Mending broken trust: Police and the communities they serve | Charles Ramsey | TEDxPhiladelphia

it's really an honor to be here with you today and in the brief time that we have together I do want to talk about some of the issues affecting policing today it was mentioned that I have served for a long period of time in policing I'm in my 47th year I spent I'm native Chicagoan born and raised I spent 30 years as a member of the Chicago Police Department I left to become police chief in Washington DC I served there for nine years and now I've had the honor and privilege of serving under Mayor Michael Nutter here in the great city of Philadelphia for the last seven and a half years so I've got a lot of experience and I've gone through a lot of transitions that is that that have taken place over the course of my career in the profession of policing but I have to admit that I have not experienced anything quite as challenging as where we find ourselves today all you have to do is turn on the nightly news or watch one of the cable broadcasts and I can almost guarantee you that you're going to see a video from somewhere in the United States showing an action being taken by a police officer somewhere that quite frankly in some instances I find to be appalling that's the environment that we find ourselves in today and all that affects our ability to build trust in many communities now there's been a lot of talk about trust in communities particularly communities of color let me start off by saying that when I started my policing career in the late 1960s early 1970s in Chicago there were some communities that we went into where there was tension where we didn't get anybody willing to talk to us about what may have taken place or what have you so it's been something that's really been bubbling beneath the surface for a long period of time and occasionally it does boil over I mean if you those of you old enough to remember some of the you know the riots that we've had in various cities around the country some of it starts through actions of police that get out of control and we wind up with civil unrest as a result so even though this is this is something that maybe we've experienced in the past I don't think we've experienced it quite like we are today and that's what I want to talk about there are two areas I want to cover this is a complex issue and certainly takes a lot more time than what we have allotted here but I just want to cover a couple things that I think maybe is a part of what we see going on and then also come up with a couple of ideas on how we can repair the damage the first is history the history of policing in the United States when we really go back in time and not in Philadelphia was the Philadelphia Police Department was organized in in 1797 we're the oldest police department in the United States of America but policing actually goes back even further than that I mean there was a period of time when you had unpaid watchman constables just walking down the street trying to keep neighborhoods as safe as they could you had people that were police that worked on plantations their job was to track down slaves that had run away so one of the things that we started doing here just recently in Philadelphia was beginning a program with the National Constitution Center right here in Philadelphia because what I wanted to do was create a training program that really talked about history now the National Constitution Center obviously is there to really talk about the Constitution how our democracy has evolved all those kinds of things but just as our democracy has evolved so has policing and I think it's important for our young people coming into the profession including our veteran officers that have been around for a while to understand that his so it starts with a discussion around 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was signed and it's not so much a history lesson of how our Union came to be what it is but it's also a snapshot in time where we talk about if you were policemen during that period of time what are some of the things you might have been doing well as I said before you may be you were just the watchman walking down the street trying to make sure that the doors were locked or whatever and people were were safe and secure but you might have been one of those individuals chasing down slaves fast forward to the civil rights period of time who was it that was enforcing Jim Crow laws of the time who was it that people encountered on Bloody Sunday when they walked across that bridge police I think it's important for us to know the history and to understand that police have not always stood on the right side of justice as we define to justice today it's just a reality and whereas I'd like to think we have evolved we and we have but there are still a lot of baggage that we carry and so when you look at different communities and you wonder why there's mistrust do you wonder why you know people really are afraid of police a lot of it has to do with history when I was police chief in Washington DC we had communities that immigrant communities first generation that had come to our city many from Central America no matter what the situation if they were a victim of a crime knew about a crime or whatever they often would not call the police why because police in their country were incredibly oppressive and they were afraid so it's not just policing in the United States we need to think about and the impact it has on communities it's actually elsewhere in 1998 when I was chief in DC I had occasion to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum it was just one of those things on my schedule I was a brand new chief and everybody's trying to get to know you and a good someone who turned out to be a very good friend of mine David Friedman from the anti-defamation league invited me to visit the museum so I went it was absolutely the most powerful experience I had had to that date to that point in time and when I left there because I was being accompanied by an actual survivor and as we were going through the museum she's actually telling me her personal story her and her family during that period of time so when I left there and I was going to catch a plane to fly to Chicago to visit family but I was really haunted by that experience so I came back about a week later unannounced where I could take my time and walk through the museum and then I began to understand what was bothering me many of the pictures and those of you that have been to that museum the pictures that you see there oftentimes include police officers working alongside soldiers participating in those horrific events that took place now I never knew that I didn't know it maybe I mean when I went through school Highschool the Holocaust was glossed over it was part of history but nobody spent any time talking about it believe me of course history was my favorite subject I might not have been paying attention but in any event I didn't know I knew about the whole cost but I didn't know about the role of police and it made me start thinking Germany had been a democratic society what happened they probably took an oath very similar to the one that I took so what happened how could they possibly then be involved and not just rounding up Jews but actually participating in death squads on death squads and and and so forth and I just couldn't get my head around it but then it sparked an idea what is the role of police in a democratic society if you ask the average police officer what their role is most of them would say to enforce the laws yet that is a very very narrow part of what we do as police how many of them do you think would actually say that their role is to defend the constitutional rights of all people if we had police in this country believe it and conduct themselves in a manner consistent with that would we be having the problems we're having today I don't think so so by taking that walk through history because we've already tried doing the so called sensitivity training something that I absolutely hate that term is it implies that you're insensitive or you go in there with the with the presumption that you know the white cops are all racists and bla bla but people shut down they don't want to hear that kind of stuff but it's a backdoor approach toward getting it many of the legitimate issues that confront us today one of the photographs for an example or as a soldier and a police officer going through a Jewish man and the first thing it reminded me of was stop and frisk I mean the lessons go on and on and I'm not trying to say police or Nazis or police are involved in that sort of thing but it's about the Constitution it's about protecting people's rights and that's the message we try to get through to people as part of this training that we're doing at the National Constitution Center the other thing that I think is important it kind of got us to where we are today are quite frankly to policing strategies that we've used I saw an earlier presentation when they talked about the 80s and the 90s I went through that when crime was soaring through the roof and I'm telling you there was an awful lot oppression from pressure from political leadership and also from communities get a handle on crime we were just beginning to engage in something called community oriented policing which would bring police and community closer together engage in color and collaborative problem-solving and all these kinds of things and was it good yeah absolutely it built much better relationships in many of our communities but was a little slow in terms of actually being able to see that reduction in crime and let's face it at the end of the year when you pick up the newspaper or if you turn on television and they're talking about crime in Philly Baltimore or anywhere else what are they showing one Staten wants that only how many murders did you have if your murders up crimes out of control murders are down fantastic great job I can have my job another year probably but is that really the barometer that we ought to be using to determine safe and secure neighborhoods I would argue that it's really not people want more so we went from community oriented policing and then we all started looking at New York City where they went into something called CompStat which is a data-driven approach to dealing with crime and they had dramatic dramatic reductions in crime so everyone started saying how come you aren't doing what they're doing there so across America we all started getting information systems we all started looking at dots on a map we all started looking at our deployments and how we're putting cops in the areas where we have the most crime and so forth and then we all started to see drops in crime I mean we are at the lowest level of crime in this country in most cities since the late 1950s and 1919 60s that's pretty dramatic folks pretty traumatic but here's the problem we didn't think about the collateral damage we were causing in many of these communities by some of the aggressive policing tactics we also I think misunderstood what people really want sure they want safe and secure neighborhoods but they don't measure success solely by the absence of crime they also want to see the presence of justice in communities we missed that so we started looking at these maps we got all the docs and we got all these things and we're driving down crime and everybody's patting us on the back oh yeah you're doing a great job so forth and so on but it's very important and I'm not saying that's a bad approach it's not I mean there's criticism about broken windows taking care of smaller crimes and that sort of thing well that's what people complain about you live in these neighborhoods you're concerned about quality of life our problem was we didn't have a strategy in place on what to do once the window was repaired and if what you're doing is effective eventually it's no longer broken so do you use the same strategies you use to get it to a manageable point in time or do you start to then engage more one of my deputies mentioned that whereas we have a lot of research being done on the various kinds of policing and it seems like every time we come up with a new strategy we got a we got to come up with a name for it so it's like hot spot policing or problem oriented policing or what everybody's got to kind of put a label on something and these are effective strategies because it does reduce crime but we don't measure again what's the attitude of people in that community once we leave if we make a hundred stops of individuals in an area looking for weapons we find one weapon that's good we got one gun off the street but now we've alienated perhaps 99 others who wins in that one it sure as heck ain't us so we need to kind of rethink and not that we don't want to continue to do things that are proven but we've got to build those relationships you've got to build that trust we've got to do the things we need to do to bring the community along with us and also accept the fact that some community certain things just aren't acceptable and that's fine we're public servants we have to I mean we have to have a surface mentality so it's history it's about the kinds of strategies but it's also about mindset and I'm talking about mindset of police community mindset needs to change a little bit too but I'm not going to talk about that I'm going to talk about police specifically you probably have heard some talk about how we need to move from a warrior mentality to a guardian mentality I agree with that we're not at war with anybody we're there to protect we're there to serve that's fine but there's got to go beyond that because how we see ourselves really drives how we behave I'll give you an example there's a metaphor and policing and all of you probably heard it it's called a thin blue line I don't think is anybody in here probably hadn't heard that use back and forth never really gave it any real thought but you know I bought into it as a young cop after my visit to the Holocaust Museum I said no we're not a thin blue line not a line of any kind we aren't we aren't something that separates good from evil I see us as more of a thread woven throughout the communities that we serve helping to hold together the very fabric of democracy and we have as much responsibility protecting the rights of those that have committed or accused of committing in crime as we do law abiding people who are just the victims of crime that's our responsibility as police so we get away from that us-against-them type of mentality the other thing we have to do is deal with the real issue of bias now we've started new training in our department fair and impartial policing dr. Laurie Friedel from the University of South Florida has a great program we've had her up we're in the process of doing that now recognizing that everyone has a bias of some kind could be gender could be sexual orientation could be race could be political affiliation could be a lot of things the real question for us is knowing that we have them how then do we manage it so it doesn't influence or impact how we do our job and that's a valuable lesson for all of us in our business but part of the problem that I see and it happens in my own agency has happened everywhere I've worked is that police officers many and most of them do a great job but there are a significant number that just don't show the kind of respect they need to show for the communities that they serve and I'm going to tell just a brief story as I as I end this that kind of drives home the importance of respect when I was a sergeant working narcotics in Chicago I had a guy that worked for me named Paris Patton and Paris was one of these guys that I mean he could sweet-talk anybody he was a guy that even though we would hit a raid narcotics raid and back in those days I mean you literally hit the door with a sledgehammer all kinds of chaos people you're trying to isolate folks so you can make sure they don't have weapons or whatever and it was pretty chaotic but by the time that was over Paris had everybody calmed down and may have even developed an informant and what I would ask him and I did ask him one time was man how do you do it because you talk about sign know people that can pour you know gasoline on a fire but he was just the opposite he could calm down anybody and he said it's really very simple he said at the moment of birth every person is a perfect 10 but deduct three right away because life is temporary does not last forever if you are born into a dysfunctional family where there's substance abuse domestic violence deduct another three because the environment you're in now you don't have the kind of role model that you need to have is going to be very difficult for you to make he said if you're a member of a minority group deduct another three because some doors may not be open to you that are open for others said that leaves one that one is that in is that person's dignity and self-respect he said do what you have to do as a police officer but never ever do anything to take away that person's dignity or self-respect because that's all they got left and they will fight you to hold on to it I never forgot that and I've always tried to to just go through my career in my contacts and my daily activities with that in mind and try to make sure that I talk about that as often as I can because a big part of the problem and the reason why we have such strained relationships quite frankly is just the interaction that takes place on a daily basis and when you think about 18,000 police departments 500,000 law enforcement officers they've got to be tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of contacts every single day but all it takes is just a few videos to change the entire dynamic we have to hold police officers accountable but we also have to deal with the very real issue we have with a disproportionate amount of crime and violence occurring in some of our communities how do we fix that so it's going to take a collective effort on all our parts we got to stop the finger-pointing in the blank and sit down and really come up with a solution a strategy to start to have a solid impact so our young people can grow up in an environment where they feel safe and secure they can be educated they can go out here and find decent paying jobs to be able to support their families well there'll be a few fall off the rails yet but there always has been but we can minimize the number and we can have a dramatic impact on what we see going out there now a lot of the burden is on us me as a police leader but some of the burden and much of the burden is on all of you two because collectively we sink or swim together so with that I want to thank you all for your time and your attention and God bless you

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Views: 127,978

Rating: 4.800797 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Global Issues, Democracy, Human Rights, Law, Social Justice

Id: mbNCatXqcLw

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2016