That change your way of thinking, theres one book that did that for me when i was in college and that was the feminine misty misty my Betty Freeman and literally a lightbulb went on when i read that book and i decided that maybe my life was not going to consist of getting married and having children and living that kind of life that i should be thinking about taking care of myself and expanding my own horizons. I can honestly say that is one book that totally changed my way of thinking about myself. Is there any reading that you do like nonfiction or historical that helps you do your job in the senate . Well, theres a lot of reading that i do just on issues such as, i read a lot about immigrationin our country because , Immigration Reform is something that we need to address and thats very purposeful for me as an immigrant area i read about whats going on in the middle east, i read a lot of those kinds of articles. I read about whats going on in the Supreme Court and so those are the kinds of informational background reading that i do a lot of that informs my decisionmaking. And thats sorta different from the kinds of books i deal with like the millionaire and the bride, those are more for pleasure but i learned a lot reading this particular book. Where you get your book suggestions . I usually look through the New York Times book section. And whenever i see books mentioned in magazines, i tear out the page. I actually have a file, books that i want to read. And i do borrow books from the library of congress for example. I read a lot of mysteries for fun. Ive read all of carlin xers mysteries, these are english mysteries and im sort of an anglophile. But literally, i think the file from books that i want to get to and also when i go to the National Gallery which is part of my routine over the weekend, if im in dc is to go to the National Gallery for the personal and i love to look through the books there and ill usually find something that i like that intriguing. In fact, i think it was there that i picked up this book on folger. Book tv wants know what youre reading this summer. We just your answer at book tv or you can post it on our facebook page, facebook. Com book tv. Cspan. Created by americas Television Companies and party was a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. Next on book tvs afterwards program, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Heather Mcdonald discusses policing in america. Shes interviewed i delores jonesbrown, professor at John Jay College about her book the war on cops how the new attack on law and order makes everyone less safe. Good afternoon mrs. Mcdonald how are you today . Guest thank you so much dolores. Host i havent had the opportunity to talk with you about your new book the war on cops. We know each other through these panels together but one of the first thingsid like to ask you , im asking about whether or not the Justice System in and police are in particular are racist. Whats your definition of racism . You dont get one in the book but you talk a lot about racism and being racist. How should we seek a definition of racism . Guest i think its hostile treatment toward a person on the basis of his or her skin color. Host okay. And the person who would be a racist would do what . Guest make judgments about somebody based on skin color alone or even as part of a other set of characteristics. What we hear from the black lives Matter Movement is that cops are racist, that they are in minority neighborhoods and oppressing people in those communities, presumably that would seem really out of women or freese because theres never any explanation as to why officers would be in those communities so i am simply adopting a phrase that is often bandied about by black lives matter protesters, i go to these protests and i see the signs that say racist killer cops, kkk cops. They are suggesting that cops are motivated by racial animus in the Law Enforcement actions that they take. Host you previously wrote a book and not i think the title is Something Like our cops racist westmark that book was published in time when there was an incident on the new jersey turnpike where for young men, three africanamerican and one latino man were shot by two Police Officers and shot 11 times. In the, specifically the two officers entered for having provided false information about who they were sobbing on the turnpike, these officers admit that they had in fact targetedblacks and latinos and that they had been told to do so by superiors mark. Guest well, that was part of the guilty plea, youre right. But evidence that was more broadbased and statistical that the new jersey attorney general used to show disparities in stock did not take into account driving behavior. And there was a study that was subsequently done by the same Statistical Organization that had contributed to the Justice Department and new jersey attorney generals decision that looks at driving behavior and found that blacks said on the new jersey turnpike at twice the rate of white drivers and that the disparities were over 90 Miles Per Hour or even greater. Its not clear that officers can even see the rates of drivers at night and stop them by radar near the same disparities but were driven overwhelmingly by driving behavior. So i former prosecutor and one of the things i love to do a trial was to use the phrase by your own admission when i had defendants on the stand for crossexamination so should i understand you to say that even though these officers admitted that they engage in racial targeting on the highway and that their supervisors had advised them to do so, we should give less credence to that than a set of statistics . Guest the set of aggregate statistics goes to the overall behavior of the new jersey state troopers. If these guys were engaged in drug interdiction and lets say they were being told to go after you make an custody and they had the dea keeps very close track of who is doing the drug smuggling between the eastern corridor and so if they are looking for a particular drug gang that is racially identified, to me it seems legitimate that that would be on parts of the ground for pulling somebody over but for average traffic stops, i just dont think thats happening. Host you spend much of the book and you spent much of your recent career talking about the effectiveness of stop and frisk in new york city and denying that it involves racism in terms of how its practiced. But you are aware that a commander, an inspector, a Deputy Inspector has on audiotape the recording introducing the floyd trial, the trial that you write about specifically in thebook , saying that youve got to stop the right people. Male blacks between the ages of 14, 21. But he doesnt go on to say anything, only if you have these suspicions, he stops at suspicion of the right people with no black ages 14, 20 or 21. Isnt that another admission at least some members of the new York City Police department believe that all male blacks are going to get them off and such targeting is unwarranted . I dont think thats a fair characterization of what he was caught on tape same. He had called in a Police Officer who is wired, who had recently joined lawsuit employed and the fact that he had done absolutely no proactive activity in the previous year, this was one of those officers on the way low and of the bell curve of officers that are trying to get out of their car and investigate suspicious behavior and he put out hypothetical, he said if we had a rivalry pattern involving young black males between the ages of 14 and 22, thats who you should be stopping. He was goaded into saying that, it was clear from this interaction that this guy came in hoping to get him to Say Something that could be used in the floyd trial, it was not something he just sat out of the blue on his own initiative but even as he phrased it, i find nothing objectionable about that. Was giving hypothetical of a robbery pattern and to be honest, its a hypothetical that sadly mirrors the situation in new york city. That praise on minority victims in minority neighborhoods. When you look at who is committing robberies in new york, after 23 percent of the population they commit the percent of all robberies. Wifi contrast or 34 percent of the population. They commit or percent of all robberies. So its in those minority neighborhoods where you have elderly people getting stuck up so when he came up with this pattern, its one that his Police Officers here again and again not from themselves but from the victims of robbery themselves and Police Officers hope against hope that they will for once get a description of the suspect in a violent street crime whether its a driveby shooting or a robbery that is white but given the ineluctable fact of how crime is distributed in cities today, that almost never happens. Host on definition of racism and that includes the definition i call classic racism, it seeks behavior of a few people from a particular view and then that behavior on to everyone in the group. So for example weve known since 1972 that in urban communities across philadelphia in the book that the greatest amount of serious crime is actually committed by a very small number of what martin called active criminals. So the notion that, and that pattern held over time, right . Theres a small number of active criminals who are violent offenders. The nypds own statistics on stock question and frisk state that roughly 80 to 90 percent of all stops do not produce an arrest for summons and that roughly, ill take the year 2012. 80 percent of blacks that were stopped during that year were not found to engage in criminal behavior. So if youre an innocent black person who is unfortunate enough to live in a high crime area, what you make of those physics from the Police Department . Guest first of all, i have found it easy to meet young black males who said theyve never been stopped. I spoke to a boy in mouthful section of the bronx he said ive never been stopped because im a good boy. Goes to work, he goes to school, these not hanging out on the corners and in philadelphia as you mentioned i like about a book that was written about young crack dealers there by alex kaufman one. He devotes a whole chapter 2 who she calls the cleaning people who are precisely the ones you mentioned dolores who do not, they drink beer rather than smoke marijuana, they stay home late video games, theyre not hanging out in the street lights and they had no interaction with the cops. Ive also met people who say yes, ive been stopped by the cops. And i understand why that was happening, the cops were doing their job or it it is, theres no question that blackmails today face a much higher rate of getting stopped when they are innocent and white male do today and thats contact that the Community Unfortunately pays because of the elevated rates of crime but i would take issue with your characterization of these stop data. Its true, about six percent. Result in an arrest and six percent. Resulted in a summons. The aclu, the Legal Aid Society through the conclusion that that meant every other stop that was necessarily an innocent person and thats not the case. The openair drug dealing are very carefully choreographed to make sure that officers do not have probable cause to make an arrest. Theres a careful segmenting of whos got the money, whos got the drug, the contraband is often kept in a neutral location. So somebody, a Police Officer can be intervening in openair drug dealing without having the probable cause to make an arrest and if somebody, lets say theres been a pattern of carpet on a street and an officer these somebody walking along a line of cars trying door handles, theres no probable cause to make an arrest for that. But that may well avert another car theft in that neighborhood. So we dont know what number of stops were in fact intervening in criminal behavior but im certain its not a zero percent. Host lets go back to your discussion of these attacks on the innocent members of high crime or even low crime communities, right . Because if youre familiar with the research that says in neighborhoods where blacks and latinos only make up 14 percent of the residential population, they make up 70 percent of the stops in those locations. So it would seem that when youre in a high Crime Community low Crime Community, so long as you are black or latino you stand a greater risk of being stopped under the practices that were challenged in court by the lawsuit, right . So let me ask you dolores, what do you think stock rates should look like . In new york city as i mentioned where 23 percent of the population commit 70 percent of all shootings, they committed, all robberies. As far as shootings, that fluctuates from year to year but it goes from 75 percent to 80 percent. When you add hispanic shootings to black shootings in new york city you account for 98 percent of all shootings. That type of criminal behavior is going to manifest itself in other types of lawbreaking, lowlevel lawbreaking. Right . Commit less than two percent of all shooting, though they are 34 64 percent of the population, given those prime disparities you think that stock rates should mirror population data . Should this whites the 34 percent of all stops and black percent of all stops even though whites are virtually not present in violent street crimes . Host you and i have talked about this before and i take the position that people are individuals and that anytime we Group Individuals together and make assumptions about the individuals and the entire group based on the behavior of a few that that is problematic, right . Your lawyer, im a lawyer. Theres a constitutional amendment that says we shall not do that, that everyone should enjoy equal protection under the law whether they are criminal or noncriminal so arguably, thats one of the first issues in terms of looking at aggregate data. Guest to criticisms i would suggest that people might be making about the book. It contains a lot of information and we only have an hour to talk about it. Host can i make one point . I would love to get your answer on this. About two years, as you recall, the New York Times was focusing on the 73rd precinct in brownsville brooklyn which had a heist operate. What they never compared, lets compare brownsville to bay Ridge Brooklyn which is several miles away. Now, the stock rate differential between brownsville and bay ridge is about 15 times greater, theres the per capita rate of people in brownsville and stopped, they have about 15 times greater chance of being stopped than those People Living in bay ridge and it is true that brownsville is predominantly black and bay ridge is predominantly white and asian. Whats left out of that analysis is that the per capita shooting rates in brownsville is 81 times higher than in bay ridge. What that means is that every time, and this is again, its not coming from the police. These are people reporting these shootings. This means every time theres a gang driveby shooting, the police are going to be out there inhigh numbers , making stops to try and let the rival gang no that they are being observed. And given that degree of shooting differential and the inevitable response of police to it, in order to try to prevent another person being either wounded or shot, will result in a higher rate of stops and again, if you go to the data driven accountability meetings where local precinct commanders are held ruthlessly accountable for the crime and their solutions for it in their precinct, they dont talk about race, they talk about where people are being victimized and given these disparities in new york city of where people are being shot, the police are going to be doing proactive policing, pedestrian stops in those neighborhoods that will generate the data that shows these disparities that the aclu will then use against the nypd in a lawsuit but they have no choice but to be there. Host im glad you use the word choice because i wrote a note in a in the margins of your book that is your position that innocent blacks have no choice but to accept high rates of stops and in terms of policing, high rates of lowlevel enforcement in order to have Public Safety . Guest i think that officers have an obligation to treat everybody they meet with courtesy and respect and if an innocent person is stopped and subjected to the humiliation and possibly terror of being stopped by the police, the police have to explain to him why he was stopped. Ideally play the radio call back and that officers should not walk away from that interaction without making sure that that person understands why he was stopped and ideally has reached some sort of agreement but as far as the broken windows policing you mentioned and these are the lowlevel qualityoflife public order offenses, every time i go to a Police Community meeting in the south bronx or Central Harlem or central brooklyn, what i hear from the residents of those neighborhoods is they want more policing, not less. And theyre not saying arrest the robbers. Theyre saying bring public order. They say you arrest the drug dealers and their back on the corner the next day. Theres kids hanging out in my lobby smoking weed and dealing drugs, im terrified to go down and pick up my mail. I spoke the cancer entity in the mouth hope. My point is that the police are getting these requests from the members of the community themselves. Host but the police also got the request from the members of the community and thats how we ended up with the lawsuit to talk about in your book like davis floyd and lego, right . So those requests for working parents that said my son cant go to t