#76 (Thaddeus Johnson)

[Music] Reducing crime features conversations with influential thinkers in the police service and leading crime and policing researchers. A former police officer, Faddeus Johnson, is now an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Georgia State University, and a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice. We discuss his career to date and his recent study where he and his colleagues examine the effects of unionization and collective bargaining on police use of force. [Music] This is Reducing Crime and I'm your host, Jerry Rackliffe. I'm going to get to my guest in a moment, but first I just wanted to let you know the podcast passed a bit of a milestone recently. It took less than 75 episodes for this podcast to pass quarter of a million plays and downloads, which almost left me speechless until I figured that really wasn't a very good trait for a podcast host. It's all down to the fantastic guests I have, and of course you're good selves for putting up with my nonsense in between the smart bits where the guests show you with pearls of wisdom. Thanks for listening, and especially those of you who contact me when one of my guests really resonates with you, I very much appreciate it, and I know the guests do too. Speaking of fabulous guests, Dr. Thaddeus Johnson is an expert in the area of policing, crime control, and governance equity. A former police officer from Memphis, Tennessee, he's now an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. He's also a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice. His research has addressed police lethality and coercion, street violence, recidivism and predictive bias. Among his many published works, he's also co-authored the 2019 book Divience Amongst Physicians, Fraud Violence and the Power to Bescribe. Johnson received his PhD in criminal justice and criminology from Georgia State University and his masters in criminal justice from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. We sat down for coffee at George Mason University and managed to grab a few minutes during their crime policy symposium organized by the Centre for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. It's a one-day conference organized every couple of years, and if you're in the area, I really recommend it. In fact, a small digression here. During the symposium, I was on a panel discussing the evidence around community impacts of stop question and frisk, with such luminaries as David Weisberg, Daniel Webster, Anthony Brager and Dan Nagan. Yeah, I was hanging with some serious company. We recently summarized that fascinating discussion across a couple of pages you can find in the full edition of the magazine Translational Criminology, which you can find for free on the Centre's website. Just Google Translational Criminology, you'll find it. Okay, it's finally time for Thaddeus. And as you join us, I'm explaining that he is the very first Thaddeus I've ever met. And so I read your name, I just had this vision of you being one of these, you know, population preachers, foreign brimstone kind of stuff and then it's like, yeah, Thaddeus Latif Johnson, I appreciate it. I used to look at the Queen Latif for the rapper, I didn't use my middle name coming up because everybody was like, oh, Latifah, it's not Latif. So I just never used it. I got old and I could name and just, like, you know, I like my name. So yeah, just some people like to just say Thaddeus, like, her family's Jamaican, they love Thaddeus. Yeah, it's Tasha, you're lovely by the name Tasha, it's acne, right? And you, I don't take this the wrong way, but you, if I can punch you well, if you wait. Hey, hey, hey, give me some. I know it. I know it. But you know, but it's so funny, like, I get these awards and things and I always tell like her and they'll say, well, Rick Rosenfield or Richard Wright, no, they are my guys, they really help. But like, those are the two I work with daily on things. So even like, these awards came, I felt so awake. I'm like, this is about the teams. But you didn't start in academia. Now, where's the start? What's the story? I flaunt my first round of college. I didn't even make it to college. I just so badly at high school that I couldn't make it into a university. So I joined a police department just before my 18th birthday. Yeah, I couldn't get to university. Really? Well, I couldn't pass through it so bad. The administrators were like, you know, when you grow up, come back. You know, this one there, we still have academic stuff. That's my become a police officer. You were bouncing around university getting problems and disciplinary stuff and so you joined the police department? Yes. I'm sorry, but that's fantastic. And you know, it even on some work when it comes to like the college education of police officers. Even before I got into doing that life and my dissertation, I was very skeptical because I was like, you know, it's often like you don't need a damn degree to do policing. You don't need these things. And this was in Georgia? This was in Memphis when I was a police officer. Okay. Memphis, Tennessee. That's where you're from? Yeah, from Memphis originally born and raised, went to school in Chattanooga at University of Tennessee. Got it. The policing had no idea that I would do it. Needed a job. I have a family that it wasn't a really popular decision, you know? You know, we don't have a great relationship with police. We respect them, but you know, it's Memphis. It's Jim Crow, Dr. King was killed. So a lot of those things are there. I remember stories of my dad telling me, you know, we're working on this piece they call me Uncle Tom talking about, you know, black officers going to black neighborhoods. And he was just saying like, how he felt about them and you know, and that really always had me interested. But I never thought that I would be a police officer and I definitely want to be a police and scholar. Definitely wasn't doing a race. I'm not going to be another black guy doing things with race, but it's funny how life takes you a certain way and it kind of calls you when you see a need for it. So you didn't do well at your first crack at university. So you joined the Memphis Police Department. I worked in Memphis for right at 10 years. I started as a patrolman. I worked my way to lieutenant. I was asked for an interim captain before I left. I didn't have the educational requirement to become a captain because you needed a bastard's degree. So I was really stuck unless they changed the requirement. So somebody died above me or retired. There was an opportunity. And so I was really stuck without a degree. That all kind of happened at the time where I didn't feel like I was making the change I wanted to make in policing because you know, Memphis, predominantly black. I've never arrested anybody that was white. Everybody I arrested looks like me. The first arrest I made, the guy's address was the street behind my grandmother's street. Then realizing, "Damn, these are not bad people. They screwed up and made some bad decisions." So you have those characters out there. But these are people who are victims of circumstance just as much as anything else. And they didn't have the same parents. They didn't have the church upbringing. So they didn't have the things that I had and they ended up on the other side of the handcuffs. But that's also a little bit testament to you making good decisions. I mean, you could have had to down there. If you're getting disciplined problems at university and stuff like that, you could have easily have gone that road. So I said something about your decision making and go, "Let's rein it in and find another path." You know, in Desperre, because you know, one thing that I hate when we talk about disparities and talk about these things, vulnerable communities, we act as if they have no agency. It may be bounded, but they do have agency. So you're right. There are those decisions, but I'll be remiss if I think about some of my friends. And I think about, "Well, what's the difference?" I had two parents in the household. I know some that screwed up their way. I know that. And I also know that I just didn't get caught in a lot of things and they did. So perhaps I was a better criminal. They were a better crew. But just amazing just to see the life trajectories and to feel like as an officer, I believe in patriotism. I believe in protecting a servant. I believe in social order, but I also believe that there's stuff beyond that and that I wasn't making the difference that I felt like I wanted to make. So I like to work with people who've got a few years in the job, because it's nice to work with people who like they've got all of that early career stuff out of their system. They've driven fast cars. They've kicked in a few doors. You know, they've gone through a door with a gun and had that adrenaline rush. They've done all of that shit. Now they're thinking, "Alright, I've got another 10, 15 years to go. Is this it? Is this all there is?" And they're an interesting group to work with, because either they go down the kind of, "Yeah, okay, I'm just going to buy my time and count the days." Or they go, "Okay, when you get them here at this conference, you get the good cops to go, let me find something that makes this more fulfilling." You know, they're a great group to be people to work with. Did you come back to academia with the idea of going back to policing? So you've done your time and you were going to a different path. Yeah, I went, nothing to do with policing. I was actually looking at research on the school to prison pipeline. I didn't want anything to do with policing. Were you a little biter about it? I had enough of it. I wasn't biter about it. I was a complex relationship. Just in front of choice. Just in front of choice of the word. I was trying to stay away from it, but that is the word. I mean, I'll give you a prime example. I remember as a young officer running outside, it was this woman could have been in her 50s, 60s, could have been in my mom's age at the time. Five o'clock rush hour. Tire's flat, traffic's backed up. Yeah. I pull over and I get out and I change the tire. I spend 45 minutes on a call. Good for you. The change the tire. I go back in to just Lieutenant at night. And he's like, Johnson, what the hell are you doing on this call for 45 minutes? I was like, yo, Lieutenant, like this, like that to give my mom. She had a tire and she was so grateful. She's like, oh my god, there are good costs. She was just so grateful. And this is exactly where she said, we don't pay you to change up in tires. We pay you to lock people access up and the right tickets. And it was in that moment, I said, I'm going to take his job. I went to my administrator. I said, what do I need to do to get on the path of leadership? Having had those experiences and being in the leadership positions in the Memphis Police Department. When you see things like the murder of the beating death of Tyree Nichols, is that a police department you recognize? Is that an aberration or is that something that you went? I saw this coming. I saw it coming. And this is a thing, even growing up in nephos, you were told you don't run from the nephos police or you're going to get someone up. Even I can't. came on. I didn't see a chance to really see a lot of that. I had to step in a couple times to jump off because I was ignorant and didn't know about the culture and saw it there without just ignorant so that was a good thing. But it's very aggressive. Memphis is a grimy city, tough city. Policing there was not as pretty as maybe other cities but it still was heartbreaking to see what happened with Tyree Nichols because I didn't leave that force. Right. It was running and gunning. It was balls to the wall. It was about protecting and serving and keeping the citizen first. It was victim-forward thinking in Memphis. Yeah. What I saw wasn't that. That was beyond a sort of an aggressive policing. That was not even a constitution that was evil. When you bring that kind of young gun mentality you can't bring it into policing. And that's who gets praised. Think about a football game. Right. Who are the football players who remember? The ones who make the big hits. And the same thing in policing, that's who gets promoted to those types of tactical units. Those officers are more productive also than also a more complaint prone because they're a very productive and active. But they also impact how citizens views the rest of the police department because they don't know a scorpion unit officer from a regular patrol officer. Right. So what was the plan when he came back to academia? Well I got married and had a good woman on my side who was already educated. You're only saying that because she's sitting right behind this. No, I'll hurt you. I can see you making eye contact over my shoulders. You're throwing these in every night again. You're getting credit. No, no, no, but really. No, she really believed in she was an educator. So she understood how to navigate higher and I had just given up. Look, I love it at 1.175 GPA. Man, some universities you can get that just by writing your name on the paper. I could have used the freemore points. Oh, we were living in Jamaica when I did school online. I undergrad degree online. I finished up my bachelor's. And we only came back to the States because I said, well, I'm gonna get my master's in what he's school online and go back to Jamaica. And I fell in love with research. Started playing with data. These are people. Yeah. Like, oh my god. And so, you know, the care, the thoughtfulness, the responsibility. It was intoxicating. I have a tool. I can use research to impact policy. I can use research to help police departments. I can do all of these different things through research. I failed developmental math. A myriad of times and now I'm this this quantitative researcher who does econometrics sophisticated modeling. To I tell my students the same thing, I failed my Scottish highs in math. And now I teach statistics and do multi-level modeling. And they're like, yes, it's okay. You'll get to it eventually. But it's the application. And I think it's also the understanding the data and like, it's a responsibility with it. What you say is really important. And this is a complaint often have about economists who download data sets doing a complicated analysis and then write a paper telling everybody what they should do. I try and make my students throw on a vest, go and sit in the back of a police car. Go see a victim of crime who is standing on the street at two o'clock in the morning with all their positions stolen, bawling their eyes out. That's one of your data points. It's a real person who has had everything taken away from them as well as their dignity. That is a line on your data sheet. Never forget that. Because it's a real person who's going through the worst day of their life. And we're captured and we're not treating it responsibly. You know, that's that's the biggest heartache. I study everything race because I find that races everything. You know, having been a black guy. Also being a police officer and understanding what police officers deal with. No, I had one time a person asked me. They were like, oh, how do we remove racism from a journalist? How do we remove racism from policing? I say, well, how do we remove racism from America? Because our systems are only a microcosm. And so we're thinking that we can fix the system about only focused solely on the system. We're a rabbit or a hamster in the wheel. We were speaking earlier today. And a really good question is, is this a police problem? Or is this a problem that society has generally created through racism and everything from education, healthcare, banking, transport, availability, job availability, and people reading resumes and judging things by names. All that kind of racism that exists in society. But it's now manifesting at the point where it's a policing problem. Is this a police racism problem? Or is this a societal racism problem? But we're just seeing it in police data. And I think that's the big question to disentangle. But bear in mind, that's from a white guy who grew up in Scotland. The only slightly non-white people of the people who went to Spain for their holidays. That notion that race sort of permeates everything, even though you've tried to get away from it to some degree. I mean, so many black police officers that I know and I've spoken to and I've gone drinking with, say, it's different being a black police officer, especially after Ferguson, after George Floyd, you found that too. Yeah, luckily I got out before my brown and George Floyd, because policing has changed. I'm not sure if I would, if I have the stones to go back into policing. I think everybody says that it's brutal, isn't it? It's so brutal and we have to have a diversifier for us. But what's most important is the race of the client, which are our citizens. Memphis Police Department. It's going to sound the weirdest phrase, but a pretty black department, right? It's a pretty black department in a very black city. Some black officers are harder on black communities because they want to keep the community safe. Right. When you see another young black man out there acting up and then you see me, I have to bridge that gap, right? And not just among white people, among black folk and all other people, right? And so you have to bridge that gap. All of us are also not immune to anti-black messaging. Since we all have dreads, man. Man, you could live up to that thaddeus name. If you were like a hundred pounds soaking wet, it was like, no, the name and this picture doesn't know. It doesn't feel like it doesn't feel like time. You can carry this off. I appreciate it, man. I appreciate it. And I tell my students, if I'm walking down the street, I see the golden girls. And that's my dirty little secret. I love the golden girls. Oh my god, wasn't expecting that. That's fantastic. That's how dirty little secret is on air. And so you want them to do better, right? And so a lot of black officers have to arouse it with I can't treat black men worse because I expect more, I want more. This must be so incredibly challenging because you're not just second-guessing yourself. You like third-guessing yourself and fourth-guessing yourself. Am I being too hard? Okay. It's my bias creeping into that. And I can't imagine the decision-making just to go deal with the kid on the street. And that's why it's so important to have good research because, you know, even I do research on police lethality and police killings. I'm not saying we're not saying whether it's good or bad. We're just saying we want to have a less lethal police force, a less lethal society. And that's how we approach it. And I would never say the teller officer to hesitate squeezing the trigger when it's life and death. But there's a balance about between that and being a trigger happy. So it's just a fine line. And you're thinking there is this a real threat? Or do I perceive this threat because of what this person looks like? Like I'd never enjoy and arrest. When I had a serial robber, he was very brutal. I see him. I'm like that's him below. And I say, "Hey man, when my shot go, you need to get on the hood of this car." And I'm sitting and talking to this guy. I was like, "He need help." I hate to go lock him up. He has to serve time and pay for his crime, but he needs more than this. Yeah. Still, I'm talking about it. Still bothers me to this day because- I can see that. The last thing he didn't need was to be incarcerated. He needed some help. He'd been failed by the system long before police ever came to his door. Everybody I've spoken to served more than a couple of years in policing. There are always those few cases that stay with you forever and you question where they did the right thing. You think about the outcomes of it. It's interesting that there are always little cases that just stay with you on that. Yeah. And it's impactful and they become part of your DNA because many people who are a fan, we know that they've been victimized or traumatized throughout some time of their lives and so they can't be callous toward them regardless of what they do. That means if a person of society has these things like you know people, I call them kitty fillers who molest kids and things, right? Kitty Federal is a fairly universal term, I heard that in British. So good, so good, so good, so good. All the British listeners would be like, yeah we know that. They steal our old mercy at some point, they pay their debt to society. So when you're in policing you had all these additional expectations and so you moved into academia. Oh my god let's move into something as far less diverse than the police department, right? Academia is a really great place and I, Ignorally was hoping to escape from the bureaucracy of public service. You're fucking joking right? Seriously? Oh, if universities were run as a business we'd all go bankrupt in a nanosecond. Oh my goodness it's no. Yeah and I ran into that and you know with anything there's a pros, there's the cons, but it is challenging because one thing is pervasive, it takes over your life, it becomes part of who you are, but in that it's hard to get their balance in your life, it's hard to communicate with family, it's hard to communicate with friends, you become even I think sometimes very cynical, the stuff that we're doing is much bigger than accoding. I have an evidence hierarchy for policy makers because the reality is that there is some research evidence that you shouldn't be making good decisions on and I've caught shit endlessly from people who do studies at the lower level because they see it as a criticism of their work and I'm like I'm sorry but it kind of is because what you produce isn't helpful to policy makers and it's fine for academia don't get me wrong but if you want to change how the world is don't be doing that stuff and nobody needs an English get like me turning up, we are half English, half Scottish, no means is a get like me turning up to them their works not as good as I would like it to be, I'm not in my business but it sounds nicer to where you see it, but I've known how far I could have got with an English accent, I'd have moved to this country years ago, I would have developed one, especially in the relationships stages, you can say anything in the way the accent really works here, I could let's say yes, I think it's called your butthole but he said it so politely like, so you You came into this, and you came into these rigorous standards, and you know, you're doing great work. Can I ask you one thing that surprised me though? You wrote a book on deviance among physicians? Yes. The full title is deviance among physicians, fraud, violence, and the power to prescribe. That seems very different than the policing world. Did you take a sabbatical for a while and just decide to become an expert in another field for 20 minutes and then come back? What's going on? It was supposed to be a book chapter for one of my mentors and the master's program who had a victimology background, and they were talking about the open-scrabbing of medical equipment for fraud. Well, they kind of expanded as we read more and wrote more, started seeing all these other things that go unchecked in the medical field, and it just really peaked my interest and got us writing that. So that was an opportunity they came, they were supposed to be a chapter, they came a book. Because people criticize policing for the errors and the mistakes. And then I'm going, have you seen the medical field and how many people they kill every year? It's scary, it's scary, and then even think about the. I don't think orders of magnitude worse. And there's race involved in that as well, too. You don't get me to start talking about exactly men with the cesarean sessions or pain killers, because I think we can deal with more pain, or because we may think they're less rare than we. It's only times worse than the outcomes for white women in maternity outcomes. But race doesn't matter, remember, we're in a post-racial law society. And then the medical field wanted to tell policing how to do it. Come on now. And this is the thing, you know, when doctors mess up at this catastrophic level, nobody calls the front the entire operation. Right. But when it comes to policing, and I always tell people like, "I've never heard of a mix of them better by this investing." And I've never seen them before, and they're just like, "I'm a real good business model." Noam Chonsky had a quote that, and I'm going to paraphrase it slightly, said that defunding is the path to privatization. Because you defund something, you make it perform so badly, eventually people get angry and complain about it, and you go, "Well, okay, obviously the government can't run it, we'll put it in the private sector." And so what you end up with is you privatize policing. And then the only people who have policing are wealthy people, and who get screwed the most, the poorest. The front of the police are all those things. I was asking, like, who the hell are they talking to? Because the black folk I talk to, the polls that I see, you look at Minneapolis and three-quarters of the adult voters, there were blacks at the front of the police, hell now. They want better policing. They want better policing than you treat it fairly. We don't want less. That's fair to us, but they don't want less policing. You say these are verbal populations, they've been underserved. Where the one thing for service that we've been providing for is police, and they haven't been perfect, are you going to take that away from them? They may not be perfect, but they're the only focus that turn up. These are good men and women in uniform. And oftentimes it's the leadership. Oftentimes it's the resources, it's the poor training. You know, don't get me to start talking about fitness standards and all these things that we move away from and policing, which I hypothesize the less fits you are, the more likely you are to go to the tools on your back belt, your utility belt. But they're doing the best that they can possibly do in a racialized, and a capitalist society that dictates where they're going to heavily put their police presence at. Policing had all these additional expectations on you being black and policing. And now you're in academia. Better, worse? It's worse. Like one or two percent of the world has a doctorate, and then the smaller percentage you work in academia, and there's a very small percentage of black folk who are in there. And particularly, you know, I say black men in that, right? We're even with your own committees. It's like, yo, you know, it has the appearance of diversity and things, but if you're on the committee and it's two white guys and me, yeah, I had a voice, but my voice does not matter. So it's beyond tokenism. It feels as if you're a caricature being a junior scholar. It's difficult. And also, you know, with me, a lot of my work has been out of spite, because they're getting it wrong. Oh, crime is going down. Yeah, it's going down in big cities because people are moving to suburbs and rural areas, and the historic recreation is that you're not getting it right. If you shift into our populations because they're scared to get in short every night, yeah, you're going to have crime going down, but that's because there's nobody left to shoot. And so it's like, those simple things are left out. So I know I get caught up, myth-busting, a lot. Nobody talked about Rick Rosenfield's crime in America. Nobody talks about the cold of the street. Nobody talks talking about black and gun culture, right? You know, in the mainstream, you hear him, like they're missing entire points. Well, there's a few white saviors kicking around with opinions, right? And that's another thing, you know, we always heard this thing about the man, you know, and particularly white men. In my education, I've had to rouse away because some of my best mentors and friends are now white guys, right? At some point, you just wish he'd stayed in Jamaica. He told an Omar from the wire and just stayed in Jamaica, right? That's what I wish. I really wish that eight mangoes, you know, worked out, you know, do my gardening. But I do feel like we were built for this, that do feel like, you know, there was a void that we were actually able to easily kind of slide into. So black scholarship, yeah, I say again, I keep diving. I'm so, this is great. These commentators are not haired in public. I'm so close to the third rail. I'm like, nanosecond away from getting cancelled every day. I talk about this, but I'm a little fascinated, especially as a foreigner, as an immigrant coming in from outside, just doing what you're doing because you care about victimization, you care about crime. You're also busting the myth of what black scholarship is because it's so easy to take the position of being critical of police and that you're critical in a very constructive way. But you're also supportive of there are a whole bunch of things that they're not doing wrong and need some support on. And that's almost a myth busting role in itself. You know what, you're absolutely right. And I also came in thinking that we have used race as a crutch. And in my works, when I see a race finding, I work to make that finding disappear. And when I end that work, when trying to remodel, re-measure the findings get stronger. The more I try to disprove a race finding, because I want to make sure there's a race finding that is real. And so that's why I do econometric work. That's why I try to do high level work. It is interactions. The methods have to write the book or how things are supposed to look as like a recipe. So finding a race finding for you isn't the end of analysis. It seems like it's almost the start. It is the start. Unpacking that and what it really means. It is the start. So on the facial recognition piece, we found that citizens that deploy facial recognition technology are rested on average, more black people, and 55% fewer white people. And freshly we said, oh, the technology is flawed. No, if police operations are already inequitable, meaning that they're disproportionately deployed in certain neighborhoods because of systemic inequities that drive statistics that put them there, you put that on top of technology on top of it, so I want to codify and exacerbate those things. That's a great way to put it. It's codifying existing systemic racism that existed in society before any of this technology came along. Graduate students have asked me, we're including race and we find it's a factor. As a starting point here is, first of all, we're looking at crime, so we're talking about victimization. It doesn't say anything about the offenders. These are communities of people who are being victimized heavily. That's what you're finding. But also, it's not a measure in itself. It's fundamentally a proxy measure for a hundred years of disproportionate outcomes in terms of healthcare and banking and housing opportunities and access to transport and employment. All those things is manifest in what you're seeing as a variable that you pick up from the census. I love that. But that gets to us our point is that crime is not a disease. It is the absolute or the symptom of the broader disease, which is those systemic inequities of things that you talked about. I feel for you because there's no expectation on me buying a white guy to do race related research. And here you are trying to do crime research, but it just permeates everything in America, doesn't it? It does. And it's not just even a race with geography. And so a few people understand it. They don't understand it. There's even things like geography, like in the race of the disparity work when they're looking in imprisonment. A big reason why the disparities decline was because the grip of mass incarceration left black folk. They started to lock it up more white folk. But injustice, nobody asked for that. Much I don't want to deal with race. Somebody has to talk about it responsibly. In fact, you started looking at things by race and geography. You'll see that in places like rural areas to urban areas, in victimization, white folk struggling. But because it's so urban-centric and black-centric, we forget that it's still about justice and justice has no race. And this is why I wanted to speak to you because I think guys like yourself and Rob Brunson are talking about this stuff really responsibly and helping people understand the nuance of it. And I have these discussions with police chiefs because they're on the other side of it, which is they're going, "Okay, I get criticised by very kind of what I call naïve metric switches. Let's look at the whole city. But the whole city's, this population is white. This population is black and your stops are just proportionate." And I can hold on a minute. Where is all the victimization? Where are the people the victim are crime? Do I not send the cops there? Because if I want to redress the balance of those stops, I just pull the cops from the black areas and put them in the white areas. And who is that serving? To under-serving the community that needs the police the most. And that's why I tell people equity does not mean equal rights. Also, you mention a very, very important point, you know, maybe think about Bismarck's. You know, when we do work on police lethality, if we do population Bismarck's, the disparity looks a whole lot worse. Yeah. When we go and use a risk, Bismarck. But like, weapons are a risk, Bismarck, you see that disparity, shrink, shrink, and for the shrink. And nobody wants to hear that. Nobody wants to talk about it. And how much shit do you get for saying this? Oh. Well, you're wearing a bulletproof vest right now, aren't you? I've had things come out like, you know, things like, Uncle Tom. And the few emails about things that we would smile at all other sides. I've been called a long-haired monkey and all those things on the other side too. Jesus. I know, welcome to America, right? But you know, that means to me that we struck a nerve. But you have to tell the truth. This speaks a true scientist. Oh. Thank you. You know what I mean? So much of a criminology is leaning towards advocacy and ideology. But this speaks a scientist saying, this is what the data says. The data doesn't care what you think. This is what the data in the analysis says. I love that, man. And you know it's funny though, so people think, "Oh, who do you have problems from like the opponents or the advocates have problems with both sides?" Right, so there you go. And this comes to the piece of work that you've done recently that I really love. It's work that you did with your wife Natasha and Megan Hartman, of course David Snively, who's with IECP now. And you publish this piece in police practice and research, called collective bargaining, police pay and racial differences in police lethality rates. And I'm just going to say before we dive into this, the listeners are interested in the paper. I'm going to make a link to it available on reducingcrime.com/podcast if you come to the entry with Thaddeus, you can download a copy of the paper that we're about to discuss. Because man, this was fascinating. See, you guys dug up the data from 282 local police departments, so we're talking about local municipal police departments over like a 13 year period. Just your findings are like, "What?" So, what did you find? So, what we found was this. Now, imagine this was going along with, remember I said myth bustling, the final police? I said, "Well, I wonder if increased police pay shows something." And this is just the even the idea of thinking, "How much we pay the cops make a difference?" Yes, they made us wonder, should the police officers make more or less the same than the people that they serve? And no one had really asked that question that regard. Who the term has paid? How has paid the term in the police department? You do do collective bargaining, where we have to understand union protections. But not every police department has the same level of union protection. And I think 41 states as union rights, some places as union, some places as police, but never in association. So, there's different levels you're right of representation. And so, the treatment measure was collective bargaining authorization. They were authorized to do so. And so, the union are responsible for the negotiations with the city and the administration for what police paying conditions are going to be like. So, it's union controlled and it's often the fraternal order of police, the local branch, the fraternal order police, are negotiating for paying conditions for the officers in the police department. Absolutely, that's very well put. If you create an index using state pay, local level pay and other metrics, if it contributed to fewer or more police commercial citizens. So, basically, what you're linking here is, if you have more pay, does that have an effect on police and officer involved shooting some killings? Yeah, absolutely. You would expect that higher pay signals, more professionalism, signals and attracts a higher quality pool of officer. It also gives them incentive to not lose their well-paying positions. And so, what we found was that as the pay levels went up, the levels of police killings of white people, black people and overall declined. However, when we did an interaction to see if these levels responded and unionized agencies, the same way they did in non-unionized agencies. And what we found was that those life-saving benefits only maintained for non-unionized agencies and this is for black people. So, the first finding alone would be enough for a journalistic elephant. Generally, if you pay cops more, they're generally going to be happier. They're going to be probably a bit more professional, attract a better pool of applicants. And they're going to shoot and kill people less. That alone would make a journal article. Is that complete? You know, the story is incomplete. You can't talk about pay without talking about unions or collective bargaining and policing. The police officer walks in here. If you want to arrest Momokoft, please do. So, we knew we had to look at unions. And so, we were happy, wow! The police police paid decreases, police brutality among our racists. However, we knew that that could not have been the full story. Right. That basic finding that improved from pay holds for reduces shootings of white people and black people. White people, black people, and we include overall races as well. But, in unionized agencies, the life-saving benefit did not extend to black people. So, we saw fewer white people killed than unionized agencies with higher pay. But in black agencies that were unionized as police paid went up, you saw that, in fact, it's slightly increased. Not only did not they manage, it's slightly increasing words opposite than the white rate and then what we also saw in non-unionized agencies. And we set what they're finding for so long because we're like, what the hell does it mean? And how can we respond to what we're talking about? What is this relationship between a police department being unionized and there being only a benefit for white citizens and not black citizens? This is why it's a little fascinating. But in non-unionized agency, in particular, you don't have certain job protections. You don't have representation in unionized agencies, right? If some collective bargaining agreements allow for you to seal certain disciplinary records, it allows you to delay interrogation, it allows you to see videotaping review evidence. Not mind you, unions are not evil. Not saying that. I don't think these protections were put there so they can go out and just kill black people with impunity. I don't think that's the case. But what I do think that happens is police have some mindful race. They've seen George Floyd, they've seen these things, if anybody says they're otherwise they're lying, right? Non-unionized agencies, they don't have those job protection. In those agencies, they take better care, they have more foresighted use, but adjustment, what I mean are things like this. They're less likely to be involved in risky behaviors, i.e. jumping in front of a fleeing vehicle, or those types of things. Because they don't have certain job protections that they don't want to lose their job. In the unions, the deterrence effect of this one and things have been diminished because you don't have favorite precautions of real issues, and motionless are justified. And let me say this real quickly, motionless are justified. Less than 0.002% of all police contacts result in a citizen dying. However, when the citizen does die, it's well, way more likely it's going to be somebody who's black, regardless of how you chop it up. So let me say that. And so it's a very smart part of policing, but it has huge repercussions unlike any other police outcomes. Unionization and the protection it provides speaks something to how officers exercise discretion. That's absolutely it. I argue that that never was what a union representative of a union was meant to do. We have to make sure our officers are protected, make sure that they're safe, they get fair pay and all those things. But the one thing we have to do is make sure that we hold them accountable. And there's ways to do this without losing labor rights. I think you're right that I don't think this was an intended consequence. I think what you're uncovering is something here is absolutely fascinating as an unintended consequence of just providing people with better job security. Yeah, it's fascinating. So how do you trade this off? You know, with the recruitment crisis and the fact that unions have been beneficial in many areas for better working conditions. I mean, people see some of the way that some unions are functioning and say they have too much power and too much less than the other. And then you see these small rural departments where if it wasn't for a union they would be getting screwed left-right in the center, right? It's typical of research, right? You do this interesting piece of research and now it's throwing up like eight questions in my head. No, that's absolutely great because you know, no research answers all the questions. Good research leads to better questions. We saw that in unionized agencies, assocagus officers also increased as pay went up. And it happened for both unionized and non-unionized but the levels for unionized agencies were much higher than the non-union counterparts. So officers in unionized agencies are getting assaulted at higher rates? Yes. So these protections are changing their employment of discretion and they're just taking more risks. And it's putting the community at risk and themselves. Absolutely. And you ask, well, how do we translate this into real life? Well, there's a couple of things. First of all, we can make sure that serious disciplinary records are not obscured because now we can see a pattern of practice. Also, we need oversight, citizen review boards, have a bunch of them but they don't have any real power. No, they don't. So what you need to do is remove restrictions in union contracts about the oversight that these places could have and be more transparent. We can understand the patterns and behaviors of these officers without attenuating any officer labor rights, without officers losing any protections. And again, by doing so, we find that we can keep officers safer as well and not just our citizen. I love that. I think most reasonable cops kind of go, I would just like to feel if I made an honest mistake or I'm involved in a good shoot because I was under real threat that I would be looked at. I need that level of protection. But yeah, we can take it too far. Man, it's fascinating work. For the listeners, if you come to RegistingGround.com/podcast, I'll put a link up to a copy of the paper. Hey, man, it's you're busting a lot of myths and it's important. And it's cocktail hour and you've got your lovely young lady across there to go take for a drink. I'm sure at some point. Yes, absolutely. I appreciate you spending some time with it. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for what you do and this has been really fun. It's high speed. That was episode 76 of Reducing Crime, recorded in Washington DC in June 2024. If you want more episodes like this, subscribe to Reducing Crime at Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple, or wherever you pod. Because well, you know, it doesn't cost a penny. Check out ReducingCrime.com for episode transcripts. And if you're an instructor and DM me, I can provide multiple choice questions for every episode. Be safe and best of luck. [BLANK_AUDIO]