This interview has been slightly condensed from the video above.
Robert Kuttner: Congratulations on the publication of Tangled Up in Blue. Your day job is a law professor at Georgetown. Among other things, you study the criminal justice system. You spent a couple of years as a reserve officer with the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C., which is one of the few police departments, as you explained, which allows people to do that part-time. Why did you do this?
Rosa Brooks: I think it was curiosity more than anything else. When I found out that D.C. had a program where anyone can volunteer to be a part-time police officer and go through the police academy and get a badge and gun, I was flabbergasted. I immediately thought, that would be fascinating. Policing is such an opaque world. It seemed like an incredible opportunity to see what it looks like from the inside.
Like other lefties, I’ve been critical of policing. But I’ve always thought if you want to change something, you need to understand it first. And this seemed like a pretty amazing way to understand it better.
I think a lot of people who will read Tangled Up in Blue may be expecting primarily a critique of police excesses. But you’ve written a narrative memoir, with poignant descriptions of police encounters with everything from domestic violence to smart-aleck kids annoying neighbors and mentally ill people. I think the book will also surprise a lot of critics of policing, for its compassion for cops as well as for victims of police misconduct, and for the lives of poor people who encounter police.
What surprised you about what you found?
I wouldn’t say that a lot surprised me, because I came to this having already spent a lot of my career interviewing people who had been victims of atrocities and torture and human rights abuses—and sometimes that also meant interviewing the perpetrators.
One of the things that has always fascinated me is that hardly anyone thinks, “I’m a bad guy.” Nobody gets up in the morning and says—maybe Hitler did—“I’d like to cause suffering for some people today.” I believe that there are some sadists who think that, but the vast majority of human beings get up in the morning and want to be able to go home and look at themselves in the mirror and feel like they did the right thing.
So I didn’t expect that I was going to find a bunch of monsters. I expected that I would find ordinary people who were struggling to come up with a narrative that made what they did make sense. And that’s what I found. In a political culture that loves binary oppositions, if you ask somebody on the political right, they’ll say cops are selfless, self-sacrificing heroes. You ask somebody on the political left, and they’ll say cops are brutal, racist thugs. Whenever you get that kind of binary opposition, you know that it’s all going to be a lot more complicated.
The title of the book, from the famous Bob Dylan song—not only did that seem to aptly summarize my own sense of having become entangled in this complicated world of policing, but my sense that in the world of policing, the brutality and the racism are all tangled up with compassion and courage. You can’t tease out one strand without ending up yanking on some of the others.
Do you think the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department where you worked is representative? It’s a city that’s about half Black, and it’s the home of a lot of white liberals. Is D.C. a little better than many urban police forces on issues of police conduct?
I think it is, but partly because it has a very dark history. In the 1980s and 1990s, the D.C. police force was not viewed as one of the more enlightened or progressive police departments. By the late 1990s, D.C. had one of the highest rates of officer-involved shootings in the country. That led to a Justice Department investigation and ultimately to a memorandum of understanding between the department and the police on changing use-of-force rules.
About three years ago, there was an independent audit to see whether that memorandum of understanding was still needed, and the auditor concluded that D.C. no longer had a significant problem with excessive force. That was my experience with the department, too. It is very far from perfect and in some ways it is typical. But it does have a lot of people in it, including very high-ranking people, who are open to change. And if you say to them, “Maybe you shouldn’t do it that way, maybe you should do it this way,” they don’t say, “Shut up, go away”; they say, “Let’s talk about that.” I think that is a necessary thing for any organization to stay healthy.
I think that agreement that you referred to was the fruit of the 1994 Crime Act, most of which was “lock ’em up.” But one of the few good things about it is that it allowed for Justice Department supervision of police departments in need of reform, and that had to operate under a court order. I believe Trump shut that down. Now Biden is in a position to start it up again. Can that program have enough reach to get at some of the departments where you’ve got police unions enforcing the blue wall of silence and you’ve got really entrenched bad attitudes, not just the occasional bad apple. Other than restarting that program, what else might you do to structurally reform bad police practices?
I don’t think there is “one neat trick” to fix policing. Having the Justice Department have that cudgel to wield is important. Congress through the spending power can create significant incentives for police departments all over the country. But policing is not centralized in this country. We have almost 18,000 different law enforcement agencies. They don’t always listen to each other, which makes it in some ways a much harder nut to crack than, say, the military, which is conveniently hierarchical. So if the top level decides, “We’re going to change something,” it’s a whole lot easier to disseminate that across the organization.
Policing is much more piecemeal. But that said, police, like everybody else, respond to funding. And if the funding involves saying, “Hey, if you do this kind of training program, not that kind of training program, the spigots will open for you,” that can make a pretty big difference. Another thing is ending qualified immunity for police. We could make it easier to hold officers accountable if they engage in shootings that aren’t criminal, necessarily, but involve constitutional violations. I think there is a lot that departments and communities can do. This includes putting pressure on police departments to change the way they recruit and to change the way they train.
One of the major lessons for me of this whole experience is that police officers get involved in situations where all the choices are often bad, because the police don’t work in a vacuum. They work in a legal, political, and socioeconomic environment that they didn’t create and they can’t do much to change.
If you look at the percentage of arrests made by police in D.C. each year that are for pretty minor, misdemeanor-level offenses, you might think that the police shouldn’t arrest people for those things. Well, the police didn’t criminalize those things. If we don’t want traffic stops to be so fraught, we don’t need to have armed police officers enforcing civil traffic regulations. We could change the law and say, hey guys, don’t stop cars unless somebody is shooting out the window, or is doing something else that clearly requires an armed police response. We’re going to let civilians figure out how you give out tickets for civil infraction, or have speed cameras.
If we don’t want people to be arrested for all these trivial offenses because we think it hurts communities, then we need to change the laws. Cops can’t do that by themselves. If cops start just ignoring the law and not enforcing it, then they get in trouble.
Your book is also very powerful in pointing out all the ways that the police are entangled with the manifestations of poverty. As you say, they often get into a situation where there are no good choices, either for the person who finds him- or herself tangled up with the law, or sometimes for the police.
You tell a very poignant story of a Black woman who gets caught shoplifting because she doesn’t have food to feed her family. You and your partner on patrol try to figure out a way to get her some food so she doesn’t have to go to jail, but then it turns out that she’s got an outstanding warrant and she has to go to jail. She might have gone to a food bank, but as Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement liked to say, the poor are not just poor in money; they’re poor in the choices they make. It’s a truism that so many of these sad encounters are really about poverty.
I was also encouraged by your chapter in which you show that most cops don’t want to bother with things like expired driver’s licenses or improper registrations because they view it as harassment and they have more important things to do.
I don’t know how generalizable that is. You know, there are entire municipalities that get big chunks of their annual revenue from having police stop cars and give out tickets, so I don’t want to generalize too much from working in a very high-crime area where dealing with traffic infractions would take up a lot of time, and so I saw a lot of police officers just saying, “I don’t even want to go there, because every third car you stop is going to have someone with an expired license or something, and we’re going to have to arrest them—we have better things to do.”
I think your larger point here is very important. We have a whole syndrome where Black people, and young Black men in particular, if they’re routinely stopped for something, they are likely to have a bench warrant out for some prior offense that they didn’t have the money to pay a fine for, and then you get into this cascading horror that ruins their life.
This syndrome of over-criminalization leading to every other kid having a bench warrant leads to ruined lives—there’s been a lot of important work done by different people on how the cycle of fines for civil infractions can turn into summons for failing to appear or failing to pay your fine, which then can turn into criminal violation for ignoring the summons, and then you go to jail for what started with a traffic ticket that you couldn’t pay for some absolutely trivial infraction. You’ve got someone who now owes thousands of dollars. Their liberty is taken away for some period of time with devastating effects, and it all started with something like a right turn on red when there’s a “No right on red” sign.
We could have lower, graduated fines related to incomes like some Scandinavian countries do. We could decriminalize many of these minor offenses, and focus much more on giving warnings that are safety-oriented: “Hey listen, you might not have realized this but you went right on red. Here’s why it’s dangerous. Off you go, please be more careful.”
One of your takeaways was a fellowship that you proposed, as a partnership between Georgetown Law and the D.C. police, to help change police attitudes.
I don’t so much think of it as trying to change police officers’ attitudes. One thing that really struck me in my time as a reserve officer was that police officers get very few opportunities to talk in a sort of safe setting about all the hardest issues facing policing—such as race and excessive force. Or, how do we know what good policing looks like?
Police tend to get very defensive when people are marching and chanting slogans and carrying signs that imply that cops are just brutal racists, and the police academy is not a place where you can have those hard conversations about race or violence. Once people are out on patrol, there’s even less opportunity, because everybody’s busy responding to calls or doing whatever else they’re doing. So we thought it would be useful to create a space where cops could have those conversations, and could talk to each other and talk to community activists, talk to scholars, talk to a very wide range of people in an atmosphere where it felt like, “Hey this is actually a conversation, this is not an attack.”
So the program we created is in collaboration with the Metropolitan Police Department. It’s not a perfect department, but it is a department that cares about doing better. They helped us identify eligible officers, and they helped us make sure that those officers got time away from their routine duties to do this. They assigned each of our fellows a senior-level department mentor, so they have someone within the department who they could go to with career issues.
They come to Georgetown for these very intensive workshops on issues like race and policing. They’ve done walking tours of historic African American neighborhoods. We’ve had them meet with local high school kids and with activists for the rights of the homeless, with all kinds of different programs. And it’s really been pretty neat. I know this sounds kind of corny, but as a teacher, it’s amazing to watch the conversations that take place. That’s why I say, it’s not that we created the Police for Tomorrow Fellowship so we could “change their minds”; it’s often that officers are struggling themselves: How do I make sense of this? Is this a good thing to do? They come in with those questions, and they argue with each other very passionately, and they argue with the guests we bring in, and the conversations they have are pretty great. In some cases, the comments they have given to senior officials in the police department as a result of those sessions have led to real changes, particularly in places such as the curriculum of the police academy.
I just want to quote one short passage. You’re quoting a Black officer named Auguste who challenges the assumption of Michelle Alexander’s celebrated book The New Jim Crow, in which she treats over-criminalization of Black people as the new Jim Crow. Auguste says, “It has nothing to do with race. My skin is black, too. These people are just messed up. It’s like they like being bad, they think being bad is good. Nothing makes these people act like they do. If they don’t like it here, they should fix up their neighborhood or leave.”
Of course, as your book points out, you were assigned mostly to the poorest, toughest neighborhood in the city, part of Anacostia. And because of the larger structural forces in this society, the people there who tend to have encounters with the police are almost all Black. Obviously, it’s going to take a long time to remedy all of the structural horrors in the society that fall most heavily on Black people.
I talk about that in the book. There’s no reason cops would see that the legacy of structural racism has made those neighborhoods the way they are. They don’t know anything about the legacy of de jure segregation that kept African Americans out of some neighborhoods and forced them into other, less desirable neighborhoods. They don’t know the history of racially restrictive racial covenants and zoning rules, or bias in creating the transportation network, which is worse in those neighborhoods. It’s a lot harder to get a job if you have to take three buses and two metros to get to the places where the jobs are.
Cops typically don’t see any of that. All they see is the results of several centuries of discriminatory policies. I think part of the answer to that is obviously to start unwinding those discriminatory policies, with aggressive measures to do things such as making sure that the public-transportation network is better in poor communities, making sure that there are supermarkets that offer fresh foods and it’s not just liquor stores and convenience stores that sell junk food. How do we invest in building meaningful jobs within those communities so people aren’t forced to travel long distances to get a decent job? And then the smaller part is just for police, helping them learn about those neighborhoods.
A lot of D.C. police don’t even come from the city. D.C. now has several programs trying to encourage D.C. residents to go into the police department. But quite a lot of the officers come from somewhere else, and they don’t know the city. They don’t have any sense of the rich history or why people react to them the way they do. Or why neighborhoods are the way they are.
We took our fellows to the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, which is a great museum. They spent an hour with the curator talking about how and why D.C.’s neighborhoods have changed. I think people kind of came out saying, “I think I understand more now why this is the way it is—why if somebody responds negatively to me, it’s not because of something I did, it’s because of historical experiences, and that makes me more patient with it and less defensive about it too.”
You spend a lot of time in the book—and it’s very powerful—on how it is drilled into police officers at the police academy and in the day-to-day patrol experience that you are at risk all the time. You never know when somebody might, you know, jump out of a closed door and kill you. That mentality seems very powerful in explaining what is behind the fact that some police officers, with the adrenaline pounding when they see a toy gun, end up killing a Black kid who did nothing wrong. You do have some officers who are plainly sadistic, like the officer who killed George Floyd. You mentioned one incident in D.C. where an officer ended up in the police academy because they couldn’t trust him on the street because he was the subject of so many complaints for being abusive.
The question is, if you’ve got some who really are sadistic and others who just make bad decisions, how do you address both?
Well, the really sadistic ones should not be in policing, and that gets us to the police union issue, and also to the lack of a national police registry. If you’re a lawyer and you get disbarred, it’s really easy for other states to find out that you’ve been disbarred. But if you’re a cop and you get fired for misconduct in one town, it can be extremely difficult for other places to even find that out. So often people will go from department to department even though they’ve been fired for malfeasance.
Part of it goes back to the overall accountability structures. Police unions have not by and large been forces for progressive change. I do hope that this younger generation of police officers will take over those unions and change them, but that’s a whole other project. But you know, we can make it easier legislatively for departments to go after and get rid of bad officers. That’s one thing we certainly should do. When it’s just officers who aren’t sadists, but are just doing the wrong thing because of poor training, the solution is different. Training that emphasizes this constant sense of threat is a big part of it. The problem with that kind of training is not just that people end up shooting other people, but that sense of constant threat can also translate into, how many stops do you make, whether you think you need to stop and frisk somebody, what tone do you take with them, do you yell at them if they move quickly, as opposed to stay calm?
There’s a fantastic program in Washington state. There’s a woman named Sue Rahr who’s the former sheriff of King County, Washington. She now runs Washington state’s law enforcement academy. She has started a program at the academy with much more emphasis on communication skills and de-escalation skills, tactics to slow things down, so that officers and everybody else in a situation have some time and space to find ways to resolve things that don’t involve use of force by anybody.
She really de-emphasizes the boot camp approach to policing—you know, “Yes, sir!” “Get down and give me 20!” Instead, her approach really emphasizes that recruits need to learn to have conversations with people. She also beefed up the defensive tactics training. Her argument is that a lot of the time when cops overreact and pull out a gun, it’s because they’re scared and they don’t feel physically prepared to handle a threat without a gun—and so they reach for that gun. Her argument is, look, if you simultaneously give people more training in de-escalation and communication skills and more physical self-confidence, they’re going to be a whole lot less likely to reach for that gun. They feel like, “I can handle this. I can afford to stand here and chat and see if we can sort this out, because I know that I can take care of myself without having to shoot somebody.” That’s an example of the kind of training program that I think more cities and states should be adopting.
Do you think this approach would work in the more hard-core right-wing parts of the country where there is police sympathy for militias and infiltration of police departments by people who believe in violence? Or is that left-wing paranoia?
No, I don’t think it’s left-wing paranoia, but police are not monolithic, even in more red parts of the country. I do think there is evidence that some of these far-right extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters and the Proud Boys have made deliberate efforts to recruit—both within the ranks of current officers and to persuade their adherents to go into policing.
I think we don’t really know, however, whether that is a marginal problem or a big problem, and we need to find that out, obviously. There are almost 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States. We don’t really know if there are 200 right-wing extremists scattered across the country, in which case we’re not that worried, or if there are 100,000 of them, in which case I’m really worried. I think this is an area where the events of January 6 were an enormous wake-up call for the whole country. We have to be taking this threat of violent extremism from the right much more seriously.
That said, I always worry when I hear generalizations like “The police are just sympathetic to the far right.” I think, well, no. We saw that on January 6: I saw plenty on Twitter and so on, people on the left saying that the police just let the mob waltz right in because the police are on their side. I think it’s not impossible that a couple of those Capitol Police were sympathetic to the mob, but on the other hand, 140 police officers got injured, some of them very badly, and a police officer was killed. I don’t think they were on the side of that mob, and so I think we need to be really careful about that kind of generalization.
The new attorney general, Merrick Garland, seems just about the perfect person for this job, given his career dealing with domestic terrorism. Does the Justice Department have the authority to do this sort of investigation of right-wing efforts to infiltrate police or recruit them?
I don’t see why they wouldn’t, though I’m not an expert on that. I can’t see a single reason why the Justice Department couldn’t be taking the lead on that.
I have to ask you one last personal question since this book is partly memoir. One of the charming and brave things you do is talk about the sometime disapproval of your project by your mom Barbara Ehrenreich, who has been far more critical of police. Did she like the book?
Yes, she did like the book. I think at the end she came around—you know, when she saw that this was going to create things like the Police for Tomorrow program we started at Georgetown.
It’s a wonderful piece of work. Thanks again for the conversation.
