Quality Policing Podcast: Recent Episodes
Peter Moskos
A quality discussion about policing and crime prevention with a focus on current events and honest data. Hosted by Peter Moskos.
Peter Moskos and Leon Taylor discuss the recent (Jan 2026) ICE killings
more at qualitypolicing.com
René Ropac & Stephen Koppel discuss New York bail reform. See qualitypolicing.com for more and links to the reports.
Colonel Jeffery Glover is the Director of the Arizona Department of Public Safety. He has over 25 years of experience in law enforcement, beginning his career with the Tempe Police Department. In February 2020, Colonel Glover retired from the Tempe Police Department after more than 20 years of service. He returned to the department later that year as Interim Chief of Police and was appointed permanent Chief of Police in August 2021. The Colonel is currently the President for the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE), Renee Hall is the incoming president and currently serves as the National 1st Vice President of NOBLE. Renée served most recently as chief of police for the Dallas Police Department Prior to leading in Dallas, Renee spent nearly 20 years in the Detroit Police Department in a series of increasingly responsible roles, beginning as a police officer and culminating as the department’s deputy chief of police.
George Kelling, talks about how he got into policing, the importance of being on the street, and the legacy of Broken Windows.
Quality Policing Episode 25: "friendly fire," LA traffic stops, arming school security, cops afraid to initiate arrests, and yes, Jussie Smallette.
Peter Moskos, Eugene O'Donnell, Martin Horn, Louis Anemone talk about media bias, how the elite don't understand, Broken Windows, and keeping jails safe.
Meet Peter's mom, Ilca Moskos. She's a bright, charming, opinionated human being, and Peter and she decided to sit down and talk about some of the issues of policing, to hear her thoughts on the things we talk about here all the time - mainly issues around officers use of force.
An interview about depolicing and marauding youths in Chicago by Peter Moskos with Ed Richards.
Interview with Patrick J Ryder, the commissioner of the Nassau County (NY) Police Department.
In this collegial interview with his former Baltimore City Police Department dispatcher, Larry Williams, Peter and Larry discuss life as a dispatcher. Peter's been speaking with Nick for a while about interviewing a dispatcher, because, as he said, "I don't think many people outside policing understand the relationship between dispatchers and the police."
Peter and Nick are pleased to be joined by Gordon Graham, the co-founder of the law enforcement policy shop Lexipol.
Nick & Peter discuss the February 14, 2018, mass shooting that occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the law enforcement response to it. This covers the Broward County deputies who did not run in and engage the shooter, active shooter training, and the response by the school kids who lost friends in the mass killing.
Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force trial, EFF on body cameras, cop shot in Louisville; cops hit by fleeing man in San Francisco, giving away month...
In November, 2017, a Baltimore City Police Officer confronted a man with a knife, and .... And, well... nothing. The man put down the knife, the officer handcuffed him, and everyone went home (eventually). This happens hundreds of times a day throughout the US. But this officer was caught on body-worn camera video, so it was one of the rare times we could all listen in as an officer did his job. The following week, Peter and Nick interviewed the officer, Angel Villaronga. This is the interview.
0:40 K-9. On police dogs and bites
9:00 Cops in Oklahoma shoot man trying to kill himself
16:00 Open Minneapolis: good data on police use of force
21:30 Undercover Detroit cops fight each other in street
23:00 Slager sentenced to 20 years for...
Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton and Peter Moskos discuss what we know and don't know in November 15, 2017 killing of Baltimore City Police Detective Sean Suiter.
Includes:
Act I: 6:10"The Solution to Getting Us Home Safe"How politicians, activists, and concern about abusive cops brought body cameras to the mainstream in policing.Act 2: 5:48"Wait. I Thought These Were Here To Catch Cops."After a few years, it's become clear that the body camera video that gets used gets used to prosecute civilians. Not cops. How'd THAT happen?Act 3: 7:21"A Civil Disagreement"Civil liberties groups believe police have the advantage with body worn cameras, because officers control both the record button, and the play-back button. Act 4: 10:40"Solve for X."Every few years, politicians get a bee in their bonnets about ... something, and we all end up with new technology. From pepper spray to backscatter X-Rays, to body cameras, here's why it never solves the problem.
There has been a significant reduction in the number of published tables within the Uniform Crime Reports from the FBI.
Our friends at 538 have been writing about mass shootings (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-matter-how-you-measure-them-mass-shooting-deaths-are-up/) and it appears that they are up across the board.
Peter blames Nick for this phenomenon.
Peter and Nick discuss the terror attack in New York City; the fact that, had the terrorist not just killed people with a car, activists would have yelled that the cops shot a man with a “toy” gun.
The terror attack did not terrorize New Yorkers.
A move is afoot to allow warning shots by police; a Baltimore officer doesn’t shoot a man armed with a knife and it works out well; a Seattle officer doesn't shoot a guy who stole a six-pack, and…well…
Nick Selby looks at use of force statistics from the Metropolitan Police in the UK, and the episode starts with a segment about use of force statistics in Minneapolis. This year, of 911 calls to Minneapolis PD for domestic abuse in progress in which force was used, 57 suspects (63%) were black. That's not police selection bias - these were 911 calls. This helps us look at the results in context. But in the UK, the data provided at the direction of the Home Office by authorities is insufficient for any serious researcher to conclude anything about race and policing, or even about use of force in general. There’s data, but it is so incomplete as to mean you can’t draw from it any racial equity conclusions.
In this intense, revealing episode, we’ll hear Floyd make an outcry of suicidal ideation while speaking with officers from the Behavioral Intervention Unit of the Hurst, Euless, and Bedford Police Departments in Texas, between Dallas and Fort Worth- which just might be America’s most progressive, proactive mental health unit.
There are ten times more people (http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/storage/documents/treatment-behind-bars/treatment-behind-bars.pdf) with serious mental illnesses in America’s prisons and jails than in state mental hospitals. Some of our nation’s largest psychiatric in-patient clinics are in county jails in Chicago (http://www.cookcountysheriff.org/MentalHealthTemplate.html), Los Angeles (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93581736), and New York (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/nyregion/for-mentally-ill-inmates-at-rikers-a-cycle-of-jail-and-hospitals.html).
We’ve heard that about one in four people arrested in America suffer from both severe mental illness and drug or alcohol abuse. But that number only scratches the surface of the problem: the bigger problem might well be the people with mental illness who aren’t arrested.
Nick and Peter discuss Peter’s blog post (http://www.copinthehood.com/2017/10/cops-in-conservative-cities-seem-to.html) that showed a correlation between the conservativeness of a city, and the number of people shot and killed by police.
A large, randomized trial in Washington D.C. to test whether body worn video cameras (BWVC) have an effect on the way people – citizens and cops alike – behave. While the authors state that the effects of BWVC are neutral, Nick stated that they’re not, they’re just not neutral in the areas that are actually effected by body worn video – hint: it’s not oversight and transparency.
A police officer in Glendale, AZ, was involved earlier this year in a shooting of a man who fired at Cano (http://www.azfamily.com/story/36324433/glendale-police-dept-releases-body-cam-video-of-officer-involved-shooting), and Peter and Nick discuss how it’s nice to have video of a cop doing what we would hope cops would do: he fires back at the motorist who fired a handgun at the officer, injuring the motorist.
Nick promoted his field report, a QPP Extra: Divert To Where? Mental Health Policing, which opens with the story of a Texas cop who talked to a handgun-wielding suicidal man for almost 15 minutes, and the man finally agreed to get help.
When a witness in a murder case was murdered (http://time.com/4996638/alabama-murder-outside-courthouse-jacquees-boone/) right after he testified, the judge declared a mistrial. Peter wondered about the racial components to the old phrase that “snitches get stitches.”
Finally, the release by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office of some really fragmented datasets (https://www.cookcountystatesattorney.org/data) that might make it seem to the lazy analyst that one need only race, date, and location, and crime charged to draw conclusions about race and arrests.
This is a longer episode than normal, because of our gun control conversation.
The UCRs are out, and they show a 23% increase in homicide in the past two years. Two Chicago Police officers were disciplined for kneeling and showing a Black Power fist salute. Also, we discuss statistics on law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty, after the ambush killing of a Georgia police detective (https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/senseless-killing-slain-georgia-detective-shot-felon-captured-after-manhunt/k3c1RwmxJC8oAN95F1O3eJ/). And the decision by the Jefferson Parish jail (http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/article_a3225930-a3d8-11e7-9d57-8f558cb46340.html) to limit visiting to only video visitation (which comes with the first call free and additional calls at $13 for 20 minutes) is an outrage.
Finally, Peter and Nick do what many said couldn’t be done: we have a reasonable, calm, and constructive debate about gun control in the service of a goal to reduce gun violence. It is tied to the horrific event in Las Vegas in which 58 people were killed and more than 500 injured, and we discuss the police response to the incident, and then look at some of the bigger issues in gun control other than the issues covered in the press. That is to say, we move beyond “You won’t take my guns,” and “Yes we will.”
An instructor in the police academy said I’d do thousands of car stops in my career. He said the only way to not get complacent was to treat every encounter as an opportunity to practice good officer-safety tactics. If I did that, he said, I’d never get caught out. This isn’t some theoretical challenge — many people know that car stops are dangerous. Somehow, it’s hard to explain exactly why they’re not routine.
So, let me take you there.
The D.C. Court of Appeals agreed in a 2 to 1 ruling that police agencies that use cell-site simulators (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/09/21/police-use-of-stingray-cellphone-tracker-requires-search-warrant-appeals-court-rules/?utm_term=.c78695f086a4) like Harris Corporation’s StingRay product must obtain a search warrant before use. Police on the campus of Georgia Tech shot and killed a student who was wielding and refusing to drop a knife, after the student had called police to report a student with a knife. And the Oklahoma City Police Department is again in the news, after officers shot and killed a deaf man with mental health challenges, after the man wielded a two-foot pipe at officers and failed to drop it.
Based on a substantial corpus of significant evidence, race is not predictive of who will be killed by police, racism is not the driver of police use of deadly force, and this program's conclusions about race and police shootings – like those of reporters from the Washington Post, Guardian, ProPublica – are wrong.
On July 11, 2016, Decatur, Illinois, Police Officer Andrew Wittmer shot and wounded Lonnie Mitchell after a shirtless Mitchell reached for a black semi-automatic pistol in his waistband. Wittmer fired one shot. In this honest interview, Andrew opens up about the trauma and stresses he went through during and after the incident, particularly his struggle to deal with the the aftermath of trauma and his treatment by the Decatur PD, who refused to see his PTSD as job related.
We begin the podcast with a reference to – but not a discussion of – the trial in which St. Louis Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson acquitted Officer Jason Stockley of premeditated murder this week in St. Louis. That is included in a separate podcast.
This episode is dedicated to those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001 and to those who have since passed from injuries suffered as a result of those attacks.
Jeff Asher is a crime analyst and consultant based out of New Orleans. He previously worked as a crime analyst for the City of New Orleans. Jeff runs the NOLA Crime News blog and can be found on twitter @Crimealytics (https://twitter.com/crimealytics).
The 2017 murder rate is expected to be on par with that of 2009, well at the bottom of the historic post-1990 decline, yet still higher than the lowest recorded rate in 2013. Notably, the Brennan Center states that half the murder increase from 2014 to 2017 (55.6 percent) is attributable to two cities — Chicago and Baltimore. Yet in reality, the figure is closer to 14 percent.
Peter and Jeff had independently discussed some issues (http://www.copinthehood.com/2017/09/quality-policing-podcast-interview-with.html)with this report, and wanted to dig into them.
Nurse Wubbels and Detective Payne; David Clarke; Joe Arpaio; “We only shoot black people;” Sheriff Ed Gonzalez & the Houston response.