Prejudice and Policing

[Danyelle] Hello everybody. Welcome to Comets Discuss, part of the UT Dallas CometCast network, where we provide discussions on big, trending topics. For this series we’re talking about prejudice. While a lot has been happening recently in regards to prejudice, racism and police brutality, this is not a short-term issue. So we’re talking with UT Dallas experts — while practicing social distancing — to provide you with various perspectives on this topic. I’m Danyelle. Today we’re talking about policing with Dr. Alex Piquero. Dr. Piquero was a professor of criminology at UT Dallas for nine years. He recently accepted a position as chair for the sociology department at the University of Miami. This interview was conducted prior to his departure. We also want to issue a warning for our listeners on this episode. There are mentions of police violence, domestic abuse and bodily harm. Thank you so much, Alex, for taking time out to speak with us today.

[Dr. Piquero] My pleasure to be here.

[Danyelle] First off, can you give us a quick overview of some of the research you do and how it ties into the current events we’re seeing evolving with the police?

[Dr. Piquero] Yeah. So over the course of my uh 25-year career I’ve studied all aspects of crime — why people offend and how the criminal justice system responds to why people do what they do. In that regard I have worked with local, state, national and international government agencies as well as testified on Capitol Hill, was appointed by President Obama to several different task forces over the course of my career and work routinely with the City of Dallas. I was on the mayor’s task force for safe communities here that culminated our work in the end of 2019 where we produced a report to the mayor on non-law enforcement solutions to the crime problem. And I also do extensive work with the media all over the country on various crime and criminal justice issues.

[Danyelle] You said you did some work with Dallas Police Department.

[Dr. Piquero] So it was with the mayor. In response to the over 200 homicides that occurred in the City of Dallas in 2018, the mayor charged the police chief, Renee Hall, with coming up with a plan and that plan was designed to deal with law enforcement approaches. I counseled the department on that plan. The mayor then also created a task force that was designed to come up with non-law enforcement solutions. In Mayor Johnson’s mind the issue of crime can be addressed by law enforcement and non-law enforcement and so we produced a report at the end of 2019 that detailed some of the evidence-based strategies that the City of Dallas could employ and our task force was comprised of community members, activists. I was the sole academic on the group and I drafted a good part of the report that actually was going to be implemented and then COVID-19 hits. What’s happening right now is that COVID-19 and the police-citizen interaction is being magnified in minority communities. When you look at hospitalizations, infections and deaths, a good portion of them are African-Americans and Hispanics and not just in the City of Dallas It’s in every other big city in the United States and you can actually, in the City of Dallas, pinpoint three or four zip codes that have not only the most crime but the worst health indicators in the City of Dallas and those zip codes are in the southeast part of the city, kind of near Fair Park and Oak Cliff and what’s unfortunate is that those same zip codes have had these problems now in 2020, they had them in 2019, they had them in 2018 and they had in 2012 and if we don’t address them now they’re going to have in 2021 and 2022 and so I think what we’re seeing now in the United States, at least this is my hope, is that the call for action is going to be one that people are going to unite behind, put resources in and not talk past one another. When we’re trying to create change, you know, people want change overnight and the world doesn’t operate that way. Governments don’t operate that way. We got to think about change in three ways: change occurs with low-hanging fruit. So what can I do right now that everybody’s going to agree with so we can at least say we’ve done something. And then you have to lay out a short-term strategy and a long-term strategy. So what do I want to do in the next six to 12 months? What do I want to do then in the next two to three years? Because the things that we want to do to fix whatever sets of problems — whether they’re health problems or crime problems — these things don’t change overnight. A lot of these are structural and money doesn’t flow, you know, from the sky, especially now in state and city budgets that are just have been decimated with the the response to the COVID-19, the shutting down of businesses.

[Danyelle] So what are some examples of the short-term and long-term solutions that you have advised?

[Dr. Piquero] I’ll focus right now on the policing issue because that’s really what a lot of people are commenting about and concerned about, and rightly so. So some of the short-term solutions are eliminating certain practices of policing that have for whatever sets of reasons still been allowed to happen — chokeholds is a good example. What we saw on May 25th in Minneapolis is not in any police department handbook. What the officer did to Mr. George Floyd — that, that’s just not policing. I think the creation of a national database on officer misconduct is a good thing to do. In fact in many states, including Texas and in Florida, you can get online and see what kind of doctors and lawyers have been disbarred or lost their medical license. I don’t think that asking for police officers to be in that same kind of database is not a far cry from being consistent with everything else. I think that’s perfectly legitimate. In fact we have that in lots of states. I think that’s a good thing. I think the more transparency that organizations can create — and that’s one of those things — the better. When organizations aren’t transparent and this is truly the policing profession especially then people are left to their own devices to say, well, what’s going on? And they make up things — whether they make up things that are right or wrong. You can’t be wrong when you’re transparent. A national database is an easy thing to do. What we got to be careful about is guarding the protection of officers to make sure that when they are put on that database that it was correctly put on there. We don’t want to identify someone publicly with a mistake.

[Danyelle] Do we, society, and then do you as an academic trust that the police would accurately report data on their own infractions? And if so, how often would they update this database?

[Dr. Piquero] Great points. I mean as an academic who uses those databases or who has studied them in Philadelphia and in other departments around the country, I know how messy they are and there are reports that sometimes are really well-filled out and sometimes they’re totally blank. So as a researcher myself I had the same problem as a community person would when they’re trying to figure out what where the real answers are. So I think that the way to guard against this is when you have a community oversight board that works in tandem with the police department where they have access to those files, to how those boards work, is a big source of conflict because some boards want subpoena power, some boards want to be able to be involved in the disciplinary process and then unions get involved so then lawyers get involved. So in my mind if you’re going to have a national database, all of those data have to come from departments because that’s what national level data is, right? When the FBI tells you there was X number of crimes last year United States, the FBI is reporting all of the data that all departments bring up to it and so I think what you need to have is you need to have departments provide that data. But if you have a good community oversight board that works in tandem with the police department that provides another check on the police department data. That would be the way I think you go about doing this. Who manages it? Some sort of federal agency. Some statistical agency. There’s plenty of examples — the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for example, manages all the prison data, all the police data, all the victimization data at the national level so you would just give them this database. What strikes me is it’s 2020 and we still don’t have a national database on police killings or police use of force. I think the body-worn camera thing is another low-hanging fruit but it comes with a lot of costs that people don’t think very carefully about. So if officers are on a 12-hour patrol are you going to turn on that camera for all 12 hours or are you only going to turn it on when they have a contact? So if you have it on for all 12 hours who’s going to pay for the storage of that, right? So it’s not free, so it’s going to go in a cloud. Well cloud storage isn’t free, so who’s going to pay for that? The city? City means tax dollars, means citizens. Okay, so how long do you keep it on the cloud? Six months, nine months, a year? You know, same thing with security cameras in businesses. They delete tapes after a certain period of time. How long do we want that storage to last?

[Danyelle] There are lots of calls right now for defunding or de-vesting in the police and reallocating those funds to other services. What does the research or science or data tell us would be the best option?

[Dr. Piquero] The first problem here — not with your question but with the terminology — is no one really knows what it means to defund the police department. So are we going to defund them by 5 percent, 10, 50, 75? And what does that police department now look like? Over time police departments have had many, many more tasks added to them. They, in effect, respond to any single call for service. Someone’s drunk on the street — who do you call? Call the police. A homeless person’s walking in my yard — who do you call? The police. There’s someone drunk in the middle of the parking lot — who do you call? The police. They’re doing everything. There’s no other non-police agency that responds to all of these kinds of calls. Should there be? Maybe. What does that department look like? Who’s going to fund that department? Who’s going to train that department? Don’t know. No one has the answers for that.

[Danyelle] So you stated that there’s not currently anybody who could fill the role that the police are being called to fill and I know mirroring what you said, the former Dallas police chief David Brown stated something very similar, that police are asked to solve questions that they are not always equipped to solve, you know, like mental health crises, homelessness, domestic disruptions or violence. What are your thoughts on this? And I know you said that there’s not any current agency that could handle those, but how should this be remedied in the future? Police aren’t mental health professionals and they’re not necessarily social workers, so how could these be solved? You know, what does the research tell us?

[Dr. Piquero] In the U.S. we don’t have really good models in that. There are good models in Europe on this and in Australia and I know a lot of people don’t like to compare us with those countries because we’re America and we do things on our own, but there are a lot of lessons learned by the European and Australian countries who demonstrably have much lower crime than we do and what they do is they do a kind of a triage system where some calls for service don’t get routed to the police department. They’ll get routed to a city service agency and then they will send someone out. I think, Danyelle, your question and your comment was spot-on — police are not trained to be social workers. That’s not what they’re trained to do. 他们不是训练来解决国内的斗争. That’s not what they’re trained to do and that’s not what they want to do. But in other countries there are units that sometimes pair up, kind of like public safety officers. So think about a not someone who’s a police officer, who doesn’t have the right to handcuff or use force — almost like a pseudo security guard, a public peace officer who also has training in social and mental health services. And so therein lies an option — that you can send those individuals to calls for service. In Dallas, interestingly enough, they created a pilot program about a year and a half ago where they were pairing up officers with social workers to go to certain calls that the department got and everybody really liked that. The problem is they didn’t have enough money to hire all these people. You only have so many resources and so many people to allocate and everything always comes down to dollars. But I think that the more we can think about that and allow police to do what they’re supposed to do and if you take some of these things away from them — I don’t think about that as defunding, Danyelle, I think about that as re-imagining what police should be doing in the 21st century. Should they be doing all of the tasks that they’re doing? Absolutely not. So I don’t think it’s is defunding. You’re basically moving pots of money around, you know, if you are going to take away things that the police have been adding to their workload that they should never have added to their workload, you are then taking those resources and putting it into an another place that might make a lot more sense. So there has to be some type of police department in the United States. There’s no country that doesn’t have a police department — you just can’t do it because they’re going to be people doing bad things, that’s going to happen, so someone has to respond to those people but there are plenty of people who also need something that the police department isn’t trained to give them and doesn’t want to be able to give them and that’s what we think about when I think about re-imagining and this is a conversation that’s not driven by the police. It’s not driven by the community. It’s not driven by a mayor or governor or senator or president. It’s driven by people working together and at the end of the day police can’t do their job without the community and the community need the police to keep them safe and so that’s what I think about when we hear about these calls about defunding and dismantling. I think that those words are non-starters because we’re not gonna eliminate a police department and “defunding” — people don’t really know what that means. So I like re-imagining because we’re gonna sit back and say, okay, what do we think a police department should look like? We have developed or instituted a mindset where you call the police. We have to change that mindset and there are plenty of officers who do a good job — sometimes that gets lost in the really bad, egregious behaviors that we see.

[Danyelle] If we have a national database, does that mean that we would have a national policy on what is and is not acceptable for police to do?

[Dr. Piquero] This has always been an argument about whether or not we need national standards or local standards. A national use of force policy makes a lot of sense because policing is policing is policing. It’s not different in Dallas and in Chicago or LA or New York. It’s the same job, same people. The only thing that differs is the legal statutes by some crime types vary across cities and states. We don’t have national laws but you could have a national standard for use of force and that local jurisdictions could maybe add something to but I don’t see how they would — I don’t see why they would. So in my mind I actually don’t mind a call for some sort of national standard on use of force because, like I said, use of force in Topeka, Kansas and in Dallas, Texas is the same thing. It’s no different. Policing in the 21st century has to be built on a three-legged stool: trust, legitimacy, transparency. When you have those three you’re doing everything you possibly can do but transparency is the most important thing. You’ve got to give people the information, as much of the information as you can and as reliable as you possibly can give it to them.

[Danyelle] Why do you think there’s been reluctance to be transparent or to have a state or national database?

[Dr. Piquero] Two things: policing historically has been a very insular, guarded profession. There has always been this terminology called “the blue shield.” It really is an insular profession. That’s historical. It’s still pretty strong. I think the stronger thing, Danyelle, are the police unions. They are very, very strong and they’re going to fight the fight and they have a lot of power. Police unions give a lot of money to campaigns and they are very guarded. They’re in the business of protecting their officers.

[Danyelle] How can the police better — for lack of a better term — police themselves and hold themselves to a higher standard of not falling into, you know, racist or stereotypical or other types of prejudiced isms, and how can they do better now in the shorter term?

[Dr. Piquero] Great question. I think there are two things, and these are low-hanging fruit things that departments can do right now. The first one is something that actually Chief Hall instituted about two weeks ago, which was, I call it the “see something, do something” rule, where an officer who sees a colleague doing something that’s egregious doesn’t stand by and just let the officer do something wrong like we saw in Minneapolis. The most important thing is that the training that happens in the academy and then the training that has to continue while officers have left the academy now have been on the job for 1, 2, 5 years is we need to have implicit bias training and we need to have ethics training and we need to have continued de-escalation training and I call it booster shots. When you get vaccines you get sometimes you get multiple shots every three or six months, whatever. I think that the more training we can do, the better. One of my colleagues at UCLA, Sandra Graham, is a social psychologist. She actually came up with this technology to actually train people to look at unconscious and conscious stereotypes — Black-sounding names, Hispanic-sounding names — and so, you know, people may not realize what something is code for. Officers need that kind of training. And there’s also cultural training. I give an example — a personal, human example — of me. So I’m Hispanic, Cuban, and I was raised that when an authority figure talks to you, you look down, which is very contrary to what a lot of people are taught to, you look right at them and so one person being taught to do something may not be a sign of disrespect in their culture but it might be a sign of disrespect in another culture. What we need not just in in criminal justice but what I think what we also need everywhere is that people are trained to understand and respect different cultures. There are departments right now, Danyelle, in the country that don’t do implicit bias training. Which it’s mind-boggling to me. There are departments that don’t do mindfulness training and this is really important, this idea of mindfulness training. What officers see on a daily basis, they see the worst of human beings — they see them when they’re drunk or high or have gone to the bathroom on themselves and just in fight. They just see the worst of the worst of the worst and they need sometimes to de-stress and so there are mindfulness programs the Dallas police department’s being is doing a little pilot study of one. So there are things that we can do to train officers but there are also things that we also need to think about to do to help police officers navigate their roles.

[Danyelle] Thank you so much for talking to us today, Alex. We have enjoyed having you on here and I think we’ve had, like you said, a very important discussion that needs to be had. So thanks for all your time and all your insight.

[Dr. Piquero] Thank you for engaging me with very difficult questions and because those are the kinds of questions that we need to get on the table and have conversations about and then action about.

[Danyelle] Thanks again to Dr. Piquero for taking the time to join us. Be sure to check out our show notes for any related links on this topic. And if y’all could do your fellow Comets a favor by rating and reviewing our show on whichever podcasting platform you use it would be so, so appreciated. Thanks for joining us. Comets Discuss is brought to you by the UT Dallas Office of Communications. A special thanks to senior lecturer Roxanne Minnish for our music. Be sure to check out our other shows at anxdsk.com/cometcast. For the most up-to-date news at UT Dallas visit the university’s News Center page at anxdsk.com/news. Take care of yourselves, Comets.