B (15:22)

My pleasure.

A (15:23)

Okay, let's get right into two of the major thrusts of your book, namely, if I get it correctly, that policing has been vastly expanded or increased in the United States in recent decades and that it has changed how it works. Tell us a little bit about these two changes so we're all on the same page of what's been going on.

B (15:45)

Well, I sometimes think about the problem of policing as having two distinct qualities. One is a kind of 400 year old problem, which is a problem of colonialism and slave patrols and the management of workers. That's at the root of the creation of police forces, mostly in the early 19th century. But then there's a more recent element to the problem, which is this dramatic expansion in the scope and domain of policing over the last 40 years or so, beginning with the war on drugs, but including the expansion of border policing, school policing, and that policing has not only expanded in scope, but in many ways in intensity. So the huge increase in our reliance on SWAT teams, the whole development of mass incarceration, which is, of course, always begins with arrests, has characterized this kind of shift, not just in policing, but in our broader economic and governmental systems.

A (16:49)

And why? Why has it expanded? Why has it changed in the way you describe?

B (16:54)

Well, part of the story is about the rise of a new Republican Party, basically lined with the Nixon era. So Nixon makes the effort to respond to the victories of the civil rights movement by trying to switch white Southern voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. He knows he can't bring back segregation, so instead he decides to develop a war on crime, war on drugs narrative to signal to those white votes voters that he's going to use the power of the federal government to put blacks in their place. And we now have this evidence from inside the Nixon White House that this was the explicit intent of getting the federal government involved in drug interdiction.

A (17:41)

I was wondering, are you familiar with the work of Michelle Alexander in terms of mass incarceration? Seems to me that that work and what you're saying.

B (17:51)

Absolutely. Michelle's work is incredibly important. And in understanding that the nature of the criminalization of communities of color in the United States is a political problem. It has nothing to do with public safety, nothing to do with crime, or only marginally about those things. It's about a political project. And that political project is tied to both the politics of racial resentment and the kind of public sector austerity that you talked about in relationship to the teachers strike and even what's going on in the border. A kind of resentment of the other that's being harnessed in the face of the profound economic changes we've seen in the last 40 years, the kind of economic precarity and underinvestment that has left people looking for someone else to blame. And by ramping up criminalization, we define all our social problems in terms of, like, moral laxity or moral incompetence that will only respond to these kinds of coercive state interventions.

A (18:54)

It strikes me as almost ironic that if you go back not that long ago, it was popular for liberal media in the west to mock the arrests of political dissidents in Eastern Europe, which were always characterized as the arrest of criminal elements. And the mockery was, this has nothing to do with crime. This is a political project. And basically you're saying we were calling the kettle black, but we were in the process of doing pretty much the same thing.

B (19:32)

Well, if you just look at the War on drugs, you know, we've had this for over 40 years by any metric than you can imagine, it's a complete failure. Right. Drugs are cheaper, easier to get, higher quality overdoses are through the roof. Any young person in the United States can get drugs anytime they want them. And yet we persist in this idea that we need the war on Drugs to keep our kids safe. It's never been about that. It's never achieved that and it's never going to achieve that. And instead of giving narcotics units anti bias training, we need to just end the war on drugs and just reduce that completely counterproductive burden of policing on our society.

A (20:14)

Strikes me very similar to Trump repeating that crime is being brought in by immigrants, despite the fact that endless statistical studies show that the rate of most crimes is higher in native born populations than in immigrant communities. But this narrative has been repeated so often. It's one of those great examples in which if you say it often enough, people will believe it because of other reasons that make them want perhaps to believe it.

B (20:45)

Yeah. In my chapter on border policing, I point out that border policing has never been about closing the border, and it's certainly not about that now. It's about a production of whiteness, really. It's about a set of economic and social relationships. So signaling who we're trying to keep out is a way of identifying who we think we are. And that's always done in these racialized terms, whether it's the Chinese Exclusion Act, Operation Wetback or the Wall. These are always projects of racialization.

A (21:18)

It's like Trump telling us we need more Norwegians. If I ever write in the country. Okay, is it correct or would you comment on the notion that you really are advocating, if not the end of policing, a drastic reduction as well as change in what policing. Tell us what you would like to see happen in this country.

B (21:43)

I associate myself with a kind of what I call a divest invest movement, which is the idea that the vast majority of the social problems that we're using the police in theory to address could be better addressed in less coercive and punitive ways. And that what we need is the kind of community investments and economic restructurings that are going to reduce the burdens of crime and social disorder on communities. So really excited about work that Just Leadership USA is doing in their Build Communities movement, for example, where they understand that what's driving populations in jails and prisons is using the police to deal with the fact that these neighborhoods are in huge distress. And instead of investing in education, community centers, libraries, basic health care, drug treatment, we are turning those problems over to the police. So the way to get the police out of our lives in as many ways possible is to do that investment. So I always say, show me the problem and then let's see if we can figure out a non authoritarian solution to it. If there's something left at the end of that, guys with guns who want to enforce their will on the rest of us, maybe we need some mechanism for dealing with that. But the vast majority of what policing does is really about managing the consequences of inequality in a way that maintains and exacerbates that inequality.

A (23:14)

Let me put my economics hat on. We spend an ungodly amount of money on policing, on prisons, on all of that. If we could severely reduce the police as an institution and the incarceration institutions in our country, there would be a liberation of resources to do a lot of these other things. So it's not only a good idea in terms of the human community, but it's also economically feasible because there's a, a shift of resources. So this isn't going to be the expensive item that the critics of it might otherwise claim.

B (23:54)

I mean, I think we shouldn't limit ourselves to just those pots of money. First of all, if we look at what we spend on the military, if we put that in the mix too, then maybe we're moving in the right direction. But it is very true. There are a lot of groups around the country who are articulating things like the Youth Justice Coalition in la, which looked at how much LA county was spending on policing and jails. And they said if we could just have 5% of that money, $10 billion a year, we could fund all the youth services, community based anti violence efforts that would really make our community safer and stronger and reduce the burden of criminalization. But it's going to take more than just reducing police budgets and jail budgets. We're going to need some economic restructuring and some substantial new investments.

A (24:45)

Do you see a growing awareness of what you're saying? Is there an audience for the kind of book you've written, for the kind of arguments you made?

B (24:55)

Somewhat surprisingly.

A (24:56)

So tell us about that.

B (24:57)

Yeah, I conceptualized the book actually before the death of Eric Garner, before the events in Ferguson, and thought that I would be very much a voice in the wilderness. But as events have changed and new movements have emerged, what I've seen is a growing awareness in communities who are fighting around these issues that body cameras and community policing are not going to save us. They're not going to fix policing. They don't make any difference. There's no evidence to support them. And that what we really have to talk about is the kind of political accountability around these bigger questions of why are we using police to solve all our community problems when the tools they have to solve those problems are handguns and ticket books and handcuffs. And those are not the tools our communities need.

A (25:45)

You know, it's very similar to what I've been hearing from teachers that they feel that they are thrust into the disintegrating families, the disintegrating neighborhoods, and asked to teach as if there are no extra costs. And I don't just mean it in my money, but in time and in energy that they don't have those costs, that somehow they are to in their little classroom compensate or offset the disintegration of the larger society. And they make basically the same claim you do. These are political and broad economic problems. We could do the job maybe even with less resources than we have if people weren't here in New York, for example, the statistics that 10% of our public school kids were homeless at some part of last year. I mean, what are we talking about? The extra problems a child brings who has no home? If that problem isn't dealt with, what are you asking the teacher to compensate? It's a disaster. And then anyway, my point is, is there, I guess I want you to tell us that there is a growing audience, that there is an awareness that your idea isn't a cry in the wilderness, but is becoming the last best hope of solving these problems.

B (27:01)

Well, let's look at the Advancement Project and the work they're doing on schools. They have explicitly come out and said that part of the problem with schools is the reliance on school police. That as we've eliminated funding gone towards privatization, we're destroying the schools. Kids also are bringing their problems from home and the community into the school, giving the teachers no resources to deal with them. That's part of what the LA teachers are upset about.

A (27:27)

Exactly.

B (27:28)

We have to understand schools as a site not just for education, but for the well being of the communities, community school movements, restorative justice movements. We can make schools a positive part of the community if we reject using police privatization, charter school movements and really have a robust reinvestment in the idea of public education. And there are a lot of groups around the country doing this. In New York, we understand that there are more police than counselors in the city schools and that's got to end.

A (28:05)

I remember my elementary school being a place where everything happened. I mean, there were 10 different community activities every day after school because it was the. Well, you know, I have to say, as I often do, we've come to the end of our time. It goes very quickly. But I want to underscore the importance of the ideas you've brought. The questions about policing are long overdue. It's very good to hear that there's an audience for that. And I hope people will pursue your book and that you'll come back and talk about this with us again.

B (28:40)

Thank you.

A (28:41)

And for all of you, thank you for being part of this. And remember, please, that this is a program that's designed to have you as a partner, spreading what you learn here, sharing it with the people around you. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.