(theme music plays) HORSLEY: Hello everyone and welcome to another "P&P Live".

My name is Bashan.

I'm part of the events staff with Politics and Prose.

As a tenured law professor at Georgetown University, Rosa Brooks decided to become a sworn armed reserve police officer with the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department.

In "Tangled Up In Blue", Brooks recounts her experiences inside the usually closed world of policing, from street shootings and domestic violence calls, through the behind-the-scenes police work during Donald Trump's presidential inauguration.

Brooks presents a regulatory account of what it's like inside the blue wall of silence.

She is joined today by Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor.

Mr. Butler provides legal commentary for MSNBC and NPR, and has been featured on "60 Minutes" and profiled in the "Washington Post".

Currently, Mr. Butler is a law professor at Georgetown University.

He is the author of "Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory Of Justice", winner of the Harry Chapin Media Award, and "Chokehold: Policing Black Men", both from The New Press.

Without any further ado, Rosa Brooks and Paul Butler.

BUTLER: It's a tour de police force.

It's enraging.

It's mad funny.

It's wicked smart, often all on the same page.

So, my friend and colleague, Rosa Brooks, tells stories out of school and they really do inspire and enrage everybody from the Black Lives Matter crew to the Blue Lives Matter crew.

Officer Brooks... BROOKS: I'm no longer Officer Brooks.

BUTLER: What's a nice progressive white woman like you doing getting tangled up in blue?

As we've heard, you were a very successful law professor.

What made you want to sign up with the DC Metropolitan Police Department?

BROOKS: It's a really hard question.

It's the one that I had the hardest time answering, either for other people in the book or frankly, for myself.

When I learned about this program... and Washington DC is quite unusual.

It's got this program where you can volunteer to be a police officer and you go through the police academy and they give you a badge and a gun.

This is completely weird, right, that they will give law professors a badge and a gun.

It's not a good idea, probably, especially not to give them to writers, obviously, as we see.

When I heard about this program, I just thought, "That's so bizarre."

You know, "They would let me be a cop?"

I want to do that."

And why, partly I was just frankly curious.

It's a little bit like George Mallory, asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, because it was there.

It was there, and once I learned about this program, I just thought, "I've got to find out what that's like."

Throughout my career, from the very beginning, I've been fascinated by the relationship between law and violence and by the stories people tell to try to make sense of the violence they commit, the violence other people commit, you know, to justify it, to delegitimize it and even going back as far as law school, one of my... You know, I remember writing sort of a thesis in my third year of law school.

I spent a semester in South Africa, which is just transitioning from apartheid and I wrote about the cultural change in the South African police, the effort to take an agency of the state that had been instrumental in oppressing the majority of the South African population under apartheid, and try to turn it into an institution that would truly serve the people.

So I had always been fascinated by policing and it just seemed like an incredible opportunity to go behind that blue wall and understand a little bit more about how cops make sense of their roles, how they make sense of their lives, and whether any of it makes sense.

BUTLER: And you had worked at the Defense Department, and there's lots of interesting analogies that your scholarship has explored between police work and military work.

How did your experience at the Defense Department inform what you were thinking while you were a working cop?

BROOKS: Yeah.

When I was at the Defense Department, part of what fascinated me, and also frankly, before I was even there, but was the increasing blurriness in the lines between what counts as war, what counts as peace and not war, what does the military supposed to do, what is the civilian supposed to do, and the blurriness of those lines.

One of the things that struck me when I was at the defense department was the ways in which increasingly war fighting looks like policing in many parts of the world, especially during the last 20 years, the post 9/11 era.

A lot of what the American military does would resemble what many Americans would think of when they think of terms like community policing, or community oriented policing.

And, you know, the sort of, the age of heroic combat, either, you know, a bunch of guys on horses waving their spears at each other is long over.

But even the images of warfare that we all internalized from these World War II movies, these massive firefights, they're more and more rare.

Increasingly, the experience of conflict looks like policing in a lot of places and I was interested in the ways... Obviously we've all been hearing and talking in this country about police militarization.

I was interested in the other side of that too, the degree to which increasingly in the US policing sometimes looks like war.

Just like war looks like policing.

BUTLER: It especially looks like preparation for war in the District of Columbia as we speak.

When you see all of the military officers working with all of the local police officers after the insurrection of January 6th, what are your thoughts about that?

BROOKS: The more experience I had with the world of policing, the more it seemed to me that... the title of my last book was "How Everything Became War And The Military Became Everything".

And it almost seemed to me that you could write a book called 'How Everything Became Crime and Policing Became Everything.'

I do think that we have seen an increasing blurriness where we literally now see, as you said, Paul, police operating side by side with National Guard troops.

We almost saw, we came very close over the summer to seeing active duty troops called in by President Donald Trump, former President Donald Trump.

During the racial justice protests, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to summon up active duty troops, put them in American streets to suppress an insurrection, protect federal property.

In the end, he didn't do that, but he came very, very close to that.

And then we were seeing a complete blurring.

I think it's a hard one.

It's both totally shocking, right and I think maybe we'll talk a little bit about the events of January 6th, the failed insurrection at the US Capitol.

It's simultaneously totally shocking and appalling to see this heavily militarized presence, whether they're cops, whether we call them cops or whether we call them soldiers.

Increasingly, they look the same, right.

And it's both quite shocking to see that.

It was shocking and completely inappropriate to see that in the context of the summer's racial justice protests.

On January 6th, I think a lot of Americans looked and thought, "Boy, we could have used a little more of that to keep that mob of people out of the Capitol."

I think that's one of the toughest things to wrestle with, is, well, are there times when for better, for worse, we do need that kind of heavily armed presence to stop a group of people from doing something really bad?

BUTLER: Doesn't MPD, your former... we can't say an employer because you were a volunteer, but your former organization, does DC need the military for the National Guard to do police work, do you think?

You're the expert.

You were a police officer.

You were a military official.

BROOKS: Yeah, the DC police... DC is simultaneously like many American cities over and under policed, depending on how you look at it.

It has more police of various sorts per capita than any other American city, because in addition to the DC Metropolitan Police Department, there are entities such as the Capitol Police, the Secret Service Armed Police... BUTLER: The Zoo Police.

Don't forget the Zoo Police.

BROOKS: The Zoo Police.

The Bureau of Printing and Engraving has to have its own police force.

So we've got all these cops, which does translate into a higher per capita arrest rate.

The more cops you put on the ground, they're probably going to make more arrests because that is what they're trained to do.

At the same time, when you get something on the level of what happened on January 6th, it does raise a real question, sort of a definitional question, what was that?

Was that crime?

Was that an attempted armed insurrection?

How do you think about it?

I think that one of the conundrums for us all coming out of January 6, I mean, obviously we all saw the juxtaposition of these images of these heavily armed cops and the guard troops responding to unarmed, peaceful racial justice protesters in the summer, which is appalling.

And then, what appeared to be rather polite police officers smiling and taking selfies with an armed mob that invaded the Capitol, something is very wrong, obviously, in how we calibrate risk and who we determine poses a threat and what kind of threat.

One of my biggest fears, actually, is that coming out of January 6th, the reaction, "Maybe, oh, we can solve this problem of racial injustice by just having heavily militarized response to everybody."

And then nobody can complain because part of the story supposedly, and this may just be butt covering on the part of the Pentagon, but part of the story of why the Pentagon was so reluctant to send National Guard troops to the Capitol, to help relieve the Capitol Police as this mob makes its way into the Capitol, is they worried about the court optics of having this appearance of being overly militarized.

It's hard to know whether to just go, "Yeah, right, you were."

You know, I don't know whether that's a good faith concern where they overlearned a lesson a little too late and with the wrong people.

But I think that's going to be one of the huge challenges.

I do worry that we're going to come out of this with an even more militarized cross the board response, because that's the simple way.

To draw a parallel, Paul, you're a former prosecutor from a world that you're much more familiar with than I am.

When legislators pass mandatory sentencing requirements, they're partly doing that because they figure, well, let's reduce the amount of discretion that individual judges and prosecutors have, because if you have discretion, you have bias.

Bias can creep in really easily.

So we'll just solve the problem by saying that you don't have any discretion.

We're not going to let you say, "Oh, but this person's more sympathetic, or nicer, or more likely to be rehabilitated."

But on the other hand, what ended up happening, of course, was that you just got more draconian sentences for everybody, which creates a whole different kind of problem.

And I worry that we might be right there with policing, frankly.

BUTLER: Another maybe easier question about war, lawyers like to talk about their war stories.

But the stories you tell and take a look a little are almost like war stories in some instances.

What's one of your favorites?

I don't know.

Maybe the guy who came from life from the dead, came to life from the dead.

What's your favorite war story from your... BROOKS: Oh gosh, I have so many.

I have so many.

I'll tell you one thing.

It was so interesting to me the degree to which Donald Trump became a very helpful part of the mental status test.

So when police or medics, somebody's overdosed or they may be mentally ill, one of the standard things that EMTs will do when they first encounter that person will say things like, "Okay, what's your name?

Do you know what day it is?

Are you oriented to time, place, and person?

Where are you?"

And then they'll ask a few questions, like, who's the president?

And it's a standard part of that mini mental status test.

And I do remember, I'll tell you two stories relating to mental status tests and Donald Trump.

One of them is the guy you mentioned.

We got a call for a man down and I was very new on the job and we find this guy, he's lying on the sidewalk.

He sprawled out, his eyes are kind of half open.

His eyeballs have rolled up so you just see the whites.

His face has got a grayish cast.

He's not moving.

He doesn't seem to be breathing.

I'm freaking out.

I'm like, "Oh my God, he's dead."

I kind of, you know, go up to him and I sort of nudge him a little, and I'm like, "Sir, are you okay?"

Nothing.

And I say, "Hey buddy, are you all right?"

And suddenly he kinda springs back to life and I'm like, "Oh my God, he's not dead.

He's alive."

He's like, "What?

What?

Where am I?"

The ambulance by this point is rolling up and the medics get out.

And they say to the guy, "What's your name?"

And he doesn't seem to know that.

He's like, "Whoa."

They're like, "What day is it?

He's like, "I don't know."

And they say, "Who's president?"

They say, "Who's president?"

He looks really confused and he goes, "Is Donald Trump the president?"

And the medic says, "Yeah, sorry, man."

And he's like, "Ah."

And then he closes his eyes with much more determination this time.

But the other Donald Trump story was a woman who also perhaps had had an overdose, and they're giving her the mental status test and totally muddled up.

What's your name?

"Ahhhhhhhhh."

You know, what day is it?

They get to the, who's the president, and she goes, "That white (bleep)."

And the medic is like, "You're good.

You're oriented."

So, anyway, I don't know if that was kind of the story you were looking for, Paul, but that... BUTLER: Totally.

And speaking of White (bleep).

You signed up to join 12 after the police had killed Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray.

What were you thinking?

BROOKS: Yeah, I mean, as I said before, part of what I was interested is just understanding, how do people make sense of this, right?

Your, this is the moment when I joined the Reserve Corps.

Then, as now, the whole country is talking about policing.

The whole country is talking about race and policing.

The whole country is talking about violence and policing.

And I was really interested in, how do cops try to make sense of this?

What stories do they tell themselves about this?

Do they say, "Oh, it's a bunch of bad apples."

Did they say, "Well, no, no, no.

There's something going on here that other people don't understand, that we understan," that makes this all okay?

Do they see themselves as being part of an institution that is deeply, deeply flawed?

Do they think it's fixable?

How does that look to them from the inside?

It was something I wanted to find out.

Obviously, you know, you're on... One is on, I am on, I was on, murky, ethical terrain.

One of the things that I struggled with, when I started this, I didn't know how far into it I was going to go.

I thought, "This is so weird that they have this program.

I'll just apply.

They're not going to take me.

Plus I wouldn't do it if they did.

I just want to see what this is like."

And then they accepted me.

I was like, "They're going to let me do this?"

I thought, "Well, I should just go through the police academy and see what it's like."

And that was fascinating.

Then I had put in a huge amount of time into it and they were like, "Here's your badge.

Off you go now."

I was like, "Well, maybe I should do this a little bit longer and see what it's really like.

I've come this far."

But at the same time, I had one of those moments.

It was precisely at that moment where I finished the police academy, where up until that time, I had been able to say to myself, "You're someone who's interested in observing police, and who's interested in observing them and understanding how they are trained and the stories they tell themselves about race and violence and other issues, and understanding how people who are willing to use violence make sense of that."

And then, suddenly, I had to decide, you know am I willing to be a person who potentially uses violence?

You know, and I had to sort of struggle with...

I'm still not sure of the answer on some level.

Right, and for me, like most police officers, it was never actually put to the test in any way, because the vast majority of police officers will never point their weapon at someone in their whole careers, much less shoot somebody.

And yet, obviously, that possibility is always there.

Here we're not even talking about the kinds of appalling murders that you mentioned earlier, but even just in self-defense.

Or you can imagine, we can all imagine situations where police really are protecting people using force some, as well as situations where police officers are, are using the coercive powers of the state for horrifically awful reasons.

And, you know, t wasn't tested, for me.

BUTLER: You said it was not tested?

BROOKS: Not really.

Not in terms of the use of force, but it... BUTLER: Was the critique that police work is about racial control, and what police enforce is a racial law and order.

What was that tested?

Well, for example, how many White people did you search?

How many white people did you arrest?

BROOKS: I can tell you that it was about, in terms of arrest, one out of maybe 15.

It was overwhelmingly African American people.

BUTLER: And white folks are about somewhere around 45 to 50% of DC.

BROOKS: To be fair, some of this was because of the district which I was assigned, which was DC 7th Police District, which is heavily African American.

But it is also true that if you look across the entire city, those extreme racial disparities exist across the whole city.

So that's not the whole explanation.

No.

One of the things that was really interesting and disturbing for me was... And you've seen some of this yourself, Paul, and I should say to those people who are watching us, that Paul works with me and several of our other colleagues at Georgetown, we started a program called the Innovative Policing Program.

One of its major subprojects is the Police For Tomorrow Fellowship, which brings young officers to Georgetown Law for pretty intensive workshops on some of these very issues such as race and policing and one of the things that's fascinating, disturbing, hopeful, depends which day of the week it is and depends who you talk to, is to see these officers trying to struggle with exactly that question.

And, you knoe, I think I...

I'm sure you remember, Paul, some of the conversations we've had with them and you get the responses that people have run the gamut.

They range from absolute denial, "There is no racism in policing.

No, no, no."

This is from African-American officers, as well as from White officers, "There is no race in policing.

We go where we're told to go.

We go where the 911 calls come in.

And I really resent anybody who tries to tell me that there is any element of racism anywhere in there.

I am not a racist, period.

So shut up."

All the way to people who say, "Yeah, there's racism all over the place.

And yes, policing is part of that apparatus.

And yet I still believe that I can be an anti-racist within an institution that in so many ways is the inheritor of the coercive powers of a racist state and continues to be so."

And it's, it's, you know, it's it's a terrifically...

Intellectually, it was fascinating to me to see cops having those conversations.

One of the things I talk about a little bit in the book, for all that I just described, cops saying, "I'm not a racist, there is no racism," I talk about hearing police officers, including African American police officers talk about residents of the community they served in incredibly demeaning, dehumanizing ways.

"These people are just (bleep) animals," that kind of language, to talk about residents of the neighborhoods they were working in.

BUTLER: Yeah, you know, I found that really interesting.

It reminded me of a story that my mom doesn't like me to tell, but she's given me permission to tell it.

She was a public school teacher in Chicago, and she came to her school one day and found that it had been ransacked and that computers that had been donated to the school had been destroyed.

It was an all- Black neighborhood.

My mom said she was so mad, she just thought to herself, "Why would anyone do that?

Those n-word."

You talk about cops talking about Black people, Black cops talking about Black people in terms like that, using words like animals, saying that they deserve to be clipped.

What do you make of that?

I know this is a hard question, but were you ever tempted to go there, given some of the stuff you must have seen?

BROOKS: Well, I'll answer that question first, because that's an easy one.

No, not at all.

I mean, my work over the course of my career, I've worked in, I've worked all over the world, and I've worked in places where there have been just horrific human rights abuses on a massive...

They make us look like a rose garden.

Genocide, crimes against humanity, Bosnia, Lord's Resistance Army rebels in Uganda, etc.

And one of the things that...

I suppose one of my takeaways from all of this is that, number one, the bad guys are never that bad, even the people who behave the worst.

Usually there's some story about how they got there and what leads them to behave the way they're behaving.

That doesn't excuse bad things, whether it's vandalizing, breaking the computers at the school your mother worked at, or homicide, or armed robbery.

I think that's something that maybe actually we can come back to, is crime is real.

Criminals, we may feel sorry for them.

We may feel like the system that locks them up is full of injustice, including racial injustice.

And yet, crime also has victims who often themselves are poor people or people of color.

And grappling with that is I think one of the toughest things.

But that notwithstanding, I do think that one of the takeaways for me from all of this work is that there aren't a lot of people out there.

There are a few, but not very many, who are just psychopaths or sadists who say, "Oh, I hurt people because it's fun."

You know, most people, I think if you found the people who smashed those computers, they would probably be ashamed of themselves.

They'd probably say, "I don't know what we were thinking.

We got together.

We were drinking."

Somebody thought, "Oh, it's a school.

We hate school."

And then, the next thing I knew, we were doing it, and I'm sorry."

That I tend to think that number one, most perpetrators and criminals are pretty normal people.

And when you ask them what happened, they often have stories that you think, "Yeah, that could have been me.

I could see that being me."

And most people who are the "good guys" who never do anything bad, often that's a form of moral luck, that they just haven't been in circumstances that push them to do that.

BUTLER: So why, in terms of all the work that people could do, given what you just described, why would you want a job when it's your work to lock those people up?

BROOKS: I don't want that job, and that's why I'm not doing it anymore.

But part of the answer is because that's how we learn.

That's how we understand institutions.

That's how we understand how to change them as well.

And if I can turn the question around a little bit, you spent years as a prosecutor, locking up Black men, as you put it in your book.

What was that journey like for you?

I mean, what made you want to be a prosecutor?

I know that when I talk to cops about, "Why did you want to be a cop?"

Usually they have a story that has to do with having been a crime victim or having someone they were close to being a victim, that they very much see it as, "I want to protect people.

I want to keep people from being victimized like I was, like my mother was, like my brother was."

And some of them do become deeply disenchanted with the kind of role they're playing and leave.

Others of them believe they can stay and do good things.

But you became a prosecutor.

What were you thinking and why did you change your mind?

BUTLER: So, I said I became a prosecutor because I don't like bullies.

I stopped being a prosecutor because I don't like bullies.

I grew up on the south side of Chicago and I was a victim of some of the stickup boys.

Nothing serious, but it wasn't a whole lot of fun.

It also wasn't fun as the cop cars rolled by, to have the officers look at me with suspicion.

So I went into the prosecutor's office as a undercover brother, hoping that I could change things from within.

But what I found is that, rather than change the system, the system changed me.

I got gung-ho and I wondered if you could see that happening to even you, Rosa, if you'd stayed.

BROOKS: Yeah.

I think anybody who ever says, "Oh, I would never ever do those kinds of things," is probably lying to themselves, including me.

You know, that we all start valuing the approval of our peer group.

I think I got out before the peer group that mattered to me most could become that group.

But yeah, I think people get co-opted, they get sucked in.

Their compass points change.

I think, just as you said, you left because you could see it was going to change you and you didn't want that to happen and the same for me.

There were a couple of arrests that I was involved in that just made me feel like, "I can't do this."

You know, I'm not, no.

You know, even in the interests of emerging journalism, even the interests of scholarship, you know, I can't do it.

I mean, that said, I don't regret it at all, being the overall.

I'm curious to know whether you have any regrets about having been a prosecutor, because I do believe pretty deeply that if you want to change things, you have to understand them and there is a danger.

This is the Nietzsche line that if you gaze into the abyss, take care that the abyss doesn't gaze back at you.

But if your business is fixing abysses, at some point, you're going to have to give it a peak, right?

And I do feel like I have a much, much keener ability now than I would have had, but for this experience, to say, "These are the things that are wrong.

These are the things that we need to change.

These are the things that can be changed by police, and these are the things that can't be changed by police, that have to be changed by others outside of policing."

Did you feel that way about... Do you regret being a prosecutor or do you feel like, you know, in the end, it's given you insights that you wouldn't have had otherwise?

BUTLER: Can I say both or all of the above?

BROOKS: Yeah.

BUTLER: I have described myself as a recovering prosecutor.

You never get over that feeling.

Maybe it's part of what makes me want to do the work of pointing your finger, "That's the bad guy."

But I was doing misdemeanors in the District of Columbia, which means that I was locking up Black people for drug crimes and getting into fights.

Then and now if you go to criminal court in DC, you would think that white people don't commit crimes.

It's not just the African-Americans in Ward 7.

If you go to the white communities, the majority of people who get locked up there are also Black.

BROOKS: Yeah, yeah.

BUTLER: That wasn't my reality in terms of my lived experience.

I'm a law professor.

I teach criminal law, and the theory is that prosecution of congressmen are for people who are the most dangerous, the most immoral, and that wasn't what I was doing as a prosecutor.

But yeah, it gave me insights, which I knew when I met you, and we're buddies, so I could have just told you.

You didn't actually have to join the police.

Last question about race is, sometimes Black people wonder what White folks say when we're not around.

I especially wonder that about white cops.

Last week we had an example of two officers who didn't know that their bodycam was on, talking about how Black people actually had it good during slavery, because we had full employment in slavery.

BROOKS: Right.

These guys in South Carolina somewhere?

BUTLER: Yeah.

Yeah.

BROOKS: Yeah.

Yep.

BUTLER: Did white cops ever say things to you that you thought were... BROOKS: Not in my presence, no.

Or rather, let me rephrase that.

White cops in my presence never said anything worse to me about members of the community than Black cops sometimes said in my presence.

And I don't have the slightest doubt that there are overtly racist white cops in the DC police department as in every police department.

But certainly, I didn't see that expressed overtly during my time there.

Although, what I did see was a lot of cynicism from Black and white cops alike.

I did see a lot of people trying to do the right thing within a system that was all wrong, and I think that that gets us to the issue for, there are things that police can change about policing, and there are things that only legislators, prosecutors, judges, and all the rest of us as citizens can do to fix policing, that cops enforce laws that they don't make.

And if we're going to have a city council in DC that's going to criminalize all sorts of ridiculously trivial misbehavior and say to the cops, "Hey, enforce that," you're going to get bad outcomes, even if you have it... And this is a point that you make very powerfully, Paul, in your book, "Chokehold", that the problem is not we've got bad apples, sadist, this racist cops.

The problem is that normal "good policing" functions in terrible ways that hurts communities, and particularly is harmful to people of color.

I certainly saw a lot of cops struggling with that.

One other thing I'd just add, or two other things actually I'd add, one of which is a question for you, one of the pieces of this I think we don't talk about that much is the class piece, because I think that's a pretty powerful piece too.

Obviously, the African-American community in DC is also not homogeneous itself, and there are real cleavages, some of them along class lines.

Sometimes that was what you also saw coming out, was a kind of a classism as much as racism, a kind of, "Well, these pathetic people, they don't know right from wrong."

I think that's a really hard one to completely disentangle.

But the other piece I think, and this is something that you really wrestle with in your book, Paul, is what I mentioned before, which is crime is real too, and victims are really hurt and I think one of the things that I still really struggle with is, in the long run, when we're all dead, as the Keynesian quip is, in the long run, we could abolish the police and we could do all sorts of awesome things.

But in the short run, here we are.

And what do we do?

We've got crime and people who are being victimized.

We have policing, which is an institution that is deeply unjust and racist in so many ways.

How do you get from here to there while recognizing that crime is real too?

And how do you grapple with that?

BUTLER: I listened to what people from the community say, and we can talk about defund the police, and a lot of people in the community say that if that means no officers on the street, that doesn't work for them, because they are more concerned about violence from the guys in the corner than they are violence from the officers.

Other folks say, "Hell no," that the police make them feel less safe.

And if your experience with the cops is that they are the people who jumped your grand baby when he was just trying to walk to school, and that when the neighbor around the way got robbed, they didn't even try to solve it, then I understand the search for public safety delivered more productively.

I also learned from my friends who are police officers and prosecutors, and you were characteristically modest about our Policing For Tomorrow program.

You started it, and it's been so innovative that it's being copied all over the country.

The idea is that, as a supplement to what's often an inadequate education in the police academy, a select group of working cops from the Georgetown Law School.

Once a month, they talk to other folks outside of the academy and learn important things that every cop ought to know, that they might not learn in the academy.

And I think it's been transformative, and I think we'll see evidence of that soon, as some of our young cops become leaders in the academy.

And from those folks, I've learned some about what you were mentioning about class and race.

So a lot of our cadets are young African American and young Latinx people, who, when they're not in uniform, they have some of the same bad experiences with cops as any other Black or Latinx person.

And they get that.

And that's part of why they wanted to be a police officer.

Again, I wonder.

There's a hip hop song, "What Happened To That Boy?"

Sometimes you wonder what happens to those young officers who are every bit as idealistic as our young law students who come in and do public interest law.

And speaking of songs, my last question, I didn't know the song, "Tangled Up In Blue".

So I learned from you that it's a Bob Dylan song.

The songs I know about cops are hip hop songs, and I don't think I could say their name at a Politics and Prose event.

I could... BROOKS: Oh, you can.

BUTLER: Okay.

Well, you know the famous about doing something to the police.

But the Dylan song that I do know and love is "Just Like A Woman".

The version by Roberta Flack is everything.

After you buy "Tangled Up In Blue", listen to Roberta Flack's version of Bob Dylan's "Just Like A Woman".

Gender and policing.

Talk about that.

BROOKS: So, all I will say about that is that there is a ton of research out there that suggests that women police, very differently than men do, that women are less likely to use excessive force.

They are more likely to treat people in a respectful and compassionate way.

They cost cities a lot less money in court settlements for inappropriate police behavior and abusive behavior, and court ordered damages.

At the moment, women make up only about under 13%.

It's about 12 to 13% of all law enforcement officers nationwide.

DC, the percentage's a little bit higher.

But still, it's fewer than 20% of officers are women.

BUTLER: Okay.

Hold up, hold up.

You're not only an egghead professor who reads studies, you were a woman cop.

Did you ever... guys do stuff or have conversations with other women officers when you thought.... BROOKS: Yeah.

Yes, I did.

I did.

Absolutely.

Right.

There's a little bit there.

There's an element we've talked about race, we've talked a little bit about class, and there is absolutely an element here about gender and what today we call toxic masculinity.

I absolutely had conversations with other women who'd say, "These guys, especially these young guys, they're so determined to show who's toughest, show who's fastest, show who can drive the fastest, who can run the fastest, who can yell the loudest.

And that is actually not something that I think you really want necessarily in a police officer.

BUTLER: Okay.

Some great questions from the audience.

One is simple.

How is police effectiveness measured?

BROOKS: That's a great question and one of the problems is that nobody has any idea.

The traditional measures, which are really suspect, involve doing things like saying, "Well, let's compare arrest rates and crime rates.

And if when arrest rates go up, crime rates go down, then policing, it's working.

Whereas if crime rates keep going up, then what you're doing is not working."

In fact, I think, one of the huge problems, and this is partly just a paucity of data, and it's partly just that this stuff is just complicated.

We don't have the slightest idea, frankly.

What makes crime rates go up or down, we really don't know.

And we don't have the slightest idea what constitutes good policing or how you would measure it.

I mean, it's quite shocking.

One of the things that in the Police For Tomorrow program that we've talked about a little bit at Georgetown, that we push our young fellows about, is what is good policing?

How would you know if you're doing it?

How could you tell?

Is it how many people you arrest?

That can't be right?

And most of them know that.

Most of them do say, "Yeah, that's not right."

Is it the wealth level of people in your community?

Is it their happiness level?

It is the survey that they fill out saying, "We like cops."

How on earth would we measure this?

And there is no consensus either in this city or nationwide about what policing is or how we know if it's working.

And that is a really fundamental problem, needless to say, because to quote the another...

If we're going to quote Bob Dylan, Roberta Flack, etc., we should quote Yogi Berra, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there."

But we don't know where we're going.

So actually I think, frankly, all we really are doing is running around in circles.

BUTLER: And Eileen Drucker has a follow-up.

She asked, "Is there any recognition for discovering evidence to overturn wrongful conviction?

Is there any reward for avoiding arrest and finding an alternative to incarceration?"

BROOKS: That's something that we've actually talked about with officials at the DC Metropolitan Police Department, is how do you change the incentive structure?

Our fellows will sometimes say, and in frustration, "I feel like on the one hand, we hear the chief saying to us, 'We don't measure our success by arrests' and often an arrest is the worst thing you can do.

And you should be thinking about alternatives to arrest and using your discretion to seek alternatives to arrest."

But then they say, "But there we are.

We're out on the street.

We've got some kind of situation.

And if we don't arrest somebody, the sergeant's going to say, "Why didn't you arrest that guy?"

Or maybe somebody who turns out to be the mayor's third grade teacher, is going to call the mayor and say, "I called the police and they didn't even arrest this guy.

How do I reconcile these things?"

I think that it's a real problem that we don't currently have a way to acknowledge, measure, or reward officers who solve problems in ways other than through arrests and that's partly just the... We like things that we can count, and we can count arrests.

And we can't count dogs that don't bark, and we can't count problems averted by officers who realize that arrests were the bad idea.

I think part of what we've been talking about is the idea of really putting out there in writing, "Here are the reasons that an arrest might not be a good idea," and helping officers realize that the more they can document, "Here's why I didn't make an arrest," the less likely they are to have their sergeant or the mayor's third grade teacher say, "Well, you did that wrong," if they can say, "Look, I didn't make an arrest because...

Here is why I concluded that it would not serve justice, it would not serve the community.

It would serve neither the victim nor the perpetrator."

But it's a really hard nut to crack.

BUTLER: Yeah.

I hope you're right about how the higher ups would respond.

I think one of the most powerful moments that I experienced in our Police For Tomorrow program is when we had high-ranking police officials there.

Our rookies could talk to them about whatever they wanted.

One of our cadets said that he patrolled a neighborhood that he grew up in, and he knew a lot of the guys.

Sometimes he saw them smoking marijuana in public outside, which though marijuana possession is legal in the District of Columbia, you can't do it in public.

He said he'd walk up to those guys and say, "You know you're not supposed to be smoking outside."

And they'd say, "Oh man, we know," and they'd put out their joint.

He said that's good policing, and he doesn't get credit for that.

I wasn't confident that the higher ups really understood that.

BROOKS: Yeah.

Yeah.

BUTLER: So, Coleen Ryan says, as a female officer, she's wondering how increasing the number of women in policing can become a bigger part of the conversation about reform.

Would that work?

Would reform be advanced by having more female officers, do you think?

BROOKS: I think, yes.

I mean, so obviously, look, you can have more women, you can have more officers who are African American or Latinx or whatever, and it won't solve these, sort of, underlying structural problems in policing one little bit.

That said, and there is ample reason to think that at least when it comes to some of the more egregious problems, sort of, of, the, the, you know, root...

I mean, we rightly focus on police killings because ending someone's life is the worst thing possible.

But I think sometimes that that deflects our attention away from the day-to-day indignities that policing involves for many, many people.

BUTLER: Just to put a pinpoint there, one of the most powerful sections of the book was when you describe what it's like to search someone as a police officer.

Can you talk about that?

BROOKS: Yeah.

I mean, police officers are trained, if you search people, you're going to get really up close and personal.

You're supposed to be, if it's a woman, you're running your hands inside the line of her bra, you're running your hands up around people's private parts, you know.

You're told constantly, "Where do you think the bad guys are going to hide their drugs?

Where are they going to hide their razor blade?"

Well, they're going to hide it in the place that they think you're going to be too squeamish to search.

So you've got to search those places, which basically means you're groping somebody.

I mean, that's what a search is.

You're going to get groped.

It's going to probably be in public, and be in front of your neighbors, and maybe in front of your kids, and it's going to be creepy and unpleasant and you didn't consent to it.

You're not going to like it.

It's going to be humiliating.

And, you know, the...

Even if you leave that aside, needless to say, and again, this doesn't go to the deep structural problems, right?

But the difference in an encounter with the cops and having somebody say, "Hey, get over here, right now.

Hey, lift up your shirt so I can see your waistband," versus having somebody say, "Hey, look, we got a report that there was a man with the gun.

He seems to match your description.

Would you mind..." Is pretty significant.

And Paul, you have elsewhere sort of said, "Hey, if it's unconstitutional, it's unconstitutional, whether you're nice about it, or you're rude about it," which is absolutely true.

And this is why I say this isn't going to touch the deep stuff.

But if somebody's going to do something, we've all I think rather have them not be egregiously (bleep) while they're doing it, more than they have to be.

But women do seem to be much, much, much less likely than men to compound the structural injustices of the American criminal justice system by egregious and gratuitous obnoxiousness and excessive force, so, you know, again, 50% women as police tomorrow wouldn't solve the deeper problems, but it would probably solve some of the more superficial problems, which aren't so superficial, right, if you're... You know, it doesn't solve the injustice of what gets criminalized or the lengths of sentences or anything else.

But if you're somebody who is used to having cops come up and shout at you, having cops who don't shout at you, it's not nothing.

BUTLER: Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

Question about police training that has been heavily criticized for making cops overly militant, making police officers hypervigilant and... Rosa, you and I have talked a lot about the academy and what you learned there and what you didn't learn.

What are your thoughts about how police are trained?

BROOKS: I do think police training is a big part of the problem.

Again, this doesn't address structural inequities in the criminal justice system writ large.

But I think that cops are trained in a way that among...

I think they're trained in a way that among other things, greatly increases the risk of police killings and one of the things that really struck me very powerfully in the police academy was the degree to which the unwritten unofficial lesson of the experience was that anybody could kill you at any moment and you had to treat every encounter and every person you encountered as someone who was potentially about to kill you.

That's simultaneously true, of course, and yet profoundly distorting.

I mean, sure, any encounter could turn lethal in a minute, not just if you're a police officer, but for any of us.

We could decide to go to the post office and the postal clerk is cracked up and shoots everybody in the building.

That could happen.

But it usually doesn't, right, it usually doesn't.

I think that the more you are trained to view every encounter as potentially a source of threat, every person as potentially a threat, if you think threats can come from everywhere, you're more likely to perceive threats that don't exist, right?

You're more likely when someone reaches into their pocket or into the glove compartment, you're a whole lot more likely to go, "I've been trained to believe that people who reach suddenly into their pocket or the glove compartment are probably going to pull out a gun.

I better shoot first."

And the wonky lawyer way to talk about this is that that kind of training and the legal structure that surrounds it, which very much favors the, "Well, let's not second guess the police officer if it could have been reasonable for that officer to believe that there was a threat," that legal framework shifts the costs of mistakes on to ordinary people and away from cops, right?

So if a cop is wrong, if a cop misjudges the threat and the cop misjudges it in the direction of not seeing a threat when they should see a threat, you get a dead cop.

If the cop misjudges the threat by thinking there's a threat when there isn't, you get a dead individual, often unarmed, who posed no threat.

To my mind, if you're going to have somebody bear the tragic fatal cost of a mistake, I would rather have it be the people who are trained and paid and who signed up to take risks, not people who never signed up to do that.

Right now, it's the exact opposite.

We've trained cops to assume that their safety is paramount, rather than to say to themselves, "No, my first mission is to keep members of the community safe, even if that means that I am at greater risk."

BUTLER: But it's scary work, right?

I tell my students about a time where I've called the police in a neighborhood in DC, Mount Pleasant, for folks in DC, that when I lived there 20 years ago was different from now and I was concerned that there had been a burglary in my house when I'd left.

The window was open.

I never left the window open.

What do I do?

I called the cops.

BROOKS: Yeah.

BURTON: And the cop came.

Not the cops, one cop came.

He said he'd go.

I was scared to go in.

He said he'd go, take a look around.

He did.

Said everything looked fine, but wanted me to come up and see if anything was missing.

I did.

I said everything looked fine.

Said, "Okay, I'm going to take off."

I've watched enough scary movies to say, "Well, what about the closets?

Maybe he's hiding in the closet."

Cop said, "Tell you what..." What he did was, I would stand to the side and open the door to the closet and he would point his gun.

We didn't know if anybody was going to be in there, jump out at us or not.

No way I could do that work.

I don't have the courage to do that work.

Last question, because we're out of time.

Were there times, I'm sure there were, when the work made you feel like an (bleep), and were there times, and I'm sure there were, when the work made you feel like a hero?

So, can we end with maybe a time you felt like a jerk and a time you felt like a hero?

BROOKS: I never felt like a hero, but I sometimes felt like a jerk.

We ended up having to arrest a woman who had shoplifted food and laundry detergent and chicken thighs is what she had shoplifted and we didn't arrest her because of that.

We were not going to arrest her because of that.

But we arrested her because my partner ran a warrant check and found out that she had an outstanding warrant, which turned it into more of a mandatory arrest situation.

But the warrant was for failure to appear, which probably meant that she hadn't shown up at a hearing for some other food shoplifting type of thing and I just felt like the shittiest person in the world to arrest this woman.

That's one example.

BUTLER: So why'd you do it?

BROOKS: I felt at the time that we didn't have a choice within the terms of the job.

That was actually one of the moments that, for me, very powerfully, much as you with your story of being a prosecutor, that was one of the moments where I thought, "I can't do this."

You know, "I can't keep doing this.

Um, I just.

No.

I just, I can't.

I don't want to be part of that."

Much as I admire and like many of the police officers I know, I don't want to do that."

I don't think I ever felt like a hero.

There were moments where I felt like I did something that was helpful, or I was able to be compassionate for someone in a difficult situation.

But I don't think that makes anybody a hero.

I think that's the least we should be able to expect of any human being, and especially of people who are trained and paid by the government.

BUTLER: So, I don't know if writing "Tangled Up In Blue: Policing The American City" should make you feel like a hero, but maybe it should.

I think it should certainly make you feel brave for telling these stories out of school and it's a crucial intervention in one of the most important national conversations.

Rosa Brooks, thank you for your work.

Thank you for this book.

Thank you for your inspiration.

BROOKS: Thank you so much, Paul.

BUTLER: Goodnight, everybody.

ANNOUNCER: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose bookstore locations, or online at politics-prose.com.

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