People in the US have a growing awareness of police abuse of power, and are demanding change. Hear personal stories of interactions with police and a discussion of how public viewpoints have changed since the George Floyd protests of last year.
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of Incorruptible Massachusetts season 4 episode 19. You can watch the video version here.
You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
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* Sign up to get updates at www.incorruptiblemass.org
People in the US have a growing awareness of police abuse of power, and are demanding change. Hear personal stories of interactions with police and a discussion of how public viewpoints have changed since the George Floyd protests of last year.
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of Incorruptible Massachusetts season 4 episode 19. You can watch the video version here.
You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast
* Sign up to get updates at www.incorruptiblemass.org
Producer 0:00
[This transcript was produced by a computer program then hand edited. It may still have errors. Incorruptible Massachusetts is unscripted conversation recorded live, so the audio is the authoritative version of the podcast. Updated 9/4/2021 by CFH and FL.]
Anna Callahan 0:00
Hey! This is Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our mission here is to help you understand state politics. So we go over why it is so broken here in Massachusetts, what we could have in our lives if we fixed it, and how you can get involved. Joined by my amazing co hosts. So Jonathan Cohn and Jordan Berg Powers! Jonathan, you want to introduce yourself?
Jonathan Cohn 0:22
Yeah, I'm Jonathan Cohn, I've been active with progressive issues and electoral campaigns out here in Massachusetts and based out of Boston.
Jordan Berg Powers 0:30
And I'm Jordan Berg Powers, I use he/him, I have been involved also in electoral and political campaigns in Massachusetts and work on issue campaigns. And I'm based out of Worcester although our organization works statewide.
Anna Callahan 0:45
I'm Anna Callahan, she/her, out of Medford, although right now I'm [in a] cabin in Minnesota. And yeah, very excited about state politics and fixing it. So-- great! Today we are we're gonna talk about policing. With the George Floyd protests last summer, there seemed to be a lot of momentum and a lot of public support around that issue. We want to come back to it and touch base and see where have we progressed, both on the local levels in Massachusetts, as well as at the state level, and dig into it a little bit. Jordan, I'm going to let you come in, I think if anybody has personal stories-- I do, but I love to hear any personal stories that you have first.
Jordan Berg Powers 1:42
I have too many personal stories. I think a lot about this. So my first interaction with the police was when I was eight years old, which is the same age as my daughter. That was the first time they asked me where I was going, if I had any pot in my pockets. You know, this is the war on drugs time in the cities in the early 90s, late 80s. There's so many times that I have been-- had handcuffs, or somebody tried to put handcuffs or tried to talk to me. Luckily for me, my father is a lawyer, so I always was able to talk my way out of it through my father. But not everybody had that luxury, not everybody had that privilege.
Jordan Berg Powers 2:27
And so when I was-- most of the kids that I grew up with, at least in my neighborhood, they were all touched by the police, they all either passed, unfortunately, or were incarcerated for some stunt. And some time very few of them made it without having that and all of them had interactions with the police. And I can guarantee you that none of them did anything that were different than any kid. There was nothing about those kids that made them more likely or susceptible to interact with police.
Jordan Berg Powers 2:56
When I was an adult, I used to drive a lot from my job, so I was consistently on the roads, and consistently in neighborhoods where I'm not from. So I have had loads of interactions with the police in Massachusetts. I can tell you all the hotspots on I-90, and I-93 and all the places and the towns where it is really difficult to door knock or campaign while black.
Jordan Berg Powers 3:20
So there's just an endless supply of stories. I will take my favorite story about Worcester police where I live. So I was walking my dog one day around my neighborhood. And like most cities there's one-way streets where it's a one-way one way, one-way another way. There was an old woman driving the wrong direction on a one-way, and I'm waving at her trying to get her to stop and other people waving and there's a car coming and she's like confused-- all these things. I sort of walked by it, it's sort of resolving itself. At the end of the block is a police officer sitting in an open parking lot near my neighborhood. And he comes, lights on, blaring at-- come straight-- and I was like "Oh, he's gonna go like help this old lady." And he stops in front of me and asked me what I'm doing, and why I'm here and what's going on. And this is connected to one of the nice parks in town where I was about to go around and just walk my dog. I was like, around the corner, like, What are you talking about? And I was just like, "there was a person going in the wrong direction!" No comment about it. I'm walking my dog and the police are asking me what I'm doing and what's going on, which is just par for the course, I think, for most people of color, especially black men, unfortunately. Obviously, there's not a gender to harassment, but we know that black men are more likely to be harassed just from the statistics. And so yeah, as a black man in society-- as a large black man who happened to drive a Prius, this is all apparently very suspicious.
Anna Callahan 4:51
Yeah, Jonathan, I don't want to leave you out of that. Do you have any...?
Jonathan Cohn 4:57
I'll pass it on to you. I am fortunate enough and recognize the privilege of to not have had really many interactions with the police at all. And that speaks to the elements of privilege where [INAUDIBLE] One of the things that I always use as an example of white privilege is if you feel comfortable jaywalking in front of a cop car, because I know that if I do that they're not gonna do anything about that. And jaywalking shouldn't even be a crime. But it's something that is a very convenient pretext when they want to go up and harass somebody.
Anna Callahan 5:39
Yep, I do have a couple police interactions. As a kid, I was actually picked up by the police. I snuck out with a friend in the middle of the night, snuck out my window, and two of us went over to a third friend's house, and his mom called the police on us. We were sitting in her front lawn, she called the police on us. And when they came, she kept her own kid at home and sent us to the police station with the police. So I spent some time in the police station. They were grilling me. I was alone, they separated us, and I was alone, getting interrogated. And they asked what my braces wax was in my pocket. Like what kind of drug it was. It was very weird. I was just like, what is going on here?
Anna Callahan 6:26
There was that. And then when I was about maybe 30 or so I was attending the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles-- Sorry, I was attending the shadow convention that was *protesting* the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, I was not at the Democratic National Convention. So I was at the protest. I was sad to have missed the rubber bullets that got-- I went off to have dinner with my college friend and missed all of the excitement. Typical white person being like, oh, sad to miss the excitement of being shot by rubber bullets. And the very next day, I was on a bike ride that was just-- Critical Mass had organized a bike ride. In Los Angeles, they were usually 20 people, not blocking any roads or anything. This was about 200 people because of the DNC, and they blocked off-- we had an unofficial police escort, they put us under the 10 freeway, where it was like eight lanes across, blocked off the front shoved everybody in the back, they arrested 71 of us, threw us in jail for a couple of days. And it was super eye opening. I can tell long stories about being in the LA County Jail, which is supposed to be one of the worst ones in the country. All the women were stripped search twice, paraded us around in front of the male general population, in the middle of the night, over and over, woke us up every hour of the night telling us it was morning. And this over and over all that psychological bizarreness that they did was super freaky. I will say that as someone who didn't grow up with it, the reaction of all these, like 71 people, I think 23 of whom were women, and 23 of whom were stripped, searched twice, and most of whom were white. We talked afterwards about the fact that-- look, I would shake as soon as I saw police car, like I really had a little bit of sort of PTSD. So when we think about how people of color are treated this way, their *entire lives*, it has an effect on you, like a permanent effect on you. And so I just want to raise that as somebody who didn't really have that experience until I was an adult and then seeing my own reactions of fear for months afterwards. That was really eye opening to me.
Jordan Berg Powers 8:58
Yeah, I mean, just to that point, it's not just something you see on TV. My mom did have a conversation with me when I first came to get my driver's license, not about driving-- it was about how to stay calm in front of cops. That's not like a thing we say, that's a real thing that happened to me when I was 14 years old. The first thing My mom told me about was "This is what happens when you get pulled over so that you think."
Jordan Berg Powers 9:25
And we're trained-- the thing that I've never understood, and I will and I say this really sincerely, I don't understand why I have to be nicer than the police. I'm very, I've learned how to be very calm. I've learned how to talk to them, so that they're calm, but like I'm not armed. I'm not doing anything wrong. And even if I were doing anything wrong, I don't need to be the calm one. It's just so surreal how vindictive, how mean, how just absolutely awful. Like who like it's, you know, it is rare that you have an interaction with the police in which they think a crime has happened. So that's an important thing, right? They'll be perfectly fine if you're Miss Suzy with a white with a white picket fence. But if they believe that something has gone wrong, they're not treating you with humanity. They're not trying to figure out how to best situate the situation to calm it down, to have a conversation. They're wild and mean and bullying.
Jordan Berg Powers 10:22
There's no reason to treat women who have had, who have had a First Amendment right to protest to torture them. But they do because they can because they want to because it's just this meanness. That's a real core to a lot of the interactions I have and have had my whole life. It's just a bewilderment. I don't interact with the police and feel like I'm being treated to the front end of the law. I feel like I'm being treated by lawless people who just don't can't give me the dignity of being human.
Jordan Berg Powers 11:01
I remember all the police officers who were kind to me. I remember every one. I remember them better than I remember all the times that I didn't. I remember the black officer who pulled me over late night in Washington, DC, and just said, "Hey, I think you're going a little fast. You know, not every cops gonna be as nice as me. But like, I want you to get home safe. So just like Take it easy. You seem like you're not inebriated."
Jordan Berg Powers 11:25
I remember that conversation because of how jarringly wonderful it was. I remember the cop in Worcester who pulled me over when I *was* speeding, and said, "Hey, you're going real fast. This is a new transition area. I just want you to watch out, we're trying to keep extra careful." I remember the officer's name. Nobody looks like him. Say hi to him every time I see him in Worcester--
Anna Callahan 11:45
Yeah.
Jordan Berg Powers 11:46
--because it's so rare, because it's not my interaction overwhelmingly. And it just speaks to this to the culture, to the culture of the whole.
Anna Callahan 11:52
And I think that that culture-- we talked about training and de-escalation, but the culture is a culture of escalation. That is what they do. And you don't have to escalate it, you can be de-escalating all you want, but they have been acculturated to escalate, and then sometimes it is handed down from the top. One time during these months where I really had a visceral reaction to seeing cops, I did go to a protest. Knowing it was gonna be tough for me, I went there and I stood right near the cops. And I would talk to them, and they would talk to me and everything was fine. And there came a moment when they their faces became stony, and they wouldn't answer my questions anymore. I was like, "I gotta get out of here." Because something had come down from above, saying that they were going to change their tactics. And that was when I couldn't be there anymore.
Jonathan Cohn 12:52
The one thing with discussions around car speeding and stuff like that reminds me of is when I'm growing up in upper middle class, middle class white suburbia, I've always found fascinating is the fact that if you live in a white affluent suburb, the most frequent times that you'll probably interact with cops is been there hovering behind a stop sign in your development, so they can ticket anybody who runs runs the stop sign. And yet people have this fondness for cops-- literally that's your only interaction with them, is them like end of budget cycle trying to trying to get in a few extra tickets. It really does speak to like, kind of the weird hold the idea of policing has in this country as even like in the belief that they are doing something other than what most of their job actually ends up being.
Anna Callahan 13:49
Yeah, I was talking to a friend who I thought would be a defund the police person because she's lefty on all sorts of other things. But she was like, well, they feel like they can't react, they can't move anymore because of all the pushback against them. And I was like I'd had my bicycle-- my car was broken into in the 90s they did nothing! My bike was stolen, my sister's bike was stolen three times. They did nothing! Not like I've been involved around a lot of crime, but whenever I have seen a crime, had a crime happen around me, whether it's a bike stolen or a car broken into or whatever it might be, a house being broken into, I have literally zero times heard of anyone who has had that solved by the cops.
Jordan Berg Powers 14:42
Part of this comes from our media. According to a couple of different studies, crime shows out number every other drama, sub-drama, family dramas, medicals, anything on broadcast nets for all television. It's made up anywhere from 20 to 40% of all scripted television programs in the last two decades of television. So you're talking about there is just this thing that we do, where it's--
Anna Callahan 15:14
And they solve the crime every time!
Jordan Berg Powers 15:15
--find and solve the crime. It's nice and neat. They have all these gadgets. That's just not the reality of policing in America. Most crime in America is never solved. Overwhelmingly, if you have a burglar, if you get something stolen, if you've been beaten, if you've been physically harmed, if you've been raped, there is just statistically speaking, but not absolutely statistics. The clearance rate, which is actually not even a solve rate-- a clearance rate means that the police have sent a case to the DA-- it doesn't mean the DA will prosecute it. The clearance rates for police across this country is extraordinarily low. It never gets above, for any one crime except for murder, it's not more than a third. And that's rape as a third. Most crime is solved at 10%, 6%, which means 94% of all of that crime is not solved in any way. Little effort is honestly made around it because and again, this comes from an idea comes to the top, since the 1980s, the money for policing is in drugs.
Jordan Berg Powers 16:25
The money for policing is not for solving crime. We think it is but it's not it's for regulating the use of drug use. It's for it's for putting people away for drug use. It's for it's for criminalizing people who are using drugs. That is where the money from the federal government comes to. That's where the money from state government comes to. That is what the police do. They manage drug trade in America, and that is mostly it. And occasionally, they solve a murder or two, but mostly not.
Anna Callahan 16:53
And with all the sort of deregulating now of marijuana and other things, there are people who spent years in jail because of drug use. Years in jail. It is crazy. We'll do a whole other episode on incarceration. But it is crazy the way that our society functions and especially the sheer amount of money that we pour into police forces that don't tell crimes.
Anna Callahan 17:24
I know we had talked a little bit earlier about where have things moved. The Black Lives Matter movement is since 2014, the George Floyd protests of course. I heard that they were the largest worldwide protests in-- forever. You would think that something would have changed.
Anna Callahan 17:52
I'd love for us to just talk a little bit about about budgets and whether that or anything else has really changed since the George Floyd protests. I also remember the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. I think a lot of this has escalated because of social media and the ability for regular people to see this. I mean, honestly, that is what made me kind of radicalized is that I saw it with my own eyes. And that is what is happening now. I think that as people see these things with their own eyes through video, that we're finally seeing mass movements to change this. But I'd love to talk about Massachusetts and what really has changed.
Jonathan Cohn 18:41
So to quickly echo that point, that it it has been fascinating there in recent years about the rise of cell phone cameras, what that has done to the discussion around police and police accountability, whether even just policy and media discussion, or even when it comes to actual lawsuits themselves, especially in how when you're talking about media and different cop shows, you also have the fact that a lot of media outlets tend to default take the statements of the police as true, as a true recounting of events, because that is what they have to go on without anything else, rather than treating that as one side of a story, tend to treat it as the story itself. Where, when you have video footage, whether that's because of cell phone cameras, or even although there there can be some issues around with like-- there are limits-- accomplish sometimes also body camera footage showing that maybe they're lying in cases and should be viewed as like shouldn't be treated with the same certainty in the statements that they make. And there was a good article-- I forget what outlet recently had a piece about their news outlet rethinking how they speak about police claims on stuff so they don't Just treated as the de facto as, by default reality.
Jordan Berg Powers 20:06
Yeah, it turns out that police have the same reason to lie as regular people, which is they have a self interest in telling story that benefits the things they believe. See the way they write about any of the famous things that we've heard about afterwards where the police have sanitized, in their public statements, how the person died. The reason I think a lot about how they interact with us in our community is both because if we're ever going to get to this place where we're trying to solve crime or anything, how you interact is that, but also because I don't know, as somebody who regularly interacts with the police, if this is the time that their escalation escalates too far. And that's the, that's the fear that people of color have, that we always have to become-- we have to be perfect every interaction. And the more that we're sort of adjacent to white society, or adjacent to poverty, those are the two places that you most interact with the police, the more that you have to be perfect all the time. All the time, in interacting with the police. So these spotlights on the killings is important because no one should die, simply for interacting with the state. There's nothing about interaction with the state that should be a death sentence. You don't get killed, for stealing something. You don't get killed because you because you, you know, stepped on a street the wrong way or sped or anything. There's no reason to murder someone. You don't even get to murder someone because you think they murdered someone. You gotta to prove that they did it, and even then you shouldn't kill them. So we don't do that, right? And then on top of that, it's always that we don't know. We don't know if going into a Wendy's is gonna be the time that you get murdered.
Anna Callahan 21:55
Or in the parking lot of a Walmart.
Jordan Berg Powers 21:57
right, I mean, or inside of Walmart, right? Like inside a Walmart! We don't know and that sort of precariousness interacts with all of the times that we're facing with somebody escalating violence against us, even though we are not doing anything except existing. So I think that that's the crazy thing.
Jordan Berg Powers 22:20
I want to say something else, too, because this often gets talked about with people of color. And people of color overrepresent deadly interactions, negative interactions with the police. But one of my favorite quotes from Michelle Alexander-- So somebody came to a talk of Michelle Alexander, who wrote one of the definitive pieces which everyone should read about Jim Crow and modern slavery and our criminal justice system. And somebody asked Michelle Alexander, "well, my son is in jail for drug crimes, and he's a white person. What do you say to me?" And she said, "Look, these laws were put in place because of hatred of black people, and because of racism, and the desire of politicians to use racism to win elections, but there's collateral whenever you have a war, innocent people always get killed." Your son is innocent collateral damage. Of course, they don't want-- the system's not designed-- wants to send you away, but doesn't care. If you're poor, it's going to treat you the same as if you're a black person. Does not care if you're poor. It wants to get rid of you too, wants to send you away or to put you into a box, right? It's about managing the margins. It's about putting people who have drug addictions who are undesirable in their place. It's about telling people who shouldn't have hope that they shouldn't have hope. That's what it's about and it has consequences that range beyond race, even as its target is, of course, accentuating racism to win elections.
Jonathan Cohn 23:43
And this is quickly on our point when it comes to like a employee talking about let's say, like drug law enforcement stuff like that just reminded me what I would often say when I was living in New York, is that if the NYPD's goal was actually to find and target the sources of illegal drug use, they would be on NYU's campus and Columbia's campus all the time and less so in Harlem. Because if you want to think about like the highest density of illegal drug use, it would probably be a dorm on one of the elite colleges in New York, because that's where people have the money to get that. But that never really get prosecuted in the same way. In the same way in which-- you have the weird dynamic again of who has the privilege to break the law without consequences and the way in which underage drinking is rampant on every campus, yet colleges kind of accept the fact that they can't enforce it, so they don't. It's this kind of acceptance that we're going to allow this rampant law breaking and the police are going to accept this rampant lawbreaking where they would never have that same degree of lenience in other cases without the degree of like money and institutional protection.
Jordan Berg Powers 25:12
So, I think that the thing to Anna's part about so are we actually defunding and how do we think about these things, I just want to say that one of the things that we talked about before when we were prepping for this that's of interest is that the police themselves used to not want to be involved in these things. If you went before the politicization and I would argue, the racialization, re-racialization of policing in our modern way, right? So when Black Lives Matter pops out, but you have people basically saying, we want to be racist towards you. So that's unacceptable. Black lives don't matter, because that is the opposite of Black Lives Matter. The opposite of Black Lives Matter is that they don't and that's their belief, they don't. Or at least they shouldn't as much as other people. That re-radicalized it. But if you would talk to people before those things popped up, just about should the police be showing up to homeless people? Should they be treating people who are having o-- should they be showing up to overdoses? The police will be the first ones to tell you that they shouldn't be a part of those things. You would go to public meetings and they would complain about being the people policing the ends of society, the people that no one wants to deal with, you know, people who are really struggling, they were *complaining* about those things. And we're in like, yet we still can't manage because of it, because of the ways in which people, you know, racism is such a drug that people just live on, and can't let go of that they just can't we can't actually do it, even though they themselves say that they don't want to be involved in those things, because it's not safe for them. They're not trained to do it.
Anna Callahan 26:44
Yeah. You know, we talked a little bit about the the difference in having conversations before the George Floyd protests and after the George George Boyd protests. And I had a workshop that I gave on police abuse of power, police brutality, and police abuse of power in a bunch of different cities across the country to mostly white audiences, mostly white progressive audiences. What I found was that people who would come into the room thinking that the police are officer friendly, and they're good, and we need to fund them. Why would we ever cut the police budget? It was a short, relatively short conversation, to get those people to say, "Oh, well, okay. Sure. Yeah, you're right. We should, yes, we should, you know, reduce the police budget." That was *not* controversial to the audiences that I was talking to, and yet, the Defund the Police, you know, and again, I've had some conversations, people about Defund the Police as well, where I have like a relatively short conversation, a lot of people I think, just totally misunderstand what that means. But that, Jordan, you are saying that with this new re-racialization of this particular issue of the funding of the police, that it has become a more difficult conversation now than it was before.
Jordan Berg Powers 28:06
Yeah, and I mean, there's some good studies that show that people who think of themselves as progressive have actually moved on race to be better. That moving it in into camps does have benefits that we don't think about, but it has become part of the re-racialization of our politics, and really much in that lens, and then you get into this weird thing, but again, but it shouldn't be. Like, it shouldn't be controversial to say that when you call 911 and there's a fire that the fire truck comes or an ambulance comes. And if somebody's having a mental health-- that somebody with mental health experience comes, right? You know, one of the things I tell people all the time is, you know, again, when we think we you know, the thing about the way we spend money, and we spent a lot of money on policing, and it's really can I clear I can't explain to you much. It is trillions of dollars around drugs around finding drugs, policing drugs, stopping drugs, like it is so much money. But you know what the most dangerous thing for a police officer to walk into? It's a domestic violence dispute. Do you know how much training they get on that? Almost nothing? Do you how much money is spent every year on figuring out how to de escalate people who they themselves are in a crisis moment? Almost, we spend nothing on that, like pennies on the dollar compared to how much we're spending on trying to find drugs and solve drugs, like the war on drugs won the war on drugs, like drugs won that war. But we're spending like we're in Afghanistan on it, right? Like we just spend money at this day. That's stupid. We could be spending money to do things safer, right? Like we could be figuring out better ways to de escalate situations we could be figuring out how to make people safer. When de escalating domestic violence disputes. We could be spending money to make domestic violence less likely.
Anna Callahan 30:04
Yeah. And you're talking about all the ways, all the no brainer solutions that don't send armed people into these situations that they're completely unprepared for. And then there's the other pretty no brainer argument that especially during COVID, city budgets have gotten smaller and smaller. And so other needs, community needs budgets have been slashed. So, you know, school budgets have been cut, housing budgets have been cut, you look at anything that the city spends money on, and those budgets have been cut. And yet, we're still arguing about whether we should give more money to the police. Like, we are all cutting, we got to cut the budget. And so this idea that somehow the police budget is sacrosanct and cannot be cut, like all the other budgets, is crazy. And I you know, I would say that colloquially, just anecdotally, from what I have heard is that not a lot of police budgets have been cut, even since the George Floyd protests, even under COVID, where entire city budgets have reduced that we've not seen a lot of progress.
Jonathan Cohn 31:22
One thing I wanted to quickly chime in while we were discussing about diverting things that just should not have police responses away from police, is that there is state legislation to start moving the ball forward on that, which is a bill from Senator Sonia Chang Diaz and Representative Lindsey Sabadosa, called ACES (Alternatives to Community Emergency Services0 to start creating a funding program, through the Office of Health and Human Services for municipalities to set things up to have a common alternative place to call when you have like a mental health or behavioral health crisis or other cases where a person with a gun is simply not the best trained person to respond. And that you want somebody who has either the right professional training, or possibly even just a community member with some de escalation training to come in. Everybody ends up safer, when that's done. That connects to my [Inaudible] question of like, what are the calls that shouldn't even be getting to the police in the first place as the number one way to reduce negative interactions with the police is to reduce interactions with the police.
Anna Callahan 32:37
Yes, oh, man, wow, just looking at the time, we could talk about this I think for a long time. Let's get a guest on the show and talk more about this, and also maybe do a totally separate one on incarceration, because I would love to talk about this as well,
Jordan Berg Powers 32:50
I just to end with our call to the State House. So the state, you know, the state did pass some laws that did some really good things around this around trying to track some more information, around trying to hold some people accountable. But there really isn't a wholesale rethink of what we're doing with all of this money. Most cities, their budgets are policing and busing of kids like that's most cities' budgets, at least towns in Massachusetts, you know, a little bit of education and other things from the state. And we should just do better. The system does not make sense. And we know it doesn't make sense. People who are experts know it doesn't make sense. And we're asking the state house to just stop doing the easier things, which is to barely touch these issues. But to actually dig in to some of the research and some of the things to find solutions that make sense around these issues, because this isn't rocket science, right? It's stuff that we now have 20-30 years of data around, both our failing to tackle these issues correctly. And also, you know, the current system doesn't make sense. And it leads to just total harassment of regular folks. on a regular basis. I have endless stories of negative interactions. I have a few positive but cradle to grave interactions with the police just does not make sense for somebody as boring as myself.
Anna Callahan 34:24
I think our listeners would disagree that you're boring, but probably agree with everything else you say. And on that note, thank you both so much. We will be off next week for Rosh Hashanah. And then we will be back to you the week after that. Thanks so much, everybody.