watch a alaska weekend on c-span, c-span.org or listen on the c-span radio app. c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television company. today, we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme and public policy events in washington, d.c. and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. next, author and msnbc host on his newly updated book. initially published in 1983 which chronicles the 1975 police shooting of an unarmed black man in boston. from washington journal, this is about an hour.

" continues. host: in 1983, lawrence a book andublished the msnbc host joins us now after the book was reissued in paperback last week. why did you think now was the time to revisit this story? problem of police use with deadly force has continued in the four decades since i started studying it. the very first thing i ever wrote was the op-ed he's in the new york times. 1970 nine about the problems involving police use of deadly force. the first time that the new york times printed anything about the police use of deadly force. anything analytical or critical. and the subject hasn't changed over time but it has become something people are more aware of over the last few years because of cable news and the

ofernet and because personal, handheld videos. we all have cameras in our pockets now. so some police activity that happened in the dark of night and couldn't be proven to be misconduct is now shown through video to be misconduct. as shown in the case of antwon rose where he was running away from a police officer. threat to the police officer. unarmed. the police officer shot him in the back. the officer has now been criminally charged in the incident. there is now video that shows exactly what i just described. versionis the updated of what i wrote in the 1980's. bringing the story of james bowden which happened here in boston when he was killed by boston police officers. i bring that story into its modern context now.

where people are much more attuned to what these problems police use ofthe deadly force. so as a statistical overview -- and i have been studying this for decades, we have a very soft use of of the police deadly force because the fbi crime statistics do not include this number. no government agency collecting the total number of people killed by police. studied this as best we can over this amount of time, it is my view and belief that most of the shootings done by police are what police called good shootings. meaning there was no choice. the other person did indeed have a on or some kind of lethal threat being posed to the police officer or someone else. and the shooting was, by all police rules, the right thing to do.

so i'm not talking about most police shootings. probleming about the cases and unarmed cases. in particular, the case of unarmed black man, a real problem area in the police use of deadly force. and the case i talk about in my book is one of the cases of an unarmed black man in boston. it turned into a very dramatic trial. my father was the lawyer in the case. came to my father and asked him to take the case. but the police were surprised because my father used to be a boston police officer. he started his work life as a boston police officer and he hard andworking full-time as a police officer and going to law school during the nights here in boston. uniqueook on that

perspective of being a police officer himself. multiyear into a dramatic war with his own police department. and that is the story i tell in the book. probably no other lawyer could have successfully handled that case. because there was no video showing how he was shot in the back. everything he knew as an ex cop and a trial lawyer to bring the truth to the jury in that case. host: we invite our viewers to call in if they want to join the discussion. democrats, (202) 748-8000. republicans, (202) 748-8001. independent, (202) 748-8002. if army get to the statistics, let's go to hugh was james bowden and what happened that night?

a maintenance worker at boston city hospital. he was married and had two children. four-year-old daughter and six-month-old son. and one of the big surprises for the police on smith street in boston in the middle of the housing project after they shot him was the discovery that he had no criminal record. and that was the thing that really changes the nature of a police investigation. of a police shooting. what they expect in these instances even if it is a bad shooting is that they find someone with a criminal record and they're able to say, he was a bad guy and it will be easier to tell the story that he somehow threatened them, even though he was unarmed. and none of that worked in this case. it was a boston police department cover. it took years for us to dismantle that.

my whole family and my brothers all worked on this case with my father. i investigated this along with him and i ended up speaking to more police officers in boston then my father was able to bring it to the case legally because more territory than just the court case. so in that investigation, both the courtroom investigation and my own, we discover that the police knew right away that this was a ad shooting. and the word went out that we are going to have to tell a story about this one. and they got together and the thing about police coverups in these situations is that they it all imperfect, to put mildly. and in those days, most of them never got examined by anyone. so if we hadn't studied it, we wouldn't have been able to show

just how badly this police cover-up was put together. each is why it unraveled in front of a jury in court. host: so your father was a police officer. before he took the case. why did he take the case? guest: as he was a police officer. when he heard this story and fred wondered newspaper article he had a very strong suspicion that this was a dad shooting. it was primarily what he knew about james bowden. that he had no criminal record and had the profile that i just gave you. the firstard that, thing that any cop thinks is that well, this isn't the kind of guy who gets into this time of trouble.

at that age, with no criminal record, he probably plays life pretty straight. so he started to suspect right away there was something wrong. but there is another personal and emotional side of this. when he was 11 years old, he lost his father in tragic circumstances so he was sitting there in his office in boston, talking to a widow with two children at home. he said, i couldn't let that widow go home that day without a lawyer. ist: the widow you mention patricia. what happened to them at the end of the case? case took several years to go through court. it went to trial once. then the appeal took seven years.

it went all the way to the supreme court. it went back for another trial. my father tried the case again and won again. and this is part of the new material in the book. it took years to collect the civil rights judgment that the jury gave the family in federal court. because the city of boston was under no obligation to pay it. as most cities at that time were. no obligation to pay a judgment for any family that brought a case like this. so it took years and it took political pressure, not something that the family could exercise in boston. because we were not politically connected in any way at that time. the african-american community rallied around this cause. local preachers, especially. they got involved and they brought the pressure to city hall. especially after the mayor

change. we had a mayoral election and there was a new mayor and that was the one who actually pay the judgment that the city owed and was hit with during the time of the previous mayor. that took quite a while. and what we see these cases today and received really bad shootings. the bad killings -- eric garner -- one of the things we see that ,s now almost routine especially if there is video, like there was video of eric -- within a relatively short amount of time compared to the seven year saga that i talk about in my book, within a relatively short amount of time, approximately one year, you will see the city involved make a financial settlement with the family in usually a matter of

millions of dollars. eric garner, $5 million. in the 1980's when this case was going through the court, there were none of those settlements. none of them. no one had ever won one of the verdicts and gone to trial and won the verdict in federal court. so the system has changed in that way. it has improved in that way. isolated many spots of improvement that i can identify in the problems associated with the use of deadly force. say being iny to boston today that the boston police department is one of the areas of improvement. bill evans is the current police commissioner in boston and is one of the best police leaders -- if not the best -- currently working in the united states. and i don't believe that the story that i tell in my book

that happened with the boston police department in the 1970's and 1980's could happen in today's police department and i hope i am right about that. host: you mentioned the dedication into the search. you can see the dedication there. joining usdonnell is to talk about the release of his book. again, phone lines for democrats, republicans and independents. art, good morning. this isn't and why i am calling. but you can't strangle a guy in 15 seconds. read, nine hundred police shootings a year. 600 of them are white. under 200 are black. the others are hispanic. what happened to the white lady killed in minnesota when she

called the police and she was in her pajamas? how come you don't play up that story? there are more than 900. that is the approximation. and the washington post, since the killing of michael brown, has dedicated an effort every year to try to figure out and account for the total number of people killed by police. and we still don't have it. the washington post approximation is the best and it is well over 1000 at this point. host: so far in 2000 18, the number is 516 people have been killed so far this year. guest: and we are halfway through the year. back when i was studying, we didn't have the internet. to cut with had

scissors articles out of newspapers around the country, all the eliminated smaller towns where this was happening. thehighest number we get in 1970's, the highest approximation was 600. it is very likely that there were many more shootings in the 1970's and 1980's that there are now. with largen individual place apartments, the number of shootings ifo lisa -- students -- shootings have declined steadily. so the overall rate of gunfire around police officer seems to have declined rather significantly over the last 30 years or so but it is a real

struggle to get at what the numbers are. questionable case out there is something that people can argue about. so the aftermath that we really want to see our good, honest investigations. investigations with the best of intentions from beginning to end and in some cases, the minority of the cases, we want to be a will to see a jury in a courtroom make the decision about what they believe happened. host: 516 the leash shooting so far this year. 21 more than a same time last year in two thousand 17 according to the washington post. 987 people were fatally shot. in 2017.3 lawrence o'donnell, has there

lets herffort guest: number this is an approximation. this is the number that the washington post has been able to actually document. the real number is something higher than that. there been an effort to get the federal government to track this, it officially? guest: yes. a few democrats in congress have tried to get the justice department to do this. the justice department has specifically refused to do it. host: dennis, go ahead. caller: my name is denise. police areay that completely off-balance. i remember when there wasn't the shoot to kill policy. and i feel like, as a black

woman, the police are not there to protect me. they are more likely to kill me. and i feel like with the call linens with what has gone on recently that white people feel like they are there to protect and serve them only. that is my comment. guest: i hear it all the time and all he can say is that i completely understand how someone would feel that way. problemu point out a that in the 1970's, departments didn't have deadly force rules. do they all have that now? yes, they pretty much all have that now. are all the most advanced kinds of rules from the 1970. and the rule in most departments is that it is inspected.

some departments don't specify it but are controlled by the state law from where they are. so it is a defense of life will. and you cannot shoot someone because he is running away from you. in fact, one year after my book came out, the supreme court ruled you cannot shoot someone because that person is running away from you. some state specifically used to couldat a police officer legally shoot anyone who they suspect of a felony who is running away from them. it didn't matter if they were a threat to anyone. but that has been struck down. rule -- i support police officers using deadly

force in the defense of their lives or others. but we have to think about, what was the threat to life here? the book "deadly force" and the author, lawrence o'donnell. with us for the next 30 minutes. join us. numbers fore democrats, republicans and independent callers. good morning. caller: i have a question at the because i will veer off you put this person on air and i think the rhetoric and the propaganda coming out since chuck has been -- with people guests, responsible for the congressional shooting

at the baseball game. into your show and you, rachel maddow, chris matthews, you are so disgusted with the president that i have never heard so much negativity. so much violent talk. so i would say two things. one, name two things you love about our current president. guest: what we do with my hour of television is we deal with the truth as we see it. days,st of the time, most the president of the united states in most instances is not truth, the side of not that he provably says things that are not true.

president of the united states is now a category of journalistic tracking and statistical analysis. how often and how much he lives. we have never lived with the president like this. so the job of covering this presidency is unlike the job of covering any presidency and we have ever had to cover. so for people who are thrilled with this presidency and you want to pretend that the president doesn't lie every day about the tiniest things -- the tiniest things and the biggest things -- that there are no more nuclear threat from north korea things like that. if you want to believe that, this is the country where you can believe that. and there's not a thing that i ever going to say that would in any way upset your beliefs in that.

book, "playing with fire, the transformation of american politics." what lessons can we take today from looking back 50 years ago to that campaign? 50 years ago, we see the beginnings of the politics that we have now. that was the presidential campaign where roger ailes entered his work life in politics. he was in entertainment but nixon lured him into the campaign to help with the tv side. he did a great job of that. he went on to work on other successful campaigns and then run fox news for many years. ailes, who was brought into the politics in 1968 had a longer lasting effect on presidential politics than even richard nixon. 1968 and opening on

the left side of the democratic party that we hadn't seen before , that was the jean mccartney campaign. followed by the bobby kennedy campaign. those were in search and campaigns on the left party, running against the more moderate democratic establishment. we saw that model again with bernie sanders. so there are all sorts of dynamics. we continue to see that in our politics today. host: coming off the question we asked democratic viewers in the first segment today, do you see that same segment happening in the form of cortez and what happened last week in new york? hard to say. especially in house races. there are so many of them. , asthere is always a rush soon as anything like this happens, a rush to attach a

large and important explanation to it which has nothing to do with local politics. and that is always countered by the chip o'neill saying that all politics is local. and it takes a while to figure out and find out what these things mean. i was working in the united in 1994 in the midterm congressional election and the speaker of the house, the democratic speaker of the home ins defeated back his own reelection campaign. no one knew what to read into that because it was so shocking. and it turned out there really wasn't much to read into it. there wasn't much to change about the way the democrats were

running their campaigns. and what was going on was an energy that was against the progressivism of the current president. at the presidency from that point forward after those first two progressive years became a fairy moderate, slow-moving presidency. because at that point it was quickly controlled i a republican congress. you know, it is very hard to tell. and i was fascinated by the bronx, queens district. i know it well. i'm surprised joe crowley was able to hold onto it for as long as he did. because of the demographic change in the district. but i'm going to wait to see what it means to the party.

and it could be something that is a large and important trend. i will admit to be one who thought bernie sanders would not do well at all as a challenger to her clinton for the nomination but bernie sanders started off at 3% and i remember privately thinking that ok, maybe 6% or 9%? maybe? and i sat back and watched that patientlyarch with studying it in real-time. i'm one u.s. away. i can't make judgments about what these things mean instantaneously. host: a question from twitter. what is the difference between socialism and democratic socialism?

guest: semantics. socialism became a bad word and we then became anti-intellectual about socialism. as a country, we stop thinking about what it actually is and just adopted, for the most part, a posture of fear against the word and the concept of socialism. medicare was proposed in the 1960's, the argument against it was essentially, it is socialism. that was the entire argument. and it was surprising that the argument didn't work, especially because it was true. medicare is socialism. medicare is the beneficiary of a very smart socialistic program called medicare. and to deny that it is socialism is to deny economic literacy.

not terrifying if you know what it is. the other thing about socialism about this inall the united states. our country wouldn't work without it. every country in the world is what economists call a mixed economy. are mixes, to varying degrees, of capitalism and socialism. cuba is one extreme socialism with little capitalism. and the united states is in an area that is much towards. think of the health care system. of the spending in the american health care system is government spending. that is socialistic spending.

every single penny. so is our health care system socialist? no. is our health care system socialistic? yes. does our health care system have capitalistic elements? yes, it does. people have to grow up and drop the fear of the word and look at the socialists that they like and the socialism they think is smart. they have to look at it like social security and other programs they don't even know. and relax about the word. and make adult decisions about just how much socialism is the right mix for this economy and how much capitalism is the right mix. is, we cannott run this country without both of them. host: lawrence o'donnell.

robert is joining us from connecticut. go ahead. every year in america, twice as many white people are shot and killed the police. why is it that we don't see many crying white mothers on tv? why did hillary clinton the mothers up of the black victims white police officers who killed, where worth their mothers? i have a few friends who are cops and they show me the statistics on black men and how they murdered people at a rate that is 10 times more than whites and latinas put together. but it is always about the black. where are the crying white mothers? guest: every case has to be analyzed individually. and when you do that, you do discover that there is a peculiar phenomenon involved

with the unarmed black male victim. that in statistical terms, we see more of those. then we do of white victims. and let's remember what i said at the beginning, when you that getout the cases protested and the ones that don't get protested, what i said at the beginning is that it is my belief that most shooting by police, most of it, is justified. so most of it does not invoke any protesting at all. we see a very tiny number of protest, if we talk about 1000 or more killings by police in a a typical and we see maximum less then one doesn't over the police use of deadly force, we're talking about the really tiny

piece of the total. so you can't draw conclusions about what is happening overall with the police use of deadly force just by looking at the cases that get protested. from your book, you write "black america has our aid -- has always been this was a problem. unjustified deadly force, passing the word. but it took a series of technological developments for white america to hear the stories. video, as, body cam camera phone in everyone's pocket. guest: it also took the shooting of michael brown because that was the first one that was protested in a major way. that, we had gone a

significant distance in time before a major protest. i know people feel that all of these cases are protests but that isn't the case. what michael brown did was that it look at the news media on this issue for the first time in the age of cable news. in because the protesting missouri turned into ryan payne, cable networks were out there 24 hours a day and people were internet 24the hours a day. at the subject of the police use of deadly force was suddenly front and center because of those developments. forespecially the aftermath a few weeks in ferguson. and that was the moment -- no matter what you think of that shooting -- that was the moment when america stopped and realized that they would have to pay attention. michael from alabama.

good morning. lawrence o'donnell, i can't believe i have a chance to speak to you. thank you so much for speaking and standing up for us who have no public voice. you are so special. this element of fascism and racism that has taken over the country is bringing fear to everybody who has common sense. and what i'm asking you to do -- most of all, is to take and republicans are actually defining what the democrats are about. us baby them to call killers. we hate abortions. i will let you get back to saying what you are saying because what you are saying is so important in every way.

guest: it is a difficult thing that -- the politics of abortion are difficult. hard onthing that is the democratic pro-choice element is to talk about abortion specifically. anyone i've never met who is pro-choice who takes abortion lightly and doesn't thingthis is a difficult for people to go through. it -- it ist of hard to find the public rhetoric for that discussion. i have never found the public rhetoric. whatbortion is obviously the next supreme court confirmation process is going to be all about. democrats are going to try to do everything they can to ring attention to the possibility

that roe v. wade is at risk in this confirmation process. and that means they are going to strategically be trying to put enormous pressure on republicans. susan collins from maine and from alaska -- the only two pro-choice republicans in the united states side. and the democrats do not have any procedural or parliamentary trick that they can play on the senate floor or in a judiciary committee that could block this nomination. the democrats and the senate know that the only way the nomination could be stopped is with republican votes. and they know that senator murkowski and collins are the two most likely votes for them to try to attract. so they will be spending all of their time doing that. the nuclear option -- to

get rid of the filibuster on everything except for the supreme court justices? guest: i worked in the senate for seven years. the 1990's, we respected everyone of the rules. each side has used the rules to their own advantage at some time. and we knew there would be another day down the road where we would be using the filibuster rule in the same way that our opponents were using it that day. so i was extremely reluctant. to join in the chorus. harry reid was under tremendous pressure to get rid of it. included in not that pressure. that is another thing where i sat back and watched and didn't have a strong feeling about it. ift i do believe now is that

harry lead had not done it then, then with ricotta would do it now. why mitche any reason mcconnell would not have done anything right now. host: ohio is next. good morning. caller: thank you for taking my call. i would like to say that in the 1950's, we didn't have miranda until a legal person across the border from mexico was jailed for rape. you may be familiar with the case. the, i wanted to say that thin blue line is getting thinner all the time. and i wonder if the real goal here isn't to disarm our police

officers. you know, the killing in dallas with the police officers, the ,ay those guys were taken down that was a professional hit job. i don't know if you realize that. it wasn't an ordinary shooting that happened when that guy opened up on those people in that parking garage. i agree. it was. we all were outraged at that. only anyone in america supported what happened to those police officers. the did he broke work and police officers who tried to killer,m, stop that every single police officer in and around that scene that night at her heroic work. for a long time they had no idea

where the shots were coming from. and i will never forget that night and covering it. i was watching nothing but heroic police officer work that night. and i never heard a comment anywhere in this country that said any worth -- said anything different. the loss of those police officers was a terrible tragedy and a terrible tragedy for their families and for the country. that is really what all the news coverage of that time delivered at the time. host: and is in tennessee. caller: we can have justice when those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by who have been. good to talk to you, lawrence. the difference is, the question the guy asked earlier about, where is the outrage when white

cops get killed? the outrage is that the police are hardly ever held accountable but the black guys that kelly's people are put in prison for life. the death penalty. that is the difference. and what i want to mention -- i don't know if you mentioned this. but police and other countries, our country kills 1000 people a year. some of these other countries, they haven't killed 50 people in 50 years. did you see that in the guardian? they have all of these numbers. england, 56 wales, million people. 55 fatal shootings in 24 years. the united states, 59 fatal shootings in the first days of the year. guest: yes.

to concentrate on the subject is that police officers are government workers who have more power over you than anyone other-- over you then government workers. including the president and the supreme court and every member of congress. can kill you.icer can shoot and kill you on the spot with no trial. no jury. death penalty. on the street. that power is enormous. that power is a power that we employedust is being judiciously and carefully all the time. it is as simple as that. when you invest that enormous in human beings, you have to be ready to deal with the possible mistakes that those human beings can make.

host: a recent question asked after two officers were charged fatal police shootings, our arrest happening faster? general, certainly by a giant order of magnitude, happening faster than when i first started studying the subject in the 1970's and 1980's, because they were not happening at all. ofy were just be a couple arrests at most, in the course of a year. sometimes zero. because the evidence wasn't there. the kind of evidence that was irrefutable. in evidence you need prosecuting a police officer is a much higher bar. andes are inclined to favor sympathize with a police officer , as so many of our callers do this morning. some will sympathize to the point of thinking that the police officer can do no wrong. standard ofigh

bringing charges against police officers. the charges are rare. of we certainly see more those prosecutions now than we used to and a lot of that is thanks to the personal videos that people are able to make of the shooting incidents. what is the crucial evidence in the james bowdoin case? autopsy report, for example, it showed he was shot in the back and back of the neck. the police story was that he seems to be threatening them and looked like he was holding a gun in his hand and he was aiming at them. and the devastating question in cross-examination was that if he was looking at you and aiming a gun at you, how did you shoot him in the back and the back of the head? wasgun the james bowdoin

using according to police officers was found very far from the location of the shooting and the next question becomes, did james bowdoin have that gun? how did he throw it that far away after he was shot in the back and the back of the neck and was dead? toause he would have had throw that away after he was dead. automaticself was an there was no ejected shell found inside james bowdoin's car. and that is just the tip of the iceberg of the evidence pile that took a couple of weeks to present to a jury. no gun powder residue on james bowdoin's hands. no fingerprints when the gun was found down the street after the shooting. the police officer who found the gun told me that -- he didn't testify in the court case -- but he told me he believed it was

planted by other police officers because he found it to hours after the shooting. he arrived to the scene late and was told by a sergeant to go "look over there" and he looked under a car and there it was. and he told me right away that he thought it was a dirty gun. a throwaway gun. discussesentire case the shooting and this book was released last week. lawrence o'donnell is with us for the next 10 minutes to take questions. good morning. i would like to thank lawrence o'donnell because i watch msnbc all the time and i believe everything they report. i don't really think there is a solution to this problem as far as the police killing black youth. the police go into these areas

with attitudes? they go into impoverished areas with attitudes and think that these guys possess weapons already. part of the gang. flare.denly tempers think attitude is the central explainer of these that cases. and it is completely human. the attitude is fear. situation.on the it is fear of the attitude. fear of the person they are confronting. and it turns out after the fact that the fear is not justified fear isny cases but what you see when you study the cases. bowdoin,se of james

they ran up to his car and they immediately, within three seconds, start firing. , they wereyell terrified. about whaterrified they were confronting. never want tos say that they did what they did were terrified. but if you get in that situation and imagine what they are feeling, the truth is that it was fear. the bad cases are the cases of police officer quickly overreacting to their fear. host: an independent, good morning. caller: i am a retired police officer of california. least years i was my

trainer so i did have the chance to look at the police shootings and sadly, when i started my career in 1981, you never drew monarch and on any person for any reason unless it was so extreme that you had no choice. sadlyat i see these days is so many things i cannot even begin to explain. other than i have heard the words fear and the demographic change and the reality is that if you look at history, people don't like change. as people have been in control for so long and have seen the demographic shift. and they're are people who look not like me. brown, black, or whites. is something that absolutely will happen. and using california as a model, 50 years ago, mexicans were

hand-in-hand and now when you go , good state of california luck trying to find work because it is virtually controlled by mexican people. you that after analyzing most of the shootings, there is no reason that perception should become a reality when you are a police officer. did you see a gun? no, i didn't. youhy did you think that shot one? guest: i want to add one thing our caller can confirm. this is one of the challenges for the modern policing. learned how to be a police officer through training. everyone who shows up for police work now goes through a minimum of 20 years of that training on

television and watching cop shows and videos with dramatic shows. most police officers never fired their guns. they are never shot at. every police officer is shot at everyres their gun in police show is shot at and fires their gun. on tv shows. caller: that is spot on. you are always going to be having a healthy fear. you should. but when it gets to the point that you are so afraid -- most of my life i was in martial arts and grappling sports -- i had a

healthy fear but i kept myself it. i started in 1981. we had to get ourselves into shape because we were expected to train quarterly. i don't care what size department, if they had training once a year, that is a lot. you consequently would have cops who are not in good shape. they become afraid. if you don't feel comfortable in in my opinion and -- what i have seen guest: there are no better analysts of that will be former police

officers. they know. they know what a bad one looks like. host: elizabeth is here in inhing can, -- here washington, d.c., good morning. i was wondering if the man had stayed in his car, would that have changed? we have no idea. antwon rose got out of the car and the officer shot him in his back. we have seen armed white men stay in the car and be shot. what is really difficult about this is that it is very hard to try to figure out what you would make to --n, unarmed, lachman sorryd, black men -- i'm

to say that i don't know what to say. i can look at what he did and say, she shouldn't have done that or why did he do that or that beingknow unarmed and running away from a police officer was going to get him shot in the back in this country? it is against the law. louisville, kentucky. go ahead. commendi want to lawrence o'donnell. i want to say the call in from you, heia, as he told was an officer since 1981 and i have in since 1961. and i never shot anybody. i never killed anybody. please threw down guns and

anyone who is afraid of police should not get a job as a police officer. you can get any kind of job that you want. and i say this to the washington journal. washington journal, you see what the real america is. because you see people call in and hear the things they say. lawrence o'donnell is about the truth. i had been involved when we had a national black police convention. 1972.e founded in policet is the time when were shooting people and all of this stuff. i commend lawrence o'donnell. truth, thes

truth, the opposite of the truth is a lie. the natural enemy of the truth is a lie. the president, you can't deny that the president lies. that is wrong. you talk about the bible and that kind of stuff. it says tell the truth. host: lawrence o'donnell give you the last 60 seconds or so. guest: you are hearing from an experienced former police officer who is telling you the way things were. he talked about what the police used to call throwdown knife throwdown gun. evidence they could plant in these situations where an unarmed suspect was killed. that is the story i tell in my book, 1975 killing in boston. a very dramatic story and unfortunately it's a story that is still with us. what happened to james bowden's mother, losing her son is the same thing that happened to

antwon rose jr's mother. son two weeks ago. there are marginal ways we have gotten better as a country in dealing with this phenomenon. we come more honest in dealing with this phenomenon but those marginal improvements are no consolation a to the mother ofntwon rose jr today. -- antwon >> next, the foreign affairs executive editor on the dominant policy things today. it is 30 minutes. what is the grand foreign policy narrative of our current times? that is the question foreign affairs magazine sought to answer in its latest edition. thekurtz phelan is magazine's executive editor. why go through this