The Daily Beast Podcast - The Far Right Will Only Get Louder and More Powerful in 2024

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

The coming year is set to be a trying time for America, at least according to Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, whose new book God, Guns and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America traces the history of right-wing terrorism in the U.S. Then, former NYPD officer—and the highest-ranking whistleblower in department history—Edwin Raymond joins The New Abnormal to discuss his recent memoir, An Inconcenient Cop: My Fight to Change Policing in America. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

What a great show we have for you today. Bruce Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. Jacob Ware is a research fellow. And today they are joining us to talk about their book, God, Guns and Sedition, Far Right Terrorism in America. Then we're going to be joined by the highest ranking whistleblower in NYPD history, Edwin Raymond, to talk about his book, An Inconvenient Cop, My Fight to Change Policing in America.

But first, let's have some fun. Okay, you get to pick, and my get is probably the wrong word. You get to pick one elected Republican official to have dinner with. Who do you pick and what do you ask them? Am I my . I think we're going to use a very strong beep on that one. Thank you. Thank you, Seamus.

So you would ask them, have you tried the salmon? Yes, I would. It has a special seasoning with a little tart in it. I don't want to eat with any of these motherfuckers. Unless it's going to be like the movie, the menu. Great movie. Oh, my God. See, technically George Santos was elected.

So this is an easy answer to me. Is he? Like, what are we talking about? I want to dine with him all the time and just gossip. You're the one giving him all the time. money, aren't you? You're the reason why he's made all this fucking money on cameo. I stared that cameo down and I said that's too much money to give him. God, I don't know. Maybe Romney? Yeah, that could be interesting. Okay. Speaking of Samma, wasn't it that like

Lisa Murkowski gave him a lot of salmon fillets and he just eats them sadly each day? So, you know. Right. Yeah. I think with Romney at least, I could keep my food down. Yeah. Okay. Twitter, threads are blue sky. I'm going with threads. Oh, it's blue sky easily. I got to say threads is moving on up for me. It's getting better and better each week. I mean, if you don't mind being tracked everywhere you go by Mark Zuckerberg, I'm sure that's fine.

Yes. Okay, what's the most used emoji on your phone right now? Mine is always... It's either the shrug. The shrug and the salute. And there's one other. Mine is the laughter, the face palm. And my meditated yoga emoji.

Oh, but I don't know how I forgot this. My other one is the eye roll. Oh, nice. Yeah, I get that one a lot from you. Yeah. I'd like to say mine is the sunglasses emoji, but it really is actually the face pulp. Yeah, that seems right.

Who will have the biggest impact on American history, Ralph Nader, Jill Stein, or R.FK Jr. What are the choices? Nader, Kennedy, or Stein? Yeah, RFK Jr. It's got to be Nader. Yeah, it's got to be Nader. I think that it's also usually a trick question because you go further back, you have better odds of impacting.

Nader for his pre-pre-presidential run stuff. Yeah, very important figure. Had much more of an impact. I mean, Jill Stein has had basically no impact. And RFK Jr. used to be an environmentalist. And now he's whatever the fuck he is. So, yeah, I just don't see much there. Okay. If Taylor Swift helps saves democracy, will you listen to her music?

Sure. Like, just once? I mean, that would still be a big lift for me to even get through one album. Yeah. Oh, an album? You said like a song. I'll do a song. I'll do too. You wouldn't even do an album for saving democracy? Like if she saved democracy, she doesn't.

Need me listening? Does she need it? Well, if that was the deal. If it was the deal. Oh, I need to listen to it in order for democracy to be saved. That's not how Seamus wrote the question. Oh, okay. Well, that is an interesting premise. Oh, okay. I mean, then I would listen to it, even though it would be like water torture, usually to get it to stop. I'd give away my best friend's secrets, but I don't know why y'all hate her so much. I couldn't name a single song of hers, but like her music doesn't make me want to jump out a window. It doesn't make me want to open my ears. Okay.

You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't hate her at all. Like, as a person, I think that what she does for young girls is great. But, like, when we're talking about talent and who she's put up against, is absolutely ridiculous. But if democracy rests on it, I just hope that nobody's like, Danielle, it's either democracy or fascism, name a song, because then we're fucking. You know what I'm saying? Unless it's like her song is called Taylor. Like I, you know, we're doomed.

We're doomed. All right. Who's a writer or journalist who regularly put out stuff this year that you really think should be read more? Oh, that's a good one. Ooh. John Byrd Murdoch, who we just had on. I think he's been doing incredible stuff lately and is really underrated. I will say, and she's been on this show, Danielle Campomore, puts out incredible

reporting on abortion, on women, on just patriarchy. She's an incredible writer. Was At Today is now back to being a freelance. Yeah, really good writing. I will go with, and she's been a guest on the show, Carrie Howley, whose book bottoms up and the devil laughs, a journey through the Deep State, was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times just recently. But she also writes, she writes long features for New York Magazine. And even when it's a topic that is not generally of interest to me, her writing is so good that whatever she writes is absolutely fascinating. And I think she's one of the best American writers that we've got. Last question. The next Republican debate becomes a wrestling match.

Who's your money on? I mean, he's got to be Christy, right? Chris, it's got to be Christy. See, I don't think he's agile enough. I don't think it matters. It's about the class, the way class. I go with. him. I guess it depends. If DeSantis has like spikes that come out of his high heel boots, then maybe him. Nikki Haley, she might be the one who just doesn't quit, which would make her tough. Also, her rage towards Vivek. I definitely bet against him going out first. Oh, he's definitely the first one eliminated. Yeah. I mean, he would definitely need to tap out. Yeah, we'd be a tag team, you know, all of them against him.

is how it would start. Yeah, he's done. You haven't asked a favorite video game of the year. That's a good point, Andy. What's your favorite video game of the year? That's Alan Wake 2. One of the best games ever made. Oh, okay.

Danielle. What? I'll go with what Andy said. I played a single one this year. Legend of Zelda Ocarito of Time. I will tell you that my girlfriend asks every month for some type of console. Oh.

And the answer to that is absolutely not. You have one at your place. Enjoy it. That's why the switch comes in handy because you could bring it to other places. Nope. Bruce Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations, where Jacob Ware is a research fellow. In addition to many other credentials, they also both teach at Georgetown University's Walsh School. of foreign service. And together they've written a new book out January 2nd titled God, Guns and

Sedition, Far Right Terrorism in America, which traces the origins of American right-wing terrorism to present day and offers solutions to our homegrown problem. They join me now. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Of course. Thank you. So let's start at the beginning, since I found that usually works out well. Your first chapter is titled Accelerationism Reborn. And as you point out, Accelerationism is a term that originally referred to the Marxist strategy of revolution, but has now been co-opted by the radical right. So what is accelerationism and how did it come to play a role in the rise of far-right terrorism? Accelerationism is a strategy of terrorism that calls for revolutionary acts of violence

in order to accelerate some kind of cataclysmic, catastrophic apocalypse, which the extremists will then be able to rebuild in the aftermath in their own eyes. The far right has used this strategy really since the origins of the modern American movement. Particularly in our book, we trace it to the publication of a book called The Turner Diaries in 1978, written by a prominent neo-Nazi called William Luther Pierce. A number of events occur in this book, including a race war, including a bombing of the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. And a lot of extremists today point to this book, but also to the kind of violence that it captures, as being the blueprint or the model for successful revolution.

And so a lot of the acts of violence that we've seen in the past five to ten years have sought to advance violence for that end goal. I would add it's a strategy that the far left is used as well as the far right. The common denominator is it's designed to use violence to foment chaos and disorder and to bring down an existing system. And what the book tries to bring out is that this strategy, was certainly prevalent in violent far-right extremism, for instance, in the early 1980s. The difference was it at a much more limited reach in the pre-internet, pre-social media era. And since then, especially over the past decade, the power of accelerationism, I think, has been demonstrated by the fact that many of its adherence who have committed acts of violence have live streamed their attacks, have left detailed manifestos often on social media, and have sought to sort of set in motion a brushfire. that they hope will turn into a conflagration. Now, 40 years ago, that was much more difficult to

acquire any momentum for. Unfortunately, in the 2020s, with the power and with the reach of social media, accelerationism as a strategy, becomes much more accessible in this hope of fomenting chaos and disorder that envelops an entire country, becomes not necessarily likely, but certainly more possible. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to get more into the role of both the Turner Diaries and the internet a bit later. But before, I do. One of the things that I really liked about the book is that it makes the case that what we're seeing now in terms of far-right terrorism isn't anything new. You write that it's merely the latest manifestations of a movement and threat that have been gathering momentum since the 1970s and that have

been almost hypersonically empowered by social media. And I want to talk about the underpinnings of this movement. These movements are obviously, painfully so, racist and white supremacist. But it seemed to me, and I'm wondering if it's fair to say, that in large part, the movement's origins are in anti-communist and anti-Jewish thought. Well, yes, I mean, there's certainly a tremendous overlap between the, let's say, founding fathers of the modern violent extremist far right with anti-communist movements that first surfaced in the 1950s and also in this self-styling of what they see is the true essence of patriotism. Of course, you know, patriotism means different things to different people and everybody always claims they're the ultimate patriot. But that's

certainly a big part of it. You're absolutely right, I think unfortunately and tragically, to fasten on the Jewish dimension, because hand and glove with this overarching ideology is, of course, the classic historical anti-Semitic tropes of Jews not only being concerned with making money and being greedy and being dishonest, but also of seeking to control the world and seeking to dominate the world through banking, seeking, as we hear often today in the great replacement theory that this is another ideology that's very prominent in violent far-right extremism, this idea that nefarious Jewish and other international forces are seeking to depopulate countries of their white Anglo-Saxon character by bringing in lots of immigrants.

And actually, I would say that immigration or anti-immigration is really part of this movement, too. You know, we forget that the most restrictive immigration laws passed in the United States. were in 1924. The Ku Klux Klan was behind them. They banned immigration in the United States by Jews, particularly Jewish people from Eastern Europe, Catholics from Southern Europe, and also Asians, and that those laws remained enforced literally for half a century. And one sees the movement that we write about in the book in the late 1970s and early 1980s, first gaining traction and then attempting to translate into that into momentum by seizing on the immigration issue. I mean, In the 1970s, it was basically the boat people coming from Vietnam, especially to the Gulf

coast of Texas and competing with shrimpers that have been working those waters for decades, if not, you know, for generations. And we see today how immigration, anti-immigration concerns about the border have once again also reignited this movement combined with, as we've just been discussing, the power of social media just to elevate and focus attention on it. Yeah, you actually have a quote from James Ellison in the book. he was the leader of CSA, Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord. And he says, the Jews have declared war on our race, promoting race mixing, and thereby polluting the pure seed of God. And that, to me,

is, I mean, that is what we hear now when we hear about the Great Replacement Theory, as you just said. Exactly. You know, and that's, you've hit the nail on what's one of the most disturbing trends in the book is what I was just talking about in the 1970s and 1980s was peripheral, was on the fringe. As you just noted, we hear that increasingly in what's now become mainstream political discourse, even within the context of a presidential campaign. And that's fundamentally worrisome. One of the things you say in the book is that no other book has had so pervasive or sustained an influence over violent far-right extremism in the United States as the Turner Diaries. And I guess this flows right into, it started before this, but it certainly flows into the likes

of the 1990s militia movement. And of course, Timothy McVeigh, who was a huge fan of the Turner Diaries? Turner Diaries is a remarkable book. It was written by someone named William Luther Pierce under the pseudonym using Andrew McDonald. Pierce himself had a degree in physics, taught at the University of Oregon and at West Virginia University. He attended Caltech for a time. Certainly was not a stupid man. And part of his brilliance as a Nazi propagandist was that he headed a group called the National Alliance that pumped out exactly the kind of racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic literature, one would expect. But in the 1970s, Pierce fastened upon a different approach. He said, I can reach far more people by writing, I mean, it's a horrible

novel, but his idea was that in fictionalizing that he will attract a wider audience. And in fact, he was right. The Turner Diaries is estimated to have sold between 200,000 and half a million copies. Just as you pointed out in the question, Timothy McVeigh was very heavily influenced by the Turner Diaries, in fact, earned pocket money or beer money by selling the Turner Diaries and gun shows while he was serving in the United States Army. When he was arrested in Oklahoma City after bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office building on August 19th, 1995, pages of the Turner Diaries were found in a folder next to him. And the reason I think the Turner Diaries has had this remarkable longevity. In fact, up until January 6th, 2021, you could order it from Amazon. You can still

acquire it fairly easily, was because it laid out, I mean, it's not great literature by any stretch of the imagination, but it laid out as McVeigh adopted it, a blueprint for revolution, for race war in essence. And one of the many sort of key passages in the Turner Diaries is the bombing of the FBI headquarters, the Hoover building in downtown Washington, D.C., by a truck bomb that enters into the underground garage. That was exactly what McVeigh did in Oklahoma city. Now, the Murrah building did not have an underground garage, but in his surveillance, McVeigh realized, firstly, don't forget this was a different era before 9-11, he discovered that he could just park this rented, you know, U-Haul truck, basically, packed with explosives,

ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer mixed with racing fuel. And there was an indented loading dock. So the curb came in, and it was only 11 feet from the side of the Murah building. And he realized He initially actually had thought of it as a suicide attack, something that we've become very familiar with in the Middle East and South Asia in the 21st century. So this is already five or six years before the turn of the century and before 9-11. McVeigh originally conceived it as a suicide attack because he didn't think you could get close enough. But on his surveillance, he realized he could just park it in this indented loading dock and walk away. And what he must have seen in his surveillance in that morning when he parked the truck is that right next to sort of the delivery entrance was a preschool. where over a dozen toddlers and infants were killed.

I mean, this is where people who worked in the federal bureaucracy were able to deposit their children and then go upstairs to work. So you must have seen that there was this daycare facility there, but as he famously said to one of the FBI agents during his interrogation, when he was asked, couldn't you have blown up the building in the middle of the night and made your point? And he said, no, we needed a body count to make our point. And that's tragically what we see.

And really was one of the gateways to terrorism in the 21st century, where terrorists are just completely enveloped with the idea that they have to achieve higher rates of lethality in order to draw attention to themselves and their cause. I actually read the Turner Diaries back in the Tim McVeigh days, and I remember thinking it's one of the few dystopian future novels written from the point of view of the dystopia, because usually it's the other way around. But I want to jump ahead here. Talk about the effect of Barack Obama being elected, because I am, you know, to this day,

convinced that we're dealing as we speak with a lot of people who's, brains were broken by the fact that a black man was elected president of the United States. And of course, it happened at the same time as the rise of social media. Well, we've already spoken about rape replacement theory. If you live with a worldview that says that white people are being replaced, what more proof do you need than the election of a black president? We write in the book that this is a cataclysmic moment for the far right. and it leads to a huge surge in both violent activism and support for this movement. It's not just him, too.

I think three consecutive new presidents have all had a considerable impact on the movement. President Barack Obama's election obviously leads to a rise in violent activism. You see this mobilizing and organizing against the first black president. We write in the book, of course, that he was granted by the Bush administration's Secret Service protection earlier than any other presidential candidate in history, simply because, of the volume of threats against him. So Obama's kind of the inadvertent catalyst of the modern violent far-right. President Trump's election, which follows certain statements and behaviors that had appealed

to factions of the far-right, leads to a feeling of empowerment and victory, which then emboldens the violent far-right. And then President Biden's election, of course, was met with the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories about elections and governments that leads to arguably the most serious, not in terms of death toll, but in terms of impact event in our book, which is, of course, January 6th, 2021. So we find that elections here in the United States, especially presidential elections, are really important moments in the trajectory of this violent far right. They respond to them in ways that are very consequential.

I realize there's not enough time for you to go through the plan you lay out in the last part of your book, which is titled Countering Far Right Terrorism. But I guess, give me some broad strokes about what we do now. in the year of our Lord 2023 when we have QAnon, the proud boys, conspiracy theorists of all stripes, January 6th, as you mentioned, and the very real chance that Donald Trump will be president again. What can we do about all of this? Can we do anything or is the genie just out of the bottle? I think one of the accomplishments of our book and is we unpack a lot of themes. So it's a chronological narrative, but we also kind of weave a lot of themes through that. And those themes

will ultimately be what corresponds to the counterterrorism recommendations that we lay out in that final paragraph. So communication is a big theme. Extremists have always, far right extremists have always been on the cutting edge of social media. That is now the front line of counterterrorism. So obviously we have quite a few recommendations on the social media front. We also talk about digital literacy and the concept of trying to train the American people to be more resilient against disinformation as being spread by political actors and also adversaries. We talk about tactics and targeting and we reflect on the fact that the kind of

bombing that Timothy McVeigh performed and that they've written about in the Turner Diaries is far more rare these days. These days we typically see mass shootings using AR-15 rifles. So we talk about the kind of gun control measures you would need. One of the themes is the lack of strong legal tools that you can use against these individuals, especially in the left of boom space. So before an attack has happened, we don't have domestic terrorism legislation in the United States. So when you look at all these cases that we write about, you'll see that none of them, not a single person in our book has a federal domestic terrorism charge. So we write about how you would responsibly and safely implement a domestic terrorism law. And the end goal of that is to ultimately create,

first of all, a stronger legal regiment against this movement, but ultimately create a healthier, more vibrant democracy that allows everybody a voice and pushes back against divisive actors that's the end goal we have to get to. And the scary thing for me, Andy, is, of course, that is not going to happen in 2024, right? We're not going to have that healthy, trusted, vibrant democracy because we have candidates in the system who are rebelling against certain elements of democracy that, you know, most Americans see as fundamental. So, 2024, I believe, is going to be a tumultuous year for this country. And I think, unfortunately, that's why our book is well-timed, because it tells a story of a movement that's again going to rear its head next year

and hopefully gives at least some blueprint for how we can start to push back. I was only able to barely scratch the surface in this interview, and we are running at a time. But Bruce, I want to give you, in like two minutes or so, I want to give you last word. Well, I just want to supplement with the Jacob said and emphasize the threat is to both parties. I mean, people look at this book and they tend to think, well, this is only about, you know, one party threatening another. But as you know, from the cover of the book, it has a scaffold and a hangman's noose in front of the United States Capitol. And that hangman's news was meant for an elected Republican vice presidents.

I mean, this kind of violence cuts across parties, really, and is against everything that our Constitution and democracy stands for. I mean, what I'd like to say is just, you know, taking the 30,000-foot view, what I really like about our conclusions is we divide them into three buckets, in essence, where we look at things that should be done now that will have an immediate, or more or less. short-term effect, and that really revolves around strengthening the regulatory framework, some of the legal remedies and reforms that Jacob talked about. Then we identify things that will have an impact over the medium term, the next five to 10 years, and that will strengthen civil society. And then we talk about breaking the cycle that has perpetuated racism, anti-Semitism, anti-LGB, xenophobia, and so on, and that can bring us back in the next generation to greater national unity. So the plan we lay out envisions things we can do now and should start doing,

but also things that if we commence will pay off long-term dividends. So we're trying to look forward and break the cycle, really, that is sustained this movement. The book is God, Guns and Sedition, far-right terrorism in America. Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, thank you so much for being here. As I said, I barely scratched the surface of this book, so I encourage everyone to go out and read the whole thing. I think it's very important and as I believe Jacob said, very well-timed. Thanks so much, gentlemen. Thank you. You're very welcome. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal. Former or retired officer Edwin Raymond and author of the new book, An Inconvenient Cop, My Fight to Change Policing in America. I want to start off one with a bit about your story.

You know, I'll ask, why as a black man in 2008 did you decide to join the police department? First, thank you for having me. You know, this is a subject that we have seen just isn't going to go away on its own. This is something that we have to continuously work at. To start with that question, I guess for many, it's counterintuitive, but I actually chose to join because of the detrimental experiences that I was having with police, starting at about the age of 15, 20, about 18. I made the decision at 18 and actually became a cop at 22. But it was because of those negative encounters that it just, I didn't understand why if I wasn't involved in criminality, why I was being treated this way. And what happened at 18, that was quite different from all

the previous encounters is that it wasn't a white officer. When it was a white officer, it was easy for me to just write off as typical racism. But when I was getting the same, probably even worse treatment from a, it was an Afro-Latino cop, that's what made me say, I don't know. I got to join this thing to see what's going on. One, I want to commend you for making that decision because oftentimes, I mean, you know, I am a black woman and I grew up in the suburbs of New York and had a very different experience with policing because I grew up in a majority white area. And it wasn't until I made, you know, the transition into living in more diverse. areas did I see firsthand, not just through reporting, not just through the news, the treatment that black people and people of color got, but particularly at the hands of officers that look

like them. And so can you just like delve into that as to you would think it would be the opposite? But is there a sense that black and brown officers need to prove something even more when they are on the force and policing their own people. Yeah. And, you know, that's typically the go-to. You know, I've heard it a million times. I've even heard it. People have even thrown it at me whenever they're having a negative encounter.

Not unlawful or anything, but no type of brutality or abuse, but just negative encounter if I'm on the scene, you know, I would get things like that. And it's not to say that that doesn't happen. But overall, it's, you know, and I write about this, it's normative social behavior. You essentially conform to the environment that you're in. It's really a form of tribal. is more than anything. This is part of human behavior. You understand? Just because someone joins a police department, they're not immune to what most people is the whole one in Rome adage, you know?

So if you're in the police department, this is what it is. You're simply doing as you're told. One of the first lessons that I've learned, even in the police academy, was how much offices don't have autonomy and who they are and how they react. Your own personal values, morals, your ethics. This is not really something that the police leadership cares about. You're a pun. This is what the objective is. And this is what you're going to do. And the particular thing that I learned that made me replay my own encounters with cops and maybe really pay attention on how my peers were interacting with the public was the quota system. Like you hear about it, but you don't realize how everything goes back to those numbers. And the racism is already baked into the formula.

So it doesn't matter the race of the cop, the ethnicity of the cop, et cetera. If you simply go along with what you're told to do, which is enforced in so-called high crime areas, which are black and brown areas, but overly enforced innocuous infractions, things that happen everywhere, but we're going to go hard in the black and brown parts of town. You're essentially contributing to discriminatory policing whether you realize it and I realized so many of my colleagues just didn't understand that concept. They just saw it as they're doing their jobs. They weren't making up the infractions, but they were, you know, imagine locking someone up for biting into a jelly donut and a little bit of jelly spews out of the donut.

We're not doing that in Park Slope and Upper West Side and other white areas, but we're doing it off of these small technicalities in black and brown areas. The discrimination starts there. Before we get Eric Garner, before we get George Floyd, it starts with that initial stop. And when I realized that that initial stop wasn't officers acting how they wanted to, but more so just trying to meet the demands of pressure and quotas, that's what I said, wow, okay, this needs to stop. This is it. Mathematically, if we get rid of quotas, we're just going to end up with better. of policing automatically because these negative encounters are not going to happen as often. Yeah. Talk to us about the quotas. Talk to us about like your experience with when these numbers

would come out and what would happen if you weren't meeting those numbers. Like talk to us about that so we can get a better picture of what the pressure is. I actually went through the academy six months and I was left confused mainly because from six months of training, I couldn't see why I got treated the way that I did by cops. I couldn't see why my peers, when I was in high school and even a little bit after, got treated the way that we did. Because in the academy, if it was up to the actual training on paper, it doesn't add up. It was day one after the academy on actual patrol that we were given enforcement quotas.

It was a trifecta. It was 410 and 10, which means every 28-day period, to be exact. You have to get four arrests, 10 tickets, and 10 stopping for us. That was the minimum. And that's when I said, oh, interesting. At first, I'm in a rookie unit. I'm under the impression that they want us to focus on this now so that when we leave the rookie unit and things happen organically,

we'll know how to handle ourselves. But then I realized the pressure just never, it just, it never eased up. It continued. And I started watching what my colleagues, those that I were, that I was in the academy with, people that I know are not necessarily bad people, I started seeing what they were doing for these numbers. you know, and even my own partner sometimes, which was a woman, you know, several times I've had to pull our side after and say, what was that? And her answer was, oh, I'm going on vacation

next week, so I want to get it out the way. Wow. Yeah, exactly. You're supposed to work 20 days out of the month. If you're on vacation, that eliminates five of those days, in 15 days, the NYPD doesn't recalculate the quota to say, well, based that, because you're only there 75% of the time, you only need 75% of the quota. You still have to produce 100% of that quota every month. So, you know, I would watch her go so much harder and just more petty. Someone charged their phone using the MTA, the subway socket in the subway and was arrested for theft of service. Like, I'm watching these things happen in black and brown areas. Yeah. It gets far worse. It gets far worse. Someone was arrested. It became very violent,

unfortunately, because he wasn't complying. He was still drinking out of the cup and the sergeant wanted to charge him with littering. But, you know, he did place it on the ground. And that technicality made the sergeant wanted charge him with littering. He didn't comply. He ended up getting maced. It was a violent scene, unnecessary scene of brutality. And I'm thinking, wow, look at what these numbers caused. So again, I start seeing situations happen all throughout New York City, even other. And then I start doing the research and realizing that this type of policing,

quota-driven, broken windows policing, it's not exclusive to New York. It starts in New York. But New York basically sold this all around the country because a lot of police departments, when they're looking for new leadership, they go to. retiring or recently retired NYPD chiefs. So what do the chiefs do? They recreate what they know in New York. And now you have it in Miami through Chief Timony and Chief McCarthy brings it to Chicago and Bratton brings it to L.A. Ferguson, Missouri, if you read the Ferguson report, one of the main issues that they were issuing tickets in Ferguson, you know, they had quotas so they can raise revenue. That's another,

part of this. Yep. Those tickets become money. You have these quotas, which you very explicitly, through your memoir, but through other interviews that you've done, have said this has nothing to do with public safety. Someone charging a phone and being arrested for that has nothing to do with public safety. When you start to realize that, though, I'm trying to understand what is the rationale for a quota system in the first place? Yeah. So they deny the quota because it's unlawful. What they don't deny, though, is broken windows policing. Essentially, the broken windows theory says if we over-enforce innocuous infractions, it will prevent

larger things from happening down the line. It's a complete theory. It's never been proven. There's nothing empirical to support it. Even the biggest champions of this theory have been questioned about the lack of empirical support. And they've admitted that former Commissioner Bratton said he knows there's nothing to back it scientifically, but his gut tells him it's working. Broken windows, the idea, again, that you over-enforce small things before larger things, happening. That's essentially what they say. So, yeah, you're going to keep enforcing small things and there's going to be a lot of collateral damage. Every now and then we will get that guy that has a gun. Every now and then, we will get that guy that's robbing people. And that night in jail, that night in central bookings

might be the difference between someone getting robbed and that. Every now and then we will get that person that's wanted for something major, all because we chose to focus on the small thing like jumping the turnstile or open container of alcohol. And honestly, every now and then, it does happen, you know, but there has to be a cost-to-benefit analysis. Is it worth losing the entire community because every now and then we're able to get something major? And my estimate is, it's not. After you've seen this, you've been a whistleblower. And I can't imagine that that at all has made your life easy. Is there a right way to do policing? Like, you know, we've gone through so many different phases of trying to reform policing, trying to reform the criminal justice system. And

And, you know, we've gone through places where it is abolish the police. We've gone to places where it is about community policing. Is there a right way to police in your opinion? And if so, what does that look like? There definitely is a right way to police. And what's heart-wrenching when, you know, when I get some version of this question is people forget that there are demographics that are already receiving that. Literally how what white folks already get can be.

applied to other areas and other demographics also. Part of the problem is the people for decades who have been in the leadership positions to come up with a solution for the issues that plagued certain inner city neighborhoods because we have to be transparent and honest about the fact that some of the issues that we're dealing with in certain parts of the inner city neighborhoods and neighborhoods that experience more violence are not happening in white areas. Again, if the over enforcement of small things that happen everywhere is the answer, it just doesn't make sense because think of a direct correlation. If it's true that open containers and marijuana and, you know, bikes on sidewalks and all these things and jumping to turnstow after service, if it's true that all these things being enforced can stop violent crime, then there's

the subtext is that violent crime is connected to that behavior. The data already shows that all of those things I just mentioned happen in white areas also, especially when it comes to substance. You know, Department of Health Statistics have showed in white areas, well, white Americans use marijuana, alcohol, you name it, in some areas at higher rates than black and brown folks. So the idea that this behavior is the reason for violent crime. So we simply focus on this behavior. It's an upstream, proactive way of dealing with violent crime as a farce. The people who have been in charge for decades, what they have failed to incorporate in all of their solutions is literally just a human element in all of this. 30 years ago, because of crack cocaine, narcotics teams kicked down doors. Today, it's heroin and we have injection sites. You know, we have needle programs.

And the difference is one is criminalized and treated the way things that are criminalized get treated. And the other substance is, again, the people who are on the receiving ends, are just treated with more of a human approach. That's what's been missing from a lot of this, just a humane way to deal with it. And, you know, I've had white colleagues, especially after I became a super, who I know are not bad people, but I would watch many times in the hood, they would overcompensate. You know, they'd be extra aggressive. And the ones that I had the relationships with, you know, we'd talk about this. And it took a while, but sometimes they didn't even realize they were doing it,

but it was their own biases that, you know, before they ever put on a police uniform, they grew up in Suffolk and Nassau County and the only black people they interacted with were people that were going to, the cashiers at the mall, you understand? So everything coming from the media, even our own, even black media, it's really not the best. You know, if you didn't ever meet a black person and actually, you were never actual friends with a black person and you watch BT all day, you know, you probably not end up with the best perception of black people. You're watching, you know, I hate to say it, but, you know, it's the 50th anniversary of hip hop. And one conversation that's been missing is the true, you know, how hip hop has affected so much of American culture and society,

even globally for black folks in the last 50 years, but that's a different subject. But when you, when this is the source of your media, And now you're 23, 24, 25 years old. You got a badge and a gun, and you're in the middle of Brownsville, Brooklyn, or Harlem. I can start to understand why someone thinks they have to be extra aggressive needlessly. I can start to understand the thinking behind why you want to come off tough. But these are all things that need to be addressed because thankfully, many of them, when they start working in these communities, the ones that are willing to have genuine human interaction

with people, they realize it's, you know, everyone's just trying to make a living. Everyone's just trying to find life. Everyone's just trying to make it to the next day. It's not what you think it is. It's an iota of the neighborhood that's actually involved in violent criminality. So there's no reason to treat so many other people like this with a broad brush. Do you have hope that there can be change in policing? In short, yes.

And I just left the police department just a few months ago. If I didn't have 15 years of actual experience, I don't know if I would have answered the same. Because the cynicism that's so much. many people have, I might be, I might have been susceptible to it. What we need of justice-minded officers to get into the positions of power. Since I've been a whistleblower and activists in the last seven years, over 2,000 cops around the nation, even some in other parts of the world, have reached out. They're not willing to risk everything like I did, but they understand the system for what it is. They can see its detriments despite being employed by it. We need to get those people

in every room where decisions are being made. Really, we need. need them to be in charge of police departments. If we can get folks to believe that justice-minded officers exist and empower them, we will get a completely different system and not that long of a time. That's the uphill battle. Like, even myself with everything that I've sacrificed and done, there are some that refuse to accept me for who I am. They're like, I don't know. You know, if you understand that this system is so detrimental, why would you join them? That's something I would get all the time, especially after George Floyd, you know, but then people, when people did a little bit more research, they'll say, you know what, I can at least tell you genuine. I just don't agree

with your methods, which I can I can respect. So again, we can get a different system. We just have to start making the right demands. One of those demands is the justice minded. We need to find them, empower them, and we will get something better. Thank you so much for the work that you've been doing for making the time for the new abnormal folks. The book is an inconvenient cop, my fight to change policing in America, Edwin Raymond. with John Sternfeld. Thank you so much for your work and really appreciate your time.

Absolutely. I'll be back anytime you need. Thank you. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend

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