will here from library carla hayden, david meredith and more. the library of congress national book festival live saturday beginning at 9:30 a.m. eastern on c-span2. >> there are a lot of places to get political information but only at c-span do you get it straight from the source. no matter where you are from or where you stand on the issues, c-span is america's network. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. if it happens here, or here, or here, or anywhere that matters, america is watching on c-span. powered by cable. >> mr. o'donnell is with us.

early 80's as a prosecutor in the queens' da office and now as a lecturer at john jay college of criminal justice. welcome to washington journal, welcome back. guest: thank you, good morning. now talking about the safer america plan that he unveiled, some of which eat -- we knew ahead of time, the elements of his crime reduction and gun violence reduction plan and the key parts are $14 billion for training and 100 dish -- additional officers. $20 billion over five years, $1.7 billion for more agents, and also to emphasize to congress the passage of legislation pushing for universal background checks and assault weapons bands, some of which the elements have been passed.

we will start with the comments from president biden yesterday and his proposal, what are your thoughts? caller: -- guest: the important issue with the policing and more important to the money is that he is saying that police and will not be defunded, the institution has to be defended and i believe mayors and public officials are responsible for the lives and safety of the people must have breathed a sigh of relief hearing the president using his pulpit to finally once and for all pushback against one has -- what has basically been the social media at abbott in -- evelyn's -- avalanche not commuting -- avalanche not connected to communities. he was showing it should be a community driven conversation not by slogans. these are complex issues, and i think the mayors today will be very happy because it is to --

time to restore sanity and balance to the conversation about policing. host: the big piece of that is money for training and additional 100,000 officers across the next five years. tie that in directly to how the presence of officers might help to reduce the increase in violent crime, particularly in cities across this country. guest: the big obstacle is that we have thousands of funded positions that cannot be filled, so the big question is where do the police come from? but one step at a time and this is an important step that he is taking. the police are a popular institution, they want to see them more and it comes back in every pole. people are willing to pay to have the police out there. the important point that has been overlooked in this avalanche of attacking and social media campaign is that

most of what the police do is profoundly unobjectionable. their enforcement and conflict work is a small part of what they do. they do a lot of service functions that almost everyone would agree are laudatory. what has been happening with the shortage of police and the collapse of recruiting and people leaving the job in massive numbers is response times, which has not gotten any attention at all relative to what it should get, they have absolutely got off the charts, our to two hours long. rape victims calling, they get sent to a non-emergency numbers and the police get there when they get there. police are getting out of the business of peacekeeping and traffic accidents. a lot of functions that are not controversial that got swept up in this media avalanche and social media avalanche that was a lack of data and contemplation

of what these things would mean as this slogan took over the conversation and has caused, hopefully not irreparable damage. the only thing i want to say is that the president did not say this. one of the things that the administration is doing is getting the justice department out of the discussion -- destructive business of consent degrees. the justice department needs to tell people -- police departments how to tell people what to do over several years places like -- places like baltimore and new orleans have been crippled, absolutely paralyzed by zealots who believe that the best policing is no policing at all. maybe the president and pride in administration can recognize that it is not just funding the police, it is what they do and helping them affirmatively. everyone can tell them what not to do.

at 2:00 in the morning when citizens call in crisis it is individual cops who go to the calls and have to improvise and they can use all the help in the world and the best parts of the country the doj can hopefully canvas best practices, but plenty of places have division where policing goes on and lots of high quality interactions, that is the affirmative plan that we need to see. host: let me go back to the personnel issue. why has it been difficult to recruit? why are officers leaving the force? what is behind that? guest: this is a tough job, it is policing in america, it is the western world's most violent society with half -- have a billion guns and mass shootings practically every day. we have incredible levels of violence in some communities. it is a hard sell.

this is one of the things i got swept away in this conversation, just getting anybody to do the job was a big ask. before you turned it into a potential where people could be criminalized and demonized and the oppressive level of discipline and threatening environments in the agencies. that is a big challenge, to find the money is one thing, and to find humans that you would want in a police uniform in the most difficult places in the country will be enormous. a single journey starts with one step and it is important. the police were generally undefended and orphaned for five or six years and this conversation just went out of control. there was no deliberation so things like taking away police officers' protections if they get sued. those things were just swept away, so we see all over the country not just in the big

city, we see that the police who take the job shying away from the kind of work that people might want them to do like road safety, domestic violence enforcement, investigative work. a lot of people are committing serious crimes with a high assurance they will not be apprehended and nobody will be looked at them and it will be discussed on c-span and the chances are in the bigger cities prosecutors will go for the defender over the victim. host: we are talking about policing in america and particularly the proposals unveiled yesterday. we welcome the calls and comments. 202-748-8000 is for those of you in the eastern and central time zones. 202-748-8001 four the mountain and facet -- for the mountain and pacific region. i want to play the comments from president biden talking about the need for increased public

trust in law enforcement, and for further support of law enforcement reform. here is president biden. [video clip] pres. biden: that strengthens public safety, and that -- and there are communities that want police more than any communities which are the tough poor communities, lack, white, -- black, white and immigrants. they want to help, without that victims do not call for help and witnesses do not step forward. crimes go unsolved and justice is not served. i took executive action, which i am allowed to do as president. i always admire that governors can take executive action. all kidding aside, to make some of these reforms for federal officers and i could not do that first aid officers. no federal officer is allowed to use a chokehold or unrestricted

no-knock warrants. we created an international database for officers who have been misbehaving and held accountable so they cannot hide. my plan will make sure that state and local governments adopt these reforms. [end video clip] host: your thoughts on what the president had to say. guest: more no's and not enough yeses. what we need the president to do is to tell police affirmatively what we want them to do is -- is becoming a carnival of people impeding police work and all of that is coming at a cost of greater insecurity. we will wait and see, but it is not to be understated, it is an important today because the president took the conversation back into the community, and now you have a reset about what law enforcement should look like.

we will have, all of this, comes with challenges. you are going to take law enforcement people and disqualify them on the face of it that makes sense but you have a recruiting crisis, so what will the standard be? the details remain to be worked out, but the pressing question that has been going on for a decade that the president did not address and has ignored in the last several administration is who is going to put on a police uniform? give us the details. the reality is that the president and -- the more people know about police work the less people are likely to go into it. you get a pool of people who do not know what they are getting themselves into and you have driven away a generation of young, idealistic people. the president said that people he went to high school with they wanted to help people and those

were the people in school. we need to say that more. what he said yesterday is helpful, and it doesn't matter that the president is defending the institution. by the way as we said before, the police are not the only institution that needs to be defended. if you do not defend institutions they are always going to be -- there is an assumption that they will always be there. the police is a dying profession, so whether it is under the fbi or national institutes of health, a lot of government agencies do important work. the irs get trashed and cheap shotted by people. you need to have elected officials courageously defending government officers doing the work we ask them to do. tell the police what you asked them to do and they will do it. we have seen that cities have said we do not want the police to be involved, they have

followed those orders at great cost. host: we have calls waiting for you. we will go first to -- to california. go ahead. good morning. caller: good morning bill and eugene. i agree with eugene about slogans as a liberal black man, defund the police had to be one of the dumbest sayings that i heard. but i would also like to say that i appreciate the police when they are doing their jobs. unlike the arkansas cops that did what they did, feeding the poor man. so, do you think that body cameras and the -- people filming the police are helpful along with policing? thank you. guest: it is inevitable bill -- i do not -- it is an inevitability and i do not think it will be reversed.

i think it is unhelpful because the idea here and the nuance here is that police in order to do their work and when they have to use force sometimes they have to do that. there is no special protection for them one minute it could escalate and they could find themselves criminalized. that was always the case that there was always reasonable interaction. now that this has become politicized police officers are very afraid just to defend themselves much less to intervene on behalf of their colleagues. host: upper marlboro, maryland, me. good morning. caller: i have a few questions and comments. i am really just so distraught that every time you bring somebody on-air that has a police background it is the same

narrative over and over. so he said something about why -- that the president should be defending the police, and about other institutions needed to be defended. here is the thing, why does the police force need to be defended when police forces are defending officers doing wrong in the field? you know there is a saying from spider-man that we all laugh at, with great power comes great responsibility. when you a police you hold somebody's life in their hands and our forces have been getting out of hand for decades and there is no accountability where accountability is needed when someone's life is taken. the police officer's life is supposed to be ahead of the citizens. somebody is running away from you and the police officer is shooting the person and you are talking about that police officers, people do not want

them to have protection when they are getting sued. no. why are my tax dollars paying for a police officer's crime of killing a citizen? ok? when he is the one who committed the crime while he is working and when his job is to protect and defend? we are sick of the narrative where the police officer is the victim when you have a responsibility to be the protector in our society. you talk about body cameras and you are saying that you are against police body cameras. that is the craziest thing i have heard. you need to have accountability when you are in the field. and those body cameras can either defend the actions or they can go against the police officer's actions so if we have a police officer that is a criminal he is in jail with the rest of the criminals. host: we will get a response for our guest. guest: the storyline that the caller refers to really needs to be updated. over the last five years police

have gone missing in action everywhere, the idea that they are proactively stopping people, that is not the case and that is a current issue that we have to confront. gun violence and shootings escalating, communities melting down and it is do you and do you want the police to be involved and how do you do that. in terms of defending the institution it is eight institution dying before our lives. she speaks through wanting to have the very best and brightest people go in and this conversation has taken us in a totally different direction. you have to balance your beliefs with reality, and you have to see the reality as it is right now. host: douglas, arizona. you are on. caller: good morning. let me actually -- i am not in douglas. i am much closer to tucson, but it is all arizona. thank you for everything, thank

you for having this guy on. i have taken so many notes. so, let us start with lack of data. as you well know there is no federal reporting on gun violence. so, that argument fails. qualified immunity fails. the police -- -- the police are starting to face law -- lack of protections in the qualified immunity cases that they are required to be defendants. i would like to hear your thoughts on how qualified immunity failure, that judge are finding that qualified immunity does not quite apply in the cases where it used to apply, particularly when we find egregious violations of citizens' rights. i like your argument about protecting institutions.

one of them that is going to be very important this november is the secretary of state in the races and as i am sure that you are a trump supporter, these people start climbing defenses like zombies, especially in arizona. i know you do not like photography and that is tough but too bad. host: eugene o'donnell, if you have a response to his comments on the qualified immunity in particular regarding our topic. guest: it is a necessary topic. allow recognizes the police every time i get a call it is a new call and a call that somebody has never responded to before. they are fashioning responses in real time in danger and asis -- in a society that has guns and it is a way to recognize when they are not acting in egregious bad faith that you have to cut them slack. again measuring that against reality, the current state of

our play in a country is that police are in absentia thousands of times a day, hundreds of thousands of time a day or a week you have people who want to the police and want to engage who are not engaging. these statements on the face that they are image scents and the potential that a police officer beat civilly liable to responding to a domestic violence call, if you wrote those kinds of protections you are making police people say to each other why are we doing this job and saying to their children that where recruiting started, people are running the other way. when we talk about defending institutions that will not be automatic pools of people that want to go into the work. if the work is not explained, if people like the president do not tell people, like he did yesterday, the police mostly do a decent job there are some abuses. if you do not do that the police

institution will collapse. we are not speculating, it has collapsed, and if there was reporting that was honest we could see the extent and the depth of that damage that the collapse has caused. host: dave. atlanta. good morning, you are on. caller: good morning. every time mr. o'donnell comes on i try to make it a point to call. the reason for that is that mr. o'donnell seems to be unconditionally in -- on the side of the police, even when things are not on the up and up. we are talking about an industry where i agree with you mr. o'donnell, it is a dying industry, an industry that has failed to evolve and there are a bunch of services rolled into police work that could be disaggregated. will -- while i do not agree with your view on cameras, i do

agree that police officers are killing people at a rate of three people per day in the united states. for whatever reason, you can call them minorities or criminals, it does not matter, we are funding our own deaths and it is playing the lottery except that you do not have to enter. what part of policing can we fix and make evolve in a way that is prosocial for humans and people because there seems to be a lack of humanity in modern day policing and when someone is killed it is almost like we need to circle the wagons for the police officer. so, mr. o'donnell, tell me something you would like to change about modern day policing that has the lowest efficacy and payoff rate and has so many services and they are spending their money on pr efforts such as the one you are on this morning?

guest: i will just say you are entitled to your opinion. opinions like that get a lot of attention. what the president was pointing out by his words is that your opinion is an exceptional opinion. the vast majority of people want to see the police more, they are willing to pay for them. that shows up in poll after poll, and there is one in philadelphia that show that 70 percent of african-americans want to see the police more. one of the realities is that a certain number people are energized and local, and have gotten -- vocal and have gotten attention and they are funded by billionaire campaigns against the police and ordinary citizens have been silenced. if you're going into a community i would say certainly anybody telling you, and i am not aware of any city where the police are not in retreat and an standdown mode. you might live in a city where

that is not happening but that is pretty much happening in every city. anyone telling stories about the police aggressively pulling up on streets and being aggressive would be very exceptional. and the commonplace event would be one hour waiting times for the police and the police not on the street at all and visible, police shorthanded and working double shifts. police retiring and investigations of serious crimes going unsolved. that would be the standard of 2022. host: we will get your thoughts on reforms proposed in this tweet by grant to said that reforms need to happen for communities to begin trusting law enforcement more. he says "end civil asset forfeiture, drug schedule policy reform, no more access to military surplus gear, and make it easier to remove bad actors." any of those reforms strike you as reasonable? guest: remember the military conversation that people cheap

shoted and grandstand it on and then you saw uvalde texas. you said that police should not be warriors where 10-year-old kids that were being killed and we had police acting as guardians and you needed the police to be stepping up and to be tactically engaged and people saying you do not need swat teams small towns, what could happen? newtown and columbine and uvalde. so there is a balance that you have to strike, there is a necessary and hard conversation to have that is logan eyes, -- localized but logan -- sloganeering and hashtags is a problem. we have cities that cannot respond in a time of crisis. irony of ironies we had lawmakers call the military and. as soon as the capital was attacked there was the military for people who had bashed the

police on the idea why are they using military equipment? if you do not have the police able to take on who bring war into a school that killed 10-year-olds that will be the next step. i think two years ago we had the largest numbers of national guard employment so that is what we have to look at the backdrop of not having well-funded, well-trained police legitimized by elected officials not cheap shot in them is either anarchy in the military, those are the possible alternatives. host: let us hear from henry calling from port huron, michigan. caller: good morning. i think that one of the tragedies of the defund the police mischaracterization was that it was intended to start a conversation about reimagining policing. like the gentleman said, the

disaggregation of police having to come in contact with the public. meaning things like cameras, taking the place of doing speeding tickets and those kinds of things to cuts down on contact between police and human beings and the public except for dangerous individuals. but i have two questions for you , and they both relates to the george floyd protests, and the insurrection of january 6. i would like mr. o'donnell to please clarify for the public the difference between these two events, one being for social justice and the other being for trying to implement a coup against our government. and mr. o'donnell, also as a final point. if you could explain to me why president trump and all of the participants of the insurrection

should not be charged also as accessories to murder because of the deaths of the people in the police officers and the young lady, ms. babbet, and the commission of felonies, can you tell me why judges are not adding on those charges? host: eugene o'donnell. guest: i cannot. the larger point worth noting, again the idea and a few times ago we did this on c-span, i said we were running the risk of political violence. political violence can make -- can break out in many different directions. one of the things to consider and one of the things that elective officials should consider is having a well-equipped, well established police force where you are getting good people into the job as an insurance policy. in my lifetime i had never seen

more different types of crisis whether it is energy, food, political, violence, supply chain issues, terrorism, we are going into uncharted territories and it benefits us to come together and trying get a consensus and get policing as good as it can possibly be and vetting the politics out of it and trying to have policing responding to the greatest number of things they can and get them out of the political arena that it is something we need to be aiming at. police need to be depoliticize and taken out of the middle of this very divided country where consent is so elusive. we seem to be arguing about anything. host: washington, d.c., ken. caller: did you want to give mr. o'donnell an opportunity to answer the question?

i think you missed the answer to the previous caller's question. guest: about donald trump? caller: i do not know what he asked but i did not hear you answer. guest: to be honest, it is beyond my knowledge why donald trump is not being charged with murder, is that the question? caller: i gather. outstanding. i have been a police officer for three decades and up until now one of the biggest problems and what happened and one of the reasons i used trump as an example is because trump used a term that you are using is defund the police. what i do or what a lot of police do nowadays is do a lot of social services that we do not have the necessary abilities to do. you need other services to do that. if you want to defund the police department to move the money into social services that i do not have to respond to or that i am not best suited to handle, that is fine.

that does not mean i am losing my job. it is when someone takes a term and uses it for political gain to emotionally touch somebody and make them do something based on their emotions, not on how they think. with that said, you off to you a member who is saying what, you also about 70% -- you can watch this in its entirety if you go to our website, c-span.org. we take you live now to remarks by general john raymond, the chief of space operations in the u.s. space force. of coverage here on c-span. -- live coverage here on c-span. gen. raymond: you can't be on there and not be completely honest.