AS295: Michael A. Wood Jr, Part 2

Transcript

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

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 295, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, we've got part two with Michael A. Wood Jr., and let's just get right to it. Here you go.

0:00:52 Thomas: I've heard you talk about this a little bit other places, but people like that guy, Rice, I think you said his name was, they just kind of exist and they, they somehow they get away with it. Could you talk a little bit about that? I mean, it sounds like they're known. You say that, oh, this guy has a reputation. People know it. And I've heard it described before too, where it's like, you'll know these people are assholes, but because of the culture, it's always just like, yeah, that guy's an asshole, you know, nothing's really done about it. You know, is It, could you talk about that? Yeah.

0:01:20 Michael: But it's not just the culture. It's the system. So like Joey Crystal is another officer that's got a good bit of attention from Baltimore. He's a true whistleblower, whereas I never really was a whistleblow, even though people put that title on me that he actually testified against seeing this corruption from one of those known assholes who was Sergeant Mario G. He was like, I've gotten into personal arguments with him from him being such an asshole and a guy like that out there. But Joey ended up being kicked out of the agency, ostracized, ended up working in a small agency in Florida, having to get the run around. He suffered all the repercussions. And even though he got some small convictions on the other officers, he paid a price with his entire career, which may be with movement where eventually I'll be able to salvage that. But now it's not like you're even saying that it's just the culture. Like if they broke the culture, which is fine, you got plenty of strong people who can break the culture the system that's been created by this culture will pound them down.

0:01:46 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:02:22 Thomas: I mean, it seems kind of, I don't know, I guess maybe chicken the egg kind of thing, but it does seem like oftentimes there would be laws in place, like you could, uh, it sounds like if, if we knew, if we had the right evidence, or, or we knew this cop maybe in the Freddy Gray case was the one who actually caused harm, I mean, people were trying, clearly the prosecutor was trying to to make charges happen. They just had the wrong officers. Like, I don't know that, I mean, I guess it's, it just depends on how you look at it, but it sounds to me more, more like the, the culture of, of secrecy of, you know, not just not being transparent with it, always protecting your own versus, you know, being a whistleblower. I mean that, that, do you think that, you see that as more of a system issue or versus a culture issue?

0:03:12 Michael: Yeah, Yeah, I do see it as more of a systems issue because systems are what get played out. So when cops go in there bright-eyed and bushy-tailed thinking they're going to help people, there's a system put in place that measures everything they do based on how many people they arrest. So if they don't participate in the system, then they can't survive. They will get pushed out of the system. You would end up getting things saying you weren't good enough, so you're out of The Agency, and those people are blackballed and looked to be poor cops.

0:03:28 Thomas: Hmm.

0:03:42 Thomas: Okay. But I suppose I was talking more about the police violence kind of thing. So I think that's maybe a little bit separate in terms of the over-policing of, you know, minorities and all that kind of things. Like that's a system issues for sure. But something like protecting, okay, sure.

0:03:56 Michael: But I was trying to simplify it. So I'm taking it. It's from the very beginning that you're into that system, that you'RE into that, even that line of thinking that your brotherhood is more important because you remember you're pitted again. So it's not just these couple of issues. It's all those issues you're saying and a thousand other issues that are coming into it.

0:04:05 Thomas: Okay.

0:04:17 Thomas: When you have someone like this guy who everyone knows is an asshole, this this particular cop, what is that? How does that play out? I mean, you have these in your career. You have these people. I'm sure it sounds like from what you've said before and here where you knew they were messed up, like they would they would do shit. They would, abuse you people. How did that play? They just everybody kind of knows it and they just let it slide.

0:04:40 Michael: I mean, so the thing is, is I don't even want to go down that thought process, because what that is, is that is a a bad apple process of thinking. And we're always going to have bad apples in professions. That is just a fucking rule. But what we end up doing is we end up focusing on thinking that it's a bad apple issue. And this isn't a bad issue. This isn't an apple issue, I was not a bad apple. If you think of it that way, I acted within the law. I did what society told me to do, but my actions were implicitly biased and racist towards the communities that I was policing.

My actions were objectively white supremacists and racist in their actions. So we can't be caught up in intent. We have to Think about the system, because we have this, American policing is different from every other policing in the entire world. So if we like this bad apple analogy, we have to remember that this barrel was constructed on three things in America. It was constructed off of cops getting slaves and returning them to their rightful owners at the time from runaway slave catching. And so even officers from Boston, the first ones were poor white people who were paid to go enact their implicit biases to catch black runaway slaves and

0:05:21 Thomas: Right. I suppose it's like you said. Yeah, yeah.

0:06:02 Thomas: I think

0:06:02 Michael: Take them all the way back.

0:06:02 Thomas: They were pretty explicit back then.

0:06:05 Michael: Good point. Good point. So even if they didn't intend it that way, though, they've been manipulated into a system as well and taught these things. So they end up taking them all the way down south to their owners. So that's our first form of policing here. And then it becomes protecting white property, which is how they line up police right now to this day. When you see the CVS burning in Baltimore and the cops around it protecting it, that's an outward expression of that continued protection of white property. Even though Freddie Gray was being sent into the new Jim Crow and was the only one that actually died during the entire uprising. And then the third plank that built this whole barrel was the continued genocide of the Native American people, which you still continue to see enacted out today. And you have this barrel. And then this barrel was seasoned with more implicit bias and the drug war and mass incarceration and the crime bill and all these other things that piled up.

0:06:08 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:07:00 Michael: And then we keep putting apples into it. So people say we need to reform things, like get diversity, and we need to change laws about this. But all that is trying to do is figure out how to keep an apple from getting poisoned in that barrel, or seeing how long you can keep it from being poisoned, or putting new apples in is what everybody's trying to do. But that's fundamentally all corrupt and misleading. You have to build a new barrel that is finally built from people saying, how do you want to be be police, instead of what the entire history has been, has been rich people telling, paying people and arming them and telling you how you will be policed.

0:07:37 Thomas: Good analogy, that makes a lot of sense. I would say that the only thing I was getting, I didn't mean to use the bad apple analogy. I don't think I was, but I do think there's, there's like you said, there're a thousand issues and maybe a thousand more after that. I could see, like, if we isolate these things in our minds, you could still have all of of the bad policing policies, the over-policing of minorities, everything you talked about, which would be horrible, but we could eliminate the sort of extrajudicial violence portion of it by having better whistleblowing and changing that culture, having to change the entire system. I don't know if that's like the first step. I don't know if that's a more important step, might be less important, who knows, in the grand scheme of things. It might be more important to get rid of over-policing minorities and all these drug crimes and stopping the drug war.

0:08:27 Thomas: That might be even more important. But I think I was just focusing in on one particular component of this entire shitty barrel, which was the idea that cops are lot of leeway in terms of what they can do to a person, to a citizen, and they get away with it oftentimes because of this kind of culture of protection. But I didn't mean to say that was the only issue happening. I just think that's one issue.

0:08:52 Michael: Right. But that is, so when I say the bad apple, I just don't think that's an issue we can avoid. So if you think a cop is going to shoot somebody because they have a racist intent, that's overt, I can't, I Can't identify that. And I can to create a system that will prevent that from occurring, right? Because that's like thought police. I can do that. But what, but what I can do is I can create a system that doesn't allow that person to operate in it and and and is immediately identified and pushed out. But we have this idea in America that if we punish things, that it will reduce them.

And that is it's completely untrue. So we think that if a cop shoots – if we lock up Walter Scott – I mean Michael Slager for life for killing Walter Scott, that that will prevent the next Michael Slager from killing the next Walter Scott. And everything we know about criminal justice says that is completely untrue. So we get caught up – that's why I say we get called up in these solutions like, well, if somebody does this bad and we send them to prison, that it will solve something. And it won't because that system still enables the next Michael Slagler to kill the next Walter Scott.

0:09:12 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, you still want to punish that person. It would still be better to punish someone for murder than not. I mean for killing someone.

0:10:15 Michael: I find that I find I find them morally bankrupt. So we should our our criminal justice.

0:10:20 Thomas: You think it's not better to put these officers behind bars when they do something criminal versus not.

0:10:26 Michael: I think the idea of punishing them and seeking any punishment is ethically and morally corrupt and not how our system was even designed. It's supposed to be a system of rehabilitation. So we are supposed to be putting people in prison cells against human nature and against all their human rights in order to protect the rest of society from that person, not to treat them like a dog in a cage and punish them. So we have – I

0:10:48 Thomas: Well, I agree with that. I mean two separate issues though. I mean if we...

0:10:55 Michael: Get you, but if we have the right idea – so you got to understand, like that female officer who killed Terence Crutcher, when she – she was truly in fear, right? So we can't think that if we put her into a prison cell that we've somehow benefited the situation, because the only reason that woman is shooting him is because she has been assigned a task by society that she willingly volunteered to do but couldn't operate under an emotional condition and traumatic situation, for people that we can never judge how somebody will act under those circumstances until they're in those circumstances.

0:11:05 Thomas: Uh-huh. Uh, well, okay.

0:11:34 Michael: So the best, hold on Thomas, the best way to protect society from her killing somebody in that situation, like that again, is she just can't be a cop and can't own a gun to be perfectly morally honest about it.

0:11:34 Thomas: We're blending, we're blending things together. I'm talking about, there's a range of things. There's a rage of problems. Go ahead.

0:11:49 Thomas: I totally, I totally agree with that. I think maybe we had different, examples in mind when we were talking about this and maybe that's where the disagreement came from. Cause I actually totally agree With that. I think that especially, uh, let's think about one, do you remember that there was there's moreover, by where I am in California, there was a BART officer, the, you know, the rapid transit kind of thing who killed a man because he grabbed his gun instead of his taser. Do you remember that? It was a few years back.

0:12:19 Michael: Yeah, that's for the outstation. That's Oscar Grant.

0:12:21 Thomas: Yeah. And like, that's the kind of thing where if that guy, if it's true and I, we can't really know what's going on in his head, but it seemed like he was consistent about it. It seemed like in the video, he He was seemed shocked at what he just did. If that's true, like, I wouldn't say that guy deserves the chair like he it seems like he just should never be an officer. He should never have him be in that position ever. Like, I agree with that. I don't I don't agree with punishing people who if they were in a certain situation, maybe they were trigger happy because they were scared, whatever. I'm not talking about punishing those people. I'm talking about the ones who are actually inflicting extrajudicial violence on criminals and getting away with it. I mean, people who are doing really shitty stuff to citizens because I don't know why, because they're sadists.

0:12:22 Michael: Yes.

0:13:07 Thomas: I don't know why. I mean... So there's different ranges of examples we could be talking about. And if there's a clear-cut situation where it is something criminal, like they've actually with intent knowingly harmed someone way far over and above what it would be in their job, I'm just saying those people I think should be punished. I don't know what the you know, depends on the situation But that's the only point I was making

0:13:29 Michael: Yeah, I have no desire to punish anybody. A

0:13:31 Thomas: Well, Do you it's think like no there shouldn't be prisons I at all? I mean, I'm I fully like as Left as it gets on on

0:13:37 Michael: Prison that is it's got to be focused on protecting society from that person and then getting them back into society to be a productive member. I am not interested in any form of putting people into prisons in their current form.

0:13:41 Thomas: Rehabilitation. Yeah. Oh Okay, I mean? What do we do? I mean, this is a totally different conversation. And I actually, believe it or not, I agree a lot with you. I just think given the frame of what we're talking about, it would be pretty hard to operate in a society if we just decided that prisons were didn't like that. We can't have them. We can'T put any. If we paused all of the justice system right now, I don't know how practical that is. But I do agree that we need reform in prisons for sure. I actually work somewhat related to that. I don't really talk about it that much, but I have seen how bad they can be firsthand. But just in general, if the principle is of, let's say our principle of criminal justice is, you know, one of rehabilitation or quarantine, like we're just keeping bad people away from other people.

0:14:43 Thomas: People, assuming we have that, that's what I would want to have happen to these officers who are doing this shit. And it's not happening, I think, in large part because of the culture of silence and no one will say anything.

0:14:55 Michael: Totally agreed. I just I just wanted to always keep people reminded that what we do as human beings is we end up thinking things like, look, this black community is being punished for these crimes here. Here, we want to make sure cops get punished as much. And I want to go, no, no. We want to make sure that the black community gets punished as little as the cops. Think about it the other way.

0:15:12 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. A Great point, I agree with that. I think, mean, certainly, we could get back to, what, what specific things do you think we should do to end the stupid? I mean, is it as simple as legalize everything? Are there any nuances there that you've maybe studied or looked at that you could tell us about?

0:15:36 Michael: Well, I mean, I think we're on that path. I think it's unavoidable because the science supports it. And we're going to keep going down that way, especially as the generations move forward. But we really have to figure out the question is how to speed it up. How do We get to sensible solutions faster. And we have countries all around the world who do this much better than us. I'm pretty happy with you just picking any of them and going with it for now and figuring out which way you want to go. I mean, decriminalization keeps the violence component. So you have to remember that. That increases public health, but you keep the violent component of the black market. So I am for legalization and regulation of everything, putting it into a doctor's hands If we have to.

0:15:39 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm.

0:16:21 Thomas: Just to clarify terms, did you, so you mean decriminalizing would just mean what? Not arresting people for doing it, but it's still not okay to sell it. And that's why you'd still have the black market. Is that what you mean?

0:16:33 Michael: Yeah, as long as you have the black market and you're not putting it into the store. So, I mean, prohibition is the easiest way to think of it. If you don't have your your your state sanctioned liquor store on the corner, well, then you're going to have gangsters making alcohol for everybody. It's just a supply and demand issue.

0:16:50 Thomas: Okay.

0:16:50 Michael: So if you just decriminalize, then you make sure that the people who have alcoholism taken to hospitals and are treated for their addiction and aren't fired because they're alcoholics. You're putting measures like that in place, which are a net benefit to society, but you're still going to have the violence associated with black market trades?

0:17:10 Thomas: OK, so full legalization would mean making these things even openly available through like doctors. Is that what you think the best solution is or?

0:17:20 Michael: Well, I think primarily it's for them to decide those solutions because it's a public health issue. So I think it's for doctors, not the DEA, to argue about which drugs they test and how they use them. So cops tell that now. And that's just silly. It's completely irrational. The doctors decide those kind of things. But if you're talking about cannabis, which is literally literally the safest substance on the entire planet. It is safer than water. So as as I'm concerned with cannabis, is everybody grow it, everybody sell it, anybody do whatever you want with it.

0:17:36 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:17:57 Michael: This is a ridiculous conversation to have.

0:17:58 Thomas: What percentage do you think that would take care of? Just, just, as a ballpark, like how big of this drug war and the over policing, the people getting arrested for no good reason, or from, like, what percentage is merely marijuana versus, like, I don't know, other, other, uh, harder core, like, know, heroin and that kind of thing.

0:18:15 Michael: I'm going to be guessing, but this is something we actually don't have to guess about. We could find that out by looking at seizure reports and evidence reports from police departments. So that information may exist out there somewhere, but I'm gonna go with 50 and I

0:18:28 Thomas: Okay. And that seems like, I mean, that seems, like such a no brainer. I mean it seems so, so easy to be able to make things 50% better, which is a huge amount in no, in no time by just making this legal. I, I really, in terms of marijuana, I don't get it. I don't get why that hasn't happened sooner, but I mean I, I guess other drugs still seem like scarier. I dunno. I could, I could see people not wanting to legalize other more, I guess, I don't know what the right word would be, but hardcore kind of drugs, but marijuana, like it seems so easy.

0:19:00 Michael: Think I'm going to win an argument single time. Like, whatever your drug is, I, we're going to win the argument for why you should have it legalized. I mean, even if you take heroin, heroin was literally legal until like 1930 or something like that. It was sold on shelves, bayer heroin was sold on shelves. You didn't have, you didn't have the, I mean, the world didn't fall apart.

0:19:17 Thomas: Yeah. Well, go back long enough and everything was legal. No, I'm just kidding. But no, I agree. I

0:19:24 Michael: I mean, it's true with drugs. I mean, there was a time that nobody even thought of the concept of regulating something that people consumed. That's

0:19:35 Thomas: Yeah. I'm all for that sort of, you know, that's one thing I think the libertarians maybe have have right is why are we, what's that? What'd you say?

0:19:44 Michael: That's it, that's all the USDA.

0:19:46 Thomas: Yeah, that's pretty much it. That's, that's, that'S pretty much all. Everything else is pretty crazy. Like I'm good with the civil rights act and I'm Good with a lot of things. I'm GOOD with driver's licenses, like stuff that they're, you know, hardcore libertarians are.

0:19:59 Michael: FDA, really, CDC. I like these things. I

0:19:59 Thomas: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. But one thing I think they have right. Is this, this making something, making it illegal for me, like just Just in my house right now, I have some sort of substance, whatever it might be, and just making it illegal for me to just partake in that, like in my own body, in my own time, in My own, you know, that is, I, it's weird that we're so pro that in this country, like pro regulating that kind of experience.

0:20:27 Michael: Go with any consensual adult agreement. I'm not for are regulating, so, like prostitution, it's preposterous to be illegal. It

0:20:32 Thomas: So, oh yeah, good point. That's another element. I mean, that, that could be another, uh, it'S, I don't think it's quite as big as the drug drug war or whatever, but I'm sure that's like sex workers and stuff.

0:20:46 Michael: Almost completely stops human trafficking. So if you care about human trafficking, it's not about locking up and punishing human traffickers. So this is why I talk about changing our mentality from away from punishment ideas into solution ideas for causations. What

0:20:49 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Couldn't agree more. I really couldn't. I don't, I would say that, what do you think about the way to get this message across to people? Because people just don't think this way, you know, like they, they really, I know, I don', I know you've been trying, you've been trying your ass off and it's, you know it hasn't happened immediately. So clearly you're you're doing something wrong. No, I'm just kidding.

0:21:13 Michael: The hell do you think I've been doing? Three to four interviews a week sometimes. For real.

0:21:25 Thomas: Yeah. No. Okay. So it's a question of just trying to get this mentality, just share your view of, of the harm it will cause and, and, uh, or it causes and the, I guess the, the greater good that will happen if you just allow these things to be legal and stop over-policing them.

0:21:25 Michael: Yeah.

0:21:42 Michael: I mean, because it's things that we, we, we know these things to be true. So it's this overarching thing which obviously ties into atheism, where we just, we have a problem with accepting information and we have this anti-intellectual thread that comes in. And I can't tell you how many times I'm insulted for relying on information and scholarly resources. It's like, it's precisely,

0:21:42 Thomas: Oh yeah. Especially among, yeah, certainly there's an the element of our country that is highly against that. And sometimes it bridges both sides too. But yeah, the idea that you're, well, you're just over there in your liberal school doing liberal schoolwork and reading liberal people. So clearly, you don't have the right information. We have to rely on old fashioned police instincts or something. Thing.

0:22:28 Michael: There's just no way around it. Yeah, I don't know how we get past that. I'm hoping that it's a millennial thing, that once we have, you know, we know that the numbers are for, for accepting, uh, truthful information when it comes to generations, so when there's a certain amount of people from a certain generation that die off, I think we'll, we'll see rapid improvement, but that, or

0:22:41 Thomas: Yeah. That's what we're tiptoeing around, which is like, kindly would you die off, old people? Come on. I like, that's, yeah, yeah.

0:22:53 Michael: At least, or these retire, let us have these positions, you know? So people look at it like that. I mean, when it comes with me to running a police agency, it's like, uh, I mean I know you guys want to hire the dude that's been doing this for 15 years, but understand he's been doing it wrong for 15 year.

0:23:08 Thomas: Yeah, yeah yeah.

0:23:13 Michael: I've been doing a right for 10. Come on.

0:23:18 Thomas: No, I get it. That, that makes perfect sense. And I don't know how much, you know, what kind of philosophy background you have, have. But certainly what I think about is just the idea of free will and how much that kind of adjusted how I look at things. When you just think about how much we're born into and how much is a product of our genes and the situation we were born into that we had no control over, we had control over any of this. Arguably, we have no control over anything if you're like, like hardcore against free will as something we have. And just the idea that we take that, we should all know this. Like, it seems like we should kind of all realize this. We should all realize that you're born into a shitty situation or you're born into a certain genome and you're stuck with it.

0:24:05 Thomas: Like there's nothing you can do. And when you do something wrong, we shouldn't be going over the top, punishing you for it. We shouldn't do that. We're not killer or something, you may need to be locked up for a very long time because there's nothing we can do. But short of that, we ought to be looking at solutions, how to help you, how to, you know, help society through helping you. You know, I don't know how we change our view of that but we really need to. Just more interviews.

0:24:34 Michael: I mean, we just have to keep fighting, right? More interviews. Keep Fighting to get people to think, argue with people about how it's not about, you know, what to think, it's about how to think and critically analyze these situations. A Free will definitely affected me. I guess it's the only thing of Sam Harris that I continue to agree with on to this day. But, you know, like those kind of things we do have to think about of that was the whole, what put somebody into that situation. So I don't even, I don't even necessarily like, sometimes that individual, like once they, they robbed a bank and killed two people, like, yeah, like you're saying, they're going to go away for a long time. But what I want our police to focus on is not so much the details of this crime and how to punish this person, but what series of events led to this person being desperate enough to commit this act, because what we need to fight is the scenarios that lead up to these things.

0:24:36 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:25:31 Michael: It's often like lack of resources and things like that. So somebody's robbing a bank because they had took out too many small term loans that they couldn't drug deal enough to get with. And then they got their license suspended or whatever the circle of events has occurred. So we have to say, OK, we need to make sure that people aren't in this desperate situation because of this circumstances, and our police should actively fight those things.

0:25:53 Thomas: Yeah. I think prison reform is a huge thing. I mean, doing five years in a horribly violent, disgusting place where you constantly have to be in fear of your life and all that, the idea that that's going to help you is ridiculous. I mean, there are a lot of programs. Like I alluded to earlier, I know a little bit about this. There are a ton of programs, particularly in my state, I can't speak for others, in in corrections. You know, there are a ton of rehabilitative programs that people are trying to do, put in place and help people. But I just think we have a long way to go. And I think if you were, instead of that situation, you did five years hard time in a place where you're just, it's all about resources. It's all About help. It is all about finding a way to teach or to improve the mindset or whatever it might be.

0:26:41 Thomas: That might be a whole different story than five years of just just being afraid of people and being in a horrendous situation.

0:26:47 Michael: So in my policing model of having the civilians actually control and guide the direction of the police department, I do that because we circumvent even that system there. So if you can conceptualize the police actually being controlled by the citizens, then think about, we have identified, identified that this criminal justice system, it puts our people in a situation where they have less resources and are more likely to commit a crime or have those things that lead up to crime when they get out. So if we take over a police department as a shortcut to this, then we have identified the problem in the criminal justice and we can circumvent it. So, if we catch somebody that's doing a burglary and it's because of these circumstances and the lady who was burglarized agrees to something and we kind of do a community small term, we can not put them into the criminal justice system as a problem.

0:27:42 Thomas: Yeah. I was actually just going to try to transition into that model that you, is I it something you're developing yourself or is it something that you've come across in your studies or both?

0:27:52 Michael: Well, I would say, so my motto, if somebody wants to look it up, they could just do the hashtag civilian-led policing and you'll find the model. But it's established. It's kind of my research. It'd be my life's work. Right now, I will say it's established because I'm asking people to find my loopholes and where I'm flawed. So it's always is going to be open to change.

0:27:59 Thomas: Sure.

0:28:12 Thomas: So it's like a big peer review right now.

0:28:15 Michael: That's all it's ever going to be. A big science experiment the entire time. That that's the idea is we have to continue to identify problems and adjust. We don't have the answers. We're trying to figure out what the answers are. So, so the, or it's based primarily on stakeholder theory and the business world. So that's why my PhD is in business management education. So I did that on purpose to try and figure out the systems that we could bring over to create, create management and incentives and metrics that would create a system where officers were doing good, even if they didn't want to, just as they can do bad, even if they don't want to, because this is the way the system is structured. And to do that, we do a stakeholder theory base, which we establish the people who are directly involved with policing, and probably the hardest thing to get people to understand is that's going to mean ex-cons, that's gonna mean drug dealers, that it's going on the corner, all of these people having a say in what policing needs to be and how they like it to be.

0:28:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:29:17 Michael: And we form an overall model based off of that using a thing called a Delphi interview technique, which is you essentially just go through all these stakeholders and you all keep working to reform the system and develop the model of what you want policing to be established. Because I have to ask you, what do you want it to be? It's not telling you what it is. So I'm, I'm going to argue with you about all the shit that I've studied my whole life, and other scholars are too, but it's your police department. And so we're tasked with making your police apartment what you want it to be. And then once we get a system that's agreed upon for everybody, we implement that and continue to readjust it.

0:29:53 Thomas: Yeah, way down the list of problems, I'm talking way, way down, way down fucking parking tickets. Can we talk, can we, after you've dealt with everything else, get rid of those? When I, would I, get that, I I'm totally privileged, I get it, my vote should be like toward the bottom. But once it gets to me, I'm going to talk about parking tickets and your citizen-led model.

0:30:16 Michael: So you have to have a representative sample of a board controlling the top. So if you think of any random seven citizens essentially that you could get into a board that controlled the police department, Armin, if you think you could get up there and convince them that parking tickets were bullshit and they told me no more parking tickets, then no more parking tickets.

0:30:34 Thomas: Yeah, I, I got a part, way back in the day I told the story on, I think, another show, but, but I was having packages stolen from my house just repeatedly. I couldn't even get anything delivered. It was just being stolen. Filed police report after police report. No one gives a shit. No one cares. And that's fine. Except then I left my car parked on my street, and I just happened to leave it during the day. No, not a car in sight. Doesn't matter. There's plenty of room for everybody. Got a parking ticket immediately. And I was like, wow, I guess I see where the priorities are there, obviously, obviously, but anyway, that's my white people problems, right?

0:31:11 Michael: Well, that's how things are incentivized. That happens in the poor neighborhoods, too. And remember, that is a regressive tax. The poorer you are, those things affect you more when you focus on those other communities. And so now when you have parking ticket agents who are tasked with getting a certain amount of parking tickets per day, well, then they go around collecting expecting regressive taxes on people. So we don't want that system, right? That's that's why we have to enter this

0:31:15 Thomas: Exactly. Yeah. No. I know I can't wait to have my say in this. I really can't. I'll write a paper and shit, I'll figure, I'll do a research paper on this, is someday I'll, I, so I have to convince it, what, a committee or something?

0:31:36 Michael: Yeah There would be seven people is usually the idea, number I have in my head, but again it's not my overall system. So if they want nine, there's nine. If they went five, there's five.

0:31:50 Thomas: All right all I like, is there anything else to tell us about that, that model, model?

0:31:59 Michael: No, people have to look at it and and give me their ideas and inputs and say, hey, what, what do you think is the problem with this? People say, well, uh, the, the biggest gripe people have is you can, can corrupt the board, right? Which, duh, I thought about how do you avoid corrupting the board. I didn't come up with a whole system and skip that step. But the system actually is what created the solution to the board that I couldn't think of. And I racked my brain thinking, how the hell do I not corrupt the board?

How, if I elect them, then they can be corrupted because money is going to play into it. If I do public funding, that's going to be a pain in the ass. And then you get It's still – you've got that political will and who has the time and there's all these other issues involved. And then if they're appointed, well, they just become pawns of a mayor and you're in the same goddamn system that you were anyway just through vicarious leadership. So I was racking my brain for a long time and I was sitting – standing in front of the CVS after that's been rebuilt that was burning on Penn and North Avenue at

0:33:02 Michael: A Black Lives Matter event talking to the chef, the cook there, whose name is Dwayne Davis. His name's Shorty runs a little barbecue stand and he's an activist down in Baltimore. And I'm sitting here telling him this problem that I just can't figure this out. And he goes, oh, you dummy, you just do it like jury duty. But people have to go to training and they get qualified and volunteer. And then as long as the volunteer thing, it's not like you're forcing people into it. It's that there's just enough people that you can't corrupt them. And it's still volunteer based. And I's like, shit, you're right. That'll work.

0:32:34 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, a jury duty system.

0:33:39 Michael: Yeah. So, but it's a voluntary jury duty pool system. So you got to go in and you got to get the training. You got to show your dedication and the training is going to consist of communication training and how to think, not what to think. It's not going to be about biasing you towards what you're going in to see. It'S about teaching you how to approach it from those things we were saying before. How do we get people to think about how to communicate what their true problems truly are, what reliable information is, and how to think critically instead of just believing what you've been told.

0:33:42 Thomas: Okay, yeah, yeah. Well, what are the kinds of things that that for community based policing? What are they going to be determining? I mean, it's are they It's okay. I mean they can't be writing laws, right? Or I mean is it just how to

0:34:19 Michael: Everything. Well, no, I can't. But see, that's the thing that we often forget is like, cops have discretion. That's why they don't write their mom a parking ticket. So if the mayor, right, so if the state legislator says that he wants all, you know, Muslims locked up for, I don't know, whatever, some of the craziest thing that happens, well, then you just go, yeah, we're totally not doing that.

0:34:25 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Right. It's Just how it's Where the Focus is kind of all

0:34:54 Michael: We have discretion. We've determined that that's not what our police department does. So that's how we have to decentralize things, and we have bring them down to even Republicans and conservatives to completely agree with me. I am talking about a true representation of the people of a community that have their enforcement wing on their side, not the government side. So you don't even have to worry about your Second Amendment rights because I'm bringing you your army.

0:34:54 Thomas: Right. Simple as That. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:35:21 Thomas: Totally, and I am all in favor because there's so many times with these rules and crap we have and and laws occasionally you think, who enforced this on us? Like, why are we all participating in this? It's like someone, some alien race enslaved us and made us follow of these stupid laws sometimes. And it would be nice to have more of a say in that. So I like it. I like the, we did. So you need to find like a, you know, like a test case city, right? Like a, some sort of city where they're like, yeah, let's just do this model and get, get that going. Sort of like, I think, I think the Libertarians tried that too. They were trying to find a city or a state to move to and everybody flock there. And then it becomes like a libertarian paradise. Ice. Do you need to get that kind of thing going?

0:36:03 Michael: Yeah, I think that's actually one of the keys. There's a couple of ways to get it going. But I really think that I would like to find a city that's willing to dedicate to it and make that my permanent scientific endeavor to continue the model. And with the idea to export it out, I really, really think it'd go fast. I mean, once we do it and you have the reductions of violent crime that are going to occur instantly, it's going to catch on fast. So I think my real challenge is which city are we going to start this in? And then how do I manage and create a system of people who are trained within how this works to go to the other cities?

0:36:46 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, we mentioned Standing Rock earlier. That seems to be something, as we're winding down here, that I want to make sure we got to. Can you give me your thoughts? Because I think that's a weird intersection. Like, there's a lot of private police going on there. That's kind of an interesting little, I don't know, powder keg happening. What are your thoughts on that?

0:37:10 Michael: With Standing Rock, I think we're looking, looking at a microcosm of all these various factors that we keep talking about playing into this system. So remember that one of those planks that I'm trying to fight is the continued genocide of the Native American people. And that's one of the planks who built this system that we have to tear down. And that what you see the police there executing, whether it's private or it's public, coming from other cities who taxpayers pay for to go lock up their own citizens with the idea of punishment and putting them into cells, protecting land, which was stolen from colonizers who created a treaty that means that that land is still their land, that they have a say in. And we're doing it as those cops, not from that area, protect white property and continue the supremacy that we fight.

0:38:03 Michael: So I fight a suppressive system. And that's why I'm an act of Black Lives Matter protests and that protester. And that's why it translates over into Native Lives Mattering, because that is the fundamental principle that people miss about Black Lives Matter. It's that if we make Black Lives matter, then we create a system and institutions that make all lives matter. That's the whole goal. So that's like this intersects over with the North Dakota pipeline, because this is our fight, too. This is a Black Lives Matter fight. This, this is my fight from a scholarly perspective to tear down this plank, and this shows the world what it actually looks like. This is the system we have created when it executes in a manner that it doesn't look at you as being one of its people that it's protecting.

0:38:49 Michael: So this is what's coming towards you. This is The Orwellian Future. We have to stop this and rebuild it. So one of the things that Wes Clark Jr. and I are doing, he's the son of General Clark, who was an advisor to President Bush. I don't remember which one. I don't want to say it wrong. And so we're working on December 4th through December 7th doing a veterans stand at Standing Rock for the Native people because the Native American people are the one group that has served at the highest per capita rate in the United States military. They are literally the representative of our United States military, and we have our publicly and privately funded police departments over there taking their land and oppressing them.

0:39:36 Michael: It's preposterousness. So this is a time for veterans. This is a time for Black Lives Matter. This is a time for anyone that's interested in police reform and the environment for a pipeline that we have seen two of them rupture and poison water sources while they've been having this protest arguing. So I encourage any veterans to check in and keep up with us. We don't have everything fully hashed out yet, but the hashtag is Veterans Stand at Rock. And if they want to follow me on Twitter or something like that, we'll be pushing it out there. But we're going to be looking for funding and getting people up there to do a veteran stand at that line, standing with our brothers and sisters and the Native American population.

0:40:17 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah, I'll definitely put that hashtag in the show notes. That's that makes a lot of sense. I didn't know that Native Americans were disproportionately like serving in the in our military. I had no idea. It's really makes it.

0:40:29 Michael: And the Navajo Coat Talkers are, you know, famous for helping win the entire war.

0:40:32 Thomas: Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah, well, in coming to a close here, is there anything else you wanted to say before we wrap it up?

0:40:42 Michael: Um, no, I mean, just, I, the best thing to do is I probably, I have a thousand things that are going on at any point in time. So the best things to do, is to just follow me on Twitter. And I know people are like, oh, Facebook or whatever. I can't stay on Facebook. There's entirely too many assholes on Facebook, I couldn't do it.

0:40:49 Thomas: Yeah, Facebook

0:40:58 Michael: So, so I had to switch over to my

0:40:56 Thomas: Sucks. Facebook sucks, and its, and like, it doesn't let you see who you're following. I mean, if you like somebody on Facebook, you're not even necessarily going to see what they're doing. So, Twitter, as of now, we'll see if that changes, but Twitter is slowly becoming more like Facebook, but for now, it's a better place to really see who you're following. So what's your, give out your Twitter handle just in case people want to follow you.

0:41:21 Michael: Name. It's at Michael, M-I-C-H-A-E-L-A Wood Jr. J-R.

0:41:27 Thomas: All right. I'll put that in the notes as well.

0:41:29 Michael: And, that's it. It. I'll rant and I'll put information out there about what we're doing because it's constantly changing. We'll be in L.A. soon and then we'll be up in North Dakota. So I have no idea what's going on. And I keep getting dragged into a thousand different things.

0:41:43 Thomas: Well, it sounds fun. That sounds like you've got an active life going. It sounds like you got your work ahead of you. You're not, not, you have no shortage of work. It sounds like until yeah,

0:41:50 Michael: No, no, no. I'm very much like I had this thing where I was really settled towards I had a pension and I was going to teach online and stuff. And I had this view. I was like, oh, I'm just going to enjoy my privilege, legit, my pension here soon. This is going to be awesome. And then the next thing I knew it was like, no, you're not.

0:42:07 Thomas: That's good though. It sounds like a more, I don't know. It sounds more fulfilling, more rewarding. So I wish you luck with that. And I guess we'll know as soon as all the problems are gone, then you can relax.

0:42:20 Michael: No, thanks. No pressure.

0:42:22 Thomas: All right. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Michael Wood Jr. that was was really fun, and I appreciate all the work you're doing, and best of luck to you.

0:42:31 Michael: All right. Thanks, man.

0:42:53 Thomas: Alright, that's it with Michael A. Wood Jr. Really interesting stuff. I'm looking forward to hearing your comments. I think there's plenty more to talk about. There's plenty we didn't get to, but that's okay. Another time, maybe. Thanks for listening, and I don't think I have anything to add for now, so I will see you guys on Thursday.