Produced University History professor Randy Roberts examines the relationship between malcolm x and mohamed ali. On wednesday just blocks from the capital well be taking a tour of the Folgers Shakespeare Library in anticipation of the 400th anniversary of the death of williams shakespeare. On friday we are back at politics and prose bookstore for signs journalist report on the spread of Infectious Diseases around the world over the past 50 years. That is a look at some of the author programs look to be as programming covering this week. Many of of the events are open to the public. But for them to air in the near future on book tv on cspan2. Now, new jersey senator cory booker discusses civic involvement and recounts experiences that shaped his political thinking. He discusses his book, united, united with Robert George of the new york post. Host senator booker, united, here we are in the middle of the more divisive president ial election years ever on both sides and you brought the book called united. Why the title, why now . Spee2 . Guest first well, it is great to be here. Its great to be on the tv screen. I appreciate you being here and not making me feel in any way folic lead challenge. Host i shaved just yesterday. Guest make me feel good so i appreciate that. I ran for this office crisscrossed the state of new jersey and heard from people time and again, the lament that our country was divided and theres so much gridlock in washington. The lament about the lines that were dividing our country and weakening it. I really wanted to speak to that because so much my personal personal experience growing up in an africanamerican family, tending black church, but also living in an allwhite town i have been crisscrossing lines a lot. Working in inner cities, going to sanford, yell, it showed me as a cross the divide how united we are. Some of the leaders i had come in many coming from immunities like new york taught me the lessons of the urgency of breaking down these divide, or helping people rising conscious and understand the type that divide us our stronger than the ties that divide us. Host the book is like cinematic in terms of zeroing in on interesting people and interesting moments in your life. Tell us about virginia jones. Host she is a remarkable so that is revered in new york, even yesterday people were talking about her. For me i got my phd because of people like her. East harlem, but i decided to jump into newark coming out of law school and tried to find the most difficult street i could find and i moved in a place that was full of drug violence and and i move onto the street and my first reaction was, i was robbed my first moment there. Theres an old saying when you come to all the let you know when you are about to step into the dark space one of two things is going to happen, either you will find solid ground or the universe will give you people who will teach you how to fly. I met this woman who is tough and profoundly wise. She broke me down and rebuilt me. The first moment i had with her i went to talk with her, im cory booker out from Yale Law School and she just did not seem to care at all. With my arrogance i was you dont want my help . Host she had to lecture you. Guest she had to bless me and it did not feel like it was forthcoming. I remember this moment where she was frustrated with me and she took me to the middle of Martin Luther king boulevard and said what you see around you . And i described the crackhouse and a projects in a neighborhood and she said you can help me and she walked away and discussed. I ran after her and grabbed her and said what . And she said you need to understand that the world use the outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside. If you see darkness and despair thats all theres going to be but if youre one of the stubborn people, every time you open your eyes you see hope impossibilities in love, you see the face of god then you can be someone who helps me. And then she just walked and i thought okay grasshopper thats a lesson. Eventually i went back and i became correct now not i saw the problems i was victimized by crime but i went back now with humility and a willingness to surrender preconceived notions, surrender my agenda and plug into her and learn from her, she had me doing work in the beginning and i became like an apprentice to her and what was amazing to me is this woman showed a love and a grits and a capacity to care that i did not fully appreciate until i was writing this book but her son was murdered in this building, and yet she still stayed there and she was leading. I traced the arc in the book and she never gave up. When i get emotional now is that eventually we became partners in taking on something that got convicted in federal court. The buildings spiral out of control because the city comes in and it was being run by a political opponent, chuck james. At the end of this writing this book think and i had a story to tell but i wanted to go back and interview and track down everybody who may have been around in the 90s who could tell me what they observed because i know what i remembered safe and drug dealers, i went back to guys who are dealing drugs forgive me because there are much more than the worst things that they have done. So i find my coming out of prison, other tenant leaders, this is is what i found out about her it was very moving to me and she made me feel like i had to work really hard to earn her trust but one i heard from a leader and she said you got the story wrong, when you left one of your first meetings she turned to me and said that is my son. That so moved me. Then when im interviewing the guys were dealing drugs one of them said at one point, he intervened and alleged that they decided i was a threat and they were going to shoot me. Just a warning shot in the leg is that he put it. But they started tell me stories about how ms. Jones. Host this is when you had moved in to the projects. Guest she was telling these guys leave him alone and that she is aware that again got me very emotional here in and she was calling me family from the beginning. So this is a woman who really shaped me in some profound ways. Not only because of the things she said and her character which is really businesslike, shes a rough justice, but because of her symbol and her example. My lowest moments in those years i had elevators that didnt work roach infestations, all the hardships that for me as a young man were difficult for seniors, children were really threatening. What i found out and what i saw within her was an american character that is the best of who we are. In many ways her elegy to hold united this community has profound lessons for all of us. Host family is a recurring theme through this book, in fact you start with when you learned that your ancestry having gone on Henry Louis Gates program and it goes back to a slave master james who goes back to days of the pilgrims. Then flashing forward you talk about how one of your grandfathers was raised by a single mother, your father was raised by single mother. At that point they had the feelings of growing up as a pastor, you having grown up with two parents, there seems to be a theme of trying to identify the familial links of blood and non blood. Guest right. I saw the chapter i hate Henry Louis Gates because what he did to me was in his roots and partnering with john lewis is like partnering with superman. So is this really comical, humbling connection with this amazing hero. Then this odyssey of finding out that i could trace my lineage back to the earliest americans come into this country, that im directly descended from a white confederate soldier, direct descendent of men who fought in wars moving indiana native americans off his lands but at the same time im a descendent of slaveowners and slaves. This unbelievable tapestry that he revealed to me made me understand our connection including introducing me to my moms first cousin who never knew they were related to a black family because that was a time in the south when you had a lot of lost. Host you had white cousins. Guest so that expanded my view of family right there to know that i could be walking past folks and as louis gates said theres not a black person in this country unless they came in the flipside is theres many whites have black branches and their family that they dont know about. So that expended my idea family but the leap in the discovery was that we are is america a spiritual family much more than we know, we are all tied to each other and influencing each other every single day beyond our imagination. The common way that people give up their powers not realizing we have in the first place that we have power to touch and connect and influence that we dont know. So the story ends with my family now fighting a court case or legal efforts to move into a white town and as my father called it, its one thing and i dedicate the book to the people of this town but yet my parents had to rely on courageous white folks at the house and council. But i had listening to the stories growing up and im a reporter so i want to find the people there and interviewed them so i found this lawyer and i asked him, why did you back in the 60s get involved and he said i remember the day and i said you remember the actual day . And he said monday because the day before was a sunday and it was blood he sunday and i watched the bridge, john lewis and others on this bridge and i came and i said we need to go to alabama and they were struggling lawyers just starting out and realize they cannot afford to solicit what could they do right here right now to help out this Great Movement for civil rights. So they found the spare Housing Council and later they were given the file of my parents. So im not related to john lewis that i know of, not the whites of the black cement bridge. Christians, jews, others. But their actions sent ripples out that almost immediately change the course of my family. These are the ties in this country. My father was a growing up he would say to a single mom who eventually cannot take care of them that he broke that cycle of poverty which i show in the book because of the conspiracy of love. Because all these people understood they cant sell all the problems and all the outcomes but they would never allow their inability to do everything to undermine their determination to do something in this moment. In fact they understand the biggest thing you could do any day is offer that small act of kindness. That community of kindness and love broke the cycle of poverty. Watched my father into the middle class we set all the time im a hard worker, i made sacrifices to get where you but i only debt to all of these people who did that. So that is how we are related in this country. We have a myth of rugged individualism. An idea of selfreliance. I really respect those ideals but thats not what got us to the moon or map the human genome. It was our ability to recognize a common destiny that we need each other. Even the framers, you read the declaration of independence, there is a spirit of interdependence when they say we pledge to each other our lives, our fortune, our sacred honor. Its recognition that if were going to be successful as a country we need each other. We may not be blood brothers but we are brothers of cause and spirit. Host its a interesting story that goes in here, as i said you date your lineage and your greatgrandfather is james from the pilgrim era in your father is ended up taking them by james who running a funeral home he ruins work ethic from them so its from the slave time pilgrim to pilgrim that is kind of a fascinating, almost a perfect line. Guest ive learned in life that there is no such thing as coincidental. Theres purpose and everything and i do love that. Host one of the segments that jumps out is your visit to greenhaven when you are in law school i think its your first or second year at law school, we just take a quick passage here. From your interaction interaction with the convicts there is the obvious feeling, there but for the grace of god go i. I can walk out of the place instead of remain not just because of my own choices but because of the abundantly privileged environment in which i have bled. There is more to my discomfort than that, i was responsible, people were being put into this massive expanding facility in my name and until now i have given it little thought. In criminal cases it is the Perfect People versus or the United States versus. I realize now that we are the people and we are the United States. Peoples liberty taken away, there freedom sees, prisons built and filled again. Now i knew i marched right in and saw key part of the whole, the good, the back, the truth, truth, the lies, how system works and how it fails. What i saw here was another theme this balance between individual choices for which we have to face up to but also the idea of a social responsibility. Can you speak on that. Guest that is the balance between individual responsibility and the ideals of interdependency. I was told by parents that you have to balance those. You have to know that you are responsible for your actions. You are responsible for how your success or failure. You cant lose that understanding. It has to be part of this understanding that you are also interdependent and the things that you have relied on, the things that you have benefited from our blessings that have been yielded by others. So my parents were relentless. My my father joking with me growing up, i was a 18yearoldyearold kid with a lot of swagger, as president of my cap class, football player, my mother would look at me and say dont you walk around the house like you hit a triple, you were born on third base. My father would remind me the blessings i was enjoying, anyone who, anyone who called himself american i dont care what your struggles are, we are better to be born in this country regardless of circumstances than any other place on earth. We are are reaping the harvest of other folks. So the next step in understanding that is the idea of just taking responsibility. When you dont like something in the world i dont care it is mass incarceration or the environmental contamination and not just flint but many towns throughout this country that are facing challenges that plaintiffs facing that are hurting our children right now. I would say that you have a choice to make. You can accept things as they are or take responsibility for changing them. If you know that you are where you are because others took responsibility, even if it did not affect them directly but they took responsibility for civil rights or labor rights, then to be a patriotic american and who swears an oath that we are going to be a country of liberty and justice than you have to be one of those people who steps up and take responsibility. One of my friends who read the book for me at a glial who has written some books that have challenge me, call me out. He calls out a lot of liberal blacks but he told me there so much a death in this book and there are a lot of stories of tragedy one of the young men that died i talk about his decision led him to his coffin. But our decisions did to and thats one of the more painful chapters to write in what joe specht is one of my favorite. Host its like a fatherson issue where the sins of the father on the sun. And thats the title of the chapter, fatherson. Its really me and my father and his son and his father and we are bogged and then his eventual murder and adjust to stabilize me at a time when i was just weeks into the Mayors Office and suddenly it made me reexamine. Host this is a young man who you bonded with in the projects. Guest and the part like with hughes my father we are both raised by a single mom or he was so i bonded with him and it reminded me of my dad and his charisma, his humor, and god have put it right in front of me and then he started hanging out in the lobby of my building and i started coming home and seeing gains and smelly marijuana. It wouldve been in oculus, the marijuana smell is common in my college but we all know we live in america that the Justice System and drug war is fought differently in different areas. Host he didnt get away from it at stanford, nobodys stopping him from coming home from parties. No one saying whos the guy youre paying part four. Theyre just not facing the same Justice System. Blacks and whites use drugs the same amount, no difference. They actually deal drugs the same, some studies show young whites sell young white cell a little more but blacks will be arrested 3. 7 times more than someone who is white. Shocking disparities in our drug laws which means hassan and his friend did not have a margin of error in the way that my College Friends who flaunted drugs did ecstasy, marijuana, you name it, i thought being use. So i thought theres a crisis i need to help these guys but then we are busy people, were professionals, im going to be the mayor of the city and its my dream job in it so important because im going to be an important person i can help people. After doing interventions with the kids i got so busy that i didnt have time to follow through on the mentorships. They were still so gracious and kind to me. I get elected and Death Threats so they put Police Officers in my lobbying kids dont hang out where theres cops. I didnt see see the kids and didnt see them until i got sworn in and days into my time as mayor i was responding to shootings. Responded to one early on the scene and theres a body covered up and this is a lot of things i regret i didnt ask the names of the boys. Human beings on the pavement and i didnt ask the name. I just went went about ministering to the living. I come home that night and i see the Police Report read it now and see the kid a son and put it right in front of me is now dead. So i begin that chapter with the dissent of a community into a basement of a funeral home that i likened to descending into the bowels of a boat and i couldnt handle it, i felt felt like i was choking grief and guilt and i really start the story of these men, two fathers, two sons as i sit and i am am weeping in the Mayors Office at a time when im the most powerful ive been in my life but i feel the worst and i feel like a failure. Host that is striking because its not usually something that politicians on up to. When they feel even if it is not their own faults that they have somehow failed. You show a vulnerability that you dont often see among most politicians. Are you at all concerned that people will feel senator booker wears wears his heart on his sleeve on some of these issues . Guest no. I dont know how you can see america for who we truly are and not get broken at times. The problem we have in our country is often comes from the fact that we dont want to tell the truth about ourselves and admit to the injustice that still exists. People look at our history and they want to whitewash it and sanitize it of all of that so to speak. So that does a disservice. It diminishes our humanity as opposed to telling the truth. My parents raised me, we were unflinching in exposing to me the horrors and the negativity that happened in our country and even in our lives. In order to make me a more hopeful person. I go through this in the book that you cannot have great hope unless you are willing to confront great despair. Mr. Jones taught me that hope in its essence is a response, hope confronts and this conviction that despair will not have the last word. I dont mind telling folks about i was talking about this in front of 50 people started making me cry again because as i was writing the book i was working through the emotion of all of this in my mind. I just feel that this position that im trying to be a voice against in the country make us more united. One of the first things you have to do is courageous empathy. Really see each other. Not building walls around each other so we dont see humanity, see the trials but you have to have courageous empathy. So im going to be authentic. And thats a mistake we make in our politics you think to be strong have to be mean or to be tough you have to wear this veneer like you have iron for skin. Thats me is not the way i have chosen to leave my life. I think we need more leaders who are willing to show their vulnerability and humanity because it helps more people who are struggling themselves. One of the things they tweet out all the time i tell people lets be kind to one another because we are more fragile than we let on. When i was first at stanford i started at council crisis counseling center. I was stunned it was almost like someone this lifted a veil that i wasnt able to see because calls would roll and about eating disorders about men and women coming out in what they were enduring being gay. About depression and mental illness, about rape and sexual assaults. And i said all of this going on how can we be about confronting it if we will not admit that it is happening to the degree it is happening. You said its about the importance of seeing people. One of your mentors, frank talks about he says icu corey speak about frank. Guest frank was a great process professor who it merged and took me under his wing. I am where i am today and he was not a flashy guy, i go through this moment in a tenant meeting where i first observe him and ill get frustrated with him because we are dealing with a real crisis in this building, conditions that are really bad, and we think its criminal behavior because people are accepting money and not providing services. Im just trying to get the legal part i want to get testimony but he is going slow in this meeting and going off like ours giving everybody space to talk. So so the next day confront him on this and i said when he gives me this powerful talk about you dont understand that its not just about healing the building, we have so much trauma in this country that affects our children and others that we dont address that trauma. People need to be heard they need to have their moment to speak truth to power and authority. It was beautiful it was coincidental that this man who so much about seeing peoples humanity, letting their struggles be seen, validating humans and creating bonds between us where we could help each other, his eyesight started to go in my career when onto the Mayors Office and so forth and heres this great tenant later who is one of our most celebrated leaders in the sense that he led the longest run strike in the seventies. Hes a constant advocate advocate but his eyesight was going. He was getting old so i started taking out to movies even though he couldnt see. Some of the more precious moments we had together. On his deathbed we had begun this rhythm where i knew he was blind and i would come up and say frank its corey and he would say icu corey. And he would joke i felt like he was a man who saw the truth of me and validated me so on his deathbed on the day i walked in and i know is the last day i saw him i had this moment with him what i had to say goodbye. He could his breath was erratic and very fast. The last of the chapter ends with that powerful moment where all he says to me is i said to him i love you and he forces out very difficult lee, i love you. And then one of the last thing he said to me was i see you. So im a senator. If i cannot recognize humanity of my constituencies, even in tea party, trump loving guy who is struggling with his family making 40000 a year in a state with high taxes. If i cant see him just because i preconceived notions about him immediately and judge him immediately but fail to see his humanity failed to see the bond, i weaken my country because they failed to establish bonds over the lines that divide us. I know theres a time where where we talk about the division in washington but you cannot change something if you are not first willing to change yourself. I thought yesterday i had an interview and people were lashing out making judgment minutes about me. And i thought lead with love. You can advocate your position but lead with love. We need to be celebrating that more because we are where we are because of your rational love and courageous empathy. Host that comes a couple of times that you said we need to be more than just tolerance, we need to love. You bring that in a few other times. It is tough enough to even legislate tolerance, it can wait you cant really legislate love, as a leader is a leader bring love into the public debate . Guest these laws mean nothing, theyre worth nothing if we do not have a spirit of democracy, of love, of connection of spirit. So i am frustrated, im the first person to preach against tolerance i think tolerance is a lazy or cynical state of being that says im going to stomach your right to be different because im tolerating you. And im no better off or worse off because i was just tolerating you anyway. Guest we should be using compassion, empathy, love. Love recognizes value, love recognizes that we have an interwoven destiny. It recognizes that if you are hope for me because i cannot move this country myself. Theres a saying that if you want to go fast go alone but if you want to go far go together. So he uses a way to distinguish to better americans. Patriotism is love of country and love a country necessitates a love of country men and women, fellow citizens. So we are we are going to be a Patriotic Society we need to work on going above tolerance to be in far more loving to each other. Host one of the other people that you learn from maybe in a different way, jason bradley. Tell us about jase. Host jason his operation could put any movie depiction of drug dealing to shame. So again i am living these buildings ive moved in in my 20s, ice to sit across. Host you are sitting councilman in newark and youve made a conscious decision to move into the project to low Income Housing in newark. Guest i made a promise to miss jones and now im living in part of this community and my presence there is disruptive, a drug trade that i had never witnessed before, aroundtheclock people. People would lineup it so brash and in the open air, white friends of mine will come visit me they would mistake them for buyers and practically throw drugs through their window. So the guy who is consolidating the drug trade in that building ran an operation when he started detailing it with other guys that was amazing to me. He alleges that he bribed guards , if you make this much in our all pay three times on top of that to help my operation. He went to the whole operation some of which i detail here, lookouts on the building where you could see a cop car, for miles. So an intricate operation of dealing drugs. Behind the veil, he was a guy who is willing in the book when i started trying to trace down people who are dealing drugs like alert what was really going on, get stories that i know in my head but to get their perspective on the stories. He was a chilling guy. He is served his time in prison, hes out, his daughter i saw yesterday, but what he really described to me was a very chilling part of the book. When he started moving out it was taken over by younger drug dealers talked about how he intervened to protect me because he said i saw how you treated my mother who was an elderly person living in those buildings. So it was interesting was to see their sense of regret, their sense of remorse. When i talk to these guys about how the young ones got sucked in you begin to see that this is for bad decisions but you begin to understand the causal factors of creating an environment where the drug trade was an option for black men. Host later in the book you get very passionate about the inequities of drug policy criminal Justice System. You refer to it as the american caste system which is far more extensive than we realize. People teeter on the records of the caste system. People live in a world whether principle is innocent until Proven Guilty is a fundamental value in a Justice System however 36 states legally allow employers to deny jobs to people who are arrested but never convicted of a crime. Leaving an innocent person with no recourse in the face of this legal discrimination. That seems to guide you into what some of the issues that youre focusing on now as a senator. Guest first about i want to talk about the book the new jim crow and the authors for us exposing the injustice. Living in newark, new jersey and seeing how awful the system is and how it violates are very principles of justice in our country. Its not just in urban, black, latino problem. About one of three American Adults now have an arrest record. That is a profound we are and incarceration nation. We are resting more people on the planet earth and incarcerating them. 5 of the global population on the in our jails have nighttime the admissions rate. These are people who post are being held what waiting for trial and who are too poor, if you and i got arrested or what have it we pair bailey get out. People are in jail right now for minor crimes because they cannot pay the small fines and fees to get out. Often they are most mentally ill. Theyre addicted, poor, minorities. As baldwin has said, as as mandela, you want to see the truth of a country, dont look at the halls of washington, go to their prisons and see who they are imprisoning. It is shameful who america criminal Justice System feeds on. To the point where theyre saying this is a country where you are treated worse if you are poor than if you are rich. I i try to expose them story to tell us about how we are being hurt from the system. Also if you read the piece that we are bear responsibility for this and must address the continued injustices in our country if we are ever to be able to truly say that we are are a nation of liberty and justice. Host an interesting line going from your first unsuccessful run for mayor in 2002 when your opponent painted you as an outsider who is taking money from republicans and so forth. Now, you are in the senate and you are finding Common Ground with republicans on issues of criminal justice and so forth. So talk about the book. Guest thats the power of this issue that i just described we have republicans now who understand that this is a violation of our values. You have christian evangelicals which if you read the bible like i do, life has examples of compassion for prisoners. If your fiscal conservative, the government expansive and like never before. We were building a new prison every few days. If you are libertarian and believe that liberty of folks government taking peoples liberty of flimsy reasons. The last few president s admitted to crimes that are felonies that people every day in america especially during the height of the drug war for nonviolent drug offenses that were incarcerating people for. So this is a government seizing your liberty. So i dont care what you are, whatever your area, im fighting allies. Newt gingrich, christian evangelical leaders in our country, mike leads, mike leads, Tea Party Member of the senate ran paul, there is so much agreement the question is why are we not making the change. That is when the battle of my life that just since the senate but even my final years of newark where every year the gravity and the impact of the problem was donning more and more. Host seems theres a few bills and the president behind it now where in a president ial year does that almost make it harder even though theyre so much, ground. Guest this is my first year as a senator during a president ial year and it seems like everything gets harder at that time. Its the the silly season as many people call it. I was just on the phone speak with one of the great leaders of criminal Justice Reform along with people like Ranking Member leahy who has been working on this issue for longtime aware discussing just that. This coalition we have, can we get it across the finish line. What can we be doing to help move it across at a time when the Supreme Court battle is about to happen and the like. So im getting increasingly impatient because it should not take this long. You still have the house which is making slow but steady progress with some great bipartisan leaders over there. So im hoping this is one of the great things that has achieved this legislation that will reverse when were going into the 80. So the policy which is already being shown in the states you have all these things on saving taxpayer dollars, lowering your crime rate and i try demonstrating in the book that this massing incarceration creates more violence and more crime. When used trip away from a person any hope they can provide for the family. They come out of prison for nonviolent drug offense and cant get a job, cant get a business license, cant get loans from banks, pell grant to go to college, cant get food stamps to feed yourself and others. Strip all that away from people in surprise they go back to making bad choices. We all know that rapid attachment to work actually helps people and dramatically lowers your recidivism rate. In fact we had found out in newark who is getting killed, 84 of our murder victims had been arrested before an average of ten times. This is that cycle of incarceration that people get stuck on. And it often ends in tragedy to the point where now for africanamericans theres this big story about the disappearance a black man. Disappearing overwhelmingly because of death, of murder, and incarceration. The time is now and the urgency of the moment is upon us. The coalition exists but we have to be doing things in the state federal level to try to turn the ship around. America, the land of the free, the land the land of justice, not just talk about but be about it. Host you are the fourth elected africanamerican in the senate. Barack obama was the third and he had a book talking about the intersection of race and his personal journey. How do you say it, you touch upon of all the things the races really are links, biologically going back multi generations. How are you seeing where we are in terms of race right now in 2016 . Guest its a complicated picture. You still still have an nation with a black president , the first time to elect a black senators ever served together in the senate. Two out of 100 are africanamericans. We have similar hairstyles, handsome heads. I bump into black fields of companies now so we have seen some progress. Black millionaires. But when you look at success, look towards the vulnerable, look towards poverty, test your country that way. When i look at how when you use a racial lens you see disparities jump out at you. Whether it is black kids with healthcare outcomes, wealth outcome, violence, it is still at constructive months to see the Unfinished Business of america that we still have a lot of work to do. It is why black lives that matter to me is a very important stream of protest in our country, its trying to get people to wake up not defensiveness or being feel like theyre accused of something but please Pay Attention to the fact that we live in a nation where you are black and white, this is is our opinion, this is objective data, that two people arrested for the same crime the africanamerican on average is going to get a 20 longer sentence for that crime. When you have courageous Police Officers, the head of the fbi now saying that racial highest is having a negative impact in policing in america. I talked to Police Leaders were starting to say we need to address less because theres training on this implicit racial bias, including you and i that we need to start training on these issues to reduce the impact it has on our Justice System. There is a conversation we need to have a we need to have the courage to have it, and we need to not let it fall into prejudging a defensiveness but get to where we really want to be as a society. Where no matter what your background you have a fair shot in equal chance for your hard work, great, and determination to have the kind of outcomes that are the american dream. Host you touched upon, as a mayor you work with the police very closely. In the book you talk about the tough jobs they have and the sacrifices they are making. That is going on on the one hand, a course course in a black lives matter issue on the other. There is a divide that is going on right there when you have cops that are often dying in the street trying to protect black lives in many neighborhoods and then the critique on the other. Having seen it from both sides, how do you get those two sides to see one another . Guest i dont see those two values as opposed. When i talk to professionals until the please leaders i respect the most they understand they revere their officers, anyone like me who has had to rely on a Police Department used the levels of courage and bravery every day in america. About Police Officers who are putting their lives on the line to protect others. I talk about being on the phone with my please director during a hostage situation and talking about what to do. But before i i can even come to the conclusion about what to hand delight gunshots are going off and i just hear the phone, go, go,. The officers run into a building with gunshots going off, these are men and women with families. I would not be racing into that building into gunfire. But these people are determined to save human lives. That is the kind of courage i encounter. But thats not contrary to the fact that people who have the power to use deadly force that we should want them to be the representatives in every way. If if i was that police officer, trained me so i can be the best representation of the value of this community. So admitting that there is racial bias that i had to learn, and i had to come through it. I learned how to manage complex organization and how important data is. We were able to move at a time we are reducing reducing our government by 25 lane up one fourth of our workforce, cuttings funding to cities, we had to figure out how to increase efficiency dramatically. Were able to do some management but i was not collecting the right data on police accountability. I was making big mistakes in doing so and it wasnt until the end of my career, working in partnership with others to begin to crack for that. As the head of the fbi says we are not collecting the data to even have a constructive conversation about implicit racial violence. If we do not even know and collect the data on Police Involved shootings, which we know the most a police are wonderful but we are not collecting the data. I sat down with a data data team at the white house who is now doing things because they are not afraid to look at this problem to understand that Police Officers are human beings. Please officers are under stress. They are traumatized at times and they can do very bad things like all of us because sometimes hurt people, hurt people. What the big data pokes at the white house are starting to see is that by just collecting the right data we can begin to have Predictive Analytics about when a cop might break. In fact the cop remember the pool party and the police officer. Host in texas and he started being up on a girl. Guest what they found was one of the predictors of Police Officers doing those bad things is having been involved with suicides. Not suicide themselves but going to suicide calls. The guy who had experience with the suicide calls can be mentally stressful. So imagine that we have the data out there like private sectors are doing, you and i, people collecting big data on us every day that they can predict unless what we might want to buy them when we might want to buy it. Buyer ages, habits. The private sector is using that data. Why are we using that data in policing to begin to better predict the behavior. They found out that having to suicides within a certain amount of time makes it more likely that you have a negative interaction with someone you pull over or what have you. The data data is more sophisticated the one im telling you. For me as a mayor i found out the hard way. Now i sponsor legislation to say timeout, were having all of these dissents, people are yelling back and forth without the facts. So when i have objective data what criticizes you get . Policing we have not created the data guide that we need to help our officers who want to do the right thing to help empower them to do the right thing everyday in our community. Host and catch the officers who arent in the right thing. Guest as a mayor you could have 99. 99 of your employees be great human beings but that one tenth of 1 is a lot of people. You need to find ways, i anyone who runs a business knows that its hard to hire people and you want to catch people when theyre doing something wrong. Host before we finish up, one thing that you know now that you did not know before you started writing this book. Guest a lot of things from interviews with other people. You asked one thing. I think it goes back to interviewing people who let me know things that i do not know at the time. Often what it did was reflected to me that we have a capacity for kindness, decency, and love that we do not fully appreciate. It gets back to the ideal, do we use our power every day to create the kind of america that we want, or do we, like i have get caught up in the sedentary where we get so caught up about what we see going on but we dont realize we can get up and do something about it. Host i think thats a Perfect Place to stop. Senator booker, thank you very much. United, is the book and it is a great read this. Guest thank you, i appreciate you saying that. I was efird words a book tv signature program. And makkah. Tonight its my pleasure to introduce you to dr. Ronald feinman. He specializes in 20th century American History with an emphasis on political and diplomatic history. He has taught courses at Florida Atlantic and diversity on america in 1900 to 1945, fdr a new deal era. U. S. 1945 to the president and america in the 1960s refinement is also the author of twilight of progressivism, the western republican senators an