July 8, 2015 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:26:27
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| And we're live. | ||
| What's up, dude? | ||
| How are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good, Joe. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| For folks who don't know the story, Michael, as he prefers to be talked to as, directed as, referred to as, you were a cop in Baltimore, and you put a string of tweets that I read that was on Huffington Post. | ||
| And that's when I got interested in this whole story. | ||
| Because it's very rare that someone who's a cop comes out and tells about all the shit that they experience. | ||
| I have friends that are cops, and I know there's a lot of good cops out there. | ||
| Just like, there's good everything. | ||
| You know, Sam Harris and Dan Carlin just did a podcast recently together. | ||
| It's a really excellent podcast. | ||
| And one of the things they were talking about, they were talking about People in power people that were our politicians that they there's a the whole spectrum You get great people people that are genuinely trying to do good and you also get psychopaths It seems like you ran into a lot of fucking psychopaths How long were you a cop for? | ||
| I was a cop for 11 years. | ||
| You look like you're 20. Thanks. | ||
| How's that possible? | ||
| I don't know, good genetics. | ||
| Good genetics, and I guess the stress didn't fuck with you. | ||
| It didn't, really. | ||
| Really? | ||
| How did it not? | ||
| My idea of what an officer should be Was to be more Robocop-ish, like where I took my emotions out of the job and handled it strictly as enforcing the law. | ||
| So if I was spit on, I realized they weren't spitting at me. | ||
| They were spitting at the uniform. | ||
| It was just irrelevant. | ||
| I understood it wasn't personal. | ||
| So I separated that as like a role, maybe, like I was acting. | ||
| That's a great attitude to have, I guess. | ||
| Was that something that you thought about before you became a cop? | ||
| Or is it something you cultivated while you were a cop? | ||
| I can't say for sure, but it seems like I actually think that was the wrong way to think. | ||
| But if you analyze it and you're at that time, you think, well, how am I not going to be biased? | ||
| I'm not going to be biased by separating myself from the situation and kind of acting as autonomous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But I think that also made me blind, because if I was being blind to racism, then I was being blind to when we were doing it. | ||
| Even if I wasn't doing it, I wasn't seeing it when it occurred either, because I was literally blinding myself to it. | ||
| So you're saying that if you were blind to racism against you, then you were also blind to cops that were committing racism? | ||
| So if I looked at it as whether I was talking to somebody of Latino descent, of black, whatever, male, female, I looked at them just as equally, regardless. | ||
| So if you do that, then you don't see that you're disproportionately enforcing things against somebody, because I'm literally not trying to see that. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| So, that's interesting. | ||
| So, by trying to treat everyone as equal, you weren't taking account of how many black people you were dealing with, how many Latinos you were dealing with, how many people of color, how many minorities? | ||
| Is that a fair assessment? | ||
| It is fair to the extent that I'll admit that when I was in the Eastern District, I would intentionally lock white people up. | ||
| So that I could make sure my numbers weren't, like, my squad, it wasn't like, oh my gosh, look, they look up 95% African Americans. | ||
| I didn't want to see that. | ||
| I wanted to see some kind of balance, so I was, like, aware that, hey, we're locking too many black people up, but I don't think I, it just didn't compute at the time. | ||
| It takes time for it to settle in. | ||
| So what about those poor white people that you locked up on purpose? | ||
| I got nothing. | ||
| Were they guilty at least? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, of course. | |
| I never locked up anybody that wasn't guilty. | ||
| But you experienced a lot of shit. | ||
| I mean, some of the things that I read that... | ||
| Okay, here's one. | ||
| Punting a handcuffed, face-down suspect in the face after a foot chase. | ||
| Um... | ||
| Pissing and shitting inside suspects homes during raids on their beds and clothes Jacking up and illegally searching thousands of people with no legal justification This is crazy man. | ||
| This is crazy stuff. | ||
| Well When you're doing it, it's just what police do. | ||
| You know it. | ||
| You've seen it on TV. You've seen it driving by. | ||
| You've seen a corner full of black guys with the cops searching them. | ||
| You've seen it. | ||
| And when they're going into those pockets, you can't go into those pockets. | ||
| You simply can't. | ||
| But we do. | ||
| You're not allowed to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's illegal. | ||
| You have no way of doing it unless you're getting a frisk where you can justify plain field doctoring, and then you can get into the pocket. | ||
| But that's extremely rare. | ||
| I mean, that's a specific set of circumstances under a Terry stop, and that's nothing that you see. | ||
| What's a Terry stop? | ||
| So, Terry v. | ||
| Ohio was a case law that established, I could be slightly off in the particulars, but If somebody was displaying the characteristics of an armed person and you had suspicion or a hunch that criminal activity was afoot, you could stop that person and conduct a frisk of the outer garments. | ||
| Outer garments. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So just a pat-down, essentially. | ||
| So does outer garments mean a jacket? | ||
| Right a jacket so if you had if like you thought there they had a weapon on their hip you could pull back the jacket and kind of pat it down But it seems as the laws written it would have to you'd have to even like squish it and it's just what you can touch from the outside So if you patted the outside of the jacket and felt a gun that was in his waist Then you could you could arrest him or take that gun, right? | ||
| You're perfectly fine, but you can't dig in his pockets and look for crack Right. | ||
| Well, you can if you have what that's plain field doctrine. | ||
| So if through my expertise, I can tell that that is packaging that is consistent with narcotics that are distributed in the area, and I can justify that, then I can go and retrieve those narcotics. | ||
| That's an extremely, I mean, if you can just think about that, how do I really know that that bag in your pocket is marijuana, not oregano? | ||
| I'm not sure if that should be legally justified or not. | ||
| So, that stop and frisk shit that they were doing in New York, they're not doing that anymore, right? | ||
| Isn't that the deal? | ||
| We talked about that on a podcast once. | ||
| We went over all the times that it was just innocent people. | ||
| And it's fucking staggering. | ||
| It's disgusting. | ||
| That stop, they would just be able to pull white, I mean black kids, I should, white kids. | ||
| Not really though, right? | ||
| It was mostly black kids. | ||
| They would just be able to pull them over and go, hey, let me check you. | ||
| And they would just check their bodies. | ||
| And most of the time, they were innocent. | ||
| Most of the time. | ||
| There was nothing to check for. | ||
| I'm going to tell you that 99.9999% of them have nothing on them because they're not even usually documented. | ||
| So in Baltimore, we'll do stop and frisk, and if you do a stop and frisk, you have to conduct an entire specific report called a stop and frisk report that justifies everything you did. | ||
| And so it's a big pain. | ||
| So no one's going to write that. | ||
| So they just do it and they move on. | ||
| So your stats are, any stat you see is junk. | ||
| And the stats that you see that are junk sit there and say one in a thousand actually have something on them. | ||
| So think about what reality is. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| What led to you leaving the police force? | ||
| Was this a build-up? | ||
| Was this something that you thought about for a long time? | ||
| Are you ready to laugh? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We had a shooting range in the basement of the Eastern District. | ||
| We had to move something. | ||
| We had to put one desk on top of another desk. | ||
| It slipped and I tore my shoulder out. | ||
| There's your exciting story for why I left. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| What was the injury? | ||
| I had my shoulder reconstructed, just tore everything out, and then I put it back together. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| It just came out, and so the clavicle, not rotator cuff, so the cartilage that folds over just doesn't hold it into place anymore. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| So it can come out easily. | ||
| So if it can come out easily, they don't let you be a cop anymore, and they process you out. | ||
| And still it can come out easily, right now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's permanent forever. | ||
| Yeah, it's permanent. | ||
| It's fucked up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| From moving a desk. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| All the crime solving and all that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| I don't know what to tell you. | ||
| It's not the same story. | ||
| I've got nothing. | ||
| I have nothing. | ||
| So you left, and then you decided... | ||
| How long ago was this? | ||
| I got injured in like late 2009, but it took time to do the surgeries, try and come back. | ||
| I mean, I tried to come back. | ||
| I came back and I was going coded to a call with lights and sirens. | ||
| Went to turn down a street and the shoulder popped out. | ||
| So I went up onto the sidewalk because I had to grab it with the other hand and that's why I had to go back in and then they said I need another surgery. | ||
| Not doing another surgery. | ||
| From a fucking turn? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| You need to go to Cain Velasquez's surgeon. | ||
| Fixed that dude up pretty good, I guess. | ||
| So you decided once you were out, once you knew you were out, you'd done the surgery, you couldn't be a police officer anymore because your shoulder blows out. | ||
| What made you decide to go public with all this stuff? | ||
| Well, I've actually talked about this for a long time. | ||
| When I have, we had a lot of local media and local street reporters and stuff like that that I was friends with on Twitter, and we would talk about these things for the last couple years. | ||
| We would just go back and forth talking about things. | ||
| And I had no idea that anybody would pick up on this. | ||
| I thought I was just going to be talking to the same reporters and the same local group of people that I've been talking to the whole time, so I came back and saw that somebody started paying attention. | ||
| And what was that like for you? | ||
| Shocking. | ||
| Yeah, we were talking about it before the show started, this newfound notoriety, how weird it is. | ||
| Describe it. | ||
| When we land in L.A., a guy asked if I was on TV talking about police, and it's like, I don't know, I'm used to being anonymous. | ||
| So I'm used to just going and minding my own business and not bothering anybody, and then suddenly people know who you are. | ||
| It's awkward, and especially for what they know who you are, because every time now a cop looks at me, I'm like, oh, come on. | ||
| I'm the bad guy now, so I can't trust them as well. | ||
| It makes it kind of stuck in a weird place. | ||
| So when this most recent Baltimore incident took place, the Freddie Gray incident, the eruption of public attention on police brutality in Baltimore, and the marches, and all the news stories, then people started really paying attention to you. | ||
| Is that fair to... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it seems like that was the case. | ||
| Maybe somebody had followed me before, and somebody with a powerful retweet, I have no idea. | ||
| And so, explain how it all went down. | ||
| Like, how did you become this public figure? | ||
| I mean, I literally have no comprehension of what happened. | ||
| I decided that I was just going to talk about some of the things we do, so that it's like, look, this is what we do. | ||
| Let's not try to pretend that we don't do it. | ||
| We do it. | ||
| So it's not about Whether we're going to blame the cops that did it or whether we're going to go back and have retribution, we need to realize that this is what we do. | ||
| Stop denying it. | ||
| The black community has been lying for the last 50 years. | ||
| We need to fix it and in a realistic, scientific way where we have some empathy and treat people like human beings because we don't. | ||
| What is Baltimore like? | ||
| My buddy John Rollo lives in Baltimore. | ||
| Shout out to John Rollo. | ||
| He listens to the podcast all the time. | ||
| And the way he describes it is, I mean, I've been there a few times for the UFC, but I haven't, you know, gone into the bad neighborhoods. | ||
| I didn't watch The Wire. | ||
| So... | ||
| But watching this this whole incident and seeing these people talk about how many times they've been arrested and how many times they've been fucked over by cops and how crazy it is there and how much crime there is there and how much violence there is there What it's like trying to grow up there and become a normal person and what a fucking uphill struggle that is Describe Baltimore to somebody like me. | ||
| Okay, so Baltimore like anywhere else is largely good, but it has a microcosm of It's like the prototype for the prison cycle. | ||
| So somebody comes up in a neighborhood and they just have no hope and they keep feeding that school to prison cycle over and over and over again. | ||
| And it has a deep history in Baltimore. | ||
| So it invades everything. | ||
| So whether you're talking about... | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| Baltimore, I can't even say how long ago, maybe 100 years ago, and you still have deeds now that say you can't sell the house to an African-American person. | ||
| So even if you were a doctor there, if you were a black doctor, you couldn't buy a house in a nice white neighborhood 60 years ago. | ||
| So you had to still go buy a house in that little area. | ||
| If you're clustering everybody like that, it just pulls everybody down constantly, constantly, constantly. | ||
| They're just constantly beat down. | ||
| There's just no way out. | ||
| So 60 years ago? | ||
| 60 years ago you couldn't buy a house if you were a black guy in certain neighborhoods. | ||
| And was it law? | ||
| They had this on the books? | ||
| It was in the deeds. | ||
| Some of the deeds still have it. | ||
| What? | ||
| Still to this day? | ||
| No court's going to uphold it, but you'll still see it in there. | ||
| You'll see the language. | ||
| So if there's a white neighborhood today, there's a possibility that some black person who wants to move into this white neighborhood might encounter some resistance because of this. | ||
| I don't know if they're gonna counter resistance, but they're gonna see it in the deed. | ||
| That's gonna make you feel awkward. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Why is it still in there? | ||
| Because it's the original D. They keep carrying it over. | ||
| Why wouldn't they change that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I have no idea why this city is that way. | ||
| Why these people did these things. | ||
| It doesn't make sense. | ||
| Nobody stood objectively. | ||
| And we created these racist institutions. | ||
| I mean, they are institutional racism. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| It's up and down in these urban environments, in these cities. | ||
| Cleveland, Ferguson, Baltimore, Atlanta. | ||
| It's irrelevant. | ||
| They're all the same. | ||
| All these urban environments, all over Compton, Watts, Inglewood, there's a ton of places like that in LA as well. | ||
| It's all over the world. | ||
| I mean, all over the United States, I should say. | ||
| There's neighborhoods like that that seem almost inescapable. | ||
| Did you listen to Mau Mau on Radiolab? | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know how long back that goes. | ||
| I mean, this is... | ||
| So we're denying that we have this. | ||
| So what people are saying, these cops aren't racist. | ||
| I'm not saying they are racist. | ||
| What I'm telling you is they're participating in institutionalized racism, just like everybody in Britain was doing back in Kenya with the Mau Mau's, however long ago that was. | ||
| That was a long time ago. | ||
| And you're seeing it come out how it's just the whole thing. | ||
| If you're participating in it, you're guilty. | ||
| And that's what I'm telling you. | ||
| I'm guilty. | ||
| I participated in it. | ||
| Is there a way to fix it? | ||
| Well... | ||
| The easy thing from the police thing is I think empathy is number one. | ||
| We have to start treating human beings like they're human beings. | ||
| We just arrest them, and you throw them in a cage, just like they did with Freddie Gray. | ||
| And you don't focus on them being somebody's child. | ||
| Race is a social construct. | ||
| This is my brother, and I'm doing this to him. | ||
| It's inconceivable. | ||
| We've had this conversation a hundred times in this podcast where I have always wondered why is it that we put so much emphasis in trying to repair damage that we've done in other countries, so much emphasis in nation building. | ||
| So much emphasis in invading places because of whatever perceived threat or whatever natural resource we want to dominate and monopolize, but no emphasis whatsoever in fixing our own inner cities. | ||
| No emphasis whatsoever in fixing the ghettos. | ||
| And just constructing social centers, giving people places that are safe to go to, and somehow or another educating people and lifting them out one by one out of the fucking constant cycle that they're in. | ||
| This never-ending cycle of poverty and crime. | ||
| And being surrounded by it, man... | ||
| Everyone knows that people imitate their atmosphere. | ||
| It's just a part of being a human being. | ||
| That's why accents exist. | ||
| That's why people in some parts of the world do weird things because everyone around them does it like, you know, weird clothes that they wear, weird rituals, scarring of their face, you know, what have you. | ||
| We imitate what's around us. | ||
| And when you're around a lot of fucking crime and you grow up around a lot of fucking crime and a lot of people with Records, criminal records, and it becomes normal. | ||
| And I don't know how to fix that. | ||
| And I don't see any effort whatsoever in really engineering some sort of a solution to what these poor, unfortunate people are born into. | ||
| Well, for police, it's even worse because we're perpetuating that situation. | ||
| So we're the ones doing that cycle. | ||
| So when we see a 16... | ||
| One time I was a chief commander in the Eastern District, and I'm telling my guys, stop pulling over old white ladies. | ||
| Stop pulling over that young cute girl. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| We focus on who commits the crimes. | ||
| And who commits the crimes in Baltimore? | ||
| 16 to 24 year old black males. | ||
| That's who's committing the crimes. | ||
| So focus on them. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Until you complete the cycle and realize that you started doing that because of institutionalized racism in your organization. | ||
| And so when you are jacking up those guys in the corner and you do find that dime bag, so you sent him to jail, now he can't go to work the next day, so he loses his job, and then he can't make it to court, so he gets his license suspended, and then he's driving, and then you are focusing... | ||
| On those 16, 24-year-old black males. | ||
| So now you're more likely to pull them over. | ||
| Now you pull him over. | ||
| Now he has a suspended license. | ||
| Now he gets his license revoked. | ||
| And now he can't get to the job legally. | ||
| And now he's left with selling drugs on the corner. | ||
| So we're creating it. | ||
| We have to step back and realize what the facts are and what we're doing. | ||
| And the number one problem is the drug war. | ||
| And then we have money and politics. | ||
| Those are two big issues that we have to solve before we get anywhere. | ||
| What is the money and politics? | ||
| How does that play you? | ||
| So I don't think we can change anything until we stop having politicians that are serving their donors versus serving the people. | ||
| So somebody that's talking like me is never going to run a police agency as long as all their corporate donors are saying, no, no, no, you keep those animals in the cages, because that's what they do. | ||
| I mean, that's like a joke in Baltimore that police are actually the zookeepers. | ||
| You keep everything in and don't let it hit the county. | ||
| So that's our role. | ||
| That's what we're doing. | ||
| So your mayors and your politicians are going to continue to encourage that. | ||
| They're not going to take a risk and say, all right, how do we lower juvenile possession of marijuana? | ||
| You know that. | ||
| I know you do. | ||
| You know you legalize it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you control it, and rates actually go down. | ||
| Whether we're overseas or we're in Colorado, your possession rates for marijuana will go down among juveniles. | ||
| But we don't do that. | ||
| We keep looking at everything, like we're hammer searching for nails, and we keep looking for what we're going to hit to stop it, instead of standing back and using science and figuring out what are we actually going to do to fix this problem. | ||
| What will actually have results? | ||
| This is very rare to hear a cop talk like this. | ||
| I'm really happy that you're coming forward and speaking like this, but how many people that were with you in the police force are upset about this? | ||
| My closest friends, I think, understand me. | ||
| I think the vast majority is upset with me. | ||
| And they're going to be upset with me because what I'm really trying to do is take power away from them. | ||
| I mean, I really am. | ||
| I'm trying to take power from them and give it back to the people because we're supposed to be serving them. | ||
| We're not supposed to be this occupying force. | ||
| And this pretty little white boy from the county looks like an... | ||
| An occupying force in the city. | ||
| There's no way around it. | ||
| So I have to be aware of that and think about that. | ||
| Think about what I'm doing. | ||
| Not be an occupying force. | ||
| Intentionally actually go out of my way to lift up a situation and de-escalate it and do better than to come in there and be like, you're going to jail, you're going to jail, shut up, let's go. | ||
| Which is what I did for a long time. | ||
| So when you say the county, what does that mean? | ||
| When you say white boy from the county, what's the county? | ||
| Right, so the suburbs. | ||
| So in Baltimore, it's kind of weird. | ||
| It's a little different. | ||
| So Baltimore is incorporated. | ||
| So it has nothing to do with the county. | ||
| So there's like this hard line. | ||
| So it's not where... | ||
| The county of what? | ||
| Baltimore County. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Right, so you have... | ||
| The city by itself. | ||
| So here in Los Angeles, you think you have Marina Del Rey, you have Inglewood. | ||
| All this stuff is LA. In Baltimore, it's just Baltimore. | ||
| So everything is concentrated and focused. | ||
| And me coming from the county, I've never spent any time in the city growing up. | ||
| I come in just straight from the Marine Corps. | ||
| That's ready to roll. | ||
| We're going to do our thing. | ||
| I'm going to put on a different uniform and continue my war. | ||
| Wow, so that was why you became a comp. | ||
| So you came right from the military, and it just seemed like a logical progression. | ||
| It's a logical progression. | ||
| I think I went into the Marine Corps to prepare myself. | ||
| I was a little... | ||
|
unidentified
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Uncontrolled. | |
| And decided to go into the Marine Corps to get my shit together. | ||
| Discipline. | ||
| So I could get into the police department and everything. | ||
| And that was always my goal. | ||
| So your goal was always to be a police officer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And why was that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've said it since I was a little kid. | ||
| I think you go in with these grandiose ideas that you're going to help people. | ||
| And maybe that's why I talk. | ||
| I mean, it's still evolving that I'm saying these things. | ||
| So you're bringing up a point and maybe that's why I talk. | ||
| Maybe I feel that. | ||
| I wasn't doing what I actually set out to do. | ||
| I was actually exacerbating the situation. | ||
| So you got caught up in the cycle yourself, the cycle of law enforcement and the way law enforcement behaves in Baltimore, and it just became habitual. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| You don't think about it. | ||
| You just ignore it. | ||
| So when I say that I have that suspect that I chased and the guy comes up and kicks him in the face, I think to myself, God, that guy's a fucking asshole. | ||
| But not me. | ||
| I didn't do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I have the responsibility to do something there. | ||
| That was an assault on an innocent victim. | ||
| It's not as bad as McKinney, but it's assault on an innocent victim that I should have certainly stepped up and done something about. | ||
| It's just, you're in it. | ||
| You don't... | ||
| I can't explain it how you don't see it until you really just start to slowly step back and say, what are we doing here? | ||
| We're starting to see more and more videotapes, police stories of police brutality. | ||
| Do you think this is just a result of cell phones or is the violence escalating or has the violence always been there like this but people are finally finding out about it? | ||
| I think it's actually de-escalating, the violence. | ||
| Yeah, I think your cell phones are certainly scaring a lot of cops from doing things, but the only variable here is the proliferation of video cameras. | ||
| So, as you get more and more cameras, you're seeing more and more, but imagine what it was like before the cameras. | ||
| Cops know the cameras are there. | ||
| We've known it for a long time. | ||
| So, like... | ||
| We have pole cameras in Baltimore and So if we were gonna do something or so there's a street called Monument Street That's full of these cameras that are monitored by the city So as an officer I always knew that if I was on that street I kind of had to behave in a different manner because I knew the camera was there now We know that the camera is there all the time. | ||
| So it's it's got to be much smaller Well, there's always these guys they say that you can't even believe they're real humans and Like that fucking cop in Texas that showed up at the pool party and did the fucking roll like he's Paul Blart mall cop. | ||
| Holy fucking shit. | ||
| When you find out that that's a real person, you're just like... | ||
| So think about that situation. | ||
| So that's the McKinney situation, where you have a guy assaulting a 14-year-old girl, and that chief still comes out, and still he has that blinder, that blue blinder, where he's saying, there's 11 good cops there. | ||
| My ass there are. | ||
| There are 12 bad cops there, because he just witnessed an assault on a 14-year-old girl in a bathing suit and did shit about it. | ||
| So you have 12 bad cops. | ||
| But the reason why I'm talking is because I do think those 11 other ones can be spoken to. | ||
| I think the guy that comes up and pats him on the back then is like, yo, what are you doing? | ||
| Why is your gun out? | ||
| If we keep talking to him, then maybe he'll be able to go talk to two more people. | ||
| Maybe he'll realize what he's doing. | ||
| And we can kind of at least on a grassroots level kind of change what police think they're supposed to be versus what we are. | ||
| We've talked about it on the podcast many times, and I think that it's one of the most difficult jobs that a person can do, and one of the jobs that has the least amount of respect. | ||
| Cops, like, almost routinely are treated with disrespect, and also, no one thinks about PTSD for cops. | ||
| People think about it all the time when it comes to soldiers. | ||
| It's become much more in the public eye, but the amount of stress That's a part of being a police officer. | ||
| What is that like? | ||
| When you're going into these bad neighborhoods and you're dealing with murder, when you're dealing with all sorts of different assaults and domestic violence and theft and robbery, what is that like to be a person who deals with that every day? | ||
| And how much of a factor does that play in these people snapping on people? | ||
| This is hard for me to say because I don't feel like I had that. | ||
| I did not find the job stressful on the streets. | ||
| The greatest enemy was from within. | ||
| They say that in End of Watch. | ||
| Don't worry about the street. | ||
| You gotta worry about what the other officers are doing. | ||
| I miss that too. | ||
| I heard it was good. | ||
| Yeah, it was good. | ||
| The banter back and forth in that movie is very realistic of what cops act like. | ||
| You think cops are all professional, but we're sitting in the car talking about the same things that anybody else talks about, and then you're, oh shit, something's going on. | ||
| Mostly pussy, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| So, where were we? | ||
| We were talking about how stressful it is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It wasn't stressful for me. | ||
| Are you a weirdo? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think I built up that wall. | ||
| Do other people have that wall? | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| I know some of them handle things more personally. | ||
| So they take that... | ||
| I don't think we want those people as cops. | ||
| I understand it's hard for them. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| But the job's not for anybody. | ||
| You're absolutely right when you say the job is nearly impossible. | ||
| I think it is impossible to do right. | ||
| So that's why we have to be more human, so that when we screw up, we can say, look, I screwed up, and this is why. | ||
| And people will understand where you're coming from. | ||
| Whereas with Freddie Gray, we obviously screwed up. | ||
| There's no way around this, but yet we still come out and be like, oh, what? | ||
| We don't know anything. | ||
| Wait till the facts are out. | ||
| Bullshit! | ||
| You had somebody in your possession, and he's dead. | ||
| Stop denying it. | ||
| Now, what was all the bullshit about him having a neck injury? | ||
| That turned out to not be true, right? | ||
| Yeah, that was all bullshit. | ||
| Was it just something somebody made up online? | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
| I think he had an old car accident or something like that, and the case had some kind of final disposition that was entered into the court records, but it was harkened back to something a long time ago. | ||
| So, he died from being slammed up against the wall inside the back of a paddy wagon, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| And what was he arrested for? | ||
| Okay, so let's think about, let's put this in real terms. | ||
| Police always want to put things in legal terms. | ||
| But you're in a high drug area. | ||
| A lieutenant sees Freddie Gray, well, allegedly, sees Freddie Gray, recognize him, turn and run. | ||
| So they chase. | ||
| They follow him, they catch him, they search him, and do we have a stop and frisk? | ||
| No. | ||
|
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We don't. | |
| They didn't document a stop and frisk. | ||
| So because he's running, does that mean that he's suspicious? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So believe it or not, the law says that that's fine. | ||
| That you can chase him and you can stop him. | ||
| So my immediate objection with that case, I don't know why I can't think of it off the top of my head, but that case... | ||
| There's no clarification on how much force is allowed to be used. | ||
| So in a stop and frisk, you can actually use a legitimate amount of force. | ||
| But in that situation, the running, I don't really know how much force is allowed to be used there. | ||
| So I was curious how much force they used, but apparently they didn't use that much force. | ||
| And they searched him, and they got a knife out of his pocket. | ||
| So let's stop at this knife. | ||
| Now, how do we get into the knife? | ||
| We searched. | ||
| We went into his pocket. | ||
| Illegal search. | ||
| We don't have a stop and frisk. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| But even if you can somehow justify that, the knife that he has is only illegal if it has an internal spring. | ||
| So how could you feel whether it had an internal spring or not? | ||
| And how many white people do you think carry a knife with an internal spring? | ||
| It's gonna be the same amount, but do any of them ever get arrested? | ||
| Never. | ||
| The internal spring is so fucking stupid. | ||
| They have thumb releases for knives now that are easier than a switchblade. | ||
| The whole thing is stupid. | ||
| So why do you create a law like that? | ||
| You create a law like that so you can fuck with the people that you want to fuck with. | ||
| That's why we do it. | ||
| Because they saw West Side Story. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| They had switchblades back then. | ||
| And now everybody's scared, right? | ||
| I had a switchblade in high school. | ||
| I thought it was a badass. | ||
| But then I realized, like, it's just a knife. | ||
| If you have a regular knife, it's like a better tool. | ||
| Like, the switchblade's fucking stupid. | ||
| Spring breaks, it folds up. | ||
| So, this guy had a switchblade? | ||
| Is that what the deal is? | ||
| Well, we haven't seen the knife yet. | ||
| We haven't? | ||
| They don't even mean a switchblade. | ||
| What they're saying is, so you have an assistant. | ||
| So you have a flip-out, and you know how some of them you have to use your whole force? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And some of them are assistant. | ||
| Right. | ||
| An assistant pocket knife that's this big is illegal in Baltimore. | ||
| But I assure you that everybody that's been arrested with that is 98% going to be black. | ||
| So they use it as an excuse. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So we can fuck with who we want to fuck with. | ||
| It's exactly what we do. | ||
| So his knife was essentially like a utility knife that people might have in there. | ||
| And if you live in a hood, think you might have a knife on you? | ||
| Probably a good idea. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| So if I would have caught him, I would have probably chased him, because I think he was dealing. | ||
| Yeah, I would have chased him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But I would have stopped him. | ||
| He didn't have the drugs on him. | ||
| He wins. | ||
| I search him. | ||
| I probably do take out the knife, but I give it back to him and I say, okay, be safe. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
| And we're good. | ||
| We're playing the game. | ||
| We know. | ||
| Did it bug you that you were looking for drugs? | ||
| Did that ever, like, go, what the fuck am I doing being some sort of a glorified revenue collector for the state, pulling people over for drugs? | ||
| Yeah, you're totally right. | ||
| There is no point in any consensual adult agreements to fight against them. | ||
| But my whole point is to keep it real. | ||
| It was fucking fun! | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| It was fucking great! | ||
| Fun to catch him? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| I lived for the car chase! | ||
| I mean, think about this. | ||
| Think about if you're in a police car, and you have the lights and sirens, and you're going down, like, Coastal Highway, or you're going down your favorite 101, or whatever it is, and you're going through your side roads, and you're chasing this guy. | ||
| There is no adrenaline rush that's ever compared to that. | ||
| You live for it. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And you don't really... | ||
| I! I didn't really care why! | ||
| Give me the car chase. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| That's so refreshingly honest. | ||
| I'm so glad you're talking like this because I've always thought that too. | ||
| I always felt like it must be exciting for them. | ||
| God, it's amazing. | ||
| Like a fucking cheetah chasing a gazelle. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| I have three good stories we can tell later on that, I mean, it's just like, oh, you can understand if you're in that situation. | ||
| Is that one of the reasons why so many cops shoot people? | ||
| It's like the idea of the rush of being in a gunfight, the rush of finding someone who deserves to get shot. | ||
| You know, it's like when you're hunting, right? | ||
| You know, you see animals that you're not supposed to shoot. | ||
| But I swear to God, there's a part of your fucking brain that wants to shoot a squirrel. | ||
| It was like a 300 Win Mag. | ||
| You don't do it, but there's a part of your brain, like, you have a rifle, you're looking through the crosshairs, squirrel doesn't even know you're there. | ||
| You don't do it, but there's a part of you that wants to, and I'm like, why does that even exist? | ||
| Because people like hitting targets. | ||
| The same reason why you like going to the range and shooting at those steel targets. | ||
| Like, why do you, because people like hitting things with guns, because you have a gun, like you said, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. | ||
| And when you're in your cop car, And someone takes off, whether or not it makes sense to chase them, it must feel like the right thing to do, right? | ||
| Like, your instincts. | ||
| I'm going to go with you on the car chase. | ||
| I'm not going to go with you on the shooting. | ||
| For, like, was I looking for the target? | ||
| Yeah, I was. | ||
| You know, if I had a guy with a knife, I was sitting there, I was telling him, put it down, put it down. | ||
| But in my head, I'm cut off. | ||
| You want him to come out and shoot him? | ||
| I'm a fucking cop! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| I'm going out there, you know? | ||
| It's like, this is what you do! | ||
| But... | ||
| But you had a line. | ||
| Yeah, and I wasn't going to cross it. | ||
| I certainly wasn't going to cross it. | ||
| I was ready to shoot if I had to, but I was never going to cross that line. | ||
| But you kind of wanted to shoot. | ||
| Sure! | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, I come from the Marine Corps. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I was in FAST team. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is what I did. | ||
| I was trained from 17. I went to the Marine Corps at 17. I was handled a rifle in boot camp, and I went into special ops, and I was trained day in and day out to kill. | ||
| That's the honest truth. | ||
| And then I have to transition into bringing that skill set into the police department where, luckily, I was able to separate myself and it wasn't an issue for me. | ||
| But I don't think that's where the shootings come from. | ||
| I'm pretty convinced that your military members actually won't shoot. | ||
| I'm convinced that the shootings come from fear. | ||
| Ah, that makes a lot of sense. | ||
| So the military members have more discipline, they've been through real war, and they understand shooting and death better. | ||
| Yeah, I think you just understand the rules of engagement better. | ||
| Whereas the people that come from civilian life and, you know, there's a fucking video of this guy who's this big fat slob who's a cop and he's trying to... | ||
| Get a hold of this guy and the guy winds up beating his ass and there's like this chaos thing running around. | ||
| But I'm looking at that guy and I'm like, this guy does not, there's no way this guy should be a fucking law enforcement officer. | ||
| He's just way too out of shape. | ||
| He's just way too undisciplined. | ||
| His body is just not serving him correctly, and he's involved in physical altercations with criminals. | ||
| And to be a person that is in day-to-day contact with people that may or may not want to kill you, you have to have a certain amount of awareness, and you have to have a certain amount of physical ability. | ||
| Yeah, and you have to trust those abilities. | ||
| You have to realize that you're going to be able to handle that situation. | ||
| I think it's easier in a city than it would be for a Pennsylvania State Trooper or something. | ||
| I don't know what I would do in their shoes, and they're stuck out in the middle of nowhere by themselves. | ||
| In a city, all you got to do is hold on for 30 seconds. | ||
| You're going to get help. | ||
| But how they do it in those environments... | ||
| Baffling to me, but they don't get into a lot of shootings as much as urban environments because I think it's that fear, but I think as a nation we fear the black man. | ||
| He's the demon. | ||
| So you saw that in Mike Brown when that cop says, oh, he had a demon's look in his eye. | ||
| A demon's look in his eye? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Do you ever see anybody say that Dylann Roof, oh, he looked like he had a demon look in his eye? | ||
| They don't say that. | ||
| They say, oh, this troubled youth. | ||
| But the black guy is the demon. | ||
| So we have that in our society that that's the criminal. | ||
| So that's who we're looking at and that's who we're fearing. | ||
| We're fearing the black man raping our daughters. | ||
| We're fearing that. | ||
| Whether we want to face it or not as a nation, it's real. | ||
| And we have to face it if we want to learn how to police properly and we actually want to get our nation back to where it is. | ||
| And we tear down these borders, these things that we do, these social constructs, your flags, your Whether we have a line down at Mexico so that they can't come over here, and we don't help them, and we have our states, and we do all this, oh, there's so much dumb shit that we just make up to separate ourselves, but there's no difference. | ||
| He's got more melatonin than I do. | ||
| Wonderful. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| They're just human beings. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we're all the same. | ||
| We know this. | ||
| Scientifically, we know this. | ||
| I agree with you on that, but the guy that shot the people in Colorado, that was one of the first things they said, is that he looked possessed. | ||
| His eyes were... | ||
| I mean, I absolutely agree with you that there's institutionalized racism. | ||
| I absolutely agree with you. | ||
| But I think anytime someone becomes a school shooter or... | ||
| I mean, they treat that person like they're some psychopathic maniac. | ||
| Yeah, I'll concede that. | ||
| Did you get into altercations where you had to shoot people? | ||
| I could have pulled the trigger justifiably quite a few times. | ||
| But you never did. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| So you went 11 years in Baltimore, in the city, and you didn't have to shoot anybody. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I mean, I know of two that happened pretty close to me that were completely clean shootings. | ||
| And again, it was an ex-Marine. | ||
| Maybe I'm being biased. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, it makes sense to me. | ||
| I don't think you're being biased at all. | ||
| I would want someone... | ||
| First of all, it's... | ||
| A logical progression. | ||
| If someone is looking for a good job and they get out of the military, it's a logical progression. | ||
| I would trust military members more than I would trust a civilian who's never seen any real gunfire or any real shit. | ||
| You know, someone who has never experienced any sort of altercation like that and all of a sudden being thrust into it, you just gotta hope they can keep it together. | ||
| I know some people can, but a lot of people can't. | ||
| Someone who's been through the Marines, someone who's been through Anything, a Navy SEAL, someone who's been through war, that person, in my eyes, is a much more qualified candidate than the average person. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| So when you're talking to me and you're saying that you had a certain amount of discipline and you had a certain... | ||
| But you're also being very honest about you wanted them to come at you. | ||
| Which I think is a natural human instinct. | ||
| I think it's very important that you're talking like this. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Because I think there's a lot of people that would shy away from talking like that. | ||
| Especially someone who's still out of a career in law enforcement. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I think my hopes for resuming a career in law enforcement are probably over. | ||
| Yeah, unless someone comes along and listens to this with an open mind and realizes, no, this fucking guy is exactly what we need. | ||
| And I think that is exactly what we need. | ||
| We need people like you. | ||
| And we need people like you who other people are going to listen to and say, well, here's a guy who's on our side. | ||
| Here's a guy who's not a racist. | ||
| Here's a guy who's not just looking to shoot people and lock people up. | ||
| Here's a guy who really came into this job wanting to help and experienced a bunch of fucking chaos. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
| There's no other better word for it. | ||
| The biggest shit show you'll see is going to an urban environment and being thrust in that because it's not just a street. | ||
| It's internal as well. | ||
| The whole thing is a big clusterfuck of mismanagement. | ||
| And no one's caring about what we actually need to do. | ||
| We need to end the damn drug war. | ||
| This is ridiculous that we're doing this. | ||
| So that's most of what you're arresting people for? | ||
| Oh gosh, I don't... | ||
| Is it all of it? | ||
| 90? | ||
| 90%? | ||
|
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Jesus fucking Christ, how crazy is that? | |
| How crazy is that? | ||
| 90%? | ||
| That's all that matters there, is guns and drugs. | ||
| Guns and drugs. | ||
| And guns probably are there so they can sell drugs and defend themselves. | ||
| And defend themselves, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fucking A, man. | ||
| What a crazy, crazy situation. | ||
| Just a bizarre police state set up by the fact that drugs are illegal. | ||
| Man. | ||
| It does. | ||
| I mean, it invades the entire thing. | ||
| So, we saw what happened with alcohol, right? | ||
| So, gangs, take over, and you have violence. | ||
| Do you want to lower the violence? | ||
| Isn't that the mission of the police? | ||
| Do you want to lower the violence? | ||
| Then every single chief out there needs to be saying, hey, we need to end this drug war. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Yeah, how many cops are saying that we need to stop bars? | ||
| How about none? | ||
| They're a single bar, you know. | ||
| That's what causes all the fighting. | ||
| We all know that if they were all sitting around smoking, nothing would have happened. | ||
| Yeah, but also, I support their right to get fucked up if they want. | ||
| You know, I've been drunk a lot. | ||
| I've never hurt anybody never never did anything fucked up never caused any crimes never hurt anybody never You know, I just don't think that Human I think human beings should be able to do whatever the fuck they want. | ||
| I think when you when you violate Somehow or another you violate either other people's rights or other people's safety or other people's health and welfare, then it becomes a real issue and you should be prosecuted based on whatever transgressions you've committed. | ||
| Right, so don't you agree then that the drug war distracts you from actually being a real police? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Totally turned you away from it. | ||
| What kind of relationship did you have with the people in Baltimore, your area? | ||
| Did you develop friendships? | ||
| Did you develop any sort of connection with those folks? | ||
| None. | ||
| I was an occupying force. | ||
| I handled my stuff and I went out. | ||
| So to know you, if you were in my neighborhood, I would have to stop and talk to you. | ||
| I'd have to spend time with you. | ||
| I may even have to talk to your kids. | ||
| We could shoot the shit on the corner or something like that. | ||
| But the whole time I'm doing that, the departments are going to actually be criticizing me and saying I'm not doing my job. | ||
| Because you're not writing tickets or you're not pulling people over. | ||
| You're not meeting your quotas. | ||
| I'm not getting my stats. | ||
| I'm not making the arrests that I need to make. | ||
| So I came out of the academy and went and walked foot where Freddie Gray is in the Gilmore Homes. | ||
| So that was my first foray. | ||
| So I got solidified into this us versus them. | ||
| You threw me right into the biggest war zone we had. | ||
| On foot. | ||
| On foot. | ||
| Who were you with? | ||
| Another trainee that had no idea what the hell he was doing either. | ||
| We would team up with two others. | ||
| So you're playing cops? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| We were totally playing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And we were doing all drug arrests. | ||
| So we would go up and we would go in covert and into the projects because the projects had heat and it was winter time so you could break into one of the doors and it had heat in it and then you could watch... | ||
| What happened in the courtyard and people would sell and one of us would run down out of the room, circle around. | ||
| So you would go and break into a room because it had heat in it? | ||
| Right, because they're projects. | ||
| The heat stays on. | ||
| So it'd be a vacant house. | ||
| A vacant apartment. | ||
| Right, yeah, and the heat would be on. | ||
| Did you pick the lock or just kick in the door? | ||
| No, you could always find a way in. | ||
| Just pick a lock, you could get a key. | ||
| There was always a way in. | ||
| Someone else usually already did it for you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we would watch them, and my first arrest, I went down there and grabbed him, and the first thing he said was, these aren't my pants. | ||
| He knew he had the drugs in him. | ||
| So he was wearing pants? | ||
| These aren't my pants? | ||
| That's the first guy you arrested? | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Boy, did you know you were in for a fucking world of weirdness? | ||
| What a great way to start off a career. | ||
| That's like the perfect way. | ||
| The first guy you arrest says, these are not my pants. | ||
| The first thing to say, I grab his arm. | ||
| So I go there, and I go to the southern, which is an area where you would be fascinated there. | ||
| I'm just going to be blatantly honest, because that's the whole point of this. | ||
| You have a black ghetto, you have white trash, for the most part, and then you have this cluster next to it of really good people. | ||
| Doctors, lawyers, just regular people in that area that are nice, and they... | ||
| Mingle together and it's it's chaos. | ||
| So I go from that... | ||
| How's it chaos? | ||
| Because College kids that are going to University of Maryland think that they can just walk down the street into the bad neighborhood and everything will be fine They think they could drink and walk down the street and nothing's gonna happen to them The the and what does happen? | ||
| They're gonna get robbed They know it we know they didn't know it we know it was like hey, what are you doing? | ||
| Don't do that The whites in the neighborhood, you would have a really hard time figuring out your reports because you were supposed to put in who the person's relationship was. | ||
| And you're like, wait. | ||
| Is it your cousin? | ||
| Is that... | ||
| Wait. | ||
| So he's your cousin and your uncle. | ||
| This isn't making sense. | ||
| So what block do I put? | ||
| The guy that did it, was he your cousin? | ||
| Or, no. | ||
| He was your uncle? | ||
| He's like, no. | ||
| And everything was all together. | ||
| So, like, there's so much inbreeding. | ||
|
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|
Really? | |
| That you actually, you would have these crazy things. | ||
| That you would have Hispanics that came in and were trying to... | ||
| Come up themselves. | ||
| It would all just go together. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
| You can go there right now, and it's just a crazy societal testbed of everybody coming together from these entirely different backgrounds. | ||
| And there's real inbreeding? | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| It's like super common? | ||
| Everybody knows it, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
|
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|
So, I go from there, and I go to- So inbreeding's like, you run into that every day? | |
| Not every day. | ||
| Once a week? | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| If you're working there. | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| So I go from there and I go to the Northern District, which is this area called Mount Washington. | ||
| Mount Washington is an upper class, 80% to 90% white. | ||
| You have judges that live there. | ||
| You have nice houses, $400,000, $500,000 houses. | ||
| And now I'm in this environment. | ||
| And it's like, holy shit, where am I? I'm in Whiteland now. | ||
| I have this road that's called Cross Country Boulevard, and it has a stream next to it. | ||
| What the hell am I doing here? | ||
| So I'm expected to get the same amount of arrests, and I'm expected to write the tickets. | ||
| So I have bosses that are telling me, like, you're not doing anything. | ||
| What am I supposed to do? | ||
| I'm in a good neighborhood. | ||
| What do I do? | ||
| So I would leave my area, go to the black neighborhoods, and make drug arrests. | ||
| So that I could appease my bosses with my arrest numbers. | ||
| So you're continuing that cycle. | ||
| Once again, I'm leaving that area to go poach and specifically continue that cycle. | ||
| And I'm doing it because that's what I'm supposed to be doing. | ||
| So, if you were in a place that had no crime, you would get in trouble? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My one sergeant had to defend me constantly, because I went to a post in that same district where I started bringing the crime numbers down, but I didn't have the arrests. | ||
| And he had to defend me to his bosses, saying, like, look, he hasn't had a serious crime in a long time. | ||
| That's his job. | ||
| And I was getting criticized the whole time because I didn't have as many arrests. | ||
| Yeah, that's like the ultimate goal, right, is to have no crime. | ||
| Shouldn't that be the metric? | ||
| That should be. | ||
| It's not a metric. | ||
| But if we all had no crime, like I've often proposed this, like if we had a moratorium on crime, if the whole country got together and said, alright, no one for the next month, we can go 30 days without speeding, 30 days without illegal turns, 30 days without any violent crime, 30 days without any theft, what would happen? | ||
| We'd probably make some up. | ||
| You'd make up some crimes. | ||
| Of course they would. | ||
| Just to arrest black people, probably, right? | ||
| That would be what reality is. | ||
| But that's what we should be. | ||
| So, like, my liberal idea of policing would be to empower that officer that's on the street. | ||
| So even if there wasn't crime, then what he would really be doing is making sure that the alley was cleaned up, solving problems that are in the neighborhood. | ||
| So whatever the problem could possibly be, you know, there's this guy that constantly parks on this corner and the street sweeper can't get it. | ||
| Well, fix all those problems. | ||
| So even if you don't have crime, the peace officer, the protector, should still have plenty of things to do. | ||
| So it shouldn't be just crime. | ||
| Crime should be an element of what police do. | ||
| Did you have to pull over people and write tickets for speeding and shit like that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Baltimore doesn't care about that. | ||
| They don't care? | ||
| No. | ||
| You could just drive crazy? | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, there's no traffic cops or anything like that in the city. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, it just doesn't work that way. | ||
| What? | ||
| There's no traffic cops? | ||
| I mean, maybe a district here or there might have one guy that kind of primarily does traffic, but it's just patrol officers are expected to handle traffic. | ||
| And again, remember, I'm not being judged on that. | ||
| So why would I care? | ||
| So my car stop, the only reason I do a car stop is to get guns or drugs. | ||
| Maybe a warrant. | ||
| So you'd run a plate? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And the guy has a warrant, driver has a warrant, then yeah, I'm gonna do that. | ||
| So I'm not gonna do it unless I have a possibility of an arrest. | ||
| I'm not gonna sit there and write bullcrap tickets. | ||
| Did you arrest the same guys more than once? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, plenty of times, especially when I was doing narcotics. | ||
| So after I went from the Northern, I went to a unit called the Violent Crime Impact Division, and I was like playing clothes, got to have the tats out and be all tough and run around like you're, you know, they're called knockers in the city. | ||
| And So from there, you're dealing with the same street-level dealers all the time. | ||
| And one of those kids actually really struck me. | ||
| So a great irony that I had in doing drug work is usually drug work sends you deeper into it. | ||
| And it actually pulled me out. | ||
| Because I would interview these guys in the little rooms, and this one guy, Daniel Taylor, is the one I'm specifically remembering, and he was just a marijuana dealer, and he had a kid, and he was struggling to have this kid. | ||
| He was young, he was trying to help, but he had gotten locked up a lot when he was younger, so he was selling weed to just buy diapers for his kid, and he would tell me his stories, and we would be there, and he would be crying, and it was just like, fuck! | ||
| There's no difference between this kid and me. | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| The only difference between this kid and me Is that when I had a dime bag in my pocket, there wasn't a fucking chance in hell someone was going to look. | ||
| But him, he was going to get caught eventually. | ||
| And it sent him into that spiral. | ||
| And this could have been a good kid. | ||
| And I wouldn't be surprised if he was still in jail now. | ||
| And there was just nothing wrong with him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We... | |
| Our whole system created a criminal out of a decent kid. | ||
| It was shocking to me. | ||
| Like, I... Like, I knew... | ||
| I was following the rules, and so I had to arrest him. | ||
| I had to finish this up because I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. | ||
| But it was kind of heartbreaking to start to see that these people, they didn't... | ||
| They weren't different than us. | ||
| They just had a different environment than us. | ||
| And we should be changing that environment, not changing them. | ||
| So you felt this... | ||
| So let me... | ||
| Back up a bit. | ||
| Going into this district and this new position, why were you allowed to wear regular clothes? | ||
| And what was the idea? | ||
| You're supposed to blend in? | ||
| Is that the idea? | ||
| Yeah, so you're supposed to have an advantage to sneak up and all that. | ||
| So I have to tell a quick funny story about that. | ||
| But you're a white guy. | ||
| Yeah, this is a really good story. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, that's always a struggle. | ||
| So the tattoos help. | ||
| Blackface? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Why is that bad? | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| So the tats were out. | ||
| I had a red Mazda 6 with tenant windows, Virginia tags, cut off sleeves, was rolling down thinking I was... | ||
| Blending in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is it. | |
| I look like I'm some buying. | ||
| This is gonna be anything. | ||
| Do you consider maybe like carving a lightning bolt in your hair? | ||
| I should have done something crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To look a little more like I was out there buying. | ||
| Like you're transracial, perhaps? | ||
| I'm not opening that can either. | ||
| Why are the cans already open? | ||
| You don't even have to dig in. | ||
| It's overflowing. | ||
| I don't have an opinion on that. | ||
| I'm so happy that girl's alive. | ||
| I'm so happy this debate is on. | ||
| It gives you fodder. | ||
| Well, yes, I'm a fan of human folly. | ||
| So, you're rolling around like a white guy sticking out like a sore thumb. | ||
| Thinking I wasn't. | ||
| And I turned the corner and literally, like a four-year-old boy, he's like, yo, there are them knockers right there. | ||
| Fuck, this is as good as I get. | ||
| This is all I have. | ||
| And I still couldn't blend in. | ||
| So what was the point? | ||
| There wasn't one. | ||
| So they knew that there's a position that cops get into where they're allowed to dress like normal people. | ||
| We're called knockers in Baltimore. | ||
| And you're called knockers by the police department as well, or just by the civilians? | ||
| No, by the civilians. | ||
| And why do you think they're called knockers? | ||
| Obvious answer. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Knock heads. | ||
| That's what you do. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| You run the street. | ||
| You're the force. | ||
| You're the enforcement team. | ||
| So that's actually what it was called, the enforcement team. | ||
| We went out there and stamped down the drug. | ||
| Is there pressure to be intimidating? | ||
| You must. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You must be intimidating. | ||
| I wouldn't survive. | ||
| So you can look at me, and you can think of me being in the wire. | ||
| And Jamie, would I have survived? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| If I was not intimidating? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No, I wouldn't have survived. | ||
| I need to watch the wire. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| So, like, a technique is actually to find one of the biggest, baddest dudes in your area. | ||
| And kick his ass? | ||
| Punk him. | ||
| Punk him? | ||
| Yeah, you have to. | ||
| Do you use weapons? | ||
| Or how do you do it? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| You're gonna arrest him for something. | ||
| You're gonna be a little rough with him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| You're gonna do something to... | ||
| Because he's the kink dog in that neighborhood. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you have to assume the alpha role. | ||
| If you don't do that, you're going to get run over. | ||
| A lot of cops don't do it. | ||
| But if you don't do that, you are not going to survive in a drug unit for sure. | ||
| You're going to get trampled. | ||
| Why do you survive if you do do it? | ||
| I would think you're making an enemy. | ||
| Yeah, it's a battle. | ||
| It's a war. | ||
| It's what it is. | ||
| It's a drug war. | ||
| Don't be fooled if that's what it is. | ||
| That's what we've created. | ||
| So it's us versus them. | ||
| And if I'm going to be ahead, I have to be the alpha dog, right? | ||
| You know, I've never, obviously, never been a cop, but I worked as a security guard for a while at this concert place, and one of the things that I recognized really early on was that there was a us-versus-them mentality just from fucking security guards at a concert place. | ||
| And I would imagine the us-versus-them between cops and the people on the street gets pretty fucking intense. | ||
| Pretty big division. | ||
| And that is how you can have a black officer who's participating in a racist organization, just like anybody else. | ||
| Did you have a lot of black officers you worked with? | ||
| Oh, Baltimore's about... | ||
| It's about even. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So... | ||
| But there's no difference. | ||
| Maybe even the black officers are a little bit more aggressive. | ||
| I have a theory on that, but... | ||
| Well, that was an Ice-T thing. | ||
| Ice-T used to talk about that in the songs. | ||
| I think that's what they've always felt, that there was black cops that made up for the fact that they were black by being extra brutal. | ||
| Yeah, that's what they thought. | ||
| I don't actually think that that's why. | ||
| It's conjecture on my part, but I think that's because they're actually... | ||
| They feel embarrassed that those people... | ||
| They feel like the black criminals are making them black... | ||
| Race, the black community, look bad. | ||
| So they're kind of like extra angry, whereas I'm not gonna be angry because I don't care. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Maybe it could be a little bit of both. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or either or. | ||
| Sure, certainly. | ||
| For different people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| What the fuck, dude? | ||
| What a crazy life you lived. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't think about it like that at the time. | ||
| Right, but now, being out of it, how long did it take before you realized how fucking crazy it was? | ||
| It started when I was in but it started with like talking to that kid that was right and then I would also sit in covert and watch so you'll love this one time I was We were doing a long investigation and I had this vacant building that I would hide in a homeless dude was there and homeless dude would like leave magazines for me and then like I would come in during the day and he would come in at night It was the weirdest exchange. | ||
| We never crossed paths though He would leave magazines for you? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like what, Cop Monthly? | ||
| No, no, no, it wasn't Cop Monthly. | ||
| He'd leave Playboy or he'd leave... | ||
| High Times? | ||
| Yeah, High Times, something like that, whatever he had. | ||
| And he knew I was there, I knew he was there, but we never actually crossed paths. | ||
| But they had a... | ||
| So he left them for you, though? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, we both knew we were there. | ||
| There was a big huge picture of Jesus filling the window. | ||
| And so I carved out Jesus' eyes and I would stand behind him. | ||
| And that's how I watched. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it had like this double meaning. | |
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So I was actually standing behind him watching all the drug dealers on the investigation. | ||
| But while I would watch all these investigations like that, you would see everything for what it was and not for your perceptions because you were there for so long. | ||
| So I would see the dealer sitting there, but then I would see him take care of his kid. | ||
| I would see him sit down and make food. | ||
| I would hear the other people in the neighborhood talking about their lives and hearing the sounds, smelling the smells, and realizing that... | ||
| This wasn't a war. | ||
| This is ridiculous that we were doing this. | ||
| This was not the enemy. | ||
| This was a socio-economic problem that we had to deal with, but this isn't the enemy. | ||
| We are not at war. | ||
| This is preposterous. | ||
| So by being embedded in their community, you recognize that we really are, or you really were, an occupying force In just a community that's trying to get by, just a bunch of people that are just like you or I, but their circumstances were unfortunate. | ||
| They were born into this situation where this cycle is perpetuated over and over and over again, and you've got a chance to see it. | ||
| Right, let's not fool ourselves. | ||
| We all won the lottery here by being born in America. | ||
| We all won the lottery by being white. | ||
| So we have to recognize that... | ||
| Not gonna let it go, are you? | ||
| She's not. | ||
| She's not white. | ||
| She identifies as black. | ||
| I don't, again, I don't have an opinion on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You should. | |
| Don't send me down that rabbit hole. | ||
| Everybody should. | ||
| Orange is the new black. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| She's orange. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Ever look at her skin? | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| You're wrong. | ||
| You're wrong. | ||
| I'm not wrong. | ||
| Look, she did some good work, too. | ||
| She was running the NAACP very well. | ||
| She clearly issues there, though. | ||
| She's got some issues. | ||
| She likes black dudes. | ||
| She wanted to fit in. | ||
| It goes a little further than that. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I get you. | ||
| Some people want to be chicks. | ||
| Some people want to be black. | ||
| Who gives a fuck? | ||
| Let her be black. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| She's helping. | ||
| I got you. | ||
| A lot of people got mad at her though. | ||
| Yeah, I can imagine. | ||
| We're getting off track. | ||
| It's alright. | ||
| Did other officers share your, I want to say like, I don't want to say humanization, but your recognition of the fact that these folks are just like you? | ||
| Did other officers have that same feeling? | ||
| I think a lot of them do. | ||
| But it wasn't discussed? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, you don't discuss it while you're in, except for maybe a few people. | ||
| When I was a sergeant, I had a pretty good sphere of influence. | ||
| So our squad was a little more talkative about things like that and could be open and discuss those kind of things. | ||
| I took an officer once and just put on plain clothes and kind of walked around the district just not being cops. | ||
| And that shows you, like, how much different the neighborhood is than what you think. | ||
| Because you go from 911 call to 911 call to 911 call seeing everybody at their worst. | ||
| And when you're not seeing them at their worst, you're hunting for somebody that you can possibly pretend that they're doing at their worst. | ||
| You know, whether they have drugs on them or whatever. | ||
| But when... | ||
| You go through the city, it's not at all what you think it is. | ||
| So even me, looking like a prototypical white kid looking to buy drugs in the hood, when I would go through, it's not like the dealers are pushers. | ||
| I mean, they would come up like, yo, you want to party? | ||
| No. | ||
| And you keep on moving. | ||
| Sometimes they didn't trust me. | ||
| I was in too good of shape. | ||
| They'd be like, no. | ||
| But... | ||
| They weren't like they were pressuring you. | ||
| It's not like things were chaos in the neighborhood. | ||
| Ladies were sweeping their steps. | ||
| But the neighborhood changes when you have that blue uniform and those lights and you're now the authority. | ||
| You kind of have to see the city for what it's like when you're not there. | ||
| Right, so your point of view riding in a car, it's like there's a filter. | ||
| Super myopic, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and you never really get a chance to experience it like a person who lives there. | ||
| I mean, even if you don't really, if you don't live there, but I mean, just you get a better view of it walking around and not acting as a cop. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It seems... | ||
| Common sense that you would do that. | ||
| What would you think about cops being forced to live in the places that they have to patrol? | ||
| I think that's a real tough situation. | ||
| It's a real tough argument and very nuanced. | ||
| There's no way I would live in Baltimore City because I didn't make enough money for my daughter to go to a private school and I wasn't sending her to that school to prison cycle. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I moved the PA where I could send her to a good school and actually afford to. | ||
| Now, sure, if I made enough money, if you're going to pay an officer $150,000, $160,000, yeah, he can stay in the city. | ||
| He or she can stay in the city. | ||
| When you say PA, you lived in Pennsylvania? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So how far away was that from where you were? | ||
| 40 minutes. | ||
| So you would live in Pennsylvania, send your kid to school there, and then drive to work? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| And that's common. | ||
| So a lot of police live in Pennsylvania. | ||
| In the southern PA area, driving back and forth in Maryland. | ||
| A lot of workers, period, do that. | ||
| There's a lot of communities around LA, like Simi Valley is a big one, where there's big communities of police officers. | ||
| Is that the same thing with there, where they sort of decide to live near each other, close together? | ||
| Well, you don't do it intentionally. | ||
| No? | ||
| It's economically driven. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So it's economically driven, like you find a place that's affordable, but you don't try to move where the other cops live? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I wouldn't want to do that. | ||
| I would work for them all day. | ||
| Well, I know my friends that are cops, they actually did it on purpose. | ||
| There's some that live in Santa Clarita. | ||
| They're a little deeper. | ||
| They're pretty deep into that, then. | ||
| Well, you know how it is. | ||
| It becomes like a gang, right? | ||
| Doesn't it? | ||
| It is. | ||
| We actually say in the city that there is one gang, and that's the Blue Gang. | ||
| So, like, we don't let people... | ||
| So aggression is good in a certain extent. | ||
| We don't let gang members throw flags. | ||
| So in my post, if somebody had a red bandana or a blue bandana sticking out of their pocket, that shit was not going down. | ||
| So you arrested someone? | ||
| I wouldn't arrest them, I would just punk him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Punk him. | |
| So you embarrass him in front of his friends, you take his stuff. | ||
| And you roll out. | ||
| Did you ever experience resistance? | ||
| Sure, they're gonna resist. | ||
| If they're gonna resist, then it's gonna go bad. | ||
| Did anybody shoot at you or anything like that? | ||
| No, nothing. | ||
| No, because it's the game. | ||
| So I'm respecting the game. | ||
| You know there's a game. | ||
| The drug game. | ||
| So I have my role, the drug dealer has his role, and we're playing this back and forth. | ||
| And as long as we all play by the rules, everything is fine. | ||
| As soon as the cops stop playing by the rules of the game, then you have a problem. | ||
| As soon as they stop playing by the rules of the game, you have a problem. | ||
| Did the futility of it all, was that obvious to you? | ||
| Yeah, incredibly obvious. | ||
| There's no point. | ||
| I remember a case we had where there was a group that was selling drugs, and we worked on it for about a week or two, took down the whole group, and two days later, there was a whole new crew running the exact same neighborhood, throwing the same product, and we were just like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| That was pointless. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We just took all them off. | ||
| There was no point to it whatsoever. | ||
| And it was all drugs anyway. | ||
| It's all drugs. | ||
| Fucking A, man. | ||
| Everything is drugs. | ||
| This, you know, if I was a conspiracy theorist, I kind of been one in the past, but I've mostly abandoned that. | ||
| But if I was... | ||
| I would feel like this is engineered. | ||
| I would feel like this is just set up to make sure that these people stay poor, that you keep arresting people, and you keep this cycle going. | ||
| I don't think you're a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| Is it because... | ||
| It exists and because the system sort of feeds off of it or was it engineered? | ||
| I think the prison industrial complex has a huge role in that. | ||
| So especially with your privatizing prisons, so you're creating a vacancy for a bed that must be filled. | ||
| So who's gonna fill that? | ||
| So this is where institutional racism also comes in. | ||
| I'm not gonna fill it with you. | ||
| We're not gonna fill it with me. | ||
| We're not gonna fill it with Jamie. | ||
| Jamie's sketchy. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| We're gonna fill it With the people we like the least as a society. | ||
| The people that you feel like you can demonize the easiest. | ||
| When that judge got arrested in Pennsylvania for sending kids to jail and juvenile just for money, we really got a view into this world I think a lot of people that opened their eyes, they went, whoa, a fucking judge? | ||
| Judges can be that bad? | ||
| Judges can be so evil that they would ruin a child's life just so they could profit off of it. | ||
| But that's essentially what's going on by keeping the system the way it is. | ||
| Today, the Baltimore Police... | ||
| Who was he? | ||
| The head of Baltimore Police? | ||
| Commissioner Anthony Batts. | ||
| He resigned, or was he fired? | ||
| He was fired. | ||
| He was fired. | ||
| And why was he fired? | ||
| Because of all this shit that's going down? | ||
| Yeah, it's a really hard situation to say. | ||
| He's fired because he never led the agency. | ||
| He never had the agency, ever. | ||
| We really don't like outsiders. | ||
| So, when he comes in here from Oakland, from California, no offense. | ||
| He came from Oakland? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Oakland's fucked up, too. | ||
| Oakland is, like, one of the worst police brutality spots in California. | ||
| You find that to be coincidental that there was an uprising in Oakland and an uprising in Baltimore, two agencies he led? | ||
| This motherfucker! | ||
| What's he doing now? | ||
| Put him in jail. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| See how he lasts. | ||
| No, you don't think that's gonna happen, do you? | ||
| Is it? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| So, what is his name again, this guy? | ||
| Anthony Batts. | ||
| And what did he do that was fucked up? | ||
| He just never had the agency. | ||
| So, never take responsibility. | ||
| You can't... | ||
| So, they come in, and they come in with these ideals of what it's like in Baltimore, and they don't know what it's like in Baltimore. | ||
| Because he knows what it's like in Oakland. | ||
| No, I mean, hypothetically. | ||
| Barely. | ||
| Barely, it seems. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they come in with just these ideals and this, I don't know, aura, and they're never going to get us. | ||
| Like, they're never going to get us to follow them. | ||
| So it doesn't matter what he does. | ||
| We're not going to follow him. | ||
| He doesn't... | ||
| After the riots, he said he should have trusted his instincts and done more than to rely on his commanders. | ||
| You just threw your commanders under the bus in public and you think this agency is going to follow you? | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| So he's a politician, essentially. | ||
| They all are. | ||
| That's one of our problems. | ||
| That's why we have to get money out because we're led by politicians and policing. | ||
| What could be done? | ||
| Let's say this thing becomes bigger, and I think what you're doing today is very courageous, and you're speaking very eloquently and very articulate, and you're honest, and I really believe you, man. | ||
| I believe you from the heart, 100%. | ||
| There's a possibility that people like you and all these activists that are making these giant protests happen and causing all these people to be aware of all this police brutality and this fucking horrible cycle that these people are thrust into. | ||
| A guy like you could really change something. | ||
| A guy like you, if you were in a position of power, there might be something that you could do. | ||
| Would you consider doing something like that? | ||
| I would consider it if we had the environment to do so, because it's going to be ugly at first, because I can't stop the drug war. | ||
| It's not in my control. | ||
| Well, you shouldn't stop the drug war. | ||
| What if, this is a big hypothetical, but what if we went into some sort of a situation in this country where drugs became decriminalized? | ||
| Where the United States woke the fuck up and realized we've been doing the same shit that they did during the fucking 20s, During the Prohibition, We're doing the same shit. | ||
| We're telling people what they can't do, they're not listening, and we're feeding organized crime. | ||
| We're feeding crime that is filling a vacuum, just like it's going on in Mexico right now. | ||
| Just like these poor fucking people that live in these border towns in Mexico. | ||
| It's all being fueled by the fact that drugs are illegal and they're selling these drugs to America. | ||
| If all of a sudden that changed, how much of an impact would that have on police? | ||
| It would be striking. | ||
| Again, that's 90% of what I did. | ||
| So if we would stop doing that, it would be incredibly advantageous. | ||
| But what would they do with you guys? | ||
| See what I'm saying? | ||
| Let's focus. | ||
| Let's investigate violence. | ||
| Let's figure out how we're gonna fix things. | ||
| So use some science to say we have a problem. | ||
| What do we do to actually solve this problem? | ||
| Instead of being fueled by ideology, what are we actually doing? | ||
| Well, you saw this recent thing on Obama's gonna release all these non-violent drug offenders. | ||
| I mean, that's a good step. | ||
| I concur completely. | ||
| That's a great step. | ||
| Now, if he does that, and if the next step is obviously not arresting non-violent drug offenders, not arresting them at all. | ||
| Like, there's no more arrests for drugs. | ||
| Unless there's violence involved, and then you're arresting someone for violence, which is totally reasonable. | ||
| It doesn't matter if they're violent over fucking stuffed animals or cocaine. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| They're violent, right? | ||
| They're hurting somebody. | ||
| That's why they're arrested. | ||
| How much would that transform neighborhoods? | ||
| How much would that transform this entire cycle of people going from communities that are just engulfed in crime and becoming a part of that themselves because they were unlucky enough to be born there? | ||
| I think it's the biggest thing we could do as a nation. | ||
| I only put Wolfpack and getting money out of politics ahead of it because I question that we can actually do that as money continues to fuel the politicians. | ||
| And Wolfpack is what's set up by the Young Turks, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, which is fucking fantastic. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| There's another thing that my friend Steve Hilton put together called CrowdPak, where you could see exactly which politicians are being supported by what, where they're getting their donations from, and what they vote on. | ||
| Get a real clear analysis of their position based on influence, based on the amount of money they're receiving and where it's coming from. | ||
| It's all shocking shit, because I just would hope that as we move forward as a human race, as we move forward as civilization moves forward, and we embrace technology, and we understand that we have more access to information now than any human beings that have ever lived ever, to keep living the same way, even though we have all these... | ||
| Obvious problems right in front of us is ridiculous I mean it's it's literally the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result That is the definition of insanity right totally agree There's just there's no way around it that we're doing this wrong and that's why I'm saying the only reason I'm saying this is because We are doing it so wrong, and it's so blatantly wrong. | ||
| It's like you have to have a cognitive bias to not see this. | ||
| It's really the older generation. | ||
| I kind of have pretty much confidence that our generations and younger will be able to solve this once we get in power. | ||
| But how they don't see this now is absolutely baffling. | ||
| And I think they don't see it because it doesn't affect them. | ||
| So why should they care? | ||
| Were you still in the force when that guy got choked to death in Staten Island? | ||
| I don't think I was. | ||
| That was Eric Gardner. | ||
| Yeah, Eric Gardner. | ||
| That one drove me fucking crazy because there's a video of it and you get to see the fact that this guy was so innocent. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with what he was doing. | ||
| He's just hanging out. | ||
| Two cents. | ||
| Tax evasion or something. | ||
| Tax evasion. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The idea that these cops are going to choke a guy to death because he's not paying taxes on loose cigarettes. | ||
| Not only that, he didn't even have any loose cigarettes on him. | ||
| And they wrestled on the ground and choked him and then tried to say that it wasn't a chokehold. | ||
| I mean, that one just highlights the difference between the way they treated that guy versus the way they would treat one of their own. | ||
| It's a clear us versus them. | ||
| And they felt like they could do that. | ||
| They could do that. | ||
| The papers were signed. | ||
| They had the directive. | ||
| It was obvious that it was within their boundaries to take this guy and to physically assault him and arrest him. | ||
| Yeah, and so they don't have empathy. | ||
| So if you want to see them have empathy, please, we need to be moral. | ||
| We need to be human. | ||
| That's what I'm, like, my main message is we have to lead with empathy. | ||
| That's the starting point of everything. | ||
| So if I'm going after that guy, I can immediately see that, whether there's a law or not, the idea that I'm going to take someone's freedom away. | ||
| Like, they took his life away, but they were planning to take his freedom away for essentially nothing in stupid tax that's pennies. | ||
| He's providing a service. | ||
| Yeah, to somebody. | ||
| If you don't have five bucks and you want a cigarette, that guy's providing a service. | ||
| Yeah, so why don't you let him set up a little booth and he can... | ||
| Not only that, didn't he pay taxes on those fucking stats? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| So, Jesus Christ, I mean, you know, he's making a little bit of a profit, but who gives a shit? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| No one's getting hurt. | ||
| No one. | ||
| Literally, no one's getting hurt. | ||
| And the money that they could have made just by eliminating the drug war in taxes would make that look like a pittance. | ||
| Just the amount of taxes they're getting from Colorado. | ||
| Colorado has fucking changed. | ||
| I mean, it is morphing right in front of our eyes and becoming this free utopia. | ||
| Yeah, you got a lot of dirty hippies there and a lot of fucking homeless people, but that's part of the rap. | ||
| You're gonna get that. | ||
| They don't bother anybody, though. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| I mean, they might bother you a little bit, but whatever. | ||
| That's for some change. | ||
| Yeah, who gives a shit? | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| So why don't conservatives see this? | ||
| Why don't these states see this? | ||
| Because they're white! | ||
| They live in the suburbs! | ||
| They're my neighbors! | ||
| Don't they want money? | ||
| I mean, that money is going to go to their schools as well. | ||
| That's going to make it safer for their kid to go to Fourth of July in the city. | ||
| That's going to make it safer for all of us. | ||
| The answer is blatantly obvious that we must end the war on drugs and we must get money out of politics. | ||
| But we just sit here sitting on our hands. | ||
| Well, I agree with you, but I think you having these kind of conversations live, online, in a... | ||
| A forum like this where it's going to be distributed to millions of people you have the opportunity to influence people that might not see things your way because you have a genuine insight and a real perspective that very few people including me could ever hope to have. | ||
| You saying this kind of stuff and you talking about this kind of stuff can shed some light in a way that other people can't. | ||
| I'm listening to you talk here, man. | ||
| I'm like, you're the fucking perfect commissioner. | ||
| You're the kind of guy that I would want running a police department. | ||
| You! | ||
| You're a guy who's been there, a guy who's served the country, been there as a cop, understands what the problems are, and has solutions, and has empathy, and really is saying all the right shit. | ||
| I mean, this is what we need. | ||
| This is what the police departments of the world, of this country at least, need. | ||
| We need someone like you. | ||
| So, how do I convince other cops of that? | ||
| That's my struggle. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I mean, I know a lot of cops listen to this fucking podcast. | ||
| I'll tell you that. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if this is going to change them, but they're going to fucking Joe Rogan's high listening. | ||
| You ain't out on the streets with us, dude. | ||
| But, you know, you've seen the thin blue line sticker, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The black on the top, black on the bottom. | ||
| So we even visualize ourselves the wrong way. | ||
| So we're this thin blue line, and the thin blue line goes to the middle, and it separates the good guys from the bad guys. | ||
| And it makes us neither. | ||
| Our entire mentality is that we are somebody that's separate. | ||
| We're not the good guys or the bad guys. | ||
| We're a separate entity that runs this shit. | ||
| But that shouldn't be that way. | ||
| That should be like a blurred blue and black. | ||
| We should be part of the fabric of our society. | ||
| And we should be ingrained in it. | ||
| But instead, we fix ourselves like a wall. | ||
| And we shouldn't be a wall. | ||
| I think human beings inherently have a problem with power. | ||
| You know, that's why you see, I mean, you see it across the board. | ||
| When people have power and influence over people, like, it seems to be a natural inclination to abuse it, and it takes someone of very strong character and insight and objectivity, like yourself, to not do that. | ||
| Or at least to recognize that you have done that, and that it is wrong. | ||
| Or that it was wrong. | ||
| It seems to me that, like, whether it's politicians or whether it's the military or whether it's someone like fucking Bill Cosby, you know? | ||
| Like, how does a guy become that guy? | ||
| Well, it has to be out of power, you know? | ||
| I mean, it's the power, even just... | ||
| It might be a stretch, but the power to drug someone, the ability to do that. | ||
| What is it about human beings that makes them exploit people that are below them instead of trying to raise those people up to their level? | ||
| There's some fundamental lack of understanding about the brotherhood and sisterhood of the human race. | ||
| It all gets fucked up when you have a job. | ||
| And it seems to me that if you have a quota, and if you have a boss that's telling you you need to arrest more people, you need to lock up more people. | ||
| Like, these streets are too safe. | ||
| Either you're doing... | ||
| The right thing, or you're not doing enough. | ||
| And they almost always think you're not doing enough, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Always. | |
| They never would think, oh, this guy got lucky, and he created a good relationship with all these people, and we locked up all the bad guys, and all the people in the community that are left are all safe. | ||
| There's no more violent criminals. | ||
| It's a beautiful utopia of a neighborhood, and we never have to arrest anybody there ever again. | ||
| So cops would just be there, just sort of to say hi, and patrol the streets. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. | ||
| But you see it, right? | ||
| You see that. | ||
| So you see it. | ||
| So the first step is to recognize it. | ||
| And so do we have a problem with power as human beings? | ||
| Maybe we do. | ||
| So let's acknowledge that and put measures in place so that we don't exceed our power boundaries. | ||
| Have some checks and balances in law enforcement because we have zero. | ||
| We get away with everything we want to get away with until there's a camera. | ||
| The only difference, all these other things that you've seen in the past, you've heard these stories of guys getting shot unarmed, but yet he was attacking my gun or he was taking my gun. | ||
| How much do you really believe those now? | ||
| Well, we saw that one where the guy in South Carolina shot the guy in the back and then dropped the taser. | ||
| He walked up to him and threw the taser down near his body. | ||
| Did the other cops say anything? | ||
| There's a video of it. | ||
| I don't know if the other cops saw it. | ||
| He saw him do it. | ||
| It's right in front of him. | ||
| He saw him do it. | ||
| He thinks nothing of it. | ||
| It's right on video! | ||
| Because it's normal. | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| I only saw the one guy. | ||
| Is the other guy in the video, the other guy see the taser? | ||
| Is it obvious that he sees it? | ||
| I mean, he's first standing right next to him. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But the fact that he shot him in the back while he was running away. | ||
| I mean, that's kind of fucking crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Because that guy's being charged for murder, right? | ||
| Well, that's nice. | ||
| But it's because he got caught. | ||
| But did anybody riot? | ||
| Nobody rioted there. | ||
| But why? | ||
| Because they're busy. | ||
| They're all booked. | ||
| All the uprising. | ||
| D-Ray was booked. | ||
| D-Ray was booked. | ||
| He had too many things. | ||
| What happened with D-Ray? | ||
| You got him to not... | ||
| This guy, D-Ray, is a really noble activist, and I appreciate everything this guy's doing, and I appreciated him making Wolf Blitzer look like a fucking idiot on TV. But he had me blocked for some reason, but you got him to unblock me. | ||
| I got him to unblock you. | ||
| It's totally conjecture, but I think he's just leery of us, and I understand that. | ||
| Of white people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Us? | ||
| We're in the same group? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| But why'd he block me? | ||
| Because I'm white? | ||
| No, his blocking has something to do with something he thought that you said. | ||
| What do you think I said? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| How can you not remember? | ||
| No, you're going to have to talk to him. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You can't say it? | ||
| No, I just don't know enough and I didn't dig. | ||
| It's not my business. | ||
| So he thought I said something racist? | ||
| I don't know what he thought you said. | ||
| He thought you said something that you didn't like and I just said, you know, trust me. | ||
| He's fine. | ||
| He's one of the good guys. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Maybe I said a joke. | ||
| Maybe I said something off-color. | ||
| It's always hard. | ||
| The problem with being a comedian, man. | ||
| Maybe he heard me talk about transracialism and how I support it. | ||
| I think he's probably a little goof on that himself. | ||
| Well, he should be. | ||
| But why not? | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| He's a good guy. | ||
| I understand his lack of trust. | ||
| Well, I understand. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| But I understand. | ||
| I don't understand his lack of trust in me. | ||
| I just don't understand that. | ||
| I'm so trustworthy, but I understand what he's doing. | ||
| I think it's spectacular. | ||
| He to me is a real activist as opposed to Al Sharpton who just makes my fucking blood curdle when I see that guy show up at any fucking event that has anything to do with black people. | ||
| Jesus fucking Christ. | ||
| That guy has more harm than he does good just by his just greasy The past, his history, and there's so much about him that's just so wrong, and it's nice to see someone like DeRay come along. | ||
| It's nice to see a real activist, someone who is intelligent, is articulate, is doing all the right things. | ||
| And I think between a guy like that, between many people like him, I'm sure there's a lot more people like him that I'm not aware of, and then someone like you, who's shedding light on this from the inside, I think things are slowly but surely turning. | ||
| I think the battleship is moving in a different direction. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I really think the whole country is moving in a different direction, and I think that when we see the way people are approaching gay rights now, the way the world is just more sensitive about things. | ||
| Some people are angry at it. | ||
| They're saying everyone's oversensitive. | ||
| I think it's probably better to be oversensitive than to be insensitive. | ||
| Because oversensitive can be corrected. | ||
| And people are like, well, people are, you know, these lives are being ruined because people are being oversensitive. | ||
| You know, there was a Nobel Prize winning doctor or professor that made a joke about women in science. | ||
| And he said they should probably have same-sex labs because three things happen when women are in the labs. | ||
| He said either they fall in love with you or you fall in love with them or they cry when you criticize them. | ||
| And he was joking around, I guess. | ||
| Allegedly, and he had to resign. | ||
| He had to resign for that, for something like that. | ||
| You know, they say, equality in science is more important. | ||
| Like, that motherfucker is curing cancer, all right? | ||
| This guy's a Nobel Prize winning scientist, and he says something that's a little goofy, but he doesn't have some history of oppression. | ||
| He's not some terrible person. | ||
| It's this massive oversensitivity by people. | ||
| Where you can't even just, you know, say that's probably not a good thing to say. | ||
| And he, you know, can kind of correct it and you can kind of smooth it out because you understand that people talk off the top of their head. | ||
| This is not like a fucking story wrote for the New York Times where he had a clear position on women in science and it became a real issue because he criticized people that might have gotten into science and done some real good work. | ||
| No, the guy's just talking. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And I think symptoms like that, like these issues that we face, it's way better to have that than it is to have insensitivity. | ||
| I think the oversensitive things, like, it sucks that this guy got fired, but, or that he resigned, but he shouldn't have. | ||
| And I blame the institution. | ||
| I blame the people running for that, that are so fucking sensitive that they, and so terrified that they're worried about any criticism whatsoever, that they reacted to it in this way. | ||
| And him, he shouldn't have fucking backed down from it either. | ||
| He should have talked about it and Explained or maybe even apologized. | ||
| Maybe even said it was an off-color joke or it was just I just think that that Balance is is because we're moving in the right direction. | ||
| I really do I think I even though I've been a victim of oversensitivity I shouldn't say victim. | ||
| That's very grandiose It's it's it's affected me or it's impacted me or I've felt it I've seen it rather I think it's better. | ||
| It's better to have all those fucking crazy people running around looking at things to be offended about, looking at, you know, examples of sexism or homophobia or racism. | ||
| It's better to have people reaching too far than to not reach at all. | ||
| And I think because we're seeing all this stuff, I think it's evidence That society as a whole and our culture in America is tipping towards being more aware. | ||
| And I think that's a good thing. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I have a lot of hope. | ||
| A lot of people think that I'm overly optimistic about the future of this country and the human beings in general. | ||
| But I see plenty of evidence that people are aware and that they care and just all the people that are paying attention to your story and all these different protests and marches and all these different news stories whenever we see these examples of police brutality. | ||
| They're so highlighted now. | ||
| This is not swept under the rug at all. | ||
| And if anything, the cops are fucking thrown under the bus immediately. | ||
| I mean, it's a different world. | ||
| And I think there's going to be an adjustment period. | ||
| But I think ultimately, when we look back at this time, 10, 20 years from now, I think we're going to look at this as a shift, as a shift in our culture that we didn't see in the 60s. | ||
| You know, there's... | ||
| I think when the when Martin Luther King was around and when There was a shift then there was most certainly an awareness civil rights awareness But I think it's even bigger now. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I think this is a great time to be a human being I really think that We have the real potential to make some real change inside our lifetime and change that can Give momentum to the future I think there's without question that you're completely right. | ||
| They can't avoid it. | ||
| Technology has made us communicate. | ||
| We see everything. | ||
| We can't hide as much anymore. | ||
| We just have to be human and recognize all of our flaws and everything will be fine. | ||
| With your doctor, if we could have some empathy for his position, Because empathy is a two-way street, then maybe you can work out a solution for understanding in that ballgame. | ||
| And that's what we're doing now is we're working out the understanding, and it's going to have this ugly period in policing, for sure. | ||
| But we'll get through it, and it's going to be better. | ||
| It's inevitable. | ||
| I don't think it's me. | ||
| It's going to be somebody that comes behind me, but it's going to work. | ||
| I think you're a part of it. | ||
| I think we're all a part of it. | ||
| I think someone like you is uniquely qualified to be a part of it. | ||
| You know, the fact that you actually were there on the street arresting a dude who's wearing somebody else's pants. | ||
| I think it just shows you're uniquely qualified to talk about this. | ||
| And I think that there's a real potential with this kind of dialogue and with people just being more and more aware of it that a young kid that might be like 16, 17 years old right now that is about to go into the Marines and has the same idea that you had He has a leg up. | ||
| Maybe he can learn from your experiences and maybe his comrades and maybe his peers can also learn from what you're saying and your experiences and maybe someone like you one day becomes a commissioner and maybe that time while that's happening That one commissioner starts listening to good politicians and gets influenced by good leaders and doesn't have to start arresting people just for drugs. | ||
| Doesn't have to just perpetrate the same stupid fucking cycle that's been going on and on. | ||
| I mean, is that too much to ask? | ||
| Is that too unrealistic to hope that we can change things? | ||
| I mean, you can't think that we're not going to improve. | ||
| If we're not going to improve, we're going to stay stagnant as a culture. | ||
| Well, that's ridiculous. | ||
| That's shitty engineering. | ||
| That's non-thinking. | ||
| Are we saying that we're perfect? | ||
| Or are we saying that it's futile? | ||
| Are we saying that it can't be fixed? | ||
| Or are we saying that we're not willing to try? | ||
| One of those is happening. | ||
| The majority is not willing to try. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you even... | ||
| I don't think I belong on the pedestal you're putting me on. | ||
| Maybe somebody else was, because I participated in all this. | ||
| Maybe we can have people that don't... | ||
| That's why it's on a pedestal. | ||
| I'm not putting you on a pedestal. | ||
| I'm just saying you're hope. | ||
| What you're doing, this is hope. | ||
| You influence that, though. | ||
| Okay, so you have this philosophy where you are like, it doesn't matter what you do. | ||
| Just fucking be nice. | ||
| Just be nice. | ||
| And listening to you through these years, that has invaded my mind as well. | ||
| So if we can just talk... | ||
| Start opening up as humans and be nice and be empathetic then we're going to work all of this out regardless Bernie Sanders might even be a good example of that with his message right now absolutely huge following right yes and Like vote for this guy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean we're going to make changes It's like if you're a progressive Then you want to make changes. | ||
| If you're a conservative, you want to stay in the past. | ||
| That's what these words mean. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Who would want to be conservative and stuck in the past? | ||
| The only person that's going to be stuck in the past is the one with the Confederate flag that's collecting money off the backs of somebody else. | ||
| Well, just the definition of conservative, I think it's all fucked up now. | ||
| Conservative should be someone who's fiscally conservative, someone who's prudent, someone who makes good financial choices. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| That's a smart thing. | ||
| That's someone with discipline. | ||
| I support that 100%. | ||
| You know, good financial decisions, that is a conservative thing. | ||
| You know, when you start getting socially conservative, that means you're white. | ||
| That's what it means. | ||
| You might as well say you're white, you know, or you're a black guy who likes hanging out with white people. | ||
| And being paid more than he's worth. | ||
| Because you know that's what happens. | ||
| I mean, we live in a weird world right now, and I think society is being redefined right in front of our eyes. | ||
| I think when we look back at this time, a hundred years from now, when people look back, when we're dead, they're gonna look back and go, God, it was a fucking crazy time to be alive. | ||
| That internet just fucking threw a monkey wrench into the whole gears. | ||
| Clank! | ||
| I mean, that's really what's happening. | ||
| This ability to communicate just didn't exist before. | ||
| You being able to come on a show like this, this wasn't supposed to happen. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| If this show was on the radio or something like that, first of all, we'd be interrupted by commercials. | ||
| And then second of all, someone would probably tell us we can't talk about these things. | ||
| Or we can't talk about the way we're talking. | ||
| You can't swear. | ||
| We've already been arrested for swearing. | ||
| You can get a fucking fine of some insane amount. | ||
| I think it's like $250,000 for swearing on the radio. | ||
| For swearing. | ||
| Like just saying, get the fuck out of here on the radio. | ||
| You can go to jail if you don't pay that fine. | ||
| If you don't pay that quarter million dollar fine. | ||
| The vig to the government. | ||
| That's where Howard Stern came in, man. | ||
| Howard Stern fought all that shit. | ||
| That's why that guy's always going to be a hero to me. | ||
| I don't give a fuck what he says about podcasting or Ari Shaffir or any of that crazy shit. | ||
| If it wasn't for that guy, that guy fought the fight. | ||
| And the powers that be that have set this stupid thing up, they didn't anticipate that a guy like you would be able to go on the Young Turks later this afternoon and say anything you want, man. | ||
| And that Young Turks thing will be seen by a fucking million people. | ||
| Easy. | ||
| And that's hope, man. | ||
| That's hope because... | ||
| What we're talking about where you listen to some of the things that I've said, those things that I've said, I've heard online. | ||
| You know, I've read. | ||
| I've watched documentaries. | ||
| I'm expressing things that I've learned. | ||
| And we all learn from each other. | ||
| And we all... | ||
| The community that we create by... | ||
| Finding like-minded people or by saying things that resonate with people or by influencing people in a positive way where it actually helps their mindset and helps their life and they become thankful of that and then they spread the same kind of message and we help spread it to each other and I have a guy like you on and you change the way I think about certain things and you influence like I'm Genuinely honored to have you on the show. | ||
| I'm genuinely I really admire what you've done and what you're saying and I think other people will as well and I think it spreads it's like a good virus like it gets out there and This this wasn't available before something like this wasn't available And I think that's part of why we all got locked into this us-versus-them mentality. | ||
| We didn't have a voice that distinguishes or differentiates from the fucking same bullshit corporate voice that we keep hearing over and over and over again that doesn't differentiate. | ||
| You don't hear any we are all brothers and sisters on Fox News. | ||
| You don't hear that. | ||
| What do you hear? | ||
| You hear crime statistics. | ||
| You know, you hear Nancy Grace with 2 Chainz debating about marijuana. | ||
| I mean, really, that's what you hear. | ||
| You hear bullshit, nonsense. | ||
| You don't hear any soul. | ||
| You know, no one's got a goddamn heart. | ||
| No one recognizes the fact that this is a temporary existence. | ||
| We're going through a temporary existence, and there are so many of us. | ||
| And there's pockets that seem almost unmanageable, because they've been fucked over for hundreds of years, and there's just a swarming chaos in these areas. | ||
| And they're riding on momentum, and they're riding on the momentum of decades and decades of poverty and crime and a cycle of despair. | ||
| And it's going to be hard to fix that shit, but it's critical, and it's one of the most important aspects of our civilization. | ||
| If we don't fix that, our civilization is nonsense. | ||
| Our civilization is only as strong as the weakest links. | ||
| And it just makes sense to me, and I've always said this, the best way to strengthen America. | ||
| People want to talk about a strong America? | ||
| Are you a patriot? | ||
| Do you love America? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Less losers. | ||
| Make less losers. | ||
| Then you have a stronger America. | ||
| Go to the fucking neighborhoods that are fucked. | ||
| Go to the communities that are fucked. | ||
| Go to these deeply entrenched in crime areas and fix them. | ||
| You fix them, then you got winners. | ||
| Instead of 10,000 people in jail, you've got 10,000 people that are starting small businesses. | ||
| You've got 10,000 people that are venturing out into the world and trying to do good and influencing other people to do the same and spreading a positive message and influencing people with inspiration. | ||
| And then other people see, hey, this guy became this. | ||
| I can do this, too. | ||
| And then they do it, too. | ||
| And then other people say, then you've got a better country. | ||
| It's not that hard. | ||
| Instead of being a fucking vampire and arresting people for crack and pulling people over and doing the same goddamn shit that everybody's been doing for the last hundred years. | ||
| It's striking how much we do things similar. | ||
| One of the things we found when we were messing around digging through files is we found an action plan. | ||
| And these action plans, like, so a big crime happens and the shift commander will draw up an action plan and send it up, what he's going to do to address this problem. | ||
| And this action plan was from the 1970s. | ||
| We found it in like 2010. Whoa. | ||
| You found it? | ||
| We found it in a drawer. | ||
| And it was the exact same action plan as the other ship commander was doing. | ||
| It was like the same corners, the same response, the same plan. | ||
| So like for 40 years, nobody's changed anything. | ||
| And you have the same corners being the same problems with the same families and doing the same things. | ||
| And the police are doing the exact same goddamn thing in response. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's unbelievable how we're doing this, and that's what these talks have to get us to do, is to do exactly what you're saying, communicate, lift up the country. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense that we would treat a medical problem like it's a criminal problem and put those people into a jail cell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Drug addicts. | |
| To drug addicts into a jail cell. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Sorry, what happens to the cop that's on the beat right now in Baltimore? | ||
| What happens to the cops that are listening to this right now? | ||
| What the fuck can they do? | ||
| These guys have an incredibly hard time right now because, like you're saying with Bats, he's not leading the agency properly. | ||
| The FOP is doing some crazy things as well. | ||
| Calling the uprising, lynch mobs going after, wanting to send their officers down the pike and doing all these things. | ||
| We need justice. | ||
| We need something. | ||
| The case needs to be heard in court for anybody to have any semblance that this is going to be real and this is going to be just. | ||
| Because in the past, we know it's all been covered up. | ||
| So if we continue to cover up, which is the problem that happened in Ferguson, is the cover-up. | ||
| The problem isn't the shooting. | ||
| The problem is the damn cover-up. | ||
| That prosecutor's a criminal. | ||
| He criminally covered up that indictment. | ||
| There's no way around it. | ||
| That's what they did, and no one seemed to care. | ||
| What did he do? | ||
| Highlight what happened. | ||
| So... | ||
| When you have an indictment, the old saying is, is you can indict a ham cheese sandwich. | ||
| Because the prosecutor goes up there and his job, or her job, is to select the evidence that will get the charge. | ||
| So the way that system actually is, is if there's four of us in the room right now, if three of us think he did it and one doesn't, we don't even listen to the one that does it. | ||
| That's how an indictment works. | ||
| If you're not a reliable witness, you don't even come in for the indictment. | ||
| But in that case, he brought in unreliable witnesses, brought in everybody to taint the whole thing, when all he should have brought in was the case that, okay, so this guy was shot, and he was found this way, and these witnesses say that he put his hands up. | ||
| And you would have had an indictment. | ||
| And you would have had a trial. | ||
| And you would have... | ||
| He would have... | ||
| I think that shooting was justified. | ||
| So Darren Wilson would have been... | ||
| Exonerated. | ||
| Exonerated. | ||
| And everything would have been fine. | ||
| But we would have at least heard the case. | ||
| The problem is, is that the police walk away with nothing. | ||
| So it's like, you shoot him. | ||
| Oh no, we're not going to indict it. | ||
| Okay, see you later. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good luck. | |
| Looks like everything was clear. | ||
| We need to see more than that. | ||
| That's why when you see the indictment, South Carolina, there was no uprising. | ||
| We had a shooting in Baltimore just not too long ago where a guy was robbing a 7-Eleven, I think, and the officer came in and shot him. | ||
| There's some speculation the guy wasn't even armed. | ||
| But he was robbing a store, so nobody freaks out. | ||
| The problem is when you have somebody unarmed with no clear crime, and it's just, okay, that's what happened. | ||
| He was afraid. | ||
| Fear is not enough justification to shoot somebody, but that's what the law says. | ||
| The law says that if you're in fear of your life as an officer, you can pull that trigger. | ||
| That's preposterous. | ||
| You have to at least be some assemblance of containing your situation and not just being afraid of everything. | ||
| So everybody has a gun, which, you know, that's an American problem. | ||
| But they feel like everybody is a threat and you're ingrained into this threat. | ||
| So they run around with fear and they shoot in a heartbeat because they're so afraid. | ||
| And then they just come behind and they cover it all up like nothing happened. | ||
| And that's when you get an uprising. | ||
| It's just when there's no justice. | ||
| That's what Marilyn Mosby did. | ||
| Was there uprisings after she came out and said, okay, we're going to charge the officers? | ||
| No, because it's not that anybody's rushed into judgment. | ||
| It's not that it's a lynch mob. | ||
| It's let this play out in court. | ||
| I think the two lower officers are going to get off. | ||
| I don't think that they did anything particularly wrong. | ||
| They were following their lieutenant. | ||
| They might have some things. | ||
| They might not be cops, but they didn't do anything terribly wrong. | ||
| But you want to hear the case and you want to know what happened. | ||
| We have to know what happened. | ||
| Just because a guy has a gun and we give him a badge and he has a GED and he went to eight months of training doesn't make him above the world. | ||
| It doesn't make him a separate set of rules. | ||
| You think that the Ferguson shooting was justified? | ||
| I can't go as far as to say it's justified. | ||
| I think the evidence would say that it would be ruled justified. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Because he struck the officer, and he was at close range, and it seems like he was trying to get his gun. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, in that situation, I think you give the benefit of the doubt to the officer. | ||
| But why were there so many people that disagreed? | ||
| The hands up and all that stuff? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Did he have his hands up? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But I think that's enough justification to find that out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And how would they find that out? | ||
| At least have the witnesses on stand. | ||
| But it would just be questioning witnesses. | ||
| It would just be eyewitness information. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| But let's hear it. | ||
| You know, maybe it gets out, but it's exonerated and everything's fine. | ||
| But let's hear it. | ||
| We need to hear. | ||
| We know that we have a history of officers... | ||
| We're unjustly shooting black males, especially unarmed. | ||
| We know we have that. | ||
| So that means we must have an extra level of scrutiny. | ||
| We have to. | ||
| What is the situation in Cleveland with the 12-year-old kid that was at the schoolyard? | ||
| That guy's being indicted on murder charges, right? | ||
| Last I knew he wasn't, that judge suggested that he... | ||
| There was a judge that said there was enough probable cause to warrant the charging. | ||
| But somebody else actually has to do that charging. | ||
| I don't believe that's taking place. | ||
| See, that one doesn't make any fucking sense at all. | ||
| That was a fucking murder. | ||
| It was a murder. | ||
| It was absolutely... | ||
| There's no justification for that. | ||
| There's not been a single thing I've ever watched that affected me. | ||
| More than watching those fucking cops murder Tamir Rice and then stand over that boy, a 12-year-old boy, as he was bleeding out and choking. | ||
| They stood there and he's worried. | ||
| Conjecture. | ||
| It looks like he's worried. | ||
| Oh my God, I'm in this situation. | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| As a 12-year-old boy fucking chokes on his own blood, dying, and he stands there. | ||
| Stands there. | ||
| Doing nothing until someone else comes over and finally helps that boy. | ||
| And he's not being indicted? | ||
| Are we kidding me? | ||
| That's fucking murder. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sorry. | |
| And he shot him within two seconds. | ||
| It was less than two seconds. | ||
| It was like 1.6 seconds. | ||
| They rush up on that kid. | ||
| There's no justification for any of them. | ||
| What's happening in Cleveland is absurd. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| Is Cleveland like Baltimore? | ||
| The same sort of cycle? | ||
| I have no reason to believe that Cleveland, Baltimore, Ferguson, Atlanta, any of those places are different. | ||
| I think we can take an officer. | ||
| Something just happened in Philly just now before I walked in here. | ||
| A video was released of Philly officers, 12 Philly officers beating on somebody that was unarmed for apparently riding a bike or something like that. | ||
| I didn't get a chance to see. | ||
| But all of these things seem to be the same. | ||
| So if you took an officer out of Philly, you can put him in Baltimore. | ||
| He's fine. | ||
| When we had Hurricane Katrina, we took maybe 20 officers from New Orleans and brought them into the BPD. And they... | ||
| Not like they were like, oh my god, what are we doing? | ||
| It was the same thing. | ||
| Same shit. | ||
| Same shit. | ||
| Different report, that's all. | ||
| So it's just ghettos. | ||
| Ghettos, yes. | ||
| Black ghettos to a separate level. | ||
| Black ghettos. | ||
| It's mostly black ghettos, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's low-income, period. | ||
| It's the powerless, the voiceless, period. | ||
| But I think that institutional racism that we have throughout our society, it wasn't that long ago that we're having slaves, and we're still arguing over the Confederate flag. | ||
| I know you said something about that. | ||
| No, we're arguing about the Dukes of Hazzard. | ||
| I think you're confused, sir. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How about the fact that it flies over a state house until 2015? | ||
| It's goddamn crazy. | ||
| Yeah, that's unbelievable. | ||
| The fact that this is the first year that someone stepped up and stopped that from happening, and then people are freaking out. | ||
| This is about heritage! | ||
| Southern heritage! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Imagine a Nazi flag flying up. | |
| I mean, oh, come on. | ||
| What did you say, though, about that flag? | ||
| Come on, I saw you say something. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Oh, I said it about Daisy Duke. | ||
| I said the real flag was the Daisy Dukes, the shorts, because that was a flag of empowerment. | ||
| There never was an article of clothing. | ||
| Well, for females and for gay men. | ||
| Sluts and gay men. | ||
| There was never an article of clothing that just clearly outlined that you're hungry for dick. | ||
| There was one that we've ever created, and that's the Daisy Duke shorts. | ||
| Nobody wears Daisy Duke shorts if you don't want dick. | ||
| If you're a dude and you're wearing Daisy Duke shorts, you're hunting for dick. | ||
| And if you're a girl wearing Daisy Duke shorts, you're hunting for dick. | ||
| And there was never, like, a flag. | ||
| They threw up a flag that let people know they want some dick. | ||
| I don't have an objection. | ||
| It's true, right? | ||
| It's true. | ||
| That's the real fucking travesty. | ||
| What they should do is go over that fucking show, put the show back on the air, goddammit. | ||
| Go over that show with some CGI, put a goddamn American flag on the roof, and let's be done with this. | ||
| Yeah, how much would that be? | ||
| It costs. | ||
| They could do that shit. | ||
| If they can make the Hulk and the Avengers bounce through buildings and shit. | ||
| Make a Schwarzenegger look 20? | ||
| Yeah, you can't fucking fake a flag on the roof of a... | ||
| First of all, the real crime is to paint that fucking beautiful car that shitty color. | ||
| You took a 69 Charger or a 68 Charger, whichever one it was. | ||
| I think it was a 69. One of the most beautiful muscle cars ever created. | ||
| And you painted it like a goddamn Spanish hooker. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| That's the real bullshit. | ||
| Paint that fucking thing orange with a stupid flag of a bunch of losers. | ||
| That's a loser flag, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, you heard me, folks. | ||
| You lost. | ||
| Treasonous assholes. | ||
| Yeah, it's like raising a flag in another country anyway. | ||
| Well, it's like raising a flag. | ||
| They wanted to win, and they didn't win. | ||
| It's about economics! | ||
| It's about economics! | ||
| Yeah, if you don't pay people, you make more money. | ||
| That's an economic choice. | ||
| I hear Jake Uygur's... | ||
| You know, when he spits... | ||
| Ding! | ||
| You know, the South represents and that flag represented a lot of things to people other than racism. | ||
| What they need is a new flag. | ||
| You need a new flag that represents the South alone and not a bunch of people that were fighting to keep racism. | ||
| You know, Dan Carlin said, That they should add to the flag. | ||
| Like, maybe keep that flag and put a broken chain on it that represents the abolishment of slavery. | ||
| That, like, it keeps Southern heritage within it and adds one thing to it. | ||
| I mean, that might be a thing. | ||
| But they could come up with another fucking flag. | ||
| The flag is just a symbol. | ||
| If you want a symbol of the South, Texas has a fucking beautiful flag. | ||
| Texas has a flag and the star of Texas, and nobody ever thinks of it representing racism or represent... | ||
| It's just fucking Texas. | ||
| The star of Texas is just the star of Texas. | ||
| That's legit. | ||
| Like, if you wear a Texas flag t-shirt on, everybody knows, well, that's a guy who's a fan of Texas. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| It doesn't have any connotation that you hate black people, or you want racism, or you want slavery. | ||
| That's a legit flag. | ||
| They need to come up with a goddamn better flag. | ||
| I prefer a world with no flags. | ||
| A world with no flags? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hmm. | ||
| Okay, what about the don't tread on me? | ||
| That's pretty slick. | ||
| I like that one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Snake? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You can say it. | ||
| No? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what do you say? | ||
| I mean, everybody has had a don't tread on me sign, but you really, you really scared of those people? | ||
| How about an eagle? | ||
| A bald eagle? | ||
| With a fucking talon full of rockets. | ||
| Got rockets in one, and then the other one, a dick. | ||
| He's got a dick in one hand. | ||
| Because now we're representing everybody. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm just talking shit. | ||
| I just think that, uh, yeah, the world, a world without flags, like ideally no ideology. | ||
| You know, ideally no, uh, no borders, ideally no nationalism. | ||
| No state pride. | ||
| Just be proud that you're a human being in the human race. | ||
| But there's some cool shit about having differences. | ||
| There's some cool shit that you can go to New Mexico and it's different than going to Michigan. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I like variation. | ||
| I like people that are happy that they live in Los Angeles. | ||
| They have pride in their community. | ||
| Strikingly nice here. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I've never been to the West Coast. | ||
| We were just driving around. | ||
| We went up the Pacific Coast to the Coastal Highway today and the canyon. | ||
| I can't remember what it's called. | ||
| Malibu Canyon? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| One of my bikes so bad. | ||
| I was hurting. | ||
| It's like, where can I rent a motorcycle? | ||
| Malibu Canyon Road is amazing. | ||
| It was unbelievable. | ||
| We've never seen anything like that. | ||
| But in the Northeast, we have water. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, we'll steal water from Seattle. | ||
| They ain't gonna do shit about it either. | ||
| Sup! | ||
| Take that water, son. | ||
| Give me that shit! | ||
| This is what I think. | ||
| If they could bring fucking oil down from Alaska, why can't they bring water? | ||
| Yeah, of course they can. | ||
| You hook a big tube up to one of those melting glaciers, you steal all that fucking water, and we're good. | ||
| And then we irrigate the shit out of this bitch and turn it into a tropical rainforest. | ||
| Just giant sprinklers in the sky. | ||
| You know, giant ones, like 30,000 feet up, just spraying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit! | |
| Come on, man. | ||
| You can make a hyperloop that can get to San Francisco in five seconds, like what Elon Musk is trying to do. | ||
| You can't put a sprinkler system in the sky. | ||
| You can't steal water out of the icebergs. | ||
| Everybody's worried about global warming. | ||
| With the icebergs melt, the Malibu's going to disappear. | ||
| Fuck it is. | ||
| We're going to put a big goddamn tube. | ||
| And suck all those icebergs and spray it all over the avocado fields. | ||
| That sounds crazy, but watch that be the solution. | ||
| It is the solution. | ||
| It's why not? | ||
| If you can get oil from Saudi Arabia, buy millions and millions of gallons in tankers, and bring it across the goddamn ocean to America, you're telling me you can't take water from somewhere and bring it down here? | ||
| That's stupid. | ||
| Of course they can. | ||
| The problem is... | ||
| Can they get enough water? | ||
| Because we use a lot of fucking water. | ||
| There's a lot of golf courses here. | ||
| People like to golf. | ||
| A lot of white people. | ||
| And there's almonds. | ||
| Almonds apparently suck up a lot of water. | ||
| And a lot of people have pools. | ||
| There's a lot of issues. | ||
| But I think they can be engineered. | ||
| You know, the real issue is... | ||
| You know, there's a lot of global warming talk, but I think places have always turned. | ||
| You know, there's always been like... | ||
| I mean, all you have to do is just look back to the Ice Age, and you realize, well, there's not an Ice Age anymore, so something happened. | ||
| There's some change. | ||
| We don't live in a static place, but we're so arrogant, we feel like if we build a city, we could stay. | ||
| You know, this is it. | ||
| We're here now. | ||
| But if this becomes a Sahara, you know, go to the Sahara Desert. | ||
| What do you find? | ||
| You don't find a lot of fucking people. | ||
| There's a reason. | ||
| There's nothing there. | ||
| You can't live off of it. | ||
| What are you going to eat, man? | ||
| You going to eat your camel? | ||
| If you don't eat your camel, there's not a lot to eat. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And that's just the reality of being a human being. | ||
| If we live on this earth... | ||
| Occasionally you have to move. | ||
| Because the spot sucks now. | ||
| You know? | ||
| This spot is fantastic. | ||
| You're here for the first time? | ||
| But listen. | ||
| There's a reason why there's 30 million fucking people stuffed into this area. | ||
| It's because it's a sweet spot. | ||
| But all it would take is one of those... | ||
| The rock-style earthquakes from that new fucking movie, one real one, which has happened before. | ||
| They've had some giant ones in spots all over the world that we know of, you know, that human beings don't have a record of, that have just been just unbelievably devastating. | ||
| All we'd need is one of those. | ||
| Just one. | ||
| And everybody would scatter like ants. | ||
| And then you go to Boulder, Colorado, it'd be overrun with chicks from Santa Monica. | ||
| It'd be dudes on Adderall with fucking Botox faces. | ||
| Driving their Teslas around Boulder. | ||
| Hey, I love the Teslas. | ||
| That's what it would become. | ||
| It's a nice car. | ||
| It's fast, too. | ||
| It's a good car. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| But you guys, it's too cold in Baltimore. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| Yeah, we had a bad winter. | ||
| It's nothing. | ||
| I grew up in Boston. | ||
| Yeah, which is worse. | ||
| Way worse. | ||
| Boston's beautiful too, though. | ||
| Oh, that city. | ||
| I've walked in. | ||
| It's alright. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| You can fucking have it for five months a year. | ||
| Yes, that's true. | ||
| I went in summertime, so I'm talking about my ass a bit. | ||
| Summertime in Boston is amazing. | ||
| It's like I'm going to Chicago at the end of the month and I'm fucking psyched because Chicago in the summer is amazing. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because those people appreciate the fact that it's the summer. | ||
| Summer in LA is every day. | ||
| It could be 90 in January here. | ||
| I mean, it's happened many times. | ||
| Right, Jamie? | ||
| You've experienced 90. Yeah. | ||
| Walking around in shorts, flip-flops, t-shirt, 90. It's beautiful. | ||
| January. | ||
| Convertible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
75 today. | |
| 75. It's nice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's July. | |
| I know. | ||
| It's a nice day today. | ||
| It was 60 this morning when I woke up. | ||
| I had to get up early. | ||
| It was 60. 6-0. | ||
| Mmm. | ||
| Yeah, that doesn't happen for us. | ||
| No. | ||
| Right now, it's brutally hot. | ||
| Yeah, well, you guys get that swampy hot, too. | ||
| Nasty. | ||
| Yeah, that East Coast hot is a different kind of hot. | ||
| Like Miami, you don't even know what hot is until you experience Miami in August. | ||
| You might as well be in Africa. | ||
| You're in the goddamn jungle. | ||
| You know? | ||
| You want to hear a funny car chase story? | ||
| I want to hear all your funny car chase stories. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How many you got? | ||
| Three. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, my first car chase... | ||
| This is how far after the guy having some other dude's pants on? | ||
| About a year. | ||
| A year. | ||
| So you're in. | ||
| So I have a partner. | ||
| I usually don't have partners in Baltimore. | ||
| I had a partner on this particular day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, you ride by yourself. | ||
| What? | ||
| What is that, to save money? | ||
| I think more of an omnipresence idea. | ||
| Oh, the more people, the more cops, more cops. | ||
| It doesn't really work, I think. | ||
| You ever jerk off in your car? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Try to slip one on me there real quick. | ||
| Just asking. | ||
| I would. | ||
| I get bored. | ||
| So, I have this partner. | ||
| He looks like Sammy Davis Jr. Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| We would go to calls. | ||
| Did you call him Sammy Davis Jr.? | ||
| I mean, maybe. | ||
| Sometimes joking. | ||
| He was... | ||
| Other people did. | ||
| He looked that bad. | ||
| You were kind of a Sinatra when he was younger. | ||
| Oh, gosh. | ||
| You ever see Sinatra when he got arrested? | ||
| Nobody else thought of that. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| Pull up Sinatra's mugshot. | ||
| He was a tiny dude. | ||
| You know, Sinatra only weighed like 125 pounds. | ||
| No, no, no, not you. | ||
| You're handsome like Sinatra. | ||
| You're muscular and big, I get it. | ||
| But you're not tiny. | ||
| You're an average guy. | ||
| But I'm saying, Sinatra was like 130 pounds. | ||
| He was like a tiny dude. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Come on, dude. | ||
| You're a little better looking than him, I'm gonna be honest. | ||
| What is... | ||
| Where's his... | ||
| What are they arrested him for? | ||
| Because there's like a little card that had the... | ||
| There's a thing below it. | ||
| There was a... | ||
| I used to have it on my wall at home, actually. | ||
| It's not that one... | ||
| But he was arrested and it had his height and weight. | ||
| For carrying on with a married woman? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was called seduction. | ||
| That's what he got arrested for. | ||
| But there was actually a real piece of paper from the arrest that you could see. | ||
| They had it handwritten and everything, what he was arrested for. | ||
| See if we can find it. | ||
| But it had his height and weight, and I'm pretty sure he's 130 pounds, and he was like 5'6 or 5'7. | ||
| He's like a tiny little dude, which I never would have thought. | ||
| I thought, you know, Frank Sinatra would be like, it's just larger than life, you know? | ||
| I mean, like Tom Cruise kind of thing? | ||
| No, I think Tom Cruise is probably not as short as everybody says. | ||
| About 5'8", right? | ||
| Yeah, he might be a little shorter, like 5'7", maybe, but everybody says he's like 5'2", but people are just mean. | ||
| Well, Kareem, my partner, he was about 5'2", 5'3", little Sammy Davis Jr. Jesus Christ. | ||
| And he's a cop? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is he? | |
| A glutton for punishment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was good, too. | |
| He was good? | ||
| Yeah, so good, because he blended in. | ||
| Nobody noticed him. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Yeah, no one's scared of a 5'2 black guy, right? | ||
| We would go to places and he would be the nicest cop. | ||
| I mean, he was like what you think a cop is. | ||
| That was him. | ||
| He was so nice, so courteous. | ||
| And I'd show up behind him and be like, sit down, shut the fuck up. | ||
| Oh, you're a bad cop. | ||
| He would get the complaint. | ||
| I wouldn't. | ||
| It was unbelievably hilarious. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| It was just a running joke with us. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because he's bar? | ||
| I can't throw that conjecture out there. | ||
| Most likely, right? | ||
| That's the first time I would have thought of that. | ||
| I thought it was just they didn't like him, or they liked me, I don't know. | ||
| I never thought of it as being a racial thing. | ||
| So we're going down a road, and we type a tag in a car, and it comes up, boop, boop, boop, stolen car. | ||
| I'm like, oh shit, dude. | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| Why would we be whispering? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But you start to panic. | ||
| And I'm like, alright, fuck it. | ||
| Let's just get out and I'll just yank him out of the car real quick because we're stuck in traffic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So as soon as I jump out of the car, he looks over at me, the driver of the car, and he slams down his lock, door lock. | ||
| I'm like, fuck. | ||
| So I try to rip the door open and I can't do it. | ||
| So for some reason, instinctually, I pull out my gun and I'm like, get out of the car. | ||
| And he's like, no, fuck you, and it starts to turn green, and he's getting ready to go. | ||
| So I take my gun, and I hit it against the window. | ||
| The window doesn't break, my gun does. | ||
| And the rounds go flying on the ground, scattering out, and this is like noon. | ||
| And so everybody sees me doing this like a jackass. | ||
| What kind of gun? | ||
| A Glock. | ||
| Plastic. | ||
| Yeah, plastic gun. | ||
| Why'd you hit a fucking window with plastic? | ||
| I don't fucking know what I was thinking. | ||
| So instinctually, luckily, I reload. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he takes off. | ||
| We run back into the car, and we're not going anywhere. | ||
| I'm like, Kareem, what the fuck? | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| And he's like, I can't find the keys. | ||
| I can't find the keys. | ||
| No. | ||
| So he gets the key. | ||
| We take off. | ||
| We go down the road. | ||
| What kind of car do you drive? | ||
| That was a Crown Vic at the time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Shitbox. | ||
| Cops love Crown Vicks. | ||
| Yeah, but they're stupid. | ||
| Big V8 in them. | ||
| Big fucking goofy car. | ||
| Shitty handling. | ||
| It's better if we drive Tauruses and shit they try to give us. | ||
| So we go down the road. | ||
| The guy makes a turn. | ||
| We lose him, but we kind of know his area, where he is. | ||
| And I see a guy that's running. | ||
| He had a blue bandana on. | ||
| He was a black guy, white t-shirt. | ||
| So I see a guy going down the alley, blue bandana, white t-shirt. | ||
| I'm like, fuck, Kareem, get out. | ||
| So he gets out, and he's coming from the guy behind. | ||
| I circle around with the car and come up. | ||
| And I come around the corner. | ||
| That guy's looking at me, and I'm like, get on the ground. | ||
| And he starts getting on the ground, and I'm looking at him like, fuck, this is not the same guy. | ||
| So I'm watching him and Cream's coming up behind him and he's like, "Pfff, coming hard." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!" Just as he's getting ready to hit him and he pulls back as he's getting ready to slam him to the ground. | ||
| I'm like, this is not him! | ||
| So we leave him go, we run, and we actually find the car. | ||
| So the guy bowed out, and he left his cell phone in the car. | ||
| So we picked up the cell phone, and we called the most recent number, and a girl answered. | ||
| We're like, hey, you know, I'm so-and-so. | ||
| I found this phone on the side of the road. | ||
| Do you know who it belongs to? | ||
| I'll try to get it back to her. | ||
| She's like, oh yeah, it's so-and-so. | ||
| Pulled him up in the computer, and that was who had the car. | ||
| Oh my god, what a dumb bitch. | ||
| I'd be so mad at her. | ||
| I'd be like, what the fuck did you tell him? | ||
| Oh my god, you told him my fucking name? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It's all in the report and everything. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| Did you get the guy? | ||
| Somebody else did. | ||
| So we had the warrant and somebody else ended up catching him. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That was your first car chase? | ||
| My first car chase. | ||
| Why don't they give you guys like Mustangs or something fast? | ||
| Oh, I think that would be a bad idea. | ||
| Why? | ||
| You're in car chases. | ||
| We're not very responsible. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| The law, we're not trained to drive like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Hold the fuck on. | ||
| They don't train you how to drive? | ||
| Not high speed, no. | ||
| What? | ||
| No. | ||
| They let you drive high speed chases and they don't train you how to drive? | ||
| No, you're breaking the rules. | ||
| You're breaking the rules to do a high speed chase. | ||
| In Baltimore, you can't do more than 10 miles an hour. | ||
| In Maryland, you can't do more than 10 miles an hour over the speed limit according to the rules. | ||
| So the law says you can do it, but the rules of the agency say you can only do 10 miles an hour over. | ||
| So every cop that pulls you over and you're doing more than 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, he had to violate general orders to even pull you over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| That's the rules. | ||
| I didn't make them. | ||
| Okay, so the department lets you do high-speed chases. | ||
| They don't like it, no. | ||
| So who lets you do it? | ||
| You do it until someone tells you no. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But no one teaches you how to drive? | ||
| We go to a course, and they kind of do it, but the standards are incredibly low, and you don't go very fast. | ||
| So the standards for driving, are they more or less stringent than the standards for self-defense? | ||
| I don't think there's a standard in either. | ||
| That is so fucking crazy. | ||
| If you couldn't defend yourself going in, you're not going to be able to defend yourself coming out. | ||
| If you couldn't drive going in, you're not going to drive coming out. | ||
| If you couldn't shoot going in, you're not going to shoot coming out. | ||
| One of the scariest things is cops' ability to fire a weapon. | ||
| They're terrible. | ||
| They're terrible. | ||
| So, I would estimate that maybe... | ||
| You don't have to be accurate or anything? | ||
| No, no, it's absurd. | ||
| Like, they can't shoot. | ||
| So, like, when you hear somebody, like, why didn't you shoot him in the knee? | ||
| For one, you can't do that. | ||
| That's a silly idea. | ||
| But... | ||
| Why can't you? | ||
| Okay, so, if I'm shooting, for one, I'm shooting at your knee. | ||
| I'm shooting down. | ||
| So, I'm liable to ricochet. | ||
| Because I'm going to miss. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're going to be a moving target. | ||
| You know how hard it is to shoot an animal. | ||
| So imagine shooting a human in such a tiny area that's trying to move. | ||
| Especially with a handgun. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| It's a silly idea. | ||
| That's why you shoot center mass. | ||
| Right. | ||
| People criticize that, but it's really the only practical way to do it. | ||
| So you would shoot animals, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very rarely shoot animals in the head. | ||
| Imagine that. | ||
| Even if you were standing there, imagine trying to take out a kneecap of a boar sitting there. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| So hopefully one day we can all dispel that rumor about shooting a weapon at me. | ||
| Somebody will be like, why don't you shoot the knife out of his hand? | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's impossible. | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| But they couldn't shoot a person, let alone a knee. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The standard, the minimum score is like a 70, and it's a silhouette target. | ||
| The minimum score meaning 70%? | ||
| 70% on a silhouette target. | ||
| 70% hitting a silhouette? | ||
| You just have to hit the whole silhouette? | ||
| Right, from the 3 to the 5 to the 7 to the 15. I can shoot that whole course at the 15 with my eyes closed and pass it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 15 yards, is that what it is? | ||
| So 15 yards with a handgun hitting center mass on a target. | ||
| All you have to do is just hit the target? | ||
| Right, and you can pass the course by doing everything from the 3, the 5, and I think the 7. How big is this target? | ||
| It's a human silhouette. | ||
| A full silhouette down to the toes? | ||
| From waist up, okay. | ||
| So you're dealing with like a two and a half foot, three foot target? | ||
| Yeah, it's almost impossible to miss. | ||
| And all you have to do is get 70% and you pass? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you miss 30% at 15 yards, a giant fucking target? | ||
| We're not even talking about 15 yards. | ||
| We're talking about, I mean, some of these are from three. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| So you start from the three, you do a lot of rounds. | ||
| And they get set, hold the fuck on. | ||
| 70%? | ||
| Right, so you can actually qualify before you even go deep. | ||
| But you're not even shooting a person. | ||
| I know. | ||
| So this isn't even adrenaline, it's not even crazy? | ||
| No, this is ideal situation. | ||
| Ideal circumstances. | ||
| It should be 100%! | ||
| I know! | ||
| 100% or they kill you. | ||
| They should kill you. | ||
| Take you back a piece. | ||
| Yeah, 100% maybe get a different try. | ||
| I've had 98% from time to time. | ||
| They shouldn't be there. | ||
| It's staggering. | ||
| People don't understand what we're talking about. | ||
| When you say the job is impossible, it is completely impossible, especially with the amount of training that they have. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I don't understand how they don't train you how to do that. | ||
| They don't train you how to use firearms correctly? | ||
| Accuracy? | ||
| They're treating you how to breathe while you're shooting? | ||
| They tell you all these things, but they don't have time. | ||
| So the instructors, they know what they're doing, but they don't have time to take somebody that has no idea what the hell they're doing, or what's even worse is somebody that has bad habits, and break those habits so they can be a decent shooter. | ||
| There's no time for it, and it's not going to happen. | ||
| There's no standards. | ||
| So if they don't pass, they just keep shooting them and shooting and shooting until you pass. | ||
| So you just keep doing it, or you learn? | ||
| There's no learning. | ||
| And you only do it once a year. | ||
| What? | ||
| What? | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No practice. | |
| What the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| No practice once a year. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Right, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| I couldn't do this job without the Marine Corps. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So the only reason I was any good was for the Marine Corps. | ||
| How many guys were in the service that you worked with? | ||
| Maybe 20%. | ||
| So 80% have no experience... | ||
| Couldn't hit the broadside of a barn. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So these people are in this situation where they have these expectations, and that's why they feel so cornered. | ||
| So they're actually feeling like they're being... | ||
| somebody's judging them. | ||
| And it's not so much that they're judging them, they're judging the... | ||
| Ineptitude to do the job. | ||
| It's a Will Ferrell movie. | ||
| You could do it. | ||
| I mean, that's what it feels like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's why I say... | |
| Yeah, I say about the banter. | ||
| I mean, that's really... | ||
| It seems that way a lot. | ||
| Goddammit, I can't believe that. | ||
| Why don't I know that? | ||
| I should have known that. | ||
| I gotta get John McCarthy on. | ||
| He's the next guest. | ||
| You know Big John McCarthy? | ||
| I gotta get him on soon. | ||
| He's got some great stories about pulling over Eddie Murphy. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I'm an Eddie Murphy fan. | ||
| I will only speak about him with respect. | ||
| And Charlie Murphy. | ||
| Anyway, so no self-defense training? | ||
| What is there is just pointless. | ||
| You don't have to have a certain degree of proficiency in hand-to-hand combat. | ||
| No, they do like wrist locks and carries and stuff like that. | ||
| Wrist locks? | ||
| Yeah, these are things that you know in a real scenario we can't do. | ||
| You gotta be a bad motherfucker to pull off a wrist lock. | ||
| You can do a drill and put me to the ground with my wrist. | ||
| But in real life, you're never getting my wrist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just not gonna happen. | ||
| If I'm fighting for my life, or I'm trying to get away, it's just not gonna happen. | ||
| So the things we do just are impractical. | ||
| Well, Steven Seagal could get you to the ground if you gotta hold your wrist. | ||
| Have you ever seen him demonstrate? | ||
| I don't, yeah, I don't. | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| Do you ever see the most recent one in Russia? | ||
| No, I'm afraid to. | ||
| Flipped a bunch of people around. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| His hair didn't move once. | ||
| Serious. | ||
| That hair helmet he's got. | ||
| Is he still nicely overweight? | ||
| Oh yeah, he's beautiful. | ||
| Beautiful fucking machine of hand-to-hand combat. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| Take a look at this. | ||
| I like the do-rag. | ||
| Sweat that sweet do-rag. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| See, this is what you guys need to learn. | ||
| This kind of shit. | ||
| Why can't you do that? | ||
| This is the kind of stuff they do, and they don't factor in the fact that their suspect is going to hook you in the face with that empty left hand. | ||
| But wait a minute. | ||
| Look how this guy can't do anything. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's almost like he practiced this before to be the victim in this situation. | ||
| Dude, you can't. | ||
| No, man. | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
| You've got to get Steven Seagal to teach everybody. | ||
| Because look at the way he just throws everybody around. | ||
| They have no chance. | ||
| Look. | ||
| He doesn't even move. | ||
| Dude, learn this. | ||
| Why can't you just have him? | ||
| Isn't he a cop? | ||
| I thought he was too, like a voluntary one? | ||
| Yeah, no, he was a real cop. | ||
| Remember in Louisiana? | ||
| Remember he was talking like he was black? | ||
| If you keep talking about this, somebody's going to do this. | ||
| I think he's transracial. | ||
| I think he's transracial. | ||
| Did you ever hear him talk? | ||
| No, you're saying this now, but then there's gonna be some agency that does that and thought it was a good idea, and now it's all your fault. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They should. | |
| They should. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| This is beautiful. | ||
| If you could do this, you could kick anyone's ass. | ||
| They don't even let him in the UFC because he's too deadly. | ||
| We've had discussions. | ||
| That's why he's not there. | ||
| We've had behind-closed-door meetings of whether or not we should allow Steven Seagal to fight, and everyone says no. | ||
| He's too deadly. | ||
| You have to take Connor out, and they need him for that. | ||
| Connor's too small. | ||
| He'd be in a different weight class, but Cain Velasquez would be fucked. | ||
| Junior Dos Santos, what's he gonna do to that, huh? | ||
| What are you gonna do, Fabricio Verdum, if Steven Seagal gets a hold of your wrist? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh? | |
| I haven't heard you. | ||
| Tax wrists! | ||
| That's a very vulnerable spot. | ||
| You know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ow! | |
| Like, pull your hand back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ow! | |
| So now the question is, why isn't Joe Rogan doing it? | ||
| Why don't I fight? | ||
| Yeah, why don't you teach? | ||
| No, why don't you teach the cops? | ||
| Well, I don't think I'm qualified, because I've never been in an armed situation with people shooting guns. | ||
| I've never learned how to disarm anybody. | ||
| Hand to hand. | ||
| We don't need disarm. | ||
| We don't need disarm. | ||
| Well, I could, you know, I could give my opinions about some shit, but you should bring in legit striking coaches that teach people all the time, and then legit jiu-jitsu coaches. | ||
| Well, I think jiu-jitsu would be your route, because it's more about control than hurting. | ||
| Well, yes, but no. | ||
| Sometimes you've got to hit people. | ||
| The idea of only defending yourself by grappling, I think mixed martial arts is the best way to learn self-defense. | ||
| I'm essentially a mixed martial artist. | ||
| I started out as a striker, and then when I got older, when I got into the UFC, that's when I really learned grappling. | ||
| But I think if I had to choose one martial art that I would teach someone to defend themselves, it would definitely be jujitsu. | ||
| But as far as what I would teach police officers, you've got to understand striking. | ||
| Because if you don't understand striking and a guy can keep you off him and punch him in the face and you don't know how to deal with it, You gotta understand the way he's moving. | ||
| Like, if a guy is gonna jab you, there's a certain stance. | ||
| If a guy's gonna throw a right hand, there's tells. | ||
| If you don't know those tells, you're just gonna get mollywhopped. | ||
| You're just gonna get cracked. | ||
| I think you have to understand, at least understand striking. | ||
| And the only way to understand striking is to spar. | ||
| You have to do some sparring. | ||
| You have to definitely learn the mechanics of striking. | ||
| But you also have to understand the distance. | ||
| You have to understand when a guy can hit you, when he can't hit you. | ||
| Even if it's just defensive. | ||
| Even if you don't have any intention whatsoever of hitting somebody. | ||
| Just knowing how to get the fuck out of the way. | ||
| Knowing how to cover yourself up. | ||
| Knowing how to protect yourself. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there that are grapplers that would be fucked if someone punched them in the face. | ||
| I think you're onto something with that, actually, like the defensive method. | ||
| We're not going to really teach cops to strike. | ||
| You're just not going to get anywhere. | ||
| The best way to learn. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| The getaway, you might actually be onto something there. | ||
| That's something we probably should be doing, because what we do is we fear things. | ||
| So remember, we fear that that guy can hit us. | ||
| We fear that we should have an understanding of whether he or she would actually be capable at that range or capable in this particular situation. | ||
| Judo is good for cops too because people most of the time are wearing clothes and like if you ever fought Ronda Rousey and you were wearing a fucking like a winter coat, that bitch would fuck you up. | ||
| You're going flying. | ||
| You're landing on your head. | ||
| Carl Parisian gets a hold of you and you got like a leather jacket on, that motherfucker is gonna throw you and hit you with the earth. | ||
| That's what it's like when someone slams you, they're taking the earth and hitting you with it. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| They're hitting you with a giant, immobile, fucking 24,000 mile in a circumference ball. | ||
| That's what they're doing. | ||
| The earth doesn't give. | ||
| If someone slams you in the concrete, they're literally hitting you with the earth. | ||
| I think if a judo person gets a hold of you, some Jimmy Pedro character, gets a hold of you and you have a winter jacket on, you're a fucksville. | ||
| I think judo would be a very important thing to learn. | ||
| Wrestling, very important to learn too, because if you could hold someone down, you keep someone down, you can control someone. | ||
| Because I've seen situations where cops get flipped. | ||
| They're holding someone down in some sort of a rest video, and they just have no idea how to control someone's body. | ||
| They have no idea where to place their weight. | ||
| They have no idea how a person would move. | ||
| A good jiu-jitsu guy gets a hold of you and puts you inside control. | ||
| You don't have any jiu-jitsu training, you're not getting up. | ||
| This is just it. | ||
| You're stuck. | ||
| You might be really physically strong. | ||
| You might be able to push him a little bit, but he's going to grab a hold of you again and repeat the process. | ||
| That's what we saw in UFC 1 when Hoist Gracie was fighting chemo. | ||
| What did we see? | ||
| We saw this fucking enormous steroided up dude that's way stronger than Hoist Gracie. | ||
| And he just, chaos! | ||
| But eventually Hoist got him. | ||
| And why did he get him? | ||
| He got him because he understands the technique and he understands how to grapple. | ||
| I think that for one, if you only had one, I would say Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. | ||
| But if I was going to teach something to cops, I would definitely teach them striking. | ||
| The last thing you want to do is be someone who doesn't know how to strike and you get punched in the face and you're seeing stars, your eyes are watery, your legs are buckled and you don't know what the fuck to do because you've never been there before. | ||
| Someone who knows what to do, someone who's been there before, has been popped in the face before, you gotta go, uh-oh, alright, gotta keep my hands up, gotta move, gotta move, gotta move, you know, you'll instinctively have, like, a path that you'll go to to preserve yourself. | ||
| The scariest thing in the world is watching someone in a street fight, and you know they don't know how to fight, and their neck is up in the air, and they're flailing fists, and you know it's coming, you know, you know it's coming. | ||
| We've all seen videos. | ||
| You can go online and watch a guy gets KO'd in a street fight, and there's a million videos of that. | ||
| I just can't believe that they don't force you guys to train, first of all, in firearms on a regular base. | ||
| I would have thought that it'd be a weekly thing. | ||
| I really thought that there was like a weekly thing that you guys had to do. | ||
| You know the physical standards as well. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen a lot of fat cops. | ||
| There's not a physical standard whatsoever. | ||
| Well, how about chicks? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No standards. | ||
| They don't have to have, uh, they don't have to at least be able to, like, lift their body weight up or something or do a chin-up or something like that? | ||
| No, you get through the academy and you're finished. | ||
| What do you have to do to get through the academy? | ||
| Whatever it is, it's pathetic and easy. | ||
| That seems weird. | ||
| It is weird. | ||
| In Baltimore they had an issue with a fire cadet who ended up dying in training because they just didn't maintain the physical standards they needed to make. | ||
| Now, why is that? | ||
| Is it hard to get people to join the police force? | ||
| So you have to lower the physical standards? | ||
| That's one reason why the job is impossible. | ||
| Society doesn't seem to be willing... | ||
| Okay, so at this point in time, not to sound too arrogant... | ||
| Too late. | ||
| Too late, okay. | ||
| So may as well go for it. | ||
| I would be the prototype, okay? | ||
| I have a master's degree. | ||
| I'm confident. | ||
| I came from the military. | ||
| If you go through my training record, you'll see it. | ||
| It's all there. | ||
| I would be the prototype. | ||
| I'm what you're looking for. | ||
| But I still... | ||
| You're not willing to pay me what it would take to get somebody like me normally to do it. | ||
| Right now, if I went into a police department, they would be offering me $42,000 a year. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I mean, you don't think I'm going to take a $42,000 a year job, do you, at this point in time? | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| So they're not investing in those officers. | ||
| I really think in most areas, like in Baltimore, you have 3,000 officers, I really think you could do your job with 1,000. | ||
| So you would pay those guys, you would get those guys, and you'd get the guys with the education and girls, and have those standards. | ||
| And I really think that one really, really good cop can do the job of the four or five of what we have now. | ||
| How much harder is it to be a woman and be a cop? | ||
| Incredibly hard. | ||
| I would imagine it'd be really hard to get people's respect. | ||
| Some of them were so freaking good, though. | ||
| So that's the weird line you tow. | ||
| They do seem to make better detectives, as a general rule. | ||
| They have an advantage in a lot of things. | ||
| I think they're more empathetic, which is one of my big pushes. | ||
| They're more considerate of others when it comes to a lot. | ||
| It's harder for them with fighting, but I've seen some of them hold their own just fine. | ||
| The hardest one was actually a flamboyantly gay cop that I know. | ||
| He had the hardest time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I love that guy. | |
| You guys not a flamboyantly gay cop? | ||
| I love him so much. | ||
| How gay was he? | ||
| Very. | ||
| He's the queen. | ||
| That's how he refers to himself. | ||
| He calls himself the queen? | ||
| Yeah, he's the queen of the northern. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| That's what we need. | ||
| Just a fucking army of roiding up gay cops. | ||
| And he would fight all the time. | ||
| You could go to battle with that dude any day and you could trust that he would have your back. | ||
| You could follow him day and night because he was tried constantly. | ||
| And he became, he was always good. | ||
| Love that dude. | ||
| Awesome cop to work with. | ||
| But he was, he constantly lived in a different world than I did. | ||
| I was, maybe I fell into that medium frame where like I'm not too big to try and I'm not too small to try. | ||
| So I kind of got away with a lot. | ||
| He was tried all the time. | ||
| Because he's flamboyantly gay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, did he be like, license and registration? | ||
| He has the voice. | ||
| So, he really say that when he pulled people over and stuff? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Where you going? | ||
| He had a purse for a while. | ||
| He had a purse? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, think about that, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love it. | |
| Could you do it? | ||
| What, do I have a purse? | ||
| I mean, think about the curse. | ||
| I wear a fanny pack. | ||
| Think about... | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I actually... | ||
| You want one? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Because you gave it to me, I think I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| I thought about that in the airport, like you say. | ||
| It would be so much easier. | ||
| Perfect! | ||
| People are just scared of not getting laid. | ||
| That's why they don't have it. | ||
| They're scared of the fashion stigma attached to it. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| It's what it is. | ||
| I wear one of those motherfuckers everywhere. | ||
| People meet me and they go, dude, you're really wearing a fanny pack. | ||
| I'm like, that's right, bitch. | ||
| That shit's real as fuck Why is that a problem but if I wear a backpack? | ||
| What I'm saying is that same confidence that you have was the confidence that he had. | ||
| That's because I'm married. | ||
| I'm not trying to get laid. | ||
| It was admirable. | ||
| If I was struggling to try to get laid, I was like, man, I was like fucking hitter. | ||
| It was just how to be dressed perfectly. | ||
| You know, that's why dudes wear cologne and shit like that and designer shoes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Because they're fucking trying to tip the scales in their favor. | ||
| They're not confident in their personality and their accomplishments and how they come off as a human being. | ||
| You gotta wear the right clothes and the right style and that fanny pack could fucking sink your battleship. | ||
| Damn it! | ||
| I had her! | ||
| She could have been the one. | ||
| Could have been married and had kids. | ||
| That fucking stupid fanny pack. | ||
| I fucked my chances. | ||
| I don't know if that's why. | ||
| I think you've got enough game, you can do it with a fanny pack. | ||
| But that's what I think! | ||
| I think if a girl doesn't want to have sex with you or doesn't want to date you because you have a fanny pack, you don't want her in your life! | ||
| She's too much work! | ||
| That's too much work! | ||
| Or you don't know how to make fun of yourself. | ||
| You can't even mock the fact that you're wearing a fanny pack and then explain yourself? | ||
| Make a good joke out of it. | ||
| And she's like, why are you wearing a fanny pack, stupid? | ||
| And you're like, exactly. | ||
| Anyway, he wore a purse? | ||
| Yeah, he would keep his stuff in it. | ||
| What kind of purse? | ||
| Was it like glittery or anything? | ||
| Was it bedazzled? | ||
| If he had it, it would have been stollish. | ||
| I assure you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It wasn't no chump shit, I promise. | |
| So, what was it like for him? | ||
| I think it was incredibly challenging for him. | ||
| But they wouldn't let him arrest them. | ||
| Like, they would fight. | ||
| Like, no way. | ||
| I understand him going to jail. | ||
| But not from him. | ||
| Is he still on a job? | ||
| Yeah, he's awesome too. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Just give his first name. | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| I just want to give a shout out to him. | ||
| Q. You can call him Q. Q. You keep it sexy. | ||
| Keep it sexy, Q. So, harder for him than women? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| I think it's incredibly hard for him. | ||
| So you're saying that women make better detectives. | ||
| What else besides empathy? | ||
| Do they have, like, intuitions better? | ||
| I mean, I can't say, but they do seem to fulfill those roles very well. | ||
| So there's a role for females in policing, even if you're thinking of the physical aspects of There is a need. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So how you balance that, I can't say. | ||
| It would require a little more nuance, but definitely have their role. | ||
| Is there anything else you want to say before we get out of here? | ||
| Because you've got a bunch of notes there. | ||
| It's just that... | ||
| One of the big things that we see is everybody keeps fighting against the Black Lives Matter thing. | ||
| And it's like we're not understanding what it is. | ||
| It's not that we come out with things, all lives matter. | ||
| Somebody wear a shirt, all lives matter. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| We understand all lives matter. | ||
| That's the whole point of everything we do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they come out and they say, police lives matter. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| I don't know a life that's mattered more than a police life. | ||
| I don't know if a single cop has been killed where the killer wasn't called, which is embarrassing for our profession. | ||
| Why do we always catch the ones that hurt our own? | ||
| Maybe we're not trying hard enough in the other ones. | ||
| We go around and we say these things, but the police, everyone comes to their aid when something happens to them. | ||
| But when somebody says black lives matter, we just, oh, oh, oh. | ||
| But all they're saying is that in our society, black lives haven't mattered as much as the other lives. | ||
| And that's clear when you see something like Tamir Rice. | ||
| Because you know that doesn't happen to one of your kids. | ||
| There's not a shot in hell that that happens to my daughter or yours. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Whether they're a 12-year-old sitting with a BB gun in the middle of your street, in front of your house, that is not going to happen. | ||
| Because they're going to say, oh, well, we're going to handle that situation. | ||
| We're going to approach her. | ||
| We're going to see what's really going on. | ||
| And they're not going to be a hero. | ||
| Because a hero is the person that goes up to Tamir Rice and approaches and tries to figure it out, risks getting shot, because he wants to make sure he's doing the right thing when you take away a life or take away somebody's freedom. | ||
| Well, you don't even have to go up to him. | ||
| How about you just say from the comfort of your car, put down the gun. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| And from far away. | ||
| Figure it out. | ||
| But we go and we treat black lives like they don't matter. | ||
| And when you are putting that, oh yeah, all lives matter shirt on, or oh yeah, police lives matter on, you're proving that black lives aren't mattering as much to you. | ||
| Otherwise, you would just fucking say yes, they do. | ||
| Right, so they're not saying that white lives don't matter. | ||
| They're saying black lives matter. | ||
| Yeah, bring it up. | ||
| Bring it up to everyone else. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Just equality. | ||
| It's not a diss on anybody else. | ||
| We have this problem, and we have this problem. | ||
| Recognize it. | ||
| Let's fix it. | ||
| When I say that I want to team up with DeRay, so if I took a police commissioner job, the first thing I would do is say, DeRay, please come join me. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Because I need you. | ||
| I need him. | ||
| He's a community leader. | ||
| The idea that we don't integrate people like him into our system is ridiculousness. | ||
| He is a leader of the black community. | ||
| I need him if I'm going to run a police agency. | ||
| And we should not be turning those kind of people away and making like they're some kind of instigators from out of town is what they would call DeRay. | ||
| Instigator. | ||
| That's what they call him? | ||
| Yeah, out-of-town instigator. | ||
| He was coming to Baltimore, and he's making money, and he's doing all this, and it's not at all what he's doing. | ||
| They think he's making money doing all this, and he's simply not. | ||
| Neither am I. We came out here on our own dime with the help of me. | ||
| Do you know who's making money? | ||
| CNN. Fox News. | ||
| Anybody broadcasting it where they're going to get advertising dollars, and that's something that's going to get a lot of people watching. | ||
| It certainly is. | ||
| Our ratings were up. | ||
| I went down to where Freddie Gray was, the incident happened, and where the uprising was the very next day. | ||
| You couldn't have told me that there was a difference between that day and two weeks ago. | ||
| The problem is that no one gave a shit about Gilmore Homes two weeks ago. | ||
| But when it went on the news and you saw the CVS burning and they cycled it over and over and over again, it was one goddamn building that was burning. | ||
| You just kept seeing it over and over after the fire department had already put it out. | ||
| Violence in Baltimore. | ||
| Violence in Baltimore. | ||
| The riots and all these things. | ||
| That way they talk, that fucking news voice. | ||
| You're on it exactly. | ||
| And we do that and then we look at that community and we're like, oh my god, why would they do that? | ||
| Well, nothing ever happens without an uprising. | ||
| Whatever great civil rights movement or great progress have we ever made without some kind of uprising? | ||
| How about the United States of America? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This came about because we got away from the fucking British. | ||
| I mean, that's literally how this got started. | ||
| It was an uprising. | ||
| Boston Tea Party? | ||
| It's a goddamn uprising. | ||
| And does anybody sit there and say, oh my god, why did they just throw their own tea into the water? | ||
| That's ridiculousness. | ||
| But they don't hesitate to say, why are they burning that CVS down? | ||
| Well, that's the only symbolism of corporate America that they even have there. | ||
| Because they don't have a grocery store like you and I do. | ||
| They don't have anything that we think of as normality. | ||
| They live in an area that... | ||
| has food deserts that doesn't have good schools where the kids ride MTA buses to go to school where life is and their parents get their father gets locked up because he has that dime bag and he perpetuates the cycle but yet society keeps telling them well pick yourself up by your bootstraps they don't fucking have bootstraps Because you took them away. | ||
| That pick yourself up by your bootstraps is such a shitty argument. | ||
| It's not like everybody starts in the same spot. | ||
| You know, it's not like we're all playing Monopoly and we all start from the same spot. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| That's such a terrible, terrible mentality that people have. | ||
| And it's so short-sighted and so dismissive to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. | ||
| It's just so dumb. | ||
| It's such a short... | ||
| And that's a short-sighted conservative argument. | ||
| That is a conservative argument. | ||
| It's just such a dumb one. | ||
| Well, the last thing I wanted to say, too, is that conservatives and right-wing people are the ones that are going to argue with me the most. | ||
| If we don't do what I'm saying, then they're going to lose their guns and their argument that they want to have. | ||
| Because if we can't reel in police and they're always afraid that everyone has a gun and we have to do this war... | ||
| Then that means we can't live in a society that's armed, and we can't police it properly. | ||
| When you just said that, a bunch of people just... | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Lose my guns. | ||
| What'd you say? | ||
| First you take my flag! | ||
| You take my fucking gun! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not... | |
| Nope. | ||
| If you want to keep your guns... | ||
| Like Charlton Heston said, you can pry my cold, dead hands from it if you want my gun. | ||
| Well, if you want to keep your guns, then we need to have... | ||
| Reform and policing. | ||
| I don't like this kind of language because people are gonna keep their guns. | ||
| They're keeping their fucking guns. | ||
| Yeah, well, then let's reform policing. | ||
| I think that's a great idea. | ||
| I don't think you need to bring guns into this. | ||
| Guns didn't do anything to anybody. | ||
| Were the cops killing people? | ||
| It's people. | ||
| People are doing it. | ||
| People kill people. | ||
| People are killing people. | ||
| Guns are just sitting there looking beautiful. | ||
| How many gun deaths happened in England? | ||
| Ah, fucking English. | ||
| Bunch of pussy scared to pull a trigger. | ||
| So the argument, though, that's so funny. | ||
| It turns out they all had guns. | ||
| I can't quite do it. | ||
| I was thinking about shooting him. | ||
| It just doesn't seem right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wouldn't be proper. | |
| Wouldn't be proper. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, listen, I think you're saying some awesome things. | ||
| We do have to wrap this up, but I really appreciate you coming on, and I think you express yourself very well. | ||
| And I think you're a very unique person. | ||
| Your perspective is very unique, the fact that you have so much experience, and you're saying all the right things. | ||
| So thank you very much. | ||
| I really, really appreciate it. | ||
| You can catch him on Twitter, Michael A. Wood Jr., M-I-C-H-A-E-L-A Wood. | ||
| W-O-O-D Jr. Last thing? | ||
| Anything else? | ||
| Website or anything? | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| This has been great. | ||
| No, this is not about me. | ||
| This is about the point. | ||
| Where's the best place for people to reach you? | ||
| Twitter? | ||
| Just Twitter. | ||
| This is not about me. | ||
| This is about the message. | ||
| I appreciate that very much. | ||
| Michael Wood Jr., ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| A bad motherfucker. | ||
| You have been schooled. |
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