AS294: Michael A. Wood Jr, Part 1

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking, this is episode 294, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith, all right, got a great interview for you, Michael A. Wood Jr., really cool guy, been on a lot of shows, been on, Joe Rogan's podcast, he's been on that a couple of times, actually very popular on that show, I heard him on Cognitive Dissonance, a while back, really good episode of their show, you So, I wanted to have him on to talk about his experience in the police force and his thoughts and his reform ideas, all that good stuff, want to note that this was recorded before the election, not sure it matters a whole lot, but just in case anything, you know, that we said sounded odd, that's why, Why?

And I also want to point out that if you had any questions, any legal questions about the election, go to Opening Arguments, because we did an episode where Andrew answered all of them, it's actually two episodes worth, Earth. And they're great, it's everything you want, because we got so many, we got, the electoral college, faithless electors, Trump being impeached, all that stuff, Andrew answers it all, I'm really proud of the work that he's done over there, and I just want to point you to it, in case you haven't heard him yet, so, check out Opening Arguments for that, and with that said, let's get over to my interview with Michael A. Wood Jr., Thank you.

0:01:54 Thomas: Joining me right now is Michael A. Wood, Jr. How are you doing, sir?

0:01:59 Michael: I am great, Thomas, how are you? With awkward introductions, because white people always do awkward introductions. So we're just, let it flow naturally.

0:02:01 Thomas: I'm doing great. Look, I don't see color. I don't know what you're talking about. No, I'm just kidding. I first heard you on Cognitive Distance, actually. I know you do about a billion interviews, but I don't know if you happen to remember that one. I heard you on their show and I was like, why is somebody, why is why are they having such a serious conversation on this show. It was it was jarring, but at the same time it was really great, and so ever since then I think I've been chirping at you on Twitter occasionally here and there because I I really liked that interview and you have so much interesting to say, so I'm glad we finally were able to get you on my show, so thanks for joining me.

0:02:41 Michael: I am glad as well, but boy, you were really late to the party, Thomas.

0:02:45 Thomas: True, I should have gone on it further. I was hoping there would be like a new wave of, you know, like police violence that we could talk about, you know, because they already covered back whatever was on in the news, you know, when you're on their show. I figured we'd wait till like whatever the the next viral video was, but we it seems like oddly enough, there hasn't been anything too crazy except maybe Standing Rock. So maybe we can we'll talk about that later. But but yeah,

0:03:11 Michael: I would completely disagree that there hasn't been anything crazy, because, you just haven't heard it.

0:03:11 Thomas: Yeah. Well, right, right. I just meant none of the like Philando Castile type, you know, like viral videos that everybody was talking about is all I mean. I feel like we've been, maybe the election took over or something. They're probably still there. It's just that we haven't been seeing them or something, unless there's anything I'm totally forgetting that you could remind me of.

0:03:30 Michael: Yeah. I mean, we have one in Baltimore County, where a guy was just beaten to death, a young man was, we've had 14-year-olds be shot with BB guns, we just had a killing in Chicago, I mean, we actually we get a lot of them. It's just when you don't have that video that caps everything almost perfectly where everybody wants to say, oh, well, we're only getting one camera angle here. This doesn't tell us anything. Well, unless we have that perfectly, you don't even hear anything.

0:03:40 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:03:59 Thomas: No, I definitely didn't mean to say it wasn't happening. I Just meant we didn't have the viral, like you're saying, we don't have have the perfect video angle that we're all and talking about from every angle. And also, I wonder, do you think the election news kind of plays into that? That's sort of taken over everybody's minds. So I feel like we have a pretty short attention span. It's like we can handle one thing, and that one thing right now is, is Trump going to ruin the entire country? I think that's the one thing we're All Focused on.

0:04:28 Michael: Well, I mean that's the thing though is like these shouldn't be two separate issues and you're right that they are. But to me, the two biggest things in the entire nation that we have going on right now is getting money out of politics and the problem with police legitimacy. And these are two issues that they are not discussing at all in this presidential campaign, along with Standing Rock, which is really just another outspring and division of Black Lives Matter, too. This is all Kind of the same movement. Movement so so you see these things happening in front of us and they're not even discussing these things because that shows you who's really in charge and who's manipulating your mind when the three biggest issues that we have that I'm sure I can get a ton of scholars to agree with me on are things that aren't even being addressed right.

0:04:55 Thomas: Hmm.

0:05:13 Thomas: Yeah. Well, let's get to that. But I I was wondering if you wouldn't mind taking us through your, your, uh, sort of your origin story. I don't think I've heard it. I don't think you went too much into it on cognitive dissonance. How you, you're retired. You seem like a young retiree, if I may say so. There's probably, there's gotta be something going on there, right? You're not like 65 and living off your pension right now is what I'm, I'm guessing. I'm just by the looks of you. Yeah.

0:05:38 Michael: No, I'm not. I'm 37. But the city of Baltimore did a really kind of cruddy thing to police officers that backfired on them and worked in my benefit with This subject. But what they wanted to do is normally when an officer would be hurt for any period of time, you would end up putting them on a desk job and you would kind of cater them through the system, I'm hoping that you could either hide them away until they get, you know, they get out under a normal retirement or you do you do something to help them help them stay in their position. Well, they decided they didn't want those people on the police department budget. So they made this law where if you're injured for more than a year and there's no hope of you getting back within another year, then they put you onto the pension books so that you're off the city books to make it somebody else's problem instead of taking care of their officers. But that really backfired on them. Yeah.

0:05:38 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm.

0:06:32 Thomas: But let's go back before that. Like what? So where did you grow up and why did you want to be a police officer? I really would love to know that.

0:06:34 Michael: OK, so I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore in an area easily references like Edgewood, Abingdon area, which is a mixed it's mixed race, mixed income, but relatively lower where I was. We had government subsidized housing, a bunch of relatively poor kids playing basketball all day long.

0:06:58 Thomas: That sounds fun.

0:06:59 Michael: I wanted to be taught because, well, I mean, I guess for a short white kid that can't jump, but I mean.

0:07:00 Thomas: So you're a pretty good basketball player. Yeah. So no. Yeah, right.

0:07:09 Michael: So totally. I mean I grew up in the era like everybody else, I imagine. I mean I'm right on the edge of Generation X and the Millennials, so we kind of were all in the same group where we grow up watching cops and all these cop shows where that's kind of like the hero ship. And we set up this system where poor people are rewarded for learning how to kill other people by this lure of a college degree. So I know I needed an education.

I come from being poor, so going into the military was the way to do it. I saw these TV shows and action and everything, and I guess I had it in me. I wanted to kick in doors and do car chases and shoot things. But I got to be 21 to be a cop, so I went into the Marine Corps, signed up when I was 16, went in when I was 17, went through, did exactly what I wanted to do in the Marine Corp. Can't complain about it whatsoever, I thought it was a wonderful experience. And looking back it feels a little dirty now because I was, I mean I was essentially there trained to kill people in other land

0:08:15 Michael: Because I was poor and had no other way out. I

0:08:15 Thomas: Hmm, but did you have to go to go to the Middle East or anything? I mean, it'd be kind of around that time, right? Or a little too, did you, were you early ahead of it, ahead of Iraq?

0:08:25 Michael: Was ahead of September 11th, but I was in a, a fast team, which is a, an emergency response team, so that they don't, we wouldn't do combat anyway, so you have to be available. So like if you're launching a war in Iraq and the embassy in Korea gets invaded, well somebody still needs to go fix the embassy, so that's what we did, that deployed around I

0:08:34 Thomas: Okay. Oh, okay. It's part of that thing where like the, the philosophy of our military was always, we'd, we'd be able to fight two wars simultaneously and still be okay. Part of that kind of that attitude.

0:08:53 Michael: Would say we could, we could do special operations simultaneously probably near every single country at any point in time, uh yeah

0:08:57 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah, that's, oh, that's cool. So you were training to kill people. You, but you were kind of in it for the, were you in it for the, the college part of it, the getting help with a college degree? Is that kind of where, why you went that route?

0:09:04 Michael: Yeah. Well, I recognize the system early on that you get promoted and you get things by following the incentives that people set up. And if you achieve these goals, like I've kind of viewed them as checking the boxes. So while I want it to have fun and kick down doors and chase things, I also want it too, uh, start checking those boxes. So I've, I've had a life that's been obsessed with checking the boxes that life, uh kind of of sets up and qualifies you for? I think that's been like my OCD from being a poor kid trying to get out of it.

0:09:20 Thomas: Hmm.

0:09:44 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you could have a worse mindset for sure. I mean that, that sounds like not a bad way to try to get out of your situation. So do you think, do you think it was working for a while, but just in retrospect, you feel a little weird weird about it, it sounds like. You feel a little like you're being used or what?

0:10:02 Michael: Yeah, I mean, I was certainly being used. Every cop in this country and every military member in this country is a pawn in a system for a bunch of rich people trying to achieve goals that we don't understand. So once I realized that that's what the system was, I mean, even the Marine Corps, you realize that because no soldier fights the war because of whatever the mission is. We all fight the war to try and get that person next to us a home home safely so that they can see their kid that we see the pictures of. We don't process war like that in the big picture. We only process it as our buddy next to us. So all that feels dirty now that we were there for that, rewarded. And it worked for me because I achieved things, but I achieved things that a lot of privilege set me up for and at the cost of other people.

0:10:49 Thomas: What privilege do you think was in play there?

0:10:53 Michael: I mean, I got to go into the Marine Corps because I didn't have a track record of getting arrested for the marijuana that was in my pocket at a rate much greater than everyone else's when they were growing up. Right. So, I means, I've had incidences where I have arrested people for much less than what I did in exchanges with police that resulted in nothing. Thing. So, so those things kept me having records and staying out of trouble. I mean, my name is Michael. So I don't have a resume issue that comes up.

0:10:59 Thomas: Oh. Yeah, true. True. Okay. Yeah.

0:11:28 Michael: Everybody goes through the system when people don't realize it. But when people complain about like IQ tests and things like that, how they're slated. So you got to go going into the military. There's a thing called the ASVAB test. And so I got a 99 on my ASVAB test, which is a perfect score. But in that state, You can say, oh, you're smart. But yeah, I grew up in a society and a culture and an education system that's directly suited for that test, that its information derives from. But a kid that grows up in Baltimore goes through an entirely different education system and experience that doesn't prepare them for that task. So there's all these little things that end up just piling up.

0:11:28 Thomas: True, yeah. Interesting. I wonder, is there a solution, though? Because I would assume, maybe this is a terrible assumption, but I would presume the test is stuff you may need to know to to be good at this job, or at least skills or like background knowledge you might need to have. So it sounds like it's not really a question of changing the test. Is it a question of trying to improve the systems in place in these underprivileged places, or do you think it's a little of both?

0:12:27 Michael: I would say it's definitely a matter of both. It is a matter of changing the test. Those things that we're saying are metrics of success are largely false for this country, especially. I mean, there are other countries that put up a very good argument that we shouldn't even be considered a first world country if you look at us statistically in what we're doing. So we have examples all around the world of people that are doing entirely better than we are. So we can fix it in policy, but we can also fix it by this realization of our history, knowing that, yeah, there's a guy, there's a white kid named Michael who has a completely clean record that's applying for this job. But there's this black kid who has four marijuana possession arrests, but he grew up in the West side of Baltimore. Like we immediately think that he is an inferior person. And we have to understand that because of this history and because of these exchanges and experiences, that that is that is wholly untrue.

0:12:31 Thomas: Okay.

0:13:24 Michael: And if we know from the big picture, it is very likely that that kid is actually much better and a higher performer than the white kid that doesn't have the record.

0:13:32 Thomas: Right. Or, or at least I think maybe I've heard you talk about this before, but at least they also would represent their community better and be, you know, someone from the community policing or, or maybe a certain community or whatever it might be. And you wouldn't have a skewed kind of demographic happening in the police force and that might help, but let me, let's get back to your story. So you, you were in the, uh, the Marines, you're in the fast team, and then you, what, you finished that and and went straight to trying to be a police officer?

0:14:01 Michael: Right. So one thing I learned from being in a fast team where you have to be ready to go anywhere in the world at any point in time is that I was not interested in the CIA's offer to recruit our unit members and try and do those same kind of things for the rest of my life, where I get phone calls saying I go to go to Saudi Arabia in the middle of the night. So I was certainly, dude,

0:14:20 Thomas: Don't Know who does those jobs. I really don't. I mean, I know there's a lot of Hollywood-esque stuff going on and like I get that when I'm watching Homeland I'm probably not watching like reality, but still, like, I still don't know who does those jobs. Like what kind of person wants to be in that situation? That's, it's amazing to me.

0:14:38 Michael: I've been around them. They're the guy that lives next door to you and is the family man who whips out his satellite on the USS Cole in the middle of the night and calls his family to tuck his kids in as he's dealing with an active terrorism scenario. I mean, just everybody else. It's weird.

0:14:54 Thomas: It's so, but like, but isn't there, I mean, living with that element of danger and that, you know, like how there's gotta be something about them. That's a little different than other people. Otherwise I would assume otherwise how are they, how are they making that work? I don't know.

0:15:09 Michael: Well, I'm certainly projecting, but I would say that like on the streets of Baltimore and dealing with weapons and guns Being around there, I was I was at a level of proficiency with my firearms that I the idea of someone out shooting me never even entered my mind. So it would be perfectly reasonable to see a guy with a gun in his hand as a safety risk, but I was proficient enough that I didn't process that as a safety risk. So I would say the same thing with these CIA guys and FBI guys that do that kind of stuff, is they've been doing this for so long and they're so proficient that we don't really see, where you see the danger, we don't.

0:15:17 Thomas: That'S a good point. Yeah.

0:15:50 Thomas: Okay. So they They just, they think they're okay. Sort of like how, it's probably that fallacy, like everybody recognizes that texting while driving is bad for other people, but then they don't realize it for themselves. Is it like kind of that kind of thing?

0:16:04 Michael: No, no, I think they're absolutely correct. So even if you look at the Gulf War when it was happening, it was safer to be actively engaged in the war than it was to be stateside training. I mean, people don't understand how good we are. That's why I laugh at these Second Amendment people that think they're going to stand up against us. It's like, I don't fucking think you understand how good you are. How good we were.

0:16:15 Thomas: Oh, really? Wow. Okay. Yeah. Oh my God, I'm so glad you said that. Oh, I have made that point a hundred times. The Facebook argument, I'll see my, you know, because I grew up in the country and so I've got a ton of conservative you know kind of shit kicker friends still and they'll always be like we need guns because they the government has guns and there'll be no one to challenge the government. It's like, do you have any idea how quickly they would stamp out your little, you know, army, citizen army.

0:16:52 Michael: Yeah, we would literally be giggling to ourselves in the middle of the operation.

0:16:54 Thomas: Yeah. And That's not even to talk about like the fact that you know the helicopter, just the infrastructure of it, even if it was just, you mano a mano or whatever. The fact that they have like helicopters, coordination, satellites, all this stuff. I mean, it's a joke. Anyway.

0:17:13 Michael: Yeah, that reminds me of being in training, though. Like, when you're doing this, you're thinking that you're just by yourself. So we used to do all like these kind of like urban combat and going through these buildings and you're just training as a small team. So you don't have your resources. You're trying to train like you have no resources. And then we do these big mock drill scenarios where we can actually call in the Air Force because they participate in everything. And when you do those scenarios and you actually have your reasons, you're like, man, this shit is easy. I mean, I don't think they understand the amount of firepower that it – I mean America can like beat every single country in the entire world at the same time. That's – I

0:17:51 Thomas: Well, can I ask you then what, because One counter argument I have heard, this is a bit of a rabbit trail, but I'm kind of interested in, if you don't mind, is I've heard them say, like, well, you know, we got, we essentially weren't successful in Iraq. We weren't successful in Vietnam really, like, what, so is it just we can't handle when it's like guerrilla warfare, we're not very good at that, or what, what's going on there? Hmm.

0:18:13 Michael: don'T think you can ever win guerrilla warfare because what we're doing is we're fighting battles of ideas with bombs. So you're not going to win that. We're not actually fighting other forces. So if Russia were to fight us one-on-one, tanks and airplanes, this isn't a match, right? But if you terrorize the Russian people, you'll never be able to stop them from infiltrating and conducting terrorism operations. We always have to understand that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, which is the exact same thing that's true in this country. The entire forefathers would have been considered terrorists to the British nation. So just remember what we're talking about, even when we label someone terrorist, that to get to that point, something is going wrong with our entire society.

0:18:29 Thomas: Right.

0:18:38 Thomas: I Think, yeah, I think there's a few shades of difference there, but I do think, I do totally agree with, I mean, I don't think the founding fathers were looking to commit mass murder against citizens of, you know, the UK, like, kill, I think they were good with killing combatants, but anyway. Anyway.

0:19:14 Michael: There was certainly a Native American genocide on this country that we kind of forget a lot.

0:19:19 Thomas: Absolutely. Yeah, that's that's a different. Yeah. I think that's kind of a not quite a terrorism thing. That's more of a just take over your entire land and kill everybody thing. But yeah. No, I agree. It is all a matter of perspective. And and I

0:19:31 Michael: That's the point. It is perspective. And

0:19:33 Thomas: Think you make a good point that it's like, sure, we could beat somebody. We could, we could like win the fight against somebody's military, but that doesn't mean all the people are like, "Oh, okay," and then we submit. Like, the entire citizenry doesn't just like quit and just go, "Well, you guys are stronger so we'll be cool." It doesn't happen like that.

0:19:53 Michael: It wouldn't happen here. You know, like you actually don't need your guns to stand up.

0:19:54 Thomas: Oh for Sure. Yeah. Our Citizens aren't even giving into our own government, they're Like, yeah.

0:20:00 Michael: Right. That's what I'm saying. And you don't needs to you don't need the gun to do it because

0:20:01 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a great point. Okay, so we could beat all the military, against military we can kick everybody's asses. It's just a question of, that's not really what it's about, sounds like you're saying. Yeah.

0:20:15 Michael: We're not facing that threat. There is no militaristic threat towards the United States. What we're threat is faced by our actions domestically and abroad, which are the exact same policy. So we exploit and oppress brown people in other countries to extract their resources. And that's the same thing we do here with American policing.

0:20:16 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm.

0:20:36 Thomas: Interesting, okay so how long were you in the force? No.

0:20:41 Michael: Okay. So since we totally sidetracked our story the way we were originally –

0:20:44 Thomas: No. It's Uh Yeah, I'm Trying to give gifts back to the story, but I appreciate you going down the uh, the rabbit, rabbit hole with me there.

0:20:45 Michael: Yes. All right. So going into the police department, I went in with that bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, a little bit go have fun, but still kind of wanted to help people, and thought it of a noble mission. So I kind of saw it as it was my ability to kick in doors and still do good at the same time. That obviously gets corrupted quite quickly, but it goes down a slow path as I got deeper into narcotics, especially. I was only a patrol officer for a short amount of time, ended up going to plainclothes narcotics dealing with the drug gangs and being what would be known as a knocker if somebody watches The Wire and things like that. So I was

0:21:30 Thomas: I watched the crap out of the wire. What? I love that show.

0:21:31 Michael: Really that white oppressor that didn't look like everybody else, that came from the county. I mean, I was that typical bad example of what a police officer is doing in these kind of neighborhoods. So I Was good at that and ended up being quickly assigned to the major case squad for narcotics where you do – we focused on what you kind of hear as violent repeat offenders. And that really put me even deeper into the drug issue. And I started to see that just from the drug perspective, enforcing the drug laws was actually harming the community more than it was helping it. I saw my efforts as the net negative that they truly were. I started to see other things like racial discrimination within the agency, started to see that the good old boy network, understanding how the bureaucracy works and how cops are pawns in this system, because like another sidetrack story, but there's one cop that I talk about all the time.

0:21:39 Thomas: Uh,

0:22:30 Michael: His name is Keith Romans. He was one of these young cops that go out there and they'd be field. The old commissioner had this idea of just a simple mantra, go after bad guys with guns. So he put kids that really had no experience in what they were doing into these plainclothes units and unmarked cars and would go up and down streets pulling over cars and trying to hunt down people with guns. And this guy's got two years on. He's doing this. He ends up in a gun battle. He ends up being shot and still fights in the gun battle, saving another cop, getting everything solved. And he's like this typical hero of what you would think of as a cop. And he ends up because of that law I was talking about with my pension, he ends up being pushed out, and because he has no time on, he only has two years on after being shot, his pay is so low.

0:23:17 Michael: And the way the rules are set up, he ends up with essentially less than Social Security and kicked out of the agency with nothing to stand on, because he was feeling exactly what that pawn that he was when he went through the system, was a perfect pawn, and the system still crushed him and didn't give a shit about him. So I started seeing those kind of things on the inside and tried to fight that and increase professionalism.

0:23:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:23:41 Michael: But that, of course, got me blackballed, got me ostracized from the police department, got me from being promoted after a while.

0:23:43 Thomas: Yeah. Can I, can I have you drill down a little bit on that? Like, of, uh, so you mentioned a lot of things, this is really cool stuff, but in terms OF like the, the, the narcotic stuff you just talked about, could you give me like a micro example of the kind of thing you mean? Um, because I, I do agree. Like, I,I think actually probably most of the listeners too will agree. It seems like the drug war, bad idea. But I'm wondering if you can give me kind of a micro, maybe a real life example of the kind of thing you're talking about, the kind of harm it's causing that you witnessed.

0:24:13 Michael: So you have one aspect, which is that it's fruitless. So like One of my first big operations was to take down this whole gang that was, we worked as a team for a few days, watched, observed, did buys, and this gang was running this block selling drugs. So we locked them all up and I felt like there was gonna be this sense of victory. The very next day I went there and there was a whole new operation just with new faces running the exact same things.

0:24:16 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:36 Michael: It's completely somebody

0:24:36 Thomas: So you got rid of the Barksdale's and then it was, yeah, it's a wire reference.

0:24:40 Michael: Else steps and And probably the most intimate story of it is when I was doing major case squad a lot, there was this one drug dealer I watched for a very long time.

It took me a while to figure out what he was doing, but come to find out, he would shut down the shop and take care of his little brother and take his little brother to the bus stop, get him on the bus, and then he would try and make his money, and later on, he would end up shutting down the shop again.

He would get his brother from the bus stopped, take him to eat, come back, make sure he was set, did his homework, and then come out and would open the shop up again. But what was very easy for me to see was that in this impoverished neighborhood that has absolutely no resources, this little boy has has one resource and that's this drug Dealer that I'm watching. And I know that as soon as this operation is over, when I arrest this guy, and I did, and put him in a federal prison, that kid now was losing the one resource he had. So not only was I setting the cycle for him to have to be in the same position later on, I was also making that neighborhood empirically less safe because, because now there was nobody there to shut down that shop to protect that boy.

0:24:41 Thomas: Yeah, wow. Yeah yeah.

0:25:56 Thomas: And I suppose like the stereotypical, I don't know, cop slash, you conservative in general point of view would be he's breaking the law. He's selling something bad. He needs to be put away. What is what is kind of your counter to that in your point of view?

0:26:11 Michael: I don't have to counter it. They've countered the argument themselves as the OxyContin epidemic has kicked on and we decided that we were going to stop doctors from prescribing it, which means that people can't get the OxyContin. So they've turned to heroin, and now white people are doing heroin in areas like Massachusetts, and they've made their own argument that it's a public health issue and not a criminal one as soon as it affected them.

0:26:34 Thomas: Yeah. Do you think the scary part of it for Or we'll just go with the stereotype, the white kind of typical American thing. The scary part has got violence and the sort of low socioeconomic aspects of it. Do you think people are reacting to that? And then when they see it as just this problem that, oh, these are kind of well-off people who are merely just dying, then it's a different thing to them.

0:27:01 Michael: No, because I think they really have it all from a position of ignorance because this has nothing to do with the drugs. Violence is a result of prohibition and lack of resources. So the previous most violent time in American history was during the prohibition of alcohol. And that was way more violent than it is now. People also have to understand that this is now literally the safest time in human existence.

0:27:15 Thomas: Hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

0:27:29 Michael: So you just hear about it a lot more. You are now safer than you have ever been from the threat of any crime whatsoever. So we really have to understand that perspective. And then when you see the violence, understand that violence is because it's in the black market and people have no resources. So when things are in the black market and people have to fight for resources, then they fight for resources like anybody else would. So we shouldn't look at it as in look at these animals doing it. We should look at as what conditions of society are we setting out that we are putting people in positions that they have to resort to this? What would have to happen to me that I would resort to those actions?

0:28:11 Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. OK, well, let's let's finish up with your story and then I'll go back. I'll I'll get back into the maybe get you to talk a little bit more about the drug war. But so that's the kind of thing you saw. You put away someone who was taking care of their brother. That's a microcosm of a lot of other examples. I'm sure you saw and is there anything else you can talk about along those lines? Like the kind of harm you saw the drug war inflicting in your personally that you witnessed.

0:28:37 Michael: Well, you also know who you're not focusing on. So you realize that what What you end up focusing on is a lack of resources again. So how this is, is we know that if somebody would read the justice report from Baltimore that the Department of Justice put out just recently, that it's a scathing report and confirms everything I've said. But the hit rate in all these neighborhoods for like stop and frisk for actually finding contraband is much higher with white people. Studies show that white people carry drugs at equal rates as black people, if not more. And that also means that there's more white drug dealers. And what happens with white drug dealers is white drug dealers, because of all the other society issues, they actually have resources. So a white drug dealer is a kid with a backpack driving a brown Honda Civic and he's on his parents' insurance.

0:29:26 Michael: So he has all these other resources and you don't see that kid. And that kid is much harder to actually get because you have to have traffic violations. You have to be able able to search the car. You have to figure out who they are. You have to do all this tough work. But when someone doesn't have resources and the only way they can sell drugs is to walk 10 feet to the corner from their own house, well, then you're actually punishing their lack of resources and where they live.

0:29:52 Michael: You're not punishing dealing. So this is what we do with a lot of our things. Our implicit bias makes us execute our laws against a community that we have these factors of bias against and not actually what the crime is. So like, for instance, jaywalking, you'll see people arrested for jaywalker in black neighborhoods, but never in white neighborhoods. So you're not criminalizing the the the action. You're criminalizing who you are, what you look like in the location that you're doing it.

0:29:40 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's sort of so there's two components. It sounds like one is just a low hanging fruit thing where you're saying people who are well off, who have resources, they're actually harder to catch, too, like they're harder to even get. So it's like it sounds like police just kind of go after the easy ones, which is all this guy has no resources. He'll be just setting up shop on a corner somewhere and they're easy to find. And then the other is maybe like as a result of that over time, do you think that has led to just so much more police presence in these areas? And that is sort of like a feedback loop where it constantly keeps them down and keeps them in that cycle of oppression, I guess. And then you start over-policing, or if you haven't already, and then you're arresting people for jaywalking just because you're there or something. Does that sound like it's sort of accurately describing what's happening?

0:31:18 Michael: Yeah, you're pretty much right. So we have a feedback loop of bad data that's formulated by our oppressive system. And then our implicit biases focus on certain people. So then that fills our data. And then we look at our data and then that feeds the narrative of our implicit biases. And Drug war is a tool for that. So we have to recognize that human beings do this and this happens. So it's not like you got to be like, oh, my God, I'm not giving up my white privilege. Oh, my god, like I didn't do any of this. Like, yeah, we know you didn't doing any of these. We're trying to say that these things exist and has created an institution and a system that expresses this even if the actors in the system don't intend for it to act that way.

0:31:33 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. So while You were on the force, though, when did you start thinking about this kind of stuff? Were you still kind of going with the culture? I had a female police officer on the show from Chicago and she talked about just how she's as liberal as they come.

She's she's, you know, she went into the force, maybe like you, maybe, I don't know, a little different thinking she was going to make a difference, thinking she could focus on the areas of crime she wanted to focus on, you know, like not bullshit drug crime, but like other things.

Think I think she she really cared about animals and like animal abuse and wanted to focus on that but she quickly realized that like the culture is just so difficult to overcome that she couldn't even express like that she was voting for Obama like that was that was enough to where she was almost ostracized and and and she described how after that little thing happened that little interaction she just would never speak up again like she didn't want to stick out she didn't want to, you know, make waves or whatever. And I, I totally get it. Did you face that situation at all? Anything similar to that?

0:33:06 Michael: And I think that's really led to some of my naivety on some of the extent of police corruption and culture. And I think that's because, like, in the Marine Corps, you really, like races, at least in the unit I was in, that if anybody expressed any racial thoughts, that shit was checked right away. So I think I created my own bubble of not being around that stuff. Stuff So and especially if you're black you don't have a choice but To Always

0:33:31 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, I should have said voting for Obama wasn't necessarily just the race thing. It was, it was just even being liberal and being against that, you know, like kind of the, the, against the, uh-huh.

0:33:37 Michael: Yeah But Even If like free thought like I just I wouldn't have allowed people to not rationalize thought around me so Like if I thought you were somebody that couldn't understand that uh there's nuance to a conversation on a political issue well then I just I wasn't going to hang around you so I I created my bubble bubble of being around rational atheists and stuff.

0:33:51 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. How many of those could you find though?

0:34:09 Michael: I mean, there was a lot. And you got to remember that I was in special units, so that filtered me away from the agency, which it did in the Marine Corps too. So I kind of have a Marine Corps bubble being in an elite unit in the Marine Corps, where I was actually never around the Marine Corp. I was always around the Air Force and the Navy because they took us everywhere.

0:34:13 Thomas: Okay. Okay.

0:34:27 Michael: So, I have had some of these own bubbles that I've locked myself into unintentionally and didn't experience these things like other people have. Other cops have seen shit that took me a lot longer to see. I really, like, I put the, I knew it was wrong and I knew the metrics were wrong and I knew we weren't a professional agency. When I was promoted to sergeant, I ended up writing, writing a big long book about how to do professional policing and it's 518 pages that that I put out there for everybody and and how to handle these scenario

0:34:32 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:56 Thomas: I would hope they already had some sort of manual that would tell them that.

0:34:57 Michael: No no, it doesn't work that way, right?

0:35:03 Thomas: No, no. Okay, there's no training.

0:35:06 Michael: So no all the information is protected and that's how they keep the good old boy network going, so they pass down the information orally and within their own clubs. So I wanted to break that out and because I thought I was smart enough to, I didn't need them, I wasn't in their club, but I could, I could do it better than them and I could write, write it down at the same time and give it to everybody else.

0:35:06 Thomas: There's no, yeah. Hmm.

0:35:29 Thomas: Are you, what kind of things are you talking about? Just how to be a good police officer? Are you talking about how, hmm.

0:35:34 Michael: It's a testing thing. So there's a system to it. There's a way to put your mentality. There is a way of focus issues. There's the way to think about managing a situation like a hostage barricade, where if you're an officer, you're going to be thinking things like how to get everybody out safely. But when you're a manager within an agency, you then become responsible for protecting the image of that agency. So a lot of things is about putting the police department first, not about putting officers first. So they don't understand these complexities and how that plays out. They don't get to pass the promotional tests.

0:36:11 Thomas: Okay so they'll always be kind of down lower on the totem pole is what what you're saying. It's just because it's culturally insensitive.

0:36:16 Michael: Right. I don't like it. That's me. That's personal.

0:36:26 Thomas: They'll be lower on the pecking order. How about that? Better?

0:36:29 Michael: That's better.

0:36:30 Thomas: Okay, better. Pecking order, got it. You didn't write a book on how to police better. You wrote a book, it sounds like, and let me know if I have it wrong. You wrote a book on how to work the system better, like how to be, how to like ascend better or how to, or how To be more like a, I don't know, company minded and, and be successful within the, the force. Is that what you're saying?

0:36:31 Michael: I would say more how to play the game while doing the right thing.

0:37:01 Thomas: Okay. So you try to do both, like to bridge the gap of playing the game and doing the right thing. Interesting.

0:37:06 Michael: We got to get in power to fix things.

0:37:08 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, so, okay. I mean, we already kind of knew the ending that you were injured in some way. Do you have a cool story about that?

0:37:08 Michael: Right. No, I don't have a cool story about the injury, But so, so they ended up after the book, I started being ostracized. So that's when I got kicked out to different units. They would try to like put me in, in, in missions away from people so that I didn't have as much influence around other officers and kind of blackballed me in the agency and would keep me from getting promoted and things like that. But when I had a, an injury on my shoulder, which was just a dumb one, we were, had to to move equipment in the basement. And instead of putting officers, instead of telling officers to go do it, I said that we should go do it ourselves so our officers could be out on the street. I was trying to be a responsible manager and ended up hurting myself on a stupid desk in a basement. And it just kept getting re-injured. So I kept having to have surgeries on it. And

0:37:17 Thomas: Oh, no.

0:38:03 Michael: That pushes me over the year. So even if I could have come back eventually, they don't care. They force you you out.

0:38:09 Thomas: Is that just a Baltimore thing you were saying? Or is that okay?

0:38:12 Michael: Yeah, Baltimore thing. Yeah.

0:38:13 Thomas: Is that are they they're just what are they just trying to save money? Like, it seems like an insane policy.

0:38:18 Michael: Well, because it's two different budgets. So you have the police budget and you have the pension budget and the pension budge is largely funded by police officers themselves. So they end up actually putting the burden onto the police officers instead of the agency.

0:38:31 Thomas: I, that that sounds crazy. It's amazing, amazing. Is there, are people making waves about that?

0:38:35 Michael: Cops are constantly. Yeah I mean we all bitch and they have lawsuits and everything. I mean cops are treated like crap from their agencies. People forget that very often. So when they feel that they're pitted between two different sides they mean they truly are. Their agency is throwing them out to dry. I mean, these cops like in North Dakota right now, they don't want to be doing that. But that's what some of them turn their badges in. So like they're stuck in this system, too, and trapped. So we have to create frameworks that don't trap them into that system. And that became kind of being the function of what I did.

0:38:38 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:39:13 Thomas: So after

0:39:13 Michael: So when I went out, I recognized that we had managerial problems and we didn't use technology good. So I went and got my master's in information technology, and I already had my bachelor's in criminal justice. So I was finishing that, and yeah, they did.

0:39:28 Thomas: You, so they retired you essentially. And then you, so your response was you different, you wanted help in a different way. It sounds like, which sounds kind of noble.

0:39:35 Michael: I was just going to move straight to academia. I thought that was my only chance was to write papers and do it from an academic perspective. So I just started setting myself out to get my PhD. I was in the middle of my PhD, which I'm still about a year away from finishing that. So I'm doing it now mainly. And we ended up having Black Lives Matter movement starting, and there ended up being this whole social wave, attention being brought to the subject. And emotional break for me and kind of breaking my loyalty of any brotherhood sense was watching Tamir Rice be murdered. And I can never, like, to this day I can't, I just cannot wrap my head around that and the response from Cleveland and police departments and prosecutors, the whole system. And then my ability to separate myself from the situation happened when Freddie Gray was killed in Baltimore, because that was my police department and people I knew, and, you know, the rules and policies and procedures that I was just intimate with.

0:39:39 Thomas: Hmm. Okay. Interesting.

0:40:38 Michael: That was where Freddie Gray was picked up and arrested. It was the very first place I was. I was a police officer walking foot patrol. So it was like this big full circle where I couldn't keep up any walls of any sort anymore. And that's when I had the Twitter thing in June of 2015 that people picked up on. And I didn't expect anybody to pick up on it. I mean,

0:40:45 Thomas: Wow.

0:41:01 Thomas: Yeah. It seems like I actually, a lot of, it looks like you did a ton of interviews right around that time. So did you kind of go viral in a way?

0:41:09 Michael: It was fast. Um, so there was a whole bunch, you know, from that moment on, I, I think I've been doing, you know, three, four interviews or documentaries or something every week for the last, uh, over a year and a half now. Well,

0:41:10 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:23 Thomas: I feel like you're going to get burned out eventually. I mean, I think this is the bottom of the barrel. When you come on my show, you're like, you know what? You need to re-examine your life. Maybe I need to put an end to this. But to get back to that, though, I mean... So Freddie Gray, do you have any insight into that? I mean because they just got off off somewhat recently, right? They weren't found guilty of any charges.

0:41:45 Michael: Yeah, we say this system does this, so when the system does this, why anybody would be surprised baffles me.

0:41:50 Thomas: Well, yeah, it's just such a weird case, though. I don't know of a lot of time. Is that something that you know anything about from your experience? Was this something officers did? They put someone in a van and not secure them, and then, wow.

0:41:51 Michael: Yeah. Okay.

0:42:04 Michael: Well, The quickest way I can say this is I immediately thought the whole time that the officers that arrested him, uh, dropped a knee on the back of his neck and hurt him then, because that happens a thousand times, cities around the country. Then the prosecutor got into this narrative that it happened in the van. So the people that I know from the police department swore to me up and down that the three black cops that were involved are all the ones who were post-arrest, and that's Porter, Sergeant Alicia White, and Cesar Goodson, who was actually driving the van. Everybody I know says those three are absolutely upstanding people who would never do anything to hurt anybody and would have gotten medical attention if they would have known something. And so the white cop that was in charge of the arrest, Lieutenant Rice, is well known to be a complete asshole and is the type of person that would hurt somebody and put the blame on other officers.

0:42:57 Michael: So the general feeling around the police department and personally is I think those three black cops were thrown out to the wolves and those three white cops have a lot to answer for that they were never even questioned about.

0:43:34 Thomas: All right, that's it for part one with Michael A. Wood Jr., part two, there's lots more to come, and, of course, listeners over on patreon.com, patrons, rather, patreon.com/atheist will get part two early, I will make it available right away for you guys, speaking of, I must have missed a week, because I've got a lot of new patrons to thank, I thank you guys so much, it's going to take me a little while to get through them, but I need to thank everybody, thank you, David Eastman, Erik Janemar, Totoro, I love Totoro. Great movie.

0:44:33 Thomas: Richard Prendergast and Elizabeth Maureen Yoder. This is incredible, guys. Thank you so much. Christian Lobdell, Courtney D, Csaba Daday, Damn Monkey, or Darn Monkey. I can't tell. Rachel, Greg Drouineaud, Daniel Schauer, Njål Davidsson, and Jake Shelton. Got everybody. Thank you guys so much, and also Sammy upped his pledge. Thank you very much, Sammy. I appreciate that a lot. Lot. Yeah, really blown away by that support. That's why the show is happening. And thank you so much. I hope you enjoy the early content on this interview. So that's it for me this week. We'll see you Monday or early if you are a patron. See you then.