this is about an hour. >> good evening, everyone. my name is rachel katz and on behalf of harvard bookstore, i'm very pleased to welcome you to this evenings event with david kennedy, author of the new book, toshio: one man is dead street band in the inner shift in america. tonight the venice one author talks at harvard bookstore this fall. we saw tickets left for friday evening's talk with jeffrey sachs. he is an expert on economic and environmental policy and director of the institute and his book is the price of civilization garrity will be speaking at 6:00 p.m. at the bridal theater on friday evening. ..

or silence your cell phone or other electronic devices. it's now my pleasure to introduce this evening speaker, david kennedy. mr. kennedy is a professor of criminal justice said john jay college as well as director at the center for crime prevention and control. a self-taught criminologist, he helped engineer the boston miracle in the 1990's by bringing together law enforcement community leaders and drug traders to cut down on a street violence in the boston neighborhoods. his work has been adapted for cities across the country and has earned him numerous awards

including the to innovations in american government from the kennedy school here at harvard. his new book, "don't shoot" is a memoir of his work developing and implementing his program by understanding and describing street violence on criminal level. the recent on line review for the new republic notes would is brilliant about his work is that specificity. its insistence that street violence has its own special contours' and patterns that can be understood and manipulated to vlsi said after the talk we will have time for questions followed by a signing here of the front. as always i would like to think anyone who purchases a but this evening. by doing so you were supporting the local bookstore and as well as this author series. some of the strike me in welcoming david kennedy. [applause] >> good evening. i don't think this is just one

series of the defense. [laughter] just for the record i like this book stuff. so why was dillinger rachel earlier, so this is an author's, rather than policy. i pointed this bookstore through much of my youth and middle years so i will tell the story a little bit, apply meant to be a writer and it was my ambition to be john mcphee basically. i wanted to be a very vivid literary nonfiction writer. and i started in the 80's by going down to the out of town news and by being a bunch of writers magazines and looking at how you become a free-lance writer. writers magazines are like bicycle magazines or cooking

magazines to read the tell you the same thing over and over and over again and then they have to figure not a way to make you think it's different. and what they say in the writers magazines is right to the editor a letter and if he says yes go ahead and 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 teaching material for the faculty there and i did that until, did that the next 15 years in various ways, and i lived on douglas street and the case writing shop offices or on dempster street and i got started at the main jfk building in cambridge for four years, and i was probably in this bookstore two or three times a week the entire time. mostly in the bottom which used to be the joost books. so please, don't wait to go

downstairs. [laughter] but it's really kind of personally fabulous to be standing here doing this. and i was also telling rachel that our first book even was the end of last month in cambridge, and i did it with john seabrook who actually is a new york writer and who did a really been wonderful new york piece about this stuff about two and a half years ago and john started the conversation by saying i was fascinated when i got into this to discover that gave it meant to be a writer and now after about 30 years he has written a letter and nonfiction book. writers will do anything to procrastinate including having an entirely different career, which is what i'm actually here to talk about. so, let's talk about what i've

spent those 30 years of assessing about. so, we are a couple of weeks beyond the annual fall release of the fbi and i had a little bit with myself. i had the editorial copy for that before the fbi numbers came in and i was exactly right as it turned out. so, the news was good despite the recession and everything else the people fought were going to drive the numbers higher. once again in 2010 we had another decline in one of the crime, state rates for the country came down another 4%. that is another parole on the string of very good national years. the violent crime rate is down to 1960's levels in many parts of the country.

and everybody is very pleased. and that was the end of the discussion because all the news is good. numbers are down. everybody is very pleased, and that is both true and dramatically, tragically long because those are the national numbers and they are true. but they missed the other side of the picture. so my colleague who teaches at the rochester institute of technology who likes to say nobody lives in the country. we live in neighborhoods, we live on our blocks and on our streets. and some of our neighborhoods and bloxham streets are burnings of the national homicide rate during the crack epidemic which is its modern peak hit about ten per 100,000 so this is how criminologists and the fbi and

the tate this stuff. ten did every year per 100,000 population. it's now down to about four per 100,000 which is a part of everybody's national self satisfaction on all of this. does anybody know the homicide rate is for black men in the united states? it is over 100 per 100,000 today. and that is again the national rate because this stuff is not evenly distributed nationally, socially, geographically. and again, my friend has done the analysis and a string of rochester neighborhoods called the crescent. so many of our cities and not just big cities have these neighborhoods. these are historical the troubled almost entirely african-american neighborhoods. the stuff i'm talking about doesn't go on in white neighborhoods and doesn't go on

and hispanic neighborhoods. this is a singular black american problem, and in the crescent of troubled neighborhoods homicide rate for 18 to 19-year-old black man is 520 per 100,000 each year which means if you just do the long division, it means that more than one in 100 black men are killed almost entirely by gunshot every year. and my friend does work with the kids from these neighborhoods who got caught up in the neighborhood from boston and she and i and everybody who works on these issues is beside ourselves with the fact that this goes on in plain sight it gets almost no attention. it acquires no resources. i was in a working meeting with some of our black community partners mall that long ago at

john jay and we went off track and started talking about why nobody cares about this stuff. the question was from a black man in the white room who dying like flies out there we know what to do. all of this is hiding in plain sight. why is this not a political issue and the number from another one of our black friends in the room was coming and i quote, "we are black, we are supposed to die." and i can't get anybody to get the magnitude of the sand here is the device i finally came up with so we all have a national moment of silence in honor of the dead at the tenth anniversary of the al qaeda tax attacks on the united states. much of the focus was at new york and the world trade center attacks so here is a fact for

you and that fact is that 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 tax. nearly 3,000 people a year and the duty sea attacks were worth something the country craft for a year ahead of time and had in line of every american newspaper to read this sort of stuff gets nothing except in some quarters it does. and there are people like nouri and myself and a bunch of others lived and breathed this both inside and outside of the effective communities come and came time to write "don't shoot" because and the last 15 years or so there has been developed a

way of thinking about and acting on this problem but works so the reviews are starting to come out and not surprisingly is not a genteel book. it says very blunt and harsh things but one of the things it says is we know what we need to know now to do something about this, and i had been getting a ration of stick about this from people saying basically really? yes, really. so, in my iain box is a message from the commanding officer in the mission district of the los angeles police department which is in the samford anno valley in one of the geographic roots in l.a. of los angeles, the most engrained original hispanic gain. they began this work not long ago. they 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, nobody got shot. has never happened before. we are doing this in the worst neighborhood in sacramento in the generational drug area. they began the work over a year ago and since they began the work, they're has been in this area one non-fatal shooting. this stuff seems far too good to be true but the fact is it isn't to reduce some people in law enforcement know and some people in the communities know and people who follow the unintelligible academic literature know it. most people aren't and don't and it's a very nonacademic manifesto saying we don't know this and it's time to start acting like it and this was in

boston and 1996, and i want to read from the book about that. >> so let me set the stage for you. if one of the moments in this forecast turned out to be sitting down with extremely hard-core offenders and talking to them coming and i will talk about why that makes sense and how you find them and all that in a moment, but the fact is we sit down and talk to them. the first time that was done anywhere in the country was may of 1996 in the courthouse. so here's the scene. we are in the courthouse. there's no judge. we have just taken the place over. our side of the bar where the

judge and the witnesses and such would normally be our the boston police officers, federal agents, the suffolk county prosecutors, federal prosecutors, parole officers, the city of boston gang outreach workers, the city had hired hoekstra to work the corners and calmed this stuff down and get people off the streets. on the other side of the bar facing us are about 30 of the most dangerous gang members would find in the city of boston. and we spent the next hour or so talking to to read a couple of framing facts, you are going to hear a couple of names. one is freddie cardoza. friday close by, and a claim of basically the worst game of ander in boston and the boston cops stopped him in roxbury one

morning. he had just sold an automatic pistol to a juvenile. the kid had the gun and hoist of the ammunition. freddy had 19-millimeter cartridge in his hand and what he didn't know is the boston cops have been working with the fed, freddie didn't know what the feds call a predicate criminal record have open to prosecution under what is called the army career criminal statute that as an armed career eligible defendant he could be charged with crimes, possession of a firearm that carried with it a 15 year mandatory federal sentencing and especially didn't know under federal law cartridges count as a firearm and what would have been a misdemeanor state offense turned into a 15 year federal sentence

in prison in upstate new york and where we sit to this day when this happened 1996 he still locked up on this so you will hear fri's name and you will hear tracie's name. tracy was the head of the city average team and you will hear the name of a young brilliant and dedicated federal prosecutor named to head who was part of the core team and was sitting over here. >> so this is our site talking to their site. here's how it's going to be in boston from now on the group said. when a gang killed somebody or shoot somebody or terraces the neighborhood, this group steps in. we will focus on everyone in the game and shot the markets down.

we will serve warrants, call on probation and parole. nobody is going to smoke a joint or drink in public. nobody is going to have any fun. we will talk to the judges and make sure they know what's going on. we will talk to parents. it's up to you whether you get this attention. this group, no violence, no harm, no foul, it's not a deal it is a promise. somebody else might come get you for dealing drugs. you take that chance. we go where the violence is. most of the attitude was gone. they were leaning forward focused paying attention taking it in. even those who were still fronting don't care. they were listening. you can tell. then we turn it around. tracie by design sat in the audience, not a cop. we know you were all caught up in something you can't control. we know it's dangerous out there. and we will help any way we can. if you need protection from your enemies or want a job, if your mom needs treatment or you want back into school, tell us. here's my phone number. but he had started, too three

retired of the black kids killing each other said it makes us sick. we know you are hurting. but nobody has a right to pick up a gun and shoot somebody else coming terrorize the neighborhood where they live. we will help you any way you can but the violence has to stop. if you don't hear what is being sent to you today he told them it is on your head and it take what we are offering. i've been to over 100 funerals and by not going to any more. the violence stops now. even the law enforcement team turned ground using it ahead of time. you know what happens when someone kills a cop. we don't stop with the shooter we go laughter everybody involved and back off and stop the car never stop. that is what we are going to do if you guys hurt somebody and if we hurt you. hurting u.s. like herding a cop. it's all off-limits now. it's over today we give them copies of the poster and st. reverse for numbers and sent

them home and boston went quiet this reporters and game officers reported over the next day's the streets were buzzing about the meeting oliver the city expanded the for the cardoza prosecution. his name was everywhere. he's in his 50s and turned out to be barely 30. it visited billy stewart to check his record against cardoza and he showed him delphic criminal history matched side by side and girls tried their boyfriends and made them check with their perversion officers. they stayed calm. the street workers moved in with a summer job program they started to heat up and as intelligence reached a working for peace and messengers comes reporters and crops to the crews involved ought to tell them they are watching you, we're watching you. it goes further. stop on our team went and talked to the group in the square, no more trouble. what went and talked to the gang

on the street, no more trouble. tracie reported back amazed after one such morning. they believe, he said, there's nothing happened. revelation, the gangs or rational. they listened, they learned, they responded. they changed. which they were when they did. and it turns out they do and they are all over the country. so this was 1996. this was what was really behind what came to be called the boston miracle. it's been fun to be able to sit down and tell my own story. there is a line in the book that says when i've always hated that name, it wasn't a miracle it was a lot of work it was but a worked and then worked in minneapolis and the network in stockton and now it's working in chicago and we began this work

in the dangerous neighborhood in chicago about a year ago that that neighborhood is no longer the most dangerous neighborhood in chicago to of these meetings in the isasi the work that go with it and homicide and the park is down 40% at this point. and over and over and over. it doesn't seem possible. and that's been of the main impediments getting the work out and getting people to take it seriously, the idea that you can sit down with the gang members and drug dealers and talk to them and you get these astounding effect it's not credible, and 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 in boston to just switch off, which is basically what they did.

but when you understand the core nature of this problem, and some of its basic material facets it actually turns out not to be incredible at all. so here is the short-term version of what this is about and why this stuff works. the boston pops and with whom did in the bunch of us then became involved taught us the most important factor which is that in the hottest neighborhoods hardly anybody is doing this stuff. and we didn't believe him because the stories we had been told about the cultures of the violence in the community amex and the unavailability and the diffusion of the violence out of the crack markets and the general population all this stuff at the time, the

generation of super creditors that we are all taught to believe and everything they said that they were wrong and it turned out that they were right, so it turned out that in boston 61 cruise, gangs, drug sets, that sort of thing with something like 1300 people in rochester, hyde park, slices of gp were associated with 16% or better of all youth homicide in the city of boston. that's less than 1% of their age group city-wide. we've done this and i was a cincinnati, 61 cruise again, maybe 1500 people connected with three-quarters of all of the killing. under the half a percent of the city's population to readily identify all and standout 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 a shockingly disproportionate effect of the violence, the other main driver of all of this is the street drug areas in which they do their business the and when we match those in boston the street drugs the cruise operated in were under 4% of the city and contained over 25% of the reported violent crime in the city of boston. again, just massive hot spots, massively hot spots. so no matter where you go on the country, the fact turn out to be true, that is a all the rest. it turns out of the facts trouble some very, very powerful and in many ways profoundly

uncomfortable dynamics. the drug areas get the massive amount of law enforcement attention which looks to them on the receiving end completely opaque and random. so, they can't tell what's coming to really get away with almost everything. colleagues of mine have done a prisoner's calculation for selling cocaine, which is if you stand on the street and sell a unit of cocaine you run a one in 15,000 chance of ending up with a prison sentence. they get arrested over and over and over again which is what people in our will see. in their world they get away with almost everything they do and when they don't, they don't know about it until that is too late. if we train our dogs this way they would have the house and we would all be living in the street which is why we don't train our dogs this way. so, we hurt them extraordinarily , but the hurt doesn't do either them or us any

good. and it turns out that they are not being irrational, we are being irrational. and if we sit down with them and say look, we know we can't get you for everything that we are going to get the next in the city that kills somebody we can do that. and we are credible about that. we have just combed the entire city down because once we have that conversation nobody wants to be that first group. but we are still threatening so the second thing is most important here is that they are terrified to bid and an enormous amount of what they do they do because we are not protecting them and doing immediately irrational things that are of course terribly destructive. so we ran the numbers on the gang members in boston. so here are the numbers i've got so far. homicide was four per hundred

thousand contender hundred thousand, five per 120,000. the homicide risk every year was 1600 per 100,000. everybody that the people who had been killed you can start a one in seven chance of getting killed if you are on the streets for nine years. and we were not fixing it for them. so it turns out that if you, the streets down, many of them have a giant sigh of relief and back off because the idea that people like walking out the door and stand a chance of getting killed is a blood libel, it is not true. then it turns out you can have a normal conversation with them. sweeting fears as the past. we think they don't care. none of that is right. they are not just poor misunderstood kids. they can be doing some tremendously all of things. but are the reachable?

yes. and they won't listen to us because we have no standing. the cops have no standing so the question is who has standing and the answer is there to be found. it is the surviving mothers of the murdered, it is the right kind of ministered, the elders on the block, the older, wiser hour original gangsters who discovered the emperor has no close but they still have all kind of street credibility. and what we are really dealing with here is the st code. this isn't about drugs. it isn't about business. this is a lot respect and disrespect and the enemy of my friend is the enemy and if i am being with you now we have a vendetta. and the st code is driven by ideas and ideas are something that you can challenge. so, you have not lived until you have seen on of these original gangsters stand up in front of a

room of these guys and say, so i had a glove, i loved having my family in the streets, and i really believed him, i really did, that we had each other's back which is why when the fed came calling i kept my mouth shut while my friends rushed and they walked in and finishing a 17 year old federal bid. that is what i have on the street. and let me ask you gentlemen, the last time you were locked up who came to see you in prison, who paid your mother's rent, who bought baby formula for your kids and how long did it take one of your voice to sleep with your girlfriend and one of these meetings this kid stuck his hand up and said three days and it was my cousin. [laughter] ..

what my community standards are. before time mr. narcotic cops, they don't believe me and i finally came up with some thing that works even with cops and we can do it here. so show of hands, when you were growing up, who was really afraid of the police? this is really interesting. a bunch of narcotics cops to get a few more braced hands. so not a lot. shorthands please would you

record woodworker dupuis really afraid of your mother? everybody was afraid of their mother. i'm still afraid of my mother. this is everything you need to know about social control. another strength. 99 times out of 100 schlichtmann today trumps the fed may be in five years. and it turns out that community hates living like this. you get into any of these neighborhoods and the cop story is that everybody is complicit, all at the master of money. now, they are not. they hate the death. and at this point, we should solve the problem. not many people doing it. they don't even like it. they asked for the right type of law involvement. their committee wants them to stop and still it is operating up there. so what is that about?

this is the last when i make because it's the biggest one. and that is that it is going on because the communities hate us more than they hate what is going on. these are communities that are -- most of them historically damaged african american communities until 1968, the law was as they say not a deliberate racial conspiracy to do them damage. once the civil rights changes came another neighbor has started to get better. the economy fell out from under them. we ran to drug enforcement of the gang enforcement. mass incarceration in this country has reached a point that if you are born a black man today in the united states companies can do in three chance of going to prison. the company's neighborhoods, go back to these neighborhoods in which all of the men almost literally.

company wants to marry them. they can't pass background checks. they can't get on it to be a barber literally. we are destroying neighborhoods in the name of saving on to the police them aggressive ways. everybody gets out. everybody gets pulled over. the fourth amendment as tissue paper these neighborhoods. everybody gets their pocket turns out. the community sees it in the very real context of the history of the black in america and looks at the cops and the rest of us supporting all of this and not caring about their dad and said this is not just have name because it's an accident. that is what they want. and anybody who watched the campaign months of controversy about the jerry my history, this is what he was talking about.

the larger section of the same name to which testerman comes if they bring them into the country, giving to three strikes law, put everybody in prison and then ask us to stand up and say god bless america. well, no. that is what he was talking about, his conviction on the part of the communities that we are doing to this to them on purpose. when people believe that, they will not stand up shoulder to shoulder with the cops and so they put their guns down. thomas ministry do not cooperate. they will die on the street and not tell you shot them, which is what actually goes on up there. so the most important piece of the work has come to be brokering a process between the authorities and community and which the cops have to lead a mass. the cops will go to neighborhoods and save oil, we get it. it is not working.

we are jacking up all your young men. we understand the unintended consequences of what we're doing. we want to do something different. we are especially cognizant of how what we have done half that with fire toxic racial history. we will stop this, but we need you to do some thing, too. we need you to stay in this controlled race to the 5% of your young men who are driving this site you need them to stop it because right now they don't get that. and so they think you think it's okay. that we are having what we are calling the spec filiation hageman all over the country. for whatever reason which i do not understand, there is the goodwill on the part of these battered communities, to say they'll take another shot at

this with you. and they do and the cops event against type in the racialized transformation that takes place is astounding. or while you doing not come it turns out we can shut the drug markets down. we can start jacking up of the young men and arrested only 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 we now have the tools we need. we do not need more money. we don't need more law. we don't need marcotte. we need to take what we thought, refocus it in these proved ways and just stop it.

[applause] so i think the way we are going to do this is to speak into the microphone. some would like to do that? >> said there was the boston miracle for the boston hard work, but since then there has been a rise of crime again. there is a recent article in "the boston globe" about the exciting that was happening to train actors and how they were trying to work it out. and you hear a lot of reason for why despite it happening again and i would like to hear what your take on it is, what is the truth of it and what is going to happen as we move forward? >> so there has been ungodly

volume spent on what happened often. nearly all the which partakes in a consensual fiction, which is a fancy word for a lie. so here's what really happened in austin. they stop going to work. it is just that in bold. everything else that's been talked about. conflating among the ministers, shift in focus to homeland security, funding changes. none of that was actually relevant what happened. what happened was the police department took its eye off thinking about and act on this in the operation cease-fire framework. and over the next couple of years is a good outcome and the body count started to climb. the street started to burn again in these very positive feedback

ways that this problem generates and before long you basically back to the way that it started. and that would do -- went through two successive police commissioners, neither of whom i would say to their rank and file, we are going to fix this. they let these politics play out inside the department while the bodies stacked deck. at davis, the current commissioner has fixed that. so ed came in. i had worked with my colleague anthony braga who was part of the original core boston team. anthony had worked with ed in a while. they had entirely shut down their shooting problem using assertions and cavemen and police said no more of this nonsense. and he is actually building this way of operating more organically into the department than ever before. they're a couple of problems.

one is that just like with two grown kids and your own dogs, if you tell them you are doing some pain and doubt it's real hard to get their attention again. it is better not to do this at all to do it and lie to the streets. the streets are used to getting my two and they don't like it and they don't respect it and they don't respect us. so it is harder than the first time to get their attention and get the respect. on the second thing is boston remained severely fractured city. it's tragic because this stuff was born here. boston showed that you could do it. there was this moment of real cooperation and it's not that did not seem less, happy state. and there is a line partway through the book as i saw this kind of agency politics and political politics destroyed the separate cities, that i began to

see the basic pattern here and it still holds true. that is we know how to control the bag guys. the bad guys are not the problem. i have yet to figure out how to control the good guys. >> i want to see out the changes. i work for the public defender and see the inequities that exist and how this affects the dynamics you are talking about. for example, the corps reform that's not been done, lack of money for basic plans of things. the members if they get me out of. i am not so sure i agree. could you speak to that? i see those very real problem. >> let's be careful about what i had. it 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 -- we have the knowledge and the operating models that we need to stop the homicide to shut the drug markets down and create this breathing space in the neighborhoods. does that fix everything? not even close. it creates finally some conditions where we can do a deeper and more important work. and they resent that i am so pointed about is that our usual logic on this or there are two ways people think about this, and it depending on your character and disposition are drawn to one or the other. so if you kind of have a soul that believes in individual accountability consequent as many become become a copper prosecutor and it becomes about people making the decisions and the main mechanism is the

criminal justice system, it's not working that means we need to fix the criminal justice system. good luck with that. if we wait for us to fix the justice system, we will never get there. that is a fact. if you have a soul that is drawn to sympathy and held as an in situ deeper community conditions, you become the root cause or an try to go to work to fix the community. and not says if we can do some thing about education and health care and support family and bring all -- all the programs we need to address the needs of these extraordinarily damaged individuals, then the crime will go away. what 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 either. those are ways of thinking about the issues that have been historically almost completely ineffective. the good news is we cannot operate that way. we can work in these very precise in different ways. we can fundamentally change these community dynamics and then the drug markets and games will stop the kids and. they won't be doing nothing scanning them arrested now. is that everything? not even close, but we can do it in my view is since that is true, we have a moral obligation to do it. >> i'm curious what supports it and they have been sort of an lamented in terms of engaging

schools and teachers because that is sort of what i think it is other authority figures and adults who see kids on a regular basis. and you know, people were kids tend to get involved with gangs of men are still school-age. i was just wondering what your thoughts are on that. >> our experience has been that schools don't want to play outside their four walls. it is extremely frustrating. schools like to pretend this isn't happening. they like to think that what goes on between the four walls has no connection to the outside. they do not recognize what is almost always true that is the new gang in front of tissues in the school, they are really community issues being played out inside the schools. our experience nationally has

been you cannot get them to come to the table. you can't attend to pay attention or share information. we have real stories of gang fights that start in the school. security guys inside she's the fighters and the kid gets stabbed in the street undisclosed responses that have been on the street. it's got nothing to do with us. really bad. there are a lot of exceptions to that. and again, sort of us at 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'll be okay. >> i am interested in how you got from any case study writer at kennedy school to a self-taught cryptologists.

>> good question. so what happened is i was working out of dempster street down here. i fell in with a bunch of kendall d. school faculty. size writing teaching cases. kennedy school at a professional school. it's not a political science department. as for people who are going to work in government and public policy. and therefore, like a lot of business schools, they do a lot of their teaching by the case method and there is a little shop there a full-time case raiders and i got this wonderful job doing that, except 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 sandman at harvard and like to interview and they say yes. so it was a training ground for what i really wanted to do. writers are sort of serial academics lets us what they are.

you're completely fascinated by whatever you're doing at the time in many of the state behind without a second thought and go do something else. and that is how i was trying to learn to be a good nature. i got attacked by a group of faculty at the school, who were beginning a big project on reinventing policing. and to me 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, a lot of what they were doing was focused on their emerging crack market problem because that was the worst thing anyone was stealing it. so i found myself going all over the country walking crack markets. i always had to say in a professional capacity.

blast back and anybody who sees that, i defy you not to be changed by. it is so unbelievably awful. partway through that process since the beginning of the boston project, the police in america is now part of promoting wasn't reaching a problem. it wasn't working. i got really, really frustrated and the boston project for a minute ahead and a lot of the other people been talking about was my attempt to stop studying and start coming up something we could do about this stuff. so that is what happened. >> what was the response are the actions by community members as well as prosecutors in such?

>> said the community folks play a number of crucial roles. so some of them are literally confined to these meetings, the columns come in the forums as we have them in austin, which are as it turned out our extraordinarily powerful rl disproportionally witchy thing would get out of something like that. some business meetings, community members to frame the norms the community. they say we don't want this. we are for you, but against a couple things you are doing. 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 that gang member explained to them what having had died due to his surviving family. and this is the moment often when the cops start thinking my god, they are not sociopaths. they are listening to her and weeping in public. they challenge the street code. besides ds about respect and disrespect in the data and i will be dead by the time in 21, so nothing i do know matters and all the stuff that drives the street culture. they're simple been there in concert with these one-person agencies in concert with service providers, everybody talking with one voice is itself a transformative moment. it is something these guys have never seen before and it's actually something that's never happened before.

it is different. outside the call-in come that there is -- there are ways to keep those messages -- you said 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's mentoring. there's a lot of faith-based programming. there's an informal stuff that goes on in any community where the community tries to help its gone and it's vulnerable. the community often gets asked to do a level of work that i think is fundamentally unreasonable. so i have members been an organized community. healthy communities don't come home from work and have dinner and have every bit go do it attended community meetings to talk about issues in the community and how they will work on them together.

they read in a go to bed. that is what normal people do. it is only these communities that are already our most distressed communities and where people are working and can't get work and have all kinds of family problems and community problems. it is only then that we demand at the end of their days they'll 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 the need to step up. and then there are these important strategic ways that willing members of the community can induce in. idea back >> let's take two more. steve mackey talk about your experience walking through nickerson gardens has kind of your high moment that i can for you. have you tried to impart that moment on other people to recruit them and helping you

with this? i'll call it research. >> that is a really interesting question. so nickerson gardens was the most dangerous public housing project in watts in 1990 goodnight and 85 when i started this work right on the edge of compton. and that area, as best we can tell, it is 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 those things you realize after a while is that they don't care about you. you're not a threat. you actually don't have touch to offer. the worst thing that can happen is you might get robbed or catch a strip of wood or something like that, but that kind of stuff is actually really rare.

they hurt each other. they're worried. they're concerned and angry at each other. the rest of us don't matter. you can actually get away with it pretty easily, especially once you get your feet under you. people don't want to do it. again, sort of as a recurring team, 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 the work the works for them because what they are doing right now does not work. and there is more than enough in terms of people and resources to pull this off once folks understand this way and. and i think that is a good thing. i get asked all the time, how do you get the white folks to care about black people? 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 ways to do this where we don't have to convert everybody. we don't have to convert everybody. >> i'm sorry to have gotten his way. i was at a city council meeting at it went on longer than i had hoped. so i came in late and i heard something, a piece of what she said that was interesting to me. i happen to that in public housing here in cambridge. this not a trained come true for me. it was a mortgage foreclosure. i happen to have been elected copresident of the 10 account so and some of what she said made a lot of sense to me. what interested me is that the programs program social programs wrapped up in a police package. 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 in a police rapper? campus social programs that there's a lot of rich men and all these different workforce development, why can't they just be delivered to people and offered to people and do police have come to develop relationships as who they are? >> so you've actually asked me an exquisitely collocated question and i will try to answer it in a slightly complicated this still quick way. so, everybody myself forgot we included, would like to be able to do this without laying hands on anybody in regard to not just mass incarceration is a national shame, which it is.

we have to regard every single time somebody gets arrested on the 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 not the same. but they are very situationally specific and you take what has been done in the successful places, take it to someplace up it looks pretty much the same and they don't work. you have to get extraordinarily lucky to turn the corner and wait to base base this stuff out more than lightning strikes. the other point is that it's actually, if it's done right, it's better to do