Civic Cipher 121121 Bullies or Heroes? Do Police Deserve Both Labels? (Part B)

this week. But first, let's discuss how to become a better ally? Shall we? We shall? So I got this from beet dot com. I want to read this and try to burn through it pretty quick. And just over week after Anthony Broadwater was exonerated for the nineteen eighty one rape of Alice Sebold, she apologized and labeled the secure the Syracuse Man innocent. According to Syracuse dot com.

Prior to releasing her apology to the public on Tuesday, November thirtieth, the best selling author's representative sent a copy to Broadwater so he could be the first to read it. It comes sincerely from her heart, Broadwater told the news outlet before bursting into tears. She knowingly admits what happened, and I accept her apology. In her apology, Seabold stated that she put her faith as a traumatized eighteen year old rape victim in the American legal system. In nineteen

ninety nine. She launched her career with the memoir Lucky, which described her rape in Syracuse's Thorndon Park and going through the criminal justice system that led to Broadwater's in nineteen eighty two conviction. That's when I was born. Seabold now believes Broadwater didn't commit the crime for which he

was for which he served sixteen years in prison. It has taken me these past eight days to comprehend how this could have happened, Seabolt wrote in the statement by a medium, I will continue to struggle with the role that I unwittingly played with an assistant sent an innocent

man to jail. During the trial, the only two pieces of evidence against Broadwater were Seabolt's identification after she picked out the wrong man in an earlier police lineup, and a microscopic hair analysis, which is now deemed to be junk science. Broadwater told Syracuse dot Com that at first it was difficult for the apology to sink in, but after talking about it with his wife, the emotional weight was overwhelming. He cried, said Hammond, one of his lawyers.

His wife pried too, to become a better ally, own your mistakes and make them right moving on. That was crazy, right, I'm not going to pretend like there wasn't some gravity there, but timed out perfectly. So well. Oh and just so you know, she was white and he was black. Yeah, so yeah, that's typically. You know what's funny, A lot of the audience.

I only am given out love and I mean that. People that know me know that I mean that, and you'll come to know that as well, provided that you continue to listen to this program. These stories I'm going to share today, I think maybe one of them might be a black person. The rest of these stories are

about white people. I did my best to get all those stories and put them in here so that it doesn't seem like it's necessarily a white or sorry, a white and black thing, or a black versus police police thing, but really a police culture thing. And there's a lot of folks that continually criticize us because they feel like we are anti police, and I don't believe that that is true. I do believe that institutions like this one are necessary to hold police accountable and to compel them

to be the best version that they can be. Just because something exists and it's the only thing that you know and it does good doesn't mean that it can't be better. I love the United States. It is flawed. It can be better, if that makes sense, right, And anybody that doesn't hold the United States to that standard obviously doesn't believe that. Because for something to be the best, that it can be you know, it has to continually

evolve and adapt. The only constant is change, right, So obviously we don't have enough time to go through each of these stories, so we'll try to go through them pretty quickly. That is not to say that these stories are not worthy of full breakdowns and full examinations. Right now, Q and I, we are always going to be black and we come from that tribe and that's who we are, but right now we're going to be humans because we were not relating in a black way. This is a

human way. So do you recall the story I sent Q where there was a seventeen year old girl who was having a seizure at the concert and the police were called and she woke up from the seizure and she was still kind of disoriented and the police tased her. Remember that story? Unfortunately, So the crazy part about this is after the incident, the officers involved conceded that the teenager was not a threat, But the five officers who like subdued her and the officer that tased her, none

of these people were disciplined at all. Right, And I think that this is one example that shows that this culture of bullying is more prevalent than people know. There's a mob mentality there. You know, there was a story that we don't have the notes for, but I sent it to you. I want to say yesterday, Q, and it was a black man. He was jogging and he fit the description as you do. And he I think there were seven police cars and a police helicopter that

pulled up on him over time. You know, the first officer was there, talked to him really nice, put him in handcuffs. That the guy was cool, the officer was cool. It was a great interaction overall. But the seven police officers showing up with the helicopter all on this guy, like, Okay, where is he going to go? What is he going to do? I think it's like, if you need four cops, hey, I get it, you know, but seven I think that we need to have that defund the police conversation again, right.

talked about a few episodes ago. But as far as this girl who's having the seizure at the concert, I have to imagine, and you're listening to my boy, so imagine this with me if instead of police officers coming to help her through her seizure, she had maybe just

some concert goers helping her out. At no point do these concert goers need to have this feeling like they need to defend themselves or otherwise subdue this woman who is recovering from a seizure and is having a reaction because she blacked out and woke up in the world. You know, there's people in her face and she's you know, trying to figure out what's going on right, just like I'm not even talking about people with medical training. I'm

just talking about regular people. I've seen a seizure that's very scary. You don't want to leave a person who's having a seizure. You want to help, you don't want to tase them. Now, the one thing that people will say people that love to defend the police. And I get that that's necessary too, just like this show is necessary. But the one thing that people want to say is,

you don't know you weren't there. Well. One thing that does clear up a lot often, doesn't clear up everything always, but it does clear up a lot often is video. And all these have videos, and I've seen them, and this is the way I'm responding to them. Moving on. I got to kind of get through a couple more of these. There was one article about a it's called a callous cop who was fired for ignoring a dying gunshot victims please for help. So this officer Rogers failed

to give this eighteen year old. His name was Gelante Jones, which makes me feel like he might not have been white. But I don't know. I didn't see this person, but I you know, you could hear the audience.

aid and all this sort of stuff. But you know, and these as isolated incidents go. Each one is an isolated incident. So I'm not going to pick on this officer, but I'm going to show you a theme, you know, And I believe this themed to be very much a bullying theme. As I stated in our text conversations throughout the week, the one that really hurt the most this week. And I hope that you didn't see it, but if you did, you know why. I hope that you didn't

see it. There was an sixty one year old white male. These are hard for me because I'm not a fan of so there was a video of an older man who was in a wheelchair and he was accused of shoplifting from a believe it was a Walmart or something in Tucson, Arizona. Might have been a Lowser Walmart or some sort of place like that.

the officer was fired. As the man in the wheelchair approaches the store, the officers telling him to stop going toward the entrance of the store, and you know, he still might have been a long way away from the store. You know, I'm maybe thirty feet from the entrance, and the officer just unloads into this guy from behind. And I didn't see any de escalate. I didn't see anything, you know, and you know, if a person has a knife and is intent on doing harm from a wheelchair

at a grocery store, from something. You know, anybody can run away from someone in a wheelchair, even if that's the case. If you're a police officer and you want to be that hero, there's all these are opportunities for people to be heroes, And what I see instead is bullies. You know, there's an opportunity to be a hero there. You can go and literally take the knife out of this dude's hand, and you save the day. No one died.

You know, you're a hero. Instead, you shot him in the face, in the back of the head and the face, and then he slumped over it. And I have to live with that image in my head, and everyone that saw it has to live that man was executed and will never know what was he going back to prove himself right? Did show hey? Did that I got my receipt? Or what? Who knows if that knife was intended for a weapon?

see it, and so we're talking about it. Yeah, And then there's another one that I want to talk about where there was a man who was riding a motorcycle, right, and I believe this was an Arizona somewhere as well, which is interesting. But he was riding a motorcycle. He got off the motorcycle and walked into it might have been a walmart, right, and he was walking around the

store to get some lunch for the day. He was on his way to work, but he didn't take his helmet off, and a manager in the store came up to him and says, hey, can you take your helmet off? And the guy with the helmet just kind of blazes by him and gets his stuff, goes and pays for

it and then is leaving. And at some other point the manager kind of like approached him again from his side, but you know, based on the camera angles, you know, those motorcycle hemets, you can't see out the side, you know, and he was kind of over his shoulder a bit, so he couldn't really see him anyway. Manager calls the police, please show up immediately. This guy was white as well, and they stop him on his way out of the store. And these police officers were so angry. They were so

angry already, and you know what happened. So the guy says he takes his helmet off when he's talking to the police officers and they're like, yore, why do you have your helmet on. He's like, oh, my music's playing in my helmet. I was listening to my phone. It's connected. So I just I just came to get some lunch. He's like, well, the manager asked you to take your helmet off in the store. He's like, right, couldn't hear

the manager music. He's like, well, he came right up to you and like when you first walked in and looked you in the face, he was talking to you. He's like, I didn't know he was talking to me. He had a headset on I figured he was talking to the headset, Wasn't you know? The aggressive people in this interaction were the police. This guy, it's like they want you to bow down before them, like worship me, you insignificant peon. This is the attitude that I saw

as a theme underscoring these videos this week. Remember the definition a person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable Oxford Dictionaries, definition of a hero. And none of these encounters, none of these And Kelly, did I see you of a hero?

These people are like maybe people that want this job, A good amount of them are predisposed to violence, and they feel like this badge and this gun gives them the respect that they never got when they were in high school or whatever whatever it might be. Who knows. Again, we're talking about some but these are the ones that make stories. These are the ones that make statistics. These are the ones that really affect people, families and communities,

you know. And again I saw the one officer that stopped the man that was jogging in the story earlier, they were looking for someone who stole a lawnmower who was wearing a white tank top and dark shorts and he was jogging. He happened to have a white tank top. And the officer was real cool. He's like, listen, man, I know what's going on out here. I don't want you to think this is that if we could just get this taken care of. You need to make sure

that's not you. I don't think it's you, but we need to make sure and then you're free to go.

me being black. And you know, I already feel like some people that don't know me personally have preconceived notions, you know, so to have the police, Hey, look, can we stop you here for a second. Blah blah. Listen, man, can I can we go behind this thing or whatever? You know, there was a story about actually I think this is the next one. Let me read it. Oh no, I didn't make it in here. Okay, I'm sorry. But there's another story of a man who was driving. He

was at work. He was a counselor who's going to go visit one of his clients, and the police turned on their lights to pull them over, and he wanted to go somewhere where he was He felt a little bit more comfortable pulling over his car where people could see the interaction. And the officer ended up arresting him for fleeing from the police and failing to stop right and they called, of course all these other police out

and blah blah blah. So dignity is one of those things where no matter what you do, even if you know you're innocent, you know, I get some folks have to make those decisions. But I do want to say this. Seeing police as heroes makes it difficult to see them as prone to fear, prejudices and wrongdoing. And I'm not saying that we can't, you know, see them as heroes, provided that they are doing something heroic, but just kind

of carte blanche assigning that. I think that it doesn't leave room for the reality that we all live in. And I wanted to make those that point, using those examples of mostly non black people, so that folks know that it's not a black people versus police thing as much as it is something that we just need to continue to talk about, and this is the place for that.

Moving on here and now you start to understand why for our way black history fact, I wanted to discuss the Stanford Experiments, so for those that don't know, and my sources come from Britannica dot com with the same Britannica from the Encyclopedia Britannica and Stanford dot edu so Stanford University. So the Stanford Prison Experiment is a social psychology study in which college students become became prisoners or guards in a simulated prison environment. Funded by the US

Office of Naval Research. Took place at Stanford University in August of nineteen seventy one. That means that it's had a lot of time to really settle into the right circles, and it's not without flaws. It's not. You know, there's some legitimate challenges to the way the experiment was done. We'll talk about those as well, but I do think it kind of paints a picture. It was intended to measure the effect of role playing, labeling, and social expectations

on behavior over a period of two weeks. However, mistreatment of prisoners escalated so alarmingly that principal investigator Philip Gzimbardo terminated the experiment after only six days. More than seventy young men responded to an advertisement about a quote psychological study of prison life in Quote, and experimenters selected twenty four applicants who were judged to be physically and mentally healthy. The paid subjects were divided randomly into equal numbers of

guards and prisoners. Guards were ordered not to physically abuse prisoners and were issued mirrored sunglasses that prevented any eye contact. Prisoners were arrested by actual police and handed over to the experimenters in a mock prison in the basement of a campus building. Prisoners were then subjected to indignities that were intended to simulate the environment of real life prison in keeping with Zimbardo's intention to create a very to

create very quickly an atmosphere of oppression. Each prisoner was made to wear a dress as a uniform and to carry a chain padlocked around one ankle. All participants were observed and videotaped by the experimenters. On only the second day, the prisoner staged a rebellion. Guards then worked out a system of rewards and punishments to manage the prisoners. Within the first four days, three prisoners had become so traumatized

that they were released. Over the course of the experiments, some of the guards became cruel and tyrannical, while a number of the prisoners became depressed and disoriented. However, only after an outside observer came upon the scene and registered shock it, Zimbardo conclude the experiment less than a week

after it had started. Our way black history fact. Now, The reason that I wanted to talk about that was because I think that despite again some of the challenges to the efficacy of the tactics, and how sterile the environment was, and whether or not the pool and the candidates were, you know, the right people for this type of experiment, and so forth and so on, I do believe, and many people would agree that this does give a glimpse into the human condition. There's a statement that is

certainly much older than I am. This says, a slute power corrupts absolutely right now. Of course, we know that that's not always true in all cases, but it's something that we have to address if we're going to really challenge policing the way it's done to become better, to evolve. There's a whole group of people that view the police like the police are there to protect them. We are not that group of people. We actively avoid the police

at all costs. You know, Well, certainly we do. But a lot of people you know, who subscribe to our culture, you know, social circle, you know, and so forth, that we don't really feel like the police are for us. You know, there's a popular chant that we learned in twenty twenty. Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe? Right, And that has largely been my experience experience. It's not to say that, you know, bad turns to worse, you know,

I'm not grateful. There's a number you can call where some people that you know are more equipped to deal with and injustice show up, you know, And I have to really try to walk that line a little bit more closely, because again I don't want this show or people to really think that I'm anti police. I think that police could be better. And the way that, you know, you get that is by challenging the areas in which they could use some improvement and really addressing this culture

of bullying that we saw in the Stanford experiment. You know, we saw it. It just rose to the top. These are all students that go to the same classes, you know, just like all of us. If you're listening to me and Q right now, you know that we're all brothers and sisters, and we're all trying to find our way, and we all love our families, and we all love our babies, and we all want tomorrow to be better

than today. Doesn't matter what color you are, where you come from, where you were born, with, what under what circumstance, none of that. Those are all universally true for everyone. Right But we're noticing that if you give a badge and a gun to people, a lot of times that that modicum of authority goes to their head and they feel like they can exert control over human beings in a way that violates their civil liberties, civil liberties and

their civil rights. And this is why a lot of these stories that we're talking about today have lawsuits attached to them, you know, and addressing that and getting rid of things like qualified immunity and getting rid of things like that blue wall of silence, and having you know, a demerit system in place where people could conceivably lose their job if they abuse their power, and not treating

policing like it's a union. There's some jobs you cannot be bad at, especially if you have the right to execute a man in a wheelchair after you approached him and accused him of stealing. Right, because if he left the store and he's on his way, then he's on his way. I'm sure whatever if in fact he did steal something from the store deliberately, right, because things like

that happen on accident. I got a little kid. Sometimes he just doesn't put his candy back after I tell him too, because he forgets, and then I gotta go back and pay. Right. But if that was true, should it have cost him his life? To your point, Que, and I think that my answer is no. So we got about a minute. Your final thoughts, que, what do you think?

murdering people. Well, there's certain things that we just know aren't okay. But this country has gotten divided to a point that there's no nuance anymore. And I have to agree with everything that this side feels is right, even though I know it's not, because I have to make sure that I'm against this side. It's got about it. I think that's what I shouldn't die on the street by execution, even if I stole something from the store.