Good afternoon i'm robert lieberman a professor in the political science department at johns hopkins university and i'd like to welcome you to today's webinar already authoritarian violence policing and democracy this session is the third in a series we call democracy 2020 a project of the american democracy collaborative thinking clearly and critically about american democracy has never been more important than it is now at a time when the integrity of our democracy is apparently under threat the american democracy collaborative is a group of political scientists some of us who study the united states including previous crises of democracy it has faced and others who study the conditions that have threatened democracies around the world we've come together to examine the state of american democracy today you can read more about our projects at american democracy collaborative org there you can view recordings of our previous webinars and find information about upcoming events and other projects i should also add that a recording of today's webinar will be also available there soon our next webinar will consider questions about the so-called deep state and its implications for democracy and we'll be following that up with future sessions leading up to the 2020 election so to be sure to watch the website for updates once again that's americandemocracycollaborative.org we're very grateful to cornell university for making this series possible particularly the generosity of the inaudi center for international studies and the institute of politics and global affairs and lastly we urge you to tweet about the webinar either as it happens or afterward using the hashtag democracy2020. now i'd like to introduce the moderator for today's panel rob mickey a professor in the political science department at the university of michigan rob is a leading scholar of the history of american democracy and democratization and we're very grateful to him for joining us today rob i'll turn it over to you thanks rob um it's an honor to take part in this initiative and in particular in today's webinar on such a vital urgent topic um i'd like to introduce our three panelists all of whom are expert in different elements of policing and how it interacts with politics and democratic countries whether those democracies are healthy or as rob mentioned democracies facing many challenges they are first uh professor sabrina karim sabrina could you wave please sabrina is the assistant profes assistant professor in the department of government at cornell she's the co-author of the award-winning book equal opportunity peacekeeping women peace and security in post-conflict countries next is professor iobami lani yanu um are you waving see there he is um io is an assistant professor at the university of toronto where he studies race policing and social inequality previously he worked as senior research scientist at the center for policing equity in new york city where he worked with police departments around the us to identify and correct racial disparities in the ways police con contact civilians and use force he's published fascinating articles recently on how new york voters responded to the city's stop and frisk program and on how gentrifying neighborhoods are policed third and finally is professor vessel weaver there's vessel waving vesla is the bloomberg distinguished associate professor of political science and sociology at the johns hopkins university among her many publications is the book arresting citizenship the democratic consequences of american crime control with amy lerman professor weaver is revolutionizing the study of the political attitudes of americans living in heavily police communities and i'm hoping to hear we get to hear from her about that work and also about its lessons for thinking about american democracy today before we hear from the panelists i just want to remind you as rob said that audience members should use the question answer box anytime they want to enter questions and then at about 1 45 we'll start fielding those uh to get the ball rolling i'd like to hear a response from each of the panelists to just the just to the summer we've had so far this summer as witness as we all know widespread protests across the u.s in response not only to recent killings by police but also to the centuries-long fact of the often intensive and violent policing of poorer communities of color most recently we have the shooting of jacob blake and the murder by a white supremacist of two white protesters of police violence local law enforcement has responded to all of these protests in different ways often brutally the federal government has even responded forcefully using tear gas to disperse crowds and empowering unidentified law enforcement personnel some of some of whom have even used unmarked vans to pick up protesters this is happening in a nation of course that provide that prides itself on the ideals of freedom limited government justice before the law and equality for all so to kick off our discussion i just want to get a sense from our panelists what do you find most striking in all of this what surprising what is it dreshla could you get us started sure thank you rob and i wanted to thank the folks at cornell for really putting this all into motion and and for inspiring these conversations so what i find most glaring there's so much um is that we're seeing in real time simultaneously how armed white extremists are confronting a laissez-faire distant hands-off response by the state by police authorities um to storming government buildings with guns or even handling white militia members um you know with with giving them water bottles and saying we appreciate you we really do alongside the punishing crushing of protest when blacks and their allies have called for simply the right to life the right to have their bodies not me be molested again and again and again intergenerationally and across the decades when they call for the right to not have their communities occupied by police and so this real-time contrast between violent police responses to the latter versus the ability of some citizens to claim non-interference by government to claim non-interference and even encouragement by police authorities and i think the most dramatic recent examples are of course police high-fiving white militia groups who gunned down protesters and encouraging them with water bottles or idaho police not arresting armed protesters who threatened officials and normally because i think of and we can talk about this because of the features of our political geography and because of segregation we don't see this as clearly as we're witnessing it today we don't see how police differentially enforce the law as clearly but it is beautifully and tragically showing i think a theory of the state in action a theory of american democracy or american anti-democracy in action the duality of how the state operates in some communities and for some citizens versus for others i think the second uh glaring thing to me is that we built this system democratically and then we are shocked by it when it reveals itself to violate democratic norms and to violate uh democratically accountable uh governance and yet what i would propose is that the authoritarian methods being used to crush protests were practiced honed funded and allowed by mass publics in the policing of black neighborhoods who democratically put in place policies that would render many in black communities available to be stopped and frisked and picked up on charges of fitting the just or suspicion of fitting the description and electoral fears of crime produced the policies that we now see the consequences of and ever expanding police budgets to deal with problems that are fundamentally about economic property and so i guess i would end by saying that the arbitrary power on display now has been a regular feature of the experience of political authority in black communities and the state-sanctioned violence and surveillance of blacks creates the foundation for the violent responses to protests we now see sorry that's the first you're muted um uh thank you io how about you what's what strikes you in this summer i know you spent a lot of time thinking and researching about policing as the consequence of democracy in a sense especially was getting at yeah you know um you know personally you know personally i find the you know to center the activists and the organizations engaged in combating uh police violence racism and white supremacy but you know i find you know at a personal level and as someone who's you know uh experienced and viewed many of these events uh from abroad uh you know just be incredibly encouraging and inspiring uh you know in the face of indomitable persistent uh pervasive white supremacy and white violence you know i'm truly struck by you know the courage and the capacity and the history of organizations like black youth project 100 use for justice in los angeles we've been organizing in some of the most dominated environments and communities for decades you know as a student um and even as a child uh you know you know i really appreciate our framing of the conversation around authoritarianism and illiberalism and uh so on and so forth you know a student a child two sort of movements against uh authoritarian regimes uh you know the narration behind tiananmen square uh and sort of strangely uh the student movement uh in serbia that overflow silvan midosa and milosevic uh for me i just found incredibly inspiring and as i reflect on the protests uh besides the black lives matter movement um its pervasiveness across the united states i cannot help but be drawn to those organizations organizing in spaces that are thoroughly illiberal and increasingly authoritarian right i cannot help but imagine uh the women of color right in los angeles and in chicago who have lost children to police violence whose labor and organizing have brought us to this moment right it's their labor they're organized uh organizing and their ability to imagine better futures that allow us to think about abolition that allow us to think about the fundamental restructuring of policing the united states and that have you know activists um you know non-activists democrats republicans police chiefs um local political leaders talking about radical disinvest investment reinvestment abolition so on and so forth um i am truly struck by uh the number of folks in policing who are talking about shrinking the footprint of policing um you know might be the language that uh you might hear as opposed to abolition or disinvestment and i'm also struck by someone who's located right now in toronto canada the effect that black politics in the united states has on black communities outside of the united states right um there are black communities all throughout the western hemisphere they're black communities in europe in my conversations with activists and political leaders and police leaders in canada and in the united kingdom it is incredible the sort of transnational uh effect right that the black lives matter movement has had on behaviors attitudes among black citizens in these countries and on policy um uh moving forward so you know that to me is truly strict thank you sabrina how about you you have a you have yet a third vantage point um to help us think about this summer yeah thank you rob and thanks to everybody for being here this is a really exciting conversation um hopefully it won't be too dire um i i i want to start by saying that i think that the events of this summer you know putting them in historical context it's not new what we have seen this summer has been going on and in particular in in communities of color all the time every day and so it's you know we have to ask ourselves what was so unique about the summer that it's it's at the forefront of the media uh all you know in early june and then again um this past week um but in order to understand that i think uh it's important to kind of break down the different uh types of violence that we've seen and um the different kinds of patterns that i think at least that i've kind of observed thinking of this in a comparative perspective um so first the the kind of everyday police violence that we have you know hear about in terms of you know it almost seems like every day when there's somebody that's shot by a police officer um that is oftentimes attributed at least the police will attribute it to a few bad apples but we all know that it's institutional racism that's that's you know within the organization that's causing this kind of violence um at the organizational level right so the individual police officers because of racist attitudes racist cultures within police departments there's that that just leads to that kind of violence but what that if we just assume that that's the only kind of violence then what we don't see is that there might be a strategic nature to police violence as well and so that's actually the second kind of violence that i wanted to talk about and this is really um similar to what bachelor was saying about the kinds of enabling factors um so why is it that the police department enabled the white militia to go and shoot uh shoot shoot peaceful protesters gave them water bottles why is it that the police did nothing when the militia was allowed to enter into the michigan state capitol this to me suggests that there might be a strategic interest in police departments in permitting violence perhaps delegating violence to militias uh to uphold their interests right police are strategic actors they are political actors they have interests and so we need to consider that in terms of thinking about maybe there's a strategic element to police violence as well uh thirdly uh we saw the use of federal agents not for the first time but for the first time when the state did not authorize it uh in in oregon and um potentially other places washington dc etc so this is the first time so we have an ex this this is we have the president the executive for the first time using federal agents to quote unquote protect property um when the state did not ask for such protection other times that that has happened include enforcing court orders federal court orders or you know during the civil war when there's been other resurrections but that has always happened when the state's governor uh or you know other city of other officials have requested that that to me is one of the most clear signs of a turn towards authoritarianism or and it sets a very dangerous precedent so these kind of three different types of um patterns i think are important to separate because they all are chipping away at democracy at different ways thanks um so sabrina just mentioned um that this isn't new i'd like for us to spend a little bit of time thinking about these events and at least a u.s historical perspective so vessel io what's what's new here what's different we've had lots of long hot summers summers of of race riots really pogroms of of police-led violence what's different now special you want to get us going sure um well you're asking about sort of historical resonances or you know what are the what are the historical precedents what is what does this look like when we put it into broader um american political historical context and i would say at a very broad level um it's the quest for black citizenship and liberation has always been about the protection of life from coercive institutions including the police um and there was a little bit of a contradiction implied in your in your first statement rob um when you got us going with your initial framing which is you know you said something like you know and all of this is happening in a nation founded on freedom and equality um and i would say that actually if you look at black discourse over time and in the present day black saw this as a feature of american democracy not a bug um and one of the things as i was thinking about this question this morning that i've been thinking about again and again and again is just what explains how familiar this is how well tread um black claims for for liberation from police abuse are and yet the simultaneous failure to learn from and then depart from the past so you don't need to go very far deep to see it so just looking this morning you know in an article uh um that was written in 1969 arthur uh wescow writes during the period from the 1940s to about 1965 when liberal criticism of the police focused on brutality toward black people the liberal solutions were psychological screening to exclude sadists human relations training to soften racial prejudice professionalization to reduce reliance on naked violence and civilian review boards to discipline violators of professional norms all have failed right that was written in 1969 and if you look today you see similarly some of the same you know we need training we need uh um you know to eliminate biased policing in 1977 another scholar predicted that the biggest issue of our day may be one not of how to control crime but of how to control the police and we had studies too so we are all political scientists one by eleanor ostrom and gordon whitaker in the ajps in 19 you know our flagship journal in 1973 says our findings strongly suggest that in the area studied small police forces under local community control are more effective than a large city-wide controlled police department in meeting citizen demands for police protection so why is it that these historic and very clarion calls for a reformed police force a different kind of police protection a different response to safety deprivation have gone so long unheeded that now calls for abolition while the media may read them as new you don't need to go back back very far in black historical discourse to find them they're there um you know more specifically of the calls for autonomy from police that have been the centerpiece of black lives matter um sustained police repression of blacks is an antecedent has always been an antecedent to the consistent political expression of black autonomy self-determination and communal reliance this is one of the most established historical precedents but the least understood except for for a few uh historians calls for black self-determination are a key anchor of black politics since black power the call to shift power to police communities back to the communities themselves animates many local political struggles against police throughout the the decades of the late 21st uh and the 20th century thanks thanks um so io vessel is highlighting these these clear continuities almost this groundhog day phenomenon the u.s and particularly americans of color uh experience as the political system keeps considering and then failing to do much at all in the face of this um your opening remarks though were a little bit more optimistic i'm not asking you to be optimistic but um i guess what she's emphasizing continuities are there any differences that you think are worth highlighting uh you know you know i would say i maintain a a personal hope if uh you know sort of a uh irrational pessimism um because i don't see much uh changing um you know i would really echo what vessel said um there's more in common uh with previous moments in history than there is you know at least personally um then there is different um you know although although i'm not quite sure the extent to which at previous moments uh leaders in policing were talking about uh a sort of paradigm shift from crime reduction um um to public safety and public health um but i wouldn't be surprised if it's somewhere in there in the mistletoe for sure um you know more in common than there is different for sure thank you um certainly since ferguson there's been growing concern about the militarization of policing in the u.s not just in terms of equipment and weaponry although that's that's clear and photogenic but but tactics as well um i was wondering if you all could speak maybe starting with sabrina's speak about this issue the boundaries between um the deployment of the military to preserve order maybe in extraordinary moments and the the boundary between that and the in the use of police and um to maintain order those has that boundary blurred in the u.s um if so how do we connect that phenomenon to thinking about democracy okay thanks um yes the militarization of the police has been a big uh a part of the conversation this summer um i think most infamously the 1033 program which was started under the clinton administration which basically authorized excess military equipment to to give to any law enforcement agency including law enforcement that is in schools that requested it for free they just needed to go and pick up the material um and bring it home uh there's obviously lots of problems with this while a number of the items were you know things like table and chairs a lot of it was also military equipment that was designed for counter insurgency um there is an intimate link between the policing in the u.s and counterinsurgency strategy um u.s counterinsurgency strategy so the 1033 program you know provided uh counterinsurgency vehicles so mraps for example you can look up what that looks like it's pretty scary um which we're actually kind of actually a failure for counterinsurgency in iraq and afghanistan so we have a failed vehicle that is a very scary thing that is now in american streets that was meant for counterinsurgency being used by police so so that is one way that we see militarization there's other ways as well uh so um one of the things that police departments do is hire veterans uh so there's often many programs that try to hire veterans um so you have people with the mindset of the military who are police officers now some might say maybe there's pros to that um that's a question somebody can ask me later um and then there's also the culture um if anybody has read stuart trader's book i highly recommend it called badges without borders it highlights just how closely american policing is related to counterinsurgency and how the same people that were developing counter-insurgency policy in places like vietnam were the ones responsible for advising policing within the u.s so that's those are just a few ways i will highlight when you just end by saying the us is one of them one of the most militarized police um in the world not the only one um but definitely far different from places like in europe um in which many of the police departments don't even carry guns um and and rely mostly on peace officers and so we have a very different kind of policing there's other ways that u.s policing is different maybe that's a question that can be asked later and one of the reasons for that is because of the decentralized nature of our policing system as opposed to we don't have a federal police but i can talk about that later thanks if i can jump in on that and i'm glad sabrina mentioned uh stuart schrader's new book um you know which really shows us the links between global uh policing and you know counter-insurgency efforts and domestic policing but also i think in this conversation around police militarization it often tends to get it often tends to seem like a de-racialized well we just invested a lot of um heavy military equipment in police forces and we forget that our initial efforts at police militarization in this country can be traced back to surveillance of the black panther party i mean the the if you look at the the very first swat teams in this country first deployed in los angeles in reaction uh in 1969 um it sent 300 officers you know battering rams uh tear gas army tanks into into the the panther headquarters um and i think also you know this understanding of and this kind of goes back to the question you were asking earlier rob um about sort of what are the historical continuities and precedence versus the differences i do tend to see more uh similarities um than differences i mean if you look at police behavior today towards protesters and police behavior in say 1967 in detroit or in crown heights or in any of the the number of uh local challenges to police authority and and normally challenges that came out of um uh uh police killing a young uh black person you can see how deeply how how much the similarity uh they share so you know police reacting violently in retaliatory ways in detroit 1967 i just went and looked this up and police said to a black protester we're going to kill all you black ass n-word pimps and throw you in the river we're going to fill up the detroit river with all you pimps and right this is so today a lot of us are showing shock at how police retaliation against protesters and and sort of the violent uh tactics that are being used but this is incredibly consistent with how police have responded to mainly black protests in the past i think the difference today is that we're seeing them use the tactics on white protesters so why is it when the same tactics that are used against blacks migrate to white protesters um then we're ready to call them authoritarian right but we're not prepared to do so when they just sort of you know uh surround the everyday lives of of black black and brown communities i would be remiss if i didn't sort of bring up um you know things or history from the canadian context one of the things that i really appreciate about this authoritarian framing is that it disrupts the american exceptionalism uh the initial framing that we've had right so the canadian mounted police the mounties that you know as we know them in the united states right were initially you know their first job in canada was to clear land purchased by the federal government from the hudson bay company of indian aboriginal and metis people right so you can imagine if there was a police force um that forced the cherokee out of georgia a trail of tears to police force and that became effectively the symbol of pleasing in america right that's that's in this you know the true north quote-unquote uh um canada and so you know i've worked actually with uh police data here with the ontario human rights commission and you know the disparities that we see in terms of use of force a serious injury deaths in custody um sexual assault by police of persons of color the magnitude of the disparity is the same right so of course you know we know that there are about a thousand eleven hundred uh uh police killings of citizens united states and in canada that my number might be around like 40 or 50 right but the disparity you know the estimated disparity is about the same right so um clearly the united states is exceptional right in its in its violence right but in terms of its treatment of people of color in terms of its treatment of indigenous persons you know i would strenuously argue that it is not exceptional and that we should be thinking about these things in comparative terms thank you and maybe in particular in kind of subtler colonial polity perspective right um i mean i would just interject that the you know the first serious policing in the present-day us by european settlers or at least english settlers was um the the pressing into duty of all young white men um and working in slave patrols right as a actually handing out weapons um the use of the state budget to arm our men to uh for this mandatory duty right um so let's come back to the the the theme of all of these um great cornell webinars which is think about the implications of this for u.s democracy um or investors fine if you just want to say or not democracy but how about the american regime whatever we want to call it um i'm just wondering how you guys want to think about um the events of this summer how they relate to other recent trends in american democracy or recent the kind of broader challenges we think of american democracy is facing um [Music] mass partisan polarization um vast and rising economic inequality many white americans panic about losing their status as the demographic majority are these broader challenges helping produce the policing and the protests we're seeing now are they shaping americans responses to these um to police policing and protests how do we how do we fit these together somebody want to jump in y'all are like my summer school class somebody want to jump in well i'll jump in um it's a great question and i think it's something that all of us have struggled with as political scientists there's there's sort of this bifurcation um in the academy between people who focus on you know the trends that you just mentioned rob right declining trust in democratic institutions um you know rising polarization extreme levels of inequality um and one of the things that i have been sort of pushing is we tend to isolate those things and we tend to see those things as being you know as as raising questions about um how how healthy our democracy is and yet we we have historically separated those questions from questions of state oppression and i don't think that we should i think that um we have glamorized and sanitized and promoted a very salutary um view of american democracy as the ideal um against which the rest of the world is judged and if you look to actual lived experience of state authority in actual communities what you will very quickly see is that they do not describe living in a you know a democracy that values their voice a democracy that leaves them alone a democracy that doesn't dominate them um and so ought we begin to to really question um the extensiveness of of american democracy for some communities and so one of the concepts i've been talking a lot about lately is a concept called racial authoritarianism that there is a different experience of government um happening from below and it's very easy to see um it's it's you know they talk about police occupation of their neighborhoods um so one you know just one quote from this larger um in in my introduction rob you mentioned my work on um sort of collecting the largest archive of policing narratives by the police um and you know just looking at one right now um one person says i'm constant we're constantly under police surveillance there's huge police lights in our communities i'm talking about like military-grade equipment in people's neighborhoods and not just anyone's neighborhoods black people's neighborhoods latino people's neighborhoods low-income people's neighborhoods people can't live like this and another one goes on to say that to basically describe uh their community as being an enemy combatant how this government our government responds to riots and when black people are hurt and we feel like we have to uplift our voice instead of like being empathetic and compassionate like they sent the military or their swat teams at us and like you know it's almost like we're invaders at that point in your own city at any time you can be killed by your own soldier that's how it feels like in america so i think when we begin to think about what are the broader implications of all of this for how we understand how we assess um how robust our democracy is we have to attend to how people actually live and experience it it's one thing to have laws on the books that tell you that you can't be searched arbitrarily that tell you that a police officer can't just arbitrarily come into your home it's another thing to actually live the live policing as though you are an enemy uh combatant thank you sabrina sure so i was just gonna try to answer that question by bringing it back to the framework that i had mentioned in the intro um which is that kind of separating out these three different um patterns if you will of um police silence and so what's i think what's maybe the most scary or what um i guess uh that might you know like i'll just say scary because it is scary um is that we've thought we in this during the summer we saw all three type all three of these patterns so the the first one that i mentioned again was just the organizational culture of the police being racist sexist etc you know that's obviously gonna mean to violence but what's really concerning is the other two so we live in a country where policing is decentralized which means that there are thousands of police departments um that have their own authority and on one hand you know that makes it very hard for a executive to co-opt in a police department because there's some it's so decentralized um but that leads to much less accountability for any one police department and so if you have now if you are seeing that police departments do have strategic interests that they and they do because they each want to maintain the status quo because they live in a world in which they're getting a majority of the resources from a city or um you know county government they receive quite a bit of resources they want to maintain those resources so they want to maintain the status quo so if they are now going to align with militias to maintain this status quo and and in a you know kind of a white supremacist order if one italian special was saying then this is quite problematic because and i don't think um this is new i think historically the police have aligned with militias in the past um but if we see a rise of that again that's quite uh problematic as well as the cooperation of the any kind of federal agencies um by the executive as we saw this summer as well president trump using federal authorities to police the state um so those two trends to me signal um this this more of a push towards uh authoritarianism or different chipping away at democracy at different ways thanks you know just briefly you know i'm quite curious frankly and narrowly turn out in november and the effect of protest participation experiences of police brutality in these different states um sort of a demographic composition of who was protesting and where you know whether all else being equal we should expect you know individuals who now support the black lives matter movement who um are white and were brutalized by the police right like what sort of effect should we expect in local local turnout um local races in november you know what some of my work touched on but you know given the urgency of um we're given what's at stake in the november election you know a lot of my thinking goes somewhat narrowly uh to that point but it's a it's you know frankly it's a big question mark for me i couldn't tell from that nodding if you wanted to say something no okay um so um i want to hear from you all uh um your answers to the the leninist question what is to be done um but first maybe we um we could just table that and start hearing a little bit from the audience so this first question it reads as follows panelists have mentioned the state is an actor do you find that these problems are caused mostly by the current administration or is this administration no different than prior ones anybody want to jump in so uh um i think there's similarities and differences um i i like freshly outlined um and as we know police violence um and the the types of violence that we see in um minority communities is not new so uh democratic and republican presidents are just as guilty as anyone else and i should mention that it's not just limited to african-american communities but we're talking about indigenous communities so the immense militarized response to standing rock um for example with the indigenous rights movement um you know the strong policing of lgbtq communities strong policing of latino communities um etc all of that i mean it's historically it's done by the right the left everybody uh is sanctioned it or allowed it to happen um what again i think is different is that there's been um it's always been sanctioned and authorized um by lack of accountability as opposed to a mandate by the executive that's that's maybe then that's why i keep alluding back to that is kind of being to me the the big the yellow flag um for for this particular year yeah bachelor when when you say this state do you mean the federal government do you mean the the government at any level of the polity how are you thinking about this when i say the state i mean it uh most directly as local political authority right local police of course they have the backing of of um state and federal government um and and the federal government sometimes you know in the obama administration when obama left office i think there were you know 21 or you know just under two dozen cities under um federal oversight for police malpractice for police abuse for unconstitutional policing um including my my own city of baltimore so when i say the state and i think this is one of the problems is we tend to think of authoritarianism as being directed by a central um uh you know dominant national leader and not i mean you know rob your own work has so forcefully shown that you can have sub-national authoritarianism within the united states it's exactly what um citizens living under jim crow experienced right um you call it authoritarian enclaves right areas where um you can have a national you know federal democracy you can have and it's perfectly compatible with a federal democracy but local authoritarian rule right no political competition no party competition a one-party south um high levels of political violence high levels of of the citizenry not being allowed to to vote and cast a ballot um and one of the things that that has enabled is getting us a bit away from this definition for you know predominant in our literatures of authoritarianism being just a top-down you know executive that wants to seed power uh to to himself um that wants to control the bureaucracy that wants to put in place loyalists and instead see that citizens in this country can experience a locally driven dispersed authoritarian uh um experience of power um experience of government um through the police and we have created a situation where we so invested in policing through democratic means i should say so this authoritarianism is actually perfectly compatible with local popular democracy right we we enabled this we voted it in um and then you get a situation where it's hard to rein in police once you've invested you know in them that kind of power and that kind of autonomy um you know so what's interesting to me is the inability of of powerful lawmakers today and city officials to restrain their own police forces to restrain police abuse and it highlights how how independently and how insulated from oversight and control the police have become as a sort of ungovernable bureaucratic actor that has its own political interests and that is relatively insulated from uh democratic control even though we got that way through normal democratic politics right and um i think it's um it's useful to when most americans who are concerned about american democracy think of the the main challenge or at least uh yeah the main challenge of american democracy being the national republican party but if you take to heart what special is saying you know at the local level i mean almost all of these cities are ruled by capital d democratic officials right they're lower d democratic um as iowa's work has shown there are voters asking for things and getting them but it's it's democratic party officials and local authorities who are who are providing this um this other kind of threat to democracy um sabrina here's a question for you um from an outsider's perspective it seems like the militarization of policing the u.s and the delegation of violence to the militia is intimately tied to how the second amendment has been interpreted uh do you think this is a fair observation and if so does police reform also require constitutional reform yeah that's a great question um so the arms race the militarization of the policing is is related to the second amendment in the sense that that that's the reason that the police give for militarization so they're there they say well you know these communities there's so many guns in these communities we need bigger and better guns than what they have and that creates essentially a bit of an arms race except for that it's racist in the sense that you have militias that uh are allowed to to have white white englishes i should say allowed to have um guns and uh display them and adhere to the second amendment um have their second amendment rights um held up uh and the police for some reason are not afraid of that right they're not afraid they don't need to have an arms race with the white militias but it's only this perceived threat um of of weapons that exist in in minority communities so this this idea that there is an arms race um you know has led to the justifies the militarization of the police um and i would say that it would be very difficult to take away the militarization to take away the guns from the streets if we don't have an amendment to the constitution so they're already out there uh thank you um real quick um someone mentions that claiming that the u.s is already authoritarian may be false and even counterproductive to claim does the authoritarian label risk belittling the suffering of people living under real authoritarian regimes where political violence would leave citizens with virtually no recourse practically talking like this can backfire if people perceive a mismatch between authoritarian alarmism and reality maybe they'll conclude that other claims about the trump administration's overreach are possibly false as well what do you all think about that are you gonna stop nodding and talking i i'm thinking about that question i it's a great question and i think it's something that we we shouldn't we shouldn't flatten the comparisons by using the term i do not mean to flatten the experience the very different experience of people living under military rule or living under despotic power um that said and and i always find this hard to do without actually reading quotes from actual oral histories of american citizens who describe living under a government that bears no resemblance to what i was taught in grade school or secondary school about what government is through american civics textbooks it bears no resemblance where people will outright say the constitution gives us this that and the other right but let me tell you how it actually works in my community you never get due process you're going to be stopped and harassed at the you know tender age of 10 11 12. uh uh you cannot claim uh to to to to be on your front porch without police circling and and asking what you're doing there you can't walk to a park to play basketball or baseball without being uh asked to see your id by police so i agree that it is not it is not the same as living under a central it's not the same as living under a dictatorship or under uh i've been doing a lot of reading lately about policing in in kind of newly democratic or uh post-authoritarian uh countries right it's not the same the levels of of torture and disappearances are not the same but i think of this more as a continuum than as a dichotomy i'm thinking about this more as a there are certain there are communities within our country whose experience of america of democracy has some resonances and some similarities and begins to feel like it it it is more similar to people living uh uh under under under states where um there's high levels of violence against the citizenry um and so how do we think about that yes i agree we shouldn't flatten the distinctions we shouldn't belittle the experiences of people who simply cannot vote or simply you know uh or where military rule um is you know established within their constitutions right but at the same time i think in this country we have too often political observers journalists academics uh the lay public public holds up an idealized version of our democracy that simply does not jive it is out of sync with what actual oral histories and archival accounts of how people experience that democracy when they come from race class subjugated communities and we have to attend to that and so maybe authoritarianism isn't the right conceptual category um i do think that racial authoritarianism is perhaps a a good um conceptual innovation that we can use can i just quickly add that i don't i don't think that it's mutually exclusive like you can have you can have both at the same time and that's what i fear is starting to happen or that's the fear that i have from the events of the summer is that we've seen this racial authoritarianism as a result of racism organizational um or institutional racism and also potentially the strategic um actions of the police but like that's that's potentially a reason for the uh racial authoritarianism but that's not mutually exclusive to actual authoritarianism you can see both happening great thanks um i just want to note to the audience that sorry we're kind of overflowing with ray great questions we've got i think 18 minutes left so um yeah so we're all good on those thanks um so on this issue of of authoritarianism um we got an interesting question that um i'd like to direct io's way to start out and that is can you talk about the role of police unions in all of this and the question asker makes a great point traditionally she says i think of unions as a way to combat authoritarianism but in this case they seem to be aiding and abetting aiding and abetting it so um what's the role of unions in all of this you know that's you know as far as research damage police unions exercise an incredible amount of power right an incredible amount of control in uh protecting police officers when they engage in misconduct uh prevents um civilian oversight right so they will argue for you know a lack of civilian oversight right there uh you know the union is able to mobilize or the effect about mobilizing uh its members in terms of supporting particular political candidates right so in terms of at the local level preventing the sorts of reforms that protesters and demonstrators would like to see right police unions exert an incredible amount of power um recently you know i can't recall if it was uh enacted but you know my understanding is that the national labor labor federations and organizations are reconsidering the membership of police unions right because of this issue because of the contradiction uh that the questioner uh identified right um that said there are you know in terms of legislation in terms of state policy in terms of federal oversight in terms of uh state level accreditation which uh some folks have interestingly identified to the particular place within which we can insert community oversight and community control at all levels police are insulated with democratic accountability uh and you know fixing such that you know addressing the police unions or de-powering police unions um you know isn't the silver bullet that some folks might imagine right police are protected uh in municipal policy state policy federal oversight and in the courts right it is truly a systemic cross-institutional sort of arrangement that allows the sort of you know capricious violence against people of color to take place in the united states so absolutely police unions are part of the equation but but uh you know addressing them or contesting them you know in my opinion there's no silver bullet to this problem any other thoughts on place of unions all you progresses allegedly love unions i don't know what's going on here um it's interesting even to think about the impact of unions on on sentencing policies so i think of josh page's fascinating book on the the policy influence of california prison guards union on i think it was a mandatory minimums in california especially i'm not sure um so we have a similar question here um with the history of police brutality and policing disparities um i guess racial disparities and police behavior how can police departments appropriately respond to some of the non-peaceful and potentially violent protests that threaten property what can be done differently in the future so this is i guess not so much about day-to-day policing but the policing of protest sure you know i think um uh as we re re-imagine um what the police might look like in the future many of the proposals that i've read and that are you know the most compelling to me are to significantly and dramatically shrink the police's role to to engaging or or being deployed when there are clear moments uh where harm to persons can be done right so like you know alex without does a great job of describing this that the police are violence workers that they are trained in violence that they are trained to control situations through violence or threat of violence um and that in you know in instances where there's threat to like physical life that's the you know that may be the only uh situation where the police as we know them constituted right now uh should be deployed right you know thinking about you know how should we respond to you know day-to-day sort of petty threat property so on and so forth you know my sense is that armed members uh paramilitary individuals should not be deployed to those calls right vandalism uh there are other uh institutions other persons um we can imagine other we can't imagine other agencies that could respond to those sorts of calls in the situation you know in a situation where there's large-scale protests against police violence um and uh you know a few you know uh rogue actors or you know uh engaging you know damage to property you know you know i still don't think that the the sort of response that we observed uh this summer uh is justified or appropriate right i think there are a variety of preventative measures that one could take or a variety of ways of sort of like uh reconstituting even you know uh police violence workers or um that could be simultaneously more effective uh and maintain uh uh public health and public safety right i mean just add that i think this is where the militarization bit is really evident um if you look at you know any you look at any picture from the summer and you see you you can it looks like a war zone um the police are out there uh thinking that they're ready for battle they're in fatigues they have the armor they have the the equipment um the mraps and that's what they're that's what they're coming to with against civilian protesters it's a mindset of militarization and what does that mean that means that instead of trying to resolve a conflict peacefully they're trained and their mindset is all about violence right so that the a lot so the first thing should be allowing protesters to protest um there's no reason to escalate but when when the police show up in such a militarized form it escalates the situation so a lot of the times when we hear about violence as resulting from these protests they start peaceful but the escalators are actually the police the police are the ones escalating the situation by showing up in such a militarized form they make it a battle as opposed to it often being started by the peaceful protest so um i think all of you in different ways have talked about american policing as a policy outcome as having lower case d democratic roots it's something that it's a policy secured by people with influence who wanted it so one question asked her notes how can we explain why that is and why state and local democrats are unwilling or unable to rein it in despite campaigning on reform is the answer of psychological racism of police voters and politicians or is it the police are protecting property or is it the police or or a or a paramilitary operation i'll jump in on that oh no go ahead sabrina no i was just gonna ask um well i can start where i think so the one thing that we haven't uh well i think i know you started the conversation in a more optimistic way today um but was about the other thing that happened this summer which was the huge uh swelling and change in public opinion um and um kind of enthusiasm for change and reform this is the biggest movement in american history the black lives matters movement so you know there were more people uh peacefully protesting for this movement than movement than any other time in history which is amazing um and i think we forget that this is it probably an immense political opportunity for reform and so i think one of the reasons we might not have seen uh change amongst you know democratic city officials or democratically elected democrats big d um is because there was never such a big push um this big that kind of gives them a mandate to make change um and so i i i guess the more optimistic note would be that this is an opportunity to make changes and we are seeing cities make changes now they might be superficial changes we can get to you know what reimagining police actually should look like as opposed to you know things like oversight increase oversight or improve training which has been tried and failed um but this could potentially be an opportunity because of what we've seen we've seen the movement grow so big i i agree with all of that um sabrina i think um you know to the to the to jake's question how can we explain why policing why we have policing structured the way it is why it's producing these outcomes um why has it failed time and time again you know we've had so many reform episodes and in fact on the heels of many of those reform episodes we have not um not only have we not scaled back policing we have abetted it we have we have invested more heavily in policing um and so some of our biggest police innovations over the last you know 30 40 50 years have come in response to waves of protest and i think that's my biggest fear in this moment is that we will yield yet another round of proceduralism fixes trainings um and i think it's it's the reason why black lives matter and political black political organizing on the ground in many of these places is saying no more reform we need something different um i think part of the answer to his question is um you know has been stated before which is that uh police are powerful political actors local elected officials have um felt constrained in in um either their rhetoric or their actions um to to reform police um to remove police you know if you look at the history of um you know investigations of police abuse it's very difficult right it's the reason why people were so astounded when in the when um the shooter of laquan mcdonald was actually found guilty because it's it's it's historically very improbable um that courts held police who had engaged in serious abuse and and fatalistic interventions in black communities were held to account oftentimes they were moved to other jurisdictions um sometimes they were given promotions so what explains that i think police power explains that i think until recently it was very it was a it was a liability politically to be seen as soft on crime um and i think more broadly you know we have so stripped down other kinds of responses to safety deprivation that the thing that we have in this country unlike in the uk unlike in some of our western european counterparts um who have much more extensive welfare states what we have are police agencies um and i encountered this you know this is just a very direct example but the other day i'm i'm in you know um walgreens fulfilling a prescription and um a man uh who was homeless wanted um wanted me to buy him some soap and i bought i wanted to buy him some soap um and he goes over to the soap and it's behind lock and key behind a plastic barrier and he gets irritated with the walgreens clerk who won't open it for him and she calls the police and he's done no crime and i asked her well why did you call the police i'm willing to buy him the soap oh you know it's a four dollar pack of coast um he's truly clearly just trying to live and she says to me and this is a this is a young black woman uh clark she says because if i call you know baltimore behavioral health or mental crisis or any other agency they're not going to show up in time i need this guy gone and i know the police will show up so in the midst of a nationwide global protest movement one of the largest in history first response is to call the bureaucratic agency that's gonna show up and the reason that bureaucratic agency is gonna show up is that we have our nation has invested heavily in uh uh policing infrastructure as a first resort to all manner of social and economic problems so i halfway understand why her response was to just she's just trying to get through her shift and so lo and behold two police show up and uh they interrogate the man right this is this is not the response this is a response that has been politically and historically built up over decades right elizabeth hinton goes into this extensively in her book about how we shifted from a war on poverty to a war on crime and how as the agencies meant to uplift communities suffering safety deprivation and disparity um uh were were you know basically uh struck down and disinvested in we we create this large policing infrastructure um as a response to handle all manner of social problems i just want to interject really briefly just kind of remind folks that uh that is not all negative right so you know in terms of uh you know failures um you know it's important to keep in mind the victories uh the democrat you know that that local organizations have fought for and have been able to achieve many of these cities that for a long time you know folks were asking for were asking for uh community policing and they secured community policing and we learned that it was a failure that it didn't do the job folks were asking for body camera then we learned you know evaluate the program it's not sufficient okay and so i think it you know now folks are demanding uh shrinking the footprint right abolition reinvestment and you know as horrible as it is right uh one can be hopeful if not optimistic right um especially for you know thinking narrowly about that question about you know folks who have campaigned on reform or folks who are you know seem about reform right i think that these people are uh fighting for reform and they have been successful in the past you know and in our sort of like uh and in this moment and in our framing of authoritarianism you know i remember tank man in tiananmen square so on and so forth right in the face of you know probable odds where these social things are possible so you know there shouldn't be an erasure of the successes that uh certain political actors have had combating uh this sort of policing for sure but can i just i oh because you're you're invite okay so can you tell me what those successes have been sure yeah so i think uh you know the the one that comes to mind immediately is the passage in minneapolis right to to abolish the police even though it was kind of stymied by that local uh uh committee i guess at the same time i'm thinking about the variety of cities uh where police now responding to protests in 2006 so sorry 2014 2015 equip their police officers with body cameras right because a sense among uh maybe not uh all activists right but you know increasing number of people was that if you know one way to hold police officers accountable and i think there's an understanding that there's an accountability issue here is that if we equip them with body cameras and the evidence will be there right what's holding police officer cannibals now is um cell phone footage uh and to make that universal would give citizens the power to hold police officers accountable and it's you know it hasn't been it's it has failed and it hasn't been able to secure what folks want rapidly enough right and so i think that with an increasing number of folks asking for or shrinking the footprint so what you're talking about with the mental health uh folks in mental health crisis right i think uh you know you know police chiefs agree right that uh uh police officers aren't effective uh at dealing with individuals monsters about to help this crisis right activists wanted there's a model out there in the pacific northwest both in uh cahoots um you know where this thing is effective right so you know i'm hopeful that you know at the very least that sort of uh goose model might be implemented in more and more cities um but i think you know you know i think we can identify organizations like particularly like byp 100 and youth for justice right that have some track record of you know ending solitary confinement for young people or or reducing levels of violence right or at the very least empowering and strengthening individuals who have suffered from that violence right and getting them back into the political sphere right so you know the um you know uh you know again i would i would characterize my disposition as hopeful not optimistic right but as a sort of narrow response to jake's question you know i would not want to erase instances of political success so we're we're two minutes over i just want to see if sabrina no pressure but if you have any wrap up thoughts on the what is to be done question love to hear them million dollar question right um no i think uh i think it's important that whatever whatever does um result from all the activism that we've seen this summer um one it's important that the momentum doesn't get lost um and and and to keep putting on the political pressure because that is what's going to give the mandate to the politicians to make changes to support the the groups all the groups that if it were if it weren't for civil society we wouldn't be you know seeing these kinds of changes um and and holding people accountable holding police departments accountable um but i do think that the kind of um the approaches that we've seen in the past and continue to see um even even the ones that activists call for you know the bare minimum the eight can't wait standards etc um those are all bandages to a more systemic problem that uh that includes not just police reform but it includes health care reform it includes reform in education and in in the in fundamental um social services in our country because none of these problems all of these problems are interlinked and um you you know you can't really reform just one aspect of it um without really thinking about the big picture and i think that's we're going to strengthen democracy we need to strengthen democracy for everyone and that's not just that's just not about policing it's about um making sure everybody lives a dignified making sure that everybody is able to live a dignified life in which um you know all these freedoms are possible for everyone so that would be my concluding statement thank you special let me give you the last word here oh that's a tall order um i guess when i think about this moment i i agree with io that there is great i mean this is the first moment in my lifetime where i truly feel transformation is possible where where discourses of something different than proceduralism are are suddenly unapologetically um being embraced being held up being the you know these abolitionism used to be sort of a very um non-mainstream uh political demand and we're seeing that now i mean i have neighbors that are embracing it in a way that i never thought possible i am worried as i said before that we will repeat the past we will proceduralize our way beyond the worst of the worst abuses while maintaining a system that is nevertheless you know controlling abusive humiliating denigrating of of citizenship i think a lot of the reforms focus far too heavily on outright explicit police violence so imagine if we enact policies to stop choke holds um to train police and de-escalation to limit the use of force to limit how uh police can can engage citizens the more mundane violence and i say that explicitly of a police encounter that features no outright violence still remains so the majority of police citizen encounters and interactions leave no paper trail right if i'm just stopped by if if my son is stopped by police um and nothing further happens most cities do not even record or or provide uh publicly accessible data on that encounter and yet that's the majority of how people are encountering police and many scholars have shown that just because that encounter ends without an arrest or without a sanction or without physical violence it is nevertheless incredibly corrosive um to dignity to to what people learn about the state what people learn about their own uh citizenship um how people then adapt to moving through public space what kinds of places they avoid what kinds of uh normal constitutional behaviors that they avoid because for fear of being stopped by police so i think that's a long-winded way of saying in this moment we also need to attend to police encounters that do not feature violence right the lack of attention to policing of of blacks that don't feature violence or ended life concerns me you know so many are outraged at police killings but the public goods that are enjoyed the public goods by american citizens rely on a controlling police power on a segregating police power police segregate space they expel undesirable people from from communities they maintain social hierarchies they maintain an economic status quo that delivers some benefits uh uh to and some good neighborhoods to some people and and constrains life in other neighborhoods and so i think until we can have that conversation we're gonna we won't get to the transformative um agenda that's possible we won't get to the democratic agenda that's possible that's exactly right all right um sorry we're seven minutes over um we had over 25 questions today um and many more in advance we regret we didn't have time to get to all of them um just speaking for myself i'm grateful to the inaudible center cornell for hosting this for the great panelists and for you the audience for making this such a rich discussion thank you very much.