Transcripts For CSPAN Local Law Enforcement 20141201 : vimar

We have with us, moving from the left to the right geographically otherwise erhaps [laughter] lurk, the attorney maryland, the former states attorney in Montgomery County, former president of the National Association of attorney generals. Next to him is jeff. Assistant for Camara Harris of california. Jeff oversees criminal law as a special assistant in california. Next to jeff is cyrus vance, the District Attorney. Those of us in manhattan know him well. Next to him as anthony, the commissioner of the Baltimore Police department. Has joined us today. Finally, to my immediate left we have david keene who is a Founding Member. Former president of the National Association. Former chair of the American Conservative Union and a board member of the constitution project. Mornings next events will proceed is as follows. Each member of the panel will have a view minutes to discuss issues of key importance to them and then will move through some significant things. Attribute personal that is relevant, and that is not the fact that i was the u. S. District attorney or served in Law Enforcement. I am the grandson of a pentecostal preacher and i have a very good sense of when people start to warm to their text, which means they could go a little bit longer. I will exercise those instincts as we move forward. Each panelist will have a few minutes and then will talk about Community Engagement. Will discuss issues related to return and reentry. Will discuss issues of fairness through the operation of the criminal Justice System and how many of the panelists have strategies to root out bias and put in systems to ensure that is clearly administered firmly but also fairly. With that, i will start with mr. Kean. Ok. Thank you, i like the idea that after he talked about he would have a panel of the first person in called on has no background whatever. I found the first panel to be a really relevant introduction to this panel because it hit upon the kind of problems that we all face in trying to deal with criminal justice issues in the public sphere. Is jim indicated, i am on the organization that works on issues of this sort as well as a Founding Member of right on crime. He put together bright on crime, a number of conservatives were meeting problemy to discuss the of reform. It was our feeling that in the 60s and 70s in particular, the public discussion of criminal justice issues rescued by the fact that you have misrepresentative strawmen arguing with each other. You had politicians who claimed that since crime was a problem, but had to walk them up, throw the key, and punish the more severely. Then there were others who tended to speak for the criminals, and that was the debate that appeared. That was the wrong question. The question i should approach criminal justice issues was stated by our freshmen in the year a panel. He said the system is to provide the question is not whether there are too many people in prison or not it enough or rather the laws are to tougher tooling, the real question is what works. Got into a conversation about what works, and the mission that that paul discussed this morning became subsidiary to the smaller mission of constituencies involved. Right on crime because we felt it was time for people, regardless of our stance, to start looking at these problems realistically because the system clearly is not working when the United States becomes the premier jailer of the entire world. Where one in 100 adults are serving time or have served time in 8 p. M. Institution. Peanuted time in a lnstitution pena, institution. Where the mission that the prison and jail system cannot be fulfilled because it is dysfunctional. Where people are being locked up for things they need it be locked up for. Be locked up for. Today, we lock people up because were mad at them. What should be receiving prison and jail people we are afraid of. There are obviously people have committed crimes and they are dangerous enough that they need to be kept away from the rest of society. But when you have done is we have a loud our dedication to locking people up for political reasons to overwhelm the political system. The prison system. The bird event planned money into prison construction, like they suddenly felt of germs, build it and then come. The ability prisons and prosecutors probe them up. To try to get where person realm to try to get Prison Reform passed, we have been working with liberals, the way thend systems are working is not working. It works just about as well as the education system, but may be a reallocation of resources is in order. Historic constituency still exists. It is amazing to me. This is a great group of prosecutors and internees in the first group, but i hate to think they are representative. In every state, even in dealing with federal reform, the the prosecutor ealed Prosecutorial Team they want all of the sentence is so they can force people to not go to trial. As you know, most people do not go to trial. Lord knows how many of those people have accepted dealers because of the inadequate defense available to them rulese of the sentencing they could be subjected to. Suret involved to make that the question of what works is what does not work, what humane and what is not humane, had to be discussed in terms of that rather than where one stands in the political spectrum or want one can do to advance their career as a prosecutor or politician or whatever. Because you quit can see me getting warmed to the subject, and it is dangerous. [laughter] mise,e referred to add who has been very concerned about over criminalization, where there is thousands of ways you can end up in prison if somebody wants to put you there. I remember our first meeting. Hasi said, everything become a federal crime. The poster child for that is carjacking. Carjacking is illegal anyway. Why does that need to be a separate federal crime . The guy shook his head and said, it made a great press release. That is why so many things are federal crimes the states. They make great press releases. We need to look at everybody from all sides of the spectrum, those from the prosecutor to need to look not at punishing people or freeing people or this or that, but we need to look at what works. Over incarceration does not work. Sioner keane, you can pick that up. Interesting. Ry i think my good friend but i will for allowing me to come into his territory without a visa. I appreciate that. I also think my other good as the onlyeft me official to answer these questions, so im going to reach out to both of them. I think the theme that is correct is, what works . I wondered what i can offer to this panel. I have been in policing for close to 35 years. I started in the early 1980s and i saw a lot of Different Things happen. I always ask, why . The why projects us into future. When crime increases, and right now were seeing a decrease of relevant cities who have the United States. When crime increases, much like we had terrorism that to the city, the public does respond. I am going to talk a little bit about that in how it plays together because as we walk forward as a civilized nation and we have these conversations, i am going to get pressure one day when the crime rate goes up and someone is going to say do something about it, do something about it now. If you do not, i will place you. Then seminars will step into that position to resolve that issue and when things calm down, civil and have an academic conversation. In the city of baltimore, we continue to focus on and it is the third city i am in charge of, i come from the west coast. I was born in washington dc, we moved to the west coast. I am sure now with you because i grew up in breast los angeles. Games started in my neighborhoods. Gangs started in the neighborhoods where i grew up. Crips and theey bloods. That was my time that i grew up. Asked people, and i asked my mother at the age of eight if anybody gave a dmf i lived or died. Did anybody care if i survived as a little black kid growing up in South Central los angeles. Care about my hopes, my dreams, and my aspirations . I tried to push people toward having academic information come in and focusing on what works. Not the flavor of the day. Not with the mythology is, and based on best practices in those things that work for release agencies. In baltimore today, we have programs like seas fire. I had dinner with David Kennedy last night and we were talking about cease fire. Oversimplified, but we do is focus on groups and gangs, or crews. Into a room, we bring them from behind a curtain, and we tell that we know they are. In that room, we have all of our partners and we come with a hammer and a velvet glove approach. We tell them, we know who you are. He comes in your group violent, and to crush the whole group. But we want you to do is step over to the velvet glove, get out of the life, move on it and have a fruitful environment. That is oversimplifying but sees fire is. Cease fire is. It is working in different places. Baltimore, oakland. Were also focusing on violent repeat offenders. We are not arresting in neighborhoods. About cease fire is it is focusing on the most violent. People who are exasperating violence through problems. Focuses onr program the individual. Not the community. Not the minority kids out there. Those kids we know for a fact are killing others and were trying to take them out of our communities. Were focusing on groups, gangs, and close. Thes as a definition can be bloods, etc. They come together from neighborhoods to do criminal acts. Then you have crews. They are coming together to sell drugs. Were focusing on all of these pieces. Thatld throw on the table most in the United States have a history of incarceration. Were also focusing on legitimacy which is how i describe it for city is that we jump up and down by the fact that we have had some the lowest will will homicide rates in the history of the city and recent times, 197 what because baltimore used to be closer to 400. In a it is a significant drop and i applaud and that was before i walked in. Not that i had an impact on that but i just say that. I applaud that i applaud the way of a down to 197 but if that community is no better than what it was before the 197 what do you have to cheer about . If you still have the poverty levels, if you still have the same vacant homes, if you still have the same impact that 18yearold kid their life is no better than what it was before the 197 what do you have to celebrate when you pat yourself on the back . We are shifting and what we are doing and what i want to move our team from is away from enforcement because people tell would you me tony stay in your lane. Your job is doing policing which is enforcement. Im trying to teach the city and not only the city but also my Police Officers that her job is to prevent harm and harm comes in a lot of different forms. Its not just enforcement because if you focus on just enforcement your only told to address the problem is arresting people, mass incarceration. When you are looking at addressing an issue by prevention of harm you are dealing with a lot of Different Things and it crosses the line so you dont stay in your lane. You cross a line of economic development, you cross a line of poverty. You have a responsibility because many of these areas you are the only kind of government that these residents ever get to see. We also address reentry and we in have a reentry program. We are also internal but the Police Police Department Addressing behavioral issues with their Police Officers. Then i want to jump back and i ok want to finish because i get that body language so i want to be very short. So we have all these and progressive issues that we are taking on and i have drafted a number of papers out of harvard. The last one deals with doubleblind sequential lineups with a project innocence in new york and Carol Stephens and addressing how politics pushes sometimes and thats just one phase of the paper that we wrote. The politicians which pushes prosecutors to push through and we end up arresting the wrong people in 30 years later we find out we are arresting the wrong person. If you have a chance to pull that up is out of harvard. Im not doing that is marketing but we are trying to answer and push difficult questions. The point i raise with this is when i was a Straight Police Street Police officer in the 1980s rock cocaine hit Southern California and it hit hard. We had africanamerican young men dying left and right every single day brutal shootings taking place. People like me killing ourselves off left and right. In the communities that do something about it. We dont want to hear talk and we dont want to hear rhetoric, do something about it. The only thing we knew how to do because there wasnt a lot of theories out there to do Community Policing with starting the people said this is not a time for Community Policing. Do something about so it so we did. We arrested everyone that we could because we knew a silly it was the only thing we could do at the time. There was no Empirical Data for us to do anything differently. What drives us today whether talking about legitimacy ceasefire hotspot policing and on and on are based on theories coming out of academia. In the 1980s we didnt have the body of knowledge. In the 1980s we did what we could do to solve a problem which led to mass incarceration. That has crippled communities that i came from. As i close what we are going to do in the future needs to be based on Empirical Data. We need to research that is done that we know works and works well that we focus on the right thing to do. [applause] theres nothing to control a moderator better than a Police Commissioner saying im watching your body language. [laughter] when i grew up that was a matter of concern. Thanks, jim. Good morning, everyone and good morning, panel members. Its a pleasure to sit here and to listen to you. This panel is speaking directly to the group that deals with the largest number of people in our criminal Justice System. My office alone handles 100,000 cases a year. Not all of those are large financial fraud cases although many are. We handle more criminal cases in a year than the department of justice handles nationwide. When we are talking about where the fourth, fifth and sixth amendment meets the road its in our state courthouses with the help of our Police Department and attorneys general. This group, i think, has a unique perspective on how to deal with criminal justice in the broadest sense and how our country is adapting to it. We are going to get back with jim i hope to some more pointed issues about racial bias which i look forward to but let me share in a few minutes i have about how our philosophy and think my philosophy addresses the question of who goes to jail and how we handle that. First and foremost i think every prosecutor and every Law Enforcement official has come to understand that a crime prevented is better than one prosecuted. Crime prevented is better than arrests made. As the roles of das today have evolved and you become smarter i think our office i look at for example i dont really measure our success and how many convictions we have although obviously i want our office to win its cases. I really look at the role of the d. A. To partner with the police and over the longterm driving crime down. Thats how i measure our office of success. In an effort to achieve success its no longer just in the courtroom that we are going to be making an impact on driving crime down. Increasingly that the tools of the das office in mind in particular enable us to affect Crime Prevention in ways that i think are absolutely consistent with crimefighting. Theyre really one in the same. So i could talk at length about our Enforcement Actions whether its in the whitecollar area gangs Domestic Violence and the like, but for this purpose im going to leave the hardcharging prosecutor discussion and turned to strategies who uses the das office and Crime Prevention. First and foremost i think we realize manhattan and a lot of new york communities has a youth gang and violence issue. Part of that is going to be investigating and breaking up gangs but i believe and we have come to believe that its equally important for us to take our resources and our tools as a District Attorneys Office and invest them in the neighborhoods where we do our job. For example when i started months after starting we realized some of our gyms in some of the most high crime areas of manhattan were closed on friday and saturday nights because there was no funding for it. That was the case with the Police Athletic case in one of our blue ribbon organizations that deals with help tickets. Deals with help the kids. What we did was we simply took money that we got from drug forfeitures and we started to hire worldclass trainers in basketball to begin with and a high training operation and build teamwork and leadership among kids to provide boys and girls 12 to 18 years old, five to 9 00 p. M. Friday and saturday nights the days our group that is most at risk and to provide for them there are office through hoops we hired worldclass sports programs. We started with one gym in Central Harlem and now three weeks later three years later we have nine sites in manhattan. We have servic