 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is our colleague Jonathan Blanks. He's a research associate in Cato's project on criminal justice and managing editor of policemisconduct.net. Welcome back to Free Thoughts. Thank you very much. Is there a war on cops? The short answer is no. The longer more complicated answer is, right now, for a bunch of different reasons, I think a lot of it has to do with more video recordings of police officers doing bad things or doing things that people find shocking, there is a lot more emphasis behind the criticisms that the police are facing, whether it's Black Lives Matter or it's people looking at certain officer-involved shootings and freaking out like, oh, my God, I can't believe they did that. And so I think that's become elevated because there's more evidence for it. But in some communities and particularly in minority communities, the complaints have always been there. It's just now more people are paying attention. I think that this is interesting because everyone walks around with a camera in their pocket and I think that minority communities have been making complaints like these for a long time. And one joke I've made is that by everyone having a camera in their pocket, we now know that Bigfoot aliens and ghosts are not real, but cops are pretty bad at dealing with... Or many cops are pretty bad at dealing with minority communities. So what have minority communities known for a long time about the way cops deal with them? The Fourth Amendment is... I wouldn't say it's an illusion, but it's certainly less strong than I think a lot of people think it is. I don't think a lot of Americans understand how often the police abuse it. I mean, they sometimes they search you whether or not you consent. I was on a panel recently with Neil Franklin of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and we were talking about consent searches and pretextual stops. And he said, you know, the fact of the matter is sometimes they're going to search you anyway. You know, you can say no, doesn't matter. And Baltimore is just like one of these sort of exceptions at all. I mean, one of these examples that this happens a lot. You said pretextual stops, what is a pretextual stop? A pretextual stop is when an officer stops a motorist for a particular traffic violation. It can be anything from a broken taillight to, you know, maybe swerving a little off the yellow line or that little light above your license plate. If that's out in certain states, that's an offense. And so if they want to pull you over because they think you're a criminal, but they can't pull you over just because you look funny, they have to say, you know, we stopped them for this particular reason. And the Supreme Court says as long as they have that legitimate reason that's traffic based, it's completely legit. When they're pulling people over pretextually when they're, you know, the light above the license plate is out, do they typically have a let's call it legitimate reason to think that you are up to criminal activity and they just don't have a legally good reason to pull you over so the license plate being out is kind of a necessary step to get there or is it just, is this much more like racial profiling or straight up like there's a black guy driving in this neighborhood, so therefore. I think the perception is definitely towards the latter two. I can't tell you because we really don't know the data on how often these stops happen. I mean, in some places we're getting more data on how often these stops happen, and because the police officer has such wide discretion, it's going to vary from officer to officer. But certainly in the way that these stops typically go down, it is, you know, very, I think very much based on very, very light perceptions of criminal activity. I don't think that there's anything reasonable behind most of these at all. Yeah, you mentioned a case called RIN, which I studied in law school, I guess you did too, Aaron. Yes, but my memory for which course is like, I will remember the case if you talk about the fact, but I will not match the name to it ahead of time. I don't even know if your member is going to law school anymore, but I have recollections. What was read about and what you mentioned the Supreme Court holding, what was the actual sort of nuts of the case there? So I believe it was in D.C. There were a couple of African-American gentlemen in a car and I believe they went through a stop sign and the police had been trailing them because they suspected drug activity. And so because they actually did blow through the stop sign that they had a legitimate reason for pulling them over and the Supreme Court said, well, if you have that legitimate reason then anything that comes from that is okay. What was interesting is Justice Scalia, who wrote the opinion, wrote in that had the plaintiffs actually argued that they were pulled over because they were black, that's an equal protection issue, but this was a Fourth Amendment issue and therefore it didn't matter because he said, of course, if you could prove that they stopped you because you were black, well then we would obviously side with you because that's not legitimate reason for a stop. But because there are so many different ways that you can violate a traffic law, it's basically, it's just a matter of time until you break one unless you are just the most impeccable thoughtful driver and you know every little thing that could possibly be done. What is everything that comes from that mean in this case? So the cops, the guys blow through a stop sign, the cops pull them over, which on its face seems to mean we have, it's illegal to blow through a stop sign and so if you commit an illegal activity in front of a cop it seems perfectly reasonable for them to stop you or otherwise penalize you for committing the act. And so then are they just stopping you naturally involves walking up to the driver's side window and asking for your license and all that and so is this then they happen to see big bags of drugs on the front seat or are they doing something else that feels more illegitimate after stopping you for the stop sign? Right, exactly. If these presexual stops were just to stop someone, talk to them and walk away, like deal with whatever reason they stopped you over whether it was like they ticket you for having a busted taillight, they ticket you for going through the stop sign. I don't think that these stops would be so much as problematic as they are because what happens more often is the officer uses that opportunity to try and get you to get consent to a search or as I said earlier may just blow through the reason you're consent in the first place and search your car anyway. They can say that they smelled marijuana. If they see anything that is drug paraphernalia whether it's a hand rolled cigarette in the ashtray that looks like a marijuana cigarette or one of those little clippy things known as a roach clip or if they see tea that spilled in your back seat. Yeah, any sort of reason that's probable cause. Now it can be wrong but if it's probable cause then the search is legitimate and so any evidence they get from that is admissible in court. Was Rin wrongly decided because when you read Scalia's opinion that it's pretty clear that he thinks that the rule that they were asking for basically the ability to look into and challenge the intent and motive of a cop behind a legitimate police action and I think he called it something like the unreasonable reasonable action like that that's what they were asking the court to look into because like if you did a stop sign stop for these reasons fine but you have to be so we're going to psychoanalyze police we're going to put police on notice he kind of thought it was unadministerable and it would make cops feel like they couldn't really do their job that seems to make sense. So was Rin rightly decided. I think Rin was rightly decided when I wrote my law review article on the piece I mean on the case I didn't argue that it wasn't the issue is this is a policy matter at this point just because it's constitutional doesn't make it you know ethical or or useful and so what happens is so many innocent people are pulled up in this in these stops and are pressured and sometimes lied to to give up their right to refuse a search that it can breed resentment within particularly minority communities who suffer this more often than white people do. So then is the problem them pulling over people pretextually or is the problem them pressuring and lying after pulling them over. I think a lot of it has to do with the latter I mean I again if you're continually pulling people over for minor stuff I think that's still going to have an effect in the community but it's really the fact that because I mean I don't really care if a police officer pulls someone over for like the tail light above their license plate or or their broken tail light it's just that the two problems that come out of this is if you're just using it to pry into someone's life and and to lie to them to give up their right to a search because you're looking for drugs or money you know that that's going to draw resentment. The other part of this is these fines I mean a lot of times people don't get their cars fixed because they can't afford it they're living paycheck to paycheck and if you top a hundred and fifty dollar fine on top of that that's going to make it even worse and then they might get their license suspended and then they're caught again for pretextual stop with their license suspended and so the the fees add up and it's one of the sort of backdoor policing for profit instead of like the civil asset forfeiture which is another reason why police officers do this pretextual stop where they get to keep the money the department gets to keep the money that they seize from a suspected drug drug suspect but it just becomes another way for police to harass poor people. Maybe it would be helpful for our listeners who aren't familiar with this when we were talking about so they are they lie to them in order to get them to consent to a search or they pressure them like what they're lying about so if we give a maybe a very quick recap of when they're actually allowed to search you what those standards are like you mentioned having probable cause like what probable cause actually means. Probable cause means that there is I don't know the precise legal definition. It's articulated in different cases in a variety of different ways right but basically they have to have some sort of evidence that there was a crime or there is a crime going on. What they have to do if they don't have probable cause is get your consent the Fourth Amendment says that you either without a warrant you need I guess the Fourth Amendment doesn't say consent but you can always search someone with consent. Yeah you can always search someone with consent. I can tell you you can search me right now John. Yeah but you without a warrant they either need probable cause or they need consent from the driver and but they can lie to you and say well you know they can just make this easier I'm gonna call the canine here and like all these other people and we're just gonna search you anyway and I mean sometimes they will actually follow through on that but more often than not it's a bluff to just get you to give away your rights. So they just drag it out and then of course the dog the magic probable cause machine known as a drugstiffing dog will usually alert that there are in fact drugs in the car. I don't know about usually. Yeah I don't know if we have data on that but but it's definitely not a foolproof mechanism. No absolutely not. So now this system we have this multiple interactions with the cops which I think is the is a point that has been made in a variety of ways because we have laws like you can't have the light up of your license plate out or cigarette taxes in New York City or the kind of nickel and diming of the Ferguson people with different fines for having their shades and different colors and their shet and their their shrubbery too high and this seems to be disproportionately put on to minority communities and this all breeds a distrust of police and that has bad effects. Well absolutely I mean the relationship between minority communities particularly blacks in the United States and law enforcement has never been a good one just never and as time has gone on the relationship has changed in different ways. Back in the 60s and 70s you had officers openly using you know racial epithets and like Simon people against the wall and then the courts pushed back against that and so you have a much typically not always but typically more professional police that are operating right now or they're not going to yell you know obscenities at you and they're not gonna do all the sorts of things that like the sort of dirty hairy style breaking like bending and breaking the rules to get the stuff out of you. Aaron do you watch dirty hairy didn't you say it's disturbing? I just watched it for the first time last week and and watching it having the all of this stuff about police misconduct in the news it's like I mean I watch I have a high tolerance for like you know you can watch stuff and see like yes this just came out in the 1920s and has racist elements and like you just accept but like dirty hairy was really uncomfortable to watch because it's very difficult to sit through. Bad cops. It's so racist and so bad cop and yeah so the distrust in the minority communities comes from it's different now than it was but I mean it still has a lingering effect because if you're being pulled over because you're in a drug neighborhood well if you live there you know you fit a description I mean that that's just becomes willy-nilly you know and particularly for young black men they get harassed more often than anything. There was a study that came out in early August that showed two-thirds of blacks knew someone who has been harassed or had a violent encounter with a police officer and 30% said it was themselves so you're talking about almost a third of blacks between 18 and 30 saying that they've had run-ins with the police and this isn't like they're not all criminals certainly and then so it's just if that's the sort of relationship that you have just walking out of your house in your own neighborhood or God forbid you go to another neighborhood that's predominantly white and you're just gonna get stopped you know for because you look suspicious you fit the description of a robbery suspect maybe that suspect exists maybe a dozen but it's a reason that again the police can pull you over they'll usually say he fit the description of a robbery suspect and then he had a busted taillight that's what happened in Minnesota with the shooting up there he the officer said that he pulled him over after for whatever reason but he had a wide nose and that he fit and that's how it looked like fitting a robbery suspect yeah right so and that sort of thing and that is where these you know this antagonistic relationship like just perpetuates I mean you grow up already not really trusting police because you've heard stories from your friends and family and then you walk out of your house and you get it too and then you're gonna tell your friends and family and that just sort of cascades through a community and they know when like when other when their neighbors they see their neighbors you know get their doors kicked down or when they get stopped and because of the segregated nature of our communities because of the way that police officers in police departments police these neighborhoods differently whether it's like Southeast DC versus Georgetown you know people see that and they're going to resent it but okay but a conservative critic of this line of argument might respond with well yes of course the police police differently in Southeast DC than they do in Georgetown because Georgetown is quite a bit different from Southeast DC it's there's less crime there's less violence that that this isn't the police harassing blacks or other minorities it's just that those neighborhoods are more violent are higher crime that that the police are more likely to find criminal activity when they pull people over there and so you're going where the criminal activity is and you're responding to it and that that sucks for the people in those neighborhoods who are not criminals or not caught up in any criminal activity but that's not really the cops fault or to put even just like a more direct point on that the I looked this up on Wikipedia so this might be wrong but it that the recent last year was homicide rate for blacks is eight times the rate of whites so if you were just looking for homicide suspects who were described as black you'd the stop rate would maybe be eight times higher if I mean that would be the right proportion well yeah but like our our system of individualized suspicion doesn't talk about you know being able to stop people for proportional reasons you have to have a reason and going back to Aaron was saying you know that the police are going to those areas they should be there more often I don't disagree but that doesn't mean that any response that they give is is acceptable when you have these jump out cars in southeast DC or you know a jump out car is it's never been confirmed by the DC police but it's heavily like heavily anecdotal evidence that these these cars of unmarked unmarked police cars are in southeast and they will just jump out of their cars and throw kids up against the wall and search them for guns there is the gun recovery unit that is that the police do recognize and they still flaunt it on their website I follow the DC police Twitter account and they were like oh gun recovered you know and they and they show a picture of it and whatever but the way they often do this is sometimes they're in tactical gear and judge Janice Rogers Brown of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals wrote opinion about this as a concurrence where she talked about the sort of the the imaginary nature of consent in these sorts of encounters where police officers jump out in tactical gear on a bunch of kids just hanging out and say you know and then they might have their weapons drawn it's like hey we need to search you for for guns that's getting consent out of something like that is she can compare compared it to Sasquatch finding Sasquatch credible that that's how you feel forced yeah and walk away from that right no thank you officers I don't want to be searched today right and if you pull that in Georgetown the idea that this would be consent would be laughed out of court but that because of precedent she had to go along with because this is what the Supreme Court and other courts have gone with and that sort of difference yes you should police more violent areas more you know more proactively but that doesn't mean you get to violate the people's rights who live there just because well they face more danger well you're gonna have to deal with that in a constitutional way and unfortunately the courts have like expanded what constitutional is into a way that's barely recognizable the interesting word in your in your essay is legitimacy which is an interesting term just for legal philosophers political philosophers when his government precedes legitimate because that's at least a necessary condition to some sort of peace and not actually just thwarting the government and trying to overthrow it and you have a great line it says there's two dominant methods the government can use to encourage compliance with the law this is mean this now I'm gonna make a little comment on that because of course you can't force everyone to comply all the time with force that would be pretty weird and that's in NC say it's deterred through fear which would be this one like a cop on every corner and then cooperation through legitimacy which is something like the IRS has to depend upon people you know sitting in their taxes for example they can't enforce it enough now the legitimacy function here cooperation through legitimacy how does this affect minority neighborhoods perception of even legitimacy of police if not just the government on top of that if you look at the way that police are in these minority neighborhoods they they've been likened to occupying forces now you might feel that you have to go along because you feel that this force is going to come upon you in a very harsh and antagonistic manner and but the thing is that doesn't really jive with the protect and serve motto that goes along with so many police departments and so when you those police officers don't have positive relationship with the with the community out ever or in very rare circumstances then that decreases the legitimacy of what they're trying to do now this can eat at the core of a community because what you have when this happens in a highly violent area as many minority communities are you have high homicide rates and there's a great book by jilliovi called ghetto side that goes through this where homicide detectives have a hard time getting cooperation from the minority communities because the police those communities don't trust the police and this is such this like this legitimacy and this trust is so broken you hear this I've heard this from cops that I just met on the street or not on the street but in in social in social gatherings where they've been to homicide scenes where the kid is dying and they say who did this to you and they're like fuck you I'm not telling you and that I mean if someone is dying and someone they know who killed them and they don't want you to get it that is a broken relationship and so because of these issues and a lot of times it's not the homicide cops that are causing these problems it's the frontline cops that are over policing for stupid little stuff like you know and you know I'm not going to sit here and judge every you know law that I think is a little crazy but you know cigarette taxes with the Eric Garner thing in Staten Island there are different ways we can go through this we could say hey Eric not today because there was a directive there's a political directive for police officers to start cracking down on that but he's like if the officer just goes hey man not today take it somewhere else you know that doesn't end up in a violent encounter that happened but I think too often police officers just go out with this us versus them mentality and they're going out to crack skulls or you know just show who's boss and they're going to like enforce their will on the people that they're and that they're assigned to a police okay so I'll keep my social conservative hat on for a little bit longer and give the what I think might be the the counter argument from that set to what you just said which is that maybe this is just necessary maybe it's that these communities don't respect law and order that if you that the co-op the lack of cooperation is not because they have had these bad experiences with the cops but because there's just a high level criminal element and criminals don't want to cooperate with the cops that maybe the cops need to behave this way because we see we read stories all the time not least of all that what happened in Dallas of cops getting killed in the line of duty and so they've got to behave in ways that are gonna protect their own lives because they've got to go home to their families at the end of their shift and so it would be it would be awfully nice if you could have that model of the neighborhood cop walking the beat and being friends with everyone in the community but if the community just doesn't like cops and wants to act like a bunch of criminals that's gonna be awfully hard well the community isn't acting like a bunch of criminals there there are criminal elements there and that has to do with socioeconomic issues education but also has a lot to do with how the they view society what's what's the incentive to play by the rules of society if the rights that supposed to protect anyone don't apply to you fourth amendment doesn't apply to you why should I follow your rules but to go beyond that if the if the community doesn't respect the police the answer certainly isn't to reify that disrespect it makes your job harder if you're a police officer if you can't get cooperation you can't solve crimes and that means is you are gonna you're gonna be hostile going into that neighborhood you're it's it's as a public policy matter you can't just be like okay black people trust us that doesn't work what you have to do is go out and you know sell sell yourself to the community say here I'm here to help I understand that in the past we haven't you know we've we've gone about this wrong way we want to keep you safe and but this is not we can't continue this really hyper-aggressive policing because it's not working it's just isn't and there's more data coming out New York City just released a report on the effectiveness of broken windows policing there's no concrete evidence that broken windows broken windows policing it was started by an article in the Atlantic by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson back in the early 1980s and it argued that they argued in that piece that where you saw sort of deteriorating infrastructure and like broken windows graffiti on walls all the sort of cosmetic cosmetic quality of life areas you that's where you saw a crime and in more serious crime and the idea was you crack down on this this petty crime and you will decrease violent crime but we've had 20 years of experience 30 years of experience with us now in certain areas and the data just doesn't support that that's really going on and you had DC police chief Kathleen year at a panel several years ago talked about how this that sort of that morphed into zero tolerance policing so if the police officer saw anything that was possibly illegal they run you in well what what that actually does is you take someone off the streets and you also take that police officer off the streets and so they're now filling paperwork downtown and then the officer on patrol is no longer on patrol which dissuades criminal action from happening which and then you give you have all the attendant problems with that person who just got arrested you know maybe it was for a very small amount of drugs they get kicked out of public housing they they're become you know less secure and more likely to go into crime so it's just like this still that sort of thing feeds into this vicious cycle that of all the attendant problems in our criminal justice system is it really that clear that broken windows policing doesn't work I mean there's a lot of people who would disagree with you the data is not because the crime rate has gone down and we've had more broken windows policing and the theory of broken windows policing makes some amount of sense I always compare it to a roommate situation where where if a house can go awry as soon as like people are like leaving their dishes out that everyone leaves their dishes out that other things become a problem so you have to like stop at the beginning and make sure that you pick up things and that makes everything better so it seems that broken windows policing is not a bad theory but maybe your point is actually better that the broken windows policing if you are enforcing to the hilt these small things you create a legitimacy problem which could have downstream effects absolutely and the data that that I've seen it's inconclusive at best but when New York City is coming out and saying yeah there's no certificate of evidence saying that our actions over the past 30 years have actually led to the decline in crime you know I'm gonna take them at their word but beyond that it it doesn't make sense because violent crimes aren't typically done in the same sort of way that they're like a you know selling cigarettes is right you you have violence that comes from it's very heat of the moment it's very you know there's some sort of reason or it's in retaliation for something but I'm not saying that police should never worry about you know people you know tagging walls or with graffiti or anything like that but they don't necessarily have to go about it in the way that is so aggressive and so in your face an antagonistic you know obviously you know if we're gonna start finding people for that that makes I mean not even start if we're gonna find people for that that's cool but do it in a way that is like respectful and maybe find help for these kids like you know that because a lot of times it's like they have no job they've got nothing better to do but they like to draw like the guys who I knew who did graffiti in school they became tattoo artists you know I mean and there's and they seem to be doing successful and doing well it is interesting to try and think of behind the theory of broken windows policing it's like what is actually the connection between graffiti and murders I mean it's like well we clean up all this graffiti be much fewer murders and that I mean like it seems like it's missing some sort of causal link in that chain I think it tends to be I mean when I look at an area that is dilapidated not cared for I also look for police presence I like I and I see what kind of police presence it is if you see a bunch of guys in tact tactical gear then it's like again occupying force instead of a police officer going into a bodega and saying hey how's it going what's going you know everyone doing okay today I had any problems you know and becoming parts of the community because so much of and part of this is not to throw this all on cops it's just like being bad a lot of this has to do with like technical advances that people don't think about when police officers walk the beat you know they were much more friendly and they knew the neighborhood and they had good relationships my dad was very much like this but what happened was people started complaining about long wait times on 9 on 9 1 1 calls well what does that do well that that's a that's a noise in the community saying we want this fixed and so politicians say get better on 9 1 1 calls so what did people do that what that what's that do that put cops in cars on the radios so this is 9 1 1 call hits they go and so that pulled the cops off off the streets and into their cars and so and now when they jump out of their cars more often not it's on a 9 1 1 call or some other disturbance where they're gonna have to start some problems I mean they're gonna have to solve some problems and very often they have to take control of that situation so it becomes increasingly I mean it just kind of by nature becomes hostile or at least confrontational certainly a control situation where you're not gonna be like hey how's everyone doing two people yelling at each other and one might have some sort of weapon on them they're gonna come out and try to kick take control immediately and the problem is is that 9 1 1 response times no correlation to crime rates and so what we have is not a public safety rationale behind the police officers in cars but a political one and I'm not saying that no one should you know we should you know lower response times on that sort of thing but we need to find ways to get police back towards public safety concerns and away from the strictly political then how much of this is the reasons that you've given we've talked a lot about race and there's been racism in police departments for as long as we've had police departments but now you're talking about incentives and much more subtle effects like putting them in cars which shifts how they interact with situations so what's the is this a race problem is this like how new is this problem has it been getting as far as aggressive policing and getting away from meaningful public safety policies is it has it been going on for a long time is it getting noticeably worse now than it used to be and then we also talk about how crime rates are declining murder rates are down and so why can't we say look it's yeah this isn't you know aggressive policing may have these negative effects but we keep hearing about it but crime keeps going down and crime going down is a good thing to take the part of that is it you know it is aggressive policing worse it's hard to say because we don't have very good data what I can say is the incentives skew toward aggressive policing for varying reasons as I said earlier civil asset forfeiture gives police officers financial incentives to pull over cars that they believe are track are carrying drug proceeds not drugs not guns but drug proceeds to go into their department to either fund their drug task force or just go into the general police fund pays for overtime that sort of stuff or margarita machines or margarita machines you have the top on crime rhetoric from the 90s that was that you know culminated the 1994 crime bill that gave you know that created the cops office a community or a community-ordered policing office you had you know the like the Willie Horton ad from earlier in that in that decade where actually it was late 80s where they were just scaring people with like scary black guy you know we need to get tough on crime so we got a lot more cops and the cops were out there to lower the crime rate they're out there to jail people and so we have this I mean the incarceration rate was going up before that but net then it just sort of like jumps not necessarily strictly because federal involvement but it goes into it so you have this rising incarceration rate you have this is affecting black people particularly because of the way our our laws and have been implemented there's a great book by the late William Stuntz called the collapse of American criminal justice and when in that he argued that what you had was a white electorate that was scared of what was going on in the inner cities because DC what during that in the 80s and 90s was a very dangerous place and other inner cities were similar and so what you had was aggressive policing that was supported both on the federal level and the local level so you had a lot more cops on the streets and they're out there to bring people in and they think punishment you know these massive mandatory minimum punishments and going out and just being aggressive in all that and it just had an impact on that community the people who were voting for these laws never really felt the effect of them you don't again we don't see this kind of aggressive policing in Georgetown we don't see it in affluent white neighborhoods everyone knows that drugs go on in those neighborhoods but they're not enforced in the same way and so you had this disconnect between the people who were incentivized to support these laws and the people who are actually feeling the effects of them and of course with the people who are feeling the effect they get disenfranchised with a felony conviction so that that further decreases their political capital to change that sort of thing and so yes it's about race but it's not necessarily about racist cops or racist lawmakers it's about what that policing looks like in the society in which we live I want to nail go down a little bit more on this race question because some people will say things you know like our racist criminal justice system or all cops are racist or things like this and it upsets conservatives I mean and it's not to me to some degree too because it's a little bit facile in the sense of how this is actually working I mean it has a racial effects but every cop is not a KKK member so how do the effects of racism manifest themselves we've talked about some of them but like what does it mean to say if you do if you would say cops are racist like what does that mean I mean I tend not to go there generally I try to think of and try to explain racism in various ways because I don't actually like the term because racism people get the idea that you know it's you know people saying nigger and you know you know the Mark Furman Mark Furman or you know go further back and you have you know peaceful protesters hosed down with by fire departments in Birmingham and in bull Connor that sort of stuff and so much of how it actually manifests itself is what a lot of people call implicit bias where you're going to treat people outside of your sort of your social group more harshly than you would someone in your own group and you see this in like media where you have like in the aftermath of Katrina you have these pictures of people wading through water carrying property whether it's a TV or just a bag of stuff and the white people who were viewed doing that were you know survivors and like refugees and the black people were carrying that were looters you know it is just that sort of that those just assumptions that people jump to and I don't like calling the system racist I don't like calling various people or organizations racist you can talk about institutional racism because I think that is the sort of the effects that we're seeing that we can see in the data that like what's going on and who's being targeted for for various actions like pretextual stops the numbers skew highly towards minorities particularly blacks but that's not the same thing as oh the cop who shot X and you know such and such was a racist cop maybe I don't know but it's not really relevant the guy is dead and we have to figure out why that happened and what were what were the things that led up to that and so I think that when you start looking at policies you should say okay maybe we should pull back aggressive policing we should like lower the number of pretextual stops to decrease the amount of antagonism that's going on between the police and the community and in the race but there are like you see occasionally stories about the makeup of a police department how a police department can become racially tinged within itself maybe 10% of the cops are very maybe very actually racist and you see the police forums that are which can be shocking online discussion online discussion forums that can be shockingly racist and then and then they teach or they you know mentor people who are less race racist but but it seems to be it you know for a cop who's trying to be a good cop who just thinks you know in his head out there that black guy I mean it might be he's probably up to no good why is he here you know he's just suffering from this kind of bias he said he's not he's not bull corner or a KKK and all you would need is it you know a slight percentage of some cops to think this way and you would have a pretty big aggregate effect of the way policing is felt by minority communities and then the legitimacy point is is we can restore legitimacy and then talk about how we can lower crime but they're they're connected correct yeah I think so and because even while police departments like focus on this implicit bias I don't know if it's necessarily useful in every account because if you're just you know some police departments what they're going to do is they're going to start counting you know the race of the people that get pulled over as but they're you're still keeping the aggressive tactics you're just trying to be you know more you know more equal about it how about stop doing it in the first place I mean this I mean obviously this ties into the war on drugs without the war on drugs you just don't have that sort of need or that that incentive to pull as many people over because the idea that you're just going to pull over some random black guy and find you know the the the stuff that was stolen in a robbery is just like it's really really low unless I mean you happen to be they're speeding away from a place that just had 911 call and of course yeah you can pull those guys over but but again they're speeding it's not but it this sort of like going fishing as a way to fight crime is neither efficient nor particularly effective does this mean then that solving this problem that ending aggressive policing so if we if we stop doing pretextual stops or we radically reduce the number of stops then we're gonna let more people who have drugs or drug money in their cars get away in the sense and so does does fixing the problem with policing require or at least strongly point us in the direction of first ending the drug war like how much how much can we actually reform things if we keep waging the drug war yeah I mean I think ending the drug war is a big part of it or at least changing the way we do it I mean we're not gonna legalize heroin and cocaine anytime in the near future I'm sorry to say but the the amount of resources and personnel that are driven toward drug interdiction is a massive problem and and the thing is it's like you said well how much of it you know we're letting the drugs and guns and money go through well but if they're already focusing I mean we've got police officers on tape saying well we're catching them going you know coming out of New York City because presumably they've already dropped the drugs off and you know they're trying to catch the cash because they under asset forfeiture laws they can sell property that is used in commission of a crime but they can't but they can't sell the drugs amazing yes but we could we could reframe that as you know good economists and say its subjective value like so you want to what you're trying to do when you stop them is make is take away their incentives to continue to deal drugs because that's what we want them to stop doing and so if they went into New York City and traded this trunkful of drugs for a certain amount of money it was because they valued the money more than the drugs and so of course you would stop them when you can take away the thing that they value more rather than the thing that they value less right but the person who's dropping the drugs off is very not there's often not the kingpin the kingpin of any major drug organization is like has mules all over the place they don't care they they they figure that some of their they calculate that some of their product is gonna get stopped they want their money but you know stopping $50,000 from getting to El Chapo when he was still free doesn't do anything to him and so if you're like I mean even law enforcement estimates they think they get maybe 10% you know so 90% is getting through regardless but they're like if they're targeting for the money that's just even more drugs that are going on to the streets the drugs are already out there you know nothing they can do about that and so I don't think that that sort of policing has public safety at all in mind and and so that's just one other thing we can change if we decided we still want to go after drug traffickers that's fine but take the profit moment out of it so they can say all right does that mean maybe funding police officers in a different way maybe I don't know but certainly not through asset for which the police officers are highly incentivized to find the cash and not the drugs and guns that they say are this terrible scourge on the community which you know I think is not as true as they'd like it to be it does seem like the drug war is the reason for these stops that mean the ability to find these things I mean our colleague Adam Bates said on a previous episode that there's a huge smoking hole in the middle of the fourth amendment left by the drug war so if we're gonna have a broad conversation about how to change things that probably is the single biggest policy effect we can basically every Supreme Court case that undercuts the fourth amendment is a drug case yeah absolutely and so that would be part of this the question of reform which gets us to this the question Aaron wrote down which which I actually don't even I'm not sure I know the answer to this question I mean I know it's very complex your answer to this question which is your thoughts on the black lives matter movement well I mean it's a decentralized thing and then like last year they came out with campaign zero which came out with a bunch of really good ideas for how to reform police they've come collected databases on you know law enforcement bill of rights laws which allow which give various privileges and rights to police officers after use of force or some other misconduct where they don't have to talk to an investigator about a shooting for like 10 days or longer or they you know always have counsel sometimes some of these laws say that they get to have evidence against all the evidence against them before they make their statement full discovery for a potential defendant before you even talk to anyone let alone reject or accept a plea deal is insane I mean I wish everyone got that sort of protection but that's not the way the state works so they've gone through and found the various laws and protections that that disadvantage the public and disadvantage justice in the name of protecting police officers so in that sort of thing they they're doing great but they another group affiliated with BLM recently put out new like a similar sort of like broad strategy of things that are like list of demands that people want and one of them under target the like ending the war on black people as they put it involved stopping funding police including like body cameras and I think that's blaming tech versus policy whereas I mean there was also a recent report this week about how like 70% of body camera policies allow police to view the footage without letting the public see the footage that's bad and so we need to talk about crafting policy blaming tech qua tech doesn't make any sense so it's in unfortunately this is sort of being brought into a larger you know progressive like wishlist that same thing happened to occupy student loans yeah yeah and you know we can arguments you know foreign against those things on their own merits but I but generally I'm supportive of them if I don't not necessarily support everything that they believe because I mean it's it's a movement you know I don't agree with everything all libertarians say it's just not that's not really to I don't think it's too important to like say oh I support x y and z of what they do I think I think I think generally they're a good idea but now when conservatives say all lives matter are they missing something yes I heard of various metaphors to to the response to that it's like going to the doctor with a broken arm and saying hey doc can you fix my broken arm and he's like yeah but all bones are important it's like well yeah but can you work on this one so it's I think not understanding that there is a particular problem that black people face because of the way they're pleased not just the shootings and that that's one thing I would like try to get over to people and it's like if you're waiting for the justice system to you know prosecute police officers for shooting people you're putting your eggs in the wrong basket because of the thousands of shootings over like between 2005 and 2015 there were 59 charges brought I think total right and then the conviction rates even lower than that what you have is a system of policing that makes antagonistic encounters more likely and if you decrease that you're gonna decrease the bodies in the streets but until that changes and again this is partially driven driven by the drug war we're going to continue to see this whether it's you know it seemed to like die down over the winter but it's back in the summer because it's easier to protest and that sort of thing we're gonna have this until we start changing policing there are 18,000 police forces in this country it's gonna take a while and I think people really need to like wrap their head around that this is a broad police reform that has to focus on incentives and not just oh there's another dead black person that's that's not enough thank you for listening if you enjoyed today's show please take a moment to rate us on iTunes free thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel 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