Policing Equity and Justice: Phillip Atiba Solomon
March 7th, 2024
“We, as a nation, have not decided what we want police to do.”
Phillip Atiba Solomon is the chair and Carl I. Hovland Professor of African American Studies, Professor of Psychology at Yale University, and co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. We discuss policing equity, investing in communities, and taking police out of the mental health crisis business.
Policing equity is multi-faceted and requires collaboration with communities. Proven solutions to reduce violence include anti-poverty investments, stopping low level traffic stops, sending non-police to mental health crises or to interventions for the houseless, as well as having clear limits and rules to when force can be used.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Phillip Atiba Solomon
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Phillip Atiba Solomon Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:05] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
It's 2024 and the future of America is in your hands. Democracy is not a spectator sport, so we're here to bring you an independent perspective about the election this year and empower you to change the status quo.
We are in an odd election cycle where the number one topic seems to be whether the former president is immune from being held accountable for his crimes, and whether this means he'll actually be on the ticket, with most people thinking yes, he is. In addition, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and the threat of a larger conflict in the Middle East are also top of mind. There are some age-old issues that do continue to capture the public's attention: immigration and the border, jobs and the economy. And maybe because so many things are going on, we haven't yet heard in this election cycle the usual drumbeat about public safety. The media's constant hand-wringing about crime and how political candidates are either for or anti-police. But of course, just because we are no longer in the heat and passion of the summer of 2020 doesn't mean that policing doesn't continue to be an issue.
For a deep dive on this topic, we're joined by Phillip Atiba Solomon, formerly known as Goff. He's the co-founder of the center for Policing Equity and the chair and Carl I. Hovland, professor of African American studies and professor of psychology at Yale University. Welcome, Phil, and thank you for joining us.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:01:53] Thanks for having me, Mila.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:55] So we usually talk about policing and police reform after an incident of police brutality. And I think we have this reductive idea of why and how policing is broken. How do you define the problem with policing as it is today in the US?
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:02:11] Yeah, Mila, thanks for framing it that way. I was noting that this is one of the few times that I'm talking about the thing I spend most of
my professional life doing, and there's not an image of a dead black body on our nightly news, for whatever that's worth. It does frame how and when we talk about this. I think the problem of policing is, in some fundamental way, a problem about how we think about vulnerable populations. Right. So I don't think of it as there's this institution which is necessary and needs to be changed. I think about as there are populations that experience chronic vulnerability and crises. And we as a society have to decide how much are we investing in the resources that can prevent those crises, and how much are we allowing for there to be differentiated responses when those crises show up? So I'll give you an example. We understand that if you are wrestling with mental health concerns, that access to treatment, sometimes to drugs, to support networks, literally just a place you can go and talk, it prevents crises, dissociative crises, psychotic breaks, the kinds of things that end up in public feeling scary to people. It prevents and decreases the likelihood of those we could invest in the resources that allow those to be public goods, since it is in the public interest to make sure that folks who are struggling with mental health crises, like any other health crisis, don't experience the most acute forms. Similarly, when the crisis is in full bloom because you can't prevent every crisis, we could send people explicitly trained in how to deal with those crises. That seems like a reasonable way to respond. What's happened is through an erosion of complex, bureaucratic institutional elements, we've ended up with very few resources to prevent the crisis, and only one tool when the crisis happens, and that tool is policing. So if we frame the problem as policing needs to be improved, we're going to miss all of these situations where police agree they are the wrong tool, being sent way too late to communities in need.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:14] Okay, now that you have set the frame for this, what is police there for? What is actually the function of police?
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:04:22] So that's a complicated order with a complicated answer. I could answer that question to say that when there is a crisis of community violence, it seems reasonable that there would be people trained to respond to that violence and to de-escalate it. And you can argue that that is what law enforcement, when it's working the way that democracy would want it to work, should be trained to do. That's an appropriate role for it. I could also answer with the what have police been doing and what does it seem like they are meant to do? What has it been set up to do in prior iterations of the way in which we've got racial stratification within the society, which
is we had police departments fall out of slave patrols in some parts of the South, with some of the same exhortations to make sure that Black folks are kept within certain communities, right, within they're literally constrained in terms of their mobility, in terms of their ability to participate in the democracy. That's the point of policing. At that period of time, and in many folks' minds continued to the present. What I think is the most honest answer is: we as a nation have not decided what we want police to do. We tell stories that police are supposed to be heroes who respond to crises of human frailty and vulnerability, and keep communities safe because of the deterrent threat of punishment for doing wrong and for heroic good judgment when a crisis has spiraled out of control. And we also make sure that our most vulnerable populations have more contact with our systems of punishment than anyone else. Stalwartly refusing to provide the resources that prevent the crisis in the first place. So we're, we're split personality as a nation in terms of what we ask law enforcement to do, and therefore in terms of how we should define the purpose of law enforcement and how law enforcement understands itself.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:12] Well, this is definitely an unexpected answer that we have not decided what we want police to do. But since you actually do a lot of data collection and your work is to promote justice through science to make policing less racist, less deadly and less omnipresent, what is the data that you're actually collecting and what are you trying to measure?
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:06:36] Yeah. So way, Mila, to take this into the nerdiest, least sexy version of this conversation. It's where I live. It's where I'm most comfortable. So ..
Mila Atmos: [00:06:45] We are nerdy people here on this podcast.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:06:47] Fair enough. I have had students refer to me as the king of the unsexy, and I. I take that as a badge of honor. So the first thing is, it would be a much better world for the nerds and for everybody else, if we had anything like reasonable data on just how many people law enforcement had contact with. Not how many they stopped. How many they talked to during the course of a day, how many people had contact with law enforcement. You would think that's a basic thing. How about just how many people did law enforcement put hands on? Did they physically
coerce into compliance? We don't have that on a national scale. What we have is the emerging ability to do really advanced statistics, to get estimates of the range of what that looks like. And at the center for Policing Equity, which has long advocated data transparency and data driven approaches to solve these questions, we created the National Justice Database, which is the largest collection of police behavioral data in the world, which is a super humblebrag because nobody was doing it before. So we just got started early. And that's a lot of the data we're looking at is department by department, plus the folks that will make it public. We have information on stops, complaints, use of force patrols, sometimes something like contact, but it's not comprehensive and it's not easy to compare from department to department. There's 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States, and that's just the US component of what we do. And of those 18,000 departments, 75% are 25 officers or fewer. And there's a thousand that's just one dude. And it's, by the way, always a dude. So so like those don't, they don't have a data shop, right? They're not collecting the data that allows you to see, oh, well let's compare Black... Yeah. So we we collect the data from law enforcement. We do the best that we can to estimate racial disparities, equity, the degree to which it's poverty driving this, the degree to which it's reported crime actually driving police behavior. By the way, it's never poverty and crime alone, right? It is always something else that law enforcement can do something about and other policies can intervene on. But it's also the data on community crisis, the public health data. Who's going to the hospital? What is the substance disorder rate? What is the serious mental illness rate within a community? All difficult to estimate, but all give us a sense of how vulnerable are these communities, what crises are they asking for help on, and to what degree do they feel they have no place else to go, but the only number, which usually only has three options fire, medical or police. And police are the utility knife in that drawer. They're the ones that go and do everything that's not lit on fire, and then doesn't go immediately into an ambulance. And sometimes police have their own ambulances.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:22] Hmm'hmm.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:09:22] Those are the data that we collect to try and give a sense of how can we make change that is ready today and tomorrow and change that is worthy of a future that's worthy of being excited about.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:33] Right. So paint us a picture of what police actually does, in general, of the data that you have. Like, you don't have to talk about the things that you have not collected.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:09:41] Yeah, I'm smiling at you because police do so much. They show up to schools and before the beginning of the day and stay after all the after school programs are done. They rush people to detox facilities. They take people off the streets and put them in drunk tanks. They make decisions about who is and isn't a danger. They respond to noise complaints. They do occasionally fight with firefighters to get kittens out of trees. They do parking enforcement, traffic enforcement. They do targeted information led stings that oftentimes go right, oftentimes go wrong. They do everything at the margins of what we consider to be acceptable in terms of order within our communities. They respond to all of that and frequently with incredibly little training. So to answer the question about what police do, all of those things except wield the resources to give to communities so they're not crisis in the first place, or give to other institutions the resources they need so that they can be the ones who respond instead of police. Those are the two elements of what particularly vulnerable communities ask for that police can't and don't do in this country.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:57] Mhm. Right. Yeah. Essentially they are helping humans deal with human crises, which is really not exactly the purview of police, or at least not the way that we understand it. You know, you you mentioned at the beginning that we think of them as heroes that defuse the situation, save the day, but we don't often think about everything else that they're also doing. And we take for granted and actually puts them in constant contact with everyday people at various moments in their lives. And it could be a bad day and a bad moment for them. But you also take a deep look at how racism fits in and how the racial disparities play out with policing. So tell us a little bit more about what you've discovered there.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:11:40] Yeah. So I think the most important thing to understand about racism in public safety is the most important thing to understand about racism in general, which is that we have the wrong definition. The definition is that racism is a thing that lives inside individual hearts and minds. It's a defect of character. And you can go to racism camp and get it trained out of you, or you can unlearn it. That's not how it functions. Right? So absolutely, bigotry and prejudice is a thing, right?
You can have it explicitly. You can have it implicitly, though. I'm exhausted by people who want to turn everything into implicit racism or implicit bias. That is too small a thing. And I'm someone who's written on implicit bias. Trust me, I'm literally the scientist that knows about it. But you also have it in terms of the rules that are set up within an institution, and also the way the rules are set up across multiple institutions, and also the stories we tell about why we have those rules. Each of those are levels that really determine how we end up with these disparities. Let me give you a concrete example. If we had a rule that said, every time someone is in the midst of a mental health crisis and they're not in immediate physical danger, they would have a social worker or a mental health crisis responder who has years’ worth of training in exactly that field, respond to them. If that were the rule in lots of places, what you would see was a huge drop in police use of force and contact with folks with serious mental illness. The way we know is that in places like Austin, when they had an option, call 911, if someone's had mental crisis and they're not immediate threat, it goes to someone who is specialized in mental health response. And in the first eight months, about 82% of the calls that went to that deferral service had no police response. It saved taxpayers about $1.6 million just in eight months. And the response from community was, why haven't we always been doing this. In Denver, when they did it, they saw about a 6X increase in calls to 911, which indicates how many people needed mental health emergency care, but were afraid to call because they didn't want a badge and a gun in response. So those are the kinds of things we see that are possible. But that's not individual bigotry. That's the rules that we've got set up about when we will and won't use certain systems to respond to communities that are vulnerable.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:49] Yeah, that makes perfect sense. People don't want to call the police if they don't have to, ya, because otherwise you're afraid that you might get shot. We hear so many of these stories. It makes it sound like it's fiction, but these are real people. Call the police because there is a crisis and they don't know what else to do. And they're between a rock and a hard place. And the police shows up and shoots the victim, basically. And then you're like, what happened there? We totally could have avoided this, but nobody knows how because there aren't any other resources, right?
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:14:18] The thing I want us to understand is that we do know how.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:22] Ah right. Yeah, but except if you're in the crisis at home, you don't know how.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:14:25] That's exactly right.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:26] Yes, but the system, of course we have, we have answers to fix the system, but they're not made available to us as everyday people. I live in New York City. I think I can only call 911. I don't think New York City has has a mental health crisis center where they will send a non-cop.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:14:42] In New York, you can call 988. That is the national hotline, by the way, that puts on you the burden of determining, is this dangerous? Is this mental health, which by the way you may have the training in that. But that's also not fair. But quite right. We give communities these situations where there's no good options, and they could literally die if they make the wrong choice. But for the rule makers, we do know things that work better, and it's a question of political will and literally budget prioritization. That's a hard thing to do. But it's not to say that there are no options that we know can work. We have some things that are promising and some things that are morally better aligned than how we do it. And I cannot overemphasize this enough. Law enforcement wants this to happen. They have been arguing for 30 plus years. Get us out of the mental health business. Get us out of the substance disorder business. Definitely get us out of the homelessness business and let folks who are trained to deal with that deal with that, because we can't be trained to do all those things 100%.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:38] So I know that you work with police officers and police departments, and you just talked about them. So when you talk with police officers, what do they express as being a priority for them.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:15:50] Post 2020 in particular, policing has not had a high morale anywhere in this country to see the images of what police were capable of so consistently, and it was the worst of what they were capable of across the country. It wasn't one police department, it wasn't three. It wasn't a region. It was the institution of policing shown in one of its worst possible lights or sets of its worst possible lights. What I hear from law enforcement is it's incredibly stressful and demoralizing to be there.
Most of them say, they report, that they want to be there to try and be heroes and to try and be good. And so there's officer wellness is a major issue. Also, maybe not surprisingly, given what the press was post 2020, not a lot of folks signing up to want to be officers. And the result of that is that you get fewer officers tasked with doing more things. They make more mistakes. They're more stressed out. They feel like they're not being treated fairly. They don't, they're not being seen fully for the things that they want to be doing. And so the recruitment crisis in policing comes up a great deal. But because of what I do and who I am, I also hear from officers a growing awareness that the institution is being used to solve problems it can never solve. And that makes you think, well, maybe that's not the problem we're actually being used to do. It's not that we're being sent to help folks who are in mental health crisis; it's that we're being sent to keep those people invisible. And so there's an awareness coming in law enforcement with whom I speak, which I should say is not an unbiased sample, but there's an awareness that law enforcement is an institutional tool to accomplish a lot of things, some of which are legitimate public safety interests, but a lot of which have to do with continued stratification. And literally, borrowing language from community organizers, activists with whom we engage, the job is to make the people who make the rest of us uncomfortable, invisible. And I got to say, that's a hard job to show up for.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:47] Yeah, that is definitely a hard job to show up for. Thank you for articulating that, because I think we know that intuitively, but I don't think that many of us could say that as eloquently as you did just now. Right. Like living in New York City, we're constantly in sight of people who are homeless. And it's incredibly uncomfortable because also you feel like, what am I going to do? I can't get this person an apartment, but, you know, I am, I'm the kind of person who becomes friendly with the local homeless person. And sometimes I buy him a sandwich and I know his name, and I know that he's a veteran, and sometimes he visits his mom in the nursing home, and sometimes they let him stay there. That is like way too much information that I know. But at the same time, I also feel like I don't know what else I could be doing -- at least have one human relationship. But of course, a police officer cannot do that either. I can do this every once in a while, and sometimes when I see him, I have to be honest. I'm like, okay, I'm going to cross the street over here because today I don't have time to talk to him. But I feel like I don't want to not talk to him if I do have time, because I don't know who else he gets to talk to.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:18:54] It puts you in that position of trying to try to figure out how much charity do I have available in my heart today, and you sound like a person who has at least some charity some days, which, having lived in New York, you're pretty rare. But let's be clear, charity is not justice.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:09] Yes.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:19:09] And so we look around, well, what can I do? And individually, what we frequently can do are acts of charity. But we were responding because we're seeing an injustice. And in New York, it's the perfect example because your current mayor, Mayor Adams, has, he says, emphasized a policy that was already on the books but essentially reauthorized a policy where law enforcement can detain someone who is, quote unquote, visibly mentally unwell. That is clearly in response to an unhoused crisis in parts of Manhattan, not the rest of New York, parts of Manhattan where wealthy donors are seeing folks that they're not used to seeing. And so the response is deputize law enforcement to remove them from the public view. That's not a solve that helps folks who are working with mental health challenges. It's a solve for the public discomfort. And that's part of what we have to be able to be honest about in terms of what law enforcement gets asked to do. We could use them differently. We could also say, hey, if there's this many folks who are unhoused, maybe -- and I know this is shocking and no one in New York has ever heard this before, but maybe the rents are too high. Maybe the cost of living in New York is just a little bit higher than is reasonable. I know it's a crazy notion. I know I'm a radical professor for saying so. But also maybe we need to have different and better services. Maybe there's a root cause we can be going after. And unfortunately, because we have such a tight narrative that law enforcement is about bad guys, and it's usually guys being chased and detained by good guys. And again, it's usually guys. The only conversation that can come in is whether or not they're bad, how bad, and what else could we do as opposed to these are vulnerable communities. What are we doing to to deal with the root cause of that vulnerability, and are we sending the right help.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:02] Mhm. Well you already mentioned that we can instead of sending cops sending armed men, we can send mental health professionals. And in some places that has already been done and they have invested there. But I kind of want to pivot here to when police does use force in a way that we find shocking and
unacceptable. And you have worked on this also. So, you know, there are two solutions in a way. To make police less violent; but also to invest in communities. So how do we make police less violent?
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:21:39] So on one fundamental level, the fact of policing is violence. In several jurisdictions, not nearly enough as far as I'm concerned, when you talk about use of force and recording an incident of use of force, they talk about use of force or the threat of force, right. So if I unholster my firearm, even if I don't point it -- you might be an incredibly brave person and that might not faze you -- it'd scare the heck out of me, right. But if we want to talk about the threat of force, isn't just the fact of an officer there the threat of force? And in fact, in some jurisdictions they will list the presence of an officer as the first level of use of force. If I send someone with a badge and a gun to respond to someone who was thinking about killing themselves, that's an incredibly scary situation. And mentally it can feel violent just from their presence, right. So since they show up with a threat of violence, there's no way to get violence out of policing entirely. Okay, that said, it's not that you can't reduce violence within the context. You absolutely can. The first begins with don't send police where they don't need to be. And by the way, we've been talking about mental health. We've been talking about substance disorders. One of the the truly exciting areas that we're working on at CPE, and folks are working around the country, is getting law enforcement at a low level traffic stops because it turns out you can just send a ticket home and there's no badge and gun in the mail. And that way, officers who think of a traffic stop as one of the most dangerous places they can be, they feel safer and communities for sure feel safer. And there's not a lot of evidence, by the way, that all those low level traffic stops make our traffic situation any safer. So we're not losing anything. In fact, we're likely gaining something in terms of the tickets and we reduce the risk to health. But there are things you can do, like regulating behaviors. Right. So if law enforcement has to articulate a checklist in the form afterwards on all of the things that they had to do before they used force. If you require them, if you give a law enforcement a duty to retreat, if there's not an immediate threat to someone else. If, as they do in the UK, you make use of force proportional not just to perceived resistance, but proportional to the crime that was alleged, you can reduce use of force. So think about the case of Eric Garner. What was his crime?
Mila Atmos: [00:23:58] Selling loose cigarettes.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:24:00] Right.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:00] Yeah.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:24:01] Let's, to your audience, just to be clear. Mila Atmos: [00:24:03] Yes.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:24:03] That crime is I went into a shop, I bought cigarettes, and then I went outside of that shop, and I sold those cigarettes to other people. And then he said, "please don't take me to jail. I can't go back." Those are the two things that he was alleged to have done. In the UK, you can't use force for that because it's silly to kill someone for buying a thing and then selling that thing. Regulations that are that simple and straightforward are incredibly radical in the United States, and in terms of how we think about how we should and shouldn't constrain law enforcement. But they're just moral common sense. Those kinds of things, in addition to things like regulating chokeholds out of law enforcement's toolkit and other things that can work if properly enforced but have a checkered history. There's so many tools in the toolkit. I want to use all of them, but these more substantive eliminate force from these situations. Those are the ones that I'm most excited about going forward, because I think those are the ones that are most likely to yield actual large scale change.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:07] Right. I mean, that would have been really simple to avoid killing Eric Garner. Actually, it's very difficult to kill somebody with a chokehold.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:25:14] Yeah. You have to try real hard for a long time.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:16] Yes, yes, it takes a lot of force. I mean, I think that was maybe one of the most surprising things. As, you know, somebody who reads the news, you're like, he did what? I mean, that takes forever, honestly, that it's not even conceivable.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:29] We're taking a short break to hear about The Good Robot, an insightful podcast that asks how feminism can provide new perspectives on technology's biggest problems. And we'll be back with Philip in a moment.
The Good Robot podcast: [00:25:43] Are you tired of tech bros telling you what to do? Then join us over at the Good Robot podcast, your one stop shop for all things gender, feminism, and technology. I'm Doctor Carrie McInerney and with my co-host, Doctor Eleanor Drage. I'm an AI ethics researcher at the University of Cambridge. On our podcast, we ask what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? So find us over on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:16] And now let's return to my conversation with Phillip Atiba Solomon.
I kind of have this question about how you think about public safety. If you had a community where you did everything -- you know, you invested in mental health, you housed the houseless, you no longer have police officers in schools, and the police has been trained to not use force when really not necessary -- what does that look like in your mind? What is, I don't want to say utopia. That's wrong. But what is the ideal?
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:26:51] Yeah. Where are we headed? The real answer, and you know, the folks who are self-identified abolitionists in this moment are wise, I think, to embrace is: I don't know. If we had the right resources for communities, would we need anybody as emergency violence responders? I kind of think so. In the same way that folks who have plenty of resources still steal from pension funds because they want a bigger boat. So people like to violate rules for all kinds of gross reasons, even if they are living in lives of abundance. Right. So I'm guessing that we'll need to have responses for those. Also people who suffer from acute serious mental illness. Sometimes the onset of that is sudden. And you need to have someone who can be responsive. But I can't imagine that a future where we've invested in equity across a society and with the appropriate resources to deal with root causes of public insecurity and lack of public safety, I can't imagine that any kind of law enforcement or violence crisis response would look like what we've got, which is this Swiss Army knife that does absolutely everything in the spaces where we're uncomfortable to go if we have enough money not to live there. So it would look radically different.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:28:02] It would look like any time you've got any kind of concern that could make you feel like it's worth going and taking something from someone else. Anytime you've got an emotion regulation problem where your anger might lead you to cause harm to somebody else, you have tons of support immediately, right. And there are loads of people who are trained to provide crisis response before it gets to the point of community violence. And if we had enough of that... You know, I wrote this a kind of facetiously, I think, in 2019 to 2020. But you can imagine in rich communities, in wealthy communities, how often do you see the police? Maybe they get called because a wealthy kid was shoplifting, because of the unbearable weight of boredom about having all of their opportunities already guaranteed to them. But like, that's not, ya, I don't need law enforcement for that. And that's not a regular feature of their lives. That's what a world could look like if we had equity and basic resources secured for folks, because no one wants to be engaged in the behavior that law enforcement gets called to do, not broad swaths of people who are otherwise well.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:11] Yeah, well, let's talk about some success stories, because you've been in the space for a long time. Where are the places where you're like, yes, they went with it. We collected the data. We figured out what their patterns are, and these are the changes that they've made, and they continue to succeed. And public safety is essentially, let's say, the norm where they are. What's your proudest project?
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:29:36] So they're all on some level shorter lived than you'd want. So even if you get continued success years out, it goes through waves. You know, we were not directly related to the 911 project in Austin. I point to that because there's clear pre-post evidence. We started in Denver. And so the Star program in Denver, I think, is a national success story where they provided alternatives to law enforcement for folks in mental health crisis. And it wasn't co-response, it was just separate. Right. I think we're about to see a sea change on traffic. So in Washington state and in Connecticut, they're entertaining in the next legislative session, bills that look like they're going to go forward and that the governors would pass, that would remove law enforcement from low level traffic and record what happens on the other side to traffic safety and for revenue, and also to officer safety. Just to be clear, in California, they're looking at passing a new bill, SB 50. That would take a ridiculous law off the books, which right now says you're not allowed to operate a radar gun if you're not sworn law enforcement. That's preposterous. I have a perfectly functional right index
finger. I can operate a radar gun, I can read. I get corrective vision, but I can read. I can operate a radar gun. We should be good. And what that will do is allow for the same kind of thing, not statewide, but in places like Berkeley, California, which was the first to commit to ending low level traffic enforcement by police. A place where we worked and we made those sets of recommendations. So those kinds of off/on like light switch changes, where there are services, where there weren't before; law enforcement won't be where they were before. Those kinds of things are exciting to me. But but one thing, because your listeners are mostly nerdy like I am, I want folks to understand how complex it is to achieve lasting change here. The average tenure of a major city chief is about two and a half years. They're working within mayoral cycles and city council cycles. So once you've got a coalition of folks who really believes in something, if you're lucky, you've got six months to move something through and let it get hooks in community. And then it's fairly easy, frequently for the next person to uproot it and say, I don't want what the last person wanted. And really, since a lot of this work is about changing who has power to spend, who has power to define what safety is going to look like, and who has power to say you're going to live as uncomfortably as we're going to live, you start getting backlash. It is very difficult to hold on to. Remember 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States, $115 billion annually. Right. And that doesn't count the benevolent associations and the police foundations and the vendor ecosystem around all of this stuff. $115 billion. Why do we imagine it should be any easier than reducing inequality in our public health systems or our educational systems, which, by the way, not great track records in either of those, which are considered to be wildly more progressive in politics by the folks who are internal to it. Right. So when I think about what I'm most proud of, it's those light switch things. But I don't want folks to imagine that once a victory in policy has been secured, even if it's incredibly promising that it's going to continue to receive money, that's going to continue to produce results, let's continue to be popular, or that people will continue to pay attention to it enough to protect it when it's under assault.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:05] Right. Yeah, that's very uncomfortable for most people. I mean, like you said, the backlash is immense. Look at San Francisco, right. Or even New York. I mean, I feel like people forget that when Giuliani was first elected, that was a backlash against Mayor Dinkins, right. People were like, oh my God, we want this to end. Although I will say living in New York City today feels a lot like the years of David Dinkins, the homelessness on the street, at least. So I have a question about the defund
the police moment having passed us. We are clearly no longer there. The backlash is real, as we've just discussed, and in some places, we're spending more money now on police than we did before 2020, notably in New York. We're now spending $200 million more at NYPD in 2023 than in 2019. But I'm curious about how the protests and public demands moved the needle, what reform was made possible.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:34:04] Yeah. I just I want to push back a little bit on us being past the moment, because I think we're past the national conversation about it, for sure. And I think unfortunately, because of a lack of imagination around how we secure public safety, the ways in which it is sort of accepted that things went is, it was a radical slogan that was ill-conceived. There was huge backlash to it. And thank goodness we've come back to center. And I think that's wrong. I think that's just not accurate. I don't think it's just morally wrong. I think it's not accurate. And it reflects poorly on our ability to report on complex issues. The slogan "defund the police" was... It's a branding element. The goal of a branding element for activists is to activate people, to make people aware of something, to make it very clear what folks are asking for, and to make that feel appealing to a group of folks who were open to the idea but weren't turned on to it. So if you want to use those metrics for a slogan around activism, defund was a pretty freaking great slogan. It worked really well. People understood, oh, this is systemic. This is about what we choose to put money in versus what we don't choose to put money in. And we've got our priorities all out of whack across the country on this. It was super clear. And I think that understanding that we're only putting money in law enforcement and not in these things that are upstream of the crisis, that could prevent the crisis in the first place, that has held. What it didn't do was alleviate political Democrats', like partisan Democrats' responsibility to come up with an alternative to the, "tough on crime" narrative with which they are routinely beaten about the face and the body by Republican partisans. There is a conservative narrative about what keeps communities safe. And when I say conservative, I don't just mean partisan, though. I mean also partisan. That is, "you know what, if you don't beat these people up, if you don't show them that you're going to kill them back when they do a killing. If you don't capture these Black men who are coming for your white women, which is usually implicit, but is almost always implicit. If you don't do that, we're going to have lawlessness, because the only thing that stands between having a country and lawlessness is law enforcement's ability to do what they need to do with those bad guys." And Democrats in this country, by and large partisans, failed utterly to articulate
any darn thing. Between defund, an incredibly successful slogan that continues to have impact today, and tough on crime. And then, if I may say, whined just with without shame about how awful defund was as a slogan for themselves. Folks, it wasn't for you. Not everything is about you. It was an activist slogan for activists and communities that worked incredibly well. If it wasn't working for you, you had every right and opportunity to come up with something, a set of policies, a set of slogans, a narrative frame, a backpack, a button, right. Anything! But they didn't. And the lack of imagination from partisan Democrats in this country then was blamed on activists. That's what I think has happened in terms of defund. That said, because there was this huge uprising of awareness around the ills that lead to our overreliance on law enforcement and the ills that law enforcement engages in regardless of how much we rely on it, that awareness became an ideological entrenchment in a way that prevented the sort of horse trading and the need for compromise to get things done in policy at a national level. So we didn't get any national policy, as we never do. It has, however, invigorated and revitalized community groups to try things like Denver, like Connecticut, like Washington State, like Berkeley, California, like Ithaca in New York, like Evanston in Illinois, all of which are trying different versions of what if we took seriously? We can invest upstream and send different resources in the midst of a crisis. Project Nia, I think, is the the major supporter of a website called Million Experiments. But the idea is that there are a million little experiments across the country that are trying to stand up something different, something new, and create the beginnings of at least stories of not a a scientific or a quantitative evidence base. And a lot of that's going on. But if we are not able to aggregate that together and lift it up, I worry that in 2024, this year, where, as you mentioned, there's this odd election cycle, we are not weeks, months, we are not even days away from a presidential candidate who will possibly be under the threat of criminal repercussions, needing to contrast himself with Black people coming to steal your homes. And all of that tough on crime narrative will become the center, not the periphery, of how we think about how we're trying to fight for democracy.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:30] Right. Yeah. Well, when you were saying that Democrats had a failure of the imagination, I have to say that when Biden, during his state of the Union address in 2022, said that we should be funding the police, I almost fell out of my chair. I said, "no, why are you doing this? You didn't have to say that." I mean, you didn't have to say anything about that, right. But he chose to say this. So in this election cycle,
what's the opportunity in your mind to demand or even, I mean, I think to enact would be a stretch, but to demand policing equity?
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:40:05] So it's interesting that you bring up the state of the Union in 2022. In 2023 Biden state of the Union sounded and looked real different; where he was talking about root causes, and he was talking about the things that we need to do to make sure that whatever we're doing to keep folks safe, we're focused on communities and their safety, not focused on the mechanisms we currently have in place. It was a really different message, and I think it was because of the backlash to defund the police, which was its own reaction against a lack of imagination and the predictable use of tough on crime narratives. I think the greatest opportunity in 2024 is for us to begin to amplify some of these stories that in Berkeley, California, it was a police chief who said, you know what? I'm looking at these data. My cops don't want to do it. My community is really concerned about the racial disparities that we see in the data and that they see every day. Let me just do something different. It was a chief who said, I'm going to get them out of the low level stuff. And that set off a firestorm where all of a sudden there's a state preemption law that says, no, you literally cannot remove law enforcement from the radar guns. Tell those stories; of the silly impediments to small democracies, small communities, trying to do what works for them. Tell the stories of the successes. Tell the Austin story. Tell the Denver story. Right, I'm hoping that in 2024, we're going to be able to tell the story of Connecticut that's looking at the data. And ain't nobody in Connecticut trying to say, you know what? What we need is more people getting pulled over by cops. That's not keeping folks safe. It's just not. If we tell the stories. It shifts the narrative from a tough guy is the solution to strong communities. Strong communities are the solution, right. And by the way, anybody who's selling you tough guy, isn't interested in the root problem. You know, I use this a metaphor when I'm talking about it in classes or out in the world. If you hired a plumber and they came over and they said, "yeah, yeah, what you need is a lot more absorbent flooring. I want carpets and towels down everywhere." And you're like, "but there's a leak in there." They're like, "yeah, yeah, I'm not interested in the leak. If you just replace the carpet every once in a while, right, you won't have a problem. And thick towels, that's your solution." What in the world? Any plumber who's not interested in finding the source of the leak and fixing the leak is a terrible plumber. We've had terrible plumbers working on public safety since the founding of this country, and it's time to start saying I want someone to fix the leak, right. Not give me a bunch of towels.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:32] Mhm. Well said. Well we're always trying to beef up our civic action tool kit here at Future Hindsight. And you just gave us one tip on what an everyday person can do to advance the needle here and ask for a new model for public safety in their communities is to tell the stories. What's one more thing an everyday person can do?
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:42:55] So I wish there was a, or at least that I had had the genius necessary to figure out the one thing. Go do this in your community.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:03] You can say more than one thing.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:43:04] No, no, no, no. But there's a thing I'll say to do, which is the thing before that, because these things are so complex, because it takes so long to make change, the thing I would tell everybody to do is build yourself a list of the people and the organizations that are advocating for these alternatives to policing. I want to be clear. At my own organization, we've got retired law enforcement who work here, who think it is the best interest of law enforcement to have these alternatives to policing, because those are usually the places where police are most endangered and where they can do the least good. So cops don't want to go. But if you knew the people and the organizations advocating for it, you'd also know, oh, we don't have anyone advocating for unhoused services. That doesn't make no kind of sense. And maybe you and your friends want to just show up to a city council meeting. We don't have anybody advocating for, you know, alternatives to policing in schools. Right? Well, maybe you you want to start doing that or the folks who are doing it. Maybe you want to, you know, give them a little bit of money or even better, show up and help out, volunteer a little bit of your time. But the first step is, who are those people? What are those organizations? And once you start understanding them, be frustrated with them. Be excited about them. Learn about them. You're going to learn about how your your local community works, and you're going to be able to be in a position to say, "all right, I agree with this. I don't agree with that." And be a responsible citizen in this because citizenship is the ultimate weapon against fascism. And we've stopped teaching it. We've stopped requiring it. We've stopped lauding it amongst ourselves. So as a way to increase the engagement with and the celebration of citizenship, make that list and get to know your community in
that way. Do that and you'll have gone a lot further than most folks. Who are your neighbors?
Mila Atmos: [00:44:49] Very good advice. Thank you very much. So as we are closing out our conversation here today, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:44:59] It's cliché at this point to say, young people make me hopeful. I'm like, I'm a professor. So if young people didn't make me hopeful, I just hate my life all the time. So young people absolutely make me hopeful. But what happened post 2020, in the summer uprisings, post the George Floyd lynching, and into 2021. It wasn't just the collective protest. It wasn't just the outpouring of support and awareness. It wasn't the empty corporate promises and money that didn't quite make its way into the hands of the people they said it was going to make its way into. It was the awareness that how we deal with vulnerable communities is upside down. We punish people for making bad decisions when we only gave them terrible options. And that basic understanding, that narrative frame, it sits there as an unrealized gem that we have the ability to radicalize in this country. And I don't mean radicalize in the sense of violence or in the sense of of any negative. I want to have a radically more democratic society and this understanding that those who are most vulnerable, we have treated them the worst. Forget about the set of social programs that are all charities. We have treated them the worst and our logic for how we should treat them is illogical. I think that got a kind of purchase across this country that makes whatever comes next significantly easier, and the chances for a radically better future significantly closer. And as a new father, I have to invest my hope in the prospect that that can be true.
Mila Atmos: [00:46:38] Yeah, hear, hear. I agree. The way that we talk about public safety today is different than before 2020, even among conservatives. I think even there, like you said, there is purchase for this different kind of thinking. So I hope that all this will make truly safe communities possible for all. Thank you so much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Phillip Atiba Solomon: [00:47:02] Thanks, Mila.
Mila Atmos: [00:47:03] Phillip Atiba Solomon is the co-founder of the center for Policing Equity, and the chair and Carl I. Hovland Professor of African American studies, and professor of psychology at Yale University.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Rick Hasen. He's professor of law and political science at UCLA and director of UCLA Laws Safeguarding Democracy Project. He's an internationally recognized expert in election law, co-author of leading casebooks in election law and Remedies, and served as a CNN election law analyst in 2020 and as an NBC news MSNBC election law analyst in 2022. His most recent book is A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy. That's next time on Future hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks so much for listening. If you like this episode, you'll love what we have in store. Be sure to hit that follow button on Apple Podcasts or the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app, so you'll catch all of our upcoming episodes. Thank you! Oh, and please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me.
Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:48:53] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.