TED Radio Hour - Bucking the System (2021)

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Original broadcast date: November 12, 2021. We hear calls for systemic change, but what does that look like? This hour, TED speakers share stories of taking on institutions — from schools, to medicine, to policing — so they work for everyone. Guests include economist Emily Oster, lawyer Priti Krishtel and social psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

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From TED and NPR. I'm Anush Zumerode. And I am a parent. And back when the pandemic started in early 2020, like most people with kids, my husband and I had to make some tough decisions. Probably the hardest one was, should we send our kids back to school

and risk exposing them to COVID? Or should we keep them at home, away from their friends, isolated, and going to school virtually. Pretty much every parent faced this dilemma. So did teachers, administrators, politicians? There were no easy answers. You might remember the debate. We're more than four months into this pandemic,

and there's still no bold national plan to safely return kids to the classroom. Some worried reopened schools would spark super-spreader events. We need to be in front of COVID. I can't teach from a grave. If I go back to school, I will feel unsafe. Others said early evidence showed kids were at low risk, and keeping them home did more damage. We need to open our schools, and we need to get them back at the playground and in the classroom.

And at that time, those debates were understandable. We knew so little. What did we know? What do we not know? Just the tremendous amount of uncertainty about how you were going to get COVID. This is Emily. There was kind of no data collection effort on that. And I kept looking around for data on that and trying to figure out if there was data and just like finding myself in a sort of data desert.

Emily is a parent too. She's also an economist at Brown University and she loves data. And over the last decade, she has become a best-selling author by using data to create a kind of new genre in parenting books. She dives into academic studies on pregnancy and early childhood. childhood, and then translates them into regular language for parents, like me, so that we can make more informed decisions about what's right for our families. I think that the sort of power of data is to help us understand. And my position, very broadly, is that if we explain why to people, it makes it much easier

for them to make their own choices. And it may actually make them more likely to adhere to some recommendation that you're giving, or at least to prioritize better. So during the chaos of the summer of 2020, Emily had lots of questions about whether to send her own kids to school. And then there were parents asking her for guidance. But there was no research for her to dive into to try and make sense of the situation.

So she and her team decided to collect the data from schools themselves. So when we started this, we said, okay, like let's target principals and superiors. And let's try to pull in data. You know, let's try to ask them to do the tracking. Let's try to ask them these, you know, very basic questions, which were like, you know, here are 12 different mitigations you could be doing. Are you doing any of them? How many kids do you have an in-person school?

And how many COVID cases did you have over the last, you know, two weeks? And we did this survey every two weeks to the district. So that's kind of where we started with that idea of kind of going to the school districts themselves. as the sort of source of this data. I mean, were you picking up the phone, literally, and being like, hey, so I work at Brown and, like, how did this work? Yeah, just on the phone, on the email, different places. It was a lot. To which I have to say, like, no offense to you, Emily, but why you, you're a brown economist.

You know, you've got your own kids going at home. You're teaching. You're doing your own work. Where are the grownups here, you know what are the grownups? I know. I know. Where are the grownups? I mean, I think one of the problems is that this, this wasn't anybody's job, right? So there's a sort of moment when somebody asked Betsy DeVos, who was at the time the education secretary, you know, like, why aren't you collecting information about what's going on with COVID in schools? What's the role of the federal government in actually creating a much more expansive database? And she was like, well, that's not my job. Well, I'm not sure there's a role for the Department of Education to compile and conduct that resource.

She's wrong, of course. There were pieces of it that were her job. But there were also pieces of it that were the CBC's job. And it was kind of like this was like two jobs. And unless those people are willing to work together, it was actually very hard, I think, for either state or federal governments to get it together. But I mean, I totally share your view. I think it was really bizarre.

We hear a lot about making systemic change these days. But taking on institutions like our schools. or policing or health care can feel utterly daunting. How do we as individuals even begin to hold these pillars of our society accountable? So on the show today, three people who are bucking the system, outliers changing things up so that they can work better for all of us. Emily Oster and her team ended up collecting data from over 5,000 schools across the U.S., creating the most comprehensive database in the country.

And even early on, the results were unexpected. We did not see a lot of large outbreaks. In fact, the data that we collected, I think, was very helpful in painting a kind of big picture and in helping us understand questions like, are we seeing huge outbreaks in school? Are schools super spreaders? Are we seeing rates in schools that are way outside of what we see in the community and sort of suggesting the answers to those questions? were no. Right, which was shocking to a lot of people. I mean, I remember when you came out and said,

based on the data that we have with the right precautions, schools can mostly reopen safely. Yeah. And that actually, despite the information that you presented, this conclusion was really controversial, right? So, I mean, I think there were a few things. So one is, you know, this decision about whether or not to open schools became very political. Yeah. When the former president said that everybody should go to school all the time. You know, he sort of said it in a way that was like, if you're with me, you'll open all your schools and like, don't worry about COVID. And it generated a situation in which school openings really bifurcated on political lines rather than on science.

And I think that there was a lot of, I would say, legitimate fear. particularly among teachers and a feeling like why should we have to go to this, you know, this potentially risky job when, you know, we don't have perfect data, you know, on this. And, you know, I think that was a piece of it. I mean, as the months went by, I'll speak from personal experience. I was certainly looking to some of the information that you were sharing to make a decision about my own kids. and, you know, taking into account all the variables that you would present and all the data that was there, I started to relax a little bit about sending my kids back to school because the transmission rate was so low and because you sort of pieced it together into a story for me to understand to make a personal decision. But a lot of people got very angry with your, I guess they saw it as you inserting yourself into what should be a school or government.

system decision. Yep. It has, you know, come with a not inconsiderable, like, you know, personal costs on some dimensions, which is, you know, it's like when you try to do somebody at this, like, people yell you, like, makes you feel bad. And I think one of the things that made it possible to sort of keep doing this stuff is that I feel terrible when people yell at me and then I very quickly forget. And so that's, that's, and then I just do it.

I like, do it again. I mean, you felt terrible, but it worked, right? I mean, you showed that there was a hole in the system. And now with a new administration, the federal government is tracking what is happening with COVID in schools and looking back at how it may have affected schools. So in some ways, you help them accountable. I think it holds it accountable. I mean, I think I hope that it sort of helps them. I mean, I have found it's an interesting thing to think about because I am really much more comfortable with the.

the pieces of what I do that involve kind of talking to individuals or writing for individuals about about personal decision making. But one of the things that has been so odd for me about this last year is this kind of like being deeply embedded in trying to work in this educational system. And, you know, I have a lot of feelings about, you know, the ways that things could be run, you know, could be run differently or like things we could do that that might be. make it, that might make it better, you know, there are going to be some pretty significant losses for kids associated with having missed school last year, figuring out where those losses were

in terms of, you know, what demographics groups are most heavily affected, what places are most heavily affected, you know, those are important questions, which are going to be hard to answer if we don't know where schools were open and where they were not. Part of me is like thinking, like, this is huge, because. Because let's say five to 10 years from now, we have this group of children who are struggling in school and they happen to be predominantly children of color because they were the ones who disproportionately ended up going to virtual school, at least here in New York City. And then we see that we have less children of color in honors classes as a result, who therefore get into less colleges as a result, who therefore get less colleges as a result, who therefore get less. good jobs as a result, who therefore turn into adults who struggle, it's like this tiny piece of data can really, in the long run, tell us so much about how what happens when you're a kid

in a crisis can change your trajectory as an adult. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a world in which in, you know, 50 years we're going to be seeing, you know, what are the implications of this pandemic and at a virtual schooling on mortality, the same way they looked at that stuff in the 19-18 flu. And I think that this stories like that sort of drove me to try to put this together, which is to say, like, it would be really bad if this information was lost. In addition to the pandemic, we have also heard so many calls for systemic change in so many ways,

whether it comes to race or jobs and wages. And I just think for a lot of people, it feels impossible, right? Like to make change that big, to change the way that systems work is daunting. But in some ways, your message is like, just start. Chip away at it. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a little bit of a message in someone they do is just like, well, it's daunting. But like you won't make any progress if you don't try.

And I think that in some sense, all of the times when I have sort of felt like I wanted to quit this year. And also all of the times that I'm sort of most proud of are times when I was like, I thought I would do something because they didn't think it would be that hard. It's been like a huge trial by fire for me just in learning about what happens in this system and why some things are hard or impossible. But just be brave. Like just try. That's economist Emily Oster. You can see all the data she collected and how it's being used to analyze the impact of school closures over the last year. at COVID School Dashboard.com.

On the show today, bucking the system. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. And on the show today, bucking the system. Ideas about institutions that are letting us down and the outsiders who are trying to change them. But before we get into that, we have a love story.

For my husband, it was love at first sight. This is lawyer Prithi Christel on the TED stage. Here's what happened. Years ago, Rudy, who I had strictly put in the friend zone at the time, came over to my house and met my dad, a pharmaceutical scientist who had just retired after bringing a drug to market. My dad said, you probably wouldn't have heard of it.

It's for IPF. idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Rudy paused for a long time, and then he said, that's the disease that took my father's life 15 years ago. Rudy says that this is the moment he fell in love with my father. In my family, we have a special love for my father's inventions, and in particular, we have a reverence for his patents. We have framed patents on the wall in our house.

Last year, I met the director of the U.S. Patent Office for the first time, and I sent my family a selfie from that office in Virginia. I got so many emojis back. You would have thought I had met Beyonce. But truth be told, I was actually there to talk about a problem. How our outdated patent system is fueling the high cost of medicines and costing lives. Okay, so the patent system.

Before we launch into that, can we just kind of go back to how the patent system was intended to work, particularly in medicine? Sure. So in the United States, we have the U.S. Constitution, which talks about the idea of patents,

which is basically that you want to give a time-limited monopoly to someone who will invent something. which will, in theory, incentivize them to invent. It will reward them for inventing. And ultimately, the public is going to benefit from that invention. So the idea is like it's a prepackaged deal. You get a monopoly for a few years.

Then it goes into the public domain, right? That's right. So patents are supposed to be a 20-year monopoly under current law here in the United States and in many other places, which is quite a long time. if you think about it, where nobody else, there's no competition on the market, nobody else can sell it, make it because you were the inventor, you have that reward. And during that time, the inventor would have a time-limited monopoly. But when the monopoly period ends, when that 20 years ends, we would see competition in the market. And research has shown that by the time you get

two or even three competitors on the market, the price usually comes down by up to 80s. And that's what we want. We want healthy competition in the marketplace. We want a marketplace that offers us a lot of options so we can pick what's best for us and our families. Today, over two billion people live without access to medicines. And against this global crisis, drug prices are skyrocketing, including in wealthier countries. Thirty-four million Americans have lost a family member or a friend in the last five years, not because the treatment didn't exist, but because they couldn't afford it. Rising drug costs are pushing families into homelessness, seniors into bankruptcy, and parents to crowdfunding treatment for their critically ill children.

There are many reasons for this crisis, but one is the outdated patent system that America tries to export to the rest of the world. So you laid out a few minutes ago how the patent system should work, that it should be this symbiotic relationship between a drug manufacturer and the public where both end up benefiting. But you're saying that actually the system doesn't really work out like that. That's right. Our research has shown that on the 10 best-selling drugs in America,

on average, each has 131 patent applications today. and that means that monopoly period on a given medicine is going from 20 years, almost doubling to nearing 40 years. And what we're seeing during that monopoly period that's getting longer and longer is that towards the end of it, prices are rising sharply. And people are dying as a result. 13% of Americans are saying that they know someone who died in the last five years, a family member or a friend, who died. in the last five years because they couldn't afford their medication. And that number is twice as high for people of color. So where did things go wrong? Like when did the system start veering away from benefiting the public and really benefiting the drug companies? It's a great question that you ask. In the late 70s, early 80s, I would say, we reorganized our economy in a whole host of different ways.

And one of those ways that I think is less understood by a lot of folks is that innovation became a central pillar for our economic growth. And that's a great thing, right? We all want progress. But over time, what happened is we saw the corporatization of innovation. You know, in the first 150 years of our country's history, we saw five million patents being. filed. But today, just over the last, you know, 30, 40 years, we see another 6 million have been granted. So did we get drastically more inventive? Well, yeah, that's what I'm thinking. When you say that, I'm like, amazing. So much more innovation. No, what's happened is actually that we've started granting a lot more patent. It really flies in the face of common sense to think that one drug could have over 100 patents on it. But what you'll see is that the best-selling drugs in America have

200, 300, even 400 patents on them. And that's where we have to do something about this. Right. So when a single drug has hundreds of patents, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're vastly improving or changing the drug with each one. It just ends up being a way for a pharmaceutical company to hold on to their monopoly. Is there a particular drug right now that you are thinking of that illustrates that? The one that comes to mind for me is Ketruda. It's a cancer drug. What we have seen with Ketruda is that it's in the very early stages, actually.

Ketruda is going to be our top-selling drug in 2024. It's already nearing 100 patents being granted. And we know that they're going to have another at least eight years. of extended exclusivity. And that's on top of the 20 years they're supposed to have. That's right. And Americans are going to be paying, get this, during that eight years, $137 billion for this drug.

This is the direction we've gone. The system has gotten out of balance, granting patents without really looking at the quality. How many of these are actually rewarding true invention? And how many have just become part of a business strategy? In the legal profession, we call this life cycle management. How do we get as many patents as possible? How do we build that patent wall for this product so nobody else can enter the market for as long as possible?

Literally block people with a patent wall. Right. It's a legitimate business practice. There's nothing illegal about it. And the real question for us is, how are we going to bring it back? The higher a patent wallet company builds, the longer they hold on to their monopoly. And with no one to compete with, they can set prices at whim. And because these are medicines and not designer watches, we have no choice but to pay.

It doesn't have to be this way. We can create a modern patent system to meet the needs of a 21st century society. And to do that, we need to reimagine the patent system. to serve the public, not just corporations. So how do we do it? Five reforms. First, we need to stop handing out so many patents. We hand out patents worth billions of dollars for minor changes.

It's time to raise the bar. Second, we need to change the financial incentives of the Patent Office. Right now, the revenue of the Patent Office is directly linked to the number of patents that it grants. That's like private prisons, getting paid more to hold more people. It naturally leads to more incarceration. The same is true for patents. Third, we need more public participation. Right now, the patent system is like a black box. It's a two-way conversation between the patent office and industry. You and I aren't invited to that party.

But imagine if instead the Patent Office became a dynamic center for citizen learning and ingenuity, enabling us to participate in the policy conversations that directly impact our health and lives. Fourth, we need to get the right to go to court. Right now in America, after a patent is granted, the public has no legal standing. Only those with a commercial interest,

usually other drug companies, have that right. But I've witnessed firsthand how lives can be saved when everyday citizens have the right to go to court. Back in 2006 in India, my organization worked with patient advocates to challenge legally unjust HIV drug patents at a time when so many people were dying because medicines were priced out of reach.

We were able to bring down the prices of medicines by up to 87%. Cases like these can save millions of lives and billions of dollars. Imagine if Americans had the right to go to court too. And lastly, we need stronger oversight that can serve as a public advocate, regularly monitoring the activities of the Patent Office and reporting to Congress. If a unit like this had existed, it would have caught, for example, the Silicon Valley Company

Theranos before it got so many patents for blood testing and landed a valuation of $9 billion, when in reality, there was no invention there at all. I guess when talking about these reforms, it's important to keep in mind. Yes, there are financial costs, as you've mentioned, but there are other big costs as well, right? Absolutely. I think one of the clearest examples of this that we've seen in recent years is the growth of the insulin movement. People living with diabetes, we hear family after family saying, you know, my child actually died because they couldn't afford their insulin. or my sister passed away because she decided not to pick up her insulin because the prices have gone up. And so I think people living with diabetes are one of the clearest examples that we have

in America today of where we actually have a monopoly-based system through patents, but through other realms as well, where a few companies have the power to determine the health and lives of people and the market isn't giving them the incentives to do the right thing. That's why we have to democratize these systems now and make sure that people whose lives are directly being affected have the ability to actually weigh in. You know, when we talk about the patent system, we're talking about the root source of power. And right now it's currently wired to just drive inequity. And what we're talking about is how do we rewire it to actually work for people? So I do want to ask you, there might be people listening who say, well, you know, there is a reason why the United States is considered the most innovative country of all.

There's a reason why people come here to start their companies. How do you assuage their fears that making things more litigious or passing legislation that challenges patents won't destroy some of that entrepreneurial spirit that. exists in the United States? I think the answer is that what we need to imagine is the system that gets us the best quality patents, that gets us the ability to progress science, to progress technology, but also make sure that the public gets the benefit of that science and technology. Right now, we're not getting that. And so legislation, reform, can seem intimidating, but if done well, if we have the right kind of leadership who can provide a vision for how to get us there in a way that preserves the best of the current system

while actually modernizing this system to bring it into the 21st century, we will be able to have a system that really encourages entrepreneurs and inventors and also make sure that the public is served writ large. You know, Preeti, it's interesting to be talking about reinventing the patent system in light of what is going on in the world. I mean, we are still living through a pandemic, and there's still this debate over how to make vaccines and treatments accessible to everyone. And I think this is where we come back to. We can't rely on the voluntary actions of entities that are not incentivized to do this. This is why we need. government. You know, if you look at the vaccine, you know, we have Pfizer, we have

Moderna, Americans are getting these vaccines, but they're not reaching the vast majority of the world. And we're not getting what we want out of Pfizer and Moderna in terms of good corporate behavior either, in terms of licensing to as many suppliers as possible, participating in the world health organizations, technology sharing pool. Why not? Why aren't voluntary actions working, we're not incentivizing them to do it as corporate actors. And I think these are the hard questions we need to start really looking at, because at least with the pandemic, what we know is that none of us are safe until all of us are safe. The longer this continues, the greater the chance that variants are going to come back. And this thing is just going to drag on

forever. So what are the incentives we need and how do we get there? I think this is the next chapter for the work. There's an invitation here for all of us to think differently and think bigger and to push our government here in the United States, but also governments all over the world to move quicker, to do more, to compel our companies to do the right thing if our market incentives aren't getting us there. Yeah. I think we're in a moment right now, particularly with the pandemic, where every person is understanding that knowledge shouldn't be locked up, that knowledge, if shared, has the potential to actually save humanity in a moment like this. And yet all of our systems and structures, particularly intellectual property,

are based on the idea of locking up and proprietizing and monetizing knowledge. So how do we flip that? How do we open it up to a different paradigm where knowledge is actually shared, where it's developed, where it's not locked up, and where the fruits of all of that knowledge and research and collaboration, then make it to the people waiting for that, the fruits of that labor. That's lawyer Prithi Christel. She's also the co-founder of IMAC, a nonprofit that advocates for patent reform. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, bucking the system. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. You just can't get enough of your favorite NPR shows, can you? Well, then maybe it's time to take your podcast listening to the next level.

With NPR Plus, this is a totally new way to support public media. You get podcast perks like bonus episodes, and sponsor-free listening, and you get the satisfaction of knowing that you are helping to make our work possible. Please learn more at plus.npr.org. Give a little. You'll get a lot with NPR Plus. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Mnuch Zamorodi. And today on the show, bucking the system, including a system-like policing. My first real encounter with police was one through the television, 1985 in the city where I grew up. This is Philip Atiba Goff.

He's the co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity. I was seven or eight. And what I remember were sort of like cut scenes from the movie of my life. I remember we had a small black and white television in the kitchen of the duplex where we live. Philadelphia was also the scene today. armed confrontation between the police and a radical political group called Move. It was May 13, 1985 in Philadelphia when a police helicopter dropped two bombs onto a compound housing a black liberation group. And I remember seeing Roe Homes that we knew on Osage Avenue on fire.

And I was asking what was going on. I remember my mother saying kind of in the same kind of days, they bombed the people. I said, who bombed the people? She said, the city bombed the people. And then hearing over the television, we don't know why they're not putting the fire out. My father's saying, they don't want to put the fire out.

A police helicopter dropped a percussion bomb on top of the fortified row house. The bombs apparently started a fire that in the past thousands of... My parents tried to have normal dinner table conversation, but it would come up. It was like the world they were trying to keep us safe from had entered into our home during those conversations. And so the move incident in Philadelphia is one of the sort of foundational, fundamental touchstone incidents

in my entire life. And I'm confident that that helped shape a great deal of my perceptions of law enforcement and public safety, the whole nine. Philip carried those perceptions with him all the way through, So when I got started, I graduated college in 1999. Another tragic incident between the police and a black man made national news.

Amadudiala was shot by the New York Police Department by officers in NYPD 41 times. They had given him instructions to identify himself. He got back to his own residence, pulled out his wallet. They swore they saw a gun. They shot and they killed him. Now that, if you want to assume that they're not lying, and I don't assume one way or the other, but if you want to assume they're not lying, that kind of error, literally seeing something that wasn't there, something that was consistent with the negative stereotype about black people, it was an important kind of error that psychologists were studying at that time. We were at the height, or even maybe still in the upswing of what social psychologists called the cognitive revolution, where we're applying the tools of cognitive psychology to social phenomena. It was the combination of those factors that led Philip to get a master's and later a PhD in social psychology and work to understand how racial bias affects the way police behave.

So we started to do some studies on this automatic association between black and criminal and the ways it literally tunes our vision so that we see the world in stereotype consistent ways. But I think to me the most important thing to understand about it now, in the late 90s, we were having a national conversation about whether or not racism was over. It was as dumb then as it is now, but we were losing the conversation. How can we have racist outcomes if explicit prejudice is on the decline? And so part of the project in that moment was to develop language that made sense of the fact that you can have racism without. explicit bigotry. And this is a really important point because these studies, the ones that you just mentioned, they found that when people who didn't consider themselves racist in any way, if they were shown a picture of a person with dark skin, they were more likely to assume that

that person was a criminal. And this research in the 90s, it laid the groundwork for a lot of what we talk about today when we talk about racism, this idea of subconscious. or implicit bias rather than explicit bias, right? Yeah. So when we talk about the popularization of implicit bias, it was rigorous science about how the world works, but it was also science in search of language for something that people were experiencing

but didn't have language for, which is pervasive discrimination that didn't have the same sort of blacks-only, colors-only labeling on it that had had just a couple of decades before. Philip Atiba Goff picks up the science, idea from the TED stage. The most common definition of racism is that racist behaviors are the product of contaminated

hearts and minds. And when you listen to the way we talk about trying to cure racism, you'll hear it. We need to stamp out hatred. We need to combat ignorance. It's hearts and minds. Now, the only problem with that definition is that it's completely wrong, both scientifically and otherwise. One of the foundational insights of social psychology is that attitudes are very weak predictors of behaviors. But more importantly than that, no black community has ever taken to the streets to demand that white people would love us more. Communities march to stop the killing because racism is about behaviors, not feelings. And even when civil rights leaders like King and Fannie Lou Hamer used the language of love, the racism they fought, that was segregation and brutality.

It's actions over feelings. And everyone, everyone, of those leaders would agree, if a definition of racism makes it harder to see the injuries racism causes, that's not just wrong. A definition that cares about the intentions of abusers more than the harms to the abused, that definition of racism is racist. But when we change the definition of racism from attitudes to behaviors, we transform that problem from impossible to solvable, because you can measure behaviors. And when you can measure a problem, you can tap into one of the only universal rules of organizational success. You got a problem or a goal. You measure it. You hold yourself accountable to that metric.

So if every other organization measures success this way, why can't we do that in policing? You decided to collect data to measure police behaviors because no one else was doing it. And in fact, your organization, the Center for Policing Equity or CPE, hosts the largest collection of police. behavioral data in the world. Tell me about what this collection is, how you got it, and what you are learning from it. So we started doing this with funding from the National Science Foundation in 2013 to start collecting the data. It was slow going at first. But as soon as folks realized that they could get information on how bad the disparities were, then there was a flood. So now we have a pretty significant backlog of communities and departments that want our analyses.

And when you say data, you mean like what happened when the police arrest someone or which neighborhood did they make most of their arrests, that kind of thing? And then you bring all this information to police departments and communities to analyze together. Yeah. And there will be different appetites for change across different cities. There are folks in communities where we work, where community has no interest in working with law enforcement, and other places where they want to grow law enforcement, and that's the only option that they're dealing with. After a police department invites us in, we handle the legal stuff, we engage with the community, our next step is to analyze their data. The goal of these

analyses is to determine how much do crime, poverty, neighborhood demographics predict, let's say, police use of force. So let's say that those factors predict police will use force on this many black people. So our next question is how many black people actually are targeted for police use of force. So what's up with the gap? Well, a big portion of the gap is the difference between what's predicted by things police can't control and what's predicted by things police can control. Their policies and their behaviors. And what we're looking for are the types of contact or the areas in the city where that gap is biggest. Because then we can tell our partners, look here. Solve this problem first.

So basically, if you see rates of police intervention well above the norm in any one neighborhood, it's worth looking into why, because maybe the problem is with how the policing is being done. Yeah, so the analyses we do, we say here is the raw disparity, and here is the portion that cannot be explained by poverty or crime. Let's say that you live in a city, and I tell you that black people are four times more likely to get beat up by the police than our wife. white people. That's bad. That's unfair. But it doesn't really tell you how much you can solve by changing police behavior as opposed to investing in those communities so they are not poor, giving folks mental health and substance abuse resources. It doesn't really get a sense at what

portion of the problem is police policies and police behavior and what is everything else that happens to black communities where there's cumulative concentrated disadvantage. there's no black community that's like everything here is great except for the police right we got plenty of clean water all the jobs in the world our schools are fantastic it's just the cops when you have vulnerable communities they don't just have one problem right so when i tell you that 25% of the deadly shootings involve folks with serious mental illness maybe you should stop doing some of that stuff and what that means inevitably is maybe there should be funding for the people who can more appropriately respond to mental health, unhoused situations, substance abuse, child welfare.

And that means police have a place that they should start and communities have a place to hold them accountable for the things they're doing wrong. This brings us to something you wrote about in the Washington Post. The changes being made to the Ithaca Police Department in New York, where they are actually rethinking their approach to public safety. and when armed officers are really needed to respond to a crisis, if they're even needed. Yeah. So what's going on in Ithaca and Tompkins County, New York is absolutely extraordinary. So during the uprisons of 2020 in the wake of the lynching of George Floyd, they wanted to do something that was going to fundamentally change the way that public safety was delivered.

When I say public safety, especially right now, lots of people are thinking, oh, he just means police. but for most folks, especially folks who live in vulnerable communities, public safety means literally the safety of the public. Do I know where I'm going to sleep tonight? Are my kids safe? So in Ithaca and Tompkins County, when they started having conversations around, well, how are we going to secure public safety? They asked questions about if we were to start over, start from scratch. How would we set up the municipal services that prevent the needs. for calling out in crisis and send the right resources when crisis comes.

And I don't think what we would do is we'd have one person, an officer who goes to a drug overdose, a mental health crisis, a kid who's missing school, a bank robbery, a domestic dispute. How much training would you need for that? That doesn't make any kind of sense. So instead, let's have folks who know how to respond to those things go to those things. Yeah, so community outreach workers look like civilians on the street. We're not geared up or militarized. We don't carry guns.

This is community outreach worker Natalia Coillich. She's part of a new public safety program still being developed in Ithaca. We're just social workers who are coming at people with empathy, a need to connect, and help them get on with whatever they need to do. Natalia responds to public safety crises, like the other day when she got a call to help a man who wouldn't cooperate with the police and EMTs. This individual was kind of crumbled onto the sidewalk, really distressed, not able to engage. So I sort of walked over to them, sat down kind of close to them, seemed to be calming him down to have my presence there. And I kind of just started with him like, what's that?

going on? Do you know what's happening right now? And not surprisingly, he didn't know what was happening. He was freaked out by all of the flashing lights and loud noises and people in uniform coming at him. So just kind of getting clarity on what was happening was hugely helpful to this individual. I started talking to him more to kind of help him understand why the ambulance was there and why they wanted him to go to the hospital. After he had that conversation, he kind of came to a new understanding and he was able to go up to the hospital knowing that he was safe and that there was reasons in place why he had to go. And yeah, I think that if I wasn't there to keep the energy low and safe, I think that person would have freaked out.

I don't think that they would have willingly gotten into the ambulance. I think they would have, unfortunately, perhaps even been in danger. So, Philip, these initiatives in Ithaca, they make me, you know, think about the recent movement to defund the police, as people have called it. Do you see this, what's happening in Ithaca, as an example of what that could look like? Yeah, so I think defund means different things to different people. I think part of the reason why it caught on in the way that it did, especially among young, a newly politically engaged folks, is because it gave a target and it gave something concrete to do.

And so instead of trying to make what we've got better, we need to reimagine. We need to make something different. Because if we can't imagine that a $20 crime shouldn't have someone with the authority to take away someone's life as a response, than our crisis of imagination is literally deadly. So sure, this is what some folks might see as a way of defunding. Other folks would say, but there's not less money going in.

It's more. And if you're not careful, this just becomes a bigger version of a police department. We're in a moment of great opportunity for experimentation. We should embrace that. We should make sure that we capture data on that. So when something doesn't work, we know what's a baby and what's bathwater. when we start throwing things out. But I think in this moment

there's the opportunity for really radical reimagining of the ways that we deliver public safety and the ways that we think about what does deliver public safety. And I think that's incredibly important. And I hope we don't squander this moment. That's Philip Atiba Gough. He's the CEO of the Center for Policing Equity. You can find his full talk at ted.com.

And we just want to mention that like Ithaca, there are a number of towns and cities in the U.S. trying to redefine what public safety means for them. And on a 2021 ballot measure, Minneapolis voters rejected a proposal to replace their police department with a public safety department. Thank you so much for listening to our show today

on Bucking the System. To learn more about the people who were on this episode, go to ted.npr.org and to see hundreds more TED Talks, check out TED.com or this. The TED app. This episode was produced by Sylvie Douglas, James Delahousie, Rachel Faulkner, Katie Montalione, and Harrison VJ Choi. It was edited by Sana's Meskampore.

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