YouSaid · the spoken record

Barry Friedman

lines on the record: 123
first: 2019-11-25
most recent: 2019-11-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Different is the important word because they are not, it's not like it's hierarchical where local PD and they're all completely separate. People don't even know how many police departments we have in the country, but the number that gets bandied about is 18,000. So try to effect reform about something when you've got 18,000 independent entities operating, many of which are woefully under-resourced”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they're all localized. This gets important later when they're buying technology. They're all localized in terms of what they're going to do. And then you have state police on top of that, which is a different, typically a different organization. Right.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then the other problem with policing, which is a little bit unique to policing, is our federal system of government. So every hamlet and village in America is its own police department, and there's no structure over that that governs. And so, you know, DOJ tries to do things by cajoling and offering grants, if you will, like, just tell us how many people you killed, which we can't even figure that out. And I mean, James Comey was startled when he learned that he couldn't answer that question after Ferguson. But there's not much will in the federal government to do this. We're working on a white paper for what a new administration.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we can agree, by the way. I'm sure we do agree that you can't understand anything or fix anything unless you have data. It's a joke, right? So I guess I came at this the way most people cynically come at it, which is they say, well, the police don't want to tell us anything. And I assumed the same was true. In reality, once you get close to the situation, I think there are two very specific problems. The first is the police departments are operating on old legacy technology. They can't tell you. It's not that they've got a secret. They don't know. And I think that's a huge national agenda item, which is how do we get the tech companies to help the police departments to gather data so that we can actually figure out if we're keeping healthy.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now I'm gonna get to data because why don't we have first data about police? And then we'll talk about the technology tools in the next part that they're starting to be able to use. And I want you to sort of rank them eventually. So why don't we have data? We just don't.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a long list of things that we care about, some of which are obvious to you, like how many people are being stopped Don't kill people how many people are being stopped. Is it wildly, racially disparate? Dude, things you wouldn't think about because they're kind of geeky, but super important, like how many patrol officers are reporting to a sergeant. In some places it's a small ratio. And then you go to Chicago before the federal government went and investigated. And it was this huge range. And so nobody can be supervised that way. So it's a combination of all of that.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Roosevelt for everything. Hate to blame Teddy. And so, you know, the system of accountability around policing at the federal level too, but in everybody's local PD is there's a mayor who hires and fires a chief, and that's the end of it. And if you think about it, it's a ridiculous system. And what happens is police chiefs start to be like NBA coaches. They hold their jobs for two, three years. There's no way to affect sensible reform and change. There's no way for the public to have a voice in how that PD is operating. People can't even tell you whether they're PD is any good or bad. We're working on a project to try to metricize that, to figure out a way, we call it a health check, to figure out whether police departments are healthy or not.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then, I mean, at some level, I could just end the story right there. We made them autonomous for politics. And we've never recovered from that moment. And we've never sort of figured out a way to claim.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quantumly more. That's exactly the right word. So it's actually kind of a historical hangover, and I'm going to tell you, but it's a funny one. We have police. They emerge in the late 19th century and late 1800s, and they're famously corrupt. Right, they're on the take. They're working with Tammany Hall with the machine. And so we got to do something to deal with the corruption. And the idea was we're going to make them autonomous. We're going to make them professional and militarized kind of discipline, and they're going to be autonomous from politics.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why is that not been there? Because of the safety issues. And I want to get to technology, so I really want to focus on that. I was wondering. Yeah, no, I'm going to get it. But why has that happened? I want to set the table. I'm setting the table here.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't have a place to go, and legislatures are terrified to regulate the police because they don't want to be the ones responsible for something going wrong or dealing with the police unions. And so we have this void. We don't have a place where the public can just speak up and say, this is what I want policing to look like. And a lot of our work is trying to develop mechanisms. And we work with everybody in the field. local advocates, with police departments, with activists to try to figure out how can we get the public's voice into policing.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it means that, let's start with transparency, right? So it's like the bedrock thing in government is transparency, but it's not the bedrock thing in policing. We're going to put up a thing on our website called Emanuals Initiative in a while where we've ranked police departments on whether they've simply made their manuals available in a form that people can actually search them and find things. And some departments do just fine, but tons of them are right across the line. You just, you don't know what their basic policies are. How can you have a voice in something if you don't even know what the thing is? You go from there to voice. You know, you have a problem with zoning. You go to the zoning board. You have a problem with the schools, you go to the school board. You have a problem with the police. Tell me where you go.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No clear rules. You can't hold anybody accountable. And so that was the flash that let's try to bring regular government to policing. And those are the concepts that we use.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and in fact, I was listening to one of your podcasts that talked about this without a good front end, you can't make the back end work anyway.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything. And we all know it doesn't work. Because you're just monitoring abuses. This is how you have the problems of hate speech online because you're meeting the end part rather than the begin, the architecture of it.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The whole idea, the central idea, is that government runs through what we call front-end accountability, or in the book I call democratic policing. And the principles are going to seem duh familiar to you. So there ought to be rules. But when it comes to policing, all of it from, again, the local PD up to the NSA, we don't do that. So we're all about special monitors or civilian review boards or courts throwing out evidence or even if you think about it, body cameras or a form of back-end accountability. Something bad happened. Let's see if we can't figure out who's responsible. And the idea of the book is that's a terrible system for regulating everything. And we all know it doesn't work.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody would take apart their case and point out that they knew it three different ways. And so I think that the issue is we have to be pragmatic and realistic and say, what is the problem exactly? Are we sure we can't solve it another way? And in encryption in particular, and I think you see this in a number of places, it's a two-edged sword, right? Because there are plenty of people that feel that without encryption, we're all going to be less safe, actually. Right, absolutely. The idea is that we're protecting a bigger thing, our privacy. The NSA ends up getting hacked, right? Exactly, right. So you have these two flashpoints, especially Snowden, and you move forward with the concepts, talk a little bit about some of the concepts in your book that you were discussing. Sure.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You must have other tools. You must have other ways to track radical behavior around this country. And so I was sort of struck by that. And there was no particularly good answer, but what was interesting is Apple didn't back down and certain companies didn't back down on these things. Talk about that instance, because that was another flashpoint, a public flashpoint at least. Yeah, and it's a hard issue. I mean, I think we'd be naive to think that it's not a difficult issue. But the problem is around policing technologies, we're not very rational. We're not very sane. So one of the things that the policing project that we advocate for is serious cost-benefit analysis to figure out whether what people are saying is true. So we don't have, you don't have very good empirical evidence to know how much of a threat that they can't crack these iPhones is, right? We have to assume they're alternative means of doing things. You know, even after Snowden, I remember the government would testify to Congress that they needed X and every time, and then they'd always pull out like child pornography was always the big case for a terrorist. On Twitter,”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of operational concerns that are going to make us all unsafe. Well, I thought fast forwarding just to the encryption battle that Apple had then with the government, what was fascinating to me, two things were fascinating to me was one that you have Jim Comey pushing this and also Barack Obama, I had an interview with him where he suddenly became In that camp, which was surprising because he hadn't been. And then you had people like Ash Carter, the Defense Department, who's like, no. It was interesting, the fracture within government over these issues. And then the overall issue was if they don't have other means of surveillance or intelligence beyond cracking this phone, we're in bigger trouble. If the phone is the reason you can't figure out why these people radicalize.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know, I just recently interviewed someone from the government, and they were like, he's still a traitor, he's still a, you know, the concept of he's making us less safe, which was, I think, the government's argument that we had to do this because. Yeah, you know, so one of the questions that we were really interested in, and in fact we're running a series of salons and gatherings over the semester and next to talk about, is the tension between secrecy and transparency. You always get the story, we can't tell you about this because then the bad guys will know and they'll evade it. So that was true of, you know, whether it's stingray simulators or whether it's X-ray vans traveling around New York City. We try really hard at the policing project, and I think it's my personality to want to be sane about all this. I want to be safe. I watch the towers fall. I have small kids. But we have to be realistic about what's really required to keep us safe. And I come at this with a fair amount of skepticism that we can't tell people something, maybe a lot, and still not step on.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you do it. People get to decide. And I was just furious. And that was the moment when I thought, because again, my book was unmore to policing without permission, the whole concept of the book is before the police act, they ought to have democratic legitimacy, just like all the rest of government. We don't think about the police that way, but that was the insight. And so Snowden happened. I thought, you know, I'd really like to get into the world and see if we can't get people to think about policing. And by policing, I mean everything from your local PD all the way up to the NSA. Anybody who's doing surveillance of American folks, let's try to get a handle on front-end accountability around all this. Sure. So you had the Snowden revelations, which were that the government was spying quite hopiously, especially on tech companies through PRISM and other formats, and that”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't it strange that all of our constitutional rules don't apply when the police are involved? That seems weird to me. And that was the light bulb that led to writing the book. And while I was writing the book, Snowden happened. And then Ferguson, and I thought, boy, these ideas that I'm writing about have an application in the world. Let's try to see if we can't. We'll talk about the Snowden thing, because I think people don't realize the impact that had, especially the relationship between technology and government, technology companies and government, and the concept of what was actually happening. Yeah, you know, I think I was a startled as everybody when that news broke. I mean, we've got Brad Smith from Microsoft with us today, and he talks about that in his own podcast with him. Yeah, he's terrific. You know, I didn't know whether what the government was doing was right or wrong from a efficacy standpoint. Is this going to keep us safe? But I was outraged at the notion that they had done all of this without going through what I thought were proper democratic channels, which is you get permission from Congress, you get some buy-in.”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of technology with policing and conceptual ideas around it. So, why don't you give people your background of how you got to this policing project at NYU? Sure. I wrote a book called Unwarranted Policing Without Permission. But you worked on for eight years? A very long time. Light bulk off. So I can get on it. Your background background is you are. I'm a constitutional law professor and I've taught policing in Fourth Amendment for a long time. Right after 9-11, everybody was running around saying we have to restrict our liberties. And as a Fourth Amendment scholar, I thought they're pretty restricted already. And I would talk to people about it, and they would be surprised of the restrictions. Because they said now, now, because of what had happened with terrorism, because it's so deeply linked to terrorism and worries about it. So linked. So I wanted to write about it. And then I didn't know exactly what to say except to complain about the Supreme Court. And then a light bulb went off in my head in 2006. When I realized I was teaching constitutional law and criminal procedure, and I thought,”
2019-11-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Barry Friedman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT