Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD - Empire City Update: Introducing Unruly Subjects

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

Empire City was a limited series, but the work it opened up is far from over. In this special bonus episode, Chenjerai shares two ways to stay connected: the Empire City Impact Campaign and his new independent podcast, Unruly Subjects. Then he brings you a preview from a conversation with Mac Muir, author of Cop Cop, about civilian oversight, police accountability, and what happens when misconduct gets absorbed into the system instead of being stopped.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey everyone, it's Chingera. I want to make sure you know that the work we started together on Empire City isn't over. There are two more ways we can stay connected and keep that work moving forward. First, I want to tell you about the Empire City Impact Campaign. With the Empire City Impact Campaign, we're taking the historical and storytelling work that we started on Empire City and turning it into curriculums for schools, live events that are happening all around the country, a walking tour in New York, and the Empire City. City Podcast Club. So if you want to learn about all that, go to crooked ideas.org slash Empire City and get involved, sign up for the podcast club. And also, if you're hearing this in your feed, you probably followed along with us on Empire

City as we dug into the hidden history of the NYPD and the roots of policing in this country. I love that deep scripted historical work. But for a while, I've been wanting to start a different kind of podcast, a space that's a little more immediate. I have a lot of people I want to talk to about what's happening in the world as it's unfolding and how we're all surviving it. And that's why I partnered with Roeholm Productions to start my new podcast, Unruly Subjects. Unruly Subjects is unlike anything I've ever done before. It's a raw unscripted space where I get to think through politics and culture in real time with my family, my friends, and people I find fascinating. And honestly, I'm having a lot of fun with it. And I'm having a lot of fun with

between the heavy lifting, we're bringing in music, humor, and the energy of people figuring out things together. On unruly subjects, I've had conversations about how the Department of Justice is using private data to purge voters. And in another episode, we talk about how a community of neighbors came together to defeat the construction of a data center in their town. I've talked about the power of general strikes with veteran labor organizer Bill Fletcher Jr. and about how airlines are profiting off the cruelty of ICE deportation flights. Whether it's labor struggles in New York City or ice escalations in Minneapolis, we're trying to connect the dots between big national issues and the real everyday struggles we're all facing on the ground.

Today, I wanted to share an excerpt from a recent episode of unruly subjects. This is from a conversation with MacMurr, author of the book Cop Cop Cop, Breaking the Fixed System of American Policing. Mack was a police investigator, a civilian on the front lines of police oversight. He's the guy whose job it was to actually follow up when a citizen filed a complaint against a police officer for misconduct. First, at New York City's civilian complaint review board, and later as the executive director of Oakland's Community Police Review Agency. I think you'll find it to be a really interesting update on all the history we explored in Empire City. So here it is.

One thing I think it's really important for people to understand is that you were a CCRB investigator. You are not coming to this, not having seen some of the horror show. Oh, yeah. I've seen a lot of tough stuff. So do you remember back what it was like when you started and going through the system and what some of the lessons about police oversight specifically were? Yeah. So, I remember it clear as day walking in 100 Church Street near the World Trade Center.

If you have a complaint, it gets the NYPD. That's where to go. And you walk in, and it was like office space, the movie. I was like, this is a weird work environment. First thing, you're like, it's a wide open floor and everybody's quiet. And it was just eerie. And I got escorted to my desk, and I remember being brought into training. And then suddenly you're being trained on police procedure, mind you, almost everybody's under 30,

which you would think would make more of a jubilant work environment on some level. Right. But it was very subdued. And everybody's having serious conversations about police accountability and what their cases are. But it's not ever really zooming out onto police accountability. It's like, what cases you're working on? Oh, I got an interesting case at a mosque. I got an interesting case in Brownsville and East New York and South Bronx.

And so the language becomes talking shop about what are the cases that are going on. And I was just lucky that I got really exposed to the storytelling experience of that, of like really understanding your case was the goal as an investigator. You wanted to understand what happened from each person's perspective. Right. And you wanted to understand what happened from the surveillance camera's perspective, and you needed to be able to elicit answers through effective questions to get people to give you clear information about what they saw.

and where they were and what was going on. In terms of what you're able to talk about, can you remember a particularly instructive case that taught you a lot about how this whole thing works? I think I'll give you the first officer I interviewed. Right. So it's intense. Okay.

I'll brace myself. Right. Listeners, brace yourselves. Because this is a weird experience for everybody. And once you're more tenure, you get somebody and you just back up, this would be great. But as a civilian who's never been in the law enforcement universe,

the first officer you interview, you're like sweating bullets. You're like, what am I going to ask? Am I going to get this right? And I remember I had this. Like he's a whole officer and you're like... He's a grown man, right? Yeah, that's how it feels. I mean, I came in a little later.

I worked in politics before this. Right. But, you know, I've got the NYPD story. You know, I'm like, this is the dude who would be on TV kind of thing. And suddenly I'm sitting there in an interview room that's 10 by 10 and fluorescent light coming down and his attorneys looking at me like who is this new kid and uh and yeah he's a grown man who who allegedly beat somebody up and we don't have video footage so my interview is going to be like the only thing that uh resolves this and i remember going am i going to get it right and you come in

with another investigator who's more tenured and you know you ask question like uh so what happened here and this particular officer was pretty cagey, which on and off, that'll happen, but he was like, well, I don't recall the specifics. And the first time I'm doing this, I'm looking over the person next to me because I'm nervous. And she's like, all right, start from the beginning. Right.

Right. So you're in your car. How you're actually going to do it? So you're in your car and you got a call, right? Yeah, what was the call? Tell me about it. And then, well, yeah, you know, it was a 1085 officer in need of assistance. There was a car stopped.

What else does you know about that? Do you get any other information about the call? Did you have any conversation with your partner about it? Okay, great. We got a general pool of information about beforehand. That pie isn't that relevant? All right. So you drove up to the scene.

Tell me about that. Ask broad questions. Let them fill in the details. Mm-hmm. And then you get into it. And once people are asked open-ended questions, as you know, as an interviewer, like you're going to get a lot more information. For sure.

That reflex, as you also know, is not built into everybody, especially if you're straight out of college. So do you remember, what happened in this particular one, what the guy said? So this is pretty crazy. And that incident, it was really bad vibes. And I remember walking out of the interview, and I was like, did I do all right? Yeah.

We got all the information we needed. But there was a lingering question. It's like what had happened and had the officer used improper use force. Gary's situation with a hair pulled and pulled out of a car. and somebody in the office who knew who that officer was just walks by and it's like, you just interview that officer?

And he's like, I'm going to give it seven years until that officer kills somebody. And you're sitting there being like, what is this place? Now, he didn't. I look it up from time to time. Not yet.

Not yet. Because that person is still working. I'm like, as far as I'm aware, and I'm like, so maybe he got on the right path. Right. But do you remember if that led to like a substantiated complaint? It did not. It did not.

We were never able to determine based on those interviews. And that's all pre-body cam. So in the book, we go through the sort of transition from this era where you're just at, you've got somebody came in and said the officers beat me up. And they give you a detailed narrative ultimately of what that looks like. And then you're like what happened to the officer. And you probably don't have any witness or video footage. The transition to body cam is severe.

both in terms of the quality of evidence and also in terms of how you're approaching the case. Because suddenly you're going to see the body cam in some instances before you even talked to the victim. Right. And so that's going to frame the information you get. And then there's an ongoing question in law enforcement of when does the officer see the body cam too. Another interesting thing that I know you've looked at is how performance reviews come into this. So the way I understand this is if there's like a complaint against an officer. And maybe the, let's just say the complaint is substantiated.

Now, as part of this, or maybe as part of determining if the complaint is going to be substantiated, there might be, you know, someone might look at this person's performance. What are the patterns of how they've done their work up to this moment? What's important about that for you when it comes to police oversight? Yeah, so let's zoom out and imagine you have a performance evaluation at a corporation right now. A lot of that's going to even be AI-driven or whatever. Yeah, right. You're going to get a survey about your co-worker, hey, how does this person to work with?

That's going to be more cutting edge. You're going to have 360 supervisors, coordinates, all going to chime in, and you're going to get a sort of well-rounded perspective on this person. Right. The issue in policing is that sometimes it can just be your direct supervisor, old school, you know, giving you an evaluation based on how much they like you. Right. So that's a problem. But the broader problem that we look at in the book is this trend where officers who are making more around. and summonses and we're really focusing back to the stop and frisk era the datification of policing

more stops is good but I think we saw an issue where where there were officers who had huge complaint records at the CCRB they were in many cases getting promoted and when you looked at their arrest histories there was a through line where they were making a ton of arrests and summons and issuing a bunch of summons at a way higher rate than the average officer in the NYPD and appeared to be being rewarded for that despite committing misconduct and being a source of hundreds to thousands, if not millions of dollars in lawsuits. Is it correct to say that in a way, some of the positive that was reflected in their performance review was actually what it was resulted from harmful practices or practices

that we should at least be thinking really critically about, like, arresting too many people? It's stuff that needs to be critically analyzed. And our assessment was that there was just a raw data point. The more arrests you make, the better your performance, is liable to look now, hey, right? Why is that the metric? It goes back to the politicians, putting pressure on the police leadership

to make them look better. Say, we've got a lower crime rate, and we've got more arrests being made, more summons is being made, so I can go back out to the population and say, you feel safer because our officers are doing more. And I think both critical folks like yourself

are asking is more better, right? And I think also the cops on the street, my experience? I mean, I'm critical folks like myself are saying more is worse. Yeah, yeah. But I know, the people who are really trying to hold it as a question. I mean, you're ahead of that. But I'll say, like, I mean, one time in A city, I was talking to a lawyer who represented cops.

And he was like, I used to have cops who just did false stops. They would put in fake names just so they could pad their numbers. Right. And you're thinking about like, wow, fake names. Yeah. And let alone the folks, because they were like, well, they work in this one beat. and you're stopping the same two dudes, and you've got to make X number of stops a week or a quarter.

And so once you've stopped those dudes for the sixth time, and they're like, listen, we're going to have a serious problem. Well, maybe I'll start making fake names. All right, y'all. That was a bit of my conversation with MacMere. If you want to hear the full interview and more of these kinds of raw, unscripted deep dives, go find unruly subjects wherever you get your podcasts.

Unruly subjects is an independent. in production. That means we can pretty much do whatever we want to bring you the stories we think are important. But to do that, we need your support. And that starts with you listening. So please take a minute right now while your phone is in your hand and subscribe to Unruly Subjects. So let's keep in touch. I miss y'all. And I'll see you over at Unruly Subjects.