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

“On whom we tend to concentrate the costs of policing. And then we have to make sure that police are in fact accountable, that there do have to explain their behavior, which means we would know what they were doing, and that they face consequences when they don't live up to expectations.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'm not a big believer in silver bullets. I don't think there is a single constraint. We have been struggling with balancing the harms and benefits of policing since we started contemporary departments. So I don't think that we're going to suddenly fix this by flipping one lever. I think that one thing that we could do is facilitate better accountability in policing. And what I mean by that is if you think about policing as or accountability is that an officer would be responsive to standards, he would have to explain his behavior and he'd face consequences when he didn't live up to those standards. Those standards should reflect of the full costs and benefits of policing so that we set rules for policing that actually gets what we want out of policing. Those standards won't reflect those rules if we don't know what the costs of policing are. And that means hearing from the members of the community.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends what you do with them. I mean, you could double the number of police officers and make things far worse if what they're doing is going out onto the street and jacking people up, throwing them against the wall, frisking them and the like. And so”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuff works, at least not yet. But hopefully we can develop mechanisms, we could study these things and develop mechanisms to have alternatives to empower officers to use alternatives and then give them the backup, the time, if necessary, the cover to engage in less forceful responses.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not saying I don't think any, it's not that they won't help, you could help with education, you could help with diversification. Diversity might help in policing like women because they break up the subcultures in a police department that can reinforce bad behavior. So I actually think having women present helps, even if the women aren't less violent just by reducing the uniformity of the culture. So I don't want to say those things don't matter at all, but I think the capacity to solve problems without force and the motivation to do so matter at least is not much, if not more. And so what we have to do is give officers the capacity. I wish we had more evidence about de-escalation training and about implicit bias training and the like. We don't, so we don't know that that's”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, maybe, but even there, so I'm not 67 yet, but I'm on my way. And if you tell me that I have to complete every call in 90 seconds and I face somebody who is holding a knife and clearly in a mental health crisis, I have two options. I can wait and talk and see if I can de-escalate the situation or I can tase them and be done with it. And even a 67-year-old woman is going to respond to incentives about how she's supposed to handle that situation. If you rush her, she'll tase them.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really. And so, you know, what you're really looking at is the culture of the department, the incentive structures, the supervision, discipline. You can make good officers with imperfect people”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I think we could do some things. I think we could select against people. We could screen out people who have committed misconduct in the past, for example, by decertifying them at the state level and therefore discouraging departments that can't or don't care very much about quality of their officers from hiring those officers. So it's not that we can't select against problems and policing at all. Sometimes we know that an officer is problematic and still he'll wander around from department to department. We should set minimum age standards that are above 18, which many states have as a minimum age standard. But in terms of education or other more subtle factors, I think the effects can often be subtle. And when we look at what creates problems in policing, departments create officers. The officers don't pre-exist.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's mixed evidence on that, slightly older police officers tend to be better in certain respects at least. And education is often associated with age. But again, I don't think that we can select our way out of problems in policing.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the Violence Against Women Act has an arrest program. It was traditionally known as the arrest program, recently renamed, which provides money to police departments or to municipalities to increase the criminalization or criminal justice taking seriously violence against women, domestic violence and stalking and some other kinds of violence. That program specifically incentivized arrests and it incentivizes arrests even above prosecutions. So it's not that we're saying we should take it seriously at sentencing. We're saying we should take it seriously when we see it. We should arrest it. And it encourages departments to adapt pro-arrest policies and states to adopt pro-rest laws. But arresting people doesn't necessarily protect public safety. And it does increase harm”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so most of the money we give to local police departments isn't for accountability, it's to improve effectiveness in policing or to improve, to shift policing towards national priorities that might not be adequately addressed at the local level, like local departments don't have enough of incentive to prepare against terrorism, except maybe New York. And so we might fund them to make sure that we're all on the same page. So there are some good reasons for federal programs. But the way those programs have been designed have not focused on accountability, and often they have given money directly to police departments or been structured in ways that incentivize harmful policing. And in that way, when they do that, they actually can, even if they make policing more effective, they can also make it more harmful and therefore less efficient and also undermine community control.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, they should have the power to do that. So the lawsuits by the Justice Department for pattern and practices of unconstitutional conduct by a police department are important both symbolically and practically. Now those Lawsuits have substantial costs as well as benefits. And when the Justice Department has sued police departments in the past, those suits have been very expensive. Some suits have worked better than others in terms of reform. And some of the reforms haven't always lasted. So I don't want to suggest that they are somehow a panacea to problems in policing. At the same time, they've done a lot to signal the federal government's commitment to civil rights. They have set national standards for departments that are interested in adopting best practices. And they have reformed some very big, very problematic departments.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a little bit of research, but it's not great, and I just don't, I think police officers are situated differently with respect to force.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so for one reason, police officers and regular people aren't similarly situated with respect to violence. So if, you know, I'm a very small person, I'm only about 411 on a good day. If you ask me why I don't engage in more violence, well, maybe I don't usually have the motivation to engage in violence. And maybe even though I've done a little kickboxing, I'm probably going to lose most fights I'm in. Police officers are armed and they're trained to use force. And so there's a difference even if women are on average smaller. There's still going to be a difference in their preparedness to use force to enforce a command. And so I just don't think we can infer from what we know about women participating in violence more generally that women are going to behave differently on the police force. That doesn't mean they won't. And again, you know.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not sure we know for sure the studies on gender show a little bit better effect than the studies on racial diversity and policing. And I think communities do value police departments that reflect what the community looks like. And certainly women might help. I have no, I don't take diversity in policing to be a solution to problems in policing. I think it's an end that we might pursue for other reasons.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there are advantages and disadvantages to consolidation. I said $18,000. That's actually not the best, most recent number. It's probably a little more than 12,000 local departments. About half of those are fewer than 10 guys. Now, we talk about police accountability and having use of force policies and disciplinary structures, but in an office of 10 guys, none of that matters. And so I think some consolidation would be extremely valuable because these very small departments just can't maintain the kinds of standards that we might want. But I don't think consolidation is the solution to all problems in policing and consolidation has costs as well as benefits because it means that as communities get more diverse, segments of the community might not get what they want out of policing.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not that nice usually. And if you record me for long enough, I will forget to be nice and I'll be my normal, not that nice self. And so I think part of what happens in policing with respect to anyone wearing a camera is that people forget over time. And partly some of the causes of problems in policing aren't that officers are intentionally misbehaving. I mean, sometimes they're not being as cautious as they should be or not as polite as they should be, but often it's about the broader incentives they face. So if a department doesn't care if you're polite or not, putting on a camera isn't going to make you more polite. So there would have to be standards, there'd have to be consequences. So officers have to have the motivation to behave differently and they have to have the capacity to behave differently.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I'm not a social scientist, I'm a lawyer, but I try to follow the social science in this area. And I can tell you that what we know right now is that the results of studies of body cameras, at least in terms of if you're studying whether they reduce complaints or whether they reduce uses of force, the studies are at best mixed. I would say the evidence that they do good in these respects is pretty weak.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I would start with the premise, which is that body cams are data so far, body cams are anecdote. As machine learning gets better, they are becoming data and they're getting more useful in that way. But body cams are one perspective on an encounter. Of course, most of the data we get is officer reported, so they're useful. It's not clear whether bodycams are going to be an important form of data in policing, but I suspect over time they will be.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it does cost something to collect that data. So you'd need individual officers to take time to do it. You need departments to supervise them. And then you'd need an effort to standardize the definitions and the formats so that we could actually use the data.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are bottlenecks all along the way. If you think about the way we traditionally, what we traditionally demanded from police departments, the focus of the political demands on police departments have tended to focus on effectiveness in terms of public safety or at least visible efforts towards producing public safety. There's been a lot less focus on what kinds of harms policing is imposing. And so we do actually collect a lot of data from police departments pretty effectively with respect to crimes. We've had the Uniform Crime Reports for almost 100 years, and we have standardized definitions of what those crimes are and not perfect, but pretty good data from departments. There's just a lot less interest in collecting data on the coercion that police officers do, like arrests we use for the crime reports, but stops, uses of force, and the like.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for one reason, we have more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. And so that's a lot of data to collect. They're very diverse. And so it's hard. We'd have to have a national effort to do it in any sort of coherent way. And we haven't had the will to do that.”
2020-06-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Rachel Harmon on Policing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source