"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 79

In this episode: Defund or Unleash: What Does Effective Policing Look Like?

December 3, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 79

Episode 79: Defund or Unleash: What Does Effective Policing Look Like?

In recent years, several high-profile abuses of power have fractured public trust in police and created a false tension between police accountability and public safety. But somewhere between a blanket defense of the police and “defund the police” lie effective solutions. Peter talks with three thoughtful, accomplished people who have worn the badge to find out what they’ve learned about what is broken in American policing, how to fix it, and whether some types of police work might be better left to someone else. (This episode contains strong language.)

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Paul Pazen: I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. I had always known I'd wanted to give back to the community I grew up in.

Right out of high school, Paul Pazen enlisted in the Marines. After five years of service, he returned home and became an oﬃcer with the Denver Police Department. He served for nearly three decades — as a patrol oﬃcer, investigator, lieutenant, and by the time the summer of 2020 came around, he’d risen through the ranks all the way to chief of police. He loved it. He felt he was good at police work, that he had built a strong bond with the communities he served.

Paul Pazen: And I was so proud of our relationship. We had done a lot of great things. And we had a very strong bond, but obviously when something like this happens.

ARCHIVAL Newcaster 1: This morning, the FBI is looking into the death of a black man after he was stopped by police in Minneapolis.

Paul Pazen: It erodes all of that.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: George Floyd's death sparking protests across the country…

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: The nation erupted into scenes of chaos, violence, and widespread destruction into the early morning hours.

In Denver, demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis went on for days. There was widespread vandalism, looting, fires, violence…

Paul Pazen: I would see five oﬃcers down, eight oﬃcers down, and I went to the hospital every single night to go visit our oﬃcers. You know, broken bones and, and concussions and lacerations and it was just, this is not sustainable.

ARCHIVAL Reporter: Rocks and bottles from the rioters being thrown at police…

Three oﬃcers got hit with a speeding car.

Paul Pazen: We had 78 oﬃcers that were injured. Some of them were medically retired as a result of this. I mean, you just couldn't stay on the same path, something different needed to happen.

Something different needed to happen.

[MUSIC SURGES]

Make no mistake: police didn’t go easy on protestors, either. Officers arrested hundreds of people for violating curfews. They shot several demonstrators in the face with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. At least two protestors were left partially blind. In the years since, the city of Denver has had to pay out millions of dollars in related settlements and claims.

Paul Pazen: As somebody that grew up to a single mom in North Denver, I thought I had a good understanding of, uh, the community, the community needs. Was he wrong? On the fifth day, exhausted, he decided it was time for a completely different approach. He decided to join the protestors.

Paul Pazen: I was never as afraid as I was in that moment. I mean, some violent protesters had burned down police stations, burned down police cars. I mean what's gonna stop somebody from you know, taking out a chief like that's a, that's a trophy. So I was super nervous.

But some of the protest organizers locked arms with him and they marched together. That’s when one demonstrator confronted him.

Paul Pazen: A young lady, uh, 17 and you could see the tears in her eyes, you know, the emotion that she's dealing with. Just, growing up as a young African American female — her fear, anxiety, stress, all of that. And I'm talking to her and she tells me that she's tired, that she's tired of this. She's 17. She's in high school. You shouldn't be “tired of this” at 17. And so, the gravity… that, uh, little conversation was, was one that really hit…

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

One of the ways we stay safe in the United States is that we’re a nation of laws. And police exist to — among other things — enforce those laws. But high profile abuses of power like the murder of George Floyd have fractured the trust many people have in the police. They’ve also launched a national debate about how much police power is too much, how to hold police accountable for misconduct while also making sure the police still have enough power to enforce the laws.

[MUSIC FADES]

Over the last decade, these debates have given way to a wave of reforms in the way police are trained and disciplined. Many police academies now include things like anti-bias training, de-escalation techniques, and oﬃcers wear body cameras so that their actions can later be examined… A lot has changed.

But much remains the same. Police oﬃcers killed more people last year than any other year since 2014, and those people were still about three times more likely to be Black than white. And while most Americans support some reform, including holding police accountable for their actions, how far people think those reforms should go varies greatly based on race and — of course — political aﬃliation.

I think it’s safe to assume that everyone wants safer communities, less violence. But how do we get there? What does effective policing look like? And does public safety require more police — or far fewer? Something different still needs to happen…

But what, exactly?

Today, we’ll ask that question to three people who have worn the badge — and who have given these questions a lot of thought.

I'm Peter Bergen and this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

When looking for a fresh perspective on policing, I immediately thought of Rosa Brooks. She’s a law professor at Georgetown University who specializes in human rights. But about a decade ago, she made what some might consider a surprising choice: she decided to also moonlight as a cop.

Peter Bergen: What were you thinking exactly?

Rosa Brooks: [BROOKS LAUGHS] You know, When I found out that this reserve oﬃcer program existed in the D.C. metropolitan police, my first reaction was, you've got to be kidding me. You know, you can volunteer to be a police oﬃcer and they give you a badge and a gun. That's crazy. And the police culture, as you know, is so opaque to outsiders in so many ways that I sort of almost instantly thought. Oh, I want to do that. I just want to see what it's like.

She ended up spending several years as a reserve oﬃcer with the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. And she wrote a fascinating and often entertaining account of her experiences in a book called Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City. It’s chock full of insights about police culture.

Many things I found surprising, like how little of their time is actually spent making arrests and how much of it is spent doing what amounts to a kind of social work.

Rosa is the daughter of the late author and left-wing activist Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich told her daughter she couldn’t possibly be a police oﬃcer. After all she’d been tear gassed in the womb at an anti-war demonstration.

Rosa Brooks: She was not thrilled. She said the police are the enemy.

Peter Bergen: How did you manage the split screen of your life? You've got these two young kids, and your full-time job at Georgetown Law School as, uh, Associate Dean. I mean those are two very different worlds.

Rosa Brooks: They are very different worlds. I mean, the world of academia, with the concerns about the use of language and do we disagree with footnote 73 and then you'd go on a police shift and boy, nobody cared about those things. [BROOKS LAUGHS]

Peter Bergen: And the typical feedback as to you as a police oﬃcer was like, you better not fuck that up again.

Rosa Brooks: [BROOKS LAUGHS] No, no, no, not the sort of polite circumlocutions of like, well, you know, I do wonder if you might want to consider… Yeah. Right. If you, if you made a mistake as a police oﬃcer, it was like, yeah, don't be a fucking dumbass. [PETER LAUGHS]

Peter Bergen: What sort of feedback have you got from your former, uh, colleagues in the police about your book?

Rosa Brooks: A lot of them just haven’t read it, but by and large, very positive feedback. I think that even those who disagreed with some of my policy conclusions said, yeah, this is an honest account of what it is like to be a police oﬃcer here in D.C.

Peter Bergen: What is it like?

Rosa Brooks: What is it like? It's simultaneously fascinating, scary, troubling, funny, all of those things at once. You're constantly going into unfamiliar environments. You're constantly going into stressful environments. You never know what to expect. You never know if you're going to find dead bodies and people shooting at each other or you're just gonna find nothing whatsoever. It's always unpredictable. You get such a bizarre range of calls. And you know, I remember the, the guy who'd been sexually assaulted by monkeys, uh, for instance, or so he said. You know, you get, you get, all kinds of mental illness. You get all kinds of tragedy. You see children in terrible situations. So it's, it's this amazing mix, just of, of moments of boredom, moments of, of anxiety, uh, fear, uh, moments of deep, deep sorrow, moments of total ridiculousness.

Brooks was assigned to an area on D.C.’s southeast side with some of the highest poverty and violent crime rates in the city.

Rosa Brooks: The seventh police district of Washington, D.C., it's a neighborhood of liquor stores and pawn shops and convenience stores, that have bars between the, the checkout folks and the, the customers. It's a neighborhood where you have a lot of people standing around on street corners, partly because people are often living in very crowded conditions indoors. And there's a lot of addiction, there are a lot of substance abuse issues. So it's very tough for people. And my very first patrol shift out of the academy, I was paired with a more experienced career oﬃcer and as we drove around, one of the first things he said to me was, everybody here would be happy to kill you. And he said, I'm not kidding. And I kind of said, well, you know, surely not everybody wants to kill me. You know, what about the little old ladies? And he said, you should see some of these little old ladies. [BROOKS LAUGHS]

Rosa Brooks: But it really typified an attitude, that kind of cynicism that can become very common in police oﬃcers. You know, the nature of policing, right, is that you see people at their worst. People do not invite you for birthday parties and graduation parties for their kids. The consumers of policing tend to be the people who are in crisis in one way or another. And that can lead to tremendous cynicism.

Peter Bergen: When you were at the police academy, it seemed like an almost obsessive concern of your instructors, and also your fellow recruits, about getting killed or injured on the job.

Rosa Brooks: Yeah. One of the fascinating things in the police academy was, uh, we would watch over and over, both during class time and on break time, videos that were sort of billed to us as oﬃcer-safety videos. And they would be these videos of police getting killed. You know, cops doing a traﬃc stop and they'd walk up to the car and the door of the car would pop open and somebody with a gun would come out and shoot the oﬃcer. Or they'd walk up to a domestic violence call and somebody would open the door and shoot the oﬃcer. Then we'd be asked to analyze, say, well, what did these oﬃcers do wrong, tactically? And, and, when you spend all of your time watching videos of cops getting killed, you start thinking I'm in danger all the time. And you start thinking everybody's trying to kill cops.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Rosa Brooks: You know, we weren't watching videos of police deftly de-escalating situations. We weren't watching videos of police calmly saying, you know, “Hey, I've got a solution here.” The training really emphasizes the idea that you have to be in a constant state of readiness to face a potentially lethal threat. You know, everybody you encounter might try to kill you. Then someone reaches suddenly into their pocket or the glove compartment of their car, and the automatic response of a police oﬃcer is to think, threat, threat, threat, and pull their gun out. And needless to say, most of the time when people reach into their pockets or their glove compartment, they're not pulling out a gun, so what that often leads to is tragedy.

Peter Bergen: There's a striking statistic in your book, which is, American police oﬃcers kill other people at 64 times the rate of police oﬃcers in the United Kingdom, which is pretty mind-blowing.

Rosa Brooks: It is pretty mind blowing. It is literally true that police oﬃcers are trained to run towards the gunfire, not away from it. And a great deal of your time is spent dealing with really angry people who may be armed. And this is not to minimize the fact that policing is a dangerous job. But I also think it relates in all kinds of very complicated ways to how police oﬃcers are trained and acculturated in the United States.

Rosa Brooks: One of the things that I'd hear over and over in the police academy was ‘you know, the most important thing at the end of the day is that you go home safe.’ And having come out of a job at the Pentagon and being married to a retired army oﬃcer, I think to myself, that's so weird. When you sign up to join the Army or whatever it might be, you accept that you are placing the mission ahead of your own life and that you are signing up to take some risks. And police oﬃcers, I was really shocked that the ethos wasn't, hey, my job is to keep other people safe. And of course, we're going to, we're going to take every possible precaution consistent with that to keep ourselves safe. Um, but the emphasis was very much on, no, no, no, our job is to keep us safe.

But Brooks says she never actually felt unsafe. It made her wonder what the actual risks are.

Rosa Brooks: Amongst the most dangerous jobs in the country are things like fishing, farming, being a roofer, being a sanitation worker, being a logger. To be fair, police have the additional risk of people shooting at them, but even if you just control for that, your risk of getting murdered on the job is actually more than twice as high if you're a taxi, limousine, or Uber driver than if you're a cop, for instance. Whenever I talk to groups of police oﬃcers, I often ask them, what is your guess about the number of police oﬃcers in the United States who've been killed on the job — not accidentally — intentionally killed? And I tend to get answers like 1,000; 500; 3,000; 800. Typically, it's more like 70 or so a year. That's a lot of people. But on the other hand, it's much, much smaller number than most people would guess. The leading causes of death for police oﬃcers on the job: car accidents, heart attack, illness, and suicide. Suicide kills more police oﬃcers every single year than intentional homicide.

And yet, there wasn’t much emphasis on mental health in her training at the police academy. It’ s one of several elements that she felt were missing.

Peter Bergen: You write that when you were in the academy, I'm quoting you, we didn't talk about what effective policing would look like.

Rosa Brooks: Yeah. No and...

Peter Bergen: That seems pretty surprising. Because isn't… [BOTH LAUGH]

Rosa Brooks: It surprised me too. Um, I mean, it's very tactical, the training in the academy. Um, nobody's saying, you know, what is policing for? Or what is the role of police in a democratic, diverse society? And, and, and what is good policing? And how do we know if it's working? The academy curriculum was very focused on, here's how you put handcuffs on someone. Here are the nine property forms that you must learn to fill out, and here is the color of ink you must use to fill each of them out.

Peter Bergen: So what were some of the things you were told in the academy not to do? That, that might get you in trouble?

Rosa Brooks: Don't interview your suspect while they're sitting on their sofa because they might have hidden a gun or a knife between the sofa cushions that they could pull out, and watch their hands, not their eyes. Their hands can hurt you. Their eyes can't. You want to watch their hands in case they're quickly reaching for a weapon or something like that. The problem with that, of course, is that you're also told in the police academy — quite appropriately — you should listen, you should work on establishing rapport with people, you should try to gain people's trust. But it's hard to establish rapport if you're staring at somebody's hands and you won't let them sit on their own sofa and so forth.

Rosa Brooks: You know, one of the stories I tell in the book I was with a partner, we were called to a potential domestic violence call, and it turned out to be a fight between a mother and her teenage daughter. I was interviewing the mother outside in the stairwell of the apartment building, and my partner, a male oﬃcer, was inside, and he was interviewing the teenage daughter. And then we switched places, which is actually pretty standard, uh, see if you get the same story and so forth. So at a certain point, I said to the mother, okay, I'm going to go check it with my partner. And I went inside and when I got into the living room, there was a very tense situation. The teenage girl was saying, you know, ‘Why did you yell at me like that?’ And my partner said, ‘Well, you reached into your bag. I couldn't see where your hands were going,’ so he had shouted at her, ‘Get your hands where I can see them.’ And she was very upset that he shouted at her like that. And she said, ‘Oﬃcer, I was just reaching into my bag to get my cell phone so I could show you that I was the one who called 911’. And what had happened was she reached into her purse to get her phone and he freaked out because he was watching her hands and they were going to a place he couldn't see, and he yelled at her, and then a scared teenage girl got screamed at by a large cop with a gun. And you know, makes you think, well, is she going to call the police next time she's got a problem?

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Rosa Brooks: But what my colleague did, technically speaking, he didn't do anything wrong. Right? But I think of it like this, Peter, I think of it as there's risk in all these encounters. There is risk for police oﬃcers, but there's also risk for members of the community. There were so many situations like that, that I saw that could have ended in tragedy and thankfully did not. But the focus on oﬃcer safety at the expense of community safety creates a terrible risk to members of the community.

Risks that include not just making police maybe a little too jumpy, but also maybe more defensive and combative than needed. Sure, police need to be trained to protect themselves. But, she says, they need so much more than that.

Peter Bergen: I was struck by the extent to which the people in the 7th District were using 911 to really deal with almost any situation. You know, the police work that you actually saw was mostly a form of social work, it wasn't really what we think of police work.

Rosa Brooks: No, that's absolutely true. The vast majority of what patrol oﬃcers do does not even involve criminal activity. As a society, for all kinds of reasons, police have become the first responders for almost everything. And so most of the calls that come into 911, are people who are, you know, they're shouting at their neighbor over something and somebody calls the police or they're fighting with their kid, they're fighting with their spouse. Lots of domestic violence issues. Police respond to lots and lots of overdoses, medical issues, mental illness-related issues. And a lot of people, what they need is not something that the criminal justice system can provide for them. And it's a real problem too, though, because it's, you know, the old adage of, if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you're a police oﬃcer and you're cynical and you get a little bit lazy, and your only tool is a set of handcuffs, everything starts looking like a crime.

Rosa Brooks: Although I saw a lot of wonderful police oﬃcers who were incredibly skilled at de-escalating, who really had a strong social worker streak in them, I also saw police oﬃcers who were impatient and irritable and their sort of default response was, I wonder if there's somebody I can put in cuffs here because that's what I know how to do. That's part of the reason that we have such high incarceration rates in our society. That just ends up making everything a million times worse.

But just because it can make things worse, that doesn't mean people don't need or want cops. Many communities that experience high rates of crime don't embrace a "defund the police" position.

Rosa Brooks: When you look at the poll data on people who actually live in high crime communities are often communities of color, often very poor communities, that's not what they're asking for. They are not saying get rid of the police. They are unhappy about police abuses. They're unhappy about over-criminalization, but they also feel that they need police. They just want better police. They want better social services. They want better schools. They don't want the police to be the only option. And when the police come, they want those police oﬃcers to be respectful. They want those police oﬃcers to be good at de-escalating. They don't want to have police who come and are just shouting at everybody and acting like the biggest gang in town, which unfortunately can happen sometimes.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Rosa Brooks: Here's the thing about the police that is the good thing and the bad thing, right? Who else can you call and they will come? And it doesn't matter if it's three in the morning, and if it doesn't matter if it's raining or snowing. You can't call the doctor and have the doctor show up ten minutes later. You can't call a mental health professional and have them show up ten minutes later, but you can get the police there. And, If you have nowhere else to turn, that's where you turn because you know that they will come.

Peter Bergen: But, you know, as you say that, I'm thinking about… 911, it's not the call of last resort. It's like the first call people make when things are going wrong in some of these communities. The police are not social workers. They're not psychologists. I mean, is there a better way?

Rosa Brooks: There is definitely a better way.

There are several better ways, it turns out. In recent years, some cities have begun experimenting with alternatives to police. One involves rerouting certain 911 calls. The kinds that police aren’t typically trained on or interested in. Calls that seem to involve mental health issues, or substance abuse, or homelessness.

Instead of dispatching police oﬃcers with guns to calls that might require social workers, they’re sending actual trained social workers and counselors and paramedics.They triage and figure out how to help. Whether that’ s checking someone into a treatment facility, finding them a bed for the night, or just talking them down.

A local health clinic and the police department in Eugene, Oregon worked together to develop this approach years ago. But it was never tested in a major city, until Chief Paul Pazen decided to try it out in Denver. He and his colleagues spent years learning from people in Eugene and designing a program they thought could work in their city.

Paul Pazen: Our original planned start date was going to be April 1 of 2020. Uh, there was a little thing called COVID that got in the way. And we had to put it off a couple of months.

But they wound up with a fateful date for their raincheck:

Paul Pazen: We had made the decision that we're going to launch this on June 1.

June 1, right during the height of the George Floyd protests. As if Pazen didn’t have enough on his hands that week, for the first time, they’d be sending unarmed civilians to respond to 911 calls…

Paul Pazen: The Denver Health paramedics, they've saved our oﬃcers’ lives. And we wanted to make sure that uh, both the mental health professional and the Denver paramedic is safe.

But these STAR teams as they’re called — it stands for Support Team Assisted Response — they weren’t responding to just any call. They’d only take those social work-type calls, things like a possible overdose, or trespassing, or erratic behavior.

Paul Pazen: The types of calls that STAR go to, those are not the types of calls for service that an oﬃcer is going to, you know, be excited to respond to. Somebody running up and down the street naked, talking to themselves is not something that you're like, I hope that's the next call for service I get.

And that person in crisis, running up and down the street naked, they probably don't want to see police either. Because if they do, there's a good chance they'll get arrested.

But a STAR team won’t make an arrest, or give a ticket. And they can be helpful in ways that police can't. When police come to the same call, they're often obligated to at least run someone’ s ID, make sure they don’t have any outstanding warrants. They’re definitely not supposed to let you treat the squad car as a taxi.

Paul Pazen: Instead of sending an oﬃcer to deal with an individual with mental health challenges that's sleeping in a doorway and issuing a citation, um, now you have somebody that can respond to that that's not a police oﬃcer that can get the person the help that they need. The Denver STAR program is operating as envisioned. You know, we started in a pilot area, 40 hours a week. Now we have it in all six districts of Denver. And, uh, about 20 hours a day coverage.

STAR responders have police backup on speed dial, but so far, they haven't needed them for a safety reason. And a study by Stanford University researchers during the first six months of the program found that lower-level crimes in the pilot area went down by 34 percent. STAR has also saved the city money and saved the police force valuable time.

Paul Pazen: And I need every last oﬃcer that we have in order to address the violent crime, the property crime, and the traﬃc safety issues.

But even with all that STAR has going for it, it can only do so much. It is just one tool, and a pretty specialized, limited one at that.

Paul Pazen: You want to send the right person to the right call for service. You don't want to send the STAR van to a call where a person is armed with a weapon or violent, because somebody could get hurt.

That's why Pazen sees STAR as part of a package of programs meant to get each 911 call the right response. They also send mental health workers out with police. And they’ve created positions for case managers who follow up with people and try to keep them connected with the services they need.

But Pazen has one big caveat that he wanted to hammer home: this is not a tool for reducing violent crime.

Paul Pazen: I’ve told people if I had a thousand STAR vans it's not going to reduce one single shooting, one single murder, one single robbery. That's not what it's designed for. Some people see this as a replace the police. This is not a replace the police. What the STAR program does, uh, gives better outcomes for individuals in crisis. And that should be enough for everybody. That should be a ‘Yeah, that's good. That's great.’

And that is great. It’ s keeping people who need treatment, or just need some help out of the criminal justice system. But it doesn't begin to address the problem of police responding with too much force when OTHER calls come in. Even little things like selling loose cigarettes or trying to use counterfeit money, petty crimes, and traﬃc stops have led to tragedy in the past. Even with a program like STAR, those calls still go to the people whose job it is to enforce the law.

So besides improving training, and maybe involving people in the community for more response options — what do we do to address the problems with policing itself?

For an answer to that question, I reached out to Chief Charles Ramsey. He’s sort of the dean of policing in the United States. Over the course of his career, he’s spent nearly 50 years working in Chicago and leading police departments in Philadelphia and here in Washington, D.C. And he’ s learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. When he took over the D.C. police department in 1998, it was deeply troubled. He helped rehabilitate the force, upgraded training, and during his tenure local crime rates plummeted. The homicide rate, in particular, went down about 40% under his watch.

Peter Bergen: In your long career as a police oﬃcer, sir, looking at it from sort of 30,000 feet, what would you say has worked over time? And what would you say hasn't really worked over time?

Charles Ramsey: You know, when I started my policing career in Chicago, which is where I'm from, uh, back in 1968 — uh, long time ago — the, the way in which police operated was quite different . You know, the attitude was pretty much, you know, if you have a spike in crime, hire more cops and, you know, we'll get it under control. Uh, we weren't thinking about community in terms of partners.

That changed in 1992, when he was asked to help lead a new project: the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, or “CAPS.” It was an approach that became known as community policing — aimed at having more oﬃcers walking the beat, meeting with residents NOT in crisis, and building real relationships with people.

Charles Ramsey: Working together and forming those kinds of partnerships is critically important. Uh, it's not just about locking up bad guys. Even though that was my attitude when I first started, quite frankly, because that's what I thought. But I've learned over time it's built on relationships. You just don't come in as an army and wreak havoc and then leave. And then say that, well, we suppress crime. Yeah, but at what cost? You know, it's like stop and frisk and, you know, you stop a hundred people, you get two guns. Okay. You got two guns, but you alienated 98 people. So who's the winner on that one? Right?

Today, Ramsey says this mentality should apply to all policing, not just a standalone project.

Charles Ramsey: I really don't like using the term community policing anymore. It just should be just a way in which you provide policing services. It's built on working with community to problem solve and trying to get at the root cause, not all of which can be resolved by police, but getting other government agencies involved in correcting some of the conditions that not just lead to criminal activity, but certainly support criminal activity, uh, even if that's not intentional. I mean, uh, lights being out on a particular block, and not being repaired, and drug dealers are using it, to conduct their business or overgrown lots where people stash drugs and guns, and, you know, having that cleared out and fenced off. I mean, that's not a police issue. That's a streets department issue, perhaps. They need to be part of that solution.

Charles Ramsey: In fact, I've actually, you know, don't even think of public safety in, uh, traditional terms ‘cause when you think of public safety, you think of police, fire, emergency, medical. I think more in terms of community safety, because when you think of community safety, you think of mental health, you think about housing, you think about all these other things that really impact the quality of life in a particular neighborhood. And it's going to take all these folks coming together, uh, in order to correct that. And that's where you start to build trust. People start to get that sense of fairness. They may not think about an entire police department in those terms, but they'll say Oﬃcer Jones, Oﬃcer Smith, yeah, I trust them. You know, I, I, I know that they will treat me fair. And by default, the more people you get feeling that way by more and more of the men and women in your department, it rubs off on an entire department's reputation.

Chief Ramsey told me that this idea of building relationships and treating people with respect, it isn’t just good PR, it's good police work. It’ s actually key to getting the kind of cooperation needed to solve crimes and build successful cases.

Charles Ramsey: A lot of this stuff boils down to that. And when cops disrespect people they serve, that erodes trust, it erodes confidence, it erodes all that. Respect the people, even the ones you lock up. You lock them up, you don't have to disrespect them.

Chief Ramsey has thought about these issues a lot. He’s credited with professionalizing both the D.C. and Philadelphia police departments in the wake of huge scandals and allegations of abuse, and fundamentally changing how they operated. And that’s why in 2014, in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s murder by police in Ferguson, Missouri — when the country saw an earlier wave of mass protests against police violence — then-president Barack Obama tapped Ramsey to lead the task force created to identify best practices and find ways to repair police-community relations across the country.

[MUSIC FADES]

Charles Ramsey: There are a lot of issues in policing, but the majority of men and women that serve do just that. They serve and they do it within constitutional guidelines. But it is a reality that there are some police oﬃcers that abuse their authority. And we all pay for it when they do. So, you know, it's in everybody's best interest to make sure that these kinds of things just simply don't happen. Memphis, Tennessee, where you had the oﬃcers, and these were African American oﬃcers, that beat the individual, uh, to death, literally to death. What they did was just flat out wrong. It was just wrong, and it was criminal. It gave everyone in policing a black eye.

Whether it is fair or not, it’ s especially true in the age of cell phones, social media and body cams: the actions of one department — or one bad apple oﬃcer — affect public trust in all police.

Charles Ramsey: One of the bigger issues is there are no national standards in place at all around training as it relates to use of force, community policing, leadership training. Some focus on that kind of training. Some don't focus on it at all.

The task force report came out almost a decade ago now and several of its recommendations have already become routine in police departments across the country: training in de-escalation and implicit bias? Body cams? All these were part of the recommendations. And Ramsey says some departments are going even further…

Charles Ramsey: Some departments now are going so far as to talk about the history of policing in that particular jurisdiction, which I think is very important. I mean we're not hiring — I'm 74 years old — we're not hiring 74-year old cops, we're hiring 20 year old cops. They have no idea of what policing in the ‘60s and the Civil Rights era and uh, who was on the other side of the Pettus Bridge when the marchers came across. I mean it was police, right? The history of policing in the United States has not always been very positive at all. And so we need to understand the feelings that people have in these communities, the lack of trust that people have.

Charles Ramsey: There's a reason for it. It's not what happened yesterday. It's the history that is there. If you understand it, you can work towards trying to fix it. You know, you ask the average cop, what's the role of police? They'll say, oh, ‘law enforcement.’ What if they, what if their first reaction was ‘to protect the constitutional rights of all people?’ That's part of the oath that they take. But think about that, if that was the first thing they mentioned. Would we be having these conversations today? I don't think so.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Charles Ramsey: When I was the Chief in Washington D.C., one of the most impactful things that I had was a trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. And I, I began to understand the role that police played during the Holocaust that I was totally unaware of. What it made me think was what is the role of police in a democratic society? Germany had been a democratic society prior to the rise of Hitler. One of the first photos I saw was an individual who was being searched. He had his coat wide open and the police were going through him. What did I think about? Stop and frisk. How does that individual feel on the street, that's being stripped and searched right there in the public in front of everybody else?

Charles Ramsey: So we created a whole training, the role of police in a democratic society, understanding the importance of upholding the Constitution of the United States, because once we lose sight of that, what happens? Where are we as a society? I mean, you could see the police as, as the kind of, almost a thread that can help hold together the fabric of democracy, but we don't see ourselves that way. We see ourselves just as law enforcement, and law enforcement is such a small part of what we do.

[MUSIC FADES]

So maybe effective policing looks different in different communities. There is no one-size-fits-all approach that is going to work every time, no secret recipe. But there are some key ingredients.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

First, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum — it relies on the relationships built with local residents. It relies on there being resources and service providers in the community. Because even though police do many things, they can’t do everything. And it requires robust police training, on not just tactics, but an understanding of history, of how to care both for themselves and the community they serve. And it demands police understand their place in protecting the safety — and the rights — of all people.

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If you're interested in learning some more about the issues and stories we discussed in this episode, we recommend Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City by Rosa Brooks and Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced byJessica Pupovac, with help from Luke Cregan.

It was mixed by Bart Warshaw.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Erik German, Holly DeMuth, Nathan Ray, and Sandy Melara.

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.