origin of the term in the ancient city states of greece to the development of the nation states of europe in the th and th centuries the police were conceptualize as the group that could ensure the safety of the public and private individuals it would make sure the forces of law and order would win out and be maintained the term had a very broad meaning although their role was generally to keep the city orderly and law abiding they became concerned with such issues as the cleanliness of the streets the provisions of the markets public lighting they could find in the vagabonds the fair price of grains the cleaning of canals the healthy this of the urban environment and the of wresting abandons by stressing a be the end of the law and the regulation control of the members of a potentially disorderly community the poor and workers were most feared it was inevitable that policing would become a political question many serious doods of history in modern day a social scientist still have difficulty recognizing that reality in much of the academic media and political world policing and the role of police has been pushed into the shadows where occupies a blind spot as far as critical thinking is concerned as we live through the increasing  dysfunctionality coarseness and then civility of political economic and moral life in contemporary america maintaining order because one of the main preoccupations of the ruling order that is clearly failing or has already failed the criminal justice system its academies the police courts and prisons have a mission central to the efforts of the ruling order to maintain their power the more the social order loses legitimacy the more it arms its police the more the institutions of the dominant order withdraw and fail the more ruling elite advance the terms of surveillance on the larger community the less respect the authorities inspire the more they seek to keep us respectful so force punishment or the fear of state violence directed at us this vicious cycle continues and escalates force never has anything respectable about it as the psychiatrist activist jim delegate puts it punishment is the most powerful stimulant of violence we have discovered yet the function of the police becomes a means to make sure that the desired external or appears to be in control it tries to ensure the order of things by increasingly allowing the use of weapons of disorder to be used by the police itself in its daily state is regularly forced to exhibit it to make itself feared the promise an attempt to establish order only adds to the chaos and disorder i can democratic regime takes up the habit of having its population fired upon and the police cynically oversee an apparent order that in fact is this order they become the truth the police that is in a world of lies while also becoming a continuing lie themselves and they realize that at some level they turn to themselves for surviv the blue line is drawn it's them versus us they have the biggest gang in the city whatever happens there and together we're thrilled to have on the radical measures and today a sociologist activist who's one of the scholars and academics who gets all of this his recent book is an important work written in our exceedingly readable way for both criminal justice academics as well as the general public i that he argues that the problem is not police training police diversity our police methods the problem is a dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years a fundamental shift in the role in society the problem therefore is policing itself they've come to exacerbate the very problems they're supposed to solve and end to policing communities and individuals do deserve protection from crime and even disorder we all do we should demand safety and security but not at the hands of the police because in the end presentation and i'm so thankful that you've been able to make it here my eyes are as a nation and so as you saw charlie chaplin there i'm going to show a short clip of him big in another clip in just a few minutes but tell us how you got started with your work and and perhaps how maybe charlie chaplin can be brought into it in some way yes well i didn't you know start as a police scholar i started actually my training was in community development housing policy etc and in the late eighty's and early ninety's i was living and working in san francisco and got a job at the san francisco coalition on homelessness to work on housing policy issues but it was at that time that a lot of the folks that we were working with out on the streets complained of a really high level of harassment from the police and my boss at the time paul bowden asked me to go out and try and figure out what was going on and that turned out to be the beginnings of broken windows policing good jolly chapter so a raft in a little yes whoa charlie chaplin exemplifies some of these ideas in that he typically plays down on his luck character who through really no mal intention often or through strategies of survival you know comes in contact with the police and it's always a lumen a thing that we you know when we watch charlie chaplin being chased by the police we're always rooting for him for chaplin you saw that with the audience right at the end that i mean just going hysterical come on charlie got away and so in  so this broken windows policing was being used as a kind of radical political shift from conceptualizing homelessness as a crisis of housing and social services to a problem of law and order and using police to basically manage this problem of profound inequality and market failure essentially so as a political shift in san francisco at that time the the mayor was yet voting this so we had a liberal mayor art agnes who had been a social worker the problem of of homelessness was getting worse especially after the one thousand nine hundred and eighty nine earthquake he starts to opens some new homeless shelters but grows intolerant of the disorder but his intolerance and and actions against it are not robust enough in the face of growing public frustration so the voters actually elect the police of chief the chief of police frank jordan mayor really on an explicit broken windows platform and he begins a major public crackdown on public homelessness despite the fact that there was no place for people to go the shelter system was oversubscribed there was a nightly lottery and if you didn't your number didn't get picked you were left out on the streets very different than new york where there's a guaranteed right to shelter and so over time i began to pull together attorneys and others to try to develop strategies to push back against that and in ninety three i decide to go back to school here in new york thinking again i want to study economic development global cities kind of stuff but i get here writers giuliani is elected in the same thing happens all over again and so i get pulled into these issues and eventually write a dissertation about the rise of giuliani and broken windows politics sixteen movie the circus the minister there are the religious leaders got his money yes whatever it is that he's left with the prison they're homeless and what's going on there well this raises so many issues  there's all this focus now on talk about like reentry services and more rehabilitation programs within prisons to try to help folks who are in there you know get back into society but the research about the have a lot of respect for but i think that we the st of all a lot of what counts as services in these situations is exactly this kind of personal responsibility narrative about well if you just get your head straight that everything will work out as or i'm spent enough yes or repent enough is in this case and we can see how thin that is he's already has walked ten feet and he's already you know that watch  but that there's no exploration of the structural factors the mass joblessness the trauma the lack of basic medical care for addiction mental health trauma cetera none of that is really being addressed by these services and too often the damage has already been done people have felony records big gaps in their c v s no work histories we've got to quit putting people into these institutions that's the real solution here and i think what we see in this charlie chaplin clip of one hundred years ago is just the futility of imagining that we're going to be rehabilitating people through these processes that we've got to intercede much earlier in the process and create the structural forces that will nabl us to do that but the larger society isn't serious about that no totally caught up in this ideology of meritocracy and personal responsibility and these completely individual level explanations of crime and disorder and decades how powerful d industrialization has been in eliminating working class jobs that had decent pay for folks with limited educational attainment and it's led to this hollowing out of the middle class and really a hollowing out of the working class and african americans latinos recent immigrants made up the backbone of that in so many cities and they have now been left out of the employment picture and have become labeled as a source of crime and disorder and in the process criminalized whether it's through the war on drugs broken windows policing but usually if being right in the last forty fifty years right meticulously so the underlying processes have always kind of been there but there's been this profound intensification and the forty years really can be tied to the rise of economic restructuring of the one thousand nine hundred and seventy s austerity the rise of the war on drugs and basically the lack of pathways for so many americans to make it into the middle class that has resulted in crime and disorder that then has been criminalized and as a response also to the political position the political activism and the push back of the sixty's well whenever you have periods of political activism you get both a political retrenchment in an intensification of policing so you know in periods where very little is going on in terms of real challenges to state authority political policing takes a back seat we don't see it so strongly but when movements are on the rise like we see right now whether it was the occupy movement black lives matter we see more surveillance more recordkeeping more targeting of activists but i think it's also it's also true that one of the things that drove the austerity politics of the one thousand nine hundred and seventy s and the war on drugs was a kind of backlash against the gains made by african americans and the ga movement you know and so d m dust realisation was definitely driven by the desire to move jobs out of the unionized cities of the north st to the southern us then new mexico and then to asia so you've always come from it starting again with your community organizing background and trying to strengthen those communities so you work then and now has  focus more on community empowerment yes i saw an you know i spent the last twenty years kind of as a police scholar looking closely at the nature of policing in the u s and internationally i've lived overseas i've worked with police departments around where you will when i lived in seoul south korea for a while and lectured at the korean national police university and was attached to a riot squad there and have you know advise the police in china and places in know worked with police in europe etc so it was that deep firsthand experience with policing that has made me so incredibly pessimistic about this idea that we're going to make police friendlier and more professional and that's going to fix policing and instead i see policing is just one of the tools that the state has available to address problems and so i come with a deep skepticism about why that is would be the appropriate tool in a given situation rather than say a more robust housing program better social services better medical services etc and so my view is the solution to a lot of really bad policing is not to give the police more money for training more money for technology it's to quit using that tool in so many of the circumstances that we've come to rely on them for or even combinations like we were talking before as david kennedy's work of focus deterrence and an operation cease fire what it's somewhat tantalizing at st there are some positive results for a while so what what is wrong with the source of so as david you know my cuny colleague at right john jay college he argues that this is a progressive reform that right rather than let's say stopping and frisking every young person in the community multiple times broad ranging open ended gang databases let's a den of five the specific young people who are most of risk of involvement in serious crime whether it's shootings armed robberies or different models out there and let's hyper focus on them call them in threaten them give them extended penalties graduated sanctions and intensified surveillance and that that would be a more efficient and effective way of reducing serious crime and the research shows that in some cases there have been reductions in violence associated with this program but it comes with a lot of costs which is more mass criminalisation more threats more coersion more surveillance less privacy less privacy and so the question is not whether or not policing could possibly have any effect on crime the question is is policing the best tool to use in these situations my view is that there so many potential negatives with policing that it should always be the tool of last resort but part of the problem we've had b over the last forty years is it's become the tool of st resort for every problem under the sun especially involving poor people and communities of color and we've given up on other larger cultural political and that's part of the political that trench right that you were alluding to earlier the right wing the death of the war on poverty yeah and the idea that we can create positive social interventions and market interventions so that instead it's all about personal success personal responsibility and the use yeah a lot going on there a lot of time in cheek social disease six hundred and sixty six and what happens the puppy at the end i mean he's put in the middle of this well i think you know part of the problem we have is that we have this kind of one size fits all solution to every problem right now which is criminalization and then and part of that is driven by this kind of superficial repu social work therapeutic interventions etc so what we need to have is a more nuanced understanding you know are we talking about young people who get in fights after maybe be managed in a way that it doesn't get out of hand right and there's a lot of evidence that shows labeling it gang violence getting the police involved creates a hardening of add into tubes and a deepening of the violence in other cases there really does need to be real culturally appropriate trauma services that really do deal with young problems that young people are facing at the  should not just throw that out the window as this kind of cliche of trying to give a kid who's basically healthy services they don't need and for instance i often say a lot of people who get arrested on drug charges do not need drug treatment drug counseling because they don't have a drug problem they have a job problem and real pathways to meaningful employment is really what's going to help them stay out of trouble and they go back to solid education  which prepare them for that solid education can be a part of it i don't want to oversell it you know there's still a lot of jobs out there for young people with limited educational and tane men a licensed plumber makes a lot more than a licensed social worker does and so we need to look at the appropriateness of vocational pathways in some cases you know community colleges not the pathway for every young person and we should that again would be a simplistic one dimensional solution to the problem i'm also a big fan and of another colleague of mine david brotherton and john j who talks about social inclusion strategies you know young people should not ologist automatically they have been it was a predator yet they've been excluded they form gangs or other kind of community forms let's bring them in as legitimate actors in society and move them out of violence and drugs and this kind of thing into social programming being a forum for raising grievances community improvement models et work has been very successful in latin america and i'd like to see more of it here in new york one thing well another short clip of a more contemporary one on the more recently in one of the curb your enthusiasm larry david episodes and where he has an encounter with officer creepy after he's on the street here after a fire drill i think in the in the department store but great let's put that on confronted by the kind of youth violence that you see in west side story and the problems that emerge in the sixty's generally tried to take a non law enforcement oriented approach they tried to hire street workers and youth workers and get into the lives of these young people and break the cycle of violence much like today's credible messengers are doing louis because after as you know cloud was a commune organized that's right out of the co university school so short in l a and chicago they embraced gang suppression put the kids on a list harassed them criminalized them and what we have today is a situation where l chicago have really terrible entrenched multi generational gang problems that produce a lot of problems and new york have largely escaped that and one of the troubling developments as part of this move to turn everything into a policing problem is that new york has been continually expanding its game in unit as now labeling more and more crime as gang related has developed a gang database is bringing large conspiracy cases and there was recently a report that showed that in the so called bronx one hundred and twenty case that over half the young people ultimately were not even accused of being in a gang that eighty of the one hundred and twenty dollars were not accused of any violence that a rd of them alternately came down to weed charges so by defining everything is gang related using this kind of super predator mentality we are turning these young people into basically people labeled criminals some here holding a prophecy is a self fulfilling prophecy and i think it's incredibly dangerous and ironically the city is also using more of these credible messenger programs of training people from the community to do outreach to young people to try to figure out what's driving the violence what's activities and of course with the origins and the in most intense expression of the most problematic gangs are in the jails in the youth facilities so when we drive young people into those settings we are encouraging them to participate in kind of the worst aspects of this and as you know many of the gang activities originate in prison rights as a way of defending and solidarity forty years a fundamental shift in the role of police in society the problem is policing itself so what are some of the recommendations of alternatives which are often here that you like to what i do is i start off us to the audience yeah what i do is i start off procedural reforms that are designed to to address the process of policing but not the mission of policing in my view is we don't need to give narcotics officers anti bias training we need to get rid of the war on drugs we need to so that the remaining chapters look at specific areas of policing many of which have have either been created or deeply intensified over the last forty years like school policing the policing of folks having mental health crises and looks at what we could be doing instead of relying on police and you mentioned social and diverting the money and that learning the money and resources the money we spent on policing mental health so on yes now that it's not enough probably to just divert that money we're going to need additional money to get to really decades of failures failures of housing markets failures of employment markets you know the downgrading of government services that's going to be a big process but you mentioned social movements before and what's most exciting to me about about what's going on today is the rise of social movements that are basically giving up on the idea that we're going to fix policing with a few technical changes and instead looking at strategies of community empowerment where communities start demanding the kinds of things that will really make their communities safer why can't we have drug treatment on demand why can't we have high quality community based mental health services why can't we have community base anti violence initiatives why can't we look at you know legalizing drugs decriminalizing sex work and trying to find positive outlets for people to build real lives for themselves the community policing doesn't go that far you're talking about really getting deep within the community and in the listening the opinions of the the resident well i think community policing is actually part of the problem because the premise behind community policing is that the community brings all its problems and they work with the police to solve the problems but what tools to the police have to solve our community problems they've got guns  handcuffs and ticket books these are not the tools our communities need to solve their problems the police don't have affordable housing they don't have drug treatment slots they don't have access to mental health services they don't have real afterschool programs for young people they don't have summer jobs for people and these are the kinds of things that communities need and what i am trying to articulate is a vision that says let's put our political energy into demanding those things instead of putting it into what i believe are ultimately superficial and ineffective reforms of policing that are mostly cosmetic and don't get to the core of the issue and actually may just reem power an institution that's not capable of solving our problems only capable of putting more people in prison you find any positive response from the police themselves to some of your ideas are they open to this and not the radisson not so much in the u s occasional rank and file officers and there are parts of it you know there are a lot of police who don't want to be going on these  called e d p calls people having a mental health crisis you know between a quarter and a half of all people killed by police in united states are having a mental health crisis but we've a visceral raided any kind of mental health system and turned it over to the police so they this sympathy among police for some bits of the argument and but we have this very powerful thin blue line ideology that really is committed to this idea that the problem with young people was a lack of respect for authority that we're going to put police in the schools we're going to give them more thorough you know authoritarian interventions on the street and that'll put them on the right path and i think this is deeply problematic now in the u k and parts of europe the book has been received very positively by police and i've received many invitations to work with police to speak at policing events i think in part because they view it as a cautionary tale and what so what do the police in the u k do what what would you see their function what because we have what forty five thousand dollars police officers in the york city here so there's a perfect and that there aren't made but right to this day the vast majority of british police do not carry firearms still they do not they're not the frontline service providers for people having a mental health crisis they are not in the schools the way american police are most low level drug possession charges have been decriminalized they don't worry a lot about sex work stuff they're really more focused on serious crime and they don't want to do a lot of those things they say are they house rolling they're patrolling sure they patrol they were spawn to emergency calls but a lot of what american police do has been outsourced to other sports of government so there are wardens neighborhood wardens who deal with a lot of quality of life issues by talking to people right by working with local businesses they don't arrest people they don't get into the kind of situation that resulted in eric garner death that should not be handled by armed police that the idea that some guys standing on the corner may be selling some loose cigarettes which is essentially a tax violation we should not be using armed police for that and so you know we've got this tray of trial pencil aoe under way and yes he misused force he contributed air cars death but the idea that if we can just get him fired that's going to fix policing is just not the case because he was carrying out orders from the very top of the police department that are being built into the mission of policing and until we change that mission i don't get a better they're going to be better off to write the similar sorts as he was perfectly well trained officer he was in and randy crime unit he was experienced and you know and eric garner was a medically compromised person have handled it differently yes it's clear they did not care about his life his life did not matter to them the way they reacted after he became unresponsive is in my view you know totally outrageous but we're not going to fix policing by disciplining those few officers and certainly not just him what about the lieutenant who said on a text message oh no big deal it was a  fact that he's dead doesn't matter what about the chief who ordered it you know until we change the whole institution a little bit of accountability here there's going to matter if you notice a change at brooklyn college with the students which are absolutely younger students their attitude is they're coming in be prepared for criminal justice work so i we don't have a criminal justice program i'm in a sociology program and i've been there twenty years right  there is definitely been a change over the last five or six years sam i believe this is a significant uptick in political awareness and more importantly direct political engagement so students involved in the occupy students involved and black lives matter politics judes involved in palestine solidarity work so it's created a very different environment in the classroom where students come in with experience and social movements and this allows for a much more nuanced and in depth conversation about these issues and i think it's a very exciting restored of justice you spent some time on that tell us about that as a concept as a way of getting away from the the digital social work programs and yeah i mean part of the problem we have right now is that we have this incredibly degraded notion of justice and we've come to essentially equate justice with revenge and punishment retribution and turned our criminal justice system into a giant revenge factory so part of what we need to do is have some kind of re conceptualization of what we mean by justice and the idea that justice is you know separating out the one thousand and twenty percent of the population that's up to no good from the eighty percent that are good and then axing out that twenty percent that's not justice to me justice is about trying to figure out how to build up communities how to try to build up individuals and restorative justice is one tool we can use to do that the concept is that you know people are disruptive they're a source of disorder and harm because there's something going on in their lives and instead of using punishment in some kind of behavior modification economics robotics kind of world view of humanity what if we actually try to figure out what's driving the problematic behavior restorative justice is used primarily in the u s and schools and it's like what's going on at home are you having a beef with this teacher is there something unsafe in the school or are there kids bullying you not funny a davis as you perhaps know local and is doing that within the school and working with the oakland police on that yes my view is i'm not sure what value the police add to restore to justice ok let's get this students involved the teachers the administrators or get the police to get the kids who are obviously upset into those circuit this thing is that we already know who those gifts are you talk to any middle school teacher in high school teacher that i know who those kids are they know they that their problems are not superficial but these kids have very disordered lives home lives community lives got it we don't need to hellenes to do that we don't need the police to do that we know who these kids are we could use david kennedy's list to figure out who kids are but quit adding more threats and coersion into their lives that's the problem that to begin with is that they live in situations where there's a lot of violence threats and coercion and that's part of what's disordering them what's making it hard for them to take school seriously or to focus on positive things so let's start figuring out positive enter vengeance to make them better and to make life better for the rest of us absolutely so you're getting into and we just have a minute or two to go but you're entering into now this this very rich discussion we've had on this show for many many shows to call in healing transformation of the world and so on you're getting into some of the movements that hurting each other reverend barber comes to mind poor people's campaign and it becomes moral and spiritual in that sense there's a lot of the out there right exact there's economic trauma there's interpersonal trauma and in the us we're very phobic about mental health issues questions of trauma we want to paper over that with all this talk about personal responsibility right and i think we need to talk seriously about this not just the every day inner person or the one time but also the legacies of trauma that are affecting the you know those challenges their families face the situations that kids grow up in these are intergenerational problems and we've only got the few seconds i have you seen the howard stern interview about his own therapy and the drama so maybe people like that coming out the shock that's all we need we need stuff like that yeah and we need your work and thank you so very