Tangle - RE-RUN: Alex Vitale on abolishing the police

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Our last flashback of Tangle's two-week vacay. See you next Monday for a brand new daily pod! Original air date: Apr 25, 2021Still want the news? You can read today's newsletter 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.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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.
Starting point is 00:00:19 Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Hey guys, Isaac here. I just wanted to drop in with a brief reminder that our podcast is taking a brief interlude until March 14th when we'll be back with our daily recordings of the newsletter. But until then, while we take a couple weeks off, we wanted to make sure you guys had some content. So we're sharing some of our favorite interviews from the Tangle archives. I hope you guys enjoy.
Starting point is 00:01:20 Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some reasonable debate, and independent thinking without some of the hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and in today's episode, we are sitting down with Alex Vitale. Alex is a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He is the author of the book, The End of Policing, and one of the most essential reads on the abolition of police in the U.S.
Starting point is 00:01:55 His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, USA Today, many others. Alex, thank you so much for being on the show. It's great to have you here. Oh, you're most welcome, Isaac. So there are so many places we could start. You know, obviously, police reform is a huge issue in America right now. It's at the front of everybody's mind with the Derek Chauvin case. I read your book last year, which I enjoyed a lot.
Starting point is 00:02:20 I recommend it to anybody who's interested in sort of the case for abolishing the police. I found it really compelling despite going into it being sort of pre-biased to the opposite side of you. And I definitely want to talk about it. But one thing I don't really know about you or your work that I'd love to start with is just how you got into this. I mean, what was your path that sort of led you to the positions that you're advocating for today? What could possibly explain this, right? Yeah. So I actually went to college with an interest in urban affairs and was looking at things like community housing development programs and urban enterprise zones and things like that.
Starting point is 00:03:08 And I moved to California in the late 80s and got a job working in housing and economic development policy for the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. And it was during that period, though, that we began to see this big ramping up of the criminalization of homelessness, that the city of San Francisco, like a lot of cities across the country during this period, had basically given up on the idea that they were going to house people, and instead turned it into a criminal justice matter, turned it over to the police, and then the police begin to start ticketing people, breaking up encampments, you know, harassing people, driving people into the
Starting point is 00:03:52 jail system, etc. And this kind of forced me to think about the connection between criminalization and different strategies of economic development. And it basically led me to the understanding that, you know, the city had invested itself in this strategy of subsidizing high finance and corporate headquarters, very much like New York did. And that decision made the city kind of more competitive globally, but it also required all kinds of tax breaks and incentives that kind of bankrupted the city and forced them to cut social services. And the result is widespread homelessness, untreated mental health and substance abuse problems, failed schools, and then, you know, this gets turned over to police. And so I get pulled more and more into thinking about
Starting point is 00:04:42 the centrality of policing to our understandings about the economic and political future of cities. Yeah, and it's really interesting. I mean, in your book, one of the, honestly, one of the most compelling sections of it to me was about this very issue. It was about, you know, comparing the different ways certain municipalities and cities have handled homelessness and how, you know, I mean, it's sort of a common sense thing, if you stop to think about it, that if you send police out to arrest people who are having, you know, mental health issues or facing drug addiction and living on the streets, that's not really a great way to get them help. It sort of just throws them into the court system. They go in debt because they have tickets and fines. And, you know, I'm curious, are you seeing
Starting point is 00:05:29 anywhere in the U.S. where people are solving for this problem in a way that you hope they would? I mean, are there programs out there that are working right now to address this without police? Yes. I think the best thing to look at are cities that are using various forms of what we call a housing first approach. And this is the idea that we should not be focused on emergency shelters, transitional housing, all kinds of therapeutic interventions, much less criminalization. We just need to put people into housing. And yes, some of these folks have mental health problems, substance abuse problems, etc. So we need to put in place support services to help people maintain that housing. But the system we have a lot of places right now
Starting point is 00:06:18 is that people are told, well, first you have to be clean and sober, then you have to be on your meds, then you have to go to this training program, Then you have to show up at 8 a.m. every day for a month, and then we'll give you a temporary room. And then if you make any mistake, then we bump you back down to the bottom of the list. And therefore, people never get to any housing. Instead, put them in the housing, whatever shape they're in, and then stabilize them. The problem is cities don't want to do this because they don't want to really intervene into housing markets. They don't want to start building housing. They don't want to pay for the production of low-cost housing.
Starting point is 00:06:55 So they create this sort of pointless social services archipelago that manages people, but never really helps them in their homelessness. So there's a ton of debate, you know, outside of the homelessness issue about the defund the police or the abolish the police movement. I mean, I'm a politics reporter. I write a political newsletter. So oftentimes I'm discussing this sort of through a political lens, which is very often related to optics and messaging. And I hear moderate left, look at these radicals, and they want to abolish the police. They're telling us they want to abolish the police. I'm not asking you to speak for anyone but yourself here, but I'm wondering if maybe you could articulate to me, what is your position? I mean, what is it that you want? Yeah, so I'm not so interested in these litmus tests of like language. So if an elected official wants to take money out of the police budget and use it to create supportive housing, as they just did in Austin, then I'm all for that. And I don't need it to be labeled as defund the police or police abolition. or police abolition. And I don't use that language in the book, neither the default language nor abolition language, because I think we have to have different strategies to talking to different
Starting point is 00:08:31 populations of people. For me, what abolition means is it's an analysis. It says, look, policing is about the mobilization of violence workers, because that's what distinguishes police from other government workers, is that authorization and capacity to use violence. That's what undergirds police authority. That that's inherently dangerous and problematic for democratic societies, and that policing should always be the tool of absolute last resort. It has been used historically and even contemporarily to reproduce inequality, primarily along lines of race as well as class and sometimes gender and sexuality. And so what it means to me is that we're demanding that the state do everything it can to avoid the use of police. And to the extent that we can't figure that out, then maybe we need some violence workers to handle some very small number of things. But when we look closely at what police actually do, it has very little to do with violence or serious crime.
Starting point is 00:09:44 actually do, it has very little to do with violence or serious crime. They're chasing homeless people around and patrolling school hallways and dealing with mental health crisis calls and waging the war on drugs, and they just shouldn't be doing any of those things. And that analysis helps us to avoid the mistake of thinking that we can fix the violence and racial disparities of policing with things like implicit bias training or body cameras, that the problem is built into the mission of policing. And what we need to be doing is rethinking the mission of policing. So I'm interested in hearing, I mean, A, how we get there, but B, related to sort of the stuff you're talking about, you know, how we know that this sort of day-to-day policing is as you describe it. And I'll, I guess maybe an entryway here for me to
Starting point is 00:10:34 sort of express my concern about the abolish the police movement. I'll tell a very quick personal story. I've been, you know, the victim of crime that I would think maybe police would want to address. I was at home in college at the University of Pittsburgh and somebody broke into my house. I was, they didn't think anybody was home, but it was an armed robbery that I was, you know, came downstairs in my towel for. And there was this guy with a crowbar tearing open my doorframe about to break into the house. And I, you know,
Starting point is 00:11:06 panicked and I did what most people did. And I called 911 and had a screaming match with the guy and held the door shut and he ran away and the cops come and, you know, I'm a person who felt safer in that moment that I could pick up my phone and dial 911. And everything you're saying makes sense. Again, I found your book extremely compelling. I mean, I about like the long term outcomes of this. But how do we get from, you know, where I am in that moment to where, you know, to the future that you want for the cities and the country as a whole, because I also, you know, feel a little scared about a world where I don't have that resource to go to in that moment to protect myself. So, first of all, did the existence of police prevent that guy from trying to break into your home? No. No, yeah, no. Did the police arrive
Starting point is 00:11:59 in time to catch the guy? No, they did not. Okay, so let's not overstate what the police actually do. They may make you feel better, but they did not solve that problem for you. And this is the way most people experience policing. Policing is what happens after harms have already occurred. And then, police sometimes make those harms worse for people. We hear constantly from victims of crime, domestic disputes, etc., that the police came and made it worse. Like the case we just had in Ohio. Say her name! Say her name! Say her name!
Starting point is 00:12:40 Say her name! Say her name! Where the girl calls and says, there's fight i'm i'm feeling jeopardized she has a knife she's using to protect herself and the police come and kill her so that didn't exactly work out the way that we we think that policing works and yet this is actually quite common now this is not the whole answer right what are we doing to prevent this kind of crime from happening? One of the things we know about these kinds of burglary, because this started off as an attempted burglary, they didn't think you were home, etc., right? Well, burglary is driven
Starting point is 00:13:18 overwhelmingly by the desire to get money for drugs. This is what's motivating a massive percentage of household burglaries. And these are folks who are desperate because they can only get drugs on the black market at highly inflated prices with a lot of danger to themselves and others. So we need a complete rethink on the war on drugs. We need to look at schemes for legal distribution of drugs to people who are addicted to opioids, etc. When this has been in the past, it has a dramatic effect in reducing this kind of property crime. So let's look at what's really driving this kind of scary, dangerous property crime and actually try to address that because policing, turns out,
Starting point is 00:14:06 is actually not that effective. The vast majority, for instance, of burglaries are never even reported to the police. Very few are solved. Very few are even investigated, really. And it turns out that the amount of money that it costs to incarcerate people for burglary is greater than the value of all goods stolen in burglaries across the United States. So it's just not a very efficient or effective system. So let me ask you, I mean, I'm interested, you know, from reading your book, where it strikes me that you make a lot of really data research study based arguments around the cost of policing, sort of, that's a great example that the cheaper alternative would be to go after these root causes. And I know this is maybe the
Starting point is 00:15:01 answer is as obvious as I think it is, which is just bad politics. But why aren't cities making the choice to go your route? What's the holdup? If we know that we can reduce violence, reduce drug use, reduce homelessness, if you're the mayor of New York, then that's a no-brainer. I mean, you'd be the, you know, if you could cut violence and homelessness and drug use in New York City, you would be the most popular mayor ever. I mean, so why isn't a Bill de Blasio taking your route if, you know, he's got a team of experts who all are looking at different research that you're looking at? You know, they seem to think that having police on the streets is the solution. Well, some cities are starting to figure this out, and that's why we're hearing this discourse in places like Ithaca, New York, and in Minneapolis, where they're like, well, maybe we shouldn't turn this whole thing over to police. Maybe we should reconceptualize it and begin to engage in these investments in other strategies. I think the resistance is partly ideological, which is that this idea that all local government
Starting point is 00:16:16 can do in the face of global competition is subsidize the already rich is rooted in this kind of market-centered ideology that says that government can't intervene in markets. We just have to let the markets do what they want to do, and we can just tinker at the margins. And so what de Blasio has said about housing is, well, all we could possibly do is create some incentives for new developers to include a few somewhat affordable units in their new developments in return for getting permits and land use rights. This is very different than the strategy that the city pursued during the 1930s. During the depression, for instance, the city said, oh, we have a housing crisis. We're going to go and build housing for
Starting point is 00:17:05 tens of thousands of people. And that idea is like completely off the political radar right now. No one is willing to even talk about it. It's just inconceivable. But that is, in fact, what's needed. The free market is not capable of producing housing for millions of Americans. And so millions of Americans are homeless. And the only real way to do this is either to radically expand incomes at the bottom of the income distribution or build massive amounts of public housing through community-based organizations and scatter, you know, like we should do it in a smart way that reduces potential harmful impacts on communities, that doesn't create pockets of entrenched poverty, etc., that links people to employment through decent transit corridors and
Starting point is 00:17:58 all the rest. But right now, no mayor in a big city in the U.S. is willing to even contemplate getting into the building of massive amounts of public housing. Thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets, blocking intersections as police use tear gas to push back the crowds. Some people were seen throwing objects back at officers, vandalizing a police vehicle and smashing the front window of a police precinct. So many others marching peacefully, chanting, I can't breathe, while demanding justice for George Floyd. So, and maybe housing is your answer to this question, but there are a lot of proposed reforms to address some of these issues, not just around police violence, but around the root causes of, you know, why police are interacting with citizens, you know, abolishing qualified immunity, national data sharing on police misconduct, eliminating traffic stops. That's an idea that
Starting point is 00:18:58 I find really compelling where, you know, by now we can just do all this stuff with cameras and tickets and, you tickets and eliminating police interactions with homeless. If you could pick a reformer to go after in a city like New York, what would you prioritize? I mean, in the real world application of this, to me, it strikes me that we probably have to do this piecemeal if we're going to do it. And I'm interested in where your priorities would lie. Well, I think you're absolutely right. It has to happen piecemeal, right?
Starting point is 00:19:31 Despite the rhetoric around Minneapolis, no city is going to completely transform this overnight. So for me, I think in a sense, the obvious low-hanging fruit is to get police out of the mental health business. 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
Starting point is 00:20:09 November 19th, only on Disney+. Between a quarter and a half of all people killed by police in the United States are having a mental health crisis. And so we need to create community-based mental health services, which may mean increasing taxes in addition to cutting police budgets and we also have to create non-police crisis response teams and that's what a growing number of cities are doing from from Oakland to Los Angeles to Denver to Albuquerque to Austin to Portland Oregon They're all trying to get police out of the mental health business. They're running a pilot program here in upper Manhattan in New York. I think they've made some mistakes in the way they've organized it, and advocates have some concerns about the model they're using, but this general idea needs to move forward. The other
Starting point is 00:21:02 thing is, I think we got to get the police out of the schools. This has been a total disaster. The research shows it's not making kids any safer. We have over 5,000 NYPD personnel attached to New York City schools, which is more than all counselors of all varieties combined. So we got kids going to school with no school nurse, no counselor, but hallways filled with school police. And so we need to replace them with counselors and high quality after school care and support services for kids in crisis, etc. And this is going to save, you know, this is going to free up hundreds of millions of dollars that could be spent to provide better services instead of criminalizing our young people. Yeah, that was a part of your book that shocked me that I, you know, I mean, I know and have read a ton about the issues with sort of the quote unquote school resource officers that exist in public schools in really, you know, inner city areas. I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We had a school officer
Starting point is 00:22:13 that was sort of like a dare type cop in high school, but I, you know, I had a high school that was 4,000 students. So I barely ever saw him. And in your book, you sort of talk about the origins of this and how it's impacted kids. I'd be interested maybe if you could give our listeners a breakdown of sort of how that happened and what the impact has been from your perspective, because that was something that I didn't know a ton about before I read your book. So there was an early wave of school policing that begins in the 50s and 60s that is focused on trying to create respect for authority among young people. And so there was a certain amount of juvenile, quote, delinquency and crime, some gang activity
Starting point is 00:23:04 and some violence. And so what they said is, well, we're going to put police in elementary schools, not because there was any crime in elementary schools, but this was going to be the way to teach kids to have respect for officer friendly. And so that produced this idea of let's put a police officer here, a police officer there, have them be friendly to the kids. And that way, you know, they'll have a better attitude about police and law and order. And we'll do these D.A.R.E. programs. And so none of this is about producing public safety.
Starting point is 00:23:40 D.A.R.E., for instance, every single study ever done shows that it doesn't work, that it can actually increase drug use among kids. But they do it because the whole point is to teach respect for authority. Now, in the 90s, school policing explodes, and it explodes in relationship to kind of three changes that are going on. One is the rise of the super predator myth and this idea that there's going to be this wave of juvenile sociopaths who are just going to kill each other in the halls. This was totally spurious research based on cooked up data. It was completely inaccurate. Every year after these predictions were made, youth crime actually fell.
Starting point is 00:24:27 actually fell, but it fit a narrative that was very politically popular at the time, which said that the problems of urban America are not deindustrialization, austerity, infrastructure collapse, white flight. No, the problem is sociopathic black and brown young people, moral failure. And so what we need to do is lock these kids away as quickly and as long as possible the second factor was school reform so-called school reform which was really about papering over the budget cutting of schools the defunding of schools so they say look we can defund the schools as long as we focus on the essential tasks, reading, writing, arithmetic, and we're going to do that through high-stakes testing, rote learning, and we're going to eliminate all the extracurriculars and support services, and we're going to put in place zero-tolerance disciplinary systems.
Starting point is 00:25:18 So this is the so-called Texas miracle that leads to no child left behind. miracle that leads to no child left behind. And what it turns out happens is that test scores in some places go up, not because students are smarter, but because what they've done is they've driven the low performing students out of the schools and into either the criminal legal system or alternative schools that are included in the testing regime. And this is exactly what happened in Texas. They faked basically the test score numbers to make it look like it was working when really what they were doing was throwing away the lives of 20% of all the students in the public school system. The third factor that's happening here is the Columbine shooting, which happens in the 90s and terrifies a lot of people, despite the fact that there were school police at Columbine that day. And it made no difference, just as there were school police at Parkland High School in Florida, and it made no difference there either.
Starting point is 00:26:27 there either, right? But this fear created a lot of political space to say the problems of schools are about violence and young people out of control, not enough teachers, overflowing classes, no support services. So this engendered another round of school police expending at the federal and state and local level. And that's really what got us into this mess. I mean, this to me strikes at the heart of some of the stuff that's been in the news recently. And the Derek Chauvin trial has just told the judge that they have reached a verdict. We're expecting to hear that verdict read between 430 and 5 p.m. Eastern time this afternoon. So somewhere around an hour or an hour and a half from now. Obviously, this week, the Derek Chauvin trial happened. The verdict came down. I write in my newsletter sort of the left's take, the right's take, and then my perspective. And I had taken
Starting point is 00:27:39 a pretty hard stance on this before the verdict came down that, you know, it was clear to me charges needed to be brought. I watched a lot of the trial. I found the prosecution far more compelling than the defense. And, you know, once, once it did come down, there was sort of these interesting mix of reactions in the political and advocacy space where there were some people saying, you know, this is like the bare minimum. And this was sort of the perspective that I felt, which was like, we watched a cop kill somebody in a 10 minute video. And he, you know, his police chief testified
Starting point is 00:28:16 against him. Experts examining the use of force testified against him. All these witnesses testified against him and he got prosecuted. Like, great, this is the least we could do. And then there were other people who were like, this is sort of a watershed moment in the fight against police violence. It's setting a precedent for police. It sends a message to officers across the country. I'm interested, you know, what was your perspective of this? I mean, is it going to change anything? Do you think there's momentum being built for these kinds of reforms because of a ruling like this? I mean, is it going to change anything? Do you think there's momentum being built for these kinds of reforms because of a ruling like this? How does it sort of move the space that you're operating in? Well, I think that first we should understand the guilty verdict as being
Starting point is 00:28:57 the result in large part of the intensity of the movement and the anger in the country, right? You mentioned how vigorous the prosecution was. You mentioned how many officers were involved in testifying against Chauvin. Well, that is extremely rare. What we generally see in these cases is the prosecutor refusing to bring charges, intentionally dismantling the prosecution and subverting it by muddying the waters in all kinds of way, and the police closing ranks behind the accused officer, and then a finding of not guilty. The other thing is, is that in the rare cases where someone is found guilty, and it usually is because the department decides they want to get rid of this person for either political reasons or whatever,
Starting point is 00:29:46 nothing changes. And we're already seeing in the wake of this case, right, police unions and other bodies saying, see, the system worked. We had a bad apple. We convicted him. We got rid of him. And now we can go back to waging the war on drugs and the war on crime, war on gangs and vice raids and all the rest. And so nothing really changes as a result of it. Now, maybe if out of the thousand plus police killings a year, maybe if we had someone convicted and sent to prison every day, which would be in a third of cases, or even once a week, every day, which would be in a third of cases, or even once a week, right, which would be in like one twentieth of the cases, then maybe we could say, oh, something has really changed here.
Starting point is 00:30:32 We're in a completely different space, you know, but we're not in that space. I don't think many people in the movement expected that this verdict would have some effect on the nature of policing. I think they just felt it was a bare minimum, you know, and that the real focus is on these budget battles, trying to reduce the scope and intensity of policing. That's where the real action is, and that's where the real organizing is, people showing up to budget hearings, lobbying city council members, and the idea that we're going to reform police through body cameras and putting a few more cops in prison. I don't think many people hold water with that anymore. And that's why, you know, the signs last summer said defund the police and not put killer cops in jail, because people have tried that and they don't
Starting point is 00:31:23 think it's going to help. Lester, just an incredible reaction here. A few moments ago, this entire crowd erupted in cheers. They started chanting all three counts. And the reaction can best be summarized by Brie Graham. She's the woman I spoke with just before this verdict was read, who told us that she had been traumatized watching this trial. Brie, what is your reaction? And when that verdict was read, who told us that she had been traumatized watching this trial. Brie, what is your reaction? And when that verdict was read, what went through your head? I honestly, I don't really have the words for it right now. And I'm trying to take everything in. And it feels like we can take the day to celebrate that we're finally getting a taste of justice. And then tomorrow we move on to Dante and we keep doing this until they give us what we need
Starting point is 00:32:05 across the board. So, you know, one of the things I struggle with, I think, and a trap I fall into is that I find myself often, you know, maybe more prone to criticizing the kind of like really lefty, far left rhetoric, you know, the all cops are bastards. And, you know, you watch some of the street protests, and you see people sort of advocating that, you know, every police officer is like a horrible, violent, racist person, and that there's something inherent about their work that that makes them that way. And I'm even aside from the argument, whether that's true or not, I just struggle with it because I know police officers, I have friends who are cops and, and I had this knee jerk defensive reaction of them too, you know, where even, even despite
Starting point is 00:32:54 being an advocate for police reform, I, I end up criticizing people who I might otherwise agree with because of like the rhetoric around it. And I'm wondering how, how we navigate that in this, you know, the police reform, the police abolition movement. Well, you know, the street protests are the reason that we're here today, right? Having these conversations, they've been essential on forcing the public conversation about these issues, but they're not the only expression of the movement. You know, there's all the work that's happening in neighborhoods that involves real organizing among folks who have to struggle with both insecurity and over policing. So I think we have to try to balance the rhetoric we get from the streets with what people who are really engaged in the organizing
Starting point is 00:33:43 in the communities are saying. I think they both want ultimately the same things, which is to replace policing with better strategies, but they are going to maybe use different rhetorical tactics in their efforts to achieve that. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, there's been a lot of debate about sort of where violent crime stands and where it's going in the United States. You know, I think the sort of standard narrative is that we had this spike in violent crime in the 90s, and we saw certain reforms or laws passed, and we saw the spike in crime come down. I think, you know, there's a lot of interesting literature out there about how that was sort of a global trend and not something that was just happening in the United States. During the pandemic, I've seen a lot of
Starting point is 00:34:29 writing, especially from the right about, you know, I think a narrative forming that the police pulled back in the wake of a lot of these defund the police movements, and we saw violent crime go up as a result. And that has sort of been paired with other research from, you know, all sorts of criminologists and economists and who say that, you know, the presence of police in cities, the physical presence of them being there prevents crime from happening. It reduces crime rates. I'm interested, you know, what your reaction is to that narrative, what you've been seeing during the pandemic and over the last year, if you think there's some validity to that, if you think it's backwards, where you sort of land on,
Starting point is 00:35:10 I guess, the construction that we've seen police pull back, we've seen crime go up, and that's sort of been the story of policing over the last year during the pandemic. Well, this is just nonsense. It's politically motivated nonsense, right? It's clear that the increase in crime is tied to the pandemic, that people are in very desperate circumstances, have extremely high levels of anxiety, economic insecurity, mental health stressors, and all the rest. And this claim that police have pulled back has been disputed by police leaders across the country here in New York. Shea said, we're doing everything we can 24 hours a day to stop this violence and it's not working. What we're doing is not working. There is no pullback. We are going full square tilt head on to stop this and it's having no effect. And I think that's the reality here. So this idea that somehow because
Starting point is 00:36:07 Bill Bratton one day said, let's arrest more homeless people, that the entire Western world enjoyed a 30-year-long crime decline is, of course, utter nonsense. And frankly, these studies that claim to show, well, we put a few more police on the street one day and there were like three less car break-ins, therefore we must have policing on every street corner is also nonsense. If we disappeared all police tomorrow, would that cause problems? I'm sure it would, right? But that's not what anyone is calling for who's actually doing this work, right? What we're talking about is systematically replacing policing with better interventions. And we do that over time. We test things, we evaluate things, we look at the evidence, right? And then we try new things and we keep advancing this process. But this idea that police are the only possible strategy for producing safety is just utter nonsense and
Starting point is 00:37:06 entirely politically motivated. I'm curious. I mean, I really do feel, I feel myself moving on this issue into your camp, I guess, the Alex Vitale camp. And I'm curious, I mean, you teach in Brooklyn, you're a New York based guy. Do you have the ear of police department officials? Are politicians listening to you? I mean, is this a consideration that NYPD is making? Like, where are we in this moment? These are somewhat separate questions, right? So, I mean, sure, I know folks at One Police Plaza, and I've had conversations over the years with a lot of the police leadership, but I'm not really talking to them. They did not create the war on drugs. They did not decide to defund mental health services. They did not
Starting point is 00:38:06 pull the counselors out of the schools. These are all problems that were created by politicians and then put in the lap of the police. And a lot of police don't want to be in charge of these things, but it's not their call. This is a political problem. So do I have the ear of politicians? You know, increasingly, increasingly, and a lot of candidates in this year's upcoming election have approached me, and I've, you know, spent a lot of time meeting with them, reviewing their websites and their campaign literature and their comprehensive plans on public safety. And I'm very happy to have the opportunity to do that. And I think that we're going to see some shifts in the politics of New York City after this new city council is elected. Because there's a big
Starting point is 00:39:00 change in mindset, right? We've got, what we have now is a lot of folks who have capitulated to this idea that there's nothing they can do but send the police. And then they don't want to hear about reducing the police because that's what they've told their constituents is the only thing they can have. And a new generation that's like, oh, we have a youth violence problem. Well, why don't we start investing in our youth? Why don't we create community-based violence interruption programs? Why don't we put counselors in the hospitals to work with young people so that they don't become the next generation of offenders? We have real ideas about how to break the cycle of this violence,
Starting point is 00:39:38 and it just requires a different political mindset that says that government can actually do something positive here and not just be a mechanism for pushing wealth up the economic ladder. Alex Vitale, thank you so much for your time today. If people want to learn more about this issue, engage this debate, where do you suggest they go? Where can they follow your work? All that good stuff. Well, I'm on Twitter at A Vitale. That's with an E at the end. And Verso Books, the publisher of the book, has made the e-book free to download in response to this current round of interest and movement activity around the issue. So there's no excuse now to check it out. Wow, man, I'm a sucker. I paid for that thing. 15 old smackers or something. Alex, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. And let's keep in touch. I hope
Starting point is 00:40:31 to chat with you more sometime in the future. You bet, Isaac. 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 Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis We'll see you next time.

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