Fair Fight Initiative Podcast Episode 11: A Discussion About Current Events and Justice Reinvestment

Linda Franks

This is the Fair Fight Initiative podcast. I’m Linda Franks, the executive director of the Fair Fight Initiative in Baton Rouge.

Dave Kartunen

And I’m Dave Kartunen of the Fair Fight Initiative in Boston.

Linda Franks

Hello, handsome. How are you doing today?

Dave Kartunen

Well, beautiful. It’s Monday.

Linda Franks

It is, you know.

Dave Kartunen

But we’re still smiling.

Linda Franks

I know. I know. Welcome, everyone. Welcome, everyone. Look, Dave. Okay, look, stop me, okay? If you’ve heard this before, right? So in the town of Kenly in North Carolina.

Dave Kartunen

Not a big town.

Linda Franks

Small town.

Linda Franks

Well they have a new black female manager, city manager, in Kenly North Carolina. Progressive, I’m just amazed right. How come the entire police department, not just one or two, but the entire police force has resigned.

Dave Kartunen

All at once.

Linda Franks

All at once, including two of the clerks as well.

Dave Kartunen

Well, now, let me just white man explain something to you. We must have a thorough investigation here, Linda, and we get to the bottom of all the facts of what’s going on because any time eight white police officers all resign at once, we need to give them you know, we need to give them the due diligence and the respect that they deserve to make sure that everything and everybody was taken care of.

Linda Franks

There had to have been extenuating circumstances. And of course, we don’t know the exact merits and reasons about what happened.

Dave Kartunen

That is a fair thing to say.

Linda Franks

Let me propose a theory to you, okay? Let’s just say that as always, and I’m being generous here when I say always because it’s almost always. When there is someone in color who is put into a position of power, there is some backlash, there is some white backlash and we just got to be honest about that. Certain segments of our society do not like being told what to do by people who they feel should not be in a position to tell them what to do, let alone a black woman in Kenly, North Carolina. I could just imagine. I can just imagine.

Dave Kartunen

Well, you know, the officers said when they all resigned at the same time, that it was a hostile work environment, which is just rich. Right. I mean, it is just rich. First off, they only gave her two months. No reasonable person, I think, could expect that a hostile work environment would develop so quickly in two months that an entire white police department would resign all at once. But the hostile work environment thing is always very interesting to me because whenever a marginalized person is really marginalized and really harassed and, you know, really driven to the edges, I think about like Anita Hill or just you name them, right? You say hostile work environment and the white institutions say snowflake. So does that make these eight white male police officers snowflakes? I’m confused.

Linda Franks

I wonder. I wonder. Yeah, snowflakes. Right.

Dave Kartunen

Because we’re always told to buck up. You know, these are the rules of the road.

Linda Franks

Oh, we gaslit it and said it wasn’t what you thought it was.

Dave Kartunen

No, no. Yes.

Linda Franks

You were misinterpreting, you know, this, that, and a third, you know. But I know that you know, from what I saw in the report, you know, some of the residents there were talking about how they are targeted, how the black community in that area has feels unsafe with their own policing agency. And I wonder if this woman is coming in and trying to enact some good policies that, you know, for all intents and purposes will increase, you know, community confidence in the police department and probably help. But now all of a sudden, you can’t tell me to do this, I’m doing my job. You’re trying to change you know, it’s the same old story. I mean, for real.

Dave Kartunen

Police department in the way that law enforcement has evolved in this country, is that we are here to enforce accountability and no one may hold us accountable.

Linda Franks

Exactly right.

Dave Kartunen

This is an objective fact that I will be watching closely and we’re going to follow this one away. I think there’s there’s updated material with this story.

Linda Franks

I think there is something to come from it.

Dave Kartunen

Here is an objective fact about this story that we could know right now and that someone could tell us. And I would encourage all of the reporters, you know, fanning out in Kenley, North Carolina, which we know is not happening because it’s small town news and has just dried up. And this is probably in a news desert. And why this story probably didn’t get the attention it deserved. But an objective fact we could know tomorrow if someone looked into it was how many of these police officers live in Kenley, North Carolina? Because the other dynamic is always like Ferguson, you have an entire police department who lives somewhere else, and they come to this town and they treat the residents like they are poor.

Linda Franks

Yeah, yeah. There are parallels all over because I can see that here where I am in Baton Rouge, you know, a lot of the police officers that live in Livingston Parishes and they come here and, you know, even the chief here has been getting a lot of backlash for things that he has been trying to clean up. You know, this corrupt police.

Dave Kartunen

Yeah.

Linda Franks

This corrupt police department here in Baton Rouge has just really been amazing. But it’s going to be interesting to see how that pans out. I love her professionalism, you know, in that it is a personnel situation. She’s not wanting to dig into it. But I know behind closed doors…

Dave Kartunen

There are good liability reasons not to get into personnel matters, and I can respect those things. But there are objective things that we can know right now that might give us a little hint on the dynamics.

Linda Franks

I wonder what would happen if she hired eight black people to fill those spaces.

Dave Kartunen

Let’s talk about that in a second. I got one for you, Linda. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Okay, but we want to re-introduce you to somebody who you’ve probably known for going on some years now, but maybe hasn’t registered in the front of the consciousness. And that is Anthony Guglielmi. He is the spokesperson for the United States Secret Service who has seem to come under a little bit of fire lately because all of their text messages from all of the people that were close to the president on January sixth vanished. You know. Oh, but there’s an explanation because Mr. Guglielmi is paid lots of money, and I’ll get a little bit deeper into this after Linda registers her opinion, to provide an explanation on how this happened. The Secret Service would say that we were just in the process of a regular replacement of devices when these text messages mysteriously vanished.

No, that makes no sense. And here’s why. Because those text messages are a federal record. Every single record must be preserved. So no matter when or how you are replacing devices in the United Secret Services, you know, and you already knew that those records need to be kept so that explanation holds no water. But when you have a professional liar in place near the top of the Secret Service to create narratives around criminal activity, you bring in somebody like Anthony Guglielmi, who, before being a spokesperson for the United States Secret Service, was the spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department during the Laquan McDonald murder.

If you recall, McDonald was shot 16 times by Jason Van Dyck, who started shooting at McDonald 6 seconds after he got out of his patrol car while McDonald was walking away. And we heard all of these terrible stories about how a 16-year-old black boy was, of course, a man, because there, you know, they’re always elevated to a man. And what a menace and a thug he was and how he was swinging knives. And guess who was behind all of those false narratives? This person is a professional cop. They create narratives to justify unjust things in law enforcement. And here he is again, right at the fore of another gross injustice, Linda.

Linda Franks

And just think about it, because they are law enforcement because they are cops, right? They can come up with these almost futuristic science fiction-type explanations to explain something that should be common sense. Right. Like you said.

Dave Kartunen

And they’re taken as gospel.

Linda Franks

Right. It is never questioned. They have to be telling the truth. You know, I mean, as opposed to like you were talking about with Laquan McDonald, the evidence that’s right in front of your face. Right. This 16-year-old, you know, I mean, come on really? I’m pretty sure part of your training, part of all federal employee’s training has got to be the document trail, right? That’s got to be driven into you and in your orientation period. Right. Because any federal document is subject to being, you know, has to be preserved because it could be called upon at any time.

And it belongs to us as a nation. We need to know that at some particular time, these documents may be released, however heavily redacted, but they can be released. And there has to be a preservation of history for history’s sake. Right. And you are the Secret Service that gives a different connotation to the word secret. Right? Professional liar. I think you were telling me about something else that he was involved in conjuring up a narrative shifting and changing.

Dave Kartunen

Yeah, you know, Smollett all happened in Chicago, you know, and he was found guilty and had his issues, but it didn’t require false narrative creation. And this happens in I don’t want to say every police department, but consistently in police departments all across the country. And I walked these shoes as a reporter and frankly, January sixth is starting to create an inflection point for journalists like how many single police stories have reporters done where they simply took the spokesman’s word and repeated it as truth.

And it happens over and over again with police-involved shootings, with lost records, with all these things, journalists are starting to have a reckoning around January sixth. But it’s something that I also call the portable video inflection point. Right. It happened earlier for politicians. And in the 2000s when YouTube came of age and trackers were following politicians with small cameras and reproducing everything that they had said, politicians realized, I can’t speak out of both sides of my mouth like I used to be able to.

I can’t say one thing to one constituency and not have another constituency not see it, right? They still talk out of both sides of their mouth. I’m not apologizing for their behavior, but they’ve had to change their game. Law enforcement is only beginning to reckon with this because of body cameras and other things. In the old playbook where some suspect or a thug or 16-year-old man, as they like to describe him, made a sudden move and we had to shoot him doesn’t play anymore because the body camera is changing that.

And so now they’re fighting the body cameras and trying to hide the evidence and try to suppress because they got nothing left. Right. I mean, look at Uvalde, they fought and fought right? They’re going to have a reckoning with that, and these professional liars are still using old playbooks where the video just dispels everything that they’ve said. And it will again in this case. And some of these Secret Service agents have already lawyered up, which is always a sign of transparency and wanting to be on the same team to get to the bottom of things right? You know, when law enforcement officers have to get their own private lawyers, they’re playing on their own team.

Linda Franks

This is what I’m talking about. And I think that you know, as a country, we’ve got to come to that, right? I mean, we are going to have more checks and balances to work these people who have been given this just unlimited opportunity to be able to say whatever they want to say and it is just taken at face value. It has to be challenged.

Because I’m telling you, when it comes to confidence now, I mean, your community, the public at large has no confidence. They’re being shown to be a liar over and over and over again. And once that confidence is completely eroded, what do you have left? But, you know, hopefully not what we’ve seen on January the sixth.

Dave Kartunen

Well, and in local communities, what the cycle has proven to us is when local communities lose faith in their law enforcement, they take matters into their own hands and crime goes up.

Linda Franks

That’s it.

Dave Kartunen

Well, Linda, this provides us an educational perspective on not only how people can learn more about these types of issues, but how they can also go to the Fair Fight website to learn about them. And the topic that this ties through and you may not see it right away, of course, is the defund the police movement. And if you go to fair fight initiative.org right at the top, there’s an education tab you can go down to the defund the police movement to read more about it.

But the first thing we should say is that defunding the police is a terrible bit of messaging, right? When people hear defund the police, they hear, oh, we’re just going to let the criminals run free, of course not. So let’s talk about justice reinvestment instead. But when you say defund the police, I think that there are two unique opportunities in these two stories to describe really what justice reinvestment means.

So in the case of Anthony Guglielmi, he is SES and for people who don’t know what that is in the federal government that stands for senior executive service. This is an elite level of position in government where they’re paid extremely well and they try to recruit the best and the brightest to come. These are people who are searching for weapons of mass destruction in the Department of Defense and they are, you know, tracking hurricanes for the National Weather Service.

I mean, these are the best of the best. And we’re trying to attract the best minds to government to help solve problems. What we’re talking about here is the best of the best narrative creator, a professional liar. Should federal taxpayers have to pay for someone to make up lies to defend Secret Service officers? That’s what people mean by defund the police. They’re not saying let criminals run free. They’re saying maybe we should stop paying for professional liars.

Linda Franks

Right, exactly. Maybe we can reinvest in things that we see now because of our history. We have the benefit of hindsight. You know, we can stop operating in insanity, which means doing the same thing over and over again and getting the same result. And I agree with what your understanding about this defund the police, you know, and it gets a bad rap because people are thinking, oh, we want to take all the money away from the police and leave them out there to go run behind hardened criminals with sticks and stones.

I mean, come on. What we’re talking about is restructuring, right? What we’re talking about is wise budgeting, really using our resources where they can do the most impact and like you said, hiring in these people who we see are bad actors, right, who are narrative shifters and downright liars. I don’t think anyone would agree is a good use of our money.

And it does nothing, nothing to foster public safety. It hinders public safety because like you said, once communities lack the confidence in the people that are there to quote-unquote, protect and serve them, then I mean, we’re open for all types of mayhem to, you know, to occur. I had one person to say in an interaction with a law enforcement officer, you know, I thought you were here to protect and serve me, not to harass and oppress me.

Right. And so that’s the kind of thing that we need to make sure that when we’re investing in police that they get the proper training on how to make sure that they are interacting with citizens in the way that we deserve to be. And if they can’t, then we need to have other resources in the community that can supplement and circumvent what they have to do. You know?

Dave Kartunen

And so now we have this unique justice reinvestment opportunity in Kenley, North Carolina. There is no police department in Kenley, North Carolina. So why not have the town committee consider whether funds would be better used to hire crisis interventionists when there are mental health episodes instead of police officers with guns? Right. Maybe there is better budgeting around hiring social workers for certain things rather than having a guy with a gun show up.

There is another community, unfortunately, who has had to reckon with this recently in Uvalde, Texas, where 375 heavily armed law enforcement officers stood for an hour while children were slaughtered. Was that a good allocation of money to buy tanks and ballistic shields, or would policy make better sense? And banning assault rifles not only protect children in schools but eliminate the need to buy tanks and high-velocity ballistic shields that 375 police officers chose not to use.

Linda Franks

Exactly.

Dave Kartunen

So when you talk about defund the police, this is what we mean. You can learn more about it and read our white paper about defunding the police, about justice reinvestment on FairFightInitiative.org.

Linda Franks

And we encourage you to do so. We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that. And despite the finite disappointments of the stories that we share on the Fair Fight Initiative podcast, in this case, we must maintain infinite hope that we can end it.

Dave Kartunen

And certainly an example this week is the life of Bill Russell, who passed away Sunday night at the age of 88 after not only winning 11 NBA championships in 13 years, not only winning two national championships for the University of San Francisco, not only winning a gold medal for our country and the Olympics but maybe most importantly, he didn’t, as the right-wing pundits would like to say, just shut up and dribble.

Linda Franks

Amen. Amen. And such an amazing example of an athlete using his platform to do good. Bill Russell was an amazing civil rights icon in our community. President Barack Obama awarded him the Medal of Freedom. And it was so well-deserved. So well-deserved. Here’s a man that participated in the first noted, get this now, game boycott in 1961.

Dave Kartunen

Yes, in Kentucky.

Linda Franks

In Lexington, Kentucky, because two of his teammates were denied the opportunity to eat at a restaurant. When he found out that that happened, they went to Red Auerbach and they said, look, this is going on. Even though they were given the opportunity to go in after I’m sure Red Auerbach was saying some serious stuff to those people, they were like, you know what, we’re not playing the game. We’re not going to do it, you know? And in 1961?

Dave Kartunen

And vilified for it.

Linda Franks

I mean, you got to understand that lynchings were quite still going on regularly, you know?

Dave Kartunen

Absolutely. And it’s easy to pin these things on communities like Lexington, Kentucky. But lest we forget, Bill Russell played for the Boston Celtics. This is my community. And at that time and still today, remains a deeply segregated, sometimes latently racist community. And I’m not afraid to say it. Boston had extraordinary relationships with its white sports stars Bobby Orr and Tom Brady and Ted Williams had his moments. He got a hard time from Boston at times, but Bill Russell had an aloof arm’s length relationship with Boston pretty much from the day he left going forward. And that thawed over time. But Boston was extremely hard on Bill Russell and not in the same way that his White contemporaries were treated, Bob Cousy and John Havlicek and all of them. And he was the reason for their success. So, you know, lest we forget that maybe lynchings were still happening in the Deep South, but it was, you know, racism was alive and well in different ways in Boston.

Linda Franks

I mean, two years after that game right, he was supporting the black kids in the school boycott in Boston. Right? So there are so many things that Bill Russell was not afraid to say, I’ll walk away from basketball.

I’ll walk away from this. I will not sell my soul when I see something is wrong. God has put me here for a reason and I’m going to speak out for it. He was at the March on Washington. Standing beside Dr. Martin Luther King when he gave his amazing speech that we all continue to lift up as the iconic civil rights speech.

He supported Muhammad Ali. He was one of the, you know, athletes that stood up in support when Muhammad Ali was being just lambasted for changing his name and not wanting to participate in the war. Bill Russell has always and I think behind the scenes, a lot of things have always encouraged athletes to speak your truth and to not be, like you said, just dribble and shut up.

But this is an amazing opportunity that you have been given, you know, and I’m not talking about given by white people, but I mean by given by the fact that God has blessed you to be, you know, in such physical condition that you can participate at a certain level that affords you this type of exposure. And you have an obligation, whether you meet it or not. I mean, and even think about there’s an iconic picture of him on his Instagram, right, where he’s kneeling and he’s got the Medal of Freedom around his neck and he’s kneeling and he’s standing in solidarity with those NFL players who are choosing to take a knee. I mean, even then, you know, he still had his hand right there. And I’m sure he’s mentored so many athletes that have come across his and supported so many athletes in their quest for that.

Dave Kartunen

You know, just as you say that Bill Russell’s legacy will live on. Right. If you care about what Colin Kaepernick has done in football, if you care about the way that LeBron James continues to speak out for social justice and things like this, it started with people like Jim Brown and Bill Russell. And in baseball Jackie Robinson and Bill Russell’s legacy will live on. He has provided a rubric that basketball players in particular, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who has done such a wonderful job with social justice, to the detriment of his, you know, heroic records in basketball. Kareem is not held up in the same way that Magic is held up in these fairy tale characters, because they speak their minds and we’re better because of it. And may he rest in peace.

Linda Franks

May he rest in warrior. May he rest in power. Glory to God. You know, and it’s people like Bill that inspire us to do better, to give where we can. And that’s why I want to again urge you to visit our website fairfightinitiative.org. We have just gone to amazing lengths to make sure that we are educating our community on systemic racism and injustice and this system that has oppressed so many people in our United States of America.

But we also want to encourage you to give. That is a way that you can do your part no matter how small your donation. It is going to be used towards righting some of these wrongs and leveling the playing field. And as I will always say from personal experience, I know the benefit of it. I know what it can do to change a life and to change the trajectory of going through such a hard time. So I just want to encourage you to not only visit our website but to push that donate button.

Dave Kartunen

That is FairFightInitiative.org. You can click the donate button and you can read about topics like defunding the police and educate yourself on these issues of systemic racism and learn about the success stories we’ve had in the courts by hiring attorneys to try to level and balance the scales of justice.

The Fair Fight Initiative podcast is a production of the Fair Fight Initiative.

Linda Franks

Founded in 2017. The Fair Fight Initiative is a 501 C3 nonprofit organization dedicated to crowdsourcing litigation, which advocates for equal treatment under the law and confronts systemic racism.

Dave Kartunen

We believe that justice crowdsourced is justice delivered.

Linda Franks

Crowdsourcing resources from our contributors. We’re able to finance the litigation no attorneys will take because of the overwhelming upfront cost to seek justice in our legal system.

Dave Kartunen

And you can learn more about our mission and contribute at FightInitiative.org

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