Jay Separates Fact from Pseudo-Science

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From the 48-Hour Rule to the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights, Jay talks with social scientists and legal experts about a criminal justice system that offers special protections to the police that are neither offered to civilians nor backed by hard science. 

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Transcript

[00:13] Stephanie Wittels Wachs: This podcast contains difficult content that may be triggering to some listeners. Please be advised.

 

[00:24] Geoff Alpert: People heard gunshots and they showed up to this abandoned school, and then they would hear of a woman screaming and yelling for help. There’s loud music, there’s a lot of yelling and screaming.

 

[00:38] Jay Ellis: This is The Untold Story: Policing. I’m Jay Ellis.

 

[00:43] Geoff Alpert: So they go into the room and they’ve got to figure out who’s the good guy, who’s the bad guy, who’s the victim, who’s the perpetrator. What threat does this person pose to them, to anyone else in the room and do they have to use deadly force?

 

[01:00] Jay Ellis: That guy you’re hearing from is Geoff Alpert. He’s a criminologist, and he’s describing something that I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be anywhere near. Police can find themselves in situations like this a lot, and — say what you will about them — I don’t envy it. These are the moments where every decision can have huge, life-changing consequences.

 

[01:23] Geoff Alpert: So it was very stressful. About as stressful as you can get. 

 

[01:30] Jay Ellis: Luckily, this time, it’s just a drill. Did we get ya? What Geoff described to me was a police training exercise, circa 2010. A training exercise designed to prevent things from ending in violence. Police do exercises like this one so they can get practice keeping calm in situations that would break most people. They’ve got to learn how to work with adrenaline coursing through their veins. And for it to work, it’s got to feel as real as possible. So, these cops basically built themselves a state-of-the-art, high-crime haunted house.

 

[02:13] Jay Ellis: But, why are we telling you about this? Wasn’t last episode about police unions contracts? It’ll make sense soon. You can trust me, I’m not going to trick you again. Because confusing what’s real and what isn’t can lead to trouble, too. We’ve seen it a bunch of times during this pandemic, with false hope swirling up around possible quick fixes, cures that the science can’t back up. And believe it or not, the same thing happens in policing. Police unions benefit from that confusion, because it’s harder to put together an effective critique if you’re not working with a full deck of facts. So, that’s what we’re going to do today on the show: separate fact from fiction. Starting with something called “the 48-hour rule” Here’s how the 48 hour rule works: It’s this idea that you need to give cops a cooling off period after something super intense happens. If a cop — we’ll call him Officer Smith — does something bad. Let’s say he shoots an unarmed person. You want to figure out what happened right away. Speak to Smith immediately to get the story straight from him. It seems like justice 101, right? The surprising thing is that in a lot of cities, you can’t do that. You have to wait before you sit him down and ask questions. 

 

[03:48] Jay Ellis: That’s because the contract those cities signed with the police unions say you’ve gotta give Officer Smith a minute to get his head in order. Supposedly, his recall will improve after a couple of days, once the adrenaline stops messing with his system. That was the theory, anyway. So let’s get back to that high-crime haunted house.

 

[04:09] Geoff Alpert: Different rooms were set up in different configurations. 

 

[04:15] Jay Ellis: Geoff Alpert studies people and behavior and things like that. So when he heard about this abandoned school that was being used to train police, he saw an opportunity to experiment. He reached out to the police department.

 

[04:26] Geoff Alpert: We were able to talk them into allowing us to evaluate the officers who went through that training, interview them.

 

[04:35] Jay Ellis: The point was to do solid research to test that 48-hour rule. Geoff was familiar with the concept, It comes up a lot with him being a criminology professor and all. But he hadn’t seen any studies that actually supported the idea. Maybe you’re scratching your head right about now, wondering, how the heck does something become a rule if it’s never been studied? Good question. Enter the Force Science Institute: That’s right. Force. Science. Institute. It’s a group that does research and training about supposedly evidence-based policing methods. And they’re the ones that started calling this 48 hour theory a rule. It got repeated again and again, in the media and definitely at the negotiating table when police unions crafted their contracts with cities. Geoff was excited, because his experiment would be the first scientific experiment to actually test the 48 hour theory – even though it had been treated as fact for decades. So he got to it. He Interviewed the police officers who went through the exercise. Group 1 was grilled immediately after, and Group 2 got to wait 48 hours before answering questions. Then he could compare the details of recall. Find out how time, in this case 48 hours, affected memory of that stressful scene. Sounds like a simple enough experiment, right?

 

[06:14] Jay Ellis: What happened? I’ll get to that. First, I need to tell you that this is way more important than just proving whether or not the memory thing is true. I talked with law professor Stephen Rushin, and he told me that the 48-hour rule, or some version of it, has made its way into the contracts that police unions all over the country negotiate for their officers.

 

[06:40] Stephen Rushin: So, you know, before you’re able to ask officers questions about allegations of misconduct in a number of police departments across the country, we are actually required to give those officers a rigid waiting period and in some places is like 30 minutes or two hours. But in some cities they can be as long as, and I kid you not, like 10 days or 30 days before you’re able to ask an officer or just a question about an allegation of misconduct.

 

[07:12] Jay Ellis: Stephen teaches Criminal Law, Evidence, and Police Accountability at Loyola University Chicago. He’s also the son of a police officer.

 

[07:19] Stephen Rushin: We looked at over 650 places in the country to kind of figure out what their policies were. And what we found is that around 21 percent of those places, thereabouts, provide officers with a rigid waiting period, meaning it’s not just a waiting period that says this is for a reasonable period until you can get access to representation. It’s literally like you have two days, three days, four days before we can ask questions.

 

[07:47] Jay Ellis: 21 percent. That’s 1 in 5.  That is an uncomfortably large number. Do we even know what police officers are doing with the time they’re given? 

 

[07:57] Stephen Rushin: It’s hard to tell, right? It’s hard to tell, because if officers are using this in the way that some civil rights advocates worry, which is if they use it to construct stories, construct alibis, get their stories straight, whatever. You’re not going to learn about that, right?

You’re not going to find that in the record. I found that, you know, roughly around 30 percent or thereabouts provide officers with access to information in advance of that interrogation. So access to incriminating evidence that can be used against them. And this can range from something as small as access to a copy of the complaint. But it can also include things like access to video evidence, audio evidence, G.P.S. evidence, witness statements, basically everything you have against an officer that they get to see during the waiting period before you ask them questions.

 

[08:47] Jay Ellis: Police officers get to see the evidence against them before they have to tell their side of the story? I’m not usually a cynical guy, but this is not how it’s supposed to work. It’s hard to see it as anything but a large, thumb pressed way down on one side of the scales of justice. This just isn’t what you do if you really want to get to the truth. I’m pretty sure that’s what John Rappaport would say.

 

[09:14] John Rappaport: Let me tell you, I used to be a public defender. This is not what you do for a criminal suspect when you’re trying to figure out if he is guilty or not.

 

[09:21] Jay Ellis: John teaches law at the University of Chicago. He shares Stephen Rushin’s sentiment.

 

[09:26] John Rappaport: You don’t give him all the evidence and 48 hours to craft the perfect story that that, you know, sits alongside the evidence. You go in and you surprise him and you try to lock him into a statement early. So they’re doing the opposite of that.

 

[09:40] Jay Ellis: When you say that, when you say you go in early and you try to surprise him. I mean, if we can just see, like, what the difference in time is, are we talking about an hour with a suspect versus 48 hours, or are we talking about 15 minutes?

 

[09:55] John Rappaport: As soon as possible.

 

[09:57] Jay Ellis: I mean, I hear that and I go, well, I mean, if I got 48 hours and you gonna give me everything, I’m not really that worried about it. I’ll go home and have a shower and a good dinner and a beer and then, you know, figure it out later.

 

[10:08] John Rappaport: And by the way, talk to your lawyer. And, you know, look, again, I was a public defender. I believe that, you know, people who are accused of wrongdoing deserve representation. But you’re going to not just look at the evidence yourself. You’re going to talk it over with your union lawyer. Some of the stuff that concerns the public, I think rightly so, is also on the back-end. So imagine that despite you having 48 hours to think about and look at all the evidence, we manage to sustain the complaint against you, ok, that complaint is then going to get erased from your record in six months, a year, two years, it’ll be gone forever. 

 

[10:42] Jay Ellis: What? 

 

[10:44] John Rappaport: You know, ordinary people, you commit a crime. You’ve got a criminal record for life.

 

[10:57] Jay Ellis: You know, this whole thing reminds me of when you’re a kid, and like, one of your friends, let’s just call him Martin. You probably had your own version of Martin, the kid with the cool toys, the fancy bike, the Nintendo. His toys might be cool, but Martin was cold. As a kid you’d be running around in the neighborhood or at recess, playing freeze tag, but whenever you’re “It,” Martin would make up some new rule — invincibility zones, where I couldn’t tag him, or he’d invoke obscure by-laws, like “the freezing time-out clause” that never seemed to work in your or my favor. There is just no way to squint at it to make it look fair. Martin had his own set of rules that were just better than the rules he applied to the other kids. To hear Stephen Rushin describe it, he’s kind of saying these special rules for the police are on the level with bogus freeze tag invincibility zones.

 

[12:08] Stephen Rushin: We sent surveys to over 500 police supervisors all across the country and we just asked them, how would you feel if we were to tell you that before you could question a suspect, you had to give that suspect 48 hours of notice of your intent to interrogate him. Any guesses what those police supervisors said whenever we asked them, how do you feel about getting a suspect two days notice before you can ask him a question?

 

[12:39] Jay Ellis: My guess is there’s a resounding no. I mean, my guess would be that they hated the idea.

 

[12:44] Stephen Rushin: That’s a pretty fair summary. Like 97 to 98 percent of the officers that we talked to felt as if this would impair their ability to get to the truth. They said things like this gives suspects a chance to line up an alibi, construct lies and rehearse, strategize about how to conceal the truth, get their lives in order. Destroy evidence or hide evidence that’s not already in police possession. One officer said to us, the first 48 hours of an investigation are critical. And some folks went even further than that and said, you know, that this sort of proposal would virtually nullify the need to interrogate. So the response was overwhelmingly negative. So to us, that tells us something really important, right. They would not accept this as a limitation upon their ability to get to the truth in a criminal investigation. Then why is it so necessary if we’re investigating misconduct by officers?

 

[13:41] Jay Ellis: And then Rushin said something that made me think the stakes are even higher.

 

[13:45] Stephen Rushin: We’ve been talking about the 48 hour rule. But I think the 48 hour rule is just like one example of a much bigger problem about what is due process and what is not due process. And this debate about what is a fair labor contract, what represents a fair versus an unfair labor contract goes way beyond just the 48 hour rule for interrogations.

 

[14:08] Jay Ellis: When the rules always and unfairly favor one side, you’ve got bigger problems than just invincibility zones. 

 

[14:15] Kate Levine: Due process, it’s not a myth. It’s in the Constitution. 

 

[15:37] Jay Ellis: Kate Levine is a criminal law expert who teaches at the Cardozo School of Law in New York City. I spoke to her to learn more about due process, which is a term that I of course can explain very well and didn’t need Kate’s help at all.

 

[15:57] Kate Levine: I mean, I’m a lawyer, so it’s hard for me to, like, not parse this out in sort of like a dorky way, but like sort of most strictly, due process is a phrase from two amendments, the Fifth Amendment and the 14th Amendment. And what the due process clause, it says the same thing in both amendments. Neither the federal nor the state government can deprive a person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. You know, translated for the criminal law process, I think you could say it’s the idea that no one can be sent to prison or convicted of a crime unless they’re given the appropriate process. So that means like things like the right to a lawyer under the Sixth Amendment, or things like the right not to be tortured into a confession under the Fifth Amendment. All those things apply to the states as well, thanks to the due process clause in the 14th Amendment.

 

[16:43] Jay Ellis: OK. So we’re looking at this 48 hour rule, which gives a bunch of time to police officers for interrogations, time that the rest of us would never get. You are immediately questioned when something happens. But that is not the case on the other side. And then police tell you it’s for the best and that they are entitled to their own due process. But from the outside, obviously, it looks less like due process and more like, to be honest, just an unfair rule. Like, you know, police are setting this double standard that they get to benefit from. I guess what I’m trying to ask is due process as subjective as that or can we actually pin it down?

 

[17:26] Kate Levine: So the issue you’re addressing, I think, that makes sense is how can some people receive more process than other people? If we’re being honest about that, though, that happens informally in many cases. Wealthier people have more resources to protect themselves and challenge cases. White people have white privilege that leads to fewer arrests, and sometimes more sympathy from prosecutors and judges and juries. But what I will say about the 48 hour rule is that you’re talking about a formal, written-down protection that only applies to the police and not to ordinary citizens. And so that does seem sort of particularly problematic in terms of the unfairnesses of the different tiers of justice. And I would say, you know, the police get a lot of protections through their contract negotiations. And most of them, if it was up to me, those protections would just apply to everyone.

 

[18:26] Jay Ellis: So I thought unions were all solidarity forever. So how can unions push rules that enshrine this two-tiered system of justice?

 

[18:37] Kate Levine: I’m pro-union. And I think police unions are more complicated than other private sector unions. The problem with police unions is they sort of become these like weird de-facto communications departments for the police who see their job somehow now as sort of protecting the police in general at all costs. And they also see that as always being against progress and reform of the criminal legal system. And that’s where the problems, for me, really come in. 

 

[19:10] Jay Ellis: Do you have any advice for how we could go about restoring some, like, meaningful, idea of due process. Do you have any thoughts on it? 

 

[19:21] Kate Levine: This is what I would suggest: take a look at the protections the police give themselves when they’re being interrogated and apply all of those protections to everyone, with the exception perhaps of this waiting period. So everyone should have the right to take care of their basic necessities. Sleep, eat, use the restroom. Everyone should only be able to be questioned for a certain amount of time. Everyone should have representation. Police should never be able to threaten you and tell you like you’re going to get the death penalty if you don’t confess. I mean, false confessions are a huge problem. That’s the utility I see in looking at these law enforcement officers’ bills of rights and these contracts for officers is how are the police treated well and how can we make sure everyone else gets treated that well?

 

[20:05] Jay Ellis: Making sure everyone is treated well, now that I can get behind. That’s like, what this country is supposed to be about. But where we left it, the jury’s still out on one question. That 48 hour rule, the waiting period before police officers can be investigated. Does it actually help officers remember a stressful and dangerous situation more accurately? Is it a part of due process we all should get to access? Let’s check back in with our friend Geoff Alpert for some answers. Remember, he was interviewing police officers after a realistic, high-stress training exercise.

 

[20:38] Geoff Alpert: You start asking them the questions about what threat did this person pose? What was the weapon? Where was the person standing? How many shots were fired? Things like that.

 

[20:50] Jay Ellis: He was especially interested in asking them about the details of the experience directly related to the threat of violence. The details that are key for police officers who are trying to save lives. 

 

[21:01] Geoff Alpert: Questions about the number of shots, which were the audio. Questions about what the person was wearing, which would be visual.

 

[21:11] Jay Ellis: Professor Geoff Alpert and his team analyzed the results. Geoff, tell ‘em what you found!

 

[21:16] Geoff Alpert: We found that the 48 hour is more of a theory than anything else, that memories do not improve over 48 hours. Let me be a little bit more specific. When you look at the totality of a memory, overall, there was no change. Now, when you start asking what was the weapon? Where was the person standing? How many shots were fired? Things like that, that would really create the threat to the officer and the public, memory actually got a little bit worse.

 

[21:51] Jay Ellis: Geoff’s work shows there is absolutely no justification to wait the 48 hours. If your goal is to get to the truth, it’s actually better to speak to someone right away. This rule, it isn’t a part of due process that we all should enjoy. It’s an unfair protection that’s actually obstructing justice by clouding the truth. And I hate to say it, but that 48 hour rule isn’t the only thing in those police union contracts that’s like that. I took what I learned and got back on a Zoom chat with Sam and DeRay. They looked at me like, “Jay, keep up!” and launched into passionate activist mode. Here’s DeRay.

 

[22:33] DeRay Mckesson: The moment that we start to challenge and just sort of push, they’re like you’re attacking my due process rights and we’re like, what? This isn’t due process.

 

[22:42] Jay Ellis: These clauses that give special rights to police — all these extra process rights — are well beyond the normal due process that the rest of us can expect. These extra rights are enshrined in contracts all over the U.S. Look at Albuquerque, where police officers get the benefit of the doubt until citizens prove their credibility.

 

[23:02] DeRay Mckesson: The citizen who complained about the officer has to actually take a polygraph test first, and successfully pass the polygraph test, before the officer can be required to take a polygraph test.

 

[23:15] Jay Ellis: To Detroit, where special protections don’t end even when police officers are convicted criminals.

 

[23:21] Sam Sinyangwe: If you’re a police officer who is accused of domestic violence and then convicted of the crime, you get special treatment and remain on the force for nine months so that you have the opportunity to challenge that conviction or have it overturned or get pardoned. 

 

[23:37] Jay Ellis: From Chicago, where interrogation rules seem designed to trip up investigators. 

 

[23:40] DeRay Mckesson: Only two people can be in the room at a time and only one person can ask the officer questions at a time. The moment that two people start talking to the officer at the same time, you’ve technically violated the contract. So could you imagine getting a discipline decision overturned because two people were just talking at the same time? 

 

[23:58] Jay Ellis: All the way to California, where public leaders are kept in the dark about the entire discipline appeals process.

 

[24:04] DeRay Mckesson: Mayors and police chiefs don’t even get copies of the arbitrator’s decision. They don’t know why it got overturned. They don’t know what the rationale is. They don’t know what to change. That is wild.

 

[24:14] Jay Ellis: Taken together, they paint quite the picture.

 

[24:16] Sam Sinyangwe: It’s one thing to think about one of these clauses in isolation, but with the contracts, they really map out from start to finish — from the time that an officer commits misconduct to the time that they are investigated — what happens to the records of that investigation after the investigation is over, and how that officer can then erase those records, get reinstated and basically erase all of what happened to that point. All of that’s articulated in the contract. 

 

[24:43] Jay Ellis: And in 17 states, similar protections have also been enshrined into state laws called 

the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights.

 

[24:54] Christy Lopez: Because they sound so innocuous. Bill of Rights. You know, that’s great. But what they do is they give police officers an additional layer of protection above what anybody else has, sometimes even more protections than defendants in criminal cases have. And remember, we wouldn’t get any of these protections. But police officers do, and some of them are really problematic.

 

[25:19] Jay Ellis: Christy Lopez worked for the Department of Justice for 12 years. She served as a Deputy Chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division, and now she teaches law at Georgetown University. The police union contracts have this powerful backup system in place, this bill of rights, that basically acts like a contract on steroids.

 

[25:39] Christy Lopez: They basically make statewide what was previously included in some collective bargaining agreements here and there. Some of the things in these bills of rights are pretty innocuous and appropriate, like you can’t abuse officers verbally or physically during an interview. Well, let’s hope that, you know, we don’t need a state statute to say that, but if we do, that’s fine. But there’s so many other things in these law enforcement bills of rights that really just give a free pass to officers. Things like everything from the restrictions on when you can file a complaint. In some of them, you can only file it within 30 days of the alleged misconduct occurring. They dictate composition of hearing boards, requiring sometimes it may be all officers, or even officers of the same rank. So it makes it very difficult to hold officers accountable. The restrictions on who can file a complaint, you have to have a sworn affidavit or a notarized complaint in some places. Under many of these statutes, from the moment that you learned about the allegation of misconduct, you cannot impose discipline after the time period set out in law enforcement officer Bill of Rights. In some cases, that’s a year. In other cases, it’s 60 days. So it makes it very, very difficult to hold officers accountable. And I could go on. There’s just any number of things in these statutes.

 

[27:04] Jay Ellis: All of this stuff is maddening. But, maybe you’re thinking, like I was, that these are just some obscure rules that suck, but what are you gonna do? Well, it doesn’t just suck in theory. These rules have had real consequences. Anytime you’ve seen a police officer walk free after brutalizing or killing someone, anytime an officer has eventually gotten their job back, there’s a good chance that they used the Bill of Rights in their case. John Rappaport has seen those stories, too. And he noticed that each and every time, the police unions stepped up to back up the officers involved. He thought he could read between the lines. But, as an academic, he wasn’t about to be satisfied with a hunch. He rolled up his sleeves and dove into the research.

 

[27:57] John Rappaport: We thought, look, if unions really are as sort of obstructionist and regressive as these stories make them seem, then we should be able to see it in a big data study.

 

[28:13] Jay Ellis: Right. And so I imagine there’s challenges to that. So how do you design — do you assign one group of officers to be a control group with no union, and then another group of officers to be an experimental group, and they’re able to actually organize and collectively bargain? How does that piece work?

 

[28:28] John Rappaport: Right. So if we were studying a drug, that is exactly how we would do it. We would assign half the officers to get the drug. Half the officers to get a placebo. And then we would compare the performance of those two groups of officers. But in the real world, in a setting like this, you can’t do it that way. You’ve got to look for opportunities to do what’s called a natural experiment.

 

[28:55] Jay Ellis: Here’s the story: Police departments in Florida had been unionizing since the 1960s. But sheriff’s offices, which are basically county level law enforcement agencies, they weren’t allowed to form unions until the state supreme court gave them the go ahead to do so in a 2003 decision. Right there, that supreme court decision, that newfound right to unionize – that was the “drug” John set out to test.

 

[29:22] John Rappaport: We decided to look only at these serious complaints that involved violence. And that’s because we think it’s the issue of greatest concern to the public. It’s the most impactful.

 

[29:32] Jay Ellis: So, Rappaport measures the rate of police violence in those sheriff’s departments before and after they were allowed to unionize.

 

[29:40] John Rappaport: The short version is after 2003, it goes up by 40 percent. And so 40 percent sounds like a ton. But what we call the base rate, meaning the rate of misconduct before the treatment, before the 2003 decision that changed everything, was just .5 complaints a year. It goes up to .7 complaints a year. Now, you know, there’s different ways you could think about that. One way you could think about it is one additional serious violent incident per sheriff’s office every five years. You know, if it’s your brother, your son who’s the victim of that, it’s a serious increase.

 

[30:19] Jay Ellis: Did your research get to a really granular level where you could really just suss out like particular cases in these contracts and how they were associated with the largest jumps in misconduct?

 

[30:33] John Rappaport: No, we didn’t. And we think that’s a really important next step for research. I think what you’re getting at is this: the story that we think explains what we find is that once sheriff’s deputies got the right to bargain collectively, it becomes harder to hold them accountable because they bargained for all these procedural protections in the contracts.

I’m looking at right now at a provision from Cleveland’s collective bargaining agreement. It says “verbal disciplinary warnings and disciplinary written reprimands shall be removed from a police officer’s record after six months. And all other disciplinary actions or penalties will be removed after two years from the date discipline was administered.”

 

[31:17] Jay Ellis: Could you just explain to me what that actually means when Tamir Rice gets shot in the streets? What does that actually mean for the officer who was on the other side of that weapon?

 

[31:31] John Rappaport: So what it means is this: if someone makes a complaint, that’s going to start up an internal process, and figure out did this guy violate our agency’s policies or violate the law? And if so, what should we do about it? He’s going to have those protections we mentioned, like before they take his statement, they’re going to give him 48 hours to calm his head. See the video, hear the 911 call, things like this. And then they’re gonna take a statement. And even if they sustain a complaint against him, they say you violated our departmental use of force policy, and let’s say, you know, they suspend him without pay, something like that. Eventually, he’s going to come back, and two years later, it’s going to be like that never happened. It’s gonna be off his record.

 

[32:21] Jay Ellis: So then does that mean that police contracts are inherently bad?

 

[32:25] John Rappaport: Look, I think there are some people, both academics and activists, who are ready to, you know, try to throw this out entirely. I’m, I guess, a little bit more cautious than that. I think I would go for an intermediate solution, which would be that you could still have police unions, but that these kind of disciplinary mechanisms, the ability of a police chief who wants to clean up his department and get rid of problem officers. You know, you want the chief to be able to do that. And so we can set these kinds of things aside and we can say you don’t get to bargain over those collectively. You get to bargain over wages and vacations and things like that collectively. But disciplinary procedures, that is just not a proper subject for collective bargaining.

 

[33:17] Jay Ellis: I’ve talked to more experts than I ever thought I would. But I’m so glad to have some answers that I don’t think I would’ve found otherwise. Police unions cite science that is questionable, at best, to justify the 48 hour rule. Just one of many protections for police officers that they’d never dream of giving the rest of us. All these special protections go way beyond due process. And these distortions of due process, they add up to a law enforcement system that gives police officers cover for bad behavior. And we see it on the streets in the form of increased police violence. Look, we know this stuff is making you angry, and it probably should. But we’re not cruel. We don’t want you to leave feeling hopeless. So, next time, on the final episode of The Untold Story: Policing, we’re talking solutions. We’ll go over concrete steps. We’ll help you write your to-do list: six things to get you started making change happen in your community. So, if you haven’t already, go ahead and subscribe to the show, and tell your friends to do that, too, because these stories are important for everybody to hear.

 

[34:29] Jay Ellis: The Untold Story: Policing is presented by Campaign Zero and Lemonada Media. It’s produced by Matthew Simonson and Rae Solomon. Supervising producer is Jocelyn Frank. Music by Hannis Brown. Sound design and mixing by Matthew Simonson. Executive producers are DeRay McKesson, Jessica Cordova Kramer, Stephanie Wittels Wachs and me. For more information about all that stuff we’re talking about, check out nixthe6.org. I’m Jay Ellis. Thanks for listening.

 

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