Episode 07: Goodbye Rikers

New York City makes a big announcement. Plus, D.C.’s missing black and brown girls, what national media ignores or gets wrong, and a life-long Republican voter who’s now committed herself to the resistance. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

After years of scrutiny and calls from advocates, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the closing of Rikers Island, the facility that embodies the very worst of our country’s failed experiment with mass incarceration. To discuss what’s behind this announcement and its significance for criminal justice reform, Rebecca speaks with Greg Berman, the Director of the Center for Court Innovation. Next, Washington Post reporter Perry Stein explains the controversy of D.C.’s missing black and Latina girls, and Kymone Freeman and Alex Lawson, co-founders of We Act Radio, join to discuss what other issues the mainstream media ignores or gets wrong — and the story behind the station’s launch 5 years ago. Finally, Beverly Tuberville — formerly a lifelong Republican voter who went on to help found the Oklahoma chapter of Indivisible — joins the show. But first, Joe Soss, a professor at the University of Minnesota, talks about how disability beneficiaries have become the new welfare queens.

This week’s guests:

Joe Soss, University of Minnesota
Greg Berman, Center for Court Innovation
Kymone Freeman and Alex Lawson, We Act Radio
Perry Stein, Washington Post
Beverly Tuberville, Indivisible Oklahoma

For more on this week’s topics:

Every single takedown by TalkPoverty of the Washington Post’s SSDI story
This article, from the archives, on how Rikers Island contributed to the tragic death of Kalief Browder

This program was released on April 7, 2017

Transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, I’m your host Rebecca Vallas. After years of scrutiny and calls from advocates New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio announced this week that the jails on Rikers Island will close. I’ll speak with Greg Berman, one of the New York City advocates leading the charge to hear what comes next and what this means for criminal justice reform. Next, an update on DC’s missing Black and Latina girls, and a conversation about what mainstream media does well and what it misses. I’m joined by the founders of one of our anchor stations, We Act Radio, which was launched five years ago to elevate the facts and issues the mainstream media ignores or gets wrong. Then, our resistance work continues with a life-long Republican whom Trump’s election converted into one of the leaders of Oklahoma’s resistance.

But first, because the Washington Post decided to open up yet another dumpster fire that is myth-based media coverage of social security disability benefits, I wanted to bring in my friend Joe Soss would is a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the role of media in shaping public opinion and even public policy to talk about why this matters. And Jeremy Slevin, you get to be here too. So folks may have seen, folks may not have seen the front page, above the fold Sunday story that was in the Washington Post about Social Security disability insurance. But it was yet another anecdote based, myth fueled celebration of all of the stereotypes about people with disabilities, and in particular, disability beneficiaries. People who have turned to social security disability insurance or supplemental security income because they have a serious health condition or disability that keeps them from being able to support themselves through work.

We could walk through all the things that the Post left out, all the things it got wrong like how hard it is to qualify, like how more than 6 in 10 applicants for benefits end up being denied, like how the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, actually has said time and again that the United States has the strictest standard of disability in the entire developed world, I’ll stop there because Jeremy is already making a face at me for going through these things. But I thought that it would be more interesting, Joe, to talk about why this kind of myth based myth matters and this is a lot of what you’ve studied going back to the 1990s, when we saw this play out with Reagan’s welfare queens. So tell us the story about what happened in the ’90s and what role media played in driving that policy?

JOE SOSS: Well, I think that, you know, part of the problem here is that there are many things in our lives that we can experience very directly. For example, with crime, we can be victimized by crime, we can perpetrate a crime, we can witness one, but what we can’t experience is the crime rate. That’s something that sort of describes this aggregate of things out there in society. And when it comes to policy debates, most of the facts that matter, most of what we believe, are closer to that thing, that crime rate, than to the personal experience of it. And so we can’t reality test the claims about what policies are doing, about who’s on the policy, all of these sort of general claims, we can’t reality test them against our own experiences. So, really to the extent that we know anything about them, it’s always going to be filtered through facts and stories and ideas that are constructed for us by media and various actors that speak to the media.

And so in that sense, in the 1980s and in the 1990s, we got the rise of this set of arguments about a whole collection of underclass pathologies that had to do with crime and personal irresponsibility and within this broader narrative there was this image that arose, starting in the Reagan era and then gathering steam in the 1990s of the welfare queen as sort of the quintessential taker who was having children to get more welfare benefits, who was committing fraud, who didn’t want to work and so was living off the dollars of hard earned taxpayers, the hard earned dollars of taxpayers. In a sense, almost victimizing the good citizens of the country. And that fueled a great deal of rage, eventually sort of whipped up and channeled in the direction that we got quite draconian policy changes.

VALLAS: And you have a specific theory, sort of a way of thinking about this stuff. That there are two main factors that drive how we experience a lot of these kinds of things, and so your example is helpful. But to sort of break it down in the way that you do, there is proximity, there’s our closeness to an issue, whether we have experiences in our daily lives with it, but then there is also visibility, and how salient something is, how visible it is to us. And that where an issue is not super close to you, or you don’t have a lot of personal experience, but then also it’s not super visible to you, there is sort of a breach that media can step in and fill. Explain how that works.

SOSS: Well, I think it’s in that kind of quadrant where you have these more distant, these policy activities that are more distant from our lives, from some of our lives at least. But are quite visible in the sense that they are talked about a lot by politicians and by the media. It’s really in that space that you have the greatest potential for kind of these mythical beliefs to be constructed which are extremely resistant to just the basic facts of the matter. And so the image of the welfare queen, or beliefs about the state giving hand outs in some way, I mean, it’s been over 20 years now since welfare reform, since we turned what was the AFDC program into the TANF program for parents with children, what most people mean when they say welfare. And we created this incredibly tough program with work requirements, requirements in order to get aid, limits of various sorts and penalties for not showing up, all kinds of, it’s a very very tough program that offers very little. Yet, the myth still soldiers on, we have continued to believe that there is this program out there that’s just showering benefits in the form of handouts on to undeserving people who really are not having to do anything for them. And so, and part of that has to do with this very visible story about the state. It’s a rumor about what the state is doing somewhere else that doesn’t touch people’s lives directly in many cases.

JEREMY SLEVIN: So, what I found really interesting about this piece, is that —

VALLAS: Meaning the Washington Post.

SLEVIN: In the Washington Post piece, and for those following at home, it’s called “Disabled or Just Desperate”, as if desperation is something that should be minimized. But they don’t, they don’t even, we don’t even find out in this piece whether this man, who they follow throughout the piece, I don’t know have his name in front of me, even accesses —

VALLAS: Desmond Spencer.

SLEVIN: Spencer, even accesses disability insurance. They paint this picture of joblessness, he’s fallen on hard times, he actually is in a lot of pain according to the story, but they don’t, there’s not really a clear connection between this man actually taking advantage of the system. And I’m just wondering, like, how much does just the narrative of these people alone, like is that sufficient to convince people or, is that more powerful than any data about the programs and how do the two interact?

SOSS: Well, I think the two do interact, but I think in many ways stories are more powerful than just the facts alone. And when we sort of say, “But a certain percentage of people, most people don’t look like that. Here are these statistics.” It’s very hard for those sort of facts to just overcome these powerful stories because the stories resonate with a kind of truth to people.

SLEVIN: Right.

SOSS: And they’re memorable, you relate to them, it’s not like they’re convincing because of their logical connections or because of their verifiable sources. They resonate. And I think that what happens is oftentimes those people who are trying to put forward the facts forget that they need construct good stories around them. To get other people to understand and relate to them. And so I think in this case, the idea that here is this person who struggling in various ways, but is presented as, in some way, some difficulties, some pain, but not being authentically disabled. Is just turning to the program because it’s a way out. I think that resonates with a broader underlying narrative about, that associates turning to social supports, which from my perspective are sort a basic element of citizenship, right, that in some way turning to those social supports are a sign of personal failure and giving up.

VALLAS: So, I’m interested, not just in diagnosing the problem but in figuring out how we actually start to solve this. As you said, with in the case of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or people often call it welfare, there’s, the myths still drown out the facts. There’s still this widespread misperception that we have a quote, welfare state. That we have all of these people who are somehow, quote, on welfare, and that’s something people overwhelmingly believe, even if they’re presented with facts to the contrary. When it comes to the social security disability programs, I would argue that the myths drown out the facts, no matter how many times misleading media accounts like the Washington Post’s piece are debunked. And even by, incredibly, well, incredibly credible sources, such as former commissioners of the Social Security Administration. Eight of whom, banded together to explain what National Public Radio got wrong several years ago when they said very similar things were claimed, similar things to what the Post has now drudged up and repeated here in this piece. So how can we get to a place where people actually know the facts instead of the myths.

SOSS: Well, I’m not sure that we can expect to get to a place where all Americans somehow become knowledgeable about the facts of all of the policy areas where we have debates and where the issues arise. I mean, it’s very hard even for us, those of us who follow these issues pretty closely to keep all the facts straight in a couple of areas, right? And so that’s probably too much to ask but I think that changing the frame in which people understand these issues and changing the storylines is possible. And that can be done in ways that align more effectively with the facts. I mean, in this case, I think it’s really important to recognize that for all of it’s problems which are many, and you’ve described quite well, the Washington Post story can be read also as a fairly effective portrayal of the desperate social and economic times in much of rural America. And I think if we were to switch from their sort of, very stereotypical opposition of, is it really a disability or is it just about being desperate economically in terms of jobs, if were to move away from that classic misleading opposition and talk instead of that about how desperate times are for so many Americans now, and how desperate they are because so many other options have been closely off that, you know, a disability in many ways is actually about the condition you have and how that relates to your environment.

So my nearsightedness would be quite disabling if I didn’t live in a time and place with my glasses being available to me in the same way so many people with physical and mental conditions are classified as disabled. It’s partially about how accommodating are the jobs available to them. In some way, or what are the other conditions around them. We’re going through a period right now in which the labor market conditions have gotten so bad, and crucially, the other social supports have been pared back so much that the kinds of supports for people who simply have employment problems or simply don’t confront jobs that are accommodating to them, being a single parent, or having a particular physical ailment or whatever it is, that they’re in a situation now where in some cases, people who would not have turned to the disability program before but have a condition that is quite painful on a regular basis or limits them in terms of what they can do, they have very few options left at this time. And so I think that a narrative that shifts the attention to the closing off of so many other options and supports in some ways would put the discussion on better grounds. One that is actually closer to the facts of the matter.

VALLAS: And you make a point very similar to what I found myself thinking while I was reading the piece. Which is man, this could have been such a different and such an important and timely article if the so what had not been, oh it’s everyone’s on disability that must be a problem —

SLEVIN: Where does this guy turn? What does he need? How do we help these people in these rural communities who voted for Trump?

VALLAS: The main guy who is profiled in the piece, Desmond Spencer, he says, “I’ve never had health insurance in my entire life.” Right? Why not focus on the fact that Alabama, where he lives, is one of the states that refuses to expand Medicaid? And what that would mean if they were to actualy change their minds on that policy position. Or, as you point out, what if we were to actually have meaningful long term services and supports for people who are not poor in this country and who don’t qualify for Medicaid but who have disabilities and who need that in order to work. We could go on and on with the kinds of policy solutions that actually would make sense and be solving real problems as opposed to blaming the life boat for the flood.

SOSS: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. You know my very first book that I wrote was based on in-depth interviews and community ethnographic research with people who had applied to cash welfare programs and to disability insurance. And one of the moments that never went away for me, there were a lot of them, but one that always stuck with me was this woman who fought, we’ve talked about how difficult it is to get on disability insurance and she fought for years through levels of appeals to get on. And she finally got the letter in the mail that she had been admitted to the program and she’s telling me all of this in her living room as we’re talking, she said “I went into the house with my letter of acceptance and I tried to kill myself.” And she said, “I tried to kill myself because that letter seemed to say that my life was over in some sort of way. That I was, you know, permanently disabled and would never be able to work again. It hit me like a ton of bricks, even though I’d been pursuing this in some way.” Now that’s a very dramatic story in some way and not the norm, but what it speaks to is that people have to remember that how deeply stigmatized disability can be, how deeply stigmatized social supports and getting help from government can be in this country. And how deeply people resist turning to these programs in many cases. And actually, as I read that article, part of what could have been powerful about it is how this man, who is in so much pain and who so deeply resist this idea that he’s going to go on disability, even though a lot of people he knows are already in the program in one way or another. How everywhere he turns, there are no other options. And how for many people, a program like this is literally the last thing standing. It’s the only door that isn’t locked. And I think that sort of in that sense, the story of this person could have been a very powerful way for us to reflect on both why are we not making options available and also why are we stigmatizing this action when for so many people, there are so few other opportunities.

VALLAS: We’ve been speaking with Joe Soss, he’s a professor at the University of Minnesota, he studies, among other things, the role of media in shaping public opinion and public policy. If you want to get the facts on the social security disability programs go to TalkPoverty.org, where you can find an article called “What the Washington Post Missed on Disability”, and we’d love to hear from you, if you have personal experiences or if you work in this space, tell us what you think about SSDI. You can tweet at us @OffKilterShow. Joe Soss, thank you so much for joining Off-Kilter.

SOSS: Thanks a lot for having me, I appreciate it.

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VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Last week New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio announced he’d close the jails on Rikers Island, the notorious facility that embodies the very worst of our country’s experiment with mass incarceration. Here to discuss what’s behind this historic announcement, and its significance for criminal justice reform, is Greg Berman. He’s the director of Center for Court Innovation, and he has helped to coordinate the independent commission on New York City criminal justice and incarceration reform. Whose final report recommended the closure of Rikers. Greg, thank you so much for joining Off-Kilter.

GREG BERMAN: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So, New York state Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, who was part of this independent commission that I mentioned, has pulled no punches in describing Rikers. He actually called it, and I’m quoting here, “a mass incarceration model that stains everything it touches.” Is it fair to go that far and what made Rikers and has made Rikers so very bad?

BERMAN: So we’re not the first people to document, or the independent commission is not the first people to document the problems on Rikers Island. I think there is general agreement in the criminal justice community that this is a place, or is described as posses a culture of violence. It’s ineffective, it’s inhumane, it’s incredibly expensive. It disproportionately houses people of color. It really is in many respects a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem. It’s an isolated penal colony on the outskirts of town and really because of its isolation it breeds an out of sight out of mind kind of mentality. And I think any fair assessment would say that anyone suffers from that isolation. It’s not just the inmates. It’s the correction officers as well. And I think that our research really unearths a third population that we were very focused on that suffered from Rikers Island and that’s the family and loved ones of those incarcerated. It is so far away from New York City neighborhoods, it’s basically inaccessible by public transportation and you have to go over a three lane bridge to get there. You have endure strip searches and other kind of security measures to get on the island. So to visit your son, to visit your daughter, to visit your husband takes all day and is just a humiliating experience. And so people, again, not inmates but the people visiting inmates describe it as ‘Torture Island’ for the way that they’re treated. And so after hearing, and we did this kind of investigation for months and months and months, after hearing story after story we really came to the conclusion that, pretty simple, in 2017 we can do better than this.

VALLAS: So people may be familiar with Rikers Island because of watching episodes of Law and Order, maybe more based in reality and not fiction, they may be familiar with Rikers because of the tragic case of Kalief Browder. Which came to light in June 2015 when as a young man he committed suicide following periods of time in solitary confinement, even as a juvenile. In Rikers, and this of course followed his having been falsely accused of stealing a backpack, not exactly a serious charge, but Kalief Browder is not alone is what I’m hearing you say. I would love for you to put a little bit more of a human case of what some of these conditions have looked like, and why the place has been described as “Torture Island.”

BERMAN: Well you know often what I hear Rikers described as this place where we warehouse people. And I actually that’s a misnomer, I think that it’s worse than that. I think of Rikers as an accelerant of human misery. Any problem that you bring into Rikers, whether it’s joblessness, addiction, mental health disorder, you come out worse, in fact, than when you went in. I think it’s fair to say there is really very little, if you visit the island, very little that takes place there, and this is really hardwired into the DNA, into the very bones of the jail complex there, it’s not designed to make people better. It’s just not. It’s not designed with correction in mind, in fact. And that’s one thing that we found over and over again in our research. That it really, it was not just a problem of a fresh coat of paint or a new set of training, there was something wrong with the island itself. And it could only be fixed by closing Rikers Island.

VALLAS: One of the other things that people may be familiar with about Rikers because of, in particular, investigative reporting by the New York Times, is an ongoing culture of really brutal violence. Sometimes correction officers themselves and by prison guards. And in many cases, playing out in ways that targeted specific inmates, and I’m thinking here about people with disabilities and people with mental illnesses. How much is this specific to Rikers and how much is this something that we should be thinking about as a potential culture that plays out in jails elsewhere around the country?

BERMAN: So, a couple points. One is, I think you’re totally right to point out the coverage in the New Yorker and the New York Times, I would point to the Village Voice and Associated Press and a few other places. I think that the media in New York has done an outstanding job of covering what’s going on in Rikers Island and I think that they are one of the unsung heroes of this story. And I think I would also be remiss if I did not point out that there is a very vibrant advocacy movement here in New York, a close Rikers campaign, led by Just Leadership USA and a guy named Glen Martin that has been kind of banging on the doors of city hall for a long time, documenting some of the kind of abuses that you have detailed. I think that Rikers isn’t unique, I think that as you say there are problems with jails across the country and I would point to a dawning recognition that fundamental change in jails is required. And I think it’s worth looking at someone like the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, which has dedicated recently tens of millions of dollars to what they call the Safety and Justice challenge that’s trying to bring reform, not just in New York but to dozens of other cities that are dealing with similar problems. I think Rikers, the nature of New York and the size of Rikers and the isolation of Rikers does make it unique. But it’s not that Rikers is the only place that these kinds of abuses takes place in.

VALLAS: So what comes next in New York? If Rikers and the jails on that island are being closed, are they being replaced, and if so, with what?

BERMAN: So, the short answer is it remains to be seen. What, I can tell you what the Lippman commission has recommended. Which is to over the course of a decade to reduce the jail population in New York City to a level where it is possible to close Rikers Island. Concurrently with that, what we are recommending is the investment in new state of the art modern effective and humane jail facilities, one in each borough, each of the five boroughs and the size of those facilities would be proportionate to the size of the jail population that comes from each of those boroughs. So that’s the vision that the Lippman commission painted, now it’s kind of in the hands of the political decisionmakers in New York City, primarily Mayor DeBlasio but also the city council as well. And to see what they’re going to sign onto. I think the outstanding news from our perspective is that on Friday Mayor DeBlasio, in broad terms, endorsed this idea and really committed to setting the city of New York down the road, down the path towards closing Rikers Island. What the specifics of the mayor’s plan are going to be remain to be seen. But I think that what we’ve offered him from the Lippman commission’s perspective, is a good place to start.

VALLAS: Now, often when people think about criminal justice reform, a conversation that started to receive tremendous attention because of lots of bipartisan momentum over the course of the last couple of years. I think there is a feeling now, efforts are somewhat stalled in Congress and so to some extend national media may have stopped paying attention. But when people think about criminal justice reform, often what’s being focused on is prison, is the prison population. Is sentencing reform, mandatory minimums, policies that will shorten shorten sentences and start to reduce an incredibly bloated prison population. But that’s really only part of the situation, and this is something that you’ve done a tremendous amount of work on over the years, that misses the 12 million Americans, or something around that number who cycle in and out of local jails on an annual basis, which is a huge part of what needs to be thought about and talked about as we talk about comprehensive criminal justice reform. I’m curious what you’re hopeful that people will start to pay attention to when it comes to the solutions we need to be seeing before somebody reaches the point where they’ve been sentenced to prison and are actually found guilty of an offense.

BERMAN: Yeah, I think that you neatly summarized our perspective at the Center for Court Innovation. There are multiple opportunities to route someone to a more positive life trajectory along the way. Before you get to the point where they’re standing before a judge likely to be sentenced to state or federal prison time. And a lot of those ideas are embedded in the Lippman commission report. And they include offering diversion opportunities to police and prosecutors for low-level offenders, people who are arrested for low level offenses to help them avoid the criminal justice process entirely. Because we know that incarceration is the worst outcome that they can experience but there are whole host of other harms that come with just going through the process itself. Including, the potential of having a criminal record. So I think it’s incredibly important, I guess the way that I think about it is that for too long it has felt like we were fast-tracking people towards incarceration. And what the Lippman commission is trying to do and what my agency, the Center for Court Innovation is trying to do is build off-ramps at every stage along the process. So that, you know, I think we’re not so naive to believe that we can to get a point where we’re eliminating prisons. I think there are in fact people that are a danger to themselves and others. But far, far fewer people need to be in prison than currently are and I think that we can start attacking that problem by focusing on jails.

VALLAS: Now, a model that you have been one of the leading proponents of and even architects of over the years is something that you call community courts. And the story goes back about 15 years, just a little more than 15 years at this point, to a community court called Red Hook in Brooklyn if I’m remembering correctly. I’d love for you to tell that story and to help us understand one model that is an alternative to the Rikers model or even to the jail model and the current criminal justice system that we have, could look like.

BERMAN: So, the Red Hook Community Justice Center is the neighborhood based court in southwest Brooklyn and it was created as you say, about 15 years ago in response to a horrible murder, in fact, of a beloved school principal who was caught in a drug related crossfire between two gang members in the middle of the day, actually, while out looking for a truant student. And in the aftermath of that horrible incident, the criminal justice policymakers, the Brooklyn district attorney, the chief judge of New York at the time, said, you know, it’s important to prosecute those who committed this offense but, and they were very wise and prescient back then, you know, they said we can’t just arrest and incarcerate our way out of the problems that plague Red Hook. And they had a desire, along with the mayor at the time, to make a deeper investment in the neighborhood of Red Hook. And so what that has looked like is creating a local branch of the New York state court system, it’s an official criminal court, if you walk into it, you would see a judge in robes on the bench and an assistant district attorney from the Brooklyn DA’s office and legal aid attorneys handling all of the criminal matters, low level criminal matters, misdemeanor cases, from three surrounding police precincts.

And what Red Hook has been shown to do by independent evaluators is a couple of important things. One is changing sentencing practice, so less than 1% of the cases go through Red Hook get jail at arrangment. In a typical criminal court in New York city, it’s about 20% of the cases get jail. And so the evidence shows that Red Hook has massively reduced the use of jail. Just as importantly, Red Hook has dramatically improved perceptions of justice and fairness. So, the National Center for State Courts, which performed an evaluation of Red Hook, compared the attitudes of people who had gone through Red Hook to people who had gone through conventional courts. And they found, happily from our perspective, that defendants who had been to Red Hook thought that their cases were handled fairly, thought that they were treated with dignity and respect. And this is an idea that we call procedural justice and our hypothesis is, and it’s been backed up by some other research, is that if you can increase the sense of procedural justice. If you make people feel like their case is handled fairly, you will improve compliance with the law. And that’s what happened in Red Hook, in fact. The independent evaluators also found that the project reduced recidivism by 10% among adults and 20% among juveniles.

VALLAS: Well, here’s hoping that the Rikers news doesn’t just result in people feeling problem solved, let’s move on to the next thing but rather it actually spurs deeper conversation in communities across the country. Greg Berman is the director of the Center for Court Innovation and has been part of the independent commission on New York City criminal justice and incarceration reform as an advisor. Their final report recommended the closure of Rikers Island which hopefully is soon on the horizon. Greg, thanks so much for joining Off-Kilter.

BERMAN: Thanks for having me.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Last month, the internet erupted with calls to action to find DC’s missing Black and Latina girls. And to address racial disparities in who goes missing and who is found. I’m joined by Kymone Freeman, he is one of the founders and co-owners of We Act Radio, one of the stations that Off-Kilter is proud to air on, to talk about the populations and the issues that the mainstream media fail to cover or to cover well. And why they started We Act Radio 5 years ago. But first, Perry Stein, a reporter with the Washington Post who has been covering the story of DC’s missing Black and Latina girls, joins to walk us through the story. Let’s take a listen.

PERRY STEIN: Essentially what’s happened is you know, someone in the police department has decided to make a more concerted effort to publicize these cases of critically missing people. And critically missing people includes minors, so every time there is a minor that goes missing, they have been tweeting out pictures of them and information about that. Now, this is a new thing that they are all getting tweeted and I think the first publication on all these faces in their timeline, in their twitter timeline, was The Root. They wrote a story about, you know, all the Black and Latina missing girls that have gone missing. They do make up, these young females, make up a majority of the juveniles that have gone missing. And they made it seem, and other publications had jumped onto this and made it seem as if there was a big increase and implied perhaps it was tied to sex trafficking and what is going on, why isn’t there more coverage on this?

That prompts the interim police chief, Police Chief Newsham, he’s the DC police chief to say, “Hey look, there’s actually not an increase. What’s happened is that now we’ve decided to publicize this on twitter. So it appears there is, but there’s not.”

VALLAS: So now picking up with you, Kymone, you have been following this issue very closely as well, and doing a lot of raising awareness on social media and through other channels about the issue. Would love to hear your perspective, is this an issue that the media has done a good job of covering? Are there parts of the story that aren’t being told or aren’t being told well.

KYMONE FREEMAN: The media always a good job of omitting information. That in itself is a form of propaganda and we need to be aware of that as well. The reason I say that is because MPD, that’s Metropolitan Police Department here in Washington DC, their website for missing persons, until we pointed it out to them, had not been updated in three years. And the last missing person they had listed was Relisha [Rudd], and for those who are not familiar, this was a child, a small child, and my suspicion, my personal position on this is the mother actually sold her daughter. And the man who was the middle man, was found murdered but they never found the little girl. And it was, it’s a shameful story but she went missing and no one looked for her for weeks. The school, nobody, and that is what makes this very, a bitter pill to swallow coming from MPD and the media’s perspective on this because their position was, oh, there is no spike in missing persons, it’s the normal number of people it’s just the awareness have gone up. And I will grant that some of this has been because of this successful film “Get Out”, that showed black people being kidnapped and abducted but we cannot ignore that that does happen in this world. But, yes, the vast majority of these missing people are runaways, but that means it’s a dysfunctional home and it means they are preying on them and a not of the runaways are not documented.

VALLAS: So whether or not there has been a spike in missing girls and particularly missing girls of color, and there are views on both sides of that issue, we’ve heard from Perry Stein reporting that she believes the MPD numbers and that’s what the Post has reported. There has been a change in how this issue has been discussed, and in a lot of ways it’s a media story, a story about the media. And in particular, media that is not mainstream media. So you’ve got outlets like the Washington Post, maybe covering the issue, but it was really, it was The Root that raised national awareness about the spate of Black and Latina girls missing in this city. And it was social media that helped people start to realize that this was something going on. That’s part of what you’ve been involved in. I’m curious to hear you weigh in on how alternative forms of media outside of the mainstream have played a role in this story.

FREEMAN: Well, we’ll acknowledge that The Root definitely did a good job in their space, so we do want to appreciate them. That’s the cultural arm of the Washington Post. So I do want to acknowledge that openly. We Act Radio, we’re in Ward 8 and we’ve held events, rallies, vigils, that we covered and we broadcast. Our Ward 8 Councilman Trayon [White] has been very active on this issue. Also our ANC, our advisory neighborhood commission has been very active on this issue. Next week on tax day we’re going to 100 balloons, black balloons into the air, the kick off of our fifth opposition party, just to keep this going because we need to understand that our children are our future and there is a saying that America eats its young. We did not originate that, and Jeff Sessions, Attorney General, we can expect the government, at least law enforcement that is, to be our ally and making sure that they are protecting of lives of color.

VALLAS: So, you’re mentioning the five year anniversary of We Act Radio. You launched this network with Alex Lawson who is not with us today, so we will shame him for not joining us this morning to have this conversation. But you started that network five years ago, the two of you, out of frustration with the mainstream media. Tell a little bit of that story and why We Act Radio was born.

FREEMAN: Two things happened that created We Act Radio. One was the performance arts tax sponsored by Congressman John Conyers who called us the number one progressive AM radio station in North America at the time by the way. But he had sponsored a bill that was basically saying that artists whose records are played on the radio, should be paid, not just the publisher. Traditionally, it’s the publisher that got paid but not the performer. So he introduced the performance arts tax. And then, Radio One rallied against that saying that this was an affront to black radio and this would put them out of business and yada-yada. And we know how a lot of artists end up in the later years of their career, so we took exception to that and that led us down this road.

However, what really sealed the deal for us in convincing others, was when Fox News and Monsanto case came to bear and it was realized that the court ruled that the media is not legally required to report the truth. That they have a moral obligation, but not a legal obligation. And now Fox News is the number one quote, unquote news agency. So alternative facts has been here long before the current administration. And so we wanted to make sure that we put that out there and our motto is “Truth is our product.”

VALLAS: So tell us a little bit about We Act Radio, what kinds of programming you do and what you strive to do as a part of your mission. It’s not just reporting, it’s also more.

FREEMAN: Yes, we do more than reporting, we create the news. We produce content. In 2016, we did a radio series, a documentary if you will, called “Anacostia Unmapped.” Where we went around and surveyed our community and these programs were aired on WAMU and NPR and they ultimately became the number one download program in NPR with 15 million views. And so we made, we generated revenue for NPR, but that didn’t generate revenue for We Act Radio, in fact we was offered thousands of dollars when the largest monopoly of utility in this now Exxon Nuclear power company and we was rallying against it, we was offered against it to get on board to get on board to support that. So we had to turn it down. So the achilles tendon of the progressive community is that it is more profitable to destroy the planet than it is to save the planet. And that is why progressive media is underfunded.

VALLAS: So We Act Radio is housed in Anacostia, and that’s where your studio is and it’s really right in the heart of the community. What’s the significance of where you decided to set up that studio and where to set up your home base?

FREEMAN: Not only is Anacostia the underbelly of the nation’s capital but we hold up a mirror to the hypocrisy of America’s having the greatest disparity in wealth in the world. And in DC, having the greatest disparity of wealth in the country. So just let that marinate for a second. And then we are also standing on the radical side of Martin Luther King avenue. We want to espouse the true King and not the sanitized white washed version we get once a year. And we’re coming on the heels of April 4th, the anniversary of his assassination, also the anniversary of the “Beyond Vietnam” speech that he gave that really took him off the stage. And the author of that speech was Dr. Vincent Harding. We Act Radio has the honor of having the last interview that Dr. Vincent Harding ever gave, and he acknowledged that the role that speech played in Martin Luther King’s demise.

VALLAS: So we started off by talking about DC’s missing girls of color and racial groups that that’s a big part of what you often have argued the media doesn’t necessarily do well. It isn’t just issues, it’s certain populations and particularly communities of color that maybe are not covered in the same way as issues pertaining to white people. I’m curious to hear you talk about what We Act Radio does differently from mainstream media when it comes to covering issues related to race.

FREEMAN: I just want to say this, Congressman, well maybe one day. Our councilman Trayon White for Ward 8 actually put together an event that was filled to the brim, it was hundreds of people filling a school gymnasium for the event on missing persons. And that kind of spoke volumes against the notion that poor people and people of color don’t care about their young people. That spoke volumes to that. And then to see the kind of like a shift of culture on the street, just yesterday, just yesterday, someone was had I guess a disciplinary action with their child and so the child was walking a good distance behind the parent and I saw someone pull over and ask, “Where is your mother? Where is your father? Are you OK?” And the mother turned around and said, “No, he’s with me” They was just, “I’m just checking.” Now the community is looking out for each other a little bit more. That’s a good thing. That is not paranoia, that is a safety concern in our community. And so We Act Radio sits right there. I saw this from my store front studio. And that’s what makes us different. We are there on the ground level on the street level, eye to eye. And a lot of people knock on our door and they’re looking for jobs. They’re looking for opportunity and providing voices and everybody comes to DC to do that and that’s what we here for.

VALLAS: And Kymone, look who that is, knocking on the door of our radio studio, it’s Alex Lawson who we shamed who is actually here. He’s late, he just couldn’t apparently tear himself away from his adorable son but Alex, I’m glad you’re here because you’re here just in time to tell us what’s next for We Act Radio five years in and to tell us a little bit about how you’re celebrating your anniversary.

ALEX LAWSON: It’s a global media takeover I believe what’s next. To take over every corner of the media ecosystem.

VALLAS: I would expect nothing less.

LAWSON: To take the corporate media that exists to advance the corporate interests of the interlocking board rooms of Wall St, big insurance big pharma, to push the propaganda that we can see every day but I think most importantly to push the propaganda of the stories that aren’t told and that’s what We Act Radio wants to destroy. We want to destroy the ability for a select group of people with very vested interests, with bottom line dollars and cents interests in not telling stories that matter. What that actually looks like is we will continue to work with folks like you, Off-Kilter, bringing new voices into the media ecosystem, growing those voices, you know we have some exciting news to announce of new places where Off-Kilter will be available. And you know, five years in, it’s, we’re way past sort of, will they be around or anything like that. We’re real, we’re not going anywhere, we’re just getting bigger. So, you know, get ready.

VALLAS: And so tell us a little bit about the big party you guys have coming up.

LAWSON: April 18th, which is my birthday, also tax day, but most importantly the five year anniversary of We Act Radio.

VALLAS: So that’s how you rank those things?

[LAUGHTER]

LAWSON: So how old am I, I’m going to be 37 so like that’s a useless birthday, right?

VALLAS: Depends on how you look at it

LAWSON: Well, I mean like it’s not, I think it’s just, I think yes. I think, well I could also say the opposition party that we’re throwing with Seaton Smith who is a friend of mine, also an amazing comedian, world famous comedian. His first album “Bologna Meat” is a huge success. He starred in the sitcom “Mulvaney”, he’s going to join us. I actually know him from before he was super duper famous so he’s going to. He’s currently on VH1. He is going to perform at the show. He thought it was funny when he heard that there were politicians who were also going to be there and he was like, “Did you tell them that they’re going to have to distance themselves from me?”

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: They probably would appreciate that heads up.

LAWSON: He’s fantastic. So it’s going to be fun. It’s going to be a good time. We’re telling everyone to come down to our studio, they can see our TV studio that we just built and really just see, I always say when I tell people about the station, if they haven’t visited it, they don’t really get it yet. You really have to come down to our Anacostia based studio. See what Kymone and I have built there with an enormous amount of help from all sorts of people and then you get it right away.

VALLAS: If people are interested in going to this birthday slash tax slash oppostion party, with comics and elected officials once [Seaton Smith] opens his mouth, where can they buy tickets?

LAWSON: They can go to WeActRadio.com and join the opposition party

FREEMAN: Click the button for “Join the opposition party”.

LAWSON: It’s right there, it’s really east. Just WeActRadio.com, join the opposition party and you know, I hope to see everybody there.

VALLAS: Well, I’ll be there with bells on and I have to say I am deeply grateful to both of you for believing in the content that we produce. We started as Talk Poverty Radio, you picked us up when we were trying to figure out how to be out there and not be on SiriusXM behind a paywall and you guys believed in what we were trying to do, which was to get out real and meaningful and honest coverage of poverty and inequality and issues relating to those. You thought that was important, you thought it wasn’t being done well by the mainstream media which is how we felt. You brought us into the We Act family and now we’re Off-Kilter and we get to have even more fun because we’re c(4) and we get to be part of the resistance.

LAWSON: No rules!

VALLAS: No rule except for the few that still exist that I think about now —

LAWSON: Tons of rules!

VALLAS: Tons of rules, better rules! But that being said I am just hugely honored to be part of the We Act family and I’m really grateful for what you guys do everyday. So thanks for coming on, and happy almost birthday Alex and I’ll see you on the 18th.

FREEMAN: Peace.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. The resistance is alive and well in blue and purple districts throughout the nation but about in deep red states? In this week’s installment of our “Resistance Works” series, I speak with Beverly Tuberville, an Oklahoma resident and until recently, a lifelong Republican voter. Beverly helped found her state’s chapter of Indivisible which is now 6,000 members strong and I’m joined by Beverly by phone. Beverly Tuberville, thank you so much for joining Off-Kilter. So you are, as I said, a lifelong Republican or you were until recently. I would love to hear the story of what changed your views and how that actually sparked your involvement with the resistance

BEVERLEY TUBERVILLE: Yeah, you know, and I have to be honest, I wasn’t paying attention to politics really. I was busy. I had a career, I traveled to over 50 countries working in the medical field. I was too busy, I didn’t even watch the news. But being a Republican was part of the culture in Oklahoma. It was always synonymous with Christianity around here. So I wasn’t looking at the issues. What really opened my mind was that day when Trump came down that escalator at Trump Tower. And I had been there for business on more than one occasion and I remembered that outdated orange marble and that brass [inaudible] lobby and the strange clownish Trump coming down the escalator watching him on TV, and all of the rhetoric that came out of his mouth. I thought it was a joke, in the beginning. But I was really refreshed by the fact that he was speaking his mind. And I remember saying to a friend, you know, “that’s kind of cool, he’s speaking his mind.” But the problem was what was on his mind. And it was nothing that really aligned with my values.

And the further it went the more I saw a divide between myself and my most conservative friends. I just didn’t agree with them. And they excused everything about him. They excused the way he treated workers, the way he treated women, the rhetoric he had about immigrants, just all of the nonsense and his lack of intelligence. I found it off putting. I found it so off putting that I began to research what the opposition was all about. The opposition meaning because I was a Republican at the time, I started researching what was the Libertarian party about, what was the Democratic party about, what were independents about, what was the Green party. And what I found was all the things that I care about, people had been fighting in other parties for, especially the Democratic party, every day for years and years. Probably my whole life, and I’m 53 years old and I did not even realize that what, for example environmentalism was a progressive value. I didn’t realize caring for a lot of the things that I cared about as a Christian were really progressive values. So it was really a big eye opener for me.

VALLAS: Now a lot of the media coverage of the 2016 election has focused on one particular storyline. Which is voters who had historically actually voted for democrats and who switched over and who voted for Trump out of dissatisfaction with the Democratic party or feeling like the Democratic party no one longer was speaking to them or representing their views. A lot of those folks have been described as Obama-Trump voters. People who voted for Obama in 2008 and maybe even again in 2012 but who ended up voting for Trump in 2016. You have sort of the exact opposite story, and I’m curious if you sort of view yourself as an exception to the rule or whether there are other folks you know who have had similar progressions in their views.

TUBERVILLE: I can tell you, my own mother. She also changed her party. She was a lifelong Republican and she noticed some of the same things. When you read and you care about facts and you care about people then you can’t help but start to notice when things become so outrageous that your values are not aligned with the party you’re in. So her, that’s one example. Another example is our director of communications for Indivisible Oklahoma, her name is Jennifer. She’s been to seminary. She was a lifelong Republican and she also left the party because she found, again because of the outrageous nature of what is happening. The people start evaluating what are their core values and what party do they align with. So no, I don’t think it’s just me.

VALLAS: And I’m curious, your thoughts on how you communicate with other people, maybe people who haven’t seen a change in their views but have been lifelong Republicans or otherwise Trump supporters, but who maybe aren’t paying close attention, as you described that you hadn’t been until recently. How do you communicate with someone who says, “You know what, I care about bringing jobs back and I want to make sure that my family has economic security and that’s why I placed my bets on Trump in November.” How do you communicate with those folks?

TUBERVILLE: I communicate with those folks by talking about, sure economic growth is important but at what price? We can have great economic growth, we can take all the regulations away, we can trash our planet, drop the minimum wage and not even have one and we can be China. You know, I’ve traveled to over 50 countries, working, and I have seen what it looks like when there are no regulations. It’s really at what cost? And there is a balance. Sure, we need growth, but it has to be controlled growth. I think once you, there are Republicans who care about facts. I was one of them. And of course there is always those redneck gun-touting, you know, [LAUGHTER], you find them everywhere, you’re not going to convince them and I’m not going to try. But there are those people who really just don’t know they’re in the wrong party. They really trusted what was happening, and that was my mistake. Trusting what our leaders were doing.

VALLAS: And my last question for you is given that you are not someone who is a Democratic voter but in a red state but who has always viewed people in power who are on the opposite side of the aisle from you as being sort of the opposition. You have a very different situation and a very different story, do you find that your conservative policymakers and elected officials in Oklahoma are more receptive to hearing from you? Does that make you someone they are more likely to listen to?

TUBERVILLE: You know, that’s an interesting question because I’m suddenly seeing, just being as a part of Indivisible, I am suddenly seen as their opposition. And it’s so strange when you’ve been a conservative your whole life to be called a liberal. Or a “lib-tard”, or I can tell you that our representatives in Oklahoma are not used to being held accountable. And so, are they more receptive to me because I have changed parties? I think they are probably not. I think that they will be as they see our numbers growing and growing and we have over 40 groups under Indivisible Oklahoma right now, so they’re going to have to listen. They’re not going to have a choice. But yeah, it’s been really strange becoming suddenly the oppositon.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced each week by Eliza Schultz. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @OffKilterShow. And you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices network and the We Act Radio network, or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.