Welcome to another episode of Ciding Psycher. I am your host Ramses Josh today. My name is Quentin Ward. Yes, indeed, man, that was short and sweet. Yeah, I gotta get right to it. I am mad at you. All right, we'll stick around. I got a lot to talk about today, per usual, so a lot to stay tuned for. Today. We are going to be talking about whether or not more police officers actually makes people safer. And I know
how this sounds. It sounds like, oh, Ramses is back on his you know bs again and he's gonna, you know whatever. No, I'm going to ask some questions. And you know, the term safer is it's a matter. It's a feeling, you know what I mean, kind of kind of you know, do you feel safer? But then does it prevent crime? Does it actually translate into safer environments? Right?
So we're gonna re examine what safety means and whether or not the feeling is justified, right because a lot of people say, Okay, more police makes me feel safer, and then they assume that it actually does equal more safety. So we're going to examine that. We have a few examples to cite a little bit later on in the show, we're going to talk about how America views black children. There were a couple of videos that came our way,
and now is the time. We hadn't been able to get to them beforehand, but we saw some police interact with children, you know, some my children's age, and you know, we asked the questions that we ask on this show and try to you know, put you in the shoes of the mothers and the fathers of those children and see, you know what we end up with at the end of the day. That and so much more to stick
around for. So stay tuned. But first, like we always do at this time, let's discuss some ebony excellence, shall we? We shall? You want to take this one, you want to get it? Go for it, all right? This one comes from Black Enterprise dot com some ebony excellence. This week, doctor Jessica Watkins makes history as the first black woman to have an extended stay in outer space. That's a mouthful. Is she airbnbing out of spect man? Listen, I don't know.
She might be paying rent, she might got a mortgage, who knows, man, But she's out there on an extended stay. And that's not the hotel. Neither so listen again from Black Enterprise. According to NASA, doctor astronaut doctor Jessica Watkins, age thirty three, serves as a mission specialist on the agency's SpaceX crew for mission, making history as the first black woman a journey in the space for an extended mission. This is the fourth crew rotation flight of the crew
Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Watkins has been training for the mission for five years, while she will live and work for an extended stay per NPR. She was taken to the ISS on Wednesday by way of a SpaceX capsule sent out as part of NASA's multi billion dollar Artemis program, aimed at returning humans to the
Moon in twenty twenty five. As previously reported, quote, we've reached this milestone, this point in time, and the reason we're able to arrive at this time is because of the legacy of those who have come before to allow this moment, said Watkins in an interview with NBC News, also recognizing this is a step in the direction of a very exciting future, so to be a part of
this is certainly an honor. She explained that the mission intel's multiple scientific procedures, including physical science, material and combustion, Earth and space science, cell tissue and plant growth technology demonstrations, as well as human research as in the effects of long duration spaceflight. And so it is our honor and our duty to shout her out as an example of the Ebony excellence doctor Jessica Watkins.
Doctor Watkins, you are incredible.
Indeed, Now, first order of business, this comes from the New York Post. And this is sort of what got us thinking. Us and our show producer, Maggie. Maggie Be knowing. Maggie Be knowing and do she do got us to thinking about what a safety mean? And do police make us safer? Safer? This is a question that we ask. I know that, of course your impulse is to say yes, of course police make us safer safer, And I'm not
going to disagree with you. You know, there's there's a lot of instances where I would go along with that, sure, But for us to paint with broad strokes, I think that there are some other things that we might consider that might actually make us safer. Investing in community, investing in people, rather than investing in enforcing laws, right, we
can invest in educating people about the laws. I believe in human nature right, and for us to have armies of police officers feels less than necessary if there are better options. Right. And then there's some people who believe that human beings are inherently bad, regardless of their circumstances, regardless of their environments, and regardless of their options and opportunities, and feel that police are the only way to exact
control over a population. Right, two different philosophies. I'm not going to say which one is right or which one is wrong. I think you can do deduce on your own which one I prefer. But for the purposes of this conversation, we'll just establish that there are differing schools of thought with respect to this agree The New York Post article certainly makes a point that we will make further in this segment of the show. Year old man was fatally shot in the head in broad daylight in
the Upper West Side Sunday. This is in New York, of course. Cops said the gunfire rang out during an argument around twelve to fifteen pm at one hundred and first Street and Amsterdam Avenue, one block from the NYPD's twenty fourth precinct. According to cops, the unidentified man was pronounced dead at the scene and the shooter fled. The violence comes as the NYPD is set to begin putting more cops on duty at night Monday to help stem
shootings ahead of the summer months. Now, there are people that say, you know, as long as there's the police, if they're more police around, then you know that has a direct impact on crime. You know, people will not
commit crimes where police are near. Right now, I'm a person who I work in nightlife, so I know for a fact that people absolutely engage in criminal activities directly in front of the police because where we live Q and I, the laws are written to where if you have a nightclub sort of establishment, you need off duty police officers there and typically they're uniformed and they're in their whole police get up. And people still fight, people still pull out guns, people still break the law. They
what is it when they urinate in public? It's like a sex offense sort of thing in some places. Yeah, yeah, so all these people break the law in full view of the police all the time. Right, But those laws exist to make people feel safer, and I'm not going to say that that does not have an impact on some knuckleheads who might want to they might second guess themselves.
Right now, that's a random Please is there a danger in the perception of safety when it doesn't actually exist?
Absolutely?
Right, Because when you see a police officer in full tactical gear with a shotgun and you're a patron that said nightclub, you feel safer, You actually do, I'm less likely to be harmed. Here, there's a sheriff right there, there's a police officer right there. Now your guard is Now, are you actually in more danger because you think you're safer when you actually are not? How about this.
I remember a story where the old president was responding to a mass shooting event, right, and the shooting event took place on a campus, and I remember there was an officer on the campus and the officer fled from the active shooter with all the students did not run toward the active shooter. And the former president was kind of beating a chess saying, well, if I had been there,
I would have engaged, you know, blah blah blah. Right, But what we see there as a trained officer who's hired to protect the children, and it's like, Nope, I'm out right, I'm not going to be able to do
it talk to them now. I know that these are sort of one off examples, right, and there's probably innumerable examples of police actually running toward the uh the danger to put the fire out, so to speak, to handle the bad guys, that sort of thing, right, But we do need to ask these critical questions because I will say it again as often as I can if there's
an audience and a microphone. I do believe that there is some merit two the movement and the ideas behind defunding the police rather defunding and reallocating the fiscal resources that we pump into police departments. I wish we had a cooler way to say it that then say defund the police or what I just said. But you know, there are proven that you know, one such program, you know, daycare, head start programs in schools. There's a direct correlation between
retention rates in school graduation rates and crime. Believe it or not, helping single mothers with day care, food programs, housing programs, employment opportunities. You know, a lot of crimes are based off of inequity, societal inequity, economic inequity, right, and so addressing those issues with you know, some of the money from these really bloated police departments that no matter how much more money we pumped into them, they aren't.
It's not translating dollar for dollar into more safety. That's something that's verifiable. That's not Rams's opinion. Will make the point a little later in the segment.
I think we've proven that fiscally, there's no way to make police more effective, right, more money, no matter how much. Right, exactly if we came up with an extra trillion, it still would not make our police the way that they're structured now more effective.
That's what I'm trying to say. And so, but there exists is sort of like zombie like myth that won't die that people, even important, educated, well intentioned black people, will say, well, listen, we need to just pay the officers better. We need to get them better training, we need to get them, you know, a bias training. We need to get them, you know, all these sorts of things. You know, this is what they think. And the fact is is that no one's dealing with the fundamental issues.
One is that there's a psychologically basic human cycle, maybe not olympic, but a basic human psychological component to where if you give someone a gun and a badge and give them this perceived authority over you know, another human beings, body and agency and so forth. That it often not always creates a sort of God complex, and sometimes that gets away from from people, and we see people police officers abusing that and that causes great harm to society,
especially black and brown neighborhoods around the country. We also see that, you know, there's this almost like a I don't want to call it a brotherhood, but like a it's like a fraternity or something where they keep each other's secrets and everything that they do that is wrong, they will somehow make it right, not only to us the public, you know, they'll tell us the story that we need because we want to eat it up, but they'll make it right in their own head, like I
can't be the bad guy who wants to be the bad guy in their own story.
And that's not specific to police though, right a lot of these problems we ignore basic human elements with regards to police, as if they's somehow of a higher enlightenment. We don't know the intentions of regular people. So you spoke about giving someone a badging a gun, you often don't know how ill or well intentioned that person is until after they've already done something heinous, right, And even people with good intentions could be put into a high pressure,
high stakes position and make a fatal mistake. Sure mistakes are made, but how about people who actually have ill intent the whole reason that they want to be a police officer so that they can abuse that power. Again, these things are not unique to police officers. Protecting our own is not unique to police officers. No one wants the group they're a part of to be pointed out in a bad way. Of course, that's not again unique
to police. So I think a lot of people who were up in arms you said the old with the
old president. How and why that was so divisive is because some of those people, when you accused or attacked him, saw themselves sure and had to stand and very very vehemently defend their own position, right, but made it appear like they were just defending the person that they voted for, where he can't be all of those things because I share some of his ideology and that would mean I'm that and I'm not that, right, So that's not unique
to police. You know, keeping each other's secrets and defending each other because the idea that there's no such thing as a good cop is false. But every cop that a lot of cops might hear this show and hear us talking about the quote unquote bad cops and feel the need to defend it or to feel offended by it, because this is a collective that I'm a part of,
and I don't like it being spoken about in that way. However, we live in a society where punitive is also good for the corporations at large, or the singular corporation at large, our company, you know, one of the most thriving capitalist societies in the history of Earth, the United States of America. Right, So when punitive also helps pay the bills, Now you're talking about incentivizing the idea of enforcing these laws that sometimes we don't even know are being broken or that
exists without that education. There's profit in that education not existing. There's profit in allowing people to break laws they don't know about. So there is no incentive for the system to be better. Sadly, I hate to be the dark cloud all the time, but there is no incentive for these things to improve.
So let's jump in right here. The people that continue to bolster the system, with their votes, with their ideas, with their counter protests in recent years, are people that you know, maybe these people never change their mind, you know, And that's okay, because you know, we all need to
hold each other's ideas over each other's heads. You know, we all have different ways of experiencing reality, and each one is valid in my opinion, right, and together we should find the thing that works the best for the most people. I think that's the best that anyone could ask, right. So I'm not saying that anyone's wrong, but I do believe that it's appropriate for people to think, well, does
more police make things safer? Right? Because again you would think, well, I moved, you know, right next to the police precinct, so we're good over here. You know. I used to when I was in college, I had a work study program. I would be the person that would patrol the parking lots right from my little clipboard and my little radio. And that's how I got work study money so I could go to school, right, and we would have police
cars on the campus. This is a college campus, so you know, the college campuses do have police, at least where we live in Arizona. So yeah, police would be there all the time, all the time. There were cars in the parking lot, there would be police in the parking lot. Not just police cars, but police. Right, cars got stolen out of that lot all the time, all the time. With cameras and police, the visible cameras. People would just what we would see the tapes. Well, this
is the guy walking in yep, Now he's in the car. Oh, there goes the car. He's gone, you know, And as far as I remember, never recovered any of those cars, you know, at least not in a timely manner. You know, it's not like all the police were on the campus so they could respond immediately. And now everybody's better because
we had police there. No man, A lot of times police didn't even know, right, if someone's gonna steal a car, if their intention when they wake up is to steal a car, they are going to steal that car, right, So putting more police, you could put a million police officers. If someone is dead set on stealing car, guess what they're gonna do. Steal a car, right, But if you can't prevent the crime from happening that way, by putting a million police officers, which would cost a lot of money.
Maybe you could put a couple of programs. Maybe you could put some more job opportunities. Maybe you can prevent the necessity of someone getting so desperate that they wake up in the morning and they say, listen, the only way I can make whatever happen to get from point A to point B, or make some money or whatever is steal a car. The only way to really approach that, even if it's kids just wanting to go for a joy ride, put in some act school programs, put in
you know, whatever, whatever it is in the community. Right, maybe that might be more effective and cheaper. And if you're like, well, how are we going to pay for after school programs, and how are we gonna you know, we'll take some of that money from the million cops, put it into the neighborhood. Maybe the car thefts go down, right, So this is what I want us to think about. Again, Ramses is not right. I don't mean MS does have to ask these questions.
I don't even want to talk about the word we get the money from apart because our environment shows us as often as it feels like the money exists all.
The time for the things they want to get. It like that it's ready to go in the billions. Not a couple of dollars, man, I'm knowing. Okay. Now, another reason that the story came up is because Q sent me something on Instagram.
You want to talk about it, I do, but I want to be accurate with the agency that we cite here, Okay, with regards to that story, because I was just really blown away by what I thought was comical, something that these officers were celebrating in a way and so proudly. I initially thought it must have been a joke.
The New York.
Police Department sixtieth Precinct, we are citing them as our source. They said this not a newspaper. The NYPD sixtieth Precinct verified Twitter page NYPD Brooklyn South. Great job by your sixty Precinct public safety team in regards I'm sorry that I'm laughing, but this is so upsetting that it's funny. In regards to last night's rest of one individual and the recovery of ah ah a one. Whatever you wanted to use in place of a very singlegular firearm is
now off your streets. This is not a joke, people, This is a proud post by this precinct. Picture are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven officers grouped around a table with a single gun sitting on it, oh and two bullets.
All right. So we've talked many times on the show about police department blunders where they get a lot of money, they spend a lot of money and it doesn't make any real change, and we don't bring it up to laugh in the face of the police officers. We recognize and respect that everybody's got a job to do right, but it is our responsibility to remain ever critical of what we believe to be institutions that can improve right.
We happen to know that policing has its roots in white supremacy, and so if we call it a white supremacist institution, we don't believe that we're wrong with that. Said, our only agenda here is to make sure that we charge everyone with doing the best that they can do, and no one rests on their laurels. And you know what, you're listening to our voices, it is your responsibility to ensure that we do the best that we can do. We give you all of our information at the end
of the show, Pure gold Fere's no fire. If we get something wrong, we will admit it, we will own it, we will eat that crow. We've done it many times on the show. We've got something well, not many times, but you know, whenever we got it wrong and it was pointed out to us, you know we're not above that right. And so for us to hold police policing accountable is on with what we do. Now. I want
to add something else here. Regardless of how you feel about Sean King, he gets us some information and sometimes we'll use it on this show. So this came from a post of his that just kind of helps make this point a little bit further. You feel free to look him up. Sean King, I think this was from his Instagram says. Yesterday it was revealed that tax player taxpayers in Los Angeles are paying three hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars per officer for sixty cops to patrol
West Hollywood. They said crime exploded. Turns out it was two hundred and forty nine cell phones lost it clubs. They found two of them. Okay, so I mean sixty police officers each are costing the city three hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars. That's not just salaries or contracts or whatever that's gear, that's you know, whatever or whatever it takes to you know, benefit all that sort of stuff.
Three hundred and fifty one thousand dollars per cops, sixty of them so that they can recover two of the lost two and forty nine cell phones. They're responding to a crime wave that didn't exist, and they only I mean, this is like a less than one percent dent that they've made in this and said crime wave, just like the story you mentioned where the officers were all standing around getting one gun off the streets and posing as though now the world is a safer place, or even
their Brooklyn is a safer place. You know how many people live in Brooklyn. And so again we need to really rethink what makes us safer. Do more cops make us safer? Do more intelligent policies and philosophies and approaches to dealing with each other make us safer