Robert Evans and Jason Petty trace American policing to 1704 Carolina slave patrols, which enforced curfews and used bloodhounds to terrorize Black populations. They detail how these counterinsurgency forces evolved into modern departments, citing a 2014 DOJ report where Ferguson police maimed 100% of dog victims who were Black. Rejecting the "bad apples" theory, they argue systemic legal orders sustain this violence, linking antebellum indemnity to contemporary impunity. Ultimately, the episode concludes that policing is a man-made construct requiring radical redesign to separate traffic safety from criminal enforcement. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Dumpster Fire in the Forest00:09:05
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You doctored this particular test twice and sells, correct?
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As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
Did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
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Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit podcast, How Men Think.
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Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, everyone.
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, which is normally a show about the worst people in all of history.
And I guess it still is.
But recent world events have compelled us to create a special mini-series behind the police where we are going to be giving a detailed history of American policing.
All the good, the bad, and mostly mostly the bad and the ugly.
It's mostly bad and mostly ugly.
And in order to help me give this story and tell it to the world, my guest today and for the next couple of weeks is Jason Petty, better known as Propaganda.
Jason, you are a hip-hop artist and a podcast host.
Yeah.
How are you doing, man?
Hey, man.
You know, West West and the world's on fire, but NASCAR stops flying Confederate flags.
So that's a thing.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
We're in a weird moment right now.
I just like snag a picture of 2020 and just and like send it to yourself in 2018 and go, what stupid director wrote this storyline?
Yeah.
You know?
It's it's wild.
And like the wildest thing about it is that I think we were all at this point of getting like just completely exhausted by like this constant parade of like bad news and like political malfeasance and like horrible things being done by people in power.
And nobody was able to get on the same page about really anything.
And then all of a sudden, you know, after the Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd and that video came out, for like the first time in a long time, almost everyone, like most people got broadly onto the same page.
I mean, we weren't even on the same page about a virus.
Yeah.
Like it's like something that I don't give no shits about what political stance you are going to kill you either way.
We couldn't even agree on that.
Yeah.
But then this happened.
I was like, we could agree that Black Lives Matter for real?
That's what we're finally agreeing on?
Yeah.
It's good.
Broadly good.
Like I'm kind of, I'm, I'm recording this from outside of the, what will surely probably not exist by the time this airs, but was briefly the Seattle, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
I went to check that out for a couple of days.
Yes, it's been wild.
I wish you could talk to me a little more about like, there's got to be some sort of version of Behind the Bastards that is the Northwest.
Yeah.
It's like, it's definitely a tale of two cities up there.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've been getting tear gassed in Portland for days, and they were in Seattle too, but then they succeeded in getting their police to like pull out of a precinct, which is wild.
And now the cops are back.
So it didn't last.
But like, yeah.
And you've been on the ground in Los Angeles attending some of the protests, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah.
How have you felt about that?
Dude, it's like, obviously the sheer volume.
I mean, because I was here for the, you know, for the LA riots.
You know what I'm saying?
So the sheer volume of people, the amount of sustained energy has been like, maybe something's different.
You know what I'm saying?
The amount of diversity in the streets has been like, yo, maybe I guess after having to like take it to the streets since the day after Trump was elected, you know what I'm saying?
From the woman's march all the way to the school shootings to the to the climate to the like there's no to the damn Muslim ban.
It's just like at some point we were just like, okay, enough is a damn nuff.
But like to be fully transparent, I think I echo like the sounds of people who've been in like justice work for a while where like your arms are still kind of folded on the side like, okay, are you going to be here next week?
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, you like this song, but are you going to stay for the concert?
Like, this is a long concert.
You feel me?
Yeah, yeah, it's a long, and I guess that's kind of why we're doing, you know, after like two weeks almost in the streets reporting on that, I kind of felt like the thing to do was to try to, because I guess it's, I think it's wrong to say that we're all on the same page.
We're all reading the same book, and the book is titled The Police Are Murdering a Whole Ton of Black People and also doing a Bunch of Other Messed Up Stuff.
And it feels like for a lot of folks, the first time they opened that book was because they went out to a protest and they got tear guessed and suddenly were like confronted by the violence of American policing.
So I think now is a good time to go into a really deep history of American policing and let people know where all this came from because this didn't.
Yeah.
There's so this I and I and I know what I love about your show is I think why it rained so true with me.
It was like, it's this stuff that like when we might be looking at the same dumpster fire, but I'm looking at it with a hundred years of history to know like, I actually know what I'm looking at.
Ancient Roots of Policing00:15:51
You know what I'm saying?
And like, y'all think I'm making this shit up.
Like, I'm not, like, I swear to you, I'm not making this up.
Like, just learn more and you'll stare at this dumpster fire like I am.
Yeah.
So let's stare at the dumpster fire and really just, yeah.
I'll get into the story.
Yes.
As a side note, your camera is phenomenal.
Like, what's up with this depth of feel on your oh boy?
That's great, man.
It's like blurry in the back.
Like, look at this.
Oh, yeah, dude.
Yeah, that's so people don't see all of my all of my illegal artwork that's on the walls behind me.
Yeah.
Very erotic.
Yeah.
See my bed here is where all the magic happens.
And by magic, I mean snoring and my daughter kicking me and my wife in our ribs.
Anyway.
Yeah.
So, um, yeah, I guess let's get into it.
So obviously, like the idea of law, of there being laws that people could break and be punished, that's existed for a while.
We all remember hearing about Hammurabi's code and stuff like back in school.
But throughout history, a surprising amount of societies, probably most of them, have lacked anything that we would recognize as like a police force in like an organized and kind of a modern sense of the word.
Like a lot of times you'd have like the, you know, you'd have a military that would enforce some rules for like the king or whoever, but you didn't have like beat cops rolling around, you know, scanning neighborhoods.
Now, the ancient Egyptians had something that might be seen as kind of a predecessor to the police.
It was a small dedicated force regarding the tombs of the wealthy as well as their businesses, which will be something of a pattern throughout the episode here.
Africa invents everything.
Let's just go back.
That's the pattern.
Anyway, go on.
Including policing for the wealth.
Including policing.
They can't all be winners.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not all writing.
Yes.
So some ancient Greek city-states, including Athens, had what you might call a proto-police force as well.
And in Athens, this force was kind of geared towards protecting markets and keeping an eye on untrustworthy foreigners.
So it was a little bit like, you know, a mix between normal police and ICE.
Now, this was not considered to be an honorable job.
As historian P.K. Bailey noted in a 1928 lecture, quote, even in the enlightened democracy of Athens in the fifth century BC, no free citizen was prepared to serve in that capacity.
And such police force as there was consisted of foreigners with the status of slaves who were the property of the states.
In Greece, generally, very few of the states seem to have made any provision at all, so far as is known, for the ordinary policing of their cities.
Though the state of Sparta certainly had a very efficient system of secret police.
This is really interesting to me, especially because of what comes next.
So, Sparta really seems to be like some of the first police that are very similar.
You can draw a direct line from the Spartan secret police to the origins of American policing, which we're going to get to in a little bit.
Because the secret police of Sparta existed for one purpose and one purpose only, and it was to clamp down on any hint of rebellion from the vast majority of the nation's populace.
See, only about one in seven Spartans were like the guys from 300, right, that everybody knows, like with the abs and the spears.
The vast majority of the population were HELOTS.
They were slaves, basically.
They were slaves.
They were just straight up slaves.
Like, it was a slave empire, Sparta was.
The vast majority of people in the country were slaves.
And the Spartan like leadership and the Spartan citizens spent all of their time terrified of slave rebellions.
That's why the Spartan army didn't actually leave the country all that often because they'd get uprisen.
Yeah.
So they had all these slaves and they had to like clamp down on them.
And they established a secret policing force called the Cryptea, which was made up of young men who had just finished the basics of their military training.
So once a year, Sparta would elect a council of five Ephors or leaders.
And as part of a ritual, these Ephors would begin their term by declaring war on the Hilot population.
They did this every year.
Like every year, we declare war on our slaves.
So the Spartans had crips, is what you're telling me.
They did, they did.
Yeah.
What were they called again?
Cryptea.
Yeah.
The crips.
So they had crips.
So that's so there was the boys in blue.
I'm telling you, man, like this stuff has been going on for a long time.
The other boys in blue.
And they were trying to keep the slaves.
They were trying to keep the slaves from rebelling.
Everybody tucked that back in.
Tuck that away for a second.
Keep that in your head.
Keep that in your head.
So every year, these elected leaders, you know, formally declare war on the HELOTs.
And it's something of like a ritual.
And this ritual is based around keeping them from rebelling.
So the Kryptea would be sent out to wander barefoot, armed with knives, into the countryside.
And they would seek out the strongest and the smartest of the HELOTs, their slaves, and they would murder them in the night, culling the population of any potential leaders.
That like every year we go out, we find the smart ones and we kill them so they can't rise up against us.
What the?
How is this efficient?
Y'all telling me this is the pinnacle of Western civilization.
That's where all the Western civilization is trying to be.
Okay, got it.
It does make it kind of appropriate when you could.
A lot of American police officers wear like Spartan helmet patches now.
It's like, yeah, okay.
Little on the nose.
A little on the nose, fellas.
Yeah.
Now, I should note here that there's actually, there is quite a lot of historical debate about the cryptea.
Some scholars agree with defining them as a secret police, as a force to keep the HELOTs in line through regular murder.
Victor Davis Hansen, who's a pretty prominent pop historian, compares them to the Gestapo.
But other historians will argue that the Kryptea were less of like a policing force and more of a guerrilla military unit, an auxiliary to the regular Spartan military that sort of also acted as kind of an advanced training program designed to blood new warriors by like giving them easy kills to help them get over any hesitation they might have to do violence.
And I don't think these two views are necessarily in conflict.
The Kryptea seem to have been like a dedicated guerrilla army meant to suppress dissent against the ruling class by doing violence to the impoverished majority who produced all of Sparta's value.
In this, they fulfilled a role not very different from a lot of police forces in Western history.
Yeah, just guys he can't make this stuff up, man, because we can't make this up.
Bro, I want to, I made myself today.
I was like, okay, I'm going to do a longer meditation.
I'm going to do some yoga.
I am going to prepare myself for the amount of things you finna tell me right now.
And none of it worked because I still picked a fight with my wife today.
It was like, I'm sorry, babe.
We're about to talk about the ancient police, okay?
So I'm sorry.
And for the record, fuck the ancient police.
You know what?
You know what I'm saying?
Ancient NWA.
Like, you feel me?
What are they?
The Roman Republic didn't have any kind of like formal. national police force for most of its history.
And Rome, which was like the biggest city in the ancient world for most of the time that it was like kind of the center of the world, lacked anything that we would describe as like police.
As Rome grew to become the largest city in its era, crime became an increasing problem.
The wealthy were able to use vast networks of clients.
Romans had this weird system whereby like if you were rich, you gave money to a bunch of people who had less and they all had to like kind of have your back.
Like everybody had a posse in ancient Rome.
That's the way to look at it.
Like every rich people had squads.
Yeah, everybody had like a big ass squad.
And so the wealthy were able to use these big ass squads to like, you know, defend themselves from aggression and murder their political enemies, protect them in the streets and stuff.
Meanwhile, organized criminals and gangs did basically the same thing.
And there wasn't really a big difference between like the rich and their squads and like criminal gangs.
They were kind of the same thing.
Now, victims of crimes had to either get revenge themselves or whip up a mob of their fellow citizens to help them in this task.
There was a lot of whipping up of mobs in ancient Rome.
Why do I, I could just, it just makes, it just, it just tracks.
Yeah.
Like that just tracks so well, you know?
Yeah, we've always been the same species.
We the same.
We are the same.
But one of the best, my history professor in college, one of the best thing he said to me was like, if you want to know what happened in history, think about what you would do.
You know what I'm saying?
It's just us then.
What would you do?
It's history is us them.
Yeah.
And in ancient Rome, like the kind of graffiti networks they had really did act a lot like social media does, to the extent that, like kind of famous and powerful people would use like graffiti to get like shitloads, like to kind of do the same thing that, like people who get pissed off online and have a following can do like, but with a literal mob as opposed to an online.
I'm gonna literally cancel you ancient style.
Yeah, i'm gonna cancel you by having 400 dudes stab you repeatedly.
We're talking about the government.
Like the government, it was just kind of everyone.
Yeah, it's kind of everybody.
Uh Seneca, a Roman philosopher in this period, described street life in Rome this way, some things will be thrown at you, some will hit you um, which you know yeah, Rome's first emperor Augustus when, like the whole republic thing ended uh, he established what's generally recognized as the city's first police force, and it would be fairer to describe them as like a fire department that also did some policing.
Um, they were called the vigils um, and they stood watch at night and mainly kind of looked out for fires and attempted to stop the city from burning down, because that was like a huge problem in Rome yeah, and the vigils were armed though, and they were drilled in a similar way to Soldiers, you know, they used artillery to shoot dampening materials onto fires, but they also had the right to enforce laws and had the right to enter private homes to capture thieves, return runaway slaves, and generally ensure order.
So, kind of like a fire department mixed with a police force.
And this system didn't really spread widely throughout the Roman Empire, but broadly similar systems were established in a number of European cities intermittently over the centuries.
The night watchmen was kind of the most common way that this would wind up happening.
And these were just, you know, in most of Europe, members of the community who like would rotate through the job of defending their town or city from external threats like invaders and internal threats like fire.
Their primary job was to give alarm to kind of get like everybody together so that they could deal with whatever problem happened in the night.
And most of what we today would recognize as law enforcement was handled by citizens watching over their own communities.
The English called this kin police, as it was generally seen as the responsibility of individual families to watch out for and police their family members, right?
You know, there's nothing centralized really in a lot of this period.
You know, the Middle Ages and shit, whatever you want to call it.
Yeah.
So starting with watch your people.
Yeah.
Hey, man, get your boy.
Get your boy.
Whose man's is this?
You know what I'm saying?
I love it.
Yeah.
It makes sense.
Yeah.
It kind of does.
Yeah.
So starting in the Middle Ages, like kind of the late Middle Ages, English communities began to develop something called the Franck Pledge system.
Now, this was a structure by which small groups of men could enforce the law in communities.
And it was based around 10-man groups called tithings, which were themselves grouped into hundreds and then shires, which were similar to modern counties.
So if you're wondering, we're like the Lord of the Rings, why they call it the Shire, that was like an old English word for a county.
Yeah.
Now, the person who was in charge.
Yeah, yeah.
So the person who was in charge of all of the different tithings, those 10-man groups in a shire, was called the Shire Reeve.
And that's where the word sheriff comes from, is like the head of this like shire kind of community protection group, the shire reeve, the sheriff.
And that's why the sheriffs run the county.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Wow.
Yeah.
So that's where that comes back to.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It makes sense.
Yeah.
And so far, we're like, this isn't something you can really like, obviously, like the Spartan police is terrible, but like this makes sense.
Like, yeah, you take care of your community, like everybody kind of rotates through it.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hard to be angry at it.
Nah.
Individuals within tithings were expected to apprehend criminals and bring them to court, and shire reeves oversaw their work.
When Europeans began, you know, genociding and conquering North America, they brought variants of this system and other kind of similar systems developed in other parts of Europe with them.
Policing in the colonies, which we're broadly referring to like mainly North America here.
Like I'm not really, I don't have the time to like talk about like what went on in South America, like Central America.
We're talking about like kind of the particularly the English-speaking colonies that started on the East Coast.
Policing in those colonies fell into two broad categories, known to historians as the watch and the big stick.
And I'm going to quote next from a paper on the history of U.S. policing by Dr. Gary Potter of Eastern Kentucky University.
Quote: The watch system was composed of community volunteers whose primary duty was to warn of impending danger.
Boston created a night watch in 1636, New York in 1658, and Philadelphia in 1700.
The night watch was not a particularly effective crime control device.
Watchmen often slept or drank on duty.
While the watch was theoretically voluntary, many volunteers were simply attempting to evade military service, were conscripts forced into service by their town or performing watch duties as a form of punishment.
And I have to say, again, last night I was kind of hanging out in the autonomous zone and I volunteered to do a shift on the night watch.
And I was definitely drinking.
Broke.
You know, we Look, in the hood, you know, again, like the pot we build is called hood politics.
This is the pod our host.
And one of the things is like, I just feel like, okay, no matter how unique our experience is, like you said, we're kind of, we're still all the same species, right?
So when we talk about like neighborhood pigeons, right?
I mean, there's a misogynistic version of that.
And then there's the other part that we would call the pigeon stool, which is like... the guy who's supposed to sit at the edge of the street to make sure to see if the cops are coming.
Yeah.
Right.
So that's your pigeon stool.
Right.
And he's drunk all the time.
He's drunk and like falling asleep.
And it's just so normal.
And the hope is to do that because it's the easiest because it's odds are nobody coming.
You know, so you could just sit over there and just kind of like, he's trying to holler at girls.
Like, you know, and it's just on the one off chance that the police actually come around.
I mean, that's your life.
But most of the time, that's not going to happen.
Yeah.
Just sit there and drink and smoke.
Fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Keep an eye on things, but not all that.
Just make sure everybody just make sure mama not coming.
You know?
Yeah.
So these kind of watch systems that started, you know, hitting the colonized Northeast were more similar to the pseudo-police system that you saw in ancient Athens than anything else.
And, you know, kind of the other side of this was the big stick system.
And this was the first real example of for-profit policing.
We're not going to go into tremendous detail about it in this episode.
We're going to talk about it a lot more in our next episode, but I'm going to give an overview here.
So when we're talking about the colonies, we're talking about a very unregulated market for law enforcement in a lot of ways.
There's not an organized centralized police, but there are merchants who have a lot of property.
And those merchants want to make sure their property doesn't get stolen, either when it's in transit or when it's in a shop.
Merchants and Constables Unite00:05:55
And so, you know, they have constables in these towns.
And constables are either appointed kind of in like a rotating basis.
So like you do your brief period of time as constable or you're elected to be constable.
It was kind of, they did it a couple of different ways.
And as a general rule, because constables weren't really paid, like they had to develop services that they would sort of sell to people in order to make the job worthwhile.
So sometimes they acted as land surveyors.
They would verify the accuracy of scales, but they would also get paid directly by the merchants they were protecting.
And so as a general rule, these constables were really just hired muscle for the business leaders in these communities.
And they would be paid by the people.
They weren't being paid by the state to enforce justice.
They were being paid by people with money to enforce debts, to punish theft, and to even intimidate rival business owners, right?
Goons.
Yeah, they're goons.
They're good.
They're hired goons.
And obviously, as you caught by calling them hired goons, this was not seen as an honorable job.
People didn't really want to be a constable, right?
Like there was no blue lives back in the way shit.
Yeah, yeah, I had no hashtags.
Yeah.
So historian Gary Potter notes that constables and night watch officers, quote, didn't want to wear badges because these guys had bad reputations to begin with.
And they didn't want to be identified as people that other people didn't like.
So there was a strong resistance with early law enforcement of being identified as law enforcement because nobody liked you.
Now, some towns in colonial North America made service in the watch compulsory.
Rich people tended to pay poor people to take their shifts for them.
And Potter notes that these substitutes were usually, quote, a criminal or a community thug.
Yeah.
Again, it all tracks.
Yeah, that scans.
Yeah.
It's all scans.
In 1829, back over in England, Sir Robert Peel, who was the Home Secretary of England, introduced the bill for improving the police in and near the metropolis.
Now, the goal of this was to take the airsat system of watchmen and the like and formalize them into a real police force.
And the London Metropolitan Police are generally recognized to be the very first modern police department in history.
And Peel, he's an interesting guy.
He felt that the job of police should be to prevent crime rather than to punish it.
Because that's kind of what, you know, all these constables, something got stolen, you'd get paid to go like fuck up the person who stole it, right?
But like they weren't really preventing crime.
So Peel was like, what if we tried to stop crimes?
And he felt the best way to achieve that goal was with regular visible patrols of officers from a formal centralized apartment with uniforms and ranks and a clear physical headquarters so that people like knew those aren't just dudes.
Like those are the police and they're like a part of the state.
Now, Peel felt that it was critical that only calm, even-tempered citizens should be police officers.
He felt they needed, again, what a thought.
Yeah, what a thought.
Yeah.
Yeah, that one didn't really spread.
I don't know much about the London police, but it didn't make it across the pond.
It just, there's a few things they threw out the bay with the bathwater in this situation.
I get it.
You didn't want to have a king anymore.
You know, you didn't like the tea.
I get it.
But like, maybe having a calm police force wasn't a bad idea.
You took part of the Magna Carta.
You was like, yo, this kind of seems like a good idea.
Maybe y'all should have taken that one too.
Yeah, and I did recently watch, like, again, the London police have done a lot of messed up stuff too, even with some of the recent protests.
But I did watch that when they threw the statue of that slaveholder into the bay in Bristol, into the channel.
I watched an interview with the local constable or whatever he was, like the local police chief type guy in Bristol, because he was being asked by the news, like, why he didn't stop it.
And his answer was basically like, well, you know, I'm a cop, so obviously I'm not okay with property destruction, but we had a choice to like, like our choice was to either let it happen or like basically fuck up people to protect the statue.
And I felt like that would be bad for community trust in the police.
See, that's a pretty reasonable attitude.
That's sticking on your feet, man.
Like, you feel me?
Like, yeah.
And he's like, what do I care about this statue?
You know what I'm saying?
So, yeah, Peel had some other ideas too.
Again, he felt that like police needed uniforms with badges that had visible display numbers.
So he was the idea like police should have badge numbers so that you can identify if you encounter a police officer, you can identify them.
He also felt that police should not carry firearms.
And again, that's like still kind of broadly applied in a lot of English policing.
Now, some of Peel's ideas quickly spread.
Obviously, not the thing.
Well, we'll talk about that again in part two.
American police didn't initially have guns.
In 1838, though, the city of Boston became the first U.S. city to establish a modern police force.
Now, the creation of the Boston police, which we'll talk about a bit more in our next episode, was driven by largely a capitalist necessity to protect the property of big business.
Boston merchants had been paying constables and the like to protect their goods for years, and they pushed for the establishment of a formal police force in order to shift the burden of paying for this onto the public, arguing that such a force would be for the collective good.
So now we, the merchants, still get our stuff protected, but we don't have to pay every, or we, you know, we pay a little bit, but we pay a lot less because everybody's paying for these guys to protect our stuff.
Yeah.
So that's interesting.
Now, we'll return to these northern police.
And again, our second episode is going to cover more of that because while the Boston police are the first modern department in history, the roots of many U.S. police departments go back much further than 1838.
And I think a lot of folks have heard, you know, through social media or whatever in the last couple of weeks as we've gone through this uprising, the idea that American police started out with slave patrols.
And that's what we're going to talk about now.
And that's partly accurate.
Northern Police Evolution00:04:15
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Fast Internet with AT&T Fiber00:03:33
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All U.S. police started as slave patrols because obviously in the North, they didn't have, you know, slave patrols, really.
They had, you know, it was a different route in the North.
But in the American South, policing absolutely did grow out of slave patrols.
And it, you know, it came out, and you can draw a line between the two because obviously the first police departments in the North come out of a desire from people with money and property and shops to protect their property.
And in the American South, policing also grew out of a desire for people with money to protect their property, but that property was enslaved human beings.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, who doesn't establish slave patrols?
Well, that's not, man.
I don't know.
I don't know, man.
I think you never know, bro.
You never know.
You never know, man.
Yeah.
You know who historically might have tried to establish police departments to protect, God, this is...
I'm not doing great with this.
Hey, you know who.
Nah, I got none either, man.
I'm sorry.
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Slave Patrol Origins Exposed00:15:22
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We are back.
Yeah, so we're getting into, we're talking slave patrols now.
We're talking slave patrols.
Yes.
So the first slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704, 126 years before Boston got its police force.
And this is, again, we're not even North or South Carolina yet.
They hadn't gotten that far, but they knew they wanted Carolinas.
Yeah, we were clear on that, and they were clear that they wanted slave patrols in those Carolinas.
And slave patrol.
Sweet Caroline.
Yeah, I know.
Sorry, dude.
Sorry, man.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
First, I was going to go, oh, Carolina, but I was like, that's probably not going to land as well as Sweet Carolina.
Sweet Carolina.
Yeah.
I think you read the room right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So slave patrols had three jobs, to chase down, apprehend, and return escaped slaves to their owners, and to discipline slave laborers via violence if they broke plantation rules, and to act as an organized and constant form of state-endorsed terror in order to stop American slaves from revolting.
Now, white Southerners lived in pretty much constant fear of slave uprisings.
The Haitian Revolution, which started in 1791, and again, it's very complicated.
The Revolutions podcast by I think Mike Duncan as his name does a great job of breaking this down.
But the end result of it is that black enslaved people rose up and murdered many of their masters.
And they also, to make this very complicated, a lot of their masters were also colored people.
It's a very complicated story.
Yeah, this is twisted.
It's really twisted.
Supremacy just really scrambles your brain, man.
Yeah, it sure does.
A side note about Haitians.
Did you know that that's where the word zombie came from?
I do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a neat story.
It just came from a zombie.
Yeah.
And it is.
Yeah, there's kind of like some.
I'm sorry, Sophie.
It's history.
I'm just hoping he doesn't sing that.
She knows I'm going to start singing the cranberry song, zombie, but I'm not.
Oh, that's what that was?
Yeah.
It's like, Sophie got triggered, y'all.
I was like, he's going to sing to me again, please.
Okay.
It is kind of neat.
I don't know.
Neat may be the wrong word, but I do think like you can, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems like you might be able to draw kind of a line and sort of the impetus behind or like why kind of these, like where the zombie sort of myth came from in Haitian culture and it's like roots, to like the enslavement of black bodies and like kind of what, the like, what was kind of depicted in, Get Out like I yes yeah, it is.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of ties to that too where you're just like you're a shell of who you are.
So they were like they look like they're working, but they look like there's nothing, no life, behind their eyes and it's like well fool duh, you know saying, of course, there's not like this.
Is there anything more hopeless than where I am right now?
You know yeah, and it was.
You know what.
What scared white people so much about the Haitian Revolution is that it kind of proved that like, oh no, that light is still in there.
Like you can, you can beat them down pretty bad, But like it never goes away.
And like if we're not careful, that'll happen here and they'll kill us all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, unfortunately, the Haitian Revolution remains the only successful slave revolt in Western history.
I think maybe the only definitely the most successful slave rebellion anywhere in history, really.
At least based on like the, yeah, as far as like shadow slavery and like the transatlantic slave trade, that's the only one that worked.
Yeah.
Which is a, it's, I mean, it's good that it worked.
It's a bummer it didn't work elsewhere.
Um, but the memory of this one successful uprising was really lodged deep in the psyche of white southerners and it scared the shit out of them.
Yeah.
Um, and you can you can hear echoes of that in the slave patroller's oath from North Carolina in 1828.
And I'm gonna read that now.
Wait, let me take a deep breath before you do it.
Yeah.
Okay, go for it.
Yeah.
I, patrollers name, do swear that I will, as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district, faithfully and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs to the best of my power.
So help me God.
So again, what they're looking for here, they're trying to stop a rebellion.
So searching for weaponry is kind of like one aspect of how they did this.
But really, the thing they did the most was beat the ever-living shit out of slaves.
Yeah.
Now, in most of the South, working in these slave patrols was an obligation for white men, similar to compulsory military service.
And in most of the slave states, it was kind of broadly mixed between rich people and poor people.
So like a lot of slave patrollers didn't actually own slaves because they were poor white dudes.
But it was kind of seen as a broad duty for white people to be in the slave patrols, for white men to kind of rotate through.
Now, rich people could in some places like basically pay a fine in order to not volunteer in the slave patrol.
And it was also not uncommon for like wealthy white dudes and who were ironically the folks who owned the most slaves to pay to have poorer white men take their place.
South Carolina was unique in allowing white women to be called up for service in slave patrols.
So that's woke.
Like, right?
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
You pick your oppression and you're just like, this is the one I'm going to fight for.
It's like cheering when the CIA puts a woman in charge.
It's like, we did it.
Hey, you got to come along the way.
Yeah.
I always say that, like, I always say, you know, obviously reading the room, like, I don't have to tell y'all this, but like, just the difference between white people and whiteness, you know, it's like, it's a thing.
Whiteness is a thing.
It's itself.
It's booked and, you know, cooked into white supremacy.
And from my vantage point, it's like just how detrimental that is to the psychology of white people also.
You know what I'm saying?
Like how, yeah, like you just, this rich dude hires this poor dude, right?
So now the poor dude feels like, oh, I'm a little more important now.
You know what I'm saying?
But like, fam, you, he don't, that man don't respect you.
That man don't love you.
I will make you think he don't like you want you us.
You one of us, fool.
You know what I'm saying?
He's throwing you.
You chump change to do a shit job that he thinks he better people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm going to oppress you so you could turn around and oppress somebody else because the reality is I'm better than you.
And it's just like it scrambles.
It just, it just, it turns your brain to a pretzel.
Just does.
Yeah.
I'm not a not a fan.
I'm going to be on record about that, taking a bold stance.
Yes.
And I am a fan of you too.
The band and the two people I'm looking at.
I am a fan of y'all.
All right.
Anyway.
So yeah, South Carolina let ladies be in the slave patrols.
And I'm not sure if they ever actually really did serve in them because they had the option to pick a male from their family to go in as a substitute.
So I do think that happened more often.
There may have been someone on the road with us.
I can't tell you.
But yeah, in some states, they were kind of more of like an airsat sort of force that was kind of cobbled together.
In some states, they were a professional paid institution that was like really kind of formalized.
In some states, their membership was culled from local militias.
So they were different.
They weren't all like, they weren't a uniform thing.
But kind of the way they worked over the decades that slavery was a factor in the South, the way they worked kind of did become formalized.
Now, historian Sally Hayden's book, Slave Patrols, is probably the most comprehensive history yet written about these organizations, whatever you want to call them.
She argues that in most cases, slave patrols consisted of members of all social classes.
White people were more or less unified in their obligation to suppress the black population and thus guarantee white supremacy.
One piece of evidence Hayden or Haddon cites to support this is an 1845 letter from a former South Carolina governor to a visiting English abolitionist.
Quote, With us, every citizen is concerned in the maintenance of order and in promoting honesty and industry among those of the lowest class who are our slaves.
And our habitual vigilance renders standing armies, whether of soldiers or policemen, entirely unnecessary.
Small guards in our cities and occasional patrols in the country ensure us a repose and security known nowhere else.
What?
Yeah, that's how this governor felt.
Or at least that's what he wanted.
And again, he's talking to an abolitionist from England here.
So this is kind of the propaganda spin of the slave patrols.
You don't have to have an army or police because our only danger is from these black people, right?
Like that's what he's saying.
Oh, yeah.
That's wow.
Yeah.
Interesting.
It's a brain pretzel, man.
Yeah, it sure is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So again, in all states, slave patrols did the same basic work, which included enforcing the curfew that slaves lived under, checking, which is talking about curfews.
Yeah, fucking curfew.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Checking traveling slaves for permission passes, breaking up unlawful assemblies of slaves, and of course, searching for weapons.
Yeah.
Just, okay.
Yeah.
I'm going to need you to, I'm going to need you to define your terms here, you know, overseer.
Like, what do you mean by unlawful gathering?
Yeah.
This ain't my house.
This ain't my land.
I'm not even my own.
Tell me what, I mean, what do you, where do you want us to stand?
Where do you want us to stand so that you don't feel scared?
Yeah, that really is what it like comes down to.
Like, where do we, what, what can we do to not scare you?
Do you want us to just turn off after we're done farming?
Yeah, then if that's the case, you should have just hired animals.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, true.
That's how they felt.
Yeah.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah, historian Sally Hayden writes in her book Slave Patrols, quote, the history of police work in the South grows out of this early fascination by white patrollers with what African American slaves were doing.
Most law enforcement was, by definition, white patrolmen watching, catching, or beating black slaves.
And I do find that really interesting because that's a through line right up to today.
This fascination.
Never stopped.
Yeah.
Never stopped, guys.
Yeah.
And I like the way she describes it, this fascination with what African Americans were doing, right?
Like that's what the origin of policing in the South.
Have you heard of the phrase like, it's in like feminism also, but the phrase the male gaze.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So like in the same thing in like black activism spaces where it's like the white gaze.
Yeah.
You're just like, what are you looking at all the damn time?
Like, good Lord, just make something up yourself.
Like, why?
Like, just can you go do something?
Like, you know, I think you said in one of your, one of the episodes, because I am an actual fan, listeners, I listen to the show, like, that you were just like, if we could just give just like white kids some cosplay that's like you're allowed to just like shoot things into an open space.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, then maybe you wouldn't just be so worried about like what I'm doing right now.
You know?
Yeah.
Like that's, that's, I, I do think Warida, which is, you know, our plan to wall off Florida and turn it into a free fire zone for just once a war.
Yeah.
As long as we like cover like Miami.
Yeah.
Just can we keep Miami?
Yeah, we can keep Miami.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We have to protect Orlando free.
We have to protect Orlando real quick so that I can watch the NBA playoffs.
All right.
Well, we're rapidly chiseling away at this point.
This is not as fun, man.
Yeah.
Orlando's too far inland.
Yeah, we'll find a war state.
We'll figure it out.
Maybe the panhandle.
Can we go like the Texas panhandle?
Yeah.
Nobody likes that.
Yeah.
Nobody likes it.
Turn Abilene into a free fire zone.
Why is Abilene a city anyway?
We don't need Abilene.
There should not be a city here.
Yes.
Yeah.
I'd apologize to the Abilene listeners, but there's no one listening from Abilene.
Four of you.
You all laughed.
You're in Dallas now because you realize Abilene shouldn't exist.
Abilene, the place where you will absolutely get pulled over if you drive through, just because there's nothing else for the cops to do.
Nothing else to do.
Abilene, where as soon as you're 18, we'll see you later.
Yeah, get out of there.
Just you're leaving.
Yeah.
So the violence meted out by slave patrols was neither random nor disorganized.
Slave patrollers had the right to detain, interrogate, and search slave quarters.
They were allowed to seize property at will, which you could see is kind of an early form of civil asset forfeiture.
They also had the right to punish black people on the spot for infractions of slave laws.
Now, physical punishment could be dealt out via firearms, but was usually dealt out by what were called either Negro whips or Negro dogs.
And I probably don't need to explain what Negro dogs were, but they're large bloodhounds that patrollers use both to track down slaves and to horribly maim them.
And that is the term that historians use for these is Negro dogs, because that's what they were called by, yeah.
So we're talking mostly about slave patrols, and there's a lot of other areas I could get into detail, and I just don't have the time to, but I should note here that slave patrols were not entirely the first thing kind of like slave patrols to exist in the United States.
Even before slavery was really common in the United States, U.S. settlers in New England appointed Indian constables whose job was to police Native Americans, often by violent terror.
And it's worth noting that the St. Louis police, who we'll be talking about a bit at the end here, were formed both as a slave patrol and as a patrol to defend white people against Native Americans.
So that is a big factor in a lot of this too.
You know, some of these areas, the Native populations kind of had gotten exterminated or pushed out by the time things formalized.
But in a number of particularly more, you know, quote-unquote frontiery places, slave patrols also did a lot of violence against Native Americans.
And that is an important aspect of this.
And even in the North where slave patrols weren't a thing, there were groups of vigilantes.
Well, not quite vigilantes because they were sort of part of the government whose job was to do violence to Native people.
So that is a factor in all this as well.
So yeah, if we want to be perfectly accurate, the case is less, as it's made on Twitter, that U.S. police started as slave patrols and more that U.S. police started as a series of armed groups whose central purpose was to protect white people from non-white people via violence.
That would be, yeah.
That's that, yeah, that gets your critical race theory juices going.
Yeah.
The intersectionality of oppression from the police.
Dangerous Missouri Patrols00:07:54
Like, it ain't, look, they coming for you, too.
That's always been my answer.
Look, you chilling.
They coming for you, too.
I hope you know.
Yeah.
So the institution of slave patrols evolved and formalized over time.
And for a look at how that worked, I think it'll be useful for us to zoom in on the case of my home state, Missouri.
Now, Missouri entered the Union in 1821 as a slave state, and racism was obviously baked into the new polity from the very beginning.
In 1825, the new state passed a law banning any, quote, free Negro or mulatto from coming into the state under any pretext whatsoever.
Which Oregon had a pretty similar but harsher rule after the Civil War.
So like, yeah, how racist Oregon started out as.
1825 is also the year that Missouri established its very first slave patrols.
And I'm going to quote now from a paper by Morehouse College professor Larry Spruill.
Quote, by 1845, these patrols had permission to administer from 10 to 30 lashes to slaves found strolling about from one plantation to another without pass from his master, mistress, or overseer.
Strolling about.
Yeah.
You can't go for no walk.
What's wrong with you?
And the dude can, and you could, just as what you just said, he's like, oh, no, I don't have a, like, I'm free.
I don't have a master.
Yeah.
Well, you ain't got no letter from your master.
No, sir, you're not listening to me.
I don't have a master.
You know what I'm saying?
You're breaking the law.
Well, then you don't belong in this state.
Yeah.
Yep.
All right, I guess.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
So Missouri slave patrols worked at least 12 hours a month, but also, you know, some people worked a lot more and members received about 25 cents per hour.
Now, I should note here that the patrols weren't just randomly accosting individual slaves.
Enslaved humans in the United States resisted their situation in a variety of ways.
And so there were often like, you know, minor little uprisings that slave patrols were like working to put down.
So slaves would often take crops and livestock from their masters.
They would burn fields and even plantation houses.
They would poison their masters and they would attempt uprisings.
And so like the Spartan cryptea, most of the work of slave patrols was broadly what we would call counterinsurgency today.
In many rural counties in Missouri, enslaved black persons were the majority of people and whites were well aware that they had, you know, kind of a tiger by the tail.
Spruill continues, quote, Southern whites developed a collective conscience and political consensus to tightly control blacks within their midst.
Slave policing demanded accountability for every captive's whereabouts.
A missing slave was cause for grave concern, often causing panic.
Fear of insurrection made unauthorized blacks on roads or in the public square hazardous.
Racial features made blacks visible, suspect, and vulnerable to slave patrollers looking to catch a N-word out of this place without a pass.
Just as blackness was the stigmatized identification of bondsmen, it also singled them out as suspects and criminals.
An enslaved African's phenotype marked them as a habitual dangerous class, requiring relentless supervision and policing to guarantee their submission.
Yeah, that also sounds familiar.
Yeah, that sounds familiar.
And we'll be talking, the term dangerous class is used constantly by historians who study policing in the United States.
We will be talking a lot about the idea of dangerous classes.
It's an important concept.
You don't realize how that just poisonous stain, like just that, that weird DNA strand just stayed with us to the point to where, you know, I know you're going to get to it later, but like, you know, black men, black boys being treated like adults when you're kids because you already think we're more dangerous.
And your first gun, I was, first time cop pulled a gun on me, I was 14.
And I was like, I didn't grow no facial hair.
I still had a squeaky voice.
I just was terrified.
He was talking to me like I was some hardened criminal.
And I'm like, dog, I'm a freshman.
I'm a freshman in high school.
Like, I'm scared that I'm like, my mom's going to be pissed because I'm home late.
That's what I'm scared about.
My mom is finna be pissed that I was supposed to be home at 3.45.
I'm going to get home at 4.15.
She finna be like, where the hell are you?
You know what I'm saying?
So like, I'm, I'm terrible.
And he's talking to me like I know, like, I don't even know the words he's saying.
It's because you already see us already as dangerous.
Yeah.
And yeah, this is this is like how that kind of starts and evolves and how that ball gets rolling to the boulder it is today.
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
So for a kind of another look at how people saw the slave patrols in that time, um, I want to go to a guy named Basil Hall.
He was a 19th century English traveler and author.
He visited the American South in 1829 and he wound up in Richmond, Virginia.
His recollection of how slave patrols were explained to him gives us another insight into how white people talked about this institution to other white people, which I think is compelling.
Quote, In walking around, my eyes were struck with the unusual sight of a sentinel marching with his musket.
My companion said, and his companion is a local American southerner, a white southerner, obviously.
It is necessary to have a small guard always under arms.
It is the consequence of the nature of our colored population, but it is done more as a preventative check than anything else.
It keeps all thoughts of insurrection out of the heads of the slaves and so gives confidence to those persons amongst us who may be timorous.
But in reality, there is no cause for alarm.
The blacks have become more and more sensible every day of their want of power.
After further inquiry, Hall noted, I learnt that there was in all these places and towns a vigorous and active police whose rule is that no Negro, for example, is allowed to be out of doors after sunset without a written pass from his master explaining the nature of his errand.
If, during his absence from home, he be found wandering from the proper line of his message, he is speedily taken up and corrected accordingly.
So that's a lot of that's interesting.
Like the idea that like the police are here not just to keep black people in line, but so that frightened white people don't get scared of black people.
That's an interesting part to me, too.
Yeah.
That's a good that, yeah, that layer.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
Yeah.
Yep.
I feel like it's here for the, we're here for Karens, too.
Yeah, yeah.
Hey, Karen, you can always call us.
You can always call the cops here.
Yeah, that's exactly what's going on here.
So slave patrols were generally limited to pursuing escaped slaves within their own counties.
When a slave or a group of slaves was fortunate enough to be able to move further away from wherever they were being held, bounty hunters, like slave bounty hunters, generally took on the job of attempting to track these slaves down.
And these men were allowed to cross state lines.
And their work was supported by the Fugitive Slave Act, which was passed in 1850 as part of a compromise to try and avoid a civil war.
The law mandated that all escaped slaves, if captured, be returned to their masters, even if those slaves had escaped to a free state.
Abolitionists called this the Bloodhound Bill, after the dogs that bounty hunters and slave patrollers used to track down slaves.
Solomon Northrop, author of the memoir 12 Years a Slave, gave one account of what it was like to watch patrollers with dogs hunt down an enslaved black person.
In this case, it was not even an escaped slave, but merely an individual who had broken his curfew.
Quote, one slave fled before one of these companies, thinking he could reach his cabin before they could overtake him.
But one of their dogs, a great ravenous hound, gripped him by the leg and held him fast.
The patrollers whipped him severely.
I want to be careful.
I don't want to like draw because it does a disservice to like the horrific suffering of black people in this period of time.
And today in 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
Clayton Eckard Scandal Revealed00:03:45
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Oespi and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots, get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy.
Really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Dogs Used in Enforcement00:04:15
That's so funny.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
To draw like too many direct comparisons to some of the stuff happening now, but it's not, I don't think we can go without entirely mentioning it that like probably a lot of people listening right now had violence done to them by police recently for breaking curfew.
Like that is interesting to me.
Like the obsession with curfew is a through line, right?
Yeah.
Like if you're out when you're not allowed to, we get to fuck you up.
Yeah.
And it's funny.
Like I was talking with some of my friends, my wife, even my daughter.
My daughter's old enough now to like go to protest, go to protest with us and, you know, and kind of like kind of do her own thing.
And just us at this point being like, okay, dude, are you serious?
Like, yeah, California, we just kept getting the alerts like four o'clock, five o'clock, six o'clock.
It just kept, you kept getting the amber alerts of the thing.
And it's like, dude, okay, bro, get it together.
All right.
And just talk to us later.
But it's kind of like we, we were kind of like, is this a joke, man?
Like, okay, so wait, it's a thousand dollar fine.
Okay, throw me in the paddy wagon.
Yeah.
It's a thousand dollar fine.
It's fine.
You know what I'm saying?
Maybe you're going to rough me up a little bit, but I'm black.
I'm from Los Angeles.
You've been roughing me up my whole life.
You know what I'm saying?
So for us, we were kind of like, it's kind of, it's kind of laughable.
And then you go back to like, no, it wasn't always laughable.
Yeah.
You know, like, this was terror.
Yeah.
This was absolutely terror.
And I think they would have, it's interesting that it is talked about slave patrols as like a counterinsurgency, but like the way they countered the insurgency was by being terrorists.
Like these guys are the terrorists.
Yeah.
Yes.
And that's the first police departments in a lot of ways.
It's a gentleman.
Yeah.
So Spruitt's article, which we've been quoting from, includes a number of other first-hand accounts by enslaved persons of the use of these dogs, you know, these bloodhounds, Negro dogs.
Most of these accounts were taken down during the Great Depression, which is one of the coolest things they did during the New Deal is the FDR administration sent a bunch of people out to interview former slaves who were now at that point quite old.
But that's where we get a lot of our like kind of formal stories of what it was like to be an enslaved person this period.
So thank you, the New Deal, for that particular.
It was a good call.
So one of these people who was interviewed noted, quote, in every district, they had about 12 men they call patrollers.
They ride up and down and round looking for N-words without passes.
When slaves run away, they always put the bloodhounds on the tracks.
They had the dogs trained to keep their teeth out of you till they hold them up to bring you down.
Then the dogs would go at your throat and they'd tear you to pieces too.
After a slave was caught, he was brung home and put in chains.
Yeah.
So we also have recollections of slave patrol members of their use of dogs.
One of these guys, who was a slave patroller in Louisiana in 1857, described his method of work thusly, quote, if I can catch a cussed runaway inward without killing him, very good.
Though I generally let the hounds punish him a little and sometimes give him a load of squirrel shot, which is like a light shotgun load.
If mild measures like these do not suffice, I use harsher punishment.
The moment the hounds come close, they utter a hideous and mournful howl.
Heaven pity the poor.
And then he uses the N-word again.
So, yeah.
Not a good dude.
No.
I hope he didn't make it out of that Civil War.
Yeah, I'll be honest with you.
Yeah, I hope that guy got Gettysburged.
Yeah.
I hope he met Sherman or Grant or someone.
Something.
I'm about to Gettysburg this transition.
Yeah, let's get these burgers these ads like Pickett's.
I don't know.
Fuck it.
Just run the ads.
I call the union hall.
I said it's a matter of life and death.
I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King.
Civil War Military Misconceptions00:02:39
On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis.
A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested.
He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison.
Case closed, right?
James L. Ray was a pawn for the official story.
The authorities would parade, oh, we found a gun that James L. Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King.
Except, it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King.
One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances.
This is the MLK tapes.
The first episodes are available now.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
What's up, guys?
I'm Rashad Bilal.
And I am Troy Millings, and we are the host of the Earn Your Leisure podcast, where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance.
We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in business, sport and entertainment.
From DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross, and Shaquille O'Neal.
I mean, our alumni list is expansive.
Listen in as our guests reveal their business models, hardships, and triumphs in their respective fields.
The knowledge is in-depth, and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint.
We want to know what you want to know.
We talk to the legends of business, sports, and entertainment about how they got their start and most importantly, how they make their money.
Earn your leisure is a college business class mixed with pop culture.
Want to learn about the real estate game?
Unclear is how the stock market works?
We got you.
Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business?
Not really sure about how taxes or credit work?
We got it all covered.
The Earn Your Leisure podcast is available now.
Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activist on the gender division of labor, attorney, and family mediator.
And I'm Dr. Adiden Arukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout.
We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine.
We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves.
So take this time out with us.
Listen to Time Out, a fair play podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Confederate Flags and Police00:15:33
So we're back and we're talking about the use of dogs to enforce a regime based in terrorism, otherwise known as the American South.
That's kind of what it was, guys.
Yeah.
So the horrible wounds left by these dogs fulfilled a dual purpose.
They served as a reminder of white supremacy and as an easy way to identify troublesome slaves.
Because obviously there were a ton of slaves with horrible dog scars and other black people seeing those scars.
Both would be like white people have the power because like, look at what they're, how badly all these people got fucked up.
And also it was a way for the white people to see like ah, that guy is that guy's trouble.
Like, if that was your arrest record, was the dog scars on your face?
Yeah um yeah, he's the red sports car.
Yeah, that's what the teachers, that's what the teachers tell you.
You know, you're kind of a red sports car kid.
Yeah, just like, but the cop's gonna look for you because I expect you to be fast.
Like oh yeah thanks, miss Williams.
Thank you, it's pretty obscure, deep cut, like no statement.
Yeah, but still anyway no, nobody tells white kids stuff like that.
At least I didn't hear anything like that.
You didn't hear the red carvet or the red sports car story.
I mean, I got told as a, as a young adult, I got told not to buy a red car because the police uh, cite them for speeding more often.
But like, there it is, that was my thing yeah well, that's there it is, yeah.
Yeah, it is weird that we tell people in general like don't stand out, or the yeah, I don't know, I don't want to yeah, be leaders, don't stand out, what yeah?
So um, by the onset of the Civil War, bloodhounds had grown to become the single most reliable tool of oppression in the arsenal of southern whites.
Like the dogs in particular were like the way in which, more than any other tool, white people like I think even the lash was used more as like a punishment, but like in terms of a tool of actual oppression.
Like the dogs were really like the fucking thing.
Um, and when the Civil War started, the organized and militant men of the slave patrols were all too happy to turn their counterinsurgency skills to use in a real war.
One Union field officer scouting through rebel lands in 1862 reported hearing the constant barking of hounds which had been turned towards a new use, searching for Union infiltrators.
This officer described dogs as the detective officers of slavery's police.
Confederate generals also deployed bloodhounds on the front line.
Black Union soldiers were considered fugitive slaves in arms and it was seen as only logical that these negro dogs could be used to break their will and send them fleeing from battle.
You know that these southern generals were like, they're so scared of these dogs.
If we use them against these new black military units it'll make them all run away right like, yeah, clearly they, these these guys are won't be able to handle, you know, standing up to dogs in combat yeah, this was one of many misconceptions that the south had about how things were going to go in that war.
On october 23rd 1862, the battle of Poca Toligo Bridge marked the first time black soldiers came face to face with the negro dogs of slave patrols in open combat.
The black soldiers were the men of the first South Carolina colored regiment and their field report stated that the men met these dogs with bayonets, killed four or five of their old tormentors with great relish and i'm not normally a killing dogs person, but in this case it's a good story yeah yeah, just you when you, I and I feel like knowing a little bit of your backstory.
Yeah.
You'd be surprised when a person is like fighting for their life, the amount of bravery and adrenaline that you can muster up when you're like, I'm not dying today.
Yeah.
It's not happening today.
You know, so yeah, when you, when you don't under, if you underestimate that and you just think you, you think this dog, you think this dog finna stop these men, like you think I'm worried about that little dog right now?
Nah, bro.
We got going back.
We're not going back.
We got guns now.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So fighting between Confederate units with slavehounds and black union units continued throughout the war.
In 1864, one black soldier wrote a letter back to his wife depicting one such battery.
He actually wrote her a poem, and it's a pretty cool poem.
So I'm going to read that now.
We met the bloodhounds at the bridge.
They ran with all their might.
It was a glorious sight.
We ran our bayonets through their backs.
We shot them with the gun.
It was all over with the dogs, and it was most glorious fun.
In former days, those brutes were used to hunt the flying slave.
They tracked them through their dismal swamps and little quarter gave.
But when they tried the game of war, we knocked them on the head.
We shot them quick and ran them through until every hound was dead.
Yes, good poem.
Bars.
Bars.
Yeah.
So, obviously, and spoilers here to the listeners who have not caught up to U.S. history past like 1864.
The Confederacy didn't win the war.
Despite the amount of flags that are flying and still in our country, I'll tell you, one of the, I got to watch from a distance someone in my neighborhood in Portland have a real like growth moment.
So there's this, you know, the General Lee, the car from the Yeezy Hazard that was like the Confederate flag on the hood.
I had a little Hot Wheels one.
Yeah.
Sure.
Yeah.
There was a guy who lives not far from me who has like a, who has that car, like a perfect replica of the General Lee, and it had the Confederate flag on it.
And for the first few months I lived there, I would see him driving through the streets with his big Confederate flag on his General Lee.
And about two, three months ago, I saw him driving his car, but he painted over the Confederate flag and it was just orange.
And I was like, oh, you had a, you had a figure in it now.
Yeah, you had a little moment.
Good for you.
You grew a bit.
Oh, this is fucked up.
Yes.
See, that's what I mean by the Northwest specifically portion is a tale of two cities because I'm like, there's this just bastion of like left progressive, like freedom fighting, y'all throwing like, you know, tiger claw damn like hard hard ciders at the police.
You know what I'm saying?
And then, and then there's the guy with the, and you, right, am I lying?
Am I lying?
It's a complicated place.
Yes.
No.
And then there's this guy with the Robert E. Leed with the, with the general lead.
Like, it's just, it's two cities in one place.
Some of the greatest coffee in the world.
Oh, great coffee.
Quote me.
Solid beer.
Yeah.
Quote me.
Some of the most amazing beer.
And then there's like, and then there's Salem.
And you're like, there's Salem?
What the hell happened?
Yeah.
So, um, yeah, the Confederacy lost the war.
And by 1865, both the dream of southern independence and slavery were dead.
White supremacy, though, did not die.
White people in the former Confederate states wasted no time in turning the institutions of the slave patrols into formal police departments.
In 1865, the editor of the Lynchburg, Virginian noted, which was a newspaper, noted that, quote, stringent police regulations may be necessary to keep freedmen from overburdening the towns and depleting the agricultural regions of labor.
The civil authorities should also be fully empowered to protect the community from this new imposition.
The magistrates and municipal officers everywhere should be permitted to hold a rod interrarum over these wandering idle creatures.
Nothing short of the most efficient police system will prevent strolling, vagrancy, theft, and other destruction of our industrial system.
So that's pretty clear.
That's pretty great.
It's the moment, like, so the Chappelle show years ago had a skit where he depicted the day, like, the postman comes with the letter that the slaves are free.
Right?
Like, it's one of the greatest skits.
And they're just, and he's about to whoop this, whip this guy, whoop this guy, whip this guy.
Then the postman walks up and he goes, well, apparently, apparently you guys are free.
And he just starts like looking around at all the other slaves around him.
And they're like, he's like, uh, hey, sorry about that a second ago, man.
You know, just like, so what do you do?
Like, what exactly?
So they're like, we better, you know, we better, we better get us some protection because those last hundred years were kind of shit to them.
You know?
Oh, shit.
What if they treat us even a little bit as bad as we treat them?
Yeah.
In her book, Slave Patrols, Hayden notes, quote, policemen in southern towns continued to carry out those aspects of urban slave patrolling that seemed race neutral, but in reality were applied selectively.
Police saw that nightly curfews and vagrancy laws kept blacks off city streets, just as patrollers had done in colonial and antebellum times.
In the post-war South, police were seen as the single most important method of maintaining a system of, in the words of one prominent Virginia clergyman, liberty for the white man, slavery for the inward, so long as the white man is able to hold him.
Exactly.
Now, in the textbook Policing by North Dakota State's Carol Archbold, published by Sage Press, that textbook gives a rundown of how slave patrollers transitioned into policing freed blacks in the post-war period.
And I'm going to quote from that next.
During early Reconstruction, several groups merged with what was formerly known as slave patrols to maintain order over African American citizens.
Groups such as the federal military, the state militia, and the Ku Klux Klan took over the responsibilities of earlier slave patrols and were known to be even more violent than their predecessors.
Over time, these groups began to resemble and operate similar to some of the newly established police departments in the United States.
In fact, David Barlow and Melissa Barlow note that by 1837, the Charleston Police Department had 100 officers, and the primary function of this organization was slave patrol.
These officers regulated the movements of slaves and free blacks, checking documents, enforcing slave codes, guarding against slave revolts, and catching runaway slaves.
Scholars and historians assert that the transition from slave patrols to publicly funded police agencies was seamless in the southern region of the United States.
So they just took these slave patrols.
The war's over.
Now you're cops.
That's literally how it went.
Yeah.
Now, that's not every, obviously not every police department in the South because like a lot of cities and towns that are in the South now and have police didn't exist back then.
But like, for example, the St. Louis police started as a slave patrol.
The St. Louis Police Department that existed today began as a slave patrol.
Yeah.
The current St. Louis police have their origins as a slave patrol.
So a number of the St. Louis Police Department's first officers were former bounty hunters and slave patrollers.
And they brought to their new job their old tactics, most specifically, their old tactic of using dogs to torture and terrify black people.
And here's where things get real, real, real angry, Macon.
Because the use of Negro dogs continues to this moment right now in present-day St. Louis.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Talk to me, Nellie.
Huh?
I said, talk to me, Nellie.
Oh, he's making a single show.
Stomping in your Air Force ones.
In 2014, the murder of Michael Brown by a Ferguson-St. Police officer prompted an uprising by the city's black population.
I think people are broadly familiar with this.
And this was suppressed with extreme violence.
But the whole affair forced the Department of Justice to conduct and publish an expansive report on the Ferguson Police Department's behavior.
This report concluded that, quote, the Ferguson Police Department engages in a pattern of deploying canines to bite individuals when the articulated facts do not justify the significant use of force, leaving serious puncture wounds to nonviolent offenders, some of them children.
Now, the report went on to note that Ferguson police were allowed to sick dogs on suspects when any crime, not just a felony or violent crime, has been committed.
This permissiveness, combined with the absence of meaningful supervisory review and an apparent tendency to overstate the threat based on race, has resulted in avoidable dog bites to low-level offenders.
And the DOJ report kind of uses a little bit of weasel language on this fact, but one of the things it revealed is that 100% of the people maimed by Ferguson police dogs were black.
See, this, like, what am I trying to say right now?
What gets under my skin in discussions of this is that it sounds so preposterous that people say, we're alarmists.
We're just making this stuff up.
You know, that was a long time ago.
It's all in your head.
And it's, and you like, so after a while, you actually start thinking, you know, maybe I am crazy.
Maybe it is in my head.
And then you're just like, and then you look at your other, your other black friends and you're like, am I tripping?
Or did this happen?
And they're like, no, it kind of happened to me too.
And then you're like, how about the other fucking side of the country?
Did it happen to y'all too?
And you're just like, yeah.
So then when you, and then when the report comes out, you're just like, guys, like, I'm telling you, I'm not crazy.
I'm telling you, this is happening, you know?
And I still got to convince you.
And I'm like, what how many receipts do you need?
And it didn't convince.
In 2015, this comes out.
And it's another, like, people seem more convinced now after everything that's happened.
But like, it took like five years after this report came out.
And there was really, you know, there was an uproar over the murder of Michael Brown, obviously.
Yeah.
But there was the fucking, the fact that, the fact that a police department formed out of a slave patrol that used dogs to maim black people in order to terrorize them was, 200 years later, using dogs to maim only black people in order to terrorize.
The fact that that was happening, like yeah, that it was like yeah, and then it was out of the zeitgeist, and then it was out of the zeitgeist.
That's what I was gonna say.
Then it's gone out of the zeitgeist.
Yeah, and this and that's the other thing that's so hard about like, and i'm and i'm critiquing myself, period, i'm ticking all of us.
Period is like when, when the cameras leave, like how hard it is to keep the energy up to say look listen, I know it was a high, it was a high, like you know, high profile case, but it's not done.
You know, i'm saying, and now that it's back okay, it's a year later, y'all forgot about my ground because you met on to the next hashtag.
But i'm like, no seriously, we didn't make this up.
Like here's the evidence.
Like i'm telling you that's what happened, and it's Like, you find yourself like just exhausted as to go, like, I just, no matter how many receipts I give you, yeah.
Like, you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Speaking of receipts, I do feel like I need to quote from the New Yorker here.
And they did do a pretty good article kind of digging into the use of these dogs.
So I do want to like credit them for that.
They didn't look away.
They, they, you know, they put out an article, which isn't nothing.
Um, quote, in one account.
Better than not.
Yeah, right?
Like, yeah.
In one account, a dog was sent after an unarmed 16-year-old who was also tasered.
The electric shock of that weapon partially paralyzes a person.
If that were to happen while a dog was tearing at your arms and legs, all you could do would be to watch in immobilized horror.
Another case involves four police officers, including a canine handler, trapping an unarmed 14-year-old in an abandoned basement.
The crime, trespassing.
The Department of Justice report recounts what the boy says happened to him.
Racism Central to Policing00:09:00
When he saw the dog at the top of the steps, he turned to run, but the dog quickly bit him on the ankle and then the thigh, causing him to fall to the floor.
The dog was about to bite his face or neck, but instead got his left arm, which the boy had raised to protect himself.
FPD officers struck him while he was on the ground, one of them putting a boot on the side of his head.
He recalled the officers laughing about the incident afterward.
The boys in blue.
The boys in blue.
Yeah, the boys in blue, man.
Yeah.
You just, man, it's like, how many, how many bad apples you need before you start like checking the orchard?
Like, yeah.
What if the soil's bad?
Like, how come nobody's like, you keep talking about these, your tree keeps producing bad fruit, like, and you keep blaming, like, something wrong with your tree, man.
Yeah, all these apples are just filled with piss.
Like, what happened?
Why are all the apples pissed?
Why are all the apples filled with piss?
I asked just one.
Well, then, why are you?
Well, if it's just, why are you putting it in a bucket?
Yeah.
Where do we go?
Why do you keep growing the damn apples then?
Maybe we get rid of the orchard.
It's a bad apples.
I don't know.
Like, it makes sense to me.
Yeah.
Yep.
So, again, the use of Ferguson police dogs made very little of a splash when it was revealed.
Even though, again, 100% of the individuals maimed by Ferguson police dogs were black, and 90% of individuals that the Ferguson Police did violence to in general were black.
Names of canine officers and their supervisors were not revealed in the report.
That Department of Justice report on the Ferguson PD made 137 corrective recommendations on how the department could fix its violent behavior.
Only one of those reforms dealt with canine violence, suggesting that the police department require on-site supervisory approval before allowing a canine officer to maim people.
It's like, you got a mission of nature first.
Yeah.
Is it cool I bite this black guy?
Okay, yeah.
I want to have a dog tear at the flesh of this 14-year-old.
Is that cool?
How's that right?
Glad we put this list.
They did the paperwork.
It's all good.
So as of today, Ferguson police still use dogs to control suspects.
Most Ferguson officers are white.
Virtually all the people they arrest and detain are black.
No Ferguson officer has yet been tried or fired for using police dogs to brutalize citizens.
Professor Larry Spruel notes, quote, the officers' procedural avoidance of criminal liability for death and torture of black citizens was not dissimilar to slave patrollers' antebellum indemnity for similar violence.
Yep.
In his paper on Negro Dogs and the Ferguson Police, Professor Spruill cites two other academics, Williams and Murphy, who wrote a 1990 paper on the transition from slave patrols to police departments.
Williams and Murphy noted, quote, the legal order sustained slavery, segregation, and discrimination from most of our nation's history.
And the fact that the police were bound to uphold that order set a pattern for police behavior and attitudes towards minority communities that have persisted until the present day.
That pattern includes the idea that minorities have fewer civil rights, that the task of police is to keep them under control, and that the police have little responsibility for protecting them from crime within their communities.
Oh, God.
There we go.
Oh, my God.
Yep.
Maybe Portland can throw me one of those white claws.
There was I missed this rally, but there was apparently a rally where some of the Antifa kids, do you remember there was that Pepsi ad with Kendall Jenner?
Kendall Jenner, where she hands a Pepsi to a cop.
Like right after that ad, a bunch of those kids showed up at this, I think it was a May Day protest with crates of Pepsi and just started shucking them at the cops.
I love it.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my God, dude.
You know what I give it to the Antifa kids, man?
They got senses of humor, dad.
Y'all funny.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, you know, it's been interesting because there's all this talk of like, like, Portland has a big anti-fascist sort of activist community.
But like with all the talk that there is from the president about Antifa at these protests, they've really taken a back seat.
Like, they have not been driving the fucking bus here.
I can tell you that much.
And it's kind of obvious because I'm like, in some ways, I feel like a lot of the anti-fascist dudes, like, they got a, they have a style.
There's like an aesthetic to what they do that like, and I know it's a weird way to say it, but I feel like I go, oh, yeah, that's, that's kind of their flavor.
And I'm like, this ain't that.
Yeah.
This is just something else.
You know?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah, like it's like when you see the, yeah, when you see like the graffiti that says like, blacks rule, I'm like, black man did not write that.
No, we did not write that.
That's ridiculous.
Okay.
The flip side of that was like in Portland on two Fridays ago, I think, we had, you know, a crowd march to the justice center and then people just started fucking it up, like breaking all the windows.
They lit some fires.
Like, and it was one of, it was very obvious, I think, to everyone who knew the city.
Like, oh, because this was like the day after the precinct in Minneapolis was burned.
And I was like, yeah, yeah.
Fuck that justice center up.
It's going down.
Yeah.
And there was like, it was blamed a lot on like white anarchist kids.
Like, yeah, there were definitely some of those folks doing it, but like it was a pretty diverse crowd that fucked up the justice center.
Yeah.
You know, life in history is not so compartmentalized that you could just be like, this happened, this happened, and that group of people by themselves did the thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of folks wanted to get into that justice center and rubbish around.
So prop, that is episode one.
And again, this is, you know, the slave patrol.
A lot of, you know, this episode, pretty much every episode is going to deal with racism because it's kind of central to policing.
But next episode, we're going to be talking about sort of policing more in the north and kind of policing against people we consider white, but who at the time, the people who controlled the police might not necessarily have considered white.
You know, that's, that's a big part of this.
Yeah.
Ooh, I can't wait for this one because like at some point, man, I just feel like I know my work's going to call me to do a some sort of deep dive in the construction of like pan-ethnic terms like black or white and what the hell that means.
Like, you know, even hearing like the, who was the Milo boy?
What was his name?
Milo.
Oh, Yellow Ioonopoulos.
Yeah, yeah, whatever the hell his name is.
Yeah.
Him talking about like this, our country was made for the advancement of white men.
And I'm like, no, it wasn't because there was no such thing as white men when y'all got here.
And you ain't even, you ain't even want the Irish here.
That's the northern part of the same island for crying out loud.
So like you looking at them, you don't think it's still people in this world that don't think Italians are white.
Like I just, what the hell are you talking about?
You know what I'm saying?
Like, so you don't even know what white means, you know?
So I love what you're going to go to next because just like you have to remember, again, it's a construct.
Like y'all made, y'all made that up.
Yeah.
So we'll talk about that in part two.
Prop, you want to plug some pluggables before we roll out?
Man, yeah.
So yeah, everything for me is prop hiphop.com.
That's my at mention.
Just all of it, prop hip hop.
Doing a fun thing on Fridays called Porigami Fridays, where I basically just make a single cup of like pour over coffee with a buddy on Instagram.
That's good, right?
And we feature like, yeah, we feature like a local roaster from wherever, like offer discounts.
And like, and since since this last, you know, uprising, we've been featuring like coffee roasters, you know, owned by persons of color to just support, just support good coffee.
You know what I'm saying?
So that's kind of a fun thing I'd plug on this one.
Since I get to come back three times, I get to pick what I'm going to plug.
You know what I'm saying?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Well, check that out.
Check out Prop and his wonderful music on his YouTube channel.
And well, propaganda, people should know.
If they look for prop, they'll find something else.
Yeah, also, you know what?
Actually, I would say, you know what?
I'm glad you brought that up.
So let me save all y'all the DMs you're going to give me.
Okay.
At some point, I don't already answered the question you finna want a personal answer for in one of these videos or interviews.
So, like, so just, you know, check the YouTube.
You know what I'm saying?
Just, it's probably there.
We at some point we've talked about it.
So just go ahead and put that out.
Bad Ideas About Cops00:02:51
All right, folks.
Well, we will be back like fucking four more times at least to talk about American police and where they came from.
So I hope everybody enjoys this series.
And I hope folks pass it along to friends and family who might think that policing just needs a little bit of like, just gotta like, just gotta like get some schmutz off its face and we'll be back.
We'll be fine.
Like you can't go back to it being good.
It was always shit.
You have to rethink this thing, you know?
Yeah.
And like, and I, and I mean, I'm gonna come back to this a bunch of times.
I know this episode gotta end.
I'm gonna come back to this a bunch of times, but like, I hope people are hearing that, like almost, not almost, literally all of our institutions, we just made them up.
Like, they're made up.
You know what I'm saying?
At some point in time, we made, they don't exist in nature.
Like, we made them up.
So if you have a bad idea in any other part of your life, you stop doing the bad idea and you try to make a better one.
Yeah, we can, we can have a society where like if someone commits murder, there's somebody whose job it is to like figure out who did that and like make sure they don't get the key to a murder.
We don't have that.
We don't have, we can have that without having a dude who feels empowered to choke a man for nine minutes.
Thank you.
You don't have to have both.
You don't have to have both.
You mean to tell me the thought has never crossed your mind that the person that takes care of this homeless guy for loitering, who's just by virtue of his existence is breaking the law.
And the same guy and the same tool needs to deal with the axe murderer that's torn.
Like you need, you mean to tell me that that takes the same people?
Yeah, like there's better ways to countries that have people who like make sure there aren't drunk drivers on the road.
And the people who do that job don't have guns and don't get to like throw people in prison and ruin their lives and search them for drugs and plant drugs on them.
Like you, you don't, you can have people whose job is like, yeah, we should make sure, you know, we should have some eyes on traffic.
Cause like, of course, that's a big thing.
Like, somebody should be like, let's keep an eye on that shit.
Yes.
Without the other stuff.
Or legally.
You should go into a woman's house while she's sleeping and murder her.
Yeah.
Maybe we don't need no knock raids at all for any reason.
That's a bad idea.
Like, why?
Like, who just keeps holds on to bad ideas?
Just like, it's a bad idea.
Like, let's just think of another one.
Yeah.
Shame we can't change.
Well, yeah, right.
For more bad ideas, come back on Thursday where we will talk about cops.
Yeah.
All right.
That's us for now.
Goodbye.
Behind the Police is a production of iHeartRadio.
Seven Questions for Trailblazers00:04:33
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This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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