The Montgomery County Police Department was a major factor in the outcome of the Keith Warren case and can be linked to many, if not all, of the missteps in the criminal investigation.
The Montgomery County Police Department was a major factor in the outcome of the Keith Warren case and can be linked to many, if not all, of the missteps in the criminal investigation. Using the Warren case as a guide, this episode analyzes how police are empowered by the justice system and how that can lead to corruption. Our host, Alicia Garza, will sit down with organizer and co-founder of the Women’s March, Linda Sarsour, who has been active in the fighting against police corruption and reimagining safety for all communities. Linda will share her experience with the system of policing as a Muslim-American organizer and offer her vision for the future.
This podcast includes graphic discussion of a violent death. Listener discretion is advised.
The “Uprooted" podcast is the companion to the new discovery+ series “Uprooted,” streaming exclusively on discovery+. Go to discoveryplus.com/uprooted to start your 7-day free trial today.
Find episode transcripts here:https://uprooted.simplecast.com/episodes/ep2-policing-a-broken-system
Somil Trivedi:
When I was growing up, I was taught. If something went wrong, tell the police for a lot of communities in America. That's not only not a fruitful avenue. That could be a harmful avenue because those very folks might be the ones complicit in what is going on.
Alicia Garza:
This is Somil Trivedi, a Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project.
Somil Trivedi:
Now I'm not saying that's happening all the time, but it's happened enough for us to be skeptical, right?
Alicia Garza:
Somil knows from experience. He represents people. Who've been wronged by the criminal justice system, by prosecutors, police, judges, and jailers in court. He fights for his client's constitutional rights and in doing so, he fights for a fair system overall.
Somil Trivedi:
You know whenever we represent people who have been wronged by the system, we usually tell them, it's unlikely that our case is going to help you directly. Sometimes it will, but sometimes it's just to fix the system that has already fucked you over. And every single time they say that's okay, I'm not in it for me. I'm in it to change the system that hurt me. And I can imagine that Keith Warren's family feels the same. They're never gonna get him back. They may never know, but by using his case as a spotlight, maybe other kids won't die the same way.
Alicia Garza:
I'm your host, Alicia Garza, and you are listening to Uprooted the companion podcast to the Discovery Plus series about Keith Warren's death and investigation. In this episode, we're going to dive deeper into the police. We'll look at the larger system. They're a part of how it enables and covers up police misconduct and what needs to happen to see change. Later, we'll hear from organizer and co-founder of the Women's March Linda Sarsour, who is dedicated her life to addressing issues of policing head on and advocating for justice for all communities. This is Uprooted. When Keith Warren was found hanged on a tree, his family had so many questions. Was this a murder? Was it an accident? Who did it? The police were supposed to find the answers.
Somil Trivedi:
I do know that the people who are supposed to be entrusted with caring and figuring that out didn't bother to do so.
Alicia Garza:
Instead Keith's family only had more questions after his death about the police themselves. Why were they classifying Keith's death as a suicide? How could they fail to secure the scene? Why didn't anyone perform an autopsy?
Somil Trivedi:
If they cared about Keith Warren's life the way they care about other lives we'd have figured out what happened by now.
Alicia Garza:
The actions of the police over three decades ago, not only prevented Keith from getting justice, they also left extremely limited options for pursuing the case in the future.
Somil Trivedi:
For decades and decades and decades. We've relied too heavily on police and prosecutors and judges to administer our criminal justice system that we all said would get the bad guys and only the bad guys and would lift black and brown communities out of poverty and marginalization. It has not. Uh, obviously
Alicia Garza:
It's been just the opposite.
Somil Trivedi:
In fact, it has deepened those inequalities because there is inherent bias in the system. Black and brown people are over criminalized disproportionately in America. We know this they're over arrested overcharged over incarcerated.
Alicia Garza:
Not only that, but the crimes in which their victims also remain unsolved at disproportionate rates.
Somil Trivedi:
So they're getting screwed on either end of the spectrum.
Alicia Garza:
Yet when the Warren family tried to help solve the case, when they went looking for answers after Keith's death there were none to be found. Instead, the family was shunted from one department to another Somil says that's a feature of the criminal justice system, not a bug.
Somil Trivedi:
This is an elaborate system of buck passing, where there's no responsibility falling on any one official. And that is by design because we don't want people poking around in the gears of this machine. We don't want people knowing how the sausage is made because we would be horrified.
Linda Sarsour:
Ida B. Wells said, those who commit the murders, write the reports.
Alicia Garza:
Linda Sarsour is an activist and community organizer based in Brooklyn.
Linda Sarsour:
And it always baffles me that when a young black man or woman or brown man or woman are murdered at the hands of the police, the first thing people will say, but look at the police report, but look what the police said happened. And I wanna remind them the police is the one with the trigger that murdered that person.
Alicia Garza:
When Somil said that the justice system is hiding how the sausage is made. It's because, well, how the sausage is made. It isn't pretty,
Linda Sarsour:
The prosecutors know the police departments, the DA's know the police and the prosecutors. It is just such an incestual system, um, that you can't really get around it.
Alicia Garza:
Rather than the checks and balances we're used to when we talk about systems of power, the justice system is more like a system of protections and protections. Each branch, making sure the other is never totally culpable or fully to blame. And Linda says this very mentality is built into the DNA of the police department too. As a police officer
Linda Sarsour:
You are programmed to, uh, protect your colleague in the police department by any means necessary because there is a code of silence and a code of protection that police officers are taught. And when you cross that line, when you cross the blue wall of silence, what happens is you become an internal enemy inside your police department, and you are marginalized. You are vilified. You may get desk duty. Um, you really lose your credibility.
Alicia Garza:
But one of the larger issues Linda says is that the public has a fundamental misunderstanding of what the police do and what we can rely on them for.
Linda Sarsour:
A police officer's job is not to prevent violence. They get there after the violence happens, you know, something has to happen. And someone calls for you to get there. They're not part of the preventative. And so what I'm saying is what if we invested in the preventative?
Carlean Ponder:
Let's redefine policing for what it should be
Alicia Garza:
Carlean Ponder
Carlean Ponder:
And let's take away some of the enormous amounts of like leeway and authority that we've given them to police. Every other aspect of society.
Alicia Garza:
Carlean is the Co-Chair of the Silver Spring Justice Coalition. The organization was founded in 2018. After Robert White, a black man was killed by police while on his daily walk, his killing took place in Montgomery County, Maryland, just like Keith Warrens.
Carlean Ponder:
I mean, there is certainly a perception in, in our communities, black communities, and think a lot of other people of color that the police are simply non-responsive when we are in crisis or in an emergency situation.
Alicia Garza:
She says that in Robert White's case, Robert suffered from a mental impairment. He was known around the neighborhood, had family that checked in on him regularly was not seen as a threat. Then a policeman came, confronted him created, and then escalated the situation.
Carlean Ponder:
Police officers, you know, are entrusted way beyond the level of where they're training, um, should take them, right? We don't need them to be social workers. We don't need them to be like mental health clinicians. It's beyond comprehensible that we've asked them to take on all of these roles. And we expect them to handle themselves competently, right? In every area. We need to take away some of that authority that we've given to police officers that really, it just over stretches like where they should be.
Alicia Garza:
Instead. She says, these are jobs that can go to people who already work and live within the community.
Carlean Ponder:
I want police out of the business of responding to every social issue that happens in our streets. If somebody is homeless and they're walking down the streets and they're talking to themselves, I don't want folks to feel that their only option is to call 911 and have a police officer come out and have an altercation with that person and maybe put them in handcuffs and, you know, put 'em in jail for a night. We need to be able to address the real issue. Why is the person walking down the street talking to themselves in the first place? You know, can we have maybe day centers? If we need that, where people can go and they can rest. If they're unhoused, they can have a cot. Maybe they can have a meal. What about medications? Is there a place where, you know, they can go and somebody can help them, right. Be up to date on what it is that they need to keep themselves healthy. Real social justice looks like the community being able to design like what safety is for that community.
Alicia Garza:
So how do we go about fixing this system? Making this vision, that Carlene outlined into a reality? Well, Somil Trivedi, the ACLU lawyer agrees with Carlene's point that first we have to invest in communities as a preventative measure.
Somil Trivedi:
Giving them the things that they want so that their neighborhoods are just like rich white neighborhoods, where you don't see a cop around for days, cuz you don't have to because people are happy and educated and well compensated and well fed. And they feel safe because of those environmental factors.
Alicia Garza:
But in the case, when something isn't prevented, when someone from a marginalized community has been hurt and law enforcement won't step up to do anything about it.
Somil Trivedi:
We need accountability after the fact.
Alicia Garza:
And that means we need accountability, whether they're in a rich white neighborhood or not. And what does that look like? Well,
Somil Trivedi:
That means independent oversight of police and prosecutors and judges such that when they make nonsensical conclusions like Keith Warren's death was obviously a suicide and we're not gonna look into it anymore. When they make questionable judgments like that, we have civilian oversight.
Alicia Garza:
What Somil is really after is true. Social justice.
Somil Trivedi:
Real social justice is not simply holding cops and prosecutors and jailers and judges accountable. That's a necessary component to restore faith in the system.
Alicia Garza:
Real social justice depends on key individuals holding onto their power to keep others in check from elected officials.
Somil Trivedi:
We have examples of mayors who are willing to hold their own police chiefs accountable. When they oversee an office that is unwilling to look into cases that might not be very politically palatable. We have prosecutors and elected officials with the integrity to go back and, and look into those systems and not trust the wolves to guard the henhouse
Alicia Garza:
To voters like you and me.
Somil Trivedi:
We can all mobilize and organize and demand and vote out folks who are not willing to look backwards and get us accountability and then look forwards and get those broader changes that will make sure that there's never a situation like this again.
Alicia Garza:
And Somil says positive change is already taking place.
Somil Trivedi:
We are seeing that change. Now I know it seems slow. And I know it seems, uh, hard to accept a system that continues to be so violent to certain communities as, uh, legitimate or improving. But I think that attention to this problem is finally being paid. But it finally is to the extent that we are actually talking at least about federal legislation that might fix some of this. It won't fix all of it and it's not going to happen this year. It may not happen next year. But I think that we are finally at a point where it is too grotesque for us to ignore. And there are so many of us who are making it, their life's work to fix it that, uh, I gotta believe that we're going to change at least some parts of it. At least the worst parts of it in our lifetime.
Alicia Garza:
So far in this episode, we've talked about the way the criminal justice system is set up so that it enables police misconduct. We've heard from activists about how their communities would like to reimagine their relationship to the police. And we've talked about how that change can actually become a reality. Up next, we're going to talk more in depth with Linda Sarsour, who we heard from earlier. Linda is a community organizer perhaps best known for her work with Muslim American communities in New York and for organizing the Women's March in 2017. Linda. Welcome.
Linda Sarsour:
Thank you so much, Alicia, for having me here.
Alicia Garza:
Talk to us a little bit Linda, about who you be. I mean, I know that you are a Brooklyn born and raised Palestinian Muslim organizer, activist, extraordinaire, but I'm gonna let you introduce yourself, tell us who you are and what you do.
Linda Sarsour:
I appreciate that. I think what's really a beautiful about this conversation. Alicia is that we go back before people really knew who we were on such a high profile and we, we knew each other or met each other. And we were both the local grassroots organizers in our own local communities on literally two ends of the United States of America. I was never gonna be an activist. That's not my life choice. It's not what I wanted to do. I was an aspiring high school English teacher. I was studying English literature, um, and minoring in secondary education and then 9/11 happened and my people were under attack. And when I say under attack, I don't mean that in just the, you know, rhetorical way or, or, or headlines or just people talking bad about my people. My people were being terrorized by every level of law enforcement right before my very eyes in Southwest Brooklyn.
Linda Sarsour:
And so I stepped in as a volunteer translator and that was kind of the way my career started. I was translating for women who had lost their husbands to the incarceration and immigration system in this country to the national security apparatus. And I was grateful to my parents for teaching me another language. I was fluent in the Arabic language and that's who I am. I'm a daughter of immigrants who was an aspiring high school English teacher who has dedicated the last 21 years of my life to fighting for social racial, economic justice for of course the very communities that I come from, but by extension for all people.
Alicia Garza:
Mm. Tell me a little bit more about your entry point into fighting for justice. You said that you, you know, you intended to be a high school English teacher, but then 9/11 happened. Give the people who are listening right now, some context for how you got inspired to change career paths. Right? And jump into what I think is probably the hardest work in this world, which is trying to change it.
Linda Sarsour:
Absolutely. I saw it with my own eyes. It was happening right before me. I was watching, you know, men being detained. I was watching literally there's an image that I will never forget of an apartment building in Southwest Brooklyn where grown men about maybe 20 grown men were literally coming out of this apartment building. And then law enforcement asked them to lay down on the ground on their bellies. And I watched these little children in the windows, looking at their fathers. Maybe some of them, it was their older brothers or grandpas and crying from the window. And that really radicalized me. It triggered me. I said, this is not right. This is not what it, this is not how it's supposed to be. And so that's kind of my entry point for starting to do my translation work and starting to think about, you know, what was my role in this?
Linda Sarsour:
What do you do for your people? You know what, I didn't, I wasn't, uh, trained, I didn't know nothing about law enforcement or what law enforcement does and doesn't do. I wasn't really deep into the rights and what our rights were in the ways in which we interact with law enforcement. And that really was the treatment that my community received because this government decided that anybody who was Muslim was somehow complicit with the horrific attacks that happened to our country on 9/11 of 2001. And that's been my career ever since defending people. I don't like to see injustice. I don't like to see things that are wrong and to sit back and say, Hey, this is just how it is. It's not how it's supposed to be. It may be how it is, but it doesn't mean that it's right. And, and that's been my approach to kind of organizing, uh, for the last 21 years.
Alicia Garza:
You know, Linda, it strikes me that your organizing career has really been rooted in trying to change the way that policing is functioning in our communities or not functioning as the case may be. Talk to us a little bit about what I called segregated safety, right? Safety for some but not safety for others. And that's often based on race or gender or religion, you know, what do you think are the implications of segregated safety or unfair policing, especially for the communities that you organize.
Linda Sarsour:
It's interesting when we talk about policing and which communities feel safe around police and which demographics feel safe around police. And to be honest, I come from communities that are quite diverse. Some who are, don't see police as making them safe and other parts of my community who do think that police is the answer to safety. And that's why this work is so hard, cause it's not just about convincing, you know, folks who are not us. It's also convincing our own people. I mean, I have had to go to police precinct meetings where when I walk into a police precinct meeting, I look at the demographics. If it's in a black neighborhood and the demographic is, you know, black women over the age of 65 who are like, look, I'm trying to get to the grocery store and I don't feel safe. I don't wanna get shot.
Linda Sarsour:
And they believe in that moment that the fastest solution is to have more cops in the community. Same thing with Muslims, in some, in some parts of the country, there's been vandalisms and attacks on mosques. And sometimes their initial kind of jerk reaction is that we need more security. We need to bring more, we need to call the local police department. And what's interesting is that there's this kind of confusion that we have this tension in our bodies that we know that the same people we think are supposed to protect us are actually have been terrorizing our communities profiling our communities for a really long time. Back in 2011, there was a big expose that happened between 2011 and 2013 by the Associated Press where somebody in the New York police department leaked thousands of documents proving that the New York police department basically was engaging in unwarranted surveillance of Muslim communities.
Linda Sarsour:
It was to the point that it was actually very personal. They actually targeted the organization that I was the executive director of at the time under a, a larger kind of portfolio. They call terrorism enterprise investigation. Now mind you here's an organization I was running that was a refugee services organization. We were serving moms and children. We were teaching adult English. Many of whom were immigrants. We were providing after school programming and public schools in the area, particularly to Arabic speaking children who had just came to America, maybe within the last two to three years. This was an open community center funded by the city of New York. You know, we were getting state funding as well. And so the fact that the police department saw our work as a threat and actually put us under this larger portfolio of terrorism enterprise investigations. And that was chilling for our community. A lot of people were afraid to receive social services. We didn't go to a government agency, even if their family was starving, cause they didn't wanna have interactions with directly with the government. And that's what police surveillance does.
Alicia Garza:
You know, Linda, it just strikes me that there's so much relationship right between the surveillance and the targeting that you're talking about of Muslim communities, not just in New York city, right? But like across the nation, particularly in a post 9/11 context and the targeting and surveillance and violence that's being enacted against black communities. And of course there are intersections and overlaps between our communities as well. And you have been somebody who doesn't just organize with Muslim communities, right? You've been very active in this movement to ensure dignity and safety and survival and thriving for everyone. But in particular, this last decade of black liberation movements, mm-hmm
Linda Sarsour:
It's very clear to me that, um, and I say this all the time and it's not a cliche for me because I work this every day. I really truly believe that when black people are free, we're all gonna be free. And so working to ensure the success of the black liberation movement to ensure that every black child in America can have access to high quality education, that every black person can walk safely and freely in their communities and, and black people can thrive in America. If black people who have been under oppression in the United States of America for over 400 years could be fully, fully free. Then we got nothing left to do. It really is. Um, by extension we will all be free. One third of Muslims in America are black and they, they have to figure out how to exist as black and Muslim in America and the intersections of Islamophobia and anti-black racism. And I have grateful to have mentors in my community, including sister Aisha al-Adawiya, who is, um, just recently retired from the Schomburg Center. Who's someone that sat at the feet of Malcolm X. She is a, a Muslim woman who has her ancestry to enslaved people. And reminding me often that 25 to 30% of enslaved Africans were Muslims. They were stripped of their faith. I have no choice, but to do the work that I do today.
Alicia Garza:
So I wanna jump back into talking a little bit about the system of policing. You know, I gotta ask you Linda, there's been a lot of conversation in the last year, particularly after widespread and widely publicized police murders about defunding police, right. About a different vision for public safety. And I I'm wondering if you can give us your perspective.
Linda Sarsour:
I think there's been a distracting conversation about what we call our work. Is it defund the police? Is it abolish the police? Is it, you know, reform the police? You know, I'm not interested in the titles. And I think that people wanna bog us down into that. I have to say something quick to get your attention and, and it's been successful, uh, defund the police when you sit and explain it Alicia people are like, I actually see what you're saying. I actually do agree with what you're saying. And what we're saying is this in New York, as an example, the department of education department parks and recreation department of transportation, department of small businesses, the department of mental health and hygiene. If I added all the budgets of those agencies together, they still are less than the budget of the New York police department. When we look at the root causes of violence in communities, the solutions to those problems are not more police.
Linda Sarsour:
And, and I say to people all the time, when you have a child who is having a mental health breakdown, why would you want a police officer to come to your house to address that problem? When we have people who went to school for eight, 10 years to become licensed mental health providers, to address your children, a police officer is not a social worker. They have someone homeless, that's laying outside of your apartment. Building. Police are not the answer to homelessness. It's case management is affordable housing. It's making sure people get off the streets and are on a pathway to some sort of, uh, a consistency, some sort of normalcy in their lives. Same thing in our school system. There's no place for police in our school system. I went to John Jay High School in Brooklyn, a school that got shut down, um, many years ago.
Linda Sarsour:
And the school was very well known in New York city for gang violence, etcetera. And we had police in our schools way before there ever was NYPD officers in schools. And one thing I thought to myself later on in life, and I said to myself, why did we have a school with 4,500 students and only three guidance counselors? So the question is, what if we had more social workers and more psychiatrists and more child psychologists in our schools and, and counselors because kids in our communities are going through a lot of stuff. I went to a high school that was over 80% black of kids coming from NYCHA housing projects and different parts of the city who were coming to south Brooklyn. So again, when we say defund the police, it's not about you're gonna wake up tomorrow and there will be no police. It's about getting to the root cause of violence and ensuring that our communities have every service available to them so that they can prevent the violence before it happens
Alicia Garza:
With platform and profile comes a lot of criticism. And not only are you on the front lines and saying things that can make you a target as well, but we also kind of get flack and heat right from the people that we're organizing with right? Cause folks think, oh, you got this platform now. Now your head is big. Now you're this now you're that? Talk to me about how you deal with that tension. What emboldens you to position yourself both as a public figure, speak out against unjust systems and also navigate being targeted yourself for being clear about what you want and what we're trying to build. And then also being targeted sometimes from the very people that we're working alongside of.
Linda Sarsour:
That's the story of my life. And it's been, um, a big part of how I've been navigating the movement in the last 10 years. Um, and maybe even more so in the last five years, the bottom line is Alicia I have people who count on me every day. You know, when, when you see me in spaces, it's because somebody called me to be there. And that's the focus of the work that I do. You know, I also tell people all the time that I'm not part of a movement that's united, I'm not into unity. That's not what I'm trying to do here because unity to me is not uniformity. This is not how movements work. And so oftentimes for me, what I've been criticized for is that I'm a direct action person. I'm in the street and I'm gonna roll up on Attorney General, Daniel Cameron's house.
Linda Sarsour:
I'm gonna knock on that door. That's just who I am. You may think that's aggressive. You may think that that's harmful to our movements. You may, you could think what you want and that's fine. But me, me rolling up to Daniel Cameron's house and figuring out that he bought a house and being, being able to do the research that led us to doing a direct action Louisville, Kentucky is what is what got on the front page of the Washington Post. And why did those people go to Daniel Cameron's house? Number one is because he had the power to indict and charge the officers that murdered Brianna Taylor. And he wasn't doing his job, but also it got people to say, Brianna Taylor's name from not only from California to New York, but all over the world. And so people were criticized me mostly for tactics that I use.
Linda Sarsour:
And for being someone who believes in things like civil disobedience, and I'm also sometimes targeted because, and I'm also not afraid to say the things that I say I'm not afraid of losing. You know, I don't know what awards or losing, you know, book deals or losing my job. I'm my own boss. I do what I want. I say what I want. And you better damn believe that I'm building a platform to use, to say the things that need to be said to uplift the stories of people like Tanisha Chappelle, who literally died in the, in, in the hands of the Jackson county jail in Indiana for being arrested for alleged shoplifting. Now this is a woman who's 23 years old, who is overly overall healthy and goes walks into the Jackson county jail in three, in a place with 300 inmates. She's one of only two black people in there and she's mysteriously dies.
Linda Sarsour:
I'm gonna use my platform for that. And if you don't like it, if you think my whole platform is about bad things happening well, that's what my platform is about, is about making you aware of the injustices that continue to happen regardless of who sits in the White House. And that's the other thing that I get criticized for, especially now, I'm more criticized now than I've ever been. Cause all of a sudden, now we have a Democrat in the White House and I'm supposed to change my views on things because somehow with based on which political parties in office I'm supposed to somehow be silent, now it's not gonna happen and I'm gonna continue to do that. I work so, so, so the, the way you navigate it is just stay focused. I stay focused. I'm still here and I'm still doing the work.
Alicia Garza:
Well, Linda, it doesn't get much better than this. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure and always an honor, I adore you.
Linda Sarsour:
Thank you so much. It's been, um, a wonderful experience and an honor to be with you in conversation.
Alicia Garza:
On the next episode, we'll talk about the media and the role they played and didn't play in Keith Warren's case. And we'll talk with actor and activist, Kendrick Sampson, who you may know as Nathan on the HBO show Insecure, who is using his platform to influence social change in Hollywood and beyond.
Kendrick Sampson:
And I think that it's important to do it here because Hollywood is the largest propaganda machine, right? It is utilized to perpetuate white supremacy anti-blackness all over the world. So I think it's really important to start here. And that's a, that's a lot of the work we're doing.
Alicia Garza:
That's coming up next on uprooted for more on Keith Warren's case. Check out the mini series on discovery. Plus Uprooted is produced by Now This for discovery plus in partnership with pod people special, thanks to the production team at pod people, Rachel King Matt Sav, Ivana Tucker, Jazzie Johnson, Liz Mack, Brian Rivers, Vincent Cash, and Amy Machado.