Us. The other imminent threat is giving up a piece of the grid. And giving Law Enforcement the tools of intelligence, the single greatest asset we need have and also giving them the electronic tools, i dont think we do nearly the job we should be doing in terms of protecting against cyber attacks. Weve seen just last week what happens when supposedly the chinese have now hacked into the personnel records of upwards of 20 million government employees. The one positive out of all of that, it is the only hope we have of maybe recovering lois lerners emails from the i. R. S. , get them from the chinese. But it is a serious issue that we need to put first and foremost as a serious threat to the safety and security of our communities. I know that there are some sheriffs representing interesting states, maybe like iowa, might have interests there. Some other states like florida. I see one of those sheriffs is about to take the stage and id like to ask him to take the next question. Governor i see ted comacho former president of n. S. A. And a sheriff from iowa. You have a question for the governor. Thank you very much. Governor, thank you very much for being here. Its very important to all of us. You touched on Mental Health a minute ago in your speech and i appreciate that very much. One of the things happening across america is you know all the jails predominantly run by the office of sheriff and are funded locally. One of the things were seeing is those jails are becoming Mental Health institutes. Were starting to have to house more and more people who have Mental Illness and problems and thats very costly from a treatment standpoint and from a medical standpoint. When a person comes into a county jail, medicare, medicaid, all those benefits halt even though the person hasnt been adjudicated guilty yet, theyre pretrial. What happens is they get back on the street and sadly its difficult for them to get those support services back. If you become president , would you work to straighten that system out so the sheriffs can get help while theyre in our jails and later those people can get the help they need when they get back out . Governor huckabee i assure you i would. As a governor, one of the biggest battles we fought was dealing with the complexities itties of the medicare program. Every governor i spoke with said they would take less dollars to be given flexibility of the medicaid program, including not cutting off the medical portion of medicaid for those adjudicated, especially those preadjudicated. Thats been a huge problem. One way to make that change is to get congress to make medicaid a Block Grant Program back to the states where the people who live in your state who might know more about what your needs are than some bureaucrat in washington whos never been to iowa, let you guys make that decision and it may not look the same in all 50 states. Thats exactly the point. Each state should say this is how we want to structure our medicaid program. I was chairman of the National Governors association. We had 49 of the first governors in america sign on to a medicaid reform package to present to congress in which we went to congress and said we will take less money for more flexibility. You would think that would be a slam dunk and congress would jump all over that. 49 out of 50 governors. There was only one governor who didnt sign on, Rod Blagojevich and you know how he turned out. The rest of them, everybody was on board. I thought this would be easy, this will be a layup. You couldnt believe how tough it was and how much we had to fight through the Senate Finance committee and im sitting out there getting a lecture from Jay Rockefeller, ted kennedy and john kerry on why they didnt think it was a good idea because i didnt understand poverty and im thinking guys, i grew up in poverty and i never thought i would get a lecture on what its like to live in poverty by Jay Rockefeller and ted kennedy. This one other thing about Mental Health that has created a problem, in the 1970s, Public Policy shifted. We wanted to start mainstreaming. The novel idea to not institutionalize people because of Mental Health issues. But we have a lot of people on the streets who cannot function. There are some people we tried to mainstream we will never be able to mainstream. They are simply dysfunctional. They end up in jail because it is an easier place to warehouse them. We cannot put them in Mental Health facilities or institutions because so many dogooders in Public Policy have decided it is cruel. I do not know why it would be cool to put people in a safe environment of the institution. It would somehow be worth to put them in a county lockup facility. We need a Little Common sense in the system. [applause] host there are more people in our jails today with Mental Health problems than in hospitals. Startling. Governor, our next question comes from the great state of texas. Texas is a unique state for all whole list of reasons. I think there is a couple of other gentlemen running for office from the state. The sheriff from Jackson County has an intriguing question for you. Governor, thank you for attending the conference. I really appreciate that. Governor, you said you opposed amnesty to secure the border. How will you handle the millions of Illegal Immigrants in the country now . Mr. Huckabee if we do not secure the border, i think we are kidding ourselves we will have a way to handle the ones who are here. If the pipe in your kitchen bursts and water is spewing on the floor, the first reaction is lets get a new sink. The First Priority is to stop the leak. The First Priority of the next president should be to secure the border. I believe it can be done in less than a year. I call your attention to the fact that 73 years ago, we built a 1700 mile road between British Columbia and alaska. We did it in less than a year with technology that existed 73 years ago. Im convinced that, if somebody leads and has the will, we can secure only the border in less than a year. That is the equivalent of stopping the leak and deciding how we deal with the people who are here. We have not made the battle over how many people should be here. I think the question is not how many people are coming but why. Why do you want to come here . If you want to come to this country because you love america and our laws and you embrace our system and our way of doing things, and you want to learn the language and assimilate into america and live the American Dream and work hard and killed the country up like settlement build the country up like so many people have done, we will give you thorough consideration. But if you are coming here because you have heard we will educate, medicate you, let you vote, even let you press 2 and here it in your own language you can even burn our flag and raise yours. I would meet them at the border and say, this may not be the best trip. If someone breaks the law here, i think we have to be serious about sending them back where they came from. We can barely handle our own criminals, much less those from somewhere else. And deportations have been cut almost in half in the last few years. I am not for mass deportation. I do not blame anyone for coming to this country. I get on my knees every night and thank god i live in a country people try to break into rather than out of. I hope america never gets to the place where we are trying to get out of here. But we have to apply common sense to this. It makes no sense to leave our borders completely unprotected. The country without borders is no country at all. Job one, secure the border. Then sit down with reasonable people and say, what sink would we like to get to replace it . Thank you, sheriff. [applause] host i recall in the mid90s, the then president from hope called for Additional Police on the street. I just came back in the border. It is not just porous. It is an impossible situation. Thousands upon thousands of miles. And there is a single problem facing sheriffs a shortfall of manpower. My personal opinion is, we need 10,000 deputies. Here is the money, get it done. Mr. Huckabee it is sad when the people on the border and i have talked to Border Agents who are exasperated. Agents who are demoralized because their government for bids them from carrying out their job and their duties. There is nothing worse than to give a person a job and not let him or her do it. That is happening particularly in the enforcement of our borders and dealing with those that violate immigration laws. One of the problems the federal government creates is federal funds for the first couple of years and pretending we have solved the problem. They get to the press conference and congratulate themselves. In year three, when the budget is hemorrhaging, the state is supposed to pick up the cost. I believe Border Security should not be a cost borne by sheriffs. We are asking police to do something that is one of the few things the federal government has authority to do. I wish our federal government would spend more time doing the things it is supposed to do, Like Fighting enemies and protecting borders, and less things it is not supposed to do, like redefining what marriage looks like. [applause] host during your tenure as governor of arkansas to go back to Mental Health lets talk about your accomplishments in Mental Health. Particularly to alleviate the burden on sheriffs. They are trying every hour of every day to keep their finger in the dam and it is gushing holes. What do we need to do . Not just as president. What are we going to do about this specifically . Mr. Huckabee i learned an important lesson from our director larry noris. He said we are locking up people we are mad at rather than the ones we are afraid of. Here is one of the things we learned. Not violent drug offenders, we found, were better off in Community Corrections facilities where they would undergo treatment than put them in the general population of the main prison system. The cost of putting someone in general population, at that time , and this was nine years ago that would have been around 47 a day. We can put them in a Community Correctional program for less than five dollars a day. So the economics are attractive. But more importantly, the recidivism rate for those in a Community Program who are there for nonviolent drug offenses, it is so much more effective than it is to lock them up and throw away the key. There are some people we lock up that need to be there. They need to be there for a long, long time. If we lock people up that really do not need to be there, not only is a costly but and they come out they went in as a nonviolent offender and come out a hardened criminal. We will recapture them in many cases for the rest of their lives. We have to apply a different approach to incarcerate those that are truly the ones we need to be afraid of and a separate them from the ones we are mad at for screwing up. Host i see steve casey in the audience. He is the executive director of the florida Sheriffs Association. I want to hand the microphone over to steve casey. Governor, thank you for being with us today. Thank you for being a longtime member of the florida Sheriffs Association. There has been a lot written about the militarization of police. Some have said that police have crossed the line from protect and serve to that of a police state. Yet, in the mass shooting in aurora colorado, there are medics would not even go into the theater until the police had been able to clear it. They had to use a bearcat transport to do that. Under your administration, what restrictions would you place on the tools Law Enforcement officers have to do the job . Mr. Huckabee those are decisions that need to be made at the command of the scene. I do not think a president should be made making decisions in the minutia of handling a crime scene. The issue is, what is appropriate to get some level of control of a situation . In some cases, frankly, when it looks like a war, you need the police to be equipped for what is, in essence, a war. You do not want them underprepared, understaffed, underequipped. I would always say the decision needs to be what is necessary. What is the most significant level of force necessary for the police to get control in a short a time as possible . There will be times where it requires a military presence. If people are burning down stores and throwing molotov cocktails and shooting guns Police Officers better be as wellequipped as rioters and the people burning down the city. One thing i am currents concerned about is when federal agencies develop their own swat teams at every level. Even the federal trade commission with a swat team. I call attention to what happened at the Gibson Guitar Company in nashville. I know the ceo and i know what happened. They were accusing the federal trade commission of using an imported wood from india that was not licensed. A pretty serious violent issue the wrong kind of wood in a guitar. In the middle of the workday, a swat team burst into gibson guitar, put the secretaries and technicians working on them, all the people in the factory, put them in the floor. Held automatic weapons on them. Search the building. It was an outright raid all because they wanted to inspect what kind of wood they were using in their guitars. To me, there is no need to use that kind of force. Go in with a search warrant and say, we want to see the kind of wood you are using. There was an accountant in little rock awakened by a battering ram at 2 00 in the morning. There was a tax issue they were accused of. They called the guy and marched the accountant out into the middle of the yard, his wife in their nightgown, in the middle of the night. In front of all the neighbors. Because they wanted to seize their computers and look at some records. Again, i am not sure that is justifiable. When it comes down to your cities on fire, whatever it takes to get control of the situation. You do not want to have Law Enforcement underequipped and outmanned and outgunned by thugs on the street. If somebody has superior firepower, it has to be Law Enforcement. And whatever it takes, they should be equipped to do that. [applause] host governor, we appreciate you being with us. I have one last question. I think you will appreciate this. As you said in your remarks, the hostility towards Law Enforcement today is probably at an alltime high. Comparable to the 1960s. Even then, we did not see the vitriol we have. Deputies under attack. How do we change that . I heard your remarks. I know you said it starts in the family. But what are we going to do . How are we going to stand tall for Law Enforcement . Will this happen day one of your presidency . Is it going to impact slowly . Mr. Huckabee to borrow a phrase , there is a new sheriff in town. But that has historically meant is these days of Law Enforcement is over. In the same way, the next president should be able to say there is a new president in town. No longer will the blame crime on those trying to enforce the law. He will blame it on those who break it. I do not think i can emphasize enough how important it is for the leader of any organization especially the leader of a country, to set the tone. That is also set by the people he appoints. To have an attorney general who wants to stand with Law Enforcement rather than castigate them and question their every move. It sets a tone for the country. It is like the tuning fork for an instrument. Once it makes a sound, all the instruments to to the tuning fork. The president is like the tuning fork of america. He will set the tone and the mood. I would like to believe that, come january of 2017, we can say to launch was meant, there is a new president in town. He is not in your way but with you. There will be a different approach throughout the system about the appreciation and support of lawn was meant Law Enforcement across the spectrum. [applause] host it has been almost 50 years. It has been almost 50 years since our criminal Justice System has had a complete spectrum overhaul. You may be aware for a long time, sheriffs have been calling for a complete overhaul of the criminal Justice System. Some things are right, some things are just under. This past friday, we had the honor of hosting an elite group of folks who are responsible for leaving other entities in the criminal Justice System. The american prosecutors association, the National Association of Mental Health issues. We had 30 organizations, off the record, no spotlight. And sheriffs feel strongly the question is this congress has introduced a bill to ask the administration to look at criminal justice were. Here is the question. Lets assume the president will buy it. Is this something you will commit to today, that we should do this and you should keep it as an ongoing endeavor . Mr. Huckabee i know it will sound like i am pandering to say i will. That is the right answer. But it is the right solution. There is no way decisions like that can be made from the top down. They need to be made from the bottom up