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Melissa Harris-Perry: Back with you now on The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Nationwide, only 4% of police chiefs are Black. Since 2009, Chief Joel Fitzgerald has been top cop in four different cities. In each, he was the first Black officer to serve as chief. From 2015 to 2019, Fitzgerald served as chief of police in Fort Worth, Texas. He was fired the day he was scheduled to present the FBI with evidence of corruption in the city. Fitzgerald says he was offered a large severance if he agreed not to talk publicly. He refused.

In May 2019, the Texas State Appeals Panel ruled that Fitzgerald's performance was not the cause of his termination. The panel indicated he should have been honorably discharged. One year after this ruling, in June 2020, Chief Fitzgerald began his new job as chief of police in Waterloo, Iowa. Every year since 2018, Waterloo, Iowa has been ranked among the top five worst places to live for African Americans, according to an annual report by the website, Wall Street 24/7. The rankings are based on measures like Black median income, unemployment, and homeownership rates.

Fitzgerald started in Waterloo just days after officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis. There was a police slaying that touched off historic protests around the world, including in Waterloo.

Protestor: Black lives matter.

Protesters: Black lives matter.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Fitzgerald told me about this tough beginning.

Fitzgerald: Change-making was something that was necessary. My first day interacting with the community here in Waterloo was during the George Floyd protest. I was to be sworn in on June the 1st, and the evening before, I was out with the mayor and a crowd of about 200 to 300 people just talking and having those difficult conversations with members of the community that were frustrated with the lack of change, and the need for reform in law enforcement.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The activism and organizing of the movement for Black Lives accelerated calls for police reform at precisely the moment Fitzgerald assumed leadership of the Waterloo police. He told me that careful listening to community concerns and meaningful reform of policing practices have guided his choices in Waterloo.

Fitzgerald: When I got here, that change had to happen. I had to sit down with some of my staff members and some of the rank and file and work on things like use of force, the duty to report, the duty to intervene, bias-based policing, and other items that have come up, like no chokeholds. Things that were brought up even during the 8 Can't Wait movement that we addressed very early on as a part of our promise to the individuals out there that were protesting. I vowed to them that we would investigate every complaint, that we would promote change within the department, that we would create reforms that were born out of some of the ideas and some of the principles that people shared with me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: One of the first issues Black people in the city brought to Chief Fitzgerald was the police department's emblem. It's an image of a winged griffin adopted in the 1960s. For decades, Black Waterloo residents have noticed that the mythical, half-eagle, half-flying creature also bears a very close resemblance to the KKK dragon. Here's a Black community organizer in Waterloo addressing the chief directly about the logo during a protest back in June of 2020.

Speaker 5: How can we respect y'all when you're wearing it? How can we respect y'all when you ride through our community? They don't serve. They don't prepay. It's bad.

Fitzgerald: It has been something that has been a powder keg for this community. That has been changed. It was changed as a result of council vote. As we speak, there's a transition happening, where the patch is being removed and being replaced with a new patch. That is, let's say, something that the community in and of itself can stomach. If any member or any segment of the community is offended by something that law enforcement is doing, our job is to ensure that we first clarify our position. Second, we try to adapt and make the department something that is representative of everyone in the community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In a move that is more than a bit unusual for law enforcement, Chief Fitzgerald has granted interviews to numerous media outlets in recent weeks. Here's what he told me about the reasons he is speaking out publicly about his frustrations with his experiences in Waterloo.

Fitzgerald: The racial microaggressions that I've experienced here, the propaganda that's been put out on certain websites in reference to just changing the patch and questioning your leadership, and just certain intangibles, it seems as if we, as Black police chiefs, are subjected to a different sliding scale. Sometimes when you have the experience, you have the education, you're a change agent, you're a person that brings about community change, and you get criticized for it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's remarkable to hear a police officer point to the injustice of racial profiling, especially considering that unfair scrutiny of Black people and communities on the basis of race is precisely the concern motivating efforts to reform or abolish American policing.

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According to research published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, of the 2,400 elected prosecutors in the United States, the vast majority are white male, and approximately 85% of them, they run unopposed for their office. When Kim Foxx was elected State's Attorney in Cook County, Illinois, in 2016, she made history as the first Black woman to serve as lead prosecutor in the city of Chicago. Race and gender are not the only things that distinguish Foxx from her counterparts. She ran on a platform of sweeping criminal justice reform.

Now, her work earned her broad support within the Black community and re-election in 2020, and it attracted racist, sexist backlash. I spoke with Foxx last month during an event for the Vera Institute of Justice. Here's what she recounted.

Kim Foxx: I had racists march on my office, the proud boys, members of [unintelligible 00:07:11], and the Fraternal Order of Police all gathered together and marched on my office because they didn't like that I dropped charges on a celebrity for what would otherwise in any other place be a misdemeanor. This happened, where people literally were taking my photo and rubbing my picture on their genitalia outside of the chief prosecutor's office in the city of Chicago, and the person talking about [unintelligible 00:07:39].

Melissa Harris-Perry: For more on the challenges facing Black law enforcement officials who are creating change from the inside out, we're joined now by Roy Austin, former Department of Justice, and Obama White House official. Mr. Austin, great to have you here.

Roy Austin: Great to be here. Thank you so much, Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Also with us is Paul Butler, the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University, former prosecutor, and author of Choke Hold: Policing Black Men. Professor Butler, welcome back to the show.

Paul Butler: Hey, Melissa. It's great to be back on The Takeaway.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to begin with you, Professor Butler. Remind us of some of the most common types of reforms that are in fact being implemented over, maybe the past year or two in law enforcement across the US.

Paul Butler: Melissa, people of color have been demanding police reform since US police departments evolved or devolved from slave patrols. Police reform has been about combating violence by law enforcement officers, racial profiling, and selective prosecution of people of color for things like drug crimes. Reform has centered on transparency and accountability specifically. Now there's been a lot of focus on ending no-knock warrants, which is how Breonna Taylor got killed, getting rid of chokeholds, which are infamous after the news of the last year that inspired the protests about George Floyd. It's about specific steps that departments can take to make themselves more effective at delivering their services to the community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Mr. Roy, one of the things I want to engage with you here is that, in that long push, again, from slave patrols forward, these many, many, many decades of effort, for so long, they had been happening only from the outside in. Now there's also this effort to put into places like police chiefs or prosecutors, people who themselves are reformers from the inside out. How's that working for those inside-out reformers?

Roy Austin: It's a tough slog. They are changing the way we look at justice in this country. For a lot of people, there's only one form of justice, and that is; for people of color, lock them up for as long as you possibly can. There's a realization that hasn't worked. That has not made anybody more safe. It has destroyed communities and families. These reformers are coming in, changing the way the old guard gets to do its business, and they are being attacked for doing so.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Paul, given what Roy's telling us here that when you are on the inside of the system trying to do this work to change it, that the attacks come. There's not the same kind of respect for the office and the institution. The racialization of the people and the racial and gendered nature of the people in those roles so frequently leads to these kinds of attacks. Is that part of why some folks say you can't reform these systems, you can't reform the police, have to abolish it?

Paul Butler: I think that's right, Melissa. I'm so glad you brought up gender because in this instance we have to think about intersectionality. Kim Foxx's experience in Chicago is not unique. African American men and elected prosecutors have had it far worse than anybody else, including white male, progressive prosecutors. I do think the focus has to be on changing the culture.

The Obama Commission on 21st Century Policing talked about changing the culture from warrior mindsets, which too many departments have now, to guardians. If you think about it, the person who applies for a job as a warrior has a whole different set of skills, and experiences, and objectives than the person who wants to be a guardian. In order to transform policing, some folks have said reform is too limited. It's too unambitious given the scale of the problem.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Roy, even in the role of guardian, though, doesn't it matter who you're guarding. I'm thinking here of lynch mobs who understood themselves as guardians of white women's virtue. The violence against Black men, was it any different than a warrior mindset?

Roy Austin: You mentioned respect, and we saw this with Obama. People used to say you have to respect the presidency, and then President Obama came in and you had all these people disrespecting it. Same thing is happening with these Black men and women, especially prosecutors. They're there and suddenly everybody forgets that you're supposed to respect the institution, respect their discretion. It's just not happening because, again, they are changing the lens with which you look at justice. A lot of people are very uncomfortable with that because they've only seen justice from the lens of protecting wealthy white communities.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Roy, can you tell me a little bit more about prosecutorial discretion, what it is, and what's been happening with Black women prosecutors who've tried to use it?

Roy Austin: Prosecutors are largely allowed to decide because they can't prosecute every single thing that comes in front of them, to decide what they're going to emphasize, what they're not going to emphasize, how they're going to run their office. They were elected to do so. For as long as I remember, when you had white male prosecutors predominating, they were allowed to exercise their discretion. Well, suddenly you have these Black females and other reform-minded prosecutors in there, and everyone's trying to limit their discretion.

I first saw it with Aramis Ayala, who was trying to limit the use of the death penalty. She got threatened. Actually, they took away all of her capital homicide cases because they decided that she could not exercise her discretion as a Black woman prosecutor.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Who's the they in this case?

Roy Austin: Actually, it's a big they. The they is the media. The they is other prosecutors in Florida for Aramis Ayala. The they is the police. The they is everybody but the voters, because one thing you will notice is that these reform-minded prosecutors, when they run again, are being overwhelmingly re-elected. The they is the people in power who are not the people who are the voters.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Paul, yesterday we heard from Capitol Hill that the bipartisan effort to work on policing reform has hit what looks like an impasse that it can't move past that, at least that's what Senator Cory Booker is saying, and the issue is qualified immunity. Can you talk a little bit, remind our audience what qualified immunity is. Is there any hope of us ever moving past that impasse?

Paul Butler: Qualified immunity is the idea you can't sue me because I'm a cop. It's a doctrine that was invented by the Supreme Court to protect police officers from personal liability. Melissa, here's the thing. The Democrats were willing to compromise to an extent on qualified immunity, but that still wasn't enough for the Republicans in the Senate who are staunchly against any kind of police reform. They wouldn't even go as far as President Trump went in his executive order last year after George Floyd was murdered.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's interesting to me, Paul, because there certainly was a bipartisan effort around, not policing reform, but around incarceration reform. It was largely based on a libertarian ethic within aspects of the Republican Party, and also just a budget hawkishness. Just how expensive it is. Why is policing so different than incarceration in terms of the ability to get any kind of bipartisan work going on it.

Paul Butler: There are a lot of people to blame for the failure of politicians to respond to this moment. The New York Times says that the protest last year about police reform was the largest social justice movement in the history of the United States. Everybody knows about the infamy of January 6th. Well, last year on June 6th, there were protests about policing in 500 different American cities. There's never been a social justice movement that's had that reach.

One of the organizations that's standing in the way is police unions, Melissa. They oppose almost every effort by activists and citizens for accountability and transparency because they believe it's, I guess, good for their jobs. The thing is, if police aren't respected and trusted by the people who they're supposed to serve and protect, they're not able to do their jobs as well. At the end of the day, reform is about public safety.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Roy, we've been talking a little bit about these intersections of gender, race, and reform mindedness. I just feel like maybe it's worth talking about the ways that race and gender don't necessarily mean reform of mindedness, that a Black woman police chief or a Black male sheriff might or might not be reformers. As you look across the country, where do you see the intersection of all three? Where are the folks who have themselves through the intersectional identities and are deeply committed to reform?

Roy Austin: Where I see it is in St. Louis with Kim Gardner, Chicago, Kim Foxx, Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore. What you just spoke of, though, was what happened in the race in LA, where in LA, a Black female non-reformer was beat by a Latino male reformer. Of course, now he's caught up in some of this recall nonsense that is sweeping California. You see the intersectionality now because you're finally having intersectional prosecutors who are running for office and are winning office. We are seeing more and more chiefs of color.

We should be looking closely at Charlottesville right now. There's some nonsense happening there, where a Black female chief was pushed out. Really, it seems like some nonsense being led by the union there, the police fraternal organization. It doesn't stop. Luckily, there are people out there who are fighting for these chiefs, and fighting for reform, and fighting for fairness and justice around the country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Paul, on Roy's point, and then also connecting back to yours about the big protests. If you are not an insider, if you're an outsider, you're trying to get reform. Maybe you've gotten a Kim Foxx elected to office over in the Nita Alvarez. Maybe you've gotten a Kim Gardner elected. How do you simultaneously, from the outside, hold accountable these reformers, but also help to protect them from these powerful forces like police unions that want to push them out.

Paul Butler: First of all, you have to have everyone understand that when these African American women take these brave steps, like Marilyn Mosby, is not prosecuting sex workers. She's not prosecuting drug addicts because she understands that that's not in the interest of her community. You have to protect them, not just politically, but you have to understand that with issues like bail reform, every now and then there's going to be some case that's in the news that will be used to attack these prosecutors.

Folks have to defend them. They have to step out for them because, again, it's not just about a [unintelligible 00:20:12] racial justice equity thing. It's about family and community safety and wholeness. When people are invested in the cops, the people believe and trust their prosecutor, we have better outcomes, and that makes all of us safer.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Paul Butler is the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University, former prosecutor and author of Choke Hold: Policing Black Men. Roy Austin is a former Department of Justice and White House official. Thank you both for joining us.

Roy Austin: Thank you, Melissa.

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