Tangle - INTERVIEW: Dorothy Schulz on how we can reform police.

Episode Date: June 12, 2022

On today’s episode, we are sitting down with Dorothy Schulz to discuss Biden's executive order on policing. Dorothy was a Professor of Law, Police Studies, and Criminal Justice Administration at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and was the first woman captain to serve with the Metro-North Commuter Railroad Police Departmen. Her writing in City Journal has been cited in Tangle.You can read today's podcast here.Today's podcast is presented in partnership with Warby Parker. Try a free at-home try-on kit here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are sitting down with Dorothy Scholes. Dorothy was a professor of law, police studies, and criminal justice administration at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She's an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and was the first woman captain to serve with the Metro North Commuter Railroad Police Department. Today, she's writing in City Journal, which her stuff has actually been cited in Tangle just recently. Dorothy,

thank you so much for coming on the show. Isaac, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. So you have a really interesting background. I love to just ask people before we get into the meat of our discussion, you know, how did you end up writing about police and public safety? How did you get into law enforcement? What's your story? Who's Dorothy Scholes? Well, it's, you know, it's, as we say in law enforcement, it's harder to hit a moving target. I've moved around quite a bit. I started my career in journalism and actually went for a master's in criminal justice because I wanted to be the Supreme Court reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. I'm obviously dating myself here. The Tribune ended and so I

changed careers around the, I wound up directly in law enforcement through a series of strange career changes. Along the way, I completed my PhD, and that's what gave me the entree into teaching. After that, having the combination of practical experience and advanced degree, which at the time was what John Jay really was looking for. Subsequently, since I was very involved with transit policing, well, initially railroad, because I was really with Conrail, which was the freight railroad, I got involved with doing some consulting for transit agencies as well as for FTA. And the last couple of years, my, quote, retirement job has been working with City Journal and Manhattan Institute. So I've come full circle. I'm back to journalism, not writing about the Supreme Court, but writing about law enforcement and criminal justice issues.

So I have no complaints. It's been well good. Yeah, I love it. So the reason you came across my radar, I mean, I'm a regular reader of City Journal, but we covered in Tangle this policing executive order that Biden recently signed. And there's a ton of commentary out there from the left, which is sort of a mix of too little too late with it's a good step, but it's not going to fix a whole lot of things. From the right, that was kind of very critical of some of the things that the order was setting out to do for various reasons. And you sort of had this interesting take on it, which I didn't really see anywhere else. And I thought you made a very well-supported argument

that it wasn't so much bad, good, whatever. It was just that a lot of the stuff in the executive order was a little bit redundant, that a lot of local police departments were already doing these things and had been trying to do them for some time, whether it was creating a database or trying to better track the so-called wandering cops, which we're going to talk about. Can you tell me a little bit about your piece and just sort of what the thrust of it was and why you felt that way? You summarized it actually very well. I felt that it was all showmanship, very well. I felt that it was all showmanship, that there was really very little of substance there. Although that said, there is substance at the federal law enforcement level, where it does make some changes in their operation. But those were changes that could have been made, you know,

from the political proverbial day one, along with other executive orders that were issued. While after considerable time, obviously, the two major police groups pretty much got on board, to a greater extent, actually, than the groups I think this EO was meant to appease, it really didn't say very much. Those changes to federal law enforcement were actually long overdue and could have been done, as I say, on the proverbial day one. Federal law enforcement is in many ways behind the curve as to what local and states are doing. It's a, I guess, what's that trade expression about trying to turn a battleship? I guess that's what the federal bureaucracy really is, which I also have

experience from that through transportation, but we won't go into that today. We'll save that for another day. Yeah. So I guess I'm curious to flesh that out a little bit. I mean, what are some of the things that you are seeing, you know, happen at the law enforcement level, at the state level, where you feel like the feds are kind of behind right now? Well, states and local police departments have been making changes in recording. We can go into the wandering in certification, in training, in chokeholds, in no-knock warrants, and putting constraints on these things that are, in fact, beyond what the EO did for federal agencies. As a matter of fact, coincidentally, I usually don't quote other people, but I just read a law review article that says pretty much

the same thing about chokeholds, draws a similar conclusion, reviews, and says they talk about states having been way ahead of what the federal regulation is. The other thing is that the EO, while it says it pertains to 100,000 cops who are federal cops, the truth is that the vast majority of the federal cops don't do any of this kind of work. The vast majority of the federal cops don't do any of this kind of work. You know, you look at some of the smaller of the 60 agencies, and they're pretty much doing property protection and protecting the employees of those agencies. Mint police, engraving department police, all these various federal agencies, they're not going out on raids and doing chokeholds and things like that. So even though it pertains to supposedly 100,000 federal officers, in truth, the ones doing what we would consider active law enforcement, In truth, the ones doing what we would consider level is that, well, we just hope the states are going to sort of follow suit and do, you know, take our cue and do what we're doing.

And Biden sort of, I mean, he basically said that when he signed the order, I know this doesn't apply to all the state and local police departments, which are the ones, you know, where we really, if you want reform, that's where you really need to see it happen. And I mean, does that happen? Do the states actually look to the feds for guidance on this kind of thing and change their policies accordingly? Is that something we've seen? No, we really haven't seen it. It'll be interesting in this case, whether what I suspect is maybe in some states where recalcitrant legislators have been resisting making some of these changes at the state level, they may, this may give them a push. But really, the states have moved ahead quite quickly. And as I say, also a number of municipalities.

quickly. And as I say, also a number of municipalities. That, of course, is a different area of concern where the cities and states are not always on the same page. But basically, they're pretty much ahead of the feds. And the other ironic thing is really that many of the concerns were really caused by the federal government, particularly the so-called war on drugs. I mean, police got involved in doing more no-knock warrants and even the so-called militarization of the police are really products of the war on drugs. are really products of the war on drugs. And if you look at most, the majority of the no-knock cases, I'm not going to give statistics because I don't have them, but a lot of them, so let me not say the majority, are involved in drug cases, often part of task forces of multiple agencies, sometimes including the feds. But that's all really a product of the war on drugs, in many cases, which was really a federal impetus to push the states and the local police department to get more involved in all of that. Things change.

Yeah, that's an interesting way to frame it. When we started running ads on the Tangle podcast, I had one big rule. I had to know and love the product. That's why I'm pleased today to give a big plug for Warby Parker, one of my favorite eyeglass companies. Warby offers everything you need for happier eyes, eyeglasses, sunglasses, contact

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beautiful. I get lots of compliments on mine. And you can try five pairs of glasses at home for free right now if you go to warbyparker.com slash tangle. That's warbyparker.com slash tangle. You can get some free at-home try-ons right now on us. Go check it out. You recently wrote this paper, which I think you referenced in the piece that we cited in Tangle of yours, a white paper about wandering cops. I'd love if you could just tell us a little bit about the paper, what you found, sort of what the thrust of it is. what the thrust of it is? Wandering cops, often sometimes called rogue cops, are basically cops who leave one department, sometimes actually fired, but other times leave ahead of being fired, and they're able to find employment at other agencies. Often now, again, some never get in trouble again, but some bring their problems with them wherever they go. This is not a new issue. As a matter of fact, a law professor at

St. Louis University has been involved in this probably for 20 or 30 years. And over the course of time, this is also something that's been handled primarily at the state level. States now, I think after the last two years, just about all have what are called posts, police officers, standards and training. police officers, standards and training. Some places give them a slightly different name. But generally, police are not certified by their local agency. Police are certified by their states. And to gain certification, the various steps, hoops they jump through departmental-wise, but the big thing is completing state-certified training. And this is why wandering cops are very much a state problem, because generally what I found, and what earlier research showed also, is that the wandering cops tend to go mostly to smaller, poorer departments, primarily that want to save them the money that it costs to train police. Now, a lot of people

argue it doesn't cost that much to train police, because police training in this country should be considerably longer than it is. But if you're a small department, a rural department, and a poor community, paying somebody to go to training, even for four or five months, and paying someone else to fill the vacancy that you're filling with this person in the academy is a considerable amount of money to them. And so to hire somebody who says, I'm state certified is a big saving. And so if tighter controls are maintained at the state level, which is what is happening, is the best way to solve that problem. The other thing is it requires a certain amount of nimbleness because people who may get fired and decertified through union agreement or through arbitration. Sometimes some people argue too often,

I would tend to agree with that, get their jobs back. And then the question becomes, are they recertified? How is their original decertification handled? And these are things, I mean, the federal government is nowhere near nimble enough to keep track of these kinds of things. It's hard enough for the states to do that. You know, when you live in a big city, I know you're in Brooklyn, I'm a native New Yorker. We think of these colossal law enforcement agencies. We don't think about the agencies with 10 or 20 police officers. California and Texas each have more than 500 police agencies, even New York State, if you go up outside of the immediate area. And so the higher you push or the further away from the source that you push recording this information or keeping track on it, it's just never, never going to be current. Right. So right now, a police officer, say, gets fired for a misconduct issue. And this goes on a record in a state like Texas or California or somewhere like that.

They leave the department. They travel 200 miles away to go look for a job somewhere else. travel 200 miles away to go look for a job somewhere else. What do we know about how their record gets looked at by a potentially new hiring agency? This is where the states are really tightening up. First of all, they're defining decertification. So in other words, is it just recording that you've left law enforcement, or is it actually saying that it's the equivalent of being disbarred, that you can't be hired again? So the first step is that a number of states, this was not clear, but in the last two years, many of them have clarified what desertification means and for what you may be desertified, not only being fired, leaving while under an investigation, other sorts of things that states determine. determined. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal

web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu.

It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. I hate to use the phrase moral turpitude. Again, I'm showing my age. But various kinds of things that the state decides they don't want you to be a police officer. So, for instance, this is a federal level. If you've been involved in domestic violence, you're not allowed to carry a gun. So you can't be a police officer. And states may make other kinds of things, possibly just throwing out there if you're involved in a child abuse or some kind of. But basically, once you have the lists nicely defined, then the issue becomes that every agency should be required, which a number of states have now done, to query that database because data is only as good as it's being used. So Joe or Jane, I don't want to be sexist here, or some variant of the two, comes and says, I want to join your department. I was a police

officer in XYZ agency. Well, the agency now in many states is required to contact the database, usually maintained by these posts, and say, has this person ever been terminated? Have they ever been on the decertification list? I don't know if you want to call it a bad boy list or a bad girl list. But the states and the training directors, there's an association of state training directors, and they maintain a list like this, idealist, idolist. Currently, it's voluntary, sort of like the ABA also, I draw the parallel, keeps this sort of a list of bad boy and girl attorneys. bad boy and girl attorneys. And there's a move, a push to make it mandatory, which a number of states have. And again, most of the movement is within the state, but there's no rule that says, if I'm in Rhode Island, I can't contact Massachusetts and say, look, we have somebody here looking for a job, and let's say we assume they're fairly local, that we could query your database or query the database that would be maintained by IDList of all state, local, similar agencies. This would not involve federal officers. The database that President Biden talked about in his EO is only for federal officers, which again is duplicating or only now instituting what many states have been doing for years.

Yeah. What I'm curious about too, I guess, sort of related to it and just listening to you talk now instituting what many states have been doing for years. Yeah. What I'm curious about too, I guess, sort of related to it and just listening to you talk about it made me think of it. One of the side debates, I guess, that has come into this database on wandering cops is whether it should be available to the public or not. Because right now departments, like you said, have access to this data. They're looking at it. What's your perspective on that? I mean, how do you feel about that? Whether this should be something that the public should be able to easily access or know outside

of the department that might be hiring somebody? I don't believe that it should be publicly available. To me, that's little more than just naming and shaming. It doesn't really serve any purpose because individuals don't hire police officers. Police officers are hired by their departments or a department or a potential department. So I don't know what purpose it would serve other than, you know, retributive or we got you or anything like that. It's to me, it serves no purpose. there would be more purpose to make it their lawyers or doctors, because individuals may employ an attorney, or you may want to go to a particular doctor and know what his or her record is, but you're not employing a particular police officer. So I just don't see what the point of that is, as I said, other than some kind of

retributive or gotcha kind of emotion. Yeah. In your writing, one of the things that struck me about the white paper on the wandering cops is that you said, I think it was 3% of these officers sort of qualify as wandering cops. I did some, whatever, back of the napkin math on how many officers we think there are in the country. It comes out to something around 20,000 of these cops who qualify sort of as wandering cops. Do we imagine or do you imagine that all of these cops, the so-called wandering cops, are they defined as being people who have had questionable behavior, I guess, in their history?

Or could it just be that they were fired for a rather benign reason and are now looking for a job somewhere else and that gets them caught up in the wandering cop. Well, that's one of the things that we really don't know that maybe better statistics and better records will tell us. Or we might say that if you're fired for anything, we don't care if it's that you, you know, you stole the canteen money as versus that you practically choked someone to death. And that's one of the problems I think that would occur with making the database publicly available. Individuals may not be able to or may not want to make those distinctions. A state may say, we don't care if you're fired, you're fired. We don't want you working as a police officer again anywhere. But I don't know that that should be a federal decision.

In fact, I feel it shouldn't be. And once you escalate things to that level, you lose any kind of discretion. You also have a problem with police officers who stay with one department and cause problems. And they managed to slip through. Everybody talked about Chauvin and the large number of complaints he had, which is a different issue. But even going back to Rodney King, the Los Angeles study, I think they found that 30 or 40, maybe 50 cops resulted in a disproportionate number of the complaints. And that's true in most departments. You have a handful of people, as you do in every other profession, who are problems, you know, so what's the degree of their problem? Are they brutal? Are they just resistant to supervision? You know, there are all kinds of problems. You know, there were all kinds of problems. As one of the researchers found that I cited, she seemed so surprised that cops don't want to work with these cops. Well, everyone in law enforcement knows that. Nobody wants to work with somebody who has the potential to get you in trouble.

That's just common sense. to get you in trouble. That's just common sense. I'm curious. I mean, this moment, I think, and the state of policing and public safety where we are right now, it really does feel like an inflection point, not just because of, you know, the protests from the killing of George Floyd or, you know, just the pandemic. And this really, to me, feels like this very palpable tension that we've kind of witnessed in the last few years between communities and the officers that are policing them. Now we're seeing presidential executive orders. We're seeing lots of calls for reform at the federal, national, state, municipality level. How would you describe this moment in the state of policing and public safety and where it fits

in when we think about the last few decades, the last 30 or 40 years? It's a very combustible time. The 60s were, maybe the 80s. I mean, I don't want to sound cynical and say that this happens every 20 years, that there's sort of a pendulum, but it does seem that way. Some people might argue that there were reforms and then they fall by the wayside and things get bad again. But there are a lot of different issues. I don't like to blame everything on COVID, because I think that's kind of a cop out. But I think that there's certainly people had a lot of time to think about what made them happy and unhappy. The Floyd and a couple of the other instances of police inappropriate behavior got a lot more publicity than they would have in the past. I think some of that was exploitive. But on the other hand, if it leads to serious reform, maybe in the end, that's not a bad thing. Maybe in the end, that's not a bad thing. But I think it's continuing to be exploitive. And that was part of my distress over the executive order.

I thought that the behavior surrounding it was exploitive and played in to the anti-police rhetoric. anti-police rhetoric. It's easy for the president to say, fund them, fund them, fund them, and then invite to the signing of the executive order all the people who are suing their police departments or who have been in the forefront of speaking against law enforcement. So you can't have it both ways. I know politicians like to try to have it both ways. But either you see this as a time for positive reform, or you want to continue to exploit the anti-police bias. back, I guess, we're talking about some of the executive orders Biden has signed and some of the reforms that are out there. I'm hearing you, when you talk about the state level actions and the improved data collection and the decertification stuff, that all sounds like really positive changes to me. I mean, that feels like some movement that'll have a tangible difference. I'm curious, I mean, in a fun hypothetical where you can flip some switches on public policy today,

say you were the president able to sign some executive orders, or you were just able, you were a police chief in a local or state police department. I mean, what kind of stuff would you target to improve police behavior, outcomes in communities, reduce crime. I mean, what kind of stuff would you target to, you know, improve police behavior, outcomes in communities, reduce crime? I mean, what do you view as sort of the low-hanging fruit that we could attack for positive reform, as you say? Well, one of the areas that unfortunately is very difficult now would be in recruiting and retention. I mean, you have a real absence of candidates for law enforcement. You have departments, Seattle, Portland, cities where the unrest was the worst, which are just missing hundreds and hundreds of cops. Now, again, in New

York, we may say hundreds and hundreds, it's nothing. But not every department has 40,000 people. Seattle supposedly doesn't have detectives to investigate sex crime. SWAT unit. They couldn't find anybody who was willing to volunteer for what were once upon a time considered prestigious assignments. So I think there does have to be some reorienting of the training. One of the problems I've often seen with police training is that senior officers are often the trainers, and they tend often to reflect attitudes that are when they came on the job or maybe a generation or two behind. So there's a lot of room, I think, for reform there. One of the things I recommend in the Wanderers article is that the federal government fund police recruit training instead of just throwing money around willy-nilly, because maybe you could then, if departments weren't so worried that it was costing them three months to pay someone while they were in training, the training could be longer.

We have the shortest police training of any democratic country. And you could maybe enhance who does the training. This carries over not only to the book learning part of the training, but the in-service training. I was quite honestly horrified that Derek Chauvin was a training officer. But that also addresses that in many departments, nobody wants to be a training officer because you've got a rookie hanging around with you that, one, you may think could put you in danger. Two, you may have to do weekly reports about his or her conduct. about making assignments that improve the profession more prestigious and downgrading and prestige the assignments that reflect television's view of law enforcement.

I'm curious. I mean, one of the, and I know we just have a couple of minutes left, but one of the questions that I have seen come up a lot related to the training, because just listening to your, a few of your points, I noticed a lot of them are attached to that. Um, is this idea that police are often taught through their training, you know, to be in, I guess, maybe a very defensive posture or suspicious posture of the people around them. You know, a lot of left-wing critics of the police will say that, you know, everything's a threat all the time. And this mindset of being in a threat is often what leads to some of the violence of the tense police interactions. I'm curious for your reflection on that,

or if you feel like there's room for improvement in that training, you think that training is how it should be, or if you think it's actually at the root of any of the issues that people see out there. Because when I hear police training critics from the sort of more anti-police, more left side of the spectrum, I think that's a really common criticism that comes out. There is some truth to that, but unfortunately, there are a lot of situations that turn dangerous that you don't expect them to. So it's very hard to teach alertness and wariness without maybe going over the line. That's where possibly better screen candidates,

better screen trainers who could explain better that you have to be alert, but you can't perceive everybody as a life-threatening danger. Although, unfortunately, sometimes people are a life-threatening danger. I mean, that heightened awareness, I often laugh at myself. Friends who are always, oh, like you're always looking around the street. You tell me don't walk over here because this guy's talking to himself or whatever. Well, it's true that me may be perfectly harmless, but why do you want to walk right into his purview? And this is part of the issue with these violence interrupters and having all these social workers go on calls. That's not really what they signed on for. You don't get an MSW in social work

to go out at three o'clock in the morning and have some guy threaten you with a karate chop or urinate on you or whatever. Police, unfortunately, know that's part of the job. Police, unfortunately, know that's part of the job. So it's very difficult to how do you temper that heightened awareness that sometimes is necessary with the fact that it might not always be necessary. It's very difficult and it requires probably more sophistication than a lot of the training has now and more than the people on either side of the argument want to admit that it requires. Dorothy Schultz, thank you so much for coming on the show today. If people want to keep up with your writing or check out some of the research that you're working on, where's the best place to do that? Probably, most likely, City Journal. They've captured most of my attention right now, happily. It's a nice bunch of people and I enjoy working with them. I love it. Dorothy, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it. And who knows, maybe next time we have some action in the space, we'll get to bring you back on.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. So based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior chinatown follows the story of willis woo a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond chinatown when he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime willis begins to unravel a criminal web his family's

buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older,

and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed.