. Yeah. And it is one of those things where like, I think a lot of folks will argue that like there's a room for escapism and that this stuff isn't really harmful, but, but it just is. There is a lot of documentation about how it is harmful. And I'm going to quote from just one piece of this documentation,

an article in Pacific Standard Magazine, quote, crime dramas are consistently ranked among the most watched shows by Nielsen media, according to the authors. What's more, as many as 40% of Americans believe that such shows are somewhat or very true to real life. So to find out how the simplistic portrayal of police officers on television might influence public opinion of the profession, researchers from St. John Fisher College and Wayne State University first had to analyze how popular crime shows portray police work. The researchers also surveyed a nationally representative sample of over 2000 Americans. They found that those who watched crime shows view police as better behaved, more successful at combating crime and relatively responsible

in their use of force than those who don't. Yes. If you want to know why there's so many backs of blue folks, it's these shows that we all have some we enjoy, but they're part of the problem. I was going to say, the one for me is first 48. That's the one that gets me the most, because it always takes place in like Memphis, in the deepest of the Section 8 projects, in the way that like, I know our people are portrayed, where it's like, again, it's not like crime don't exist. But this, the way that you're painting this is so basic, so binary, and so easy that like, I tried to watch it, I tried to get into it because I had a friend that liked it. So I tried to get into it and I was like, I can't, I can't, I can't even finish this.

Yeah. I don't have anything else. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's like, it's just hurtful. It's really hurtful to see that because you know it's not real. You know what I'm saying? But you're telling me this is like a reality show. And I'm like, this is not real. Yeah. And like, just given by how few Americans have an experience with violent crime and how even, how an even smaller chunk of those Americans actually have the police do something about the thing that they suffer, that's a tiny fraction of us. When people say, what about, you know, and then they list their thing that we need the police for, most of them aren't thinking about a real thing that's happened to them or friend, they're thinking about something

they saw on TV, like that, like, like they wouldn't say that, but that's what's actually going on. Yes. Yes. Yeah. The militarization of US police started from a mix of fear over specific incidents of shocking violence and, and cruel calculus by soulless politicians. But part of why it has been allowed to continue for so long and why American voters traditionally react very negatively to the idea of cutting police funds is that decades of Hollywood depictions of law enforcement have convinced many of us that the police are completely necessary to save us from a constant imminent threat of violence and barbarism. The weight of pro-cop cultural inertia is only increased by the fact that a decent number of the 700,000 cops in our country do useful and

good things from time to time. Like there are like most cops on the force will have a period where they even cops who are critical later will be able to point to individual things they did that were good. The question is not whether or not cops ever do things that are good. It's whether or not it's worth the cost, whether or not the benefits we gain from having police. Number one can be gained from something that's not the police. And number two are worth the price of having police. Hollywood has spent a lot of time and made a lot of money showing us what we get from law enforcement at its best. And again, the statistics show that they are lying about what we get from law enforcement. So perhaps we should spend more time as a culture

thinking about what law enforcement costs us. And I think my best way of doing this is always an anecdotal example, you know, because we do talk about the statistics. We talk about the broad problem. The broad problem is that a thousand people a year are killed by US police. Many of them in shady circumstances. Many of them, most of them without real investigations that are open to the public taking place. And that that number is, for example, more than die have died in every school shooting in American history. Every year the police kill more people than school shooters have ever killed. Like, yeah, like people like people flip out about AR-15s. And I'm not saying you're wrong to be scared or frightened about the easy availability

of AR-15s. Like 400 Americans every year are killed by long guns that are AR-15s or similar weapons. The police kill a thousand. Not saying one's not not saying one's not a problem, but like it doesn't suck. Yeah, well, if we're gonna, yeah, anyway, it's it's an issue. But I think that when it comes to getting people to really emotionally understand the cost of police, individual, horrific anecdotes are the thing that drives it home to people. And that's certainly what the the police do individual anecdotes of cops doing good to talk about why we need them. So we might as well respond in kind. And I'm going to respond in kind by talking about something that happened in Philadelphia in 1985, the move bombing. So have you heard of the move bombing? I have. Yeah,

yeah, I had a feeling. Yeah, move was a strange organization that we're not going to get into a lot of detail about. It was founded by a guy named John Africa. And every member of move took on Africa as a surname. They were not all black. Actually, it was a mixed race organization. They were hard to pin down ideologically, but it would be fair to say that they expressed a deep hatred of technology. They did some like protests at zoos against animal cruelty. They ate natural diet. They're like a hard group to pin down. They did a lot of shouting into bullhorns though. So the organization briefly wound up squatting in Powellton Village in West Philly. And they they kind of fortified a house. They were squatting in there and they they've pissed

off a lot of their neighbors by regularly brandishing firearms and shouting at the neighborhood through a megaphone. They eventually were raided by the feds who found a bunch of guns and pipe bombs. Police barricaded several blocks around the compound and basically laid siege to it for 56 days. This all came to a head when the cops moved in to forcibly evict them. There was a gun battle and a cop was killed while 16 other officers and firefighters were injured. Eventually, the move people all surrendered and the cops beat the ever loving shit out of one of them. A guy who had not taken part in the gunfight but who had been on the bullhorn heckling them. They just beat the piss out of this kid in broad daylight. Nine of the members of move were

convicted of third degree murder and sent to prison after this. So move was not taken out though. As an organization continued, they moved on and set up a new base on Osage Avenue, which was a middle class black neighborhood that was doing really well. It was kind of like a Black Wall Street sort of situation, right? Like Osage Avenue was like doing well and move moves in and they were out there welcome pretty quickly because they again turned their house into a fortified bunker. Like they build a literal bunker on top. They yell at a lot of people through bullhorns. They're not physically harming people, but they're like kind of annoying people and like people in the neighborhood don't know what to do but call the city and the city calls the police

and the police do what the police do, which is escalate the situation into another siege in May of 1985. Philadelphia brings in 500 militarized officers armed with flak jacket, swat gear, 50 caliber machine guns and an anti-tank rifle. The cops move in to serve arrest warrants on folks that they believed were living in the compound and they estimated six adults and 12 children were inside. The movers opened fire on these militarized police and the police responded with just an insane torrent of wild gunfire pouring 10,000 rounds into the building in 90 minutes. Now thankfully the police had evacuated most of the neighborhood telling everyone they'd be able to come back home quickly, but they're just firing wildly into the neighborhood.

Swat teams next try blowing holes in the sides of the building, but nothing worked to breach the compound because the move folks had really done a good job of fortifying it. Yeah, they were good at this shit. The police began lobbying Mayor Good, the first black mayor of Philadelphia, for the go ahead to drop a bomb they built on the compound. And after hours of ferocious gunfire, the mayor agreed. So the police drop a bomb on this building in Philadelphia, an Osage Avenue. And it fails to crack the bunker that move had built atop their house and it doesn't end the stalemate, but it did start a fire that spread very quickly to the roofs of other homes clustered around the move building. The police commissioner ordered firefighters to stand down.

Later telling the city commission, I communicated that I would like to let the fire burn. In 45 minutes, three more homes on the black were burning. Then the roof of the move house collapsed. The police did not allow firefighters in until more than 90 minutes had passed and the entire north side of Osage Avenue was burning. I'm going to quote now from an NPR article on what happened next. Philadelphia streets are famously narrow, which made it easy for the fire to leap from burning trees on the north side to even more homes on the south side. From there, the flames spilled over to the homes behind 6 2 2 1 Osage to Pine Street. By evening, three rows of homes were completely on fire, a configuration so large that the flames could be seen from planes landing at

Philadelphia International Airport, more than six miles away. The smoke was visible across the city. By the time firefighters brought the fire under control a little before midnight, 61 houses on the once tidy block had been completely destroyed. 250 people were suddenly shockingly without homes. It was the worst residential fire in the city's history. In the end, 11 people died in that fire on Osage Avenue, including five children weeks past before the police were able to identify their remains. This is what I mean when I'm talking about, sorry. Yeah. I was like, this is the story I was referring to in the first episode about like a bomb being dropped on Americans. Turns out that's a long, yeah. There's a lot of parallels

between this and Tulsa, but Tulsa, it was a mob of random citizens. The move bombing was mostly white police. And the organization moved, I'm talking about counting the cost here. Move was a problem. They caused real issues for their neighbors. And their neighbors' problems should not be discounted. Like their neighbors had a serious issue with these people that needed to be dealt with, and they called the city to help them deal with it. And the city brought the police in. Any reasonable society would need to have a way to deal with something with like a bunch of people fortifying a building in a neighborhood and shouting at everyone in a bullhorn until they can't sleep. That's a problem. That's a problem. Of course. That merits a solution.

The solution the police brought to this problem was to burn down the entire neighborhood. Yeah. That's not, yeah. That didn't need to happen. You didn't have to do that. Yeah. There were ways to deal with these people, because again, the members of move never went out murdering people at random. That was not what they did. They're annoying. Problematics. They were annoying. And yeah, they weren't just killing strangers. That police did that. Yeah. The Philadelphia police did succeed in dealing with the issue of the move organization. They did not harangue neighbors on loudspeakers anymore after this. And whatever possibly illegal weapons they may have had on the property were incinerated along with 60-something black homes and businesses.

You could argue that some problems of law and order were solved by bombing the move compound. The question is like, was the price worth it? And that's broadly the question we need to be asking and answering about our police. Is the cost worth it? Guys, you know, what would wipe out your COVID-19? You could drink the bleach. You're right. It will end it, but you will die. Yeah. Yeah. Did you ever listen to Chris Christofferson prop? Yeah. Yeah. Do you ever listen to a song, The Laws for Protection of the People? No. You'd like that song. It's a good example of like early country, you know, now country, there's like a lot of popular country is like very kind of reflexively patriotic pro-military.

Old country was like, was like punk music, but played differently, right? Yeah. And Chris Christofferson embodies that in a lot of ways. And The Laws for Protection of the People is a song about cops. And it's like, like the first verse is about like a drunk guy that like falls down drunk on the sidewalk and the six squad cars, you know, come streaming to the rescue to haul them off to jail. And the refrain of the song is, because The Laws for Protection of the People rules are rules and anyone can see. We don't need no drunks like Billy Dalton is the name of the drunk scaring decent folks like you and me. And the second verse is about a hippie who like a bunch of brave cops come surround and like beat down and shave

his head forcibly. And you know, there's another version of that refrain. And then the last verse is, so thank your lucky stars. You've got protection. Walk the line and never mind the cost. Don't think of who them lawmen was protecting when they nailed the savior to the cross. Put the Jesus on them. Chris Christopherson, bring it at home. Yeah. Bring it at home. He said, hey, you know, I'll hunt your precious savior. A crooked justice system. Awesome. Awesome. Trumped up charges. Yep. So mind the cost is, I guess, the end message I want to have for this podcast. Yes. Like, this was the Lord's work, Robert. Whatever you, if you wind up agreeing with us or not about what should be done with the police, when you think about what should be

done with the police, think about what the price you're paying for them is and ask, is it worth it? Yes. Do you protect your children by strapping them to their bed and barb-wiring the door? Or do you protect your children by loving them and caring for them and teaching them better ways to take care of themselves and their fellow neighbors? Yeah. Yeah. And it's, people get aspects of this. Like, people get aspects of this when like folks who are pro-gun talk to liberals about like, oh, you know, people should defend themselves and like always carry a gun. And a lot of liberals will like rightly point out like, sounds like a miserable world if everyone has to have a gun at them at all times. I don't, I don't like that vision of the world,

but it's like, but do you support there being police who always have a shitload of weapons on them who walk around with like five different weapons that are potentially lethal on their belt at any given time? Like, that's part of it. I agree. It's better if there aren't a ton of weapons all over the place, all of the time in the public sphere. Yeah. Let's deal with that problem and let's recognize that it really starts with police in our society. Let's just be honest. Yeah. Deep breath, everybody. Yep. Yep. Man, that was a lot of words. That was a lot of fucking facts. Yep. Yes. And my facts do care about your feelings prop. So how are you feeling? Man, that was great. I like that. Thank you. I am feeling disgusting. Yeah. I'm a little tired,

but I'm also a little hopeful because of the response we've been getting from this pod. Good. Very hopeful. Yeah. Yeah. It has been a great response. It's good to be hopeful. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man. Man. Be hopeful. It sucks. Defund the man. There's better ideas. There's better ideas. Yeah. We can come up with a better idea, guys. Yeah. Yeah. We can come up with so many better ideas. For example, what if we just, what if we replaced all of our cops with like, you know, those dogs that they have in the mountains somewhere in Europe that have liquor around their necks? Those are rad. Yeah. Let's try that. Let's just fill the streets with those dogs.

Those are so rad. It'll work maybe. Yeah. If a Husky walked up to me and had whiskey on his neck, I would be like, this is the coolest Husky I've ever met in my life. I will stop whatever crime I'm doing because I just want to see this dog with whiskey. Yeah. And like a bunch of huge well-trained dogs everywhere, probably going to stop more rapes than the cops. I'll tell you what, because everybody's scared of dogs, except for Sophie. Except for Sophie. Yeah. Well, well, Jinx. Yep. You want a plug? All right. Prop. Oh, plug time. Yeah. I kind of knew that. Yeah. Propitpop.com where I don't sell weapons. That's good. That's good. I challenge you to think of better ways to organize the world. And I sell coffee stuff.

I do music and poetry. And that's all of the things are at prophipop.com. And I do not sell weapons yet. But when I move to my compound in Ohio, I'll start a legally manufacturing sawed-off shotguns so that the ATF will finally raid me. You know, that's the, that was, that was a ruby rich joke. Yeah. I actually really think you got a market there. I do. I do. You could start branding some weapons. Yeah. Uncle Robert's illegal homemade shotguns. Yes. I just couldn't, I couldn't repeatedly Waco in this episode without dropping a ruby ridge in there. So yeah, it's not fair. That's the precursor. No. And it's not fair that we talk about Waco all the time, but not the move bombing,

because like they're both cases of like out of control militarized police burning children to death. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those black people. Yeah, it's fucked up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Find a way to make the move bombing Waco again. I don't know what the that's not a good moral. They need a Netflix series where they hire a sexy guy to be John Africa. Yeah. Yeah. They could play like do it or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have them have them have a blues concert as they're being bomb. Just throw that in there for no reason. Unnecessary. That was the wildest thing about the Waco show is like, okay. So you guys are just, you guys just turn and David Koreshid do a rock star. All right. I was like, what? I don't remember this. That's a stance. Yeah. Yeah. Now I want to

see the fucking, I want to see them like do a Jim Jones mini series where they turn him into like a stand up comedian. He's just hilarious. That's why we all go. Yeah. We cast David Chappelle as Jim Jones. Fuck it. No one gives a shit. We're Netflix. Oh Lord. All right. Podcast is out. This podcast has to stop. Go defund your local police. Behind the Police is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out Drink Champ's conversation with Yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

When's the last time you took a time out? I'm Eve Rodzky, author of the New York Times bestseller Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space. Activist on the Gender Division of Labor, Attorney and Family Mediator. And I'm Dr. Adidina Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello, Sunshine. We're peeling back the layers around why society makes it so easy to guard men's time like it's diamonds and treat women's time like it's infinite, like sand. And so whether you're partnered with or without children or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is a place

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