Megan Kamerick interviews Janet Napolitano, former Secretary of Homeland Security and author of How Safe Are We?

MK: How are we making mistakes in evaluating true threats?

JN: I think the biggest mistake is to focus only on the Southwest border as if that is a danger to the safety and security of the American people.

I know the Southwest border very well. I grew up here in New Mexico. I spent most of my adult life in Arizona as the U.S. Attorney, the Attorney General and then the Governor. The border is a zone. It needs to be managed in accordance with our laws and with our values, but it is not itself a risk to the safety of the American people.

If you watch the news now, you would think the Department of Homeland Security was the “Department of the Southwest Border” and that that was all that it was responsible for when in fact it’s responsible for many other functions.

I am concerned that the over focus on the Southwest border is detracting from the department and the Federal Government’s ability to deal with other more pressing challenges.

MK: What should we be doing at the border that’s different from what is happening now?

JN: When I was Secretary, we had increased manpower, technology at the ports of entry and between the ports of entry and we drove immigration to a 40 plus year low. It was still going down when I left the department.

Now of course we have a surge and the surge is from basically three countries; Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. These are countries with very high homicide rates, the highest in the world. They have suffered from an infestation of gangs and gang violence. They don’t necessarily have stable institutions.

We should invest in those countries. We should provide training and equipment so that they have adequate police forces. We should help them develop and have independent judicial systems. I think we need to focus on the migration from that part of the world, not by waiting until they actually appear at our border, but trying to turn the faucet off at the source. That, to me, would actually increase our border security.

Building a wall will not increase our border security. What we should do is we should make sure that the ports of entry are well-staffed and use the most current available technology. Then, for those who are seeking asylum, we need to have a way to process those cases in accord with our values and the rule of law.

MK: We are recording this shortly after the mass shooting in El Paso which was apparently perpetrated by someone who had white supremacist views. Should we consider white supremacist groups terrorist organizations?

JN: I think we should. One of the gaps in the federal criminal law is that there is no specific criminal violation for domestic terrorism.

MK: Do we need to change the law to address that?

JN: I think so. I also think we need to recognize that, leaving aside the terrible loss of life on 9/11, since then there has actually been more loss of life attributable to domestic terrorists than those influenced by foreign Islamic organizations.

MK: What are the biggest threats that you see right now to homeland security?

JN: I would say three. One of those three is definitely the rise of domestic terrorism and mass gun violence. It is high time to enact some gun safety measures at the federal level; universal background checks. I think we ought to reconsider the ban on assault weapons.

Two other risks. Cyber security is huge and complicated. It has evolved a great deal. When I started as secretary, I spent maybe ten percent of my time on cyber security. By the time I left, it was a good forty percent of my time.

Now we’ve seen ransomware attacks, denial of service attacks, different kinds of hacking, the theft of personal information.
We’ve seen an attack on our democracy itself in the 2016 election with no confidence that that has been adequately dealt with or that that infiltration of our electoral process by the Russians is not still continuing. I think the intelligence community has concluded and warned us that it is continuing, but we have no national plan on how to deal with it.

The third risk I would identify are the risks associated with global warming. We are seeing a perceptible increase in migration from South to North across the planet. We are having the creation of so-called “Climate Refugees;” people leaving their homelands because of extreme drought that has destroyed the agricultural economy.

The rise in new types of plant diseases have destroyed crops. The coffee crop in Guatemala has been basically destroyed by something called coffee rust leaving all of those small farmers without any income.

We have areas of the world, due to global warming, where the local economies have been affected and destroyed leaving a population of primarily young men growing up hopeless and helpless and ripe for terrorist recruitment.

Another way is if you think of Homeland Security as protecting human life and property in the United States so that we are secure, the increase in extreme weather events related to global warming is really quite astounding. Landfall hurricanes, tornadoes, drought in the Western United States that has led to massive wildfires with loss of life and property.

MK: What should we be doing from a Homeland Security standpoint to address these impacts of global warming?

JN: One is we should as a country do our part to reduce the amount of carbon that is being emitted into the atmosphere. I think we should rejoin the Paris Accord. That would be a first step.

A second step is to focus on adaptation to the climate change that has already occurred or that we know is going to occur in the near future. Rising sea levels affect where we rebuild communities, where we site things like airport runways. Having a real discussion and plan to how to deal with that is essential.

MK: You write about real security versus security theater. What do you mean by that?

JN: Security theater is when you do things that make you look tough, but that have no perceptible outcome in terms of improvement in our safety and security. Real security involves manpower and technology. It should be evidence-based and data-driven and should have as its goal the increase in the safety of the American people.

MK: The idea of how we’re viewed around the world, which some people though about after 9/11, why is that an important part of homeland security and keeping us safe?

JN: Our ability to work with other nations, just for example on intelligence sharing. There was a plot to put explosives in printer toner cartridges that were going to be loaded into cargo holds of passenger planes. We learned about the plot because we had active intelligence sharing with the Brits. We were able to intervene, stop it, take it down and then change some of our security protocols so that it couldn’t be repeated.

If American retreats from the world and it’s “America alone,” you lose that kind of capability and that make us less safe.

MK: One of the things we often ask guests on the show is how can our listeners contribute to promoting a culture of peace and safety in conditions that seem beyond their control.

JN: Everybody has a role to play. We’re a nation of problem solvers. We’ve taken on big challenges before. We should take this one on.

By the way, just being an active participant in our democracy matters, not just voting, but between elections, let your voice be heard. Communicate with your Congresspeople, with your Senators. I used to be an elected official. I know that when you hear from a lot of people about an issue, you know that you need to pay attention to it and perhaps take some action.

Megan Kamerick Interviews Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear and co-host of the Fear Not podcast

BG: I think that have been fears around for a long time, but right now what’s going on is that it’s very profitable for a lot of different organizations and individuals to be promoting fears and scares.

As a result of that partly and in response to that partly, anxiety is the number on psychological disorder in the U.S. at this point.

MK: Can you give us some examples of that?

BG: Probably the biggest perpetrator is local TV news. Even though crime rates are down in most of the nation, in many places near record lows, anybody who watches local TV news very much is going to think that their communities are crime-ridden.

Politicians routinely run on fear of crime and that if you don’t vote for them, you’re going to be in even greater danger than you are now.

Non-profit organizations are very prone to fear mongering for their fundraising. They take the form of this horrible thing is going on, the worst thing you can imagine, it’s getting worse and so you should send us money.

What I do when I receive a fear campaign solicitation from an organization that I do support, I respond to them. I tell them that I’m not going to contribute even though I support their organization because they’re engaging in this kind of activity.

You can respond to fear mongering in media too. Local TV news stations don’t often hear enough from people saying, “I don’t want my scare of the evening. I want to know what’s really going on in my community.”

MK: Fear is not a new concept. You quote anthropologist Mary Douglas who writes that “Dangers get selected for special emphasis either because they offend the basic moral principles of the society or because they enable criticism of disliked groups and institutions.”

BG: When people use fears about other groups, they’re basically making moral judgements, implicitly rather than explicitly which makes it seem more legit or kosher.

What’s different now is that it’s all around us; on cable TV news, in politician’s campaigns. All over the internet there are fear campaigns in the new edition of the culture of fear.

I say it’s updated for the Trump era and I make the point that Trump is, as I call him, the “Fear Monger-in-Chief.” He’s hardly the first.

Initially, I wrote this book in response to something that was going on way back in the 1990s that was really the impetus for my research and that was fear mongering about teenage moms. It was Bill Clinton who called them “America’s most serious social problem.” It had a big effect obviously on pregnant teenagers who were hardly America’s biggest social problem in reality. It resulted in lots of outcomes and lots of money being spent. Federal welfare law that was passed the next year in ’96 was $250 million for states to use to persuade young people to practice premarital abstinence.

Clinton did a lot of fear mongering about adolescent males too talking about them as super predators. This had a big effect in terms of how young people were treated and in terms of the cost associated with “dealing with the problem.”

MK: You also spend a lot of time talking about dangers to children which I thought was fascinating. We’ve actually learned a lot about how pedophiles and sexual predators groom their victims by ingratiating themselves into their lives. But we still see so much focus on “stranger danger” or the fears of random kidnappings. What are the real stats that we should be worried about?

BG: Stereotypical kidnappings each year in the U.S. average around 110. What happens is exactly the sort of thing that you were saying; a tragic incident occurs. I would never minimize how tragic these are. That then is covered in the news media and online in social media in ways that then make it seem like this is happening on some large-scale basis when it just isn’t.

There certainly are two big downsides at least. It’s not great for children to be living in an environment where they are told not to trust anybody or anything.

Secondly, what we do to try to combat these very rare incidents is very expensive typically at a time when we’re not spending a whole lot of money on needs that affect many, many more children and much more often from crumbling schools to homelessness to child hunger where that money would make a very big impact if it were spent well.

When we talk about low probability dangers, sometimes what we’re doing is avoiding ones that we either feel we can’t confront emotionally or as a society or that we just don’t think we know what to do about.

A great example that comes up unfortunately very often is when there has been a mass shooting. There is a lot of talk about things like video games and movies. The research is very clear; if they have any impact, it’s very small. What we should be talking about is unambiguous which is guns and what to do about them.

Another popular one of course is mental illness. When you look at studies, what you find is that people with diagnosable mental illness commit about 5% of shootings, but we feel like we’re not going to get anywhere with dealing with the gun issue, so let’s pay attention to these others.

Or if you’re a politician who is beholden to certain interests who don’t want to deal with the gun issue, then it’s a great idea to do fear mongering about mental illness and video games and all those sorts of things.

MK: Barry Glassner, what are you afraid of right now? What should we be afraid of?

BG: I’m afraid of drunk drivers. I’m very pleased that the rates are lower than they have been which, by the way, is attributable in large part to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I know that I’m much more likely to have something happen to me from a drunk driver than from all sorts of other things.

I don’t sit about worrying about a terrorist attack because I know that the probability of this affecting me or anyone I know is very, very low. That’s not to say that terrorism should not be confronted. Of course it should. It’s a big issue, but I don’t sit around worrying about that when I go to get my flu shot is there going to be some negative effect because I know it’s a phenomenally rare event.

In terms of a more global fear I have, I do have one and that relates to the high-end equality rates in our society. They have been increasing so very, very rapidly are at really extreme levels now. It’s not just harmful for the people with the lowest levels of income, high levels of income inequality have big effects throughout the society.

MK: Fear is so powerful. How do we deconstruct our own fears and decide if they’re real or not and how do we help others who might hold a fear that is not based in fact?

BG: What I recommend is to ask the person or ask yourself; “Do you really want to hold onto this fear?” Most people are going to say, “No.” The way to help oneself and friends and family is to get educated about where you can get that information that will be true and reassuring.

An entertaining way is to listen to our podcast. It’s hilarious. Alonzo is funny about all these things all the time and I’m debunking all kinds of serious and funny scares on Fear Not.

The reason I’ve taken this new approach and I doing this new podcast is because for years I’ve been trying to tell people that some of these are really hilarious and you need to learn how to laugh at them.

Megan Kamerick Interviews Reggie Jackson, Senior Columnist with the
Milwaukee Independent newspaper and co-owner of Nurturing Diversity Partners

RJ: I think it (recent incidents of whites calling the police on people of color doing routine things) creates a great deal of fear in people, particularly for African American men.

A good example of that here in Milwaukee was Dontre Hamilton. He was at a public park here in downtown Milwaukee, Red Arrow Park sleeping on a park bench. There is a Starbucks in that park as well. The employees of Starbucks called the police department saying there was a strange guy sleeping on a park bench outside of the Starbucks.

The first officers who arrived on the scene talked to the employees, went out and talked to Dontre Hamilton. They went back in and told the employees, “Listen, it’s a public park. He’s taking a nap. He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s not breaking the law.” And they left.

The Starbucks employees once again called the police. They called 911 for the second time. The same officers came back and told them, “Why are you wasting our time? We told you, he’s not breaking the law. He’s within his rights to sleep in the park.” Those officers left.

Unfortunately, another officer heard the second call. He arrived on the scene and had an altercation and the officer shot Dontre Hamilton 14 times and killed him.

It’s this idea that only certain people are allowed to occupy specific spaces and if you’re not one of those people then the police can be called, and have you removed.

In many instances when these things have happened the police have handled them very well, but there have been instances where the police don’t necessarily handle things well.

I think they’re putting the police in a very bad place. I think that it increases the angst between Native American, African American and Latino communities and the police department. It’s really adding fuel to fire unnecessarily.

MK: Does this feel like a resurgence of a pattern or does it feel like it’s been going on all the time?

RJ: It’s simply business as usual. The only thing that’s different is that we are aware of it because of all of the people who have cell phones and social media. These things spread like wildfire when they happen now.

I’ve shared with people on many occasions, I do a presentation called How We Got Here, looking at the history of American history and how we have what I refer to as an aversion to diversity. Part of what I share is how we have treated different marginalized communities. We’ve created a sense of fear of these communities to justify treating them horribly.

For instance, we refer to Native American groups as “savages,” which justified us killing them in large numbers.

In the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was a great level of fear around the country of Asians infiltrating America. There was something called the “yellow peril” in which Chinese citizens were banned from coming to the United States by a law called the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

We signed an agreement with the Japanese government that there would be only a limited number of Japanese coming to the country.

Then in the period right after WWI, there was a great deal of anti-immigrant fear in the country, so we passed some of the strictest immigration laws. In 1921, we put a quota system in place.

Then in 1924, we extended this quota to basically keep people from Southern and Eastern Europe out of the country because there was a fear of these people somehow creating a stain on America.

The Eugenics Movement was very strong, and they said that this group of people are not the type of people that we want.
Fear is a common theme in American history to justify treating people very poorly.

MK: How does implicit bias play a role in these encounters where people see someone who they think doesn’t belong in a certain space and they call the police? How can we overcome that?

RJ: At my company Nurturing Diversity Partners, we do a lot of training around metro Milwaukee and other places and talk quite a bit about implicit or unconscious bias. These biases develop over a long period of time. What we try to teach people is the science behind it. This is an unconscious part of the brain that you don’t have access to. You don’t necessarily know that these biases are there.

We teach people the history of where these negative ideas come from. It’s hard to fight something that you don’t know exists within you. What we teach people is ways to recognize biases by recognizing habits that come about as a result of the biases we have.

For instance, a classic example is you’re a white woman on an elevator. A black male gets on the elevator with you and you grab your purse thinking that somehow this man may try to snatch your purse. You may not be aware that you’re biased about this black man and being afraid of him, but you can certainly recognize that if you are grabbing your purse every time a black man gets on an elevator with you, you can certainly change that behavior. It’s really an unconscious or implicit bias.

The resolution is to begin to look at the habits that we develop based on those biases and ask ourselves why we do these things and then do things differently moving forward.

MK: Can you talk a little bit more about what you do in this arena to educate people to get to these goals?

RJ: We were part of a small group of volunteers who were working to continue to do the work that the founder of America’s Black Holocaust Museum, Dr. James Cameron started. His work was designed to educate Americans about this part of history that they didn’t learn and to help us build a society where we could begin to work on racial repair and reconciliation.

We’ve been in so many different communities and what we try to do primarily is to reeducate people about American history. Our favorite and most prominent tool we have available to us is historical understanding, historical knowledge to contextualize how we’ve gotten to where we are by providing that information for people around the state and even around the country as we travel to other states telling them the things that they didn’t learn in history class that can really help them understand why we have these issues and why it’s so important that we learn about them.

We can’t fix problems if we don’t know the genesis of those problems. There are a lot of spaces that we are working in really trying to raise people’s awareness of this history and also to give them the tools to interact and have conversations across cultures and across differences.

We use a facilitated dialogue method we call the caring circle which teaches people to actively listen, which is something that we don’t do enough in these conversations. We want people to have conversations that are productive and the only way to have productive conversations about race and racism and some of these other issues related to it is to know the history first.

We believe in contextualizing things, giving people an understanding and then giving them a chance to explore their views and their feelings about these things.

What we found when we first started the business, everyone told Fran and I the same thing; “You’re not going to be successful. You can’t make a business talking about this stuff in those communities because white people are not going to come out to hear you talk. They don’t want to talk about race and racism.” They told us that we were crazy, that we would be run out of town, that we would need bodyguards.

We heard all kinds of negative critiques when we decided to start the business two years ago, but it’s been the exact opposite. We’ve been welcomed with open arms in every community that we’ve gone to.

We realize that despite the fact that we think we’re such a divided nation along these lines, we’ve found during our work not only here in Wisconsin but also traveling to Texas and doing work there and doing conferences in Chicago and Detroit and Newark New Jersey and Charleston South Carolina as well as Charlotte North Carolina that a lot of people are engaged in these conversations that really want to see change happen.

We think that America is in better shape than we tend to think it is. I think that for the most part, the people who are most against this type of work are the loudest voice in the room. Because they have the loudest voice in the room, it appears that there are many more of them than there is.