Joe Rogan | What If Police Didn't Have Quotas? w/Malcolm Gladwell

Yeah, the power trip aspect of it. I mean, you know, if someone often said, what would they do? You know, because there are certain areas where police officers do have quotas, or they have to write a certain amount of tickets. What would they do if no one broke the law for six months? Welcome to...that's what small town candidates... Yeah, right. That's right. What would they do? I mean, I would really be curious, like, what would happen to the numbers? Because what you're saying to these people is an ATM. They really do. I mean, people are...they're glorified revenue collectors. They're pulling people over, trying to write huge tickets. And I believe it's North Carolina where you're talking about that's got this creepy law that they've recently...I think they've recently changed it, where you're allowed to just confiscate people's money. Because if you see, like, I pull you over, hey, Malcolm, why do you have $3,000 on you? Yeah. You have $3,000 in cash? What are you doing with $3,000? Give me that money. And they take it and you have to prove that you weren't going to buy heroin or buy illegal guns or whatever. And then most of that money wound up going to the police department. So they used it to, like, build a fucking gym for the cops or whatever. I mean, it was literally they had an incentive to keep the money. And is that North Carolina that they did that? There's a number of states that have those... It is North Carolina. That have those confiscation laws. Civil forfeiture laws. And they're really gross. Do they still have that? Or is...I mean, I know it's extremely controversial. And people are up in arms and furious that their money has been stolen. People are on their way to buy a car, for instance. And they get pulled over in the comp, they'll just take all the money. This is what...I talk a little bit about the Ferguson case in my book later on. This is what Ferguson was ultimately about. The focus in the Ferguson case was whether the officer in that case, this is Darren Wilson, what he did and didn't do to Michael Brown. But the real story, when the Department of Justice investigated, the real story is not the encounter between those two. It is that the police department in Ferguson was being run as a revenue generating arm of the city government. And people in the city government were directing the activities of law enforcement to maximize revenue. And there's these incredible stories of...there's one...a story where there's a guy who's just been playing basketball and he's sitting in his car parked by the basketball court, like cooling off after playing basketball. Cop rolls in, pulls up behind him, and ends up writing eight tickets, including...accuses the guy being a pedophile, gets him for...one of the things he gets him is putting a false name on his driver's license. And his driver's license, his real name was like Michael and his driver's license said Mike. Like that's the level of eight tickets, right? That was routine practicing. So you...there's a reason why a kid like Michael Brown in Ferguson is...gets really angry at law enforcement because law enforcement was a completely discredited institution in that city. For years and years and years and years and years, they had been basically praying. They had been praying on the lower income community of that town. So of course relationships between the population and the cops had reached a low ebb. That's a real...you know, there's a...it's funny, the...one of the reasons I wanted to write this book was the kind of conversations we have around these things...Ferguson's a great example. Ninety-five percent of the conversation about Ferguson was just about trying to break down what happened between a cop and Michael Brown. And the issue, when we finally look at it in a systematic manner, we realize, oh no, no, no, it's not about that. It is about a system that had been in place for years and years and years and years in which the African American population of that town had been preyed upon by the police department. That is the broader...and you cannot come to an understanding of what happened with Michael Brown until you're willing to engage that case on that much more broader systemic level.