[00:00:06] Speaker A: Hi, and welcome to spill the tea, the podcast that brings interesting information about life, the universe, and everything. I'm Brigitte. I'm a writer. And I'm Lara.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: I'm a researcher.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: And today we are talking about policing in America.
We're going to go ahead and warn you now that this is probably a hot button topic. We're also going to give you the disclaimer that, well, you go for it.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: One, we're releasing this on Juneteenth for a reason, because we want to show our allyship to black and minority communities in America. That said, we are speaking from a space where we are comfortable and confident of our position.
Instead of representing anything with the direct cultural minorities and their stories. We're talking from the side that we are part of. We're white, which means we are talking about the police, not about the minorities in their stories. That is, their stories to tell. So that's caveat number one. Caveat number two, we are not anti police.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Mostly.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: We are not anti police. We are absolutely aware of the fact that this is not all police. You don't need to tell us about that. We get that. But we are trying to discuss some very real issues in how policing is trained and how policing is produced in America. And so it's not anti police. We're not defund police. We are just saying, if you don't address. If you don't look at the problem and address the problem, you can't solve the problem.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: And with that, let's jump in. I know we're gonna hit a little history that goes prior to America, but a lot of. Well, it does lay down some foundations for why we have this concept of a specific force of people who enforce our laws, our protections, and who help to prevent crime.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Absolutely. And the interesting thing is, the whole reason I started down the rabbit hole this time is your fault. I love you.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: You give me. Was not actually because of Juneteenth.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: No, it was not because of Juneteenth. It's because you very simply enlightened me with the fact that you understood that police, the police force in America, started with the slave groups. The.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Yeah, they had a term, slave patrol. That's what it was.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: There it is. Started with the slave patrols, of course. Couldn't leave it there. Had to go find out the less biased version. Because that is biased. All information is biased. We'll get into that another time.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Actually, we can just make that caveat across the board. Yeah, all information is biased. We just try really hard to find multiple sides. Multiple sides. And quite frankly, the most academic or least biased. Least biased information we can.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: That said, I said, okay, fine. What about policing and history? So, of course, Wikipedia, because, you know, I.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Well, because we start there because librarians.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Hate Wikipedia, but at the same time, we love Wikipedia. It's that bad.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: It's that love hate relationship. Yeah.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: Because anybody can do it, can publish anything and edit anything on Wikipedia. So it's its own issue.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, but make it a problem.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: But this one I did back up with Britannica online, too, so.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: There was a group called the scythian archers in ancient Greece. They were slaves. They were actually prisoner of war slaves, and they were. They're hypothesized to have been a police force early fifth and fourth century BCE.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: I think that sounds right. Yeah.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: And they source comments that 300 armed Scythians, which were a nomadic people from Iran, that lived in the european steppes or the european plains, for lack of a better way of putting it, and they were public slaves in Athens. And what happened is they were slaves, but they were slaves that were purchased by the government for the purpose of keeping the peace on the streets in.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: Athens, which happened a lot more regularly in the ancient world than I think sometimes people realize.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: Now, interestingly, it didn't always involve coercion, which we'll get into a lot with modern policing in America. It didn't involve coercion. This shows an inclusive survey of 51 ancient societies in all continents showed that interpersonal mediation, in other words, communication, actually facilitating conversation and successful communication amongst parties was the first means to settle disputes. They actually talked it out, first and foremost.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, talk out your problems. Communication goes a long way in maintaining healthy interpersonal relationships.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Let's see. My husband and I have been together for how long? Because we communicate with each other, we don't always agree. We don't always have the same plan, but we at least communicate. Another piece is there is a crucial distinction between the people who were legally endowed with policing responsibility and the people who actually carried out the policing duties. Those are two separate groups.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: Okay, tell me more.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: The police authorities belonged to the social elite.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:05:56] Speaker B: So the people who had the responsibility came from the upper echelons of society.
The people who actually were hired came from really diverse backgrounds, and policing was considered a low level occupation. Hence why slaves could do it.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: And last, the police, kind of like our police today, performed a wide array of tasks ranging from. And now, this is not like our police today. Firefighting and garbage disposal.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Well, you know, as time and technology have increased, not to mention population. I can see how those kinds of things could be split off eventually.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Now, as slaves, they had little direct relation to crime control. The responsibility fell to the social elites.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: Interesting. How on earth would that work?
[00:06:47] Speaker B: That's a good question. The sources didn't actually offer that much because this was a. This was the skim through, Cliff notes version of it, because there's enough without going in depth there. That's its own.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: This could be a multi parter. Is that what I'm hearing?
[00:07:02] Speaker B: It's probably gonna be a multi parter anyways. Now, the first police force was created in Egypt. Big shocker, right? Most of our civilization, cultural materials did come to us from Egypt via Greece and Rome. And Rome, exactly, yeah. The first organization was about 3000 BCE.
They had administrative jurisdiction. For each jurisdiction, the pharaoh appointed an official who was responsible for justice and security. Kind of like a commissioner or a police chief.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: And the scythian slaves were charged with maintaining peace and order in public places and public gatherings.
[00:07:44] Speaker A: Kind of like constables, kinda, yeah.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: So they did do bailiff duties. Occasionally they stand in the court and make sure the bad guys stay put while they're doing the court trial and sentencing. They did do that periodically. And now, one of the earliest forms of organized policing came from Augustus. Thank you.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Good old Emperor Augustus.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: Seven BCE.
That was Augustus. And then the earliest policing system in England predates the norman conquest of 1066. It was community based and had collective responsibility, which is a very different thing than the social elites have the responsibility, and it's a very different thing from what I was taught back in the day about the feudal system. Now, interestingly, the shire is the collective group, and it was. This is going to be fun. We're going to have some word play. The person who was in charge of the supervisor of the policing in the shire was a Shire reeve. Play with the word like sheriff. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And that is where we get the term sheriff. And that developed into the office of county sheriff in England and the United States.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: But it was much more vigilante. All citizens were obliged to pursue wrongdoers. If you saw someone doing something wrong and didn't pursue them, you could get in trouble. Citizens arrest was an absolute necessity.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: Then that's actually a good thing.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: But if you didn't do it, if you refused, you got punished. If there were no witnesses, the efforts to identify the criminal after the fact were the responsibility of the victim. There was no government resource for investigation. That came around with Louis XIV in Paris, 1666, in France. Now, the system that with the no governmental agency, they called that the Frank pledge system. If anybody's interested in going and looking up the term, there you go. Frank Fledge.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: We can provide a link in the showcase.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: We can provide all sorts of information. Now, Louis XVI in 1666. So 600 years later, created the first efficient system of policing. A frenchman provided comprehensive definition in his treatise on the police. And his police first meant government, whether the government of the whole state or particular institution within the state, and denoted public order in the city and designated, a more technical sense, the special authority of the police magistrate to establish all regulations necessary to promote public order in an urban environment.
Now, then, we move into the next century, and more Frenchmen put out an encyclopedia, find it mildly amusing that we're.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: Not even at America yet, but we're getting there. The French and the British and the Dutch and the Spanish all did.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: They colonized, which means they brought all this with them. Which is why it's kind of important to understand. Exactly this is what they brought with us here is where we're going to break off, though, because we are looking at 1760s. So we are now into the founding of America.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Well, we're past the founding of it. Well, no, into the founding of the United States.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: We're already colonies.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: We're already colonies, but we're into the actual getting close to the revolution itself and founding of the United States. But this is important to understand that the people that moved here and then the people who were significant aides and therefore close friends of the people who were completing the revolution, had massive, significant influence on the basis of our police system. Because there was a police system in America before the slave patrols. Okay, okay, so tell me that's where this all comes down to.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: Okay, so then tell me more.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: So police comes from French and means the regulation and government of a city or country, as far as regards the inhabitants. So police meant governance, preservation of security being just one component of what the police mandate was.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Okay, so now I want to know, what's the french word for police?
[00:12:12] Speaker B: But I remember there's the political philosopher. Montesquieu was huge in the politics and the political discussions of the founding fathers. So I know they were reading this because they were reading Montesquieu. They were talking to Montesquieu.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: So he actually stressed the features that were. I just talked about the police mandate, the important features of policing. He even wrote an in spirit of laws. He also suggested that in France, there was a crucial feature of policing. Felonies in contemporary wording versus misdemeanor. They made a distinction. Felonies, as we call them, were tried by the various city parliaments, which acted as courts provided accused with due process safeguards stipulated by the law. Minor, everyday offenses, also known as misdemeanors, were dealt with by the police officers and, if needed, by police courts that had very few procedural formalities so they could get through quickly. So a pickpocket would likely be prosecuted by police. In a police court, a murderer would get tried in what, for us, would be essentially the state supreme court equivalent.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Okay. That was essentially their two levels.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: Okay. I wonder how they broke it down for area to area.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Louis XIV set up policing districts.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Makes sense. It would take an awfully long time to get people, everybody to Paris.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Yeah, well, they set up policing district. They set up sectors for various. Within the districts. They set up sectors for various. Various police.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: So this whole.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: This whole concept of the urban stacking system of the police administration was developed in France. And then we get to America, and as we saw, this was all brought to America first. So it was there. It was. It was part of the culture. It was part of what was being practiced and in place. What we added were the slave literals.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: And that's where the american edition comes in. And the change.
The alteration to the french system.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: When I've heard people, because I am one of those people who's foolish enough to read the comments, some days it's entertaining, and some days it's a less. It's. Some days it's a lesson in, why did you do that to yourself? But some days, it's actually kind of entertaining. And I've seen a lot of people comment about policing started with slave patrols. And I'm like, I don't know if that's quite 100% true.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: The interesting thing is. So I'm not surprised I even know where they're quoting. And nothing against this source. It's a great source, but it is even more highly biased is the NAACP. They flat out say the origins of modern day policing can be traced back to slave patrol. That is how they open their section. And I respect and understand that they have a very. That absolutely. There has been a major influence.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: Oh, yes.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: On policing, and it very much altered the system that was in place.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: I can see that. Because racism has always been a problem in our country, and setting up a slave patrol can very easily set up the mindset that it's. It's okay to police based on race.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: And it's okay to use tactics of excessive force to control and produce desired behavior. Yep. The slave controls continued to the end of the civil war and passage of the 13th amendment, abolishing slavery.
Following the civil war, during Reconstruction, the slavery slave. I can talk. Today, slave patrols were replaced by militia style groups who are empowered to control and deny access to equal rights to freed slaves.
Again, this is NAACP. And I respect their historical research and their perspective and their view, because this is their story.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Yes, it is their story.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: So I respect and am sharing their story in their words. Yeah, but the. These groups relentlessly and systematically enforced black codes, the local and state laws that regulated and restricted access to labor, wages, voting systems, general freedoms for formerly enslaved people, the criminal justice system, and we will see more of this, is heavily impacted by this bias of police mentality and outdated judicial precedents.
It's driven to, according to the NAACP, by racial disparities. And the black community does continue to be a target as we keep seeing minority communities in general, but especially the black community.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: You can see it easily in mixed communities as well. I live in a very mixed apartment complex, and despite the fact that I don't know many of them, I am fiercely protective of my neighbors. I have seen instances in my own neighborhood that look suspiciously like racial profiling.
And I will tell you right now, not much makes me angrier than that.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: I'm starting to wonder if the car I was telling you about that keeps driving by, it's a police car, because that's the only one that has these insanely bright lights to shine into people's windows.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: I don't know, some of the newer leds on cars.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Oh, no, these are not.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: Oh, no. Shining.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: These are on top of the vehicle.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Shiny in the window.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm. This is new. This didn't happen last year. I'm wondering because we've had a lot more racial minorities move into our area, and I think it's fabulous.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: It makes it so much more diverse for my kids that are going to school there, public school there. I think it's wonderful. I welcome our neighbors always.
But there's this car that keeps coming through. It's a cop carved in the middle of the frickin night. 01:00 in the goddamn morning. Sorry for the language on that one, because I don't usually use that one, but 01:00 in the gods be damned morning with the insanely bright lights through the windows. Fortunately, I'm up, but I feel bad for anybody who isn't.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: I have blackout curtains, so I wouldn't actually necessarily experience that, but it would make me really angry if that's the.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: Same kind of thing, because we've become a more racially diverse neighborhood, and this is now starting.
One of the other big points that NAACP makes relative to the situation with policing is who gets arrested.
We have our prison. This. This needs to be a whole nother topic. You realize that our prison system is a fucking mess.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: Our prison system will be another topic.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: I guarantee you, $81 billion a year, year out of our taxes, and 655 people per 100,000.
Our prison population could fill a good sized Pacific island. Not a small Pacific island, a good sized Pacific island. I mean, this is ridiculous.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: I am really hoping that the federal government will.
Will legalize marijuana. Again, a topic for another. Damn sure.
Because it would cut down on the prison population. And to some degree, I wonder if that's one of the reasons why they haven't. Because a lot of those prisons are for profit.
Exactly.
And. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a topic for another day.
[00:20:06] Speaker B: You know, the NAACP has really proper. A really proper beef. If you look at the statistics on excessive force, or in this case, police shot, people shot to death by the police, 2017, 2024 one. It's increased massively, which is really disturbing as all fuck. To be blunt, we have more and more people every year getting shot to death by police.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: And it's a steady trend growing. And yes, I did verify the facts on. I did verify the data on this one. It's from a company out in Germany that collects this data for various businesses. They have no reason to be modifying their data and messing with things.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: Most likely.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Most likely.
But their business is statistics and data, which means if they are modifying it in some way, it would really bank badly on their profit margin and their business.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: Fair. Good point.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: So they have a lot of reason to offer good data. And back in 2017, we only had 981 people shot to death by the police. Only folks think about that. Only 981 people shot to death by the people that are supposed to be protecting us, not killing us.
Last year, 1163 people shot to death by police.
Two thirds, approximately. I'm looking at a bar graph and approximating here, two thirds are non white.
Yeah.
Does that say that there's a problem? Yeah, it says there's a bit of a problem. And does it say that non white are more likely to commit crime? Not necessarily. As we dig into police training, police background, and all of the other fun things, I looked up for this.
I was taught as a child, officer friendly and Andy Griffith and Barney Feit, you know, you're taught that. Trustworthy, affable, this is the guy you go to when you have a problem. We were taught in school, if you have any issues, go find the nice police officer. The police officer will help you. I hate to say it, but I don't teach my kids that.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: A lot of people don't. I have friends and colleagues who are black, and I gotta tell you, I'm.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: White, and I don't teach my kids that.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: The things that they have to teach their children, oh my God. Have to teach their children to try to keep them safe is just painful and so incredibly sad to listen to that. We live in. We live in a time and a place where they have to teach their children how to keep from being killed.
[00:23:04] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: And it's literally do all of these things to make sure you don't appear as a threat because actually you don't exist. You don't appear as more of a threat because you already appear as a threat because of the color of your skin.
It's bullshit.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: Well, a lot of it comes back to training.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: Oh, I'm not surprised.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: Massive, massive amounts of what I uncovered comes back to training. Some of the data I'm present, some of the data I have is older. But what I was able to cross reference with what we have freely available in the state of Indiana for what they do for police training, it hasn't changed, which means the data might be older in terms of how the police training was happening, but it's not that different from what we're already doing for most of Indiana.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know when the last.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: Time it got updated, I think it said on the website. I don't remember what it was, but even with the updates, it's still not a significant change. They updated bells and whistles to be able to say they updated. They didn't update the core scenarios.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: And that's a lot more common than people realize.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:24:21] Speaker A: A lot of training updates tend to.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: Be small, but the biggest problem I found back to talking about policing, is that somewhere along the way, the police training devolved to moving police into this warrior mentality. One of the things that from the earliest day, one of the sources that I offered was from the earliest day in the academy, when the officers are told their prime objective, the first rule, air quotes, of law enforcement, is to go home at the end of every shift. The implication of that is that your shift is going to be so violent and so traumatizing and so terrorizing and so horrible that you will have to kill someone to be able to go home at the end of the shift successfully.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Yikes.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: I mean, if you think about it, your first rule is to be able to go home to your family at the end of the shift. The implication is that you might not be able to, and it's not because of overwork or too much paperwork, it's because of a very real threat to your life. And that is what they are taught from day one in the police academies.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: While, yes, it can be a possibility, and it's not necessarily a bad idea to make them aware of this fact, you are going to be in a profession where you are actively putting yourself in potential danger.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: But the first thing they're hearing when they come in, according to the law enforcement's warrior problem article, the first thing they heard on day one, not just the dangers the officers face in graphic visual detail, but the dying words of an officer who was shot in the line of duty. Folks, there were 27 total officers, and that is tragic in and of itself, that died last year in the line of duty, 2023, compared to almost 2000 civilians that they killed in the line of.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: In police related death.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: In police related deaths that were not just police related, they were officer shot.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: They were officer caused.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: They were officer caused deaths.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Did they just check on deaths from shooting or did they check on deaths from other situations? Like what happened with this is police.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: Shot to death, people shot to death by police in 2023.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: It would be interesting to see what the statistics are for people who died. Like George Floyd did.
[00:26:57] Speaker B: I know that's a whole nother ball of wax statistics. This is just the gun issue. Yeah, and, but when day one, this is what you encounter. But people need to understand the us police have killed more people.
This is, this is another statistic pulled from an article that I was reading. The us police killed more people in the first 24 days of 2015 than british and welsh police. British and Welsh. The entire main UK, main Isle of Great Britain, not including Scotland, including Scotland, killed then did in 24 years.
In 24 days, our police killed more people than they did in 24 years. That's a problem.
[00:27:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I do know a big difference between uk police and, and american police is they're not allowed to carry guns.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: Ah, some uk police, some can.
[00:27:57] Speaker A: Yes, some can.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: But even in countries where all police and many civilians carry guns, the us police officer still out kills kill all of them. They kill civilians at twelve times the rate of the armed police force.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: In Australia, another place where significantly heavier.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: Gun laws, they only killed six people in 2011. Four times the rate of Canada, where civilians and police can have weapons.
[00:28:24] Speaker A: Can have weapons.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: And yet us cops are killing people at four times the rate. These are statistics from 2015.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: Can I do, I believe, nine years.
[00:28:33] Speaker B: So it's been nine years from those specific numbers. However, if you go back and look at the statistical trend of the rise in number of police killings via gun that we were looking at.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: It still stands to reason that the numbers are not probably that far different still.
[00:28:51] Speaker A: No, probably not. I don't know about. They may be a little higher in the UK and Canada because I know there's been a certain amount of unrest.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: But ours have also gone up higher even still.
[00:29:07] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Yeah, they might have gone up, but ours have also compensatorily gone up too.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: The comparative percentage may have changed, may have lowered a little bit, but I doubt it. Probably not that much.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Sarcasm?
[00:29:24] Speaker A: Fair.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: As a group, police collectively kill between two and three civilians per day. Over a thousand civilians per year. That does not sound like someone I want to trust.
[00:29:36] Speaker A: No. When back to my neighborhood, when I see six police cars clustered in an area because they have two teenage kids sitting on the side of the road.
Why do you need six police cars to deal with two teenagers? I mean. Yes, yes, teenagers can be a little bit rabid. The brain reconstruction and the hormones running through them can make them a little rabid sometimes, but not that bad. In high school, we had a. We had a police officer in my high school. I swear to God, he was one of the best bouncers I've ever seen. His main job really, was keeping an eye on the common area during the lunch periods. And again, great bouncer. He was really good at breaking up fights.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: You got damned.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: Ok, I know, but you're talking one cop in a group of, like, three or four. Three or four teenagers who are basically trying to beat up on each other. One cop is separating them. Not six one.
[00:30:42] Speaker B: You got damned lucky, because here's my problem with police in schools. Avon recently partnered with the police to have a greater. An Avon police force that is dedicated strictly to policing for the schools. Yes. A subset of the Avon police force is the Avon school police force. This scares me because police aren't trained as teachers. They are not trained to deal with juveniles that are nothing. Law breaking juveniles. They are not trained to deal with the standard juvenile interaction of I'm having a bad hormone day and I'm going to beat the crap out of this guy and sit. You know, you separate him, you two go to your different corners. Once you calm down, we're going to sit down and talk it out. They're not trained to do that, which.
[00:31:29] Speaker A: Is what he would usually do.
[00:31:30] Speaker B: They are trained to put them in fucking handcuffs. Okay? Not having a teenage boy not really fond of this.
My kid won't do anything. I know this. But I don't trust that he won't be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The cop won't handcuff him, and I'm gonna have to go bail his ass out of jail because the cop was overzealous. Because this is not. This is never happening as we've seen.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: And your child, as a typical teenager, can absolutely shoot off his mouth.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: Statement of century there, right?
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Typical teenager. We don't necessarily have a filter during that time period because the amygdala. Amygdala, however the hell it's pronounced, I own here, is the part of the brain that is running the show, and the amygdala is absolutely the emotion center of the brain. So you have people being run strictly by their emotions, crowded together in a building, not knowing how to deal with conflict resolution. When you have hormonal, emotional teenagers involved, it's dangerous. I'd rather see social workers.
[00:32:40] Speaker B: No. To be honest. No, that's. Indiana passed their law on that one. They're allowing pastors in, non social workers.
[00:32:46] Speaker A: Oh, for fuck's sake.
[00:32:48] Speaker B: Yes, they're allowing pastors, and just like they're allowing take the kids out for doing religious stuff whenever you want to. But that's a whole nother. That's a whole nother ball of wax day.
[00:32:58] Speaker A: Oh, I wonder how many churches Satan pastors, clergy are going to be applying for those jobs.
[00:33:03] Speaker B: I hope several.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: That will be fantastic.
[00:33:06] Speaker B: I hope several.
[00:33:07] Speaker A: I am not. I'm not a satanist, but I do love the satanic church.
[00:33:10] Speaker B: Your situation with the teenagers. I have a suggestion where the teenagers. People of color.
[00:33:15] Speaker A: Mm hmm.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: So that's a known issue. Racial profiling is a huge known issue. I'm sorry. They don't call it racial profiling. And because I was looking at the police training material, they call it shooter bias. They don't even call it racial profiling.
[00:33:33] Speaker A: Shooter bias. Tell me more.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: Threat perception. Failure is the larger descriptor of it.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Okay, what does that mean?
[00:33:42] Speaker B: That means you perceive a threat that isn't there. And that frequently occurs when an officer encounters an unarmed person and mistakenly believes they're actually armed, which most often occurs when they either think that the suspect is reaching for a weapon in their pocket or waistband, or when the suspect is holding another item that they decide to mistake for a gun. Other items can include, and this is straight from the Indiana training area, wallet, cell phone, because those look like guns. Anyway.
[00:34:15] Speaker A: Teenagers are not James Bond folks.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: When threat perception failure occurs, it's disheveled disproportionately against black Americans.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: Of course it is.
[00:34:22] Speaker B: They've done actual different article. The link is in the materials that will upload, but I don't have specific quotes from it. But another article I was reading talked about a couple of different studies that were done relative to this concept of threat perception to see what the racial bias is. Here's the thing. When you're going in for a study that, you know, this is what it's about.
The act of knowing that it's a study changes your choices.
[00:34:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: And so it impacted to show that threat perception failure wasn't a thing as bad as we're making it out to be. But the statistics gathered outside of these specific psychological experiments say completely otherwise, that it is a racial thing, that the police officers have a greater likelihood of deciding to shoot an unarmed individual if that individual is black. And that's what they call shooter bias.
[00:35:20] Speaker A: That's shooter bias.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: Black men only constitute, at the point of the writing this article. In 2015, only 7% of the population, roughly 36% at that time, of unarmed men killed in the United States by police officers were black.
[00:35:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: So these two kids needed six cop cars because, you know, they were black.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. I didn't even mention that. But yes, they were. They were.
[00:35:48] Speaker B: Well, that's why I asked. Were they people of color?
[00:35:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: So, absolutely.
[00:35:52] Speaker A: I watched another officer pull over two people from different parts of the complex, because there's a public street running down the middle of my apartment complex, and one person pulled out from one side. He pulled them over, got out of the car. Another person was pulling out from the other side of the road, and he directed the person to park directly behind his vehicle, conveniently hiding his license plate.
[00:36:19] Speaker B: Lovely.
[00:36:20] Speaker A: Want to guess what color both drivers were?
[00:36:22] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. They were probably black.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: Mm hmm.
[00:36:25] Speaker B: Was the cop white?
[00:36:27] Speaker A: Yep. And he would not come close enough to me to let me see his badge number.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: So the result of this in 2015 was that unarmed black men were killed at seven times the rate of unarmed white men.
[00:36:40] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: Unarmed white men do still get killed.
[00:36:43] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: Okay. A cigarette lighter that looks like a gun. Still looks like a gun, you know? Yeah, I'm pulling from Sandra Bullock movie. I was gonna say miss congeniality.
[00:36:55] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I remember that now.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: The Texan with the gun, cigarette lighter.
[00:37:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: But we had the stories back in the early two thousands and in the 2000 teens of the kids that were playing with a toy gun. Yeah. And got shot and killed.
[00:37:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: Because the cop thought it was a real gun. The more they make these toy guns look like real guns, the more danger the kids are in. And the cops shoot first and ask questions of the corpse.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: Exactly. And that is a big problem, you see, with a lot of toy guns. That's one of the reasons why I can't. I don't have the information to confirm this. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if this is one of the reasons why Nerf guns are so brightly colored.
[00:37:47] Speaker B: Probably. But that'll be something we'll talk about when we talk about guns because, you know, we're going to.
[00:37:53] Speaker A: Yet another spoiler topic.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: You know, we're going to. That's kind of got to be out there somewhere because, you know, America and gun issues not. Let me think about this one.
[00:38:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Yet another hot button topic.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: But here's the problem. These people who have so little training, only 480 hours, so twelve weeks.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: So back to the fact that they only have three months of training.
[00:38:17] Speaker B: Three months of training. What do they have to deal with? They have to deal with these imagined cops and robbers scenarios because, again, think about how we play it as kids. Cops and robbers. It's always violent.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: Mm hmm.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: It's always violent. You pretend to shoot the robber.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:38:35] Speaker B: You know, that's always violent. You have to run around as fast as you can to simulate that fast police chase.
It's really ingrained from early on this concept of what police do or don't do. It's kind of like the Sesame street version of what librarians do and don't do.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: Right.
[00:38:52] Speaker B: We have these Sesame street definitions from when we're kids and we forget to actually to publicize the reality. It's more dangerous to be a construction worker, to be a garbage collector.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: That one doesn't surprise me with the number of people who don't follow traffic laws.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Exactly. It's more dangerous to be an air traffic controller than it is to be a cop.
[00:39:19] Speaker A: It's definitely a lot more stressful.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: It's still more. The level of the sheer number of things that are more. It doesn't. Cops don't even rank in top ten of the most dangerous professions.
[00:39:30] Speaker A: Interesting. Really?
[00:39:32] Speaker B: Really.
It's just not that dangerous to be a cop. And yet the training they get says, danger, danger, danger, danger. They're always put in this state of heightened fear to train.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: I understand the need to emphasize the fact that you are in a potentially dangerous situation. I don't see a need to give the impression that this heightened state is always necessary.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: It creates a war mentality, a warmind mentality in us versus them, rather than in us helping them.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: And has this gotten worse since the eighties? Because I was in high school in the eighties, so again, dating myself, but I don't remember that officer ever being extremely violent with the kids. Yeah, he was breaking up fights, but it was literally separating them out and basically helping any teachers who were monitors during that lunch period. So that wasn't my experience with cops in schools. That wasn't my experience largely with the police at all. I had a very positive image of a cop.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, it's gotten way worse because the training's gotten more intense.
[00:40:40] Speaker A: Oh, I'm not surprised.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: And in some places, in some locations, in some small areas, it is that south side of Chicago. Yeah, you do have a gang violence issue. A massive, massive gang violence issue. And yes, you do have deport neighborhoods where the people are either scrounging to make their ends meet and survive, or you have the people that are going to take over their neighborhood to try and protect the people in there because they don't think the cops are doing it. And so you have that conflict building. Oh, yeah, that's a reality. There are pockets in these really, really large cities. You get, what was it, 14 million? I think in LA, you get 12,000,010 to 12 million in New York City. These are such massively huge population areas that, yeah, you're gonna have some pretty intense crime happening.
[00:41:40] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. I know. And I don't know now because apparently crime has seriously, it dropped in Detroit.
[00:41:47] Speaker B: But tanked in the major cities.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: But ten years ago, even as early as ten years ago in Detroit, there were literally neighborhoods that police would not go to in the daytime.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Yep. Part of the reason it's tanked so much in those areas is they have taken a different tactic on policing. They have started actually understanding that as police, you have to deal with mental health crises, you have to deal with homeless crises, you have to deal with crime, obviously.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:16] Speaker B: You have to deal with moving violations, you have to deal with community outreach, you have to deal with school discipline. You have to deal with all of these things that are not solved with guns.
[00:42:28] Speaker A: No. And they're not necessarily solved with violence.
[00:42:31] Speaker B: They're not solved with beating people up. They're solved with communication.
And so there's been a strong push in the larger metropolitan areas. It even happened with Indianapolis. I remember seeing this in the news when they did this, they worked with the FBI to set up these programs in Indianapolis. You remember? And I remember seeing that, okay, they set up these new programs and trained the police to not be hammers, to be a swiss army knife that had enough other tools that didn't include violent response, to actually be more like your police officer in your high school, to actually be able to listen, communicate, assess the situation better, think through possible solutions, come up with programs that can actually work towards rebuilding some trust between the police and the community and to not necessarily be able to have more accountability. We'll get into that in a minute for the police, because there are limits on how much you can hold the police accountable, but to at least be more open about dealing, taking away this warrior mentality and replacing it with what they're calling a guardian mentality.
[00:43:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And honestly, the fact that I don't know how transparent the IMPD, Indian Metropolitan Police Department, how transparent they've been about that to the community. And I'm not just talking about in a news report. I'm talking about sharing this information with the community, but making that move, taking those steps, actually encouraging their officers to do that, and letting the public know that they're making this shift is what could help the IMPD's and quite frankly, not great reputation, especially in high minority and mixed neighborhoods. It bothers me when people have this mindset of, well, your high minority and your mixed neighborhoods are higher in crime. Okay. I hear a lot of people say, oh, there's higher crime in higher minority communities, and there's higher crime in mixed. Okay, I probably shouldn't say mixed communities. I should probably be saying diverse communities because that's more the correct language.
Sorry, y'all. I was raised in a racist extended family, and some of that stuff is still getting filtered out from my behavior. But, you know, I hear people saying that in more diverse communities and in more, mostly minority communities, there's higher crime. I live in a working class, mostly white neighborhood on the east side of Indianapolis. For 15 years, I had my car stolen out of my driveway and my house broken into twice.
[00:45:30] Speaker B: Crap.
[00:45:31] Speaker A: I have no problems with people here. We've had the rash of Kia's and Hyundai's being stolen. That has been happening lately because of the software.
[00:45:41] Speaker B: But that's a Kia Hyundai thing.
[00:45:43] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:45:44] Speaker B: That's a national thing.
[00:45:45] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: Local thing.
[00:45:47] Speaker A: Exactly. That's a national thing that's happening, and it's not something that's indigenous to my neighborhood.
[00:45:54] Speaker B: Right.
[00:45:55] Speaker A: I don't see a lot of crime in my neighborhood. And I live in a very diverse apartment complex.
[00:46:02] Speaker B: Oh, there's almost no crime in our neighborhood. And yet the cops are still patrolling in the middle of the fucking night with the really bright lights.
[00:46:08] Speaker A: I would be so pissed.
[00:46:11] Speaker B: Can tell you I'm not real thrilled about it because I'm trying to decompress and get ready to go to sleep.
[00:46:16] Speaker A: Diphtheregh. Deep breath. Right, right.
[00:46:19] Speaker B: All of a sudden, shoom. It's like, really, people, a year ago you weren't doing this crap. What the fuck? Just because we had more black people move in, really? This is not acceptable.
[00:46:28] Speaker A: No, it's not. I don't tolerate racist behavior in my neighborhood very well.
[00:46:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
However, body cameras, oh, they are such a joyous little tool.
They have been shown to be very effective.
[00:46:45] Speaker A: The love hate relationship that a lot of people have with body cameras and not just the police.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, this is a report from an agency police executive research forum, or perf.
[00:46:56] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: They put out a lot of research on a lot of things that impact the police community. And this one on body cams, they did a ten years later, looking back of what we were thinking then, what we were thinking now. And it's interesting, some of the facts they've discovered as part of body camera usage. Some of it no big shocker, but at the same time, it is quantified and quantifiable as part of their research. How police treat people during an encounter. It's definitely more important than whether the officer is wearing a body cam or I. But when officers are wearing a body cam that's active, they treat people better. So some of the findings with the body camera, the recommendations they came up with, with limited exceptions, officers should be required to activate their body cameras when responding to all calls for service and during all law enforcement related encounters, officers should be required to obtain consent prior to recording interviews with crime victims. That covers that whole.
[00:48:11] Speaker A: I can see that being a requirement because of privacy laws, right? What the laws are regarding recording, recording in person, recording over the phone, those kinds of things are all part of the privacy laws, which I believe is part of the 14th Amendment. So, yeah, I can see that being an issue with the body cams.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: And that's the one time they recommend that officers be given responsibility to turn off their own body cam. Is the option of keeping the camera off during conversation with witnesses and community members who want to discuss criminal activity in their neighborhood, because, again, that could potentially lead to some very dire consequences in a high crime community.
If you have gangs, situations, things like that, that the body cam footage becomes public. There's the witness. The witness is now a target. Is now a target. Exactly. Policies should length specify the length of time for which recorded data must be retained. That's another issue. It gets dumped before anybody sees it.
Oh, yeah.
[00:49:19] Speaker A: I had not considered that possibility of corruption. I said it, I meant it, because.
[00:49:26] Speaker B: They'D never do that anyway.
I warned people I'd be snarky and sarcastic.
[00:49:32] Speaker A: This is.
[00:49:33] Speaker B: This is me.
[00:49:34] Speaker A: The history of policing in America absolutely has to include corruption. Back in college, back in the day, in the Stone Ages, I was transcribing interviews for. I worked in the archive section of the library, and I was transcribing interviews from the first black police officer in Muncie, Indiana.
[00:49:58] Speaker B: Oh, cool. That sounds kind of neat.
[00:50:01] Speaker A: It was a historical interview. It was a. It was a living history interview. And he got in a lot of trouble because he uncovered a lot of corruption in the Muncie police department.
[00:50:15] Speaker B: And Muncie isn't that big.
[00:50:17] Speaker A: No. Even with Wall Street University, even back in.
[00:50:19] Speaker B: Even back in the day, Muncie was even smaller. Muncie isn't that big.
[00:50:23] Speaker A: Despite having been a college town for most of its history.
[00:50:28] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah, that's kind of wow.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: Lots of corruption in the police department back in the. Oh, lord, was this the forties, probably? Forties or fifties, I think.
[00:50:40] Speaker B: Probably. That sounds.
[00:50:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it's been 30 years. I read that. Listened to those. So it would have been wrong.
[00:50:47] Speaker B: It would have been more nationally, respons. More nationally. Remarkable if he had been a black officer in the twenties. So.
[00:50:54] Speaker A: Yeah, and I don't.
[00:50:55] Speaker B: The closer, the farther back you get. At the beginning of the 20th century.
[00:50:58] Speaker A: Yeah, it was somewhere between the thirties and the fifties. I just don't remember. It's. Again, too many memory slots have been ever written since then.
[00:51:06] Speaker B: They also suggest that written policies should clearly describe the circumstances when supervisors are authorized to review the footage. In other words, supervisors don't get to just review all the footage whenever they want, which to some extent, that would be a protection from harassment by the supervisor to the employee.
[00:51:27] Speaker A: I can see that.
[00:51:28] Speaker B: And that agency should have clear and consistent protocols for when they release this footage to the media because the press is known to be so responsible.
[00:51:37] Speaker A: You know, as someone with a degree in journalism, I should be slightly offended by you saying that.
[00:51:43] Speaker B: Deal.
[00:51:43] Speaker A: However, I love you.
[00:51:46] Speaker B: Deal with it.
[00:51:47] Speaker A: However, since the invention of, quite frankly, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, I can't say that anymore.
[00:51:55] Speaker B: Oh, and then we have the limitations of their living versus what our kids have in school. They spent for the tier one group. They have to live on campus for their training period. Or if they commute. They follow these rules, too. No firearms of any type to be taken into student living quarters.
[00:52:19] Speaker A: Okay, that sounds like college campuses.
[00:52:21] Speaker B: All students in residence will be issued a key to a gun locker for securing their firearms. The gun lockers are located in a hallway just south of the quartermaster commuter and one day seminar. Students are permitted to wear their firearm in class classrooms, cafeteria, and all common areas. But in general, they're not even allowed. They don't even allow their students to have access to their firearms when they're on campus, and yet they have access to firearms in my kids school.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: I have issues with a cop having access to a gun in our schools. And.
[00:52:52] Speaker B: Oh, and the push to arm k through twelve teachers in our schools.
[00:52:55] Speaker A: Oh, my God.
We will cover school shootings in another episode. And I. I will be ranting. I can just warn everybody now. I will probably be ranting, but they.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: Don'T even allow their students on the police academy grounds when they're training to do this, to have their guns on them, unless they're day commute students.
But that's okay. To have the cops or to have the teachers have guns in my kids school. Let me think about this.
[00:53:22] Speaker A: I really don't want somebody who does not have military training and combat related, specifically combat situation related training, having a gun around students, because if you're dealing with an active shooter situation, you are now in a combat situation.
I know what my responses are to trauma. I know exactly what my response would be to a combat situation because my most common trauma responses are freeze and fawnitevere, neither of which is going to do any good in an active shooter situation.
It doesn't matter how many guns you hand me. If my brain is going to freeze up and my body can't do anything, a gun is going to be pointless.
[00:54:06] Speaker B: Yep. But that's kind of my point, is the absolute lack of self awareness relative to the choices that are being made. They keep their cadets safer at the police academy, then their cops are keeping my kid at school, and they don't see a problem with this.
[00:54:30] Speaker A: Oh, the second amendment. People aren't gonna hate us.
[00:54:34] Speaker B: I I don't have a problem with personal gun ownership.
[00:54:39] Speaker A: I don't either.
[00:54:40] Speaker B: I really have a problem with the idiots that say I have to have weapon that can only be used to kill another human being. Gun ownership. I'm all for the people that go hunting. I love venison. And you're not gonna get venison farmed, okay? That's not a thing. And the only way you get it is by gun, is by hunting.
[00:55:02] Speaker A: And I'm kind of surprised that we don't have venison farmed. But anyway, really?
[00:55:06] Speaker B: Especially Indiana.
[00:55:07] Speaker A: Right.
[00:55:07] Speaker B: But anyway, I get it. You know, there are a whole lot of meat products that I am a huge fan of. And I'm great with hunting, and I am great with the guys that have the guns for hunting. That's fine because it can also be used to protect your home, and that's okay. Yeah, but the guns that are assault rifles, again, this is. This is my rant.
[00:55:31] Speaker A: And the struggle with assault rifles is how they're defined.
[00:55:34] Speaker B: I know, but if the gun has no viable purpose, if it's all it's going to do is completely obliterate what you shoot, that is pretty much guaranteed not going to be a hunting gun. So you don't want it? Yeah, I think there is a fairly clear one there. If the design of the gun is strictly to obliterate what you target with it, then it's not a good gun for hunting. If it's not a good gun for hunting, there is no need for it in the private home.
[00:56:00] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:56:01] Speaker B: But that's, again, that's a. We'll get into that one later because we are both very. It's not that I have a problem with the second amendment. It's literally, I have a problem with the replacement phallic object. And yes, I will go there.
[00:56:15] Speaker A: I love the fact that you went.
[00:56:16] Speaker B: There, but again, it's just literally insane. What we're teaching police because we're teaching police that school shootings are going to happen all the time. They happen a lot.
[00:56:29] Speaker A: They happen a lot.
[00:56:30] Speaker B: Which is unfortunate.
[00:56:31] Speaker A: Increase significantly, which is also unfortunate.
[00:56:34] Speaker B: But again, not in Indiana. And I'm not of the mind of. Oh, but not here, not in my backyard. I'm of the mind of honestly, do an actual assessment of what is happening in your community before you make changes that make it more dangerous in your community, not less. And right now, they're making changes that make the community more dangerous, not less, which means they're going to be importing more school shootings more. We have had bomb threats at Avon schools during COVID We had bomb threats.
[00:57:10] Speaker A: We've had multiple threats, but no school shootings. Oh, and I guarantee you this is not an exhaustive list. We've had God threats, and I think one or two shootings. I know Noblesville's had a couple. Kokomo actually had one. A lot of people don't realize this stuff may end up in the, in the school shooting episode, but a lot of people don't realize that the big generational fear for Gen Z and probably Gen Alpha is actually school shootings.
[00:57:39] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.
[00:57:40] Speaker A: They live in constant fear because they're.
[00:57:44] Speaker B: Trained to be in constant fear. Again, I'm not saying, I'm talking students. I know.
[00:57:50] Speaker A: Yeah. They've been conditioned to condition because it's happened so much. They're running into the same generational fear of. And it, to the logical mind it sounds like it should be irrational and it isn't. They have that fear of school shootings being a daily possibility. Like we had nuclear annihilation every day.
[00:58:15] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:58:16] Speaker A: When we were growing up and they.
[00:58:18] Speaker B: Weren'T trained duck and cover for nuclear annihilation. They're trained duck and covered. I for school shooters, notice it's still ducking cover. That's an issue there too, but that's beside the point. Yeah, 21st fucking century. And here we are still with. Our best choice is to huddle on the ground in a little ball and.
[00:58:39] Speaker A: Pray to God it goes away.
[00:58:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And pray to the divine that whatever is happening just goes away. Leaves us alone.
[00:58:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:46] Speaker B: But yeah. There has been one incident wherever in Avon where a student was found to have brought a weapon to the middle school. And there was another incident where a student waved something that looked and was assessed to look to have looked like a gun at a bus driver. The second one that I mentioned, the gun at the bus driver was during COVID back when we were just starting to open.
[00:59:14] Speaker A: Just starting to open back up. Yeah.
[00:59:16] Speaker B: So that's another factor that I found in here is this rise in violence and violent response. Even some of the authors mentioned that it's gotten significantly worse since COVID Now whether that has to be a reflection of the trickle down of national politics could be or whether that is a reflection of we couldn't control Covid, so we can control the. So we have to lock down and control everything we can about it, essentially.
[00:59:49] Speaker A: I find it interesting that the amount of violent crime has risen despite the fact that overall crime has dropped in the last four or five years.
[00:59:59] Speaker B: Well, part of it too is the violent crime happening against the minority communities.
[01:00:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:04] Speaker B: The queer community has been targeted left and right heavily.
[01:00:08] Speaker A: Very heavily.
[01:00:09] Speaker B: Very heavily.
[01:00:10] Speaker A: Especially in the last couple of years.
[01:00:12] Speaker B: Yes. And that the statistics on that show that the violent crime against the queer community has essentially skyrocketed.
But interesting. I mean dealing with minority crime or dealing with police relative to minorities? We're looking at some of the data from us level data from 2001 to 2021. So a 20 year period that I found talks about the fact that both black African Americans and Hispanic Latinos are twice as likely to experience the threat of or use of force during police initiated contact. This is not an opinion. This is fact. Produced by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Based on CDC data, black African Americans are more than twice as likely to be killed in almost five times more likely to suffer an injury requiring medical care at a hospital compared to white, non Hispanics.
[01:01:09] Speaker A: Hmm.
[01:01:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Add to it, you'd ask me at one point, and I did a little poking while, you know, talking because. Multitasking.
[01:01:17] Speaker A: Right?
[01:01:18] Speaker B: Multitasking.
You'd asked about the violence that wasn't done.
[01:01:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:01:25] Speaker B: And so I found a police violence report for 2023, because I think of.
[01:01:30] Speaker A: Things like George Floyd.
[01:01:31] Speaker B: Right.
[01:01:32] Speaker A: Who was not killed with a gun. Right. He was suffocated.
[01:01:36] Speaker B: Right. So 96 people were killed when police responded to reports of someone behaving erratically or having a mental health crisis. So 96 people were killed just because they were having a bad day.
[01:01:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:01:50] Speaker B: 264 non violent offenses got killed by police, nonviolent offenders. Doesn't say what those are. I could probably pour through this in a lot more detail.
[01:02:03] Speaker A: Oh, I'm sure.
[01:02:04] Speaker B: For violent crime, compare 264 nonviolent to 382 violent. That's not a big difference between nonviolent people getting killed by cops.
[01:02:16] Speaker A: No, not really.
[01:02:18] Speaker B: 122 more were people with a weapon. But I. The weapon could have been a knife, and they got shot with a gun. The old adage, don't bring a knife to a gunfight. Well, I'm pretty sure the person with the knife wasn't planning on bringing a knife to a gunfight. 109 people killed at traffic stops. I remember right after George Floyd, there was another black man that got shot and killed because he was driving his car.
He got stopped, shot and killed by a cop.
[01:02:45] Speaker A: There are quite a few people I know who have been, as they put it, got pulled over because they were driving while black.
[01:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's beyond wrong in some of the ways.
[01:02:56] Speaker A: And it's a thing that's been around for a long time.
[01:02:59] Speaker B: Out of more statistics include 95 people were killed who were unarmed completely. 199, 766 of the people that are listed had a gun. So a lot of them did have guns, but 199 had a knife or a sharp object. That is still a legitimate fear potential moment.
[01:03:21] Speaker A: Sure. Especially if you get up close.
[01:03:23] Speaker B: Right.
[01:03:24] Speaker A: Because I got news for you. If they're throwing that knife at you, one, if it's not balanced, it's not going to throw well. And two, people don't realize how hard it is to throw a knife.
[01:03:34] Speaker B: There is a reason that it was a sideshow carnival thing for the longest time, and that was an expert knife thrower doing it.
[01:03:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Throwing a knife is actually not as easy as throwing an axe.
[01:03:46] Speaker B: Well. And they consider having a vehicle to be armed, which goes back to. Yeah, exactly. But it goes back to my statement, and this is the second amendment. Amendmenters will hate me for this one too. With Indiana saying, you don't need a license to have a gun. I need to have a license to have my cardinal.
[01:04:05] Speaker A: Exactly.
[01:04:06] Speaker B: My car is a lethal weapon. Your guns a lethal weapon. You need to have a license. That's simple. But most unarmed people killed by police were people of color. 34 black, 19 hispanic, one Asian Pacific islander, 36, white, four, unknown. How you are unknown. I'm not entirely sure, but it's unknown.
[01:04:25] Speaker A: Could be first native.
[01:04:27] Speaker B: The statistical breakdown on this. Black people were more likely to be killed by police, more likely to be unarmed, and less likely to be threatening someone when killed who are black.
[01:04:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Because of what they teach each other. What they teach their kids. Do not appear threatening.
[01:04:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:04:45] Speaker A: Do not appear to resist arrest.
[01:04:48] Speaker B: And yet they're still getting killed by the police. And this has been going on. This site has statistics. 20, 1819, 2021, 22 and 23. Police are disproportionately killing black people every year.
[01:05:02] Speaker A: Mm hmm.
[01:05:04] Speaker B: They have finally decided that the police be banned from shooting at people. Oh, yeah, the other movie thing. Oh, yeah, you're looking at that one. I love that one.
The. That the police be banned from shooting at people and moving vehicles because it's ineffective and dangerous.
[01:05:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:05:20] Speaker B: Since. Oh, I don't know, you shoot the driver and the vehicle goes uncontrolled and it's a threat to both officers and the public. Despite this, most police departments continue to allow office officers to shoot people in these situations because. That's a brilliant idea.
[01:05:34] Speaker A: Exactly.
[01:05:35] Speaker B: In many countries, police routinely disarm people who have knives without shooting them. You can disarm, but not in America. Oh, yeah, you can disarm.
I know how to fucking disarm someone with a knife, okay? And I'm not even a cop.
[01:05:48] Speaker A: Oh, but you do have martial arts training.
[01:05:50] Speaker B: I know, but the cops are getting the same martial arts training and yet they're using the gun instead of disarming the person with the knife. Disarming a gun technically, I know how to do it. Would I ever try it? Oh, hell no. If someone comes at me with a gun, I'm gonna give them whatever the hell they want. Fair gun moves faster than knife. Knife is still attached to a hand. You can still move out the way and get rid of the knife.
[01:06:13] Speaker A: Even throwing. Even throwing a knife. A gun is going to be faster.
[01:06:17] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:06:18] Speaker A: It's that simple.
[01:06:19] Speaker B: In the UK, a country of 67 million people, where police encounter knife attacks, a similar rate as the US.
Police fatally shot zero people with knives in 2023. In LA county, population 10 million law enforcement officers fatally shot 15 people armed with knives throughout 2023.
This is our same armament to same armament situation. This isn't. Oh, they had a gun. They didn't have a gun. All they had was a knife. So it didn't matter whether the cop had a gun or nothing. The cop didn't need to take their gun out, but the first thing they went to was the little phallic replacement. I'm going to keep going there until it gets through to people that that's exactly what this is. So thank you for listening about this, Juneteenth, and I hope it at least helps you think through some of the possibilities and problems that are surmountable and can change moving forward.
We can change it if we demand that it get changed.
[01:07:22] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[01:07:23] Speaker B: But if we don't open our eyes and say, make these changes, the change will not happen. Period. Guaranteed.
[01:07:31] Speaker A: Precisely. And if we don't change from the top down, it's not going to happen.
[01:07:35] Speaker B: No.
[01:07:36] Speaker A: And yes. And one day we may actually do an episode on Juneteenth, because I don't understand it completely, but I would really like to have someone come on that we can interview who actually knows more about the subject.
[01:07:47] Speaker B: Absolutely. Because I can research all the history of it, and I know exactly what the date is about and everything else, but at the same time, not my direct story in any way, shape, or form.
[01:07:57] Speaker A: Exactly. I know. I've read about it before. It's just not coming to the forefront of my brain right now.
[01:08:01] Speaker B: The date that the last state finally stopped, June 19, was the date that Texas finally said, no more slaves. It was the date that the last pulled out.
[01:08:13] Speaker A: That's right. I knew it was connected to slavery ending. I just couldn't remember past that.
[01:08:19] Speaker B: It was the date that the last southern state finally said, you're free.
[01:08:23] Speaker A: Okay, fine, no slaves.
[01:08:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:08:26] Speaker A: And then they brought about for profit prisons. That's a different podcast episode. That's what we have for today. And we hope you have enjoyed this episode. We'd love to hear what you think. So drop us a line at spilltheteapodcast 224 mail.com. we would also love your support, so please visit our Patreon site or buy us a
[email protected]. spilltheteapodcast thanks everybody.
[01:08:53] Speaker B: Happy two teeth.
