that i will tell you it's just the state prison population as i will talk to you all about in a minute. many of the state prisoners are now shifting to our county jail population. the problem is in one sense good and better shows us what the solutions are but also tells us how much more work we have to do. one other dimension to this and the commissioner or cy mentioned this, there also are other issues more than just as it relates to who, how many people we have in our prison system today. again another telling statistic we have in california is in a state of california 6.5% of the population is african-american but 29% of the state's prison population is african-american. there are statistics like that now and that is just one example but it tells us again what more we have to do. we know from the 1970s leading up to 2006 by way of example a

perspective on the problem in california are state prison population skyrocketed about 750% from 20,000 prisoners in the 1970s from 1975 to over 172,000 by 2006 and that is what led us to much of the prison litigation some of which is still ongoing today. that by court order requires a state of california to reduce its prison population and that is what leads us to what the economist has described as probably one of the most significant experiments in criminal justice which is something in california recall public safety realignment. many of you here being experts in the field are familiar with it but public safety realignment is as john peter celia has described as a titanic shift in the criminal justice system.

a law called a.d. 109 shifted the primary responsibility for incarceration in the state of california from the state prison system to the local counties. it localized essentially our criminal justice system. by doing so you did a couple of things. one, first and foremost is that had an immediate reduction in our prison population not because it opened the doors to these prisons. in fact public safety realignment did not do that but it change the issue of the source that went into the prison system. in other words it was essentially the law equivalent of the spigot to the faucet for hose. what is was a change to goes into the prison system and how. so whereas you have the vast majority of crimes are felonies that would lead to imprisonment in our state prison system which led to the overcrowding problem, we now have a system through

public safety realignment for the vast majority of crimes specifically what we call the triple non's, the nonserious and nonviolent and nonsexual crimes are now primarily going to be incarcerated and supervised among local counties. this is significant for a lot of reasons first and foremost because their local counties now have to bear the responsibility for what are we going to do with these that we have whereas before these offenders were the problem of the state prison system. there are l.a. counties and stanislaus counties and everything in between. they now have the responsibility of thinking from the d.a. level who are we going to prosecute to the sheriff level the police department level and what are we going to do with these offenders once they are prosecuted and convicted? i will tell you that issue, that compression that has been caused to the system has forced in many ways counties to rethink how

they approach criminal justice in the state. it's produced some good results. we know on a primary level that the numbers have been reduced. we know that now we have probably some of the greatest reductions in terms of input into the state prison system that we have seen since the 1980s. that is a positive step and it shows what we have accomplished through public safety realignment. what is also presented in the state of california is the manner in which we have had to re-approach what we do when it comes to issues related to arrest, prosecutions and more important than that what happens after prosecution and after -- so the last comments i want to talk to you all about is what i think ultimately is the most important issue when we talk about the issue of general mass incarceration. it's not enough just to talk about how do we stop putting people in the system, there are

some people who must be prosecuted. there some people who must go to jail. the issue instead is what about preventing people from going to jail in the first place by making sure that if we are talking about people that previously committed crimes that they don't do it again. because in the state of california like unfortunately almost every state in the country there is a significant issue when it comes to recidivism which is the repeat offending by people who have been previously convicted of crimes. in the state of california that percentage is 61% and that is despite the fact that we spend billions and billions of dollars every year in the state of california on incarceration. what many counties have done what the attorney attorney general of california has done is said why do we think about approaching this from the issue of reducing recidivism as a way to ultimately reducing our prison population. one of the things attorney general harris did was in november of 2013 create something through her office

was to create something called the division over cynicism reduction in re-entry. what she did as the chief law enforcement officer of the state of california was to say i want to create a new new office to my department of justice that is going to focus exclusively on assisting counties and how we approach re-entry, how we approach recidivism reduction and what kinds of things we can do to develop and assist and promote those policies across the 58 jurisdictions that implement criminal justice policy every single day. one of the things we are doing right now. >> i'm going to have to pause you there because there are couple of things that doug has prepared to pick up that you are just about to deal with. >> i will stop there. >> i got into college for playing lacrosse. [laughter]

i've been a prosecutor for 22 years. i was assistant united states attorney for six years and basically the district attorney for eight years and attorney general of maryland at the state level for eight years. i applaud the brennan center and nyu for doing this conference and grappling with the issue of greentree which i think is the issue of today. in maryland for example almost half the people who go to jail come back into jail within three years. that is kind of the discussion and i think it's an important one that we are having. i'm not going to talk about that however. what i'm going to do about is a solution that my 22 years from a prosecutorial perspective is one of the things that i do believe does work and it takes off from where the district attorney, the two things that he said. one, all the actions in the state and i am paraphrasing which is the fact of the matter.

there are federal crimes and often when somebody is prosecuted by the federal system they are at a place where they should be prosecuted by the federal system. it's harder to figure out what to do with that person because they are much farther down the line of committing crimes. the state level there's a lot more opportunity. we have in montgomery county when i was a state's attorney there and i will talk about specific experience there. we had five cases. montgomery county, maryland is everything you have heard of other than an office in maryland. i'm going to talk about an issue that the district attorney brought up which is a little bit different but along those same lines which are the gyms. when you start talking about opening gyms, why is the d.a. in manhattan where we have these programs keeping gyms open. that is part of a solution called community prosecution which is something that i first

learned about interestingly enough because it's coming next from eric holder. we started something called community prosecution. it started in early 1980's in portland from a local d.a. there and has taken many different forms around the country but what it basically does is it bootstraps off of community policing and puts prosecutors in the neighborhoods and the communities and has a recognition that the prosecutor's job is not to get convictions but to make sure we prevent crime and intervene in potential crimes and if the right thing happens in each and sometimes that means putting someone in jail for the rest of their lives and sometimes it means figure out a way to get that person back onto the streets. what we did in d.c. when the attorney general holder was the u.s. attorney was we took one of the seven police districts at that time called the sixth

district which is northeast washington and for a two-year time limit everything else stayed the same and judge you might remember this, everything stayed the same except we would have community prosecutors. that means prosecutors were now assigned to the sixth district. everything else are many constant the sixth district went from the second most called for crimes in the second most violent in the area d.c. to the second least criminally invested areas in terms of calls for service as well as crimes being committed. so i took that and when i became the state attorney in montgomery county and the first fully implemented prosecution in the country wants to work. you can study it but the fact of the matter is there's a sea of work and it makes common sense. as you look at those television shows with das and prosecutors office -- there's a homicide section and narcotic section and all these different sections divided arbitrarily by crime.

dividing it by jurisdiction and neighborhoods and so in montgomery county not only do we have five police districts. if you think about it there is a simple assault and a homicide and oftentimes somebody dies and you have a ballistics expert and a medical examiner but you want to make sure you have senior prosecutors in each of those jurisdictions. the one area of prosecution that does take in my view expertise is sex offenses. even within those you have people within each of those districts and those crimes. a piece of that is you have what we call field community prosecutors, prosecutors that are in the rockville districting going to the meetings at night the civic meetings at community meetings in hearing from the

people on the streets instead of being in some office somewhere what actually works and what doesn't work in terms of crime prevention. i'm a little older so i remember we had an issue one time we used to have payphones. you put according to pick them up. >> i remember when there were dimes that you put in. >> exactly. there was the situation in this movie theater in bethesda where there was drug activity taking place. we talked to the community and removed the phone. prosecutors are working with police and the drug crime went down there. another component of community prosecution which i think works very well and the police were reluctant to have this implemented at first was you are working with the same community police.

you are going to do roll calls and teaching many cases that have come out and working with them on training. especially in large areas instead of working with different police every time you get a case on the top of the stack you work with police officers. one of them their story doesn't match but you don't see that officer for a couple of years. you get to know who the good ones are who are the ones who do need help. there's a lot of different levels but things like making sure the gyms stay open is one that works. in montgomery county where we have 1 million people we counter homicides in the teens. 13, 14, 15 homicides with a million people. there integrated statues that really have been proven to work. in new york you can imagine that the prosecutors that are just in greenwich village or the east side and just in harlem. they work with the businesses and community leaders in the

civic associations and the police and you can then identify also who should be in jail and you shouldn't and what are some strategies to keep those people in jail. so with that i will subside other than to say when the attorney general, the u.s. attorney holder became the deputy attorney general to the department of justice he convened a prosecution workshop and we have prosecutors from all over the country come and at how people define community prosecution varies but the idea and the concept is the same. that is getting prosecutors out of the courthouse, out of the concept and the notion that their sole responsibility is to convict people went into the business of prevention and intervention to reduce the number of people who are in jail. >> this has been a very rich set of opening statements but as i look at the clock we have 20 minutes left. i know we want to have time for questions. i would ask this if we can take five minutes from lunch. the next series of questions is frankly a little tougher. we have had this morning a

series of examples of good news stories, but one of the issues that we have touched upon but not delved into is the issue of race and enforcement. we have touched on it a little bit in a report today between the commissioner and i about my body language and what i might expect but it's a very tough issue within the city of new york and within law enforcement and the relationship between black and brown communities and law enforcement nationwide. in the preparation for this i discuss with sligh and discuss with tony strategies that they are engaged in to identify and root out potential bias and law enforcement. i want to spend a little bit of time discussing that and return to the issue of re-entry.

i think there are a host of perspectives on those issues. so i will start with tony and cy and anyone else who would like to jump in on that and move to re-entry. i promise we will save time for questions. >> very quickly -- it is interesting for me moving from the west coast growing up and working in southern california moving to northern california which is like moving to another country and then moving to baltimore which is like moving to another country. all of them deal with the same thing -- race and policing. anytime you have an underclass that doesn't even have to be dealing with race. it could deal with socioeconomic issues. when the deal of an underclass and many times police departments are built to maintain the status quo you have to break through that. that's where you hear from me that trying to shift the organization from enforcement to prevention of harm because you need to be part of that community. i can tell you you have to build police departments in a different way than when i came on and what i mean by that i will give you good example.

i'm in charge of close to 3000 police officers. 2000 out of 3000 are young officers on the streets every single day and they come in contact with different residence and citizens. within those contacts it's not race, african-american and black or white which tends to be her discussion but with the gay and lesbian community. it's with the orthodox jewish community. it's with different ethnicities and immigrant populations that come into our country. unique for law enforcement in america's anytime you have trauma, a place in the world to end up with residents from most locations in our cities.

we take people in and when you have of large groups of people that move into a location you have to address that. ferguson that everybody wants to use as a bellwether for policing in the united states, ferguson did not start on the day of that incident. rodney king did not start the day of that incident. that incident started five or 10 years before that. watching the riots of rodney king, issues dealing with local grocery stores started 10 years before. issues dealing with police officers being heavy-handed and not connecting with the community started numerous years before. it starts with relationships. the things that i do when i go into the three very tough cities that i have gone into whether it be long beach and oakland and baltimore which are tough cities is starting those relationships. the city that i'm in right now baltimore my minority communities many and i can't talk about them, my minority communities, there's a visceral hatred for the people who wear the uniform, a visceral hatred. what i have to give my organization to do is to address we have earned that.

many times we have gone out to help and make it better we have exacerbated the problem not because we have tried to but because we don't have the tools to address that. what i mean by that is most police officers think they are doing god's work. they're going out and trying to address an issue and the only issue we have is enforcement. when you have drugs and shootings taking place we are going and doing god's work to make it safer for the people at work and we arrest people. because we don't have a lot of theories to address that so we have to recalibrate and understand we have been part of the problem. in our effort to be part of the solution we have become part of the problem. when we arrest large numbers of young people and incarcerate them, we demoralize the community. so we have to shift their mindset. we have to shift what we are doing and we have to started with relationships and understanding we are part of the solution. with that we have to change how we solve the solution.

pointing a high-powered weapon at citizens exercising their constitutional rights is off the charts. that's crazy. i mean that's wild. [applause] and i thank you for that but i can tell you of the chiefs of police and united states think the same way, that is wild. what the heck is going on with that? as we is ferguson is a bellwether most police chief chiefs that i know of in major cities that i work with and their peers think it's so far out of the norm that it's crazy. how i approach protest in my city when there were protesting in ferguson is the point is we are there to help them protest. we are there to help them to do their constitutional rights of saying that this upsets me and this angers me so how can we allow this to happen? how do we help people to obtain their dreams? what i go back to every time is

that 8-year-old boy in that community, how do you help that eighty-year-old little boy attain his dreams and aspirations? how do you allow people to say i'm angry that i don't agree with this and as long as i do that and don't care of the city that's okay. the race issue goes back to relationships changing the dynamic of what policing is today, changing how we see ourselves as helping to solve the problem. [applause] >> thank you, tony. cy, if you could shift just a little bit. you have just received a study in which it asked for taking a look at prosecutorial decision-making. can you share that a little please? >> of course. >> and anything else. >> i view this issue as how we approach the issue of

prosecution in the communities that we work within as well as in our office. i think it is time for prosecutors and time for our office to be increasingly aggressive on making sure that people are not brought down for arrest and processing simply because they got picked up for a minor offense. this is something that i think we need to work with the police department about but where i'm going with this and i hope the commissioners also is to essentially establish in the precincts criteria for minor offense, young man or women. that case should be if it meets certain criteria should be diverted to community sanctions within the community as opposed to case processing arresting coming downtown. that way i think we addressed the issue of wrongful behavior but we do it in a way that

respects, respects the individuals that are being detained and giving them the best option to turn an unfortunate incident into a net positive. so outside the office i think we are going to be changing what we are doing and i hope to be working with the police department on that. inside the office, as i was running for office i was asked a number of questions what i think about this agency and that agency relating to the issue of race. i felt it was incumbent on me as i commented on other agencies to understand whether we had issues that we needed to address. i commissioned veira shortly after came into office to do a racial bias review of the manhattan das office. they started out in earnest in 2012. they issued a technical report and a report you could read and understand report about two months ago and ultimately i was

pleased with their conclusions. it confirmed what i believe to be so that the lawyers in our office are treating the cases squarely and fairly but the vera report did indicate that there was a racial disparity in certain key case processing elements. one related to bail, one related to amount of time for misdemeanor convictions. there was a significant, statistically significant difference between young african-american men and women and whites and asians and latinos. so what that enabled me to do was to then work within the office to understand what levers are being pulled that result in statistical differences in how we can address them and we have brought in a consulting firm.

we are just starting work within our office to address implicit bias in our decision-making as prosecutors, recognizing that none of us feel like we are biased and yet the statistics may at the end show that the institution has in fact got a statistical difference that must be examined and corrected and that's what we are trying to trying to do. so bringing in an outside agency or outside firm to help us deal with this issue of implicit bias in our office. we would not have done it without the study. it is not often that prosecutors invite consultants to pour through their thousands of records to look at the issue of race but i'm glad we did it and we are learning from it and i think it will make our work better as we go forward. >> thank you for that and this is almost consistent with -- [applause] you know it's almost consistent with black history month being the shortest month

of the year. we are given 10 minutes to deal with the issue of race and we could've filled in the entire afternoon to discuss that. we have to move on and i do want to talk about re-entry from the challenge perspective. one of the things that i found both of these sessions heartening because you are hearing about things that work and almost like ok, good, we are done but we have a great distance to travel particularly in the area of re-entry. from a policy perspective because there are still some people who aren't moved on the issue of re-entry and on a practical perspective. david, if you could address the policy issues and then doug the practical aspects of the re-entry problems. >> i would like to make one. this ferguson thing and we don't know who did what to whom but we do know one thing. my daughter who has served in army, two tours in iraq and one

in afghanistan is a siop specialist called me up and said what is going on out there? in iraq, we instructed our troops and we had a situation with a crowd that we took off our helmets and if you pointed an automatic weapon at somebody without cause you would be brought up on charges. in this country we have two things. we have a discussion here about treating people as individuals and evaluating those individuals whether they are black, white, yellow or green or they have all of the different things that go into it and then we have this impetus to turn police forces into occupying armies and give them tanks and machine guns that were passed out by the thousands by the pentagon in most cases for no reason. now the police department saying they need heavier weapons because lord knows you may want to blow up a house somewhere. those are two things that need to be addressed and i have to

add that. i had to do that. do you have any tanks? but i got involved in some of these issues originally because i gave it some thought back in the 80's and 90's because you think about the way things work. we lock everybody up and let's assume for a minute that we lock them up fairly and that they deserve to be sentenced to prison and if they are persecuted they did something wrong so we put them into prison. we eliminate a lot of the rehabilitation stuff and we just lock them up and punish them so that persons become graduate schools for criminals. what did they learn while they are and there is how to be a better criminal. they get tough because they have to survive and somebody mentioned that there are different prison systems. really the breakdown is pat owen told me there is no prison system and they depend upon wardens.

the federal system in the state system can be awful. a lot of them make deals like evidently happened at rikers with gangs because the officers and the wardens get judged on the basis of whether they maintain order and not on the basis of whether it's working. and then we let them out after this is over. [applause] and what happeneds? the social net is less than it once was which i think is okay but if you want to prison in the 1950's you couldn't get a job when you got out as a bank teller but you can get a job doing a lot of other things. technology, insurance companies and social mores have changed so that you can't get a job to dig a ditch in many places if you have got a record. so we let hunters of thousands of people off and how are they going to live? they only know one thing and then we are surprised and 60% of them go back within two years

because they not just fall back into the life and the friendships that they have but they discover they can't move on. one of the great challenges and we talked a lot about who do you send to prison for what reasons and for how long, and when they get out, they have a better chance to survive then when they got in, and when they get out they need help and that is a hard, hard question. some of you may know bob woodson in washington, who is a housing activist, and we were talking about some of the proposals, and they said, wait a minute. you have to be careful. the convicted felon gets off and does not have the opportunities of somebody who went to prison because that doesn't send the right signal to the community either. but we have to worry about that because just from the standpoint of a civil society you can't take hundreds of thousands and millions of people, lock them up and tell them there's only one

way to survive and then throw them back out on the street and expect the civil society to continue to exist in any kind of realistic way. so a lot of the effort and we talked on the earlier panel there was a lot of talk about money. in the state like texas and mississippi where there have been significant criminal justice reforms measures passed but texas has closed three major prisons and reducing prison population significantly probably the poster child in the last six to eight years for this. that money is rechannel them to some of the programs we are talking about. that's an important investment and that is what has happened at mississippi and is happening in georgia and happening in other cases of that money doesn't go back to general revenue.

for $50 you can give an inmate >> just briefly, on the racial bias issue, there is a lot in there. what we obviously need to do is make sure that we hire people and the police are messieurs as prosecutors, and i just came in the attorney general conference, and we have kamala harris, and three african-american u.s. attorney generals in the history of our country, so we have to make sure we have diversity. and on the reentry piece, we brought all of the experts together, and it really goes to three different things pre-when you are coming out of jail, you need three things. you need a job opportunity. you need a place to stay, and

you need somebody who is going to care about you. we can think of a lot of examples. there are a number of things we can do in a practical sense. reentry systems. one of the things i was ridiculed about, and i bring it up again because i think it is a great thing, which is we spend32,000 32,000 dollars per year incarcerating people in jail. for $50, you can give an inmate and android, an ipad kind of voice, where they can actually learn, with the on loan in -- online schooling opportunities. they want to be a cook when they get out. they can get certified they have a skill where they can go to a job. and then, of course, you have job employers who get tax incentive to make sure they hire someone coming out of jail and

give somebody a chance. of course, we do not people -- do not want people using porn and all this stuff. there is no expectation of privacy in jail, but that kind of thing, thinking differently about helping people -- look this is a captive audience. they have committed a crime. they are in jail. you can work with them in so many different ways to make sure that you do more and get that recidivism rate down to the 20% and the taxpayers are no longer paying 30,000 some odd dollars a year to house these people. it is a win-win for everyone involved so the notion of talking about reentry and figuring out practical solutions is something we need to continue to dialogue as we go forward. >> thank you for that. we have time for two really good and short questions.

[laughter] [applause] sir? >> i am a prosecutor. and if you look at the issue of wrongful convictions, it is clear that wrongful convictions more likely affect african-americans and other minority groups. so if we are talking about bringing an end to mass incarceration, shouldn't we be talking about bringing an end to wrongful convictions? i think we would like to invite a comment on that. conviction and integrity units. >> just before we get there, before you get to the prosecutor you often get to lineups and things like that and tony has some issues that would address that first piece before we get to the prosecutor. >> i don't no how i can make this short. i tell stories, unfortunately.

i had to find the chief of -- i had a friend in gascoigne who was the chief of police who called me and said, could you be on this list of chiefs who are against the death penalty. and i talked to my girlfriend at the time and said, can you believe he is asking me to be on the panel of police -- chief of police who are on this panel. and i made be in the wrong audience, but that's how i believe. so she said, well, why don't you take a look at how many of these rape or accusatory cases where you have dna were you guys got it wrong. and i went, wow. so when i started to do research and talk to different friends, he and i had the same conversation. he says, i am very much into the

innocence project. we need to take a look at this. we sat down and started looking at how many people are wrongfully incarcerated. it is coming out because we have the technology with the dna where it is showing how many times we get it wrong. then we stopped and went backwards. we have gotten it wrong. what went wrong went wrong on the front end? many of the times it is the practices, the standardization where there is no checks and balances. and we looked at a case here in new york. it is political pressure. when someone says do something. the system responds in some way, and it may not be the right way. when the police officers started locking people up and not doing it by due process or through checks and balances then it goes

to the attorney, no offense, and they get the same pressure and push it through because their are no checks and balances or you go back and audit yourself, to make sure you got it right so , a part of the paper that we drafted tells the police department to have standardized mechanisms and to audit itself. also for the district attorneys and prosecutors, have systems and go back and question whether you have the right person. i just made an arrest in. i am going to shut up. we have 60 seconds. we had a three -year-old little girl who got shot as a result of a drive-by. so i stepped up and said we will do everything we can. we put a lot of pressure and arrested a guy. there was a guy who took a look at it, and i said, and i put it into my command staff, go back and audit. go back and double check.

could it be somebody outside the scope of what we are thinking? sure enough we popped up with another candidate because we took time away from the pressure to go, let's look outside of the way we are thinking, and let's go back and double check our make sure we got it right. system and if we are going to put someone in jail, we wanted to be the right one. [applauding] >> the body language that matters is nicole's, and she has told us we have one minute. >> from the prosecutor's point of view, we, in our office proudly say that we are one of , the best prosecutors offices in the country, but if you are going to say that you have to yourself be a leader in affecting fair prosecution practices, and there is no issue that is more concerning to prosecutors than wrongful convictions and the reality that we have come to understand that people have gone to jail who are not, in fact, guilty. so for our office in 2010 when i got elected i created a

conviction integrity program within our office. i looked at dallas, the only other office out there that had one at the time, and they are doing great work on reinvestigation using dna but to me, and i think i'm saying this just as tony, i was not satisfied with just having a reinvestigation unit, which we have. to me a conviction integrity office has to work with training and decisions on the front end of the case on making sure as we , do now with checklists. when we have a case, there is a checklist, the young men and women can go through with supervisors to make sure that we make sure we have asked the right questions before it goes forward. we have standard protocols on when someone becomes a ci you can't have someone in our office because you want one. there are things that we no now cause wrongful convictions that

we now train our assistance and have protocols in our office to minimize the chance that we make a mistake in judgment, and i think it is the right way to go. to end it, above all things, i think, i think prosecutors and perhaps police officers have to understand with all the anonymous power there must be a humility that goes along with exercising it and an understanding that we want to make sure that we have tried to consider all the facts and do not conclude simply because we believe something firmly at the beginning that that should not be questioned. i think that that kind of attitude, self-awareness and self analysis and all of us is going to make us to better had conviction integrity. >> and we will end with a note of humility and thank the panel.

they have been -- [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> and here at c-span, we are live at the copernicus's center with president obama and the decisions he took last week, which will allow up to 5 million undocumented immigrants to stay in the country and fully enforce the president speaking in chicago, and we may also hear from the president about last night violence in ferguson in the wake of the grand jury decision yesterday. the president's attorney general spoke to reporters just a short while ago in washington, saying he is disappointed that some people resorted to violence last night. we will show you the attorney general's comments in just a bit, and jay nixon, the governor of missouri, tripling the force of the national guard in the st.

louis area, and he spoke earlier with public safety officials in missouri and we will show you those comments a bit later on c-span. and we have live coverage on c-span. ♪

while we wait to hear from president obama in chicago, who will be talking about immigration this afternoon, we will bring you a portion of this morning "washington journal." ♪ host: how surprised were you? guest: not very. host: explain, this announcement

coming after the midterm election. guest: yes, the timing did surprise me. i was not expecting it to happen yesterday, but there was a sense -- two things going on, essentially. there was a sense that maybe the administration wanted to have a shack up in the national security team or maybe an appearance of a shakeup of the national security team, and secondly, the president is coming to the end of his second term, and there is only so much time left. it is hard to get someone to take the job unless you give them time to settle in and get something done. really, for practical purposes, if the president had waited another six months or so it would have been hard to find someone to take it for 18 months, so it looks like the secretary would have almost two years, which is almost the bare minimum you need to get in. >> was it a mutual decision or

was secretary hagel pushed out? >> well, there was a lot about this yesterday. it was portrayed as mutual. i think they were portraying it as not mutual. i think the white house was sort of priming the gossip circuit to suggest that the president was unhappy with secretary hagel. host: in the back room? guest: yes, that was it, that the president was not happy with the secretary, and this really reflects the change in how the world looks in obama's second term. when chuck hagel came in shortly after his reelection, it looks like the main task for the secretary was going to be to initiate a budget and wrapped up the war in afghanistan and basically continue on the core obama national security policy which was basically a reluctance to use the military as a primary

tool of foreign policy, and chuck hagel was very much attracted to that, and what we have seen over the past year with civil war in syria and the rise of isis and the collapse of the iraqi army, it is just a very, very different scenario, and the white house is having to go on a war footing. and what was happening in 2013 was not really a good match for the challenges they were facing. host: secretary chuck hagel spoke after the president made the announcement, and here is what chuck hagel had to say about his accomplishments during his time at the pentagon. [video clip] >> i am immensely proud of what we have accomplished during this time. as the president has noted, our allies and the afghan security forces have a successful transition in afghanistan. we have bolstered enduring alliances and strengthened

emerging partnerships while successfully responding to crises around the world. and we have launched important reforms that the president noted, reforms that will prepare this institution for challenges facing us decades to come. i believe we have set not this department, the department of defense, but the nation on a stronger course for security, stability, and prosperity. if i did not believe that, i would not have done this job. of[end of video clip] host: here is something from john mccain, a former colleague in the senate. he said, i know chuck was frustrated with the national security and the process, and the president spoke of excessive micromanagement and how they were supposed to do their job successfully, and chock's

situation was no different. guest: that is an alternative view coming from capitol hill, particularly republicans, and everything has a partisan bent to it. the national security policy, something we have heard a lot and chuck hagel was just too independent to carry on, and it is hard to know about the conversation between the president and the secretary. in the past few months, we have seen the secretary side in their slightly more hawkish views with isis and the operations there. so that is probably a little bit a part of it also. >> this is the chairman of the house armed services committee who said that chuck hagel would give him a thankless task and an underfunded defense department and an intrusive white house

micromanagement. the obama administration is on their fourth secretary of defense, and when the president goes through three secretaries he should ask, is it them or is it me? we're taking your calls on the resignation of secretary chuck hagel announced yesterday. the phones are open. democrats can call 202-585-3880. publicans can call 202-585-3881. independents can call 202-585-3882. caller: i am from fort lauderdale and went to school at george washington university a few years ago and also wrote for cold war times. one of the things that bothered me is that somebody up on hearing about chuck hagel being you know, no longer secretary of

defense was that he was just the sergeant, and they do not think that was a good choice. i don't know. i do not know who said it, i never really got word of it, but what bothers me, the person who said it, he is no will rogers either. i think hagel did a fairly good job. i am not sure about some of the differences that were going on. there is the non-interventionist versus the interventionist debate that is going on about american foreign-policy, things getting more widespread and what is going on. can you comment on some of that, or cheekily remark that that person made question mark i forget who it was now. guest: yes, sure. i did hear that yesterday but do know -- that is what you get when you put a sergeant in charge. chuck hagel was the first

enlisted combat veteran to serve as secretary of defense. host: he was a sergeant in vietnam and had two purple hearts. guest: i think that comment was made somewhat in jest, and i think would be somewhat offensive to the senior enlisted military, but what i think is important to talk about as you mentioned earlier, john, chuck hagel was not -- i do not want to say he was set up to fail. he came in at an extremely difficult time, even before the rise of isis. this is as departments were declining in a way they have not in decades. that really limits his power to execute an agenda, and he came in under a president who has had years of tension between the president and the senior pentagon brass.

it goes back to the surge in afghanistan decision. they have always been skeptical of the maneuverings of the senior military officers, and chuck hagel had to balance those two. it is a really difficult job and it is not really surprising that there was a struggle. host: with isis, how central was chuck hagel in crafting the strategy that is being deployed against isis and is that strategy considered to be successful so far? guest: i do not get the sense that chuck hagel was that central to that strategy. i think that strategy was largely driven by brokering an agreement between the white house and the pentagon brass. the white house basically just does not want to put boots on the ground and wants to limit the use of the military in the execution of its foreign-policy as much as possible. it is a fundamental situation.

>> they want to put some things on warheads. i do not people -- do not think people cdm that way. chairman martin dempsey has spoken about this. he has been much more forceful in articulating what we are doing. >> jean is calling from mississippi. you are on our independent line. caller: good morning. host: good morning, sir. caller: you will have to forgive me. i am going to try to squeeze this in, and i have been a practicing lawyer for years, and to talk for a couple of minutes is kind of hard, all right

question mark first of all, i truly admire chuck hagel. i grew up in a military family and actually enlisted, and then my two sides were officers, and i admire chuck. number one. number two, if you would allow me i would like to ask your guest your opinion on the following. my concern as a 74-year-old man is this, that talking heads on tv and the people they bring on to express opinions, freedom of the speech and freedom of press but, but you cannot yell fire in a crowded theater and get away with it, and i am not too sure that the press -- well, they

have a responsibility to not do some of the things that they are doing. this is my opinion, and i guess my question is this. shouldn't we all just shut up and go to work and not give our opinions? i had a double amputation a little over a year ago, and i have been watching you all since then, as the lady says, about the folks who are cooking the soup. do you all think that we should not express so many opinions and let the american people get the news and to form their own opinions about chuck? host: all right, let's jump in and talk a little bit about the press coverage of secretary hagel before the announcement yesterday and then after. guest: well, i think that be --

i think the press has been relatively fair to secretary hagel. i think he has had a good relationship with the press. the worst thing you can say about secretary hagel in the press is that he has receded a little bit. his profile for secretary of defense has been a little bit lower than some of his predecessors. if you look at donald rumsfeld and robert gates, they were really, for better or worse towering figures that dominated the voice of the building and really dominated the discussions at the national security council, and i do not think you have seen that with hagel. i and my colleagues at the press room, and i talked about this a lot, secretary hagel and chairman dempsey will come out and do a joint re-think to reporters in the press room, and they will and that basically write what chairman dempsey

said, because he seems to articulate the current situation a little bit more forcefully and that is just -- we are not making any value judgment. it is just as we type up a story and it only can be 12 inches long we end up using his quotes other than the secretary's. host: the secretary's profile is a little bit lower. guest: right when we compare it, and that is a little unusual. it used to be the secretary primarily articulating a policy and the chairman and much more of a supporting role. host: on twitter, what does the administration want to do with the military? guest: i think those are really good questions. one of the questions i've heard a lot yesterday when talking to people about this is the question about to what extent does hagel's resignation signal some sort of significant

reassessment of this administration's foreign policy, military policy, particularly towards isis in iraq and syria and i do not know. i do not get that feeling there is going to be a massive change in that policy. but also, you mentioned the issue of readiness and about the shape the military is in. i think that is a huge question. there has been a lot of battles over budget, and certainly the top brass is saying more on the crux of the cusp of a readiness crisis because of the budget cuts. you know, i think that readiness is such that it is a big but nebulous thing that there are not really solid metrics to put behind that, but that is a real question as to whether in the next couple of years whether the military readiness is going to drop and there is a lot of questions about the budget that will have to be resolved this

spring, this summer by this new secretary, which is sort of like a three ring circus on capitol hill, and one will be the new secretary dealing with this budget issue, because we have a two year the quest ration deal that is going to expire next fall, and that is going to put all of those issues on the table. host: the fourth secretary of defense, the first president since harry truman to have four secretaries earning his time in office. this was created during the tenure of truman at 1947. and on the line from maryland for democrats. good morning. caller: good morning. i would like to completely support the caller before you talking about the talking heads and the spin doctors yes. i would also like to caution all of us, the american people, to respect and trust this president, who has put us on another