sketch out in an outline form were instituted by reform minded commanders prior to the doj investigation and independent of that and this truly was a voluntary shift. we can talk later about why this came about. so what am i talking about voluntarily surrendering techniques that have delegitimized law enforcement? i'll give two examples. first, those of you in new york are familiar with the program operation clean halls and related programs that enforce -- that are trespass enforcement programs basically where police agencies enter into agreements with private property owners to check and purge privately owned property open to the public of people determined by the police not to have business there. so in an apartment building this

could be a kid who lives there who can not prove that he lives there. he went out to get a carton of orange juice and is coming back, doesn't have i.d. and the police don't believe that he really lives there and so on. they have recently institute add lawsuit about operation clean halls. seattle has had a similar program for decades. in seattle trespass is a transitive verb. it's something police do to people. it's amazing what happens to grammar when we do this to people. for decades the police department have made agreements with private businesses where they become the agent. i mean, on their own they couldn't do this but they become the agent, stand in the shoes of the private property owner and then they get to determine that someone is no longer allowed to use this property. and then they're banned for a week, for a month, for a lifetime. if they come back they're subject to arrest for criminal trespass. probably more important, they --

many people don't come back. they alter their use of the space permanently because they think that the police can and do regulate where they can go throughout their city. similar programs have been in place elsewhere in the country. kn notoriously in cincinnati and over the ryan neighborhood. and so recently -- legally this is very problematic because this is a state depriving someone of liberty without any kind of process, and we could have litigated that and we said we would litigate that. if we had and we had won process, what we would have had is a system where an individual could seek a hearing to determine whether or not they could be banned from the parking lot of a stop and shop or something like that. we didn't want that. people wouldn't use it. if they used it, they would probably not prevail. but this legal flaw in the program was a wedge to open a

conversation with city leaders and with the police department but what's remarkable is what the department did when we said we're going to bring this program down. do you want to talk about doing things differently? they said, yes, they did. they said that because there had been a series of highly publicized videotaped encounters between police officers and young people of color that was highly embarrassing and department leadership recognized that programs like this trespass enforcement program were contributing to that and took the opportunity to say you could remake this program in court, but we want to remake it more broadly voluntarily as a matter of policy. so it has been completely revamped and now police officers don't decide who can go where in the city of seattle or at least they're not supposed to. implementation on the street has been spotty at best, and i think that is a very important question to investigate in any discussion of law enforcement reform is translating command level decisions and policy

changes to the street. the major work we've done, though, has been on partnering with the seattle police department, the king county sheriff's office and the king county prosecutor on moving toward unilaterally moving down arms and the war on drugs and although we're still working under a paradigm as is set nationally, law enforcement and prosecutors choosing not to file felony charges against people who have committed felony drug crimes and instead taking those people directly to voluntarily -- directly to social services intervention program where resources are provided to those individuals to address whatever the underlying issues why that led them to sell drugs on the street corner. it could be addiction but for an increasing number of people, of course, it's a wage. this is a job that people can do and make money for rent or

whatever other obligations they have when they're not able to access reliable employment in the official labor market. this program is called the law enforcement assisted division program or l.e.a.d. and came about after years of litigation we were involved in in seattle drug arrests. seattle is an extreme outlier in terms of racial disparity, the most extreme instance among mid-sized cities in the country over the last ten years. and when we -- just to wrap up -- in the course of this litigation, we would win some preliminary trial level decisions, and the prosecutor would dismiss charges against our clients and we would start over again and do it again. after a few rounds of that, we had kind of a sitdown with the mayor's office, the police department, and the prosecutor

with the two-part agenda. part one was are we all on the same page that there's a problem and the answer to that was no. the fur was flying for an hour long conversation. there was no agreement despite the fact one superior court judge said this question passed the any idiot test. any idiot can see that everybody who is charged with a drug crime in king county superior court is black even though it's well established that the large majority of people selling drugs, not just using drugs in seattle, are white. there was no agreement about what was really going on out there. but at some point in that discussion a guy who i now recognize as really visionary, head of the seattle police department narcotics unit interrupted and said what if if we set that question aside and instead of trying to agree on what the problem is, what if we said we were all for our own reasons interested in doing something different about drug enforcement? what should that be?

it was fascinating because we had no answer to that question. we had rhetorical. my favorite was arrest all the white people. and our aclu partners were not thrilled about that position. more important, the more realistic position that we had thrown out was a moratorium on covert stings, low-level buy bust operations that yielded most of the cases that were being filed and prosecuted p. our partners in communities of color were not enenthused about this. they were not supportive -- and there are many exceptions but think were by and large not supportive after decriminalization paradigm because of the sense of not wanting to abandon the individuals and their families. the individuals out selling drugs on the street corner and their families and those communities and neighborhoods. they did not want laissez faire. they wanted something. they did not want this, though. there was the sense of if this is such a great approach why

isn't it being done to the white kids, right? and so what we tried to engineer with l.e.a.d. is for the time being the police will be asked to deal with these issues and problems and to a significant extent their deployment will be racialized, that this is a bigger problem and more long-standing pattern than we can take on with the single policy change. however, could we reduce the harm of that police engagement and patterns of deployment by making it so when the police responds what happens is not a harmful interaction that destroys this individual's life but an interaction that puts greater resources at their disposal to actually map out a realistic life plan that will not require them to sell drugs on the street corner to pay their rent indefinitely. that's what we're trying to do. there are all kinds of implementation challenges and this model is a very partial solution because it accepts things like racialized deployment and that police contact is going to be the

mechanism that we use to inject resources into certain communities and populations because we don't care to do that in a more comprehensive public policy approach that is not predicated on the criminal justice system and that's all very problematic. so i'll say more later. >> professor richardson, if the p police want to build trust in minority communities and they want to be responsive to the concerns that lisa daugaard says have been raised by minority communities in seattle, are there psychological mechanisms having to deal with the way that people including police officers think about race that need to be taken into account? >> yes. i'm going to take lisa's -- but i will expand. but first i want to quickly thank rachel and anthony and nyu center for inviting me to participate in this conversation. so what i wanted to, in response to david's question, talk about is the ways in which race is

discussed. so often when this conversation or when this topic is raised we tend to focus on issues of character. so are the police rational or are they racist when they stop african-americans or other nonwhites at much higher rates than whites? is george zimmerman a bigot, or is he a concerned citizen? is trayvon martin an innocent victim or a thug in training? these are the ways in which we typically discuss race, and what i want to discuss is that our focus on character and conscious racial bias may actually mask the ways in which we can still achieve racially disproportionate consequences even in the absence of conscious bias. and so the reason for this, in my view, is based on something that i call suspicion cascades. and these are the systemic and predictable errors in decision making that occur because of the

way that we all think. so i just want to talk about that very briefly. the way that our minds work, we tend to make associations between concepts in order to process information quickly. so you can imagine if i had to figure out how to use this pen every time i came across a pen, i wouldn't be able to function. so our minds make these automatic associations so if you see the word doctor, for example, your mind will automatically think hospital and other related concepts will become activated nonconsciously in your brain. unfortunately, the same things occur when we think about race. so these nonconscious stereotypes affect all of us. and there's research, for example, that demonstrates that police officers who think about crime automatically trigger nonconscious stereotypes of blacks. as a result of that, they pay more attention to black citizens

than they do to white citizens. and this can happen even if an officer is attempting not to be affected by race and, in fact, if you tell an officer do not use race in your judgments, that will cause the association to come to the forefront of his memory and affect his behaviors even more. just like if i told all of you right now don't think of a white elephant, the first thing you do is think of a white elephant to avoid thinking about it. so just simply thinking about the concept of crime triggers these nonconscious biases of blacks and the reason i only speak of blacks is because the science, this social cognition research upon which my research is based, focuses primarily on the black/white relationship. i want to share one quick study before i end which is it particularly relevant to police/citizen interactions and criminality.

so there's a study, it's a famous one where researchers wanted to test whether or not stereotypes would affect the interpretation of ambiguous behaviors. so they had subjects watch two men who were on a video engaged in a discussion that grew increasingly heated and one of the individuals, excuse me, kami, shoves the other, and the subjects could rate it as horsing around, dramatic, aggressive or violent. and the researchers manipulated the race of the pusher and the pushee to see if it would affect the interpretations of this ambiguous behavior and found that it did. so when both individuals on this video were white, only 13% thought that this shove was aggressive. 69% thought, though -- excuse me. let me start all over again. when the two individuals were

white, only 13% found that shove to be aggressive. about but when both individuals were black, that number went up from 13% to 69%. in the interracial pairings, the statistics or findings are even starker. when the white individual was the pusher only 17% found that to be aggressive. when the black individual was the one who pushed, that number went up from 17% to 75%. who viewed this interaction as aggressive. you can imagine an officer on the street thinking about crime which triggers these nonconscious stereotypes, his attention is going to be drawn to nonwhites first regardless of his conscious racial attitudes. and then when he's attempting to determine whether or not the conduct he views is suspicious, he's more likely to view that conduct as suspicious if the individuals involved are

nonwhite. the studies demonstrate this is likely to happen. the final thing i want to add is something called stereotype threat, because we don't actually focus on the victims of stereotypes and yet psychological studies demonstrate that people who are stereo typed negatively have reactions that are difficult to volitionally control, furtherive movements, sweating, increased heart rate. and this is because of the fear of being judged or confirming a racial stereotype about your group. so you imagine when an officer approaches you and you are aware of the stereotype, you will uncontrollably act in ways that the police are trained to view as suspicious. so we can understand now how implicit or nonconscious thoughts or nonconscious stereotypes can explain the

raci racially disproportionate stops of nonwhites even in the absence of conscious bias. so i think in order to deal with the effects of race and policing, we should engage more with the social psychology of contemporary bias and also spend time like lisa and others on this panel have done collaborating with police departments to figure out ways to deal with the effects, the nonconscious effects of stereotypes. thank you. >> so, thank you. chief thomson, let me ask you, professor richardson says that unconscious discrimination can lead even well-meaning officers and departments to police in ways that are racially biased in harmful ways and can leave members to act in ways that the police wind up thinking are suspicious. is that something that a police department can and should address? >> well, absolutely. let me start by saying i'm going

to relate to you my experiences that i've had in the past 18 years in the city of camden. my city is about 77,000. it's 95% minority. over the past decade, we've never ranked lower than five. we've been number one three times. we perennially are one of the poorest cities. we again perennially rank at the lowest with graduation rates and dropouts. the challenges are in some terms even that much more exasperating with what we're dealing with. the issue of race in an urban environment and a challenged community is at the forefront. it's not -- if it's not something that is part of the

daily conscience of an organization, officers out in the field, you are prime for a watershed moment at any point in time whether it be a trayvon martin or some type of civil unrest. so whether it's legitimacy and even with some of the things lisa was saying with regards to the enforcement aspects of it, it's absolutely dead-on accurate. one of the things that we to do find and, again, in our most challenged communities, are, number one, that mass incarceration does not work. what we have seen and the tactics and strategies in the '70s, '80s, even 2000 with regards to whether it's the low level buy/bust operations or the corner sweep operations, it has not had a positive impact of either changing the mental calculus of the folks engaging in the criminal activity or

changing the criminal patterns that are taking place. the fact of the matter is, and when you're looking at a street level drug operation, probably the most expendable component is the street level dealer. but at the same time, you're dealing with the challenge of addressing the concerns of the community. and the community doesn't want it existing there because it's negatively defining their lives. and it's not so much the drug dealing itself, but it's all the issues that come with it as well that turn into violent crime. so in dealing with these aspects, and we're dealing with race in an urban setting such as mine, the fact of the matter is we constantly see and are dealing with kind of the flip side of the racial disparity in application of policing in the fact that when you have a densely populated minority

community, and then you're seeing they amount of caucasian individuals in high-end vehicles in a very poor environment driving throughout the city, the community is saying, they don't belong here. see that white go? go stop them. officers are make that go deduction. that doesn't make it right in application either way. we can't be naive to think, number one, we don't have a complicit bias and it's something we have to address. furthermore, i do wholeheartedly believe there cannot be an overreliance upon potion control, formal social control to have the profound impact within communities that we want to have. the reality is i believe police should act as a facilitator, a convenor to get that collective efficacy that research has shown us to be productive. we've seen it work in smaller

segments of our city. but it's trying to get that and transition it into a much larger application but all the while realizing that the solutions to a challenged community do not lie in a pistol or pair of handcuffs. >> professor simmons, we've been hearing a lot about building trust and operating in fair ways that elicit trust from minority communities. is there a role for law and for legal institutions in ensuring the police do move forward in these ways? >> yes. and i do have more. i just want to borrow from lanny guinier the miner and the canary, you may be familiar with this, and she basically says that like the minimumer's canary

alerts miners to dangerous conditions in the mine, racial minorities alert our society to broader issues. i think this is true with policing, right? so there are some broader issues that we need to address with policing. we have a broader problem here. so if we can fix a broken system or make some improvements overall, i'm confident that we can make some improvements for racial minorities and so to that end i advocate a swiss army knife approach. this takes everyone. it takes the federal government, state and local government, and communities working together to address this. i have a little less faith, i think, in the role of courts because we are talking about the exclusionary role and some of these other judicial remedies.

these remedies can only affect adjudicated conduct. so much of what happens on the ground with police officers is unadjudica unadjudicated. if it doesn't get to a court of law that doesn't mean it's still not a problem. we need to have a multifaceted approach and more transparency in police departments. and that will go a long way to solving some of the problems communities have with trust and legitimacy. so i want to talk specifically about the united states department of justice and their pattern and practice of authority. they have the authority to sue and seek injunctive relief against police departments that are engaging in patterns of unconstitutional behavior, of which racial profiling is one. of many things that police

departments could be doing. and so one of these, doj has used this authority in washington, d.c., pittsburgh, los angeles, and a lot of reforms that have been gained, the reforms the department is seeking to gain, focus on implementing an early warning tracking system so if -- what one thing that we know about police agencies is when there's a problem there's a problem with a small number of officers who have repeated instances of misconduct. if we can implement an early warning tracking system, identify these officers for training, retraining or discipline, that might help our department. we can see how that would also, by making those officers accountable, alsos engender some trust and legitimacy among the community.

other reforms involved implementing a fair complaint process. that makes sense. citizens have complaints about their police department, they should know the proper procedures in order to make a complaint and they should feel some confidence that those complaints are going to be acted upon in a fair manner. and other reforms compared to racial profiling. all of these reforms are in an attempt to gather information so that we can have additional remedies. but the federal government can't do it alone. obviously the special litigation section of doj that does this and they may have, i'm not sure the number of attorneys but let's say it's 20 or even 50 attorneys, they can't be in every police department that may

have a problem. so state and local governments are going to have to step up here and make some changes. and, also, there has to be buy-in from the local community. the local communities know, chief thomson, they know the problems in their communities and they should have a role in developing and identifying those problems and developing solutions that are tailored to their local needs. so, again, i think the federal government can play a role here because they can incentivize states and local governments. there's millions of grant dollars that remain available each year to local police departments, and i would have the radical view that if you have a police department that has these problems, we should maybe withhold that money and see if they can't be brought into line or we could maybe do

competitive grant programs and give money to a police department s that have experimented and developed programs that are working. again, i think we need a multifaceted approach to change the broader culture of police departments and if we can fix some of the broader issuesen that certainly we will fix some of the issues related to racial minoriti minorities. >> so if i could push back on the idea we need a multifaceted approach and we need to take account of fairness and there's all kinds of different ways to think about this, why isn't the answer just to say, the police should not be making decisions based on race and then put in structures to find out if that's

happening. this morning the senate judiciary committee is having hearings not just on racial profiling but a bill introduce ed by ben caldin of maryland last file for the end racial profiling act. and this act bans racial profiling by federal law enforcement, by state law enforcement, and by local law enforcement. it enforces that ban through suits that the department of justice has authorized to bring and private individuals are authorized to bring. it also enforces the ban by cutting off any funding or state or local law enforcement agents that don't comply to end racial profiling and commands to keep statistics, to gather data, so we can tell whether they are, in fact, making decisions on race for conscious or unconscious reasons. isn't that the way forward?

>> well, so there have been -- this bill has been introduced many times. it has not yet passed. maybe 2012 will be the warm. but a lot of states and local governments that already collect this information. about 21 states are under statutory mandates to collect the information and about 25 states are voluntarily collecting this information already. and i think a federal law is a good way to ensure that we have more uniform collection. the problem is once we collect this information, what are we going to do with it and how are we going to develop programs or remedies to end -- because a lot of states that are collecting it have found -- for example, missouri collects information