Factually! with Adam Conover - Cars, Debt, and Police Violence with Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Our dependency on cars isn’t just bad for traffic and the environment; it also forces many Americans to take on debt, or interact with our dangerous and deadly criminal justice system. Today on the show, Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston join Adam to talk about why cars, famously a symbol of freedom, actually consign many to imprisonment and death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for tuning in again. It's a delight to have you here. Now, I just want to remind you before we get going, if you want to support the show, you can do so at patreon.com slash adamconover. Just five bucks a month gets you every single one of these episodes ad-free, and it supports me directly, and I thank

you for doing so. Now, let's get to this week's episode. You know, I've talked on this show quite a bit about my dislike of cars. I'm a little bit famous in that arena. I hate them. They're wildly inefficient. They're awful for the environment. They alienate me from the people around me, from my community. They cut up my city, and then, you know, when I'm stuck in traffic, they make me just plain angry. I resent that cars are something that I need and that there's something that everyone needs. They just plain suck. Okay. That's part of why I personally have chosen not to drive. I take public transportation. I walk, I hitch rides with friends. And you know, I do occasionally take the occasional

ride share if I need to. And I just make my peace with getting nauseous in the back of the car, and I give a big tip, okay? But look, I want to be clear about something. I'm in a position of privilege. Even if I did prefer to drive everywhere, I'm not one of the people in society who is most penalized and punished by our reliance on the automobile. I'm not one of the people who is most screwed over by our car-centric society, not by a long shot. Because, you know, I make a decent living. I can afford to drive if I need to. Because even if you don't have a lot of money, even if you're one of the many, many members of the working poor in this country, you still need to have a car. In fact, you probably need to have a car even more because you're less likely to have a job that allows you to telecommute. If you need a car to get to work because you live in an

area where there is no other way to get around your community, and if you don't make a lot of money, well, then you need to go into debt. You are literally forced by our system to take out a loan. And for working people, the debt collection industry in America can be incredibly destructive. So you get ensnared into this system just because you need to get around. But even worse than that, especially for black and brown people, just driving around in a car puts you at the mercy of our dangerous and often deadly criminal justice system, as we just saw this past week. criminal justice system as we just saw this past week. In Memphis last week a man named Tyree Nichols was murdered by the police just for driving home. He was

barely 80 yards from his own house. And you know his story is sadly not a unique one. Black drivers are 20% more likely to be pulled over than white drivers and they're twice as likely to be searched once they are. Simply being in a car creates points of contact between you and a criminal justice system that, depending on who you are in this country, might be extremely dangerous for you to engage with. So there is this striking dichotomy about the way we talk about cars in America. They're presented to us as a symbol of freedom. So there is this striking dichotomy about the way we talk about cars in America. They're presented to us as a symbol of freedom. But for many people, cars instead represent dependency and debt, or even worse, imprisonment and death.

All the things we think of as the opposite of freedom. So how do we get here? How dramatic is the deleterious effect of car dependency on the lives of everyday working Americans? And what can we do about it? Well, our guests today are perfectly positioned to answer this question. You might be surprised, but we got, as always, the best two scholars on this topic to talk to us about this incredibly pressing topical issue that is so much a forefront in all of our minds this week. Their names are Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross, and they're professors at New

York University and the authors of the book, Cars and Jails, Freedom Dreams, Debt and Carcerality. Please welcome Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross. Andrew and Julie, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having us So I've talked extensively on this show about, and on every platform I have about my dislike for cars I don't drive them, I hate to be in them I don't like them as a system of transportation

but a lot of that is based on I think their lack of convenience to me the way they affect the built environment I live in I happen to be a white man who is relatively affluent in America. And you two wrote a wonderful piece in the New York Times detailing how much our car based system of transportation affects those who are not in such a position of privilege in manifold ways. So what are some of the ways that our car-based system of transportation hurts people?

Well, I think that car is a form of compulsory consumption in this country. In the vast majority of the country, you absolutely must have access to a private vehicle in order to be able to get to work, to get to the hospital, to pick your kids up from school, to do your shopping, etc. And because it's compulsory, it opens up working poor people to vast systems of predatory lending that they have to engage with in order to access a vehicle. And then being on the road also opens them up to contact with the police who are seeking revenue for their municipality or county in the form of traffic fines. And you had said, Adam, that you feel relatively insulated being white and relatively affluent, and you're an urbanite. And while most of our book is focused on the uneven perils of, let's say, driving while black

or brown or poor, police surveillance of vehicles and police stops of vehicles affects all of us. It's our most common encounter with the police. Our most common interaction with the police is comes when we're driving behind the wheel of a car. And invariably the result is a punishment. And so this is our interaction with the state, which comes in the form of a punishment. And there's a long history of how that came to be,

which we cover in the book. And there are many, many ways, as you mentioned in your intro, many ways in which car ownership and car use somehow get entangled with the criminal injustice system and how they can lead to detention, which is the main topic of the book. Right. Well, let's start with the financial topic, because that's always the one that's the most salient to me. I remember when I lived, you know, when I was in my 20s and I was not so affluent as I am now that I work in television. Back then I was, you know, scraping odd jobs together and I lived in New York and I could get anywhere that I needed to go for the price of a monthly MetroCard. It was like, you know, a hundred bucks and change at that time in the mid two thousands. I remember when I moved

to Los Angeles, I realized, oh wait, I have to purchase a car. And then I also have to fuel a car and I have to purchase insurance for the car. And then if the car breaks, I have to pay for it. I have to pay for parking. I have to pay for tickets. So, and I could afford all those things because I was moving with the job, but it really leapt out to me, the financial demands that are put on people by, as you say, the compulsory need for a car is so huge. And look, I was able to afford that stuff out of pocket, but you're right for many, that means they're, they are forced by the transportation system to enter the debt system, the lending system. Right. And so what are the effects of that?

Yeah. Well, let's throw some statistics your way, Adam. Auto loan debt, which is the outcome of what you're talking about, auto loan debt has doubled over the last decade, largely as a result of the entry of subprime lending, which migrated from the housing market to the auto loan market. And also the long-term loans that you can get car loans for up to 84 months now. So the average auto loan payment on a monthly basis now is a whopping $700. The average?

Yeah, that's higher than rents in some parts of America. That doesn't include your insurance. It doesn't include your maintenance costs. It doesn't include all the car parts, which you're going to have to acquire because they wear out quickly. And they get financed too, adding to your debt. This amounts to a massive debt burden.

And none of it is optional, as Julie pointed out earlier on. This is pretty much compulsory debt burden for most people in this country. And there are lots of reasons for that. And there's lots of predatory opportunities for dealers and financiers to profit from. It's funny to me because when you watch car advertisements, there's so much financial language in the advertisements that you start to realize that really what they're selling is a financial product. When they say, hey, the car goes real fast.

Here it is driving down a road. 0% APR, no money down, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Wait, hold on a second. They're selling me a loan. That's the product. And when you listen to the radio in Los Angeles, where I live, one out of every two ads is like, you need a car right now. No money down, blah, blah, blah.

It's someone selling you a predatory loan. But please go ahead. You are absolutely right, Adam. You got it. And it adds up to the tune of one point five two trillion dollars in auto loan debt in this country. Transportation accounts for a fifth of household income in many households in this country. So it is a substantial, substantial burden on many. And in addition to the details that Yonder just gave you, I think it's important to remember that the second you drive your car off the lot, it loses value.

Yeah. So if the loan term is, let's say, 72 months, long before you've paid off that loan, you're already what's called upside down on it, meaning you owe more than the car you're driving is now worth. So it is unlike paying into a mortgage where one hopes they're making an investment in something that's going to accrue value or at least maintain value over time. The car loan is a different animal entirely. And the government plays no role in it whatsoever. You know, with housing mortgages, you got your loans secured by the government, student loans, the government's involved in that. But the auto loan market and business is almost entirely unregulated. The federal government collects almost no data whatsoever. So it's rife. It's rife with opportunities for fraudulent and scamming type behavior.

by, what is it, one of the federal agencies that purchase mortgages. And so my mortgage is owned by the federal government. The rate is set. I know the federal government isn't going to knock on my door and engage in some of the predatory behavior, or at least I believe that they're not going to, compared to what a corporate loan might. But I didn't realize that that doesn't exist at all in auto loans. I mean, there are, from state to state, there are what are called usury caps. that that doesn't exist at all in auto loans? I mean, there are, from state to state,

there are what are called usury caps. But you're not supposed to charge interest rates below a certain level. Some states don't have them at all. But in most states that do have them, there's all sorts of loopholes that are available to dealerships and lenders to get around that so that they can charge higher interest rates. And of course, in any private agreement, you can go as high as you can. But essentially, as we all know, when we walk into a dealership, there's the start of a hustle. I think we all know that. And, uh, and there's a process

of upselling that kicks in whereby whatever you think you're going in to buy, isn't what you're driving off the lot. It's a much more expensive vehicle. And in the book, maybe Julie can talk about this. We uncovered, you know, really, really, really strong testimony about that on the part of formerly incarcerated men and women who are the people we interviewed for the book. Yeah, we talked to a lot of people about their process of purchasing a car when they've come home from a period of incarceration. Because they were incarcerated, their credit score took a nosedive because of economic inactivity. You can't bank from behind bars. And as a result, no matter how good your credit was going in, it's going to come out in the basement. So that means that these people are going into a dealership. They don't have

enough saved to be able to buy a used car on the private market, you know, online, let's say. They have to go into a dealership that's extending a loan, and they're going in with a subprime credit score. And we heard a whole array of different tactics that were used in order to sell people loans at rates often that they couldn't afford, but that they were anxiously trying to earn enough money to be able to raise their score and refinance. We talked to some people who had gone into a dealership hoping to get a bottom of the line used Honda, but could only get out of the dealership with a top of the line Mercedes. We talked to other people who were able to get a car of the type that they were looking for. But once we did the math, they

discovered that by the time they had paid off their loan, they would be paying well more than double or even triple the blue book value of the car. So the array of different strategies that are employed by dealers was really kind of head turning. Yeah. And then, I mean, what are the effects of having to take on so much debt in order just to get around or to make just have to make a big purchase or having a big monthly fee? I mean, first of all, that just seems like a gigantic drag on any local economy. If everyone to get to work, everyone who wants to clean a house or, you know, pick a piece of fruit or or, you know, go go work in an office job is having to pay some huge amount of money. But also, if you suddenly are not

able to pay that money for one month, then you lose your transportation. And that's a huge problem as well. But what else am I not thinking of? Like, what effects does this have on people? Certainly, for some people, their car was their most important asset, and it might be in tension with their ability to afford housing. So you know that cars are emergency housing for people in this country where the price of housing is also not regulated and goes through the roof and becomes unobtainable to people. So something that requires like such a significant part of the paycheck, as you say, opens people up to having their car, their vehicle repossessed. Andrew, I think can talk a little bit about how getting into this

credit relationship for some people can even wind up in jail time. Really? It may be that you've entered into a loan that required you to produce a post-dated check in order to secure the loan and then when you've missed a month of payment that um whoever's holding that loan decides to cash that check now you've passed a bad check um which opens you up people have gone to jail for that? Yes. Well, yeah. You probably know, and a lot of your listeners probably know, that Datter's prisons were abolished in this country in 1833. I hope they were.

That's what I was told. Is it true? You would hope so, but it ain't true. There's a back door to Datter's prison that's been open for quite some time. And there are local courts across the country where this happens for civil debts. Technically speaking, you can be incarcerated for not paying your debts. But there are all sorts of ways in which you can end up behind bars, and people do through other means,

other legal judgments, especially contempt of court. Your creditor will put a lot of pressure on the court and the judge to issue a contempt of court order if you fail to make a court appearance, and there's all sorts of ways in which that can be manufactured. And in courts across the country, that's what happens. And the threat of detention, real detention or probation, that's the outcome of not being able to pay those debts. And as a result, the small claims courts of this country, you know, which were set up to provide some kind of redress for the small guy, you know, for regular people,

are dominated by these kinds of judgments on the part of the debt collections industry. Wow. Yeah, I mean, tell me a little bit more about the debt collection industry, because I almost have this sense that when you enter into a loan like this, you've created an asset for the company that gave you the loan, you know, because now you owe them money. And so your loan can be sold or to a debt collector. And, you know, it has value that someone can use to squeeze money out of you later. And so it puts you in a very vulnerable position to take one of these loans, right? It does. And also, I mean, a large part of our book is also about state debts, what we think of as state deaths, which are largely initially in the form of traffic fines, where

the state is the creditor. And the state, I mean, that's the outcome of most traffic stops, right? There are some that result in fatalities, as in the case of Tyree Nichols and many others. And there's some that result in arrests that then fill the jails. 10 million people cycle through America's jails every year and there are 50,000 traffic stops a day. So a lot of those result in detention ultimately. But for most of us, a traffic fine is the outcome. A traffic fine is the outcome. And so we were interested in trying to chart the pathway that leads from that initial traffic fine to being behind bars.

And it's a relationship in which the state is the creditor. The state creates the debt when they write you a traffic ticket. They're the punisher, they're the you a traffic ticket they're the punisher they're the enforcer and they're the collector all at the same time which is a kind of very unique form of debt if you think about it um this is a form of debt though i didn't even think of it that way yeah and when i said earlier that the federal government isn't going to come you know fuck with me too much if you know if i'm late on my mortgage payment i'm't going to come, you know, fuck with me too much. If, you know, if I'm late on my mortgage payment, I'm not going to jail for that kind of debt. If I, it is true that if you owe too much parking debt to your local city government,

well, you do go, you could spend a night in jail or longer. You absolutely could. Or if you owe a traffic fine and then you don't have the money to pay it because um you know it's four hundred dollars and we know the majority of americans don't have that kind of disposable money just waiting there when they need it so you can't pay it yet so extra fines and fees accrue to it which are late penalties and then before you know it um the court itself uh can ask you to come in for an appointment. And when you miss the notice for that, you're in contempt of court. Or we can think about it another way, which is you owe these traffic fees and fines, but the state holds the driver's license as collateral against all of the debt you owe to the state. So they can suspend your license. Now, you still have to drive to get to work in order to pay those tickets and the late fines and fees. But now you're driving on a suspended license.

So you're committing a misdemeanor. And if you do that, you get caught doing that or you get caught doing that multiple times. And if you do that, you get caught doing that or you get caught doing that multiple times. You know, your trouble with the law only gets further and further along. And I think it is important that we say something that should be obvious in this country, though it's unacceptable, which is that all of these systems are racialized. Yeah. Black and brown people pay more for their loans. They pay more for their insurance. They're pulled over more often by the police.

Tragically and unacceptably, they are more often killed by the police in those encounters. They are, you know, more likely to have their license suspended, et cetera, et cetera. These are just the raw numbers. They are more likely people of color are more likely than white Americans to have all these things happen to them. Yes. Yeah. And they're also disproportionately low income, which is a big consideration if you consider that we have, you know, the traffic fine system in this country is based on flat fees. Everyone gets the same ostensibly. I mean, in principle, everyone gets the same fine. There are a lot of countries where there's a sliding scale system, which seems more just to us, especially northern European countries.

Depending on your income, you're going to get a bigger fine for speeding, let's say, for reckless driving. And if you have a flat fine system, then the outcome is discriminatory. Because if you treat everyone the same same regardless of their ability to pay then there'll be an unequal outcome and and that is what happens with the traffic fine system in that form of state debt and that's why people who are disproportionately poor uh black black and brown people end up in in greater in greater legal and fiscal jeopardy than others. I mean, it's a regressive system. And I think if you look at the crime blotter on any rural newspaper, including in very white spaces, you will find like countless cases of people having been pulled over for driving on a suspended license. So there is a lot of detail depending upon the geography, the economy, et cetera, of the various

locales of the country, but those racial and class-based pieces of it are important. Yeah. Regarding the fines, I mean, I've, you know, you hear stories about wealthy people, you know, I don't know, Warren Buffett parks, wherever he wants in Omaha and just pays the fines, right? Because the $50 fine doesn't mean anything to him. A $50 fine is unpayable to someone who's making, you know, $25,000 a year, uh, I don't know, sweeping floors or whatever. Um, and so there's this like adage that there's this adage that if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then it just means it's legal for rich people to do it. And I think that absolutely applies here.

We have so much more to talk about this. We've got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more on this topic with Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston. you the next time okay we're back with andrew and julie you know talking about this and and the the way the the criminal justice system or the criminal injustice system as you as you put it and snares people it reminds me of this tv show i saw years ago called Parking Wars. Have you ever heard of this show? No. This is a show. This was a show. I saw it on a hotel TV. It aired on I just looked it up. It aired on A&E from 2008 to 2012. It was a reality show about parking enforcement in Philly. And the whole show would follow somebody. Oh, this car was parked in the wrong spot. Their car got booted. And then they would follow the poor person whose car got booted. And by the way, these are always, always, always poor black people in Philadelphia.

They would be like, I got to get to work. I can't have my car be booted. And they go to court and say, well, you got to pay a fine. I don't, I shouldn't, I was only there five minutes. And then they have the officer talk and et cetera, et cetera. And I understand to a certain extent why a show was made out of that, because there's natural drama that's relatable of seeing someone deal with the court system. But it also was to me like a window into, my God, so many people's lives are just constantly ensnared in that, you know, there were debt things on this show, as you say, there were parking enforcement, there was traffic stops.

show as you say there were parking enforcement there was traffic stops um how many people's lives are ensnared in these petty legal you know tangles over five hundred dollars or who parked where your license has been suspended because you can't pay a little bit of money and now you can't get to work and like the tragedy of it that people so many people in america have to deal with this and for those you know as someone who never, because I've never really driven that much, it was like, I don't know, it was just like seeing a whole underbelly of American life that like a huge swath of our society of black and brown people, of low income people of all stripes are constantly just in this morass that anybody over a certain income threshold doesn't really have to deal with. And it and it shocked me to witness it. And so I guess it was a good show at the end of the day because I because I got that out of it. I don't know if that's what the creators intended, but that's why I got out of it. Yeah. Well, you know, I haven't seen Parking Wars, although I'm from Boston, which is like 24 hour parking war day in, day out. So I

can a little bit relate. But this story you tell reminds me of something that people have said to us about to help, you know, everyone understand how vast, labyrinthine and seemingly arbitrary many of the traffic laws are. So in New York City, where Andrew and I live, every day the driving population engages in a collective breaking of the law where they all move for street cleaning and double park, waiting for the ticket guy to go by and the street cleaner to go by. Everybody's double parked. And then they go back to their parking space. And there's a basic agreement that you're not going to get ticketed during it because that's how everybody is doing it. Everybody would rebel if that were a ticketable offense. Right. So there are so many rules of the road that we do not get pulled over for.

We do not get ticketed for, and yet we could be. And because of that, there is a kind of room to maneuver an arbitrary dynamic somehow within the giving of tickets for traffic, for parking, et cetera, and which opened them up to be a kind of pretextual move by the state to decide if they want to go further, to search somebody's car, to give them a ticket, et cetera, et cetera. In our book, one of the people who we quote is a police officer who said, you know, in 30 years of working as a police officer, I've seen thousands of traffic accidents. I have yet to see one that was caused by an expired registration sticker or by a low tire pressure or somebody who signaled 90 feet from the intersection rather than 100 feet from the intersection. But you could be pulled over for any of those things.

And whether or not you're pulled over may have something to do with how capitalized you would appear to be. also a way of funding governments, Adam, which is one of the most serious problems that we have with something called revenue policing or policing for profit. More and more local governments, municipalities, counties depend on revenue policing to meet their budgets. So they send out, you know, they send out officers to issue more and more traffic fines. Their salaries depend on it. And not just the ways of funding the courts and judges and police officers, but the general operating budgets of many of these jurisdictions now depend on the collection of those fines. So it's evolved really from being caught in a speed trap. These are rinky dinky towns that you would pass through that would set up speed traps for you. Now it's a much more systematic way of meeting budgets. Again,

it's a shitty way of funding governments. Then it's also a regressive form of taxation because the people that get pulled over, you know, are disproportionately black, brown or poor drivers. And if you disregard their ability to pay, then then the burden falls on them, you know, in them in ever greater ways. Yeah, and this is a common way to fund governments after something has happened, like property taxes being slashed in order to appease wealthy homeowners as they were here in California in the 70s, for example. So let's talk about the news of the day and the horrible case of Tyree Nichols, which is in the news every day. And, you know, that obviously resulted from a traffic stop. And to start our discussion of that piece of it, I'd love to know, like, it strikes me the fact that law enforcement is involved in this system of transportation at all is somewhat strange. That again, when I take the subway or, you know, the bus or, you know, you take even an airline

is less law enforcement mediated than driving is. There aren't, you know, cops saying, hey, you know, your man's spreading on the subway. You got to put your leg, close your legs guy, you know, or whatever. No one's like keeping track of it that way. So how did that enter into the American system of car transportation and, and why is it so pervasive? I mean, is it simple, simply a matter of this is a need for adequate traffic safety, for enforcing traffic safety. I think we're all agreed on that. In the 1920s, when there was a mass uptake of car ownership, police departments very rapidly grew. That's the reason why police departments grew into the behemoths they are today. why police departments grew into the behemoths they are today. Before that, they were just chasing gangsters and robbers, like in the movies. Now they're chasing everyone who's otherwise a law-abiding citizen. And the courts had to decide if police officers could stop and search you in your private vehicles without a warrant.

They can't do that in your private homes. They can't without a warrant. They can't do that in your private homes. But the courts decided they could. Why? Because you're on a public road. You're in a public place. And one thing led to another. And over the decades, the courts gave more and more powers to the police to make these stops on the mere pretext of a gazillion traffic code violations. And then inevitably you've got abridgments of civil liberties and racial profiling and so on and so forth. So it's an interesting history that leads to the current power and relatively unrestricted power of the police to make those stops. I mean, it certainly doesn't feel as though traffic safety is the main thing that police are doing in the traffic system. I mean, I did a segment on my show years ago about how

if you're a driver and you kill a pedestrian or a bicyclist with your car, no matter how reckless you were, and by the way, if you're that person, you're usually at fault because you're the person who's driving the two-ton metal object. The bicyclist or the pedestrian is not. They're moving more slowly than you, et cetera. And certainly, you know, drivers are often quite reckless, texting while driving, all these sorts of things. It is almost impossible for someone to be penalized at all for doing that. It is basically legal to kill someone with your car in America, you know, let alone, you know, the behaviors that lead to that. Like no one's stopping people and saying, hey, you didn't, you rolled through the stoplight,

you rolled through the stop sign. That is not enforced whatsoever. So it's difficult as an observer to feel like that's what it's for. It seems like most of these stops, like the Tyree Nichols type of stop, they're looking for something else, are they not? It certainly would seem that way. It's absolutely the case that the rate of automobile-related fatalities continues to rise

in this country, despite the hyper-policing of our roads. So we know that they are not, that that form of policing is not the gateway or the pathway or whatever you want to call it to public safety. While at the same time, some drivers and passengers are made very vulnerable in their person when they are pulled over, as we see quite tragically in the case of Tyree Nichols. So in our book, one of the things we strongly advocate for is the removal of armed police from traffic duty. And that is not because we 100% agree with you, Adam. It is two tons of steel barreling down the road. People who drive need to be trained to do so. There need to be rules that people obey, etc. But armed police is not the way to enforce those rules. driving a car puts you, it's a point at which you can interact with police where you might not otherwise. If you're driving a car at all, especially if you're black and brown, it is simply more likely that you will have a police interaction. And the problem is in America,

police interactions are fundamentally dangerous. I read, I can't remember where I read this. It might've been a Twitter thread. This was back in probably 2020, but it was, I believe, an Australian writing that they were in the United States and they were driving a car and they got pulled over. And then in Australia, and again, I hope I'm not

misrepresenting this. It's my memory of a couple years ago. But in Australia, when the cops come up, you get out of your car and you say, hello. Good to see you, officers. And you're friendly to them.

And this guy does that. And the cops pull their guns out and say, get down good to see you officers. And you're friendly to them. And this guy does that. And the cops pull their guns out and say, get down to the ground, get down to the ground. Because in the United States, because essentially they're really, the problem is there's so many guns in the United States. The police are worried that any interaction could be a gun interaction. So in the U S unlike in other countries, when you, when you are stopped by the police, you have to, you are trained to keep your hands on the wheel, look straight forward, don't move, certainly don't move your hand towards your pocket or anything. I mean, Philando Castile was killed while he was saying, I'm reaching for my pocket to get my whatever. So because of policing in America and the number of guns in

America, it's dangerous just to interact with the police at all and can result in one's death. And so the fact that being in a car causes you to interact with the police more often is by itself a harm, is it not? That is right. And I believe it was the New York Times that reported last year they did a big set of stories and investigation on this very topic. And they found that I want to say it was between 2017 and April of 2022 that some 600 people, passengers and drivers had been killed during traffic stops. And these were all people who were found to have been unarmed etc i may have the figures not exactly right but i want to say that it's 10 percent of um people who uh are killed at the hands of police um that begins with the traffic stop wow and 10 percent

of people who are killed by police begins with a traffic stop. I believe you have that figure correct. Because you're imagining, look, you're imagining when someone's killed by the police, it's a, it's a, you're thinking about a, you know, a CSI episode. There's a standoff and, you know, people, everyone's armed and et cetera, et cetera. But it begins with someone driving a car and being pulled over and ends with them being killed. Yeah, because the police have the power to do that. They don't necessarily have the same power as to barge into your home, for example, as we mentioned earlier. And they are also told there's a vicious cycle to this because they're actually told that traffic stops are dangerous to them.

told that traffic stops are dangerous to them and that a significant percentage of police are in physical peril and are wounded or die as a result of traffic stops. So they approach the traffic stops in anticipation of them turning violent. of them turning violent. The vicious cycle being it's the presence of the armed police that turns them violent. But that's what they're trained to think. So they already go into the encounter in a potentially belligerent fashion with that kind of mentality.

In an escalating way that causes, I mean, if they go in so tense and they're expecting hold on this person might have a gun or whatever then then that is going to escalate the situation if the person does even if the person was dangerous well they were just driving around if you hadn't stopped them and approached them in a dangerous manner then everything might have been fine exactly exactly I would say that some of the differences of who is most vulnerable to this have to do with where the police set up speed traps or zones that they tend to police heavily and pull people over. So some neighborhoods of your city of Los Angeles

are more heavily policed than other neighborhoods of your city of Los Angeles are more heavily policed than other neighborhoods of your city. So even though everybody is subject to being pulled over by the police and getting a traffic fine, people who live in particular neighborhoods, there are just more cops there who are pulling people over, hoping that they can find either the person who has drugs in their car that they're going to go sell the person who has the weapon that they don't want to have they don't want them to have etc etc so there's also something about the landscape of where the police um set up to pull people over that has some something to do with this and that's what happened in memphis

that's exactly what happened in mem with the, the scorpion, you know, the so-called scorpion saturation unit, the police send in, they're basically gangs that they send into what they designate as high crime neighborhoods. And the, and the purpose of this team is to,

or of teams like this is to, is to what just do as many stops as just like, Hey, let's do traffic stops on people. Like, see what you can get. Essentially stop and frisk for cars. Is that basically what it is? Yeah, I don't think that those units only look at cars,

but they are stopping and frisking. They are pursuing people who they believe are in gangs or in this or in that. And pulling people over is one of the many tactics that they are using. And there, it is one of the tactics that can result in a man dying on the pavement, telling the police, he's just trying to get home a hundred yards from his mother's house. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, those kinds of stops, at least here where I am in LA, those aren't happening in West Hollywood or Los Feliz, but I know that they're happening elsewhere, you know? That's very apparent. I feel like it should be apparent. A lot of people are probably listening to this

driving around in their car. And I'd ask, you know, do you feel in your car right now that you are likely to get pulled over for a pretextual reason? You know, and then I would ask, where are you in your city? And do you think that has anything to do with your feeling of whether or not, you know, interacting with the police is likely to happen to you in the next, you know, hour, day or week. I don't think it takes any more than that to realize, you know, how things are tilted in this country. But even even if you feel it's not tilted against you and you're and you're moving through a insulated buffer zone when you're driving, just the sight of a police cruiser in your rear window and especially one with flashing lights, instills this really intense and abject fear

in everyone, I think. Yeah. And this is how we respond almost instinctively to seeing police on the roads as a threat to ourselves, as a punitive threat to ourselves. And in an ideal world, that shouldn't be the case, especially if these officers are supposed to be there for our protection and to keep a lookout for particularly reckless drivers.

We shouldn't have to fear their presence. And certainly, if we're of the wrong skin color, we have every reason to more than fear their presence. So that is an overall condition, which is unevenly shared, but I think it's shared by everyone. It's unevenly shared, but I think it's shared by everyone. Well, we have to take another really quick break, but let's, when we get back, let's talk about what a more ideal world could look like. So we'll be right back with more Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston. Okay, we're back with Andrew Ross and Julie Livingston. So you said before we left you know

in an ideal world we wouldn't have a feeling of abject fear driving around we see uh you know we see a cop go by we wouldn't have that startle in our chest obviously in an ideal world we wouldn't have cops performing traffic stops and pulling people out and beating them to death I think it's it's easy to say we would also also not have people having to put themselves thousands of dollars into debt and putting themselves at the mercy of the debt collection industry just to get from place to place.

So how might we go about building that ideal world? Like what are the steps that you would wanna take to fix it? And let's start with the sort of reformist steps, the smaller ones, and then let's start with maybe envisioning, and then let's move towards envisioning a bigger picture change that we could make as a society. But yeah, where do you start this conversation?

Well, towards the end of the book, we have a wishlist of some of those reforms. We felt obliged to do that. And in the aggregate, we do think that they would be transformative if all these measures were adopted. I mean, we can name some of these for you. The no-brainer ones, like withdrawing, we've already mentioned withdrawing armed police from traffic duties, the same way they've been withdrawn from toll booth enforcements or parking duties. We think that the US should adopt the sliding scale traffic fines and fees. We think that

subprime lenders who really do exploit these legal loopholes and charge these extortionate interest rates should be instead of slapped over the wrist and given fines, which are just the cost of doing business, they should be put out of business. And the government should be more firmly in the business of regulating the auto lending market, including making sure there are usury caps. You want to mention some others, Julie? Well, I think that those are the kind of reachable pieces of policy that we've thought about. of policy that we've thought about. And then, of course, the biggie is we need robust, accessible,

pleasurable, you name it, public transportation in this country that people can use, that people want to use. We are not arguing that the private motor car should just be abolished from society, but the compulsory nature of it should be. Yeah. And then there's debtors' prisons. I think I would just add to that. We should be really serious about the fact that there was very good reasons for abolishing debtors' prisons. And the back door to debtors' prisons have to be closed, the federal government should ensure that local judges and local courts do take into account the ability of offenders to pay. They should be forbidden for issuing arrest warrants in the case of debtor judgments. And they should ensure that detention and or probation should never be used as a threat to make people pay their debts under pressure from the creditors.

I mean, that should be easy to do because the federal government and the Department of Justice has the power to do that. But at the local level, it is routinely neglected and we see violations almost every day in the courts thereof. I'm curious about your solutions. Half of them are transportation focused, but the other half are frankly general problems with the criminal justice system. We need non-armed officers elsewhere in almost every aspect of life, right? And say, you want to deal with homelessness. We need more mental health care on the streets. Even as a subway rider, what I want the most, and here in Los Angeles, there's a lot of people in dire poverty. There's a lot of people in experiencing mental health issues. There's drug issues on the subway. I want non-armed people down there who can offer aid, right? Who can just say, hey, this person's having a crisis and I'm down here to call, you know, to get them somewhere safe or to defuse, you know, a situation that's getting

escalated or whatever. You know, just government employees who do not have guns but are trained for the situations we need them. We need that in all aspects of life. So I'm curious how much you feel that this is a transportation problem. Cause obviously I would love that world of better public transport. I would love all of the United States to be like Amsterdam and have nice public transportation and bike paths everywhere. But would we then end up in a situation where our inequitable criminal justice system would just start figuring out a new way to punish and extract money from black and brown folks? And is that really the underlying problem in your view? Or are they just too entangled to pull apart? I think that they're all quite entangled. And in fact, this book on the car comes out of more broad-based research that Andrew and I are part of a

laboratory, a collection of students and faculty who look at the relationship between the carceral system, the system of laws and prisons and jails and policing, and the debt economy. and jails and policing and the debt economy. And the car is just a really tidy, convenient object to help you see how they collaborate with one another. It helps you see all sorts of things, but it's not the sole location for it. We could talk about public housing. We could talk about private housing. We could talk about all sorts of things so um we have these recommendations not because we think that they will just solve the problem and then america will be the land of like everybody's free and happy and rich and it's also great um but that uh it requires multi-pronged strategies of people agitating for change from many, many, many different directions.

Here in New York, our subways are heavily policed. And as you say, our jail, which is an incredibly broken, violent, terrible place, is the largest mental health facility in the city. Yeah, that's true in L.A. is not prepared to do. So if we really cared about that problem, well, we would look at both sides of it at the same time. And so, too, with this. But I think there are many, many places to start, but they're not the places to end. Yeah, I think that ideally looking at the issues this way should help, you know, bring us together as as advocates. Like I have a lot of people listen to the show who like what I say about cars and public transportation, you know, who are urbanist types and, you know, they've joined the

war on cars and they they want to take, you know, fast electric buses everywhere on bus rapid transit. But I would say, well, use your interest in that issue and connect it to the criminal justice system, because it's not just about, you know, you get into the grocery store. It's about the people whose lives are being oppressed every day by the criminal justice system. And that's connected to this thing that you care about. And the opposite way for people whose primary issue is criminal

justice reform, well, you should also recognize that our transportation system is one of the main drivers of that. Not to pun. And are because the issues are entangled we we can be we can appreciate that it's it and and work on them together you know absolutely and i'll just say we haven't talked about the environment which you can't not talk about anytime you think about car but um you know you bring those people on board as well. Although it has to be said that putting all our eggs in the basket of electric vehicles, personally owned electric vehicles, which the Biden administration has, you know, his infrastructure bill revolves around that as the solution, you know, the biggest remedy. And for sure, driving electric cars is going to result in reduced carbon footprint at some level. combustion vehicles with electric vehicles will not make any difference to any of the ills or inequalities that we mentioned in the course of the book and that we analyze

in the course of the book. We'll not remedy any of those whatsoever. So that kind of future is one in which the patterns of injustice that we tried to nail down will continue unless the patterns of ownership and the carceral system that envelops our behavior and our conduct is transformed. Yeah, we can't shop our way out of this problem. It doesn't work like that. And the substance that fuels those electric cars has to be gotten from somewhere. It comes from inside of the earth. And just like the fossil fuel economy, it is going to be heavily militarized.

And it is going to leave its own environmental footprint when you try to pull it out of the ground so a simple like oh buy a tesla instead um maybe better in the short term although there's a lot of carbon baked into the manufacturing of that tesla wasn't born out of the head of zeus um it can. There's no one singular technological solution to this problem. And the emphasis on electric cars as a solution is a product of the same power imbalances that lead to what we're talking about.

Because the fact that we have the system that we do, both the transportation system and the criminal justice system that we do, both the transportation system and the criminal justice system that we do, is that it works fine for affluent, largely white folks, right? Oh, hey, yeah, what's the big deal? I drive my Hyundai to and from, you know, I got my big ass Ford F-150. I never have any trouble, et cetera. My worst problem is traffic, right? And I can afford a brand new car every year, et cetera, et cetera. And so a and those happen to be the people who donate to political organizations, political parties. Those happen to be people who have easier access to the polls and every other advantage in life. So their voices are more prominent in society. That's how power works, unfortunately.

And since those people would love to just buy a new car hey I'll just get a new Hyundai Ioniq Tesla I don't know I don't like Elon anymore but Hyundai's got a cool new car I can buy uh well then that ends up being the solution to our transportation system that is that is written into the law when in fact a better solution would be one that helps everybody in America but those aren't the solutions we get because the people who are most affected by this transportation system are the people whose voices are diminished the most and repressed the most in our in our political system. The people who the people who can't afford, you know, 100 bucks, 100 bucks for a parking ticket and have their car repossessed. Those aren't the voices who ultimately work their way up to Joe Biden's ears, unfortunately. Mm-hmm.

I think that's a good way of putting it, Adam. And we, like you probably and many of your listeners, we don't believe that technological advances necessarily provide solutions to social problems, although that is Silicon Valley's way of looking at the world. We're also aware of the kind of power of advertising those vehicles and also the long history of promoting cars in America in particular. They're very special commodities. cars in America in particular, they're very special commodities. They're not even commodities in a way because everyone needs them. They're not optional choices outside of a few urban areas where you have decent public transport. They're not optional.

So they're not like most commodities, but traditionally they've been advertised, especially in the Cold War era, as freedom machines, symbols of American prowess and capitalist freedom. And what we found in all the interviews we did was a lot of credence given to that and the pleasure of driving cars

and the pleasure of owning them and coveting them. But in addition, what was more important, I think, and what we discovered is how quickly they can turn into instruments of unfreedom that deliver us into social or economic custody in one form or another, and actually then do result in these fatalities and arrests and detention for civil and also for criminal debts. Or just the, it's supposed to be freedom, but you're sitting in traffic for hours, furious at the people next to you. Cars have some wonderful uses for certain people who are mobility impaired and they're helpful for them or people in rural areas with vast distances to cover or electric cars, yes, better than gasoline powered cars. But the system of dependency, when you think about the time that you spend in your

car, when you think about the headache of when it breaks down and what that means for you, when you think about having to stop to get gas or however many hours it's going to be to plug that thing in, when you think about planning, actually, I'll stay at work another two hours because the traffic is going to be so terrible. It'll take too long to get home. What kind of freedom is that? And it diminishes our entire society. I mean, think about this, a transportation system where everybody who needs to do any job has to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a vehicle or put themselves into debt for it, has to spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars a month for insurance or fuel, has

to put themselves in legal liability every time they drive it, whether that's because they might get pulled over or because they might hit somebody, where people are pulled from their cars and beaten to death. This is bad for everyone. Like this makes, again, even if you're a wealthy person, the fact that the person who cleans your house has to come, has to drive to your house and deal with that just in order to get there, right, is bad for you. It raises at the very least costs for everything. It makes that person's life more, more precarious. And that's bad for you. It makes

the people in your, it makes your entire community less thriving it makes the if it takes everybody twice as long to get anywhere that's bad for literally everyone it's a it's an overall drag on the life quality of everybody in the city and everybody who you interact with and how is that anything but bad even if you personally have made your peace with it you're like i'm okay with it um it's it's to have such an inefficient inefficient harmful system but a lot of people are in love a lot of people are in love with their cars adam this we know this yeah this we've encountered them from from uh uh uh writing this book and from the feedback we got from the article we wrote in the Times, we realized that we're really taking on a sacred cow

that is at the very heart of a love affair within American culture. You can say it's a manufactured love affair, but it's still something that people feel very, very strongly about. They do. And I happen to my girlfriend is a car lover. She loves cars. Right. But she doesn't love traffic and she doesn't love driving to work. You know, and what I try to tell people is, hey, if we had if we had an efficient bus system, right, that got everybody around LA, there'd be less traffic.

And that car ad that shows someone driving up the Pacific Coast Highway in a vintage car, right, taking the turns, what if that were possible? What if when you drove to the Pacific Coast Highway, it wasn't clogged with traffic because everyone was actually on a bus and you could just have that nice experience if driving was just for pleasure

or just for those who truly need it, for shipping and for those with disabilities, et cetera, and everybody who wanted to had a cheaper, more efficient form of transportation, that would be good for drivers, I think, right? I totally agree, although I, like you, not a driver. I totally agree. Although I like you, not a driver. You know, it's, if you want to keep your hobby, great, but you shouldn't have to do it every single day for three hours a day to get to and from work. That's, that's, uh,

and you shouldn't lose your job because your car broke down. Yeah. That woman who's going to clean the house, who you used as an example, the inconvenience to the employer is when her car needs repairs and she doesn't show up or she's late. And if they decide that that's too inconvenient, they move on to the next person. And there she is now unemployed, having to fix her car in order to be able to go get the next job. Yeah. And you shouldn't lose your life, you know, whether by in a traffic crash or in the case of Tyree Nichols, where you're literally killed for driving a car, killed by the police

for driving a car. And I just hope to God we can start building a world where that doesn't happen. Hallelujah. I really thank both of you for being here. What's the name of the book again? Tell me once again. It's called Cars and Jails, Freedom, Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality. That's a wonderful title. Folks can pick it up at our bookshop factuallypod.com books uh i thank you so much for being here both of you andrew and julie thanks so much for having us we really appreciate it it's been a pleasure talking to you adam

well i want to thank julie and andrew once again for coming on the show to check out their book you can head as always to factuallypod.com books books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And when you buy a book there, you'll be supporting not just our show, but your local bookshop. I want to thank our producer, Sam Roudman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. And this week, I'm going to read all your names once again. I want to thank A, Akira White, Alexey Batalov, Allison Lipparato, Alan Liska, Ann Slagle, Antonio LB, Ashley, Aurelio Jimenez, Benjamin Birdsall,

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