>> Professor Wherry here
at Princeton University.
And I'm pleased to be joined by a sister
South Carolinian, Dr. Monica Bell,
who is now an Associate Professor at the
Yale Law School and at Yale Sociology.
Welcome, Dr. Bell.
So, as we talk about police violence
and the Black Lives Matter movement,
we are forced to reckon with
the criminal justice system.
So, as a lawyer and a sociologist, how
do you think about criminal justice?
>> Right. So, you know, from a sociological
vantage point, we think that there's supposed
to be some kind of system in society that
promotes social solidarity by rendering
out punishment to people in order to help
them conform more to certain laws or norms.
And we think that also from a legal angle.
You know, we focus on individual accountability,
and what becomes really clear, though,
certainly from a sociological
angle, and I think, increasingly,
people see this when they spend
real time in the legal system.
We see that is not the actual function of
the, quote unquote, criminal justice system,
or what I and many others at this
point call the criminal legal system.
We see that, actually, the primary function of
these systems is to maintain racial hierarchy,
so such that when we examine what is made
criminal and what is not made criminal,
when we examine which crimes are treated as
misdemeanors and which are treated as felonies,
when we look at who has to actually spend
time in prison versus who can get sort
of lighter sorts of punishments for
engaging in similar types of behavior.
And, of course, when we examine these dynamics
at a larger, structural level, we see that,
you know, in a legal sense you might
be focusing on an individual case,
but sociologically what you see is that whole
neighborhoods, and a certain kind of race,
racial gender, and economic groups are really
facing the brunt of the criminal legal system,
even if -- like, you know, even though the
actual conditions underlying crime are more
complicated than they appear.
So, that's generally how I
think about these issues.
>> Yeah. And I noticed that you were drawing
on some work by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1904
and 1905, and somehow that work
really resonates with us today.
And, you know, we know Du Bois as both a
sociologist, a historian, and an activist.
And so, when you're thinking about how his work
resonates with us today, what comes to mind?
>> Yeah. So, I think when we look at work
over the course of time, what you see over
and over again is a lot of the things
that movements are talking about today,
and a lot of concerns that people have today
with respect to the criminal legal system,
and especially black communities, is similar
to what we have seen recorded in the past.
And W. E. B. Du Bois' work at the Atlanta School
of Sociology, particularly this report called
like Some Notes on Negro
Crime, Especially in Georgia.
That report -- in that report he talks about the
fact that lynching, for example, was a way --
was kind of never punished and it was these kind
of racial harms that black people experienced.
The unjust treatment that
black people experienced
in courts essentially sent the message to black
people that the criminal legal system was --
you know, that basically the few people
who were actually convicted are
really guilty of anything, right?
Which is a profoundly delegitimating
observation.
And it's certainly a dynamic that we continue to
see today, you know, more than a century later .
So, yeah, so this is kind of like a persistence
with logical effect, and it helps under --
it helps underscore the point
I was trying to make earlier,
which is that it's a basic function
of the criminal legal system.
So, some people like to say, oh, you know,
maybe there's institutional racism now,
but it doesn't have to be that way.
And I think in this kind of story of continuity
we see that this is actually a basic function,
it's not something that's easy to tweak
[audio skip] procedural rules and change.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So, basically, we're
not dealing with glitches.
>> Right, yes.
>> This is hardwired, okay.
>> Yeah.
>> And indeed, in your article
in the Du Bois review,
you further argue that the way
policing gets done really sends messages
to groups about their place in society.
It's what James Baldwin calls
the place in which we fit.
So, talk about how those
messages are being sent.
>> Right, yeah.
So, we have this idea that when
people experience police violence,
or when they experience maltreatment,
that they're really experiencing
it as an individual harm.
So, I mean, there's this whole
literature and this whole movement built
around this concept called procedural justice,
which is, you know, I'm oversimplifying here,
but basically it's this idea that if
police officers treated any person,
whether they be black, brown, white,
whether they are non-binary male, female,
like whatever their categories might be, if
the police officer treats them with dignity
and respect and explains
what they're doing, etcetera,
then they will have a more positive
affirming and legitimating reaction
to their experience with the police.
Now, in my research with black communities
in particular, this is not the dynamic.
And so, it's not just that people focus
on their own individual experience,
they think about the meaning of the experience.
It's like why is this police officer
stopping me in the first place?
You know, they can be polite, but the
message of exclusion is still there.
The sense that you wouldn't be
stopping me if I were not black.
You wouldn't be stopping me if
I weren't in this neighborhood.
You wouldn't be stopping me
if I weren't in this car.
You know, you wouldn't be asking
me these questions if I --
if I were standing outside in a different place.
You know, like all of these --
like black people know this.
Like this is not -- and so -- and so,
the message of exclusion is sent not
from the specific behavior of the officer,
but instead the existence of the -- their --
kind of their presence in the first place.
And so, this is just one example of the way
in which mere police presence sends
a strong message that it's not just
about individual exclusion, but it's more
about a group-based sense of exclusion.
And in other work I refer to
this as legal estrangement.
>> And indeed, so many Americans
really talk about policing
as a service we consume,
a service of protection.
But you also warn us that even when it is talked
about as a service, as community policing,
for example, its intended audience
might not want to consume it.
And so, a lot of what we're trying
to do, I think as sociologists,
is we're trying to understand why is it that
the thing that you would think as common sense,
if you're providing a service, individualized,
you've got to get service or you don't,
why don't you want to consume it?
>> Yeah. Yeah.
Well, so, I should say -- I should start
by saying, yes, like black people --
black and brown people who live in marginalized
communities want public safety services.
It is not that black people are
unconcerned about public safety.
The problem is, as I was kind of hearkening
to earlier, we also know that even
if police sometimes sort of play that
role, there is great risk involved
with having police present because police also
serve this broader function of racial control.
So, you know, I talk to people
all the time who call the police.
They say, I called the police about an incident.
They were in a moment of danger.
But then the police officer shows up and
they don't really know how it's going to go.
So, it could be fine.
It could be that they get help that time.
But it could also be that they wind up getting
arrested, someone they care about gets arrested,
or the officer treats them
with profound disrespect
and asks them why they're
calling in the first place.
All of [audio skip] risks are involved
with making use of this service.
Like basically, it's not
a straightforward service.
>> No.
>> So, this idea of community policing
is also really important and interesting
because that's what people always say.
You know, anytime there's, you know, a
movement unrest, it's like, okay, well,
what we need is community policing.
>> Yeah.
>> Well, what does that mean?
So, often to officers, and the way it was
kind of theorized initially was, basically,
police being present to be
supportive of the community,
and in doing so the community
will trust them more
and then give them more information
about fighting crimes.
So, becomes really challenging because
it feels instrumental to people.
So, it's one thing, you know, if police
officers are, you know, playing basketball
in the community or whatever, but it becomes
a slightly different thing when the function
of that basketball playing
is to build relationships
such that they can get more
information about, you know,
some sort of criminal activity they think
is going on, and people can feel that.
So, that's another reason that the whole
community policing idea doesn't resonate
to people, because they know that at the end
of the day a police officer is an officer.
This is someone coming into
the community with a weapon
who is -- has the power to lock people up.
>> Yes.
>> To abuse people with impunity.
And so, even if people want community
support, having that support come
from the police department is a
very bizarre set of circumstances.
And instead, we could do things
like invest in communities that --
in ways that don't require police, and that
would be kind of preferable to a lot of people.
>> And so, then, how should we think
about resistance to law enforcement?
And why is it that resistance
is not necessarily a problem,
that most of the time we see resistance we'd
say there's something wrong with the system
or there's something wrong
with a particular event,
and we just want the resistance to go away.
And so, how should we really
think about resistance?
>> Yeah. Yeah, so, there are all
kinds of forms of resistance, right?
So, probably the one that people talk about
the most is this idea of resisting arrest.
So, this is a crime.
And police officers routinely use a charge
of resisting arrest to basically suggest
that the person is being unruly,
they're not just rolling over
and saying, okay, cool, arrest me.
I am -- they're not yielding to
authority effectively enough.
You know, and we actually also see this type
of charge all the time in which, you know,
there's no evidence that there
was any meaningful resistance.
So, why is this important?
It's important because if there is some form
of resisting even to arrest, it can be a signal
that there is something deeply
problematic systematically.
>> Yeah.
>> You know, so resistance can be a way --
I mean, anthropological literature talks about
resistance as a, quote, weapon of the weak,
which is a way of speaking against
authority that has gone wrong.
So, we also think about this in
the context of protests, right?
So, you know, all the protests we've
seen going on, there's, you know,
has been a lot of police brutality, federal
agent brutality directed at protesters
with this -- with this impulse of pushing
back resistance to their authority.
And what that does is basically squelch speech,
it squelches the expression that we're supposed
to be using as kind of a space
of dialogue to build more --
basically to be able to work out some of the
issues and kind of craft a better future.
So, basically, resistance functions as a
really important way of moving society forward,
and it's kind of the miner's
canary, so to speak,
that there are real problems
that need intervention.
So, that's just kind of the beginning of an
answer about the significance of resistance
in a conversation about police violence.
>> And finally, let -- help me sort of
reimagine what policing might look like.
So, when we're talking about transformation
and talking about changing how the place
in which we fit in criminal justice,
what exactly are we looking at here?
>> So, I think a few -- there are a few
key ingredients to developing an agenda
around transformation of
the criminal legal system.
And probably the first is to recognize a point
that I made earlier, which is that black people
who feel -- often feel oppressed by police
violence are also concerned about public safety.
Now, that might seem like such a basic
point, but it's an important starting place
in the conversation to think, okay,
well, that means like what's implicit
in that statement is an idea
that police are not the insurers
of public safety in many black communities.
So, the question then becomes, well, what is?
You know, how is it possible to build systems
of accountability, systems of harm reduction,
systems of flourishing that don't rely upon
this kind of mechanism of state violence?
And so, when we start with that question,
and we see many examples of creative ways
in which people in their communities are
doing that transformative work already.
So, for example, if there's an incident of
domestic violence or intimate partner violence,
there are different sorts of mechanisms
that don't rely on calling the police,
but might involve calling a community
worker to come negotiate, to kind of --
to have an agreement about the type of
accountability mechanisms that need to occur,
and then to hold people accountable for those.
We can also have these kinds of restorative
and transformative justice models
for other sorts of infractions.
And we often do, but here's the thing.
We have an ideology in our nation in which
when we hear the words public
safety, we think police.
We don't have any way of thinking about
these, you know, small, often underfunded,
community-led transformative justice mechanisms.
So, this is what so much about -- of
the defund conversation is about, right?
So, like, you know, people hear defund the
police, and it's like whoa, whoa, whoa.
Or, even more so, you know, abolish the police.
Like people are talking about
abolition and it's like, wait, what?
That means we won't have any way of
protecting ourselves from violence and harm.
But that's not actually what
these movements are about.
They're about, what do we invest in?
Where are we -- where are we putting our chips,
so to speak, in terms of what we're going to bet
on for really building sustainable,
non-racist public safety in our nation?
And we've never actually deeply
funded supported, and believed in,
as an ideological matter, alternatives
to the criminal legal system.
And so, there are ways in which social
science can actually be really helpful
on this front, right?
Like so, I think oftentimes social
science is somewhat reactionary
because of a structural feature,
which is that we're empiricists.
We study what's happened.
We theorized about it, you know?
But we need a forward-looking, or what Erik
Olin Wright called an emancipatory vision
of social science.
And what you could also be doing is studying
these smaller transformative justice mechanisms,
helping figure out and theorize what's working,
what's not working, how could it work better?
Like relying upon our sociological
theory and our ideas to think about that,
to kind of anticipate what certain
kind of consequences might be.
Like we have all sorts of tools at our
disposal, but often in policy conversations
about the criminal legal system we just kind
of become the people who are like, well,
I evaluated this police intervention
and here was the outcome.
We got to broaden that out.
>> Yeah.
>> And so, that's another important piece
of transformation, is actually getting data
and being evidence-based, but not being
evidence-based in a reactionary way,
but being evidence-based in an emancipatory --
>> Yes.
>> Way.
>> Yeah. So, we could actually imagine
new possibilities and test them .
The only thing we can imagine is whatever has
already happened, and we're not even going
to test those in the same way
that we test everything else.
And so, I'm always sort of, as I've spoken with
Andy Papachristos and others and said, you know,
it's great that we're now saying the
way that you study violence and gangs,
you can study violence among police officers,
and it's great that Rashawn Ray is now saying,
you know, we talk about sort of having the wrong
incentives, and yet we will use that for --
you know, if you're poor, we
can worry about your incentives.
If you're able to shoot and then the city has
to pay sort of the settlement, [inaudible] hit,
your budget's not hit, you're -- you
know, you're completely off the hook.
We're not talking about those incentives.
We're, you know -- otherwise, you
know, we're talking about incentives,
we're talking about moral hazards,
but only for everyone else.
And I think what I'm hearing from you is
we have to shake it up and use the tools
at our disposal, but we also
have to imagine better.
>> Yeah. Well, I'll say one
other thing about that.
So, just kind of quickly on
the -- on the other point.
There are all kinds of protections
that police have that kind of --
that seem natural to people
that we have to denaturalize.
So, this is this police indemnification
of lawsuits, like this is the key aspect,
the way that -- the role that
ensures play in policing.
And also, probably something that people
have heard a lot about recently is this idea
of qualified immunity, police
qualified immunity.
Can we get rid of qualified immunity?
And it's like, what is qualified immunity?
It's basically a way to shield police officers
from accountability, from legal accountability,
individual accountability, for the
violation of people's constitutional rights.
And the reason that we have
these kind of doctrines emerged
that shield police officers is because,
over time, courts and legislators defer
to whatever police said about what they needed.
And so, this story is really about powerful
institutions and powerful organizations
and those who have been disempowered.
>> Yes.
>> It's like who -- like where
are we pointing our lens?
And I think what's really
exciting about this point in a way
in which social science is really relevant is
we're starting to turn the lens toward policing
in a more fundamental way where we're
questioning all of these modes of deference
and all of their claims about how
public safety actually happens.
And so, it's really exciting, I think, not just
as someone who is concerned about racial justice
and not just, you know, kind of from more from
the advocacy space, but also really critically
as a social scientist, there are so
many new questions to be explored, yeah.
>> Well, thank you so much for
joining us today, Dr. Bell.
And we look forward to reading
more of your work.
>> Great. Thank you so much for having me.
