Towalame Austin: Hello. My name is Towalame Austin. I'm Sony, music's Executive Vice President of Philanthropy and Social Impact. I am pleased to present a very special internal podcast just for Sony employees that highlights the work being done through the Global Social Justice Fund. Sony's Global Social Justice Fund supports anti-racist initiatives and educational opportunities around the world, with hopes of fostering equal rights. This fund aligns with community partners and stakeholders to help advance bipartisan solutions in the areas of civic and community engagement, criminal justice reform, diversity, and education. You are about to hear an exclusive conversation led by Van Jones from CNN. This conversation features Grammy- nominated multi-platinum recording artist, singer, songwriter and, producer Mike Posner. Mike Posner recently climbed Mount Everest as a fundraiser for the Detroit Justice Center. You will also hear from Dr. Amanda Alexander: lawyer, writer, historian, and founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center. Amanda's legal research and dedication is crucial to reforming the criminal justice system. And last you will hear from famous attorney Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project and a principal organizer of CLEAN, the Community Law Enforcement Accountability Network. His work is important in creating accountability and transparency in policing, which is crucial to the fight for change.These individuals are spearheading the fight for racial justice, education, and changing the narrative around equality every day. This conversation is encouraging, uplifting, and educational, and I think you will find it very rewarding. So without further ado, I present to you Van Jones.

‍Van Jones: Hi, it's good to meet you as well. Are we ready? All right. Good. Good. Well, I am especially happy to get a chance to talk to two serious change makers: Dr. Amanda Alexander and Mike Posner. Politics, spirituality, art, love, all that stuff, you guys both represent so much of it. I wanted to start with you, Amanda. Before we get into some of the issues and some of the work, I just wanna know what music are you listening to these days? What's keeping you pumped up? What's keeping you striving? What's keeping you glowing and growing on the music scene? What, what do you listen to do these?

‍Amanda Alexander: Nice. Honestly, I listen to a lot of the Anderson .Paak. He's great driving music. We drive everywhere in Detroit, right, so I'm often driving around listening to him. In terms of getting pumped up, I always go back to Nina Simone. 

‍Van Jones: Gotcha. Gotcha. No, that that's good stuff. Well listen, you know, I think we are in a time now where people recognize this sort of, you know, inner change and social change, they go together. You have to, if you wanna change the world, we first have to change ourselves. So I always wanna start off with the music and the culture. But, you know, looking at society, what do you recognize as some of the most important social change, political change, you know, since George Floyd's death. I mean, it's almost two years — it is two years now since he was murdered. Where are we? What do you see out there now that's making the world better? 

‍Amanda Alexander: Yeah. So, you know, there is a lot to be upset and outraged about in the world, but I also, I always look to organizers. That's where I find my hope. So, I think as much as the defund the police demand has been dismissed and attacked, what we're seeing is that that demand has taken local organizing around police and jail funding and budgets to a whole new level. People are asking themselves and each other, you know, what does it really mean to look at our city budgets and how much are we spending on police?Here in Detroit for every dollar that we spend on police in the city budget, we spend 14 cents on housing, and across the country people are looking at city budgets and saying, we are not investing in what will actually make communities safe. So here and in dozens of cities and towns across the country, people are saying we want supportive housing, mental health supports, economic development, and they're actually doing the hard work of shifting money within budgets.So there's a huge win in Seattle. You know, back in 2020, where organizers won $30 million for a participatory budgeting process, where people will get to decide how they wanna invest their money. So I would say, while pundits have been busy debating the semantics of defund the police, organizers have been hard at work on making change in their communities and doing the unglamorous work of attending budget hearings.

‍Van Jones: Well, that's, that's good. You know, a lot of times the progress at the local level does get overshadowed by some of the food fight politics at the national level. And I I'm with you. The grassroots, you know, the bottom- up movements are always gonna be more inspired than a lot of the top down gridlock.You know, speaking of the gridlock in DC, we do have the midterm elections coming. You know I don't know what to think. I'm scared, but do you see anything out there that might be positive, especially when it comes to criminal justice reform, as we look towards the mid?

‍Amanda Alexander: So I would want people to understand that criminal justice reform, this is always a local fight. So when we hear words like mass incarceration, it sounds like this huge problem that is out there. Like we need to impact, you know, what's happening out in Washington, DC, but the vast majority of people who are incarcerated aren't in federal prisons; they're in city and county jails and state prison, which means that we have an incredible opportunity to make change locally. So it means that we have to look down- ballot in the midterm elections. We have to be thoughtful about which judges, prosecutors, city council people, county commissioners, you know – who are the state legislators that we're voting for, because these are the people who decide whether or not police should be allowed to pull someone over for broken tail light or whether we should put more funding into supportive housing instead of a new jail. So I would say pay attention to who you are electing locally and what their positions on public spending and safety are. 

‍Van Jones: Mm, good. That's good stuff. Always good advice. And look, we just had an election out here in California, and, you know, you look at the ballot measures and there's all kind of stuff out there. You can make a difference locally, and we spend a lot of times screaming at the TV, if you watch any of the cable news, or looking at our social media and upset about that, but we could make a difference locally. You know, you mention something about defund the police and the criticism that slogan has come under in some concerns, which even, you know, I've had some concerns about the slogan, but you're right. A lot of good work is going forward.Another controversy has been around critical race theory and the way that term has been generated and, or really just stolen by negative forces and to make something negative out of it. As you think about the work that you're doing at the Justice Center there in Detroit, how does this kind of anti- CRT sentiment impact your work? How do you think about that whole controversy? 

‍Amanda Alexander: Yeah. So I would say, in general, it is incredibly dangerous what's happening in education and in schools in terms of preventing young people from learning accurate history. The attempt to deny the reality of gay people and trans people; the criminalization of trans young people and their parents for just trying to affirm their gender identities.And it goes back, I would say to this previous point about the power of state legislatures and how important it is to be involved at that level and beyond just voting. So same goes with reproductive justice, you know, given the rollback in abortion rights at the federal level. Reproductive justice is now a state- by- state fight in a way that it hasn't been in 50 years.So I would hope that instead of feeling stuck and demoralized people see this as an opportunity to get en engaged on the local and state level. You don't have to go to DC or be a federal policy expert. Organizing with your neighbors, showing up at city council hearings fighting to get state reps elected in your district this fall: those are some powerful actions that you can take in the next three months, the next six months, that can have a really big impact.

‍Van Jones: Yeah. Well, look there I think all that is something that I hope that folks are paying attention to and doing. A lot of negative things happen, you know, but literally like just right down the street at City Hall, and we don't even know that it's going on until it's already been enacted. So I appreciate everything that you're doing in Detroit and all the people across the country who are taking a local action.You know, you can't have a mass movement without music and media and art and culture. And that's one of the reasons I'm so happy that we have Mike Posner here with us, one of the great artists of our time. Look, I'm not gonna ask you what you're listening to, cuz you probably listen to everything, but I wonder do you have in your mind a theme that could be used for the social justice movement of today? That'd be my first question to you Mike. 

‍Mike Posner: Well, I think that's not really for me to decide. Like sometimes you'll hear songs being sung at protests and things like that. I've definitely seen videos a lot of Kendrick Lamar's material. "We gon' be alright."

‍Van Jones: I love it.

‍Mike Posner: Seemed like that that was kind of a theme for a while. So those things, they kind of happen on their own, I think.

‍Van Jones: Yeah. Well, like, I love Kendrick Lamar in all regards, and I think that's a good answer, especially just putting you on the spot, cause you gotta pick among too many friends to name any one, and you're right. It should be left up to the – but you know, you did something that a lot of people haven't done and would never do. And I ain't never going to do . You couldn't pay me to do it.You climbed Mount Everest. I can't – look man, if I have to climb several flights of stairs, I'm mad. So I'm very, very impressed. What did you learn on that journey? Why did you decide to do something like that? I know you raised a bunch of money for the Detroit Justice Center. Before we get to that, just talk about that decision and talk about that journey to – I think that's the highest place on Earth. Am I wrong? 

‍Mike Posner: That's correct. That's the tallest mountain on Earth.

‍Van Jones: That's crazy. 

‍Mike Posner: 29,035 feet. I really wanted to climb Everest for selfish reasons. I was exploring myself, what I was capable of. I wanted to get outta my comfort zone, and I wanted to become somebody I was actually proud of. I wanted to be able to look back on my own life and be an inspiration to myself. I got really tired of watching documentaries that were inspiring, listening to podcasts that were inspiring. I wanted to be inspiring to myself, so this is really why I wanted to go. But I realized, you know, because of my past as a performer, I had an opportunity to do some good in conjunction with my selfish motivations.And that's how I got linked up with Amanda. My father was a criminal defense attorney in Detroit for over 30 years. And I knew I wanted to do something from my hometown where I'm from, place like basically gave me everything, especially musically. You know I feel like I'm part of a long lineage of greatness. I try to like honor and uphold as I create. So I wanted to do something that honored my city, that that was aligned with my beliefs personally, and that honored my dad at the same time. So, you know, I call some of my buddies that are in Detroit more often than I am, and they say, you gotta talk to Amanda. We got linked up. And, you know, when she told me about the work they were doing, I was just blown away. And so yeah, we raised over a quarter of a million dollars for Detroit Justice Center through the climb.

‍Van Jones: Yeah. Look, man, you said you had a goal to be inspiring, and you succeeded in that regard. I mean, it's a kind of thing that it's easy to say and hard to do. And I love what you said about it being something you did for selfish reasons, because I think things are more sustainable when we know what we're giving but also what we're getting. I think sometimes we ask – it sounds like we're asking people to, you know, sacrifice this and sacrifice this and give up this and give up that and be a martyr. And then maybe you'll help somebody you've never met or help somebody a thousand years from now. And I think that's fine that that should be a part of the mix. But also this work is very rewarding on its own. You know, the people who decide to take a stand always have the best Thanksgiving dinner conversations when they did something crazy or they met somebody amazing like Amanda. And of course, you know, you grew up with somebody amazing. Can you talk a little bit about your dad and his incredible work as a criminal defense attorney and how you decided to kind of, you know, honor him and get involved in this fight for social justice and criminal justice reform. 

‍Mike Posner: Sure. Thank you. My father was a beautiful human. I miss him. He made his transition five years ago now. He was – at home, he was like a big teddy bear. And really what's interesting as far as like his, his work in the city, I found out more about that – I became more informed of some of the things he did after he passed. Some people that he represented got in touch with me and my family and shared stories.And, you know, a moment that's popping into my head was he was honored towards the end of his life by CDAM, the Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan. And there was a man that gave a speech there. He said, when you get charged with a crime, everyone in your life disappears, and sometimes even your family disappears, and you literally have no one. And your job as a criminal defense attorney's to be one last person in somebody's corner. That's so I kind of understood that's that's what my dad does.

‍Van Jones: Wow. Wow. Well, look, I know that he is and will always be proud of you proud of you, probably from you first wandering around in diapers and stuff, let alone all the great things that you've done and continue to do.And he has a lot in common with Barry Scheck, who we've got here. Barry Scheck has been there making a way outta no way for people for a very long time. Taking on the toughest causes, the toughest cases, and doing it with real power and just real creativity and, frankly, with real success.You got funding as, as did everybody on this call, from Sony's Social Justice Fund. How did you use those dollars and that support to really accelerate and amplify the work you've been committed to for so long Barry Scheck? 

‍Barry Scheck: Sony's Social Justice Fund took a chance making a commitment to what we call the Community Law Enforcement Accountability Network, and this is a unique coalition that we hope will be a prototype for the rest of the country.Because everything Amanda said about all criminal legal reform is local, it's state- by- state. So what we've been doing in California is that they passed two very, very important bills. One is Senate Bill 2, which goes into effect on January 1st, 2023. And this bill for the first time makes every law enforcement agent in the state of California, whether in corrections or police, you must get a license. So that police officers will have the same kind of license that, Van, you and I have as lawyers or people have as doctors or, you know, or other professions where life and liberty is at stake, right? 

‍Van Jones: Mm-hmm

‍Barry Scheck: They'll get that license. There is an independent board that was set up in California. They're calling it the Police Officer Standards and Training Board, and they passed a statewide standard for decertifying police officers, taking away their licenses for acts of misconduct. The standards for what those acts of misconduct are should be at every state in this country. It includes not just lying; although it's very hard to get people for lying. Mike's father did a good job of that. But the fact is that just take one of the reforms that we saw, you know, not coming about with the George Floyd Act. And that is what happens if you're a police officer and you do not intervene to stop another officer that's beating the hell outta somebody. Right now in California, that is officially an act of misconduct, and you can be decertified for it January of 2023.Here's the other thing that directly relates to what we're doing with Sony and this Community Law Enforcement Accountability Network, because with our friends at the ACLU we got this in the legislation. Every California law enforcement official must have a quote- unquote unique police officer standard and training identifier.Now, why is that important? Because shield numbers of police officers are not unique, right? They change all the time by generation. So this is absolutely essential. All the data scientists will tell you, you cannot track an officer: both of their activities internally, much less if they commit an active misconduct than they go to another state. You can't get good data unless you can uniquely identify the officer. That's how primitive, to be honest with you, data collection has been in the criminal legal system. So what we've put together is – big picture think big picture – is to have civil society have oversight over law enforcement. Because we have a coalition: the ACLU; all the public defender offices in the state of California are on board; the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers that has a unique application to track police misconduct and learn about patterns; the School of Communications' data journalists at Stanford, which will be actually the public facing website of all the information we carry; the Berkeley Investigative Journalism School led by now David Barstow with his four Pulitzer Prizes; and in some ways most important of all, a friend of ours Saul Perlmutter, who has a Nobel Prize in astrophysics, who runs the Berkeley Institute of Data Science, and the BIDS – as they call it – is assisting us in getting ingestion tools to make this work, because you pass a transparency statue. And those are the big wins this year, cuz I know that's a question you wanted to ask me, Van: the California transparency bill and Senate Bill 2 and Senate bill 36. In Maryland, we passed Anton's Law, which is another transparency bill that gives you access to police misconduct information. In New York, we repelled 58 of the Civil Rights Act, which gives us great access to misconduct information. 

‍Van Jones: Wait, wait. It sounded like you said you repelled a civil rights act. 

‍Barry Scheck: Well, it was known as a civil rights law. It was a law that was used to prevent people from getting access to adjudicated acts of misconduct by police officers. 

‍Van Jones: So, it wasn't really civil rights; it was civil wrongs; it was like a civil civil wrongs. Okay. 

‍Barry Scheck: And you also were gonna ask me about what people should be looking out for. There's something called the Law Enforcement Officer's Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights has been the vehicle over the last 25, 30, 40 years to make secret all the misconduct information. And I'm talking about officers that had been adjudicated by their old police departments for having used excessive force, for having lied, for having covered up, right? Those things have been secret for a very long time in this country. And now we're first getting, with these transparency statutes, the opportunity to get access to the adjudicated acts of misconduct.Now, it's one thing, by a statute, to get access to the adjudicated acts. It's quite another thing to give access to that information to the press, to the public defenders, to innocence organizations, even to conviction integrity units and prosecutors' offices that will actually do something about it. And that's where Sony came in because we have an alliance, all these organizations, and we're gonna be getting tools to get this information in quickly. Any of you that have ever done this kind of data research and see, oh, you have right of access, so you filed some complaints against a police department. And then after a lot of litigation a year or two or three later, you finally get access to it and you get a whole bunch of PDFs, right? That's worthless, a big stack of papers like that. You have to send out law students, journalism students, other people to start going through them and coding and tagging the data. What Berkeley Institute of Data Science is gonna try to do for us is get artificial intelligence tools where we can scan in the data very, very quickly.And we can start – you know, lawyers know this – there's something called PACER that lists all the civil rights lawsuits. We should have applications that can strip PACER, so we could put together the civil rights lawsuits, the adjudicated acts of misconduct, all of this together and have some of this in a public facing database.

‍Van Jones: Look, man, I ask you one question, you talk for 20 minutes. That just show how much passion you've got for what you're doing. And that's important because it's important that people really understand like the people who are on the front lines who are doing the stuff every day. The passion is unrelenting because the things you're up against are unrelenting. And you wouldn't believe that basic information that – you know, taxpayers are paying for all of these things to happen, but taxpayers can't get any information about a cop that's going from department to department, killing people or beating people or are using racial slurs.So that's a huge issue and I appreciate your leadership on it. One, one last thing I wanted to get from you briefly in the time that we have. Part of freedom is being able to be free from being beaten and brutalized and mistreated by folks under color of law police officers or anybody else. That's a freedom from brutality, but there's also the freedom to do things life, for instance, voting, which seems to be under a great deal of stress and a great deal of attack. Can you talk a little bit about where we are with voting in America before we close up? 

‍Barry Scheck: Oh, my God. What, in some ways, I think was the single worst thing I saw recently on that is Mark Elias talking about Ohio, that five times a Republican Supreme Court invalidated the gerrymandered max in the state of Ohio. Five times! And yet they never changed, and the Republicans were able to go into federal court and prevent the latest decision from being enforced. So this is a mess. We are now living in a country where minorities of the population are overseeing and controlling the Senate, the House of Representatives, even local governments in ways that threaten us. 

‍Van Jones: And when you, and when you say minorities, you don't mean racial minorities. You mean numerical minorities. That a very small group of people, who don't represent America and what America looks like and where America's trying to go, have gotten a lack of control over state legislatures, which then means they can control voting districts, which means they can dilute your vote. All this is happening against the will of the vast majority of American people. 

‍Barry Scheck: Right. Well, if you permit me this one last thing, because I, now, before I came on this show, I started listening to all your ,podcasts which I've enjoyed a great deal. And one thing I, at the last point I wanna make for my friends at Sony, because they've been very generous in getting us started. But we actually need a lot more money to make this happen. There are things that we have to focus on that I think we can call non- reformist reforms. That is to say reforms that actually we can get red and blue, conservatives and liberals, supporting just as you were just saying, Van. I mean, who can possibly be opposed to getting information out about a police officer that is known to have framed somebody, who has lied, used excessive force. How can that be kept secret? Right? People will respond to that. And what Sony has done for us is giving us an opportunity to really move the needle in a way that we haven't before. 

‍Van Jones: Everybody will be better off for, for that having happened. Yeah Amanda, I think I wanna give you the last word. You're right there on the front lines. The Detroit Justice Center is a real beacon of hope for a lot of people. You take on the tough fights. You don't run from any fight. And I just wonder, as you look out – you certainly have a great deal of appreciation for Sony as well. As you look out for yourself and the work that you're doing, what's keeping you moving forward? And what do you think your next big fights are gonna be? 

‍Amanda Alexander: Yeah. So I would say, you know, I always try and think of this as intergenerational work. The way that we think about you know, the impact of Mike's dad, John. When I took the news back to the team that Mike was gonna climb Mount Everest to support our work, it was incredible to hear the response of the staff attorneys who all shared memories spontaneously of having been mentored by him. One staff attorney in particular, when she was just starting out as a criminal defense attorney, she said that John really took her under his wing and said that, you know, he believed in her when, when she didn't believe in herself. And she said that when Mike went about this, it was almost like John coming back to me and saying, I still believe in you. And I still believe in the work that you're doing. So it's just this legacy rippling forward. And I think of our work in very long haul terms. So, you know, we need to focus not just on what can we win in the next 18 months or this election cycle but what can we do today that will make Black people proud five generations from now. What kind of legacy can we leave? How big can we dream when it comes to not just what's winnable today but what our communities actually need? So at DJC we use an approach called defense- offense- and- dreaming, where, yes, we are providing defensive legal services to meet people where they're at. We're getting people out of jail and prison, reuniting them with their kids, helping them hold onto jobs and stable housing. We go on offense with an economic equity practice, and that's where we are shoring up the freedom dreams of our clients for their neighborhoods. So helping to, you know, start community land trust, worked-owned cooperative businesses, helping people coming back from prison to start small businesses. And then we dream with our Just Cities Lab. So it's really important to us to focus not just on what we are tearing down. Yes, we will get rid of jails and prisons eventually, but we also have to think about what are we building up in their place to keep communities safe. So we have started a restorative justice network that is building the capacity of restorative justice practitioners to take more and more serious cases out of the criminal legal system and into restorative processes. We started a community reinvestment coalition that is fighting to shift millions of dollars out of state and local budgets out of policing jails, prosecutions, and prisons and into community wellbeing. So I think that it's really important to us to focus on not just what we're tearing down but what our communities need and to dream together in really big intergenerational terms. 

‍Van Jones: Well, I have nothing else to say. You'd have to be crazy to follow that with anything except for a very hardy thank you. You're such an inspiration to all of us and, you know, we need more people like you to get support, and we need you to get more support. So let's stay together. I'm really happy to talk to you and let's talk again very soon.

‍Amanda Alexander: Thank you so much for the support, Mike and Sony.