What Policing Looks Like From The Inside

Current Affairs

Rosa Brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author Tangled Up In Blue: Policing The American City, named one of the best books of 2021 by the Washington Post. The book chronicles Prof. Brooks' experiences as a reserve police officer with the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. As an academic raised in a socialist household (her mother is a former Current Affairs podcast guest), Prof. Brooks wanted to get a better understanding of how police saw themselves and the sources of dysfunction in the system. In this episode we discuss:

- How police officers are trained to fear the populations they police

- The limits of police training: what police are taught (e.g., how to handcuff suspects) and what they're not (e.g., anything about racism)

- How police officers are often called on to perform "social work" responsibilities that they are ill-equipped to handle, and why arresting and jailing people becomes an all-purpose tool

- What it means to say that the problems with policing are "systemic" and why individual good-hearted officers cannot hope to change the fundamental nature of the institutions they work within

- Explanations of polling that indicates that poor communities want more policing: they're offered a false binary where the only choice is more police or nothing

- How many problems do not necessarily originate within the institution of policing itself but with lawmakers and with the United States itself

- The problem of militarized institutions more broadly, which Prof. Brooks has explored in her previous book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

- Why it's going to be more difficult than just "defunding" police: we need institutions that actually care for people properly, and we haven't built them yet

"Much of what the average patrol officer does [every day] doesn't need to be done—and really should not be done—by a person with a gun and a badge and a uniform." — Rosa Brooks