Discrimination and Disparities: Is Policing a Bigger Problem Than Crime? | OLD PARKLAND CONFERENCE

[Music] again i'm jason reilly of the manhattan institute and our next discussion is is titled discrimination and disparities another book title from thomas saul from a few years ago is policing a bigger problem than crime and along with the last panel education um uh i i think that um that the discussion around crime in this country is is criminal um frankly um you know as i watched those george floyd protests play out a few years ago it it was otherworldly to me um i think like a lot of people in this room um i've lived in in low-income black neighborhoods gone to school in those neighborhoods worked in those neighborhoods and i don't ever recall a time when the people living there thought the police were a bigger problem than the criminals and that was the narrative constantly pushed um it sort of reached its apex under after the floyd uh murder in minneapolis but it didn't start there and and that has been the direction of this discussion in recent years and i find it otherworldly that we've reached a point where law enforcement is being blamed scapegoated for social inequality in america if only these those police would leave black people alone everything would be fine that seems to be i mean it's a slight caricature but it's largely the direction the conversations i hear uh so we wanted to assemble a panel to discuss to discuss to help me understand what is going on here and um i will give for the sake of time some brief introductions of of my panelists uh if you want longer longer versions they should be in the in the package you have but beginning my far left is uh ralph mangul also a senior fellow at the manhattan institute um roland fryer is a professor of economics at harvard and um janice rogers brown uh who in a more just world would be on the supreme court right now but that is uh that's another panel discussion um served as a judge on the u.s circuit court of appeals for the district of columbia so we have a very distinguished uh panel here and i wanted to start uh with you judge judge brown um on sort of a 30 000 foot question critics of our criminal justice system point to the racial disparities in arrests and incarceration and conclude that the system is inherently racist um how do you respond to that charge is there evidence that blacks are treated differently for the same offenses and if racism isn't driving these imbalances in the system what is well i think um with uh homage to tom soul he talked about the problem with disparities equaling discrimination and he starts that he has a book by that name and he starts the section on criminal justice with the um quote from mark twain that there are three kinds of lies lies damn lies and statistics and and so his point is that you can have a number which seems to be factual which is in fact accurate but which is misleading if you don't know the premise that is being used in order to develop that information so for instance most of what we see that says uh you know there's a big problem with the criminal justice system with arrest and sentencing and conviction is based on um looking at these numbers and then looking at the proportion of black people in the general population which of course is not the relevant criteria when when you don't do that when you look at the rate of violent crime and the proportion of black people who are involved then those differences tend to disappear now i'm not i don't do empirical work and i'm not somebody who figures out statistics but and i think our other panelists will talk about that but it's very clear that we're not seeing a true picture because people tend to focus on what gives them a number that looks like the most outrageous number that you could come up with and there has to be a reason for doing that there has to be some payoff um jason in his book about tom soul tom soul says if you want to help people you tell them the truth and so i think the reverse is also true if you want to manipulate people uh you give them propaganda right um you distort the information in such a way as to have them have an emotional reaction to it instead of being able to think about it logically okay um professor fryer uh a few years ago you you dropped uh the equivalent of a nuclear bomb into this conversation with a study that that you published and got widespread attention um it was a study about uh policing and and race and i wonder if you could uh talk about your findings uh you know what what did the data show and and what did it not show sure and before i start i just want to say that i thought this was going to be the easiest paper i'd ever written in my entire career i just i was so biased against the police myself frankly so i i thought this is clear i'm gonna get some data i'm gonna show the police are discriminating and this is a way to protest because being outside actually protesting i don't you know i like the sun so uh any rate so what we did is we collected millions and millions of data points um across the country and the the paper has there's kind of three basic points number one we wanted to try to understand whether or not there were racial differences on lower level uses of force routine stops where people might be thrown up against a car or the weapon pulled on them etc and and that's hard to find data on that because in a routine arrest putting handcuffs on someone or kind of putting them up against a car well that's that's that's what you do that's business they don't even collect data on that and so it's really difficult to find um millions of data points on police stops where uh it was just policing just uh you know kind of civilian contact type things so we did that and what we found was that there are large racial differences in lower level uses of force putting hands on people throwing them up against a car etc and probably the most disturbing fact is that um even when the police themselves say the suspect was fully compliant the racial difference in uh the likelihood of having force don't used on you a person wasn't arrested there was nothing and the person was fully compliant according to the police it's still 25 okay and so we found very large racial differences in police and this paper's been attacked a lot i i think it's withstood a lot of these attacks but the one of the things that people say was oh roland's so dumb he's using data on the police you can't trust that right okay i'm not quite as dumb as i look if you have data from the police that show bias right then that's kind of a lower bound of the true bias duh are we allowed to say duh anymore i'm bringing it back so there are large racial differences in lower level uses of force okay then what we did was we collected data on 18 cities on actual shootings so our first data set came from right here in dallas texas and i'll never forget it because we were foraging around trying to find data it's very it turns out if you just call the police department say could you give me all your data on police shootings you know it doesn't turn out well so so we did all this and we got 300 shootings from here in dallas and i'll never forget i sat down at my my coffee table put my my two daughters to sleep got a strong cup of coffee and and i thought i can't believe police shoot people the way they do and i read these 300 narratives they're 50 pages a piece we had 300 of them and so what we found though when we did all those cities and in houston we had the best data of all of our data sets and because we not only had all of the shootings that had happened in houston for 15 years we had a randomly pulled by us set of interactions with police where force would have been justified but wasn't used okay sorry to be a data nerd but you need the zeroes here or as uh derek neal my friend from university chicago told me when i was writing the paper we need the risk sets you need to understand what could have happened okay and houston afforded that on two dimensions number one i know i'm going too long but i'm sorry um houston afforded that in two dimensions one zero one we could tell whether or not we thought the purse the force could have been used but wasn't okay and second uh in houston on the strong hip they carry a glock 9 on the we kept they carried taser so we could look at gun versus taser in any i'll cut to the chase in any way we cut the data there were no racial differences in shootings okay and it was like people lost their minds right i mean the attacks were so funny i mean not all of them some were like whoa but but some of them were so funny like oh my god he's using regressions right i was like i thought that's what we did i mean i didn't know that's what we did before um and or but the real one of the real critiques was um uh you know if you look at the videos um that were that we're all shown it is to oversimplify traffic stops gone amuck okay and so um the question then becomes hey roland if you are starting with a set of traffic stops isn't that a biased set because you know that in itself could be biased okay absolutely fair the issue is you have to actually really look at the data you got to go beyond that because more than 80 of shootings happen uh with 9-1-1 calls for service so that if you actually sit and look at the narratives what you'll see is the vast majority of police shootings are there is a robbery in progress three people call the police they can see a gun the police come down and they shoot the suspect okay it is these 12 videos or so or 15 that we've seen that are horrific don't get me wrong uh are just not what the data tell you okay now could you convince me that in the distribution of egregiousness of police shootings that if you went at the 98th percentile that there's a racial difference in 98 percent maybe but you can't estimate that with 15 data points okay what i'm saying is that the mean of that distribution is zero okay so big racial differences in lower level uses of force none when it comes to shootings and uh the the last piece is and i promise i'm looking 30 seconds is that um what we did was say okay well let's look at the way federal the federal government investigates police departments and the issue that happens is that what we found in the data is that when an investigation is announced in the more recent kind of history that we live in so there's virality of the video and then you go and thump your chest and announce an investigation of the chicago police department for something like laquan mcdonald what happens is the police pull back okay it the month if you look at the police civilian interactions in chicago the month before the investigation and the month after the amount of regular old contact between civilians and the police went down 89 percent it's the most beautiful graph disturbing but beautiful graphically produced in my career i mean it's just phenomenal okay and then crime goes up so what we we estimate is that for the the three awful shootings and lives that we lost uh michael brown freddie gray and laquan mcdonald where there were investigations those investigations caused a thousand additional lives lost one quick follow-up even though you found uh racial disparities and non-lethal use of force to judge brown's point can we assume from that that racial bias is the reason well there's a series of statistical tests that that we put the data through and um for example gary becker outlined this thing he called an outcomes test in his nobel speech in 1993 and we put the data through that test and so yes we actually do believe on the lower level uses of force there is bias there it's not just a disparity the issue jason is i i've talked to hundreds of cops trying to understand this research it's like a mantra when you ask them about shootings they'll say things like discharging your weapon is a life-changing event i have never heard anyone say roughing up a black teenager is a life-changing event yeah okay and so maybe there's some incentives et cetera that we can put i think there are solutions to that which i hope we get to solutions but yes we do i think that the lower level uses of force are bias but we don't find the differences in shootings and i ask you that because i think while there are some on the left who have misread your data some on the right have read too much into it and and i wanted to give you a chance to reply to that as well yeah i mean i again something about this paper makes people lose their minds and um uh you know i had people sending me emails saying thank you this shows me why the nfl shouldn't be kneeling and i'm like what are you talking about i have no i [Laughter] have no idea what you're talking about right and so um i think that yes it's been misused for folks political agendas and and i tried to write it up i did write an op-ed in the wall street journal trying to be very very clear about this the thing about the lower level uses the forces that are that are important is they happen thousands of times a day and if we're going to really do real reform with with police not to police then maybe that's an area to start right and so that's why i like to emphasize that um uh ralph you've done a lot of reporting on on crime interviewed police chiefs police officers and so forth um how do you respond to the argument that low-income minority neighborhoods are over policed and that's why we have these racial disparities in our jails and prisons the the police spend all their time in these neighborhoods so of course they're going to find more criminality in these neighborhoods yeah um i mean there are a couple ways to respond to that i mean one thing i like to say is that i'm old enough to remember when one of the central critiques about police racism was that they weren't responsive enough to black crime there you know you can hear it in rap music these references to how long it takes police to respond to a 911 call in a black neighborhood versus a white neighborhood we reformed that institution over the course of the 1990s into the early 2000s and made police extremely responsive to crime in the black community which is disparate that's just a reality right one of the things that gets really left out of the conversation about disparities in criminal justice and policing is that we we tend to focus on one side of the ledger right we look at the costs associated with enforcement we look at these measures in disparities and arrests and incarcerations and in uses of force what we'd never talk about that were the outputs of the of that system and that's it's not the arrest is not the only output use of force is not the only output so are crime reductions when you talk to police chiefs in any part of the country the thing that they tell you that they're most proud of are when they presided over a reduction in crime now who benefits from that well that's the other side of the ledger in the united states black americans make up about 13 of the population and in 2020 constituted 53 of homicide victims in my home city of new york every single year a minimum a minimum of 95 of all shooting victims are either black or hispanic almost all of them are male so you have to ask yourself what do you want police to do is it right that on the upper east side of manhattan that that precinct should have as many police resources dedicated to it as east harlem which has a homicide rate that's 3 or 4x i think that if that were the reality the critique about racism in police would be real um and thankfully it's not and so yes it is true that when you have police officers spending a disproportionate amount of their resources in time in low-income minority neighborhoods you're going to have a disparity in terms of outcomes in low-income minority neighborhoods but that's where police are needed and the benefits are disproportionately dispersed to those areas there was a study by a criminologist named patrick sharkey who looked at the homicide decline between 1990 and 2014. that homicide declined was i mean it was really one of the biggest achievements in urban american history if you ask me i mean it was our homicide rate was cut in half as a country in my home city of new york we went from 2262 murders in 1990 to 292 in 2017. i mean um well he looked at the racial um uh sort of dispersion of the benefits associated with that it added 0.14 years to the life expectancy of white men in this country and 1.0 years to the life expectancy of black men in this country the public health equivalent of that as he puts it would be to eliminate heart disease altogether or obesity altogether i mean it's just profound so no the answer is that i don't think low-income minority communities are overpoliced in light of the disproportionate burden that they bear of the crime and then you know there are other ways to respond you can look at data there are studies that look at the benefits of spending additional resources on police and they consistently find that there's still a large return so there was one study done by a criminologist named aaron chalfin that found that in 2010 every additional dollar on police produced a benefit of one dollar and sixty three cents a sixty-three percent return um uh chalfen and morgan williams another uh criminologist recently did another paper looking at the addition of police officers and each additional police officer obeyed 0.1 homicide so for every 10 cops you have one fewer homicides but the benefits were most pronounced in black communities so you know that's that's that's the i think the main response if you're going to argue that they're over police then you have to grapple with the other side of that ledger and that's the benefits um judge brown feel free to respond to to what you've just heard but i also wanted to ask you about these so-called soft on crime policies that seem back in vogue we have district attorneys in major cities bragging about how few people they are going to prosecute if elected we have effectively decriminalized shoplifting in cities all over the country um what do you make of these developments and we're told they're being done in the name of reducing these disparities will they well first of all i think this is outrageous when law enforcement particularly attorneys district attorneys and city attorneys and people like that are basically saying we won't enforce the laws that are on the books they not only violate their oath i think they under undermine the rule of law and the people who are harmed by this are the very people who they say they are doing all of this um to help um there are no no one that i know of in uh most um poor neighborhoods who think that um it's better if um crimes don't have any penalties if we create incentives for criminality essentially and if you look at the places where this has been done california being a prime example because because of three strikes they have tried for years chipping away at that and what they finally did was to say well if you steal under 950 dollars uh it's essentially not that used to be a felony now it's not even a misdemeanor it's actually an infraction they give you a ticket if they do anything at all so most merchants who are dealing with that don't even respond i mean they don't try to do anything about it they don't try to find out you know who did this or call the police but what happens is you create this incentive which it's fine they're saying 950 you can steal that it's kind of you get out of jail free card but people don't just do it one time they come back several times a day and fill their shopping carts um and so what what actually happens is those stores close down they move away from those neighborhoods and so once again the impact is on the poor people who have to deal with the results of that um one of the things that you may have seen is that union pacific uh railroad which has a a a facility in southern california the theft from their railroad cars got so bad that they threatened to close that down and not have that facility in in california because they were losing all of this money and they said your leniency is exacerbating the problem but if you saw the photographs of that it really looked like something unbelievable i mean the tracks were littered for miles with all these boxes where people had broken into rail cars and so forth so none of that is dealing with the perceived problem if there is one but um it is kind of a um you know we spoke last night about the road to serfdom you know this is the uh the cliff to chaos i mean you just are it is falling into the situation where it's an unlivable situation people in beautiful communities are afraid to go outside this is not just the poor this is everybody that's being affected by this okay so i i think it's a it's ridiculous if their justification is that it's about poor folks um you cannot solve the problem of disparity by saying well if there's disparity uh we just won't enforce any laws and therefore there won't be a disparity i mean that's a ridiculous way to respond um professor fryer you're an economist uh on on at this conference uh most of the panels have an economist participating that's by design and one of the reasons is that some of us like to deal with people who think empirically who bring data to a discussion but what does what are the lessons you've learned from using the data you've come up with to make your arguments against a very emotional narrative they throw back at you data seems to be less important than owning the narrative and and you can throw all kinds of numbers at them whether we're talking about educational achievement crime marriage rates what have you they come back at you with a narrative that seems to be completely divorced from the data and yet carries the day yeah i think you you just said it i mean i think that the what have i learned i i've learned that um a couple things one i'll start with the positive thing i've learned i think there's just a hunger for it in the population so um my police paper garnered a lot of criticism from a lot of places but it also i received thousands of emails a day for weeks of people just saying thank you for at least giving me some data that that i can start to understand what's going on in the country and so i was i and i responded to every single one of them because i just thought that was a real teaching moment so i think that's really positive and i think there's we forget that the one percent uh that are always in our face about these types of things there's a silent you know 99 out there who who really just want to use data to get better and try to make progress on these issues i think i've been surprised at i'm just going to call it cowardice of some social science test on this um you know there's a another popular paper that shows the same thing that we do on the racial differences police use of force and turns out they show the same thing on the shootings too but it's an appendix table 74. okay and and it that is irresponsible okay um and and we never call that that kind of stuff out so i think that that is that is an issue and and i think the the what's been interesting to me is watching people and maybe this is just my naivete jason but watching people bend themselves in pretzels not to believe the results um and that it's been just a really interesting observation to to watch uh and but is the is the reaction uh to your work the reason more people aren't willing they're bearing the data in appendix 74. because of of what i mean is this a problem among academics this this intellectual cowardice um well i think so yeah right like i mean i i have uh there are a lot of students that refuse to work on these issues now right there are a lot of students i remember sitting in my office with with with a student who found something relatively interesting on race and police he shows it to me and he says can't say that in public i'm like who are you what do you mean you can't say it in public what does that even mean right you're a graduate student um and so i think that that i mean it's not like he's just as thomas or the judge here like i can't show you that in public i might move markets right like a graduate student um okay but i think that so i think that's the problem is that if the smartest minds aren't willing to work on these issues because they're scared then again every time we take these these these types of risks etc it is black people who suffer okay yeah and just to follow up on that ralph um professor fryer said earlier uh one of the one of his findings was that uh when we start scapegoating police for this when these um high-profile shootings results in these investigations not just of the individuals involved but the entire police department in a city police police pull back they're less proactive one of the tactics that police have used over the years uh some argue effectively is stop and frisk uh then it fell out of favor for a while in some places um it's coming back slowly uh why don't you talk about what the criticisms of stop and frisk were um were they valid is the practice effective i mean what is what what is your reporting shown yeah so i'm going to talk mostly about new york because i think that was the highest profile kind of example of a a stop and frisk policy or program if you will and the criticisms were that as the number of stops ramped up um you ended up placing a an undue burden on low-income minority communities where again police were spending a lot of their time because that's what the crime was um but you had a lot of these instances in which these uh you know kids who weren't doing anything at all were kind of mistaken for potential perps patted down and that this was you know an upsetting experience that this was an embarrassing experience and and you know i i understand all of those criticisms and you know as for the policy the argument was that the nypd kind of created this incentive um for bad stops for cops to kind of be over broad in their application of the policy and i think there may be something to that but i think we have to sort of pull back and understand the moment right in the mid 1990s new york was coming off of three years in a row almost of 2000 murders um i mean the city was desperate and the citizens were adamant that something had to be done and so it's not crazy to me that that a police executive might think okay well let's let's incentivize the kind of behavior that we think is going to turn up contraband that we think is going to lead to the discovery of open warrants and you know other opportunities to make arrests um but i do think that there is a valid criticism that it was overused at one point okay now what do we do about that we can say okay well let's just roll this back and incrementally reform this in a way that we're still retaining its value and it did have value right there are studies show there's a great paper by a criminologist named david weisberg who looked at stop and frisk in new york and found that in crime hot spots um stops were actually associated with a significant deterrent effect on crime now again we can argue about whether that those costs are worth it or worth bearing and that's a valid uh debate to have but the idea was that every time you saw one of these instances in which a stop was reported and that's a really important thing right the stop was reported if police officers have incentives to report stops they're often going to report stops that doesn't necessarily mean a stop and frisk took place a stop and frisk is a it's a legal term of art in in a lot of ways it refers to a case called terry versus ohio basically you have to have reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot if you have that then you can detain a person against his or her will now if i'm a cop and i walk up to you know a group of teenagers on the court and i say hey what do you guys do in here they start interacting with me and i say you got anything on you that you shouldn't have and they say no no we're all good you say you don't mind if i check do you go ahead well that's a consensual encounter right but you have every incentive to report it as a level three stop in new york city um if you're gonna if that's what you get credit for so i think we have to kind of you know take the data with a bit of a grain of salt um but we were told to look at these instances in which a stop was reported and no contraband was found as prima facie evidence of bias on the part of the police officer um and i think that's wrong i think that's wrong for a lot of reasons because it's not reasonable suspicion is a relatively low bar right it doesn't you you don't it does because someone turned out not to be engaged in criminal activity doesn't mean that the reason you were wrong was bias and i think in a lot of ways police officers pick up on something that people are putting out there and there's a really great book that i hope a lot of you have read but if not you should go read it it's called code of the street by a sociologist named elijah anderson and he embeds himself in north philadelphia in the 1990s and sort of reports on and just kind of does an anthropological assessment of what's going on and how people carry themselves and what he finds is that there is this code of the street as he puts it where you know young kids kind of adopt this outward facing posture of aggression that communicates proximity to violence and uh adjacency to criminality and in that book i remember him writing that you know while this often functioned as an effective defense mechanism against predators in in that community right if i don't really want to end up scrapping every day i'm going to look tough and that's going to protect me well it also he says confused shop owners who would end up following kids who probably didn't need to be followed while they were shopping but also police who were picking up on those signals so we have to ask ourselves do we want police to ignore those signals in their entirety and we end up with a situation like we had in chicago with roland found with an 89 percent decline in reported stops and a huge spike in crime or do we want to train police officers to have better eyes and to inform their deployment strategies with data in a way that allows us to be more precise in how we use aggressive tactics like that judge judge brown mass incarceration is something i want to ask you about hotly the debated topic critics say we lock up more people in this country than anywhere else in the developed world do we lock up too many people is that the measure and our drug offenses what's driving these racial disparities in in the incarcerated population and is drug legalization the best way to address that those racial disparities oh wow okay um we do lock up a lot of people i think uh in the developed world we probably have more people in prison but we have a big population we have a very high rate of violent crime so i know that mass incarceration is now talked about as the quote new jim crow but i think people only say that who don't know anything about jim crow [Laughter] and i actually do but um so i again when you look at the statistics there's no indication that there's an anti-black bias in people being locked up there's a very high rate of violent crime as ralph pointed out a very high rate of homicides and so those are the kinds of crimes for which people go to prison now the drug issue i think is a little bit more complicated perhaps people may not remember that when the crack penalties were really ramped up that was because black people in those communities were were begging for help the crack epidemic set off a lot of violence in those communities and so both the communities and the legislators the congressmen who were representing those districts asked for help and they sought higher penalties but so there were a lot of people locked up for longer periods of time for drug use that was particularly true at the federal level and i think most people when they are thinking about this they're looking at what was happening on the federal level right but you have to understand that the feds have a very small percentage of the prison population so if you wipe that completely out you would not change very much about what is you know is talked about as mass incarceration the best analogy that i can give you for this is that if you think about the federal courts they're like a little uh nice pleasure yacht they're floating along with their little you know flags flying and everything and they're and so the state system you know the prison system there it's like a super tanker if they you know if they offloaded that onto the federal system it would sink it right so it is not um if you got rid of that part of the drug um uh arrests and convictions and imprisonments you wouldn't move the needle very much that you know that that's the reason well the the drug offenses aren't driving the incarceration rates i don't think they are they they may be driving it a bit for a time on the federal level now you have the first step act and there's actually some shifts in that they're letting people out earlier and everything there are a lot of initiatives to try to get people out of prison earlier there are a lot of lawsuits which are you know focused on de-incarceration and all that sort of thing where they're trying to say um you know let's not keep people uh you know in prison for such lengthy times things like three strikes where they had very high penalties for continued criminal activity a lot of those are going away so that may change the numbers somewhat but i don't think it's going to make a huge difference because you know if you have a high level of violent crime you have to deal with that uh you know what government's foremost obligation is to protect people and and property people have a right to feel safe um so i i don't think that just uh letting people out of prison um is again it's it's not an answer to hold people accountable for anti-social destructive and lethal conduct that's not something that we should find objectionable okay professor fryer i'll give you the last word before we uh turn things over to q a uh uh with the audience um what what types of solutions reforms would you like to see um you know what are we trying now what's wrong with that and what would you like to see instead yeah i feel like police use of force is where education reform was two decades ago i'd love to see police funding tied to collecting data so that we'd actually understand some where these issues are i think we need to take a real look at the incentives that i described earlier about the lower level uses of force someone sent me a note and said oh this you know lower level uses of force don't matter because you know i thought it was about black lives this is you know who cares if they get pushed up against a car and i wrote back could you give me your address i'll come push you up a game card and see how you feel about it and i just think it's a really important um i think it's really important because um dignity matters too and and i think that the most important thing for any solution is to do it with the police okay not to the police right um uh sure yes so i've spent uh working on a committee with some other with another economist i spent months uh with other data sets investigating whether roland got it right and roland knows that if he got it wrong i'd tell him uh but every data set we looked at kept getting the same answer that there's a big problem with uh dignity and these low-level interactions and you can't find any evidence of racial bias in shooting and there's actually more variation geographically than there is racially you're more likely or equally likely to be shot as a white citizen in the west as you are as a black citizen in the northeast and i would like on that score to ask the following question i'm concerned about the move towards stopping cars and searching for weapons and this especially comes up in chicago as kind of the new stop and frisk because there's a law in the books in illinois if somebody's in their 30s they've been working a job they haven't done anything wrong in 15 years but they did something stupid when they were 18 and have a felony and they have a gun under their seat because they live in a bad neighborhood and they are pulled over and the gun is discovered they go straight to a state prison no questions asked and there's no it's mandatory and there has been this dance between uh the mayor of chicago and whoever the governor was for years in that uh mayors often want to use mandatory sentences for weapons as a way to just go through dangerous neighborhoods and send people straight to prison through these types of search and seizure operations and if we believe roland and i do that the slogan should be black dignity matters um i want to get rolling in anyone else's response to whether or not the war on weapons can replace the war on drugs in a way that builds resentment and makes police reform harder because people know that they've got a relative sitting in state prison that didn't do anything other than try to have some protection in a neighborhood where the police weren't providing enough protection all right does anyone want to take that on well i'm not qualified but i'll do it i think that i don't know derek and and i don't i really don't have the data but i would say that i i guess i would worry if folks are carrying you give an interesting example of someone carrying a weapon my grandmother used to carry a 357. i get it but but but there's also a bunch of punks that are 14 right and and when i did look at some data a lot of the shootings that are happening in places like chicago are like getting dissed on social media and then you have a gun and so i think part of the thing that we see in our data derek is that there's even like stuff on the youtube you can see gangs are sending out kids with guns on them past police and when the police don't do anything because they're they're like look i'm part of the 11 percent who's not stopping people right or 89 people then you just have guns around and then silliness happens and shootings happen so i think there's an other side of it and i don't know the net effect yeah i would just add to that i mean in the city of chicago the chicago crime lab did a study of shootings in 2015 and 2016. what they found was the average shooting or homicide suspect had immediate a mean of 12 prior arrests 20 of them had more than 20 prior arrests there is an incongruity with the framing about the need for reform in cities like chicago and the reality which i think pushes back on the idea that we are systematically sending people uh to prison for uh mere possession offenses uh whether they're for weapons or anything else i mean if you look at the prison population in the united states at least the state prison population which accounts for about 89 of all prisoners the average state prisoner has 11 prior arrests and five prior convictions the idea that we're systematically denying people second chances is false it is false and there's a real cost associated with a broad overbroad in my opinion effort to minimize the kind of outcomes like the one that you described am i all for identifying who those people are and diverting them away from incarceration absolutely and i think the system probably does a decent job of that the problem is is that they're also diverting the 16 year old gang banger i mean i'm just so sick and tired i almost moved to tears because i mean some of these kids are living in these communities where the system refuses refuses to hold these guys accountable and you end up with a video like that that i saw on twitter yesterday of a kid running down a street in broad daylight in chicago dodging bullets yes with his backpack and this kid's got to go to school tomorrow and take it i mean how do you come back from that and so i think we have to be really really careful about letting the marginal case become the mean in our minds as a society because that pushes us down a road to reform that is absolutely disastrous for these communities okay yes thank you jason thank you for this incredible panel um you talked about this low level if some would extend it to harassment and the data is pointing to the disparities and so i appreciate that you pointed that out because now there's this distrust and nervousness in many of these broken zip codes so we also heard a lot of discussion after george floyd about the unionized police officers and how they're protected under these unions and then the discussion moved to community policing so i'm wondering if you can speak into that for a moment just so that we can begin to really heal what's broken down because as the gentleman on the my right just pointed out your name yet by heart um this is real fear for these young kids this is this is just not an environment that's acceptable in 8 700 zip codes across our country so if you can speak into how do we you want to take this one sure thank you um yeah i mean look i think i think it is really important to figure out ways to bridge the gap that exists in certain communities between the citizenry and the police and healing that relationship to the extent that it's broken is an important mission and i think it also serves public safety i think we also have to understand that part of the distrust is a result of the system failing to do its job one of the reasons i think i suspect um that you see violence sort of uh uh people take violence into their own hands as a way of sort of exacting revenge in a lot of high crime communities i think one of the reasons for that is that they don't really trust the system to step in and do its job and so they handle things on their own and that's destructive um you know i think there are certain reform levers that we can look at pulling increasing the education level of police is one of them um there's there's a lot of literature showing that college-educated police officers use force less often even in the same situations that non-college educated officers um are in even when you control for the type of assignment that they get that's that's a really good thing but we're also living in a time in which we have demonized the entire institution and profession and so what you end up doing is disincentivizing high quality highly educated psychologically stable recruits from even considering taking this job my father spent more than 20 years in the nypd i took the lsat and the nypd exam in the same week when i was a senior in college and when i told my dad that i was thinking about becoming a copy threat and never talk to me again this was in 2010. he threatened to never talk to me again because he said the community is never going to appreciate what you do and if you make one mistake they will plaster you on the front page of a newspaper and throw you out without a pension and he he kind of scared me straight and i chose law school and you know i that's probably the right choice for me but i think a lot of people are choosing not to go into that profession and it has a lot to do with how we talk about it so i do think there's a responsibility on the part of the community to communicate that they're actually open to healing that relationship as well and and i think that means we have to take the microphone from our activists and give it to the 81 who told gallup that they want just as much if not more policing in their community can i do a part two to what he just said because then what broke down at the national level when tim scott was trying to get these reforms what would you say in one spot uh it's hard to say i know the the qualified immunity issue was it was a big sticking point um in terms of that that legislation but you also have you know a big cohort in congress that you know didn't want to see incremental reform they wanted to you know defund police or you know really put a heavy hand um uh of oversight um from the federal government down on these agencies and and as as roland's work has shown that that that can be problematic um so yeah i mean i i you know the politics are kind of beyond my area of expertise that's my best guess about about why things broke down but um you know again there is low-income black communities consistently report that they want more policing um we have somehow gotten it into our heads that the activists with megaphones holding protests represent the interests of the black community writ large and that's just not true okay i was curious to know is there any correlation between how long a person stays in prison and the possibilities to reform that person is there any kind of connection at all do sentences the length of sentences really matter in this regard about reforming a person or race of recidivism well two things i can say about that one is that this um when when we were looking at three strikes uh which was initially a california initiative i think some other states have it too but one of the things that we looked at was that there are even though we're talking about how much crime there is it's actually a small percentage of people who account for a huge amount of the crime that's going on so you're it's probably 10 maybe a little more than that so if you do incarcerate those people you have that at least means they are not committing crimes so sometimes um initiatives that look at someone who has a very long record and who is a basically a career criminal taking them out of the equation um tends to help um and as ralph was saying people don't go to prison for the first offense they have often been given many many second chances and probation and all kinds of things before uh they they get a conviction that takes them to prison the other thing and this is i guess just biological and i don't know that this has changed but at least at the time when i was looking at it you have young males have are typically very aggressive in that 18 you know to 25 year olds range but what we found with recidivism at least in california prisons was it's like there's a switch that's thrown 42 you can let them out it's over [Laughter] the testosterone level drops and they become good citizens so go ahead bob yeah you mentioned judge brown that incarcerating 10 percent of them would change it but we have some grassroots leaders here anthem lucky ex-gang leader john ponder with examples where you take that 10 percent and convert them from predators to ambassadors of peace yes yes and then as a consequence of that conversion they use their influence in positive ways so that there have been islands of excellence like this in my city of washington dc right one of our groups the alliance concerned men that created a peace for 100 days and one of the most dangerous neighborhoods not a single incidence of violence but there were no social scientists showing up right to study why and how they did it why they did it anton lucky and them went into madison high school one of the most dangerous schools and and they introduced moral mentors and character coaches from that communities who served as antibodies and that transformed that school to one of the most dangerous to the most peaceful so my point is there there are islands of excellence that are created in practice around the country they're they're not resourced nor do we have social scientists left or right of center coming in looking at the resilience and perseverance of people in these conditions the answers are going to come from within so but we need to resource them and we need to report on them and not just do failure studies yeah that we're faced with now no i i totally agree with you i mean we have been talking about uh you know crime and policing and imprisonment and and that's how we have handled the problem that doesn't mean it's the best way to handle the problem uh and it doesn't mean that um the the only thing that i maybe take issue with is i i don't know about resourcing because it seems like when the government comes in with money then if that's where the that's where you're getting the resources take some of the 100 million we spent on political campaigns right invested in i mean you're not going to get a you're not going to get disagreement from me on that issue because i agree with you one of the things that we didn't get to talk about is kind of you know what's next and you know what do you see um as the you know as a different way of approaching this and one of my concerns is that the focus that we have on you know discrimination identity politics and all of this stuff is moving us away from what we need to be thinking about which is you know how do people we're never going to have a perfect world we're never going to get everything right but you know i grew up at a time when things were more wrong than they are now but i was never told uh oh poor you you're a victim and so you're you there's no way out for you just forget about it um i you know my grandmother would have if i came in and said it's not fair she would say yes what's your point [Laughter] it's true life is not fair but you're going to have to deal with it that you know that's what you know that's how she would have responded so the focus we have on it's not fair somebody needs to fix it you know you uh you have to wait for this to be uh put into some kind of condition where it's okay now for you and we're not focusing on that well judge brown that will have to be the final word we're out of time thank you professor fryer thank you ralph thank you all

Channel: American Enterprise Institute

Views: 9,850

Keywords: AEI, American Enterprise Institute, politics, news, education, old parkland conference, police, black lives matter, discrimination

Id: U5Uix1J2u_k

Length: 57min 50sec (3470 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022