Jason: Welcome to Holding the Line, a podcast about cops, courts, and crime. I'm LELDF President Jason Johnson, joined as usual by Sean Kennedy, our Director of Policy at the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. So Sean, you had Professor Peter Moscos of John J. College on on this an interview we're gonna play on this episode, actually. And man, you guys are nerds. I
Sean Kennedy: don't I don't know how many lockers Peter got shoved into, but you know, I've seen the inside of a few.
Jason: Well, I mean, he was a Baltimore cop for a little while, he's probably like he had to do like anti-nerd training or nobody to understand what he was talking about in East Baltimore. but Peter Harvard educated guy, academic, decides even after he was in academia, hey, I think I'll go be a Baltimore City cop for a year and see what that's like. which is unique. not many of these folks in academia that study policing, no matter what perspective they're coming from, actually has walked in the shoes of a bona fide big city cop in America.
Sean Kennedy: Absolutely. And and what's important about, you know, sort of lived experience is, you know, that phrase I hate so much, but he actually did the job. So many of these people are like anthropologists and they just wander around tagged along with cops, but they don't actually have to do the work. They just get to like sit in the back of the squad car don't have to go home and like live on the paycheck and, you know, all these other things that are the real nitty-gritty of all this. And Peter did do it. and then he went back into academia. And now he has a perspective that few in academia have. There is a few others, but almost every one of them came from policing to that, not academia to policing and then back. but Peter has a great book out called Back from the Brink about the NYPD's astounding success in the nineties tackling violent crime. And we talk about a lot of different things that I think, you know, if you're interested in the state of policing and what actually works in crime. Peter is not a conservative. Peter is a a liberal to say the least, but he's you know, reasonable on crime and he looks at it from a really practical point of view, which is refreshing in academia. we're so glad to have Peter Moscos join us. Peter has the strange refreshing perspective of being both Harvard educated, an academic, and a former cop. Peter, thank you for joining us and tell us a little bit about yourself and how you went from Being an academic to being a cop to being an academic again.
Peter Moskos: I did my PhD research. Originally I was just going to observe police and Baltimore City said I could until I got there and then they said I couldn't. And I think they just had mercy on me and said, Well, why don't you want to become a cop for real? And I said, Well, who's gonna hire me knowing that I'm gonna quit after a year, though I stayed a bit longer? but I'm gonna quit and write a book about it. And the acting commissioner at the time said, if you can get hired, we'll hire you. Harvard was not very happy with that by the way. but I've you know, in effect I I mean, not only have I banked my career on the on the my twenty months in Baltimore, but you know, it gave me a perspective. I joke, you know, cops do twenty and out, but mine were months and not years. but still Eastern District of Baltimore is a a y you learn quick there. people may know it as as the where the wire was filmed. it's a rough it's a rough area. then I've been I moved to New York and I've been a professor for twenty years now and teaching both New York City undergrads and also NYPD officers in a masters program. So it's a nice combination.
Sean Kennedy: one of the things we just had Laura Huey on the podcast and Laura's a professor at the University of Western Ontario. what's interesting is her background is not yours in the sense that you were a law enforcement officer, but you also have a unique background. But there's a lot of people in academia who study policing but have never walked a mile in the shoe of cops, let alone you were talking about observing cops. Some of them have never even done that. And they write extensively about policing.
Peter Moskos: Laura's great by the way. We were just swapping pictures of our garden today. sorry. but she, you know, talks to cops and she does great work. By and large, though, I mean I look at the the people I respect in academia and it's not a huge list. probably about a dozen or so. And the vast majority of them do have practitioner background. Those who don't who are good, and there are many who are not, but the those who are good simply do quantitative work and look at, you know, data and and numbers and so they can do good work on that. I'm thinking of someone like Eric Pisa. he does good stuff. and Anthony Braga, he was never a ca was he a guy? He I don't think he was has a police background, but they're great. But it at some point it's just understanding and it this does not only apply to policing, I wish it you it applies to everything and the social sciences, but how can you possibly, do research and write things about people you don't understand, that you don't know, that you haven't spoken to. and in theory you shouldn't have to be a cop, but maybe it does to a certain extent, give you a deeper understanding. It certainly helps my research because cops will talk to me because they know that I was one and, you know, so there's there's a there's an assumption that I don't have my head up my ass right from the beginning. And you know Hopefully I prove that assumption works in my favor. but yeah, it is interesting it was so long ago, but I'm also, you know, I'm still in touch with people I worked with twenty six years ago in Baltimore, and I feel closer to them in many ways than most of the professors I've been working with since then.
Sean Kennedy: you've written a little bit about this, actually a lot of bit about this, but but it's something I think is so fascinating when you're talking about the idea of doing quantitative research But one of the big fundamental problems is what is it about this kind of push? I almost see it it's in the media too, and maybe it's a human failing, but it's the idea of creating singular causality. When we talk about crime and policing, both failures and success There's always this notion of like this is the one reason why X is happening. X causes Y causes Z. What is it about academia and at least in the context of crime and policing that has gotten us sort of reduced to singular causality? Because when I read so many of these academic papers about policing, there's they try to isolate a variable, but they're really not fully taking into account on either side all of the different moving parts.
Peter Moskos: yeah, there but there's there's sort of a a flip side to that coin, which is academics are so leery to say there's any causality ever. And they talk about correlation doesn't equ equal causality, which is statistically true, but it's a clue. and then you have to put on your thinking cap and figure out if there is some causal action there, because I mean in the real world you're not gonna do you're not gonna have the blind randomized control experiment. like a medical trial that can that can prove causality, but you know, it's at some point you see the same patterns again and again. but I think a lot I mean, so I I'm anti-theory. I mean my background, my education was sociology, I don't and I don't teach in a sociology department. I'm much more interested simply in how to make policing better and how to reduce crime and violence and how to save lives through policing. I don't think police are the only way you can do that, but they're certainly part of the equation. And that's where I start attacking the you know, advocacy you can't you have to have some look, everyone's got their biases, but you have to have a certain amount of objectivity. I mean I criticize police all the time, which people who criticize me don't seem to notice because those critics usually come from more of the the A CAB crowd and the and the defun movement but I'm lucky to be at John Jay College. in a you know, department that has a lot of diversity in every way. and so I've I have a happy home there. But yeah, i I think you get a lot of singular causality because you write a dissertation and then sort of everything for the next ten years of your career has to sort of follow that pattern. So you're trying to you're trying to prove whatever your point was to sort of hammer that home again and again. you know, I've been able to do my research a bit more broadly. my first book was a revision of my dissertation on policing in Baltimore. But I you I wrote a book about crime and punishment. I wrote a book that was originally my father's book on Greek Americans. and now I have an oral history on the New York City crime drop in the nineties, which is kind of why I got into the field. going back to my Harvard days, because I started grad school in nineteen ninety-five and murders were plummeting in New York City and All the sociologists and criminologists were basically saying that it it wasn't happening. It couldn't happen. It was impossible because as they keep telling us, you have to address root causes and fix society. and it turns out you don't. not that you shouldn't, but you don't have to. And you can reduce violence by just addressing violence. and that that is a realization that is you know, I I thought the f field would change to reflect reality and it it hasn't.
Sean Kennedy: I mean one thing I will tell you about the and I want to talk more about the New York City crime job 'cause I'm fascinated by by it and what you think Bratton's role in it was or Giuliani and then other things about NYPD culture. But one of the fascinating things about violence is I did an analysis. Now again, I'm not saying this is a perfect statistical analysis to the idea of singular causality or or limited quantitative measures, but I took an analysis and took the highest point year, which I believe is nineteen ninety one or nineteen ninety three, depending on which one you count. Which was about twenty one hundred, about two th a little over two thousand homicides in a year in New York City. And New York City at the time had about seven and a half million people. At the time, if that had stayed static at twenty one hundred homicides, by nineteen by two thousand eighteen, which was the low year in the history of New York City, which were under three hundred homicides in a city of now eight million people, the homicide delta was forty. thousand between each year of the actual homicide tally and the expected homicide tally at a nineteen ninety one level. The idea that there are forty one thousand people alive today that wouldn't have been otherwise, I don't know how you can argue with that. I mean I'm not arguing for Bukalele, but but at the same time
Peter Moskos: Yeah, I think I think you can, you know.
Sean Kennedy: that's a that's an amazing miraculous moment.
Peter Moskos: We can you know, you can quibble about numbers a bit because I don't think policing is the only answer. I mean look, the crack epidemic receded. but New York could have we could have a murder rate like Chicago today. what happened in New York was unique. People say, well, crime went down er everywhere. Well, first of all, no it didn't. It did go down most places. it didn't go down in Baltimore, for instance. but it happened first in New York, it happened fastest in New York, and it happened longest in New York. clearly something special was happening in New York City. and there's just at least th so many people are just are th they're willing to believe any theory other than policing. And that's sort of the ide ideological bias. but it's a it it I I I'm was well, it's kind of depressing actually, you know, starting in twenty fifteen, but really in twenty twenty, to go from you I'm not saying I played a major role in it, but whenever small role I played in the field and I like to think I made, you know, very indirectly policing a little bit better. and then it'd be half, you know, fifteen, twenty years after I start to have to argue that, actually policing is good. I mean it was like this is where we're at now is don't abolish police. and that's unfortunate. I think the pendulum's, you know, swing has swung back a little bit towards sanity. But it was it's it's it's was a crazy ten years and We you know, policing hasn't recovered. You see that in recruitment issues and and so on, and funding issues still. but you know, re recent trends have been have been pretty good. So, you know, let's but so my point being, you know, I don't know if if if New York City had bad leadership all these years, we'd probably have fewer than two thousand murders, but we could have one thousand. Either way, we're talking Yankee Stadium filled with people who are alive today who otherwise would have been killed. And that doesn't count. You know, all the people who are shot and lived and and traumatized in the family. I mean that the the way that trauma spreads through peer groups and intergenerationally, it y you prevent a murder and just in a you know, you you don't have the counterfactual world so you can never document. Some people have tried to show the cost of a murder. It's huge, just financially, much less
Sean Kennedy: A million dollars, it's supposedly according to a number of academics.
Peter Moskos: Yeah. and that doesn't count all sort of the indirect trauma and so on. and this year we'll see. yeah, but now, you know, probably under three hundred murders. that's amazing for an American city of of more than eight million people.
Sean Kennedy: Yeah. One of the things I wanted to talk about because you wrote a book, as you said, called Back from the Brink, and it's about this story, and I I think it's a really compelling narrative. And what I think is most interesting is I can do the data, I could do the analysis and say, Okay, well, this is what it is, it's forty thousand people, and there's the causality, and here's what Bill Bratton said in the New York Daily News that week, or whatever. But you talk to a lot of cops about what actually went ha on behind the scenes. Can you give us a quick sort of summary about what people were doing to make it happen. Cause Bill Bratton and Giuliani and other people obviously both have taken credit and may have, you know, steered the ship, but they didn't, you know, man the torpedoes. What was going on down at the ground level that made that such a success?
Peter Moskos: Yeah, going after repeat violent offenders. That's I mean the single biggest thing, but when I went into this and I the interviews happened over a period of more than ten years. so I spoke to a lot of people, including Bradton, about what happened. And I understood sort of the philosophy behind it, and you know I understood the work from a patrol cop of what you can do and what you can't do. but I still did not understand. So you have this thing called Comstat, okay. They set that up, Jack Maple and Lou Animone, and and Bratton supported it. I don't give Giliani much credit. He did hire Bratton, but remember he fired Bratton very quickly. those are,
Sean Kennedy: Yeah, ninety
Peter Moskos: two big egos and you know one worked for the other, so Bratton so Bratton resigned. Giuliani also, did not give cops a raise for three years, zeros for heroes as it was known. But it's that middle ground. How how do weekly meetings stop people from shooting each other on the street? That is the question I was trying to answer. And it's about accountability. It didn't have to necessarily be Comstat, though that was what they used and it worked very well. the exam the story I give is so Jack Maple was Bratton's right-hand man, and he When he came in and he was a transit cop lieutenant before that, so you know, he wasn't really trusted or how did this guy suddenly become number basically the number two guy in the police department? but he asked NYPD chiefs, how many people were shot last year in New York City? and nobody knew. how could the NYPD not know how many people were shot in New York City? because they weren't focused on crime. I mean they had the data, you know, they if the shootings were recorded, but no one was paying attention to them, no one was compiling them. and if you start w from such a low bar of why don't we figure out where crime is happening and when? And then why don't we put cops where the crime is happening? it was a mission statement. We're gonna care about crime. Before that the NYPD cared about corruption, they cared about preventing riots, particularly race riots, they cared about scandal. But they weren't focused on crime. Crime goes up, crime goes down. Look, the academics say it's not our business. so you know, we sort of passed the buck. And for Bratton to come in and say we're gonna reduce violent crime fifteen percent in the first year, there was nothing in it for him to do that. No police commissioner or chief had ever done that before. Say it's on me, the buck stops here. that was a bold move by on on his part. But they were so confident. that they could do this, partly because they had experience in the transit police department a few years prior. they needed they needed the political support. Giuliani did give them that. and then they simply they mapped the crime. Jack Maple loved maps. He didn't love computers or tech, but he loved maps. And he noticed that nobody was working on weekends. Nobody was, you know, the specialized units were all working Monday to Friday, nine to five. so who's But criminals were working twenty four seven. so you know, he made people work nights and weekends. And in a way that's easy because he just did it. But I mean, you know, if you're in a i it's a huge deal to change work schedules and so on. a lot of the institutional change, you know, it's just bureaucratic stuff. If you have this huge organization and if you weren't on board, you were t you know, kinda forced to r you weren't forced to retire. But b the way it works is you can get demoted down to civil service rank. So if you're a chief and you're not on board, you're gonna have you're gonna resign before you're demoted for pension reasons. and they got their team and they just said, we're gonna talk about it every week. And we're gonna, you know, if you make an arrest clearance, that was the other thing that mattered before. You make three or four robbery arrests for every ten robberies, you're good. But no one asked are we s are we stopping the robberies? they went after organiz you know, instead of just arresting a car thief Let's see where he's taking the car. Let's take down the whole operation. Let's go to the chop shop. sort of pulling on all the threads. And the speed at which it started working was I mean, it was almost instantaneous, although August nineteen ninety four is the real sort of tipping point. And murders just started plummeting. it's also worth pointing out just for the naysayers, and I d I you know, I don't think there are too many naysayers listening right now, but poverty did not go down in New York. Giuliani cut social spending. now you can argue, you know, whether his cuts were right or wrong is sort of a political matter, but it didn't matter in terms of fighting crime. And and they, you know, he was Bratton was on the cover of Time magazine, which is sort of why he got fired. But it wasn't a secret. And the r the s recipe was you know, they had a dog and pony show. People came in, they won awards, and they said, let's just focus on crime. We're police officers, let's be cops again. And so other departments were able to follow that pattern as well, some with more or less success. But the genesis really was with well, with the NYPD but before that with the New York City Transit Police.
Sean Kennedy: So not to not to be the skunk in the garden party, but Bill Bratton's next job was at the Los Angeles Police Department or one one of his next jobs, which at the time was under a consent decree. And what happened was after Bratton left, it is later revealed through an LA Times investigation and then becomes a city audit and goes on for years after that, that they were cooking the books, particularly on aggravated assault. Something that has now basically become part of this DC police scandal about downgrading crimes. So do you see a downside to the pressure about numbers that Comstat unleashed?
Peter Moskos: Well, look, they were very focused on don't cook the books. the numbers in New York were honest at the time. But if you're gonna judge people by numbers, of course people are want the numbers to be favorable. It constantly has to be you need oversight. It it has to be stressed time and time again. And you know, as an academic I don't like looking at assault numbers because most assaults aren't reported. The difference between, you know, simple and aggravated or, you misdemeanor and felody is somewhat arbitrary. You don't have to be even trying to cook the books to categorize one or the other. I like I like murders. I like shootings. in terms of data
Sean Kennedy: can't hide
Peter Moskos: those numbers are reliable. You can you can compare them city to city. And other time other crime almost always correlates with that. If I see a large decrease in assaults and no decrease in shootings and murders. I'm very suspicious. I don't know Los Angeles that well. I do know murders plummeted under Bratton again, so maybe they were you know
Sean Kennedy: to your point, what they were doing was under the old UCR, not I don't wanna go too depth for for our our listeners who are lay crime stats people, but under the old crime system until pre twenty twenty was called Universal Uniform Crime Reporting System, SRS, summary reporting system, and that involved violent crime and property crime split into two, and violent crime co consisted of murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault. And to your point, aggravated assault between assault and simple assault is a violent vr crime in the four category, and simple assault's not even on the ledger. And so by reducing aggravated assault, which in general context constitutes between a third and a quarter of all violent crime, murder by the way, constitutes less than five percent even in the largest jurisdictions, you can have an outsized influence on totals. And percentages. So what they were doing was taking a third or it turned out it was a fifteen percent decline over the ten year period. And they were just basically reducing some share of ag assaults down to simple assaults. And then they came off the total counts and made it didn't matter that the same number of crimes were happening, or there were fewer, but it was reducing the rate of or increasing the rate of decrease. it's like shaving points. Sometimes it doesn't affect the outcome of the game. But somebody wins.
Peter Moskos: Well, it's worse than shaving points because once you start doing it you have to keep doing it or else you're gonna get a artificial numer crime increase that it doesn't reflect reality once it's reported correctly again. But you know, if you're if if you're a precinct commander,
Sean Kennedy: And that just happened in Columbus a couple of years ago. That actually was exactly what happened in Columbus.
Peter Moskos: yeah, there's a you know, you you're gonna be out of there in a couple of years. So that's you only have to keep up the stat cooking business for until you're out of there and then, you know, it's not in your hands. there's a flip side to that. There's a n neighborhood in New York City, Corona and Queens. And yeah, I noticed a couple of years ago that compared to that there were as many aggravated assaults as as the worst years you know, nineteen ninety ninety ninety one, I said that can't be. meanwhile sh you know, shootings compared to that time period were st you know down whatever, eighty, ninety percent. I said, something is wrong here. Like there's no way I mean I I you g yeah, I I don't believe my lying eyes. I I go there, it's not that and I so I asked a cop who had some insight in it. I said, What the hell is going on? And he said, Well, body cameras. I said, What do you mean? How do body cameras increase assaults? He said, 'Cause in the old days you have a bar fight and you just tell to go home. or you arrest them for disorderly conduct. and now with body cameras, you have to re the the reporting accuracy is much greater. And so he said, These assaults were always happening. The the numbers now are correct. It's just before You know, twenty years ago cops weren't worried about recording aggravated assaults.
Sean Kennedy: that's a great point because that's something we just wrote about in the Wall Street Journal, Jason wrote about regarding the ice shootings that had happened in the last month or so, that either way, whatever actually happened, body cameras would have answered the question, or at least helped to answer the question, maybe not fully. So what is your take on body cameras? Because one of the most interesting things is you were saying ten years ago or the last ten years, there was a lot of resistance in law enforcement agencies to body cameras. So what is your take on what the sort of legacy so far is
Peter Moskos: I will say I'm happy I didn't I didn't have to wear one, but not because I was covering stuff up. but I was back in Baltimore a couple of years ago, and did a ride along with the guy And he's like body camera on. I was like, now we can't crack jokes. there was a lot more joke cracking and making fun and I don't know, good times. you know, nobody was hurt, but There was a certain of there was a greater discretion for better I mean just I I'm pro discretion, but you know, it can be misused too. I mean, the story of them is fascinating because yes, they were imposed on cops. Cops were kicking and screaming, and people who wanted body cams thought this will reveal the dark underbelly of policing, and then it turned out that that Cops were basically telling the truth the vast majority of the time. And you know what? If they're not, great, then body cams can catch that too. and now the same people or maybe well, yes, the same people and certainly the same causes who were pushing body cams want to limit them because you know, it's it's a lot easier to convict somebody when they're on body cam doing exactly what the statement of probable cause says they were doing. and now cops are like, I can't imagine policing without them. You know, every bit of technology cops resist and usually end up embracing from the walkie talkie to body armor. yes, cops are are very resistant to change. and then often it not always, but often that technology ends up being good for cops.
Sean Kennedy: So you write a lot about good policing. Not not it's not a question of whether or not policing is good, though you think obviously you're pro police, is that there is bad policing and there's good policing. So what would you judge a police department by? What are the what are the qualities of a good police department? And on the flip side, what are the qualities of a bad police department? How should we judge whether or not an agency is doing a good or bad job?
Peter Moskos: To some extent I simply want to j I think good policing is effective policing. are police reducing crime and disorder? is the public less afraid of criminals? And hopefully not afraid of cops either, at least, you know, non-criminals I'm talking about. it's very hard to measure public fear, so it usually isn't measured. but you can do it. But if people feel safer, they're willing to cut cops a lot of slack. and there is a problem that some there are bad cops out there. and that is on police departments to identify them and either retrain them or get rid of them. And some police departments do that better or worse. bad police department is less transparent, is hiding stuff, is not releasing, you know, not answering questions. A bad police department feels under siege, sometimes they can be, by the way, which is you know, a another issue. a good you know, y as a researcher, if I go to a police department and say, hey, can I have unlimited access? most American police departments will still say no or put condition. I have to know somebody. I've been I've done research in England and I've done research in the Netherlands and both places welcome me with open arms and just said, Yeah, do whatever you want. I th I found that very refreshing. because they they had they had nothing to hide and I guess they also figured I wasn't out to get them. I don't know, but they there was nothing to get necessarily. other countries don't have the ideological divide that we do, where conservatives are pro cop and you know, liberals I mean I'm I'm oversimplifying of course, and liberals are are are anti cop. But I put myself in as a pro policing liberal 'cause I think there's you can't have a fair society if you don't have good policing. I do like to say it's a subtle distinction, but I like to emphasize it. I'm not necessarily pro police, I'm pro policing. I'm pro police when they're good. I'm anti police when they're bad. But policing as a verb, we need it, we want it. and it's it's it's it's it is you know, rule of law is the basis of civilization. When that breaks down, you can't have nice things.
Sean Kennedy: So in that sense, what does the left get wrong about policing? What is it that there's a few I would say as you could say pro-policing public intellectual liberals like yourself, Thomas Edsel, Matt Iglesias, I haven't checked in on Ezra Klein lately, but those kind of like Yimby, whatnot, intellectuals. But What are they what is the general left? Because as you mentioned, post Floyd there was this, for want of a better term, mass hysteria that policing needed not necessarily to be abolished, but defunded, or what they would call reform, but they they really meant like tearing it down or doing a lot of sort of very radical things to it. What is the left getting wrong about policing today?
Peter Moskos: I I do think as you sort of did it, I think it's important to distinguish between I mean, I identify as politically as a liberal. the Democratic Party is current especially in New York is being taken over as being hijacked by the f progressive far left wing. they hate liberals, by the way, j just you know. and and so that's an important distinction to make. Here's if you want to make I mean what the what the far left gets wrong is simply that policing they say policing is bad and is no and and is in fact, you know, the cause of crime. I mean it it gets really crazy and extreme at some level. you know, revolutionary ideas and of course they would just implement their own brutal police department. or you have mob rule. I just listened to a podcast about CHOP in Seattle and yeah, y you know, and they ended up shooting and killing an unarmed black teenager. exactly what the whole movement in theory was supposed to stop. The irony is is deep and you know, and lives were lost. the old left, you know, Bill Clinton passed the nineteen ninety four four crime bill. the black congressional caucus supported tougher drug laws for you know, for better or for worse. we didn't used to have that distinction. Everyone understood that we need police. The question was how to do it and, you know, to reformers I say this. I mean If you want to make policing better, if you y you know, I want reform to be good. Yeah, reform is often a cover for now for abolish policing or or drastically reduce it. if you good policing scares that abolition crowd because I mean, yeah, they bad that good policing to them is worse than bad policing because they're they're they're have an agenda and they're trying to get there by any means possible. if you don't want to make police better, you should not have a seat at the table of police reform. if you're well intentioned in the sense that, you know, even if mistaken, and you know, we're all mistaken sometimes, but if your goal is to improve policing, then yes, have a big tent. It's something Bratton, by the way, did in LA, is try and get his opponents to be part of his team. and he told me I'd I I much prefer to have people inside my tent than standing outside pissing on it. so you know, you have to welcome to a certain extent what you might see is the opposition, but the opposition has to also be well intentioned and say yes, it is our goal. I mean, look, if we could reduce police involved shootings without any impact on crime, great, who's against that? If there's you know, that would be true reform. But as, you know, I forget the term you used, hysteria, I believe. I would also call it a moral panic, and it's a more academic term, but this You know, you take a little grain of reality and then just you know, even today I think people think cops shoot and kill so many more people, than reality reflects.
Sean Kennedy: And speaking of mugged by reality and and tying it to Brat not Bratton is a little after Bratton, but LAPD. So after in the early two thousand tens, they brought in a civilian oversight board for police discipline. And the idea was that the internal police IA system, disciplinary system with, you know, commanders and chiefs making decisions about whether or not line cops got disciplined for misconduct was too buddy buddy. So they bring it in. The misconduct complaint substantiation rate drops. The number of disciplinary actions taken against officers drops. The reason was the people who are on the inside were holding the cops to higher standards. That you were did something wrong, you're a stain on the department, you're a stain on us. We have to hold you to account. Whether or not that's to take your badge or not, it is not it. But you need to know that you're getting cacheted or whatever want to call it. And the civilians were like, I don't know what to make of this incident. So Nothing.
Peter Moskos: Yeah, I've never been there. it looks like a rough job. I y you can you get that from sometimes from civilian oversight commissions and the flip side is you get people who are fishing for just to screw cops any way they can. and you see that more in Chicago, to some extent New York. I do want some outside people because yeah, I can get I mean it depends on the department It it all depends on leadership. But I don't know how you ensure good leadership. So you have to have a system that can also be stable and effective when the leadership isn't so good. I think we in a way focus too much on big city police departments that tend to do things better. there are a lot of sheriff departments and a lot of small town police departments that no one's really looking at. and I mean it's just 'cause people know the name and I don't mean to pick on them in particular, though I kinda do, but like you know Ferguson, Missouri back. in the days like, Yeah, they were doing some bad stuff and which is ironic 'cause the actual controversy was not one of those things. But then we found all these other things that were going on about how they were
Sean Kennedy: It was smoke you know, where there's smoke there's fire. It was that the the shooting of Michael Brown was sort of blown out of proportion, but it didn't mean that the rest of the Ferguson department didn't have problems.
Peter Moskos: Yeah, as soon as you pulled back the curtain, you were like, my god, they're really they're doing this and the whole thing's funded through fines and so on. and I don't know how we'd bring attention to that. If you're concerned about police involved shootings, let's look at the departments that shoot a lot of people, because they're out there. and they're almost all medium-sized cities west of the Mississippi. often with a s low percentage of black population. And but they're shooting people at, you know, rates ten times New York City. So we're we're keep you know, New York City has its problems, as does the NYPD, but arguably it's it is one of if not the best large police department in America. you know, how much deuce can you get from that squeeze? You set up another oversight commission? you know, that's not I don't think shootings in n police involve shootings in New York could get much lower, honestly, than they are now. and you know, and and they and they you cops there used to be a Police involved shooting. I mean, now we're going back decades, but there used to be one almost every day in New York City. And now it's, you know, ten a year or something.
Sean Kennedy: well Peter, I wanna end on a final note and take you back to your roots to Baltimore. Baltimore has recorded a historic low, it's roughly at the time of this podcast, about sixty homicides for the year. Baltimore at this pace is going to for the first time in maybe a hundred years. See fewer than a hundred homicides. What is going on with Baltimore?
Peter Moskos: Fabulous. well, they haven't solved poverty, you know, bad education, racism, all those things haven't changed much. what I think has happened is they replaced a corrupt and incompetent prosecutor with a good prosecutor, who I I'm just gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's not corrupt, but he's effective. often when there's a Kim Fox in Chicago or something that does get attention. but not enough attention is played to the prosecutor. It's more important than I realized, and I think more important than a lot of other people realize. so that's part of the equation. the other part is they had good police leadership. and that took a while. friend of mine, Tony Barksdale, who passed away not that long ago, became the mayor's crime man, and he was a protege of Jack Maple and understood what is going on. And I think the mayor matured a lot. He came in very young and I think he's gotten better. do the community programs work? let me just say they they've been going on for twenty years. So have they changed and gotten better? Maybe. I don't want to discount them. but I am a little bit dismissive of that. at some point maybe it can hurt. If you if you have people that go into you know visit a hospital and immediately to try and prevent retaliation after a shooting victim shows up. Like that kind of stuff. hopefully it can't hurt, but man, there's a lot of corruption in those programs as well. but it just seems that suddenly we have, you know, good policing and good prosecution. and yeah, the drop has been dramatic. I don't have all the answers to Baltimore, quite frankly. I'm not there anymore. but it's it's I mean, I'm personally I still feel attached to the city, so I'm thrilled to see that happen. it is the it is the hard work of men and women in various capacities that are doing it. It doesn't just happen. It's very easy to say, well, now they're you know, after it happens, well now their murder rate's more like other cities. Yeah. great. I mean it still could be even lower. But the you learn from success. rather than just saying, well, you know No, it's not 'cause we got rid of lead and gasoline fifty years ago. it's not because of of, you know, legalized abortion. it's because of
Sean Kennedy: Let me stop that for our listeners. Peter is referring to a number of academic freconomics arguments about the idea that leaded gasoline contributed to people's lower IQs, which caused them to commit crime, or that we aborted our way out of the crime problem. So just to give you a context
Peter Moskos: Yeah.
Sean Kennedy: of Peter's obscure reference, those are academic theories that are somewhat comical. But yes, go ahead.
Peter Moskos: But I hear that a lot still, even among non academics. The funny thing is even the proponents of the lead theory say, you know, there are a couple of different studies. It might maybe it was ten to fifteen percent of the reduction. Though what was interesting about the reduction is it wasn't cohort based. when crime went down in New York, violence stopped among young people and old people. So lagged effect studies are just tough because in the real world so much else happens. But you just see that you know, it's you you see people say, We're gonna do this new strategy. and then it works and people say, Well, it must be something else. I don't know. You know, you know, you can never prove anything for sure. But again, this that that correlation is a clue and then you gotta look into it and see what's going on. But yeah, Baltimore does have specific changes that what I'd like to know then is, you know, what's that next step? I don't know exactly. What did Tony Barksdale do to policing? But I you what I can guess, 'cause it's not rocket science. It's hard work, but it's is you focus on the repeat violent offenders. There's so few people that are causing so much of the problem. And you get them and you take them out through incarceration. And you do that to just a you know, this is not mass incarceration. It's very it's targeted incarceration. and you take out, you know, in a city like Baltimore, if you can if you can lock up ten to twenty shooters and maybe that deters another ten to twenty, that's your reduction right there.
Sean Kennedy: Yeah. it's striking. thank you, Peter, for joining us. your insights are always valuable. And one of the most refreshing things about Peter is Peter is not sort of a monolith in that and i I would recommend everybody, if you are on the Twitter X, whatever they're calling it these days, follow Peter's very amusing and informative X account at Peter Moskos and again, Peter, thank you for
Peter Moskos: That's it. Yeah.
Sean Kennedy: joining us.
Peter Moskos: it's a pleasure. Thanks for the conversation. as you can tell, I love talking about this stuff.
Sean Kennedy: This was a really great interview. And if you want to catch up on all the other episodes, please check us out on your podcast apps, and give us a five-star review. Until next time, this is Holding the Line, a podcast about cops, courts, and crime.
Sean Kennedy: don't I don't know how many lockers Peter got shoved into, but you know, I've seen the inside of a few.
Jason: Well, I mean, he was a Baltimore cop for a little while, he's probably like he had to do like anti-nerd training or nobody to understand what he was talking about in East Baltimore. but Peter Harvard educated guy, academic, decides even after he was in academia, hey, I think I'll go be a Baltimore City cop for a year and see what that's like. which is unique. not many of these folks in academia that study policing, no matter what perspective they're coming from, actually has walked in the shoes of a bona fide big city cop in America.
Sean Kennedy: Absolutely. And and what's important about, you know, sort of lived experience is, you know, that phrase I hate so much, but he actually did the job. So many of these people are like anthropologists and they just wander around tagged along with cops, but they don't actually have to do the work. They just get to like sit in the back of the squad car don't have to go home and like live on the paycheck and, you know, all these other things that are the real nitty-gritty of all this. And Peter did do it. and then he went back into academia. And now he has a perspective that few in academia have. There is a few others, but almost every one of them came from policing to that, not academia to policing and then back. but Peter has a great book out called Back from the Brink about the NYPD's astounding success in the nineties tackling violent crime. And we talk about a lot of different things that I think, you know, if you're interested in the state of policing and what actually works in crime. Peter is not a conservative. Peter is a a liberal to say the least, but he's you know, reasonable on crime and he looks at it from a really practical point of view, which is refreshing in academia. we're so glad to have Peter Moscos join us. Peter has the strange refreshing perspective of being both Harvard educated, an academic, and a former cop. Peter, thank you for joining us and tell us a little bit about yourself and how you went from Being an academic to being a cop to being an academic again.
Peter Moskos: I did my PhD research. Originally I was just going to observe police and Baltimore City said I could until I got there and then they said I couldn't. And I think they just had mercy on me and said, Well, why don't you want to become a cop for real? And I said, Well, who's gonna hire me knowing that I'm gonna quit after a year, though I stayed a bit longer? but I'm gonna quit and write a book about it. And the acting commissioner at the time said, if you can get hired, we'll hire you. Harvard was not very happy with that by the way. but I've you know, in effect I I mean, not only have I banked my career on the on the my twenty months in Baltimore, but you know, it gave me a perspective. I joke, you know, cops do twenty and out, but mine were months and not years. but still Eastern District of Baltimore is a a y you learn quick there. people may know it as as the where the wire was filmed. it's a rough it's a rough area. then I've been I moved to New York and I've been a professor for twenty years now and teaching both New York City undergrads and also NYPD officers in a masters program. So it's a nice combination.
Sean Kennedy: one of the things we just had Laura Huey on the podcast and Laura's a professor at the University of Western Ontario. what's interesting is her background is not yours in the sense that you were a law enforcement officer, but you also have a unique background. But there's a lot of people in academia who study policing but have never walked a mile in the shoe of cops, let alone you were talking about observing cops. Some of them have never even done that. And they write extensively about policing.
Peter Moskos: Laura's great by the way. We were just swapping pictures of our garden today. sorry. but she, you know, talks to cops and she does great work. By and large, though, I mean I look at the the people I respect in academia and it's not a huge list. probably about a dozen or so. And the vast majority of them do have practitioner background. Those who don't who are good, and there are many who are not, but the those who are good simply do quantitative work and look at, you know, data and and numbers and so they can do good work on that. I'm thinking of someone like Eric Pisa. he does good stuff. and Anthony Braga, he was never a ca was he a guy? He I don't think he was has a police background, but they're great. But it at some point it's just understanding and it this does not only apply to policing, I wish it you it applies to everything and the social sciences, but how can you possibly, do research and write things about people you don't understand, that you don't know, that you haven't spoken to. and in theory you shouldn't have to be a cop, but maybe it does to a certain extent, give you a deeper understanding. It certainly helps my research because cops will talk to me because they know that I was one and, you know, so there's there's a there's an assumption that I don't have my head up my ass right from the beginning. And you know Hopefully I prove that assumption works in my favor. but yeah, it is interesting it was so long ago, but I'm also, you know, I'm still in touch with people I worked with twenty six years ago in Baltimore, and I feel closer to them in many ways than most of the professors I've been working with since then.
Sean Kennedy: you've written a little bit about this, actually a lot of bit about this, but but it's something I think is so fascinating when you're talking about the idea of doing quantitative research But one of the big fundamental problems is what is it about this kind of push? I almost see it it's in the media too, and maybe it's a human failing, but it's the idea of creating singular causality. When we talk about crime and policing, both failures and success There's always this notion of like this is the one reason why X is happening. X causes Y causes Z. What is it about academia and at least in the context of crime and policing that has gotten us sort of reduced to singular causality? Because when I read so many of these academic papers about policing, there's they try to isolate a variable, but they're really not fully taking into account on either side all of the different moving parts.
Peter Moskos: yeah, there but there's there's sort of a a flip side to that coin, which is academics are so leery to say there's any causality ever. And they talk about correlation doesn't equ equal causality, which is statistically true, but it's a clue. and then you have to put on your thinking cap and figure out if there is some causal action there, because I mean in the real world you're not gonna do you're not gonna have the blind randomized control experiment. like a medical trial that can that can prove causality, but you know, it's at some point you see the same patterns again and again. but I think a lot I mean, so I I'm anti-theory. I mean my background, my education was sociology, I don't and I don't teach in a sociology department. I'm much more interested simply in how to make policing better and how to reduce crime and violence and how to save lives through policing. I don't think police are the only way you can do that, but they're certainly part of the equation. And that's where I start attacking the you know, advocacy you can't you have to have some look, everyone's got their biases, but you have to have a certain amount of objectivity. I mean I criticize police all the time, which people who criticize me don't seem to notice because those critics usually come from more of the the A CAB crowd and the and the defun movement but I'm lucky to be at John Jay College. in a you know, department that has a lot of diversity in every way. and so I've I have a happy home there. But yeah, i I think you get a lot of singular causality because you write a dissertation and then sort of everything for the next ten years of your career has to sort of follow that pattern. So you're trying to you're trying to prove whatever your point was to sort of hammer that home again and again. you know, I've been able to do my research a bit more broadly. my first book was a revision of my dissertation on policing in Baltimore. But I you I wrote a book about crime and punishment. I wrote a book that was originally my father's book on Greek Americans. and now I have an oral history on the New York City crime drop in the nineties, which is kind of why I got into the field. going back to my Harvard days, because I started grad school in nineteen ninety-five and murders were plummeting in New York City and All the sociologists and criminologists were basically saying that it it wasn't happening. It couldn't happen. It was impossible because as they keep telling us, you have to address root causes and fix society. and it turns out you don't. not that you shouldn't, but you don't have to. And you can reduce violence by just addressing violence. and that that is a realization that is you know, I I thought the f field would change to reflect reality and it it hasn't.
Sean Kennedy: I mean one thing I will tell you about the and I want to talk more about the New York City crime job 'cause I'm fascinated by by it and what you think Bratton's role in it was or Giuliani and then other things about NYPD culture. But one of the fascinating things about violence is I did an analysis. Now again, I'm not saying this is a perfect statistical analysis to the idea of singular causality or or limited quantitative measures, but I took an analysis and took the highest point year, which I believe is nineteen ninety one or nineteen ninety three, depending on which one you count. Which was about twenty one hundred, about two th a little over two thousand homicides in a year in New York City. And New York City at the time had about seven and a half million people. At the time, if that had stayed static at twenty one hundred homicides, by nineteen by two thousand eighteen, which was the low year in the history of New York City, which were under three hundred homicides in a city of now eight million people, the homicide delta was forty. thousand between each year of the actual homicide tally and the expected homicide tally at a nineteen ninety one level. The idea that there are forty one thousand people alive today that wouldn't have been otherwise, I don't know how you can argue with that. I mean I'm not arguing for Bukalele, but but at the same time
Peter Moskos: Yeah, I think I think you can, you know.
Sean Kennedy: that's a that's an amazing miraculous moment.
Peter Moskos: We can you know, you can quibble about numbers a bit because I don't think policing is the only answer. I mean look, the crack epidemic receded. but New York could have we could have a murder rate like Chicago today. what happened in New York was unique. People say, well, crime went down er everywhere. Well, first of all, no it didn't. It did go down most places. it didn't go down in Baltimore, for instance. but it happened first in New York, it happened fastest in New York, and it happened longest in New York. clearly something special was happening in New York City. and there's just at least th so many people are just are th they're willing to believe any theory other than policing. And that's sort of the ide ideological bias. but it's a it it I I I'm was well, it's kind of depressing actually, you know, starting in twenty fifteen, but really in twenty twenty, to go from you I'm not saying I played a major role in it, but whenever small role I played in the field and I like to think I made, you know, very indirectly policing a little bit better. and then it'd be half, you know, fifteen, twenty years after I start to have to argue that, actually policing is good. I mean it was like this is where we're at now is don't abolish police. and that's unfortunate. I think the pendulum's, you know, swing has swung back a little bit towards sanity. But it was it's it's it's was a crazy ten years and We you know, policing hasn't recovered. You see that in recruitment issues and and so on, and funding issues still. but you know, re recent trends have been have been pretty good. So, you know, let's but so my point being, you know, I don't know if if if New York City had bad leadership all these years, we'd probably have fewer than two thousand murders, but we could have one thousand. Either way, we're talking Yankee Stadium filled with people who are alive today who otherwise would have been killed. And that doesn't count. You know, all the people who are shot and lived and and traumatized in the family. I mean that the the way that trauma spreads through peer groups and intergenerationally, it y you prevent a murder and just in a you know, you you don't have the counterfactual world so you can never document. Some people have tried to show the cost of a murder. It's huge, just financially, much less
Sean Kennedy: A million dollars, it's supposedly according to a number of academics.
Peter Moskos: Yeah. and that doesn't count all sort of the indirect trauma and so on. and this year we'll see. yeah, but now, you know, probably under three hundred murders. that's amazing for an American city of of more than eight million people.
Sean Kennedy: Yeah. One of the things I wanted to talk about because you wrote a book, as you said, called Back from the Brink, and it's about this story, and I I think it's a really compelling narrative. And what I think is most interesting is I can do the data, I could do the analysis and say, Okay, well, this is what it is, it's forty thousand people, and there's the causality, and here's what Bill Bratton said in the New York Daily News that week, or whatever. But you talk to a lot of cops about what actually went ha on behind the scenes. Can you give us a quick sort of summary about what people were doing to make it happen. Cause Bill Bratton and Giuliani and other people obviously both have taken credit and may have, you know, steered the ship, but they didn't, you know, man the torpedoes. What was going on down at the ground level that made that such a success?
Peter Moskos: Yeah, going after repeat violent offenders. That's I mean the single biggest thing, but when I went into this and I the interviews happened over a period of more than ten years. so I spoke to a lot of people, including Bradton, about what happened. And I understood sort of the philosophy behind it, and you know I understood the work from a patrol cop of what you can do and what you can't do. but I still did not understand. So you have this thing called Comstat, okay. They set that up, Jack Maple and Lou Animone, and and Bratton supported it. I don't give Giliani much credit. He did hire Bratton, but remember he fired Bratton very quickly. those are,
Sean Kennedy: Yeah, ninety
Peter Moskos: two big egos and you know one worked for the other, so Bratton so Bratton resigned. Giuliani also, did not give cops a raise for three years, zeros for heroes as it was known. But it's that middle ground. How how do weekly meetings stop people from shooting each other on the street? That is the question I was trying to answer. And it's about accountability. It didn't have to necessarily be Comstat, though that was what they used and it worked very well. the exam the story I give is so Jack Maple was Bratton's right-hand man, and he When he came in and he was a transit cop lieutenant before that, so you know, he wasn't really trusted or how did this guy suddenly become number basically the number two guy in the police department? but he asked NYPD chiefs, how many people were shot last year in New York City? and nobody knew. how could the NYPD not know how many people were shot in New York City? because they weren't focused on crime. I mean they had the data, you know, they if the shootings were recorded, but no one was paying attention to them, no one was compiling them. and if you start w from such a low bar of why don't we figure out where crime is happening and when? And then why don't we put cops where the crime is happening? it was a mission statement. We're gonna care about crime. Before that the NYPD cared about corruption, they cared about preventing riots, particularly race riots, they cared about scandal. But they weren't focused on crime. Crime goes up, crime goes down. Look, the academics say it's not our business. so you know, we sort of passed the buck. And for Bratton to come in and say we're gonna reduce violent crime fifteen percent in the first year, there was nothing in it for him to do that. No police commissioner or chief had ever done that before. Say it's on me, the buck stops here. that was a bold move by on on his part. But they were so confident. that they could do this, partly because they had experience in the transit police department a few years prior. they needed they needed the political support. Giuliani did give them that. and then they simply they mapped the crime. Jack Maple loved maps. He didn't love computers or tech, but he loved maps. And he noticed that nobody was working on weekends. Nobody was, you know, the specialized units were all working Monday to Friday, nine to five. so who's But criminals were working twenty four seven. so you know, he made people work nights and weekends. And in a way that's easy because he just did it. But I mean, you know, if you're in a i it's a huge deal to change work schedules and so on. a lot of the institutional change, you know, it's just bureaucratic stuff. If you have this huge organization and if you weren't on board, you were t you know, kinda forced to r you weren't forced to retire. But b the way it works is you can get demoted down to civil service rank. So if you're a chief and you're not on board, you're gonna have you're gonna resign before you're demoted for pension reasons. and they got their team and they just said, we're gonna talk about it every week. And we're gonna, you know, if you make an arrest clearance, that was the other thing that mattered before. You make three or four robbery arrests for every ten robberies, you're good. But no one asked are we s are we stopping the robberies? they went after organiz you know, instead of just arresting a car thief Let's see where he's taking the car. Let's take down the whole operation. Let's go to the chop shop. sort of pulling on all the threads. And the speed at which it started working was I mean, it was almost instantaneous, although August nineteen ninety four is the real sort of tipping point. And murders just started plummeting. it's also worth pointing out just for the naysayers, and I d I you know, I don't think there are too many naysayers listening right now, but poverty did not go down in New York. Giuliani cut social spending. now you can argue, you know, whether his cuts were right or wrong is sort of a political matter, but it didn't matter in terms of fighting crime. And and they, you know, he was Bratton was on the cover of Time magazine, which is sort of why he got fired. But it wasn't a secret. And the r the s recipe was you know, they had a dog and pony show. People came in, they won awards, and they said, let's just focus on crime. We're police officers, let's be cops again. And so other departments were able to follow that pattern as well, some with more or less success. But the genesis really was with well, with the NYPD but before that with the New York City Transit Police.
Sean Kennedy: So not to not to be the skunk in the garden party, but Bill Bratton's next job was at the Los Angeles Police Department or one one of his next jobs, which at the time was under a consent decree. And what happened was after Bratton left, it is later revealed through an LA Times investigation and then becomes a city audit and goes on for years after that, that they were cooking the books, particularly on aggravated assault. Something that has now basically become part of this DC police scandal about downgrading crimes. So do you see a downside to the pressure about numbers that Comstat unleashed?
Peter Moskos: Well, look, they were very focused on don't cook the books. the numbers in New York were honest at the time. But if you're gonna judge people by numbers, of course people are want the numbers to be favorable. It constantly has to be you need oversight. It it has to be stressed time and time again. And you know, as an academic I don't like looking at assault numbers because most assaults aren't reported. The difference between, you know, simple and aggravated or, you misdemeanor and felody is somewhat arbitrary. You don't have to be even trying to cook the books to categorize one or the other. I like I like murders. I like shootings. in terms of data
Sean Kennedy: can't hide
Peter Moskos: those numbers are reliable. You can you can compare them city to city. And other time other crime almost always correlates with that. If I see a large decrease in assaults and no decrease in shootings and murders. I'm very suspicious. I don't know Los Angeles that well. I do know murders plummeted under Bratton again, so maybe they were you know
Sean Kennedy: to your point, what they were doing was under the old UCR, not I don't wanna go too depth for for our our listeners who are lay crime stats people, but under the old crime system until pre twenty twenty was called Universal Uniform Crime Reporting System, SRS, summary reporting system, and that involved violent crime and property crime split into two, and violent crime co consisted of murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault. And to your point, aggravated assault between assault and simple assault is a violent vr crime in the four category, and simple assault's not even on the ledger. And so by reducing aggravated assault, which in general context constitutes between a third and a quarter of all violent crime, murder by the way, constitutes less than five percent even in the largest jurisdictions, you can have an outsized influence on totals. And percentages. So what they were doing was taking a third or it turned out it was a fifteen percent decline over the ten year period. And they were just basically reducing some share of ag assaults down to simple assaults. And then they came off the total counts and made it didn't matter that the same number of crimes were happening, or there were fewer, but it was reducing the rate of or increasing the rate of decrease. it's like shaving points. Sometimes it doesn't affect the outcome of the game. But somebody wins.
Peter Moskos: Well, it's worse than shaving points because once you start doing it you have to keep doing it or else you're gonna get a artificial numer crime increase that it doesn't reflect reality once it's reported correctly again. But you know, if you're if if you're a precinct commander,
Sean Kennedy: And that just happened in Columbus a couple of years ago. That actually was exactly what happened in Columbus.
Peter Moskos: yeah, there's a you know, you you're gonna be out of there in a couple of years. So that's you only have to keep up the stat cooking business for until you're out of there and then, you know, it's not in your hands. there's a flip side to that. There's a n neighborhood in New York City, Corona and Queens. And yeah, I noticed a couple of years ago that compared to that there were as many aggravated assaults as as the worst years you know, nineteen ninety ninety ninety one, I said that can't be. meanwhile sh you know, shootings compared to that time period were st you know down whatever, eighty, ninety percent. I said, something is wrong here. Like there's no way I mean I I you g yeah, I I don't believe my lying eyes. I I go there, it's not that and I so I asked a cop who had some insight in it. I said, What the hell is going on? And he said, Well, body cameras. I said, What do you mean? How do body cameras increase assaults? He said, 'Cause in the old days you have a bar fight and you just tell to go home. or you arrest them for disorderly conduct. and now with body cameras, you have to re the the reporting accuracy is much greater. And so he said, These assaults were always happening. The the numbers now are correct. It's just before You know, twenty years ago cops weren't worried about recording aggravated assaults.
Sean Kennedy: that's a great point because that's something we just wrote about in the Wall Street Journal, Jason wrote about regarding the ice shootings that had happened in the last month or so, that either way, whatever actually happened, body cameras would have answered the question, or at least helped to answer the question, maybe not fully. So what is your take on body cameras? Because one of the most interesting things is you were saying ten years ago or the last ten years, there was a lot of resistance in law enforcement agencies to body cameras. So what is your take on what the sort of legacy so far is
Peter Moskos: I will say I'm happy I didn't I didn't have to wear one, but not because I was covering stuff up. but I was back in Baltimore a couple of years ago, and did a ride along with the guy And he's like body camera on. I was like, now we can't crack jokes. there was a lot more joke cracking and making fun and I don't know, good times. you know, nobody was hurt, but There was a certain of there was a greater discretion for better I mean just I I'm pro discretion, but you know, it can be misused too. I mean, the story of them is fascinating because yes, they were imposed on cops. Cops were kicking and screaming, and people who wanted body cams thought this will reveal the dark underbelly of policing, and then it turned out that that Cops were basically telling the truth the vast majority of the time. And you know what? If they're not, great, then body cams can catch that too. and now the same people or maybe well, yes, the same people and certainly the same causes who were pushing body cams want to limit them because you know, it's it's a lot easier to convict somebody when they're on body cam doing exactly what the statement of probable cause says they were doing. and now cops are like, I can't imagine policing without them. You know, every bit of technology cops resist and usually end up embracing from the walkie talkie to body armor. yes, cops are are very resistant to change. and then often it not always, but often that technology ends up being good for cops.
Sean Kennedy: So you write a lot about good policing. Not not it's not a question of whether or not policing is good, though you think obviously you're pro police, is that there is bad policing and there's good policing. So what would you judge a police department by? What are the what are the qualities of a good police department? And on the flip side, what are the qualities of a bad police department? How should we judge whether or not an agency is doing a good or bad job?
Peter Moskos: To some extent I simply want to j I think good policing is effective policing. are police reducing crime and disorder? is the public less afraid of criminals? And hopefully not afraid of cops either, at least, you know, non-criminals I'm talking about. it's very hard to measure public fear, so it usually isn't measured. but you can do it. But if people feel safer, they're willing to cut cops a lot of slack. and there is a problem that some there are bad cops out there. and that is on police departments to identify them and either retrain them or get rid of them. And some police departments do that better or worse. bad police department is less transparent, is hiding stuff, is not releasing, you know, not answering questions. A bad police department feels under siege, sometimes they can be, by the way, which is you know, a another issue. a good you know, y as a researcher, if I go to a police department and say, hey, can I have unlimited access? most American police departments will still say no or put condition. I have to know somebody. I've been I've done research in England and I've done research in the Netherlands and both places welcome me with open arms and just said, Yeah, do whatever you want. I th I found that very refreshing. because they they had they had nothing to hide and I guess they also figured I wasn't out to get them. I don't know, but they there was nothing to get necessarily. other countries don't have the ideological divide that we do, where conservatives are pro cop and you know, liberals I mean I'm I'm oversimplifying of course, and liberals are are are anti cop. But I put myself in as a pro policing liberal 'cause I think there's you can't have a fair society if you don't have good policing. I do like to say it's a subtle distinction, but I like to emphasize it. I'm not necessarily pro police, I'm pro policing. I'm pro police when they're good. I'm anti police when they're bad. But policing as a verb, we need it, we want it. and it's it's it's it's it is you know, rule of law is the basis of civilization. When that breaks down, you can't have nice things.
Sean Kennedy: So in that sense, what does the left get wrong about policing? What is it that there's a few I would say as you could say pro-policing public intellectual liberals like yourself, Thomas Edsel, Matt Iglesias, I haven't checked in on Ezra Klein lately, but those kind of like Yimby, whatnot, intellectuals. But What are they what is the general left? Because as you mentioned, post Floyd there was this, for want of a better term, mass hysteria that policing needed not necessarily to be abolished, but defunded, or what they would call reform, but they they really meant like tearing it down or doing a lot of sort of very radical things to it. What is the left getting wrong about policing today?
Peter Moskos: I I do think as you sort of did it, I think it's important to distinguish between I mean, I identify as politically as a liberal. the Democratic Party is current especially in New York is being taken over as being hijacked by the f progressive far left wing. they hate liberals, by the way, j just you know. and and so that's an important distinction to make. Here's if you want to make I mean what the what the far left gets wrong is simply that policing they say policing is bad and is no and and is in fact, you know, the cause of crime. I mean it it gets really crazy and extreme at some level. you know, revolutionary ideas and of course they would just implement their own brutal police department. or you have mob rule. I just listened to a podcast about CHOP in Seattle and yeah, y you know, and they ended up shooting and killing an unarmed black teenager. exactly what the whole movement in theory was supposed to stop. The irony is is deep and you know, and lives were lost. the old left, you know, Bill Clinton passed the nineteen ninety four four crime bill. the black congressional caucus supported tougher drug laws for you know, for better or for worse. we didn't used to have that distinction. Everyone understood that we need police. The question was how to do it and, you know, to reformers I say this. I mean If you want to make policing better, if you y you know, I want reform to be good. Yeah, reform is often a cover for now for abolish policing or or drastically reduce it. if you good policing scares that abolition crowd because I mean, yeah, they bad that good policing to them is worse than bad policing because they're they're they're have an agenda and they're trying to get there by any means possible. if you don't want to make police better, you should not have a seat at the table of police reform. if you're well intentioned in the sense that, you know, even if mistaken, and you know, we're all mistaken sometimes, but if your goal is to improve policing, then yes, have a big tent. It's something Bratton, by the way, did in LA, is try and get his opponents to be part of his team. and he told me I'd I I much prefer to have people inside my tent than standing outside pissing on it. so you know, you have to welcome to a certain extent what you might see is the opposition, but the opposition has to also be well intentioned and say yes, it is our goal. I mean, look, if we could reduce police involved shootings without any impact on crime, great, who's against that? If there's you know, that would be true reform. But as, you know, I forget the term you used, hysteria, I believe. I would also call it a moral panic, and it's a more academic term, but this You know, you take a little grain of reality and then just you know, even today I think people think cops shoot and kill so many more people, than reality reflects.
Sean Kennedy: And speaking of mugged by reality and and tying it to Brat not Bratton is a little after Bratton, but LAPD. So after in the early two thousand tens, they brought in a civilian oversight board for police discipline. And the idea was that the internal police IA system, disciplinary system with, you know, commanders and chiefs making decisions about whether or not line cops got disciplined for misconduct was too buddy buddy. So they bring it in. The misconduct complaint substantiation rate drops. The number of disciplinary actions taken against officers drops. The reason was the people who are on the inside were holding the cops to higher standards. That you were did something wrong, you're a stain on the department, you're a stain on us. We have to hold you to account. Whether or not that's to take your badge or not, it is not it. But you need to know that you're getting cacheted or whatever want to call it. And the civilians were like, I don't know what to make of this incident. So Nothing.
Peter Moskos: Yeah, I've never been there. it looks like a rough job. I y you can you get that from sometimes from civilian oversight commissions and the flip side is you get people who are fishing for just to screw cops any way they can. and you see that more in Chicago, to some extent New York. I do want some outside people because yeah, I can get I mean it depends on the department It it all depends on leadership. But I don't know how you ensure good leadership. So you have to have a system that can also be stable and effective when the leadership isn't so good. I think we in a way focus too much on big city police departments that tend to do things better. there are a lot of sheriff departments and a lot of small town police departments that no one's really looking at. and I mean it's just 'cause people know the name and I don't mean to pick on them in particular, though I kinda do, but like you know Ferguson, Missouri back. in the days like, Yeah, they were doing some bad stuff and which is ironic 'cause the actual controversy was not one of those things. But then we found all these other things that were going on about how they were
Sean Kennedy: It was smoke you know, where there's smoke there's fire. It was that the the shooting of Michael Brown was sort of blown out of proportion, but it didn't mean that the rest of the Ferguson department didn't have problems.
Peter Moskos: Yeah, as soon as you pulled back the curtain, you were like, my god, they're really they're doing this and the whole thing's funded through fines and so on. and I don't know how we'd bring attention to that. If you're concerned about police involved shootings, let's look at the departments that shoot a lot of people, because they're out there. and they're almost all medium-sized cities west of the Mississippi. often with a s low percentage of black population. And but they're shooting people at, you know, rates ten times New York City. So we're we're keep you know, New York City has its problems, as does the NYPD, but arguably it's it is one of if not the best large police department in America. you know, how much deuce can you get from that squeeze? You set up another oversight commission? you know, that's not I don't think shootings in n police involve shootings in New York could get much lower, honestly, than they are now. and you know, and and they and they you cops there used to be a Police involved shooting. I mean, now we're going back decades, but there used to be one almost every day in New York City. And now it's, you know, ten a year or something.
Sean Kennedy: well Peter, I wanna end on a final note and take you back to your roots to Baltimore. Baltimore has recorded a historic low, it's roughly at the time of this podcast, about sixty homicides for the year. Baltimore at this pace is going to for the first time in maybe a hundred years. See fewer than a hundred homicides. What is going on with Baltimore?
Peter Moskos: Fabulous. well, they haven't solved poverty, you know, bad education, racism, all those things haven't changed much. what I think has happened is they replaced a corrupt and incompetent prosecutor with a good prosecutor, who I I'm just gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's not corrupt, but he's effective. often when there's a Kim Fox in Chicago or something that does get attention. but not enough attention is played to the prosecutor. It's more important than I realized, and I think more important than a lot of other people realize. so that's part of the equation. the other part is they had good police leadership. and that took a while. friend of mine, Tony Barksdale, who passed away not that long ago, became the mayor's crime man, and he was a protege of Jack Maple and understood what is going on. And I think the mayor matured a lot. He came in very young and I think he's gotten better. do the community programs work? let me just say they they've been going on for twenty years. So have they changed and gotten better? Maybe. I don't want to discount them. but I am a little bit dismissive of that. at some point maybe it can hurt. If you if you have people that go into you know visit a hospital and immediately to try and prevent retaliation after a shooting victim shows up. Like that kind of stuff. hopefully it can't hurt, but man, there's a lot of corruption in those programs as well. but it just seems that suddenly we have, you know, good policing and good prosecution. and yeah, the drop has been dramatic. I don't have all the answers to Baltimore, quite frankly. I'm not there anymore. but it's it's I mean, I'm personally I still feel attached to the city, so I'm thrilled to see that happen. it is the it is the hard work of men and women in various capacities that are doing it. It doesn't just happen. It's very easy to say, well, now they're you know, after it happens, well now their murder rate's more like other cities. Yeah. great. I mean it still could be even lower. But the you learn from success. rather than just saying, well, you know No, it's not 'cause we got rid of lead and gasoline fifty years ago. it's not because of of, you know, legalized abortion. it's because of
Sean Kennedy: Let me stop that for our listeners. Peter is referring to a number of academic freconomics arguments about the idea that leaded gasoline contributed to people's lower IQs, which caused them to commit crime, or that we aborted our way out of the crime problem. So just to give you a context
Peter Moskos: Yeah.
Sean Kennedy: of Peter's obscure reference, those are academic theories that are somewhat comical. But yes, go ahead.
Peter Moskos: But I hear that a lot still, even among non academics. The funny thing is even the proponents of the lead theory say, you know, there are a couple of different studies. It might maybe it was ten to fifteen percent of the reduction. Though what was interesting about the reduction is it wasn't cohort based. when crime went down in New York, violence stopped among young people and old people. So lagged effect studies are just tough because in the real world so much else happens. But you just see that you know, it's you you see people say, We're gonna do this new strategy. and then it works and people say, Well, it must be something else. I don't know. You know, you know, you can never prove anything for sure. But again, this that that correlation is a clue and then you gotta look into it and see what's going on. But yeah, Baltimore does have specific changes that what I'd like to know then is, you know, what's that next step? I don't know exactly. What did Tony Barksdale do to policing? But I you what I can guess, 'cause it's not rocket science. It's hard work, but it's is you focus on the repeat violent offenders. There's so few people that are causing so much of the problem. And you get them and you take them out through incarceration. And you do that to just a you know, this is not mass incarceration. It's very it's targeted incarceration. and you take out, you know, in a city like Baltimore, if you can if you can lock up ten to twenty shooters and maybe that deters another ten to twenty, that's your reduction right there.
Sean Kennedy: Yeah. it's striking. thank you, Peter, for joining us. your insights are always valuable. And one of the most refreshing things about Peter is Peter is not sort of a monolith in that and i I would recommend everybody, if you are on the Twitter X, whatever they're calling it these days, follow Peter's very amusing and informative X account at Peter Moskos and again, Peter, thank you for
Peter Moskos: That's it. Yeah.
Sean Kennedy: joining us.
Peter Moskos: it's a pleasure. Thanks for the conversation. as you can tell, I love talking about this stuff.
Sean Kennedy: This was a really great interview. And if you want to catch up on all the other episodes, please check us out on your podcast apps, and give us a five-star review. Until next time, this is Holding the Line, a podcast about cops, courts, and crime.
