Original subtitles

ALEXANDRA NATAPOFF: Welcome to the inaugural session

of Harvard Law School's series on Policing in America.

I'd like to start by thanking Dean Manning and the Harvard

Law School staff for making this series possible.

You can't see her, but we all owe a special thank you

to Jenna Cowie, who is our faculty assistant, and who

has put in an enormous number of hours

to make sure that this session was possible and able to run

smoothly, so thank you, Jenna.

This is a year-long series.

We are committed to having this conversation over the series

of the entire year.

Next month's session will be on police accountability,

and the highly contested issue of qualified immunity.

The session after that, in November,

will be on police unions.

I will not go through every session,

although I am excited about every single one of them.

And they're all fabulous with wonderful panelists

and participants.

I encourage you to go to the website,

policinginameric a.law.harvard.edu, which

has information on all our future sessions,

our future panelists, and additional resources for those

of you who would like to read more

deeply about these subjects, both regarding this session

and future sessions.

My name is Professor Alexandra Natapoff,

I teach criminal law and criminal procedure

here at Harvard Law School.

Before I entered the Academy, I was

an assistant federal public defender

in Baltimore, Maryland.

I have been looking forward very much to this series,

to this set of conversations.

And I'll start by saying that I am very optimistic,

and I am very worried.

I am optimistic because such a broad and deep range of people

have and are now speaking out against the injustices

of our criminal system.

I am optimistic and moved because of the bravery,

because so many people are stepping up

with incredible bravery and putting

their bodies and their lives and their careers on the line

to insist that our criminal system be better.

And I am worried because political momentum dissipates.

Because meaningful change is, and has always

been so difficult to achieve and sustain in this arena.

10 years ago, as perhaps you all recall,

we had a solid bipartisan consensus

that mass incarceration was a terrible idea.

It's expensive, we all agreed, it's racist, it's ineffectual.

And yet, today, a decade later, we still

practice mass incarceration.

We still rely on our criminal system as a go-to response

to our social problems, to our problems of inequality.

As a nation, we still overuse the criminal system

as a form of governance to a greater degree,

and in a harsher manner, than any other nation.

And so until we rethink those historical

and political and economic choices,

I am worried that extraordinary moments like this one,

and the sacrifices that so many people are making

in this moment, may not bring the kinds of structural changes

that we hoped for.

And so I am looking forward very much to this panel,

to our extraordinary experts on this panel,

to help us understand the depths and complexities

of these challenges, and also where we might go from here.

I am going to turn the session over now

to my co-host, Professor Crespo, who

will introduce our speakers.

We will hear opening remarks from each of our panelists.

As moderators, Professor Crespo and I

will then pose some questions to each of them

to get the dialogue going.

And then we will look to the audience for questions.

Please, if you have questions that you

would like to pose to the panel, submit them through the Q&A

function in written form.

Professor Crespo?

ANDREW CRESPO: Thank you so much, Professor Natapoff.

I echo Professor Natapoff's thanks to our dean,

to our school and to all the staff

here at Harvard Law School whom made this something

that we could pull off.

For both Professor Natapoff and I,

I think that this series is a professional

and a personal passion project.

Professionally, the two of us each spend our academic careers

teaching and writing about the police

and about the law of policing.

Before becoming academics, the two of us

were each public defenders.

I think between the two of us, we've probably

represented hundreds of people, all of them poor,

because that's what public defenders do,

they represent people who can't afford a lawyer.

And thinking of my clients, overwhelmingly people of color,

almost universally people of color.

We represented them in their encounters

with the American penal system.

And for each of them, those encounters

started with an encounter with policing in America.

Personally, I'll just add that, in my heart--

I teach at Harvard Law School, but I am a New Yorker.

I'm a New Yorker from a big, extended Puerto Rican family.

And in that family, there are multiple people

stretching over decades who have been harassed by the police.

There are multiple people who have

been arrested by the police.

And there are multiple people who are police officers.

And I love all of them.

From these professional and personal perspectives,

I come to this space seeing it as a space in which there

are in fact some clear right and wrong answers,

and some clear and deep and long-standing

systemic injustices that have stood for way, way too long.

And then I also see it as a space

marked by some real complexity, and some nuance

with hard problems to solve.

So I just feel so incredibly fortunate

that our school has committed to spending a full year discussing

these questions.

I feel especially fortunate to be

joined by Professor Natapoff in that project and in the work.

And I think most of all, I feel fortunate

about the amazing people who are joining us

over this year in these seven lectures,

as just such incredible guests with such range of perspective

and expertise and voice to bring to this discussion.

So it's a real privilege to introduce to you our kickoff

panel.

I'm going to introduce each of them, starting with Cori Bush.

Cori Bush is a nurse, a pastor, a former early childhood

educator.

And ever since the killing of Michael Brown in 2014,

in her hometown of Ferguson, Missouri,

she has been an activist and one of the leading

voices in the Black Lives Matter movement

on issues of police reform.

This past August, she defeated congressman Lacy Clay

in the Democratic primary for Missouri's 1st district,

which includes Ferguson and St. Louis.

It is a heavily Democratic district,

so it is safe to say that Ms. Bush joins us

as the presumptive next representative from the 1st

district of Missouri.

So if I slip over the next hour and a half

and call you Congresswoman Bush, please consider me

[? impressioned ?] and not necessarily inaccurate.

Come January 3rd, Ms. Bush is likely to be

the first black woman to ever represent the state of Missouri

in the US Congress.

I'm going to introduce a panelist we don't yet

have on with us, which is our own district

attorney, Rachael Rollins.

DA Rollins had a last minute change

in her schedule due to be unfortunate and surprising

passing our chief justice here in Massachusetts,

the late Chief Justice Gants.

And I should just pause for a moment

and say that Chief Justice Gants is

someone who those of us in Massachusetts

knew well, who was a champion of racial justice in our state,

and someone who I think many people miss

and are grieving right now.

And DA Rollins is right now speaking to her staff

about the passing of Chief Justice Gants,

and we hope that she'll be able to join us soon.

I'm going to introduce her now, so that when she joins us,

she can just pop right in.

To those of us here in Massachusetts,

Rachael Rollins is a familiar face.

She serves as the district attorney for Suffolk county,

which includes the entire city of Boston.

She is the first woman to hold that office,

and the first woman of color to serve as a district attorney

anywhere in the state.

She was elected in 2018 on a progressive prosecution

platform.

And since then, her office has, among other things,

published the now-famous in these circles Rollins

memo, which, among other things, outlined

her plans to decriminalize certain low-level offenses

by simply refusing to prosecute them.

A month later, she sued the Federal Immigrations

and Customs Enforcement Agency, more commonly known as ICE.

She sued them in federal court to try

to block them from arresting immigrants

in Massachusetts courthouses.

And one week from today, she has promised

to release her office's so-called Brady list.

This is an internal document that pretty much

every prosecutor's office in the country

has, cataloging police officers known

to the prosecutor's office to have misconduct issues.

Usually those lists are kept secret.

DA Rollins has promised that hers

will be released to the public one week from today.

Next on our panel is Rachel Harmon,

who is one of the country's leading scholars of policing

and of the laws that govern police behavior.

She is a professor of law at the University

of Virginia Law School, where she directs that school's

center for criminal justice.

She's a member of the American Law Institute, where

she serves as an associate reporter

for the forthcoming Principals on the Law of Policing.

She's also the author of a first of its kind

casebook entitled, The Law of the Police, which

is due out next year.

A former law clerk to Jude Guaido Calabrese

and Justice Stephen Breyer, Professor Harmon

worked for eight years as a federal prosecutor

in the criminal section of the DOJ's civil rights division,

where her responsibilities included

investigating and prosecuting police misconduct.

Finally, Professor Priscilla Ocen

is a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles,

and a scholar of criminal law and critical race theory.

She's an expert voice on many topics,

including most especially, the way that race, gender,

and class interact to render women of color

vulnerable to various forms of violence and criminalization.

In addition to offering numerous articles on this topic,

she's the co-author of an influential policy report

called, Black Girls Matter--

pushed out, over-policed, and under-protected.

Before becoming an academic, Professor Ocen

served as a law clerk to Judge Eric Clay on the Sixth Circuit,

and is a Thurgood Marshall fellow

with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights

under Law in San Francisco.

She currently serves on the oversight

commission for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's oversight.

Thank you all so much for being here, and welcome.

It's wonderful to see you and it's wonderful to have you.

To start off our discussion, we'd like to invite each of you

to share some opening remarks--

in the order of five to 10 minutes--

that help us all understand the challenge

of policing in America today.

What should we, as a country, learn

from the killing of George Floyd and so many others?

How should we understand the summer of protests

that followed in their wake?

And where should we be taking our penal system

and our institutions of policing from here?

And slipping already, Congresswoman Bush,

if you could just start us off.

CORI BUSH: First of all, thank you for having me.

Thank you for this invite and this platform

to be able to share, especially from the standpoint of someone

who came into this as just an activist, but not even

an activist first, just someone who just wanted to see what

was happening in her community.

So let me just start with before I ever

stepped foot at a protest, standing up

for Black Lives Matter.

For me, I was just a--

you know, I always saw myself as just this black woman

trying to survive in America and trying to raise two children,

and wanting to keep my son alive.

That was just the way that I-- you know,

that's how I walked through life.

And I was a registered nurse, became a pastor

and opened a church.

And I thought that my work was capped--

after working early childhood for 10 years,

I felt that my work was working, of course, as a nurse,

but then working with the unhoused population

in our community, working with helping

fight human trafficking.

You know, I felt like that was my thing,

and then pastoring my church.

But it was when Michael Brown was murdered

in 2014 that saw something that I never thought I

would see in my own community.

You know, I remember the day that he was murdered,

I just kept seeing his photo across my feed,

on my social media.

Didn't even pay it much attention,

just saw this body laying face-down and uncovered--

this body just laying on the ground.

And it took a while before-- it's a few times that I saw it,

I kept scrolling and I kept seeing it

over the course of the day, still not realizing that was

happening in our own community.

Then once I found out that it was in Ferguson, which was just

six minutes from my home, that's when I realized

that I could do something.

So I decided, show up.

You know, I don't know what I could do,

I just saw people congregating.

I didn't know what-- you know, but I was thinking,

hey, I'm clergy, I'm a nurse, I can go out and be a medic,

I can just offer support.

I can pray with people.

So that's what I did.

What I saw, though, when I stepped onto the ground

in that community, something that looked like civil rights

footage from the '60s that I never

thought I'd see in my own day.

I grew up in a household-- my dad's been in politics

for most of my life.

He was the kind of father, he wouldn't allow me to put--

you know, at that time, people may not remember,

but it was like Barbie, Strawberry Shortcake, Cabbage

Patch Kids, Jem, you know, I couldn't have that on my wall

as a kid.

I had the great kings and queens of Africa on the wall as a kid.

I had Rosa Parks and Dr. King, and I had Jesse Jackson,

you know, Jesse Jackson '84, something on the wall.

Like that's who my dad was.

But he wanted me to learn that my skin color was OK,

that my skin color was--

that I had to love it, but society would not love it.

And so he was building me up.

What I didn't realize that, through that teaching,

that it would later sprout out into something

that I could use later.

And so, looking at what we were taught, we were taught--

so many of us, anyway were taught--

if you go to school, if you do well, go to school,

get good grades, go to a good high school,

get into a good college, get you a scholarship,

go in and get you a good job, travel, and then have kids.

Get the spouse and the picket fence, the white house,

all of that great stuff, whatever color

the house is, the white picket fence, couple dogs--

we were taught that this is what was achievable for us.

Like now, you can sit at the front of the bus.

You're good now.

You have arrived.

But what we didn't learn was that the police were still

killing us.

And I remember as a child, my dad was in politics,

but I remember every time we stepped

outside of our small municipality

where he was no longer an elected official,

he would get pulled over by the police at least once a week.

And that's not even an exaggeration,

he would get pulled over by the police so much,

I used to be angry when I had to ride with him in the car,

because I didn't want to see what happened every time he

was pulled over by the police.

And I used to just think, boy, why are you such a bad driver?

Why won't you do better?

That was my thought process as a child.

I just didn't understand it, even as a teenager--

as an early teen--

why won't you do better?

It wasn't until I got a little older

and I started to see now my friends are driving,

and how much they were getting pulled over by the police.

But it still didn't compute.

I grew up in a household with a politician,

the police were in and out of my home all the time.

So to me, maybe something was wrong,

maybe we're doing something wrong, is what I--

you know, I was fighting with that.

But when Michael Brown was murdered,

and I'm out there on the streets,

six minutes from my home, where my nail salon was

on one side of the street-- the place where I will go,

and the place where I would get my hair done

was on the other side of the street.

This was my community.

When I hit the ground and I saw the police in riot gear,

I thought MRAPs, I saw dogs, and I saw thousands of people

in the street.

I couldn't believe my eyes, because this

is my neighborhood.

Nobody said this was coming.

And not only that, are we prepared for this?

I remember as we started to get the--

we started to hear about how we were protesting wrong.

And I just remember pushing back on that all the time--

you're telling us we're protesting wrong.

But first of all, you should have fixed it

before you decided to come tell us that we're doing it wrong.

Because we're only doing it because there is a need,

because somebody was murdered.

And not only him, but so many others.

In the course of us protesting, more were murdered.

So instead of telling us that we're doing it wrong,

you should have fixed it first.

But because you didn't fix it, and because there

is no playbook-- there was no playbook the day

before Michael Brown was murdered, they say,

this is how you protest.

This is what you do-- if you are a nurse,

this is what you do when you hit the ground.

If you are a chef, this is what you do you hit the ground.

If you're a this, this is what you do.

There was no playbook.

And so we did what we felt we needed to do in that moment.

And then there was this split--

whether it was generational or clergy,

it was just so many splits, because everybody was just

showing up doing what they thought was right.

Our politicians were doing what they thought was right.

And it tore up a community.

But even though it started to tear up a community,

the ripple effect of what was happening in Ferguson,

in the St. Louis area, started to move across the country

and the world.

What we learned when we think about George Floyd's murder,

first of all, is that as much as we've protested,

as much as we've organized and we've pushed,

these things continue to happen.

What we've learned is, when our government wants to tell us

we need to throw some more money at it to fix it--

we've seen that when money was thrown at it in Minnesota,

George Floyd was still murdered with a knee on his neck.

And so, we threw money at it, and say--

the governor, $12 million to help with police training.

And is that the police training that came out of that?

This is what you do, you put a knee on someone's neck?

So for us, throwing money at it is not the solution.

When we think about this when we think about what you call

the summer of protests, that summer of protests to me,

it was different than what I remember in 2014 with Michael

Brown in 2014, because we protested

the more than 400 days, even though the media stopped

covering it.

And we protested again in 2017 after the verdict--

Jason Stockley was-- that man should

have gone to jail for what he did to Anthony Lamar Smith,

but we protested then.

Still, it's just a lot of brutality.

A lot of excessive force against protesters.

What we've seen this time is that what

we fought for, just being able to say, Black Lives Matter,

now is a fad.

It's this thing-- oh, yeah, Black Lives Matter.

We still can't get our police to stay it,

but the corporations can say it and make money off of it.

The police won't say it.

Someone said to me recently, they said,

you know, when a police officer is murdered,

why don't we see Black Lives Matter get up and denounce this

and say, oh, that's a horrible thing.

And what I said to them was, when do the police get up

and say-- when do all the police departments get up and go

on television and say, you know, what another life was taken,

so we denounce that action.

So

Stop telling people who are volunteers

for this movement, that are just trying

to fix a problem that has been going on for so long,

for decades--

and actually, the real problem has

been going on for centuries--

stop telling us how to fix it when you are the problem.

What we saw this summer was we saw people

from all walks of life-- we saw it in Ferguson,

but even more now-- we saw people from all walks of life,

any age group, ableism is out the door,

ageism is out the door, everybody was showing up,

fighting in the streets.

And we weren't just saying a black man's name,

we were saying black women's names, as well.

That's important, because black women are dying, too,

black children are dying.

So we were hearing those names being said.

And I'm looking forward to what we're able to do now,

where we're taking this.

We're talking about defunding the police,

and making it very clear what we mean by defund.

The reformist conversations, the abolish

the police conversations are all important right now.

So it's up to us to figure out how to get there.

And so when we take regular people like me,

and put them with academics, and put them with other people

from different walks of life in the community,

that's how we're going to get somewhere with this.

And so I'm thankful to be on this panel with everyone,

and I can't wait to see what comes out of this.

Thank you.

ANDREW CRESPO: Thank you so much.

I see that we are joined, at least virtually, by DA Rollins.

As she gets set up and plugged into Zoom--

we'll really look forward to hearing from her,

but I think we're going to turn right now to Professor Harmon.

RACHEL HARMON: Thanks so much for having me.

It's an honor to be on this panel.

But before I talk about policing in America today,

I want to ask you a question that follows up

on what Sasha mentioned.

Sasha said that despite agreement

about mass incarceration, we haven't done enough to fix it.

But you might ask--

what's so wrong with mass incarceration?

I mean overwhelmingly, people in prison today

are guilty of the crimes they committed.

Most of those crimes are pretty serious,

and many people think that punishing people for crimes

by sending them to prison is a legitimate thing to do.

So in some sense, it should be a little surprising

that actually Americans overwhelmingly

agree that far too many people are in prison,

and that reforms should continue to bring those numbers down.

The answer to that question helps us answer the question

that Andrew asked at the beginning-- which

is, what's new in the conversations

about policing today?

What's new in the protests?

But let me step back one step further and say,

before we talk about what's new, let's

talk about what isn't new.

Congressman Bush brought up some of the issues that are not new.

There is a longstanding concern that officers

engage in unnecessary overpolicing and violence,

especially against racial minorities.

And that there's an absence of meaningful legal remedies

for misconduct.

So one journalist described it this way,

talking about officers in New York,

"it's not seldom that a peaceful citizen meets a front

at the hands of a policeman.

Too often, an officer sees a need for his interference

where none exists, and nearly as often, he's impolite or even

insulting in his manners."

The journalist goes on to talk about

whether a person treated this way should resist or disobey,

and says, not unless he's utterly bereft of sense.

Because doing so is going to result in physical damage,

and not to the policeman, either.

That article was published this week, 122 years ago

in the New York Tribune, 1898.

You will hear in today's protests,

in the reform efforts, in contemporary talk about

policing, this age-old concern--

that policing is racist, that it's violent,

and that it's arbitrary.

Because the law's too permissive,

that police nevertheless break that law, and when they do,

they're not really held accountable-- or at least

not often enough.

Now, I don't want to suggest that those complaints have

gone away.

I think they're clearly there-- or that contemporary reform

efforts aren't designed to mitigate them.

But I've been working on policing issues

for more than 20 years, and it seems to me

there is something new in today's protests

and the conversations about police.

There's a growing concern that's not

about the precise shape of the law governing the police,

or whether a specific incident complied with or broke the law,

but an argument that it doesn't matter.

That even accepting police is necessary and useful to promote

public safety, or bring offenders to justice,

and even assuming that most of the damage the police do,

in the name of those goals, is legal,

that policing's harms have just, as a whole,

gone too far in light of its benefits, especially

for individuals and communities who pay most of the costs.

And that's in lives lost, and also in humiliation suffered.

And we're not just talking about people of color--

we're talking about people with mental and physical

disabilities, the youth, people with alcoholism and suffering

from homelessness, LGBT community.

The new theme that I hear in today's protests about policing

is that policing's problem is like mass incarceration.

That whatever policing's benefits, as a whole,

it is doing too much harm.

So you can see this in a whole variety of ways.

I'm going to mention three of them.

First, you can see it in the swift and severe response

of protesters to incidents of deadly force today.

So if you look nearly 30 years ago when Rodney King,

a 25-year-old African-American father of two daughters,

was beaten by LAPD officers--

LA burned with the worst urban riot in the 20th century.

But that didn't happen until a year

after the videos were first shown

on TV, when the officers were acquitted

in the state criminal trial.

And you see that continuing.

Congress member Bush just mentioned

the officers involved in Stockley's death,

the acquittal there and the protests to which it led.

But three months ago, when Rayshard

Brooks, who was a 27-year-old African-American father

of three daughters, was killed in Atlanta.

And a video showed his killing was released,

demonstrators gathered within hours.

And by the next day, the Wendy's restaurant

near where he was shot was burned to the ground.

Now, the officers involved in Brooks's death

have been charged.

By my reading of the facts and the law,

I think that prosecution is going

to be a serious uphill battle.

Because the video shows Brooks resisting arrest,

taking a taser from one of the officers,

and firing at another officer.

Even though he's ultimately shot as he runs away.

Given the video, you might read the immediate and angry

presence of those protesters as saying,

in effect, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter that his arrest was obviously

legal, it doesn't matter that he resisted it,

it doesn't matter that he was caught

on video grabbing an officer's weapon

and turning it on the police.

The new emphasis in the conversation today

is that all of that is beside the point.

It's enough that Brooks was one of too many black men

whose death seems pointless and avoidable,

making the shooting illegitimate,

whether or not it was illegal.

You can also see this in the call for reforms.

Now, many of the reforms we're going

to talk about today, and in the course of this series,

such as requiring independent prosecutors for police

misconduct, or eliminating qualified immunity,

are really contemporary versions of an effort

we've been talking about for more than 100 years, which

is strengthening whatever accountability mechanisms are

available for individual officers.

And those remain important.

But I want to suggest that Congress member Bush's

reference to the call to defund the police, that's

a break with that tradition.

And it's consistent with this new theme.

Defunding the police, which usually means significantly

cutting back the police department's budget,

isn't a way to make police more accountable.

And unlike abolition, it's not a way to get rid of the police.

It's a way to make policing more harm-efficient.

The idea is that with reduced resources,

police will be forced to limit coercive policing

to circumstances in which it's most

essential to achieving public safety,

such as stopping ongoing violence.

And in the process, they'll give up

practices like aggressive stops and frisks

that impose mass harm, in order to discover or deter crime.

Defunding advocates usually take this one step further

by repurposing the funds from police departments

to other less harmful methods of achieving public safety.

And the idea there, too, is that with the same money,

we can achieve some of the same public safety benefits

with less pain and more dignity than we do now.

Now, whatever you believe about whether that defunding effort

will work the way advocates imagine,

you should hear in this idea this new emphasis

on harm efficiency over, or in addition

to, officer accountability.

My last example is actually--

I call it harm efficiency, but that's because I'm a professor.

The demands for the community input in the past

have often focused on civilian review, which is basically

a way of making disciplinary proceedings more thorough, more

accurate.

Today's protesters want something different.

They want to shift decision-making

about policing to those who suffer its harms,

rather than leave it with traditional political elites.

And I think that's not just a demand for control,

there's a more subtle message there,

that effectively we will only get

policing that's worth its costs if we pay attention

to what those costs are.

And the only way to do that is actually

to give voice to people who suffer them.

The protests, in this sense, are themselves

a way to make policing more efficient.

Because they highlight the real harms of police, the Black

and brown bodies, especially.

And for Americans who don't experience

those harms, and could otherwise easily ignore them,

the protests help them understand

the full cost of policing, which may

make them more likely to demand policing

that minimizes those harms.

Now, maybe I'm reading too much into all this.

That's possible.

A few years ago, I wrote an article entitled, Why Arrest?

And I argued that, even if all of the 10 million arrests

conducted by the police each year were legal,

they're unjustifiable.

Because they're far too harmful.

And as Brooks's death reminds us,

as does George Floyd's, there's certainly a locus for violence.

And it turns out, we don't need them to protect the public

or to start the criminal process.

If arrests weren't just the automatic standard practice,

and we actually evaluated whether they were worth

the harms they impose, neither Brooks nor Floyd

would be dead today.

More broadly, I've argued elsewhere,

that every course of policing practice,

whatever its legality, should be evaluated from this standpoint.

It has to be necessary to achieve important goals,

the harms have to be proportionate to the goals,

and the harms have to be minimized

and fairly distributed.

So given that I've argued that in the past,

I might be hearing too much in what's

going on in today's protests.

But I don't think so.

I think that critics of policing today

care deeply about the issues with which policing has long

grappled, but there is this new emphasis

that policing does too much harm, more than it

needs to get the job done.

And actually, given the harms , not all the job is necessarily

worth doing.

Or to say it another way, that policing's problem

is like mass incarceration.

And if that's true, if the critics are right,

then the public policy challenge we

face is a little bit different than the one we faced before.

Because taking our public safety goals seriously,

and maintaining a commitment to fairness and legality

in individual encounters, we still

have to think anew beyond accountability to ways

to ensure that policing, as a whole,

is something we can and want to live with.

I look forward to hearing from the other panelists

in discussing this further.

ANDREW CRESPO: Thank you so much, Professor Harmon.

Professor Ocen?

PRISCILLA OCEN: Thank you all, so much.

Thank you Professor Natapoff, and thank

you Professor Crespo for convening this amazing series.

I look forward to attending some of the later discussions.

And thank you so much for convening this amazing panel

of powerful women--

you know, it's rare that you have a full panel

of women on these topics.

And so I really appreciate the care

with which this panel was convened,

and I appreciate hearing from powerful voices

like Congresswoman Bush and Professor Harmon.

I look forward to hearing from the DA a little bit later.

So what I want to talk about is an intersectional analysis

of the challenge of policing.

And to start, I want to talk about something

I've written about in the past, which

is a collaboration between different state

entities in a city called Lancaster

in the state of California-- it's a suburb of Los Angeles.

And for most of its history, it was almost exclusively white.

It was known as a sundown town.

But in the early 2000s, especially as the housing

market imploded, those demographic realities began

to shift, and quite rapidly.

Increasingly poor Black and Latino families

moved in, pushed out of cities like Los Angeles

due to exorbitant rents, and pulled to the suburbs

by the desire for a better quality

of life and affordable housing.

Many were utilizing Section 8 vouchers

to pay for their housing.

In 2000s-- roughly around 2006, alarmed

by the numbers of poor Black households

and Latinx households coming into their community,

the city of Lancaster, in collaboration

with the Los Angeles Sheriff's department,

the Lancaster department of public housing, the school

district, and the Department of Children and Family Services,

convened a task force on ostensibly

to address the needs of people who

were coming into the community.

But in reality, it was to manage and regulate

what was seen as a nuisance--

these families that were drawing from public coffers and putting

burdens on city resources.

This task force was asked to identify, surveil, and in fact,

intimidate individuals in Section 8

housing, who were disproportionately

Black women and their children.

Members of this task force, particularly law enforcement,

followed these women as they took their children to school,

or as they went to work.

Teachers were contacted by DCFS and by law enforcement

and asked about the attendance records of their children--

which were used to make allegations

of criminal truancy, which could, in some instances,

land these women in jail or result in hefty fines.

Their homes were searched for Section 8

lease violations, which are non-criminal,

but could result in the loss of their homes or housing

vouchers.

The Department of Children Family Services

investigated their homes for abuse and neglect.

And quite frankly, when these women

called the police for help, for example, for domestic violence

incidents, these women were instead arrested

rather than their perpetrators.

And their homes were searched again

looking for evidence of an illegal occupant.

I tell this story, which as I said,

I examined it in a piece called The New Racially Restrictive

Covenant, to say this--

if we are to understand the expansive problems of policing,

which Congresswoman Bush described,

in which Professor Harmon articulated in her comments,

then we have to not just talk about traditional law

enforcement.

We can't just talk about the police.

We should view this moment--

the uprisings and the reckoning that the problems of policing

that gave rise to this moment--

through an intersectional lens that

elevates the concerns of women like those who were targeted

in the city of Lancaster.

By that, I mean that we have to examine

the ways in which marginalized identities render

individuals and communities vulnerable to state violence.

And we also have to pay attention

to the multiple institutions and systems that

collide to produce a myriad forms of state violence.

So when we hear community activists, scholars calling

for defunding of police, they're not just talking about police.

And Miriam Makeba said this in a wonderful op-ed

in the New York Times-- we're talking about policing

and the logics that undergird it.

And when I say that, and when I say

that we need to look at an intersectional lens in terms

of how we examine the problem of policing,

it helps us to understand the ways in which policing

is gendered and racialized, and affects women-- like those

who were impacted in Lancaster.

All too often, when we think about policing,

we focus almost exclusively on traditional police departments

and police practices, such as stops, searches, and use

of force that target Black and brown bodies,

and rely on racialized stereotypes of criminality

as justification.

This traditional view of policing and police violence

posits Black men and Latinx men as the primary targets

and victims of policing, obscuring

the ways in which girls, women, and gender nonconforming people

are subject to state surveillance, control,

and punishment.

This traditional view of policing, in turn,

limits our ability to create narratives

around anti-Black police violence

that women, in [INAUDIBLE] experience,

to develop advocacy strategies, to call attention

to these dynamics, and to draft policy interventions that

address all of the ways that policing writ large harms

Black and brown communities.

So I want to just give a couple examples

of the way in which this intersectional lens can help

us to lift up these expansive forms of policing,

and their racialized and gendered harms

that they inflict on Black communities, and particularly

Black women and girls.

So here's a couple of examples.

So if we talk about American policing, race obviously

[INAUDIBLE],, so is policing of gender and sexuality.

We talked about the experiences of women in Lancaster

who were being followed when they were taking their children

to school, when they attempted to seek help

as a result of domestic incidents.

And that's just the sort of tip of the iceberg.

There have been a number of studies conducted by the AP,

as well as a number of other institutions, [INAUDIBLE]

Bowling Green State University, that

found that the second most complained about form of police

misconduct-- when we're talking about traditional policing--

is sexual violence.

In a year-long investigation by the AP,

they found that over 1,000 officers

lost their badges in a six-year period because of allegations

of rape, sodomy, or other sexual assault.

And [INAUDIBLE] is one example of that.

In the other study that Bowling Green conducted,

roughly 405 police officers were prosecuted for rape,

and another 600 were prosecuted for forcible fondling,

for example.

But when we go beyond traditional policing

institutions, we still see this happening-- this policing

of gender, sexuality, the way in which

Black women appear in their homes

and attempt to care for their families.

So in the context of welfare institutions,

a case called Sanchez versus the County

of San Diego, authorized warrantless

searches of the homes of individuals who

were reliant on public housing.

And this was done, again, by members of law enforcement,

this was done by welfare investigators.

And information that was obtained

during the course of those warrantless searches

could result in criminal prosecution.

Black women and other women of color

encounter surveillance in hospitals and schools.

There've been a number of cases of Black women being

subject to arrest and prosecution for conduct

during pregnancy.

So we see all of these other sites,

outside of this sort of traditional beat cop,

outside of the traditional forms of law enforcement, that

cohere into forms of policing that we also need to be talking

about, that we also need to be addressing--

these logics of punishment that Sasha mentioned, when we talk

about governing through crime.

So when we want to talk about dismantling the police,

or defunding the police, or reforming the police,

we have to be talking about policing,

and we have to look at how these logics appear

in multiple institutions, and the way in which they affect

a diverse set of populations, including

Black women and girls.

And only when we can liberate Black women and girls

from these forms of surveillance,

policing, when we can liberate trans people,

and we can liberate people who are

disabled from these systems of surveillance

and policing that occur across a broad swath of institutions,

can we say that we have firmly dealt with the problem

of policing in America.

That's all, I'll stop there.

Thank you.

ANDREW CRESPO: Thank you so much, Professor Ocen.

And welcome, DA Rollins.

It's wonderful to see you again.

Thank you for making it.

We've explained to our audience the sad reasons

why you weren't able to join us right at the start.

RACHAEL ROLLINS: The hardest thing I've ever done in my life

was getting onto this Zoom.

But I made it.

So I'm very happy.

ANDREW CRESPO: We're so glad you're here.

Thank you.

And you're here just in time, because we've just

come to where we are asking folks to share their opening

remarks, and we're up to you.

And the question that we put to the panel

was just what should we as a country

be learning from the killing of George

Floyd and so many others?

How should we understand this summer

of protests we've just seen?

And where do we take the institutions

of policing, given this potential crossroads

we're standing at?

And we'd love to hear your thoughts.

And then we'll ask some questions of the group.

RACHAEL ROLLINS: Sure.

I think what many people are seeing with respect

to the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud

Arbery, and Brianna Taylor--

which, of course, we've now had two different iterations

after that batch there--

is what many communities have been screaming for centuries,

right?

I like to point out to people that, where we find ourselves

for cultural reference-- this is why Colin Kaepernick silently

took a knee and people lost their minds, because he

was silently protesting police brutality.

There was an amazing article in the Washington

Post a few months back where it said, two knees--

you have to choose one.

Either Colin Kaepernick's, or Derek Chauvin's-- you can't opt

out.

You must choose which one that you will support.

I think where we find ourselves is a moment of reckoning

and a need for atonement.

And although the police are getting--

and I believe justifiably in much of it--

taken to task with respect to some

of this outrageous, and murderous,

and felonious behavior, we have to look at district attorneys,

as well.

When we think about an Ahmaud Arbery, all of us

have watched that video of a lynching-- which,

let's be very clear, the definition--

yes, there was not a rope, but that's not what

the definition of lynching is.

And three district attorneys' offices watched that same video

we've all seen of the McMichaels hunting

Ahmaud, and then killing him.

We now know the youngest McMichael, Travis,

uttered a racial slur as Ahmaud took his last breaths.

Three district attorneys watch that video

and said, looks fine.

Georgia has a citizen's arrest statute.

This seems clear.

What I think where we find ourselves

is many other communities are now recognizing

that poor people and Black and brown people,

overwhelmingly, receive a very different police department

than other people do, receive a very

different criminal legal system than many others do.

And as a progressive prosecutor myself,

I think people are fearful that I

want to pull the ceiling that they

get to walk in with the assumption of innocence

and not guilt, walk in with the belief

that the system actually works, I

want to drag that down to the floor

of where poor Black and brown people experience the system.

And when they say that, they don't use those words.

I say, but you're proving my point.

There are two systems, right?

I want to lift the floor to the ceiling.

I want everyone to feel as though, because our tax

dollars pay for it, and many individuals, immigrants

documented or undocumented, some at times paying taxes

into our system, yet a system that is failing them every day.

And not just failing them, in some instances killing them

with impunity.

Deporting them for matters that, if as an American,

we wouldn't even potentially be looking at things.

I have stood up and fought on behalf of individuals that had

a misdemeanor seven years ago, that was going to be deported

back to Somalia, where he spent two days of his life--

the first two days of his life--

then went to Saudi Arabia, and then

ultimately came to the United States in his teens--

was going to be deported back.

So I think where we find ourselves,

what we see with police and law enforcement-- which of course,

includes ICE and the federal agents,

as well as state and local actors--

is a moment of reckoning.

And I am optimistic that this is-- cautiously optimistic--

that we are going to keep the pressure on, and make

significant change with respect to policing.

And I might not use the word defund,

but I support whatever words people are

using, because they're fed up and tired,

as well they should be.

And when we protest peacefully, nobody listens.

When we take a knee quietly, nobody listens.

So when we scream and yell, or maybe break a window

or engage in behavior with respect to property damage--

our country values property more than they

do our bodies, our Black and brown and poor bodies.

And they will point to that less than 1%

of the masses that might engage in violence, where insurance

fixes those windows, that building

gets that property back.

George Floyd's family is never going to see him again,

neither is Brianna Taylor, or Elijah McClain's, et cetera.

So we have to keep the pressure on.

The unions, the police unions, are fighting tooth and nail

to change any situation that we have,

where there is going to be more transparency, more oversight.

They love the fact that they get to self-regulate.

And anyone who questions them gets labeled soft on crime.

So we are in an incredibly unique situation, but I think--

I'm cautiously optimistic that we're going

to see some profound change.

ANDREW CRESPO: Thank you all so much

for these terrific remarks that just set the table

and set the frame.

Hopefully everyone at home now is able to see all of us.

We're trying to have the Brady Bunch set-up

now, because we're going to move into some discussion.

And all of you who are sending in questions to the Q&A,

thank you.

Because we can read them here, and we're trying to both--

we're drawing on them and melding some of them together.

So if we don't quite read out your name and your question,

please note that we're also reading

them and trying to get as many into the conversation

as we can.

The first question here is to Ms. Bush.

You know, hearing you speak, there

is this powerful language of activism

animating your diagnosis.

And then, hearing Professor Harmon speak,

there was this similar diagnosis in the language of legislation,

law, policy reform.

And it occurs to me, hearing you talk,

that you're kind of on the cusp of these two

ways of looking at the problem.

And I was reminded in thinking of that,

of something that someone who--

again, come January, is very likely

to be your colleague, the chairwoman of the Congressional

Black Caucus, representative Karen Bass,

who was asked recently about some of the police reform

legislation that is working its way through Congress.

And one of the things she said in response

was, it's the role of an activist to push us

as far as they can push us.

It's our role to legislate, and that is a different role.

I'm just kind of curious, as someone

who is in this maybe transition moment in life,

or is straddling these two worlds,

do you see those roles as different?

If so, how are they different, and what

is it that you are hoping to accomplish

for all of these bills you've talked about?

By making that move from where you

have been, as an organizer and an activist,

into the halls of Congress as a legislator,

what are you most hoping to achieve by that?

CORI BUSH: Most hoping to achieve?

You know, just doing this thing different in our day.

Some things aren't happening just simply

because somebody who has the vision to do

it just hasn't done it yet.

So I want to take us from a place of thinking

that we have to walk and do things

within the confines of what we know,

or who did it before, or--

forget all of that.

What I saw on the streets of Ferguson

was something that I never thought I'd see.

But what I also saw was how the entire world, just

all over the world, people stood up.

And how many changes have happened across our country

even now, six years later, because people did something

that they never thought they would do.

And people did-- people spoke up and stood up.

Like people said that they couldn't, you

know, oh, you can't do that, you can't do that.

But we did it.

And now we're here.

So I'm walking into the doors of Congress,

hopefully in January, as a politivist--

you know, I'm being told I have to shave off

the rough edges of the activist and all of that

to come into these doors, but I push back on that

and say, I don't have to do that.

I'm bringing the activist into Congress,

because it's the reason why I want to go,

is because of what I've seen as an activist,

and because I've had to step into being an activist.

Because if there was nothing there, I wouldn't have to--

I could be a nurse and a pastor somewhere.

You know, I could be taking care of--

I'm a single parent, you know, me

and my kids, me and my three, you know, that could be me.

But instead, there are all of these problems that continue

to happen in our communities.

I remember, at one point people kept saying to us,

oh, you activists are so mean.

You're so mean and you're so angry.

Like where is your forgiveness?

You should be forgiving, like we need

to move into a place of not just truth, but reconciliation.

When do we get to reconciliation?

And how do we get to reconciliation

if you keep killing us?

And so we push truth for a long time,

and then we're talking-- so many groups right now

are talking conciliation.

I got it.

But don't try to get me to a place

of reconciling and forgiving when

these things continue to occur.

And so I'm walking into those doors

remembering what my face felt like when

it hit the ground when I was brutalized by the police when

they threw me in the air.

I remember seeing the stars coming towards my face,

and then the ground coming towards my face.

I couldn't understand what was happening.

Why am I seeing the stars?

Didn't realize they had threw me up in the air.

And then, just remembering how my face felt on the ground,

on that hard concrete, while it was being stomped

by several police officers.

Remembering every time I saw someone hung upside down

and hog-tied, hanging off of a baton,

because they said no to an officer.

Every time somebody stepped over off of a curb,

and just because they stepped off of the curb,

and you got near that white line in the street, that

meant you were impeding traffic, so now you could

be brutalized by the police.

I remember all of that, and I won't forget it.

I won't forget what the rubber bullets felt like.

I won't forget the bare mace that

burned my skin for 22 hours back on July the 5th this year.

You know, I won't forget that.

And so I'm taking that in those doors,

because that voice has to be there, as well.

Yes, I will work on policy because I remember

what that burning felt like.

Yes, I will remember every single person that

was out there and the things that we went through,

whether it was with the police, or whether it was with the DA,

whether it was with the judge, we

got to talk about the entire system.

And so that is how I'm going to--

and that will inform policy.

RACHAEL ROLLINS: If I could add, as an elected myself--

and I wish I could vote in wherever you're running,

Ms. Bush, because I would send two votes in.

But I'm telling you, I used to say

when everyone-- when we talk about wealth-based disparities

and race-based disparities, and people say to me,

as well, why don't you smile?

You're always so angry.

And I say, when do I smile?

When I'm talking about, I don't know,

somebody squeezing the life out of George Floyd

for eight minutes and 46 seconds,

does the smile come after that?

When does the smile come?

None of this is funny.

If white communities woke up and had--

they went to sleep and then woke up the next day,

and all of their police officers were black,

and they beat the crap out of their kids,

or FIOed them constantly, or were harassing them

on the way to school, and pulling them over-- you

would have your congressman, your senator, your mayor,

your city council, the governor--

you'd be demanding justice immediately.

That is what our lived experience is every single day.

We are policed, and over-policed and over-prosecuted

in every aspect of our lives.

And so for me, I like to say, when

people say when do we get to reconciliation?

I'm the oldest of five, and if I looked at my brother

and slapped him dead in the face,

and then said, from this moment forward,

we are going to have peace in this relationship.

As his cheek was stinging he'd say, wait, so now

we have peace?

I don't get to--

you know, and nobody saying we need to swing back.

But what you haven't even done is acknowledge the harm.

We have a president right now that does not even

want to acknowledge the 1619 Project from The New York

Times.

This isn't an article that I'm writing in my home

as some zealot, this is The New York

Times that is doing this work.

They don't even want to acknowledge

the slavery, the redlining, the reconstruction,

all of the Jim Crow era--

they don't want to talk about it because it

makes them uncomfortable.

I think murder is Trump's uncomfortability every--

you get my point.

I don't care about your uncomfortability,

or being comfortable, if my people

are still being murdered, maimed, and brutalized in 2020.

So we need more people that are politivists.

And I don't know whether I'm a district attorneyist,

but I will tell you, what I love about my job is the autonomy.

We need a Cori Bush.

We have already-- and we are lucky in Massachusetts,

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

People that lead, and are their true and full selves.

But I agree with you, don't ever forget those lived experience.

That is what needs to be brought to our halls of Congress.

I don't forget as the DA visiting my siblings who

have been incarcerated, visiting my siblings who

struggle with mental health issues or substance use

disorder, being the guardian of two of my nieces

as a result of that.

I walk to work every day with that lived experience, and try

to lead with that lens, not just let's fling them all in jail

and let the sheriff figure it out.

ALEXANDRA NATAPOFF: Wow.

I want to invite Professor Ocen into this precise moment

of the conversation.

And DA Rollins, you just mentioned the sheriff--

Professor Ocen, you are on the oversight commission that

oversees the LA county sheriff's department,

and you are also deeply engaged in community

activism in Los Angeles.

And in many ways, you are straddling that same line

that so many on this panel are straddling.

In your previous remarks, you mentioned something

that I don't think that we appreciate enough, which

is the risk of impunity that we grant to police officers,

not just on the job but off the job.

You mentioned the very high rates of domestic violence

that police officers engage in, high rates of sexual assault.

And I want to ask you to meditate on this question

of the role of law, when we see examples of law enforcement

officials and--

and perhaps if you want to talk about it, the sheriff's

department that you oversee, feeling that they have

some ability to ignore the law.

And just ask you to join in this conversation at that space.

PRISCILLA OCEN: Yes, so part of what I've really

been thinking about in terms of my academic work,

my activist work, and my policy work,

is the efficacy of reform, and the efficacy of law

and regulating and governing police departments.

We see policing as a basic social good,

as something that our elected representatives

and our government has an obligation

to provide to the public to ensure

that we are all safe and secure in our communities.

And that's effectuated by police, who

also ensure the rule of law.

That's the sort of traditional story.

And so when police fall afoul of our basic expectations of them

by engaging in excessive use of force, by murdering people,

brutalizing people, lying, and so forth, we often

chalk that up because of how valorized law enforcement is,

to a few bad apples who can be reformed

or rooted out by policy reform.

We can appoint a civilian oversight body,

we can eliminate qualified immunity,

we can change the use of force standards--

which is what we've been doing here in California.

We can do any number of things to try to give police

more inter-control of their communities,

to ensure that police meet the basic expectations

of professionalism, courtesy, kindness, and law-abidingness

that we expect of them.

And so we utilize these democratic reforms to try

to reform police departments.

And here's what I've learned being on the civilian oversight

commission.

That these democratic reforms don't work,

and we become frustrated with them,

and we become angry-- especially the communities who

are directly impacted by them, Black and Latino communities,

because we've been at this for decades, trying

to reform inherently violent and corrupt institutions.

And why haven't we been able to reform the police,

despite decades and decades of trying?

Despite multiple reports, despite multiple commissions,

despite generations of attention to this issue?

This is the conclusion I've come to-- you can't fix the police

with democratic reforms through the use of--

and through the enactment of laws

through the democratic process.

Because the police are inherently anti-democratic.

If you look at how they operate, they routinely flout the law.

If we're talking about consent decrees that

are imposed upon police departments,

they intimidate elected officials.

You can look at the city of New York,

under Bill de Blasio, when stop and frisk was terminated.

The way that the police unions bullied and intimidated,

and attempted to intimidate the mayor here in California.

We recently had an incident where the police union ran ads

with a target on the back of an elected representative.

They routinely lie in court and on official documents,

when we expect our law enforcement

entities to tell the truth.

They routinely flout directives from their elected officials.

And that's the problem that we're

having here in LA county-- we have

been granted subpoena power, which we've used.

Our sheriff has ignored it.

We have asked the sheriff to cooperate with the inspector

general, in terms of investigations

of police killings by members of the sheriff's department.

We've been locked out.

We have asked the sheriff to provide just basic information

about who is in our jails-- and we have one of the largest jail

systems in the world.

We have been rebuffed.

Our sheriff has called a Latina member

of our board of supervisors-- which funds the sheriff's

department-- a racial slur.

Why?

Because he knows he can act with impunity,

and that there will be no one to essentially check him,

aside from the voters every four years.

And even then, those elections have very low turnout,

and our sheriffs essentially can't be checked

by any other democratic body.

So time and time again we turn to the law,

we turn to the democratic process to try to effect change

within violent law enforcement institutions, and we fail.

Precisely because law enforcement

simply flouts these democratic initiatives,

and asserts their own rules, their own culture

on the public with tremendous harms, in the way

that Professor Harmon described.

ANDREW CRESPO: I think this tees up for me what is--

directly it goes into a question I have for DA Rollins.

DA Rollins, you live between two worlds, also,

but of a different sort of sort, right?

We've just heard from Professor Ocen

about the enormous power of police

unions, police institutions.

We're going to have an entire session in this lecture

series on police unions.

But when Professor Ocen talks about criticizing

or intimidated elected officials, I mean,

a few days before you were sworn in,

the National Police Association filed a bar complaint

against you.

You've had you've had public confrontations with police

unions locally and nationally.

And yet, at the same time, I was listening to you

on WBUR just recently talking about

how the vast majority of police are doing a good job,

and that it's a problem of the kind of focus on bad apples.

And obviously, you have to work with police officers every day.

So I hear you speaking in both senses here--

a focus on the police as ally, and as partner

and as the essential other arm of the law enforcement

team that you lead.

And yet, at the same time also, as groups-- groups

that have criticized you, and taken steps against you

as an elected official, that are in some ways unprecedented.

So I'm just curious how you think of that?

Question of the power of organized policing,

or in police institutions, as someone

who's interacting with that institution in really

two different ways, with potential tension between them.

RACHAEL ROLLINS: Yeah, and again,

if anyone who's ever handled fruit,

or knows what a bad apple looks or feels like, it's disgusting.

It's infecting all the other fruit in that bowl.

There are fruit flies everywhere.

So this is not just one or two bad apples.

I like to say, if there are 10 bad police officers and 1,000

good police officers who say nothing about the 10 bad,

we have 1,010 bad police officers.

That's why there are now bystander requirements

that we've seen as a result of things, where you can't

willfully look the other way.

Where we have seen abject failures regarding IAD,

which is Internal Affairs Division, and ACD.

These are the words we use in Massachusetts,

I don't know what you guys use in the states

that you're in, which is Anti-corruption Division.

That's the criminal as opposed to the procedural

or administrative violations.

It's become very clear to me that the DA's office that I

inherited, just about a year and a half ago,

had no oversight on that.

At the end of a process, they might spit something out

and say, here you go, DA, we think this is a crime.

Well, that doesn't help me if you hand me two small things--

is that two of 12 things you looked at?

Is that two of 1,000 things you looked at?

If you're talking about $300 worth of overtime fraud,

but when I go into the community I'm

hearing about brutalization of people

by certain units in our police department,

that's excessive use of force, as opposed to a written rules

violation.

I think we have to be far better as DAs looking at the police.

And why I think they were most upset with me is they,

of course, had put all of their money

and power and privilege behind a candidate in the race,

who I can happily say, came in second.

And so I owed nobody anything as the elected candidate.

And I had made clear to them, we aren't friends.

I don't report to you and you don't report to me.

But the difference between our role

is, when you break the law, just like anyone else,

I'm holding you accountable.

Period, end of story.

And in fact, because we have to work together,

if I don't hold you accountable, the system,

which I believe and know, is operating just

the way it was supposed to.

It's not broken, it is working just

the way it was set up to work.

But people lose faith if they say, wait

a minute, Massachusetts, you have now no less than six

or seven state police scandals.

These troopers who have stolen tens and tens if not

hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime fraud,

get to retire with dignity, accept their pension,

and maybe get some slap on the wrist in Florida

where they live now.

But if I shoplift $200 worth of stuff, because I'm starving

and need food from a supermarket or Target,

they're going to want me to charge them with some crime

and put them in jail.

It's hypocrisy, right?

It's complete hypocrisy.

And the thing I will just double down on

is the unions have the power to label elected

officials as soft on crime.

They're unlike any other unions we

have-- this isn't the teachers union,

this isn't the nurses union.

The police have the lethal and legal authority

to kill you, kill you, with no oversight.

They don't have to stop and make a phone call.

And what I like to tell them-- and it's my job afterwards

to see if that was reasonable and justified or not.

So I'm proud that, before these reforms were demanded,

and I know communities demanded it

way before George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery

and Brianna Taylor and others, but nobody was really

listening--

I created what is the first in the nation, discharge integrity

team.

Where my office doesn't even investigate

officer-involved shootings, I do.

Outside of my office, I have a community member,

a retired judge, a criminal defense lawyer,

and an active member of law enforcement,

and I'm the fifth member.

I only have one, two, or three people in my office

that present to us.

We don't meet in our office, we meet monthly,

and we meet with the community, and we discuss with them

what we are doing so that they have at least a sliver of faith

in the system.

As opposed to these officer-involved shootings

happen, they go to the DA's office,

they don't hear anything for years.

And then quietly, they say, yeah, reasonable,

justified, not a big deal.

And I will end with Black communities overwhelmingly,

and brown in some circumstances, we fail in both realms.

We never get the criminal prosecution

that we are entitled to when we are murdered,

and we're of course blamed for our murder--

we're the only group of people-- most culturally appropriate

a group of people on the planet earth,

who are then blamed for our murder.

But above and beyond that, we now, with qualified immunity,

we don't even get the ability to get

a dime as a result of this behavior

in certain circumstances, where that

is the other place that not only does that person go to jail

for murder, but then, the city has

to pay the millions of dollars out to that family.

Which, of course, doesn't fill the hole

in the void of the loss, but at least can get them

some sort of accountability.

ALEXANDRA NATAPOFF: Thank you.

Professor Harmon, I want to join up a thread.

DA Rollins mentioned this challenge

of maintaining the legitimacy of the criminal process

that we have.

And you mentioned in your remarks what, I think--

the insight that the people do not wait for the legal system

anymore.

They enter the streets as soon as the injustice occurs.

And I took you to be implying-- or maybe not implying--

that it's a reflection of a loss of faith,

that we don't need to wait anymore.

We have no faith that the outcome

will vindicate those interests.

And I think that's such a powerful point.

And it's particularly powerful coming from you,

because you have spent your career grappling with the law.

We-- Professor Harmon and I both--

serve as an advisor to the project

that she is an associate reporter for the American Law

Institute, attempting to articulate

what principles of policing should look like under the law.

And I just wanted to invite you to join this theme that we

are hearing emerging from this panel on the role of law,

its limitations, what can we do to render--

what is our ability to render it legitimate?

We are, after all, at a law school,

speaking to dozens of people who are

entering the legal profession.

What can we say to them about the possibilities

and the limits of the law in this space?

RACHEL HARMON: Well, I'm happy to continue

to listen to these three brilliant

and powerful African-American women,

so I don't need to say anything.

But if I'm going to say something about the law,

I would say that one of the reasons I left the Justice

Department is because I thought, well,

prosecuting police officers can't possibly be

the way to solve the problem.

But you know, when you look at people marching in the street,

demanding those prosecutions, I started

to have to pay more attention to the idea

that even though they didn't solve the problems, one

of the things the victims told me is that it was

the first time in their lives when I said, look,

I'm from the Justice Department, what happened to you was wrong

and I'm going to do something about it,

they felt like that was a sign of respect from the government.

And so prosecution, civil damages, this is not enough.

This isn't close to enough.

But it doesn't mean it's not important.

It is a sign of the government's respect for individuals.

And so we need to continue to refine and improve

the laws we have governing police conduct,

and the methods we have for holding police accountable.

But at the same time, we have to use law for the bigger mission.

And you could see this in DA Rollins's reforms,

that you both have to focus on the system

as a whole, on what it's achieving,

whatever its intent is, whatever its individual incidents might

seem to justify, what it is doing to people,

who it's actually affecting.

And to do that, you have to hear from those voices.

Which is why congress member Bush's election

is so important.

It's bringing into the lawmaking process

the voice of people who know the effects the system is

having on people on the street.

And so, I think the law plays multiple roles.

I don't think accountability is unimportant.

I don't think the rules governing what police should do

are unimportant.

I don't think the structure of political systems,

which allow the voices to get heard, are unimportant.

But I think we have to, on top of that,

think about the tools that we have to improve outcomes

more broadly.

ANDREW CRESPO: Professor Harmon, when

you speak of the importance of a voice

here, I see a theme in probably five or six of the questions

that have come in, that actually focus a lot

on the language of this moment.

So much of this moment is marked by phrases that we hear--

defund the police.

On the other hand, back to the blue.

There's this language that comes of all of this.

And a bunch of people are asking about how

people who are in the activism space,

or the space that is generating these moment-defining phrases,

how do you navigate the tension between trying

to appeal to people who don't agree with you,

and maybe win over people who don't agree with you,

on the one hand, without giving up

the centrality and the urgency that we're

seeing on this panel?

So a lot of folks have been asking in the Q&A about,

for example, the phrase, defund the police.

On the one hand they think, gosh,

this feels like maybe a hazy phrase.

On the one hand, some folks are saying, gosh,

it feels almost inherently conservative-- it's

about just taking a little bit of money

away, or taking some money away, and repurposing it

to other state agencies.

On the other hand, we see in our national media

that defund the police is described

more frequently than not as a kind of fully radical idea.

I'm just curious, as those of you

who try to navigate the politics of this,

how do you think through this question of--

are you trying to persuade people who disagree with you?

And what do you do if some of the ways that we go about this

put people off.

We have a comment from a student who says,

you know, honestly, I have a lot of police

officers in my family.

And when I hear things spoken about some of these ways,

my instinctive reaction, this person says,

is to feel defensive and on guard and not trusting.

And maybe it's an inherent tension,

but I'd love to just hear those of you who

give so much thought to the dynamics

of this talk about that.

I see you singling me, Congresswoman Bush, please.

CORI BUSH: Yeah, so that feeling that that student just

spoke about, that's how we feel every day just in life.

So hearing about what happened--

hearing about that thing that's making you uncomfortable

when people say these things about police,

that's how we feel every single day.

And we can't even just say, walking out of our home.

Brianna was murdered in her bed.

So we can't just say that--

Atatiana Jefferson wasn't murdered outside of her home,

she was in her home, you know.

So that's how we feel.

So I understand that that thing makes you uncomfortable,

but it makes you uncomfortable the thought

of something, the hearing some words makes you uncomfortable.

But we're talking about our lives are on the line,

so I'm asking you to push in a little further,

and think about what it's like for people who only--

This is the thing, there is a physical reaction

that people have when they see my skin,

a physical reaction, a negative reaction

happens in their bodies.

And so then that comes out some way, either in their actions,

verbally, or comes out some other way later.

We're talking about stopping that.

So when we say defund, I'm sorry if the language

makes you uncomfortable.

And I'm not trying to be ignorant,

or anything like that.

But when we say defund, it made you think.

Because let me say this, when education was defunded,

did anybody say anything?

Education has been defunded for a long time.

We've been moving money from the education system,

putting it into private prisons for a long time,

and nobody is saying anything about that.

But when we say defund the police, because the police have

to be this treasure, look, we want money

to go to places that are underfunded.

So do I want money to go from MRAPs?

If a MRAP is $300,000, my community

could probably use that money for our unhoused population.

We could have used that money to bring

COVID-1o supplies quicker into our communities,

but that didn't happen.

We could use that money to pay our mental health

professionals, instead of having our police be mental

health professionals, instead of having

our police be social workers.

Let's have them do what they're supposed to do, and then

have the people who have gone to school to do these things,

let them be paid to do that job.

Because let's face this--

social workers aren't even paid the wage that they deserve.

But we won't even go into all of that.

You know, I think about as a nurse, the amazing DA Rollins,

was talking about the bad officers and the good officers.

You know, I think it was Chris Rock that said,

can we be have a bad pilot?

Can you have the bad pilots?

Or who wants the bad pilot?

Who wants the bad chef, the chef of the restaurant?

Yeah, come on in, some of them are good, some of them are bad.

But sit on down.

You know, no-- we can't have good officers and bad officers.

There should be officers, and then extraordinary officers,

the ones that get the medals.

That should be all that we have.

Because I think about it as a nurse working in a hospital,

look, when I'm at the hospital, and I have my staff,

if I have a staff member that continues to murder people

because this nurse can't figure out 100 units of insulin

to give to this person, versus 100 milligrams

of insulin to give to this person.

And this nurse is always killing folks,

or this person is always hurting people.

And then I say, well, you know what,

we got to keep that amongst us.

You know, we're going to just do better next time.

Tell the kids I say, hello.

Is that what you expect from me?

When you show up to that hospital,

you expect the quality care that nurses bring.

In the end, if a nurse does something wrong,

it makes the paper.

Like it goes into the--

you know, the state sends out a paper,

the nurses send out a paper every month,

and it has a portion in it where it says, this nurse,

such as such-- by name--

this nurse did this, and this is what happened when

the investigation happened.

Just because-- just because we turned it in and said,

this nurse did this.

It goes somewhere and that information is made public.

So we're holding even nurses to a standard

that police officers aren't being held to.

And so I have to push back on the comfortability of people

and how things make you feel and what labels make you feel like.

If saying defund made you stand up

and say, oh, something is wrong with this-- you paid attention.

And look, I'm asking you to not be

upset when you have your foot--

you're stepping on my foot and I say,

you know what, get off my foot, and you don't do anything.

Hey, you know what, would you move, get off my foot?

And you don't do anything.

But when I push you off my foot, and now you want

to say, why are you pushing me?

Why you getting mad?

You can't do that.

No, you should have moved the first time,

or you shouldn't have even been there.

That's what we're saying.

So it's not about your comfortability--

if I'm making a word up--

it's not about your comfortability,

it's about what's right for all people.

RACHAEL ROLLINS: If I could jump in.

I mean, to her point, my mom's a registered nurse--

the reason why it makes the paper

is because she's licensed, just like lawyers are.

And many police officers aren't, right?

And I, as a lawyer, we don't have

the death penalty in Massachusetts,

but I can't kill you with my pen--

writing something.

I can make enormous changes in people's lives

with the decisions I make, and the autonomy.

But police officers have the legal and lethal authority

to kill.

And that-- they aren't licensed.

At least in Massachusetts they are not.

And we're hopefully moving toward that.

Budgets are a value statement.

Budgets are a value statement.

And when we, in Massachusetts, or Boston, have a $14 million

budget for the Boston Police Department,

and then somewhere else $60 million in overtime,

you shouldn't have to have a Nobel Peace Prize in economics

to read a budget of a city.

It should just be like police budget,

all the stuff should be there, and it should be explained.

And that's four times as much money

as the Boston Public Health Commission makes.

When we think about education and prisons--

and I testified in front of our legislature and said,

when we were asking for $17,000 more per student

in rural poor schools, and urban poor schools, to say,

we want to be equal with some of these more wealthy communities,

where their taxes allow the public school

systems to be better, I was peppered and drilled

with questions.

And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a minute--

I was just here a couple months ago,

and we pay $55,000 a year for a prisoner at Nashua Street jail,

and you didn't ask me a single question.

You don't care about the end of the system, where

it's three times as much money to pay for a prisoner--

which, by the way, two to three prisoners-- every two

to three prisoners, one correction officer.

That's the ratio there.

In our schools, it's 28 students to one teacher,

and we're hemming and hawing about $15,000 to $17,000.

Our system is set up for failure.

And I can tell you as the DA, one of the best indicators

as to whether or not you will touch

the criminal legal system--

not the only-- but is, are you getting a quality education?

What is your housing situation?

Are you suffering from environmental racism,

which is very real, and higher levels of COPD and asthma

because you live in a place where

there are bridges and roads going through everywhere,

and toxins and emissions are significantly

higher in your community.

I will just also point out that when our government--

when attorney general, Jeff Session

cut all the consent decrees, and there was no longer

any oversight on all of these rogue police departments,

nobody questioned the defunding of that, right?

The regulation, they're like, oh, this is wonderful.

He's fiscally responsible, right?

But it resulted in more harm to our communities.

And then, as far as protesters, it's

part of why, when I hear the professor talk about--

and I love this-- people don't wait

for the criminal legal system anymore.

They take to the streets.

You're right-- that same criminal legal system

that allowed Derek Chauvin to have 17 infractions,

and didn't do anything, that is now going to investigate Derek

Chauvin for the homicide of George Floyd,

and the DA's office that didn't look into Derek

and prosecute him if any of those were crimes,

absolutely right.

They should be outraged and out there.

And it's why I've said, I believe in the First Amendment.

And unless there is violence--

and I don't mean disrespect, or loud language,

or stepping off of a curb, I mean

violence and significant harm--

we are not going to be prosecuting

protesters in Boston.

ALEXANDRA NATAPOFF: So, I wish we could

go on for many more hours.

We are out of time.

I'm going to exercise moderator privilege, because we

started five minutes late.

So I'm going to ask everyone to stay a couple minutes more.

I would love to give our extraordinary panelists one

last minute to say a few parting words to our students,

to this group.

DA Rollins, if we could start with you.

And then I'll ask Professor Harmon, and then

Professor Ocen, and then we'll give Congresswoman Bush

the last word.

Anything you would to leave our students and our community

with?

RACHAEL ROLLINS: Yeah, just that I

think that there's this false dichotomy

where it's police reform, but what

about Black on Black crime?

Or if you harm a police officer, people say,

but what about police brutality?

I think we can believe Black lives matter,

and also want to make sure that police officers aren't harmed.

We look at what happened in LA with these two

deputy sheriffs--

I'm praying for their recovery.

And I will say that out loud, of course I will.

We oppose violence, period.

We're not saying we want white people

to experience the same thing that we do every day.

We don't want violence at all.

We just want it acknowledged that it's

happening at an incredibly disparate rate for us.

So I will say, I think there's a false dichotomy that's

out there.

I do think it's important that we continue maybe

not trying to persuade, but speaking to people that we

disagree with.

We have to start having very uncomfortable conversations

period, end of story.

And to the congresswoman's point, uncomfort

and maiming or murder, your uncomfort,

you can deal with that.

I promise you.

Being a little bit uncomfortable because you

hurt some words that hurt your feelings--

and I'm not belittling that-- but as opposed to the George

Floyd family, your uncomfort is, I'm sorry for that,

let's keep it moving and speed up a little bit,

Because our uncomfort is that's just

the level I wake up with every day,

and the assumptions that are made about me as a visibly

brown and Black woman.

So I will say, be involved, even if you

disagree with what I'm saying.

And if this is at Harvard Law School where people are local,

let's engage in a conversation.

Or debate, you know, that's fine.

But let's start a conversation if we disagree,

because where we are is harming too many people,

and we need to start moving forward in the process.

And then, I'm just honored to be with these amazing two

professors and this woman.

So Wesley Bell and Kim Gardner are my two good friends,

so you know I'm texting them about it now in Missouri.

All right, but thank you for having me.

ALEXANDRA NATAPOFF: I'll just take the opportunity

to mention that Wesley Bell will be at our next session

on October 16, so I hope everybody

will remember to join us again for

future extraordinary sessions.

Professor Harmon?

RACHEL HARMON: I guess, you know, police

can and do play a really important role

in making people and making communities safer

and making them more livable.

But they don't play that role in every community.

And until they do, we're going to have

to talk about the harms that police do,

as well as the benefits that they can bring.

And so yes, there are hard conversations to be had.

But that really shouldn't be taken

as a lack of faith in what policing can

achieve in the United States.

ALEXANDRA NATAPOFF: Professor Ocen?

PRISCILLA OCEN: I would say that this

is a movement not a moment.

So for many, the uprisings in cities across the country

seems quite sudden.

But when we look at the historical record,

this reckoning has been decades, or centuries even,

in the making, in terms of even when the first police

departments were founded to regulate labor in the North,

and to regulate unpaid labor, i.e.,

enslaved people in the South.

So this has been a long time coming,

in terms of trying to align policing

with our democratic norms, our democratic expectations,

our anti-discrimination norms broadly.

And what produced this moment is an abject failure on all

of those counts, in terms of regulating police departments

along the lines of democracy, along the lines of equality,

along the lines of ensuring that people

can live with dignity in their communities,

notwithstanding their race, gender, sexual orientation,

disability, and so forth.

And so the work that's been done over the decades

is significant.

And it has helped us to understand

the true nature of the problem that we're addressing.

So it's not just with regard to police departments--

it's with regard to our political systems.

Its with regard to our civil institutions that perpetuate

the logics of policing.

So when folks say, defund the police,

what they're talking about is not merely shifting resources.

They're talking about bankrupting a particular kind

of ideology that views police as the frontline of segregation,

that views police as a mechanism for regulating the poor,

the racially marginalized, and those

who are differently abled-- those who are not normative.

And so that's really the question in terms

of what are we defunding?

We're not only shifting the resources that fund police,

but the ideologies that undergird them.

And those ideologies exist in a number of institutions

outside of law enforcement, traditional law enforcement

agencies, as I was discussing.

So if we're going to divest from police,

we can not simultaneously reinvest

in other punitive institutions.

So we really have to pay attention to those logics.

That work is there, it's decades long.

And at this moment, folks are being called in--

not called out.

They're being called in to be allies.

And that includes law students, law professors.

We have a lot of work to do to really question

the role that we play in facilitating police violence,

and legitimizing policing in the way

that it has been exercised in the United States.

And we need to be partners in really dismantling

the ideological underpinning of policing in the United States

in the way it affects those who are the most vulnerable

in our communities.

And I hope that the folks who are watching this now

will take that invitation and will join us

in asking these critical questions about the role of law

in democracy in regulating public safety,

and what public safety means more generally.

ALEXANDRA NATAPOFF: And I'll just

take this moment remind everyone that there

are some supplemental readings from some

of our academic colleagues on the website

if you're interested in reading more deeply about these issues.

Congresswoman Bush, can you send us off?

CORI BUSH: Absolutely.

I just want to ask a question, just

for people to think about later on as you go through your day,

and hopefully that you can mull over the next few weeks,

you know, thinking about this subject

and what is your anti-racism work?

And how does that plug into what we've been talking about today?

You know, we're always told, can we get past this?

Or if you all will comply, and all of these things, and then

I think about how in 2015, one year after year after Michael

Brown was murdered and we had protested

for more than 400 days with the Ferguson uprising,

and we ended up with a blue lives matter law.

We ended up with a 70% of Black drivers were more likely--

Black drivers were 70% more likely to be pulled over

in Missouri than white drivers.

Now, in 2019, we were 95% more likely to be pulled over

by police officers than white drivers,

in a state where we're only 11.8%--

where the white community is 83% in this state.

And where and our Latinx and Hispanic community is 4.3%--

we were 95% more likely to be pulled over,

40% more likely to be stopped and searched,

and 40% more likely to be arrested,

even though we were the ones, a lot of times,

didn't have anything on us when we were searched.

So what is your anti-racism work,

and how can you use that to help fix this problem?

And I'm saying that because everybody has a place.

I don't care if you're a student,

I don't care what your place is right now,

there is a work that you can do.

Take it to your families, to your network,

if you have a religious affiliation, whatever groups

you're a part of.

Take it to the board room, take it

to wherever, whatever access you have, use that

and put it to this work.

Because that's the only way we'll change it.

And if you think that if you're not

a part of-- if there is something

that you can not bring, you haven't dug deep enough.

So go back and look at this thing.

Every single person has a place in this

to fix this in this country for all of us.

Because if I die tomorrow, if I'm murdered tomorrow,

can you say that you did the work to make sure

that Black lives matter?

Thank you.

ALEXANDRA NATAPOFF: Thank you.

Like to thank our extraordinary panel.

This has been illuminating and inspiring.

I'll turn it over to Professor Crespo,

if you'd like to leave us with any few words.

I'd like to thank all the students and all

our participants who listened.

And I hope everybody appreciates the time

that these extraordinarily busy and overcommitted people--

none of these panelists have any time,

and they donated that time today to us,

so that we could do our work better,

so that we could proceed in our education better.

So thank you, we're very, very grateful.

ANDREW CRESPO: Thank you all so, so much.

Echoing the DA and the future congresswoman.

As the DA said, part of the work is having a conversation.

Certainly not all of the work, but that's

what we're hoping to do here--

to have this type of conversation,

to have at last a full year, and to put in the time

that we can to make sure that we explore

these questions as thoroughly and as thoughtfully,

but with the urgency that the moment calls for.

And many of your questions in the chat,

as I was reading through them, I thought, OK, well, we've

got a whole session on that.

Which is why those questions might not

have been asked today.

But we hope that you'll go to policinginameric

a.law.harvard.edu, you can see the full slate of topics

we're going to talk about.

You can see our future panelists.

And we look forward to seeing many of you

back here in October.

And to our amazing panelists, one more time

I'll just say, thank you so, so much.

RACHAEL ROLLINS: Thanks for having us.