The massive protests after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City strained relationships among police departments, the neighborhoods they serve, and political leaders. Then, in late December, the assassination of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos further escalated the rhetoric and what was at stake. This week on Here’s The Thing, Alec Baldwin talks to two people with years of street experience. Both have compelling visions for improving the broken relationship between police and communities.
John Eterno is a retired captain in the NYPD who once defended “stop and frisk” policies. Today he teaches criminal justice at Molloy College and worries about how many more people were singled out for aggressive police scrutiny during the Bloomberg administration. Eterno advocates for a more individually autonomous, accountable, and, above all, transparent police force. David Kennedy is the architect of Operation Ceasefire, a community-based approach to de-escalating inner city gang violence. Over the last three decades, his work has transformed relationships between law enforcement and communities in cities across the country, including South Central Los Angeles and Boston. Now, he’s working in New York City. Kennedy believes that the influence of families, friends, and neighbors has a greater impact on lowering crime than handcuffs, firearms, and courtrooms.
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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policy makers, and performers, to hear their stories. What inspired their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influence their work. There are thirty four thousand police officers in New York City and hundreds of thousands more in departments across the country. We give the police a lot of responsibility and a lot of power. How they use that power, more specifically, how they use force is central to the quality of our democracy and one of the hottest topics in our society today. The deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, both killed during controversial police encounters, led to massive protests across the country and in New York City to the apparent retaliity Tory assassination of two police officers, Wenjin Lou and Rafael Ramos in late December, the New York City Police Union had Patrick Lynch responded to the officers deaths with this there's blood on many hands tonight. Lynch went on to blame protesters and even New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio that blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the Office of the Mayor. Last week in The New York Times, Isabel Wilkerson wrote that the protests across the country quote are a response to unprosecuted police brutality, but are also a plea for recognition of African Americans humanity unquote. How people feel about police and policing maybe as divisive now as it has ever been. I wanted to know how we came to this point and how we might make things better. I started by talking to two people, John Eterno and David Kennedy, who have been working on policing issues long before the conversation became the current front page shouting match. Both have deep street experience. Johnny Turno, my first guest, teaches criminal justice at Malloy College. He is a retired New York City Police captain and once defended stop and frisk, but not how it came to be used. Under the Bloomberg administration. After two thousand and two through two thousand and eleven, we climb from less than a hundred thousand stops to seven hundred thousand stops, mostly in minority neighborhoods. And this this is the problem. The police became like an army of occupation in these neighborhoods. And this is what the Floyd case stands for. Floyd is a case where the Center for Constitutional Rights sued the city regarding their stop behaviors. Who is Floyd and what happened in the case, Well, these are minority individuals who are stopped illegally by the police. One was a medical student um and Judge Sinlan in the case essentially finds that the police department, through its policy, was the facto racist in what it was doing. Do you think the New York City Police Department is the factor racist? I don't. I don't think officers individual or do you think that the policies can result in racists? I think the policy of stopping first did result in an and in the fact of racist pattern that Judge Sinlan talks about. And she's very clear in her finding. The officers uh And again I talked to many officers, most almost all all officers are very high upstanding, honest working citizens doing a very very tough job. But what officers swear an oath to They don't swear an oath to bring down crime. They swear an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States, and that means that you have to allow free speech. You have to allow people the maximum freedom that you can within the law. So you have to enforce the law while at the same time following law. And in this case, would stop and frisk officers went too far? Why because they're under these heavy quotas. Rookie officers are sent out there told we want you to do ten stop in first today, so they would go out then they stopped like ten people that they saw. Officers were doing this because of all of these pressures, according to Judge Finlin, and I would agree with that. And because of all these pressures, they're stopping innocent, mostly minority youth. They're finding very few violations of the law. They're finding very few guns, which was what Commissioner Kelly at the time stated was the reason why they were doing all this, but they weren't getting much. It wasn't really an effective thing. Now, with Commissioner Bratton back, we've gone down to less than a hundred thousand stops, and they're more effective stops. They're finding guns more often than they did under Commissioner Kelly. And I would also say that under Commissioner Kelly, crime was also dropping, So that's that's a good thing. But with crime dropping, they're or less criminal suspects on the street, or there should be less criminal suspects. So how do you go from a hundred thousand stops or legally doing a hundred thousand stops, or to doing seven hundred thousand stops if there are less criminal suspects? The law requires officers to have something called reasonable suspicion. Reasonable suspicion is a level of proof that people needed, like you have to be kind sure that the person is is doing something wrong. So you can't just, like on a mere hunt, say I'm gonna stop that guy. That's illegal. It's unconstitutional. You need to have reasonable suspicion to legally stop someone. And this court found that the stops being made by the New York City Police Department war unconstitutional according to the fourth and fourteenth And the result of that ruin well, there's frisking. Well that's a good question because Commissioner Kelly was continually saying I'm not changing the policy even after this was rendered. And you have to understand though that during the time of Bloomberg. It's kind of like a a steam being put in a bottle. There's all the steam and minority communities and building and building and building, and then the Blasio comes in and he kind of pops the cork and all the steams coming out and people are all. You know, people didn't complain under Kelly and Bloomberg, because what was the point. I think people have a right to say what they're as long as it's peaceful. You know that, And I'm fine with that. I'm even fine with the police officers themselves. Um, as long as it's peaceful and it's in the spirit said that the Blasio had blood in his hands. Well, what was your reaction when you heard them? Um? There is a rhetoric in in in this game. Sometimes the rhetoric goes a bit too far, and uh, I think they've never seen it. It's a bit far. But I do think Pat lynch Is is more much more concerned more about how his officers are perceived. He wants that respect that officers deserve, and I agree with that. Uh, these officers are out there doing a tough job and he's right, they need to be respected. And he felt a mad to Blasio disrespected them. Did he go a bit far with his rhetoric. Yes, you know, things have gotten out of hand and we need somebody to, you know, bring the level back down. Minority communities are upset because of the unconstitutional stops that were done over years and years. We're not talking about it a day or or a few unconstitutional stops. We're talking about wholesale stops done in um mostly minority neighborhoods that have been done. Seven stops in one year is to me is incredulous. Uh, And it seems like a waste of money too. Most people I know look at the police. They realize it's a tough job. They realized they're not paid very much money. They see what happened with Eric Garner, and they think, why the finest police department in the world has four guys that can't bring down some guy that's selling lucy cigarettes on the ground. Why can't they bring him down without killing him? Well, when you saw the Eric Garner footage, what did the first thing you thought? Well, first, it's a lot more complicated. If somebody doesn't want to be handcuffed, that's whoever it is. It's very difficult to handcuff them. It is. And now these officers, these officers. When I saw the film, um, I didn't have a problem with the use of force. But here's my problem. I hear I can't breathe. I can't breathe, and it's very audible on the tape about eleven times, and they ignore that Eric Graner is cuffed. Now it's over. They haven't coughed and they didn't do anything. That's my problem getting him cufed. I understand you have to do what you have to do to get him coughed. There should have been a shift, that's right, and that didn't happen. But didn't happen, you'd have to ask the officers. I don't know. There was a sergeant on the scene too, I don't know. But what should have happened at the end of that is that Eric Ghana Mr Ghanna should have immediately immediately without without stop. He should have been sat up, and he should have been taken to the hospital immediate without any hesitation. When you hear something like my I have hard palpitations on my I can't breathe, or anything like that, that is the queue for the officers to do. Something. So in terms of the use of force, I didn't have a problem. Do you find that that's the difficulty is for them in an instant to shift from being the aggressor and the police officer who's trying to incapacitate you and handcuff you too in a split sitt of the in turner and then care for you and become like a QUEZ I E. M. S. Technician and make sure you're okay. That is the difficulty. That is one of the most difficult things for a police officer to do it. I'm glad you you you pointed that out. How hard it is for police officers to initially get very aggressive and then switch it off and become the helper. That is one of the most difficult things that for police officers to do. But on the flip side, they should have. That is what being a democrat trained to do. That they are and that's what being a democratic police officer is all about. And and but understand Alec that being a police officer is not a clean, easy, simple Yeah it's you. You want to say. Remember, I'm from south Shore, Long Island, Okay, I'm from Massa Pekra, which is the NYPD Rivieria. I'm someone that if I didn't end up doing for a living what I ended up doing now, there's every chance to believe I'd be running down an alley but with a gun in my hand of a narcotic squad. All the men who are in that job. I'm so different than them. Who's to say how I would I acknowledge that. All I'm saying is is that people in this city believe that when the cops do something wrong, they never get punished. And here's the PS. Guess who's gonna pay Garner's family in a civil settlement? Well, I agree, how much money is spent every year by the city to settle cases against the cops? How much it's ridiculous. There's hundreds of millions of dollars. Yes, and I understand that. But let's let's just go back, of course, So let's go back to to Pat Lynch. Though for for a second he does talk about money. But I think sometimes rightfully so, I think that officers deserve um a race, and I would I would be out there and I would say, yes, they doss ave more money. Their job is that tough. But on the flip side, we have to be reasonable and responsible with the coffers of the city. But the city right now is in very good shape. You know, it's not like we're back. I don't care if the city was in good shape or bad ship. They shouldn't have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars settling the cases. Just get a fair wage. What I believe is I want to go even further, meaning I want there to be less cops and they're better trained. I want to sit there and I want to talk about the physical requirements, the fitness requirements, the language requirements. I want cops to have a starting salary of a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars a person. But you want to know something, They've got four years of college. They can pass the physical fitness test like nobody's I mean, I want these guys, men and women to be ready. Do you think you have that in the police department now? Well, being a police officer is a lot more complicated than than It's not necessarily just being you can, not necessarily being superman. It's it really does require the ability to not only fight crime, but also the ability to be understanding, the ability to work with communities. Uh So, you're not just out there, you know, enforcing the law. You're also a community officer. You're an officer, and that would be part of the training I'm talking about. They would have more of that training as well. Yeah. I don't want anybody to be Batman, That's that's one. I want them to have capabilities in all aspects. I think we should have better cops and we have slightly fewer of them and pay them more money, a lot more money. Yeah, that's a possibility. The job a very difficult job to get. Understand that the city is already down about six thousand cops from its high point where they had forty. It's a thing. Yes, I do. I think. I think you need officers out there, officers is back up or officers who can be trained in very specific types of work, domestic violence officers, officers who are capable at all different types of things. So we're not necessarily looking for, you know, Batman, as you say, We're looking for people who are uh educated, who are understanding, who are willing to keep the discretion, who have that's the key, and I think that discretion has been taken away. And I'm glad you said that back in my day, there was far more discretion, and there were times when you'd stop somebody and you know, you'd say to them, have a nice day, and you wouldn't give him a summons. But for quite a while there officers were stopping people and just giving them something. Let me give you a couple of examples. Chess players and in wood these guys are just playing, you know, the cement board. They're just playing chess in in the city and along coome a couple of cops. What do they do They write them summons is for being in the park without children. You gotta be kidding me. Back in my day, a couple of guys playing chest but I wouldn't even looked at it. And then they have the donut caper in uh in Brooklyn. These are women. They're eating donuts in a park, but they don't have children with them. Officers run up to them because they don't have children. There is a law about this. They all get summons is for eating donuts. One of the most egregious ones is in Queens where a woman and a man, an elderly woman and a man. They're driving in their cards. She doesn't have a seatbelt on. She's going to get prescription drugs. The officers stopped the car. They asked for identification, and the woman says, I'm sorry, I don't have identification. It's it's it's not on me. I I don't know. So they order the man her husband, elderly, to go get it the houses a few blocks away, and meantimes she gets her prescription drugs, comes out the right every summons for the no seat belt, using her prescription drug bottle as the identification. The man then comes back, exhausted on a freezing cold night. I mean it's like you know today, it's cold outside. Um, and he gets back he was here, I have the identification on. The officers say, oh, we don't need it. We already wrote the summons. The man subsequently died and had a heart attack from his exertion. Well, I was working. If you stopped an elderly couple, you know, you might escort them home, or you might just say, gee, I'm sorry, just put you see about on have a nice day. But officers had to reflect these things in their numbers, and at the time Pat Lynch, to his credit, said, don't blame the beat cop, blame NYPD management. And he took out full page ads, which I agreed with it. This was certainly a policy developed by the higher ups telling officers you're gonna do this, so that discretion that you brought up has been lost for years. Where did you grow up bayside Queens and anybody in the family in the department? Uh No, nobody the first Yeah, how did that come about? Well? I needed a job like anyone else, and I took the test service tests. I did. I went to Queen's College history degree. You got a four year degree from Queen's College. I did. He had a four year a degree from Queen's College, a really, really good school. And you wanted to you decide you want to go to the department. Why I did? Well, Like most people, I felt a calling. I felt that I wanted to help people. I felt it's something that's um very important job where I've believed in the Constitution of the United States. I believe in democracy, I believe in our rights. I think many people have died for us to live the way we are. And I'm not just talking about officers. I'm talking about soldiers. We're talking about World War Two. My uncle was in the Battle of the Bulge, got a purple heart there my cousin fort in Vietnam. I mean, look, I believe that democracy is the best form of government that that that's out there now. And I think that as a police officer, you are the front line of democracy at work. And you attached a lot of pride to wearing that uniform, you know, of being a New York City police officer. That was a job with a lot of integrity. Absolutely, So describe your career. Do you were there twenty one years? So you're a patrolman, right, I wonder what happened. Yeah, I worked in the tenth Precinct. That worked in tenth is On in Chelsea. There's a lot of prostitution um in the area. Made made a lot of arrests in that and then I got my master's degree from New York Institutent Technology, got promoted to sergeant and went to South Jamaica and I worked there for a while. I also worked in uh the one on nine and Flushing Queens. From there, I won a scholarship for my PhD and eventually on one of the few officers that managed to get the PhD. Yes, yes, I am you got. You got your PhD in Criminal Justice. Yes, from New York Tech as well. No, that's from Sunni Albany from UH you know, very respected UH criminal Justice school. Eventually got promoted to captain, and as captain I did my UH I was in Queens, South uh is where I worked, and eventually I was brought back into do a very large project which was defending stop and frisk for the department back in which I did and I felt h pretty strongly that the department was doing the right thing back then. They were not abusing their authority. At the time, we were doing less than a hundred thousand, and I was very confident we were doing the right thing. After that, I retired and went to Malloy College in Rockville Center, Queens, where I'm currently a professor and Associate dean of criminal Justice. So you were in the department what years from I was in there from three through two thousand and four. During the time that you were a police officer, did you or anybody you work with ever have to put a chokehold on anybody? There were times it wasn't illegal. I mean, it's still not illegal. It's just something that UM is against the department guidelines. Right, So if you do it you can get fired. I've seen chokeholds being done. I personally have not done them. But when you saw that done, you realize that this would had to be done under those circumstances. It did absolutely and I have to say at the time when I saw the chokeholds done, I have to say that they were a pretty successful way of bringing somebody down. But there was a danger in doing that, and that's why the department eventually said chokeholds uh must not be done. You know, listen, I'm going to bring up the worst cliche of all because it's nonetheless truer now than ever, which is, you know, you always bitch about the cops until you need one. My father's brother was in New York City police officer years ago in the sixties. My sister's former husband's family or police officers. My question for you is what makes a good cop today? Um, I do want to see educated officers. I think that's something. There's a two year requirement. Now there is a two year and that that was also something that I helped put in while I was on the place, and that's been on the book since swim. This is since the nineties. So I would like to see a four year degree. But I think more importantly what an officer needs is an open mind. To be a democratic officer, you have to balance the rights of people with the ability to fight crime. And there's an interesting book called Tempered zeal And. I think that describes exactly what a police officer needs. We want somebody that can think, Somebody that gets out there and knows when it's enough. Somebody that gets out there and says, Okay, I can arrest this guy. But maybe I don't have to today. Maybe you know what, I don't have to write that summons today. Maybe not giving a summons to these people playing chess is a good thing. I need somebody out there that can think like that the best choice long term, Yeah, what is the best choice long term? Not these short term fixes that that you know, we're gonna stop somebody riding a bicycle in the city. Who's but the officer needs to have that discretion, and that officer needs to be a thinking officer, not somebody that's just a an automaton, not a robot, Not somebody that just says, Okay, I'm gonna get out there and and and I'm gonna call the boss. Every time you know this, we're gonna write a summons, We're gonna make an arrest. And that's what's been going on for twelve years. We've got to get away from that very very robotic. They've taken the discretion out eactly right. We need to get away from that robotic police officers. So I want to see a police officers that can think. But more importantly, I want to see a police department that's more transparent. This, I think is the most important thing that the police department can do is open up. You know, if you're so great, you know you have to say, and you're the greatest, what are you doing to address these problems? Show us let us in. Look, why can't I anyone visit a CompStat meeting or or a walk into the police academy. You know, you should be welcome. You may have to get you know first or whatever to make sure it's safe, but you're a citizen. You should be open up. Data, data, information. All of these things are closed the department. The New York Times had to sue the police Department to get to get data from them. That's unconscionable. This is data that that that we the taxpayers are paying for that data should be widely available. There's no reason not to. So this way we if we have the data, we can do these studies to test whether or not a new practice might work. Stopping first data. The only reason that data came out is because they were sued. But before they were sued, that data was only in the police department and nobody else could view it. That's wrong. We need a police department. We need a different way of paradigm shift, a way of thinking where we're transparent. And when I tell you that being a police officer is a difficult thing, I I mean that it's difficult, but I believe. I believe in democratic society. I don't want to live in Nazi Germany. I want to live into me. I love my country, I love the constitution, I love this place. That's why I became a police officer. And I think most people become police officers they believe in our country. If you're a police officer today, and I mean today, like right this moment, in the wake of Ferguson and Garner and uh the two police officers that were murdered uh here in the city recently, you just look at the way things are now, it's it's so hostile, it's so tense. What do you think the average police officer who's a good man or woman who wants to do their job, what do you think that person wants the citizens of New York to know about the police department. They want to be supported by the by by most citizens. And I think that that's that's something that they really crave. They're out there defending, putting their lives on the line every day, and I think officers, the typical officer, would like to feel somewhat appreciated. So the next time you see a cop out there, you know, thank them for for doing the job that they do, don't just carse them. I do think that minority communities right now are up in arms, and I think in some cases rightfully so. And when we look at the situation in New York City where we've seen all of these stopping frisks and uh this building up over time, I think part of the democratic process is allowing people to peacefully protest. And I think that's part of what the police are doing right now. They're peacefully probably they're exercising their democratic right and it shows you what a great country we live in. What do you miss about being a cup I missed my friends. Actually that's that's really what I missed. A brotherhood. It is, it is, it's a family. I do feel it when I go away. I'll go to different places, and if I say I'm a police officer there and I talked to other police officers, there is a difference. People's eyes open up when I testify your talk and they realized that I was a cop. It does change things, and I'm glad for that brotherhood. Johnny Turno is the co author of the crime numbers game Management by Manipulation. The protests against the police are in response to recent events, but history plays a role to Brian Stevenson heads up the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. He thinks history and our response to historical events has a lot to do with contemporary social problems. We've been acculturated into believing that you never back down, you never never missed an absolutely, and I think actually, as a country, that's our big is problem. All we do is tell people around the world how great we are. That's right, and that arrogance actually sets us up for the kind of conflicts that then follows. I used to get mad at my parents for not taking me to town because we lived out in the country there's nothing to do. But they didn't want me to go with them in town because they didn't want me to see them humiliated by any white person that they encountered. And it accumulates these injuries, this burden, this problem, and we haven't talked about it. And because of that, we've now set ourselves up for the conflicts and controversies that were still experiencing. Where the police are the face of this racial order, and this presumption of guilt haunts us and follows all these young people called. The Bureau of Justice is now reporting that one in three black male babies born in the twenty one century is expected to go to jail for a prison that wasn't during the twentieth century, wasn't during the nineteenth century. It became it's only getting worse. That's Brian Stevenson from the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. My full conversation with him will be out next month. Coming up next, I talked with David Kennedy, who brings communities and police officers together to talk and the results are surprising. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. David Kennedy teaches criminal justice at John Jay College. He is the architect of Operations Ceasefire, a pioneering violent crime reduction strategy that continues to be implemented in big cities across the country. Kennedy's work, which involves sit downs with police and gang leaders, helps address what he considers the larger problem. The broken relationship is pretty much with us all the time. And that means it's not about stopping frisk, it's not about this program, it's not about this policing fad. It's much deeper than that. And I've been traveling this geography for thirty years now, and I spent a lot of time with cops, and I spent a lot of time with what we think of as the good people in the neighborhood. And I spent a lot of time with gang members and drug dealers. And if there's one one thing that folks like us on the outside need to understand, it's that when we have these moments, you know, white folks and the cops, they talk about the incident, they talk about the moment black folks talk about history and they're historical experience. They're deeply historical anger, their present frustrations that will crystallize around the moments. But it's not about the moment. It's just that we see it in the moment. No, what is it about your own background? I mean, from what I read, you were raised in Detroit outside Detroit, inside Detroit, And what is it about your background that you went on to become And then this is a glib uh maybe way of putting it, but to the gang whisperer that you became. That's funny because the the head of the New Jersey State Police once gave me the highest compliment I think I've ever gotten, and he said I was a cop whisper So, um, I've been really lucky to play both sides of the fence. The thing that got my attention thirty years ago, I was a budding journalist. I wanted to be John McPhee and work for the New York or something like that. And the work that I was doing at the time, which was staff writing for an academic institution. I was not an academic. I wasn't professor, wasn't graduate student. I was at Harvard at Harvard, at the Kennedy schoolt Harvard, and the assignments I got at that time in the mid nineteen eighties got me into the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country, and sort of outside actual insurrection or something like that, South Central l A. And places like that, Washington Heights and the very peak of the crack Heyres when you could buy kilos of powder on the street without getting out of your car. And the thing that you see is an absolute horror show. You see violence and despair and fear and hopelessness. And at that time you know young men thick on the ground and wheelchairs and walkers, and these are gunshot one survivors. The streets look like a mash unit. But when you spend time there and you really come to understand the experience of those communities, what is the worst about those neighborhoods. So we talk about schools and healthcare and economic opportunity and all those things are really, really, really important, but the grinding, day to day insults in the community are violence. Everybody's getting arrest, didn't go into prison, which has changed over the years. It's gotten much worse since I first set foot into the streets. Um, it's an epidemic. Yeah, and it is an absolutely broken relationship between people in those communities and the criminal justice system. There's nothing of the moment about that. That's not Eric Garner, it's not this, it's not that, it's not Oscar Grant. It is pervasive. And then these moments happened when the community and people outside the community kind of find their posture and find their voice, and those of us who aren't there say, ah, something's changed. But the only thing that's changed is the crystallization. Well, in the work that you did, the first job you have, the first police department that you go to work with in an official capacity was who Boston Police Department, So you got to work with. But that's where the ceasefire thing was. That's and that was your thing you created with a whole bunch of others, with a team of people, and you can and take us through essentially what was but what was going on in Boston then? And what was ceasefire? What did you propose? So the most obvious worst issue in these neighborhoods is just spectacularly awful levels of violence, so that the national homicide rate right now is down to about four per hundred thousand. Where we've been patting ourselves on the back for twenty years. We're sitting in New York City, and especially in New York City, but nationally as well, that crime is down and down and down and down and down, and it is that's right. What we have been dealing with is this long decline and the Crack era into the heroin epidemic. Things are much better. We all know that for hundred thousand, I work in neighborhoods where after the Crack declines and all the rest of it, young black men are dying at the rate of over five hundred per hundred thousand every single year. And you walk those neighborhoods and there are you know, rain soaked street shrines to the dead on the corner, and r I P. Chalked on the side of buildings, and bullet holes in the buildings. And these days it's fashionable for the young men to tattoo the names of their dead on their forearms and their fingers and next year and these are places where there has been no peace dividend. Twenty years ago, when Crack had not received it, it was even worse. So we set up in Boston to try to do something about that, and very rapidly, not from you know, econometric research or anything fancy, but from spending huge amounts of time with street cops, in probation officers and hanging out with gang members and just being there. It became immediately apparent that what was going on was not what we on the outside thought was going on. This was a conversation then about drug markets and gun availability and cultures of violence and cultures of poverty and the you know, dire impact of being exposed to gangster rap and all this kind of thing. In fact, what was going on on the ground was that there was a very small number of drug crews that were shooting each other. And if you were in those drug crews and you were on the street for ten years, about a seventh of you were killed by guns, and statistically everybody left standing had been shot. And it also turned out that nobody involved really liked it very much. Right, we think the gang members are getting rich, and there's a prison industrial complex and they need the streets to feed the engine, and there are no institutions left except the Black Church, and the community doesn't really care about the violence and everything that everybody thought about that was wrong. The kids didn't want to die, they didn't want to go to prison. The cops were frustrated. The community hates the violence, and nobody liked it. And so what turned out to be possible, and what we did was we created these interventions. We called them forums. They get called collins now, but they're actually moments in which the cops and social service providers and ministers and ex gang members and the street guys all get together in a room and everybody who's not a gang member and a drug dealer looks at those who are and says, this has gonna stop. You know, we know who you are, and we know what you're doing. We actually don't think you like it. You want to kill you. We don't want to kill you. We don't want to lock you any for We don't want you to kill each other. We especially don't want to go knock on your mother's door and tell her that you're dead. So this is going to stop. Will help you if you let us? There are all these social services there for you. Even you don't take the services, your community needs you to understand that there is no excuse for shooting each other. So your community insists that you stopped that, and rather than hiding in the bushes and bringing d e a down on your head or stopping everybody that moves in your neighborhood, we're just going to tell you today that the next body that hits the ground, everybody in the crew that did that is going to get our full attention. Thanks for your time, You're free to go. In Boston, we saw a two thirds reduction in the youth killing in about eighteen months in Kansas City. This year they got thirty in New Orleans. Over the last two years they've gotten in Boston. When you're talking about that period that you were doing it then was what years began in ninet The average number of homicides in the city when we started was about a hundred annually, and in nine, which was the last year they did it for real, it was down to thirty one. And from I mean a lot of what I pulled was from the New Yorker profile on you from about five years ago or at six years ago. In two thousand nine, you've been in North Carolina. Even is this anti Boston, New York, Los Angeles? If I missed a few maybe um I'm sorry, but but you've been around. Where are they getting it right? Where are they getting it better where they were? Is there some innovation? Well, they're they're increasingly getting it right. So we've been talking about stuff that's twenty years old now and what was really pretty radical insurgent stuff just isn't anymore. So there's a backbone to this way of thinking about doing the work on the ground. The simple operational backbone is, when you're talking about the worst stuff, not many people do it, killing, killing your wife, standing on a corner, selling drugs to pregnant women, you know, in in the hardest hit communities, not very many people do that. And because that's right, you can deal with them in a very different way. You can load services on them, you can load community influence on them, you can put them on prior notice of their legal risk. Those are not radical ideas anymore. What's so interesting about that in the present moment is that from the beginning it worked much better than anybody could possibly have reasonably bullieved. We had two meetings like this in Boston and the whole city changed ridiculous. As part of why people couldn't believe it was real, just doesn't make I think that was going to work. We didn't. We thought we were at best. We thought we were up for years of heavy lifting and uphill slog at the very best, and the streets just flipped. What do you attribute that too? So I already said nobody involved in this was what anybody on the other side of the fence thought they were right. And so that's one answer to each other and know each other, and they profoundly misunderstood each other. Kid goes a drive by, cops looks at that says, obviously, you're an animalistic super predator with no morals and no respect for human life. And then you sit down with that young man and he says, I didn't want to do it. Those guys are beefing with our guys. I want to put my guns down, but they'll kill me anyway. It seemed easier to do with than not to do it. And my own boys will tear me up if I don't, and they He looks at the entire Boston Police Department, which they think of as able to do anything they want, and literally would say they could have stopped me if they wanted to. He really believes that, and the only reason therefore that they that this happened is because they don't care if we kill each other. And both sides really believe that both sides are wrong, right, So mediating some of that makes a big difference. But here's what then turns out to be the lesson of the moment. When you think the cops are your race enemy, when they have always treated you with disrespect, when the community sees them not being able to tell the difference between the grandmother and the pastor and the guy on the corner because they both get stopped and frisk you know, all three of them get treated the same way, when nobody you know, has ever gotten any help from the police an occupying army. Then when you know who killed your friend, when you know that somebody is coming to get you, you don't call nine one one, You get your friends, you get a gun, you take care of it yourself. And then we look at that and the violence, you know, the shooting that comes after that in retribution, and the shooting that comes after that in retribution, and we look at that and we say, this is a broken community full of people with bad morals. What we ought to be saying is this is a community that has never trusted the police, doesn't expect any help from it, and rather than working with the criminal justice system, is taking care of itself. And when you sit down with communities and say, we realize that almost everybody here is fundamentally a good person, and even those who are misbehaving aren't the monsters we think they are, and we're going to treat you with respect, and we're going to begin by saying to you, we want to keep you safe, we want to keep you alive, we want to keep you out of prison, and we want to work with you so that we can do that. It turns out that those communities are not nearly as broken as we think. They don't really hate the police. They just don't want the policing they've been getting, and when you give them something different, they take it. Do you think that New York right now is ripe for that kind of a program, for a ceasefire type of program here now, or do you think it's unlikely that will happen now in the wake of those two killing And I certainly hope it's right, because we started already. You have, Yeah, it's happening. The first How did that get started? First? It started under Bratton and the new Bratton administration, with the full support of the mayor, who is looking at this even before the election. So it's been a long time coming. But the fact is that what the department is calling New York ceasefire, their version of this is live in Brooklyn North and a couple of associated precincts, And the first of these face to face collins was held in Fort Green and Brooklyn about a month ago. You describe how that went. It was pretty amazing. Part of what's wonderful about this is that this is really about people and it's about relationships. The way you make this happen is you identify the groups, the gangs, the drug cruise. You look at the individuals in them. Each group has somebody on probation and parole most days, most of the time. To make the meeting happen, Probation parole reaches out to them, says to them, you're going to be here at this time. So they walk in and they see a roam full of New York Police Department, the Brooklyn DA's representative, the U. S. Attorney's Office, Probation Parole, the Brooklyn North Patrol commander, ex Gang member Service, providers cast of thousands, and they hear some very very basic stuff. You are the most at risk people in this city. Brooklyn right now is the most dangerous borough in New York, beyond all the gentrification, beyond all that fabled out there. Brown's Ville and East New York are parallel universes. Might actually have been the Bronx at the time, but Brooklyn and the Bronx are where the action is right now in New York City. We said earlier homicide risk four per hundred thousand for everybody in the country. If you're in the street network, it's three thousand per hundred thousand every single year. You know, it's just astronomical. You are safer on the ground in Afghanistan than being one of these guys. And everybody here has organized to keep you alive and out of prison. And we're about to sit down and talk to you for an hour about how we're going to do that. When we're done here, senior police representatives says, my officers are going to serve your dinner. We would like you to stay, will serve you pizza. We've got Soto, will answer any of your questions. Please stay long, and brought their mothers. Right, they were about and one of the things that happened that night was that one of their mothers came with them. Was furious, angry, suspicious doesn't cover it. You're you're setting him up, this is this is a scam, set him down in the chair. She went off to where she was listened to this whole thing. He was one of the first guys out the door when they were free to go. She brought him back into the room, made sure that he talked to everybody, thanked everybody for making it happen, and anyway it works. Right, Scholars divide some of what we're talking about into formal social control and informal social control. And formal social control is the cops and the badge and the gun, and the courts in prison and probation and parol. Right, all that apparatus of the state. We all think that's what controls crime. Right, that's the thin blue line. The other scholarly categories informal social control, and that's your mother, your your sense of shame, your mother or your father, or your girlfriend, the girl you want to be your girlfriend eighteen months from now, and everything scholarship knows about this says that informal social control. Trump's formal social control almost every time, and you and your work and your programs have played off on them. And we figured out how to teach this to practitioners, right, and you can show the theory and the evaluations. None of it punches through. Nobody believes it. So the the public speaking version of this has been to say to a room full of you know, season narcotics guys, when you were growing up, who was afraid of the cops? And like five to ten percent of the room will raise their hand when you were growing up, who's afraid of your mother? Right? And everybody in the room raises their hand, because we're all afraid of our mothers. And you get the mothers, you get the community, you get that informal fabric going. That's what controls the violence and what our history of policing the community, Jim Crow, the Black Code, Separate but Equal, the FBI trying to blackmail Martin Luther King, stop and frisk profiling. What all of that has done is it has lost us the community, and it has lost us that natural community crime control. That's what we're dealing with right now, and that's what we need to get back. I can't argue with you about the informal social control because when I was pulled over by the police for riding my bike the wrong way on Ffth Avenue, it wasn't until I got home and my wife said to me, please don't ride your bike the wrong way on the streets anymore, because it's only going to embarrass me and you and our family. That was really the message that hit home. That's how it really works, the informal I'm gonna remember that now. I'm gonna quote you and say, let's say to my wife. You know, David Kennedy said, it's informal social control you're exercising on me. There is not just one way to do policing. There are lots of ways to do policing. And part of what's so awful out the shouting that's going on around Garner and can't breathe and don't shoot and all of that right now, is that the loudest and dumbest voices on both sides have thephone the microphone. And what a lot of us know is that there is a huge middle that respects what everybody's got to say. Crimes bad, violence is bad, locking everybody up is bad. Stopping every black kid in troubled neighborhoods is bad. We're going to deal with all of it, but we're going to deal with it in a way that honors the need for crime prevention, for public safety, and for not expecting being sent to prison to be a normal part of growing up. There's a moment that you in the New Yorker article where they mentioned I don't know whether it was in Boston or Cincinnati, where the the guy that was a gang banger gets up in front of the guys at the call and they bring the woman in the wheelchair. Yeah, Cincinnati, that Wasntcinnati described what that what happened there? Were you there? I was there. Yeah. The guy who did that had been a serial strong armed ar robber, so he was an old school guy. This is before cracking stuff. He ran around Cincinnati with a gun, putting in people's faces and saying, you know what time it is. And this man stood up in the call in and said, I did very bad things, and they haunt me. I will never make up for them. They will never leave me. And one of the things I did was shoot this woman right here. And he had and She was there in her wheelchair which he had put her into, paralyzed from the chest down, and she pulled her colostomy egg out and showed it to all in assembled and said he did this to me. And then I sat down with my brothers and said, you are not going to go after him. This has got to stop. It's really kind of the sermon for our time right there's very very little common ground evident out there right now, and I believe and pray, but I do believe we'll get to it. I think the the heat of the moment will ease a little bit and sanity will will emerge. The one thing that joins everybody in this world right if you're on the corner, or if you're in the neighborhood, if you're a cop, if you're a prosecutor, the one thing I hear more than anything else is everybody is sick of this. Without knowing it, we have been backing each other into corners that none of us want to be in. And the way out of this is really to recognize what is nascent out there that everybody involved in this wants to be safe. They don't want to hurt anybody, They don't want to be hurt. They don't want to get locked up. You know, the cops themselves have been saying for forever, we can't arrest our way out of this. They know that ceasefire and things like that our moments in which you can actually construct that common ground, and a lot of us think that that is visible. Now you know this this city is a good example of it, despite the turmoil of the moment. You know, this is a city where people said two years ago, we stop stopping every black kid in the city, the gutters will be running red with blood. And we have stopped stopping everybody in the city and on a side continues to go down. There are different ways to do this, and they actually begin to show the way out of this mess. Who do you think is the person that can bring the healing to the situation in New York? You had to pick one? Where is it not one person? I don't think it's one. I don't think this is, you know, a man on a horse territory. I did not say that. I think Bratton is going to be essential. I think the mayor is going to be essential. I think there are lots and lots and lots of people in positions of you know, authority and respect and influence here who can be part of fixing people have to play their part. I think a lot of people do want to. I mean, I've been in New York for ten years now and I have worked all over the country. This city has the highest quality criminal justice establishment, set of institutions of anywhere in the country. It's amazing, which is not saving us right at the moment. So I don't think it's going to be one or two people. I think what's going to happen is that some of the heat and the extremism will leave the moment that we're in. The moment will not go away, but I think the bonfire will will tone down a little bit. And I think then we have every bit the raw material we need to fix this. And I think New York in fact can be, needs to be, and is going to turn out to be one of the central national laboratories on this. I really do one last question. You have kids, not money own, right, Okay? Have you raised kids? How old? Different ages? But grown? Yeah, what do you tell them about if the cops pull them over? Do you ever have that conversation? Let me tell you what I do when I get pulled over. Right, I spend my entire life with law enforcement. When I get pulled over, I stopped the car, I rolled the windows down, I turned the ignition off, I turned the radio off. I put the keys in plain sight on the dashboard, and I put my wrists on top of the stirring wheel. Because I spend all this time with cops. And I got pulled over when I still lived in Boston while driving around a lovely young lady with long blond hair, and there wasn't any safe place to pull over. So we pulled into a small stripmall parking lot, and I went through my routine, and I looked over and my date was getting out of the car, and I looked at her, and I said, what are you doing? And she said, well, we're going to a party. There's a liquor store right here. I'm gonna go get a bottle of wine. Sit down, don't move, show your hands. Those are not moments where you want to have this debate. You want to get through those moments and then we can have the debate. I mean, I think about that myself, which is that how do you send the signal of compliance to the police well, like you said, hands on the plain side of the dashboards, of the on the on the steering wheel. What's the one thing you think, because I asked our other guests, Johnny Turno from Maloit College, and I'll ask you the same thing, what's the one thing in their hearts? You think cops want most they want to go home safe at the end of the day, just like all the rest of us. And after that they want I was gonna say they want what I'm about to say, I don't think that's right. I think I want this for them. I think a lot of them are so deep in what they do every day it doesn't really occur to them to ask for this. But I don't know any more accomplished people than good season cops. Not all of them are good, not all of them are seasoned. But most of the people on any force, they've been there for a while. They've seen things that the rest of us cannot imagine. They're smart, they're creative, they're capable, they're physically skilled. They'll save your life in any number of different ways and then turn around and do something under and eighty degrees different and never never break stride. And the ones who have been doing it for a while and have not succumbed to cynicism or anger or the bottle or whatever. They are some of the most impressive human beings I have ever met in my life, and I wish more people understood that David Kennedy is the author of Don't Shoot One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner City America. This is Alec Baldwin you're listening to. Here's the thing, M