Broadcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios. I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Civic Cipher. I am your host, Ramsey's job.
He is Jay. He speaks so eloquently, don't you agree? Do you hear the velvet? And Okay, I'm sorry sometimes I get a little carried away, but his tone is just so anyway, he's rams' Jah. I am q Ward And you are tuned in to sit excitfl Yes, sir, We're gonna have some fun today. Stick around because we had a lot to talk about. Per usual, we are.
Going to be spending some time talking about a Brooklyn neighborhood that policed itself.
Is Brooklyn in the house without a doubt? Okay.
We talk a lot on this show about the defund the police movement. We've renamed it a couple of times, but effectually, what we've described it as a reallocation of police resources and a rethinking of what policing means. And so now we have a little bit more data and we're going to talk about it. Some has been positive, some has been challenging. But today we have a positive case and we'd love to share the details of that
with you. Also, just in time for Father's Day, we're going to be talking about black fatherhood, specifically the myths surrounding absent black fathers in this country, which a.
Heck of a story to tell and then perpetuated, isn't it. Yeah?
Yeah, And so you know you may have grown up thinking, well, black people just need to stay in the homes and raise their kids. Well was It turns out black people are better at doing that than everybody else, black men specifically, and the data supports that. In short, you can check that out via the CDC or just a quick Google search and you just find out that black fathers are
doing better than everyone else. But we're going to talk about it, of course, in more detail on the show, and of course many many other things that you'd like to hear about, including the largest deportation in US history, which affected our Mexican American brothers and sisters. So stay tuned for that. But first and foremost, like we always do it, this time, we're gonna discuss some ebony excellence. How does that sound cute?
Shall we? We shall? So this is.
My favorite brought to you by Major Threads for the finest in menswear. Check out Major Threads Dot com This comes from Double XL magazine. Tupac Shakur, I'll say it, the best rapper ever, greatest rapper of all time.
You guys can't see me, but I definitely just threw up the West Side one time for the late great Tupacamorrow Shakour.
Listen and if you want to debate me, I'm ready. I stay ready for that one. But Tupac Shakur has finally been honored with a star in Hollywood Walk of Fame. On June seventh, he was posthumously. He posthumously joined the increasing list of rappers turned actors who've been enshrine on the world famous Hollywood Walk of Fame. Seems like it would have already happened by now.
But no, I would have thought it was overdue, except I assumed did it already happen?
Yeah?
Same anyway.
This ceremony was led by Los Angeles radio legend and our good friend big Boy. Big Boy, and Tupac's sister accepted the word.
On his behalf.
It was the two thousand, seven hundred and fifty eight star and there were speeches from Jamal Joseph and he was the one who directed Dear Mama Saga Feffini and Tupac Shakur. And let's see his newly minted star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located.
Just a quick correction, Alan Hughes directed that Oh Dog okay as a writer and activist who was also president and Spring Tupac's brother. Thank you for that. Yeah, I misread that, okay.
And if you want to check out the star, it's located at sixty two twelve Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California. And now he joins other hip hop notables such as DJ Khaled, Missy Elliott, and the late Nipsey Hustle. And of course he's got lots of musical work, but film work as well.
The star as well deserved.
So shout out to Tupac that is have any excellence if I ever seen it.
So that made me very happy indeed.
All right, So defunding the police, ma'am a great idea that was challenged, which I'm not mad at. Great ideas need to be challenged, right.
It was.
I think we both both Q and I here on the show, we both have had wished that it had been marketed better. I just wish they'd had a think tank.
Yeah, you know what I mean, spitball some ideas on how should we phrase this, because of course you can't explain everything in a catchphrase. But defund the police sounded so it's alarming. Yeah, it triggered an almost negative response, even in people that supported the idea, like we've had rams and I have had opportunities to have that conversation in long form, and at the end of that conversation looked at people who were like, oh, yeah, that makes
all the sense in the world. Even those people heard defund the policemen were like, oh right, if we want to defund, we don't want to not have policing.
So one of the things that I want to say, I feel like the people who may have come up with this idea, maybe they were being intentional about having something so alarming, because for better or worse, it got everybody talking, Okay, for better or worse that that that's true, But remember at that time, we needed to have conversations.
The police were killing people that think I think the focus group would have helped us to not have It's such a negative immediate response, even though it started conversations. Both in a lot of cases, both sides of the argument were coming to the table feeling the same. That's not what you want.
Yeah, that's not the type of conversation. But the fact of the matter is that having it takes center stage meant that at least some people started to conceptualize what it means to rethink policing. Some people, I'll say it again, some people started to conceptualize what it means to rethink policing.
Operation rethink policing probably would have been a better sure, sure.
Sure, but maybe it might not have had the same gripping effect on the populace. Now this is this is me, This is me maybe making excuses or maybe trying to you know, imagine what the folks who came out with this idea might have been trying to do. I don't know, I don't want to profess us to know. But the fact is that this idea rose up in late twenty twenty about defunding the police.
And.
That led to a rethinking of what policing means, what policing should encompass. Remember, police were responding to things that didn't necessarily have anything to do with public safety. Still, yeah, and they were responding to bonafide medical health related emergencies with weapons. Draw You see what I'm saying, And you said this before on the show to the man with
the hammer. Everything is a nail? Is there some sort of like saying or anecdote or something like that, some sort of I forget the name of it, but I think it encompasses kind of the feeling when it comes to at least enough police to where we can identify there's a problem. Sure, not every police officer is bang bang, shoot them up, let me get my gun first. I recognize and see that immediately. But there is a problem.
And the people that turn the blind eye to this problem are the people often enough where the problem doesn't affect them in their communities.
It doesn't show up at their doorsteps, so it's not happened, right, or it's not important.
So let's say if even if we just take a small number, one percent of the police is they're out of pocket, out of line, and ninety nine percent are good.
Sence a high number.
But listen, let's just hit me out because it's simple for the listeners to follow. One percent of the police are bad, they're pulling out guns, they're mistreating people, police brutality, not playing by the rules doing a legal activity, you name it, right if because the consequences are so dire for police mistakes, and indeed police end up making up for it and taxpayers. Because of qualified immunity, police are never held accountable for mistakes they make or indeed egregious
overstepping of their their boundaries. But let me say this, because the consequences are so dire, because oftentimes they're life and death, because they're recorded, because we have to witness it, and because it doesn't affect certain communities, they're able to turn the blind eye to it. Now, let's swap it out. Let's say one percent of pilots are bad apples. Okay, phrase that. We've heard you sure a lot of your story. Sure, sure,
Now all of a sudden, it's everybody's problem. And you get this with the with the FAA, I believe it is right, the Federal Aviation Administration.
I want to say, there's.
No such thing as one percent. There's no such thing as bad pilots, period. You can that is not a job.
Where you're not a pilot anymore. Once' that's it, that you're a bad one. Then okay, that's it. Right, Do this commercially.
More exactly when it comes to like doctors, and you can lose your medical license, you can be disbarred if you're a bad lawyer, all of these things. There's all this sort of oversight. But you know, for police, and we've given them carte blanche to write their own rules to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. And oftentimes it's black people, black and brown communities and poor communities that end up bearing the brunt of police violence.
And we end up incarcerated or getting involved in the car sool system in this country because of bad actors or because of a litany of other circumstances, and that shapes outcomes not just for individuals, but for communities. Let's add one more thing. I know I'm on my soapbox here, but follow me. I'm going to add one more thing here. Oftentimes the recruitment tactics for police are in such a way that they attract peopeople who have a predisposition toward violence.
If your police recruitment and video shows everybody in a tank riding through a war zone, jumping out and shooting, you know, in the practice fields, or are hashtag stop cop city folks jumping out shooting guns.
It's too late. I think they are already.
No, it's it's never too late.
They already moved forward.
No, it's never too late. I had a conversation with you, Naja how lone Wolf recently on the Bion Daily podcast, and there's still some some movement there.
So keep the faith everywhere, encouraging story, keep the faith everyone.
But you know, if they're playing this like death metal music in the background and they have like the Punisher logo, you know that you might be attracting a violent sort of person to engage in this. Add to that the systemic and historical composition of police, which is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male, and it doesn't it's not an accurate reflection of the population, and so you end up with this toxic mix of folks who are deciding what policing is.
But because that's what we're used to, because this is what we've seen, then we find it hard to challenge that. So the one percent of police is too high a number, and I believe that that's even to you seem like you might have had some data on that.
It's close to ten thousand officers would be one percent. You talking about ten thousand potential murderers, drug traffickers in this bad actors. Let's make it a little bit more generally, a little bit more palatable. But that's ten thousand though, that's not a couple hundred. That's not a couple right, because one bad pilot would be too many. Ten thousand possible bad actors should be way too many.
Right, And again this is a thought experiment. I suspect that there are more than one percent. You can just look at the domestic violence that is reported for police officers. That's reported, right. It's common knowledge that police officers are own to domestic violence. Again, these recruitment tactics tend to recruit people with a predisposition toward violence. They want to beat them up, they want to shoot them up, they
want to do this sort of stuff. So I say all that to say, rethinking policing was the order of the day. It still is very much so. And one of the things that came from that rethink was this idea of community policing.
Right.
In other words, we don't need to invest billions of dollars into policing. We can invest into programs that actually have a direct and proven impact on crime rates things like daycare. Access to daycare has a direct effect on crime rate. It has proven, it is well documented. Buying another tank, hiring more officers and giving them more badges and guns, better training. It been better training since the fifties. These things do not work. They do not cause crime
rates to go down. Eight cares do. How about that? Right? So you start to begin understand how a rethink access to daycare, access to day sure, access to jobs keep going, access to land, access to capital, their housing, food, housing, medicine.
Ye, all the above, all of those healthcare. Listen, increase the likelihood that your neighborhood safer, not one hundred more cops patrolling your neighborhood.
How about this, I will for those listening, think of the safest neighborhood you know, the safest neighborhood you've ever been in. Just think of imagine it the platonic ideal in your mind's eye. Is there a police officer on every corner keeping it safe.
You might not picture a police squad car out.
So what makes that neighborhood, say, the fact that nobody needs anything? What is the point of crime? Now, granted there's going to be greedy people, no matter what. That's part of the human race. We all have either had greedy moments or sometimes there's people who are just greedy they want more than their fair share. We have people who are they're violent people of the violence rights.
There are officers that are bad based actors or bad acts.
That's a human condition.
Yeah, human beings in general. There are some of us who do not have good intentions for other human beings sadly.
Sure, sure, but that neighborhood, critically, that neighborhood that you imagine wasn't safe because there's police everywhere. So the idea that increasing police presence and putting them in bad neighborhoods is going to somehow affect crime shows that you know full well listening to us, you know full well that
that is not an effective strategy. And you could start with again the programs that you mentioned with healthcare, with job opportunities, with access to todaycare, with access to fare, housing, you know, et cetera, on and on, and once you start asking, well, who's going to pay for these things, well, I know a group that is actively harming this community, that has way more money than they know what to do with and you're thinking about it wrong. You're thinking
about public safety wrong. We can take the money from these police, put it in a program to where we don't need the police, and then have people do jobs where they don't have to carry a murder weapon. I got to imagine that at some point an officer has to come to term with the fact that I'm carrying a weapon only function is to end the life. This is not I hope I never have to end the life. I I if I lived one hundred years and never had to end the life, that'll be better.
So here's the problem. I think the normal control officer, yeah, the normal control No. No, I mean the normal human thought would be that, right. It's the same with our military. We are kind of sensitized to the idea that we ship and fly over to other countries and murder people because in whatever the given circumstance, they're the bad guy. It's okay to murder the bad guy.
Yeah.
Our country has done a very good job of giving our police officers a bad guy, so they are not thinking, I hope I don't have to know there's a bad guy that I need to do this too to protect and serve.
Well, how about this. How about this, So once they've become super duper indoctrinated and they're police first and not people first, right, because we've had that conversation on the show. That may be true. But what I'm talking about is human beings who happen to have that occupation and have not let's say, maybe they have not crossed over fully into like I'm a cop even when I'm people.
I don't even I don't even mean in extreme cases though, right, like you said, the type of person that's that's that gravitates to that job even with the purest intentions of serving and protecting. That idea has to be from something protecting us from someone.
So how about this I have and this is this is perhaps my mistake. I have a global view now of police, as do you. You. I've been to I couldn't even tell you how many countries around this planet of ours, and I have been to all of fifty of the states US states. So I've seen how that looks, you know, in the same tactics and are sitting on the highway of clocking and.
All this sort of stuff.
Right, But elsewhere in the world, recruitment tactics are very different. You know, gun. The gun part of the job is very, very very very secondary. The primary part of the job is helping people, being a presence, and you know you're on the way to you know, to the personnapping. If you realize that there's a person, a woman crossing the street and she needs help because she's in danger, you might stop and help the women cross the street before
you continue after the personapper. You prioritize things versus over here. If the personapper, we need to execute this person apper, we need to, we need to take them down. We needn't and this is bringing safety and justice. You know, it's a different way of thinking about it, right.
I mean you hear Americans talk about nationalism, we talk about it, and even the way we frame it, it's false even in that sense, right, And those other countries they see each other as countrymen. Yeah, okay, so citizen first countries sure have this idea of actually protecting and serving each other. We're all countrymen and women matter the color of your skin, right, their country women and women first, and then whatever needs to be. The specific description here
is absolutely different. You're black first, it's called African American. You're black first. You're not countrymen first, you're not country women first. And in a lot of cases, being black means criminal, means bad, means enemy means the person that I'm protecting everyone else from. So that's what I'm saying. Even the purest of us has grown up in this environment with the skin that looks just like Mineed, yours
have grown up in this environment. Yeah, our country has made us the enemy before you, even before you even go through the recruiting, before you go to academy, before you learn what this job means. You know what I mean. So yeah, and other countries where the ideas we want these outcomes to not result in death, similar to the way that other countries react to mass shootings. Okay, too many of our of our fellow countrymen and women and or children died on this day. This will never happen
again if we can help it. Let's change it now everything we can to change it right now, right now.
Well, because again I have that global view. I've seen how they how police move in Hong Kong, I've seen how police move in New Zealand. I've seen out you know, all different places around the world. One of the things that I come back to on the show quite frequently. Is that. I believe it's New Zealand where they have guns. The officers have guns, but they keep it in the trunk of their car. And it's not like they had to keep it in the trunk of the car because
you know, they were out of pocket. And that's a new strategy, a new compromise. They keep it in the trunk of the car, same way you keep a jack and a spare tire. Like it's like, yeah, just in case you need it, Yeah, isn't it.
I don't. I'm not going to carry it with me. It's heavy.
I'm not gonna kill anybody kills what you know what I mean, it's it's just crazy to think that way.
But over here again because we fully bought in because of copaganda since Dragnet hit the TV shows and collaboration with the LAPD and they were able to design the episodes and the cop are always the good guys and the bad guys were always doing this blah blah blah, and really Taylor made Taylor make a narrative for the viewing public that has us seeing police as the super duper ultimate heroes and they're like almost these superhuman creatures
that never make mistakes. I know that in the front of your mind you can conceive of people making mistakes as officers. But the fact is is that we've given them so much freedom that their mistakes we don't even question it as two free Yeah exactly, but you.
Teased a positive, exactly case study for exactly so.
Community policing, community policing. This comes from the New York Times. What happened when a Brooklyn neighborhood policed itself? Okay, this is one of the ideas that comes from defunding the police. Right, we can still have officers, but community policing is a way to rethink policing.
So I'll read and a side note.
Similar programs are underway in Oregon and Denver, Rochester, New York, and other places, according to the Center for American Progress, a left landing think tank, and the group estimated that almost forty percent of calls to police could be handled by community responders.
Okay, all right.
In Brownsville, the effort not only gives residents more say over what public safety looks like, but it can deter crime if people know there are more eyes watching. This
comes from Brooklyn District Attorney Er Gonzales. It's quoted as saying a lot of people worry that if police systems are not fully active, crime will go up, he said, But the Safety Alliance has been thriving amid a positive trend in the seventy third precinct becomes Alla said, in the first half of this year, homicides fell fifty percent, shootings fell twenty five percent, and the rate of grand larcenies of automobiles also fell, even as it rose in other neighborhoods.
He said on sorry.
One set of watching eyes belongs to Almon, who's a forty seven year old former gang member who spent more than thirteen years in prison for a bank robbery. Now he's now the good guy and he's held and provide safety in his own community, all right. He returned to Brownsville in twenty fourteen, has passed along with his calm, straightforward approach helps him navigate conflicts. During one Safety Alliance week, he persuaded a man going into a bodega with a
gun to give him the weapon and go home. The next day, that same man returned, but this time to volunteer. He spent all days washing beefs and breaking up fights. So here's a case study in Brownsville, Home of the Brave. Shout out to MOP one time.
A small sample size, however, you cannot argue with the results. Fifty percent decrease in shootings twenty five or in murders twenty five percent degrees in shootings. That's significant. So bear in mind that rethinking policing is something worth as a worthwhile endeavor. And then in freeing up the fiscal resources, you can invest in programs that actually do impact crime. There's just some food for thought. I