The NPR Politics Podcast - How To Make The Public Safer? It's A Lot Harder Than Just Hiring More Police

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

A special episode from our friends at Code Switch:In the wake of violence and tragedies, people are often left in search of ways to feel safe again. That almost inevitably to conversations about the role of police. On today's episode, we're talking to the author and sociologist Alex Vitale, who argues that many spaces in U.S. society over-rely on the police to prevent problems that are better addressed through other means. Doing so, he says, can prevent us from properly investing in resources and programs that could make the country safer in the long run.Subscribe: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitchThis episode was fact-checked by Alyssa Jeong Perry and Christina Cala. Summer Thomad, Alyssa Jeong Perry, Diba Mohtasham and Christina Cala contributed to the production.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey everyone, it's Asma Khalid, and today on our show we're featuring an episode from our friends over at the Code Switch podcast. It's about how the simplest policy responses often are not the best ones. And for those of you all who are interested, we'll leave a link to subscribe to Code Switch in the show notes.

And we will be back in your feeds for regularly scheduled programming tomorrow following the January 6th hearings. You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. And it has been a rough couple of weeks. I mean, we often have rough weeks on the race beat, but between the mass shooting in Buffalo and then the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, it's been a lot. So after that shooting in uvalde people were angry and frustrated both because the details that come out are more horrific and disturbing with each passing day but also because if you're over the age of i don't know 10 you have been through several rounds of this. A gunman goes on a killing spree in a school

somewhere in the United States. The grieving families are forever fractured. Elected officials then dutifully offer up their requisite thoughts and prayers. There are calls for stricter background checks before someone is able to buy a gun. There are calls for assault weapons bans. There are calls for stricter background checks before someone is able to buy a gun. There are calls for assault weapons bans. There are calls for lawmakers in Washington to pass so-called common sense gun laws. But when these things have happened in recent years, there have also been very loud calls to go in a really different direction. Meeting these gunmen head on with more force, with more guns. There has been clamoring to arm teachers with guns. And of course, there were calls to put more police in schools. The thinking there is that if more responsible, trained adults were in schools, armed and present, they could maybe

prevent massacres like the one at Robb Elementary from happening, or at the very least, they could intervene sooner. We can do a lot of things, and Texas has done a lot of things after the Santa Fe shooting. Obviously, we have to do more. We have to harden these targets so no one can get in ever except through one entrance. Maybe that would help.

I've introduced legislation to say schools like this elementary school behind me can get federal grants to harden their security, to put in bulletproof doors, bulletproof glass, to put in armed police officers to protect kids. $1.3 billion in federal funds. One of the things you've talked about is arming teachers. Is that a possibility in Texas? I absolutely think it's a possibility. I think that's something that should be done. They're the ones on the ground. They're right there. If we're going to save these kids and stop mass shootings from occurring,

we have to have people that are prepared and trained to react appropriately and quickly. Within minutes, there was a school police officer. That voice that you're hearing belongs to Alex Vitale. Within minutes after that, there were local police. Minutes after that, there were the local SWAT team, a BORTAC unit, which is a border patrol, you know, SWAT team. The issue here is not a shortage of people with guns. He runs the Policing and Social Justice Project

at Brooklyn College, and he argues that keeping schools, and really the public at large, safe involves thinking of solutions that go far beyond policing. Solutions that get at the root causes of some of this violence, and that might help prevent it before it even starts. Policing, he says, is not the answer. The answer is more complicated than that. You know, there's no magical switch that if we could just find it, we could turn off all police, right? This is a long-term project of transformation. Alex says there are effective and meaningful ways to reduce violence in schools and to keep children safer.

But he says putting more police in American schools or arming teachers, that's just a terrible idea. So I asked him to explain. Sure. violence is that when we introduce more guns into an environment, they are not used to, quote unquote, get the bad guys. They end up generating accidental shootings, suicides, increases in interpersonal shootings, and the deaths increase. You know, after Parkland, Florida, there was talk about arming teachers and some teachers did get authorization to carry guns. And immediately we saw accidental shootings happening. In one case, a teacher was displaying the weapon and it discharged, hit the ceiling,

and the bullet fragments hit students. Wow. Fortunately, none of them were seriously injured, but imagine multiplying that by a thousand or 10,000 with the mass arming of teachers. So the teacher was just displaying the gun in class, like just to show it. Well, it was actually supposed to be a lesson on gun safety. Oh, wow. The irony. Yes. So despite whatever people think are their best intentions, when we bring more guns into schools, it's going to mean more people get shot. You also mentioned that when more officers are brought into schools, that has a disproportionately negative effect on students of color, on students who have disabilities, on queer students. Why is that decades of research that has failed to find

any real public safety benefit to school policing. Instead, what we find is that policing criminalizes youthful behavior that is deemed disorderly, disruptive, things that historically would have been dealt with as disciplinary issues. And what we've seen in the data, even the data collected by the Federal Department of Education, is that the burden of this policing falls on exactly the kinds of more vulnerable populations you mentioned. And it's producing these tremendous disparities, in part because school police deem those populations as disorderly. Whether it's because of racial intolerance, whether it's because of intolerance of gender difference, ignorance about disabilities, etc.,

those young people's behavior gets defined as disorderly and then criminal and is subjected to school policing. I'm thinking about that infamous viral video in South Carolina of a 16-year-old Black girl getting yanked from her desk and thrown to the ground by a school police officer. Look, this case is so emblematic of the problem because that child was in crisis. That child had recently lost a parent and was unable to focus at school for obvious reasons. And instead of linking that student

to counseling services, mentoring, giving them space to deal with their grief, their behavior was interpreted as aggressive defiance, disruption of the classroom, and was immediately criminalized with violence. And the friend who knew that this was what was going on and videotaped the incident was also criminalized by the school police. So if your argument is that police do not help, what do you think needs to be done to prevent situations like the tragedy that we saw in Uvalde last week? So it's not that there aren't public safety challenges in schools, whether it's students engaged in fights, disruptive behaviors, or these incredibly rare and tragic school shooting incidents. So first of all, school

shootings, which, you know, just break our heart and capture the imagination, are very rare. And the chances of a student getting killed in a school building in the United States is about one in 10 million. And we built this entire security apparatus around something that is incredibly rare. And then it turns out policing actually doesn't deal with very well. So we need to take a step back, and we need to start thinking about what are exactly the risks that students face, and what are the most effective ways of addressing these risks. Now, the Uvalde case is like, unfortunately, so many of these cases, which is that this was a young person who had been in crisis for an extended period of time. Students knew that this young person was a risk. The young person even posted things on social media leading up

to the attack. The FBI found that in 90% of school shootings, there were people who knew, who clearly knew ahead of time that this was a real risk of happening. And in some cases, actually reported it to police. But what do police do? They go and visit the young person, talk to them, but because no crime has happened of the criminal legal system as much as we possibly can and create early warning systems that are run by counselors, teachers, school officials. that young people don't report fellow students as being at risk is that they don't want to be the kid in high school who gets their friend arrested, which is what happens in these cases, right? Who get the police involved. So we have to take it out of the criminal legal system and say, look, this kid in Uvalde was self-harming, was crying out for help, and school officials did nothing except get elementary school kids to draw posters about why bullying is bad. That is not an anti-bullying program. That's a PR stunt.

We need real interventions. Uvalde is spending 40% of its municipal budget on policing, has a SWAT team for a town of like 20,000 people, but has completely inadequate mental health services, completely inadequate numbers of school counselors, has no meaningful early intervention programs. So we let these problems fester out of control until someone does something horrific. And then we say the solution is to put more guns in the schools. Uvalde also has a giant law enforcement presence of all kinds. It's the home to a border patrol station, which is a major employer of people in the town. In fact, in the initial fog of what happened after the shooting, there was some confusion as to which law enforcement agencies were doing what, right? Like the initial reports were that these were Uvalde police officers who were wrestling

people to the ground, wrestling parents to the ground who were trying to get into the building. It turned out those were border patrol agents. But it speaks to how many and how big a law enforcement presence is in the area that people are confusing which agency was doing what at any given time. You know, within minutes, there was a school police officer. Within minutes after that, there were local police. Minutes after that, there were the local SWAT team, a BORTAC unit, which is a border patrol SWAT team. The issue here is not a shortage of people with guns. The issue is that there are too many guns and a culture of gun violence in

our society. And we have to quit thinking that no matter how well-trained, well-deployed, well-armed the police are, that they're going to be able to prevent these things. Because no matter how quickly and aggressively they show up, people are already going to be dead. You say that events like the shooting at Robb Elementary School are rare, but shootings in the United States are not rare. They're really common. They are so common that they don't even like register to most of us. So how do we square this argument that what we need is less policing with the fact that violence in America is a quotidian part of life. Well, so is policing, and it doesn't seem to be helping, right? I mean, we have a massive infrastructure of policing in this country, and yet the violence continues. So I think we need to really ask some tough questions about why we put all our eggs in

the basket of an institution that doesn't appear to be doing what we think it does. And we need to understand that that intervention comes with a tremendous amount of costs. Almost 7% of all homicides in the United States are committed by police officers. That's a huge amount of violence in our society. I found cities where there were years when 15% of all homicides in that city were committed by police. Bakersfield, California, for instance. So we have a tremendous problem of police violence. The American Public Health Association a few years ago issued a national resolution saying that police violence is a major public health problem in our society.

It's also diverting huge amounts of resources away from the kinds of interventions that could help us reduce the amount of suffering, of alienation, of bullying, of interpersonal violence that leads to things like school shootings, and even other kinds of interpersonal beef-type shootings between people. So we have a growing body of evidence about community-based anti-violence initiatives, independent of the criminal legal system, that are proving tremendously effective at reducing the violence right now while we invest in longer-term strategies of community improvement, of individualized care to help us deal with the longer-term problems. Can you give us an example of those strategies? Sure. I'll give you a couple of examples. One is the Cure Violence model. This is a model that is rooted in a public

health analysis of violence. They hire people from communities where violence is a problem, and they hire people who themselves have a history of involvement in street life, gangs, violence, incarceration, but who have reached a point in their life where they're ready to do something positive to help the next young people break that cycle of violence. They engage in street mediation. They try to develop truces between groups who are kind of warring with each other. They try to involve high-risk young people in pro-social activities. And where these programs have been well-run well funded, they have dramatically reduced the number of shootings in comparison with similar communities that don't have these interventions. Another model is the advanced peace model that began in California and is beginning to spread across the country.

Advanced peace? Advanced peace. So this involves identifying young people at high risk for involvement in violence, enrolling them in job preparedness, social services, mental health counseling, and paying them to be engaged in those services, and providing financial incentives for meeting certain benchmarks so that it provides not just counseling and support services, but what is very needed by these young people, which is income support that can keep them out of black market activity that can be a contributor to violence. This program has been tremendously successful.

We've just launched five pilot sites here in New York City, and we need more of these kinds of right now, immediate targeted interventions. After the break. Yeah, part of the challenge, right, right is that for generations people have been told the only resource they can have to address their public safety concerns is policing stay with us y'all you're listening to code switch from npr NPR. Gene, just Gene, Code Switch. I've been talking to Alex Vitale, who runs the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, and one of his books is called the end of policing.

It's a title that freaks a lot of people out. When my editor lead the Nella interviewed you before for the coach was blog. There was some, some, uh, raised eyebrows. What's the main case that you're making in the end of policing. We have come to assume that policing is this incredibly effective cost-free intervention to deal with our public safety problems and that there's nothing else we can do. And what I'm trying to point out is that, and I've been a police scholar for over two decades, working in policing policy for over 30 years, people grossly overestimate the effectiveness of policing, fail to calculate the costs, and fail to consider what we could do other than policing. And for whatever the public safety problem is that you're concerned about, we have credible alternatives that we could be implementing right now that would allow us to reduce our

reliance on policing. We need to get police out of the drug business, out of the mental health crisis response business, out of schools, out of homeless outreach, out of sex work, out of gang suppression, and put in place interventions that try to lift people up, try to repair communities, try to create greater solidarity in our society. How does that argument intersect with or not intersect with these calls, these growing calls to abolish policing? You know, police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from other kinds of government interventions. And so once we have that analysis, we should understand that policing should be the tool of absolute last resort. If we can't figure out any other way to resolve a problem,

then we have policing as it exists now. But when confronted by a choice right now between should we put more school police in schools or hire more counselors, create more early warning systems, establish restorative justice programs, an abolitionist analysis helps us make the right decision in that moment. What do you think people misunderstand about that argument? Yeah, part of the challenge, right, is that for generations, people have been told the only resource they can have to address their public safety concerns is policing. When they go to community meetings, they're like, well, we'll get the police on that. But when they ask for a new recreation center for their kids, more school counselors, more employment, safer housing, they're told you can't

have those things. We're not going to pay for that. But if you want more police, we'll give you more police. And then they hear something on the news that misrepresents the movement that says those people want to take away all police and then you're on your own. Well, that doesn't sound very good to people, but that's not what we're saying. What we're saying is we want to build a whole new infrastructure of public safety that's not rooted in violence and racism. called Locking Up Our Own, which is about the role that black people, black elites, but not always black people in black neighborhoods, invest in parties in black neighborhoods, you know, whether it's the old church ladies or black elected officials played in mass incarceration. One of the things he said was in the late 80s, early 90s, when there was a spike in crime around

the country, was that there were as many people saying that actually policing would make things worse. And even the people who were saying we need more police were also making calls for other kinds of interventions like job training programs and better housing and things like that. But the thing that they kept getting was more police. That was the only policy response that was being acknowledged, right? Why do you think that is? I think we have to understand the role that policing plays in a larger set of political and economic relationships in our society. Let's first start with the case of DC. Remember, DC does not have full autonomy over their politics and budget. Congress plays a crucial oversight role that sets the parameters. And also the federal government plays a role with all cities because of the money it can bring to

bear to address problems that cities face. So what we saw happening in the 70s and 80s was this transition from a war on poverty, support cities, build up poor neighborhoods to neoliberal austerity. And by that, I mean, with the increasing globalization of the economy, the federal government took a hands-off approach to supporting local places and told them, basically, if you want economic activity in your city, you have to subsidize the already most successful economic actors in hopes that they'll bring jobs to your community. So this led to a race to the bottom of tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, subsidies for corporate investments that left these local places essentially bankrupt, unable to provide basic services. And this is what has produced mass homelessness, mass untreated mental health and substance abuse problems, mass involvement in black market activity like drugs and sex work and stolen goods. And then those problems, which

are at root economic, have been turned into problems of crime and disorder to be managed by So as long as big city mayors continue to embrace this austerity politics of tax breaks for downtown real estate deals at the expense of the neighborhoods, they're going to lean into policing. Because they need policing to keep a lid on all the social problems that this economic relationship is driving. So there's an organic connection here between really bad economic policies that are making inequality worse and turning our social problems over to the police to manage. I mean, after something like Yuval Day, I think a lot of people want to hold on to manage. I mean, after something like Uvalde, I think a lot of people want to hold on to something to feel safe and protected. I know you have kids.

I'm a new parent. This was the first news cycle for me with a story like this. And it's always hard to listen to and always hard to watch or cover these stories even. But it hit a lot differently now that I'm a parent myself. And I think a lot of people, like, want to feel that their kids are cops, if there were more cops in the neighborhood or something were to pop off that there'll be a police officer nearby that might be able to

attack my kid's daycare center or whatever. What would you say to those people? People like me, I guess. Well, first of all, you know, I was hit very hard by this. I'm from Texas. I have family, not far from you all day. I have kids who go to school. I have kids who ride the subway to get to school. You know, I'm deeply concerned about these things.

These are not abstract questions for me, but I think it's pretty clear to everyone listening today that policing did not help those kids. This is a myth. The police are not providing the kind of safety that we think that they are providing. Not because of bad intentions, not because they don't want to protect people. It is the wrong tool. The damage has already been done by the time they show up too, too often. And how many of the people who are like,

I want my kids safe by introducing more police into their lives, end up with kids in the criminal legal system over low-level stuff that shouldn't be a police matter? How many of those parents are going to end up with kids who are brutalized or even killed by police? You know, people say, well, if we introduce more police into the school and we save one student's life, isn't that worth it? But the last year that we have full statistics on this, school police killed three children in the process of doing their job. So we have to understand that policing is not a cost-free, all-good, highly effective intervention. It's a deeply problematic and mostly ineffective intervention.

And we must, must, must focus on what else we could be doing that can allow us to reduce our reliance on a reactive, violent intervention. Alex Vitale is the author of The End of Policing, and he is a sociologist at Brooklyn College. Thank you, Alex. I appreciate you. My pleasure. All right, y'all, before we go, a few members of the Code Switch team have been looking for ways to help process what's been going on in the news. And one of the things that they've come up with is poetry.

Amanda Gorman, you might remember, shared a poem at Joe Biden's inauguration in January of 2021. She was the first person to be named National Youth Poet Laureate, and she was kind enough to share with us a poem that speaks to the moment that we're in. It's called The Truth in One Nation, and it's from her book, Call Us What We Carry. Here's an excerpt. The truth is one nation under guns. Country of guns and germs and stealing land and life. Oh, say can we see the blood we stand on, shining below us like a blood-slick star. What we might have been if only we'd tried. What we might become if only we'd listen. Scars and stripes, school scared to death,

school drills of death. The truth is one education under desks stooped low from bullets. Soon comes the sharp plunge when we must ask where our children shall live and how and if. Who else shall we let perish? Time said you must transform to survive.

We said not over our dead body. We want to believe the truth is we are one nation under ghosts. The truth is we are one nation under fraud. Tell us honestly, will we ever be who we say? All right, y'all. That's our show. You can follow us on Twitter and IG at NPR Code Switch. Or if email is more your jam, we're at codeswitch at NPR code switch, or if emails more, your jam where code switch at NPR.org. Subscribe to our newsletter by going to newsletters.npr.org. And,

and don't forget to check back in the code switch feed on Friday for the latest episode of school colors. It's a good one. Y'all this episode was produced by lead the Nella with help from Diva Mota. Sham, Christina Kala, summer to mod and Alyssa John Perry.

It was edited by Leah and Steve Drummond, and it was fact-checked by Christina K, and Alyssa Jong Perry. It was edited by Leah and Steve Drummond, and it was fact-checked by Christina Kala and Alyssa Jong Perry. And a shout-out to the rest of the Code Switch familia. You got your Karen Griggs-B-Bates. You got your Taylor Jennings-Brown. You got your Kumari David-Roshan. Our art director is Ellie Johnson. And as for me, I'm Gene Demby.

Be easy, y'all.