dee watkins, also former fbi assistant director and former police officer himself, tom fuentes. gentlemen, thank you for being here. dee, i do want to read an excerpt from this article that you penned this op-ed for "the new york times." you wrote for our generation police officers have been the most consistent terrorists in our neighborhoods. plus we are currently in a culture war where a cop can shoot if you put your hands up or if you follow their directions or if you lie down or if you are asleep. you go on to right i swear they see black skin and think bull's-eye. this comes from a very personal place for you. tell me why you wrote it and your experience. >> it comes from dealing with the baltimore city police department. not just for myself and my friends and everybody in the community, we feel the same. we feel there's just a huge communication barrier. they have issues communicating with us and we don't understand them and we have issues communicating with them. so the essay came from a personal place and it came from like all of the emotions i had inside of me from being a victim of brutality and knowing what my family and friends have been through. >> i spent some time yesterday with a group of high school kids 17 and 18-year-olds and some of them voiced frustration about their interactions with the police. another one told me look we know most police officers are good. we know most are trying to protect us. how do we get to a place in this city where there's more of a feeling like that? as you well know you've had some very bad experiences, they're not all alike. >> yeah i think, again, it's a communication problem. i think if more police officers spent more time in the communities where they work or more police officers lived in the city then maybe they can build those connections with community members that and not resort in violence. >> you're a former fbi director and police officer, so for you how does that bridge begin to be built. >> i think one of the problems that helps create this lack of communication is that so many departments around this country are being increasingly underresourced. they don't have the officers to take off the street and put in schools and community groups and recreation centers with the kids like there used to be when i was a cop. we had that all the time. but now you see departments like new york city go from 40,000 police officers to 33,000 or 34,000 and many of the other departments in town it's kind of the same story. you couple that with baltimore averaging five murders a week over the last two and a half years and commissioner batt says the majority are being committed by gangs fighting for turf people random confrontations and the black guerrilla family. so now you want the police to reduce the murder rate and it just creates a difficult circumstance for them to deal with violent criminals on the street but yet not alienate the individuals that aren't violent criminals. >> tom brings up an important point, because i think when you look at ferguson missouri a very different situation in terms of the individual we're talking about. but when we talk about the police in ferguson you heard a lot of people saying the police force is almost all white and we are a majority black community. here you have a majority black police force representing a majority black community. so it goes beyond race doesn't it? >> it goes round racebeyond race. it's bigger systemic issues. it's problems with our schools, it's problems with unemployment it's a collection of problems that make up the whole crime element and enter the cops. you mix all these things together in a cocktail and it explodes. >> you talk about economic disparity people have been talking about all week. you look at this city where you've got a 37% unemployment rate for black young men and a 10% unemployment rate for white young men. almost four times. >> and he's exactly right. you underresource the community, starting from the birth of these kids. lack of preschool assistance for the mothers so they're off working, the kids are running free. the schools are underresourced so they don't get a good education. and then they're not prepared to have jobs. many drop out of school. and now the 18 19 20-year-old on the street can't get jobs can't get employment and as a society, what we say is okay police officers they're all yours, you deal with it. what can the police do? can't get them jobs can't get them an education that they have missed for the last 15 years of their lives. so that is a big -- i completely agree that there is an economic disparity in these communities that almost sentences many of these kids to continuing a life of poverty. it almost dooms them to a life where they're not going to be to have gainful employment. then we say to the police your problem. you deal with it. >> tom fuentes, appreciate you joining us. deeyou do. i appreciate you sharing your personal experiences with us. >> thank you for having the conversation. i think it's helpful. >> i do too. thank you, sir. tom, thank you very much. we're going to take a quick break. later in this show you're going to hear from some of the youth of baltimore. they are going to talk about their experiences with the community, with the police and what they need to succeed. stay with us. 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