 an opportunity to women voters. Thank you Michelle. I'm Kate Rader with the League of Women Voters and I want to welcome our audience and tonight's speaker. I'm at Prakash as a graduate at Oberlin College and Columbia University and is visiting assistant professor of global studies and co-assistant director of the first year seminar program at Middlebury College. He specializes in the history of colonialism, policing, and immigration politics with a focus on France. Tonight he will describe how events and policies beyond our borders can influence policies and practices here at home. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here tonight. I wanted to thank both Kate Rader and Michelle Singer for all the work they put in in organizing this and also to the League of Women Voters for the invitation and the Kellogg Hubbard Library for hosting us. So you might have noticed that policing is kind of in the news these days. Since the police murder of George Floyd in late May what the New York Times has estimated to be the largest protest movement in American history has unfolded across the summer. Equally remarkable was the fact that there were a number of sympathy protests across the world that not only decried the death of George Floyd but also protested police violence in their own communities. So two conclusions can be drawn from this. One is that American police violence and race relations are indeed globally scrutinized. Second and perhaps more important for our purposes tonight is that police violence is an issue that resonates globally because it is experienced globally. So in essence what we have is a global police rebellion or a global rebellion against what is supposed to be the legitimate power or the legitimate coercive power of the state. And so I just want to pose the question why is this the case right that this is supposed to be legitimate power why? In order to answer this question I want to start with another question and so I'm going to share my screen and hopefully this will work. Everybody can see that? Yes. Okay great. So the first question I'd like to sort of pose is what is the form of contemporary police power? So how do we answer this right? So if we want to know why there's a global rebellion against police violence I think we need to understand what is this contemporary form. So I want to do this first by just taking a short tour around the world and we're hopscotching to be sure over many countries but we just want to sort of glean the basic idea of what this current form is. So let's start with the United States. Ferguson 2014, Ferguson again, Florida in 2015 this was initially taken by the sheriff of Ruslan County with a 50 caliber machine gun on it which can cut a person in half with three rounds. It's a very powerful weapon. Baton Rouge and then this summer again this summer Brazil this is in Rio, Bosnia, France, Hong Kong, Kashmir. So in general and there's a couple more here yes Iraq and then Israel. So what we can observe is that the modern police on a global scale are militarized. I think that's a fairly safe observation. How so? What does it mean for them to be militarized? So some of the key features that scholars of police and police militarization which is a growing field really have discussed are these ones here and I'm not going to go through every single one of them but I want to talk about a few of them. So one is materiel. It's the actual things, the stuff of the military that the police have inherited. So you saw in all those photos that the materials of the military are on display and in the US a lot of this is coming from what's called the 1033 program. This is a provision of the 1997 National Defense Authorization Security Act which created the law enforcement support program and today what it does is it basically takes the excess material from our various wars and redistributes these various weapons and technologies and vehicles many things to law enforcement across the country. Since 1997 $7.4 billion with the weapons etc have been distributed to over 11,000 departments. So that's one. You've got the culture, you've got the sort of the posture if you like of the military, you've got the organizational form with the sort of military discipline, you've got the training and specifically what's important here is the American style training which has an outsize influence on other departments around the world precisely because America sends a lot of police assistant trainers around the world. Warrior training is something that maybe some people have heard about. The sort of premier instructor on this is a retired army colonel named David Grossman. He's the most popular police trainer in the country and the argument that he's basically making is that law enforcement in the American streets are exactly like warriors. They are effectively soldiers and are operating in squads and going on patrols and that the neighborhoods that they patrol are sort of conceived of as battle spaces. Okay so that's that's one and then with the 1033 program you've also got a massive law enforcement and military connection with training itself. So not only do you have sort of these sort of private endeavors and entrepreneurs like like David Grossman but you've got actual active duty military trainers coming in and what does this mean? One military officer who trains police argued and I'm quoting here why serve and arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a 38? With full armor and the right shit and training you can kick ass and have some fun. By the late 1990s about 46% of all SWAT teams in the United States and there are many of them were regularly training with Army Rangers and Navy SEALs and in another quote I'm paraphrasing here one of the officers in the SWAT basically said that when they get this training they have to use their own judgment because it usually ends up with the Navy SEAL saying and this is when we bring in the artillery and blow everything to hell. So here's another example of the sort of posture. Urban Shield is an annual event held in San Francisco where police departments send their SWAT teams to engage in sort of SWAT competitions and you can see that there's a sort of you know extremely militaristic ethos that celebrates violence here. Now why while I think all of this is sort of fundamental sorry I'm going to go back here sort of fundamental for understanding the contours of the contemporary form of police power it remains purely descriptive it's not really explanatory. We can describe the features but we don't quite know how we got here so then let's ask a prior question a more fundamental one why do we have the police buried underneath all that body armor and buried under all the hyper masculine bravado of SWAT team competitions is an answer but for the police these men of violence and I stress men here there's a sort of very masculine stress here there would be chaos and anarchy. Every jurisdiction would be an anarchist jurisdiction to quote the current attorney general. The influential LAPD chief William Parker in the 1950s coined the phrase the thin blue line to describe this police role in shielding order from anarchy and to most of us this seems perfectly reasonable a world without police seems unreasonable seems unintelligible therefore in order to have order one must have police and this is completely plausible so long as you forget that for most of human history what we call the police did not exist. In effect what we have then in our modern assumption that the police are a prerequisite for order is a fetishism for police fetishism in the literal sense of the world an irrational extravagant fixation or devotion to something. So let's go back to our question of why do we have the police what I want to do is provide a very abbreviated history of this concept of police and the institution of the police and I want to start with that crucial distinction while every society in history has had what we could call policing some form of coercive behavioral regulation not all societies have or have had what we call the police and there's a British criminologist named Robert Reiner who has a useful definition here the police a specialized body of people given primary formal responsibility for legitimate force to safeguard security is a feature of relatively complex societies that mean societies with high division of labor. The police have developed in particular with the rise of modern state forms they have been quote domestic missionaries in the historical endeavors of centralized states to propagate and protect a dominant conception of peace and propriety throughout their territories. I probably should have highlighted that last line the dominant conception of peace and propriety it's it's not universal it's it's quite particular. So let's get started here the first thing to do is to trace how police a concept became an institution became the police so our word police originates from the French Burgundian policy in the late 15th century also took other forms in western and central Europe at the time and its basic meaning at that time meant good governance for good order. Police by the 17th and 18th century had a broader connotation of consolidating and promoting greater happiness in the aggregate for a given society. Police becomes the prerequisite to good order and here we have two things there's a sort of implied scope of police power right that the promotion of greater happiness is quite large and sort of undefined in its limits and then there's the sort of semantic origins of police fetishism. The first is a key feature in the meaning of police because the reach of police power is vague and imprecise. The end may be the imposition of the dominant conception of order but the means to achieve it are quite open. In one very influential police tract of 1757 it was argued that quote the objects which the police embraces are in some senses indefinite. A century later a U.S. Supreme Court ruling noted that police power is quote is and must be from its very nature incapable of any very exact definition or limitation therefore a sort of capacious and perhaps limitless power. These days I would argue that power goes by the name of discretion which is quite broad. Now second if it is the case that an expansive view of police power emerged between the 15th and 18th centuries in Europe we might ask why that was how it came to be understood to be necessary for good order and the short answer is the decline of feudalism. With the collapse of feudalism there emerges in Europe and this is a story that starts in Europe and then travels around the world. There emerges a new class of quote masterless men who are no longer bound to the land and supervised by their lords yet they are also mostly landless and by the 18th century will have had their lives and livelihoods upturned by the onset of the industrial revolution and the capitalist market economy. What was once a private enterprise the reproduction of the social order via lordly supervision was now a public matter. In the United States this anxiety about the poor would be mixed with racism and accelerated by the abolition of slavery and I would argue that the entire project of the police or of police in general and what comes to be the police is concerned with the management and administration of the poor that become a sort of social category category of sort of anxiety and great concern. The poor is the raison d'etre of the police. Now speaking of the police let's turn to a turning point in its institutional history. So in 1829 you've got the birth of the London Metropolitan Police at the urging of Sir Robert Peel. Peel between 1812 and 1816 had governed Ireland as chief secretary and created what he called the peace preservation force. He believed this force of social control and English colonialism in Ireland would be useful in England itself. Why? England was as you probably know an innovator in industrialization and therefore had already created an immiserated industrial labour in class and out of work agricultural workers who flocked to cities and towns in hopes of work. The result was labor unrest and growing calls for democratization of voting. The Peterloo massacre is already in 1819. Riding the electoral system of property requirements even though those stay in some form until 1918 in England and then also there's sort of embryonic forms of union organization. Thus the conception of order that Peel imagined was the protection of property from a sort of undeserving and unruly poor. The quote here is again from Peel 300 men acting in concert well armed and determined to resist to the utmost any attack upon property would do much good in places like Burnley and Blackburn. So what his conception of order also imagined was that property would be protected and the property would not be touched by this new police. The London Metro police Scotland Yard still does not have jurisdiction over the city of London the one square mile in the center of London that has historically and traditionally been the sort of the stomping grounds of their aristocracy and the wealthy it's the current financial district they have their own internal police and that's a sort of hangover from from the origins of the London Metro police. The other reason to focus on the London Metro police is because they were extremely influential. It becomes a model for the prefecture police in Paris that's already created by Napoleon in 1800 but the uniforms the regular beats the weapons are all sort of appropriated and mimicked by the prefecture police. By 1838 the Boston police department is founded modeling itself on the London Metro police the Berlin municipal police and then finally in 1845 the NYPD. All of these departments in turn become sort of international marquee departments and influence police practices in departments in small cities and towns across the world. So let's now move to a different aspect of this story. So alongside of this European aspect of the story of why do we have the police is a parallel history of colonialism and colonial history. Policing was central to the entire colonial system and the maintenance of imperial domination. Here was perhaps the most obvious example of the police being deployed to impose the dominant view of good order in social relations which was often quite detached from what many colonized people believe what good order might look like. What was different in the colonies however was that it was the military that did the work of the police for most of the colonial period. I'm speaking broadly here there's there's certain exceptions. Settler colonialism is a little bit different but purely sort of exploitation and extraction colonies this was certainly the case. The reason for this is that most colonies were the products of military conquests and resulting military occupations and only later did civil administration gain importance when in the 20th century they were pushes for decolonization. So the other major thing to note here is that colonies were very often the sites for experimentation with tactics and strategies of rule and and in particular uses of force. For example in the British Empire the army used what were called dumb dumb bullets that exploded upon impact and their use was banned when fighting European adversaries not so when fighting the so-called savages. Also in British India you get the invention of fingerprinting for identification. Initially for civil purposes but then it's quickly repurposed for criminal identification. In French Algeria there's the tactic of burning all of the grain slaughtering all of the animals of the civilian population so that they could not provide any aid or to potential rebellion. They also engaged in the wholesale slaughter of populations themselves and this was all sort of categorized under good strong police methods or the other name was pacification. As an example of this this is during the in the throes of the French conquest of Algeria which began in 1830 and was very hard fought. This is a French colonel sort of discussing what was required. All the populations that do not accept our conditions must be crushed. All must be taken and laid waste without distinction of neither age nor sex. The grass must no longer grow where the French army has set foot. This my good friend is how one must wage war against the Arabs. Kill all the men down to age 15 take all of their women and children put them on boats and send them to the Marquesas islands to be pacified in the mother countries themselves. It's usually the case that these are sort of racial, ethnic or religious minorities. Moving ahead I want to get to the 20th and 21st century. So these historical sketches of the itinerary of police power is I think the necessary preamble to understanding the American situation. And to tackle this let's start with another version of American exceptionalism and which is the uniqueness of the police form in America and its unique history. There's these three sort of streams that American policing came from and they're regional. The northeast you have the sort of night watchman model which is imported from England. In the west or the western frontier that's constantly moving you've got the sort of Indian killer model who's sort of bringing civilization to the savage world. And then in the south and in parts of the north but certainly mostly in the south you've got the slave patrol which basically creates a sort of past system for black people if they're on the move in the south that they that without a past they are subject to arrest by the slave patrol. So the US police institution I think as it developed across the 19th century and into the 20th blends a bit of all three. All three of these elements are kind of there in their fingerprints are sort of visible I think. So another thing that's quite important is the Cold War context in the 20th century. What this meant in practice right this idea of internal security of the US being dependent on other countries internal security was a vast system of overseas police training funding and assistance by an institution called the office of public safety which was housed within USAID but was staffed and peopled by many CIA agents and and former police officers. And so the generalization of the American style police institution became another metric of the relative sovereignty of a given state during the Cold War and what that meant was that how to what extent was this state impervious to the overtures of communism and or not really overtures the infiltration of communism. And this is you know this is obviously coming from the perspective of the US national security establishment. The influence wasn't just one way though you know the US exploits abroad influence police trainers who then argued that some of the threats perceived overseas could arise at home and could be adapted to home so the sort of methods could be grafted on to the local situation. So one thing I mentioned before is that one of the key points about police power is its imprecision and we've seen that this was articulated in various police treaties long ago I cited just a couple there's there's a steady drum beat of those and it still has its uses it's the other thing is that that thinking has become fully institutionalized. I'll give you the example of the first inter-american conference of uniform police that took place in Peru in 1966. This was set up by the US office of public safety a Bolivian official there commenting on what he termed the American concept of police stated quote this concept states that police has no ascertainable limits everything that tends to promote public welfare is a matter of for the police and quote so again that sort of imprecision that was already there with the idea of producing good order has lasted for centuries in various ways and has and has really just sort of become part of the police institution. The other thing that's important across the 20th century and into the 21st century is the doctrine of counter insurgency and there's you know a lot of ink spilled on on this topic effectively what that doctrine it's a military doctrine that argues that war fighting in the population the war and the crowd is a much more difficult one and therefore there needs to be total information awareness about what the crowd is made up of and the only way to do that is to fully police the crowd the population so the entire population you know is seen as being infiltrated by troublemakers but the only way to sort of identify those troublemakers is to treat the entire population as suspect and this becomes a sort of standard approach for for policing minority and poor populations in America and across the world and it's seen as sort of best practices I think is is the other sort of major point okay now before concluding I'd like to offer maybe it's idiosyncratic but but I think it works which is an example of tear gas as what I find to be a potent symbol of contemporary police power it's a potent symbol not only because it's ubiquitously used according to its billing as a quote non-lethal riot control agent but because it's continued use by domestic police forces around the world is a material trace of the global history of police so but before we get to that you know very briefly what is it and what does it do it usually takes three different forms these are abbreviations of its chemical compound names cn gas cs and cr pepper spray which is goes under oc of also falls under this umbrella of lacrimatory agents in latin lacrima means tear it's most people who write about it say it's not quite a gas it's more of a moisture that sticks to everything it is supposed to be physically debilitating and also to cause psychological terror it works by attacking the mucus membranes the repress respiratory system and causes blurred vision excessive tearing the burning of the nostrils and mouth dizziness nausea vomiting and stimulates pain pain receivers it was developed and used in world war one and this is the the purpose here was to get enemies out of the trenches so that they could be visible for artillery and machine gun fire and it's been used on countless other battlefields but has been technically banned since the Geneva protocol of 1925 and has been banned again that ban was reaffirmed by the 1993 chemical weapons convention the u.s right after world war one created a department of chemical warfare and the leader Amos freeze was a big promoter of of tear gas and there was a big profile done on him in the gas age record which was a trade magazine in 1921 and this is the description said that freeze quote has given much study to the question of the use of gas and smokes in dealing with mobs as well as with savages and is firmly convinced that as soon as officers of the law and colonial administrators have familiarized themselves with the gas as a means of maintaining order and power there will be such a diminution of violent social disorders and savage uprising as to amount to their disappearance 40 years later an American security expert in 1963 uh sort of doubled down on this and said quote the best way for the free world to guard freedom in southeast Asia is to make use of chemical warfare weapons so by the late 1960s tear gas had become the chemical weapon of choice used by police forces um in chicago and in paris in 1968 in berkeley california and dairy in northern ireland in 1969 and the expanded use uh was partially due to a growing industry that was connected to police departments and were run by former military veterans or police officers um but one of the most important ones was the lake eerie chemical which was uh founded by american world war one veteran um and here you can see here that they're they're hawking c s rather than c n gas uh because it's uh more potent um c n may stop here c s keeps them running home um lake eerie chemical was one of the largest tear gas manufacturers uh and the veteran who founded it thought that tear gas could be useful to police and also commercially successful at home and he was right um in addition to the commercial impulse there was also the influence of the vietnam war on american policing at home um in california a 39 year old police inspector named darryl gates who had experienced the riots in wats in 1965 noted that the police quote did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare and by 1968 working with marines at fort pendleton outside of san diego he created the first special weapons and tactics teams um he he wanted to call them actually initially the special weapons assault teams but his underlings thought that was a bit too warlike so special weapons and tax as it was better known as swat um so tear gas as well as other chemical weapons were also heavily used in vietnam so there's this sort of knowledge being produced by the vietnam war that's being um integrated into american policing as well and so what we have with tear gas is an artifact of police power and a symbol of its contemporary operation uh it has escaped the battlefield and is ubiquitous in the streets once deployed it's it is indiscriminate in who it harms as an entire region or group is deemed sort of suspect and deserving how much tear gas is used and how many how many injuries are caused by it nobody knows there's no mandatory accounting of the damage it causes there's also no legal requirement to track its sale export or its environmental damage it's a military weapon that has slipped from the battlefield where it is banned by the laws of war but falls with well within the discretionary power of the police so to conclude um a few things that we can say is that there are similarities in contemporary forms of police power due to this increased international collaboration but mostly because there are certain western police departments that have had outsized influence on what a professional police force is supposed to look like and what it's supposed to do how it's supposed to deal with threats uh the types of force it's supposed to use the type of weaponry it's supposed to be equipped with second that if we want to understand the militarization of the police in America there is an American story to this that's true but there is also a global story to this that is crucial and you're I would argue you're sort of leaving a lot out to just focus on the more provincial story it's a story about in European history colonial history cold war conflicts contemporarily Palestine is acting as uh that sort of experimental site for security innovation and then also American cities I'll just note that you know the NYPD which is one of the most influential departments in the world and certainly in America trains with the Israeli defense forces in Palestine every single year and then finally we can note that contemporary police power retains these traces of its past in the sort of ideological views and postures the practices and certainly in the very material that it uses to practice uh its profession okay uh so I'm going to stop my screen sharing and get back thank you very much okay so I guess we're we're in Q&A now um and so there are a few questions in the it's so okay so Kate asks the question does the military culture of police attract a particular type of recruit who's drawn to policing uh so so one thing to think what I think one thing that's interesting about policing um is that because it's one of the few uh unions in the country that sort of does well by its members and is quite powerful uh so in terms of achieving a middle class lifestyle with a guaranteed requirement with a high degree of job protection with great benefits that are permanent this is it's one of the few few professions left really that allows for this uh so what I think we can say because I'm not I'm not going to go into the sort of authoritarian personality argument when I know there's a sort of psychological argument out there that there's there's there's certain um psychological features that people exhibit that draw them to wanting to be part of a coercive mechanism um I I would say that socially there's two things at work if you find yourself interestingly enough to be a poor person the police is a good way to go to have some social mobility that's it's it's it's a pretty solid job to get the other thing that we can also see is that there's a sort of tradition in policing that often what's often the case is that children of police officers become police officers so there's a sort of generational continuity so Kate I'm totally going to punt on that question of if there's a psychological profile to a sort of architectural police person but I think there are sociological factors if I can put it that way that can sort of help explain why recruitment and so I'll speak about where I live for a while which is in New York why Staten Island is filled with police there there there's a there is a sort of generational tradition there and and and also sort of guaranteed provisions that older 1950s 1960s working-class jobs can provide that police can provide now so we've got a number of questions uh Tom Cohn how widely militarized are the Vermont police so I teach a course at Middlebury College called Policing the Globe and usually it's taught in the J term and one of the things that my students do I let them they can write a paper if they want but they can also do podcasts and and what I've learned from their podcast through their research is they they went and talked to the state police the county sheriffs and so on and they are quite militarized that they are they they are well aware of the 1033 program they use the 1033 program they've been offered things by the 1033 program that they've turned down the Addison County Sheriff turned down a whole batch of bayonets for instance right that I don't know why you would need a bunch of bayonets in Vermont but but he also understood that they also turned down a gunboat which I guess you'd put an under creek or something but but I'm not quite sure where where that would be used other things that are used however our surveillance drones m16 rifles body armor concussion grenades tear gas and in some cases not all over a month in some cases there's a few m-wraps which are these mine resistant armored personnel carriers which were created or souped up really during the Iraq war I mean that's one of the things is that you know that we have tank depots in Nevada where there's you know thousands of tanks that just sit lying there you know created for what was thought to be the great tank battle in Central Europe against the Soviet Union which never happened and so the the military through its wars over time has this excess and and the 1033 program was created to sort of distribute that excess to sort of offload some of the maintenance costs of keeping on that stuff but they also don't track it very well right so there's been a lot of congressional hearings about the people who are managing that program and they don't they know they give it away but they don't quite track where it goes so this the stuff is is going everywhere um right let's see here there's some more questions okay if the use of tear gas was banned via the Geneva protocol and that ban was reaffirmed why then would the hedge modern power of the U.S. allow its police to use said chemical in its own citizens so one of the one of the dirty secrets of that Geneva protocol is that the United States reserved the right to use tear gas not on battlefields but for riot control in domestic situations and and so that's where you know this is sort of grand irony right is that it's it's it's a chemical weapon that's banned by war but it's you know 2020 is the year of tear gas right i mean you see tear gas every the year before that would be 2011 during the arab spring but but certainly certainly this year this there's a lot and again we don't know exactly how much because there's no tracking mechanism there's no mandate to track um what happened to elizabeth bernstein's asking what happened to the night watchman part of policing i think that you know i i see it's weird it's a weird mix right you know people like george zimmerman become the sort of night watchman type they're sort of self-deputized uh and then trayvon martin becomes the frontier right that that this is this is confronted with with um moving boundaries now that that the actual frontier is is has been met um there are these other sort of threats that are sort of produced um that model i think has also become militarized to be quite frank you know it's it's one way that that police departments around the world get to use their gear more often is to put it do it reserve it or not purely reserve it but it's more reserved for uh night police units that only go out at night um hence they have the infrared goggles they have they have again they have all of the stuff uh that you would maybe need for or perceive that you need for nighttime war fighting which which is policing murphy robinson are there any examples of modern countries who don't police in this way or don't police at all and this works well for them so i'll i'll give the example um uh if you ever watch like a british crime show you know they they'll they'll freak you out by saying armed police showed up right because usually the police aren't armed there like armed police things got serious um and one statistic in the statistics you know can lie and so on but but one thing that's telling is that since 1900 the british police and we're not talking about the royal ireish constabulary in in in northern ireland so on but but british police within the british isles and again northern ireland separate have since 1900 have killed 50 people right that 50 people have been killed the u.s police on average kill a thousand people a year which is about three a day right so that um difference right there shows you that there isn't an arms race on the streets in the same way as there is in the united states and that's perhaps one of the greatest challenges for demilitarizing the police should you want to uh is that there's there's as many weapons as there are people um legal weapons uh firearms in circulation in this country um and high powered ones too and so the police kind of have a very strong argument as to why they need these weapons because there are a lot of other people with a lot of very powerful weapons and body armor and so on and all of these things um the statistics once again shows show you that it's very rare uh that those sorts of confrontations ever come to pass and these sort of militarized police expeditions are now we're sort of created for urban warfare against rioting are now used to do low level drug warrants with all sorts of terrible consequences to to the communities involved chris spencer uh is police oversight and citizen review board effective uh i guess the answer would be it depends right it depends on do they have teeth right do they have a purely advisory role um can they only sort of shame um but uh not really do anything can can um to what extent are those boards themselves uh staffed by police officers that's often the case right i know in vermont that's a thing that that there there's a whole controversy around police reform in vermont where one of the the the items on the docket is that should there be or how much representation should there be a police on a review board um and and and the police their argument is that well we know our profession the best we should have some representation we know uh what needs what looks sort of kosher and and not whereas people critique that are basically arguing that that becomes a way for to defang really um a review board by by having a populated by police in in any form so i think it sort of depends i i think it it's not a bad idea it's better than nothing um that's that's true um but it really matters of whether it's a paper tiger or not um is there so ellen and and uh um similar questions so i'll synthesize them is anyone working at a high level in us to demilitarize the police in this administration no um certainly not um the obama administration did do certain things to wind down a little bit of the 1033 program in other cases it did a lot more to ramp them up particularly with border policing um so you get increased militarization of the policing of borders under obama um it starts you know with clinton and is sort of ramped up by the bush administration and and the obama administration uh really um accelerates it um but uh this administration is it turned back the clock on all of the the 1033 program limitations so that's that's back in full effect um what would demilitarizing the police look like uh so you saw all that material right i mean the the the question is that are those things needed right and and it and it sort of begs the question the sort of more fundamental question that i started with is that why do we have the police right that that is it the case that all our towns and cities are effectively just we're they're war zones right that that that we are constantly there's a sort of ambient state of violence in this country that requires heavily armed police to be patrolling at all times and to approach every sort of infraction um not with a hammer but uh with a machine gun right that that's and the answer overwhelmingly has been yes so far right that i i think it's a sort of there's not a lot of political will uh around demilitarization i think one of the things if we talk if we think about okay these are the features of militarization that we talked about earlier um these various characteristics the training the stuff all that if that's what militarization looks like demilitarization could look like taking away some of those things right it would be a start that would be that would be something one could do um is there the political will to do that uh is an entirely separate question i think uh are there examples of police collaborating successfully with social workers or mental health workers so this is one of the things that the new administration has argued for right that rather and and i'm a bit critical of this the the the argument that joe biden has made is that there should be more police reform and therefore more money for police training and i would just say that if you look at the history of police training um they've been trained a long time not to choke people not to racially profile there's been a lot of training that's been going on for decades and somehow that money is used to sort of showcase we've done this training we had some sort some powerpoint that we were shown uh and that and that money is then sort of siphoned in different places and often it's it's into sort of more coercive force um i would say that rather than investing more money in bringing police and teaching them how to work with social workers maybe invest more money in social workers that that that is the sort of area of investment that also kind of leads to demilitarization i'm sure you've heard this this term defund the police right what is what what what does that mean what that means is it doesn't mean that there's necessarily no police anymore but that it it ultimately narrows their purview it narrows the ambit of their activity that every problem in our society is not a problem for the police and so defunding doesn't mean you it's defunding and you do nothing with that money but you reallocate that money in different places and there is an argument to be made and the police often make this argument is that that underserved communities face a lot of crime and they often call for more policing but what's often left out is that they also call for better jobs better healthcare better education all of these things and those things are are often very lacking but the but the police solution seems to be not lacking so that's where i think if we want to talk about reform it that's where some success may lie but marrying a SWAT team with a social worker i don't think is is going to be you're not really what that social worker will end up doing is acting as cover for the doings of the SWAT team it becomes a sort of alibi for the continued policing of evermore sectors of society um do fear just fear concern of safety play a role in militarizing please i i think it plays a role in the discourse right that that's that's the only rationale right what other rationale could you have but for fear right and that's the argument of the police is that if you don't have the police um it's it's a war of all against all right that that becomes the sort of uh the threat of of anarchy um you know william bar is a good testament to this right that that this this this type of discourse is is is there um and of course it's not i mean this is this is the hard thing right to thread with american society which is that there are a lot of guns there's a lot of weapons um and this is a violent society there's a lot of there's a lot of murders in this country way more so proportionately than other countries that are not at like civil war um so those things are very real and it might well be the case in those narrow circumstances that police could be deployed um but for somebody wandering in the street with a mental health crisis uh for panhandling for for truancy um uh the the the deploying of the police um is is a uniquely american thing actually right that that the extent to which we use uh police is is is quite extraordinary um ellen louis asked are there any particular books on this issue that you recommend or am i writing one i i'm writing a book i just finished a manuscript on the policing of north africans um in paris uh and uh they the the prefecture police there had they were although the french like to sort of argue it's the americans that are the racists because they've had you know they had you know racialized slavery and so on somehow forgetting about their own colonies um but they argue that they there's a sort of universal treatment of the french citizen is the sort of myth but with policing it's a very different story because they had openly explicit north african brigades right so what we would call racial profiling they fully institutionalized um and and so i'm i'm i'm working on a book on that so it's a little bit different but it's there's a lot of the story of colonial history in the intersection of militarized policing there i think the two books um fairly that came out fairly recently that i would recommend um one is a very easy read uh it's short but it's useful is alex vitali's uh the end of policing and that's american-centric there's some chapters on on international policing and things like that um but it's it's very approachable for the general reader and i think and what's really useful about his book is that not only and he's a radical critic of of policing but he in addition to offering the critique in every chapter he quite literally offers paths forward other things that one could do right that this is what you're doing and these are some of the effects why don't you try this so i think that's a great book another book um that just came out last year is a book by steward trader um called badges without borders and i think the subtitle is how global insurgency transformed american policing um and he's a sociologist uh at uh john's hopkins uh that's a much more dense read um very academic book um but it's it's going to be um i think a classic um and a foundational book in 20th century studies of american policing um so that's another one i would i would i would i would highly recommend it's it's it's very good it's very good but it's not beach reading okay um what can average citizens do to be involved with policing in their community that is a big question i don't know quite frankly this is you know at the one thing that's been interesting for me at least with this national election is that because it's forced all of us to pay more attention to politics i'm paying much more attention to local politics as well uh and policing happens at the local level um and so as much as you know we can there should be a focus on national programs and things like that that's important but actual transformation of how policing operates really comes down to who's you if you're voting for sheriffs who your sheriff is um the towns council members how much money they're allocating for you in their budgets and so on so it really is a sort of local issue and it's very granular which makes it completely boring and unsexy but but in terms of actually affecting change that's where the rubber meets the road you know local prosecutors things like that those things really matter okay other questions that maybe i've missed uh lila richardson what do you make of article five of the vermont constitution quote that the people of this state by their legal representatives have the sole inherent and exclusive right of governing and regulating uh the internal police of the same what's its relevance today right so well that's true right that that the vermont state police are the sort of you know marquee institution in vermont they they are extremely important but this is kind of you know i think it's an effect of how professionalization works right how influence moves around societies is that yes there is technical sort of sovereignty in that sense over the internal policing of vermont but then you know the vermont police want to look like other police that are considered to be the best police departments so there is a sort of fashion system if you like at work where there's sort of there's this imitation at least the other thing of course to remember is that as we know vermont is a border state which means if we think about the border patrol they have a hundred mile radius that is their jurisdiction around the country around the border so and and ice can go wherever they like so those are there's sort of multiple forms of police that then sort of countermand the would-be impenetrable sovereignty of internal policing in vermont okay elizabeth quarker why do you think it's mainly the youth that have been involved in shedding light on this issue in terms of protest why haven't the older generations been involved more it is the case that certainly in the united states and i think this would probably be the case in other countries certainly in France i can speak to that it is younger people who and usually men it's gendered as well that are more frequently stopped by them they have more police encounters so and and of course america being america there's a racial order to that as well right so that that's that's certainly the case i this summer you know the protest movement this summer of what is projected to be between 15 million and 25 million people largely youth but it was also multi-generational i thought you know there's there's a lot of different sort of voices out there which made it very different from when the movement emerged after the murder of trayvon martin right so that where where it was more sort of niche if you like but that's i think that's a big shift right that is that is that is a very big shift for people interested in police demilitarization you can sort of capitalize on that political will right because you know that there is there is some political will right whereas before even the idea of you know cutting police budgets at all would have been sort of laughed out of the room you know at least some you know modifications to to police budgets are now on the table keith gauss lent to what is the percentage of current police officers who have come out of the militaries so they're bringing their training as an active part of their police response something like 15 to 25 percent is a broad figure and and it's and it's very different depending on the region that you're in that said many police officers get military training so they get military either they get military training from actual military trainers or they get this sort of warrior training from people like david grossman it's been banned in some in some departments now so in minneapolis it was banned after the killing of falando castile because david grossman had trained that an entire department but the police union balked and then paid for it privately too so it's so it still can continue to continues in other forms so and you can't sort of stop that if the union's willing to pay for it so that the the others sort of ways in which the sort of militarized training sort of comes back they're the most sort of i don't know important example of this was it was a a marine named mike cotone who came back from afghanistan and joined the springfield massachusetts police department and he and basically he argued that the counterinsurgency manual that was being used by the police by the military in afghanistan could be used in springfield to deal with gang problems and he created this counterinsurgency continuum policing which he's now branded as continuum policing three or something like that and sort of sells to different departments around the country and that's become fully integrated right that's that's that's that's become fully integrated i mean so there's there's a very sort of direct line you know from afghanistan to massachusetts and the integration of the practices and that's just one example there's there's there's there's many more questions okay i think i've answered most of them i think that's i believe are there any other questions no okay all right kate and michelle are we yeah thank you amit that's really generous of you to kind of offer your wide knowledge of this to answer all these questions yes this is this is kate thank thank you because i think you're giving us a really good context for the rest of our series the next one on january 13 we'll discuss policing during mental health crises so i do that for a couple questions about that so i think that that we're off to a good start it's the mission of the league of women voters to empower voters and defend democracy and we hope that this series advances that mission thank you very much thank you everybody thanks for coming thank you