Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
27 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“Again, since my experience as a lawyer was primarily in the government sector, it’s hard for me to assess the tradeoffs in automation and in deprofessionalization, as well as outsourcing law work.”
02 / belief
“I think that the analytic tools that I learned as an engineer definitely informed the way I think about legal issues.”
03 / belief
“If you’re talking about ranked 30 to 40, sure. If you’re talking about ranked 150 to 200, then I think the answer is no.”
04 / uncertainty
“I’m just not sophisticated about them enough to weigh in. I resist talking about things I don’t know anything about.”
05 / uncertainty
“I definitely do feel the difference. I don’t know that I have perfect intuitions about what has changed.”
06 / uncertainty
“I don’t know that I have one message, but maybe partly it’s actually about being a serious legal thinker and a human being.”
07 / belief
“From engineering, I learned to start with an outline and decide what I wanted to say, and then write all the sections to meet my outline.”
08 / belief
“The studies on gender show a little bit better effect than the studies on racial diversity in policing, and I think communities do value diverse police departments that reflect what the community looks like.”
09 / belief
“I think the police should not be able to open your smartphone when they see you on the street, but with a warrant, sure.”
10 / uncertainty
“Probably helped me get with the academic jobs. So, for me, it’s been probably overall efficient, but I don’t know that anyone cares that much.”
11 / observation
“Even the Justice Department — it would often close the case at least once before I got it. So it’s very hard to see how big the problem is or to investigate and handle those cases.”
12 / belief
“Of course, most of the data we get is officer-reported, so they’re useful. It’s not clear whether body cams are going to be an important form of data in policing, but I suspect, over time, they will be.”
13 / belief
“I’m a lawyer, but I try to follow the social science in this area, and I can tell you that what we know right now is that the results of studies of body cameras, at least in terms of if you’re studying whether they reduce complaints or whether they reduce uses of force, the studies are, at best, mixed. I would say the evidence that they do good in these respects is pretty weak.”
14 / belief
“I think setting up some national standards so that we not only have a federal intervention in making police more effective or federal intervention in suing police departments and prosecuting police officers, but national standards for ensuring that policing is actually beneficial, that we’re harm minimizing, that it’s fair, and that it’s authorized by local communities.”
15 / uncertainty
“I don’t know enough about what’s going on in San Francisco, but one of the big problems in San Francisco seems to be radical economic inequality that leads to the underlying problems, which you can’t arrest your way out of.”
16 / belief
“I think we should set minimum age standards that are above 18, which many states have as a minimum age standard. But in terms of education or other more subtle factors, I think the effects can often be subtle, and when we look at what creates problems in policing, departments create officers.”
17 / uncertainty
“I don’t know, again, much about Singapore, although I did spend a week there in 1989.”
18 / evaluation
“You hear that, again, with Attorney General Barr in repeated advocacy for more aggressive forms of policing, which are harm inefficient, I think.”
19 / observation
“There’s just a lot less interest in collecting data on the coercion that police officers do, like arrests. Arrests we use for the crime reports, but stops, uses of force, and the like.”
20 / evaluation
“Some law schools are effectively diploma mills that produce lawyers who don’t have a good shot of getting a JD-required or JD-valued job, which means they can’t pay off the loans that they take out to go to law school.”
21 / preference
“I don’t know if there’s one way to do it, but there are several ways to do it, and I think partly, communities have to do it themselves.”
22 / commitment
“Indemnification is when the city pays, even though the officer gets the judgment against him, and people object to this because they think the officer should be punished more. But I’m actually pro-indemnification, because I think if the city pays, then as long as we make that payment transparent so we don’t have nondisclosure agreements, then we can act, and we also collect data on it.”
23 / preference
“I don’t know about mandatory therapist visits, but I would say that we have to prioritize the health and well-being of police officers because police officers who are overly stressed or who are hurt physically or mentally are more likely to hurt others.”
24 / evaluation
“Those standards won’t reflect those rules if we don’t know what the costs of policing are, and that means hearing from the members of the community on whom we tend to concentrate the costs of policing.”
25 / prediction
“” You could do all those things and help improve policing, sure. And then at the end of the day, the police officers in your nice town might also be likely to wait out people who are noncompliant or look for alternatives because in a nice town, that’s what people do.”
26 / evaluation
“That is not an area I’m nearly as expert in as policing. But I think one of the problems is that we clog the system with a lot of offenses we never mean to prosecute, that we’re using the criminal justice system to address problems that, really, we should and could address in other ways.”
27 / recommendation
“Now, we talk about police accountability and having use-of-force policies and disciplinary structures, but in an office of 10 guys, none of that matters. So I think some consolidation would be extremely valuable because these very small departments just can’t maintain the kinds of standards that we might want.”