By Greg Berman

Tracie L. Keesee has been a serial trailblazer. 

The first African American commander in the Denver Police Department. 

Denver’s first female police captain. 

The first deputy commissioner for equity and inclusion in the New York City Police Department (NYPD). 

And the cofounder of the Center for Policing Equity, an organization dedicated to reducing racial disparities and promoting cultural change within American police departments. 

All told, Dr. Keesee has spent more than three decades thinking about police-community relations. Throughout her career, she has sought to advance what she calls “the co-production of public safety.” Dr. Keesee believes that police cannot create neighborhood safety by themselves. She has argued that police need to cede authority to communities in ways that departments have traditionally resisted. This includes listening to community voices who want to narrow the scope of police activity.

In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Dr. Keesee contributed an opinion piece to The Washington Post entitled “After this crisis, policing should never be the same.” In it, she wrote, “As the deaths of Black men and women continue to mount and the collective pain of a community boils over, some argue that improving policing is pointless—that we’d be better off defunding departments entirely. I can sympathize; this is difficult and, at times, discouraging work. But on the other side of this crisis, we will still need policing in some form. We should strive to align it with the values of communities as much as possible.”

In the fall of 2021, Dr. Keesee spoke with Greg Berman, the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, about race and policing. This transcript of their conversation has been edited and condensed. 

Berman: I’m curious to hear how the past couple of years have felt for you given the various cross-cutting identities that you inhabit — former police official, Black woman, reformer, grandmother, etc. What has it been like to walk in your shoes over the past twelve to twenty-four months?

Keesee: I would tell you that the number one thing that always comes out of my mouth is that it continues to be exhausting. For most of us who are in these intersections, it has been increasingly heavy over the last two years. 

There is a lot of eagerness right now to understand how race is showing up and implicating criminal justice and law enforcement. But this work is hard. You have to be able to understand the different perspectives and try to help folks think through ways that we can move forward. 

I am a part of a broader community that has historically experienced injustice. There are millions of people across this country who look like me and carry this burden of Blackness. It is both a joy and a burden. And it is weighing on me in ways that only Black police officers, and Black female police officers, would understand. 

And then when you compound it with this pandemic that no one saw coming and that a lot of folks were not ready for…it makes you reevaluate what you believe about yourself and what you believe about others. So it’s been heavy. It’s exhausting and it’s tiring. You can burn out quickly if you don’t do self-care. 

Rewind for me: why did you join the police force to begin with?

That was thirty-something years ago. I was looking for a job with benefits. I was a single parent at the time, and I needed to find something that provided a bit of stability and medical insurance. I come from a family of uniformed folks, but not in the policing realm. A military family. And my mother was a nurse. So we always have had this ethic of service that you should be doing something.

When I sat down to take the police test, I was twenty-five and I needed a job. I was born and raised in Denver. I applied to three places actually—Denver, Houston, and Colorado Springs. This would’ve been in 1989. My mother narrowed my options down really quickly saying, “One, you’re not moving to Houston, and two, you’re not moving to Colorado Springs.” Luckily enough, I got the call from Denver. And so that started my career. 

I had an opportunity to serve my community and I did. I am one of the lucky ones, in that I was the commander of the district where I grew up. That was a big honor. But it also meant that a thousand eyes were on me, including my parents. 

How do you think being a part of the police department changed you as a person?

It changed me in profound ways. It provided me with a huge learning opportunity, sort of a lab to do different things, to think about what’s happening and what are the determinants of crime. If it were not for the Denver PD, I would not be the person I am. I also would not have been prepared to go somewhere else and begin to try to have these conversations in a different way. So I honor my experience, because it has shaped me. 

Whenever we have tragic events, the first thing that comes out of everyone's mouth is, “Well, they should do more training.” And that is not always going to be the appropriate answer... But one of the things that we still have not gotten really good at is doing long-term evaluations to see how people use their training.

When you look back on your career, you can see that you’ve grown in many different ways. I was able to meet just incredible people. But I was also exposed to the other side of things, people who were just downright nasty, racist, and misogynistic, where you wonder how some of these people can get into the uniform.

But, as I tell a lot of folks, I’m grateful for my career. I had somebody ask me if I would do it again. And I said, of course I would. I absolutely would. For me, the experience was definitely on the joyous side and the plus side. It was a pleasure. I enjoyed it. 

How would you compare and contrast your experience in the Denver PD to the NYPD? Denver isn’t exactly a small town, but I would imagine that the NYPD is a whole different kind of ecosystem to operate within.

When you talk about the fundamentals, all departments have a lot in common. What is different is the culture within each department. The thing that struck me about NYPD is that it is very, very rich in tradition. There is a tremendous amount of reverence for that tradition. I learned that NYPD is a really large family. Of course, as with many families, there are dysfunctional uncles. But there are also people within the NYPD who are doing beautiful things in the community, trying very hard to provide safety. 

You have to recognize the scale of the NYPD. When you are that size, you have to have processes and systems. In smaller agencies, you can do pilots much quicker. In very large organizations, it is hard for a commissioner to push change all the way down to the precinct level. There are exceptions to the rule, but most commissioners and chiefs only last four years on average. You can only get so much done in four years. And so that means that you have to prioritize. When you have commissioners that only last three or four years, the community’s expectations have to be managed about how much movement and change you can really make in four years.

I would say you get resistance to change no matter where you are because we’re cops, and we don’t want to change, period. I think in your larger organizations, it is a bigger challenge because you have folks who either don’t want to know or who are confused about what you’re asking them to do. 

When you were at the NYPD, you oversaw the department’s training program. I was wondering whether you could help me make sense of how to think about the potential impacts of training.  Obviously, we should be training officers for the roles we want them to play and the values we want them to embody. But a lot of the research I have been reading recently about implicit-bias training and anti-racist training induces skepticism about how effective it is in actually changing people’s behavior. So I guess my question to you is this: what should we reasonably expect of police training?

It’s a good question. Whenever we have tragic events, the first thing that comes out of everyone’s mouth is, “Well, they should do more training.” And that is not always going to be the appropriate answer.

One application of training is not going to give you the outcomes that I think people are looking for. Training for police officers is not always evidence-based. In some cases, folks are doing what we might call check-the-box, liability training, to protect themselves in case something bad happens. 

We need to make sure we have the right people doing the right jobs. Once you do that, you can then begin to design your training around what outcomes you would like to see. We historically have not done outcome-based training. That has changed over the past ten to fifteen years. But one of the things that we still have not gotten really good at is doing long-term evaluations to see how people use their training.

You are now hearing some of the same conversations that happened in the ‘90s, that we are going to need more officers to get spiking crime under control. I think we need to be very careful about this.

We assume a lot. We assume that people leave the academy and eventually go on the streets and that all of their training is intact. That’s not necessarily the case. We really have not been clear about how officers are implementing their training. But body-worn cameras now allow you to go in and see if officers are using their training or not. This technology has really begun to move police training in ways which we just have not thought about before. 

I would also say that the environment in which police learn is pretty important. Not everyone has an academy like NYPD. I don’t think the community understands that a lot of police organizations don’t have facilities like that. In smaller departments, if they get training once a year, they’re lucky. 

There are a lot of things we have to look at. We have to look at whether the training is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. And then there is the actual officer. What is going on with that individual? How have they digested the training? Are there non–work related issues that are going on with that individual that may be complicating the way that they’re showing up at work? And that is just something we’ve historically never talked about. When you got sick, you still showed up for work. If you were going through a divorce, you showed up for work. If someone was terminally ill in your family, you showed up for work. You’ve got officers who are traumatized and the culture and the way in which we deal with that is still not healthy. So, for me, training is helpful for a lot of things but there’s also some real deep-dive questions still to be asked.

Do you have a take on why we’ve seen shootings go up in New York and other cities over the past year or two?

You have these conditions on the ground that are happening. You have a country that has a tremendous amount of firearms. You also have people who have been locked down. People have lost their jobs and they don’t have health care and they’re trying to feed their children and care for themselves and their mental health issues. You’ve got people who are desperate and they don’t have anything to lose. I think you also have parts of the community who are telling us that this has been happening for decades, that there’s been a lack of investment in people who are most in need. 

You are now hearing some of the same conversations that happened in the ‘90s, that we are going to need more officers to get spiking crime under control. I think we need to be very careful about this. I 100-percent believe that there are occasions where you need to have someone who’s armed respond to a call for service. That is my experience. And that is just what it is. But what the community is also asking for—not all communities, but some—what they’re asking for is a lot of investment in prevention and a lot of focus on the social needs that people have and making sure that those things are also taken care of. 

It is going to be interesting. We are seeing conversations about how to define public safety. Typically, the first thing you think about public safety is law enforcement. But when you talk to the community about it, the community is not thinking about law enforcement as the first priority for public safety. For them, public safety means housing security. It means food security. It means health care. They want to get those things in alignment and make sure that armed response personnel are not the primary thing you go to when you talk about public health safety. A lot of folks are trying different ways to get to that promise. Those types of experiments are what you’re watching play out in Minneapolis and a lot of other places as well.

In the op-ed that you wrote for The Washington Post last year, you expressed sympathy for those who argue for defunding the police, but also said that for the foreseeable future, we’re going to need policing to continue to exist. I don’t know if it’s how you intended it, but I read the piece as you trying to carve a path in between the abolitionists, on the one hand, and the people that believe we have to back the police, no matter what, on the other. I’m wondering what kind of response you got to the piece. 

For me, it’s about finding a way to have a conversation where you don’t have to pick one or the other. There are clearly spaces where law enforcement does not belong. Because of the historical relationship with Black communities, I get it. I understand the concerns about calling 911. Why would you want to call somebody who comes to you, and you end up either hurt or dead? Every day folks are calling 911, and people are getting hurt, people are getting victimized. 

What’s happening now is that there is a real conversation about alternative ways to respond. Take domestic violence. When I became an officer, there was no mandatory arrest policy for domestic violence. Then you had a movement and activism around mandatory arrest. Fast forward to today, when you have conversations with community members about domestic violence responses. In communities of color, the question is: why are the police coming? Because when they come, they set up a chain of things that happen that are not helpful for the family. 

Over the last couple of years, there’s been a real awakening about how governments are providing service to their community and whether or not there's a political appetite to do what needs to be done for the good of communities. It is creating a tremendous amount of stress for service providers on the ground and for cops on the ground.

I can tell you as a police officer, I was really surprised to hear that. There are community members that do not believe police officers should be the first ones to respond to a domestic situation. And me, I’m thinking, some domestics are very violent. I question how you set it up where you have a service provider walk into a household that may be violent. But those are the kinds of conversations we are having today. The community is asking whether the mandatory arrest policy impacts women and men of color more so than anyone else and whether it is helpful in protecting individuals and family.

You have to allow space for these types of conversations. It’s what we’ve done for the last thirty years. Is it doing what we wanted it to do? Is it having an impact that we never anticipated? And if so, what other things should we be doing? I say all this recognizing that you have folks that absolutely don’t want that effort changed. You have to look at it from different perspectives and different lived experiences.

But the community is saying we need to take a deeper dive and really begin to ask ourselves some hard questions. And when we start really thinking about alternatives, it triggers other issues. It triggers issues of power. It triggers issues of who gets served. It triggers budget issues. Over the last couple of years, there’s been a real awakening about how governments are providing service to their community and whether or not there’s a political appetite to do what needs to be done for the good of communities. It is creating a tremendous amount of stress for service providers on the ground and for cops on the ground. 

We’ve got to figure out a way to begin to shift things and provide service in a different way. And it doesn’t have to be the same in every community. What I’m talking about is customizing public safety for the neighborhood. How do communities define what it means to be safe, and how do we fund that to make sure that they have the safety that they need? 

Talk to me about the history of policing in this country. Some people argue that American policing grows out of slave patrols. And then you have people like former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton who say that the roots of modern policing in the U. S. are in ideas that were first raised in England in the 19th century. Part of me thinks that this is just an academic debate, but part of me actually thinks that it is important to get this right, because it has implications for how we see our current problems with policing. Do you have any thoughts about that?

It’s not one or the other. You need to learn the whole story, the whole experience. 

I had the pleasure and honor of working for Commissioner Bratton. I had many conversations with him about race and policing. He understands it. He gets it. He understands the whole ugly truth, the whole history. 

You hear conversations about Sir Robert Peel and the [19th-Century] principles of policing that were brought over to the United States [from Britain]. That is true. But the roots of how we manage Black bodies clearly comes from our history and from slave patrols. When we talk about the great migration and Black folks trying to leave the South to go North for a better life, they’re met with the exact same thing—they were told to stay in this neighborhood, don’t think about taking these jobs. It’s the same thing. 

This is what the conversations with police officers around race are about. They need to understand that slave patrols and Jim Crow laws and redlining—this is a part of our culture. Understanding that doesn’t mean you can’t also understand Robert Peel’s principles, which are, on their face, absolutely on point. Police are part of the community. But how those principles got implemented has been very erratic when you’re talking about policing in the United States.

One of the things that we have to be careful with is really trying to step over the bad part of our history. I think people often think when they hear talk about Jim Crow laws and things like that that it is ancient history, and why are we still talking about it. It is not ancient history. My mother is eighty-three. There are a lot of elders in our community who lived through this. This is not ancient history. 

I think that when people are uncomfortable, they have a tendency to want to move through it. And that’s not what’s being asked for here. What’s being asked is that you understand what that uniform represents in different communities and what it has meant historically. When you can do that, then you can spend time in the community and not feel that you need to control the room and control the narrative. We don’t teach how to listen in the academy, for the most part. That’s a hard tactic to learn — to sit, to take it in. It’s going to make you feel some kind of way. How do you manage that? How do you manage being uncomfortable? There used to be an effort to try to make cops feel comfortable around these types of topics. That’s not happening anymore. There’s pure exhaustion around trying to make somebody feel okay about what is wrong.

Black folks are not all monolithic, they’re not all thinking the same way. They’re not all in agreement. That means that you have to create spaces where you’re hearing from a tremendous number of people. And that is the challenge for a lot of chiefs right now: how do you provide service for multiple perspectives around public safety?

The Center for Policing Equity’s motto is “justice through science.” I’m curious about how the organization is navigating the current moment when it feels like you have some on the right who are questioning the very notion of science. And then on the left, you have some academics who won’t acknowledge that there’s evidence that policing can make a positive difference. Does that make the terrain complicated for your organization?

At CPE, we have under our roof social scientists, of course, but we also have activists, we have former police officers, we have people from the community. We have incredible people who have chosen to join CPE. Because we are science-based, our North Star is what we believe will work. We have very difficult conversations on both the left and on the right about what policing should look like. We pride ourselves to be able to have those kinds of conversations with everybody. We try to bring unlikely folks into the same space. For us, it is about what is best for the community, what is best for public safety, and what is best for the police officers. But some days are hard, really hard.

I’ve heard you say that the window of opportunity for change is only going to stay open for a short time. Are you feeling optimistic, pessimistic, or something in between when you think about the conversation about policing in this country?

I’m always going to be somewhere in between, because I’ve lived through these cycles before. I do think that for policing itself, as a profession, there’s some self-reflection that is happening. But for me, the question is at what level is that happening? Because there’s always been a political disconnect between what the chiefs may want versus what the folks on the ground who do this every day are asking for. And so there has to be some internal reckoning around who are we and what are we supposed to be and to who. 

Everybody wants the cops to be one way or another, but no one can give a straight answer when I ask them: what is their role? If their role is no longer to respond to X problem, then tell them that and train them for that. If their role is no longer to make low-level traffic stops, then tell them that, and train them for that. You also have to leave space for the human condition. In any employee setting, they’re going to be asking questions. And this is where we often find leadership breaks down. When officers ask, “Why are we doing this?” or, “What’s going on?,” oftentimes leadership can’t answer that question. There’s a void of silence.

I think that most cops have awareness of why we’re in this moment, but there’s still quite a few of them who don’t understand how we got here. And there are also some that don’t think it’s an issue and think this is something that was created just to divide folks. So I would tell you that many police chiefs today feel like they are walking through land mines. 

Over the next five to ten years, it’s going to be interesting to look back to see what is really different. I see the people on the ground who are committed to doing the work. There is a tremendous amount of heart and optimism on the ground that we will get to the other side and that it will look and feel different. And so I tend to latch onto that.

Greg Berman is the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He previously served as the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation for 18 years. His most recent book is Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press).

Views expressed are the participants’ own and not necessarily those of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

By Greg Berman

Over the past couple of years, John Jay College professor Peter Moskos has been a prominent voice warning about the rise in violence in American cities and the potential perils of depolicing. 

Moskos brings a unique point of view to the public conversation about policing: in addition to being a Harvard-trained sociologist, he spent more than a year working as a police officer in Baltimore, Maryland. That experience served as the basis for his first book, Cop in the Hood, which offers a first-person perspective on the challenges of street-level law enforcement.

Moskos is working on a new book, an oral history of the New York City crime decline that started in the 1990s, told from the perspective of police officers on the ground. In addition, he hosts a podcast, Quality Policing, and curates the Violence Reduction Project, a collection of essays about short- and medium-term strategies for reducing neighborhood violence.

Greg Berman, the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, talked to Moskos about New York City’s historic success reducing crime and incarceration and about what has gone wrong in recent years as shootings have increased. This transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Greg Berman: Your father, Charles Moskos, was a sociologist who devoted his career to studying the military. Is it just a coincidence that you are a sociologist who spends a lot of time looking at paramilitary organizations?

Peter Moskos: I’m an apple that did not fall far from the tree. My brother’s a businessman in Holland, so he did not take that path. But both my dad and my mom, who’s still alive, were both thinkers so we had lots of intellectual conversations around the dinner table. I thought that everyone did, but when people would come over they would say, “No, this is a little bit odd.” I grew up in an intellectually rigorous household, but I was never pressured to follow in his footsteps. But I did. I went to the same college, and I’m in a field that’s shockingly similar to his. I think part of it was I saw that my parents were both teachers—my mom was a high school teacher—and we had a pretty good life. Certainly, I don’t think I’d be where I am now if it weren’t for them.

Your first book, Cop in the Hood, was about the time you spent working as a police officer in Baltimore. I’m interested in experiential learning versus book learning. How did your experience of being immersed in practice compare to your graduate studies?

It was very different. 

When I started grad school in ‘95, I went to study something urban-related because I’ve always been a city boy. That was when murders were plummeting in New York. And when I read some of the literature, all the experts said it couldn’t happen. Not unless we fixed the root causes and changed society. That was the traditional sociological argument. I thought they were wrong on some fundamental level. It seemed obvious that the data didn’t fit the theory. I thought to myself that sociology is probably a good field to get into if all the leading experts are basically wrong about it.

In a graduate class, I read John Van Maanen’s Observations on the Making of Policemen, which is a great ethnographic work on the Seattle Police Department in the late ’60s. My original plan was just to replicate his study and look at socialization in the police academy. I set out to try to get access for that. It wasn’t easy. Police departments don’t want researchers. Certainly, they didn’t back then. 

Most researchers aren’t part of the group they study, and, of course, there are issues about bias and objectivity. But absolutely the things I learned as a cop I could not have learned just as an observer.

But Baltimore said I could do it there. And  when I got there, the politics had changed and there was a new commissioner. They said, “You can’t do it.” I said, “If I go back to Harvard, I don’t have a place to live.” And that’s when they said, “Well, why don’t you become a cop for real?” So that’s what I did. I went through the process and got hired. I told them that I was going to quit after a year and write a book about it. My advisor at Harvard was not pleased with this plan, but in the end, it all worked out.

Why was your advisor opposed to it?

I think he thought I’d pulled a bait-and-switch on him, because it wasn’t my original plan. Some of it might have been just pure class snobbery. Eventually it got smoothed over and ultimately he was supportive. But there were a rough couple of months there where I was having problems on both sides. 

But I’m lucky. I think I could have gotten a dissertation out of my original research plan, but it wouldn’t have been anything more than that. The academy is not where the real story is. Ultimately, it is about being a cop on the street. Where I was assigned was a pretty good place to learn if you’re going to be a cop for a short period of time. Most researchers aren’t part of the group they study, and, of course, there are issues about bias and objectivity. But absolutely the things I learned as a cop I could not have learned just as an observer. And certainly as an observer, you wouldn’t have that access. And that experience in Baltimore has given me access to cops ever since. I can talk to cops because I walked a mile in their shoes. 

Before we get into what’s gone wrong in New York and other cities of late, I want to spend a minute talking about what went right previously. When I talk to my kids about criminal justice in New York, I tell them that, up until very recently, basically every indicator that we care about was pointed in the right direction—crime was down, jail was down, complaints against the police were down, use of force was down, etc. They are shocked, because the only things they have heard about the criminal justice system are negative. What’s your answer to what New York City got right prior to the past two years?

Well, that’s what I’m working on right now. My next book is going to be an oral history of the crime drop in the ’90s. I think the fundamental thing that went right was when William Bratton became [New York City police] commissioner for the first time, he said, “We’re going to reduce crime, fear of crime, and disorder.” He got the police back in the crime-prevention game. That was really revolutionary. If you go back to the Kerner Commission [convened by President Johnson to study U.S. civil unrest in the 1960s], they articulated what became the sociological party line about crime: that we have to fix society to address crime and that police don’t play a large role in that. In fact, they blamed police for a lot of the riots that happened. And that was just accepted by everyone. 

In New York City before Bratton, if you made arrests in 30 percent of the serious crimes, you were doing okay. As long as there was no scandal, you were fine. It was very much an anti corruption-obsessed department post–Serpico and the Knapp commission. That was business as usual. There just wasn’t any drive to do better.

Bratton effectively said, “To hell with that.” The idea of going back to the crime-prevention game was the major switch. It was essential that he said, “This is our job.” I think a big part of what has been lost over the last year or so is that police departments suddenly said, “Okay, we won’t be in the crime game again. If you’re worried about police use of force, we can focus on that and disengage.”

[The crime-tracking tool] CompStat gets a lot of credit, but at some level, it’s just a crime map. But it was an accountability tool and that was the key. It was about saying to precinct commanders, “This is your job and you have to know what’s going on.” The results were shockingly quick. 

Violence in New York didn’t start to go down in 1995 because lead was removed in 1980. All those macro things, I’m not saying they don’t matter, but they don’t matter so much in New York City. It was so basic, this idea that the police should care about crime. Other departments quickly followed suit. It was basically saying, “This is our job again.” And we’re still going to worry about corruption, but we’re not going to be obsessed by it. And of course there are tons of little details, like the broken windows approach of saying we are going to focus on public order.

I want to return to broken windows in a minute, but first I wanted to ask you how much credence you give to Patrick Sharkey’s argument that some percentage of the crime decline in New York City was due to the existence of community groups, business improvement districts, and other nongovernmental organizations?

That’s part of the story, certainly. I don’t focus on it because I’m focused on policing. But my book actually starts with three stories that don’t get enough attention, that really have very little to do with policing. Bryant Square Park reopened in 1990. The Times Square business improvement district remade Times Square. And the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey started cleaning up the bus terminal. The courts in New York ruled that the Port Authority and the subway system could make and enforce rules. They said that begging on the train wasn’t a constitutional right. It couldn’t have been done without that course correction. All this happened before the crime drop and, in a way, set the stage for it.

To say it's bail reform's fault that shootings have gone up is not accurate. But people are using bail reform as a proxy for the whole movement in general. In that sense, I think it's a fair criticism. 

Another important milestone was getting graffiti off the subways in the ’80s. This was significant because it was the first victory against disorder that the city had seen in literally decades. This problem that was supposedly insurmountable was fixed. The idea that we can actually make a difference here was, I think, an important philosophical foundation for what happened in policing. 

But the actual major decline in violence was primarily, I think, a focus on gun offenders and on public order. The police got back in the crime-prevention game. But I don’t want to dismiss these other things. New York was also in a good position. Compared to other cities, we had money. We also have a rich tapestry of treatment and alternative-to-incarceration programs. They’re all little pieces in the jigsaw puzzle. Collectively, I have to assume it makes a difference. 

Let’s talk about broken windows. In other forums, you have said that broken windows policing has basically ended in New York City. I’m wondering what your reaction is to those who argue, “Well, that’s a good thing because it lightens the touch of the system, particularly on overpoliced populations like young Black men”?

I would say: ask people in those neighborhoods what they want. There’s a great strain of paternalism out there. People are telling other people how their neighborhoods should be policed. 

Broken windows is not the cause of mass incarceration. It’s about changing behavior. When broken windows was first implemented, it was part of a community policing strategy. Bratton certainly saw it as community policing. It was part of the police asking the community what they wanted us to do. It was a bottom-up approach.

[Co-author of the broken windows concept] George Kelling, before he died, said maybe broken windows was a bad metaphor in hindsight, because he never expected the phrase to take off like it did. And he certainly saw problems in the way it was interpreted. But Kelling and Bratton were close until the end. Bratton really did fundamentally change the police department culture. And broken windows was a part of that. 

But the problem is that after Bratton left, some things went off the rails. I’m pretty sure that stop, question, and frisk would not have taken over the police department in the late 2000’s had Bratton still been commissioner. That’s what a lot of people say and I believe that. Bratton was very much against zero-tolerance policing. Those two concepts have gotten linked by opponents, but they’re fundamentally at odds. 

In terms of broken windows, I think the label has become toxic, but you could come up with a new name and do the same concepts again. Because we are having the same problems again.

I know that you haven’t done an empirical study, but what’s your sense of whether bail reform actually has had an impact on the streets of New York?

The idea that it has no impact is crazy. When people don’t get detained, some of them commit crimes. I don’t think it’s a huge number, but it’s not zero.

But bail reform is being used as a crude weapon to say, “Something’s going wrong, let’s blame bail reform.” Bail reform is a multifaceted thing and much of it is good. But, as I’ve said on Twitter recently, the absurd parts are so absurd. You could just fix it. You could allow judges to consider public dangerousness. You could fix the witness disclosure part of it. There are a few things that would be so easy to fix, and you could have the rest of it. But the politicians and activists who are rooted in the police and prison abolition philosophy don’t want to fix it. 

So to say it’s bail reform’s fault that shootings have gone up is not accurate. But people are using bail reform as a proxy for the whole movement in general. In that sense, I think it’s a fair criticism. 

Speaking of the movement, on Twitter you have written, “Prominent police reformers don’t want better policing, they want less policing and abolition. Reform is too often a disingenuous tool masking a misguided, dangerous, and unpopular goal.” Do you think that anything good has come out of the Black Lives Matter protests?

My first thought is no, but that’s not entirely true. Police do need accountability. And they’re not inclined to be self-reflective on that matter. Part of the reason I think New York is better in policing than other cities is because there has been accountability. Al Sharpton is a divisive figure in policing circles, but he and others did hold the NYPD’s feet to the fire. And the NYPD is better because of that. They don’t get away with things other departments do. Police should be under pressure. Police need critics. In that sense, it’s good. 

How do you respond to the argument that American policing is rotten to its core, that it has its roots in slave patrols and that it is essentially a mechanism for oppressing Black people and always has been? 

Well, it’s historically just inaccurate. I think it’s an important issue. It’s not just an academic debate, because this claim does lay the groundwork for everything that follows. If it were true that policing was a legacy of slavery, then yeah, you’d want to get rid of it. I think there’s a parallel to the 1619 controversy. Is American policing a bad concept that we’re doing our best with, or is it a good concept with flaws? 

There’s no mystery how police in the North were established. And even in the South, before it came crashing down with the end of Reconstruction, the police were set up by an occupying army imposing a northern way. And it failed, unfortunately. 

Look, it was a weird year and there was COVID, but the evidence that [the increased violence] was policing-related is pretty strong. Police got out of the crime-prevention game. There was a push and a pull that led to less policing.

It is true that, wherever they are, policing reflects American society and American society has often been quite ugly. Police are a part of city politics, and that was a pretty flawed institution when we’re talking about the late 1800s.

I recently looked at Frederick Douglass’s newspaper in Rochester, New York, because he was writing when police were established in Rochester. If it were really a White supremacist concept, you’d think he might have said something about it. But it just wasn’t on their radar. 

Look, at a functional level, policing fills a need. That’s why abolishing policing will never work. Someone’s going to fill that vacuum. I’d much prefer to have it done by public employees who have to abide by the Constitution as opposed to private security guards and gangs. These experiments in Seattle or Minneapolis where you have police-free zones, they all come crashing down. We’re not ready for that yet.

Do you think that the police in New York have a legitimacy problem? 

Legitimacy is a relatively new concept. Legitimacy is important for any organization, especially policing. But the same people that raise the issue of legitimacy are the ones actively working to undermine police legitimacy. The same people who are saying that police need to be more legitimate are also saying that they’re slave catchers. Well, you can’t be legitimate if you’re a slave catcher. So I find that argument disingenuous. 

I think legitimacy is an outcome of good policing, broadly defined. Policing has legitimacy when it’s effective. That’s how police gain legitimacy primarily. Legitimacy is more of an effect than a cause, I think. Some people are never going to like cops for ideological reasons. And I don’t see any efforts to increase the legitimacy that actually do increase it. 

There are reports that clearance rates are down in New York City. Do you think that is unrelated to people’s perception of police?

I don’t think the public really cares or knows about the clearance rate.

That’s probably true, but I’m asking if the clearance rates have gone down because people are less willing to participate in investigations.  

I think there’s a link to bail reform. I talked to a reporter the other day who said that she is hearing people in the streets say that they’re not willing to be witnesses because they can’t remain confidential. That hasn’t gotten any attention yet. That does a lot to decrease the legitimacy of the system.

I also think that there’s more crime and that does lower clearance rates. When shootings double, you can be certain clearance rates are going to go down because suddenly there are twice as many cases. It’s not like they have twice as many detectives to resolve these things.

Look, it’s not like people were talking to the cops ever. I mean, the very first shooting I handled, the victim wouldn’t tell me his name. The idea that you don’t talk to cops, it’s been around forever. It’s very hard to convict someone if you don’t have someone who’s willing to testify. I’m inclined to believe it’s gotten a bit worse recently, but we don’t actually have data on that. And then the question is: why has it gotten worse? Well, if a guy’s got a gun and he’s not detained and he’s back on the street, then I think it’s understandable that people don’t want to tell the cops. The fact that the system isn’t working like it used to has an impact. 

Tell me about your Violence Reduction Project, in which you invite a variety of people to explain how they would reduce violence.  Are there good ideas out there that you’ve been unearthing beyond Cure Violence and focused deterrence?

When shootings started to rise in 2020, you had respected academics saying, “Violence can’t be up this much.” And then you had people saying, “Well, it was worse in 1990.” What a stupid debate to be having. I don’t care that it was worse in 1990. It just doubled now. More people are getting shot every week. This is real. And then, very quickly, you started to hear the same arguments that you heard in previous decades: “We have to fix society.”

Look, it was a weird year and there was COVID, but the evidence that [the increased violence] was policing-related is pretty strong. Police got out of the crime-prevention game. There was a push and a pull that led to less policing. Some of it was changing laws and decriminalization and legalization and nonprosecution. And some of it was police saying, “Well, screw it.” Cops are upfront about this. They’re like, “Yeah, if I see someone with a gun, I’ll still go after them. But if I see someone suspicious in an alley, I’ll just drive on. Because if I stop him, what if a crowd gathers and he resists and I have to use force and suddenly…” The bottom line is there was less policing and that correlates perfectly with violence in a way that COVID or the economy doesn’t.

Just hearing gunshots outside your house is traumatic. Most privileged people have no connection to that level of violence. And I think that's part of the problem. It needs to be a higher priority. 

So I said to myself, well, maybe I should figure out what can be done. So I put that website together. The only condition for contributors to the violence reduction project is: I don’t want long-term solutions. It’s got to be short- or medium-term. And it has to be somewhat feasible, politically. Give me your solution.

Do you have a favorite among the contributions?

They’re all my babies, but I think gun prosecution is key. It was key in the ’90s and it’s key now. You have to crack down on gun offenders. That’s probably the single most effective thing that can happen. But that’s more of a prosecutorial thing than a police thing, because cops are arresting the gun offenders, at least in New York. 

But part of me doesn’t want to have a favorite because I think you do have to do everything. I want effective violence interrupters, though I do think it’s vastly overblown. I don’t think any of it will work without police. For these programs to work, you need a certain level of public safety. You’re not going to improve society if people are getting shot every day on your block, or you hear gunshots. For people to say that things were worse in 1990, I don’t think they understand the trauma of gun violence. It really should dominate everything.

I think, in particular, people don’t understand the ripple effects of shootings.

Just hearing gunshots outside your house is traumatic. Most privileged people have no connection to that level of violence. And I think that’s part of the problem. It needs to be a higher priority. In terms of absolute death, it’s actually about 20,000 a year, which is less than a lot of things. But the trauma is so much greater. People sometimes say, “Well, someone was shot, but they will recover.” No, you don’t. You don’t recover from a gunshot wound, really, ever.

How hopeful are you about New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the new administration? 

Adams wasn’t my first choice, but I’ve liked everything he’s said and done since the primary. And it’s interesting that he basically won all of Black and brown New York while the progressives all voted for Maya Wiley and all the New York Times readers voted for Kathryn Garcia. 

A lot of New York still speaks with a New York accent. I think it’s important that Eric Adams feels that that’s his base. And he made crime an issue. No one else was talking about crime before he did. As I said before, before you can solve the problem, first you have to say, we’re going to care about this. So I think Adams is passing that first test. The devil is in all the details, but I do have an atypical feeling of optimism right now. 

Do you think Adams will close Rikers Island?

Rikers is a frustrating issue. Who would have thought that the plan to close it was going to get outflanked from the left? Rikers is horrible. But I think the left may have effectively killed the idea of building new jails. At some point, there are going to have to be jail beds for people, whether they’re on Rikers or somewhere else. The idea that we’re going to achieve prison abolition simply by closing prisons…it’s not going to happen. I fear it’s going to backfire. I don’t want a right-wing overreaction.

From the outside looking in, it seems like the intellectual climate in the academy is bad right now and that things have become very politicized. Do you think this is a fair assessment? And have you paid any professional price when you have departed from the social justice orthodoxy of the moment?

I don’t think so. I’m always afraid it’ll happen. I think it helps that I’m in a nontraditional department in terms of my academic field. I think it also helps that I’m not a right winger, though certainly I know many people think I am. 

Academics are a weird breed. It’s amazing how afraid academics are. My own theory is that the PhD weeds out people who don’t comply. In my mind, the press is a bigger issue. I hear from respected older journalists a lot and they’re afraid. They’re afraid of the newsroom. That’s troublesome, that idea that objectivity is somehow bad.

I do find in general that the left is far less willing to engage. I don’t get invited to those panels. They don’t want to hear dissenting views, and I think that’s worrisome. There is an attack on the traditional model of free speech that I think is probably the single most dangerous part of the movement. But hopefully the pendulum will swing back.

Greg Berman is the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He previously served as the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation for 18 years. His most recent book is Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press).

Views expressed are the participants’ own and not necessarily those of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

By Greg Berman

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protesters took to the streets in many American cities to condemn police brutality. Some places also suffered from widespread looting and property destruction that will take years to restore. 

Little of this came as a surprise to Kami Chavis, the director of the criminal justice program at Wake Forest University School of Law. A former federal prosecutor, Chavis has spent the bulk of her academic career focusing on issues of police accountability and racial justice. When Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, Chavis wrote: “This is a pivotal moment in our nation’s history, and every police chief in America should be asking: ‘How do I ensure that I maintain the integrity of my department and earn the trust and legitimacy of my community?’” The sense of urgency has only increased since then.

In this interview with Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Chavis talks about issues of police reform and the relationship between police violence and the recent increase in shootings in many American cities. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

Greg Berman: I wanted to start by asking you about your time as a prosecutor. How did that experience shape you?

Kami Chavis: I was only a prosecutor for three years, but the experience definitely shaped my scholarship and teaching. It was one of the reasons I entered academia. 

I did a lot of domestic violence, guns, and drug cases at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC. I had a very busy caseload. It really put me face-to-face with how vulnerable some people and some communities are, not only to violence but also to the criminal justice system itself.

There were just so many disparities that I saw within our criminal justice system. As wonderful as our U.S. criminal justice system is, I just saw a lot of times where, quite frankly, it fell short. You would look at a person and see all the times that they had been arrested or convicted. Is the criminal justice system really the only response that we have for this individual’s actions? I guess I would say I saw the criminal justice system being overused.

[What] the George Floyd era—has done is really elucidated the need for local reform and how local communities really are going to drive this reform.

Before I became a prosecutor, I was certainly aware of the role that race has played since the inception of our country. We’ve always punished marginalized communities more harshly. So I can’t say that what I saw when I was a prosecutor was a surprise, but I can say that it was very different being a part of that system. It was very weighty for me, the power that I had, even as a young, inexperienced prosecutor, really to change the trajectory of someone’s life.

You have said that we are in the midst of a criminal justice revolution in this country. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about how things are going?

At the time that I wrote that, there had been a number of high-profile shootings of unarmed Black people—Michael Brown, Freddy Gray, Philando Castile, Keith Lamont Scott here in Charlotte. I can name others across the country. 

This had been something that, of course, had been happening for decades. Black communities were very familiar with the tension that existed between police and their communities. But it seemed like the rest of America had awakened and recognized these problems. The body-camera footage and cell-phone footage corroborated what had been happening all along. So that was very powerful. And people were really spirited about the need for change and for reform. 

You asked me whether I’m optimistic or pessimistic. I’ll say that I am cautiously optimistic because I think what this era—the George Floyd era—has done is really elucidated the need for local reform and how local communities really are going to drive this reform. Certainly federal legislation is important. But in the wake of what happened to George Floyd, a lot of local communities enacted some really important changes, whether it was banning certain use-of-force tactics or requiring greater transparency, those kinds of things. These are small, incremental steps. We are still a long way from transformative reform in policing, which is really going to require us to think about our use of the criminal justice system to deal with so many social problems.

Help me understand the scale of the problem. Some people say that we have an epidemic of police violence in this country. Others say that, if you actually look at the numbers, very few unarmed Black people are killed by the police each year. I’m curious to hear your sense of how big a problem we’ve got in this country.

Oh, my gosh. I think we have a huge problem. I would say that if you have one unconstitutional violation, one preventable death, it’s one too many. 

Do you think that we can realistically get to zero preventable deaths?

I think we should try to get to zero but I don’t think we’ll get to zero, because I don’t think that we will be able to enact the policies and cultural change to get there. 

But to answer your question about the scope of the problem, it’s not just about the number of people that are being killed. It’s the number of people who are impacted at every point in our criminal justice system. Who do the police stop? Who do they search? Who do they decide to arrest? Who do the prosecutors decide to charge? How severe are those charges? What sentence do they receive? We see disparities in every single aspect of our criminal justice system. So, to me, it is endemic. And policing is the entry point for all of that.

I think that the scope of the problem really is understated. One reason I say that is because we really don’t keep great statistics. For a long time, it was the Guardian, a British newspaper, that was one of the most reliable sources to figure out how many Americans had been shot by police. Thankfully, that’s improved. There are now other groups that are keeping track of that. 

But I think that we’re still underestimating the disparities that happen all throughout the criminal justice system—and the effects that those disparities have on the legitimacy of our system. Black Americans and White Americans view our criminal justice system very differently. When you have that type of divide, it’s ultimately going to impact the legitimacy of your entire system.

Help me parse what role implicit bias plays in all of this. I’ve been to a number of implicit bias presentations and I generally have found them to be pretty persuasive. On the other hand, I have read that the implicit association test is useless and that there’s no indication that implicit bias training makes a difference. So I’m kind of confused about how to think about implicit bias.

I think implicit bias certainly plays a role in some of the disparities that we’re seeing. But I also think we have explicit bias that we haven’t really dealt with. Our case law really protects officers and other actors in the criminal justice system because the standards are so high for making an equal protection claim. You have to show intentional discrimination. Even if it exists, it can be very difficult to prove. Our laws and our standards also allow pretextual stops to occur. And so before we even get to implicit bias, I think that we have a problem with how we deal with explicit bias. 

You’ve called President Obama’s task force on 21st-century policing a missed opportunity. Why was that?

This was a national conversation that was taking place in the wake of a spate of shootings of unarmed African American men. There were so many experts convened, so much information. You had some of the greatest law-enforcement officials themselves who were involved in this, as well as renowned scholars. 

I don't think it's just an issue of a few bad apples. What I think is that there’s a lack of accountability for bad actors. We cannot overestimate the role that police culture plays in police misconduct. Even if you have one or two officers within a department that are causing the problem, they are part of an ecosystem. Their actions can really harm the entire department.

There’s a lot of good information in that report. For example, they talked about technology in law enforcement and how we have to be careful about how those technologies might be used. They basically forewarned about some of the things that people are talking about today, in terms of gun-shot detection software and aerial surveillance and how that’s deployed. 

That document contains a wealth of ideas about how to improve policing. And they made some very good recommendations that we still haven’t been able to codify. It would have been great to see a lot of local police departments adopt some of these principles internally.

You mentioned that police were engaged in shaping the Obama reform agenda. Just to play devil’s advocate for a second, if police are the problem, why do we need to engage them in the reform process?

Oh, my goodness, that’s just a basic principle of stakeholder participation. If you have top-down policies and you want to implement them without the input and advice and expertise of the people that are very close to the problem, you’re not going to get great solutions. And not only are you not going to get workable solutions, you’re also not going to get the buy-in that you need to sustain any reform that you put into place. 

We say that police are the problem. Actually, I don’t think it’s all police that are the problem. I think that a fraction of police officers engage in these negative behaviors. There are a number of police officers and police executives around the country who also think that our system needs to change. I think if you were to ask any number of police officers, they would tell you that their role has expanded unreasonably and what they are tasked with doing on a day-to-day basis has an impact on their morale, their mental health, their ability to do their jobs effectively. And so I think that we do have to involve law enforcement in the conversation about reform.

I recently talked to Andy Papachristos from Northwestern, who has done research that echoes what you just said, which is that when you’re talking about the worst kinds of police misbehavior, you really are talking about a handful of officers in any given department. But of course many progressive reformers reject talk of “bad apples” because they think this obscures the need for structural change.

I want to make a distinction. I don’t think it’s just an issue of a few bad apples. What I think is that there’s a lack of accountability for bad actors. We cannot overestimate the role that police culture plays in police misconduct. Even if you have one or two officers within a department that are causing the problem, they are part of an ecosystem. Their actions can really harm the entire department.

How do we deal with these officers? In my opinion, I don’t think you can train away bias. We have to figure out a way to get rid of people who have shown a propensity for violence. When we keep officers in the ranks that are doing these things, that’s very problematic.

President Biden comes to you and asks you to lead an updated version of the Obama task force on policing. If the goal is to change the culture of police, what’s your best guess on where we should be focusing our energies at this point?

I don’t think that there’s just one thing. I’ve always said that there’s a wide array of tools available to solve this problem. It’s not going to be one single thing. I think the first thing we need to do is to rethink the role of police in society. I don’t think we need police officers to engage in all of the roles that we’re currently asking them to engage in. Do we need an armed first responder for every police call? We don’t.

So I think the first thing we have to do is to rethink the role. And then I think that we have to have clear policies and procedures that elevate human life over some of these small criminal violations. Nobody should ever need to break down the door of someone’s home in the middle of the night just to serve a drug warrant. We have to weigh the value of human life against the value of a few grams of cocaine. That happened here in North Carolina in Elizabeth City. Seven armed sheriff’s deputies came to execute a warrant for something like three grams of cocaine. The guy’s dead now. Why are we doing this? It doesn’t make sense to me. 

We know that police officers can show great restraint. We saw that on January 6. No matter what you think about that event, I know I saw lots of people disobeying law-enforcement orders and breaking down barricades and entering and trespassing into a building, and we did not have mass casualties. So that shows me that police can exercise restraint. It’s just they choose not to in certain circumstances. We need to value Black lives in the same way that we value others.

Do you think there’s a link between the kinds of police violence that we’ve been talking about and the gun violence that we see in the streets of American cities? 

I think that they’re both very complex problems with long histories. But I do think that there is a connection that we need to explore if we’re going to address either of them effectively. The first thing to say is that the gun culture in our country endangers everyone. Police officers don’t know who’s armed and who is not. So that plays a role.

I also worry about what happens when an officer goes into an area that's been identified as a hot spot. You're going to go into that area with a different mindset than you would in another area. You're automatically going to put on your warrior hat rather than your guardian hat.

When you have the type of police misconduct that we’ve seen, it delegitimizes our entire criminal justice system. And so you won’t have the community partners that you need in order to prevent and address the violence that’s happening. People don’t necessarily want to turn someone in or to help in an investigation. There are instances where people have tried to be helpful, and then they themselves have been arrested or made a suspect. And so there are legitimate fears in some communities. 

If there’s massive distrust, you’re not going to have the partnerships and collaboration that you need to address these other underlying issues. And it can actually exacerbate problems because perpetrators can move about freely without fear that someone in the community is going to cooperate with police in an investigation against them.

When I spoke with David Weisburd, he talked about how crime tends to cluster in a handful of locations within a neighborhood. We also know that crime tends to cluster among a discrete handful of people. I’m wondering how you think about hot-spot policing and efforts to target individuals who are at high risk of committing violence. Do you have any concerns that these kinds of strategies might exacerbate racial disparities? 

I think that it is true that when we look at what we would call a high-crime area, usually you can identify the drivers of that crime. You don’t have a community of people who are all engaging in criminal behavior. It’s usually a small number of people who are having a really big effect.

But we have to be very careful with hot-spot policing or predictive policing because one thing that we know is that a lot of the algorithms used to determine whether an area is high-crime or not—the underlying data is biased because communities aren’t policed in the same way. We know that there’s an over-enforcement of certain crimes in certain areas. We know that Whites and Blacks use drugs in the same proportion. But there’s a disparity when you look at the people who have criminal convictions for possession and things like that. People in marginalized communities are having disparate outcomes. So my point is that when it comes to hot-spot policing, you’re using data that could be potentially biased. If we’re talking about predictive policing, we know that these algorithms are proprietary so we don’t even know how they are making this determination. 

I also worry about what happens when an officer goes into an area that’s been identified as a hot spot. You’re going to go into that area with a different mindset than you would in another area. You’re automatically going to put on your warrior hat rather than your guardian hat. Is everyone you see a potential threat to you? I worry about that and the implications that it could have.

In 2016, you played a role in putting together a report on engaging communities in reducing gun violence along with the Joyce Foundation, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and the Urban Institute. That report included a survey. Half of Black respondents ranked police misconduct as an extremely serious problem, whereas 80 percent ranked gun violence that way. How do you read those results looking backward? Do you think we’d get the same results if that survey were done again today?

I don’t know. I can’t really speculate. We often try to be dichotomous about these issues. I’ve always said that respecting the civil rights of people is not mutually exclusive to effective law enforcement. I think you can have both. You can investigate and prevent crimes and you can do so constitutionally. And it really is disappointing to constantly hear it framed in this dichotomous manner. If you critique the police, then you’re antipolice. If you don’t believe in defund the police, or if you want to address gun violence, then you are pro-police. 

I think the survey results indicate that communities are concerned about violence in their streets, but they are also concerned about the way in which they are policed. The thing that we learned from that survey is that people didn’t necessarily not want police. They want police to really focus on community priorities. They want police to focus on violent crime. Our communities are not simplistic or monolithic. How I read those surveys is that both police misconduct and gun violence are important issues to address. 

Greg Berman is the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He previously served as the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation for 18 years. His most recent book is Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press).

Views expressed are the participants’ own and not necessarily those of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.