second, i would ask the task force to encourage federal stake holders to facilitate more opportunities for law enforcement communities to learn from social scientists and vice versa because this evidence base is only growing. and third, i would ask the task force to recommend expanding technical and financial assistance from departments thatr want to benefit to the approaches to fairness but lack the means to follow through on intentions. cep doesn't ever take money from the law enforcement partners, but we are constantly approached by a department that can't even afford to task a lieutenant with being a project liaison. if we want to take seriously that law enforcement wants tooed the right thing, i hope the task force will recommend there are the means to accomplish that. i began by saying as a scientist, an important question without a satisfactory answer. anathema. i do not believe that social science is the answer. but i do believe that it can help set the table for divining what the answers would be. and i hope the task force allows us the space to continue doing that. thank you very much for your time.

>> thank you so much, dr. goff. our next witness is jim mcdonald who is the sheriff for l.a. county. welcome. >> thank you very much very honored to be here today. thank you for allowing me to address you today. nearly three months ago, i was sworn is as l.a. county's elected sheriff. the first person in over a century elected from outside of the sheriff's department. i took command of a law enforcement agency facing many challenges. i also took command of an agency flown below the radar for years, not always acknowledged for the cutting edge work and expertise. i speak to you today as both a new sheriff with an agenda driven by a need for a change as well as somebody who has become fiercely proud of the organization i'm now privileged to lead. the los angeles sheriff's department is the largest sheriff's department in the country and the second largest policing agency in the nation. we serve a county spanning over 4,000 square miles with a population of over 10 million

people. we also run the nation's largest jail system, police 42 of l.a.'s cities and protect the safety of the nation's largest court system. today, i want to focus on what managing complex law enforcement organization as well as a large jail system has taught us about the challenges and opportunities facing policing. well, we clearly need more resources and support. we're equally in need of fresh thinking and new strategies that can enable us to rethink the job of policing and learn from each other as we do so. the l.a. jail system provides housing for up to 20,000 inmates and seven facilities. we are facing many challenges. our inmates include rival gang members, our inmates security and threat levels. most of our facilities are antiquated. past poor management resulted in unacceptable inmate abuse and recidivism rates are far too high. many in our custody need to be separated from society.

for too long and too many, jail has become a default placement and the latest step in a recurring cycle. while i've seen these challenges, i've also seen how far we've come. we have education programs that enabled over 300 inmates to secure high school diplomas last year. we're also increasing drug treatment programs targeting the homeless for housing assistance. enhancing reentry planning. these efforts are happening despite the environment in which we work not because of it. yet we can and we must do more but we can't get there alone. we need federal help including support for new correctional treatment facilities rather than jails where we simply warehouse offenders. we need flexible funding streams that enable us to address medical and mental health funding for those in our charge and resources to expand education, vocation and reentry planning that can chart a better future for those returning to the community. in los angeles's jails we're also running what amounts to the

largest mental health facility in the nation. we house over 3500 inmates in need of mental health services yet jails were not built as treatment centers or with long-term care in mind. we're addressing challenges in patrol. they lack mental health training and a dearth of mental health teams for contacts with the mentally ill. we need crisis intervention training so deputies working the streets know how to respond to mentally ill and whenever possible divert them from the justice system. support for teams and community-based resource centers where we can create a comprehensive response to those in crisis and strategies that focus on alternatives to incarceration. finally we need to focus on our next generation and those exposed to trauma and violence. too many youth are exposed to a level of violence equivalent to that of a war zone. while the young person may not have been physically struck, we

know their brains are permanently damaged by violence. law enforcement needs to strengthen communities so they are and feel safe. we must realize our responsibility does not end when the yellow tape comes down. violent crime has many victims and we must do more to support them. we must recognize every interaction we have shapes the future both of individuals and of our community. most trained to interact with young people in crisis and those trauma impacted. we need to taylor or response to age and characteristics of the individual and need to help support an environment in which our children can learn develop and thrive and move away from punitive approaches that push young people out of schools and into our justice system. our founding fathers wrote governments derive powers from the consent of governed. as this timeless message reminds us whatever authority we have is granted us and derived from our community. community oriented policing is not something we do on the side,

it's how a department should operate. we must police when and not nearly in the communities we serve. peace officers don't tend to ask for help. to do what is expected of us in today's challenging times, we must acknowledge we need help. i'm here today to thank you for your work your wisdom and help and welcome any questions at the end of this you may have. thank you for this opportunity. >> thank you so much sheriff. dr. daniel nagin our next witness and a professor at carnegie mellon. >> first of all let me indicate how gratified i was to receive this invitation to be on this distinguished panel. 250 years ago enlightenment admonished better to prevent crimes than punish them. i recently co-authorized and he say titled "reinventing american policing a six-point blue print for the 21st century. in it we lay out an ambitious blueprint for reorienting the

goal. an important objective i have policing, maintenance of high levels of credibility and confidence in the communities they are sworn to protect. both objectives form the bedrock of effective policing in a democratic society. u.s. criminal justice over the past four decades institutionalize many characteristics of today's criminal justice system. for law enforcement, the function of arrest became a central measure of performance. even ideas like broken windows policing that were preventive came to be applied in ways that police knew best zero tolerance and arrest for even the most minor crimes. police practice towards crime prevention and improving community trust requires important changes in the functions, values and operations of law enforcement. the six-point blueprint we lay out is grounded in decades of research and two principles.

principle one is that crime prevention not arrest is paramount. crimes averted not arrests made should be the primary metric for judging police success and meeting their objective to prevent crime and disorder. the second principle is that citizen reactions matter. citizen response to the police and their tactics for preventing crime matter independent of police effectiveness in this function. principle one follows from zakaria's observation better to prevent crimes than punish them. it is costly to all involved, society at large who must pay for it the individual who must endure it and also the police whose time is diverted from crime prevention. rolling crime prevention arrest signals failure of prevention. if a crime is prevented in the first place, so is the arrest and ensuing costs of punishment. principle one does not suggest

we should stop making arrest. important function of police despite crime prevention bring them to justice. further police cannot possibly prevent all crimes. however, over the past three decades steady accumulation suggests proactive prevention more effective than reactive arrests preventing crime. proactive focus efforts on people, place, times and situations that are a high-risk of offending. proactive policing stands in sharp contrast reactive approaches and tries to address the problems before they beget further crimes through a variety of strategies that do not -- often do not emphasize arrest. thus in this first principle we suggest greater emphasis on proactive and preventive deployment strategiesed than arrest based strategies. principle two emphasizes police in democracies are not

responsible for preventing crime but maintaining their credibility with all segments of the citizenry. the objective of maintaining citizen trust and confidence means that the reabsences of citizens to the police is important to judging their effectiveness independent of their success in preventing and solving crimes. while citizens trust and confidence may facilitate police effectiveness in preventing crime, we treat trust and confidence as important in its own right because the overriding objective should be -- of policing should be a safe democratic society not a safe police state. in emphasizing the importance of citizen confidence and trust in the police, we are fully cognizant that police citizens encounter may be hostile through no part of the police officer. these encounters may involve people who have committed or in the process of committing crimes and may involve real threat to safety of police officers and innocent bystanders. however, even in these

circumstances, the person responsible for hostile interaction does not forfeit his or her status as a citizen even if his or her behavior provides legal basis for arrest or even lethal police response. in putting forth these two principles we're cognizant of the difficulty of what must be done to achieve them. three functions of police, crime, bringing to justice credibility to police are each significant in their own right and also highly dependent on one another. however, recognition of the difficulty of what must be done to advance these principles should not be used as an excuse for dismissing their excuse as quixotic. i've summarized six items. let me say briefly the first is prioritizing arrests --

prioritizing crime prevention over arrest and second citizens for monitoring citizen reaction to police and reporting back to public officers. the other items elaborate upon innovations in training organizational incentives and management items in the national structure on these goals. thank you. >> thank you very much. as ron davis noted, we've had over 150 witnesses at our listing sessions but i think our next witness has come the further of anyone who has come before the panel. dr. lauren sherman is a anan -- loren sherm, from united kingdom. >> thank you. i hasten to add i'm will a professor at the university of maryland. it's my bicontinental resident status that leads me to note that while the doctor is quite

right, we don't know how many people were killed by police in the united states in the year 2013, estimates range from a low of 461 reported to the fbi and estimates of over 1,000 compiled for newspaper clippings. in that same year the other country i live in the state of england and wales within the united kingdom and that's an important point, the number of people killed by police in england and wales that year was zero. 55 million people, 140,000 police, thousands of armed situations thousands of situations to which armed police responded, not one person killed. this is a comparison that is crying out for an explanation. maybe my explanation doesn't sustain the level of policy conclusions that i'm going to suggest to you but i think it's inescapable that there's a massive difference in the infrastructure of policies and

institutions governing police in wales and infrastructure governing the united states. i think we have to have a conversation at the institutional level that transcends specifics of training and other options but does start with the fundamental policy difference in terms of deadly force. the policy in the uk is similar at law to the u.s. which is essentially you can kill in defense of life. but the ride along with that policy in wales is essentially that if you are killing somebody for an offense that they are not willing to be arrested for that is essentially trivial then you're doing the wrong thing. even the moment you pull the trigger you may be in defense of life. you put yourself in the position where you had no choice. that's not allowed in the uk, neither is the idea of

continuing a confrontation that may not be necessary to apprehend somebody so de-escalation as well as proportionality are key principles. what i would like to recommend in my remaining time is a serious of federal, state and local actions that could, in effect, test the hypothesis of what's done in the uk and how they would work at this country. first the federal level president issue four executive orders. first executive order would be for 120,000 employees of federal law enforcement agencies to adopt the english standards of proportionality and de-escalation in shooting more restrictive than defense of life. second, i think the president should create a national policy of policing certification of a three-month course anybody who would serve as a police chief of a certified police agency in the united states. third, the president would ask the college to issue standards that are compiled from the 50 state post boards.

actually there's no 50 of them yet but that's a recommendation to the states to finish that job. and forth that the federal government establish a register of people dismiss from federal law enforcement agencies which would be accessible to anybody screening applicants for employment in police!nv# agencies at federal, state local levels. for the states, i think they should adopt something since 1856, inspector general of police had power to decertify police agency so they would lose all of their national funding. that certification would be something the states could require and similarly they could require the chiefs of police of agencies that are, in fact creatures of the state local government. they would have to meet some certification if there wasn't one made available wiby the national government one would be made available. standards like deadly force

standard i recommended would be part of the post board authority. in england and wales we have statewide independent police complaints commission which gets around issues of local commissions. states could do that have registered officers, contribute to the federal register. most radically i think, it's very important a lot of killings of citizens by police come from small agencies and i think we need to go with a minimum of 100 employees for each police agency, adequate standards for vetting candidates for training, certifying and disciplining them at the level you see with extraordinary success in places like new york city that used to kill upwards of 80 people a year and now killing an average of less than 10. that doesn't happen with small agencies being able to change the way it can in a big agency where you have training and

supervision. i have similar recommendations for local agencies but i think for your consideration of these specific ways in which actions could be tape now that could have a big impact in saving the lives of young people in the united states in unnecessary tragic, illegitimate, albeit possibly legal confrontations with police. thank you. >> thank you so much, dr. sherman. our final witness on this panel is president jeremy travis of john jay college of criminal justice in new york city. >> thank you. thank you very much for introduction co-chair ramsey members of the task force. i'm delighted and honored to have been asked to appear on the last witness on the last panel and to be on this panel with my colleagues. i have one thank you and three recommendations. the thank you is to often thanks to the department of justice for opportunity provided by a grant

provided to john jay college leading a consortium of yale law school ucla urban institute to launch national initiative for building community trust and justice. we're thinking today about looking forward. this is in my estimation one of the most important undertakings of the justice department. on behalf of my colleagues, a member of my consortium, brian stephens on the advisory board. i want to express my appreciation. first meeting of the advisory board last week. it was an exciting sobering and humbling opportunity to think forward. i thank cops office and other agencies for this initiative. we hope to learn a lot in the five sites to be named in the undertaking we provide to the nation. let me recognize philadelphia is a partner there. so recommendation number one may not surprise you coming from the president from an institution of

higher education, which is education matters. predecessor task forces by other presidents long ago after similar times of urban strive and concern about the role of policing have all recommended different ways or others it's important to have an educated profession of people who carry out the work of enforcing our laws. college i head up john jay after one of those commissions or recommendations. it was then a radical idea that a college educated police officer will be a better police officer. that idea still resonates and we need to provide opportunities as we are for stem des palins, returning veterans. this is an important profession and we need national investment in the education of police officers. i would also echo what dr. sherman indicated at our advisory board last meeting jim berman of the organization announce add need for national cohesion, a way of thinking

about this as a nationally important profession. there's very little national attention. the cops office does the best they can but not really thinking about standards, about research, developing leadership. jim proposed as did larry and i a police commission. the closest is an fbi executive session -- academy, that's not the same thing as a way to build the leadership. so universities can make a difference to develop that sort of capability. my second recommendation also won't surprise you having been director of national justice serving under attorney general -- assistant attorney general robinson and attorney general reno, i'm a strong believer in the importance of research and echo what my fellow panelists have said. the matter of research under the '94 was historic but critical. when we think what we could have

known had we invested more had there been more money available, if like any other research institute able to invest in the basic understanding of this important relationship between government and citizen. it's really sobering. so of course we should invest more in research. we learned a lot in those days. but i think what this panel would recommend is that today's research agenda would be broader and different than that funded by the '94 act. police and public we don't have it all, then i echo what dr. goff has stated here and have learned a lot from tracy meares research, first brought to my attention, what works in crime prevention study. we just do not understand the interactions, retail interactions of law enforcement. that's the goal for next generation. let me focus on the third recommendation that i highlight

in my prepared statement. the title of today's panel is future of community policing. so this is the conceptual framework for police revolution that has taken place over the last generation. three articulations there one embraig bracing crime prevention. we talked about this a lot. great successes crime in this country. through problem solving principle of policing methodology. those two pillars are very strong. the third pillar, partnerships with the community has gotten less attention is underdeveloped. in some ways i think we lost ground while others have gained ground. we need to think about strengthen that pillar. so how do we do that? focus on legitimatesey. my testimony site the station by bill bratton when he was sworn in as please commissioner for a second time a year ago exactly.

he said he's come back to new york because he's troubled by observation, his personal observation, realization although crime has been reduced to record lows in -- people in communities of color, particularly young people in communities of color are angry at police. how could this be, he asks, when we've done so well, in his view. how could it be there's so much dissatisfaction. we've talked about this. we talked about it at john jay with the colleagues, stop and frisk era, but it's different, deeper than that. so in addition to procedural justice and legitimacy what i argue for in this testimony and we take on under the national initiative is to imagine a process of racial reconciliation, imagine a process that brings police and community together, not in the way which is the easy way of community councils and public opinion polls but really getting

to the deep distrust between the the police that exists for a long time. i'll end with a quote from my colleagues david kennedy who on a radio show said when there's one of these incidents we've seen all too often and brought us into being today with the president's directive, a young unarmed african-american man killed by the police maybe justifiable, maybe not, white america talks about the incident. what happened? was it legally justifiable? what does the grand jury do? black america talks about history. it's that history that matters. we have to think about ways to bring history into conversations constructively. very difficult. i don't pretend expertise here but i think that's the imperative of the day. thank you very much. >> thank you so much, president travis. we're going to turn now to questions from our panel. i'll be calling on people in the

order which they indicate to me they want to raise questions. i'll be starting with brittany packnet followed by sue rahr. >> thank you very much. i have two questions, the first for doctor nagin. i'm a pastor's kid. i was taught early wherever your treasure is stored up, that's where your heart is and translate it into the work i do now and have operations and systems, whatever we measure, that's what we value. so my question is really around this idea of measuring crime prevention and i want to know how we can viably measure prime prevention that does not provide a perverse incentive to support predatory broken windows policing that led to issues like stop and frisk and aggressive traffic stops i see in my native st. louis county. and instead measurement that incentivizes community policing and guardianship. >> thank you for the question.

with regard to the issue of measuring prevention, first of all acknowledge as a researchers, those who know what i do, that's very hard to do. in this context i think real headway can be made on it. it begins with some of the research that larry sherman had begun with. if, for example, you target places and people at high risk of offending you can see whether you're efforts to reduce crime at those locations was effective. so by having targeted strategies you can do that. with regard to the second part of your question using tactics which don't emphasize arrest, an integral part of policing but don't emphasize it. here again, these kind of proactive strategies which i

should say my co-author has summarized in a very nice website at george mason university, they involve things like problem solving, changes in the physical environment with lighting and things like that or bringing third parties in like landlords and so forth to try to mitigate the places that generate crime. by doing that, not only by avoiding the crime also avoiding having to make arrests because there's no crime. do not emphasize policing in which there are a large number of arrests made for minor crimes. >> thank you. my second question for professor sherman, really interested in written testimony recommendation number ten talk about executive order on deadly force and executive order should focus on both proportionality of the force used and emphasis on

de-escalation before force is a choice that's made. so i'm wondering if you could just kind of discuss that a bit more and if that executive order were in existence, what would that mean in cases like killing of tamir rice in cleveland where the shooting occurred two seconds after the officer arrived. >> this idea i'm very glad you gave me a chance to give examples, is very important. it goes back to mayor bradley of los angeles discussing report on higher education with police right after a woman named eula love was killed by police. she hadn't paid her gas bill. when the gas man came to turn her gas off, she told him to leave and he wouldn't. she took a shovel and whacked him on the arm. when the police pulled up she and in the front door of her house with a knife.

the police pulled out their guns and pointed them at her and said drop the knife. she didn't so they shot her and killed her. there's more details to it. but essentially it's an example of an argument that can be made that there was a threat to life but it was an unnecessary confrontation because the police could have used other tactics to deescalate the situation. number one it was disproportionate to the underlying offense which was a simple assault, misdemeanor assault and certainly not worthy of in fact, a pretrial death penalty. more importantly perhaps because there are situations where offenders kill people. the police in london encountered somebody who had just beheaded an 80-year-old woman with a machete last year. and they managed to take that man into custody alive. i put it to you it would be very difficult for police in the united states to do that but the

police were under this infrastructure i'm talking about which can make such a huge difference not only in the letter of these policies but in the spirit which they are implemented, expectations from the first day of training that police officers have in the uk that their job is to keep people alive no matter who they are. >> my question is for professor sherman as well. i have to say i was tantalized by your written testimony about putting limits on the size of the police departments but lower them as opposed to limits. one of the things fiercely protected in this country is local independence and local control. we've had conversations amongst our colleagues about the concept of multiple agencies and independents. it seems larger agencies moves us away from a close

relationship with the community that you seem to get with a small department. it seems as departments get larger more anonymity departments have that seem to create a distance. i wonder if you would delve a little into how in the united kingdom you do maintain that close community when you have that agency and so much movement from one community to the next. >> i'm so glad you asked that. my first job with new york city police department in 1971 was to evaluate police commissioner patrick murphy's neighborhood police program which is exactly what is done in police forces of 1,000 or 5,000 or 8,000 or 40,000 in the uk. when you take it down to the neighborhood level, it's sort of like the adage of a former speaker of the house, which is that all politics are local and all policing is local. if you organize policing to maximize face-to-face interaction between police responsible for an area and citizens they are serving you

don't have to have a small agency to do that. arguably you'll get more equity in providing that kind of interaction if you have a larger agency that's looking at things like fairness of the distribution of resources. so the effort in the uk since the last effort like this, the royal commission over scandals of police in smaller departments getting too close to the community leaders, not just corruption but also preference and bias and before britain was 15% black and minority ethnic as the term is phrased there that which now leads more to complexity in terms of bias one, ferguson, white serving african-american community. if you have larger entities st. louis county level of responsibility for all of the

different areas outside of st. louis city, there is more checks and balances. the point i want to make about localism, really two points. one is this proliferation of tiny police agencies is not something we've always had. it's mostly since world war ii we had the luxury of putting first one and then three or five police officers all over pennsylvania, 800 police departments for 10 million people. that is something if you want to cut taxes, you merge police departments and have a single call center for the county. it's one of the easiest ways to cut taxes right now. that financial aspect of it might change the game rather than just saying the locals have all this power and we can't touch it. the fact is it's a decision for 50 state legislatures to machlt they are the ones that create cities. legally it's a creature of the

state. they can nominate cities if they want to. of course they have politics to worry about. if one state or two states want to be bold enough to take this vision and cut taxes and improve equity in policing by having larger police departments, the whole country will benefit by following suit. >> can i follow up with how does local community exercise control over their policing? >>ening there's a wonderful series of institutions that we see in england and wales including police complaints commission and including inspector constabul, ary looking at these things. latest institution i think the jury is still out on is electing police and crime commissioners for, in effect, 42 of the 43 forces. deputy mayor for policing of london is the counterpart and crime commissioners in all the

other forces. those elections are controversial because they were introduced out of cycle, 15% turnout. there's lots of other questions. they replaced a board of about 18 locally elected city and county councilmembers who were the board of directors for the police department. so you've got the democracy under any model you want to look at throughout british history before 2012 when we changed to elected police and crime commissioners. there's lots of ways to do this. the states can look at this if they want to create a more cost effective form of policing that i think will have more checks and balances for more equitable policing. >> our next convert is cedric alexander followedrobert villasenor. >> a question for those with

background over the years that have done research as relates to your profession. oftentimes what i've seen even going back to my days at university in miami and rochester where i trained is a lot of research is compiled among academics, but it tends not to go very far other than -- you know, a lot of interesting discoveries are made as it relates to how to improve our society, make things better for all of us. i think some of you will agree or hold in part that oftentimes dr. goff a lot of this research doesn't get out where it can be of some real benefit. so we're in a real crisis place in my opinion in this country as it relates to policing community relations. it's not getting any better. it's becoming more challenged. hopefully what we're all going to do here is do something to

move things along and provide some guidance as to what we need to do to make things better. but i would even say, too to sheriff mcdonnell you're the practitioner. you're the one who takes research like i and others who are ceos in our own agencies but we're not getting that information. so how do we take all this wonderful research that you are coming up with and make it applicable, make it come alive. it's great stuff. how do we make that transition from academia and putting it into the community where it's going to evolve into something, and it's something that's got to happen really quickly. so i'd just like to get your thoughts and insights into that. you're welcome to start, dr. goff. >> thank you for that question. i'll answer in, i guess two and a half parts. the first echoing the words of president travis national

initiative is choosing five sites to do intervention research. there's also clearing house for national initiative. the goal is to have a central place where people who are looking for research or best practices or just the emerging trends in this evidence base, emerging evidence base can go and say what do we know and there can be a firm answer about that. so i think that's a good step towards being able to translate it. i think the key question here is the point two and a half, translation is quite difficult. i don't think it's because academic publish in journals only seven people read. i think because academics are people picked last in kickball and do not develop same social skills many people do. it's not just that we don't talk to each other we don't talk to each other. there's a profound need to establish modes of communication not just between law enforcement and researchers but between law enforcement communities and researchers, because there needs to be a cross-poll nation of

literally on not just academic but community issues and law enforcement issues. one of the things we get a chance to see and saw at the initiative board meeting, community groups who have a language for this, law enforcement who has a language for this, researchers who have a language for this. that's three different languages trying to talk about the same thing and same set of issues and that's with people already on the same page. because we don't work together go together we don't know. my dad has a phrase and i'll end with this. forgive me and him. if you want to be a philosopher, go with philosopher go. i'm not suggesting we become philosopher but if we want to translate we need to be in the same place talking about that. because there's no national conference convening with any kind of regularity, there's no short-term usualent response and no long-term process for it. >> thank you for the opportunity.

in listening to that, i look at where we are today as a data driven society and i think there's tremendous value to that. the challenge is much as we focused on in the community policing arena is that we don't focus just on numbers to drive the way we do business. because if we ask for numbers we'll generally get numbers. it may not be what we want in the long-term. we need to focus on outcomes rather than outputs. in doing so i think the challenge for us as practitioners is taking the data and making it applicable translating it to how do we use that in the field how do we use that in a way we get the greatest value for resources deploy. also from a justice perspective, what does that mean in the delivery of police services to the communities we serve. going back to evidence-based strategies, certainly we can take data, we can focus on best practices. we need to share those. we need a forum to be able to do that. but in looking in the absence of

using data ags a sole criteria for judging an organization or individual, officer or deputy in the field, other options community surveys and other means to be able to determine how the community feels about their police and how the community feels about their safety. i think it's a complex conversation to have. certainly welcome the data but also put it in context to make it meaningful without having the data drive solely the way we do business. thank you. >> an excellent question and i'll respond with two levels. one is the most recently fully appointed nij director john lau emphasized translational criminology. there have been places in universities that have picked up on that challenge. in particular my co-author at

george mason university is actively involved at the center for evidence-based crime policy and doing a number of really i think, quite remarkable ways of communicating the implications of academic research for police practice. but i think it also needs to go beyond that. in the written testimony, i emphasize the need and echos some things we've heard throughout, we need a much larger national infrastructure for dissemination not unlike at the national institutes of health where they do not only basic research but an important part of their mission is dissemination of that research and its implications for medical practice. i think there needs to be something comparable here as well. if i may just to pick up on the idea of community surveys, to

speak briefly to susan's point about difficulties of having large organizations, in my testimony, we talk about the need for collecting systematic data on reactions and using it in the evaluation, performance evaluation of the police officers. so one thing you could do in this regard is when you replace these -- you know, the police departments of small towns with larger organizations, you can still collect information systematically on the reactions of people in that community and whether they are satisfied with the performance of the police. >> i should have said about every police force does that. they can do annual survey go down to areas and pick up the fact that in one part of the country where you have predominantly muslim neighborhoods, trust and

confidence in police is extraordinary low levels and that corresponds to human intelligence about potential acts of terrorism being organized there. so you don't get that kind of knowledge of your community if you're breaking up policing into lots of little bits that lack coordinated strategy of thinking broadly across big population centers. but i did want to say that another answer to dr. alexander's question about getting the research applied in practice is to get the police involved in doing research, which we've been doing at cambridge for almost 20 years now but especially in recent years with a focus on evidence-based policies. we have police like surgeons like other people in the health professions conducting their own experience and publishing their own experience, co-authors and academics, joining in enthusiasm discovering new things about how to do policing better.

some of our graduates in 2010 found society for evidence-based policing mostly consists of police professionals. there's 2,000 members in 30 countries including 500 in australia and new zealand where there's huge interest and they are demanding we go down there and spend a fair amount of time. also in latin america huge interest in evidence-based practice into the policing of that continent. asia india. the only place not asking to have this kind of help from universities is the united states. >> so this is one of my favorite topics. let me see what i can add to what my colleagues have already said. first to state something that's fundamental, which is we need independent sources of information about policing independent of the police. this is actually piggy backing

on your question. there's a lot of history in the room, if we remember back to the early 1970s when another group of federal officials decide to create first victimization survey, we know so much about crime because we ask residents of communities about their experience with crime and we don't rely on police to tell us only what they report to fbi. that independent source of information about crime has benefited us enormously over the years. we need a similar nationally norm independent survey of the experience of the interactions with the justice system. i don't include just the police. actually i'm as much concerned about mass incarceration and supervision as i am the police in terms of racial issues. we need that independent source of information. so that's not a popularity poll, that's really going to people in regularly systematic way. this is justice survey dr. goff referred to that needs a big investment of federal money and

has to be the way police ask the question how am i doing. secondly we talked a little about importance of what this paper i wrote with chris stone, national coherence. a set of national expectations that you can go to any police department and expect they would do certain things the way best evidence would require. as you go to any hospital and expect a surgeon to know what is the latest, best evidence of how to conduct a certain medical procedure. that national coherence requires a long time of building a body of evidence as to what is best practice. that comes along with this notion of a national sort of policing college that develops leaders. so what professor sherman said is the other important point here, there has to be -- it's not a two-way street between two people who otherwise don't talk to each other. this is building a capacity and appetite within police agencies to do their own research and

data driven and to partner with universities. so in the medical profession we have institution of the teaching hospital where young doctors you know are spending time at university also learning in the emergency rooms. so we've blended these two ways of thinking about the same phenomenon, one highly scholarly and highly practice oriented so we're learning from each other all the time. it's not a dissemination model, although that's important. it's really a collaborative model. so data infrastructure becomes very important there. we need to think about data. we need to think about operations research. but we need to really help police agencies recognize the importance of developing this -- what professor stone and i call innovation mentality, which means we're always learning, experimenting, always open to criticism and recognition when things don't work. >> thank you.

our next questioner is roberto villasenor followed by bryan stephenson. >> thank you. all the presentations were very informative. i have two questions. first one, sheriff mcdonald, i heard you talk about corrections, mental health training for patrol officers, we need ways to influence the youth. and, you know, dr. goff, i heard your talk about partnerships. so there's a lot of different elements of the entire criminal justice system that need to get involved in this reform movement. and as we worked here and we've shared recommendations, written recommendations through the group sai that's helping us, i see a lot of that coming up where we're making suggestions outside of the traditional police world. and where we've often said in community policing, we can't arrest our way out of these type of problems. we have to look in a broader scale and a grander scale. and when we do that, i think we

go far outside the traditional police realm. so i'd like to hear your thoughts on how we transition that from thought to action on a broader scale. open that up to anyone. >> i'll kick it off i guess. in looking at the business we're in and the results that we're seeing i think we need to look nontraditionally. the way we've been doing it is giving us the results we have today. when you look at you know kids at the earliest age you know the old, you know from the time you're born until the third grade, you read to learn. for the rest of your life you learn to read up to third grade and then you read to learn. and there's nothing, i think, more impactful on success or failure as that piece. and so kids who start to fall off track at the third and fourth grade we see the outcome. they get into alcohol, drugs and gangs and dysfunctional behavior. and when you look at up to 70% of the people incarcerated in

the state prisons are illit illiterate. we need to focus on what are not viewed as policing solutions, education solutions nurturing young people at the earliest ages and setting them up for success. and then on the back end, when we have people incarcerated, what are we doing? we know they're coming back out to society. what are we doing to be able to get them ready to be back out in a different fashion than they came in? to be able, again, to set them up for a greater level of success than they would otherwise have. i think we need to look differently than we have been and look at options that weren't on the table previously. and i think that's where national evaluation and analysis of, what are we trying to get to at the end of the day rather than just how do we do our job a little bit better as we've been doing up until this point? >> can i try an answer to that, as well? this is really building on the observation i just made about

thinking about our incarceration policies. i think we have to. if we step back from the policing question that is in the title of this task force, i think it's important for us and maybe this is not within your -- to recognize the entire criminal justice system has changed enormously over the past 40 years. professor and i were privileged to be members of the national academy of sciences panel on the causes and consequences of high rates of incarceration in the u.s. i was fortunate to chair that. and we've come through a time in our nation's history where we have used prison as a response to crime. more than any other time in our history. and we stand now outside the experience of every western democracy by a factor of five to tenfold. so i spent a lot of time with 20-year-olds these days 15000 of them at john j. and i ask them questions, like,

what's it like growing up? they're more likely to have a parent in prison. they're more likely to have somebody under supervision in their family. they're more likely when they were in high school to have been at the receiving end of a more punitive disciplinary system in their schools. and so the young people coming up today have a very different personal experience with the justice system. so it's a truism to say we should think about how police interact with the rest of it. but i think the police bear a burden not of their making, which is that the justice system itself is a much bigger footprint in the lives of young people particularly in the communities of color. police can do a lot of work but they're the front end of a system that's much more punitive. our panel recommended significant reduction incarceration rates, and that's going to be tough. but that's the reality. and my testimony, i cite the finding in our report that a

high school african-american male high school dropout today has a 68% chance of spending at least a year in prison. this reality has never existed before in this country. we need to recognize some things have changed and the police are, because they are the law enforcement agency of most direct contact with the citizens are to some extent bearing a burden they didn't make. and that's unfortunate. but i think we have to have this larger frame. >> if i could just point out the british police are actually major player in a offender management. they have succeeded in recent years somewhere between 40% and 50%, of all of the people who receive a criminal conviction. but the process stops in the police station. there is no further prosecution. there's no chance of going to prison when the police make that decision. they have used a variety of programs, but one that has been

tested in collaboration with the university of maryland and the project director has just completed a randomized trial to see if in fact the police have come up with a pre-prosecution probation program starting the day they're arrested rather than waiting nine months to have the case go to court and with lots of delays and dismissals of the cases. there may be a major opportunity to keep the offenders under the watchful eye of neighborhood police officers who know where they are and who in a recent experiment in philadelphia demonstrated that they could get bigger crime reductions in hot spots of policing by more contact with offenders, not necessarily making arrests. but just making this connection clear so that there is a sense that you better stay out of trouble. and that's something that's reinforced with people coming out of longer prison terms in

britain. but sadly not for people with short-term incarceration for less than a year. many of whom can be diverted at the front end which is where i think a lot of the evidence and innovation is being directed in british policing. so it's not just a matter of putting the people in jail, it's a matter of keeping them out of jail, which is going right back to professor nagin's point about the fundamental goal is prevention of the crimes in the first place and not taking some satisfaction. you shouldn't be bragging about the number of people you arrest. it's really the crimes that don't happen. >> i'd like to pick up on both larry's comments and jeremy's, as well. about five years ago, i published a paper along with an economist called imprisonment and crime can both be reduced. and, you know, in that paper we -- essay, we argued you

know, the conclusion that was ultimately from our imprisonment panel that lengthily prison sentences were neither effective or efficient way of preventing crime but that there was a lot of evidence that if you use police properly, you can prevent crime from happening in the first place. after publishing that essay, i started getting pushback from people saying, well you know, if you start emphasizing policing, aren't they going to start arresting lots more people and shoving them through the criminal justice system? and that's what you know started getting me thinking. much more interested in policing. and when you look at the data is just remember that every year there are 11 to 12 million arrests in the united states. but less than 20% of them are for felonies. you know, most of them are, you know for misdemeanors and more minor crimes. and one thing that's happened, accompanying the big increase in

imprisonment there's been a comparable increase in jail population over the same period. and that these kinds of arrests for these minor crimes, while they rarely end up being in prison, they wind up being in sheriff mcdonald's jails. and with all the problems associated. which is why we need to as larry said and i said we need to use policing methods that prevent crime from happening so there's no arrests. >> the second question i have is probably geared a little bit more towards dr. sherman. and it was in regard, when you talked about the numbers and the comparison between great britain and the united states, i agree with sue, those numbers are fascinating. there's a lot further research we need to do in that area.

when you also talked about the incident with the beheading and they're able to take that individual in custody and you made the remark that, you know that may not happen so much in america. i pushed back a little on that. i know within my own agency, quite often, we take people into custody and deadly force situations withoutñó/ using deadly force ourself. and i'm sure it happens across the country. we don't hear about those things because it doesn't satisfy the american media's appetite for violence. and that is, i guess, my question is what do you feel about the difference maybe, and what you see. you're in a unique position to compare the two systems. is there that same fascination in great britain and that old adage if it bleeds, it leads. and that's what you see on american media. and does that portray or affect the portrayal of policing? >> i think the size of the

audience for the newspapers in britain and their financial success compared to the u.s. actually make them the most -- and everything good i'm saying about the british police is completely off limitspf! reporting in the british newspapers. one british paper picked up in my testimony today but certainly not the others that are on an announced anti-police campaign, but i think your point about how, yes, there are many police agencies. no doubt places like tucson and los angeles county where there would be outstanding handling of mentally ill people, which is what this fellow was that beheaded that lady. and there is relatively no hope that good news like that will get reported. we're working with trinidad where they're killing quite a few people and what we're

introducing is bandages that the police can put on to try to save their lives along with videos so they can have their own evidence they've actually tried to save the life of somebody they've just shot. and i think that getting -- because it bleeds and leads on the evening news. that might be a way of these new technologies being brought together to make it very clear that the police aren't just trying to kill people, they're trying to save lives. and maybe a more concerted campaign to get that word out when it happens in the places it does happen. i think that the sort of broad swipe that you can accuse me fairly of having taken about how it would be less likely in the u.s. to happen is across the 17,000 police agencies, i think correct. and i think that if we can drill down in these numbers and we're doing this right now to see whether the rates of killings of

citizens per officer are higher in the smaller police agencies the 75% of them that are under 25 officers then i think we'll have even more evidence to support the idea of having bigger police agencies with more training because dealing with mentally ill people, especially with weapons is one of the most complicated -- brain surgery's nothing compared to dealing with a mentally ill person with a knife. i have enormous respect for anybody who has to do that. and because it's so complicated, i want to see a nationally coherent strategy of recruiting training and certifying highly skilled people who can do that work. even if it's only a specialist team which you have in a big agency and they're the ones brought in while the responding officers keep things under control until the very skilled people can try to take that troubled person into custody. >> brian stevenson followed by

tracy mears. >> thank you. i've got two questions, as well. the first, i'll start with directed at sheriff mcdonnell. i was really interested in your testimony about the challenges of this growing population of people who were in jail and the need for more dynamic services. we've got increased number of people mental illness et cetera. i'd like to ask you what role your deputies play in the adjudication of people who are pretrial. that is you know, do your people provide insight, opinions testimony about their experience with the incarceration. my experience is that's not the norm. and i'd like to know what your folks. then i'd like your thoughts or anybody else's thoughts about whether changing the role of people who have the most intimate knowledge of people who see their progression or lack

thereof with regard to treatment and response to treatment on mental health issues or education or whatever the need is. it seems to me, if we've got this population, we're going to be working in this intense way. we get the resources to provide these services. we want to do something with what we learn about that. that's not currently the model. it'll be interesting to hear whether -- and any thoughts you have about that. i'll put my second question out there. it picks up on what brittany asked about. i'm very very impressed and very, very attracted to this notion of crime prevention over arrest. but i also share this concern that crime prevention often means targeting. it means engagement with community members. it actually decreases the trust and the legitimacy. what i talk about when i think about crime prevention. i think about a range of issues, dealing with poverty dealing

with trauma, dealing with services dealing with a large set of issues that impact behaviors. drug enforcement policies. and i'd be interested in hearing how you all think we should reconcile the fear that some of us have when we hear crime prevention unregulated by did i commit a crime that would justify arrest with the obvious good goal of limiting the number of people we arrest. and obviously limiting the number of crimes that are committed. >> thank you. just to touch on your first piece relative to the population of the l.a. county jails the people who are in there for pretrial are about half the population we deal with. of those numbers, we work very hard on various intervention methods, try and provide education as best we can to be able to help somebody get a g.e.d., to be able to supplement

what they bring and bring them a package moving forward. we're heavy on programming, we're heavy focus on education and then also on the mental health piece, doing the best we can, working with the department of mental health to be able to provide whatever it is we can to make -- put them in a better position they were when they get in. about 20% of our population as i mentioned are there because of their illness. that's something that we need to work very aggressively on to be able to lobby for community-based mental health clinics. to be able to work with courts that focus on mental health so they can triage people and prevent them from going into the system as a default mechanism and rather be able to focus them on treatment in the community that will be better for them in the long run and better for all of us in the long run. we focus on best practices. we focus on trying to be able to share success stories. i don't know that we do that nationally as well as we could but we certainly want to be a

partner with others across the country in sharing those. and certainly in the custody environment the challenges are significant. we have a lot of work to do, and we look forward to working with others to be able not only to show what works, but what doesn't work as well, and what hasn't in the past. >> in individual cases, are you proactively reporting the success we see as a pretrial detainee or lack of success either to the prosecutor, the judge, the defense attorney if i contact you and say, look your guy's been doing this, i want him to come to court and -- do you have a policy around that? >> we don't. and we don't have a policy per se, i've been on the job now three months. i'm still getting up to speed on what we have. what are the best practices in the field and to ensure we're in line with those on an individual basis, there are some -- we have people who come in from the community who are experts in a variety of different specialties who work with our incarcerated folks to be able to provide a

variety of different services and programs to them. pretrial, they could subpoena somebody to come in and say based on my interaction with this, i feel they're in a better position or not. but to be able to have, i think a coherent program to be able to address those issues, we have work to do in that regard, as well. >> take on your second question professor stevenson. police are responsible, among others for public safety. robert piel's been mentioned a couple of times talking about history and that was his first priority. what is the role of the exercise of police powers in the prevention of crime? and that's in part a -- i'll call it a research question. which is to what extent does the exercise of police powers the

power to arrest in this case when there are other police powers. let's call it that one. does that or does it not result any behavioral change such that you can say there's actually been a prevention of crime there's been a reduction in crime. and there's more research that can be done. more research done by people at this table on hot spots policing, on ways to exercise that power in a strategic way. with crime reduction as the goal. and i for one don't shy away from acknowledging that the police are authorized and expected and deputized in essence by us with our consent to use those powers>qd+ in ways that will produce safety. what we have not done adequately is in my view is to ask the corollary question. i think this entire panel is saying, is important for the country, which is to say what are the costs of that exercise

of police power such that you can say well, at some point, maybe there are bad things happening as we use that power to reduce crime. they'd have to be somehow balanced against a benefit. complicated balance, but we don't have the data to be able to know. what's the cost -- you mentioned. what's the cost of legitimacy? what's the cost in trust? what's the cost in the willingness of people to cooperate with the police, to report crimes. how does all of this sort of feed into the stop snitching movement? we don't have an understanding of some of the costs of the legitimate exercise of police power even if it's in the name of a good thing called crime reduction or crime prevention. and even if we know that has actually happened. so i think there's a -- actually our institution last night giving the lecture to be followed by dan nagin soon. and i said one of the things that comes out of the national academy report for me is the imperative of re-thinking the

criminal sanction in terms of its ability to change behavior. and it's not just an automatic reflexive, we're going to put somebody away for a long time. even though in a personal statement, we have to say that retribution is ha legitimate social purpose. but we need to constrain and limit to really limit the exercise of state power. so the director of the cops office, chief davis said at the outset, we're thinking about public safety and trust at the same time. these two things are independent objectives we hold for the police. we don't understand trust enough, don't have measures of trust enough. we know we have public safety benefits. we're not sure, really how much the police have contributed to the public safety declines we've seen recently. but we can't hold up the public safety benefit and say we don't care about trust. and my sense is that we can do a lot to get more public safety benefit and get increase trust,

which is what the national initiative is trying to figure out with fewer arrests shorter sentences, fewer people in jail that we can use a lot of the resources that roberto was talking about before, mental health resources. respond to troubled people in much more productive ways than we do now. this is the failure of imagination. we haven't figured it out. but it's also a failure of expectation. we need to say we expect this of our enforcement agencies. and it's not just the police. it's the child protective services people who show up. it's the probation people who show up. it's the school safety officers who show up. all of those public servants can be held to that same expectation of providing for safety and promoting trust and confidence at the same time. >> i'd like to speak. the issue you raise the second issue you raise is the central theme of the essay that i wrote with cynthia. and, you know in that essay we

delineate three important functions of the police. prevention of crime, bringing the perpetrators of crime to justice and maintaining community trust. and we described them as being independent functions each important in their own right. and in doing that we recognize ed -- talking about. but they're both important. and specifically, one thing we avoided doing and we said that one objective doesn't trump the other objective. they have to be balanced. and we resisted, for example, emphasizing too much the argument that if there was greater community trust police might be more effective in crime prevention. not because that -- i think that

based on tracy's research, there's good reason to think that's true. but we -- the reason we wanted to set that point aside was that we didn't want to privilege one objective over the other. and so that people would have to deal with the tradeoffs necessarily, the police must make in balancing their success at these different, each function, which is each very important in its own right. >> if i can just dovetail off of that and then to jeremy's point, the question is about i think, how metrics create perverse incentives. if you don't have a metric for the thing you care about most in this case being community trust then i think there's a real danger of that. broken windows policing was designed to be cost of life quality of life responses to promote community policing. but if there was not a way to look at the ways the community

cared about policing, if there was no metric for that it can become irresistible. briefly what i would say, we're talking about legitimacy. if there's no metric for that then there's no safeguard against the possibility of it becoming a perverse incentive. >> let's move on then to tracy mears followed by jose lopez. >> so i put myself on the queue a long time ago and sue asked the question i wanted to ask, but i didn't want to ask it of professor sherman. i wanted to ask it of you. because i was -- a lot of what you have all recommended is consonant with what we heard throughout our several sessions, except for this idea of the minimum size of police agencies, which is why i think we find it intriguing. and, you know, the advantages of it are obvious. i don't think we need to go into

that. but my concern wasn't so much the localism point, but the pushback that we might get in recommending something like that among not just smaller agencies but sheriff agencies in particular. my sense is that they tend to be small and they're also directly responsible to an electorate. and i was wondering if you, sheriff, could speak to if you agree with this idea or find it at least intriguing. what kinds of arguments you think your constituency would respond to in accepting that kind of a recommendation. >> well, thank you. i do think it's very intriguing. i think it certainly bears further examination. in looking at that and looking at the 18,000 police agencies across america. certainly, it's hard to have everybody in line with best practices when you have that many varieties and just numbers

of different leaders throughout the various organizations. you know, i'd want to look at a much more detailed, i think, examination to be able to say it's a positive or negative. but there are certainly are efficiencies that could be gained by regionalization. we see that on a lot of different fronts. the combining of different agencies. i know there would be pushback as far as independence of local electeds as far as their own police department. i think that it's hard to argue what the efficiency argument. but as far as the -- or the ability to be able to maintain a standard across the nation. but certainly, the pushback, i think, would be significant from local jurisdictions who want to have that level of independence and to be able to have their own police agency that they believe will do a better job, you know, providing police services than a

larger agency might. i think it's certainly worthy of further conversation. but i do think there will be different perspectives on that. >> can i just clarify that i would be happy to exempt elected sheriffs from my proposal. because they serve the place it'd be an issue several hundred people in a county and lots of counties that have that small population. but where you have a police department, it's generally a city level or township or borough or something like that. and i think that's where the critical need. >> jose lopez followed by chuck ramsey who will be the last questioner. >> so i have a question for professor sherman related to de-certification models. so, you know right now, two recommendations that you put forth. one is certifying and de

de-certifying officers. if an officer does get discertified, that raises a flag so other agencies are able to know that. as a screening tool before hiring that officer. seems like in most states, we have the potential to -- or the board that can certify and or de-certify officers seems hard to do that. so i'm just wondering, based on the states that we see that have this kind of decertification board. how do we see officers get decertified. what can we do to give it real teeth so that when officers are not doing their jobs and when they're violating people's civil rights, they're, in fact, held accountable for that. >> could i just clarify that my primary focus on certification

of individuals is on chiefs of police. and not to certify them to be police officers, but to be executives of police agencies of at least 100 employees. that would go a long way toward the nationally coherent idea that you get good surgery in every hospital. with respect to the list of officers who are dismissed, it doesn't require that you have certification of the officers in the first place. that is without having states have to enact a statewide certification procedure for any local police department to hire somebody which is actually a huge ask in cost and politics and everything else. i think to get something, we just start with the fact that if they've been hired as a police officer. and i think of albuquerque, new mexico, which was profiled in the new yorker recently when they had a push to hire lots of

officers, they actually took people who had been fired in other agencies. and certainly they took people they rejected in previous applications applications. it struck me in reading that article that this system which is brand new in the uk. we've had the capacity to find this out. but there was a police officer who was sanctioned for having pushed somebody to the ground inappropriately who died of a heart attack in a demonstration. and he'd been dismissed from another police force before he was hired in the one where he did that. and that sort of brought the issue up on the radar screen so that just within the past 24 months britain has created this what's called -- they've had for doctors for a long time. and so you can't practice medicine again once you've been struck off

state and local. i think if we get that much out of it. i did recommend the complaints commission at a statewide level would have the power to recommend dmis sal that would be the kind thing you could toss out to get the bill to the governor to sign it. and i take a politic view of

these recommendations that we simply can make some progress on the hope that we'll get some benefit in terms of a higher standard of police attention to this goal of maintaining trust and confidence in the community with every person we hire and every incident that we investigate. thank you. >> chuck ramsey. >> very quickly. first of all thank all of you very much. this has been very informative. you know this task force has been charged with the goal of coming up with some recommendations for the president regarding policing. a lot of it has to do with recent events that occurred last year and the need for change reform, what have you. but just from your testimony as well as panels that have appeared in prior listening sessions, it's very clearsfwsq

that policing is not the only area that needs to be reviewed and looked at. i think it's been 50-some odd years since a comprehensive look at the entire criminal justice system has been done. i don't think asking once every 50 years or so to take another look is asking for too much. and i think that things have changed so dramatically that it's time. i'd like)u9ç to hear your opinions about that, bringing together practitioners, researchers academics, community and whoever else can add value to the discussion. looking at, you know, probation parole, courts corrections reentry, poverty and tr3u(páion, which actually are made drivers of crime. different models that dr. sherman you've mentioned. what's practical for the united states? is there something better that we could be doing?

i just would like your thoughts and opinions. and just as an aside all the major associations. iacp, noble. major county sheriffs national sheriff's association have all come together making this request. and i just from your perspective. one, do you agree with that? and, two, what would you like to see as part of that look at criminal justice? >> what you're looking at -- >> you're looking at me. i'll go first. so absolutely, i think that there's no one who would disagree with the call for a coherent and comprehensive look at the criminal justice system that would include not just practitioners, but academics and community leaders and stake holders. there needs to be that integrative approach because as you know, commissioner ramsey and everyone in the room, it's frequently the case that law enforcement and the criminal justice system get packaged together in the minds of the

citizenry. what's happening in a grand jury room suddenly becomes the fault of the officer and the next day's encounter. and, in fact what happens in the legislature with regards to our immigration policy and our drug policy becomes the fault or the responsibility of the officer in the next encounter. what i would issue as a challenge to that is to say, and this goes back to your point about what is traditional policing approaches. traditional criminal justice approaches that if we think there are problems in terms of law enforcement's relationship with the community, they never start only there. i'll use the example of the thing i work most closely with, which is issues of discrimination. if you imagine that there's discrimination within the context of criminal justice or law enforcement, then you have to also imagine it happens in educational context and housing context and employment context and health care context. and all of that is upstream of where someone would have contact with law enforcement. you talked about drivers being poverty and educational outcomes. those are not integrated systems in the way -- and we talk about

accountability and transparency for policing we almost never for state governance. and if what we're going to be doing is nontraditional approaches to change or to fix or to rectify certain problems within law enforcement, then i think we need to start way further upstream and we need to center policing and criminal justice outcomes in the national conversation about participating in american democracy. so if you're talking about a look of the criminal justice system, that's fair and appropriate and the appropriate scale. but i think that also needs to be integrated with these upstream issues that are fundamental ways to participating in american democracy. part of the issue of what has become traditional policing is traditional policing approaches have started with the acceptance that most of the american citizenry wants criminal justice to stay away and out of line of sight. and what that's done is separated it so we pickpicket police departments in a way we would never do to our schools or hospitals. i hope if there's a call to do

this, there would be the opportunity, first, to do it in an ongoing way so it doesn't happen once but it happens once and again and again and again and also an integrative way so the criminal justice is not on the hook for all of the outcomes and communities are able to take sort of empowerment over the rest of it. >> thank you. great question to finish with. i'm fully supportive of a national crime commission. i think it's critical to the future of all of us of being part of a greater nation. crime is a symptom of dysfunction across the board. police are the only entity that you can dial three numbers and get an immediate response and come out there to an emotionally charged very difficult complex situation. often times with very, very little information to work with and have to work under sometimes life threatening circumstances. it's dynamic, it's emotional, and it goes back to a number of root causes. some of them mentioned here. health care, education poverty

as drivers and so many others. but we tend to deal with it and the focus is on the police as a silo. and we need to be able to have a response that's not a silo but rather a web of all of the different entities that you mentioned earlier. and that starts with early childhood you know, health care and then education and all the way through with mentoring and all of the things that we value and accept in many of our communities as the norm. and that's something that we pitted each other in many ways against each other, competing -- in effect, basically, dissolve the team, and instead, acted as individual agencies where we couldn't possibly expect to be successful.

the analogy earlier of the teaching hospital, i think, is critical. we don't do enough of those type of things. i think we can learn a lot from the health care model looking at the underlying symptoms and providing a treatment long-term for the individual whether that's an individual person in the community or, you know, the body that we're tasked with protecting. >> i think your suggestion is an excellent one. if you look at the evidence on citizen attitudes and confidence in the criminal justice system in general. policing comes off looking great by comparison. and i think stepping back and taking a larger view of as you're suggesting of the functioning of the criminal justice system is you know, is a very important and timely idea.

>> just to put numbers on it in both the united kingdom and the united states, the confidence in local courts is running about 15% compared to 60s for the police. so there's a huge difference. and i think that the 1967 report of a commissionáappointed by president johnson is something that shaped an entire generation of reform, not to say the careers of reformers some of us being here at the table because of that report. but it's striking that report was far more comprehensive and detailed with respect to the different pieces of the criminal justice system. it wasn't just the overall report of the commission. it was the task force report, the police, the task force report on corrections, report, i believe, on probation. and even on science and technology, and there was so much research behind each one of those task force reports. so the first systematic observational evidence we have

on police interaction with the public showing us that most of the time when they can make an arrest, they don't, was done by my ph.d. supervisor who observed 10,000 individuals with 36 observers encountering the police in about 3,000 situations in three cities. and that revolutionized our understanding of the police. it goes to a lack of investment in ongoing policy research that could help to contribute to reform. and i will contrast that commission with something that we've all forgotten about, which is one appointed by a later president, it's called a national advisory commission on criminal justice standards and goals, which i challenge anybody here to remember one recommendation of. because i don't think they did any research. i don't think the research was there to back up the recommendations. but i do think that if you go back to the '67 report, you will find a recommendation that we create much larger police departments all over the

country. >> really? >> let me also echo some of my panelists fellow panelists observations, and thank you for the question commissioner ramsey. i frame it somewhat differently however. and you said time 50 years later to look at the criminal justice system. and actually, i would -- i would broaden our scope. i gave a talk a while ago referencing the same presidential commission that professor sherman alluded to. and the title of that talk was the tyranny of the funnel. and the basic theory was we have intellectual tyranny. we think of the system as our response to crime. right? and that we put everything into a funnel and the police make an arrest, the prosecutors do what they do. it goes off the end of the assembly line, off to corrections or probation. and we have justice.

and that has, it's important to understand the operations of the agencies and think about how each one of them can be improved. but actually the fundamental question we're talking about here, first of all, how do we prevent crime? that's not about the system only. but we -- also then quickly go to the recognition that we have to think carefully. how do we respond to the harm committed by one of us against another one of us? that's a democratic question, right? what's the role of the state in that. what's the role of families and communities and to that harm. and if you start with the harm, we call it crime. if you start with the harm, it means somebody's been harmed. and that person may or may not have called the police. so as some of you know, i'm very influenced by the writing of my wife on this topic.+ñ3. victim's perspective on justice. and half of them never report to the police. and for most of them, they never see an arrest so they never get

put into this assembly line that is the funnel. so at least i would start with -- how do we respond to the harm that is committed against one of us? and that means doing something for the trauma experienced by that crime victim as we call them. that's not compensation. that's not restitution necessarily. that's the system at work. it's responding to the need of that one of us to haveú át)áh @r(t&háhp &hc% life back on track. that's the first imperative justice in my view. and then we have the related question, which is how do we respond if we can find that person to the person who committed that harm against one of us in ways that recognize they may have significant challenges that brought them to that moment. medical issue, mental health issues. and if there's some appropriate role of the state in exacting some sort of deprivation of liberty, perhaps very serious harm. we have to limit that power, as well. we also should recognize those two individuals may have

something going on between them. that the system is very poorly equipped to do anything about it. they may have a history of conflict. they may have -- they may be a landlord tenant. who knows what. the adjudication system we all learn in law school. actually, take the blood out of those conflicts and don't -- and disempower the individuals who are in conflict to do something about their relationship. so it's not the system that we need to start with. we need to start with these relationships and the harm caused by somebody against someone else. and ultimately for those who go into the system and become -- and convicted very serious offenses. another colleague of ours gave me this wonderful phrase once. we have to figure out how to live with the felons amongst us. some of those people caused harm are then adjudicated to have done something very serious. meaning they go off to prison. and guess what, they all come back.

so we have this question of, how do we reintegrate into our society? those who have caused those harms, been adjudicated and taken away from us for a while. it's really these big democratic societal questions that go to, yes, they go to other government functions, but really to how do we deal with conflict in our society? and it becomes more complicate ed when you add race to the equation. that system has done enormous harm to our pursuit of racial justice. the optimism i sense not just from my students but everybody in this field that now is the time to do things very differently. there's a sense this is a breakthrough moment. your idea is really very timely. >> on that very optimistic note

i think all of us should thank this marvelous panel. >> and i also want to say, i know you're extraordinarily busy. to move your schedules around to be here, we're appreciative. let me turn to my co-chair and also all of the panelists or task force members for their final comments. >> well, just a few final thoughts. this is the seventh and last listening session. it has been a very interesting experience. and we've gotten a lot of feedback both from oral testimony, written testimony. people who appeared and asked questions from the audience. and i'm confident that we will have concrete recommendations for the president on march 2nd as he has requested.

i'm also very optimistic, like jeremy travis that this is just the beginning of a much broader discussion that needs to happen. if we really truly want change. and the best opportunity for change is in a time when you have a crisis. and we're at that moment in history where we can move in one direction or another. but we know the status quo is not going to really get us anywhere. so i really welcome the challenge. i think this is an exciting time to be part of this profession. it's an exciting time i would imagine to be a researcher. to maybe have an opportunity to work in other countries and make comparisons and see how things can change by looking through a different lens that perhaps you didn't look through before you had that opportunity. but this is time now for us to not only listen but to turn this into some kind of action and i think that was -- how do you

make that happen? how do we establish the lines of communication communication? how do you make it happen in your particular jurisdiction? just because it works in l.a. doesn't mean i can transplant it to philadelphia. what should the tweaks be? i like what dr. goff said, is what we don't need is another commission that does work for two years and sits on a shelf. there has to be ongoing44 dialogue. we have to continue to tweak and improve what we're doing. but also be sensitive in knowing that"b4ñ what we do in policing has a ripple effect on the rest of the system. and that's why we have to be very careful. something as simple as not too long ago in philadelphia where a decision was made for some small, minor offenses you know summary offenses that by state law we'd been required to actually make a physical arrest now want to issue citations. fine, we'll issue citations.

who is going to process those things on the other end? who is going to handle that work load? and so if something as simple as that has a ripple effect unintended consequences we have to carefully think through. and that's why i think a comprehensive look at everything the drivers what happens once somebody enters the funnel, what happens when they come out and back in. we talk about crime prevention, but what does that mean? at what point in time does that start? how much crime will we accept before you actually do punish? these are serious questions. and there needs to be some consistency in a way in which we apply it. so we don't have situations where people believe that one group of people do this, another group of people do the same thing that there'll be severe consequences for this group but not so severe for another group. and whether that's real or perceived, it's something we have got to grapple with and we've got to deal with. and it's going to really require all of us police and others to take a real hard look at

ourselves and even air a little bit of dirty laundry which initially might be a little uncomfortable. but in the long run, will make for a stronger and better profession. you all have helped us a great deal more than you probably can imagine. i want to thank all of you for that. we'll turn to the other task force members. and we're going to work our way down. >> well, i thank commission ramsey, you pretty much stated it all. and without being redundant. i want to thank you all for being here in sharing your experience with us, as well. and i, too, am optimistic we're embarking upon is going to be very important to this country now because something needs to

be done now. and as we move toward a future, as well. so thank you all very much. >> so thanks to all the panelists who came in today. very informative panel, good recommendations that we will discuss. this wraps us up i think. this is the last panel that we'll be having. and now we have a few days to deliberate and make some decisions and get this report to the white house early next week. my hope is that we can do that that the recommendations are strong, that we can see them through even after this process. and also that we can do that in a timely way. because time is crunched. but, again, thank you to all of the panelists and all of the folks working behind the scenes. and i know we showed you a lot of love at the beginning. but definitely have to do that again.

who have been assisting us in this process and guiding us along the way. >> tanisha anderson kajim powell antonio martin sean bell emmanuel comfort michael bell, vonderret myers eric garner ayanna jones, and 200 days ago michael brown. these are the names that brought thousands of young and old people from their homes over the last 200 days and beyond. these are the names that continue to shake me out of my comfort and hold me in a position of urgency. these are the names that brought me here and i know many more names brought all of us here. i name the names because in all of our deliberations and reporting and testifying and

word smithing and recommending we must remember this is fundamentally about the inherent unnegotiable human dignity that all of our american systems should preserve and affirm and never threaten especially for our most disenfranchised and marginalized, people of color, low-income families, black and brown children. lives must not be lost for us to continue to have this conversation. too often the story of oppressed people is one of a -- i read these names in particular as we enter deliberations. not because they are the only names that matter but because they are the ones to whom i am accountable. their deaths require that we turn tragedy into permanent systemic racially equitable change. i believe we have the power to do some good but only if we keep our humanity at the center. i'm appreciative of the chance to take that step with all of you and deeply thankful to all of the people who have made this work possible. thanks.

>> thank you, brittany. we began our hearings in january. with the panel and at that panel one of our speakers, one of our witnesses was professor sam walker. and in addition to invokeing the 1967 report that we've spoken so much about today he held up a book. which was the report of the kerner commission which happened about the same time. the kerner commission's report was a response to some of the incidents like the ones that brittany has recounted. but it also turned out that many of the police riots, in fact, almost every single one of them. if my memory of that report is correct was sparked by some kind of police interaction, not necessarily a fatal incident

but some kind of police action. and so in addition to being mindful of the names that brittany has just mentioned, i want us to be mindful of a particular history that we have recounted before, that that is also our jumping off point. and while much has been made, as has been mentioned already today that the policing that we have today is a function of the -- in some part of the 1967 report, we have made much too little progress. and it's my hope that we can connect what we're doing on this task force today to history. and that mindful of those lessons, we can make a collective decision that it's time to change. >> well, i especially want to thank the panel. this was probably the most incredible panel to end our series of hearings. i think criminal justice

students around the nation. if they listened to just this particular panel it would spur conversations for semesters and years to come. one of the things i think brought us to this task force was what many of us have called the elephant in the room of race. and i think we've really discussed that quite a bit. but professor sherman i appreciate you bringing the other elephant in the room to our attention. and that is how do we improve this profession when we have 18,000 different ideas about how it should be done. and i think that is an issue that we have to grapple with because at the end of the day, no matter how grand our recommendations are we have to convince 18,000 leaders to adopt them. and so, i really appreciate you escorting that elephant into the room and thank you very much for all my fellow panel members and supporters. this has been an incredible discussion today. thank you.

>> i would echo my colleagues. thanks for the witnesses here today and all of the witnesses that we've had over the course of the last several weeks. we've we've really engaged in an ongoing dialogue and i hope that this is the start of that dialogue. for the most part the dialogue has not been about blame. it's about recognition. as professor travis said earlier in his testimony, police are the tip of the spear. they bear a burden not of their own making in many, many respects. i'm very encouraged and look forward to working together with the rest of the task force to come up with solid recommendations to give the president next week but i think that really will just be the beginning because we do have to recognize our history.

i think we also have to be ready to make history. and that's what i look forward to doing in the coming days. so thank you very much. thank you for the opportunity and the leadership that you've shown. >> tell you just a very quick story. about six months ago i was actually invited to do a talk in sweden, stockholm sweden and i took the flight over and i was told to make my body adjust to the times something that i'm sensitive to right now i should stay up all day and not go to sleep until nighttime in sweden which would be a 40-hour day for me. so i did that. i walked around and it was a beautiful sunny day. it was a much more diverse community than i thought it was going to be. then i saw something that worried me. i saw a police officer having an encounter with a young mother who was surrounded by her three children. they all looked under the age of six. i didn't speak any swedish so i

couldn't understand what was going on but it seemed like this mother was in crises about something and she was dealing with the police officer. so i watched what was going to happen just given my interest in these issues. then i saw something quite amazing. the mother at some point just left, went into a store and the police officer watched this mother's three children while she went into the store to get something. then she came back out. she thanked the police officer. the police officer thanked her. the kids said good-bye to the police officer. he said good-bye to the kids. and i realized she had asked him to watch her children while she went into the store. my first reaction was that that would never happen in america. it would never happen. what i'm most excited about and grateful about for this whole process is that i'm actually revising that opinion. i think we've heard testimony we've heard from people who have perspectives that we can actually change the identity of policing. we can change the character of policing. so maybe that could happen in america. maybe we can create communities where mothers with children who

are in crises feel like the police officer is the first person that they should talk to when they're frying to problem-solve a situation. i'm very excited about that. i was concerned whether we were going to get even more since we've heard so much and absolutely that concern has been alleviated. you've all contributed something new, distinct, different and valuable to the process that we're going to try to make forward. i particularly want to appreciate this idea of reconciliation. for many of us, the injury that has been created by centuries, decades of conflict, police being the manifestation of that conflict, cannot be addressed until we talk honestly about how we recover from that injury no matter what the policy recommendations are. i want to especially thank you for advancing that idea and my colleagues for facilitating a process that has made me much more helpful about what we can do about policing in this country.

>> i think that i have experienced the world series, the all-star game and the super bowl at one with today's panel. my thanks to the co-chairs for bringing on this last panel. it couldn't have ended with any better representation of all the expertise and knowledge that we've been privileged enough to listen to. i think it really brings up the point of the basis of research and the importance of research in any recommendations we come up with. we have to not give in to the attractive idea of basing recommendations upon anecdotal painting of issues. truth has got to be the basis and it has to be an all encompassing truth supported by research at all levels. we need to be aware of the power though of perception and how perception can really influence the impact of our profession and

the ability of us to do our job. brian's story here just reminded me of something. i'm going to give another story from my agency just off the cuff here to maybe help to reinforce his newfound feelings. on valentine's day while i was at another one of these listening sessions, back home i had a burglary of a flower truck that had thousands of bouquets and flower arrangements that were headed out to different obviously, recipients. my officers located that truck, and when they opened it up found that the air conditioning was off and the flowers were in danger of dying. we brought police cars in from around the sector, filled the police cars with the flowers, took them back over to the florist to get them under air conditioning. i think that's one day we probably could have measured our

crime efforts by all the bouquets that got delivered that day. that's what i see when i talk about my police officers and the type of hearts that they have. it's easy to get caught up in the high profile mistakes that we do make. i'm not saying we don't. but we have to remember the reason most police officers went into this profession is to help others. we have to reclaim that idea and help make sure that they remember those thoughts and they recognize that and don't get affected by the sin similar that this job can do. my thanks to the staff and to president obama for putting this panel together and allowing me to serve on this. so back to the chairs. >> a few final thoughts. as a washington native and a student of history, i think about the sin similar

potentially about a task force set up to solve a problem and i reflect back too on the crime commission, the johnson crime commission, which i think has made a very substantial -- had a substantial impact on our field. i teach about the crime commission findings to my students and they're actually very interested in it. as some of you may know, my husband served as a young staff attorney writing about the police chapter helping contribute to that. i think it has had some fundamental influence on our field. but moving far ahead to one of the fundamental questions will be whatever we write up, what happens to implementation. i think several of you have mentioned that. and that of course, is the big

question. so movingv┘y ahead, i think your testimony today has been very, very h zó11ñ as has that of other witnesses in helping us in thinking ahead on what we do in our recommendations and what others do in helping us in grasping and grappling with those questions and the issue about the 18,000 departments out there really goes to the fundamental heart of this. but thank you again for coming. thank you for your thoughts. thank you for all of your recommendations. with that, let me turn back to our director ron davis. >> once again, i say this to every panel but this is especially true as we close this phase up. on behalf of the president, let me thank the panelists for coming, for those that are watching and especially for the task force members for their contribution. interesting when we talk about everybody mentioned about a 90-day task force but if you

look at the process that we're following and the steps that we're going into there's really multiple phases that are going to extend beyond the 90 days. for example, as we close this phase out, i'm struck by a couple things. one, i think brian mentioned this. i'm sitting here after 28 years in law enforcement, my own changing in thoughts about chern certain things. just ,'g7éi= mzez public hearings, listen to 150 witnesses and the quality of community leaders that have really destroyed so many stereotypes just in the first phase of this process, that it says a lot. views have changed on this panel. views have probably changed in this nation just by watching and listening. that's the first phase. we've shown how we can have diverse perspectives ranging from community leaders and youth leaders to long-term police chiefs in how we can come together, build consensus, agree to disagree without being violently disagreeable. we know all of this is just the

first part of it. now we'll go into deliberations and provide a product to the president that everyone on this task force has worked hard to do, they'll be proud of. but we know regardless of where we ultimately end up in this nation with regard to the amount of police departments, we still have an obligation right here right now to not only come up with this product but to deliver it, sell it improve it implement it for the 18,000 agencies that are there. we're going to have to come up with a strategy for that working together. so i have good news and bad news for the task force. the good news is we're getting very close to presenting the report to the president.çn i &háhp &hc% the bad news is if you think this is the last time we're going to call on 3md we have to implement to 18,000 departments so you have much workú g ahead. it's been one of my greatest professional privileges to work with this great team to see these professionals, these great americans come together in such a manner that it is something that i will look back 20 years from now and be proud of and tell the kids and the grandkids what a good time