RAMONA PEREZ: Hello and welcome to part two of the American Anthropological Association's webinar on the Persistence of Racialized Police Brutality and Community Responses to these Traumas.
My name is Ramona Perez. I am a professor of anthropology and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at San Diego University, and I currently serve as our incoming president to the American Anthro Association.
I am a light-skinned Mexican-American woman who goes by she/her/hers with white hair, hazel-green eyes, and I am wearing a black blouse with large floral embroidery and red chandelier earrings.
On behalf of the nearly 10,000 members of the American Anthropological Association, the largest professional association of anthropologists in the world, I want to thank you for joining us today as we continue our conversation on how to address the inequities and violence against Black lives, as well as the lives of Indigenous and other racialized people.
As we get started, I would like to give a brief overview of how our webinar will function today.
You've logged into the Zoom webinar format, which is different than the Zoom conference format.
At the bottom of your screen, you should see the category of Q&A.
For most of you, it will be next to the chat link.
Throughout the webinar, you can type in your questions for our panelists and Jeff Martin, the Director of Communications for the American Anthro Association, and Daniel Ginsberg, our Director of Education and Professional Practice, will read through your questions and bring them to our panel to answer.
The webinar has heightened security that includes muting each attendee and preventing anyone from accessing the screen, so the Q&A function will be your mode of creating questions for our panelists.
The chat function is available, and please feel free to use it to communicate with each other, but our panelists will not be following the chat.
So again use the Q&A for questions for them.
Closed captioning is available through the CC link at the bottom of the screen, and each of us will describe ourselves as I previously did for those with limited or no visual access.
If you have any problems with any of these details, please locate Nell's, N-E-L-L, name in the chat, and direct your question to her, and she can help with any technical difficulties.
I'd like to acknowledge that we have about 200 people in attendance today, many of whom are not anthropologists, for that reason, I would like to clarify who we are and why we have something to say about racialized police brutality and our communities' responses.
About two years ago, the American Anthropological Association created a task force to address the issues of racialized police brutality and extrajudicial violence.
We put together many resources that are available on the AAA website that include a list of anthropologists whose work addresses this phenomena, as well as materials for teaching.
The webinar that we held two weeks ago was another project of the task force and had already been set in motion while George Floyd was still alive and working toward his tomorrow.
In our first webinar, we began the conversation on the defunding and demilitarization of the police, what consequential steps should be taken regarding new training and hiring, and what we as anthropologists can be doing on our campuses and in our communities.
The video of that webinar and our discussion is now live and available on the American Anthro Association YouTube channel.
We're posting the link in the chat section right now.
This second part takes up the questions from our audience that we were unable to address and incorporates what has been happening in the last two weeks as communities, police forces, legislators and other government officials have responded or have not responded to the demand for violence against Black lives to end.
We assert that the violence manifested by police against Black lives is deeper and broader than the encounters that have been and continue to be made visible.
Racism is structural.
It is embedded in our history as a nation and in global interactions that manifest in every day practices.
While many social sciences advance our understanding of culture and society, and in particular, how these encapsulate racism, it is cultural anthropology's commitment to community-based engagement that documents how people actually experience these phenomena and how they strategize their lives around it.
Our four panelists are ethnographers who dedicated their research lives to the communities with whom they work. They are experts on the lived experience of Black communities, of police forces, and of anthropology's engagement between these two entities.
We don't have all the answers, but what we have is knowledge gained from working at the community level, including the community of policing and how these experiences create our responses and our reactions.
Our panelists are Dr. Shanti Parikh, who's an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology and of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Dr. Kalfani Ture is assistant professor of criminology at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut who has trained and served as a police officer.
Dr. Donna Auston is an anthropologist, writer, an activist, whose body of work focuses primarily on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, media, and Islam in America.
And Dr. Avram Bornstein is professor of anthropology, Interim Dean of Graduate Studies, and was co-director of the New York Police Department's leadership program at John J. College at City University New York. 
So, if I could start off by asking our panelists, Dr. Parikh and Dr. Auston to talk more about defunding and demilitarizing of police forces in order to move funding to other services such as social work, mental health, job placement programs, and even shelters, our audience in the last webinar noted that these entities are in themselves complicit in the marginalization of our Black communities.
Dr. Auston or Dr. Parikh, you wanna jump in on this? 
>> DR. AUSTON: I'll start. This is Donna Auston speaking. I am a brown-skinned African-American female. I am wearing a navy blue shirt and a navy blue head wrap.
With regard to this question of defunding and demilitarization and relatedly abolition, many people who are behind, sort of, the push right now, for, for steps like defunding, you know... a lot of those -- a lot of those folks pushing for that are people who see abolition and you know, sort of dismantling or at least, significantly scaling back the infrastructure, the policing infrastructure and defunding is one of the steps that, that has been proposed as a way to get there.
And I think, you know, and one of the -- one of the projects and one of the -- as I understand it -- is that -- this process is to help us begin to imagine different ways of creating what we understand -- what -- you know, what we conceptualize as public safety.
How do we ensure that, that citizens are safe, right?
And so defunding and demilitarization and sort of related proposals on the table right now tackle that.
And one of the things I would say with regard to how this connects to other institutions -- I think this is a really important question -- because one of the things that has to shift, is not just the institution and the personnel, within the police department, itself, but really understanding that policing is one institution that exists in a web or an ecosystem of institutions.
It exists in connection with courts. It exists in connection with schools.
It exists in connection with social services, you know, particularly if they're, if they're government attached, right?
Child services. All of these, all of these function as policing apparatus.
Often.
Right?
>> DR. PEREZ: Mm-hmm.
>> DR. AUSTON: And how does that play out?
For example, you know, you know, mandatory reporting, right?
While, of course, has good intentions, right?
The ways that Black people are often perceived by police officers on the street to be inherently criminal and their behaviors and their lives to be read through the lens of criminality -- this also often happens, for example, with child protective service agencies across the country.
So Black families, for example, are read, often in a way with the same, you know, same sort of criminal logic, right?
Which leads to devastating consequences.
Which leads to families being split up at a higher rate.
In schools, this might show up as, you know, discipline meated out to Black students, meated ou at much higher rates.
It's currently the case that in every single state, all 50 states, that Black girls are suspended from school at higher rates than white, young, you know, young girls, right?
In every state in America.
So I think we really have to think about the ways that not just the institution of, you know, the police itself, but the mindset of policing that courses, and the culture of policing, that courses through many of our ancillary institutions functions and thinking about how do we shift that, how do we shift that paradigm into a more care-taking and different types of problem-solving mode, right?
So that we can actually deal with people in ways that aren't punitive as the first and only recourse.
And disciplining as the first and only recourse.
And once we begin to think about this, as not just about the police, but about the mindset of policing, I think that we can begin to avoid some of these problems that, that also extend into other institutions.
>> DR. PEREZ: And if I can provoke a little bit more on this, and Dr. Parikh, please feel free to jump in.
I'm noticing that across the board I'm seeing that schools remove policing from their campuses, and they're putting in its place restorative justice and other kinds of programs like that.
Is that a first step, and does that -- does that really bring the sense of comfort and safety to our youth that will allow them to actually express what's going on in their lives and why particular incidents are happening?
>> DR. AUSTON: Shanti?
>> DR. PARIKH: Oh, was that question for...? I think some people would argue it is certainly a first step to decriminalize schools in certain locations, right?
So having the police presence there as opposed to dealing with and handling children where they are and at their immediate needs was sending a signal to those communities. So that's certainly a first step. The school debate of course is a lot larger. It's about the funding of the school system, at least where I am. It's about how the -- it goes along with the defund movement.
And to reiterate what Donna said, defund doesn't mean to completely do away with a policing system. It means to reimagine what it means to both responding to what the community needs are in terms of being able to achieve the type of life they want. So Ramona, to get to your question about schooling, one of the debates here in St. Louis is how do you equally fund schools when the taxpayer base around the school is limited and the neighboring area has so much more?
So it's also about reimagining what does it mean to uplift an entire region.
So in that situation, the schooling would be about distributing the resources.
Instead of having police to do the role that a counselor might do or to do the role of maybe enabling the parents to get jobs and to be able to provide the same of the children at home.
But I want to pick up what some of what Donna had said about the fund for -- the Abolition Fund. Being in St. Louis, one of the things that we have found is that, after Ferguson in 2014, you did have elected officials trying to work within this broader criminal justice system, as Donna was pointing to, and try to do reforms from within.
What you're seeing around the country now is people on the streets demanding reform, but you're also seeing a backlash.
A very much of a hunkering down, tightening of some of those structures.
So later in our discussion, I have some images -- because I think sometimes images help to animate the debate of what's going on, so some of it is that people are particularly interested in the idea that, and even the New York Times and the Atlantic have run stories on this, that this is not police broken; this is how policing was set up.
So looking historically how certain bodies in America, the Black body in particular, was used as economic extraction.
And the criminal justice system is also a form of extracting money from certain communities, whether it's in fines or even the prison industrial complex.
So people, many of the reforms -- people have argued, have lead to pumping more money into the system.
Whether it's accountability training, tracking but instead of the money going out to the community, I was looking at a graph, and over time, the money for the police department and the criminal justice system has actually increased with all of the reforms. So what people are saying, and I wanna quote from what Angela Davis has said, and it's on one of my slides, but I'll just read it. She said that she was asked this recently, "The problem is that reforms have often rendered the institution itself more permanent and ultimately, more repressive, more racist. For those of us who have been engaging with this question for a long time, we have come to the conclusion that the system itself needs to be abolished. We call ourselves, instead, reformists or abolitionists.
So Angela and others are not arguing for doing away with policing, but the idea, as Donna said, is being, what does the community-- what can enable the community?
And the conversation here is a lot with economic distribu- economic achievement, and the texture of the conversation is being animated by increasing resistance to doing this, and increasingly seeing the Black Lives Matter movement, and again, I'll show some of the slides, as the enemy.
And it's becoming very polarized.
So as an anthropologist, I think now is the moment for us to look ethnographically at our particular sites and areas and see how does the current form of policing reproduce and sustain certain sets of geographic inequalities?
How does the policing as it's deployed now, unevenly police in certain areas, or when certain bodies move through certain areas?
So in the St. Louis region, Black bodies are constantly having to go through "white or affluent" communities and when their bodies travel through that way, they're increasingly policed, fined, sent into the work house, things like that.
So I'll stop there.
But I think for us, as anthropologists, it's about how do we understand how policing has been used in our local areas to, to reinforce, to reproduce certain hierarchy, certain inequalities and how can we better imagine a system that will improve the lives or allow people in disenfranchised communities to live the sort of life they're interested in living. And it's about refunding into economic opportunities.
Mental health is what I hear more than social services.
I think the mental health industry, people say that it's the biggest, the biggest [indiscernible] for mental health is now the prison system.
So it's about schools, it's about jobs, it's about taking away the incentives to fine people or to traffic people.
We have certain municipalities in St. Louis where petty fines for jaywalking, which is what Michael Brown was pulled over for in 2019. It's called manner of walking.
He was pulled over for a manner of walking, and those sorts of policing of blackness, those petty warrants, was a big part of local municipalities economic base.
So how can we change that system when the policing system is wrapped up with economic incentives? And I'll stop there.
>> DR. PEREZ: Yeah, absolutely.
But can I ask just one question before we move onto something else to both of you, and Dr. Auston, and that is, when we -- and Dr. Bornstein and Dr. Ture, please feel free to jump in on this too.
But when we think about moving the funding over, for instance, into social work or into mental health or into any of these other things, I think we're also assuming that those systems are already set up to be progressive and to actually respond to community needs, and I don't find that to be true.
And so, for instance, at our university, one of the things our faculty senate did was pass a mandate that all criminal justice majors now need to take these courses on racism in policing, but I wonder too if there isn't -- should we not also be talking about those support systems and how to make sure those support systems are getting a kind of education that is reflective of particular communities' needs?
Everything, you know, most education is [indescernible], right? This is how we do it; here's your manual; go to this chapter.
This is how you, this is how you would knock on a door and let a parent know that you may, you know, "I'm CPS, and I need to come in and take your child."
But being able to make that culturally-appropriate, based on a community, based on a community's needs, based on a particular group's needs. Do you imagine that this, too, needs to be addressed and addressed right now?
>> DR. PARIKH: Oh, definitely.
>> DR. AUSTON: Yeah.
>> DR. PARIKH: Definitely. No, that's an excellent point.
And those would not, those would, those simultaneously -- right?
So this is large, I mean this, what we're talking about is a larger, is a larger, a longer term project.
But -- especially schools.
Schools are notorious for also replicating racialized and gendered stereotypes and hierarchies in the larger, in larger society. So I think you're absolutely right. We don't need to look at these other institutions as being removed from the racist and anti-blackness structure that surrounds them.
So it's a complete, yes, it's looking at all of them.
>> DR. AUSTON: Yeah, and I mean, I would just, I would agree with that.
And that was part of what I was talking about when I was alluding to, you know, the ways that one, these institutions are all linked and that would also, in fact, include the universities that are doing the educating.
Because, you know, within, you know, I mean, if people are plugged into Twitter and have paying attention the past few weeks, there was a really interesting hashtag conversation, #BlackInTheIvory, that really talked about the ways that racism both, you know, on an interpersonal and structural level, operates on, you know, in universities and so, the universities that are educating social workers, police officers who are, in fact, you know, you know, using, you know, accessing Higher Education.
Some of them are; some are not.
Mental health professionals.
All of these people are being educated in systems that are not necessarily doing the most effective job at you know, getting -- at working these issues into the curriculum and education and their, you know, like, certification priorities.
But, it's also, too, I think that's a part of changing the mindset from part of what's at stake, part of what's happening here is that this idea that Black people need to be policed is pervasive.
It's not just something that the police believe. But it is something that a lot of us, we pick this up from, you know, we pick this up everywhere.
We pick this up in the schools that we go to.
I can tell you, like, as a young Black girl, you know, who went to school, you know, my elementary school was predominantly Black, and one of the first things I learned was that, you know, my language was lazy, deficient, you know, you're speaking like, you know, speaking of African-American vernacular English, the very ways that we talk, as young children were already being policed.
Already being disciplined as incorrect and problematic and derelict.
And all this, you know, all of these negative connotations.
So this starts very early and it's everywhere, and so we really have to begin to think about -- and this is part of what I understand, one of the projects of abolition to be.
And it's not just about changing structures outwardly, but actually, thinking about how to change the way we think about you know, the way we are oriented towards recognizing these problems and solving them, right?
Because, again, if, if you are educated into, you know, a mindset that, that understands Black people as needing correction, you're going to get this in all of the, you know, you're going to get this wherever.
You're going to get it in a police department.
You're going to get it in the mental health facilities; you're going to get this in the schools. You're going to get like, you know, so it's just going to reverberate out.
So what we really have to do is think about how do we begin to change, how do we begin to initiate a paradigm shift in the way we actually understand relationality between various communities.
>> DR. PARIKH: Yeah.
>> DR. PEREZ: Right.
>> DR. PARIKH: If I can just briefly add, the difference between the police and some of these other institutions, whether it's social services or mental health, is the power that our country has given the police since the beginning of time.
As slave patrols, in the Emancipation, in the local militia.
They have been given a lot more authority and power to wield violence.
So if a teacher hits a student, there's a good chance that teacher is going to be called to the carpet.
If a police does, the police -- there are ways a police can justify it.
There are built-in mechanisms to say they were resisting arrest, I was afraid for my life -- even if a teacher is afraid for the life, it would be a harder thing.
So police have been empowered and militarized with a lot of equipment.
So that's why, to me, the focus is on the police.
It is such a brutal way of policing, of, it's a such a brutal manifestation of the way the system thinks about blackness.
>> DR. PEREZ: Absolutely.
>> DR. PARIKH: The idea of being able to empower even the local militias.
So the Central Park bird, you know, the Cooper -- Amy Cooper.
>> DR. AUSTON: Amy Cooper.
>> DR. PEREZ: Yeah.
>> DR. PARIKH: Or the Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman.
So the way that they also -- I think we talked about before, sort of deputized people to also, the population can police Black bodies.
And since the Black body is already seen in the public, as we see on police union websites, they are seen, they are positioned as the oppositional character to the police.
And the police are trying to justify why they're protecting -- it's to protect society, particularly from Black men.
Black women's bodies are, of course, accessible for all sorts of other types of violations.
But it is this very stark image.
So it's built into it.
But I would like to say that -- that's why, yes, the other systems need to also be reformed but, there's -- the police are such a dangerous part of Black lives in America.
>> DR. PEREZ: Yes, you know, that's -- in may ways, Dr. Bornstein, in your work, you note that data collection and how data is used to be, and how data is used actually needs to be an area of scrutiny because these data influence the career trajectories of police officers.
Police officers need these kind of datasets in order for their, in order for them to advance.
And on top of that, Dr. Ture, you've actually written about toxic masculinity and the reverance for violent action that manifests in what you call blue fragility.
The two are so linked and are integral to addressing the actual structure of policing, which is what Dr. Auston and Dr. Parikh are basically pointing at, that it's so pervasive. 
I wondering if you could talk about these two areas of your research.
>> DR. TURE: Dr. Bornstein.
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: Ok. So, thank you very much.
So, Avi Bornstein speaking. I'm a 51-year-old white guy, bald white guy, sitting in my New York apartment in a blue-collared shirt next to a window.
And yeah, I guess, I think that I want to add a -- a sort of an additional angle to this also.
We've been talking about mindsets and of white supremacy in different institutions.
And -- and, absolutely, questions about, you know, cultural biases that are shared through symbolic means and education, individual biases, whether they're explicit, ideological, or implicit bias, all of this is an important part of the kinds of oppression that we're talking about here.
But there's a -- It's even more insidious and more powerful than that in a way.
And that leads us to the question you're asking me about data and about the way management happens, right?
The way people's careers in management happens, because, a certain level -- it goes beyond any kind of mindset, right? 
That you can have officers, white, black, Hispanic, whatever -- pardon me, Latinx -- that have, might wear a Marcus Garvy pendant on their shirt, but they're still subject to the same kind of management system in an organization that counts certain kinds of things, you know, as countable, right?
So, certainly, in New York City, stop and frisk became very famous in many departments.
It was just collars, arrests, or summonses, you know, both for their, their, the generating money as we've spoken about in terms of for the city but also in terms of the career of the individual officer who gets a point for writing a summons, or gets a point for writing, you know, a collar, or ten points -- I mean, I'm making, it's not really points, but you know, gets this kind of credit and that becomes part of their personal evaluation.
Now when you put that kind of numeric system, right?
And the kinds of data that come into the system that have to do with, let's say, crime reports, right?
And you have an already segregated geography because of institutions like red lining, right, and the banking systems behind that, that have created, right?
Black ghettos in every city of America, in the mid-20th century through design -- through the FHA -- when you create that system and then you have differential crime reports as this numeric mechanism in order to drive the call for more summonses and more arrests, you can talk about that and you can organize that without ever talking about race.
You can never mention questions about, about blackness, whiteness or any of that.
All you need to say is hey, this neighborhood, this pre-existing neighborhood that we didn't create, we cops or whatever -- we're here, we're just dealing with higher crime rates.
And they don't even need to be here in New York.
We had horrible crime rates back in the 80s.
Now, I mean, you know, it's a whole different city, but nonetheless, we have differentially higher crime rates.
That becomes, you have to get those numbers down and an individual cop has to get those numbers up.
And that's institutional racism.
That's where policy-driven, whether it mentions racism or not, is driving the system, and individuals who might not even like it -- who might be willing to take a knee at a demonstration, right?
Are ideologically diverse group, right? Ethnically and ideologically diverse, that they are going along with it because this is the system.
And of course, we, in education, you know, our own standardized testing, has a certain element of that as well, and certainly we mentioned educational funding before.
And educational funding is probably, we could debate which is the worst, policing, whatever. I would say that educational funding and institutionalized racism that creates the loop that creates property values that were the FHA red lining I was talking about, right?
The undermining of black communities in that way, that reproduce that through funding education through property taxes, right?
There's no reason that has to be the case, right?
>> DR. PEREZ: Right.
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: We don't have to fund education that way, but we do, and it institutionalizes racism withou ever talking about race, just as property taxes. 
>> DR. PEREZ: Absolutely. Yeah.
>> DR. PARIKH: Yeah, and that's exactly the system I was referring to.
And we've normalized it, that the school funding is tied to the property rates.
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: Right. And we've normalized the idea that slightly higher crime rates, right, of your seven index crimes, are going to call for some kind of action to bring that down.
And if I can just make that, close the loop a little bit more to talk about socioeconomic systems in that.
Getting the numbers down, even if the community isn't, you know, let's say, here in New York, in East New York and parts of Brooklyn, that are distant from Manhattan's glamorous central, not during COVID, but geting numbers down there, even property crime numbers down there, helps, you know, New York City sell its entertainment industry and helps New York, you know, rent the convention centers and bring people here to Broadway and all that stuff.
>> DR. PEREZ: Yeah.
And there's -- in addition to gentrification and the property real estate markets that are driven by that. So all of this is definitely this web of institutions, and so, we have to -- I'm a little bit sensitive, working, you know, it's a white supremacist system all the way, but I'm a little bit sensitive about scapegoating police officers, in a way, if I can push back a little bit and say the bankers have really done the biggest job to these communities and cops are left, you know, as the violent arm of society, trying to deal with that kind of inequality, right?
And that kind of horrible thing with all the other parallel institutions.
>> DR. PARIKH: No, and I think we would agree.
That it's the police who've been almost, the system has been used so that they're the ones who maintain something.
And they maintain it, yeah.
>> DR. TURE: And not to be redundant here, but I actually, yeah, I think blue fragility is important to be understood, but before I talk about blue fragility, I think it's important to sort of -- and it's necessary to be redundant about laying out the context of how blue fragility within law enforcement culture works.
I do want to just sort of double back and say in response to Dr. Bornstein, yeah, data is important, in the Justice Act and the Justice and Policing Act.
The proposition is -- part of the reform is to collect data.
And they both also call for studies of police and racialized violence.
The question is who is privileged in the data collection, and what types of histomologies are advanced in the data collection? 
And I would argue, and maybe we could discuss this a little bit later that tnthropologists have to make a case for why our qualitative paradigms, or mixed method approaches, or particularly ethnographic approaches, are important for the types of data that will be collected and the types of sound conclusions or understandings that we can arrive at by this rich data.
I would, and it's no slight against those of my colleagues that are quantoids, but to say that you can manipulate statistical data, just as much as the argument is that ethnographic data is not objective enough.
But in terms of the context, let's be clear that primary organizing principle of the socialization process in the U.S., or in United States of America, is race.
And race is, is important and understand what this means.
It means that if you are white in a society, that you are assigned a high degree of morality.
You're considered scrupulous.
Therefore, you are attributed a high degree of credibility.
And you are considered, whether there is evidence to belie the fact, you are considered a productive citizen.
That is sort of the framework, that ready-made framework, which shapes our perceptive schema, right?
Which is part of the American socialization.
On the con -- conversely, if in fact you are Black, you are considered unscrupulous, you have a deficit of credibility, and you are extended provisional citizenship.
Elijah Anderson, the ethnographer on the spatiality of race, talks about provisionality, and he says to be a provisional citizen, you always have something to prove, you have to prove your right to belong and your right to access to whatever the goods are.
Now police are slightly different.
Police are bestowed the greatest amount of moral authority, legitimacy and the license, as Shanti Parikh stated, and Donna also stated, the license to use coercive means to achieve a social order that both maintains and reproduces the benefits that they received, but also the benefits of the larger society.
So I don't get into the debate anymore about bad apples making the barrel spoil.
I think this is a discussion about the actual orchard.
That we need to look at, we need to look at the way in which law enforcement functions as a structurally-racist institution to maintain both social inequality and white supremacy which presupposes that there's also gender inequality and these other sort of hierarchies within social divisions.
Now, in terms of blue fragility, I just want to note here that we've been thinking about reform and we've been engaged in all types of reform, you know, for a long time.
I mean, we talk about studies of this issue, Otto Kerner in the Kerner Commission in 1968, and out of that commission was more money for police officers.
Out of Bill Clinton's study with the crime bill was to hire 100,000 more police officers.
So there is a problem with reform that often leads to the increase or sort of, the increasing of the coercive state apparatus of policing.
But blue fragility -- I sort of define as sort of this strategic deploying of defensive and protective strategies that both shield law enforcement agencies from legitimate criticism -- it shuts down, sort of -- civil discourse around issues of use of force, and it just totally stops or halts, you know, the types of reforms that we're going, you know, asking for.
And it's done to maintain the legitimacy of police officers and their authority. It's done to sort of maintain this fictional idea that law enforcement are exclusively fit to bring about public safety.
And it's done in a way that limits our critique of their use of force.
Now, we've witnessed a lot of blue fragility, in fact, over the last few days, or few weeks, if you will, 57 police officers in Buffalo who decided to resign when two of their emergency response team members pushed a 75-year-old gentleman, causing him to suffer, hit his head and suffer brain injuries, instead of questioning whether or not activation of this militarized unit was fit and suitable for a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest.
That, you know, that question or that consideration wasn't even sort of dealt with adequately because these officers are deploying this fragility, this sort of blue fragility, to stop that discussion.
And there's multiple other examples, perhaps in this conversation that I can tell you, but there's one thing I want to say about blue fragility.
It is not weakness. It is not weakness.
In fact, it is a maneuver of strength. It is a strategic and strengthful maneuver to parry critics and to shield our understanding of the way in which police operate, historically and contemporarily, around structures of racism and inequality. So we don't even look at police, policing, and race, so that becomes a problem.
And so thinking about all of this, in closing, at least for this part of the conversation, you know, as a Black man, I want to be personal about this, because I am a Black male, and the goodies are in white space.
The goodies are predominantly white institutions, whether it be Higher Ed or just in white space.
And so part of my strategy of survival is to access those goodies.
And when I attempt to access those goodies, I am crossing into white space where I am perceived as an immediate and urgent threat.
So now I have to unnecessarily think about how do I sort of navigate law enforcement, even as a former police officer.
How do I navigate that?
And police officers are almost always activated to protect that white space and to push me back into my social status.
>> DR. PEREZ: That's a -- there are so many things you threw in on this that my mind is still unpacking a lot of it.
But I know one of the things folks have really asked about is how these police unions have participated in protecting police and reinforcing, in the case that you talked about, Dr. Bornstein, the data.
You know, creating ways that they can, they can prevent police from being held accountable for certain kinds of things.
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: Let me address that, but let me back up a little bit and address Kalfani's last point there.
This is Avi speaking.
That, about space.
And I think that the question's about geography here and are we thinking about the -- our geography is I think, probably, one of the biggest organizing issues that we have here.
That it is exactly that creation of a white space or the segregated space that has allowed all kinds of institutions to, to be so discriminatory and oppressive, right?
So the two that we've been hitting on so far here, you know, about schools and about, about policing, clearly -- I mean... you -- it -- we know about this difference in funding of schools, but just the way they operate and everything.
And the mentality of police officers in one precinct or another, certainly in one community or another, an all-white community -- you know, the kind of way you agree -- the way you're given advice to put -- I mean -- it's kind of -- it's kind of night and day, right? 
In terms of the way geography allows for these things to happen, but of course, we know in terms of healthcare, and the food deserts issues, there are all of these things that, hitting geography, and questions about how housing is, you know -- where we live, right?
That that is kind of a linchpin in some ways of the effect of kinds of oppression and segregation that exist in other institutions, right? Not completely, not everything is like that, but certainly --
>> DR. PEREZ: Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And Dr. Parikh actually talked about that a little bit in our first webinar -- the whole notion of geography. 
And I know here in California, there was a point where we tried to move funding from taxation out so that it didn't just sit in these white suburban communities, that those -- that funding would be dispersed equitably across the state.
And it failed.
But this is one of the conversations that is definitely situated within privilege, white privilege and within race.
And we need to have conversations directed at things like that.
Just like we do about social work and housing and, you know, all these other things.
It is so pervasive.
Racism is so pervasive, what that, that we really have to pick apart the various institutions that it's impacting.
>> DR. TURE: So if I could just add.
Because I do want to get to your question about police unions.
I think in a society where -- there's a sort of inter-linking of all institutions, and white supremacy, in some ways, has this sort of [indiscernible] seal over our sort of social existence. And so all institutions are implicated, whether it be education, economics, entertainment, law, labor, politics, war, religion, nutrition, etc. All of these important areas about sort of human dimension is sort of implicated with white supremacy, and so another way to think about it is what dominant society considers a benign institution, we readily realize it to be a coercive institution.
And so it's not just sort of the police and someone said earlier, we have to be careful about looking at corresponders, social workers, or you know, other types of corresponders.
There's a history in social work.
Where they have been just as coercive and their practices have led to the sustaining of unequal societies.
But in terms of police unions, in thinking about how they allow police officers to corrupt data or deny access to good data.
You know, unions get their start by the second decade of the 20th century in Boston, by 1968.
They have their major victory in New York City, and they're sort of full blown.
We have been, by and large antiunion, but we're never antipolice union.
But one of the -- police unions engage in multiple practices. So when I was in law enforcement, we learned the sort of three-prong approach.
When a police officer was involved in a critical incident, 1) you have to paint the victim, or the suspect, you have to paint the victim as a suspect.
Unarmed or not, there has to be something about their character that necessitated violence or use of deadly force.
Second thing is if that doesn't work, you have to, in fact, talk about how tough it is, just sort of the precarity of being a police officer, right? 
You have to impress upon the citizenry that this is a tough job.
And if that doesn't work as this sort of mitigating strategy, then you just sort of wait it out.
Because the argument in police culture, and as part of blue fragility, is that we have short attention spans.
And so we'll just let it go by.
Now, there's other more sort of concrete and direct examples.
Police unions advocate for the expungement of both claims of abusive practices, as well as substantiated practices that police misconduct to sort of fall off a police record.
You are more-likely to get an expungement for engaging in police misconduct than you are if you were wrongfully convicted. I mean let that sink in for a minute.
You can get an expungement quicker for doing bad things as a law enforcement officer than you can if you were wrongfully convicted. And there are multiple other things that police unions do, but one of the things that I would say is that police unions have been a major hindrance to even getting rid of qualified immunity.
Which shields officers from civil liability when the criminal sort of remedies fail to work in the interest of people who are adversely impacted by the type of policing we've seen.
So those are a few examples.
>> DR. AUSTON: And I would just put on top of that, in addition to things like qualified immunity, and I -- it really pains me to do this because I'm very much a union person, I believe in unions, really.
But, yeah. Police unions, I think, are a different sort of animal, and you know, appeals process, when a police officer is actually fired, that, you know, unions are able, in many cases, to get officers reinstated.
And I would also say too, if they're not reinstated with their original department, where the violations took place, a lot of times, what ends up happening is that police are -- they're just picked up by other departments.
And so they're, so even if that functions, where the union is not directly involved in that process, and many times they are assisting an officer to be placed somewhere else, you know, police departments and law enforcement agencies, as a whole, function, you know, to sort of keep these officers working.
Even when they are known to have extremely problematic records.
So I don't know, it's like, you know, you know there's an abusive employee in another field and we just -- and it happens in other fields as well.
Including Higher Education, a lot of people who have -- anyway, that's a separate discussion.
But it is sort of, you know, there are ways the institution protects its employees from the consequences and this, again, this extends into the courts.
Because then, we talked I think, last time, I think it was Shanti who was mentioning the ways that, you know, police departments and prosecutors offices have, I mean, they have this relationship.
I mean, the prosecutors rely on the police to do the investigating, and so there's this really -- I can't, if it was someone else, I'm sorry, I can't remember -- but we did, I remember it coming up.
Where, you know, it's very difficult because of the incestuous nature of the relationship between police departments and prosecutors offices, often for, for them to do their job -- for the prosecutors to step in and do their job when a clear crime has been committed, when someone has been murdered, when -- et cetera, et cetera.
There are so many ways that police unions and of course, the other ancillary institutions function to really make it so that there is close to zero accountability for police officers who commit the most-egregious acts of violence and abuse against the public.
>> DR. PARIKH: Can I add too -- Avi, did you have something on unions? I have two case studies, and I'll make them really quick. People can Google them. 
I know we're running out of time.
But in terms of the union, so after the Mike Brown thing, which was a pivotal moment for the St. Louis region.
After that, we're divided into the city and this thing called the county.
So St. Louis region is huge.
It's 100 municipalities.
The Wesley Bell in 2018, won the election of the county -- St. Louis county prosecutor.
Bob McCullough is the one who decided not to, you know, press charges against Daron Wilson who murdered Mike Brown, so he won. McCullough had been in there 27 years.
Wesley Brown is an attorney, had a history of, you know, he certainly knows the prosecutorial world, so that wasn't an issue.
Before he even took office, the police union and the prosecutors met secretly, even before he took office and decided to join a union with the police officers.
That's how threatening the mention of internal accountability and reform were.
This wasn't even a discussion about defund, unfund, redistribute -- this was all about the police and the prosecutors have a bad reputation -- we know we're good people, we're going to clean it up.
It was so threatening that they -- this is the first time in history -- here, at least, maybe it's done other places, that the prosecutors joined in the police union.
Second case, city of St. Louis, again, two different places.
City of St. Louis, 2017, Kim Gardner was elected as the top prosecutor of our city.
She ran on a platform, and she said we're going to hold, to Donna's point and to Kalfani's point, we're going to hold police accountable.
If you as a police officer have, in the past, lied, misrepresented, easy things, corrupt, abused, if you had bad misconduct, when it comes to dealing with a citizen arrest, we're not going to, until we do an investigation -- take any cases from you, or recognizing a warrant -- a "do not call" list, what is it, you know there are a bunch of other names for it.
So now she is the number one target on the police union web- on their Facebook page.
So the pinned post -- and I was actually going to show this -- um, the pinned post, I'll just read it.
The police officer union and again, there not, that's not the employment thing -- that's a union.
It says "Will you or your loved one be the next victim of Kim Gardner's George Soros's backed criminal empowerment agenda?" So probably about every month, every other month, the police union is targeting her.
So much that, other African-Amer-, other Black prosecutors from around the country had to come and defend her.
She had to file something about racism against them. So any time reform is done from within, the police union harrasses the person. 
They also harrassed the Black police officers who were in solidarity during the mourning of Mike Brown. There were police officers that went out to sort of show solidarity with the community saying "We feel your pain." The more -- sometimes protests are about pain.
They were blackballed on the police union page, saying, "Would you", you know, as a police officer, "Would you want to work under this person?" And so you know, in terms of that -- and then the incentives.
I'll just stop there -- I think lots of [indiscernible] yeah.
>> DR. TURE: So I have, in fact, I always found -- thinking about this idea of provisionality and thinking about how my own experience, as I've said, I've been through three agencies, went to the police academy three times. And coming in law enforcement as already a provisionary citizen, I'm very sensitive to that which increases my provisionality. And entering in law enforcement, I immediately became -- suspiciously was accused of being too black for the blue uniform. 
In other words, that I was an affirmative action hire, or I just, you know, just maybe wasn't fit for law enforcement, because of the lack of morality, lack of ethics, all this stuff. I mean, these were the assumptions that were made about me, and I suppose they're made about a lot of Black and Latinx people in law enforcement.
The other part of it was that I became too blue for the Black community.
So I sat in this right, interstitial space with the ability to sort of keenly analyze what was happening between the two -- between my community and law enforcement.
What I would say about police unions and just about the culture in general, as a Black officer, you have to give the appropriate nods or at least the overtures to the dominant force -- which is by and large, white.
Officers make -- we are one in four of, African-American officers are one in four -- or people of color as police officers are one in four in the country in law enforcement.
And it differs, depending on where you are geographically.
Some police departments are 70- 80% white.
You have to give overtures to say that you are part of the blue team.
Again, you're still provisional, so you've got to prove it, over and over again, you're always being tested.
But at the point at which you disagree in a very sort of explicit and public way, then you are facing all kinds of hazing. You are ostracized. You are -- disincentives come into play, where you are assigned the worst shifts, the worst locations to patrol. I mean all kinds of things happen to you once you push back.
So I think, as anthropology as a discipline, think about how we might intervene. I think it's really interesting to look at how police unions and police culture discipline Black and Latinx officers, or women, or queer officers, or Indigenous officers, to tote the party line and stick to the cultural scheme.
>> DR. PARIKH: Yeah, yeah. I think what's interesting -- this is Shanti. Kalfani, I think what's interesting is -- I'd be -- I haven't -- the, so there's Black police unions.
The Ethical Society of Police is what it's called here, and then there's the National Black Police Union.
Of course, this is just looking at three or four case studies, but a lot of times they're led by Black female police officers.
And this is why I like your idea of the fragile, you know, the blue fragility. There's something about masculinity in the police thing. 
So the Black female police officers were already getting targeted and they were -- it was sort of already a done deal that they were going to be targeted as Black women.
But, so just a gender note that there's something -- there's a very different relationship, depending on gender as well.
And you're absolutely right, in terms of the hazing that sort of goes on, and the discipline, and the public shaming that goes on, on some of the media sites.
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: I would just add that, even some of the organizations you're referring to, like NOBLEE, National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, and in New York City, in fact, like the Guardians, which is the local Black organizations, Black police officers. Although, there are many, actually, different kinds of fraternal organizations.
Those -- They came in to being, really, because of exactly the problem that Kalfani was just talking about.
That -- and the pushback, and that the union had been captured, right? And obviously, I too, I spent a decade as the grievance officer for our union, our faculty union.
But sometimes unions get captured by other kinds of forces, right? Certainly in the McCarthy era, they were, and they were completely corrupt.
And here, they have often been captured and organizations like the Guardians had to organize because there was no other voice to protect them, right, from the dominant -- the kind of disciplining that you guys are referencing.
>> DR. AUSTON: Yeah, I mean, yeah, one of my beloved uncles who passed away a couple years ago actually was one of the founders of The Guardians in the city where I grew up, and you know, we've talked a lot about, you know, sort of his experience.
I mean he was hired as a police officer in the late 50s and, you know, was a part of a group of officers, both in Pittsburgh and other parts of the country.
They sued the Pittsburgh police department. They sued other departments across the country.
Interestingly, he was also part of a group of folks who sued one of the local schools of social work, to sort of tie it back to the question that we opened with and the ways of these institutions often work together in similar ways to discipline and police Black people to the detriment of folks in those communities.
And yeah, and I, just to pick up, also, I think it's important to, to highlight and to amplify a little bit Shanti's introduction of the question of gender here.
Because, I mean, imagine that female police officers, or female-presenting police officers are experiencing these types of -- this type of harassment or, you know, like, discomfort within -- within the context of the -- the social context with their coworkers, right?
This is also definitely playing out on the street.
Women are, excuse me, women are subject to particular types of police abuse.
And I think that's a really important element to bring into this conversation.
You know, a lot of times the, the common narrative or the mainstream narrative about racialized police violence is that it's a problem that afflicts Black males, right?
We often don't think about or talk about or examine the ways that Black women experience the shootings, the beatings, the same things that Black men typically experience in terms of their interactions with the police, but also, specific types of police abuse, including sexual abuse and rape that happened very frequently. The high rates of domestic violence and intimate partner violence among police personnel within their families.
I mean there's all sorts of really interesting and disturbing -- interesting in a disturbing sort of way, gender dynamics that need to be examined in this question.
And so the consideration of toxic masculinity that we, that was mentioned earlier in the conversation and how that shapes police culture, I think really thinking about that helps us not just to get at sort of understanding police reaction, but actually understanding the specific ways that police violence as a spectrum happens in different contexts and different settings and to different sets of people.
Or sub-sets of people, right?
Because of course, the, the question of, you know, racialized police violence or that notion as a concept, actually is -- needs to be broken down further, right?
Because Black women, Black trans people, experience really high rates of state violence.
And often very absent from the conversation.
They're not even -- we're not even on the screen.
And for, for more than -- I mean, if people want to follow this question up -- Kimberlé Crenshaw, who of course is the scholar who is, most known, most especially known for the appointing of the term intersectionality as a way of getting at the simultaneous experience of oppression -- for example, race and gender -- her African American Policy Forum, a think tank research institute that is based in New York City, back in 2015 introduced the Say Your Name hashtag and campaign, specifically like, at the height of the last flare ups around police violence around 5 years ago.
To really introduce and to bring the question of gendered violence, gendered police abuse into the national conversation.
So I just wanted to highlight that here as we're talking about how this plays out, gender is really an important -- an important analytic for us to consider.
>> DR. BORNSTEIN:  I'd like to jump on that and push it a little further, also in thinking about police, police behavior and notions of -- and intersectionality, not just around race, but around class and ideas about manhood.
Because there's been some interesting work by people -- studying community policing, really.
And seeing how there is certain rejection of community policing by police officers was motivated, theorized in a sense -- was motivated as being -- because it's too feminine. That, that notions of masculinity that were -- that sort of depend on violence, right?
And physical prowess, right?
As being sort of the dominant, a dominant motif in policing because, because of where it sort of sits in the American class, cultural milieu, right?
That a different -- that a professional, you know manhood, let's say, is, is less tied to physical prowess, more tied to say, financial prowess, perhaps and, and so that, this, this understanding of manhood as being, and gender, as being one of the things that has actually undermined all kinds of efforts in policing to move it away from this militarized kind of functioning that we've had, and that, that, you know, this is, this is this complex -- way beyond the institution, but related to all class and perceptions of manhood that needs to be addressed before we can actually have any kind of demilitarizing of the process in a policy or procedural way.
>> DR. PARIKH: Yeah. Right. One thing I'd like to add about the gender piece is the figure of the white woman in the ability to justify what exactly the police are protecting, and the image --
Of course, the Emmett Till historical case is the one that best animates all of this, but it is about protecting white man's property.
And historically, that was not only his plantation, but his woman.
And again, on my slides, that I don't, that we don't have time for me to show them, but that was one of the key images on the police website.
It was a picture of a police officer who had these wings, and a little white girl with a teddy bear, and the caption read "The difference between us and them." And it was very much trafficking in race, gender, innocence, and then next to it was an image of Alton Sterling, and he's holding guns and he has his kids. So it was this -- and it says us and them. And it was about protecting, you know, a particular type of whiteness.
The second thing I want to go back to is something Avi said awhile ago about police becoming the scapegoat for a lot of the critiques, and I agree. 
In some ways I want to flip it and say they've been the scapegoat of the state.
The state has been very instrumental in deploying, I bet -- I'm sure the average income of a police officer, on the streets is probably not that high.
I would imagine -- but they are there too -- in some ways, they're also a scapegoat for the state to act as a buffer between the elite -- whether it's bankers who are shaping geographic spaces a certain way or schools or protecting businesses. They are also used as a way to protect the elite.
So not only is it becoming a scapegoat within the discussion but they are -- they have been used as -- by the state to serve in this function.
>> DR. TURE: Absolutely.
>> DR. PEREZ: And we've seen that --
[talking simultaneously]
>> DR. AUSTON: I would agree with that --
>> DR. PARIKH: And of course they take it further than that.
I mean I'm not, that's not to excuse people who have been trafficking it and you know.
>> DR. AUSTON: I would agree with that analysis.
I think police are definitely a mechanism of protection of state -- protection of the state, itself right?
They are the means by which a lot of these boundaries are enforced.
I would -- I do, though, bristle at the term scapegoat.
Because I don't know -- in my mind -- this is maybe just me -- and I do, but I think that language is important because you know scapegoating, in my mind, is -- you know, has connotations --
>> DR. PARIKH: They're not innocent --
>> DR. AUSTON: They're not innocent at all.
They're willing participants, you know. They execute this function willingly and defend, violently, their right to do so, which means that yes, there, is a class element.
Yes, there is sort of a -- you know, there is -- and I think that's an important distinction to highlight in the ways that there is -- there are degrees of -- like the state is not, again, it's not an undifferentiated mass.
There are degrees and levels of who is, you know, like -- levels of power, that sort of thing.
Elite versus sort of mid-level.
All of that is important to tease out.
But the police are not innocent.
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: Yeah.
>> DR. AUSTON: You know, and I don't think people are arguing that, per se, but I think the language -- the chosen language, here, I think, you know, it makes me bristle an a little bit.
Because we need to sort of identify that, you know, there's some problems here, and people are willingly engaging in this sort of violent enforcement.
>> DR. PARIKH: Yeah, and I would -- ironically, more like, you're also an agent of --
>> DR. AUSTON: Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to clarify.
>> DR. PARIKH: Avi, go. 
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: Well no, I think you're absolutely right, that that is a difference between the innocent scapegoat and the scapegoat who is a participant for their own career goals.
But the part that I would want to maintain, I guess, of that word, is the fact that, you know,  in a classic Biblical scapegoat story, right?
It's about putting the sins of the community on this goat and then, you know, killing the goat.
So it, that doesn't speak to the innocence or guilt of the goat, but it's the fact that the sins of this problem are widespread, right?
>> DR. AUSTON: Yeah. I agree.
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: And that all of these like, really righteous corporations right now, are you know pointing their fingers at police officers, you know, and that's the part of it that seems like, oh, you know, "We look -- we're all -- it's their fault that we have all these problems, and it's not the fault of the rest -- of the society."
>> DR. TURE: I would just clarify that, first of all, police officers are recruited from an inherently unequal society, and many cases, their social status benefits from the way in which that society is structured.
So they come into the profession with the placid understanding of what they are tasked to do and what their functional role is in terms of the larger society.
But you know, one of the things we talk about in the professionalization.
We say that violence is inevitable, right?
Like, because if you can appreciate the fact that you are in a sort of racially unequal society and perhaps -- and by the way, this, this, this difference between white society and Black society is not just like a sort of natural in -- like a food desert -- it just doesn't grow out of that thing, but is intentionally designed.
In other words, that advantage or white privilege happens through accumulation of disadvantage of Black folk -- of people at the bottom of society.
So police, understand, fundamentally, that, you know, that people are going to push back at those -- they're going to push back at this inequity.
They're going to go for the goodies on the other side of the track.
And so I think law enforcement, we know and expect, and we tolerate violence against LGBTQI and A.
We tolerate violence against women. We tolerate violence against Indigenous people. We tolerate violence against Black and Latinx people, because that is understood as fundamentally part of what happens, right?
So whether it is sort of the sins being sort of -- voice of the pawn, police, I'm not sure I would buy that any more than I would buy sort of this idea that they're being scapegoat.
I'm not sure about that.
>> DR. PARIKH: But -- this is Shanti. One thing. I think the reason police are important is because, revolutions happen on the street.
And if you look at, again, I'm going to Ferguson, to that period, but even now... if one is going to have a change in the system, whether, to protest -- to demonstrate -- whether it's protesting in the administrative hall of a university or whether it's protesting at the counter, during the Civil Rights Movement, our ability to protest and say descent is a big part of the history of the world and police are called upon to stop descension.
And if you look at the Ferguson thing, even going on now, the kettling, the tear gassing, the very visual, "We are here to protect the--" -- and I agree with you, Donna, the state is not this one thing -- but let's deploy it now, I'm using it now as a social order.
So in some ways, the police become important because they become the local military in those instances and they become the way to squelch descension.
>> DR. PEREZ: Yes.
>> DR. PARIKH: And historically, that's what we've seen.
So leave alone the daily policing and the fines, and in some places, in St. Louis, it's up to 25% of the municipal -- 20% of the municipality revenue is off taxing Black people for petty cr-, you know, for jaywalking and things like that.
Leave that alone. They also can prevent certain sorts of descension.
And again, we have visual reminders of Trump trying to bring in the military and then finally people were like, "Ok, the military is supposed to be used somewhere else, not on our people. But police are ok." So I think that's another reason that there's something very symbolic about their, the power that they're bestowed upon to maintain the peace.
That's the peace that we're trying, that I think people who are for the abolition movement are trying to say, "We want a different type of peace."  We want a piece of this peace.
>> DR. PEREZ: Yes. Absolutely.
I am going to ask if there's any final comments on this.
And then, we've got some amazing questions from the audience.
>> DR. PARIKH: I think Avi has one.
>> DR. PEREZ: We want to open up and have you guys begin to -- have you all begin to engage with them.
So is there any final --
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: I'll make it quick. I'll make it quick.
We've been sort of like uncomfortable with the way we've been talking about state, and I think you're right: that we should be a little bit uncomfortable with that because the state -- because there's -- my feeling is that really what we need to be doing is seizing the state a little bit more and instead of relinquishing it to sort of the dominant white supremacist, capitalist, misogynist glasses, right? That's, that's the thing.
We want -- We want police officers to be on the side of -- we want the state to be on the sides of the community. The community to control the state.
If we relinguish the state, then it's just rich folks who can do whatever they want, and there's no organization for poor folks, really, or everybody else, right?
And that the state is the vehicle, the democratic vehicle, when it's working, to maintain the -- to bar the control or the willful, arbitrary, capricious power of powerful people, right?
Of capital, let's say.
>> DR. PEREZ: Absolutely.
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: So really -- we want to -- I see police, I see the state, I see education, health care, all those elements of the state, as something that the struggle, and I try to argue this with police officers too.
That you have a choice -- are you going to work for the man, right?
And oppressive communities, or are you the police officers trying to protect anybody, no matter who they are or what they are?
Are you that model of police officer?
Are you working for the "people", the community, whatever it is?
And that -- that's the -- that's the ideological attention.
>> DR. PEREZ: So if it's ok, I want to bring Daniel Ginsberg forward -- this is Ramona -- bring Daniel Ginsberg forward so that he can begin to present some questions to our panelists.
>> DANIEL: Hi, thank you.
My name is Daniel Ginsberg.
I'm Director of Education and Professional Practice at the AA.
I'm a male-presenting white person with unruly dark, pandemic hair and a striped blue shirt.
And I use he/him or they/them pronouns. I wanted to thank all the panelists for this outline of some really exciting critical scholarship about policing.
I'm really feeling it for myself, living in ancestral Piscataway land, now known as Washington, D.C., that has recently been policed by the Utah National Guard.
But what I wanted to transition us to now having talked a lot about the "what" of the scholarship.
There's some really interesting questions in the Q&A from this, and also from the previous session, transitioning from the "what" to the "how". How can we, as anthropologists, best-contribute to anthropological research on policing?
Thinking of it in terms of methods and really thinking of it in terms of ethics, because there are a lot of potential risks of it.
There's a couple things that people have mentioned that I would like to name to contribute to the discussion going forward.
When we talk about police unions, how do we talk about the problems of police unions without contributing to a more general antiunion rhetoric? Which is something the panel has already touched on today.
Also, if we think about our ethical commitments that we make to our research participants, when our research participants are police officers, how can we, then, do scholarship, that's designed to contribute to abolition?
And if we are advancing demands for abolition, how do we think about the way that that could potentially, on the one hand, lead to more overpolicing of communities where activists are, or on the other hand, if abolition takes place, lead to essentially a neoliberal privatization of the police function.
So all of these things are risks in even having this conversation, and the question that I wanted to pose to you on behalf of the audience is what's the right way for us going forward to think about all of that as we do our work?
>> DR. AUSTON: I would say, just to -- you said a lot there.
And so, I guess I'll just try to -- I didn't -- my own research -- this is Donna speaking, I'm sorry -- my own research, I did not work with the police.
It just was something -- one, it wasn't the thing that was most interesting to me.
But two, I just -- my personal politics, don't allow me to do that.
And also, there were safety concerns.
I'm a Black woman -- I'm a black Muslim woman, by the way, and I just don't -- I don't feel safe doing research with the police, for a whole bunch of reasons, and -- but I think, there are definitely cautionary -- I mean, examples of anthropologists working with the military, during the Vietnam War and then later sorts of engagements that I think give us pause or, you know, material to consider when we're thinking about how you might go about researching, partnering with, whatever you want to call it, in a way that doesn't expose any of your research participants to harm. 
I don't see that there's an inherent contradiction, personally, between working with police and asking for abolition.
I think -- for me, I think some of the principles you might engage in and that I try to live by as a researcher, regardless of who I'm working with, is that I'm clear and transparent with my research participants about who I am and, you know, letting them know the things about me that they need to know in order to feel comfortable talking to me or letting me follow them around or whatever it is that I'm going to do with them.
I think transparency -- and then people decide if they want to engage with you or not.
I mean, that's -- I think that's, as an anthropologist -- I think that ought to be our stance regardless of who the people are that we're trying to work with.
We, we want to examine their lives. We want to be admitted into their private world and their work world and all of the -- you know, and they don't have to grant us admission there.
>> DR. PEREZ: Right.
>> DR. AUSTON: So if we are, if we understand that and, you know, I was always very -- not just saying, "Hey, I'm affiliated here and this, that, and the third." But personally, I maintain a fairly public presence.
I have a website, I have a Twitter account, I have a -- you know, and I will direct people there.
You want to know who I am?
You want to know sort of the types of views that I might have, whatever, then you can decide if I'm somebody that you actually want to engage with or grant access to.
So I think that regardless of what your target population is in terms of research -- ethically -- you need to make yourself legible, what your purposes are and that doesn't -- that also doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to produce research that they agree with, right?
That's not necessarily the end game.
And I make that clear as well.
I might -- you might tell me something or you let me see something, and I may take this analysis in a direction that you don't ultimately care for in the end.
If you are still comfortable working with me, regardless, right?
Then we can proceed.
If not, that's fine and I'll find someone else.
So I think, part of it is really making your -- if you're working as sort of a traditional ethnographer, right? And that's what sort of setting as an anthropologist, then I think making yourself transparent is a big part of that.
I think one of the other things too is that it's important to remember, we talked about this a little bit the last time -- but also, sort of remembering that anthropologists work with people in a lot of different ways, right?
It's not just traditional fieldwork, right?
Anthropologists work in a variety of settings.
And so really, just allowing, you know, basic questions of how to, again, be transparent, but also to sort of -- you know, not expose people to risk that, you know, they wouldn't necessarily consent to and, you know, just being clear about what it is and what the purposes are of whatever engagement you're, you know, you're sort of dealing with folks in.
And give people the opportunity to be, you know, to be in company with you or not.
>> DR. PEREZ: This is Ramona. Thank you, Donna.
>> DR. TURE: So I'll just jump in really quick, and say, in terms of Donna's comment -- by the way, I apologize, this is Kalfani Ture. I'm an African-American male, dark skin, wearing a gray shirt and sitting in my living room.
But in terms of Donna's point, we need to understand how people experience state violence, so we need people who study those who interact with police from the other side.
So I think that that scholarship is really important.
I would simply -- I want to offer a couple things here.
One, you know, I want everybody who is listening -- we need to write the discipline with AAAs and say, "Hey, we need to put together a kind of project that's akin to you know, Race: The Power of an Illusion or the Race Project that was organized -- I think Audrey Smedley was part of it, but in house, we need to put together something substantial. And we can call it, Police and the Power, I mean -- we can call it, Police: The Power of White Supremacy. And then we can go at it, right? 
But we need something substantial, because even those who are the in the discipline, we need to understand that while we may not be, or we are self-declared anti- -- or we are self-declared non-racists, et cetera.
But how does our passivity may even contribute to this larger structure of inquality?
And with that being said, we need to think about how do we compensate Black scholars who are going to be tasked with getting this ball rolling?
All right. Now, in terms of the second project that I propose for the discipline, as a police officer, I can tell you, you know, police officers make really great ethnographers.
Because by the nature of what we do, we have to be observant. In some ways, we have to find ways to participate.
We take -- collect our field notes, etcetera.
I think one of the disjunctures from my own personal observations is that, you know, law enforcement are aware of what those inequalities are, of what those problems are -- but we don't see it as our responsibility to lobby on the behalf of the citizens we serve. We don't see ourselves in the business of producing policy.
So I think that the discipline can pull together some type of academy, and bring officers in, and teach them, not only about, you know, the history of race and power, et cetera.
But teach them how to adequately do ethnographic work, right, and sort of bringing them in, expose them to the value of anthropology, but also share with them the skillsets, right?
I have many more, but I'll stop there.
>> DR. BORNSTEIN: I see our time is running, so I'll make it really brief.
I think that -- I think that there's all kinds of possibilities for anthropologists to get involved with this.
I think that the area of policy change, right, is, part of it is political and marching on the streets and part of it is a process of analysis and gathering evidence and making policy decisions.
You know, we had, in, at John J. we in anthropology, we live with a lot of this stuff, so we've done studies with lots of students, going into their own communities to talk about these issues, to ask, you know, how, how they perceive different things, as Kalfani was saying, about how what the experience of policing is.
It could be working with law enforcement agencies.
There are -- There is a whole movement of evidence-based policing.
It could be -- it could be with a certain advocacy for a demilitarization, so, you know, to pitch, especially if you're in a small town or you have a police department in your large campus, right?
And that, you know... you have a -- an organization, a trans organization, mental health organization, something like that, that wants a different kind of intervention, and you try to set up a pilot with that small police organization.
These things happen.
And then you help them with a study. How did it turn out? How did the people respond? We've done those kind of things in New York on a big scale. We had a [indiscernible] article about community courts, going into the community, asking people, you know, tell me about your experience with police, with the judge, and what happened and everything.
And you know, we found, we have findings that can speak to policy, right, and speak to a demilitarizing policy, right? So, all of that is possible. The larger the police organization, the more difficult it is, but if you're in a smaller town, it's possible, and there is a level of professionalism at the top of policing that appreciates this.
It doesn't really, it's not at the ground level, I don't think. It's much more an elite group. But, I mean, those are the ones we see at John J., but they self-select, and they show up at a place like there or at George Mason where they have an amazing program of evidence-based policing. These are ways that anthropologists, and they are completely quantitative, and they need a lot of help with doing community work. That's where anthropology really comes in, and why we were working on community justice, community course project. Because they can look at recidivism rates, and they can look at all that stuff, and all that's important, as Kalfani said, you know, the quant people, but we add something additional to it that can explain quantitative things in ways that didn't make any sense to people, but it explains how people come up with those numbers. 
>> DR. PEREZ: Absolutely, and if I could, you know, I've actually done research with police officers and with the larger community, and it's not as difficult as one would imagine, precisely because, going back to what Donna said, when you make clear what it is that you're working on, and you understand that the police can benefit from it too, in such a way, the engagement becomes a much more shared engagement, even though it may end up having some really critically important things for people to unpack, but one of the other things I would just like to point out quickly is where our expertise comes in is because we know these local communities, and this is why knowing who your anthropologists are, and our anthropologists in communities, making sure people know you're available to begin these conversations where you can take the community's perspective into it and begin to set a platform for an engaged conversation becomes very important. 
But also, I just wanna say for those of us who train, for those of us who mentor, for those of that are working, teaching mixed methods is integral. We need to understand how quantitative data is being captured. We need to look at that quantitative data. We need to unpack the categories and the definitions that went into things like disorderly conduct. Well, what do you mean by "disorderly conduct"? What does that qualify for? 
And as Shanti had pointed out earlier, you know, jay walking all of a sudden becomes, you know, a category, or how a person is dressed can becomes a category of how the body is moving, and so it produces a kind of justification. 
So as anthropologists, training each other, making sure that we understand the quantitative aspect of every bit of our ethnographic analysis, I think is integral. 
>> DR. PARIKH: Can I add --
>> DR. PEREZ: [indiscernible] closed captioning. I just want to make folks aware that we did lose our closed captioner, but please, Shanti, go ahead. 
>> DR. PARIKH: I'll just, I'll make this very quick. It's actually just going to be a list, because I think my, my colleagues have done a brilliant job already summarizing as well as you, Ramona. I just have one thing, you know, I think as ethnographers, one thing we know is that people love to tell their stories, and I, in my, I haven't done a lot of formal interviewing with police, but I certainly did some for a Ferguson forum that we're putting out, and people like to tell their stories, and when you treat people as individuals, each of them -- we're not saying that individual police are bad, I mean in some ways we are, but you know, when we talk about policing as the whole system -- so people love to tell stories, and that's what we as anthropologists are good at doing. 
I think in terms of the violence not only how anti-Blackness state violence is felt, but also the survival of Black people in it. The liberation, so the opposite of the violence, what is the Black joy? What is the Black liberation? What is the Black survival? 
Second, I think that anthropology always brings to all of its topics this idea, if we study the police, like any institution, it has a historical trajectory. It is embedded within complicated historical lenses. It has an economic embeddedness, social embeddedness, and that's what we bring as anthropologists. 
This complex milieu of how whatever institution we're looking at is situated and is not independent of any of them, so it's a complicated mess. 
Fourth thing. I think that we are also very right to really -- I love the idea of evidence-based policing, and I think we're very right to looking at what is the meaning of this idea of public safety in, with, in communities. That also calls to question that the idea of community is so fraught with complexities. 
But if this is a discussion, and if the police are doing public safety, we have to say, one, how are we defining community, but two, what is that public safety, but also anthropology is good at recognizing that even within what we are calling community, there are going to be disciplinary tactics within there. 
So community itself is not a monolithic. There are going to be debates within that about who is, to be policed. 
So all that to say, I think we have a lot to contribute, and you know, I would love to look at some -- and the white supremacy thing. 
I have tons of stuff on how that is such a big part of policing. Again, it serves a particular instrumental function, because it helps to shore up the notion of "us vs. them", and the "them" happens to be these communities that are a lot of times of color, or masculine, or, you know, whatever. I'll stop there. 
>> DR. PEREZ: So our webinar is past the time that we had available. I want to first thank every one of the panelists. I want to thank our many attendees that were here. We have, we have a lot of questions that we didn't get to, and so we're going to focus on that, and make sure we get some of these answers out to folks. We will do follow up, so please look for those. 
Dr. Auston, Dr. Parikh, Dr. Bornstein, Dr. Ture, Daniel, Jeff, Nell, Scott, Gabby -- thank you so very much for all of your work on this and for agreeing to continue to work on this -- you like the way I just slipped that in, that just you agreed to continue working on this? 
And thank you so much to every one of our attendees. Thank you for taking the time to sit with us today and engage with us. 
More than anything, let's take this out. Let's move this out into our communities. Let's move this out into the street. Thank you, very much.
>> DR. PARIKH: And thank you, Ramona!
>> DR. TURE: Thank you. 
>> DR. AUSTON: Thank you, everyone.