On August 19 2025, I sat down with documentary filmmaker and producer Dawne Langeford at a summer rental in Bethany Beach. Dawne grew up in DC and has worked on powerful, socially resonant documentaries- most recently, THE BODY POLITIC, which aired nationally in theaters and on PBS in 2024. The movie follows Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott in the first year of his mayorship as he changes Baltimore policing resulting in a. Dramatic reduction in crime. This was a great backdrop for our conversation about Trumps performative occupation of Washington DC.
Links
- The Body Politic (PBS)
- The Body Politic (Amazon Video)
- FLARE USA – Instagram – GoFundMe
- Free DC – Web – Instagram
Trailer for The Body Politic
Transcript
Patrick: Hey Dawne. How’s it going? We are here at the beach in Delaware. It’s beautiful.
Dawne: Yeah, it’s great.
Patrick: And thank you for coming and hanging out with my family and I on our vacation.
Dawne: Thanks for having a random black lady on vacation for a couple of days. Love that.
Patrick: Very glad to. Well, when it’s my wife’s best friend and my old friend now, like 10 years.
Dawne: That’s right. It’s 10 years.
Patrick: It’s a good thing. And it frankly makes it easier with the kids and everything just to have another person around.
Dawne: Good. Well, they’re hilarious. They are. Your kids are great. Yeah.
Patrick: Thank you. Thank you. Let’s talk about crime in DC and Baltimore and other things that are related to it. Most recently, I have this podcast and my co-host and I, Rob, are just trying to address essentially in broad strokes like how Democrats and now really progressives can take power back and fight what’s going on now and it’s getting more and more dire over the course of the few months that we’ve been doing this. Yeah. Now it’s like really dire over the past few days with this new invasion of DC, which is probably just one more distraction from, you know, the disaster of, you know, the tariff sent, you know, that Epstein stuff.
Dawne: Epstein.
Patrick: Yeah, yeah.
Dawne: Well, I will say at least white people are getting mad now. I don’t I mean just the DC class though, which is you know I’m thinking of the sandwich thrower in particular that he’s a new hero Hey Yeah, so at least it’s a not just contained to BIPOC communities in some ways, but they are the police presence, the federalized police and the militarized police presence is in Northwest predominantly, which is an interesting place for them to be. So they’re showing up there and I’m curious why they’re showing up there. They’re not in Northeast, they’re not in Southeast. they’re in the most visible areas and particularly downtown and then they of course are in Mount Pleasant because traditionally that’s an immigrant neighborhood and my neighborhood too.
Patrick: Yeah, they’re not in the places where residents have actually been asking for more.
Dawne: Yeah, no, actually the DC police are unable to answer local calls now. So calls that are being made through 311 9 911 911 sorry are basically the DC police force are under the orders of the federal police force. And I just read this a few minutes ago. So I’m not able to corroborate that story, but it seems like now it’s actually increasing violence and crime, this federal takeover of the city. So now there’s no one’s responding to the actual calls. ***And this military presence is mostly for the visuals. And that they’re outwardly lying about the crime rate. The crime rate in DC is the lowest it’s been in 30 years. So yes, are there teen young people who car jack? Yes, that happens on occasion. I know, so Patrick, we were talking earlier and there’s a theory that we both share that the whole thing that started this whole thing off was a young man by the name of Big Balls, which is disgusting. And he was the DOGE, a teenage doge henchman.
Patrick: Right. So yeah, this kid’s first offense is to come into DC and just displace, completely thoughtlessly, tens of thousands of people from their jobs with this pretense of waste, fraud, and abuse, just making shit up, coming in and just generating lists of people to be fired at these excuses.
Dawne: How old is he? He’s not even 21.
Patrick: He’s 19 years old. Yeah, this kid has not even gone to college. He’s just a kid. He’s a child. Clearly, in the thrall of Elon Musk and this whole DOGE bullshit, another performance. Yeah, so he’s here in DC and yeah, so we have serious questions about whether this was a staged event and this kid was a crisis actor.
Dawne: ***Yeah. I think that we all wanted to punch him in the face. So literal, you know, I think that he probably got his, you know, karma. It’s, you know, but if it’s not staged, well, also we were saying that he probably was being racially offensive and that in DC, you know, if you mind your own business, you’re usually going to be fine. But if you, if you say something to somebody, that’s, it’s, it’s done.
Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. ***And for context, right? It was three AM in Dupont Circle and this kid’s 19 years old. The bars in DC close at two AM, right? So what are you doing when you’re 19 in Dupont Circle, like, and clearly out of your car? I mean, I think he was trying to buy drugs, you know? I mean, I can’t think of what else you’d be doing.
Dawne: Well, I don’t think there’s an open-air drug market necessarily in DuPont Circle or anywhere in D.C. anymore. I don’t know. I don’t know, to be honest. But yeah, I don’t know what he was up to. I mean, he’s clearly up to no good.
Patrick: Yeah. I mean, it’s 3 a.m., right? So it kind of doesn’t matter whether he was a crisis actor or not because Trump got what he wanted out of this event of him getting beaten up. It was an ideal situation, a white kid getting beaten up. by, you know, black youth, right?
Dawne: I think 15-year-old girls.
Patrick: Yeah, by some 15-year-olds.
Dawne: How it’s being described. And now we have tanks stationed. Well, I haven’t seen it, so I haven’t been back to DC since this happened, so I’m not sure what it looks like.
Patrick: But it… And river… River down.
Dawne: My recording, yes.
Patrick: The fact that he got this, you know, this violence that he could use as the pretext for this invasion of the city and that it was his own person is suspicious because I mean I think one thing that is and which is crazy is that with all this law enforcement all this provocation and these masked thugs coming around I feel like he has been fishing for a violence like he’s he’s He might have. If he wanted to be putting these Ice Asians and these National Guards in harm’s way, because any harm that would come to them would be his pretext for invasion. And it turned out to be this Doge Kid instead. But think about how restrained the city has been and how tolerant of this to have this be the only, as far as I know, the only kind of Violence towards you know any of these kind of these invaders and I consider this kid one of these invaders for sure Yeah, for sure. I mean that’s that’s nuts, right? I mean I think eventually someone is gonna shoot one of these masked ice people So they’re not gonna know whether they’re a cop or not.
Oh
Patrick: Yeah, no, I think that’s… And they’re trying to put you in their band, right?
Dawne: Yeah, no, it seems like a bunch of people wearing masks could just throw you into a van and no one’s gonna do anything about it. It’s very dangerous. I probably am not gonna come back to DC for a while. And I need to get stuff and I need to close out my apartment and I need to do a lot of things, but I’m also, I don’t want to be at risk because I am a person of color. And I feel like now they’re sending 200 more troops from Mississippi as well. So there’s troops from Ohio, South Carolina, and now Mississippi has jumped on the bandwagon. And any other states that want to curry favor with Trump can do that by sending their army reserves to our nation’s capital so they can racially terrorize us.
Patrick: Because the DC National Guard and the Maryland National Guard are basically locals, right? So they know that it’s a lie.
Dawne: They know it’s a lie. And they’re part of the problem.
Patrick: The lawlessness, craziness. To be clear, there is violence in DC. It’s a real issue. A lot of people get hurt by it. It would be much better if it was not that way.
Dawne: The young people in DC have been pretty disadvantaged for a while. I think about it going back to when Michelle Rhee was, she had taken over the education department locally, closed several schools that were functioning, that had communities, families, and had no numbers to prove why and a lot of those schools served a lot of youth locally and so now in DC there’s a system where you know it’s very hard for a kid to be able to go to a school that’s close close by and it just sort of shifted everything around so I mean you’re I’m sure that you’ve as a parent you you guys probably had to figure out your schooling situation and you know anyway so that happened that broke up those communities and that and a lot of those buildings are either sitting empty or they’ve been privatized they’ve taken public assets and sold them off and now they’re condos like there’s actually quite a few like bespoke condo buildings that used to be these schools.
Patrick: Oh that’s sad I didn’t know
Dawne: Yeah, quite a few. And many of them are around Howard University. So there’s at least four or five that I can think of. And I used to go by these schools all the time. I was in the neighborhood and saw they were vibrant. They were wonderful. They were happy. And I think because they were serving a majority Black youth, they were closed. So a lot of these youth that are like, I feel like they, you know, they don’t have, there’s nowhere to go. There isn’t necessarily like being schooled in community as opposed to being, you know, considered a problem at another school and just being taught with care. And I think that and having a community around is, it helps. And that’s not really, I don’t feel like that’s really an option right now.
Patrick: Yeah, I’m sure it’s going to get even worse with this because they have power over DC. And you know, I’m part of, you know, this whole, you know, MAGA Republican project. I wouldn’t even see MAGA because MAGA is not that well thought out, but the long term Republican project is to eliminate public schooling altogether and move to charter schools and private schools, you know, and vouchers and all that kind of thing. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that’s their next move in DC since they can’t. That’s the problem with DC is that they can do it. They can take control over the city.
Dawne: Yeah. I mean, I’m sure that that’s part of the plan. I don’t know if they’re going to withdraw the troops at any point. I don’t know if that’s how long they can how sustainable that is and how long that’s going to go for, how many resources they’re going to put into effectively taking it over and probably misreporting. But the resilience of the DC citizens, I don’t think it’s going to be I don’t think people are going to lie down for it.
Patrick: No.
Dawne: I mean, obviously not. And then you’ve got like some of the, you know, people who have been serving our country in civic positions for decades or they’ve committed their entire careers to it and people who are just now entering that they’re not, I don’t think they’re going to lie down for it either. And then we’ve got enough people who’ve been privileged for long enough who are very type A and are not going to like they’re definitely going to fight against it. There’s that layer. of people. So I think that I don’t think DC is going to just lie now.
Patrick: No, no, no, we’re not.
Dawne: Yeah, I can tell you that right now.
Patrick: And I’ve seen it, you know, so did you know that I went viral lately? I’ve been checking my Instagram every two minutes because I had been watching on the news and I had seen all this personnel carriers and these troops outside Union Station. That’s ridiculous, like Union Station. is not a place where I’ve ever felt unsafe. I have felt unsafe in DC before, but not right there. And I did used to live right there.
Dawne: Yeah, they hit that place for a reason. It’s high visibility, but also there’s generally partial encampments of unhoused people there. So they went to make a big spectacle of removing them.
Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s kind of a national landmark.
Dawne: For sure. Yeah, I mean they’re stationed there, they’re stationed in all the high visibility areas.
Patrick: But a lot of that, those encampments had already been, I don’t know if they’d already been cleared or if they already had kind of died down because there has not been a lot of that lately.
Dawne: Yeah, there’s regular sweeps.
Patrick: Yeah, like prior to all this bullshit.
Dawne: There’s always been the sweeps for sure.
Patrick: So, because I moved through there, you know, I ride the transit, you know, we drive past there all the time. But I thought, you know, I just want to, this is a couple of days ago, I just want to see for myself and I got on the train and I came up and I expected to come up, you know, around all these personnel carriers and all this stuff, but it was all gone. They just completely moved out, you know. And so there’s only a few like metropolitan police and, you know, just kind of wondering, like I came out, if you saw that video, there’s actually, when I was coming up out of the station, there was a guy there who was like, looks like he was, you know, had heat stroke or something. There’s a couple MPD like helping him, you know, just like you kind of see on an ordinary day. And that was the only thing I saw. And I did see, you know, there are some, there is one encampment, which is like a protest encampment. from these from Flair and I think there’s another group and I really liked I sat and talked to the Flair people for a while and they’re like all about making like anti-fascist art and statements like that. Love that. Yeah, and then I went over but there’s really nobody around but I heard that there was gonna be something over at Judiciary Square from Free DC so I went over and sure enough there were some people at Free DC because they were there to you know The Pam Bondi had just announced that she was going to displace the chief of police with, you know, the head of the DEA.
Dawne: Yeah, yeah, I saw that.
Patrick: So people were the MPD, police headquarters to protest that. And they started up and there was, you know, people there. So people are not taking it lying down. And I talked to some of the people, like you said, they’re kind of like, privileged type DC residents who have a long time who are not used to this and know that it’s ridiculous. They’re totally outraged. And then they were also gearing up while we were there that we got a hearing scheduled for the judge to hear the challenge that our DC Attorney General had filed. to enjoin that order from going through, displacing the chief of police.
Dawne: That’s right. I saw that.
Patrick: That was right there.
Dawne: Yeah. Now DC is going to fight. They’re going to fight that. Yeah. Yeah.
Patrick: And we won that. We actually, that was the battle that we won, which I’m sure drove Trump out of his mind, you know?
Dawne: Yeah. They might abandon this effort, maybe.
Patrick: I mean, at least the effort to, you know, completely displace the DC chief of police. And so that, I mean, yeah, like little, little victories, you know, are great. But yeah, so anyway, I recorded my whole little journey down there. I posted it on Instagram. I said, look, people like this. Look how beautiful the city is. Look how clean this metro is. And this is not because of Trump. All this was completely like unnecessary.
Dawne: Glad you did that.
Yeah.
Patrick: Yeah, and I got more views than I’d ever gotten on Instagram. But all these people are like, hey, yeah, well, that was during the day. What about at night? And it’s true.
Dawne: Is that what they said?
Patrick: Yeah, I’m getting comments like that. And it’s like, at night, I used to live down there at Union Station. Remember, we lived at 3rd and D, and I would take the metro home late at night, and I would walk that couple blocks. And I would look behind me sometimes. But you know it’s not like crazy, but I mean I’m not You know out at 3 a.m.
Dawne: You know just about ever well Yeah, I think any city at 3 a.m. It is kind of you know kind of your You know, you’re definitely attempting fate more at three in the morning.
Patrick: Yeah, especially if you’re trying to buy drugs.
Dawne: Well, yeah, you know, who knows what that little guy was trying to do.
Patrick: I can’t think of any other explanation. I mean, yeah, but anyway.
Dawne: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know, but yeah, I think It was interesting to see, so Sinclair Media, they are based in the Baltimore area, not Baltimore City, but Baltimore County. And Baltimore County is it’s crazy because it’s essentially it should be part of the city and they just don’t want to like all the people that like the developers people who are making money in the city live in the county and that way a lot of tax revenue is not being generated or stays in the city and it goes back over the line into the county. So Baltimore County extracts wealth from the city. The city doesn’t get that tax revenue. So it’s not showing up in the schools. It’s not showing up in trash removal. It’s not showing up in like tons of things that should, there are entire neighborhoods in Baltimore that have never had public transportation. And we’re talking and so like in Baltimore, white flight happened a hundred years earlier than it did in like many other cities. So there are places in that city that have never been invested in. So they’ve never had access to. regular amenities. But anyway, Sinclair makes a lot of money by feeding into the fear of black cities and the fear of democratically run black cities. So they extract you know, images and especially, and it started in Baltimore. And so- Yeah.
Patrick: And so people don’t know that maybe Sinclair is like this company that bought up all these AM radio stations all over the country.
Dawne: Worse than that, they own 49% of all the local news affiliates. That’s right. They do, yeah. So it’s like, and then they editorialize it. So it’s like, they, it’s not just Fox. So like in DC, they actually bought WJLA, which is- Oh, wow.
Patrick: Seven on your side.
Dawne: They’re still doing a good job. And they were called out during that first fateful time that Trump won, that the word for word in 49 local news
Patrick: made them read off that statement.
Dawne: Yeah, verbatim, supporting Trump for president. And they keep, they’ve been buying more and more. So they probably own more than 49% now, but they make a lot of money through the, you know, like extraction of poverty, imagery of black crime of, and so it’s like, I travel a lot for work and I’ll be in another city and I’ll out of curiosity. check out the news while I’m in a hotel and generally, you know, I will be able to identify which one is the Sinclair station because of how they are and it’s weird because they report on Baltimore crime in these other cities that don’t have anything to do with Baltimore like there’s no reason and
Patrick: But it’s just porn.
Dawne: And it’s just sort of extracted and used in that way. And so it’s burned in the psyches of many Americans in all kinds of states all over the country who wouldn’t know anything about it otherwise. And then they used the mayor as an example, Mayor Brandon Scott of Baltimore, when that, and it’s completely unrelated to anything that he, that’s under his jurisdiction, but a large shipping boat crashed into the bridge. I think the key, like their key bridge. And, you know, it had some fatalities as a result of that. I’m trying to remember who, someone tweeted from, and it was like one of the right wing newscaster people that said, you’re DEI mayor. And then it had a, and people love to flip out about his hair as well. So he’s grown it out and it’s like in an Afro or something or mini Afro. And so they love freaking out about how he looks, about how he talks, the fact that he’s younger, he looks younger. He’s like under, well, he’s 40 now, but.
Patrick: Well, I’m glad you brought up Brandon Scott because just to segue, like the reason why I was so excited to talk to you about this issue in this time is that because you have this perspective based on what you’ve been doing that just completely puts the lie to the idea that any kind of like big surge of law enforcement in DC is going to solve the problem, right? Because it’s just absolutely not like, you know, there’s been, you know, over policing and zero tolerance policing, you know, in big cities for years and years and years. And yet, you know, the violence has just kind of continued to go up.
Dawne: It just perpetuates the cycle of violence. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it interrupts families. Yeah. It creates more trauma. There’s several reasons, and I’m glad that you got to watch The Body Politics.
Patrick: Yeah, and so you produced this movie called The Body Politics? Yeah. And it’s about, what’s it about?
Dawne: We followed the mayor. So we saw like at first it was just going to be like a like a just like a sorry my brain’s a little blanking right now like an election film which is a genre onto itself so there’s like who’s gonna win and like you get to know the candidates yeah it’s exciting it’s very West Wing yeah we had multiple candidates for like you know each one had their own you know
Patrick: So you were following other candidates too?
Dawne: Yeah, we followed. It was interesting because there’s two mayors recently of Baltimore who have been charged with federal offenses. So one of them was Sheila Dixon, who was forced out of office in 2016. She was basically money laundering or not money, but she was like definitely doing some things that were not great. She still won’t take full responsibility for it. She wasn’t fully charged for it. She was running, and she really went after Brandon Scott. So Brandon Scott, who did win, we found that the footage was more interesting what happened after he won rather than just him winning. And that’s not really revelatory, and that he only won by 3,000. He barely beat Sheila Dixon, who had to step down from being the mayor and she’s kind of like the like the Marion Barry almost of Baltimore like people love her and they they don’t care what she did wrong but also there’s and there’s like an age difference there’s a generational divide I would say not just with like you know, in like black politics, but like, you know, in general, I think. So older Democrats and younger Democrats are not seeing eye to eye. And so, you know, there’s more progressive policies.
Patrick: Yeah.
Dawne: And every demographic. So they’re going after him for his age, speaking down like he didn’t even have the qualifications. He’s so much smarter than she is, clearly. And the fact, she glosses over the fact that he’d already been in politics since he was 23. So he’s already been in office for 13 years. And didn’t step down because of committee.
Patrick: Is he like a city councilman or something like that? Or what was he for?
Dawne: Okay, got it. And also, so there’s also like the power culture that I think Baltimore encompassed as well politically so you’re you know you’re living high off the hog you’re you know eating off of the dime the tax dollar dime and that’s like what it’s perceived as you’re going out to fancy restaurants you belong to the private clubs You’ve got the fancy car, you’re dressed up and that’s like kind of oddly connected with respectability politics. So, you know, in the black community in particular, you have to like dress the part and you have to, you know, and it’s like, That can be left by the way sign as well. So he’s challenging a lot of conventions about like who should be in power? What do they need to look like? What rules are they playing by? He doesn’t believe in like performativity as far as like, or respectability politics that if you’re black you have to look, if you’re not like dressed in, you know. whatever, like a three-piece suit or something that you’re not considered capable or viable. So he definitely, he just challenged a lot of different notions. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he never has. He lived in a $1,100 a month apartment. Yeah, you know, he had a girlfriend the whole time who he kept out of the limelight.
Patrick: Oh yeah, you don’t see her once. You wouldn’t even know that he had a girlfriend.
Dawne: And yeah, and he also made sure to keep his, not just from us, but in general, he wanted to keep his private life. Safe and that’s really great that he did. It’s funny because Sheila Dixon they were playing so dirty They were spreading rumors that he was gay because he didn’t have a visible girlfriend Exactly part of playing the whole yeah, but also he so he his campaign manager is He might be gay. I’m not sure. I don’t want to out this gentleman, but like you know It just it was very it was so dirty.
Patrick: Yeah, and so they’re trying to affect his numbers that way Yeah, it’s very it’s very Very contentious and so it was more in his story like the movie, you know, it Yeah, he talks about it having seen his first, you know shooting before he was 10 years old Yeah, so he took completely grew up in this violence
Dawne: Well, so he was also in one of the parts of the city in Parkview that was, you know, not had never benefited from it from being invested in in any particular way. Yeah. So it was like the wrong side of the tracks, but also it was when the crack epidemics were right in most inner cities, very, very hard to escape from that. And, um, So they kind of held, I think they really held that against him as well, which is so, it’s like he’s a son of Baltimore, but not from the right part of Baltimore. Yeah, right. For them.
Patrick: So once he gets elected, he immediately wants to change the way that policing is happening. You know, he wants to address the crime issue. And I’m sure that he had other things too that he wanted, other things like, he wanted to do as a mayor besides just crime but you guys were kind of focused on the crime.
Dawne: We ended up going into the policing because that was uh well so his sort of performance as mayor was tied to the number of Homicides or in gun violence. So they they have boiled it down to numbers So that was kind of where we put our focus we had we had all kinds of things no matter who you are every mayor in Baltimore It’s just like what’s your number? What’s your number? Yeah, exactly So he there’s no way he could get away from the metrics of what then what those numbers were and they were subtly rising and no one can’t be like I’m focused on recycling Well, the very first thing he focused on actually was getting into a ship that had holes in it and that there was no systems of accountability. So technology-wise, they had to get their systems up from maybe the 90s. We’re talking about no innovation in their data systems and all sorts of things. And it was very easy for all of these other previous mayors to break laws and be able to abscond with money. Because there was no accountability. There was no systems of accountability, no one checking it. It was broken. So we had to really dig in deep and found talent nationally to build, build up. Yeah. And he’s a big data guy actually. So they worked with gov.x and they are, they’re at, they’re out of them. Hopkins, Don Hopkins. So he unsilowed data, and that’s how they figured out what changes they would make to the policing system. So they found in their data that a lot of the violence was interpersonal violence, so it wasn’t connected to a particular drug trade or it wasn’t tied to running guns or anything like that.
Patrick: That was a big change in perception, right? Because it has a huge implication for where do you focus your energy in crime reduction. If it were true that all the murders were just drug deals that went gone bad, you would go after the drug dealers or you would try and do that interdiction. But if it really is, I think in the movies, you know, he makes the example. He says, you know, I thought, you know, she was my girlfriend and he thought she was his girlfriend. And we found we found on the internet that that wasn’t true, you know, and they mentioned Instagram in particular, like they call it Instagram. It’s being like literally Instagram is like causing crime in Baltimore, you know, but it’s not tied to drugs. So that really does change the way that you do policing, right?
Dawne: Well, it was mostly, so if it’s interpersonal, it’s mostly trauma. People you know. So these are.
Patrick: Not someone you’re just buying drugs with, but someone that you know.
Dawne: Well, it’s people that you know, but it’s also, it’s more, it’s like a trauma response as well. Cause you’re not gonna care that much about what somebody says about you on Instagram unless there’s, unless there’s like, I don’t know. I mean, it’s definitely rooted in trauma to have that kind of response.
Patrick: Unless you have to show up to school and see that person or be like, you know, or whatever.
Dawne: Well, and there’s no escape. The way that kids are getting bullied now is if they’re bullied online, it doesn’t stop when they get home from school. It doesn’t stop over the summer. There’s no break from it because of social media, essentially. So yeah, social media’s created a lot of problems. But they also unsilowed different sets of data. So they were able to identify who who’s just now coming out who’s being you know who’s coming out of jail right now and because there’s a higher probability for them returning citizens there’s a higher probability for family members to be a victim of crime or to be you know to to be part of the cycle of crime because one crime will equal another crime Generally, and that a lot of the crime, a lot of the shootings were retaliatory. So if somebody shoots somebody in a deal gone wrong, then that guy’s brother is going to want to shoot the other guy’s brother. And then that’s going to start, that will be a never ending perpetual and there’s nothing stopping that violence. Like it’s an energy that just finds somewhere to go basically. And um, So they’re like, let’s remove individuals. So they started targeting specific individuals who were at higher risk and then reducing those risks for them. So because of this strategy, they were only able to like do it in one small region. And now, and then they got to do it citywide. And now crime is down, not just 33%. I think it’s even like even more.
Patrick: It’s huge, by like 50%. I think after the movie was made, yeah. I think by the end of your movie, their goal, or Mayor’s goal, Brandon Scott’s goal had been 15%, I think by the end of 2021. And they missed that goal city-wide. But in that area where they had run this Safe Streets group violence production program, they had gotten like 30%
Dawne: murder reduction, which is crazy of huge number. And it’s funny because like so many people refute refuse for a while to give him that credit.
Patrick: I’m sure.
Dawne: Yeah. And it’s like the liberal, the white liberals too, in Baltimore, it’s just very, very racist.
Patrick: Yeah. So in 2021, the murder number 337 people died and then by the way, I just thought it was very Touching to end to end the movie and also just horrible, you know But to have the mayor the ritual at the end of each year I guess they read the names of all the victims of the people who died that year Yeah, and some of them are so young.
Dawne: Yeah, no, it’s it’s when you see like just how devastating those numbers were are
Patrick: And that there are children, like babies.
Dawne: So many babies. Yeah, just bullets cutting through people’s windows. And so it’s traumatizing. And that an entire community is traumatized. So you’re already in the state of not being able to heal, of being in fight or flight. And I think that’s a powder cage for violence as well.
Patrick: Yeah. So in 2021, the number was 337. That was his first full year. And then 2022, 333, just down a tiny bit. But again, in 2021, he had had that big reduction in that area. It was the Western District or whatever. mm-hmm 2023 261 so down like like 70 murders you know and then 2024 down to 201 so that’s down that’s like a 50% reduction I mean that’s yeah amazing yeah and it’s the look like a
Dawne: Yeah, I don’t know what records it’s breaking, but it’s breaking some massive records. Yeah. So I mean, they tried, you know, hyper over-policing, particularly when Martin O’Malley was the mayor. So that was the stop and frisk era. And so we’re going back now. Was he a Democrat?
Dawne: Democrats are a big police fan. They’re big fans of police. It’s funny because one of the jobs that I had back in the day, I was a video, like we would basically broadcast on the internet live from the Department of Justice at the DOJ, so I would be there filming. And they were usually symposiums on policing or on different strategies. And I’ve heard, you know, during democratic, uh, you know, run, I mean, not, not that it met like the DOJ doesn’t, doesn’t really matter, but they would talk very openly about what, what is considered like racist policing tactics. So probable cause was, you know, and then they’d present all these cases for why it was, you know, Yeah, useful. Yeah. So a lot of these things were, were mandated and a lot of them were orchestrated by, by, by Democrats. Um, you know, the Clintons were big mass incarcerate and select the mass incarceration, industrial complex. There’s tons, you know, Democrats were feeding into that for a very long time. Um,
Patrick: Totally. Yeah. Let me save just because I really don’t, this is kind of, record again.
Patrick: And we’re recording. Yeah. Okay. Good.
Dawne: Am I? Yeah, that’s me. Okay.
Patrick: Yeah. Okay. So, um, for, I mean, this movie was crazy because you had, you were filming and talking to somebody and I’m thinking of a Tater Barksdale, which is an amazing name by the way, especially after the wire, right? Yeah. But I mean, and he was the leader of one of the safe streets programs. Is that right?
Dawne: You know, he’s one of he was one of the community, you know, leaders for a while. Yeah.
Patrick: Yeah. So did you meet him when you’re filming the movie?
Dawne: Like, no, he passed away a few months into while we were filming. So during production. I didn’t personally meet him and then we found out we had some things scheduled with him for sure and he died and there’s different theories that because some of the violence interrupters Become targets and they get made they get made an example of mm-hmm So if there’s people who are like, oh, you know, he’s messing with my turf or something like that So it’s a very dangerous job, right? Yeah, and so killing tater was like definitely a very dark moment. It might have been by accident too. There’s some different theories floating around.
Patrick: Did they catch the person who did it? Do they know who did it?
Dawne: They did finally, yes. They did finally catch. I think it was for something else. It wasn’t even for that. I don’t remember the exact details, but It was, you know, underwhelmingly not, you know, filled with justice.
Patrick: Yeah.
Dawne: Yeah. So, um, but we, when we’ve, you know, we’ve had lots of screenings now, like we’re deaf. We’re like, we’ve had a theatrical run. We’ve had, um, a festival run, you know, we’ve been, it’s been international. And so, um, Erica Bridgeford and, um, Don’t the other guy the other the other Dante will come out and speak directly to audiences. So we’ve got like a whole It’s really interesting like in LA. We had some people that were from violence interrupter organizations in California or in Southern California come to see the film which was exciting and that they’re like they feel seen Because we’ve got them, you know, yeah predominantly as part of of the the community solution to lowering violence and just improving life in general in the city.
Patrick: What does Brandon Scott think about it?
Dawne: He loves it.
Patrick: He loves it. Great.
Dawne: He loves it.
Patrick: And he’s term limited, right? He’s almost done now.
Dawne: Yeah, he’s almost, well, yeah. I mean, he just got reelected. So he’s got a few more years. So I think he’s going to be a really great leader in these Trumpian times. For the city, he’s not going to back down. He believes in doing the right thing. He doesn’t believe in, you know, cow-towing the certain powers that be. So I think that’s really great. I think he’s gonna do a great job keeping people feeling like that we can do this.
Patrick: And his relationship with the governor is probably 180 degrees different than it was with Larry Hogan who wouldn’t even meet with him for the first, what, six months of his whole mayor ship, you know, and then was just You know, essentially, it was pretty clear that Hogan would want it to fail, you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Would actually prefer that, you know, the status quo of Baltimore Fry.
Dawne: Oh, no. I mean, there’s a lot of people that win if Baltimore fails. The developers the Sinclair folks are also a lot of like there’s a lot of crossover with the developers and Sinclair Yeah, they there is of course they want to empty out the city of all the black people and take over and turn it into some kind of I don’t know giant outdoor mall Yeah, or something.
Patrick: Yeah, definitely.
Yeah
Patrick: So, do you know whether Wes Morris, like, way better, you know, wanting to fund this type of policing?
Dawne: They’re not, like, totally on the same page with everything, but they have a very good working relationship. And then I think it’s, like, some of the corporate white business people, they think Brandon’s too, like, you know, radical. They just look at them and think black radical and then they see Wes Moore as like the good kind of black person. I can’t believe I’m saying this. It’s like, I just want to vomit. But I’ve heard it from their like directly, I have some white family members of one. So this is what I’m hearing. I’m just like, okay. Thanks for sharing that.
Patrick: Well, Mayor Bowser in D.C. is clearly, you know, obviously she hates Trump with a burning passion, you know? I mean, I think they probably, like, both live and free.
Dawne: Does she hate anything, though? I just feel like she’s something.
Patrick: Well, I mean, something has changed, you know, a little bit. I mean, like, she really did fight last time around, you know, in his first term, you know? Yes, she did. And was also all about kneeling him and creating Black Lives Matter plaza right there across from the White House.
Dawne: She did.
Patrick: All this kind of thing. And now something has definitely changed this time around where she’s really taking a different tack and seems to be in retreat.
Dawne: A little bit, yeah, I think because she knows he’s got her in a corner. He didn’t have her in a corner before. He does now. Like Trump 2.0 is like much more deadly. And I think that she was emboldened. She was part of the Bloomberg mayor, like so that he creates like this cohort of mayors. and she was part of it. So she was buddy buddying around with a billionaire. So I think that helped empower her a little bit and that that’s kind of in her interest zone. Now I think she knows that she has to play more carefully with him because he’s using, he’s like, well, you can keep this, we’ll take that if you don’t, you know, I mean, she’s literally
Patrick: And he is defunding cities and he is making threats.
Dawne: We’re at that point where he has positioned himself in such a way that he does have his power.
Patrick: And the Congress is so compliant that there’s no fall back.
Dawne: They’re all compliant. Yeah. No, I mean, we’re all in a really precarious situation right now. The fact that he’s even able to hold office doesn’t make any sense. They didn’t move fast enough. He’s going after Jack Smith now.
Patrick: Oh yeah, anybody who went after him or the January Sixers, they’ve all been removed from the DOJ. It’s crazy.
Dawne: It’s crazy. Also anyone who was tracking the Russians, they’ve been fired or mysteriously died.
Patrick: Who’s mysteriously dying? I’m sure you’re right, but I can’t think of him.
Dawne: Two people. I don’t remember. two people, like one woman who had been on those cases for the longest time was found dead for no reason.
Patrick: Yeah, his funders or whatever.
Dawne: And she’s like, you know, and her family home in McLean, basically. Like there’s definitely no reason to commit suicide.
Patrick: You remember when people used to like fight for the transcripts of his phone calls, they’re like, why is he even allowed to talk to Putin on the phone, you know, without anybody? listening in like this. That’s completely out of the ordinary. Now he like goes into Putin for his reprogramming session or whatever it is. I literally like picture him like turning around and then Putin like opening a hatch on the back of his neck and putting in a new chip or something like that. But it’s like he is completely or just like rethreading and re-showing him the video that he’s extorting him with. I mean there’s just no explanation. Like you keep hearing like Is Trump a Russian asset? But then you hear, but it actually does not matter whether he is or not because he acts like a Russian asset.
Dawne: Yeah. Well, I think so now the billionaire, the certain sect of the billionaire class don’t believe in nation states anymore and that they want to kind of change that about the world. So I think that maybe that’s more along the lines of where he’s at, where they’re making these deals, and it’s just like, you know, the nation states, the best for those nation states isn’t even considered. And so, I don’t know, there’s this film called The Grab, it’s a documentary, it’s incredibly disturbing and there’s a lot of information but there’s a lot of manufacturing of scarcity in natural, and so there’s a case like in Arizona, Russians and people from Saudi Arabia or from Dubai and from wherever and they’re coming and they’re buying up land in the US and then like in places like Arizona if you own land you have the right to pump for water that’s underground and they’re siphoning it out basically they’re taking as much as they can there’s not enough groundwater for farming or for anyone that already lived there So that’s like a manufactured moment of scarcity from international powers. And he’s not going to do anything.
Patrick: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our national sovereignty. He doesn’t care at all about our national sovereignty. He cares about the sovereignty, the sovereign powers of the billionaire class to revert to feudalism.
Dawne: Exactly. Yeah. And I think that Putin probably operates in a similar fashion. So he’s operating the same way. Everything’s just there for the highest bidder. If they can get a cut, that’s great. If they can make it easier for themselves somehow. Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of where we’re at.
Patrick: So I want to talk to you about another thing because I know that you’ve been an activist for a long time and you work with young people. I know that you’re working with a group of young students in Harlem and you’re doing some filmmaking with them and that kind of thing. But I was telling you about my experience as I walk from like that. the flair, you know, kids, I call them kids, you know, because I’m 50 and they’re in their 20s probably, you know. And then going over to the free DC, and there was this like, you know, both great organizations for sure, you know, but there’s this like stark generational divide between these two different protest movements, you know, and it’s like not that either one is more or less legitimate than the other, but they cannot seem to connect together, right? And I have to say that just even on my walk between Union Square and Judiciary Square, I ran into these ladies who were kind of very interested in me and kind of interrogating me about, oh, Freedies seems like a great organization. Like, oh, yes, yes, you need to do the two-day orientation. I’m like, I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can do a two-day orientation. I can barely find half an hour to ride the metro down here. Like, oh, well, no, you have to do it. You know, and you have to do this, this, this, A, B, and C. And I’m like, you know, I’m bristling from these boomers telling me what I need to do. You know, like I’m a Gen Xer, right? And I was like, and my question is like, and I imagine that the millennials and generation Y people at the flare tent would probably feel exactly the same way of me. If I were telling them what to do, and I wouldn’t tell them what to do, I thought it was great.
Dawne: Jenix is not as annoying as a boomer.
Patrick: Yeah. I mean, these boomers are driving me crazy. Boomers be boomering. They are booming. But I just wonder, I think this is an obstacle to whatever the solution is in terms of coming together to fight this thing, this generational issue. I don’t know how we’re going to talk to each other. My family has been going to the Quaker meeting in DC. I’m actually going to officially become, I’ve applied to be a member of the Quaker meeting.
Dawne: Well, you guys have to talk everything out until everyone agrees.
Patrick: That’s right. It’s true. It’s by consensus. So they all have to meet and they have to reach a consensus about whether I can become a member. right anyway so i’m good luck my best behavior but good luck it is a you know i have to say it’s a bunch of great hairs i’m you know our family like listen i work 50 like we’re one of the youngest people there there are some younger people there but by far i’d say the average age there is probably 65 or so you know and because that includes people that are way up they need to
Dawne: get some more multi-generational Quakers.
Patrick: They do. And there’s this great organization called the Friends Committee on National Legislation, which is kind of the quicker lobbyists. And they are all trying to, you know, reach out. I was on a call with, you know, and they’re like, in the next events, we have, you know, the young friends this and the young friends that and the meeting for, you know, College, you know Quakers or whatever and someone on the call is like why are all these meetings just for just for young people? What about the elders and the person on the call is like well, that’s why frankly because we have enough elders We’re not having any trouble attracting elders. We’re having trouble attracting young people.
Dawne: Yeah, that makes sense Oh my gosh. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what the solution to any of that is. Some of the young people are acting like no one’s ever done this before. So that’s annoying. And then the older people are just annoying in general as well. So I don’t really… That’s the thing about activism is that you have to sit in the room. You have to be patient. You have to let other people talk. You have to go through some redundancies. There’s always going to be some squabbling. It’s messy. It’s messy. It’s annoying. And that’s democracy. That’s basically how it works.
Patrick: Well, there was a scene in the movie where I forget what the community meeting was. There was a whiteboard standing up there taking ideas about how we’re going to reach out to these different groups. Who do people listen to? Who are leaders? Anyway, you could just see someone You know, said, hey, well, what about this group? What about, you know, the, the barbershops and like that, you know, it’s like being a place where we can get the message out. She write barbershops and they pan back to that guy and he’s beaming. You know, and it’s just like that guy feels hurt, you know? Yeah. And I’m like that. I really like noticed that. I’m like, oh, yeah. And I have the same experience. Actually, it’s kind of part of my job too. Like I convene a lot of groups and like I end up like being the person at the whiteboard. Okay. But it is so, I mean, when people you actually do listen and even like having even writing down what they said and they recognize that you actually heard them.
Dawne: That’s nice. Yeah.
Patrick: People like light up in that same way.
Dawne: Yeah.
Patrick: But you’re right. It’s a lot of work and it’s not on their phone.
Dawne: No, it’s a lot of work.
Patrick: It’s like it’s face to face.
Dawne: It’s a lot. It can be very messy. And that’s my experience. And activism from the 90s on is that there’s always a power struggle, generally. People don’t, just because of what you’re fighting for, the egos are still there, unfortunately. So there’s always that. There’s always people that were holding each other or ourselves to impossible standards as well. So it’s just like, where, how is that? Where is that going to give? You know, and I think that’s why progressive politics where there’s no unification, like everyone under the, in the Death Star was able to align. You’ve got, you know, all the people who want the world to end. That’s their common shared goal. I feel like maybe we can get some people together who just like the planet Earth. We’d like to stay here. We want life to continue flourishing here. We don’t want to like destroy the entire ocean so we can have chat GPT-5, which is gonna be dumber than the right like there’s these like the younger people that use it they’re acting like they have dementia because they’re not thinking right yeah they don’t think and i’m like your brain is atrophying from and i call it chad gpt because that’s some chad business right there it’s it’s terrifying it’s all and i i use it i mean i i can’t I’m not going to use it. It’s not always right. It’s an amalgamation of information. It’s not necessarily the right information. And it’s not even just an amalgamation. It’s an algorithmic amalgamation. So it’s algorithmic based on my search data.
Patrick: Okay, so and other people’s and it’s literally trying to make you out like it’s trying to please you which is crazy too. And that’s cool doesn’t give a shit or didn’t give a shit. I miss it. Maybe it kind of give a shit about like whether you liked it, but not like you particularly. It’s kind of like you don’t I want to make you happy. This isn’t true. I’m going to tell you, it seems to prefer, given the choice of truth or like, you know, kissing your ass, that it’s going to make you do whatever it takes to make you happy.
Dawne: Well, I think bias confirmation is a thing. And so they, because they’ve been studying us, they’ve been studying how we use social media. And I don’t mean they as in like AI consciousness, because I don’t believe in that either. But well, we’ll say, sorry, AI, if you do come alive in your friend. But yeah. No, we have to kill the planet for AI to flourish and live, which is, it just doesn’t seem right.
Patrick: And I can use- Yeah, we’re like gonna build nuclear power plants by these AIs.
Dawne: Yeah, I can just use Google. I would prefer, and I was like, I wanna see.
Patrick: Google is now AI too, though.
Dawne: Well, I do some tasks and I avoid that.
Patrick: That top thing.
Dawne: Saying to you the other night, I couldn’t find the accurate story of the Central Park Five. And that’s a very important story because they were 14-year-old boys, black and brown boys, and Donald Trump in New York City in the 90s or late 80s, I forget exactly when, put out a full-page ad calling for them to be murdered, killed. for this. They didn’t do it. And then you go to Wikipedia and everything and you look at the AI results. The AI results also reflect a racist view and a skewed version of that story. So now we can rewrite history with AI. And I don’t know exactly where this amalgamation of information is coming from, but it’s not coming from the sources. I can’t tell what the source is. There’s no way to tell at all. So the source could be Stormfront or any other Nazi publication or whatever. So I don’t know where these sources are.
Patrick: But in your medium documentary, it’s like you’re pointing a camera at somebody. There’s no question what your source is, right? Like it’s the person who’s in the frame of the camera, right? That’s kind of cool. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can’t really lie. It’s like a real thing. Like a person can’t be like, hang on a second, you know, like, let me like chat GPT. Let me check my notes. I mean, I do have my, my notes here that I took during the movie, you know, But it’s like, you can’t really do that during, you know, when the camera’s on you. You know, we can’t do it right now, except, you know, I can kind of glance over here and get my stats.
Dawne: I mean, the way that I use the, like, so documentary filmmaking, there’s different ways. And I would, I do like Verite style, where we’re not like, now you’re on camera. But more like, we’re here, we want you to forget that we’re here, we’re documenting this. We don’t want you to necessarily address the camera.
Patrick: Like the office.
Dawne: Like, yeah, we’re not breaking the fourth wall and preferably not.
Patrick: Did that ever happen in your body politic?
Dawne: No, not in the body politic, but in my, like in other stuff, like there’s one film.
Patrick: So did Brandon Scott, was he able to forget the cameras there, do you think?
Dawne: He totally ignored the camera. Yeah, a lot, which was great. I mean, he’s already under the scrutiny of the public eye already. At first, though, he didn’t give us a lot of access. He’s like, you can show up for my press conference. So we’d like show up for his press conference or follow him to his press conference. Yeah, like he didn’t particularly enjoy being filmed. It was hard. It was actually took a lot of work to get him to, that’s why there’s like, he keeps his agency through this process. Yeah. What were you talking about? Oh, yeah. Well, so journalistic, there’s like journalistic standards and then documentary ethics, two different things. So documentary is not journalism. I mean, it should have journalistic standards, but journalism does not have documentary ethics. and then with, you know, so like I worked with this journalist and in something that he was documenting a man who was, you know, a very vulnerable died and he was dying and he filmed him dying and then he
Patrick: instead of helping? Like, could he have helped and didn’t?
Dawne: No, I mean, the guy was in a home for men who were dying of terminal illness. But it was not the right thing for him to do to film that. And I don’t think he would have done that to a white man. And then used it and then showed it. And I was like, I’m out. I was like, we need to take that out. And he’s like, well, I’m a journalist. And he was saying that journalistic standards would require him to show that. And I was like, I don’t think so. Yeah. This guy was older than me and like a Pulitzer winner and I was just like, hey, we fought about it for a while, that fought, but like I didn’t let it go for a while. And I was like, well, I’m not going to work with you. If you really are going to use that, it’s awful.
Patrick: I feel like even like war photographers don’t, you know, they have like a level of respect and restraint when it comes to that kind of thing.
Dawne: You would think so, yeah.
Patrick: We know something, you know.
Dawne: Yeah, no, I mean, I don’t think the war photographer that I worked with would have done that either, to be honest. But they all know each other.
Patrick: Talk about that crazy guy.
Dawne: One of them. I think I know who you’re talking about. I have so many. There’s so many.
Patrick: It drives you crazy probably going to war zones and shooting the stars.
Dawne: Of course. I mean, I still have compassion for whatever trauma that must create. But documentary standards or documentary ethics, you need to kind of like appreciate that person’s free will and that you have to constantly negotiate access and consent.
Patrick: Another theme like you’re just talking about like the trauma of the war photographer is like In your movie, I mean, there’s no question that self-care was a theme in the movie. Like taking care of, well, I forget her name, the woman who was here.
Dawne: Erica.
Patrick: Erica, yeah. So she was all about making sure that people were okay, including the mayor himself. And just recognizing the trauma of what they were doing. And I thought that was super important.
Dawne: Because you’re being dehumanized. It’s dehumanizing as well.
Patrick: Yeah, it’s like rehumance. It’s like preserving your humanity in the face of this.
Dawne: And that we’re not allowed to stop down and recognize how deeply horrifying all this is. Yeah.
Patrick: And she also talked about her journey of dealing with the media and becoming savvier about it and realizing that she could push back and that she could question the question.
Dawne: Yeah. There’s that whole moment in the film. They do ask and they frame the story in a particular way. You have to be on the defensive depending on what is being asked or how it’s being asked. that you don’t have that agency and so yes journalism is and also like in journalism frequently they they’re not going to have more than three minutes to have to explain a story or 30 seconds even they might have to do something in a 30 second sound bite so they have to they report differently than let’s say a documentary would yeah the documentary is not about telling you what to think it’s about you coming to that conclusion on your own and that there’s things that are revelatory that happen that will unfold hopefully instead of having somebody sort of dictate to you or narrate it or, you know, I think it’s, you know, my, at least the verite style is that you’re immersed in the experience. Yeah. And that’s what makes it transformative.
Patrick: Well, it was a really good movie. Thanks. Well, that’s all I’ve got. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Dawne: Thank you, too. I’m so happy to be your guest.
Patrick: Thank you. OK, great. Thanks a lot, man.
Dawne: Bye-bye.
Bye.