Tangible Solutions to America's Policing Crisis with Dr. Rashawn Ray

This critical conversation features Dr. Rashawn Ray, a fellow at The Brookings Institution, and a Sociology Professor and the Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research at the University of Maryland.  In this episode, we discuss some of the public health issues stemming from racism. Dr. Ray also presents some tangible solutions to America’s policing crisis, including abolishing qualified immunity, implementing insurance policies and malpractice liability for individual officers, and providing officers with housing subsidies to live in or around the communities they patrol. 

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Transcript

Abbie: [00:00:02] Welcome to critical conversations. My name is Abbie Henson, and I'll be the one conversing with our guests. And I also serve as an assistant professor in the school of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona state university. After the killing of George Floyd, my social media blew up.

I kept seeing posts and reposts as stories, all about criminal and social justice issues. However, much of what I was seeing were just flat words that lacked voice and depth and nuance. And so I wanted to create a space where those words could come alive. I wanted to engage in dialogues with people who had actually been impacted by the criminal justice system, whether through their own experience research or both, I felt this was the moment to think critically to examine the complexities of our system in place today, and to figure out how to move forward in a way that allows for equity and true joy.

So I started hosting live webinars, both in an attempt to have the audience be active participants either by raising their hand and joining the conversation, or by contributing a question to the chat box and to also build a sense of community and togetherness in a time when we were so isolated through quarantine, but because of zoom fatigue, and with people starting to slowly move their lives beyond the home has places open up.

I wanted to figure out a way to keep these conversations going away from the screen. So I started this podcast in order to reach a broader audience and keep these issues in your ear as you move throughout your day. And while it can be really overwhelming to think about how to change a massive system, that seems so ingrained in the fabric of our society by participating in these conversations.

You just listening to this podcast is participating. That is where we see. True, true change beginning. Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining me in this critical conversation with Dr. Rayshawn Ray, Dr. Ray is a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings institution and serves as a sociology professor and the executive director of the lab for applied social science research at the university of Maryland.

In this episode, we discuss some tangible solutions to America's policing crisis, including a bullishing qualified immunity, implementing insurance policies for individual officers and providing officers with housing subsidies to live in or around the communities they patrol. I hope that you enjoy this episode feeling engaged and please as always continue the conversation.

Once the episode is. 

Rashawn: [00:02:57] So I'm Dr. Rayshawn Ray. I am a sociologist. I'm a professor at the university of Maryland in college park, where I direct the lab for applied social science research. I'm also a fellow David Rubenstein fellow at the Brookings institution, which is a think tank in Washington, DC. And I've been doing work on policing.

Criminal justice and health disparities along with systemic racism for, uh, for over a decade now, but particularly over the past decade, as it relates to policing. When I was at UC Berkeley doing a postdoctoral fellowship with the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, I was examining physical activity. The ways that physical activity varies by race, by gender, by social class and how place matters in people's likelihood of engaging in physical activity.

And I essentially a FA found Unimog Arbery effect. Of course, a mater Arbery was the black man who was killed, not by police, but by a person who was a former police officer and who worked with the prosecutor's office. And what many are calling a racial profiling and even a potentially a hate crime. And the people who killed him are currently.

In jail, waiting for trial and a modern Arbery was a black man who was running through a predominantly white neighborhood in Southern Georgia. And what I found a decade ago was that black men. Are significantly less likely to be physically active in predominantly white neighborhoods. And a lot of that has to do with criminalization.

It has to do with what I call when blackness becomes weaponized. Even when a black person does not have a weapon, even when they are not attacking is perceived at any given point. Particularly the whites people that. Black people's physical bodies can cause bodily harm to someone else. And if they are a threat and that threads oftentimes leads to the outcomes that we're talking about today.

So that particular finding then led me to exploring the various ways the black people are policed or criminalized, oftentimes in the neighborhoods where they actually paid mortgage or rent, where they go to school, where they work and where they engage in leisure activity. And that led me then to obviously looking at policing and the criminal justice system.

Right. 

Abbie: [00:05:22] That makes a lot of sense. That's so interesting that you found that. I mean, it, it makes so much sense, but the fact that, and how is physical activity operationalized just like running, working out outside, what were some of the things. Some 

Rashawn: [00:05:36] of the variables. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. I mean, it was, it was how much do people, people engaging in at least 30 minutes of physical activity at one given time.

And that could be anything, but for the most part, people talked about exercising outside, running, walking, even going to a gym. So we found a spillover effect that we continue to find about what we call the illness, spillovers of police violence. So in other words, even if a person is going to a gym, if they've had a discriminatory experience in, or around that gym, they're going to be less likely to frequent it.

It's, it's just like going to a restaurant, right. And having a bad meal or having any bad service. Not only do you not go to that place, but every particularly if it's a chain restaurant, every time you think about that, That chain restaurant, even if it's in a different part of the country, you just won't go.

Right. 

Abbie: [00:06:25] Right. Wow. Okay. So yeah, so that all led you to the focus on policing. So you've said in the past that there are two forms of justice for black people and essentially non-black people or white people, but really, if we want to encompass it, there's nuance with indigenous populations who are also disproportionately policed, but two forms of justice really do exist in America.

And I guess we could also say it's white people and then non white people. But I want to, something that I like to do in this podcast is to really get into our definitions, to not just accept words for face value, to really unpack them. Because I think as we just, except for face value, it allows issues to perpetuate because we're not thinking critically about them.

So I would love for you to speak on. What justice means in this scenario? What does it mean to have two forms of justice? 

Rashawn: [00:07:22] Yeah. So when we talk about justice and when we talk about inequality or really inequity, because there are differences in the ways we might think about equality versus equity, right?

Equality, equality is giving everyone the same thing. Equity is giving people what they need. And when we talk about justice justice at this given time, isn't simply making things equitable. It's also creating a corrective. It is creating restitution. It is creating reconciliation for the past wrongs that we know creates the presence.

So when it comes to policing and criminal justice reform in recent history, we're talking about mass incarceration. We're talking about the fact that if you were a black boy or a young black man growing up in the 1990s one, you had a one out of three chance of being incarcerated. On parole or having a previous criminal record.

And what's important here to highlight these, these disparate ways that justice plays out or justice for one group and injustices for another is that it wasn't necessarily the black people. And even to this day, it wasn't necessarily that black people weren't engaging in different types of activities.

It was that they were over policed for those same activities. Drug activities is probably one of the best examples where at one point in time, in the late nineties and early two thousands, 75% of black males who were incarcerated were incarcerated for low level non-violent drug offenses. So now we can talk about the 25%, right.

But if we just focus on that 75%, what do we know about drugs? Well, we know that when we ask people, they volunteer this information that white blacks. Really do not differ in the frequency by which they use drugs. And even in some studies, white people actually use drugs at a higher rate. Why would that be?

Because drugs are expensive. They cost money. I think sometimes we forget that whether we're talking about alcohol, whether we're talking about marijuana or cannabis, or whether we're talking about some more elicits, illegal drugs, they are costly. So if you have more money, if you have more resources, you might be more likely to engage in those activities more often.

So that is an example of how we see two different forms of justice, where people are engaging in activities at similar rates. But all of a sudden one group is not only stopped by police, but they are profiled that leads to the stop. They are then searched. They are oftentimes harassed and physically brutalized, and then oftentimes they are arrested even when they have not done anything wrong.

For example, there too. Uh, examples that I can provide two studies. If you will. One in New York city that was done about a decade ago, looking at roughly 700,000 police stops, this we'll stop and frisk at his height. Okay. And part of what the study found was that over 50% of the people stopped were black about a third will Latino and less than 10% white.

Well, when people think about crime, they think, oh, well, that makes sense. Given what we know about who commits violent crime, but see here goes the kicker. When we actually looked at what the person was doing, only 2% of these stops led to the discovery of contraband or a criminal or a weapon, something that remotely resembled a crime or a person having a previous criminal record, but force was used on black people over 70,000 times.

Over 50,000 times for Latinos and less than 10,000 times for whites. This is the way we see justice being disproved, disproportionately applied. And we can now look at Washington. DC was just had a new report that came out that essentially found the same thing that New York city faced. Over a decade 

Abbie: [00:11:21] ago, right.

Something I recently came across this tweet that I feel is relevant. Um, it was by Marie Beacham and she said, some people have a hard time recognizing privilege saying I work hard. I don't get things handed to me. I understand that. Here's how I respond privilege. Isn't bonus points for you and your team.

It's unfair penalties. The other team gets that you don't privilege. Isn't the presence of perks and benefits. It's the absence of obstacles and barriers. That's a lot harder to notice if you have a hard time recognizing your privileges, focus on what you don't have to go through. And I thought that was so key to what you're saying is it's not that.

White people aren't being imprisoned. It's not that white people aren't being arrested. It's that they're not being additionally brutalized when they're doing these things, it's that it's not disproportionate their whiteness. Isn't being weaponized against them. As you say that blackness is, I was recently having a conversation about how we often complete policing with public safety.

But if you are able to conflate those things that shows your privilege, right? If you feel safety as the, like, if who you call, you're going to be safe. That's a form of privilege. 

Rashawn: [00:12:44] Maybe without a doubt. I mean, I mean, you nailed it. I mean, when we think about privilege and we think about some of these outcomes, it doesn't mean that white people haven't worked hard.

It doesn't mean that they don't experience police violence. We know that that's the case. And I actually think that's been a problem with the narrative as well, is that, of course the focus should be on the group that is disproportionately more likely to experience it. But police violence is a problem.

No matter who you are. It just depends on the likelihood of it happening. I think when it comes to policing the best stat to highlight this is that black people are 3.5 times more likely than whites to be killed by police when they're not attacking or have a weapon. Let's break down this stats, which I rarely get the chance to do unless I'm talking long form like this, which I always appreciate because there's this graph that I show that came from the FBI.

I provide some guidance to the FBI on how they should think about collecting data for law enforcement and on, on the criminal justice system. One thing is interesting about that is in any given year, over 1000 people are killed by police. Over 1000 people were killed by police every single year. That's like one every eight hours right now.

What's interesting about that is the federal gun Ms. Steele does not properly collect, collect that information. The CDC collects information on how many people get the flu every year. We're now starting to get a really good, accurate portrait of COVID-19 at least in the U S context. And, and the CDC actually collects information on how many people are, he'll buy jelly fish every year, like, which is crazy, but we don't collect it on how many people are killed by the police.

Like it's a travesty, like, like no matter who you are, if you pay taxes, you're just like, hold on, wait. Like, like, it just doesn't make sense until you start to realize that maybe it's purposeful and not always purposeful, purposeful from the standpoint of one individual person saying they don't want to do it, but systemic.

And what do I mean by that? Well, most police departments are. Most of them are. It's like in the heat of the nights that I used to watch the, in the eighties and nineties, I mean, most departments have like 10 to 20 police officers. They don't have the resources, they don't have the human capital. They don't have the skillset to even be able to collect this information.

So, but, but then of course there's some people who just don't want the information collected, but I found in all the work I do with law enforcement, that mostly it has to do with, they simply don't have the resources to do it, to send the information because are 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States are highly decentralized, which I think is a problem.

So back to the stat, what do we know that stat of the roughly 40% of law enforcement agencies who submit this information? Well, black people baseline are about two to 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police. So black people represent about 13% of the population they represent over 30% of people killed by police.

Some people again would say, oh well, that's just because black people come in more violent crime. No, that's actually not why instead then when we add in whether or not the person was attacking or whether or not they had a weapon, which are two questions that law enforcement are asked when they fill out their reports.

So these is coming from police officers themselves. We would expect the racial gap to decrease, right? If, if, if people weren't attacking, if they did not have a weapon that suggest they didn't pose a threat, police officers say that we would expect that 2.5 times gap to shrink. Instead it gets larger. It goes from about 2.5 to 3.5 times.

And that's how I got to the fact that, okay, what is it that's explaining. Is blackness in and of itself. That, that, that is. And, and oftentimes it is the absence of any perceived whiteness. Even if that's present, even if a black person has a white person who is their parents, like Dante writes, even if a black person has a white person who they're married to, whether they're dating or if they have biracial children, none of that matters because the one drop rule in the United States is still alive and well, the perception is that you're black.

And when the perception is that your black is perceived that you are a physical threat, that your, your body could cause harm. You don't have to be armed. You don't have to be attacking the stereotypes about black people's bodies. And this is where implicit bias comes into play. And really a concept that I've been pushing around structurally imposed, implicit bias.

It's not simply that implicit bias rest in a person's mind is that systemically implicit biases allowed to proliferate. It's allowed to matter in a host of outcomes. If a person walks into a store, if they go into a restaurant, if they walk on a ball field or a court, if they walk into a classroom, the stereotypes about blackness transcends all of these spaces to become structurally imposed forms of relegation and marginalization for black people that doesn't exist for whites.

Right. 

Abbie: [00:18:14] I just read something recently about the NFL and how, I don't know if you read this, but they, the testing for dementia between black players and white players, the bar was lower for black players because the assumption was that they would have lower cognitive function from the rip. And so there are all these civil suits happening now, but that's, I mean, it's exactly what you're talking about.

It's these structural ways that racism is allowed because of the stereotypes that have proliferated for decades, for centuries in our 

Rashawn: [00:18:49] country. That's exactly right. I mean the NFL example. Is so spot on because Stephen FOYA and I, we published an article in the American journalist sociology last year.

Look, we were looking at basketball, but what the paper was really about is the way the racial stereotypes play out onto people's bodies and what we found to, to no surprise. But I think for a lot of people, they're shocked at the continued significance in 2020 and 2021, we found that if a player was light-skinned more likely to be white, that they were talked about for their mental abilities, how clever they are, how, how crafty they are, how hard they work.

And if you're darker skinned, you're more likely to be discussed for your physicality, for your speed, for your strength. Interestingly, Lighter skin players were bigger, like physically bigger. They weigh more than the darker skin players. They didn't stop the stereotypes about strength and physicality to come out more about the darker skin players than the lighter scan players like this.

This is what I love about research is that it takes something and can, and can completely juxtapose it. So in NFL, what that means is if you already assume that black people are less than telling. Then that means now they have to score even lower on the dementia test to qualify. And this is the reason why there are these multi-billion dollar lawsuits and settlements coming out and think about this, that has a spillover effect.

Again, it's not simply about what happens on the field that has transference to when they're in the classroom that has transference to when they're coaching on the sideline that has transference to when they're trying to start a business, when they're trying to live in a neighborhood. And then of course it comes back to the policing of black bodies and also black minds in ways that create, that sets up distinctly different forms of justice based on what you look like.

Abbie: [00:20:54] Right? Absolutely. And so when we talk about then solutions, when we think about how to move in a way that we can aim towards equity and. Justice, but I would love for us to also define what we want justice to look like. Right? Like it moving forward. What would justice mean? And I think you hit on this a little earlier that it's not just that it's also a reconciliation.

It's also these things that are not only addressing the current moment, but multiple stages of the past. And so I want to get into some of the ideas that you put forth. So if we can first talk about you, you mentioned the need to abolish qualified immunity. So if you can first define what qualified immunity is and why it's important to abolish it.

Qualified 

Rashawn: [00:21:53] immunity is a court doctrine that essentially allows for police officers and other government officials to not face any financial or civil culpability for. Uh, miss act. Such as police misconduct or some other sort of accident. So what does that mean? So what that means is then the person is sued, but oftentimes if a person is going to Sue, they Sue them.

I mean, it's a palliative care where the person works. They Sue the police department where the person works. Frequently, what people should note that they hear particularly of journalists really are really good and know that know the language they will say, um, a person is named in a lawsuit. Well, really oftentimes the person is trying to Sue that person, but the person is named because that person actually can't be sued financially or civilly, whatever that, whatever that outcome might mean, it's not always about money.

It's about other sort of things. But then municipality is, so what happens when the municipality has to pay? Well, let's take George Floyd, but we could also take, of course that was a $27 million settlement. We could take the $12 million settlement from Brianna Taylor. I think those are the two most recent ones that people know, but there are several others, like the $20 million to William Green's family and prince George's county, Maryland, the $38 million for Korryn Gaines, his family in Baltimore county.

I mean, the list could go on and on. These are huge. This money comes from taxpayer dollars from the general funds. It does not come from the police department budget, which is something else to talk about just to kind of set the context for the money, because all the work that I've done. And of course, we'll, we'll probably talk about the virtual reality training program that we have at the university of Maryland.

But yeah, what led me to this point where some of the limitations of those sort of programs, even though I think they're vitally important, but it's what you noted. Individual officers are one thing holding the system accountable is another. So when we look at the conviction of Derek showman, he's just one point.

He's just one cop or former cop who should have, who shouldn't have been on the street to begin with. I mean, long before he killed George Floyd and probably even long before he put his knee on the back of that teenager for longer than he did George Floyd, he shouldn't have been on the street. He had like 20 police complaints.

We go to Chicago, the fraternal order police president has like roughly 50 complaints. I mean, we talking, I mean, 50 complaints. He makes Derek Shovan look like chunk change. So, so that is what we're dealing with from the other side. And so dealing with qualified immunity, when we look at a city like Oakland, where over 40% of all of their general funds, meaning the budget, all tax money over 40% goes to policing on top of that 40%.

You have the police misconduct settlements. We go to Chicago, Minneapolis close to 40% on top of that percentage is the civilian pay. So in other words, to be very, very clear when we see these civil payouts for police misconduct, the $6 million that went to Laquan McDonald's family, the probably large settlement is going to go to Adam Toledo's family.

The 13 year old, recently killed in Chicago. When he turned around with his hands up, that money comes from Chicago. Taxpayers were not out of the police budget, which steel comes from taxpayers, but on top of that is coming from taxpayers, but then it gets deeper net because in a city like Chicago, They've ran out of money to pay the settlements.

They're so large when Rami manual was mayor. And this is the reason why it's so important at times to note people because the person oftentimes triggers a political party, people know Rami mag. Is a Democrat. He worked in the Clinton white house. He worked in the Obama white house. It's important to note that he's a Democrat because at times this issue is framed in a partisan way.

That, that from a research standpoint, I don't really see that. Right. And in fact, I think criminal justice and policing is a pathway to bipartisanship. And that that's been my experience in a, in a lot of respects. And I found a lot of resistance in democratic led areas. I'm not saying I haven't felt resistance in Republican led areas.

I have to, but the point of noting that is that it's, it's not as if one is necessarily better than the other. This is a system that's been in place for a long time. So Rami manual came up with a plan where he said, wow, we're spending out millions of dollars in police misconduct. Settlements. How about we put that into the budget?

So in Chicago, there is a budget line appropriated for police misconduct, but what Chicago. Is has such a corrupt police department has so much police the misconduct. They overspent that they busted the police misconduct budget, which was like 50 million or $70 million. So they didn't have enough money to pay for it.

So what is it? I knew they then took out police brutality bonds. So this is one of the things people don't know about cities and municipalities. When a city doesn't meet their budget. And it really, we can think about this as simply as the ways when, all right, you get a paycheck. Everybody gets a paycheck.

Total of how much you get per month. Most people get paid twice a month. You total up that amount of money. If you don't have enough money to cover all your expenses, what do you do? You take out a loan, right? You figure it out. You, you, you put it on a credit card, cities and municipalities counties. They do the same thing.

They take out bonds, bonds that are essentially prepaid for them to use the money. And then they're hit with a really high interest rate. And a lot of fees kind of think about it. Like you're taking out a payday. Municipalities take out a payday loan. They've had to take out payday loans on police misconduct, police brutality, bonds that are now that is now costing cities, even more money, so better qualified immunity.

What this all means is that at the end of the day, if we look over the past five years in only the largest 20 Metro areas, only the top 20, again, I said there were over 18,000 police agencies, only the top 20. They have spent out over $2 billion with a B on police misconduct. And what's interesting is even more money has been spent in suburban and rural areas simply because there are more of them.

They're like 17,980 of them around the country spinning out taxpayer money and repelling qualified immunity. When now whole police departments and police officers accountable for. For people's money and for their behavior. 

Abbie: [00:28:52] Right. You know, I think what's hard, hard and true is that, so often when we talk about criminal justice reform, we frame it as a fiscal issue, right?

Like, do these changes it'll benefit you fiscally, right? Like you'll save money if you reform these things. We, and we see that with justice reinvestment, right? The idea that we would, the, the original intention of justice reinvestment was to intentionally decarcerate. So reduce the prison population, then use the funds that are typically allocated for corrections and put them into communities that are most harmed by mass incarceration.

We saw a bunch of like pew charitable trusts and Vierra Institute of justice picked up this idea and they started pitching it to states all around the country specifically and mostly conservative states, but it was framed in a way that this will help you with your budget. It wasn't framed as a moral argument that we're incarcerating too many people and disproportionately too many black people.

And it's devastating these communities that are marginalized and minoritized. And because it was framed in a fiscal way, we see that individuals did not intentionally decarcerate, but they solely put a cap on and then they would. Take the funds and funnel it into other corrections agencies. So community corrections, SU supervision, probation, parole treatment facilities for those coming home who were incarcerated.

It's, it's all being funneled back into the criminal justice system. And so the thing that I worry about is that although, necessary and true that it will assist the budget. When we talk about transformation of the system, I want to try and see if it's possible at all, to move away from the fiscal argument and, and make it a moral argument.

Because the issue too, is that if the, the reason that we had mass incarceration, the reason that we have. Over policing of certain areas is not fiscal it's moral. It was a moral outcry for three strikes laws for the death penalty for hyper policing and militarization, because there was a moral outcry of threat, right?

We know these things cost way more, but we do them because there's a moral backing to them. And yet we try and fight morality with fiscal rather than fighting moral with moral. And so I'm wondering how we can move towards that. When we talk about transformation, 

Rashawn: [00:31:43] I mean, those are all great points. I'm not sure that this is, this is how I think about it sitting at a lot of tables, whether that be on Capitol hill and in state legislatures, city councils with police departments, the moral issue makes sense.

If you're a moral person. And if you actually care about the morality and humanity of the people who were talking about being overly policed, the problem is that enough people don't care. And unfortunately that oftentimes does fall on political lines, just based on a person's political ideology and part of the reason why it falls along those lines.

And far part of the reason why the morality argument on this side of the coin doesn't work well for those people is because for them, it is about morality and humanity. But from the other side, for many of them, it's about protecting whiteness is about that. Blackness is a threat to the morality. And a threat to the humanity of whiteness and about white people ruling the United States.

And, and we saw that on January six. I mean, that, that is an unfortunate, an unfortunate reality. And part of what I've, what I've realized is that the money spent on law enforcement, oftentimes leading to state sanctioned violence is put in place to protect whiteness and protect white people from the threats to protect white neighborhoods from the threat of black people, migrating it now, not even anything black people have done.

See, that's the thing about the threat. When you actually look at the research, you're like, Wow. So the people who end up really getting over policed the most are the ones who actually weren't doing anything. Like, like we're not talking about the ones who were in prison for murder. That's what I, we were talking about.

And so, so when, when you get to that point, it becomes, okay. Okay. And then upset at these tables, making all different, particularly the morality argument. Again, it doesn't work because the other side of the morality argument are people who are thinking about morality, humanity. They're just not thinking about it for people.

You look like me for black people, right? And so when you go to the fiscal argument, all of a sudden you can move the needle because, and, and you bring up such a great point about how oftentimes when we talk, when we make fiscal argues, And when it all shakes out that money was simply regurgitated back until the entire end to the same system.

Right? So this brings up what, what makes policing different? Well, I think this is the reason why the defund, the police movement has gained so much steam and the reason why it's so much of a threat, see, always know when it's a really good idea on policing or criminal justice reform. When police officers start talking about they're going to quit, always know is a great idea.

I'm like, yeah, this is a winner. Cause that's the only thing they can respond with. They're like, dang, you got me. I quit like that. That's what people do when you're playing a game. Right. And they know that they're going to lose. They just quit. They storm off the court. They're upset. But what was interesting is that most of them are not quitting.

It doesn't mean that some that is not happening for some of them. Yeah, no about policing serving on taskforces and advising police chiefs and helping to select police police chiefs in working with thousands of police officers, is that typically if they're leaving or a group of them are leaving is because something is about to be exposed that they've already done.

It's not because they're worried about changes to what's going on with their job. It's because they already did something dirty and corrupt and racist, and they're about to get caught doing it. So they retire and leave to keep their pension and go work somewhere else. See that we have to really unpack as, as the point of this podcast is really on a pack, why these outcomes happen.

So the fiscal argument part of what I do is I put the fiscal argument on other things. See, it's about triggering. We'll look at how much more money we could have for your children's education. Oh, parent parents love that. Doesn't matter who you are. You can be conservative and be, even be liberal. You people want money for their kids' education.

Right? And then you highlight examples where policing has obstructed funding for education. Like in Inkster, Michigan, a small town police department, like many of the thousands around the country where they had a large civil payout and the town didn't have enough money to pay it. So they ended up having to close the school system.

Because the police brutality settlement wiped out the budget. We could also go to a place in Nebraska where it's slightly different situation, but, but it's the same outcome. So it highlights the principal. There were a group of people who got charged with murder, come to find out they didn't do it. And they got let out of prison.

And there was a large settlement for them that the town is called Beatrice. They're known as the Beatrice six and the town had to pay out restitution to these people were, who were falsely incarcerated. And in order to make the payment. The town Beatrice had to increase property taxes to the highest amount possible to the people living in that town.

It doesn't matter if you're a conservative or liberal. When you start talking about schools, you start talking about property taxes. It is a fiscal argument. So it's about linking that together and helping people to see the consequences of policing. Because right now, for the most part, people only see the positives of policing for them, which is a napping state, sanctioned violence against potential threat of people, migrating and potential threat of their daughters, dating a black boy potential threat of something happening to their home.

When nothing really happens to their home, like we have to get beyond the threads and get to the actual fiscal outcomes that happened. So is 

Abbie: [00:37:42] the idea then that through abolishing qualified immunity and by putting it on the police budget, the officers would then be. Told by the higher ups to act in a different way so that they don't have the threat of the payout.

Rashawn: [00:38:03] That's exactly one way. And it's not in, it's not just the higher ups, it's their fellow police officer beside them. See, see, see, the thing I've learned about law enforcement is they have a lot of internal accountability and very little external accountability, internal accountability, meaning. They wreck their car or they say a cuss word, they break break protocol, like, like say they're somewhere.

And they don't respond quickly enough because they were doing something else, say they were handling something personally. They didn't, they weren't where they're supposed to be. They get in a lot of trouble for that, but they, they have very little external accountability to the communities they serve.

See, we have to leverage that internal accountability to then create some form of external accountability to get the outcomes we want. This is one way to do it. Now with that being said, that will only happen in municipalities that will not simply increase the police budget. See for a lot of places, they'll say, oh yeah, we.

Yeah, we'll just give them the extra money, because in a way it doesn't really change. What's currently happening. It just changes where the money's coming from. Right. So what has to happen is there has to be a cap on police spending, which is where reallocating and defining the police comes from. But the big thing that I assert even beyond just keeping on using taxpayer money is we need to have insurance policies, police department, insurance policies, individual officer malpractice, liability policies, probably up to a million dollars doesn't mean that 4 million, if each of those officers had 1 million with Georgia, Florida, and even five or 6 million, cause there were other officers kind of across Frida on the scene that that will pay that 27 million.

But what it means is that they would have some liability and part of what, what happened there is just like you driving a car. If you have enough accidents, what is the insurance company going to say? We can no longer insure you. Well, yes. First they're going to say they're going to Jack up the prices. So all of a sudden it's going to double your premium.

Nobody wants to pay that. And then if you keep getting out of hand, they're not going to be able to insure you the same way. Some physicians can not keep their license, they can not be insured. So, so if, if a police officer can not get an insurance policy, they should not be able to get certified to be a police officer, which is what we do for a host of other professions, right.

And Denver, Colorado, and the state of Colorado more broadly is the best example here, where they are creating police department insurance policies. And right now they have a setup where officers are going to have liability up to $25,000. Now, should that be more? Yeah, but, but it is a start. So most officers are not going to be able to come out of pocket for $25,000, but it's going to lead them to getting an insurance policy.

And the research I've done is small municipalities that had an insurance risk pool becomes the exception that proves that. These are small places that have unlike Beatrice in Inkster that I mentioned, these are places like in east Tennessee, that's part of an insurance risk pool for their entire government.

And they just happened to roll in policing because there was so few of them see, typically policing is separate. It is separate. Not because it's a different animal. It's separate because it costs so much darn money, but it doesn't mean that insurance companies won't insure it. They will write in a lot of officers actually have injury insurance already.

If they get injured on the job. So we act like that. It's not set up. It's already set up to go. So in short, there were two officers who beat up a motorist. He was driving a motorcycle, beat him up really bad. There was a large settlement, it was a large insurance claim filed and paid out. The insurance company said.

Unless you fire those two officers, we will drop you for my insurance. And then what pressure did that put on? There were other municipalities part of that insurance risk pool. So now they're looking at that department and that, that city saying. You all need to let them go. And they got fired and there have been places where there have been entire police departments where they, where that has happened to where those police departments that were rotten and corrupt and racist have literally closed down because they happen to have insurance policies.

So we already have this in place. It just needs to become common place throughout it. And I, and I think it will, in some places being a realist, I think there'll be some places, even if qualified immunity is abolished at the federal level, which is, should be, she'll be part of the George for justice and policing act.

If it doesn't that act won't have the amount of teeth and bite that people think it will. But even if it does, there'll be some places that won't change anything, which is part of the reason why Republicans are going to probably get on board with it unless something else happens. But in other areas, they'll think of innovative ways.

They'll create insurances, they'll start to cap police budgets that will lead to. More accountability and police officers policing each other. 

Abbie: [00:42:56] So here's my question, because I don't think, I mean, sure. There are probably some officers who are like, I'm going to go get me some black folks today. Right? Like, but I think a lot of officers have, as we've spoken about this unconscious implicit bias that we all have, it's just that they're then put in this position with a weapon where the threat that everyone in America has internalized of blackness gets exponentially higher in a job where you are literally to sniff out threat, right?

Like there are these multiple issues happening. And so even if they're all of these monetary incentives to not act in this way, How do we get people to not act in that way when it's so deeply embedded in who they are and how they see the world? Like how, and I think this goes into the training that we're talking about and not only training, because this is the thing too, that, that I'm, I'm actually starting research with the Tucson police in the fall to talk about cultural company evidence.

And it's, it's not just about like training the racist out of you, right? Like there has to be also some mechanisms in place at the hiring so that we're not just hiring everyone and then trying to get everyone on the same page. We have to have some sort of hiring techniques of where we're really.

Feeling these things out and how it would play out. And I think the implications of my study specifically in looking at cultural competence, the way that I framed it in my cramped proposal was that the findings on how cultural competence is built or not over the life course, that's not just to inform police training that's to inform elementary school, primary school and secondary school curriculum, because police are not just this special group.

They're just civilians who then put on a uniform and chose this path. So. It's all of us. And so how, how do you think if we abolished qualified immunity, if we put these insurance policies together, a lot of these police, because they're not trained in the deescalation that you spoke about and other things, because they're not trained in these certain ways, it's, it's very snap decisions, right.

That they have to make. And so even if there's, there might be less of that future orientation where they're thinking in that moment, oh God, my insurance policy, they're about to pull a weapon on a young black kid. How do we get them to just actually not see threat of blackness in that way? 

Rashawn: [00:45:57] Yeah, I mean, so, so Otis Johnson who's at Hopkins.

He always says about policing. He said, I'm unsure if culture is referring. Because that's really what we're talking about here. And I tend to agree, but also think that leveraging structure and aiming to alter systemic outcomes is the pathway forward. So the way that I think about it, I kind of think about qualified immunity.

It's like, it's like the big ACE, and if you're playing spades or it's like the queen it, when you play chess, the king is obviously. Ending racial disparities and police violence. Right. But the queen is qualified immunity. It becomes difficult to almost win a game, playing chess without the queen. And so that's how I think about it, but then it's all these other pieces that become part of it.

And one of the biggest pieces is training police officers when they come through the police academy. And one of the first things we did was we did a, an ethnography of a police recruits class. We wanted to see essentially everything they went through. So before we built our virtual reality training program with computer scientists and with corporations and all of that, we wanted to see what they did.

And I mean, some of the things truly shocked us. So the byline that I say, when I do media stuff, I like how you put that earlier. Like, okay, let's go beyond the soundbites is always say, officers receive about 50 hours of firearm training. And less than 10 hours of deescalation training, part of what we aim to do with our virtual reality training program, which is where police officers put on goggles, they are immersed in a virtual world and they have to use communication, social interactions by which to get through those situations and deescalate.

Abbie: [00:47:44] I want to just mention too, though, as you did, 90% of calls are not for violence or deadly weapon. Right. So exactly. So we know, we know that if you ask any police officer, what are the main calls that you're receiving? It's mental health issues, right? Like someone is becoming a threat to themselves or others, not with a deadly weapon, but just because.

Some kind of mental illness that's occurring. I spoke to one officer. He said it was that it was responding to deaths in a home that had occurred naturally. And it was just these random things that were nowhere near the idea of the cops and robbers that we often speak about. And so if we're, if we're giving all this training, I mean, go on, go ahead.

So we give 10 hours of deescalation training, even though we know that that's the majority of their work right 

Rashawn: [00:48:45] now. I mean, they're just training the tactics, right? And so, so when they show up and they pull a gun, and I remember when, when we finally looked at the data and we had, we had done this large quantitative study, we had done the qualitative study.

We had done the experimental study and I came to a very, very frightening realization, which was that I'm surprised they don't pull their guns even more. Given how much they are trained to do so. So when you put them in situations where things are unknown, right? That the social psychological concept is subjective uncertainty.

When it's a whole bunch of unknowns, people then Infor people, subjectively Infor. And when they do that, they oftentimes replace the unknown information with stereotypes. It's kind of like having a bottle of liquid and you can't see what's in it and you make assumptions. What's in it based on what the person looks like, where they're at all these things, they could be completely inaccurate, but that then impacts how you're going to respond to what's in that bottle.

That's what law enforcement does all the time. So yes, the training is important. Cultural competency is important. Implicit bias trainings are important. I've done so many of those. I think they're impactful. They're just limited without the other things on the chess board for. Hurts people hurts people. I have a large dataset on policing about 8,000 officers that shows 80% of them suffer from chronic stress.

That includes depression, anxiety, marital problems. They get angered issue and angered easily. One out of six of them are suicidal and report substance abuse, alcohol illicit drugs, 90% never seek help. 90% of them never seek any sort of mental health training. So what are they doing? They're just holding all that inside.

Or they might talk to other officers and put on a certain bravado. Even the women do it. Or they go talk to a priest, which when you look at large police departments that you ask, who are the people who are around the most, when people talk to its priests, because police officers assume they're going to hold it in, because they assume that if they say something about their mental health, that they're going to be viewed as less than they're going to be stigmatized.

So we have the mandate mental health training, like police officers are human human beings. Right. I have several of them in my family. I mean, my great uncle was the first black chief of police in my hometown. I have another uncle who was a cop. I have a cousin who was cop. I mean, When you see what they go through, you realize how difficult their job is.

And as, as we noted earlier, it doesn't really matter what race or gender the person is either. I mean, sure. I mean, we see some differences in implicit bias outcomes about anti-black racism by race, but it's not as much as people would think instead of what I think is the biggest driver is where people live or where they're from, that if people are familiar with the neighborhoods.

And so if you're in a black, Latino neighborhood and you're, you're black, Latino officer, and you're from that city, It's a, it's a hyper high likelihood that you probably came from those neighborhoods. Right? So, so you become more familiar, whereas whites officers, they're just not nor do they live in or around those neighborhoods.

So those are the other chest pieces that come to the table to make a difference in the outcomes that we want to see. Right. 

Abbie: [00:52:09] So I think one of the things that you had mentioned that I hadn't heard of as a solution that I think is really intriguing is the idea of housing subsidies for officers. And again, I heard this in a sound bite, so I wanted to unpack it.

And I wanted to know too, if, when you're talking about housing subsidies for officers as a way to alleviate some stress, do you think that those houses should be located within the neighborhoods that they are. 

Rashawn: [00:52:38] Yes. Most definitely. So I think two things, I think first it should be mandated. Well, first let me say this.

When I think about funding police funding. Yes. We have to think about reallocating funding, which is defunding, but we also have to think about shifting funding within the police budget when I've examined the police budgets around the country. It's just a lot of them. Misspending like misappropriation, where you got people doing budgets, who that's not what they do.

They were like, they're not accountants, they're not finance people. They're police officers. So what do you expect them to do? I mean like, like we really have to think about that. And we also have that they've been in law enforcement similar to, to, to the academy. People get promoted when they do the best thing you want them to do.

Well, if you're an academic and you publish, well, you're a good researcher. They throw you in administration and act like you're going to be a good administrator. Same thing with policing. If you're a good beat cop, which could mean you're a community person, or it could also mean that you brutalize people, let's be clear about that because you get a lot of arrests.

You get a lot of stops. You get a lot of tickets, but overall, they assume those people should get promoted. Now that behind the desk. So I've seen tons of great officers, people who we think should be cops. They're not doing the type of stuff on the street. They're doing stuff behind a desk that they're probably not even that good at.

So, so nonetheless, we have to shift funding. So part of what that would mean is it doesn't mean increasing the budget. You shift the funding around you make it mandatory for police officers to live in or around the municipality. So in a large city, let's take a large city, Austin, Dallas, you could, you should be at a find anywhere to live.

There. Let's take Philly, even same sort of thing, but let's take DC where it's only seven miles around. Oh the diamond. So maybe you expand the scope and you go out five miles, which now all of a sudden in the DC area, I mean, you can live during that era anywhere you want to, but that doesn't mean living 40 miles out.

And what they, we know, I think this will provide a pathway, not just for police officers, but for teachers as well. There was a study showing that 90% of police officers and teachers can not afford to live in the major Metro areas around the United States. They don't get paid enough, which then that's why they work all that over time.

And then we know that people who are exhausted, who are tired, who are working 60, 80, a hundred hours a week, 120 hours a week made bad decisions because they're tired. They're implicit biases go on steroids. And we get some of the outcomes that we see. So if all of a sudden we make it mandatory that they live in the commute.

We provide them with the, with the subsidy. What does that mean? It's just like a first-time home buyers club. Like in a lot of cities, they do it for people who just moved to an area. You give them renters assistance off their rent, which a lot of places do privately apartment complex is for police officers.

But then you also give them down payment assistance, five or 10% to put down on a home. They get invested in the community. You give them mandatory mental health training. I think they should have to go at least four times a year. I think they should probably go monthly, but let's start with four times a year right now.

And then all of a sudden we start to change what community policing looks like. We start to change the way that black and brown people experienced law enforcement and more so. They then start to experience public safety, which is what we know a lot of predominantly white and affluent neighborhoods experience every single day.

And then we started to transform justice. So look, this isn't something we can just put a band-aid on. I mean, policing is so fractured in the United States that it's going to take surgery to redo it. And when you have surgery, you don't simply feel better after the surgery, you have to rehab, you have to heal.

You have to learn how to walk again. Sometimes you have to learn how to talk again. You have to learn how to run. That is where we are with law enforcement. And instead, what we can try to do is to put band-aids on an open wound and act like it's going to heal knowing that it needs surgery. And so all of these things go on a chess board to not just focus on accountability, but to also focus on what officers need to become people.

And then. What will also happen is we will start getting a different pool of recruits who want to be police officers, because the whole logic that defund the police or black lives matter has people not want to be cops. It's just not true. People didn't want to be cops before, and they didn't want to be cops because it's a difficult job.

It, I mean, depending on who you are, I guess you can end up getting paid really well, if you want to work that many hours, but it's hard work, but what does change it when police officers live in the community, when people know that they're going to actually be able to make change. And so, yes, part of what I see with background and I serve on the state of California's advisory review board for background checks that psychologists give out, I know police officers and I've had police chiefs tell me this and majors and captains people overtrain.

And they say, yeah, that guy he's tried to be a cop three times. And he finally made it. And everybody knows that guy should not be on the streets either. They're racist. And, or they have some mental health issues where they should not be put in the situations that they're put in. And so look, I mean, that's a long way of saying, of course there's a lot of things that have to be done, but a lot of that is in the George for justice and policing act.

But the queen is qualified immunity. I think it fits off the table. If it's off the chessboard, these other pieces are going to be difficult, moving the needle. 

Abbie: [00:58:07] Yeah, I think, I think that's great. I think what's so important about this kind of conversation is the acknowledgement that it's so multifaceted.

There's no silver bullet to change this issue. It is so multifaceted. And I feel like I could talk to you for hours

Rashawn: [00:58:29] we can go so far in this as it is at least cover a 

Abbie: [00:58:34] range. Yeah, no, I think when we move forward in thinking about police, I do like. Just off the bat. We have to question, as we move forward away from this conversation, we have to question, what is the purpose of police? What does public safety look like?

What does justice look like and how can it be achieved and what is necessary? Are police necessary? I think so often we. We because we're socialized into the culture and context that we are, it's very difficult to think of anything different than the structures we have in place. This is why people really have a hard time with the abolition of prison.

This is why people have a hard time with the abolition, right. Police, but these were not things that just arose as like, they, they weren't there in the land. Like it wasn't something that we were just, we came across as humans and we were like, oh, these are here. We constructed this. And we constructed it from a racist place.

So we have to think about, is it necessary or can there be something else? And I know that's very threatening to anyone who's involved in it, but that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be outlets or jobs or anything else for those people if they were moved out of that position. And so I think we have to think about what's necessary.

Um, take, don't take these ideas for face value, questioned them, challenge them, and then ask yourself what makes you feel safe. And then how does that maybe reflect, 

Rashawn: [01:00:18] I mean, you nailed it. I mean, look, people had a problem with abolishing slavery. People had a problem with abolishing Jim Crow. They're not around anymore, but it is still around law enforcement, which came out of, of course, slave patrols in that same time period.

And as you know, What should abolition look like? I oftentimes stake. What does rebuilding look like? I mean, if we look at Newark, I don't think our officer fired their gun in 2020 now. I think they've done so in 2021, but that was a department that was rebuilt in a way that came in. They also had a consent decree, which is something we haven't talked a lot about, which I think helps create a lot of change.

But one thing is clear. Then when we talk about defunding the police and reallocating calls for service, that other people can handle mental health calls, Denver has showed us that other people can handle traffic calls, Oakland, Berkeley, even DC and other places have showed us that when it comes to violent crime, only 60%.

Of homicides are solved every year. That means 40% of homicides go unsolved. Does that mean police officers? Aren't good at their job? Not necessarily, but it does mean that they might be focusing on the wrong things and solving violent crime is what we want them to do. Instead we've overly focused on policing.

The people who we think commit the violent crime and police have not gotten that. Correct. Right. 

Abbie: [01:01:42] Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for talking to me. I feel like I need. Another episode or five with you, but again, thank you so much. And I look forward to speaking with you again. 

Rashawn: [01:01:58] All right. Thank you so much.

Abbie: [01:02:02] Thank you so much for participating in my critical conversation with Dr. Rayshawn Ray. First of all, I thought it was so interesting that his previous research found that black folks living in. The spaces were less likely to engage in physical activity. I think I mentioned in a previous episode, an article written by Elijah Anderson, where he speaks about being yelled at, by a white man in a truck while running through a predominantly white neighborhood to quote unquote, go back to where he came from.

This experience is not unique and demonstrates one of the many public health impacts of racism. I also appreciated the discussion and reframing of privilege, the idea that privileges not added points, but the ability to not have points deducted for no reason, but the main points I want to highlight from this conversation, our race Sean's ideas for solving the police and crisis in America.

I think that this podcast does a great job of highlighting the vast impact of racialized policing and the criminal justice system. And so I'm really happy to add to that conversation, how to truly move forward in policy and practice three months, same points, Rayshawn brought up we're abolishing qualified immunity to shift the ways that people these payouts are funded.

Implementing insurance it's palsy is in part as a means to identify officers who should not be patrolling. And lastly, providing officers with housing subsidies so that they can alleviate some stress and also become more familiar with the communities that they are trolling. I appreciated how Rayshawn brought in the chess analogy, how changing culture and eliminating racism are the king, but there are other important pieces to the game that can significantly impact outcome.

Next episode, I'll be speaking with Michael Akon. Fenella a previously incarcerated individual from London who provides unique insights into the British prison system and discusses the differences from the American system as well as the similarities. So I hope you'll tune in, expect new episodes every other Monday.

And don't forget to subscribe, rate and leave a review. I can't wait to read your feedback. I am Abbie Henson and this was critical conversations.