captioning performed by vitac how do you think the u.s. should confront the problem of providing air power for iran backed shia militias in iraq that are often iran backed and having links to terrorist attacks previously against americans? how do you think that -- >> we shouldn't be collaborating with iranian backed shiite militias and providing them air support either. the central command tested in our armed committee hearing that we were not in fact doing so the militias had withdrawn before we began to use close air spors in tikrit.

it will only bring more strive in iraq if the militias move into anbar totally ineffective as well. they have proven themselves to be a paper tiger. just like iran, couldn't defeat saddam hussein despite the nine-year war whereas we defeated him in a mere three weeks. they have repeatedly showed themselves to be paper tigers not up to the fight. we need to work with the iraq i didn't government and security forces, we don't need an arbitrary cap to the number of troops. some of those are things that going to be near the front lines like forward air controllers to make air power more effective and some are core level assets like intelligence advisers or logistics experts. we in conjunction with the iraqi government need to be taking the fight to the islamic state not trying to rely on toothless iranian backed militias.

>> how about in terms of ramadi right now they have had abadi dispatched these militias to retake the city after the forces fled, even though they outnumbered the isis fighters. what do you think in terms of that situation? >> i don't think it will will be successful because the shiite militia have repeatedly shown themselves not to be up for the fight against islamic state. >> good morning, my name is terry ryan, i'm an air force veteran and i'm going to shift geography a little bit. what foreign policy challenges do you see in latin america and in africa and what would strategies would you recommend because in venezuela, honduras mexico and nigeria, there's great problems. >> let me start with afterry ka since it's closer to -- you do

see that nigeria faces serious challenges with boekko haram. there have been attacks in the past week in response to his promises. we need to work with allied governments like nigeria or in northern africa to continue to provide them the support they need to fight our common islamic terrorist enemies. that is rarely going to be outright military support. it may be combat service support for instance or intelligence support. but we can't fight this -- we can't fight the islamic state or extremism everywhere directly with americans we have to work with local governments that have a strong interest in defeating them as well. and latin america you're right, there many countries on verge of being failed states like venezuela or central american states. we have a strong interest in the

monroe doctrine to ensure the western hemisphere has countries aligned with the united states and report on the western way of life. unfortunately at lot of countries there don't. i don't think the way to do that is support leftist governments in the most extreme example of what president obama has done in cuba by essentially upending 50 years of policy in return for very little to include very little on human rights front. but rather to try to work with governments that are open to the united states and that are willing to support constitutional reforms that protect democratic peoples. sometimes that will involve more military or para military support as it has in colombia over the last 15 years to great success. most of the time it will be a matter of economic and diplomatic cooperation. >> it is interesting though and i'm not trying to bait anything, but when i try to make sense of this, what there are areas where the u.s. and the congress so forth feel compelled to actually

be much more adamant much more involved in actually working on the ground and the other ones taking a more diplomatic approach. how does one pick which ones you're going to actually get in there like in nigeria or not but syria, yes. >> we're not in syria either. >> no. >> but there's more interest in some countries than in others to get more involved. >> well, in summary the middle east, for instance it's been a volatile region for a long time. and we have a critical interest in stability and order in that region and we always have great britain when it played the role of the global super power for much of the 18th and 19th century did as well. we've always had an interest in having a stable middle east because at the cross roads of humanity. that doesn't mean we don't have an interest in particular for the united states in a stable western hemisphere as well. but the threats to the stability

of world order are greater in the middle east, right now they are greater in east asia as well because of a rising and aggressive china than anything you see in southern latin america generally. we do have governments there not friendly but at the same time they are not as hostile as countries like china or russia or iran. >> thank you. >> one final question since we're in the middle of a political season. what do you think will be the main foreign policy issues for the next year for the political campaign and as a republican with 10,000 people joining the race, who do you -- is there anybody you support more than any other? >> no, not endorsed any candidate and don't expect to any time soon. i do hope to help make national security a center piece issue in the campaign. in terms of the issues we face they are too man ifold to reduce to one.

the most immediate question is going to be a nuclear deal with iran because the president is treating that as a mere executive agreement, it will be largely up to the next president to change course. most republicans have said they would. hillary clinton who helped start us down this course in the secret negotiations has implied she would not. i would look at the broader strategic challenges in a few different categories. one is the threat of trans national terrorist islamic state and al qaeda. two, rogue states like iran and north korea. three, rising nation state power like china and four, a declining but still dangerous nation state power like russia. and the republican nominee for president, i hope and i expect will have policies that will reverse the president's policies and put us in a stronger position in all four of those challenges that we face. >> okay i thank the senator for his views and thank you all for coming and thanks again.

>> thank you all. appreciate it. over next several weeks the supreme court will decide a number of cases the center for american progress holds a discussion on what to expect. the cases deal with issues including the affordable care act and marriage rights for gays and lesbians. watch this discussion live at 10:00 eastern on c-span2. tomorrow the senate homeland security and government affairs committee holds a hearing on the oversight of the transportation security administration's challenges. a dhs inspector general and former tsa officer who's written several stories about his tenure

with the agency are scheduled to testify. tune in live on c-span3 at 10:30 a.m. eastern tomorrow. >> tonight on the communitiers, at this year's consumer electronics show we met up with andrew keen and ask him why he feels the internet is not the answer. >> the internet is not the answer at the moment. it's not the answer in the sense it's not working currently. it's lending itself to undermining jobs. it's compounding the inequality of our economic life, it's creating new massive monopolys unimaginable in the 20th or 19th century and this economy in which we've all been internet user have been turned into products. you and i we've been packaged up when we use google or facebook. we've become the product. it's leak a big hitchcock movie.

>> tonight, on the communicators on c-span2. >> thursday on road to the white house, hillary clinton spoke to an audience at texas southern university about voting rights. this is about 30 minutes. [ applause ] >> wow, thank you so very much. i cannot tell you how personally honored i am to be here with all of you to be at this historic institution. let me start by thanking president ruddly everyone at southern texas university. it's a great treat to be here to have heard just briefly from dr. rutley and others about the incredible programs and progress and the fact you graduated more than a thousand young people

into the worldot so many days ago. this institution is the living legacy the absolute embodiment of human sweat and long struggle for civil rights. [ applause ] and for me -- to be surrounded by so many here in houston texas and indeed from across our country who were part of that movement is especially touching. i'm delighted to be here with my friend, sheila jackson lee. she has been -- [ applause ] >> a tireless champion for the people of the 18th district. and the state and the country. [ applause ] >> i have to say though, i expected her to tell you the most important news coming out

of the congress and that is she is finally a member of grandmothers club. [ applause ] >> as a member of a little over eight months it is the best club you'll ever be a member of, sheila. i also have to confess i was excited about coming here and talk about an issue that was important to barbara jordan and should be important to all of us, but to do so in front of dr. freeman is a little daunting. i mean anyone who knows what this man has met not just to barbara jordan, but to so many who have studied here, who have been in any way affected by his brilliant teaching of elkugs and delivery would be a little daunted too.

i notice that both dr. ruddley and sheila got off before dr. freeman came up. i also want to say my thoughts and prayers are with the families in houston and across texas who have been affected by the recent terrible flooding. and i am confident that this community will embrace them. i remember very well coming here after katrina with my husband and in fact we invited to come along a young senator from illinois by the name of barack obama. [ applause ] >> and with sheila and other leaders in the community, we toured the facilities that houston had provided to those who were fleeing that horrific storm. and i saw how people opened their hearts and their homes. this is a city that knows how to pull together and i'm confident

you will do so again on behalf of those suffering from this latest terrible disaster. [ applause ] >> and it is also a special moment to be here knowing that barbara jordan was succeeded by micky leeland and 18th district was so well represented for so long. i'm delighted to be here with allison and to remember the pioneering work he did on behalf of the children and the poor and unger, so many issues he was the champion of. and i want to thank -- [ applause ] >> rosemary mcgowan and all of the friends and loved ones of barbara jordan here today. [ applause ] this is such a particular honor for me because the award is in memory of one of my true

personal heroes. a woman who taught me and so many others the meaning of courage and determination in the pursuit of justice. i first met barbara jordan when i was a young attorney and had been given a position working for the house of representatives' judiciary committee investigating richard nixon. and it was such profound moment in american history. and there wasn't anyone who was a more effective eloquent inquisitor than barbara jordan. as a 26-year-old fresh out of law school as some of you are perhaps now having graduated from the thurgood marshall

school here at tsu -- [ applause ] -- i was riveted and not a little intimidated to tell you the truth by this unstoppable congresswoman from texas. i got to talk with her which was thrilling. i got to hand her papers which was equally exciting. but mostly i got to watch and listen to her. at a time of shaken confidence she stirred the entire nation with her words. remember what she said my faith in the constitution is whole. it is complete. it is total. it was that passion and moral clarity that took barbara jordan from tsu and the halls of the texas legislature all the way to

congress. the first woman, first african-american ever elected to represent texas in the house of representatives. [ applause ] and she defended and continued the civil rights legacy of dr. martin luther king jr., and her friend and mentor, president lyndon johnson. and in particular, she was a staunch advocate for the voting rights act, which had helped make it possible for her to be elected. in 1975 in the face of fierce opposition barbara jordan led the fight to extend the special protections of the voting rights act to many more americans, including hispanic americans native americans and asian

americans as well. [ applause ] [ applause ] and like every woman who has run for national office in this country in the last four decades, i stand here on the shoulders of barbara jordan and so does our entire country. [ applause ] >> boy do we miss her. we miss her courage. we also miss her humor. she was funny. i remember talking to her and ann richards one time and between the two of them -- forget trying to get a word in at all. and they were telling me about how they loved to go to the university of texas women basketball games, right? barbara would be there but that time in her wheelchair, on the

sidelines and ann would be holding court next to her. and barbara would be yelling directions like she was the coach. why are you doing that? jump higher. that's not a pass you know, all of those kinds of sideline comments. >> and so ann was telling me this with barbara right there. and ann said, you know, i finally turned to her, barbara, encourage these young women don't just criticize them. and barbara turned around and said, when they deserve it i will. [ applause ] we sure could use her ir resistible voice. i wish we could hear that voice one more time, hear her express the outrage we feel about the fact that 40 years after barbara jordan fought to extend the

voting rights act, its heart has been ripped out. and i wish we could hear her speak up for the student who has to wait hours for his or her right to vote. for the grandmother who's turned away from the polls because her driver's license expired. for the father who's done his time and paid his debt to society but still hasn't gotten his rights back. [ applause ] >> now, we know unfortunately barbara isn't here to speak up for them and so many others but we are and we have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what's really going on in our country? because what is happening is a

sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other. [ applause ] because since the supreme court eviscerated a key provision of the voting rights act in 2013 many of the states that previously faced special scrutiny because of a history of racial discrimination, have proposed and passed new laws that make it harder than ever to vote. north carolina passed a bill that went after pretty much anything that makes voting more convenient or accessible. early voting, same day

registration, ability of county election officials to even extend voting hours to accommodate long lines. now, what possible reason could there be to end preregistration for 16 and 17-year-olds and eliminate voter outreach in high schools? we should be doing everything we can to get our young people more engaged in democracy, not less. [ applause ] in fact, i would say it is a cruel irony, but no coincidence that millennials, the most diverse, tolerant are now facing so much exclusion. we need look no further than

right here in texas. [ applause ] you all know this far better than i but if you want to vote in this state, you can use a concealed weapon permit as a valid form of identification. but a valid student i.d. isn't good enough? now, crystal watson grew up in louisiana, but came to marshall texas to attend wylie college. she takes her responsibilities so seriously not only did she register to vote in texas where she was living and would be for a number of years, she even became a deputy registrar to help other people vote as well. but this past year when she showed up at her local polling

place with a wiley college i.d., she was turned away. experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of registered voters in texas may well face similar situations and while high profile state laws like those in texas and north carolina get most of the attention, many of the worst offenses against the right to vote actually happen below the radar. like when authorities shift poll locations and election dates. or scrap language assistance for nonenglish speaking citizens, something barbara jordan fought so hard to provide. without the preclearance provisions of the voting rights act, no one outside the local community is likely ever to hear about these abuses.

let alone have a chance to challenge them and end them. now -- [ applause ] it's not a surprise for you to hear that studies and every day experiences confirm that minority voters are more likely than white voters to wait in long lines at polling places. they are also far more likely to vote in polling places with insufficient numbers of voting machines. in south carolina, for example, they are supposed to be one machine for every 250 voters. but in minority areas, that rule is just often overlooked. in richland county, nearly 90% of the precincts failed to meet the standard required by law in 2012 instead of 250 voters per

machine in one precinct. it was more than 430 voters per machine. so not surprisingly people trying to cast a ballot there faced massive delays. now, there are many fair minded well intentioned election officials and state legislators all over our country. but this kind of disparity that i just mentioned does not happen by accident. now some of you may have heard me or my husband say one of our favorite sayings from arkansas i learned it from him, you find a turtle on a fence post it did not get there on its own. [ applause ] well all of these problems with voting just didn't happen by accident.

and it is just wrong. it's wrong to try to prevent undermine, inhibit, americans rights to vote. it's counter to the values we share and in a time when so many americans have lost trust in our political system it's the opposite of what we should be doing in our country. this is the greatest longest lasting democracy in the history of the world. we should be clearing the way for more people to vote not putting up every roadblock anyone can imagine. [ applause ] yet unfortunately today there are people who offer themselves to be leaders whose actions have undercut this fundamental american principle. here in texas, former governor rick perry signed a law that a federal court said was actually

written with the purpose of discriminating against minority voters. he applauded when the voting rights act was gutted and said the lost protection were outdated and unnecessary. but governor perry is hardly alone in his crusade against voting rights. in wisconsin, governor scott walker cut back early voting and signed legislation that would make it harder for college students to vote. in new jersey governor chris christie vetoed legislation to extend early voting and in florida, when jeb bush was governor, state authorities conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the presidential election in 2000. [ applause ] thankfully in 2004 a plan to purge even more voters was headed off.

so today republicans are systemically and deliberately trying to stop millions of american citizens from voting. what part of democracy are they afraid of? i believe every citizen has the right to vote and i believe we should do everything we can to make it easier for every citizen to vote. [ applause ] i call on republicans at all levels of government, with all manner of ambition, to stop fear mongering about a phantom

epidemic of election fraud and start explaining why they are so scared of letting citizens have their say. now, yes this is about democracy but it's also about dignity. about the ability to stand up and say, yes, i am a citizen. i am an american, my voice counts and no matter where you come from or what you look like or how much money you have, that means something. in fact, it means a lot. i learned those lessons right here in texas. registering voters in south texas down in the valley, in 1972, some of the people i met were understandably a little wary of a girl from chicago who didn't speak a word of spanish but they wanted to vote. they were citizens. they knew they had a right to be

heard. they wanted to exercise all of the rights and responsibilities that citizenship conveys. that's what should matter. because when those rights are denied to anyone, we're all the worse for it. it doesn't just hold back the aspirations of individual citizens but holds back our entire country. that's why as a senator i championed a bill called the count every vote act. if it had become law it would have made election day a federal holiday. and mandated early voting opportunities. [ applause ] deceiving voters including sending by flower flyers into minority neighborhoods with false voting times in places would have become a federal crime and many americans would have finally gotten their voting

rights back. well, today with the damage to the voting rights act so severe, the need for action is even more urgent. first, congress should move quickly to pass legislation to repair that damage and restore the full protections that american voters need and deserve. i was serving in the senate in 2006. we voted 98-0 to reauthorize the voting rights act. after an exhaustive review process, there had been more than 20 hearings in both the house and senate judiciary committees. there had been testimony from so many expert witnesses investigative reports documenting continuing discrimination in covered jurisdictions. there was more than 15000 pages

of legislative record. now, that is how the system is supposed to work. you gather the evidence. you weigh it. and you decide and we did, 98-0. we put principle ahead of politics. that's what congress needs to do again. [ applause ] second we should implement the recommendations of the bipartisan presidential commission to improve voting. that commission was chaired by president obama's campaign lawyer and by governor mitt romney's campaign lawyer. and they actually agreed. and they set forth common sense reforms including expanding early absentee and mail voting providing online voter registration establishing the principle that no one should ever have to wait more than 30

minutes to cast your vote. [ applause ] >> third, we should set a standard across our country of at least 20 days of early in person voting everywhere. [ applause ] including opportunities for weekend and evening voting. [ applause ] if families coming out of church on sunday are inspired to go vote they should be free to do just that. [ applause ] we know that early in-person voting will reduce those long lines and give more citizens the chance to participate, especially those who have work or family obligations at a make it difficult to get to the poll s on election day. it's not just convenient it's

also more secure more reliable and more affordable than absentee voting. let's get this done. and i believe we should go either further to strengthen voting rights in america. so today i'm calling for universal automatic voter registration every citizen in every state in the union. [ applause ] everyone, everyone young man or young woman should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18. unless they actively choose to opt out, but i think this would have a profound impact on our

elections and democracy between a quarter and third of all eligible americans remain unregistered and therefore unable to vote. and we should modernize our entire approach to registration. the system we have is a relic from an earlier age that relies on a blizzard of paper records. it's full of errors and in fact, we can do better by making sure registration rules are secure up to date and complete. so when you move your registration should move with you. [ applause ] if you're an eligible voter and want to be registered, you should be a registered voter period. oregon is already leading the way, modernizing its system and the rest of the country should follow. the technology is here. states have already a lot of the data that is needed, it's just a

matter of sinking and streamlining. now, all of these reforms from expanded early voting to modernized registration are common sense ways to strengthen our democracy. but i'll be candid here, none of them will come easily. it's going to take leadership at many levels. now more than ever we need our citizens to actually get out and vote for people who want to hear what's on their minds. we need more activists working to expose abuses educate americans about their rights and hold authorities accountable for protecting them. some of the worst provisions in recent laws have been blocked or delayed by tireless advocates raising the alarm and filing legal challenges but they can't do it alone. we need more grass roots

mobilization efforts like the moral monday movement in north carolina to build momentum for reform. we need more justices on the supreme court who will protect every citizen's right to vote. [ applause ] i mean, the principle underlying our constitution which we had to fight for a long time to make apply to everybody, one person, one vote and we need a supreme court that cares more about protecting the right to vote of a person than the right to buy an election of a corporation. [ applause ] but of course you know what we really need? we need more elected leaders from houston to austin to

washington to follow in the footsteps of barbara jordan and fight every day for the rights and opportunities of every day americans, not just those at the top of the ladder and we need to remember that progress is built on common ground not scorched earth. when i traveled around as your secretary of state, one of the most frequent questions i was asked was how could you and president obama work together after you fought so hard in that campaign? people were genuinely amazed which i suppose is understandable considering that in many places when you lose an election or oppose somebody who wins you could get imprisoned or exiled or killed and not ask to be secretary of state. and it's true i was surprised when the president asked me to serve. but he made that offer and i accepted it for the same reason we both love our country!

[ applause ] so my friends, here at this historic institution let us remember america was built by people who knew our common interest was more important than our self-interest. they were fearless in pursuit of a stronger, freer, fairer nation. as barbara jordan famously reminded us when the constitution was first written it left most of us here out. but generations of americans fought and marched and organized and prayed to expand the circle of freedom and opportunity. they never gave up and never backed down. nearly a century ago on this very day, after years of struggle, congress finally passed the 19th amendment to

give women the right to vote in the united states. [ applause ] so that is that is the story of progress courageous men and women, expanding rights not restricting them and today we refuse -- we refuse to allow our country in this generation of leaders to slow or reverse america's long march towards a more perfect union. we owe it to our children and grandchildren to fight just as hard as those who came before us to march just as far to organize just as well and to speak out just as loudly and to vote every chance we get for the kind of future we want. that's what barbara jordan would do. that's what we should do in

honor of her. thank you and may god bless you. [ applause ] [ applause ] >> next a talk at the cato institute on the baltimore riots, followed by a roundtable discussion with ben cardin on the city's recovery. over the next several weeks the supreme court will decide a number of cases. the center for american progress holds a discussion on what to expect. the cases deal with issues including the affordable care act and marriage rights for gays and lesbians. watch this discussion live at 10:00 eastern on c-span2. tomorrow the senate homeland security and government affairs

committee holds a hearing on the oversight of transportation security administration's challenges, a dhs inspector general and tsa officer who written stories about tenure with the agency are scheduled to testify. tune in live on c-span3 at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow. >> this summer book tv will cover book festivals from around the country and top nonfiction authors in books. near the end of june, watch for the annual roosevelt reading festival from the presidential library. in the middle of july we're live at the harlem bookfair with author interviews and panel discussions. at the beginning of september we're live from the nation's capitol for the national book festival celebrating its 15th year. that's a few of the events this summer on c-span2's book tv. >> in may the cato institute hosted a discussion analyzing the recent protests and police

actions in baltimore. the panelists talked about ways to improve community policing and use of body cameras by law enforcement and poverty in baltimore and other american cities. this is about an hour. >> good afternoon, everybody. i am peter russo, the director of congressional affairs at the cato institute. lessons from baltimore. just over three weeks ago charges were filed against six baltimore police officers for their roles in the death of 25-year-old freddie gray. this announcement largely though not entirely stamped out violence in the west and northwest neighborhoods in baltimore. soon the fires were put out and curfews were ended so too went the army of press who went on to

cover more enticeing stories. left behind were over 100 injured police officers and 500 people jailed and burnt vehicles, more than 350 damaged businesses but also many questions. most obvious, who is to blame? there's plenty to go around. not least of which are the writers who chose justice with more injustice and likely counter productive. what about the police? the last few years have seen a wave of excessive force, deadly force even unlawful searches and seizures and discriminatory policing? it's no longer novel to see thin blue line square off against violent demonstrators. for those who watch national policy unfold from washington, two broad questions arise. how is the federal government contributing to these problems? and second what role does it have in resolving them? at first one might assume, none after all, the police function is a local matter right?

>> not so fast. the federal government launched two domestic wars, the war on poverty and enterprise spearheaded by lyndon johnson and in 1971, nixon's war on drugs. more recently a third war then called the war on terror and sparked by international events ushered in homeland national security. and an accompanied era of fear. no longer were we worried about armed drug cartels but international terrorists with a pension for indiscriminate and spectacular violence. the results have contributed pernicious effects to american life. tremendous amounts of resources are expended to all levels of government to solve the problems of poverty and drugs and terrorism. the cost of these are not just peck kuhn narry. what should the federal government do about it? should the department of justice sue the city of baltimore for a

practice of civil rights violations? i'm aware the president in congress made steps in this direction but what about police equipment? defense oriented officer safety items seem to be a no brainer. does it make sense for local police departments to deploy weapons of war armored vehicles and weaponized aircraft and grenade launchers and large caliber firms? >> what considerations do body camera merit? so let's dig in. to my right, tim lynch is director at cato's project on criminal justice which has become a leading voice since the bill of rights and civil liberties. research interests include the war on terrorism, overcriminalization, drug war, militarization of police tactics and gun control. he joined 1981 and published widely on a variety of national periodicals and frequent guests on public interest programs.

he is a member of the wisconsin drikt of columbia and supreme court bars. a policy analyst at the cato institute. matthew worked at reason magazine as assistant editor of reason.com and worked at american conservative liberal democrats in the institute of economic affairs. matthew is a dual british american citizen and received ba and ma in philosophy from the university of reading in england. finally mike tanner senior fellow at kat cato a emphasis on social welfare policy and health care reform and social security. a prolific author his newest book "going for broke" will be released in just a few weeks in june. tanner's writings have appeared in every major american newspaper, and appear regularly on network and cable news programs. each of our speakers will have about 10 to 12 minutes and after

which we'll open it up to session of q and a. let's welcome tim lynch. or please welcome tim lynch. try it that way. >> thanks, peter. good afternoon everybody. it's great to see such an excellent turnout on the eve of a holiday weekend. glad you could be with us. i do have a lot of ground to cover. so let me jump right in. as peter mentioned yesterday, a grand jury in baltimore approved criminal charges against six police officers in that city. the officers who were involved in the arrest of freddie gray. it looks like their criminal trial of those officers will not get underway until this coming fall. freddie gray lost his life in a horrifying set of circumstances. the authorities tell us that

freddie was handcuffed and put into the back of a police van but that police officers did not put him in a seat belt. so with his hands handcuffed behind his back, he would not able to brace to brace himself as the police van moved along around the city and as he pleaded for medical help, again the authorities tell us that the officers who were responsible for him ignored his pleas. a medical examiner later reportedfreddie's spine was snapped, he fell into a coma, and later died of those injuries. the protests we saw in ferguson last summer and the protests in baltimore that started after freddie's case came to light has started a long overdue discussion of poverty and policing especially in our cities. my remarks are going to focus on police tactics and police

misconduct and the police misjustice system more generally. we started the national police misconduct reporting project and you can find that on the web at policemisconduct.net. each day we gather together misconduct incidents from around the country and one of our purposes is to draw more attention to the problems of police misconduct and also to develop policies that can reduce the number of incidents and bring accountability to those who abuse their power. now, sometimes people ask me well isn't everyone by definition already against police misconduct, and my response is that well, on one level, yes. no one defends police brutality or illegal searches, but people do disagree on -- they do not always agree on what constitutes

police misconduct. people do not always agree on the scope of the problem, and people do not always agree on what to do about it. after studying the problem of police misconduct for several years, it is apparent that the problem is worse than many people realize. we're not just talking about, you know, the proverbial few bad apples. the department of justice is now investigating the baltimore police department for what it calls a pattern and practice of constitutional violations. these federal investigations have been conducted before. we've seen department of justice investigators go in to departments in new orleans, philadelphia, seattle, miami, oakland, and many other cities, but it's begun to get more prominence since they moved into the ferguson police department last year and issued their scathing report about that department.

and what usually happens is there's a familiar pattern that's found over and over again in these large sized police departments and medium sized they go into. what they found is it's rare. they tentin'd to be very tilted toward the officer and against the citizen. review is rarely staffed. they do find lawsuits in settle. s, lawsuits for police brutality that are brought against the city. but what happens in these cases is the taxpayers end up paying for the jury verdicts and the awards and the culpable officers who juries have found have overstepped the line and broke the law, these officers are not held accountable and disciplined when these jury verdicts come

in. sometimes they're not just not disciplined. sometimes they're even promoted. not because of what they did but because there's just no feedback loop between what a jury finds in a lawsuit and the other work that that officer is involved in. now, i'm going hazard a guess and say that in a few months the department of justice is going to issue a report on the baltimore department and they're going to find a pattern and practice of problems there because we really already know those problems exist. "the baltimore sun" did an extensive expo say on the department and all of the police misconduct lawsuits that have been brought against that city over the years. i suspect that the department of justice is going to issue another scathing department report finding a number of scathing problems with the baltimore police department and they'll issue a series of recommendations and then the mayor of baltimore and the

police chief there will ledge they will move on these recommendations to get the department on a better track. we've seen this before. and a few days ago i should also mention that the white house task force on policing, they issued a report just a few days ago that contained dozens and dozens of recommendations to improve policing and race relations. but i'm afraid the reforms that we see reforms calling for more police training more data collection, more transparency in the police departments, these proposals are good, but they really talk around a basic problem. so even if they are implemented in good faith by police officials in the cities we're not going to see anything more than improvements at the margins. if we want to get dramatic

improvement from our current situation, we have to dramatically consider our policy on drugs as peter mentioned at the outset. the drug war has been going on now for some 40 years, and it has been a failure. the war policy has not stopped drugs from coming into the country. the drug war has not stopped people from using drugs. and the war policy has not kept drugs way from our schools. each year the government spends billions of dollars on the war effort, but it cannot even keep drugs out of our penitentiaries. and it's bad enough that we're pouring a lot of money into a policy that's not working, but it's actually worse than that. the policy is counterproductive. it is creating more problems than it is solving. and one of these problems concerns the relationship between young minority men and the police. during the days of alcohol prohibition, there was a

thriving underground market to supply liquor to those who wanted it. today we have a thriving underground market to supply narcotics to the people who want to use them. and it's no secret that young minority men in our cities in the poor neighborhoods are tempted to make some cash selling drugs. they're disproportionately part of the trade that sell drugs out into the open and this underground market created by our drug policies is standing out there and it's telling these young men that, yeah, even if you drop out of school there's still going to be an opportunity to go make some cash. unfortunately it's one of the only ways in which many of these people can make cash because they are in poor neighborhoods. they do not have the skills from the schools that are failing them, and this is standing out there as an opportunity to make a quick buck. now, you combine that situation with what we ask the police to

do. the police are tasked with waging the war policy. they're told to go out and make drug busts and the police are often evaluated by the number of arrests that they make and the drugs that they seize. so we have this powerful dynamic at work where the police are constantly clashing with young minority men in our cities. so many of the stops and searches on the streets of our cities they're not about burglary investigations. they're not about rape investigations. they're about trying to make drug busts. there is a marijuana arrest in the united states every minute 24/7, all year long. and that's just marijuana. and behind every arrest there are dozens and dozens of searches stops, and raids that

go on. i have to lay that kind of background before we can you know, discuss some of the proposals that have been put forward. one of the president's proposals is called my brother's keeper. it's designed to help mentor young minority men. we also have proposals to collect more information from the police departments about their stops about, you know, the persons who are stopped, how long the stop took place, whether any drugs were seized, collect more information from the police. we also have the popular proposal to spend more money on body cameras, which we'll be talking about in a few minutes. these ideas, there's some merit to them but it's only going to bring small marginal improvement from where we are right now. if we want to take some intermediate steps to try to get

some better results, the police departments can scale back on the stop-and-frisk tactics that the police have been using in minority neighborhoods. these are tactics where the police stop people pedestrians out on the street when they suspect that there's some criminal activity afoot, and they'll stop and often frisk people down see if they have any drugs or weapons on their persons. in new york city -- now, these are tactics that would never be tolerated in the suburbs. you know, a lot of my friends complain about police searches or tsa searches at airports. now, if you can imagine, at least when you're going to an airport, you can kind of prepare yourself. you know you're going to be going through that. but if you can imagine you know this stuff happening in your everyday life like when you want to go to work, go see a friend go to a movie and you're stopped by the police

detained and frisked, you can begin to get an idea what life is like for young minority men in the inner cities. in new york city between 2004 and 2012, there have been 4.5 million stops, and what's interesting -- this is from a federal case when this was challenged in federal court and the judge found that of these 4.4 million stops in nearly 90% of the cases there was no summons given or no arrest. now, remember, in order to make a stop legal, the police say that they had a pretty good reason for stopping somebody because they thought criminal activity was afoot. but yet what the judge found and what was undisputed by the litigants is that in nearly 90 p of the case, there was no summons, no arrest. they stopped somebody, may have detained them, may have frisked that person and nothing happened. it kind of is a window into this realm where the police -- their

incentive is to stop people to try to find drugs. they're not purposely trying to harass people, but they're evaluated by, you know the number of arrests that they make and yet they're told in court that they had a good reason for stopping somebody, and yet 90% of the cases 090%, it turns out they were wrong. it turns out not to be the case otherwise, there would have been a simmons or arrest. this has happened right here in washington, d.c. as well. judge brown has written eloquently about this, u how young minority men are treated differently, that if the police had stopped several people in business attire hanging out outside of a starbucks, we don't seem to see that type of thing happen, and yet when it comes to

the power people who live in a different part of town, the police rush up, detain these people, and subject them to frisks. she said this creates a lot of problems treats people differently, and puts the residents of minority in a community in a police battle. these are the people coming out to protest when things go so far as when somebody is actually killed like a freddie gray. mayor de blasio in new york city has begun to scale back on stop-and-frisks in new york city. that's one thing other leaders can do. the stop-and-frisk tactics create a lot of resentment in our cities and they're really misguided. the other thing we can do is stop the flow from the pep gone.

president obama talked about this on monday. when the police roll into these neighborhoods in armored vehicles and camouflage and wearing helmets and military-type weaponry, there are violent raids on people's homes. we have a map on the cato institute website. we call it the raid map. they include raids on residents' homes. too afternoon people are trampled, people get hurt, and more generally, even if you're not the subject of the search your next-door neighbor people begin to view the police not as a force that's helping them solve problems but as an occupying force coming in. we used to refer to police officers as peace officers.

they were there to respond to a disturbance and restore the police. these days too often they're rolling into the neighborhoods in the middle of the night early in the morning conducting a violent raid and actually creating the disturbance. that's another problem that we night to reverse. another thing that we can take a look at is re-examine the red tape that too many police units have put into place with respect to accomplishes. there's too much red tape to almost at times get rid of a bad police officer. sometimes a police chief will tell you they know who the bad apples are right now, but it's almost impossible to get them off of the force because of the red tape in involve. our friends on the right see this in the education department where it's hard to get rid of bad teachers because of union contracts but the same problem

exists are request ss with respect to that. i'm almost out of time. once again, if we want to see dramatic improvements, we have to see it end the same way we saw alcohol prohibition to an end. that's not to say the problems won't go away. it's always going be with us but we can see significant improvements in these areas if we were to bring the drug war to an end. at cato we've studied the policies of other countries including portugal and one of the primary objections we used to hear is if we or two end the drug war we'd see a spike in drug use and a public health crisis and it would be too late to turn back. turns out if you study what has happened in portugal, that did not happen.

there was no spike. the policy has been in that place in that country for many years and there's no effort to say, oh my gosh, we made a mistake, we need to reverse that. in fact, other countries are beginning to look at portugal and study what they're doing there and looking in that direction. we should le place focus on violent crime and let health officials focus on drug abuse. thank you for your attention. >> okay. well, thank you tim, thank you, peter, thank you all for coming. i want to follow up on what tim said regarding the issue about body cameras which are tools that are often cited as remedies for police misconduct. in the wake of tragic deaths like freddie gray and michael brown.

i often hear if we had cameras on more police officers we could hold plvs accountable. what i want to do is discuss the data on body cameras and what their effects are. the role that body cameras can play into police misconduct t role of the federal government where i'm, i suppose, standing now, albeit in a basement, and the issues that must be addressed if anyone is interested in formulating a body camry policy. sol one of the most cited body camera studies was carried out in rialto, california. it was a study carried out from february 2012 to february 2015. 50 officers wore the cameras. half the officers did wear cameras. the other half, they did not. interestingly this was the result. this is from the raw data. so you'll see that the last batch right here, this is the experimental period. there was a dramatic drop in use

of force incidences as well as complaints against police officers. now, that might strike you as great evidence that body cameras play a big role in police behavior. but there are a couple of things i want to point out in this study. first off there th is not the classic case. so the study came in after the new police chief came in. we don't know to what extent the other reforms also contributed to this. also it's worth point ought that we don't know what the welcome results are because the cameras make citizens behavior better if they make police officers bane baiv better. we have this interesting problem. we can't isolate the effects. are these body cameras have a citizenizing effect or both. i have come across a problem

that other people have found. i was very limited to a peer review study on the body camera. if anyone is in the position to kaye out such a study, i would urge them to do so. another study was done in arizona. 50 cameras, 12 months. the first six months activation was require. in the second half, activation was up to the officer. two things i want to point out to the study. when the officers were allowed to turn them off or on at their own discretion t camera use declined 42%. that should tell us something. while looking at the literature there's a point to keep in mind, which are volunteers and who were assigned to wear the cameras. in this, there was a mixture of both.

the blue team refers to soft ware that police used to record complaints and use-of-force incidents. as you can see, there's a decline in complaints and well as useful study. we're not sure whether it's because of other variables being look at or other forms in the police department. the lawsuit i want to discuss was in aberdeen scotland. they concentrated in mastrick and northfield. you can look at the chart. it looks like compared to the same period before, june to august 2010 is the trial period. the same the year before there's

a decrease in crime. even the researchers in this study say it's difficult to note the differences. in particular it is challenging to attribute any changes in crime to one specific intervention. given that there are other changes simultaneously both at societal lever for example in terms of restructuring of police services. so the evidence siems to suggest that after the body cam rahs are deployed in a given area, you have proper results. you have the decline in crimes. the next slide shows two areas of study enjoyed a greater decline in aberdeen during the declining period. what do we make of this?

>> what i want to argue is even if the police body cams didn't have any effect, they would still be worth using because of the evidence they provide. the slide here is a still from body cam raj image in march 2014. the man in white with his hands in this position is james boyd who's a homeless schizophrenic who was camping out in the mountains. he was shot and killed and a canine was sent out on him. in january two officers were charged with murder. at the time the county district attorney said in this case we have evidence to establish probable cause we didn't have in other cases. i skr seen many, many body

cameras that show misconduct. the study shows that in fact even if officers are wearing these devices, they still engage in this behavior on occasion. i receive there was a recent case of a man holding a screw diver who was shot and killed in dallas. the officers are not facing charges in that case. going on what tim was saying body cameras are a panacea. you can't expect that they're going to solve our problems. there are other policy reforms with very to consider. first of all i want to talk about federal agencies. i'm a federalist, i believe it should with handled at the local and state level. i don't believe they should tell local businesses how to do their

business. however, a lot of enforcement agencyies have the alkt to arrest people so i think the federal government certainly has a role in discussing body camera policiful these agencies. >> i know they have as well as rand paul and schatz have. i'm more than happy for congressman and senators and the president to take part in a conversation of bomb bod cameras but we should be wary of attaching financial incentives. so i want to finish up by talking about what a good bad camera may looj at. looking throughout the country, there are examples o good policies and exam els of bad

policyies policies. the knee jerk reaction is that they should be on at all the time and available to the public am the time. paem interact with police on the worst days of their lines. we need to think about body cameras for children who have been asaumted or are victims of skejual abees we know from tash cam real footage interact with celebrities and people who have had too much to drink on a saturday policy. we need to have a previous policy states when the camera will be on, when it will be on and when the footage can be relaced in the first place.

i have seen policy proposals, speply the lapd that would allow them to view boll camera video footage before making statements on a violent incident. we need to have a policy in place that puts accountability and transparency ahead of any opportunity by exonerating themselves. i think it should certainly be used as evidence in criminal case bus they should. be afforded. i'm more than happy to take questions afterward but i'm going to hand it over to my colleague miegal tanner at the time. thank you for your time. >> thank you all. i'll try to be brief so we can

get to the question and answer-period. if freddie bray gray in baltimore was the spark that set off the riots in baltimore and the troubles there there was an awful lot of gun powder already lying around, not just in terms of the police misconduct but in term os testify general conditions under which people in that area of town had to live. if you look at sand town, the area where the issue happens in baltimore, more than half the people there are unemployed. this is an area of town that doesn't have a single grocery store. there's not a single restaurant in the area. not even a fast food joint. so you have high unemployment. you have very few opportunities for people and it's not surprising there's a certain hopelessness and december spare and frustration that sets in so when there's an incident like freddie gray it light as spark that then goes off. the question is how do you tamp

this down, how do you solve the problems that bee bea set an area like that how do you give people more hope, more opportunity to get out from under the conditions they're living in in a place like sand town. right after the riots people thought about it. politicians in particular thought about it for ten seconds and immediately came up with an answer which is we need to spend more money. we heard over and over and over again we need to invest in these cities. president obama said it. steny hoyer said it who represented maryland and that area. constantly we heard this refrain. what we really need to do is spend more money because baltimore has been neglected for years. the inner cities have been neglected for years. poverty has been neglected in this country for years. the reality is there's very little evidence of neglect. we have been pouring money for

decades. you know, if you want to go back to 1965 when lyndon johnson declared war on poverty h e have spent $22 trillion in this kun true on anti-poverty programs. last year along lone the government spend $688 billion financing 127 separate anti-porch earth programs. the states tossed in more and so we spent about a trillion last year on poverty. that doesn't strike me as neglect neglect. well between 2003 and 20e 13 which is the last year we have complete data for, baltimore received $6 billion in federal and state grants to fight poverty. and it received an additional $1.6 billion in stimulus money from the big stimulus program

that we had and it spent about $1.4 billion of that $1.6 billion. and yet we still see 25% of baltimoreans living in poverty. we still see the problems that beset sand town. we're not get gragt deal of bank for our buck. and it might be because we're spending -- throwing money at the problem of poverty rather than dealing with the things we know actually can lift people out of poverty. number one of those is a job. you know less than 3% of people who work full time live below the poppverty level. one reason for that might be the fact that maryland and baltimore in particular have among -- some of the worst tax and regulatory climates for business in the

nation. maryland has the tenth worse business tax climate in the nation and the fifth worst personal knicks tax climate. when it comes to small business, they're the seventh highest tax rate of small busy in the nation. now, if a business is going to try to locate in an area like inner city baltimore that's a high risk venture for that business. they're only going to do that if they see a substantial opportunity for rush. and the more barerierbarriers, the less likely they're going to be to thank knows investments. you're not going to lure businesses to high poverty, high crime areas while you still -- you're piling on additional regulations and additional taxes which is the policy that maryland has undertaken. second is education. we know that if you drop out of school chances are you're going to be poor.

if you go on and graduate college, you're not. 25% of baltimore students fail to graduate. the s.a.t. scores in baltimore are 100 points below the average. less than 100% pass the assessment standardized test for high school and yet baltimore spends a great deal of money on education, over $16,500 per student in the baltimore school district. depending houston you want to measure it baltimore is the second and fourth highest spending big city in america when it comes to education. so we're spending money not getting good results. why? because the baltimore school system acts more like its job is to protect teachers than preserve parents and students. maryland has one of the worst,

strictest restrictions in charter schools. more students are educated at charter schools in washington, d.c., than in the state of maryland. parents don't even have public school choice in maryland. if you're assigned to a district. you're essentially stuck in that district. no matter how bad the school is. if you're sent to a school down the street that's crime ridden. doesn't have textbooks. the teachers don't teach. you're stuck there. you don't have the opportunity to send your kid somewhere else let alone things like vouchers or tuition tax credits or something that really would give parents control over the students. so we fail on jobs we fail on education, and finally we fail on family formation.

we know that one of the keys to being not poor or one of the keys to getting out of poverty is waiting until you're married to have a kid. now, this is not a moral judgment. it's an economic one. you're five times more likely to give birth without a father or husband than if you wait until you get married before you have children. and yet we've had two separate policies in place that increase out-of-wedlock birth in maryland. one is extremely high welfare benefits, often as condition of not having a father in the family. and second as we already have a war on drugs that criminalizes young men, gives them a criminal record that makes it very difficult for them to get employment in the future and also in the words of william juiceous from harvard makes them not marriageable. if you're a single woman in the inner city looking for a

husband, chances are it's much more difficult to find one because they can't get a job, they're not set for marriage or families because they have this criminal record they're tied to. and then on the other side you say, okay, if you still have a child, we'll still give youal the child welfare benefits. so it's not surprises that two-thirds of the births in baltimore are to unmarried women and more than half the houses in baltimore are headed by single women, what is a recipe for posh earth. the fact of the matter is we throw money trying to soothe our economy. we're giving people money to make poverty a little less uncomfortable but we're not taking steps that would actually get people out of poverty. that would include reducing tax and regulatory business for businesses that want to invest

in these high-risk areas improving our school system by giving parents control over schools and holding teachers accountable, and increasing the incentives for family formation by reducing welfare and ending the war on drugs and the overcriminalization of young black men. thank you all very much. appreciate it. look forward to the questions. >> we have a limited amount of time, so i'm going to ask everien to keep their question in the form of a question so that we don't take up too much. we'll start with you there. >> sharon bogot, blaze civil moderate. i have a quick -- in 1992 i got to go to the l.a. riots people were talking to the president because i was living in the bay area it took an hour. if i had a body cam on me i would have noticed it was more of an economic issue than the

racial issue. the mainstream media portrayetrayed it more as that. also with ferguson, i think that the body cam would have helped but also it's poverty and what you said. if question is if you don't like the body cam, it can protect the general public so we know what's really going on because i was told the ferguson indictment was delayed so it could happen during prime time and then it happened aet night, which was a lot more dangerous for society had they just released it five hours earlier. so any comments you have about both of those.

you do hear sometimes police officers saying sometimes they like it because it cuts down. two different ones were alieued to emerge. one was this was a young angry man who needlessly attacked a police officer and was justifiably slanged and the other narrative was that, you know, the opposite of that, let's put it that way. but one of these or neither of those is true and a body camera would have helped. so i think in the future a number of americans are going to demand that they have body cameras. it ooh going to become the norm. we need good policy in place to make sure it's not a disaster when it does happen. >> one quick comment on that

closely related to body cameras is the proliferation of cell phones and conducting police conduct with a cell phone. a generation ago when somebody complained of police brutality the average person didn't know what to make of it, right? somebody says the police beat me up. the police respond and say, well, we used the force that was necessary to bring somebody you know, under control so that we could arrest them, and you average person, they didn't know what to make of it. i wasn't there. i don't know what to believe. i don't want to believe the police didn't is telling a lie. but nowadays, more and more arrests and incidents are caught on cell phone coverage and now the average person can reach their own conclusions about whether the police were using necessary force or whether they had stepped over the line and engaged in, you know just

police brutality and a police beating. and so this sis bringing a rev lewis. and a protest about it until there is accountability. >> can i quicklied a to that? >> sure. >> i really think in doing research i watched a lot of depressing youtube i have owes whether it's body cameras or people filming the police. what's really brought ittomy ho me is a lot of people do not understand their rights when it comes to filming the police. it is a first amendment protected -- if you're legally where you're supposed to be you can film the police. there are apps -- i can show any of you. u stream is direct video upload. it's not installed on the phone it goes to the website. you have come up with apps.

film the police. it's worth doing. >> yes. >> my name is janice wolf gren dear and i was jailed for 22 days. 14 days in solitaire confinement so that mark warner could be re-elected in the state of general. we have an ununusual app of checks and balances that have become the perfect storm. we're saying right now this is an african-american problem. it's an american problem. way would like to ask you is who can we go to and who do you think we should be able to go to for justice and fairness in the courts. we send our young men and women off to war to fight for rights. we no longer have in this country. >> well, it's a complicated question. obviously if you feel like your rights have been trampled, first step for anybody is to find a good lawyer because they're going to help recommend to you the things you can do and the

things that you shouldn't do and get in touch with elected officials. and they'll know to bring the proper complaints against the police departments and to bring viable lawsuits. but i agree with you. i know what you're saying. there are lots of obstacles in place to get redress of grievances and to get compensation. so there's a lot of reforms that need to be done in order to get the system to where it ought to be. >> they do a lot of good work in this area if you're not familiar with their efforts. >> so i understand the secondary benefits of drug legalization but in terms of sales and distribution do you really think that these poor black communities will benefit or a harder drug or cultivated marijuana will take place and the cycle will continue on? >> well, the primary benefit is it brings peace and harmony back

to these neighborhoods. right now there is a driving underground market and it's controlled by criminal gangster organizations that fight one another to get control of the trade. so there's the violence among them. the gangs have no reservations about selling drugs to minors. so by ending the drug war and putting drugs into places like liquor stores, i mean it's not great. there are some problems that are going to be there, but it's a whole lot better than what we have right now where you have this thriving underground market and the gang violence. as i said, it's a tempting invitation for young people who are dropping out of schools go and make some cash. what happens is they make some cash for a few months thanl either get busted get a

criminal record. makes it hard to enter the main mainstream work or get killed by a rival gang so these are the problems that we can get away from if we were to end the war on drugs. time for one more. yes, in the back. >> tax incentives in maryland and also creating jobs. do you have a time line that say, was implemented today, those policy changes for tax and education and businesses coming into maryland, a time line where you think you would see a change in those communities? >> well, it certainly wouldn't be overnight. i mean the fact is these are not -- these are high risk areas for a business to invest in. people who are working in these areas or living in these areas, tend to be low skilled, all the other problems we've been talking about plus they're high crime areas and areas that are

simply not areas where people want to rush in and create a business. so even with incentives, it's going to be a slow process to get folks to invest in that. that said, you can see communities turn around fairly quickly. you only need one or two anchor businesses to bring into an area that sometimes you can then see the whole area begin to turnaround. you can look down here in the chinatown area where after the fbi center went in, a couple of businesses went into that area or downtown silver spring in maryland where the discovery store went in and they created a pedestrian mall. so once you can get one or two to anchor the investment others will follow. so i think it's going to be be a multi multi-year process. you're going to have to deal with other things too, educate the work force which means changing the schools deal with all these other problems as well, deal with drug wars so you don't have the high crime and so on. it's not a single magic bullet

but it's certainly part of the process. by the way this one store's moving in, let's tack the heck oust them. you can't do that. >> all right. there's time for one more i guess. >> can you identify by name any presidential candidates or leading congressional figures that have got this message of saying let us decriminalize, back off of this stuff and can you make any statement about either party or caucuses like congressional black caucus or whatever, any group that has stature within congress that would at least say maybe we can pass a law saying we will -- any state that wants to take the authority, we'll let them -- let the states experiment. the federal government will stand back and let them give it a try or something like that. >> well it's important to

recognize that it's come at the state level and also by referendum, not by elected officials passing or repealing drug laws through a state legislature. that's how it happened in colorado colorado, washington state, and a few other states as well, and california will be the bing one in 2016 p so it's happened by referendum. that said, there are some members of congress who have put forth some bills. rohrbacker is one who's trying to say restrain the federal law enforcement apparatus who's saying let's respect the states choosing to liberalize drugs, restrain the dea and the other law enforcement agencyies who are trying to open up legitimate stores and things like that.

so we're beginning to see some progress there. but what i expect will happen over the next ten years is we'll have more and more states, especially on marijuana begin to turn away from the war policy and i think marijuana will be largely legal in the united states. but it's taking -- it's taking too long. it will happen, but i think it will happen in eight, nine, ten years. >> as far as the economic incidents and the larger welfare policy goes, i think the major candidates, at least, marco rubio, has a very detailed proposal in which he would essentially turn federal funding -- welfare spending back to the states with relatively few strings to allow more experimentation. rand paul wants to slash taxes on inner city high poverty arias. he also has a proposals, i believe, with cory booker and

dick durbin to eliminate or roll back criminal records for people so people who had been arrested for minor offenses those felony records would go off their record. they would. have to put that down when they apply for work. they would have clean records. i think that would go a long way as well sfloo and also the enterprise bill is out there. we're seeing these things come up ad hoc. there doesn't seem to be a collective group do anything at the federal level. officially you guys are all dismissed but i will entertain questions since we started late. if you want to stay, you're welcome to. ? >> the senator has done a lot of work on police militarization. . patriot act. it went about ten hours to talk about a lot of these issues.

>> that's exactly right. the bill has a problem there and there's also a companion bill to that effort. believe they mirrored what president obama announced earlier. yes. >> i want to say i'm glad you had a speaker on here, michael, to talk about the economic issues and some of the other issues. i notice there tends to be a dichotomy in this debate where some of us concerned with police brutality, police militaryization militarization, there's a pushback -- but the real problem is -- well actually you can say that we need to address both problems and push them out in tandem as opposed to trying to set up this either/or dichotomy. >> somewhat related but i always found -- in any debate, i find

republicans will support the war on drugs considering how expensive it is and how expensive it is to incarcerate so many people. oftentimes, you know keeping people incarcerated is more expensive than putting people through clorj on a four-an um basis. how this is fiscal sanity amuses me, so there are a number of ways to attack this, at least on drugs. the issue can be attacked -- fiscal as well as basic moral arguments. >> yeah. i document think you can address these issues separately because i think they're very much tied together. it strikes me a lot. you hear a lot of conservatives talk about we need to do more for family formation. but it's not like -- george bush had this proposal where you're going to go out and advertise in low income areas with billboards that says marriage is good. well, the fact is that most

women, including most poor women want to get married. the problem is they couldn't find men to marry because the men are unemployed or in jail some of you're going to have to deal with these economic issues and criminal issues. it's not enough to simply lecture poor people that they should go out and get married if you have these other problems. >> one more. >> i believe mr. lynch mentioned in his remarks of dealing with the bad apples in the police force and the red tape involved. is there anything in the legislation to create policies to address that? >> there are good policies contained in the task force report that was issued a couple of days ago. there are some good recommendations in there, but the problem is that the political incentives of elected

officials. i thought it was a mistake for the department of justice to launch its investigation of the baltimore police department because i didn't think the time could be any better to clean up that department than right now. the mayor said she was interested in reform. her police chief said he was interested in turning the department around. they do get pushback from like police unions and that sort of thing, so i think with the outcry and the protests going on in baltimore there's never been a better time to get it cleaned up. the medial plan for the police department is to kick the can down the road several years from now and then they will issue their report with good criticisms and probably some good recommendations but then the political climate will have changed. everyone will have moved on and

they'll make some probably small changes without having a big political fight. that is the pattern that we see over and over again. so sometimes the federal intervention can have an enabling effect for the local officials who do not really want to make hard decisions at the local level. see, sometimes they want to invite the feds in so that the feds can make tough decisions. but, you know, this is why we elect a mayor and a police chief. it's their primary responsibility. and now it was the time for them to do it. and they've avoided and evaded responsibility, i think, by asking the feds to come in and give them recommendations about what to do. >> i would -- i would justed a that i think with -- as i said in my presentation, i think if there's bad body camera policies in place, it might become harder to fire bad apples because if

police officers are involved in the lethal use of force incident and then they get back to the station and they're allowed to view that footage with a union representative or with another colleague and they're allowed to conclude and come up with their own report about what happened that's going to allow, you know for them to ex-cull pate themselves. initial reports have to be about what do you think you saw, what do you think you feel up to and including incident. on the other side, what i will say is the footage that's coming out, whether it's by citizens or body camera is making this debate a lot more fierce. the shooting in north charleston, i think everyone saw the that football and thought how could this be justified. it's going to be become increasingly difficult if bad amples aren't caught on camera but not if the police are the only ones reviewing the footage. >> with that i want to thank everyone for staying and being a

part of this audience. thank you, everybody. i do have one bit of housekeeping. next wednesday we'll have another event in this same room called prudent spending. we'll have daniel mitch frl cato will be here as well as representatives from switzerland and congress. if you know hum at all. thank you all for coming. . this morning the deputy secretary of state tony blinken will speaker. later the speaker of iraq's parliament and highest muslim

official talks about it as the department is considering legislation to help conduct isis. that's live at 3:15 p.m. on c-span. this summer book tv will konk book festivals from around the country and top pick authors and books. near the end of june watch for the annual roosevelt reading festival from the presidential library. we're at the heart of the book fare with author interviews and panel discussions and at the beginning of september we're live at the nation's capitol for the national book festival celebrating itself 15th year. that's a few of the events this summer on c-span's book tv. friday senator ben cardin held a community roundtable in baltimore on building and recovery efforts following the protests and riots from freddie

gray. communities and activators discussed a way to revive the chunt and address urban decay. this program is about an hour and 20 minutes. >> okay. let me -- we're going to get started. first let me thank don cheatham for his leadership in this community. we've been friends for a long time. he comes from the community and we appreciate that. he'd held many leadership plans over the years. ite greats to be here at the elementary school, neighborhood association. we thank you all. we are of course, in the neighborhood in which the

tramgic episodes concerning freddie gray occurred. so let me just start if i might to let you know that our federal delegation, which includes senator barbara mikulski, my teammate captain of our team in the united states senate, along with our three members of the house, elijah cummings who did an incredible job to calm the community, john sarbane and josh rupertberger we have been strategizeing. we love baltimore. we love our city. i've lived my life in baltimore. i'm prout ofd of this city. what happened in baltimore, could have happened in other cities. we know that. but it happened in our city. we want to make sure that we take the right steps. so there are two areas that we are trying to deal with in regards to what happened in baltimore. one is to restore the confidence

of the community that the police are on their side that the police in the community are working together. we have to end profiling in this country and in our community and anywhere in america. i've introduced legislation that helps people who have had problems. there's not a single person here and there's not a single person in the united states senate who hasn't had a second chance. so we got to recognize that our criminal justice system has not treated everyone fairly. we got to give people a helping hand. this past week i was at second chance in baltimore, which is incredible what they do to help people who have finished their prison sentences. they also do a great job on a commercial venture of taking old material from buildings and recycling them into new products that are good marketplace for. we have to do a better job in

dealing with the policing so that you have confidence accountability justice and safety in our community. the second area is that we have to deal with the rebuilding of our city. that's, yes, rebuilding businesses. many businesses were very badly damaged, destroyed by what happened. so we have to rebuild the businesses. but we also have to provide opportunity for people. and that means looking at what we're doing with our young people. do they have recreational facilities? that are first rate so they can do what young people do. and that is they like to do things. they don't like to sit around. do we have summer jobs? do we have opportunity? so that's a huge part of what we're trying to do. i want to thank president obama. president obama convened a meeting in the white house for our federal congressional delegation with his team. and he had representatives from most of the federal agencies. we had the secretary of hud

there, housing, because we know we have a housing problem. we know we have a housing problem in this community and in many communities in baltimore. we had the secretary of education, because it starts with good schools. we want good schools and opportunity for all of our children. we had the small business administration represented and the administrator has been in baltimore. you know there's a center open not too far from here to help businesses get the help from the small business administration. they were there. department of justice was there. we questioned the department of justice on second chance opportunities and getting some of those funds here in baltimore. so they were very actively engaged. the department of health was there, because one of the key things for a neighborhood to be able to be a place where you want to live you have to make sure you have access to healthcare. we also want to make sure that you are not a food desert. we will make sure you have

opportunities for healthy food choices in your community. all that are important areas to have a healthy nun yiey community and neighborhood. you know what came out the most that i heard? this is the reason i wanted to be here. i thank reverend stephens for making the arrangements. what i heard more and more is that most of us in government and that can make a difference, are we really listening to the community when we make our policy decisions? whether it's the mayor of baltimore or the united states senator. are we really engaging the community? you know there's not endless amount of funds available. you are realistic about that. but are we making sure that we put those resources where the community wants it to be? that's one of the points that i just want to make sure that we reach out and talk to the people in the community and understand your priorities so that as we go

forward, we are in sync. that we are together and that we are using every opportunity we have to give hope and opportunity to people of our community. and that's why i wanted to be here to listen to your concerns. i can assure you, i will take it back to our team. not only our federal team. we are working close with the mayor of baltimore. we're working closely with our state team. we're all trying to work together. faith community is working with us. we're trying to put everybody together. we have the one baltimore campaign that the mayor started with mike cryer at the head of it. the information that you share today will go into that equation so that we can try to move our city forward in the most progressive way possible. in the last couple weeks i have walked the streets. i went into businesses. i saw what happened. i have been around here. i know that people have an incredible amount of energy in this community.

but there's a lot of frustration. and we want to know how we can work together so we all have a bright future. with that let me turn if over to don. >> it's an honer to have you here. we won't share with anyone how long we've known each other and how many different groups we worked with. it's an honor to you have here in the neighborhood of matthew henson neighborhood association. some of us have lived here so long, we remember these were houses before the school was built. many of us go back quite a ways. matthew henson is in a neighborhood called winchester. we are abutting to fan town. one of the biggest challenges we have had in the last few weeks since the civil unrest or riot, depending upon what you want to call it is that a significant number of our faith leaders, a significant number of our elected officials really weren't cognizant of this area we are in. many of them have gone to

northern pennsylvania. we don't begin until fulton. we had 14 businesses damaged during the riots in our neighborhood. we actually had more businesses in our neighborhood ruined than sand town did. because the largest damage was done was done in sand town most everyone felt when they got to fulton and we have one of the owners of one of the properties here that the rest of the community had not been hit. we actually had 14 businesses. what made our situation a little bit different -- i guess a little more damaging -- is we no food market here. we have not had a food market since october. one of the small convenience stores -- it wasn't a food market. didn't have fresh food, vegetables, doesn't have chicken, fish. but it did have milk, orange juice, bread. that is one of the stores that also got hit. so what we found and ironic

enough, one of my longtime friends sitting here one of our officers of matthew henson, the day after the riots he came down the street and had a very perplexing look on his face. i've known him all my life. i'm 64. he is 63. we have known each other all our lives. i could tell by his face something was terribly wrong. and he said don things are so bad, we don't even have a place to buy toilet paper. that's how desperate it got. the few stores that we had were gone. now, we have -- we have a good owner here. we have a pleasurer are a of liquor stores. we have 15. only two parts of baltimore city have more than we do. other than that we have a plethera of liquor stores. no food stores. we have candy stores. what we found was two days after the riots, we didn't know where do we go, with ahat do we do.

one of the greatest things that has happened is matthew henson elementary school. not only because they are educating children, but they have for almost two years been feeding people out of their food pantry. the lady sitting on your other side is the one who does this day in day out, month in month out. how does she do it? i don't know. she need to quadruple her salary. hopefully something on north avenue hears this. when we looked at it we said how do we get service snzs, food, necessities, toothpaste toilet paper, diapers for children when we have no place here to get it? none. and what we were seeing was that everybody was at north and pennsylvania but we had not seen anyone here. it's not that we are pointing fingers or angry or upset. we just had to tell it like we saw it. we didn't see any of the elected owe fishes. when we began to call the officials, we have been in your

neighborhood. i said you have seen this store or that store? no, we haven't seen these stores. things have been real tough for us, because we didn't have a food market in the beginning. then it was compounded by the riots. then -- >> what food store was here that closed? >> stop, shop and save closed. it was one of eight stores. stop, shop and save we have is on monroe and pressman. as f we get an opportunity to walk today you won't know that a store was even there. the owner, which is pete flan i began and sons, which has been a good community partner for us acquired the property. we could not find any food market to come in and replace stop, shop and save. that's just a vacant land right now. >> where is the closest supermarket? >> mont dom ant. it's a little more than a mile. we are if a food desert. what makes it challenging is just the