hello everyone I'm speaking today with Rachel Hartmann who is a professor of law at the University of Virginia she is director of the Center for criminal justice and one of the nation's leading experts on policing Rachel welcome thank you simple question why is the United States so bad at gathering data about its police well for one reason it we have more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States and so
that's a lot of data to collect they're very diverse and so it's hard we'd have to have a national effort to do it in any sort of coherent way and we haven't had the will to do that is it that they don't want to do it and it's the bottleneck at the level of the individual police officer the department somewhere else there are bottlenecks all along the way if you think about the way we traditionally what we traditionally
demanded from police departments the focus of the political demands on police departments have tended to focus on effectiveness in terms of Public Safety or at least visible sign it visible efforts towards producing Public Safety there's been a lot less focus on the how what kinds of harm is policing is imposing and so we do actually collect a lot of data from police departments pretty effectively with respect to
crimes we've had the Uniform Crime reports for almost a hundred years and we have standardized definitions of what those crimes are and not perfect but pretty good data from departments there's just a lot less interest in collecting data on the heart the coercion that police officers do like arrest arrests we use for the crime reports but stops uses a force and the like and it does cost something to
collect that data so you'd need individual officers to take time to do it you need departments to supervise them and then you need an effort to standardize the definitions and the formats so that we could actually use the data if you think of body cams as a form of data on police behavior what having a body cam each officer be an effective way of improving the quality of conduct well so
I would start with the premise which is that body cams are data so far body cams are anecdote I'm as machine learning gets better they are becoming data and they're getting more useful in that way but body cams are one perspective on an encounter of course most of the data we get is officer reported so they're useful it's not clear whether body cams are going to be an important force of a form of data in policing but I suspect
over time they will be but do you think police would behave better if they knew they were always being taped some people say they'll just turn off the body cam or you won't be able to prosecute them anyway what's your empirical view well so I'm not a social scientists I'm a lawyer but I try to follow the social science in this area and I can tell you that what we know right now is that the results of studies of body cameras at
least in terms of if you if you're studying whether they reduce complaints or whether they reduce uses of force the studies are at best mixed I would say the evidence that they do good in these respects is pretty weak but what your intuition as to why they're not a clear winner so we're doing a podcast in essence with the body cam we're of course super nice anyway but we're going to be super nice to each other why
doesn't that just work across the board well so um I'm not that nice usually and if you record me for long enough I will forget to be nice and I'll be my normal not that nice self and so I think part of what happens in policing with respect to anyone wearing a camera is that people forget over time and partly some of the causes of problems in policing aren't that officers are intentionally misbehaving I mean sometimes they're not being as
cautious as they should be or not as polite as they should be but often it's about the broader incentives they face so if a department doesn't care if you're polite or not putting on a camera isn't going to make you more polite so there would have to be standards there have to be consequences and there and often so officers have the motivation to pave differently and they have to have the capacity to behave
to behave differently do we have too many separate police departments you mentioned the number of different departments as an obstacle to collecting data should there be more consolidation sure I mean very advantages and disadvantages to consolidation I said 18,000 that's actually not the best most recent number it's probably a little more than 12,000 local departments about half of those are fewer than 10 guys now
we talk about police accountability and having use of force policies and disciplinary structures but in an office of 10 guys none of that matters and so I think some consolidation would be extremely valuable because these very small departments just can't maintain the kinds of standards that we might want but I don't think consolidation is the solution to all problems and policing and consolidation has costs as
well as benefits because it means that as communities get more diverse a segments of the community might not get what they want out of policing I believe that right now around 1/8 of police officers are women should that percentage be higher is a way of addressing police misconduct that is you might want it to be higher for other equity reasons that's fine but in terms of people being happier with their police would it help I'm not
sure we know for sure you know there the studies on gender art show a little bit better effect than the studies on racial diversity and policing and I think communities do value diverse police departments that reflect what the community looks like and certainly women might help but I have no I don't take diversity in policing to be a solution to problems in policing I think it's an end that we might pursue
for other reasons but if I think of data an on police behavior for whatever reasons women are much less violently aggressive than our men so you might think if the police force were half women more or less the cases were worried about would fall significantly if that's not true what's your intuition for why not well so for one reason police officers and regular people aren't similarly situated with respect
to violence so if you know I'm a very small person I'm only about 411 on a good day if you ask me why I don't engage in more violence well maybe I don't usually have the motivation to engage in violence and maybe even though I've done a little kickboxing I'm probably gonna lose most fights I'm in police officers are armed and they're trained to use for us and so there's a difference even if even if women on are
on average smaller there's still gonna be a difference in their preparedness to use force to enforce a command and so I don't I just don't think we can infer from what we know about women participating in violent violence more generally that women are going to behave differently on the police force that doesn't mean they won't and and again you know it's a little bit of research but it's not great and I just don't I
think police officers just situated differently with respect to force should the Department of Justice have the right to file suit against Police Department's as they've had I believe what since 1994 yes a good idea should they yes they should have the power to do that so the the there I have so the law suits by the Justice Department for pattern and practices of unconstitutional conduct by a police department are important both
symbolically and practically now those lawsuits have substantial costs as well as benefits and when the Justice Department has sued police departments in the past those suits have been very expensive some suits have worked better than others in terms of reform and some of the reforms haven't always lasted so I don't want to suggest that they are somehow a panacea to problems in policing at the same time they've done a
lot to signal the federal government's commitment to civil rights they have set national standards for departments that are interested in adopting best practices and they have reformed some very big very problematic departments but say when the feds give money to state in local departments and enforce standards of accountability there's at least the risk that lowers local accountability right I mean does
that always work out for the better when they give them money well so most of the money we give to local police departments isn't for accountability it's to improve effectiveness in policing or to improve to shift policing towards national priorities that might not be adequately addressed at the local level like local departments don't have enough of incentive to prepare against terrorism except maybe New York and so we might
fund them to make sure that we're all on the same page so there are some good reasons for federal programs but the way those programs have been designed have not focused on accountability and often they have given money directly to police departments or been structured in ways that incentivize harmful police saying and in that way when they do that they actually can they even if they make policing more effective they can also
make it more harmful and therefore less efficient and also undermine community control what would be an example of incentivizing harmful policing through those subsidies well the Violence Against Women Act has an arrest program it was traditionally known as the arrest program recently renamed which provides money to police departments or to municipalities in to increase the criminal the criminalization or criminal justice
taking seriously violence against women domestic violence and stalking and some other kinds of violence that program specifically incentivize arrests and it incentivizes arrests even above prosecutions so it's not that we're saying we should take it seriously at sentencing we're saying we should have take it seriously when we see it we should arrest it and it encourages departments to adopt Pro
arrest policies and states to adopt proell at rest laws but arresting people doesn't necessarily protect public safety and it does increase harm should we impose higher educational standards on police forces there's mixed evidence on that slightly older police officers are tend to be better in certain respects at least and education is often associated with age but again I don't think that we can select our way out of
problems in policing but but why can't we because different individuals they behave so differently they think so differently why is it that there's no change in selection criteria that would get the police to be more the way we want them to be whatever that might be well so I think we could do some things I think we could select against people we could screen out people who have committed misconduct in the past for
example by D certifying them at the state level and therefore discouraging departments that can't or don't care very much about quality of their officers from hiring those officers so it's not that we can't select against promise and policing at all sometimes we know that a officer is problematic and still he'll wander around from department to department I think we can we should set minimum age standards that
are above 18 which many states have as a minimum age standard but in terms of education or other more subtle factors I think the effects can often be subtle and when we look at what creates problems in policing departments create officers you know the officers don't pre exist in the department really and so you know what you're really looking at is the culture of the department the incentive structure is the supervision
discipline you know you can make good officers with imperfect people say many more of the police were 67 year-old women ah and they were short obviously there's an issue they might be more willing to use their guns because they would feel physically more endangered but wouldn't it just be highly likely that in terms of misbehavior there would be less of it just by changing the composition it seems true for every other job we
know yeah maybe but even there so you know I'm not 67 yet but I'm on my way and if you tell me that I have to complete every call in 90 seconds and I deal I face somebody who is holding a knife and clearly in a mental health crisis you know I've two options I can wait and talk and see if I can deescalate the situation or I can't a ZEM and be done with it and even a 67 year old woman is going to respond to
incentives about how she's supposed to handle that situation if you rush her she'll tase him so what's the incentive then we should change if composition and selection won't do it well I'm not saying I don't think any it's not that they won't help you could help with education you could help with diversification and diversity might help in policing like women because they break up the subcultures in a police
department that can reinforce bad behavior so I actually think having women and present helps even if the women aren't less violent just by reducing the uniformity of the culture so I don't want to say those things don't matter at all but I think the capacity to solve problems without force and the motivation to do so matter at least it's not much if not more and so what we have to do is give officers the
capacity I wish we had more evidence about de-escalation training and about implicit bias training and the like we don't so we don't know that that stuff works at least not yet but hopefully we can develop mechanisms we could study these things and develop mechanisms to have alternatives to empower officer to use alternatives and then give them the backup the time if necessary the cover to engage in less forceful
responses let's say we doubled the number of people in the politicus police force is it possible then misconduct would go down everyone's not so rushed there's a greater sense you can do things properly it depends what you do with them I mean you could double the number of police officers just to make things far worse if what they're doing is going out onto the street and jacking people up
throwing them against the wall frisking them and the like and so it really depends what you do with the officers you have but we do know that that you know one of the things is that we don't have a lot of good research so we do have some research that suggests if you add officers to a department Public Safety gets better even if arrests don't go up so the presence of officers as a sentinel is to discourage misconduct or discourage
crime actually works pretty well but what we don't know is whether adding those police officers also increases harm and so we don't know if doubling a police force actually makes things far worse or far better so conceptually what do you view is the fundamental constraint in the system so someone might say well it's too hard to watch police officers but body cams it's not clear they'll work whom we pick it's not
obvious that's the lever of progress what's the actual constraint you would like to be able to control better yeah so I'm not a big believer in silver bullets I don't think there is a single constraint we have been struggling with balancing the harms and benefits of policing since we started contemporary departments so I don't I don't think that we're gonna suddenly fix this by flipping one lever I think that one
thing that we could do is facilitate better accountability in policing and what I mean by that is if you think about policing as or accountability is that an officer would be responsive to standards he would have to explain his behavior I need face consequences when he didn't live up to those standards those standards should reflect the full costs and benefits of policing so that we set rules for policing that
actually gets what we want out of police those standards won't reflect those rules if we don't know what the costs of policing Laura and that means hearing from the members of the community on whom we tend to concentrate the costs of policing and then we have to make sure that police are in fact accountable that that there are cotton that they do have to explain their behavior which means we would know what they were doing and that
they face consequences when they don't live up to expectations if we paid law professor it's 50% more we'd probably get more good people wanting to be law professors should we pay police 50% more so I don't think there's a you know I think there's it's clear that when we reduce police salaries a lot as you see in some small departments and in poorer communities then police quality goes down because you start selecting you
start getting officers with records and misconduct and the like so I think we don't want to salaries to go too low but I don't know that if we if we doubled salaries or I've raised them for fifty percent that we'd get radically higher quality police officers I'm open to it you know you could think of you we could have a police for America program like we have a Teach for America program and kids out of Harvard would then go police
in big cities and small towns for three years I mean I'm open to almost trying almost anything is an alternative but I don't think we know that raising salaries is gonna make things better in policing I think there are about as many social workers as there are police should we take a third of those social workers and in essence reallocate them to police work paying them more if we have to sure one of the great things
that would I mean there are some aspects of what police departments are expected to do now that would be better handled by social workers who are trained to deal with people in crisis but there was a substance abuse or mental health crisis or other social services needs like people without housing and the like and so we dumped a lot of that on police departments there is no police department in America who wouldn't say
what we need is more mental health services because mental health services would prevent the crises and if we had more social workers responding to those crises either with law enforcement or without depending on the nature of the crisis we might get more effective policing yeah sure what about mandatory therapist visits for each policeman or women I didn't know about mandatory therapists visits
but I would say that we have to prioritize the health and well-being of police officers because police officers who are overly stressed or who are hurt physically or mentally are more likely to hurt others and so we have to take seriously officer well-being now what that means can be complicated you know we want officers to be able to get the therapy services they need often pure
services work better some departments are looking to the military model for increasing well-being because officer suicides or a huge problem right now but we also want to make sure that an officer who is in potentially in crisis or harmful to others isn't on the street and so states are struggling with the trade-offs between protecting officers to make sure they seek the help they need and ensuring that officers are
removed if they are risky to others you spend quite a few years working on the issue of sexual assault by police right what's the main thing the American public does not know about that topic well I don't think they realize how common sexual assaults by police are how difficult that unlikely they'd already be reported and then how difficult they are to prove once they are reported and I mean so I prosecuted cases involving
police misconduct for the Department of Justice and one of the one of the big issues in some of the sexual assault cases I did was that the first complaint this second complaint the third complaint would come in they would come in sporadically it would be he said she said the department would investigate decide that there was no evidence to support the woman's claim and the officer would go about his business and
the women were off had often had credibility problems they might be felons they might be prostitutes with drug habits runaways but over time what you would see is a department sort of you know never vindicating those claims never investigating them thoroughly enough and when you would look at these cases and start actually seriously investigating you'd realize that actually this officer had done it dozens of times some of them
might be beyond the statute of limitations some of the women might have serious credibility issues but you'd get enough that in you know some cases I had more than a dozen prosecutable incidents involving sexual abuse by an officer not as some of which had very been complaints about but only some and none of those had been recognized as legitimate even the Justice Department it had often closed the case at least
once before I got it so it's very hard to see how big the problem is or to investigate and handle those cases what should we do to improve that problem well that might be diversifying police departments or in with respect to gender might help that problem I don't know but police almost certainly would right yeah I can only think you know what we don't want is police officers to be alone or in in in with somebody else or
with other people that they can rely on and not to report misconduct so that means officers have to have a duty to report misconduct with respect to each other and we have to have a culture interior to department that that facilitates that happening nobody I mean the difference between you know uses of force are often hard to determine whether they're legal or illegal whether it was a appropriate or inappropriate there's no
question that sex between a police officer and and somebody who's just arrested is is wrong I mean that is just pure bad and so we should never have a situation in which another officer had it has information or evidence or has witnessed such a thing and is unwilling to report it but it's offered legal correct yeah in some places well so it depends what you mean by legal yeah in is it is not unconstitutional in some
states yeah it is consensual sex between an officer and a person in custody is not illegal and so it depends in part on whether it's non-consensual in other places custodial sex with somebody in custody is illegal so it varies but if it's non-consensual it's always illegal I would think in a sense it can never be consensual yeah but that's so that's true in fact one of the problems that we had in federal cases involving sexual
misconduct or sexual abuse is that the you would have to prove force to prove a fell in it but officers don't have to use for us and they don't even have to explicitly threatened force they control the situation and the person is under arrest they are wearing a gun and they are they express and act as if they're invincible and the best the women often the women who are abused are carefully
chosen to believe that they are so they know because they didn't arrest it before and they know because they have a criminal history they know because you know I had one case involving someone who directed a halfway house and the women had to have sex with him in order to see their children because if they got he could affect their probation status and if they if they it got their probation revoked or ended up back in
jail they wouldn't see their children anymore he picked them pretty carefully so yeah they don't always need force and you know we might be lost to better protect against that if I think of this problem it most general form let's say we agree that having more policemen doing the right thing is a high positive social return so we don't just want to discourage the police from engaging flat-out right at the same time there
are many instances of misconduct it seems hard to limit them through a number of mechanisms that I've been suggesting so what is the most cost-effective intervention that will improve the quality of policing but without just limiting the number of engagements I don't know the most cost-effective intervention to improve the quality of policing without limiting engagement I don't know I don't know that I can think
of a single intervention I mean if you think about particular interventions I can tell you how they might affect that equation but there are a lot of forces acting on policing so for example people talk about civil damages actions and one of the things about civil damages actions they worry about indemnification indemnification is when the city pays even though the officer gets the judgment against him and people object
to this because they think the officer should be punished more but I'm actually Pro indemnification because I think the city pays then as long as we make that payment transparent so we don't have non-disclosure agreements then we can act and we and we also collect data on it in a community could actually say hey I don't want my taxes to go up because you idiots won't train and prepare
officers and discipline them and supervise them so that they do less of this right and so we want the the costs to be internalized I think all the way there are a lot of different ways to ensure that we internalize the cost of policing making them more visible making them experienced by the political actors who are going to make decisions about for hiring and firing police chief say about setting policy for police
departments and I think the more we internalize the four full costs of policing and make sure they're fairly distributed the better policing will be there are other countries that are very different an extreme example would be Norway I'm not saying we can be like Norway right we're a very different country but if you're a rachel harman dictator of all matters police and you're allowed to make one change that
will last after you're gone I mean what would that be I think setting up some national standards for making for so that that we not only have federal intervention and making police more effective or federal intervention ensuing police officers I'm suing Police Department's and prosecuting police officers but national standards for ensuring that policing is actually beneficial that it's that we're harm minimizing that it's fair and that
it's authorized by local communities given that we do operate policing the way we do which is in lots and lots of departments having some shared national standards the way England does it might help a lot even if we continue to organize policing the way we did and if a department doesn't meet those standards you take away money put them into receivership something else what do you do yeah so there are different
proposals for that and right now people are talking about an accreditation system where departments would seek to be accredited by meeting national standards you could penalize them by taking away money for things that they want but that has again costs and benefits and over time the federal government has been totally unwilling to do that it's basically not used money as a tool for ensuring police accountability so you know I don't know
if there's one way to do it but I think there are several ways to do it and I think partly communities have to do it themselves that is to say once we have national standards out there communities can hold their own departments accountable for not meeting them Camden Trenton and Newark seemed to have improved the quality of their police from what we can tell are there lessons we can draw from those examples and
those are tough cities right yeah they are so one thing is the value of innovative leadership Scott Thompson and Camden I think did a lot of good and thought seriously about the problems and engaged all of the different participants both communities the officers you know he put out a new use of force policy last year which was probably the most progressive in the country based in part on work that the
al I did the American Law Institute did and I've been involved in that work I helped draft those principles and he did that by getting everyone to the table and getting buy-in from everyone involved and that's a lot more likely to have success lasting success now you know so leadership matters buy-in matters he also had a little more power to restructure the department from the ground up so one of the problems that
people have had when you know we might get a new leader in a department who wants to reform the department but that the culture of the department is resistant to change and they know that the guys likely to be fired within a year anyway so they can just wait them out and so you can often have trouble penetrating department culture one of the things that happened in Camden is they were rebuilding a department from
the ground up and that gave them a lot of power to make things a little bit better so dismantling resistance to change actually helps a lot too those are some of the factors you know I'm terrible because I'll never give you like you know yep here's the answer and it's easy I just don't have it that's good the people who give that are terrible I would say that Minneapolis at least claim unless you ask me about
civil asset forfeiture and then I'll just tell you it's all bad yes that's an easy one Minneapolis claims it will be dismantling its police department but this of course will be under intense glare and scrutiny as a national issue is that likely to go the route of Camden and be a positive or what's your intuition on that case I don't know I mean you know Minneapolis is known it's had some problems for several years
Minnesota has had some hearings Minneapolis has tried to do some reforms and they haven't even after some high-profile events not as high-profile as what's going on now for sure but some high-profile salient they were unable to generate the kind of change that would make a difference at least significantly so and they have on paper some of the formal reforms that people often demand in policing and so I
don't know what the I mean I don't know enough about what's going on on the ground I mean one of the things about police institutions is that they are local institutions and so you have to know a lot about what's going on in a community to know how likely they are to change how much of the problems with American police are just correlated with the problems of the citizens so if you
had a tan we're just literally everyone was completely nice would police brutality be a major issue well so you know there are a lot of ways to prevent a police you know called brutality let's call it violence or just a use of force let's say all uses of force are it would be better if no uses of force happened now we could prevent them by preventing the underlying problems and that that police respond to so we could do
education and have economic development and provide mental health services and then police will respond to far fewer problems and things would be better we could re identify problems and tolerate a little bit more disorder maybe a police officer doesn't have to break up a loud party and then he won't have to arrest the people involved and so we could do that we could encourage people to react differently to the police if
people trust the police in your nice town where people believe that the police are there to help not to hurt where police are not being aggressive towards them they might be far more likely to respond to it just a mere request you know what why don't you turn the music down and they would say fine and so you could do all those things and help improve policing sure and then at the end of the day the police officers
in your nice town might also be likely to wait out people who are non-compliant or look for alternatives because in nice town that's what people do and so I think you know nice this could help but it's thinking about how it could help is really what matters how do we limit the number of police who lie at trial or lie to back up their peers or somehow just outright refuse to play by the legal rules of the game
telling the truth yeah so we impose consequences you know right now there are almost no consequences for police officers who lie you could think of you know if a judge thinks that a police officer lies in a suppression motion he will maybe suppress the evidence if the truth indicates that the search or the seizure was illegal but that's hardly much of a penalty you know police officer engages in an illegal search then he lies a
trial taking the chance that you know he might get it in at worst the only outcome is what would have happened if he had told the truth so I don't think that's a very effective incentive departments when officers do lie at trial often don't take stops and sometimes when officers admit that they were under pressure to lie or that they did lie you know they learn very quickly that admitting a lie is much more problematic
and then lying and so we need to create different we need departments I mean that's problem that really is internal to departments in in some cities there's a culture of more reporting than in others and so that's something that departments can do to facilitate truthfulness and policing but expecting truthfulness would go a long way to improving it here's a question from a reader and I quote the author advocates
curtailing arrests but in places we've seen this it has resulted in absolute bedlam San Francisco Seattle New York where are the leading examples that have delivered better outcomes end quote so I don't accept the premise that reducing arrests first of all I'm not sure although cities of reduced arrests and certainly Seattle in New York cab I don't know the numbers in San Francisco but in New York we dramatically dropped arrests for
misdemeanor offenses without a substantial increase in crime I'm not sure that I would call that absolute bedlam you'd have to convince me I mean you know I look at everything the same way which is is it effective at producing the goals which are public safety and public order is it beneficial in the sense that the costs don't outweigh the benefits is it efficient in the sense that there's no less harmful
alternative is it fairly distributed and I think arrests to a large degree fail those tasks and so for those reasons you know I would like to reduce them because I think they impose harm where harm is unnecessary um I'm not I don't accept the premise of the question that reducing arrests has caused bedlam but if we look at San Francisco I was watching the movie Dirty Harry a week ago said in 1971 in San Francisco City
was much cleaner in terms of problems on the street although crime was higher it seemed to work much better there are now cases of people maybe homeless people just going at stores taking things knowing they won't be arrested citizens have had it up to here they came it's unlivable why don't the police there simply need to be much tougher why is that wrong ah so one you know if we're talking about that in San Francisco I so I don't
know enough about what's going on in San Francisco but one of the big difference in San Francisco seems to be radical economic inequality that leads to the underlying problems which can't you can't arrest your way out of you arrest somebody who walks into a store and they spend the night in jail and then they're back out on the street and homeless again I don't know what that arrest achieved in terms of public safety in
public order and I'm not sure that San Francisco would be willing to pay the costs of those arrests or that it would get them what they want but inequality is very high in Singapore right but you know there if you commit a crime you will be arrested sent to jail why wouldn't that work for San Francisco yeah so first of all I would detach the idea of an arrest from the idea of criminal and and penalizing I mean I don't know
again much about Singapore although I did spend a week there in 1989 I was sick for most of it maybe it was 90 the what we can say is that we might want to if somebody is engaged in behavior that we don't want there are lots of ways to address that one of them is criminal sanction but the decision to arrest somebody and the decision to sanction them criminally aren't the same decision okay and so we didn't arrest Harvey
Weinstein he was allowed to self surrender with a prema goshi ated pal a bail package the only time he ever spent in handcuffs was in walking before his conviction was walking from this police station to the courthouse after his self surrender this was a violent felon okay who was against him we had evidence of that he would be a harm to the public if he was let go and we didn't arrest him
I'm not sure we should arrest every low level offense for possession of marijuana what does he I don't think that I don't think that gets us Public Safety you look at the numbers of arrests that we dropped in New York just by not arresting people for simple possession of marijuana and you see that's a lot of harm reduced and no additional public safety risk or I think that should be illegal but people who steal things I
would arrest all of them whom I could catch without hesitation why wouldn't you charge them and ask them to show up in court they won't show maybe they have addresses yeah well so most people who get traffic tickets show up or pay their ticket um and we know that's really malleable that is to say you know we all we have to do is remind you and then the percentage of people who show up goes up
10% I'm you know when we're talking about low-level thefts the penalties are not that high these are not people who are worried that they're gonna spend the rest of their lives in prison most people are easy to find I'm not saying you might not if you convince me that really people won't show up and really we can't find them if they don't but I don't think we have any reason to believe that's true in most of these
cases what important truth our law students least likely to learn about policing that it's not all about constitutional law you know when you go to law school what you learn about policing is the Fourth Amendment and Miranda and you think you've learned the law of the police and I am Chi Minh I teach a class now after I teach them Criminal Procedure my more advanced class is on all of the law that relates to policing
so they can see that the kinds of that you know we have to consider all the harms and benefits of policing that law plays a critical role in setting standards that policing is worth its cost and shapes expected values given the costs of not taking a plea bargain can it be said today that there's even still a right to a fair trial it seems to me no am I wrong so is there a right no no there's not
much of a right to a fair trial yeah I mean if we really do about that well that it's not an area I'm nearly as expert in on as as policing but I think one of the problems is that we clog the system with a lot of fences offenses we never mean to prosecute that we're using the criminal justice system to address problems that really we should and could address in other ways and so that burdens the system you know mmm tons and
tons of misdemeanors are just dropped as soon as the person walks into court counsel is really really limited people have limited opportunities to meet with their counsel I think we could do a lot to improve the system by just reducing this scope of the system what's a good movie about the police you know I try not to watch that many movies about the police to tell you the truth I'm a relatively low media consumption person
so I'm not sure I'm the best person to say a good novel about the police again I don't know that I've read many novels about the police popular culture a problem if both tells police how they ought to behave and they tell citizens what to expect from police doesn't it say the norm of a high expectation of violence on both sides well so you know we used to have officer friendly and now we have training day yeah I think it's
it certainly portrays a message of policing that can distort both public perception and police perception of what the norms are just like the media could do that in other contexts yeah why is boxing interesting because there is nothing that focuses your attention more and then someone trying to hit you in the face it is absolutely terrific at its screening out all distraction you forget who you are when you box what makes for
a good boxer is it coaching pain tolerance brute strength sighs well I don't know because I've never been a good boxer yeah so I'm not sure I'm qualified to say should we be worried about how many young men seemed to love Knicks martial arts today is that a sign of decadence or it's just fine or well again I you know I think it's a mixed bag I have to say that I the the experience of engaging in kickboxing is
so terrific that I am very that I understand why people want to do it even though it's also injurious and you know my kids would say it's a bloodsport they won't even watch football they'd certainly wouldn't watch that and they think that my you know affection for it is ill not my best feature should the police ever write to the contents of your smartphone it's not a simple question to ask in what context
and think the police should not be able to open your smartphone when they see you on the street but with a warrant sure sometimes I think it's important evidence and yeah to convict someone of a serious crime sure Apple as you know tries to make the contents of smartphones impossible to decrypt if the user wants privacy should the federal government pass a law in essence disallowing that protection I don't know
what's the economic future of law schools how many will survive ah actually I think it could be far fewer and that wouldn't be a bad thing I mean I think we could reduce the number of law schools some law schools are effectively diploma mills that produce lawyers who don't have a good shot of getting a JD required or JD valued job which means they can't pay off the loans that they take out to go to law school
so I wouldn't mind seeing some law schools depart from the system so UVA as you know is a top-rated law school but say you go to a law school ranked like between 35 and 40 which could still have a lot of good elements produce a lot of good research has some great professors you're asking students to pay a lot of money probably they're not getting aid does it make sense in economic terms for that institution and still exist 10
years from now yes if you're talking men they're ranked 13 to 40 sure if you're talking about ranked 150 to 200 then I think the answer is no 70 to 80 I don't know I'd have to look at more data if you think of the legal profession as a whole you see a lot of lawyers at lower levels now being displaced by a mix of software and research assistants and the research assistants are paid much less than lawyers used to be alright by how
much will the legal profession contract given you know AI machine learning and just smart people who are willing to do some work without a law degree yeah again since my experience as a lawyer was primarily in the government sector I'm it's hard for me to assess the the trade-offs in automation and in deep professionalization as well as outsourcing law at work I can't really tell I think the New York
City murder rate has declined by about a factor of 20 yeah it's peak what's the main driver of that that's an enormous change right most people didn't predict it why did that happen yeah there are lots of debates about why that happened I mean I again you know you know that's a good question for a criminologist but it's not happen right yeah yes I grew up in New York Gotti the police you're from Brooklyn you must
have some sense why this is happening it's funny I'm I'm always trying to convey how radically different you know New York is today from when I grew up in the 70s and 80s in New York because my students read the Bernhard Goetz case and they just have no sense of the context of you know how people felt in New York given the crime and that they were afraid to ride the subway or that Times Square was not in fact the
Disneyworld that it is today so I I definitely do feel the difference um you know I don't know that I have perfect intuitions about what has changed yeah Soho was it dumped right even the Upper East Side wasn't safe now New York City is one of the safer cities in America even safer than many midsize cities and we have no idea what happened no there are lots of people who have lots of ideas about what happened I'm just not
sophisticated about them enough to weigh in I resist talking about things I don't know anything about again not one of my best qualities but again it can't be you know nothing about it right you're an expert on the police you're an expert on the police okay so what I can tell you what I can tell you is that the the part of it that that I focus on is was it proactive policing was it stop question
and frisk and broken windows policing that drove the murder rates down and the answer to that is probably no I think cities that didn't engage in those strategies also had substantially lower crime rates and murder rates them they do today does that mean that policing had no effect no I won't say policing had no effect I just don't think it was adopting proactive broken windows policing and when I look at those
strategies I'm all about the costs as well as the benefits so I think those strategies a specialist tough question first as a cat was carried out in New York was so vastly costly that we would be very cautious in thinking about its benefits as on their own the exclusionary rule how much has it mattered yeah so the exclusionary rule has mattered a lot to the culture of policing I often tell my students a story about a guy I prosecuted he
committed tons and tons of crimes and when we were talking with him about some of them he was explaining to me about how he would pull over people he suspected of being drug dealers and robbed them for their cash and their drugs and then let them go or you know write them a ticket or whatever and when I asked him what he would make up for probable cause when he would either ticket them or stop them what he
told them for his reasons he said what do you mean and I said well you're pulling them over because you're gonna rob them what would you make up for probable cause for this stop and he said oh no no I would follow them until they committed a traffic offence and then I would pull them over um I wouldn't make up probable cause and I said I'm sorry you're pulling them over to rob them but you wouldn't make up probable cause and
he said no I'm still a cop and the reason I that incident struck me so much is because the reason he has internalized the norms of probable cause is because that is subject to the exclusionary rule and so the effect of the exclusionary rule in large part was to give police departments an incentive to teach officers the law and give officers an incentive to learn that law and follow it at least in large part so
that the constitutional law before the exclusionary rule was not something police officers knew anything about and after the exclusionary rule every police officer thinks that the Fourth Amendment is part of his police manual and so I think it's impossible to underestimate the cultural change in terms of internalizing norms of constitutional law into policing that doesn't mean that it provides an effective incentive to
never lie or never engage in illegal conduct as it's currently structured but I think it's having an enormous effect on the culture of policing if we put aside all the bigger political issues and put aside the unusual events of the last few weeks and we dis compare the Obama and Trump administrations on policies toward police departments what is the main difference not the hot-button issues on the news every
night but the dry boring stuff yeah so the three things that the Trump administration did well so three the three things it did and things and none of the things that it said so when sessions came in as Trump's first Attorney General he effectively shut down the pattern of practice lawsuits as the Justice Department was carrying at he allowed the can on going wants to continue though he tried to get out of the two
that were not yet ink dry but had been already been negotiated in Baltimore in Chicago and he managed to get out in Chicago not in Baltimore because the judge wouldn't let the Justice Department out of the suit so that was one thing which is that no new investigations are almost no new investigations and they just shut down a program that the Obama administration had pursued very actively that was one thing another thing is that they
reversed changes to the military equipment program 1033 some of which is coming out now in association with the militarism around the protests and there's one more which o which I am forgetting off the top of my head but I'll think of in a minute then the other thing that the Justice forum that the Trump did President Trump and Jeff and Jeff Sessions did is they advocated for more aggressive policing so they
advocated stop question and frisk as a strategy in Chicago and repeatedly valued more aggressive forms of policing and you hear that again with attorney general far in repeated advocacy for more aggressive forms of police in which are you no harm inefficient in I think and then President Trump in his speech in Suffolk County New York he advocated allowing officers or encouraged officers to let
to let suspects bang their head on the car door which was effectively advocating constitutional violations by the police department and so together all those things have conveyed a very clear message to police departments that they value aggressive policing and not constitutional or harm efficient policing our very last segment is called the Rachel Hartmann production function it's about you having an engineering degree from
MIT how has it influenced how you think about the law oh well so I went from engineering to philosophy to law and you know you could call it a random walk or you could say that I'm really interested in the structure of things and I think that my the analytic tools that I learned as an engineer or definitely informed the way I think about legal issues is it efficient to graduate with the highest grade possible from Yale Law
School as you did or is that inefficient well so Nate I didn't know the answer to that I guess it had some benefit I think it helped me get a clerkship the Supreme Court that was kind of fun and probably helped me give with the academic jobs so for me it's been probably overall efficient but I know that anyone cares that much what did you learn clerking from Judge Guido Calabresi I mean many
things but what is what stands out so Guido has been a mentor to me both as a lawyer as a thinker but also personally you know he married he performed the wedding for me and my husband he's been involved in my life since I don't know that I have one message but maybe partly it's actually about being a serious legal thinker and a human being I mean he has a remarkably rich and full life and cares enormous ly
about people and that's been a wonderful thing to see and try to live up to at clerking for Stephen Breyer he again he's a remarkable wonderful man and a hugely human human being Stephen Breyer one of the things that's great about him is that he is exactly the same person on the bench off the bench on in media and you know in with his children and so he's a role model as a person but as a one of the things he taught me about
writing that actually affects my academic work most is that from engineering I learned to start with an outline and decide what I wanted to say and then write all the sections to meet my outline and Justice Breyer taught me to figure out but to just write all my paragraphs and then work backwards to figure out what I had to say after the fact you've qualified four times for the USA Triathlon national championships
that was planned to go I was planning to go this year you know I've qualified but I don't usually go to the age group nationals because it's a big hall and you know be away from my family for days but this year I was planning to go and compete in August but obviously almost everything shut down there are no races this year and last question I'm sure you have many great very very smart law students but
what is it you look for to see if one of them might be a promising future legal scholar as you are what traits so the two things I look for most in a legal scholar one is you know I want to see someone who's a dog with a bone I want to see someone who just has a set of questions even if it's on a different related some set of fundamental questions that bothers them enough that they just have to keep coming back to
them again and again and then maybe if I can mix my metaphors I want to make sure that bone is a rich mcvane to mind you know I want to know that that's gonna yield results over years and years and so when I see those two things that kind of desperate need to chew and something that's likely to pay off in in learning something more about the world then I say that person's gonna go someplace Rachael Harmon thank you very much thank you