Behind the Police: How The Police Declared War On All Of Us

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Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio.
The Corps are Problems, Problems. I'm Robert Evans. This is

(01:53):
Behind the Bastards, normally a podcast about the worst people
in all of history, and it still is. But this
is the last of our sit episode mini series Behind
the Police. Um. That introduction started out rough, but it
came together in the end um much like the Police,
except for well no not really, uh my guest uh.
With this episode, as with all of the others is

(02:15):
Jason Petty, better known as the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason,
how are you doing? What's up? I'm breathing thin air
because I'm on the road. But let's hope that this
isn't the end of the police story and it does
turn out okay. Yeah, yeah, I think that I think
they might pull it together in the last the last quarter. Yeah.

(02:37):
Let's let's just hope the last quarter isn't the year
four thousand. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I haven't been checking the
news in months, so I I don't know, um how
how how the police are nowadays? I assume everybody's happy
with them, yeah, or they're sticking to brand Yeah, so

(02:57):
um boy, Jason. As as I finished this up, it
became incredibly clear to me how much I was going
to have to leave out of this of this series,
like not just the fact that we're not really talking
about federal law enforcement, the FBI, the d e A,
the A, t f UM, just because I wanted to
focus on like, you know, cops, like normal straight up
specifically cops. Yeah, in your neighborhood cops. Um. There's but

(03:22):
there's like so much like we're not going to talk
much about the civil rights movement, just because a lot
of what the police did then was just kind of
like the same tactics that we already talked about them
doing in previous periods. Um, We're not going to talk
a lot about like the LGBT movement and violence against them.
We're not going to talk about the Green movement and
the suppression of that, um, just because I already wrote

(03:42):
sixteen pages for today. Yeah, so we're gonna we're gonna
talk about what I think is the right last subject
to end on a series that is inevitably not going
to cover everything that it would have been good to cover. Um,
And that is the military's nation of American Police. UM. Yes,

(04:03):
So that's where we're where we're going to today, and
it's important. It's important to note I'm gonna throw this
in there that like all the pieces that he's talking about, like, remember,
those are like lived experiences, So it's appiled on history
that emotionally and psychologically all of us who have lived
through it, like, no, it's there, But good god, if

(04:25):
there's no way to actually cover all of it in
a podcast, you know what I'm saying. No, I mean,
if we'd had another dozen episodes. Yeah, we wouldn't have
had to leave out much like we would have had
to leave out a lot, but we would have been
able to give broad coverage of all of the things.
But like, yeah, there's just this isn't going to be
you know, we had to had to stop somewhere. So militarization,

(04:47):
I think does kind of make sense, um to to
focus on in our last episode because it's kind of
the biggest aspect of where we are right now, UM,
in terms of like why the why the ship that's
happening right now is happening, Like a lot of it
has to do with militarization, and obviously the foundational issues
of racism that we're behind policing contributed to. Um. So

(05:09):
we're gonna talk about all that, um. But to start
us off today, we are going to get into one
of the aspects of the U s law enforcement that
we have thus far failed to cover it enough to
tail US policing and indigenous people's um. Yeah, yeah, because
this is really where we get to the very start
of militarized police in the United States. When people talk

(05:30):
about use that term today, militarized police, they're generally referring
to equipment, right, the transition of cops from the friendly
Andy Griffith style lawman who wore like maybe a gun
on his hip and a pair of handcuffs to like
the guys wearing heavy body armor in a tool belt
with like five different weapons on it. Um, you know,
police tanks and grenade launchers and a R fifteens. And

(05:51):
when people talk about that stuff, they kind of see
militarization as a new and worrying trend because the cops
they grew up with didn't look like that. Um. And
that's a part of police militarization. Um. And it is
a new part of police military. Well, it's not even
really a new part of it. It's worrying, but it's
not new. UM. So it's the most visually like, yeah, identifiable.

(06:13):
You know, somebody can get their brain around that. Like
we say there's a problem with militarization. You could go, yeah,
logically speaking, I am not an enemy insurgent, so I
don't understand what grenade launcher for. Yeah I didn't an Yeah, yeah,
you didn't used to on a daily basis. See dudes

(06:34):
in like the middle of Los Angeles who looked like
they could have walked out of downtown, right and now
you do um b yeah, yeah, why hamo, Like, how
is it? What do you expect to happen in the Yeah?
The fucking I was at a cop right the other
day where like there were like a bunch of rapid

(06:56):
response guys and fucking uh and fucking like rural camo
and it was like, what are you. We're in the
middle of that in front of the Portland's Justice Center.
What do you think is going to happen? You're gonna
bland in. You need to be wearing some like cut
off dickies, wearing some sort of coffee stain on your shirt,

(07:16):
got some really tight jeans and a flannel shirt if
you want a camouflage into Portland, Like what do you
what do you fucking play? That wouldn't even camouflage you
in the goddamn woods? Thank you so? Um yeah. In
episode two of this mini series, we talked about how
the Philadelphia State Police were formed in direct imitation of
the Philippine Constabulary, a colonial police force the u S

(07:38):
form to suppress the natives of a conquered land, and
such colonial police forces were really common among like imperial
powers during the period of colonialism, or at least the
period where colonialism was kind of openly embraced by everyone. Um,
So all of the big European nations did this ship
and you know, the US did as well. The most

(07:58):
influential example of such a force in American history though,
because like you know, the British had a whole bunch
of different ones, they're probably the best at it. So
did the French, so did the Germans, um, and so
did the United States. But since we didn't have the
as as extensive and overseas empire as as those European
nations did, a lot of our colonial policing forces were

(08:19):
actually like deployed right here at home, you know, kind
of in frontier areas that weren't states yet. And the
most influential example of such a force in American history
is probably the Texas Rangers, who were formed officially in
eighteen thirty five. So we're talking about the Rangers today, baby,
not that not the not the sports team. They're broadly
George Bushy's team. Yeah, they're whatever we're talking about talking about.

(08:44):
The sport are the Rangers? Robert their baseball right, Oh
my god, I'm so proud Texas. I was like no, no, no, no,
no no no no no no, it's Texas. So he
knows that answer. Yes. Yeah. So I to tease my
Texas homeboys to be like, I know y'all go to
to Alamo every year, and I was like, at my

(09:04):
DJ I traveled with it from Texas. I was like, hey,
you know y'all lost the Alimo, right. He was like,
I didn't realize it until college because then every year
like y'all lost. Anyway, go on, So the Range speaking
of the Alamo and such, The Rangers started out kind
of in the period where Texas was doing its own
thing uh and not yet part of the United States,

(09:26):
and they were initially kind of just a small, irregular
band of hired tufts whose job was to protect newly
settled white families out on the frontier. UH. This put
them in constant conflict with local native tribes, the Cherokee
and the Comanche primarily, and it also pit them against
the Mexican population in the area. The Texas Rangers quickly
evolved into one of the most formidable forces for protecting
whiteness on the American frontier. When non white people were

(09:49):
accused of robbing or attacking white settlers. The Rangers acted
as designated vigilantes to see that justice was done. And
because we're talking about Texas in the period we're talking about,
we're actually talking about like what is today Texas, Oklahoma,
parts of New Mexico and even some Colorado. I think, um,
like it's that whole region. And and a lot of
this is like Comanche who were like this is there

(10:10):
where they've been living for a while, um, and the
the colode they started having conflicts with settlers, and settlers
would murder them. They would murder settlers, and the Texas
Rangers would be they act a lot as like scouts
and stuff, for like hunting down these bands and leading
militias to them and stuff. And that's kind of like
they're kind of like special forces in this period. And

(10:31):
I just can't just throwing it in, like I just
think like the the social interaction, just the humanity of
the moment. Of course, it's tints, of course, it's like, uh,
there's a lot of like bigger forces of like colonialism
and frontiers and all these things happening, but just the
human interaction of saying you're just waking up, gonna make

(10:51):
a cup of coffee, step out of your house and
someone's building a house in your lawn. Yeah, they looked
at you like you crazy. It's just like yeah, what
what like what do you? What are you doing? Man?
Do you well? And it's one of those I don't
want to I'm talking about my ass a little bit
now because it's been a long time since I read.

(11:12):
I've read like one good book about what happened to
like the conflict between the Comanches and the the the
white settlers in this period. But if I'm not mistaken,
like they were living somewhere else and yeah, we kicked
them out of it. Uh. And so they wound up
kind of in you know, the the broad Texas region,

(11:32):
and then we were like okay, but not here either,
like it was it was yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very
frustrating history. So white settlers quickly learned how to use
the Texas Rangers is like a mercenary force um, and
not just against and well not just against like indigenous peoples.
It became very common for white men to raid cattle
from Mexican ranches, uh, and then the Mexican would steal

(11:55):
their cattle back, and so the white folks would call
in the Texas Rangers to retrieve their stolen property um.
And you know, the Texas Rangers would murder people during
these raids to retrieve property like cattle they had owned
and had been stolen from them and that they'd taken
back as a rule in sort of the Texas Republic
period and the early period of statehood, when non whites

(12:17):
resisted the Rangers in any way, they could be killed, arrested,
or tortured. So the Texas Rangers go from being kind
of this like quasi military scouting force, like a counterinsurgency
um force, to like acting as kind of a law
force for for defending whiteness on the frontier um. And
over the course of several decades, the Texas Rangers acted

(12:39):
as the tip of a spear that gradually drove most
indigenous people's out of Texas, often very violently. For much
of the eighteen hundreds, the Rangers were yeah again, like
counterinsurgency was kind of their their bag, and they worked
with the militia or the military as basically special forces.
The Comanche Wars were a brutal series of conflicts that
crossed the line and to outright ethnic cleansing on a

(13:00):
number of occasions, and the Texas Rangers were very heavily involved.
One of these ethnic cleansing moments would be the Red
Fork Massacre of eighteen forty, when a team of Texas
Volunteer Rangers surrounded a Commanche village whose men were all outrating.
Rather than attempt to arrest the women, children, and elderly inside,
the rangers surrounded the camp and opened fire. When their
rifles ran out of ammunition, they closed in with pistols

(13:22):
to execute the survivors. Some hundred and forty Commanches were
gunned down, and probably another hundred and forty at least
died later from exposure. Their horses were stolen to pay
the rangers. Now, this was an act of genocide, UM.
It was also pretty much a fundamentally military endeavor. UM.
But as the and that's that's generally when you're we're

(13:42):
talking about like the the kind of cutting edge of
the genocide against the Native Americans, the intentional parts of it, UM,
we are often talking about a military endeavor, like policing
plays a role, but it's it's a lot of like
the U. S. Military UM, and the rangers, Yeah, move
into a different part of the country. But like when
you get into like the Little Big Horn and General

(14:03):
Custer stand that was a military move too, and in
a lot of ways, the ingredients were the same also
in the sense that like this is where the cron
nation lives. Uh, now we actually but we only live
here because y'all made us live here. And then you
discovered gold in the Black Hills and now you on
our land again. And yeah, so just this like obviously

(14:28):
in a Little Big Horn, it's because they grossly underestimated
um sitting bowl. But uh, but that but that, but
that continual like um like fake diplomacy, which was really
a militarized ethnic cleansing from what I know from the

(14:48):
first tour I ever did was twenty seven Native American reservations,
So first tour as a as an artist. So when
you start talking to them about the way that they
see these things, they were, yeah, it's in their mind
it's always been an act of military Yeah. Yeah, and
that that's part of I guess why we haven't kind
of gone into that aspect as much, um and one
of one of the just because like it's it's less

(15:09):
of a policing thing and more of a military thing.
Although those lines blur, and they blur, especially with the
Texas Rangers because while the Rangers kind of our start
out is a quasi military force, as the eighteen hundreds
turned into the nineteen hundreds and kind of the frontier fades,
the Rangers transitioned into a law enforcement agency and they
become they're broadly similar to the U. S. Marshals like today,

(15:31):
that's kind of like more or less where they land,
um and they're but they're like this weird Texas state
law enforcement agency that kind of resembles in a lot
of ways more of like a FED type agency than
it does you know, a beat cop. But their their
law enforcement now, so they and they still exist, Yeah,
they still exist. They go from being like okay, not

(15:52):
like uh, it's not like Queen Elizabeth like they actually
do no no no. If you fly into um, if
you fly into love Field Airport today in Dallas, which
is the airport you want to fly into and out
of in Dallas because DFW was a goddamn nightmare. There's
a statue. There's a statue of like a dude, a
cowboy looking dude with a six gun on his hip.

(16:14):
That's like a statue of the Texas Rangers. And I
think it's like the words written on it are one Ranger,
one Riot, which is their motto. And we'll be talking
about where where that motto really comes from now. But
they're no, they're still around. There's still a law enforcement
agency in Texas. And yeah, that's the they kind of
transition from being a military guerrilla warfare unit to being

(16:34):
like the law. Um. And and as a side note,
as a side note, I still don't know what a U. S.
Marshal does except for fly on a plane. You know
a lot of that's true. Yeah, the movie US Marshals,
I think is perfectly accurate. Just watched watch the movie
US Marshals with Robert Downey Jr. And uh and Tommy
Lee Jones, and I think that's a percent right. Um. Yeah,

(16:56):
I was like, so this is unnecessary. Your whole job
is unnecessary going so um, the new Texas Rangers as
law enforcement, um, didn't act as like military scouts anymore,
but they still enforced white supremacy. At the barrel of
a gun. In nineteen eighteen, at a place called Poor Veneer,
Texas Rangers gunned down fifteen unarmed Mexican people and drove

(17:17):
their families across the border into Mexico. I found a
fun article on the Rangers in the Texas Observer, which
is a great news source on Texas. The like really
good journalism. UH, and they interviewed historian and professor Monica
Martinez about the history of the Texas Rangers. UH. The
article notes quote martinez Is research posits the height of
Texas Ranger violence against Mexicans who have occurred from nineteen

(17:38):
fifteen to nineteen nineteen. Some three hundred ethnic Mexicans were
murdered between nineteen fifteen and nineteen sixteen alone. These dates
coincided with the reign of not only the disgraced Governor
James Poff Ferguson, but also, starting in nineteen seventeen, the
oft venerated William P. Hobby. Martinez is appropriately unsparing in
the detailing of hobbies consistently anti Hispanic, anti double a

(17:58):
CP agenda. In short, he is the Rangers as his
own personal goon squad and instigating intimidation tactics against minorities.
Hobby presided over an era that, according to Martinez, saw
the widespread practice of executing landowning Hispanic men to force
the sale of their land by their widows through threats
of physical violence. Much yeah, much the same Hobby from

(18:22):
the Houston Airport. Yeah wait same guy. Yeah I think so, yes, yes, yes, yes,
George Billson. Then there's Hobby. That's that's like, yeah, that's
Houston's love Field, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, their
other airport. Yeah yeah yeah much have said violence aided
and embed it if not directly perpetrated by the Rangers
with the state official state consent. Powerful US political elites

(18:43):
like Hobby made sure that any serious investigation of Ranger
crimes through official legal channels would be doomed to failure.
Now yeah, that is just just straight up ethnic cleansing again,
like like there's still ethnically cleansing people. Um. And obviously
I didn't learn any of that in Texas history classes.
I learned about them fighting the Comanche, but it was
it was framed as like, well, they were, you know,

(19:04):
both two sides in a war and they both did
bad things. Um yeah. Now uh it turns out that
and this is I also didn't learn in middle school.
It turns out that the Texas Mexican border was kind
of prior to this point where the Texas Rangers come
in and start murdering landloaders. It was a semi autonomous
region because it was both too remote and too close

(19:24):
to Mexico to really be controlled by any central government.
So people on the border from both countries would travel
freely and like cross the border kind of without even
noticing it was there. They built communities together, they had
families together, they traded together, um, and this was great
for them, but it was really bad for rich people
in racists who lived many hundreds of miles away. So
the Texas Rangers were sent in to secure the border,

(19:46):
and this was like the first time the border was
really secure. And again they did this by executing people
who owned land near the border and handing their stuff
actually Mexican people who owned land in the border, and
handing their stuff over to white people. Um. The dead
were portrayed as bandits and criminals, and heavily armed rangers
would pose for photographs with their bodies. By nineteen nineteen,
the sheer scale of the violence and forced to state

(20:08):
legislative hearing on extra judicial killings by the rangers. This
hearing resulted in no formal charges and the detailed record
of the Texas Rangers mass murder spree was sealed for
fifty years so as to not tarnish their record as
tex And heroes. Yeah, I bet, I bet. Also, also
there's parts of El Paso that are still like that.

(20:28):
Then you still can't tell where the border is and
isn't where there's a there's a high school down there.
I know because the kid came to a show where
the football field is in Mexico. Yeah, and then but
the rest of the school is in Texas, so nobody
really knows where. We really don't know where it is.

(20:50):
But yeah, anyway, I just thought that's interesting that, like
to this day that like it's important for us to
all remember that borders are made up. They're not we
made them up. You know, they're just by pain. Yeah. Yeah,
maybe it's not They're not real and they're yeah yeah,
enforced by pain is a good way to Yeah. Uh

(21:11):
So the Texas Rangers went well into the twentieth century
acting as a colonial police force. They didn't stop in
nineteen um and Alex Vitali, author of the end of
Policing Rights quote. In the sixties and seventies, local and
state elites used Rangers to suppress the political and economic
rights of Mexican Americans, and played a central role in
subverting farm worker movements by shutting down meetings, intimidating supporters,

(21:32):
and arresting and brutalizing picketers and union leaders. They were
also frequently called in to intimidate Mexican Americans out of
voting in local elections. Most Latinos were subject to a
kind of wan crow like it's a Jim Crow's thing,
in which they were denied the right to vote and
barred from private and public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants,
bus station waiting rooms, public pools, and bathrooms. This is

(21:54):
what that statue in love Field is referring to when
it says one ranger, one riot. That's the riot. Is
the is Mexicans being like, what if we had the
right to vote in Texas? Rangers saying what if we
shot you? You still have to say to yourself, like
if it's so you like everybody's a situation is so unique,
but like as a as a Texan Mexican where you

(22:19):
never moved, your house, never moved, it's just the land
up under you became Texas and then everybody acting like
you ain't supposed to be here that you ain't got right.
So he was like, I I've never left. I don't
understand how I don't have rights in land. I never left. Yeah,
like you're the new guys. Yeah, it's just the mind

(22:41):
bender of that. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty
cool and good. So the Rangers were eventually beaten back
to an extent in the early nineteen sixties when Tehanos
began to organize in a significant way. They set up
voter drives and fought, literally fought in some points to
get leaders elected on the local city council of a

(23:02):
small town called Crystal City. This whole operation exploded into
a big fight, with Rangers cracking skulls and trying to
break up rallies. Um, but this time they're victims. Attracted
the attention of the press, The Rangers eventually were forced
to back down by public opinion, and the Tahanos won
both the election and major civil rights concessions from the
white majority you know, all across Texas, and things started
to get better. Obviously they're still not perfect or even great,

(23:26):
but they got better. Um. Today, the Texas Rangers are
sort of just like a weird Texan variant of the U. S. Marshals.
They do a lot of unsolved crime investigations like cold
case murders, they investigate serial killers. UM. They also act
as kind of like they're supposed to be kind of
a watchdog for the police because they they investigate officer
involved shootings and of course they do border security um.

(23:49):
And the fact that they have a I don't know
enough about how they do today to know how problematic
they are, and sort of currently in the vein of
the rest of law enforcement, I will say they have
a very positive reputation among just Texans um. And this
is not due to anything they actually do, but is
owed largely to the nineteen nineties TV show Walker Texas Ranger,

(24:09):
in which Chuck Norris assumed because Chuck Norris, yeah, Chuck
Norris basically erased the Centurion and change long history of
ethnic cleansing and genocide um by doing enough roundhouse kicks
while wearing a badge on its chest that people were like,
They're okay, now he punched a bear. Look at at me,

(24:29):
punched a bear. Yeah, he's got to be a good guy. Yeah.
And in sort of in following this arc of like
committing genocide, acting as like a military force of ethnic
cleansing and like like mass murder to suppress minorities, and
then getting whitewashed by a TV show with Chuck Norris.
The Texas Rangers kind of perfectly encapsulate a lot of

(24:51):
law enforcement history in this country. That is the most
a sinc sentence. Yeah, the most sinct sentence we've done
this whole Yeah, they protested all six, they participated in
at least two genocides. But then Chuck Norris started kicking
all right, spinning roundhouse kid uh. Also also as a

(25:14):
native Californian who married a first Gin Mexican woman from
southern Mexico. I will go to my grave that I
am not a fan of tex mex food in that
caso is terrible. No, No, that's the only thing I'll
fight for about Texas is text mex Hey, man, Hey,
I'll take your fajitas. They're great, But you can lead

(25:36):
a caso alone, sucking Calimex, putting fish in everything. Come on, touche. Yeah,
I mean it's actually all pretty incredible compared to the
burritos we get up here in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah,
don't call those burritos. No, they're not. They're not burritos.
Somebody put keen Wa in one of them. I was just,

(25:57):
what are you that's a rap. It's just a rap.
That's a rap. Come on, don't call this a fucking burrito.
So in our last episode of the series, we talked
about August Volmer. You remember Valmer, like the the good,
the best cop that we're we're going to talk about
the series. Yeah, um, probably the most influential police chief
in US history. Volmer was a big advocate of what

(26:18):
is called like the professional model of policing, of like
what a police force should be. UM. He believed that
police officers should be trained professionals with college degrees. And
when he thought trained professional, he was not thinking about killing, right, Like,
their ability to handle a gun and shoot people was
kind of low on Volmer's list of what cops should
be professional at UM. He focused on the number one

(26:39):
their ability to kind of scientifically solve crimes UM. And
their ability to interface with and be parts of communities. UM.
And these are both still things. Yeah, broadly, there's still
problemat One of the things we won't get into enough
is the number one. Like a lot of police science
fingerprinting and stuff works a lot less well than than
they say it does, so like and ship like yeah,

(26:59):
like like there's a lot of problems with that. And
there's also people who argue that community policing doesn't like
is better than you know, maybe what we're doing now,
but doesn't really work all that well. Like there's arguments
to be made. We're not going to get into them enough.
I don't want to be saying that. Like his attitude
was perfect, but I think it was less problematic. Yeah,
was he like the like the precursor to like c
S I Miami, you know, like yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely,

(27:21):
you gotta like scientifically solve these crimes and that everything
that has a science degree in forensics is unimaginably gorgeous
and they work in a lab that is looks more
like a club. Yeah yeah, it's really well, Yeah, it's
really well. Yeah. Volmer is the guy who advocates for
like sexy, brilliant um doctor cops who like yeah, yeah, exactly,

(27:47):
that's that's that's kind of hiss. Yes, oh my god,
an incredible shape with abs, like like how do they
get abs that nice? And also do police work. Yeah,
so Volmer that's Mer's attitude. That's kind of the professional
model of policing. But Volmer was not the only person
with a vision of what policing should be. And there
was a you know, in the nineteen twenties in particular,

(28:08):
a competing model of policing started to evolve. Now, if
you remember your high school history courses, you'll know that
the period from like eighteen seventy seven to eighteen ninety
five is referred to broadly as the Gilded Age. And
this was a time of massive wealth inequality, a period
that saw the USA's first multi millionaires rise, alongside a
devon stating series of economic recessions and depressions. Um, the

(28:30):
Gilded Age was a time of intense political polarization. Political
parties got like at each other's throats in a way
they really hadn't been, you know, you know, prior to
the Civil War, which I guess hadn't been that long ago.
So let's not pretend that hasn't always been an aspect
of our politics. But yeah, uh, And around the turn
of the century, um, the Gilded Age kind of gave
way to what's called the Progressive era. And progressive today

(28:53):
is the term we broadly used for just like folks
on the left, but back then it meant something different.
And like, progressives of this era kind of had things
in common with both our modern left and right. Um,
some of the values they had in common with, like
today's lefties, would be sort of a rejection of conservative
individualism in favor of more collective attitudes towards the common good.
Progressives wanted to use state power to do things like

(29:14):
help lower class individuals, workers, immigrants, you know, the urban poor.
They stood against the greed of unchecked capitalism and the
corruption of a system of party bosses that had dominated
urban politics and US cities during the Gilded Age. And
the progressives weren't really they progressive was a political orientation,
but they didn't really care about They weren't like super
into parties. Like a lot of the progressive air was

(29:35):
kind of a rejection of where party politics had led
things in the Gilded Age. That's a factor in this doo.
And when you when you read what I just read,
the progressives kind of sound like lefties, but that's not
all they were. Many progressives also held deeply conservative attitudes
towards religion and acceptable social behavior. Progressives were by and
large a homogeneous, middle class, white Protestant group. Um. They

(29:57):
chewed political parties in favor of local in formal organizations
like the Anti Saloon League. And as that last bit,
Mike Keia, we are in on a whole lot of uh,
progressives were very jazzed about prohibition. Um. And it's also
progressives that also, you know, as an aside, that brings
us like early race science, um, for for some reasons
we're going to get into. So the progressives are a

(30:18):
mix of left and right and problematic as all hell. Like. Yeah,
it's also it's also a good lesson for the modern thinker,
the younger thinker to remember that, like even our terms
left and right are so malleable and they haven't always
meant the same thing that you can like find clips
of like George Bush seen you're talking about climate change,

(30:39):
because the talking points can vary in these just like
borders are made up terms and they are very malluable.
So even just jumping into this time with a vocabulary
list that you think you know in seeing that like nah,
you'd like those are also malleable too, is like super good.

(30:59):
That So, which is one reason why I love this
this part of American history and politics. Yeah, and it's
it's like it's fascinating. Um, it's very because they're like
part of why they get into race science is that
like this idea that again we kind of think of
as broadly positive today, those of this idea that like, Okay,

(31:20):
the poor, it's like, we should use the government state
resources to help deal with things like homelessness and poverty. Um.
But the way a lot of progressives take that's like, okay, well,
let's figure out the root causes of homelessness and proverty. Boy,
it seems like certain races of people are more likely
to be homeless, you're impoverished. Maybe part of what the
government should be doing to solve this problem is sterilized them.
That's that's where the thought process goes. It's just like

(31:44):
a weird sharp left. Yeah, there's there's obviously there are
certain things I think the government ought to be doing
that it shouldn't. But let's never forget that when you
start talking about the government ought to do this or that,
that can go badly too, Which doesn't mean we shouldn't
try to solve problems, but let's all keep that in
our fucking head to remember yes, Um. Yeah, So have

(32:05):
you ever read Justice by um Michael Sandow? No, I
have not. Yeah, this is a good one, um, And
it's a complete tangent knowing that you have forty five
more pages to read. But uh, it is important to know,
like what he talked about, what the basic premises, like
you're what you see as just, um, and how you

(32:30):
define what justice is? If I if you can answer
that question, it could tell me where you're probably gonna
land historically and politically. Like, for example, if you think
just means the greatest good for all, so everybody looks
at like what's the greater good? How can the most
amount of people see the most amount of flourishing, You're
probably gonna lean more liberal and progressive, right. Uh. If

(32:51):
you're like, no, justice means leave me alone to figure
out how I want to make things happen. It is
unjust for you to limit my liberties. Well that's like
libertarian and you know, moving into that area where like
justice means lead me alone, Right, you don't get to
tell me how to do things. But if you're like,
just this means there is a right way to do stuff,

(33:13):
and that right way we all need to fall in line,
and that's more a conservative lean. So if you say that,
that's that, then that makes a just society. So if
you look at things like that, then when you jump
into this region, you're going they're answering the question how
do we make how do we make a just society?
But their solution was, well, you know, brown people suck,

(33:33):
so they shouldn't have no more children. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
it's complex, a complex period to talk about. Um and yeah,
so yeah, you know what doesn't support eugenics prop Well,
hopefully the products and services that advertise on this place.

(33:55):
That's our that's our one line. Sophie calls every advertiser
and and just says the word eugenics and kind of
like that way. Have you ever measured a brain? Yeah?
Do you do? You take skull measurements? Yes? Um, all right,
here's some ads. Hi. I'm Robert sex Reese, host of

(34:21):
The Doctor sex re Show. And every episode I listened
to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues, and yes,
I despise every minute of it. And she she made
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We're all trapped here and there's nothing any of us
can do about it, So join me, won't you? Listen

(34:42):
to the Doctor Sex re Show every Tuesday on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get
your podcast. Rafie is the voice of some of the
happiest songs of our generation, Baby So who is the
man behind Baby Bluga? Every human being wants to feel
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(35:06):
can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad
and host of Finding Raffie, a new podcast from my
Heart Radio and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the I
Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. The
Gangster Chronicles podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around underworld,
the criminals and entertainers to victims's crime and law enforcement.

(35:29):
We cover all facets of the game. Gainster Chronicles podcast
doesn't glorify promotilised activities. We just discussed the ramifications and
repercussions of these activities because at the Wall she played
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Heart Radio is number one for podcasts, but don't take
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(35:49):
my Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast
We're Back, We're Back, And I just I hope to
god that was not an ad for a company that
sells calipers. Um, tell me you're not selling calibers. Yeah, yeah, Sophie,
I mean these calipers are just off with the promo

(36:09):
code bastards. On a personal note, On a personal note,
I remember the first time I saw some of those
like phrenology, like like manuals and drawings. I was just
a visual artist, so I was like, dude, that's so cool,
and I wanted to buy one of those old ones.
And then then then my father looked at me and
was like, boy, if you don't get that out my house.

(36:31):
A funny moment. Yeah. Anyway, So, um, all right, so
we we're talking about the progressives and particularly the fact
that they get they get a whole hog and the
motherfucking prohibition. Uh. And I'm gonna quote next from a
paper by Ellen Leichtman, an associate professor from Eastern Kentucky
University that's about early police militarization. She starts by kind

(36:52):
of talking about the genesis of a lot of progressive thought.
So she's talking about progressives here as the city's grew,
many of them began to yearned for a small town
pass that had existed mostly in their imaginations. These towns
were conceptualized as homogeneous villages where everyone knew everyone else
and looked after each other. While small towns still existed
throughout the country, Progressives bemoaned the fact that these traits
could not be transferred to urban living. Actually, many of

(37:15):
these traits could be found in urban immigrant neighborhoods, but
progressives could not transfer their idealized image of small town
living to a foreign environment. The small towns they had
envisioned were based on Anglo Saxon Protestant ethics and culture,
not the Catholic, Italian and Irish, Eastern European Jewish and
other customs of the immigrant neighborhoods, which did not hold
with many of the Sumptuary laws, especially that of prohibition.

(37:35):
So dear to the progressives, hearts so they they're they're big,
family oriented people. But the actual like, the people who
are really living the kind of family oriented small towns
sort of life within the big cities are these immigrants,
and they drink and progressives hate that. Um. So progressives
get their way on prohibitions starting January seventeenth, nineteen twenty.

(37:56):
But it didn't go well, and the first two years
of prohibition saw are all crime increased by twenty four
percent nationwide. This included a increase in homicide and increase
in assault and battery. Most of this violence was driven
by the enforcement of prohibition. One study that compared South
Carolina counties that did and did not enforce prohibition found

(38:17):
that enforcement led to a thirty to sixty increase in homicides. Yeah,
a lot of people get killed when you prohibit drugs arbitrarily.
It turns out this is the lesson maybe we should
have learned. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, there's at some point somebody
needs to go ahead and go in and explain how

(38:37):
there was really no scientific reasoning behind prohibition, just snop
political power. People just didn't like alcohol and wanted the
state to stop something they didn't like from happening. Uh So, Yeah.
The increase massive increase in violence as a result of
prohibition infuriated a lot of progressives, and rather than recognized
that prohibition was maybe a bad idea, a lot of

(38:59):
them started pushing hard to use state power to put
an end to bootlegging in an organized fashion and This
is what led to the first major challenge to August
Volmer's like professional model of of police, many progressives began
to push for an alternate idea, a military model of
a police force. And I'm gonna quote again from Professor Lakeman, Well,

(39:20):
there was a substantial overlap between the professional and military models,
and that both insisted that the police be autonomous, be
subject to physical requirements, and used the latest technology to
defeat crime. There was a difference in focus. For the
military model, the city and its police represented the nation
and its standing army. People who broke the law were
equated to enemies of the state, not citizens, and became
person and on grata in their own country. To fight

(39:42):
these adversaries, the uniformed branch of the police and the
detectives the non uniformed branch, were equated to different services
of the military. Illegal behavior was seen as an attack
on the American way of life. To save the country,
the police had to engage in a war on crime.
Needless to say, many cities began recruiting the lilitarymen to
run their departments. And Jason, one of these military men

(40:05):
was a fellow you and I discussed kind of off
handedly in one of the first episodes of the series.
You remember when I read you that quote from Marine
Corps Major General Smedley Butler. Yes, Smithley, Yeah, Now that
quote was from kind of after he woke up a
bit um and started to realize some problems with earlier
aspects of his career. Um. But in nineteen twenty four,
he was still a Marine Corps general in the city

(40:27):
of Philadelphia elected Freeland Kendrick mayor on a law and
order platform. Kendrick, a Republican, was livid that his city
had more speakeasies than perhaps any other area in the country.
The city of Brotherly Love had an estimated eight thousand
of legal bars in liquor stores in nineteen three. Because
it's Philly, you know, it's fucking Philly, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(40:49):
Philly is always on brand, So yes, Mark Kendrick decided
that a military man and a military model were needed
to reform the Philadelphia p D into something that could
tackle the problem of vice, and he chose Marine Brigadier
General Smedley Darlington Butler to be the new Director of
Public Safety. And again, Butler was still in the military
at this point. He had to get like a special

(41:09):
a special like leave from the Marine Corps so that
he could go be the director of public safety in Philadelphia. UM.
So he's still a general. He's still in the military
as he takes over a police force. UM. Now at
age forty two in nineteen forty two, General Butler had
survived fourteen campaigns and expeditions over twenty two years of service.

(41:31):
He had joined the military illegally as a literal child
after lying about his age in order to fight in
the Philippines. UM. During his time fighting for capitalism in
his own you know, that's how he framed it. Later,
Butler had earned the nicknames Old gimlet Ie, Hell's Devil Butler,
the Fighting Quaker, and old duck Boards. He had a
lot of nicknames. Fighting Quaker, Yeah, that's a that's a

(41:53):
good nickname. That's a tattoo bro y, and he gets
the nickname waker. Like duckboards are like wood boards they
would put down and like trench fighting because it was
like muddy so that you would be able to walk
and like basically they're during World War One, there was
this fight where like everything was fucking muddy as ship
and they needed to get boards into place and Butler,
who was like I think a general still at this point,

(42:15):
just picks up a funckload of boards and like runs
into the battlefield to like set them down, and like
he he's he won two medals of Honor and he
wanted to Yeah, and he wanted Distinguished Service Cross, which
is like the British like award, like their medal of Honor.
Like he he wins two of our medals of honor
and like the British equivalent or inside they're British to
the French equivalent, like he's, he's he's not just like

(42:37):
an officer who like commands troops in battle from like
a safe position, like like Smedley Butler. Whatever else you
want to say about him, it's a fucking terrifying badass.
Um Like he was. He was just like one of
these guys with like a contempt for his own safety
and battle. Um. Yeah, man, hey, did you know any
kids like that when you were like in Texas growing

(42:58):
up where he's just a kid that you were just
like this guy, yeah, is dangerous and doesn't care about
his body, but I'm my friend. Yeah yeah, yeah, those
are good people to have be friends with. Um, outside
of certain situations. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so but that's that's
Smedley Butler at this period. So he's kind of a legend.
He's still a general and he gets made the director

(43:19):
of public safety in Philadelphia. Um. And you know, Butler
himself was a progressive um and he he was also
a drinker, like not a heavy one, but he drank um.
So he didn't like prohibition, but he was progressive progressive. Yeah,
it was kind of his belief that even bad laws
had to be enforced for the sake of public good.

(43:40):
And upon taking off, as he stated, I do not
care whether the state laws or city ordinances are right
or wrong. From January seven, they are going to be enforced.
So like that's his attitude, is like that, and that's
such a military at yes, it is. Yeah, when you
when you said earlier, like I've never heard that train
of thought put in the order that you put it
when you were like, um, an active crime is an

(44:04):
act against the state. Therefore you are no longer a citizen,
you are now an enemy combatant. I've never heard that
train of logic because I never understood how if you're policeman,
how you like who are you fighting? And like you're
fighting the people you supposed to protect. Like, I don't
get it. That sentence finally at least made me be

(44:26):
able to follow the logic. I just wanted to go
back and point that out. Yeah, and this is this
is one of the things that we're seeing in Philadelphia
right now, is like the the first time where so
obviously you've had uh, um, you've had the police being
used to suppress segments of the American pop the dangerous classes, right, Um,
and this like primarily black and brown people. In this

(44:48):
period of time, what we start to see happening with
the militarization of the Philadelphia police, it's kind of the
first time the police are at war with everyone in
the city like that. That because you know, white people broadly, Um,
if they weren't members of a dangerous racial group, um,
could see the police's protectors in this period. And that
starts to change in Philly because in Philly, like, yeah,

(45:09):
they they this is the first time like the police
like again, and the police in the twenties are heavily
corrupt and a lot of them are criminals, but they're
not as an organized force. They're not going to war
with the city. This is the first time that really happens,
because like you were selling drugs now, yeah, just calls
nine yeah yeah yeah. Um. So. Butler gave his first
address to the Philly p D in a uniform he

(45:31):
had designed for himself, complete with a cape, which is
a flex like yeah, yeah, if you got if you
got that many medals on the from multiple countries, you
can wear a cape. You get to wear a cape.
Yeah fuck it, yeah, ok. Yeah. He demanded the police
stopped making bribes, and he told them that while the
rest of the city might see them as just a
bunch of corrupt gangsters, he saw them as soldiers like

(45:53):
the Marines he'd spent years commanding in battle, and that's
what he planned to turn them into. So Butler launched
an immediate series of raids on bootleggers and speakeasy's changing
city policy by not informing the mayor first, I think
in part because he knew the mayor knew some of
these people and had been protecting them. And in a
matter of days, Butler's police closed down nine hundred illegal bars.

(46:13):
Now at the same time as he cracked down General
Butler began the process of transforming the Philadelphia Police into
a military force. He created a new squad of three
hundred officers whose job was to spy on their fellow cops.
These men would be the teeth behind Butler's admonition that
Philly cops had to stop taking bribes. Another of Butler's
first steps was to abolish the police training school see Volmer.

(46:34):
August Volmer wanted educated professionals with like degrees in criminal justice,
who like approached crime from a scientific standpoint. General Butler
thought that was bullshit. He thought that cops, like soldiers,
learned best in the field. Um and before his term,
police training had taken more than three months. Butler's new
policies sent the cops that on the street almost immediately,
gave them like a booklet that outlined their duties and

(46:54):
was just like you'll figure it out once you're on
the street. You talk about buyinary thinking, Yeah, you either
a get trained for three months or be get a
little pamphlet. Get a little pamphlet. Yeah, go crack some heads.
You'll learn quick, you'll figure it out. Like there ain't

(47:17):
thought maybe they're somewhere in between there, maybe we could
pull a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
Just those my two options, yep, and it's it's like so.
The one thing that's interesting is that Butler didn't actually
cancel all training. There was exactly one area where police
still trained because he thought it was important, and it

(47:37):
was in the use of firearms. Um. He had realized
early on that most cops barely knew how to use
their weapons, and even if fewer ever fired them. Butler
thought this was a problem because he again, he's treating
them as soldiers. So he mandated two weeks of marksmanship training,
which was the only training his cops received. He also,
rather bafflingly, decided to arm the fire department with forty

(47:58):
five caliber revolters, which, yeah, he gave. He gave all
the firefighters guns, and he required them to wear their
guns off duty. Um well, they had arresting powers. Firefighters
could arrest people in those days, so he was like,
when you're off duty, you're all auxiliary cops, and you
need to carry guns in case you have to shoot
some people. Basically, he viewed all public safety employees as

(48:22):
soldiers who might potentially get called in to fight a
war against the criminals within their city. And since every
criminal was now the same as a foreign combatant. Butler
started applying the same counterinsurgency tactics he'd learned in the
Philippines and throughout Latin America. He announced that he would
give a promotion to the first officer to kill a bandit.
The bandit in question did not have to be committing
a violent crime. If he had a revolver in hand

(48:45):
or on his body while he was being chased, that
was fair game for the Philadelphia p d. From Professor
Lichtman's paper quote. Butler took this further and stated that
like soldiers, those police who killed criminals should not be
called upon to either defend themselves or to contribute to
their defense. A policeman who shoots a bandit is serving
his city exactly as a soldier when firing at his
country's enemies. Butler said he saw no difference in context

(49:07):
between the role of the soldier and then of a
police officer. Uh, that's bad. Yeah, it's not great, I mean,
and we we wound up nationwide with the same ruling
Butler made that it's cool to shoot people running away.
It was like in the eighties of the early nineties
where the it was like the Supreme Court ruled that
if you a police officer can shoot you even if
you're not actively threatening them, if you're trying to get

(49:29):
away from an arrest, Like, that's a thing that could happen.
It's why cops get to shoot so many people in
the back. Um, it's it's fine. So Butler saw no
reason why his soldier cops shouldn't have access to the
latest in military grade weaponry. He ordered several customized armored
cars to enable his officers to get into motorized gunfights
with bootleggers. Rather than holding two men as with a

(49:50):
normal police car, these armored buggies held four officers. The
rear seats were set up back to back with the
front seats so that the men in the bat could
shoot directly at bandits without needing to turn around. Every
man in the car would carry a rifle, a sot
off shotgun, and a revolver and if you want to,
if you want I can't imagine a gesture that shows
more contempt for the people just living in the city

(50:13):
then firing a shot off shotgun from a moving vehicle.
That's a drive by. Yeah, I don't understand what drive by. Yeah,
it's that's so reckless. What do you like a sot
off shotguns not accurate and more than like fifteen feet
in a good situation, and you're just shooting it from

(50:34):
a car moving one at that it's fucking nuts. Yeah, yeah,
fuck it? Yeah and again like one. Sorry I didn't
even note this at the start. One of Butler's like
requirements when he took the job, because he was used
to being a military officer in a foreign war zone,
was that no one questioned anything he did, like the city,

(50:56):
not like he'd basically be unaccountable. And they were like, share, yeah,
that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of wars. I
for the first time, uh, in a little personal news,
have shot big. This is my first positive experience with

(51:16):
guns this weekend that we're recording this. Every other experience
has been terrifying and life threatening. This is the first
time I've ever seen a gun in a very recreational place.
And I walk away with two really real thoughts, which is,
you must anyone holding these has to have a deep

(51:38):
respect for the deadly power in their hands, Like how
do you not revere this thing like you feel it's
power holding it? And then secondly, what has to click
off in your brain? To be able to point this
at another human like even reckless or with joy, or

(52:02):
just to not think about that. I'm like some about
your soul turned off because I just couldn't. I've kneeled
in front of a fifty cow, which is crazy, but
also hailed held to a R fifteen now shooting it
felt like the most powerful thing I did in my life.
I'm not gonna lie to you, I screamed and howled.
That was a redneck. I'm not gonna lie, I went, WHOA,

(52:23):
I'm not gonna lie. But I thought to myself, how
could you point this at a person? Yeah? It's yeah,
I mean it it Um. There's a lot too, There's
a lot to say about like what what is emotionally
involved in that? And like I have, I have, unfortunately
been in a couple of situations, fortunately never where I

(52:44):
had to point my gun at a person, but where
I had a gun and somebody was doing something violent
with a weapon in their hand, and it was like
a There was like this thought process of like, where's
my line gonna be? Yes? Yeah, And That's what I'm saying.
You still have all your faculties. I believe you're fully
developed human. So you thought to yourself, there is a

(53:05):
cost to this. Yeah, you know, and I don't know
if this juice is worth the squeeze. So what you're
telling me is you put four dudes off just say
shoot wildly into the city. Yes, to stop people with

(53:26):
a couple of gallons of rum. Yes, yeah, it's pretty
pretty wild. Um. So Butler divided Philadelphia up like a
war zone with interlocking zones of control. Um that like
different patrols were set for and every patrol would have
like set routes that they were supposed to travel in
the event that they had to like intercept people. There
were convoys of armored vehicles, and he even set up

(53:48):
a number of military style outposts to allow for better
monitoring that were fortified like fortresses within Philadelphia that we're
able to act as like outposts that there. We call
them fobs forward rating basis today in Afghanistan, Like what
he did in Philadelphia is exactly the same tactically as
what the US does an Afghanistan today. Like that's how

(54:08):
he divided Philly up for his police force. Um, because
he's he was like he was good at prosecuting an insurgency.
He knew what he he knew his business. Um, and
that's what he did to Philadelphia because it was a
military model police force. Now under Smedley Butler, the entirety
of Philadelphia's urban infrastructure was actually turned to the cause
of prosecuting his war on crime. He used the street

(54:29):
lights to broadcast blink codes to officers about what crimes
were taking place where. So he would basically do like
not semaphore, Um, what's it called? Like like like yeah,
he would blink the street lights and morse code to
so officers could see like, oh, there's a crime taking
place in this street. Um. Yeah. He had four huge

(54:51):
searchlights and like a big basically fucking billboard set up
in city hall. Uh that would like display the license
plates of cars of that like bandit vehicles that were
in the area. Um like yeah, it's like some fucking
Big Brothers ship. Smedley's tactics were very successful in closing
down a huge number of Philadelphia speakeasies, but they were

(55:13):
not successful and actually winning the war for prohibition. For
one thing, a ton of officers drank, and so did
many of the mayor's wealthy backers. These same men and
women had a lot of business interests in upper class
clubs and restaurants that had been serving alcohol illegally prior
to Butler, but were forced to shut down due to
his raids. He refused to treat the favorite watering holes

(55:33):
of the wealthy any differently than hole in the wall
slum speakeasies, and this caused increasing problems for the mayor
who had hired him. Yeah It's Yeah, Professor Lichtman rights.
In an attempt to divert what he saw as an
imminent disaster, he asked Butler to meet with these men
and women, believing Butler could outline his plans and get
their cooperation. But Butler was too brusque and did not

(55:54):
handle the situation well. Instead of coming to some sort
of compromise with these business people, he approached them as
if he were a general informed that them that he
intended to install a special squad of undercover detectives dressed
in full evening attire to police these establishments. This began
a two year battle between Butler and the hospitality industry.
But there must have assumed that either the public would
support these laws or that he that he could enforce

(56:15):
them against public opinion. What he learned was what many
occupying armies learned, it is often the oppressed that prevail culturally.
Those arrested for liquor and fractions came before magistrates who
released them for lack of evidence. When Butler began padlocking
the establishments of persistent liquor violators, judges rejected his arguments
and allowed the places to reopen. He also came to
the realization that many policemen were in league with bootleggers,

(56:37):
and regular citizens had their own bathroom stills. Most Philadelphians
did not want prohibition and did everything in their power
to thwart it. So yeah, look and and this lesson,
this motif is so clear and so repeated everywhere that
like you're just you're just holding onto power. And when

(56:59):
you old onto power, even with ridiculous laws, you're gonna
have to use violence. And people are going to turn
against you because it's stupid. Yes, it's it's stupid. And
and that's like Butler is good at running an insurgency
the way our military has always run insurgencies. And if
you have studied the history of our military and insurgencies,

(57:21):
we almost always loose, like we don't have a great
battgg record when it comes to fighting insurgents. Yeah, I
think we come home. People think we come home like
we did this country of favor and the whole country
looking at us like no, no, you know. It's interesting
because the the U s mility, the modern US military

(57:43):
is incredible at combat training, at like training people to
fight in gunfights, and all of our training is cribbed
and descended from German military training that started out at
the end of World War One, um and like into
World War two out trucks tactic is like the name
of the kind of techniques, and the German military world
War one and two was hands like not even brilliant,

(58:05):
no fucking competition in their ability to train people to
fight and gunfights. Yeah, historically speaking heads and shoulders, the
German military was above everybody and they lost both wars,
which maybe is a lesson about the actual value in
a broad sense of having your truth to be real
fucking good at gunfights doesn't matter if you fail at

(58:26):
the other ship. And that's what Butler fails at um
is understanding the broader dimensions of the conflict he's got
himself into. And he gets let go from his job
running the Philadelphia Police after just two years, most of
the changes he had instituted reverted back to the way
things had been before. Philadelphia continued drinking, and eventually the
whole country got over this absurd attempt to ban a

(58:47):
widely used intoxicant. Now, during this period, a number of
other cities did try the same military model police force
tactics as Philadelphia, putting like military men in charge of
their police. General Francis Green, you know in New York,
Colonel James Everington in Los Angeles, Major Mattelis Funkhauser in Chicago,
one of the best names I've ever heard. Yeah, so

(59:08):
this is something we try. We try militarized police during
Prohibition and a lot of the country, and it doesn't work. Um. Now,
there are aspects of police militarization that get adopted in
this period that kind of stay. For one thing, police
nationwide begin adopting more military style weapons during this period,
picking up automatic rifles because the gangsters have Tommy guns
and b A. R S. You know. Um, that's the

(59:29):
kind of ship that Bonnie and Clyde and you know,
my cousin pretty boy Floyd or packing as machine guns.
So cops get machine guns too. Uh. In general, though
the military model of policing pursued by progressives in the
nineteen twenties and thirties seemed to have died out with prohibition,
the professional model espoused by Volmer was obviously superior. For
a few decades. From the war years up until the

(59:51):
nineteen sixties, the story of the US police was the
story of growing professionalism and centralization. This was obviously an
uneven an imperfect process, but most American probably would have
assumed that professionalization and the professional model was pretty successful
during this period of time. A good example would be
law enforcement success and putting an into lynching as a
widespread phenomenon. Now, as we talked about that was not

(01:00:12):
did not actually happen the way that it was into.
But you gotta think about how like white people at
the time, Oh, people aren't getting lunched anymore. We fixed it. Yeah,
you know people. Yeah, it's like give occasion where it's like,
well crime dropped, yeah, yeah, where yea Yeah. So in
nineteen fifty four, the TV show Dragnet first hit the airwaves,

(01:00:33):
and Dragnet was probably the first TV show about modern
law enforcement that or I think it was actually um,
it was probably the first TV show about modern law
enforcement that deliberately set out to be realistic. Every episode
opened with the disclaimer that the cases in the series
were all real, only the names had been changed to
protect the innocent. Uh. The creator was a guy named
Jack Webb, and he was also the star of the show.

(01:00:54):
He was he was Officer Friday Um, and he partnered
with the l a p D from the very beginning
of the series is the very first time that ever happens,
and partnering with the l a p D brings the
production of Dragnet a ton of benefits. Number One, they
were allowed to film anywhere they wanted to in the city.
Their crew got access to police vehicles and police gear
without paying for it. The department would even loan them

(01:01:15):
real cops who uses extras on the show. All this
saved the network just a fortune. Um. The only cost
was that Dragnette scripts had to be approved by the
l a p D before they could be filmed. Oh wow.
Whole episodes were scrapped on the basis that the police
didn't think they portrayed policing in a positive enough light.
So obviously, Dragnet is not going to deal with problems

(01:01:38):
in the l a p D. It's not going to
deal with an equality, you know, in in in enforcement
and stuff. Dragnet you know, legitimately broke new ground for
American television. It was the first show to actually depict
black and Hispanic cops, but it also failed to mention
that the l a p D was segregated. Um. Yeah, yeah.

(01:01:58):
There were very few instances of on Dragnet actually firing
their guns, but whenever they did, those cops were shown
to be calm and emotionally stable in the moment. Nobody
ever fired in panic on dragnet Um, and the show
helped shape a generation's attitudes towards law enforcement, portraying the
ideal scientific, professionalized, vulmer police working almost flawlessly. Right, the

(01:02:19):
police are just the facts, is Friday's right? Yeah, I
was gonna a fact. Dragnet is the showing like the
ideal of the professionalized police. That's what's depicted in dragnet Um,
and the l a p D has a vested interest
in wanting to make sure that gets depicted. Obviously. So
Dragnet was so good for the l a p d

(01:02:40):
s image and reputation that in nineteen fifty five, the
commissioner of the California Highway Patrol demanded his Public Affairs
division get us a show like Dragnet. Highway Patrol had
its first season later that year. Yeah, so the Highway
Patrol show launches next. And of course, the FBI gets
their own version of this treatment in nineteen sixty five
with the creatively named TV series The FBI. All of

(01:03:02):
these shows push an idealized image of what law enforcement
was and claimed that their fiction was very close to fact.
Now to the extent that people bought into this myth.
It started to puncture in nineteen sixty four as the
civil rights movement took to the streets and US police
responded by turning fire hoses and dogs on demonstrators. Many
of the yeah, yeah, it's on TV. That shuts it down.

(01:03:26):
Oh we didn't see this part of it on TV.
Um this. These people don't seem to be interested in
the facts. They seem to be interested in sticking dogs
on folks. Yes, yeah, that that didn't make it into Dragnet,
so yea. And most of the protests. Many of the
protests and what we're called riots during this period were

(01:03:46):
sparked one way or another by police brutality. The police
tear gassed masses of young activists at the nine Chicago DNC,
and from sixty seven to sixty eight there were two
hundred ninety two mass demonstrations on a hundred and sixty
three college campuses, Most were in opposition to the Vietnam War.
By the end of nineteen sixty eight, vivid images of
battered civil rights protesters, clouds of gas, and the corpses

(01:04:07):
of those students at Kent State had very significantly reduced
public opinion of law enforcement. Probably it's lowest EBB up
till the present moment. Like my my grandpa was a
lifetime military man, fought in World War Two in Korea,
was like managing a hospital on Okinawa, on a military
base in Japan when Kent State happens and was like

(01:04:30):
very pro the Vietnam War, and he was fucking furious
about Kent State because like like like that was the
thing that Kent State lost, even like a lot of
like pretty conservative milit because they were like, you know that,
that's not what the militaries for. We're not supposed to
shoot kids with signs on college campuses. Um, Like people
get real pisted at law enforcement in this period of time.

(01:04:50):
Uh And in nineteen sixty eight, in order to address
the collapsing faith in law enforcement nationwide, the US Congress
passes the Omnibus Crime Control Ole in Safe Streets Act, which,
among other things, pumped a shipload of federal dollars into
what dr Gary Potter, who you'll remember from other episodes,
we've talked about calls rather cosmetic police community relations programs,

(01:05:13):
which were mostly media focused attempts to improve the police image.
So this is when you start getting like really advanced
public affairs departments and police departments hiring pr agencies to
help them reform their image. And a lot of the
effort in reforming police images was still landed on Hollywood.
And of course in this period, Dragnet gets brought back
for another three seasons, running from nineteen sixty seven to

(01:05:36):
nineteen seventy. And the years that Dragnet comes back is
not There's no coincidence there, right, Yeah, So propaganda did
not protect the police from the economic downturns of the
nineteen seventies, and cities nationwide started making massive cuts to
police and other municipal workers just because the economy fell apart,
and you know, part of this isn't a show about

(01:05:56):
the economy, but a big part of what happens is
like the US had started exporting a lot of manufacturing
jobs had been like this is like the first This
is where we start to see the hollowing out of
this middle class and of like these good union jobs
that had persisted for decades since the end of the
war in the seventies. This all falls to ship. Um,
you start getting eaten alive economically by like Japan and

(01:06:17):
other countries and its it's you know, this is when
like services start to be cut nationwide, and one of
the services that gets cut is policing um out of
necessity of services. Yeah, you know what services won't be cut?
Yeah that was good. So you know who doesn't hollow

(01:06:39):
out the American middle class? Actually who hollows out there will? Yeah, yeah,
there we go bred services. I'm Colleen with joined me
the host of Eating Will Broke podcast While I eat
a meal created by self made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities

(01:07:03):
over a meal they once eight when they were broke.
Today I have the lovely aj Crimson, the official Princess
of Compton, Asia Kidding and Asia is the Professor. We're
here on Eating While Broken. Today, I'm gonna break down
my meal that got me through a time when I
was broken. Listen to Eating While Broke on the I
Heart Radio app, on Apple podcast or wherever you get

(01:07:24):
your podcasts. Hey Leath the listeners take here. Last season
on Lethal Lit, you might remember I came to Hollow
Falls on a mission clearing my aunt best name and
making sure justice was finally served. But I hadn't counted
on a rash of new murders tearing apart the town.
My mission put myself and my friends in danger. Though

(01:07:48):
it wasn't all bad, I'm going to be realisty take
I like you, But now all signs point to a
new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is starting,
you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm tig Torres and
this is Lethal Lit. Catch up on season one of

(01:08:09):
the hit murder mystery podcast Lethal Lit, a tig Tara's
mystery out now, and then tune in for all new
thrills in season two, dropping weekly starting February nine. Subscribe
now to devern miss an episode. Listen to Leave the
Lit on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or
wherever you get your podcasts. I call the Union Hall
as his male life and death. I thank these peeples

(01:08:32):
of planning to kill Dr King. On April four, Dr
Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A
petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled
guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his
life in prison. Case closed right, James L. Ray was
upon for the official story. The authorities would pray at

(01:08:55):
all we found a gun the James el Ray bought
in Birmingham, the kill ductor, except it wasn't the gun
that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came
out when I got the Ray case was that some
of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did
not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The

(01:09:16):
first episodes are available now. Listen on the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back so um police departments in this period, you know,
budgets get cut, municipal workers get cut, uh and a
lot of the blame like as these cities who in

(01:09:38):
a lot of cases like their budgets got fucked, not
just because the economy was bad, bad because of like
massive corruption, but they blame it on union workers, and
of course police are some of the union workers in
this period, so they get some big gas cuts and
out of necessity because their budgets are being trimmed. UM
police departments nationwide embark on a process called tailorization, which
is tailorization hat doesn't just happen to the least. It's

(01:10:00):
like a scientific optimization of of of of of an organization, right.
It's attempting to cut manpower and reduce costs without cutting efficiency.
UM officers started going from two cop to one cop
per patrol car and nine on one lines, and computers
became more widespread and put control of the police UH
is centralized more so police administrators gain more power. Civilian

(01:10:23):
employees are also brought in to do jobs that had
been done by police employees in order to reduce the
number of highly paid union workers. So this is tailorization.
And while all this is happening inside the US, the
Cold War is also happening outside of the US, So
inside the country, professionalism is kind of like the professional
model of police are still dominant, and they're also like

(01:10:44):
that becomes even more powerful and ideas as the number
of police are cut and they have to get more
efficient to try to do the same work. So that's
what's happening in the US. Outside the US, though, international
policing is having something very different happened to it. And
this is as a result of the Cold War. So
as the Cold War really starts to kick off, our

(01:11:06):
government finds itself trying to prop up friendly states all
around the world, you know, anti communist states, particularly in
Latin America and Southeast Asia, and we go, Yeah, this
proved problematic because a lot of these regimes were corrupt
in brutal and people didn't really like living underneath them.
H And as a rule, our government responded to that
by pouring money into training foreign police to murder dissidents,

(01:11:28):
because that works a lot better than training the army
in a lot of cases. So from nineteen sixty two
to nineteen seventy four, the US government operated the Office
of Public Safety, an agency that worked closely with the
CIA to train police and nations racked by conflict due
to the Cold War. These nations included South Vietnam, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil,

(01:11:50):
and Colombia. Tens of thousands of people were tortured or
killed by various police departments who received over two hundred
million dollars in US aid for firearm and equipment. And
I'm gonna quote now from an art cold in the
Age before you get there, there's there's one that's off
the papers, which I know you haven't done an episode on,
but like there is there is the Nicaragua one that
they wasn't supposed to be spending money on, which is

(01:12:12):
the B line. Y'all, looklyly, look, I'm excited, but I
don't want to remove. I don't want to ruin the reveal.
But what he's talked about right now leads directly to
the crack attack and the war on drugs. But yeah,
and I know we're gonna get to that. No, we're not,
not nearly, because I I I don't want to half
asked that one, like, because there's there's so much. Yeah,
well we will, we will do, we will get into that,

(01:12:34):
we'll dip in because because it's all tied in, it's
the beginning of it. Even this like pr stuff. I
grew up with the DARE program, you know, the drug
abuse where with a cop car pulled up with the
sirens at my elementary school to try to convince me
that this cop is cool, you know what I'm saying.
But yeah, anyway, were paying for wars and we got

(01:12:55):
paid in crack. Yeah yeah, so um yeah. The CIA
and you know, the US government starts training cops and
all of these countries to suppress uh, you know, primarily
left wing like political movements. And I'm gonna quote now
from an article in the Asia Pacific Journal by scholar
Jeremy Kazmarov, who's like one of the top like people

(01:13:16):
studying this particular phenomenon. Quote. During the mid nineteen sixties,
the director of United States Agency of International Development USA,
David Bell, commented in congressional testimony that the police are
the most sensitive point of contact between the government and
people close to the focal points of unrest, and more
acceptable than the army as keepers of order over long
periods of time. The police are frequently better trained and

(01:13:38):
equipped than the military to deal with minor forms of violence, conspiracy,
and subversion. Robert W. U Comber, who served as the
National Security Council advisor to President John F. Kennedy, further
stress that the police were more valuable than Special Forces
and our global counter insurgency efforts, and particularly useful in
fighting urban insurrections. We get more from the police in

(01:13:59):
terms of preventative medicine than from any single U S program,
he said. They are cost effective while not going for
fancy military hardware. They provide the first line of defense
against demonstrations, riots, and local insurrections. Only when the situation
gets out of hand, as in South Vietnam does the
military have to be called in. So again that's that's
the police. The police are especially as Vietnam goes badly

(01:14:22):
in other countries, we increasingly see if you if you
train the police to stop this ship before there's a
strong left wing movement, you don't have a Vietnam which
you then lose. Right, That's that's what Yeah, So that's
internationally what the US is doing to other police agencies.
As our police agencies, you know, pull back from the

(01:14:42):
militarization of the twenties and thirties and towards professionalism. We
we push militarization in a lot of ways. Outside of
the United States. Some fifteen hundred Americans were involved in
training more than a million foreign police officers during this time.
Now many of those cops did fail in their duties,
which is part of why South Vietnam is no anger
a country and why Iran does not have a shot anymore. Um,

(01:15:03):
but the suppression tactics taught by US police educators were
successful in many other nations. Like it does not always fail.
We are not always bad at training these people to
brutally stop left wing uprising because it works a lot
of the time. And when the office is they're like,
oh wait, real quick, this is like the perfect time
to like take like a take a take a slice
from like the hood politics way a way of thinking things,

(01:15:26):
thinking of things because sometimes like using these terms can
they're so lofty and big if you don't know history
or military politics, like it's hard to understand them. It's
this moment in history is so like it's so simple
because it's just eighth grade. So like you, you're there,

(01:15:47):
You and this you and this other boy or girl
are beefan, but y'all never actually fight. You just keep
bringing other kids around the fight. So by and I'll
prove it. Mass out of the playground is better because
this kid from who I propped up and trained and
gave a rock through at another kid who's got a

(01:16:08):
rock that's on your side of the playground, and that's
proven that I'm hard. But it's really they fighting a
fight that me and you are supposed to fight. But
we got sense enough to know we've probably been not
fight this fight, so I'm gonna let you fight it. Really,
that's the Cold War is yeah, you're you're going, I'm
gonna go get my little homeboy to funk up yo,

(01:16:29):
little homeboy. That's that's that's the Cold War. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly,
um so yeah, uh so yeah, we we we have
we we spend fucking a decade or more training all
these foreign police agencies to act homeboys. Yeah, counter insurgey Yeah,
our little homeboys to access counterinsurgency forces. Uh And when

(01:16:51):
the Office for Public Safety closes in nineteen seventy four,
these police trainers needed still needed work. Like these guys
who'd spent more than a decade training foreign cops, and
they find more work, and it's inside of the United States.
It's this time alex fatality rights in the end of
policing quote. Many of the trainers moved in large numbers
into law enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Agency FBI and

(01:17:14):
numerous local and state police forces, bringing with them a
more militarized vision of policing steeped in Cold War imperatives
of suppressing social movements through counterintelligence, militarized riot suppression techniques,
and heavy handed crime control. Now in the middle of
this period, like right before that office closes, really like
in nineteen seventy one, so a couple of years before

(01:17:34):
we stopped training the police, you know, foreign police in
this kind of organized way. Uh, not that we stopped entirely,
but like the way we had been, you know, we're
even less of it. In nineteen seventy one, Richard Millhouse
Nixon declared drug abuse public Enemy number one. Soon after
that declaration, US press began to discuss a new war
on drugs. Now, this war was launched just as the

(01:17:56):
US war in Vietnam started to finally end and spoilers,
it wasn't any more successful. Nixon's goal, though, had never
actually been to stop drug use. He started the war
on drugs because he wanted to win the support of
southern white voters who had gone Democratic for generations. These
people were furious about segregation, and they were pushing back
at the success of desegregation. Um, they considered civil rights

(01:18:20):
marchers to have been just looters and rioters, but the
weak LBJ administration had failed to murder these people. Professor
in legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains quote posters and political
strategists that found that thinly veiled promises to get tough
on them, a group suddenly not so defined by race,
was enormously successful in persuading poor and working class whites
did effect from the Democratic New Deal Coalition and joined

(01:18:43):
the Republican Party and droves. Ultimately, this backlash against the
civil rights movement was occurring at precisely the same moment
that there was economic collapse in communities of color, intercity
communities across America. And of course, again we're talking about
the seventies. We're going at a period where the economy
contracts massively and it hits black inner city communities worse
than anyone else. Um. And what is the number one

(01:19:05):
predictor of crime, particularly pop property crime. It's poverty. Yeah.
And and we're there's even like a a tie to
that moment now of how changing the language from we
just hate black people too, we're having a war on

(01:19:26):
drugs um we're the fact that we call weed marijuana.
It's just it's just a Spanish word for cannabis. But
that's marketing because you because if we already hate Mexicans
as a nation and you use this drug and you
just refer to it by its Spanish name, now it
seems more evil. It was just it was a racist

(01:19:49):
marketing that we call cannabis marijuana. But just and that's Nixon.
I just want y'all knowe Nixon did that anyway, Yeah, yeah,
m so yeah. The backlash against the success of the
civil rights movement reaches its height kind of just as
unemployment in the inner city peaks and the consequences of
the industrialization and globalization hit the U. S economy, so

(01:20:11):
crime sores and suddenly a shipload of people find themselves
impoverished and desperate without options, and the war on drugs
gives the government a way to take huge numbers of
these people, primarily these black and brown people, off the
street and satisfy white voters that they're doing something about crime. Now,
drug use was actually falling when Nixon made his announcement,
and it had been falling for years drug abuse, but

(01:20:34):
blaming drugs rather than unregulated capitalism, hollowing out the American
middle class, and exchange for corporate profits worked a lot
better from a messaging standpoint for the Republican president in yeah, exactly,
in nineteen eighty two, Ronald Reagan doubled down declaring an
official war on drugs, even though only three percent of
Americans at the time considered drug abuse to be the

(01:20:55):
nation's most pressing issue. Since the existing tailorized US police
were ill equipped to fight a war, President Reagan had
to start pouring tens of millions of dollars of federal
funds into turning law enforcement into an army. Now, the
broad trend, so this occurs. Reagan starts pumping all this
money in as these these guys who had been these
US guys who have been training foreign military forces oversee

(01:21:17):
sees start coming back to the country and training cops.
So there's a number of things kind of happening at
the same time that lead to and are are a
part of police militarization. Um. Now, the broad trend that
occurs throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties as a result
of all this is that US police nationwide turn away
from the professional model and towards a military model, not

(01:21:39):
a different in a military model pretty similar to the
one that General Butler proposed to defeat bootlegging in Philadelphia. Um.
This process was not smooth or uniform, and it was
not all due to the War on drugs. The Watts
Rebellion of nineteen sixty five was a major inciting incident
for the militarization of US police. And the short story,
the almost criminal lee short story of the Watts Rebellion

(01:22:02):
is this, a black motorist was was pulled over, um
and like there was a confrontation again with the police.
Conmmunity members confronted the cops as like this guy was
getting arrested, and a fight ensued. Um one of the
cops I injured a pregnant woman, or at least people
in the crowd believed that a cop had injured a
pregnant woman and kind of rage over this whole incident

(01:22:24):
boils over and like acts as a match stick. So like,
obviously the l A p d had been hideously racist
for a long time. One of the things that happens
when Jim crow Win's is that the police chief of
l A starts liberally courting Southern police officers who are like,
this is history. Yeah, if you're if you're pissed about
Jim Crow ending, come to Los Angeles, We'll let you
beat the ship out of black people. M making this

(01:22:45):
stuff up? Yeah, I could not. I thought we brought
this up before and one of the older episodes we
didn't get into it or not. Did you get into it? Yeah?
Did I tell you all my watch Riot story? No? No, no,
please do. This is a good time for it. Yeah,
it's a good time for it. So it was during
the La Riots. It is how my story starts. Um,
my grandmother, you know La Riots was you know Florence

(01:23:07):
and Normandy. Right, grandmother lived off Florence Engage, so it's
just a few more blocks to the east. Um, my
father calls my grandmother and she said, and he says, like, hey,
why don't you come stay with us? We were living
like maybe a fifteen minutes east. Right, So he says,
why don't you come stay with us? You're out of
like the hotspot in South Central And my grandmother says,

(01:23:31):
if I'm lying, I'm flying. She says, baby, unless there's
tanks coming down this street, I ain't going nowhere this house.
And I and I went, my grandma's a gangster. That's
the hardest thing I ever heard in my life. Right,
and then my but my parents looked at each other
and I was like, tanks, she's hard. They go, she
lived in the Watts Riots and the like history came alive.

(01:23:55):
They're like, yo, she she lived through the watch Riots.
That's what she's referring to. Tanks came down our streets.
I was like, oh, because I thought the l A
Riots was the end of the world. SE's what I'm saying. Like,
you know, I'm a preteen during its time, so I
was like, this is the end of the world. Grandma
is like, no, baby, tanks come down the streets anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

(01:24:17):
And that's like the Watts Riot is is fucking wild. Um. So,
like there's a ton of anger, uh and like black
and Hispanic communities towards the lap. Another thing that's happening
is like the l a PD is also separately but
but at the same time horrifically suppressing the Chicano Liberation movement,
which is like the like Mexicans and Latinos in l
a UM and like at one point murders a journalist

(01:24:39):
who's like drinking at a bar by shooting him in
the back of the head with a tear gas grenade.
Hunter Thompson actually wrote one of his best pieces of
investigative journalism about all of that, and in fact, Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas. Yeah, oh yeah, shit, yeah,
it happened in my neighborhood. I live in Boyle Heights,
like ship, Oh yeah, that happened the neighborhood. Yeah yeah,
Ruben Salazar and like so if like Fear and Loathing

(01:25:00):
in Las Vegas, like the funny, silly Hunter Thompson movie,
we all know the actual genesis of that. The real
thing that happened that he was actually writing about was
one of the leaders at the Chicano Liberation movement was
this guy Oscar at Costam, who was Hunter's lawyer, and
he like the reason that he and Hunter Thompson drove
to Las Vegas is that they needed to have a
conversation about what the l a p d Was doing

(01:25:22):
to murder Hispanic activists in Los Angeles. And the only
place that wouldn't be bugged would be a fucking a
convertible car with the top down driving through the desert
in New Mexico. Or not New Mexico and uh yeah,
you know, you know what I'm talking about. Like that's
that's what fear and loathing is. Is like this is
all tied up in this so like all of this
ship fucking explodes um into into anger uh at the

(01:25:48):
or like into the Watts riots in in nineteen sixty five,
and like the stuff that happened with Ruben Salazar and
stuff was like five years after this, but like all
of these this like racism and stuff is still happening.
So like the this fight winds up just kind of
for whatever reason being the thing that ignites all of
the anger in in this part of Los Angeles, and
it's the Watts riots is what most history text will

(01:26:09):
call it. The Uprising is another thing you'll hear that
I think is probably more accurate. And the uprising included
a shipload of angry black folks breaking into gun stores, um,
getting guns and then sniping at l A p D officers.
This is a thing that happens, and it the cops
flip the funk out about it. Um. The police chief
gets on television and compares what's happening and Watts to

(01:26:30):
what the insurgency in Vietnam. He compares the rioters to
the Viet Cong, and he states that a paramilitary response
is the only thing possible. The Governor Pat Brown announces
the l a p D was quote dealing with guerillas
fighting with gangsters. Um, the National Guard called in and
the uprising was brutally suppressed. And you know, generally when

(01:26:50):
you hear because this is a key movement in the
militarization of police, and generally when it's talked about, you
will hear about like the person writing about it will
pivot from like rioters looting guns and sniping at the
l a p d h to like the National Guard
coming in to kind of make the case that the
l a p d was just overwhelmed by armed citizens.
This is not what happened, um. Only three sworn personnel

(01:27:13):
were killed during the Watts riots. One was an l
A firefighter who died in a structure fire, one was
that Los Angeles Sheriff's deputy who was shot by another
deputy when that deputy accidentally fired his shotgun and during
a clash with rioters. And another was another Los Angeles
police officer who was shot by another one of his
fellow cops. Accidentally during a fight with rioters. No Los

(01:27:36):
Angeles police were killed by by rioters with guns. Um. Meanwhile,
the l a p D killed twenty three, mostly black
people during the Watts Riots. The National Guard killed seven. Um.
So again, the image of the Watts riots is that
like these writers, which is so heavily armed that like
it inspired the militarization of police because cops needed more

(01:27:57):
weapons and tactical teams in order to deal such threats.
The reality is that like the fucking no no, no,
no cops even got killed by bye rioters. Like it's
it's definitely accurate to say that like the l A
Police had been like more uh more militant, I think
than other police departments, but not like not like a

(01:28:19):
tactical way, just in a way of seeing themselves as fighting.
They saw themselves as fighting and is fighting a war
against the non white population of the city that was
the l A p D in this period. Yeah. There
there's this idea of like returning to the America they remember,
Yeah yeah, and the Watts riots kind of scare cops

(01:28:39):
around the country into all adopting a lot more paramilitary
tactics in order to defend themselves. From the people they're
supposed to be protecting. Now, the Watts riots are like
one of the one of two things that will be
generally cited as the justification behind the creation of the
very first SWAT teams, which you know means special weapons
and tactics. Another you're inciting incident for the creation of

(01:29:01):
the SWAT teams was the nineteen sixty six u T.
Austin clock tower sniper Charles Whitman, who killed sixteen people. Um.
The basic idea was that police were easily overwhelmed by
snipers and other dangerous criminals. Like cops just couldn't handle
these threats, and so specialized warrior cops were necessary to
handle these incidents. So SWAT teams took off as a

(01:29:21):
concept in the late nineteen sixties, and before long every
department in America was fighting to get a SWAT team
of their own, whether or not they needed one. Today,
the vast majority of police agencies serving populations of fifty
thousand or more in the United States have some form
of SWAT team. Nationwide, SWAT teams are deployed tens of
thousands of times per year, and since these teams were

(01:29:42):
formed and exists to handle extraordinary situations of exceptional danger.
You might picture these tens of thousands of SWAT raids
as like pulse pounding gunfights against really dangerous people. And if, yeah, if,
if that's the picture in your head, you are wrong.
Most states very deliberately do not provide US with statistics
for their SWAT deployments. Maryland is one of two that does,

(01:30:05):
and in Maryland, ent of SWAT raids are just for
serving search warrants. Half of those warrants are for non
violent drug crimes, and one third of those raids result
in no arrests. So a third of the time when
SWAT teams go out, they don't even get to arrest anybody. Now,
almost all of the SWAT raids in Maryland at least
are for drug crimes. Utah is the only other state

(01:30:27):
that requires police agencies to report on SWAT deployment, and
the first batch of numbers that they released in two
thousand and thirteen showed that eighty three percent of their
SQUAT deployments were serving search warrants for drug crimes. Less
than five percent of deployments were too violent crimes in
process a k a. The sort of thing SWAT teams
were formed to deal with just three of the states
reported five hundred and fifty nine raids. Half a percent

(01:30:50):
turned up illegal firearms. Now half I bring all the
half percent. Yeah, I bring all this up because when
I talk about the possibility of police abolition with people,
one of the first things they will generally bring up is, like,
who will protect us from all of like the violent madmen.
They're pictually like cartel guys and stuff gangsters. And of
course those people do exist. There's very dangerous criminals in
this country who are heavily armed. That that's that's that

(01:31:12):
is a thing that exists, but it is not the
scale of problem that you think it is. Um and
like it's also people will talk about, like who's protect
us from mass shooters? And I would ask, can anyone
listen to this podcast name a mass shooter who's been
stopped by a squat team. I'm gonna guess exactly not
that it hasn't happened. If you did, you can find

(01:31:33):
a couple of cases where swat teams stopped a shooting
in progress that can be defined as a mass shooting.
But you have to really rack your brain to think
of a situation where it did happen, or to think
of a situation where the cops successfully stopped a mass
shooting as opposed to like what happened during the Parkland
shooting where the officer I think, drove his car into
a ditch. Like yeah, like they're not good at this.
Or you can think about the Virginia Tech shooting. We're

(01:31:55):
swat teams were posted up outside the buildings, but we're
scared to enter while the shooter was killing people, um,
get it? Or or even saying this if like big
drug cartels, these drug bosses are like such a problem,
I would ask that person, Hey, do you know any
do you know any drug drug cartel bosses? Okay, you
never met one? All right, word, do you know anybody

(01:32:15):
that's like stolen some soda out of a out of
a liquor store. Yeah, we know a lot of those.
So what I'm saying is maybe you you're saying this
is a big problem, but you don't know nobody that
done that. But we are instole something out of a
out of a liquor store, So maybe there's more problems there,
and maybe you don't need to be specially trained for that. Yeah,

(01:32:37):
maybe we can solve people. Jack and shipped from liquor
stores to the extent that that's a problem without Yes,
machine guns, maybe snipers are necessary for this. Yeah. I
walked into the room. I walked into the room. Uh,
and my daughter was with a hammer and a shoe,
and I was like, the hell are you doing. She's

(01:33:01):
standing on one side of the room. The other side
of the room was a daddy long leg just a spider.
And I'm like, what you got a hammer for. She's like,
I gotta kill this spider. M hmm. And I have

(01:33:22):
a deep distrust for anything with eight legs or six legs.
I get it, But a hammer, baby, Harry yesterday, the
swiffer is fine. I don't so when you put a
hole on this wall, I mean, I'm gonna be honest
with you, prob I I have my Air fifteen right

(01:33:45):
here next to the table in case I see a spider,
which you know there's a lot. I gonna lie to you.
That's an issue. Yeah, yeah, that's what That's what the
police say. Um that that is also what my neighbors say.
You know what is Yeah, what the police say is accurate.
That's exactly what you mean. Find me to show you
the spider bite that I got that sent me to

(01:34:07):
the hospital. Next the hammer. Okay, that's different. Let's talk
about speaking of hammers, because I actually have a number
of hammer analogies coming up here. So um yeah yeah.
So again, the point of all these statistics, to the
extent that we have them, is that it really looks
like swat teams are actually kind of ship at fighting,

(01:34:28):
the one kind of crime that expired their existence in
the first place. Because again, you actually have an easier
time finding cases of people with concealed handguns stopping shootings
than you will swat teams stopping shootings like mass shootings
in progress, like our traditional like, and that doesn't happen
often either, Like usually mass shooters get to do whatever
they're gonna do and then shoot themselves or whatever turn
themselves in like they generally don't get stopped. Um, but

(01:34:51):
you you will. You'll have trouble finding swat teams taking
out these guys because it's usually over it before they
can scramble. Um. Now. Well, which is not to say
that there's no a place for them, because I think
any society as large as ours, you're gonna need to
have some rapid response units. But we're not using them
for that, and there's way too many of them now.
While state data on SWAT deployments is lacking, I did

(01:35:12):
find a fascinating report by two researchers, David Klinger and
Jeff Rojack, using funds provided by the Department of Justice
in two thousand eight, they analyzed thousands of SWAT raids nationwide,
and what they found was fascinating. Out of tens of
thousands of deployments they analyzed, SWAT officers only fired their
weapons in three hundred and forty two incidents. Those officers
shot two hundred citizens, killing one hundred and thirty nine

(01:35:35):
of them. In seventy of these shootings, fewer than ten
rounds were used. Now, this suggests that military grade weaponry
may not be necessary for SWAT teams, since again, you
don't need it. Yeah, they're not getting into gunfights. They
sometimes they shoot people, but like and a lot of
the time those a lot of those guys who died
were wounded by SWAT and then killed themselves. Um, yeah,

(01:35:58):
it's it's yeah. Meanwhile, during this same span of time,
SWAT officers had thirty nine accidental discharges, so shot two
hundred citizens and accidentally fired their own weapons thirty nine times.
This means that accidental gunfire. We're looking at three three
forty two um incidences where SWAT officers fired, and thirty

(01:36:20):
nine of those are accidents. That's not an insignificant percentage
of all SWAT weapons discharges. Like that's that's that's noteworth all.
The study authors right quote. This data indicates that something
is substantially amiss with the way that at least some
SWAT officers handled their weapons, and strongly suggests that this
problem is rooted in training. That more than one in

(01:36:42):
tent of the incidents in which those who are supposed
to be the most highly trained officers in their agency
fired shots involved accidental discharges is simply unacceptable in our minds.
Among the aforementioned hundred thirty nine citizens who died after
being struck by SWAT gunfire were two who fatally shot
themselves after being hit by SWAT bullets. In addition to
these two, we have firm data that three seventy nine

(01:37:02):
other individuals killed themselves in situations in which they were
not shot by SWAT officers. It is thus clear that
in the current data that it is more likely citizen
will take their own lives during SWAT operations than be
killed by SWAT officers by a margin of more than
two point five to one point five. Finally, the data
indicate that nearly one in four citizens struck by SWAT

(01:37:24):
gunfire wished to be shot, as respondents classified their actions
as indicating they wish to commit suicide by cop. If
respondents classifications are correct, this indicates that an even higher
portion of the citizen deaths and SWAT operations involved individuals
who wished to die that of the SWAT officers struck
by gunfire and the current data were shot by fellow officers.

(01:37:46):
Suggests that while the most substantial threat officers face comes
from armed suspects, the prospect of fratricide looms large and
tactical operations. So you're more likely to get shot by
your homeboy. Not more likely, but pretty like lead Yeah
about when when SWAT officers are shot. More than one
intent of SWAT cops who get shot are shot by
their own guys, and one in ten times when SWAT

(01:38:09):
officers shoot, they're shooting negligently without meaning to fire. So
again the whole elite SWAT team thing. There are some
well trained swat teams out there. It's also real fucking
easy to to just give guys military grade weaponry, call
him a SWAT team, and then they funk up. But
more than anything, SWAT teams don't get into a lot

(01:38:32):
of serious gunfights on a nationwide level. Um, and most
of the people they encounter who are seriously armed like
our fucking want to kill themselves. Yeah, they want to die,
which is maybe suggests that a SWAT team isn't the
thing to bring to that person. They shouldn't go. Yeah,
maybe just a dude who's a good therapist having a

(01:38:54):
conversation would have better odds of resolving this without gun fire. Yeah.
Uh yeah. So the conclusions here are pretty clear. Number one,
swat teams virtually never do these sort of work their
portrayed doing in movies and tv I directly engaging dangerous
bad guys. And number two, swat teams kind of suck
at their job regularly shooting people and each other by accident.

(01:39:17):
And perhaps no story illustrates the second point better than
the case of Wanas Thava. Uh now, good job, many,
I'm doing my best here. And on Wanas sold a
small amount of methamphetamine uh to a confidential informant um
or bought a yea so sold a small amount of
methemphetamine too a confidential informant um. Several hours later, on

(01:39:40):
the morning of the seven man swat team from the Cornelia,
Georgia Police Department carried out a raid on wannass home. Now,
because Wannas had a previous weapons charge on his record,
officers were given a no knock warrant. They broke through
Wannas's door with a battering ram and as they were
pushing the door in, they noticed there was resistance behind
the door and this led that what the officers in

(01:40:00):
the swat team to believe that they're like someone had
barricaded the door, so they tossed a flash bang in. Now,
it turned out that the thing that had actually been
against the door was the playpen where wannass nineteen month
old child was sleeping. Uh. The flash bang ignited the
nineteen month old child, burning it badly and tearing the
child's face and chest open um. The kid was put

(01:40:23):
into a coma and very very nearly died. The swat
and was you know, suffered permanent injury as a result
of the police flash bang igniting it. The swat team
found only a small amount of meth residue in the
home and no wet weapons. No arrests were made. When
the Bonus EVA sued, a local prosecutor threatened to charge
them for their child's injuries. In the end, no officers

(01:40:46):
were indicted for horrifically maiming a small child. I found
one CNN article that interviewed the sheriff in charge of
the swat team, a guy named Tarrell. Quote in hindsight,
Tarrell said, at the time, officers would have conducted the
raid differently had they known there was a child inside
at the home, but there was no sign of children
during the alleged drug purchase that prompted the raid. We
might have gone in through a side door, he said.

(01:41:06):
We would not have used a flash bang, like and
that showed defense, big homie. Yeah, that's interesting to me
because it shows it. It never occurs to this guy
that like, maybe maybe a dude selling a small amount
of meths, maybe sending in an army to funk with
that guy, and that army having grenades and battering rams.
Maybe that's inherently reckless in a bad way to deal with. Again,

(01:41:29):
a small amount of meth being sold. Yeah, and it's
just it kind of feels like to me, like if
I'm the swat guy, I feel a little insulted. Yeah,
you think I'm so incompetent. That has got to be
nineteen of us with with sucking fifty cows to come
get this one dude that just sold a little men
imposibly most get like, you think I'm that weak that

(01:41:51):
I can't just Yeah, it's it's fucking It's the problem
with militarization in general, which is that like it. It
means that you're going to have a military situation if
the police are going it's fucking Waco. When you start
the conversation with tanks and machine guns and snipers, You're
not going to end it in a good way. You're

(01:42:12):
going to end it by burning seventy children alive. Because
that's this is how that works. This is so true
in every area of your life. If you're in any
sort of relationship, whether it's a monogonous one or a
romantic or a or a friendship or a sibling, if
you come in guns ablazing, it's just not gonna work.

(01:42:34):
You know, this is your Yeah, this is exactly why
I was able to improve a lot of my personal
relationships propped when I stopped having the B A. T.
F Um show up with tanks to support me. You
know that that really was was a game changer for me. Um.
I imagine, man, a lot less of my friends get
burnt to death in in basement compounds outside of Waco. Now, yeah, yeah,

(01:42:56):
that's good man, because I you live and learn, because
I reference in here, Robert, just like a Waco reference
in everywhere. Hey Man, talk about talk about Waco. Talk
about a rebranding. Boy has gotten Yeah, yeah, I mean

(01:43:17):
it was now the Home and Garden TV network. That's
we have some sort of oversized initial letter in your
room and uh a refurbished wood panel. So you have
a farmhouse store and a farmhouse sink and yeah, and
you admire Joanna Gaines there it is build an empire.

(01:43:39):
She built it. She built an empire out of a
city that was known for burning seventy babies. Well, I
don't understand most of what we're talking about here, but
you know what I do understand is that we're gonna
we're gonna talk about another kind of Waco type thing
where a bunch of children get burned by militarized police.
At the end of this, that's gonna be fun um

(01:44:00):
all right, fun is the wrong word anyway. So like
the the the again, Like the point here is that
like the worst case scenario of like what happened with
Wanas and his family without the police is that like, oh,
these parents might be selling small amounts of meth amphetamine
and that maybe isn't great for a kid, and that
this is a problem that does need a solution to it. Um.

(01:44:22):
But the solution that they got a grenade, burning their
child alive. It was worse than probably anything that would
have happened if they had just been left selling math, right,
like or just or take fifteen minutes more to do
just a little bit of investigation on the guy and
be like, oh he's a parent, Yeah, it's it's it's

(01:44:43):
always that's like with Waco, like there was there was
a problem, David Koresh was doing some fucked up ship.
You could have just arrested him and not burned Like
those kids, whatever they were going through under Koresh, getting
burnt alive was worse for them. Absolutely. The police made
it worse. And it's because militarized police are a hammer,
and we've got a hammer. Every single problem looks like
a nail. And like, if that hammer is a hammer

(01:45:05):
in the hands of a cop, it's specifically going to
be used to hammer the faces of black people. Um,
because that's how cops work. As we've previously discussed, I've
had a two thousand eighteen study published by the National
Academy of Sciences. It uses a geo coded census of
swat team deployments in Maryland and shows that quote, militarized
police units are more often deployed in communities with large
shares of African American residents, even after controlling for local

(01:45:27):
crime rates. Further, using nationwide panel data on local police militarization,
I demonstrate that militarized policing fails to enhance officers safety
or reduce local crime. So after controlling for variables like
local crime rates, the author of the study calculated that
for every ten percent increase in the black population of
a zip code, there is a ten percent increase and
the likelihood of that zip code experiencing a swat rate

(01:45:48):
now and again. He also showed that swat raids and
swat teams don't reduce violent crime, so they're they're they're
kind of what you're seeing here. Sure looks like they're
just being used vindictively against black people, you know, whether
or not there's intention behind it. That's how the data
really looks, now. Yeah. Yeah. A Washington Post write up

(01:46:10):
of the research notes telling Lee Uh he found no
statistically significant change in the killings of police officers, which
were too infrequent to measure, or assaults on police officers.
So again, part of the justification of swat teams is that, like,
police are in so much danger that we need special,
heavily armored police. And it's like, actually, when SWAT teams
are used all the time, cops still get killed with
the same right, it has no impact. Yeah, so SWAT

(01:46:34):
raids also get just so many dogs killed. My so
so many dogs getting killed by fucking swat teams. If
you want to know what swat teams love to do most,
it's it's shoots some goddamn dogs. Um, it's impossible to
to separate the number of dogs killed by swat from
the number of dogs killed by regular cops serving the
same kind of search warrants, because again, regular cops regularly

(01:46:57):
served the exact same kind of search warrants swat cops serve,
which maybe suggests that why do we have squat teams?
If yea also but yeah, um either way, a ship
let of fucking dogs get killed when police serve warrants,
and a lot of those warrants are served tens of
thousands of them are served by swat teams. Um. We
will never know how many dogs get killed exactly um

(01:47:19):
by police in this country. But in two thousands sixteen,
one Justice Department expert called the police shooting of dogs
and epidemic. It is estimated that cops shoot twenty five
dogs in this country every single day, and some estimates
range as high as five hundred dogs per day. It
is very likely that police use their guns to shoot
dogs more than they use their guns for any other

(01:47:39):
purpose nationwide. Why because they fucking I mean, you know,
I have to actually talk to some cops about this,
um and including I talked to a cop who had
to who was in a justified shoot of a dog,
a dog that like maim turned to the point that
her life has never been the same since, Like, obviously
the dog is tearing you apart. Yeah, you're gonna shoot
that dog. Um, Like I've talked to some police about

(01:48:01):
this and like one theorious why it happens so much
without like there are some justific like a lot of
like sometimes fucking people who have dog fighting rings get
rated and like, yeah, yeah, you're gonna shoot some of
those dogs because they're just like they've been broken and
they're dangerous. Um. But also a lot of cops are
terrified of dogs. And if cops are terrified, they get
to shoot UM. So even in situations where there's no

(01:48:26):
exactly a lot of the time, probably most of the time,
there's no justification for the animals. That's that's that's yeah, yeah,
And one out of five, training makes you scared, and
that's what I want to get into. The training makes
you scared. And in one out of five of these
incidents of a police dog shootings, a child was either

(01:48:49):
in the direct line of fire or standing nearby. And
one horrifying too. That's in fifteen case, a four year
old girl was shot in the leg by a police
officer who was trying to shoot her dog. UM. And
this dog was not threatening this police officer necessarily UM.
Thus the officer felt threatened, like he felt like he
might get bit, and even fear of a minor injury

(01:49:11):
um is enough to make an officer completely immune to
any consequences for shooting a dog. Meanwhile, I should note
people who kill police dogs regularly face longer sentences than
child molestus. You'll go away for life if you shoot
a police dog. Um. But police can imagine. Yeah, can
you imagine having the right to slap the ship out
of somebody because you think they might slap you. Yeah,

(01:49:32):
it's pretty pretty crazy, pretty bad. So this may seem
like it's getting a little bit off the topic of
police militarization, but it really is not. A lot of
times when liberals talk about reforming police, they discussed the
need for more police training, but police actually go through
a shipload of training. Like there's there's a bunch of
billboards or like placards them going in a protest that
like talked about how much less cops training cops need

(01:49:53):
than like hair stylists, And that's true, but that's true
for how much cops training. Cops need to get on
the street. They take a lot of training after becoming cops,
and a lot of that training makes them more dangerous
as cops. Um. And this is part of the problem
we talk about like needing to train police more. Over
the last twenty years, police training has become increasingly paramilitary,

(01:50:15):
with military veterans like Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman and companies
like Close Quarters Battle CQB providing training that deliberately bills
itself as military style and refers to officers as warriors,
all while convincing them that they are in more danger
than cops have ever faced. From the end of policing.
Quote Sef Stoughton, a former police officer turned law professors,
shows how officers are repeatedly exposed to scenarios in which

(01:50:38):
seemingly innocuous interactions with the public, such as traffic stops,
turned deadly. The endlessly repeated point is that any encounter
can turn deadly in a split second. Of officers don't
remain ready to use lethal force at any moment. So
take the case of John Crawford, an African American man
shot to death by a police officer in Walmart and Ohio.
Crawford had picked up an air gun off the shelf

(01:50:59):
and was carrying it around the store while shopping. Another
shopper called nine one one to report a man with
a gun in the store. The stores video camera shows
that one of the responding officers shot without warning while
Crawford was talking on the phone. In Ohio, it is
legal to carry a gun openly, but the officer had
been trained to use deadly force upon seeing a gun. Similarly,
in South Carolina, a state trooper drove up to a

(01:51:20):
young man in his car at a gas station and
asked him for his driver's license. He leaned into the
car to comply, and the officers shot him without warning.
See Unexpected movement shoot. This is again what you get
with more police training. This is what I'm saying, The
training makes you scared. Yes, yeah, more training is not
the solution because this is what the training does. Yeah,

(01:51:42):
you could argue maybe different training is the solution, but
you also still have tens of thousands of cops who
already have this ship in their heads. What do you
do with them? If they're still on the force, how
do you how do you cleanse that from them? Are
you confident you can? Now? Modern police US cops are
equipped with military grid weaponry, but not with military grade training.
They're told that their own safety is their number one

(01:52:03):
concern and anything they do to protect themselves is justified.
We have essentially raised and equipped a military, told them
that they are at war every day with the people
of this country, and then sent them out to the
streets with a license to kill if they feel scared
for any reason. And this is not a simple right
versus left issue. After Democrat Michael Ducacus was defeated in
nineteen eighty eight for being soft on crime via a

(01:52:25):
super racist ad, Democrats pivoted to Yeah, the Willie Horton ad.
Democrats pivoted to endorsing right wing law and order politics.
Bill Clinton's nine Crime Bill added tens of thousands of
police nationwide and expanded the drug war. And in fact,
it wasn't until Clinton's second term that widespread police militarization
was even made possible. In nineteen a bunch of heavily

(01:52:46):
armed and armored gunmen try to rob some businesses again
to a big gunfight with Los Angeles cops. Is the
North Hollywood shoot out? Um? Yeah, police side arms were
incapable of piercing their armor, and cops had to borrow
high caliber rifles from a nearby gun store. When the
National Defense Authorization Act was passed later that year, it
included the ten thirty three program, a provision that allowed
law enforcement agencies to acquire military hardware. Between nine and

(01:53:11):
two thousand fourteen, five point one billion dollars in material
was transferred from the Department of Defense to local law enforcement.
Now near the end of his time in office, President
Obama attempted to belatedly halt this massive transfer of military
armaments to police, but President Trump reversed that and accelerated
the transfer of military weapons to cops. And this is
why in a ten year period, forty nine m wraps

(01:53:33):
mine resistant patrol vehicles were handed out to police departments
in Florida alone. Many of these went to lightly populated
rural counties like Baker population seven thousand. In Ohio, the
Department of Natural Resources received two hundred and forty fully
automatic rifles. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department got seven
hundred and sixty eight fully automatic rifles. By the way,

(01:53:54):
I found all of this in a Forbes breakdown, which
notes that U. S cops also received more than six
thousand bay anets between two thousand six and two thousand seventeen.
What do you need six thousand like our milits? Our
soldiers don't even fucking use bayonets anymore because they're useless
and modern. They weren't even that useful when bayonets were
actually used in combat. Um So, remember the study that

(01:54:17):
showed SWAT teams were more likely to be deployed in
black neighborhoods. Well, it also found that quote seeing militarized
police and news reports made diminish police reputation in the
mass public. And this is you know there's that news
story about like the the l A school police having
an m wrap. These are the tanks, Like they're not
really tanks, but they're huge armored trucks. And I have
a story about huge armored trucks prop because when I

(01:54:41):
was in Moses, most of the people I was inbedded
with were the Iraqi army, and they mostly drove a
mix of like technicals which are just like Toyota trucks
with guns in the bed uh and old U S
military hum vs. They didn't have a whole lot of
heavy military vehicles. The only time you saw US police
in the places, or the US cops or not cops,
sorry the him you say, US soldiers in the places

(01:55:01):
where I was was when they were rolling around in
em wraps and usually be a patrol of like three
of these gigantic I can't exaggerate how fucking big an
im wrap looks there. They are nightmarishly large vehicles, and
they look like The first time I remember seeing one
is I'm on the out, like maybe a quarter of
a mile back from the front line, and I'm like
literally sitting and smoking a cigarette with um my photographer

(01:55:24):
and some friends on a pile of rubble, like listening
to a gunfight occur in the distance, and there's like
little kids running around and stuff, trying to sell us
things and whatnot. Like we all stopped for a second
as this US patrol rolls by, and these three giant
m wraps, And the first thing I think of when
I see them up close and personal for the first
time is like, these look like a T eighties. That's

(01:55:48):
what these are is. These are these are the These
are the fucking Imperial Stormtroopers T eight You can't see
the human beings inside, you can't see people. It is
just this. It's this, this physical manifestation of the violent
power of the state. That's what it felt like. And
that's what I could see. These little Iraqi kids on
the ground, like we're seeing that that was what a U. S.

(01:56:10):
Soldier was to them, was like was was a fucking machine.
And that's what seeing these in the hands of cops
makes you think about cops, Like police want to wonder,
like why people don't like them or expect them anymore.
It's because we see you as pieces of an armed
machine and nobody likes Yeah, you rolled up like the
Sith Lord, like you look like you look like Darth Vader,

(01:56:33):
like you, you know what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, you
look like Stormtroopers. We don't like stormtroopers. No, they're not
the good guys. Yeah. Now, I could go on and
on about like the insane weaponry cops are given these days,
and I could lest repeated anecdotes about how often they
badly misuse it. But I think the most important point
to end on for this episode and for this series
is how fucking much we spend on militarized police for

(01:56:56):
how fucking little we get. The Minneapolis Police Department takes
up thirty five percent of the city's general fund, The
Chicago p D are thirty seven percent of their city's budget.
Atlanta and Detroit police come in and about thirty percent.
The l A p D is a quarter of Los
Angeles's budget. Many cities spend up to of their municipal

(01:57:16):
budgets on their police department, making the basically making like
a lot of cities in the US are basically like
small armies with towns attached to them. Up until the
nineteen eighties, the U. S government spent about as much
money on criminal justice as we did on cash welfare,
on like welfare programs that deliberately like directly hand out
like aid to people um. Up until the nineteen eighties, Yeah,

(01:57:36):
about equal what we spent on law enforcement we spent
on welfare. In the decades since, welfare spending has declined
and police funding has soared. Today we spend more than
twice as much money on law and order as we
do on social welfare, and we get very little for
our money. For all the weapon really buy our cops,
the vast majority of police officers will never fire a

(01:57:56):
weapon in the line of duty, for all the police,
not once, not once. For all that police advocates talk
about dangerous criminals, most police officers make no more than
one felony arrest per year. And when it comes to
the question of how good police are it actually solving crimes?
About forty of murders go unsolved, only about fifty three

(01:58:17):
percent of aggravated assaults are solved, less than thirty percent
of robberies are solved, and only about of automobile thefts
are solved. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports says that thirty
percent of rapes are solved, but that number doesn't really
tell the whole story. And I'm gonna quote from the
Guardian for this one because again, this is like the
reason I bring this up is that like that's one

(01:58:37):
of the number one things. Like people who will argue
about like police abolition. Other folks will say like, well,
who are you gonna call if you're getting raped? Well,
let's talk about how good police do it solving Only
that I hear the argument like, no, they need more money,
they're underfunded, and I'm like, actually, they're more funded than
every other program. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, significantly more. I'm
gonna quote from the Guardian for this one quote. The

(01:59:00):
fact is that the police never investigate most sexual violence
because most sexual violence goes and reported. According to the
Rape and Incest National Network or RAIN, a little less
than twenty of sexual assaults are reported to police significantly
less than other violent crimes. The reasons are myriad, but
an often cited one is a distrust and fear of
the police, which obviously is increased by militarization. One survey

(01:59:21):
of sexual assault survivors found that of those who chose
not to report, fient feared that the police could not
or would not do anything to help. An additional seven
percent did not want to expose their attacker to the police.
A two thousand eighteen study of the Austin, Texas Police
Department found that officers tasked with investigating sexual assaults could
not read lab reports on DNA evidence and often lacked

(01:59:42):
a basic understanding of female anatomy. I have to google.
I listen to fucking this, I have to google stuff
like labia majora. One officer said that guy shouldn't be
investigating sex cribes invigating sex crist here and but but
rather than paying for him to learn what a volva is,

(02:00:04):
big home, he got a bayonet. Oh, I'll bet he
knows how to use a machine gun, all of the
parts of a machine gun. So sometimes police failures to
investigate sexual violence look like the result of not just stupidity,
but of outright duplicity. One study of the New York
Police Department discovered that it was knowingly under counting rapes
and its public figures, using a deliberately strict definition of

(02:00:26):
rape in order to shrink the number of reported cases
in New York. An inquiry into the NYPD found that
it's Special Victims Division to be grossly dysfunctional, with officers
instructed to simply not investigate misdemeanor sexual assault cases. First
of all, the fact that that's a thing, a misdemeanor
sexual assault is already a problem. Now you're not going
to investigate. Yeah, well, and like, this is actually kind

(02:00:48):
of a pattern with the NYPD, and I assume other
departments of like, so they're under counting rape and its
public figures, so it seems like they solve more rapes
than they do. There was a study that came out
about how often the NYPD hits when they shoot people
with their firearms, right, which is something you want to know,
especially since the YPD is considered to be one of
the best trained police departments in the country, and the
NYPD was very proud of the fact that they had

(02:01:10):
a thirty percent hit rate um in gunfights, um, which
is actually, like, I mean, I'm gonna be honest with you,
people very rarely hit when they are shooting at each
other in a gunfight because it's stressful. A lot of
fucking misses. It's very hard to be accurate, not to fit.
But like that was their their number was, like we
hit thirty percent of the time when we just charge
our weapons in like a a violent situation. But then

(02:01:31):
people who analyze the NYPD data found that the NYPD
was only hitting because they were including police officers suicides
as one shot stops. Wait, they were they were they
were goofing their own numbers by including their suicides. Is like,

(02:01:51):
I mean, yeah, they're They're basically saying, like that cop
took a dangerous man off the streets himself. Count it counts,
It counts. Yeah, it's pretty pretty wild. So conservative estimates
suggest that US police have two hundred thousand untested rape
kits in their possession nationwide. Rain's best estimate is that
only about four point six percent of sexual assaults ever

(02:02:13):
lead to an arrest, and less than one percent are
ever referred to police by prosecutors. So if you are
raped and you refuse to talk to the cops. Your
odds of getting justice are more or less the same
as someone who dials and nine one one right away.
She's And then, of course there's the fact that cops
commit just a shipload of rape. Bowling Green State University,

(02:02:34):
you know you're gonna get I was gonna say, when
you're talking about rape, I was like, they're not reporting
them because they're doing it. They are doing a lot
of them. Yeah. Bowling Green State University documented at least
four hundred in five rapes by police officers on duty
between two thousand five and two thirteen. That is an
offer an average of forty five per year. They also
documented six and thirty six instances of forcible fondling. These

(02:02:54):
numbers are only a fraction of the real total, since
most sexual assaults are never reported and most rapists have
at least five victim is over the course of their career.
The CNN article I found about this investigation into cop
rape includes one of the most horrifying lines have ever
read in an article, quote about half of the victims
their children, researchers, say Stinson, one of the researchers, has
gotten accustomed to hearing his research assistants proclaimed during their work,

(02:03:15):
Oh my god, it's another fourteen year old. Oh again, Yeah, yeah,
that I have a guttural physical response to that. Yeah. So.
One of the first arguments you'll get against police abolition
is against some version of the question without cops, who's

(02:03:36):
who you're gonna call if you know, rape or whatever,
if X crime happens to you. The second argument is
usually that even if the cops aren't necessarily great at
solving crimes, they prevent violence and crime by their presence
and areas. And Alex Vitali, the author of the End
of Policing, strikes back at that claim quote it is
largely a liberal fantasy that the police exists to protect

(02:03:57):
us from the bad guys. As the veteran police scholar
David Bailey argues, the police do not prevent crime. This
is one of the best kept secrets of modern life.
Experts know it, the police know it, but the public
does not know it. Yet. The police pretend that they
are society's best defense against crime and continually argue that
they if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they
will be able to protect communities against crime. This is

(02:04:19):
a myth, and he is very right when he says
that a lot of data backs this argument up. The
raw number of police in this country has declined for
the last five years straight, and the rate of police
officers per one thousand residents in the United States has
been dropping for twenty years. You know what else has
been dropping for twenty years? Prop? What the crime rate?

(02:04:39):
The crime rate? Yeah, the police lost twenty three thousand
net officers nationwide from two thousand and thirteen to two
thousand and sixteen, with no corresponding surgeon crime. Now, despite
the fact that crime has dropped sadly for twenty years,
most Americans believe that crime rates have increased throughout their lifetimes.
Why are people like that? Why are people like that?
I have an answer for you. Up, Yeah, I have

(02:05:01):
a fucking answer for you. Are you ready for this?
Are you ready to talk about Hollywood again? Yea be yeah,
A lot, yeah, a lot of you know, like when
you're like, okay, you know what you know what prevents crime? Jobs? Yeah? Resources,

(02:05:21):
It's just easy giving people heroin if they're addicted, you know,
maybe maybe laws that shouldn't be laws, like and making
sure that the person handing them that heroin says, Hey,
there's some doctors or some professionals over here if you
want to stop this, like we can. We can help
you out with this, but nobody's gonna fuck you up
for doing this. Here's a couch. Yeah. It turns out

(02:05:42):
that actually objectively works better in every single place that
he works. Yeah. Um. So the answer to why people
think that police are just absolutely critical and holding back
a tide of violence has a lot to do with
the TV show Dragnet and its descendants. In the fall
of two thousand nineteen, more than six percent of primetime
dramas on TV were about police, crime and the legal system.

(02:06:06):
Many of these shows, like Cops and Live p D
worked directly with law enforcement and receive approval from departments
for every episode they aired, the same way Dragnet did.
That's Cops. Cops got like the the Cops sign off
on every episode of Cops, which is why that show
doesn't show. There's a wonderful podcast you should all listen
to after this called Running from Cops um and it

(02:06:26):
it is a show, a podcast about the TV show
Cops and about live TV And it's one of the
things that they showcases. In the very first episode of
Cops like they got access to the unaired footage that
was shot for that episode of Cops, and like it
showed that in the in this episode of Cops, like
it showed them like busting this like family and like
taking the kid, and like the the female officer who

(02:06:48):
took the kid was like, it's okay, we're gonna get
you to a safe place tonight. You're gonna have anice
warm bed and toys and stuff. And in the part
that wasn't aired, she took that child to like the
place that she was supposed to take this kid after
arresting the kids parents and they just put the kid
in basically a cell because they didn't have a better
or any toys. And like the lady cop is like
in tears and like enraged when she realizes how fucked

(02:07:09):
up the situation is that didn't they're on cops Like no, um,
so again, watch Running from Cops. It's a great or
listen to it. It's a great fucking podcast. Um. But
one of the things they did on Running from Cops
is they tried to analyze, like they watched eight episodes
of the show, um and like analyzed the race of

(02:07:29):
all of the people involved analyzed um the kind of
crimes they're arrested for, and like put together data on
like the world as presented by Cops as opposed to
the actual world, and how crime actually works in our
real world. Um, and I'm gonna quote from from an
article written by one of the guys behind Running from Cops. Now,
what we discovered was that, contrary to early press predictions,

(02:07:51):
the world portrayed on Cops is not like the real world.
There are about four times more violent crimes and cops
than in reality, and three times more drug arrests and
about ten times more arrests for sex work. The cops
on the show are also, statistically speaking, extremely good at
their jobs. Segments on the show in and arrest eighty
four point four percent of the time. That number reflects
a change over time from back in nineteen ninety tone

(02:08:15):
and the most recent season in Cops World, law enforcement
officers are so effective it's basically a given that a
crime will end in an arrest. Now, that's interesting to me. Um,
there's a lot that's interesting to me, including Like, one
of the things they find in the show is that
early on Cops like showed a hell of a lot
more non white people getting arrested and like the double

(02:08:36):
a CP complained and Cops fixed the problem and switched
over to showing mostly white criminals. And part of yeah,
part of how they did it was by just filming
in Portland, Oregon. That's hilarious. I didn't know that, Yeah, yeah,
but I did know, like, wow, it seems the black
people no more. Yeah, yeah they did. They did fix

(02:08:58):
that particular problem, m um. And you know, I gotta
give it to him. Moving to Portland's a smart way
to do that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So most people who
even like most fans of Cops Williganola is that the
show has always been, you know, kind of trashy. But
even lea yeah, and and like you would have found
a lot more people who'd be willing to argue that

(02:09:19):
Cops was harmful back before this most recent uprising. Then
you would get to argue that there was a harm
and shows like for example, Law and Order. But even
shows like Law and Order contribute to our distorted cultural
beliefs about the police. Now, obviously Law and Order doesn't
push the militarized police angle. There's Law and Orders very
much like a tribute to like Volmer's idea, of the
police as scientists. Um, yeah, but it's still has a

(02:09:43):
negative effect. Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University who
studies television and pop culture, noted in an interview with
the Desiree News, quote, the very thing that keeps law
and order going is the idea that they keep showing
this efficient process over and over. Law and order gives,
at least in part, some feel for this being an
efficiently well oiled machine. And it just isn't. We already

(02:10:03):
went through the statistics of how few crimes the police solved,
because again, most of these scientific policing methods don't work
nearly as well as as there they TV portrays them
as yeah. Now. Color of Change released a report in
January of this year based on a study of twenty
six scripted crime dramas. It found that quote, these shows

(02:10:24):
rendered racism invisible and dismissed any need for police accountability.
They made a legal destructive and racist practices within the
criminal justice system seem acceptable, justifiable, and necessary, even heroic.
The study noted that of the writers for these shows
were white men, only nine percent were black. Now. In
the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's murder and this whole

(02:10:46):
uprising thing. Both Cops and Live p D were canceled,
and I I really think most people don't get what
a big victory it is to have fucking cops off
the air. Um. Yeah, I think they'll understand a little
better after this. It does seem likely that other police
procedurals will wind up dying out rather soon. And everyone
has their favorite We've all we've all enjoyed some cop dramas, um,

(02:11:07):
I and I and I will say I don't think
that the wire is a part of the problem. I
think they actually did a real good job of making
everybody see, like Jesus Christ, policing's fucked. It just wasn't enough. Yeah. Um,
there's a lot of you know, Brooklyn nine nine. I
know a lot of people who love Brooklyn nine nine,
And I know a lot of Brooklyn nine nine fans
are apprehensive and like a little bit guilty right now

(02:11:27):
and wondering like, is there a way to like fix
this show, to make it like not contribute to the problem,
and like, you know, the show does. The show does
has leaned in at a few points to some problems
in policing in a way that most police dramas don't
um and it is one of those things where, like
I think a lot of folks will argue that, like
there's a room for escapism and that this stuff isn't

(02:11:48):
really harmful, but but it it just is. There is
a lot of documentation about how it is harmful. And
I'm gonna quote from just one piece of this documentation,
an article in Pacific Standard magazine quote crime dramas There's
insistently ranked among the most watch shows by Nielsen Media.
According to the authors. What's more, as many as forty
percent of Americans believe that such shows are somewhat or

(02:12:08):
very true to real life. So to find out how
the simplistic portrayal of police officers on television might influence
public opinion of the profession, researchers from St. John Fisher
College and Wayne State University first had to analyze how
popular crime shows portray police work. The researchers also surveyed
a nationally representative sample of over two thousand Americans. They
found that those who watched crime shows view police as

(02:12:30):
better behaved, more successful at combating crime, and relatively responsible
in their use of force than those who don't. Yes,
if you want to know why there's so many back
the Blue folks. It's these shows that we all have,
some we enjoy, but they're part of the problem. You
may say. The one for me is first forty. Yeah,

(02:12:50):
that's the one that gets me the most because it
always takes place in like Memphis, in the deepest of
the Section eight projects, in the way that like, I know,
our people are portrayed where it's like, again, it's not
like crime don't exist, but this the way that you're
painting this is so basic, so binary, and so easy

(02:13:14):
that like I tried to watch it. I tried to
get into it because that had a friend that liked it.
So I tried to get into it, and I was like,
I can't, I can't. I can't even finish this. I
don't have anything else. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's like
it's just hurtful. It's really bad because you know, it's
not real, you know what I'm saying, But you're telling

(02:13:36):
me this is like a uh reality show, and it
means it's not real. And like, just given by how
few Americans have an experience with violent crime, and how
even how an even smaller chunk of those Americans actually
have the police do something about the thing that they suffer.
That's a tiny fraction of us. When people say what

(02:13:57):
about you know, and then they list their things that
we the police, for most of them aren't thinking about
a real thing that's happened to them, our friend. They're
thinking about something they saw on TV like that that
like like they wouldn't say that, but that's what's actually
going on. Um. Yes, yeah. The militarization of US police
started from a mix of fear over specific incidents of
shocking violence uh and and cruel calculus by soulless politicians.

(02:14:20):
But part of why it has been allowed to continue
for so long, and why American voters traditionally react very
negatively to the idea of cutting police funds, is that
decades of Hollywood depictions of law enforcement have convinced many
of us that the police are completely necessary to save
us from a constant, imminent threat of violence and barbarism.
The weight of pro cop cultural inertia is only increased

(02:14:41):
by the fact that a decent number of the seven
thousand cops in our country do useful in good things
from time to time, like that there are like most
cops on the force will have a period where that
even cops who are critical later will it will be
able to point to individual things they did that we're good. Um,
the question is not whether or not cops ever do
things that are good. It's whether or not it's the cost,
whether or not the benefits we gain from having police

(02:15:03):
Number one can be gained from something that's not the police,
and number two are worth the price of having police.
Hollywood has spent a lot of time and made a
lot of money showing us what we get from law
enforcement at its best, and again the statistics show that
they are lying about what we get from law enforcement.
So perhaps we should spend more time as a culture
thinking about what law enforcement costs us. And I think

(02:15:26):
my best way of doing this is always an anecdotal example.
You know, because we do talk about the statistics, we
talk about the broad problem. The broad The broad problem
is that a thousand people a year are killed by
US police, many of them in shady circumstances, many of them,
most of them without real investigations that are are open
to the public taking place, and that that number is
for example, more than die have died in every school

(02:15:48):
shooting in American history. Every year the police kill more
people than school shooters have ever killed. Like yeah, like
people like people flip out about a R fifteen. And
I'm not saying you're wrong to be scared heard or
frightened about the easy availability of air fifteens. Like four
hundred Americans every year are killed by long guns that
are air fifteens are similar weapons. The police kill a thousand.

(02:16:09):
You're not saying one's not not saying one's not a problem,
but like does it suck? Yeah, Well, if we're gonna
yeah anyway, it's it's an issue. Um. But I think
that when it comes to getting people to really emotionally
understand the cost of police, individual horrific anecdotes are are
the thing that drives it home to people. Um, and

(02:16:30):
that's certainly what the police do. Individual anecdotes of cops
doing good to talk about why we need them. So
we might as well respond in kind. And I'm going
to respond in kind by talking about something that happened
in Philadelphia in nineteen five, the move bombing. So have
you heard of the move bombing? I have, Yeah, Yeah,
I had a feeling. Yeah. Move was a strange organization

(02:16:53):
that we're not going to get into a lot of
detail about It was founded by a guy named John Africa,
and every member of move took on Africa as a surname.
They were not all black, actually, it was a mixed
race organization. There were hard to pin down ideologically, but
it would be fair to say that they expressed a
deep hatred of technology. Um They did some like protests
at zoos against animal cruelty, They ate natural diet. They're

(02:17:13):
They're like a hard group to pin down. They did
a lot of shouting into bullhorns though. Um So. The
organization briefly wound up squatting in Powellton Village in West Philly,
um and they kind of fortified a house they were
squatting in there, and they they've piste off a lot
of their neighbors by regularly brandishing firearms and shouting at
the neighborhood through a megaphone. They eventually were raided by
the Feds, who found a bunch of guns and pipe bombs.

(02:17:36):
Police barricaded several blocks around the compound and basically laid
siege to it for fifty six days. This all can
do ahead when the cops moved into forcibly evict them,
there was a gun battle and a cop was killed
while sixteen other officers and firefighters were injured. Eventually, the
MOVE people all surrendered and the cops beat the ever
loving ship out of one of them, a guy who
had not taken part in the gunfight but who had

(02:17:56):
been on the bullhorn heckling them. They just beat the
piss out of this it in broad daylight. Um Nine
of the members of Move were convicted of third degree
murder and sent to prison after this, so Move was
not taken out though as an organization continued. They moved
on and set up a new base on Osage Avenue,
which was a middle class black neighborhood that was doing

(02:18:16):
really well. It's kind of like a Black Wall Street situation, right,
Like Osage Avenue is like doing well, and Move moves
in and they were out there welcome pretty quickly because
they again turned their house into a fortified bunker, like
they build a literal bunker on top. They yelled at
a lot of people through bullhorns. They're not physically harming people,
but they're like kind of annoying people, and like people
in the neighborhood don't know what to do, but called

(02:18:38):
the city and the city calls the police, and the
police do what the police do, which is escalate the
situation into another siege. In May, uh, Philadelphia brings in
five dred militarized officers armed with flak jacket, swat gear,
fifty caliber machine guns, and an anti tank rifle. The
cops move in to serve arrest warrants on folks that
they believe we're living in the compound, and they estimated

(02:19:00):
six adults and twelve children were inside. The movers opened
fire on these militarized police, and the police responded with
just an insane torrent of wild gun fire, pouring ten
thousand rounds into the building in ninety minutes. Now, thankfully,
the police had evacuated most of the neighborhood, telling everyone
they'd be able to come back home quickly. But they're

(02:19:21):
just firing wildly into the neighborhood. Swat team's next try
blowing holes in the sides of the building, but nothing
worked to breach the compound because the move folks had
really done a good job before. Yeah, they were good
at this ship. Um. The police began lobbying Mayor good,
the first black mayor of Philadelphia, for the go ahead
to drop a bomb they built on the compound, and
after hours of ferocious gunfire, the mayor agreed. The police

(02:19:45):
dropped a bomb on this building in Philadelphia, an Osage Avenue,
and it fails to crack the bunker that Move had
built atop their house, and it doesn't in the stalemate,
but it did start a fire that spread very quickly
to the roofs of other homes clustered around the Move building.
The police commissioner ordered firefighters to stand down, later telling

(02:20:06):
the city commission I communicated that I would like to
let the fire burn. In forty five minutes, three more
homes on the black were burning. Then the roof of
the Move house collapsed. The police did not allow firefighters
in until more than ninety minutes had passed and the
entire north side of Osage Avenue was burning. I'm gonna
quote now from an NPR article on what happened next.

(02:20:26):
Philadelphia streets are famously narrow, which made it easy for
the fire to leap from burning trees on the north
side to even more homes on the south side. From there,
the flames spilled over to the homes behind six two
to one Ossage to Pine Street. By evening three rows
of homes were completely on fire, a conflagration so large
that the flames could be seen from planes landing at
Philadelphia International Airport more than six miles away. The smoke

(02:20:48):
was visible across the city. By the time firefighters brought
the fire under control a little before midnight, sixty houses
on the once tidy block had been completely destroyed. Two
and fifty people were suddenly shockingly without homes. It was
the worst residential fire in the city's history. In the end,
eleven people died in that fire on Osage Avenue, including
five children. Weeks passed before the police were able to

(02:21:10):
identify their remains. This is what I mean when I'm
talking about Sorry, Yeah, I was like, this is the
story I was referring to in the first episode about
like a bomb being dropped on Americans. It turns out
that's a long Yeah, there's a lot of parallels between
this and Tulsa. But you know Tulsa, it was a
mob of random citizens. The move bombing was was mostly

(02:21:32):
white police um and the organization moved. That was part
of what I'm talking about. Counting the cost here move
was a problem. They caused real issues for their neighbors.
And their neighbors problems should not be discounted. Like they
they they their neighbors had a serious issue with these
people that needed to be dealt with, and they called
the city to help them deal with it, and the

(02:21:52):
city brought the police. In any any reasonable society would
have need to have a way to deal something with
like a bunch of people fortifying a building in a
neighborhood and shouting at everyone in a bullhorn until they
can't sleep. That's a problem. That's a problem that merits
a solution. The solution the police brought to this problem
was to burn down the entire neighborhood. Yeah, that's not

(02:22:16):
that didn't need to happen. You didn't have to do that. Yeah,
this there there were ways to deal with these people,
because again, the members of Move never went out murdering
people at random. That was not what they did. They
they they're problematics and they were annoying, and yeah, they
weren't just killing strangers. That police did that. Yeah, the

(02:22:40):
Philadelphia police did succeed in dealing with the issue of
the Move organization. They did not harangue neighbors on loudspeakers
anymore after this, and whatever possibly illegal weapons they may
have had on the property were incinerated, along with sixties
something black homes and businesses. You could argue that some
problems of law and order were solved by bombing the
move compound. Question is like was the price worth it?

(02:23:02):
And that's broadly the question we need to be asking
and answering about our police. Is the cost worth it? Guys?
You know what would wipe out your COVID nineteen? You
could drink the bleach. You're right, it will end it.
I'm like, you will die. Yeah. Did you ever listen

(02:23:23):
to Chris Christofferson prop? Yeah? Yeah. Do you ever listen
to a song The Laws for Protection of the People? No?
It you'd like that song. It's a good example of
like early country, you know, now country, there's like a
lot of popular country is like very kind of reflectively patriotic,
PROCP pre military. Old country was like it was like

(02:23:44):
punk music but played differently, right um, And Chris Christofferson
embodies that in a lot of ways. And The Law
Is for Protection of the People is a song about cops,
and it's like they're like the first verses about like
a drunk guy that like falls down drunk on the
sidewalk and the six squad cars come streaming to the
rescue to haul him off to jail. And the refrain
of the song is because the laws for protection of

(02:24:06):
the people rules or rules, and anyone can see we
don't need no drunks like Billy Dalton is the name
of the drunk scaring decent folks like you and me.
And the second verses about a hippie who like a
bunch of brave cops come surround and like beat down
and shave his head forcibly, and you know there's another
version of that refrain, and then the last verse is,

(02:24:27):
um uh so, thank your lucky stars, you've got protection,
walk the line and never mind the cost. Don't think
of who them lawman was protecting when they nailed the
Savior to the cross. But Chris, Chris Stofferson, bring it

(02:24:48):
at home, Yeah, bring it at home. Hey, you know
what pressus Savior? Crooked justice system? Awesome, awesome trumped up charges. Yep,
So my into the cost is I guess the end
message I want to have for this podcast? Yes, like
this was the Lord's work. Robert whatever you what if

(02:25:11):
you wind up agreeing with us or not about what
should be done with the police. When you think about
what should be done with the police, think about what
the price you're paying for them is, and ask is
it worth it? Yes? Do you protect your children by
strapping them to their bed and barbed buying the door?

(02:25:33):
Or do you protect your children by loving them and
caring for them and teaching them better ways to take
care of themselves and their felling neighbors? Yeah? Yeah, And
it's people get aspects of this, Like people get aspects
of this when like folks who are pro gun talk
to liberals about like, oh, you know, people should defend
themselves and like always carry a gun, and a lot

(02:25:55):
of liberals will like rightly point out, like it sounds
like a miserable world if everyone has to have a
gun at them at all times. I don't. I don't
like that vision of the world. But it's like, but
do you support their being police who always have a
shipload of weapons on them, who walk around with like
five different weapons that are potentially lethal on their belt
at any given time, Like that's part of it. I agree,

(02:26:17):
it's better if there aren't a ton of weapons all
over the place, all of the time in the public sphere. Um, yeah,
let's deal with that problem, and let's recognize that it
really starts with police in our society. UM, let's just
be honest. Yeah everybody, yep, yeah, that was a lot

(02:26:41):
of words. There was a lot of works. Yes, and
my facts. Do care about your feelings, props. So how
are you feeling? Man? That was great? I like that,
Thank you. I am feeling disgusting. Uh, I'm a little tired,
but I'm also in little hopeful because of the response

(02:27:02):
we've been getting from this pod. Good, very hopeful. Yeah, yeah,
it has been a great response. It's good to be hopeful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man,
be hopeful. Defund to the man. Um, there's better ideas.

(02:27:23):
We can we can come up with a better idea, guys, Yeah,
we can, we can, we can, we can. We can
come up with so many better ideas. UM, for example,
what if we just what if we were placed all
of our cops with like, you know, those dogs that
they have in the mountains somewhere in Europe that have
liquor around their necks. Those are rad. Let's try that.

(02:27:45):
Let's just fill the streets with those dogs. Those are
so rad it'll work. Maybe. Yeah, if if if A,
if A husky walked up with up to me and
have whiskey on his neck. I would be like, this
is the coolest husky I've ever met in my life.
I will stop whatever crime I'm doing because I just

(02:28:07):
want to see this dog with whiskey. Yeah, and like
a bunch of huge, well trained dogs everywhere, probably gonna
stop more rapes than the cops, I'll tell you what,
because everybody scared it dogs except for Sophie. Except for Sophie. Yeah,
well well jinks ye oh blood time. Yeah. I kind

(02:28:31):
of do that. Yeah, profit pop dot com where I
don't sell weapons. Um, that's good. Good. I challenge you
to think of better ways to organize the world. And
I sell coffee stuff. Um. I do music and poetry
and that's all of the things are at prop hip
hop dot com. And I do not sell weapons yet,

(02:28:54):
but when I moved to my compound in Ohio, I'll
start legally manufacturing sought off shotguns so that the the
the A t F will will finally raid me. Um
you know that's the that was a that was a
ruby ridge. Think. Yeah, I actually really think you gotta
market there, I do, I do. You could start branding
some weapons yeah, Uncle Robert's legal homemade shotguns. Yes, I

(02:29:20):
just couldn't into something. I couldn't repeatedly Waco in this
episode without dropping a Ruby Ridge in there. Um, So
it's not fair, that's no. And it's not fair that
we talked about Waco all the time but not the
move bombing, because like they're both cases of like out
of control militarized police burning children to death. Yeah yeah,
yeah because those black people. Yeah, it's sucked up. Yeah

(02:29:40):
yeah yeah. Find a way to make the move bombing
Waco again. I don't know what the that's not a
good moral. Um, they need a Netflix series where they
hire a sexy guy to be John Africa. Yeah yeah,
they could play like do it or something. Yeah yeah,
I haven't. Haven't have a Blue s concert. Is there

(02:30:03):
being bombed? Just throw that in there for no reason, unnecessary.
That was the wildest thing about the Waco show was like, Okay,
so you guys are just you guys just turning David
Koresh into a rock star. Alright, Like what that's a stance.
Yeah yeah, And now I want to see the fucking

(02:30:23):
I want to see them like do a Jim Jones
mini series. He turned him into like a stand up comedian.
He's just hilarious. That's what we all go. Yeah, we
we cast David Chappelle's Jim Jones. Fuck it, No one
gives a ship where Netflix? Oh lord, alright podcast is out.

(02:30:48):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Behind the Police: How The Police Declared War On All Of Us