How The Police Declared War On All Of Us

Jason Petty, better known as the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason, how are you doing? What's up? I'm breathing thin air because I'm on the road. But let's hope that this isn't the end of the police story and it does turn out okay. Yeah, yeah, I think that I think they might pull it together in the last the last quarter. He yeah, Let's let's just hope the last quarter isn't the year four thousand. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I haven't been checking the news in months, so I I don't know,

um how how how the police are nowadays? I assume everybody's happy with them, yeah, or they're sticking to brand. Yeah, so um boy, Jason. As as I finished, this up. It became incredibly clear to me how much I was going to have to leave out of this of this series, Like not just the fact that we're not really talking about federal law enforcement, the FBI, the d e A, the A t F UM, just because I wanted to focus on like, you know, cops, like normal straight up

specifically cops. Yeah, in your neighborhood cops. Um. There's but there's like so much like we're not going to talk much about the civil rights movement just because a lot of what the police did then was just kind of like the same tactics that we already talked about them doing in previous periods. Um, we're not going to talk a lot about like the LGBT movement violence against them. We're not going to talk about the Green movement and the suppression of that, um, just because I already wrote

sixteen pages for today. Yeah, so we're gonna we're gonna talk about what I think is the right last subject to end on a series that is inevitably not going to cover everything that it would have been good to cover, um, and that is the militarization of American police. UM. Yes, so that's where we're where we're going to today, and

it's important. It's important to note I'm gonna throw this in there that like all the pieces that he's talking about, like remember, those are like lived experiences, So it's a piled on history that emotionally and psychologically all of us who have lived through it like, no, it's there. But good god, if there's no way to actually cover all

of it in a podcast, you know what I'm saying. No, I mean, if we'd had another dozen episodes, yeah, we wouldn't have had to leave out much like we would have had to leave out a lot, but we would have been able to give broad coverage of all of the things. But like, yeah, there's just this isn't going to be you know, we had to had to stop somewhere.

So militarization, I think does kind of make sense, um to to focus on in our last episode because it's kind of the biggest aspect of where we are right now, um in terms of like why the why the ship that's happening right now is happening, Like a lot of it has to do with militarization and obviously the foundational issues of racism that we're behind policing contributed to UM.

So we're gonna talk about all that, UM. But to start us off today, we are going to get into one of the aspects of the U S law enforcement that we have thus far failed to cover it enough to tail US policing and indigenous people's UM. Yeah, yeah, because this is really where we get to the very start of militarized police in the United States. When people talk about use that term today, militarized police, they're generally

referring to equipment. Right the transition of cops the friendly Andy Griffith style lawman who wore like maybe a gun on his hip and a pair of handcuffs, to like the guys wearing heavy body armor in a tool belt with like five different weapons on it. Um. You know, police tanks and grenade launchers and are fifteen. And when people talk about that stuff, they kind of see militarization as a new and worrying trend because the cops they grew up with didn't look like that. UM. And that's

a part of police militarization. UM. And it is a new part of police military Well, it's not even really a new part of it. It's worrying, but it's not new. UM. So it's the most visually like, yeah, identifiable. You know, somebody can get their brain around that. Like we say there's a problem with militarization. You could go, yeah, logically speaking, I am not an enemy and surgeon, so I don't

understand what the grenade launcher for. Yeah, I didn't an y yeah, yeah, you didn't used to on a daily basis. See dudes in like the middle of Los Angeles who looked like they could have walked out of downtown, right, and now you do, um yeah, yeah, Camo, Like, how is it? What do you expect to happen in the Yeah, the fucking I was at a cop right the other day, were like there were like a bunch of rapid response guys and fucking uh and fucking like rural camo and

it was like, what are you. We're in the middle of that in front of the Portland's Justice Center. What do you think is going to happen? You're gonna bland in. You need to be wearing some like cut off dickies, wearing some sort of coffee stain on your shirt, get some really tight jeans and a flannel shirt. If you want a camouflage into Portland, like what do you fucking play that wouldn't even camouflage you in the goddamn woods?

Thank you so um yeah. In episode two of this mini series, we talked about how the Philadelphia State Police were formed in direct imitation of the Philippine Constabulary, a colonial police force the U S form to suppress the natives of a conquered land, and such colonial police forces were really common among like imperial powers during the period of colonialism, or at least the period where colonialism was

kind of openly embraced by everyone. Um So, all of the big European nations did this ship and you know, the US did as well, the most influential example of such a force in American history though, because like you know, the British had a whole bunch of different ones. They're probably the best at it. So did the French, show, so did the Germans, um, and so did the United States.

But since we didn't have the as as extensive and overseas empire as as those European nations did, a lot of our colonial policing forces were actually like deployed right here at home, you know, kind of in frontier areas that weren't states yet. And the most influential example of such a force in American history is probably the Texas Rangers, who were formed officially in eighteen thirty five. So we're talking about the Rangers today, baby, not the not the

not the sports team there, broadly George Bushy's team. Yeah, they're whatever we're talking about. What working about the sport or the Rangers. Robert their baseball right, Oh my god, I'm so proud Texas. I was like, no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no no, it's Texas. So he knows that answer. Yes, yeah. So I used to tease my Texas own boys to be like, I know, y'all go to the Alamo every year, and I was like, at my DJ I traveled with

it from Texas. I was like, hey, you know, y'all lost the Alimo, right, He was like, I didn't realize it until college because every year, like y'all lost. Anyway, go on, So the Range, speaking of the Alamo and such, the Rangers started out kind of in the period where Texas was doing its own thing, uh and not yet part of the United States, and they were initially kind of just a small, irregular band of hired tufts whose job was to protect newly settled white families out on

the frontier. UH. This put them in constant conflict with local and native tribes, the Cherokee and the Comanche primarily, and it also pit them against the Mexican population in the area. The Texas Rangers quickly evolved into one of the most formidable forces for protecting whiteness on the American frontier. When non white people were accused of robbing or attacking white settlers, the Rangers acted as designated vigilantes to see

that justice was done. And because we're talking about Texas in the period we're talking about, we're actually talking about like what is today Texas, Oklahoma, parts of New Mexico and even some Colorado. I think, um, like it's that whole region and and a lot of this is like Comanche who were like, this is there where they've been living for a while, um, and the the colode they started having conflicts with settlers, and settlers would murder them.

They would murder settlers, and the Texas Rangers would be they act a lot as like scouts and stuff for like hunting down these bands and leading militias to them and stuff. And that's kind of like they're kind of like special forces in this period. And I just can't just throwing it in, like I just think, like the

the social interaction, just the humanity of the moment. Of course it's tents, of course, it's like, uh, there's a lot of like bigger forces of like colonialism and frontiersm and all these things happening, but just the human interaction of saying, you're just waking up, gonna make a cup of coffee, step out of your house and someone's building a house in your lawn. Yeah, and they looked at you like you crazy. It's just like yeah, what what like what do you what are you doing? Man? What

do you well? And it's one of those I don't want to I'm talking about my ass a little bit now because it's been a long time since I read I've read like one good book about what happened to like the conflict between the Comanches and the the the

white settlers in this period. But if I'm not mistaken, like they were living somewhere else and yeah, we kicked them out of it, uh, and so they wound up kind of in you know, the the Broad Texas region, and then we were like okay, but not here either like it was it was the to yeah yeah, yeah, it's very frustrating history. So white settlers quickly learned how to use the Texas Rangers is like a mercenary force um and not just against and well not just against

like indigenous peoples. It became very common for white men to raid cattle from Mexican ranches, uh, and then the Mexicans would steal their cattle back, and so the white folks would call in the Texas Rangers to retrieve their stolen property um. And you know, the Texas Rangers would murder people during these like raids to retrieve property like cattle they had owned and had been stolen from them

and that they'd taken back. As a rule in sort of the Texas Republic period and the early period of statehood, when non whites resisted the Rangers in any way, they could be killed, arrested, or tortured. So the Texas Rangers go from being kind of this like quasi military scouting force like a counterinsurgency um force, to like acting as kind of a law force for for defending whiteness on

the frontier um. And over the course of several decades, the Texas Rangers acted as the tip of a spear that gradually drove most indigenous people's out of Texas, often very violently. For much of the eighteen hundreds, the Rangers were yeah again like counterinsurgency was kind of their their bag, and they worked with the militia or the military as

basically special forces. The Comanche Wars were a brutal series of conflicts that crossed the line and too outrighte ethnic cleansing on a number of occasions, and the Texas Rangers were very heavily involved. One of these ethnic cleansing moments would be the Red Fork massacre of eighteen forty, when a team of Texas Volunteer Rangers surrounded a Commanche village whose men were all outrating. Rather than attempt to arrest the women, children, and elderly inside, the rangers surrounded the

camp and opened fire. When their rifles ran out of ammunition, they closed in with pistols to execute the survivors. Some hundred and forty Comanches were gunned down, and probably another hundred and forty at least died later from exposure. Their horses were stolen to pay the rangers now this was an act of genocide. UM. And it was also a

pretty such a fundamentally military endeavor. UM. But as the and that's that's generally when you're we're talking about like the the kind of cutting edge of the genocide against the Native Americans, the intentional parts of it, UM, we are often talking about a military endeavor, like policing plays a role, but it's it's a lot of like the U. S. Military UM, and the rangers move into a different part

of the country. But like when you get into like the Little Big Horn and General Custer stand that was a military move too, and in a lot of ways, the ingredients were the same also in the sense that like this is where the cron nation lives. Uh, now we actually but we only live here because y'all made

us live here. And then you discover gold in the Black Hills and now you want our land again and yeah yeah, so just it's like obviously in a Little Big Horn, it's because they grossly underestimated, um sitting bowl. But uh but that but that but that continual like um like fake diplomacy, which was really a militarized ethnic cleansing from what I know from the first tour I ever did was twenty seven Native American Reservations, so first

tour as a as an artist. So when you start talking to them about the way that they see these things, they were, Yeah, it's in their mind it's always been an act of military. Yeah. Yeah, And that's that's part of I guess why we haven't kind of gone into that aspect as much, um and one of one of the just because like it's it's less of a policing

thing and more of a military thing. Although those lines blur, and they blur especially with the Texas Rangers because while the Rangers kind of our start out as as a quasi military force, as the eighteen hundreds turned into the nineteen hundreds and kind of the frontier fades, the Rangers transitioned into a law enforcement agency and they become they're broadly similar to the U. S. Marshals like today, that's kind of like more or less where they land, um,

and they're but they're like this weird Texas state law enforcement agency that kind of resembles in a lot of ways more of like a FED type agency than it does you know, a beat cop, but their their law enforcement now, so they and they still exist. Yeah, they

still exist. They go from being like okay, not like uh, it's not like Queen Elizabeth, like they actually do no no no. If you fly into um, if you fly into love Field Airport today in Dallas, which is the airport you want to fly into and out of in Dallas because DFW was a goddamn nightmare. There's a statue. There's a statue of like a dude, a cowboy looking dude with a six gun on his hip. That's like

a statue of the Texas Rangers. And I think it's like the words written on under one Ranger, one Riot, which is their motto. And we'll be talking about where where that motto really comes from now. But they're no, they're still around. There's still a law enforcement agency in Texas. And yeah, that's the they kind of transition from being a military guerrilla warfare unit to being like the law um and and as a side note, as a side note, I still don't know what a U. S. Marshal does

except for fly on a plane. You know a lot of that's true. Yeah, the movie US Marshals, I think is perfectly accurate. Just watched watched the movie US marshals with Robert Downey Jr. And uh and Tommy Lee Jones. And I think that's a hundred percent right. Um. Yeah. I was like, so this is unnecessary. Your whole job is unnecessary, Okay, go so Um. The new Texas Rangers as law enforcement, um didn't act as like military scouts anymore, but they still enforced white supremacy at the barrel of

a gun. In nineteen eighteen, at a place called Poor Veneer, Texas Rangers gunned down fifteen unarmed Mexican people and drove their families across the border into Mexico. I found a fun article on the Rangers in the Texas Observer, which is a great news source on Texas. They do like really big journalism. Uh. And they interviewed historian and professor

Monica Martinez about the history of the Texas Rangers. Uh. The article notes quote martinez Is research posits the height of Texas Ranger violence against mex Sickens to have occurred from nineteen fifteen to nineteen nineteen. Some three hundred ethnic Mexicans were murdered between nineteen fifteen and nineteen sixteen alone. These dates coincided with the reign of not only the disgraced Governor James poff Ferguson, but also, starting in nineteen seventeen,

the oft venerated William P. Hobby. Martinez is appropriately unsparing in the detailing of hobbies consistently anti Hispanic, anti double a CP agenda. In short, he used the Rangers as his own personal goon squad and instigating intimidation tactics against minorities. Hobby presided over an era that, according to Martinez, saw the widespread practice of executing landowning Hispanic men to force the sale of their land by their widows through threats

of physical violence. Much yeah, much the same Hobby from the Houston Airport. Yeah wait, same guy, Yeah I think so, yes, yes, yes, yes, George Billson. Then there's Hobby. That's that's like, yeah, that's Houston's love Field, you know what I'm saying. Yeah their

other airport. Yeah yeah yeah. Have said violence aided and embedded, if not directly perpetrated by the Rangers with the state official state consent, Powerful US political elites like Hobby made sure that any serious investigation of Ranger crimes through official legal channels would be doomed to failure. Now yeah, that is just just straight up ethnic cleansing again, like like there's still ethnically cleansing people. Um. And obviously I didn't

learn any of that in Texas history classes. I learned about them fighting the Comanche, but it was it was framed as like, well, they were, you know, both two sides in a war and they both did bad things. Um. Yeah, now uh, it turns out that and this is I

also didn't learn in middle school. It turns out that the Texas Mexican border was kind of prior to this point where the Texas Rangers come in and start murdering landloaders, it was a semi autonomous region because it was both too remote and too close to Mexico to really be controlled by any central government. So people on the border from both countries would travel freely and like cross the

border kind of without even noticing it was there. They built communities together, they had families together, they traded together, um. And this was great for them, but it was really bad for rich people and racests who lived many hundreds

of miles away. So the Texas Rangers were sent in to secure the border, and this was like the first time the border was really secure and again they did this by executing people who owned land near the border and handing their stuff actually Mexican people who own land in the border, and handing their stuff over to white people. Um. The dead were portrayed as bandits and criminals, and heavily

armed Rangers would pose for photographs with their bodies. By nineteen nineteen, the sheer scale of the violence and forced to state legislative hearing on extra judicial killings by the Rangers. This hearing resulted in no formal charges, and the detailed record of the Texas Rangers mass murder spree was sealed for fifty years so as to not tarnish their record as tex and heroes. Yeah, I bet, I bet. Also, also there's parts of El Paso that are still like that.

Then you still can't tell where the border is and isn't where there's a there's a high school down there. I know because the kid came to a show where the football field is in Mexico. Yeah, and then but the rest of the school is in Texas, so nobody really knows where. We really don't know where it is. But yeah, anyway, I just thought that's interesting that, like to this day that like it's important for us to all remember that borders are made up. They're not Yeah,

we made them up. You know. They're just by pain. Yeah yeah, maybe it's not They're not real and they're yeah yeah, enforced by pain is a good way to yeah. Uh So. The Texas Rangers went well into the twentieth century acting as a colonial police force. They didn't stop in nineteen um and Alex Fatali, author of the end

of policing rights quote. In the sixties and seventies, local and state elites used Rangers to suppress the political and economic rights of Mexican Americans and played a central role in subverting farm worker movements by shutting down meetings, intimidating supporters, and arresting and brutalizing picketers and union leaders. There were also frequent they called in to intimidate Mexican Americans out

of voting in local elections. Most Latinos were subject to a kind of wan crow like it's a Jim Crow's thing, in which they were denied the right to vote and barred from private and public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants, bus station waiting rooms, public pools, and bathrooms. This is what that statue in love Field is referring to when it says one Ranger, one riot, that's the riot is the is is Mexicans being like, what if we had the right to vote in Texas? Ranger's saying, what if

we shot you? You still have to say to yourself, like if it's so you, like everybody's a situation is so unique. But like as a as a Texan Mexican where you never moved, your house, never moved, it's just the land up under you became Texas and then everybody acting like you ain't puposed to be here, that you ain't got right. So he was like, I I've never left. I don't understand how I don't have rights in land. I never left. Yeah, you're the new guys. Yeah, it's

just the mind bender of that. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool and good. So the Rangers were eventually beaten back to an extent in the early nineteen sixties when Tahanos began to organize in a significant way. They set up voter drives and fought literally fought in some points to get leaders elected on the local city council of a small town called Crystal City. This whole operation exploded into a big fight with Rangers cracking skulls and

trying to break up rallies. Um. But this time they're victims. Attracted the attention of the press, The Rangers eventually were forced to back down by public opinion, and the ta Haanos won both the election and major civil rights concessions from the white majority you know, all across Texas, and things started to get better. Obviously they're still not perfect or even great, but they got better. Um. Today, the Texas Rangers are sort of just like a weird Texan

variant of the U. S. Marshals. They do a lot of unsolved crime investigations like cold case murder or as they investigate serial killers. UM. They also act as kind of like they're supposed to be kind of a watchdog for the police because they investigate officer involved shootings, and of course they do border security UM. And the fact that they have a I don't know enough about how they do today to know how problematic they are and sort of currently in the vein of the rest of

law enforcement. I will say they have a very positive reputation among just Texans UM. And this is not due to anything they actually do, but is owed largely to the nineteen nineties TV show Walker Texas Ranger, in which Chuck Norris assume because Norris. Yeah, Chuck Norris basically erased the Centurion and change long history of ethnic cleansing and genocide, um by doing enough roundhouse kicks while wearing a bad join Us chest that people are like, ah, they're okay.

Now punched a bear. Look at at me? Punched a bear. Yeah, he's got to be a good guy. Uh yeah. And in sort of in following this arc of like committing genocide, acting as like a military force of ethnic cleansing and like like mass murder to suppress minorities, and then getting whitewashed by a TV show with Chuck Norris, the Texas Rangers kind of perfectly encapsulated a lot of law enforcement history in this country. That is the most acinct sentence.

Is the most scinct sentence we've done this whole series. Yeah, they protested all six they participated in at least two genocides. But then Chuck Norris started kicking all right, spinning roundhouse kid. Uh. Also also as a native Californian who married a first Gin Mexican woman from Southern Mexico. I will go to my grave that I am not a fan of tex mex food in that case, so is terrible. Oh no, that's the only thing I'll fight for about Texas is

text Max. Hey, man, Hey, I'll take your fajitas. They're great, but you can lead a case fucking Calimex putting fish in everything. Come on, yeah, I mean it's actually all pretty incredible compared to the burritos we get up here in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, don't call those burritos. You know, they're not They're not burritos. Somebody put Keen Waw in one of them. I was just you, what are you? Yeah, that's a rap. Come on, don't call this a fucking burrito.

So in our last episode of the series, we talked about August Volmer. You remember Valmer, like the the good, the best cop that we're we're going to talk about the series. Yeah. Um, probably the most influential police chief in US history. Volmer was a big advocate of what is called like the professional model of policing, of like

what a police force should be. Um. He believed that police officers should be trained professionals with college degrees and when he thought trained professional, he was not thinking about killing, right, Like, their ability to handle a gun and shoot people was kind of low on Volmer's list of what cops should be fessional at um. He focused on the number one their ability to kind of scientifically solve crimes um and their ability to interface with and be parts of communities. Um.

And these are both still things. Yeah, broadly, there's still problematic. One of the things we won't get into enough is that number one, like a lot of police science fingerprinting and stuff works a lot less well than than they say it does, so like and ship like yeah, like like there's a lot of problems with that. And there's also people who argue that community policing doesn't like is better than you know, maybe what we're doing now, but

doesn't really work all that well. Like there's arguments to be made. We're not going to get into them enough. I don't want to be saying that. Like his attitude was perfect, but I think it was less problematic. Yeah, was he like the like the precursor to like c S I Miami, you know, like yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, you gotta like scientifically solve these crimes and that everything that has a science degree in forensics is unimaginably gorgeous, and they work in a lab that is looks more

like a club. Yeah, yeah, it's really all. Yeah, it's really well it. Yeah. Volmer is the guy who advocates for like sexy, brilliant um doctor cops who like, yeah, yeah, exactly, that's that's that's kind of his vision. Yes, oh my god, an incredible shape with abs, like like how do they get abs that nice? And also do police work. Yeah, so Volmer, that's Volmer's attitude. That's kind of the professional

model of policing. But Volmer was not the only person with a vision of what policing should be, and there was a you know, in the nineteen twenties in particular,

a competing model of policing started to evolve. Now, if you remember your high school history courses, you'll know that the period from like eighteen seventy seven to eighteen ninety five is referred to broadly as the Gilded Age, and this was a time of massive wealth inequality, a period that saw the USA's first multi millionaires rise alongside a devin stating series of economic recessions and depressions. Um the

Gilded Age was a time of intense political polarization. Political parties got like at each other's throats in a way they really hadn't been, you know, you know, prior to the Civil War, which I guess hadn't been that long ago. So let's not pretend that hasn't always been an aspect of our politics. But yeah, uh, And around the turn of the century, um, the Gilded Age kind of gave

way to what's called the progressive era. And progressive today is the term we broadly used for just like folks on the left, but back then it meant something different, and like, progressives of this era kind of had things in common with both our modern left and right. Um, some of the values they had in common with, like today's lefties, would be sort of a rejection of conservative individualism in favor of more collective attitudes towards the common good.

Progressives wanted to use state power to do things like help lower class individuals, workers, immigrants, you know, the urban poor. They stood against the greed of unchecked capitalism and the corruption of a system of party bosses that had dominated urban politics and US cities during the Gilded Age. And the progressives weren't really they progressive was a political orientation, but they didn't really care about They weren't like super

into parties. Like a lot of the progressive air was kind of a rejection of where party politics had led things in the Gilded Age. That's a factor in this too. And when you when you read what I just read, the progressives kind of sound like lefties, but that's not all they were. Many progressives also held deeply conservative attitudes towards religion and acceptable social behavior. Progressives were by and

large a homogeneous, middle class, white Protestant group. Um. They achewed political parties in favor of local informal organizations like the Anti Saloon League. And as that last bit, Mike KEYU, we are in on a whole lot of Uh, Progressives were very jazzed about prohibition. Um. And it's also progressives that also, you know, as an aside that brings us like early race science, um, for for some reasons we're going to get into. So the progressives are a mix

of left and right and problematic as all hell like. Yeah, It's also it's also a good lesson for the modern thinker, the younger thinker to remember that like even our terms left and right are so malleable, and they haven't always meant the same thing that you can like find it. So like George Bush seen you're talking about climate change, because the talking points can vary in these just like borders are made up terms and they are very malluable.

So even just jumping into this time with a vocabulary list that you think you know in seeing that like nah, you'd like those are also malleable too, is like super good. That's so, which is one reason why I love this this part of American history and politics. Yeah, and it's

it's like it's fascinating. Um, it's very because they're like part of why they get into race science is that like this idea that again we kind of think of as broadly positive today, those of this idea that like, okay, the poor, it's like we should use the government state

resources to help deal with things like homelessness and poverty. Um. But the way a lot of progressives take that, it's like, okay, well, let's figure out the root causes of homelessness and Proverty point, it seems like certain races of people are more likely to be homeless, you're impoverished. Maybe part of what the government should be doing to solve this problem is sterilized them. That's that's where the thought process goes. It's just like

has a weird sharp left? Yeah, there's there's obviously there are certain things I think the government ought to be doing that it shouldn't. But let's never forget that when you start talking about the government ought to do this or that, that can go badly too. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve problems, but let's all keep that in our fucking head. Let's remember yes, um, yeah, So have you ever read Justice by um Michael Sandow? Oh no, I have not. Yeah, this is a good one, um.

And it's a complete tangent knowing that you have forty five more pages to read. But it is important to know, like what he talked about, what the basic premises, like you're what you see as just, um, and how you define what justice is? If if you can answer that question, it could tell me where you're probably gonna land historically and politically, Like, for example, if you think just means the greatest good for all, so everybody looks at like

what's the greater good? How can the most amount of people see the most amount of flourishing you're probably gonna lean more liberal and progressive. Right. Uh, if you're like, no, justice means leave me alone to figure out how I want to make things happen. It is unjust for you to limit my liberties. Well that's like libertarian and you know, moving into that area where like justice means lead me alone, right, you don't get to tell me how to do things.

But if you're like, justice means there is a right way to do stuff, and that right way we all need to fall in line. And that's more a conservative lean. So if you say that that's that, then that makes a just society. So if you look at things like that, then when you jump into this region, you're going they're answering the question how do we make how do we make a just society? But their solution was, well, you know,

brown people suck, so they shouldn't have the more children. Yeah. Yeah, it's complex, complex period to talk about um and yeah, so yeah, you know what doesn't support eugenics prop Well, hopefully the products and services that yeah advertise on this place. That's our that's our one line. Sophie calls every advertiser and and just says the word eugenics and kind of like that way. Yeah. Have you ever measured a brain? Yeah? Do you do? You take skull measurements? Yes? Um, all right,

here's some ads. We're back, We're back, And I just I hope to god that was not an ad for a company that sells calibers. Um, tell me you're not selling calibers. Yeah, yeah, Sophie, I mean, these calibers are just off with the promo code. Bastards. On a personal note, On a personal note, I remember the first time I saw some of those like phrenology, like like manuals and drawings. I was just a visual artist, so I was like, dude, that's so cool, and I wanted to buy one of

those old ones. And then then then my father looked at me and was like, boy, if you don't get that out my house, it's a funny moment anyway. So um, all right, So we were talking about the progressives and particularly the fact that they get they get a whole hog and the motherfucking prohibition. Uh. And I'm gonna quote next from a paper by Ellen Leichtman, an associate professor

from Eastern Kentucky University that's about early police militarization. She starts by kind of talking about the genesis of a lot of progressive thought. So she's talking about progressives here. As the city's grew, many of them began to yearn for a small town pass that had existed mostly in their imaginations. These towns were conceptualized as homogeneous villages where

everyone knew everyone else and looked after each other. While small town still existed throughout the country, Progressives bemoan the fact that these traits could not be transferred to urban living. Actually, many of these traits could be found in urban immigrant neighborhoods, but progressives could not transfer their idealized image of small

town living to a foreign environment. The small towns they had envisioned were based on Anglo Saxon Protestant ethics and culture, not the Catholic, Italian and Irish, Eastern European, Jewish and other customs of the immigrant neighborhoods, which did not hold with many of the Sumptuary laws, especially that of Prohibition.

So dear to the progressives, hearts. So they they're they're big, family oriented people, but the actual like the people who are really living the kind of family oriented small towns sort of life within the big cities. Are these immigrants and they drink and progressives hate that. Um So progressives get their way on prohibitions starting January seventeenth, nineteen twenty.

But it didn't go well, and the first two years of prohibition saw overall crime increase by twenty four percent nationwide. This included a thirteen percent increase in homicide and at increase in assault and battery. Most of this violence was driven by the in worsemen of prohibition. One study that compared South Carolina counties that did and did not enforce prohibition found that enforcement led to a thirty to sixt increase in homicides. Yeah, a lot of people get killed

when you prohibit drugs arbitrarily. It turns out this is a lesson maybe we should have learned. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, there's at some point somebody needs to go ahead and go in and explain how there was really no scientific reasoning behind prohibition, just snop political power. People just didn't like alcohol and wanted the state to stop something they

didn't like from happening. Uh So, Yeah, the increase massive increase in violence as a result of prohibition infuriated a lot of progressives, and rather than recognize that prohibition was

maybe a bad idea. A lot of them started pushing hard to use state power to put an end to bootlegging in an organized fashion, and this is what led to the first major challenge to August Vollmer's Like professional model of of police, many progressives began to push for an alternate idea, a military model of a police force.

And I'm gonna quote again from Professor Lakeman, well, there was substantial overlap between the professional and military models, and that both insisted that the police be autonomous, be subject to physical requirements, and used the latest technology to defeat crime. There was a difference in focus. For the military model. The city and its police represented the nation and its standing army. People who broke the law were equated to enemies of the state, not citizens, and became person and

on grata in their own country. To fight these adversaries, the uniformed branch of the police and the detectives the non uniformed branch, were equated to different services of the military. Illegal behavior was seen as an attack on the American way of life. To save the country, the police had

to engage in a war on crime. Needless to say, many cities began recruiting military men to run their departments, and Jason, one of these military men, was a fellow You and I discussed kind of off handedly in one of the first episodes of the series. You remember when I read you that quote from Marine Corps Major J. L. Smedley Butler. Yes, Smithley, Yeah, Now, that quote was from kind of after he woke up a bit um and

started to realize some problems with earlier aspects of his career. Um. But in nineteen twenty four he was still a Marine Corps general in the city of Philadelphia elected Freeland Kendrick mayor on a law and order platform. Kendrick, a Republican, was livid that his city had more speakeasies than perhaps any other area in the country. The city of Brotherly Love had estimated eight thousands of legal bars in liquor

stores in nineteen because it's Philly. You know, it's fucking Philly, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, Philly is always on brand, So yes. Mark Kendrick decided that a military man and a military model were needed to reform the Philadelphia p D into something that could tackle the problem of vice, and he chose Marine Brigadier General Smedley Darlington Butler to be the new director of public Safety. And again, Butler was still in the military

at this point. He had to get like a special a special like leave from the Marine courts so that he could go be the director of public safety in Philadelphia. UM. So he's still a general. He's still in the military as he takes over a police force. UM. Now at age forty two in nineteen forty two, General Butler had survived fourteen campaigns and expeditions over twenty two years of service. He had joined the military illegally as a literal child after lying about his age in order to fight in

the Philippines. UM. During his time fighting for capitalism in his own you know, that's how he framed it. Later, Butler had earned the nicknames Old gimlet Ie, Hell's Devil Butler, the fighting Quaker, and old duck boards. Like he had a lot of nicknames. Fighting Quaker, Yeah, that's a that's a good nickname. That's a tattoo bro y, and he

gets the nickname waker. Like old duckboards are like wood boards they would put down and like trench fighting because it was like muddy, so that you would be able to walk and like basically there during World War One, there was this fight where like everything was fucking muddy as ship and they needed to get boards into place, and Butler, who was like I think a general still at this point, just picks up a funckload of boards and like runs into the battlefield to like set them down,

and like he he's he won two medals of Honor and he wanted to yeah, and he wanted Distinguished Service Cross, which is like the British like award, like their Medal of Honor. Like he he wins two of our medals of honor and like the British equivalent or inside their British to the French equivalent, like he's he's he's not just like an officer who like commands troops in battle from like a safe position like like Smedley Butler, whatever else you want to say about him, it's a fucking

terrifying badass. Um like he was. He was just like one of these guys with like a contempt for his own safety and battle. Um. Yeah, man, hey, does you know any kids like that when you were like in Texas growing up, where he's just a kid that you were just like this guy yeah, is dangerous and doesn't care about his body, but I'm my friend. Yeah yeah, yeah, those are good people to have be friends with. Um outside of certain situations. Yeah yeah, yeah. So but that's

that's Smedley Butler at this period. So he's kind of a legend. He's still a general and he gets made the director of public safety in Philadelphia. Um. And you know, Butler himself was a progressive UM. And he he was also a drinker, like not a heavy one, but he drank um. So he didn't like prohibition, but he was progressive, progressive. Yeah, it was kind of his belief that even bad laws had to be enforced for the sake of public good.

And upon taking off, as he stated, I do not care whether the state laws or city ordinances are right or wrong. From January seven, they are going to be enforced. So like that's his attitudes like that, And that's such a military Yes, it is. Yeah. When you when you said earlier, like I've never heard that train of thought put in the order that you put it when you were like, Um, an act of crime is an act against the state. Therefore you are no longer a citizen.

You are now an enemy combatant. I've never heard that train of logic because I never understood how if you're policeman, how you like, who are you fighting? Like you're fighting the people you're supposed to protect? Like, I don't get it. That sentence finally at least made me be able to follow the logic. I just wanted to go back and

point that out. Yeah, and this is this is one of the things that we're seeing in Philadelphia right now is like the the first time where so obviously you've had uh, um, you've had the police being used to suppress segments of the American the dangerous classes, right, um,

and this like primarily black and brown people. In this period of time, what we start to see happening with the militarization of the Philadelphia police is kind of the first time the police are at war with everyone in the city like that that because you know, white people broadly, um, if they weren't members of a dangerous racial group, um

could see the police's protectors in this period. And that starts to change in Philly because in Philly, like, yeah, they they this is the first time like the police like again, and the police in the twenties are heavily corrupt and a lot of them are criminals, but they're not is an organized force. They're not going to war with the city. This is the first time that really happens that because like you were selling drugs now, yeah,

just calls nine yeah yeah yeah. Um. So. Butler gave his first address to the Philly p D in a uniform he had designed for himself, complete with a cape, which is a flex like yeah, yeah, if you got if you got that many medals on the from multiple countries, you could wear a cape. You get to wear a cape.

Yeah fuck it, yeah, ok. Yeah. He demanded the police stopped making bribes, and he told them that while the rest of the city might see them as just a bunch of corrupt gangsters, he saw them as soldiers, like the Marines he'd spent years commanding in battle, and that's what he planned to turn them into. So Butler launched an immediate series of raids on bootleggers and speakeasy's changing city policy by not informing the mayor first, I think in part because he knew the mayor knew some of

these people and had been protecting them. And in a matter of days, Butler's police closed down nine hundred illegal bars now. At the same time as he cracked down, General Butler began the process of transforming the Philadelphia Police into a military force. He created a new squad of three hundred officers whose job was to spy on their fellow cops. These men would be the teeth behind Butler's

admonition that Philly cops had to stop taking bribes. Another of Butler's first steps was to abolish the Police Training School see Volmer August Volmer. When it educated professionals with like degrees in criminal justice, who like approached crime from a scientific standpoint, General Butler thought that was bullshit. He thought that cops, like soldiers, learned best in the field. Um and before his term, police training had taken more

than three months. Butler's new policies sent the cops that on the street almost immediately gave them like a booklet that outlined their duties and was just like, you'll figure it out once you're on the street. When you talk about binary thinking, yeah, you either a get trained for three months or be get a little pamphlet. Get a little pamphlet it, Yeah, go crack some heads. You'll learn quick.

You'll figure it out, Like there, maybe they're somewhere in between there, maybe we could pull a little bit of his little bit of that. Just those my two options, yep, and it's it's like so, the one thing that's interesting is that Butler didn't actually cancel all training. There was exactly one area where police still trained because he thought

it was important, and it was in the use of firearms. Um. He had realized early on that most cops barely knew how to use their weapons, and even fewer ever fired them. Butler thought this was a problem because he again, he's treating them as soldiers. So he mandated two weeks of marksmanship training, which was the only training his cops received. He also, rather bafflingly, decided to arm the fire department

with forty five caliber revolvers, which, yeah, he gave. He gave all the firefighters guns, and he required them to wear their guns off duty. Um well, they had arresting powers. Firefighters could arrest people in those days, so he was like, when you're off, you're all auxiliary cops, and you need

to carry guns in case you have to shoot some people. Basically, he viewed all public safety employees as soldiers who might potentially get called in to fight a war against the criminals within their city, and since every criminal was now the same as a foreign combatant, Butler started applying the same counterinsurgency tactics he'd learned in the Philippines and throughout Latin America. He announced that he would give a promotion

to the first officer to kill a bandit. The bandit in question did not have to be committing a violent crime. If he had a revolver in hand or on his body while he was being chased, that was fair game for the Philadelphia p D. From Professor Lichtmann's paper quote. Butler took this further and stated that like soldiers, those police who killed criminals should not be called upon to

either defend themselves or to contribute to their defense. A policeman who shoots a bandit is serving his city exactly as a soldier when firing at his country's enemies. Butler said he saw no difference in context between the role of the soldier and that of a police officer. That's bad. Yeah, it's not great, I mean, and we we wound up nationwide with the same ruling. Butler made that it's cool

to shoot people running away. It was like in the eighties of the early nineties where the it was like the Supreme Court ruled that if you a police officer can shoot you, even if you're not actively threatening them, if you're trying to get away from an arrest, Like, that's a thing that could happen. It's why cops get to shoot so many people in the back. Um, it's it's fine. So Butler saw no reason why his soldier cops shouldn't have access to the latest in military grade weaponry.

He ordered several customized armored cars to enable his officers to get into motorized gunfights with bootleggers. Rather than holding two men as with a normal police car, these armored buggies held four officers. The rear seats were set up back to back with the front seats so that the men in the bat could shoot directly at bandits without needing to turn around. Every man in the car would carry a rifle, a sot off shotgun, and a revolver.

And if you want to, if you want, I can't imagine a gesture that shows more contempt for the people into living in the city then firing a shot off shotgun from a moving vehicle. That's a drive by. Yeah, I don't understand what drive by? Yeah, it's that's so reckless. Just what do you like? This is a sawt off shotguns, not accurate and more than like fifteen feet in a good situation, and you're just shooting it from a car moving one at that It's fucking nuts. Yeah, yeah, fuck it?

Yeah and again like one Sorry I didn't even note this at the start. One of Butler's like requirements when he took the job, because he was used to being a military officer in a foreign war zone, was that no one questioned anything he did, like the city, not like he'd basically be unaccountable. And they were like, shure, yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of wars. I for the first time, uh, in a little personal news,

Oh yeah, I have shot big. This is my first positive experience with guns this weekend that we're recording this. Every other experience has been terrifying and life threatening. This is the first time I've ever seen a gun in a very recreational place. And I walk away with two really real thoughts, which is, you must anyone holding these has to have a deep respect for the deadly power in their hands, Like, how do you not revere this

thing like you feel it's power holding it? And then secondly, what has to click off in your brain to be able to point this at another human, like even recklessly or with joy or just to not think about that. I'm like some about your soul turned off because I just couldn't. I've kneeled in front of a fifty cow, which is crazy, but also held held to a R fifteen now shooting it felt like the most powerful thing I did in my life. I'm not gonna lie to you,

I screamed and howled. I was a redneck. I'm not gonna lie. I went, WHOA, I'm not gonna lie. But I thought to myself, how could you point this at a person? Yeah? It's yeah, I mean it it Um. There's a lot too, There's a lot to say about

like what what is emotionally involved in that? And like I have, I have, unfortunately been in a couple of situations, fortunately never where I had to point my gun at a person, but where I had a gun and somebody was doing something violent with a weapon in their hand, and it was like a there was like this thought process of like where's my line gonna be yes. Yeah, And that's what I'm saying, Like, you still have all

your faculties. I believe you're a fully developed human. So you thought to yourself, there is a cost to this, you know, and I don't know if this juice is worth the squeeze. So what you're telling me is you put four dudes and just say, shoot wildly into the city, Yes, to stop people with a couple of gallons of rum. Yes, yeah, it's pretty pretty wild. Um. So, Butler divided Philadelphia up

like a war zone with interlocking zones of control. Um that, like different patrols were set for and every patrol would have like set routes that they were supposed to travel in the event that they had to like intercept people.

There were convoys of armored vehicles, and he even set up a number of military style outposts to allow for better monitoring that were fortified like fortresses within Philadelphia that we're able to act as like outposts that there we call them fobs, forward operating bases today in Afghanistan, Like what he did in Philadelphia is exactly the same tactically as what the US does an Afghanistan today. Like that's

how he divided Philly up for his police force. Um, because he's he was like, he was good at prosecuting an insurgency. He knew what he he knew his business. Um, and that's what he did to Philadelphia because it was a military model police force. Now under Smedley Butler, the entirety of Philadelphia's urban infrastructure was actually turned to the cause of prosecuting his war on crime. He used the street lights to broadcast blink codes to officers about what

crimes were taking place where. So he would basically do like not semaphore, Um, what's it called? Like like like yeah, he would blink the street lights and morse code to so officers could see like, oh, there's a crime taking place in this street. Um. Yeah. He had four huge searchlights and like a big basically fucking billboard set up in city hall. Uh that would like display the license plates of cars of that like bandit vehicles that were

in the area. Um like yeah, it's like some fucking big brother shiit Smedley's tactics were very successful in closing down a huge number of philip Alfhia speakeasies, but they were not successful and actually winning the war for prohibition. For one thing, a ton of officers drank, and so

did many of the mayor's wealthy backers. These same men and women had a lot of business interests in upper class clubs and restaurants that had been serving alcohol illegally prior to Butler, but were forced to shut down due to his raids. He refused to treat the favorite watering holes of the wealthy any differently than hole in the wall slum speakeasies, and this caused increasing problems for the mayor who had hired him Yeah It's Yeah, Professor Lichtman Rights.

In an attempt to divert what he saw as an imminent disaster, he asked Butler to meet with these men and women, believing Butler could outline his plans and get their cooperation. But Butler was too brusque and did not handle the situation well. Instead of coming to some sort of compromise with these business people, he approached them as if he were a general and informed that them that he intended to install a special squad of undercover detectives

dressed in full evening attire to police these establishments. This began a two year battle between Butler and the hospitality industry. But there must have assumed that either the public would support these laws or that he that he could enforce them against public opinion. What he learned was what many occupying armies learned. It is often the oppressed that prevail culturally. Those arrested for liquor and fractions came before magistrates who

released them for lack of evidence. When Butler began padlocking the establishments of persistent liquor violators, judges rejected his arguments and allowed the places to reopen. He also came to the realization that many policemen were in league with bootleggers, and regular citizens had their own bathroom stills. Most Philadelphians did not want prohibition and did everything in their power to thwart it. So yeah, look, and and this lesson, this motif is so clear and so repeated everywhere that

like you're just you're just holding onto power. And when you hold onto power, even with ridiculous laws, you're gonna have to use violence, and people are going to turn against you because it's stupid. Yes, it's it's stupid. And and it's like Butler is good at running an insurgency the way our military has always run insurgencies, and if you have studied the history of our military and insurgencies, we almost always loose. Yeah, like we don't have a

great batting record when it got to fighting insurgents. Yeah, I think we come home. People think we come home like we did this country of favor and the whole country looking at us like no, no, you know. It's interesting because the the U. S. Mility, the modern U. S. Military is incredible at combat training, at like training people to fight in gunfights, and all of our training is cribbed and descended from German military training that started out at the end of World War One, um and like

into World War Two. Out trucks tactic is like the name of the kind of techniques, and the German military world War one and two was hands like not even brilliant, no fucking competition in their ability to train people to

fight and gunfights. Yeah, historically speak heads and shoulders. The German military was above everybody and they lost both wars, which maybe is a lesson about the actual value in a broad sense of having your truth to be real fucking good at gunfights doesn't matter if you fail at the other ship. And that's what Butler fails at um is understanding the broader dimensions of the conflict he's got himself into, and he gets let go from his job

running the Philadelphia Police After just two years. Most of the changes he had instituted reverted back to the way things had been before. Philadelphia continued drinking, and eventually the whole country got over this absurd attempt to ban a widely used intoxicant. Now, during this period, a number of other cities did try the same military model police force tactics as Philadelphia, putting like military men in charge of

their police. General Francis Green, you know in New York, Colonel James Everington in Los Angeles, Major Mattellas Funkhauser in Chicago, one of the best names I've ever heard. Yeah, so this is something we try. We try militarized police during Prohibition a lot of the country, and it doesn't work. Um. Now, there are aspects of police militarization that get adopted in

this period that kind of stay. For one thing, police nationwide begin adopting more military style weapons during this period, picking up automatic rifles because the gangsters have Tommy guns and b A r s. You know. Um, that's the kind of ship that Bonnie and Clyde and you know my cousin, pretty boy Floyd, or packing as machine guns,

so cops get machine guns too. Uh. In general, though the military model of policing pursued by progressives in the nineteen twenties and thirties seemed to have died out with prohibition, the professional model espoused by Volmer was obviously superior. For a few decades. From the war years up until the nineteen sixties, the story of the US police was the

story of growing professionalism and centralization. This was obviously an uneven an imperfect process, but most Americans probably would have assumed that professionalization and the professional model was pretty successful during this period of time. A good example would be law enforcement success in putting an into lynching as a widespread phenomenon. Now, as we talked about that was not did not actually happen the way that it was into.

But you gotta think about how like white people at the time, when oh, people aren't getting lunched anymore, we fixed it. Yeah, you know people. Yeah, it's like disive occasion where it's like, well, crime dropped, yeah yeah, where yeah. Yeah.

So in nineteen fifty four, the TV show Dragnet first hit the airwaves, and Dragnet was probably the first TV show about modern law enforcement that or I think it was actually um it was probably the first TV show about modern law enforcement that deliberately set out to be realistic. Every episode opened with the disclaimer that the cases in the series were all real, only the names had been changed to protect the innocent. Uh. The creator was a guy named Jack Webb, and he was also the star

of the show. He was he was Officer Friday UM and he partnered with the l a p D from the very beginning of the series is the very first time that ever happens, and partnering with the l a p D brings the production of Dragnet a ton of benefits. Number when they were allowed to film anywhere they wanted to in the city, Their crew got access to police vehicles and police gear without paying for it. The department would even loan them real cops to use his extras

on the show. All this saved the network just a fortune. Um. The only cost was that Dragonette scripts had to be approved by the l a p D before they could be filmed. Oh wow, whole episodes were scrapped on the basis that the police didn't think they portrayed policing in a positive enough light. So obviously Dragnet is not going to deal with problems in the l a p D. It's not going to deal with an equality, you know, in in in enforcement and stuff. Dragnet, you know, legitimately

broke new ground for American television. It was the first show to actually depict black and Hispanic cops. But it also failed to mention that the l a p D was segregated. Um. Yeah, yeah. There were very few instances of cops on Dragnet actually firing their guns, but whenever they did, those cops were shown to be calm and

emotionally stable in the moment. Nobody ever fired in panic on dragnet Um and the show helped shape a generate sation's attitudes towards law enforcement, portraying the ideal scientific, professionalized, vulmer police working almost flawlessly. Right, the police are just the facts, is Friday's right? Yeah, I was gonna the fact Dragnet is the showing like the ideal of the professionalized police. That's what's depicted in dragnet Um And the l a p D has a vested interest in wanting

to make sure that gets depicted. Obviously, So Dragnet was so good for the l a p d s image and reputation that in nineteen fifty five, the commissioner of the California Highway Patrol demanded his Public Affairs division get us a show like Dragnet. Highway Patrol had its first season later that year. Yeah, so the Highway Patrol show launches next. And of course, the FBI gets their own version of this treatment in nineteen sixty five with the

creatively named TV series The FBI. All of these shows push an idealized image of what law enforcement was and claimed that their fiction was very close to fact. Now to the extent that people bought into this myth. It started to puncture in nineteen sixty four as the Civil Rights movement took to the streets and US police responded by turning fire hoses and dogs on demonstrators. Many of the yeah, yeah, it's on TV. That shuts it down. Oh we didn't see this part of it on TV.

Um this These people don't seem to be interested in the facts. They seem to be interested in sicking dogs on folks. Yes, yeah, that that didn't make it into dragnet so and most of the protests. Many of the protests and what we're called riots during this period were

sparked one way or another by police brutality. The police tear gassed masses of young activists at the nineteen six Chicago DNC and from sixty seven to sixty eight there were two hundred and ninety two mass demonstrations on a hundred and sixty three college campuses, most were in opposition to the Vietnam War. By the end of nineteen sixty eight, vivid images of battered civil rights protesters, clouds of gas, and the corpses of those students at Kent State had

very significantly reduced public up union of law enforcement. Probably it's lowest EBB up till the present moment. Like my my grandpa was a lifetime military man, fought in World War two in Korea, was like managing a hospital on Okinawa, on a military base in Japan when Kent State happens and was like very pro the Vietnam War, and he was fucking furious about Kent State because like like like

that was the thing that Kent State lost. Even like a lot of like pretty conservative milit because they were like, you know that, that's not what the militaries for. We're not supposed to shoot kids with signs on college campuses. Um. Like, people get real pissed at law enforcement in this period

of time. Uh. And in nineteen sixty eight, in order to address the collapsing faith in law enforcement nationwide, the US Congress passes the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which, among other things, pumped a shipload of federal dollars into what Dr Gary Potter, who you'll remember from other episodes, we've talked about calls rather cosmetic police community relations programs, which were mostly media focused attempts to improve the police image.

So this is when you start getting like really advanced public affairs departments and police departments hiring pr agencies to help them reform their image. And a lot of the effort in reforming police images was still landed on Hollywood. And of course in this period, Dragnet gets brought back for another three seasons, running from nineteen sixty seven to

nineteen seventy. And the years that Dragnet comes back is not There's no coincidence there, right, Yeah, So propaganda did not protect the police from the economic downturns of the nineteen seventies, and cities nationwide started making massive cuts to police and other municipal workers just because the economy fell apart.

And you know, part of this isn't a show about the economy, but a big part of what happens is like the US had started exporting a lot of manufacturing jobs, had been like this is like the first This is when we start to see the hollowing out of this middle class and of like these good union jobs that had persisted for decades since the end of the war

and the seventy is this all falls to ship. Um, you start getting eaten alive economically by like Japan and other countries, and it's it's you know, this is when like services start to be cut nationwide, and one of the services that gets cut is policing. Um out of necessity of services. Yeah you know what services won't be cut? Yeah that was good. You know, who doesn't hollow out

the American middle class? Actually who hollows out there will? Yeah? Yeah, there we go, brod services, We're back, so um police departments in this period, you know, budgets get cut, municipal workers get cut, and a lot of the blame, like as these cities who in a lot of cases like their budgets got fucked not just because the economy was bad because of like massive corruption, but they blame it

on union workers. And of course police are some of the union workers in this period, so they get some big gass cuts and out of necessity because their budgets are being trimmed. UM police departments nationwide embark on a process called tailorization, which is tailorization had doesn't just happen to the police. It's like a scientific optimization of of of of of an organization, right, it's attempting to cut

manpower and reduce costs without cutting efficiency. UM officers started going from two cop to one cop per patrol car nine on one lines, and computers became more widespread and put control of the police UH is centralized more so police administrators gain more power. Civilian employees are also brought in to do jobs that had been done by police employees in order to reduce the number of highly paid

union workers. So this is tailorization. And while all this is happening inside the US, the Cold War is also happening outside of the US, so inside the country professionalism is kind of like the professional model of police are still dominant, and they're also like that becomes even more powerful an ideas as the number of police are cut and they have to get more efficient to try to do the same work. So that's what's happening in the US.

Outside the US, though, international policing is having something very different happened to it. And this is as a result of the Cold War. So as the Cold War really starts to kick off, our government finds itself trying to prop up friendly states all around the world, you know, anti communist states, particularly in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and we go, Yeah, this proved problematic because a lot of these regimes were corrupt in brutal, and people didn't

really like living underneath them. And as a rule, our government responded to that by pouring money into training foreign police to murder dissidents, because that works a lot better than training the army in a lot of cases. Um. So, from nineteen sixty two to nineteen seventy four, the US government operated the Office of Public Safety, an agency that worked closely with the CIA to train police and nations racked by conflict due to the Cold war. These nations

included South Vietnam, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. Tens of thousands of people were tortured or killed by various police departments, who received over two million dollars in US aid for firearm and equipment. And I'm gonna quote now from an article in the Age before you get there. There's there's one that's off the papers, which I know you haven't done an episode on, but like there's there's the Nicaragua one that both they wasn't supposed to be

spending money on, which is the B line. Y'all. Look, look, I'm excited, but I don't want to remove I don't want to ruin the reveal. But what he taught about right now leads directly to the crack attack and the war on drugs. But yeah, and I hope we're gonna get to that. No, we're not not nearly, because I I I don't want to half asked that one, like, because there's there's so much. Yeah, well we will, we

will do. We will get into that, we'll dip in because because it's all tied in, it's the beginning of it. Even this like pr stuff I grew up with the DARE program, you know, the drug abuse what a what A car pulled up with the sirens at my elementary school to try to convince me that this cop is cool. You don't say it, yeah, but yeah. Anyway, we were paying for wars and we got paid in crack. Yeah yeah.

So um yeah. The CIA and you know, the US government starts training cops and all of these countries to suppress uh, you know, primarily left wing like political movements. And I'm gonna quote now from an article in the Asia Pacific Journal by scholar Jeremy Kazmarov, who's like one of the top like people studying this particular phenomenon. Quote.

During the mid nineteen sixties, the director of United States Agency of International Development USA David Bell, commented in congressional testimony that the police are the most sensitive point of contact between the government and people close to the focal points of unrest, and more acceptable than the army as keepers of order over long periods of time. The police are frequently better trained and equipped than the military to

deal with minor forms of violence, conspiracy, and subversion. Robert W. U Comber, who served as the National Security Council Advisor to President John F. Kennedy further stress that the police were more valuable than special forces and our global counter insurgency efforts, and particularly useful in fighting urban insurrections. We get more from the police in terms of preventative medicine

than from any single U S program, he said. They are cost effective while not going for fancy military hardware. They provide the first line of defense against demonstrations, riots, and local insurrections. Only when the situation gets out of hand, as in South Vietnam, does the military have to be

called in. So again, that's that's the police. The police are especially as Vietnam goes badly in other countries, we increasingly see if you if you train the police to stop this ship before there's a strong left wing movement, you don't have a Vietnam which you then lose. Right, That's that's what yeah, So that's internationally what the US is doing to other police agencies, as our police agencies, you know, pull back from the militarization of the twenties

and thirties and towards professionalism. We we push militarization in a lot of ways outside of the United States, some Americans were involved in training more than a million foreign police officers during this time. Now, many of those cops did fail in their duties, which is part of why South Vietnam is no longer a country and why Iran does not have a shot anymore. Um, but the suppression tactics taught by US police educators were successful in many

other nations. Like, it does not always fail. We are not always bad at training these people to brutally stop left wing uprising. It works a lot of the time. And when the office is they're like, oh wait, real quick, this is like the perfect time to like take like a take a take a slice from like the hood politics way a way of thinking things, thinking of things because sometimes like using these terms can they're so lofty and big if you don't know history or military politics,

like it's hard to understand them. It's this moment in history is so like it's so simple because it's just eighth grade. So like you, you're you and this you and this other boy or girl are beefing, but y'all never actually fight. You just keep bringing other kids around the fight. So by and I'm proving my side of the playground is better because this kid from who I propped up and trained and gave a rock through at another kid who's got a rock that's on your side

of the playground. And that's proven that I'm hard. But it's really they fighting a fight that me and you are supposed to fight. But we got sense enough to know we've probably been I fight this fight, so I'm gonna let you fight it. Really, that's the Cold War is you're you're going, I'm gonna go get my little homeboy to funk up yo, little homeboy. That's that's that's

the Cold War. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, um so yeah, uh so yeah, we we we have we we spend fucking a decade or more training all these foreign police agencies to act as yeah, counter insurgery. Yeah, our little homeboys to act as counterinsurgency forces. Uh And when the Office for Public Safety closes in nineteen seventy four, these police trainers needed still needed work. Like these guys who'd spent more than a decade training foreign cops, and they

find more work. And it's inside of the United States. It's this time alex fatality rights in the end of policing quote. Many of the trainers moved in large numbers into law enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Agency FBI and numerous local and state police forces, bringing with them a more militarized vision of policing steeped in Cold War imperatives of suppressing social movements through counter intelligence, militarized riot suppression techniques,

and heavy handed crime control. Now in the middle of this period, like right before that office closes, really like in nineteen seventy one, so a couple of years before, we stopped training the police, you know, foreign police in this kind of organized way. Uh, not that we stop entirely, but like the way we had been, you know, we're even less of it. A night teen seventy one, Richard

Millhouse Nixon declared drug abuse public Enemy number one. Soon after that declaration, US press began to discuss a new war on drugs. Now, this war was launched just as the US war in Vietnam started to finally end, and spoilers, it wasn't any more successful. Nixon's goal, though, had never actually been to stop drug use. He started the war on drugs because he wanted to win the support of

southern white voters who had gone Democratic for generations. These people were furious about segregation, and they were pushing back at the success of desegregation. Um, they considered civil rights marchers to have been just looters and rioters. But the

week LBJ administration had failed to murder these people. Professor in legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains quote posters and political strategists that found that thinly veiled promises to get tough on them, a group suddenly not so defined by race, was enormously successful in persuading poor and working class whites did effect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and joined

the Republican Party in droves. Ultimately, this backlash against the civil rights movement was occurring at precisely the same moment that there was economic collapse in communities of color, inner city communities across America. And of course, again we're talking about the seventies. We're going at a period where the economy contracts massively and it hits black inner city communities worse than anyone else. Um. And what is the number

one predictor of crime, particularly property crime. It's poverty. So yeah, and and we're there's even like a a tie to that moment now of how changing the language from we just hate black people too. We're having a war on drugs. Um, we're the fact that we call weed marijuana. It's just it's just the Spanish word for cannabis. But that's marketing because you because if we already hate Mexicans as a nation and you use this drug and you just refer to it by Spanish name, now it seems more evil.

It was just it was a racist marketing that we call cannabis marijuana. Just and that's Nixon. I just want John note Nixon did debt anyway. Yeah, yeah, um so yeah.

The backlash against the success of the civil rights movement reaches its height kind of just as unemployment in the inner city peaks and the consequences of the industrialization and globalization hit the US economy, so crime sores and suddenly a shipload of people find themselves impoverished and desperate without options, and the war on drugs gives the government a way to take huge numbers of these people, primarily these black and brown people, off the street and satisfy white voters

that they're doing something about crime. Now, drug use was actually falling when Nixon made his announcement, and it had been falling for years. Drug abuse but blaming drugs rather than unregulated capitalism, hollowing out the American middle class, and exchange for corporate profits worked a lot better from a messaging standpoint for the Republican president in nineteen yeah, exactly.

In nineteen eight two, Ronald Reagan doubled down declaring an official war on drugs, even though only three percent of Americans at the time considered drug abuse to be the nation's most pressing issue. Since the existing tailorized US police were ill equipped to fight a war, President Reagan had to start pouring tens of millions of dollars of federal funds into turning law enforcement into an army. Now, the

broad trend, so this occurs. Reagan starts pumping all this money in as these these guys who had been these US guys who have been training foreign military forces over seas start coming back to the country and training cops. So there's a number of things kind of happening at the same time that lead to and are are a

part of police militarization. Um. Now, the broad trend that occurs throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties as a result of all this is that US police nationwide turn away from the professional model and towards a military model, not a different in a military model pretty similar to the one that General Butler proposed to defeat Bootleg in Philadelphia. UM. This process was not smooth or uniform, and it was

not all due to the War on drugs. The Watts Rebellion of nineteen sixty five was a major inciting incident for the militarization of US police. And the short story, the almost criminally short story of the Watts Rebellion is this, a black motorist was was pulled over, um and like there was a confrontation began with the police. Conmmunity members confronted the cops as like this guy was getting arrested,

and a fight ensued. Um one of the cops I injured a pregnant woman, or at least people in the crowd believed that a cop had injured a pregnant woman and kind of rage over this whole incident boils over and like acts as a match stick. So like obviously the l A p d had been hideously racist for a long time. One of the things that happens when Jim crow Win's is that the police chief of l A starts deliberately courting Southern police officers who are like,

this is history. Yeah, if you're if you're pissed about Jim Crow ending, come to Los Angeles, will let you beat the ship out of black people making this stuff up. I couldn't. I thought we brought this up before and one of the older episodes we didn't get into it, or we didn't get into it though. Yeah, did I tell you all my watch riot story? No? No, no, please do. This is a good time for it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good time for it. So it was during

the La Riots. Is how my story starts. Um, my grandmother, you know l A Rites was you know Florence and Normandy. Right. Grandmother lived off Florence Engage, so it's just a few more blocks to the east. Um, my father calls my grandmother and she said, and he says, like, hey, why don't you come stay with us? We were living like maybe a fifteen minutes east, right, So he says, why don't you come stay with us? You're out of like the hotspot of South Central. And my grandmother says, if

I'm lying, I'm flying. She says, baby, unless there's tanks coming down this street. I ain't going nowhere this house and I and I went my Grandma's a gangster. That's the hardest thing I ever heard in my life. Right, and then but my parents looked at each other and I was like, tanks, she's hard they go. She lived in the Watts Riots, and like history came alive. There's like, yo, she she lived through the Wats Riots. That's what she's

referring to. Tanks came down our streets. I was like, oh, because I thought the La Riots was the end of the world, you know what I'm saying, Like, you know, I'm a preteen during its time, so I was like, this is the end of the world. Grandma was like, no, baby, tanks come down these streets anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And that's

like the Watts Riot is is fucking wild. Um So, like there's a ton of anger, uh and like black and Hispanic communities towards the l A p D. An other thing that's happening is like the lap is also separately, but but at the same time horrifically suppressing the the Chicano Liberation movement, which is like the like Mexicans and Latinos in l a UM and like at one point murders a journalist who's like drinking at a bar by shooting him in the back of the head with a

tear gas grenade. Hunter Thompson actually one of his best pieces of investigative journalism about all of that, and in fact, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Yeah, oh yeah, shit, yeah, happened in my neighborhood. I live in Boile Heights, like ship, Oh yeah, that happened neighborhood. Yeah yeah, Ruben Salazar and like so if you like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, like the funny, silly Hunter Thompson movie, we all know

the actual genesis of that. The real thing that happened that he was actually writing about was one of the leaders at the Chicano Liberation movement was this guy Oscar at Costa, who was Hunter's lawyer, and he like the reason that he and Hunter Thompson drove to Las Vegas is that they needed to have a conversation about what the l a p d Was doing to murder Hispanic

activists in Los Angeles. And the only place that wouldn't be bugged would be a fucking a convertible car with the top down driving through the desert in New Mexico or not New Mexico, and uh yeah, you know, you know what I'm talking about. Like that's that's what fear and loathing is. Is like this is all tied up in this so like all of this ship fucking explodes um into into anger at the or like into the

Watts riots in in nineteen sixty five. And like the stuff that happened with Ruben Salazar and stuff was like five years after this, but like all of these this like racism and stuff is still happening. So like the this fight winds up just kind of for whatever reason, being the thing that ignites all of the anger in in this part of Los Angeles, and it's the Watts riots is what most history text will call it. The Uprising is another thing you'll hear that I think is

probably more accurate. And the uprising included a shipload of angry black folks breaking into gun stores, um, getting guns and then sniping at l A p D officers. This is a thing that happens, and it the cops flip the funk out about it. Um, the police chief gets on television and compares what's happening and Watts to what the insurgency in Vietnam. He compares the rioters to the Viet Cong, and he states that a paramilitary response is

the only thing possible. The Governor Pat Brown announces that the l a p d was quote dealing with guerillas fighting with gangsters. Um, the National Guard are called in

and the uprising was brutally suppressed. And you know, generally when you hear because this is a key movement in the militarization of police, and generally when it's talked about, you will hear about like the person writing about it will pivot from like rioters looting guns and sniping at the l a p d h to like the National Guard coming in to kind of make the case that the l a p d was just overwhelmed by armed citizens. This is not what happened. Um. Only three sworn personnel

were killed during the Watts riots. One was an l A firefighter who died in a structure fire, one was that Los Angeles Sheriff's deputy who was shot by another deputy when that deputy accidentally fired his shotgun and during a clash with rioters. And another was another Los Angeles police officer who was shot by another one of his fellow cops accidentally during a fight with rioters. No Los

Angeles police were killed by by rioters with guns. Um Meanwhile, the l a p D killed twenty three, mostly black people during the Watts Riots. The National Guard killed seven. Um. So again, the image of the Watts Riots is that like these writers, which is so heavily armed that like it inspired the militarization of police because cops needed more weapons and tactical teams in order to deal with such threats. The reality is that like the fucking no no, no

no cops even got killed by by rioters. Like it's it's definitely accurate to say that like the l A Police had been like more uh more militant, I think than other police departments, but not like, not like a tactical way, just in a way of seeing themselves as fighting. They saw themselves as fighting and is fighting a war against the non white population of the city that was

the l A p D in this period. Yeah, there there's this idea of like returning to the America they remember, yeah yeah, and the Watts riots kind of scare cops around the country into all adopting a lot more paramility Harry tactics in order to defend themselves from the people they're supposed to be protecting. Now, the Watts riots are like one of the one of two things that will be generally cited as the justification behind the creation of the very first SWAT teams, which you know means special

weapons and tactics. Another major inciting incident for the creation of the SWAT teams was the nineteen sixty six U T. Austin clock tower sniper Charles Whitman, who killed sixteen people um. The basic idea was that police were easily overwhelmed by snipers and other dangerous criminals. Like cops just couldn't handle these threats, and so specialized warrior cops were necessary to

handle these incidents. So SWAT teams took off as a concept in the late nineteen sixties, and before long every department in America was fighting to get a SWAT team of their own, whether or not they needed one. Today, the vast majority of police agencies serving populations of fifty thousand or more in the United States have some form

of SWAT team. Nationwide, SWAT teams are deployed tens of thousands of times per year and since these teams were formed and exist to handle ex extraordinary situations of exceptional danger, you might picture these tens of thousands of SWAT raids as like pulse pounding gunfights against really dangerous people. And if that, yeah, if if that's the picture in your head, you are wrong. Most states very deliberately do not provide

US with statistics for their SWAT deployments. Maryland is one of two that does, and in Maryland, of SWAT raids are just for serving search warrants. Half of those warrants are for non violent drug crimes, and one third of those raids result in no arrests, So a third of the time when SWAT teams go out, they don't even get to arrest anybody. Now, almost all of the SWAT

raids in Maryland at least are for drug crimes. Utah is the only other state that requires police agencies to report on SWAT deployment, and the first batch of numbers that they released in two thousand thirteen showed that eighty three percent of their SWAT deployments were serving search warrants for drug crimes. Less than five percent of deployments were too violent crimes. In process A K a the sort

of thing swat teams were formed to deal with. Just three of the states reported five and fifty nine raids. Half a percent turned up illegal firearms. Now half I bring all this half a percent. Yeah, I bring all this up because when I talk about the possibility of police abolition with people, one of the first things they will generally bring up is, like, who will protect us from all of like the violent madmen. They're pictually like cartel guys and stuff gangsters. And of course those people

do exist. There's very dangerous criminals in this country who are heavily armed. That that's that's that is a thing that exists, but it is not the scale of problem that you think it is. Um and like it's also people will talk about, like, who's protect us from mass shooters? And I would ask, can anyone listening to this podcast name a mass shooter who's been stopped by a squat team.

I'm gonna guess not that it hasn't happened. If you did, you can find a couple of cases where swat teams stopped a shooting in progress that can be defined as a mass shooting. But you have to really rack your brain to think of a situation where it did happen, or to think of a situation where the cops successfully stopped a mass shooting, as opposed to like what happened during the Parkland shooting where the officer I think drove

his car into a ditch. Like yeah, like they're not good at this, or you can't think about the Virginia Tech shooting. We're swat teams were posted up outside the buildings, but we're scared to enter while the shooter was killing people, um, get it? Or or even saying this if like big drug cartels, these drug bosses are like such a problem, I would ask that person, Hey, do you know any do you know any drug drug cartel bosses? Okay, you

never met one? All right? Word, do you know anybody that's like stolen some soda out of a out of a liquor store. Yeah, we know a lot of those. So what I'm saying is maybe you you're saying this is a big problem, but you don't know nobody that had done that, But we ought installed something out of a out of a liquor store, So maybe there's more problems there, and maybe you don't need to be specially

trained for that. Yeah, maybe we can solve people jack and shipped from liquor stores to the extent that that's a problem without Yes, machine guns, maybe snipers are necessary for this. Yeah. I walked into the room. I walked into the room. Uh, and my daughter was with a hammer and a shoe, and I was like, the hell are you doing. She's standing on one side of the room. The other side of the room was a daddy long leg just a spider. And I'm like, what you got

a hammer for? And she's like, I gotta kill this spider. M hmm. And I have a deep distrust for anything with eight legs or six legs. I get it. But a hammer, baby, Harry yesterday, the swiffer is fine. Don't so when you put a hole on this wall, I mean, I'm gonna be honest with you, prob I have my Air fifteen right here next to the table in case I see a spider, which you know there's a lot of Yeah, that's an issue. Yeah, yeah, that's what That's what the police say. Um that that is also what

my neighbors say. You know what is Yeah, yeah, what the police say is accurate. That's exactly what you mean. Find me to show you the spider bite that I got that sent me to the hospital. Next the hammer day. Okay, that's different. Let's talk about speaking of hammers, because I actually have a number of hammer analogies coming up here.

So um yeah yeah. So again, the point of all these statistics, to the extent that we have them, is that it really looks like swat teams are actually kind of ship at fighting, the one kind of crime that

expired their existence in the first place. Because again, you actually have an easier time finding cases of people with concealed handguns stopping shootings than you will swat team stopping shootings like mass shootings in progress, like our traditional like, and that doesn't happen often either, Like you Usually, mass shooters get to do whatever they're gonna do and then shoot themselves or whatever turn themselves in like they generally

don't get stopped. Um, but you you will. You'll have trouble finding swat teams taking out these guys because it's usually over it before they can scramble um now. Well, which is not to say that there's no place for them, because I think any society as large as ours, you're gonna need to have some rapid response units, but we're not using them for that, and there's way too many

of them now. While state data on SWAT deployments is lacking, I did find a fascinating report by two researchers, David Klinger and Jeff Rojack, using funds provided by the Department of Justice. In two thousand eight, they analyzed thousands of SWAT raids nationwide, and what they found was fascinating. Out of tens of thousands of deployments they analyzed, SWAT officers only fired their weapons in three hundred and forty two incidents.

Those officers shot two hundred citizens, killing one hundred and thirty nine of them. In seventy of these shootings, fewer than ten rounds were used. Now, this suggests that military grade weaponry may not be neces sary for SWAT teams, since again, you don't need it. Yeah, they're not getting into gunfights. They sometimes they shoot people, but like and a lot of the time those a lot of those guys who died were wounded by SWAT and then killed themselves. Um, yeah,

it's it's yeah. Meanwhile, during this same span of time, SWAT officers had thirty nine accidental discharges, so shot two hundred citizens and accidentally fired their own weapons thirty nine times. This means that accidental gunfire. We're looking at three forty two um incidences where SWAT officers fired, and thirty nine of those are accidents. That's not an insignificant percentage of all SWAT weapons discharges. Like that's that's that's noteworthy. The

study authors right quote. This data indicates that something is substantially amiss with the way that at least some SWAT officers handled their weapons and strongly suggests that this problem is rooted in training. That more than one in tent of the incidents and would to those who are supposed to be the most highly trained officers in their agency fired shots involved accidental discharges is simply unacceptable in our minds.

Among the aforementioned hundred thirty nine citizens who died after being struck by SWAT gunfire were two who fatally shot themselves after being hit by SWAT bullets. In addition to these two, we have firm data that three d seventy nine other individuals killed themselves in situations in which they

were not shot by SWAT officers. It is thus clear that in the current data that it is more likely citizen will take their own lives during SWAT operations than be killed by SWAT officers by a margin of more than two point five to one point five. Finally, the data indicate that nearly one in four citizens struck by SWAT gunfire wished to be shot, as respondents classified their actions as indicating they wish to commit suicide by cop.

If respondents classifications are correct, this indicates that an even higher portion of the citizen deaths and SWAT operations involved individuals who wished to die. Thatt cent of the SWAT officers struck by gunfire and the current day were shot by fellow officers. Suggests that while the most substantial threat officers face comes from armed suspects, the prospect of fratricide looms large and tactical operations. So you're more likely to

get shot by your homeboy. Not more likely, but pretty likely. Yeah, about when when SWAT officers are shot. More than one intent of SWAT cops who get shot are shot by their own guys, and one in ten times when SWAT officers shoot, they're shooting negligently without meaning to fire. So again the whole elite SWAT team thing. There are some well trained SWAT teams out there. It's also real fucking easy to to just give guys military grade weaponry, call

him a SWAT team, and then they funk up. But more than anything, SWAT teams don't get into a lot of serious gunfights on a nationwide level. Um, and most of the people they encounter who are seriously armed like our fucking want to kill themselves. Yeah, they to die, which is maybe suggests that a SWAT team isn't the thing to bring to that person. They shouldn't go. Yeah, maybe just a dude who's a good therapist having a conversation would have better odds of resolving this without gunfire.

Better chance. Yeah yeah, yeah. So the conclusions here are pretty clear. Number one, swat teams virtually never do these sort of work there portrayed doing in movies and tv I directly engaging dangerous bad guys. And number two, swat teams kind of suck at their job regularly shooting people and each other by accident. And perhaps no story illustrates the second point better than the case of Wanas Thnava. Uh now, good job, man, Yeah, I'm doing my best.

Heere and on Wanas sold a small amount of methamphetamine UH to a confidential informant um or bought a yea so sold a small amount of methamphetamine too a confidential informant um. Several hours later, on the morning of the seven man swat team from the Cornelia, Georgia Police Department carried out a raid on wannass home. Now. Because Wanas had a previous weapons charge on his record, officers were

given a no knock warrant. They broke through Wannas's door with a battering ram and as they were pushing the door in, they noticed there was resistance behind the door and this led that what the officers in the swat team to believe that they're like someone had barricaded the door, so they tossed a flash bang in. Now, it turned out that the thing that had actually been against the door was the playpen where wannass nineteen month old child

was sleeping. UH. The flash bang ignited the nineteen month old child, burning it badly and tearing the child's face and chest open um. The kid was put into a coma and very very nearly died. The swat and was you know, suffered permanent injury as a result of the police flash bang igniting it. The swat team found only a small amount of meth residue in the home and no wet weapons. No arrests were made. When the Bonus EVA sued, a local prosecutor threatened to charge them for

their child's in reese. In the end, no officers were indicted for horrifically maiming a small child. I found one CNN article that interviewed the sheriff in charge of the swat team, a guy named Tarrell. Quote in hindsight, Tarrell said, at the time, officers would have conducted the raid differently had they known there was a child inside the home, but there was no sign of children during the alleged

drug purchase that prompted the raid. We might have gone in through a side door, he said, We would not have used a flash bang like and defense. Yeah, that's interesting to me because it shows it it never occurs to this guy that like, maybe maybe a dude selling a small amount of meths, maybe sending in an army to funk with that guy, and that army having grenades and battering rams. Maybe that's inherently reckless in a bad way to deal with. Again, a small amount of meth

being sold. Yeah, and it's just it kind of feels like to me, like, if I'm this wat guy, I feel a little insulted. Yeah, you think I'm so incompetent. That has got to be nineteen of us with with sucking fifty cows to come get this one dude that just sold a little men imposedly most get like, you think I'm that weak that I can't just Yeah, it's it's fucking It's the problem with militarization in general, which

is that like it. It means that you're going to have a military situation if the police are going it's fucking Waco. When you start the conversation with tanks and machine guns and snipers, You're not going to end it in a good way. You're going to end it by burning seventy children alive. Because that's this is so how that works. This is so true in every area of

your life. If you're in any sort of relationship, whether it's a monogamous one or a romantic or a or a friendship or a sibling, if you come in guns ablazing, it's just not gonna work. No, this is your Yeah, this is exactly why I was able to improve a lot of my personal relationships propped when I stopped having the b A T. F Um show with tanks to support me. You know that that really was was a game changer for me. Um. I imagine, man, a lot less of my friends get burnt to death in in

basement compounds outside of Waco. Now, yeah, yeah, that's good man, because I live and learn, and because I really like the reference in here, Robert, just a Waco reference in everywhere. Hey Man, talk about talk about Waco. Talk about a rebranding. Boy has gotten Yeah, yeah, I mean it was now the Home and Garden TV Network. That's we have some sort of oversized initial letter in your room and uh,

a refurbished wood panel. We have a farmhouse store and a farmhouse sink and yeah, and you admire Joanna Gaines there it is build an empire. She built it. She built an empire out of a city that was known for burning seventy babies. Well, I don't understand most of what we're talking about here, but you know what I do understand is that we're gonna we're gonna talk about another kind of Waco type thing where a bunch of children get burned by militarized police. At the end of this,

that's gonna be fun. Um all right, fun is the wrong word anyway, So like the the the again, like the point here is that like the worst case scenario of like what happened with Wantas and his family without the police is that like, oh, these parents might be selling small amounts of meth amphetamine and that maybe isn't great for a kid, and that this is a problem that does need a solution to it. Um. But the solution that they got a grenade burning their child alive.

It was worse than probably anything that would have happened if they'd just been left selling math right, like or just or take fifteen minutes more to do just a little bit of investigation on the guy and be like, oh he's a parent, Yeah, it's it's it's always that like with way Go, like there was there was a problem, David Koresh was doing some fucked up ship. You could have just arrested him and not burned like those kids, whatever they were going through under Koresh, getting burnt alive

was worse for them. Absolutely. The police made it worse. And it's because militarized police are a hammer and we've got a hammer. Every single problem looks like a nail, and like, if that hammer is a hammer in the hands of a cop, it's specifically going to be used to hammer the faces of black people. Um, because that's how cops work. As we've previously discussed, I've had a two thousand eighteen study published by the National Academy of Sciences.

It uses a geo coded census of SWAT team deployments in Maryland and shows that quote, militarized police units are more often deployed in communities with large shares of African American residents, even after controlling for local crime rates. Further, using nationwide panel data on local police militarization, I demonstrate that militarized policing fails to enhance officers safety or reduce

local crime. So after controlling for variables like local crime rates, the author of the study calculated that for every ten percent increase in the black population of a zip code, there is a ten percent increase in the likelihood of that zip code experiencing a SWAT raid now and again. He also showed that swat raids and SWAT teams don't reduce violent crime, so they're they're they're kind of what

you're seeing here. Sure looks like they're just being used vindictively against black people, you know, whether or not there's intention behind it. That's how the data really looks now. Yeah. Yeah. A Washington Post write up of the research notes telling Lee Uh he found no statistically significant change in the killings of police officers, which were too infrequent to measure,

or assaults on police officers. So again, part of the justification of SWAT teams is that, like, police are in so much danger that we need special, heavily armored police. And it's like, actually, when SWAT teams are used all the time, cops still get killed with the same right, it has no impact. Yeah, so SWAT raids also get just so many dogs killed. My so so many dogs getting killed by fucking swat teams. If you want to know what swat teams love to you most, it's it's

shoots some goddamn dogs. Um, it's impossible to to separate the number of dogs killed by swat from the number of dogs killed by regular cops serving the same kinds of search warrants, because again, regular cops regularly serve the exact same kind of search warrants swat cops serve, which maybe suggests that why do we have swat teams? If yea also but yeah, um either way, a shipload of fucking dogs get killed when police serve warrants, and a lot of those warrants are served tens of thousands of

them are served by swat teams. Um. We will never know how many dogs get killed exactly um by police in this country. But in two thousands sixteen, one Justice Department expert called the police shooting of dogs and epidemic. It is estimated that cops shoot twenty five dogs in this country every single day, and some estimates range as high as five hundred dogs per day. It is very likely that police use their guns to shoot dogs more than they use their guns for any other purpose nationwide.

Why because they fucking I mean, you know, I've actually talked to some cops about this, um and including I talked to a cop who had to who was in a justified shoot of a dog, a dog that like maimed her to the point that her life has never been the same since. Like, obviously the dog is tearing

you apart. Yeah, you're gonna shoot that dog. Um, Like I've talked to some police about this and like one theorious why it happens so much without like there are some justife, like a lot of like sometimes fucking people who have dog fighting rings get rated and like, yeah, yeah, you're gonna shoot some of those dogs because they're just like they've been broken and they're dangerous. Um. But also a lot of cops are terrified of dogs. And if

cops are terrified, they get to shoot UM. So even in situations where there's no life exactly a lot of the time, probably most of the time, there's no justification for the animals. That's that's that's yeah, yeah, and one out of fight training makes you scared, and that's what I want to get into. The training makes you scared.

And in one out of five of these incidents of a police dog shootings, a child was either in the direct line of fire or standing nearby, and one horrifying to Thus, in fifteen case, a four year old girl was shot in the leg by a police officer who was trying to shoot her dog. UM. And this dog

was not threatening this police officer necessarily UM. Thus the officer felt threatened, like he felt like he might get bit, and even fear of a minor injury um is enough to make an officer completely immune to any consequences for shooting a dog. Meanwhile, I should note people who kill police dogs regularly face longer sentences than child molest us. You'll go away for life if you shoot a police dog. Um.

But police can imagine. Yeah, can you imagine having the right to slap the ship out of somebody because you think they might slap you. Yeah, it's pretty pretty crazy, pretty bad. So this may seem like it's getting a little bit off the topic of police militarization, but it really is not. A lot of times when liberals talk about reforming police, they discussed the need for more police training,

but police actually go through a shipload of training. Like there's there's a bunch of billboards or like placards them going in a protest that like talked about how much less cops training cops need than like hairstylists, And that's true, but that's true for how much cops training. Cops need to get on the street. They take a lot of training after becoming cops, and a lot of that training makes them more dangerous as cops. Um. And this is part of the problem we talk about like needing to

train police more. Over the last twenty years, police training has become increasingly paramilitary, with military veterans like Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman and companies like Close Quarters Battle CQB providing training that deliberately bills itself as military style and refers to officers as warriors, all while convincing them that they are in more danger than cops have ever faced. From

the end of policing. Quote Sef Stoughton, a former police officer turned law professors, shows how officers are repeatedly exposed to scenarios in which seemingly innocuous interactions with the public, such as traffic stops, turned deadly. The endlessly repeated point is that any encounter can turn deadly in a split second. Of officers don't remain ready to use lethal force at any moment. So take the case of John Crawford, an African American man shot to death by a police officer

in Walmart and Ohio. Crawford had picked up an air gun off the shelf and was carrying it around the store while shopping. Another shopper called nine one one to report a man with a gun in the store. The stores video camera shows that one of the responding officers shot without warning while Crawford was talking on the phone. In Ohio, it is legal to carry a gun openly, but the officer had been trained to use deadly force

upon seeing a gun. Similarly, in South Carolina, a state trooper drove up to a young man in his car at a gas station and asked him for his driver's license. He leaned into the car to comply, and the officers shot him without warning. See Unexpected movement shoot. This is again what you get with more police training. This is what I'm saying, The training makes you scared. Yes, yeah, more training is not the solution because this is what

the training does. Yeah, you could argue maybe different training is the solution, but you also still have tens of thousands of cops who already have this ship in their heads. What do you do with them? If they're still on the force, how do you how do you cleanse that from them? Are you confident you can? Now? Modern police US cops are equipped with military grid weaponry, but not with military grade training. They're told that their own safety is their number one concern and anything they do to

protect themselves is justified. We have essentially raised and equipped a military, told them that they are at war every day with the people of this country, and then sent them out to the streets with a license to kill if they feel scared for any reason. And this is not a simple right versus left issue. After Democrat Michael Ducacus was defeated in nineteen eighty eight for being soft on crime via a super racist ad, Democrats pivoted to Yeah,

the Willie Horton ad. Democrats pivoted to endorsing right wing law and order politics. Bill Clinton's nine Crime Bill added tens of thousands of police nationwide and expanded the drug war, And in fact, it wasn't until Clinton's second term that widespread police militarization was even made stable. In nineteen ninety seven, a bunch of heavily armed and armored gunmen try to rob some businesses and get into a big gunfight with

Los Angeles cops. Is the North Hollywood shoot out? Um? Yeah, police side arms were incapable of piercing their armor, and cops had to borrow high caliber rifles from a nearby gun store. When the National Defense Authorization Act was passed later that year, it included the ten thirty three Program, a provision that allowed law enforcement agencies to acquire military hardware.

Between nineteen ninety seven and two thousand fourteen, five point one billion dollars in material was transferred from the Department of Defense to local law enforcement. Now near the end of his time in office, President Obama attempted to belatedly halt this massive transfer of military armaments to police, but President Trump reversed that and accelerated the transfer of military weapons to cops. And this is why in a ten year period, forty nine m wraps mine resistant patrol vehicles

were handed out to police departments in Florida alone. Many of these went to lightly populated rural counties like Baker population seven thousand. In Ohio, the Department of Natural Resources received two hundred and forty fully automatic rifles. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department got seven hundred and sixty eight fully automatic rifles. By the way, I found all of this in a Forbes breakdown, which notes that US cops also received more than six thousand bayonets between two thousand

six and two thousand seventeen. What do you need six like our millets? Our soldiers don't even fucking use bayonets anymore because they're useless and modern. They weren't even that useful when bayonets were actually used in combat. Um So, remember the study that showed SWAT teams were more likely to be deployed in black neighborhoods. Well, it also found that quote seeing militarized police and news reports made diminish

police reputation in the mass public. And this is you know there's that news story about like the the l A school police having an m wrap. These are the tanks, Like they're not really tanks, but they're huge armored trucks.

And I have a story about huge armored trucks prop because when I was in Moses, most of the people I was inbedded with were the Iraqi me and they mostly drove a mix of like technicals which are just like Toyota trucks with guns in the bed uh and old U s military hum vs. They didn't have a whole lot of heavy military vehicles. The only time you saw US police in the places, or the US cops

or not cops. Sorry. The only time you say US soldiers in the places where I was was when they were rolling around in em wraps and usually be a patrol of like three of these gigantic I can't exaggerate

how fucking big an im wrap looks there. They are nightmarishly large vehicles, and they look like The first time I remember seeing one is I'm on the out, like maybe a quarter of a mile back from the front line, and I'm like literally sitting and smoking a cigarette with um my photographer and some friends on a pile of rubble, like listening to a gunfight occur in the distance, and there's like little kids running around and stuff, trying to

sell us things and whatnot. Like we all stopped for a second as this US patrol rolls by, and these three giant m wraps, And the first thing I think of when I see them up close and personal for the first time is like, these look like a T eighties. That's what these are is these are these are the These are the fucking Imperial Stormtroopers T eight You can't see the human beings inside, you can't see people. It is just this. It's this, this physical manifestation of the

violent power of the state. That's what it felt like. And that's what I could see. These little Iraqi kids on the ground, like we're seeing that that was what a U. S. Soldier was to them, was like was was a fucking machine. And that's what seeing these in the hands of cops makes you think about cops, Like police want to wonder, like why people don't like them

or expect them anymore. It's because we see you as pieces of an armed machine and nobody likes Yeah, you rolled up like the Sith Lord, like you look like you look like Darth Vader, like you you know what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, you look like stormtroopers. We don't like stormtroopers. No, they're not the good guys. Yeah. Now, I could go on and on about like the insane weaponry cops are given these days, and I could list

repeated anecdotes about how often they badly misuse it. But I think the most important point to end on for this episode and for this series is how fucking much we spend on militarized police for how fucking little we get. The Minneapolis Police Department takes up thirty five percent of the city's general fund, The Chicago p D are thirty seven percent of their city's budget. Atlanta and Detroit police come in and about thirty percent. The l A p

D is a quarter of Los Angeles's budget. Many cities spend up to of their municipal budgets on their police department, making the basically making like a lot of cities in the US are basically like small armies with towns attached to them. Up until the nineteen eighties, the U. S Government spent about as much money on criminal justice as we did on cash welfare, on like welfare programs that deliberately,

like directly hand out like aid to people um. Up until the nineteen eighties, Yeah, about equal what we spent on law enforcement we spent on welfare. In the decades since, welfare spending has declined and police funding has word, Today we spend more than twice as much money on law and order as we do on social welfare, and we get very little for our money. For all the weapons really buy our cops, the vast majority of police officers will never fire a weapon in the line of duty.

For all that police not once, not once. For all that police advocates talk about dangerous criminals, most police officers make no more than one felony arrest per year. And when it comes to the question of how good police are it actually solving crimes. About forty percent of murders go unsolved, only about fifty three percent of aggravated assaults are solved, less than thirty percent of robberies are solved,

and only about of automobile thefts are solved. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports says that thirty percent of rapes are solved, but that number doesn't really tell the whole story. And I'm gonna quote from the Guardian for this one because again, this is like the reason I bring this up is that, like that's one of the number one things. Like people who will argue about like police abolition, other folks will say, like, well, who are you gonna call if you're getting raped? Let's

talk about how good police do in solving rapes. Not only that, I hear the argument like, no, they need more money, they are underfunded, and I'm like, actually they're more funded than every other program. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, significantly more. I'm gonna quote from the Guardian for this one quote. The fact is that the police never investigate most sexual violence because most sexual violence goes and reported.

According to the Rape and Incest National Network or RAIN, a little less than twenty of sexual assaults are reported to police, significantly less than other violent crimes. The reasons are myriad, but an often cited one is a distrust and fear of the police, which obviously is increased by militarization. One survey of sexual assault survivors found that of those who chose not to report, fiftcent feared that the police

could not or would not do anything to help. An additional seven percent did not want to expose their attacker to the police. A two thousand eighteen study of the Austin, Texas Police Department found that officers tasked with investigating sexual assaults could not read lab reports on DNA evidence and often lacked a basic understanding of email anatomy. I have to google. I listen to fucking this, I have to

google stuff like labia MAJORA one officer sex. That guy shouldn't be investigating sex cribes, shouldn't beating sex crib ever. But but rather than paying for him to learn what evolva is, big home, he got a bayonet. Oh, I'll bet he knows how to use a machine gun. All of the parts of a machine gun. So sometimes police failures to investigate sexual violence look like the result of

not just stupidity, but of outright duplicity. One study of the New York Police Department discovered that it was knowingly under counting rapes and its public figures, using a deliberately strict definition of rape in order to shrink the number of reported cases in New York. An inquiry into the NYPD found that it's Special Victims Division to be grossly dysfunctional, with officers instructed to simply not investigate misdemeanor sexual assault cases.

First of all, the fact that that's a thing, a misdemeanor sexual assault is already a problem. Now you're not gonna investigate. Uh yeah, well, and like, this is actually kind of a pattern with the NYPD, and I assume other departments of like, so they're under counting rape and its public figures, so it seems like they solve more

rapes than they do. There was a study that came out about how often the NYPD hits when they shoot people with their firearms, right, which is something you want to know, especially since the NYPD is considered to be one of the best trained police departments in the country, and the NYPD was very proud of the fact that they had a thirty percent hit rate um in gunfights, um, which is actually, like, I mean, I'm gonna be honest with you, people very rarely hit when they are shooting

at each other in a gunfight because it's stressful. Is a lot of fucking business. It's very hard to be accurate, not to fit. But like that was their their number was, like, we hit thirty percent of the time when we just charge our weapons in like a a violent situation. But then people who analyze the NYPD data found that the NYPD was only hitting because they were including police officers

sewic sides as one shot stops. Wait, they were, they were they were goofing their own numbers by including their suicides. Is like, I mean, yeah, they're they're basically saying, like that cop took a dangerous man off the streets himself. It counts, It counts. Yeah, It's pretty pretty wild. So conservative estimates suggest that US police have two d thousand

untested rape kits in their possession nationwide. Rain's best estimate is that only about four point six percent of sexual assaults ever lead to an arrest, and less than one percent are ever referred to police by prosecutors. So if you are raped, and you refuse to talk to the cops, your odds of getting justice are more or less the same as someone who dials and nine one one right away. She's And then, of course there's the fact that cops

commit just a shipload of rape. Bowling Green State University, you know you're gonna get these I was gonna say, when you're talking about rape, I was like, they're not reporting them because they're doing it. They are doing a lot of them. Yeah. Bowling Green State University documented at least four undered in five rapes by the officers on duty between two thousand five and two thirteen. That is

an offer an average of forty five per year. They also documented six and thirty six instances of forcible fondling. These numbers are only a fraction of the real total, since most sexual assaults are never reported and most rapists have at least five victims over the course of their career. The CNN article I found about this investigation into cop rape includes one of the most horrifying lines I have

ever read. In an article, quote about half of the victims their children, researchers say Stenson, one of the researchers, has gotten accustomed to hearing his research assistants proclaimed during their work, Oh my god, it's another fourteen year old. Oh again, yeah, yeah, that I have a guttural physical

response to that. Yeah. So. One of the first arguments you'll get against police abolition is again some version of the question, without cops, who's who you're gonna call if you know, rape or whatever, if X crime happens to you. The second argument is usually that even if the cops aren't necessary great at solving crimes, they prevent violence and

crime by their presence in areas. And Alex Vitali, the author of the End of Policing, strikes back at that claim quote it is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exists to protect us from the bad guys. As the veteran police scholar David Bailey argues, the police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it,

but the public does not know it. Yet. The police pretend that they are society's best defense against crime and continually argue that they if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth, and he is very right when he says that a lot of data backs this argument up.

The raw number of police in this country has declined for the last five years straight, and the rate of police officers per one thousand residents in the United States has been dropping for twenty years. You know what else has been dropping for twenty years? Prop? What the crime rate? The crime rate? Yeah, the police lost twenty three thousand net officers nationwide from two thousand and sixteen, with no

corresponding surgeon crime. Now, despite the fact that crime has dropped saidly for twenty years, most Americans believe that crime rates have increased throughout their lifetimes. Why are people like that? Why are people like that? I have an answer for you, prop, Yeah, I have a fucking answer for you. Are you ready for this? Are you ready to talk about Hollywood again? Yes? Because yeah a lot. Yeah. You know, like when you're like, okay,

you know what you know what prevents crime jobs? Yeah? Resources, It's just easy giving people heroin if they're addicted, you know, maybe maybe laws that shouldn't be laws, like and making sure that the person handing them that heroin says, Hey, there's some doctors or some professionals over here if you want to stop this, like we can. We can help you out with this, but nobody's gonna fuck you up for doing this. Here's a couch. Yeah. It turns out

that actually objectively works better and every single place that works. Yeah. Um. So the answer to why people think that police are just absolutely critical and holding back a tide of violence has a lot to do with the TV show Dragnet and its descendants. In the fall of two thousand nineteen, more than six percent of primetime dramas on TV were

about police, crime and the legal system. Many of these shows, like Cops and Live p D worked directly with law enforcement and receive approval from departments for every episode they aired, the same way Dragnet did. That's Cops. Cops got like the the cops sign off on every episode of Cops,

which is why that show doesn't show. There's a wonderful podcast you should all listen to after this called Running from Cops um and it it is a show, a podcast about the TV show Cops and about live TV And it's one of the things that they showcases in the very first episode of Cops, like they got access to the unaired footage that was shot for that episode of Cops, and like it showed that in the in this episode of Cops, like it showed the like busting

this like family and like taking the kid, and like the the female officer who took the kid was like, it's okay, we're gonna get you to a safe place tonight. You're gonna have an ice warm bed and toys and stuff. And in the part that wasn't aired, she took that child to like the place that she was supposed to take this kid after arresting the kid's parents and they just put the kid in basically a cell because they

didn't have a better or any toys. And like the lady cop is like in tears and like enraged when she realizes how fucked up the situation is. That didn't aar on Cops. Like no, um, so again, watch Running from Cops. It's a great or listen to it. It's

a great fucking podcast. Um. But one of the things they did on Running from Cops is they tried to analyze, like they watched eight episodes of the show, um and like analyzed the race of all of the people involved, analyzed, um the kind of crimes they're arrested for, and like put together data on like the world as presented by Cops as opposed to the actual world, and how crime actually works in our real world. Um, and I'm gonna quote from from an article written by one of the

guys behind Running from Cops. Now, what we discovered was that, contrary to early press predictions, the world portrayed on Cops is not like the real world. There are about four times more violent crimes and cops than in reality, and three times more drug arrests and about ten times more arrests for sex work. The cops on the show are also, statistically speaking, extremely good at their jobs. Segments on the show in and arrest eighty four point four percent of

the time. That number reflects a change over time from back in ninete to and the most recent season. In Cops World, law enforcement officers are so effective it's basically a given that a crime will end in an arrest. Now,

that's interesting to me. Um, there's a lot that's interesting to me, including Like, one of the things they find in the show is that early on Cops like showed a hell of a lot more non white people getting arrested, and like the double a CP complained and Cops fixed the problem and switched over to showing mostly white criminals. And part of yeah, part of how they did it was by just filming in Portland, Oregon. That's hilarious. I

didn't know that. Yeah, but I didn't know, Like, wow, it seems the black people no more y. Yeah, they did. They did fix that particular problem. Um and you know, I gotta give it to him. Moving to Portland's a

smart way to do that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So most people who even like most fans of Cops williganala is that the show has always been, you know, kind of trashy, but even lea yeah, and and like you would have found a lot more people who'd be willing to argue that Cops was harmful back before this most recent uprising. Then you would get to argue that there was a harm and shows like for example, Law and Order. But even shows like Law and Order contribute to our distorted

cultural beliefs about the police. Now, obviously Law and Order doesn't push the militarized police angle. This is Law and Orders very much like a tribute to like Volmer's idea of the police as scientists. Um. Yeah, but it's still has a negative effect at Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University who studies television and pop culture, noted in an interview with a Desiree News, quote, the very thing that keeps law and order going is the idea that

they keep showing this efficient process over and over. Law and order gives, at least in part, some feel for this being an efficiently well oiled machine. And it just isn't. We already went through the statistics of how few crimes the police solved, because again, most of these scientific policing methods don't work nearly as well as as there they TV portrays them as yeah now. Color of Change released a report in January of this year based on a

study of twenty six scripted crime dramas. It found that quote, these shows rendered racism invisible and dismissed any need for police accountability. They made a legal destructive and racist practices within the criminal justice system seem acceptable, justifiable, and necessary, even heroic. The study noted that of the writers for

these shows were white men, only nine percent were black. Now, in the mediate aftermath of George Floyd's murder and this whole uprising thing, both Cops and Life p D were canceled, and I I really think most people don't get what a big victory it is to have fucking cops off the air. Um. Yeah, I think they'll understand a little better after this. It does seem likely that other police

procedurals will wind up dying out rather soon. And everyone has their favorite We've all we've all enjoyed some cop dramas, um I and I and I will say, I don't think that the wire is a part of the problem. I think they actually did a real good job of making everybody see, like Jesus Christ, policing's fucked. It just wasn't enough. Yeah. Um, there's a lot of you know,

Brooklyn nine nine. I know a lot of people who love Brooklyn nine nine, and I know a lot of Brooklyn nine fans are apprehensive and like a little bit guilty right now and wondering, like, is there a way to like fix this show, to make it like not contribute to the problem, and like, you know, the show does. The show does has leaned in at a few points to some problems in policing in a way that most

police dramas don't. Um. And it is one of those things where like, I think a lot of oaks will argue that, like there's a room for escapism and that this stuff isn't really harmful, but but it it just is. There is a lot of documentation about how it is harmful. And I'm gonna quote from just one piece of this documentation, an article in Pacific Standard magazine quote. Crime dramas are consistently ranked among the most watched shows by Nielsen Media,

according to the authors. What's more, as many as forty percent of Americans believe that such shows are somewhat or very true to real life. So to find out how the simplistic portrayal of police officers on television might influence public opinion of the profession, researchers from St. John Fisher College and Wayne State University first had to analyze how popular crime shows portray police work. The researchers also surveyed

a nationally representative sample of over two thousand Americans. They found that those who watched crime shows view police as better behaved, more successful at combating crime, and relatively responsible in their use of force than those who don't. Yes, if you want to know why there's so many back the blue folks. It's these shows that we all have some we in joy, but they're part of the problem.

You may just gonna say the one for me is first, that's the one that gets me the most because it always takes place in like Memphis, in the deepest of the Section eight projects, and the way that like I know, our people are portrayed where it's like, again, it's not like crime don't exist, but this the way that you're painting this is so basic, so binary, and so easy that like I tried to watch it. I tried to get into it because I had a friend that liked it, So I tried to get into it, and I was

like I can't, I can't. I can't even finish this. I don't have anything else. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's like it's just hurtful. It's really hurt because you know it's not real. You know what I'm saying, But you're telling me this is like a uh reality show and it's not real, And like just given by few Americans have an experience with violent crime, and how even how an even smaller chunk of those Americans actually have the police do something about the thing that they suffer. That's

a tiny fraction of us. When people say what about you know, and then they list their things that we need the police for, most of them aren't thinking about a real thing that's happened to them, our friend. They're thinking about something they saw on TV like that that like like they wouldn't say that, but that's what's actually

going on. Um. Yes, yeah. The militarization of US police started from a mix of fear over specific incidents of shocking violence uh and and cruel calculus by soulless politicians.

But part of why it has been allowed to continue for so long, and why American voters traditionally react very negatively to the idea of cutting police funds, is that decades of Hollywood depictions of law enforcement have convinced many of us that the police are completely necessary to save us from a constant, imminent threat of violence and barbarism.

The weight of pro cop cultural inertia is only increased by the fact that a decent number of the seven cops in our country do useful in good things from time to time, like that there are like most cops on the force will have a period where that even cops who are critical later will it will be able to point to individual things they did that we're good. Um, the question is not whether or not cops ever do

things that are good. It's whether or not it's worth the cost, whether or not the benefits we gain from having police Number one can be gained from something that's not the police, and number two are worth the price of having police. Hollywood has spent a lot of time and made a lot of money showing us what we get from law enforcement at its best, and again the statistics show that they are lying about what we get

from law enforcement. So perhaps we should spend more time as a culture thinking about what law enforcement costs us. And I think my best way of doing this is always an anecdotal example, you know, because we do talk about the statistics. We talked about the broad problem. The broad The broad problem is that a thousand people a year are killed by US police, many of them in shady circumstances, many of them, most of them without real investigations that are are open to the public taking play.

And that that number is, for example, more than die have died in every school shooting in American history. Every year, the police kill more people than school shooters have ever killed, Like yeah, like like people like people flip out about a R fifteens And I'm not saying you're wrong to be scared or frightened about the easy availability of air fifteens. Like four Americans every year are killed by long guns that are air fifteens are similar weapons the police kill

a thousand. You're not saying one's not not saying one's not a problem, but like does it suck? Yeah, Well if we're gonna yeah anyway, it's it's an issue. Um. But I think that when it comes to getting people to really emotionally understand the cost of police, individual horrific anecdotes are are the thing that drives it home to people. Um, And that's certainly what the police do. Individual anecdotes of cops doing good to talk about why we need them.

So we might as well respond in kind. And I'm going to respond in kind by talking about something that happened in Philadelphia in nineteen five, the move bombing. It's so, have you heard of the move bombing? I have? Yeah, Yeah, I had a feeling. Yeah. Move was a strange organization that we're not going to get into a lot of detail about. It was founded by a guy named John Africa, and every member of move took on Africa as a surname. They were not all black, actually it was a mixed

race organization. There were hard to pin down ideologically, but it would be fair to say that they expressed a deep hatred of technology. Um They did some like protests at zoos against animal cruelty, They ate natural diet. They They're like a hard group to pin down. They did a lot of shouting into bullhorns though. Um So. The organization briefly wound up squatting in Powellton Village in West Philly.

Um And they kind of fortified a house they were squatting in there, and they they've piste off a lot of their neighbors by regularly brandishing firearms and shouting at the neighborhood through a megaphone. They eventually were raided by the FEDS, who found a bunch of guns and pipe bombs. Police barricaded several blocks around the compound and basically laid siege to it for fifty six days. This all came to ahead when the cops moved into forcibly evict them.

There was a gun battle and a cop was killed, while sixteen other officers and firefighters were injured. Eventually, the MOVE people all surrendered and the cops beat the ever loving ship out of one of them, a guy who had not taken part in the gunfight, but who had been on the bullhorn heckling them. They just beat the piss out of this kid in broad daylight. Um Nine of the members of Move were convicted of third degree murder and sent to prison after this, so Move was

not taken out though as an organization continued. They moved on and set up a new base on Osage Avenue, which was a middle class black neighborhood that was doing really well. It's kind of like a Black Wall Street situation, right, Like Osage Avenue is like doing well, and Move moves in and they were out there welcome pretty quickly because they again turned their house into a fortified bunker, like they build a literal bunker on top. They yelled at

a lot of people through bullhorns. They're not physically harming people, but they're like kind of annoying people, and like people in the neighborhood don't know what to do, but called the city, and the city calls the police, and the police do what the police do, which is s late the situation into another siege. In May, uh, Philadelphia brings in five militarized officers armed with flak jacket, swat gear,

fifty caliber machine guns, and an anti tank rifle. The cops move in to serve arrest warrants on folks that they believe were living in the compound, and they estimated six adults and twelve children were inside. The movers opened fire on these militarized police, and the police responded with just an insane torrent of wild gun fire, pouring ten thousand rounds into the building in ninety minutes. Now, thankfully, the police had evacuated most of the neighborhood, telling everyone

they'd be able to come back home quickly. But they're just firing wildly into the neighborhood. Swat team's next try blowing holes in the sides of the building, but nothing worked to breach the compound because the move folks had really done a good job before. Yeah, they were good at this ship. Um. The police began lobbying Mayor Good, the first black mayor of Philadelphia, for the go ahead to drop a bomb they built on the compound, and

after hours of ferocious gunfire. The mayor greed, so the police drop a bomb on this building in Philadelphia, an Osage Avenue, and it fails to crack the bunker that Move had built atop their house, and it doesn't in the stalemate, but it did start a fire that spread very quickly to the roofs of other homes clustered around the Move building. The police commissioner ordered firefighters to stand down, later telling the city commission I communicated that I would

like to let the fire burn. In forty five minutes, three more homes on the black were burning. Then the roof of the Move house collapsed. The police did not allow firefighters in until more than ninety minutes had passed and the entire north side of Osage Avenue was burning. I'm gonna quote now from an NPR article on what happened next. Philadelphia streets are famously narrow, which made it easy for the fire to leap from burning trees on the north side to even more homes on the south side.

From there, the flames spilled over to the homes behind six two to one Ossage to Pine Street. By evening, three rows of homes were completely on fire, a conflagration so large that the flames could be seen from planes landing at Philadelphia International Airport more than six miles away. The smoke was visible across the city. By the time firefighters brought the fire under control a little before midnight, sixty houses on the once tidy block had been completely destroyed.

Two and fifty people were suddenly shockingly without homes. It was the worst residential fire in the city's history. In the end, eleven people died in that fire on Osage Avenue, including five children. Weeks passed before the police were able to identify their remains. This is what I mean when I'm talking about Sorry, yeah, I was like, this is the story I was referring to in the first episode

about like a bomb being dropped on Americans. It turns out that's a long Yeah, there's a lot of parallels between this and Tulsa, But you know, Tulsa, it was a mob of random citizens. The move bombing was mostly white police um and the organization moved. That was part of what I'm talking about. Counting the cost here. Move

was a problem. They caused real issues for their neighbors, and their neighbors problems should not be discounted like they they they their neighbors had a serious issue with these people that needed to be dealt with, and they called the city to help them deal with it, and the city brought the police. In any any reasonable society would have need to have a way to deal something with like a bunch of people fortifying a building in a neighborhood and shouting at everyone in a bullhorn until they

can't sleep. That's a problem. That's a problem that merits a solution. The solution the police brought to this problem was to burn down the entire neighborhood. Yeah, that's not that didn't need to happen. You didn't have to do that. Yeah, this there there were ways to deal with these people, because again, the members of Move never went out murdering people at random. That was not what they did. They they they problematics and they were annoying, and yeah, they

weren't just killing strangers. That police did that. Yeah, the Philadelphia police did succeed in dealing with the issue of the Move organization. They did not harangue neighbors on loudspeakers anymore after this, and whatever possibly illegal weapons they may have had on the property were incinerated along with sixties something black homes and businesses. You could argue that some problems of law and order were solved by bombing the move compound. The question is like was the price worth it?

And that's broadly the question we need to be asking and answering about our police. Is the cost worth it? Guys? You know what would wipe out your COVID nineteen? You could drink the bleach. You're right, it will end it. I'm like, you will die. Yeah. Did you ever listen to Chris Christofferson prop? Yeah? Yeah? Do you ever listen to a song The Laws for Protection of the People? No?

If you'd like that song, it's a good example of like early country, you know, now country, there's like a lot of popular country is like very kind of reflectively patriotic, procop military. Old country was like it was like punk music but played differently, right um, And Chris Christofferson embodies

that in a lot of ways. And The Law Is for Protection of the People is a song about cops, and it's like they're like the first verses about like a drunk guy that like falls down drunk on the sidewalk and the six squad cars you know, come streaming to the rescue to haul them off to jail. And the refrain of the song is because the laws for protection of the people rules or rules, and anyone can see we don't need no drunks like Billy Dalton is the name of the drunk scaring decent folks like you

and me. And the second verses about a hippie who like a bunch of brave cops come surround and like beat down and shave his head forcibly. And you know there's another version of that refrain, and then the last verse is, um uh, so, thank your lucky stars, you've got protection. Walk the line and never mind the cost. Don't think of who them lawman was protecting when they nailed the Savior to the cross. But Chris Christofferson bringing

at home? Yeah, bring it at home. Hey, you know what Precius Saver crooked justice system awesome hunt awesome, trumped up charges. Yep, So mind the cost is I guess the end message I want to have for this podcast? Yes, like this was the Lord's work. Robert whatever, you what if you wind up agreeing with us or not about what should be done with the police. When you think about what should be done with the police, think about what the price you're paying for them is and ask

is it worth it? Yes? Do you protect your children by strapping them to their bed and barbed buying the door, or do you protect your children by loving them and caring for them and teaching them better ways to take

care of themselves and their fellow neighbors. Yeah? Yeah, And it's people get aspects of this, Like people get aspects of this when like folks who are pro gun talk to liberals about like, oh, you know, people should defend themselves and like always carry a gun, and a lot of liberals will like rightly point out, like it sounds like a miserable world if everyone has to have a gun at them at all times. I don't. I don't

like that vision of the world. But it's like, but do you support their being police who always have a shipload of weapons on them, who walk around with like five different weapons that are potentially lethal on their belt at any given time, Like that's part of it. I agree, it's better if there aren't a ton of weapons all over the place all of the time in the public sphere. Um, yeah, let's deal with that problem, and let's recognize that it really starts with police in our society. Um, let's just

be honest. Yeah, yep, yeah, that was a lot of words. There was a lot of works. Yeah, yes, and my facts. Do care about your feelings, props. So how are you feeling? Man? That was great? I like that, Thank you. I am feeling disgusting. Uh. I'm a little tired, but I'm also a little hopeful because of the response we've been getting from this pod. Good, very hopeful. Yeah, yeah, it has been a great response. It's good to be hopeful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man,

be hopeful. Defund the man. Um, there's better ideas. We can we can come up with a better idea, guys, Yeah, we can, we can, we can, we can. We can come up with so many better ideas. Um, for example, what if we just what if we replaced all of our cops with like, you know those dogs that they have in the mountains somewhere in Europe that have liquor around their necks. Those are raun Well, let's try that. Let's just fill the streets with those dogs. Those are

so rad it'll work. Maybe. Yeah, if if if a if a husky walked up with up to me and had whiskey on his neck, I would be like, this is the coolest husky I've ever met in my life. I will stop whatever crime I'm doing because I just want to see this dog with whiskey. Yeah, and like a bunch of huge, well trained dogs everywhere, probably gonna stop more rapes than the cops, I'll tell you what, because everybody scared it dogs except for Sophie. Except for Sophie. Yeah.

Well well jinks ye oh blood time. Yeah, I kind of do that. Yeah, profit pop dot com where I don't sell weapons. Um, that's good, and I challenge you to think of better ways to organize the world. And I sell coffee stuff. Um, I do music and poetry and that's all of the things are at prop hip hop yeah dot com, And I do not sell weapons yet, but when I moved to my compound in Ohio, I'll start legally manufacturing sought off shotguns. Um, so that the the the a t F will will finally raid me.

Um you know that's the that was that was a ruby Ridge think. Yeah, I actually really think you gotta market there, I do, I do. You could start branding some weapons, yeah, Uncle Robert's legal homemade shotguns. Yes, I just couldn't into something. I couldn't repeatedly Waco in this episode without dropping a Ruby Ridge in there. Um, so it's not fair, that's no. And it's not fair that we talked about Waco all the time but not the move bombing, because like they're both cases of like out

of control militarized police burning children to death. Yeah yeah, yeah because those black people. Yeah, it's sucked up. Yeah yeah yeah. Find a way to make the move bombing Waco again. I don't know what the that's not a good moral. Um, they need a Netflix series where they hire a sexy guy to be John Africa. Yeah yeah, they could play like or something. Yeah yeah yeah, haven't haven't have a Blue S concerts. They're being bombed. Just

throw that in there for no reason, unnecessary. That was the wildest thing about the Waco show was like, Okay, so you guys are just you guys just turning David Koresh into a rock star. Alright, Like what that's a stance. Yeah yeah, And now I want to see the fucking I want to see them like do a Jim Jones mini series. He turned him into like a stand up comedian. He's just hilariousous. That's why we all go. Yeah, we we cast David Chappelle's Jim Jones. Fuck it, No one

gives a ship? Where Netflix? Oh Lord, all right? Podcast is out. This podcast has to stop. Go to fund your local police. Behind the Police is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.