How The Police Declared War On All Of Us

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio.
The Corps Are Problem Problems. I'm Robert Evans. This is
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 six episode mini series Behind

(00:25):
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
Jason Petty, better known as the hip hop artist propaganda. Jason,
how are you doing? What's up? I'm breathing thin air

(00:47):
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.
He yeah, 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,

(01:09):
um how how how the police are nowadays? I assume
everybody's happy with them, yeah, or they're sticking to brand. Yeah,
so 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,

(01:31):
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
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

(01:52):
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 violence against them.
We're not going to talk about the Green movement and
the suppression of that, um, just because I already wrote
sixteen pages for today. Yeah, so we're gonna we're gonna
talk about what I think is the right last subject

(02:15):
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 militarization of American police. UM. Yes,
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 a

(02:39):
piled on history that emotionally and psychologically all of us
who have lived through it like, no, it's there. But
good god, if 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

(03:00):
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, 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,

(03:20):
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 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

(03:40):
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 about use that term today, militarized police, they're generally
referring to equipment. Right the transition of cops the friendly

(04:00):
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 are fifteen. And 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

(04:23):
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. You know,
somebody can get their brain around that. Like we say
there's a problem with militarization. You could go, yeah, logically speaking,

(04:45):
I am not an enemy and surgeon, so I don't
understand what the grenade launcher for. Yeah, I didn't an
y yeah, yeah, you didn't used to on a daily basis.
See dudes in like the middle of Los Angeles who
looked like they could have walked out of downtown, right,
and now you do, um yeah, yeah, Camo, Like, how

(05:09):
is it? What do you expect to happen in the Yeah,
the fucking I was at a cop right the other day,
were like there were like a bunch of rapid 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

(05:30):
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, get
some really tight jeans and a flannel shirt. If you
want a camouflage into Portland, like 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

(05:54):
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 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

(06:14):
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 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, show,
so did the Germans, um, and so did the United States.
But since we didn't have the as as extensive and

(06:36):
overseas empire as as those European nations did, a lot
of our colonial policing forces were 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

(06:57):
talking about the Rangers today, baby, not the not the
not the sports team there, broadly George Bushy's team. Yeah,
they're whatever we're talking about. What working about the sport
or 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, no no no, it's Texas. So he knows that answer. Yes, yeah.

(07:22):
So I used to tease my Texas own boys to
be like, I know, y'all go to the Alamo every year,
and I was like, at my 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 every year, like y'all lost. Anyway,
go on, So the Range, speaking of the Alamo and such,

(07:42):
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, 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 and native tribes, the Cherokee and the Comanche primarily,

(08:02):
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 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

(08:22):
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 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

(08:45):
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 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 tents, of course, it's like, uh, there's a

(09:06):
lot of like bigger forces of like colonialism and frontiersm
and all these things happening, but just the human interaction
of saying, you're just waking up, gonna make a cup
of coffee, step out of your house and someone's building
a house in your lawn. Yeah, and they looked at
you like you crazy. It's just like yeah, what what

(09:27):
like what do you what are you doing? Man? What
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
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

(09:49):
them out of it, uh, and so they wound up
kind of in you know, the the Broad Texas region,
and then we were like okay, but not here either
like it was it was the to 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

(10:12):
like indigenous peoples. It became very common for white men
to raid cattle from Mexican ranches, uh, and then the
Mexicans would steal 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 like raids to retrieve property like
cattle they had owned and had been stolen from them

(10:33):
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 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

(10:58):
the frontier um. And over the course of several decades,
the Texas Rangers acted 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

(11:20):
of conflicts that crossed the line and too outrighte ethnic
cleansing on a 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

(11:41):
camp and opened fire. When their rifles ran out of ammunition,
they closed in with pistols to execute the survivors. Some
hundred and forty Comanches 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. And it was also a
pretty such a fundamentally military endeavor. UM. But as the

(12:03):
and that's that's generally when you're we're 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 move into a different part
of the country. But like when you get into like

(12:24):
the Little Big Horn and General 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 discover gold in the

(12:45):
Black Hills and now you want our land again and
yeah yeah, so just it's like obviously 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

(13:09):
cleansing from what I know from the 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's that's part
of I guess why we haven't kind of gone into
that aspect as much, um and one of one of

(13:31):
the just because like it's it's less 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 as as 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

(13:52):
broadly similar to the U. S. Marshals like today, 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

(14:12):
still exist. They go from being like okay, not 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.

(14:32):
There's a statue of like a dude, a cowboy looking
dude with a six gun on his hip. That's like
a statue of the Texas Rangers. And I think it's
like the words written on under 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

(14:54):
a military guerrilla warfare unit to being 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 watched the movie US marshals
with Robert Downey Jr. And uh and Tommy Lee Jones.

(15:16):
And I think that's a hundred percent right. Um. Yeah.
I was like, so this is unnecessary. Your whole job
is unnecessary, Okay, go 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,

(15:36):
Texas Rangers gunned down fifteen unarmed Mexican people and drove
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. They do like
really big 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

(15:58):
of Texas Ranger violence against mex Sickens to have occurred
from nineteen 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

(16:21):
a CP agenda. In short, he used 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

(16:45):
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. Have said violence aided and embedded,
if not directly perpetrated by the Rangers with the state
official state consent, Powerful US political elites like Hobby made

(17:07):
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, both two

(17:28):
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 to Mexico to really be

(17:49):
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 and racests who lived many hundreds
of miles away. So the Texas Rangers were sent in
to secure the border, and this was like the first

(18:10):
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 own 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

(18:31):
to state 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.

(18:51):
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.

(19:13):
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 Yeah,
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.

(19:34):
Uh 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 Fatali, 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,

(19:56):
and arresting and brutalizing picketers and union leaders. There were
also frequent they 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

(20:17):
what that statue in love Field is referring to when
it says one Ranger, one riot, that's the riot is
the is is Mexicans being like, what if we had
the right to vote in Texas? Ranger's 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

(20:40):
where you never moved, your house, never moved, it's just
the land up under you became Texas and then everybody
acting like you ain't puposed 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, you're the new guys. Yeah, it's

(21:03):
just the mind 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 Tahanos 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

(21:25):
of a 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 ta
Haanos 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

(21:48):
or even great, 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 murder or as
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 investigate officer involved shootings, and

(22:09):
of course they do border security UM. 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, in which

(22:32):
Chuck Norris assume because 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 bad
join Us chest that people are like, ah, they're okay.
Now punched a bear. Look at at me? Punched a bear. Yeah,

(22:54):
he's got to be a good guy. Uh 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 encapsulated a lot of law enforcement

(23:15):
history in this country. That is the most acinct sentence.
Is the most scinct sentence we've done this whole series. Yeah,
they protested all six they participated in at least two genocides.
But then Chuck Norris started kicking all right, spinning roundhouse kid. Uh.

(23:35):
Also also as a 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 case, so is terrible. Oh no,
that's the only thing I'll fight for about Texas is
text Max. Hey, man, Hey, I'll take your fajitas. They're great,

(23:59):
but you can lead a case fucking Calimex putting fish
in everything. Come on, 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. You know,
they're not They're not burritos. Somebody put Keen Waw in
one of them. I was just you, what are you? Yeah,

(24:23):
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
is called like the professional model of policing, of like

(24:44):
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 fessional at um. He focused on the number one
their ability to kind of scientifically solve crimes um and

(25:06):
their ability to interface with and be parts of communities. Um.
And these are both still things. Yeah, broadly, there's still problematic.
One of the things we won't get into enough is
that 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, like
like there's a lot of problems with that. And there's
also people who argue that community policing doesn't like is

(25:28):
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,
you gotta like scientifically solve these crimes and that everything

(25:48):
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 all. Yeah, it's
really well it. Yeah. Volmer is the guy who advocates
for like sexy, brilliant um doctor cops who like, yeah, yeah, exactly,

(26:10):
that's that's that's kind of his vision. 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 Volmer'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,

(26:32):
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
devin stating series of economic recessions and depressions. Um the

(26:53):
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

(27:16):
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

(27:38):
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

(27:58):
kind of a rejection of where party politics had led
things in the Gilded Age. That's a factor in this too.
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

(28:20):
achewed political parties in favor of local informal organizations like
the Anti Saloon League. And as that last bit, Mike KEYU,
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 mix

(28:42):
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 it.
So like George Bush seen you're talking about climate change,

(29:02):
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.

(29:23):
That's 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,

(29:44):
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, it's like, okay, well,
let's figure out the root causes of homelessness and Proverty point,
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

(30:07):
has 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. Let's remember yes, um, yeah,

(30:28):
So have you ever read Justice by um Michael Sandow?
Oh 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 it is important to know,
like what he talked about, what the basic premises, like

(30:48):
you're what you see as just, um, and how you
define what justice is? If 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

(31:08):
people see the most amount of flourishing you're probably gonna
lean more liberal and progressive. Right. Uh, if 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,

(31:30):
you don't get to tell me how to do things.
But if you're like, justice means there is a right
way to do stuff, 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

(31:52):
make a just society? But their solution was, well, you know,
brown people suck, so they shouldn't have the more children. Yeah. Yeah,
it's complex, complex period to talk about um and yeah,
so yeah, you know what doesn't support eugenics prop Well,

(32:14):
hopefully the products and services that yeah advertise on this place.
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. Yeah. Have you ever measured a brain? Yeah?
Do you do? You take skull measurements? Yes? Um, all right,

(32:38):
here's some ads. We're back, We're back, And I just
I hope to god that was not an ad for
a company that sells calibers. Um, tell me you're not
selling calibers. Yeah, yeah, Sophie, I mean, these calibers are
just off with the promo code. Bastards. On a personal note,

(33:02):
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, it's a funny moment anyway. So um,

(33:24):
all right, So we were 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 of talking about the genesis of a
lot of progressive thought. So she's talking about progressives here.

(33:46):
As the city's grew, many of them began to yearn
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 town still existed throughout the country, Progressives bemoan the
fact that these traits could not be transferred to urban living. Actually,
many of these traits could be found in urban immigrant neighborhoods,
but progressives could not transfer their idealized image of small

(34:08):
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.
So dear to the progressives, hearts. So they they're they're big,
family oriented people, but the actual like the people who

(34:32):
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.
But it didn't go well, and the first two years
of prohibition saw overall crime increase by twenty four percent nationwide.

(34:52):
This included a thirteen percent increase in homicide and at
increase in assault and battery. Most of this violence was
driven by the in worsemen of prohibition. One study that
compared South Carolina counties that did and did not enforce
prohibition found that enforcement led to a thirty to sixt
increase in homicides. Yeah, a lot of people get killed

(35:13):
when you prohibit drugs arbitrarily. It turns out this is
a 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 there was really no scientific
reasoning behind prohibition, just snop political power. People just didn't

(35:34):
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 recognize that prohibition was
maybe a bad idea. A lot of them started pushing
hard to use state power to put an end to
bootlegging in an organized fashion, and this is what led

(35:54):
to the first major challenge to August Vollmer'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, there
was substantial overlap between the professional and military models, and
that both insisted that the police be autonomous, be subject

(36:14):
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 these adversaries,
the uniformed branch of the police and the detectives the
non uniformed branch, were equated to different services of the military.

(36:38):
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 military men to run their departments,
and Jason, one of these military men, 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 J. L.

(37:00):
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 of Philadelphia elected Freeland Kendrick
mayor on a law and order platform. Kendrick, a Republican,

(37:22):
was livid that his city had more speakeasies than perhaps
any other area in the country. The city of Brotherly
Love had estimated eight thousands of legal bars in liquor
stores in nineteen because it's Philly. You know, it's fucking Philly, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Philly is always on brand, So yes. Mark Kendrick decided
that a military man and a military model were needed

(37:44):
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
a special like leave from the Marine courts so that
he could go be the director of public safety in Philadelphia. UM.

(38:04):
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.
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

(38:28):
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. Like he had
a lot of nicknames. Fighting Quaker, Yeah, that's a that's
a good nickname. That's a tattoo bro y, and he
gets the nickname waker. Like old duckboards are like wood

(38:49):
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 there 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, 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

(39:11):
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 their
British to the French equivalent, like he's he's he's not
just like an officer who like commands troops in battle
from like a safe position like like Smedley Butler, whatever

(39:32):
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, does you
know any kids like that when you were like in
Texas growing 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,

(39:54):
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 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

(40:16):
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.
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 attitudes like that, And that's such

(40:39):
a military 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 act of crime is an act
against the state. Therefore you are no longer a citizen.
You are now an enemy combatant. I've never heard that

(41:00):
train of logic because I never understood how if you're policeman,
how you like, who are you fighting? Like you're fighting
the people you're supposed to protect? Like, I don't get it.
That sentence finally at least made me be 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

(41:20):
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 the dangerous classes, right, um,
and this like primarily black and brown people. In this
period of time, what we start to see happening with
the militarization of the Philadelphia police is kind of the

(41:41):
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,
they they this is the first time like the police
like again, and the police in the twenties are heavily

(42:03):
corrupt and a lot of them are criminals, but they're
not is an organized force. They're not going to war
with the city. This is the first time that really
happens that 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 had designed for himself, complete with a cape,
which is a flex like yeah, yeah, if you got

(42:26):
if you got that many medals on the from multiple countries,
you could 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
the Marines he'd spent years commanding in battle, and that's
what he planned to turn them into. So Butler launched

(42:46):
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 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

(43:09):
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 August Volmer. When it educated professionals with
like degrees in criminal justice, who like approached crime from
a scientific standpoint, General Butler thought that was bullshit. He

(43:30):
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 was just like, you'll figure
it out once you're on the street. When you talk
about binary thinking, yeah, you either a get trained for

(43:54):
three months or be get a little pamphlet. Get a
little pamphlet it, Yeah, go crack some heads. You'll learn quick.
You'll figure it out, Like there, maybe they're somewhere in
between there, maybe we could pull a little bit of
his little bit of that. Just those my two options, yep,
and it's it's like so, the one thing that's interesting

(44:18):
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 was in the use of firearms. Um.
He had realized early on that most cops barely knew
how to use their weapons, and even 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.

(44:42):
He also, rather bafflingly, decided to arm the fire department
with forty five caliber revolvers, 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, you're all auxiliary cops, and you need

(45:02):
to carry guns in case you have to shoot some people. Basically,
he viewed all public safety employees as 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

(45:22):
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 or on his
body while he was being chased, that was fair game
for the Philadelphia p D. From Professor Lichtmann's paper quote.
Butler took this further and stated that like soldiers, those

(45:43):
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 between the role
of the soldier and that of a police officer. That's bad. Yeah,
it's not great, I mean, and we we wound up

(46:04):
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 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

(46:27):
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 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

(46:47):
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
into living in the city 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.

(47:12):
Just what do you like? This is a sawt off shotguns,
not accurate and more than like fifteen feet in a
good situation, and you're just shooting it from a car
moving one at that It's fucking nuts. Yeah, yeah, fuck it?

(47:32):
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, not
like he'd basically be unaccountable. And they were like, shure, yeah,
that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of wars. I

(47:54):
for the first time, uh, in a little personal news,
Oh yeah, I have shot big. This is my first
positive experience with 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

(48:17):
really real thoughts, which is, you must anyone holding these
has to have a deep 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,

(48:39):
what has to click off in your brain to be
able to point this at another human, like even recklessly
or with joy or 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 held held to a R

(49:02):
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. I was a redneck. I'm not
gonna lie. I went, WHOA, 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.

(49:22):
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 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,

(49:47):
And that's what I'm saying, Like, you still have all
your faculties. I believe you're a fully developed human. So
you thought to yourself, there is a cost to this,
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 and just say, shoot wildly into the city, Yes,

(50:14):
to stop people with 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

(50:36):
up 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 operating bases 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 he divided Philly up for his police force. Um,

(51:00):
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 lights to broadcast blink codes to officers about what

(51:20):
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
searchlights and like a big basically fucking billboard set up

(51:44):
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 brother shiit Smedley's tactics were very successful in closing
down a huge number of philip Alfhia speakeasies, but they
were not successful and actually winning the war for prohibition.

(52:05):
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 of the wealthy any differently than hole in the
wall slum speakeasies, and this caused increasing problems for the

(52:27):
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
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 and informed that them that

(52:49):
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
them against public opinion. What he learned was what many
occupying armies learned. It is often the oppressed that prevail culturally.

(53:10):
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,
and regular citizens had their own bathroom stills. Most Philadelphians
did not want prohibition and did everything in their power

(53:31):
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
you hold onto power, even with ridiculous laws, you're gonna

(53:52):
have to use violence, and people are going to turn
against you because it's stupid. Yes, it's it's stupid. And
and it'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,
we almost always loose. Yeah, like we don't have a

(54:13):
great batting record when it got 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 U. S.
Military is incredible at combat training, at like training people

(54:34):
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,
no fucking competition in their ability to train people to

(54:57):
fight and gunfights. Yeah, historically speak 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
the other ship. And that's what Butler fails at um

(55:17):
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
widely used intoxicant. Now, during this period, a number of

(55:38):
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 Mattellas Funkhauser in Chicago,
one of the best names I've ever heard. Yeah, so
this is something we try. We try militarized police during

(55:59):
Prohibition 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
kind of ship that Bonnie and Clyde and you know

(56:20):
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
nineteen sixties, the story of the US police was the

(56:41):
story of growing professionalism and centralization. This was obviously an
uneven an imperfect process, but most Americans 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 in putting an into lynching as a
widespread phenomenon. Now, as we talked about that was not
did not actually happen the way that it was into.

(57:03):
But you gotta think about how like white people at
the time, when oh, people aren't getting lunched anymore, we
fixed it. Yeah, you know people. Yeah, it's like disive
occasion where it's like, well, crime dropped, yeah yeah, where yeah. Yeah.
So in nineteen fifty four, the TV show Dragnet first
hit the airwaves, and Dragnet was probably the first TV
show about modern law enforcement that or I think it

(57:26):
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. He was he was Officer Friday UM
and he partnered with the l a p D from

(57:47):
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 when 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 real cops to use his extras
on the show. All this saved the network just a fortune. Um.

(58:10):
The only cost was that Dragonette 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 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

(58:33):
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. There were very few instances
of cops 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

(58:56):
on dragnet Um and the show helped shape a generate
sation's attitudes towards law enforcement, portraying the ideal scientific, professionalized,
vulmer police working almost flawlessly. Right, the police are just
the facts, is Friday's right? Yeah, I was gonna the
fact Dragnet is the showing like the ideal of the

(59:17):
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 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

(59:39):
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 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

(01:00:00):
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.
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 sicking dogs

(01:00:22):
on folks. Yes, yeah, that that didn't make it into
dragnet so and most of the protests. Many of the
protests and what we're called riots during this period were
sparked one way or another by police brutality. The police
tear gassed masses of young activists at the nineteen six
Chicago DNC and from sixty seven to sixty eight there

(01:00:43):
were two hundred and 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 of those students at Kent State had
very significantly reduced public up union of law enforcement. Probably
it's lowest EBB up till the present moment. Like my

(01:01:05):
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 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

(01:01:26):
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 pissed at law enforcement in this period
of time. 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 and Safe Streets Act, which,

(01:01:50):
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,
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

(01:02:11):
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
nineteen seventy. And the years that Dragnet comes back is
not There's no coincidence there, right, Yeah, So propaganda did

(01:02:32):
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
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
when we start to see the hollowing out of this

(01:02:54):
middle class and of like these good union jobs that
had persisted for decades since the end of the war
and the seventy is this all falls to ship. Um,
you start getting eaten alive economically by like Japan and
other countries, and it's 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

(01:03:16):
necessity of services. Yeah you know what services won't be cut?
Yeah that was good. You know, who doesn't hollow out
the American middle class? Actually who hollows out there will? Yeah? Yeah,
there we go, brod services, We're back, so um police

(01:03:47):
departments in this period, you know, budgets get cut, municipal
workers get cut, and a lot of the blame, like
as these cities who in a lot of cases like
their budgets got fucked not just because the economy was
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 gass cuts and out of necessity because their budgets

(01:04:08):
are being trimmed. UM police departments nationwide embark on a
process called tailorization, which is tailorization had doesn't just happen
to the police. It's 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

(01:04:30):
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 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

(01:04:52):
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 that becomes even more
powerful an 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

(01:05:15):
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 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

(01:05:37):
really like living underneath them. And as a rule, our
government responded to that by pouring money into training foreign
police to murder dissidents, because that works a lot better
than training the army in a lot of cases. Um. 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

(01:05:59):
racked by conflict due to the Cold war. These nations
included South Vietnam, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. Tens
of thousands of people were tortured or killed by various
police departments, who received over two million dollars in US
aid for firearm and equipment. And I'm gonna quote now
from an article in the Age before you get there.
There's there's one that's off the papers, which I know

(01:06:20):
you haven't done an episode on, but like there's there's
the Nicaragua one that both they wasn't supposed to be
spending money on, which is the B line. Y'all. Look, look,
I'm excited, but I don't want to remove I don't
want to ruin the reveal. But what he taught about
right now leads directly to the crack attack and the
war on drugs. But yeah, and I hope we're gonna

(01:06:40):
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, 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 what a what
A car pulled up with the sirens at my elementary

(01:07:02):
school to try to convince me that this cop is cool.
You don't say it, yeah, but yeah. Anyway, we were
paying for wars and we got 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.

(01:07:26):
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 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

(01:07:48):
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 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

(01:08:09):
insurgency efforts, and particularly useful in fighting urban insurrections. We
get more from the police in 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

(01:08:32):
called in. So again, that's that's the police. The police
are especially as Vietnam goes badly 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

(01:08:53):
is doing to other police agencies, as our police agencies,
you know, pull back from the militarization of the twenties
and thirties and towards professionalism. We we push militarization in
a lot of ways outside of the United States, some
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

(01:09:14):
South Vietnam is no longer a country and why Iran
does not have a shot anymore. Um, 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. 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

(01:09:36):
a take a take a slice from like the hood
politics way a way of thinking things, 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

(01:09:59):
eighth grade. So like you, you're you and this you
and this other boy or girl are beefing, but y'all
never actually fight. You just keep bringing other kids around
the fight. So by and I'm proving my side of
the playground is better because this kid from who I

(01:10:19):
propped up and trained and gave a rock through at
another kid who's got a 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 I fight this fight, so I'm
gonna let you fight it. Really, that's the Cold War

(01:10:40):
is you're you're going, I'm gonna go get my little
homeboy to funk up yo, 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

(01:11:00):
agencies to act as yeah, counter insurgery. Yeah, our little
homeboys to act as counterinsurgency forces. Uh And when 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

(01:11:23):
policing quote. Many of the trainers moved in large numbers
into law enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Agency FBI and
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 counter intelligence, militarized riot suppression techniques,
and heavy handed crime control. Now in the middle of

(01:11:45):
this period, like right before that office closes, really like
in nineteen seventy one, so a couple of years before,
we stopped training the police, you know, foreign police in
this kind of organized way. Uh, not that we stop entirely,
but like the way we had been, you know, we're
even less of it. A night teen seventy one, Richard
Millhouse Nixon declared drug abuse public Enemy number one. Soon

(01:12:05):
after that declaration, US press began to discuss a new
war on drugs. Now, this war was launched just as
the 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

(01:12:28):
people were furious about segregation, and they were pushing back
at the success of desegregation. Um, they considered civil rights
marchers to have been just looters and rioters. But the
week 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

(01:12:49):
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
the Republican Party in 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, inner
city communities across America. And of course, again we're talking

(01:13:11):
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 predictor of crime, particularly property crime. It's poverty. So yeah,
and and we're there's even like a a tie to
that moment now of how changing the language from we

(01:13:37):
just hate black people too. We're having a war on drugs. Um,
we're the fact that we call weed marijuana. It's just
it's just the 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

(01:13:59):
to it by Spanish name, now it seems more evil.
It was just it was a racist marketing that we
call cannabis marijuana. Just and that's Nixon. I just want
John note Nixon did debt anyway. Yeah, yeah, um so yeah.
The backlash against the success of the civil rights movement

(01:14:20):
reaches its height kind of just as unemployment in the
inner city peaks and the consequences of the industrialization and
globalization hit the US economy, so 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

(01:14:41):
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 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 nineteen yeah, exactly.

(01:15:03):
In nineteen eight 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
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

(01:15:24):
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 over
seas 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

(01:15:45):
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
a different in a military model pretty similar to the
one that General Butler proposed to defeat Bootleg in Philadelphia. UM.
This process was not smooth or uniform, and it was

(01:16:05):
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 criminally short story of the Watts Rebellion is this,
a black motorist was was pulled over, um and like
there was a confrontation began with the police. Conmmunity members

(01:16:25):
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 boils over
and like acts as a match stick. So like obviously
the l A p d had been hideously racist for

(01:16:45):
a long time. One of the things that happens when
Jim crow Win's is that the police chief of l
A starts deliberately 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, will let you
beat the ship out of black people making this stuff up.
I couldn't. I thought we brought this up before and
one of the older episodes we didn't get into it,

(01:17:07):
or we didn't get into it though. Yeah, did I
tell you all my watch riot story? No? No, no,
please do. This is a good time for it. Yeah. Yeah,
it's a good time for it. So it was during
the La Riots. Is how my story starts. Um, my grandmother,
you know l A Rites was you know Florence and Normandy. Right.
Grandmother lived off Florence Engage, so it's just a few

(01:17:27):
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 of South Central. And my grandmother says, if
I'm lying, I'm flying. She says, baby, unless there's tanks

(01:17:52):
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 but my parents looked at each other and
I was like, tanks, she's hard they go. She lived
in the Watts Riots, and like history came alive. There's like, yo,

(01:18:12):
she she lived through the Wats Riots. That's what she's
referring to. Tanks came down our streets. I was like, oh,
because I thought the La Riots was the end of
the world, you know 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 was like, no, baby,
tanks come down these streets anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And that's

(01:18:33):
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 l A p D. An
other thing that's happening is like the lap is also separately,
but but at the same time horrifically suppressing the the
Chicano Liberation movement, which is like the like Mexicans and
Latinos in l a UM and like at one point

(01:18:54):
murders a journalist who's like drinking at a bar by
shooting him in the back of the head with a
tear gas grenade. Hunter Thompson actually 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,
happened in my neighborhood. I live in Boile Heights, like ship,
Oh yeah, that happened neighborhood. Yeah yeah, Ruben Salazar and

(01:19:15):
like so if you like Fear and Loathing 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 Costa, 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

(01:19:37):
the l a p d Was doing 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

(01:20:00):
um into into anger at the 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

(01:20:23):
riots is what most history text will 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

(01:20:43):
on television and compares what's happening and Watts to 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 that
the l a p d was quote dealing with guerillas
fighting with gangsters. Um, the National Guard are called in
and the uprising was brutally suppressed. And you know, generally

(01:21:06):
when 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

(01:21:28):
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

(01:21:52):
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

(01:22:13):
weapons and tactical teams in order to deal with such threats.
The reality is that like the fucking no no, no
no cops even got killed by by 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

(01:22:35):
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

(01:22:55):
around the country into all adopting a lot more paramility
Harry 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 major inciting incident for the creation

(01:23:17):
of 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

(01:23:37):
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

(01:23:58):
formed and exist to handle ex 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 that, 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

(01:24:20):
of two that does, and in Maryland, 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

(01:24:42):
is the only other state that requires police agencies to
report on SWAT deployment, and the first batch of numbers
that they released in two thousand thirteen showed that eighty
three percent of their SWAT 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 and fifty nine raids.

(01:25:05):
Half a percent turned up illegal firearms. Now half I
bring all this half a 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

(01:25:27):
are heavily armed. That that's that's that 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 listening to this podcast
name a mass shooter who's been stopped by a squat team.
I'm gonna guess not that it hasn't happened. If you did,

(01:25:48):
you can find 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't think about the Virginia

(01:26:10):
Tech shooting. We're 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

(01:26:31):
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
had done that, But we ought installed 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

(01:26:52):
trained for that. Yeah, 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

(01:27:15):
are you doing. She's 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? And she's like, I gotta kill this spider.
M hmm. And I have a deep distrust for anything

(01:27:41):
with eight legs or six legs. I get it. But
a hammer, baby, Harry yesterday, the swiffer is fine. Don't
so when you put a hole on this wall, I mean,
I'm gonna be honest with you, prob I have my
Air fifteen right here next to the table in case

(01:28:02):
I see a spider, which you know there's a lot
of Yeah, 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, yeah, what
the police say is accurate. That's exactly what you mean.
Find me to show you the spider bite that I

(01:28:22):
got that sent me to the hospital. Next the hammer day. 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

(01:28:43):
of ship at fighting, 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 team stopping
shootings like mass shootings in progress, like our traditional like,
and that doesn't happen often either, Like you Usually, mass
shooters get to do whatever they're gonna do and then
shoot themselves or whatever turn themselves in like they generally

(01:29:06):
don't get stopped. Um, but 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 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,

(01:29:28):
I did 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

(01:29:50):
thirty nine of them. In seventy of these shootings, fewer
than ten rounds were used. Now, this suggests that military
grade weaponry may not be neces sary 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,

(01:30:14):
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 forty
two um incidences where SWAT officers fired, and thirty nine

(01:30:36):
of those are accidents. That's not an insignificant percentage of
all SWAT weapons discharges. Like that's that's that's noteworthy. 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 tent

(01:30:59):
of the incidents and would to 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 d seventy
nine other individuals killed themselves in situations in which they

(01:31:22):
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 gunfire wished to be shot, as respondents classified their

(01:31:44):
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. Thatt cent of the SWAT
officers struck by gunfire and the current day were shot
by fellow officers. Suggests that while the most substantial threat
officers face comes from armed suspects, the prospect of fratricide

(01:32:07):
looms large and tactical operations. So you're more likely to
get shot by your homeboy. Not more likely, but pretty likely. 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
officers shoot, they're shooting negligently without meaning to fire. So

(01:32:30):
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
of serious gunfights on a nationwide level. Um, and most

(01:32:52):
of the people they encounter who are seriously armed like
our fucking want to kill themselves. Yeah, they 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
conversation would have better odds of resolving this without gunfire.

(01:33:14):
Better chance. Yeah yeah, yeah. So the conclusions here are
pretty clear. Number one, swat teams virtually never do these
sort of work there 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. And perhaps no story illustrates

(01:33:35):
the second point better than the case of Wanas Thnava.
Uh now, good job, man, Yeah, I'm doing my best.
Heere 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 methamphetamine too a confidential
informant um. Several hours later, on the morning of the

(01:33:57):
seven man swat team from the Cornelia, Georgia Police Department
carried out a raid on wannass home. Now. Because Wanas
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 the swat
team to believe that they're like someone had barricaded the door,

(01:34:20):
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 into a
coma and very very nearly died. The swat and was

(01:34:43):
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 in reese. In the end, no officers were
indicted for horrifically maiming a small child. I found one

(01:35:05):
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 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, We would not
have used a flash bang like and defense. Yeah, that's

(01:35:28):
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, a small amount of meth
being sold. Yeah, and it's just it kind of feels

(01:35:49):
like to me, like, if I'm this wat 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 imposedly most get like, you
think I'm that weak that I can't just Yeah, it's

(01:36:10):
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 going to end it by
burning seventy children alive. Because that's this is so how

(01:36:33):
that works. This is so true in every area of
your life. If you're in any sort of relationship, whether
it's a monogamous one or a romantic or a or
a friendship or a sibling, if you come in guns ablazing,
it's just not gonna work. No, this is your Yeah,
this is exactly why I was able to improve a

(01:36:55):
lot of my personal relationships propped when I stopped having
the b A T. F Um show 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, that's good man,
because I live and learn, and because I really like

(01:37:16):
the reference in here, Robert, just a Waco reference in everywhere.
Hey Man, talk about talk about Waco. Talk about a rebranding.
Boy has gotten Yeah, yeah, I mean it was now
the Home and Garden TV Network. That's we have some

(01:37:37):
sort of oversized initial letter in your room and uh,
a refurbished wood panel. We have a farmhouse store and
a farmhouse sink and yeah, and you admire Joanna Gaines
there it is build an empire. She built it. She
built an empire out of a city that was known

(01:38:00):
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 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

(01:38:23):
of like what happened with Wantas 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. But the
solution that they got a grenade burning their child alive.

(01:38:43):
It was worse than probably anything that would have happened
if they'd 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 always that
like with way Go, like there was there was a problem,
David Koresh was doing some fucked up ship. You could

(01:39:03):
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 in the
hands of a cop, it's specifically going to be used

(01:39:24):
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 crime rates. Further,

(01:39:44):
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 in the likelihood of
that zip code experiencing a SWAT raid now and again.

(01:40:06):
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 of the research notes telling

(01:40:27):
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 raids also get

(01:40:51):
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 you 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 kinds
of search warrants, because again, regular cops regularly serve the

(01:41:13):
exact same kind of search warrants swat cops serve, which
maybe suggests that why do we have swat teams? If
yea also but yeah, um either way, a shipload 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 by police

(01:41:35):
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 purpose nationwide.

(01:41:57):
Why because they fucking I mean, you know, I've actually
talked 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
maimed her 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 this and like one

(01:42:18):
theorious why it happens so much without like there are
some justife, 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 life exactly a lot of

(01:42:43):
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 fight 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 in the

(01:43:05):
direct line of fire or standing nearby, and one horrifying
to Thus, 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 um is enough

(01:43:28):
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 molest us.
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, it's pretty pretty crazy,

(01:43:50):
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 than like hairstylists, And that's true,

(01:44:12):
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, with military veterans like Lieutenant Colonel

(01:44:33):
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 seemingly innocuous interactions with the public,

(01:44:56):
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 and was carrying it around the
store while shopping. Another shopper called nine one one to

(01:45:19):
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 young man in his car
at a gas station and asked him for his driver's license.

(01:45:39):
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, you could argue maybe different training

(01:46:00):
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 concern and anything they do to

(01:46:20):
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 super racist ad, Democrats pivoted to Yeah,

(01:46:44):
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 stable. In nineteen ninety seven,
a bunch of heavily armed and armored gunmen try to
rob some businesses and get into a big gunfight with

(01:47:05):
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 nineteen ninety seven and two thousand fourteen, five point

(01:47:28):
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 mine resistant patrol vehicles

(01:47:50):
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, I found all of

(01:48:11):
this in a Forbes breakdown, which notes that US cops
also received more than six thousand bayonets between two thousand
six and two thousand seventeen. What do you need six
like our millets? 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,

(01:48:32):
remember the study that 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

(01:48:54):
because when I was in Moses, most of the people
I was inbedded with were the Iraqi me 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

(01:49:15):
or not cops. Sorry. The only time you say US
soldiers in the places 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,

(01:49:36):
and I'm like literally sitting and smoking a cigarette with
um my photographer 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

(01:49:57):
the first time is like, these look like a T eighties.
That's 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

(01:50:19):
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. 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

(01:50:41):
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, 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

(01:51:01):
weaponry cops are given these days, and I could list
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 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

(01:51:24):
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 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

(01:51:44):
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, about equal what we spent
on law enforcement we spent on welfare. In the decades since,
welfare spending has declined and police funding has word, Today
we spend more than twice as much money on law
and order as we do on social welfare, and we

(01:52:06):
get very little for our money. For all the weapons
really buy our cops, the vast majority of police officers
will never fire a weapon in the line of duty.
For all that 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

(01:52:27):
are it actually solving crimes. About forty percent of murders
go unsolved, only about fifty three 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

(01:52:48):
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 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? Let's
talk about how good police do in solving rapes. Not
only that, I hear the argument like, no, they need
more money, they are underfunded, and I'm like, actually they're
more funded than every other program. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,

(01:53:11):
significantly more. I'm gonna quote from the Guardian for this
one quote. The 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

(01:53:32):
and fear of the police, which obviously is increased by militarization.
One survey of sexual assault survivors found that of those
who chose not to report, fiftcent 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

(01:53:54):
assaults could not read lab reports on DNA evidence and
often lacked a basic understanding of email anatomy. I have
to google. I listen to fucking this, I have to
google stuff like labia MAJORA one officer sex. That guy
shouldn't be investigating sex cribes, shouldn't beating sex crib ever.

(01:54:17):
But but rather than paying for him to learn what
evolva is, 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

(01:54:38):
under counting rapes and its public figures, using a deliberately
strict definition of 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

(01:55:01):
gonna investigate. Uh yeah, well, and like, this is actually
kind 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 NYPD is considered to be

(01:55:21):
one of the best trained police departments in the country,
and the NYPD was very proud of the fact that
they had 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. Is
a lot of fucking business. 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

(01:55:43):
charge our weapons in like a a violent situation. But
then people who analyze the NYPD data found that the
NYPD was only hitting because they were including police officers
sewic sides as one shot stops. Wait, they were, they
were they were goofing their own numbers by including their suicides.

(01:56:06):
Is like, I mean, yeah, they're they're basically saying, like
that cop took a dangerous man off the streets himself.
It counts, It counts. Yeah, It's pretty pretty wild. So
conservative estimates suggest that US police have two d thousand
untested rape kits in their possession nationwide. Rain's best estimate
is that only about four point six percent of sexual

(01:56:28):
assaults ever 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,

(01:56:50):
you know you're gonna get these 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 undered in five rapes by the 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.

(01:57:10):
These numbers are only a fraction of the real total,
since most sexual assaults are never reported and most rapists
have at least five victims over the course of their career.
The CNN article I found about this investigation into cop
rape includes one of the most horrifying lines I have
ever read. In an article, quote about half of the
victims their children, researchers say Stenson, one of the researchers,
has gotten accustomed to hearing his research assistants proclaimed during

(01:57:31):
their work, 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 again some version of
the question, without cops, who's who you're gonna call if

(01:57:53):
you know, rape or whatever, if X crime happens to you.
The second argument is usually that even if the cops
aren't necessary great at solving crimes, they prevent violence and
crime by their presence in 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 us from the bad guys. As

(01:58:15):
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 a myth, and he is very right when

(01:58:37):
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?
The crime rate? Yeah, the police lost twenty three thousand

(01:58:59):
net officers nationwide from two thousand and sixteen, with no
corresponding surgeon crime. Now, despite the fact that crime has
dropped saidly 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, prop, Yeah,
I have a fucking answer for you. Are you ready
for this? Are you ready to talk about Hollywood again? Yes?

(01:59:24):
Because yeah a lot. Yeah. You know, like when you're like, okay,
you know what you know what prevents crime jobs? Yeah? Resources,
It's just easy giving people heroin if they're addicted, you know,
maybe maybe laws that shouldn't be laws, like and making

(01:59:46):
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
that actually objectively works better and every single place that works. Yeah. Um.
So the answer to why people think that police are

(02:00:07):
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. 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,

(02:00:29):
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 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

(02:00:51):
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 the like busting
this like family and like taking the kid, and like
the the female officer who took the kid was like,
it's okay, we're gonna get you to a safe place tonight.
You're gonna have an ice 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

(02:01:14):
take this kid after arresting the kid's 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 up the situation is. That didn't
aar on Cops. Like no, um, so again, watch Running
from Cops. It's a great or listen to it. It's

(02:01:34):
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 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

(02:01:56):
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, 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

(02:02:17):
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 ninete to 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,

(02:02:41):
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 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

(02:03:05):
didn't know that. Yeah, but I didn't know, Like, wow,
it seems the black people no more y. Yeah, they did.
They did fix that particular problem. 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 williganala is

(02:03:27):
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 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

(02:03:49):
doesn't push the militarized police angle. This is 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 negative effect at Robert Thompson, a professor at
Syracuse University who studies television and pop culture, noted in
an interview with a Desiree News, quote, the very thing
that keeps law and order going is the idea that

(02:04:09):
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 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

(02:04:29):
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 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,

(02:04:51):
even heroic. The study noted that of the writers for
these shows were white men, only nine percent were black. Now,
in the mediate aftermath of George Floyd's murder and this
whole uprising thing, both Cops and Life 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

(02:05:13):
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 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,

(02:05:36):
Brooklyn nine nine. I know a lot of people who
love Brooklyn nine nine, and I know a lot of
Brooklyn nine fans are apprehensive and like a little bit
guilty right now 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

(02:05:57):
things where like, I think a lot of oaks will
argue that, like there's a room for escapism and that
this stuff isn't 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 are
consistently ranked among the most watched shows by Nielsen Media,

(02:06:18):
according to the authors. What's more, as many as forty
percent of Americans believe that such shows are somewhat or
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

(02:06:40):
a nationally representative sample of over two thousand Americans. They
found that those who watched crime shows view police as
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 in joy, but they're part of the problem.

(02:07:02):
You may just gonna say the one for me is first,
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, and 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

(02:07:24):
painting this is so basic, so binary, and so easy
that like I tried to watch it. I tried to
get into it because I 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 hurt because you know

(02:07:49):
it's not real. You know what I'm saying, But you're
telling me this is like a uh reality show and
it's not real, And like just given by 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

(02:08:10):
a tiny fraction of us. When people say what about
you know, and then they list their things that we
need 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

(02:08:32):
shocking violence uh and and cruel calculus by soulless politicians.
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.

(02:08:53):
The weight of pro cop cultural inertia is only increased
by the fact that a decent number of the seven
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

(02:09:14):
things that are good. It's whether or not it's worth
the cost, whether or not the benefits we gain from
having police 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

(02:09:34):
from law enforcement. So perhaps we should spend more time
as a culture thinking about what law enforcement costs us.
And I think my best way of doing this is
always an anecdotal example, you know, because we do talk
about the statistics. We talked 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

(02:09:57):
investigations that are are open to the public taking play.
And that that number is, for example, more than die
have died in every school shooting in American history. Every year,
the police kill more people than school shooters have ever killed,
Like yeah, like like people like people flip out about
a R fifteens And I'm not saying you're wrong to
be scared or frightened about the easy availability of air fifteens.

(02:10:18):
Like four Americans every year are killed by long guns
that are air fifteens are similar weapons the police kill
a thousand. 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

(02:10:42):
anecdotes are are the thing that drives it home to people. Um,
And 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. It's so,
have you heard of the move bombing? I have? Yeah, Yeah,

(02:11:05):
I had a feeling. Yeah. Move was a strange organization
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

(02:11:26):
at zoos against animal cruelty, They ate natural diet. They
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

(02:11:49):
the FEDS, who found a bunch of guns and pipe bombs.
Police barricaded several blocks around the compound and basically laid
siege to it for fifty six days. This all came
to 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

(02:12:09):
loving ship out of one of them, a guy who
had not taken part in the gunfight, but who had
been on the bullhorn heckling them. They just beat the
piss out of this kid 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,

(02:12:29):
which was a middle class black neighborhood that was doing
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,

(02:12:50):
but they're like kind of annoying people, and like people
in the neighborhood don't know what to do, but called
the city, and the city calls the police, and the
police do what the police do, which is s late
the situation into another siege. In May, uh, Philadelphia brings
in five militarized officers armed with flak jacket, swat gear,
fifty caliber machine guns, and an anti tank rifle. The

(02:13:12):
cops move in to serve arrest warrants on folks that
they believe were living in the compound, and they estimated
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,

(02:13:32):
the police had evacuated most of the neighborhood, telling everyone
they'd be able to come back home quickly. But they're
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

(02:13:54):
to drop a bomb they built on the compound, and
after hours of ferocious gunfire. The mayor greed, so the
police drop 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

(02:14:14):
very quickly to the roofs of other homes clustered around
the Move building. The police commissioner ordered firefighters to stand down,
later telling 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

(02:14:35):
and the entire north side of Osage Avenue was burning.
I'm gonna quote now from an NPR article on what
happened next. 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

(02:14:58):
so large that the flames could be seen from planes
landing at Philadelphia International Airport more than six miles away.
The smoke 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

(02:15:19):
the end, eleven people died in that fire on Osage Avenue,
including five children. Weeks passed before the police were able
to 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

(02:15:41):
between this and Tulsa, But you know, Tulsa, it was
a mob of random citizens. The move bombing was mostly
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

(02:16:04):
people that needed to be dealt with, and they called
the city to help them deal with it, and the
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

(02:16:26):
was to burn down the entire neighborhood. Yeah, that's not
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 problematics and they were annoying, and yeah, they

(02:16:50):
weren't just killing strangers. That police did that. Yeah, the
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

(02:17:12):
problems of law and order were solved by bombing the
move compound. The question is like was the price worth it?
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.

(02:17:35):
I'm like, you will die. Yeah. Did you ever listen
to Chris Christofferson prop? Yeah? Yeah? Do you ever listen
to a song The Laws for Protection of the People? No?
If 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,

(02:17:56):
procop military. Old country was like it was like 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 you know, come streaming

(02:18:16):
to the rescue to haul them off to jail. And
the refrain of the song is because the laws for
protection of 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

(02:18:39):
there's another version of that refrain, and then the last
verse is, 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 Christofferson bringing

(02:19:04):
at home? Yeah, bring it at home. Hey, you know
what Precius Saver crooked justice system awesome hunt awesome, trumped
up charges. Yep, So mind 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

(02:19:27):
if 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,

(02:19:49):
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 fellow 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

(02:20:11):
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,

(02:20:33):
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, yep, yeah, that was a lot of words.

(02:20:58):
There was a lot of works. Yeah, 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
a little hopeful because of the response we've been getting

(02:21:18):
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 the man. Um, there's better ideas. We

(02:21:39):
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 replaced 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 raun Well, let's try that.

(02:22:01):
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
had 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

(02:22:23):
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

(02:22:46):
of do that. Yeah, profit pop dot com where I
don't sell weapons. Um, that's good, and 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 yeah dot com, And I do not sell weapons yet,

(02:23:10):
but when I moved to my compound in Ohio, I'll
start legally manufacturing sought off shotguns. Um, so that the
the the a t F will will finally raid me.
Um you know that's the that was 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

(02:23:36):
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

(02:23:56):
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 or something. Yeah yeah yeah, haven't
haven't have a Blue S concerts. They're being bombed. Just

(02:24:20):
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
I want to see them like do a Jim Jones

(02:24:41):
mini series. He turned him into like a stand up comedian.
He's just hilariousous. That's why we all go. Yeah, we
we cast David Chappelle's Jim Jones. Fuck it, No one
gives a ship? Where Netflix? Oh Lord, all right? Podcast

(02:25:03):
is out. This podcast has to stop. Go to fund
your local police. Behind the Police is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.

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Robert Evans

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