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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. Police behavior is more controversial and more under scrutiny than ever, but being a police officer can be a thankless job. Both things can be true at the same time. The hours are long, your gear is heavy, your interactions are often unpleasant. You're called into situations where people are often at their lowest point or their worst selves. Law professor Rosa Brooks knew all these things when she signed up to be a volunteer reserve officer in Washington DC's Metropolitan Police Department, but she was curious, and she wanted to know, what was it like to be a police officer in America.

Although she didn't initially set out to write a book about policing when signing up for the force, she says. She does offer insight into her "messy complicated experience" in four years with the DC police in a new book. She writes, "Americans call 911 both in genuine emergencies and for trivial reasons, and police officers don't get to choose whether to respond." That was true for Brooks herself when she patrolled DC's predominantly black and low-income Seventh District. She writes that in one of our first shifts, other officer tells her, "People here are different from you and me. You and me, we don't want to get in trouble, or get hurt, or go to jail. These people, they're so used to it, they just don't care."

Police having a hard job and police falling into racist culture, maybe both at the same time. On top of people's problems, Rosa Brooks had to confront that attitude. What was it like to be a police officer in a major American city? What are these experiences? Tell us about the largest story of policing in America, and what difference do officers make in communities like Washington DC's Seventh District? With me now is Rosa Brooks, Law Professor at Georgetown University, and founder of Georgetown's Innovative Policing Program, and the author now of, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City. Rosa Brooks, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to WNYC today.

Rosa Brooks: Brian, thanks for having me.

Brian: Can you start with some basic background? Most people don't know what a reserve officer is, so what is that position, and were you already a law professor when you signed on for that?

Rosa: Yes, yes. I was already a law professor. That's my real job. My full-time day job for many years at Georgetown Law Centre. DC has a unusual program. A lot of cities have auxiliary or reserve police who just help out with things like directing traffic at big public events. DC along with a handful of other cities has a program where you can volunteer to go through the police academy, get the same training as full-time career officers, and you emerge on the other end, a sworn armed officer with a badge and a gun, and arrest powers and the same police powers as full-time paid officers.

Brian: What was your interest?

Rosa: I think you said it. It was curiosity. When I heard about this program, I have to admit, I thought, "No way DC would let a random volunteer, a law professor, get a badge and a gun, and be a cop. Are you kidding?" It just seems so strange, but I was immediately curious because the culture of policing from the outside can seem so opaque, so closed. I like many others, I've been reading and watching TV and thinking about race and policing, policing and violence, and it seemed to me that if you want to change something, you first need to understand it, and this was a fascinating way to get inside that blue wall if you will.

Brian: Before we get into the details of your experience and the insights that you drew from them, and maybe how from your experiences and how they can help with innovative policing as your program is called at Georgetown. I have to admit when I first saw what your project was, I thought, "Oh like the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who's been on this show many times, when she decided to work as a maid and a Walmart worker, and more low paying jobs for a while and then wrote the book Nickel and Dimed." Then I saw, "Oh, you're Barbara Ehrenreich's daughter," which I did not know. Of course, you're a person in your own right, but can you say anything--

Rosa: I hope so.

Brian: I'm sure. Everybody is, but can you say anything about how your mother's work informed this project?

Rosa: I admire my mother's work tremendously and in fact, one of my worst moments when I was writing Tangled Up in Blue came when I decided to go re-read her book Nickel and Dimed, in which she went into these low wage jobs, and it was so good that I briefly got depressed and had writer's block because I thought I just can't write as well as she does. I had to put it all aside for a few weeks and wait and try to come back to it and say, "Okay this is going to be in my voice and it's going to be a different voice, but you can't compare it," but no, I admire my mother tremendously.

Brain: One more thing by way of preview, what would you say about this project, and this book to law enforcement people listening right now who are immediately suspicious like, "Oh, another liberal academic looking to demean us, not understand us"?

Rosa: I would say, on the contrary, I think it's a book that presents a very sympathetic picture of the challenges that police officers face. It's based on having been there. I think our political culture, we love to have binary opposition's and stereotypes, and depending who you ask, you either get cops or, self-sacrificing heroes, under-appreciated heroes, or they're a bunch of brutal racist thugs. Of course, what I found in four and a half years in the DC Reserve Corps working side by side with many career officers, is it's a whole lot more complicated than that. Cops have really impossible jobs. Most of them are trying to do their best in a really difficult situation.

Brain: Your very first night on the job, I see, you are told that anybody can kill you at any time, and as you write, "When you start with a belief that you're in constant danger, you're more likely to perceive situations as threatening." Were you ever in a situation where you think your perception got skewed in that way from what the situation really was?

Rosa: Yes, I'll give you one example, where nothing bad happened, or nothing really bad happened, but it could have. It was a domestic violence call, and I was with a partner, who took his responsibilities very, very seriously. He took the importance of being tactically safe and alert very, very seriously. A teenage girl in her mother's living room, the teenage girl had actually called the police herself. She and her mother had gotten into a fight, and she called 911, and she was trying to explain to this officer that she had been the one who called 911.

She reached into her bag to bring out her cell phone to show him that she called 911, and he yelled at her immediately. He said, "Get your hands out of your bag. Put your hands where I can see them." She was really distressed and it was one of those small things. She refused to talk to him after that. She would only talk to me, she was so upset. She said, "You didn't have to do that. I was going to cooperate with you." He said, "I didn't know. You might have been pulling out a gun to kill me." She looked at him like, "You're the guy with the gun," and I think that's the kind of thing that happens, that we rightly, the media rightly focuses on situations where people get killed.

Police misread the situation maybe and kill someone who did not pose a threat, but underneath that is the whole iceberg of situations that go bad in smaller ways. Like a cop yells at a girl in her living room, because she reached into her bag and the cop, he wasn't trying to be a jerk. He was a decent guy, but you're so primed to think you got to watch their hands, you can't let anybody reach for something you can't see. That he immediately snaps into action and yells at her, and from her perspective, she called the police, she wanted help, and instead, she gets yelled at.

Brian: Yet, it's true that when you're a police officer, you can get killed at any time, and you don't know when that time might be. Yet, would there be a better, truer, first lesson for a new police officer to hear?

Rosa: Oh, absolutely. Policing is dangerous no question, but it's not nearly as dangerous as police officers and the general public think it is. It doesn't even make the top 10 list of most dangerous occupations. When you look at deaths from intentional harm, how likely are you to get murdered by somebody on the job, taxi, and limousine drivers have a homicide death rate on the job that is about twice as high as cops, but nobody runs around saying, "Oh my God, we need to arm the taxi drivers and train them to immediately leap into action when a passenger reaches for their bag."

I think that Americans, all of us we're horrible at thinking about statistical risk. We read about a situation and when I was in the Police Academy, we watched videos showing, officers, domestic violence calls, or traffic stops, who got killed. It can happen, but then you exaggerate in your mind how frequently it happens. It's not actually all that frequent. You and I could be killed at any time. An airplane could crash into our house and that could happen, but it probably won't.

It doesn't make any sense to live your life on the assumption that that might happen. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but I think it's a similar kind of situation here. If you think most people are potentially a threat to you, you're going to overreact. If you think almost nobody is going to be a threat to you, you're going to be a whole lot less likely to immediately freak out when somebody reaches for something.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Around the same time you finished your firearms training course, I see Alton Sterling and Philando Casteel were killed at the hands of police in Louisiana and Minnesota, respectively. We covered both of those cases on the show at the time. What was it like to be entrusted with the power to fire a gun the same week those two men were shot dead by police and at very least controversial shootings? What was the conversation like among other recruits who you were with about these incidents?

Rosa: It's a tremendous responsibility. I remember, actually, one of our instructors of the Police Academy in firearms training, one of the best instructors, saying the department issued Glock it takes two pounds to pull the trigger. Two pounds of pressure. He said, "That's the heaviest two pounds you'll ever carry." One of the things that really shocked me at the Police Academy, was the whole nation was having this conversation about race, policing violence, and policing. The one place we weren't having those conversations was at the Academy, at least in terms of the official instruction. It was very, very tactical.

It was memorized this list of vehicular offenses, the nine property forms, and the right color of pen to use on each property form. It wasn't, "Hey, what's policing for? What's the role of policing in a democratic and diverse society.? Hey, what about race?" We weren't having those conversations.

I think recruits were uneasily aware. People would talk about it a bit in the hallway and cafeterias, but we weren't talking about it in the Academy. Even though Philando Casteel is a classic case in point of the issue we were just talking about. He had a legally registered firearm. It was a traffic stop. He told the officer he had a legally registered firearm and then when he reached away from the officer's line of sight, the officer panicked and shot him.

Brian: Yes, As seen on video, tragically.

Rosa: As seen on video.

Brian: One experience that you get into is the time your shift partner, a young Haitian American officer, gave CPR to a dying man. After the man dies, your partner becomes visibly distraught, but then he and the medic on the scene start talking about how people, even the children in the predominantly Black district, are animals. The medic goes on to say, as you write, "I call these kids, the walking dead. They're dead. They just don't know it yet. Give them a few years, and some more smack, and some more guns, and they're going to be riding in my ambulance in body bags."

How did the police and other first responders like that medic reconcile their duty to protect people on the one hand and their blatant resentment or dismissal of those same people, some of whom maybe had even similar backgrounds on the other?

Rosa: I think there's a lot of cognitive dissonance. Most police officers went into policing out of idealism. There are some bullies who went into it because they wanted to be a bully with a gun, but most people go into it because they want to protect communities. Very often they were crime victims or had a loved one who was a crime victim and they see their job as protecting other people, trying to keep them from being in that situation or help them if they are.

A lot about the training and a lot about the experience creates a real cynicism. By definition, people aren't calling you to celebrate the happy times in their lives. They're not calling 911 to invite you over for a barbecue. They're calling because something horrible is happening. You spent a lot of your time talking to people who are in horrible situations, are pretty dysfunctional, and so on. It can make police very cynical.

It can make them feel helpless and angry. It can make them feel frustrated because so many of the problems they encounter are problems that they know they can't solve. Mentally ill people, the desperately poor, people who are addicted to various substances, and it can lead to a really toxic kind of cynicism. Yes, this particular partner, he wept when the man he had given CPR to died. He was just broken up that he couldn't save him.

Then half an hour later, he's saying-- I don't think I can say it on the radio. He's dismissing them as animals. I won't add what else he said. I think if you had talked to him and said, "Wait a minute, what about that guy and his family?" He would say, "Okay, not them." Part of this, Brian, I actually think is that when we think about racism and policing, our criminal justice system is structurally racist. In a zillion ways, we sometimes overlook the dimension of class, which also operates and that I think was part of what was going on in that particular encounter.

That it was, the guy who had died was from a solid lower-middle-class African-American family, and the people the medic that they thought they were talking about were people who weren't employed and it was easy, from a class perspective to dismiss them as the non-people.

Brian: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for Rosa Brooks, Georgetown Law Professor, founder of Georgetown's innovative policing program, and now the author of a book about her experience as being a reserve DC police officer as it's called kind of a civilian volunteer with the force for four years, called Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City. If you are a police officer, former police officer, you can call in. If you're someone who has had encounters with the police, you can call in.

At this moment where we seem to be polarized into defund the police versus Blue Lives Matter politics, the complex picture that professor Brooks is trying to tell here is refreshing in how does it lead to good policy going forward? We will ask. That actually saves lives, especially civilian lives, at the hands of the police. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet a question @BrianLehrer and we'll continue in a minute.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Georgetown's Rosa Brooks author now of Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City. Let's take a call. Don in Teaneck you're on WNYC. Hi, Don.

Don: Hello, how are you? How's everybody?

Brian: Good, how about you? What'd you got, Don?

Don: Okay. Maybe she could help me understand why police officers are trained often to empty their whole guns in defending themselves, I guess. These guns have whole 15 bullets on them. In some of these situations, a person was shot many, many more times than they need to for the officer to defend themselves. I just like to know why are they trained to be so lethal?

Rosa: Yes, that's a great question. I don't think the training says, "Empty your gun," but I do think that, certainly, my training emphasized, "Make sure they're really down." That you have to neutralize the threat. If that meant, making extra sure, I think a lot of cops interpret that as "I want to make sure that this threat stays down. If that means I empty my magazine, that's what I'm going to do." But I also think part of it, to be honest, is panic.

People imagine that police are these firearms experts and that they're very highly trained in the use of their weapons, but the average municipal police officer, certainly in DC, it's a two-week initial training program. Only about half of that time is actually on the firing range. Then every six months you have to pass the firing range exam, again the firearms exam. You don't get a tremendous amount of tactical training.

There, obviously, are officers who are much better trained often from other prior experiences in the military, for instance. Basically, you're taking a random person, you're giving them a couple of weeks of firearms training and they're not necessarily doing anything that's super well thought through. I think people do panic.

Brian: Amir in Queens you're on WNYC with Rosa Brooks. Hi, Amir.

Amir: Hi. All right. Two questions. First question. The girl she was talking about that called the police when she went to their apartment because she had an argent with her mom and she reached into the bag and Ms. Brooks partner freaked out. Was she an African-American girl or was she a white girl? That's the first question girl.

Rosa: She was an African American girl.

Amir: That seems pretty obvious. Second question. I heard not on this program, but another program that your mom was opposed to this program or to your project and why you wanted to join the police force, I'm just curious if you, I didn't hear you mention that and I'd be curious if you wanted to address it.

Rosa: Oh gosh. Amir, you're asking the hard questions. My mom thought this was a horrible idea. She said the police are the enemy, you shouldn't join them. I said, "I'm trying to learn more about this. I want to understand it better." She said, "So go interview some cops." I actually didn't have a great answer to that. I really was curious and I did have a deep instinct that a lot of the media coverage of policing misses big pieces of the picture. I just wanted to do it and it was pretty tense.

My mother and I had some fairly tense conversations, I think in the end she came around. I said, "Mom trust me, I'm not going to do something bad with this." In the end, I think when she saw the programs that came out of it at Georgetown, that focus on really working to reinvent policing and the book itself, she came around and she said, "Okay, I was opposed to this, but it worked out."

Brian: Amir, thank you for asking the hard questions there. Donna in Albany, you're on WNYC.

Donna: Hi.

Brian: Hello.

Donna: Good morning. Hello.

Brian: Hi, you're in the air Donna.

Donna: Okay, good. Here's my comment with a question. Unless we disarm people all over the place, this is going to continue to escalate. in United Kingdom, the police are not armed, so therefore they do not expect that they are going to get shot at. I think there ought to be a policy. It's reductive, people have said it before you got to guns out of the whole system because it's creating this situation where things are going to escalate and they are going to escalate. Then, you add in the racial factor. Fear of a Black man, all right, that's so firmly rooted in our culture. People are going to panic. Why can't we do what London does and get the guns out of the cop's hands and get them out of the people's hands. Do you see what I'm saying?

Brian: Yes, Donna. At the same time you write in your book, Professor Brooks, that many of the Black officers you work with felt that the safest place for a Black man in America is behind a badge, but have you done a cross-cultural study in trying to figure out how to improve policing in America, like with the London example that Donna points to if that's an accurate description?

Rosa: No, I haven't done a cross-cultural study, but I do think the US could learn a lot from policing in many other countries not just the UK. Donna, you're absolutely right as long as we are a society awash with guns, you get this vicious circle where ordinary people have guns, which means that there's more threat to police officers. If they're encountering somebody, which means the police need to have guns. That ends up in some bad places. I'm all in favor of more effective gun control policies.

That said, I don't think there's anything inevitable about the number of police shootings that occur in the US each year, which per capita are still higher even than many countries which also have armed police officers. I do think that the most promising emerging trend in police training is a real focus on de-escalation and on giving officers not only the verbal skills to communicate effectively and deescalate things, but also the tactical skills to try to slow things down, to make better use of cover and concealment, for instance, to make better use of calling for backup and so on.

A lot of the police shootings that ended up making the news, you look at them closely and there's sometimes the issue of what they call officer-created danger, where an officer rushes in and gets too close, instead of taking cover and assessing the situation. Then the officer perceives a threat while it's too late to duck for cover so they end up shooting, but to the extent that you can change that through training.

I think you can. Some police academies are doing this effectively. Train officers instead to say, "No, no, no, your job is not to race in when you don't know what's going on your job is to slow down, assess the situation get behind a tree. If you have to get behind a tree, call for backup, wait." It's better to do that than to rush in because if you rush in it's a whole lot more likely that a dangerous will come out of that and that somebody is going to get killed.

Brian: As we start to run out of time, I'm synthesizing a few big thoughts from your book and asking you to tie them together in the context of practical advice that can get us past this moment that we're in, in this country. You do allude to policing in America being broken and that in communities all across America, like the predominantly Black and poor district you patrol, there's always a rift between police and civilians and that we haven't even figured out in this country what the police are for and that any place you go, you'll find teenage boys hanging out on the street, but in poor, more heavily policed areas, like the one you patrolled, officers tell those teenagers to leave.

That police make low-level arrests all the time that ultimately come to nothing except a waste of the taxpayer's money and getting criminal records for these people. As founder of Georgetown's innovating policing program-- Innovative policing program, sorry, with this experience that you've had for four years, what are your top-line policy recommendations to make things better for everybody?

Rosa: Some of them don't have to do with police at least directly, because one of the things that became really clear to me as I worked as a reserve police officer was the role of-- Cops don't operate in a vacuum. Cops enforce laws, they didn't make in a social context they can't do much to change. If you want to have fewer arrests made by police for trivial offenses, for instance, you got to think about-- Frankly, we've got to look in the mirror because we're the ones who elected the people who criminalized all sorts of trivial behavior and cops can't change that.

Legislators have to change that and so on, with prisons and so on the role of legislators, prosecutors, judges, and ultimately all of that. I think that we do need to be really attuned to the degree to which if we want to change policing, you can't just tell the police to do something different, we also have to do a lot of different things ourselves. That said, as I said, changing training is really important. Helping people learn how to deescalate and slow down, giving them those skills is really vital.

Another program that we run at Georgetown is something called the act bystandership for law enforcement program project ABLE. What that does is it gives police officers the skills to intervene when they see a partner about to do something stupid, giving them the skills to say, "Hey buddy, I got this." When they see someone getting hot under the collar and about to haul off and slug someone or curse at them or something like that or worse. That's a program that's actually been amazingly successful and police departments all over the country have been signing up for that training.

It can be really effective, remember the old mothers against drunk driving slogan. Friends don't let friends drive drunk. The idea is to shift the conversation from, "Hey, don't rat out your fellow cop. That's what loyalty is." To saying, "No. Loyalty, the way you take care of your partner. Friends, don't let their partners do something stupid. Friends don't let their partners break the law and beat someone up. Friends don't let their partners curse at citizens." That's how you take care of each other. That's been pretty exciting.

Brian: Rosa Brooks, her book is Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City. Thank you so much for coming on with us with it.

Rosa: Brian, thanks for having me.

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