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Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: The Corps are Problems, Problems. I'm Robert Evans. This is
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, normally a podcast about the worst people
Speaker 1: in all of history, and it still is. But this
Speaker 1: is the last of our sit episode mini series Behind
Speaker 1: the Police. Um. That introduction started out rough, but it
Speaker 1: came together in the end um much like the Police,
Speaker 1: except for well no not really, uh my guest uh.
Speaker 1: With this episode, as with all of the others is
Speaker 1: Jason Petty, better known as the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason,
Speaker 1: how are you doing? What's up? I'm breathing thin air
Speaker 1: because I'm on the road. But let's hope that this
Speaker 1: isn't the end of the police story and it does
Speaker 1: turn out okay. Yeah, yeah, I think that I think
Speaker 1: they might pull it together in the last the last quarter. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Let's let's just hope the last quarter isn't the year
Speaker 1: four thousand. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I haven't been checking the
Speaker 1: news in months, so I I don't know, um how
Speaker 1: how how the police are nowadays? I assume everybody's happy
Speaker 1: with them, yeah, or they're sticking to brand Yeah, so
Speaker 1: um boy, Jason. As as I finished this up, it
Speaker 1: became incredibly clear to me how much I was going
Speaker 1: to have to leave out of this of this series,
Speaker 1: like not just the fact that we're not really talking
Speaker 1: about federal law enforcement, the FBI, the d e A,
Speaker 1: the A, t f UM, just because I wanted to
Speaker 1: focus on like, you know, cops, like normal straight up
Speaker 1: specifically cops. Yeah, in your neighborhood cops. Um. There's but
Speaker 1: there's like so much like we're not going to talk
Speaker 1: much about the civil rights movement, just because a lot
Speaker 1: of what the police did then was just kind of
Speaker 1: like the same tactics that we already talked about them
Speaker 1: doing in previous periods. Um, We're not going to talk
Speaker 1: a lot about like the LGBT movement and violence against them.
Speaker 1: We're not going to talk about the Green movement and
Speaker 1: the suppression of that, um, just because I already wrote
Speaker 1: sixteen pages for today. Yeah, so we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about what I think is the right last subject
Speaker 1: to end on a series that is inevitably not going
Speaker 1: to cover everything that it would have been good to cover. Um,
Speaker 1: And that is the military's nation of American Police. UM. Yes,
Speaker 1: So that's where we're where we're going to today, and
Speaker 1: it's important. It's important to note I'm gonna throw this
Speaker 1: in there that like all the pieces that he's talking about, like, remember,
Speaker 1: those are like lived experiences, So it's appiled on history
Speaker 1: that emotionally and psychologically all of us who have lived
Speaker 1: through it, like, no, it's there, But good god, if
Speaker 1: there's no way to actually cover all of it in
Speaker 1: a podcast, you know what I'm saying. No, I mean,
Speaker 1: if we'd had another dozen episodes. Yeah, we wouldn't have
Speaker 1: had to leave out much like we would have had
Speaker 1: to leave out a lot, but we would have been
Speaker 1: able to give broad coverage of all of the things.
Speaker 1: But like, yeah, there's just this isn't going to be
Speaker 1: you know, we had to had to stop somewhere. So militarization,
Speaker 1: I think does kind of make sense, um to to
Speaker 1: focus on in our last episode because it's kind of
Speaker 1: the biggest aspect of where we are right now, UM,
Speaker 1: in terms of like why the why the ship that's
Speaker 1: happening right now is happening, Like a lot of it
Speaker 1: has to do with militarization, and obviously the foundational issues
Speaker 1: of racism that we're behind policing contributed to. Um. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about all that, um. But to start
Speaker 1: us off today, we are going to get into one
Speaker 1: of the aspects of the U s law enforcement that
Speaker 1: we have thus far failed to cover it enough to
Speaker 1: tail US policing and indigenous people's um. Yeah, yeah, because
Speaker 1: this is really where we get to the very start
Speaker 1: of militarized police in the United States. When people talk
Speaker 1: about use that term today, militarized police, they're generally referring
Speaker 1: to equipment, right, the transition of cops from the friendly
Speaker 1: Andy Griffith style lawman who wore like maybe a gun
Speaker 1: on his hip and a pair of handcuffs to like
Speaker 1: the guys wearing heavy body armor in a tool belt
Speaker 1: with like five different weapons on it. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: police tanks and grenade launchers and a R fifteens. And
Speaker 1: when people talk about that stuff, they kind of see
Speaker 1: militarization as a new and worrying trend because the cops
Speaker 1: they grew up with didn't look like that. Um. And
Speaker 1: that's a part of police militarization. Um. And it is
Speaker 1: a new part of police military. Well, it's not even
Speaker 1: really a new part of it. It's worrying, but it's
Speaker 1: not new. UM. So it's the most visually like, yeah, identifiable.
Speaker 1: You know, somebody can get their brain around that. Like
Speaker 1: we say there's a problem with militarization. You could go, yeah,
Speaker 1: logically speaking, I am not an enemy insurgent, so I
Speaker 1: don't understand what grenade launcher for. Yeah I didn't an Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you didn't used to on a daily basis. See dudes
Speaker 1: in like the middle of Los Angeles who looked like
Speaker 1: they could have walked out of downtown, right and now
Speaker 1: you do um b yeah, yeah, why hamo, Like, how
Speaker 1: is it? What do you expect to happen in the Yeah?
Speaker 1: The fucking I was at a cop right the other
Speaker 1: day where like there were like a bunch of rapid
Speaker 1: response guys and fucking uh and fucking like rural camo
Speaker 1: and it was like, what are you. We're in the
Speaker 1: middle of that in front of the Portland's Justice Center.
Speaker 1: What do you think is going to happen? You're gonna
Speaker 1: bland in. You need to be wearing some like cut
Speaker 1: off dickies, wearing some sort of coffee stain on your shirt,
Speaker 1: got some really tight jeans and a flannel shirt if
Speaker 1: you want a camouflage into Portland, Like what do you
Speaker 1: what do you fucking play? That wouldn't even camouflage you
Speaker 1: in the goddamn woods? Thank you so? Um yeah. In
Speaker 1: episode two of this mini series, we talked about how
Speaker 1: the Philadelphia State Police were formed in direct imitation of
Speaker 1: the Philippine Constabulary, a colonial police force the u S
Speaker 1: form to suppress the natives of a conquered land, and
Speaker 1: such colonial police forces were really common among like imperial
Speaker 1: powers during the period of colonialism, or at least the
Speaker 1: period where colonialism was kind of openly embraced by everyone. Um,
Speaker 1: So all of the big European nations did this ship
Speaker 1: and you know, the US did as well. The most
Speaker 1: influential example of such a force in American history though,
Speaker 1: because like you know, the British had a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of different ones, they're probably the best at it. So
Speaker 1: did the French, so did the Germans, um, and so
Speaker 1: did the United States. But since we didn't have the
Speaker 1: as as extensive and overseas empire as as those European
Speaker 1: nations did, a lot of our colonial policing forces were
Speaker 1: actually like deployed right here at home, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of in frontier areas that weren't states yet. And the
Speaker 1: most influential example of such a force in American history
Speaker 1: is probably the Texas Rangers, who were formed officially in
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty five. So we're talking about the Rangers today, baby,
Speaker 1: not that not the not the sports team. They're broadly
Speaker 1: George Bushy's team. Yeah, they're whatever we're talking about talking about.
Speaker 1: The sport are the Rangers? Robert their baseball right, Oh
Speaker 1: my god, I'm so proud Texas. I was like no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no no no no no, it's Texas. So he
Speaker 1: knows that answer. Yes. Yeah. So I to tease my
Speaker 1: Texas homeboys to be like, I know y'all go to
Speaker 1: to Alamo every year, and I was like, at my
Speaker 1: DJ I traveled with it from Texas. I was like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know y'all lost the Alimo, right. He was like,
Speaker 1: I didn't realize it until college because then every year
Speaker 1: like y'all lost. Anyway, go on, So the Range speaking
Speaker 1: of the Alamo and such, The Rangers started out kind
Speaker 1: of in the period where Texas was doing its own
Speaker 1: thing uh and not yet part of the United States,
Speaker 1: and they were initially kind of just a small, irregular
Speaker 1: band of hired tufts whose job was to protect newly
Speaker 1: settled white families out on the frontier. UH. This put
Speaker 1: them in constant conflict with local native tribes, the Cherokee
Speaker 1: and the Comanche primarily, and it also pit them against
Speaker 1: the Mexican population in the area. The Texas Rangers quickly
Speaker 1: evolved into one of the most formidable forces for protecting
Speaker 1: whiteness on the American frontier. When non white people were
Speaker 1: accused of robbing or attacking white settlers. The Rangers acted
Speaker 1: as designated vigilantes to see that justice was done. And
Speaker 1: because we're talking about Texas in the period we're talking about,
Speaker 1: we're actually talking about like what is today Texas, Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: parts of New Mexico and even some Colorado. I think, um,
Speaker 1: like it's that whole region. And and a lot of
Speaker 1: this is like Comanche who were like this is there
Speaker 1: where they've been living for a while, um, and the
Speaker 1: the colode they started having conflicts with settlers, and settlers
Speaker 1: would murder them. They would murder settlers, and the Texas
Speaker 1: Rangers would be they act a lot as like scouts
Speaker 1: and stuff, for like hunting down these bands and leading
Speaker 1: militias to them and stuff. And that's kind of like
Speaker 1: they're kind of like special forces in this period. And
Speaker 1: I just can't just throwing it in, like I just
Speaker 1: think like the the social interaction, just the humanity of
Speaker 1: the moment. Of course, it's tints, of course, it's like, uh,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of like bigger forces of like colonialism
Speaker 1: and frontiers and all these things happening, but just the
Speaker 1: human interaction of saying you're just waking up, gonna make
Speaker 1: a cup of coffee, step out of your house and
Speaker 1: someone's building a house in your lawn. Yeah, they looked
Speaker 1: at you like you crazy. It's just like yeah, what
Speaker 1: what like what do you? What are you doing? Man?
Speaker 1: Do you well? And it's one of those I don't
Speaker 1: want to I'm talking about my ass a little bit
Speaker 1: now because it's been a long time since I read.
Speaker 1: I've read like one good book about what happened to
Speaker 1: like the conflict between the Comanches and the the the
Speaker 1: white settlers in this period. But if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 1: like they were living somewhere else and yeah, we kicked
Speaker 1: them out of it. Uh. And so they wound up
Speaker 1: kind of in you know, the the broad Texas region,
Speaker 1: and then we were like okay, but not here either,
Speaker 1: like it was it was yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very
Speaker 1: frustrating history. So white settlers quickly learned how to use
Speaker 1: the Texas Rangers is like a mercenary force um, and
Speaker 1: not just against and well not just against like indigenous peoples.
Speaker 1: It became very common for white men to raid cattle
Speaker 1: from Mexican ranches, uh, and then the Mexican would steal
Speaker 1: their cattle back, and so the white folks would call
Speaker 1: in the Texas Rangers to retrieve their stolen property um.
Speaker 1: And you know, the Texas Rangers would murder people during
Speaker 1: these raids to retrieve property like cattle they had owned
Speaker 1: and had been stolen from them and that they'd taken
Speaker 1: back as a rule in sort of the Texas Republic
Speaker 1: period and the early period of statehood, when non whites
Speaker 1: resisted the Rangers in any way, they could be killed, arrested,
Speaker 1: or tortured. So the Texas Rangers go from being kind
Speaker 1: of this like quasi military scouting force, like a counterinsurgency
Speaker 1: um force, to like acting as kind of a law
Speaker 1: force for for defending whiteness on the frontier um. And
Speaker 1: over the course of several decades, the Texas Rangers acted
Speaker 1: as the tip of a spear that gradually drove most
Speaker 1: indigenous people's out of Texas, often very violently. For much
Speaker 1: of the eighteen hundreds, the Rangers were yeah again, like
Speaker 1: counterinsurgency was kind of their their bag, and they worked
Speaker 1: with the militia or the military as basically special forces.
Speaker 1: The Comanche Wars were a brutal series of conflicts that
Speaker 1: crossed the line and to outright ethnic cleansing on a
Speaker 1: number of occasions, and the Texas Rangers were very heavily involved.
Speaker 1: One of these ethnic cleansing moments would be the Red
Speaker 1: Fork Massacre of eighteen forty, when a team of Texas
Speaker 1: Volunteer Rangers surrounded a Commanche village whose men were all outrating.
Speaker 1: Rather than attempt to arrest the women, children, and elderly inside,
Speaker 1: the rangers surrounded the camp and opened fire. When their
Speaker 1: rifles ran out of ammunition, they closed in with pistols
Speaker 1: to execute the survivors. Some hundred and forty Commanches were
Speaker 1: gunned down, and probably another hundred and forty at least
Speaker 1: died later from exposure. Their horses were stolen to pay
Speaker 1: the rangers. Now, this was an act of genocide, UM.
Speaker 1: It was also pretty much a fundamentally military endeavor. UM.
Speaker 1: But as the and that's that's generally when you're we're
Speaker 1: talking about like the the kind of cutting edge of
Speaker 1: the genocide against the Native Americans, the intentional parts of it, UM,
Speaker 1: we are often talking about a military endeavor, like policing
Speaker 1: plays a role, but it's it's a lot of like
Speaker 1: the U. S. Military UM, and the rangers, Yeah, move
Speaker 1: into a different part of the country. But like when
Speaker 1: you get into like the Little Big Horn and General
Speaker 1: Custer stand that was a military move too, and in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways, the ingredients were the same also
Speaker 1: in the sense that like this is where the cron
Speaker 1: nation lives. Uh, now we actually but we only live
Speaker 1: here because y'all made us live here. And then you
Speaker 1: discovered gold in the Black Hills and now you on
Speaker 1: our land again. And yeah, so just this like obviously
Speaker 1: in a Little Big Horn, it's because they grossly underestimated
Speaker 1: um sitting bowl. But uh, but that but that, but
Speaker 1: that continual like um like fake diplomacy, which was really
Speaker 1: a militarized ethnic cleansing from what I know from the
Speaker 1: first tour I ever did was twenty seven Native American reservations,
Speaker 1: So first tour as a as an artist. So when
Speaker 1: you start talking to them about the way that they
Speaker 1: see these things, they were, yeah, it's in their mind
Speaker 1: it's always been an act of military Yeah. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that that's part of I guess why we haven't kind
Speaker 1: of gone into that aspect as much, um and one
Speaker 1: of one of the just because like it's it's less
Speaker 1: of a policing thing and more of a military thing.
Speaker 1: Although those lines blur, and they blur, especially with the
Speaker 1: Texas Rangers because while the Rangers kind of our start
Speaker 1: out is a quasi military force, as the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: turned into the nineteen hundreds and kind of the frontier fades,
Speaker 1: the Rangers transitioned into a law enforcement agency and they
Speaker 1: become they're broadly similar to the U. S. Marshals like today,
Speaker 1: that's kind of like more or less where they land,
Speaker 1: um and they're but they're like this weird Texas state
Speaker 1: law enforcement agency that kind of resembles in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways more of like a FED type agency than
Speaker 1: it does you know, a beat cop. But their their
Speaker 1: law enforcement now, so they and they still exist, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they still exist. They go from being like okay, not
Speaker 1: like uh, it's not like Queen Elizabeth like they actually
Speaker 1: do no no no. If you fly into um, if
Speaker 1: you fly into love Field Airport today in Dallas, which
Speaker 1: is the airport you want to fly into and out
Speaker 1: of in Dallas because DFW was a goddamn nightmare. There's
Speaker 1: a statue. There's a statue of like a dude, a
Speaker 1: cowboy looking dude with a six gun on his hip.
Speaker 1: That's like a statue of the Texas Rangers. And I
Speaker 1: think it's like the words written on it are one Ranger,
Speaker 1: one Riot, which is their motto. And we'll be talking
Speaker 1: about where where that motto really comes from now. But
Speaker 1: they're no, they're still around. There's still a law enforcement
Speaker 1: agency in Texas. And yeah, that's the they kind of
Speaker 1: transition from being a military guerrilla warfare unit to being
Speaker 1: like the law. Um. And and as a side note,
Speaker 1: as a side note, I still don't know what a U. S.
Speaker 1: Marshal does except for fly on a plane. You know
Speaker 1: a lot of that's true. Yeah, the movie US Marshals,
Speaker 1: I think is perfectly accurate. Just watched watch the movie
Speaker 1: US Marshals with Robert Downey Jr. And uh and Tommy
Speaker 1: Lee Jones, and I think that's a percent right. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was like, so this is unnecessary. Your whole job
Speaker 1: is unnecessary going so um, the new Texas Rangers as
Speaker 1: law enforcement, um, didn't act as like military scouts anymore,
Speaker 1: but they still enforced white supremacy. At the barrel of
Speaker 1: a gun. In nineteen eighteen, at a place called Poor Veneer,
Speaker 1: Texas Rangers gunned down fifteen unarmed Mexican people and drove
Speaker 1: their families across the border into Mexico. I found a
Speaker 1: fun article on the Rangers in the Texas Observer, which
Speaker 1: is a great news source on Texas. The like really
Speaker 1: good journalism. UH, and they interviewed historian and professor Monica
Speaker 1: Martinez about the history of the Texas Rangers. UH. The
Speaker 1: article notes quote martinez Is research posits the height of
Speaker 1: Texas Ranger violence against Mexicans who have occurred from nineteen
Speaker 1: fifteen to nineteen nineteen. Some three hundred ethnic Mexicans were
Speaker 1: murdered between nineteen fifteen and nineteen sixteen alone. These dates
Speaker 1: coincided with the reign of not only the disgraced Governor
Speaker 1: James Poff Ferguson, but also, starting in nineteen seventeen, the
Speaker 1: oft venerated William P. Hobby. Martinez is appropriately unsparing in
Speaker 1: the detailing of hobbies consistently anti Hispanic, anti double a
Speaker 1: CP agenda. In short, he is the Rangers as his
Speaker 1: own personal goon squad and instigating intimidation tactics against minorities.
Speaker 1: Hobby presided over an era that, according to Martinez, saw
Speaker 1: the widespread practice of executing landowning Hispanic men to force
Speaker 1: the sale of their land by their widows through threats
Speaker 1: of physical violence. Much yeah, much the same Hobby from
Speaker 1: the Houston Airport. Yeah wait same guy. Yeah I think so, yes, yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: George Billson. Then there's Hobby. That's that's like, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: Houston's love Field, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, their
Speaker 1: other airport. Yeah yeah yeah much have said violence aided
Speaker 1: and embed it if not directly perpetrated by the Rangers
Speaker 1: with the state official state consent. Powerful US political elites
Speaker 1: like Hobby made sure that any serious investigation of Ranger
Speaker 1: crimes through official legal channels would be doomed to failure.
Speaker 1: Now yeah, that is just just straight up ethnic cleansing again,
Speaker 1: like like there's still ethnically cleansing people. Um. And obviously
Speaker 1: I didn't learn any of that in Texas history classes.
Speaker 1: I learned about them fighting the Comanche, but it was
Speaker 1: it was framed as like, well, they were, you know,
Speaker 1: both two sides in a war and they both did
Speaker 1: bad things. Um yeah. Now uh it turns out that
Speaker 1: and this is I also didn't learn in middle school.
Speaker 1: It turns out that the Texas Mexican border was kind
Speaker 1: of prior to this point where the Texas Rangers come
Speaker 1: in and start murdering landloaders. It was a semi autonomous
Speaker 1: region because it was both too remote and too close
Speaker 1: to Mexico to really be controlled by any central government.
Speaker 1: So people on the border from both countries would travel
Speaker 1: freely and like cross the border kind of without even
Speaker 1: noticing it was there. They built communities together, they had
Speaker 1: families together, they traded together, um, and this was great
Speaker 1: for them, but it was really bad for rich people
Speaker 1: in racists who lived many hundreds of miles away. So
Speaker 1: the Texas Rangers were sent in to secure the border,
Speaker 1: and this was like the first time the border was
Speaker 1: really secure. And again they did this by executing people
Speaker 1: who owned land near the border and handing their stuff
Speaker 1: actually Mexican people who owned land in the border, and
Speaker 1: handing their stuff over to white people. Um. The dead
Speaker 1: were portrayed as bandits and criminals, and heavily armed rangers
Speaker 1: would pose for photographs with their bodies. By nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: the sheer scale of the violence and forced to state
Speaker 1: legislative hearing on extra judicial killings by the rangers. This
Speaker 1: hearing resulted in no formal charges and the detailed record
Speaker 1: of the Texas Rangers mass murder spree was sealed for
Speaker 1: fifty years so as to not tarnish their record as
Speaker 1: tex And heroes. Yeah, I bet, I bet. Also, also
Speaker 1: there's parts of El Paso that are still like that.
Speaker 1: Then you still can't tell where the border is and
Speaker 1: isn't where there's a there's a high school down there.
Speaker 1: I know because the kid came to a show where
Speaker 1: the football field is in Mexico. Yeah, and then but
Speaker 1: the rest of the school is in Texas, so nobody
Speaker 1: really knows where. We really don't know where it is.
Speaker 1: But yeah, anyway, I just thought that's interesting that, like
Speaker 1: to this day that like it's important for us to
Speaker 1: all remember that borders are made up. They're not we
Speaker 1: made them up. You know, they're just by pain. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe it's not They're not real and they're yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: enforced by pain is a good way to Yeah. Uh
Speaker 1: So the Texas Rangers went well into the twentieth century
Speaker 1: acting as a colonial police force. They didn't stop in
Speaker 1: nineteen um and Alex Vitali, author of the end of
Speaker 1: Policing Rights quote. In the sixties and seventies, local and
Speaker 1: state elites used Rangers to suppress the political and economic
Speaker 1: rights of Mexican Americans, and played a central role in
Speaker 1: subverting farm worker movements by shutting down meetings, intimidating supporters,
Speaker 1: and arresting and brutalizing picketers and union leaders. They were
Speaker 1: also frequently called in to intimidate Mexican Americans out of
Speaker 1: voting in local elections. Most Latinos were subject to a
Speaker 1: kind of wan crow like it's a Jim Crow's thing,
Speaker 1: in which they were denied the right to vote and
Speaker 1: barred from private and public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants,
Speaker 1: bus station waiting rooms, public pools, and bathrooms. This is
Speaker 1: what that statue in love Field is referring to when
Speaker 1: it says one ranger, one riot. That's the riot. Is
Speaker 1: the is Mexicans being like, what if we had the
Speaker 1: right to vote in Texas? Rangers saying what if we
Speaker 1: shot you? You still have to say to yourself, like
Speaker 1: if it's so you like everybody's a situation is so unique,
Speaker 1: but like as a as a Texan Mexican where you
Speaker 1: never moved, your house, never moved, it's just the land
Speaker 1: up under you became Texas and then everybody acting like
Speaker 1: you ain't supposed to be here that you ain't got right.
Speaker 1: So he was like, I I've never left. I don't
Speaker 1: understand how I don't have rights in land. I never left. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you're the new guys. Yeah, it's just the mind
Speaker 1: bender of that. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty
Speaker 1: cool and good. So the Rangers were eventually beaten back
Speaker 1: to an extent in the early nineteen sixties when Tehanos
Speaker 1: began to organize in a significant way. They set up
Speaker 1: voter drives and fought, literally fought in some points to
Speaker 1: get leaders elected on the local city council of a
Speaker 1: small town called Crystal City. This whole operation exploded into
Speaker 1: a big fight, with Rangers cracking skulls and trying to
Speaker 1: break up rallies. Um, but this time they're victims. Attracted
Speaker 1: the attention of the press, The Rangers eventually were forced
Speaker 1: to back down by public opinion, and the Tahanos won
Speaker 1: both the election and major civil rights concessions from the
Speaker 1: white majority you know, all across Texas, and things started
Speaker 1: to get better. Obviously they're still not perfect or even great,
Speaker 1: but they got better. Um. Today, the Texas Rangers are
Speaker 1: sort of just like a weird Texan variant of the U. S. Marshals.
Speaker 1: They do a lot of unsolved crime investigations like cold
Speaker 1: case murders, they investigate serial killers. UM. They also act
Speaker 1: as kind of like they're supposed to be kind of
Speaker 1: a watchdog for the police because they they investigate officer
Speaker 1: involved shootings and of course they do border security um.
Speaker 1: And the fact that they have a I don't know
Speaker 1: enough about how they do today to know how problematic
Speaker 1: they are, and sort of currently in the vein of
Speaker 1: the rest of law enforcement, I will say they have
Speaker 1: a very positive reputation among just Texans um. And this
Speaker 1: is not due to anything they actually do, but is
Speaker 1: owed largely to the nineteen nineties TV show Walker Texas Ranger,
Speaker 1: in which Chuck Norris assumed because Chuck Norris, yeah, Chuck
Speaker 1: Norris basically erased the Centurion and change long history of
Speaker 1: ethnic cleansing and genocide um by doing enough roundhouse kicks
Speaker 1: while wearing a badge on its chest that people were like,
Speaker 1: They're okay, now he punched a bear. Look at at me,
Speaker 1: punched a bear. Yeah, he's got to be a good guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in sort of in following this arc of like
Speaker 1: committing genocide, acting as like a military force of ethnic
Speaker 1: cleansing and like like mass murder to suppress minorities, and
Speaker 1: then getting whitewashed by a TV show with Chuck Norris.
Speaker 1: The Texas Rangers kind of perfectly encapsulate a lot of
Speaker 1: law enforcement history in this country. That is the most
Speaker 1: a sinc sentence. Yeah, the most sinct sentence we've done
Speaker 1: this whole Yeah, they protested all six, they participated in
Speaker 1: at least two genocides. But then Chuck Norris started kicking
Speaker 1: all right, spinning roundhouse kid uh. Also also as a
Speaker 1: native Californian who married a first Gin Mexican woman from
Speaker 1: southern Mexico. I will go to my grave that I
Speaker 1: am not a fan of tex mex food in that
Speaker 1: caso is terrible. No, No, that's the only thing I'll
Speaker 1: fight for about Texas is text mex Hey, man, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'll take your fajitas. They're great, But you can lead
Speaker 1: a caso alone, sucking Calimex, putting fish in everything. Come on, touche. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's actually all pretty incredible compared to the
Speaker 1: burritos we get up here in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't call those burritos. No, they're not. They're not burritos.
Speaker 1: Somebody put keen Wa in one of them. I was just,
Speaker 1: what are you that's a rap. It's just a rap.
Speaker 1: That's a rap. Come on, don't call this a fucking burrito.
Speaker 1: So in our last episode of the series, we talked
Speaker 1: about August Volmer. You remember Valmer, like the the good,
Speaker 1: the best cop that we're we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the series. Yeah, um, probably the most influential police chief
Speaker 1: in US history. Volmer was a big advocate of what
Speaker 1: is called like the professional model of policing, of like
Speaker 1: what a police force should be. UM. He believed that
Speaker 1: police officers should be trained professionals with college degrees. And
Speaker 1: when he thought trained professional, he was not thinking about killing, right, Like,
Speaker 1: their ability to handle a gun and shoot people was
Speaker 1: kind of low on Volmer's list of what cops should
Speaker 1: be professional at UM. He focused on the number one
Speaker 1: their ability to kind of scientifically solve crimes UM. And
Speaker 1: their ability to interface with and be parts of communities. UM.
Speaker 1: And these are both still things. Yeah, broadly, there's still
Speaker 1: problemat One of the things we won't get into enough
Speaker 1: is the number one. Like a lot of police science
Speaker 1: fingerprinting and stuff works a lot less well than than
Speaker 1: they say it does, so like and ship like yeah,
Speaker 1: like like there's a lot of problems with that. And
Speaker 1: there's also people who argue that community policing doesn't like
Speaker 1: is better than you know, maybe what we're doing now,
Speaker 1: but doesn't really work all that well. Like there's arguments
Speaker 1: to be made. We're not going to get into them enough.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be saying that. Like his attitude
Speaker 1: was perfect, but I think it was less problematic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: was he like the like the precursor to like c
Speaker 1: S I Miami, you know, like yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: you gotta like scientifically solve these crimes and that everything
Speaker 1: that has a science degree in forensics is unimaginably gorgeous
Speaker 1: and they work in a lab that is looks more
Speaker 1: like a club. Yeah yeah, it's really well, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: really well. Yeah. Volmer is the guy who advocates for
Speaker 1: like sexy, brilliant um doctor cops who like yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's kind of hiss. Yes, oh my god,
Speaker 1: an incredible shape with abs, like like how do they
Speaker 1: get abs that nice? And also do police work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Volmer that's Mer's attitude. That's kind of the professional
Speaker 1: model of policing. But Volmer was not the only person
Speaker 1: with a vision of what policing should be. And there
Speaker 1: was a you know, in the nineteen twenties in particular,
Speaker 1: a competing model of policing started to evolve. Now, if
Speaker 1: you remember your high school history courses, you'll know that
Speaker 1: the period from like eighteen seventy seven to eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: five is referred to broadly as the Gilded Age. And
Speaker 1: this was a time of massive wealth inequality, a period
Speaker 1: that saw the USA's first multi millionaires rise, alongside a
Speaker 1: devon stating series of economic recessions and depressions. Um, the
Speaker 1: Gilded Age was a time of intense political polarization. Political
Speaker 1: parties got like at each other's throats in a way
Speaker 1: they really hadn't been, you know, you know, prior to
Speaker 1: the Civil War, which I guess hadn't been that long ago.
Speaker 1: So let's not pretend that hasn't always been an aspect
Speaker 1: of our politics. But yeah, uh, And around the turn
Speaker 1: of the century, um, the Gilded Age kind of gave
Speaker 1: way to what's called the Progressive era. And progressive today
Speaker 1: is the term we broadly used for just like folks
Speaker 1: on the left, but back then it meant something different.
Speaker 1: And like, progressives of this era kind of had things
Speaker 1: in common with both our modern left and right. Um,
Speaker 1: some of the values they had in common with, like
Speaker 1: today's lefties, would be sort of a rejection of conservative
Speaker 1: individualism in favor of more collective attitudes towards the common good.
Speaker 1: Progressives wanted to use state power to do things like
Speaker 1: help lower class individuals, workers, immigrants, you know, the urban poor.
Speaker 1: They stood against the greed of unchecked capitalism and the
Speaker 1: corruption of a system of party bosses that had dominated
Speaker 1: urban politics and US cities during the Gilded Age. And
Speaker 1: the progressives weren't really they progressive was a political orientation,
Speaker 1: but they didn't really care about They weren't like super
Speaker 1: into parties. Like a lot of the progressive air was
Speaker 1: kind of a rejection of where party politics had led
Speaker 1: things in the Gilded Age. That's a factor in this doo.
Speaker 1: And when you when you read what I just read,
Speaker 1: the progressives kind of sound like lefties, but that's not
Speaker 1: all they were. Many progressives also held deeply conservative attitudes
Speaker 1: towards religion and acceptable social behavior. Progressives were by and
Speaker 1: large a homogeneous, middle class, white Protestant group. Um. They
Speaker 1: chewed political parties in favor of local in formal organizations
Speaker 1: like the Anti Saloon League. And as that last bit,
Speaker 1: Mike Keia, we are in on a whole lot of uh,
Speaker 1: progressives were very jazzed about prohibition. Um. And it's also
Speaker 1: progressives that also, you know, as an aside, that brings
Speaker 1: us like early race science, um, for for some reasons
Speaker 1: we're going to get into. So the progressives are a
Speaker 1: mix of left and right and problematic as all hell. Like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's also it's also a good lesson for the modern thinker,
Speaker 1: the younger thinker to remember that, like even our terms
Speaker 1: left and right are so malleable and they haven't always
Speaker 1: meant the same thing that you can like find clips
Speaker 1: of like George Bush seen you're talking about climate change,
Speaker 1: because the talking points can vary in these just like
Speaker 1: borders are made up terms and they are very malluable.
Speaker 1: So even just jumping into this time with a vocabulary
Speaker 1: list that you think you know in seeing that like nah,
Speaker 1: you'd like those are also malleable too, is like super good.
Speaker 1: That So, which is one reason why I love this
Speaker 1: this part of American history and politics. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: it's like it's fascinating. Um, it's very because they're like
Speaker 1: part of why they get into race science is that
Speaker 1: like this idea that again we kind of think of
Speaker 1: as broadly positive today, those of this idea that like, Okay,
Speaker 1: the poor, it's like, we should use the government state
Speaker 1: resources to help deal with things like homelessness and poverty. Um.
Speaker 1: But the way a lot of progressives take that's like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: let's figure out the root causes of homelessness and proverty. Boy,
Speaker 1: it seems like certain races of people are more likely
Speaker 1: to be homeless, you're impoverished. Maybe part of what the
Speaker 1: government should be doing to solve this problem is sterilized them.
Speaker 1: That's that's where the thought process goes. It's just like
Speaker 1: a weird sharp left. Yeah, there's there's obviously there are
Speaker 1: certain things I think the government ought to be doing
Speaker 1: that it shouldn't. But let's never forget that when you
Speaker 1: start talking about the government ought to do this or that,
Speaker 1: that can go badly too, Which doesn't mean we shouldn't
Speaker 1: try to solve problems, but let's all keep that in
Speaker 1: our fucking head to remember yes, Um. Yeah, So have
Speaker 1: you ever read Justice by um Michael Sandow? No, I
Speaker 1: have not. Yeah, this is a good one, um, And
Speaker 1: it's a complete tangent knowing that you have forty five
Speaker 1: more pages to read. But uh, it is important to know,
Speaker 1: like what he talked about, what the basic premises, like
Speaker 1: you're what you see as just, um, and how you
Speaker 1: define what justice is? If I if you can answer
Speaker 1: that question, it could tell me where you're probably gonna
Speaker 1: land historically and politically. Like, for example, if you think
Speaker 1: just means the greatest good for all, so everybody looks
Speaker 1: at like what's the greater good? How can the most
Speaker 1: amount of people see the most amount of flourishing, You're
Speaker 1: probably gonna lean more liberal and progressive, right. Uh. If
Speaker 1: you're like, no, justice means leave me alone to figure
Speaker 1: out how I want to make things happen. It is
Speaker 1: unjust for you to limit my liberties. Well that's like
Speaker 1: libertarian and you know, moving into that area where like
Speaker 1: justice means lead me alone, Right, you don't get to
Speaker 1: tell me how to do things. But if you're like,
Speaker 1: just this means there is a right way to do stuff,
Speaker 1: and that right way we all need to fall in line,
Speaker 1: and that's more a conservative lean. So if you say that,
Speaker 1: that's that, then that makes a just society. So if
Speaker 1: you look at things like that, then when you jump
Speaker 1: into this region, you're going they're answering the question how
Speaker 1: do we make how do we make a just society?
Speaker 1: But their solution was, well, you know, brown people suck,
Speaker 1: so they shouldn't have no more children. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's complex, a complex period to talk about. Um and yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, you know what doesn't support eugenics prop Well,
Speaker 1: hopefully the products and services that advertise on this place.
Speaker 1: That's our that's our one line. Sophie calls every advertiser
Speaker 1: and and just says the word eugenics and kind of
Speaker 1: like that way. Have you ever measured a brain? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Do you do? You take skull measurements? Yes? Um, all right,
Speaker 1: here's some ads. Hi. I'm Robert sex Reese, host of
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Speaker 1: We're Back, We're Back, And I just I hope to
Speaker 1: god that was not an ad for a company that
Speaker 1: sells calipers. Um, tell me you're not selling calibers. Yeah, yeah, Sophie,
Speaker 1: I mean these calipers are just off with the promo
Speaker 1: code bastards. On a personal note, On a personal note,
Speaker 1: I remember the first time I saw some of those
Speaker 1: like phrenology, like like manuals and drawings. I was just
Speaker 1: a visual artist, so I was like, dude, that's so cool,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to buy one of those old ones.
Speaker 1: And then then then my father looked at me and
Speaker 1: was like, boy, if you don't get that out my house.
Speaker 1: A funny moment. Yeah. Anyway, So, um, all right, so
Speaker 1: we we're talking about the progressives and particularly the fact
Speaker 1: that they get they get a whole hog and the
Speaker 1: motherfucking prohibition. Uh. And I'm gonna quote next from a
Speaker 1: paper by Ellen Leichtman, an associate professor from Eastern Kentucky
Speaker 1: University that's about early police militarization. She starts by kind
Speaker 1: of talking about the genesis of a lot of progressive thought.
Speaker 1: So she's talking about progressives here as the city's grew,
Speaker 1: many of them began to yearned for a small town
Speaker 1: pass that had existed mostly in their imaginations. These towns
Speaker 1: were conceptualized as homogeneous villages where everyone knew everyone else
Speaker 1: and looked after each other. While small towns still existed
Speaker 1: throughout the country, Progressives bemoaned the fact that these traits
Speaker 1: could not be transferred to urban living. Actually, many of
Speaker 1: these traits could be found in urban immigrant neighborhoods, but
Speaker 1: progressives could not transfer their idealized image of small town
Speaker 1: living to a foreign environment. The small towns they had
Speaker 1: envisioned were based on Anglo Saxon Protestant ethics and culture,
Speaker 1: not the Catholic, Italian and Irish, Eastern European Jewish and
Speaker 1: other customs of the immigrant neighborhoods, which did not hold
Speaker 1: with many of the Sumptuary laws, especially that of prohibition.
Speaker 1: So dear to the progressives, hearts so they they're they're big,
Speaker 1: family oriented people. But the actual like, the people who
Speaker 1: are really living the kind of family oriented small towns
Speaker 1: sort of life within the big cities are these immigrants,
Speaker 1: and they drink and progressives hate that. Um. So progressives
Speaker 1: get their way on prohibitions starting January seventeenth, nineteen twenty.
Speaker 1: But it didn't go well, and the first two years
Speaker 1: of prohibition saw are all crime increased by twenty four
Speaker 1: percent nationwide. This included a increase in homicide and increase
Speaker 1: in assault and battery. Most of this violence was driven
Speaker 1: by the enforcement of prohibition. One study that compared South
Speaker 1: Carolina counties that did and did not enforce prohibition found
Speaker 1: that enforcement led to a thirty to sixty increase in homicides. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of people get killed when you prohibit drugs arbitrarily.
Speaker 1: It turns out this is the lesson maybe we should
Speaker 1: have learned. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, there's at some point somebody
Speaker 1: needs to go ahead and go in and explain how
Speaker 1: there was really no scientific reasoning behind prohibition, just snop
Speaker 1: political power. People just didn't like alcohol and wanted the
Speaker 1: state to stop something they didn't like from happening. Uh So, Yeah.
Speaker 1: The increase massive increase in violence as a result of
Speaker 1: prohibition infuriated a lot of progressives, and rather than recognized
Speaker 1: that prohibition was maybe a bad idea, a lot of
Speaker 1: them started pushing hard to use state power to put
Speaker 1: an end to bootlegging in an organized fashion and This
Speaker 1: is what led to the first major challenge to August
Speaker 1: Volmer's like professional model of of police, many progressives began
Speaker 1: to push for an alternate idea, a military model of
Speaker 1: a police force. And I'm gonna quote again from Professor Lakeman, Well,
Speaker 1: there was a substantial overlap between the professional and military models,
Speaker 1: and that both insisted that the police be autonomous, be
Speaker 1: subject to physical requirements, and used the latest technology to
Speaker 1: defeat crime. There was a difference in focus. For the
Speaker 1: military model, the city and its police represented the nation
Speaker 1: and its standing army. People who broke the law were
Speaker 1: equated to enemies of the state, not citizens, and became
Speaker 1: person and on grata in their own country. To fight
Speaker 1: these adversaries, the uniformed branch of the police and the
Speaker 1: detectives the non uniformed branch, were equated to different services
Speaker 1: of the military. Illegal behavior was seen as an attack
Speaker 1: on the American way of life. To save the country,
Speaker 1: the police had to engage in a war on crime.
Speaker 1: Needless to say, many cities began recruiting the lilitarymen to
Speaker 1: run their departments. And Jason, one of these military men
Speaker 1: was a fellow you and I discussed kind of off
Speaker 1: handedly in one of the first episodes of the series.
Speaker 1: You remember when I read you that quote from Marine
Speaker 1: Corps Major General Smedley Butler. Yes, Smithley, Yeah, Now that
Speaker 1: quote was from kind of after he woke up a
Speaker 1: bit um and started to realize some problems with earlier
Speaker 1: aspects of his career. Um. But in nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 1: he was still a Marine Corps general in the city
Speaker 1: of Philadelphia elected Freeland Kendrick mayor on a law and
Speaker 1: order platform. Kendrick, a Republican, was livid that his city
Speaker 1: had more speakeasies than perhaps any other area in the country.
Speaker 1: The city of Brotherly Love had an estimated eight thousand
Speaker 1: of legal bars in liquor stores in nineteen three. Because
Speaker 1: it's Philly, you know, it's fucking Philly, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Philly is always on brand, So yes, Mark Kendrick decided
Speaker 1: that a military man and a military model were needed
Speaker 1: to reform the Philadelphia p D into something that could
Speaker 1: tackle the problem of vice, and he chose Marine Brigadier
Speaker 1: General Smedley Darlington Butler to be the new Director of
Speaker 1: Public Safety. And again, Butler was still in the military
Speaker 1: at this point. He had to get like a special
Speaker 1: a special like leave from the Marine Corps so that
Speaker 1: he could go be the director of public safety in Philadelphia. UM.
Speaker 1: So he's still a general. He's still in the military
Speaker 1: as he takes over a police force. UM. Now at
Speaker 1: age forty two in nineteen forty two, General Butler had
Speaker 1: survived fourteen campaigns and expeditions over twenty two years of service.
Speaker 1: He had joined the military illegally as a literal child
Speaker 1: after lying about his age in order to fight in
Speaker 1: the Philippines. UM. During his time fighting for capitalism in
Speaker 1: his own you know, that's how he framed it. Later,
Speaker 1: Butler had earned the nicknames Old gimlet Ie, Hell's Devil Butler,
Speaker 1: the Fighting Quaker, and old duck Boards. He had a
Speaker 1: lot of nicknames. Fighting Quaker, Yeah, that's a that's a
Speaker 1: good nickname. That's a tattoo bro y, and he gets
Speaker 1: the nickname waker. Like duckboards are like wood boards they
Speaker 1: would put down and like trench fighting because it was
Speaker 1: like muddy so that you would be able to walk
Speaker 1: and like basically they're during World War One, there was
Speaker 1: this fight where like everything was fucking muddy as ship
Speaker 1: and they needed to get boards into place and Butler,
Speaker 1: who was like I think a general still at this point,
Speaker 1: just picks up a funckload of boards and like runs
Speaker 1: into the battlefield to like set them down, and like
Speaker 1: he he's he won two medals of Honor and he
Speaker 1: wanted to Yeah, and he wanted Distinguished Service Cross, which
Speaker 1: is like the British like award, like their medal of Honor.
Speaker 1: Like he he wins two of our medals of honor
Speaker 1: and like the British equivalent or inside they're British to
Speaker 1: the French equivalent, like he's, he's he's not just like
Speaker 1: an officer who like commands troops in battle from like
Speaker 1: a safe position, like like Smedley Butler. Whatever else you
Speaker 1: want to say about him, it's a fucking terrifying badass.
Speaker 1: Um Like he was. He was just like one of
Speaker 1: these guys with like a contempt for his own safety
Speaker 1: and battle. Um. Yeah, man, hey, did you know any
Speaker 1: kids like that when you were like in Texas growing
Speaker 1: up where he's just a kid that you were just
Speaker 1: like this guy, yeah, is dangerous and doesn't care about
Speaker 1: his body, but I'm my friend. Yeah yeah, yeah, those
Speaker 1: are good people to have be friends with. Um, outside
Speaker 1: of certain situations. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so but that's that's
Speaker 1: Smedley Butler at this period. So he's kind of a legend.
Speaker 1: He's still a general and he gets made the director
Speaker 1: of public safety in Philadelphia. Um. And you know, Butler
Speaker 1: himself was a progressive um and he he was also
Speaker 1: a drinker, like not a heavy one, but he drank um.
Speaker 1: So he didn't like prohibition, but he was progressive progressive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was kind of his belief that even bad laws
Speaker 1: had to be enforced for the sake of public good.
Speaker 1: And upon taking off, as he stated, I do not
Speaker 1: care whether the state laws or city ordinances are right
Speaker 1: or wrong. From January seven, they are going to be enforced.
Speaker 1: So like that's his attitude, is like that, and that's
Speaker 1: such a military at yes, it is. Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: when you said earlier, like I've never heard that train
Speaker 1: of thought put in the order that you put it
Speaker 1: when you were like, um, an active crime is an
Speaker 1: act against the state. Therefore you are no longer a citizen,
Speaker 1: you are now an enemy combatant. I've never heard that
Speaker 1: train of logic because I never understood how if you're policeman,
Speaker 1: how you like who are you fighting? And like you're
Speaker 1: fighting the people you supposed to protect. Like, I don't
Speaker 1: get it. That sentence finally at least made me be
Speaker 1: able to follow the logic. I just wanted to go
Speaker 1: back and point that out. Yeah, and this is this
Speaker 1: is one of the things that we're seeing in Philadelphia
Speaker 1: right now, is like the the first time where so
Speaker 1: obviously you've had uh, um, you've had the police being
Speaker 1: used to suppress segments of the American pop the dangerous classes, right, Um,
Speaker 1: and this like primarily black and brown people. In this
Speaker 1: period of time, what we start to see happening with
Speaker 1: the militarization of the Philadelphia police, it's kind of the
Speaker 1: first time the police are at war with everyone in
Speaker 1: the city like that. That because you know, white people broadly, Um,
Speaker 1: if they weren't members of a dangerous racial group, um,
Speaker 1: could see the police's protectors in this period. And that
Speaker 1: starts to change in Philly because in Philly, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they they this is the first time like the police
Speaker 1: like again, and the police in the twenties are heavily
Speaker 1: corrupt and a lot of them are criminals, but they're
Speaker 1: not as an organized force. They're not going to war
Speaker 1: with the city. This is the first time that really happens,
Speaker 1: because like you were selling drugs now, yeah, just calls
Speaker 1: nine yeah yeah yeah. Um. So. Butler gave his first
Speaker 1: address to the Philly p D in a uniform he
Speaker 1: had designed for himself, complete with a cape, which is
Speaker 1: a flex like yeah, yeah, if you got if you
Speaker 1: got that many medals on the from multiple countries, you
Speaker 1: can wear a cape. You get to wear a cape.
Speaker 1: Yeah fuck it, yeah, ok. Yeah. He demanded the police
Speaker 1: stopped making bribes, and he told them that while the
Speaker 1: rest of the city might see them as just a
Speaker 1: bunch of corrupt gangsters, he saw them as soldiers like
Speaker 1: the Marines he'd spent years commanding in battle, and that's
Speaker 1: what he planned to turn them into. So Butler launched
Speaker 1: an immediate series of raids on bootleggers and speakeasy's changing
Speaker 1: city policy by not informing the mayor first, I think
Speaker 1: in part because he knew the mayor knew some of
Speaker 1: these people and had been protecting them. And in a
Speaker 1: matter of days, Butler's police closed down nine hundred illegal bars.
Speaker 1: Now at the same time as he cracked down General
Speaker 1: Butler began the process of transforming the Philadelphia Police into
Speaker 1: a military force. He created a new squad of three
Speaker 1: hundred officers whose job was to spy on their fellow cops.
Speaker 1: These men would be the teeth behind Butler's admonition that
Speaker 1: Philly cops had to stop taking bribes. Another of Butler's
Speaker 1: first steps was to abolish the police training school see Volmer.
Speaker 1: August Volmer wanted educated professionals with like degrees in criminal justice,
Speaker 1: who like approached crime from a scientific standpoint. General Butler
Speaker 1: thought that was bullshit. He thought that cops, like soldiers,
Speaker 1: learned best in the field. Um and before his term,
Speaker 1: police training had taken more than three months. Butler's new
Speaker 1: policies sent the cops that on the street almost immediately,
Speaker 1: gave them like a booklet that outlined their duties and
Speaker 1: was just like you'll figure it out once you're on
Speaker 1: the street. You talk about buyinary thinking, Yeah, you either
Speaker 1: a get trained for three months or be get a
Speaker 1: little pamphlet. Get a little pamphlet. Yeah, go crack some heads.
Speaker 1: You'll learn quick, you'll figure it out. Like there ain't
Speaker 1: thought maybe they're somewhere in between there, maybe we could
Speaker 1: pull a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
Speaker 1: Just those my two options, yep, and it's it's like so.
Speaker 1: The one thing that's interesting is that Butler didn't actually
Speaker 1: cancel all training. There was exactly one area where police
Speaker 1: still trained because he thought it was important, and it
Speaker 1: was in the use of firearms. Um. He had realized
Speaker 1: early on that most cops barely knew how to use
Speaker 1: their weapons, and even if fewer ever fired them. Butler
Speaker 1: thought this was a problem because he again, he's treating
Speaker 1: them as soldiers. So he mandated two weeks of marksmanship training,
Speaker 1: which was the only training his cops received. He also,
Speaker 1: rather bafflingly, decided to arm the fire department with forty
Speaker 1: five caliber revolters, which, yeah, he gave. He gave all
Speaker 1: the firefighters guns, and he required them to wear their
Speaker 1: guns off duty. Um well, they had arresting powers. Firefighters
Speaker 1: could arrest people in those days, so he was like,
Speaker 1: when you're off duty, you're all auxiliary cops, and you
Speaker 1: need to carry guns in case you have to shoot
Speaker 1: some people. Basically, he viewed all public safety employees as
Speaker 1: soldiers who might potentially get called in to fight a
Speaker 1: war against the criminals within their city. And since every
Speaker 1: criminal was now the same as a foreign combatant. Butler
Speaker 1: started applying the same counterinsurgency tactics he'd learned in the
Speaker 1: Philippines and throughout Latin America. He announced that he would
Speaker 1: give a promotion to the first officer to kill a bandit.
Speaker 1: The bandit in question did not have to be committing
Speaker 1: a violent crime. If he had a revolver in hand
Speaker 1: or on his body while he was being chased, that
Speaker 1: was fair game for the Philadelphia p d. From Professor
Speaker 1: Lichtman's paper quote. Butler took this further and stated that
Speaker 1: like soldiers, those police who killed criminals should not be
Speaker 1: called upon to either defend themselves or to contribute to
Speaker 1: their defense. A policeman who shoots a bandit is serving
Speaker 1: his city exactly as a soldier when firing at his
Speaker 1: country's enemies. Butler said he saw no difference in context
Speaker 1: between the role of the soldier and then of a
Speaker 1: police officer. Uh, that's bad. Yeah, it's not great, I mean,
Speaker 1: and we we wound up nationwide with the same ruling
Speaker 1: Butler made that it's cool to shoot people running away.
Speaker 1: It was like in the eighties of the early nineties
Speaker 1: where the it was like the Supreme Court ruled that
Speaker 1: if you a police officer can shoot you even if
Speaker 1: you're not actively threatening them, if you're trying to get
Speaker 1: away from an arrest, Like, that's a thing that could happen.
Speaker 1: It's why cops get to shoot so many people in
Speaker 1: the back. Um, it's it's fine. So Butler saw no
Speaker 1: reason why his soldier cops shouldn't have access to the
Speaker 1: latest in military grade weaponry. He ordered several customized armored
Speaker 1: cars to enable his officers to get into motorized gunfights
Speaker 1: with bootleggers. Rather than holding two men as with a
Speaker 1: normal police car, these armored buggies held four officers. The
Speaker 1: rear seats were set up back to back with the
Speaker 1: front seats so that the men in the bat could
Speaker 1: shoot directly at bandits without needing to turn around. Every
Speaker 1: man in the car would carry a rifle, a sot
Speaker 1: off shotgun, and a revolver and if you want to,
Speaker 1: if you want I can't imagine a gesture that shows
Speaker 1: more contempt for the people just living in the city
Speaker 1: then firing a shot off shotgun from a moving vehicle.
Speaker 1: That's a drive by. Yeah, I don't understand what drive by. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that's so reckless. What do you like a sot
Speaker 1: off shotguns not accurate and more than like fifteen feet
Speaker 1: in a good situation, and you're just shooting it from
Speaker 1: a car moving one at that it's fucking nuts. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: fuck it? Yeah and again like one. Sorry I didn't
Speaker 1: even note this at the start. One of Butler's like
Speaker 1: requirements when he took the job, because he was used
Speaker 1: to being a military officer in a foreign war zone,
Speaker 1: was that no one questioned anything he did, like the city,
Speaker 1: not like he'd basically be unaccountable. And they were like, share, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of wars. I
Speaker 1: for the first time, uh, in a little personal news,
Speaker 1: have shot big. This is my first positive experience with
Speaker 1: guns this weekend that we're recording this. Every other experience
Speaker 1: has been terrifying and life threatening. This is the first
Speaker 1: time I've ever seen a gun in a very recreational place.
Speaker 1: And I walk away with two really real thoughts, which is,
Speaker 1: you must anyone holding these has to have a deep
Speaker 1: respect for the deadly power in their hands, Like how
Speaker 1: do you not revere this thing like you feel it's
Speaker 1: power holding it? And then secondly, what has to click
Speaker 1: off in your brain? To be able to point this
Speaker 1: at another human like even reckless or with joy, or
Speaker 1: just to not think about that. I'm like some about
Speaker 1: your soul turned off because I just couldn't. I've kneeled
Speaker 1: in front of a fifty cow, which is crazy, but
Speaker 1: also hailed held to a R fifteen now shooting it
Speaker 1: felt like the most powerful thing I did in my life.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna lie to you, I screamed and howled.
Speaker 1: That was a redneck. I'm not gonna lie, I went, WHOA,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna lie. But I thought to myself, how
Speaker 1: could you point this at a person? Yeah? It's yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it it Um. There's a lot too, There's
Speaker 1: a lot to say about like what what is emotionally
Speaker 1: involved in that? And like I have, I have, unfortunately
Speaker 1: been in a couple of situations, fortunately never where I
Speaker 1: had to point my gun at a person, but where
Speaker 1: I had a gun and somebody was doing something violent
Speaker 1: with a weapon in their hand, and it was like
Speaker 1: a There was like this thought process of like, where's
Speaker 1: my line gonna be? Yes? Yeah, And That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: You still have all your faculties. I believe you're fully
Speaker 1: developed human. So you thought to yourself, there is a
Speaker 1: cost to this. Yeah, you know, and I don't know
Speaker 1: if this juice is worth the squeeze. So what you're
Speaker 1: telling me is you put four dudes off just say
Speaker 1: shoot wildly into the city. Yes, to stop people with
Speaker 1: a couple of gallons of rum. Yes, yeah, it's pretty
Speaker 1: pretty wild. Um. So Butler divided Philadelphia up like a
Speaker 1: war zone with interlocking zones of control. Um that like
Speaker 1: different patrols were set for and every patrol would have
Speaker 1: like set routes that they were supposed to travel in
Speaker 1: the event that they had to like intercept people. There
Speaker 1: were convoys of armored vehicles, and he even set up
Speaker 1: a number of military style outposts to allow for better
Speaker 1: monitoring that were fortified like fortresses within Philadelphia that we're
Speaker 1: able to act as like outposts that there. We call
Speaker 1: them fobs forward rating basis today in Afghanistan, Like what
Speaker 1: he did in Philadelphia is exactly the same tactically as
Speaker 1: what the US does an Afghanistan today. Like that's how
Speaker 1: he divided Philly up for his police force. Um, because
Speaker 1: he's he was like he was good at prosecuting an insurgency.
Speaker 1: He knew what he he knew his business. Um, and
Speaker 1: that's what he did to Philadelphia because it was a
Speaker 1: military model police force. Now under Smedley Butler, the entirety
Speaker 1: of Philadelphia's urban infrastructure was actually turned to the cause
Speaker 1: of prosecuting his war on crime. He used the street
Speaker 1: lights to broadcast blink codes to officers about what crimes
Speaker 1: were taking place where. So he would basically do like
Speaker 1: not semaphore, Um, what's it called? Like like like yeah,
Speaker 1: he would blink the street lights and morse code to
Speaker 1: so officers could see like, oh, there's a crime taking
Speaker 1: place in this street. Um. Yeah. He had four huge
Speaker 1: searchlights and like a big basically fucking billboard set up
Speaker 1: in city hall. Uh that would like display the license
Speaker 1: plates of cars of that like bandit vehicles that were
Speaker 1: in the area. Um like yeah, it's like some fucking
Speaker 1: Big Brothers ship. Smedley's tactics were very successful in closing
Speaker 1: down a huge number of Philadelphia speakeasies, but they were
Speaker 1: not successful and actually winning the war for prohibition. For
Speaker 1: one thing, a ton of officers drank, and so did
Speaker 1: many of the mayor's wealthy backers. These same men and
Speaker 1: women had a lot of business interests in upper class
Speaker 1: clubs and restaurants that had been serving alcohol illegally prior
Speaker 1: to Butler, but were forced to shut down due to
Speaker 1: his raids. He refused to treat the favorite watering holes
Speaker 1: of the wealthy any differently than hole in the wall
Speaker 1: slum speakeasies, and this caused increasing problems for the mayor
Speaker 1: who had hired him. Yeah It's Yeah, Professor Lichtman rights.
Speaker 1: In an attempt to divert what he saw as an
Speaker 1: imminent disaster, he asked Butler to meet with these men
Speaker 1: and women, believing Butler could outline his plans and get
Speaker 1: their cooperation. But Butler was too brusque and did not
Speaker 1: handle the situation well. Instead of coming to some sort
Speaker 1: of compromise with these business people, he approached them as
Speaker 1: if he were a general informed that them that he
Speaker 1: intended to install a special squad of undercover detectives dressed
Speaker 1: in full evening attire to police these establishments. This began
Speaker 1: a two year battle between Butler and the hospitality industry.
Speaker 1: But there must have assumed that either the public would
Speaker 1: support these laws or that he that he could enforce
Speaker 1: them against public opinion. What he learned was what many
Speaker 1: occupying armies learned, it is often the oppressed that prevail culturally.
Speaker 1: Those arrested for liquor and fractions came before magistrates who
Speaker 1: released them for lack of evidence. When Butler began padlocking
Speaker 1: the establishments of persistent liquor violators, judges rejected his arguments
Speaker 1: and allowed the places to reopen. He also came to
Speaker 1: the realization that many policemen were in league with bootleggers,
Speaker 1: and regular citizens had their own bathroom stills. Most Philadelphians
Speaker 1: did not want prohibition and did everything in their power
Speaker 1: to thwart it. So yeah, look and and this lesson,
Speaker 1: this motif is so clear and so repeated everywhere that
Speaker 1: like you're just you're just holding onto power. And when
Speaker 1: you old onto power, even with ridiculous laws, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to use violence. And people are going to turn
Speaker 1: against you because it's stupid. Yes, it's it's stupid. And
Speaker 1: and that's like Butler is good at running an insurgency
Speaker 1: the way our military has always run insurgencies. And if
Speaker 1: you have studied the history of our military and insurgencies,
Speaker 1: we almost always loose, like we don't have a great
Speaker 1: battgg record when it comes to fighting insurgents. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we come home. People think we come home like
Speaker 1: we did this country of favor and the whole country
Speaker 1: looking at us like no, no, you know. It's interesting
Speaker 1: because the the U s mility, the modern US military
Speaker 1: is incredible at combat training, at like training people to
Speaker 1: fight in gunfights, and all of our training is cribbed
Speaker 1: and descended from German military training that started out at
Speaker 1: the end of World War One, um and like into
Speaker 1: World War two out trucks tactic is like the name
Speaker 1: of the kind of techniques, and the German military world
Speaker 1: War one and two was hands like not even brilliant,
Speaker 1: no fucking competition in their ability to train people to
Speaker 1: fight and gunfights. Yeah, historically speaking heads and shoulders, the
Speaker 1: German military was above everybody and they lost both wars,
Speaker 1: which maybe is a lesson about the actual value in
Speaker 1: a broad sense of having your truth to be real
Speaker 1: fucking good at gunfights doesn't matter if you fail at
Speaker 1: the other ship. And that's what Butler fails at um
Speaker 1: is understanding the broader dimensions of the conflict he's got
Speaker 1: himself into. And he gets let go from his job
Speaker 1: running the Philadelphia Police after just two years, most of
Speaker 1: the changes he had instituted reverted back to the way
Speaker 1: things had been before. Philadelphia continued drinking, and eventually the
Speaker 1: whole country got over this absurd attempt to ban a
Speaker 1: widely used intoxicant. Now, during this period, a number of
Speaker 1: other cities did try the same military model police force
Speaker 1: tactics as Philadelphia, putting like military men in charge of
Speaker 1: their police. General Francis Green, you know in New York,
Speaker 1: Colonel James Everington in Los Angeles, Major Mattelis Funkhauser in Chicago,
Speaker 1: one of the best names I've ever heard. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this is something we try. We try militarized police during
Speaker 1: Prohibition and a lot of the country, and it doesn't work. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: there are aspects of police militarization that get adopted in
Speaker 1: this period that kind of stay. For one thing, police
Speaker 1: nationwide begin adopting more military style weapons during this period,
Speaker 1: picking up automatic rifles because the gangsters have Tommy guns
Speaker 1: and b A. R S. You know. Um, that's the
Speaker 1: kind of ship that Bonnie and Clyde and you know,
Speaker 1: my cousin pretty boy Floyd or packing as machine guns.
Speaker 1: So cops get machine guns too. Uh. In general, though
Speaker 1: the military model of policing pursued by progressives in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties and thirties seemed to have died out with prohibition,
Speaker 1: the professional model espoused by Volmer was obviously superior. For
Speaker 1: a few decades. From the war years up until the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, the story of the US police was the
Speaker 1: story of growing professionalism and centralization. This was obviously an
Speaker 1: uneven an imperfect process, but most American probably would have
Speaker 1: assumed that professionalization and the professional model was pretty successful
Speaker 1: during this period of time. A good example would be
Speaker 1: law enforcement success and putting an into lynching as a
Speaker 1: widespread phenomenon. Now, as we talked about that was not
Speaker 1: did not actually happen the way that it was into.
Speaker 1: But you gotta think about how like white people at
Speaker 1: the time, Oh, people aren't getting lunched anymore. We fixed it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know people. Yeah, it's like give occasion where it's like,
Speaker 1: well crime dropped, yeah, yeah, where yea Yeah. So in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four, the TV show Dragnet first hit the airwaves,
Speaker 1: and Dragnet was probably the first TV show about modern
Speaker 1: law enforcement that or I think it was actually um,
Speaker 1: it was probably the first TV show about modern law
Speaker 1: enforcement that deliberately set out to be realistic. Every episode
Speaker 1: opened with the disclaimer that the cases in the series
Speaker 1: were all real, only the names had been changed to
Speaker 1: protect the innocent. Uh. The creator was a guy named
Speaker 1: Jack Webb, and he was also the star of the show.
Speaker 1: He was he was Officer Friday Um, and he partnered
Speaker 1: with the l a p D from the very beginning
Speaker 1: of the series is the very first time that ever happens,
Speaker 1: and partnering with the l a p D brings the
Speaker 1: production of Dragnet a ton of benefits. Number One, they
Speaker 1: were allowed to film anywhere they wanted to in the city.
Speaker 1: Their crew got access to police vehicles and police gear
Speaker 1: without paying for it. The department would even loan them
Speaker 1: real cops who uses extras on the show. All this
Speaker 1: saved the network just a fortune. Um. The only cost
Speaker 1: was that Dragnette scripts had to be approved by the
Speaker 1: l a p D before they could be filmed. Oh wow.
Speaker 1: Whole episodes were scrapped on the basis that the police
Speaker 1: didn't think they portrayed policing in a positive enough light.
Speaker 1: So obviously, Dragnet is not going to deal with problems
Speaker 1: in the l a p D. It's not going to
Speaker 1: deal with an equality, you know, in in in enforcement
Speaker 1: and stuff. Dragnet you know, legitimately broke new ground for
Speaker 1: American television. It was the first show to actually depict
Speaker 1: black and Hispanic cops, but it also failed to mention
Speaker 1: that the l a p D was segregated. Um. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: There were very few instances of on Dragnet actually firing
Speaker 1: their guns, but whenever they did, those cops were shown
Speaker 1: to be calm and emotionally stable in the moment. Nobody
Speaker 1: ever fired in panic on dragnet Um, and the show
Speaker 1: helped shape a generation's attitudes towards law enforcement, portraying the
Speaker 1: ideal scientific, professionalized, vulmer police working almost flawlessly. Right, the
Speaker 1: police are just the facts, is Friday's right? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was gonna a fact. Dragnet is the showing like the
Speaker 1: ideal of the professionalized police. That's what's depicted in dragnet Um,
Speaker 1: and the l a p D has a vested interest
Speaker 1: in wanting to make sure that gets depicted. Obviously. So
Speaker 1: Dragnet was so good for the l a p d
Speaker 1: s image and reputation that in nineteen fifty five, the
Speaker 1: commissioner of the California Highway Patrol demanded his Public Affairs
Speaker 1: division get us a show like Dragnet. Highway Patrol had
Speaker 1: its first season later that year. Yeah, so the Highway
Speaker 1: Patrol show launches next. And of course, the FBI gets
Speaker 1: their own version of this treatment in nineteen sixty five
Speaker 1: with the creatively named TV series The FBI. All of
Speaker 1: these shows push an idealized image of what law enforcement
Speaker 1: was and claimed that their fiction was very close to fact.
Speaker 1: Now to the extent that people bought into this myth.
Speaker 1: It started to puncture in nineteen sixty four as the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement took to the streets and US police
Speaker 1: responded by turning fire hoses and dogs on demonstrators. Many
Speaker 1: of the yeah, yeah, it's on TV. That shuts it down.
Speaker 1: Oh we didn't see this part of it on TV.
Speaker 1: Um this. These people don't seem to be interested in
Speaker 1: the facts. They seem to be interested in sticking dogs
Speaker 1: on folks. Yes, yeah, that that didn't make it into Dragnet,
Speaker 1: so yea. And most of the protests. Many of the
Speaker 1: protests and what we're called riots during this period were
Speaker 1: sparked one way or another by police brutality. The police
Speaker 1: tear gassed masses of young activists at the nine Chicago DNC,
Speaker 1: and from sixty seven to sixty eight there were two
Speaker 1: hundred ninety two mass demonstrations on a hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: three college campuses, Most were in opposition to the Vietnam War.
Speaker 1: By the end of nineteen sixty eight, vivid images of
Speaker 1: battered civil rights protesters, clouds of gas, and the corpses
Speaker 1: of those students at Kent State had very significantly reduced
Speaker 1: public opinion of law enforcement. Probably it's lowest EBB up
Speaker 1: till the present moment. Like my my grandpa was a
Speaker 1: lifetime military man, fought in World War Two in Korea,
Speaker 1: was like managing a hospital on Okinawa, on a military
Speaker 1: base in Japan when Kent State happens and was like
Speaker 1: very pro the Vietnam War, and he was fucking furious
Speaker 1: about Kent State because like like like that was the
Speaker 1: thing that Kent State lost, even like a lot of
Speaker 1: like pretty conservative milit because they were like, you know that,
Speaker 1: that's not what the militaries for. We're not supposed to
Speaker 1: shoot kids with signs on college campuses. Um, Like people
Speaker 1: get real pisted at law enforcement in this period of time.
Speaker 1: Uh And in nineteen sixty eight, in order to address
Speaker 1: the collapsing faith in law enforcement nationwide, the US Congress
Speaker 1: passes the Omnibus Crime Control Ole in Safe Streets Act, which,
Speaker 1: among other things, pumped a shipload of federal dollars into
Speaker 1: what dr Gary Potter, who you'll remember from other episodes,
Speaker 1: we've talked about calls rather cosmetic police community relations programs,
Speaker 1: which were mostly media focused attempts to improve the police image.
Speaker 1: So this is when you start getting like really advanced
Speaker 1: public affairs departments and police departments hiring pr agencies to
Speaker 1: help them reform their image. And a lot of the
Speaker 1: effort in reforming police images was still landed on Hollywood.
Speaker 1: And of course in this period, Dragnet gets brought back
Speaker 1: for another three seasons, running from nineteen sixty seven to
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. And the years that Dragnet comes back is
Speaker 1: not There's no coincidence there, right, Yeah, So propaganda did
Speaker 1: not protect the police from the economic downturns of the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, and cities nationwide started making massive cuts to
Speaker 1: police and other municipal workers just because the economy fell apart,
Speaker 1: and you know, part of this isn't a show about
Speaker 1: the economy, but a big part of what happens is
Speaker 1: like the US had started exporting a lot of manufacturing
Speaker 1: jobs had been like this is like the first This
Speaker 1: is where we start to see the hollowing out of
Speaker 1: this middle class and of like these good union jobs
Speaker 1: that had persisted for decades since the end of the
Speaker 1: war in the seventies. This all falls to ship. Um,
Speaker 1: you start getting eaten alive economically by like Japan and
Speaker 1: other countries and its it's you know, this is when
Speaker 1: like services start to be cut nationwide, and one of
Speaker 1: the services that gets cut is policing um out of
Speaker 1: necessity of services. Yeah, you know what services won't be cut?
Speaker 1: Yeah that was good. So you know who doesn't hollow
Speaker 1: out the American middle class? Actually who hollows out there will? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there we go bred services. I'm Colleen with joined me
Speaker 1: the host of Eating Will Broke podcast While I eat
Speaker 1: a meal created by self made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities
Speaker 1: over a meal they once eight when they were broke.
Speaker 1: Today I have the lovely aj Crimson, the official Princess
Speaker 1: of Compton, Asia Kidding and Asia is the Professor. We're
Speaker 1: here on Eating While Broken. Today, I'm gonna break down
Speaker 1: my meal that got me through a time when I
Speaker 1: was broken. Listen to Eating While Broke on the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, on Apple podcast or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. Hey Leath the listeners take here. Last season
Speaker 1: on Lethal Lit, you might remember I came to Hollow
Speaker 1: Falls on a mission clearing my aunt best name and
Speaker 1: making sure justice was finally served. But I hadn't counted
Speaker 1: on a rash of new murders tearing apart the town.
Speaker 1: My mission put myself and my friends in danger. Though
Speaker 1: it wasn't all bad, I'm going to be realisty take
Speaker 1: I like you, But now all signs point to a
Speaker 1: new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is starting,
Speaker 1: you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm tig Torres and
Speaker 1: this is Lethal Lit. Catch up on season one of
Speaker 1: the hit murder mystery podcast Lethal Lit, a tig Tara's
Speaker 1: mystery out now, and then tune in for all new
Speaker 1: thrills in season two, dropping weekly starting February nine. Subscribe
Speaker 1: now to devern miss an episode. Listen to Leave the
Speaker 1: Lit on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. I call the Union Hall
Speaker 1: as his male life and death. I thank these peeples
Speaker 1: of planning to kill Dr King. On April four, Dr
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A
Speaker 1: petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled
Speaker 1: guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his
Speaker 1: life in prison. Case closed right, James L. Ray was
Speaker 1: upon for the official story. The authorities would pray at
Speaker 1: all we found a gun the James el Ray bought
Speaker 1: in Birmingham, the kill ductor, except it wasn't the gun
Speaker 1: that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came
Speaker 1: out when I got the Ray case was that some
Speaker 1: of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did
Speaker 1: not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The
Speaker 1: first episodes are available now. Listen on the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: We're back so um police departments in this period, you know,
Speaker 1: budgets get cut, municipal workers get cut, uh and a
Speaker 1: lot of the blame like as these cities who in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases like their budgets got fucked, not
Speaker 1: just because the economy was bad, bad because of like
Speaker 1: massive corruption, but they blame it on union workers, and
Speaker 1: of course police are some of the union workers in
Speaker 1: this period, so they get some big gas cuts and
Speaker 1: out of necessity because their budgets are being trimmed. UM
Speaker 1: police departments nationwide embark on a process called tailorization, which
Speaker 1: is tailorization hat doesn't just happen to the least. It's
Speaker 1: like a scientific optimization of of of of of an organization, right.
Speaker 1: It's attempting to cut manpower and reduce costs without cutting efficiency.
Speaker 1: UM officers started going from two cop to one cop
Speaker 1: per patrol car and nine on one lines, and computers
Speaker 1: became more widespread and put control of the police UH
Speaker 1: is centralized more so police administrators gain more power. Civilian
Speaker 1: employees are also brought in to do jobs that had
Speaker 1: been done by police employees in order to reduce the
Speaker 1: number of highly paid union workers. So this is tailorization.
Speaker 1: And while all this is happening inside the US, the
Speaker 1: Cold War is also happening outside of the US, So
Speaker 1: inside the country, professionalism is kind of like the professional
Speaker 1: model of police are still dominant, and they're also like
Speaker 1: that becomes even more powerful and ideas as the number
Speaker 1: of police are cut and they have to get more
Speaker 1: efficient to try to do the same work. So that's
Speaker 1: what's happening in the US. Outside the US, though, international
Speaker 1: policing is having something very different happened to it. And
Speaker 1: this is as a result of the Cold War. So
Speaker 1: as the Cold War really starts to kick off, our
Speaker 1: government finds itself trying to prop up friendly states all
Speaker 1: around the world, you know, anti communist states, particularly in
Speaker 1: Latin America and Southeast Asia, and we go, Yeah, this
Speaker 1: proved problematic because a lot of these regimes were corrupt
Speaker 1: in brutal and people didn't really like living underneath them.
Speaker 1: H And as a rule, our government responded to that
Speaker 1: by pouring money into training foreign police to murder dissidents,
Speaker 1: because that works a lot better than training the army
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases. So from nineteen sixty two
Speaker 1: to nineteen seventy four, the US government operated the Office
Speaker 1: of Public Safety, an agency that worked closely with the
Speaker 1: CIA to train police and nations racked by conflict due
Speaker 1: to the Cold War. These nations included South Vietnam, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil,
Speaker 1: and Colombia. Tens of thousands of people were tortured or
Speaker 1: killed by various police departments who received over two hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars in US aid for firearm and equipment. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from an art cold in the
Speaker 1: Age before you get there, there's there's one that's off
Speaker 1: the papers, which I know you haven't done an episode on,
Speaker 1: but like there is there is the Nicaragua one that
Speaker 1: they wasn't supposed to be spending money on, which is
Speaker 1: the B line. Y'all, looklyly, look, I'm excited, but I
Speaker 1: don't want to remove. I don't want to ruin the reveal.
Speaker 1: But what he's talked about right now leads directly to
Speaker 1: the crack attack and the war on drugs. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and I know we're gonna get to that. No, we're not,
Speaker 1: not nearly, because I I I don't want to half
Speaker 1: asked that one, like, because there's there's so much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well we will, we will do, we will get into that,
Speaker 1: we'll dip in because because it's all tied in, it's
Speaker 1: the beginning of it. Even this like pr stuff. I
Speaker 1: grew up with the DARE program, you know, the drug
Speaker 1: abuse where with a cop car pulled up with the
Speaker 1: sirens at my elementary school to try to convince me
Speaker 1: that this cop is cool, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: But yeah, anyway, were paying for wars and we got
Speaker 1: paid in crack. Yeah yeah, so um yeah. The CIA
Speaker 1: and you know, the US government starts training cops and
Speaker 1: all of these countries to suppress uh, you know, primarily
Speaker 1: left wing like political movements. And I'm gonna quote now
Speaker 1: from an article in the Asia Pacific Journal by scholar
Speaker 1: Jeremy Kazmarov, who's like one of the top like people
Speaker 1: studying this particular phenomenon. Quote. During the mid nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: the director of United States Agency of International Development USA,
Speaker 1: David Bell, commented in congressional testimony that the police are
Speaker 1: the most sensitive point of contact between the government and
Speaker 1: people close to the focal points of unrest, and more
Speaker 1: acceptable than the army as keepers of order over long
Speaker 1: periods of time. The police are frequently better trained and
Speaker 1: equipped than the military to deal with minor forms of violence, conspiracy,
Speaker 1: and subversion. Robert W. U Comber, who served as the
Speaker 1: National Security Council advisor to President John F. Kennedy, further
Speaker 1: stress that the police were more valuable than Special Forces
Speaker 1: and our global counter insurgency efforts, and particularly useful in
Speaker 1: fighting urban insurrections. We get more from the police in
Speaker 1: terms of preventative medicine than from any single U S program,
Speaker 1: he said. They are cost effective while not going for
Speaker 1: fancy military hardware. They provide the first line of defense
Speaker 1: against demonstrations, riots, and local insurrections. Only when the situation
Speaker 1: gets out of hand, as in South Vietnam does the
Speaker 1: military have to be called in. So again that's that's
Speaker 1: the police. The police are especially as Vietnam goes badly
Speaker 1: in other countries, we increasingly see if you if you
Speaker 1: train the police to stop this ship before there's a
Speaker 1: strong left wing movement, you don't have a Vietnam which
Speaker 1: you then lose. Right, That's that's what Yeah, So that's
Speaker 1: internationally what the US is doing to other police agencies.
Speaker 1: As our police agencies, you know, pull back from the
Speaker 1: militarization of the twenties and thirties and towards professionalism. We
Speaker 1: we push militarization in a lot of ways. Outside of
Speaker 1: the United States. Some fifteen hundred Americans were involved in
Speaker 1: training more than a million foreign police officers during this time.
Speaker 1: Now many of those cops did fail in their duties,
Speaker 1: which is part of why South Vietnam is no anger
Speaker 1: a country and why Iran does not have a shot anymore. Um,
Speaker 1: but the suppression tactics taught by US police educators were
Speaker 1: successful in many other nations. Like it does not always fail.
Speaker 1: We are not always bad at training these people to
Speaker 1: brutally stop left wing uprising because it works a lot
Speaker 1: of the time. And when the office is they're like,
Speaker 1: oh wait, real quick, this is like the perfect time
Speaker 1: to like take like a take a take a slice
Speaker 1: from like the hood politics way a way of thinking things,
Speaker 1: thinking of things because sometimes like using these terms can
Speaker 1: they're so lofty and big if you don't know history
Speaker 1: or military politics, like it's hard to understand them. It's
Speaker 1: this moment in history is so like it's so simple
Speaker 1: because it's just eighth grade. So like you, you're there,
Speaker 1: You and this you and this other boy or girl
Speaker 1: are beefan, but y'all never actually fight. You just keep
Speaker 1: bringing other kids around the fight. So by and I'll
Speaker 1: prove it. Mass out of the playground is better because
Speaker 1: this kid from who I propped up and trained and
Speaker 1: gave a rock through at another kid who's got a
Speaker 1: rock that's on your side of the playground, and that's
Speaker 1: proven that I'm hard. But it's really they fighting a
Speaker 1: fight that me and you are supposed to fight. But
Speaker 1: we got sense enough to know we've probably been not
Speaker 1: fight this fight, so I'm gonna let you fight it. Really,
Speaker 1: that's the Cold War is yeah, you're you're going, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go get my little homeboy to funk up yo,
Speaker 1: little homeboy. That's that's that's the Cold War. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: um so yeah, uh so yeah, we we we have
Speaker 1: we we spend fucking a decade or more training all
Speaker 1: these foreign police agencies to act homeboys. Yeah, counter insurgey Yeah,
Speaker 1: our little homeboys to access counterinsurgency forces. Uh And when
Speaker 1: the Office for Public Safety closes in nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: these police trainers needed still needed work. Like these guys
Speaker 1: who'd spent more than a decade training foreign cops, and
Speaker 1: they find more work, and it's inside of the United States.
Speaker 1: It's this time alex fatality rights in the end of
Speaker 1: policing quote. Many of the trainers moved in large numbers
Speaker 1: into law enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Agency FBI and
Speaker 1: numerous local and state police forces, bringing with them a
Speaker 1: more militarized vision of policing steeped in Cold War imperatives
Speaker 1: of suppressing social movements through counterintelligence, militarized riot suppression techniques,
Speaker 1: and heavy handed crime control. Now in the middle of
Speaker 1: this period, like right before that office closes, really like
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, so a couple of years before
Speaker 1: we stopped training the police, you know, foreign police in
Speaker 1: this kind of organized way. Uh, not that we stopped entirely,
Speaker 1: but like the way we had been, you know, we're
Speaker 1: even less of it. In nineteen seventy one, Richard Millhouse
Speaker 1: Nixon declared drug abuse public Enemy number one. Soon after
Speaker 1: that declaration, US press began to discuss a new war
Speaker 1: on drugs. Now, this war was launched just as the
Speaker 1: US war in Vietnam started to finally end and spoilers,
Speaker 1: it wasn't any more successful. Nixon's goal, though, had never
Speaker 1: actually been to stop drug use. He started the war
Speaker 1: on drugs because he wanted to win the support of
Speaker 1: southern white voters who had gone Democratic for generations. These
Speaker 1: people were furious about segregation, and they were pushing back
Speaker 1: at the success of desegregation. Um, they considered civil rights
Speaker 1: marchers to have been just looters and rioters, but the
Speaker 1: weak LBJ administration had failed to murder these people. Professor
Speaker 1: in legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains quote posters and political
Speaker 1: strategists that found that thinly veiled promises to get tough
Speaker 1: on them, a group suddenly not so defined by race,
Speaker 1: was enormously successful in persuading poor and working class whites
Speaker 1: did effect from the Democratic New Deal Coalition and joined
Speaker 1: the Republican Party and droves. Ultimately, this backlash against the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement was occurring at precisely the same moment
Speaker 1: that there was economic collapse in communities of color, intercity
Speaker 1: communities across America. And of course, again we're talking about
Speaker 1: the seventies. We're going at a period where the economy
Speaker 1: contracts massively and it hits black inner city communities worse
Speaker 1: than anyone else. Um. And what is the number one
Speaker 1: predictor of crime, particularly pop property crime. It's poverty. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and we're there's even like a a tie to
Speaker 1: that moment now of how changing the language from we
Speaker 1: just hate black people too, we're having a war on
Speaker 1: drugs um we're the fact that we call weed marijuana.
Speaker 1: It's just it's just a Spanish word for cannabis. But
Speaker 1: that's marketing because you because if we already hate Mexicans
Speaker 1: as a nation and you use this drug and you
Speaker 1: just refer to it by its Spanish name, now it
Speaker 1: seems more evil. It was just it was a racist
Speaker 1: marketing that we call cannabis marijuana. But just and that's Nixon.
Speaker 1: I just want y'all knowe Nixon did that anyway, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: m so yeah. The backlash against the success of the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement reaches its height kind of just as
Speaker 1: unemployment in the inner city peaks and the consequences of
Speaker 1: the industrialization and globalization hit the U. S economy, so
Speaker 1: crime sores and suddenly a shipload of people find themselves
Speaker 1: impoverished and desperate without options, and the war on drugs
Speaker 1: gives the government a way to take huge numbers of
Speaker 1: these people, primarily these black and brown people, off the
Speaker 1: street and satisfy white voters that they're doing something about crime. Now,
Speaker 1: drug use was actually falling when Nixon made his announcement,
Speaker 1: and it had been falling for years drug abuse, but
Speaker 1: blaming drugs rather than unregulated capitalism, hollowing out the American
Speaker 1: middle class, and exchange for corporate profits worked a lot
Speaker 1: better from a messaging standpoint for the Republican president in yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty two, Ronald Reagan doubled down declaring an
Speaker 1: official war on drugs, even though only three percent of
Speaker 1: Americans at the time considered drug abuse to be the
Speaker 1: nation's most pressing issue. Since the existing tailorized US police
Speaker 1: were ill equipped to fight a war, President Reagan had
Speaker 1: to start pouring tens of millions of dollars of federal
Speaker 1: funds into turning law enforcement into an army. Now, the
Speaker 1: broad trend, so this occurs. Reagan starts pumping all this
Speaker 1: money in as these these guys who had been these
Speaker 1: US guys who have been training foreign military forces oversee
Speaker 1: sees start coming back to the country and training cops.
Speaker 1: So there's a number of things kind of happening at
Speaker 1: the same time that lead to and are are a
Speaker 1: part of police militarization. Um. Now, the broad trend that
Speaker 1: occurs throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties as a result
Speaker 1: of all this is that US police nationwide turn away
Speaker 1: from the professional model and towards a military model, not
Speaker 1: a different in a military model pretty similar to the
Speaker 1: one that General Butler proposed to defeat bootlegging in Philadelphia. Um.
Speaker 1: This process was not smooth or uniform, and it was
Speaker 1: not all due to the War on drugs. The Watts
Speaker 1: Rebellion of nineteen sixty five was a major inciting incident
Speaker 1: for the militarization of US police. And the short story,
Speaker 1: the almost criminal lee short story of the Watts Rebellion
Speaker 1: is this, a black motorist was was pulled over, um
Speaker 1: and like there was a confrontation again with the police.
Speaker 1: Conmmunity members confronted the cops as like this guy was
Speaker 1: getting arrested, and a fight ensued. Um one of the
Speaker 1: cops I injured a pregnant woman, or at least people
Speaker 1: in the crowd believed that a cop had injured a
Speaker 1: pregnant woman and kind of rage over this whole incident
Speaker 1: boils over and like acts as a match stick. So like,
Speaker 1: obviously the l A p d had been hideously racist
Speaker 1: for a long time. One of the things that happens
Speaker 1: when Jim crow Win's is that the police chief of
Speaker 1: l A starts liberally courting Southern police officers who are like,
Speaker 1: this is history. Yeah, if you're if you're pissed about
Speaker 1: Jim Crow ending, come to Los Angeles, We'll let you
Speaker 1: beat the ship out of black people. M making this
Speaker 1: stuff up? Yeah, I could not. I thought we brought
Speaker 1: this up before and one of the older episodes we
Speaker 1: didn't get into it or not. Did you get into it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Did I tell you all my watch Riot story? No? No, no,
Speaker 1: please do. This is a good time for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good time for it. So it was during
Speaker 1: the La Riots. It is how my story starts. Um,
Speaker 1: my grandmother, you know La Riots was you know Florence
Speaker 1: and Normandy. Right, grandmother lived off Florence Engage, so it's
Speaker 1: just a few more blocks to the east. Um, my
Speaker 1: father calls my grandmother and she said, and he says, like, hey,
Speaker 1: why don't you come stay with us? We were living
Speaker 1: like maybe a fifteen minutes east. Right, So he says,
Speaker 1: why don't you come stay with us? You're out of
Speaker 1: like the hotspot in South Central And my grandmother says,
Speaker 1: if I'm lying, I'm flying. She says, baby, unless there's
Speaker 1: tanks coming down this street, I ain't going nowhere this house.
Speaker 1: And I and I went, my grandma's a gangster. That's
Speaker 1: the hardest thing I ever heard in my life. Right,
Speaker 1: and then my but my parents looked at each other
Speaker 1: and I was like, tanks, she's hard. They go, she
Speaker 1: lived in the Watts Riots and the like history came alive.
Speaker 1: They're like, yo, she she lived through the watch Riots.
Speaker 1: That's what she's referring to. Tanks came down our streets.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, because I thought the l A
Speaker 1: Riots was the end of the world. SE's what I'm saying. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a preteen during its time, so I
Speaker 1: was like, this is the end of the world. Grandma
Speaker 1: is like, no, baby, tanks come down the streets anyway. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that's like the Watts Riot is is fucking wild. Um. So,
Speaker 1: like there's a ton of anger, uh and like black
Speaker 1: and Hispanic communities towards the lap. Another thing that's happening
Speaker 1: is like the l a PD is also separately but
Speaker 1: but at the same time horrifically suppressing the Chicano Liberation movement,
Speaker 1: which is like the like Mexicans and Latinos in l
Speaker 1: a UM and like at one point murders a journalist
Speaker 1: who's like drinking at a bar by shooting him in
Speaker 1: the back of the head with a tear gas grenade.
Speaker 1: Hunter Thompson actually wrote one of his best pieces of
Speaker 1: investigative journalism about all of that, and in fact, Fear
Speaker 1: and Loathing in Las Vegas. Yeah, oh yeah, shit, yeah,
Speaker 1: it happened in my neighborhood. I live in Boyle Heights,
Speaker 1: like ship, Oh yeah, that happened the neighborhood. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: Ruben Salazar and like so if like Fear and Loathing
Speaker 1: in Las Vegas, like the funny, silly Hunter Thompson movie,
Speaker 1: we all know the actual genesis of that. The real
Speaker 1: thing that happened that he was actually writing about was
Speaker 1: one of the leaders at the Chicano Liberation movement was
Speaker 1: this guy Oscar at Costam, who was Hunter's lawyer, and
Speaker 1: he like the reason that he and Hunter Thompson drove
Speaker 1: to Las Vegas is that they needed to have a
Speaker 1: conversation about what the l a p d Was doing
Speaker 1: to murder Hispanic activists in Los Angeles. And the only
Speaker 1: place that wouldn't be bugged would be a fucking a
Speaker 1: convertible car with the top down driving through the desert
Speaker 1: in New Mexico. Or not New Mexico and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you know what I'm talking about. Like that's
Speaker 1: that's what fear and loathing is. Is like this is
Speaker 1: all tied up in this so like all of this
Speaker 1: ship fucking explodes um into into anger uh at the
Speaker 1: or like into the Watts riots in in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: and like the stuff that happened with Ruben Salazar and
Speaker 1: stuff was like five years after this, but like all
Speaker 1: of these this like racism and stuff is still happening.
Speaker 1: So like the this fight winds up just kind of
Speaker 1: for whatever reason being the thing that ignites all of
Speaker 1: the anger in in this part of Los Angeles, and
Speaker 1: it's the Watts riots is what most history text will
Speaker 1: call it. The Uprising is another thing you'll hear that
Speaker 1: I think is probably more accurate. And the uprising included
Speaker 1: a shipload of angry black folks breaking into gun stores, um,
Speaker 1: getting guns and then sniping at l A p D officers.
Speaker 1: This is a thing that happens, and it the cops
Speaker 1: flip the funk out about it. Um. The police chief
Speaker 1: gets on television and compares what's happening and Watts to
Speaker 1: what the insurgency in Vietnam. He compares the rioters to
Speaker 1: the Viet Cong, and he states that a paramilitary response
Speaker 1: is the only thing possible. The Governor Pat Brown announces
Speaker 1: the l a p D was quote dealing with guerillas
Speaker 1: fighting with gangsters. Um, the National Guard called in and
Speaker 1: the uprising was brutally suppressed. And you know, generally when
Speaker 1: you hear because this is a key movement in the
Speaker 1: militarization of police, and generally when it's talked about, you
Speaker 1: will hear about like the person writing about it will
Speaker 1: pivot from like rioters looting guns and sniping at the
Speaker 1: l a p d h to like the National Guard
Speaker 1: coming in to kind of make the case that the
Speaker 1: l a p d was just overwhelmed by armed citizens.
Speaker 1: This is not what happened, um. Only three sworn personnel
Speaker 1: were killed during the Watts riots. One was an l
Speaker 1: A firefighter who died in a structure fire, one was
Speaker 1: that Los Angeles Sheriff's deputy who was shot by another
Speaker 1: deputy when that deputy accidentally fired his shotgun and during
Speaker 1: a clash with rioters. And another was another Los Angeles
Speaker 1: police officer who was shot by another one of his
Speaker 1: fellow cops. Accidentally during a fight with rioters. No Los
Speaker 1: Angeles police were killed by by rioters with guns. Um. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the l a p D killed twenty three, mostly black
Speaker 1: people during the Watts Riots. The National Guard killed seven. Um.
Speaker 1: So again, the image of the Watts riots is that
Speaker 1: like these writers, which is so heavily armed that like
Speaker 1: it inspired the militarization of police because cops needed more
Speaker 1: weapons and tactical teams in order to deal such threats.
Speaker 1: The reality is that like the fucking no no, no,
Speaker 1: no cops even got killed by bye rioters. Like it's
Speaker 1: it's definitely accurate to say that like the l A
Speaker 1: Police had been like more uh more militant, I think
Speaker 1: than other police departments, but not like not like a
Speaker 1: tactical way, just in a way of seeing themselves as fighting.
Speaker 1: They saw themselves as fighting and is fighting a war
Speaker 1: against the non white population of the city that was
Speaker 1: the l A p D in this period. Yeah. There
Speaker 1: there's this idea of like returning to the America they remember,
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and the Watts riots kind of scare cops
Speaker 1: around the country into all adopting a lot more paramilitary
Speaker 1: tactics in order to defend themselves. From the people they're
Speaker 1: supposed to be protecting. Now, the Watts riots are like
Speaker 1: one of the one of two things that will be
Speaker 1: generally cited as the justification behind the creation of the
Speaker 1: very first SWAT teams, which you know means special weapons
Speaker 1: and tactics. Another you're inciting incident for the creation of
Speaker 1: the SWAT teams was the nineteen sixty six u T.
Speaker 1: Austin clock tower sniper Charles Whitman, who killed sixteen people. Um.
Speaker 1: The basic idea was that police were easily overwhelmed by
Speaker 1: snipers and other dangerous criminals. Like cops just couldn't handle
Speaker 1: these threats, and so specialized warrior cops were necessary to
Speaker 1: handle these incidents. So SWAT teams took off as a
Speaker 1: concept in the late nineteen sixties, and before long every
Speaker 1: department in America was fighting to get a SWAT team
Speaker 1: of their own, whether or not they needed one. Today,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of police agencies serving populations of fifty
Speaker 1: thousand or more in the United States have some form
Speaker 1: of SWAT team. Nationwide, SWAT teams are deployed tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of times per year, and since these teams were
Speaker 1: formed and exists to handle extraordinary situations of exceptional danger.
Speaker 1: You might picture these tens of thousands of SWAT raids
Speaker 1: as like pulse pounding gunfights against really dangerous people. And if, yeah, if,
Speaker 1: if that's the picture in your head, you are wrong.
Speaker 1: Most states very deliberately do not provide US with statistics
Speaker 1: for their SWAT deployments. Maryland is one of two that does,
Speaker 1: and in Maryland, ent of SWAT raids are just for
Speaker 1: serving search warrants. Half of those warrants are for non
Speaker 1: violent drug crimes, and one third of those raids result
Speaker 1: in no arrests. So a third of the time when
Speaker 1: SWAT teams go out, they don't even get to arrest anybody. Now,
Speaker 1: almost all of the SWAT raids in Maryland at least
Speaker 1: are for drug crimes. Utah is the only other state
Speaker 1: that requires police agencies to report on SWAT deployment, and
Speaker 1: the first batch of numbers that they released in two
Speaker 1: thousand and thirteen showed that eighty three percent of their
Speaker 1: SQUAT deployments were serving search warrants for drug crimes. Less
Speaker 1: than five percent of deployments were too violent crimes in
Speaker 1: process a k a. The sort of thing SWAT teams
Speaker 1: were formed to deal with just three of the states
Speaker 1: reported five hundred and fifty nine raids. Half a percent
Speaker 1: turned up illegal firearms. Now half I bring all the
Speaker 1: half percent. Yeah, I bring all this up because when
Speaker 1: I talk about the possibility of police abolition with people,
Speaker 1: one of the first things they will generally bring up is, like,
Speaker 1: who will protect us from all of like the violent madmen.
Speaker 1: They're pictually like cartel guys and stuff gangsters. And of
Speaker 1: course those people do exist. There's very dangerous criminals in
Speaker 1: this country who are heavily armed. That that's that's that
Speaker 1: is a thing that exists, but it is not the
Speaker 1: scale of problem that you think it is. Um and
Speaker 1: like it's also people will talk about, like who's protect
Speaker 1: us from mass shooters? And I would ask, can anyone
Speaker 1: listen to this podcast name a mass shooter who's been
Speaker 1: stopped by a squat team. I'm gonna guess exactly not
Speaker 1: that it hasn't happened. If you did, you can find
Speaker 1: a couple of cases where swat teams stopped a shooting
Speaker 1: in progress that can be defined as a mass shooting.
Speaker 1: But you have to really rack your brain to think
Speaker 1: of a situation where it did happen, or to think
Speaker 1: of a situation where the cops successfully stopped a mass
Speaker 1: shooting as opposed to like what happened during the Parkland
Speaker 1: shooting where the officer I think, drove his car into
Speaker 1: a ditch. Like yeah, like they're not good at this.
Speaker 1: Or you can think about the Virginia Tech shooting. We're
Speaker 1: swat teams were posted up outside the buildings, but we're
Speaker 1: scared to enter while the shooter was killing people, um,
Speaker 1: get it? Or or even saying this if like big
Speaker 1: drug cartels, these drug bosses are like such a problem,
Speaker 1: I would ask that person, Hey, do you know any
Speaker 1: do you know any drug drug cartel bosses? Okay, you
Speaker 1: never met one? All right, word, do you know anybody
Speaker 1: that's like stolen some soda out of a out of
Speaker 1: a liquor store. Yeah, we know a lot of those.
Speaker 1: So what I'm saying is maybe you you're saying this
Speaker 1: is a big problem, but you don't know nobody that
Speaker 1: done that. But we are instole something out of a
Speaker 1: out of a liquor store, So maybe there's more problems there,
Speaker 1: and maybe you don't need to be specially trained for that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe we can solve people. Jack and shipped from liquor
Speaker 1: stores to the extent that that's a problem without Yes,
Speaker 1: machine guns, maybe snipers are necessary for this. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: walked into the room. I walked into the room. Uh,
Speaker 1: and my daughter was with a hammer and a shoe,
Speaker 1: and I was like, the hell are you doing. She's
Speaker 1: standing on one side of the room. The other side
Speaker 1: of the room was a daddy long leg just a spider.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, what you got a hammer for. She's like,
Speaker 1: I gotta kill this spider. M hmm. And I have
Speaker 1: a deep distrust for anything with eight legs or six legs.
Speaker 1: I get it, But a hammer, baby, Harry yesterday, the
Speaker 1: swiffer is fine. I don't so when you put a
Speaker 1: hole on this wall, I mean, I'm gonna be honest
Speaker 1: with you, prob I I have my Air fifteen right
Speaker 1: here next to the table in case I see a spider,
Speaker 1: which you know there's a lot. I gonna lie to you.
Speaker 1: That's an issue. Yeah, yeah, that's what That's what the
Speaker 1: police say. Um that that is also what my neighbors say.
Speaker 1: You know what is Yeah, what the police say is accurate.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what you mean. Find me to show you
Speaker 1: the spider bite that I got that sent me to
Speaker 1: the hospital. Next the hammer. Okay, that's different. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about speaking of hammers, because I actually have a number
Speaker 1: of hammer analogies coming up here. So um yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So again, the point of all these statistics, to the
Speaker 1: extent that we have them, is that it really looks
Speaker 1: like swat teams are actually kind of ship at fighting,
Speaker 1: the one kind of crime that expired their existence in
Speaker 1: the first place. Because again, you actually have an easier
Speaker 1: time finding cases of people with concealed handguns stopping shootings
Speaker 1: than you will swat teams stopping shootings like mass shootings
Speaker 1: in progress, like our traditional like, and that doesn't happen
Speaker 1: often either, Like usually mass shooters get to do whatever
Speaker 1: they're gonna do and then shoot themselves or whatever turn
Speaker 1: themselves in like they generally don't get stopped. Um, but
Speaker 1: you you will. You'll have trouble finding swat teams taking
Speaker 1: out these guys because it's usually over it before they
Speaker 1: can scramble. Um. Now. Well, which is not to say
Speaker 1: that there's no a place for them, because I think
Speaker 1: any society as large as ours, you're gonna need to
Speaker 1: have some rapid response units. But we're not using them
Speaker 1: for that, and there's way too many of them now.
Speaker 1: While state data on SWAT deployments is lacking, I did
Speaker 1: find a fascinating report by two researchers, David Klinger and
Speaker 1: Jeff Rojack, using funds provided by the Department of Justice
Speaker 1: in two thousand eight, they analyzed thousands of SWAT raids nationwide,
Speaker 1: and what they found was fascinating. Out of tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of deployments they analyzed, SWAT officers only fired their
Speaker 1: weapons in three hundred and forty two incidents. Those officers
Speaker 1: shot two hundred citizens, killing one hundred and thirty nine
Speaker 1: of them. In seventy of these shootings, fewer than ten
Speaker 1: rounds were used. Now, this suggests that military grade weaponry
Speaker 1: may not be necessary for SWAT teams, since again, you
Speaker 1: don't need it. Yeah, they're not getting into gunfights. They
Speaker 1: sometimes they shoot people, but like and a lot of
Speaker 1: the time those a lot of those guys who died
Speaker 1: were wounded by SWAT and then killed themselves. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's yeah. Meanwhile, during this same span of time,
Speaker 1: SWAT officers had thirty nine accidental discharges, so shot two
Speaker 1: hundred citizens and accidentally fired their own weapons thirty nine times.
Speaker 1: This means that accidental gunfire. We're looking at three three
Speaker 1: forty two um incidences where SWAT officers fired, and thirty
Speaker 1: nine of those are accidents. That's not an insignificant percentage
Speaker 1: of all SWAT weapons discharges. Like that's that's that's noteworth all.
Speaker 1: The study authors right quote. This data indicates that something
Speaker 1: is substantially amiss with the way that at least some
Speaker 1: SWAT officers handled their weapons, and strongly suggests that this
Speaker 1: problem is rooted in training. That more than one in
Speaker 1: tent of the incidents in which those who are supposed
Speaker 1: to be the most highly trained officers in their agency
Speaker 1: fired shots involved accidental discharges is simply unacceptable in our minds.
Speaker 1: Among the aforementioned hundred thirty nine citizens who died after
Speaker 1: being struck by SWAT gunfire were two who fatally shot
Speaker 1: themselves after being hit by SWAT bullets. In addition to
Speaker 1: these two, we have firm data that three seventy nine
Speaker 1: other individuals killed themselves in situations in which they were
Speaker 1: not shot by SWAT officers. It is thus clear that
Speaker 1: in the current data that it is more likely citizen
Speaker 1: will take their own lives during SWAT operations than be
Speaker 1: killed by SWAT officers by a margin of more than
Speaker 1: two point five to one point five. Finally, the data
Speaker 1: indicate that nearly one in four citizens struck by SWAT
Speaker 1: gunfire wished to be shot, as respondents classified their actions
Speaker 1: as indicating they wish to commit suicide by cop. If
Speaker 1: respondents classifications are correct, this indicates that an even higher
Speaker 1: portion of the citizen deaths and SWAT operations involved individuals
Speaker 1: who wished to die that of the SWAT officers struck
Speaker 1: by gunfire and the current data were shot by fellow officers.
Speaker 1: Suggests that while the most substantial threat officers face comes
Speaker 1: from armed suspects, the prospect of fratricide looms large and
Speaker 1: tactical operations. So you're more likely to get shot by
Speaker 1: your homeboy. Not more likely, but pretty like lead Yeah
Speaker 1: about when when SWAT officers are shot. More than one
Speaker 1: intent of SWAT cops who get shot are shot by
Speaker 1: their own guys, and one in ten times when SWAT
Speaker 1: officers shoot, they're shooting negligently without meaning to fire. So
Speaker 1: again the whole elite SWAT team thing. There are some
Speaker 1: well trained swat teams out there. It's also real fucking
Speaker 1: easy to to just give guys military grade weaponry, call
Speaker 1: him a SWAT team, and then they funk up. But
Speaker 1: more than anything, SWAT teams don't get into a lot
Speaker 1: of serious gunfights on a nationwide level. Um, and most
Speaker 1: of the people they encounter who are seriously armed like
Speaker 1: our fucking want to kill themselves. Yeah, they want to die,
Speaker 1: which is maybe suggests that a SWAT team isn't the
Speaker 1: thing to bring to that person. They shouldn't go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe just a dude who's a good therapist having a
Speaker 1: conversation would have better odds of resolving this without gun fire. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah. So the conclusions here are pretty clear. Number one,
Speaker 1: swat teams virtually never do these sort of work their
Speaker 1: portrayed doing in movies and tv I directly engaging dangerous
Speaker 1: bad guys. And number two, swat teams kind of suck
Speaker 1: at their job regularly shooting people and each other by accident.
Speaker 1: And perhaps no story illustrates the second point better than
Speaker 1: the case of Wanas Thava. Uh now, good job, many,
Speaker 1: I'm doing my best here. And on Wanas sold a
Speaker 1: small amount of methamphetamine uh to a confidential informant um
Speaker 1: or bought a yea so sold a small amount of
Speaker 1: methemphetamine too a confidential informant um. Several hours later, on
Speaker 1: the morning of the seven man swat team from the Cornelia,
Speaker 1: Georgia Police Department carried out a raid on wannass home. Now,
Speaker 1: because Wannas had a previous weapons charge on his record,
Speaker 1: officers were given a no knock warrant. They broke through
Speaker 1: Wannas's door with a battering ram and as they were
Speaker 1: pushing the door in, they noticed there was resistance behind
Speaker 1: the door and this led that what the officers in
Speaker 1: the swat team to believe that they're like someone had
Speaker 1: barricaded the door, so they tossed a flash bang in. Now,
Speaker 1: it turned out that the thing that had actually been
Speaker 1: against the door was the playpen where wannass nineteen month
Speaker 1: old child was sleeping. Uh. The flash bang ignited the
Speaker 1: nineteen month old child, burning it badly and tearing the
Speaker 1: child's face and chest open um. The kid was put
Speaker 1: into a coma and very very nearly died. The swat
Speaker 1: and was you know, suffered permanent injury as a result
Speaker 1: of the police flash bang igniting it. The swat team
Speaker 1: found only a small amount of meth residue in the
Speaker 1: home and no wet weapons. No arrests were made. When
Speaker 1: the Bonus EVA sued, a local prosecutor threatened to charge
Speaker 1: them for their child's injuries. In the end, no officers
Speaker 1: were indicted for horrifically maiming a small child. I found
Speaker 1: one CNN article that interviewed the sheriff in charge of
Speaker 1: the swat team, a guy named Tarrell. Quote in hindsight,
Speaker 1: Tarrell said, at the time, officers would have conducted the
Speaker 1: raid differently had they known there was a child inside
Speaker 1: at the home, but there was no sign of children
Speaker 1: during the alleged drug purchase that prompted the raid. We
Speaker 1: might have gone in through a side door, he said.
Speaker 1: We would not have used a flash bang, like and
Speaker 1: that showed defense, big homie. Yeah, that's interesting to me
Speaker 1: because it shows it. It never occurs to this guy
Speaker 1: that like, maybe maybe a dude selling a small amount
Speaker 1: of meths, maybe sending in an army to funk with
Speaker 1: that guy, and that army having grenades and battering rams.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's inherently reckless in a bad way to deal with. Again,
Speaker 1: a small amount of meth being sold. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: just it kind of feels like to me, like if
Speaker 1: I'm the swat guy, I feel a little insulted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you think I'm so incompetent. That has got to be
Speaker 1: nineteen of us with with sucking fifty cows to come
Speaker 1: get this one dude that just sold a little men
Speaker 1: imposibly most get like, you think I'm that weak that
Speaker 1: I can't just Yeah, it's it's fucking It's the problem
Speaker 1: with militarization in general, which is that like it. It
Speaker 1: means that you're going to have a military situation if
Speaker 1: the police are going it's fucking Waco. When you start
Speaker 1: the conversation with tanks and machine guns and snipers, You're
Speaker 1: not going to end it in a good way. You're
Speaker 1: going to end it by burning seventy children alive. Because
Speaker 1: that's this is how that works. This is so true
Speaker 1: in every area of your life. If you're in any
Speaker 1: sort of relationship, whether it's a monogonous one or a
Speaker 1: romantic or a or a friendship or a sibling, if
Speaker 1: you come in guns ablazing, it's just not gonna work.
Speaker 1: You know, this is your Yeah, this is exactly why
Speaker 1: I was able to improve a lot of my personal
Speaker 1: relationships propped when I stopped having the B A. T.
Speaker 1: F Um show up with tanks to support me. You
Speaker 1: know that that really was was a game changer for me. Um.
Speaker 1: I imagine, man, a lot less of my friends get
Speaker 1: burnt to death in in basement compounds outside of Waco. Now, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's good man, because I you live and learn, because
Speaker 1: I reference in here, Robert, just like a Waco reference
Speaker 1: in everywhere. Hey Man, talk about talk about Waco. Talk
Speaker 1: about a rebranding. Boy has gotten Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it was now the Home and Garden TV network. That's
Speaker 1: we have some sort of oversized initial letter in your
Speaker 1: room and uh a refurbished wood panel. So you have
Speaker 1: a farmhouse store and a farmhouse sink and yeah, and
Speaker 1: you admire Joanna Gaines there it is build an empire.
Speaker 1: She built it. She built an empire out of a
Speaker 1: city that was known for burning seventy babies. Well, I
Speaker 1: don't understand most of what we're talking about here, but
Speaker 1: you know what I do understand is that we're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about another kind of Waco type thing
Speaker 1: where a bunch of children get burned by militarized police.
Speaker 1: At the end of this, that's gonna be fun um
Speaker 1: all right, fun is the wrong word anyway. So like
Speaker 1: the the the again, Like the point here is that
Speaker 1: like the worst case scenario of like what happened with
Speaker 1: Wanas and his family without the police is that like, oh,
Speaker 1: these parents might be selling small amounts of meth amphetamine
Speaker 1: and that maybe isn't great for a kid, and that
Speaker 1: this is a problem that does need a solution to it. Um.
Speaker 1: But the solution that they got a grenade, burning their
Speaker 1: child alive. It was worse than probably anything that would
Speaker 1: have happened if they had just been left selling math, right,
Speaker 1: like or just or take fifteen minutes more to do
Speaker 1: just a little bit of investigation on the guy and
Speaker 1: be like, oh he's a parent, Yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: always that's like with Waco, like there was there was
Speaker 1: a problem, David Koresh was doing some fucked up ship.
Speaker 1: You could have just arrested him and not burned Like
Speaker 1: those kids, whatever they were going through under Koresh, getting
Speaker 1: burnt alive was worse for them. Absolutely. The police made
Speaker 1: it worse. And it's because militarized police are a hammer,
Speaker 1: and we've got a hammer. Every single problem looks like
Speaker 1: a nail. And like, if that hammer is a hammer
Speaker 1: in the hands of a cop, it's specifically going to
Speaker 1: be used to hammer the faces of black people. Um,
Speaker 1: because that's how cops work. As we've previously discussed, I've
Speaker 1: had a two thousand eighteen study published by the National
Speaker 1: Academy of Sciences. It uses a geo coded census of
Speaker 1: swat team deployments in Maryland and shows that quote, militarized
Speaker 1: police units are more often deployed in communities with large
Speaker 1: shares of African American residents, even after controlling for local
Speaker 1: crime rates. Further, using nationwide panel data on local police militarization,
Speaker 1: I demonstrate that militarized policing fails to enhance officers safety
Speaker 1: or reduce local crime. So after controlling for variables like
Speaker 1: local crime rates, the author of the study calculated that
Speaker 1: for every ten percent increase in the black population of
Speaker 1: a zip code, there is a ten percent increase and
Speaker 1: the likelihood of that zip code experiencing a swat rate
Speaker 1: now and again. He also showed that swat raids and
Speaker 1: swat teams don't reduce violent crime, so they're they're they're
Speaker 1: kind of what you're seeing here. Sure looks like they're
Speaker 1: just being used vindictively against black people, you know, whether
Speaker 1: or not there's intention behind it. That's how the data
Speaker 1: really looks, now. Yeah. Yeah. A Washington Post write up
Speaker 1: of the research notes telling Lee Uh he found no
Speaker 1: statistically significant change in the killings of police officers, which
Speaker 1: were too infrequent to measure, or assaults on police officers.
Speaker 1: So again, part of the justification of swat teams is that, like,
Speaker 1: police are in so much danger that we need special,
Speaker 1: heavily armored police. And it's like, actually, when SWAT teams
Speaker 1: are used all the time, cops still get killed with
Speaker 1: the same right, it has no impact. Yeah, so SWAT
Speaker 1: raids also get just so many dogs killed. My so
Speaker 1: so many dogs getting killed by fucking swat teams. If
Speaker 1: you want to know what swat teams love to do most,
Speaker 1: it's it's shoots some goddamn dogs. Um, it's impossible to
Speaker 1: to separate the number of dogs killed by swat from
Speaker 1: the number of dogs killed by regular cops serving the
Speaker 1: same kind of search warrants, because again, regular cops regularly
Speaker 1: served the exact same kind of search warrants swat cops serve,
Speaker 1: which maybe suggests that why do we have squat teams?
Speaker 1: If yea also but yeah, um either way, a ship
Speaker 1: let of fucking dogs get killed when police serve warrants,
Speaker 1: and a lot of those warrants are served tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of them are served by swat teams. Um. We
Speaker 1: will never know how many dogs get killed exactly um
Speaker 1: by police in this country. But in two thousands sixteen,
Speaker 1: one Justice Department expert called the police shooting of dogs
Speaker 1: and epidemic. It is estimated that cops shoot twenty five
Speaker 1: dogs in this country every single day, and some estimates
Speaker 1: range as high as five hundred dogs per day. It
Speaker 1: is very likely that police use their guns to shoot
Speaker 1: dogs more than they use their guns for any other
Speaker 1: purpose nationwide. Why because they fucking I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I have to actually talk to some cops about this,
Speaker 1: um and including I talked to a cop who had
Speaker 1: to who was in a justified shoot of a dog,
Speaker 1: a dog that like maim turned to the point that
Speaker 1: her life has never been the same since, Like, obviously
Speaker 1: the dog is tearing you apart. Yeah, you're gonna shoot
Speaker 1: that dog. Um, Like I've talked to some police about
Speaker 1: this and like one theorious why it happens so much
Speaker 1: without like there are some justific like a lot of
Speaker 1: like sometimes fucking people who have dog fighting rings get
Speaker 1: rated and like, yeah, yeah, you're gonna shoot some of
Speaker 1: those dogs because they're just like they've been broken and
Speaker 1: they're dangerous. Um. But also a lot of cops are
Speaker 1: terrified of dogs. And if cops are terrified, they get
Speaker 1: to shoot UM. So even in situations where there's no
Speaker 1: exactly a lot of the time, probably most of the time,
Speaker 1: there's no justification for the animals. That's that's that's yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And one out of five, training makes you scared, and
Speaker 1: that's what I want to get into. The training makes
Speaker 1: you scared. And in one out of five of these
Speaker 1: incidents of a police dog shootings, a child was either
Speaker 1: in the direct line of fire or standing nearby. And
Speaker 1: one horrifying too. That's in fifteen case, a four year
Speaker 1: old girl was shot in the leg by a police
Speaker 1: officer who was trying to shoot her dog. UM. And
Speaker 1: this dog was not threatening this police officer necessarily UM.
Speaker 1: Thus the officer felt threatened, like he felt like he
Speaker 1: might get bit, and even fear of a minor injury
Speaker 1: um is enough to make an officer completely immune to
Speaker 1: any consequences for shooting a dog. Meanwhile, I should note
Speaker 1: people who kill police dogs regularly face longer sentences than
Speaker 1: child molestus. You'll go away for life if you shoot
Speaker 1: a police dog. Um. But police can imagine. Yeah, can
Speaker 1: you imagine having the right to slap the ship out
Speaker 1: of somebody because you think they might slap you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty pretty crazy, pretty bad. So this may seem
Speaker 1: like it's getting a little bit off the topic of
Speaker 1: police militarization, but it really is not. A lot of
Speaker 1: times when liberals talk about reforming police, they discussed the
Speaker 1: need for more police training, but police actually go through
Speaker 1: a shipload of training. Like there's there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: billboards or like placards them going in a protest that
Speaker 1: like talked about how much less cops training cops need
Speaker 1: than like hair stylists, And that's true, but that's true
Speaker 1: for how much cops training. Cops need to get on
Speaker 1: the street. They take a lot of training after becoming cops,
Speaker 1: and a lot of that training makes them more dangerous
Speaker 1: as cops. Um. And this is part of the problem
Speaker 1: we talk about like needing to train police more. Over
Speaker 1: the last twenty years, police training has become increasingly paramilitary,
Speaker 1: with military veterans like Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman and companies
Speaker 1: like Close Quarters Battle CQB providing training that deliberately bills
Speaker 1: itself as military style and refers to officers as warriors,
Speaker 1: all while convincing them that they are in more danger
Speaker 1: than cops have ever faced. From the end of policing.
Speaker 1: Quote Sef Stoughton, a former police officer turned law professors,
Speaker 1: shows how officers are repeatedly exposed to scenarios in which
Speaker 1: seemingly innocuous interactions with the public, such as traffic stops,
Speaker 1: turned deadly. The endlessly repeated point is that any encounter
Speaker 1: can turn deadly in a split second. Of officers don't
Speaker 1: remain ready to use lethal force at any moment. So
Speaker 1: take the case of John Crawford, an African American man
Speaker 1: shot to death by a police officer in Walmart and Ohio.
Speaker 1: Crawford had picked up an air gun off the shelf
Speaker 1: and was carrying it around the store while shopping. Another
Speaker 1: shopper called nine one one to report a man with
Speaker 1: a gun in the store. The stores video camera shows
Speaker 1: that one of the responding officers shot without warning while
Speaker 1: Crawford was talking on the phone. In Ohio, it is
Speaker 1: legal to carry a gun openly, but the officer had
Speaker 1: been trained to use deadly force upon seeing a gun. Similarly,
Speaker 1: in South Carolina, a state trooper drove up to a
Speaker 1: young man in his car at a gas station and
Speaker 1: asked him for his driver's license. He leaned into the
Speaker 1: car to comply, and the officers shot him without warning.
Speaker 1: See Unexpected movement shoot. This is again what you get
Speaker 1: with more police training. This is what I'm saying, The
Speaker 1: training makes you scared. Yes, yeah, more training is not
Speaker 1: the solution because this is what the training does. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could argue maybe different training is the solution, but
Speaker 1: you also still have tens of thousands of cops who
Speaker 1: already have this ship in their heads. What do you
Speaker 1: do with them? If they're still on the force, how
Speaker 1: do you how do you cleanse that from them? Are
Speaker 1: you confident you can? Now? Modern police US cops are
Speaker 1: equipped with military grid weaponry, but not with military grade training.
Speaker 1: They're told that their own safety is their number one
Speaker 1: concern and anything they do to protect themselves is justified.
Speaker 1: We have essentially raised and equipped a military, told them
Speaker 1: that they are at war every day with the people
Speaker 1: of this country, and then sent them out to the
Speaker 1: streets with a license to kill if they feel scared
Speaker 1: for any reason. And this is not a simple right
Speaker 1: versus left issue. After Democrat Michael Ducacus was defeated in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty eight for being soft on crime via a
Speaker 1: super racist ad, Democrats pivoted to Yeah, the Willie Horton ad.
Speaker 1: Democrats pivoted to endorsing right wing law and order politics.
Speaker 1: Bill Clinton's nine Crime Bill added tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: police nationwide and expanded the drug war. And in fact,
Speaker 1: it wasn't until Clinton's second term that widespread police militarization
Speaker 1: was even made possible. In nineteen a bunch of heavily
Speaker 1: armed and armored gunmen try to rob some businesses again
Speaker 1: to a big gunfight with Los Angeles cops. Is the
Speaker 1: North Hollywood shoot out? Um? Yeah, police side arms were
Speaker 1: incapable of piercing their armor, and cops had to borrow
Speaker 1: high caliber rifles from a nearby gun store. When the
Speaker 1: National Defense Authorization Act was passed later that year, it
Speaker 1: included the ten thirty three program, a provision that allowed
Speaker 1: law enforcement agencies to acquire military hardware. Between nine and
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen, five point one billion dollars in material
Speaker 1: was transferred from the Department of Defense to local law enforcement.
Speaker 1: Now near the end of his time in office, President
Speaker 1: Obama attempted to belatedly halt this massive transfer of military
Speaker 1: armaments to police, but President Trump reversed that and accelerated
Speaker 1: the transfer of military weapons to cops. And this is
Speaker 1: why in a ten year period, forty nine m wraps
Speaker 1: mine resistant patrol vehicles were handed out to police departments
Speaker 1: in Florida alone. Many of these went to lightly populated
Speaker 1: rural counties like Baker population seven thousand. In Ohio, the
Speaker 1: Department of Natural Resources received two hundred and forty fully
Speaker 1: automatic rifles. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department got seven
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty eight fully automatic rifles. By the way,
Speaker 1: I found all of this in a Forbes breakdown, which
Speaker 1: notes that U. S cops also received more than six
Speaker 1: thousand bay anets between two thousand six and two thousand seventeen.
Speaker 1: What do you need six thousand like our milits? Our
Speaker 1: soldiers don't even fucking use bayonets anymore because they're useless
Speaker 1: and modern. They weren't even that useful when bayonets were
Speaker 1: actually used in combat. Um So, remember the study that
Speaker 1: showed SWAT teams were more likely to be deployed in
Speaker 1: black neighborhoods. Well, it also found that quote seeing militarized
Speaker 1: police and news reports made diminish police reputation in the
Speaker 1: mass public. And this is you know there's that news
Speaker 1: story about like the the l A school police having
Speaker 1: an m wrap. These are the tanks, Like they're not
Speaker 1: really tanks, but they're huge armored trucks. And I have
Speaker 1: a story about huge armored trucks prop because when I
Speaker 1: was in Moses, most of the people I was inbedded
Speaker 1: with were the Iraqi army, and they mostly drove a
Speaker 1: mix of like technicals which are just like Toyota trucks
Speaker 1: with guns in the bed uh and old U S
Speaker 1: military hum vs. They didn't have a whole lot of
Speaker 1: heavy military vehicles. The only time you saw US police
Speaker 1: in the places, or the US cops or not cops,
Speaker 1: sorry the him you say, US soldiers in the places
Speaker 1: where I was was when they were rolling around in
Speaker 1: em wraps and usually be a patrol of like three
Speaker 1: of these gigantic I can't exaggerate how fucking big an
Speaker 1: im wrap looks there. They are nightmarishly large vehicles, and
Speaker 1: they look like The first time I remember seeing one
Speaker 1: is I'm on the out, like maybe a quarter of
Speaker 1: a mile back from the front line, and I'm like
Speaker 1: literally sitting and smoking a cigarette with um my photographer
Speaker 1: and some friends on a pile of rubble, like listening
Speaker 1: to a gunfight occur in the distance, and there's like
Speaker 1: little kids running around and stuff, trying to sell us
Speaker 1: things and whatnot. Like we all stopped for a second
Speaker 1: as this US patrol rolls by, and these three giant
Speaker 1: m wraps, And the first thing I think of when
Speaker 1: I see them up close and personal for the first
Speaker 1: time is like, these look like a T eighties. That's
Speaker 1: what these are is. These are these are the These
Speaker 1: are the fucking Imperial Stormtroopers T eight You can't see
Speaker 1: the human beings inside, you can't see people. It is
Speaker 1: just this. It's this, this physical manifestation of the violent
Speaker 1: power of the state. That's what it felt like. And
Speaker 1: that's what I could see. These little Iraqi kids on
Speaker 1: the ground, like we're seeing that that was what a U. S.
Speaker 1: Soldier was to them, was like was was a fucking machine.
Speaker 1: And that's what seeing these in the hands of cops
Speaker 1: makes you think about cops, Like police want to wonder,
Speaker 1: like why people don't like them or expect them anymore.
Speaker 1: It's because we see you as pieces of an armed
Speaker 1: machine and nobody likes Yeah, you rolled up like the
Speaker 1: Sith Lord, like you look like you look like Darth Vader,
Speaker 1: like you, you know what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: look like Stormtroopers. We don't like stormtroopers. No, they're not
Speaker 1: the good guys. Yeah. Now, I could go on and
Speaker 1: on about like the insane weaponry cops are given these days,
Speaker 1: and I could lest repeated anecdotes about how often they
Speaker 1: badly misuse it. But I think the most important point
Speaker 1: to end on for this episode and for this series
Speaker 1: is how fucking much we spend on militarized police for
Speaker 1: how fucking little we get. The Minneapolis Police Department takes
Speaker 1: up thirty five percent of the city's general fund, The
Speaker 1: Chicago p D are thirty seven percent of their city's budget.
Speaker 1: Atlanta and Detroit police come in and about thirty percent.
Speaker 1: The l A p D is a quarter of Los
Speaker 1: Angeles's budget. Many cities spend up to of their municipal
Speaker 1: budgets on their police department, making the basically making like
Speaker 1: a lot of cities in the US are basically like
Speaker 1: small armies with towns attached to them. Up until the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, the U. S government spent about as much
Speaker 1: money on criminal justice as we did on cash welfare,
Speaker 1: on like welfare programs that deliberately like directly hand out
Speaker 1: like aid to people um. Up until the nineteen eighties, Yeah,
Speaker 1: about equal what we spent on law enforcement we spent
Speaker 1: on welfare. In the decades since, welfare spending has declined
Speaker 1: and police funding has soared. Today we spend more than
Speaker 1: twice as much money on law and order as we
Speaker 1: do on social welfare, and we get very little for
Speaker 1: our money. For all the weapon really buy our cops,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of police officers will never fire a
Speaker 1: weapon in the line of duty, for all the police,
Speaker 1: not once, not once. For all that police advocates talk
Speaker 1: about dangerous criminals, most police officers make no more than
Speaker 1: one felony arrest per year. And when it comes to
Speaker 1: the question of how good police are it actually solving crimes?
Speaker 1: About forty of murders go unsolved, only about fifty three
Speaker 1: percent of aggravated assaults are solved, less than thirty percent
Speaker 1: of robberies are solved, and only about of automobile thefts
Speaker 1: are solved. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports says that thirty
Speaker 1: percent of rapes are solved, but that number doesn't really
Speaker 1: tell the whole story. And I'm gonna quote from the
Speaker 1: Guardian for this one because again, this is like the
Speaker 1: reason I bring this up is that like that's one
Speaker 1: of the number one things. Like people who will argue
Speaker 1: about like police abolition. Other folks will say like, well,
Speaker 1: who are you gonna call if you're getting raped? Well,
Speaker 1: let's talk about how good police do it solving Only
Speaker 1: that I hear the argument like, no, they need more money,
Speaker 1: they're underfunded, and I'm like, actually, they're more funded than
Speaker 1: every other program. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, significantly more. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from the Guardian for this one quote. The
Speaker 1: fact is that the police never investigate most sexual violence
Speaker 1: because most sexual violence goes and reported. According to the
Speaker 1: Rape and Incest National Network or RAIN, a little less
Speaker 1: than twenty of sexual assaults are reported to police significantly
Speaker 1: less than other violent crimes. The reasons are myriad, but
Speaker 1: an often cited one is a distrust and fear of
Speaker 1: the police, which obviously is increased by militarization. One survey
Speaker 1: of sexual assault survivors found that of those who chose
Speaker 1: not to report, fient feared that the police could not
Speaker 1: or would not do anything to help. An additional seven
Speaker 1: percent did not want to expose their attacker to the police.
Speaker 1: A two thousand eighteen study of the Austin, Texas Police
Speaker 1: Department found that officers tasked with investigating sexual assaults could
Speaker 1: not read lab reports on DNA evidence and often lacked
Speaker 1: a basic understanding of female anatomy. I have to google.
Speaker 1: I listen to fucking this, I have to google stuff
Speaker 1: like labia majora. One officer said that guy shouldn't be
Speaker 1: investigating sex cribes invigating sex crist here and but but
Speaker 1: rather than paying for him to learn what a volva is,
Speaker 1: big home, he got a bayonet. Oh, I'll bet he
Speaker 1: knows how to use a machine gun, all of the
Speaker 1: parts of a machine gun. So sometimes police failures to
Speaker 1: investigate sexual violence look like the result of not just stupidity,
Speaker 1: but of outright duplicity. One study of the New York
Speaker 1: Police Department discovered that it was knowingly under counting rapes
Speaker 1: and its public figures, using a deliberately strict definition of
Speaker 1: rape in order to shrink the number of reported cases
Speaker 1: in New York. An inquiry into the NYPD found that
Speaker 1: it's Special Victims Division to be grossly dysfunctional, with officers
Speaker 1: instructed to simply not investigate misdemeanor sexual assault cases. First
Speaker 1: of all, the fact that that's a thing, a misdemeanor
Speaker 1: sexual assault is already a problem. Now you're not going
Speaker 1: to investigate. Yeah, well, and like, this is actually kind
Speaker 1: of a pattern with the NYPD, and I assume other
Speaker 1: departments of like, so they're under counting rape and its
Speaker 1: public figures, so it seems like they solve more rapes
Speaker 1: than they do. There was a study that came out
Speaker 1: about how often the NYPD hits when they shoot people
Speaker 1: with their firearms, right, which is something you want to know,
Speaker 1: especially since the YPD is considered to be one of
Speaker 1: the best trained police departments in the country, and the
Speaker 1: NYPD was very proud of the fact that they had
Speaker 1: a thirty percent hit rate um in gunfights, um, which
Speaker 1: is actually, like, I mean, I'm gonna be honest with you,
Speaker 1: people very rarely hit when they are shooting at each
Speaker 1: other in a gunfight because it's stressful. A lot of
Speaker 1: fucking misses. It's very hard to be accurate, not to fit.
Speaker 1: But like that was their their number was, like we
Speaker 1: hit thirty percent of the time when we just charge
Speaker 1: our weapons in like a a violent situation. But then
Speaker 1: people who analyze the NYPD data found that the NYPD
Speaker 1: was only hitting because they were including police officers suicides
Speaker 1: as one shot stops. Wait, they were they were they
Speaker 1: were goofing their own numbers by including their suicides. Is like,
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, they're They're basically saying, like that cop
Speaker 1: took a dangerous man off the streets himself. Count it counts,
Speaker 1: It counts. Yeah, it's pretty pretty wild. So conservative estimates
Speaker 1: suggest that US police have two hundred thousand untested rape
Speaker 1: kits in their possession nationwide. Rain's best estimate is that
Speaker 1: only about four point six percent of sexual assaults ever
Speaker 1: lead to an arrest, and less than one percent are
Speaker 1: ever referred to police by prosecutors. So if you are
Speaker 1: raped and you refuse to talk to the cops. Your
Speaker 1: odds of getting justice are more or less the same
Speaker 1: as someone who dials and nine one one right away.
Speaker 1: She's And then, of course there's the fact that cops
Speaker 1: commit just a shipload of rape. Bowling Green State University,
Speaker 1: you know you're gonna get I was gonna say, when
Speaker 1: you're talking about rape, I was like, they're not reporting
Speaker 1: them because they're doing it. They are doing a lot
Speaker 1: of them. Yeah. Bowling Green State University documented at least
Speaker 1: four hundred in five rapes by police officers on duty
Speaker 1: between two thousand five and two thirteen. That is an
Speaker 1: offer an average of forty five per year. They also
Speaker 1: documented six and thirty six instances of forcible fondling. These
Speaker 1: numbers are only a fraction of the real total, since
Speaker 1: most sexual assaults are never reported and most rapists have
Speaker 1: at least five victim is over the course of their career.
Speaker 1: The CNN article I found about this investigation into cop
Speaker 1: rape includes one of the most horrifying lines have ever
Speaker 1: read in an article, quote about half of the victims
Speaker 1: their children, researchers, say Stinson, one of the researchers, has
Speaker 1: gotten accustomed to hearing his research assistants proclaimed during their work,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's another fourteen year old. Oh again, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that I have a guttural physical response to that. Yeah. So.
Speaker 1: One of the first arguments you'll get against police abolition
Speaker 1: is against some version of the question without cops, who's
Speaker 1: who you're gonna call if you know, rape or whatever,
Speaker 1: if X crime happens to you. The second argument is
Speaker 1: usually that even if the cops aren't necessarily great at
Speaker 1: solving crimes, they prevent violence and crime by their presence
Speaker 1: and areas. And Alex Vitali, the author of the End
Speaker 1: of Policing, strikes back at that claim quote it is
Speaker 1: largely a liberal fantasy that the police exists to protect
Speaker 1: us from the bad guys. As the veteran police scholar
Speaker 1: David Bailey argues, the police do not prevent crime. This
Speaker 1: is one of the best kept secrets of modern life.
Speaker 1: Experts know it, the police know it, but the public
Speaker 1: does not know it. Yet. The police pretend that they
Speaker 1: are society's best defense against crime and continually argue that
Speaker 1: they if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they
Speaker 1: will be able to protect communities against crime. This is
Speaker 1: a myth, and he is very right when he says
Speaker 1: that a lot of data backs this argument up. The
Speaker 1: raw number of police in this country has declined for
Speaker 1: the last five years straight, and the rate of police
Speaker 1: officers per one thousand residents in the United States has
Speaker 1: been dropping for twenty years. You know what else has
Speaker 1: been dropping for twenty years? Prop? What the crime rate?
Speaker 1: The crime rate? Yeah, the police lost twenty three thousand
Speaker 1: net officers nationwide from two thousand and thirteen to two
Speaker 1: thousand and sixteen, with no corresponding surgeon crime. Now, despite
Speaker 1: the fact that crime has dropped sadly for twenty years,
Speaker 1: most Americans believe that crime rates have increased throughout their lifetimes.
Speaker 1: Why are people like that? Why are people like that?
Speaker 1: I have an answer for you. Up, Yeah, I have
Speaker 1: a fucking answer for you. Are you ready for this?
Speaker 1: Are you ready to talk about Hollywood again? Yea be yeah,
Speaker 1: A lot, yeah, a lot of you know, like when
Speaker 1: you're like, okay, you know what you know what prevents crime? Jobs? Yeah? Resources,
Speaker 1: It's just easy giving people heroin if they're addicted, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe laws that shouldn't be laws, like and making
Speaker 1: sure that the person handing them that heroin says, Hey,
Speaker 1: there's some doctors or some professionals over here if you
Speaker 1: want to stop this, like we can. We can help
Speaker 1: you out with this, but nobody's gonna fuck you up
Speaker 1: for doing this. Here's a couch. Yeah. It turns out
Speaker 1: that actually objectively works better in every single place that
Speaker 1: he works. Yeah. Um. So the answer to why people
Speaker 1: think that police are just absolutely critical and holding back
Speaker 1: a tide of violence has a lot to do with
Speaker 1: the TV show Dragnet and its descendants. In the fall
Speaker 1: of two thousand nineteen, more than six percent of primetime
Speaker 1: dramas on TV were about police, crime and the legal system.
Speaker 1: Many of these shows, like Cops and Live p D
Speaker 1: worked directly with law enforcement and receive approval from departments
Speaker 1: for every episode they aired, the same way Dragnet did.
Speaker 1: That's Cops. Cops got like the the Cops sign off
Speaker 1: on every episode of Cops, which is why that show
Speaker 1: doesn't show. There's a wonderful podcast you should all listen
Speaker 1: to after this called Running from Cops um and it
Speaker 1: it is a show, a podcast about the TV show
Speaker 1: Cops and about live TV And it's one of the
Speaker 1: things that they showcases. In the very first episode of
Speaker 1: Cops like they got access to the unaired footage that
Speaker 1: was shot for that episode of Cops, and like it
Speaker 1: showed that in the in this episode of Cops, like
Speaker 1: it showed them like busting this like family and like
Speaker 1: taking the kid, and like the the female officer who
Speaker 1: took the kid was like, it's okay, we're gonna get
Speaker 1: you to a safe place tonight. You're gonna have anice
Speaker 1: warm bed and toys and stuff. And in the part
Speaker 1: that wasn't aired, she took that child to like the
Speaker 1: place that she was supposed to take this kid after
Speaker 1: arresting the kids parents and they just put the kid
Speaker 1: in basically a cell because they didn't have a better
Speaker 1: or any toys. And like the lady cop is like
Speaker 1: in tears and like enraged when she realizes how fucked
Speaker 1: up the situation is that didn't they're on cops Like no, um,
Speaker 1: so again, watch Running from Cops. It's a great or
Speaker 1: listen to it. It's a great fucking podcast. Um. But
Speaker 1: one of the things they did on Running from Cops
Speaker 1: is they tried to analyze, like they watched eight episodes
Speaker 1: of the show, um and like analyzed the race of
Speaker 1: all of the people involved analyzed um the kind of
Speaker 1: crimes they're arrested for, and like put together data on
Speaker 1: like the world as presented by Cops as opposed to
Speaker 1: the actual world, and how crime actually works in our
Speaker 1: real world. Um, and I'm gonna quote from from an
Speaker 1: article written by one of the guys behind Running from Cops. Now,
Speaker 1: what we discovered was that, contrary to early press predictions,
Speaker 1: the world portrayed on Cops is not like the real world.
Speaker 1: There are about four times more violent crimes and cops
Speaker 1: than in reality, and three times more drug arrests and
Speaker 1: about ten times more arrests for sex work. The cops
Speaker 1: on the show are also, statistically speaking, extremely good at
Speaker 1: their jobs. Segments on the show in and arrest eighty
Speaker 1: four point four percent of the time. That number reflects
Speaker 1: a change over time from back in nineteen ninety tone
Speaker 1: and the most recent season in Cops World, law enforcement
Speaker 1: officers are so effective it's basically a given that a
Speaker 1: crime will end in an arrest. Now, that's interesting to me. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot that's interesting to me, including Like, one
Speaker 1: of the things they find in the show is that
Speaker 1: early on Cops like showed a hell of a lot
Speaker 1: more non white people getting arrested and like the double
Speaker 1: a CP complained and Cops fixed the problem and switched
Speaker 1: over to showing mostly white criminals. And part of yeah,
Speaker 1: part of how they did it was by just filming
Speaker 1: in Portland, Oregon. That's hilarious. I didn't know that, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I did know, like, wow, it seems the black
Speaker 1: people no more. Yeah, yeah they did. They did fix
Speaker 1: that particular problem, m um. And you know, I gotta
Speaker 1: give it to him. Moving to Portland's a smart way
Speaker 1: to do that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So most people who
Speaker 1: even like most fans of Cops Williganola is that the
Speaker 1: show has always been, you know, kind of trashy. But
Speaker 1: even lea yeah, and and like you would have found
Speaker 1: a lot more people who'd be willing to argue that
Speaker 1: Cops was harmful back before this most recent uprising. Then
Speaker 1: you would get to argue that there was a harm
Speaker 1: and shows like for example, Law and Order. But even
Speaker 1: shows like Law and Order contribute to our distorted cultural
Speaker 1: beliefs about the police. Now, obviously Law and Order doesn't
Speaker 1: push the militarized police angle. There's Law and Orders very
Speaker 1: much like a tribute to like Volmer's idea, of the
Speaker 1: police as scientists. Um, yeah, but it's still has a
Speaker 1: negative effect. Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University who
Speaker 1: studies television and pop culture, noted in an interview with
Speaker 1: the Desiree News, quote, the very thing that keeps law
Speaker 1: and order going is the idea that they keep showing
Speaker 1: this efficient process over and over. Law and order gives,
Speaker 1: at least in part, some feel for this being an
Speaker 1: efficiently well oiled machine. And it just isn't. We already
Speaker 1: went through the statistics of how few crimes the police solved,
Speaker 1: because again, most of these scientific policing methods don't work
Speaker 1: nearly as well as as there they TV portrays them
Speaker 1: as yeah. Now. Color of Change released a report in
Speaker 1: January of this year based on a study of twenty
Speaker 1: six scripted crime dramas. It found that quote, these shows
Speaker 1: rendered racism invisible and dismissed any need for police accountability.
Speaker 1: They made a legal destructive and racist practices within the
Speaker 1: criminal justice system seem acceptable, justifiable, and necessary, even heroic.
Speaker 1: The study noted that of the writers for these shows
Speaker 1: were white men, only nine percent were black. Now. In
Speaker 1: the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's murder and this whole
Speaker 1: uprising thing. Both Cops and Live p D were canceled,
Speaker 1: and I I really think most people don't get what
Speaker 1: a big victory it is to have fucking cops off
Speaker 1: the air. Um. Yeah, I think they'll understand a little
Speaker 1: better after this. It does seem likely that other police
Speaker 1: procedurals will wind up dying out rather soon. And everyone
Speaker 1: has their favorite We've all we've all enjoyed some cop dramas, um,
Speaker 1: I and I and I will say I don't think
Speaker 1: that the wire is a part of the problem. I
Speaker 1: think they actually did a real good job of making
Speaker 1: everybody see, like Jesus Christ, policing's fucked. It just wasn't enough. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of you know, Brooklyn nine nine. I
Speaker 1: know a lot of people who love Brooklyn nine nine,
Speaker 1: And I know a lot of Brooklyn nine nine fans
Speaker 1: are apprehensive and like a little bit guilty right now
Speaker 1: and wondering like, is there a way to like fix
Speaker 1: this show, to make it like not contribute to the problem,
Speaker 1: and like, you know, the show does. The show does
Speaker 1: has leaned in at a few points to some problems
Speaker 1: in policing in a way that most police dramas don't
Speaker 1: um and it is one of those things where, like
Speaker 1: I think a lot of folks will argue that, like
Speaker 1: there's a room for escapism and that this stuff isn't
Speaker 1: really harmful, but but it it just is. There is
Speaker 1: a lot of documentation about how it is harmful. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from just one piece of this documentation,
Speaker 1: an article in Pacific Standard magazine quote crime dramas There's
Speaker 1: insistently ranked among the most watch shows by Nielsen Media.
Speaker 1: According to the authors. What's more, as many as forty
Speaker 1: percent of Americans believe that such shows are somewhat or
Speaker 1: very true to real life. So to find out how
Speaker 1: the simplistic portrayal of police officers on television might influence
Speaker 1: public opinion of the profession, researchers from St. John Fisher
Speaker 1: College and Wayne State University first had to analyze how
Speaker 1: popular crime shows portray police work. The researchers also surveyed
Speaker 1: a nationally representative sample of over two thousand Americans. They
Speaker 1: found that those who watched crime shows view police as
Speaker 1: better behaved, more successful at combating crime, and relatively responsible
Speaker 1: in their use of force than those who don't. Yes,
Speaker 1: if you want to know why there's so many back
Speaker 1: the Blue folks. It's these shows that we all have,
Speaker 1: some we enjoy, but they're part of the problem. You
Speaker 1: may say. The one for me is first forty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the one that gets me the most because it
Speaker 1: always takes place in like Memphis, in the deepest of
Speaker 1: the Section eight projects, in the way that like, I know,
Speaker 1: our people are portrayed where it's like, again, it's not
Speaker 1: like crime don't exist, but this the way that you're
Speaker 1: painting this is so basic, so binary, and so easy
Speaker 1: that like I tried to watch it. I tried to
Speaker 1: get into it because that had a friend that liked it.
Speaker 1: So I tried to get into it, and I was like,
Speaker 1: I can't, I can't. I can't even finish this. I
Speaker 1: don't have anything else. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's like
Speaker 1: it's just hurtful. It's really bad because you know, it's
Speaker 1: not real, you know what I'm saying, But you're telling
Speaker 1: me this is like a uh reality show, and it
Speaker 1: means it's not real. And like, just given by how
Speaker 1: few Americans have an experience with violent crime, and how
Speaker 1: even how an even smaller chunk of those Americans actually
Speaker 1: have the police do something about the thing that they suffer.
Speaker 1: That's a tiny fraction of us. When people say what
Speaker 1: about you know, and then they list their things that
Speaker 1: we the police, for most of them aren't thinking about
Speaker 1: a real thing that's happened to them, our friend. They're
Speaker 1: thinking about something they saw on TV like that that
Speaker 1: like like they wouldn't say that, but that's what's actually
Speaker 1: going on. Um. Yes, yeah. The militarization of US police
Speaker 1: started from a mix of fear over specific incidents of
Speaker 1: shocking violence uh and and cruel calculus by soulless politicians.
Speaker 1: But part of why it has been allowed to continue
Speaker 1: for so long, and why American voters traditionally react very
Speaker 1: negatively to the idea of cutting police funds, is that
Speaker 1: decades of Hollywood depictions of law enforcement have convinced many
Speaker 1: of us that the police are completely necessary to save
Speaker 1: us from a constant, imminent threat of violence and barbarism.
Speaker 1: The weight of pro cop cultural inertia is only increased
Speaker 1: by the fact that a decent number of the seven
Speaker 1: thousand cops in our country do useful in good things
Speaker 1: from time to time, like that there are like most
Speaker 1: cops on the force will have a period where that
Speaker 1: even cops who are critical later will it will be
Speaker 1: able to point to individual things they did that we're good. Um,
Speaker 1: the question is not whether or not cops ever do
Speaker 1: things that are good. It's whether or not it's the cost,
Speaker 1: whether or not the benefits we gain from having police
Speaker 1: Number one can be gained from something that's not the police,
Speaker 1: and number two are worth the price of having police.
Speaker 1: Hollywood has spent a lot of time and made a
Speaker 1: lot of money showing us what we get from law
Speaker 1: enforcement at its best, and again the statistics show that
Speaker 1: they are lying about what we get from law enforcement.
Speaker 1: So perhaps we should spend more time as a culture
Speaker 1: thinking about what law enforcement costs us. And I think
Speaker 1: my best way of doing this is always an anecdotal example.
Speaker 1: You know, because we do talk about the statistics, we
Speaker 1: talk about the broad problem. The broad The broad problem
Speaker 1: is that a thousand people a year are killed by
Speaker 1: US police, many of them in shady circumstances, many of them,
Speaker 1: most of them without real investigations that are are open
Speaker 1: to the public taking place, and that that number is
Speaker 1: for example, more than die have died in every school
Speaker 1: shooting in American history. Every year the police kill more
Speaker 1: people than school shooters have ever killed. Like yeah, like
Speaker 1: people like people flip out about a R fifteen. And
Speaker 1: I'm not saying you're wrong to be scared heard or
Speaker 1: frightened about the easy availability of air fifteens. Like four
Speaker 1: hundred Americans every year are killed by long guns that
Speaker 1: are air fifteens are similar weapons. The police kill a thousand.
Speaker 1: You're not saying one's not not saying one's not a problem,
Speaker 1: but like does it suck? Yeah, Well, if we're gonna
Speaker 1: yeah anyway, it's it's an issue. Um. But I think
Speaker 1: that when it comes to getting people to really emotionally
Speaker 1: understand the cost of police, individual horrific anecdotes are are
Speaker 1: the thing that drives it home to people. Um, and
Speaker 1: that's certainly what the police do. Individual anecdotes of cops
Speaker 1: doing good to talk about why we need them. So
Speaker 1: we might as well respond in kind. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to respond in kind by talking about something that happened
Speaker 1: in Philadelphia in nineteen five, the move bombing. So have
Speaker 1: you heard of the move bombing? I have, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had a feeling. Yeah. Move was a strange organization
Speaker 1: that we're not going to get into a lot of
Speaker 1: detail about It was founded by a guy named John Africa,
Speaker 1: and every member of move took on Africa as a surname.
Speaker 1: They were not all black, actually, it was a mixed
Speaker 1: race organization. There were hard to pin down ideologically, but
Speaker 1: it would be fair to say that they expressed a
Speaker 1: deep hatred of technology. Um They did some like protests
Speaker 1: at zoos against animal cruelty, They ate natural diet. They're
Speaker 1: They're like a hard group to pin down. They did
Speaker 1: a lot of shouting into bullhorns though. Um So. The
Speaker 1: organization briefly wound up squatting in Powellton Village in West Philly,
Speaker 1: um and they kind of fortified a house they were
Speaker 1: squatting in there, and they they've piste off a lot
Speaker 1: of their neighbors by regularly brandishing firearms and shouting at
Speaker 1: the neighborhood through a megaphone. They eventually were raided by
Speaker 1: the Feds, who found a bunch of guns and pipe bombs.
Speaker 1: Police barricaded several blocks around the compound and basically laid
Speaker 1: siege to it for fifty six days. This all can
Speaker 1: do ahead when the cops moved into forcibly evict them,
Speaker 1: there was a gun battle and a cop was killed
Speaker 1: while sixteen other officers and firefighters were injured. Eventually, the
Speaker 1: MOVE people all surrendered and the cops beat the ever
Speaker 1: loving ship out of one of them, a guy who
Speaker 1: had not taken part in the gunfight but who had
Speaker 1: been on the bullhorn heckling them. They just beat the
Speaker 1: piss out of this it in broad daylight. Um Nine
Speaker 1: of the members of Move were convicted of third degree
Speaker 1: murder and sent to prison after this, so Move was
Speaker 1: not taken out though as an organization continued. They moved
Speaker 1: on and set up a new base on Osage Avenue,
Speaker 1: which was a middle class black neighborhood that was doing
Speaker 1: really well. It's kind of like a Black Wall Street situation, right,
Speaker 1: Like Osage Avenue is like doing well, and Move moves
Speaker 1: in and they were out there welcome pretty quickly because
Speaker 1: they again turned their house into a fortified bunker, like
Speaker 1: they build a literal bunker on top. They yelled at
Speaker 1: a lot of people through bullhorns. They're not physically harming people,
Speaker 1: but they're like kind of annoying people, and like people
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood don't know what to do, but called
Speaker 1: the city and the city calls the police, and the
Speaker 1: police do what the police do, which is escalate the
Speaker 1: situation into another siege. In May, uh, Philadelphia brings in
Speaker 1: five dred militarized officers armed with flak jacket, swat gear,
Speaker 1: fifty caliber machine guns, and an anti tank rifle. The
Speaker 1: cops move in to serve arrest warrants on folks that
Speaker 1: they believe we're living in the compound, and they estimated
Speaker 1: six adults and twelve children were inside. The movers opened
Speaker 1: fire on these militarized police, and the police responded with
Speaker 1: just an insane torrent of wild gun fire, pouring ten
Speaker 1: thousand rounds into the building in ninety minutes. Now, thankfully,
Speaker 1: the police had evacuated most of the neighborhood, telling everyone
Speaker 1: they'd be able to come back home quickly. But they're
Speaker 1: just firing wildly into the neighborhood. Swat team's next try
Speaker 1: blowing holes in the sides of the building, but nothing
Speaker 1: worked to breach the compound because the move folks had
Speaker 1: really done a good job before. Yeah, they were good
Speaker 1: at this ship. Um. The police began lobbying Mayor good,
Speaker 1: the first black mayor of Philadelphia, for the go ahead
Speaker 1: to drop a bomb they built on the compound, and
Speaker 1: after hours of ferocious gunfire, the mayor agreed. The police
Speaker 1: dropped a bomb on this building in Philadelphia, an Osage Avenue,
Speaker 1: and it fails to crack the bunker that Move had
Speaker 1: built atop their house, and it doesn't in the stalemate,
Speaker 1: but it did start a fire that spread very quickly
Speaker 1: to the roofs of other homes clustered around the Move building.
Speaker 1: The police commissioner ordered firefighters to stand down, later telling
Speaker 1: the city commission I communicated that I would like to
Speaker 1: let the fire burn. In forty five minutes, three more
Speaker 1: homes on the black were burning. Then the roof of
Speaker 1: the Move house collapsed. The police did not allow firefighters
Speaker 1: in until more than ninety minutes had passed and the
Speaker 1: entire north side of Osage Avenue was burning. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote now from an NPR article on what happened next.
Speaker 1: Philadelphia streets are famously narrow, which made it easy for
Speaker 1: the fire to leap from burning trees on the north
Speaker 1: side to even more homes on the south side. From there,
Speaker 1: the flames spilled over to the homes behind six two
Speaker 1: to one Ossage to Pine Street. By evening three rows
Speaker 1: of homes were completely on fire, a conflagration so large
Speaker 1: that the flames could be seen from planes landing at
Speaker 1: Philadelphia International Airport more than six miles away. The smoke
Speaker 1: was visible across the city. By the time firefighters brought
Speaker 1: the fire under control a little before midnight, sixty houses
Speaker 1: on the once tidy block had been completely destroyed. Two
Speaker 1: and fifty people were suddenly shockingly without homes. It was
Speaker 1: the worst residential fire in the city's history. In the end,
Speaker 1: eleven people died in that fire on Osage Avenue, including
Speaker 1: five children. Weeks passed before the police were able to
Speaker 1: identify their remains. This is what I mean when I'm
Speaker 1: talking about Sorry, Yeah, I was like, this is the
Speaker 1: story I was referring to in the first episode about
Speaker 1: like a bomb being dropped on Americans. It turns out
Speaker 1: that's a long Yeah, there's a lot of parallels between
Speaker 1: this and Tulsa. But you know Tulsa, it was a
Speaker 1: mob of random citizens. The move bombing was was mostly
Speaker 1: white police um and the organization moved. That was part
Speaker 1: of what I'm talking about. Counting the cost here move
Speaker 1: was a problem. They caused real issues for their neighbors.
Speaker 1: And their neighbors problems should not be discounted. Like they
Speaker 1: they they their neighbors had a serious issue with these
Speaker 1: people that needed to be dealt with, and they called
Speaker 1: the city to help them deal with it, and the
Speaker 1: city brought the police. In any any reasonable society would
Speaker 1: have need to have a way to deal something with
Speaker 1: like a bunch of people fortifying a building in a
Speaker 1: neighborhood and shouting at everyone in a bullhorn until they
Speaker 1: can't sleep. That's a problem. That's a problem that merits
Speaker 1: a solution. The solution the police brought to this problem
Speaker 1: was to burn down the entire neighborhood. Yeah, that's not
Speaker 1: that didn't need to happen. You didn't have to do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this there there were ways to deal with these people,
Speaker 1: because again, the members of Move never went out murdering
Speaker 1: people at random. That was not what they did. They
Speaker 1: they they're problematics and they were annoying, and yeah, they
Speaker 1: weren't just killing strangers. That police did that. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: Philadelphia police did succeed in dealing with the issue of
Speaker 1: the Move organization. They did not harangue neighbors on loudspeakers
Speaker 1: anymore after this, and whatever possibly illegal weapons they may
Speaker 1: have had on the property were incinerated, along with sixties
Speaker 1: something black homes and businesses. You could argue that some
Speaker 1: problems of law and order were solved by bombing the
Speaker 1: move compound. Question is like was the price worth it?
Speaker 1: And that's broadly the question we need to be asking
Speaker 1: and answering about our police. Is the cost worth it? Guys?
Speaker 1: You know what would wipe out your COVID nineteen? You
Speaker 1: could drink the bleach. You're right, it will end it.
Speaker 1: I'm like, you will die. Yeah. Did you ever listen
Speaker 1: to Chris Christofferson prop? Yeah? Yeah. Do you ever listen
Speaker 1: to a song The Laws for Protection of the People? No?
Speaker 1: It you'd like that song. It's a good example of
Speaker 1: like early country, you know, now country, there's like a
Speaker 1: lot of popular country is like very kind of reflectively patriotic,
Speaker 1: PROCP pre military. Old country was like it was like
Speaker 1: punk music but played differently, right um, And Chris Christofferson
Speaker 1: embodies that in a lot of ways. And The Law
Speaker 1: Is for Protection of the People is a song about cops,
Speaker 1: and it's like they're like the first verses about like
Speaker 1: a drunk guy that like falls down drunk on the
Speaker 1: sidewalk and the six squad cars come streaming to the
Speaker 1: rescue to haul him off to jail. And the refrain
Speaker 1: of the song is because the laws for protection of
Speaker 1: the people rules or rules, and anyone can see we
Speaker 1: don't need no drunks like Billy Dalton is the name
Speaker 1: of the drunk scaring decent folks like you and me.
Speaker 1: And the second verses about a hippie who like a
Speaker 1: bunch of brave cops come surround and like beat down
Speaker 1: and shave his head forcibly, and you know there's another
Speaker 1: version of that refrain, and then the last verse is,
Speaker 1: um uh so, thank your lucky stars, you've got protection,
Speaker 1: walk the line and never mind the cost. Don't think
Speaker 1: of who them lawman was protecting when they nailed the
Speaker 1: Savior to the cross. But Chris, Chris Stofferson, bring it
Speaker 1: at home, Yeah, bring it at home. Hey, you know
Speaker 1: what pressus Savior? Crooked justice system? Awesome, awesome trumped up charges. Yep,
Speaker 1: So my into the cost is I guess the end
Speaker 1: message I want to have for this podcast? Yes, like
Speaker 1: this was the Lord's work. Robert whatever you what if
Speaker 1: you wind up agreeing with us or not about what
Speaker 1: should be done with the police. When you think about
Speaker 1: what should be done with the police, think about what
Speaker 1: the price you're paying for them is, and ask is
Speaker 1: it worth it? Yes? Do you protect your children by
Speaker 1: strapping them to their bed and barbed buying the door?
Speaker 1: Or do you protect your children by loving them and
Speaker 1: caring for them and teaching them better ways to take
Speaker 1: care of themselves and their felling neighbors? Yeah? Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it's people get aspects of this, Like people get aspects
Speaker 1: of this when like folks who are pro gun talk
Speaker 1: to liberals about like, oh, you know, people should defend
Speaker 1: themselves and like always carry a gun, and a lot
Speaker 1: of liberals will like rightly point out, like it sounds
Speaker 1: like a miserable world if everyone has to have a
Speaker 1: gun at them at all times. I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: like that vision of the world. But it's like, but
Speaker 1: do you support their being police who always have a
Speaker 1: shipload of weapons on them, who walk around with like
Speaker 1: five different weapons that are potentially lethal on their belt
Speaker 1: at any given time, Like that's part of it. I agree,
Speaker 1: it's better if there aren't a ton of weapons all
Speaker 1: over the place, all of the time in the public sphere. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's deal with that problem, and let's recognize that it
Speaker 1: really starts with police in our society. UM, let's just
Speaker 1: be honest. Yeah everybody, yep, yeah, that was a lot
Speaker 1: of words. There was a lot of works. Yes, and
Speaker 1: my facts. Do care about your feelings, props. So how
Speaker 1: are you feeling? Man? That was great? I like that,
Speaker 1: Thank you. I am feeling disgusting. Uh, I'm a little tired,
Speaker 1: but I'm also in little hopeful because of the response
Speaker 1: we've been getting from this pod. Good, very hopeful. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it has been a great response. It's good to be hopeful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: be hopeful. Defund to the man. Um, there's better ideas.
Speaker 1: We can we can come up with a better idea, guys, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can, we can, we can, we can. We can
Speaker 1: come up with so many better ideas. UM, for example,
Speaker 1: what if we just what if we were placed all
Speaker 1: of our cops with like, you know, those dogs that
Speaker 1: they have in the mountains somewhere in Europe that have
Speaker 1: liquor around their necks. Those are rad. Let's try that.
Speaker 1: Let's just fill the streets with those dogs. Those are
Speaker 1: so rad it'll work. Maybe. Yeah, if if if A,
Speaker 1: if A husky walked up with up to me and
Speaker 1: have whiskey on his neck. I would be like, this
Speaker 1: is the coolest husky I've ever met in my life.
Speaker 1: I will stop whatever crime I'm doing because I just
Speaker 1: want to see this dog with whiskey. Yeah, and like
Speaker 1: a bunch of huge, well trained dogs everywhere, probably gonna
Speaker 1: stop more rapes than the cops, I'll tell you what,
Speaker 1: because everybody scared it dogs except for Sophie. Except for Sophie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well well jinks ye oh blood time. Yeah. I kind
Speaker 1: of do that. Yeah, profit pop dot com where I
Speaker 1: don't sell weapons. Um, that's good. Good. I challenge you
Speaker 1: to think of better ways to organize the world. And
Speaker 1: I sell coffee stuff. Um. I do music and poetry
Speaker 1: and that's all of the things are at prop hip
Speaker 1: hop dot com. And I do not sell weapons yet,
Speaker 1: but when I moved to my compound in Ohio, I'll
Speaker 1: start legally manufacturing sought off shotguns so that the the
Speaker 1: the A t F will will finally raid me. Um
Speaker 1: you know that's the that was a that was a
Speaker 1: ruby ridge. Think. Yeah, I actually really think you gotta
Speaker 1: market there, I do, I do. You could start branding
Speaker 1: some weapons yeah, Uncle Robert's legal homemade shotguns. Yes, I
Speaker 1: just couldn't into something. I couldn't repeatedly Waco in this
Speaker 1: episode without dropping a Ruby Ridge in there. Um, So
Speaker 1: it's not fair, that's no. And it's not fair that
Speaker 1: we talked about Waco all the time but not the
Speaker 1: move bombing, because like they're both cases of like out
Speaker 1: of control militarized police burning children to death. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah because those black people. Yeah, it's sucked up. Yeah
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. Find a way to make the move bombing
Speaker 1: Waco again. I don't know what the that's not a
Speaker 1: good moral. Um, they need a Netflix series where they
Speaker 1: hire a sexy guy to be John Africa. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: they could play like do it or something. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I haven't. Haven't have a Blue s concert. Is there
Speaker 1: being bombed? Just throw that in there for no reason, unnecessary.
Speaker 1: That was the wildest thing about the Waco show was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so you guys are just you guys just turning David
Speaker 1: Koresh into a rock star. Alright, Like what that's a stance.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And now I want to see the fucking
Speaker 1: I want to see them like do a Jim Jones
Speaker 1: mini series. He turned him into like a stand up comedian.
Speaker 1: He's just hilarious. That's what we all go. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: we cast David Chappelle's Jim Jones. Fuck it, No one
Speaker 1: gives a ship where Netflix? Oh lord, alright podcast is out.
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