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Bacon: OK. And so when you use the term public safety—I’m very focused on public safety. I think part of it is, like, how do you have an argument with someone who says—because I think a lot of people’s views about public safety means police. How do we get people to rethink—a safe city is not—when I think, when people think safety, they think men with guns. Not just also the police, but also, even with ICE, we’re having to explain that ICE is not making you safer.

So how do we get away from—say, a safe community is one where everyone has what they need is what we’re trying to get to. But how do we convince people that a safe community is not one where there’s lots of—at least the three—even safe communities in America, like gated communities, have the threat of armed men coming. So how do we get people to rethink what safety means? You used the term public safety a few different times, and I think people mean, think, public safety and the police are the same thing.

Vitale: Yeah. So first, I want to kind of cover two areas here. One is that we have limited our conception of public safety to the kinds of things that we send the police for, right? There’s a robbery, there’s a shooting, there’s a burglary, right? But somehow what’s not included in that is corporate pollution, unsafe food, wage theft by employers. When these things actually kill more people and steal more money than all that other kind of policeable crime combined.

So we focus too much on the wrong thing, and this is not an accident. This is by design, I would argue. The other thing is that we have told people that the only way they can produce safety in their community is policing. We’ve given them this—I would say it’s a kind of terrorism to tell people, Either accept all these people with guns in your community, or you get nothing.

And so, given that horrible choice—what’s amazing is how many people, given that choice, still say, No police. Which we know in a lot of poor communities, people are like, “I would just rather not have any police.” That people actually say this and believe this. But how do we overcome this? So my advice, typically, when I’m asked to come and meet with folks, is to say, “You got to start with a needs assessment. You got to go out and talk to people about what their public safety concerns are,” some of which are based in reality, and some are based on watching too many television news shows where, when it bleeds, it leads, and if there’s not enough local murder and mayhem—

They’ll go find some in Indiana or whatever, on the local news in New York. So you got to do a needs assessment, and then you need to put together a menu of options that are rooted in actual functional examples around the country, around the world. Oh, turns out a lot of people are concerned about opioid overdoses. Turns out policing has been a total disaster, complete failure. Actually has made the problem worse.

So what could we do? It turns out there are lots of things we could do, right? We could look at harm reduction strategies. We could look at legalization schemes. We could look at public education that’s not run by police, right? Drug testing. There’s lots of things we could do to save lives. But we don’t do those things. We just send the police to make more pointless narcotics arrests.

So when we do the needs assessment, when we get stuff on the table, then we can talk concretely to people about, “Oh, you’re concerned about young people getting in fights. Maybe there’s some shootings. OK, we noticed that there’s a community center down the street that is shuttered.” And they’re like, Oh yeah, they told us 20 years ago there was no money for the community center, but we could have a special narcotics unit and a gang task force instead. And if we say to people, “Would you rather have a fully functioning youth community center, or another gang suppression unit in your community?”—and when we give people that choice, it turns out the vast majority of them would rather have the community center open.

Bacon: Now let me put on my dumb pundit voice. I’ve already done it once, we’re doing it again. Did you know, Alex, that if you do a poll, that Black people—and did you know that you’re not Black, Alex? But Black people, if you ask them in a poll, will say that they prefer more police rather than fewer, and they live in Black areas, and sometimes those areas have high crime. So aren’t you just an out of touch white liberal who is talking about things that don’t really affect you? I’m just—

Vitale: Yeah.

Bacon: I’m going to give the full—this is the implication of what people are saying. So I’m just going to say it fully and get you to respond to it.

Vitale: Yeah. And of course my personal life situation is much more complicated than—

Bacon: Yeah, and I actually don’t know.

Vitale: —but that’s irrelevant. It shouldn’t matter. So the fact is that, yeah, that reflects decades of disinvestment and criminalization. And so that’s the choice people have been told they have to make. And of course, you laid out the choice in exactly that way: police or nothing. But it turns out, when we actually do polling that says, “Would you rather have the specific concrete thing other than policing?” the numbers are much better.

And so my job is to give people those other choices, to harness the national and international perspective, to look at the evidence. So when a community asks me to come in, as they do all the time, I can say, “Have you thought about this?” Or, “Did you know there is a program doing this, but they have no funding and no support, and the police are trying to undermine their work? Maybe we should lean into that, properly support it.” And then people are like, “Oh, yeah.” It’s giving them the alternatives, and also giving them permission to ask for what they really want.

Bacon: Two more questions. The first is, you’re in New York City, so Zohran did not quite give the AOC “Woke 1.0 was crazy,” but he did say, I’m opposed to defund. Defund is not something I agree with. I work with the NYPD every day. They’re a vital part of public safety in New York. Do you view him—I guess I view him as backtracking as well, and I view that as a worrisome thing, because he’s a DSA member in a fairly blue area, and if he can’t hold the line on this, then nobody can.

How do you view the mayor you’re experiencing right now? And I think you were on some kind of advisory committee after he won. So talk about what you’re seeing in your city, and if I should be worried about that, as someone who wants to see more real changes happen.

Vitale: So during the campaign, I, along with many other people, was asked to review the proposal for a Department of Community Safety. I have some fingerprints on that, and introduced him around to people. And then after he won, I was appointed to the mayor’s transition team, for the Committee on Community Safety, and I continue to act as an informal but regular advisor to the mayor’s office on public safety issues.

So I just declare all that. The mayor said during the campaign, I don’t want to increase the police, and I have some areas where I’m concerned about—gang policing, sex work policing, protest policing seems problematic and needs some change, and we maybe need to get rid of some units. And what I really want to focus on is creating a Department of Community Safety that’s going to do exactly these investments that the invest/divest movement has been calling for.

So that’s great, and he has appointed a deputy mayor of community safety to help get this department up and running, and they have staff now, and I talk to them all the time, and they are developing these things. They’re taking what already existed in city government, and they’re trying to fix it, expand it. They’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars of new money to try to make this work.

But on the other hand, the other side of the equation, nothing is being done about abusive policing. Broken windows policing is running wild. The complaints are running wild. There’s no accountability, and there’s no dialing back of these problematic areas of policing. I’m not happy about that. And I’ve been very public about not being happy about that. And when there was talk of hiring more police, because that’s what the police commissioner wanted, I was in The New York Times and other outlets, and working with people and organizations to put a stop to that, which we did, which is great. He did hold the line on hiring more police.

My best read of this is that he will feel politically in a stronger position to push back on policing when this Department of Community Safety is really up and running, and these on-the-ground infrastructures of safety are stronger and have more public support. This Department of Community Safety was very popular during the campaign, and there are a lot of people who want it to succeed. And I’m concerned that the city council speaker, Julie Menin, is trying to block it. But that’s what we need. So yes, I’m speaking out about the harmful policing stuff, but I’m also still heavily invested in the possibility of building out these new investments.

Bacon: So just to tell you where I see this—you were giving an answer about how you thought he would move forward on these things, and I thought you were going to say after he won a second term. But you said after the department, and I think I might be more right about this than you—we’ll see—but I think the actual constraint is, the police commissioner can be removed. My prediction would be, the day he wins a second term, or three days after that, the police commissioner will be asked to find some other job. But I think she’s—

Vitale: I think she’s going to become such a political liability for him, actually. By allowing out of control policing, she’s actually creating political problems for him in the neighborhoods. So I think there’s a point—and she’s opposed to his overall agenda, and she represents the interest of the billionaire class, and so—

Bacon: That’s why she’s going to be there the whole time, I would argue. But anyway, we might disagree.

Vitale: Maybe, maybe. Yeah, I’m not making a concrete prediction. This is just my read of the situation.

Bacon: And the final thing is, is there a place in the world—because I think you’ve done a good job making the point that policing—is there a place in the world that is doing public safety the way you would want to see it done?

Vitale: There are lots of places that are doing one or two parts of it here, and another two parts here. Belgium joined a couple of countries recently in decriminalizing sex work, and bringing them into employment schemes and benefit schemes and giving them workplace protections. Portugal has decriminalized all drugs. I was there recently. It just looks incredibly successful. Public health measures have improved dramatically as a result of that.

And we’ve seen cities get rid of school policing and bring back counselors and programs that target the highest needs, highest risk young people. I think what Newark, New Jersey is doing on violence reduction is amazing, and New Orleans and Baltimore similarly, and other places, including small places like Richmond, California. So there are lots of cities moving in the right direction, I think.

Bacon: As you’re speaking, I thought about San Francisco as the one I think is moving in the wrong direction, right? They’re the ones cracking—

Vitale: Yeah, they are, really.

Bacon: I saw my former employer, The Washington Post, wrote a story praising the new mayor, and I was like, “Oh, that’s a sign he’s doing something wrong.” And he’s cracking down on any kind of drug, any kind of mental health, drug use, you know?

Vitale: Yeah. And they messed up the civilian mental health response. They kept it too close to the police and fire department. It doesn’t have community trust. It’s not achieving the objectives. But if you go to Denver, where they created a robust civilian-only team, the results are fantastic, and crime is even going down in the neighborhoods they operate in.

Bacon: Alex, anything else you want to add about this policing discussion, which I think has gotten—I think you’ve even got us back to where we should be a little bit, so I’m just curious if you have—

Vitale: Yeah, no, I think it’s important to have a reality check that after 10 years of police reform, police are killing as many or more people than they ever have, that the racial disparities—

Bacon: Around 1,000 a year, right? In the US?

Vitale: More than 1,000. Significantly more than 1,000 a year, and that’s the numbers that we’re able to account for with no police assistance, right? They refuse to even tell us how many people they’re killing. So there are estimates that are much higher. And also, the racial disparities remain in place. And this is an unjust endeavor that we need to unwind.

And I think that communities have very mixed feelings about policing, and there’s no telling when another George Floyd-type incident might bring us back to where we were in 2020. These things are unpredictable and episodic, but they do occur, right?

Bacon: Alex, thanks for joining me. Tell people where they can find your work.

Vitale: So I’m on Substack, Alex Vitale, and I’m on most social media platforms.

Bacon: Good. Alex, thank you for joining me. Appreciate it. Good to see you. Bye-bye.

Vitale: You bet. My pleasure.