03/28/2024
Crime in America with Scott Thomas Anderson
A conversation about crime in America with Scott Thomas Anderson, author of “Shadow People,” journalist for Sacramento News & Review, and producer of the podcasts “Drinkers with Writing Problems” and “Trace of the Devastation.” Songs in this episode: “Helen” by Glass Wave and “Hey Joe” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
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[ Music ]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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[ Music ]
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Any new stand will provide an abundance of empirical evidence
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for the Christian doctrine of original sin.
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As Budler put it, I quote,
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"It's impossible to glance through any newspaper
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without finding the most frightful traces of human perversity."
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Every newspaper is a tissue of horrors.
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Wars, crimes, thefts,
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luxuries, tortures,
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the evil deeds of princes, of nations, of private individuals,
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an orgy of universal atrocity.
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In American papers like the New York Times, things get even more perverse,
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with full-page ads for luxury items,
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interspersed into the chronicle of human depravity.
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The blank eyes of ponsi young women,
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staring at you with diamonds from hellish African mines,
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flashing on their fingers.
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If you think this has more to do with the degradation of the modern metropolis,
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than with human nature as such,
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let's board a train in London and leave the city behind.
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Here's Sherlock Holmes on the lovely landscapes of rural England.
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It is my belief Watson founded upon my experience
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that the lowest and vilest alleys in London
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do not present a more dreadful record of sin,
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than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
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You look at these scattered houses,
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and you are impressed by their beauty.
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I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me
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is a feeling of their isolation,
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and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.
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The impunity with which crimes are committed,
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that is the devastation, this impunity for acts committed not only by criminals,
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but also by those who make the laws,
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abuse the laws, send nations to war,
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decide on policies or perpetrate crimes against nature in the name of development.
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On the American continent, which is far lonelier and vaster than the well-groomed island of England,
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impunity as much greater territory at its disposal,
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America has always had a problem with crime, maybe because it was born crime.
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We believe in our better angels, we believe in the rule of law,
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get meanwhile we have this ongoing strife between the law and its shadow,
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between the sheriff and the outlaw, between sin and redemption,
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and yes between punishment and impunity.
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The guest who joins me in KZSU today knows a great deal about crime in America,
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Scott Thomas Anderson is a journalist who has spent the last 17 years covering American crime,
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the drug world, environmental threats, and the societal impacts of poverty.
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He has been first and foremost a police reporter throughout that journey.
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In addition to writing for the Sacramento News and Review,
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Anderson is a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.
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His work regularly appears in the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications as far a field as the Irish Independent.
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Furthermore, Scott Anderson is no stranger to entitled opinions.
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In 2022, he joined me in a two-part show on California writers.
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Scott has also published an inspired piece about entitled opinions for the San Francisco Chronicle,
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back in November 2021, and just this week he's published a second piece in the Sacramento News and Review on entitled opinions,
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with the striking title, writer, podcaster Robert Harris and challenges AI, brain delusion,
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the humanities deathbed, and fear and loathing with the love bots.
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Check it out.
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And you may also want to check out Scott's fascinating podcast series called Drinkers with Writing Problems,
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and also his newest project, which is a five-part true crime podcast series called Trace of the Devastation.
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That series opens the doorway to a shocking murder saga tied to his upbringing, his hometown, and his own family's past.
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Both podcast series are available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Scott. Welcome to the program.
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Thank you. It's good to be back.
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Yes, very good to have you back. And if it's okay with you,
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I'd like to begin by asking what it's like to be a crime reporter.
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You're exposed day in and day out to what Bud Leer called this tissue of horrors and the most
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frightful traces of human perversity. How much does your job mess with your psyche? How much does it
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keep you awake at night? Well, I can't tell you that I always sleep well at night. As we would
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say in journalism, there's a couple good sources that you could talk to about that.
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And it was other people around me, other people close to me. I think first started noticing that
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this chronic long-term immersion in suffering and the reality of violence, and in some cases,
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near unspeakable acts might be sinking into my core in some way. And that's something I didn't think
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about when I was a young reporter and first going out to crime scenes and being in murder trials.
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I think back then, I'd like to think that I had some amount of grit and that I could
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handle anything that was in front of me. I understand now looking back that I was sort of
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betting on the confidence of youth or whatever term is popular right now, toxic masculinity,
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whatever, but betting on that to somehow shield me from these realities kind of clinging to my
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interior life. And it doesn't really work that way. So well, the other thing is I didn't understand
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what I was really writing about back then either. At that time, I thought I was writing about
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individual fascinating and air quotes stories. And it's really writing a wave of these much broader forces
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like unending grief and communal trauma and cases of personal disintegration. In those forces
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are what people want to know about on some level, hence my job, but I've also found on another level,
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they don't always really want to know. So I think my approach to crime reporting has evolved
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a lot over the last 17 years as I've come to understand some of these things.
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So you've been doing it for 17 years and you've had a number of connections to crime in your
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own past. No, before you became a crime reporter, we'll talk about that shortly in our show when you
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kind of yielded the fruit of your most recent podcast series on the trace of devastation. It's
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about a serial murders and so forth. But let me inform our listeners that between May 2010 and
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October 2011, you spent 18 months as an embedded reporter with California law enforcement agencies,
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right? Yes, you were partnering with officers on night patrols, accompanying detectives on
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warrant searches and probation sweeps, observing SWAT operations and spending hundreds of hours
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with attorneys and victims advocates in small town courtroom. So during this time, you travel,
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you know, it's a different rural communities across the United States. And the result was your
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nonfiction book shadow people how meth driven crime is eating at the heart of rural America.
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Can you tell us what that experience was all about in granular detail, if you don't mind?
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Well, and why this book that you published about it was was such a, I don't know,
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sensation is the right word, but it certainly got on a lot of people's radar.
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It looking back, it's so strange in retrospect. So I was the first five years I was a crime reporter.
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I was covering the California central gold country, specifically Amador and Calaveras counties,
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which was where I grew up. I grew up on the river border of those two counties. And I covered
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both in my first five years as a crime reporter. And I just happened to be working for 160 year
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old legacy newspaper, gold rush era newspaper that had a publisher who did something a lot of
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publishers would not have done for newspaper that size. And he basically funded a full time crime
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desk. He saw that there was a lot of interest in those kind of stories and that kind of coverage.
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And we had a meth epidemic that was destroying the community at that time. So between those two things,
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he allowed me to be a full time rural crime reporter, which I think is rare. I think it's really rare.
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And the reason I think that is a few years in, I was able to fly to Washington, DC, sit down with
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a bunch of funders at a think tank and convince them to fund this national project on how
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meth addiction drives crimes against the innocent and crimes against other people in rural communities
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all over the country. And I have to say, when I had this meeting with them, I was competing against
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journalists from much, much bigger newspapers, much better known publications. It's orders of magnitude.
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No one had heard of me outside of three counties in Northern California. No one had ever heard of me.
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They knew nothing about me when at whether I was any good or not. But because I had been living in
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courtrooms in Amador in Calaveras County, I was able to tell a really detailed, I think compelling
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story to these funders about the shock and awe that this meth epidemic had brought to a once
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bucolic and fairly peaceful place. And these communities were on the verge of dying in a lot
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of respects, not just from the meth, but also boom and bust economies and the hollowing out of
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rural America's livability. But I mean, all of that together, they decided to fund this project. And
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again, I somehow beat out all these reporters from much, much bigger newspapers to get that grant.
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Even more surprising thing in retrospect, when I today in 2024, when I tell other journalist
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or cops that I was allowed to be embedded with law enforcement for 18 months,
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it's almost impossible to believe now that I was even ever allowed to do it. And it would never be
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allowed to happen today. Like that project couldn't be done today. And why is that? I think there's just
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too much distrust between generally speaking, I think there's too much distrust between law enforcement
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and journalists, even though, you know, someone like me has a really long track record and a
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certain professional reputation, I just don't believe anybody would ever allow that project to happen
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now. And it's worth mentioning it was rare even then in the sense that I think I'm one of
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only two reporters and in generations that's done it. I know David Simon did it. I think in 1989
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in Baltimore. And then I did it between 2010 and 2012 in Northern California. I don't,
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I could be wrong, but I don't know of any other reporter that's done it, but besides the two,
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was there a specific base for, yeah, you're embedding over the place? Well, I was on a rotation
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between seven different law enforcement agencies located in five different counties. And part of the
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rotation was just so I could see different neighborhoods, different areas through the prism of
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mostly nighttime patrols being in cars during nighttime patrols for the entire shift is if I was,
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you know, just the officer's partner. And that was one of the ideas, but also I didn't want any of
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these folks to just get tired of me being all around all the time. So on a rotation,
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they wouldn't just get sick of me every night, you know, being there. But over the course of 18 months,
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I feel like I just became part of the furniture for their lives. You know, there were a lot of times,
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I think they even forgot I was there other than as, you know, we're different tribes, but I mean,
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we were pretty close for a while. You got to know some of them very well. Yeah, very well.
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So there's a lot of controversy surrounding law enforcement and officers. How many
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cops are what we call the bad cops as opposed to the ones that do the quiet, unsung work of coming to
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the rescue of people in danger or in severe need. Yeah. Yeah, this is a conversation. I have a lot
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of difficulty with sometimes with my colleagues because I just come from a totally different
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perspective based on that time being embedded with them. I did over a thousand hours of ride
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a long time for that first book. And then I later did 500 more hours for my second book. So
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to answer your question. And you know, of course journalism is about being a civic alarm system.
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So I'm not going to be an apologist for bad policing when it's real or those instances when
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recklessness and terrible tactics lead to tragedy. Those things are real. Those things happen.
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But I think people in my profession in the last six or seven years have will fully misled the public,
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at least where I work in California, will fully misled the public on what the nature of law
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enforcement really is. Now, look, when I was in those patrol cars at night going out to scenes,
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going out to domestic violence calls, going out to child abuse calls, going out to runaway calls.
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The officers that were bright and careful and committed, I knew them for what they were and the much,
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much smaller number of officers who were lazy and not in the right frame of mind and dead weight
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on their departments. I knew them for what they were too. And I can sit here and tell you that
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there's a lot more cerebral, least stunted and mediocre journalists than there are bad cops.
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That's just how I would explain it. The job is so difficult. People have no idea. They have no
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idea if they haven't seen it in real time. It's just walking into one volatile situation after another
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where there's silence and then the roar of chaos. And that's your life on a daily or nightly basis.
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And you have to make these life and death decisions and a split second in some cases. And most of
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the time, thanks to better training and better tactics and better experience and better equipment.
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And also some of the things through the reform advocates have brought to it like body cams with all
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of those pieces of the puzzle. A lot of times those situations will split second decisions end up
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being the right ones most of the time. But journalists cherry pick the most extreme examples.
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They don't share the actual statistics. And they just paint this narrative. And that's just kind
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of how it's been less six or seven years. And there's such a disproportionate in, let's say, media
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power, journalists have the word. And therefore they have the attention of the public.
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Yeah. And the police do their job, but without having any kind of microphone to communicate about that.
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Yeah. So it really depends a lot on honest journalism to be a crime reporter, I would imagine.
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I think most of them, and this goes for the prosecutors and the defense attorneys as well and the
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judges, most of everybody working in the criminal justice system, especially the police and deputy
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sheriffs and probation officers, parole officers, but everyone working in that system. My experience is
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most of them just want bear and accurate reporting. If you can go above and beyond that and do
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really in depth reporting and get into the very complex mechanisms of the criminal justice system
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and the complex mechanisms of a very challenging homicide investigation, if you can do that
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even better, they love that. But most of them are not trying to be lionized or turned into public
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heroes or community heroes. Most of them just want fair and accurate reporting and and not lazy
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reporting. Just the same way we don't want lazy service from law enforcement. They don't want lazy
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reporting. It's these 18 months. What was your activity where you're just sitting in the backseat
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and observing where you're taking notes, taking notes, taking pictures, I always wore a press badge
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always, but you'd be shocked how many people who were getting arrested didn't read it. They looked at
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it and then assumed I was either law enforcement or maybe a health inspector or somebody from the county
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and there was just a lot of the folks that were getting arrested would just talk to me as if I was
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one of the officers just in conversation. And then if I actually really wanted to interview one of
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them, then I would make sure they knew or the officer would make sure they knew that this is a
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journalist. He's writing about he's writing a big project on meth. And that's why he's here. You
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don't have to talk to him if you don't want to. And the vast majority of them would talk to me,
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the vast majority. I can only remember a couple instances when somebody didn't want to talk,
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which is fine. But what did they want to talk about? I just want to know about their lives,
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what was going on. In some cases, I'd be asking about what's happening on the street,
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you know, depending on what the dynamics of their neighborhood were and how the the meth trade was
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unfolding in their neighborhood. And none of them are going to, you know, give people up to the officers or a
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journalist because that's called snitching in their world. And it's sort of the ultimate sin. But
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just if you're trying to have a conversation with them about what is the rhythm of things,
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what's it like out here, what's your experience? It's almost like asking anybody else at their job,
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do you like your job or not? What's hard about your job? What's not hard about your job? It's up for me.
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It's it's meth dealers. And on cases where we show up and one of these people had done something
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horrible, like oftentimes just, you know, beat the living hell out of their girlfriend or wife
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or whatever. I'm not interested in talking to that person. They can put the bracelets on him,
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throw them in the backseat, good renance. But a lot of cases people were getting arrested for
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trafficking meth and substantial quantities. And yeah, I would try to have conversations with them.
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And that was really helpful, really helpful.
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It's most of the crime surrounding meth due to the traffickers or to people who were under the
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influence of it. Well, it's both people who are under the influence of meth sometimes
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experience what's called meth psychosis. This often happens if they haven't slept for days
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and they haven't been eating. It's not uncommon to find these folks have, you know,
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been up for a week and putting nothing but methamphetamine and diet Coke in their body. And they
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may be just to begin to hallucinate. And they can be really, really dangerous if they reach that
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state of mind because they're having a full, basically psychotic breakdown and they're experiencing
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all forms of delusion. And it can make an otherwise not violent person extremely violent.
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So I mean, people in a state of meth psychosis, I've seen everything from a father,
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stabbing his baby daughter to death with a pair of scissors because he was hallucinating to people
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just going crazy in public settings and just attacking random civilians and, you know, trying to
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rip their hair out. I mean, it's nuts. What it can do is somebody reaches that state of mind. Now,
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most meth addicts are not like that. When most meth addicts, when you encounter, you know, they might
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be really, really tired or really, really spun and hyper, but they're not violent.
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Meth psychosis is like a terminus point you get sometimes when you've been doing too much of it for
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too long without sleeping. So the other ways that drives crime is, okay, so we have gang dynamics,
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gang cell drugs. They sell methamphetamine. They sell cocaine. They sell heroin. They sell fentanyl.
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And in Sacramento, where I work now, some of our gang warfare is over the drug trade,
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but much more common in my experience is people they get amped on meth. They allow personal
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beefs with each other to escalate and then, you know, some insane act of violence will occur.
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A lot of meth murders I've covered over the years are they're not random at all. They're often
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deeply personal, family member, a best friend, spouse. So, you know, again, there's all these
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different ways the drug can make people dangerous, but it feels crime, it feels violent crime
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through the drug trade and gang warfare in the drug trade. And that can be everything from
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motorcycle gangs to your, your traditional bloods, crib gangs, your traditional
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nortennial, sereno gangs. So all these gangs have like unbreland network. So, and then separate from
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that. But I mean, the whole point of my book was just to talk about the crimes nobody ever thinks
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about with meth. Because to me, the real story of meth in America is a story of child abuse,
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child neglect, domestic violence, elder abuse, rampant, uncontrollable amounts of property crime that
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just began to degrade a community in a neighborhood because it just whittles away your quality of
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life when there's constant property crime and it never stops. So, does the dominant drug always
|
| 00:23:18.540 |
get worse and worse? Because meth came on the scene and before that what we were in a regime of
|
| 00:23:24.940 |
cocaine and crack. And now there's opioids, it's the meth epidemic still. There's parallel epidemics now
|
| 00:23:33.820 |
about 2014, as I remember in my own professional experience, we started seeing heroin swing up
|
| 00:23:42.780 |
again. heroin has ebbed and flowed in its popular use in American history. But in around 2014,
|
| 00:23:49.420 |
we saw a massive spike in heroin and opioid use. And that started causing a lot of deaths. And then
|
| 00:23:57.980 |
it's morphed into the fentanyl epidemic, which is causing death on a scale that I've never seen in
|
| 00:24:03.500 |
my whole career in terms of overdoses. Is it equally criminal? I mean, does it engender the same
|
| 00:24:10.220 |
amount of criminality or less? I would imagine less just because it's a downer rather than that.
|
| 00:24:16.700 |
The way I would think about this is in the media is really fixated on heroin, opioids, and fentanyl
|
| 00:24:23.900 |
right now for a good reason. It's causing so much death. It's causing so many private family
|
| 00:24:29.500 |
tragedies. It's causing so much pain. That's so you have that on one burner and on the other
|
| 00:24:34.700 |
burner, you have the fact that there's more meth use, I think than ever. And that's fueling just
|
| 00:24:41.100 |
a ton of property crime. And in some cases, a ton of violent crime. Meth is so cheap and so easy to
|
| 00:24:47.580 |
get. And it's so ubiquitous. It's everywhere that where I work, meth's all through the homeless
|
| 00:24:52.300 |
camps, meth is, you know, snuck into jail and prison facilities, meth is, there's meth houses,
|
| 00:24:59.420 |
which is the main place people use it. And then they go out and burglarize everybody else in their
|
| 00:25:04.220 |
neighborhood. And they do identity theft, you know, the steel mail and try to do identity theft. There's
|
| 00:25:09.420 |
huge identity theft rings that are all based on meth use it, getting more meth, buying more meth,
|
| 00:25:15.900 |
selling meth. So yeah, they're sort of parallel epidemics. They affect society in different ways.
|
| 00:25:21.660 |
I can't say I'll let the listener decide if they think one's worse than the other.
|
| 00:25:29.020 |
In 18 must, were you getting at all demoralized about the fact that every day was like the same
|
| 00:25:36.700 |
old story with the cops going to do their cleanups, but that nothing is changing, that there's an
|
| 00:25:43.820 |
essential impotence to law enforcement when it comes to drug use and that you just have to get
|
| 00:25:50.860 |
used to it. Yeah, living with a certain quotient of this every day, despite all the best and hero
|
| 00:25:57.500 |
efforts of the peace officers. Yeah, and the victims advocates and the substance abuse treatment
|
| 00:26:05.180 |
specialists and, you know, the various rehabilitative experts that work in parole and probation,
|
| 00:26:12.860 |
there's a lot of folks that are on this front line. The faith community and a lot of these towns
|
| 00:26:18.220 |
are part of trying to stop it to answer your question. I would never use nor endorse the term
|
| 00:26:25.580 |
war on drugs after what I did and saw and wrote about. I think the justice reform advocates are
|
| 00:26:32.380 |
right to find that term, a term of lunacy basically, wars are fought in one by force of arms.
|
| 00:26:41.180 |
Addiction is a cancer of the human spirit. One is not going to beat the other. So now that doesn't
|
| 00:26:49.660 |
mean I think you can do full on legalization of hard drugs, you know, so to speak, Portland has
|
| 00:26:58.140 |
experimented with that. And there was just a report from the New York Times last week that huge
|
| 00:27:05.260 |
by polling huge amounts of citizens regret it because the way it was described by that New York
|
| 00:27:11.100 |
Times reporter, certain parts of Portland are a hellscape. I would encourage your listeners to go
|
| 00:27:17.180 |
check that reporting out. So while I don't think the war on drugs is a real meaningful thing and I
|
| 00:27:23.820 |
think that mentality that we had in the 80s and early 90s that we had a war on drugs was really
|
| 00:27:30.540 |
destructive. And it caused a lot of unnecessary harm to a lot of neighborhoods and communities
|
| 00:27:36.540 |
in certain specifically in certain cities. But I also think you, the way law enforcement
|
| 00:27:42.700 |
factors into it is and the the more intellectual officers know this, they know it's not a war because
|
| 00:27:49.260 |
they know if it if it was a war, they would be losing. So most of them don't think about it like that.
|
| 00:27:53.980 |
It's crime containment. These addictions cause a certain amount of crime that affect other people
|
| 00:28:01.340 |
and the best they can hope for on their best day with whatever resources they have at their disposal
|
| 00:28:06.700 |
is to keep that crime as contained as possible and stop it from affecting as many people as they can.
|
| 00:28:13.660 |
But yeah, you can't stop it completely until we figure out some way to address our failures
|
| 00:28:22.300 |
at treating addiction in this country.
|
| 00:28:24.060 |
Forgive my naive table. What is the difference between meth and speed? Speed's just another word
|
| 00:28:32.060 |
for meth because speed's been around a long time. Most people when they say speed, they mean
|
| 00:28:38.380 |
amphetamines and pill forms. So when I hear the term speed, you know, mostly I hear that in
|
| 00:28:45.340 |
occupational settings, restaurants, truck driving, you'll hear people that are taking amphetamines
|
| 00:28:52.700 |
referred to it as speed usually means they're taking pills. Whereas if somebody says math or
|
| 00:28:58.860 |
other so many names for math, but crank is another one that's been used forever.
|
| 00:29:03.420 |
Dope. Like when people in the drug world say dope, they're not talking about marijuana. Dope is
|
| 00:29:08.620 |
math. But so I know that you haven't watched breaking bad. I asked you about that because this
|
| 00:29:15.900 |
breaking bad came out during this period, essentially, when you were embedded and when your book came
|
| 00:29:22.780 |
out and it brought a lot of attention to with the at least a drug trafficking aspect of the
|
| 00:29:28.700 |
epidemic. And of course there you have the story of some chemistry teacher who found a way to
|
| 00:29:35.580 |
produce this super pure kind of meth that was much in demand. But if it's meth is just another
|
| 00:29:43.420 |
word for speed and it's that cheap, it's at all realistic that there would be huge sorts of
|
| 00:29:51.340 |
cartel wars over this purest form of meth and the crystal of it and so forth. Well, most meth is
|
| 00:29:59.020 |
I started writing shadow people right as the era of what we call the mom and pop meth cooks,
|
| 00:30:07.100 |
the kitchen sink meth cooks. Like they were in their twilight when I started writing shadow people.
|
| 00:30:12.540 |
I started writing in 2010 and what had happened is 2006 and 2007, we passed all these new federal
|
| 00:30:19.340 |
regulations on a federal, which is a key precursor to making meth and federal mean and became very
|
| 00:30:24.380 |
difficult for your average person to cook meth at that point. There was still a way to do it if they
|
| 00:30:30.300 |
did what's called smurfing where they got a bunch of people to go out and get small amounts of
|
| 00:30:35.500 |
a federal and bring it back and then they would have enough to cook some batches. It wasn't
|
| 00:30:39.420 |
efficient way to make meth and it would really only be for somebody to keep their status as a
|
| 00:30:44.940 |
meth cook to do it because you wouldn't be making enough to really sell to people and pay for your
|
| 00:30:49.740 |
time and investment in that. So what happened was the Mexican drug cartels took over the meth trade
|
| 00:30:56.060 |
and they can make mountains of the stuff in Mexico. They have access to as much of
|
| 00:31:01.740 |
veterans they want. They even have made meth with the old original precursor, which was propone
|
| 00:31:07.740 |
known, drug that's almost impossible to get now. So they've made meth different ways,
|
| 00:31:12.220 |
but they make a ton of it and they trafficked it all through the United States and we found
|
| 00:31:18.060 |
meth shipments, huge meth shipments from the cartels and the most rural places I've ever been to
|
| 00:31:25.900 |
in my career, such as Forsyth Montana, which I went to when I was working on shadow people.
|
| 00:31:32.140 |
There was pounds and pounds of cartel meth intercepted in that town and that's a town that's
|
| 00:31:38.220 |
you know, 100 miles from anything in eastern Montana. So when we passed all those regulations, it in
|
| 00:31:44.220 |
one respect, it did what was intended and that was to knock out all these really corrosive and
|
| 00:31:50.060 |
toxic and polluting meth labs that are horrific for the environment and a community and so it did
|
| 00:31:59.020 |
that, but it also brought it also gave the Mexican drug cartels a stake in parts of the United
|
| 00:32:05.980 |
States that they didn't traditionally have trafficking patterns in. That makes sense.
|
| 00:32:11.580 |
Yeah, it does make sense. You said that meth opiates it that they're like a cancer of the
|
| 00:32:17.420 |
spirit of the spirit, but that spirit perhaps has to have been demoralized, greatly demoralized through
|
| 00:32:24.220 |
economic conditions. And as you said, you know, the hollowing out of a lot of rural areas in America
|
| 00:32:29.980 |
and this great demoralization, which is really behind the Donald Trump phenomenon to a great extent.
|
| 00:32:36.620 |
And I think that on the coasts, we tend to downplay the extent of the devastation of rural America
|
| 00:32:45.340 |
in terms of the spirit of it, because I don't think that you would get an epidemic of a drug like that
|
| 00:32:52.860 |
if the communities themselves were healthier, the economies, you know, less corrosive of people's
|
| 00:33:01.180 |
sense of their own dignity being compromised through the loss of jobs and of incomes and so forth.
|
| 00:33:07.420 |
Yeah, when Trump was elected that night, I was surprised. But when I went to work the next day,
|
| 00:33:13.980 |
my colleagues were in a state of utter shock and disbelief, almost like an out of body experience,
|
| 00:33:22.380 |
and by that time, I was starting to at least see what he had capitalized on because I'd been to
|
| 00:33:30.140 |
places like Sterling, Illinois, and I'd seen the rust belt apocalypse up close. And when you see
|
| 00:33:36.540 |
the condition of these towns, then you can understand how we have what I call cultures of hopelessness
|
| 00:33:45.660 |
and cultures of hopelessness, they breed violence, they breed addiction, they breed tragedy.
|
| 00:33:54.220 |
And so obviously, I travel to a lot of rural communities all over the US. And one thing a lot of
|
| 00:34:01.980 |
them had in common is they were struggling for sustainability, they could not keep their young people,
|
| 00:34:08.060 |
they had essentially a brain drain of young people who, in many cases, wanted to stay,
|
| 00:34:12.060 |
but just could not make a living. There were no jobs, even in the traditional industries that
|
| 00:34:16.780 |
sustain those places like ranching and farming and things like that. So these communities are
|
| 00:34:23.100 |
almost feeling like they don't have a future. And so in context of that, it's not surprising that
|
| 00:34:30.620 |
many people in those communities want to self evaporate on some level. And the same is true in
|
| 00:34:38.380 |
urban settings, because now I work in the capital of California, the capital city. And we have
|
| 00:34:44.700 |
neighborhoods there that were subject to redlining and intentional forms of economic racial
|
| 00:34:51.660 |
segregation over generations. And they've felt the punishing effects of that. And they're dealing
|
| 00:34:57.020 |
with that same kind of hopelessness in those neighborhoods. And they have these gang problems.
|
| 00:35:03.900 |
And most people in a neighborhood with gang problems have nothing to do with the gangs. And they
|
| 00:35:07.660 |
just want to be safe like anybody else. And so imagine the amount of stress they live with
|
| 00:35:12.860 |
when violence, serious violence, serious gunfights could just erupt at any moment in their parks
|
| 00:35:19.500 |
in front of their businesses, in front of their barber shops, in front of their stores.
|
| 00:35:24.060 |
You know, imagine the kind of stress that causes. And I think a lot of this has to do with a certain
|
| 00:35:29.580 |
aggravated form of capitalism,
|
| 00:35:32.380 |
and they can go in there and in my intro, I spoke about different kinds of crime. And sometimes
|
| 00:35:40.940 |
the crime is part of the law perpetrated by the forces of law or by policy makers. And there are
|
| 00:35:47.900 |
ways in which the impunity that I was speaking about applies to institutional forms that are
|
| 00:35:57.820 |
completely indiscriminate when it comes to, if not, directly engendering this kind of culture of hopelessness,
|
| 00:36:06.220 |
then being complicit with it through decisions that are made far away in governmental administrations
|
| 00:36:16.540 |
that deal in abstractions rather than with concrete realities.
|
| 00:36:21.580 |
And they deal in political wind because I've talked to reporters that have been doing this
|
| 00:36:28.060 |
longer than me. And I've talked to law enforcement officers who have been, you know, doing this,
|
| 00:36:33.820 |
you know, in some cases since the 70s or before that. And one thing you get is this picture of,
|
| 00:36:39.100 |
let's just say there's a pot of money to work on all the addiction and crime that comes with it.
|
| 00:36:45.740 |
You know, just think of that pot being slid on to one side of the table for a while,
|
| 00:36:50.140 |
which is law enforcement. And then the whole pot gets slid to the other side of the table,
|
| 00:36:54.060 |
which is treatment and intervention. And then after a while, crime goes way up. Everyone gets
|
| 00:36:58.940 |
pissed and starts screaming at their elected representatives. They slide the whole pot back over
|
| 00:37:02.940 |
to law enforcement. It's happening here in the Bay Area. Right. And so you need both, you need
|
| 00:37:09.660 |
both. You need that crime containment from law enforcement. So your community can have safety and
|
| 00:37:13.980 |
some kind of quality of life. But you also need, you also need a lot of investment in treatment
|
| 00:37:19.980 |
specialists and criminal rehabilitation, youth programs in some of these neighborhoods that are
|
| 00:37:26.220 |
where poverty is just destroying everybody. Youth programs not only can keep those young people
|
| 00:37:33.580 |
from going down the path of addiction, they can keep them from going down the path of gangs.
|
| 00:37:37.980 |
You know, I mentioned there was another journalist writer who wasn't better with law enforcement
|
| 00:37:42.780 |
long before me. That was David Simon. I believe he has said that the American drug trade is essentially
|
| 00:37:48.620 |
a form, an inverted form of capitalism. And so when someone can see a ladder down the road,
|
| 00:37:54.300 |
but they're not allowed to climb up that ladder, if you offer them a different ladder,
|
| 00:37:57.820 |
it's hard not to take. No, I couldn't agree more. I think that there are a lot of criminals
|
| 00:38:05.100 |
on boards of companies. And the politicians whom they buy off, and I'm willing to believe that
|
| 00:38:13.580 |
they're not even aware necessarily of the crimes that they are at the origin of. Well, or if not as
|
| 00:38:22.540 |
individual, certainly the system that the economic system that they operate within and of which
|
| 00:38:29.740 |
they are the beneficiaries randomly, luckily the beneficiaries of it. Well, of course,
|
| 00:38:36.460 |
in contact with justice reform advocates all the time. And they, you know, they talk about
|
| 00:38:43.340 |
this different tiered, these different tiers of justice system in America. And they're right in the
|
| 00:38:49.820 |
sense that there's absolutely different tiers of justice for different Americans. I think it's
|
| 00:38:54.300 |
class and economic base because I mean, the fact that the Sackler family is not in prison right now
|
| 00:39:00.860 |
is what I would point to. Can you tell us who that family is? They are the family that
|
| 00:39:06.220 |
according to civil court findings and multiple investigations from attorney general offices in
|
| 00:39:12.860 |
multiple states. They're largely responsible for the opioid epidemic. They intentionally marketed
|
| 00:39:19.900 |
opioids incorrectly when they had data knowing that they shouldn't. And that they misled doctors,
|
| 00:39:26.860 |
they misled health professionals and about the dangers of these drugs. And they let this
|
| 00:39:32.140 |
grim reaper of death out of the bottle that nobody's been able to put back in. And, you know,
|
| 00:39:38.140 |
there's been multi million dollar, maybe more. I would have to go back and look, but multi
|
| 00:39:44.140 |
hundreds of billions of billions of dollars that they've been found liable for all these deaths.
|
| 00:39:50.700 |
And they have these civil judgments against them that were pushed by state attorney general
|
| 00:39:55.740 |
offices for all this death they caused. But an ordinary person, if you are accidentally killed someone
|
| 00:40:02.860 |
in our car who's on a bicycle and we could be stoned cold sober if we were driving recklessly,
|
| 00:40:07.660 |
we're going to prison for a little while. But you can turn around and be responsible for a
|
| 00:40:11.820 |
quarter of a million deaths. But if you're rich, you don't. I mean, like that's what I would point.
|
| 00:40:16.380 |
Yeah. Right. Well, Scott, it's on the one hand, fascinating on the other hand, you know, again,
|
| 00:40:24.780 |
sobering, you know, talk about this because we live in a country that somehow does have crime
|
| 00:40:31.340 |
inscribed in this DNA in a way that makes it almost impossible to imagine an America, which isn't
|
| 00:40:38.940 |
always fighting with itself over this kind of schizophrenia between the outlaw and the in law.
|
| 00:40:45.740 |
Let's want to put it in those terms. But as we wind down, I want to read what I think are
|
| 00:40:51.580 |
two really eloquent paragraphs that conclude your book of shadow people from your epilogue.
|
| 00:40:56.780 |
If you don't mind, can I share that with our listeners? So here you write on April 18, 1945,
|
| 00:41:05.260 |
war journalist Ernie Pyle was killed by Japanese machine gunners when he was embedded with US
|
| 00:41:11.660 |
troops in Okinawa. It was the closing days of World War II and Germany had just surrendered
|
| 00:41:17.820 |
inside the dead reporter's pocket was his last newspaper column, which focused largely on the American
|
| 00:41:24.060 |
troops he had spent more than two years embedded with in Italy as they fought the German war machine.
|
| 00:41:29.740 |
Quote, "Now I am as far away from it as possible, but my heart is still in Europe,
|
| 00:41:36.140 |
and that is why I am writing this column. It is to the boys who were my friends for so long.
|
| 00:41:42.060 |
My one regret of the war is that I was not with them when it ended." And quote, and then you go on
|
| 00:41:48.460 |
to say, "For the peace officers I mentioned, the police officers that you talk about in your book,
|
| 00:41:55.340 |
it never ends. And my one regret is that I won't be with them to see the future victories
|
| 00:42:03.020 |
like arresting a violent fugitive, stalking through a peaceful county, neighborhood,
|
| 00:42:09.420 |
or snapping a pair of handcuffs on a so-called man whose pummeled his girlfriend's face to
|
| 00:42:15.100 |
sickening colors or carrying a small, underfed child who's covered in dirt and flea bites
|
| 00:42:21.180 |
out of a meth house. Finite victories, silent victories, anonymous and mostly forgotten victories,
|
| 00:42:29.500 |
but victories nonetheless."
|
| 00:42:34.060 |
Yeah, I wrote that in Washington, DC, as the project was ending, and I had this realization that
|
| 00:42:43.260 |
I wasn't going to be out there with them anymore. I am in this other tribe, and it was time for me
|
| 00:42:48.860 |
to go do my job and do the job that they all expected me to do. But it was hard to imagine
|
| 00:42:57.500 |
at that time in my life, them walking into all these shadows and threats that they go into all the
|
| 00:43:05.580 |
time and not being there anymore. We've been speaking with Scott Anderson here on entitled
|
| 00:43:11.100 |
"Openian." Scott is the author of "Shadow People," it's a book that we've been discussing at length
|
| 00:43:17.020 |
here today. I want to mention also the title of your other book. Those 500 hours you spent in another
|
| 00:43:24.060 |
project, that's a book called "The Cutting Four Piece," "Cribe and Tragedy in an Era of Prison Over
|
| 00:43:30.540 |
Crowding." Also, the two podcast series that I mentioned at the beginning, one is called "Drinkers
|
| 00:43:38.300 |
with Writing Problems." The other is called "Trace of the Devastation," and finally,
|
| 00:43:45.340 |
the two parts show that Scott and I did on California writers a couple of years ago.
|
| 00:43:52.380 |
Scott, thanks for coming on in title opinions. It's been a very moving conversation, and glad you could make it.
|
| 00:44:06.380 |
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