01/14/16 – Jacqui Shine – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Yeah, my Skype computer exploded, so sorry that Sarah Helm interview ended so rough there.
In fact, let me do her a favor real quick.
She asked me to mention to you guys that book, Loyalty, that we mentioned at the beginning there, that was her play and it's about Bush and Blair and how they went to war.
So if you're interested in plays and stuff like that, that sounds good.
It's Sarah Helm, Loyalty.
I definitely owe her at least that much for the end of her interview coming to such a tragic conclusion there.
All right, but next up is Jackie Shine.
And I was telling you before, our friend JP Sotili sent me this link yesterday.
Inside the police industrial complex.
Terrifying.
PSMAG.com, the Pacific Standard.
PSMAG.com.
Welcome to the show.
Jackie, how are you?
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm doing really good.
I really appreciate you joining us here and really appreciate this journalism.
I'm so glad that even though I live in the world I live in and the country that I live in, I still live in proximity to people like you who show up at things like this and write all about them.
Because you couldn't catch me dead there.
But I sure am happy to read this thing just for the terror and the thrill of that.
Well, thank you.
Inside the police industrial complex, the convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
The international one, huh?
Yes.
It actually started as a North American organization in 1893.
At the time it was only Canadian and United States law enforcement officials.
But has since grown much, much bigger.
And I think there were people from something like 70 countries there.
Amazing.
650 exhibitors you say here.
Yes.
So this was huge.
And now, I'm sorry, I may have missed it.
Did you have a ballpark estimate of the turnout for this thing?
How many people?
About 14,000 people came.
And so these are, I guess, presumably the chiefs and their smitherses and their purchasing bureaucrat.
That kind of thing, huh?
Right.
And there also were a number of lower ranking law enforcement officials there just at the expo.
Because anybody who served in some sort of law enforcement capacity was able to get an expo badge.
But about 75% of the people at the expo had purchasing power within their organization.
But in other words, I mean, just as the introduction here, there's nothing subtle about this whatsoever.
This is basically the most ostentatious type of exposition that you could put on at any convention center for any industry.
It's just in this one it's weapons for cops.
Right.
Good times.
Do you have a video?
Unless somebody else shot some, no.
I took some photos that are on my Twitter feed, which is Dear Splenda, which is a nickname that doesn't make it.
It's a long story.
But anyway, I have some photos from the expo that I took on the expo floor.
I haven't seen any video of it, but it was about the size of four football fields.
McCormick Place is the largest convention center in the United States.
Amazing.
See, because this is the fun part of it.
We're not even into the terrible part of it.
But the fun part of it is the part where no one there, except maybe you, knows that this is embarrassing, knows that this smacks of corruption, knows that this smacks of something that previous generations used to call a thing called conflict of interest, where people have wrong incentives for deploying their political or legal authority, for doing it in ways contrary to the public good and the law.
And here, nobody even notices.
It's all just a bunch of fun.
It's a big four-day weekend for the guys or whatever, right?
Right.
That's the part I like.
Okay, so let's get to the part I don't like.
Tell us about all the scary stuff you saw and what they're going to do with it to us.
Well, the expo was huge, and I was really surprised by how many brands I recognized there, like how many multinational and national corporations were represented there.
I was definitely expecting to see a bunch of vendors who did specific law enforcement products that I didn't recognize or know much about, but I was not expecting to see Champagne Aesthetic Wear or Dell or Ford or GM or the makers of the Roomba or Xerox or Thompson Reuters.
So there's a huge number of companies were involved in marketing products to law enforcement officials.
And outside of that, on the sponsorship level, there were also a number of big companies and firms, including Accenture and accounting firm Ernest & Young, who were underwriting the conference.
I don't know why Ernest & Young has an interest in underwriting a police convention.
That doesn't quite make sense to me.
But nonetheless, there they were.
Yeah, well, there's a conflicting interest in there somewhere they wouldn't have bothered, right?
It isn't just because they're publicly interested citizens.
Maybe they get contracts to double check the books of some of these departments or whatever it is.
But there's obviously there's obviously something in it for them.
That kind of goes without saying even.
But so so, yeah.
So tell us about I mean, I guess it's not shouldn't be too much of a surprise, right?
That the automakers would be there because, of course, cops need new cars all the time.
And is it going to be a Chevy or is it going to be a Ford?
That kind of thing.
Is that the kind of lobbying that's going on there?
Yeah.
And I was I was surprised almost at my surprise, because as soon as I thought about it for a minute, I was like, everybody knows that that Crown Victoria's right are a standard police car.
I had just not ever given much thought to the fact that that Ford Motor Company is the same Ford Motor Company that sells cars to civilians every day.
Oh, yeah.
Well, and that's the whole thing about Nick Turse's great book, The Complex, where he says there's too many things that go in the hyphens to even talk about it.
Right.
Where it's the military, industrial media, scientific, academic, police and tube socks and toothpaste and and cars and trucks and everything complex.
You know, if you make rivets, you want the contract to make the rivets for the boots for the army, because otherwise some other rivet company is getting that contract.
So you are in on it now to some degree.
You know how much the rivet company actually puts into lobbying.
It didn't much.
But in the scheme of things, all that adds up to a lot of vested interest in keeping things the way they are and or making them worse.
Right.
That's the other thing that was interesting to me was thinking about the relationship between these economic exchanges and the influence that that has on developing technologies for police, especially because the public is increasingly looking toward technological solutions to problems of police brutality and use of force.
So I had gotten a half dozen emails from different body camera manufacturers who were all going to be at the show.
First, I thought, I'm going to go talk to all of them, see what each one of them was doing and see, you know, who's doing the really cutting edge stuff and what might be the best product here.
But it didn't take long before I figured out the product itself is actually not really the question, because the product itself is not necessarily the solution.
What the public thinks body cams might be used for and what police agencies think they're going to be used for are different things.
And we keep talking about what the camera captures.
Right.
Well, the camera is going to capture it as though what the camera captures is something we all agree on and something that is easily defined and something that's neutral in some way.
We can all say this was a use of force incident.
That's not really how it works.
There are certain things that we all agree are bad.
Right.
The fact that Eric Garner's death was recorded.
Everybody thinks that that was bad.
What my conjecture is, is what would have happened if he hadn't died at the end of that encounter?
Everything else had been the same.
Would it have raised any flags within the NYPD for use of force?
I'm not sure it would have.
So there's a lot that the camera captures that you and I might find problematic, but it's held to a different standard within a police agency.
There's no consensus between the public and the police complex about what those things mean.
We're not sharing common terms or a common understanding.
Right.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry I've got to stop you here, but that's a great place to pick this conversation up.
On the other side of this break, I'm talking with Jackie Shine.
She wrote this very important piece.
I really hope you'll read it.
It's Inside the Police Industrial Complex at PSMAG.com.
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All right.
So, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jackie Shine.
She wrote this thing for PSMAG.com, the Pacific Standard, inside the police industrial complex about this gigantic police chief technology convention, you know, things for sale convention for cops.
Well, they had the expo, and then plus they had their annual meeting or whatever.
But anyway, so where we left off, we were talking about the cameras, and she's making this very important point about, you know, and as you say in the article here, Jackie, about how the vast majority of violence, you know, unjustified police violence is very low level type stuff, or not even necessarily very low level, but lower level type stuff, not necessarily just capping people in the brain all day long, although they do kill three people a day every single day, but out of many more arrests than that, but many of which are not justified.
But I think what you're trying to say before the break there was, so when we have the footage of all of that, what ends up happening is, instead of their kind of getting away with bloody murder and doing the wrong thing unofficially in a way, abusing their power, that this will be normalized, and we'll have moved the bar of what's tolerable behavior from the police that much more.
Ah, come on.
It's not like they killed them.
They only did just this much.
Right.
And part of the issue here is that the 1989 Supreme Court decision that set the legal standard for use of deadly force put so much of it in the mind of a police officer.
A police officer can use deadly force when there's an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others.
And I think that that means that police in general sort of have a broad ambit in which to operate vis-à-vis what is acceptable behavior.
If the goal is met, whatever the goal is, right, the goal is met, the means don't matter so much.
Mm-hmm.
Well, and we see that all the time with them attempting to escalate situations so that they can use force, in that sense, and be within, put themselves in a situation, run toward a car that's driving away, and then say, oh, boo-hoo, he was trying to run me down as he shoots through the window, that kind of thing.
Right.
Yep.
So, and then, now, here's the other thing about the body cams is, I mean, well, there's a couple other things.
Obviously, the first thing is it is a little bit of a double-edged sword in our favor in the sense that the cops, assuming they can't just turn it off whenever they feel like it or whatever, the cops are a bit more mindful of what they do and what they say and whether they call people by racial slurs or not and whether, you know, they give an elbow or maybe an open hand instead or whatever, these kinds of things.
There's a little bit, and we've seen, as you mentioned in here, hard to measure but somewhat fewer complaints and that kind of thing, and that makes sense, and we're living in a society where people are desperate for accountability or they know they can't get any accountability, but, you know, maybe the slightest threat of some will help cool these cops off a little bit, and apparently that is working.
But then what I'm really interested in is what the body cam salesmen are telling the cops when they're trying to get rid of them.
They're saying, this will just protect you from protesters, or I'm more worried about the more nefarious end of the biometric data and every body cam being hooked into the network and every cop basically scanning the face and or the iris of everybody on the sidewalk that he walks by.
Or the license plate.
Yeah, or the license plate, exactly.
And it can all just be automated, right?
So then we're turning, we're, in the name of protecting ourselves, we're really cutting ourselves guts open in a way or here, you know, stabbing ourselves by empowering them over us in a way where they never could have done it before.
Right.
It's the same way in which the NSA was empowered to sort of indiscriminately collect citizens' data on the justification that there might be something there.
And then there becomes a set of questions about what happened to that data?
Where does it go?
And what other uses might it be put to that we hadn't imagined?
Right.
Yeah, that's really something.
So now at the, did you get to hear the schtick of the body camera salesman there at the convention?
I heard the schtick that they gave me knowing I was a journalist.
So whether or not that was different than how they might have talked to a law enforcement official, I can't really say.
I mean, it's not that I thought that the body camera manufacturers weren't interested in improving the situation for policing in the U.S., but the clients are the police, not the public.
And so it's one thing to say, and this sort of seems like a, may seem like a nitpicky part, but I think it's a big deal.
It's one thing to say that cameras will reduce complaints.
It's another thing to say that cameras will resolve complaints.
Right.
Right.
And part of that is because I can easily imagine, I think we all can, a situation in which a civilian who has, quote unquote, acted badly on camera may be afraid to complain, even though they have a legitimate reason to do so.
So in that sense, you know, on the end of the agency, reducing complaints is important.
But it's what those complaints are about and whether or not they are resolved properly that the public is concerned with.
Yeah.
And in fact, if you ever listen to any of these people, the best spin that they could put on it is we must restore the public's faith in the police.
Now that we got to really necessarily make the police treat the people any better, but we got to figure out a way to get the people on board with whatever the status quo is.
Yes.
And the message that I heard at the conference over and over again was that many, many law enforcement executives do believe it's a perception problem.
Right.
They should just send Karen Hughes and Connalisa Rice to do a little speaking tour and just explain that, yes, we kill you, but only because we love you and we're trying to bring you democracy and freedom.
And then we'll all be convinced, right?
I know I am.
Right.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Right.
Sorry.
Anyway, I'm sorry I talk so much when I'm supposed to be interviewing, but I really did appreciate this piece.
I do hope everyone will go and read it.
The police industrial complex.
It's a great little window into how this works, and especially the paragraph that includes all the corporations who, you know, spend, as you say, spend quite a bit of money making sure that they have their place at the table.
They have their table at the convention and make sure to, you know, it'd be interesting maybe to see just, you know, what percentage of their annual sales are to government, especially these companies that, as you said, you don't initially think of as government contractors, right?
You think of Ford as making trucks, not like Lockheed, just making stuff for the military.
But it'd be interesting to see just how much are they making off of the U.S. Treasury versus off of private customers and voluntary sales.
Right.
Very interesting stuff here.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for coming on the show here, Jackie.
Appreciate it.
Sure.
Thank you.
Very good stuff.
That's Jackie Shine.
The website is PSMAG.com, the Pacific Standard, which is a new one for me.
I don't know.
It's pretty good.
PSMAG.com, inside the police industrial complex.
And when we get back, Andy Worthington on actual progress in closing Gitmo.
Really?
No.
Hey, all.
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