Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Cops Are Untouchable with Joanna Schwartz

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Is there such a thing as "too much justice"? This week, Adam explores the pressing issue of police violence and accountability with Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law Joanna Schwartz. Together they discuss the challenges faced in holding law enforcement accountable, potential reforms, and explore the role of litigation in seeking justice and fostering meaningful change. Pick up Joanna's book at factuallypod.com/booksLike the show? Rate Factually! 5-Stars on Apple Podcasts and let Adam know what conversation you'd like to hear next.Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/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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I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert

about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together. We're going to have so much fun doing it. And by the way, we are here in our brand new studio recording both audio and video. If you're listening to the show on your favorite podcast player, go check out my YouTube channel. If you're watching on YouTube, hey, maybe subscribe to the podcast. We have an amazing show for you every single week. And this week we're talking about police violence and accountability. See, for years we have been bombarded with stories and videos of cops killing and abusing people they should not have, especially black and brown people.

And part of what makes this so offensive and upsetting to all of us is that this is the cops doing the opposite of their job. Right. I mean, we're told that cops are supposed to protect us and protect our constitutional rights, not violate them on a massive scale. Yet somehow cops never seem to get in trouble for doing this. Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, never charged. Daniel Pantaleo, who with other NYPD officers killed Eric Garner, never charged. And the two Buffalo officers who brutally pushed over a 75-year-old Black Lives Matter protester and left him bleeding out on the street, you guessed it. They had their charges dropped. Now, the exception that proves the rule to this is Derek Chauvin, who murdered George

Floyd. But he was only convicted after sparking one of the largest civil rights uprisings in American history. But, you know, the cops shoot to death about a thousand people a year. And if just two percent of those are obviously unjustified, well, that would be about 20 mass protests annually we have to wage just to get a little bit of justice. And I do not think we can march that much. You know, if I fail at my job, people don't laugh.

Or maybe I get fired from doing my TV show. I face immediate accountability. But somehow the cops who are charged with keeping us safe and upholding the law and constitution never face any accountability whatsoever. Why is that? Well, as it turns out, police impunity is written into our laws. You would think that when a cop violates your rights, you'd be able to sue them for their abuse, right? Well, wrong. There's a legal doctrine called qualified immunity, which makes it nearly impossible to hold police accountable when they violate your rights. Starting from rulings in the 1960s, qualified immunity sets the bar absurdly high for a

plaintiff to prove that a cop has violated their rights. Justice Sonia Sotomayor calls it an absolute shield, which tells officers that they can shoot first and think later. And it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished. I mean, how nuts is that? If cops seem to act like they're unaccountable to anyone ever, it's because to a great extent they are. And unfortunately, qualified immunity isn't even the final word of police impunity in America.

It's just the opening salvo. Police are protected not just by the law, but by the structure of our court system itself and crucially by other cops. And to help us pick apart this web of impunity, we have an incredible guest today. But before we get to her, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Just five bucks a month. It gets you every episode of this podcast ad free. You can join our community discord. We would love to have you.

And if you want to support me personally, I want to remind you I am going on tour. If you want to see my standup tour dates, head to adamconover.net for tickets. I would love to see you there. I do a meet and greet after every show. We can take a little selfie. It'll be really nice. But now let's get to our guest. We have an incredible one for you this week. Her name is Joanna Schwartz. She's a law professor at UCLA, and she's the author of Shielded, How the Police

Became Untouchable. Please welcome Joanna Schwartz. Joanna, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. So you have a new book out called Shielded, How the Police Became Untouchable. This book opens with a shocking story. There's a group of police officers in Atlanta. They are about to do a no knock raid. They have a warrant. Only one of them reads the warrant. He doesn't read it all the way through. They end up going to the wrong house, which they wouldn't have if they had read the thing that they were supposed to do. They bust into this house. They find an 80 year old man thereabouts. They throw him on the ground.

He has a heart condition. He starts having a heart episode. They arrest him. Eventually it's all cleared up and they find out that they weren't supposed to arrest this man. And then the shocking thing is nothing else happens, right? Like if I, if I were to do, if I were to fuck up that badly or anything close to that badly at any job, I would at the very least be fired, right? Um,

if I were to, uh, harm a person like this, I would be culpable to some degree, even if I was doing it as the course of my job, because this is like basic, uh, basic competence, right? Um, basic, uh, lack of negligence. Um. And yet nothing happened to these police officers. Why was that? And by the way, this is something that we're very familiar with from watching police doing basically anything in America. This happens daily. We're all aware of this. Why are the police so unaccountable? And what does that story tell us about why they are? Well, they're unaccountable because each of the kinds of avenues that we have for some kind of justice in these cases doesn't work very well. I mean, there's really sort of three kinds of avenues to some kind of justice. One is that officers could be criminally prosecuted.

They virtually never are. And why? Because district attorneys, prosecutors are unlikely to want to bring charges against the officers who they're reliant upon to get convictions in other cases. It's politically difficult. Absolutely.

Internal affairs, investigations, and discipline, and firings is another avenue. And police reformers or police officials all the time say we don't need outside oversight because we can police our own. Well, that doesn't work. so powerful and protected essentially officers from getting any kind of punishment or or a consequence from within the department and so then what we're left with and what Henri Norris the person whose story I told in the beginning of the book is left with is filing a lawsuit filing a lawsuit seeking some sort of damages or forward-looking relief. But that path is almost unpassable also because the Supreme Court and state and local governments across the country have created multiple barriers to relief out of

made-up concerns about the dangers of too much justice in these cases. And so a person like Henri Norris, who clearly had his rights violated, who anyone, any one of us who had that happen to them would think that they were deserving of some something more than the officers just coming in, you know, nailing their door. This is like what a lawsuit is for. An organization falsely accused me of doing X, Y, Z. They threw me on the ground. They harmed me. They hurt me. I had medical bills.

I was afraid for my life. This is literally the point of a lawsuit. And yet it's somehow impossible for a lawsuit to to work against police in this way. So I want to talk about all these avenues. But let's talk about that last one first, because this sounds like the most interesting one. What you say the Supreme Court has put in place made up concerns. Yes. That prevent us from successfully suing police officers who are grossly incompetent or malicious and hurt innocent people or hurt people of any type. Yes. What are those concerns? How did this happen? to zoom back to 1871 to the years after the Civil War during Reconstruction, Congress created the right to sue for violations of constitutional rights.

And they created that right to sue because the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups were terrorizing black people around the South, particularly, and state and local governments were doing nothing, or they're participating in the violence themselves. So Congress said, we need to have this right to sue. We need to have this forum for people to get some kind of justice. And then the Supreme Court really quickly said, you know, interpreted the statute and interpreted the constitution in all sorts of ways that made it really difficult to sue then you get to 19 oh yeah let me just ask i'm sorry if these laws were passed in order to you know fight the ku klux klan fight uh you know the the militarized forces of white supremacy

the remnants of the confederate army right yep and the supreme court hold on, that's not OK. Was that because the Supreme Court was like on the side of the Klan? Like, is that is is that what is that the legacy that we're dealing with? Hey, these these laws are at least part, you know, pro Ku Klux Klan rulings by the Supreme Court never came out and said, we support the Ku Klux Klan. Right. And this is actually an important point because, you know, the Supreme Court doesn't set out to say we want to deny people's rights. Right. They use other language. They use language about the importance of state government, states being able to control themselves about the concerns of, you know, the, you know, the federal government infringing upon the rights of states and also through these sort of kind of ridiculous interpretations that that that advance these interests, even if they're not saying it. So just as one example, the 14th Amendment, which is which is, you know, offers equal protection, meaning equal protection to black people freed freed slaves and and white people um to challenge the ku klux klan's you know terrorism the supreme court interpreted that not to apply um to private actors so i mean the 14th amendment was created yeah in response in part to the violence of private actors. And then the Supreme Court says, no, no, that can't be what it means.

Are they explicitly saying we want the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize people? No. But is that the sort of obvious, predictable consequence? It's the effect. And the laws were passed in order to protect black Americans from the Ku Klux Klan. And so if you're alive at that time period and you're on the Supreme Court and you're saying, actually, I'm going to invalidate that law, you are taking sides in conflict to some degree. You're saying, actually, that law designed to protect black Americans from the Ku Klux Klan, it's unconstitutional for a bunch of reasons. You know what you're doing to some extent.

We can at least make that presumption. So, OK, so please continue with the narrative. The Supreme Court at the time in this period of, you know, white supremacy decided to invalidate some of these laws. So what happened? And through a bunch of decisions, as you're saying, that doesn't explicitly say that's what we're doing, but in effect does that. And so then, OK, then comes Jim Crow laws throughout the South. Then comes essentially legalized segregation and mistreatment of black people. Then comes the rise of the civil rights, civil rights movement and the Supreme Court, which, of course, you know, is changing personnel, judges, justices over the years starts to think, oh, I guess we need to do some more to protect the constitutional rights of black people.

And in 1961, the Supreme Court first recognizes is 90 years after that statute was passed, first recognized that people could sue police for violating their constitutional rights under this statute. OK, like 100 years later. 90 years. Yeah. And it was a case involving very similar, actually, to the facts that I talk about in the introduction of the book. black family living in Chicago, white police officers came into the house, busted into the house without a warrant, pulled this man, James Monroe, and his wife out of bed in the middle of the night naked, beat James Monroe, beat his children. And it was all because a white woman had pointed his photo out of a pile of mugshots and said that he had killed her husband. In fact, she and her lover had killed her husband to get his insurance money. Oh, my God.

But James Monroe was pointed out. This is like a Law & Order episode, plus the most virulent racism imaginable. Right. If Law & Order was set in, you know, the Jim Crow South. Yes. Right. And also very similar to things that we see, you know,

unfortunately today. Anyway, the Supreme Court created that right again, recognized the right that it had, you know, that Congress had passed 90 years before. Again, talking about the importance of having this right to seek justice in the courts.

And that, you know, opened the door to these suits being brought for the first time, you know, violations of constitutional rights. But then soon after that, there became concerns that the door to the courthouse was being opened too wide. And the kinds of concerns that were raised then and have been raised in the decades since are that frivolous lawsuits will flood the courts, will bankrupt police officers who are only doing their jobs,

maybe made a reasonable mistake in a split second, and that if it's too easy to sue and officers are going to be bankrupted for these split second good faith mistakes, no one will agree to become a police officer. And then we won't have any police. And then chaos will ensue. I mean, that's really a version of that argument has been made over the past 60 years and used repeatedly by the Supreme Court to create barrier after barrier after barrier. This reminds me of it. Just that argument reminds me a bit of a couple of years ago, I covered the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit on my show.

frivolous lawsuits are running amok is was at that time like a deliberate strategy of corporate lobbyists and lawyers to, you know, reduce the power of the civil lawsuit against them, where McDonald's had actually grievously injured this woman because they were the coffees at boiling temperatures. And, you know, it was part of an overall strategy to make it harder for the average citizen to reduce to sue companies that are hurting them uh by creating the impression that oh frivolous law lawsuits are running amok which is a thing that people were saying constantly in the 90s and and still say today um i didn't realize the same thing the exact same strategy has been pursued by basically the supreme court by by our own government against us um in the year since i mean what is maybe there is a little bit of shred of

we could we could credit that argument a little bit and say maybe there's a shred of truth to it. But on the other hand, the way that you put it makes it really clear to me. We're talking about the state violating our constitutional rights. We're talking about armed officers of the state who have a monopoly on violence, a monopoly on this sort of power. They're the only organization that can burst into your house in the middle of the night and throw you on the ground and step on your neck and put you into a paddy wagon and take away your liberty. And they're doing it to people who they don't have a warrant. In some of the stories we're talking about, they are they're violating your right to privacy and all of these other rights that are like specifically in the Constitution. And there's no method of

redress. They're not fired. They're not criminally prosecuted. You can't civilly sue them. That seems like a pretty, pretty basic, pretty basic constitutional violations that there needs to be some kind of legal redress for. So where is that argument in the Supreme Court? I'm sorry to get mad so early into the interview. You know what? It's being mad is the right response to the current state of affairs because I think that you framed it just right.

People are losing their privacy, their dignity, their liberty and their lives at the hands of police. And the question that we need to ask as a society is when that happens, who should bear the cost? Because when there's not a consequence, the cost is just being borne by the person who has lost their lives or their privacy or their Liberty or their dignity. Yeah.

And that is not the system that we should have. And the Supreme court talks a lot about the need to balance. Of course, they give a lot of pay, a lot of lip service to the need to vindicate rights when they've been violated. Of course, of course, lawsuits are an important tool. However, it's always an and but, you know, we have to worry about these frivolous cases. You know, we have to worry about these frivolous cases. We have to worry about bankrupt officers and worry that that officers are going to be too distracted and too burdened by being sued as if that's not just part of what comes with the job of getting a badge and a gun and the and the authority to end someone's life. Yeah. And and it is a responsibility that has some, you know, it has some risk to it. it's right to be angry. idea let's move off of this in a second but but just to dwell on it for one more moment there's this sort of idea that individual police officers should never be held responsible for anything that they do in the line of duty which again is different from any other occupation

other than i suppose that a similar doctrine might exist in the military i could imagine that you know they're just sort of following orders thing. But there's so much individual attitude that individual people have. Individual people make mistakes. Is there, I mean, is there any justification for that, that makes sense to you? Because to me, it's sort of ludicrous because, I mean, you, because to me, it's it's sort of ludicrous because I mean, I often think individual responsibility is overemphasized in America. And I think we should look at systemic harms and systemic causes more often. But like, it's still a fundamental American principle that like take responsibility for your actions like you.

You are the person with a brain with your finger on the trigger. Right. Well, and I wouldn't the Supreme Court never has come out and said there should be no consequences. Of course, this is a little bit like the discussion that we that we just had about what happened after the Civil War and Reconstruction, where the you know, the sort of center was cut out of the of the statute. The Supreme Court's never said we shouldn't have any responsibility. What they've said is we need to protect against over deterrence. We need to protect against too much justice because there's negative consequences of too much justice. But then what the court has done, as I try to outline in the book, is, you know, is create so many different overlapping barriers that it makes it virtually impossible. Like,

have you heard about the idea of having like a belt and suspenders approach? Like the idea that you need to keep up your pants, you know, you wear a belt and then like doubly sure you also put on suspenders. It's like the Supreme Court has done belt and suspenders and another pair of suspenders. And, you know, this is what is done any time rights are being eroded or constrained. Like if you look at, you know, the various times and currently the various places that voting rights are restricted, they never say, oh, we don't want these people to vote. They just say, oh, we want you to present an ID and we think people should need to take a literacy test and this and that and this and that. And then the effect is no black people in the state vote or whatever it is. Um, and so, so I'm very used to that looking at, okay, what is the effect of this? Um, because of course,

nobody ever comes out and says it. Uh, but I mean, it's strange that there's no there's no personal accountability at all when the sort of folks who I feel like the folks who are most defensive about the police are the same folks who say in every other area. Oh, personal responsibility is so important. You know, if you don't want the police to come person to your house, maybe you should think about what you know, your your own personal actions. But they never talk about the police's individual actions. you know your your own personal actions but they never talk about the police's individual actions um but but okay moving to the systemic uh piece of it why okay let's let's say we want to there's never first of all there's never been too much justice as you say it's never happened i haven't seen it justice i haven't seen it yeah but let's just admit that point for a second and move on to what about systemically like why why do we not have police chiefs thrown out on their ear or, you know, completely reformed when when events like this happen?

When, again, the state violates citizens constitutional rights, which is the point of the fucking Constitution. Yeah. Well, so to take these lawsuits for for a second. So to take these lawsuits for a second, I mean, first of all, I should say I agree completely that systemic problems are, you know, at the root of all of this. And I and I really resist the whole bad apple officer idea that there's one bad guy out there. You know, the reason that that there were 24 officers who raided that Henri Norris's home in the outskirts of Atlanta and only one read the, you know, read the warrant. And then nobody was disciplined. That's not a that's not a bad apple. That's a rotten barrel or, you know, something something much more systemic than that. The Supreme Court, again, wanting to make sure that states rights are protected and local government's ability to govern themselves as protected.

This is like the same language that you've seen in the reconstruction after, you know, tearing down reconstruction protections after the civil war, the Supreme court has said, if an officer violates the constitution, the local government isn't automatically responsible, which is completely different from private, private companies. You know Foods has a truck that

runs you over, you're not going to sue the driver, right? You're going to sue ABC Foods. They have the money, they have the resources, they have the ability to prevent something from happening in the future, but you can't do the same thing with the government. You have to prove that the government itself, the police department or the chief themselves violated the Constitution, caused the constitutional violation of your rights. Bizarre. to get justice in these cases against governments. I talk in the book about the Vallejo Police Department, Vallejo's outside of Oakland, like 30 miles outside of Oakland. That department has killed more people

between 2010 and 2020 per capita than any but one of the largest hundred police departments in the country. Wow. And they had a hundred officers, 14 of them call themselves the fatal 14. They've killed one or more people. And when they do, they have a little ceremony like at a barbecue or at a bar where they bend a corner of their badge.

Wow. And that's been admitted by these officers. Wow. And that city has never been held to have caused the violations of any of their community members' rights.

That's a small police department. 100 officers is very small. Very small. And they've killed more people there than most other cities in America, much larger cities. And they have essentially a gang there than most other cities in America, much, much larger cities. And they have essentially a gang initiation when they do it, which is we could get into police gangs as a real phenomenon.

We have them here in Los Angeles. And, yeah, that is that that is like a poisonous root system in that city like that must be facilitated and tolerated at the highest levels for that to exist i mean and i should say none of the officers were disciplined or fired of course not right um but also that's i mean that's the level at which you should have the doj coming in and putting a consent decree on or something a lot like that is the most that's the most terrible possible situation for police department. And nothing has happened in this city. Well, to say nothing has happened is is an overstatement. I mean, there's there's a lot that's trying trying to happen in none of these lawsuits

that have been filed. Has there ever been a court that says city, you should be held responsible for what's happening to your officers? The California AG's office is doing an investigation. Unclear, you know, how that's progressing and what impact it's having. There's massive amounts of community advocacy. You know, community groups are flooding the city council meetings and doing all that they can. Yeah. But you ask, why does this stuff not get changed? And there's why is there not a lever for one of those community groups to actually push on to cause something to happen when, again, these are gross constitutional violations? I can imagine being one of those community members being like, like, we're here. We've been talking about this for years. We've been pushing on that. What? Why the fuck does nothing happen? Yeah, that is precisely what they are saying. Yeah. You go to those if you go to those meetings and at some point you can have pressure,

you can have advocacy, you can have oversight, you can have stern conversations from the AG's office. Eventually, you need a consent decree. As you said, you need an order by a court saying you have to do this, you have to do that. And that hasn't yet happened. And in part, again, this all goes back to the Supreme Court that has made it very difficult in the name of states' rights and local governments' rights, to bring claims directly against the city and also to bring claims to get what's called injunctive relief, which is like the forward-looking relief that you have to change policies, you have to change practices.

That's another area of the law the Supreme Court has made very difficult to get past those barriers, again, out of these interests in states' rights, local governments governing themselves. So, I mean, you're talking about 100 years of this sort of – dating back to Reconstruction. And I can go back to the Reconstruction years and say, well, I know why they did it, because they were racist and they were trying to uphold white supremacy and they privately liked the Ku Klux Klan and maybe they wore little white hoods at night, you know, when no one was around because it was the 18 whatever's. But, you know, over the course of 100 years with multiple

different Supreme Court regimes that, as you said, going going through the civil rights era as well, why would why why would you see this persistent theme to constantly be protecting, you know, the police from any form of accountability? Like, what is there any reason in your view that that the Supreme Court would constantly, you know, protect that over and over again? I know a police union would did it would do it. We're going to we're going to talk about police unions. But why would the Supreme Court have an interest in this? Well, I mean, the Supreme Court is, I should say, first of all, I mean, the court has shifted in over time. You know, there's high marks and low marks. You know, after the law was passed in 1871, the Supreme Court, you know, was very against any

protection of rights in 1961. And in the 60s, this is like the Earl Warren Court, which is the Supreme Court's sort of high watermark in terms of a liberal court, added a number of different constitutional protections and strengthened the Constitution in various ways. And then since the late 1960s, the court has been dominated by conservatives who have then stripped away many of those protections. Why did they do it? I mean, I can't you got to get the justices on this couch to, you know, to try to get into their hearts and minds. But because they think it's good when the police kill and injure black Americans. Of course, they would. Of of course they would never say that um but i think again you know it's the interests of the government yeah and also of

business i mean you you know you pointed to the the hot coffee mcdonald's litigation i mean i think the roberts court will go down john roberts chief justice currently as a very pro-corporation, pro-government court that whether the point is that they actually want to put Black Americans and poor Americans under their thumb, I don't think that's what they wake up and go to sleep hoping and dreaming for necessarily. But, you know, in all of these cases, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a plaintiff and there's a defendant, right. And there's a V between them and, and, you know and there's a question of whose rights are you going to preference. And again, and again, and again, it's the government and its corporate defendants. Yeah.

And often based on these mythical, I believe, stories about, you know, what would happen if it was too easy to sue. I mean, I know it's like it can seem ludicrous to say I can look into their hearts and know how they feel, except when they rule the same way over and over again. their hearts and know how they feel, except when they rule the same way over and over again. And you can see what their priorities are. You know, the idea that we need to protect the police from the people who they're killing or harming rather than the other way around. It's pretty it's pretty obvious. I mean, it's the conversation we've had on the show many times. And you look at the overall thrust of the criminal justice system. well, nobody will say that it's to, you know, harm and oppress people of color or generally poor people in America. But when that's been the effect for the past couple hundred years, it's hard to not look at it and say, it sure seems like the point because that's what it's doing.

You know, I will say, and I mean, this this in some ways is part of the reason that I wrote this book and wrote it in the way that I did, is that I do think and maybe this is just hopelessly naive of me, but I do think that compelling stories of real people whose lives have been turned upside down can have an effect where, you know, people in power, whether it be courts or legislators, can say, wow, this goes one step too far. And, you know, there's a legal doctrine called qualified immunity that the Supreme Court has created. It's just awful. And it basically says that an officer can violate people's rights. And if you can't find a prior court decision with virtually identical facts, you're out of luck. But the Supreme Court in November of 2020 issued a decision in a case called Taylor versus Riojas, where they said, you know what, in this case, it's so obvious that this person's rights were violated. You don't need a prior case. And the court, even Sam Alito, who was like very, very conservative and very dismissive of these kinds of cases, said this was clearly unconstitutional.

Any officer should have known that this was unconstitutional. And I mean, it was a it was a horrifying case of a of a man held naked in a freezing cold cell in a prison with feces and human waste covering the cell for six days. And I mean, this is an extreme case, but when you have Sam Alito saying, okay, here we've gone one step too far. This cannot be what we mean or what we want. That shouldn't have to be the bar. It definitely shouldn't be the bar. But I do think that part of the reason I wrote the book in the way I did, which is sort of filled with human stories, is to say, if you believe in restricting people's rights in these ways, you have to be comfortable with the outcomes of these cases. But is there so look, I could look at this case you just told us about and say,

well, that's maybe some progress, except that I worry about there being one or two exemplary cases where somebody is punished. In the intro, I talked about how Derek Chauvin was convicted, I talked about how Derek Chauvin was convicted, except that he was convicted at the end of a multi-month long largest civil rights demonstration in America in decades where people spontaneously took to the streets. That's only going to happen once a decade or so. Right. You know, and also along the way, tons and tons. And, you know, first of all, it was the George Floyd case. The reason it was an explosion was it was exemplary of thousands of cases across the country. And then in the course of that protest, there were dozens and dozens of this was another piece of viral footage, where, like, an elderly man who was protesting but not doing anything, you know, he was just sort

of, like, standing still, and police came towards him, and he was just like, stop for a second. I don't remember what he said to them, but he was just, like, standing there, and one of the police officers shoves him. He falls backwards. He hits his head. He starts bleeding on the street. It's horrifying footage. And the police just like walk around him and leave him there. And it was so stunning. And you could watch the footage and say there's no justification for the shove. There is at the very least a police officer you would imagine have some kind of duty to give medical attention to someone who's bleeding on the street, an elderly man.

to give medical attention to someone who's bleeding on the street, an elderly man. And my memory of the case is that nothing happened to those police officers. Maybe there was some, maybe they were put on leave or something along those lines. Yeah, I don't recall exactly what happened. So we won't make any assertions that we are not positive about, but I'm pretty certain those police officers were not fired, were not sued, were not convicted. And so and whether or not they were, there's there's a there's literally thousands of these cases that could be brought every year. And so there's isn't there this risk of, you know, the Derek Chauvin's of the world? OK, we did it. We you know, front page of The New York Times, that one guy's in prison. But meanwhile, systemically, you know, this is still happening dozens of times a day.

I absolutely agree. I absolutely think so. And, you know, I'm always I'm regularly on panels with law enforcement folks, you know, who who who say that very thing. Our systems, our disciplinary systems work. Just look at Derek Chauvin or look at the people who killed Tyree Nichols. Those officers were immediately fired. They are criminally prosecuted. Look, our system works, but we cannot judge our system by how it treats the people who killed George Floyd and Tyree Nichols. We have to judge our system by the cases that don't get that kind of massive press attention and outrage because those cases far outnumber the ones that do get the same, that kind of press attention. And those cases, the resolution of those cases look nothing like

what happened and what's happening with George Floyd and Tyree Nichols. Okay. Well, I want to keep getting into this and talk a lot more about police unions specifically, but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Joanna Schwartz. OK, we're back with Joanna Schwartz. Let's talk about police unions. I, as everybody knows, am a union man. Our last episode was about the the Writers Guild strike. We are on strike right now. I believe very strongly in people coming together and fighting for their rights and making sure that they're not abused in the workplace. I believe that every worker deserves a union. The big problem for the progressive labor movement is police unions because, well,

we have this awareness that police unions, well, they look out for their members as they should, but they tend to look out for them in ways that hurt the rights of the people who those police officers are meant to be protecting at the very least. So tell me what your view of police unions are and are they a problem for why these these officers are never disciplined? OK, well, I'll take the second part of that first. They are absolutely a problem for why officers are not disciplined and fired. And I would say that at the same time that the Supreme Court was chirping about the dangers of too much justice through the court system, chirping about the dangers of too much justice through the court system,

union officials in the 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond were making the same kinds of arguments about the need to protect officers from unwarranted discipline, firings when they'd done nothing wrong. And union agreements within individual departments create all sorts of barriers to transparency to the public, barriers to investigating and disciplining and terminating officers. not only make discipline and firing difficult, but they create all of these extra levels of review, even when a department decides to fire someone or take action, that end up meaning that those actions get reversed and officers get put back into their jobs. And even law enforcement officials say these protections are too strong. Really?

Yes. I mean, not all of them, but but there have been law enforcement chiefs, police chiefs who say part of our challenge is that when we want to fire people, we can't or we try and then it gets overturned. So police unions are a huge part of the problem. I think it's it's very challenging to be-union and to think about how it relates to the police. But I guess I would say a couple things. One is that when you think about union, many other kinds of union agreements, they are creating protections against the corporate entity who's trying to shove down wages, whatever else. A lot of the work that police unions have been doing is essentially pushing down further the people that they are policing.

Right. It's making them from the public, not from, say, the mayor or, you know, the budget cutters at City Hall. Exactly. history is that it's very difficult for unions to maintain power now, to get power, to demand the kinds of things that they want. Police unions don't seem to have that trouble. They do not have that problem. And part of it may be because, again, what they're asking for is protections against the people who they're trying to police. The people who have the least power in our society.

And so part of the problem to me is what unions are asking for. Another part of the problem is what local governments and state legislatures are giving them. These are negotiations. These union agreements are negotiated and agreed to by local governments and the union. So part of the problem is what the union is asking for.

And part of the problem is what the local governments, what the city or the city council or the mayor is letting them have. Is the existence of a police union period always going to be inimical in that way? Or is it a cultural problem in what those unions are asking? Because, look, again, I'm a I'm a I'm a proud unionist. You know, I believe in the importance of of workers getting together and having their power. I also know not every union under the sun has done the right thing in every circumstance. has done the right thing in every circumstance. Plenty of dark stains on the on the labor movement over the last hundred years where, you know, for instance, some unions use their power to exclude certain types of workers from a workforce rather than including them and bettering their working condition, things of that nature. So is it a is it a matter of could there be such

a thing as a reformed police union that is focusing on the right things? Or is there, Be such a thing as a reformed police union that is focusing on the right things. Or is there, you know, something structural in in the problem, you know, in that institution that is always going to lead to a lack of accountability? Are police different from other workers in a way that, you know, because I've heard that argument made that, you know, police are the one type of worker who should not have a union because they are, you know, the the the wielders of violence against, you know, other citizens in a way no one else is. And it's a very complicated question, but it is a complicated question. And and, you know, I'm not a you know, although I support unions, I wouldn't say I'm like an expert in all of this. But but I mean, here's one way I would think about it.

It strikes me that you could keep police unions, but limit the kinds of things that they could negotiate. So again, if we sort of keep with this general idea, negotiating salaries, negotiating various terms of employment seems very different from negotiating about the transparency and availability of disciplinary records or how long the department can keep disciplinary records. And what I've heard anecdotally is that local governments, you know, mayors, city councils have been willing to, and unions have as well, been willing to negotiate down salaries in exchange for these other protections. Wow.

So again, you know, the city is thinking we don't want to have to pay a 10% salary increase or whatever it is. Okay, we'll give you less transparency and less oversight as the, you know, as the negotiating tool. From the union perspective, you'd say, well, that's a fine deal because we can go get the money next year. You know, we can go back and get the salary bump. But if we've won a persistent protection against any sort of accountability, that's then we've

won that forever. And we can go back and get our one percent you know next budget negotiation or whatever right and i and i think that there's an argument that doing that is is unconstitutional i mean it certainly violates certainly results in the violation of people's rights but even you know very basically um criminal defendants have the entitlement to see discipline, evidence that an officer may be untruthful, may have lied before. And if those records for union agreements are being destroyed or not protected or not turned over, those are agreements that know, indirectly leading to the violation of people's constitutional rights. And so now let's talk about the political piece of it, because I think that's where we really get. We really start to see it. You're talking about district attorneys being unwilling to prosecute police officers because those are they need to work with the police department. And actually here in L.A., you know, we we we had a turnover in our district attorneys. The former county district attorney, Jackie Lacey, was was booted out primarily because in the wake of George Floyd, you had a huge campaign against

her of activists saying she refuses to prosecute cops who kill. And yet our new district attorney, George Gascon, who's been a guest on the show, has also had some difficulty prosecuting those police officers. It's not always there's been a couple of cases where he said, I can't actually make this prosecution, et cetera. It seems to be a fraught thing for the justice system to enforce, period, because it's essentially trying to enforce it against itself. Is that a deep structural issue or is there a way around it? you know, a gloss, a quick gloss, and the problems are much deeper than that. As I think George Gascon has talked about, the problem, even if you're a motivated prosecutor to do this, the law itself, what the criminal laws are that you can charge officers with have extremely high standards. And then whether it's a grand jury system where a grand jury is deciding whether to indict or a jury that's deciding whether to convict, jurors tend to be very sympathetic to officers.

So it's not just about getting a prosecutor who's motivated. It's all of these other steps as well. who's motivated. It's all of these other steps as well. The challenges of proving what the heightened standard is in these cases and then convincing a jury. Are there ways around that? Well, I mean, one thing that's being done in parts of the country is having a prosecutor other than the local prosecutor decide whether to bring these charges, whether it's going to a state AG or someone who's not so reliant on these. And that's why you when there actually is enforcement here, you'll see it from the state or maybe from the feds rather than the county or the city. Right. Some in some cases, for sure. As far as making it easier to, you know, changing the laws that that strikes me as as difficult.

And as far as the juries go, you know, it's it's it's interesting. And I think we're going to see how things play out over the next several years. I think it's it's hard to get this data about how often prosecutions happen or about how jurors people feel about the cops. But certainly post 2020, I feel like we've at least seen more stories about about prosecutions of cops and more stories about convictions. Yeah. And I do think that people are becoming more skeptical. Sentiment towards the police has changed to some degree. And actually, we should get into that. But I also recall last time that I went far enough in the jury selection process to be like they're excluding and including people. I seem to recall one of the questions being, well, have you ever had a negative

interaction with a police officer that would make you biased against the police? Which like, I don't know, that seems like a pretty reasonable way for a citizen to feel if they've had a negative interaction with a police officer. Hey, there's a time I got stopped and frisked and I did nothing wrong. And so I kind of don't trust the police all the time. Well, they literally try to exclude you from the jury if you feel that way. Whereas if you watch Law and Order every week, you know, and you you you love you love your Brooklyn Nine-Nine and you're like, oh, yeah, I love Andy Samberg. He's a nice cop. And so is everybody else. Then you get to be on the jury. That's, that's a phenomenon, right?

A hundred percent. I have a whole chapter about juries in a shielded. And part of what I talk about is the various ways in which people get excluded from juries ends up meaning that people who might be most sympathetic to plaintiffs in these cases are cut out of the jury process. So like in federal juries, which is where a lot of these civil rights cases come, you're excluded if you are a felon. If you've ever been convicted of a felony for life, you're excluded. And the percentage of of I mean, because of racist policing and racist criminal prosecution, who, you know, who disproportionately is excluded black men. Yep. Then you're excluded if you're not a registered voter.

Then, you know, to get a jury summons, you have to have a stable address. Uh huh. Right. Where the where the questionnaire is sent. Right. You have to be able to show up. You have to have the time to fill it out and the time to send it in and the time to show up. Yeah. And then after all of that, you get asked questions about whether you've ever

had a negative experience with police and can get excluded if you say you have. So this is selecting for people who have probably never had an experience with the police. This is selecting for people who have probably never had an experience with the police. This is this is like what you've described as a process that selects the affluent person who lives in the suburbs, who sees, you know, the nice patrol car drive by once a once a week and is like, hello, officer. And, you know, and has never, ever suffered from the kind of violation of their constitutional rights that so many other Americans had. Those Americans don't get the opportunity to serve on juries. I never even fucking thought of that. That's incredible. It is. And if you go to your jury room, you know, if you go to jury service, particularly in federal courts, because federal courts have a broader geographic area. So like if you're in LA going to the state jury service, the county, it's just limited to LA County.

You might see a more diverse group of people. But if you're in the federal system, that's Simi Valley, that's sort of all stretches of the central district of California. It's a lot of white people. And it's a lot of white people and it's a lot of people who are not living in the city. And I mean, you know, there are judges who've made comments, it's not about LA or California, but saying like, we're in Detroit and we're in the federal courthouse and there's barely any black people in the jury pool. And that's just simply not a representative jury.

The whole point of a jury is to have a jury of one's peers, a representative community of of lay people who can assess your case. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's messed up. OK, so, Joanna, let's let's it's messed up. or, you know, punished in any way. And a criminal justice system that is designed root and branch to exclude the voices and the power of the people who it's doing it to. Yeah.

Right. And again, when, when I have these conversations about criminal justice, I look at it and I go, that seems, it seems like it's designed from the beginning in order to do that. It's impossible to look at it anyway. Once you, once you're holding it all in your mind, as I often am, 45 minutes into an interview like this. Yeah. And so now we get into what we do about it. There's a lot of movements around criminal justice right now.

There's reform. I tend to use the phrase criminal justice reform. There's also folks who are abolitionists because they believe that the entire system is so corrupt that that's the only approach that they can see to take towards it. I'm curious what prescriptions you make in your book right here. Is there a chapter at the end where it says, well, that's the glossary. No, no, there is. It's chapter 13, unlucky chapter 13. It's called A Better Way. Right. Tell me about it. I got to hear it because I am in a dark place right now. Well, look, I'm in a dark place, too.

And, you know, I understand and very sympathetic to the idea that you could just like go into the bunker and shut the door and take your like family size bag of Cheetos and just wait for, you know, wait for the end to come. But I'm you know, I'm I that couldn't be the last chapter of the book. So, so I do talk about a lot of different possible reforms. Look, I think that the way that we make the system better in broad terms are at the front end, making it less likely that police interact with people when they don't need to. Okay. Let's just, let's just let them sit by themselves and not, if they just didn't ever talk to

anybody, that would be great. I just love that version. But I mean, what I'm saying is a version of abolition, right? Or defund. What folks who want abolition or defund is to invest in other parts of our society, unarmed, you know, unarmed people responding to people in mental health crises, you know, building up education, et cetera, et cetera, so that we don't need police. I don't, I'm more of an incrementalist. I'm more of a, you could call me a radical

incrementalist. If you want to aim towards the final goal of defund or abolish or limit the footprint of policing, part of it is having fewer contacts. And there's ways in which police want that too. I mean, LA's police union in March came out with a statement that said, we don't want to be responding to people in mental health crisis. We don't want to be responding to homeless people who are peeing on the street. We don't want to respond to people who are in traffic accidents where nobody's injured. And great. You know, we let's fund other programs, other people who don't have guns to do those things. And this is what, by the way, a lot of people who describe themselves as abolitionists

will tell you that that is what abolition means to them. It's a long-term view of if we are able to put all of those other processes, all those other teams in place, then we may not need policing the way that we have it today in the same way that, you know, I think when people describe themselves as slavery abolitionists 200 years ago, they were taking that long view. And one of the best things that's ever been said to me on this show, talking to the wonderful writer and scholar James Forman Jr.

and asked him how he felt about the phrase defund. And he said, and I repeat this all the time. I'll never forget it. He said, we, the, the only problem with that is we, we shouldn't be leading with what we're taking away because that frightens people. We should be leading with what we're putting in place instead with those mental health response teams. If you go to anybody in Los Angeles or anywhere else, and, and who's afraid about the phrase defund the police, and you say, actually, what we need is mental health teams rather than police addressing. Everyone agrees with that because we've experienced. I mean, I think I've told this story on the show before. I was, you know, experience I had walking down the street in Los Angeles at like 11 p.m. at night, walking home from the subway stop. And there was a woman in some great distress and she was shouting, help, help, you know, and I was like, ma need and she just kept shouting help help i was like oh i can't help her i walk a block down the street i see two police officers i say oh thank god folks like sir ma'am there's a woman down the

street yelling help and they said to me oh she's just crazy that's what they said and i was like what the i mean this is there's a woman shouting how she clearly she was in a fucking nightgown on the street you know what i mean this is a woman in distress who needed help yes she was crazy she still needed help and these officers did not have the tools and i'm like all right so why the fuck are we paying for them to be there if they can't help her clearly and i think so many people in la have had that experience why is no one being helped in this situation so uh so i i very much agree with that i think you can have that incrementalist approach and still be working towards that eventual goal um of saying if we put these programs in place and we see that they work

then we'll be able to shift the resources over um i'm on board with that. However, when we live in a world where we have this incredibly complex and incredibly carceral criminal justice system that is clearly designed to lock up the powerless, the poor, the know, the people who are not normative, the non-white affluent person. And we've, we've built it over the past couple hundred years. I mean, politically, are we going to be able to get there? Because, because we have all of these forces, unions, you know, there's people in America who simply like these policies. You know, they thirst for blood. They like to see people who they don't like locked up. We've got the weight of inertia.

We've got the 200 years of Supreme Court decisions. That's what starts to make me a little bit... Please speak to my doom here. Well, I guess I would say, what's the option? What's the alternative? Well, I guess I would say, you know, what's the option? What's the alternative? Because, yeah, the system is completely stacked against justice, in my view, in every dimension. But I can't I can't just like take that and then say, well, I guess we're fucked. You know, I mean, that's not that doesn't seem like all you can do is wake up and fight another day. And I do think that finding, you know, it's not a sexy it's it's definitely not as sexy as saying abolish the police to say to say interest convergence, find ways in which the police and the public can agree. That's not a very you know, that's that is a dissatisfying answer from the perspective of it's a it's a dissatisfyingying prescription when the disease is what you've described. It's like a cancer all over the body.

And then what I'm saying is, have you tried more vitamin C? You know, it doesn't feel like it's a response that's meeting the harm. Like it's a it's a response that's meeting the harm. But I also think that chipping away is how, you know, how changes have been made throughout. You know, as you said, it's not like abolitionists of slavery just said abolish slavery in, you know, and then it happened. Well, who's good? Well, then where are we going to get the cotton from? Like, no, it is like, you know, there were there were steps along the way to this. It was a long term goal. Yes. But, you know, saying saying take take little steps, take advantage of of opportunity, like the opportunity around the fact that people seem generally to agree that police are doing too much and that they shouldn't have to do all of these things. I guess the problem with the slavery comparison, which we're making and I think is very apt, is that it took a war to eventually end it.

There were the incremental steps, but it also took, you know, the federal government to say, hold on a second. We need to fight a war over this. We need to kill each other in order to end this. And that's my concern. But and by the way, I mean, it didn't end. I mean, you know, how many books have been written about the fact that that slavery ended and then slavery by another name, you know, I mean, we talked about the reconstruction period and those Supreme Court decisions, which were part of that story. So we have, you know, it's not like there's injustice and then there's some switch that you flip and then there's justice. There's no golden age of accountability that you're going to get through some shift. But, you know, part of what I'm talking about in

shielded is how many different barriers there are. Yeah. Not just on the, you know, my focus is on the backend, you know, so we've been talking about reducing police interactions on the front end on the backend, you have to have accountability and justice when they violate the law.

And that's where all of these barriers are that we've been talking about. So you start chipping away at some of those barriers and the system gets incrementally better. Does it address all of the problems? No. I mean, no. But as we said, what's the alternative? When you say finding common cause or finding these places where incentives meet, with the individual members of the police themselves or police unions. I'm curious if you find any prospect for doing that, because a lot of the time when I look at the way individual police officers behave and the way police unions behave, I look at that and I say

they're terrified. That's the fundamental, like emotional thing that's happening is like, why, why do the police pull out guns and shoot people at a moment's notice is because they're terrified. They're going to get shot. It's fundamentally a fear response. And part of that comes from the fact there's guns everywhere in America. And that's like just the ambient, well, anybody could have a gun at any time. So you better shoot them right away. Um, but you know, even when you look at the unions, we said they're protecting themselves from the people they're policing. That's who they're afraid of. They have that mentality of they're going into a war zone and they have to protect themselves. And so to me, sometimes when I'm like lying, lying awake at night thinking about this, it looks like it might be possible to make the argument that like the structure of policing doesn't serve your members. And rather than protecting yourselves from the

system, you need to make common cause and change the system. If I were to imagine a police union that is actually progressive and making progress on that, I can almost think my way through that, you know. But that is the largest cultural shift I can possibly imagine. Is that something that you think is is possible or a conversation that we could have? Because if any any police officer wants to come on and talk about this, I'm happy to, you know, I mean, I absolutely agree with you. And the I think there I think there is, you know, I'm I'm an optimist to my own detriment, I think. But I think that there are ways of seeing that kind of shift. So so, for example, qualified immunity, again, is protection for individual officers.

And it's been justified based on this myth that officers are personally responsible for settlements and judgments in these cases, which is simply not true. Officers virtually never pay anything. And it's not because of qualified immunity. It's because of of of agreements. So even if it weren't for qualified immunity, they would. So qualified immunity is protecting nothing, because even if it weren't for that, there would be no prosecution or penalty anyway. There wouldn't be a penalty. Well, it's that it's that even if there's a finding, there's these things called indemnification

agreements around the country that provide that if an officer is sued, you will be given a lawyer and a settlement or judgment will be paid by the city. Yeah. Okay. So that has nothing to do with qualified immunity. It's a totally different protection. But the rhetoric, and I think it's a rhetoric that officers believe, is that they're one lawsuit away from bankruptcy. You know, just because of that's what's being said, unless they have qualified immunity.

Yeah. Policing Act, which would have which is offered by Congress that would have ended qualified immunity. People like Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham, conservative Republicans who are completely opposed to getting rid of qualified immunity, said, OK, how about you just bring lawsuits directly against the city instead to protect officers from being bankrupted? And my response is, OK, sounds great to me, Lindsay and Tim. Let's talk because these officers aren't paying anyway. So, yeah, you want to you want to just allow claims directly against the local government who, you know, they don't have qualified immunity.

I'll take that deal any day. I'll take that deal any day. But it's a deal that I think some Republicans think is a good idea because it's protecting officers. It's protecting officers' bank accounts, their pocketbooks. And so, you know, I do think that officers and the local governments don't necessarily have exactly the same interests. And I would absolutely find ways to create allegiances with officers to get at the systemic problems. If you're trying to create a systemic reform, you can occasionally say, OK, I think I can make common cause with the police union, such as putting in place a mental health team. such as putting in place a mental health team.

Sure. That's like a case in which even an avowed abolitionist could work with a police union or, or there might be some other cases like that. And I've heard of such cases. There have been conversations like that in Los Angeles. I've heard, but I've also heard of, I mean,

I believe I've heard this anecdotally that like Los Angeles, for instance, has paid out millions in the kind of lawsuits that you're talking about with the police abusing people. I guess I guess that sort of thing does happen in L.A. Oh, yeah. Certainly hasn't changed anything about how policing is waged here or how much money the police get. It's just like an expense that ends up being borne by the taxpayer to pay millions out to the victims of abuse. When the police go out and, you know, set off fireworks, a truckload of fireworks in the middle of a crowded street in L.A. as they did a year or two ago, they just end up like, all right, well, the city foots the bill.

Yep. So fuck it. Right. There's a there's a risk there as well. But at the at the very least, the the systemic the people in charge of creating the systemic problem are are having to pay out. So it's some. I mean, I think it can help. And part of one thing I have a chapter about that, too, in the book. And one thing I talk about is is the value of taking settlements and judgments out of police departments budgets, which doesn't happen in L.A. And actually, the sheriff's department does this, but not the LAPD. We should be taking the money from the police department. Yeah. Yeah.

And again, it's still, I mean, one thing that people don't realize is they talk about the millions and millions of dollars that are paid in these cases. The payouts are less than 1% of most local government's budgets and far less than 1%. And you compare that to a quarter or a third or more of the city's budget that is the police department budget. People complain about the millions of dollars spent in these cases that could have been used to fund community centers and fix roads and all of those things. Well, maybe that's true, but maybe we should be looking at the 40 percent of the city's budget that's taken up with the police department and maybe think about where we can take some of that money away. But but just that it would still be a relative drop in the bucket for police departments to pay settlements and judgments from their budgets.

But the risk managers for police departments I've talked to who do that say at least it gives them some incentive, some reason to just take a peek at these cases and think, could we have done something different? Send a memo out. Hey, maybe could everybody read the warrant? You know, because that might help save us all some money. And then we could throw you a pizza party at the end of the year. Exactly. save us all some money and then we could throw you a pizza party at the end of the year exactly the money we save on all the lawsuits that we don't have to pay out because you didn't like accidentally almost murder an 80 year old man uh because you read the the fucking warrant correct seems it seems straightforward it seems pretty straightforward um it just it never fails to

boggle my mind how far the distance is between what we are taught about how the criminal justice system, how the Constitution is supposed to work in this country and how it literally does that. That the government violates America's constitutional rights every day and there is no current legal mechanism to actually ameliorate that or to punish the people who do it is still shocking to me. For folks who are similarly shocked and want to fucking do something about it, is there anything that you suggest people do? Well, one thing I would say is that, you know, I've lost most faith in the Supreme Court and Congress. We all have. You know, on the front end and on the back end, you know, there's moves in in L.A. and and Philadelphia and other places around the country to limit traffic stops by cops to limit, you know, the kinds of things that cops do with their time. But also on the back end, advocacy to get the the city council to budget in the settlements and judgments cost into police departments budgets. That's something that the city council could do. Another thing the city council could do is make their departments or do themselves analysis of the settlements and judgments in

these cases to try to make changes that will prevent things from happening in the future. There are departments across the country that have these outside auditors who look at the cases and find trends in them and say, hey, you're entering into people's houses without a warrant. You're not supposed to do that. And actually, that training can actually make a difference. But those are changes that can happen at the local level. People can go to their city councils.

People can actually make those changes happen. And I think that there's, you know, everyone, all the focus has been on qualified immunity, this really hot button issue. A lot less attention has been paid to local government budgeting. It's a little bit less of a, you know, sexy topic, but in fact, that's an opportunity

because it means that people can think rationally about this and perhaps, you know, make sensible choices. Yeah. And here in L.A., we've had a lot more focus on local government from both activists, but also the public have really started to take notice. And we have a new crop of reformers in our city council and there are starting to be changes slowly, but, you know, we're starting to see them to some extent. And at the very least, there's a conversation being had that our local police department is having to deal with, having to reckon with and, you know, negotiate with. And that, at the very least, has changed. That's why I constantly preach the importance of participating in state, but particularly local government, because those are the people who really affect your life.

And it's and I think it's important also in terms of maintaining hope. You know, it's it's very easy to say, although painful to say, nothing's changed in the past hundred and fifty years. Well, things have changed. I mean, things have changed since Rodney King. We had a multiple civil rights movement in that time and things have changed. I mean, things have changed since Rodney King. We had a multiple civil rights movement in that time and things have changed. And yes, like, you know, there's, there's four steps forward and two steps back and one step to the side and then one step forward again, like change is not, you know, like a jet plane taking off. Um, but, but why should we be

surprised? I mean, of course, when people are trying to advance civil rights against the government, it's not going to be an easy path. But, you know, that doesn't mean that you don't keep walking it and finding other other ways forward. Just like, again, when I talk to abolitionists, people who describe themselves as abolitionists today, they make the point that people were abolitionists in regards to slavery for hundreds of years. That was, uh, people were, people grew up and died and then their kids were abolitionists and they grew up and died before slavery was finally abolished. And, you know, but that doesn't mean they, they gave up and I'm sure they said, Oh my God, this is going to be so hard to change. But then one day it did. And all we can do is,

is wake up and wage that battle every day. Joanna, thank you so much for being here. It was my great pleasure. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you once again to Joanna Schwartz for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of her book, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode ad free. And if you want to come see me on tour,

I'm headed to Chicago. I'm going to be in St. Louis later this year. I'm going to be in Baltimore, Maryland. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. I want to thank Tony Wilson and Sam Roudman for producing and editing the podcast with me and everyone at HeadGum for making this possible. You can find me online at adamconover or at AdamConover.net.

And until next week, we'll see you on Factually. Thank you so much for listening.