Radley Balko is a writer at the Washington Post, and the author of The Rise of the Warrior Cop. He recently published a new book with Tucker Carrington, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. This week we spoke about his book, policing, and guns in schools.
This interview has been lightly edited.
Adam Rubenstein: The last sentence in your new book is a quote from Kennedy Brewer, who says, after having been on death row and exonerated through the work of the Innocence Project, “the system’s gonna do what the system’s gonna do.” Could you tell us a bit about Brewer’s case? How had the “system” operated for Brewer? What’s was at stake?
Radley Balko: Brewer was convicted in the early 1990s for the rape and murder of a little girl. A couple years earlier, Levon Brooks had been convicted for a very similar crime in the same Mississippi county, just a few miles away. The two men were convicted thanks in large part to the testimony of Steven Hayne, a medical examiner who did about 75 to 80 percent of the state’s autopsies for the better part of 20 years, and Michael West, a forensics charlatan and Hayne’s sidekick. They were finally released from prison in 2007, after DNA testing pointed to a known sex offender, who then confessed to both crimes. Hayne and West dominated Mississippi’s death investigation system from the late 1980s until the late 2000s. Hayne testified in thousands of cases, West in well over 100. We may never know the full extent of the damage the two of them caused.
AR: Can you tell us the factors that most often lead to wrongful convictions, like Brewer’s? What can be done to reform tactics that lead to wrongful convictions? Are police departments abusing public support? If so, how?
RB: John Grisham lays out eight reasons for wrongful convictions in the foreword to our book. I won’t go through them all here. Generally speaking, I think the biggest problem in our system is bad incentives. Prosecutors are incentivized to put people in prison rather than to seek justice. Police officers in some jurisdictions are incentivized to generate revenue instead of to keep the peace. Federal anti-drug grants incentivize raw arrest numbers instead of keeping communities safe. One recent study even found that in many states, crime labs get funding each time one of their analysts helps win a conviction. If the analyst gets results that don’t allow for a prosecution, they get no funding for that case. In Louisiana, public defenders are funded with fees from the state’s courts. But defendants are only assessed the fees if they’re convicted. This means that every time a public defender gets someone off, they get less funding for their office. We need to think more about how we structure, align, and fund the criminal justice system.
AR: Why do you think there is reflexive, unquestioned support for the actions of our nation’s police officers? In the wake of the Parkland shooting, might this change? Should it? What’s your view on Sheriff Israel’s response to the shooting, and his department’s incompetence? Does the police failure in Parkland tell us something larger about policing in America?
RB:I think we want to believe that cops are always good, always honest, and always make the right choices—especially when it comes to lethal force—because the alternative is just too scary to contemplate. We give police officers enormous power. When it comes to one-on-one interactions, they have about as much power as can be entrusted in a single person. It isn’t that cops are uniquely bad people. It’s that they’re human. And as humans, they’re subject to the same trappings of power as anyone else, whether it’s the president, an FDA bureaucrat, your local HOA president, or the participants in Stanley Milgram’s experiments.
What happened in Parkland isn’t all that different than what’s happened in some other mass shootings. At both Columbine and Virginia Tech, SWAT teams showed up as the shooting was still happening, but deemed it too dangerous to go inside. In other mass shootings, police intervention did save lives. But I think the mixed results tell us that we can’t rely on police interventions to save us. And if police have a mixed record at mustering the courage to stop mass shooters, I don’t see how arming teachers will be much better. I think the only real lesson from Parkland when it comes to policing is that, again, police are human. They’re subject to the same flaws, fears, and shortcomings as the rest of us. But because we entrust them with some pretty profound powers, we need to monitor them to ensure that human foibles don’t result in abuse of those powers.
AR: Also on Parkland: You’ve written that putting more police in schools won’t make them safer. And President Trump has suggested that teachers should be armed. But the two aren’t the same. You’re in good company thinking that arming teachers is an awful idea. Why is having a larger police presence in schools a bad idea? In the hierarchy of bad ideas, which is worse?
RB: I’ve answered why on arming teachers. I don’t want more cops in schools because we’ve been trying that since the 1990s, and as far as I know, a school police officer has yet to stop a single mass shooting. What we do find, is that when we put cops in schools, kids are more likely to get arrested for petty offenses that once resulted in detention or suspension. That saddles more kids with arrest records, and possibly with criminal records. And as is often the case, mentally ill kids and black and Latino kids get arrested more often, and are more likely to be arrested for petty infractions. Only a couple states require school resource officers (the euphemism for school cops) to get any more training than regular cops. That’s crazy. Working a school is and should be different than your typical beat. That should mean more training.
As it stands, school is pretty much the safest place your kid can be. It’s always been that way. Schools are not only the safest place for kids, they’re as safe today as they’ve ever been. The average elementary, middle, or high school can expect to see a mass shooting about once every 150,000 years. And the odds of a particular kid dying in one are well less than one in a million. Those figures are of course of little comfort to the families and friends of the slain Parkland students. But we need to make public policy based on data. These policies have real world consequences. I don’t think arming teachers or putting cops in schools is going to make our schools the slightest bit safer. I do think both will have unintended effects that could be destructive. Both are solutions that won’t work in response to a problem that I’m not sure we really have.
AR: At the Washington Post, you’ve distinguished yourself writing on criminal justice, drugs, and civil liberties. Your last book, Rise of the Warrior Cop (2013), documents how American police tactics and technology have led municipal police departments to resemble small armies. The book came out in 2013, and the paperback in 2014, at around the same time as the Ferguson protests. Since then, have American police become even more militarized? Has the trend you pointed to continued? If so, in what way?
RB: Domestic policing has probably been militarizing at about the same pace since the book came out, mostly because the incentives and trends driving the militarization haven’t changed much. At the same time, I do think many jurisdictions are looking at alternatives to highly confrontational, aggressive, and predatory policing. This is mostly happening in larger cities, although I’ve a handful of sheriffs move in that direction, too. It’s a hard thing to change an entire professional culture. So while I don’t think we’re anywhere near the sort of community-oriented policing that’s been shown to be effective, responsive, and respectful of the rights of the people the police serve, I do think there are places in America where things are at least moving in that direction. That’s something. I’d also think that the legalization of marijuana around the country had had an impact. By most accounts, about 75 percent of SWAT raids are to serve warrants on people suspected of drug crimes, and about half of those are for pot. I’ve yet to see any reports from the states where pot has been legalized, but I have to think that eliminating that entire class of crimes would have a noticeable impact on the use of SWAT teams, no-knock raids, and “dynamic entry” tactics.
AR: What should the president be reading? And why?
RB: Let’s start modestly—anything that doesn’t have his name on it.
