Speaker 1: Close your eyes and tell me about a time when you felt safe.

Speaker 2: When around my friends and family, people that all have a history of building each other up. Nowadays I'm living on my own out here, going to college and whatnot, and especially with this last election, DC getting wild. I don't feel safe around here like that no more.

Speaker 3: When was the time that I felt safe? I would have to go almost back to childhood, because as an adult, especially as a black person in America, I don't really feel safe. But yes, childhood, being around my mom. I think that may be back 30 some odd years ago since I've really felt safe. [music]

Kai Wright: It's Notes From America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show. We are in the final weeks of the life of this show and the broader reporting project that it grew out of at our home station, WNYC. At the end of the year, we'll stop making this show and turn to the next adventure. We're thinking about some of the questions that we've asked most often during our run here. The stuff that just keeps coming up as we try to understand life in these United States. One of those topics is public safety. How do we make ourselves feel safe? How do we make ourselves actually safe?

These are questions I've pursued in one way or another for a couple of decades as a journalist, and I'm pretty clear at this point that what we're doing right now is not the answer. For that matter, there's not a lot of evidence that it was ever even intended to be the answer, at least not for my communities. Black people, queer people, workers. This week, in our final conversation on this show about public safety, we're turning to a few people who have begun thinking about how do we get safe without cops and prisons. I spoke first to a guy named Dennis Flores. He's a Puerto Rican from New York who remembers vividly the first time he thought, oh, wait, maybe safety for me won't come from the police.

Dennis Flores: It happened at a very young age. Steven Seagal was in my neighborhood filming this.

Kai Wright: Steven Seagal, the actor?

Dennis Flores: Yes. When he was a big action star. He was in Sunset Park filming this movie, Out for Justice.

Movie Trailer Voice: In this neighborhood, someone's got to take out the garbage. Steven Seagal, Out for Justice.

Dennis Flores: The streets in my neighborhood were crowded. This guy was the big action star and we all wanted to see him. I was about 14, 15 years old. I remember I stepped off the sidewalk onto the street to take a peek, and a cop just came right for me, grabbed me by my neck, dug his thumb into my throat and picked me up off my feet. I was a scrawny, skinny kid back then.

I just remember I couldn't breathe, and I just started crying. All these adults that were around there started yelling at him, "This is a little boy. This is a little kid. What are you doing?" That for me was the awakening of like, wait up, we get treated different. Prior to that, being a kid, I wanted to join the military. I looked up to cops. This was the beginning of my rites of passage.

Kai Wright: How did that change you, that experience? How did that stick with you?

Dennis Flores: Well, I remember coming home and going to my mom, and my family, my uncles, and telling them what happened to me. They just told me, you're going to have to eat it. We can't do nothing. We can't go to the precinct and demand that they hold this cop accountable. We can't do anything about it. I remember being angry at them that they wouldn't speak up, or protect me, or stand up, like, do something about it. They're like, that's just the way things are. I didn't get it. But just a little while later, I had to deal with that upfront in many different ways throughout my teenage years especially.

Kai Wright: Dennis grew up in New York while Rudy Giuliani was mayor in the '90s. Giuliani is now best known a a clown for his bumbling and illegal efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election. But in the '90s, he took over New York as a tough on crime, pro-cop, head knocker who was gonna clean up the city's troubled reputation.

Dennis Flores: The day he got elected, it was like the wild west. They were just aggressively enforcing- sweeping the streets clean of anyone that, for them, shouldn't be there. Giuliani brought in these laws of no loitering, where two or three people together are considered a gang. That was overturned years later, but cops heavily enforced that. If you were gathering together and there was two or three of you, the cops were justified in locking you up.

Kai Wright: Look, Dennis isn't claiming he was an angel. He got in fights, got mixed up in the violence that grew up out of beef between neighborhood kids in Brooklyn. Eventually he got sent to Rikers Island, which is the city's notoriously dangerous jail, including the well documented corruption and abuse among officers stationed there. While locked up, Dennis started hearing a different kind of conversation between some of the street gangs.

Dennis Flores: There was the ÑETAs, the Latin Kings, the Zulu Nation.

Kai Wright: There were older guys from the Young Lords who wanted to teach Dennis and all his peers about their history.

Dennis Flores: They started as a street gang that got politicized and became a revolutionary political movement. They wanted to do the same for the next generation to get us to stop the infighting, to squash beef, to organize together against police brutality.

Kai Wright: That idea, that blew Dennis' young mind. Can you take me a little bit to that moment, though, when you're discovering the Young Lords and they're trying to organize you to stop fighting amongst yourselves? How did they begin to engage with you guys?

Dennis Flores: We would have public meetings. We would be at the park, and there's 50 to 100 people in a big circle. They showed up and they engaged us by putting words into things that I felt and I understood, but I couldn't articulate. It was about the over policing in our communities. It was how cops were not there to protect us, but protect the interests of the rich and to police us. Giuliani promised that they were going to clean up New York, Black and Brown kids that were part of gangs, and we need to get rid of them and put us in jail. People that look like me and are from my community, they're not the enemy.

I don't want to be at war with my friends and neighbors and the people I grew up with. I didn't want that. I didn't want to be that part of that destructive element in my community. That made sense to me. It changed the course of my life. It helped me find myself. From that moment on, I began to work on myself and develop into a productive human being that was invested in protecting our community, doing right by my elders, and not destroying. I wanted to build.

Kai Wright: Being invited into community by community, that's what helped Dennis. Not being arrested and locked up. He went on to start his own community group, El Grito of Sunset Park.

Dennis Flores: El Grito, grito translates to an outcry. There were moments in our history, not just Puerto Ricans, but many Latin American countries, where there was these outcries, these gritos. In Puerto Rico, there was El Grito de Lares, where on September 23rd, 1868, Puerto Rican people raised up arms and fought against Spanish colonialism to abolish slavery. For me, that connection of that history is what I believed was what was needed. Not Necessarily armed combat and violent uprising, but the sense of the people stepping up. We didn't plan to become an organization. El Grito de Sunset Park was an action that we took, and we called it that the evening of the Puerto Rican Day Parade.

Kai Wright: This was 2002. The annual parade, for those outside of New York City, is one of the largest, most fun street parties in the world. A million people dancing and singing and showing off their boricua pride.

Dennis Flores: Where do those people go after this parade ends at four o'clock in the afternoon? They go back to their communities. They go back to Sunset Park, Bushwick, the Lower East Side, Spanish Harlem. They go back into these communities, and there's hundreds of thousands of people spread out through the city who want to continue to celebrate. People are going to be in front of their house and playing congas and dominoes and having some drinks and having a good time.

Kai Wright: Invariably, that party led to conflict with the cops who wanted to restore what they considered a sense of order. To Dennis, it was just like when he was a kid in a crowd trying to get a look at Steven Seagal. Cops shoving him and other Puerto Ricans around just to put them in their place, and he was tired of it.

Dennis Flores: We did the same song and dance every year with the cops. The cops didn't have any other way to solve this problem other than let's just bring more cops next year.

Kai Wright: First, Dennis got the idea to turn cameras on them when they showed up. He organized a cop watch for the day. Then that one year in 2002, he got a whole other inspiration.

Dennis Flores: I know a lot of folkloric, traditional musicians who played bomba y plena, this Afro-Puerto Rican music. I would ask these musicians that I would document to bring their drums, and let's go to the hottest spot in the neighborhood, and let's line up all the musicians up against the wall where we're not blocking pedestrian traffic, and let's play our music.

[music]

Dennis Flores: I would give out know-your-rights information to the neighborhood, and I would tell the people, "Meet us here on 49th street and 5th Avenue. We have the right to assemble. We have the right to be here." The cops would threaten us, and the musicians would be scared, but the elders would come, and the little old ladies would bring their hand percussion instruments and stand in front of us, between us and the cops, and command us, "Nobody go home. Play. Play the music."

Kai Wright: Play the music.

Dennis Flores: That inspired us. I'm getting goosebumps remembering this right now, because that, for us, is what gave us strength. We played. We didn't move. They couldn't shake us, and we remained and we held on. This was a public space that we have a right to.

Kai Wright: That post parade street concert became an annual event that is ongoing. They held the space. The cops had defined their joy as disorder and tried to disrupt it with force in the name of public safety. But Dennis and those musicians and those old ladies said, nah, what we're doing here, that's not public safety, and honestly, we can figure that part out without you.

Dennis Flores: The ideas came from the community. We decided for ourselves on what ways we can keep ourselves safe.

Kai Wright: Where did the other ideas come from? The ones that say the only way we can have safety is with a massive heavily armed police force stationed in every community. That history, just ahead.

[music]

Kai Wright: This is Notes From America. I'm Kai Wright. As we wind down production for this show, our final episode will be at the end of this year, we're gathering closing thoughts on some of the stuff we've discussed over the course of the years. One of those is public safety and our total reliance on policing and punitive incarceration systems to make us feel safe. How do we get past that? I spoke recently with the author of a new book asking this question directly. The book is called Beyond Policing, and it's written by sociologist Philip V. McHarris, who's an assistant professor at the University of Rochester. Philip is an abolitionist. He wants us to move on from policing altogether to come up with something brand new. But the core challenge he and other abolitionists face is when you say stuff like that, let's get beyond policing, what people hear you saying is, oh, let's just not worry about public safety.

Philip V. McHarris: It's very difficult for people to delink policing from safety. That's the main thing that people say, especially communities who experience a number of different conditions that make them feel unsafe. Because for so many years and decades of people's lives, we're socializing to the idea that police and the criminal legal system equate to safety and justice. Part of what I offer is to say is that, if punishment equated to safety insofar as we live in one of the most punitive societies, shouldn't we also live in one of the most safe societies?

Kai Wright: Indeed.

Philip V. McHarris: If that's not the case, then we've been socializing to this idea and to this model and to this framework that it feels like the only option, even when it's actually not. The other thing that I like to say, do you want police or do you want help? Do you want police or do you want safety? What is it actually that you want? Is it that you want safety and you're using police as a proxy or is it that you just want police because you just want police.

Kai Wright: Because of whatever cultural and psychic things that you have attached to that, and that's what you want.

Philip V. McHarris: Exactly. But what's at the core of it is that people want safety, people want help when they feel like they need it. The problem is that the conversations always start with policing, in prisons, in the criminal legal system. When we start from scratch and say, you don't feel safe, why? You need help in certain moments, what are the conditions that create that, and how do we create a world in which you feel safer and you have the kinds of safety interventions that you are looking for when you need them?

Kai Wright: How did safety and police become synonymous in the public mind? Where'd that start? Anyway, how did policing as we know it take shape? What are its origins? Philip says these are all the questions he'd been asking for many years, since he was a little kid, and they're the questions he asked right as he began his journey as an academic.

Philip V. McHarris: I remember asking different professors like, I really want a history of policing. There were different articles, different books, but it was hard to find the big picture that told a longer and broader story about these histories. The history section, which is the first part of the book, is essentially that. It's me writing the history that I wanted to read when I was early on in grad school and wanted to understand where did the police come from.

Kai Wright: You set out to write the history that you wanted to read. Where did that history begin?

Philip V. McHarris: When I started to write that section, what quickly became very immediate to me is that it is a very complex story. There are certain threads, though. One of those threads is that the histories of policing is deeply rooted in race class control, and as colonial projects. Slave patrols were one of the first funded, organized models of policing, particularly in the Carolinas. It emerges in the early 1700s. But then there are other models that also show up in other places that might look different, depending on a specific context, but still have this focus on race class control. We can also look to Texas Rangers in the west and their role in the dispossession of indigenous and Mexican land, and the violence against indigenous and Mexican communities, but also the policing of Asian communities around certain punitive immigration policies early on.

What I started to see very vividly was this focus on race class control. Also, the other piece that's really important is the transnational origins of policing. We can also look to the 1800s, where more sort of modernized policing formations were starting to emerge in places like Boston, and New York City, and Philadelphia that were also greatly inspired by models of policing in the context of London, which was largely formulated as a tool of colonial control for Irish populations early on. A part of what stood out to me was just the fact that colonization was a global project. People were in conversation. People were relying on other models in other different contexts in order to figure out how do you control populations that will resist in the face of colonialism and capitalism.

Kai Wright: In the late 19th century, in newly industrialized northern cities of the US, that resistance mostly meant workers pushing back on the rapid social changes that they were experiencing. Industrialists, the factory owners and the like, they needed help reining in that kind of disorder.

Philip V. McHarris: You had a number of folks, people striking, people protesting against labor conditions. People were living through unjust conditions. In order to manage the consequences of that inequality, in many places, there started to be this advocation for a model of policing that didn't have to come from the private funding streams of people who had the resources. They, in a lot of ways, mobilized to convince the government and public to fund essentially what was largely protecting capital and property. But what ends up happening is that early on, it's very clear that there is corruption that exists all throughout.

That is when these reformers started to say, we need to change policing. A part of that reform started to look like embracing a paramilitary structure and way of engaging, which a lot of those strategies were being imported from places like the Philippines or Guam.

Kai Wright: But the point had been like, oh, if we give it this military structure, we can control the corruption and the behavior of officers up and down, was the idea. Why did the corruption happen immediately? That's interesting to think about from the beginning. People were like, boy, this is a corrupt force. What were the roots of that corruption?

Philip V. McHarris: I would say police power itself. Is that when you give an entity that kind of power, it has historical tendency to become corrupt throughout. The other reason that went hand in hand was there was also a number of political machines that were also using and mobilizing police for their interests and for their beck and call. That was another part of it, and there were also a number of what has been deemed organized crime networks that many police had ties with. All of that was very known. It's very clear when you read documents from the 1800s onward, you can see that it was a major issue. You start to see many of these police departments and the more modern orientation that we can see as legible today.

Kai Wright: The next evolution in policing here in the US also came in response to political disorder.

Philip V. McHarris: Towards the mid 20th century, you have a number of things happening. One of the main things happening in the context of this period was a range of activism. There were a number of different activist movements, civil rights activism, feminist movements, labor organizing, interwar efforts, and you had the vestiges of inequality that had ran rampant for many years.

Speaker 4: They made it only to the Edmund Pettus Bridge where authorities set upon them. The violence of that bloody Sunday was broadcast across the nation.

Philip V. McHarris: A part of what also happened is that there were a number of uprisings as well. Now, of course, we know that there was a powder keg of inequality, centuries of unjust racial dynamics and economic inequality that was a powder keg. But a part of what came out of that period was that there was some acknowledgement of those structural, deeper problems, but then there was also this level of desire to expand policing and prisons as a way of responding to the fears of Black rebellion and just activism more broadly.

Kai Wright: How did it grow? It's impossible now to think of any community, but certainly any large city without a police force as one of the biggest parts of the bureaucracy. At what point did it grow like that?

Philip V. McHarris: There was a specific period of time in the mid-1960s, specifically around Lyndon B. Johnson, who sparked the first federal funding stream for local and state law enforcement, and that was the Law Enforcement Assistance Act. Once you had the Law Enforcement Assistance act, which would later become its own entity, that started to really expand the expenditure, the funding, the resources that could be channeled towards policing, and really was sort of kick started what would become in the coming decades what I call the police boom. That would shape mass policing because there became a federal funding stream. As of now, there's over $100 billion a year that gets channeled towards policing alone. Because the federal funding stream, one, it created a context where there was more resources when we think about the federal, local, state interplay. It also sets a standard and a direction. Then cities, states start to follow suit. If there's a federal funding scheme, then there starts to become more and more of an emphasis.

The other thing that I think it's important to mention is also this piece around offering some semblance of security for those deemed worthy of it. This is where it gets- it's not like a linear story that- that category can shift at times. There's context where some folks can feel some semblance of security or protection that are deemed worthy of it, but it's much more complicated than that because even that category is precarious in the context of, what is it actually doing? Is it managing the consequences of inequality that can create conditions that people find unsafe or is it actually about engaging in a project of public safety?

Kai Wright: What you're trying to do in this book is facilitate us imagining, as the title says, a world beyond policing. Help us out. What would a world without policing incarceration look like to you that created safety without these ideas?

Philip V. McHarris: I love that question. Within conversations, I ask people- for folks to close their eyes and imagine what is a time where you felt the most safe.

Speaker 1: Close your eyes and tell me about a time when you felt safe. [unintelligible 00:25:20]

Speaker 3: I would have to go almost back to childhood--

Speaker 2: My friends and family--

Speaker 3: Childhood, being around my mom.

Speaker 2: People that all have a history of building each other up.

Philip V. McHarris: Never once has anyone said, oh, when there were a bunch of police around, that's probably a place where the crime rate was low. That safety is much more complex because we know that so much that happens in society we can directly trace to what happens when people don't have the resources that they need. Then when people don't also have the resources that they need to thrive is that there's a number of different consequences of that that can lead to conditions of unsafety within society. I think it's one of the most well known findings within social science literature around what is referred to as crime rates. I say it in that way because I also think we need new metrics of understanding safety, because of course, there are certain things that are harmful that are criminalized, and there are certain things that are criminalized that are not necessarily harmful related to legacies of injustice.

But when you look at the relationship between crime rates and poverty, it's one of the clearest indications of why certain conditions exist in certain communities and why they don't in other communities. I feel like it's well known, but then it's always the immediate reaction is like, well, just put some more cops there. It's like, no, we actually need to deal with the consequences of racial capitalism.

Kai Wright: But how do you deal with that in people's mind? Because I think dealing with the consequences of racial capitalism feels massive, and unsolvable, and long term, and like a thing very far removed from what's going to happen when I walk out my front door today on my block. Put cops there, feels very concrete and immediate. How do you deal with that gap in just how the mind works?

Philip V. McHarris: No, for sure. One is that there are certain systems that are in place that do not benefit the vast majority of people. These systems, we have to create new ways of being in relationship to one another that do away with these paradigms and regimes. But my view, and this is- I argue in the book, is I'm not imagining a utopia. What I'm imagining is a world where the actual underlining causes of violence and harm and conflict are actually addressed. That is a big, complex, nuanced, difficult thing.

In chapter four, which is entitled Solutions for a New World, I talk about the specific entities, initiatives, efforts that are going on right now, or that have gone on that address a range of different concerns, even the tough things like violence and its different iterations. What you see is that there are so many examples, models, experiments, initiatives that have existed that are often not funded or not resource, but that do exist that we can actually see how it impacted concerns around safety. We can completely switch that framework. Yes, people need help, people need safety, people should be able to walk down the street and feel safe. What are other ways that we can approach these safety concerns that do not rely on police, which then actually can create other forms of safety concerns?

Let's show up, given the specific situation, and offer a safety intervention that's community-driven and has the actual person at the center of it. We can have that, people should have that, but the model that we have, it does not do what people need in terms of safety interventions. What we see is that when that is a model, we have people die, people are brutalized, people are abused, and we deserve a better world where people have safety, where people have help when they need it, where people have people to call, where people can rely on their networks and communities in order to keep them safe. We can have that world, but we have to move beyond policing.

Kai Wright: I really like this exercise of closing your eyes and imagining a time when you felt safe. I want to invite our listeners to do that, and I want to invite you to model it for us. Philip V. McHarris, if you close your eyes and imagine a time when you felt safe, what do you see?

Philip V. McHarris: I see family. I feel loved. I feel supported. I feel warm. I can smell food, and it feels like nothing can go wrong. It feels like I have a sun that's entering through the window. It's not too bright, but it's resting on me in a way that allows me to feel comforted. It feels like in those moments, I'm safe, I'm protected, and those around me will do whatever to keep me safe and I will do the same for them. It's not even something that I really have to consider because the feeling is such that I don't even have safety, even on my mind.

[music]

Kai Wright: Philip V. McHarris is author of the book Beyond Policing. He says there are lots and lots of initiatives around the country that are finding ways to create and hold public safety without relying on violent policing and punitive incarceration. Coming up, we talked to someone who's leading one such initiative in Brooklyn, New York, and doing it with victims of truly violent crime. That's just ahead.

Katerina Barton: Hey, it's Katerina Barton from the show team at Notes From America with Kai Wright. Something happens to me when I listen to this show. No matter the topic or the guest, I can always think of someone I want to tell about what I just heard, and I do. If you're thinking about who in your life would enjoy this episode or another episode you've heard, please share it with them now. The folks in your life trust your good taste, and we would appreciate you spreading the word. If you really want to go above and beyond, please leave us a review. It helps more people, the ones you know and the ones you don't, find the show. I'll let you get back to listening now. Thanks.

Kai Wright: This is Notes From America. I'm Kai Wright. We're thinking this week about public safety, something that has dominated our political discourse for, well, decades now, but certainly over the past few years. In the US, we rely entirely on policing and incarceration to make us feel safe, despite all the collateral damage that approach has caused. I've been talking with people who are offering fundamentally different approaches.

Danielle Sered: I think the most radical decision we could make in our approach to crime and justice would be if we decided we were going to constrain ourselves to only doing things that worked.

Kai Wright: Danielle Sered is executive director of an organization called Common Justice in Brooklyn, New York. It offers alternatives to incarceration for people convicted of serious violent crimes, which is a place where a lot of conversations about alternatives to our current model fall apart. Danielle says, "First off, people often don't understand that violence is rarely random and detached. It's rather personal, and importantly, it's cyclical."

Danielle Sered: I've done this work for a very long time. I grew up around a lot of violence. I've met thousands of people who've engaged in it, and I've yet to meet a single person who commits violence who didn't survive at first. That doesn't mean people aren't responsible for the harm they cause. I do restorative justice work. We are obsessed with accountability. We care about accountability more than anybody in any court ever has. It is the heart of what we do. But caring about accountability doesn't mean that you can't be interested in why someone caused harm. In fact, if you actually want to hold someone to the responsibility of repairing what they did and not doing it again, you have to understand why they caused harm.

Kai Wright: Which to me, demands some kind of collective social capacity for empathy, for just a pause and a thought before reaching for retribution. That's all fine and good for me to say here, now in this moment, when I don't feel any particular danger. But when your community is in fact constantly experiencing violence, or theft, or some drug organization has taken over the park across from your house, well, it's not so simple. Even if you know that real security comes from deep investments and things like jobs and schools and homes, you also want a tool that can help you right now. That's why it's true that much of the political demand for robust law enforcement has come from communities most affected by violent crime. But Danielle says that's only part of the truth.

Danielle Sered: The other thing that's true in communities impacted by violence is many communities have the experience of asking for so many things that will keep them safe. James Forman's book, Locking Up Our Own, is really brilliant on this.

Kai Wright: Just as an aside, we had a conversation with James Forman Jr. About his book a couple years ago. We'll put a link to it in the show notes for this episode.

Danielle Sered: You'll ask members of Black and Brown communities, what do you want to be safe? They'll say, we want schools, we want after school programs, we want parks, we want streetlights, we want grocery stores, we want police, we want good teachers, we want treatment programs. The city will be like, oh, did you say you'd like police? We got you. Even if It's a number 49 on a list of 50 things, it's the request that gets honored. I think it's really important to acknowledge that there are communities impacted by violence whose members are asking for more policing.

They are also asking for a thousand other things that actually do much better to prevent violence, and those requests are typically unmet, unheard, disregarded. If you do surveys about whether people want more police in high crime neighborhoods, you almost always get a 51-49% split. People know that policing is limited. They know that it also causes damage. But if they're being offered nothing else whatsoever, people will choose it over nothing.

Kai Wright: Okay. But still, for that person standing at their front door, worried about safety on the block right now in absence of these other investments in prevention that Danielle's talking about, what are the concrete alternatives to police?

Danielle Sered: I would say that community violence interruption programs are among the most promising things ever. Unlike police, they actually show up when people are being hurt. People want police because they want the feeling that if they're being hurt, someone will show up in that moment to protect them, but that's not actually what police do. Police are called and come after that person has been hurt to mete out punishment against whomever did it. That's a different thing. It's not what meets that fundamental desire. Violence interrupters do it. They go to where violence is happening and stand between and among people. Neighbors do that too. Neighbors look out for each other. I think almost none of us can think of an instance in which in a moment when we were being hurt, a law enforcement officer protected us and prevented that from happening.

Kai Wright: Sure can't.

Danielle Sered: Almost all of us can think of a time when in a moment of being hurt, someone else, a neighbor, an elder, a teacher, a friend, someone walking behind the block, stopped and kept us safe.

Kai Wright: True facts.

Danielle Sered: That's how we generate safety. There is a lot of information in all the ways we've ever been safe about how we become safe. The way become safe is the things that we know to work. Those violence interrupter programs are incredible. They're an immediate solution. They are incredibly useful. Things like summer youth employment and other pathways to employment for people are immediately useful for people who are committing violence in order to meet their basic needs. So are things like access to affordable housing. The number of people who commit harm in order to evade homelessness are extraordinarily high. Those basic needs being met are immensely helpful.

Kai Wright: You say these things as a matter of theory or a matter of--

Danielle Sered: As a matter of fact and evidence. The research is overwhelmingly positive on all of these kinds of interventions and always has been. The research on incarceration shows recidivism rates, depending on how you measure, between 40 and 85%. We know that those kinds of interventions fail and that they produce further harm. Whereas, these other interventions that meets people's needs are consistently proven to reduce recidivism, to reduce instances of violence in the near term, and to have a productive long term effect.

I have the privilege of leading Common Justice, which serves as an alternative to incarceration for serious violence. Fewer than 7% of the people who have come through our program for crimes like assault, robbery, even attempted murder have been terminated from the program for new crimes. When the Division of Criminal Justice Service looked at a 10-year study of our graduates from 2012 to 2022, only one had been reconvicted of a new violent felony in that 10-year period. There is not a prison in the world that can produce those kinds of outcomes.

Kai Wright: Let's talk a little bit about how the program works, because you mentioned earlier, accountability is a really important idea. How does the program you run work in a basic sense and what is the role of accountability in it?

Danielle Sered: Common Justice, with the consent of the district attorney and the victim of crime in a given case, diverts serious and violent felonies like robberies, stabbings, shootings into a restorative justice program. We hear the word accountability a lot, but usually people use it to mean punishment. The longer I do this work, the more I think not only are accountability and punishment not the same, they're in many respects antithetical. Punishment is passive. All you have to do to be punished is not escape it. Accountability is active. It requires that you acknowledge what you did, acknowledge its impact, express genuine remorse, make things as right as possible, ideally in a way defined by those you've harmed, and become someone who will never cause that harm ever again. Accountability is some of the hardest work any of us will ever do in our lives. Unlike punishment, it has the benefit of positively transforming the person who caused that harm, but also has the benefit of being transformative for the person who was hurt.

As survivors, we want to know why. We want to ask questions. We want to express our pain and outrage. We want to tell someone to go F themselves, and we want to say in the outcome. We want to be able to shape what they have to do to repair it. We want things like apologies. We want our stuff back. We want them to become people who won't hurt people ever again. We want to know something good came out of the pain that we survived all those things, and we get none of those in a standard criminal legal process. None of them. In a good restorative justice process, we get them all. We get every last one of those. That accrues to our healing, which survivors deserve, and it also contributes to breaking cycles of violence.

Kai Wright: The people who have been harmed by violence must agree to the approach in your program. Why do they agree to it?

Danielle Sered: Such a good question. 90% do, which is a crazy number. Fewer than half of survivors of violence call the police in the first place. Another half will drop out before grand jury. 75% have divested from this entire process before the first evidentiary hearing.

Kai Wright: Wait. Let me just take that in. In general, when a crime happens and people call the cops and someone gets arrested and it goes through the system, you're saying that--

Danielle Sered: That represents a tiny fraction of violence. Half of victims of serious violence will never call the police, will never have any touch point with the police. In my mind, it's actually one of the most damning facts about the criminal legal system, and there's a lot of competition to be the most damning fact about the system. That a full 50% of people seriously hurt people who survived real violence, fewer than half will call the police. That's in New York. That's nationally. That's virtually every jurisdiction you can find. Then even if those who call the police or where the police are called because someone witnesses it, half of them won't participate in- won't go further than grand jury. The first thing where they're made to testify about what happened to them, they will drop out at or immediately after that process. That means 75% of victims are saying no to everything that system has offer.

25% is a bad approval rating, and that's partly because there is a ton of evidence that the criminal legal process is re-traumatizing to most victims who participate in it. I talked about what you do need as a victim of crime in terms of validation, an ability to express your experience, an ability to ask questions. What you don't need is to be made to relive it in front of strangers, to be grilled about it, to be made to doubt your own memory, which trauma already makes fraught and complicated. To be forced to open up your most personal wounds in front of a room of strangers whose job is to meet you with doubt and suspicion. But those things are actually quite terrible for survivors, and so they very often opt out of it.

That 25% who stay in, those are the survivors we talk to. We ask them, do you want Common Justice or do you want the person in prison? 90% choose Common Justice. When I first saw this trend, I thought it was because I thought people were better than I knew. I thought we were merciful, that we thought for the grace of God go I. We believed in each other's ability to change. It was a very bright time in my life. What I've come to understand is something I really should've known all along as a survivor myself, which is that as survivors of violence, there are two things we can't stand. We cannot stand the idea of going through it again, and we cannot stand the idea of someone else going through what we went through.

If we are faced with a choice, we will choose the thing that we believe will prevent the things that we cannot stand. If you present them with another option, it's not because they're abolitionists, though maybe some are. It's not because they read the new Jim Crow, though maybe some did. It's because they're pragmatic. It's because they want to be safe, and they want something that works.

Kai Wright: All of these things we've discussed are hard and complicated, and it's hard to imagine them at scale. How do we imagine them at scale?

Danielle Sered: I think first it's important to know, I don't think there is anything harder or more complicated or more expensive than prison. If I put forward to you, in a world without prisons, a proposition that we would have- we would spend a third to a half of every city budget on police, and then we would spend more on courts, and that these systems would have guards in them and lawyers in them and judges within them, and they would have huge buildings that we would have to build and maintain, and we would put these in literally every jurisdiction, and then we would build other buildings big enough to hold 2.3 million people in our country, and we would spend billions and billions and billions of dollars on that every year, and we would do that absent any evidence that it worked. You would think I was out of my mind.

We're doing something that absolutely defies logic. It only makes sense if our one non negotiable is not safety, but revenge. If we're like, look, as a culture, revenge is worth anything to us. It's worth our own safety. It's worth our children's safety. If we said that out loud, then the thing we're doing is consistent with that being our one non negotiable value. Community violence intervention work is increasingly drawing some of the resources that it deserves. That's work that is very feasible to scale. People come from neighborhoods, they are committed to those neighborhoods.

Alternative to incarceration programs across the board, even the most expensive of them are a thousand times cheaper. I think concretely, at least 100 times cheaper than incarcerating someone. Particularly if you're doing alternatives to incarceration for long sentences, you're talking about almost a million dollars. Then if that person recidivates, you're talking about another million dollars the next time you send them back. I think all of us can imagine that if we had a couple million dollars per person, that we could probably do something that works. In many ways, airdropping cash over East New York would be more effective.

Kai Wright: Where are we though in our journey of implementing alternatives to the current system?

Danielle Sered: We've seen really remarkable growth in- particularly in the last decade. Just really incredible, sound, grounded experimentation. We've come a really far way in being able to say these are the range of things that we know produce positive outcomes and are worth doing more of. They are no longer just hypotheses. We are not yet at the place that we resource them at any level comparable to how we resource enforcement. Communities' appetite for these programs is vast, and I think-- We've seen since 2020. In 2020, we see a huge surge of interest in racial justice and criminal legal reform. People who had never cared about it are talking about it at dinner or investing their money and attention in it, and we've seen a lot of retrenchment since then. A lot of regression to a previous, in some respects, easier but more brutal status quo.

In some ways, I feel like when that wave came in and as it goes back out, it's taken with it a lot of the appetite for really visionary, significant criminal legal reform. That's an enormous loss to all of us, but the thing I will say I feel like came in on that wave and was left on the shore even as the tide went back out is this appetite for new solutions. I think something has awakened in so many of us in being able to see that there are things that work. It's one thing to do something terrible in the absence of something that works, you're stuck with it. I understand why people use leeches. Your person is dying. Leeches seem terrible, but they're better than certain death, and so you do them. To do leeches in the presence of antibiotics, for example, is weird. That's a weird choice. I think there is a way in which our collective understanding everywhere, from the neighborhoods impacted by violence to the larger public conversation has awakened to the fact that there are other things we can do instead.

I think while the appetite for steering bravely into our country's devastating racial history has receded in so many respects, I don't think the appetite for affirmative solutions has receded. I think that remains strong. I think it's a place where we can find an enormous amount of practical and pragmatic convergence. Because who doesn't want to be safe and who doesn't want to do things that work? I think as we do those things, they start to bring us into right relationship and help us become the kind of people who will one day be capable of repairing all of that other harm.

Kai Wright: Danielle Sered is executive director of Common justice, which works alongside Brooklyn's court system to provide an alternative to incarceration. Notes From America is a production of WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Regina de Heer and Danny Perez. As I said at the outset, this week we are winding down our show. WNYC will cease production of this program at the end of the year. We're having some final reflections on the conversations we've had often in this space like this one, and we'd love to hear your own reflections on anything really. Just leave a voicemail at 844-745-8255 or email a voice memo to note@WNYC.org. Just tell us what's on your mind. I look forward to hearing from you. I'm Kai Wright. Thanks for spending time with us.

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