we've all seen or heard the disparate racial numbers on crime data across the country here's some you may not have read specifically concerning new york city crime statistics in new york city's four major boroughs through court monitoring reports of the last four years which included five thousand one hundred sixty two cases observed four thousand six hundred forty five or ninety percent involve new yorkers of color these were the most problem types of arrests coming to the kernel does the system and the individual charge for those infractions the n y p d continues to engage in aggressive application the vast number of these quota driven punitive interactions including some says traffic tickets and arrests affect new yorkers of color over one million dollars per day or over four hundred  ten million dollars a year is spent by the n y p d on this broken windows approach which means that every day the police charge can find and criminalize hundreds of people of color for minor infractions this is the true tale of the two cities that we new yorkers live on it's a stark counterpoint to the publicized positive impact of the policies as opposed are exposed by the n y p d and the mayor's office the everyday reality is that the n y p d and courts inflict incalculable harm hardship and human misery and great numbers of vulnerable and disenfranchised people is a significant ways of resources that would be better spent on collaborative neighborhood based law enforcement programs and social services that are dress the real social and economic problems that drive unlawful behavior the n y p d and mayor's approach is just simply stupid and cruel today will be talking to the founder and executive director of the organization that collected the data i've just read the police reform organizing project or prop he's been an activist committee organizer and public policy advocate in new york city for over forty years and served as executive go to that end in the seder world and more just new york city he will be visiting us here on the radical meds as our mayor he came up short this time in the last election but that wasn't because of his of trying intelligence and certainly not because of his compassion and understanding of what it would take to build a truly transformative criminal justice system which would go a long way to creating a more just and radically how the way our campaigns are run and manage and supervised by government agencies really stacked the deck and favor people of incumbents or people have access to money most dramatic representation of that is in order to participate in the official debates the televised debates which you were not allowed to do i was not permitted to do because i didn't raise the threshold amount of money which was a hundred seventy five thousand dollars and that's a lot of money to raise for a political during the campaign because we debated each other on a fairly regular basis of political obs and that kind of thing so good guy i disagreed with him on certain very important policy areas but soule in order to make the hundred and seventy five thousand dollars fresh old he had to turn to the patrolmen benevolent association really now called it took out the man recently so i think it's the patrol off i forget what it's  called but it now the name does not occur includes the realization that women are now a significant part of the police force but any case he got almost five thousand dollars ri that which is the union that represents police offices which is regressive force in the city's politics today led by an outspoken in leader named pat lynch who sometimes not always sometimes he says relatively reasonable things but a fair amount of time he says things that make donald trump to appear a very sort of moderate of civilizing force in our political disclose and as couple of other law was particularly frustrating about it is first of all just the flat out unfairness of it because the system that surprisingly but the system favors people who have read the wealthy have access to wealth  and in effect discriminates against campaigns like ows which was grassroots which was based on our form of community organizing as applied to a political campaign we only got small donations we didn't make the threshold so i representing our campaign didn't have the opportunity to challenge the black you directly and a number is policies including the policing policy of the city that are just undeniably stokley racially biased that serve no useful purpose that hurt people every day house i mean police and i think is the most obvious and the most  previous members may is not pay sufficient attention to providing decent quality of education for the poor black and latino students of all public schools and homeless crisis ninety percent of the homeless families in the next city are african american  race is a factor and in and money is a factor as controlling the political process exactly and the lobbying efforts of money and also the money in the way we have the government spends its money  the the man of money spent on law enforcement dollars in new york city is over ten billion dollars the lion's share of that goes to the n y p d and if the city for example instituted the policies that we are proposing we a prop that i talked about doing i'm aerial campaign and that other police reform organizations are proposing those those from poses would involve significant cutbacks to the n y p d to the district attorney's office to courts to our jails the city could literally save billions of dollars that it could then put into providing smaller classes for all the students who one point one million students who attend the public schools provide truly affordable housing a lot affordable housing program is not providing units that are actually affordable in the neighborhoods where they're being built for the people who live in those neighborhoods so the so called affordable housing program on the part of the city is becoming one of the factors that is generating enjoy having a change of occasion in a city driving poor people out of the neighborhoods where they live and where some of them have lived for generations very helpful the way you link this up and again the criminal justice system is so central to this and and how it hurts people and what is going to put this in some little bit of historical perspective by showing a clip here that shit out of somebody there's a lot there the reminds me a friend of mine is retired now but he worked for a long long time in as a social worker providing treatment and sometimes connected to drug treatment programs methadone treatment programs and he told me a story once where there was some reason his agency had to have regular contact with police for getting why escorting people i'm not sure and he got to know a couple of the cops a really good guys very friendly enjoyed talking sports with him or whatever else was going on at the time and it was on one occasion he was sitting with one of his clients latino guy and they were sitting together and and one of the cops that he was very friendly with showed up you know like of course the room but it reflects reality have why people friends of like i am a white guy most white people had a prior was making this point don't have a very good here or the reality of that it called the way the police departments and police offices often treat poor people marginalized people of any kind could be shibboleth that i first heard maybe in grammar school maybe in high school but very common power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely and i think people have a general understanding that that's fundamentally true  cole video the kind of things that pride was talking about nothing's going to happen to them in fact the way the n y p d quota system is of works if you beat the crap out of somebody and really hurt somebody but you make an arrest you're going to get a nice ring a bell because the rest is a step toward making your quota the cops who arrested eric on if their actions had led to his death they would have gotten credit for making that rest of them and they would have charged him with more than one offense they would have charged him typically with resisting arrest disorderly conduct something called obstructing government administration at least three charges in that one arrest and that's typically the way the n  d operates in fact if you see to arrest this is as cynical we have property come but we know which granted in the truth if you see somebody arrested for disorderly conduct resisting arrest and what they call o of break on this unchecked power well the what we're getting at is is the essential question which is not that we do we know what happens and we continue to do research initial reports that expose it a lot of other organizations do but the could almost put the findings of all our reports and the reports of other organizations in the category arrested for marijuana possession of people of color that's an asian eyes baltimore right baltimore same thing the york city same thing one out of four homicides are not solved the resources are going to so so i think it's important and it's a lot of what we do is continue to expose and acknowledge the problem right but we're also dealing with the reality is you know it sounds glib to say none of this is new like the ever qana incident what's the only thing it's new is is a video that captured that from the beginning to the end and you could see in very dramatic terms that how reckless and responsible those police officers were both in how they physically manhandle him and piled on and applied a choke hold and how they ignored him saying eleven times i can't breathe and how when he was laying you know like a lifeless on the ground they stood around for a couple of minutes just chatting as if you know they wondered who was going to be the saudi pitcher for the mets game that night yeah and the so these things and was going on  similar things really since the beginning of time the n y p d was founded in one thousand nine hundred five and part of its purpose then was to control and contain two unruly new york city and the other population they targeted were three black people because new york city state about slavery in eight hundred twenty seven was it's always been part of the purpose of police and it's about hurting that and that always been about that physical psychological he radiation disrespect right it's not there it's not about it's not like this or a sometimes i frame it it's we're propping other people who oppose these practices it's not so much because they're legal which they are or they are unconstitutional rightly ari that they harm people and they harm people on it quite right way to put it on an individual basis soul part of this which droid nearly huge could say monstrous apparatus that's been created that harms individual people but also inflicts a kind of collective hominid collect a community primarily low income black and brown people putting them in their place and making sure they stay there right and also instilling some kind of wariness on the heart of many many black and brown people and also a feeling that they don't fully belong to america because of the way america has tolerated the way that they are treated and the at a certain point i don't know how intentional or purposeful it is it is i think some people think it is very intentional and purposeful the i'm sure of it is it is real inflicts not only physical harm and also economic harm in terms of lesser incomes in terms of when you get a criminal record you can lose access to public housing scholarships many ways that it could prevent you from a lot of people every year for driving with suspended license and you you get brought into the holding facility and you are one of sixteen people there every myrna way and every one of those other people maybe with one exception is a black or brown person you know you you integrate the reality that the system that governs your society at its basic level because in some ways the police officers are the most immediate representative of that system because that's who you see in the streets they are on a they in a regular basis do something that violates you as a person and violates the rights that you think you have because sharon american let's listen briefly here to a clip by your island ok someone is hurting my brother we're not going to take it had a lot of volunteers and interns work for us over the last summer by the way if anybody's interested in voluntary do we need internship with prop feel free to contact me you can go to our website police reform organizing project that august and send the message that way g mail r p a gain g if you mail contact me directly so we had twenty five to thirty interns and was a wonderful group and we were being very planful about how do we provide them with a useful experience and we had this idea we would bring in experts for relating to police issues or related issues and they would spend time with those experts in and one of the people we b of getting his last name at the moment first name was clarence taylor it was a professor at root is recently retired and he was an expert on the n y p d particularly its brutal interactions with people in the black community just written a book about it that has recently been published and so we brought him in for an interview yet with a bat was your interact with the intern and and he brought with  them but either while he was congressman or prefers congressman he was involved in publishing the people's voice and it had regular stories about police brutality against black people in h and he quoted we had a panel discussion and he quoted from a paper that he was aware of and he felt like it could have been written yesterday it was actually from a paper written in the  the they had been a disturbance in harlem and then there was a a commission appointed by look wadia to study it and you should report on it and it was called a hollow right before it and it was triggered by an goes to the heart of the way the grievances that the plex community feels about how america will leitch to it and treats it and particularly how cops treat the black community and you know the pieces that muhamm was the author had interviewed the white woman who said perry said it didn't really happen the incident that led to till's death but even if he had whistled at her obviously  will be familiar with black novelist who was the live at that time i think he wrote detective novels that were set in home and he was well known literary figure and haim said i will remember the quote exactly but this was right after the news broke that the men who put on trial for killing emmett till were found guilty and he said the most disturbing thing for him is a black man again i'm quoting  me exactly was when his mind came to terms with the fact that america really doesn't want to do anything about this because if it did it would and that's stop now now having having said that the the black people are there's no question that the violence that used to take place against black people regularly in the south has been significantly reduce reality of our lord forstmann forces in some way or another either carrying out different kinds of brutality against people of color without any punishment or protecting people who carry out those kind of violent acts against people of color or against what people homeless people and not sufficiently punishing them we haven't take the steps to stop that kind of thing and i see it mainly in terms actually not so much would happen in material which was white man outside law enforcement killing him and then being in effect protected and exonerated by the system is what cops do now to people of color being really punished or sanctioned and it's because the system doesn't want to take steps to stop it because the steps would be the powers that be the invested powers resisted resisted because they least in part because it's too controversial like for example what would have to happen let's say in the case of the eric honore incident where you had five or and the kind of thing that if it happened could be a meaningful step to stopping it from happening again is the mayor should have fired all those people they have to the video cam and you don't need to process the sort she was for me what the fuck happened and instead of their being fired as you know jim they also work for the n y p d till this is now four and a half years later they still work for the n y p d that sends a message to cops and to the community that you could do something as agree just as what we saw in the video that led directly to a man's death and you don't get punished so of course if you arrest somebody and charge them with  possessing you grabbed a knife or petty larceny or smoking a joint and you just made it up you know nothing's going to happen you business because nothing happened to those cops would kill their economy and so would the good cops on the side you probably know the  touches on so much of what you've been talking about and what needs to happen so this is to me a department of civilian justice or is my goal this in many gomez zone work to my goal goal to make a bill which can be followed by every state in the u s in the united states the new state build new york state will provide a mechanism for just as we're currently there is not the new agency will have oversight powers over all the state police departments the d a offices department corrections statewide the agency wall powers the ability to hold the ministry of hearings as well as the ability to suspend or fire anyone found guilty of corruption regardless of their position the partners of the justice will provide regular citizens the ability to report corruption from the d a s office police department apartment correction will have investigators and judges who are not affiliated with any other state and it's an agency to ensure that fair impartial investigation hearings are provides for the public in addition it will also provide the ability for police officers t report police corruption themselves without fear none of this internal affairs business to report police corruption without fear of retaliation and sure that a fair investigation is conducted and when preventing a investigator departments of the justice that's good from securing evidence will be automatically suspended regardless of position or appointment the department of civilian justice bill will bring accountability to the agencies in addition providing a voice to the voiceless against current injustices so said that i mean it certainly does get at does it that's all i want and some of the stuff you've been doing right and some of the stuff we're proposing i mean posing right to get back and this is where it overlaps with many suppose bill right the to get back to the things that should happen to stop the air con or incidents from  without pay regardless of whatever the union contract says ok so the the and if they are suspend they're always getting paid right right now this is suspended without pay without knowing the strike so now they are they under the mayor's powers they still have a right to i don't know if it's an internal hearing within the department it was in city government they still have a right to what some might call some form of due process but when the man it takes that has never taken a step and not that we have proper study this i don't recall any mayor taking that step where he we haven't had a woman mayor where he makes that decision on his  own rather than waiting for some kind of internal disciplinary process within the department i mean to to to show what a mockery of a just response of the governor incident is the n y p d is just getting around to an the second thing is this is where the manny's bill overlaps with what we've proposed is this should be outside in the frame the prosecutor's whose only job is to investigate allegations of police brutality not necessarily not only where there was a fatality we're not only where the person was an unarmed any allegation of police brutality excessive use of force that office investigates it's outside of the to have an institution investigate an action by a member of that institution where a lot of people who run that institution you think anybody who's found guilty of misconduct reflects badly on the to give a very minimum punishment or no punishment at all in a panel a ok so they may make a political decision that it's probably going to serve our interest if we actually do punish this guy so that we could at least claim in the going or incident windows policing the day to day policing that cops engaging in new york city and in many other cities in a country which is oil or water driven quota driven which they will deny and they called something else productiv  middle class people or laura biting simple so that it makes broken when those kind of policing which is imposed on cops they have to one way or another carried out and they have to meet their quota every day will force or in some police offices a more cavalier attitude about the lives and well being of the people they're interacting right so more likely that they will engage in physical force or excessive force or batalla tea without thinking in some application of force to solve problems are a rather more nuanced more sophisticated more effective more you main response and now what have they had five or six police commissioners in the last couple years and baltimore now they're going to come again and baltimore like broken windows policing and the only way to stop that is significantly reduce the number of police offices the budget the power and use the money to the programs and services services that would help  we've got we're about out of how i'm here we've got thirty seconds so we want to remind our audience you've been really helpful articulate in getting this out and we understand the issues much better now i know are these and i do too as well  if you can't speak out against this kind of thing