Key points:
- Former police investigator Mac Muir describes American policing system as designed to produce “everyday injustice.”
- Muir’s book Cop Cop explores the systemic harms of American policing beyond isolated acts of brutality.
- Muir advocates for expanding community-based alternatives to traditional policing methods nationwide.
In a recent interview on the Everyday Injustice podcast, former police investigator and author Mac Muir described the American policing system as a structure designed to produce “everyday injustice,” not isolated acts of brutality.
Muir, co-author of Cop Cop: Breaking the Fixed System of American Policing, drew from his years investigating misconduct with the New York Civilian Complaint Review Board and later as head of Oakland’s Community Police Review Agency.
“Investigated NYPD misconduct for seven years,” Muir said. “Started out as an investigator, moved my way up the ranks, became a supervisor, and then I went on to run the Police Oversight Agency in Oakland, California.”
He explained that his motivation to write the book with Greg Finch stemmed from frustration within oversight offices.
“You could see interviewing the officers every day and speaking to the victims of misconduct that the conversation we were having around policing was disconnected from what was happening on the street,” he said.
According to Muir, the national reckoning after George Floyd’s murder obscured the systemic, smaller-scale harms happening daily.
“A huge part of what’s so horrifying about American policing is it’s the everyday injustice,” he said. “It’s the normal stops and frisks. It’s the daily fear that you might be surveilled, harassed, stopped, frisked. That’s far more likely than actually being killed by a police officer.”
Muir argued that the system itself perpetuates resentment both ways.
“The system is designed to over-police Black and brown communities. It’s designed to make officers resent the public that they serve, and what better way to do it than from the perspective of the people who police the police,” he said.
He pointed to structural incentives that reward misconduct rather than deter it.
“What we saw is a general trend of officers who had the highest performance, the most arrests, summonses were likely to be promoted. And in that way it insulates those officers from disciplinary action moving forward,” he said.
Muir also addressed the legal standard governing police force.
“That speaks to the standard for use of force in policing, which is something that’s reasonable as opposed to necessary. And oftentimes you would see an action which isn’t technically misconduct, but was it necessary? Did this have to happen this way?” he said.
He described one case where two young officers shot and killed a man experiencing a mental health crisis after being evicted.
“He tells the officers, shoot me. And they do. And it’s a horrible incident on all sides,” Muir said. “The lingering question is like, why did this have to happen this way? I mean, it didn’t.”
Mental health calls, he emphasized, highlight the limits of policing.
“We’re asking officers to enter different scenarios that are going to take tremendous technical skill at times, tremendous negotiating skill, tremendous empathy, tactical skill,” Muir said. “Not many people have that whole, and it’s a unique feature of policing that we would ask a single profession to do everything.”
Muir supports expanding community-based alternatives. “For me, the key is to frame it again as community safety as opposed to the framework of sort of defund the police, which I don’t think is going to be politically viable moving forward,” he said. “But the sentiment of creating community safety that doesn’t need police intervention, I think is valuable to everyone.”
The pitfalls of data-driven policing also drew scrutiny. Muir said former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others treated crime statistics like financial metrics.
“What that led to was more stop and frisk. What that leads to is quotas because you’re just identifying, well, if more arrests is good, we need more arrests,” Muir said. “And it’s an infringement on everyone’s civil liberties.”
He recalled cases where officers notorious for misconduct were still protected and even promoted because of high arrest numbers.
“You’ve got to look at these instances where there’s this sharp contrast between what we would expect from law enforcement and the accountability measures that are taking place,” he said.
Muir outlined several reform proposals from his book, beginning with changing who enters the profession.
“One thing that we saw over and over again is that female officers were less likely to be subjects to complaints,” he said. “Male officers are less likely to use force in the presence of female officers, which is a real stunner.”
He cautioned that hiring more women must be paired with safe, supportive environments.
“It’s not only incumbent on police departments to hire more women, but to create environments where there’s protection from any sort of office workplace harassment when there’s a strong whistle blowing component to your department,” Muir said.
Another solution, he argued, is ending low-level offense policing and the drug war.
“There needs to be an acknowledgement that the war on drugs is continuing,” he said. “It is still doing harm. And so we call it out through the framework of prohibition, and really that’s what it is.”
Muir also called for investment in violence prevention.
“Having alternatives to police showing up to incidents… we look at the lens of violence prevention in the classic idea that you’re going to be going and targeting the folks who are most likely to be involved in violence and encouraging them through positive incentives to not participate in violent cycles,” he said.
He described his experience in Oakland where efforts were underway to shift Internal Affairs to civilian oversight.
“Police officers want a fair disciplinary process,” he said. “Particularly in New York, Internal Affairs is a political tool used by a police department to reward friends of the leadership of the department and to punish people who are willing to speak up against things they don’t believe in.”
Chicago, he said, has shown what stronger oversight could look like.
“When there is a shooting, for example, there’s a van with civilian oversight investigators who show up and they take the body cam off the officer and they watch the video first, and then they interview the officer. That’s real transparency, accountability,” he said.
Another priority is tearing down what Muir called the blue wall of silence. He pointed to California’s secrecy laws on personnel records as a major obstacle.
“California is one of the least transparent states in the country on police personnel records,” he said. “There are many ways one might conceal wrongdoing. There’s just a lack of transparency and the quality of the investigations that are occurring.”
Muir emphasized that transparency protects good officers as well.
“You want transparency left and right,” he said. “You can be concerned about being second guessed. Absolutely. But you also want to just be able to say, this is what happened. It’s a tough environment and I’m here to stand in the public eye because I’m a public servant.”
Finally, he argued for a truth and reconciliation model to address both systemic and everyday harms.
“There are a million little pieces of the everyday injustice that, I do think, there is a good faith missing link there where there are oftentimes, where it’s just there’s a total lack of awareness of the potential harm,” Muir said.
He described efforts in Oakland to launch mediation programs and stressed the importance of hearing both officers and complainants outside adversarial structures.
“The voices of the everyday complainants are not heard in a public forum nearly enough,” Muir said. “And I think also the average officer is not heard from nearly as often as we might think.”
Muir closed by encouraging communities to proactively draft oversight frameworks before scandals erupt.
“The goal isn’t to begin having the conversation once that incident takes place, it’s to have your conversation finalized and drafted,” he said.
His book Cop Cop is available through major booksellers.
“We’re happy to answer any questions about the book, about police oversight. If you’re interested in investing in police accountability in your community, we’re happy to partner on that,” Muir said.
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