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Ras Baraka

2020 Conversation with Jelani Cobb

Ras Baraka has served as the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, since 2014. In 2020, he sat down with the historian, staff writer for The New Yorker and FRONTLINE correspondent Jelani Cobb, who also happens to be an old friend, to discuss policing and race relations in Newark. For more on their ongoing dialogue, read and watch a previous conversation from 2015 and learn about their intertwined stories.

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The Consent Decree

JELANI COBB: The last time we talked, the city was just starting the consent decree process with the Department of Justice.Where are you now, and how have things gone with that, with that process?

RAS BARAKA: Well, we’re a few years in now.I mean, I think we should be winding down.We have at least a half a dozen or so new policies that were created.Police officers have been trained on it.We have a couple more that we still have to train on.COVID stopped a couple of those things.Our LGBTQ training I know for a fact was stopped because of COVID, but it will continue.

I think we are a world away from where it was when I was a child and probably where it was five years ago as well.So I think they've made considerable progress.

So talk to me about that that, like what kind of progress, or what are—what are the things you see that have changed?

Well, just the data shows, you know, just the amount of complaints that people have on a police department are like record lows, you know.The amount of money we have to spend on, you know, cases where people have won because of police abuse and violation, also at record lows.The amount of contacts we have with the community are higher, but they are not police-related.

We make less arrests, and crime is down with less arrests, you know.So when we have more community contacts but less—but less complaints. It says a lot, you know, and the police regularly have to have these kind of community contacts that are recorded in ComStat.Just like, you know, they record violence or robbery, they also have to record the community contacts, whether it be community meetings, Public Safety Round Tables, stopping at local stores.They have to report that and report things that they've done, and it's measured.

And I think that's a great thing.The sign of that is at one of our staff meetings, the police officers were able to get up and talk about things that had nothing to do with policing, you know, abandoned buildings and stuff that they got at police meetings.People started to talk to them about other stuff rather than just police work.They're talking to them about the lights being out, you know, garbage on the street or the potholes, so they get to report that stuff as well.

Community-life things.

Yeah.They're starting to talk to them about other stuff rather than, you know, “My house got robbed,” “Such-and-such got shot down the street,” “The police smacked somebody in the face,” “They was disrespectful.”So they're starting to have different conversations with the law enforcement.And I've witnessed community meetings where that also happened, you know, where they begin to start talking about other stuff.And that just tells you that the, you know, people have a different look at what the police are responsible for and what—and what their relationship is in the city as it once was before.

Do you think the consent decree has been kind of essential to that process?

Yeah, I think the consent decree has been a part of that, absolutely, I mean, because you know, when you change the policies and people get trained on it, it helps change the culture.It helps—it helps the cultural change.And when new officers come in and they get trained on this, well, there's a myriad of different things that goes along with that, but the consent decree is an important part of it.I mean, body-worn cameras for everybody, I mean, you know, in-car cameras—all that is, you know, that helps; promoting Black and brown people in the department to high positions that they never had like that before, in numbers.The majority of the department now is Black and brown.Over 70% of the department is Black and brown at this point.So, I mean, it's just the complete different makeup of the department, period, and I think the consent decree added—helped us with culture, a cultural shift that didn't exist before.

So when we talked, it was just ahead of the 2016 election.Obviously there was a big change in the Department of Justice between the Obama administration and the Trump administration which followed it.And the [Trump] DOJ there has essentially gutted the consent decree program.Did that impact you in Newark, and do you think that had a bigger impact in the national conversation about policing?

I think on the national side, it had a bigger impact, and I think it had an impact on cities who were resistant to the consent decree, because it gave them the signal that, you know, it was no—it wasn't something that was serious, and your people could basically do what they wanted to do.And for other cities and municipalities that need to be under consent decree, I mean, you know, they’re going to continue their behavior.We—it had virtually no impact in the city at all, in Newark, besides, you know, people calling and asking you about it.We went forward, business as usual. …

George Floyd

When did you become aware of the George Floyd video?Do you remember what you were doing and what your initial reaction was?

No, I don't remember exactly what I was doing.I know my reaction initially was like, you know, one, that it was crazy.You know, it was like savage, barbaric kind, you know, kind of thing.But also, you know, I wasn't surprised.So like some people watched it, and I think that's what's happening around the country and the world.People are looking at it like, oh, wow, you know, this really happens.I didn't—I didn't have that kind of reaction to it.I just thought that it was ugly and that somebody needed to go to jail.

Well, I mean, the reason it comes to mind in the course of this conversation is that we have been talking—for a number of years now, we've been talking about police departments that have chronic problems, that have high numbers of complaints from the citizens that are interacting with them, and the importance of reform in those instances.And then there's Minneapolis, which is a police department which had longstanding problems, culminating in what happened with George Floyd.

And I wonder if you see the reluctance to intervene.The Department of Justice has said that they see consent decrees as an unwarranted federal intrusion into local affairs, and I wonder if you, in light of everything that we saw in Minneapolis, I wonder what you—what you make of that?

Well, if it wasn't for federal intrusion, we'd still be in slavery, I mean, so it's important that we have some level of federal intrusion in some of this crazy stuff that's been happening in these states, I mean, whether you’re talking about voting rights or public accommodations or anything.I mean, we'd be in bad shape without federal intrusion, and I think that it’s—is necessary because, you know, when we fight for—to be looked at as citizens, as human beings, then we deserve the right to have the same federal protections as anybody else.And if states go awry, then the federal government ought to step in and do something or say something.And in this instance, like, for example, you know, if the state order of municipalities can't provide justice for people who are harmed, then the federal government should step in and—and defend people's civil rights.And I think that's important.And that's what the federal government is doing.That's their job, to do the consent decree and everything else.That's their job, to step in and intervene when people's rights are being violated, when their federal, their civil rights are being violated.That's what they’re supposed to do.

Were there meetings after George Floyd happened?Were there meetings here?What kind of conversations did you have after that happened?

Well, I mean, there weren't a lot of meetings because we were in the middle of COVID.I mean, we had our regular meetings about COVID, and those topics come up in the meetings, you know, because people were just, you know, incredibly—I mean, they were just—they were just struck by it.Like, you know, it was just probably the most barbaric thing you've seen in a long time, and so those discussions came up, and we were watching, in fact, what was happening around the country in Newark.

And I actually said, we need to do a tabletop, same way we did a tabletop on COVID, that got us prepared for COVID.I said we need to do a tabletop in Newark about what happens if the police does something crazy in Newark.I would say about two days after that, our protest came, so we never had an opportunity to do a tabletop.You know, the protests started happening in Newark.We might have had at least six or seven protests in the city right after that.

And that's the reason I ask about—about what kind of planning and preparation went into it, because notably, in many places in this country, dozens of places in this country, there were protests that tipped over into violence.We saw police cars being set on fire in Salt Lake City.

Right.

Newark is a city whose history has been defined in some ways by 1967 and the uprising that happened in response to an act of police brutality.

And so it's almost the opposite.You know, while there's a great deal of violence happening in other cities, things remained relatively calm during the protests here.I wanted to understand how that happened and what kind of mechanisms were in place, what dynamics ensured that you had a peaceful situation here, whereas in other places it was so different.

A lot of prayer, brother.… But I think there's a lot of paths or roads that, you know, intersect here that created that environment.I mean, one, historically people know what we've been through in Newark, and we have not fully recovered from it, right?We haven't recovered from it physically, economically still, emotionally, you know, psychologically, and people wear that.They feel it, you know.

They know that we needed police reform in 1967, and we burned the city down for three or four days, 20-something people got killed, and we still need police reform.We’re still in the middle of police reform, 50-something, 50 years later or so.So they—I think in their heart, they understood that that, in and of itself, would not give us the results we were looking for.A lot of people, you know, felt that and understood that, because they live in this town.

Two, I think the organizers are seasoned, you know, who organized that, and they knew what they were doing.And Newark, they have protests like—like that, those groups protest like, almost every week.So the city police are used to protests, right?We have a policy and a posture not to disrupt or interfere with protests.We bring motorcycles to clear the street and basically give them an escort.

And I think that they prepared the same way.They just didn't think it was going to be thousands of people down there, because, you know, we don't normally have protests with 10,000 people, you know.We usually—maybe about 200, 300 people.So they prepared in a regular sense, and we didn't come out there with armed—you know, with the—with the riot gear on, the helmets or billy clubs and rubber bullets.

Can you talk about that?That was notable that—that in a lot of places, the police did come in riot gear, and they did not here.And so was that an intentional kind of aspect of this?

Yeah, it's intentional.The public safety director was very intentional about it, but also it's regular.So we don't normally come out there like that, so we didn't feel the need to now, except that, you know, you’re getting reports from the feds; all this stuff going around here, you get a little nervous.So, you know, they had a standby spot, just in case things got really crazy.But the police that were assigned to the protest purposely and deliberately did not come down there to antagonize the protesters.Our job is to make sure people can protest safely, right?And that's—that's basically—we kept the same posture.And then I showed up to the protest.I did a press conference with Larry Hamm before that.

Larry Hamm, one of the organizers?

One of the organizers before that, and then I came to the protest, spoke and marched in a protest with everybody else.And then we have, you know, our Citizen/Clergy [Academy Workshop], all our other folks that work with the police, that work with the community relations thing, out there in the protest, too.So we have our own people out there as well, you know, talking to the crowd, being a part of what's going on, all those things.

So I think a lot of that was important.And then lastly the residents really made a concerted and deliberate effort to make sure that, when the headlines came out the next day, that it was, “Newark has protested the murder of George Floyd,” and not, “Newark has burned the city once again,” right?And—and that's what I mean by they—they understand the ramifications of what happened 50 years ago, because they know how the press is and what's going on.

They know that the story would be “Newark burns again,” as opposed to “Newarkers come out 10,000 strong to protest the murder of George Floyd.”And I think that people were very conscious of that. …

Treating Violence as a Public Health Issue

One of the things that came to prominence after the protests started, related to George Floyd, was this national conversation about “defunding the police.”What's been your perspective on that and kind of—what are the voices in Newark saying about that?

As the mayor of a major city like Newark, man, we—we always have to be clear and careful about how we organize and what we say.Let me just—our perspective is at a different level than other people's perspectives.For example, I think defunding is necessary, right?I think it's necessary to begin to divert funding from police organizations to other kind of opportunity in a community: social services, other kind of things like that.I think the conversation has not been developed the way it has, where it needs to be, so people keep talking about defund and abolish.It has not developed into: What are we going to do with the money; how is this going to roll out?

There's over-policing, which I think is abusive, and under-policing, which I also think is abusive, right?And so when you go to these communities, the greatest obstacle to defund is not going to be the police department, and it hasn't been in Newark either.The greatest obstacles are people's mothers who lost their son to violence on the street.They want to know where the hell was the cops at, you know?Who's going to—who's going to arrest this guy?How's it going to be safe for me in my neighborhood?

I mean, if you go—if you go by Rutgers’ report that we did years ago, it says 80% of the city experiences virtually no violent crime, right?But the real side of that is that 20% of the city experiences damn near 100% of the violent crime, right?

So if you live in the 20% area, you think all hell is breaking loose all the time.That's where the robberies are; that's where the shootings are; that's where the multiple shootings are, the carjackings.All that stuff happens in that neighborhood.Those people are crying for protection, right?And so when they hear the word “defund,” the way it's being, like, discussed in the press is like, you trying to get rid of police, and people in those neighborhoods are like, “Wait a minute, you know.What I'm a going to do?”And, “Can I call you, brother?Are you going to come over here and protect me when things go wrong?”

So on that side of it—so I think the defund efforts that we’re doing in the city, we are trying to fund, and we are going to fund our Violence Prevention Office and Trauma Recovery.The work that we've been doing anyway—hiring social workers, using Newark Community Street Team, Newark Street Academy, you know, the Shani Baraka [Women’s Resource] Center, West Ward Violence Reduction Initiative, the hospital stuff—bring it all together under one thing and begin to use community-based initiatives and strategies to reduce violent crime in our community, to stop people from engaging in violent crime—and crime, period.And we believe if you reduce the level of violence in the city, you reduce the need to have all these cops, right?And so instead of hiring 2,000 police officers, maybe you only need 850, right?And then the rest of that money needs to go towards those programs, so that community-based initiatives can exist to kind of treat the violence and people that are victims of violence.

And that comes from the idea of violence as public health and treat it as a public health crisis as opposed to the police—as a police response, because we've already proven in Newark that you can reduce crime without arresting people, right?So we've got less arrests.In 2013 we had 116, 115 murders, and then last year we had 51.But we've actually arrested more people in 2013 than we did last year.

So that shows that there's no real causal relationship between arresting people and reducing crime, and that there's some other factors that are part of that, and we need to figure out what those factors are and boost those things up.Then we can reduce the need to over-police these neighborhoods and these communities, keep families and people out of jail, stop stopping people arbitrarily because they think this neighborhood is a violent neighborhood, work with the community organizations to go into places and do conflict resolution, do all the other kind of things that people have been talking about frankly for the last 10, 15 years to reduce violence and crime in these communities, and then you don't need to have a cop on every corner.Like, if you go to community meetings, people demand almost, you know?And so if you’re the mayor of Chicago, the mayor of Newark, of Trenton, of Camden, of East St. Louis.

Places were there are a lot of—historically been a lot of violence.

And where we are historically, because the violence is a symptom of, you know, inequity, white supremacy, poverty, all these things.It is an—it is a direct—has a direct relationship to those things, and we have to address that.And you can't just tomorrow say, “I'm going to take all this money away; there's not going to be any cops,” because now you don't see it as public health, because that—in public health, some people are sick.And because there's some people sick, you have to address them with doctors, right?You have to address sickness, and then do—and then do prevention and intervention and education and all those things, so you can reduce the—how we say it in COVID, right, you reduce the infection rate, right?And so that's how we want to address it, and it's necessary.And what that does, it begins to move violence away from this idea that it is genetic, that it is individual-based, and that there are no factors that—that, you know, cause violence, right?There's no environmental factors that create violence that that can infect you, like a person that under different circumstances would not be violent, but coming into this space in these conditions creates violence.It makes him a victim of violence and maybe even a perpetrator of violence, right?And so—and that it moves like a disease, like sickness.And prior to that, all the strategies were stuff like <i>Scared Straight!</i> and these kind of programs.

The program where they take young people into prisons, yeah.

Yeah, where they take people there, and they—they try to scare them, cuss them out, make them, you know, be afraid of jail so they won't go.None of this stuff had any scientific basis to it whatsoever.Just, you know, people are being convinced to be criminals and violent to other people, and they decide to do it.Like there's gangs on a corner recruiting people, like they're passing out applications for folks to be a part of a gang, this kind of mentality that not only police had but the legislative body had, the superstructure had, that fuels, finances and pushes the police.They—the whole criminal justice system believes violence is this way, that you can't treat it, that it just happens, and the police has to go there because some people are good and other people are bad, that kind of notion, which is unscientific, right?

And so we believe differently.We believe that the conditions, people's surroundings and their individual circumstances create the room and the space for them to become a victim of violence and a perpetrator of violence.We believe that, and we think it needs to be dealt with like other public health crises are dealt with.And the fact that African Americans—men—die disproportionately all over the country in the same conditions, hundreds and hundreds of them, that if it was anybody else—that was the premise.If anybody else, people would already have some kind of scientific look at what's going on.If 700 white men were shot in Chicago, come on, right, with another 300, 400 in New York, 100 in Newark, 70 in this city, 70 in that city, thousands of white men murdered in these communities, there will be a study, all kinds of stuff going on, trying to figure out why this is happening.

But because it—because it starts with us, it's looked at as more about behavioral and about, you know, your genetics, and you was born this way as opposed to there's something going on here that's wrong.And so we began to talk about it in that way, and I think it's been helpful, because what it does is now allows the police to look at it differently; it allows the courts to look at it differently.So now you have things like Youth Court, community court.You get legislators to look at it differently.They begin to use violence dollars to put into your community so you can do violence prevention.And these intervention strategies are at hospitals now.Now you have hospitals involved in violence prevention and intervention.Five years ago, never.It would have never happened.

It would have been an impossibility five years ago for the state legislature to begin to give money to hospitals to intervene when people are shot, to begin to talk to them, give them social services so they won't become a perpetrator of violence later on.Unheard of.This is—this is the methodology of beginning to treat violence as public health, right, and—and that's what we're doing. …

Shifting Funds and Priorities

So you recently moved $11 million from the policing budget into other social service activities.That's exactly what people who have been talking about “defund the police” are talking about.

Yeah, that’s what we’re doing. Yeah.

So what is the plan for that?How do you plan to use that in place of things that people will typically call the police for?

We are going to commandeer the 1st Precinct over here that was normally the 4th Precinct.We’re going to put those police officers in a different location.We’re going to—and that was the precinct where the taxi driver was beaten—

In 1967?

—the start of 1967.And we’re going to turn that into an Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, and we’re going to put all of those organizations that I talked about under that roof.We already put Keesha Eure as the manager or director of the Violence Prevention Office.All of the programs that—that these people use, that they have to go get grants for and the city give them a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there, we’re going to give them sustainable money so they can continue what they're doing, but also expand and grow it throughout the city and be a real partner with the community, in terms of reducing the level of violence and crime, and begin to allow the police to understand that they're not the only institution that's here to reduce violence and crime in our community, that there are other institutions, and we’re going to solidify that, and they have to work with them, right, as well.And there's some calls police are not going to go to anymore, right, that—or they’re not going to go to alone.

We had an instance where the police was called to a mental illness situation, and two of them got stabbed, you know, which was, you know, interesting because nothing happened to the guy, but the—the lady, excuse me.But we—in instances like that, we want to send social workers.We want to send social workers to certain domestic violence things, social workers to drunk and disorderly.We want to send different—you know, send folks out and be able to have a community response to some of this stuff.

And we've already done that.We done it all in COVID.And we've begun to move that way.So if there are large, unruly crowds, people not wearing masks, you don't always necessarily send the police; we send education and information task force, right?You send—you have a community response to that, because the community should be, you know, enforcing people to wear their masks, and the community should be enforcing people to make other people safe.There should be some things that the community folks should enforce with one another.

And we’re going to—we want to go in that direction and bring police in when it's necessary.I think police should be dealing with violent crime and crimes that we can't initially go to and deal with, because I don't care what you think ideologically, we could debate for years about the present moment, but the present moment says, if there's shots fired, people want police to go to that.If there's an armed robbery in progress, people are still going to call 911.

One of the things that came up, we've talked with Director [Anthony] Ambrose, we've talked with Peter Harvey, who's overseeing the consent decree here, and that has been the need for funding for policing to make sure the departments actually function in the way that you want.So how do you balance those two things?

It's hard.And, you know, and I think people don't—like, most of the police budget is personnel, and they're usually the largest budget because they have the largest number of people in their department.I mean, New York has some crazy 30,000 kind of officers, you know.They have more people in the police department than we have working for the city, period.So, I mean, what you—what you're talking about is reducing the number of personnel in the police department in order to secure money to do other things.

And that's only possible by finding other ways to reduce… that's why I go back to that, to reduce violence and crime in the community.I believe there are other ways, right, and we just have to—we've been trying to convince the people of the city, the state and the county that there are other ways to do it.I think because of George Floyd, it expedited that moment and gave us the leverage we need to say—needed to say, listen, we have to do this now. …

A “Trauma-Informed City”

What's the thinking behind the Trauma [to] Trust program, and how does it operate?

First, we're trying to be a trauma-informed city, and that goes along with violence is public health; that everybody experienced—that growing up in Newark, you've experienced some level of trauma.When I go to those meetings, I talk about the trauma I experienced.Like … I've been traumatized, you know?I've seen my father beaten by the police, arrested by the police, you know.I've been arrested, stopped by the police.I've seen people shot, all kind of stuff.

So I've been traumatized, and most of the adults are walking around here with untreated trauma.And then we run into each other, and that trauma crashes, and then we have a huge explosion.And police are traumatized because they’re in communities, before they even became cops, they were indoctrinated by a super-structure that told them that the community don't like them, that the neighborhood is violent, that the criminals live here, people are going to murder you, shoot you, they don't care about you.Then you drop a 20-year-old, 21-year-old kid in that neighborhood with halfway training, someone with no, like, college at all, and—and some of them learned racism as children.

And so that's a recipe for what we see today.And what we try to do is go face-to-face, the police and the community, come face-to-face with those kind of realities.You know, I grew up, you grew up in Newark; I'm traumatized.When I see the police, the police cause me trauma, you know, so if—if I'm in Academy Spires housing project, and last night the police bust in the project and arrested 32 people, two of my uncles, my cousin, my mama, and then I’ve got to go to school, and on my way to school the next day, there are police at the door, wanding and scanning me before I walk through the door, this is trauma.And if don't nobody call the school and say, “Look, this kid just experienced some trauma over the weekend,” he act out in the school, don't nobody know why he acting out.Then he's penalized for acting out, right, which kind of perpetuates this kind of thing that's—that's going on.And happening now, the DEA, when they arrest people in Newark over the weekend or [at] night, they have to call the school and tell them, “This person got arrested, that person got arrested, that person got arrested, you know, or their parents,” and so forth and so on, which is one step.So that's what that—that is designed to do, to put everything on the table.And police say, “Look, I want to go home at night,” and—and the people in the neighborhood say, “Look, I want to go home, too.” …

Police Accountability

Is there accountability when it comes to police in Newark today?

Yes, I think so.I think there’s accountability.Is it where it needs to be? I don't—no, no.But I think it—I think on a—on its face, yes.And the work towards that?Absolutely.I think people get addressed immediately, right, but there are other pieces of it that have to—where there's qualified immunity or allowing police officers the opportunity to have a certain period of time before we even question them or bring them in.All of this stuff is contractual legal things, which is why I say we're not all the way where we need to be.But in terms of us responding to something that they did, they know we're going to respond to it.Whether you're going to get suspended or addressed immediately, I think they understand that part of it, but—some people need to be fired immediately.

The problem is, those people could come back, you know what I mean?So we—you know, because the law protects them.So when you get fired, right, so you still have the union; you still have due process; you have all that stuff.And they have a greater amount of protections than regular citizens.And so at the end of the day, you wind up—they can go to court, we wind up losing, you have to pay them all that pay back, and then you have to bring them back on the force anyway, which happens in many places around the country.We have to change contracts, and we have—we need a state legislature to change some laws.

So what's your thinking about the bill that's been introduced in Congress, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, and specifically them talking about this, a national registry for police misconduct and, you know, national standards for use of force and so on?

It’s necessary.You need a national standard for use of force.You need to get on a national level.You need to get rid of the qualified immunity on a federal level, national level.Get rid of it, because those things begin to trickle down in the states and municipalities.You need to get rid of that immediately.The ban on the chokeholds and all of those things, that stuff needs—that—that has to happen.The same way people are fighting for national kind of laws around, you know, gun ownership and guns in communities, the same thing around police.I think that that is important. …

Measuring Fair Policing

So Director Ambrose recently wrote an op-ed; he was saying that there are still predominantly African Americans, people of color, who are arrested and have contact with officers, but that this—but that this did not constitute racial profiling.For a person who's looking at the old setup, state of affairs, and the person looking at that admission from Director Ambrose, they say, “This feels the same to me,” like, what would you say to that person?

Well, in some instances it is the same, right?But I think the point that Director Ambrose was trying to make was that the victims of the crimes are African American and their perpetrators are African American, so they go after those people, and they're going to have the most contacts, you know, because violence and crime is intraracial, you know what I'm saying?So most white people are hurt by other white folks, and the same with Black people, right?So we try to make this as something like an anomaly, but it's just the reality because we all live together.America is still segregated.But at the end of the day, because the victims are predominantly African American and the perpetrators of those victims are, when you target that, there's still going to be a high number of African Americans you come in contact with.

So what then becomes the metric for what is fair policing?Like, if you're in a situation where you're saying, OK, the predominant number of victims here are African Americans, how do you make sure that your policing is victim-oriented and not a kind of generic policing that targets people based on their skin color?

So I think that's why it's important for us to do the Office of Violence Prevention-Trauma Recovery.I think that's important to begin to give victims a voice to—because sometimes the victim becomes the perpetrator, so to give them an opportunity to weigh out the target and focus on victims, as opposed to just the perpetrator.And then I think what the difference is, this kind of arbitrary wide net that people throw out to round everybody up in the community, this—this “broken windows” thing that was broken in the beginning, that people have used to target violence and crime in a community, was just flawed seriously, and that all has to be thrown out the door, all to be thrown out the window.And then we have to have a kind of serious conversation about where crime is happening and why it's happening and begin to target crime and violence, not people, right?You target the crime and the violence.The problem in these areas is when you—even when you target crime and violence, the people you're targeting, inadvertently it's going to be us, and it becomes incredibly important for you to have alternative or community-based initiatives to begin to reduce that, like, to bring that down.If the data says that if my father was arrested, I'm more likely to be arrested; if my father was involved in violent crime, I'm more likely to be involved in a violent crime—if that's what the Rutgers data is telling us, the hospital data is telling us, then we have to intervene so that the son and the grandson is not targeted by the police but is now targeted by people who are trying to give them social services to pull them out of a condition that they are almost guaranteed to come across, simply because of the ZIP code that they live in. …

Is This Moment Different?

So we've known each other for a long time.We talked previously about the time when we were in upstate New York hiking, and there were I think five of us on this trail, five African American men.By the time we got to the bottom of the trail, there were five police cars.

Right.

One cop car for each of us.

Right.

And that was, you know, us, you know, against a car for nothing other than being Black and hiking in this community.And we were college students then.That was the Rodney King era.We're now older than college students, and we've seen—

A lot older. (Laughter.)

We've seen over the years many things along in that same line, with Eric Garner, Philando Castile, on to George Floyd.Are you optimistic about change happening, you know, in terms of the way that Black people in this country fundamentally relate to policing?

Yeah, yep.I have to be optimistic because, one, I'm the mayor, and I don't have the luxury of pessimism.Two, I think that this is the time now.I don't think the window is going to be open forever.When people start putting “Black Lives Matter” up, the same way these stores put up “Soul Brother,” so they won't get their window busted, when that—when that period ends, like, now you can see a basketball game with “Black Lives Matter” on the court; Amazon, “Black Lives Matter”; commercials, “Black Lives Matter.” It's almost like they—they're selling you a hat or a scarf or something.But, you know, this is the time period to make it happen, right now.And I—and I've been concerned.My only concern is that we have a real organized push and thrust to articulate clearly what it is that we need out of this time period, what we need out of this that is not a bunch of disparate kind of things, and people out here getting all kind of stuff; that we clearly come up with, “This is what we need at this time,” right?We need it now, which—which is important for us.That's my only worry.But I am very optimistic about our ability to make things happen.

So for all the—for all those instances that we just talked about, we've seen things that are outrageous, we've seen things that are unjust, things that are unconstitutional, things that are racist, a redundant cycle, and then George Floyd and a completely different response, because in all those other instances, the people who were predominantly outraged about them were Black.

Was us.

Right, exactly.And then George Floyd, and as we were talking about before, there were people rioting in Salt Lake City, with a 2% Black population.Why do you think this moment is different?Like, what happened differently, and what do you think is driving that?

George Floyd is the Emmett Till of 2020, of this generation, you know.I mean, so many people got lynched before Emmett Till.Emmett Till's lynching kind of buttressed the—his mama showing him all over the world, the body, the face, the everything like that, kind of outraged the rest of the country to see that these people were as evil as we were talking about all of this time; that there was undeniable fresh evil running around and—and that folks needed to address it.There was no way to get away from it.I think everybody being under quarantine and COVID and stuck in the house, no baseball, no basketball, no Broadway, no theater, no movies, no entertainment was the perfect storm, glued to the social media, to the TV, to see this man kneeling on somebody's neck, with no—with this kind of stoic look on his face, with his hands in his pocket, represented like hundreds of years of what we've been talking about, and the—with the proverbial knee on our necks, right?And it was—there was nowhere to run from it.It just was live, in living color, man.And—and there's nothing that you could say to justify.Not even other police officers could justify what they were witnessing.

There's nothing that they could do.There was nothing that they could say that there was resistance; that maybe if he did this or, “You don't know the police story,” because they usually get into these things, right?I get into arguments with my guys and other cops all the time about stuff that go on.They always have these little nuances about why things went this way.There was no nuance to this at all.He simply laid there and said, “He's—they're going to kill me,” and they did it.And other officers watched him.

And it—it embarrassed everybody.The rest of white America was clearly embarrassed by it, and, you know, these institutions who wanted to pretend that it didn't exist couldn't do it anymore.

I think one of the things about that—that film, did you—have you seen the entire video?

Yes.

I think I made it like halfway through the video, and one of the things that struck me—one of the things that struck me about that video was the fact that he was calling out for his mother—

Yeah.

—and not simply the fact that he was calling for his mother, but the fact that his mother had died two years earlier.And what that said to me was that this was a person who had given up hope on any worldly intervention saving his life.

Sure, sure, sure.

And he was placing his fate in the hands of things that are well beyond what we know in this world.And I think that that was both stunning and disheartening.And I think that maybe the questions we're asking is about the ability of those forces in this world to change those situations, of approaching this in a way that—that maybe there's not another person calling on a deceased relative to try to save their life in the future.

It’s the will.Even the “defund the police” don't get at the—doesn't get at the crux of it.The reality is the inhumanity that we're treated with, the inability for other people to see us as human beings, has always been our struggle with this country, from—from Dred Scott to everything else, right, you know, from, you know, we—we just are not human beings.And what people really want is they don't want to be murdered running from—at a traffic stop or choked to death because they’ve got a loose cigarette or, you know, their neck stood on because of a $20 bill, or their kid murdered in front of a rec center for playing with a toy gun.

They don't want to be murdered, and the real crazy thing is, even if you defund the police, it's not going to stop people from murdering us or make people see us as human beings, right?That's—that's not the—that's not the crux of what—what we need to be getting at.And Jesse says something powerful, and I don't—I don't quote Jesse a lot, but he says something powerful.

Jesse Jackson?

Jesse Jackson said, "Listen," he said, "we didn't struggle all these years just to have a kinder and gentler police force."That's not what we want, right?It would be helpful, right?But that's not the end.That's not—that's not what we wish we did.You know, people don't get beat and water-hosed and shot and murdered and killed so the police could treat us better.

The police represent a larger system that—that they're enforcing these people's values, right?And every institution in America has the same values that the police department has in America.The police just got guns.As a matter of fact, more African American women die in the emergency room giving birth than on the streets by police because of inequity in the damn hospital, right?So people have the courage now to say, “Black Lives Matter,” but they don't have the courage to say, “Abolish white supremacy.”

The Double Pandemic

Last thing, I'm interested in this connection.You talked about people registering George Floyd differently because they were at home, because COVID-19 meant that, you know, there was no entertainment; there was no going to work.They were just at home with the news, and they saw what happened.I wonder if you see a connection between the pandemic, the fact that African Americans have died at double, in some instances triple, the rates of whites, and the issues that we saw with George Floyd, and this kind of national reckoning with policing and racism and violence.Do you see a connection between those two things?

Absolutely.We—we've been—I've been saying since the beginning, there's a double pandemic, right?So I see a deep connection.I mean, inequity is real, and I think it just unearthed—COVID just unearthed everything, man.It's like a typhoon just came and just boom—and unearthed inequity in housing.People can't social distance in a house.They can't quarantine.I mean, our access to health care, our access to—to everything, how vulnerable our families and communities were, not just from the sickness but from the lack of resources.And then it allowed the world to see the relationship that people have with the police, how violent and ugly that was, and that was just another check on the list of all the other things that we had to deal with, the other stress that we have to navigate in America.Absolutely.

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