Save them for the q a at the end of the event. I want everyone to know that before we get started. As i said, this of course could not be a more important and timely conversation we are going to have today. Since the death of george floyd in Police Custody last month, weve seen nationwide unrest. Weve seen protests, not only here in america but internationally. Weve also seen a certain narrative take hold. It starts with the assumption that the only way to properly view George Floyds death is through a racial lens, in fact, all encounters between police and black suspects are increasingly viewed this way. Its a narrative that assumes the behavior of Derek Chauvin, typical Police Behavior toward black suspects entered assumes that george floyd is a black every man in america that whatever happened to him happens to black people all the time. That blacks essentially leave the house each day worried about having a violent encounter with police. The media has run with this narrative which faces very little pushback, very very little skepticism. It leaves us with the impression that the biggest problem facing black America Today are in fact the police. That Law Enforcement is at the root of social inequality in america. So we find ourselves in the middle of a National Conversation about policing. There are calls to defund the police and abolish prisons there is legislation being discussed in congress that would make it easier to prosecute cops and fire them. We have armed radicals that have taken over entire neighborhoods of a major city like seattle. That includes Police Precinct thats been abandoned. These people have the mayors blessing in doing so. They are commentators who are not only making excuses for the writing and the looting but indeed sharing it on to a large extent. So whats going on here . Im at the point where this is that today weve invited some panelists to talk about that. Particularly interested in what they have to say because they fall within the democratic dome acumen abthey are young men of color. They are supposed to be the biggest beneficiaries of whats being advocated in the wake of George Floyds death. Lets get to our panel, then we can get started with questions. First up we have jamil jivani whos a lawyer and author and who has the Nonprofit Organization aimed at helping young people called road Home Research and analysis. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and the author of the book why young men the dangerous allure of Violent Movement and what we can do about it. I hope we have a chance to talk about that. Our next panelist is Rafael MangualDeputy Director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute and britain widely on the criminal Justice System in general. Finally, we have Coleman Hughes his recently joined the Manhattan Institute another graduate of columbia university. Coleman has to testified before congress about slavery reparations lets get started with the questions, gentlemen, i thought i would start with you, ralph with a very basic question i think a lot of people assume but i wanted to get your take on this and that is do we know that the floyd encounter with police was racially motivated that it happened because floyd is black. Can we make that assumption . If not, why have so many people jumped to that conclusion . Works it sounds like a simple question but i think the answer is pretty complicated that the short answer is no, i dont think we can make that assumption because as far as ive seen there is no evidence that officer Derek Chauvin harbored racial animus that motivated him that day. I think the reason so many people have assumed that this was racially motivated is because the event fits into a preexisting rhetorical structure. The rhetorical structure is built upon the assumption that policing is a system that was built to perpetuate aso when you have a terrible instance of misconduct like the case of george floyd, when the officer is white and the victim is black, the question the motivation is assumed. Its considered to be a ford on conclusion. As to what some of the reasons for that are, i can only speculate, i think one might be the power that weve seen that these narratives can happen to drive change into obscure facts that get in the way of the change that a lot of people have been capitalizing on these events to affect id like to ask the same question to coleman. Why do so many people assume this was a racial incident . I agree with ralph that it fit a narrative that some activist and political types, some more progressive commentators want to push. Absolutely. I agree with ralph that the short answer is we dont know if it was racially motivated. That sounds crazy to people who havent been paying attention to the full range of people who get killed by police in this way. But its worth reminding people theres a white nam named tony timms who died in a very similar way under the need of a Dallas Police officer for 13 minutes and 2016 and that was released in video and didnt spark as much outrage as the george floyd incident which leads to your question which is why is it that people view this as something that only happens to black people . The answer lies in the massive coverage by it in the National Media. Dozens of white people at least a dozen, sometimes several dozen unarmed white people get killed by the cops every year. Those stories just die in the black hole of local news. They never escape and make it to national news. People who are just following the news casually understandably get the false impression that this kind of thing overwhelmingly or only happens to black people and in many ways its not their fault because its what the National Media has fed them. The question then becomes, why is there that coverage biased in the National Media . Why have we heard about george floyd almost no one knows the name tony timbo. The answer to that i think has something to do with an understandable sense, i can certainly speak for myself, i think Many Americans were raised watching and rewatching the videos of white Police Officers brutally sicking the dogs on civil rights protesters in the 60s Peaceful Protesters and that kind of mold is imprinted in many ways on the countrys moral imagination and almost ingrained in our subconscious. When we see a white officer doing something to a black man it actually hits the american minds much differently and much more poignantly that if we saw a white officer doing the same thing to a white suspect or black officer doing it to a white suspect or blessed ab black suspect. Jamil, do you agree with coleman that the media plays a role here in helping people jump to these conclusions regardless of whether all the facts have been laid out white cop, black suspect, must be something fishy going on here . What role does the press play in leading people to jump to conclusions . I do think the media does play a role. Certainly the media helps direct our attention to some cases more than others but part of why the media has the control on that narrative that is speaking to a reality. That reality is disproportionality and the way that works in our society. I think when people see george floyd for example being killed by Police Officer, it is objectively more likely it would happen to george floyd because hes black and it would happen to a white person. That alone that disproportionality i think is genuine frustration and concern. I think a lot of black people across america know that theyre more likely to be stopped by the police more likely to interact with the police. More likely to have a negative encounter with the police and a white person. It does deserve the much more nuanced conversation in the media allow space for. It is a reality that black people are disproportionately experiencing Law Enforcement in this sort of way i think the media wants to point us to certain explanations over others for why that might be the case. Lets have that conversation. Thats part of why we wanted to have this panel. So why are black encounters with police the rate of those encounters why is it so much higher than with other groups . Are the Police Picking on blacks . Are they over policing these communities . Do they have have it in for blacks . What explains this disproportionate number of encounters between black communities and Police Officers . A big part of that i think is the way Violent Crime is dispersed in a city and in a given geographic area. If you live in a majority black neighborhood youre more likely to be exposed to gain balance, gun crimes can be more likely to have to worry whether your kids are going to make it home safe after going to school or going to visit her friends house. You are calling the cops and relying on the cops to provide some sort of stable presents for Community Safety and because of that, black people are going to interact with the cops and a disproportionately higher rate. It is prejudice and bias a factor . Im sure it is just like prejudice and bias as a factor in every other part of life. As part of how human beings think and experience the world but i think the way Violent Crime is distributed in American Cities is a big part of why police are having more common interactions with black individuals than others. Okay. Ralph, jamil says racism still exists, it could be playing a role here in the way communities are policed. Congress is right now considering some reforms including making it easier to fire cops or prosecute cops. Police are perfect. [indiscernable] a central database for police that have been disciplined so they can move to another state joined the force and hide their background and so forth. Just curious what you make of these reforms in general on principle whether you think they are good but more importantly how much of a difference do you think the reason reforms will make when it comes to getting out the problem jamil is talking about . I think thats where the right question is and before you answer it i think we have to get a realistic picture of just how big of a problem Police Violence is. One of the problems as i see it within this broader defeat is that there is this kind of toxic narrative, particularly in the black community which says that policing is an institution can be fairly characterized by unjustifiable uses of force majority of which are purposely reserved for black and brown people. This is false. Police use of force is extremely rare and thats true whether talking about lethal force or nonlethal force. Lethal force is used in about 0. 003 percent of all arrests and thats coming from estimates 2018 police made 10. 3 million arrests and fired their weapons an estimated 3043 times. When it comes to nonlethal forceps generally less than one percent of all arrests. This is not evidence of a largescale problem. That sort of the first practical limit a lot of these popular reform proposals are going to face in terms of the difference they can make wishes to say that because the problems of Police Violence is so overblown there just really isnt all that much room for improvement. Police have made incredible progress on this front over the last several decades and this is just one of the sort of political problems is that theyve gotten absolutely no credit for that practice. 1971 the nypd they wounded more than 220 people and killed almost 100 by 2016 those numbers were down to 72, 20 something and nine respectively. None of that progress was reflected in this sort of rhetorical posture of this debate so i think thats one practical limit any proposal any policy proposal is going to face is the extent to which its going to be able to overcome this overwhelmingly powerful narrative. But the second is that theres just not a lot of data behind a lot of the popular poles we are seeing. I do agree that it has been made too difficult to fire some bad Police Officers when the misbehave and a lot of departments and i think that reflects some very real concerns about job security. And there are ways around that we should be talking about in the support for that is really just a general incapacitation argument. The same way that benefits societys incapacitated criminal by imprisoning them to benefit society to incapacitate a bad cop by taking that power away from them. We have to do that unreservedly and soberly and unfortunately our conversation right now just doesnt allow us to get to that point so i dont have a ton of hope for the potential that these popular reform proposals have to make things better. What you think about that coleman . Some of these proposals are calling for collecting more data, better data, sharing more data for instance, Different Police departments collect crime in different ways or collect data in different ways theres no central database where they feed the information into in terms of the behavior of their officers how often they fire weapons there is no uniform way of reporting this nationwide, some of this legislation would move us in that direction. I know you are a dater, i like data too, we all like to use it but im wondering if thats the real problem here when it comes to the narrative being pushed add if they had better data we wouldnt see the narrative we see pushed out there. I would like to see more data too. Do you think would make much of a difference in terms of changing the conversation we are having nationally . And pretty aligned with ralph here and so there are two things to say, one is which reforms make sense . I think transparent data makes a lot of sense to me. Universal body cameras make a lot of sense to me. Perhaps changing qualified immunity although i can sort of see both sides of that one, demilitarized weapons makes a lot of sense to me. But then theres the other question of how much will that address the problem of deadly shootings of unarmed americans and here i am rather pessimistic because i think we are misunderstanding why the shootings happened to begin with theres ralph that the numbers are very low to begin with and its harder to bring them lower from a low point then to bring them hi from a high point. Many of the shootings happened because america is the foremost gun country on planet earth which means when a cop pulls over a suspect, for example, that cop has a legitimate fear the suspect has a pistol hidden in the glove compartment. That means in america, unlike in say britain, when somebody reaches for their wallet or their smart phone, a cop is going to have a fear that cant be legislated away the suspect is about to pull a day or her. It has to be said that roughly 300 cops die every year and that has an effect on how american cops approach in american suspect. We can do all these reforms and i think we ought to have a very serious and rational conversation about how we can make Police Departments accountable because the status quo i think is unacceptable which is that in short of shooting someone in the back its very difficult to get punished as a Police Officer in this country. That seems like it has to change to me, however, at the same time, we also have to manage our expectations about what is possible. I think we probably can, i certainly hope we can get to a place we never see Something Like george floyd or tony tims again. I would bet all the money i have that no matter what we could do we cannot get to a situation where there are zero or even very close to zero deadly shootings of unarmed americans because of the reality of being a gun country. What i think im hearing here, and i certainly agree with it what im hearing is correct is no one thinks cops are perfect. We should find ways to get rid of bad cops, root them out of police forces. Thats all for the good. But at the end of the day, policing doesnt seem to be the central problem. He said before that police are in these communities and thats where the 9 11 calls originate. They have legitimate reasons to be there. If you think we are overemphasizing the role of police in black homicides in this country, and by every data measure we have we are in fact doing that. More than 7000 black homicides last year, two or three percent were police. Where should the focus of this conversation be . Reinvesting money away from Law Enforcement into pro it back to my productive things Like Mental Health and social services and childcare and all these other things, its a necessity that a lot of crime is reduced. Its a vicious cycle in that respect where the problems that require us to invest more in policing then take money from things that might address the issues require police to come into the neighborhoods in the first place. Every Police Officer spoken to readily acknowledges that not to simply arrest our way out of them. I think of the last 25 years Law Enforcement can have a heavy hand on crime but that will also have devastating effects on families and communities at the same time. Theres a role for the communities themselves to play and i think a lot of black americans that i work with understand theres attention therebetween addressing the need to address violence in our neighborhoods and also create conditions for the police to interact with our young men less often. Where i dont think that tension is appreciated is among people who shake the narratives abshape the narratives a