Welcome to What Happens Next – 12.6.2020 COVID, BREXIT, Ligitating for Liberty, Gangs and Incarceration Victor Rios

Rick Banks: Our first speaker will be Victor Rios. He is a Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara, and he will discuss our society's of black and youths. Victor came to my attention when he gave a talk at Stanford some years ago. The talk not only informed the audience of faculty, students and community members, it also captivated them.

Rick Banks: In part that was because Victor talked about his path to academia. It was not ordained, that he would become a professor. You see, as a teenager, Victor himself was a gang member. And had it not been for his willingness to accept the help of a teacher who helped him find a job at an auto shop, he might not be here with us today. His academic work now combines his own experiences as a youth with the insights of years of academic study. And illuminates the dynamics of gang . And even more the texture of the lives of young men who are caught up in such tragic circumstances.

Victor Rios: All right. Well, thank you. I'll just get going here and thank you all for having me. For over a decade, I've been following young people that get caught up in the criminal justice system, both black and Latino young people. And one thing that I've found is that particularly in , I've been in the streets of Oakland, California, watching young people grow up in what we call the school to prison pipeline. I've been in the streets of Watts, watching young people grow up there, facing the rise of mass incarceration, of police brutality. I've been in Ferguson, Missouri, right at the beginning of black lives matter, just weeks after in that instance, the killing of Mike Brown, unarmed young black men, by police. And so I guess what I'm saying here is I've followed ethnographically for years at a time, young people facing police harassment, police brutality, and criminalization.

Victor Rios: And one thing that I've found is that there is a system that I call the youth control complex in place. And it's not just police that criminalizes our young people, it's actually an entire system. It's a complex, it's community centers, it's schools, it's educators, it's probation officers, it's businesses, security firms who make money off of people getting criminalized. So you have an entire enterprise that's criminalizing these individuals. And in the face of black lives matter, in the face of reform efforts, one piece of the conversation I've seen missing, has been the Latino question. You see in America, the way we talk about race is very black and white, it's a binary. And so when we're seeing the news or seeing politicians talk about what's happening with race and police, it's really a conversation of African Americans and police.

Victor Rios: So it's time to go beyond that because it doesn't benefit African Americans, it doesn't benefit Latinos to just talk about one group when it comes to policing, we have to change the system

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together as multiple populations. In California, for example, Latinos are over two times more likely to be killed than whites, by police, for African Americans, it's a lot more, it's three times more likely to be killed by police than whites. So I always say that Latinos are sandwiched in between, in terms of the wrath of the punitive state. So from that, we just completed a recent publication where we talked about what we call, mano suave-mano dura, and I'll explain that in a minute, but it's the form of policing that it's taking place right now. In a time of reform, in a time of procedural justice, in a time of community policing, that's the soft hand, if you will, mano suave in Spanish, means soft hand of policing.

Victor Rios: It's a great attempt, it's actually making some progress, building some trust in communities, but at the end of the day, after doing ride along with police and seeing this process happen in vivo, what we also find is that the mano dura, the iron fist, is always there covered by a velvet glove. So in those interactions, any single one police officer can at once be a nice community cop, and at the same time within a few minutes time-span, be brutalizing black or Latino young men in this case, in the study I conducted. So reform and diversity training alone aren't going to cut it. We need to go beyond reform and beyond diversity training in the police force. We have to bring in a systematic cultural competency and social justice literacy. We have to change the incentive system.

Victor Rios: Earlier, we were talking about the incentives of police being able to take property and keep it and use it to fund their departments. There's so many other incentives that individual police officers and police departments receive for their punitive treatment, for the stop and frisk, for criminalizing communities of color. So those incentives have to change. We have to dis- incentivize negative police behavior and incentivize those officers that are truly doing the positive work out there in the community. And they're out there. When I work with gang youth, I always ask them, "Hey, is there any officer you get along with?" And in one community, they kept saying, "Yeah, officer G, officer G." "Well, what does officer G do for you?" And they said, "Well, what he does for me is that he looks out for me. He cuts me breaks. He takes care of me." So let's incentivize officer G because when I asked the other officers about officer G, they said, "Oh, that guy's the hug a thug." So he was outcasted for being too community and too soft on the people.

Victor Rios: And finally, we need review boards with teeth, we need review boards with power, that have the power to investigate and discipline police officers and ultimately allocate and reallocate resources as we see in the cause for defunding the police. Final statement here, one former LAPD officer tells me, "When I was on the force for nine years, my whole crew felt we were untouchable because no one held us accountable." So police won't change racist practices unless we make them touchable, unless we hold them accountable. Thank you.

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