continues. host: we welcome back steve casstevens, recently serving as president of the chiefs of police international association. good morning. guest: how are you? host: doing well. in the year since george floyd's murder do you think this conversation around policing reform has been a beneficial one? has it made community safer?

has it made police departments better at doing their jobs? guest: i think the conversations are incredibly important and it's good to listen to people's opinions and thoughts on law enforcement. i have been in law enforcement 45 years and i have seen a lot of positive changes, but that doesn't mean we can't have more. i think there is always a good opportunity to evaluate our system and see what we can improve. host: have you seen positive changes when it comes to policing and race and understanding disparities in this country? guest: i do. i have seen many positive changes whether it is policies and procedures for law enforcement agencies, whether it's the amount of training or type of training that police departments see. back when i became a law enforcement officer there was no training received at the academy

or basic training and field training about race relations and things of that nature. i think we have improved a lot of ways and like i said, training and recruiting as well. recruiting is one of the most important factors. host: how is recruiting going in the past year in the wake of a lot of criticism that police departments have received the past year surrounding the conversation? guest: absolutely true and is something that we have been looking at recruiting for quite a few years. we released a report back in september 2019 on the state of recruiting in the law enforcement profession. even back then we were receiving information that nearly 80% of law enforcement agencies across this country were having difficulty in recruiting qualified candidates. not just in recruiting candidates but qualified candidates.

for example, in the chicago area i can easily recall where, 40 years ago, we would have 800 to 1000 applicants and we are currently testing my agency maybe 100 applicants. as i have had conversation with others recently just because i have 100 applicants doesn't mean i have 100 qualified applicants. there is a great conversation which i think is incredibly important right now of recruiting qualified candidates and truly looking for the best of the best. that's difficult to do for a variety of reasons. host: if you want to have that conversation, join this conversation this morning and you can do so on the phone lines. democrats (202)-748-8000, republicans (202)-748-8001, independents (202)-748-8002. special line for law enforcement

which is (202)-748-8003. returning once again to the negotiations over police reform legislation. some sort of compromise bill on capitol hill. what does that look like in your eyes? what is something you could support? guest: interestingly i think there are more things we agree on then disagree on. iecp has agreed on a a variety of police reforms the past years. for example, we released in 2017 our consensus use of force policy that we supported and a lot of those things are just now being talked about. things like officers shall only use force when necessary or objectively reasonable because we follow the 1980 supreme court ruling.

that's discussing use of force and that is the law of the land for law enforcement no matter what agency you work for. we have to remember that in this country we have 18,500 law enforcement agencies employing over 850,000 officers but we have to follow the same rules. many of those are set by supreme court decisions. we also talk about the duty to intervene, we talk about the duty to render aid during an arrest, we talk all use of force should be documented. we have discussed for years the mandatory participation in the national use of force database. i keep pushing in my speeches to law enforcement and police chiefs specifically, we have to participate in the national use of force database. no statistician will tell you

can rely on data if you are only getting 40% to 50% of the data. we need to have 100% contributing to the database. here's why this is so important. a lot of law enforcement agencies don't report to the use of force database because they have not used force that meets the criteria. they are not reporting those zero use of force. that is just as important to the national conversation as when police officers do use force to affect an arrest. those are a lot of things we are pushing including the national standards for discipline and termination of officers, national de-certification database of officers. host: congresswoman karen bass, senator tim scott, senator cory booker are leading the negotiations. have you or the iacp had a

chance to talk to any of those individuals directly about these issues we are talking about? guest: i can say the iacp executive staff and elected leadership, our current president, has spoken with both sides of the aisle and we have continuous conversation on these topics. host: we will let you have a conversation with our callers. beth in tampa, florida, independent. caller: good morning. thank you for taking my call. yes, i am very concerned. accountability, what happened to people being held accountable for their own actions and not just police officers, not just law enforcement, but society? we are talking of reforming police officers but what about the disobedience we have shown toward laws set forth in this country? what about respect for others and their property? why are we blaming everything --

it seems like white people and other races have no hard times, we aren't poor, we don't get arrested, we don't get hungry, we don't suffer through abuse or alcoholism. something is not right. host: chief? guest: i will say we have got a lot of ills in our society. many of those are dumped on the doorstep of law enforcement that were never our responsibility before. that could be the separate conversation of why are we involved in drug addiction and homelessness? these are societal issues when society back in the 1950's and 1960's defunded those. what i will say to the caller about respect, my job as a police chief is to make sure everyone of my officers treats every single person they come into contact with with respect.

that should be the mantra of every police chief, every state police director, every sheriff and i think when you look at the numbers of the millions, truly millions, of police-citizen contacts that happen every year in this country 99.9% you will never hear about because they were handled respectfully. host: rick on twitter cuts to the heart of the debate over police reform. what is your position on qualified immunity? guest: great question. qualified immunity is granted to law enforcement officers based on supreme court decisions. there is discussion on qualified immunity and i listen to a lot of talkers on a variety of shows and news media and social media that i don't think share what

qualified immunity means. qualified immunity does not mean a police officer cannot be sued for their actions. it does not mean that at all. there are many police officers who have been personally held accountable for their actions. but that's if they violate the law and the whole point of qualified immunity is if the action a police officer takes during the course of duty was lawful at the time, based on either court decisions or current law, then they should be protected by qualified immunity. that doesn't mean that the city or county or state cannot be sued for variety of reasons but it is the one protection of officers they have. many people forget that our elected officials have absolute immunity. host: now to new york this is catherine, a democrat.

caller: good morning. i would like to bring up the idea of police insurance. the same way our physicians who also have the power of life and death over us and who are human and can make mistakes and they are required to have insurance. why can't the police have policing insurance? with 850,000 people there is enough to start an insurance company. maybe that is the way of saying if you don't qualify for insurance anymore, you cannot be a police person. host: any thoughts? guest: i have heard this type of conversation before and again, i am not an insurance adjuster and not a city manager but i can

easily tell you this. i have spoke with many city managers and mayors on this topic. the reality is -- this is a deeper conversation -- but if qualified immunity were taken away and cities had to buy insurance, let's call it malpractice insurance on every law enforcement officer, there are some cities that would have to fold the police department. they flat out could not afford that unless they had considerable increase in taxes on their citizens which i suspect in most cities would not go over well. host: to vicki in gainesville, texas. good morning. caller: hi. i have an issue with recruitment of police officers. i attended police academy here in town and they were all pretty nice but i was the only black

person that was in that class. the classes they had were few in the past that had attended. they talked about the hiring process and they started with this 35 question application preceded by several other things that the applicant had to, you know, be able to get by in order to be hired. my whole concern was that the questions were pretty pointed. they were, how would i say, culturally biased? the interviewers were all of the police force which i can understand, but they also had biases. as a result really no minorities were hired.

i was concerned about that because i was really kind of treated cruelly for even being there and gone through the experience. host: chief? guest: first of all, it is unfortunate you were made to feel that way and secondly, come to buffalo grove and put your application in here. [laughter] i will tell you this and this is part of the conversation on police recruiting because with over 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country there are many different rules, including on recruiting. most law enforcement agencies will start the recruitment with a simple application process. it will then transition to an orientation and then into a written test and then an oral interview with some police board or commission. then there has to be a physical fitness test, there has to be a medical screening, psychological screening and polygraph.

a very intense background and then successfully complete the academy and then go through field training and have an 18 month probation. it is not a simple process but it's not supposed to be a simple process because again, our society demands our law enforcement officers be the best and i want every officer that works for me to be the best. i don't want mediocre officers. i want the diamonds in the rough, the best that we can find to serve the citizens of our community and i know every police chief feels that way. that's when the process takes so long. the conversation of minorities in recruiting, that's a great conversation because that is something that is always near and dear to my heart. we have a number of minorities on the buffalo grove police department but at the end of the day the police officers on your

agency should be reflective of the community they serve. if you have a very high black community, you should expect a number of black officers on your department. if you have a high asian community, you should expect there are asian officers. the fact of the matter is whenever i have this conversation in my community and people say you should have more minority officers, my answer is send them my way. if you know someone who is a minority that to be an officer, please send them my way and i will discuss with them the process and i will do everything i can to help them be successful. host: are you saying right now you don't believe your agency reflects your community in buffalo grove yucca guest: we do. minority officers. we actually have a high percentage of female officers but we have black officers, hispanic officers, asian officers. think we are incredibly reflective. host: from the new iacp survey

on factors driving the police recruitment crisis in this country, showing our viewers some of those factors that are of concern, what we haven't touched on his generational differences. guest: well, that is a great topic because people kind of wonder what that means. what that means is when i became a police officer and the generation when i started in the 1970's and early 1980's officers were so dedicated to the job that they put every hour in that they could to learn and work overtime. this over the years was to the detriment of officers and quite often lead to high suicide rates, high divorce rates among officers because that's all they did. the current generation, they are

looking at work differently. they are saying i'm not interested in the overtime. it is more important for me to spend quality time with my family, quality time with other things away from work. quite often we get in a situation where current generations, you're are going to force me to work overtime? if you force the door holidays because when i started i worked 11 years before i got christmas or new year's off to spend with my family. the generation of would-be candidates look at that in say, you know what? that's not for me. host: few more minutes left with steve casstevens, the chief of the buffalo grove police department in illinois. we will take your calls until 10:00 a.m. when we are heading over to the hearing before the house appropriations subcommittee looking into the 2021-2022 budget request of the

national institutes of health. dr. francis collins and dr. anthony fauci will be testifying. stick around on c-span if you want to watch that or c-span.org and the free c-span radio app. back to your phone calls. this is clyde in san antonio, texas, independent. caller: good morning to you both. my interest is in specifically giving an example of a few questions. how do you psychologically vet these police officers? also, do you have access to what platforms on the internet they have been engaged with? also, i understand former military people are recruited or hired by police departments and do you have access to their psychological records or records

in general while they were in the military? thank you. host: thank you for the question. guest: all great questions. first of all, being former military myself we, like most police agencies, give extra preference to candidates who have served in the military. they do make their records available to us. we do not have access to any psychological testing that may or may not have been done by the military but every police department in this country, as part of the process i enumerated earlier of medical screens, polygraph, psychological screenings, we send all our candidates through polygraph testing and psychological screening with a private agency. people who are smarter than me who have phds who do this process and we rely on them. their profession does this for police and fire agencies.

we rely on them to do this screening. i think it's incredibly important because we go back to the earlier conversation, people in this country want the best police officers serving their communities. they don't want me to hire someone with issues in the past with either alcoholism or mental health issues or theft or lying on their application. all of these things we have to sort through when we do intensive background a best occasion and psychological screening. host: what about having access to a candidate's search history on the internet? the rising importance of social media. how much do you check that out as you're going through the screening process? guest: we absolutely do a check through any social media whether they are using facebook, twitter, etc. we cannot demand, like, some agencies in the past they demand

the candidate to give their passwords. but if anything is publicly available, we do look at that. i had a question not long ago from a reporter who asked, hey, do you know of any officers that were in washington, d.c. for the insurrection and how do you know any of your officers don't belong to these radical groups? well, that's a great question. none of these radical groups post their membership list on social media. but we certainly do look at social media to see if there's any indicators any of our candidates we are looking at may belong to any of those type of groups. host: david in kansas on the line for democrats. good morning. caller: good morning to both of you. i have a couple of things i wanted to mention. why haven't the police gone to a national license like they do

with truck drivers like the cdls? as a police officer when you do something wrong and you get fired you just go to the next department to get hired on. that's horrible. also, i wanted to bring up the fact these awards that are given to people brutalized by police officers, which is happening more and more all the time, these awards -- they are paid for by the taxpayers. the police themselves are not being punished for this. i believe what should happen rather than insurance, which the police would get the taxpayers to foot the bill for the insurance so they will not be punished, so why don't we take

the awards out of the retirement funds? if that were to happen and somebody gets a $10 million award and it comes out of the retirement fund for the police department in the police department has to foot the bill, each cop has to pay $200 or $300 a month out of their own retirement for that other officer's indiscretions, that would cause the police themselves to start policing themselves. host: chief? guest: first of all, let me talk about the de-edification which i believe he is talking about -- de-certification which i believe he is talking about. every state has their own criteria on how they would decertify an officer whether he is found guilty of a crime,

fired or terminated during an investigation for some reason. that officer can be decertified by their state training board. that's what happens in illinois. but not every state has the same rules and there really isn't a good single database that someone can go to and can be sure an officer from any of the 50 states who left the police department who has truly been decertified has made the national database list. that's one of the things we agree upon. as a police chief i don't want an officer i terminated go to another police department in another state and be hired as an officer. nobody wants that. that's incredibly important to our profession to make sure we continue to support that national decertification database. regarding the other topic, i understand with the caller was saying but let's remember this.

the more roadblocks that we throw into the process of becoming a police officer the less we are going to have who wo become a police officer. and if we have legislation that says you are going to be sued personally and civilly for something that happened, we can go back to the qualified immunity topic, you will not have any people who want to be police officers. what you see across this country, if you look at states like minnesota and the major cities are losing hundreds of officers who were either retiring early or leaving the profession that says it is not worth it for me anymore. you are seeing a mass exodus of good officers leaving this profession. and we have to make sure that that does not happen, because we have to make sure we are protecting our community. host: as we wait for the hearing

to begin, time for just one or two more calls if you do not mind. nelson, st. louis. a democrat. morning. caller: thank you for taking my call. i have a question about -- you mentioned overtime earlier. shouldn't there be hours of service just like there is for truck drivers? we have police officers now that serve there eight hours or whatever and then they go work security somewhere else, but when they come back on the job a lot of them are tired. i have had a discussion with police officers come back on duty and just do not get there rest. there should be hours of service laws for police officers at a minimum. i do not disagree with you about what you said about the insurance. right now in the cities, the cities are paying those awards anyway, so just like doctors, the hospitals do not pay their

insurance, they have to pay themselves. host: chief. guess: hours of service -- guest: hours of service, you have had discussions about them. it is exacerbated right now because we have a number of officers even -- either leaving the profession or going onto a different profession, or a lack of candidates. we have so many law enforcement agencies across this country who are understaffed right now, which forces officers to work more overtime to keep their minimum staffing. yes, that contributes to burnout. it would be great for me as a police chief to say i do not want my officers to work anything more than eight hours. sadly, that is not reality. i have to protect the citizens of my community and force my officers to work overtime. there are many agencies with a policy of a maximum number of hours that you can work is 16 hours, which is essentially a

double eight hour shift. or, as many police departments working 12 hours and then a half shift after that. i do not want my officers working more hours than that either because of exactly what this caller said. your officers will be tired and force to make decisions that they might not be prepared to make. host: he is the fourth president of the international association of pleat -- chiefs of police.

the committee will come to order.