YouSaid · the spoken record

Rachel Harmon

lines on the record: 72
first: 2020-06-17
most recent: 2020-06-17
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

“So, the two things I look for most in a legal scholar one is I want to see someone who's a dog with a bone. I want to see someone who just has a set of questions, even if it's on related some set of fundamental questions that bothers them enough that they just have to keep coming back to them again and again. And then maybe if I can mix my metaphors, I want to make sure that bone is a rich vein to mine. You know, I want to know that that's going to yield results over years and years. And so when I see those two things that kind of desperate need to chew and something that's likely to pay off in learning something more about the world, then I say that person's going to go someplace.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I was planned to go. I was planning to go this year. You know, I've qualified, but I don't usually go to the age group nationals because it's a big haul and, you know, be away from my family for days. But this year I was planning to go and compete in August, but obviously almost everything shut down. There are no races this year.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, he's a remarkable, wonderful man and a hugely human being. Stephen Breyer, one of the things that's great about him is that he is exactly the same person on the bench, off the bench, in media and with his children. So he's a role model as a person. But one of the things he taught me about writing that actually affects my academic work most is that from engineering I learned to start with an outline and decide what I wanted to say and then write all the sections to meet my outline. And Justice Breyer taught me to figure out, to just write all my paragraphs and then work backwards to figure out what I had to say after the fact.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What stands out? So Guido has been a mentor to me, both as a lawyer, as a thinker, but also personally, you know, he married, he performed the wedding for me and my husband. I don't know that I have one message, but maybe partly it's actually about being a serious legal thinker and a human being. I mean, he has a remarkably rich and full life and cares enormously about people. And that's been a wonderful thing to see and try to live up to it.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I didn't know the answer to that. I guess it had some benefits. I think it helped me get a clerkship Supreme Court. That was kind of fun, probably helped me give with the academic jobs. So for me, it's been probably overall efficient, but I don't know that anyone cares that much.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I went from engineering to philosophy to law, and you could call it a random walk, or you could say that I'm really interested in the structure of things. And I think that the analytic tools that I learned as an engineer definitely inform the way I think about legal issues.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of which is coming out now in association with the militarism around the protests. And there's one more, which I am forgetting off the top of my head, but I'll think of in a minute. Then the other thing that the Justice that Trump did, President Trump and Jeff Sessions did, is they advocated for more aggressive policing. So they advocated stop question and frisk as a strategy in Chicago and repeatedly valued more aggressive forms of policing. And you hear that again with Attorney General Barr in repeated advocacy for more aggressive forms of policing, which are, you know, harm inefficient, I think. And then President Trump in his speech in Suffolk County, New York, he advocated allowing officers or encouraged officers to Lets us.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the three things that the Trump administration did, well, so three things it did and things and then the things that it said. So when sessions came in as Trump's first attorney general, he effectively shut down the pattern of practice lawsuits that the Justice Department was carrying out. He allowed the ongoing ones to continue, though he tried to get out of the two that were not yet ink dry but had already been negotiated in Baltimore and Chicago. And he managed to get out in Chicago, not in Baltimore, because the judge wouldn't let the Justice Department out of the suit. So that was one thing, which is that no new investigations or almost no new investigations. And they just shut down a program that the Obama administration had pursued very actively. That was one thing. Another thing is that they reversed changes to the military equipment program 1033.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Internalizing norms of constitutional law into policing. That doesn't mean that it provides an effective incentive to never lie or never engage in legal conduct as it's currently structured, but I think it's had an enormous effect on the culture of policing.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pull them over. I wouldn't make up probable cause. And I said, I'm sorry, you're pulling them over to rob them, but you wouldn't make up probable cause. And he said, no, I'm still a cop. And the reason that incident struck me so much is because the reason has internalized the norms of probable cause is because that is subject to the exclusionary rule. And so the effect of the exclusionary rule in large part was to give police departments an incentive to teach officers the law and give officers an incentive to learn that law and follow it, at least in large part, so that the constitutional law before the exclusionary rule was not something police officers knew anything about. And after the exclusionary rule, every police officer thinks that the Fourth Amendment is part of his police manual. And so I think it's impossible to underestimate the cultural change in terms of”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the exclusion rule has mattered a lot to the culture of policing. I often tell my students a story about a guy I prosecuted. He committed tons and tons of crimes. And when we were talking with him about some of them, he was explaining to me about how he would pull over people he suspected of being drug dealers and rob them for their cash and their drugs and then let them go or write them a ticket or whatever. And when I asked him what he would make up for probable cause when he would either ticket them or stop them, what he told them for his reasons, he said, what do you mean? And I said, well, you're pulling them over because you're going to rob them. What would you make up for probable cause? For the stop. And he said, oh, no, no, no. I would follow them until they committed a traffic offense. And then I would.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I can tell you is that the part of it that I focus on is was it proactive policing? Was it stop question and frisk and broken windows policing that drove the murder rates down? And the answer to that is probably no. I think cities that didn't engage in those strategies also had substantially lower crime rates and murder rates than they do today. Does that mean that policing had no effect? No, I won't say policing had no effect. I just don't think it was adopting proactive broken windows policing. And when I look at those strategies, I'm all about the costs as well as the benefits. So I think those strategies, especially stop question fisc was carried out in New York, was so vastly costly that we would be very cautious in thinking about its Benefits on their own.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, there are lots of people who have lots of ideas about what happened. I'm just not sophisticated about them enough to weigh in. I resist talking about things I don't know anything about. Again, not one of my best qualities.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny. I'm always trying to convey how radically different New York is today from when I grew up in the 70s and 80s in New York because my students read the Bernhard Getz case and they just have no sense of the context of how people felt in New York given the crime and that they were afraid to ride the subway or that Times Square was not in fact the Disney world that it is today. So I definitely do feel the difference. You know, I don't know that I have perfect intuitions about what has changed. Yeah.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are lots of debates about why that happened. I mean, again, you know, that's a good question for a criminologist, but seeing it happen.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, again, since my experience as a lawyer was primarily in the government sector, it's hard for me to assess the trade-offs in automation and in deprofessionalization, as well as outsourcing law work. I can't really tell.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, if you're talking about rank 30 to 40, sure. If you're talking about ranked 150 to 200, then I think the answer is no.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I think it could be far fewer, and that wouldn't be a bad thing. I mean, I think we could reduce the number of law schools. Some law schools are effectively diploma mills that produce lawyers who don't have a good shot of getting a JD required or JD valued job, which means they can't pay off the loans that they take out to go to law school. So I wouldn't mind seeing some law schools depart from the system.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not a simple question to ask in what context. I think the police should not be able to open your smartphone when they see you on the street, but with a warrant, sure. Sometimes I think it's important to evidence to convict someone of a serious crime, sure.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, I, you know, I think it's a mixed bag. I have to say that the experience of engaging in kickboxing is so terrific that I am very, that I understand why people want to do it, even though it's also injurious. And, you know, my kids would say it's a blood sport. They won't even watch football. They certainly wouldn't watch that. And they think that my, you know, affection for it is not my best feature.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there is nothing that focuses your attention more than someone trying to hit you in the face. It is absolutely terrific at screening out all distraction. You forget who you are when you box.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so you know, we used to have officer friendly, and now we have training day. Yeah, I think it's certainly portrays a message of policing that can distort both public perception and police perception of what the norms are, just like the media could do that in other contexts. Yeah.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I try not to watch that many movies about the police to tell you the truth. I'm a relatively low media consumption person. So I'm not sure I'm the best person to say.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that is not an area as expert in as policing. But I think one of the problems is that we clog the system with a lot of offenses we never mean to prosecute, that we're using the criminal justice system to address problems that really we should and could address in other ways. And so that burdens the system, you know, tons and tons of misdemeanors are just dropped as soon as the person walks into court. Counsel is really, really limited. People have limited opportunities to meet with their counsel. I think we could do a lot to improve the system by just reducing the scope of the system.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's not all about constitutional law. You know, when you go to law school, what you learn about policing is the Fourth Amendment and Miranda, and you think you've learned the law of the police. And I am, I mean, I teach a class now after I teach them criminal procedure. My more advanced class is on all the law that relates to policing. So they can see that the kinds of, that we have to consider all the harms and benefits of policing that law plays a critical role in setting standards that policing is worth its cost and shapes expected values.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so most people who get traffic tickets show up or pay their ticket. And we know that's totally malleable. That is to say, you know, all we have to do is remind you, and then the percentage of people who show up goes up 10%. When we're talking about low-level thefts, the penalties are not that high. These are not people who are worried that they're going to spend the rest of their lives in prison. Most people are easy to find. I'm not saying you might not, if you convince me that really people won't show up and really we can't find them if they don't, but I don't think we have any reason to believe that's true in most of these cases.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who was against whom we had evidence that he would be a harm to the public if he was let go? And we didn't arrest him. I'm not sure we should arrest every low level offense for possession of marijuana. I don't think that gets us public safety. You look at the numbers of arrests that we dropped in New York just by not arresting people for simple possession of marijuana. And you see that's a lot of harm reduced and no additional public safety risk or overcome.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so first of all, I would detach the idea of an arrest from the idea of criminalization and penalizing. I mean, I don't know, again, much about Singapore, although it's been a week there in 1989. I was sick for most of it. Maybe it was 90. What we can say is that if somebody is engaged in behavior that we don't want, there are lots of ways to address that. One of them is criminal sanction, but the decision to arrest somebody and the decision to sanction them criminally aren't the same decision. And so we didn't arrest Harvey Weinstein. He was allowed to self-surrender with a pre-negotiated bail package. The only time he ever spent in handcuffs was in walking before his conviction was walking from the police station to the courthouse after his self-surrender. This was a violent felon.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if we're talking about that in San Francisco, so I don't know enough about what's going on in San Francisco, but one of the big problems in San Francisco seems to be radical economic inequality that leads to the underlying problems, which you can't rest your way out of. You arrest somebody who walks into a store and they spend the night in jail and then they're back out on the street and homeless again. I don't know what that arrest achieved in terms of public safety and public order. And I'm not sure that at San Francisco would be willing to pay the costs of those arrests or that it would get them what they want.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't accept the premise that reducing arrests, first of all, I'm not sure all those cities have reduced arrest, certainly Seattle and New York have. I don't know the numbers in San Francisco. But in New York, we dramatically dropped arrests for misdemeanor offenses without a substantial increase in crime. I'm not sure that I would call that absolute bedlam. You'd have to convince me, I mean, you know, I look at everything the same way, which is, is it effective at producing the goals which are public safety and public order? Is it beneficial in the sense that the costs don't outweigh the benefits? Is it efficient in the sense that there's no less harmful alternative? Is it fairly distributed? And I think arrests, to a large degree, fail those tasks. And so for those reasons, you know, I would like to reduce them because I think they impose harm where harm is unnecessary.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very quickly that admitting a lie is much more problematic than lying. And so we need departments. I mean, that's a problem that really is internal to departments. In some cities, there's a culture of more reporting than in others. And so that's something that departments can do to facilitate truthfulness and policing. But expecting truthfulness would go a long way to improving it.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we impose consequences. Right now, there are almost no consequences for police officers who lie. You could think of if a judge thinks that a police officer lies in a suppression motion, he will maybe suppress the evidence if the truth indicates that the search or the seizure was illegal. That's hardly much of a penalty. You know, a police officer engages in an illegal search. Then he lies at trial taking the chance that, you know, he might get it in. At worst, the only outcome is what would have happened if he had told the truth. So I don't think that's a very effective incentive. Departments, when officers do lie at trial often don't take steps. And sometimes when officers admit that they were under pressure to lie or that they did lie, they learned.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being aggressive towards them, they might be far more likely to respond to it just a mere request. You know what? Why don't you turn the music down? And they would say, fine. And so you could do all those things and help improve policing. Sure. And then at the end of the day, the police officers in your nice town might also be likely to wait out people who are non-compliant or look for alternatives because in Nice Town, that's what people do. And so I think niceness could help, but thinking about how it could help is really what matters.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so, you know, there were a lot of ways to prevent a police, you know, call it brutality, let's call it violence or just a use of force. Let's say all uses of force are, it would be better if no uses of force happened. Now, we could prevent them by preventing the underlying problems that police respond to. So we could do education and have economic development and provide mental health services. And then police would respond to far fewer problems and things would be better. We could re-identify problems and tolerate a little bit more disorder. Maybe a police officer doesn't have to break up a loud party and then he won't have to arrest the people involved. So we could do that. We could encourage people to react differently to the police, if people trust the police in your nice town where people believe that the police are there to help, not to hurt, where police are not.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, you know, Minneapolis says, no one has had some problems for several years. Minnesota has had some hearings. Minneapolis has tried to do some reforms and they haven't, even after some high-profile events, not as high profile as what's going on now for sure, but some high profile salient events were unable to generate the kind of change that would make a difference, at least significantly so. And they have on paper some of the formal reforms that people often demand in policing. And so I don't know what the, I mean, I don't know enough about what's going on on the ground. I mean, one of the things about police institutions is that they are local institutions. And so you have to know a lot about what's going on in the community to know how likely they are to change.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have had when we might get a new leader in a department who wants to reform the department, but the culture of the department is resistant to change and they know that the guy's likely to be fired within a year anyway.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they are. So, one thing is the value of innovative leadership. Scott Thompson and Camden, I think, did a lot of good and thought seriously about the problems and engaged all of the different participants, both communities, officers. He put out a new use of force policy last year, which was probably the most progressive in the country, based in part on work that the ALI did, the American Law Institute did, and I've been involved in that work. I helped draft those principles. And he did that by getting everyone to the table and getting buy-in from everyone involved. And that's a lot more likely to have success lasting success. Now, so leadership matters. Buy-in matters. He also had a little more power to restructure the department from the ground up. So one of the problems that people...”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there are different proposals for that right now people are talking about an accreditation system where departments would seek to be accredited by meeting national standards. You could penalize them by taking away money for things that they want, but that has again cost them benefits and over time the federal government has been totally unwilling to do that. It's basically not used money as a tool for ensuring police accountability. I don't know if there's one way to do it, but I think there are several ways to do it and I think partly communities have to do it themselves. That is to say, once we have national standards out there, communities can hold their own departments accountable for not meeting them.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think setting up some national standards that we not only have a federal intervention in making police more effective or federal intervention in suing police officers and prosecuting police officers, but national standards for ensuring that policing is actually beneficial, that we're minimizing, that it's fair, and that it's authorized by local communities. Given that we do operate policing the way we do, which is in lots and lots of departments, having some shared national standards the way England does it might help a lot, even if we continue to organize policing the way we did.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be internalized. I think the way there are a lot of different ways to ensure that we internalize the costs of policing, making them more visible, making them experienced by the political actors who are going to make decisions about hiring and firing police chiefs, about setting policy for police departments. And I think the more we internalize the full costs of policing and make sure they're fairly distributed, the better policing will be.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. The most cost effective intervention to improve the quality of policing without limiting engagement. Know, I don't know that I can think of a single intervention. I mean, if you think about particular interventions, I can tell you how they might affect that equation, but there are a lot of forces acting on policing. So, for example, people talk about civil damages actions. And one of the things about civil damages actions, they worry about indemnification. Indemnification is when the city pays, even though the officer gets the judgment against him. And people object to this because they think the officer should be punished more. But I'm actually pro-indemnification because I think if the city pays, then as long as we make that payment transparent so we don't have non-disclosure agreements and we also collect data on it, then a community could actually say, hey, I don't want my taxes to go up because you idiots won't train and prepare officers and discipline them and supervise them so that they do less of this, right? And so we want the cost.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It got their probation revoked or ended up back in jail. They wouldn't see their children anymore. He picked them pretty carefully. So yeah, they don't always need force. And, you know, we might need laws to better protect against that.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but that so that's true. In fact, one of the problems that we had in federal cases involving sexual misconduct or sexual abuse is that you would have to prove forced to prove a felony. But officers don't have to use force and they don't even have to explicitly threaten force. They control the situation. The person is under arrest. They are wearing a gun and they express and act as if they're invincible and the women, often the women who are abused are carefully chosen to believe that they are. So they know because they've been arrested before and they know because they have a criminal history. They know because I had one case involving someone who directed a halfway house and the women had to have sex with him in order to see their children because if they got he could affect their probation status and if they”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in some places, well, so it depends what you mean by legal. It is not unconstitutional. In some states, it is consensual sex between an officer and a person in custody is not illegal. And so it depends in part on whether it's non-consensual. In other places, custodial sex with somebody in custody is illegal. So it varies. But if it's non-consensual, it's always illegal.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I can only think. What we don't want is police officers to be alone or with somebody else or with other people that they can rely on and not to report misconduct. So that means officers have”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those claims never investigating them thoroughly enough. And when you would look at these cases and start actually seriously investigating, you'd realize that actually this officer had done it dozens of times. Some of them might be beyond the statute of limitations. Some of the women might have serious credibility issues. But you'd get enough that in some cases I had more than a dozen prosecutable incidents involving sexual abuse by an officer, some of which had, there have been complaints about, but only some, and none of those had been recognized as legitimate. Even the Justice Department had often closed the case at least once before. I got it. So it's very hard to see how big the problem is or to investigate and handle those cases.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't think they realize how common sexual assaults by police are, how difficult, how unlikely they are to be reported, and then how difficult they are to prove once they are reported. And I mean, so I prosecuted cases involving police misconduct for the Department of Justice. And one of the big issues in some of the sexual assault cases I did was that the first complaint, the second complaint, the third complaint would come in, they would come in sporadically. It would be, he said, she said the department would investigate, decide that there was no evidence to support the woman's claim and the officer would go about his business. And the women often had credibility problems. They might be felons. They might be prostitutes with drug habits, runaways. But over time, what you would see is a department sort of never vindicating”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know about mandatory therapist visits, but I would say that we have to prioritize the health and well-being of police officers because police officers who are overly stressed or who are hurt physically or mentally are more likely to hurt others. And so we have to take seriously officer well-being. What that means can be complicated. You know, we want officers to be able to get the therapy services they need, often pure services work better. Some departments are looking to the military model for increasing well-being because officer suicides are huge problem right now. But we also want to make sure that an officer who is in potentially in crisis or harmful to others isn't on the street. And so states are struggling with the trade-offs between protecting officers to make sure they seek the help they need.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, one of the great things that would, I mean, there are some aspects of what police departments are expected to do now that would be better handled by social workers who are trained to deal with people in crisis, whether there's a substantive abuse or mental health crisis or other social services needs like people without housing and the like. And so we dump a lot of that on police departments. There is no police department in America who wouldn't say what we need is more mental health services because mental health services would prevent the crises. And if we had more social workers responding to those crises, either with law enforcement or without, depending on the nature of the crisis, we might get more effective police. Yeah, sure.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's clear that when we reduce police salaries a lot, as you see in some small departments and in poorer communities, then police quality goes down because you start getting officers with records of misconduct and the like. So I think we don't want salaries to go too low. But I don't know that if we doubled salaries or raised them for 50%, that we'd get radically higher quality police officers. I'm open to it. You could think of, we could have a police for America program like we have a teach for America program and kids out of Harvard would then go police in big cities and small towns for three years. I mean, I'm open to almost trying almost anything as an alternative, but I don't think we know that raising salaries is going to make things better.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source