GENE DEMBY, HOST:
What's good? You are listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm Gene Demby. And I want to talk about what's happening in Washington, D.C., where I live right now. President Trump temporarily federalized the D.C. Metro Police and brought in the National Guard to tackle what he describes as the city's, quote...
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.
DEMBY: And to do that, I want to go back a few years to a place on the other side of the country from D.C. It's called Grants Pass.
JESSE RABINOWITZ: Grants Pass is a small town in Oregon that is similar to many small towns across the country. There are a lot of people there who just can't afford to make ends meet.
DEMBY: That's Jesse Rabinowitz.
RABINOWITZ: And I'm the campaign and communications director at the National Homelessness Law Center.
DEMBY: And Jesse says there was only a 1% vacancy rate in Grants Pass. That means there was just no housing available for anybody who was looking and no housing, importantly, that people could afford.
RABINOWITZ: About half the people in Grants Pass pay more than they can afford for rent, which is actually true across the country, as well. And when people can't afford housing and when there's no housing, people live outside.
DEMBY: In that town of about 40,000 people, almost 600 folks were experiencing homelessness at any given time. And Jesse said there was no traditional homeless shelter in Grants Pass. There's a Christian gospel rescue mission, but that required people to do things like attend Christian worship services.
RABINOWITZ: Required people to abstain from drugs, sex and alcohol, required people to pay money to stay there, and required people to perform labor for the mission. So, for all intents and purposes, there was no place for a lot of people on Grants Pass to go.
DEMBY: And so a lot of people lived outside. And the city of Grants Pass decided to crack down on all those unhoused people. They started giving folks tickets for sleeping outside. And as you probably guessed, many of those unhoused people could not pay those fines, fines that could cost hundreds of dollars. Some of them even ended up in jail for nonpayment.
RABINOWITZ: Grants Pass took an incredibly expansive definition of what sleeping outside meant to mean that if you put your sweatshirt under your head as a pillow, that was an encampment, and you could be ticketed.
DEMBY: Some of the people who had been living on the streets decided to take the town of Grants Pass to court. Their argument was this violates our constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment if you subject people to criminal punishment for not having a place to live.
RABINOWITZ: If you read the court documents, an elected official in Grants Pass said that their stated goal was to make homelessness so uncomfortable in Grants Pass that people would go somewhere else.
DEMBY: But those people did not want to leave. Many of them were from Grants Pass. They had family ties in the town. They had community there. And so their case against the town wound its way through the judicial system before ending up in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court sided with the town of Grants Pass. It said cities or states could criminally punish people for living on the street. Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not agree with that ruling and voiced the dissent.
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SONIA SOTOMAYOR: The majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice - either stay awake, be arrested, or leave the city.
DEMBY: That was in 2024. And since that Grants Pass Supreme Court decision, a lot of cities have passed similar laws that criminalize a lot of the behaviors or conditions that are associated with homelessness. Here's Jesse Rabinowitz again.
RABINOWITZ: Since the Grants Pass ruling, 320 such laws have been introduced across the country, 260 of which have passed.
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TRUMP: This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we're going to take our capital back. We're taking it back.
DEMBY: OK, so now let's fast-forward again to August 2025 in Washington, D.C.
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TRUMP: Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people. And we're not gonna let it happen anymore. We're not going to take it.
DEMBY: President Trump vowed to crack down on homelessness in the nation's capital. He's deployed federal agencies and even the National Guard to clear out homeless encampments. And Trump may well have done all this to D.C. regardless of that Supreme Court decision last year, but his interpretation that D.C. is basically Gotham City, like, full of crime, full of disorder - it's not, by the way, but we'll get to that - that idea is based in part on the fact that there are visibly homeless people in D.C., and I personally hear people all the time equate homelessness with crime. Like, saying things about how, you know, unhoused people are dangerous. It's unsafe to be around them. And it's important to know here, by the way, that in D.C., nearly nine out of 10 people experiencing homelessness are Black, which almost certainly plays a big role in how these connections get made. Here's President Trump again at that press conference.
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TRUMP: You don't want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed. And you all know people and friends of yours that that happened. And so you can be anything you want, but you want to have safety in the streets. You want to be able to leave your apartment or your house where you live and feel safe and go into a store to buy a newspaper or buy something. And you don't have that now.
DEMBY: And that's what we're getting into this week on CODE SWITCH. What's going on in D.C. right now, how stereotypes about homelessness affect how the country is metabolizing everything that's going on, and what it means to try and use the police to solve big social problems.
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DEMBY: Jesse Rabinowitz, who you just heard from, lives in D.C., and he's worked in homeless services and advocacy for about a decade. And he's now at the National Homelessness Law Center. I spoke to Jesse on Friday, August 15, at the end of the first week of this federal takeover.
So today, as we're recording, as you and I are talking, it's Friday, August 15. What has the day been like for you?
RABINOWITZ: The day has been pretty hectic. I was out until about 10, 10:30 last night, trying to make sense of what was happening. There were roving bands of federal agents. Probably 30 agents was the most I saw at one time - FBI, Homeland Security, Border Patrol, Secret Service, comingled with MPD - walking around the city, primarily, spending a lot of time in places where folks had tents set up. And then this morning, I got word that the police had begun evictions in northwest D.C. in the White House. I made it down there to see them trash about four or five tents near the border of, like, Foggy Bottom and into Georgetown. There was a police caravan with dump trucks of probably 20 to 30 police cruisers. It was an incredibly aggressive show of force, and nobody got helped.
DEMBY: If we can go back to earlier this week on Monday, August 11, Donald Trump is giving this press conference, and it's at that conference that he announces his plans to deploy the National Guard and all these other federal law enforcement agencies to D.C., and he says he's going to federalize the D.C. Metro Police. Where were you when you first heard that announcement, and what was your first reaction to it?
RABINOWITZ: I was at home. I was not really surprised. We know that Donald Trump, for years, has been talking about rounding homeless people up and forcing them into government-run detention camps.
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TRUMP: When I'm back in the White House, we will use every tool, lever and authority to get the homeless off our streets. We want to take care of them, but they have to be off our streets.
DEMBY: This was Donald Trump back in 2022.
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TRUMP: We would then open up large parcels of inexpensive land, bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers and drug rehab specialists, and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified.
RABINOWITZ: So I was angry, but I wasn't surprised, and I immediately knew that he was going to live true to his word.
DEMBY: That was four days ago, as of when you and I are speaking. What has happened over the last week in D.C.?
RABINOWITZ: We've been hearing a lot of mixed things about what's going to happen. Thankfully, the D.C. government has stood up some additional shelter capacity with no help from the federal government. But as of this morning, again, they began using police to forcibly evict folks from their communities and throwing away what little possessions they had.
DEMBY: Can you talk a little bit about when you say evicting people from their communities, what that means for people who are unhoused?
RABINOWITZ: Sure. We know that often people who live outside form really tight-knit communities of people who look out for each other, people who support each other, people who, you know, watch your belongings when you have to go to work, or people who check on you to make sure you're doing OK. I think it's important for folks to know that people are living outside in D.C. for the same reason people are living outside across the country, which is that rent is just too high. The average cost of a one-bedroom in D.C. is $2,300. That's just too much for most people to afford.
DEMBY: This is not the first set of sweeps of homeless encampments in D.C. Can you walk through, like, a little of the history of how the local government and the federal government have addressed or treated homelessness in D.C.?
RABINOWITZ: I think what I'll say is that there are frequent clearings of homeless encampments in D.C., and they're harmful and they're cruel and they shouldn't happen. But this idea that D.C. has become this incredibly permissive place to experience homelessness is simply not true. The police presence today was nothing like I've ever seen before. But what I want people to know is that D.C. is clearing homeless encampments all the time. The federal government is, the local government is. They shouldn't. It's bad. It's shameful. But these things are happening all of the time.
DEMBY: For context here, the website for D.C.'s Department of Health and Human Services says that the reason encampments are removed is because those encampments can lead to, quote, "a number of health and safety issues," end quote. Health and safety issues, they say, include garbage that attracts pests, a lack of running water and electricity, danger from weather conditions and cooking that can cause fires.
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DEMBY: Three weeks ago, Donald Trump issued an executive order around ending homelessness.
RABINOWITZ: I wouldn't say ending homelessness. I would...
DEMBY: All right. Sorry.
RABINOWITZ: ...Say around (laughter)...
DEMBY: Fair, fair. The executive order says - I'll quote it. It says, "endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe."
RABINOWITZ: I mean, similarly to how Donald Trump spoke at his press conference, he is trafficking in this myth that people experiencing homelessness - who, in America, are predominantly Black and brown - are dangerous, are making the choice to experience homelessness, are using drugs, have mental illness.
And those things sometimes are true, but a lot of people have mental illness, and a lot of people use drugs. And he is specifically focusing on a community of folks that, in this country, is disproportionately Black and brown and using them as a testing ground to test his authoritarian policies.
What we know about authoritarians is they take groups of people who are believed to have little public sympathy. And in this country, sadly, that includes people who sleep outside.
DEMBY: OK. Cutting in from the future here, we reached out to the Trump administration for comment on the rationale behind some of the decisions he's made in the past few weeks. And here's what we got back from Abigail Jackson, who is a spokesperson for the White House. I'm going to quote it here 'cause it's worth hearing it in its entirety.
Quote, "President Trump is cleaning up D.C. to make it safe for all residents and visitors while ensuring homeless individuals aren't out on the streets, putting themselves at risk or posing a risk to others. Homeless people will have the opportunity to be taken to a homeless shelter or receive addiction and mental health services. Would these critics prefer homeless people be left on the streets to suffer? President Trump's actions will make D.C. safer and cleaner for everyone."
She then said, "this was all addressed in the White House press briefing last week" - last in all caps - "and was widely reported on. You can refer to those comments." She also flagged a statement from the D.C.'s Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services - his name is Wayne Turnage - who said that there was currently shelter space in D.C. for anyone who wants to come inside. And he said that there were more than 1,100 beds for single adults across the city's shelter system.
So President Trump's executive order from July 24 advocates for a, quote, "treatment-first" approach to homelessness in order to help clean up the streets. What do you make of this treatment-first approach that he says he's adopting?
RABINOWITZ: Sure. I mean, I also take issue with the clean up the streets. You don't clean up people, right? Like, you help people. The role of Housing First is to get folks off of the street and into apartments they can afford. But Housing First is not able to address the lack of housing in this country. We need more housing that people can afford for Housing First to actually work.
But what we used to do in this country is require people to jump through all of these hoops to prove they were worthy of getting help, right? They had to go to therapy. They had to be looking for jobs. They had to be sober. They had to be taking their psych meds.
Those are burdens that, honestly, like, most of my friends couldn't meet right now. Like, if you had a drink, you were kicked out. I don't know about other people, but I know a lot of friends that have drinks. I have a lot of friends that, like, don't go to therapy that probably should. Requiring people to jump through these hoops just didn't work because these people were trying to survive, and it takes a minute before you get settled into housing for you to get your feet under you.
What we've seen with Housing First is that if you get people a safe place to live, a bed to rest in, a medicine cabinet to store the medicine, a door to lock, they get better. And they are better able to access treatment and support from the stability of their own home. I've seen this so many times in D.C.
I've had clients that were homeless during the old days of Housing Last and would just talk about how it just didn't work for them. They were getting kicked out all of the time and cycling between Housing Last programs, the streets and prison. But once they got into Housing First, their lives changed.
DEMBY: There are lots of laws that are used to, you know, target homeless people, even when it's not specifically illegal...
RABINOWITZ: Yeah.
DEMBY: ...To be homeless. Can you tell us what some, like, what those laws might be that are used against homeless people in D.C.?
RABINOWITZ: Sure. Governments are very creative in using existing law to punish folks for sleeping outside. So trespassing is a big one. Public urination is a big one. Look, nobody wants to go to the bathroom outside, but it's something that everybody has to do. Instead of giving folks tickets for going to the bathroom outside, we should build porta-potties. There are, like, really easy solutions right in front of us that the government doesn't seem interested in doing.
And now, since Grants Pass, we have seen an explosion of these laws that are specifically targeting folks who experience homelessness. But one piece of good news that I want to share is that there were about 54 state laws to make it a crime to be homeless introduced over the last legislative season. Eighty-percent of those laws were beat back by advocates.
DEMBY: Wow. Once the drama of a sweep is over - right? - you've been to a lot of these, like, sweeps and seen the aftermath of them. What happens to the people who've been - who've had their lives upended?
RABINOWITZ: It's traumatic. I wish I had never seen what happens, but you hear about what people lose. You hear that people lost their urn with their mother's ashes or the last picture they had of their deceased relative. People's medications that they need to stay healthy are thrown away. People's IDs that they need to get into housing are thrown away. People's bikes that they need to use to get to their job are thrown away.
People are displaced from their communities. People are scattered further across the city where their outreach workers and case managers can't find them. People are killed. In - over the past year in both Georgia and California, people were killed when the city was using vehicles to clear their encampment. People die.
In D.C. several years ago, a man was picked up by a bulldozer when the city was throwing away his encampment. Thankfully, he wasn't seriously hurt, but that's what happens when you treat people like trash. And people lose trust in government because if the only time you see the government is when they're coming to throw away your things, why would you trust them? I'm thinking about when I was in Deschutes, Oregon, in May. The Trump administration evicted about 200 people from a national forest at 3 o'clock in the morning. People had nowhere to go. People were struggling to get by. People were terrified, and they moved to another federal forest that is going to be closed down, again, by the Trump administration. We are treating people like Whac-A-Mole, and it doesn't work.
DEMBY: You know, when I hear people talk about homelessness or unhoused people, there's this way that people make this slippage between the fact that there are unhoused people in their neighborhood - right? - and their sense of their own safety. What do you make of that?
RABINOWITZ: I think we have to redefine what safety means. We know that safe communities are communities where people have their needs met. And those needs include housing and support. People experiencing homelessness also want to be safe and are already disproportionately victims of crime and violent crime. People experiencing homelessness are incredibly vulnerable to not only the elements, but attacks, and there have been a string of serial killers purposely targeting people experiencing homelessness, including here in D.C.
DEMBY: Wow.
RABINOWITZ: We have to connect with each other as neighbors. This is going to sound really cheesy, but, like, my faith tradition, I'm Jewish, and there's, like, a teaching that you should treat everyone like they have the name of God written on their forehead because every person is made in the divine image. That includes homeless folks. Love thy neighbor means love thy neighbor. It doesn't mean love thy neighbor who has a place to live. It means love everybody, and we've moved so far away from that.
DEMBY: Is there anything else we should be thinking about that we - like, anything we did not ask you that you think is really important that we tell our listeners?
RABINOWITZ: I want folks to know that D.C. is already the most policed city in the country.
DEMBY: I was trying to explain this to somebody. There's the Capitol Police, there's the MPD, which is the actual city police, there's the Park Police. There's the - I didn't know this until the other day - the D.C. Public Library Police.
RABINOWITZ: Yep.
DEMBY: There's the FBI Police. There's a Secret Service Police. There's a Smithsonian Police. The Smithsonian has a police. Like, it's bananas, yeah.
RABINOWITZ: It's - there's so many police here. We don't need more police. If police made cities safe, D.C. would be - there would be no crime here. There is crime here, I don't want to lie, but that's because people don't have what they need. We know the solution to homelessness. It's getting folks housing and help. It's not throwing folks in jail. It's not throwing away their stuff. It's helping people make ends meet. We are at this time in our country where 60% of people struggle to make ends meet, 50% of people pay more than they can afford in rent, and 1-in-4 people worry about imminently becoming homeless. Our government has a responsibility to act, to address the housing crisis, not just for folks who are living outside, but for everyone in this country who can't afford to live here anymore. We have enough money in this country to solve homelessness, but our priorities are backwards.
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DEMBY: Jesse Rabinowitz is the campaign and communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington, D.C. Thank you so much, Jesse.
RABINOWITZ: Thank you. I'm going to go to sleep (laughter). I appreciate it, y'all. Thank you so much.
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DEMBY: When we come back, we're going to talk about what it means to try to solve so many social problems with the police.
ALEX VITALE: This has been a kind of toxic politics that I think has opened the door to what Trump is trying to do in D.C. It has really legitimated this idea that the problems of urban America are the result of drug cartels and gang bangers.
DEMBY: That's after the break. Stay with us, y'all.
Gene - just Gene this time - CODE SWITCH. And we're talking about the implications of President Trump's D.C. takeover. And next, we're going to get into what it means to try to use the police and law enforcement to try and solve these long-standing social issues that are happening in cities across the country. And to do that, I want to bring on...
VITALE: Alex Vitale. I'm a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and I run a public policy shop called the Policing and Social Justice Project.
DEMBY: And Alex has been on CODE SWITCH before.
VITALE: I've been a police scholar for over two decades, working in policing policy for over 30 years. People grossly overestimate the effectiveness of policing, fail to calculate the costs, and fail to consider what we could do other than policing.
DEMBY: He says that policing has become the main tool that cities use to address issues that aren't really about crime at all, like mental health interventions and homelessness and a whole bunch of other problems in those cities. And he says policing doesn't fix any of those issues.
VITALE: While on the one hand, we can think of this as a kind of security theater, on the other hand, this has real implications for both the residents of Washington, D.C., and the larger public.
DEMBY: Can you say more about the larger implications that you think this augurs?
VITALE: Yeah. So, you know, on the one hand, the law enforcement aspects of this are mostly laughable, you know, beautification efforts and community safety patrols and pointless checkpoints and upscale nightlife neighborhoods. But on the other hand, what we see is this normalization of the idea that if the president just says there's a crime problem, that he can bring in federal law enforcement, take over local law enforcement and put in place this idea that he is going to be in charge of law enforcement in this country at a time when we're seeing, you know, widespread protests against his policies.
And this is basically, you know, the classic playbook of dictators around the world. And so while I don't want to engage in, you know, superficial kind of comparisons, you know, this should be deeply troubling to anyone who believes strongly in sort of core constitutional protections that were created precisely to prevent a foreign king from, you know, exercising this kind of a police state on the American people.
DEMBY: So, OK, Alex, how do you think we got here?
VITALE: What's troubling about how we got here has been the way in which local, mostly Democratic, mayors have leaned into exactly this kind of fear of crime, pro-police rhetoric, going back to the first Trump administration. In 2019, Trump rolled out Operation Relentless Pursuit.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: We're calling it Operation Relentless Pursuit.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: New executive order from Governor Mike Kehoe about Operation Relentless Pursuit.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: The FBI, the DEA, the ATF and the marshals are all excited about this program. It means more boots on the ground from federal...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: The fact that Attorney General Barr has personally come to Detroit to announce this exciting initiative speaks volumes about his strong desire to keep Michigan a safe place to live and to work.
VITALE: That targeted a host of American cities run by Democratic mayors with the same language, that Baltimore, Milwaukee, Memphis, Kansas City were out of control, run by criminals, and that local officials were incapable of managing the problem. So he flooded those cities with federal law enforcement and dollars for local police to work with them.
And almost all of these mayors, except for in Baltimore, totally embraced this, were happy to accept this partial federalization of local law enforcement because they themselves have campaigned on law and order. They themselves have campaigned on a pro-policing agenda, and this was a way for them to, quote-unquote, "do something" in front of the eyes of the public about crime without actually having to spend local resources or actually get to the underlying roots of these social problems, things like mass homelessness, untreated mental health and substance abuse problems, widespread economic precarity, etc.
DEMBY: I mean, one of the things that's really interesting about the fact that so many of the mayors that you mentioned ran on tough-on-crime campaigns is that crime has been going down across the country since at least the mid-'90s and not just, like, a little bit, but dramatically, right? And so there was this, you know, this bump in crime rates during the pandemic, but those have since fallen away. And now crime is again at or near record lows in big cities across the country. Like, how are these mayoral candidates and then eventual mayors able to run on a tough-on-crime platform when there is relatively little crime?
VITALE: Yeah. It's been a really striking development over the last couple of decades to see the ways in which cities have basically given up on the possibility of actually solving their social problems. They've thrown up their hands around homelessness. They've thrown up their hands about providing people with adequate health and mental health care. They've thrown up their hands about fixing the schools and instead have doubled down on policing to manage those problems, not to solve them, but to kind of keep a lid on them.
And this has been a kind of toxic politics that I think has opened the door to what Trump is trying to do in D.C. It has really legitimated this idea that the problems of urban America are not the problems of de-industrialization, austerity, federal cutbacks to central programs, but instead are the result of drug cartels and gang bangers, and that the solution to these cities' problems is ever more intensive and invasive policing, papered over with a few, you know, superficial police reforms.
DEMBY: One thing that I've noticed is that here in D.C., like, when you talk to neighbors, when you, like, go on next door, when you hear or see people talking about, you know, things like gang activity and juvenile crime, they're often just talking about, like, Black teenagers visibly congregating in public spaces.
Like, sometimes those kids are being loud and obnoxious, you know, as teenagers are and maybe, like, obligated to do, but that sort of distaste for that - their behavior, their public sort of presence, does a lot of heavy lifting in these combos in ways that is not interrogated the same way that visibly unhoused people - like, there's the sort of slippage between - in people's minds between, like, seeing these people and then, like, crime, right?
VITALE: Anytime we see someone mobilizing the concept of gangs in public discourse, this should be a big political red flag. This is a manufactured term that has a very amorphous, you know, meaning. The meaning is expanded to whatever situation people in power want it expanded to. It has become an entirely racialized term.
When white kids engage in disorderly behavior, steal things, deal drugs, their behavior does not get labeled as gang related. But if four Black kids from the same housing development play basketball together, walk to school together, occasionally get in a fight and steal some sodas in the store, they are a gang and the solution to their existence is evermore repressive policing and criminalization.
Are there kids who are engaged in violence and other harmful behavior? Absolutely. This has been a terrible problem in D.C., but D.C. is also a place that has community-based efforts to try to rein in the violence, the use of credible messengers and violence interrupters going back many years. But these groups never get funding, never get mainstream support, and they never get sort of legitimized by official sources. And so until we change that calculation, whether it's for labeling young people gang bangers or labeling unhoused people criminals and dangerously mentally ill, we're going to be stuck in this failed dynamic of criminalization leading to evermore rightward shifts in our national politics.
DEMBY: So not too long ago, we saw these massive ICE raids in Los Angeles. Now we're seeing the sweep of homeless encampments in D.C. Both were at President Trump's discretion and his direction. Do you see a connection between these two crackdowns, as the Trump administration refers to them?
VITALE: Well, absolutely, and I see a connection in two ways. First of all, for Trump, this is clearly all about testing the waters to see how far he can expand his control over the national law enforcement apparatus, his ability to project power, even into the most progressive cities and states. But there's also a similarity in the way in which Democratic mayors have been largely ineffective at resisting it.
You know, as problematic as Trump's ICE raids are, it's important to point out that in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, that claim to be sanctuary cities, that it has been local police under local mayoral control who have been arresting protesters, engaging in crowd control, shooting members of the media with less lethal weaponry, you know, engaging in traffic control at ICE raids. So acting as kind of force multipliers, enabling this deportation machine that Trump has created to move forward.
DEMBY: You wrote a book in 2008, "City Of Disorder," which is about what happened after New York City decided to direct its police force to go after what, you know, are often called quality of life problems. This is in the 1990s. We're talking about things like homelessness and, you know, people asking for money on the streets. Things that are not crimes, even if they make a lot of people, you know, uncomfortable. And Democrats and liberals were very receptive to Rudy Giuliani and other people beating the drum on these quality-of-life issues back then. But what was going on there, and what did that sort of augur for this, like you said, this rhetoric around being tough on crime in these liberal cities?
VITALE: So the 1990s is really this transition period where cities, you know, give up on real solutions to problems like homelessness and failed schools. They accept the terms of austerity, of federal cutbacks, of a race to the bottom in terms of cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations and reframing their social problems as police problems. And one of the tools that enables this is the so-called broken windows theory, you know, produced by politically motivated, deeply conservative commentators who publish these ideas in a magazine. It's never a peer-reviewed, you know, evidence-based strategy. So this theory posits that the problem with urban America is too much social freedom.
The deregulation of public behavior. They pointed to things like interracial couples walking down the streets and kids doing graffiti and homeless people panhandling as signs of the collapse of Western civilization. And the only possible solution to that was the dialing back of the social movements that produced this freedom and the implementation of intensive and invasive policing, and that this would somehow, you know, magically restore law and order to society. And on its face, it's kind of nonsensical, because a lot of what it was about was criminalizing homeless people in downtown shopping districts where there was no serious crime.
You know, there was no linkage between disorder and homicide rates that were going up in, you know, outer communities that were highly impacted by poverty and racial isolation. So this theory is then put to work by extremely conservative forces, adopted by conservative politicians who are trying to act out this politics of austerity so that they can enable more tax cuts to the wealthy and more transfer of the wealth from working people to the investment class.
DEMBY: So, as we're looking forward, I'm wondering what you would say to people who are watching what's happening in D.C., what they should be paying attention to in the aftermath of what we're seeing right now, with this federal takeover of D.C.?
VITALE: Well, I think the first thing we should look to is how this is actually impacting people in D.C., including people who are being labeled as criminals and, you know, dangerous. But also we should be monitoring the rhetoric that says that this is needed in other cities.
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TRUMP: We have other cities also that are bad, very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. And we have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don't even mention that anymore. They're so - they're so far gone. We're not going to let it happen. We're not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further. We're starting very strongly with D.C., and we're going to clean it up real quick, very quickly, as they say.
VITALE: Trump has made clear that he'd like to take this power and apply it to lots of American cities. And so I guess that means that the last thing we should be monitoring is resistance to this.
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DEMBY: Alex Vitale is a sociologist at Brooklyn College and runs the Policing and Social Justice Project. Thank you so much, Alex.
VITALE: You're welcome.
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DEMBY: And that is our show. You can follow us on Instagram - @nprcodeswitch, all one word on IG. If email's more your thing, ours is codeswitch@npr.org. And subscribe to our podcast on the NPR app or, you know, wherever it is you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. And just a reminder that signing up for CODE SWITCH+ is a great way to support our show, support public media. I don't know if y'all heard. We kind of need the help right now, but you get to listen to every episode of our show and other shows sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.
This episode you're listening to was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Leah Donnella and our engineer was Patrick Murray. And I will be remiss if I did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez, Dalia Mortada, Veralyn Williams and B.A. Parker. And I just want to wave goodbye for now to our beloved Courtney Stein, who held us down in so many different capacities over the last couple of years. You may not have heard Courtney's voice, but her fingerprints have been all over this show. We're going to miss you, Courtney.
As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy.
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