into the issue from international politics to the global pandemic and everything in between. join me if i take on the lars dismantled misconceptions and debate the contradictions upfront with me workline here on out steering. ah hello there. i'm the associate a and her with an update for you here on out a 0. the army general who lead a military takeover ensued on last month says he will not be part of the future government after the transitional period. speaking exclusively to al jazeera under fat, albert han says he's committed to a smooth democratic transition. once elections are held in 2023. last month, the military took power, dissolved the civilian arm of the government, and declared a state of emergency menorah la donna. or it is our pledge,

a pledge we made to ourselves, the sudanese people and the international community that we are committed to completing the democratic transition, holding elections on time, and committed to not stopping any political activity as long as it is peaceful and within the bounds of the constitutional declaration and the past that have not been suspended. we also ask the international community to look at the issue critically and through the reality and wait to see what we do. we are committed to handing over power to civilian government. a government of national competency and we pledged to preserve the transition from any interference that can hinder it. on the hand also denied that the army was responsible for the deaths of protesters who've been demonstrating against that take over on sunday security forces, fied, tear gas at a group of teachers who were protesting on the capitol. cartoon. demonstrators had set up barricades on the 1st of 2 days of civil disobedience. several people were

arrested during the sit in. although counting his underway in nicaragua elections, the pole has been denounced as a pantomime by the u. s. president daniel ortega is running for a 4th term launch the unopposed, at least 40 opposition figures including 7 presidential candidates have been jailed or banned from taking part. demonstrations against ortega have been held in neighboring costa rica where thousands of nicaragua, excise have fled in recent years. the protesters describe the elections as a circus. the government says it won't recognize the version. a latin america editor lucio newman, is following the story from the capital san jose. the closer closed in nicaragua, amid a very low voter turnout and an apparent response to paul's in my, the opposition and, and the nicaraguan catholic church for citizens to stay at home and not legitimize a fraudulent election. president daniel taylor did make a speech after he and his wife rosario rodeo was also the vice president cast their

ballots. he called. * the election, free and democratic as always, to quote him and he had in the united states and accusing it of terrorism and of financing and attempting against his government. and however, he did not offer any concrete evidence of these charges, as you know, the and all of the main screen of the candidates are, he's a competition. we're unable to take part in the selection 7 of these candidates, which would be candidates, are imprisoned. the rest have been borrowed from running or have gone into exile here in neighboring costa regional, where there are also thousands of other exiles. they demonstrated throughout the day, calling on the international community to step up to the labor and try to ensure that there be meaningful consequences to president daniel ortega's actions. now hundreds of thousands of people have rallied across ethiopia and supportive government forces. battling a rebel advance to grind,

rebels have captured strategic towns along the highway to the capital. and i've also threatened to move on, addis ababa. china's ruling communist party is holding a key leadership, musing, and beijing presentation being is expected to further cement his authority. the meeting will lay the groundwork for the 2022 congress where she will seek a 3rd term hundreds of top party officials, including state leaders and ministers, and military chiefs are all attending registration will open for candidates and libby as elections in the coming hours. december's vote will be the 1st time that libyans have directly elected a president since the overthrow of mamma gadhafi. these powers apart of you and backed plan, which is trying to unite the rival east and west administrations. west african regional block echo us has imposed sanctions on molly is transitional leaders for delaying elections set for february? the restrictions include travel bands and a freeze on their assets. well, those are the headlines. i'll be back with another update for you here after the

bottom line. do you stay with us? ah hi, i'm steve clements and i have a question. if the funding, the police can't work and reforming the police takes forever, can american policing ever be fixed? let's get to the bottom line. ah, the murder of george floyd by minneapolis policeman, last year was one of the sparks that led many communities across the united states to demand radical change and law enforcement. it started with lofty demands to abolish or defund the police. but that slogan, proved divisive and impossible to implement. at the time, joe biden was the democratic candidate for president, and he refused to adopt it. police reform has been happening in different cities in states across the country, each at its own pace, some have be criminalized marijuana to ease the racial inequality and drug arrests

. some have made it illegal for officers to see misconduct on the job without reporting it. and some of made it easier to sue officers personally for their wrong doing. but is this enough to deal with the root causes of the problem? or is it just scratching the surface? to day, we're joined by someone who's been focused on the history and practice of policing in the united states. alex vitaly is a professor of sociology and coordinator of the policing and social justice project at brooklyn college. he's the author of the end of policing, which comes out with a new addition with new material next month that have italy. thank you so much for joining us today. let me just start out and ask you to went when your book was written. it was written 3 years before george boy's murder before the murder of b, brianna taylor, an occupant, aubrey, and. and it seemed to presently recognize what was coming undone in public trust. and public confidence in policing can you share with us what the key

findings you had at that time and your, your important study policing in america? we know after the police killings of mike brown and eric garner in to me or rice and a number of folks in the period about 7 years ago, we were told don't worry, police are going to get reformed. president obama had a national task force on 21st century policing that issued a huge raft of recommendations and nothing has really changed. and so part of the motivation for writing the book was de skepticism about the effectiveness of a lot of the police reforms that have been proposed over the last several years. based really on 30 years of scholarship on policing of both in the united states and internationally. and so my feeling was, is that we need to ask some tougher questions about why so many problems that are really social and origin, economic and origin had been turned over to policing to manage, you know, between

a quarter and a half of all people killed by police in the united states are having a mental health crisis. we've got police filling our schools. we've got police disrupting homeless encampment chasing young people off street corners. and they're just not the right tool to be addressing those kinds of social problems. so my feeling was rather than investing more resources and trying to fix narcotics and homeless outreach units, that maybe we should develop real alternatives that directly address the underlying problems instead. well, i want to read for our audience something that you wrote in your book and you say poor communities need better housing, jobs, and access the social health, recreational and educational services. yet local politicians continue to hold out more police and new educate or new jails as the solution to community problems. so what, what you really saying is, here is a part of our community that's an under stress that's having trouble. that's,

that has not been on the railroad track this success. and the answer is to contain them to control them. am i getting that right? yeah, i think that's right. i mean, if you look at what police actually do day in and day out, especially in poor non white communities, it is really the management of populations that have been at the losing end of a whole set of political and economic arrangements. you know, police are not solving homelessness, they're not solving people's mental health and substance abuse problems. they're not fixing our schools. they're trying to manage those problems through a system of criminalization. and rather than putting all of our eggs in that basket of policing, we need to diversify the strategies that we use to manage those problems. especially when those alternatives don't come with all the negative collateral consequences and baggage that are kind of inherent to policing. now matthew

iglesias of vox um, basically said that in your book in the review, he did that there was so much he did agree with. but there were certain elements that he couldn't find how you were dealing with how you thought about violent crime . in particular, that violent crime is, it is a problem out there. and then even in the last election, if you were to go in and do a pretty, you know, sober and, and, and dispassionate assessment, even of some communities that were largely black and brown, there was a concern about the d fund, the police, logan, that somehow this would enhance, were lead to conditions were violent, crime would increase. what is your thought on the violent crime part of the security equation and, and how do you get that? however you respond to that right? without creating this very dysfunctional and horrible set of negative effects of policing that you've outlined in which i should say, magically you said you're right on target. yeah, so there, there was a, a chapter in the original version of the book that dealt with you filings. and i felt like i did address a lot of these things. but in response to matthew's concerns,

i have in the new edition have a much more extensive conversation directly about violence. and there are a few things to keep in mind here, right? violence is not just one thing. violence is a lot of different things and the causes of it are different. and right now the solution that we throw at all these different things is policing domestic violence, terrorism, gang violence beefs on the street. a car accident all gets treated as violence to be sold in the same way through criminalization. so what, what my argument is, is that we need to 1st make some pre concrete assessments about what is driving the harmful behavior, our communities. and then we need to look at strategies that address both individual level and community level drivers of that violence. and that means we need nuanced responses. if the problem is interpersonal violence,

intimate partner violence in the home, you know, no amount of policing has been effective at addressing that no amount of stop and frisk or, or assertive policing out of the street, is going to prevent some intimate partner from harming their spouse. or boyfriend or girlfriend in the privacy of their own home. so what are we doing to provide support for families to help resolve what's driving the harmful behavior that's occurring there? and it's often a pattern that's repeated over an extended period of time. and when we use policing to manage that, what we find is that merely causes people excuse me, to become reluctant to call 911 in the 1st place. instead, we should be looking at community based family support centers that have both outreach teams that can go into people's homes when they're requested, but also can serve as a place of respite counseling and provide crucial supports. income supports mental

health support, substance abuse. because what we find is that most people want to keep their families together. they don't want the partner criminal eyes and they don't want police coming into their homes. and so most people don't call the police when they have these problems. so we need to get beyond this idea that the only possible tool that we could use to address violence problems is sending armed police. what are some of these other bank shots slash reforms that could really impact both the over incarceration of people but also ah, the, the level of crime in this country and, and how to get dealing with crime right. as opposed the wrong? yeah, well one area i think would be to rethink our use of police and schools. almost every single study ever done shows that that form of policing is not effective and producing safety that it creates a school to prison pipeline that overreacts to discipline problems and schools. and

instead we need to get back to having counselors and social workers and mentors and culture coaches and teachers aides, directly dealing with why students are and acting disruptive lee. we need to look at restorative justice programs that involve young people in the co production of safe schools. you know, when, when i tell my colleagues in europe about the extent of school policing in the united states, they think we're crazy. they would never treat their own children in that way. we need to also look at things like the d, criminalization of sex work. vice units have been notoriously both ineffective, corrupt, and abusive in their efforts to control what is essentially consensual sex work. we need to look at places like new zealand that had and parts of australia that have legalized and decriminalize sex work. the outcomes have been very positive. you

mentioned marijuana, but, but voters last november in oregon in the state of oregon, voted to decriminalize all drugs at low levels following the model of portugal. and the portuguese have had full d criminalization of drugs for many years now and are very happy with the result. and finally, we need to rebuild some kind of real community based mental health infrastructure including crisis response capacity. that is not rooted in armed policing, but i also know that you consult with lots of police departments on the other side of that line so to speak. i'd be really as in your insight to your experiences, how to police departments, look at what your counseling and offering and what do you share with them as some of the best practices they could begin taking their existing infrastructure and scaffolding on policing and begin moving it in a different direction, we know there are a lot of police who don't want to be in the mental health business who don't want

to be in the homelessness business. they understand the profound limitations of using policing to address those problems. and then i talked to many police who express great frustration because their cities lack any real infrastructure for addressing those problems so that when communities are negatively impacted, their quality of life is affected by those problems. they make demands of the police that the police are unable to adequately respond to. so they end up wasting thousands of staff hours chasing homeless people around the block and endlessly responding to the same person in. busy mental health distress without ever really addressing those people's underlying problems. so there is an openness among police departments to try to figure out how to reduce their exposure to those problems.

and that's why we're seeing a growing number of cities in the u. s. embracing the creation of non police crisis response teams that can respond to 911 calls that have to do with mental health, substance abuse and homelessness. and the results of these programs so far been extremely positive. you know, another, another dimension which i think you for saw in the, in the book that you wrote before at least before the more recent crimes that we've seen. there's, but as you pointed out, there were other deaths, earlier of course, but we have on unfolding right now is the, some of the criminal proceedings and the trials. and the ottoman aubrey case in georgia, in which allegedly, a few people actually trailed and tracked. this runner through town, allegedly executing him, and then there was a cover up locally and it raises this interesting question about law enforcement and, and to what degree it looks like us and it shares the value of us and then i raise

the question of who is us, what is us in a community in georgia who and what is us in a community in baltimore, or you know, wherever it may be. and i'm just interested in this, this tension between, you know, in, outside st. louis and ferguson, of looking at ferguson and just seeing no very, very few members of the black community in the police forces. have you thought a lot and what are your thoughts on basically beginning to much more, expeditiously make sure police forces look like and feel like and value the things that the communities that they're policing do well, you know, in the early years of the obama administration there was a lot of kind of self congratulatory back slapping that maybe the u. s. had reached some kind of post racial moment, that we were going to be a colorblind society. and i think the events over the last few years involving the differential response to police violence as,

as well as what's happened with national politics, etc. has kind of put that myth to bed in the united states continues to struggle with major problems of racial discrimination. and racial inequality and policing has been one of the central mechanisms in the history of our country, of maintaining that color line. and i'm not just talking about the deep history of slavery in jim crow. i'm talking about today in the way that the problems of communities of color are redefine as problems of crime, to be managed by intensive and invasive policing, rather than receiving the kinds of social services that would help lift people up repair, passed harms address, traumas, et cetera. hiring a few more black police officers and brown police officers is not going to fix that problem. the research is pretty clear that at best a few cities have shown, you know, very minor improvements and

a few measures. but most apartments when they hire more black and brown officers see no change in the use of force arrest rates, community satisfaction, and all the rest. so we really need to get at these deeper issues of racial inequality in the united states and quit focusing on kind of superficial symbolic responses asked what did 911, do i mean in 911 as, as part of the story as well because of the massive spending on military gear for wars abroad, you know, in many ways non conventional wars abroad. but i'd be interested cuz you've written about what happened with a lot of at hardware. yeah. so 911 did a few things. one is that it kind of close the door on any community base criticism of policing, which there was during the period before that concerns about the ramping up of stop and frisking hotspot policing and gang policing. and it also contributed to

a kind of popular culture that said that, you know, whatever flaws there might be, policing, we need to give them a green light to do whatever it is they think they need to do to keep us safe. and one of the consequences of that was the ramping up of the transfer of military hardware from the department of defense and defense contractors directly to civilian police departments. and this is what directly. ringback led to the kinds of images we saw in ferguson after the killing of mike brown, which was the intensive policing and suppression of protest activities from armor vehicles and sniper rifles and kevlar body armor and all the rest. and i think that this is really raised a red flag for a lot of americans about why we're creating police forces with the same hardware as our military. one of the really astounding pieces of data out there which you

referred to, is that in the global prison population, america has 25 percent of that. while it only has 5 percent of the world's population. and so after, wherever those people are in america's prison population, they're going to have a prison records, criminal records. you know, that trail them that, that become balls and chains around them as they proceed through their life. i mean this, you know, when i sort of looking at that and coming to terms with it, it sounded like the ways in which we used to talk about, you know, communist systems though the ord, old soviet union. you know, it's a certain way, at least in my book, and i'm just interested in what the what do you think is the reason why there is not broader social recognition of how troubling that number is of the number of people we've incarcerated? well i think actually there is a growing. busy sense that incarceration rates are too high in the us. the trouble

is people are divided about what to do about it. so i think there's, there's polling data that shows americans think our, our car incarceration rate is too high. but what's been lacking is a clear plan for what to do instead. and that's a lot of what this current movement is trying to articulate whether we call a d fund, the police or community reinvestment. we're really talking about trying to develop new infrastructures of public safety that don't rely. busy on the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, you know, our, our nature reaction to every social problem has been we'll put more people in prison. right. and it's really been a kind of mass warehousing of the problem, not a solution. one of those elements of that of had move is, you know, we end up with like a situation where there's been a privatization movement in the prison. a sector there about a 150000 of people incarcerated in private prisons. president biden said he wants

to end that. where, where are we in the, i know you, you wait in on the private prison problem as well, where are you in terms of thinking of where we might go with that? well, i think it's important to keep in mind that in terms of prison populations, the private prisons are only responsible for about 5 or 10 percent of all prison capacity. the most private prisons in the u. s. are primarily used to hold immigration detainees. so even if we got rid of all. busy private prisons to day we have none. for instance here in new york stay that wouldn't really make a big impact on the overall levels of incarceration. i think it's more symbolic. this idea that we've turned prisons into a profit center is deeply troubling. but really there's a bigger politics involved here, which is that elected officials have use policing and mass incarceration to promote a kind of politics that lets them off the hook for producing the kinds of economic

problems that are associated with the problems that are being criminalized. so they, we've had this politics of austerity for decades now that his di, funded essential social services in favor of providing tax breaks to the rich incentives to very successful corporations. and we need to reverse that politics and quit, trying to fix our problems through policing and incarceration whether they're privatized or not. you know, i've, i've had the privilege of interviewing a former governors like a governor, chris christie and others after the george ford murder and about the question of police reform. and governor christie, a, you know, who's a controversial character nonetheless. hold me. look, they're going to be police departments that you have to. you have to tear him apart down to the base. and he's told the story of cam, the new jersey. and he said we had real problems with training. we had real problem

and we had a problem there that we couldn't fix. may we had to go down and build it back from the base up and, and create a very, very different kind of department and rebuild trust with the community. i've heard, i know, as we've even described a show today and talking to reading your material that the a police situation, the trust is very uneven and there are some police departments talking to you. i guess my question i'm always here and show and tell is are there places that stand out to you now in america, that ought to be looked at that are getting the equation right? that had begun to move in directions that you think are healthier and smarter than, than the structures we've had before when it came to policing. well, i think for me it's not so much a question of what's happening within police departments. the question is really the ways in which cities as a whole are rethinking holistically their overall approach to public safety. i think that despite some fall start somewhere a year ago, minneapolis remains,

for instance, a really interesting place to look at. they are currently going to have a referendum about redoing their charter that in a way that would allow them to significantly shift resources, ada policing in into a variety of new public safety initiatives. community based violence reduction programs, alternative forms of traffic enforcement, increased civilian mental health, outreach crisis response teams, et cetera. similar movements are underway and a lot of cities, oakland. busy albuquerque, austin, texas. and we have a number of pilot programs here in new york along these lines. so there are a lot of cities, i think because of the pressure that we've seen over the last several years, who are beginning to try to figure out how to do this. well, listen, we'll have to leave it there. what a fascinating conversation professor alex vitaly of brooklyn college author of the end to policing and what for the new edition next month. thank you so much for

being with us today. thanks to a. so what's the bottom line? our guest today has some really thoughtful ideas on reforming policing and prisons . it's promising that there's some cities out there sending experts like social workers instead of police when they get certain types of emergency calls. that just seems smarter to me and fewer innocent people are going to die. the vast number of encounters between the public and their police officers are positive and helpful. we've got to put that on the record. but there will always be law enforcement officials that abuse that power in lawless ways. at the same time, face with a violent life and death situation. who you're going to call. americans are never going to abolish a police, but they will change how they work. the change won't be even across the entire country. each city and state is going to have to decide what they want and their citizens will have to be vigilant and demand accountability for years to come. if they really want, we'll change. that's the beauty and the headache of democracy, and that's the bottom line, ah,

a with

we know what's happening in our region. we know how to get to play this than others and not a far, as i said, i'm going the way that you tell the story is what can make a difference. lou. hello there understands your day and don't know what the headlines for you here on al jazeera, the army general who led a military take over and sued on last month, says he will not be part of the future government. after the transitional period, speaking exclusively to al jazeera until fossil bohannon says, he's committed to a smooth democratic transition. once elections are held in 2023. last month the military took power, dissolve the civilian arm of the government and declared

a state of emergency. it is our pledge a pledge we may draw shelves, the sudanese people and the international.