American Doom
'Hands up, don't shoot'
I'm Justin Glaw, writer and journalist, and I've spent my career chronicling the violence, unrest, and chaos of American life. On this podcast, I'll discuss the events roiling this complex and troubling country, and speak with some of the people trying to make sense of the madness that pervades our world. This is American Doom. Hey, everyone, and welcome to the American Doom podcast. Today I'm talking with DeRay McKesson of Campaign Zero. DeRay and I met 10 years ago in Ferguson when I was there covering the police killing of Mike Brown, and since then, DeRay's gone on to work in police brutality and criminal justice reform spaces through his group Campaign Zero. Today, we're going to talk about the Sonia Massey case, police brutality in general, and a little bit on the 2024 election. Join us. First off, DeRay, it's so nice to have you, after all these many years later when we met on Ferguson, which, you know, four days from now, will have been 10 years ago, believe it or not, which I want to talk about, but first, I wanted to talk about, obviously, the Sonia Massey case. You know, if you want to just start off and kind of give us your thoughts on what you've seen there. Obviously, tragedy, right? You know, the police still killed three people a day in the country. We're looking at the numbers. This year, we have more data than we've ever had, and it does look like it is changing where it's happening, but the Sonia Massey killings are a reminder that it continues to happen all the time. That's a sheriff's department. The sheriff's departments get very little attention in the grand scheme of how we talk about this is mostly local police departments, but we've looked trying to find the use of forced policy in that department can't find it. The police here in Ferguson at the department can't find it. So it is one of those places where they could have actually been following the rules, and that is even scarier. Mm-hmm. I'm glad you brought up those numbers because that's another thing I wanted to talk about. Obviously, you know, the FBI is, it's up to law enforcement, individual law enforcement agencies to submit use of forced numbers to the FBI. But you know, since Ferguson, the media has really stepped in and has done a much better job of tracking fatal use of force. And every time an event like this occurs, you know, you'll hear calls for the media to sort of like stop race baiting about police brutality. They'll point to things like high profile police killings of white people, like Tony Timpa, who is basically suffocated by Dallas police much in the same way as George Floyd. It seems crazy to have to explain this, but for the benefit of those who might not fully understand and lighten us on why police brutality against black Americans has resulted in widespread responses like protests and calls for criminal justice. It is wild. At the beginning of your question, it is wild that the federal government doesn't require departments to submit this information. The law does require it, but the only thing that the federal government can do is withhold money if police departments don't comply and they will not withhold the money. So less than 50% of the departments send in the data. It is wild. It's our database, mappingpoliceviolence.org, and then the Washington Post database that are the two best repositories of it. And the difference is that the Washington Post only includes you if you were killed with the gun and they don't include people that the police kill off duty or with other weapons. We do all weapons all duty status. And also let me just ask in custody deaths in jails and prisons that may not like those are mostly not committed by law enforcement with firearms. Those are taser and you guys do that as well, right? If you don't do jails and prisons, there is no great source of jail and prison data at the national level. So they're people who like track jail deaths in Atlanta and in LA and Rikers are probably the three cities, New York City, the three cities that have good city data on jail deaths. But there's no national tracker of prison and jail deaths in one place like nobody's doing that work. They're people that did some really incredible work around prisons and jails during COVID, but they did COVID deaths. So they sort of stopped after COVID, after the restrictions were lifted. I want to ask you about another thing that always happens in the, in the wake of a tragic incident like this is that, you know, people go, and especially as we know the numbers, we know that the numbers continually have been going up since we really started tracking them 10 years ago, and the question always becomes, okay, so how do we mitigate this? And one of the things that I kind of tend to think about, especially in the case of Sean Grayson at the Sangamon County Sheriff's Office in Illinois and a lot of small law enforcement agencies, especially in rural places, not to be dismissive here, but I don't think that they're getting the best and the brightest candidates to become officers and law enforcement agents. You know, when you think about things that could help alleviate this problem, would reforms like requiring higher levels of education or even higher levels of pay sort of help to disqualify people who probably shouldn't be out there as law enforcement? You know, I forgot to answer part of your previous question. Oh, yeah, sure. People are about 12% of the population and almost 30% of the people killed by the police. So that's how we talk about the disproportionate and violent black communities is because the outcomes are actually disproportionate. But to your question, you know, people talk about training and education and salary, and the way that I think about the police is like, imagine if you had a job where it was impossible to be held accountable, like there was like no way anybody could hold your accountable. I mean, that's what the police are. So you could add all the bells and whistles you want, but if you knew that no matter what you did, it would be damn near impossible to terminate you, then like it, that breeds a level of lawlessness that we see in American policing. In 2014, when I was in the street in Ferguson, I thought that the police were like breaking all these rules. I was like, this is wild. I can't believe it. And then I realized they're not that the rules actually written for them. The rules are in their favor. So all they have to do is say they were afraid and they can kill people. That wasn't even a violation of the rule. The rules are actually written for them. So instead of thinking that they were breaking the rules, I was like, oh my goodness, they got their own set of rules. That's why we did this big project in 2013 that we started and have continued on police issue contracts. I didn't know that the contracts make it like, like Detroit has this clause and I've always been fascinated by it. And I want a reporter somebody to write about it in Detroit. The contract literally says that if an officer is convicted of domestic violence, they cannot be fired for the next 12 months to give them a chance to fight the conviction that is in the contract. That's like what it is what it says. And you're like, that seems like they might know, it seems like they might have had some experience with officers being convicted or indicted for domestic violence cases then, right? It is it like floors me. Yeah. So yeah, thinking that like there was some violation, the rules are bad. It sort of reminds me like one of the things I've always found that's to your point about law enforcement, there's not a lot of accountability. Like being in the police department, having a police department is like one of the only jobs that I can think of where like the worst you are at your job, the more money you get, right? Like crime goes up and Chicago PD, NYPD, whoever they say, you guys got to give us more money, man. This crime is out of control. We need to get this under control. So please give us more money. And it's like it just seems like sort of the opposite of how that incentive should work. And then, you know, if crime goes down, the argument becomes you guys got to keep giving us a lot of money because we're keeping the crime down here. And if you don't give this money, then the crime is going to go up. So like there's no way around, it seems like the rationale for law enforcement to continually getting increased funding. And maybe that's what we should talk about, you know, obviously, you know, there was after Ferguson and then again, throughout the last 10 years, but really Ferguson and George Floyd are these sort of two like pinnacle events in my mind where we, they brought about the conversation of police funding and criminal justice reform. Tell me about sort of where those arguments stand. Obviously, we've had like all the defund, defund the police stuff, but let's talk a little bit about funding and kind of where you stand on that and where you think things are. Hey, you know, what's true is that, and this is true of most government, big government systems, like I used to be the chief human capital of the school system of Baltimore. This is true in almost all school systems. It's also true in police departments is that around 80% of the budget is people. So if you want to move a big chunk of money, there's no way to go without decreasing that account. That's just like the way it goes. There's like not enough police cars and guns and badges and uniforms to make up for the dollar amount. It will be people. And the only way to decrease the number of people is through the contract. Yeah. So one of the things that happened when the conversation about funding became a big deal in 2020 and today is a so few people even forget organizers. It's like legislators don't even understand the contracts. So it's like you couldn't get rid of a hundred officers in a city if you wanted to overnight because the contract makes it really hard. What you could do is eliminate vacancies. You can cut overtime. That just won't give you the dollar melt cut that people are pushing for and it won't allow us to redirect the money to social services and a big enough joke. So I say I'd like to say that my stance is the same as it's always been is that until we deal with the contracts and sort of are honest that the police are not a labor union like the domestic workers and the nurses and just be honest about that until we do that we'll never be able to make headway. You know, when we all look at the data, it's like 5% that I won't calls go to violent crime. The vast majority of what the police are doing is not violent crime. You know what I mean? So the police have done a really good job of scaring mayors and city council people to continue these like wild levels of funding and it doesn't make crazy salaries with no accountability. Right. That's interesting that you bring up the number of calls that are actually violent crime because that the calls for service is one of those things that law enforcement agencies will use as a rationale for increased funding, right? Like every time a police department goes to a city council, they say last year we had this many calls for service and that's up 20% from here or whatever, you know, so like the calls for service, but like I think it's important to note what those calls are. And as somebody who has spent a lot of time over my career listening to police scanner traffic, most of those calls for, you know, they're some of them are like, I don't know, some kid knocking down a mailbox or something like that, you know, so, so tell me a little bit about that 5% for violent crime where that number comes from and how it is maybe reflective of what law enforcement actually does compared to what they say they do, which is, you know, like we are the thin blue line between, you know, civil society and complete chaos and violence. Yeah, it's one of the few national figures that we get from the aggregate data that the environmental government compiles, which is unhappy, they do it, but you know, the local data bears that ought to, the other big data point that's important is the clearance rate, which most people call like how what percentage of crimes do the police solve. Do you know what the clearance rate actually measures? Do you know what it measures? The clearance rates are insanely low and especially. Do you know what it measures like, all it measures is an arrest was made. It does not measure whether or not that person is convicted at the end of the criminal justice cycle. Right? So yeah, but tell me about it. Just an arrest. Yes. Just an arrest. So you're like you look at, you know, people in DC are like, it's out of control and da, da, da, da. You're like, the clearance rate is 20% for shootings. You're like, y'all don't even find, you don't even think you have one person right for these shooting. It is or robberies. The clearance rates are like 20, 25% you're like, what are you? It's a million of y'all. What are y'all doing? Because it's certainly not fun. People steal anything. It's a rational choice to steal in a place where the clearance rate is 15%. You know what I mean? Y'all not finding nobody. Right. Yeah. One of the things I will never forget is back in my Chicago days. So I think like when I think of clearance rates, I think of murder. I think of homicide and like a very generalized number for what the national clearance rate is for arrest for homicide is around like 55, 60%. In actuality, that number is more like 18 or 20%, because by the time you get through the court system, the number of people who actually get convicted for homicides, which is about, you know, there's 15,000 homicides a year in this country is probably something more like, you know, between 15 and 25% or something. So like, we hear all of this stuff about law enforcement. Again, the thin blue line, we are protecting the week, you know, from these criminals. Well, yeah, the clearance rates are very interesting because again, that is we need more money because we got to do this. And then yet when you start looking into the numbers of how effective they are at their jobs, it doesn't really hold up. So yeah, I don't know, that's not a question, but I think it's just like one of those crazy things that many people maybe don't know about how law enforcement works. And we don't even track the relationship between clearance rates and convictions. That's not even a number we know. That's wild. Right. The next question I have for you, it's like, this is such a huge subject. But I just, I, I can't believe that we are on Friday will have been 10 years since Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson. I don't really have a question here. I don't really even know where to begin. But I just kind of want to get your thoughts on, on all of it, really. Yeah, 10 years is wild. You know, I'm reminded that this is the first sustained period in American history where people have been focused on structural change to the police. Mm hmm. Don't we think about the civil rights movement, which is the other era that people talk about often, they were surviving the police getting through the police to get to the big winds that they were looking for, voting, housing, desegregation, wages, they weren't passing laws about the police. And that's not a critique of them. It just wasn't the actual focus. It was what they had to get through to get to the thing that they were trying to do. Yes. In this moment where the focus is actually like, how do we do something about the police? And, you know, I think this first decade was like laying the foundation and helping people understand that there was a problem. And we've made real structural change, which I'm happy to talk about. But in 2014, we didn't even know how many people the police killed. It was like a, you know, we had no data, it was sort of wild. Right. Ten years later, we do. What I'm, what I'm excited about with the next decade is that I do think there's been a lot of momentum. I think that there can be a lot, a lot more change and I'm happy to talk about the changes happen. The thing that has frustrated me is that unlike the civil rights movement where they got these big pieces of national legislation passed, it worked because they were looking for like voting, housing, stuff like that. But the police, the reality is that they're 18,000 police departments and less than a hundred of them are managed by the federal government directly. There is no one piece of federal legislation that's going to do what we need because you know- Not the George Floyd Policing Act? No, not, that's not even a knock on the joint, the George Floyd Act is good, but it only directly impacts the hundred police department, less than a hundred police departments, the federal government manages. Right. They can't, the federal government can't make your local police department do anything. They can make your state sheriff's office do anything. What they can do is incentivize it and they can penalize people for not doing things using money. I mean, it's like how we got seatbelt laws. Right. It's how we got speed limits, but they can't actually make the departments do anything and they can model. It's a big deal. They can model things, especially the smaller departments will feel pressured to use, but it won't single-handedly do it. That's not the way that we set up federalism in the police departments. So what is true is that like best case scenario, we're going to be running a 50 state strategy around the police. That's like the way it has to work, or we'll be running city strategies in red states to get the blue cities to show people as possible. Like that is the way that the change will actually roll across the country. And that is different than the civil rights movement era. They were looking for big federal pieces of legislation. You know, the federal government can do patent and practice investigations, but we got that power after the beating of Rodney King. That's relatively new. And Obama did the most in history at the time, which is three police departments and even they investigated. They're 18,000 police departments. Right. Well, and let's not, you know, let's not dismiss the progress that has been made in the past 10 years. And the biggest piece of that that I think of is the proliferation of body cams, which was not something that was really being discussed and was on the table prior to Mike Brown and Ferguson, but is now more used and widespread across law enforcement, I mean, we're still a very long way away from all of those 18,000 agencies that you described, really having a robust body camera program, let alone releasing those videos in a timely manner after fatal uses of force. So, but it's interesting to hear you sort of describe this as a movement in decades, right? Like that that is how long potentially that we're looking at going from Ferguson to something like more actionable, you know, noticeable change. So you mentioned a 50 state strategy. What else does this next decade entail for your work and the work of others in this space? You know, body cameras is sort of complicated. The hard part about body cameras is that they rolled out before there was any like movement infrastructure to put in rules. So in some places, body cameras are great, like great in terms of like being a metric for accountability and stuff like that. And in all of the data we have suggests that body cameras certainly make people feel more safe. And the research is unclear, though, if it actually has like an impact on use of force, because some places, the body camera rules are so crazy that, you know, you can't look at the the supervisor can never audit the footage. Right. The officers don't have to put it on. You're like, well, what does it mean if they have a camera they don't have to use departments fought back really hard that like you can't ever release the footage like that. So I'm oriented so long for the footage to come out that by the time it's actually released, unfortunately, I hate to say it this way, but the news of the event has passed. So the people who might get upset about it. And I think that's purposeful. I think that delay tactic is purposeful. There's a reason that it took so long for the Laquan McDonald footage to come out, right? Because they knew that if they released it in 24 hours of when that happened, people would have taken to the streets in Chicago with huge numbers. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, you're right. It is one of those things. So I say that the body camera stuff is complicated. It's just like a complicated thing. But what has happened before 2020, people weren't talking about qualified immunity. Colorado got rid of qualified immunity, which is the law that has historically or the judicial practice that has historically limited people from filing successful civil complaints against police officers. Colorado ended it. That is a big win. There about 20 states in the district of DC, the district of Columbia that passed the first ever restrictions on officer use of force. That work around use of force is the single biggest reduction of the power of the police in American history. That has never happened before. After Breonna Taylor, we get Louisville putting the first ever restrictions on non-accrades. And then we get five states that have state-level restrictions on non-accrades. That has never happened. So it is happening. It is not happening, you know, I'm torn about the way people talk about it. Like, if there's no big federal thing, then nothing will happen. You're like, "George Floyd Act is actually good and it won't change these things." There's actually a federal Biden did an executive order around non-accrades and use of force that are both great and only applied to the federal agencies, right? So I think it's happening and I think we need more activists in the policy work so that we can both make the noise around the need for change and write the laws. Right. Last thing I want to discuss here, and I'll try to tie this into what we've been talking about. But, you know, for folks who like want to get involved and want to see this next decade of police accountability work, you know, continue, how does our national politics play into this? You know, do you have any qualms about Kamala Harris's background as a district attorney? And does that play a role? Because who is the next president play a role in how we look at the issue of police accountability and reform going forward? You know, the reality is that there are two nominees at this point and Donald Trump can't be president and Kamala knows what she's doing and is going to be a strong leader. I'm not worried about her having been a prosecutor. I'm actually, I think the good thing is that it allows us to make really concrete demands of her about the criminal justice system because she knows it. Right. She understands it. She worked in it. Whereas I'll tell you, I work with mayors and legislators all over the country where I'm trying to explain the difference between a search warrant and an arrest warrant. Right. Well, should Donald Trump understand the criminal justice system? He's been indicted of 40 some odd counts. You would think he would have this a passing now. I'm explaining to legislators like what, what qualified immunity is, they just don't, they don't even know. It's starting to zero. Kamala's not starting to zero. So that does allow us to make a difference out of demands because she's coming in a content expert on this very issue. Her sister was the head of ASL, you in California, you know, like she knows this stuff. And I think that that's just shaped by our demands and the president sets a tone around police accountability for sure. So I'm hopeful. What she says she's going to do, I remember meeting with her when she was here for president the first time, is that she talked about police accountability. She talked about increasing the number of staff in the DOJ's office of civil rights to increase the number of investigations they can do. The George Floyd Act will actually increase the power of that office to hold police departments accountable, which is a good thing. First ever change in their power since post-rounding king. So I actually think that it sets us up to make really concrete demands of change as opposed to thinking about it as a bad thing. Right. Thanks so much for joining us here today, DeRay. Tell folks where they can find your work and sort of what you got to have going on. Yeah. So I lead a group called Campaign Zero, they're about 40 of us. We do laws and policies around police violence and mass incarceration. We believe that we can end police violence in this lifetime. That is a real belief, not a Pollyanna belief, and you can find me on Twitter at DeRay, D-E-R-Y. Thank you for listening to American Doom. This podcast is just a part of my work as a writer and journalist. To keep up, or at least to try to, because chaos and speed are the two primary drivers of my work, you can subscribe to my newsletter on Substack. Just search for American Doom there, and you'll find the investigations and stories that I cover. Coming up on my newsletter are more dives into electing deniers working as local election officials across the country. 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