mole investment, inevitably the investment proceeds past the point* where people jockey for position. so the main mike wrote economic message is that it encourages spending of that sort not productive so we could raise revenue by taxing those kinds of activities to produce taxes on other activities. you have to tax something if you are in the dole you don't argue about that put the question is what should we tax? there was a writing manual there is a great passage they say omit needless words. omit needless words. wait a minute there are six words they could have omitted.

i thought about it. i gather the point* was they did not know this bled to to show the brain is hard wired to hear it only once if it is important to lay down the brain circuits. teach the students you have to loopholes tell them over and over i would say tax harmful activities. [laughter] that is the message that i get from darman. don't tell people you can do what you want to do that is too much of an approach to know them when you do will impose harm on others. think about that and take into account.

>> i am strongly persuaded by your argument. [inaudible] >> i'm interest did you feel we live in a period reit could accelerate changes but my own impression is we live in it period the of the paralysis. [laughter] if they wanted to make changes we could make them quickly.

and not to happen a particular expertise in then there has been a lot of skepticism expressed about the ability to pick winners and losers but at the same time i believe individual incentives to not always coincide with group incentive so we're open to the possibility to intervene to make matters better than if we just stood aside brick of the main message i tried to communicate to students students, if you got this from me or not, but you should be humble as a regulator, you are not done when you show the unregulated and come come with the alternative is the regulated outcome. you need to assess what will happen. how will the regulate? how will people respond to

the new rules for incentives that i laid down? maybe there will be unintended consequences. suppose the safety manual passenger with the standards i could easily imagine a firm owner eliminating instead of trying to comply with the incomprehensible requirement described. you have to be a pragmatist. that is where we lost ground. we have the ideological slogans to drive the conversation when they say what is the most sensible thing to do? life is in perfect. you have to make do with things that are not quite that you wanted but it is

good to have a diverse population because we could teach chip been more than they could if it is just the libertarians. they have reasons to compromise. they will pay taxes no matter where they live. they could pay of or taxes and less than critics say to what they have to say. we could do better. milton friedman said to be a nice letter after wrote an article in 1997 say why a progressive consumption tax would be a good step to take and was quick to say he did not agree the government should spend more money on infrastructure and what i was advocating but he added if the government needed more revenue the progressive consumption tax is by far the best ways to raise it.

he included in envelope with a reprint of his 1943 article in which she had advocated the progressive consumption tax as the best way to pay for the world were to cost. [inaudible] [laughter] i thought about that. but in the end, i think it is the policy that i want to put my money on. >> thank you for your time. robert frank. author of "the darwin economy" well done. [inaudible conversations]

>> good evening. my name is rachel and on behalf of the bookstore i am pleased to welcome you to this evening's event with david kennedy author of the book "don't shoot" in tonight's event is one of many author talks we're hosting this fall we still have tickets left for the friday talk with geoffrey sax was an expert on

economic environmental policy and director of the lourdes institute in his new book is the price of civilization speaking at 6:00 p.m. on friday evening. we also have tickets on sale for later in the fall for evens with jim lehrer and tom brokaw as well as well as other events you can visit us online where our fall event schedule is continually being updated. after the talks this evening you have questions from the audience as it is being recorded if you have a question please wait for the audience microphone to come to be for you ask it. i also want to take this moment to remind you please turn off four silence your cellphone or other electronic devices it is my pleasure to introduce david

kennedy privity is professor of criminal justice at john jay college as well as director for crime-prevention and control. self-taught criminologist to help engineer the boston miracle in the '90s by brig together of law-enforcement and drug traders to cut down on street violence. his work has been adapted for cities across the country and earned him numerous awards including two innovation of american government awards from the kennedy school. his book "don't shoot" a memoir of his work developing and implementing his program to describe it street violence on a theoretical level. every cent on line review notes with his brilliant about the work is a specificity that it has its own special patterns that could be understood and manipulated. as i said we will have time for questions followed by a signing in the front. i would like to think anyone

who purchase is a book to support the local independent bookstore as well as the authors series. please join me in welcoming david kennedy. [applause] >> good evening. i don't think this is just one series of many book defense just for the record. i'd like this book stuff i really do i was telling rachel earlier this is in the authors, rather than policy by haunted this bookstore through much of my youth in middle years. i am meant to be a writer and it was my ambition i

started out in the a380 is literally going to out of town news to buy a bunch of ryder magazines to look at how you become a free-lance writer it is like a bicycle magazine they tell you the same thing over and over in every issue and a half to figure out a way to make you think it is different write the letter to the editor if he says yes then write the article and everything else is secondary. while i did that i got a job at the kennedy school and i did that until the next 15 years in various ways

airlift in dudley street then removed over to the main jfk building and i was probably in this bookstore to our three times per week the entire time. mostly at the bottom which used to be the used books. [laughter] so please don't wait for "don't shoot" to go downstairs. [laughter] it is personally fabulous to be standing here to do this. and i was also telling rachel our first book event was the end of last month in cambridge and i did it with john c.. who did a wonderful "new yorker" piece about this two and a half years ago and he started the conversation by saying, why was fascinated

to discover that david mid to be a writer and now after 30 years he has finally written a literary nonfiction book writers will do anything to procrastinate which is entirely different career. [laughter] so let's talk about what i have spent those 30 years obsessing about. we are a couple of weeks beyond the annual fall release of the fbi crime numbers. i wrote the editorial copy for that before the fbi numbers came out and i was exactly right as it turns out. the news was good. despite the recession and everything else that people thought would drive the numbers higher, once again

in 2010 we had another decline of crime it came down about another 4%. that is another pearl and string of very good national years of violent crime rate is down at the 1960 levels in many parts of the country and everybody is very pleased. that was the end of the discussion because all the news is good and everybody is pleased. that is both true and dramatically tragically wrong. because those are the national numbers and they are true. but they miss the other side of the picture purpose of my colleague who teaches at the rochester institute of technology likes to say

nobody lives in the country relive in the neighborhood and on our box in streets and some of our neighborhoods and walks and streets are burning. national homicide rate at the modern peake hid about 10 per 100,000 so this is how the fbi and a taped. 10 dead every year for every 100,000 of the population is now down at about four which is part of a national self satisfaction did you know, bahamas eight -- homicide rate for black men? over 100 per 100,000 today. that is the national rate because this stuff is not even the distributed geographically or socially

and again my friend has done the analysis in a string of rochester neighborhoods called the crescent. many of our cities in not just big cities have these neighborhoods. these are historic the troubled almost entirely african-american neighborhoods and nationally says not going in hispanic it is a singular black american problem. it in this crescent of troubled neighborhoods the homicide rate for 18 and 19 year-old's is 520 per 100,000 every year that means if you do the long division it means more than one out of a hundred young black men are killed almost entirely by gunshot every year. and my friend does work with

the kids from the neighborhoods who were caught up in the system in boston and she and i in everybody who works on these issues are beside ourselves with the fact this goes on in plain sight think it's almost no attention and requires the resources. i was in a working meeting with our black community partners not that long ago and we went off track to talk about why nobody cares about this. the question was from a black man in the room. who we are dying like flies out there and read what to do. but all of this is hiding in plain sight why is this not a political issue? the answer is it an ' pullback we are black for the we're supposed to die.

we cannot get anybody to get them magnitude of this. so we always had a national moment of silence in honor of the dead of the tenure anniversary of the oxide etch tax on the united states. most of that focus was on the york and the world trade center attack spurt here is the fact. the annual death toll of young black men, every single year is almost exactly the same as the body count for the world trade center. nearly 3,000 people per year. and the world trade center attacks is something that the country prepped for one year ahead of time and was headlined in every american newspaper. the other stuff gets nothing.

except in some corners it does. there are people like lori and myself and a bunch of others who live and breathe this incited outside the affected communities and it came time to write "don't shoot" because in the last 15 years there has been developed a way of thinking about it acting on this problem that works so the reviews on the book our starting to come out and not surprisingly, it is not a genteel book. it is very blunt and harsh but one of the things it says that we know what we need to know to do something about this and i have been getting letters saying really? yes. in my in box is a message

from a commanding officer in the mission district of the los angeles police department in the san fernando valley one of the geographic grids in los angeles with the most ingrained a generational hispanic gains -- things they began this work and had a signal moment just over a month ago and the message in my box says for the first time in the history of the mission district in september, and nobody got shot. that has never happened before. we do this in the worst neighborhood in sacramento and they began the war over one year ago and since they began coming in this area one non fatal shooting.

it seems far too good to be true but the fact is, it is not. some people and law-enforcement know it those who follow the unintelligible academic literature know it. most people don't and this is a very non academic manifestos saying we know this said it is time to start acting like it. the first big moment came here in boston 1996. i want to read from the book about that. >> so let me set the stage. when of the moments has turned out to be sitting down with extreme they hard-core offenders and i will talk about why that

makes sense and how you find them in a moment but the fact is we sit down and we talk to them. the first time that was done anywhere in the country was may 1996 in the courthouse so here's the scene. we're in the courthouse, there's node judge we had taken the place over. our side is the boston police officers come a federal agents, prosecutors agents, prosecutors, federal prosecutors, probation and parole officers come a city of boston in game outreach workers the city had hired folks to call myself down to get people off the street. on the other side facing us are about to 30 of the most dangerous game members we

could find in the city of boston. and we spent the next hour talking to them. a couple of framing facts one name is freddie who was basically the worst gang offender in boston and the boston pops stopped him in roxbury and he had just sold an automatic pistol to a juvenile kid thicket had begun and most of the ammunition he had 19 mm cartridge if his hand and he did not know that the of boston and copps were working with the fed's and did not know he had a criminal record two intend to prosecute under the armed career criminals statute to

aid he could be charged with the crime that carried with it 15 year mandatory federal sentence if he especially did not know under federal law cartridges count as a fire arm and was probably would have been a misdemeanor state offense turned into a 15 year federal sentence in upstate new york. where he sits to this day. this happened in he is still locked up. you will hear his name, you hear tracy's name, she was the head of the city gang dow reached team. you hear the name of a dedicated federal prosecutor named ted who is part of the core team and who is 16 and over here.

>> this is our side talking to their side. here is how it will be in boston from no one. when they gang kill somebody or shoots guns our terrorizes the neighborhood the group's steps in a real focus on everyone in risk drug dealers to shut the market down. we will call on parole nobody will smoker jury or drink in public have any fund. we will talk to the judges to make sure they know what is going on. it is up to you if you get this attention. no violence or no harm or no-fault. it is not a deal but a promise. somebody else may come to give you for dealing drugs but we go for the violence. most of the attitude is gone they were paying attention to take it in period even those who were still fronting don't care they

were listening. you could tell. then we turn it around. tracie sat in the audience. we know you're all caught up in something you cannot control. we know it is dangerous and we will help in any way that we can. if you need protection from enemies, if your mom needs treatment, if you want back into school, tell us. we are tired of black kids dying and killing each other. it makes us tick. we are no you are hurting but nobody has the right to pick up a gun to shoot somebody else to terrorize the neighborhood. we will help in any way we can but the violence has to stop. if you don't hear what is being said today, a takeover offering. i have been to over 100 funerals i will not go to any more. the violence stops now prevent law enforcement team turned it around, but you

know, what happens when someone kills a cop. we don't stop with the shooter we go after everybody involved in we never got off four stock. that is what we will do if you hurt somebody. if somebody hurts you prefer hurting you his like herding a cop. it is over. today. we give them copies of the posters and though workers on numbers and send them home and boston went quiet third of the street workers in getting officers reported the streets were buzzing about the meeting. and they had explained that it freddie cardoza prosecution in his name was every where. turning now to be barely 30 checking out his record stuart showed the criminal histories match. girls dragged boyfriends to make them check with their

officers. this tree workers moved in with the summer job program. gangs elsewhere started to he does intelligence sent to the working group they sent copps out to tell them they're watching you. we're watching you. it goes no further. stopper our team talk to the gang. no more. talk to the west and the street. no more trouble for patrice c. reported backed after one warning they believe there is nothing happening. revelation. they were rational. they listened and learned and responded. and it changed. they were and they did and it turns out they are and they do all over the country. this was 1996 this is what is behind of the boston

mayor call it and it has been fun to sit down to tell my own story in this book. ways hated the name it was not a miracle it was a lot of work. [laughter] it was but then it worked in minneapolis and stockton now working in chicago. we began this in the most dangerous neighborhood in chicago about one year ago and that neighborhood is no longer the most dangerous neighborhood in chicago true the of these meetings with homicide in west garfield park is down 40% at this point* and over and over and over. it does not seem possible that is one of the main impediments to getting the work out to get people to

take it seriously the fact you could sit down and talk to them to get these astounding e facts was just not credible. we did not expect it when we had that first march meeting 1996 in the second one at the beginning of the summer, and nobody expected the streets to switch off is what they did basically. but when you understand the core nature of the problem with some of the basic material facets it turns out not to be incredible at all. here is the short version of what this is about hong and why it works. the boston pops -- copps taught us the first and most

important fact which is in the hottest neighborhoods, hardly anybody is doing this. we did not be the them because the stories we were told about timidity dynamics and culture and gun availability and diffusion of fireman's out of crack market into the general population, the generation of super predators' comet everything said they were wrong and it turned out they were right. it turns out in boston boston, south 61 cruise with 1300 people in rochester hyde park slices or associated 60% or better of all youth

that is less than 1% of their age group citywide. we just did this in cincinnati so no matter

where you go the facts turn out to be trooper govett is just descriptive. but it turns out with those facts travel some very, very powerful and uncomfortable dynamics. one it is those drug areas get a massive amount of contingent that looks to be completely opaque and ran down. they cannot tell what is coming and get away with almost everything and then to do the prison risk calculation and if you stand on the street and sell a unit of cocaine you have no one at a 15,000 chance the

pending above the prison sentence. they are arrested over and over again but in their world they get away with almost everything they do and when they don't, they don't know about it until it is too late if retrained our dogs this way we would live on the street and they would own the house. so we heard them extraordinarily but the hurt is not do anybody any good. it turns out they are not being irrational but we are. if we sit down with them to say we know we cannot give you for everything but we will get then next crew that kills somebody, we can do that and we are credible about that. because once you have that conversation nobody wants to be the first group. a strange way of doing deterrence. but we're still punishing and threatening.

the second that is the most important is they are terrified. under an enormous amount of what they do, they do because we are not protecting them and they are doing the immediate rational things that are terribly destructive. we ran on the members on the gang members in boston. here are the numbers i have so far. the homicide risk every year was 1600 per 100,000. everybody got shot. everybody who had been killed you were about one out of seven chance getting killed if you are on the streets nine years. we were not fixing it for them. so if you called the streets down, and many heave a giant sigh of relief and back off because the idea people like to walk out their door and

don't have the one out of seven chance of getting killed is liable. then it turns out you can have a moral conversation with them. rethink their social past, they don't care, that is not right. they are not just for misunderstood kids but to do tremendously awful things but are they reachable? yes. they will listen to us because we have no standing and the cops have no standing so who has standing? the answer is there to be found, the surviving mihm -- mothers of the murdered, the elders, the ministers come and the older wiser original gangsters who have discovered the emperor has no clothes but still have streaked red. but what we really deal with is the street code. it is not about drugs it is

about respect and disrespect the enemy of my friend is my enemy if our groups are beefing now we have a vendetta. the street code is driven buy ideas that is something you can challenge. you have not lived until you have seen one of the original gangsters stand up in the room to say i love having my family on the street and i really believed we had each other's backs which is why when the fed came calling i kept my mouth shut while my friend rushed to ted and they walked in i am finishing a 17 year federal. let me ask you the last time you were locked up who came to see you in prison or who bought a baby formula for your kids are paid your

mother's red and how long did it take one of your boys to sleep with your girlfriend and one kids said the three days and it was my cousin. [laughter] everybody knows this is hollow but nobody says it. somebody back here is nodding see work with the kids and you know, it is right. so it turns out saying this stuff is very powerful. we know there is nothing more powerful than community standards. so we lead with the cops with the academics call social control. everything we know about the world says informal social control is far more important that is my conscience end of my eight friends think of my mom thinks and what my girlfriend thinks and my

community standards but try telling this to narcotics cops. they do not believe you and i came up with something that works. a show of hands, when you were growing up who is afraid of the police? this is interesting. with the narcotics cops you get a few more. not a lot who was really afraid of your mother? when you're growing up. everybody was afraid of their mother. i am still afraid of my mother. everything you need to know about informal social control. the mothers trump the fed. 99 times that of 100 and even today we'll trump the fed in five years but it turns out six community hates living like this for a good you get into any of these neighborhoods they're

all accomplice it running off drug money. know they are not. they hate this. at this point* we should have solved the problem. they don't like it. they are reachable with more of engagement to listen to their community in still is all burning out there. what is that about? this is the last point* because it is the biggest. that it is going on because the communities hate us more than what is going on in. they are the communities that most historic leave very damaged african-american communities until 1968 frolov was a deliberate racial conspiracy to do them damage. once the civil rights changes came, their neighborhoods did not get

better priggery ramped up drug enforcement and mass incarceration in this country has reached the point* if you are born a black man today in the united states you stand a one at a three chance to go to present. they come from the neighborhoods and go back in in which all the men could have criminal records they cannot get work or make money but it all want to marry anybody else. cannot pass background checks and cannot be bonded to be a barber. literally. we're destroying the neighborhoods in the name of saving them ample lease them. everybody is stopped and pulled over and every buddy gets it turned out. the community sees its especially in the very real context in the history of

being black in america to look at the rest of us too not carry -- care about their dead it is not just happening because it is an accident but this is what they want. anybody who watched the campaign months of controversy about the edge share of mine at -- jeremiah wright, this is what he was talking about. the larger section of the sermon goes something like they bring the drugs into the country, give them to our kids pass the three strikes law, but everybody in prison than they ask us to stand up and a sing god bless america? no. goddamn america that is the conviction on the part of the community that we do this to them on purpose. and when people believe that they will not stand up shoulder to shoulder with the cops to tell them then

to put the guns down they will not cooperate and they will die on the street and not tell you who shot them which is what goes on. the most important piece of the work has come to be brokering a process between the authorities and the community in which the cops have to the. they will go to the neighborhoods to say we get it. it is now working. rear jacking up your young men. we interesting in the unintended consequences of what we're doing. we want to do something different. we are especially cognizant of what we have done to fit with the toxic racial history. we will stop this. but we need you to do something. we need you to say in a controlled and safeway to the 5% of your young men

that you need them to stop because right now they don't get it. they think that you think it is okay. we are having the use reconciliation engagements all over the country and for whatever reason that i do not understand, there is the good will on the part of these battered communities to say we will take another shot at this with you. they do. the cops see them acting against type and the cops against type and the rationalized transformation that takes place is astounding. but while you are doing that we can stop the shooting and shut down the drug market stop jacking up the young men and stop arresting one at a three and we don't have to do this in a war. then we can finally turned to the deeper issues in

these communities because they need more than not to get killed. they need a lot of help. but you can do that when people are afraid. you cannot do it. we know have the tools we need, we don't need more money, laws, cops kumbaya programs, we need to take what we have got, refocus in these proven ways and just stop it. [applause] . .

and you hear a lot of reasons for why this might happen again and i would like to hear what your take on it is and what is the truth of it and what is going to happen moving forward? >> so there has been ungodly volumes of ink spent on what happened in boston. nearly all of which partakes of the consensual -- which is a fancy word for a lie. everything else that has been talked about, the inflating him on the ministers, the shifting focus to homeland security,

funding changes. none of it was actually relevant to what happened. what happened was the police department took its eye off thinking about and acting on this in the operation cease-fire framework and over the next couple of years, as they did that the body count started to climb. the street started to burn again in these very positive feedback ways that this generates and before long it was back to the way it was at the start. that went through two successive release commissioners, neither of whom would say to their rank-and-file, we are going to fix this. they let these politics play out inside of the department. at davis the current commissioner has fixed that so ed came in. ed had worked with anthony, part

of the core of the austin team. anthony had worked with ed and lowell. they had entirely shut down their gang and it came in and put his foot down and said no more of this nonsense. he is actually building this way of operating more organically into the department than ever before. there are a couple of problems that remain. so, one is that just like with your own kids and your own dogs if you tell them you are going to do something and you don't do it it's real hard to get their attention again and it's better not to do it all than to lie to the streets. the streets are used to getting lied to and they dealt like it and they don't respect it. it's harder the first time to get their attention and to get their respect in the thing -- second thing is that austin remains a very fractured city. it is tragic because the stuff

was born here. boston show that you could do it. there was this moment of real cooperation and it is not back to that seamless, happy state. and there is a line part way through the book as i saw this kind of agency politics and lyrical politics destroy these efforts in the cities, that i began to see the basic pattern here and it still holds true and that is that we know how to control the bad guys. the bad guys are not the problem. i have yet to figure out how to control the good guys. >> i wonder if you could speak on the issue of -- i work for the public defenders office and see the inequities that exist and the dynamics you are talking about. for example they corollary form

that has not been done. the lack of money for basic kinds of things. the gang member will say get me out of boston, get my tattoos off. i'm not sure if i agree that. could you speak to that? i see that as a real problem. >> let's be careful about what i said. i didn't say we don't need more resources and more attention to this problem. what i said was, we don't need anything else to create fundamental public safety in these communities and that is true. we have the knowledge and the operating models that we need to stop the homicide, to shut the drug markets down and create this reading space in the neighborhood. does that fix everything? not even close. it creates finally some conditions where we can do the deeper and more important work. and the reason that i am so

anointed about bad is that our usual logic on this -- there are two ways that people think about this and depending on your character and your disposition you are drawn to one or the other so if you kind of have a soul that believes in individual accountability and consequences then you become a cop and a prosecutor and it becomes about people making bad decisions in your main mechanism is the criminal justice system and it's not working and that means we need to fix the criminal justice system. good luck with that. if we wait for us to fix the criminal justice system to stop the killing, we will never get there. that is a fact. if you have a soul that is drawn to sympathy and help and kind of an insight into deeper community conditions then you become a root qasr and use try to go to work to fix the community and

that says that you can do something about education and health care and support families and bring all the programs we need to address the needs of these extraordinarily damaged individuals. than the crime will go away. well, good luck with that, because if we wait to fix these communities that are as we speak, paralyzed with fear and trauma, then we are not going to get there. those are ways of thinking about the issue that have been historically almost completely ineffective. the good news is we don't have to operate that way. we can work in these very precise and different ways. we can fundamentally change these community dynamics and then the drug markets and the gangs will stop. the kids, they won't be doing the things that are getting them arrested now and things are

different. is that everything? not even close, but he can do it in my view is that since that is true we have a moral obligation to do it. >> i am curious, you know what supports if any have been implemented in terms of engaging schools and teachers because those are other authority figures in addition to parents and adults who see kids on a regular basis, and you know, kids tend to get involved with gangs when they are still sort of school age so i was just wondering what your thoughts are on that? >> our experience has been that schools don't want to play outside of their four walls and it is extremely frustrating.

schools like to pretend that this isn't happening. they like to think that what goes on between their four walls has no connection to the outside. they do not recognize what is almost always true which is when there is community issues being played out inside of the schools. our experience nationally has been you can't get them to come to the table and you can't get them to pay attention and you can't get them to share information. we have real stories of gang fights that start in the school. the security guys inside chase the fighters out into the street. the kids get stabbed in the street and the school's responses, that happened in the street and it has got nothing to do with us. it is really bad. there aren't a lot of exceptions to that and again with this last discussion, the good news is you

don't have to change that in order to be successful. you can work with the people who want to work with you and you will be okay. >> i am interested in how you got to be a case study writer. >> good question. so what happened was, i was working and i fell in with a bunch of kennedy school faculty so what i was doing was writing teaching cases. the kennedy school is a professional school. it's not a political science department. is for people who are going to work in government and public policy and therefore take a lot of business schools they do a lot of their teaching by the case method and there is a little shop there of full-time case writers, and i got this

wonderful job doing that come except that nobody reads your stuff. it's kind of like working at "the new yorker." you get lots of time to work and great access and you call somebody and say i'm at harvard and i would like to interview you and they say yes. it was a training ground for what i really wanted to do. and writers are, they are sort of serial academic slots is what they are. you are completely fascinated by whatever you are doing at the time and then you leave it behind without a second thought and go do something else. that is how i was trying to learn to be a good writer. i got tagged by a group of faculty at the school who were beginning a big project on reinventing policing, and to me it was just like any other assignment. as part of that work, i spent the next 10 years going to

cities around the country that were doing really break through police work and because this was the mid-80s on, and a lot of what they were doing was focused on their am urging crack market problem because that was the worst thing anybody with dealing with. so i found myself going all over the country walking crack markets. i always have to say in a professional capacity. and anybody who sees that, i defy you not to be changed by it. it is so unbelievably awful. and it just drew me in, and partway through that process which was the beginning of the boston project, the policing work that i was now part of promoting wasn't reaching that problem. it wasn't working. and i got really really frustrated and the boston

project where i met ted and a lot of the other people we have been talking about was my attempt to stop studying and trying to come up with something we could do about the stuff so that is what happened. >> what was the response or the actions by community members as well as prosecutors and such? >> so, the community folks play a number of crucial roles. so some of them are literally confined to these meetings, the collins, the forums as we had them in boston which are as it turns out, extraordinarily powerful, effective moments. again, all disproportionately what you think you ought to be able to get out of something like that so in those meetings, community members framed the

norms of the community. they say, we don't want this. we are for you but we are against a couple of things that you are doing. the people you care about and who care about you are being devastated by the violence, here is what it means to us. if you get killed, i have seen 40 of the scariest guys in a big american city literally reduced to tears listening to the mother of a murdered gang member explained to them what having him die did to his surviving family. and this is the moment often when the cops start thinking, oh my god they are not so she'll pass. they are listening to her and they are weeping in public. they challenge the street code. these ideas about respect and disrespect and then data and i am going to be dead by the time i'm 21 so nothing i do now matters and all that stuff that drives the street culture.

there are simple being there in concert with all these law-enforcement agency, and concert with the service providers everybody talking with one voice is itself a transformative moment. it's something that these guys have never seen before and it's actually something that never happened before. it is different. and then outside to call in, there are ways to keep those messages fresh so this really is like talking to your own kid. you don't do it just once. they can provide what you might think of as direct services so there is mentoring, there is a lot of faith-based programming. there is the informal stuff that goes on in any community where the community tries to help this young and it's vulnerable.

the community often gets asked to do a level of work that i think is fundamentally unreasonable. so i have never seen an organized community, healthy communities don't come home from work and have everybody go out to big community meetings to talk about the issues of the community and how they're going to work on them together. they do their family life and they read and they go to bed. that is what normal people do. it's only these communities that are already our most distressed communities and where people aren't working and can't get work and have all kinds of family problems and community problems. it's only them that we demand that at the end of their days they all get together and solve their own problems. people get paid to do this work and they are not doing it. it is the rest of us that need to step up, and then there are these important strategic ways

that willing numbers of the community can and do fit in. let's take two more. >> and you talk about your experiencing you're experiencing walking through nickerson gardens and your kind of ah-ha moment where it stuck in -- sunk in for you. have you tried to import that moment on other people to recruit them into helping you with this research? >> that is a really interesting question. nickerson gardens was the most dangerous public housing project in watts in 1985 when i started this work. is right on the edge of compton and that area was calm as best we can tell, it was ground zero for the american crack epidemic. and i will confess that i have not had a great deal of success getting people to voluntarily go

wander around in those places. it is actually not nearly as dangerous as people think it is. one of the things you he realized after it while is that they don't care about you. you are not a threat. you don't actually have much to offer. the worst thing that could happen is that you might get robbed or catch a stray bullet or something like that but that kind of stuff is actually really rare. they hurt each other. they are concerned about their -- they are angry at each other. the rest of us don't matter so you can actually get away with it pretty easily especially once you get your feet under you. people don't want to do it and again sort of as this is a recurring theme. you don't really -- need new people to care about. there are lots of people who care about this professionally and just because it's what they care about. what those people need is a way of doing the work that works for

them because what they are doing right now doesn't work. there is more than enough in terms of people and resources to pull this off once folks understand this way and. i think that is a good thing. i get asked all the time, how do you get the white folks to care about that black people and my answer is you are not going to. it is wrong, it's outrageous but so far it is true. so we had better figure out a way to do this where we don't have to convert everybody and we don't have to convert everybody. >> i'm sorry to have got here late. i was at a city council meeting and it went on longer than i had hoped. so i came in late and i heard something, peaceably said that was interesting to me. i happen to live in public housing here in cambridge. it was not a green -- dream come true for me. is because of mortgage

foreclosure, invective, scrambling for a place to live in affordable housing community. i happen to have been elected co-president of the tenet council and some of what you said made a lot of sense to me. what interests me is that the programs, they bring around social programs wrapped up in a police package, and i've had this feeling, why does it have to be? why can't people in public housing here or anywhere, this is a luxury situation compared to what you were just talking about, but why does it have to come to the police rapper? campus social programs -- that there are a lot of rich men and all these different workforce development, all these programs. why can't they just be delivered to people and offered to people as what they are and do the police, have the police come and develop relationships as who they are?

>> so, you have actually asked it exquisitely complicated question and i'm going to try to answer it in a slightly confiscated but still quick way. so, everybody, myself, fervently included, would like to be able to do this without laying hands on anybody. we should regard not just mass incarceration as a national shame, which it is, but we ought to regard every single time somebody gets arrested and locked up as a failure. as a material fact, nobody anywhere has been able to create safety and these neighborhoods, reliably, without the involvement of law enforcement. you can find occasional success stories and they are magnificent but they are very situationally

specific and you take what has been done in those successful places, take it to someplace else that looks pretty much the same and they don't work. you have to get extraordinarily lucky to turn the corner and we need to base the stuff on more than lightning strikes. the other point is that, actually if it's done right, it is better to do it with law-enforcement close involvement than not and i emphasize in that if it is done right. what happens most of the time is cops are still doing the same things they are doing. everybody else grab some a little bit of help. that is the package and what is remarkable is i was prepared for for the communities to hate the cops. i was not prepared for the communities to hate the social service providers which many of them do.

social service providers are distant and arrogant. they don't produce. they don't deliver. they all get paid and go home at the end of the day and they are not doing anybody any good and communities that have been dealing with this for decades are furious about it. what you want is for this new partnership to change the behavior of the cops, to change the behavior of the social service providers and to model for the community that what we were doing before and the way we were thinking before is not what we are doing and thinking now. and again if everything is done right, it is better for the social services to be offered with the narcotics cops standing near and a narcotics cop saying i want you to succeed. i don't want to have to arrest you. i don't want to kick your mom store in. i am part of this because i respect you and i think you make good choices and that is what we

want. and if you make us, i'm going to enforce the law but please don't make us. that as is a whole different engagement. one more. >> so, all of this seems like kind of common sense to me because it didn't work as well and i think it is common sense that anyone else who does the work, but there are so many different organizations in and around boston doing the work that sometimes i feel like they are not working together. they are working more against each other. >> sometimes he feel like that? >> okay, all the time. [laughter] so my question is how do we get all of our organizations on the same page and doing the same work at the same time so that we can all actually really be making a difference? >> it is common sense. it is so common sense and i

called one of my old girlfriends after i figured out the boston step. she was out in california. i said we had this breakthrough. we are going to set the gangs down and talk to them and tell them the first group that kill somebody is going to talk to them and it's amazing. there was dead silence on the end of of the that phone and judy said what have they been doing? we should be ashamed of ourselves. we really should. and we are not all pulling together. it is not all common sense to everybody and i have come to believe that this prescription that says we have to get everybody together before is a disaster. we have got to organize the black churches, we have got to get all the agencies on the same page, we have to get all the social service agencies working together. you're not going to do it. it's not going to happen so and said instead what you do is

define the folks who get it. you work with them. that is enough as it turns out and in a good city what happens is that when that becomes so evident and the architecture is there, people start binding their place in it and it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. if you way to change everybody's mind first, you wait and that is the end of it. >> it doesn't die out the way that it did in boston. >> you build it into the thinking in the working of the city. you have the city put its foot down and you have real management. you have people whose job it is to keep this going. you build it into agency systems. you build it into the boston police department which they have done. it is common sense management stuff and it's not that hard to envision. when people are willing it's not that hard to do. the willis the issue.

and we will really wrap it up here. thank you very much. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author of book you would like to see featured on booktv? sent us an e-mail at the tv at c-span.org or tweet is at twitter.com/booktv. >> joining us on booktv is ronald kessler. his most recent book, "the secrets of the fbi." mr. kessler you have done a whole series of books along this line, correct? >> i've done a lot of fbi related intelligence related book's. i like to go after secrets and i even did a book on palm beach because there are a lot of secrets there in society. we call that a midlife crisis but you know i think people especially with the internet and tv want to get new information about important subjects and then that is what i try to do

with these books. >> so what are two things that are revealed in this book that we should know about? >> one is how the fbi breaks into homes and offices with bugging devices. courses all quarter of rice but the incredible stories before they do a break and they will conduct surveillance of the premise. they figure out who goes in and who goes out. on the night at the of the break and they watch everybody who might go back to the premises and they do. they will divert them. they will stage a traffic accident and give them a ticket. they will even take a photo of any dog that might be on the premises and the veterinarian will prescribe just the right amount of tranquilizers to shoot into the dot before the break-in to knock him out and then at the end of the break-in they wake up the dog and all is fine. another item is a real story of how the fbi caught robert

hansen, the of the eye agent with what you see in the movie breach. it's a real story but there are a lot of secrets about marilyn monroe, about vince foster and even the killing of a summa bin laden because the app the i was actually involved in that. >> well, you obviously have a lot of inside sources. do you get pressured in any way to reveal those sources? >> do i get what? >> pressured to reveal those sources? >> no i don't have people asked me how do i get them to talk? usually i waterboard them. that works pretty well but i think after a while you develop some trust. i think that they feel that i will tell the story but at the same time if there something negative i will report that. for example one of my books, the dismissal of william sessions as it the i director over the abuses, this book takes louis