Rise of the Warrior Cop

0:00:07.2 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:09.2 Aaron Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:10.8 Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Radley Balko, who reports on criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for the Washington Post. He was previously a senior editor at Reason and also previously at the Cato Institute. His book with Tucker Carrington, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, was the subject of a previous Free Thoughts episode. Today we’re discussing the new edition of his book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Welcome back to the show, Radley.

0:00:35.0 Radley Balko: Thanks for having me.

0:00:36.7 Trevor Burrus: When did you get interested in the militarization of police? Because it’s interesting that everyone now seems to kind of realize this, especially post-​Ferguson, but in a weird way, it also creeped up on us.

0:00:49.9 Radley Balko: Yeah, I think I first kinda started paying attention to it in a… As part of my beat when I was at the Cato Institute, ’cause I was covering the drug war, and obviously the drug war was a big motivating factor in the trend toward police militarization, and specifically, I had been recording or covering a couple of no-​knock raids that had been done to serve drug warrants, and after looking into a few of those cases, I started tracking them pretty closely and seeing that they were, not only were the raids themselves very common and for kinda low-​level offenses, the number of times police were making mistakes, because the drug war is fought with dirty information by necessity, so innocent people were getting victimized in these raids, as well as people who were at worst guilty of kind of low-​level, consensual drug offenses.

0:01:52.9 Radley Balko: At the time, that was probably in like the early 2000s, Cato in 1997 had published a white paper about sort of creeping police militarization, started looking into the work of Peter Kraska, a criminologist in Kentucky who had documented kind of the rise of SWAT teams across the country, and I guess just from there, it was… You saw some of the sort of excesses of policing, some of the problems with policing culture, but then, and some of the… And the problems with holding rogue police officers accountable, but at the same time, kind of the level of accepted force, as a matter of policy, in police departments across the country was increasing as well. So you had sort of problems with bad cops going out and violating policies, violating the law even, you had problems with holding those cops accountable, you had problems with police culture, but then just kind of even within all of that, you had, just as a matter of policy, the amount of force that police were permitted to use for increasingly low-​level crimes, that ratio was getting out of whack as well.

0:03:00.0 Radley Balko: And I think I probably… I think the first paper I wrote for Cato on this came out in… I wanna say 2006, but even before that, if you go back to the 1990s, when I was in high school, in college, it was the right that was up in arms about police militarization, particularly with the ATF raids on people suspected of violating various gun laws, and then we had people like G Gordon Liddy on his show telling his listeners to shoot for the head when ATF agents come into your house. And you had the NRA calling federal police officers jack-​booted thugs, you had Waco and Ruby Ridge. So I think there this just… There’s been this continual trend for a long time, but it’s also sort of fascinating to watch as various parts of the American political establishment get upset about this, when it affects their own people, but don’t seem to be nearly as concerned when it affects people with whom they disagree politically.

0:04:04.6 Aaron Powell: How new is this trend, as opposed to us noticing it, paying attention to it, or the general political culture being more up in arms about it? Because you look back at like, the LAPD in the 1950s wasn’t exactly a bunch of boy scouts, or we look at the way that cops treated marchers during the Civil Rights Movement, it seems like cops have always been pretty violent.

0:04:28.1 Radley Balko: Yeah, I do think there’s a tendency to pine for kind of a hey day or salad days of policing that probably never existed. I will say, though, that I do think that the militarization trend is something unique, it is, even during the kind of the Civil Rights protests, even throughout kind of labor uprisings and other civil unrest, in the United States, we’ve always had this firm line between policing and the military. We keep them very separate. And even at the height of the drug war in the 1980s, there was a time when Congress and the Reagan Administration wanted to kinda erase that line, they wanted the military to be coming in doing drug raids, Marines marching up and down city streets, and to its credit, and to the credit of our… The health of our democracy, I think, it was the Pentagon that objected loudest and actually derailed those plans.

0:05:24.6 Radley Balko: But if you… The premise behind that is that policing and soldiering are two very different jobs and it’s dangerous for a free society to conflate the two. I would argue that there isn’t much difference between using actual soldiers to conduct domestic policing and taking domestic police and training them like soldiers, arming them like soldiers, giving them kind of a soldier’s mindset or mentality and then telling them they’re fighting a war of various kinds, whether it’s a war on terror, war on drugs, war on crime, you start to erase that distinction, not by having soldiers do the policing, but by turning your police into soldiers.

0:06:00.5 Radley Balko: And I think that’s really where… It’s not that police brutality didn’t exist, it’s not that racism in policing didn’t exist before all this, it’s just that I think this is a particularly unique trend and one that kinda drives a lot of the other problematic trends in policing.

0:06:17.2 Trevor Burrus: Can you give us a sense of the scope of the problem in terms of growth? Because as Aaron mentioned, there have been times in the past where some things police did, like say the old third degree were a little bit… Were worse than presumably what they do now, but when we’re talking about… Let’s say just SWAT raids, what would have been the changes in terms of how many of those are being conducted versus in the earlier days of SWAT teams?

0:06:42.3 Radley Balko: Yeah, so it’s hard to put a definitive count on how many SWAT deployments or SWAT raids there are each year, each day in the US. Peter Kraska, the criminologist I mentioned, sent surveys out to police departments across the country in the 1990s and asked them to go back to when they started their SWAT team, how many times they deployed their SWAT team, and that data is only as good as the number of police agencies that cooperated and sent the surveys back. But among those that did, he estimated, I believe it was like in the late 1970s, there were a few hundred SWAT deployments per year in the US, and the vast majority of those were for active shooters or hostage-​takings or bank robberies, a situation where you have somebody who is in the process of committing violent crime.

0:07:38.0 Radley Balko: By the late 1990s, I believe it was up to 40,000 or 50,000 SWAT deployments per year. So from a few hundred to tens of thousands, 40,000 or 50,000. And about 80-85% of those were to serve warrants on people who were still suspected of non-​violent consensual drug offenses, typically pretty low level offenses. So you’ve got this police action that in the ’70s was reserved for the situations where somebody was in the process of committing a violent crime. Now it’s, not only is this tactic used exponentially more often, it’s primarily used not to apprehend somebody who’s in the process of committing a violent crime, but to serve a search warrant to investigate somebody who’s still merely suspected of a non-​violent consensual drug crime.

0:08:34.6 Radley Balko: And the problem with that is that these tactics are extraordinarily violent, there’s a very thin margin for error, the police make a mistake, if somebody in the home makes a mistake, there’s a good chance that somebody’s gonna die or end up severely injured. And yet you’re using these tactics against people who haven’t yet been convicted of any crime or even charged, for that matter. And that really I think is a massive shift in how the government has used this kind of force and violence, and it’s not the sort of policy where there was ever really much public debate, it’s not like Congress passed a bill that militarized the police and authorized mass SWAT raids. It’s something that’s been gradual and that’s building up… Been building up for a generation or more.

0:09:18.8 Aaron Powell: Is this stuff necessary to protect officer safety or the public safety, though? For example, you mentioned non-​violent drug offenders or people who haven’t been convicted of drug offenses yet, but I’ve seen enough movies from the 1980s to know that drug dealers carry a lot of fire power, and so it would seem like you send a beat cop with his revolver in there and it may not turn out well for him, so maybe this force is helpful.

0:09:45.5 Radley Balko: So there are a couple of ways to address that. First, the vast majority of police officer killings where a police officer is feloniously killed on the job are killed with low, small caliber handguns. So the idea that most police officers are killed with these massive guns or the massive fire power that you saw on Miami Vice, for example, just isn’t borne out by the data. The other thing is, I would argue that these types of raids actually make things more dangerous for police officers. When you wake somebody up in their own home, in their own bed, in the middle of the night with arms, men breaking into their home, usually masked and dressed all in black, you elicit a very visceral, primitive response in people, a fight or flight response, and if flight isn’t an option, people are gonna fight. And so we’ve had numerous examples where people, where somebody, an innocent person was raided and reached for a gun and shot and killed a cop or was shot and killed themselves or injured police officers, but also even drug dealers.

0:10:47.0 Radley Balko: I’ve interviewed a lot of former police chiefs for my book, people who are from an era where drug warrants weren’t served this way. Where they were served just like you said, a uniformed officer came and knocked on the door and they had no problem, and what they said is that people don’t go into drug dealing to kill police officers, they go into drug dealing to make money, and they know that killing a police officer means you’re gonna be lucky to survive the next five or six seconds, and if you do, you’re going to prison for the rest of your life, and if you live in a death penalty state, you’re probably gonna get the death penalty.

0:11:18.5 Radley Balko: So I think even in cases where the police are raiding somebody who has drugs in the home, who fires back at the police, usually they’ll say they didn’t know that they’re police, they thought they were rival drug dealers, and I think there’s a… There’s a lot of… That makes a lot of intuitive sense. But there are options, other than just either coming in guns blazing in the middle of the night or sending a single uniformed officer. There’s a process called Surround and Call-​Out, where you bring a lot of officers and you bring your bulletproof truck and you surround a place and you get on a megaphone and you ask the person to come out, or you apprehend them as they’re coming or going, or you set up some sort of ruse where you’re able to apprehend them.

0:12:00.2 Radley Balko: And this is actually what police tend to do when they have suspects who are actually violent or people who they are actually fearful will open fire on police officers. They take the time to take these extra measures, these extra protective measures. The problem with doing Surround and Call-​Out or some sort of ruse when it comes to searching drug warrants, and I’ve had police officials flat out admit this to me, is that there’s just too damn many of them. If you’re a police department that’s serving 15 or 20 drug warrants a week, you don’t have time to do Surround and Call-​Out, it’s a lot easier to just kick somebody’s door down in the middle of the night.

0:12:34.6 Trevor Burrus: How much did alcohol prohibition change policing in this country? ‘Cause you kind of alluded to this, and it’s something I’ve written about at Cato, that when you start prohibiting, you start having victimless crimes, ’cause usually when someone commits a crime or when someone has a crime committed against them, like you have your house robbed or you get assaulted, you call the police and you ask them to come to your house and to take evidence in order to find the perpetrator of this crime. But if you are both the criminal and the victim, the purported criminal and the victim, because you put a substance into your body, now the police have to do something very different in order to find the criminal, so to speak, because you’re not giving… You’re not asking them to come in and give evidence up.

0:13:18.0 Trevor Burrus: So then they have to start adopting tactics that are very different than standard interpersonal crime when there are victims, they have to start surveilling, and investigating, and doing… Pumping your stomach and kicking down doors, ’cause you might get rid of the evidence and things like this. It seems to me that might have all kind of started during alcohol prohibition.

0:13:36.7 Radley Balko: There are definitely similarities. I think we saw a ramping up of police power during alcohol prohibition, then it kind of… Evolving back down when it was repealed and then it gets fired back up for the drug war. But I think the similarities are inescapable, you… First of all, you’re fighting this war based on dirty information, it’s because you don’t have direct victims to report these crimes, you’re relying on informants, you’re relying on tips from rival drug dealers, you’re relying on anonymous phone calls, and if the police don’t do their due diligence and do their collaborative… Corroborative, excuse me, investigation, a lot of times, you’re going to have people accused who are innocent. And when the consequence of that, of having an innocent person being accused based on bad information, is that the police kick down your door in the middle of the night and put a gun in your face, those are pretty serious consequences, and those are pretty… They’re consequences that can have pretty drastic implications for the people on the receiving end of these raids.

0:14:46.9 Radley Balko: The other thing, though, is when you have laws that can only be enforced by the police themselves breaking those laws, which is the case, I think, with alcohol prohibition, drug prohibition and most consensual crimes, you instill in the police officers who work that beat or who are on that beat a sense that the law doesn’t matter. If they’re allowed to break the law in order to catch drug dealers, if they’re allowed to instruct informants to break the law in order to catch drug dealers, that is a whole different kind of policing than somebody who’s going out on a beat and enforcing the laws as they see them broken. And I’ve had… I spoke to Sue Rahr, who’s with the Police Executive Research Forum now, but used to be the sheriff in King County Washington, Seattle.

0:15:39.1 Radley Balko: And she made a great point, which is that she would never let her police officers be in narcotics for more than three or four years, and the reason was that being in narcotics for a long period of time changes the way you look at the job, it changes the way you look at policing, it changes the way you look at yourself. When you are allowed to break the same laws you’re enforcing, it creates kind of a sense of… That you’re above the law, that you could also maybe break other laws as long as you have good reason or as long as the ends justifies the means. So I think both of those things. I think the fact that you have to fight these wars based on dirty information, and the fact that the police have to break the very laws that they’re enforcing, is just one of many ways, I think, two of many ways that the drug war really kinda corrupts law enforcement from the top-​down.

0:16:27.0 Aaron Powell: How much of the problem now then is a result of, I guess, internal incentives? Like it’s easier to use these kind of tactics than less dangerous or less violent alternatives, or it’s cheaper for budgetary reasons or whatever, versus cultural in the sense that if the cops have a bunch of military equipment and are able to use it, they’re attracting potentially the kind of people who wanna bust heads and drive around in tanks.

0:16:56.5 Radley Balko: It’s both. It’s definitely both. I think that the… There are really perverse incentives. So for example, there are federal grants that are tied solely to drug policing and are based on the just sheer numbers of arrests, which encourages police to go out and sort of crack as many heads as possible. There’s asset forfeiture policies, SWAT teams are… Once you get all that equipment, and it’s all free from the Pentagon or from DHS or whomever, but then once you have it, you have to maintain it, and that can get a little bit expensive. And so now there’s an incentive to use your SWAT team for drug enforcement, because drug enforcement brings the possibility of asset forfeiture, whereas most other types, you’re walking a beat or responding to domestic calls, whatever, all the other sort of day-​to-​day mundanities of policing don’t generally come with that possibility.

0:17:51.7 Radley Balko: But then again, once you have that stuff, you wanna use it. There are two sides, I think, to police militarization. One is to gear, the stuff that they’re getting from the military, from DHS, from other places, and then there’s the mindset problem, that’s police are seeing themselves as troops, as soldiers, seeing themselves as psychologically isolated from the rest of the community. The idea that there’s police and there’s everybody else, so there’s police and their families, and there’s everybody else. And these two things reinforce one another, right. You get the gear, and the gear is inappropriate for domestic police work, but then you have it, you start to see yourself as a little bit of a soldier, maybe the community that you’re supposed to be serving starts to see you less as an officer who’s there to help them and more as kind of an occupying force, you’re gonna start to see people in the community not as the people you’re serving as citizens with rights but as a potential threat.

0:18:46.5 Radley Balko: And so you see this throughout policing culture today. If you go on online bulletin boards, if you go to sites like offi​cer​.com or polic​ing​.com, you’ll see this kind of mentality, whatever I have to do to get home at night, or this idea that police are constantly under attack. And generally speaking, policing has gotten safer since about the early 1990s. There are some jumps and dips in the number of police officers feloniously killed each year, but for the most part, it’s been trending down for about 30 years now. So the idea that every police officer kind of has a target on their back and that they need to be constantly vigilant and everybody is a potential threat and every interaction could be their last, not only is that not true and not backed up by the data, but it really creates a lot of tension and animosity between police and the community they serve.

0:19:41.5 Radley Balko: It’s also just… It’s kind of a miserable existence for a police officer, right? I mean, if you don’t have any kind of relationships on your job with people who aren’t police officers, if all your interactions with non-​cops on your job are hostile, that’s kind of a miserable work experience, and also just puts people on edge. If you’re told that everybody’s a potential threat, if you’re told that there’s a target on your back, you’re gonna be more likely to see an innocent gesture as a furtive one, you’re gonna be more likely to rule, your actions are gonna be ruled more by your limbic system than your frontal lobe, and I think that’s a problem as well.

0:20:24.0 Trevor Burrus: How does… When we’re talking about criminal justice and maybe especially policing, we can’t not discuss race issues, and it’s interesting, ’cause something I’ve written about too, we use the rhetoric war, war on drugs, war on crime, and one of the interesting things about war, in the more, the real sense of the word war, the international foreign conflict problem, is that dehumanizing your, the opponent is kind of essential to fighting a war, unless… You need your soldiers to think that they are not… They’re not Germans, they’re Huns, and have your cartoons and all this stuff, because otherwise you’re just murdering people. I feel like that’s similar to what’s happened, what you have to do here, and race plays a big factor in that when it comes to making war on our own citizens.

0:21:14.6 Radley Balko: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You see the dehumanization in rhetoric, drug war rhetoric, going back to the Nixon Administration, referring to people as vermin or cockroaches or just denying people their basic humanity. And there’s been a push in the drug war, drug law reform movement for a long time toward treating addiction as a health issue instead of a criminal issue. And the problem with that, if you’re a drug warrior, is if you start to see people with drug problems as people with a health problem and not as people who are breaking the law, it becomes a lot more difficult to dehumanize them, and I think that’s one reason why you’ve seen, there was long such resistance on the kind of law and order right to acknowledging that drug addiction is a health issue and not some sort of moral or human failing.

0:22:08.6 Radley Balko: But I think you’re absolutely right. As far as race goes, going back to the 19-​teens and ’20s and ’30s, the drug war, alcohol, prohibition, all these wars on substances have always been about othering a certain ethnic group, and the drug war, certainly the modern drug war, I think, is certainly a continuation of that.

0:22:35.8 Aaron Powell: What role do judges play in all this? Because they presumably are not subject to the same incentives, or part of the same culture as the police officers, and they have to approve these warrants before the SWAT team can bust in, right?

0:22:50.0 Radley Balko: They do. I think there are two ways that the courts have contributed to the problem. One is, I think the appellate courts, from the Supreme Court to the federal appeals courts to the state supreme courts, have really contributed to the problem by creating this drug war exception to the Fourth Amendment, and that’s been happening for going back to late ’50s, basically, if not further. The drug war has… I talk in the book a lot about the castle doctrine, and this idea that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary, and this is where the knock and announce requirement comes from, and the courts have basically obliterated the knock and announce requirement.

0:23:31.4 Radley Balko: It still technically exists in name, but there’s no consequence when police violate it, even egregiously. The Supreme Court has ruled that the exclusionary rule won’t apply when police violate the knock and announce rule. There’s rarely, if any, ever… Rarely, if ever, any discipline for police officers when they violate the rule. And with qualified immunity, it’s extremely difficult to win a lawsuit. There was just a case a couple of weeks ago where a police officer, a SWAT team, raided this elderly man, and the SWAT team actually knew that they were raiding the wrong house because they got to the house and the address didn’t match, and they just sort of assumed that maybe the error was on the other end, not in there, and they raided the house anyway.

0:24:19.7 Radley Balko: And the federal courts ruled that they had qualified immunity because they couldn’t find another case in which a court had explicitly said that raiding the wrong house intentionally is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. So that’s kind of the role I think that the Supreme Court and the appellate courts have played, but then just day to day, judges have really abrogated their constitutional duty to protect the Fourth Amendment. I would love to see a study on how, what percentage of search warrants are approved versus denied, what percentage of particularly no-​knock search warrants are approved versus denied.

0:24:54.9 Radley Balko: There isn’t a recent study that’s kind of directly on point. There are some studies from the ’80s and early ’90s, though, that show that judges almost never reject search warrants. They reject specifically no-​knock warrants maybe a tiny bit more often, but there’s almost no scrutiny. There have been studies showing that judges have granted no-​knock warrants even when police didn’t request them, and my own reporting over the last several years has found lots of examples of this in Little Rock, Arkansas. I reviewed about a hundred warrants that were conducted over about a two-​and-​a-​half year period, all no knocks.

0:25:32.6 Radley Balko: In every case, the warrant itself was illegal, the police had… Under Supreme Court precedent, the police have to, if they want to conduct a no-​knock raid, they have to provide specific information as to why this particular suspect poses a risk to police if they knock and announce. You can’t just use boilerplate language saying all drug dealers are dangerous, therefore we have to use a no-​knock. But that’s exactly what the Little Rock police department was doing, they just used the same word-​for-​word language in every single warrant and requested a no-​knock every single time. And with an exception of maybe one or two cases, the judges signed the warrant every single time.

0:26:12.1 Radley Balko: And the reason why they get away with that is… It is a clear, egregious, no-​debate about it, violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling in this case, Richards versus Wisconsin, which says that you can’t just use this kind of boilerplate language, and yet nothing happened. The judges, one of the judges who signed all… Who signed about half the warrants, now has a higher judicial office, all the others retired. The police officers who sought the illegal warrants, nothing has happened to any of them. And the reason for that is because, again, the Supreme Court created this rule in 1997. But then in 2006, with Hudson versus Michigan, they basically said, okay, we have this rule, the police have to knock and announced before they come in, but we’re not gonna give them any… There’s no reason… We’re not gonna enforce it, there’s not gonna be a penalty if they violate the rule.

0:27:06.6 Radley Balko: And so the police have since basically violated the rule with impunity, judges don’t even bother sort of enforcing it anymore. And it’s not just Little Rock, I mean, this is… We saw similar examples in Louisville after the Breonna Taylor, after the death of Breonna Taylor. I’ve written about similar examples in South Carolina, and I’ve met a few… If somebody paid the money to do a kind of comprehensive look across the country at how these warrants are applied for and granted by judges, we would find it’s very similar. My guess is that you’d find a very, very tiny percentage of judges ever deny police a search warrant. Those that do, the police know not to go to those judges anymore, so they can seek out judges that are less… Provide less scrutiny, but also that I think we would see that a lot of these warrants are illegal and nothing is being done about it.

0:27:57.6 Trevor Burrus: We hear about these botched raids quite often, and it’s sort of stunning. I don’t think the police are usually doing botched SWAT raids, and of course, the ones that get reported are not maybe representative of the whole, but it seems to happen a disturbingly large number of times in ways that are sort of just gratuitously erroneous. You could have just looked up the address, as you pointed out. Is this just ’cause the police… Do you think this is directly tied to the fact that they don’t really care? I mean, they’re viewing everyone as sub-​human and there’s no consequences, and maybe they’re not even worrying about the safety of their fellow officers because they’re dressed like soldiers, so they just don’t really care about making mistakes?

0:28:40.3 Radley Balko: I think that’s part of it. I think they don’t feel like it’s dangerous to them because they’re on the giving end of this, they know what’s gonna happen, they have the advantage, they’re taking the other people by surprise. And look, I mean… There are candid interviews with the SWAT officers, there’s a great one in the documentary, Do Not Resist, where they go to one of these SWAT meet-​ups, these kind of SWAT competitions, and they talk to some of them and they flat out admit that it’s a huge rush to go on one of these raids, right, it’s a… You get a lot of adrenaline going, it’s apparently a lot of fun for them.

0:29:13.8 Radley Balko: I mean, I’m speaking very broadly and very generally here, but I do think that there’s a kind of disregard for the rights of the people who are on receiving end of these raids because they’re… Yeah, because they’re drug users, they’re morally weak, they’re criminals basically, and I think that’s the way that the police look at it. But I also think there’s all of that, but then also there are no consequences for getting it wrong. The courts have basically ruled that if you… If the police raid a wrong house because they made a mistake, as long as you can’t prove that the mistake was intentional, which is pretty much impossible, and in most cases probably isn’t the case, it’s just a lack of diligence and doing your corroborative investigation.

0:30:02.3 Radley Balko: But unless you can tell it’s intentional, then nothing is gonna happen to them. And for the level of violence that comes with one of these raids, the fact that there are no consequences for mistakenly kind of visiting that violence on the wrong person ought to trouble us, to say the least. [chuckle]

0:30:23.4 Aaron Powell: How much of all of this is the result of racism, or at least racially motivated, because if we listen to that… We’ve had the protests over the last year, and a lot of conversation about criminal justice reform, and a lot of it has focused on racism within policing and criminal justice.

0:30:42.1 Radley Balko: Yeah, so it’s always difficult to kind of isolate how much race is a motivating factor, right? We know that the drug war was waged with kind of racist intent and racist justifications and racist stereotypes of various groups that aren’t true. We also know that that continues to be the case, right, there are multiple studies, I mean, the data on this is overwhelming, in multiple cities, showing that while black people are much more likely to be searched when they’re pulled over, they are less likely to actually be carrying contraband. So the police are more suspicious of black people than white people, even though white people, who are pulled over, at least, are more likely to have some sort of illegal substance on them.

0:31:32.7 Radley Balko: And we see the arrest rates compared to usage rates, and all of it strongly points to a drug war that is disproportionately directed at non-​white people and black people in particular. It’s always difficult to delve into the motivations of individual police officers or individual… An individual SWAT team, but we know that in policing in general, that there is a problem with race. We know over the last three or four years, we’ve seen multiple reports about where people, investigators have looked into social media posts by police officers, and we see a disturbingly high percentage of officers have posted racist… Put racist stuff on Facebook or Twitter or online, or other online forums or have glorified police violence, anti-​Muslim posts.

0:32:25.0 Radley Balko: And we also see just kind of a glorification of violence in police culture in general. I’ve heard a lot about police T-​shirts, for example, that you see during Police Week in Washington DC or that the Police Union sell, and they’re awful. They glamorize violence, they dehumanize people. A lot of times they’re explicitly racist. So obviously, I’m not saying all police officers are racist. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that there is a race problem within policing. I think there are… There’s institutional racism in policing, which is that we have a system that was kind of designed and honed during a period in our country’s history where there were explicitly racist policies like Jim Crow, for example.

0:33:11.5 Radley Balko: A lot of those institutions are still with us. I think it’s a mistake to think that we’ve suddenly somehow purged all of the kind of racist intent from those institutions just because Jim Crow ended, whatever it ended officially, I don’t know, the late ’60s, maybe. But then, within… So there’s that. And institutional racism I think is gonna exist independent of the motivations of individual police officers. But then I also think that we have seen, through some of these reports, that there are a lot of problems with bias and racism of individual officers as well. At The Post, I’ve got an ongoing kind of piece where I just have been accumulating academic literature on race in the criminal justice system. And you know, the numbers are pretty overwhelming, even when you account for crime rates between black and the black and white populations, black people are clearly over-​policed and… I’m rambling a little bit.

0:34:16.7 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. I think that’s part of the story. The story you tell, it’s interesting, ’cause I agree with you, but you also made a good point that I use an example from your last book, Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, where there are things that can start for racist purposes, as you point out in that book. Mississippi lacked a credible death investigation system for most of the 20th century, because they were using it to exonerate lynchings. But by the time you got to the ’80s, there was a different group. There were different interest groups that had formed around what was originally a racist policy, and this happens a lot, so you might have started the drug war because you don’t like Mexicans very much, let’s say, prohibition of marijuana.

0:35:01.5 Trevor Burrus: But then by the time you’re trying to get rid of it in California in 2009 or ’10 when the first time, it’s the prison guard unions that want to keep marijuana prohibition, and they may not be racist at all. They just want a job. And it was the prosecutors and the AGs in Mississippi who didn’t wanna have a credible death investigation system, and there’s a lot of these around here. The cops, they like their gear, they like the way they do their job, maybe they enjoy cracking heads, and some of them are racist. But then there are other groups around them, like police officers’ unions, that are just protecting what they think are the interest of police officers, so I think it’s important to point out that this stuff is actually intermixed with so many different interest groups that including just out and out racists, but then things that are sort of racially institutionalized, but maybe not performed by out and out racists.

0:35:50.5 Radley Balko: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And particularly over the last couple of years, I’ve gotten into debates and discussions with libertarians on this issue. And it kind of baffles me why. I’m baffled by why libertarians, and even conservatives to a certain extent, have such a difficult time admitting that something is racist. It doesn’t hurt me to admit that the criminal justice system is racist as a white person. There’s no skin off my back on that, but there is this extreme reluctance. And as libertarians, especially, the idea of racist policing or racially disproportionate policing or the over-​policing of black people, what that means is that it means that there are a lot of people in this country who are going to be unfairly accused, unfairly arrested, unfairly searched, unfairly targeted, because they belong to a group that is assumed, probably truthfully, to commit more crimes.

0:36:54.7 Radley Balko: So you’re treating people, you’re using government force and coercion against someone, not because of something they did, but because they belong to a group who you think commits more crimes. And as a libertarian that ought to offend the hell out of us. The government should be judging us and accusing us based on what we actually did, not based on what people who look like us did. And I don’t think there’s anything un-​libertarian about recognizing that this happens in government and being opposed to it and working to stop it.

0:37:27.7 Aaron Powell: Related to that, though, is there a concern that too much of a focus on race as the driver of so many of these things might get in the way of meaningful reform because it would get people thinking, “If we can just get rid of the racism, everything will be good,” or has them overlooking problems that don’t tie into that particular kind of sub-​narrative of criminal justice?

0:37:55.0 Radley Balko: I understand that argument, and I think maybe there is some merit to it to some extent. I will say, though, that Black Lives Matter has been more successful than those of us who have been beating this drum for 20 years at actually getting real police reform implemented, and they’ve done that through the lens of kind of racial justice. But white people benefit from these police reforms as well. If you go to the Campaign Zero webpage and you look at their recommendations for police reform, that’s all driven from a kind of racial justice viewpoint, but white people will benefit if police initiate those policies, if we abolish qualified immunity.

0:38:39.9 Radley Balko: So I’m hesitant to say that putting a… That viewing a lot of the problems in the criminal justice system through race is going to hamper reform. I think there’s good evidence that it does actually help reform. Now, that said, white people are victims of police abuse and police misconduct. It happens all the time. And I don’t… I think it’s wrong to pretend otherwise. I think that there are problems in policing and the criminal justice system that are racially motivated. I think there are problems that have nothing to do with race, and are more about power and control. But I also think that even those problems are exacerbated by race and the country’s history of race.

0:39:17.8 Radley Balko: But I’ll give you a good example from the book. So when the book first came out, it got very positive reviews, but the one criticism I kept seeing over and over again from some quarters, was that the book was… The examples that I used in the book were primarily white people, white people accused of basically marijuana-​related crimes. And in my original manuscript, which was about twice as long as the book, I had a lot more of examples, more examples and some examples that include black people. They got cut for various reasons, mostly because when we were editing and trying to cut the manuscript down, we chose cases that best illustrated the particular point that the book was trying to make.

0:40:00.0 Radley Balko: But in doing so, we cut out a lot of examples of black people. And so I think it is a valid criticism, that the book, that the anecdotes in the book to illustrate points paint… Portray a picture of who’s victimized by the drug war that probably isn’t entirely accurate. And I tried to remedy that a little bit in this update. But there’s a reason for that. The reason why the cases involving white people were more apt to illustrate a particular point is because those are the cases where the victim had a platform, because… Probably because they are white in large part, that they were able to get a lawyer to take their case, or they were able to get a journalist to look into the case, or they got a lawyer and the resulting lawsuit flushed out facts about the case that were probably hidden in a lot of these raids on black people, because black people… When you’re a black person and you’re subject to one of these raids, it’s hard to get people interested, much less believe that you’re innocent.

0:40:57.0 Radley Balko: And so what we find are that the cases where police have victimized white people in these cases tend to be the ones that blow everything up, that expose the fundamental problems in the system and the repeat problems, the incentive issues. It tends to be white people or very sympathetic black people, like the 92-​year-​old woman, Kathryn Johnston, who was killed in a police raid in Atlanta in 2006. Those are the cases that get public sympathy, that get investigations going, that get reforms. But when you look back at that, since those are the cases that get all the attention, if you’re not following the stuff closely you could be forgiven for thinking that most of these raids target white people, because those are the cases that you tend to read about.

0:41:44.1 Trevor Burrus: I completely agree about libertarians, and it’s sort of odd how some libertarians or people who call themselves libertarians resist these kind of racially-​tinged language. Whereas, in addition to your points, if we understand that the power of the state can be wielded by the people who win elections and the people who create the interest groups, and then they can use the power of the state to pursue their interests that are against the interests of the people who lost the election, well, we also then understand that if a bunch of those people are racist and they’re using the power of the state to pursue their racist policies against another race.

0:42:20.5 Trevor Burrus: And so a lot of… As you know, write in the book, the Watts riots were a huge sign-​post on this story, of a bunch of people being… White people being very, very afraid, and that’s when we get the first SWAT team and we start seeing a lot of the policing in black neighborhoods, or at least maybe the quote-​unquote demand for the drug war, coming from white people and the cost of that being put on to black people. Which is something we shouldn’t be for when it comes to the state’s obligation to treat people the same, as you pointed out.

0:42:51.4 Radley Balko: It’s a recurring story too, right. So in the update to the book, one of the cities I look at is Chicago in some detail, because Chicago never really experienced the drop in violent crime that the rest of the country did. And people have always assumed that the reason for that is gang culture or black culture, black on black crime, whatever you wanna call it. But Chicago also has a long history of police abuse and misconduct, going back to the Jon Burge torture scandal of the 1980s, which frankly was only recently resolved. They only established reparations for the victims in I think it was 2013 or 2014.

0:43:29.6 Radley Balko: But then you have Laquan McDonald, you’ve got the Chicago Police Union, you’ve got multiple examples of police oversight boards in Chicago that have been captured by the police unions that they’re supposed to be overseeing. You’ve got multiple incidents of officers lying. You’ve got a small percentage of officers with an overwhelming number of complaints against them who were never disciplined. But the amazing thing is, when I was researching for the update to the book, I found this report from a Blue Ribbon Commission that had been put together in the 1970s after police killed a black motorist, after pulling him over, I think it was for some sort of traffic violation.

0:44:14.2 Radley Balko: There was a lot of outrage about it, and there was this commission that was formed. The commission wrote a report that talked about the problems of policing in Chicago. Well, after the Laquan McDonald shooting, actually not after the shooting, about a year later, after the city was forced to release the video, and then forced to admit that the shooting was unjustified, there was another commission that was formed to write another report about Chicago policing. And the Chicago Reader compared the two reports, which were about 40 years apart, and the conclusions that they came to were remarkably similar. They talk about there’s no accountability, how the officers in charge of investigating other officers tend to prod them to give the right answers.

0:44:52.8 Radley Balko: They let them collaborate their stories, they talk about black people being afraid of being pulled over by officers. They talk about how black complaints against white officers are not even investigated. And it was just kind of stunning. In some cases, the language was almost verbatim, outlining the problems. And these two reports were 40 years apart and almost nothing had changed.

0:45:15.6 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, exactly. That goes to some of… How we fix this stuff too. Because the racism is a problem and how this… We have the militarization, which is again used on white people quite often too, these SWAT raids. And I’ve had calls and consultations with Black Lives Matter people and Campaign Zero people about what to do. And one of the things that I’ve told them is that, although they have been successful, more than anyone else in the last 20 years, but it’s that sometimes you just need to take away their toys, giving them implicit bias training or something like this, which is the kind of thing that the police union would try and make a concession on, that they’ll have training to take away their racist bias, whereas I mean I’m scared of something like that, because it’s an empty solution that doesn’t actually do anything.

0:46:09.5 Radley Balko: Whereas I just wanna take away their toys. I mean, I think if you have… If they have tanks, they will use them, and due to all these factors we’ve discussed, they will use them disproportionately on African-​Americans. So I’m much more pragmatic in the sense of, I can’t rewrite the cops’ minds to be less racist, but we can take away their toys as a start.

0:46:29.9 Radley Balko: Yeah, I mean, although… I mean, we’re never gonna have an unarmed police force, right? I mean, they’re always gonna have guns and they’re always gonna have…

0:46:34.0 Trevor Burrus: Well, I mean, like the tanks. Yeah, I mean, like the ones that they use. Yeah, yeah.

0:46:37.3 Radley Balko: Right. Yeah, look, the implicit bias stuff, I have seen the study that doesn’t work. I’ve also talked to black police officers who have attended those classes and say they don’t work because they’re not designed to work, right? They’re designed to sort of check off boxes so that the police department can then say, “Yes, we gave everybody implicit bias training.” The effort isn’t really there to actually make officers aware of their own bias and teach them how to kind of think their way out of it. It’s just, we’re just gonna let everybody sit through this class so that we can tell the federal government that we did it, but I don’t know that it works or it doesn’t work. I do think… I think I’m much more interested in tangible kind of substantive reforms, like you said, taking some of the gear, where…

0:47:26.5 Radley Balko: But also just things like… We just need to remove the opportunity for these bad incidents to happen, right? So getting police out of traffic enforcement, for example. So you don’t have the situation where you have an armed officer confronting you over a very, very minor offense in a very kind of fraught and difficult encounter. He’s on the side of the road, cars are whizzing by, cops are sort of… Have it hammered into their heads from the police academy that every stop… On any traffic stop somebody could ambush you and pull out a gun and blow you away, which that happens three or four times a year out of, I don’t know, how many million stops, but enough that there are lots of videos to circulate.

0:48:09.2 Radley Balko: So you have this incredibly tense kind of situation where you’ve got a cop who sees every stop as a potential shoot-​out. You’ve got motorists, particularly black and brown motorists, who don’t trust the police, who are worried about getting searched, who are worried about things escalating. There’s no reason why the police should be doing that. It could be done with… As a libertarian, it pains me to say this, but I think it’s the better option of the two. It could be done with traffic cameras. We could also engineer and design our roads better so that we don’t need as many rules, right? Roundabouts instead of stop signs, that kind of thing.

0:48:45.1 Radley Balko: We could also just enforce traffic laws less. Speed limits are pretty artificial, for the most part. They’re not the result of some study to find the optimal safe speed in that particular zone. It’s basically… In a lot of cases, they’re artificially low in order to generate revenue for the local government. So we can get police out of that altogether. We can get police out of the schools. There’s no data showing that police school resource officers actually make schools safer. We can start funding violence interruption groups. And here’s another area where I think libertarians, we could… Not even change the way we think about it, but just kinda be open to this idea.

0:49:29.0 Radley Balko: I’ve written about these groups like Cure Violence. What they do is they try to intervene before the violence and the kind of retaliatory violence starts escalating. A lot of times they’ll hire kind of former gang members or people from the neighborhoods where violence is happening. And study after study after study has shown that they’re effective at reducing violence, in reducing homicides in particular, both chronologically. So when they’re well-​funded, violence tends to go down. But also geographically, the neighborhoods where they operate tend to have lower violent crime figures after they start operating there.

0:50:09.0 Radley Balko: And yeah, as a libertarian, if I can spend the amount of money I would have to pay for salary and benefits for 10 police officers, and I can hire 100 of these violence interrupters and get the same reduction in violent crime or even a better reduction in a way… Then the reduction is achieved in a way that it uses less force and coercion and there’s less opportunity for escalation and violence and tragedy, why wouldn’t we go for that option? I mean, it seems to work. There’s also CAHOOTS Program out of Eugene that’s spreading across the country, where when somebody is having a mental health crisis and they call 911, instead of sending a SWAT team, which to me has always been the most absurd possible way you can react to that kind of situation, they send a paramedic and a counselor. And that’s been enormously effective everywhere that it has been tried.

0:51:04.1 Aaron Powell: Over the last few years, and particularly over the last year, we’ve seen a wave of progressive and reform prosecutors elected, a sustained criminal justice reform movement, and even what looks like a possible winding down of the drug war. Are these lasting and meaningful changes, or at least, do you think maybe we’re on the cusp of getting lasting and meaningful changes?

0:51:33.6 Radley Balko: I think some of them will be. I hope some of them will be. I mean, I’ve never seen the kind of substantive reforms that we’ve seen since the protests last year. In the almost 20 years or so I’ve been covering police militarization and these raids, I’ve never before this year, never, in any state or any city have I seen a serious proposal to end or limit no-​knock raids. There have been a few sort of individual police chiefs who’ve implemented policies to cut down on them. But since Breonna Taylor, since the George Floyd protests, literally dozens of cities across the country have banned no-​knock raids, and a couple of states.

0:52:15.2 Radley Balko: Are these are… Some of them are problematic, some of them have loopholes that are way too big for my taste, some of them have a problem with a lack of an enforcement mechanism. Some of them were very good. The Virginia law ban on no-​knocks, I think is great. I think it’s… The only thing I would add is it needs a provision requiring officers to be wearing body cameras when they conduct these raids. But I’ve never seen that kind of legislative action that we’ve seen over the last year. Also, similar legislation on chokeholds, on de-​escalation training, across the board, we’ve seen a lot of really strong substantive reforms at the state and local level. Nothing at the federal level, of course.

0:52:54.1 Radley Balko: But by the same token, we’ve seen lots of state legislators pass these bills that limit the liability of people who run over protesters with their cars. And with the result, the surge in homicides we’ve seen over the last year, I think there’s gonna be some backlash, we’re gonna see probably some progressive prosecutors get beaten, we’re probably going to see some reforms get rolled back in particularly conservative states. I don’t know, I’m hoping… My hope is that the homicide surge is related to the pandemic and the once in a lifetime weird phenomenon, aberrant phenomenon that was 2020, and that we’re gonna see things start to go back to normal.

0:53:43.4 Radley Balko: But I don’t know, the bad policies that we got that resulted in mass incarceration that resulted in the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment, that resulted in… A lot of the problems we have in the criminal justice system today were the result of policies that were passed in response to soaring crime rates. And hopefully, we’ve learned from that and hopefully we’ll be kind of more nuanced and careful and less reactionary in how we respond to this latest homicide surge. But I don’t know, as a politician it’s much, much easier to support getting tough on crime policies. Because like Bastiat argued with economic policies, I think the cost of those policies tend to be hidden, whereas it’s very easy to tie a rise in murder to a more progressive DA’s office, despite the fact that the spike in homicides has happened all over the country, including in cities that have pretty conservative prosecutors.

0:54:51.1 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us on Apple podcasts on your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.