>> members of the commission, chief scott, thank you for asking me to be with you tonight. it's a great opportunity to talk about the work we did in north carolina when i served as police chief there. i'm not sure to what context of my story ties to your agenda item but i can share what happened in fayeteville. >> chief, i'm sorry to cut you off. there is some delay. before you start, if you can give a brief introduction to the public and then take it away to what everyone is here to listen to.

>> sure. >> thank you, my colleagues. it's really a pleasure here today to be able to welcome retired chief who is here to give us a presentation from fayeteville to reform policy there. a brief background to chief matt lock's experience who served at the fayeteville's police department from 2013 to 2016. over two decades to the department in a variety of assignments as deputy chief and earned bachelor's degree and mba and graduate of the national executive institute, the fbi national academy and senior institute for police. chief matt

lock has served on a number of boards, including the north carolina police commission, and north carolina commission for racial and ethnic disparity. chief mattlock, it's wonderful to have you here. thank you very much and we look forward to your presentation. >> thank you and sorry to jump the gun. i appreciate the kind introduction. i served quite a number of years with charlotte mecklenburg police in fayeteville in 2013. as a result, an issue we called here at that time driving while black or driving while back, we had a police chief and a city

manager who didn't see there was an issue or problem in fayeteville. as a result, the chief retired and the city manager was fired. a new city manager was brought in and one of his first responsibilities was to hire a police chief to hopefully repair some of the items or the issues that the police department faced with its community. so as a result of that, i took the reigns in early 2013 and quickly as i prepared to go to fayeteville do quite a bit of research and for an old country boy, i'm pretty data driven and i did all the research i could and data. in north carolina, we have 20 years of traffic stop data. we started that in 2000. we have about 20 million stops from across the state, and

certainly some good database to draw on. certainly i looked at the work in fayeteville. as i arrived, i did one thing and that was to meet with everyone and listen. so, from meetings with the naacp with groups, with community watch and neighborhood association groups, and with my police officers, i really quickly learned that we did have a problem. it was not a problem that the police department necessarily recognized, and it was a problem that some of our wealthier neighborhoods didn't recognize, but certainly we had some problems with disparity of traffic stops and the way we searched those vehicles as a result of the traffic stops. the other thing you have to know about north carolina is we are

home to ft bragg, the 82nd air born and these young soldiers were coming home from iraq and afghanistan and having dodged a tour of duty and being able to come back. these young folks had faced death and still feel sometimes invincible. they took that employment money and immediately bought a fast car and fast motorcycle and very quickly were contributing to traffic deaths and serious injury of traffic crashes. we conducted a lot of the traffic stops in fayeteville, but the majority of those in 2010, 11 and 12 and early into my time there, a lot of the stops were for non-moving

violations, in other words regulatory stops. those things that in some cases would be considered tags that were out of date, driver's license that were expired, expired insurance. as a result of those stops, officers found ways generally by consent in most cases, i think it was coerced consent to get in the car and conduct searches for contraband, drugs and guns. what i did is i conducted this research was to look at the yield from those stops for all of those years and all the contraband that the officers had actually taken off the street and really it was about one 10th

of one percent that yielded contraband and our yield in our searches and assignment we had very many crash problems. we had to do something to keep our public safe. when i began to focus on were things to keep people alive and keep people safe. keep our young people and our city safe. what i focused on as i talked with the officers with the community groups, with the activists, we really as a consensus came up with the determination that we needed to do something to deal with our traffic fatalities and series injuries. so i focused on five areas. those were speeding, reckless

driving, stoplight violation. those are the things that killed people or seriously injured them. what i did make the decision to do was tell my officers that we would no longer be conducting stops for regulatory violations. those would not be the sole reason we are were going to conduct a traffic stop. we were going to conduct traffic safety stops for traffic safety purposes. unless the officers had reasonable suspicion or probable cause to do a traffic stop and search of a vehicle, they were not to search the vehicle. interestingly over the years, as i have done this presentation for a lot of communities. communities have asked me for a policy. i didn't have one. i simply stood in front of my officers and told them that this was the way we were going to

enforce traffic safety in fayeteville, north carolina. as you can probably imagine, everybody within the police department was really really happy about that. i'm being extremely facetious for you there. i faced a lot of resistance from my officers, faced resistance from members of my community. the determination was that we were going to do this. as i met with every employee from the police department over three months of three different series of meetings over a 24 hour period, i listened to the complaints, the concerns, the ideas, suggestions, but mostly complaints and concerns from my officers. one of those major concerns was that drugs and guns were now running rampid throughout our streets of fayeteville, north

carolina, and the second was that it was going to be out of control because we were not conducting traffic stops and stopping criminal behavior. i said we are going to do this and those were the intentions we had. we began early in the year of 2013. as you can imagine in about ninety days our traffic stops why nearly zero, all traffic stops. my officers showed me what that was going to look like if i didn't want to make traffic stops. i became a little bit concerned because our fatalities and serious injuries maintained and so they came on

board. one of the concerns, chief if you are not in my neighborhood and someone is running traffic signs, someone is going to be killed. i said if you call us about a stop sign that people are running or speeding, we will come to your neighborhood and enforce those moving violations. otherwise i kept my officers off the main thoroughfare across fayeteville. so sure what happened: at the end of 2013, 2014, end of 15, our traffic stops stopped and what were done were moving

violations. we conducted a traffic stop and issued a moving violation that would cost the violator money. we were going to make that stop and enforce those traffic laws. our community started to recognize that they weren't in threat for the search of having their car searched and it was a disproportionate search and they became much more confident and accepting when the officers made that stop because the violator generally knew that they would really knew they were running a stop or stoplight. the interaction between our officers and public became more positive. here are the unexpected outcomes. i'm going to cut the story short because it's about a three hour story. when the folks said and our

officers in the community said that crime would go up, actually crime went down in every category for all violent crimes including assaults with deadly weapons and except residential burglary. i do not know how we were able to not impact residential burglaries throughout the day. the others were complaints of officers went down, our use of force against the public went down. our citizen satisfaction surveys went through the roof. we all of a sudden became the popular kids on the block, and so where we were once not necessarily liked in a community, we had great relationships with the community. we were getting as accolades. our injuries to the public and our actions went down, our officer involved shootings went

down, injuries to officers went down. when the officers started to recognize that they actually had a better life in 2014, 15, 16, at the height of the work we were doing. as you remember, 2014 was ferguson, missouri and bat rouge and a couple of other cities where there were really bad incidents that happened. we were able to meet with our community and keep these things from happening because they started to develop that trust. next, we opened our training up to the community. if our officers why under going use of force training, we invited the community to go through that with them.

we were doing range time and our officers were going through their qualification and training, we allowed the public to come in and sit and see the kind of training we were doing that also involved use of force training and when to shoot and not to shoot. we started two blocks of instruction recognizing bias in policing and deescalation training. those were well accepted by our department. in fact our department became instructors for other departments nearby. everything that we learned from this and i heard them call this an experiment or project, it really wasn't. it was a way of life in fayeteville, north carolina. in 2016, i faced some issues with my shoulder. my right shoulder at that time i had to have rotator cuff surgery. so i

figured that was a good time for me to retire and we were poised to continue that work. many of the officers that remained there in fayeteville, promoted through the ranks. in fact one of my lieutenants who was really resistant to a lot of change early on, is about to be sworn in at the end of this month as the next fayeteville police. i have a great hope that the work we started in 13-16, will now pick back up and continue with this new police chief. i will be happy to answer any questions that you might have. i'm sorry to breeze through this so quickly, but it's a lot of information, much more than i can share with you. >> thank you, chief. it's a pleasure having you here and appreciate you speaking with us.

i will turn it over to commissioner carter oberstone. >> commissioner max carter-oberstone: thank you for being here and appreciate your story. it's an incredible result and crime went down and employee relations improved and less dangerous moving violations which were a threat to the roadway. what i wanted to ask is you said prior to your implementing the policy, your department was conducting a lot of searches, incidents to traffic stops, and you had low yield rate on those searches. i'm just curious, once you started searching fewer cars, can you give some examples that your department used to get guns

off the street and in order to apprehend individuals engaged in crimes? >> we did this thing called, we returned the criminal investigation. essentially what i told my folks as we started this was i wanted them, if they wanted to fish on their off duty time, don't fish on duty. as they asked that question, how are we supposed to get the bad guys off the street? my response was let's be smarter than they are. they clearly know we are not stopping the right cars and getting the drugs and guns we hope to get. we didn't get any miami vice kind of drugs, we had the officers that were street drug unit and told

them they were not doing that work anymore. i wanted them doing really deep investigations. if we needed to make a stop of a drug dealer or gun runner, it would be a stop based on probable cause. let's be honest with a person. if i can share one example with you. we had a note russ drinking -- and no one would speak to this guy. we brought in the district attorney's office and we actually conducted surveillance investigation, a really true criminal investigation of this guy. the

district attorney took the case, the fbi was there to help us. we had an officer on that task force, and we videotaped this guy a number of times conducting a number of major drug transactions at his car wash while in possession of a fun with. that young man, that 28 year old will not get out of federal prison until i'm dead. he got 330 months. if you do the math, it's 30 years federal time. when we took him off the street, not only did we take this guy and his gang down, but we send a message to fayeteville that we were not going to tolerate this criminal behavior and we are coming at you. that was one of the drivers that

really helped us take down our drug driver reduction to really impact this. >> thank you, chief. i think i read about this story. is it correct that prior to involving the fbi and intelligence agency, that this man had previous traffic stops where you had not encountered guns or drugs? >> before i arrived in fayeteville, this man had been stopped dozens of time. after i arrived, this was one of the guys that you hear right off that we are continuing the investigation, we are stopping his vehicle. we never found anything on this guy. the officers never found anything. but he had been stopped so many

times that he and his mother, this was a 28 year old drug king pen in our city. he and his mother filed a complaint, one of many, but finally they came to the police department headquarters one day and demanded to see me. i sat did you know with them. this young man sat down with me at the table at the conference room to say chief, either one of your people are going to kill me or i'm going to kill one of your people. i said i don't want that to happen. i had already stopped my officers from stopping this guy. i said, you need to know, you need to make a decision on who is going to raise your children because somebody is going to kill you. it won't be my people but you are either going to get killed or going to prison. he said i'm a business man, i have

a car wash and i don't do drugs. i said make sure someone is able to raise your children because your mother may not be here and at the end of the day, somebody will have to raise your children. he left that meeting and within two hours i got a call from my unit, the folks that were conducting the investigation with the fbi and said we have him on tape selling drugs at his car wash holding a 40 caliber glock handgun. then it just continued and they have such a strong case against this man that he had no real defense. when the fbi finally took him from fayeteville, the day that we made the arrest of him and several of his lieutenants. he was in our headquarters and the fbi said when we leave, you need to look around because it's the

last time you are going to see fayeteville for the last time and he turned around and through up on the floor. it was a great message from our officers to understand that we could do criminal investigations using our federal partners, but also using all the resources that we had as a department, but we had just decided we weren't doing that. at some point in the past we felt we could address the drug problem in our city by conducting regulatory vehicle stops. >> thank you, chief. you said in your opening remarks about the fact when you initially announced the policy that there was some resistance among officers in the department. i'm wondering if you can speak a little bit more about what got officers to ultimately overcome their initial resistance to the policy and buy into it?

>> as i shared with you, when i was speaking earlier, there was great resistance. and there was great verbal resistance in the meetings i had with the officers. but i stood there and took it and addressed all of their concerns. i had comments like this. chief, you know, i make three dozen traffic stops a month. i'm just giving you a number off the top of my head. and i make searches and i want you to know that you are taking away a great tool from us. my response was this, how many guns did you get out of those traffic stops? how much drugs did you get out of those searches? when you put it back to the officer that way, well, shoot, i'm doing 36 traffic stops and doing 30-35 consent searches a month but really not getting

anything, i'm wasting my time. when you start to address those concerns where officers come to you and have those direct comments and complaints and criticisms and go right back at them and ask them what their experience is, it starts to change. i think the real key was bringing in about ten officers about three months into this. about ten officers, a couple of really sharp sergeants and sitting down and sharing with them my vision, my expectation and a couple questions that i need you to go to work. they rose to the occasion. these officers, these men and women went out and did the work and didn't just do the work, they demonstrated it for others. others started to see they are getting less resistance, they are more productive, they have more time to do other things like -- engage with the

community and non-law enforcement activities. they are -- their uses of force are down and when you hear about them calling to report their successes, everyone wants to join them. almost every officer wants to do the right thing for the right reasons all the time. that's really what it was. we had leadership from within. i think the key, i will tell you in my experience, it was going directly to the officers, going directly to the sergeants and really cutting down at my command staff because at the point i wanted to do this, i had to move quickly because i had a

community that i had to address. when i met with my folks in the meeting room, i wanted them to hear the message directly from me. i wanted my commanders to see that i was willing to take the heat and also not to allow my message to be filtered to the officers. so i was intent on doing that, and then i made sure that i had a real open door for officers that could at their discretion show up at my door to say chief, i have got a problem or i have a concern about this and we would talk about it. it took a lot of effort, a lot of time. but the work we did started to payoff very very shortly. >> thanks, chief. this would be my last question which is you spoke about how implementing this policy

improved your policy at the department. if you can speak a little bit about what that meant concretely and tangibly and any more color that you might be able to give on that? >> yeah, you know, one of the things that insisted on that i and all of my command staff would be meeting with every community watch meeting, community watch group, neighborhood groups, community interest group. we met with soldiers on ft bragg, we had community meetings going on all over the place. one of the things we wanted to do was get that feedback monthly, that immediate feedback. it's really cool as a police chief when you come in initially and you have people who are complaining about your officers, and then you have folks that come up at the end of the community meeting and stand

up at the end of the community meeting and say, chief, i met the nicest officer the other night. he stopped me because i was speeding. in this particular case, the one lady who had a big smile on her face. i said, that's great. it sounds like you didn't get a ticket. so i'm glad you had a good experience. she said, oh no, i got a ticket, but i deserved it, but he was the nicest officer. and to have that kind of change. we experienced that over and over again. again, going back to the unrest in a lot of cities in 14, 15, and 16. during that time, my officers would come to me at the end of their shift and said we went to eat at a certain restaurant and when we went up to pay, someone paid for it. that is the rule and the pt