No Equity, No Justice

to make that time. And so for me, dear friends here on woke F, I am going to be taking a much needed vacation so that I can rest and recharge as we head into what I believe is going to be one of the craziest falls we've ever seen.

I have left you with eight amazing episodes that we have recorded back in twenty twenty one with some of the most thoughtful, engaging and insightful commentary that looks at our politics, our spiritual nature, our emotional well being, and a look inside frankly with some of the guests that we are bringing to all of you. These conversations have been heard by our amazing Patreon supporters who get video

episodes every single day. Because of their belief and financial support of woke F throughout the years, and so I'm really excited to bring all of you across all the platforms that you listen to woke F daily on these episodes and these interviews that I think will be enticing

to all of you. They hit on all of the major topics that we consistently discuss here on woke F, from racism to gender inequality, to police misconduct to wealth inequality, which my God, and the need and the need and the need upmost for spiritual connection and wellness practices that allow us to successfully maneuver all of the things that have been thrown at us over the past couple of years.

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fantastic episodes that we have. Do drop your thoughts in the comment section, do hit me up in the socials. Just don't draw my attention to anything that is terrible because I'm taking a break from the news. But dear friends, I really do hope that you enjoy these next eight episodes and I will see you with brand new episodes after Labor Day. It's no secret that the news is

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so you never miss a new episode. Folks, I am so excited to welcome to wok F, I believe for the first time, friend Philip Atiba Goff, who is the CEO of Policing Equity. Philip, you must be busy, I mean, because police in America are clearly clearly out of goddamn control. I don't know how many more mornings we need to wake up to another shooting of another unarmed black person or person of color. I don't know how many more

headlines we need. It's like we are interrupting the Derek Chauvin trial, then to interrupt it to tell us about Dante Wright to then interrupt it to tell us about Adam Toledo, to then interrupt it to tell us, what, how are you feeling right now about what is unfolding in America? I think I'm feeling what most folks are feeling, or many folks are feeling. I'm feeling tired right like.

It's just it's exhausting. I know that. When Adam Toledo video came out, the first version I saw, the unaddited version, I was done. I had to shut it down for a little bit because it's it's just exhausting. It doesn't matter how hard you work right now, there's no way to stop the next one. You're hoping to stop one like twenty or thirty or forty killings down the road just turned turned down the spigot a little bit, so

it's less. And it's when you're seeing the full volume of it, as we've been seeing for the last couple of days. It's a hard thing to get up to to be like, I'm going to make a dent on this, and yet that's the thing you gotta do, because if you're not making a dent, then it won't change at all.

I have been questioning myself as my listeners know over the past year, the past several months, about whether or not anything that I do matters, right, Like, the whole point of woke app is to provide a platform and a space for us to have more than soundbites, for us to have real conversations about the issues that are affecting our everyday lives. And it just seems that every day I pick up the microphone, I have more bad news to report. And so what does it feel like

for you? You work with police, you work with police departments across this country? What is the problem? Phillip? Like, what is the problem? Where is the problem? Because if I hear one more time that there are just a few bad apples, when I'm lying, how many bad apple spoils the entire goddamn orchard? Do you know what I'm saying? Like, like, it's not an apple, it's not a tree, it's the entire orchard is rotten. How are you maintaining your hope

around reform? So the word reform has a tricky meaning right now in that it's contrasted oftentimes and rightly oftentimes, to abolition. The ideas reform is about changing the stuff that we have and the stuff that we have. Part of the reason why it's so frustrating is because it's doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing, right, Like, it's not that it's it needs some tweaks, and it's dented and it's bruised, and so we just need to

refurbish policing. It's like, no, no, no, These killings have been part of the mission. So that's not the goal. To be clear, that was never the goal. The goal was harm reduction until we can open up the prospect of ridding ourselves of the addiction to punishment that we've got. So we've had in our mind a medical model since jump right, this country is addicted to punishment as the way out of difficult social problems. It's in part because we are sort of genetically predisposed as a country to

lie about our history. That's why we're having That's why we had fights about the Confederacy immediately after the uprisings in George Floyd. Right, those things don't automatically make sense next to each other unless you understand it's the lies about our history that make our pre isn't possible. So a year ago, year and a half ago, we could push and push and push and say, you understand, it's way worse than the couple of videos that you saw. Right.

There are cities across this country that used to have and I pray to God that they don't do it anymore, but they used to have a policy where law enforcement could conduct field cavity searches. What field in outside cavity searches. Now, if you and I were to perform a field cavity search, that's just sexual assault. And yet law enforcement undercover of law they'd be like, well, I search you, and I somehow know you have drugs. I somehow know you might have a weapon. So it can get way worse. We

haven't talked about what happened recover. We haven't talked about what happens when we do investigations of sex trafficking. There's not video of that. To talk about the places where women are, particularly where trans folks are particularly vulnerable to the abuses of the state, we haven't begun to get

at it. Today there is news of a city asking to avoid four hundred convictions, four hundred convictions, not charges, convictions because one officer lied over the course of three years, four hundred lives that at the very least have finds they have to pay, but most of them are in cages as a result of one officer line, we haven't begun to scratch the surface. And the thing that I want people who are really pissed off about policing to

understand is it's not just the police. The conversation about defund the police happens after defundmental health, which wasn't so much a popular After defund education, defund programs, defund hospitals, defund green spaces, defund urban renewal. In not the gentrification sense, in the sense of don't let the houses drop down and fall down on the babies. We've defunded absolutely everything in these communities. So the only public resource we have

left is the police. And the logic has been, well, we have to because look at the crime as opposed to look what we did to create the crime happen, Philip, because that is my thing, Like you have said everything that I have been questioning, right, which is we've created these problems, right, And I continue to say that our criminal justice system, poverty, all of these things are functioning

the way that they were meant to function. Right. The idea behind all of this was that we defund every public good, every social service, and so that we can turn this prison industrial complex into the moneymaker that it is. For those folks that are like, because when your incentive is to increase prisons so that you can increase profit, that's the trickle down. That's the only trickle down that we've ever felt in this country. Right, And so it's like, if you know what the problem is, how do you

create the will in order to fix the problem. So, for better or for worse, I want to offer a friendly amendment on the profit motive because right now we're talking about a little bit about fines and fees. I think that the story of Ferguson is not fully told, and that's to our detriment because when the federal government came in and said, y'all are using fines and fees to tax poor black people, Ferguson literally said, well, if we can't use racist fines and fees, how can we

fund the city bankrupt if we didn't have racism. So we need to be talking about the people that was literally their responsible. We'd go bankrupt if we couldn't tax poor black people. But private prisons and the profit motive within policing is a smaller portion than is easy to comprehend the bigger game. We just want to throw these people away. That whiteness says, this set of problems is just it's too it's ikey. I don't want to have anything to do with it. And so when it's in

folks faces, you'll see a little bit of movement. But the movement isn't to solve the problem. The movement is to make that discomfort go away. And so what we're getting right now is electeds and corporations. Like I loved all the corporate speak this summer. We're like, we stand with black lives. We're gonna fund voter suppression in Georgia, but we stand with black lives. It's to solve the problem. It's to get rid of the discomfort. The way you

move it forward is you don't let them. So all the folks who are out here saying, well, you know, defund is radical, or we don't want to you know, we're pushing too hard. That's too. That's two out there. I need those folks to sit down, because two out there is what opened the window for what's possible right now. Now, the folks who come in who know how to actually make moves and get stuff done to make these these moments of fashion into real sustainable policy. They need to

have access too. It's gonna take a lot of hands. But they don't rage so hard crowd. They need to have a seat, But they don't rage so hard crowd. They do have a seat, Philip. They have a seat in Congress, you know what I'm saying, Like, they do have a seat. They sit and write in Congress telling us all of the things that they can't get done, all of the things that they can't work on because it's too big, because it's too hard, all of the

things that you're saying. So if the people that we need to stand up are actually sitting down in Congress not doing a goddamn thing while we have extraditional killings every single goddamn day in this country, then where do we go. No, it's fair because they don't just sit in Congress. They also sit in boardrooms, you know, in corporate decision making positions the thousand percent, and they sit they sit at a decision making a nonprofit profits and

philanthropy as well, a thousand percent. What I mean is they need to have a seat facing the wall like that they can sit yes with the duns add on. Yes, Yes, But I will say say, in all of that frustration, thousands of municipalities around the country are actually doing something different, and it's hard for journalists to get together and wrap their minds around it because it does look super different. So you saw for a little while a lot of

stuff on replacing law enforcement with mental health. That's still going great, that's still a good story, and they're still momentum. You're now seeing a couple stories come out about reducing low level traffic enforcement so that Dante Wright didn't have to die. That's also going on. But there are thousands of experiments happening across the country in municipalities. There's one in particular that it brought me to tears in the

good way for like the first time in months. What's going on in Ithaca and Tompkins County is possibly breathtaking and a model for how we go about doing this. So in Ithaca they came, they came to the Center for Policing Equity and to community folks, they said, we need to do something radically different, and we can. We're doing okay right now, and if so if we can't make it happen, who can't. And what they did They went through a nine month process. They got the high

school students involved, right in senior thesis on this. They got the local communes, not just Cornell, but if you are college, they got the college kids involved. They had the janitors involved, They had folks who were formerly incarcerated and involved. And on the other end of that process, they gave to Governor Cromo. Because the New York State,

everybody has to have a plan for public safety. They gave them a plan that dismantles their police department and puts in its place a Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety that is majority unarmed, civilian led, no armed response to non violent calls for crisis and standing up social services so that communities can keep themselves safe instead of calling out for it. There is no more police department.

At the end of this process, there is a Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety led by civilians staffed, majority unarmed, that will go to ninety six percent of

the calls for service in Ithaca and Tompkins County. Wow, good news, And we got to protect those things because I understand Ithaca is not the center of black trauma, right right for a couple of black kids who went to Cornell, and you know, like, I can't help it, right, right, But it can be a model for how we set it up because once you see it can be done, then you start removing the excuses for not doing it.

So then talk to me. But here come the excuses, right, which is, you know, can we do that in New York City? Can we do that in Minneapolis? Can we do that in these places where we're seeing the cops literally run rampant, right, like run rough shot, like there's some type of mob. Can we do it in places that do have violent crime? So I get that question, and it's in order to do it, the larger it goes. But there's no like, it's the same basic budget process.

It's just larger. Right. You have worse union issues, but they're just bigger, and that means there's more people who can stand up and say no, we insist. And remember, in Minneapolis it might be hard, but in Brooklyn Center it's not. Saint Louis it might be hard, but in Ferguson it's not. These killings are happening in the suburbs

of surrounding YEP, and they have much smaller departments. Right, eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies in the United States, seventy five of them have twenty five or fewer officers, and there's a thousand that are just one. Dude, those can be transformed and or removed overnight. M you know, I want to switch gears a little bit to talk about

what happens to officers that are charged. And as we're watching the Derek Chauvin trial unfold, and we know that Kim Potter has been charged with second degree manslaughter in the what I will refer to as the murder of Dante Bright, tell us why it is so goddamn difficult for us to convict officers. Tell us why we need eighty seven videos with every single vantage point possible. And we still don't know with certainty that an officer will

be charged with the crimes that they commit. If your boss tells you to write them a memo, and you write them a memo and give it to them, how likely are you to get fired for that? Like, not at all, because you did what the boss told you to do. Yeah, that's the answer to this. The boss, folks in charge of law enforcement are largely happy with what law enforcement has been doing, so they oftentimes don't want to see how the sausage gets made. They don't

want to see the literal. But you had to actually kill him and his hands were up and he was thirteen. That feels itchy. Let's do something so I don't have to feel icky. But the idea of keeping whiteness safe from black and brown people and for the set of terror options we've given to folks who experience concentrated disadvantage, and that's what they were supposed to do. So they show up with the advantage of faith and trust from

communities that like what the outcome has been. So on one level, there's a very simple answer for why we don't get convictions. It's because the system is working as it's supposed to. It won't convict someone of something that it wants people to do. And where are we with qualified immunity right, Where where are we with being able to at least get to some type of level playing ground where you don't have this get out of jail free card. Yeah, so unqualified immunity. There are states that

are making changes, they're saying they're abolishing it. That's not quite right. What they're doing is they're changing the standard for it, which should be useful on state cases and can be useful on local cases. But we're not close from any of the states. As examples, the Justice for Justice and Police saying George Floyd Act would end in this current iteration, would end qualified immunity, and I think that has a shot of making it through the Senate.

So in that case, we would be in fact revealing the precedent and saying, no, you cannot use it this way. But qualified immunity might might make a difference in about a quarter of the cases that come forward where they're charging. So even those things that are that are sort of easy villains in this fight, the real villain here is

the way we use police. So if most cities ninety six percent of what police do has nothing to do with violence, do you think we could figure out a way to spend less and get less armed response for that ninety six percent of behavior. So I'd be happily qualified immunity in place if police had ninety six percent less contact with folks, Right, Like, if all I'm trying to do is reduce the number of bodies going to

the Morgus a result of contact with the state. That seems like the bigger lever to pull is to pull police out of the places where, by the way, for the last quarter century, they've been saying, we can't do this. You give us too much. We can't do mental health and substance abuse and homelessness and child welfare. Why do you give all that to us? Right, So they want to get out of the business. They just want to

do it without losing their budgets. Right, I'm happy to law enforcement to get them out of the places they always wanted to get out of. And in many cities, by the way, we should be standing up those systems before we're disinvesting, so we can we can invest before we divest in some places. But it's got to be push pull, because we have fed this beast so much that if they were the military, US law enforcement would be the third largest military in the world after our

military and then China's military. That's too much, which is obscene when you look at the lack of money we put into let's say education, right, like you judge a country by where they put the most of their resources, and like you said at the beginning, America is addicted right to locking people up, and it's no wonder to me. I mean, we would rather in America send children to school with bulletproof backpacks, armed teachers, then do something substantive

on gun reform. We'd rather have a Dante right a week or a day, then admit to the fact that our policing system is absolutely atrocious and if it didn't have a badge, would be considered the KKK in terms of the number of black people that they murder on a regular basis. I just you know, what expectation do you have of this current administration to be able to move the ball forward with this systemic problem that we have. It will really depend to me on who they get

through Senate confirmation. The Senate confirmed nominees right now are of fantastic slate of folks that are way bolder in terms of their vision for what can be done than this president campaigned on. So we get Kristin Clark, and we get Vinita Gupta, and we get Anne Milgram has had a da that's good for the set of things I care about. Vinita Gupta was the best thing that had happened to the Civil Rights Division in at least a generation and for her to come up and then

have Kristin Clark take that over a Senate confirmed. I mean, it's not just history setting. It sets a table for removal qualified immunity, for really ramping up what investigations look like a civil rights for expanding how civil rights investigations of law enforcement actually go into the full municipality. Right, because before the Ferguson report, no one was talking about how cities generate revenue. So how much more cans of folks who are really credential to have some experience, how

much more could they do? And also I want us to be thinking about what are we going to make them do? Because under Obama, what we did was we said, there's a black dude there right blaze basketball. We like his march madness, his wife is wonderful, his kids are wonderful. Let's not embarrass him, let's not put him in bad spots. And so we didn't push. I'm not saying that's what I thought. I'm not saying this what everybody thought. No, no, no, But I mean, but that's right. But that's right. There's

no reason not to push Uncle Joe. There's just not And so I want to say, what are we going to insist on? And I hope we insist on the recognition nationwide that we have a system that punishes people for the choices they make in a context where we have given them only terrible options. So we should be giving them better options before we even talk about how

we want to ratch it up punishment. Last question for you, fill Up is this, do you feel like we need to change our messaging around defund the police, around abolish the police? Do you think that the messaging is off or do you think that it's right where it needs to be. So this conversation around messaging, I actually think it is super duper important because there's a lot of assumptions that have gone into it when we've had it

in public. So members of what i'll call a democratic establishment have said, well, we can't be making this defund demand. That's ridiculous. It's killing us electorally. Be like you were not one's making it. It wasn't for you. It was activating folks who were outraged and felt like what on earth can I do? Like you and I were saying and feeling at the very beginning of this conversation, those folks are like you, know what. Yeah, I'm not up for reform. I'm up for just getting rid of this

because it's actually killing us. So if folks want to have different messaging, feel free to develop some. That's how I feel about. It's like, so we all of us, we're not messaging the same thing. So I hearing abolition that's talking about I want to talk about refund, not defund refund to the community. I hear abolition is saying that, Oh right, that feels good to me. But you know what, defund is still working in places. And I also, I know, like you said last question, I'm gonna trying not to

be too prof come on now. But my deal is we think of abolition right now like it's some's something brand new, okay. And then some folks are like, oh, Miriam cob has been around for a little while, Yes she has, she's been doing it. And then something were like, well, Angela Davis been around for a little while. Okay, okay, okay. But Angela Davis, when she is summarizing a great portion of her life's work in two thousand and five, writes

a book called Abolition Democracy. She is quoting from W. E. B. Du Bois writing in nineteen thirty five about black reconstruction. This thing goes back to the point of emancipation, when we have black geniuses talking about not just the destruction of the systems that kill us, but the proactive, affirmative construction of systems that will keep us safe and that will rip the body politic of the toxins of historical legacies of racism. Abolition is not just about getting rid

of something. It's about standing up something that's better than what we've had. And when we have a more historically literate appreciation for what that word means, I think it stops being so scary and starts being a bit inevitable. You know, you're so right on so many things. What makes me discourage, though, is that we're a nation that is illiterate about our own history, about our own lives,

about the lives of our neighbors. We are pissfully ignorant, and so for every issue that we have, there is a re education that needs to happen, because the way that we have been educated is through the lie. I keep saying that the big lie wasn't just about election fraud. The big lie has been what we've been teaching in public schools since the beginning of time, right, And so it's just like, you know, you make sense if you were to take things into historical contests and actually understand

the context of the words that we are using. But my fear for America is that we continually show our ass and our celebratory around just how ignorant we are. And so if that be the case, Philip, it's like, do we ever see the needle move right? If we're in a constant state of having to go back and re educate folks and bring them up to where they should be, are we ever moving forward if I got to keep looking back? Yeah, I understand and the frustration.

And so let's say there's two options. There's a yes and there's a no. If the answer is no, then what we're doing just give up? I should I should become a black person who says that black people just need to pull the pants up and that will get all the shootings are because there's money in that, for sure, O percent. You could be rich on Fox News go ahead if you didn't care about a conscience or Yeah, like if I didn't have a soul, I could just

do that. And so I answer yes both because I see change happening, and I watch the genius of communities coming together and saying we will demand better, we will insist on more, and because that is the only option that makes living the way that I'm trying to live makes sense, living with any kind of hope, looking at babies and saying not just I'm sorry for what we're giving you, but I think you can make this place better, literally looking at my God and saying that that it's

required for me to believe it can be and to work so that that's true. Now, I believe that optimism in the face of reality is a revolutionary act, and I try and be a little bit of a revolutionary every day. Right. So I'm not trying to sugarcoat stuff. But if we're talking about is it possible, Slavery wasn't ended till it was, right, Voting rights weren't secured un till they were now they're not. We're gonna do it again, right, all the things that weren't possible you think about it.

The moon was just something up in the sky for a long time throughout all of human history, and then a small group of folks got a bunch of resources and the will of the people to say, let's go. And now that's a thing that probably in the next twenty years you can buy a ticket to buy a ticket to the moon. This thing that doesn't have oxygen doesn't exist within our earth. The things that humanity can

do when we decide it is required are amazing. We dream about technology, and we dream about power, But when do we dream about a better society? What does democracy look like twenty thirty forty one hundred, five hundred years from now? How have we set ourselves up to be better? When we start dreaming about freedom not just for ourselves, but as the root construct of what we're going to gift to the next generation. I imagine that we can take ourselves to the Moon, to Mars, to solar systems

we can't even see with the naked eye. In terms of how we keep ourselves safe. I know that's possible, because humanity does the impossible all the goddamn time. It's just we've done it for the wrong reasons and for the wrong set of people. Philip Gough, you know you continue to do the good work, preach the good message because folks like me and my listeners here at woke AF we need all of the hopefulness and the faith that we can muster because the times are pressing, and

they are pressing us into the ground. But you are right. We are nothing if but dreamers, and so we have seen dreams turn into action, and that is where we should be putting our focus and our energies. Thank you so much for joining Woke. If appreciate you, I appreciate you. Stay safe as always, dear friends. Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck. See after Labor Day.