Who Pays When the Police Go Away?

with Rob Henderson

In a clip from this week’s episode, psychologist and author Rob Henderson describes a peculiar facet of the movement to defund the police. According to survey data he cites in his new memoir, defunding the police has the most support among people who, we have reason to believe, are the least likely to need the police, while it would take police out of the communities that, we also have reason to believe, would most benefit by their presence. If low-income communities are beset by crime that could be prevented by a police presence, why has it become a badge of honor in certain progressive precincts to work toward ejecting police from those communities?

We know why, of course. Over the past eight or nine years, “defund the police” has become a progressive shibboleth. According to Rob, its underlying premise—that police are a scourge on low-income black communities—is an example of a “luxury belief,” which Rob defines as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” To remain a progressive in good standing, one must claim to want to defund the police in the name of the very communities that defunding would, in all likelihood, harm. In this view, luxury beliefs are almost like a good enjoyed by the wealthy but paid for by the poor. I guess that’s left egalitarianism for you.

In this clip, Rob describes how his own often rough upbringing helped him identify the perverse implications of luxury beliefs. Raised in foster homes and then a single-parent, working-class adoptive home, Rob’s journey from teen slacker to Air Force volunteer to Yale and Cambridge-educated psychologist gave him an outsider’s perspective. One would think that Rob—an up-from-his-bootstraps, high-achieving member of a racial minority—would be exactly the sort of person progressives would want to hear from. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Apparently the kind of luxuries Rob identifies are those progressives can’t live without.

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ROB HENDERSON: My mother and I, we were homeless for a time. We lived in a car. We then moved to a slum apartment in Westlake, which is this rundown part of Los Angeles. And my mother would have “visitors” coming into our apartment at all hours of the day and night, trading favors for drugs. At one point, some neighbors called the police because they heard a child screaming in this apartment. And it was me. I was tied to a chair with a bathrobe belt so that I couldn't break free and disturb my mother as she was engaging in her activities.

I was taken from my mother at age three, placed into the foster care system, and spent about the next five years living in seven different homes in LA. My mother was deported. She was not a US citizen. At this time, she was sent back to South Korea. I was a US citizen, I was born in LA, and so I remained in the system and was essentially cycling through these different homes.

Eventually, shortly before my eighth birthday, I was adopted by a working class family. My adoptive mother, interestingly enough, was also Korean, but she was adopted by a white working class family. My adoptive father was a white working class guy. So we settled into this dusty blue collar town in Northern California called Red Bluff.

This was interesting because, in hindsight, I understand what had occurred, which was that I got a front row seat to what authors like Robert Putnam and Charles Murray and other social scientists have been documenting for decades now, which is this of deterioration of working-class and lower-middle-class communities across the US at this point. This was late 90s. The median household income in Red Bluff was $27,000 a year, which was very low even for 1999.

There was a teacher that I had my senior year. It was a history teacher, and he was a male teacher. He pulled me aside. He could tell that I was smart kid who just refused to apply himself. He showed me this picture on his computer of himself in an Air Force uniform. I thought, oh, that looks pretty cool. And he was like, “Look man, I can tell you're a bright kid. I don't know what's going on at home. I don't know what's going on with you. But this may be a good option for you. Just think on it.”

I left as soon as I could. I was still 17. I had to have my adoptive mother sign what amounted to a permission slip—because I was still legally a child—to join the Air Force. I was the youngest guy in my unit. Most of them were 18-plus, and I was the only 17-year-old guy there. It turned out to be the best decision I ever made.

So I did four years initially, then re-upped for four more. And I needed every single second of those eight years to reorient myself in the world and change my mindset, give me some space to develop and to mature and to achieve some breadth of perspective that I didn't have, that I wouldn't have had if I had just stayed in Red Bluff in my teens and twenties.

GLENN LOURY: I'm trying to picture you as a 25 year old freshman in New Haven. You had to be an odd duck.

Yeah. I was even odder because a lot of veterans, Glenn, when they get out of the military, [they realize] I don't have to work out anymore, I don't have to shave anymore. So I had a beard, so I looked even older than I do now, actually.

The students could tell. They didn't necessarily know about my rough and tumble upbringing, but they could tell I was older. They'd ask, and I just told them I was in the Air Force before. After the first year, the academics, I was able to manage that. It was the social aspect that remained difficult for me, because I arrived at Yale at a very strange time. Sometimes I say that I arrived at Yale during the birth of what people now call wokeness. Wokeness was around before 2015, but 2015 was the year where it really exploded and spilled out of the universities, because that was the year of what people now call the Halloween costume controversy with the Christakises. And that was a very strange sort of introduction to elite campus culture for someone who came from where I came from.

“Luxury beliefs.” You did psychology at Yale. Is that where you first began to think about this concept? And tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah. I coined this term a few years ago, luxury beliefs. The idea had been sort of stewing in my mind ever since those years in undergrad. But the term didn't develop until I had arrived at grad school, Cambridge University, during my first year during my PhD program. But I remember, I arrived on campus at Yale, and so after the Halloween costume controversy, I would see students talk about the pain these professors had caused or talk about how they felt that they were in danger, that they felt unsafe on campus. They would use all of this provocative and charged emotional language.

These were the sons and daughters of millionaires, one of the richest institutions in the world, ensconced in this bubble with campus security on every corner. I lived off campus, so I would walk through New Haven, I'd walk through a lot of poverty, a lot of addiction, homelessness, mental illness. I'd walk through all of this in the New Haven green on my way to my apartment, and I would think about these students talking about how they were the ones who were in pain or how they were the ones who were being victimized.

I would go through that experience on a weekly basis or more and realize that a lot of these students have not had much contact with reality. Some of the professors and administrators, too, for that matter. It wasn't just the students. Graduates and inhabitants and people who have associations or affiliations with these institutions would adopt these views.

Luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. In the book, I describe how it developed out of the ideas of people like Thorstein Veblen and the idea of luxury goods, of conspicuous consumption.

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The Theory of the Leisure Class, that's Veblen's classic text from early in the twentieth century, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, published in 1899. In Veblen's time, the elites would exhibit their social status through material goods: pocket watches, delicate evening gowns, tuxedos, attending lavish and expensive events. And my claim is that, today, material goods, luxury goods, they're still useful for exhibiting one's position in society, but they're noisier signals. My friends from Red Bluff have the same iPhone as my friends from college. In Veblen's time, you could walk through the streets of any major city and immediately tell, just by how people look, who was rich and who was poor. That's less true today.

How does the most affluent segment of society set themselves apart? My claim is they do it through these beliefs, these costly signals. I describe in the book this idea of cultural capital from Pierre Bourdieu, the mid-twentieth-century sociologist who described how, at least in the 1970s, they would convert economic capital into cultural capital. They would expend resources in order to learn intricate and arcane knowledge about wine and artwork and furniture, sophisticated vocabulary, attending certain schools. And through their opinions and their views, they would be able to reveal themselves to one another, reveal these buried signals of “I'm a member of the affluent,” so that if they're in a space, they would be able to identify one another.

Relatedly, I read this book from Michael Knox Beran called Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy. Wasps being “white Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” the ruling class in America from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. And Michael Knox Beran describes how the wasps, many of them—he called them the “high wasps,” the upper tippy-top segment of wasp society—they would intentionally support fashionable movements and causes, because they would abhor the vulgarians. They liked the fact that ordinary people would hear about these newfangled ideas and react with horror and revulsion. And this pleased the wasps because it indicated to themselves that, oh, we really are set apart from them. We've achieved distinction.

That's by the way, the title of Bourdieu's book, Distinction. And then he has a subtitle. I just want the audience to know, in case somebody wants to do their research.

But I have a question. Because, as I understand it, the signaling idea is an idea that I can convey information by taking an action which is relatively less costly for me to take than it would be for somebody else to take. And that action then becomes an indicator of my status, like luxury goods that I can buy that are visible: automobiles, clothing, and things like that.

And I'm wondering if that's not distinct from there coming to be a consensus within a class of people about what the right side of history is, what is virtuous. Saving the planet is virtuous, and to take on that belief is the indication of my membership in this clan. But it’s not a signal in the classical sense of the term, because I'm not really bearing any cost one way or the other. I'm conforming to a trope or a norm that is class-specific. Is that a reasonable distinction?

Yeah. So I understand that the luxury beliefs idea is a bit of an amalgamation, integrating these two ways of thinking, of exhibiting class while also engaging in some costly signaling or some of what some biologists call “self-handicapping.” And a point that I've made in some essays and in the book as well is that even if members of the luxury belief class, when they do partake in some of these beliefs, it does affect them less. They are able to engage in it and incur lower costs than people who are not members of educated and affluent circles.

A simple example of this might be the defund the police movement. It's funny, I coined the term luxury beliefs in 2019, and I never would have imagined in a million years that within a year's time people would be calling to ... at a certain point they were calling to abolish the police, and then I think they walked it back a little and said defund the police. I reported some survey data in the book from YouGov. So this was a representative sample of US citizens. When they broke down the data by income category, the highest-income Americans were the most in favor of defunding the police, and the lowest-income Americans were the least supportive.

I consider this to be maybe an example we're talking about here, because a lot of these people who are championing the defund the police movement, if they were to defund the police in their area, they already live in gated communities. They already live in safe neighborhoods. And so even if their police are defunded, they would incur a lower cost than when the police are defunded in poor, low-income communities. And even for a lot of these affluent communities, when the crime wave did eventually come into contact with their lives, there were reports of affluent neighborhoods in Chicago hiring off-duty police officers or security guards or private bodyguards and so on. And so even when it does go on to affect them, eventually they will find ways to protect themselves.

The whole defund the police thing, to me, that was interesting. Of course, a lot of people are familiar with the crime stats that homicide rates increased, violent crime rates increased through 2020 and 2021. The majority of the victims of these crimes were poor. I cite data from federal statistics indicating that, relative to Americans who earn $75,000 or more a year, Americans in the poorest income category, which I believe in these statistics that I looked at were Americans who earned less than $20,000 a year, they're seven times more likely to be victims of violent crimes, seven times more likely to be victims of robbery and assault. One thing that shocked me was that low-income Americans were twenty times more likely to be victims of sexual assault than Americans who earned more than $75,000 a year.

And so these all get folded into aggregate statistics. There was a story in San Francisco of a tech executive who was stabbed. And he was named, he was described by name in the papers in San Francisco, the Chronicle and so on. There were a couple of journalists, one in New York City, one in Philadelphia a few months ago. They were also identified by name in national media, “targeted by violent crime.” And I just found it fascinating that, when ordinary people are killed, when the peasants kill each other, well, that just gets folded in. That's just a statistic. But when members of the aristocracy are killed, they get identified by name, they get they get articles written about them, and, you can look them up and there will be pieces about how, “Oh, actually maybe crime has gone too far and we should rethink these policies.”

And this very much just reveals whose lives really matter in this country and how class really does affect how people treat their views.

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