earlier -- this is an author's comment rather than a policy guy's comment. i haunted this bookstore through much -- much of my youth and middle years. so -- i'll tell this story a little bit but i meant to be a writer and it was my ambition to be john mcphee, basically. i wanted to be a literary nonfiction writer. and i started out in the early '80s literally by going down to out of town news and buying a bunch of writers magazines and looking at how you become a freelance writer. writers magazines are like bicycle magazines or cooking magazines. they tell you the same thing over and over and over and over again in every issue and then they have to figure out to make you think it's different. and what they say in writers magazines is write the editor a

query letter and if he says yes, go write an article. everything else is secondary. so i started doing that and while i was doing that i got a job at the kennedy school writing materials for the faculty there. and i did that until -- i did that for the next 15 years in various ways. ..

and i was also telling rachel that our first book event was the end of last month in cambridge and i did it with john seabrook who is in new york writer who did a really wonderful new yorker piece about two years ago. he started the conversation by saying i was fascinated when i got into this to discover david wanted to be a writer and after 30 years he has finally written a literary nonfiction book. writers will do anything to procrastinate. including having an entirely different substantive career which i am here to talk about. so let's talk about what i spend those 30 years obsessing about. so we are a couple of weeks beyond the annual fall release

of fbi crime numbers. i have a little bet with myself. i wrote the editorial copy for that before the fbi numbers came out and i was exactly right as it turned out. news was good. despite the recession and everything else people thought they were going to drive the numbers higher once again in 2010, we had another decline. the homicide rate for the country came down another 4%. that is another pearl in a string of very good national years. violent crime rate is down to 1960s 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.

everybody is very pleased. and that is both true and dramatically, tragically wrong because and the national numbers are true but they miss the other side of the picture. my colleague who teaches at the rochester institute of technology likes to say nobody lives in the country. we live in neighborhoods and on blocks and on streets and some of our neighborhoods and blocks and streets are burning. the national homicide rate, lauder and peak, ten for 100,000. and it is 4 for 100,000.

everybody's of satisfaction on this. anyone know what the homicide rate for black men is in the united states? it is over 100 per 100,000 today. that is again the national rate because this stuff is not evenly distributed nationally, socially or geographically. my friend john clovis has done the analysis in a string of rochester neighborhoods called the crescent. many of our cities and not just big cities anymore have these neighborhoods. these historically troubled, entirely african-american neighborhoods. this stuff doesn't go on in white neighborhoods and almost doesn't go on in hispanic neighborhoods. this is a singular lack american problem. in this crescent of troubled

neighborhoods homicide rate for 18 and 19-year-old black men is 520 phosphor 100,000 every year which means if you do long division it means more than one in the one hundred black men are killed almost entirely by gunshot every year. lord those work with kids from these neighborhoods that have gotten caught in boston and she and i, and this goes on in plain sight. it was at john jay and we went off track and started talking about why nobody cares about this stuff. the question is from a black man

in a rome, we are dying like flies out there. why is this not an issue with another of black friends and i. quote we are black. we are supposed to die. i can't get anybody to get the magnitude of this and he is what i came up with. we all just had a national launch of silence in honor of the dead at the ten year anniversary of the al qaeda attacks on the united states. most of the focus was on new york and the world trade center attacks so here's a fact for you and that fact is 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 attacks. nearly 3,000 people year. w t c attacks were something the country prepared for year ahead of time and was headlined in every american newspaper. this other stuff gets nothing. except in some quarters it doesn't. there are people like warren and myself at the bunch of others who live and breathe this inside and outside the affected communities and it came time to right "don't shoot" because in the last 15 years or so there has been developed a way of thinking about and acting on this problem that works.

not surprisingly it is not a genteel book. it says some blunt and harsh things. to do something about this, a rational stick about this. oh really? in my in box is a message, the police department -- in the san fernando valley, warning of the geographic roots in l.a. of los angeles, most and grained intergenerational hispanic games. they began this work not long ago. they have a signal moment and just over a month ago, the message in my box says for the first time in the history of the

mission district in september, nobody got shot, has never happened before. we are doing this and the worst neighborhood in sacramento in international gained area. they began the work over a year ago and since they began work there has been in this area one non fatal shooting. the stuff seems far too good to be true but the fact is it isn't. some people in law enforcement know it. people who follow the unintelligible academic literature on this know it be personal most people aren't and don't. this is a very nonacademic manifesto saying we know this at this time to start acting like it. the first big moment of this came in boston in 1996. i want to read from the book

about that. so let me set the stage for you. one of the moments in this work has turned out to be sitting down with extremely hard-core offenders and talking to them and i talk about why that makes sense and how you find them and that sort of thing in a moment but we sit down and talk to them. first-time this was may of 1996. in the courthouse there is no judge. we have just taken place over. on our side of the bar where the judge and witnesses would normally beat, boston police officers, federal agents,

prosecutors be personal federal prosecutors, parole officers, city of boston gained out reach, city of boston tried to calm this stuff down and get people off the streets. the other side of the bar facing us are about 30 of the most dangerous gang members we could find in the city of boston and we spent the next hour or so talking to them. we hear a couple names. freddie cargoes the was basically the worst gained offender in boston and the boston pops stopped him in roxbury one morning. he had just sold an automatic pistol to a juvenile.

freddie had one, 9 mm cartridge in his hand. what he didn't know was the boston pops had been working with the fed. freddie didn't know he had what the feds call predicate criminal record that opened him to prosecution under the armed career criminal statute. as an armed career eligible defendants he could be charged with crimes, possession of a firearm that carried a 15 year mandatory federal sentencing. he didn't know under federal law cartridges count as a firearm. what 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 1996. he is still locked up on this.

if you here freddie's name you will hear tracy lift its name, the gang out reach team. you will hear the name of a young and freakish we brilliant and dedicated federal prosecutor named ted heinrich who was part of the core team and was sitting over here. so this is our side talking to their side. here is how it is going to be in boston from now on. one gained kill someone or shoots or terrorizes the neighborhood is group steps in. we focus on everyone in the game and arrest dealers and shut the markets down and call in probation and parole. nobody is going to smoke a joint or have any fun. we talked to the judges and make

sure they know what is going on and talk to parents. is up to you whether you get this attention. no violence, no harm and no foul. not a deal, it is a promise. someone else might get you for dealing drugs if you take that chance. we go where the violence is. most of the attitude is gone. they were focused and paying attention. even those who were still fronting and don't care they been listening. you could tell. that we turned around. tracy sat in the audience. we know you are caught up in something you can't control. we know it is dangerous and we will help any way we can. if you need protection from your enemies if you wanted job or your mom needs treatment and you went back into school tell us. here's my phone number. we're tired of black kids dying and killing each other. it makes us sick. we know you are hurting but nobody has a right to pick up a

gun and shoot somebody else, terrorized the neighborhood where they live. we help anyway you can but the violence has to stop. if you don't hear what is being said to you today it is on your head. take what you are offering. i have been to over 100 funerals and i'm not going to any more. the violence stops now. even the law enforcement team turned it around using a trope we worked out ahead of time. you know what happens when someone kills a cop. we don't stop with the shooter. we go after everybody involved. we never stop. that is what we're going to do if you guys hurt somebody. that is what we're going to do if somebody hurts you. hurting you is like heard a pop. it is off-limits and over. we gave copies of posters and street workers phone-number is and sent them home. in boston went quiet. the street workers and the gang officers reported over the next day streets were buzzing about

the meeting all over the city. explain the freddie cardozo prosecution was everywhere. it was in his 50s. he turned out to be barely 30. checking record against cardozo's, thick criminal histories matched side by side. girls drag their boyfriends with their probation officers. the street state calm. street workers moved in with a summer job program. gangs elsewhere started to heat up as intelligence reached the working group, we sent messengers, street workers who knew the jobs involved. we are watching you. it goes no further. stop. our team talked to the gang. no trouble. went and talked to the gang on stanley street. no trouble. tracy reported back amazed after one such warning. there is nothing happening.

revelation. the gangs were rational. they learned and responded. it change. which a were and it did and it turns out they are and they do all over the country. so this was 1996. this was what was really behind what came to be called the boston miracle. it has been fun to sit down and tell my own story on this. there is a line in the book that says are always hated that name. it wasn't a miracle. was a lot of work. and it was. but it worked. and it worked in stockton and now it is working in chicago. we began this work in the most dangerous neighborhood in chicago a year ago and that neighborhood is no longer of the most dangerous neighborhood in

chicago. true of these meetings and associated work that go with it in west garfield park is down 40%. over and over and over, it doesn't seem possible and that has been one of the main impediments to getting to work out and getting people to take seriously the idea that you could sit down with the gang members and drug dealers and talk to them and get these astounding effects was just not credible. we didn't expect it. when we had that first march meeting in 1996 and the second one at the beginning of the summer nobody expected the streets of boston to just switch off which is basically what they did. but when you understand the core

nature of this problem, some of its basic material facets that actually turns out not to be incredible at all. so here is the short version of what this is about and why this stuff works. the boston pops with whom ted and a bunch of the >> involved top as the first and most important fact which is in the hottest neighborhoods hardly anybody is doing this stuff. we didn't believe them because the stories we recalled about cultures of violence and community dynamics and gun availability and diffusion of violence out of crack markets into the general population and all this stuff people were talking about, the generation of superpredators, everything said they were wrong and turned out they were right. it turned out that in boston, 61

crews, gangs and 1300 people in them in rochester or dorchester or hide park, slices of j.p. were associated with 60% or better in the city of boston. less than 1% of their age group sitting why'd. we have done this analysis in cincinnati. 61 crews, 1500 people connected, under 1/2% of the city's population. they are readily identifiable and stand out which means you can focus on them in various ways and because it is so fantastically concentrated if you effect that dynamic and their behavior you have

shockingly disproportionate effect on the violence. the other driver is the street drug areas where they do business and we map those in boston but crews that you operated in were under 4% and 25% of all violent crime in the city of boston. again just massive hot spots. no matter where you go in the country those facts turn out to be true. that is not normal or all the rest. with those facts, travel some powerful and in many ways profoundly uncomfortable dynamics.

so those drug areas get a massive amount of law enforcement attention which looks to them on the receiving end completely opaque and random. they can't tell what is coming. they get away with almost everything. colleagues have mine have done the prison risk calculation for selling cocaine which if you stand on the street and selling units of cocaine you run a one in 15,000 chance of a prison sentence. they get arrested over and over again which is what people in our world see. in their world they get away with everything they do and when they don't they don't know about it until it is too late. if we train our dogs this way they would have the house and we were living on the street which is why we don't train our dogs this way. we hurt them extraordinarily but the hurt doesn't do either of them or us any good and it turns out they are not being irrational. we are being irrational. if we sit down with them and say

we know we can't get you for everything but we are going to get the next crew in the city to kill somebody we could do that and we are credible about that. you have just called the city down because once you have that conversation nobody wants to be that first group. strange way of doing deterrent but very effective. we are still punishing them. still threatening them. the second thing that is most important is they are terrified. enormous amount of what they do they do because we are not protecting them and they're doing immediately rational thing this that are terribly destructive. we ran the numbers on gang members in boston. here were the numbers are trotted out so far. homicide is 400,000 to 520 -- their homicide risk every year was 1600 per 100,000.

everybody got shot. everybody -- people who had been killed. a one in 7 chance of getting killed if you were on the streets for nine years. we were not fixing it for them. it turns out if you calm the streets down many of them he's a giant sigh of relief and back off because the idea that people like walking out there door and stand a one in seven chance of getting killed is not true. then it turns out you can have a moral conversation with them. their sociopaths and we think we don't care. none of that is right. they're not just poor misunderstood kids. they can do some tremendously awful things but are they reachable? yes. they won't listen to us because the cops have no standing.

the answer is there to be found, surviving mothers of a murder. the right kind of ministers and elders on the block. it is the older and wiser original gangsters who discover the emperor has no clothes but they have all kinds of street credit. what we are really dealing with is the street code. this is not really about drugs. this idea, my friend is my enemy and power groups are beefing and we have a vendetta. the ideas are something you can challenge. these original gangsters stand in front of a roomful of these guys and say -- i loved having my family on the street and i believed we had each other's

backs which is why when the fed came calling point, mouth shut while my friends rushed to ted heinrich to shout me up and i'm finishing a 17 year federal bid. let me ask you, gentlemen, last time you were locked up who came to see you in prison and to pay your mother's rant and who bought baby formula for your kids and how long did it take one of your boys to sleep with your girlfriend and in a meeting this kid stuck his hand up and said three days and it was my cousin! everybody knows this is hollow but nobody ever says it. somebody back here is nodding. you work with these kids and you know this is right. it turns out that the same stuff is very powerful. we know there is nothing more powerful than community

standards. we lead in these neighborhoods with the cops. the cops are what the academics call agents of formal social control. , send corrections and judges. everything we know about the world says informal social control is far more important and that is my conscience and what my friends think and what my mom thinks and my girlfriend and prospect of girlfriend thinks and what community standards are. try telling this to a bunch of narcotics cops. they do not believe you. we can do it here. was a friend of the police? a few more raise their hand. not a lot. show of hands please. when you were growing up who was afraid of your mother? 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's 99 times out of 100 and especially mom today trumps the fed in five years. it turns out the community hates living like this. you get into any of these neighborhoods and the cop story, everybody is complex and living off drug money, no they are not. a this stuff -- they take this stuff. not many people doing it. they don't even like it. they are reachable with the right kind of law-enforcement and law engagement and listen to their community. and still it is all burning out there. what is that about? this is the last point i will make because it is the biggest one. that is going on because communities hate as more than

they hate what is going on. these are communities that are most of them historically very damaged african-american communities. until 1968 the law was a deliberate racial conspiracy to do them damage. once the civil-rights changes came, their neighborhood get better. the economy fell out from under them. we wrapped up drug enforcement and gained enforcement. mask incarceration in this country has reached the point that if you are born black man today in the united states you stand one in three chance of going to prison. they go back to these neighborhoods in which all the men can have criminal records almost literally. they can't get to work. they can't get money. they don't want to marry anybody else. can't pass background checks or get bonded to be a barber

literally. we are destroying these neighborhoods in the name of saving them. we police the man aggressive ways. every begets stopped. every body gets pulled over. tissue paper in these neighborhoods. everybody gets their pockets turned out at the community sees it especially in the very real context of the history of black america. and they are not caring about their dead and this is not just happening because it is an accident. that is what they want and anybody who watched the campaign, months of controversy about the jeremiah right, this is what he was talking about. the larger section of the sermon from which that line comes goes something like bring the drugs into the country and give them

to our kids and pass the three strikes law and put everybody in prison and asbestos stand up and sing god bless america. no, god damn america. that is what he was talking about. the conviction on the part of the community that we're doing this to them on purpose. and when people believe that they will not stand shoulder to shoulder with the cops and tough young men to put their guns down. they will not cooperate. they will die on the street and not tell you who shot them. it is brokering a process, the cops have to lead on this. cops will go to the neighborhood and say we get it. it is not working. we are jacking up your young men. we understand the unintended consequence of what we are doing. we want to do something

different. we are especially cognizant of how what we have done has fit with our talks racial history. we will stop this but we need you to do something too. we need you to say in these controlled and safeway's to the 5% of your young men who are driving this that you need them to stop it because right now they don't get that. they think you think it is okay. and we are having what we are calling these reconciliation engagements all over the country and for whatever reason 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 and they do and the cops see them asking against type and the cops acted against

tight and the racial transformation that takes place is astounding. we can stop the shooting and turned out weakened its shut the drug market down and stop jacking up the young men and arresting one in three black men. we don't have to do this anymore and when we do that we can finally turn to the deeper issues in these communities because they need more than not to get killed. they need a lot of help and uplift but you can't do that when people are afraid to go outside. you can't do it and winnow have the tools we need. we do not need more money or law or cops or programs. we need to take what we have got, refocus its the in these ways and just stop it. [applause]

>> i think we we're going to do this is to speak into the microphone so who would like to do that? >> the boston artwork, but since then there has been a rise of crime again. there was an article in the boston globe about the infighting that was happening and how they were trying to work it out. you hear a lot of reasons for why despite happening again. i would like to hear your take. what is the truth of it? what is going to happen moving forward? >> so there has been ungodly volumes of ink spend on what

happened in boston. nearly all of which partakes in a consensual fiction which is a fancy word for a lie. here's what really happened in boston. they stopped doing the work. it is that simple. everything else that has been talked about, infighting among ministers, shift in focus to homeland security, and none of it was actually relevant to what happened. what happened was a police department took its eye off thinking about and acting on this in the operation cease-fire framework. and over the next couple years as they did that they started to climb the streets, started to burn again in these very positive feedback ways this problem generates and before long basically back to the way

it started. and that went through two successive police commissioners neither of whom would say to their rank-and-file we are going to fix this. they let these politics play out inside the department as the bodies stacked up. ed davis came in and worked with my colleague anthony braga who was part of the original core boston team. he had worked with ed and they had entirely shut down their age and gained shooting using a version of this and ed put his foot down and said no more of this nonsense and he is actually building this way of operating more organically into the department than ever before. there are a couple problems. one is just like with your own kids and your own dogs if you tell from their going to do

something that you don't is hard to get their attention again. better not to do this at all and to do it and lie to the streets. the street to use to getting lied to and they don't like and respect and the prospectus so it is harder to get their attention and respect. the second thing in boston remains a fractured city. it is tragic because this stuff was born here. boston showed you could do it. there was a moment of real cooperation and it is not back to that seem less, happy state. there is a lie and part way through the book, as i saw this kind of agency politics and political politics destroy these efforts, this holds true.

the bad guys are not the problem. the bad guys control the good guys. >> a wonder she could speak to this issue on vacation, the equities that exist. for korea reform that has not been done and the mandatory minimum. lot of money for basic thing is. the gang member will say get me out of boston, i am not so sure i agree. can you speak to that? >> let's be careful about what i said. i did say we need more resources and more attention to the problem. i said we don't need anything else to create fundamental public safety in these communities and that is true.

we have the knowledge and operating models that we need to stop homicide, shut the drug markets down and create this breathing space in the neighborhood. does that fix everything? not even close. creates finally some conditions where we can do the deeper and more important work. the reason that i am so.about that is our usual logic on this, their two ways people think about this depending on your character and disposition. so if you kind of have a school that believes in individual accountability and consequences then you become a cop and a prosecutor and it becomes about people making bad decisions and the main mechanism is the criminal-justice system and it is 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 insight into deeper community conditions then you become a rout hawser and you try to work to fix the community and that says if we 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 damage individuals then the climb will go away. good luck with that. because if you wait to fix these communities that are as we speak paralyzed with fear and trauma that we are not going to get there either. 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 look at these very precise and different ways. we can fundamentally change these community dynamics and the drug markets and the gang this will stop sucking kids in and won't be doing things that are getting them arrested now and things are different. is that everything? not even close. but we can do it and my view is since that is true we have a moral obligation to do it. >> i am curious what support if any has been implemented in terms of engaging teachers because that is what i am thinking the other of 43 years and adults to see kids on a

regular basis and kids tend to get involved with gangs when their school age. i was just wondering what your thoughts on that. >> our experience has been that schools don't want to play outside 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 are gained and violence issues in the schools they are community issues being played out inside the schools. our experience nationally has been you can't get them to come to the table. can't get them to share information. we have real stories of gang

fights that started in school. the security guys inside chase the fighters out into the street. the kid gets stabbed in the street and the school's response is that happen down the street. it has nothing to do with us. it is really bad. there are the lot of exceptions to that. and again, as 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 at kennedy school to a criminologist. >> good question. what happened was i was working down here, felt it with a bunch

of kennedy school faculty. what i was doing was writing teaching cases. kennedy school, professional school, not a political science department. people who are going to work in government and public policy. and therefore like a lot of business schools they do a lot of teaching by the caseload and there was a little shock of full time case writers and i got this wonderful job doing that except that nobody read your stuff and it is like working at the new yorker. lots -- you call somebody and say i am at harvard and the like to interview and they say yes. a training ground for what i wanted to. writers serve as serial academics. you are completely fascinated by whatever you are doing at the time and without a second thought you do something else. that is how i was trying to be a

good writer. on got tagged by a group of faculty at the school who were beginning a big project on reinventing policeing. to me it was just like any other assignments and as part of that work i spent the next ten years going to cities around the country that were doing break through police work and because this was the mid 80s a lot of what they were doing was focused on very merging crack market problem because that was the worst thing anybody was dealing with and so i found myself going all over the country walking crafts markets. always have to say and a professional capacity. anybody who sees that, it file you not to be changed by it.

it is so unbelievably awful and it drove me in and part way through that process it was the beginning of the boston project. the policeing work that i was part of promoting wasn't reaching that problem. wasn't working. i got really frustrated. the boston project where i met ted was my attempt to stop studying and start trying to come up with something we can do about this stuff. that is what happened. >> what was the response or action by community members as well as prosecutors? >> community folks clay a number of crucial roles.

some of them are literally confined to these meetings or forums as we called them in boston which are as it turned out extraordinarily powerful, effective moments. auld disproportionately what you think you ought to get out of something like that. in those meetings, community members frame of the community, they say we don't want this, we are for you bet against a couple things you are doing. people you care about and who care about you are being devastated by the violence. here's what it means to us if you get killed. i have seen 40 of the scariest guys reduced to tears when sitting to the mother of a murdered gang member explain to them what having him die did to

his surviving family. this is the moment of one of the cops are thinking they're not sociopaths. they are weeping in public. they challenge the street code. they challenge respect and disrespect and vendetta and i am going to be dead by the time i am a 21. nothing i do now matters and all that stuff that drives the street culture. their simple being there in concert with all these law enforcement agencies in concert with service providers. everybody talking with one of voice is its of a trans formative moment, something these guys have never seen before and never happened before. is different. and outside there are ways to keep those messages fresh.

is like talking to your own kid. you don't do it just once. they can provide what we might call direct service so there's mentoring and faith based programming and informal stuff that goes on in any community, it is young and full hon.. the community often gets asked to to a level of work i think is fundamentally unreasonable. i have never seen an organized community. healthy communities don't come home from work and have dinner and have everybody may community meetings to talk about the issues of the community and how they will work on them together due to family life and they read and go to bed. that is what normal people do. it is only these communities the

are already are most distressed communities where people aren't working and can't get work and have all kinds of family problems and community problems. is only them that we demand they get together and solve their own problems. people get paid to do this work and they're not doing it. it is the rest of us that need to step up. and willing members of the community fit in. let's say two more. >> talk about your experience in the gardens where it sunk in for you. have you to impart that moment on other people to recruit them into helping you with this? i will call it research for lack of a better term. >> that is a really interesting

question. nickerson gardens was the most dangerous public housing project in 1985 when i started this work. in that area, as best we can tell a was ground zero for the american -- i have not had a great deal of success getting people to voluntarily wander around in those places. is not nearly as dangerous as people think it is. one of the things you realize after a while is they don't care about you. you are not a threat. you don't have much to offer. the worst that could happen is you might get robbed or catch a stray bullet but that stuff is really rare. they heard 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 once you get

your feet under. people don't want to do it. and again sort of has a recurring theme, you don't really need new people to care about this. there are lots of people who care about this professionally and just because it is what they care about. what those people need is a way of doing work that works for them because what they're doing right now doesn't work and there is more than enough in terms of people and resources to pull this off once folks understand this way in and 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 is outrageous but so far it is true so we 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 was at a city council meeting and it went on longer than i hoped to. so i came in late and heard something, piece of what you said that was interesting to me. i live in public housing in cambridge. was not a dream come true for me. was because of a mortgage foreclosure. the victim and scrambling for an affordable place to live in an expensive housing community. i happen to have been elected co-president of the tenant council and some of what you said made sense to me. what interests me is programs bring a around social programs wrapped up in a police package. i 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 with you ridge just talking about but why does it have to

come in a police rapper? can't the social programs that there's a lot of enrichment and bridge and all these work-force development and all these programs, why can't they be delivered to people and offered to people as what they are and have the police come and develop relationships as who they are? >> you have asked an exquisitely complicated question and i'm going to try to answer it in a slightly complicated but still quick way. everybody, myself, fervently included, with 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 in these neighborhoods reliably without the involvement of law enforcement. you can find occasional success stories and they are magnificent but very situational the specific. you take what has been done in those successful places, take it 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 this stuff on more than lightning strikes. the other point is if it is done right, if it is better to do it with law-enforcement's close involvement than not and i emphasize if it is done right,

what happens most of the time is cops are doing the same thing they have been doing. everybody else, you graft on a little bit of help. that is the package and what is remarkable, i was prepared for the communities to hit the cops. i was not prepared for the communities to hate the social service provider which many of them do. social-service providers are distant and arrogant, they don't produce, don't deliver, they get paid and go home. they're not doing anything any good. in communities dealing with this for decades are furious about it. what you want is for this new partnership to change the behavior of the cops. change the behavior of the social service providers and to model for the community what we doing before and away we were thinking before is not what we

are doing and thinking about. if everything is done right is better for social services to be offered with a narcotics cop standing there saying i want you to succeed. i don't want to have to arrest you or kick your mom's door in. i am part of this because i respect you and i think you will make good choices and that is what we want and if you make us i am going to enforce the law but please don't make us. that is a whole different engagement. one more. >> all this seems like common sense to me because i do this work as well and i think it is common sense to 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 against each other. >> sometimes you feel like that? >> all the time. my question is how do we get all organizations on the same page and doing the same work at the same time so we can really make a difference? >> it is so common sense. i call one of my old girlfriend after we figured it out in california and we had this breakthrough. we are going to sit again as the out and talk to them and tell them the first group that kills somebody will get all of our attention. the community talk to them. amazing. there was dead silence and judy said what have they been doing? you should be ashamed of ourselves. we really should. it is not common