>> anyone else want to comment? >> i think, again, i go back to my fist reflection is -- first reflection is what can we learn from this opportunity of having the last four years captured in the book. so, one, i would encourage everyone and those of us who have not yet read the book to read it, to reflect. and then also, how do we come together and at least have a starting point, develop a shared vision of what we want the city's education system to look like. i think if -- we haven't even as a community done that. and i think as we do that work, then we can backwards map on what are the right strategies that we need as a community, need to take in order to reach that goal. and that's something that we're committed to continuing to do and really looking for solutions

to build the infrastructure to allow that to happen. >> thank you, shanae. i want to thank dale -- [applause] i want to thank dale russakoff for a very accessible treatise on what has been going on in the public education sector in newark over the last several years. her book is a very interesting read, and i think the opportunity to meet her here and to hear her talk about her book was also very, very important. ..

>> dale will be signing in the gallery, so if you will line up the right-hand side you will be in line for the book signing. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching the tv,

television for serious readers. watch any program you see here online at the tv.org. next on the book tv, investigative journalist joe domenick chronicles america's policing from the 1990s. follow the beating of rodney king in the late rights through 2014, that even some new york city and ferguson, missouri. >> we are here today to talk about and interesting and extremely important subject, policing and the relationship to read i cannot think of anything that is more timely. you cannot pick up the paper or watching the news about learning more about things in wondering about, you know, where things are going. one of the things i my previous life, i was a historian at the university of wisconsin and the university of ucla in one of the reasons i like history is

because i always used to look at history in the past to try to figure out what's going on in the present and maybe get a sense of where we are going in the future and i think we will be able to do that right with a great book by joe domenick, the book: "blue". we will hear from joe and the police commissioner in 2010 in 2013 and they will talk a bit about lapd in the history of it and then i'm going to bring my friend in, might favorite mayoral candidate who is the current commissioner and steve will, but we will talk about the present in the future and i'm sure you have a lot of questions and a really great session, so with that let me introduce our author, joe domenick. [applause]. >> i have been asked to say a few things about the look and i

think the best thing i can do is to read you a bit from the authors know, which will kind of tell you how i got involved in covering the lapd rights. i was so fascinated with it when i first came to los angeles. i moved here in 1975, so i have a bit of an alley accent, but you can't tell where i moved from just by listening to me. so, i will start with this. i first became interested in the lapd when i moved from manhattan, to los angeles, in the mid- 1970s i was a public school teacher working at a junior high school deep in the south bronx. where the frenzied halls reflected both the chaos of the time and that wild discourse desk discord of the streets outside. on a subway ride back to manhattan the five turned edgy as my subway car grounders on the city's most violent neighborhoods without a cop in sight then, nypd officers and their counterparts seem never to

be around when you wished they were. when they were, you could not help but notice the wary slump of their shoulders and their disheveled appearance that announce their disillusionment with their job. when i arrived in los angeles, i was astounded by how different lapd officers were. first, it was clear that they had not given up. that apartment superbly tailored motorcycle officers had the look and daring of the prototype model that they actually work for the film robocop and acted the part. the lapd had been trained to aggressively seek out crime and to quote confront and command a suspect in an aloof intimidating and often arrogance matter. even if that suspect had committed only a minor infraction or done nothing at all wrong. that attitude alone seem to start more trouble than it stopped and if you are black the

experience was astonishing and worse and exponentially more frequent peer it every politician in town moreover, seem to count out to the lapd, afraid of getting into a public spat with the succession of chiefs who paradoxically were not afraid of offending anyone. i wanted to understand the source of the department's extraordinary power and wrote my first book about the lapd called : protect and serve, as a way of finding out an understanding, protect and serve is different from this book in this respect. insert was essentially a narrative history of the lapd, written in the same way that this book has been written. through characters who i talk through the entire book, but it started when the lapd started in 1977-- i forget now.

this book starts with the los angeles riots in 1992. i-- about the first 70 pages i use the riots as it unfolds to talk about the people who were around and in some ways caused the riots, mayor tom bradley and other people and i talked about them in their careers and i introduce my characters, charlie beck, for example and he was a sergeant during the riots, so i pick him up there and all the way through till he becomes chief. so, i think that's about it. if you want to know more, get the book. [laughter] >> host: when my friend asked me to appear it was to really interview joe, so i went to the book and i got a few questions that i'm going to post to him.

but, let me first give a plug to the book. i do think it is an excellent overview of the history of the department from 1992 till the presence and how it has evolved over that. back of time. i have lived in los angeles my entire life, so i was here for the 66 riots as some of you may have been as well. my first encounter with the lapd was getting a ticket when i was 18 and that has been the only real contact i have had with lapd. i was going bit too fast. the pled guilty to that would. so, let me-- in your book you say and i am quoting you, now four years later-- the book

really goes from 1992 through 2011. then, the epilogue brings it sort of current through 2015. but, the history part of it is really through 2011, and he really addresses some of the problems we see everyday on the front page of the los angeles times, so in the epilogue he says, up four years later people continue to ask me if the lapd is really reformed. to that, i answered, compared to what. he you then compared it to daryl gates, which you call the arrogant comparative years as chief and what you call the decade of drift under willie williamson, bernard parks and then you compared to many other police department's and your reply is, yes emphatically yes. so, why don't you summarize for us how lapd has changed from

1992 to 2011 in the present? see to their own the inheritor of an attitude-- part of me, in a succession of lapd chief starting with william parker who became chief of los angeles police department in 1950, and when he became chief he was heralded as a great performer and he was indeed a reformer. at that time los angeles, like many big-city police departments -- lapd like many of those police department's was a department on the take. if you are stopped, you would pay a curb side side. there were bagman going around and taking money from gamblers and prostitution etc.

it was a corrupt department in that way. bill parker said, no, no, we are not going to do that. this stops now and the credo was within the lapd after parker. if you get in trouble, if you are involved in a bad shooting, you beat up someone that needed to be beaten up, we will protect you. but, if you take money you-- your is ours and that's pretty much been the history of the lapd since then, so parker did something that i think started a lot of problems for the lapd. he agreed to have a small police department on the cheap and that police department would be mobile, go cover these-- what is it? 470 square miles of los angeles and to be faceless, be in a

patrol car looking around, not truly making contact anyone him as they saw someone they suspected of doing something and very very often in ghettos and berrios, that's where they suspected people of doing something all the time. that was an attitude of policing that we are going to stop people and we are going to really put the fear of god into them. bill parker firmly believe that if people were nice to the police it meant that they wanted something, so police were not supposed to be nice to you and they were to be aloof and be better than you and believe that they were better than you. so, that brought us-- can you repeat your question please? >> host: i'm rambling here. >> guest: from the. of time in 1992 which is the

last year of gates tenure of chief to the department has received today under charlie beck. it changed and you say it's reformed and obviously you believe it has changed for the better. >> host: it has changed and is due to a number of reasons. one, the christopher commission reforms carried to the christopher commission reforms did not go far enough, but one thing that they did do is they enabled the police-- the chief of police to be not rehired after five years. prior to that time, there are gays, for example, was chief of police for 14 years and he had no intention of going anywhere until he was finally forced out. so, under the christopher commission reforms, the chief service for five years and then the police commission decides

whether they want to rehire him or not. in the 1990s, after that past both willie williams and bernard parks were not rehired. pose for various different reasons, so that was an important form. the lapd-- so, the chief of police had to be more politically aware and astute and be willing to deal with the rest of the power structure of the city, which he had it been willing to do in the past. secondly, the inspector general came into the picture. before that, there was no one internally that was really watching the lapd. the inspector general's job was to be the eyes and ears of the police commission and to tell them and the public what was going on in terms of malfeasance

and abuse within the department. it has worked sometimes and sometimes it has not. depending on who the police commissioner is, the president of the police commission and the ig is. but, that has been important. but, i think probably the two most important things that finally brought the lapd to heal and started some of the reforms was the rampart scandal occurred and that caused so much attention, the lapd put it on the front page day after day after day, deliberately because they wanted people to pay attention. there were editors there who had lived through decades of the lapd and really wanted this to matter. instead of just doing some story

over a weekend, uninvestigated story of the weekend and then everyone forget about. that brought in the us department of justice, and they forced the city of los angeles into a consent decree-- to create. that tikrit was very important because it had very strong met-- metrics but the lapd had to me in terms of not violating civil liberties. they had to improve that and improve that immensely and there was a judge who some of you might know, and gary freese, who had been on the christopher commission and acutely aware that the christopher commission had not gone far enough. he really held the city and lapd fee to the fire in terms of getting them to make these changes that were necessary. then, finally, the mayor and

police commissioner hired bill grattan, the most famous police performer of the 20th century to commence and complete the job. so, to get back to your question , the biggest change, i think, was attitude change. the way they policed their mission as i saw it before bratton was to keep african-americans and poor people and latino people who were poor in their place, deal with the scourge of the gangs, which they clearly do because they just double down on what they had been doing and it had not worked for decades. so, bratton came in and he started-- he-- he went visited the aclu.

he went and visited all of the prominent african-american leaders and essentially said to them, i understand the situation. i know what's been going on. my doors open to you. i will listen to you. if i think something should be done i will be happy to do it, so he opened up to a lot of different people who never got a hearing, so that was important, also. when it came time for him to be reappointed the aclu actually wrote a letter favoring his reappointment, that's how well he did that. he also did something that was very important. he encouraged innovation, not just innovation that he thought up, but the innovation that his captains in the field thought of and the captains-- he told the captain's in the field, i want you to prevent crime. no one in this department is preventing crime. all we are talking about is

putting people-- arresting people, as many people as you can, get a reputation for doing that and you'll get promoted. but, that does not work and bratton understood that. so, he pulled his captains in the field to do what they thought they needed to do to get both the lower crime and to get the permission to get the legitimacy for the offices to police in those neighborhoods, to try to start to do that. a number of captains, most prominently charlie beck in south bureau started to do that. they came up with their own community policing plans can and community policing-- pray god it is the future of american policing. trolley beck did a really fantastic job in south bureau. so, community policing is a big

legacy of the lapd and bratton and it beck. that continues and under bratton and then under back gang interventionists, gang intervention academy was started. made up almost primarily of ex- gang members and not just ask king members, but famous, series players who were gang members at the time in prison etc. and the lapd said we are going to support this intervention academy and we are going to-- we know how to use them and we will use them so that they are not snitches because they can be effective if they are snitches going to the police, but we will use them. when there were gang wars and a lot of what happens is that a shoots b and then b once retaliation and he gets this gang and they should another

person from that gang. with interventionists did was they stopped those retaliatory killings, which had resulted in so much crime and so much death, so those were, i think, the major accomplishments and i think that the training, everyone tells me that the younger officers back amount and certainly the captains really get it. they really get what needs to be done within the framework of the kind of police department that we have, which are really agents of containment. they need to be more than that, so that's how, i think, the lapd has been reformed. how has it not been reformed? well, we have had 25 people shot by the lapd this year, 13 who have died. chief beck has promised transparency and he started off when he was chief to being very transparent and seemingly making

every move instinctively that was right. you could tell it. this was the right thing to do and it brought joy to my heart because i had been criticizing the lapd for so long and i knew charlie and interviewed him many many times for this book and i have the highest respect for him. more respect than i have ever had for any public official. but, now we come with these shootings and he is-- has trouble with the police commission. he is not being transparent. we look at, for example, body cameras. he introduced them to the police commission, a body camera policy that is not transparent. the people-- you cannot find out what happened. if there's something caught on tape the lapd will decide

whether they will release it or not. the offices are allowed to view the tape before they make their official statements to internal affairs, and then we hear nothing about these shootings. shooting in venice, shooting here, shooting where a guy waved them down and had something on his arm or something and he got shot, so the tactics are not being in force and charlie beck is caught between a rock and a hard place between pacifying the troops who feel that they are under siege and pacifying people like me who want them to be accountable and want them to be transparent-- >> guest: let me ask you a question about the shootings.

i think if you go back and look at the last 20 years, you will find years in which the number of police shootings were higher on many elements. we all have nine months, but on an annualized basis and there will be years in which they are lower and it varies. do you think things are worse today in terms of the police use of force then say 10 years ago or 20 years ago? >> host: note, i think it's better because previously under chief parks, under willie williams who really didn't care and did have a position anything and under daryl gates, daryl gates was automatically-- you know, telling the press what this civilian did to get himself shot by the police. that was the attitude of the lapd and so there was a lot more of that. there was a lots less

accountability. but, la has really changed. as a native los angeles and is literally the complexion of the city has change dramatically. as has the income gap between the wealthy and the very poor, so what we are seeing, i think, with the crime rates-- crime rise is that people are getting desperate. and a lot of the crime in central bureau, for example, is caused by the homeless. no one is doing anything about the homeless. the lapd should not have to deal with the homeless. they are the least prepared by their training and by their instincts and by wanting to have control to deal with these people who are heavily drug addicted and/or mentally ill.

and who are living on the streets and some of them-- homeless is going up because of justification in neighborhoods and people are just being pushed out and they are kind of desperate. so,-- >> host: let me ask you a question about chief back for a moment. this idea of him being less transparent now than when he came into office in the fall of 2009. i will go back to the consent decree point that you made earlier on. when i first got on the police commission and assistant chief, so there are three assistant chiefs and they are number two, three and four, but right below the chief and assistant chief told me that the most important thing that popped into los

angeles police department in the last 25 years was the dissent decree and without the dissent decree that a permit would never have reformed itself and was the department reformed itself and got used to the community policing model that just build on itself, but that dissent cree and the strict oversight that judge frees out over the department is what forced the change, so that dissent decree expired in-- eventually after it was extended one time overbuild bronze objection, it was eventually-- judge frees lifted the dissent cree in 2008. and sort of as you point out in the book, paved the way for bill bratton to exit on a high notes. after the dissent cree there was what was known as a transition agreement. there was a three-year transition agreement, which gave

the police commission some greater oversight and also in the background was the department justice. they were monitoring the department further and could act a moments notice scope back to judge frees and say they violated the transition agreement, we have to go back to the dissent decree, so that was all his hanging in the balance and in the three years that i was on the police commission i know that the chief was very anxious to get out from under the transition agreement. in 2011,-- i think it was 2011, maybe 2012, but the transition agreement was lifted and i wonder if that is the time in which the attitude of the chief started to change and things became less transparent. do you have a sense of that?

>> guest: i don't necessarily have a sense of that, but i can tell you what i know about charlie beck. charlie beck, unlike daryl gates who was bill parker's driver that bill parker's adjutant and was on the ritchie chief, charlie beck was a real cop, a gang cop in pico union, in south bureau, so he was a hard nosed guy. he had a partner literally die in his arms in a crowd of people outside of jordan towns, surrounding him and his partner and started shouting at him, why are you trying to help him, why don't you help the black guy over there who had run into the car when officer who got killed was in the car. those worse herein events for him. ..

>> not tearing it down by arresting everybody in sight. >> so why, what's caused the lack of transparency? what's caused the change in your mind? >> so in my mind, i think there are, there were 300 million guns in america.

the cops are scared. beck makes a distinction between somebody who's just kind of a ruthless cop and shoots somebody for really no reason and a cop who comes upon a scene and because he doesn't have what it takes to be a cop, like i wouldn't have what it takes to be a cop, to assess that situation and do, use the right tactics, so he doesn't have that ability, or he's just frightened, or, you know, he doesn't know how to read -- if he's a white officer -- doesn't know how to read black people because he has never known them, goes and shoots somebody because he's frightened. beck has a lot of time for those officers and thinks that those officers not only should not be punished, but should be retrained, and, you know, a lot of people disagree with that, the aclu, members of the police commission, etc. --

>> [inaudible] a policy for that very reason. >> i think so. >> i don't know if -- >> and i think that, i think he -- he understands that a big constituency that you always have, a chief of police always has to consider is his own troops. daryl gates made the mistake of considering his own troops as only constituency. charlie beck is much smarter than that. but i think he's, he wants to keep -- he doesn't want to be known be as somebody that's going to, you know, give up his guys. >> yeah. i'd like to bring steve up now. be and we talk a little bit about where we're going into the future. steve, come on up and -- >> [inaudible] >> no, come on up. [laughter] >> ask me one question -- [inaudible] it's hard to be a cop right now.

and what i found so fascinating about your book before i knew about this was i know the players now. and a lot of my time is on the psychology of why they act why they act. why they do what they do. where's it coming from? what in their broadband, what in their experience -- background, what in their experience, etc. and your book helped me with that, because things are making sense to me now that were perplexing before. but let me tell you my observations after two years. number one, and i think the greatest thing that i've learned is that community policing is from the bottom up now. these cops actually believe in community policing. they spend time --

[inaudible] football team returning these 21 police stations into community centers. we give away shoes, we have libraries in them, they're welcoming, the officers are trained to be welcoming. we have so many programs. the cadets program has 6,000, 6,000 kids in it. those 6,000 kids don't come from this neighborhood, they don't come from marlboro school. these are kids that are really standing up strong against all these forces, and they're saying i'm taking this work on the road. what i see -- in the book you mentioned two things that i agree with charlie on a lot of things and then when i don't, i obviously tell him, but usually i tell a newspaper first because that's a lot easier to do. [laughter] the media's really important in this. but charlie talks about the bank

of trust. and when i talk to the officers, i've been to every station. every monday morning i go, so this is my second year, i've done it a hundred mondays, and i've gone to roll calls, and the officers, when i talk to the officers, i mention about his bank of trust, and he talks about how you've got to have -- just like our own bank accounts, we've got to have some money in there so that when things get tough, we can pull from that money. the problem for these officers is they make all the deposits, but the people with the atm cards making the withdrawals live in ferguson, live in cleveland, live in new york, live in baltimore, live in all these cities, and they are having a huge impact on the way the public, the aclu and the media is dealing with our lapd, and our guys don't deserve that. number two is crime rate's going up, and i've got to tell you, all the stars are in alignment now for the crime rate to keep

going up for a really long time. there's no middle class anymore. so this upper 10% has no empathy for the lower 45%. they don't support the service providers that keep people off of the -- what did charlie call it? not a treadmill, a -- >> it is -- >> he didn't call it, he called it a -- >> a conveyor belt. >> a conveyor becialghts which i thought was interesting. but i need to modify be it. what charlie said is people get on this conveyor belt, and all the cops do is get them when they're falling off. and the conveyor belt keeps going faster, and more people keep going on the conveyor belt. and i agree with that. but i think the new school is, think of it as a freeway to prison. we need to buildoff ramps. we've got -- build offramps.

we've got to get the kids off of this freeway. what gets you off the freeway? a job. a father. a program. minute that care -- somebody that cares. a good education. what's happening to these kids? they can't even watch the lakers or the dodgers on television anymore. that's another three hours a day that they're out on the streets. they can't watch the clippers -- everything is moving away from them. they go to school, there's 65 kids in their class. then we wonder, let's see, the reciprocity of felons is 70% in l.a. within three years? so we're reducing crimes that were felonies, not to be felonies, we're releasing people out on the street without giving them any training or any place for them to go. so they have a 70% recidivism rate, and we're wondering why crime's going up? we just let out 5,000 people?

that means 3500 of them are going to be going back to jail, and we're wondering why the crime rate's going up? duh. we've got to stop that. >> well, i couldn't agree with you more. that's really a terrific summation of what people don't understand, that you can, you can reform the police, the police can get better and better, they can have some impact. but unless you look at the structural problems that you were talking about, all of the issues that you mentioned are not being taken care of, not even talked about being taken care of because we don't want to spend the money to do it, and we don't -- >> [inaudible] >> right. and people don't understand that. we haven't even started to do that. and once we start to do it, we might not see the results for 15 years. because this problem has been going on for so long. i mean, you know, the watts riots, the riots in newark and in new york in 1964, it's the

same thing. nothing changes. >> we're having things repeat now in bigtime, fast ways that create big crime, and i'm shocked it isn't twice what it is. >> right. >> synthetic marijuana. it costs a buck. i mean, that's like going -- it doesn't cost $10. this is a mass-marketing drug that takes people who have any sort of mental issues and puts them up two or three, two or three levels. you have people in other cities, their answer to the homeless problem is one thing, it's $43 or $143. it's give them a bus ticket to l.a. that's what they do. they just go down to the bus station, see where all the people are coming. so, but let me leave that alone, because lapd has to do things better and different. everybody talks about the word "transparency." it's, you know, i think it's overused. i think the word we need to focus on now is "deescalation."

decan escalation. deescalation. how do we thing things from occurring or from going in one scale -- let me stop you on the boulevard for going -- and that turn into me shooting you. and for these things to happen in two or three seconds. so how -- we have to go back and retrain these officers. like charlie says, it's not an inoculation -- [inaudible] yeah. it's not like one vaccination for your whole life. we have to keep going back and keep retraining, keep doing things. we have to double down on programs. the one thing that worries me is cynical, older officers. we get these young people that are joining the force now -- not enough of them -- they join the force, they do wear their seat belts, they do can understand community policing, and then they get in the car with some guy who says, ah, you know,

that's a bunch of bullshit, you don't need to do that. i wish -- and we all get a little bit cynical. but at least i'm smart enough when i get cynical and i'm around younger people, i just keep quiet. you don't have to spread your cynicism. go tell it to somebody else. so i don't want to say there are all these problems and lapd is doing everything perfect. policing is changing dramatically. i read the consent decree. i know the community like the back of my hand, been involved with big brothers for 50 years, every park, every school, all that stuff. and i love diversity, and i love the people. but i don't know law enforcement. so i asked 30 different people, a number of you here, you know, what should i do? what should i focus on? i read the consent decree, and then i read the other agreement. what's it called? the transition agreement. and i kept asking everybody, so what's your favorite five? what are the things that i need to focus on?

and over and over again it was these cameras can really be important. because the preliminary results in smaller cities, 90% decrease in officer-related complaints. 50, 60% decrease in officer uses of force. and that's only half of it. the other half is what doesn't escalate because people know they're being filmed? i'm not saying some things right now because i'm being filmed. take that to every single person that gets stopped. we arrest 400 people a day. do you think any of them want to be arrested unless it's pouring rain or they want an extra meal or something, i don't i don't k. but it changes the mentality, and they keep things from happening. so on my first day as a commissioner, i'm too old to let the world define me now because it takes too long. i said i'm going out on a limb here. i'm going to get these cameras

here in 18 months instead of 18 years. because it took 18 years to get the car cameras. and i think it's going to be a really important factor. so that's what i wanted to discuss. >> [inaudible] >> there is a microphone just to the left. [inaudible] >> president of -- [inaudible] >> and on the christopher commission before that. and one of the things that we saw in the christopher commission and that we talked about, of course, community policing and all of the things that we've been talking about. but we did have a very small part of it we talked about gender, and we talked about discrimination within the department, but we also talked about the use of women in larger

numbers in part because of deescalation, in part because they shad how -- they had shown extraordinary ability to be on the street and yet not be involved in unlawful force. in the book are you seeing, were you able to follow women? were you able to get any of those issues in the book? >> the answer is no. but i should have, and it's a very interesting, it's a very powerful issue. and what i do know is that if you have, like, 6% or 7% women on the department, they tend to go along with the male culture, the macho culture, because there's not enough of them to really make an impact. so the lapd has now, i think, 19% -- >> 19.6, i think. >> what is it? [inaudible conversations] >> yeah. so i think that, you know, once they reach, they reach that

level, then they are going to, and i assume that they already have had an impact on the culture of the lapd. >> and that's, i think that's what we were seeing when we were on the commission. and so many of the people also joined, so many of the women joined because of public service and because of, no, i don't want to be a nurse, no, i don't want to be a social worker. what i want to be is a cop. >> yeah. you know, we have these times, a couple of times a year when we buy guns back. two things that are just off limits as far as cops are concerned is when somebody has a gun on the streets, number one. and number two, when they're selling drugs to kids. our guys don't go for that. they'll, you know, they'll community police it out, but when you cross those lines -- so i went to one, we had a buyback, there were 700 guns purchased. i mean, semiautomatic weapons, just unbelievable stuff.

but the people that were driving in sort of looked like in-and-out burger where they have two lanes and somebody meets you in the front, were moms and grandmas. because they would, they'd wait, oh, yeah, my kid's asleep. i don't care what he's doing, i took it right out from under the bed. they have this ability to just go in and be very strong. and i find that the women officers that we have can relate a lot of times in intervention and understanding the psychology and being very, very helpful. and you've got to respect charlie for promoting, for promoting people that deserve to be promoting and keeping diverse balance in the department. >> his daughter is an lapd officer, as you know. >> let me ask a question for both of you. you know, in the, in 1992 there were over a thousand murders in

the city of los angeles. the part one of violent crimes were over 300,000. and before this recent uptick in the last couple of years, murders had gotten down to close to around 250 part one violent crimes got down to about 100,000. and now we're seeing a fairly significant uptick, and you both have identified some of the reasons why we're seeing that. but let me ask this question. in the reaction to the crime that we saw in the 1980s and the early 1990s, california passed the three strikes law, federal government passed mandatory minimums, jurisdictions throughout the country started to enhance the

sentences, many more people -- and particularly minority and african-americans -- went to prison for much longer periods of time. and more recently we've seen proposition 47 which has resulted in a reduction of many of the crimes, as steve has pointed out, some of the revolving door. we have ab109 which is the solution to overcrowding to force nonviolent offenders back into the jails who then get out because the jails are overcrowded, they then commit crimes which they don't get punished for. let me ask, have we gone too far in that direction? and did those significant, what many people would call draconian penalties, have any impact on the reduction in crime that we saw from the 1990s to 2012? >> it's, it's hard to know.

what criminologists will tell you is perhaps 15% of the reduction in crime that we've seen for the last 15 years might be attributed to that. but, you know, new york's crime rate, new york city's crime rate has fallen every year for 20 years, and that has happened as prisons are closing in new york state. prison population is much lower than it was ten years ago or twenty years ago while california was building up their prison system so we were spending $11 billion a year to put people many jail under -- in jail under the three strikes law for things like walking into a safeway and opening a bottle of vodka, taking a sip and walking out. that was a third strike, and that person wound up sentenced to 25 years before he could be, before he could be released or go on parole. so three strikes law, i don't

think, has had any effect other than to just destroy more lives without doing anything to make the situation better but making it worse. because when people get out of prison, they are so screwed up. they are, it's just a horrible experience if you go into a prison and you see what's going on. it's very difficult to come out of that with your sanity intact. now, defelonization of possession of so-called hard drugs, i think, is a good thing. i don't think people should go to prison because they have some cocaine in their pocket or they're doing other drugs. even though drug, the drug problem in this country is very severe. it's very severe. but it's a mental health issue. and it's a social, sociological

issue in terms of all of the stress that we live in in this society. and the more -- the poorer you are, the more stress that you're under and the more you want to do drugs. so drugs are a very difficult thing, but i think it was very good about the defelonization of hard drugs. so i'm a big fan of prop 47. >> you don't see any correlation then between the drop in crime and the kinds of draconian sentences which if somebody's in prison, they're not committing a crime on the street. and and then sort of the reaction that we see, and there are good reasons for the reaction, but at the same time that we've seen that reaction, we've also seen an uptick in crime. >> [inaudible] it's a very good one. >> i don't have much to add to what joe said except for a couple things.

in l.a. it's going to take another year or year and a half because the times did an expose showing the classifications in some cases weren't 100% or 80 -- so now the classifications are better even nationally. i think people are more in tune to that. so we'll see. a lot of our uptick may have been through reclassification. i think that that's one issue. >> yeah. could i, could i please comment on that? one of the things that shocked me when i was writing my book and really pointing out all the good things that beck was doing with community policing, etc., how he had done everything right in the first years was that this occurred. and what occurred, and it was due to an incredibly fine investigation by the los angeles times. i don't know how many of you remember that. but what the los angeles times

found out that was during 2013 the lapd had misclassified 1200 violent felonies, the kind of crimes we fear the most, getting, you know, getting mugged and beaten up, a man beating a woman almost to death who he's living with, etc. they were misclassified as misdemeanors. and what that did was it made it appear that crime was going down when, in fact, it was going up. and i think that that was a severe break in the trust between our police department and our public. and i agree that we still don't know, we still don't know what's being reported now with the crime going up that may have been covered up in 2008 and 2009 and 2010.

>> it's different now, i think it is different now than a couple years ago. because of these iphones and everything else, the public feels empowered to wise off at the officers. over and over -- officers, every single officer will tell you every time they give somebody a ticket. what do you mean? it's my word against your world. i'm going to take your vacation -- [inaudible] from the privileged all the way down. people throwing the cameras and trying to gold the officers -- god the officers into doing -- good the officers, and -- goad the officers, and they feel like they're under siege from the general public, and that's new. and i think it's not good. so we have to train them, they have to live with it. i mean, if that's the way it is, that's the way it is. >> but establishing legitimacy in these poor, these poor communities of color for the

lapd is their task. >> right. >> and you don't -- and establishing trust is a long-term project. you can't -- and if you pull away from it at all, then they start to mistrust the officers again, and they start to hate them. >> that decree was the best thing that ever happened. and i'm sure that they're consenting, you know, these other cities should wish they were put under consent decrees. it gives the chiefs, the mayors, it gives them a chance to say, hey, guys, it's not my fault, the feds are doing this. and so i respect what happened under the consent decree. i think it was, i think it was a great thing. but now we don't have it, and now the commission is not under the transition agreement. the commission didn't -- took that role. now there isn't that role. so we've got -- we have to guard against slippage, and that makes everybody -- >> let me ask that question. so i've got president of the

police commission, president of the police commission, president of the -- [laughter] is the, is the police commission an effective model for oversight, civilian oversight of the police department? we were all part time, we're all volunteers, we all have other jobs, we all are restricted by the brown act so we can only talk to one of our fellow commissioners. is that really an effective model to insure that we don't have the slippage that, you know, charlie's lack of transparency suggests maybe we're seeing? >> well, history has proven in los angeles that it's not effective, although since the christopher commission we have seen some police commissions who were effective. gary greenbaum's police

commission really focused on willie williams and, in effect, fired willie williams. and i think that that was right. same thing with chief, chief parks. you know? they didn't rehire, they didn't rehire chief parks because mayor james hahn didn't want them to. >> that was exact lay the point i was going to make. the reason ultimately chief parks didn't get rehired was mayor jimmy han who, i think in an act of political courage that we haven't always seen in this city, decided that he didn't want to see bernie parks rehired, and that's the reason why bernie parks was not rehired. not really because the police commission made that decision, but because jimmy han, in effect, cost himself the next election but showed a profile in courage. >> we have with the three police commissioners we have here, how

hard was it for you to get information? how difficult was it for you to tell some captain to do this thing and unless you wrote it down and you kept after it, you got it? it's very, very difficult when you're part time and, you know, i forget the name of this judge, federal judge on the ninth circuit now -- >> [inaudible] >> yeah, reinhart. reinhart, when i wrote my first book, "protect and to serve," he called them the masters of the half truth. and so has that been your experience? >> [inaudible] >> yeah. this is a simple one for me. commissioners need training. they need training and to know when they're being bullshitted, they need training to know that this is not a -- it's not a level situation. you're climbing a hill like this. human nature doesn't want oversight. human nature doesn't need --

five more people don't know anything about law and have a total of seven months worth of law enforcement experience? i don't care if they're lawyers, that's not -- so in order to make the system work, you have to know how to maneuver the system, manipulate the system. so i would say some police commissions may be great at that. it depends who the police commissioners are. but i believe the way to motivate and to get things done is through positive reinforcement. now, you can have a gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, or on the other hand, you can have, you know, you can try and motivate, motivate that way. so, and i think it's a balance. but it's not an easy job, and i think it does take training s and i think that there should be more training in psychology. i don't even think we need the law enforcement. it's the psychology of getting people to want to succeed and to keep moving forward. and that's not easy, and there is no better -- >> if