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16. The Broken Blue Line: The Troubles of Policing and Being Policed in America with Clarissa Sosin and Daryl Khan
260 Plays2 years ago
The 2020 killing of George Floyd was a huge step, a reckoning over the relationship between Black Americans and law enforcement. In all the debates about police reform, much less attention is paid to the competing incentives that shape police culture. In today’s episode, we are joined by journalists Daryl Khan and Clarissa Sosin, who spent four years investigating police corruption in Baton Rouge, to discuss the culture within police departments that help shape many of today’s challenges.
Learn more by visiting our website and follow along with us on Instagram.
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Transcript
Supporting Civil Rights and Police Reform
00:00:00
Speaker
I guess it depends on what activists you're talking about. Some of our sources in Baton Rouge are not against the police chief and are, in fact, campaigning to support him because they recognize, in some ways, it's an extension of one of all the stories in the country, Jason. It's a new take on civil rights. There was a period where people had to fight
00:00:28
Speaker
for rights that should have been guaranteed. And some of those rights like voting or getting a square education were met. And so now the next step is to ensure that those institutions that serve all of us, black and white, northern and southern,
00:00:51
Speaker
that those institutions are doing a straight job. They're doing a fair job. And that is what some of the activists in Baton Rouge are looking at. They're like, okay, we have a place at the table. We have power. We want that power to be justly wielded, right? Like in the most basic sense. And so it's a restoration of the credibility of institutions that in the past
00:01:19
Speaker
were not honorable and were not living up to sort of the promises made and all those marketing materials that I was talking about earlier, America's great marketing materials.
Introducing the Podcast and Investigation
00:01:32
Speaker
And to suddenly at the moment when you have a chance to restore credibility to those agencies and those institutions and those words,
00:01:53
Speaker
Carl is a great example. Carl Dunn, he's now police chief over in Baker, which is a town that's next to Baton Rouge. He was a BIPD officer, ultimately an administrator. He was the head of patrol. He was there for, I think, what, 30 years.
00:02:13
Speaker
worked his way up through the ranks. And he definitely, he tried to do it right. And at one point he had a unit that was, they were assigned to the like highest crime zip codes. And what he wanted them to do was he wanted them to go out and their goal was contacts, contacts with people, but no tickets, no nothing, no arrests, but he wanted a lot of contact.
00:02:39
Speaker
And that unit ultimately, I mean, it got disbanded. It didn't have any support from the department. And then he ended up leaving. So he tried. And he's still trying over in Baker.
00:03:06
Speaker
From Goose Creek Consulting,
Exploring Baton Rouge's Police Issues
00:03:08
Speaker
this is the Silver Linings Handbook. I'm Jason Blair. That's Daryl Kahn, a practicing journalist and distinguished lecturer at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, and a specialist in investigative reporting, urban reporting, race in America, and law enforcement.
00:03:28
Speaker
That's also Clarissa Sozin, a writer who has covered local politics, the Liberian healthcare system after the Ebola epidemic, and law enforcement. Together, Daryl and Clarissa have recently turned their attention to the people who police the police. In a series of articles, Daryl and Clarissa explored police corruption, misconduct, and the internal affairs department of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana Police Department.
00:03:55
Speaker
Located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, Baton Rouge is the fourth largest city in the deep south of the United States and the second largest city in Louisiana after New Orleans. Baton Rouge owes its historical importance to its location on a bluff upriver from the Mississippi River Delta, which allowed people to build a business corridor that was safe from flooding and to create a levy system that protected low-lying agricultural areas.
00:04:22
Speaker
It is a culturally rich city. It's a city of immigrants from numerous European nations and African people brought to North America as slaves or indentured servants.
00:04:34
Speaker
It was ruled by the French, the British, the Spanish, the Republic of West Florida, the Confederate States of America, and twice by the United States. Baton Rouge also helped elect Davante Lewis, the first openly LGBT politician in the state government. You can find many different religions in Baton Rouge, from Catholicism to Haitian Voodoo.
00:04:58
Speaker
Its main industries are petrochemicals, medical research, motion picture, and technology. It's also the home to Louisiana State University. Baton Rouge also has a darker side. Its police department was founded in 1865, just after the end of the Civil War. It has a history of police brutality against Blacks and strained relations with the Black community.
00:05:21
Speaker
Most recently, in 2016, two BRPD officers shot and killed Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man. They killed him while trying to detain him. The killing led to protests and demonstrations in Baton Rouge that led to hundreds of arrests, lawsuits against the department for violating the First Amendment rights of protesters.
00:05:44
Speaker
Less than two weeks after the killing of Alton Sterling, three officers in the department were shot and killed in an ambush by Gavin Eugene Long, who traveled 700 miles from Kansas City to target the officers. Darryl and Clarissa conducted a close examination of internal affairs reports, dash cam videos, and other evidence.
00:06:07
Speaker
They interviewed complainants, their families, and lawyers. They uncovered questionable injuries, shootings, and other revelations. Their work has uncovered significant discrepancies between officer and citizen accounts of police abuse, discrepancies that raise serious questions about the behavior of officers involved in the integrity of the Internal Affairs Bureau of the Police Department.
00:06:32
Speaker
In some cases, officers rose through the ranks of the department and its union to position to power after being cleared. And despite a policy requiring complainants to be notified of the outcomes of investigations, no one interviewed for the story ever received an update.
00:06:49
Speaker
Today, we're going to step back and discuss what it's like to be a police officer, the expectations of the communities being police, the purpose of policing, the organizational culture of police departments, and their political overseers, all of which may lead to and contribute to the challenges that Daryl and Clarissa and
00:07:23
Speaker
I just wanted to thank you guys for joining us. Well, you're welcome. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. Of course. I wanted to ask you guys just sort of starting out a little bit about your backgrounds, how you got interested in journalism, how you got interested in policing.
00:07:38
Speaker
So I actually started off with an international focus. I guess my first real journalism job was at a really hyper-local paper outside of Boston, taking photos of senior citizen events and ice cream days at the library. But right after that, I was doing photojournalism in South Africa.
Journalists' Backgrounds and Motivations
00:07:57
Speaker
So very internationally focused. But when I was in grad school, I really wanted something to sink my teeth into in New York City. And criminal justice and policing
00:08:09
Speaker
I just kind of I covered an event actually because of Darryl. I covered an event, a screening about Rikers. And then it was just I just went down that rabbit hole. And was that when you were a student in Darryl's journalism class? Yes. Yeah. OK. And so so for you, Clarissa, really sort of the interest in policing and crime really came from deciding to sort of focus on the biggest topic that was in front of you at the time in the New York City. That was a huge talk.
00:08:39
Speaker
How about you, Darren? I mean, I've been interested in journalism since I was a kid, I guess. I was on the high school paper. Before that, I would grab the copies of the Washington Post I could find and read William Raspberry columns and George Will columns.
00:08:57
Speaker
Watch the old news shows funded by Archer Daniel, Dr. Midland Daniel. Archer Daniel's Midland. Archer Daniel's Midland, yeah. I've always liked figuring out how things ended up the way they did and why things work the way they do and have always been a little bit sensitive about freedom, how we keep it, how we got it, how it gets violated.
00:09:27
Speaker
And as a profession, journalism is sort of the canary in the coal mine, I guess. And I think in the interest of full disclosure, you and I actually worked together at the student newspaper at the University of Maryland, the Diamondback. I think we both worked for each other at some different point.
00:09:47
Speaker
And also we both worked at the New York Times together. And I think we shared probably, you may not articulate it the same way I would, but we both shared an interest in, I think, helping people, right? For you very much protecting democracy and for me, I think, similar things. I don't know. Protecting democracy just sounds like a way to sell newspapers. It's
00:10:13
Speaker
Finding out what's going on. It's lowercase t truth and that's sort of the raw material that people work with when they want to go do democracy or not do democracy or whatever they choose to do. I don't know.
00:10:33
Speaker
And police reporting, policing is sort of where the rubber hits the road when you talk about self-governance, right? It's like all the major amendments, the ones that we get most worked up about. First, fourth, 14th, eighth, are we securing people's liberty? Are we killing them in cruel and unusual ways? Are we depriving them of their liberty in a way that's fair?
00:11:03
Speaker
Some people look at the police reporting as a round-up of local crimes, but if you just turn the steering wheel a little bit, it becomes the fault line of- It's a round-up of our liberties in the way that we- Yeah, there you go. That's a good way to put it. You really understand how difficult a lot of these things that we care about are,
00:11:33
Speaker
When you enter a state and you go to their little tourist board and they have all the materials for like, this is why our state's great. All that about our country. They all play out in really hard ways, in gritty ways. You as a reporter need to go show people
00:12:03
Speaker
that the public interest and liberty clash every night in some way in any city in America. And like, I don't know, reporters got to be the one that goes and goes like, yeah, here's what happened. Reporting out one story, like even one minor crime story, really,
00:12:20
Speaker
If you really report it all the way out, it really goes into so much about life. It's interesting you say the thing about tourism boards. I remember when we were in college, one of our colleagues, Heidi Sherman, she was, I don't know if she was reported at the Diamondback or whether she was just a journalism student, but she had to go out to
00:12:43
Speaker
the eastern shore of Maryland, like the tippy tip eastern shore of Maryland. It was such a long trip, it was a rural trip, so I decided to go out with her, or she asked me to go out with her to report the story. I can't even remember what the story was, but I do remember walking into a convenience store to get gas and get food.
00:13:05
Speaker
It was covered in Confederate flags and Confederate figurines. I do remember at that moment thinking to myself, if I went to Baltimore or one of the rest stops on 95, this is not what they would have as the Maryland Tourism Bureau. Well, don't forget that Maryland flag is half Union, half Confederate, so is the state.
Challenges in Investigating Police Accountability
00:13:32
Speaker
I have a flag I never want to change so I wanted to start off by asking you guys just a little bit about the story of the behind the publication of your articles and.
00:13:49
Speaker
You know how did you get turned on to the case and what was happening in Baton Rouge and. I read somewhere that you guys have been working on the story for about five years which actually surprised me and I didn't know about it and I didn't know was that long or didn't realize was long so what's the story of the story. Well yeah we have been working on it for five years.
00:14:08
Speaker
It's probably six, right, Clarissa? No, we just passed the five-year mark in March, end of March. I posted on Instagram a photo of New Orleans when we were flying in, and it was five years ago, I think.
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah, we had a lot of delays, the pandemic mainly. They were supposed to go down for a trip in April 2020, and obviously that got blown up. And then a lot of our public records requests got delayed because they were
00:14:39
Speaker
I mean, they were ravaged by Delta, so it's been a long process, but it's been good that it was delayed, I think. I don't know, Darrell, if you'd agree. Yeah, yeah. Was it Alton Sterling or was it something else that caught your attention to get you to even go down there? Yeah, I mean, that's why I would say it's been longer than five years. I had assigned two interns of mine when I was working in a different publication, both real, real pros.
00:15:09
Speaker
who went to cover the protests in the wake of the Alton Sterling shooting, the fatal Alton Sterling shooting in July of 2016. And that led to some protests, some peaceful protests there in Baton Rouge that the crackdown on those protesters was sort of something I'd never ever seen before.
00:15:36
Speaker
As you know, Jason, I think I've covered the biggest protests in American history. Once in New York and in DC. I've covered just too many to count. I don't know if you remember back when George Bush was running for his second term.
00:16:01
Speaker
The RNC was at the Madison Square Garden, and for basically six months, I was on the protest beat. There were big protests, there were little protests, there were leading up to it. And I had never seen anything like what my reporters were sending back to me. And at the RNC, was it similar in the sense that at the RNC, there were enormous protests, but the police response to it was kind of beyond
00:16:31
Speaker
the tail, as I recall. What, an RNC? Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, the peaceful protests were by and large, what happened in New York, I don't want to get off track, but what happened in New York was a bunch of people who didn't deserve to be arrested, did get arrested. Right.
00:16:54
Speaker
But it was in, and I'm not diminishing, I've been arrested reporting and I've been arrested. So I'm not diminishing it, but it was all in a very, for the most part, banal way. If you were in an area, they sort of wrapped, they sort of circled you, arrested you.
00:17:14
Speaker
You know the technocratic mayor we had didn't give a lot of didn't put a lot of stock into Madisonian values. So you just kept people sort of in Lock up even I think in the sanitation Basement that'll be mayor Bloomberg but you know when the violent when there was violence in The only time I saw the police respond violently is when the protests got violent destruction attacking police officers, etc
00:17:44
Speaker
This was not the case in Baton Rouge. In Baton Rouge, we had a protest that was incredibly peaceful that, in fact, more peaceful than most even minor protests in New York. You often will see a trash can getting grabbed and thrown and shit getting kicked over. Baton Rouge was as peaceful a protest as I've seen, reminded me of footage from the 60s when there was people organizing strategically.
00:18:13
Speaker
to be peaceful, right? To, to demonstrate. Soma. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And any, the big one's small, everything in between, right? You think about the sit-ins where people would sort of, had sort of angelic calm in the face of, you know, people screaming and being violent. And you, you just had the police respond in an overwhelming, overwhelming force using weapons
00:18:40
Speaker
designed for war in foreign countries. Gas masks, long guns, dragging people, beating them despite them following the commands that they were giving them. And it was the combination, it was a combination of the strong shooting and that response, right? Like the police kind of tipped you off to something's wrong in this department.
00:19:07
Speaker
Well, what's going
The Alton Sterling Case and Its Impact
00:19:08
Speaker
on, right? It's just a journalistic question, like curiosity. What's going on here? How did we get here? And that reporting revealed, I think, a lot of people telling my reporters on the ground, like, this has been going on forever. This has been a simmering tension. No one's listening to us.
00:19:29
Speaker
And you know, that was it, I think. And that says, okay, well, then you just start asking like your basic five W's and take it from there. But Clarissa, I guess you could talk about why we were flying in that day. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so we, um,
00:19:45
Speaker
had we just finished covering the march for our lives down to Washington DC. And we were editing that video together when we found out that the state attorney general was going to announce whether or not he'd be charging the officers who killed Alton Sterling. And that was like the last line, like the city wasn't going to charge them, the feds weren't charging them, like everybody was declining to like take any action.
00:20:06
Speaker
And so this was the last chance of them facing charges. And we just decided to get on a plane and go and see what would happen. See how the city would react. Just kind of see what was going to happen on the ground when that announcement came out. So you had gone down to D.C. from New York. You had gone down to D.C. to cover the protests. March for Our Lives, that was the student gun control one, right? Yes.
00:20:31
Speaker
And then went back to New York and then immediately flew down to New Orleans? Yes. It was a wild day or a wild week, essentially. We pulled our ticket to New Orleans like five hours before the flight took off. It was like 2 a.m. and we had a like 7 a.m. flight. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was a little nutty. A little nutty.
00:20:57
Speaker
When you got down there and, you know, you read the report, I guess, from the read what the state attorney general had to say and you got down there, what did you find? I mean, it was really quiet. The first thing we did was head to the Triple S Mart where Sterling was killed because we thought some people would gather there. And there were there were like a handful of activists, protesters, but that was it. It was just it was quiet. The city was like deadly quiet. Right, Darrell? I mean,
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I remember a handful of supportive honks from passing cars. One striking image to me, Jason, was there was a guy. So the Alton Sterling
00:21:42
Speaker
encounter began with an anonymous 911 call of a man with the gun, and it was Alton Sterling who was behind a ramshackle table selling CDs. Just out on the street? No, in front of the triple S mark, which for New Yorkers is sort of- Like a bodega. It's like, hey, it's a bodega with the parking lot. We call that a convenience store down there.
00:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, right. I forget. 7-11. You forget. It's like half 7-11, half bodega. In that city, there's a lot of activity that might happen in those parking lots. Sterling was selling CDs the day he was killed.
00:22:30
Speaker
And when we went on the day the State Attorney General made his announcement, there was another guy with another sort of fold-out ramshackle table selling CDs just like Alton Sterling. Oh, wow.
00:22:45
Speaker
And there are only a handful of protesters. Where did you guys go from, you know, in your reporting? At this point, you have the state attorney general's report, you have the Alton Sterling shooting. And then wasn't there right after the Alton Sterling shooting, there was a shooting of three police officers, right? Two?
00:23:05
Speaker
No. More. More. Okay. Four ultimately died, right? Four died, six were shot. One died recently. Yeah. Oh, wow. Like injuries. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so that's sort of like the raw material that you're starting with.
Investigating Calvin Tony's Shooting
00:23:25
Speaker
Where do you go from there? Well, so that day at Triple S Mart, we actually met this woman named Roslyn.
00:23:30
Speaker
who's just a, I mean, she's an integral part of North Baton Rouge. And she introduced us to the first case other than Alton Sterling that we started looking at. This young man, Calvin Tony, who had been shot in his apartment complex by the BRPD. And kind of what was up in the air was whether or not he was handcuffed when it happened.
00:23:56
Speaker
Later that day, Roslyn actually took us, we went and met Tony's mother. We interviewed her and Tony's sister and we walked around the complex. That's really what got us going down this path. I remember back in 2020, because I hadn't heard of the Calvin-Tony story, but it was mentioned in an article. It was in the Virginian pilot, which is the Virginia Beach.
00:24:25
Speaker
newspaper and it had been a similar kind of scenario where a black man had been shot.
00:24:33
Speaker
At some point, it was after he was being escorted out of the mall and in handcuffs. And one of the really interesting things about that is that the Virginia Beach Police Department apologized. You know, the officers essentially said, at that moment, we didn't realize that he was in handcuffs or whatever, whatever the backstory was. How did the Baton Rouge Police Department respond to that story? Or incident, I guess. Well, the officer got a medal of valor.
00:25:02
Speaker
Oh, wow. That's the opposite of what you would think would have happened. Clarissa, do you want to tell them about the close call we had there at the Palm? That's the name of the complex, right? The Palm? Yeah, something like that. The Palm, the Palm's apartments, something like that. Yeah, right. Well, there had been one woman who the shooting happened right outside her apartment door. And when we went the day with Tony's mother, nobody was in the apartment.
00:25:29
Speaker
but we went back like the next day or a couple of days later, really soon after. And we, we went and we, she was there. We talked with her, we interviewed her and on the way we actually sent a request to the Baton Rouge, to the BRPD asking them for more info on the shooting. And she's now like, so I'm trying to remember the complete order of events here, whether or not the building manager talked to us first,
00:25:56
Speaker
We were taking photos outside of the apartment after the interview. And the building manager came and told us we had to leave. And then we went with him to his office. Right, Daryl? I'm trying to remember the exact order of events. Yeah, and then we sent the, I'm blanking on the guy's name, the guy at the press office at BRPD. What is it? Coppola. Coppola, right.
00:26:24
Speaker
I think I may have sent what was probably, in retrospect, a snarky comment. I said, we're here now. I said something like, it's OK. And that's what the address was. Yes. And I said, we found it on our own. We're actually here now, exclamation point. And yeah, we got into the car. And there had a bit of, you know how this is, Jason, when you're reporting and someone sort of is lurking in your
00:26:55
Speaker
periphery Mm-hmm. So there was a guy that had sort of been lurking in our periphery for a while and he started to smoke and I got out of the car and Walked over to him and interviewed him and he said he knew Calvin and like told me a little bit about Him and told him me about sort of you know that night because apparently that night was a tinderbox It was a really
00:27:22
Speaker
It wasn't too long after Alton Sterling and it came close to there being civil unrest. I got the guy's number, I got back into the car, and almost as I sat into the car, Clarissa was in the passenger seat because she had all her gear. As I get into the car, Clarissa, I don't know how many cars did you say?
00:27:47
Speaker
At least six. At least six patrol cars just pulled in. And they pulled in and they parked kind of haphazardly around us. Lights and sirens flashing? No lights and sirens, but they just pulled in. They screeched in. Everybody got out and they just walked straight for the spot where Calvin Tony had been shot. Oh, wow. And we just were sitting in the car and slowly backed out. And it went away.
00:28:15
Speaker
They were looking for you all. Yeah. That's what we assumed. Another member of the department told us later that they were there to intimidate us. We asked exactly how far that would have gone and he said, they're probably just going to scare you a little bit.
00:28:37
Speaker
What does that mean? I don't know. I have no idea how easily I scare. Wow. What did you guys find out about Calvin and Tony and his shooting? Well, the real thing was there were security cameras, there was body cameras, and so the real thing was like, will you guys release this? Let's clear the air. Was he handcuffed or not?
00:29:08
Speaker
That was the angle of our story. Yeah, you would think if they had footage or body cams, that would be a simple enough question to answer through the evidence. I think this is an important moment, I guess, Jason, to note.
Internal Conflicts and Accountability in Baton Rouge PD
00:29:24
Speaker
The reason you go out and report on stuff isn't because you have sort of an answer in mind and then you sort of confirm what you want your answer to be five years later, six years later, you know what I mean?
00:29:38
Speaker
The story, we had to report it out. And as we reported that out, we learned more. And sort of our assumptions or what we thought maybe was going on changed.
00:29:51
Speaker
pretty deeply, but that's the game. That's what we do. We're dealing with uncertainty. You deal with it the best you can, asking questions, trying to get answers. I think a lot of times when you go into a story, if you find out that the bad thing that everybody thinks happened, that's a story. But certainly, if you find out that the bad thing didn't happen, that's also a story. It's not about proving something. That's advocacy.
00:30:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's about finding out what the hell happened. And we started to realize that there was, right, Clarissa? I mean, I don't know how you'd characterize it, but this wasn't a story. I think the boilerplate is Southern town, segregated town. Black residents are sort of at odds with the police department, right?
00:30:47
Speaker
And some of that was true, but only partially true. Because we started to realize that the police department wasn't necessarily... You cover these stories and you're like, oh, the NYPD says. We know covering the NYPD. It's monstrous, Leviathan. The police department's not a monolith.
00:31:12
Speaker
The police department was on monolith and even in a smaller department like the BRPD. Not only was it not a monolith, but the more reporting we did, the more we realized that it was a department almost at war with itself. I think, by the way, you're actually hitting on a really good point here with your description of the way that
00:31:35
Speaker
you're reporting this story. Do you remember the concept when we were both at the times of like the toe-touch story, you fly in for one day, you have a bunch of stringers, get it? And the headline for that story sounds like it would have been about Baton Rouge Police Department's horrible relationship with the black community. But there's a real difference with investigative reporting. We're
00:32:00
Speaker
you're able to get under the surface and see a much deeper story than that one day story that I think a lot of journalism can be focused on. One day story was true, but the part that it would have missed was a new police chief had come into office like two months before our first trip down there together. That was really where everything started to change.
00:32:23
Speaker
that idea of the department truly the point about it not being a monolith and being at war with each other. Could you guys tell me a little bit about that? You said it wasn't a monolith. By that, do you mean that there were folks that were problematic in some ways within the departments? There were people who were fighting against it, the new police chief.
00:32:46
Speaker
didn't necessarily fit the mold of much of the department, whatever. So the new police chief was from the state police. So he had never been in the BRPD before. And he took over, I think it was January 2018. So like two months before we went down. And he, I mean, what he basically started to do was, I mean, he started off with just trying to implement what was on the books already.
00:33:12
Speaker
and over time he did also change some policies. I mean, one of the main policies he changed during our reporting was, I know he changed a bunch of them, but one just to talk about Calvin Tony, right? Like the video for Calvin Tony, Calvin Tony hadn't been released and it had been like months, right? His shooting didn't happen recently when we were there. It had happened months before. Chief Paul now has a critical incident policy.
00:33:38
Speaker
where he releases them, he releases the videos within, I don't know what the timeframe is, but it's a very quick turnaround. But his enforcing of things on the books has, I mean, it's annoyed part of the department, right, Daryl? Yeah, both, you know, current and former. And when we started looking into the internal affairs history, right,
00:34:04
Speaker
You try to figure out a structural, system-wide way to answer the questions of the protesters. You know what I mean? They're saying, we're not getting any accountability. There's no transparency.
00:34:20
Speaker
What does that process look like? Why aren't they getting accountability and transparency? That was the idea of exploring, going deep and exploring, why does the community, wherever this leads me, feel like there's this gap? Yeah. How do you show that instead of just tell it? We went down the internal affairs rabbit hole. That was 10 years worth of files.
00:34:48
Speaker
Could you talk a little bit about what the purpose of internal affairs is and police departments and the battlers department? It's the part of the department that investigates the department. So a citizen files a complaint against you, a fellow officer files a complaint against you, you do something that triggers an automatic investigation, such as like fire your weapon in some departments that would trigger an investigation automatically. They are the officers that investigate the officers.
00:35:18
Speaker
And so a natural place for you to look when you're trying to answer this question. Yeah, especially like, you know, with use of force. Well, the reason I brought it up, Jason, is because, you know, pulling on that thread years ago led us to what is basically one of the animating divisions and political fights playing out in the entire city. Right. Like, you know,
00:35:48
Speaker
this sort of obscure division within a medium-sized police department has really become as galvanizing sort of, you know, as abortion nationally. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, like post George Floyd and then also the shooting in Georgia. I mean, similar themes in each of the, I don't know whether to say it, the departments, but certainly the communities.
00:36:15
Speaker
Well, but no, I mean specifically internal affairs. You're making it even broader than it needs to be. Internal affairs like the people who were there before are some of the people leading the counter revolution against the new police chief Murphy Paul and his regime. They're putting up billboards saying like, this is not a safe city.
00:36:41
Speaker
because of the guy, the guy who used to run it. Right. So there's some former police chiefs who feel like that the, uh, for lack of a better word reforms, uh, sort of, you know, discipline that the chief is meeting out as a black guy who grew up in the South. He'll appreciate this. You know, they're, they're saying that Murphy Paul is targeting white officers with discipline disproportionately. And, um,
00:37:10
Speaker
that he's sort of running sort of a get even kind of campaign, right? So the numbers that we've looked at in no way that doesn't play out, it all seems to be statistically more or less even, the discipline meted out to black and white officers. But the story that's being, the way the fight is being seen and the way it's playing out there,
00:37:40
Speaker
is that you have former white police chiefs. You have, in particular, one guy who, you know, he feels like the police chief targeted him because he was trying to hold him to account who used to be in internal affairs and is now gone.
00:37:58
Speaker
but it's still very public. I've spoken to him. He's very public in criticizing Murphy Paul. Was Chief Paul the first black police chief or? No. Okay. No. He's not the first, for lack of, again, I'm sorry, for lack of a better word, he's not the first reformer either. Okay. Yeah, there was one chief, Dwayne White. I forget exactly his years. I want to say they were in the early 2000s, maybe?
00:38:28
Speaker
A little bit later than that. A little bit later than that? Yeah. He tried to also kind of reform and looked into internal affairs and he got run out of the department. They like unearthed text messages between him and his mistress and like it just- When she says they, she means the police department. The police department did. Yeah. They took the woman's phone and they published the
00:38:58
Speaker
texts. As a part of an official investigation or? The official, semi-official, formal, informal, all of the above.
Resistance to Reforms within Baton Rouge PD
00:39:08
Speaker
It got rid of him. Yeah. A black mayor who many in the sort of civil rights kind of political
00:39:18
Speaker
community in Baton Rouge, say, was very much a supporter of the police union, which obviously was against White the same way he's against Murphy Paul, fired him. We have a police department.
00:39:36
Speaker
that has a history of running out chiefs, reformers, revolting against them. You have these incidents with black men or violence against black men that are a problem. Just curious from my perspective, did the issues that exist go beyond just black men and just more broadly into the community? Yeah, well,
00:40:03
Speaker
In our main story, we talk about this young man, Brett Perkel, and he's white. And actually, I think everybody in that story, all of the people who had an encounter with this one officer, they were all white. Tell me about the one officer in your main story. It focuses on him and his interactions with them over a long period of time, interactions with the community.
00:40:31
Speaker
Yeah, so this guy, his name is Robert Uruzi, and he, so he has an interesting history. It kind of starts with him allegedly pulling a gun on a bar manager when they're arguing because he's trying to steal a sign from the bar that's hung up outside the bar. The police officer is trying to steal the sign?
00:40:58
Speaker
Yes, the police officer is drunk and off duty and pulls his gun on this bar manager and his buddy, who's also a police officer who's with him, has to restrain him and throw him. There's surveillance video of it. He's like, they put him in a pickup truck. He climbs out of the pickup truck.
00:41:14
Speaker
And so he gets fired for that, but then he actually gets reinstated back to the force. And then a few years later, he, uh, the, the young man I mentioned, Brett Perkle, he bashes Brett Perkle's teeth in during a raid for marijuana. Um, Brett's at his friend's house and they're just playing music and his friend is the one with the weed and they come in and Brett's face just, I mean, he's still missing teeth. He like, and, uh,
00:41:43
Speaker
Well, he wants to get taken out. He's got fake teeth, but they're hurting him. And so he does that. Then there's an LSU student who he tasers because the LSU student's drunk and there's another woman that's mentioned in a deposition. We don't really know the full details of that, but that was a traffic stop. But yeah, he just, he kind of keeps having these incidents. The Brett Perkel case, I mean, the city lost in federal court. Perkel sued and won.
00:42:12
Speaker
Is that how he got reinstated, or did he get reinstated? He got reinstated before, years before, right, Darryl? Yes. Yeah, he got reinstated years before. Was that by the police chief, the Civil Services Board? Yes. Okay. Yeah, he got reinstated by the police chief. Black police chief. Yep. Chief LeDuff. Who is also the chief who decided to fire him, or was it previous chief? No, it was, no, same one. Okay.
00:42:40
Speaker
Was he under pressure? Is that why he decided to do it? We tried to talk to him, Jason. He didn't return our calls. There are some statements in the internal affairs report that go into why. They all seem a little bit. And in the deposition. Yeah, and in the deposition. What were those reasons? He had to go visit his sister and couldn't go to the meeting, to the hearing.
00:43:10
Speaker
What we've heard and what we've been told is that he— Who's the he that you're talking about? The police chief at the time. I think Chief Lidoff was the first black police chief in Baton Rouge history. What people have told us is that he was facing pressure. He wanted to keep the peace.
00:43:33
Speaker
And so he brought him back into the fold. But keep the peace in his department. In his department, yes. The thing I haven't mentioned yet, though, about Maruzzi is he then became the department's representative on the Civil Service Board, which is where if you get disciplined, you go and appeal your discipline. If you get fired, if you get suspended, whatever. So he was the police representative on that board.
00:43:59
Speaker
Who was he appointed to that board or elected to that board? He's elected by the union. Okay. Elected by his fellow officers. Yeah. So it's essentially a situation where the officers themselves are voting a guy who has a long and probably public history of questionable behavior onto the board that
00:44:25
Speaker
reviews people who have questionable behavior? That's, yeah, very succinct. They reelected him during all the George Floyd protests that one summer. Wow. Yeah. Now he stepped down.
00:44:40
Speaker
One thing that we go into detail not in this story, but one that's going to follow to this IA investigation. He stepped down and then the gentleman who I mentioned before who was in IA, he took over. The guy who spearheaded the resistance to Chief Paul's regime.
00:45:04
Speaker
And then he was in that same position that Maruzzi was in for a while, and then he, too, stepped down. Oh, wow. You mentioned a federal lawsuit. What was that? Clarissa, you were talking about that was... Oh, the purple one? Yeah. Yeah, so purple sued the department. He sued the department for a few abuses, and he won.
00:45:28
Speaker
He won. He didn't get much money. He got like, I think $25,000, but he did. He won in federal court. Wow. So you're saying that this is going on within the department pre George Floyd. During George Floyd, it's sort of the department itself or its officers reaffirm their support for people who are sort of a part of this counter revelation against what we've been
00:45:56
Speaker
what we've been seeing as the department had a long history, I'm sure you guys have looked into its history, a long history of challenges like this. And the other question is, is it singular? Is Baton Rouge unique or worse compared to, if you know, compared to what else is out there in similar departments? I guess what I'm getting at is our other chiefs.
00:46:24
Speaker
facing this balancing act where they're trying to do reform, but one of their big risks is their department revolting against them. Part of the reason why I'm asking is that's not something that we normally see in the news. We hear about the communities revolting against them, politicians, but I don't read often about departments revolting against major police departments.
00:46:53
Speaker
That's a whole lot of questions you just asked. It was my White House press conference question. Yeah. Got to get them all in. I don't know the answer to this question because there's so many police departments. There's 100 quadrillion police departments in the United States of America, some with five cops and some with thousands.
00:47:22
Speaker
So I can't answer your question. I would love to find out. I would love to do this kind of reporting in other cities and find out, right, Jason? And then the question is, really, I think Baton Rouge is a national story, and it's a very important national story. Because as you know, policing can be
00:47:49
Speaker
Policing and crime can have a wildly disproportionate influence on elections of all stripes, right? And we sort of care about it a lot intensely for a while and then don't give a shit. And then suddenly something happens again and we care a lot again. And so what I think Baton Rouge does for the rest of the country is say, hey, man, like, this is what
00:48:19
Speaker
This is what it looks like when you start meeting out with discipline, when you try to conduct audits on body camera footage, when you start having a honorable internal affairs process that's independent from the guys being investigated. This is what kicks up. This is what sparks fly. And you don't, often what you see
00:48:49
Speaker
This sort of dreary pattern is a loud-mouthed progressive politician, a city council type person or something, makes a lot of noise, passes something that may or may not make any kind of sense, right? Yeah. Some sort of external imposed law that is so diverse in the reality of what their job is.
00:49:11
Speaker
It may pass because it's a blue city and it does nothing to change behavior whatsoever at all. Then they take a victory lap or even worse, like in New York, there was a very poorly written chokehold law, which is no longer in the books but was briefly, that was going to lead to police officers having to resort to breaking joints.
00:49:38
Speaker
in order to subdue an arrestee because they weren't allowed to basically touch them above the ribcage. Yeah, that it's actually going to perversely create an even worse problem or a situation where I as a cop am going to just not arrest that dude because I'm going to have to get physical and I'm going to end up being the one.
00:50:05
Speaker
Who else? One thing that I learned recently in a class I teach about civil rights reporting and how you can apply it to the modern day. We had a police officer come in and talk about that she was finishing up. She was almost at her 20 years. When she started,
00:50:27
Speaker
in the academy, the guy training her. It's like, right, you go back 20 years and you go back another 20 years, right? There's a guy training her and he explained, like, you know, as you know, Jason from working in New York, that chokehold is
00:50:43
Speaker
is shorthand for almost a civil rights movement in New York. Do the right thing. The Spike Lee movie is about a notorious, in some ways, about a very notorious chokehold. Right. It didn't start on Staten Island with, what's that guy's name? I can't remember it. With Eric Garner. But what she learned and what she was able to tell me, which I'd never heard before,
00:51:09
Speaker
was that that choke hold was in fact a response to the shooting of a little kid in the 60s. And the idea was like, well, we want to reduce lethal force, so we're going to use these holds. And the holds were a reform. And it's an important thing, I guess, maybe just
00:51:32
Speaker
whether you're on the right or the left in the political spectrum. We're always sort of inheriting a world as broken as we may think it is from our perspective that's probably a world of reforms that were made in another generation.
00:51:47
Speaker
Well, if you think about it, yeah, it jumped to New York in the 1970s. They had the Knapp Commission in the 1990s. They had the Mullen Commission all driven for the same purpose, right? Exact same purpose. Their goal was to improve police accountability.
00:52:09
Speaker
You know, I remember police officers when we worked there together and we covered policing, you know, perhaps for a moment, it improved accountability, it inserted problems and it also harmed morale. You know, there were also tough economic times in New York at different points, salaries didn't go up enough. But essentially we end up, you know, in the same place
00:52:35
Speaker
over and over again, maybe it's a different thing. It's a shooting, it's a taser, it's a chokehold, but we end up in the same place. Is there something, and you may not be able to answer this question, but fundamentally wrong with our concept of policing and the relationship with the community and politicians and leaders. Because I mean, to me, it all smacks of a failure of thoughtful leadership.
00:53:04
Speaker
whether that's the city council or the police chief or the mayor or community activists like we're putting bandits on things that 20 years later like the point of the officer you described are going to be leaking creating their own problems well i mean that's you just described the whole the whole shebang there and it's you know all i can say is journalists we're supposed to report back on all those fronts
00:53:33
Speaker
the activists, the legislature, the executive, I think you mentioned unions. I mean, that's all we can do. That's what, hopefully, I guess the danger is that there's so little good reporting.
00:53:48
Speaker
going on now, that's not happening. The fourth estate and cities around America are so depleted that they're not reporting that back.
The Role of Journalism in Police Reform
00:54:00
Speaker
That's it. Those are all the institutions. Those are all the players. They all have different agendas. The important thing is that you don't
00:54:11
Speaker
You, a citizen, don't confuse propaganda with meaningful change. What is the role, to that point, of journalists holding police accountable? Well, it's not just police accountable. That's the wrong way to look at it. A whole policing enterprise. To make sure everyone's...
00:54:40
Speaker
The problem with reporting saying we got to hold police accountable, it assumes that the police are constantly and always in the wrong.
00:54:48
Speaker
Right. And then the stories that we write are going to be like, no, no, no, no, no, because the concept of accountability is that I hold myself, you know, accountable for my actions that other people are holding me accountable. Every company that goes through an audit does it once a year. Sometimes there's no issues. Sometimes there is. I think the idea that I'm getting at is if
00:55:11
Speaker
You know, you have all these entities, right? And you're describing a situation where you've gone in and maybe the initial story looked like this and there was some truth to it, but it's much deeper. That journalists are kind of in a unique position in my mind to hold all of those people accountable, right? The police union can't really hold the mayor accountable.
00:55:35
Speaker
the mayor and the city council, but what journalists can do, like you said in the beginning, is tell the small t truth. And one of the things that we know is that journalism itself has been decimated. Well, I think what you're just describing is the boring old fashioned idea of objectivity, which is to say, you go in and you ask questions and you look at what you can get your hands on.
00:56:01
Speaker
and go out into the world where people actually live and say, you know, Chief is claiming he's doing this. Is he doing it? Yep. What's being said, what's on the books, and what's actually happening?
00:56:13
Speaker
And I don't think that concept is... It ain't fancy. Right. I don't think it's as boring as you think because if you listen to, like if you go into the heartland or you go outside of like major liberal cities and you hear people complaining about the media, exactly what you said is exactly what they're complaining about.
00:56:33
Speaker
There's not objectivity. Just give me the facts and tell me what happened and I'll figure out my own opinion. I know among sort of like elite liberal circles, there's a push away from this idea of objectivity, but there seems to be just a disconnect in my mind. I mean, just like the same disconnect between police department and communities, I think sometimes there's a disconnect between
00:56:56
Speaker
right-leaning liberal journalists and the people. So I take your point on that objectivity. I was wondering, so looking at it, did you get a chance in your reporting to sort of talk to police officers who are just on the ground, doing their jobs, stuck in the middle of all this stuff? Yes. And what was their experience like?
00:57:25
Speaker
I mean, to me, one of the great challenges we face as a country is the difficulty we reporters have talking to police. And that is an auroboros of a kind. It's not always the police department's fault.
00:57:49
Speaker
In some cases, it's also not always our fault, the media, but in many cases it is. And what I mean by that is we need to hear from them more. They are a tribe unto themselves.
00:58:09
Speaker
I've spent 20 years reporting on them and I'm still an outsider looking in. I have some better understanding. I go out into the places they police. I go out and
00:58:23
Speaker
the same world they go out, but I'm not in their precinct commands. I'm not going and getting drunk with them every night. By that, there's the police officers who have to deal with the mess, the messiness of human affairs.
00:58:40
Speaker
are basically ordered not to talk to us, and they'll get their overtime pay stripped. They'll get their right to promotion stripped. They'll lose vacation time, and nobody wants that. Nobody wants that. But we need to hear from them when something happens. We need to understand, and we don't get that understanding. I want to hear from all these officers. Instead, we get the sanitized PR version.
00:59:10
Speaker
Now, the other half of that is reporters do a terrible job a lot of times covering police and what happens out there. It's rough out there, man. A lot of reporters need to just understand what the day-to-day is like. Yeah, they need to understand the day-to-day. One of my friends and sources in New York City cut off a reporter because the reporter was
00:59:39
Speaker
saying, oh, what you're telling me about such and such isn't true. And she was like, well, have you gone out to my precinct and looked for yourself? And she was like, well, no, I have it, but I'm hearing from them. It's like, well, I'm not talking to you anymore, right? Or one thing that people who don't deal with arrests and use of force in their day-to-day life
01:00:05
Speaker
which includes like, you know, as you know, Jason, I've been roughed up a lot. And like, you sort of get a sense for like, well, this is not worthy of me complaining. This is like fog of war stuff. Do you know what I mean? But like, people look at say a pregnant woman is arrested, right? And she's
01:00:25
Speaker
like going to do something, maybe she's picking up her kids or whatever, and it's all very sympathetic. But she's breaking the law, and she refused to pull over, or she refused to listen to commands that were lawfully given. If you arrest somebody like that, even though she's sympathetic, it doesn't mean that you as a reporter
01:00:47
Speaker
don't sort of say, okay, well, like this is, you know, she's sympathetic, but she didn't listen. She's more to this story. Yeah. Too often now, especially now, man, like every single action of the police department or police officer takes is treated like
01:01:09
Speaker
it's prima facie wrong, right? And why wasn't there more discipline? Well, because I followed the rules, man. And we, as the press, need to make a better effort at understanding who we're covering. Now, that doesn't mean everyone's going to say, oh, what's the word? Co-opted? No, because the police officer is obviously one element
01:01:36
Speaker
in this massive drama that you cover when you cover this stuff. There are the people, the families, there are the people who are arrested, either rightly or wrongly. There are activists who are sort of in the mix. There are the families of the people, and if someone is killed by a use of force, those family members, and then other family members who come to their aid and offer support and who have been involved in lobbying, there are state politicians, local politicians, federal politicians, there are unions.
01:02:06
Speaker
There are, right? They're one piece of the puzzle. Yeah. If you're a good police reporter, you can't be held captive by one point perspective because there's too many. But you can't rule one out. You can't rule that one out. I think you're actually hitting on a decent point because I think a lot of folks will say,
01:02:32
Speaker
that, to your point, that if you look at it from a police officer's perspective, you're just being a stenographer for the police department. Or it just reminds me, recently I read the story about a 10-year-old boy in Wisconsin who had murdered his mother.
Community Policing and Reform Efforts
01:02:55
Speaker
And the headlines were all
01:02:58
Speaker
about how he was being charged as an adult. It was outrage about just this outrage about how he was charged as being an adult. And my initial reaction in reading the stories, I was like, why is everyone taking this unobjective activist position? But as I read more into the stories, I realized it wasn't about them being activists. It was about them being lazy.
01:03:22
Speaker
They didn't want to do the details. When the details came out, I think we found out he fatally killed his mother, shot her because she didn't
01:03:36
Speaker
wouldn't buy him a virtual reality headset. And as more nuance came in the story, you thought, yeah, maybe this guy should be charged as an adult. But it was that underlying laziness there. I was curious, do you guys have examples of people in your reporting, whether you've used them in your stories or not, of police officers that you think got into policing for the right reasons? And have they been able to do what they
01:04:06
Speaker
wanted to do, or does the system work against that? I mean, I think we definitely know officers who got into it for the right reasons. And they've definitely had their struggles. There's like parallels between journalism and policing that way, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like you think about The Wire, and you think about McNulty. He wants to do an investigative, a big investigative project. And his editors are like, nope, we want you to do 200, 300-word stories every day.
01:04:34
Speaker
Shut up. I don't know, Claire, so what do you think about Carl? I mean, I think Carl's a good example. Carl's a great example. Carl Dunn, he's now police chief over in Baker, which is a town that's next to Baton Rouge. But he was a BIPD officer, ultimately an administrator. He was the head of patrol. He was there for, I think, what, 30 years.
01:05:02
Speaker
Yeah, almost 30 years, I think. Yeah. Worked his way up through the ranks. And he definitely, he tried to do it right. And at one point he had a unit that was, they were assigned to the highest crime zip codes. And what he wanted them to do was he wanted them to go out and their goal was contacts. Contacts with people, but no tickets, no nothing, no arrests. But he wanted a lot of contact.
01:05:29
Speaker
And that unit ultimately, I mean, it got disbanded. It didn't have any support from the department. And then he ended up leaving. So he tried. And he's still trying over in Baker. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, what else would you add about him? You know, he's trying to put his money where his mouth is, right? He says, you know,
01:05:55
Speaker
There's a lot of crime. It's a very, very poor place. I think it might be one of the poorest towns in Louisiana. It's right up there. He is an interesting guy because he doesn't use any sort of
01:06:13
Speaker
He doesn't use any of the Orwellian DEI language that's so popular right now, but he in some ways is trying to say, look, if you want to lower crime, you need to not be looked at as an occupying force. He's a conservative guy, he's a black police chief, and he has been on the front lines of one of the most violent cities in America. He's not talking
01:06:43
Speaker
about stuff he hasn't had. He knows what he's talking about. He's got firsthand experience. And he is committed to the idea that you need, if you want to, you know, get the bad guys, that they need to establish themselves as the good guys. And that means behaving in a certain way, right? Like, it's absurd to hear, like, he had quotas for contact without arrest or tickets, right, Jason?
01:07:11
Speaker
It's almost the exact opposite of the Comstat regime in New York City. It's the exact opposite. How many times can I interact with the public and not arrest someone? How can I have a contact with people and not get money coming into our coffers? It's like crazy, but that's his mission. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's like, yeah. He's an example of law enforcement that we can get to talk to us.
01:07:41
Speaker
And those are stories that you get to hear. I literally can't answer that other question because I'm not doing reporting in those places, but it's also very hard. I understand their weariness.
01:07:52
Speaker
It's a double paranoia because it's the one hand, if I talk, I get in trouble. But if I talk, you might just totally ignore what I'm saying. Right, or distort it. Right. I have to work really hard to get the police perspective personally. So I didn't grow up in a neighborhood that was highly policed. I grew up in a very suburban town that was, I mean, you barely saw the cops.
01:08:16
Speaker
And when I first started reporting on anything criminal justice or policing related, it was focused on the families of people killed by the NYPD. So I was getting a very skewed view and I knew I was getting a very skewed view, but it was so hard to find anybody who would talk with me. And so I can see, especially like if you're a young reporter and you just, you can't get that person to talk to you, you could end up just doing some really bad reporting.
01:08:42
Speaker
If you're unable to really learn about that side, I had to really proactively seek it out.
01:08:51
Speaker
I remember when I was reporting and when I was covering the police, I remember I would go to, you know, we had Amadou Diallo's shooting in the Bronx by the New York Police Department street crime unit. I will never get the words 19 shots out of my head. He was unarmed and I heard it at so many protests.
Political and Activist Influence on Reforms
01:09:14
Speaker
And now post George Floyd, you hear these
01:09:18
Speaker
comments about defunding the police. And in thinking about defunding the police, I haven't been a police reporter for a while, but I always remembered when I would listen to those protests and hear the protesters talk about what the solution was. And then I would go out into the community and cover crime or talk to people in neighborhoods. There was a very different message that activists
01:09:44
Speaker
you know, very focused on attacking the police department. But the little black lady on a stoop in East New York, Brooklyn just wanted more police. They just wanted them to stop harming unarmed black men, but they actually wanted
01:10:00
Speaker
more policing. And I'm just wondering, is this gap between, I think, what activists and politicians are saying and what communities really want and need part of the reason why we can't get reform right? So my favorite, not my favorite, but I was covering politics in New York during the George Floyd protests, specifically on Queens.
01:10:24
Speaker
And I remember there was a city council member out in the far Rockaways and he was running for a borough wide office. He was going to become the borough president.
01:10:40
Speaker
That's like a county in New York. Yeah. Yeah. Essentially, he wanted to like run the county and his district, though, for decades had been fighting for a new precinct because their precinct was overstretched and they really wanted a second precinct. They wanted faster police responses. They wanted more cops. And they'd finally gotten it approved like pretty recently.
01:11:08
Speaker
So he runs for borough wide office, starts to cater to the like white progressives who are like a strong voting block in like Long Island City in Astoria, starts to become more defund the police, right? Ultimately, his district loses the funding for their precinct. The funding for the precinct then gets put towards a community center that already existed in a different
01:11:38
Speaker
district. It's not even like they then built a community center in their district. It gets put in another district. Then he becomes our president and the new city council member who wins in the special election, she ends up getting the money back. I don't know where that stands now, but she was like, no, we want that precinct.
01:12:01
Speaker
But that was a great example in my mind of the complete disconnect between the activists and the communities that were really getting policed. It was fascinating to watch play out. And I also remember there were city council members in the Bronx who were getting threatening phone calls from activists, but they were like, yeah, it was wild time.
01:12:27
Speaker
But it's almost like listening to the carnival barkers. Maybe the politicians seem to go door to door in their own neighborhoods too. How about you, Daryl? Do you think there's a gap in what activists are calling for and what people in communities really want and need and maybe a gap in what journalists are reporting? I guess it depends on what activists you're talking about. Some of our sources in Baton Rouge are not against the
01:12:57
Speaker
the police chief and are in fact campaigning to support him because they recognize, in some ways, it's an extension of one of all the stories in the country, Jason. It's a new take on civil rights. There was a period where people had to fight
01:13:23
Speaker
for rights that should have been guaranteed. And some of those rights like voting or getting a square education were met. And so now the next step is to ensure that those institutions that serve all of us, black and white, northern and southern,
01:13:50
Speaker
that those institutions are doing a straight job. They're doing a fair job. And that is what some of the activists in Baton Rouge are looking at. They're like, okay, we have a place at the table. We have power. We want that power to be justly wielded. In the most basic sense,
01:14:16
Speaker
And so it's a restoration of the credibility of institutions that in the past were not honorable. And we're not living up to sort of the promises made and all those marketing materials that I was talking about earlier. America's great marketing materials. Way to bring it around. And to suddenly at the moment when you have a chance
01:14:42
Speaker
to restore credibility to those agencies and those institutions and those words that you then say, no, we're going to disband it. I don't know. What is that? It almost reminds me of the freewheeling anarchy in the county notorious for letting Emmett Till's killers go, the free state of Tallahatchie.
01:15:11
Speaker
a place I've done some reporting. In Mississippi, yeah, not too far away, a bit north in the Delta. In some ways, that kind of complete totalitarian racist regime, it's no different. You don't care about institutions. You don't care about checks on power. You just care about wielding power, how you want to wield it.
01:15:41
Speaker
So I don't know, man. I don't know if that answers your question, but like, so yeah, I think the proof is in the smart activists are understand the nature of the, of the stakes of the fight. Yeah. Yeah. And that doesn't mean they all agree. Of course. It's like, just like police departments disagree with themselves. Activists disagree. But you know, the sources we've been working with for years understand
01:16:11
Speaker
that you don't necessarily aren't going to get leadership that is resilient enough to try to make hard changes. All of us, it doesn't matter what your job is. I want you to think, whoever's listening to this, about your job. Do you want your job to be easier when you go in and as frictionless as possible? Or do you want it to be as
01:16:33
Speaker
embittered and brutally conflict-ridden as possible. All of you are no different than these guys. They want their jobs to be easy. When someone decides to make their job hard to make a difference, it means something. I think that's what's happening in Baton Rouge. They understand the moment and they want to take advantage of it. I made a mistake, Jason. This is a fight with consequence. There have been
01:17:03
Speaker
threats i mean right some of this is politics but some of this is is is real threats and real danger of of against the chief and and against his family so i mean the stakes are high man that actually you know i wanted to ask you one last question before we before we close do you think chief paul is going to be successful i don't know i guess it depends on how you measure success man but
01:17:32
Speaker
Once you start pointing a country or an institution or an agency in a direction, sometimes it's hard to go back in the other direction. You can look at some of the titans of the civil rights movement, the names we know and the names we don't. Can you say that they got everything they wanted? No.
01:17:59
Speaker
No, but did we head in a direction that's better? For sure. Yeah, I think that's what we're looking at here. Well, I wanted to thank both of you guys for joining me and give you a chance to throw any closing remarks or just anything about lessons you think people can learn from your stories and these types of stories. I don't really, I don't know if I have anything else to add. I mean, I don't know if we ever said our story is on Verite News, a New Orleans publication.
01:18:28
Speaker
Yeah, we're really excited. Really excited. Finally, five years, I guess more for Daryl, five years later. Yeah, we're really excited that they've decided to partner with us and we look forward to working with them for a long time. They're a new publication in New Orleans. I guess the one thing I'd say to Jason is- I'll drop a link in the show notes. Beautiful. I guess just in terms of closing comments,
01:18:58
Speaker
Journalism, like I said, man, it ain't rocket science. It's just going out and talking to people. But you got to talk to a lot of people and you need to bring all those points of view out into the open. The reporting that we've done is sort of just the most throwback kind of
01:19:28
Speaker
basic, get off your ass, shoe leather reporting, I guess. That still is what makes a difference in my mind. Hopefully, people understand that these stories aren't pro-police or anti-police or
01:19:49
Speaker
But they're exposed in this completely messy system of government that we have. That change doesn't usually come just with the bill. It doesn't come with the tweet. It doesn't come with a protest or a billboard. It is this. It is this raucous mess.
01:20:19
Speaker
And the more I think people who care about these things understand, if you're not looking at a raucous mess of some kind, then there's some dimension that you're missing. Well, to add to that, you don't know the story. You can have an idea of what you think it is, but with that mess, you have to be open-minded that you might actually be making a left turn when you thought you were making a right.
01:20:44
Speaker
Thank you all for joining us for this conversation with Clarissa Sozin and Daryl Kahn. We're looking forward to being with you all again on the next episode. I'm Jason Blair, and this is the Silver Linings Handbook Podcast.