Last we spoke with Brandon del Pozo, he had just finished his PhD after concluding a long and was looking for a home for his research agenda. Now at home in academia, he realized he could spread innovation better by getting beyond the local beat. Find out how reflecting on what you've seen and know locally can have eventual large-scale impact.
When Brandon del Pozo first thought about the life of an academic, it seemed way too slow-paced. Like Jack Kerouak, he needed to go experience what people were doing across America. But once he'd walked that road, he realized he could spread innovation by getting beyond the local beat. After concluding his long policing career, he did go back for his PhD and had just completed it when he first spoke with Roads Taken, somewhat in academic limbo as a postdoctoral researcher.
In this episode, find out from Brandon how reflecting on what you've seen and know locally can have eventual large-scale impact …on Roads Taken Revisited with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Brandon del Pozo is currently an assistant professor of medical and health services, policy and practice at Brown University. He conducts NIH-funded research at the intersection of public health, public safety, and justice, focusing on substance use, the overdose crisis, and violence. Prior to his research career, Brandon served as a police officer for 23 years, 19 with the New York City Police Department and an additional four as Chief of Police of Burlington, Vermont, where he directed the city's interdisciplinary response to the opioid crisis, an effort associated with a substantial and sustained reduction in opioid overdose deaths. His book, The Police and the State: Security, Social Cooperation, and the Public Good, was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. You can find out more at brandondelpozo.com. (240)
For Brandon’s first appearance on Roads Taken, listen to The Philosopher Officer.
Find out how reflecting on what you've seen and know locally can have eventual large-scale impact..
Brandon del Pozo: He was telling me, well, at this point, if you want to be a philosophy professor, you will apply to graduate school, go to graduate school, spend, you know, five to seven years in graduate school, getting your doctorate and then become a philosopher. And I was, okay, I'll be honest. I was like, my God, that sounds incredibly boring. I love these big issues at the time that had implications, but I was like, no.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Last we spoke with Brandon del Pozo, he had just finished his PhD after concluding a long career in policing. Finally at home in academia, he realized he could spread innovation better by getting beyond the local beat. Find out how reflecting on what you've seen and know locally can have eventual large-scale impact...on today's Roads Taken Revisited with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with my friend Brandon del Pozo, and we are here for a very special Roads Taken Revisited, having talked to Brandon when he was beginning a transition of sorts, and we're always transitioning, so let's see where he is now in the whole thing, walking the road. So Brandon, thanks so much for being here.
Brandon del Pozo: Great. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
LJR: So last time we did the whole who were you? What did you want to do? All those things. And we realized that you had spent a lifetime really in a number of progressive roles that put you smack in the face of police reform, system based reform and you realized you needed to do all of that work from a different angle. Walk us through when we were, I guess, three years ago. That's crazy that we last talked.
BDP: Yeah, it seems like it's three years. I was thinking about that. Cause I remember originally either listening to or setting up our first podcast in the parking lot of a Staples in Plattsburgh, New York. And that would have been probably at the height of covid.
LJR: Podcasts are so fancy, aren't they?
BDP: I was buying, you know why? We were looking to stockpile SodaStream, like, gas, gas bottles. Did you make it through? They were a commodity and we found a lead on them, like in Plattsburgh, New York. So I was up there with family. So that would have put this, yeah, like in, let's say for argument's sake like late, like mid to late 2020, possibly 2021. But nonetheless a long time ago. Or maybe it was yesterday, right? But yeah, a few years. So then I had resigned from policing in December of 2019. I'd been a police officer up through chief of police, all the ranks. From 97 to 2019, so for about 23 years, I rose through the ranks in the New York City Police Department, commanded police precincts, did intelligence work for, you know, the counterterrorism folks overseas, lived in the Middle East, all that stuff, worked in the police commissioner's office, was a strategic planner.
Then was the Chief of Police of Burlington, Vermont, which is a small city, but it's Vermont's largest city. I realized—between drug policy and overdose and police reform and even things like gun violence, the…—I could probably have more influence and would probably be happier if I was doing it from the research side.
So then I was a postdoc. I think when we spoke. Fast forward, I'm faculty at the medical school at Brown in the school of public health at Brown in Providence, where I do research. LJR: Yeah. And that walk. Actually, I remember a walk that you told us about, walking across the green and being very philosophical. But the walk that took you to that place of being a professor, that could have been a place that you envisioned when you were walking across the green, but you took this practical route in the beginning and have a very different background than, I'm guessing, any every colleague of yours at Brown.
BDP: Yeah. You know, there were a few colleagues out there that have a bit of police experience, you know, in academia in general, not, not very many. I can think of a few pretty notable ones. To be honest, for most of them, it's, you know, three years, five years, seven years at like one or two ranks, not necessarily 23 years at, you know, in two departments. And then there seems to be another path, which is you do your 20, 25 years as a police officer and you become a professor, but it's really sort of like semi-retirement. Like you're an adjunct professor teaching a few classes or your faculty, but your faculty at pretty much like a non-research university where, again, where you're teaching something like criminal justice. But to insist on being different, you know, I did the, the 23 years of policing and then went into what is sort of like a pressure cooker of getting research funding and getting the results out there. I think since we've spoken, I've been funded by the National Institutes of Health on two major grants to look at policing and drug policy, and then a bunch of smaller grants as well, to look at like just the way we can make a dent in the overdose crisis. And as you mentioned, like I did not go straight into this type of grad school slash professorship out of undergrad.
So number one, I was a philosophy major and my PhD is in philosophy. It was another, that's another pivot. But I remember talking to professor Moore, one of my you know, like such a wonderful professor. He was telling me, well, at this point, if you want to be a philosophy professor, you will apply to graduate school, go to graduate school, spend, you know, five to seven years in graduate school, getting your doctorate and then become a philosopher. And I was, okay, I'll be honest. I was like, my God, that sounds incredibly boring. I love these big issues at the time, you know, abortion, the death penalty, all these big philosophical issues that had implications, but I was like, no. There's this line from—like, this is going to sound so cheesy—but there's this line from on the road where Jack Kerouac. So it's ironic: He takes a job actually is like the railroad police. And he's sitting there in the railroad depot talking to other railroad police and he's like all I could do is one—I'm paraphrasing—all I could do is want to get out there and find out what everyone else was doing all over the country. And ironically, I felt like being a cop would actually give me that in New York City and then up in Vermont finding out what everyone else was doing all over the country and going straight into being a professor would have for me, for my own personality, and which was not well disciplined and circumspect and would have stifled me. So I took this like really obtuse long…
LJR: Did you think, as a one- or two-year in police officer. Oh, Oh, it's out there. I'll go back and be the philosopher or be the professor? Was that in the cards?
BDP: No, I think I was. So first of all, my lovely wife, Sarah said to me when we first met, we met in 97, she said, You know, you should be a writer. Like your writing is in your blood. And she didn't specify like academic writing, popular writing, but very like, you'll be fighting the urge to do this for the rest of your life. And so I was always, so I enrolled. I started enrolling in graduate school in 1999, maybe 2000 around then. And it's pretty much stayed in until 2019, just getting these different degrees. But I guess there was this tension where I really loved the practical aspect of policing. Just solving these, solving, responding to crises. Crises that had an immediate consequence, but I always like, I would write these op eds or write these essays and then not publish them because I was like, my boss wouldn't like this. The mayor wouldn't like this. I’d publish a few; I'd get like a strong reaction from city hall. So I was, oh, and that pressure was building over the years. And then by the time I left policing, I think for me professionally, it had run its course. And I was done. I wanted to go on now. I love the freedom. I gave up freedom for experience and discipline and being part of a big, big collaborative effort on the part of the government. Now I have the opposite. Like I run a pretty—by comparison—a research shop. I have to people who report to me as great collaborators and complete freedom to run my day, which is you can tell I'm giggling. I'm still, I'm still a little high on that.
LJR: Exactly. It's a different world. Well, I have to harken back to a conversation we had earlier where the, our first episode where you retold running into someone at a cocktail party and they gave you a bit of an epiphany. And when you told that story, it was a little epiphany for me, too. And I've held on to this, that…
BDP: You want me to tell this?
LJR: No, I will tell it as I remember it. And you can tell me if I had it right…that you were kind of hemming and hawing. Do I need to stay a little longer? There are things I could still accomplish. You know, I have X number of years, maybe X plus two is what I need to do. And this guy said, Really, are you going to be all that better off? Will you have learned much more if you stay that one or two extra years? Is it really about the learning or is it about like some number that you had in mind? And maybe that's not right.
BDP: Yeah, no, no. You're very, very, very close.
LJR: Close, close.
BDP: I was debating whether to go to the Burlington Police Department to be the chief or to stay in the New York City Police Department. And I thought—and I probably used this at the time—that the NYPD was like Samson's hair. You know, it's the NYPD. You're not just, you know. any police department. You're the largest municipal agency in the U. S., second in the world. Like, New Delhi's bigger, but totally disanalogous. And if I left, I'd be giving up, like, the mantle of the NYPD. And he said, like, at cocktail parties like these or looking back on your life or in any situation, no one's going to say, He was an NYPD cop, but only for 19 years, not 21 years. He said, once you've walked the beat in the NYPD, you get to take that with you for the rest of your life. And, and no, one's going to like, look back and say, well, for how many years did you do it? Were you, that's a totally internally imposed number. So don't let it stifle you. It sounds like you're using it to stifle yourself. And that was the epiphany. And to me, that translates into, like, once you really capture the essence of the experience, and once you've fulfilled your basic duties, right? You don't want to leave people high and dry or abandon an enterprise. But once you do that, the reasons for staying are often just internal and psychological, and bear that in mind, they may, in fact, be stifling you. And I think about that a lot, like, I mean I could go on.
LJR: Oh, I was just, I wanted to tell you, I think about it a lot, too. And it's actually helped me, you know, extricate myself from things that, now I might even just be dead weight here. You know (BDP: Yeah.) I'm sitting here thinking. Oh, I need to hold on and keep contributing But am I really contributing or have I gotten out of it what I need to get out of it, what they've gotten out of me. It's just it's a helpful thing to realize so much of it is self-imposed.
BDP: Yeah, I mean and so you want to do your duty right like if you're in the middle of some huge endeavor that’s like has a meaningful outcome, you don't wanna go, oh, well I got the title and I got the pay, and I got the experience that I need. I'm outta here. You know, that's not, that's…I don't know. That sounds wrong to me.
LJR: Right.
BDP: But another possibility is like shouldering yourself with duties. Like, oh, I can't leave. I have a duty to stay. Like, you can overestimate that.
LJR: Right. Right.
BDP: Right? But let's say for argument's sake, you have a really good handle on that. The rest of it is self-imposed, right? And I think sometimes, right, sometimes, so there was a a chief of police, Kathleen O'Toole, who was a successful chief in Boston, a very successful chief in Seattle. She does a lot of consulting work now, but a similar piece of wisdom she gives police executives is: you'll find in retrospect that it was easy to get hired, but knowing when and how to leave is by far the hardest thing you'll do.
LJR: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Well, we're not in the stage that you're leaving where you are, because you just got there. So tell us a little bit about that freedom and how it is that you choose to spend your days and what you're concentrating on and what you've
BDP: Yeah. So I did like accelerate to a nice position in research like fairly quickly and part of that is, is not genius or maybe wisdom just cause I'm…We're old now, right? I'm old. You're not.
LJR: No, no.
BDP: Time is, this is like interstellar. You know, in Princeton, the time travels slowly, but in the rest of the world, I'm like entering my sixth decade. But it was just because I had a lot of life experience and I'd been around a lot of smart, thoughtful people. And I wasn't a 30 year old with a brand new PhD entering academia. I had a brand new PhD and, you know, and another 20 Years of experience, right? So, so I came to this point where I think like I was able to enjoy a lot of the things that come of having a solid footing in research, which is number one, you got to get, in my position, external funding. So I'm funded by the NIH. I'm funded a bit, just a tiny bit, but hopefully more by the NIJ, National Institute of Justice. But you get to decide what to pitch them. And you can't pitch them something from completely out of left field. But examining how police respond to addiction and overdose and examining how they respond to alternatives to arrest to get people into treatment, something that fascinates me…I pitched them researching that. Also like in the annals of obscurity, I was instrumental to decriminalizing a type of very effective addiction medication in Vermont and Rhode Island. And I pitched studying the effects of that, right? Which is a passion of mine. So they're like, okay sounds good. Here's the money to go pursue your passion. Right? And so my supervisor and research basically said I'll, I'll switch tracks to bring it home this way. Like I was in the Grand Canyon with my family last year. And I missed a meeting and I got a text like, are you coming to the faculty meeting? And I said I'm sorry, I'm actually on vacation in the Grand Canyon. And she wrote back, thanks for telling me. So the former soldier and cop was like, thanks for telling me, was a passive aggressive way. Like, thanks for telling me, like I should have told her. So when I saw her in person, I said, I'm sorry I didn't tell you. And she goes, no, no, no, thank you for telling me. And I said, like, what do you mean? I wasn't at the meeting. She said, well, I don't want you to misspend money. And I want you to meet the research goals you set for yourself, and that's how I'm going to judge you. Other than that, I don't care where you are or what you're doing. And I was like, whoa! I've never had that before.
So, what that enables me to do is, number one, like, if you pick the research projects you like, and you can get them funded, you have the freedom to work on them, which is hard. I've had beginner's luck at that. I'm funded for the next few years. But people stress out. But, but, when you're not stressed and you're funded? Again, you're, you're, you're doing like pretty smart work with pretty smart people. It's thoughtful and hopefully collaborative. And then disseminating it, getting the information out there. And there's two vectors to that. One is within the research community—so going to the conferences and the research events, and those are different places all over the country. And then getting research like this out to practitioners and officials, right? So I've been to Austin, Texas, to deal with Texas officials and Texas scientists about the addiction and overdose crisis in Texas. So I'm down there having barbecue and meeting really interesting people. Then right after that, I went to brief the governor's office in Minnesota and a bunch of chiefs of police in Minnesota. And then next week I'm going to Chicago to talk to some folks there. And I like travel as you could tell, but I think being in contact with all, you know, that idea from On the Road, getting out and finding out what everyone's doing all over the country. Like, I always thought that was super exciting. And if you're a researcher doing something topical, I guess you get to do that, right? I published in like, I can just go on the laundry list of Boston Globe, the Philly Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times. And I used to worry, I used to write these op eds and never send them anywhere because I was worried that like a mayor or my boss in policing would be angry. Now it’s like my job. It's my job to send these op eds in. It's my job to write papers and it's my job to go talk to people about science and policy. Like that's, that's a gift.
LJR: Yeah. It sounds like you're exactly where you need to be. And I love the practitioner part being coupled with the dissemination at large and the writing. Because my question for you was going to be after years and years of feeling as though I am responding to a crisis, which means I need to assess and diagnose and deal and make it go away or be better and see that immediate fruit of the labor, right? How is it now, when it is incremental chipping away at the bigger problem. Impact is the same, but different. You know what I mean?
BDP: No, that's a good question. And I think about it. So a few things. One, I think when it comes to handling those, those crises, the practical ones that it, like the chiefs of police and those bosses handle, like there's a lot of really, really good men and women out there who could handle your garden variety crises, whether it's a hostage situation or a huge civic event, or, God forbid some act of, you know, terrible violence. And I have faith in the workaday sense of, any of those things happening of like many many many talented people out there doing it. Certainly, I don't add a lot on the margin to that. On the other hand, I was always like trying to innovate things or push them a little—not reinvent wheels or you know sell snake oil—but figure out like wait, wait: the way we're responding to overdose in the police setting can be really improved and here's how I want to do it. In that regard policing is in a holding pattern right now. Like the last few years have been very contentious. And when you look at you what police agencies are doing, a lot of it is still responding to big crises that will unfold in big cities. But the innovation that would inspire me is sort of on hold as policing and America gets its bearings as we see who the next president this is. And there's so many variables. Then on the flip side, maybe it's that I'm a rookie and I have the excitement, but I published a few studies that, although they are incremental in the grand scheme of knowledge, like they've gotten a lot of interest from policymakers in a really satisfying way. I mean, we found that New York City opened up too safe injection sites, two overdose prevention centers, and there was a big worry that—not only there, but wherever else these sites might open—that crime and disorder would go up, that there'd sort of be magnets or criminal behavior. We had a really nice article, my colleagues and I, Aaron Chalfin and David Mitra Bessaril, in the Open Journal of the American Medical Association, that showed crime did not go up in the vicinity or the neighborhood, the wider neighborhood, around New York City's overdose prevention centers. Took us almost a year to do it. I thought it was a well-designed study. Like that got a lot, granted, tiny piece of knowledge, throwing it on the heap of knowledge. In everyday time it got a lot of interest, right? It was covered around the country. I'm still getting calls about, will you go on the record to my community to explain this? So I’m not saying…
LJR: Incremental at scale is still big. Right?
BDP: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, so I'm saying, like, I've had a few papers like that, right, since we last spoke. We had a paper that found that, you know, Chicago was called Chiraq, like, meaning it's as violent as Iraq.
LJR: Oh.
BDP: One of the things we wondered was, is that trope true? So we looked at military age males in Chicago, Philly, New York, and L.A. and asked the question, Is it safer for them to live in the most violent neighborhoods of their city or would it have been safer for them to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan? And we found that in the most violent neighborhoods of Chicago and Philly, the young men who were about military age would have been at much reduced risk, would have been much safer just fighting at war in our most recent wars than just living at home. Not so in L. A. and New York. It's actually phenomenally safe in comparison in those cities for even the people in the most violent areas. But, like that was, you know, it's one thing—around the time of the Chicago elections—it's one thing to say, Chicago has this reputation, but like, what does it really mean? And it's not that bad. And another thing to say, no, like we've, we've got the data.
LJR: It is that bad.
BDP: The young men in these communities, like if they want to escape the violence of Chicago should have gone to fight in Afghanistan. Like that got a fair amount of coverage too. And it felt like we were informing the debate. So again, tiny piece of knowledge, but like it got some uptake in a way that, in the arc of a human life, that felt satisfying.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah, and I'm sure there's more to come on that because, unfortunately, we are in this time where we haven't quite gotten it right and people aren't really listening and who knows what's right.
BDP: Yeah, I mean, we still haven't, we haven't ever-escalating gun violence. So, I mean, if I were to pick two, I said this to a colleague when I talk about like the research agenda, like if I wanted to start a center what it would concern, it would be broadly health, safety and justice. But I think the big health and safety issues that bear on justice these days are overdose, which kills 105, about, about 100,000 people a year now, which is the largest cause of accidental death in the U. S. Double that of roadway deaths, like quintuple that of homicides. And then gun violence generally, not just the homicides of gun violence, but the, the way that gun violence permeates, like our civic life. Where the answer, so many people's answer is, no no no, you don't understand. Just, just carry more guns. If everyone had guns and sorry, you could tell by my tone of voice, how I feel about this as a former soldier and police officer trying to create a civic life where you did not have to worry about these things. But you know, we have this escalating gun violence, this escalating violence in schools. We have this idea that we could have like, not just gun violence, but mass gun violence almost anywhere. And then a bunch of Americans that see that happening, but perceive the risk in a way where their answer is, well, clearly we should all just be prepared to gunfight. That's what a civilized society does. More guns everywhere. I think that's a terrible idea. And I'd love to just try to get us back to a, frankly, like a more civilized place where we're not a nation obsessed with guns.
LJR: Yeah, I'm, I'll join that.
BDP: Just the NRA is, is having a conniption right now.
LJR: Yeah, they won't be funding you, but perhaps…
BDP: No, they definitely…in fact, every single time they’ve mentioned me, they said I'm a terrible human being that like, Loved by communists and hated by red blooded Americans. It's amazing. They actually wrote that in their magazines about some of the stuff I've said. I just said like you shouldn't be able just to carry a gun everywhere all the time without any regulations. They're like “you communist.”
LJR: Right.
BDP: That's the NRA for you, folks.
LJR: Well, so it seems as though you have this agenda of things that you want to be thinking about and you do want funding for, and it just takes time. But it also affords you time. So life outside. Is there a life outside of being this thinker and professor, it sounds like the Grand Canyon?
BDP: Yeah, it's actually better than it was as a chief of police. I think my family's happier. As a chief, you know, my day was more structured. Like, I could easily finish this podcast with you and then work until the sun goes down and comes up again. Because it's all self-managed, and if you're intrinsically motivated and like, you know, excited, you just keep working and working. The only chemical dependency I have to keep moving is caffeine, so I hit a limit as to how long I can work. But anyway, in policing it wasn't that, you know, you could have a crisis strike at any time. I remember on my wife's birthday down in the Hudson Valley celebrating it in December, like around Christmas is her birthday. There was a homicide up in Burlington and I had to just get in the car at 11 at night, drive back up to Burlington and run a homicide investigation. You don't have that type of emergency as often in academia. So number one, the flexibility allows me to carve out more time. My kids, my older son is on varsity basketball and soccer. I get to see his games. He's a great athlete. My younger son is like a really, he's what we call in skiing a park rat. He's a freestyle skier, takes the training up at Whiteface Mountain in New York. We spend a lot of time up there skiing. I love, my knees don't love it. My knees remind me that I'm like a traitor to my knees.
LJR: You're not the 30 year old PhD here.
BDP: No, no, the 30 year old knees had…these knees are, I've since broken both of them. They're just out of there. It's a longer story. This is not a medical podcast, but. A lot of skiing, and I live in a little village on the Hudson River, an hour north of New York City. Part of having funded research is not always having to be at your university, so, you know, getting the research done on behalf of the university.
LJR: Well, it sounds as though that's exactly where you need to be (BDP: Yeah) and I think society needs you to be doing that work, caffeine fueled as it might be, (BDP: Yeah) to get us to a better place, and we appreciate it, and we're so glad that we could check in with you.
BDP: Yeah, thanks.
LJR: That was Brandon del Pozo who currently is an assistant professor of medical and health services, policy and practice at Brown University. He conducts NIH-funded research at the intersection of public health, public safety, and justice, focusing on substance use, the overdose crisis, and violence. Prior to his research career, Brandon served as a police officer for 23 years, 19 with the New York City Police Department and an additional four as Chief of Police of Burlington, Vermont, where he directed the city's interdisciplinary response to the opioid crisis, an effort associated with a substantial and sustained reduction in opioid overdose deaths. His book, The Police and the State: Security, Social Cooperation, and the Public Good, was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.
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