 The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops has sparked an ongoing series of nationwide protests against police brutality, and it seems that a new consensus is forming around the urgent need for criminal justice reform. Six years ago, after the police killing of Michael Brown and Ferguson, Missouri, just 43 percent of Americans believed that such incidents were indicative of a systemic problem. Now, even though police killings have remained level since 2014, 69 percent of us agree that the killing of Floyd represents a broader problem within law enforcement. To better understand the shift in calls for police reform and what sorts of changes would be most effective, I sat down with the Washington Post opinion writer Radley Balco, a former reporter and senior editor at Reason, who covers police abuse, the drug war, and criminal justice reform. His coverage of Corey May, a black man in Mississippi put on death row for killing a police officer during a no-knock raid, helped bring about May's acquittal, and his books, Rise of the Warrior Cup and the Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, reveal widespread problems with law enforcement and expert testimony. Radley Balco, thanks for talking to Reason. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. You have been covering the broad topics, the intersecting topics of the war on drugs, police abuse, race issues in America, going on 20 years now at a variety of outfits, including the Cato Institute, Reason, Huffington Post, Washington Post. Why did the George Floyd killing, do you think, explode into public consciousness the way that it did? I mean, I think it's really the power of video. You know, if you go back to the civil rights movement, obviously there were civil rights abuses going on for a long time in our country's history. But you know, I think the organizers of the civil rights movement in the 60s really recognized the power of images, and I think there were, you know, we know now looking at that history that a lot of the events or the protests that inspired these kind of iconic photos and videos were, you know, they knew there was going to be violence. They knew that the other side, I think they're going to be provoked. And that was a strategy to kind of win over the middle and win over white America. And you know, the George Floyd video is, I mean, it's indisputable, right? I mean, there have been attacks on Floyd's character, you know, whatever his decisions of life. But like that video, there is no excuse for having your knee on a guy's neck for nine minutes. Yeah. And it's, you know, I was, when I first saw that, I was like, in my mind, I always go to the Rodney King beating video, which in a lot of ways is kind of the starting point of kind of citizen surveillance of police in a modern context. And I can remember in the trial of the LAPD cops accused of beating Rodney King, or not it, I mean, they beat him, but of doing it in a in a felonious way. The defense broke that video down in the original trial to show that actually they weren't beating him. There's a broad kind of support of like, oh, well, you know, maybe the LAPD was doing okay. When we look at Michael Brown or the, or the, the riots or the protests that came out of Michael Brown and Ferguson in 2014, there was also this discussion of like, well, you know, on the one hand, the cops have to do this and on the other. With this, Floyd, nobody's protecting him, right? Or nobody is, nobody is defending the police action. Is that a sign of progress, even as, you know, we're in the middle of ongoing protests against police abuse? I mean, I think it's a sign of progress if there's been such a widespread sort of embrace of, of the idea that police are systematically abusive, that there's, that the idea of racism in policing in America is crept into white America into the suburbs that you have. Now, if you remember four years ago, the Democratic nominee for president couldn't say the phrase, black lives matter without qualifying it, and a lot of people were like that. When I first heard the phrase, I thought, well, that's kind of a weird slogan, although now makes a lot of sense. Now you have, you know, Mitt Romney saying it unsolicited, you have, you know, it's a, you have people, you know, who probably haven't protested ever in their lives now joining this protest. So I think that sign of progress. I think, I think the, the role the video plays is that it, like, like Michael Brown in Ferguson, St. Louis County, like a lot of, you know, Tamir Rice, of these incidents that have sparked sort of uprisings, you know, none of them are really about those cases in isolation, right? There have been unjustified killing, police killings of, you know, white and black people in cities all over the country over the last 20 years, where we see the uprisings tend to be in places that those, those stories speak to people on a very personal level. They tap into some, some long simmering tension, resentment, pain, fear, despair. And so, you know, I think with Michael Brown with, you know, like you said, even the Rodney King, I think the fact that the, that the initial narrative then had some qualifications or context that made it less compelling drew away from the fact or gave sort of white people an excuse to sort of dismiss it all as not, you know, as a false narrative, as based on a false narrative and actually sort of ignore the broader, you know, long simmering, you know, anger and despair that led to the protest in the first place. In this case, there's no, there's no contextualizing that video. And so it's easier to kind of, you know, say, all right, I'm fully on board with this. What, you know, critics of Black Lives Matter and of the protests more generally talk about two things. One, typically they'll say, okay, police abuse, you know, is widespread yet it's really an issue with individual police or individual cops. And also that race is not the issue here. It's something else. I'll point to things that I'm reading from a recent article in City Journal put up by the Manhattan Institute, but where in 1971, the NYPD, the New York Police Department, killed 93 people. In 2016, they killed nine, discharged their weapons 810 times in 1971, 72 times last year in 2016. And they'll say that they're just, you know, this is bad, but it is not a big scale problem. How do you, how do you get across the idea that actually it is a large scale problem? So of you, I think there are two different questions there. One about how systemic is, is police abuse and police or violations in general? And then how, how systemic is, is race or race? Yeah. And let's, let's separate the race to the two, you know, for a second here. So. My response to that is, you know, there are lots of different things that drive how many times police shoot people over the course of year, including, you know, general crime rates, general sort of consensus about, you know, how people's lives are, you know, police attitudes, how many police officers are on the force, how well-equipped they are, well-trained they are, you know, there was a lot of more violence period in the 1970s and 1980s and up to early 1990s. You know, my, my measure of whether a system is corrupt is whether you can, you can point to specific incidents where, you know, a bad apple or whatever you want to call it has clearly acted corruptly and in a, you know, violated some of these constitutional rights and nothing is done about it. You can say that bad cops are a tiny percentage of the overall force, but if the system isn't doing anything about those bad cops or even if it does, they can find a job of, you know, a county or two over, I think you have a corrupt system and, and, you know, yes, it's probably a small percentage of cops who kill people or shoot and kill a lot of people or sort of blatantly racist, but there is an entire police culture of covering up of this idea that cops should always look out for each other, that sort of the best interests of cops are, you know, prioritized over everything, justice over the community of people are supposed to be serving. So, you know, I feel like there are lots of different ways that you can break down police shootings. A lot of ways you can crunch the data. A lot of ways you can try to like, you know, add or remove different variables. But if you have a system where even the sort of obviously corrupt people are very rarely held accountable, then I think you can say sort of unequivocally that system itself is corrupt. And I think, you know, your focus on systems of policing in this, I'm thinking of your book Rise of the Warrior Cop, where, you know, in the end, I mean, you, you know, individuals, obviously, you know, we're both libertarian, leaning or libertarian. And so, you know, you want to prioritize or you want to, you want to pay a deference to people's individual actions, but when you're in a system that is so overwhelmingly pointed in one direction, the limit for the scope for individual action is by definition limited, right? So, yeah, I mean, this is, you know, as somebody who sort of vaguely came from the right and who finds, you know, less and less in common with the right. But you know, one point I've tried to make over the years and I've tried to bring sort of people on the right along on these issues is that, you know, we, people on the right conservatives, they understand the value and the importance of incentives in almost every other facet of government except the criminal justice system. You know, if you're a police officer, every incentive points toward you covering up for bad cops, because if you don't, you know, they're not going to get your back if you need them. There's going to be enormous peer pressure, you know, there are, I don't know, how many stories I've written over the years where, you know, there was some sort of blatant act of corruption or police abuse or shooting or beating someone and the only person who ends up getting disciplined in any way is the cop who reported the other cops. I mean, that's almost a cliche, it's so common. So, you know, we have a system, a criminal justice system is poorly incentivized. We have to start talking about how we reverse those incentives. And I'll give you a sort of a good example. You know, one of the policy proposals that's, you know, pretty out there in terms of, you know, whether it would ever be sort of politically acceptable, but I think makes a hell of a lot of sense. It's this idea that we should start paying settlements or awards and police abuse cases, lawsuits out of police pensions instead of out of the public funds. And, you know, it's never going to fly, although to be honest, I never thought repealing qualified immunity would have the support it has today. So who knows? But if you think about how that would operate on the ground, if I'm a cop now, you know, every incentive is pushing me toward sort of going along with the way things have always been, not raising, you know, if I'm a sort of a well-intentioned, you know, conscientious cop, every incentive is toward me sort of just going along to get along, looking the other way. One of the cops are corrupt or abusive, but if, you know, if we're in a system where every time another cop does something that risks a lawsuit and now it's sort of like my pension is at stake when, you know, my partner does something bad, now the incentive, you know, you're pushing back a little bit and now maybe the incentive is maybe not to report him, is that we'll probably do a lawsuit, but at least to sort of, you know, try to get him moving in the right direction and at least, you know, trying to not just sort of going along to get along. You recently updated a story, I guess, or a practice that you did, a survey that you did in 2018 of kind of studies and stories about systemic racism in policing. You just updated that at the Washington Post. Can you define systemic racism and then the ways in which, you know, to summarize kind of your findings? Because I think part of the confusion here, particularly on the right, is that most people are not, you know, openly racist. They're not George, or, you know, they're not Strom Thurman types or anything like that. And so they're slow to kind of acknowledge that there can be racism even if there aren't that many particular races. But can you talk about what is systemic racism and then what have you found? How does that influence policing? Yeah, so I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what systemic racism is. And I'll be honest, you know, for a long time, I didn't fully understand what it was. Systemic racism is not the idea that everybody, every player within a system is racist on a sort of individual level. It's that the system itself, it was, you know, constructed, built, honed at a time when in this country where, you know, racism was sort of written into our laws. It was a sort of day to day fact of life and way of life. And so, you know, the idea that the criminal justice systems that we built during the Jim Crow era, even during reconstruction, you know, which haven't really substantively changed since the end of Jim Crow, the idea that, you know, I don't even think it should be particularly controversial to think that those systems, you know, that had a purpose at that time. Now, you know, probably haven't shed all of the sort of aspects of, you know, deliberately wanting racially based outcomes. They're not just going to sort of shed that stuff overnight. I mean, it has to be purged from them. We haven't really done a good job of that. And I'll give you a good, you know, my favorite example of this, which is, you know, after Ferguson, I went to St. Louis County in Missouri and did some reporting and there's been a lot of subsequent reporting on this. But, you know, St. Louis County has over 90 municipalities within the county, which has seen a number of cities and towns. And the reason for that is in during this sort of great white flight from the suburbs or to the suburbs from St. Louis, white people would sort of move into a suburb, you know, eventually sort of black people would also upper class, middle class black people would also move out. White people didn't like that. So they would pick up and move a mile over and start a new town. And this kind of just kept happening all over St. Louis County. And you got these sort of what they go postage stamps towns all over the county. Well, every one of those towns also has a town council or almost all of them have the town council and a police department. And the towns are basically funded. Well, the primary source of funding is supposed to be a sales tax. Well, if you're a poor town, which tends to be the blacker towns, you're going to get much less revenue from sales taxes. And so they supplement that or in some cases their primary source of revenue are fines and fees that they extract from their residents. And the really sort of pernicious part of this that I think is hard for people to sort of understand without knowing that history is that the blacker the town, the poorer the town, probably the blacker the town, and the blacker the town, the more reliant they are on these fines and fees. And in all these towns, the police don't actually solve crimes. The county believes they do that. Their sole purpose is to extract revenue from their residents in order to pay their own salaries. I mean, conservatives always like to joke about the government program that pays one guy to dig a ditch and the other guy to pull it back up. I mean, here you have a police department that solely exists to extract fines from people to pay the salaries of police officers. And a lot of these towns have a black city council or black city manager. Their police departments are usually blacker than other police departments. And yet they're doing more harassing of their residents in any other town. And so that's systemic racism where it's it's it's independent of almost anybody's explicit motivations in a system. Right. I mean, I was going to argue that the black cops that are harassing people in the black towns are racist. You also can't argue that that is an racist system that is built on a racist legacy. And, you know, I think, you know, we, you know, so battalions, I think we need to recognize that. I also think, you know, the whole idea of racism or systemic racism, racial profiling, racism, criminal justice system, you know, the counter that is always, well, you had to look at black crime, you know, and black on black crime, looked at blacks committed disproportionate number of times. Matter of fact, I mean, a lot of people now are talking about however, you guess, Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, 18 people were killed on May 31st. But we don't hear about that. Almost all of them black on black. Right. That's the argument. But, you know, the you look at, for example, stop and frisk in New York City, which is often justified, you know, that look at all the black lives that stop and frisk say because it took guns out of the hands of criminals, right? Well, I can't remember the exact figure, but something like 90 for 95 percent of the people were stopped and frisked, at least didn't find anything, right? So if that's the argument that, you know, look at all the black lives we save, or this is in response to the higher proportion of black people commit crimes, what you're saying is those 95 percent of people who were stopped and frisked were innocent, sort of, that's fine. And that means we're sort of fine with punishing people of one group, of a particular group, because other members of that group, you know, did bad things. And, you know, that's sort of the opposite of individualism, right? I mean, we're sort of treating people based on the actions of other people who look like them, you know, if the argument is that black people commit more crimes, therefore black people, more black people are in prison, you know, that's at least something that we can look at the data on and try to figure out. But, you know, the idea that it's that racial profiling and stopping and searching innocent people on the side of the road is OK, because those people, you know, are a member of a group that tends to, I don't know, be more likely to engage in drug trafficking. You're excusing justifying people, excuse me, you're justifying punishing people based on a member, the fact that they're a member of a racial group. And that is fundamentally un-libertarian. To turn it kind of in the other direction, if libertarians and conservatives often get, you know, the understanding of systems or, you know, in the way you point out, you know, they believe that incentive structure behavior in every way, except in, you know, policing. What are the main problems, what are the main problems that you see in kind of liberal and progressive critiques of policing or of a larger system of oppression? Well, I mean, I think there is a lot of emphasis on, there can be a lot of sort of unproven social programs that, you know, I think have maybe contributed to a lot of the problems that we're trying to fight. You know, on these issues as a libertarian, I tend to, you know, identify more with progressives than with conservatives. So, you know, and I think that for about a generation or two now conservatives have had kind of the upper hand on this and have kind of implemented their policies almost that will, a lot of times with help from, you know, the Democratic Party, for example. Yeah, it's a, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I was just watching a documentary where Charles Rangel, you know, a black member of Congress, very influential, talked about his push in the 80s and 90s to increase sentencing disparities between powder and crack cocaine, and then recognizing that he actually made a significant mistake there. Yeah, and both he and Biden actually, at various points, criticized the Reagan administration for not going far enough or on drugs. But I guess my point is just that it's, you know, it's hard for me to find a lot of fault with where progressives are coming down on policing issues right now, just because we're in such a whole over the last, you know, several decades of, you know, tough and tougher and toughest on crime policy, you know, a lot of progressive ideas haven't been tried, so it's hard to sort of say, hey, you're, you know, you're advocating policies that have failed, which we can look at. Do you buy into the, you know, I see this adjacent to a lot of protests, you know, the idea that capitalism is actually the root cause of all of the sufferings of black people in America? Yeah, I mean, it's hard for me to give that much credence because, you know, there's nothing, you know, capitalism is about voluntary exchange. It's about, you know, owning your body and owning the products of your own labor. You know, I understand the argument that the police sort of exist to protect a capitalist system or that's kind of traditionally how they've been viewed. But, you know, I actually agree with progressives that, you know, policing, you can draw a direct line from modern policing to slavery and slave patrols, in fact, a number of police departments, you know, are direct descendants of slave patrols in the paint bill themselves. But, you know, as a libertarian, I think slavery is sort of the opposite of capitalism, right? I mean, there's no, and there's a lot of debate on this, I know, with the 1619 project, but, you know, I firmly believe that, you know, capitalism means free exchange, it means you own your body, it means you own the fruits of your labor and slavery is antithetical to that. And so to the extent that, like, police evolve from the system that tried to protect slavery, I think, is a pretty good argument that it doesn't have sort of its roots in capitalism. Right. You have written about the Breonna Taylor case, which a person who was killed by police just a little bit before George Floyd, that case seems to be a horrifying kind of encapsulation of the way in which the drug war and a whole host of kind of constitutional abuses that go along with the drug war culminate in, you know, in terror of innocent citizens. Can you talk a little bit about that? And, you know, do you think the Breonna Taylor case is driving enough of the conversation for police reform? You know, I'd like to see it driving more because I think that those, the use of those kinds of tactics are far too common. We're seeing them expanded to being used, you know, it used to be that kind of tactic was only used if you were confronting somebody who was in the process of committing a violent crime, right, where somebody is like with immediate risk. And what we see in the 80s and 90s is those those kinds of, you know, dynamic entry, forced entry rates, increasingly and then dominantly used to serve drug warrants. And it was really a dramatic shift in the use of that kind of violence, government violence, where before you were using it against somebody who was, you know, in the process of committing a violent crime, so an active shooter or a bank robber or hostage situation, where now that kind of force primarily being used against people who are still merely suspected of committing nonviolent consensual crimes. You know, most of these raids are not, you know, arrest warrants, they're search warrants, they're still in the investigative process. A lot of times it's based on dirty information. It's the tactics themselves are extremely volatile and violent. They leave a very, very little margin for error. They leave very little margin for error. And, you know, as we see the Breonna and Taylor people have died because of it. The piece I wrote about Breonna and Taylor, you know, it's a bit, it gets a bit into the weeds and the legal history of all this, but it's really kind of remarkable. So about a year and a half ago, I looked at about 100 search warrants, no knock search warrants that were served in Little Rock, Arkansas. I found that about 95% of them were illegal. They were indirect defiance of the Supreme Court ruling on a case called Richard Wisconsin what the court held in that ruling was that in order to get a no knock warrant, the police have to show specific information that the person they're going to search is a threat to either, you know, attack the police, dispose of evidence or flee if the cops take the time to knock in the house first. And in these warrants, I found in Little Rock, every single warrant just had this boilerplate language cut and paste, almost word for word. And most of them that said that all drug dealers are a threat, you know, to attack the police or dispose of evidence or flee if the police knock in the house. The Supreme Court has explicitly said that that's illegal. That is not acceptable. You have to show specific information about that particular suspect. And in Little Rock, you know, they were using we have videos is they were using explosives to blow doors off the hinges. I mean, you know, somebody's on the other side of that door, they're likely to be alive. The remarkable thing is the judges were signing off on these warrants. And I talked to the two judges who had signed most of them and they were completely oblivious to the fact that they were signing illegal warrants. So is it that they don't read the warrants or they do and they just ignore the Supreme Court ruling or what's going on there? So here's the problem. So a few years later in the Hudson versus Michigan, the court ruled that, yes, the not going to announce rule is, you know, inherent in the Fourth Amendment and it's part of the Castle Doctrine, which is a centuries old law that goes back to English common law. But we're not going to apply the exclusionary rule when the police violate this rule. And so basically there's no mechanism to actually enforce this requirement. And so the police, you know, a lot of us at the time predicted, you know, this is going to be terrible because there's nothing stopping from police to violate it just on paper, but it's not a rule at all if there's no way to enforce it. And so that's what we saw on the rock and that's what we saw in the Breonna Taylor case. I looked at the five warrants for that particular drug investigation and on every one of them under the portion with the officer, the detective requested a no knock. It was the word for word exact same language about drug dealers being, you know, violent or a threat to dispose of evidence. And Breonna Taylor's case, you know, it was particularly pernicious because Taylor, her involvement in this, you know, drug conspiracy or whatever you want to call it, was that she dated the guy who was under investigation several years earlier that broken up years ago, but she had let him use her address to receive some packages in the mail. That was the extent of it. Now, if they had actually, you know, followed the Supreme Court's, you know, guidance or rules in the situation, they would have done a little bit more investigation and they would have had to because the judge would have required it before giving a no knock. And they, you know, they and the judge would have learned that she her connection with all this was tenuous and that this kind of violence wasn't necessary against her. The packages that the boyfriend, ex-boyfriend received her house or clothing and shoes are actually weren't even getting any drugs in the packages. So her only crime was still letting, you know, a former, you know, Paramore use her address to receive some clothing in the mail. And for that, they kicked on her door in the middle of the night and her then boyfriend, you know, reaches for a gun, which he legally owned. In fact, that's another thing. I mean, you know, they would have they done some research that were known that he stayed there. They would have known that he was a licensed gun owner. And they probably I would hope it would have drawn the conclusion that drug dealers tend not to license their weapons with the government. Right. Is you know, this is a ridiculous question. So I took, you know, I apologize in advance for asking, but is it a sign of progress that charges against the boyfriend who wounded a police officer were dropped immediately in the in the melee after the Breonna Taylor killing? Absolutely it is. I mean, the Corey Maycase that, you know, I sort of started my career with a reason was great example. I mean, Corey did 10 years in prison and several of them on death row for mistaking the cops who were breaking into his home again with an warrant that was probably illegal. And right now there's a guy in Texas. It's about to go on trial for killing a police officer in a very similar situation. And in that case, the police, you know, admitted that they didn't find they didn't follow their own policies when they did this, no, not great on the guy's house. And they actually admit that he reached for the gun at the same time that the battering room hit the door. So there's no way he had known that they were cops and also they didn't buy any drugs. So yeah, I mean, it is progress. I think the public pressure probably helped. I think the fact that Breonna Taylor was completely innocent. I think if she had any kind of record at all would have been a lot more difficult to persuade the district attorney to drop the charges. What are, you know, let's talk about reforms. What are the, you know, top three or five reforms that you think can happen that will actually radically shift the way that policing is done in America? I mean, it's an interesting question because if you'd asked me that question a month ago, the the sort of overton window of what was possible? Is that what you would, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think what's possible now versus what was possible a month ago are two very, very different questions. You know, I think even before George Floyd, we saw the ball was moving on qualified immunity. I think thanks a large part to work from from I. J. and Cato, who I think have really mainstreamed the really absurdities that come with the idea that cops should be sort of above the law when it comes to violating people's constitutional rights. So I think abolishing qualified immunity is very high on that list. I think reducing the influence of police unions. Can I ask before we get to the union question, qualified immunity, though, Tim Scott, the Senator, Republican Senator from South Carolina, a black man who has talked movingly in the Senate about his experiences with cops, you know, rousing him simply for being black. He's he said, you know, qualified immunity is not going to get across the finish line. So do you think qualified immunity is is a live reform or is it kind of dead on arrival in the U. S. Senate? I mean, I think it's dead on arrival as long as the Republicans hold the Senate. I think there's there's possibility that, you know, Senate changes hands that it could could pass. But I mean, I think to remember a qualified immunity is it's it's judge made law. I mean, it's it is not, you know, if you call yourself an originalist, there's no way you can support qualified immunity. And it's also just absurd. I mean, we want to talk about incentives. I mean, so in order to get past qualified immunity in a lawsuit against police officer, you have to prove that a the officer violated your constitutional rights. And you have to invent B, you have to show that basically sort of the fact pattern by which the cop violated your rights, that there is established law showing that that fact pattern is unconstitutional. And the way the courts have interpreted this is is you almost have to have a, you know, spot on fact for fact, everything has to be exactly identical to a previous case where the court has said yes, this is constitutional violation to, you know, to give an extreme example that no reason is covered. And there are cops who stole, I think it was like $300,000 from people while they were conducting a search warrant on their house, stole their money. And the courts ruled that, well, yeah, that's certainly a violation. But there's no sort of on point existing law saying there's a violation, so we can't hold these cops accountable. And the really absurd thing is, if you think about sort of the incentives that puts in place, it, it's actually incentive for the police to not educate themselves on the latest developments in constitutional law because they more they know about it, the harder it is for them to say, this wasn't established law, and I couldn't have known. And then the other really, you know, crazy part of this is that the courts sometimes, they'll just move immediately to the second prong, they'll just say, well, there's no previous case on point here, you know, that matches this fact pattern. Therefore, this isn't established law, therefore your suit fails. But they never actually rule on whether the actions in that fact pattern were unconstitutional. And so that means the next time the cops do something very similar, they can say, well, there was no established law because you didn't say that this was wrong. You just said there was no established law and it becomes a self sort of perpetuating problem where the courts never actually hold cops accountable because they never actually, you know, definitively say, no, you can't do that. So qualified immunity is one, you were about to talk about police unions. How does that, you know, what needs to happen to police unions to allow more accountability? I think they need to be abolished, frankly. I mean, I know that's kind of that's politically pretty difficult. But, you know, at the very least, we need to drastically diminish their influence. You know, a lot of places a little rock again, we're shivering a lot about the black black police officers actually started their own union because they felt that the white or the traditional union wasn't representing their interests, particularly when it came when a white officers were inflicted with the black officer or when a black officer, you know, was facing discipline for reporting misconduct by a white officer, the union would not protect the black officer, wouldn't represent them. The unions are far too influential. They have a massive stranglehold on politicians, particularly in larger cities. If you look at de Blasio, I mean, he ran a police reform platform was elected on it and then said, offered to the most tepid kind of milk toast criticism of policing. I think I've seen a politician who's told, he mentioned in public that he had told his mixed race son, I can't remember what the exact wording is, something about, you know, you should be careful when you're around the police, which, you know, is fine. And the union reacted this massive, like, you know, show of effrontery and pearl clutching to the point where, you know, they turned his back on him when he tried to give a eulogy at a police funeral. And it's clear that from his action sense that that shook him to his very core because he's been nothing but deferential police. He is. He is in his own category because literally everybody hates him in New York, but he can win elections with, you know, 60 percent plus of the vote. So I mean, he's doing something right while he's doing one now. Yeah. So, you know, what what would go into actually restraining police unions or redirecting whatever collective bargaining rights I have? How does that work? I mean, it's difficult. I mean, I think I think part of it is just, you know, electing politicians who have the spine to sort of stand up to them and making clear that that, you know, there's more of a political price to be paid for capitulating the police union than than or standing up to them. I mean, I think that's really kind of what it boils down to. They are, you know, they're the more powerful in some places than others, but they also don't exist everywhere. And the idea that sort of policing will collapse and the cops will nobody will be want to become a police officer if there are no unions is is alive by the fact that, you know, in a large majority of the country, there are no unions and cops are fine. Policing, you know, I mean, they're fine in the sense that, you know, they're not. Yeah, they they get paid. They, you know, they're not fired for no cause or anything like that. I mean, it's it's almost impossible to buy a police officer whether there's a union there or not. That's pretty well established. Are there are there particular philosophies or theories of policing that that are gaining ground in various places that are more consistent with the idea of people being able to pursue life liberty and the and the pursuit of happiness? You know, is any of that taking place? Well, so one reform that I think particularly libertarians should be giving a lot of paying a lot of attention to is a group called Cure Violence that operates in several large cities, but but primarily in Chicago. And this is a group. It's an intervention group. So they operate in high crime areas. And when there's a an incident, you know, homicide or, you know, some some sort of gang activity, for example, you know, they go in and they have they have authority and respect and credibility in the communities where they operate. A lot of times they hire people who used to be in those communities. They'll hire former gang members. The idea is that they go in and they intervene and they try to prevent violence from spreading and they try to prevent you know, prevent it before it happens. And there's pretty compelling empirical data in Chicago showing that in the neighborhoods where they operated, they had a very substantial effect on reducing the homicide rate. In fact, when the homicide rate spiked in Chicago several years ago, it did coincide with the city cutting funding to clear cure violence. In fact, if you look at the neighborhood specific data, it's pretty overwhelming that this group was doing a very good job. The city cut funding, they were no longer in those neighborhoods and crime, you know, resumed and spiked in those neighborhoods. You know, would that work as a replacement for police? I don't know, you know, probably not. But the idea that, you know, maybe we could redirect, you know, a not insubstantial amount of money that we give to armed, you know, officers of the government patrolling these neighborhoods to unarmed people who try to resolve things, you know, not with coercion, but with negotiation and talking and mediation. I think it's definitely something that's worth looking at. You know, it's hard to kind of say policing has been with us for so long in its current form. It's hard to sort of even kind of imagine a country without any sort of armed police at all. But, you know, I do think we can think creatively about these things. I've written a little bit about the defund, the term defund and a lot of the controversy that it's created. But, you know, there are a lot of policies that I think libertarians, even conservatives, even police groups support or can support that at least would dramatically reduce the front footprint of police. Decriminalizing drugs would take a massive number of cops off the streets. Has there, you know, related to kind of drug war issues, you know, most people in the country now live in a place where either Pot Marijuana is legal or has certainly been decriminalized. Is there evidence that in place, you know, and this is the beginning stages of the, you know, of the end of the drug war, which is going to take decades, if not centuries to really unwind, unfortunately. But is there evidence that in places where recreational pot is legal and widely accepted, people are buying and selling it legally? Does that have an effect on police abuse? Or, you know, is anything, or, you know, are there, is there anything to report on that yet? So the studies I've seen in states that have legalized marijuana is that it dramatically reduces the number of arrests, the number of stops, the number of searches, which is all very good things. It doesn't really do much on, when it comes to the racial disparities among the ongoing stops and arrests and searches. But it does diminish them overall. It reduces the number of, you know, contacts between police and citizens, which is always a good thing. And, you know, it reduces the kind of roadside, you know, harassment that we've seen, which I think is positive. And, you know, it's been a while now, so I'm sure you could sort of cherry pig data to make it say whatever you want to say. You want to say crime has gone down or up since legalization, but we certainly haven't seen the sort of explosion of crime that, you know, the, you know, people were pro drug war, people were predicting. And if anything, I think, I think, you know, generally crime has either stayed the same or went down in those states. Are there other reforms that you think are particularly worth kind of focusing on? Yeah, so one that, you know, Alex Tabarak wrote about yesterday, I think, and I think a few other people call him for you to do anything he's written about it, is, you know, there's no reason why our traffic laws have to be enforced by armed government agents. I mean, you know, if you Well, now you're talking crazy, but this is the type of thing where it's like to say that out loud is to be like, of course, you know, it's but it's unimaginable until you actually say it. Yeah, and you start thinking about it. I mean, what does a police when a police officer pulls pulls you over? What does he do? He pulls you over. It gives you a ticket, which then you take home and decide whether or not you're going to pay and you send it into mail. Like, why can't you have a, I don't know, some sort of civilian traffic core who instead of pulling you over, they see you speeding, they write down your license plate, they call it in, you get a ticket in the mail. I mean, the end result is still the same. You get to take it in the mail that you can pay or choose not to pay and face the consequences of that. The difference is you're not having this arms, you know, interaction slash confrontation with a police officer, which is completely unnecessary. You know, the other thing is we can we also need to just kind of divorce the idea that we need our traffic laws need to be about road safety and not about generating revenue. You know, there are lots of studies done in Europe about, for instance, roundabouts instead of stop signs. There have been some really interesting studies about speed limits and how arbitrary they are. Our roads are actually built, you know, imagining people driving much faster than speed limits allow, which means, you know, cities and towns can sort of place speed limits wherever they want arbitrarily in a way that sort of maximizes revenue to the city. That shouldn't be the goal of our traffic laws or traffic the goal of our traffic law should be to keep the streets safe. So it could dramatically reduce the size of police force by stopping traffic enforcement and by, you know, reimagining the way our traffic laws work so that it's not about you don't have police departments and cities that are reliant as budgets are. I mean, they're just cities that, you know, 40, 50 percent of their budget. I mean, it can be smaller towns, but are reliant on traffic revenue. And that, you know, police officers in those places know that that's their job. It's to catch people. And this is, you know, it's kind of like the idea of going to school and hating it. I mean, that idea of the, you know, of of a traffic stop or, you know, of driving through small towns and, you know, and getting a ticket and stuff like that. It's so deeply embedded in our culture. It's almost impossible to think about a world where you wouldn't always be worried about picking up a ticket. Right. And, you know, nobody's saying that that there's to be anarchy on the highways, but we could have speed limits that are more organic and are more designed or sort of calculated based on how people actually drive. I mean, studies showing the safest speed limit is one that's like, I think, what the 90th percentile of people drive at. And right now it's far lower than that. And that just creates unnecessary interactions. I mean, if you think about all, if you think about all the police abuse cases or deaths or beatings that originated with the traffic stop and in sort of escalated from there, you think about all the animus and anger and, you know, marginalized communities that come from the regular harassment they face from traffic stops, you take and take those out of the picture. I mean, you could go a long way toward, you know, rehabilitating kind of the image of the police. And, you know, just those proposals, you know, taking cops out of schools stopping the use of cops for forced traffic laws, you know, even just sort of decriminalizing drivers. I'm not even necessarily legalizing them right there. You're eliminating massive portions of the police. I mean, that I think any of those things would have qualified for defunding the police. And, you know, it would leave a much smaller police force, but it also means you could pay the cops who are there more, you could hire better cops and they would actually be fighting, you know, crime and so I mean, is part of the large issue of reform is really minimizing contacts, a particularly kind of confrontational context between the police and citizens. Because I recall reading, you know, that in any individual stop, it may not be that a black or Hispanic is more likely to, you know, get into, you know, be ticketed or arrested, but they have so many more contacts with the police that essentially it's, you know, overpolicing is a function or, you know, bad things happening is mostly a function of the number of contacts you have with the police. So minimizing the overall number, you're going to have a less fraught society. Yeah, well, I think there's there's an inherent power imbalance when you're pulled over and there's this guy who's got, you know, six different weapons on his belt, a sort of hovering over you while you're sitting in your car looking up at him. And if you're, you know, and if you're part of the community where this happens to you, you know, I don't know, however many times a month, five, six, seven, 10, some areas, you know, yeah, it's easy for us, you know, somebody who looks like me to say, what, you should be respectful to cops and polite to them. But, you know, if they're like harassing you and screwing with you, you know, several times a month, you know, eventually you're going to like kind of lose your patience. And, you know, I think we expect people to be perfect in those situations. And yeah, I think reducing the number of those contacts is a huge part of this. And, you know, it also creates animus between it makes it more difficult for police to actually solve crimes in those communities because people don't trust them. I mean, their polls showing it was about a very reasonable actually showing that black people are more fearful of being a victim of a police beating or police shooting than they are of being victimized by a criminal. And if people are more afraid of the police than they are the criminals, they're not going to cooperate with the police to help solve crimes. Are you optimistic? Final question. Are you optimistic about some kind of serious reform happening in a lot of ways? I mean, it seems, you know, we've been here before at various points where there are high profile cases to his credit. Donald Trump did sign some criminal justice reform legislation earlier in his presidency. You know, when you go back to the discussions and arguments and conversation that came out of Ferguson, are you optimistic about police reform and how will we know when we got there? Yeah, so, you know, Trump signed did sign the first step back. I mean, he kind of has tried to undermine it every since he signed it. But the fact that he, you know, wanted kind of the symbolic credit for signing it is remarkable. I mean, I think for most of my life, you know, the Democrat and Republican nominee for president thought over to see would be the, you know, look the toughest on crime. So the fact that people are trying to look like reformers is pretty significant. And we must say Joe Biden now is essentially walking back almost his entire legislative history, right? Which is, you know, I don't want either. I think we should just not have a president for maybe the next eight or 10 years, but it's kind of great to see Joe Biden basically say, yeah, I didn't mean any of that. It was a big mistake. I think, you know, whether you find that sincere opportunistic, who cares, right? I mean, if he's signing or if he, yeah, you know, but I actually am more optimistic than I've been in a long time, even even that I was at Ferguson because I do think with Ferguson again, because of the narrative around Michael Brown that people could seize on if they didn't want to sort of sympathize with the protesters that was there. I mean, if you look at polling, it is remarkable. I mean, I think it's the support for the protesters has jumped 20 points in the last two weeks. Well, and the Washington Post actually just around a poll that said it was something like 69% of Americans now agree that there is a problem with policing compared to something like 43% right after Ferguson. And the race aspect, too, I mean, large, large majorities now accept the fact that there is, you know, inherent racial discrimination and policing. And, you know, that alone, I think is is going to I don't see it fading just because I don't think that's the kind of thing that you're convinced on. And then two months from now, you change your mind and like, oh, well, maybe I was right about that. So, you know, the fact that it is can I ask in on the topic of police reform? I mean, there's, you know, there are certain federal laws that can be changed that will have a significant impact. But so much policing is done at the local and state level. There are so many police departments, there are so many municipalities. Is it? I mean, there is not a switch, right, to just flip things and say, OK, cops, you can't do this anymore. Right. So what the best thing we can do at federal level is to remove the kind of reverse incentives that are driving bad behavior at the local level. But you're right. I mean, I think most of the reform is going to happen at the local level. And, you know, what happened in Minneapolis? I mean, it's going to be fascinating to see what what results from that. Maybe that is too much. And maybe there'll be problems and I'll have to kind of roll it back a little bit. And they essentially, I mean, the city council is effectively abolishing the police department as it exists now and replacing it with a different set of kind of operations. Right. And it's not sort of clear what it's going to look like later. But, you know, I mean, this says that, you know, Libertarian I think is a good thing. I mean, I think we want to see cities experimenting and trying different things and trying different ways of, you know, walking that line between public safety and individual rights. And, you know, the more that try different formulas, the more likely are we to find one that's going to hit on the right equation. And then once we know what works, we can ignore that, right? But I mean, you know, you already are kind of see this. I mean, for years, I was harping on the idea that, you know, it is really easy to influence, significantly influence the district attorneys race or sheriff's race. And it's something that like criminal justice reporting people had kind of not really engaged with until about, say, four or five years ago. Then we saw them start to engage. And now we're seeing, you know, the election of prosecutors across the country or, you know, former defense attorneys who, you know, are refusing to enforce unjust laws or at least deprioritize them. And, you know, that the idea that, you know, a prosecutor wouldn't enforce certain laws strikes this as, you know, maybe there's something unjust or unfair about that. It's always the case. I mean, prosecutors have never had the resources to enforce all the laws all the time. There's always a matter of prioritizing. But when we're seeing prosecutors that are now elected in blazes that are there, you know, implementing these reforms, less so in sheriff's elections, but we are seeing a little bit of that. And, you know, we're not seeing crime spike in those particular areas. I mean, there are some places where it has other places where it's gone down. I do think that, you know, if you can't show some sort of dramatic reaction to a prosecute, sort of a progressive or reform minded prosecutor, you know, the fact that less people are being rolled into the criminal justice system, that less people are having their lives run with the criminal record or sitting in jail for six weeks, waiting for six months, waiting for charges. You know, that all to self is inherently a good thing. And, you know, I think you have to show some pretty severe consequences in terms of crime in order to offset that good that's being done. And we really haven't seen that. Well, we are going to leave it there. We've been talking with Radley Banoka of the Washington Post about criminal justice reform, police abuse, systemic racism. Radley, thanks so much for talking. My pleasure. Thanks.