Episode 208: How US Media Repackages Pro-Police Policies as Reform AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Citations Needed

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Episode: Episode 208: How US Media Repackages Pro-Police Policies as "Reform"

Author: Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson
Duration: 01:20:32

Episode Shownotes

“Citizens to Aid Police in New Program,” reported the Los Angeles Times in 1975. “Community Policing: Law Enforcement Returns to Its Roots,” declared the Chicago Tribune in 1994. “Obama Calls for Changes in Policing After Task Force Report,” announced The New York Times in 2015. Periodically, US officials propose some

type of police “reform,” usually after a period of widespread protest against ongoing racist police violence. Police, we’re told, will improve their own performance and relationships with the public with a few tweaks: better training on use-of-force and equipment, upgraded technology like body cameras and shooting simulators, and deeper integration into the “community.” But, every time a new “reform” is introduced, it almost always serves as justification for bigger police-department budgets and fawning media coverage over police, painting the image of a scrappy force for public safety that just doesn’t have the right training and resources. Meanwhile, levels of police harassment and police violence remain the same, and, in many cases, even increase. Indeed, 2023 was the worst year for fatal police shootings in decades despite – or perhaps because of – all the post-Ferguson “reforms." On this episode, the Season 8 Premiere of Citations Needed, we’ll discuss the media-enabled phenomenon of how pro-police narratives, programs and budget bloating busy work are spun as “reform,” how they are used to stem public anger and placate squishy politicians and nonprofits, and look at the decades-old practice of turning public opposition to, and victimization from, US policing into an opportunity to expand and enrich the security state. Our guest is civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis. ** Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) is a civil rights attorney and the founder of Civil Rights Corps. He is the author of Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter, the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (The New Press, 2019), the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation study “The Body Camera: The Language of our Dreams,” and the forthcoming book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, which will be published early next year by The New Press.

Summary

In Episode 208 of 'Citations Needed,' hosts Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson examine how U.S. media frames pro-police initiatives as 'reform' following protests against police violence, often resulting in budget increases for police departments rather than substantive changes. Despite claims of reform, the episode highlights the rise in fatal police shootings in 2023, illustrating the failure of these initiatives. Featuring civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis, the discussion emphasizes the problematic narratives surrounding police accountability and the expansion of the security state under the guise of community engagement and reform efforts.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Episode 208: How US Media Repackages Pro-Police Policies as "Reform") to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_08
This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson. Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson.

00:00:17 Speaker_08
This is the premiere episode of season eight of Citations Needed. We are back from our end of summer break. Thank you all for joining us again. Of course,

00:00:27 Speaker_08
You can follow the show on Twitter at CitationSpot, Facebook, CitationSneeda, and become a supporter of the show if you are so inclined. And we do hope that you are so inclined because we are 100% listener funded. We don't run ads or commercials.

00:00:39 Speaker_08
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00:00:47 Speaker_04
Yeah. If you listen to the show and you like it, please do support it. If you've always thought about it, but I haven't done it and you're kind of sitting around listening to it, reach for that wallet.

00:00:55 Speaker_04
Why don't you grease me off a Jackson, maybe a Lincoln, maybe a Benjamin. Let's get this done.

00:01:06 Speaker_08
Citizens to Aid Police in New Program, reported the Los Angeles Times back in 1975. With community policing, law enforcement returns to its roots, declared the Chicago Tribune in 1994.

00:01:21 Speaker_08
Obama calls for changes in policing after task force report, announced the New York Times in 2015.

00:01:29 Speaker_04
Periodically throughout the decades, U.S. officials propose some type of quote-unquote police reform, usually after a period of widespread protests against ongoing racist police violence.

00:01:39 Speaker_04
Police, we're told, will improve their own performance in relationship with the public with a few tweaks, better training on use of force and equipment, upgrading technology like body cams and shooting simulators, and deeper integration into the so-called community.

00:01:51 Speaker_08
But every time a new reform is introduced, it almost always serves as a justification for bigger police department budgets and fawning media coverage over police, painting the image of a scrappy force for public safety that just doesn't have the right training and resources.

00:02:08 Speaker_08
Meanwhile, levels of police harassment and police violence remain the same and, in many cases, even increase.

00:02:16 Speaker_08
Indeed, 2023 was the worst year for fatal police shootings in decades despite, or perhaps because of, all of the post-Ferguson so-called reforms.

00:02:28 Speaker_04
On today's show, we'll discuss the media-enabled phenomenon of how pro-police narratives, programs, and budget-bloating busywork are spun as so-called reform, how they are used to stem public anger and placate squishy politicians and nonprofits, and look at the decades-old practice of turning public opposition to and victimization from U.S.

00:02:45 Speaker_04
policing into an opportunity to enrich and expand the security state.

00:02:50 Speaker_08
Later on the show, we'll be joined by Alec Karakatsanis, civil rights attorney and founder of Civil Rights Corps.

00:02:56 Speaker_08
He is the author of the Substack Alec's Copaganda Newsletter, the book Usual Cruelty, the Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, published by the New Press in 2019, and also the recent study, The Body Camera, The Language of Our Dreams, which was published in the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation.

00:03:16 Speaker_05
Story of the police body camera is almost exactly the opposite of the story that we've been told.

00:03:24 Speaker_05
And what I found when I looked at it with my research assistants was something I think really profoundly important for understanding the whole context of reforms, not just to policing, but reforms to the whole punishment bureaucracy, and indeed reforms across a wide range of areas where a lot of the most powerful institutions in our society end up using their own ineffectiveness, their own corruption, their own violence,

00:03:53 Speaker_05
as an excuse to get more resources and to actually increase their capacity to control people.

00:04:00 Speaker_04
Now, as always, we are required by Illinois, New Jersey, and New York state law to say this is a spiritual successor to episode 132, The House Always Wins, How Every Crisis Narrative Enriches the Security and Carceral State, where we discussed how various crises always present pro-police, pro-carceral solutions.

00:04:16 Speaker_04
In this episode, we're going to discuss the way police themselves, when they're in a state of crisis, when there's a huge public outcry, anger, or lack of trust or credibility crisis within police,

00:04:26 Speaker_04
The solutions that are presented to the public by the media, by electeds, and by liberal groups is almost always to give the police more money and more power. That's right. Resources, Adam, resources.

00:04:39 Speaker_04
Which over the decades, we will argue, has mostly, not exclusively, but mostly not solved any of the problems that they're essentially supposed to solve.

00:04:48 Speaker_08
While the concept of so-called police reform as a generic objective goes back centuries, the modern practice of framing counterinsurgency strategies as reform really began in earnest in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, following widespread uprisings against racist policy and policing, and the visible, often brutal, police repression that followed.

00:05:10 Speaker_08
So let's start with the Kerner Commission of 1967.

00:05:15 Speaker_08
Following the urban uprisings of the summer of 1967, President Lyndon Johnson assembled a commission to determine, quote, what can be done to prevent, end quote, what it deemed to be, quote unquote, riots.

00:05:28 Speaker_08
Now, as Stuart Schrader, Associate Research Professor of Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins and Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism,

00:05:37 Speaker_08
has written in his 2019 book Badges Without Borders, quote, the commission offered recommendations to alleviate racial and economic inequality, urging a vast federal spending program on jobs, education, and housing to address the socioeconomic conditions underlying the political unrest.

00:05:57 Speaker_08
President Johnson spurned this proposal, but most of the subsidiary recommendations the Kerner Report delivered on how to transform policing were adopted. The way to assure security was to reform its technical apparatus."

00:06:11 Speaker_04
President Johnson formalized these recommendations by signing into law the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.

00:06:18 Speaker_04
The law established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, or the LEAA, which, among other things, earmarked $100 million to states for, quote, community crime control efforts, unquote, and $50 million for law enforcement agencies themselves.

00:06:31 Speaker_04
The $50 million figure included quote, $15 million for riot control, unquote, according to the Brookings Institution.

00:06:37 Speaker_04
Around the same time, the Ford Foundation had been providing funding for some civil rights organizations, including the Urban League and Congress for Racial Equality.

00:06:45 Speaker_04
University of Cambridge researcher Sam Collings-Wells argued in his 2020 study that by the late 1960s, the Ford Foundation began to incorporate police reform initiatives after backlash from congressional opponents of the civil rights movements, such as Senators James Eastland and John McClellan.

00:07:00 Speaker_04
As part of the pivot, in 1970, the Ford Foundation established a Police Development Fund of $30 million, with the stated intention of funding police training, procedural reform, and quote, community policing, unquote, and building trusts between police and people of color.

00:07:15 Speaker_04
So-called community policing was, and of course remains, extremely ill-defined, seeming to refer to the mere existence of cops interacting with civilians.

00:07:23 Speaker_04
The Police Development Fund would later become the Police Foundation, as Collins-Wells would go on to write, quote, The Police Foundation was designed as a catalyst for liberal police reform nationwide, pioneering measures to repair the relationship between the police and community.

00:07:36 Speaker_04
Liberal law and order appeared to offer Ford the best of both worlds, a way for philanthropic organizations to continue its work on civil rights, but in a way which appeared, quote unquote, tough on crime, end quote.

00:07:47 Speaker_08
By the early 1970s, initiatives centered around community policing and diversity in policing programs began to crop up in cities such as Santa Cruz, California and Cincinnati, Ohio.

00:07:58 Speaker_08
Many, if not all of them, receiving grants from police organizations like the Police Foundation and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, again the LEAA.

00:08:09 Speaker_08
The Cincinnati Police Department, for example, received multiple grants in the early 1970s, including a $2.3 million grant in 1973. That's approximately $16.2 million today.

00:08:22 Speaker_08
This from the Police Foundation in order to launch, quote unquote, team policing and inclusion initiatives. A July 1972 article in the Cincinnati Post announced this initiative with the headline, Brother in Blue.

00:08:37 Speaker_08
racially balanced police team's aim of program.

00:08:41 Speaker_08
The article would say this, quote, Cincinnati City Council is expected to pass legislation Thursday, accepting a $1.9 million grant for a community team policing program, including a provision that the city try to hire at least 31 blacks for the 61 new police jobs the project creates, end quote.

00:09:02 Speaker_08
The source of that grant, again, was the Police Foundation.

00:09:06 Speaker_08
Just a few years later, in December of 1975, in Southern California, Santa Ana Police Chief Raymond Davis introduced a similar program labeled, quote, community-oriented policing, end quote, cleverly abbreviated as COP, framing it as a potential solution to the problem of rising crime rates.

00:09:24 Speaker_08
On December 23rd, 1975, the LA Times ran a piece headlined, Citizens to Aid Police in New Program.

00:09:33 Speaker_08
The Times would report this, quote, officers who once spent the majority of their work hours in patrol cars will have time to meet citizens on a first name basis as a result of a department reorganization which included the hiring of 88 additional officers, end quote.

00:09:51 Speaker_08
The article would continue, quote, Police Chief Raymond Davis said the program was prompted by the 1973-74 statistics, which showed that the city's 20% crime rate increase was the highest among major California cities and third highest in the nation.

00:10:07 Speaker_08
To reverse that trend, he said citizens are being asked to, quote, be suspicious, to call us, to do what they can to help us, end quote.

00:10:16 Speaker_08
Davis said he expects an increasing number of citizens to respond to the program as they develop more confidence in law enforcement through interaction with police."

00:10:28 Speaker_04
The estimated price tag for the program's implementation was $2.8 million during the first year, approximately $16.3 million in today's dollars, and $2 million, or $11.7 million in today's dollars, for each subsequent year.

00:10:39 Speaker_04
Part of the funding was provided by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the LEAA, again created as part of the Johnson's crime bill as, quote-unquote, riot control.

00:10:48 Speaker_04
The LEAA had also funded similar programs in six other cities at that time, according uncritical report. The so-called community policing approach would expand throughout the state of California.

00:10:58 Speaker_04
After visiting Santa Ana's police department in 1977, Governor Jerry Brown outlined a community policing concept called crime resistance, ostensibly created to reduce home burglaries.

00:11:07 Speaker_04
Now make no mistake, Brown was fully committed to carceral solutions, stating while introducing the program that, quote, we're going to pass more laws and we're going to build more prisons, unquote.

00:11:16 Speaker_04
Just how successful were these team policing approaches at reducing crime and building trust between police and communities, whatever that means? Not very. The LEAA was found to have little verifiable impact on crime rates.

00:11:27 Speaker_04
and had the effect of further militarizing the police as it gave police departments surplus military equipment, including helicopters, body armor, and armored vehicles. And a move that's basically unthinkable today, the LEA was abolished in 1982.

00:11:38 Speaker_04
It wasn't for moral reasons, but budgetary ones. One of LEA's successors, the Office of Justice Program, still exists today.

00:11:46 Speaker_08
And the Police Foundation, now known as the National Policing Institute, was a key driver of the much criticized and heavily debunked broken windows policy that followed.

00:11:57 Speaker_08
In 1982, two Police Foundation officials, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, authored an infamous piece headlined, Broken Windows, for the Atlantic Monthly Magazine, a piece which we've discussed multiple times before on Citations Needed.

00:12:13 Speaker_08
Now, Kelling and Wilson introduced this theory as an extension of community policing, suggesting embedding officers in neighborhoods on, quote unquote, foot patrol to crack down on, quote unquote,

00:12:24 Speaker_08
disorderly behavior like loitering, asking for money, or so-called rowdiness in order to prevent more serious crime.

00:12:34 Speaker_08
Never mind, of course, that broken windows policies all across the United States has led inevitably to surveillance, racist targeting, and criminalization of urban neighborhoods, as well as the rise of mass incarceration.

00:12:47 Speaker_04
Yeah, because one thing that I think really is worth noting here is that When you reframe pro-police initiatives and this kind of liberal ease, you accomplish two things.

00:12:55 Speaker_04
Number one, of course, you increase the budgets of police departments and power and surveillance and militarization.

00:13:00 Speaker_04
But also, you sort of look like you're doing liberal reforms, because the sort of social solution, right, the kind of center-left liberal and left-wing

00:13:08 Speaker_04
solution to things like crime is that they are largely, not entirely, but largely social phenomenon with social solutions, things like redistributions, reparations, building nice, clean, affordable housing and schools and universal health care, that these things would be a way of reducing crime.

00:13:22 Speaker_04
Environmental pollution, putting lead, which many criminologists have argued throughout the decades, increases crime. All these sort of

00:13:30 Speaker_04
This robust or holistic approach to reducing crime gets totally pushed to the side or is completely under-resourced if it's resourced at all, and then the solution becomes more cops in cages but done through this kind of liberal ease because that's the easy, cheap solution that the ruling class prefers because it doesn't require them to redistribute their wealth.

00:13:47 Speaker_08
Yeah, and optically you get this idea of, you know, more cops on the beat, this kind of liberal vision of every city becoming Mayberry, right?

00:13:55 Speaker_08
Like a town where, you know, everyone knows everyone's name and you're all neighbors and you're all friendly and the cop is just, you know, one other neighbor, which obviously is not the reality in so many communities across this country.

00:14:07 Speaker_08
But this idea of community policing or more foot patrol or more cops on the beat, has this veneer, right? It's a way to say, oh, cops are part of the social fabric just as much as anyone in the neighborhood.

00:14:23 Speaker_08
And this type of quote-unquote reform, as we see, is very palatable, gets a lot of funding, and does very little to not only, say, reduce so-called rising crime rates, right, which the media is obsessed with, but really

00:14:38 Speaker_08
just masks the funneling of more and more money into police coffers.

00:14:44 Speaker_04
Yeah, because at the time, you know, from the 1960s, when they started up until the mid 90s, you know, for 25, 30 years, crime rates didn't go down. In many ways, they went up. But meanwhile, the mass incarceration skyrocketed around the same time.

00:14:56 Speaker_04
And so there was a sense that they could just keep, again, you could just keep building cages and

00:15:00 Speaker_04
funding more police and that would somehow solve the problem, because again, the goal is to pivot away from social solutions that deal with the underlying causes. So here we are in the 90s.

00:15:09 Speaker_04
So let's start off in 1994 when Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime and Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, sponsored most notoriously by now-President Joseph Robinette Biden. This is generically known as the Crime Bill.

00:15:22 Speaker_04
Two years after, he campaigned as a tough-on-crime candidate. The law was the largest federal crime legislation ever passed in the U.S.

00:15:29 Speaker_04
and of course is notorious for creating harsher criminal sentences and incentivizing states to build and fill more prisons even as crime rates were falling.

00:15:37 Speaker_04
The law contained a community policing provision characterizing, quote, community policing as, quote, cops on the beat, unquote, meaning more uniformed officers on the street and thus adopting the broken windows framework.

00:15:48 Speaker_04
The law authorized the distribution of grants for the following among much else, rehiring laid off officers and hiring training new ones, purchasing equipment, technology, and support systems. paying overtime.

00:16:00 Speaker_04
The law also established a community-oriented policing services office. Again, the acronym being COPS, they love to use that. They want to use it several times.

00:16:08 Speaker_04
This authorized the hiring of 100,000 more police officers to patrol the streets with funding going only to cities that launched, quote, community policing programs.

00:16:16 Speaker_04
The COPS office states that it had appropriated more than $20 billion for so-called, quote, community policing initiative. Since its creation, the word community policing in the bill itself, in the crime bill itself, is used dozens of times.

00:16:28 Speaker_08
Now a few months before the bill became law, the Chicago Tribune excitedly broke down the stipulations for cities, stating under the headline, Community Policing, Law Enforcement Returns to its Roots, this, quote, The 1995 federal budget has $285 million earmarked for community policing programs.

00:16:47 Speaker_08
The programs are intended to add more uniformed officers on the street while working with schools and community organizations in educational and problem-solving projects."

00:16:57 Speaker_08
The Tribune would go on to frame broken windows policing policies as, quote-unquote, problem-solving.

00:17:03 Speaker_08
The paper stated this, quote, funds will be used to work with communities to identify and provide police services as needed, such as putting more police on foot patrols in problem neighborhoods, establishing neighborhood watch educational programs, setting up mini stations in high crime neighborhoods, bike patrols and or corner beats as needed and adding drug and crime prevention programs in schools, end quote.

00:17:32 Speaker_04
In the past two decades we've had a torrent of so-called reforms many of which if not most of which have involved similar dynamic of just pumping money back into the police.

00:17:41 Speaker_04
With very little redistribution of power any concrete results at all the most egregious example the one will our guest wrote a whole study about.

00:17:49 Speaker_04
is out of body cameras this became popular following the uprisings in august of twenty fourteen response to local police officer darren wilson shooting michael brown in ferguson missouri the protest were of course met with a highly militarized police response involving machine guns armored vehicles and other military grade equipment just a few months after the uprisings began in december twenty fourteen then president brock obama requested two hundred and sixty three million dollars

00:18:13 Speaker_04
in police funding in order to, as NBC News put it, quote, help improve relations between police departments and minority communities, unquote.

00:18:21 Speaker_04
Through such, quote, unquote, reforms as, quote, unquote, oversight, transparency, and training, unquote, for use of military-grade weapons and equipment and the use of body cameras, this training would be a convenient way to avoid the act of reducing military surplus available to police while generating the appearance of being a vaguely progressive reform.

00:18:40 Speaker_04
So once again, police shoot someone, national uprising, protest. And the result, a quarter of a billion dollars, more to police.

00:18:47 Speaker_04
And now here's a clip from NBC's Nightly News from December 1st of 2014, announcing Obama's proposal in a gleeful and hopeful way.

00:18:55 Speaker_09
After a series of meetings today, the president promised programs to bring police and communities together.

00:19:01 Speaker_00
Part of the reason this time will be different is because the president of the United States is deeply invested in making sure that this time is different.

00:19:10 Speaker_09
The president is also asking for $263 million for community policing, including $75 million for body-worn cameras. A year-long test in California showed dramatic results. Far fewer complaints of police abuse and use of force was weighed down.

00:19:27 Speaker_08
Yes, dramatic results, Adam. Indeed, the California study that NBC cited in that clip, which is commonly known as the Rialto study, was deeply influential.

00:19:37 Speaker_08
Axon Enterprise, formerly known as Taser, which had sold more than 300,000 police cameras worldwide as of 2013, has cited this Rialto study on its own website. And as the New York Times noted, also in 2013,

00:19:52 Speaker_08
Quote, a federal judge also cited the study in 2013 when she ordered the New York City Police Department to conduct a year-long pilot program using body cameras, end quote.

00:20:03 Speaker_08
It was similarly referenced in a testimony before the Obama administration's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which justified Obama's request for $75 million in body camera funding as referenced by NBC.

00:20:19 Speaker_08
But while the study was indeed influential, it was also grossly misleading, at best. A 2017 study found that police wearing cameras used force and prompted civilian complaints at about the same rate as those who weren't wearing the cameras.

00:20:35 Speaker_08
The study included more than 2,000 officers. Meanwhile, the Rialto study involved a mere 54 officers.

00:20:44 Speaker_08
Additionally, a 2019 review of 70 available studies on the effects of body cameras on police behavior concluded that body cameras, quote, have not had statistically significant or consistent effects on most measures of officer and citizen behavior or citizens' views of police, end quote.

00:21:04 Speaker_04
But this clearly doesn't matter.

00:21:05 Speaker_04
As the body cam industry is growing, Axon, the largest supplier, claims it made $1.5 billion in revenue in 2023, a 31% increase from the previous year, and shipped more than 100,000 units of its latest camera model in the second half of 2023 alone.

00:21:20 Speaker_04
Another busywork faux reform is that of police diversity. Now, from the onset, we'll say, look, all things being equal, police departments should be diverse. Why not?

00:21:29 Speaker_04
It's better than, probably better than having 100% white guys with Punisher tattoos who vote for Trump. I mean, that just sort of intuitively makes sense. But broadly speaking, there's not a lot of evidence.

00:21:39 Speaker_04
It doesn't really affect police harassment and police killings.

00:21:42 Speaker_04
But this is a very popular talking point pushed by everyone from President Obama to President Biden, this idea that a more diverse police force will somehow be better for oppressed communities who are over-policed and over-criminalized.

00:21:53 Speaker_04
And again, money is funneled to police departments ostensibly for the purposes of recruiting and training people of color in these communities so they can, quote unquote, represent the communities that they police.

00:22:02 Speaker_04
President Biden, when lobbying Congress for his $37 billion police bill, So one of his goals was to, quote, help police departments attract officers they need and hire more diverse officers from the communities they serve, unquote.

00:22:14 Speaker_04
But as Mustafa Ali Smith noted at the appeal in 2022, quote, in response to the murder of Michael Brown in 2014, a 2017 study by Indiana University Bloomington researchers looked at whether more black police officers were associated with a decrease in police-involved homicides of black people.

00:22:29 Speaker_04
They found that the results were mixed. In some cases, adding more black officers was actually linked to an increase in violent encounters towards black people.

00:22:36 Speaker_04
In other cases, adding an overwhelmingly large number of black police officers was linked to a decrease in encounters. Overall, for the vast majority of cities, simply increasing the percentage of black officers

00:22:46 Speaker_04
This is the quote, within a quote, this is the researcher's quote. For the vast majority of cities, simply increasing the percentage of black officers is not an effective policy solution, unquote, the researchers wrote.

00:22:57 Speaker_04
So the study showed there was no real evidence that increasing the number of black officers led to a less racist police force. Now, of course, the reason for that is because They are a function of a system.

00:23:06 Speaker_04
It's not about the discrete moral choices of individuals, by and large. And of course, LAPD, which has a very diverse police force, is also one of the more notoriously corrupt and violent. So studies on this are pretty mixed.

00:23:19 Speaker_04
There's no real evidence that it actually does anything. There's no evidence that it necessarily makes it worse. So all things meek, well, sure, why not?

00:23:25 Speaker_04
But this is another kind of superficially sounding solution that doesn't really change the status quo much at all.

00:23:32 Speaker_08
Another one of these is so-called police training. So let's examine this a bit. The idea that police officers simply need more and better training to do their job more effectively and thereby be more engaged with the community.

00:23:48 Speaker_08
and ostensibly less violent. Let's see how this actually works out. A common method of police quote unquote training is the use of shooting simulators, something we have actually discussed on Citations Needed before.

00:24:01 Speaker_08
This another product conveniently offered by Axon Enterprises. Another method is the use of force scenario training. which basically teaches police de-escalation tactics.

00:24:15 Speaker_08
Now, for over a decade, police departments have sunk millions of dollars into these types of trainings, these simulators and these scenarios.

00:24:24 Speaker_08
Yet police violence, especially lethal police violence, has not decreased since these simulators have been introduced. According to the organization Mapping Police Violence, the number of people killed by police has risen every year since 2019.

00:24:40 Speaker_08
In 2023, police killed 1,352 people, rendering that year the deadliest for homicides committed by police in more than a decade.

00:24:49 Speaker_08
The same year, 2023, Virtra, a leading supplier of these shooting simulators, reported record annual revenue, to the tune of $38 million.

00:25:01 Speaker_08
Now, Virtra offers a useful example of how this simulator training industry has used local media as part of its PR strategy. Now, we discussed this a bit when we did a patron only news brief called the split second decision trope.

00:25:17 Speaker_08
Why every media outlet does the exact same puff piece on shooter simulators. In 2018, industry consultant Ron Lapidus wrote a media guide for Virtra focused on how these simulators can be used to, quote unquote, educate the community.

00:25:34 Speaker_08
Lapidus quoted Ed Smith, range master and training officer for the O'Fallon Police Department in Missouri in order to underscore the need to sell, quote unquote, the community on the idea that de-escalation is theoretically ideal, but typically unrealistic.

00:25:52 Speaker_08
Lapidus wrote this quote, Smith is a firm believer in continually sharpening the knife by ensuring that officers go back on the street every day, just a little bit sharper than they were the day before.

00:26:07 Speaker_08
To do that, he has built an officer training program around his city's Virtra simulator. He has shared the same scenarios with the public so that they can get an idea of those split second decisions needed to stop a threat.

00:26:20 Speaker_08
Participants and viewers soon learn that taking control of a situation is not nearly as easy as it is in the movies, and that de-escalation, while preferable, may not always work."

00:26:33 Speaker_04
Right. So there's three things going on here. And this is kind of – this stuff is just made in a lab for citations needed because it is – these police shooting simulators are A, a way of just bloating budgets for police to rack up over time.

00:26:45 Speaker_04
But B, they're explicitly based on internal marketing literature that they write when they're trying to sell them to police departments. They are public relations devices.

00:26:53 Speaker_04
for bringing in journalists to kind of do these rigged scenarios where they have to blow someone away. Because the simulator is rigged, right? It's not like a real simulation.

00:27:00 Speaker_04
It's just like one of those, you know, rail video games where you have to shoot someone, basically. And they always put in, and when they bring in the reporter, they give them the scenario where they have to blow someone away.

00:27:09 Speaker_04
That's why they say it's not like the movies, right? And then C, finally, the reason why they're so effective is because this idea that cops are going around shooting people because they failed their training is actually the inverse.

00:27:20 Speaker_04
They shoot people because that's exactly what they're trained to do.

00:27:24 Speaker_04
If the training is just to tell them to shoot people that doesn't really work and that is largely what the training tells them to do as evidence by the fact that when they do these police shooting simulator propaganda segments, the reporter in question whoever it may be or even when they don't know if they bring an activist to do it as part of some sort of like.

00:27:42 Speaker_04
Empathy like a gotcha right. Yeah, see what it is? So they have to shoot the guy with the knife to the woman, right? So these are all PR devices and budget bloating pretext.

00:27:54 Speaker_04
These are not here to help some sweaty rookie cop learn how to deescalate a situation when Cletus has a shotgun to his girlfriend's head.

00:28:01 Speaker_08
Now, this is also the case with use of force scenario training as kind of distinct from those shooter simulators. And these can be both high and low tech type trainings.

00:28:12 Speaker_08
It's really in this context that we have countless local and cable news segments, again, featuring these simulations and scenario training as innovative methods meant to refine and reinforce police decision making.

00:28:24 Speaker_08
Here's a particularly noxious example from Fox 10 Phoenix back in 2015 that addresses protests against racist police violence, but only for the purpose of getting an organizer, as we've discussed, to sympathize with police as he experiences use of force scenario training.

00:28:42 Speaker_08
Take a listen.

00:28:45 Speaker_03
Jaret Maupin gets his weapon. You might recognize him as a high-profile organizer in the minority community. Just last month, he led marches on Phoenix Police Headquarters after an officer shot an unarmed man.

00:29:01 Speaker_03
Today, he accepted an invitation to look at things from the other side, agreeing to go through a force-on-force training session with the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. Three scenarios where you have to decide to shoot or not shoot.

00:29:14 Speaker_03
Scenario one is a call about a man casing cars in a parking lot. Maupin approaches the man and starts asking questions.

00:29:24 Speaker_07
You're looking for your vehicle, what kind of car do you drive? What kind of car do you drive?

00:29:28 Speaker_03
Maupin, the officer, is shot. It happens that fast.

00:29:36 Speaker_06
At what time did you think that it was time for you to address the use of force that was given?

00:29:42 Speaker_07
When he came to the back of the vehicle and was hiding, I could sense something was wrong.

00:29:49 Speaker_03
Scenario two, a call of two men fighting.

00:29:53 Speaker_07
What's going on today, gentlemen? What's wrong with you? What's going on today, gentlemen? What do you want? What's happening here? What's wrong with you? Back up. What are you doing, man? Hey. Hey, he shouldn't approach me.

00:30:07 Speaker_06
He shouldn't approach me. He shouldn't approach me. We were just arguing about what happened in there.

00:30:10 Speaker_07
Yeah.

00:30:10 Speaker_06
What are you doing?

00:30:12 Speaker_07
You just shot him? Hey, he rushed me. Tell me why you shot. Well, I've shot because he was within that zone. You know, I felt there was an imminent threat. I didn't necessarily see him armed.

00:30:24 Speaker_07
But he came clearly to do some harm to the officer, to my person.

00:30:30 Speaker_08
And later in the same segment, the activist turned killer cop, I guess, Jarrett Maupin says that he recognizes the need to comply with police now. He's been reformed. He's seen the light.

00:30:42 Speaker_08
And then the news anchors discuss Maupin's experience and add this coda.

00:30:48 Speaker_03
At the time, oh, I can think through this and I can figure this all out. No, it's boom. It's just there. It's that fast.

00:30:52 Speaker_01
I have a lot of respect for Maupin for going through that.

00:30:55 Speaker_03
Yeah, I agree.

00:30:55 Speaker_01
I do too. And agreeing to go through that and seeing it from the other side as well.

00:30:59 Speaker_03
Do you think it changes the way he approaches these issues going forward? He says he's going to go out into the community and say what he said at the very end there. You have to comply with what police officers tell you.

00:31:09 Speaker_03
Let everything sort out at the end, but just do what they tell you right then and sort things out afterwards. Interesting.

00:31:15 Speaker_04
So there's literally hundreds of these stories. They run them every month. You can Google it. Again, we did a news brief on it. You can check it out on our Patreon. And I wrote about it for the Substack as well, right, documented.

00:31:25 Speaker_04
It's the oldest trope in the book. The general idea is that they didn't realize how the split-second decision worked. But of course, the scenario they're given guarantees a violent response.

00:31:34 Speaker_04
There's the things that actually, for the most part, have outraged communities, whether it's kneeling on George Floyd's neck for eight minutes,

00:31:41 Speaker_08
or you know michael brown being unarmed these things are not typically some split second twenty four you know trolley problem the cops has to do and he makes the choice you know incidentally this happened in maricopa county where according to the police scorecard organization there have been more police shootings per arrest between twenty thirteen and twenty twenty one then seventy eight percent of other police departments across the country and

00:32:09 Speaker_08
that that county accounted for more killings by police per arrest than 94% of other police departments across the country.

00:32:18 Speaker_04
So again, these are the reforms that are presented by centrist liberal politicians as the thing that's going to fix the problem.

00:32:26 Speaker_04
But as the data shows, especially in terms of fatal police shootings, the numbers have actually gone up since George Floyd and since Michael Brown. So they're not working. And there's a question as to why they're not working.

00:32:38 Speaker_04
And of course, when you just pump in billions of more dollars to police,

00:32:42 Speaker_04
You can call it training you can call it community this you can call it being your best friend and holding your hand all you want to make your social workers with guns but ultimately the function of the police remains exactly.

00:32:53 Speaker_04
The same and this is why. Police critics are abolitionist or abolitionist adjacent organizations have taken this resource model is that the question is are you just giving police more resources i mean the idea that there's uprisings in ferguson and.

00:33:07 Speaker_04
Obama's responses to send a quarter billion dollars to police departments is wonderful public relations.

00:33:13 Speaker_08
And to take decommissioned tanks from Iraq and basically send them to Missouri.

00:33:18 Speaker_04
Right. And this is the kind of PR spin we're dealing with here, that the House always wins. It doesn't matter what the problem is. Crime goes up, they need more money. Crime goes down, they need more money because their budget's been cut.

00:33:29 Speaker_04
They shoot some people and cause, you know, riots and local and national unrest, they need more money because they need more training. They don't shoot anyone for a year, they get more money as a reward for not shooting.

00:33:39 Speaker_04
I mean, no matter what the fucking scenario is, it's heads I win, tails you lose, no matter what.

00:33:44 Speaker_04
And I think this is, of course, one of the things that frustrates people who want to see genuine results, who want to see these communities not be shot and terrorized to the extent to which they have. And thus far, these reforms have not done that.

00:33:54 Speaker_04
And in many ways, of course, they've done the exact opposite.

00:33:57 Speaker_08
To discuss this more, namely the phenomenon of body camera reforms, we are now going to be joined by Alec Karakitsanis, civil rights attorney and founder of Civil Rights Corps.

00:34:08 Speaker_08
He is the author of the Substack Alex Coppaganda newsletter, the book, Usual Cruelty, the Complicity of Lawyers and the Criminal Injustice System, and the recent study, The Body Camera, The Language of Our Dreams, which was recently published in the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation.

00:34:24 Speaker_08
Alec will join us in just a moment. Stay with us. We are joined now by Alec Karakitsanis. Alec, thank you so much for joining us again on Citations Needed. Thank you so much for having me back.

00:34:46 Speaker_04
So I want to start off by talking about, though it's part of a much larger trend of pro-police, pro-incarceration policies being framed as reforms, a broader picture which we can get into later, I want to begin by

00:34:57 Speaker_04
The specific subject of your study, police body cams, I'm sure anyone who lived through 2014, 2015, the Ferguson uprisings, obviously uprisings in various cities throughout the country, they remember body cams kind of being this apparently common sense, modest reform that everyone could kind of get behind.

00:35:13 Speaker_04
The idea being is that if police know they're being monitored at all times, that they would therefore be more likely to abide by the law.

00:35:22 Speaker_04
This kind of seems intuitively true to, I think, a lot of people, even people of good faith who want to quote unquote reform the police.

00:35:29 Speaker_04
But you sort of paint a different story, one that fits squarely within the milieu of our show, which is something more sinister and more PR driven. and maybe has an ulterior motive.

00:35:38 Speaker_04
So I want to sort of begin there, what the origins of the body camera as a mode of reform were, why it was so aggressively pushed by pro-police forces, even police unions, in the wake of the Michael Brown killing almost exactly 10 years ago, and what these sort of good faith efforts got wrong.

00:35:54 Speaker_05
Story of the police body camera is almost exactly the opposite of the story that we've been told.

00:36:02 Speaker_05
And what I found when I looked at it with my research assistants was something I think really profoundly important for understanding the whole context of reforms, not just to policing, but reforms to the whole punishment bureaucracy, and indeed reforms across a wide range of areas where a lot of the most powerful institutions in our society end up using their own ineffectiveness, their own corruption, their own violence,

00:36:31 Speaker_05
as an excuse to get more resources and to actually increase their capacity to control people. So I think it's really important to go before 2014, when the body camera narrative exploded in the wake of Michael Brown's killing by Darren Wilson.

00:36:49 Speaker_05
to maybe five, six years before that, when many, many people around the country had not even heard of the body camera. There was a small group of companies who were producing the technology and who saw it as a multi-billion dollar a year industry.

00:37:05 Speaker_05
And there's a whole constellation of surveillance industry profiteers who are not just thinking about body cameras, but they're thinking about all kinds of other things like big databases, AI, algorithmic policing, what's called predictive policing,

00:37:24 Speaker_05
various types of software programs and ongoing perpetual contracts that can be secured to manage and update these systems for sort of in perpetuity.

00:37:38 Speaker_05
Also the sort of data storage companies, Microsoft and Amazon, et cetera, who have the cloud storage, cloud computing contracts. Anyway, there's this whole industry, this whole ecosystem, and they started marketing the body camera to police leaders.

00:37:52 Speaker_05
And what's really, really interesting is if you look back at their own statements by police leaders, by prosecutors in particular, we'll get into hopefully a little bit later, why this was such a profound boost to the power of prosecutors.

00:38:06 Speaker_05
But they started marketing the police body camera. And if you look at their own statements from prior to Michael Brown's killing, they bear almost no resemblance to what came after in that they don't talk about reform at all.

00:38:19 Speaker_05
the origin of the body camera was actually about surveillance. And it was really pitched as doing three or four main things.

00:38:27 Speaker_05
One, to reduce the potential liability of police officers and city governments, because they were giving police a tool that they could control.

00:38:36 Speaker_05
They could turn on and off, they could sort of utilize and weaponize how it was released to the public, which is a really important thing we'll get into later when we talk about the PR. Really importantly, it was pitched as a tool of surveillance.

00:38:47 Speaker_05
So for example, cops can attend protests. They can affix a little device to their chest. They can scan the crowd.

00:38:55 Speaker_05
And then when you later combine the body camera technology with things like facial recognition technology, AI, you can all of a sudden have a documentation and a record, not just of who all is going to which protests, but who is standing near whom, who's connected to who appears to be a leader, et cetera, et cetera.

00:39:14 Speaker_05
who is really agitated, who is not agitated, etc.

00:39:18 Speaker_05
They also were pushed by police and prosecutors because the thought was that it would give them very powerful, almost irrefutable evidence for very low-level criminal offenses that characterize the vast bulk of the millions and millions of arrests that happen every year.

00:39:34 Speaker_05
And one of the problems is that the police arrest so many people for so many low-level things. So, for example, about 4% of all police time in the US is spent on what they call violent crime.

00:39:45 Speaker_05
Only 5% of all police arrests are for things the FBI classifies as serious violent crime. So the vast bulk of what police do is kind of the relentless, pervasive interference in the lives of very poor people.

00:39:59 Speaker_05
The plurality of arrests in the US are things like driving on a suspended license, unpaid debt, trespassing by someone who typically is unhoused, drug possession, disorderly conduct. These kinds of cases kind of clog criminal courts.

00:40:15 Speaker_05
And prosecutors have trouble processing all of these low-level cases because there's so many of them.

00:40:21 Speaker_05
But they're very profitable, obviously, because whenever you get a conviction for someone, there's fines and fees that have been collected, and that money helps fund prosecutors, police, judges, et cetera.

00:40:29 Speaker_05
So everyone has an interest in this bureaucracy kind of churning as an assembly line.

00:40:33 Speaker_05
And so the theory for prosecutors and police was you can actually coerce more people into pleading guilty for these low-level offenses if you can collect video evidence of them committing crimes.

00:40:44 Speaker_05
So those were the kinds of things, surveillance and increased punishment. And obviously, if you reduce the leverage that criminal defendants have to take a case to jury trial, for example, you also can increase the punishment.

00:40:57 Speaker_05
You can give them more fees and fines, longer jail sentences, etc. So those were the kinds of things that all of these people were discussing. They had a big problem, though.

00:41:07 Speaker_05
they couldn't get government to put in the billions of dollars it would take to outfit every cop in the United States with a mobile surveillance camera that the cops control, plus the very expensive computing database storage software that would allow the police to process this data.

00:41:27 Speaker_04
Yeah, it's a lot of data.

00:41:28 Speaker_05
It's so much data. I mean, think about what would happen if there are hundreds of thousands of police recording tens of millions of interactions. That's a lot of data and very expensive.

00:41:38 Speaker_05
And so they had this problem and they wanted them so badly that they were actually getting people like Steven Spielberg to donate to private police foundations for the purchase of body cameras for like the Los Angeles police.

00:41:51 Speaker_05
This is how badly they were getting private rich people to pay for these gadgets for them, because they wanted them.

00:41:56 Speaker_04
He just really likes filmmaking, in his defense. That's right. He just has an ideological commitment to filming, but go ahead.

00:42:02 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, but I think it's very telling that in the sort of mythology that's been created about them in subsequent years, it's portrayed as this tool of accountability and reform, when it was actually something that they wanted for profit, surveillance, control, punishment, et cetera.

00:42:19 Speaker_05
And in the wake of Michael Brown's killing, where much was made in the public and in the news media, and even by Michael Brown's family, right? I mean, understandably, that the story of the police officer didn't match up, and there was no video.

00:42:34 Speaker_05
There was no street cameras, the cop wasn't wearing a body camera, and understandably, people wanted to know what happened.

00:42:41 Speaker_05
The proponents of body cameras, the policing industry, the surveillance companies, police chiefs all over the country, they were very savvy. They saw this as their opportunity.

00:42:51 Speaker_05
and they engaged in a remarkable public relations campaign, really spearheaded by Barack Obama and leaders in the Democratic Party who were very pro-prosecution all over the country, who seized on this immediately because it was a kind of quote-unquote reform that could be offered to the public that would make it look like they were doing something about police violence, but that would actually enable them to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars a year into the policing and surveillance industry.

00:43:20 Speaker_05
And that's why it became a powerful form.

00:43:23 Speaker_08
Yeah, Alec, I actually want to pull one of the many threads that you kind of laid out here.

00:43:28 Speaker_08
This idea that body cams really, you know, rather than, as you said, being a tool of accountability and documentation, have really been shown to be a tool for police PR. And as you have noted, who controls the footage

00:43:46 Speaker_08
is a critical central issue here that was largely overlooked in this entire debate, and especially during the rush to then, as you said, equip every police department, every police officer with their own personal body camera.

00:44:01 Speaker_08
As you yourself have written, quote, As public relations specialists understand, controlling the editing of videos and the precise moment of their release can be used to either foment or diffuse a potential scandal."

00:44:14 Speaker_08
So, Alec, please do kind of like dig in a little deeper on this one part of what you teased earlier, this idea of, yes, things may be recorded, but who is in control?

00:44:27 Speaker_08
of that footage, and how can that be manipulated even further to be a tool of police PR?

00:44:35 Speaker_05
This is such an important point. I want to say a few things. First, not only do the police control the footage, but the police create the footage.

00:44:45 Speaker_05
So the body camera, and the reason I think James Baldwin's quote that the camera is the language of our dreams is so important, it's because whoever controls the camera, whoever stands behind the camera, gets to decide what is captured in the film.

00:45:02 Speaker_05
And notice that many of the most famous videos of police brutality and misconduct the Rodney King video, the Eric Garner video, the George Floyd video, etc, etc. I could go on and on. They were not filmed by police.

00:45:17 Speaker_05
They're so powerful because they're filmed by people who are able to capture what the police are doing in the shot. The body camera is affixed to the officer's chest.

00:45:29 Speaker_05
So not only is it designed to be quite chaotic, but it's outward looking from the police officer to the person.

00:45:34 Speaker_05
Also, by the way, police are trained now when they're on the body camera video to say in the background things like, stop resisting, stop resisting. They're trained to create contemporaneous records that create confusion.

00:45:47 Speaker_05
So it's not a surprise that the federal government and others who have studied this have shown that body cameras actually do not reduce police violence at all.

00:45:55 Speaker_05
But once you even create this body camera video, the police are then in possession of the footage.

00:46:03 Speaker_05
And you could see with the example of like Laquan McDonald of Chicago, for example, the police just hid the video of this child's murder until Rahm Emanuel was reelected mayor. until a court ordered them to release the footage.

00:46:16 Speaker_05
So when police don't want the public to see footage, it's either lost or it's never recorded or it's often edited in very deceptive ways that are designed to prevent the virality of the video.

00:46:28 Speaker_05
Because a video going viral immediately when a killing happens versus a video not going viral,

00:46:35 Speaker_05
or they're not being in video for weeks or months or even days, is the difference between hundreds of millions of people seeing it, potentially, and a few thousand people seeing it, eventually.

00:46:46 Speaker_05
And this is the whole ballgame for many police departments. So they also, as we talk about in the article, police departments have huge social media teams, PR teams,

00:46:56 Speaker_05
You know, there are over 50 employees, for example, in the Chicago Police Department doing PR. They've got people who edit the videos. And when they present it to the public, they sometimes put music on them. They have captions. They have narration.

00:47:08 Speaker_05
They have deceptive editing. And so it's like any filmmaker. When you control what's being filmed and how it's been edited and presented, and when it's released, you get to control huge aspects of the public narrative.

00:47:20 Speaker_05
And that's another reason why police wanted the body camera.

00:47:23 Speaker_08
Yeah, it's such a perfect distillation of what we mean when we say framing the narrative. It literally is about what is in frame, what is out of frame, and how to manipulate what we see and what we hear.

00:47:35 Speaker_04
I was just reading this exchange I had with the official Taser Twitter account back in April of 2015 about this.

00:47:40 Speaker_04
I criticized the YouTube promo video they had, saying they're basically selling it so police can control the narrative, and they got all mad. How can this promo highlighting the unfounded claim that's just proved by video be a negative?

00:47:50 Speaker_04
We don't see the truth. Anyway, they basically argued. They say in the video that they, quote, want police to tell their story.

00:47:56 Speaker_04
Sorry, that's an aside, but it's just funny that they were marketing it to police departments specifically to curate narratives, to say you control the information.

00:48:03 Speaker_04
This was around the time states were passing laws saying that the police basically had unilateral control over the video footage itself and that it was subject to these kind of onerous discovery laws on behalf of the public and journalists that they sort of would not be able to just FOIA whatever they want.

00:48:17 Speaker_04
And obviously that depends, that's a state by state thing, but I just thought that was funny. I want to zoom out here a little bit.

00:48:22 Speaker_04
And talk about this bigger trend here that we've been talking about on this episode, which is framing police bloating policies, increased surveillance, increased carceral policies as reforms, just as one frames school privatization as school reform, or promotes Ross Perot gutting the federal government as a reform party.

00:48:40 Speaker_04
Reform is kind of this great generic word. Obviously, this is one of the reasons why there was a pivot to more concrete demands like defund or abolish the police in the wake of George Floyd in 2020, because people had seen

00:48:50 Speaker_04
where quote unquote reform got you in 2014 and 2015, which is saying kind of be whatever you want it to be.

00:48:55 Speaker_04
But from the 1994 crime bill that focused a lot on quote unquote community policing to pushing for a quote police training and post Michael Brown, there's always a framing of more police budgets, more power for police, more gizmos and gadgets.

00:49:11 Speaker_04
For police as reform which is interesting cuz it's kind of an implicit acknowledgment that people know that the police have too much power and control that you could have sort of capricious and violent.

00:49:21 Speaker_04
But then again it sort of spins it doesn't you know they're not gonna say we need more high tech kind of robocop stuff for the cops that would not be very popular specially.

00:49:28 Speaker_04
in communities that Democrats are supposed to represent, like black communities and people of color in general.

00:49:33 Speaker_04
So everything gets framed as this very kind of squishy reform without much specifics, which is why a lot of abolitionist groups and other kind of more grassroots groups, especially here in Chicago, for example, and I know other places,

00:49:45 Speaker_04
their framework is simple does this add money to the police is a sad part of the police if the answer is yes then they rejected obviously there are nuances there but that's kind of the general framework, which is a really interesting way to clarify it in a critical resistance this is their framework and it's actually pretty good framework i want to talk a bit about.

00:50:01 Speaker_04
This approach to framing everything as reform and sort of very squishy very liberal.

00:50:07 Speaker_04
What criteria do you make the determination with an understanding that some reform is good not over form is necessarily sinister but do you use a similar kind of resource framework when you analyze these things.

00:50:17 Speaker_05
I do. I think there's a couple of different ways to analyze reform. One I would call more substantive, and one I would call procedural. So as the substantive evaluation of reform, I think that's the best framework I know, the resource framework.

00:50:31 Speaker_05
So you ask yourself a question like, is this reform giving this institution or this bureaucracy more resources and power when it does bad things? And if so, then it's probably bad, because it's probably going to be viewed as a reward, actually.

00:50:46 Speaker_05
I think police and prosecution bureaucracies view body cameras as a reward. And so it's the very opposite of any kind of accountability. They commit all this violence and do all this stuff that

00:50:58 Speaker_05
people don't like it and they actually get rewarded with more money for more things that they want, right?

00:51:03 Speaker_05
And you can see that when police celebrate the addition of several tens of millions of dollars to their budget so they can have better surveillance programs. They want total information awareness, right?

00:51:15 Speaker_05
They want every cop in the country having a mobile surveillance camera that creates videos they can then put into databases and they can pay for algorithms to evaluate all that and they can learn more information about whoever they want to

00:51:27 Speaker_05
Learn information about keep in mind the police only enforce some laws against some people some of the time so all of the surveillance infrastructure.

00:51:35 Speaker_05
Even though police are called law enforcement which misleadingly gives the impression that they're enforcing all laws against all people at all times it's very selective.

00:51:45 Speaker_05
You have to understand that police are a – the policing bureaucracy as a whole, leaving aside all the profiteering that the companies are doing, but the policing bureaucracy itself is designed to enforce some laws, sometimes, in some places, against some people in ways that help people who have power in our society.

00:52:05 Speaker_05
And so if you live in a really unequal society like ours, the more resources you put into the police are going to be used by the people who control the police, i.e. the people in power, to perpetuate the inequalities that underlie our society.

00:52:21 Speaker_05
One of the most fascinating things about this topic and what I write about, I think one of the most interesting parts of the study, is how did it come to be that all of these liberals and progressives around the country, not radicals, but liberals and progressives, supported the greatest expansion of police surveillance in modern history?

00:52:44 Speaker_05
And how did it come to be that these companies and policing bureaucracies who could never have dreamed of getting billions of dollars in state funding for this convinced a lot of liberal politicians in a lot of different cities all over the country to spend all this money on this technology?

00:53:00 Speaker_05
Then how did it come to be that other liberal people, namely, and I write about some of these, the worst examples of this, professors at certain schools, leaders at certain non-profit organizations.

00:53:13 Speaker_05
They have started appearing in virtually every news article about body cameras as quote-unquote experts. And they were chosen as experts by the mainstream media precisely because of their pro-body camera stance. And so let me give you an example.

00:53:29 Speaker_05
It would have been really different if in every New York Times article, every CNN piece, every NBC News article, every Washington Post story, if the people advocating for body cameras were the police themselves.

00:53:44 Speaker_05
or were the investors in the police surveillance industry. If those were the people promoting body cameras, many people in the general public might have been a little bit more skeptical.

00:53:53 Speaker_05
But precisely because most of these articles had, like, people who looked like academic experts or even civil liberties experts, right?

00:54:04 Speaker_05
You know, I write about the same guy from the ACLU who starts popping up in all these news articles talking about how body cameras are a win-win for everyone.

00:54:13 Speaker_05
Now, keep in mind, he's doing that in the context of research that shows that body cameras do not reduce police violence.

00:54:20 Speaker_05
And yet, the average person reading these articles is thinking, oh, well, even the people that are supposed to be in charge of our privacy and our civil liberties and thinking about these hard questions that I don't have the time to think about, even those people support body cameras as a reform, so they can't be that bad.

00:54:35 Speaker_05
And so there's this whole industry, and this is not limited to policing, It's a tool of counterinsurgency generally.

00:54:43 Speaker_05
It's the kind of counterinsurgency that was really perfected by the French colonial governments in Algeria, Vietnam, and the British colonial governments in a number of places, and was incorporated into U.S.

00:54:54 Speaker_05
Army counterinsurgency manuals throughout the Middle East conflicts.

00:54:58 Speaker_05
It's a very common tactic in modern colonial history to co-opt certain elite elements of the population that you're trying to control as validators of the tactics and strategies and technologies and surveillance systems and control that you are implementing in order to control people.

00:55:19 Speaker_05
They're much more effective when you have credible validators from within those communities that you're surveilling and controlling and monitoring and enacting violence on.

00:55:27 Speaker_05
And that's something we have to confront because I do not think that the body camera explosion and the surveillance and profiteering explosion that went along with it would have been possible without the active complicity of many of the sort of liberal elite in academia and in nonprofits.

00:55:46 Speaker_04
Yeah, in some ways you can sort of see it's, you know, aside from I think the more sinister actors who are pushing this prior to that, in some ways it's kind of the perfect, you know, something has to be done liberal solution, right?

00:55:55 Speaker_04
So you have all this popular outrage, you have uprisings, you know, obviously CBS is burning, you know, things of that nature, Baltimore. And so like you sort of have to do something, right?

00:56:03 Speaker_04
And so people take signals, especially from at that point, the White House, the Obama White House, who came out in support of body cameras because it was kind of the ultimate, again, it was a win-win-win.

00:56:11 Speaker_04
It's sort of win for reformist liberals because they got to go to their donors and say, you know, we changed this within a very specific, narrow framework, right? Sort of a partisan framework, a framework Democrats could get behind.

00:56:23 Speaker_04
It appeals to the kind of liberal ethos of transparency fixes all, right? So you don't really want to, you don't need to confront power or even take power away from people in power, but you need to like have better disclosure or transparency.

00:56:34 Speaker_04
It is a kind of a liberal ethos. And so in some ways, you kind of understand how it fit into this do something liberalism where it's like you had to do something because everyone understood there was a problem.

00:56:43 Speaker_04
And this was kind of the perfect do something, especially because the police union supported it by and large for some rare exception.

00:56:49 Speaker_04
So I don't know, to me, it was kind of like this perfect storm of just like easy, inoffensive, generic liberal looking busy reform.

00:56:59 Speaker_05
It's actually more sinister than that because, and I write about this in much more depth in the article.

00:57:06 Speaker_05
But police and leadership and the police bureaucracy and the punishment bureaucracy, more broadly, wants to associate anything bad that happens with bad apples, with isolated people like, for example, Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd, if at all possible.

00:57:26 Speaker_05
They want to blame anything bad that happens, particularly anything bad that the public finds out about. on sort of like one individual bad cop or one cop who made a bad decision in a bad moment.

00:57:39 Speaker_05
And body cameras actually focus public discussion on particular incidents. and away from deeper questions like, why were the police in that neighborhood in the first place? What were they doing?

00:57:56 Speaker_05
Why is our society using armed government bureaucrats to deal with this particular situation, et cetera, et cetera. And I write in the article about all of the different deeper structural systemic questions

00:58:10 Speaker_05
that quote-unquote reform like body cameras actually helps obscure because it helps police set the narrative about particular incidents that they capture on video that they want released to the public when they're actually pretty able to prevent body camera video from getting out into the public at least quickly in incidents they don't want this for.

00:58:31 Speaker_05
But it enables them to, even in the rare cases where

00:58:36 Speaker_05
what happens on the video is so unambiguously bad that the police have to acknowledge a mistake or an error or even worse, a crime, enables them to focus on the facts of that particular incident and not on deeper questions that I think abolitionists want us talking about.

00:58:53 Speaker_04
It's the rat in the maze. You very quickly learn what wall not to touch because you get electrocuted. And I think that in the event of mass uprisings, you have so many people kind of looking around for something to do.

00:59:02 Speaker_04
And then invariably the thing that, again, is supported by cops and supported by people who want to focus on this kind of bad apple narrative, and especially a lot of these kind of vaguely reform adjacent groups like the Marshall Project.

00:59:13 Speaker_04
Yeah, again, they're validators. They're kind of liberal validators. They say, this is actually good. This is going to change. And then, you know, the data comes in and actually the situation is much worse.

00:59:21 Speaker_08
Yeah, I mean, these cameras, as you said, Alec, like have everything to do with focusing on individual incidents while deliberately kind of decontextualizing and avoiding any kind of systemic or structural analysis. Right.

00:59:34 Speaker_08
I mean, the image begins when the cops decide it begins. Right. Like that's when their story begins. there's nothing before that button is kind of clicked to record.

00:59:45 Speaker_08
And that, you know, as you've said, is absolutely deliberate and part of this kind of laundering of pro-police policy through liberal counterinsurgency. But kind of digging in a little deeper into this, how like body cams really

00:59:57 Speaker_08
broaden the kind of violence of broken windows policing, this focus on the low level. Can we talk a little bit about prosecutors in this scenario? You know, I think we hear a lot about police. We hear a lot about prisons.

01:00:12 Speaker_08
And there's this other P in the middle, the prosecutors. And especially at this time, when there is a framing at the kind of highest level of presidential campaigning right now, of the felon versus the prosecutor, right?

01:00:26 Speaker_08
And the cop is supposed to be the more trustworthy one, the, you know, kind of pro-cop prosecutor at the top of the ticket, right? All about law and order. Let's kind of flip that, you know, Democrats, liberals are like reclaiming that mantle.

01:00:41 Speaker_08
Where do you see that being incredibly dangerous and Why are prosecutors such a kind of key component in maintaining this surveillance and kind of carceral system overload?

01:00:54 Speaker_05
I think the question of prosecutors is a really important one to understand when you're thinking about body cameras. And I think that the first way of getting into the topic is to understand that when we say that we are concerned about

01:01:12 Speaker_05
police violence, about state violence generally. We are not just talking about quote-unquote illegal violence. So body cameras are commonly thought of as like are they depicting or not depicting like police misconduct.

01:01:29 Speaker_05
But that's missing the sort of the rest of the iceberg, just below that sort of illegal tip.

01:01:36 Speaker_05
I mean, the sort of illegal police violence, while, you know, extremely pervasive and horrific, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg of state violence that is sort of lawful in a sense, right? And

01:01:51 Speaker_05
For example, the millions of arrests for the possession of the marijuana plant every year, right? So there's been more arrests in most years this century, more arrests for marijuana possession than all violent crime combined.

01:02:07 Speaker_05
And tens of millions of people have been separated from their children, have been put in a cage, have been brutalized in many ways for possession of the marijuana plant. That is all illegal, right?

01:02:18 Speaker_05
There's also a huge swath of the rest of what police and prosecutors do, which is jailing people for things that all of the evidence shows our society could deal with much better without human caging.

01:02:33 Speaker_05
And yet, even though human caging is the cause of enormous misery and harm, for example, every year a person is jailed, takes two years off their life, and the U.S.

01:02:44 Speaker_05
jails people at such rates, higher than other countries, that the entire life expectancy of the entire United States is 1.8 years lower than it would be if we jailed people like other comparable countries. So we're all being killed.

01:02:58 Speaker_05
We're talking about hundreds of millions of life years. The vast bulk of that, of those hundreds of millions of life years lost for all people in the United States, is legal violence by police and prosecutors. Body cameras are

01:03:14 Speaker_05
the oil that greases this machine, because as I mentioned earlier, it enables this assembly line to function.

01:03:22 Speaker_05
It enables police and prosecutors to process way more low-level arrests than they otherwise could have, and to secure longer sentences of incarceration and fines and fees, et cetera, by reducing the leverage that criminal defense lawyers have.

01:03:37 Speaker_05
So it actually enables prosecutors to prosecute more people

01:03:41 Speaker_05
By making the prosecution of people for low-level offenses because you know now the body camera video actually captures a person on video without an attorney admitting to possessing the drug paraphernalia or admitting to trespassing on the property to sleep somewhere right all of the ways in which body cameras simplify prosecution are ways in which.

01:04:02 Speaker_05
We're actually increasing the ability and power of the government to enact state violence for things that actually are social and public health and economic problems that our society has chosen to handle through punishment.

01:04:16 Speaker_04
I want to ask you about the two other squishy concepts we asked you about earlier, because I want to broaden this out a little bit, which is the idea of community policing and police training as this very popular solution.

01:04:26 Speaker_04
This is something that Biden, Harris, others who sort of nominally gestured towards reform, they always tried out those two concepts, community policing

01:04:33 Speaker_04
and police training now i will give you and anyone else one hundred dollars if you can tell me what the fuck community policing is because when seeking a fixed definition it's very difficult to come by and of course police training is just this again a budget floating catch all that operates under the liberal the kind of bad apples liberal framework right the issue is that they're just,

01:04:52 Speaker_04
Not trained well, and of course, when you look at how they're actually trained, they're trained to shoot people. So the issue is not training, that's what they're trained to do. The issue is that they did it in a sort of tacky way.

01:05:02 Speaker_04
So talk first, if you could, about community policing, how you sort of see that term, how it's been still popular after 30 years, 40 years even, and how you view its partner in reform, police training.

01:05:14 Speaker_05
So community policing, it's funny that you say that because I have a similar thing whenever I hear someone in any space, whether it's a politician I'm talking to or a nonprofit person or anybody, and they say the word community policing, I ask them to tell me what it means.

01:05:29 Speaker_05
because almost nobody in D.C.

01:05:32 Speaker_05
in politics, and almost nobody in any city that I go to where I litigate these cases against police prosecutors and judges, talk to city council people, talk to mayor offices, et cetera, almost nobody understands what that term means.

01:05:46 Speaker_05
And very few of these people actually have any conception at all of the history of that concept. Community policing is a counterinsurgency tactic.

01:05:57 Speaker_05
Community policing is, and this is funny because a couple years ago there was a scandal where Harvard had a ex-military professor who started offering a class on counterinsurgency where the students were going to help local police in Massachusetts.

01:06:14 Speaker_05
adopt strategies from Iraq and Afghanistan in the US military and apply them in Black communities in Massachusetts.

01:06:20 Speaker_05
And when the Harvard students kind of found out about this course offering, they started protesting and the university cancelled the course. That was community policing. I mean, that is what community policing is.

01:06:31 Speaker_05
It's a term that describes a series of tactics

01:06:35 Speaker_05
that are designed to get a heavily targeted and heavily policed community to have nicer, warmer thoughts about the police, to embrace surveillance, to turn some members of a marginalized group against each other for the benefit of policing.

01:06:54 Speaker_05
So that's one of the key community policing strategies and tactics is police hosting basketball tournaments for inner city youth. or police around thanksgiving driving into a low-income neighborhood and setting up a truck and giving away food.

01:07:11 Speaker_05
A lot of this stuff is done to cultivate informants, to boost falsely the impression in these communities that the police both care about their material well-being and are a main way that the government is actually helping these communities, as opposed to, you know,

01:07:29 Speaker_05
opening food cooperatives and urban farms and grocery stores in these communities, right?

01:07:34 Speaker_04
It also doesn't help that in every mob movie, this is what the mob boss does, too, by the way. That's not a good sign when you're just doing what the guy with the white coat in Godfather Part 2 does.

01:07:42 Speaker_05
Yeah, and for Democratic politicians, community policing is just a word they can say that makes low-information liberals think that something different is being done. Sounds great.

01:07:57 Speaker_04
Yeah, because the community, like we're just, I guess they're, yeah, they're doing barbecues, they're doing little, you know, face tattoo stickers and henna tattoos and they're, you know, I don't know, doing the Super Bowl pool.

01:08:08 Speaker_04
I don't know, community policing. It sounds good though, doesn't it?

01:08:10 Speaker_05
And police training is similar. I mean, it's two words that when put together makes one think good things. Oh, the police are getting trained.

01:08:21 Speaker_05
Now, anybody who actually knows anything about the police training industry is horrified when they hear those two words together in response to incidents of police violence, because the police training industry is one of the most disturbing, violent, fascist,

01:08:40 Speaker_05
and honestly kind of incompetent areas of our society. It is where police learn how to be warriors, how to be violent, how to break the law, how to cover up their tracks.

01:08:51 Speaker_05
There's so many really powerful investigations by even state and local governments into the police training industry. Obviously, it's become relatively well known now that a lot of U.S. police are trained by the Israeli military.

01:09:06 Speaker_05
And so I don't think we have time to get into the whole scandal of police training. There's some great documentaries and great research done about it. But the point is, this is a very nefarious industry.

01:09:16 Speaker_05
And it's kind of shocking and should be really scandalous that one of the main liberal responses to police incompetence and violence over the last 15 years has been to funnel

01:09:29 Speaker_05
hundreds of millions of dollars into one of the most violent and unaccountable areas of our society, which is training police in how to be more military-like warriors.

01:09:41 Speaker_05
And it's just anybody who proposes increased police training in response to police violence or incompetence is either an extremely nefarious actor who is trying to mislead you or completely and utterly incompetent.

01:09:56 Speaker_08
Alec, this has been so great to talk to you. I feel like we could just keep going and going. But before we let you go, would love to hear about your forthcoming book, Copaganda, How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.

01:10:09 Speaker_08
It is, as one might imagine if they're listening to the show, extremely our shit. Please tell our listeners about the book and about what else you have going on and where people can find your amazing work.

01:10:20 Speaker_05
Absolutely. Well, it has been called by my grandmother the most anticipated book of the year. And so, she's very excited about it.

01:10:29 Speaker_04
Can't argue with that.

01:10:30 Speaker_05
Exactly. She knows what she's talking about. As you guys both know, I've been thinking a lot and writing a lot over the last couple of years about the very particular kind of propaganda that we all call copaganda that

01:10:45 Speaker_05
I think has really three main functions that I try to explore in the book using lots of examples.

01:10:51 Speaker_05
I try to also infuse the book with humor and funny anecdotes and things like that because it's kind of a very depressing topic when you actually start to look at the sheer scope and relentlessness of the propaganda that organizations like the New York Times and most mainstream news entities are pummeling us with.

01:11:11 Speaker_05
And I try to give people some tools to fortify their own minds against this relentless propaganda. And I think it has three main functions, really.

01:11:20 Speaker_05
And function number one is that propaganda in mainstream US news tries to narrow our conception of what safety means.

01:11:28 Speaker_05
It tries to make us think that our safety is intimately connected with and maybe coextensive with the kinds of very particular crimes that the police focus on that are committed by poor people. So, you know, for example, shoplifting.

01:11:45 Speaker_05
There's a lot of news articles about shoplifting. And there's whole sort of moral panics that are created to make us really, really worried about shoplifting.

01:11:53 Speaker_05
But shoplifting is a drop in the bucket compared to something like wage theft, which takes about $50 billion a year from low-wage workers in the United States. It's a tiny speck

01:12:05 Speaker_05
on the drop in the bucket when compared to something like tax evasion, which is about a trillion dollars a year, or corporate fraud, $800 billion a year.

01:12:13 Speaker_05
So even if you're just going to look at property crime, the scope of the harm in our society dwarfs the narrow kinds of things that the news focuses on as crime. And so the first major function of propaganda is narrowing that focus.

01:12:29 Speaker_05
So you think about all of the types of things that harm us the most, like air pollution kills over 100,000 people in the United States every single year. That's four to five times the number of homicides combined in the United States.

01:12:43 Speaker_05
Water pollution, hundreds of thousands of people getting the most serious illnesses imaginable, death, cancer, rotting teeth for children, et cetera. There's hundreds of thousands of water pollution

01:12:55 Speaker_05
Violations you never see in the local news every night the same kind of relentless coverage of those harms because the first function of propaganda is again nearing our conception of harm and threatened safety to only those things that strangers who are poor due to us.

01:13:12 Speaker_05
Second major function of propaganda is through the volume of news and through the framing of stories and through choosing which stories get told and which ones get ignored, constantly making us think that those small categories of crime committed by the poor are ever-increasing.

01:13:29 Speaker_05
That's why, for the last 25 years, if you look at the Gallup polls on crime, everyone always thinks every year that crime is up, even though crime has been down almost every single year in that period.

01:13:39 Speaker_05
And then I think the third and most important major function of propaganda that I try to really get at in the book is it tries to narrow our conception of solutions to these problems that the media has made us really afraid of.

01:13:54 Speaker_05
And it wants us to think that the solution to all of our fears about our own safety is investing more in the punishment bureaucracy and the corporations that profit from it, as opposed to what the evidence says, which is investment in reducing inequality.

01:14:10 Speaker_05
early childhood education, housing, income for people, the arts, music, theater, poetry, dance, athletics for children, reducing isolation in our society, environmental cleanup.

01:14:22 Speaker_05
All of these things are far more associated with what even what the police call crime. And so, propaganda, though, wants us to think that if you care about violent crime or

01:14:34 Speaker_05
people harming each other, you have to support increases to the size and power of the punishment bureaucracy. And I think that's not only false, but quite dangerous in a time of rising authoritarianism.

01:14:45 Speaker_08
Yeah. Sounds like that's going to be a good book. It's always such a pleasure talking to you, Alec. Your work is really vital. We, of course, have been speaking with Alec Carrick Kitsanis, civil rights attorney and founder of Civil Rights Corps.

01:14:57 Speaker_08
He's the author of the Essential Substack, Alec's Copaganda Newsletter, also the author of the book Usual Cruelty, the Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, which was published in 2019 by the New Press.

01:15:09 Speaker_08
Author of the new study, The Body Camera, The Language of Our Dreams, published by the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation.

01:15:16 Speaker_08
And of course, author of the highly anticipated and grandma-endorsed book, Copaganda, How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, which will be released early next year, also by the New Press.

01:15:27 Speaker_08
Alec, thank you again for joining us on Citations Needed.

01:15:31 Speaker_05
Thank you all so much.

01:15:43 Speaker_04
Yeah, I think this is why the resource model, while not perfect, and can be a little bit of a blunt instrument, I think is the right way to approach this issue, which is, are you just giving more money, more power, more surveillance?

01:15:52 Speaker_04
Or are you building alternative systems of, not to sound, again, like hippie, but of care? Are we building Are we being redistributive? Are we building schools? Are we building parks?

01:16:01 Speaker_04
Are we creating healthcare for people, both postnatal, prenatal, maternal care? Are we building systems of giving people support so they can thrive and live, or are we just giving more money to cops?

01:16:13 Speaker_08
Yeah, exactly. The idea of kind of social determinants of health, as it is often known in kind of non-profit ease.

01:16:20 Speaker_08
But yeah, I mean, really just meeting the fundamental building blocks of a functioning society rather than using all of that money, all of those budgets, all of the resources being allocated instead to these already violent wealth and property protecting police departments that are not and will never be

01:16:40 Speaker_08
integrated into the community in that kind of quote, unquote, community policing, ideal, right, the idea that, you know, the, the cop on the beat is just your buddy, and you're looking out for him, just like he's looking out for you and your family, right?

01:16:54 Speaker_08
Rather, what we see is more and more money just funneled into these so called training programs, or two new technologies going to these businesses that are making plenty of money doing PR effectively for police departments.

01:17:10 Speaker_08
So the corporations are getting money, the police departments are getting money, and politicians get to have supported something out of them.

01:17:16 Speaker_08
I think that's another aspect of this, something that we've discussed a lot on this show, the idea of having to do something without doing the thing that is actually necessary because

01:17:28 Speaker_08
of the way that that challenges power or the way that that advocating for maybe taking money away from police departments would be politically unpopular for some politicians, maybe most politicians, and therefore that is unpalatable, that is not what they can do, but they still need to quote-unquote, look serious, be concerned, wring their hands, and do something, and that something winds up being more money for police departments

01:17:52 Speaker_08
and the tech companies and the training companies that equip them and provide ongoing resources, bloating police budgets, but of course, still doing nothing for the actual quote unquote, community.

01:18:04 Speaker_04
Yeah, because ultimately, 40% of the country is liberal, and they need to have things that sound good. And that reform sounds good.

01:18:10 Speaker_04
So you just sort of pitch the same things that bloat budgets and provide military equipment and more power and more surveillance. But you can't make it sound evil. So you make it sound good and perform performs good, right?

01:18:21 Speaker_04
It sort of means whatever you want it to mean. And so it mostly works even though it doesn't.

01:18:26 Speaker_08
And so that will do it for this season eight opener of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening.

01:18:31 Speaker_08
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01:18:42 Speaker_08
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01:20:07 Speaker_08
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