The Meaning of Public Safety

Abstract

Christy E. Lopez joined the Georgetown faculty as a Distinguished Visitor from Practice in 2017, and was made Professor from Practice in 2020. From 2010 to 2017, Professor Lopez served as a Deputy Chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. She recently sat down for an interview with Contexts Managing Editor, Genesis Fuentes, to discuss her time at the Department of Justice where she was the primary drafter of the Ferguson Report.

Christy E. Lopez joined the Georgetown faculty as a Distinguished Visitor from Practice in 2017, and was made Professor from Practice in 2020. From 2010 to 2017, Professor Lopez served as a Deputy Chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. She recently sat down for an interview with Contexts Managing Editor, Genesis Fuentes, to discuss her time at the Department of Justice where she was the primary drafter of the Ferguson Report.

GENESIS FUENTES: Can you tell us what a normal day in the Department of Justice was like?

PROFESSOR CHRISTY LOPEZ: I’m not sure there were normal days. A normal day could begin in one of many cities across the country. It could begin before you got to work with a text or a phone call or an email alerting you to some issue. I was working in the civil rights division section called the Special Litigation Section. And within that section, I was focused on investigations of police departments and otherwise coordinating the department, helping to coordinate the department’s efforts around police misconduct and lawful constitutional policing.

I headed up what we called the Police Practices Group. It was a high-profile group with high-profile work throughout the time that I was there. I worked with a team of really amazing people, administrative assistants, investigators, lawyers, paralegals, and what the day looked like depended on what particular project I was working on. Most often, I was involved with the investigative process. I was working with experts to help to understand their findings. I was in a city talking with community members, talking with police officials, going on ride-alongs. There’s not really any normal day because there were so many different tasks involved with even just the investigative process and that wasn’t all the work that I was doing.

GF: Can you tell us a bit about the Ferguson report? Why it came about? What were some of the major findings?

CL: I remember vividly Ferguson. I was on vacation, and I saw a news flash that there had been a shooting of apparently an unarmed Black man by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri. I kept getting these additional news alerts and I realized that something different was going on there. Over the ensuing weeks, I learned that there was a long history in Ferguson of some pretty oppressive enforcement practices by the department. And lots of allegations of discriminatory treatment, unconstitutional stops and searches. So, we went there, my team and our experts went to Ferguson.

That was the quickest an investigation was ever completed at the Department of Justice, which was six months. We really chose to focus on fines and fees and the way that Ferguson had a police department in large part to raise revenue for the city. One thing came up implicitly and I think we didn’t really see how important this was until after the murder of George Floyd. This method of policing wasn’t just because the city wanted to use policing to raise revenue.

Christy E. Lopez

Georgetown University Law School

And we were quite clear that it was doing so on the backs of poor people and Black people in Ferguson. That part was clear. But what was less emphasized, or I think less fully appreciated by the public, was that this form of policing was also done out of fear.

Ferguson had gone from majority White to majority Black in a fairly short time period over about 10-years, just prior to Michael Brown being killed. That was frightening to a lot of people in Ferguson, a lot of leadership. They wanted to use policing to keep people in line. It was about using policing to enforce a racial order and I think that’s really important.

Policing wasn’t always done to protect communities. Whether it was for money, whether it was for racialized reasons, it wasn’t for public safety. I think that recognition, putting that idea in the minds of the public, was what many activists had been trying to do for years. I’m really happy that the DOJ were able to take that important truth and help expand people’s understanding of it.

GF: What do you think are the major problems within policing?

CL: I think that the major problem with policing is that we’ve normalized a lot of unnecessary police activities. There’s a lot of emphasis on personal responsibility. I think capitalism really does have a lot to do with it. There’s a lot of fear of what people in the lower socioeconomic status will do if they’re given access to wealthier communities’ stuff. Rather than have a broad social approach that says, “Hey, let’s try to reduce some economic disparities,” we say, we just have to police those people, the “have-nots,” a lot heavier. So, it’s not just race and ethnicity. I strongly believe it’s also class. But it’s all wrapped up in the United States.

We tend to define public safety very narrowly. Protection from precipitous violence, that’s important, but most people think, “well actually a house would keep me much safer than a police officer.” We’ve defined public safety very narrowly, it’s about policing, not about those other things. Then even within that narrow definition of public safety, we have defined how you secure that protection from precipitous violence very narrowly. It’s with armed police officers with a gun, not a better mental health safety net, not better housing for people, not more afterschool activities for kids. I mean, there’s myriad of approaches one could take.

GF: Does reform go far enough, or do we need to push beyond conceptual and policy boundaries of reform to reimagine policing?

CL: I think it’s really important to define terms here because people mean different things and they often talk past each other because of that. The way I think of reform, I think that reform does not go far enough. And… one way to think about it is that there are what I call three buckets of policing. There are the things that police do that no one should do. For example, write tickets to raise revenue rather than for public safety reasons.

The second bucket is things police do that other entities could do better. That’s responding to mental health crises where there’s no imminent harm of bodily danger. Dealing with people who are unsheltered and sleeping on someone’s stoop. We don’t need police to be doing those things. I think changing those things both require you to go beyond reform. It does really require us to rethink what police do, to rethink how many people we need to do it, whether they need to be armed, whether they need to be sworn versus unsworn, civilian, what we often call civilian employees. All that puts [us] far beyond reform in my conception of reform.

The third bucket, however, is, and many people disagree with me on this— at least people who are really active in this area—I do believe that we continue to need police for certain functions, but we need them to police better. And that’s where the reform comes in. We’re never going to get police to police the way we want to, if we don’t attend [to] those first two buckets. Because we’re asking them to do things that set them at odds fundamentally with the communities they’re supposed to be protecting. We’re asking one individual, one police officer, to have too broad a set of skills. I think that we need to go beyond reform, but I still think that we need to work on actually fixing policing itself as well.

GF: How was it, transitioning from being a government employee to academia?

CL: Well, in two words, it was both energizing and humbling. I went from knowing how to do what I did and doing it. Then I went to this field where I knew nothing about how to teach or how to navigate a law school as a professor. On the one hand that steep learning curve, I found extremely energizing and really got a lot of my creative juices working again.

One of my main reasons for coming to Georgetown was because I realized that you are not going to fix policing if you just focus on police officers. The architects of the system are prosecutors, judges, legislators, and of course the public at large. But those prosecutors, judges, and legislators are largely lawyers and they all go to law schools. I had to go to where we’re creating the lawyers and help teach them from the outset. I have learned that it is a different perspective, and it is valuable for law students to learn about these issues from this perspective. I’m hoping that helps make a difference as they go out into the world, and do their work.

GF: As an academic now, what do you think is important to understand for academia to be able to be a part of the policy reform and changes at the government level?

CL: One of the things I learned is that a lot of academics really want to make sure that their article has real-world applicability and makes sense and can be operationalized quickly. I realized that might not always be the best approach, because it’s going to be really hard for an academic to actually write an article that operationalizes this theoretical, principled idea. I actually think the real value of the academic scholarship is by expanding our imaginations about what’s possible, or by giving us a framework for what might be possible. Then other people, who made it their life’s work to operationalize things, can work with that idea and figure out how to make it apply in real life.

I think I previously would’ve not fully appreciated the value of the academic scholarship in that respect. But I now think quite the opposite: that it’s actually better for everyone if the academics stick in their lane, and the other people stick in their lane and we work together to come up with something that makes sense. I think, increasingly, academics are resistant to that because they want to feel like they’re a part of the solution. I wish they could understand that. I know you are. This is an important thing that those practicing would never have the time and sometimes not the skill to do. So, thank you for your service. But now let’s hand it off to a practitioner.