Public Safety in an Era of Criminal Justice Reform

welcome to the Manhattan Institute or event cast on Public Safety in an era of criminal justice reform I'm Michael Hendricks director state local policy and were grateful to be joined by a stellar line-up kicking off with our senior fellow Jason Riley after I introduce him we'll dive right in throughout the program please feel free to enter your questions throughout on our slide out platform and our moderators will either wrap them into the discussion or include them in Q&A at the end also please click the polls tab and share your affiliation with us including even if you don't have one and now without further ado Jason Riley Jason is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a commentator for Fox News he is also a recipient of the 2018 Bradley prize after joining the journal in 1994 he was named a senior editorial writer in 2000 and a member of the editorial board in 2005 Jason also speaks frequently on ABC NBC CNN PBS and NPR it is the author of multiple books and countless opinion pieces on the issues of politics economics education immigration and race Jason over to you thank you Michael for that introduction and I want to welcome everyone to this Manhattan Institute event on criminal justice reform and Public Safety what we've tried to do today is to assemble a group of people that can talk about race and policing from different perspectives so we have some academics some journalists some law enforcement professionals we also have participants who know something about being young and black and dealing with police so we have people who can bring that to the discussion as well not only facts and data but also personal experience and I hope they will be willing to draw on that experience for the discussion now this obviously is an emotional topic but the goal is to have a rational and informed discussion and I'm pretty confident that we can do that in this format because we have mute buttons now some of you probably know that we originally scheduled this event for earlier this year but like everyone else we had to make some adjustments due to the corona virus pandemic in the interim however I'd argue that the urgency of this issue has only grown we've had the case of Ahmed our burry in Georgia who was chased down by a former police officer and his son and then shot dead we have Brianna Taylor or black emergency room technician in Louisville who was killed by police when they were issuing a no-knock warrant on her home and most recently we have this George Floyd case of a black suspect in Minneapolis who died in police custody after a police officer was seen pressing his knee against the man's throat until he passed out the point here is not to litigate these cases we don't know all the facts we don't know all the circumstances but I do want to make a larger point about these events and that's that they seem to that a pattern found a black person is killed video services perhaps on social media showing some part of the encounter the video goes viral cable news channels pick it up and a narrative takes hold the incident you know however statistically rare it might be is presented as commonplace it's typical of what black people America have to endure on a daily basis presidential candidates talk about systemic racism being in the air that we breathe New York Times runs full-page stories about jogging while black the mayor of Minneapolis issues over-the-top statements like being black in America should not be a death sentence this is part of a pattern that we've seen time and time and again and then the protesters come out and the activists come out and they target of course the police and then with increasing frequency the federal government gets involved and that brings us to our headliner today professor Roland fryer of Harvard University is going to talk about the efficacy of these investigations and how they impact Public Safety particularly in minority communities is co-authored a new academic paper on the subject and his concern is that we may be investigating police departments in a way that leads to even more violent crime and even fatalities and lives lost in these communities this follows an earlier paper that he wrote on police use of force and whether there is evidence that blacks and Hispanics are being unfairly targeted by law enforcement we'll talk about that as well professor Pryor is one of his generations leading social scientists he's a MacArthur Genius grant Award winner he's also a recipient of the Jam giant of the John Bates Clark medal which goes to the country's leading economists under the age of 40 and is considered by many to be second and prestige only to the Nobel Prize in addition to his research on criminal justice he's also published path-breaking studies on education everything from the achievement gap to minority attitudes towards schooling and to school choice but whatever the subject professor fryer can be counted on to bring facts and data and logic to the discussion and he's going to share some of that with us today so without further ado let's let's get this the discussion started that's good how are you today I am doing really well I'm a little overdue because of Kobe for haircuts looks good looks good to me looks good to me obviously so professor the title of your paper is policing the police the impact of pattern or practice investigations on crime so maybe you could just start by explaining that term what is a pattern or practice investigation and why did you decide to look into them in the first place she would a practice investigation is the federal governor it's one of their main tools if not be main tool to investigate police departments across America who have where there have been complaints about systemic racism so many of the cases that you just described in the ones that have come before it in the last few years particularly the Obama administration folks in the federal government have gone into cities and investigated whole Police Department's to really look for just as the title suggests a pattern or practice that's discriminatory toward certain groups this started in 1992 actually with right after the Rodney King riots in in California Congress gave the authority to the federal government who investigate investigate police departments in this way and here's where I got the idea I basically got from police so in 2016 I wrote a paper about looking at police shootings so the paper looked at racial differences in police use of force which started from being pushed all the way up to police shootings and as part of that paper I have to admit that partly because of the way I was grew up as a kid or what have you I had a particular view of the police and as a social scientist going into this from a data perspective but also just answering any question this large I just figured I really needed to understand how the police view these situations and not rely of my 14 or 15 year old self to think about but to analyze the police and so I embed at myself at least in a police department in more than one I went into Camden and did a couple shifts with police in Camden and did the same thing in Houston in two other cities and I have to say it was one of the best education I got and since my grandmother and it was a real eye opening and as part of that process to try to understand which data sense exists in the police side of force jerk chatting with police officers one of the things that kept coming up were police officers who had undergone one of these investigations and what he made him feel like and so after I finished that paper in 2016 I immediately started working on this because if racial differences in police use of force is a problem then the main policy tool to fix that problem is through these pattern or practice investigations so for me those two papers in the two sets of inquiry so I remember none of you did about the first paper and I do want to talk about that a little later on but I remember reading that you you had said you you went into that research with certain expectations of what you might find you said no I I tend to think there might be some some some prejudice or policing going on here and I was surprised not to find it did you bring certain expectations to this to this pattern of practice research as well and were you surprised by anything you found after you got into the weeds yeah I think any social scientist who says they didn't have any expectations who wanted to research papers for graft so you know of course I did and in the first one I really did believe that it was just hard not to believe I think of myself as one of the most rigorous stats people around like I will out nerd you Jason any day but like how can I not be moved by the the videos and what we were seeing and the frequency of them seemed just like it wouldn't end every week or two weeks so it seemed there was a new video surfacing with a port behavior then sir will you just start to think wow that must be the norm almost like you described in the beginning and so I wanted to do something I wanted to do something positive but I'm not a I'm not a big protester that's just not my my style personal but but that's not what I respect people who do that but that's not me I'm a data nerd and so I started just collecting mounds of data that way millions of police stops etc in the in this most recent paper yes I also went into it thinking that this was probably just being ignored I thought they were pretty benevolent I thought you know it's an investigation but likely likely nothing happens and the police officers that I've talked to in multiple districts who said they had changed their behavior completely after an investigation I thought were feeding me the same type of information that you know you get on cable news and so I just thought no it's not we won't find that in data but I was really blown away by what the results so let's talk about the results what was the top line finding in the pattern of practice research sure top line finding is in general pattern or practice investigations don't really do much crime doesn't change that much it has been one case in all of them LA sometime ago where crime seems to have gone down so the pattern practice investigation might have worked that's one observation out of 50 and so the statistician of me won't allow me to say that that's a pattern of those where but I'd like to delineate the types of situations in which pattern of practice investigations were launched let's imagine one of them there was a report to the federal government that a city is behaving in a systematically discriminatory way and the federal government goes in they investigate they put in some patterns or practices that they think are positive because of what they found and then in those cases what we found was it dissonant zero effect crime didn't go up that much I didn't grow up going at all and we can't find any evidence that Officer behavior changed on the other hand when the federal government launches into a hotbed let's call so they go into a city where you have a viral event and there are protests and there's lots of the community and police relations are strained in those cases we find pretty dramatic results and just to prove to everyone I'm a nerd I'm going to show you just a couple of slides on this because you want I don't want you to my English language is not about the it's not great but but my date is better so let me show this we get this quickly okay I have I am ten seconds away here there we are now if I go up and I say okay what these are these are that the dark black lines are cumulative homicides on the Left total crime on the right but that's total felony crimes I don't have misdemeanors in here and this is on the on the x-axis at the bottom is months since the investigations announced so Jason what I do here is I say the experiment if you will is or the event that I'm trying to analyze is the announcement the day the announcement was made that this city would be under investigation and then I'm tracking homicides per hundred thousand when that happens so if you look over all the pattern of practice investigations have a small but measurable negative impact on homicides we take the whole city's combined and total crime is roughly zero okay so nothing not a lot going on there if anything slightly positive however when I look at cities in which the investigation was preceded by a viral event so exactly those types that you described in your opening homicides go up considerably total crime goes up considerably okay and so this is cumulative for 24 months and you've noticed the homicides haven't tapered off yet and they have not hit their peak in the data data window that we described I want to show you one last thing on this questions why okay so when I look at police activity these are stops to see not in a like traffic stop way but many of these are just police civilian contacts okay in the first panel shows what happens when you have an investigation without a deadly incident that preceded it so nothing this red line is when the date was the investigation was announced not a lot at all when it's a viral shooting only that's the right panel without an investigation if anything police activity goes up not down I'll just give you two cities but this is true in all six of them where we've seen this recently look at this in Chicago okay I'm not I've been doing data analysis now for nearly two decades and I don't have any graphs this pretty this is an awful thing too we're looking at but just the data aesthetics look at this this is the month the investigation was announced now I can also show you literally down to the day in Chicago that the investigation is announced to the left of that red bar you see here are the police civilian contacts in Chicago before the investigation was announced look what happens immediately when the investigation has announced that month you have a 90 percent drop in police civilian context Riverside California is the same Baltimore was to say Ferguson was the same Baltimore literally went to zero okay zero there was no out that you know you can't get negative police contact so they literally went to the bottom and so I and the last thing is when you look of course in this and ask yourself the question well are the places the precincts in a city in which you see the largest change in stops pre and post the announcement of the investigation are those the places where you see homicide go wrong and the answer is absolutely and so just to give you a sense of the magnitude enough and not be quiet we are talking about just like forward not just but for the important lives of laQuan McDonald Michael Brown etc Freddie gray the investigations into those incidents with police in which those individuals lost their lives which is tragic I don't want to under under play this any way shape or form deeply empathetic because of those investigations though my estimates show that we lost a thousand more lives most of them black as well because of the increases in homicide and almost 40,000 more felony crimes okay so this is not to say and I hope we really get into the meat of this this is not to say that Police Department shouldn't be investigated but to quote Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago investigations have to be done with the police not to the please so so just so I'm clear here you you need a certain you need some preconditions for the dramatic drop increase ability in contact that you described to take place which happened in Baltimore and Chicago and Ferguson you need a high profile that that gets a lot of media attention goes viral and then you need the the feds to announce in response to that that they're going to do one of these pattern of practice investigation it's the combination of those two things that you think leads to these drops and increase activity that's what the data tell me it's important to delineate when you have one of these high-profile cases where there's a video and with it it goes viral and there is not an investigation you might see an increase in crime right that that's the important work because yeah I don't want to move three things around there's one down region between those two things in these cities and it's important okay okay and you mentioned Rahm Emanuel and I and I want to ask you about him because I think in the report that I read in your paper you thanked some politicians and policy types and law enforcement types for their input and in your research I'm wondering if they say things to you off the record or in private that you don't hear them saying publicly I'm wondering if if there's a political correctness problem here that prevents us from having more honest conversations about what we're talking about here that's a good question that's above my pay grade I don't know that and I'd love to even answer the question directly but I don't know what they say in public that throughout my time as an economist that many of the comments on the papers that I write that are the most salient and important and the push my thinking the most don't come from my colleagues down the hall it actually comes from people in school districts we're actually running School District people in mayors and city's police chief's who have a intuition and an understanding of what's actually going on instead of us sitting around in the ivory towers to talk to real people and and you've also said that it's the pullback in proactive policing it's not that the police stop policing at all they're still handing out tickets for speeding or still answering 911 calls it's a specific type of policing it's an important part of policing you say that is affected by these investigate Shen's and leads to these these spikes and crabs can you talk about that a little bit that's incredibly important and thank you for mentioning that so I also looked at response times to 9-1-1 calls and things like that and when you talk to police about it getting back to your district previous question they tell you that straight up I'm doing my job I don't know if that's true or not I don't have the the job manual but that is their response and I take that to mean they are responding to nine one one call so we don't see any change in response time for 9-1-1 calls what we do see is a huge change so that change in Chicago at sprout much of that was driven by not because some place didn't stop people for speeding or highway but when they see something they think is suspicious they are not it just refuses to practice it and it they you know or I've talked to police officers or some say you know when we're under investigation I'm not going to chase someone down an alley 2:00 in the morning and so I think there are types of policing from the data that we see that are dramatically reduced and those types are much more likely the proactive types where they go and ask people what they're doing there to a block of them and and what's your theory as to why they are pulling back somewhat fear spite as it is it coming from higher-ups in the department any thoughts on on what's going on there I think it could be a combination of all three Jason I don't know yes this is where things get very difficult for me because it's where the social science ends and speculation begins I will say that in talking to police officers I've heard all three I've heard literally the terms I'm not going to be the next YouTube sensation you probably know about at least one case in Chicago in which a female police officer was beat up quite badly because she didn't want to pull a gun on the suspect because she didn't want this to be made infamous by one of these events and I think part of it could be spite look if we look at another aspect of this has nothing to do with with race and policing but just look at Alex Montz is an economist at Princeton he's got a famous paper but what happens when the police Union negotiates about salary okay of what he finds is that when they lose the negotiation and don't get the salary bump they want or an arbitrator doesn't pick their the their side relative to management then you also see an increase in crimes so there there's this term called the blue flu where if you upset police officers it can have effects on crime I see this is an extreme version of that that some of it could be spite some of it could be fear I've heard other police officers say I just want to get my pension man like I'm like I just like I mean I think that's goes into the fear bucket and people are worried what if you make an honest mistake do you want your career you mentioned earlier how your own upbringing informs your interest in this topic somewhat and I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit you know where you grow up and and and and and what your relationship as a teenager or a young adult was with law enforcement or what was the relationship of your peer group with law enforcement did you leave the house every day in fear of getting shot by a cop or getting harassed by cops any thought sure I grew up in combination I'd say because three quarters in every year North Texas near Dallas and a quarter in Daytona Beach Florida and I did not leave the house every day and fear that I was going to be shot by the police it just that didn't get to my mind I was like getting pulled over by the police I can tell you that and part of that was I part of that was I was a knucklehead it was I did what my grandmother Manolos in the cover instead a part of it was a a culture a reputation that the police didn't have the best interest of black people in mind and so I have been in one really bad altercation with the police it is it is it's an event you don't don't forget I've been in other altercations with the police where nothing happened at all you called me sir and have a good breakfast I got my kids in the car and that kind of thing I will say however my wife is from Austria and her view of the but you know I I don't think only living in fears is this fair for me let's do a big-picture question here in terms of policing in general and the role it plays in our discussions of criminal justice reform or what's wrong with the system and I'm wondering given your earlier paper on finding that that the police are not in fact targeting young black and Hispanic men with lethal force and and the findings in this paper that is - what are we putting too much emphasis on the policing aspect of this issue in other words we know that black and Hispanic men particularly young black Hispanic men commit a disproportionate amount of crime including violent crime which is going to draw police attention so you have more encounters with police which will inevitably lead to more mistakes happening during those encounters and is this just the function of the numbers and if we really want to get it a root cause here um should we be looking at the police as much as we're looking at the police obviously bad cops we need to make sure there aren't you know they exist and they cannot be ignored we don't want the trust and public trust in law enforcement to be undermined but the the amount of attention policing gets in this discussion is it justified given what you've seen in your research that is a great question and it's I don't know the answer to that I will say that if you talk to the police that believe they would say policing gets too much attention and schools don't get enough you know other other parts of society that are all that we're asking the police to essentially solve for because it's not a reasonable threat our should be also addressed I I would say that in my other paper I did find that I didn't find racial bias and shootings but we did find very large racial differences in lower-level uses of force okay so that part is real and we need to do something about that part in I think that you know I have heard some activists say if if we I'm going to try to phrase this in the way they do it if we didn't have the lower level uses of force maybe then we would have more trust between us to talk about the police unions right in the in the case in my opinion that's you know empathetic to that view it's like if I know that there are big racial differences in the lower local uses of force and the difference between whites and blacks is 25% even when the police say that both white and black subjects have been fully compliant okay even if that's the case it's I don't know what we expect from a rational person when there's a shooting that we don't know what happened right so if you have discrimination in the lower levels and you have imperfect information at the top level how you ferret that out is difficult but let me just say one last thing on this news I think it's section 4 I wouldn't underestimate how much a little fear and uncertainty on small probability events can radically change human being we're all sheltered in red because there's an uncertainty last ones here the virus even though you know my wife won't let me move because she just thinks I'm one big walking precondition even though I show her every day but come on I'm like 40 I don't know how to fit that together that we're doing that piece but then we're also saying hey just because there were a hundred shootings last year we shouldn't bet that's not the Apple just definitely not the energy for sure but neither in our the you know there's this the median of thing response to Cogan is almost it's close to asymptomatic yet we're it's changing our behavior and so on we need to put the same wins on both and so in some social scientific way so if you are if you're arguing in the paper that these pattern practice investigations can backfire and often do after these high-profile events what what is the response to this finding I mean we want police departments to be investigating if we suspect them of wrongdoing particularly if they think there's a culture or pattern or history in this Police Department of this sort of aberrant behavior um so what what is the alternative new a pattern and practice investigation when when we suspect something is off yeah it's a it's a it's what we're working on now and have worked on what does optimal investigation of Police Department's look like I don't know yet but I do know there's no free lunch and so my guess is that we are going to have to get comfortable with some uncomfortable trade-offs when it comes to investigating police departments if you go full-bore then you end up actually taking good cops and changing their behavior and we see from the graphs that that's not a good idea if you don't do anything then you allow discrimination potentially manifests itself and so I think I'd like to keep working on this but the things that are top of mind for me are what it looks like to investigate individual officers when there's something that when there's a when there's an event that is above some threshold where it's clear an investigation is needed instead of doing the entire department maybe there's a way to more narrowly target investigations and so that's the kind of thing we're working on now but I don't have the answer I will say again channeling Chicago I do believe that in the interim figurative how to do it together and not in a rancorous way is a good stuff yeah you you had mentioned to me earlier in another discussion that that after your first paper came out I believe was after that you spoke with President Obama about it and he explained why the feds were so eager to to get involved in these investigations they saw it as I believe he said an opportunity for reform can you talk about his his argument and I we can maybe use that as representative of the federal view how they view these incidents and and their role I can't obviously can't speak further than President Obama but I think that the in a meeting that that you described it was pretty interesting to see law enforcement to see activists to see hi members of the federal government in a room talking about solutions so in and how can one they were dealing with the third question that is in this room circular for me how do you try to root out bad policing without affecting duties and I think that's the fundamental question and I think that that that folks in the Justice Department under an Obama were did see it as a term as an opportunity to given the amount of attention that was on police violence in the u.s. an opportunity to reform police departments in the better way I just think that those things can backfire okay okay we did have one question about and I'm not sure about this is the paper actually out yet can people view it or are we still waiting on the official version you know the official version should be ready to go things a little slower and concrete 19 but it's been posted it's just not I don't think it's actually on the website I'll make sure the madness dude gets a copy okay okay okay so you're not calling for an end to these federal investigations necessarily you're saying we might find a better way of conducting them or a way that is mindful of the the backlash that that could occur if they're not done properly yeah I mean I don't I'm never thinking myself as the person who can call for it into anything I've got a three-year-old I can't call from but but I think that you're you hit the nail on the head which is it's not about not investigating or looking for systemic discrimination within the police departments if we have evidence that that exists of course we should look into it but how we do that is extraordinarily important so coming to Terrell guns blazing may not be the right way to do it and I'm not saying I know the right way to do it I'm saying the way we're doing it now it's costing like a lot and and it pains me because they are going no one's writing about those yeah yeah and you you you also spoke earlier about how the media had sort of been managing your expectations on what you would find before you began something began some of this research and I want to talk about the media's role you say it along with the activists the media can really drum up interest in these in these stories which lead to these federal investigations and I wonder if you have any thoughts on how responsibly the media covers this sort of thing in terms of of putting things in perspective I mean I remember a lot of coverage whenever you know let's say an illegal immigrant commits a crime and the media is very quick to explain how statistically speaking immigrants are not more likely to commit violent crimes the natives and so forth but they want to really put this in context because they don't want immigrants or illegal immigrants to be a target they don't seem to go through the same care when a police officer shoots a black person even though it's a statistically very very rare or that they're they don't they don't seem to want to bring that sort of perspective to to the discussion and I'm just wondering if if if you think a more responsible media in that sense could play a positive role here how much time you know I want to have a possible media on every dimension no well I asked you this is because the data which I'm sure you've seen if you the the the number of police shootings overall has gone down dramatically I mean it is it is plummeted literally plummeted and and and yet these events are never put into that sort of context the empirical data is extremely clear in terms of the trend lines or people doing the stuff since 17 years now this is my 17th year at Harvard and I have had the great fortune talking to a lot of folks in the media but I've only had one shouting match and was about this this paper and it was just a refusal I'm not gonna mention the media but a refusal to believe it and a deep anger with me I just try to get some feedback on what we were finding and a deep refusal to to just sit with the reality maybe this particular type of investigation not all investigation but this particular type might be causing black lives and my view is if you if you care about lies then you should care about this even if we disagree about what the next thing to come is right that's a different story because we don't have data on yeah but the absolute refusal to grapple with the data there were the the insistence that I not put this out because that would be banned and that they're sure these investigations are working on dimensions that we can't measure I just can't I don't know what to do so when when you present the data there's there's there's a either a disbelief in your numbers or it's just dismissed as not relevant to the overall picture they're trying to paint in their narrative d all the above and so yes there's part this particular conversation was part that in part a more philosophical or at least different way of thinking about the world which is I've been with these I've seen these investigations firsthand they are good and and they root out systemic discrimination and and so you don't calculate all lots of positive bits benefits from them that are not realized in time and I say of course great show me those things that will will will include those in our analysis ready and so you have some other things on every dimension with its education or anything else well don't like a result the 10 it's the old it's really important on the stuff in the news your trick that's what this particular person did but I was I was very surprised at the immediate media and how strong the pushback was I thought the person might sit with the numbers for a bit and go hey I'm a thousand limes that's that's that's a lot and so let's think about what that means well I can anticipate some pushback to the current paper from police in terms of saying you know as they were telling you when you were out riding with them know we're doing our job we're doing our job we're doing our job but as you say police are human beings and they're going to respond to incentives and if you and if you're going to escape go with them for the problems in these communities I think they're gonna they're going to behave accordingly right yeah that's that's what he would be and whether or not they were doing extra and are not doing extra or we're doing their jobs and you're doing less than their jobs that's not for me to say my name's identifying the behavioral change that's related to important statistics when it comes to crime and homicides particularly in lower-income that that one thousand lives number that you mentioned over what what time period are you are you talking about there that's a question from other viewers that was summed across six cities over twenty four months after the investigations okay okay okay every every month we go by and like if I had more data they'd be it's a cumulative number so another question I want to ask you that we and you you hear this a lot from the media and from the activist is the the tension between the police and and these minority communities and my question is do you do you get any sense that that is overplayed at all I you know we know that the 911 calls mostly originated in black communities brown communities which is a funny way of showing police you don't like them if you're constantly calling them to come help and and of course most of the people living in these neighborhoods are law-abiding people and it is a small percentage of these populations that is causing you know ninety percent of trouble mom so again the question is is this tension is palpable as as some of the activists and some of the media coverage has led the public to believe whereas it tension between certain elements of these communities and and and and law enforcement well it's almost surely certain and I and I say that just a quick fall because as you mentioned when you were young you didn't want to get stopped by the police because of what you might have in the car so come interviewer comes up to you 17 18 year-old Roland fryer what your relationship was like please I want them to leave me alone but you had an ulterior motive there I'm just wanting how representative 18 year-old Roland fryer was of the quote-unquote black community in its relationship with please community of just being straight with you know there must be a statute of limitations on knucklehead oh of course it's the tension is stronger in some subsets in the community relative others of course however I will say I also see lots of different kitchen across the cities that I was able to dis right so I would say one of the most embarrassing things that again since we're admitting that there's some things on the amendments it's more embarrassing things is that even despite my bias going in eight hours in a police car riding around and you start to see everyone you see is a criminal it's just it's really hard right like I mean he's really skilled at it because I was like I mean I did some training when I was working in my first police paper and the police trainers told me I was the worst you know in one community I would go in someone who would look you know like hey I was here I think I'd asked that person a few questions police said were able to quickly say I know that person that's mr. Jones he just likes to do that but I mean I did was it was really interesting it was to make fine delineation between some people in some cities where I thought police and community relations were working well in other situations I would say that there was a lot of palpable tension if every stop right I did a double shift in the Houston Police Department a lot of attention at every stop and when I asked the officer I was riding around with hey like the first couple of three steps out of this car you seem really nervous and he was like this is Houston everyone's gotta go you know he was nervous the person it might have been nervously you can see you can just imagine that yeah it doesn't take how many those interactions happen today even with a very low hazard ring right I'm a nerd a few of those can just turn out wrong turn out wrong go wrong and so I see it in the way you describe certain segments of the community of course you know the statistics but I think it's overlooked that some cities do this a lot better than other cities and the question is what can you do okay okay well let's let's end our discussion there and let this this expert panel that we've lined up take it from here and and perhaps expand on it hopefully I'm going to turn things over now to Howard he saw my colleague at the Manhattan Institute and he is going to moderate the next panel thank you again I professor fryer and I'll be back when how it's done to give a few closing remarks and thank some people thank you so much Jason and sorry to be a little shaggy looking in my lockdown mode here to respond and expand on Professor fryers new report and his observations we do have an expert panel and an extremely varied panel we have a practitioner we have a political scientist a criminal criminologist and we have social commentator / media executive so I think we're going to get a number of quite different perspectives and I hope it will be quite useful to introduce our panelists now beginning with Edward Flynn ed Flynn is the recently retired Chief of Police of Milwaukee Police Department where he served from 2008 to 2018 he previously served as the police commissioner in Springfield Mass as well as the Secretary of Public Safety in Massachusetts he has really had a long and distinguished career in law enforcement he's a graduate of the FBI National Academy and he was part of the executive session on policing at the Harvard Kennedy School some of you may know that Bill Bratton very successful police commissioner in New York was also a product of that same program I we next we have Camille Foster Camille is a partner the media company free think he's the co-founder of the telecommunications consultancy tell Cal Q and it's the co-host of the libertarian podcast the fifth column you has been the co-host of the independence on the Fox Business Network chair and former chairman of the America's future foundation a non-profit political activist organization so political activists are represented on our panel next we have Barry Lancer Barry is the emeritus professor of John Jay College of Criminal Justice here in New York City he's the author of the rise and fall of violent crime in America and the upcoming book the roots of violent crime in America from the Gilded Age through the Depression it'll be published in 2021 he previously taught the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and prosecuted and defended accused criminals both there and while at John Jay and our final panelist is dr. Wilfred Reilly dr. Reilly's assistant professor of political science at Kentucky Kentucky State University historically black college he holds a PhD in political science and a law degree from Southern Illinois University is the author of the books hate crime hoax how the left is selling a fake race war and taboo 10 facts you can't talk about and the 50 million dollar question I'd like to begin if I might with chief Flynn good afternoon chief Flynn there flu you heard the situation laid out by Professor fryer and it seems like a if I might law enforcement is squeezed into between trying to control crime and trying to preclude incidents that might be viewed as race related or as reflective of racism on the part of the police what was it like for you in Milwaukee which I should point out as a city 38% black 26% poverty rate it's kind of ground zero for this kind of thing what was it like to operate such a police department in that context well it's a challenge in any era to operate in that context certainly there are many social historical reasons why african-american particularly young african-american males may be distrustful the police but I would say there is my pre Ferguson environment in my post Ferguson environment in which you know given the extraordinary homicide rate in Milwaukee when I arrived they were averaging about 130 homicides a year in the city of 600,000 my first two years there we reduced it to the 70s and for most of the decade I was there it was below a hundred the year after Ferguson I went up to 142 and what we were experiencing was a version of what dr. Friars has been has been studying which is a post critical incident environment against the context of other critical incidents in other cities that are apparently showing this pattern of rampant police illegal activity and there was a viral video of fact floating around I think it ended up with like 8 million hits me expressing my frustration at a community meeting where we were being assailed over an incident in which a police officer used deadly force on a mentally ill man who was assaulting the officer with the officers baton and I was on my way to a homicide scene or a five-year-old girl had been shot to death in our house in a drive-by shooting because two drug hitmen hit the wrong house and had killed this girl sitting on her grandfather's lap and what was so frustrating to me is that you know here our officers are the ones out they are in that environment trying to protect folks and they're being assailed as the source of the problem and what I try to explain to people is that and I once want to thank dr. friars for actually getting in a police car and watching the wolf and warp of policing is it's practiced in disadvantaged neighborhoods is the fact that the police when I look at the disparate death rates in the cogut environment and people look at this and they think it's a major public health emergency and something should be done about it I agree and the people that are risking their lives in you know hospitals treating this disparity you know I'm a death rate from makovan are rightly hailed as heroes and I think of my son who's patrolling the streets of Washington DC right now patrolling neighborhoods that have a disparity amah side rates you know maybe 85% of the homicides in this city or african-american victims the same as it was in Milwaukee but he's assumed to be biased because he's in those neighborhoods engaged in proactive activity policing and so I think our fundamental issue was really raised in the prior conversation is that the neighborhoods at risk of violent crime want to need ethical policing responsible to their concerns and the fact is proactive activity saves lives but what we haven't figured out is what is an acceptable disparity in police activity and what's an unacceptable disparity and what's the denominator I mean if I apply the same dosage of policing in every neighborhood of Milwaukee I have been guilty of ethical immoral malpractice because the fact of the matter is where the 9-1-1 calls are where the bodies were falling who the described offenders were ever the exact neighborhoods or poverty and unemployment and educational achievement and housing quality were all below scale all at poverty rates and we are the one aspect of society's response to the overall ills of poverty who seem to be the full guys for those ills well everyone else is dealing with the same disparities we are I think we have to decide you know what it is we're trying to accomplish here we're trying to reduce the death rate in these communities that are plagued by so many social ills and they're destabilized by violence the police are charged with doing something but we are operating in a political and media environment right now that values values conflict above all and I don't know yeah I was aware of the concept of alternative facts by ever before I ever heard anybody in the White House tried out that expression meaning alright your side of the issue claims these are the most relevant facts well I have other relevant facts your relevant facts are a number of critical incidents have occurred involving police officers and african-american men resulting in death some of those deaths wrongful my alternative fact is we are deploying officers where there's the greatest risk of violent death and those are african-american communities in Milwaukee you are 8 12 times more likely to be murdered and 15 times more likely to be shot if you're an african-american than a white person and we were supposed to do something about it I think trying to do something about it isn't just about the police or requires some political moral courage to just raise the level of the conversation we're not blaming the victims for being victimized but it's part of a context of the many negative components of intergenerational poverty and our symptom of that the police is dealing with the violence and to disaggregate that from everything else and make the police now the symbol of the unfinished work of civil rights while everybody else goes about their business is destructive to those same communities that need us to try to help them stabilize so they can exist exact informal social control so that's the dreadful thing about it the missing link is you know pattern of practice instigations don't cause additional homicides but the disabled ization and d legitimization of policing does and that's accomplished when every disparity has to be a bias disparity and no other explanation is permitted and that's just destroying rational conversation okay thank you chief Flynn I'm gonna jump to Professor Riley if I might we're gonna get to everybody of course but you know you published a book called hate crime hoax do the protesters if the activist black lives matter are they entirely wrong we just had an incident yesterday in Minnesota where a young black man died in a you know with this then the the knee of a police officer on his neck apparently and he actually said I can't breathe just has happened in a famous or infamous incident in New York I are they are you really confident that these protests are ill-founded well um as dr. fryer said I tend to be I'm an academic myself I feel like I can out nerd pretty much anyone on the panel and I tend to to the extent possible be data-driven so when you say something like wrong that's almost a moral statement what I do think about most black lives matter style activists is that they're well-intentioned at the general but they're very unaware of some of the real facts here that are relevant to this debate so I mean as regards dr. Friars enlightening comments I mean there's an obvious statement of fact here which is that if you pull serving police officers back from proactive policing in high crime neighborhoods you're going to see more crime I'm actually from Chicago I was born on the south side of the city I grew up in the Wicker Park neighborhood pre gentrification and a couple of months after the events in Ferguson I recall one of our news weeklies one of the african-american papers I believe running an incredible headline that ran police stops down 90 percent while crime skyrockets so that obviously was a tragedy and that was a tragedy that claimed primarily black and brown lives and the narrative that's generally used to justify that kind of system shift on the part of police departments is the black lives matter narrative chair no Biko once went on Fox News and claimed that to quote a black man is murdered by the police every 28 hours there is I mean the platform for the movement for black lives uses figures like thousands there's this idea in several contexts of court but there's this idea that there's a wave of police near assassinations of African Americans especially males for this is the implication little reason and that is not accurate in any sense the reason dr. fryers work is valuable to those of us in the academic community is that he runs comprehensive well done regressions and what he points out and Heather McDonald at Manhattan Institute has done this as well is that if you adjust for very basic variables like crime rate and urban status which you can easily do and what's called the stat package program like Stata or are there is no statistically significant disparity in the shootings of african-americans as versus for example Hispanics or urban whites or any other large population group um there's not a gigantic gap in the first place I mean I obviously pulled up the statistics on this before this conversation today as per one of my own books taboo in 2015 which is a representative year that's used reasonably often in the discipline there were roughly 1,200 people all in that were killed and encounters with on-duty police officers 258 of those persons were black and if you unpack that a little bit more exactly 17 17 were unarmed black men that were killed specifically it encounters with on-duty white officers that is an extraordinarily small number of people that is significantly smaller than number of people killed annually by bees wasps and hornets for example in 2019 we see a pretty similar pattern I'm using Washington Post data here but there have been 1,000 there were 1,000 four people killed during that year in its entirety of those 235 were black I will note in the interest of honesty that some of these individuals believe more than 100 were not identified by race but you see a very specific two to three hundred in the overall pool annually that are african-american so there's a huge media element to me of the Mis comprehension that goes on around this so in a typical year as I've mentioned african-american men make up perhaps 25% of those killed by police however cases in which police have unfortunate violent encounters with african-american men make up about 80% I'd say a bit more of the stories around this area covered by the national media while researching taboo I actually just very simply deleted cookies on a couple of computers and searched well-known police shooting and of the cases that were turned up during the first 10 pages of results we found out in fact I know three white cases two Hispanic cases 32 black cases despite the actual numbers that are on point here so I think that this kind of curation of fear actually occurs in the context of many topics as it would be difficult not to today a number of us have mentioned covert 19 obviously a terrible killer something to be aware of let's not take excessive risks but I actually pulled up the data from the CDC as of yesterday while we were talking the total number of people under the age of 25 so far to die from kovat in the United States is 88 the number of persons between 25 and 34 to die from covert 19 to the United States 463 total number under 45 although I may have neglected to add two of these categories but it looks like 1186 so when we make complex difficult moral decisions it's absolutely important that we have the real facts on deck we have to decide which trade offs we do want any human loss whether that's to covet or to a law officers bullet is a great tragedy but it makes no sense to respond to a false narrative with specific directed real actions so I think that many of the people that are engaging in advocacy on the black lives matter side simply don't know what the facts are if you asked many passionate proud young activists to estimate the number of black men killed by white officers in fights or encounters in a typical year unarmed I don't think they'd say 15 and that's a problem let me turn to a slightly out of order from what i warn't to camille foster and we've had a variety of I won't say denunciations but concerns expressed about the media you have a lot of experience in the media it may be true that the media blows they sings out of proportion but if you're chief Flynn in Milwaukee you can't make that go away you can't say well those are not the most important facts those are still the facts he has to deal with how might you advise him to think about that dilemma well that's that's a very difficult circumstance obviously when an incident like this occurs and it does take control of the local and in many cases national media conversation any Police Department finds itself in a very difficult spot usually the response that you'll see is not unlike the shooting that we saw just this not the shooting but the man who died while he was being apprehended by the police just this week where you know local officials especially now post the black lives matter movement tend to come out and they'll say something very very resonant with community concern something along the lines of you know no black person should be killed for being black or being black shouldn't be a death sentence you know when you have to deal with that sort of hyperbole it can be extremely emotional but I think it's terribly important that we start at some point before the incident when we're talking about how to address these issues for the most part I mean I could give advice on how to respond but that's triage um before and perhaps even after an incident like this I think the way in which these shootings are investigated and adjudicated is critically important to the conversation is something that has generally overlooked I have had and I've been involved in stories where we've investigated the various ways that different departments release involved deaths and one of the things that I think is underappreciated and profoundly poorly understood is the degree to which investigations into civilian deaths when the police are involved can oftentimes seem secretive can oftentimes not be nearly as in-depth as folks might deem appropriate and can very often involved local district attorneys police officers who are effectively co-workers um that is a dynamic that is obviously problematic and I don't think it lends itself to creating trust amongst the public at large and the police and it is certainly the case that one doesn't want to create an overly rival risk process where in your to hang every police officer for any mistake that's made during the line of duty even an honest mistake but like transportation safety like an institution like the National Transportation Safety Board we investigate airline crashes just as we ought to impartial II and thoughtfully prudently extensively investigate all police-involved deaths with an eye toward developing policy that improves things and makes it better and the degree we find ourselves politicizing these encounters so we find ourselves looking at the death of Brianna Taylor for example 26 year-old woman was killed in her home as a result of a midnight no-knock raid at her in her house the police department had the wrong address it's very easy for the media to latch on to a racial narrative it's very easy for activists to get animated about this along those same lines for whatever reason it becomes a lot more difficult for us to have this sort of broad national conversation that it seems very appropriate to have about the number of no-knock raids that ought to be happening about the frequency with which these things are happening and degree to which it's even necessary about the underlying policies that we have Anna SOT as a society of endorsed wear and we're asking police officers to enforce a range of laws that may or may not serve our best interest and unfortunately because of the disproportion and emphasis on race I think we don't get around to having those conversations so the best advice that I can give to local law enforcement to municipal governments that are responsible for funding them and operating them is to make certain that you are giving people the sort of transparency that is actually acquired when incidents like this happen to empower your citizens so that they can have visibility and what what's going on because that is the only way um that we can actually find our way out of this in a way that actually gets us the result that we want you know a minimal number of people getting hurt police officers empowered to do their jobs and a citizenry that can trust their police departments and have faith in them Thank You Camille let me turn to Barry lad sir john jay college he's both our criminologist our historian of the panel chief Flynn in talking about the the really broad backdrop for the conflicts and controversies that were engaged in exposed to talked about it's the product of intergenerational poverty police can't be expected to solve that you've looked at the history of violent crime do you see contemporary violent crime or violent crime in American history as linked to intergenerational poverty yes I do Howard but that's not the primary cause otherwise all impoverished groups would commit the same amount of violent crime and we know that's not the case so poverty is one factor but it's not the only or necessarily the most significant factor in producing violent crime I so what do you see as the most significant factors there are cultural factors too there are groups because of their experiences that resort to violence african-americans in the United States are a prime example of course and because of there are historical / cultural experiences we find a long-standing and ongoing problem in poor black communities and when I say long-standing my research goes shows that the excessive violence in the impoverished african-american goes back to the 1880s so and and continues right through the 20th century may I come in if also on another historical issue that relates to a professor fryers paper please from around the late 1960s to the early 1990s this country went through the probably the worst violent crime boom that ever occurred in its history and during that period police tried everything they could think of to stanch the tide of violence and for the most part nothing worked the tactics that worked in one city didn't seem to work in another city so there's a second order if you will inference in professor fryers paper forthcoming paper the first inference of course has to do with the impact of investigations on policing but the second order inference it seems to me and I'm skeptical about it is that the police can readily control a violent crime they could reduce violent crime all they have to do is be proactive I'm very skeptical about that simply because I know for a fact and I can prove it and have proved it that there have been various tactics including proactive policing a community policing hot spots policing and I can go through the whole long list of different police tactics that work with varying degrees of effectiveness and so my argument would be even if professor fryers right that within 24 months let's say of the start of an investigation you have an uptick in homicide or violent crime I'm not at all persuaded that that's due to a reduction in proactive police and now I'm sure professor fryers an excellent research and I'm sure he controlled for all sorts of factors that could have affected the crime rate but I'm very skeptical about it and I'm Pro police and I'm not sympathetic to black doesn't matter at all I recognize how much we need the police and I'm in complete sync with the Chiefs remarks about these being social problems and not just the police's of problems but I'm very skeptical that the police can effectively stanch a violent crime rates because they didn't they didn't over a period of over 30 years and that's why I think the second-order inferences in professor fryers of paper should be examined and shouldn't be readily accepted all right well we have to go back to chief Flynn he talked about his experience in Milwaukee pre Ferguson and post Ferguson and through a sharp line between under a hundred murders and 143 murders I'm guessing you would take issue with professional answer well somewhat I mean you know I went to Joey saw a scholar about policing history as well and I'm familiar with the heresies contrasting I think we could probably have a widely discussion about the impact of the police on crime in different generations of our iterations and our access to better intelligence and the types of officers were recruiting and any police it has to be embedded in an overall strategy so he's correct in noting that some tactics work well in some cities but not in others but that's because the other variables in the you know replicated city weren't address their work perhaps pre-existing relationships of trust with the community or there wasn't you know a coordination with the rest of the criminal justice system I mean weren't the painful things we've learned is you know something has to happen after an arrest if you're trying to lie to reduce crime and that requires you know the intervention of the district attorney's office it requires that you know the courts operate it effectively and of course we all know that the court systems are overwhelmed because even with the Menard no court system in America can handle the number of jury trials that would be required for all the felony arrests may be given City so consequently there's always spillage which means career criminals get to reoffending an intervention of the courts but I think what it is necessary to keep in mind is that police activity doesn't matter if it's connected or overarching strategy and we did the kind of analysis the Roland fryer did we measured our traffic stop activity in Milwaukee we used that because we found that traffic accidents were co-located with my crime neighborhoods or instruction with me upward to the officers was to emphasize warnings because we had a lot of tickets on poor people and they have their licenses suspended what we wanted to see high-profile active police enforcement of traffic laws even if it did culminate in a warning and what we saw was there is an absolute negative connection between traffic stop activity and three variables which surprised us there is literature that said you could stop robberies and car thefts with street-level traffic enforcement by regular patrol units but the third thing we saw we haven't we impacted was non-fatal shootings and so three activities that required the vigorous use of public space could be deterred by data driven policing enforcement activities regardless of whether or not an arrest or citation was issued that in some ways should we say contended for the public space to make it available to all because you know poverty doesn't cause crime linearly I understand that but I also understand that public space violence does belong to those criminals who happen to be poor and that is why we have the public police you know other people with criminal intent of different social classes don't mug people they figure other ways to get your money and some that's the challenges we have to be visible and available in the neighborhoods where that public space must be contended for and if we do it effectively trying to connect to communities as well as part of a thoughtful overall strategy we can have an impact on crime and when you delete item i's us and back us off you know kind of like the manager arguing with the umpire it's about the next call alright you do see and in fact on what happens in those public spaces and I commend that the professor fryer for examining that honestly and the challenge of course is how do we how do we different facts that support perhaps different interpretations that all disparities can only be explained by biased I I don't want to get into a policing debate it's between you and and professor Lancer although that would be quite interesting but professor Riley we have on the table a kind of a bleak picture about the limits of policing and then we have something related but it was saying that chief Flynn also said before which was I the importance of getting to a what he called ethical policing an ethical dimension of policing activity in a sense he just gave us a really interesting example let's go to high crime neighborhoods and disproportionately if you will enforce traffic laws do you and I want to ask Camille the same thing do you regard those as examples of ethical policing Camille do you want to take that first there I can't it sure sure I mean it's certainly it's certainly a matter of how the policy is is instituted I mean I I've I lived in bedford-stuyvesant Brooklyn it's a actively gentrifying neighborhood at least it was before the pandemic I guess everyone sort of took off in a manner of speaking afterwards at least those that could but while I was there I certainly saw incidents where there would be a shooting in the neighborhood and immediately after the shooting you see precisely the sort of spike that Professor fryer was describing afterwards where the police would be present inside of you know train terminals etc um this was in the last several years so most of the active concern about stop and frisk in New York City had abated because the policies had changed but it is certainly appropriate and I think for many of the residents of a community generally speaking black and white it is appreciated to see that sort of response after something like that happens but of course one has concerns about the way a policy like that is instituted and again I think you have unless you're able to cultivate the sort of trust necessary certainly you know making additional stops in a neighborhood just to kind of take a look inside of someone's car I mean perhaps that could be done in a way that that makes sense but if it's just a stop on the basis of suspicion as opposed to someone actually had some sort of moving violation then that certainly seems like something that would raise some levels of concerns from a civil liberty standpoint yeah so professor I think what does go too far than what would become unethical okay that's a good direct question and I think a good direct answer would be abuse so I mean one thing that I think we're all in agreement on across the panel is that actual unethical policing of the kind used to see and say black communities in the south and the 1930s is unacceptable you shouldn't have police officers manhandling or physically abusing people you shouldn't have police officers for example taking large amounts of money from drug dealers and essentially stealing it the use of racial language shouldn't be tolerated so on so I think that at the baseline obviously Police Department should work with community leaders if there are any remaining angry cavemen on the force they should be removed from the forest turn in the badge and the gun but one thing I absolutely do want to say here is again a guy who came of age in mid-1990 Chicago the underlying reality in Chicago in New York in Milwaukee in these other world cities in terms of Detroit in terms of why there are so many police officers in certain areas of town the underlying reality is crime and I live in Kentucky about 30 minutes from Appalachian now we see the exact same issue with quote-unquote poor white communities in Frankfort Lexington so on down the line the police are near those trailer parks because there's a lot of crime there if you're looking for someone who might be selling crystal methamphetamine there's gonna be a profile of a working-class [ __ ] age and individual who might be committing that crime so I mean in general policing since the cop stat era in the 1990s has involved sending officers to high areas to try to reduce crime my assumption having looked at some of the models is that if crime ever stabilized at the citywide normal those officers would be to some extent withdrawn from those areas but sending police in to afflicted areas to for example stop and frisk to search young males for the weapons used in violent crimes is probably a necessary evil I would draw the line at abuses such as expressed racism theft manhandling people so on down the line but we can't ignore the reality of crime it would be to a certain extent malfeasance of duty to have the same number of heavily armed police officers swaggering around a suburban neighborhood full of young mothers as you would have in a housing project community or a trailer park community that wouldn't make any sense because in the first community you don't have a very large number of violent crimes so I think there certainly is an ethical explanation for Quantico cops tat policing targeted policing as long as that doesn't lead into the individual abuse of citizens but that and you're gonna have trouble drawing what exists on either side of that line but that I think is this stinking that has to be drawn you simply can't pull the police out of the highest crime areas because people note that there are more police in high crime areas of course there are well a related question that comes from one of our viewers and and I think it's for for a professor Lancer implicit in what professor Reilly just said is that if you're going to target communities with a disproportionate amount of police activity you better have good data are you satisfied as a criminologist that what professor Riley called the CompStat Eric computer directed policing do we really have the data and the data systems in so many local police force we have thousands of local police forces do we have the kind of data that makes that practical well if you mean crime data there's no question and the data is unimpeachable at me you can't even argue at the data so the answer is indubitably unquestionably we have the data the data show where the crime is the crime is in the poor african-american areas of big cities that's why we have a problem policing those areas of course creates racial tensions that's why I said I agree with everything chief Flynn said because as a matter of fact that's the major problem in the United States in terms of policing and has been for the past half century by the way just this historical point it might be interesting to note that prior to the 1960s the police didn't have big problems in black communities because they under police them they ignored the crime that was going on in those black communities it's just that when you had a big migration from the south of African Americans up north and when crime started to hit White's as well as blacks and crime rates soared that you had a much bigger demand for policing in black communities but that's where the crime is and and I think the the data are unimpeachable unquestionably correct would you speak briefly you made an offhanded comment that I thought was I got my attention and that was about a culture of violent crime in african-american communities going back to the 1880s why is that why is that the theory I present in my forthcoming book in which I allude to in the book about crime in the post-world War two ear is as follows a 90% of the black population prior to 1910 lived in the south southern whites had very high violent crime rates southern blacks in effect adopted the same sort of they call it the honor code if you're insulted if someone offends you if you have a grudge with somebody you resort to violence to defend your honor to defend your integrity this type of approach to interpersonal relations supports a great deal of violence it existed among whites in the south and existed by the way throughout the 20th century some of the areas where professor Riley is in in the Appel actions are witness to this and it exists among african-americans now as african-americans move to the middle class as with all ethnic groups that have moved to the middle class you will see a big decline in violent crime so we're not talking about a racial characteristic here violent crime rates among middle class African Americans probably not any different than violent crime rates among middle class whites so we're talking about a cultural manifestation that develops in the south and was transported north with the great migration it was largely ignored and that's why black and black crime rates continued and I would add further because of racism because of discrimination it was more difficult to block for blacks to move to the middle class that perpetuated this lower-class black population which engaged in high levels of interpersonal violence and this in a nutshell is my theory of violent crime in the United States although I don't wanna limit this to African Americans because White's did more than their share but that's my theory of crime violent crime in the United States for most of our history since the 19th century right but don't things change there's one way to change that you just put forward become economically better off yes and I want to turn to Camille on this do we have a reward in popular culture for engaging in allusions to violent behavior that are perpetuating the honor culture that Professor Lanza referred to over and apart from poverty and I guess I'm talking about the hip-hop and rap music and other platforms of certain culture yeah you know I've certainly heard allusions to that I mean the fact of the matter is that major consumers of hip hop exist all around the world in virtually every community I haven't seen any evidence that hip hop in particular is driving violence it is certainly a genre in which there is a great deal of virus violence but one could say the same about r-rated films and again I also haven't seen any sort of indication that people who go to see you know die hard films with great regularity are more likely to shoot people I think that the that crime is complex I've certainly seen some you know an honor culture before I definitely think it's appropriate to look at cultural cultural aspects that might be contributing to rates of violence in particular communities and and I actually think that the if I'm if I'm remembering the data I've seen and I haven't looked at it recently there really is a bit of stickiness there in terms of blacks being over-represented across different income groups in various violent crime stats so even like middle-class blacks tend to be over-represented when compared with their middle-class counterparts that's a confounding and difficult reality that we have to contend with but I do also think that it's separate and apart from a number of the other issues related to policing and criminal justice issues broadly I think that you know a conversation about what we can do to ensure that we're having as I mentioned earlier independent investigations it's important conversations about what we can do to ensure that you know that there's impartiality you know justice system is very important and even those conversations tend to be dominated by concerns about race but the things that most concerned me pertain to forensic science for example and whether or not our practices and procedures there are ones that are actually getting us good outcomes and we've seen pretty good rigorous scientific work that suggests that in many instances we're not getting great results there and we failed to do anything about it in fact the Obama administration failed to do anything about it when they had an opportunity so it's I hope that we're able to disentangle these conversations about policing and race enough for us to see clearly the opportunity that we have to improve policing and to deliver a better quality of life to citizens who are in the most challenging community challenged communities in the country I'm gonna get to chief Flynn in a minute and his reaction to your points about transparency and investigations and the alliances between district attorneys and police or the perceived alliances but would you expand on what you mean by forensic science there have been a number of high profile incidents of many many cases being overturned because there have been discoveries about various tactics that have been used in courts when prosecuting crimes whether it be the dental records or forensics related to bullet analysis that have proven to be less than thoroughly scientific with questions about the reproducibility of results around those practices and still many of those practices continue to be used in courts today and greatly to the disadvantage of folks who have the least means to mount the defense to push back against scientifically dubious practices that have been used in courts to convict people of various crimes so I think you have to have conversations about that an examination of that and there was a report that was issued in 2013 towards the end of President Obama's time in office hours 2016 20 end of 2017 it was a president's the President's Council on science I can't remember the name exactly but anyone who's looking for this can find it that actually has a pretty comprehensive summary of a lot of the areas that have the highest difficulty and proposed the great many reforms and unfortunately the Obama Justice report Department and declined to do anything about this report despite the fact that it was constituted by this that particular administration chief Linda's Camille's point about both those kinds of post-mortems I guess you would have to call them and transparency in the judicial and investigative process does that make sense to you and do you think it would have helped you in Milwaukee or would help other police chiefs including the potential police chief who is your son well I there's tons I just say no even though the points he makes are all good ones when you're in the middle of one of those controversies the facts to stop mattering controversy has become evidence for a strongly held position and I mean it didn't matter in Milwaukee that over the course of my 10 year we have a 77 percent decrease in citizen complaints against the boys the University of Wisconsin and Milwaukee did a public survey they conducted not the police department and finally had a three-quarter approval rating including a sixty-two percent approval rating any african-american community of course I was concerned about the gap and approval ratings black and white but what public official wouldn't kill for a 60% approval rating from anybody none of matter what matters is we had a controversial use of force that this use of force was perceived by some to be evidence of a national problem and we got fitted into the national conversation and it was one of these incidents where I really had to make a tough call because at the point the officer used deadly force to kill this deranged man the officers being assaulted he's been disarmed of his baton he had no options I had to defend that use of force but ended up firing him because of his incompetence in handling the initial encounter he had had to the appropriate training and oh the mentally ill he went in by himself he put his hands on the man and patted him down without engaging in a conversation it was officer created shepherded and so the officer even as always said he should not be criminally charged in the ultimately wasn't the result was that the local black lives matter people demanded that I be fired for not you know wanting his prosecution and the police union voted no confidence of me and I like to think at that moment I brought the police linky let me but I wonder I wonder challenge right now is you know we the police have become symbols all right we are symbols of much bigger issues but that keep the conversation politically and in the media has been oversimplified to the point of useful uselessness I can barely read the paper anymore because I know what everybody's gonna say yes Susan this story happened yes it looks like police malpractice to make sure but what's the editorial the Washington Post today when will it is stopped the police right Helene I mean stop it you're worried yeah acceptance in the community when you're the biggest propaganda arm the legitimizing police relationship okay let's let's slow down let's slow down yeah please do quick follow-up I'd say a strong agreement with you it's actually worse than useless so I'll emphasize this a bit it is dangerous there have been incidents of mass shootings where people have targeted police officers motivated by precisely these kinds of narratives and I don't think people are particularly careful when they go on television and say it seems like it's open season on black men or something insane like that that is hyperbole worse than that it's dangerous hyperbole but I do wonder if you'd agree with me because as you were describing a circumstance where you found an officer who done something wrong who jeopardized citizens lives it seems to me based on what I've seen that there are far too many situations where there are in fact law enforcement officers who respond to incentives just like any other person would who look to protect people who work in the same profession they do who think to themselves perhaps there but for the grace of God go I and who might obscure the truth and allow for a circumstance where a bad officer continues to do there continues to be on the force endangering fellow officers and endangering citizens and I wonder if you'd agree that there there ought to be the broader broadly understood and applied standards for guaranteeing independent investigations of police involved encounters with police when someone is killed or seriously injured because I had seen Cirque stances where there is essentially police officers investigating fellow officers when something like this happens and the the truth doesn't come out and whether or not that individual incidents wit again if it's the wrong sort of person if it's a white officer and a white citizen who's killed no one is paying attention but it matters a great deal whether or not we're adjudicating those things fairly and whether or not we're getting bad cops off of the force and whether or not we're changing policy in order to protect people and allow cops to do their job safely I would just point out that chief Flynn has given us a new phrase police created jeopardy police created jeopardy the bad practice of the officer that he discussed created the Jeopardy that he was in so that's that's a new a new turn now we have another phenomenon that's going on and that's related to police and that's what some people call mass incarceration some called D incarceration I wanted to ask both Barry and professor Riley how do you see that the mass incarceration and the demands for release of certain lower-level so-called criminals as an appropriate response to the concern about over policing or is it a complicating making it worse well I mean everyone has a bias and I'll be open and say Eileen center-right right up front but my strong impression is that mass incarceration in the United States except to the limited extent that you're talking about low-level drug offenses is a result of mass crime during the period between the mid to late 1960s in about 1994 where you had the expansion of the welfare state where you had specific changes under law of the fruit of the poison tree rule Miranda Escobedo Gideon assigned public defenders for all felony and misdemeanor defended so on down the line as a result of all this you saw a dramatic I believe 400% would be accurate increase in crime and this resulted in a large number of people being incarcerated many studies like the new Jim Crow that look atlet's that's a book by Michelle Alexander yeah yeah it's just about to point that out but Michelle Alexander's the new Jim Crow for example look at the reality one of high rates of incarceration and to the reality of racial disparities in incarceration and say that what we're doing is creating a new Chantell slave system ignoring the fact that not long after the original chattel slave system ended we did not see these kind of racial disparities these kind of rates of incarceration this is to some very large extent a result of the growth in crime in the recent past history of the United States and getting to the point I mean the obvious reality is that if you begin letting large numbers of people out of jail or out of prison you're going to see once again a substantial increase in crime I believe it was the New York Times that once ran a hilarious headline that was along the lines of despite the fact that more criminals are in prison crime continues to decrease or we're not seeing increases in crime and you're gonna see the exact reverse of that if you begin emptying the prisons and jails again during the Copa 19 pandemic we've seen a very very very slight foretaste of that so obviously I I think Camille would probably agree with this but I think that almost all drugs of pleasure and personal doses should be legalized for example but when you're talking about the majority of the crimes that are going to take you to prison not to a one-week stay in the county hotel taking the people that have committed these offenses burglary sexual assault 2 and so on and releasing them in public is gonna have a major negative effect that is entirely entirely predictable well I agree with that I agree with that were you gonna turn to me or no I was gonna turn to you and I was going to ask you whether go ahead and agree but I was going to ask you whether there's there's a trope one hears about if low-level drug offenses were not offenses there was a decriminalization or legalization then we wouldn't see this mass incarceration well if you look only in prisons and it's only gonna have at best at 16 cent impact on the prison population and most of those drug imprisonments are for dealing and not and not for you not for possession not for mere possession but but but do those kinds of incidents in which police are either cracking down or searching for drugs or arresting somebody for possession disproportionately or do we know lead to these kinds of altercations oh I don't know if those and particularly to altercations maybe some of the other panelists this one very quick comment here I mean the two sentences first of all my impression is that most of the altercations that lead to a viral shooting would be something like a domestic violence potential arrest or something outside a liquor serving establishment I'd have to check the data on that but I don't think drug cases are disproportionately represented but one point that was made in passing is an Indian chief lens made this point in the United States criminal justice and to some extent criminal bargaining system something like ninety seven percent of legal cases are plea bargain so if someone is in prison for the crime of marijuana possession that's almost certainly the charge that they've quote-unquote cops - out of a list of several charges that it could include trafficking of the same substance possession of cocaine as well as marijuana possession of an illegal firearm and so on down the line there are very very it's hard to go to prison at least the first couple of times you get arrested there are gonna be very very few people whether that's African American white etc in prison just on the basis of a misdemeanor marijuana beef quota clause and nobody goes to prison for that jail maybe but not prison the real issue here is recidivism and you'll have very high recidivism rates in the United States so if you release people and the time spent in prison is only about two years on average anyway so if you release people who are prone to commit additional crimes as soon as they get out and we know the data and the data are pretty horrifying to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the Justice Department tracked people for nine years and you had an 80 something percent recidivism measuring you sitov ism by an arrest for serious offense so with that high-end recidivism rate if you release people prematurely you're bound to increase crime okay well I I'm gonna give you a chance but it's going to be your closing remarks keep in mind okay so hi God I'm gonna give everybody now a chance we're coming to the end of our time so everybody will get and I'd ask you to reflect on maybe what you got out of this that you didn't think before or know before I know that's hard for academics because they already know what they know but I'm gonna start with I'm gonna start with chief Flynn and reflect on the conversation and and closing remarks of any kind they're all the immediate conversation I just like to note that most victims of violent crime or victimized by people who look like them and that has some meaning for those who find themselves in jail later on the larger issue is I just would really like to commend the Roland fryer for doing the kind of research that put him in cars watching the context of policing in the environment in which it occurs and making an effort to understand policing beyond the numbers some great scholarship has come out of observational studies I think his may have that potential simply analyzing data and this great date of disparities that anybody could have anticipated but does not help move the community conversation or get us closer to true justice for disadvantaged communities Thank You Camille Foster I would agree forcefully with all of that now I'll begin by also thanking professor fry for the work that he's been doing I think for some time he's been amongst the the most thoughtful people on these issues providing really indispensible data which unfortunately I think it's almost I don't know if it's biased predominantly or if it's an unwillingness to look the facts in the face when it comes to these issues but it is very useful to have folks who are doing that kind of rigorous work and worth very much underscoring the conclusion or at least the central finding of this paper with respect to the excess deaths that are occurring around these issues I think highlighting for people the degree to which our panics around these issues our panics around particular police involved shootings aren't serving the communities that we are at least ostensibly concerned about is very important the number of police shootings that occur on an annual basis since 2015 has not really changed that much and neither as the composition of the people who are getting shot which suggests that that's probably not the case that all of this is motivated by racism or if it is we're certainly not doing anything about it so it is high time that we change our approach and our conversations around these issues evolve and I think this is a great panel all in a great start I'll go to Barry Lancer well one would hope that this would change the dialogue and at least bring a breath of fresh air in to this conversation so that we begin to realize that there are consequences for what I would call over investigating police departments in the United States so I'm not optimistic that this would happen but when one remains hopeful and finally Wilfred Reilly well as everyone said I mean thanks to dr. fryer for the excellent research he's doing thanks to you guys the gentlemen on the panel for having me um the one thing that really stood out to me in the second half of this conversation was the statement that the police have become a symbol and I very much as a young man for example talking online see that some people will defend police departments literally no matter what they do others will find the police to almost always be at fault as they try to keep order in high-crime cities I don't think that either is useful when at the level of Manhattan Institute er the people here we're discussing serious issues like crime the focus should be on reality and not symbology so my statement to the audience would be look at what the actual numbers are before taking a strong position on questions like this one challenge and question narratives my final line the narrative that races ever president a lot of these situations I find very questionable I've been doing a little googling and begging while we've been talking and I pulled up the name I happen to of the first officer to have been fired in the unfortunate situation that just happened in Minneapolis and his name was swapped thorough if I have that correct he appears to be of Cambodian American descent so the idea that this is a racist anti black attack perhaps not it could simply be poor policing or even the tough situation we don't know much about so first get the facts then the opinion thanks to all our panelists chief Edward Flynn Camille Foster professor Wilfred Reilly professor berry Lancer thanks to all of you and now back to my colleague Jason Riley Thank You Howard and I'd like to second that I think that it's a very stimulating panel discussion I want to thank everyone who participated in this I know we had had this all set up and ready to go some months ago and we had to pull the plug at the last minute and I'm just very very grateful that you all made yourselves available to do this today I hope the audience got the brush of fresh air to use professional a search phrase that I got from the conversation and I also want a second the importance and significance of the work that that Professor fryer is doing it is it is to be commended there are so many social scientists who shy away from this type of work they don't want the backlash they don't want to follow the facts where they lead and so they simply go along to get along with it with the narrative or they keep their mouth shut in that's not helping anyone it's not hoping to close these gaps that we all want to see closed and improve the situation in these low-income communities and we need to have honest conversations about the problem if we're ever going to get to the solution so I really really commend professor fryer for doing that at taking the time to chat with us about his paper I encourage you to read it when it is available as well as his last paper and again I just want to thank my colleagues at the Manhattan Institute Michael Hendricks especially and the rest of my colleagues there who work so hard to put this all together online and I hope you all it was worth worth your time so be safe everyone thank you

Channel: Manhattan Institute

Views: 19,374

Keywords: criminal justice reform, race relations, black progress, racial inequality, police-community relations, police departments, manhattan institute, think tank

Id: J8KvHbWSypA

Length: 113min 53sec (6833 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020