 Hello, everyone. I'm speaking today with Rachel Harman, who is a professor of law at the University of Virginia. She is director of the Center for Criminal Justice and one of the nation's leading experts on policing. Rachel, welcome. Thank you. Simple question. Why is the United States so bad at gathering data about its police? Well, for one reason, we have more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, and so that's a lot of data to collect. They're very diverse. And so it's hard. We'd have to have a national effort to do it in any sort of coherent way, and we haven't had the will to do that. Is it that they don't want to do it? And is the bottleneck at the level of the individual police officer, the department somewhere else? There are bottlenecks all along the way. If you think about the way what we traditionally demanded from police departments, the focus of the political demands on police departments have tended to focus on effectiveness in terms of public safety or at least visible efforts towards producing public safety. There's been a lot less focus on the how what kinds of harm is policing is imposing. And so we do actually collect a lot of data from police departments pretty effectively with respect to crimes. We've had the uniform crime reports for almost 100 years, and we have standardized definitions of what those crimes are and not perfect, but pretty good data from departments. There's just a lot less interest in collecting data on the heart, the coercion that police officers do like arrest arrests we use for the crime reports, but stops uses of force and the like. And it does cost something to collect that data so you'd need individual officers to take time to do it you need departments to supervise them, and then you'd need an effort to standardize the definitions and the formats so that we could actually use the data. If you think of body cams as a form of data on police behavior, what having a body cam on each officer be an effective way of improving the quality of conduct. Well, so I would start with the premise which is that body cams are data so far body cams are anecdote as machine learning gets better they are becoming data and they're getting more useful in that way. But body cams are one perspective on a encounter. Of course, most of the data we get is officer reported so they're useful. It's not clear whether body cams are going to be an important force of form of data in policing, but I suspect over time they will be. But do you think police would behave better if they knew they were always being taped. Some people say they'll just turn off the body cam, or you won't be able to prosecute them anyway. What's your empirical view. Well, so I'm not a social scientist I'm a lawyer but I try to follow the social science in this area, and I can tell you that what we know right now is that the results of studies of body cameras, at least in terms of if you if you're studying whether they reduce complaints or whether they reduce uses of force. The studies are at best mixed, I would say the evidence that they do good in these respects is pretty weak. But what's your intuition as to why they're not a clear winner. So we're doing a podcast in essence with a body cam. We're of course super nice anyway but we're going to be super nice to each other. Why doesn't that just work across the board. Well, so I'm not that nice usually and if you record me for long enough I will forget to be nice and I'll be my normal not that nice self. And so I think part of what happens in policing with respect to anyone wearing a camera is that people forget over time. And partly some of the, the causes of problems in policing aren't that officers are intentionally misbehaving. I mean sometimes they're not being as cautious they should be or not as polite as they should be, but often it's about the broader incentives they face so if the department doesn't care if you're polite or not, putting on a camera isn't going to make you more polite. So there would have to be standards that have to be consequences and they're an office so officers have to have the motivation to behave differently and they have to have the capacity to behave to behave differently. Do we have too many separate police departments you mentioned the number of different departments as an obstacle to collecting data. Should there be more consolidation. Sure. I mean there are advantages and disadvantages to consolidation I said 18,000 that's actually not the best most recent number it's probably a little more than 12,000 local departments, about half of those are fewer than 10 guys. Now we talk about police accountability and having use of force policies and disciplinary structures, but in an office of 10 guys, none of that matters. And so I think some kind of consolidation would be extremely valuable because these very small departments just can't maintain the kinds of standards that we might want, but I don't think consolidation is the solution to all problems and policing and consolidation has costs as well as benefits, because it means that as communities get more diverse segments of the community might not get what they want that of policing. I believe that right now around one eighth of police officers are women. Should that percentage be higher is a way of addressing police misconduct that is you might want it to be higher for other equity reasons that's fine. But in terms of people being happier with their police. Would it help. So here we know for sure, you know the studies on gender are show a little bit better effect than the studies on racial diversity and policing. And I think communities do value diverse police departments that reflect what the community looks like and certainly women might help but I have no I don't take diversity and policing to be a solution to problems and policing. I think it's an end that we might pursue for other reasons. But if I think of data on non police behavior for whatever reasons women are much less violently aggressive than our men. So you might think if the police force were half women. More or less the cases were worried about would fall significantly. If that's not true. What's your intuition for why not. Well, so for one reason police officers and regular people aren't similarly situated with respect to violence. So if you know I'm a very small person I'm only about 411 on a good day. If you ask me why I don't engage in more violence. Well, maybe I don't usually have the motivation to engage in violence and maybe even though I've done a little kickboxing, I'm probably going to lose most fights I'm in police officers are armed and they're trained to use the police force and so there's a difference even if even if women on are on average smaller there's still going to be a difference in their preparedness to use force to enforce a command and so I don't I just don't think we can infer from what we know about women participating in violent violence more generally that women are going to behave differently on the police force. That doesn't mean they won't and and again you know that it's a little bit of research but it's not great and I just don't I think police officers are situated differently with respect to force. Should the Department of Justice have the right to file suit against police departments, as they've had I believe what since 1994. Yes, should that a good idea, should they. Yes, they should have the power to do that. So the there, I have. So the lawsuits by the Justice Department for pattern and practices of unconstitutional conduct by a police department are important both symbolically and practically. Those lawsuits have substantial costs as well as benefits and when the Justice Department has sued police departments in past those suits have been very expensive. Some suits have worked better than others in terms of reform and some of the reforms haven't always lasted. So I don't want to suggest that they are somehow a panacea to problems and policing. At the same time, they've done a lot to signal the federal government's commitments to civil rights. They have set national standards for departments that are interested in adopting best practices, and they have reformed some very big very problematic departments. Say when the feds give money to stay in local departments and enforce standards of accountability, there's at least the risk that lowers local accountability right I mean does that always work out for the better when they give the money. Well so most of the money we give to local police departments isn't for accountability, it's to improve effectiveness in policing or to improve to shift policing towards national priorities that might not be adequately addressed at the local level like local departments don't have enough of incentive to prepare against terrorism, except maybe New York. And so we might fund them to make sure that we're all on the same page. There are some good reasons for federal programs, but the way those programs have been designed have not focused on accountability, and often they have given money directly to police departments or been structured in ways that incentivize harmful policing. And in that way, when they do that, they actually can they even if they make policing more effective they can also make it more harmful and therefore less efficient, and also undermine community control. So what would be an example of incentivizing harmful policing through those subsidies. Well, the Violence Against Women Act has an arrest program was traditionally known as the arrest program recently renamed, which provides money to police departments and or to municipalities in to increase the criminal, the criminalization of justice taking seriously violence against women domestic violence and stalking and some other kinds of violence. That program specifically incentivize arrests and it incentivizes arrests even above prosecutions so it's not that we're saying we should take it seriously at sentencing we're saying we should take it seriously. If we don't see it, we should arrest it and it encourages departments to adopt pro arrest policies and states to adopt pro arrest laws, but arresting people doesn't necessarily protect public safety, and it does increase harm. Should we impose higher educational standards on police forces. There's mixed evidence on that slightly older police officers are tend to be better in certain respects at least and education is often associated with age, but again, I don't think that we can select our way out of problems and police. But why can't we because different individuals they behave so differently they think so differently. Why is it that there's no change in selection criteria that would get the police to be more the way we want them to be whatever that might be. Well, so I think we could do some things. I think we could select against people we could screen out people who have committed misconduct in the past, for example, by decertifying them at the state level and therefore discouraging departments that can't or don't care very much about quality of their officers from hiring those officers so it's not that we can't select against promise and policing at all. Sometimes we know that an officer is problematic and still he'll wander around from department to department. So I think we can we should set minimum age standards that are above 18 which many states have as a minimum age standard, but in terms of education or other more subtle factors, I think the effects can often be subtle and when we look at what creates problems and policing departments officers, you know, the officers don't pre exist department really. And so you know what you're really looking at is the culture of the department, the incentive structures that supervision discipline, you know, you can make good officers with imperfect people say many more of the police for 67 year old women. And they were short. Obviously, there's an issue that might be more willing to use their guns, because they would feel physically more endangered. But wouldn't it just be highly likely that in terms of misbehavior, there would be less of it just by changing the composition. It seems true for every other job we know. Yeah, maybe. But even there so you know I'm not 67 yet, but I'm on my way and if you tell me that I have to complete every call in 90 seconds. And I deal I face somebody who is holding a knife and clearly in a mental health crisis. You know, I have two options. I can wait and talk and see if I can de escalate the situation, or I can taste them and be done with it. And even a 67 year old woman is going to respond to incentives about how she's supposed to handle that situation. If you rush her, she'll taste them. So what's the incentive then we should change if composition and selection won't do it. Well, I'm not saying I don't think any it's not that they won't help you could help with education you could help with diversification. And diversity diversity might help in policing like women, because they break up the subcultures in a police department that can reinforce bad behavior so I actually think having women and present helps. Even if the women aren't less violent just by reducing the uniformity of the culture. So I don't want to say those things don't matter at all. But I think the capacity to solve problems without force and the motivation to do so matter, at least is not much if not more. So what we have to do is give officers the capacity. I wish we had more evidence about de escalation training and about implicit bias training and the like we don't. So we don't know that that stuff works at least not yet, but hopefully we can develop mechanisms we could study these things and develop mechanisms to have alternatives to empower officers to use alternatives, to give them the backup, the time, if necessary, the cover to engage in less forceful responses. Let's say we doubled the number of people in the active police force. Is it possible then misconduct would go down. Everyone's not so rushed. There's a greater sense you can do things properly. It depends what you do with them. I mean you could double the number of police officers and make things far worse if what they're doing is going out onto the street and jacking people up throwing them against the wall for asking them and the like. And so it really depends what you do with the officers you have. You know that that, you know, one of the things is that we just don't have a lot of good research so we do have some research that suggests if you add officers to a department public safety gets better, even if arrests don't go up. So the presence of officers as a Sentinel is to discourage misconduct, or to mis discourage crime actually works pretty well. But what we don't know is whether adding those police officers also increases harm. And so we don't know if doubling a police force actually makes things far worse or far better. So conceptually what do you view is the fundamental constraint in the system. So someone might say, Well, it's too hard to watch police officers, but body cams it's not clear they'll work. Whom we pick. It's not obvious that's the lever of progress. What's the actual constraint you would like to be able to control better. Yeah, so I'm not a big believer in silver bullets. I don't think there is a single constraint we have been struggling with balancing the harms and benefits of policing since we started contemporary departments. So I don't I don't think that we're going to suddenly fix this by flipping one lever. I think that one thing that we could do is facilitate better accountability and policing and what I mean by that is if you think about policing as or accountability is that an officer would be responsive to standards. He would have to explain his behavior and he'd face consequences when he didn't live up to those standards. Those standards should reflect of the full costs and benefits of policing so that we set rules for policing that actually gets what we want out of policing. Those standards won't reflect those rules. We don't know what the costs of policing are and that means hearing from the members of the community on whom we tend to concentrate the costs of policing. And then we have to make sure that police are in fact accountable that that there are that they do have to explain their behavior, which means we would know what they were doing and that they face consequences when they don't live up to expectations. If we paid law professors 50% more, we'd probably get more good people wanting to be law professors. Should we pay police 50% more. So I don't think there's a, you know, I think there's it's clear that when we reduce police salaries a lot, as you see in some small departments and in poorer communities. Then police quality goes down because you start selecting you start getting officers with records and misconduct and the like. So I think we don't want to salaries to go too low, but I don't know that if we doubled salaries or raised them for 50% that we'd get radically higher quality police officers. I'm open to it. You know, you could think of we could have a police for America program like we have a Teach for America program and kids out of Harvard would then go police in big cities and small towns for three years. I mean, I'm open to almost trying almost anything as an alternative, but I don't think we know that raising salaries is going to make things better in policing. I think there are about as many social workers as there are police. Should we take a third of those social workers and in essence reallocate them to police work paying them more if we have to. Sure. One of the great things that would I mean, there are some aspects of what police departments are expected to do now that would be better handled by social workers who are trained to deal with people in crisis. Whether there's a substance abuse or mental health crisis or other social services needs like people without housing and the like. And so we dump a lot of that on police departments. There is no police department in America who wouldn't say what we need is more mental health services because mental health services would prevent the crisis. And if we had more social workers responding to those crises either with law enforcement or without depending on the nature of the crisis, we might get more effective policing. Yeah, sure. What about mandatory therapist visits for each policeman or woman. I didn't know about mandatory therapist visits but I would say that we have to prioritize the health and well being of police officers because police officers who are overly stressed or who are hurt physically or mentally are more likely to hurt others. And so we have to take seriously officer well being. Now, what that means can be complicated, you know, we want officers to be able to get the therapy services they need. Often pure services work better. Some departments are looking to the military model for increasing well being because officer suicides are huge problem right now. But we also want to make sure that an officer who is in potentially in crisis or harmful to others isn't on the street and so states are struggling with the trade offs between protecting officers to make sure they seek the help they need and ensuring that officers are removed if they are risky to others. You spent quite a few years working on the issue of sexual assault by police, right. What's the main thing the American public does not know about that topic. Well, I don't think they realize how common sexual assaults by police are how difficult that how unlikely they are to be reported and then how difficult they are to prove once they are reported in. I mean, I so I prosecuted cases involving police misconduct for the Department of Justice and one of the, one of the big issues in some of the sexual assault cases I did was that the first complaint, the second complaint, the third complaint would come in. They would come in sporadically it would be he said she said the department would investigate decide that there was no evidence to support the woman's claim and the officer would go about his business. And the women were often had credibility problems they might be felons they might be prostitutes with drug habits runaways, but over time what you would see is a department sort of, you know, never vindicating those claims never investigating them thoroughly enough. And when you would look at these cases and start actually seriously investigating, you'd realize that actually this officer had done it. Dozens of times, some of them might be beyond the statute of limitations, some of the women might have serious credibility issues, but you'd get enough that in, you know, some cases, I had more than a dozen prosecutable incidents involving sexual abuse by an officer, not some of which had there had been complaints about, but only some and none of those had been recognized as legitimate even the Justice Department had often closed the case at least once before. I got it so it's very hard to see how big the problem is, or to investigate and handle those cases. What should we do to improve that problem. Well, that might be diversifying police departments in with respect to gender might help that problem. I don't know. But police almost certainly work right. Yeah, I can only think, you know, what we don't want his police officers to be alone or in in with somebody else or with other people that they can rely on and not to report misconduct. So that means officers have to have a duty to report misconduct with respect to each other and we have to have a culture interior to departments that that facilitates that happening. Nobody I mean the difference between you know uses of force are often hard to determine whether they're legal or illegal whether it was appropriate or inappropriate. There's no question that sex between a police officer and and somebody he's just arrested is is wrong. I mean that is just pure bad and so we should never have a situation in which another officer had it has information or evidence or has witnessed such a thing and is unwilling to report it. But it's often legal correct. Yeah, in some places. Well, so it depends what you mean by legal in is it is not unconstitutional in some states. Yeah, it is a consensual sex between an officer and a person in custody is not illegal. And so it depends in part on whether it's non consensual in other places custodial sex with somebody in custody is illegal. So it varies. But if it's non consensual it's always illegal. I would think in a sense it can never be consensual. Yeah, but that so that's true. In fact, one of the problems that we had in federal cases involving sexual misconduct or sexual abuse is that that you would have to prove forced to prove a felony. But officers don't have to use force and they don't even have to explicitly threaten for us. They control the situation. The person is under arrest. They are wearing a gun and they are they express and act as if they're invincible and the women often the women who are abused are carefully chosen to believe that they are so they know because they've been arrested before they know because they have a criminal history they know because you know, I had one case involving someone who directed a halfway house and the women had to have sex with him in order to see their children because if they got he could affect their probation status and if they if they got their probation revoked or ended up back in jail, they wouldn't see their children anymore. He picked them pretty carefully. So yeah, they don't always need force and you know, we might need laws to better protect against them. If I think of this problem in its most general form, let's say we agree that having more policemen doing the right thing is a high positive social return. So we don't just want to discourage the police from engaging flat out. Right. At the same time, there are many instances of misconduct. It seems hard to limit them through a number of mechanisms that I've been suggesting. So what is the most cost effective intervention that will improve the quality of policing, but without just limiting the number of engagements. I don't know. The most cost effective intervention to improve the quality of policing without limiting engagement. Yeah, I don't know that I can think of a single intervention. I mean, if you think about particular interventions, I can tell you how they might affect that equation, but there are a lot of forces acting on policing. So for example, people talk about civil damages actions. And one of the things about civil damages actions they worry about indemnification indemnification is when the city pays even though the officer gets the judgment against him. And people object to this because they think the officer should be punished more, but I'm actually pro indemnification because I think if the city pays, then as long as we make that payment transparent so we don't have non disclosure agreements. Then we connect and we and we also collect data on it then a community could actually say, Hey, I don't want my taxes to go up because you idiots won't train and prepare officers and discipline them and supervise them so that they do less of this. Right. And so we want the the costs to be internalized. I think all the way there are a lot of different ways to ensure that we internalize the cost of policing, making them more visible making them experienced by. The political actors who are going to make decisions about the hiring and firing police chiefs about setting policy for police departments. And I think the more we internalize the full costs of policing and make sure they're fairly distributed, the better policing will be. But there are other countries that are very different. An extreme example would be Norway. I'm not saying we can be like Norway right we're a very different country, but if you're a Rachel Harmon dictator of all matters police, and you're allowed to make one change that will last after you're gone. I mean what would that be. I think setting up some national standards for making for so that put that we not only have federal intervention and making police more effective or federal intervention in suing police officers and suing police departments and prosecuting police officers, but national standards for ensuring that policing is actually beneficial that it's that we're harm minimizing that it's fair and that it's authorized by local communities. Given that we do operate policing the way we do, which is in lots and lots of departments, having some shared national standards the way England does it might help a lot, even if we continue to organize policing the way we did. And if a department doesn't meet those standards, you take away money put them into receivership, something else what do you do. Yeah, so there are different proposals for that. And right now people are talking about an accreditation system where departments would seek to be accredited by meeting national standards. You could penalize them by taking away money for things that they want. But that has again cost and benefits and over time the federal government has been totally unwilling to do that it's basically not used money as a tool for ensuring police accountability. So, you know, I don't know if there's one way to do it but I think there are several ways to do it and I think partly communities have to do it themselves. That is to say once we have national standards out there communities can hold their own departments accountable for not meeting them. Camden Trenton and Newark seem to have improved the quality of their police from what we can tell. Are there lessons we can draw from those examples and those are tough cities right. Yeah, they are. So, one thing is the value of innovative leadership Scott Thompson and Camden, I think did a lot of good and thought seriously about the problems and engaged all of the different participants, both communities, the officers, you know he put out a new use of force policy last year which is probably the most progressive in the country, based in part on work that the ally did the American Law Institute did and I've been involved in that work I helped draft those principles. And he did that by getting everyone to the table and getting buy-in from everyone involved and that's a lot more likely to have success, lasting success. Now, you know, so leadership matters, buy-in matters. He also had a little more power to restructure the department from the ground up. So one of the problems that people have had when, you know, we might get a new leader in a department who wants to reform the department, but that the culture of the department is resistant to change, and they know that the guys likely to be fired within a year anyway, so they can just wait them out. And so you can often have trouble penetrating department culture. One of the things that happened in Camden is they were rebuilding a department from the ground up and that gave them a lot of power to make things a little bit better. So dismantling resistance to change actually helps a lot too. Those are some of the factors. You know, I'm terrible because I'll never give you a like, you know, yep, here's the answer and it's easy. I just don't have it. That's good. The people who give that are terrible, I would say. Now, Minneapolis at least claims- Unless you ask me about civil asset forfeiture and then I'll just tell you it's all bad. Yes, that's an easy one. Minneapolis claims it will be dismantling its police department, but this of course will be under intense glare and scrutiny as a national issue. Is that likely to go the route of Camden and be a positive or what's your intuition on that case? I don't know. I mean, you know, Minneapolis has known it's had some problems for several years. Minnesota has had some hearings. Minneapolis has tried to do some reforms and they haven't- Even after some high profile events, not as high profile as what's going on now for sure, but some high profile salient events, they were unable to generate the kind of change that would make a difference, at least significantly so. And they have on paper some of the formal reforms that people often demand in policing. And so I don't know what the- I mean, I don't know enough about what's going on on the ground. I mean, one of the things about police institutions is that they are local institutions. And so you have to know a lot about what's going on in a community to know how likely they are to change. How much of the problems with American police are just correlated with the problems of the citizens? So if you had a 10, we're just literally everyone was completely nice. Would police brutality be a major issue? Well, so, you know, there are a lot of ways to prevent a police, you know, call it brutality, let's call it violence, or just a use of force. Let's say all uses of force are, it would be better if no use of force happened. Now we could prevent them by preventing the underlying problems that police respond to. We could do education and have economic development and provide mental health services. And then police would respond to far fewer problems and things would be better. We could re-identify problems and tolerate a little bit more disorder. Maybe a police officer doesn't have to break up a loud party and then he won't have to arrest the people involved. And so we could do that. We could encourage people to react differently to the police if people trust the police in your nice town where people believe that the police are there to help not to hurt, where police are not being aggressive towards them. They might be far more likely to respond to just a mere request. You know what? Why don't you turn the music down and they would say fine. And so you could do all those things and help improve policing. Sure. And then at the end of the day, the police officers in your nice town might also be likely to wait out people who are non-compliant or look for alternatives because in nice town, that's what people do. And so I think, you know, niceness could help, but thinking about how it could help is really what matters. How do we limit the number of police who lie at trial or lie to back up their peers or somehow just outright refuse to play by the legal rules of the game, telling the truth? Yeah. So we impose consequences. You know, right now there are almost no consequences for police officers who lie. You could think of, you know, if a judge thinks that a police officer lies in a suppression motion, he will maybe suppress the evidence. If the truth indicates that the search or the seizure was illegal. But that's hardly much of a penalty. You know, police officer engages in an illegal search, then he lies at trial taking the chance that, you know, he might get it in. But worst, the only outcome is what would have happened if he had told the truth. So I don't think that's a very effective incentive. Departments when officers do lie at trial often don't take steps. And sometimes when officers admit that they were under pressure to lie or that they did lie, you know, they learn very quickly that admitting a lie is much more problematic than lying. We need to create different, we need departments. I mean, that's a problem that really is internal to departments. In some cities, there's a culture of more reporting than in others. And so that's something that departments can do to facilitate truthfulness and policing. But expecting truthfulness would go a long way to improving it. Here's a question from a reader and I quote, the author advocates curtailing arrests, but in places we've seen this, it has resulted in absolute bedlam San Francisco Seattle, New York. Where are the leading examples that have delivered better outcomes and quote. So I don't accept the premise that reducing arrests. First of all, I'm not sure all those cities have reduced arrest as certainly Seattle and New York have I don't know the numbers in San Francisco. But in New York, we dramatically dropped arrests for misdemeanor offenses without a substantial increase in crime. I'm not sure that I would call that absolute bedlam. You'd have to convince me. I mean, you know, I look at everything the same way, which is, is it effective at producing the goals which are public safety and public order. Is it beneficial in the sense that the costs don't outweigh the benefits. Is it efficient in the sense that there's no less harmful alternative. Is it fairly distributed and I think arrests to a large degree fail those tasks. And so, for those reasons, you know, I would like to reduce them because I think they impose harm where harm is unnecessary. I'm not I don't accept the premise of the question that reducing arrests has caused bedlam. But if we look at San Francisco I was watching the movie dirty Harry a week ago said in 1971 in San Francisco city was much cleaner. In terms of problems on the street, although crime was higher. There are now cases of people maybe homeless people just going at stores taking things, knowing they won't be arrested. Citizens have had it up to here. They claim it's unlivable. Why don't the police there simply need to be much tougher. Why is that wrong. So, one, you know, if we're talking about that in San Francisco I so I don't know enough about what's going on in San Francisco but one of the big, big problems in San Francisco seems to be radical economic inequality that leads to the underlying problems which can't you can't arrest your way out of you arrest somebody who walks into a store and they spend the night in jail and then they're back out on the street and homeless again. I don't know what that arrest achieved in terms of public safety and public order and I'm not sure that at San Francisco be willing to pay the costs of those arrests, or that it would get them what they want. But inequality is very high in Singapore right, but you know there if you commit a crime, you will be arrested sent to jail. Why wouldn't that work for San Francisco. Yeah, so first of all, I would detach the idea of an arrest from the idea of criminalization and and penalizing. I mean, I don't know, again, much about Singapore, although I did spend a week there and 1989 I was sick for most of it. Maybe it was 90. What we can say is that we might want to. If somebody is engaged in behavior that we don't want. There are lots of ways to address that one of them is criminal sanction, but the decision to arrest somebody and the decision to sanction them criminally aren't the same decision. Okay, and so we didn't arrest Harvey Weinstein. He was allowed to self surrender with a pre negotiated pale bail package. The only time he ever spent in handcuffs was in walking before his conviction was walking from this police station to the courthouse after his self surrender. This was a violent felon. Okay, who was against him. We had evidence that he would be a harm to the public if he was let go, and he we didn't arrest him. I'm not sure we should arrest every low level. I don't think that gets us public safety. You look at the numbers of arrests that we dropped in New York just by not arresting people for simple possession of marijuana, and you see, that's a lot of harm reduced and no additional public safety risk, or I think that should be illegal but people who steal things. I would arrest all of them whom I could catch without hesitation. Why wouldn't you charge them and ask them to show up in court? They won't show. Maybe they don't have addresses, yeah. Well, so most people who get traffic tickets show up or pay their ticket, and we know that's totally malleable. That is to say, you know, we all we have to do is remind you and then the percentage of people who show up goes up 10%. You know, when we're talking about low level thefts, the penalties are not that high. These are not people who are worried that they're going to spend the rest of their lives in prison. Most people are easy to find. I'm not saying you might not, if you convince me that really people won't show up and really we can't find them if they don't, but I don't think we have any reason to believe that's true in most of these cases. What important truth are law students least likely to learn about policing? That it's not all about constitutional law. You know, when you go to law school, what you learn about policing is the Fourth Amendment and Miranda, and you think you've learned the law of the police. And I teach a class now, after I teach them criminal procedure, my more advanced class is on all of the law that relates to policing. So they can see that the kinds of that, you know, we have to consider all the harms and benefits of policing that law plays a critical role in setting standards that policing is worth its costs and shapes expected values. Given the cost of not taking a plea bargain, can it be said today that there's even still a right to a fair trial? It seems to me no. Am I wrong? So is there a right? No, no, there's not much of a right to a fair trial. What should we do about that? Well, that is not an area I'm nearly as expert and on as policing. But I think one of the problems is that we clog the system with a lot of offenses we never mean to prosecute, that we're using the criminal justice system to address problems that really we should and could address in other ways. And so that burdens the system, you know, tons and tons of misdemeanors are just dropped as soon as the person walks into court. Council is really, really limited. People have limited opportunities to meet with their counsel. I think we could do a lot to improve the system by just reducing the scope of the system. What's a good movie about the police? You know, I try not to watch that many movies about the police to tell you the truth. I'm a relatively low media consumption person. So I'm not sure I'm the best person to say. A good novel about the police. Again, I don't know that I've read many novels about the police. How popular culture a problem, it both tells police how they ought to behave and it tells citizens what to expect from police. Doesn't it set a norm of a high expectation of violence on both sides. Well, so, you know, we used to have officer friendly and now we have training day. Yeah, I think it's it certainly portrays a message of policing that can distort both public perception and police perception of what the norms are. Just like the media could do that in other contexts. Yeah. Why is boxing interesting. Because there is nothing that focuses your attention more than someone trying to hit you in the face. It is absolutely terrific at it's screening out all distraction you forget who you are when you box. What makes for a good boxer is it coaching pain tolerance brute strength size. Well, I don't know because I've never been a good boxer. So I'm not sure I'm qualified to say should be we be worried about how many young men seem to love mixed martial arts today. Is that a sign of decadence or it's just fine or. Well, again, I, you know, I think it's a mixed bag. I have to say that I the the experience of engaging in kickboxing is so terrific that I am very that I understand why people want to do it, even though it's also injurious. And, you know, my kids would say it's a blood sport they won't even watch football they certainly wouldn't watch that. And they think that my, you know, affection for it is ill. Not my best feature. Should the police ever write to the contents of your smartphone. It's not a simple question to ask in what context and think the police should not be able to open your smartphone when they see you on the street. But with warrant, sure. Sometimes I think it's important evidence and to convict someone of a serious crime sure. As you know tries to make the contents of smartphones impossible to decrypt. If the user wants privacy, should the federal government pass a law in essence disallowing that protection. I don't know. What's the economic future of law schools. How many will survive. I think it could be far fewer. And that wouldn't be a bad thing. I mean, I think we could reduce the number of law schools some law schools are effectively diploma mills that produce lawyers who don't have a good shot of getting a JD required or JD value job, which means they can't pay off the loans that they take out to go to law school so I wouldn't mind seeing some law schools depart from the system. So UVA as you know is a top rated law school, but say you go to a law school ranked like between 35 and 40, which can still have a lot of good elements produce a lot of good research has some great professors. If you're asking students to pay a lot of money. Probably they're not getting aid. Does it make sense in economic terms for that institution to still exist 10 years from now. Yes, if you're talking about the rank 30 to 40 sure. If you're talking about ranked 150 to 200, then I think the answer is no 70 to 80. I don't know. I'd have to look at more data. But of the legal profession as a whole you see a lot of lawyers at lower levels now being displaced by a mix of software and research assistants and the research assistants are paid much less than lawyers used to be. By how much will the legal profession contract, given you know AI machine learning and just smart people who are willing to do some work without a law degree. Again, since my experience as a lawyer was primarily in the government sector. I'm, it's hard for me to assess the trade offs in automation and in deep professionalization, as well as outsourcing law work. I can't really tell. I think the New York City murder rate has declined by about a factor of 20. It's peak. What's the main driver of that that's an enormous change right most people didn't predict it. Why did that happen. Yeah, there are lots of debates about why that happened I mean, I again, you know you'd have that's a good question for criminologists, but it's not. Right. Yeah. Yes, I grew up in New York. Sure. Study the police. You're from Brooklyn. You must have some sense why this is happening. It's funny. I'm always trying to convey how radically different, you know, New York is today from when I grew up in the 70s and 80s in New York. Because my students read the Bernhard gets case and they just have no sense of the context of, you know, how people felt in New York, given the crime and that they were afraid to ride the subway or that Times Square was not in fact the Disney world that it is today. So I definitely do feel the difference. You know, I don't know that I have perfect intuitions about what has changed. Yeah. So ho was a dump right even the Upper East Side wasn't safe. Now New York City is one of the safer cities in America, even safer than many midsize cities. And we have no idea what happened. No, there are lots of people who have lots of ideas about what happened. I'm just not sophisticated about them enough to weigh in. I resist talking about things I don't know anything about. Again, not one of my best qualities. But again, it can't be, you know, nothing about it, right? You're an expert on the police. So what I can tell you, what I can tell you is that the part of it that that I focus on is, was it proactive policing? Was it stop question and frisk and broken windows policing that drove the murder rates down. The answer to that is probably no. I think cities that didn't engage in those strategies also had substantially lower crime rates and murder rates than they do today. Does that mean that policing had no effect? No, I won't say policing had no effect. I just don't think it was adopting proactive broken windows policing. And when I look at those strategies, I'm all about the costs as well as the benefits. So I think those strategies, especially stop question and frisk as it was carried out in New York was so vastly costly that we would be very cautious in thinking about its benefits as on their own. The exclusionary rule. How much has it mattered? Yeah, so the exclusionary rule has mattered a lot to the culture of policing. I often tell my students a story about a guy I prosecuted. He committed tons and tons of crimes and when we were talking with him about some of them. He was explaining to me about how he would pull over people he suspected of being drug dealers and rob them for their cash and their drugs and then let them go or, you know, write them a ticket or whatever. And when I asked him what he would make up for probable cause, when he would either ticket them or stop them, what he told them for his reasons, he said, What do you mean? And I said, Well, you're pulling them over because you're going to rob them. What would you make up for probable cause for the stop? And he said, Oh, no, no, no, I would follow them until they committed a traffic offense. And then I would pull them over. I wouldn't make up probable cause. And I said, I'm sorry, you're pulling them over to rob them, but you wouldn't make up probable cause. And he said, No, I'm still a cop. And the reason I that incident struck me so much is because the reason he has internalized the norms of probable cause is because that is subject to the exclusionary rule. And so the effect of the exclusionary rule in large part was to give police departments and incentive to teach officers the law and give officers an incentive to learn that law and follow it, at least in large part so that the constitutional law before the exclusionary rule was not something police officers knew anything about. And after the exclusionary rule, every police officer thinks that the fourth amendment is part of his police manual. And so I think it's impossible to underestimate the cultural change in terms of internalizing norms of constitutional law into policing. That doesn't mean that it provides an effective incentive to never lie or never engage in illegal conduct as it's currently structured, but I think it's had an enormous effect on the culture of policing. If we put aside all the bigger political issues and put aside the unusual events of the last few weeks, and we just compare the Obama and Trump administrations on policies toward police departments. What is the main difference. Not the hot button issues on the news every night, but the dry boring stuff. Yeah, so the three things that the Trump administration did. Well, so three, the three things it did and things and then the things that it said. So when sessions came in as Trump's first attorney general, he effectively shut down the pattern of practice lawsuits that the Justice Department was carrying out. He allowed the ongoing ones to continue, though he tried to get out of the two that were not yet ink dry but had already been negotiated in Baltimore and Chicago. And he managed to get out in Chicago, not in Baltimore because the judge wouldn't let the Justice Department out of the suit. So that was one thing which is that no new investigations or almost no new investigations and they just shut down a program that the Obama administration had pursued very actively. That was one thing. Another thing is that they reversed changes to the military equipment program 1033, some of which is coming out now in association with the militarism around the protests. And there's one more which oh, which I am forgetting off the top of my head but I'll think of in a minute. And the other thing that the Justice Department that Trump did President Trump and Jeff and Jeff Sessions did is they advocated for more aggressive policing so they advocated stop question and frisk as a strategy in Chicago and repeatedly valued more aggressive forms of policing and you hear that again with Attorney General Barr in repeated advocacy for more aggressive forms of policing which are, you know, harm inefficient in I think. And then President Trump in his speech in Suffolk County, New York, he advocated allowing officers or encouraged officers to let it to let suspects bang their head on the car door, which is effectively advocating constitutional violations by the police department And so together all those things have conveyed a very clear message to police departments that they value aggressive policing and not constitutional or harm efficient policing. Our very last segment is called the Rachel Harmon production function. It's about you having an engineering degree from MIT. How is it influenced how you think about the law. Well, so I went from engineering to philosophy to law and, you know, you could call it a random walk or you could say that I'm really interested in the structure of things. And I think that my the analytic tools that I learned as an engineer definitely informed the way I think about legal issues. Is it efficient to graduate with the highest grade possible from Yale Law School, as you did, or is that inefficient. Well, so it didn't have the answer to that. I guess it had some benefits. I think it helped me get a clerkship to the Supreme Court. That was kind of fun. Probably helped me get with the academic jobs. So, for me, it's been probably overall efficient, but I don't know that anyone cares that much. What did you learn clerking from Judge Guido Calabresi. I mean many things, but what. What stands out. Guido has been a mentor to me, both as a lawyer, as a thinker, but also personally, you know, he married, he performed the wedding for me and my husband. He's been involved in my life since. I don't know that I have one message, but maybe partly it's actually about being a serious legal thinker and a human being. I mean he has a remarkably rich and full life and cares enormously about people. And that's been a wonderful thing to see and try to live up to. And clerking for Stephen Breyer. Oh, he again, he's a remarkable, wonderful man and a hugely human human being. Stephen Breyer, one of the things that's great about him is that he is exactly the same person on the bench off the bench on in media and you know in with his children. And so he's a role model as a person, but as a one of the things he taught me about writing that actually affects my academic work most is that from engineering I learned to start with an outline and decide what I wanted to say, and then write all the sections to meet my outline and Justice Breyer taught me to figure out, but to just write all my paragraphs and then work backwards to figure out what I had to say after the fact. I've qualified four times for the USA triathlon national championships. More than that I think more. I was planning to go I was planning to go this year. You know, I've qualified but I don't usually go to the age group nationals because it's a big hall and you know be away from my family for days. But this year I was planning to go and compete in August but obviously almost everything shut down there are no races this year. And last question I'm sure you have many great very very smart law students. But what is it you look for to see if one of them might be a promising future legal scholar as you are what traits. So the two things I look for most in a legal scholar. One is, you know I want to see someone who's a dog with a bone I want to see someone who just has a set of questions. Even if it's on a different related some set of fundamental questions that bothers them enough that they just have to keep coming back to them again and again. And then maybe if I can mix my metaphor is I want to make sure that bone is a rich make vein to mine, you know I want to know that that's going to yield results over years and years and so when I see those two things that kind of Desperate need to chew and something that's likely to pay off in in learning something more about the world. Then I say that person's going to go someplace. Rachel Harmon. Thank you very much. Thank you.