 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Today we've got a special episode of Free Thoughts recorded before an audience at the 2015 International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C. Joining us is Jonathan Blanks, a research associate in Cato's project on criminal justice. So, Jen, it seems like every day we read stories about police brutality, police misconduct, cops beating up grandfathers out for a walk, just what was it last week, cops shooting or maiming children, cops killing family pets at an extraordinary rate, blasting away with firearms and even the most minimal hint of a physical threat. So I guess let me start by asking the obvious question, what the hell is wrong with police? I think it's a number of factors. First of all, I don't think that police officers are being trained properly. I think, as you said, the reaction to the hint of violence, they escalate so fast anymore. It's becoming very problematic and as in the age of cell phones, we're just seeing it a lot more often. Other problems include lack of accountability. A lot of times they're going to face their own police officers when they're going to be investigated. So any misconduct, you just go to your boss instead of, you know, if I hurt you, you can go to the police and they will investigate me. But if you are the police, who do they go to? Well, they just go to their boss and their boss doesn't want any trouble, so they'll look the other way. Do we think that it might be possible that cops themselves have changed? Are there different types of people who are now cops than maybe were before? Certainly. There are different theories about why exactly this is going on, but I think part of it is the federal government has subsidized hiring former military officers coming back from the wars to go because they already have the firearms training. It's just easier and, you know, it's a jobs program, essentially. And while that's a noble intent, it doesn't transfer immediately. It's an old phrase, I think from Rush Limbaugh, but the military is to kill people and break things. Police are to protect and serve and those are completely different functions just because they both carry firearms. It doesn't mean they're the same thing. And of course you see the police militarization, which is one of the big thing where it's become a very hostile environment for most police officers. One of the arguments that we hear in favor of militarization or in defense of cops who shoot people out on the street is that it's simply really dangerous to be a cop, especially a beat cop in a city. Is that true? And if it is dangerous, is it more dangerous than it used to be? Yes, it's dangerous to be a police officer. It is not more dangerous than it used to be. The police in the line of duty desks is down, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but it is at like 20 year lows. Last year was extremely low. Most police related desks now in duty come from vehicle accidents. You know, you're pulling someone over on the highway, car speeds by, hits you, it's terrible, but it's not that every encounter that you're going to have is going to result in violence. But I think there is this apprehension because police do bring this up a lot in when you have the tragedy that happened in New York where some crazy guy kills two cops. You know, police come together, they're very tight unit, and they, I don't know, they just sort of circle the wagons. And so they kind of promote this blue wall of silence. No, that's something different, but it's the solidarity. Yeah, the solidarity and the just, you know, we protect our own. No one knows what we do. This is what we're going to be like. Hey, teachers, teachers say that too, actually. But yeah, I think this does sort of go back into the military mentality. It's not just because that we're getting veterans, but there's a book by a man named Maurice Punch and he talks about the sort of similar social mechanisms that work within police departments that are that also reflected in military departments where military departments where it's it's a band of brothers. Everything all discipline is handled in house and sort of like the code read from, you know, a few good men. And so they are hostile to the outside world. They don't believe that anyone understands what's going on, and they are very protective of one another. Can you say that police deaths are down substantially over the last 20 years? Couldn't someone turn around and say, well, yeah, but that's because we have begun shooting people at the drop of a hat and have begun, you know, arming our cops with military gear and putting them in tanks. So of course, deaths are down. But if we instituted the reforms that you, you know, bleeding hearts would like us to then those numbers are going to shoot right back up again. Well, actually, I mean, that's definitely a correlation causation problem where police officers, particularly with the militarization, like the rise of SWAT, actually make situations much more dangerous. I mean, people protect themselves within their own homes with firearms. If you throw in a flashbang grenade at two o'clock in the morning and you're waking someone up, they don't know if you're cops. And you can say not going to announce, but you're yelling out someone's outside of someone's door at 3am. They don't know who you are. And they just hear rumbling in the house. If you live in a bad neighborhood or if you've been robbed recently, which happened in Virginia a few years ago, you come in, you're not going to, you're going to shoot first. And if you kill a cop, they're going to try you for capital murder. Even though you don't know that you're going after a cop, you don't know anything that's going on. And so this this idea that, well, you know, all the armor and the Kevlar and the tanks are going to make police more safe is absolutely the opposite. Do we have any good numbers now? Anyone here's Facebook feed is like mine. It seems like cops are just doing horrible things all the time. But that's a bias, of course. But do we have any good numbers about how prevalent and comparatively high or low these kind of shootings and violent actions are done by police? No. Why not? Isn't someone in charge of that? You would think so. But the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI collect data from police departments on violent actions, use of force. Unfortunately, it's a voluntary submission. And so if your department killed five, six, 10 people in the past year and you don't necessarily want the FBI to know it, you don't have to tell them. There's no enforcement mechanism to let you know. So there's a really, so we don't really know how many people are dying. We don't know how many people are being hurt because of the myriad problems of actual reporting police violence and getting someone to respond to it. Would you be in favor of like a federal program that tried to do oversight on that? I've been thinking about that a lot recently. I'm always skeptical of government of large federal government programs. But I think as a check to sort of make the police department's report, use of force incidents, yes. Some people have suggested that you could make this dependent on the myriad subsidies that police departments get from the federal government. We've talked about a handful of different kinds of police violence, right? So there's there's the instances of throwing the flashbang into the toddler's bedroom. There's the, you know, opening up on someone in the street because it looks like they may have been reaching for something. There's I mean, are there different kinds of police violence that we can talk about and are certain ones more prevalent, less prevalent? Yeah, I think that basically comes down to five different five different types of violence. First, you have sort of like the random daily harassment that you see in like stop and frisk where you're just going to throw someone up against the wall and search their pockets. That's common in larger metropolitan areas, but not but less so in say rural or small towns. Then you have what people would consider just police brutality. That's sort of your Rodney King. Just police way laying way laying on people well beyond what is needed to incapacitate an individual. Then you have deadly use of force, which is firearm. That would the, you know, the biggest case recently, of course, is Mike Brown out in Ferguson. Then you have a like violence as part of like a crime that a policeman is committing. Say if a policeman has become completely corrupted and starts dealing drugs, then you have coercion. You've got gang bang and you've got murder. That's one of the rare. I think the probably the rarest of all the forms. And of course the fifth is police militarization where you're going to have the flashbangs and using SWAT teams to take down completely peaceful, peaceful operations. Like recently there was a poker game out in Fairfax County. I think it was a $20,000 buy-in. And $20,000? Yeah, it's $20,000. It is a serious poker game. But the police came in because the house took one and a half percent for the rake. And basically that paid for food, beverages, and a masseuse to like while you're playing because these games go all day long. The funny thing is though is when the homeowner asked them, you know, why did you do this? And they said, well, there are a bunch of Asian gangs going around knocking over poker games. And so it was quoted in the Washington Post, but he didn't say this directly back to the police officer. He's like, but you got us first because they decided they were going to drop the charges, the criminal charges after six months if all the players keep their nose clean. But they'll keep 40% of the take due to civil asset forfeiture. So another gang, there wasn't an Asian gang, raided them and took some of their money. Absolutely. Otherwise known as the police department. Yes. I think that in terms of the police that are doing these things, have there been any studies about it? Is it everyone or just bad apples? They concentrated on specific cops? I hate the term bad apples, but there is some evidence to suggest that particularly with the type of violence that would be sort of the day to day brutality. Resisting arrest. Yeah, resisting arrest. That's one of the big stats where in New York City, 5% of the police force is responsible for 40% of the resisting arrest complaints. Resisting arrest is something that criminologists use to measure police brutality. So if they're going to come, basically if a cop roughs you up during an arrest, basically you could have talked back. You could have done any number of things. You ticked off the cop. Any roughs you up? Oh, you were resisting arrest. That's why he used force against you. And so 5% of the police officers in the NYPD are responsible for 40% of those. And if you expand that out, 15% of NYPD officers are responsible for half. Most of the police officers are not doing that. But because New York Police Department is so stat happy with comp stat and they like track everything and they put it into a computer and they know all the numbers. NYPD knows this is going on and they tolerate it. And that's sort of this lack of accountability that plagues police departments all over the country. Why do they tolerate it? I mean, if most of this problem comes from a minority of cops and presumably a large chunk of cops got into the police force because they care about law and order and justice, why are they putting up with this sort of stuff? Wouldn't it be easy enough to just kind of get rid of that 15% or 20%? Well, there's a bunch of reasons for this. I think you can see it in various levels. First off is what I said earlier with the sort of military mentality where they're going to protect each other. And so your police officers are not going to want to tell on each other because of the blue wall of silence, as Trevor mentioned a little bit, where there is a very strong chance of retaliation if you tell on another cop. It doesn't matter if it's, did he take a little money off of a drug bust or did he beat someone and put him in a hospital? Police typically do not talk about other cops because of the both professional and personal ramifications involved. I've read stories where one police officer who was running for sheriff turned in another police officer for a DUI that wasn't reported. And that the reporting police officer that was running for sheriff was run out of the department. It gets much worse in New York City. Again, I hate to keep going back to New York, but they have the largest police force in the country and they also have a lot of journalists who look into their police department that gets hit a lot. So we have a lot of stories that come out of there. But there was a famous story back in 2010. A police officer named Adrian Schoolcraft took a bunch of secret tape recordings inside the police locker rooms and revealed to the press that they were inflating statistics messing around with comp stat numbers to make it all look good. In retaliation, they had him committed to a psych ward for five days involuntarily. They dragged him out of his house and they said, oh, he was, you know, he was, he was unstable. We did it for his own good. Well, when they broke down his door and took him out, he also had a tape recording going and it was completely another lie. They harassed him at his house and they ran him out of the department. He still has a $50 million lawsuit against the city and the department for false imprisonment and whatnot. But I mean, this wasn't any like massive crime. This was just, well, you know, they're massaging the numbers for PR and, you know, they had him involuntarily committed. This is the sort of retaliation that you're going to face. Now, what about unions though? Because I think it's funny that I was watching not really on my own will Fox News during Eric Carter and Michael Brown stuff and the amount of way that the conservatives talk about police and say, you have to their public servants. You have to respect what they do is very similar to how Democrats talk about teachers like, oh, they're public servants. You have to respect what they do. And in both those situations, they're unionized public servants who protect especially the worst ones. So how much of the unions factor into this? Oh, they play a huge role. They, when we had the Darren Wilson, Michael Brown thing in Ferguson, you had these, you know, GoFundMe pages that were there to help support Darren Wilson. They didn't ever say who was collecting the money, but people tracked down like the information from the pages. And of course, it both was the unions. The unions were responsible almost certainly for the negative PR about Mike Brown releasing the tape of him shoplifting as if for some reason that, you know, justified the death penalty and various other, you know, anti PR that are going on. They also have a lot of political strength where they pass law enforcement officers, Bill of Rights, that give police all these special privileges when they're accused of misconduct that no civilian would ever get. Sometimes they get passed into legislation. Sometimes they just become standard operating procedure. Darren Wilson, when he was interviewed by the grand jury, he said, Yeah, I know I gave that statement at first, but I'm not quoting. But I gave that statement, but I was told that what you're supposed to do is have 72 hours before you really make a statement on what happened after a use of force incident. And, you know, I had a couple of days to sleep on it. And I remember it much better. I don't know of a single homicide detective in the country that would say, You know, I know you just shot somebody, but here you go, take like three days. Here's the number of a good lawyer and come back. But that's the sort of thing that law enforcement bills rights do. I don't know whether or not it's legislative, legislatively supported in Missouri, but that sort of thing, cooling off periods, always having counsel with you, not being able to say that of any implications. about your job when you're being interviewed about some misconduct that you may have committed. All of these things are part of union sponsored bill of rights. Well, they also try to nationalize that. They come back also with a recitation of the event that has all these key words in it that the Supreme Court has been like, and they just put them in there, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, it's, I mean, I don't know. I don't know enough about the inner workings to pin it on the unions. But when you have, you have two Supreme Court cases, Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Conner that basically lay out what a police policeman should do in a use of force situation. Basically, to use deadly force, you have to be an imminent fear of your life. You have to, or you have to fear for the public or you they, because Tennessee v. Garner came from a case where a guy had just like robbed a house. He was a skinny guy running away, wasn't armed, nothing, and they shot him dead. And the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that. He wasn't any, he wasn't a public health threat, excuse me, a public safety threat. And he posed no threat to you so you can't shoot him. So when you ever hear of a police officer shooting someone, you'll hear something along the lines of, oh, he reached for his waistband could be a gun. He was charging right for us like it was South Park, you know, it's coming right for us. The, you know, oh, he didn't respond to less lethal force like tasers or bean bag rounds or whatever. There was just a shooting the other day out in Arizona, I think. It's one of the western states. A guy was just throwing rocks at cars like in an overpass at a bunch of cars. I mean, it's dangerous. I mean, you hit a car. I mean, these are big rocks. You hit a car. They could swerve into lane. It could kill someone. So it's not that the police shouldn't have involved. They said that, you know, they, they taste him. He didn't respond and then they responded with lethal force. Well, then the videotape came out and sure enough, he was running away when they shot him. And this is why I think body cameras and dash cameras and people recording police interactions are so important. But the, this sort of, there's just a boilerplate of what police say. Oh, yes, yes. I was imminently afraid of my life and I feared for the public safety. It's like they were citing us exactly. Yeah. It's just like no one actually talks. Yeah. Yeah. So the Supreme Court, you know, basically gives you a blueprint of what to say. And this happens pretty much every fatal use of force situation. Cops go around protecting cops, whether through the unions or this wall of silence or whatever. But there's also, I mean, there are people out there whose job it is in part to protect us from the bad cops, right? So the district attorneys who are supposed to prosecute these cops do, you hear these stats about how few cops get indicted by grand juries compared to civilians who committed similar crimes. Are DAs, do DAs protect cops? And if so, why would they be doing that? I think, well, I mean, all this boils down to is incentives. District attorneys work with police officers to make their cases. If a police officer is accused of misconduct, whether it's violence, whether it's, you know, perjury, whatever it is. Wait, cops lie? Sometimes. Okay. Sometimes. The district attorney, the prosecutors are disincentivized from exposing that or to, I mean, they can't intentionally hide it. That's against the rules they get disbarred. However, they are incentivized not to look or ask too many questions because if you find an unreliable police officer, all your cases that you prosecuted from on the word of that police officer get questioned. You have to reopen it up. And so a bunch of guilty people go free. And obviously you don't want that. Other people that are supposed to protect us from police officers are civilian civilian review boards that are supposed to look over misconduct within police departments. They face pressure from the unions. They face pressure from budgetary restraints. People say, you know, we don't really need this, you know, because police officers are so well trusted. They are, I think, the second highest like profession trusted in the country. You're just meddling. You're getting in the business of police officers and they are pressured not to get too involved. You have internal problems because some people will bring civil suits when they get beat up by a police officer. And they, you know, sometimes they settle. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose. It's really hard to win one of these civil suits. And then they do. There's no mechanism that makes that civil suit or the facts from that suit get into the record of that police officer. There was a case I did for police misconduct.net the other day where the officer was, he was convicted of obstruction of justice. And the two charges he beat were, he threw a driver in the back of his vehicle for not signaling to turn. He took the guy into custody and started driving him around. And then he found out he's an Iraq war vet. And he was like, oh, I'm sorry, you know, no big deal. Sorry about that. You know, false imprisonment and whatnot. And he beat the first two charges, but he got convicted on the obstruction charge, which is still a felony. He was facing two years in jail. The prosecutor asked for two years, 23 months. And the judge was like, you know, he lost his job. He's got a felony record. We're going to give him one day. One day in six months house arrest. And he had an impeccable record, they always say, whether it's a judge or the prosecutor. He had an impeccable record. He was a good civil servant. He made a mistake and we should let him go on this. Well, the thing is, is he had several civil suits of police brutality against him and he lost some of them. But that never made it into his record. So that's just not something that police departments look for. That's not something they want to include because obviously if you have someone, if it's in their actual file, then, you know, that's going to be evidence if when this officer comes to testify. I want to get to possible paths to reform. Before that, I was curious about public perceptions of bad cops. Like, has the, in general, the public's notion of what counts as a good cop or a bad cop or what kind of behavior is appropriate for policing changed? Because I'm struck by, so for a long time, shows about police officers have been popular on television. And if you look at those over time, it's the way that cops behave on TV. Like on Dragnet, they're these very straight laced and then you get to like Hill Street Blues is a similar way. And even like early law and order, they're all kind of good upstanding cops. But now we have things that look more like the shield where every cop is corrupt and they're busting heads, if that means getting the guy in the Constitution is kind of this thing that we have to figure out how to get around because otherwise it's going to let the bad guys escape. And that seems to be the more prominent view of police work as like the rebel who, you know, may have to turn in his badge, but then he gets it back. Do, so I guess have, has the public perception shifted in a similar way and do cops? I mean, also do cops learn how to be cops from this pop culture view? What I've looked at is like the Pew, no, not Pew, Gallup does the faith in public institutions. And the police, you know, they're pretty solid around 60% support pretty much across the board. I think normally with the pop culture thing, I haven't looked at any like demographic data on this or anything, but it seems to me that people sort of excuse that behavior because, you know, they had it coming. You know, it's always like got off on a technicality. That's this, you know, oh, he got away because of a technicality. Yeah, that technicality has caused the Constitution more often than not. But people think, well, criminals are bad people, bad things happen to bad people. Eh, who cares? And I think that's one of these things that people are really, they kind of glom onto. I mean, you look at what happened with Michael Brown. Here's a guy who's a shoplifter, technically he's a criminal. And there's no evidence of what happened. Now keep in mind, Darren Brown's story is completely unbelievable. But, you know, people are like, oh, he's a thug, I support Darren Wilson, blah, blah, blah. Those same people who were absolutely sure that Mike Brown, after being shot, charged a police officer with a gun pointed at him. Look at the Eric Garner tape and stat, not only like, oh my god, I can't believe that happened. I cannot believe that that was something that they did. Chocolds have been banned forever. I mean, you still have people saying, well, you know, he was overweight and so if he wasn't overweight, then, you know, he would have survived. Or he was resisting arrest. I don't know how this, how holding up your hands is resisting arrest, but okay. But it's just sort of, people have to see it to believe it when they realize that police go over the line. I think they give them the benefit of the doubt when police use violence, but I don't think that generally speaking that they're like, oh, well, and even when they do, it's like, oh, it's a bad cop. You know, it's just like, it's like the bad apple, which is again why I hate the term. So given these layers of corrupting culture and influence that have gotten us to the situation where now, how do we fix it? Is it possible to fix this? It's going to take a lot of time and it's going to take governments being very, you know, very hard on their police officers. I think body cameras are a neutral arbiter when there's a conflicted story, when there's a conflicting story. This of course is not a cure-all because often what will happen when there's a dispute about an altercation, there's a TV reporter who got a female TV reporter who was roughed up by police officers maybe 10 years ago. And all the police officers that responded had their dashcans on, right? There's 700 police officers that come to the scene. She says she was roughed up. They go to trial. All the footage is gone. Amazing. Like the Watergate tapes. Yeah, it's amazing. It's gone. And because police officers have this sort of benefit of the doubt, she lost. But people have suggested, like Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice, that when there is an altercation and there is an accusation of police misconduct and there was a camera there and the footage is gone, the assumption should go to the plaintiff. Now what about accountability standards? I've always thought it's very bizarre that police can shoot someone on the slightest fear. A .1% chance that they have a gun dead, right? Would you be in favor of raising that to have more reasonable, higher standard of fear or threat? Well, the problem is it's supposed to be an objectively reasonable standard now. But in practice that it boils down to does the jury trust the police officer. So I don't know what standards are really going to help. Just adjusting them. You change the language a little bit, maybe. Again, without the video evidence, I don't know what more we can do from an administrative position. One of the things I think we can do, as you mentioned with the unions, is break this ability to protect bad cops. I was at an event a few months ago with the DC police chief, Kathy Lanier, and she said, we have to be really careful with our training program because after nine months, the probationary period is over and it's almost impossible to fire them. So police chiefs who know that they have problem officers and everyone knows they have problem officers cannot fire bad cops when everyone knows that they're bad. There are times where officers are caught, suspended, fired, tried, and they could take a plea deal and they can still keep their law enforcement's license. They'll apply back for their old job and the police chief says, no, I don't want them back. They're paying. And there's this arbitrator again that was put into the city contract by the unions and they say, oh, nope, you've got to give them their job back. So being able to, like, strip the arbitrator and give police chiefs the power to fire bad officers would be a great step. So we've got some time for questions. So if you've got a question, come up to the mic and given that we don't have a lot of time, keep it a question, please. Question. Are alleged instances of sexual assault recorded by the FBI or asked for? Like, from police officers? Not to my knowledge because so much of this is, they keep track of instances per unit, like the national, at the national level, how many sexual assaults are reported and all that. But there is no separate category for sexual crimes by police, no. You've discussed the danger of policing with a military mindset. However, actual soldiers undergo extensive training are held to strict rules of engagement and prosecuted for misconduct under the UCMJ. Given that our police often behave like trigger-happy militias, might we see less violence in policing if we were to replace our warrior cops with actual soldiers? I have nothing against someone with military background coming into the police department. I have no bias against the military. My fear is hiring people because they can and being incentivized to hire people out of the military, whether or not, because a lot of police departments are having a hard time finding good recruits. And so the standards that they set are not very high. Again, I have no problem with hiring former soldiers, but insofar as the way that police hiring actually happens, that it's becoming difficult to keep track of, you know, to keep the standards high on, like, stability just across the board, soldiers and non-soldiers alike. I think if police started attacking well-suited white men the way they do blacks or other people who don't look very well off, I think public perceptions would change quite rapidly. I think there's an implicit bias in people's perceptions. So they see someone who's not well-dressed or who's black, who's poor, and they think, ah, he must have done something. But if they started seeing people who look like executives being brutalized, then they wouldn't think that, right? But of course the police are not going to brutalize well-off people because they might not get off with their crime. That's absolutely true. I didn't really get to touch on it here, but I mean racial bias and class bias in the police is unquestionable. You look at police's own reports when they get hit with corruption investigations, whether it's the LA Commission after the Rodney King beating or the Mullen Commission. Please recognize it. Just this week the FBI director admitted to the implicit bias in policing. Everyone knows that white people do drugs at the same level as black people and others. And we know that certain professions, you know, sort of go towards certain kind of drugs, but you don't see investment bankers lined up outside of Goldman Sachs, you know, with their pockets turned out, because they can afford the lawyers that can win. And until we get this sort of an accountable police force that is accountable internally, accountable to the federal government, and accountable to the civilian review boards that should be set up, that this will continue, and that's unfortunate. So obviously body cameras are well-intentioned from a libertarian perspective, but by giving law enforcement officers more cameras, couldn't that possibly infringe upon citizens' privacy rights? Oh, absolutely. You should definitely... When you have any time where you're going to allow a police officer in your home with a camera, that's going to be a problem, because what they can do if they're in to investigate a robbery, and then they go back and look at the evidence... Well, robbery's a bad example because they should be looking for clues in that case. But if they're coming over for a domestic disturbance, right, you're yelling at your brother and someone called the cops, they come over, and they go back and they look at evidence and they see a water pipe or something sitting out. They're like, oh, we can go back in with that evidence and send a SWAT team and then people die. That's really bad. So it's not that it should just be like body cameras and let it go and be on with it. You need to set up rules to prevent, to have the clearing of evidence when it's no longer useful, not using the evidence for anything that it was not intended for. Obviously, if you let a police officer in your house and they see a water pipe, well, you know, that's too bad. But as far as the video evidence there need to be rules implemented, also for confidential informants and that sort of thing. Well, if you've ever seen an episode of cops, you'll see the kind of stuff that people might not want to be aired into the public, yes. Indeed. I have kind of a similar question as far as infringing on our liberties. I know personally I've been pulled over a few times and I've had cops let me off because I batted my eyelashes or cried or whatever. How would wearing body cameras possibly affect the good cops from being able to help people? You mean the ones who don't give you a ticket? Exactly. That's why I said good cops. But the ones who are more understanding in situations, do you think that that could possibly kind of cause more issues if they have to actually follow through? Yeah, but I would think, you know, I don't think anyone goes through and, you know, is going to review every single body camera of every single police officer for every single thing that they do. They're going to look at it when there is a conflict, when there is a crime involved, when there's something like that. As far as the cameras there, you know, policemen have the discretion. It's completely legal to let you go after speeding. So it's not that they're committing misconduct by letting you go. So I don't think that particularly would be a problem. But that will become a problem when they start looking like if they look the other way on drug deals or something along those lines. But as far as, you know, just day-to-day interaction, I think it's better because they know if you complain, like if they rough you up, if they sexually harass you and you complain, they go back to that tape, that's going to be on them. How do you think the Department of Justice surplus programs have sort of raised the stakes in the police brutality argument? You know, by further militarizing smaller police departments who either don't need the kind of weaponry they're being provided or who don't have the proper training to use that type of weaponry. How has this kind of changed the landscape of the police brutality debate? Yeah, it's one of my areas. The problem with the police militarization is that what no one thought, I think, when they started giving, it's the same thing happened with civil asset forfeiture. No one seemed to think it would change the incentives. With civil asset forfeiture, if people don't know that, that's when they take your stuff without committing to a crime. And originally they were like, well, this is going to be great. Drug dealers are going to be funding the cops. Won't that be ironic and wonderful? But they didn't realize that they would start funding themselves. Similarly with the militarization, they're like, well, they'll be safer. Give them an armored car and a grenade launcher because that's really useful in domestic law enforcement. And they didn't really realize that they'd say, if we have it, we might as well use it. And there's a marginal safety benefit to riding up in an armored vehicle. And usually they think, what is the number one rule of policing? Anyone know this like bad? The number one rule of policing is get home for dinner. It comes from untouchables, but that's the wrong attitude. You want cops to be protected, but not at the expense of let's drive a tank into their house because we want to get home for dinner. And I think also it's attracted different types of cops. In Radley Balco's book, which is Rise the Warrior Cop, which is spectacular, one of the best public policy books ever written, I think, he talks about how when a bunch of cops came out for the Democratic Convention in Denver, because they kind of did all hands on deck for that, that they had shirts for this one department that were made up that said, DNCC, 2008, we get up early to beat the crowds. And there's just like a cop punching a bunch of people. And I think that militarization thing goes into that. You look at these recruitment videos and all this stuff is like, be a cop, kick some ass. So it's not officer friendly anymore. It's officer, shut the fuck up and listen to me. I didn't know we could swear on this, but it's free thoughts, man. Free yourself. All right. Adding to that, I mean, you see what's going on right now in New York. So Bill Bratton, New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton says he's going to start this new unit. It's going to have 300 guys to handle terrorism like Madrid and Paris, and crowd control as in he made the direct comparison with the Black Lives Matter protests. They're going to have more armor. They're going to have long guns and machine guns. Now, I seem to think that terrorism and murdering people is slightly different than my First Amendment rights. And this sort of, this has become so blurred partially because of the militarization. And going back to what he said earlier that the training with the military is really actually essential because they asked, I know when the Ferguson protests were going down and they had weapons trained on protesters that military people came out and were like, what are they doing? That's not something that we would do. So, but yeah, I think the militarization, the whole thrust of it has just amplified that us versus the mentality that already was there. Given the bureaucratic nature of law enforcement, it seems doubtful that real change could come quickly and that an incentive system could be created that would hold cops accountable. Should we consider possibly privatizing police forces? Do you think this would be beneficial or even possible or should the government solely run it? That's a profound question. There's only been one, I don't think it's been adequately studied. It is important to point out that you can measure the ineffectiveness of police by almost measuring spending on private security. This is where police are failing, how much people spend on locks, security systems, private security guards, because the police aren't there. Now we of course don't want them there all the time standing on every street corner and things like that. So we do spend a lot privately on security. Now whether or not we want to roll back or like transfer things over, the only book that's ever really been written about this that I know of is Bruce Benson's police, I can't remember the name of it, it's Bruce Benson's to serve and protect. And there hasn't been a lot done on it. I would prefer many private security things over many police situations, especially in areas where the police are more of a problem than a solution like the inner city. They're like an occupying force. And there is private security there. Gun ownership and things like that is also private security. So I would be in favor of ramping that up, but there's a lot of open questions still. Yeah, and this gets to core points of libertarian political theory too, right? Because unless you're on the anarchist wing of libertarianism, you probably think that among those things that even Robert Nozick would endorse as a proper role of the state is protection of our rights via police and courts. So we would need to answer those sorts of questions as well. Is this a role of the government? Is this a role that the private sector should fulfill? Are there benefits to having monopoly law enforcement because there's concerns of what would competition do? What happens if private is great but there are people who might not be able to afford it and do we want only people who have money to be able to have protection of their rights, and of course create a spiraling effect because if you don't have your rights being protected, it's going to be awfully hard to dig yourself out of poverty at all. So there's a lot of big questions contained in that question. Yeah, one of my fears about private policing is it would, I think, amplify the problems that we have now. There's a book called The Claps of the American Criminal Justice by William Stuntz. One of his major points was that so much of what we had with the ramping up of militarization, the ramping up of the drug war, was white American suburbia paying for and asking for and politically pushing for the drug war in the inner city. So again, you have the people with the money dictating the laws and not feeling the effects of it that the other people do. And so again, I think that would just kind of exacerbate the problem with in the inner city. I think we have time for one more actually, yeah. So with television shows such as cops and like bait car, which is like, I think, blatant entrapment. What world's wildest police chases the most pro cop thing ever? Exactly. Does that, one, how is bait car legal? Because I think that's entrapment from what I've seen. And then two, does that not establish somewhat of a culture that allows for us to, like you just said, pro cop that we like hero heroize these people that are doing things that I would call legal? I think it does. Michael Malis wrote a piece a while back about why he's never been a fan of the police because he was born in the Soviet Union and the police was the last thing you wanted to come. There was no, it was a civil service job and there was no heroic element of it. And I think what Aaron said about some of the shows, world's wildest police chases just drives me nuts. It's always like, he thinks he could run, but he couldn't run fast behind bars. And that kind of like, so I think, I mean, I do think it's a problem. But I also, I mean, I don't think we should hate police like on site. I think we should, but we should regard them for what they are and try to avoid using them and think that they're a necessary evil at best, right? Not like heroes of public servants. I don't even like the public servant work. If they were not getting paid, they'd be public servants, right? But they're getting paid to do a job. So we need to make sure they're doing it well. I come from a position where my father was a police officer. And so, you know, I grew up on a policeman's, you know, as a beneficiary of a policeman's pension and that sort of thing. So I'm certainly not anti-cop. But keep in mind, my father, he ran for sheriff in my hometown and he, we would go out and he'd been retired from the force and people would always come up to say, hey, hey, Mr. Blanks, you know, Officer Blanks. All this, all, like, as long as I can remember until the day he died, we would be out and someone would recognize him and come out and say hello. He was a beat cop. People in the neighborhood knew him and he treated people well. And this is not the sort of policing that we have now. If we can get to an actual community-style policing that the federal government is pushing, I would appreciate it. I welcome it because right now the community-oriented policing has incentivized cops to run around, jump out of cars, and throw people up against the wall. Best cop show ever is The Shield, by the way. If anyone doesn't know that, you should watch The Shield. My question actually kind of is a follow-up question to that about the police force present in the community and how they are less present in community life than they used to be. So this might provide a feeling of detachment from the public, which could lead to a sense of superiority. So does a police force need to meet more present in everyday community life in order to respect the community and better help, protect, and serve? Yeah, absolutely. As I said, my father was well-respected. People really liked him. People came up to him. I don't think too many police officers get that right now because you don't know, I don't know. I mean, there's a policeman who lives in my apartment building. You don't know his name? I don't know. He always parked outside of my fiance's in front. He always parked outside. And I'm sure he's a nice guy, but we don't know him. And I think part of this is also, I think America has changed a lot. People always used to know their neighbors and all that, and it doesn't really happen so much anymore. But in the areas when they're going to be protecting businesses and you're going to know the store owners coming to city hall meetings and all that, that's where police officers should be. Instead of approaching someone as hostile and as a suspect, treat them like a human being, and I think a lot of that has changed and I think part of it is the detachment that you're talking about. Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod. That's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.