you trouble here in new york not a day seems to go by without some major new story on some profound abuse tragic incident or some disturbing trend involving the police and policing practices in the country in just the last few days new york times carried three major stories that were prominently headlined the first read on the trail of a death in baltimore family is left in the dark after teenagers fatally shot by the police another one read where police cameras and web users see and are watching you police secrecy law unchanged and the third read the spike vows after eric gardner's death the disciplinary history of police officers still cannot be disclosed these are just the tip of the iceberg of stories the few that eventually gain national in and international notice and of course there are the countless daily cases that never see the journalistic light of day that many of us never become aware of even in our local communities in the face of a society that increasingly finds itself incapable of bringing about a progressive and transformative world  radical of economic and political justice more and more of us disproportionately poor and people of color come up against an increasingly technologically militarized over policed criminal justice reality increasingly these forces seem to be operating to manage our make sure that true radical and progressive yearnings and change never come to fruition these structures and policies included and continued to include blatant acts of police brutality and killings punitive cruelties of mass incarceration and solitary confinement and racially class directed policies such as stop and frisk wars on drugs and broken windows these practices continue to wreak havoc and misery and millions of people's lives as well as increasing strains and pressures on the lives of many police themselves as as thrust into impossible situations for the disrespect for the police and the law itself is a byproduct of this toxic interactive brew that many politicians and law and order authorities are slow to realize it was not until the nineteenth the eighteenth thirty's that the idea of a centralized municipal police department first emerged in the united states more than one hundred years earlier in seventeen zero four the colony of carolina developed the fledgling united states first  which consisted of roving bands of armed white citizens who would stop question and punish slaves caught without a permit to travel the way the patrols are organized and maintained provided a later framework for preventive rather than reactive community policing particularly in the south more modern centralized and bureaucratic police departments have focused on the alleged crime producing qualities of the so called dangerous classes the economic underclasses they came to believe that crime could stop before it started by subjecting everyone to surveillance and observation the concept of the police patrol as a preventive of police into the normal daily events of everyone's life a previously unknown and highly feared concept in both england and the united states patrols in the north also became useful for breaking up labor strikes and those who are agitating for better working conditions and rights of collective bargaining our guest on the radical imagination today has been in the forefront and cutting edge for criminal justice and police reform for over forty years in new york and around the country fighting to assure that repressive outrages and fear based criminal justice and police practices and trends don't become acceptable routinized and the new normal he's been an activist community organizer educator political policy advocate and political candidate he served as the executive director of the correctional so station in new york a progressive candidate for mayor of new york city in two thousand and seventeen and founded the police reform organizing project prop prop has dedicated itself to exposing discriminatory and abusive practices of the new york police department that routinely and disproportionately affect our cities low income communities and people of color he's what cornel west would call a long distance love warrior attending the build a world where justice would be what love looks like in public now before we meet bob we're going to have a very short little clip of charlie chaplin made a point of watching as many of his shorts on all of his long features as i could and a favorite scene of mine reminded me this scene reminded me of it although it's not quite the same it was a pretty it was from  and he's not presented as a political figure and he's just wandering in the street and a truck comes by that has a red flag hanging out of its back to basically one cars for not getting too close to the truck and the red flag falls out of the truck so chaplin tramp picks up the red flag to go chasing after the truck to get back to the truck at the same time that a bunch of marchers workers rights come around the corner behind them so he's wave and love my old man was working class so he in well resigned guy and he and as far as i could see his friends and all the members of the family just love chaplin laugh the chaplain and he spoke to them and he spoke i think their own sense of being beleaguered people and people not sufficiently valued by the watches sidey but because of this fighting spirit because of its enormous good humor correction association focused on conditions of confinement in state and local facilities in new york watchdog agency yes right and we also did organizing around issues that affected the use of prison so we were  again policies and practices that affected the way our government in society use prisons when i left a correction association in two thousand and eleven so little more than seven years ago i didn't want to retire i wanted to focus on an issue that i thought at least up until a time was not getting sufficient attention from from advocates in organizers and certainly from the watch of society and that was abusive discriminatory policing on the part of the n y p d and right around the time we we found that prop a lot of attention began focused on and began to be focused on stop and frisk as a tactic time of the organizing and about stop and frisk although we also participated in organizing was the our concern being the n y p d and whoever the mayor was could significantly reduce the use of stop and frisk without right eighty seven eighty percent new york is a call it was a blatantly racist practice a blatant example of over policing and eventually lost whatever popularity and credibility it had it was a successful lawsuit against it right in any even reference the standing of the history of policing and you made a point of it in your intro knows that since the very beginning of institutionalized policing in our country and in new york city the police department was hundred forty five had racist underpinnings and the purpose of institutionalized policing was at least in part if not centrally to control and contain certain populations but irish as an ethnic group eventually took over the police department case later it was also free black people because new york state had abolished slavery in eighteen twenty seven so the police departments and the whatever rubric now it's under broken windows fleecing have always targeted and irrational low income groups marginalized groups and other populations now for so the philosophy the fundamental philosophy of warren foresman in new york city today and other large urban areas in the country is broken windows for the scene where the police department criminal justice system was created and really is structured to be a reactive system of crime is committed then there is a response by the criminal justice of that response would broken windows policing introduces in again all the tactics over the years that targeted harassed low income people of color no the marginalized groups was a former proactive policing we were going to talk at them we were going to  that is i think part of the thinking that certainly would foundational at the very beginning of these kind of policing methods but now it's i mean in my view it's also become a integrated into the daily life of the city and also into their early life of have the criminal justice system operates for example one of the props main activities is our quote mining project where we go into the in parts of the criminal courts of the four major verbs in the city to see who's being arraigned at a particular day at a particular time of day the the importance of that is everybody gets arrested in new york city has to be arranged so if you do that kind of court monitoring on a consistent basis as we do a prop you get a very good idea of n y p d arrest practices so you randomly pick a particular court that one of it's the bronx  and go to one the next morning so you can pick almost any time a day when you could have volunteers or represented as a prop going to an arraignment and you'll see what's going on and and there's no particular credential you have to know to to enter a room for it open to any member of the public and what we see consistently that between eighty five percent to one percent of the people being arraigned are people of so it's on my license marijuana possession petty larceny favor of a jand something called possession of a weapon in the fourth degree which means that you have in your possession and the way the law reads of just give a quick example of how bogus these practices are the way the law reads it the law prohibits something called a gravity knife which when you and i were younger jim we call the switch blade something that you could flip your wrist and open with people arrested for consistently we've actually never seen anybody arrested with a weapon or tool that fits a description of a gravity next the people the qataris people who are and these aren't gravity knives because you have to you can only open the blade with your hand but the cops arrest people for it the d a s prosecute people for it and for example  in cuomo to me democratic politicians in a state support that war but practices today on an everyday basis targeting low income people of color subjecting them to either getting tickets or being arrest so being deprived of liberty even if they're released that arraignment for a certain period of time and then they're the collateral consequences that follow those arrests because you become criminalize you develop a criminal it's a system the that that to get back to how i guess suddenness has been normalised the term that you use and the extent that goes on every day there is we try to generate protests and there are some protests that different groups including us raise against these practices but it's not it's not a white spread express  so for example my guess is in the south for the ninety or just use that jim crow was applied the notion of black and white people drinking a different what defines got so normal d that for many many of the use nobody questioned it until the civil rights movement came in so the kind of practices that i'm describing have become normalized to the extent that there's when even when there are some sort of just really deeply absurd things that happen for example we would do in court monotone in queens sometime last month and the police had arrested somebody who had an open war twenty eight years ago one thousand nine hundred ninety you know which means if you have an open warrant from twenty twenty years ago you have not been arrested or been quote unquote in trouble for the twenty eight years and then you get stopped because you are carrying an open apple container or you walk between two subway cause they're going to check on you and they find that there's an open warrant and then they  is no reaction on the part of the judge the da or the legal aid attorneys for just how excuse me deeply fucked up this is in also absurd and unjustifiable on any basis and of course it was the victim of that was a middle aged latino man because almost all these practices these absurd practices these purple  arrests are inflicted on people of color so i think one is that all is a should have it the other is that it's perceived as a political risk to take strong stance against it so even mainstream politicians who we consider to normalization the political risk perceived taking strong positions and different things found nuanced racism right and the other the other point and i just had a discussion about this earlier today with some of the that in the area of predatory sexual activity by men practices that were tolerated or even chuckled at for decades or even hundred years have now in the case of a lot of these men become totally unexceptable reputations in the in korea is destroyed literally overnight and the what in the conversation with  what we all recognize is the population particularly initially that drove the me to movement were sympathetic sometimes famous white women who had been clearly abused and there should be sympathy for them but much more likely much more possible to galvanize widespread public concern about what happened to these women and in the  really just terrible and and crude and gross and injurious activities that man imposed on them right where is the population that we're justice system so it's not a group that for a lot of people in our society that they can readily identify with and sympathize with it's even though more and more are finding that their own economic situation becoming more and more precarious yes and also the thing that sometimes brings these issues to the forefront and has actually a number of times of the last five years or so where the videos of the brutal police actions which shocked everybody even people who aren't necessarily we were considered part of our base of people who would organize in an appeal to support fundamental changes in practices so the videos have helped make people across the country more aware of bad policing and the terrible effects that it can have but it's a little by large the police aren't being punished for the little violent until very rarely very rarely of right punish for those actions which in some ways though reinforces part of our now says which is the the problem with policing and why police and the entire system gets away with abusive and discriminatory practices is the enormous power that they have and it's unchecked power in a a could be a more dramatic example of that on check power to realize that all the cops involved in the reckless actions that contributed directly to eric on his death still work for the n y p d so we're we're we're not even promoting indicting know and there are a lot of police there are thirty seven thousand police officers new york city so even if only say ten percent or twenty percent were bothered by it that's a large group that's objectionable they find it and some of these cops are talking to us only anonymously but some of them of also basically play the role of whistleblowers they usually police of color but not always  some some people are attracted to being police officers because they're already have racist tendencies and statistic tendencies that are part of them even if your desire to have power over right and which is a form of that and then for some of them some police offices some people become police officers with good intentions or least intention of having a job that earns a decent pay and you know after twenty twenty two years i could have a pension but the the the people and what they've learned over the years of being police officers nothing will happen to them there is a little consequence there is no consequence to police officer who makes a bogus arrest who rest somebody for marijuana possession for example when there's no evidence that that person had marijuana possession on them because what usually happens in a case like that is the the rest a person accepts a plea to a lesser charge like disorder will have a mock you know criminal record that operates against you and people will accept that outcome because it gets them out from under the criminal justice system without any other negative effect other than the experience of been arrested and being charged with a bogus offense and even if the person sues the city in winds that say a settlement the fifteen grand the twenty five grand nothing happens to the individual officer and  the settlement payment doesn't even come out of the n y p d budget it comes out of another part of the city's budget so there's no consequence to bad policing in fact to sort of keep the  i'm talking about is the officer gets rewarded because soon as the office of makes his or her arrest they get a notch on their belt by the way the quota system operates the quota system as it's practiced by the n gives credit to the arresting officer even if it's a bogus arrest even if it's thrown out of court somewhat a sign that somehow he's doing his job yet as i said he's being productive and the civilian review board role in this recommendation the police commissioner is the wanted decides on what kind of punishment will be applied and often the police commission either ignores the sanctions being recommended by the civilian point review board or reduces them own living also there are a lot of people working at this yeah yeah and we're just obviously not just us there academics working at this there are organizes including very local community based organizes are organizations like the new york civil liberties union and there's another organization and you call the communities united for police reform all in similar and different ways working at this and they receive more press coverage of that new york times covering it the daily news has undergone some changes in its leadership is aggressively covering some of these issues is an article today about how the city agency who has paid out the largest settlements for sexual harassment within the department is the n y p d and so there is that cumulated of black marks against police seen in police departments in the york and across the country but it still hasn't created the breakthrough they don't even with all the things i just mentioned with the videos with the attention that the black lives matter movement has brought to these issues there's been no meaningful change either nationally or in any job jurisdiction on this issue so on one hand it is grim and on the other hand it's important to keep working at these issues to keep banging away at these issues and break the data to collect the  like the many many people obviously millions of people have shaking their head now figured we speak insane how could we ever accept actions now to say we know so much of hollywood knew about what he was doing right how did we had they accept it now it's completely unacceptable and i think it's possible that that our society gets to the point where they look at what happens today with broken windows families and say how did we accept that ninety three percent of the people the n y p d arrests for marijuana possession are new yorkers of color how did we accept practices  where when the cops find a homeless person sleeping under the stairwell in a public housing project they only get rewarded by the quota system if they arrest that person they don't get rewarded if they or some other agency tries to help that person appreciate at some level not being hassled bothered sure let the police take care of the people that write may bother them keep them out of sight out of mind and so some many of the rest of us also complicit in this and we sort of need to be don't get into an understanding of that right i think part of the and you made reference to this earlier it's that people need to be jolted but it's also and i think this is classic humans of organizing it's not possible to organize people who don't see a way that their involvement can lead to change and i think just give you an example  when i referred to this really when i was at the correction association we organized a statewide campaign called the drought the rock campaign against the rockefeller drug laws we would have regular meetings forty fifty people would be there some of the people would be people black and latino people from in a city communities who were directly affected by the imitation of the drug was and sometimes we get off the gender and we'd be talking about abuse of policing and you know everybody had stories either of what happened to them or their children or their loved ones or other friends but you felt strongly that they had that they as a community were resigned to the reality of having to deal with cope with figure out a way around this these harsh policing practices that was in any sense like what we had around the rockefeller drug laws that we could organize to change the rockefeller drug laws and because people had hope that they could organize to change it they then became organized young became activists and promoted the change so part of the difficulty with the issues that we're as a taking is is the is there a way that people both from the directly affected communities and for people for want of a better term concerned white progressive people who are not directly affected  who don't like what's going on when they know what's going on to mobilize them to thinking we can be effective we can change these things we can significantly eliminate or reduce police power police personnel police resources and then use those resources to find both government programs and community based programs that are going to provide support services for the very people that the necessary and so we begin to see these eck larger profound economic and political structures that are keeping us at each other keep in keeping us segmented segment person rather than getting help for that person and because the resources aren't being directed to the sort of help that the actually the right so we leave it to the cops right and the who also resentful at grade level to throw it at us  woman who stole the package of him and eggs from holland pathmark and she's not stealing that to sell in a black market she still went out to be hungry so the risks because she's hungry so the response to her actions should not be i'm an old guy lived in new york city all my life but i was not expecting just how stacked the system is and in favor of incumbents and in favor of candidates who won't rock the boat in favor of candidates who have access to money so for example a key setback for our campaign is we were not permitted to participate in the televised debates and the reason know that should be easy for you to raise it's not easy for you to raise if you don't know wealthy people and i don't know wealthy people and you're running a campaign that is raising some issues that would be considered  coming at the blasio from his left and raising what would be traditionally progressive criticisms of his policies and practices this especially around police but not only around police that didn't get a proper hearing so he didn't have to defend those practices and the the ideas the proposals that we were making that we think a lot of people would support even though right they may be considered quote unquote radical didn't get a proper hearing so a travesty of the democratic  know that in other words i assumed if i got enough petitions i got on the ballot i'd be in it the televised debates so i didn't know in beginning to campaign that we had raised one hundred seventy five thousand dollars and then i also was was flung mix by how do you defend i mean how do you claim that this is a progressive system that we've created right for a publicly financed elections when the only criteria for whether you participate in  they can get touch with you perhaps even volunteer in turn right here please form open eyes and project we have a web site the police reform organizing project that org people can e mail me directly that com r p a ganji each e mail that com people can call me nine win seven three two seven seven six four eight nine one seven three two seven seven six four eight and if you google us will come up and we depend to a large degree of volunteers work as a mentioned earlier we have thirty volunteers mainly young college students who are interning with us this summer and we welcome volunteers of well  william barber on just this this is jim brad ose thank you so very very much for joining us here on the radical meditation thank you bob again thank you you get in touch with bob and help us out on all this right welcome your support we welcome your support very much thank you again we'll see next week on the radical imagination here's reverend william tonight i want to talk about the demand or the need for for a for morrow clarity in the midst of a maro crisis impact has been taking on the crisis of some seventeen years right now in the middle of a tax plan and i love what impact statement has done because you all have the right message every great religion tells us that the deepest values a caring for the poor the sick the marginalized the immigrant the stranger i believe that the koran says in one place the believe us both me and women are in charge of and responsible for one another they all enjoy one in the doing of what is right and they must for beer the doing of what is wrong is a good twenty two says your politicians are like wolves prowling and killing and taking whatever they want and your preachers cover up for the politician appertaining to have received visions and special revelation they say this is what god says when god has said no such thing extortion is rife robbery is epidemic the poor and the needy even when i hang around and meditate on that brown skinned palestinian jew named jesus jesus said the spirit of the lord is upon me for he has chosen me to preach good news to the poor and the word poor there is a greek is the year for everybody to be accepted regardless of their race their color or their gender that is the jesus i follow and i do not know the of the e u reality is from the cover on to the hebrew scriptures to the new testament anything less than this biblical witness for justice and love and mercy is a heretical attempt to have jack faith and use it in the service of domination and oppression it is an abdication of a basic responsibility of faith it is theological malpractise of faith that says nothing and let alone does nothing while people are treated like things and corporations treat it like people is a heretical form of hypocrisy the only way you can get to that kind of faith is it has to descend from slaveholder religion that's the only way you can be so loud on the things that god is so quiet on and so quiet on the things that god is so loud on we must have morrow dissent because i deepest faith traditions and constitutional traditions have been had jack too often to serve greed and racism and lies and because of that we must raise our voice like the prophets and cry loud and span and declare that in this moment silence  is not an option those are all morrow issues not left versus right or democrat versus republican but it's about what's right versus what's wrong we must come together not to say to the party but to say the soul and the heart of this nation itself we cannot give on on this democracy not now not if there's some scriptures that muslims and jews and christians  one is the psalms and in the psalms it says the stone that the builders rejected can become the chief come the stone are they any people in here who have felt rejected sometime you felt looked down on because you're black or looked down on because you're muslim or looked down on because you're jew or looked down on because you're a woman or looked down on because you're gay what the bible says if the stones that the builders rejected come together then those stones become a builder of a cornerstone the chief the broken have to create the breakthroughs we need if we do god's wheel he will use us to change tomorrow narrative of this nation and to help us together we will