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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. After the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police, yet another incident like this so soon after George Floyd and others, let's go all the way there in a conversation now and imagine a radically new system of public safety without policing as we know it today. It can be a scary proposition because violent crime is real.

It can seem to contradict things we're told by elected officials that crime is down substantially in the New York City subways since an infusion of many more police officers a few months ago. We also know that, especially in low-income communities of color and even higher-income communities of color, experience teaches people to be afraid of the criminals and the police.

Tyre Nichols is the kind of extreme case that makes national news and makes even most police officers denounce their brethren, but that also obscures the routine, lower-level oppression that many people experience even as they experience threats from civilian crime. Whatever reforms that have been made within the existing system, body cams, whatever, did not prevent the killing of Tyre Nichols.

Let's go all the way there with someone with experience and expertise who wants to go there. Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, Brooklyn Law School professor, whose bio page says she teaches and writes in criminal law and procedure, evidence and abolition, and co-directs the Center for Criminal Justice, and that her scholarship interrogates the policies, doctrines, and practices within the criminal legal system, that he wrote people's constitutional rights and perpetuate racial subordination.

She was previously at Columbia Law School, was a top official with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and worked in the federal public defender's office in Nashville, same state as Memphis, obviously, where this police killing took place. Among her many publications is an article in the Fordham Law Review in 2021 called Abolition as the Solution: Redress for Victims of Excessive Police Force. Professor Hoag-Fordjour, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be with you again. That was quite the introduction. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Accurate enough, I hope?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: I hope so as well. We'll find out. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Could you begin by giving us your definition of the word "abolition" in this context? Because many listeners will hear that and think it means no police force at all and think that's too utopian. When you write that abolition is the redress for victims of police force, what does abolition mean?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: Sure. In this context of policing, abolition seeks to decrease the presence of police in society, decrease our reliance on police in society, and to redirect some of those funds to life-affirming institutions, and things that would actually address the root cause of crime as opposed to address and respond once crime has already occurred.

Brian Lehrer: Right, but decrease and redirect some, those words sound different than the word "abolition," which sounds absolute. What are you saying?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: I do teach a course on abolition here at Brooklyn Law. It's a course I've taught at Columbia, a course I've taught at Vanderbilt law. There's the acknowledgment that abolition is really twofold. We have the theoretical framework of abolition and then there's the everyday practice of abolition. I think abolitionists most believe that, tomorrow, we can't get there, right?

We're not going to get rid of all police and close all prisons tomorrow, but that's something that we can work toward and strive toward and this idea to just slowly decrease and shrink our reliance on police. I think Tyre Nichols' brutal murder is an example of why it is that we don't need a fully-armed, specialized squad carrying out routine traffic stops and this idea of decreasing the role of police in society.

Brian Lehrer: Well, certainly, that SCORPION unit model is coming under withering criticism from many, many different corners. We know that the five Memphis police officers are being charged with murder in this case. I read your Fordham Law Review article and it even seems to question whether prosecuting criminally violent cops is even a good idea. You note that after the police murder of George Floyd, protestors called both to criminally prosecute Officer Derek Chauvin and to defund the police.

Then you write, there is an inherent tension between abolishing the criminal legal system as it currently operates and demanding that that legal system deliver justice to Black victims of excessive police force. Are you arguing that the conviction of Chauvin or that prosecuting these Memphis police defendants can actually be counterproductive in the campaign for racial justice?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: In the long term, this idea of-- and it is a tension, right? On the one hand, we have a criminal adjudication system that disproportionately punishes and incarcerates Black people and poor people. Then yet as aggrieved people, we want to point to the same criminal adjudication system to somehow more justly, perhaps, seek out, prosecute, incarcerate police officers when they engage in misconduct.

This idea of relying on a system that we can't predictably rely on to act without discrimination, that's inherent tension. In talking to people who have experienced harm, this idea that incarcerating someone, it doesn't necessarily alleviate all of their desires, perhaps the way that they experience harm. This idea of incarcerating a person doesn't necessarily meet the loss.

It doesn't fulfill or redress the loss or the experience of harm, and to think about more dynamics solutions to provide some sort of redress. Some of this comes from my practice when I was in Tennessee as an assistant federal public defender defending people who had been convicted and sentenced to death, working on the appeals process, and engaging with family members of people who had lost a loved one to really aggravated murder.

This idea of the life incarceration, potential execution of the person that engaged in that harm didn't necessarily provide a sense of redress. This is not all in uniform. Many times, people who've experienced harm want to be able to hear some sort of acknowledgment and apology. Our criminal adjudication system, which is set up in this very adversarial posture, doesn't allow for that acknowledgment and verbal redress.

Brian Lehrer: You're talking about the concept of restorative justice, right? Does it apply? Should it apply to police officers? Because so much of what we hear from advocates for racial justice is the police have to be held accountable with things like murder convictions in order to stop excessive police force. At least that's one tool.

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: That's one tool after the harm has happened. Looking at a more long-term solution, the idea of preventing that initial harm from happening. I would much rather live in a society where I don't have to argue about qualified immunity. I'd rather live in a society where there's no some sort of initial harm because of contact between police officers and the public.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, Black listeners especially, how much abolition versus how much reform would you like to see of the police or any questions for our guest, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, Brooklyn Law School professor, as we try to envision the most far-reaching change that would replace current policing models of public safety and crime prevention with new ones to whatever degree.

How far can we go? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. I guess we should acknowledge, Professor, that part of the debate now is whether police reforms like body cams and better training can stop excessive use of force or if the whole category we call reform is too timid to really make the public, especially the Black public, safer from police violence. How do you view the whole attempt at reform or even the word in the context of these issues?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: Again, Tyre Nichols' brutal murder shows that these interventions, body-worn cams did not stop the police officers from brutally murdering him. Those police officers knew they were on film. They had dash cams. They have body cams. There's the aerial cam, which captured both the audio and, obviously, visually what was happening. That didn't, in any way, prevent what occurred.

The benefit of the body-worn cams and all the footage is that we can now see what happened. It completely refutes the initial written report from those law enforcement officials. This idea somehow that body-worn cams are a reform that can reduce violence. No, they can perhaps, again, on the back end, address this idea of accountability, but they don't necessarily prevent that violence from happening.

Brian Lehrer: Why do you think that is? Because, theoretically, they would prevent it. Obviously, did not in this case. These police officers, one or more of them, were rolling their body cams as they were committing this brutal beating. They must have felt some sense of impunity or somehow diluted themselves into thinking they were doing nothing wrong. I don't know. If they knew the body cams were rolling, do you have a theory as to why they behaved in this way anyway?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: Well, I think if Tyre Nichols had survived his injuries, he would've been arrested. I highly doubt that charges would've stuck if the District Attorney's Office tried to prosecute him and there would be no review of the footage. We wouldn't see the footage. We wouldn't know that it completely refuted the police officer's conduct. I think that's generally what happens is the footage is captured as a written report. In the written report, there was this idea that there was a confrontation. "We were giving him demands. He didn't comply." Of course, the footage refutes that, but we are able to look at the footage and see that it doesn't match what happened only because Mr. Nichols died.

Brian Lehrer: I think that's such an important point in this case and such a tragic point. If he hadn't died, this probably would've gone down as one of God knows how many other cases in the history of police misconduct, where there's an official report that covers up what actually took place. There was misleading information, factually incorrect information released by the department initially. It's now being reported. If he hadn't died, then there wouldn't be the attention that makes people go back and say, "Wait, what really happened here?" and make sure they look at the video footage and things like that, right?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: Exactly. Mayor Strickland in Memphis, Chief CJ Davis, they both celebrated this unit and celebrated the fact that it had over 566 arrests. Notice, they didn't cite convictions because, for whatever reason, the District Attorney's Office didn't move forward to prosecute these cases. Then they confiscated a certain amount of guns, of drugs, and of cars. Just months after it was formed in late 2021, this was a unit that was touted in the media, elected officials within the police department. My assumption is that this SCORPION unit would've been operating just as it had if Mr. Nichols had survived.

Brian Lehrer: How dismissive or supportive are you of the Democrats' main proposal for reform in Congress? That's much in the news again after this. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. You probably know its main provisions include creation of a national registry of police misconduct cases to shed light on where misconduct is happening and make it harder for cops dismissed in one place to get hired in another because there would be a record of what they did.

Also, federally-enforced training standards for local police departments because they vary so widely in quality and limiting qualified immunity so police officers could be sued for damages as individuals for their actions and misconduct cases. That's the one that gets the most attention, but how about the whole package? How much do you think the George Floyd Act would matter or not?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: It is a very small tentative step in the right direction. Getting into the weeds of the act, it's directed mostly at federal law enforcement. There are over 18,000 different departments throughout the nation. Many of them are under municipal county or state control. There is some funding provisions that say, "We'll withhold federal funding to local agencies if they don't comply in X, Y, and Z way," but the Justice in Policing Act is quite tentative. Again, with the direction and attention at qualified immunity, that's part of it.

Qualified immunity only comes up after harm has occurred and then there's a legal action and then it prevents or limits the police department, the police officer from then raising this affirmative defense of qualified immunity. It's a back-end measure. It would be some small tentative step forward. Again, I think, as a country, if we really want to dynamically address harm between police officers and the public, we need to decrease the type of contact that police officers have with the public and decrease our reliance on police officers.

That's how you start to address these issues. Once we're able to shrink the size and the contact, the purpose, the role of police in society, we can start to focus our energy and efforts and funding on things that actually address and reduce crime, which is people need places to live. They need living-wage jobs. They need access to mental health treatment. We know. Research shows us. That is what addresses crime. Robust activities for young people so that they're not out of school and unsupervised. This gets at crime, not more police officers.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a call from Michael on Staten Island, who says he is an active NYPD officer for 16 years and wants to weigh in or ask you a question. Michael, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling.

Michael: Hi, thanks for having me, Brian. I just wanted to let people know that there are good cops out there, but the system and the subculture of policing varies these good cops. Unless America adopts a policy like they do in Europe where if you're interested in becoming an officer, you go to a four-year university specifically for criminal justice, not that you need just 60 credits and whatever.

If you shift the model of policing, something of a European model, and yet shrink the amount of responsibilities that the police have, we will get better quickly, but there's going to be more deaths and more protests. The good cops who see this and have an education and have been doing it for a decade and a half want to scream at the top of their lungs because it's the same thing over and over. It's not Black officers versus Black people. It's blue versus Black. It's a terrible system, but it could be better. That's what's so frustrating about it. I just wanted to say thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Professor, any comment on Michael's comment?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: I agree with much of what Michael said. I appreciate his insight and his service to the city. The idea though that just more education would help. I don't know if all, but most of those five officers had four-year college degrees in the Memphis Police Department. Michael did mention this idea of police culture and that the color of blue policing actually supersedes Trump's, even the race of the individual officers. Law enforcement in this country has developed an identifiable culture of white supremacy. The first municipal police force at least was formed in Boston in the 1830s. The earliest police forces were modeled somewhat after slave patrols.

Earliest police forces, some of them were privatized, actually broke up organized workers in steel mills. Policing has a history of monitoring, subordinating and controlling, and exacting violence on Black people, and then on people that were trying to organize themselves for better working conditions. This is a legacy that has sustained and maintained over time. This idea of the race of the police officers, I think, as an additional nuance to layer to what happened in Memphis. This idea that police officers are exacting violence and control of the people they encounter is something that we saw play out regardless of the race of the individual officer.

Brian Lehrer: Desmond in Crown Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Desmond.

Desmond: Good morning and thank you for taking my call. Your guest, I did not get her name. She has cited so many things that are correct.

Brian Lehrer: Hang on. Let me give you her name and for other people who may have tuned in since the last time I gave it. She is Alexis Hoag-Fordjour. Fordjour, forgive me, it's spelled like Ford, the car. Jour, the French word for "day," but pronounced "forger," if I've got you correctly.

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: You do.

Brian Lehrer: She's a professor of law and an advocate for police abolition at Brooklyn Law School. Desmond, go ahead. Sorry.

Desmond: Thank you. Professor Fordjour, you are spot-on with the things that you have elucidated. I work in my community with my community board and with my local police force. At a community level, you can find things that are correct, but qualified immunity as you have stated is a back-end action. That would be needed. The primary thing that you cited was the fact that culture and economic opportunities need to be provided.

If economic opportunities and education are provided and this country acts as it's supposed to, as it's listed as, then a lot of these problems would disappear. As you so brilliantly stated, the initial police officers in Boston were there to strike down labor fights, which were typically when white people felt threatened to compete with people of color or anyone else because they felt that they were taking their jobs.

When this country begins to stop doing those things and understanding that if they're going to claim a meritocracy, they have to allow it to happen, then those things will cease. Qualified immunity on the back end right now is a stick sitting there, in my opinion, to stop a lot of actions. If police unions and policing felt that they were going to have to face that, they might not be as cavalier as they are.

If you look at the actions that were taken in Memphis, there was immediate retribution for bad acting. In New York City, when the gentleman in Staten Island was murdered for allegedly selling cigarettes, the officer was allowed to stay on the force long enough to continue to get his pension or to go onto another municipal job. Once again, it comes down to the ability to maintain economic viability at the cost of other people.

In my experience, I used to go to meetings at the Brooklyn DA's office. I remember bringing up the phrase that we needed to examine terrorism. Everybody stopped cold. The next two months after that, the DA lashed into me every single time I went to say something because I guess people told him that you can't allow this Black man to speak about something like that. It's damaging to everything that we're doing.

That is the systemic violence that is perpetrated through CRT, Caucasian Racial Trauma. Until they get over the fact that they basically robbed the Indigenous people, robbed every other group of color that came to this country, then they're not going to flex. They're not going to change. It's in their DNA. Ibram X. Kendi, who was a guest of our host, already brought that out, but CRT stops that. It's attempting to stop the education of American people to their true history.

Brian Lehrer: Desmond, thank you very much for your call. I don't like saying that something's in any group's DNA, so I'm just going to push back a little bit on that and note it. What Desmond brings up, Professor, and you can say anything you want about it, I think, is a good example of how the conversation can be really narrow after an atrocity like Memphis police body cams, criminal prosecution of the individuals, all the way through to the basic notions on which this country was founded and a huge reckoning with our history. It can be overwhelming.

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: Indeed. Desmond left us a lot to unpack. I do really appreciate the fact that he shows up to, it sounds like, both District Attorney's public forums and the police department public forums there. That's something we can all do. I think to return to Memphis, part of the reason that we had the swift action or we witnessed the swift action of the District Attorney's Office bringing charges against the five law enforcement officials is because Steve Mulroy is a brand-new elected district attorney who campaigned on a platform of criminal justice reform.

He unseated an incumbent, Amy Weirich, who was known to withhold exculpatory evidence in cases, have been reprimanded by the Tennessee Supreme Court and other entities in the state. What we witnessed was years of activism and engagement and organizing among Memphians to unseat this district attorney, who was not truly representing the people in Memphis. They elected Steve Mulroy.

He'd come from, I believe, the law school, University of Memphis Law. Shortly thereafter, he was just put in office after this November election. He delivers charges and indictments. We see now from the police chief in Memphis, she's the first Black female police chief. CJ Davis fires the officers within days. Desmond brought up the fact that here in New York City following Eric Garner's death, five years is what it took the NYPD to fire Pantaleo.

We all remember the demands of the public to fire this individual. I think what we all witnessed after all of these well-publicized lethal use of force from law enforcement is that, particularly after George Floyd's murder, local elected officials and police departments realize they have to act quickly. The public is demanding swift action. I've had a lot of conversations with people about, "Why did things remain peaceful in Memphis following Nichols' tragic murder?"

A big part of that is the responsiveness from the elected officials, the responsiveness from leadership. I also wonder, and I'm curious, Brian, your thoughts and maybe some of our callers, what role the race of the police officer had to do with the swiftness of law enforcement. When I say "law enforcement" here, I mean the District Attorney's Office coming down with charges as quickly as they did.

Would we have seen the same rapid action had the race of the officers been white? I think the role of this presumption of criminality and dangerousness that society at large assigns to Black people, it obviously factored into Tyre Nichols' initial stop to pull him over for an alleged unsupported traffic violation. Then I think it also worked against the officers with the swiftness of the prosecutor's office filing charges. Second-degree murder is the top charge.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, it's a question that everybody's asking, that we've been talking about on the show the last few days as well. That can't be really answered because you can't take a case that didn't exist. That would be the exact same case and compare it. Obviously, there have been many other cases involving white police officers where they haven't been held accountable.

One could argue that since George Floyd or maybe even since Ferguson in 2014 and the reforms that have come after that, there's more holding police accountable generally. I think maybe the most important thought was expressed by Benjamin Crump, the attorney for the family of Tyre Nichols. We played the clip on the show yesterday where he hopes that this will set the new standard for white cops as well as Black cops. When they see what happened here, there'll be no excuse for treating white cops more leniently in the future. Of course, only time will tell, right?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: Yes, and there's so much nuance and there are so many factors at play. I wanted to add that to the conversation. I certainly hope this is a new blueprint. Again, I'd rather these legal interactions not happen to begin with than for us to praise or complain about the reaction to the lethal violence.

Brian Lehrer: Right, which is why you lean on abolition and, to the degree, we can have abolition at whatever pace. Now, politically, abolition seems to be a pretty losing cause so far. We see working-class Black neighborhoods in New York City as the strongest supporters of Eric Adams for mayor, for example, in the primary that featured one or two credible, more abolitionist candidates. I also saw a poll last year where Black New Yorkers were majority in favor of more police in the subways. How do you account for that?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: I'm a Black person. [chuckles] You may not be able to tell from my voice. We care about addressing violent crime. Violent crime is real, but not at the expense of our dignity and not at the expense of the loss of life to our loved ones or even violence against our loved ones. There has to be some other medium between the presence of police and addressing violent crime and then also preserving Black life.

For those of us that believe of all races that Black Lives matter, we also have to know and realize that the way that policing operates in this country cannot sustain. It is not sustainable. It must be overhauled. This idea that we can keep on doing what we're doing and have some different result is insanity. For the real preservation of life, we have to alter the way that we rely on police. I think about all the unaddressed violence, right? There's this slow violence of people who are unhoused.

There's this slow violence of people who live in polluted communities. There's the violence and crime that occurs that is not necessarily even defined as crime or prosecuted as such. I think about drug use and sexual assault that happens in Polish campuses that is not necessarily prosecuted or regulated, but yet in a different location that happens to be under-resourced or overpoliced. These are exactly the same acts that are criminalized and dealt with in the criminal adjudication system.

Brian Lehrer: Justin in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Alexis Hoag-Fordjour from Brooklyn Law School. Hi, Justin, you're on WNYC.

Justin: Good morning, Brian. Good morning to you guest. Brian, quickly, I am trying to be a pilot, an airline pilot. The regular road it takes for you to even get a pilot license to fly people because you're talking about people's lives, and here you have a country where you have people go to a little training and you give them a gun and tell them they can use their power based on their judgment if they feel threatened. I wonder, doesn't that give human being the opportunity to abuse the system, to get in the same system, to do the same sins that they're punishing for?

Brian Lehrer: You wanted to relate this to the Memphis police officers, right, Justin?

Justin: Yes, but I'm relating it to the Memphis police officer because there's a pattern. We can see when a police officer shoots somebody, you said, "Oh, he have to react quick." When you have police beating somebody to death, it takes time and it takes rage. I'm wondering if these people just go inside the police force and you have a system that allows it because of the demographic that is always dying. Because one thing I know, government fix what they really care about and what they're passionate about.

Brian Lehrer: Justin, thank you. Keep calling us. We always appreciate your calls. I know you got to go in a couple of minutes. I want to play one clip of Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez, considered a progressive prosecutor, and there you are at Brooklyn Law School. He was on the show on January 11th. He says he's doing things like drug rehab and mental health diversion for many people committing crimes who have those problems, but he also talked about the significant reduction in shootings and homicides in Brooklyn last year as partly the result of smart deployment of the police. Here's DA Gonzalez.

DA Eric Gonzalez: To see the shootings decline in neighborhoods like Brownsville is a positive sign, East Flatbush, Coney Island, because they had been ravaged by shootings the year earlier. I'm very optimistic that we will continue to do that. Again, it's been some really fine police work in trying to disrupt some of the gang activity. Many of the shootings and I would say nearly three-quarters of the shooting, the person who is the shooter is involved in gang activity.

Brian Lehrer: Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez here this month. My last question for you, Professor Hoag-Fordjour, as a Brooklyn Law School professor and someone who envisions the world moving toward abolition of the carceral state, is Brooklyn heading in the right direction under DA Gonzalez in a meaningful way?

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: Yes, I think that DA Gonzalez points to one factor without necessarily connecting the idea of more police actually causing this decrease in crime. Some of the trends that I have noticed are that people are in school more now coming out of the pandemic, so we have a lot less children, young people that are out and about unsupervised. People have greater access to their employment, again, coming out of the pandemic.

I would argue that activities for young people and greater job security were much bigger factors having to do with the decrease in crime. When I'm looking at the clearance rates of the NYPD, they hover on average just this last quarter, about 30%, and that's for violent crime. That means 70% of violent crime is not being addressed by police after it occurs. I don't know that I would necessarily agree with DA Gonzalez that more presence of police officers on the street is what can explain the decrease in crime in Brooklyn.

Brian Lehrer: Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, professor at the Brooklyn Law School, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate the conversation.

Professor Hoag-Fordjour: Thank you so much.

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