The Problem With Jon Stewart - Excessive Use of Force: Diagnosing Our Over-Policing Problem

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

The media may have moved on from its wall-to-wall coverage of the killing of Tyre Nichols, but the nation is still hurting. This week, we’re discussing how incorrectly diagnosing the problem of police brutality has led to a system that hurts everyone. We’re joined by Heather McGhee, author and chair of the racial justice organization Color of Change, and Phillip Atiba Goff, Ph.D. Chair and Carl I. Hovland Professor of African American Studies and Professor of Psychology at Yale University. Dr. Goff is also the cofounder and CEO at Center For Policing Equity. They share their thoughts on why armed cops shouldn’t be doing minor traffic stops, how the system changes a cop from the inside out, and how investing in human infrastructure is our best solution to the ongoing problem of police brutality. Also, writers Rob Christensen and Kasaun Wilson weigh in on the sensationalization of the body cam footage and their own run-ins with the law. Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV+. CREDITS
Hosted by: Jon Stewart Featuring, in order of appearance: Heather McGhee, Phillip Atiba Goff, Kasaun Wilson, Rob ChristensenExecutive Produced by Jon Stewart, Brinda Adhikari, James Dixon, Chris McShane, and Richard PleplerLead Producer: Sophie EricksonProducers: Zach Goldbaum, Caity GrayAssoc. Producer: Andrea Betanzos Editor: Zach SilberbergEditor & Sound Engineer: Miguel CarrascalSenior Digital Producer: Freddie Morgan Digital Producer: Cassie MurdochDigital Coordinator: Norma HernandezSupervising Producer: Lorrie BaranekHead Writer: Kris AcimovicElements Producer: Kenneth HullClearances Producer: Daniella PhilipsonSenior Talent Producer: Brittany MehmedovicTalent Manager: Marjorie McCurryTalent Coordinator: Lukas ThimmSenior Research Producer: Susan Helvenston Theme Music by: Gary Clark Jr.The Problem With Jon Stewart podcast is an Apple TV+ podcast, produced by Busboy Productions.https://apple.co/-JonStewart

And is that and what about now are you guys still here? I think I don't hear anything. Oh, the metaphor for the conversation of race in America. Are we are we recording this? I'm just trying to say. All right. All right. So now can we jump on the Jewish thing too now? Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast.

It's the problem with John Stuart. I am John Stuart and it's going to be fucked, man. It's going to be one of those shows. By the way, we're on Apple TV Plus. If you want to watch episodes, I keep forgetting. I have to. They keep telling me, you got to keep promoting the show. And I'm always like, oh, but, but, you know,

I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. The show. And I'm always like, oh, but, but aren't we just by being us? Aren't we that? But obviously, this was a weekend of trying to distract yourself from the terrible video and the murder of Tyre Knickles in Memphis. And to get into that, we are going to have Heather McGee,

who's the author of The Some of Us with Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, and Dr. Philip Atiba-Goff and really looking forward to them giving us an opportunity to kind of get some perspective on all this shit. And we've got Kason Wilson and Rob Christensen are going to be joining us as well to try and help distract. Did you distract yourselves this weekend? Did you have a good weekend? What happened?

Yeah, just avoiding watching any videos. We don't want to watch the internet. That's what I'm talking about. OK, I'm good. This is the first time I was like, I'm not watching it. I'm just not doing it. I can't. It's one of those things, too. I think that it's just always in back of mind when, you know,

when something like that gets seared into consciousness. And you think like, oh, no, I'm supposed to steer into this. But I feel like I'm not emotionally equipped to steer into it. And I guess that's the point is to feel to feel the pain. I guess is is is that the point or is it to take action? I don't fucking know. I honestly don't fucking know. Yeah, it's like, what do you do at this point? How many videos, how many times is going to happen, right?

Filled with landmines everywhere, fully politicized. You know, it's like the first ten minutes of Bambi, where you're like, OK, you didn't have to shoot the deer, but it's a great movie. It's infuriating because you know what's going to happen next. It's disgusting how much of a formula we've made around tragedy, you know, like tragedy in general. Like we just had two mass shootings in California last week, like 15 minutes from my house.

So it's like that's already gone. Oh, yeah, there's been five or ten of them. And that that cycle has already played itself out to the point where, you know, you can shoot five people and not trend on Twitter. Like that's we're done with that. Yeah, I think I'm doing a lot better because I think this is the first time when I'm like, you know what, I'm not going to go on Twitter. I'm not going on Facebook.

I'm just going to relax and let it do its thing. Now, CNN is playing the video. I wish I was stopped. Y'all just playing it in restaurants and McDonald's and Wendy's. Are they playing it like wallpaper? Are they doing that thing where it's in the box and the announcer is talking about something else and you're just seeing it over and over again?

You know, like if Kobe hit a game winner and they would just sports, they would just keep playing it over and over, going to commercial. Are you fucking serious? Legit, like I caught one. Yeah, I've been avoiding it. They're playing it like Fox plays spring break footage. Like it's just on the loop. And now it's like they're talking about something else,

but the girls and bikinis are still dancing. Like that's how they're using this. Like here's how quickly that gets just numbing. When they first put it out there, they had to do that like cheesy. Disclamp now this image, the images you're about to see are somewhat disturbing. And I want to I want to warn everybody. And then fucking two hours later, it's just rolling like it's a vine. It's crazy. And I've been avoiding the video,

but I did catch it because they play it nonstop. And it reminded me of a video of the Taliban that I saw that I also had to watch for your show, not just Fox News, but Taliban videos. And that's what it reminded me of. Wait, you were in the army. Didn't you have to watch Taliban videos when you were in the army? Air Force, baby. Good food, better women. Is that the slogan?

Listen, there's there's no Marines or naval officers here. No one's coming after you. No one's no one's coming after Air Force. Everything's all good. Yeah. And the good thing now is because the protests were all peaceful and civil. The media coverage has gone down pretty much 50 percent over the weekend. It wasn't even a story after Sunday. It's crazy. 50 percent of its public steam in the media because they're not.

They don't have any more footage. 100 percent. It was it was this weird thing on Friday where it was kind of like a Netflix drop. But they were like, check us out at midnight. The video is dropping. We got you. The anticipation leading up to that, you I just thought like the only time you ever see that is like when Taylor Swift is about to put out a Taylor's version. Like the news media was almost giddy and salivating over what they were cutting

into programs, you know, coming up. The video is going to be coming out in two hours. And then after that, I'm sure we're going to be able to get you some real shit. Like we're going to get you some real shit. Yeah, they they they really hyped it up. It's like, yo, you've seen the season premiere, police brutality. We can't wait. And then the video came out and then Fox News is like, yeah, the cops are black.

What you're going to say now? We're like, yeah, we're going to say the exact same thing with all just because it's not central casting and it's not a white police officer and a black victim. It's the same call. They actually may not have been a better scenario for us to discuss anti blackness than in a scenario where the cops are black. Right, right, right. Because now we can actually discuss structural issues and how maybe this really is now.

Maybe it allows everybody to get past a point and go like, all right, we're framing this wrong. And this really is about a system that's been designed. And it doesn't matter who you plug into that system. The outcomes will be the same. And maybe that that's why I'm, you know, our two guests. And you know what, we should get to them because I can't think of two better people that can sort of help process this.

So let's bring out, we're going to bring on Heather McGee and Dr. Philip Atiba Goff. So recent events made it clear this is a conversation that the country is having such a difficult time having. But thank goodness we have two incredible people to join us. Heather McGee, author of The Sum of Us, What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, also the chair of the Racial Justice Organization, Color of Change and Dr. Philip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, chair of African American Studies and Psychology Professor at Yale University

are joining us now. Thanks for having us. Good to be with you. And we've got Kason Wilson and Rob Christensen are going to be joining us as well. Heather, Philip, thank you so much for joining us. Heather, I'm going to start with you if that's OK. This incident on top of all the other incidents feels different, feels like even the vocabulary of our terrible cycle that we're in can't be used on this one

as its five black officers. And how does that change the conversation? And what do you make now of that dynamic? Well, I think there are some racial dynamics, even to the fact that we saw such swift action by the by the city in terms of the charges and the dismissal of these five officers, and we are now seeing that that an additional white officer who was on the scene and brutalized the victim, Mr. Nichols, is just now seeing some some accountability and consequences.

But yes, for days, we saw a stream of black faces in blue uniforms as the the attackers and as the people who caused Mr. Nichols death, and that is not what we are used to seeing. And so it makes us have to reckon with the fact that even though as Americans, we tend to want to look at everything through an individual lens. Is this a good guy or a bad guy that fundamentally the problem with policing in America is not about black or white or black versus white. It's about blue versus black.

Diversity doesn't fix systemic issues. We've created a system of overpolicing, overincarceration, over surveillance and disinvestment in the things that we actually need as communities and families to be healthy and well and safe. This country at all levels of government spends roughly double on police, prisons and courts, what it spends on anti-hunger and anti-poverty measures. You know, our budgets really reveal our values and we care more about policing people, brutalizing people, taking away their freedom than we do about making

sure that they can thrive and you throw in bombs and tanks. And I bet that figure looks even that's exactly right. Even more disturbing. Philip, you work with a lot of police departments in terms of this and we've seen, I think, a real effort to try and reckon with it. And the reforms are, well, what if we had some some de-escalation training? Hey, how about this? Let's throw a camera on that. You know what? No chokehold.

Let's not do the chokehold this time. Yet none of it seems to address that core issue that I think Heather is talking about. So what is your feeling about? Are we looking in the right places for reform? So this should be a place where we're doing everything. And all options should be on the table. Some of the stuff that we've done hasn't received the kind of investment that it would need to see significant change, but we're definitely avoiding looking at

some places that are the biggest levers for change. So we've talked about the sort of shock of seeing while this time it was black officers, we usually don't see that. Heather rightly points out that the black officers were immediately fired or almost immediately fired and charged while we're still waiting on the white officers and paramedics. But the reason why that's shocking is because we've got the wrong definition of the problem, and that means we're not trying a whole bunch of the most important

solutions. The definition of the problem we've got is that, well, individual contaminated hearts and minds go in and it's their biases that we've got to undo, right? Somehow it's some kind of defect of the soul that needs to be cured, as if that's not a problem for Saturdays and Sundays. But the reality is that's not how it works. I am literally a psychology professor. I can tell you that that's not even how human psychology works, right? It's the situations we put people in that are way bigger predictors of what

people actually do. So if we want the behaviors to change, we need to put folks in different situations, which is to say we need to not have law enforcement responding to places where we don't want to badge in a gun as a potential consequence for what the heck is going on. And if we're not willing to look at that, to look at the fact that these systems are incredibly well funded, as Heather says. In Memphis, for instance, it's 40 percent of the municipal budget, 38 percent, if we want to be exact.

It's not that it's poorly funded and they're poorly trained. It's that we're spending a bunch of money to have them do exactly what we ask them to do, and then we're upset about the consequences as if we've not paid attention to the rules of the game in the first place. So that's what needs some change if we really want to see some change. What what a phenomenal point that is and that we have outsourced society's responsibility for the ills of poverty and struggle to teachers and police officers,

because we hire them and say, OK, you guys deal with that. And then we use them as scapegoats when they do the thing that we are paying them to do, we are we are using the police as a border patrol between wealthy communities and poor communities, between white communities and between black and brown communities. And they are doing the thing that we've hired them to do. And there is something to when you empower someone with authority, when you give them a uniform, there is something that happens to good people.

And and you add a uniform and adrenaline and a weapon into a situation. It's like if if road rage was legalized and then we get and then we scapegoat them. So how do we how do we it's us? We're the problem. And how do we fix that? Philip, you're the psychologist, fix this.

No, this is this is not a psychology question. You're asking a spiritual question about the soul of a nation. And I'm pretty sure that Heather is the one who's qualified to do that. Didn't you get your degree in spiritual redemption of the soul of a nation? So I'm a nation, Heather, fix it. That's that's kind of the issue here. I mean, what I will tell you is if we're afraid to face things, if we're not fixing any of it, and if we haven't appropriately diagnosed

the problem, then we can't fix any of it. When you say that we are the problem, I want to just double down on that, at least in a couple of spaces. First, I want to say it is in many cities, 9 1 1 calls that are the number one way in which law enforcement contacts communities. So it's literally us calling police, meaning society, us calling police on other folks in there. But it's not us, all of us, right?

It's usually folks who are in distressed communities who wish they could call for mental health, who wish they could call for substance abuse, who wish even more than any of that, they could call for money so that the lot next door was not vacant, right, so that they had other resources. Those are the folks who were calling 9 1 1 and then 9 1 1 shows up. And to your point about how we use them. And by the way, great that we rely on teachers and law enforcement because the pay is fantastic.

But but the deal is law enforcement has been saying for more than two decades, you ask us to do too much and then you blame us when we do it wrong. Right. They are the number one responders to mental health issues and they get at best eight hours of training on critical incidents, which is how we ended up with the number one largest mental health facility in the world being the L.A. County Jail. If this is not a question of there are people we don't want to see, so we neglect

them and then we punish them for the fact we didn't want to invest them in the first place, like it is absolutely the platonic ideal of us being more interested in burying our decision not to invest in people than being interested in fixing the problem. I mean, Heather, that's when he talks about diagnosing the problem. And you mentioned earlier that the budget being kind of a window into the soul, let's say, of a nation and what their priorities are. How how deep is this?

And are we fixing a gaping wound with with the band aid then? And are we even looking at the wrong pathology? Well, listen, I mean, I think we're having a broader conversation than Mr. Nichols. It's not clear exactly, you know, how how many laws and municipal codes he actually violated, right? This seems to have been a person who should have been able to go through his day and his night and be home with his four year old today. That said, the whole conversation in America about how

necessary policing is comes under the context of, well, we've always got to keep ourselves safe, right? That's why we justify spending so much money and why we justify this this system. But fundamentally, if you look at the roots of crime, if you control for poverty, rural, suburban, urban places, majority white, majority of color, all of those disparities that we see virtually disappear. What we need to do is compare what this country spends on policing, about a hundred billion dollars a year, the federal level.

We could in homelessness for 20. We could create a universal pre-K program for another 20, 26. We could eliminate poverty all together among families with children, all the neglect, the abuse, the you know, the hunger, the stress, the the mental strife that comes from poverty for 70 billion dollars a year, right? And somehow those never get truly fully funded. And yet we as a society are spending more on police than we did before George Floyd was killed. There were more deaths at the hands of police last year than on record.

And then zooming out, of course, we are a society with 120 handguns per 100 people. And so, you know, Phil and John, you're both right to say that this is about the systems and structures and that the systems and structures are reflective of a deeper belief that we have. And in my research, I've found it really comes back to the way this country was founded on a belief in a hierarchy of human value. We don't have the sort of gut level presumption among one another that we are fully human. And where did that begin?

Whereas in been perpetuated generation after generation has been in this caste system we have around race, but like so much of systemic racism, it doesn't mean that white people get off scot free from it, right? There were over 300 white people who were killed by police last year, right? 366 white people were killed by police, 254 black people were killed by police. Now there are nearly 200 million more white people than there are black, but one out of three Americans gets arrested in this country, right? We create these systems in order to control a targeted community, but ultimately

racism in our systems and our politics and our policymaking has a cost for everyone. No one wants to live like this. Heather, you are dangerously close to CRT and I'm afraid Rhonda Santis is going to shut this podcast down when something has taken decades and decades to build up, which is, as you said, a caste system. And I'm sorry, I don't see how you can argue that there hasn't been a caste system set up in this country and even to the point where I think we have criminalized struggle in the old days, it was debtors prison, but now it's poverty has been criminalized.

Philip, a white kid in the suburbs does not do less drugs than a black kid in the city. But they go to prison almost never. So how do you decriminalize struggle? How do you decriminalize living in that system that we've built, that caste system? So the interesting way to answer that is, you know, the joke about you go to the doctor who says, hey, doc, it hurts when I go like this. Doc says, well, don't do that.

That's how you work on decriminalization. Wait, that's it. You decriminalize it in the last Democratic administration, the Obama administration, which was the last time we were talking about this in a major way. They had a task force on 21st century policing. They said, hey, we're not investing in these places and we're punishing them for the things that come when you don't invest in places. So we should invest in them and stop punishing them, which is a good thing.

It's the first time in this country we'd ever done that, except prior to that. And after the 1990s, we had the big uprisings around the Rodney King beating and the exoneration of those officers. And there was a big presidential task force on that. And they said, you know what? We don't invest in these places and we punish them for that. We should invest in these places and stop punishing them for it. And that was the first time in this country we had done that, except for about 30 years

prior, when 1968, we had the Kerner Commission where they said, you know what? We don't invest in these communities and we punish them for it. So what we should do is invest in these communities and stop punishing them for it. That was the first time we had done that in this country. So for 30 years prior to that, what we had, you understand that there's a pattern to this. No learning curve. But you say we've done that, Phil. You mean there's been a blue ribbon commission, but it doesn't mean that we've

had funds flowing into these communities as a response. But isn't that because it's politically untenable? You know, after George Floyd we had six months of we really need to look at policing. And then Fox News and all their brethren ran with the countries in chaos, crime is rampant and immediately even the biggest proponents of yes, we need to look at policing suddenly said and make sure that we give them more money, more helmets, more weapons. And I'm not honestly like I'm I am very close to police

communities and first responder communities. So I have blind spots galore. I have incredible esteem for them, although I also understand you have to hold them to the highest standards. But my experience with them is they're being asked to do something that is impossible. Yeah, there are tools of a system that brutalizes people who've already been disinvested, right? And that feels awful. So I mean, I work closely with folks who are retired law enforcement,

got retired police chiefs that work at CPE, I work closely with current law enforcement, as well as activists, right? And I got to say, the problem is not the individual officers. The problem is what we have accepted. It's OK to use state dollars to do, which is not to treat folks with mental health concerns and substance abuse issues. Right. People who don't have housing, but it is to punish people when they have those sets of problems.

And we've been doing it forever. And you say it's politically untenable. Part of the reason it's politically untenable is because I do that little bit of low grade comedy, and I apologize doing that in front of a comedy guy. But I'm not 20 to 30 years. We do this mess. I don't even know if I'm allowed to curse on this. You may every 20 to 30 years, we do this.

And then collectively, we decide that was cool. Can we please forget? Because it's super uncomfortable. It's only politically untenable because there are people like Rhonda Santis who've decided it's not OK to learn our history. We are able to move this forward when people realize how much of this we've done before. Well, because it's weaponized, Philip, and Heather, I want to speak to that. When you talk about reform, reform has to be perfect in this country.

Because let's say you do redesign a system and one of the individuals within that redesigned system commits something that is well, then the whole thing gets torn down because it has to be perfect because Atwater decided that Willie Horton was going to be used in an ad against Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush won the presidency. And so now it has to be zero tolerance for anything. I really feel like like it has if it's not perfect, we won't do it. We have no fortitude.

We have no resilience to deal with the tribulations and trials of redesigning a better system. Well, that's right, because you have people whose financial and political self-interest lies in capitalizing on those examples. Right. People who profit from selling a story of racial division and hierarchy and scapegoating. You know, you mentioned Rhonda Santis and I think it's really important that we put this in the context of the hyper-organized, well-funded, completely

partisan backlash to the racial consciousness raising that we've had in this country, which is probably the most powerful thing to come out of the summer of 2020's history making social demonstrations. Right. We had probably 300 state and local police reforms, but we also had a massive consciousness raising, right? People saw things that they would never be able to unsee. They read things and learned things and asked different questions in the dialogue

completely shifted and that terrified the right wing, not because they in their hearts and minds hate black and brown people. That's not what I'm litigating here. What I'm litigating here is that they've known for generations, really ever since the civil rights movement, that the way to get a governing coalition to remain relevant and be able to redistribute wealth upwards has been to scapegoat and to race bait. And so if you've got another 20, 30, 40 percent of white people being inoculated against the Willie Hortons and the CRT nonsense, then they can't do

what they want to do, right? They can't still have the political power to enact tax cuts and stuff like that. And so you see right now that three years almost since the crescendo of a movement that really began with Michael Brown's murder and Ferguson and Trayvon Martin's murder in Florida is a really fraught one, because if we don't keep our eye on the prize of the kind of systemic reforms, which frankly would make everyone better off, right? If we spent more money on child care and health care and anti poverty measures and housing, everybody would be better off than if we spend that

money locking people up and creating systems of violence and oppression, state sponsored violence and oppression. That's infrastructure, human infrastructure. Exactly. This is the moment when we need to stay focused and not be distracted by individual stories and exceptions and race baiting from the right wing. Heather, that's amazing. Kay, you've got something. I, first of all, just want to say, well, that's that's that's why we said Defund the police, if you're wondering out there, that's what it all was.

But I do want to ask you guys this question, because I think when the decriminalization conversation comes up, one thing that infuriates me is we talk about people's past sins in their victimhood in a way that makes me very uncomfortable. For instance, George Floyd, his entire trial, we're discussing this man's past as if the police officers who had anything to do with this had a PDF of everything he did in his life.

It's unjust and it's wrong to prosecute a victim at someone else's trial. And I wonder if we are to engage with this Tyree Nichols story in a way that we did with Eric Garner and Breonna Taylor and Amar Arbery and all of these victims and we discuss police reform. Is there any police department, any city that we can point to that enacted a change that we can look at to say we actually have an effect of policy that can come from it? Because we're going to discuss this. I'm not watching a video.

I'm just telling y'all now I ain't watching it. I'm watching Martin and I'm keeping my mental health together. Is there something that we can look to to say when these stories do go viral, this is the change that can come from it, even if it's small? Yeah, there are thousands of examples. And I really thank you for asking the question because I really wish that more folks who had larger platforms would ask the question and then would amplify them. And you led with, well, you led with Defund, but I think that all goes together

with the concern we've got around litigating someone's moral perfection before we're able to say, actually, this was a problem. This is, by the way, why we have stories about Rosa Parks, but we don't have stories about Claudette Colvin, who was the 15 year old girl who really began the Montgomery bus boycott moment, but because her personal life was such that it was difficult to put that on a poster, we needed to get an older woman and then we sanitize that. She couldn't be an organizer. She was just tired.

How old was it? She was just tired. I mean, she planned a whole mass mobilization issue. She'd spent her entire life dedicated to these issues. But really, it was just about her being tired. That's part of the reason and how we ended up here because Heather's quite right. There are people who make their money off of these narratives. But the flip side to that is that we are so and I've just been told I'm allowed to curse, we are shit at producing the other side of that narrative.

What are the emotional appeals that disarm there are bad people that need punishment? What do you run on? That is the opposite of that. The only thing we've come close to is a scolding adults do better, which, by the way, no one wants to vote for I have to be an adult. If the millennial generation has taught us anything is that adulting is incredibly hard and is not appealing on mass. So one of the ways that we can can do the emotional appeal is that it's not about being tough on bad people, it's about creating communities that are strong enough.

We don't have to pay the fuck attention to them. Right. And so places like Ithaca and Tompkins County, New York, where they said, you know what? We don't want to send armed responders to nonviolent crises like just fuck all that. Places like Berkeley, California, which began the national movement, and I'm happy to say CPE played a significant role in the analysis that led to this. But they said, you know what, low level traffic enforcement, let's not do that. There's this radical thing that we've just invented in Berkeley and Berkeley

only called the mail and we can send you a ticket. Isn't that amazing? And it turns out that there's this thing on the East Coast called Easy Pass. They had figured that out a generation before, which allows for people in Philadelphia to enjoy the same basic privileges of getting something in the mail. It's shitty, by the way, to get it in the mail, but it's way shittier to have a gun in your face as a result of it. By the way, Tyree Nichols, Kenan Anderson, still alive if we're not doing low level

traffic enforcement and nonviolent accidents with armed responders, right? That Berkeley led to Philly, led to Seattle, led to Pittsburgh and a small pilot project in LA, the Star Program in Denver, which sends no police, sends actual mental health experts, gasp to mental health crises instead of badges and guns. And by the way, if they're scared for their safety, they can call the police just like anybody else and the police will rush right over. In fact, they've got a hotline to it. There are thousands of these local experiments that are mostly working,

but they're underfunded in terms of evaluation. So we don't have great data on them, making it harder to make the like you've heard Heather and I just talking stats back and forth because we're both aggressive nerds, but it helps on policy as well. So we've underfunded the back end of it, which means it's hard to scale. And because federal folks can't take credit for local interventions most of the time, they don't like talking about them. So we've got a demand that our language, our narratives change so that we've got

an emotional appeal that also references specific things that work, because it turns out the kinds of changes that defund activists were calling for. Again, laziness by electeds on why defund became so villainized rather than the ineffectiveness of defund, because defund was hella effective. Everybody knows what I'm talking about when I say it, even though they don't, they'll define it terribly. But the deal is on that front, if we would allow or demand that people would lift up these individual elements

and we would say, hey, this is stronger communities, those kinds of demands are seventy percent, seventy three percent popular among white Republicans, because they have law enforcement in their family. Right. They know that law enforcement get asked to do too much. And they know that it is the least safe places for law enforcement or out of traffic stop are in communities where they don't have good connection, which is why the kinds of changes I'm talking about when CPE does them, we see a thirteen percent reduction in officer injuries.

So when Heather says everybody benefits from this, that is what she is talking about. These things that seem so radical right now, because they're a radical departure from our collective hatred of black people are actually radically redemptive of the entire soul of the nation and allow for folks who are in harm's way, who rush towards the danger to be safer on the other side of it. It is only our calculated desire to ensure that there's a group of people who suffer that allow it to maintain its political practicality.

Philip, I'm sorry, your zoom box is on fire. It's on fire, Philip. That says it all. I mean, that Heather. What? Now that that's narrative storytelling. This is the part where we understand it. We don't know the facts. We don't know the figures.

We haven't been in the communities. But what we do know is narrative storytelling. And what Philip is talking about is you have the story, the story is real. The soul of a nation is obviously redeemable. But why is it so hard to tell that story? Why is fear such a powerful motivator and driver? And what he just said right now, the way he said it,

how do you squeeze that into a bottle and drink it? I mean, how do we get that? It is absolutely true that everything we believe comes from a story we've been told. And the stories that we've been told about each other, about crime, about different communities that are not like us are mostly filtered through our big megaphones, right? What are our big megaphones? They are television, social media and news media.

So television, right? Color of Change two years ago released a groundbreaking report called Normalizing Injustice, which actually looked at the most popular shows on television. What's the formula for the most popular show on television? Crime procedurals, right? We are entertained by the spectacle of cops and robbers and victims and good guys and bad guys. There's nothing like it.

Nothing touches it except for reality TV and crime dominates there, too. Right. And what Color of Change found was that the stories that Hollywood is telling about crime fundamentally distorts what we know as policymakers and advocates to be true and what communities that are overpoliced know to be true. And that ultimately ends up creating the permission structures for bad police policies, for more money to police and for a sort of colorblind look at what is a deeply, deeply racist system.

One, two, when we look at what are the stories in our political narratives, right? We've got mostly white politicians in this country, right? Two out of three of the politicians in this country at every level are white men. You know, up to 90 percent of politicians in this country are white. And so on a bipartisan basis, even though, of course, Democrats have a much more diverse caucus, you've got this at worst well-honed script for using racial fear to bring the majority of white voters over to a political party that has an economic agenda that defunds everything we care about and funds the war machine

and the police machine. That's at worst, right? People who know exactly how to capitalize on racial fear among white people in order to create a majority white coalition and create the majority of white people in the Republican camp. And then at best, I'm just going to be real here. You've got mostly white Democrats who are fumbling around, right? They are in the they are terrified of losing one more white voter, right?

Because we know that the majority of white voters have not voted for a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act into law to this day. Are you saying causation equals correlation? So we're suggesting I'm saying I'm saying that this country has had racially polarized politics throughout its entire history and that ultimately a white Democrat is a minority, right? And so there's this fear of white grievance, fear of white backlash that makes it

difficult for what are mostly white political leaders who maybe want to do the right thing to have the confidence to be able to say, this is the America we want to build. And this is actually what we're willing to change about the status quo. These are the experiments we're willing to put forward. And what we're not willing to do is to keep doing more of the same. Can you incentivize a system that isn't a fear based economy? Because, you know, everything that you talk about,

the media makes its money on this very thing that you talk about. The unobtainment that drives this nation is a fear based economy. During the election cycle in New York, you would have thought that Mad Max was on the loose and that we were living in the Thunderdome, the commercials that ran in between every show. Liselde literally said, vote as if your life depends on it because it does. That was his closing argument, because the argument that you and Philip are making and I think that that we are

trying to make is investment in human capital improves outcomes across the board. And you see it everywhere. I want to ask Rob, Rob, your family is, is, you know, look, they're they're mostly law enforcement, right? You got a good law enforcement military family and you've been in jail. So you can talk about you can talk about both sides. But in your mind, is this conversation happening in your family? So the closest relative that's a cop is my brother.

And I always ask him when something's happened in the news, his response is always, well, you know me my whole life, why would you think I would behave that way? And then I'm like, I don't I don't care if I know your whole life. We got to talk about this. He gets it from all sides of the family. So I guess we're good in that regard. But like I can never be like a cab, all cops are bastards or anything like that. Because I have one cop, my brother, who like, you know, I love.

So I love a cop. So I don't know I'm kind of caught in between here. I love a cop too. I mean, I think most people who have, you know, Heather loves a cop. You know, and I think what Philip is saying is it's not about that individual's heart. Right. And I wonder, does he ever talk about, does your brother ever talk about like this system is fucking me? We are flooded with guns and it's incredibly dangerous for me out there.

And so how can I not be on death con one at all times? And this is in them. They've put me in an impossible position. Yeah, I mean, we do talk about it all the time and he would he doesn't like when he's with other cops that are really hot, especially in a traffic stop. It's like, how do you believe the brother of a cop? When he's going to say, my brother's a great cop, he's a good cop. But my brother, he got like commendations for not using force, which is something

crazy that they give medals for not beating people up. And I don't know if my brother might have been the right type of person to be a cop. He was like very popular, well liked, never lost a street fight and like was the captain of his baseball team. So it's like, if you have two sides of like very calm, but also can handle himself. That's what my brother is. It's interesting because, you know, Philip, you've been in in training police officers. How do they talk about this within the departments?

So, you asked the question, does Rob brother ever say, you know, like they're fucking me? If he doesn't say that every day, he's not actually a cop. Rob, you're just making it up. I've never met a line officer who does not have 20 things in a list to complain about that they got screwed over that day, right? Nineteen of which are probably pretty legit, because again, we frequently do not pay them the kind of pay that would be reasonable

for someone going into the kind of dangerous situations that they're in. The pensions used to be extravagant. They used to say there's always two police forces, the one you're paying now and the one that's retired, but now the pensions are getting taken away. The union protections are not nearly what they used to be, though the unions are their own sets of problems and they've got legit grievances with the executive group and the city, and it's how the city treats people who are running towards danger, right? So a thousand percent that's and we're in a period of incredibly

low morale amongst law enforcement, in part because we're having conversations about how terrorizing law enforcement has been within black communities and almost nobody, almost nobody signed up to be a cop to be the villain in the story of an entire community, which you asked whether, in part, whether or not like there's a way to incentivize on the show, we can regulate political speech. I don't see that happening anytime soon. We can regulate what's on the airwaves. There's too much money in that to really happen.

And if not, I just want to take us back. I know it's super annoying because you got a professor on who's talking about history, but I just want to take us back to the last times that we made serious change. The last time we made serious change around these issues, the whole country was on fire for a decade, right? We call it the civil rights movement. I think it's better to understood as the second reconstruction. But that's what it takes for this country to pay attention. And we're doing this conversation.

What is the date? Well, on a Tuesday after the video was dropped on a Friday and national media stopped paying attention to it on a Sunday, right? Because there weren't cars that lit on fire. Because nobody died during the protests, in part because law enforcement didn't show up as an oppressive force, right? So like the tensions did not get inflamed. And so if you want to think about when did we do it before the civil rights movement, you got to go back to the end of slavery, which was a literal fucking war.

Right. We do not do this at large scale, unless everything is on fire and there's nothing else we can do. What we would rather do, like a mass aggressively dysfunctional family is like, all right, all right, we've had our fight over dinner. That was difficult. We're going to move the way that we do the potatoes from now on. OK, I can put salmonella in the potatoes. Everybody can be happy.

Now, can we all just sit down and have a good loving time and we'll see you all again next year. And by next year, I mean next 30 years, when there is another place that blows up, we do not do it unless things are on fire and unless we've got leaders that require better of us, we're going to be here another 20, 30 years from now, if lucky enough to all be alive by then having this exact same fucking conversation. Wow. I mean, this has been eyeopening, you know, diagnosis. And I feel like I've gone through the life cycle of an issue.

I want to be cognizant of your guys time, Heather. I'm just going to give you the last word as we go away. I think it's sobering, but hopeful. I think the hopeful part is it seems like there really is a diagnosis. The sobering part is we've known the diagnosis for 240 years, and we only fix it in those three or four cataclysms of violence and fire. As someone who is working towards doing this without that, you know, terrible catastrophe,

where do you look at the conversation from here on? Bill said the country has to be on fire for things to change. But what's the step, right? The country's on fire and then things change automatically. No, the country's on fire and then more and more people decide that they are going to vote on this issue, that they are going to contact their legislatures on this issue, that they are going to fundamentally show up as citizens and people in a community in a different way.

And so what I want to leave your listeners with is you may be outraged, you may be confused, either way, you don't ever want to see a video like that again in your life. What have you actually done? Have you contacted your congressional leader, your senator, and said, we need to pass police reform now? Have you contacted your city council person and said we need to divest from over-incarceration and mass policing and invest in the systems that actually care for people? If you tweet about it, if you talk to your friends about it,

that doesn't mean a politician is listening. So take that one step and that's how we can get to the place we want to be faster than the next 30 years. Well, thank you guys so much, Heather McGee, Philip Atiba-Gough, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time. And I hope that the next conversation that we have about this is sooner than 30 years and is speaking about some of the progress and some of the great stories that Philip and Heather have been talking about that have been working in certain

places. So thank you both so much for your time. Thanks. Thank you. I want Dr. Gough involved in my life. Yeah, absolutely. I need a pep talk from that, dude. That's crazy. I don't know that I've ever seen someone who is able to express themselves so enthusiastically, forcefully, but precisely.

I feel like Heather and Philip, they're such a great team, they just compliment each other so well. That's all. That's all. You know, my mom told me it's the coldest thing I ever heard. She said, you know, if you black, the trial will always be named after you. Wow.

That's the coldest. She was like, if they think you did it, it's the OJ Simpson trial. But if it happened to you, it's still the George Floyd trial. Like they're prosecuting you either way. Wow. That point you made, though, about prosecuting someone, that really is like, and I guess I didn't I never thought of it that way, but every time something like this happens, there's always that.

But he was no angel. Like if you're not an angel, this is what happens. Who who's an angel? But it's also like Derek Chauvin wasn't giving him a spanking for what he did when he was twenty one. Like you didn't know this. And by the way, it doesn't it doesn't matter. Like you cannot be an angel and still not deserve to be killed in the street.

You could have a broken tail light and and not be killed like that's that's OK, even if you did smoke pot or got arrested once for whatever it is. And and I do think it's to remove it from the idea of the individual and place it in that idea of it's a system that has to be redesigned because they are executing orders as to the system that they've been placed in. And it's a much easier thing to scapegoat cops than it is to scapegoat

what we're asking them to do and how afraid we are. It's actually very surprising to me, John, that police officers have such a sense of community and can express their fears and concerns of the community, but the community never gets the liberty to feel the same way. Right. Where it's like, we just want to go home to our families. We just don't know what you're going to do. I'm like, I know what it's like to be pulled over by a police officer at night

and think like, let me hit record. Like, Takara has an app on her phone that records automatically when you get pulled over. I know if it feels like it may not stop me from getting killed, but at least I'll have some footage for the trial. That that's one of the most dystopian things I think I've heard. And to clarify, I don't have that app. Yeah, I think I think I've got angry birds and Candy Crush. You know, I get away with a lot of tickets.

I get pulled over in New Jersey a lot. The last time I was pulled over. Why did you go to jail? All right, look, so. Yes, I've been waiting for this moment. Why did you go to jail? No, no, no, hold up, hold up. So not not prison, right?

Prison is different than jail. All right, all right, jail a few times. You were not in the system. Right, I was not in the system and I've been good about staying out of the system. But the short answer is graffiti, maybe a little bar fighting, but not prison. So in other words, you've you've had a field trip to the system. I basically went on a field trip, got a juice box, came back out. That's correct.

You didn't find yourself embroiled. It was it wasn't a good time. The juice box was the best part of it. But I got out of it. It's probation for guys like me is they like to give me probation. And but I will say in New Jersey, when you get pulled over by a cop. Hey, Jersey, the name John Stewart goes a long way. In the state of New Jersey, I get pulled over.

I got a veteran's card and I dropped that I write for John Stewart. Untouchable, baby. Untouchable. License to kill. Not that license to speed. Yeah. Case on, maybe that's the app you need to have on you. You just need to whenever they pull you over, just pull it over and probably John Stewart and that's that's the end of it.

I'll try that and report my findings. Yeah. You know what? That's an excellent face time me from the car. Hey, man, do you mind if I just we'll just we'll just go through it that way. I'm going to show them this podcast episode. I'm going to fast forward through Heather and

don't worry about that part. Don't know the reform part. Don't forget that. Don't watch the middle. He didn't say he didn't say defund. Don't worry about that. Dr. Goff is talking. You just fast forward.

I'm going to get through that. Guys, thank you for this episode. Thank you for, you know, helping the process because it's and and I thought the the question about like, what are you doing? I thought Heather's Heather's was like that incredible moment where she goes like, you know, we're all just sitting here, but like you're doing fuck all. Why don't you do something? And you're like, oh, right.

She goes, don't don't tweet. Don't get anything like fucking do something. Oh, yeah. OK. That's the hardest thing to do is something. Right. My favorite part about this podcast is that in the last five seconds, every guest is always like, so so, John, we're going to fix climate change. Right.

Are you are you on board? You could see at the Capitol. I don't have a board. I don't have any John has a backlog of 14 pecs acts he needs to do for various issues in America and he just can't. But I really do think they sort of they think it's like you do like a five minute hit on Newsmax and it's done, right? Like, you know, like actually it took a few years or like meetings.

You got to get to that get to that point. But gentlemen, as always, much appreciated. And and big thanks to Heather McGee and to Dr. Gough for for being on the show and the case on and Rob, the problem with John Stewart run Apple TV Plus. Check it out and we'll see you guys next week. Thanks for engaging in conversation. I appreciate it. Bye bye.

Prima John Stewart podcast is an Apple TV Plus podcast and a joint busboy production.