“Bad Apples Come from Rotten Trees”

Rebecca talks to sociologist Rashawn Ray about the George Floyd protests and how we move from the “bad apples” smokescreen to uprooting the “rotten trees” in policing that keep producing them. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

“Black people are 3.5 times more likely than white people to be killed by police when they are not attacking or have a weapon: George Floyd. Black teenagers are 21 times more likely than White teenagers to be killed by police: Tamir Rice and Antwon Rose. A Black person is killed every 40 hours by police: Jonathan Ferrell and Koryn Gaines. One in every 1,000 Black people are killed by police: Breonna Taylor. And, as sobering as these statistics are, they are improvements to the past. These statistics are the reason why from Minneapolis to Los Angeles people are protesting, marching, and rioting….”

So writes Dr. Rashawn Ray, a sociologist at the university of Maryland and a fellow at the Brookings Institute who’s spent the past decade studying police and policing, in a recent piece on the ongoing protests titled “Bad Apples Come from Rotten Trees in Policing.” Rebecca sat down with him virtually.

This episode’s guest:

• Rashawn Ray, sociologist, University of Maryland & fellow, Brookings Institute (@SociologistRay)

For more:

• Dig into Rashawn Ray’s research in “Bad Apples Come from Rotten Trees in Policing”
• Here’s the NYT Jamelle Bouie piece Rebecca mentioned: “What Happens When Police Riot in the Streets?”

TRANSCRIPT:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

“Black people are 3.5 times more likely than white people to be killed by police when they are not attacking and don’t have a weapon: George Floyd. Black teenagers are 21 times more likely than white teenagers to be killed by police: Tamir Rice and Antwon Rose. A Black person is killed every 40 hours by police: Jonathan Ferrell and Koryn Gaines. One in every 1,000 Black people are killed by police: Brionna Taylor. And as sobering as these statistics are, they are improvements to the past. These statistics are the reason why from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, people are protesting, marching, and rioting.”

So writes Dr. Rashawn Ray, a sociologist at the University of Maryland and a fellow at the Brookings Institute who’s spent the past decade studying police and policing, in a recent piece on the ongoing protests, titled “Bad Apples Come From Rotten Trees in Policing.” I’m so excited to sit down with him, virtually, of course, after talking with Rashawn for a long time about coming on the show. And I want to give a brief shout-out to my sociologist dad, who actually introduced us a few years ago as part of his ongoing campaign to get me to have more sociologists on this podcast.

RASHAWN RAY: [chuckles]

VALLAS: But, Rashawn, thank you so much for taking the time to come on amid all of the incredibly challenging and painful events of the recent weeks.

RAY: Well, thank you for having me on the show, Rebecca. As you mentioned, your father is phenomenal, a phenomenal sociologist. And I had no doubt that he was a phenomenal, that he is, a phenomenal father, but hearing that from you as well just adds to his legacy for me. So, thank you for having me on the show. I mean, obviously, we’re talking about a very serious topic, but I think that I have some solutions from the work that I’ve been doing that can hopefully help people who are in various spaces to move things forward.

VALLAS: And that’s something part of why I’ve been excited for quite some time, but especially in this moment, to talk with you. Because you bring a tremendous amount of research that you’ve conducted over the years to bear that is incredibly timely in understanding this moment. For the past decade, you have worked with dozens of police departments, with the Department of Homeland Security, with the U.S. military. I quoted in my opening from a recent piece that you wrote for Brookings about the ongoing protests. And I’m going actually just lift up one more passage from that piece wherein you note that based on your research on body worn cameras and implicit bias courses, two of the things that obviously come up a tremendous amount in the conversation about police practice reform, and here I’m going to quote you: “While these solutions to police brutality matter, they fall short of dealing with the rotten trees because they focus on the bad apples.” Talk to me about your research and what it tells us about the root causes of police brutality, which, of course, is what spurred the protests that are continuing in cities across the country right now.

RAY: I mean, as you’ve noted, I’ve been doing work on policing for several years now. And it started serendipitously, to tell you the truth. My research primarily focuses on racial and social inequality. I started doing work on health disparities. And essentially, what my research does is follows upwardly-mobile people as they progress throughout the life course. And so, Black Americans become a great group by which to make some of these comparisons, because not only do we might deal with forms of social inequality related to social class as well as gender, but race brings in another variable by which to say, OK, if people do certain things that we expect for them to do — graduate from school, go to college, get a college degree, you know, don’t get in any trouble, get a good job, get a home — do we still see disparities?

And when I was working at UC Berkeley as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation scholar, the Affordable Care Act was being rolled out. And I was doing the research on obesity and physical activity, really looking at what policies will lead to a reduction in obesity. And physical activity was one of the main ones. Of course, eating healthy and health care access and those sort of things. But I started looking at the ways race and place were linked together. And what came out of that was a finding that I’ve published on highlighting that Black men are significantly less likely to be physically active in predominately white neighborhoods. And I started exploring that, obviously. And what I found was that Black men are overly-criminalized in predominately white spaces. They are perceived as being threatening. They’re perceived as being physically aggressive. They are perceived as being emotionally volatile. Stereotypes, of course, about Black men, and particularly the men that I was studying, which were middle-class Black men. All of these men in the larger sample I had was about 500 college-educated Blacks and whites were all, you know, all had a college degree, all had professional jobs, or were working at home, might’ve had small children. And these Black men talked about their experiences trying to exercise in public, having neighbors call the police on them, police stopping them, neighbors walking across the street, neighbors yelling at them, saying that they’re trespassing when they lived in the same neighborhood, oftentimes doors down from these neighbors that were saying this.

So, it led me to doing a lot of work on policing. And we fast forward now, and I’ve done probably like 100 trainings in implicit bias. I have an implicit bias training course that honestly, I think is second to none. We have a virtual reality decision-making program that police officers and police departments can participate in. We give them a very detailed report: everything from how their own personal attitudes matter, to how department attitudes matter, to how their own physiology comes into this, their heart rate, their stress level. I mean, look. We can do all kind of cool things, just to be blunt about it, that no one else is really able to do that we’ve developed over time. And even though I think that that program is really important — we’ve done it with large, small, medium-sized departments, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. military, and we’re very good at keeping things discreet, depending on who we work with — what I started noticing was the limitations of these types of initiatives, of these types of policy solutions, whether that be implicit bias trainings or body-worn cameras. And what I discovered is that although those programs are meaningful, they mean much less if they don’t come along with larger structural changes.

And I started noticing how police officers, they legally have qualified immunity, which prevents them from, even if they are sued personally and if there aren’t any criminal charges brought forth, which rarely happens. So, what people are seeing in Minneapolis rarely happens. Well, less than 2 percent of the time does it happen, and then well less than 1 percent of the time of those 2 percent of cases that are brought forth is there a conviction. So, we have to be very clear that what we’re seeing in Minneapolis is a big shift. And with that being said, what I started noticing is that there are a set of additional policy solutions legislatively, from oftentimes, at the state and federal level that needs to come in. And I’ll quickly highlight them, and then we can unpack them.

I think first, we need comprehensive data. So, Senator Cory Booker has been proposing this. This is important because comprehensive data actually reduces officer-involved killings by 25 percent because police departments are very data-driven. And that’s one of the things I’ve noticed. The problem is that we know how many people are killed by jellyfish every year. The CDC collects that information. They even collect information on how many people get the flu. And I think eventually, we’ll really have a good idea of how many people have coronavirus, for example, are contracting this version of COVID-19. But we don’t know how many people are killed by the police. And it’s not always the fact that police departments don’t want to collect this information. A lot of departments are like in the heat of the night. They simply don’t have the capacity to do it. There are some departments who simply don’t want to do it. Overall, what I found, though, is that it’s a capacity issue. So, we need the state and the federal government to come in and provide funding and resources to allow sociologists like myself to come in and help departments collect their data. I’ve done a lot of that with police departments, and they yearn for that.

Secondly, we need to ensure that officers like Chauvin can never work in law enforcement again. He had nearly 20 police misconduct complaints. And that’s extremely important to notice. But he’s not the only one. The officer who killed Tamir Rice, Loehmann, he also had been let go from a previous department because he was deemed mentally unfit. I really don’t think people understand how high the bar is to be deemed mentally unfit as a police officer. And then not only that, then he ended up getting another job at a large police department in Cleveland. And then even after he killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a toy gun in a park, he then went to another police department and was working! And if it wasn’t for a watchdog group that kind of follows these bad apples around. And that’s part of what I was highlighting in this piece, that bad apples come from rotten trees. And these bad apples are allowed to proliferate. If you have bad apples, they have to come from somewhere. And the rotten trees in policing stems from the origins of law enforcement, as well as the infiltration of white nationalist groups into law enforcement.

Then I think the final big thing is to make a shift in the way the civilian payouts for police misconduct are done. Right now, these monies come from taxpayer dollars. In Chicago, Chicago has spent over $600 million over the past two decades on police misconduct payouts, $600 million. As much as people like to highlight crime in Chicago, particularly the Southside of Chicago — which I know very well. My best friend from college from the University of Memphis is from the Southside of Chicago — as much as people like to talk about that, imagine how much $600 million could go to improving schools, to improving work infrastructure.

And one thing I know about crime is if you really want to reduce crime, it’s not police enforcement. It’s giving people equitable education and work so that they feel like that they don’t necessarily have to engage in certain types of crime to simply put food on the table. So, we may need to make a shift to police department insurances. That will then take on a healthcare model and allow police chiefs to weed out bad apples.

VALLAS: Well, and Rashawn, I want to get into all of those policy recommendations, particularly as you start to bring up this idea of police department insurances, because it’s such a tangible and concrete recommendation that could do so much right now. I want to zoom up a level before we get into some of those specific policy recommendations. And I want to go to something that you said there about needing to really not just focus on bad apples. There’s so many bad takes out there, it’s not even worth trying to keep track of them anymore, making it seem as though these police-involved killings are somehow the result of bad apples or isolated incidents. And you really have been incredibly vocal in recent days, including in this piece, on Twitter, and a lot of your media appearances really trying to say, you know what? Actually, there is a long history here of the role of police in American society and who they are accountable to, who they are not accountable to, and the role that they play, particularly in policing and criminalizing blackness that we need to reckon with if we’re really ever going to address the roots of where those bad apples come from.

I want to read a little bit from Jamelle Bouie’s op ed today in The New York Times to provide just a few examples of the police brutality that we’ve seen against peaceful protesters in recent days to provide a little bit of context for the national conversation that you and I are sort of having this in the middle of. He notes, “Rioting police have driven vehicles into crowds, reproducing the assault that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. They’ve surrounded a car, smashed the windows, tased the occupants, dragged them onto the ground clad in paramilitary gear. They have attacked elderly by-standers, pepper sprayed cooperative protesters, and shot, ‘non-lethal rounds’ directly at reporters, causing serious injuries. In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old man is in critical condition after being shot in the head with a ‘less lethal round.’ Across the country, rioting police are using tear gas in quantities that threaten the health and safety of demonstrators, especially in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic.”.

I mean, many people have observed that police brutality at protests against police brutality in so many ways just proves the protesters point. But the question that so many people are increasingly and finally seeming to ask is, what is the function of the police? And as I said, who are they accountable to? You and others, including Jamelle Bouie in the piece I quoted from, have pointed out police were never intended to be accountable to Black people in the U.S. And in fact, looking back at the sordid history of police and their role in U.S. society, that’s a feature, not a bug. Talk a little bit about the historical context here.

RAY: You hit the nail on the head. I think what we’re seeing in the streets right now is the exact reason why we’re seeing people in the streets. Is because the way that the First and Second Amendment is allowed to be enacted and expressed is significantly different based on your race. It always has been. And that is one of the fundamental reasons why things need to change. I think there’s three points in history that are important. We can name several. But I’m just going to name three. The first, the origins of law enforcement in the United States, as I highlight in this piece and Jamelle does as well, is originates in slave patrols in the United States. Meaning Black people who were enslaved on plantations would flee those plantations, and then they would be pursued by groups of people, oftentimes groups of white men, but at times, Black people who were hired to also track Black people, which has always been something that has happened in the United States, but overwhelmingly white and led by white people. The slave patrols would go around and try to capture slaves who had ran away. And I think if people haven’t seen the movie Harriet that’s one of the best examples of this. I think that is one of the best slave-era movies ever in history. It is a phenomenal film because Harriet is probably the best American representation that we have ever had in all of her humanness that she brings to bear. That’s the first example.

Actually, I’m going to give four. The second was after the Civil War ended, KKK, of course, started to rise. And particularly with The Birth of A Nation that Woodrow Wilson allowed to play in the White House and then used it as a blueprint by which to further dehumanize and marginalize Black people legally based on state-sanctioned violence. Is that when the KKK came to bear, they firmly integrated within law enforcement, and it was to continue to oppress Black people. Let’s fast forward to the ’60s. We know that the ’60s was a moment in time that people would never forget. Honestly, the ’50s and ’60s, just the Civil Rights Movement in whole. And I think that we have that moment right now, starting with Trayvon Martin in 2012, up to the present and into the future. Like this is our Civil Rights moment for policing as we pursue racial equity and human rights for people. In the ’60s, widespread legislation was passed. But one thing happened in ’68 after MLK was assassinated, assassinated in Memphis, where I happened to go to college at the University of Memphis. And I happened to be in the same fraternity as Martin Luther King Jr., which is Alpha Phi Alpha, the first Black fraternity founded for Black men on a college campus.

And as I reflect on that, I remember going to vigils and marches and protests on MLK Day, on his birthday, and on the day that he died. And I remember that I would leave enthused from the Lorraine Motel. And in our ride back up Poplar and Union on my way back to the University of Memphis, and I would pass by a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped to found the KKK. And I was like, wow, this really captures America. And this is the reason why people are upset about [unclear] and protest. And they ended up removing that one. But that KKK moment was important. In the ’60s, after MLK was assassinated, several days later, President Johnson passed wide-sweeping Civil Rights legislation for the Fair Housing Administration. But he also did something else. He also enacted legislation to militarize the police to deal with riots. Richard Nixon then ran on that law and order platform, the same platform that Trump has now got to because he’s ran out of all of the other media narratives that he could bring to bear. So, now he’s running on the law and order narrative, staging things in Washington, D.C. for people who think that things should be corrected.

But then there was also something else that happened. About a decade ago, FBI put out a report showing that white nationalist and white supremacist groups were viewing law enforcement as a profession that they should integrate into. And we’ve seen that integration. We’ve seen that integration over time. I mean, we even seen it in the 1950s with a group called the Emerald Society, which was founded by Irish firefighters and police officers in Boston. And so, there have been periods in time where white nationalists have viewed law enforcement as something to get into. And even if I know that a majority of police officers are not white nationalist, and I also know from the research I do, they’re also not overt racist, even though they have a lot of implicit bias, those bad apples proliferate. They become chiefs like we’ve seen in Florida. They become police officers like in Louisiana who posted on Facebook that it’s unfortunate that more Black people didn’t die from COVID-19.

So, this history is part of a continuum of police violence that oftentimes starts with incidents like what happened with Christian Cooper in Central Park, where Amy Cooper played up the damsel in distress narrative that is older than the birth of the nation, the literal birth of our nation as well as the movie and the book that highlighted the KKK that Woodrow Wilson played in the White House, that oftentimes leads through people like Amaud Arbery being chased in their neighborhoods, which research, which my research, highlights, and ends up underneath the knee of a police officer like George Floyd for everyone to see in public like we used to see public lynchings decades ago.

VALLAS: Rashawn, in writing, actually, about the Amy Cooper/Christian Cooper case, you actually write in the same Brooking’s piece that I’ve quoted from, in addition to summarizing your research, you also note your own personal experiences. That as a black man, you have been stopped by police more times than you are years old. And I hope I’m not calling you out here by saying. You also note in the piece that you’re turning 40.

RAY: [chuckles]

VALLAS: So, that answers that question. But you note, in making that observation more broadly that, quote, “No credential, no degree, no level of income or wealth, no smile, no level of professionalism or grace can protect my babies” — you’re talking about your children — “from the gaze and guise of police violence and white supremacist stereotypes.” There, you’re talking about the Amy Cooper/Christian Cooper case as a recent illustration of that truth. Though, that incident involved obviously a white civilian who was weaponizing race in the ways you’re describing and effectively wielding her whiteness and her access to the police as tools, which then put Christian Cooper’s life at risk. Talk a little bit about your own personal experiences here. There might be people listening who could benefit from hearing someone describe what it’s like to be rounded up by the police when you’re not doing anything just because you’re Black.

RAY: Yeah, Rebecca. I mean, it’s…. You know, this is one of those moments where, as a researcher, and you know from your father that when you do research, we are taught in graduate school — I mean, it’s ingrained in us. it was socialized. I mean, hazed, some people would even say — to approach our work objectively and not allow our own personal experiences to come in. I mean, I still think that research is always personal. It just depends on what type of research is normalized or not. But particularly, I think, for minority scholars who study these issues, we have an added burden, an added tax we feel, to approach things even more objectively so that people don’t try to say we’re biased. So, I never really talk about this side. But since I’ve been working at Brookings, the vice president of Governance Studies, Darrell West, has urged me to share some of these experiences I’ve had more publicly, and I felt like this was the time to do it. And I’m glad that it’s resonating with people, because, as you know, I think people look at me and they say, “Oh, Rashawn’s life is great. You know, he has a PhD. He’s a professor at a major university. He’s working at what many would say is the top think tank in the U.S. and the world. His life is good.”

The interesting thing is that my life is oftentimes more similar to the men — and it’s mostly men — who pick up my trash than I am to the professor who’s in the office next door to me. That’s what race still means. That we cannot outclass racism. And I mean, I have so many experiences that I could recall. But I think what’s important to note are two things. First, I had a conversation with my college roommate, who is a banking executive. He’s high up at one of the major banks we have in the U.S. and around the world. And we were talking about how difficult it is for Black people to be able to express our emotions. And he noted that Black people have to hold in our emotions, our emotional trauma, to pacify white comfort at work and in public. And it’s a burden, a tax of being Black. And he talked about how one event didn’t create anger or frustration, but it was a collective memory of distrust that did.

And he talked about how oftentimes, Black people have to code switch. And it’s not simply code switching our speech or our clothing. But he talked about an emotional code switch, the fact that we have to transpose our emotions in the midst of pain, frustration, anger, and just kind of pure grief, and then we have to come home. And the collateral consequences of racism from our normal day spill over where oftentimes, Black people, Black men in particular, can’t fully express their emotions at home when their family wants to hear their laughter and the smiles, all of which they’ve given a work oftentimes to their white coworkers in the midst of anger and frustration. And then they come home, and they don’t have anything left to give. And so, one of the things my college roommate highlighted as we were having this conversation — and this has been a conversation I’ve had with a lot of Black people, particularly Black men, who call me because I do this work. And I think because Black people are just expressing their frustration, and they can’t do it more broadly, that it spills over.

And we noted that our Americanness is never fully whole, despite being the only ones oftentimes, who are truly American. Because we are the only ones who don’t know where we come from unless people have had the ability to really trace their lineage. And I think this is part of what my colleague at Brookings, Andre Perry, and I aim to lay out in our recent piece on reparations: that it’s not simply about financial atonement and compensation, which should happen. But it’s also about a truth and reconciliation process on behalf of America, primarily white America, but also with Black people to learn where they come from. We are the only ones who have fought in every war. We are the only ones who have defended America at all costs. We are the ones who are truly American, and we love America! But America has never truly loved us back and keeps showing us that. And so, what I tried to express in that moment was that depthness that Black people go through the process. And I think it reached a chord with people.

And I think the second thing is I worry about raising Black kids in America. I have two Black boys, a eight and a nine-year-old. And I worry about the instantaneous way they will go from cute to criminal. That, as you noted, no level of professionalism. Nobody cares they make straight As in school. Nobody cares that they speak proper. Nobody cares that they have smiles that can light up a room. Nobody cares when they see their Black skin. And then all the stereotypes that comes along with blackness and maleness collide on their young bodies, where, as they become teenagers — and kids grow at different ages and phases — that as they start to grow out and look adultlike, that there are a set of additional stereotypes where people think they look older than what they are.

When the officer who killed Tamir Rice said, “Oh, I thought he was older.” 12 years old! Thought he was older. What is him being older have to do with you showing up in two seconds and killing him? When George Zimmerman stood or sat on the stand and looked at the Martin family, said, “I’m sorry. I thought he was older,” what does 17-year-old Trayvon Martin being older have to do with justifying you taking the life from someone? And this is what people don’t understand is that people always say, “Oh, if Black people do what they’re supposed to do, they’re going to be fine.” That is a fallacy! Stop saying it. It’s not true. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing people on the streets, not just Black people, mind you. The racial diversity of the Black Lives Matter movement right now, the Movement for Black Lives, we’re seeing it in its true form, that George Floyd, that his death is something about seeing the life come from someone. Hearing someone yell out for their momma who died nearly two years before them. That there’s something about seeing that that’s similar to something about seeing Emmett Till’s body in that casket as a teenager that leads you to moving, leads you to want to act, leads you to taking some type of introspection at the least. And I think that is the moment where we are at.

So, as I thought about this moment, studying this work, I was like, you know, maybe I should share this. And I was reflecting on my experiences and literally going through the counts. And I was like, wow, I’ve literally been stopped by the police more times than my age. And have I been stopped for speeding, and I’ve been speeding? Yeah. But for a lot of people, it doesn’t lead to people investigating your car and tearing up stuff and pulling stuff out and saying you fit a description and pulling you out the car and throwing you up against the wall or putting you on the floor, putting you in handcuffs, and putting you in the back of a car. These are the kind of things that happen when you’re Black. And so, it’s one of the things where Black people, like who wants to say they’ve been stopped over 40 times? It suggests [laughs] some type of criminality. Because a lot of people, particularly white people, have very positive views of police. So, it’s like, wow, the only reason you’re stopped that much is if you’re really doing something. They just haven’t caught you yet. No. Sometimes you’re just Black in America. And it’s high time we deal with that.

VALLAS: Well, and on the flip side, I have to say, one of the things that I’ve heard a number of people make in terms of observations about the racial diversity in the streets, as you know, that the people protesting is that part of what that is also bringing is a diversity in the faces of people who are now the victims of indiscriminate police violence and brutality at these protests. And so, many of the people that we now have videos of who are facing completely disproportionate and unnecessary and often escalating violence at the hands of police, despite the fact that they are peacefully protesting, are a range of people who look and have a range of different colors of skin and come from a range of different backgrounds. There are videos of elderly people. Just before we started taping about really shaken up watching a social media video that has now gone viral obtained by NPR that showed a man, an elderly man, shoved back by police. And he cracks his skull on the sidewalk, and the police just keep walking and don’t appear to even care. I ask the question as I take this stand and as I hear many people making that observation, are we now at a point? And does that diversity of personal experience with police brutality actually make more likely that we are at a tipping point in ways that I wish might might not have needed to be the case for the level of broad, sweeping outrage that we now see, no longer limited to Black people and their voices and experiences?

RAY: Yes, I think so. Technology is powerful. And the Movement for Black Lives really started leveraging technology. I’ve published on this: we collected a dataset of over 30 million tweets from one year in Ferguson from the time Michael Brown was killed to one year after. And one of the key themes that came out of that research was the way that the Movement for Black Lives started very early on to use technology. I think part of it is an age thing, right? I mean, the older you get, you know, like I can do Twitter and Facebook, and I’m getting pretty savvy with Instagram. But TikTok and Snapchat, I’ve aged out of that. I just can’t go that far. But these are the kind of things that are used by protesters and people who are aiming to be advocates. And I think about this: what does it mean — I’ve written about this, and I think about this often — what does it mean to be a racial equity advocate? We’re seeing that. Advocacy is when you advocate for people who cannot advocate for themselves, whether that’s a Black person being handcuffed or whether that’s a old man being shoved down who has a cane, being shoved down by police in the street. I mean, both of those things are criminal, and it’s high time that police officers are held accountable for it. They should not just go along with qualified immunity. Qualified immunity, which, according to the legislation, is primarily about not facing financial recourse. That should not really carry over to not facing criminal consequences.

We also need to ensure that as police departments and police officers are sanctioned internally, that the public knows about this, that the public plays a role in this. Our taxpayer money is paying their salary to supposedly protect, serve, and keep the peace. And they are not doing that. And we’ve seen one group of people who are fully able, oftentimes, to express their First and Second Amendment and another group who are relegated to not necessarily do that. And it harkens back to the origins of law enforcement. Those roots are still there. And we need to weed out those roots if we’re really going to get to a racially equitable society and allow America to truly live out the words that we know that supposedly we are supposed to govern ourselves by. Because words and actions are two very different things.

VALLAS: And Rashawn, I want to spend the last several minutes that we have in this conversation really digging into one of the policy recommendations that you mentioned up top and which is such a specific and kind of novel idea that you’ve been pushing for at Brookings and elsewhere. I would really love to have you actually explain it in some detail. You talked about the potential for restructuring how civilian payouts for police misconduct, including police-involved killings, actually happen. And you described some of the numbers, which just, I mean, they blow my mind, right, and I’m sure many of our listeners hearing it. Chicago spending over $650 million on police misconduct cases. You said, what if this money was used for schools or creating jobs and infrastructure and other kinds of things? And so, here you are calling for police department insurances to replace the civilian payouts that we currently see for police misconduct. Talk about how that functionally would work and how that, in effect, is sort of learning lessons from healthcare to try to change policy and practice and culture.

RAY: Yes. So, one of the things that people don’t recognize about law enforcement is that they really don’t have external accountability. It’s perceived that they do, but they don’t. What they have is a lot of internal accountability. Let me explain. When a complaint comes in, and I read an article this morning, actually, from a woman who was stopped by Chauvin, I think in 2007. She had just given birth. She had her newborn baby in the backseat. She had her dog in the car. She gets pulled over. She thought it was for speeding. They yank her out the car, undo her seatbelt, throw her in the backseat of the car. She’s nervous. They haven’t told her what’s going on. And she starts lactating because she’s nervous, and she’s breastfeeding at this time. And one of the officers who she thinks was Chauvin, he was one of the ones on the scene said, “Oh, yeah. You must be dealing with postpartum depression,” and then just lets her go. Puts her back in the car, and she drives off. She files a report, never hears anything about it. And it wasn’t until Chauvin killed George Floyd that she realized who it was that did that to her.

Why is this story important? Not only is important because a woman was just pulled out of her car for no reason. But this was a white woman this happened to. And so, it becomes important to kind of recognize how this happens. If Chauvin was dealt within, George Floyd probably wouldn’t be dead. And I highlight that to say that that went through an internal investigation. They gave him some kind of demerit in his file. There was no external accountability at all as it went through the internal affairs process to the trial board, which is something that should be interrogated. There needs to be a civilian on the trial board to ensure transparency, accountability, and objectivity with internal police sanctions. And what I’m arguing for is to make this shift away from taxpayer dollars. Because if she sues, she’s going to get a civil payout. And that money that she’s paid with is going to be some of the money that she’s paid into the city! Her own tax money that should be going toward infrastructure and other things, not paying her back because a police officer brutalized her.

So, making a shift to police department insurances is set up like healthcare. So, we know with healthcare, there are a lot of physicians, a lot of nurses who are doing tons of things on a regular basis trying to help people safe. I mean, we could think about this during COVID-19. People are rushing. Mistakes happen. Of course, sometimes these things happen where they leave a cloth in a person’s body and sew them up. They accidently removed the wrong organ. They do the wrong surgery. They unfortunately, at times, even kill people on the operating tables. And there are civil suits for that. Malpractice is what we call it. When that happens, the hospital’s premium increases same way our vehicle insurance does it. If we go out and don’t have an accident for year two, oftentimes, our premium is lowered. If we go out and have an accident every three months, not only is our premium going to increase, we’re probably not going to be able to be insured because we are too much of a liability. We have that model with healthcare where, if a physician messes up enough, the hospital says, you know what? I’m sorry. You can no longer perform surgery here. And if it’s egregious enough, it goes before the medical board, and they actually remove their certification. We need to do that with police officers.

This will give police chiefs — and I’ve talked to a lot of police chiefs about this — they want a mechanism to be able to hold their bad apples accountable. Everybody knows who they are! In every profession, every workplace, people know who the bad people are they work with. You know, as a professor, I know who the creepy professors are. I know who they are. And academia has a problem dealing with these sort of things, too. And so, if you make this shift, what it looks like practically is that the city would pay for the insurance policy, yes. But of course, like all other insurances, when it’s paid out, the insurance company will pay out the civil payment. The insurance company then makes a decision on whether or not to increase the premium or keep the police department. For smaller police departments who may not have the capital or cities and municipalities that may not have the capital for their own, they can bundle together. They already kind of do this with other sorts of insurances for vehicles and accidents and those sort of things. So, the mechanism is already there. It’s just adding a layer onto it.

This then, when they get a report back showing which cases increased their premium, and you look and you see Chauvin’s name is listed for five of them in the past three years or something like that, police chiefs now have the ability and the right to say, “You are costing us too much money. You should not be part of this department,” and letting them go. And if that happens, they should also not be able to go work in law enforcement for another department. This is how we change the structure, how we get out the rotten roots, and we also deal with these bad apples that fall from these rotten trees.

VALLAS: Such a commonsense idea and one that I hope gains traction, a huge part of why I wanted to have you on the show, in addition to the broader conversation. Because this was just such an important and commonsense, specific idea that could have such power in changing incentives, changing culture, and rooting out those rotten trees, as you put it.

I’ve been speaking with Dr. Rashawn Ray. He’s a sociologist at the University of Maryland and a fellow at the Brookings Institute who’s spent the past decade studying police and policing. His recent piece on the ongoing protests is titled Bad Apples Come From Rotten Trees in Policing. And you can find a lot more of his work, of course, on our nerdy syllabus page on Medium. Rashawn, thank you so much for taking the time. And I wish it were under different and better circumstances, but I am so incredibly appreciative of your voice in this current moment.

RAY: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

VALLAS: And that does it for this episode of Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart. Transcripts are courtesy of Cheryl Green. Find us on the airwaves on the We Act Radio Network and the Progressive Voices Network, and say hi and send us your show pitches on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And of course, find us anytime on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.