Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Blue 20150921 : vi

Youve commuted communicated something to them and them to us maybe two. So thats 11 part of this changing world. Its not just the docket. Its the world world that has changed. Youre not there because, our opportunities are not a function of individuals and their not a function of one philosophy or another philosophy. They are a function of a world thats changing and has changed and thats the point i want to get across because those are the challenges that i think, in part, we have to deal with. That is an inspiring note on which to end. What you have told us is that all citizens, not only america or around the world have an obligation to educate themselves about the constitution by listening to each other and divergent points of view. By bringing bringing people together and respecting the arguments on both sides you are suggesting they can learn from each other. That is what you were trying to do in this book and thats what were trying to do at the National Constitution center. I think out of your many great contributions justice breyer, in addition to your opinions and books, the fact is you are at heart a teacher. You are still trying to inspire citizens in america and around the world to educate themselves about the constitution is the highest calling a imaginable. I give you some final homework, read his book. Then make up your own mind about whether you find him persuasive or if youre more persuaded by the majority. Thank you for all you have done for the constitution. Thank you [applause]. [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] now on book tv, joe domanick talks about a history of american policing. Through his examination of the Los Angeles Police department. We are here tonight to talk about a really interesting and timely subject. Policing and the relationship between policing communities. I cant think of anything that is more timely. You cant you cant pick up the paper or watch the news without finding more about things and s. Wondering about where things are going. One of the things that i, in my previous life, i was a historian at the university of wisconsin and ucla, one of the things i liked history is because i always used to look at history and the past to try to figure out whats going on in the present and get a sense of wher were going in the future. I think well be able able to doa that with a great book by joe dominic. We will hear from joe and the Police Commissioner from 2010 and 2013. They are going to talk. They are going to talk a little bit about lapd and the history of it. Then ill bring in my friend anm mayo are all candidate steve silber off. Hell hell come up and well talk about the president and the future. Let me introduce joe domanick. Thanks for coming. Thank you very much. Ive been asked to say a few things about the book and the first thing i can do is read you a little bit from the office note which will tell you how i got involved in covering the lapd and why i was so fascinated with it. When i first came to los angeles, i moved here in 1975, i have a little of an l. A. Accent but you can tell where i moved from tell where i moved from just by listening to me. Ill just start with this. I first became interested in the lapd when i moved from manhatta to los angeles in the 1970s. I was a Public School teacherblc working in the south bronx. It reflected the wild discord of the streets outside. The vibe turned edgy as my subway car ground through thegot most violent neighborhoods without a cop ever in sight. Back then, nypd officers and their counterparts seem to never be around when you wished they were. When they were you couldnt help but notice the weary slump of their shoulders and the disheveled appearance that announce their disillusionment with their jobs when i arrived in l. A. , i wasthi astounded by how different lapd officers were. It it was clearto they hadnt given up. They had the look and bearing ot the prototype model that they actually were for the film rowboat cop and they acted theob part. Like the rest of the lapd, they had been trained to aggressively seek out crime and confront and command a suspect in an aloof and intimidating or. Arrogant matter. Even if that that suspect had committed only a minor infraction or do nothing at all wrong. That attitude alone seemed to start more trouble than it stopped and if you were blacked the experience was worse. Rse every politician in town were afraid of getting into a public spat with a succession of chiefo who paradoxically were notch afraid of offending anyone. I wrote my first book about the lapd called to protect and to serve as a way of finding thatsb out and understanding it. To protect and serve, whats different about this book, to protect and serve was a narrative history of the lapd written in the same way that this book has been written. Through characters who to takeo through the entire book, but iti really started in 1877. This book starts with the los angeles riots of 1992. About the first 70 pages, i use the the riot as it unfolds to talk about the people who were around and in some ways caused the 92 riots. I talked about them in their careers and then i introduced m character, charlie back who is a true character and he was a sergeant during the riot and i pick him up there all the wayhee through to when he becomes chief. I think thats about it if you want to know more, get the book. [laughter] my friend asked me to appear and interview joe, so i went to the book and i gotta few questions that i will posed to him. Let me first give a plug to the book. I do think it is an excellent overview of the history of the department from 1992 until the present and how it has evolved over that. Of time. I have lived in l. A. My entire life, so i was here for the 66my riots as some of you may haves been as well. I like to say my First Encounter with the lapd was getting a ticket on when a cup boulevard when i was 18. That has been the only contact i have had with the lapd. I was going a little bit too fast. I pled guilty to that one. So let me start, in your book, you say, now four years later the book really goes from 1992 through 2011. Then the epilogue brings it current through 2015. The history part of it is really through 2011 and then you address some of the problems we see every day on the front page of the l. A. Times. In the epilogue, he says, says, now four years later people continue to ask me if the lapd is really reforms. To that, i answer, compared to e what . He then compared it to the arrogant combative years asald chief and the decade of a drafte and then you compared to othere Police Departments in your reply is, yes, emphatically yes. If you can summarize for us, how has lapd changed from 1992 until 20112 until 2011 and then to the present . Darrell gates was the inheritor of an attitude, pardon me, in a succession of lapd chiefs. It started in 1950 and when he became chief he was heralded asc a great reformer and he was indeed a reformer because at that time, l. A. Like many bigcity Police Departments, was a department that was on thet take. If you were stops you would pay a curbside fine. They were taking money from gamblers and prostitution. It was a corrupt apartment in that way. He came in and said no, were not gonna do that anymore. This stops now. The now. The credo was, within the lapd after parker, if you get in trouble, if youre involved in a bad shooting or beat up somebody that needed to be beaten up, we will protect you, but if you take 1 penny your asses ours. E that has pretty much been the history of the lapd since then. So parker did something that i think started a lot of problems for the lapd. He agreed to have a small policr department on the cheap in that department would be mobile to cover these 300 or 400 square miles of l. A. And to be faceless in a patrol car looking around, not really making contact with anybody unless they saw somebod they suspected of doing something, and very often in ghettos, thats where they suspected people doing something all the time. That was an attitude of policing that were going to stop people and were going to really put the fear of god in them. N they firmly believed if people were nice to the police, thei police were not going to be nice to you. They believed believed that they were better than you. That brought us, can you repeat the question please. From the. Of of time in 1992 which was the last year darrell gates tenure of chief up througs the department as we see itie today under charlie bet. How has it changed and you say its reformed and you believe it stage for the better question it. It has changed and its due to a number ofob reasons. One was the Christopher Commission reforms. Those didnt go far enough but one thing they did do is theyu enabled the police of chief, the chief of police to be not rehired after five years. Prior to that time, gates was chief of police for 14 years and had no intention of going anywhere until he was finally forced out. Under further Christopher Commission reforms, they have to decide whether they want to rehire him or not after that five years is up. Bernard parks and gates were not rehired for certain reasons so that was an important reform. The lapd the chief of police had to be more politically awarw and astute and willing to deal with the rest of the power structure of the city which heh hadnt been willing to do in the past. The second reason, the Inspector General came into the picture. Before that there was nobody internally that was really watching the lapd. The Inspector Generals job was to be the eyes and ears of the Police Commission and tell them ina the public what was going on terms of abuse within the department. It has worked, sometimes and sometimes it hasnt. It depends on who the Police Commissioner is and who the ig is. So that has been important. I think the two most important things that helped the lapd to heal and started some rapport was the rampart scandal occurred and that caused so muchn t attention that they put it on the front page day after day after day because they wanted people to pay attention. Le there were editors there that had lived through decades of thr lapd ande really wanted this to matter. Instead of just doing a story over a weekend, they put it on the front page every day. That brought in the u. S. Department of justice and they forced the city of los angeles into a Consent Decree. That decree was very importante because it had very strongc metrics that the lapd hadau tori meet in terms of not violating civil liberties. Was there was a judge, jerry freeze that had been on the Christopher Commission and was acutely aware that it had gone far enough. He really held the city and the lapd feet to the fire and terms of getting them to make these changes that were necessary. To finally, the mayor and the Police Commission hired the most famous please reformer of the 20th century to come in and complete the job. To get back to your question, the biggest change was an attitudinal change of the way they police their mission as i saw it, was to keep africanamericans and poor people and latino people who are poor in their place, deal withp the gangs which they couldntou really do because they just doubled down on what they were doing and it hadnt worked for decades, so bratton came in and he went to visit the acu and all of the prominent africanamerican leaders in town. He set i understand the situation and said my door is open to you. I will listenowi to you if i thn there is something that should be done, i would be be happy toe do it. So he opened up to a lot of people who never got a hearing. That was important too. When it came time for him to be. Reappointed to a the aclu actually wrote a letter supporting him. He also did something important, he encourage innovation, not Just Innovation that he thought of but the innovation that his captains in the field thought f he said i want you to prevent crime. Nobody in this department is talking about preventing crime. All were talking about is putting people, andars arresting people and get a reputation for doing that. Or that doesnt work and heet understood that. He told his captains in thewo fieldrk, do what they needed tos to get lower crime and to get the legitimacy for the offices to police in those neighborhoods. Try to start to do that. A number of captains, most prominently charlie bet charlie back he did a really fantastic job. Community policing is a big legacy of the lapd. That continues today. Under bratton and under beck, a Gang Intervention Program was started. efembers at the time. Ere gang the lapd said were going to support this Intervention Academy and were going wemy know how to use them so that they are not switches because they cant be effective if they are snitches going to the police, but we are going to useu them. Here is how they use themt when there were gang wars, a lot of what happens is that a shoots b but then be once retaliation and he gets this game and they a shoot another person from that gang. What the interventions did is theyer stopped those retaliatory killings which resulted in soe much crime and death. C those were the major accomplishments. I think the training, everybody tells me the younger officers that come out, and certainly the captains now really get it. They really get what needs to be done within the framework of the kind of Police Department that we have. They are reallyh agents of containment and they need to be more than that. I think thats how the lapd has been reformed. How is it not been reformed . Weve had 25 people shot by the lapd this year. Thirteen of whom have died. Chief beck has promised transparency. He started started out being transparent and seemingly makingt every move instinctively that was right. You could tell that this was the right thing to do. It just brought joy to my heart because i had been criticizing the lapd for so long. I knew charlie and i had interviewed him many many times for this book and i had the highest respect for him. More respect than ive ever had for any public official. But now, with the shootings, he has trouble with the Police Commissioners. He is not being transparent. We look we look at, for example, body cameras. He introduced them to the Police Commission, of audie camera policy that is not transparent. You cant find outds  what hapd if theres something caught ons tape the lapd will decide whether they will release it or not. The officers are allowed to view the tape before they make their official statements to internal affairs, and then we hear nothing about these shootings. The the shooting in venice, shooting here, the shooting where the guy waved him down and he had something on his armv and he got shot. The tactics are not beingt enforced and charlie beck is caught between iraq and a hardh place between pacifying the troops who feel like they are under siege and people like me who want them to be accountable andt transparent. Let me ask you a question about the shooting. O if you go back and look atut the last nine years, do you think things are worse today inu terms of the police use of force no i think its better. Previously under chief parks, who didnt have any opinion on anything and under darrell gates , it was telling the press what this civilian did to get himself shot by the police. That was the attitude of the lapd. There was a lot less accountability. L. A. Has really changed as you know and its literally the complexion of the city that has changed dramatically, as has the income gap between the wealthy and the very poor. What we are seeing, i think, with the crime rise is that people are getting desperate. A lot of the crime is caused by the homeless. Nobody is doing anything about the homeless. The lapd shouldnt have to deal with the homeless. They are the least prepared by their training and instincts and by wanting to have control to deal with these people who are heavily drug addicted and or mentally ill. They are living on the street and some of them are going up because people are being pushed out and they are desperate. Let me ask you a question about chief beck. This idea that he has been less transparent than when he came into office in the fall of 2009, ill go back to the Consent Decree and the point you made earlier, when i first got on the Police Commission, and assistant chief there are three at assistant chiefs, the assistant chief told me the most important thing that happens in the last 25 years was the Consent Decree and without that the department would have never reformed itself. Once the department reformed itself and got used to the Community Policing model that just built on itself. That Consent Decree and the oversight over the department is what forced the change. So, that consent to decree, it was eventually lifted into thousand eight. As you pointed out the book, it paved the way for bill broughton to exit on a high note. After the consent degree, there there was a transition agreement. It was a threeyear agreement which gave the Police Commission some greater oversight er ovt and also into the background was the department of justice to monitor the department further at a moments notice go back to save a violated the transition agreement we have to go back to the Consent Decree and it was always hanging in the balance. The three years i was on the commission and nova chief is very out and anxious to get out under that. In 2011 it was lifted. I wonder if that is the time in which that attitude of the chief started to do change and things became less transparent . Day you have a sense of that . I dont necessarily but i can tell you what i know about charlie. Unlike gates that was parkers driver was put on the road to chief he was a real cop a gang cop in the south tyrol. He was hardnosed. He had a partner literally die in his arms in a crowd of people surrounded him and his partner and started to shout at him. Wire you trying to help him . Help of black guy over there who ran into the car with the officer that got killed was in the car. Those were searing events for him at one time he had to leave the National Constitution<\/a> center. I think out of your many great contributions justice breyer, in addition to your opinions and books, the fact is you are at heart a teacher. You are still trying to inspire citizens in america and around the world to educate themselves about the constitution is the highest calling a imaginable. I give you some final homework, read his book. Then make up your own mind about whether you find him persuasive or if youre more persuaded by the majority. Thank you for all you have done for the constitution. Thank you [applause]. [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] now on book tv, joe domanick talks about a history of american policing. Through his examination of the Los Angeles Police<\/a> department. We are here tonight to talk about a really interesting and timely subject. Policing and the relationship between policing communities. I cant think of anything that is more timely. You cant you cant pick up the paper or watch the news without finding more about things and s. Wondering about where things are going. One of the things that i, in my previous life, i was a historian at the university of wisconsin and ucla, one of the things i liked history is because i always used to look at history and the past to try to figure out whats going on in the present and get a sense of wher were going in the future. I think well be able able to doa that with a great book by joe dominic. We will hear from joe and the Police Commissioner<\/a> from 2010 and 2013. They are going to talk. They are going to talk a little bit about lapd and the history of it. Then ill bring in my friend anm mayo are all candidate steve silber off. Hell hell come up and well talk about the president and the future. Let me introduce joe domanick. Thanks for coming. Thank you very much. Ive been asked to say a few things about the book and the first thing i can do is read you a little bit from the office note which will tell you how i got involved in covering the lapd and why i was so fascinated with it. When i first came to los angeles, i moved here in 1975, i have a little of an l. A. Accent but you can tell where i moved from tell where i moved from just by listening to me. Ill just start with this. I first became interested in the lapd when i moved from manhatta to los angeles in the 1970s. I was a Public School<\/a> teacherblc working in the south bronx. It reflected the wild discord of the streets outside. The vibe turned edgy as my subway car ground through thegot most violent neighborhoods without a cop ever in sight. Back then, nypd officers and their counterparts seem to never be around when you wished they were. When they were you couldnt help but notice the weary slump of their shoulders and the disheveled appearance that announce their disillusionment with their jobs when i arrived in l. A. , i wasthi astounded by how different lapd officers were. It it was clearto they hadnt given up. They had the look and bearing ot the prototype model that they actually were for the film rowboat cop and they acted theob part. Like the rest of the lapd, they had been trained to aggressively seek out crime and confront and command a suspect in an aloof and intimidating or. Arrogant matter. Even if that that suspect had committed only a minor infraction or do nothing at all wrong. That attitude alone seemed to start more trouble than it stopped and if you were blacked the experience was worse. Rse every politician in town were afraid of getting into a public spat with a succession of chiefo who paradoxically were notch afraid of offending anyone. I wrote my first book about the lapd called to protect and to serve as a way of finding thatsb out and understanding it. To protect and serve, whats different about this book, to protect and serve was a narrative history of the lapd written in the same way that this book has been written. Through characters who to takeo through the entire book, but iti really started in 1877. This book starts with the los angeles riots of 1992. About the first 70 pages, i use the the riot as it unfolds to talk about the people who were around and in some ways caused the 92 riots. I talked about them in their careers and then i introduced m character, charlie back who is a true character and he was a sergeant during the riot and i pick him up there all the wayhee through to when he becomes chief. I think thats about it if you want to know more, get the book. [laughter] my friend asked me to appear and interview joe, so i went to the book and i gotta few questions that i will posed to him. Let me first give a plug to the book. I do think it is an excellent overview of the history of the department from 1992 until the present and how it has evolved over that. Of time. I have lived in l. A. My entire life, so i was here for the 66my riots as some of you may haves been as well. I like to say my First Encounter<\/a> with the lapd was getting a ticket on when a cup boulevard when i was 18. That has been the only contact i have had with the lapd. I was going a little bit too fast. I pled guilty to that one. So let me start, in your book, you say, now four years later the book really goes from 1992 through 2011. Then the epilogue brings it current through 2015. The history part of it is really through 2011 and then you address some of the problems we see every day on the front page of the l. A. Times. In the epilogue, he says, says, now four years later people continue to ask me if the lapd is really reforms. To that, i answer, compared to e what . He then compared it to the arrogant combative years asald chief and the decade of a drafte and then you compared to othere Police Departments<\/a> in your reply is, yes, emphatically yes. If you can summarize for us, how has lapd changed from 1992 until 20112 until 2011 and then to the present . Darrell gates was the inheritor of an attitude, pardon me, in a succession of lapd chiefs. It started in 1950 and when he became chief he was heralded asc a great reformer and he was indeed a reformer because at that time, l. A. Like many bigcity Police Departments<\/a>, was a department that was on thet take. If you were stops you would pay a curbside fine. They were taking money from gamblers and prostitution. It was a corrupt apartment in that way. He came in and said no, were not gonna do that anymore. This stops now. The now. The credo was, within the lapd after parker, if you get in trouble, if youre involved in a bad shooting or beat up somebody that needed to be beaten up, we will protect you, but if you take 1 penny your asses ours. E that has pretty much been the history of the lapd since then. So parker did something that i think started a lot of problems for the lapd. He agreed to have a small policr department on the cheap in that department would be mobile to cover these 300 or 400 square miles of l. A. And to be faceless in a patrol car looking around, not really making contact with anybody unless they saw somebod they suspected of doing something, and very often in ghettos, thats where they suspected people doing something all the time. That was an attitude of policing that were going to stop people and were going to really put the fear of god in them. N they firmly believed if people were nice to the police, thei police were not going to be nice to you. They believed believed that they were better than you. That brought us, can you repeat the question please. From the. Of of time in 1992 which was the last year darrell gates tenure of chief up througs the department as we see itie today under charlie bet. How has it changed and you say its reformed and you believe it stage for the better question it. It has changed and its due to a number ofob reasons. One was the Christopher Commission<\/a> reforms. Those didnt go far enough but one thing they did do is theyu enabled the police of chief, the chief of police to be not rehired after five years. Prior to that time, gates was chief of police for 14 years and had no intention of going anywhere until he was finally forced out. Under further Christopher Commission<\/a> reforms, they have to decide whether they want to rehire him or not after that five years is up. Bernard parks and gates were not rehired for certain reasons so that was an important reform. The lapd the chief of police had to be more politically awarw and astute and willing to deal with the rest of the power structure of the city which heh hadnt been willing to do in the past. The second reason, the Inspector General<\/a> came into the picture. Before that there was nobody internally that was really watching the lapd. The Inspector General<\/a>s job was to be the eyes and ears of the Police Commission<\/a> and tell them ina the public what was going on terms of abuse within the department. It has worked, sometimes and sometimes it hasnt. It depends on who the Police Commissioner<\/a> is and who the ig is. So that has been important. I think the two most important things that helped the lapd to heal and started some rapport was the rampart scandal occurred and that caused so muchn t attention that they put it on the front page day after day after day because they wanted people to pay attention. Le there were editors there that had lived through decades of thr lapd ande really wanted this to matter. Instead of just doing a story over a weekend, they put it on the front page every day. That brought in the u. S. Department of justice and they forced the city of los angeles into a Consent Decree<\/a>. That decree was very importante because it had very strongc metrics that the lapd hadau tori meet in terms of not violating civil liberties. Was there was a judge, jerry freeze that had been on the Christopher Commission<\/a> and was acutely aware that it had gone far enough. He really held the city and the lapd feet to the fire and terms of getting them to make these changes that were necessary. To finally, the mayor and the Police Commission<\/a> hired the most famous please reformer of the 20th century to come in and complete the job. To get back to your question, the biggest change was an attitudinal change of the way they police their mission as i saw it, was to keep africanamericans and poor people and latino people who are poor in their place, deal withp the gangs which they couldntou really do because they just doubled down on what they were doing and it hadnt worked for decades, so bratton came in and he went to visit the acu and all of the prominent africanamerican leaders in town. He set i understand the situation and said my door is open to you. I will listenowi to you if i thn there is something that should be done, i would be be happy toe do it. So he opened up to a lot of people who never got a hearing. That was important too. When it came time for him to be. Reappointed to a the aclu actually wrote a letter supporting him. He also did something important, he encourage innovation, not Just Innovation<\/a> that he thought of but the innovation that his captains in the field thought f he said i want you to prevent crime. Nobody in this department is talking about preventing crime. All were talking about is putting people, andars arresting people and get a reputation for doing that. Or that doesnt work and heet understood that. He told his captains in thewo fieldrk, do what they needed tos to get lower crime and to get the legitimacy for the offices to police in those neighborhoods. Try to start to do that. A number of captains, most prominently charlie bet charlie back he did a really fantastic job. Community policing is a big legacy of the lapd. That continues today. Under bratton and under beck, a Gang Intervention Program<\/a> was started. efembers at the time. Ere gang the lapd said were going to support this Intervention Academy<\/a> and were going wemy know how to use them so that they are not switches because they cant be effective if they are snitches going to the police, but we are going to useu them. Here is how they use themt when there were gang wars, a lot of what happens is that a shoots b but then be once retaliation and he gets this game and they a shoot another person from that gang. What the interventions did is theyer stopped those retaliatory killings which resulted in soe much crime and death. C those were the major accomplishments. I think the training, everybody tells me the younger officers that come out, and certainly the captains now really get it. They really get what needs to be done within the framework of the kind of Police Department<\/a> that we have. They are reallyh agents of containment and they need to be more than that. I think thats how the lapd has been reformed. How is it not been reformed . Weve had 25 people shot by the lapd this year. Thirteen of whom have died. Chief beck has promised transparency. He started started out being transparent and seemingly makingt every move instinctively that was right. You could tell that this was the right thing to do. It just brought joy to my heart because i had been criticizing the lapd for so long. I knew charlie and i had interviewed him many many times for this book and i had the highest respect for him. More respect than ive ever had for any public official. But now, with the shootings, he has trouble with the Police Commissioner<\/a>s. He is not being transparent. We look we look at, for example, body cameras. He introduced them to the Police Commission<\/a>, of audie camera policy that is not transparent. You cant find outds  what hapd if theres something caught ons tape the lapd will decide whether they will release it or not. The officers are allowed to view the tape before they make their official statements to internal affairs, and then we hear nothing about these shootings. The the shooting in venice, shooting here, the shooting where the guy waved him down and he had something on his armv and he got shot. The tactics are not beingt enforced and charlie beck is caught between iraq and a hardh place between pacifying the troops who feel like they are under siege and people like me who want them to be accountable andt transparent. Let me ask you a question about the shooting. O if you go back and look atut the last nine years, do you think things are worse today inu terms of the police use of force no i think its better. Previously under chief parks, who didnt have any opinion on anything and under darrell gates , it was telling the press what this civilian did to get himself shot by the police. That was the attitude of the lapd. There was a lot less accountability. L. A. Has really changed as you know and its literally the complexion of the city that has changed dramatically, as has the income gap between the wealthy and the very poor. What we are seeing, i think, with the crime rise is that people are getting desperate. A lot of the crime is caused by the homeless. Nobody is doing anything about the homeless. The lapd shouldnt have to deal with the homeless. They are the least prepared by their training and instincts and by wanting to have control to deal with these people who are heavily drug addicted and or mentally ill. They are living on the street and some of them are going up because people are being pushed out and they are desperate. Let me ask you a question about chief beck. This idea that he has been less transparent than when he came into office in the fall of 2009, ill go back to the Consent Decree<\/a> and the point you made earlier, when i first got on the Police Commission<\/a>, and assistant chief there are three at assistant chiefs, the assistant chief told me the most important thing that happens in the last 25 years was the Consent Decree<\/a> and without that the department would have never reformed itself. Once the department reformed itself and got used to the Community Policing<\/a> model that just built on itself. That Consent Decree<\/a> and the oversight over the department is what forced the change. So, that consent to decree, it was eventually lifted into thousand eight. As you pointed out the book, it paved the way for bill broughton to exit on a high note. After the consent degree, there there was a transition agreement. It was a threeyear agreement which gave the Police Commission<\/a> some greater oversight er ovt and also into the background was the department of justice to monitor the department further at a moments notice go back to save a violated the transition agreement we have to go back to the Consent Decree<\/a> and it was always hanging in the balance. The three years i was on the commission and nova chief is very out and anxious to get out under that. In 2011 it was lifted. I wonder if that is the time in which that attitude of the chief started to do change and things became less transparent . Day you have a sense of that . I dont necessarily but i can tell you what i know about charlie. Unlike gates that was parkers driver was put on the road to chief he was a real cop a gang cop in the south tyrol. He was hardnosed. He had a partner literally die in his arms in a crowd of people surrounded him and his partner and started to shout at him. Wire you trying to help him . Help of black guy over there who ran into the car with the officer that got killed was in the car. Those were searing events for him at one time he had to leave the Southeast Bureau<\/a> to play in a transfer because he was starting to hate everybody this is the dilemma working in the ghetto for so long. Research you hate to the people and dont make differentiation is between lawabiding citizens or kids acting out and serious criminals to be arrested. That is another reason why Community Policing<\/a> is so important see you can get to know the people. The cops need to be part of the neighborhood to build that not just to arrest everybody insight. What causes the lack of transparency . In my mind there 200 million guns in america but that makes the distinction between somebody who is a rootless cop to shoot somebody for really no reason and he doesnt have what it takes to be a cop like i wouldnt so to assess the situation to use the right tactic but he doesnt have that ability or he is frightened, he doesnt know how to read black people because he has never known them. Those and shoots somebody. Back has a lot of time before those officers to think not only should they not be punished but also be retrained and people disagree with that. And i think he understands the big constituency a chief of Police Always<\/a> pass to consider his own troops. Gates made the mistake of considering his troops was the only constituency but back is much smarter than that but he doesnt want to be known as somebody to give up his guys. Now we will talk about where were going in terms of the future. Come on up. [laughter] it is hard to be a cop right now. What i found so fascinating about your book is i know the players now. A lot of my time is on the psychology of why they act how they act and why they do what they do where is it coming from . Theyre background or experience and your book helped me with that because things make sense to me now that were perplexing. But i will tell you my observations. Number one, the greatest thing that i learned, a Community Policing<\/a> is from the bottom up now. These cops actually believe in Community Policing<\/a> to spend time that 21 police stations and Community Sanders<\/a> there are libraries they are welcoming the officers are trained to be welcoming. We have so many programs that Cadets Program<\/a> has 6,000 kids dont come from this neighborhood, they are kids that are standing up strong against all these forces to say i will take this fourth year of the road. What i see, in the book you mentioned two things i agree with him on a lot of things we usually tell the newspaper first. [laughter] but what was really important in this but charlie talks about the bank of trust when i talk to the officers every monday morning i go. After 100 mondays with the roll call and the officers officers, i mentioned the bank of trust to talk about just like a grown Bank Accounts<\/a> you have to have money in there so when things get tough you can pull from that but the problem with the officers is they make all the deposits but the people with the atm card making withdrawals are in cleveland and ferguson and new york and baltimore and all these cities and they have a huge impact on the republic the aclu and immediate deals with our lapd number to the crime rate has gone up and all the stars are an alignment it will be for a long time. There is no middle class anymore. So the upper 10 percent has no empathy for the lower 45 they dont support this Service Providers<\/a> to keep people off of the conveyor belt. I thought that was interesting but to modify that a little bit he says people get on and the cops just get them when they fall off the more people keep getting on. I do agree with that but i think think of it as the freeway to prison. We have to you give them ways to get off the freeway what gets you off . A job. A father. A program. Somebody that cares, a good education. What happens . They cannot watch the lakers or dodgers on television anymore. That is three hours there on the street. Everything is moving away towards them 65 kids and their class at school. Then we wonder the reciprocity is 70 within three years . Reducing crimes that were felonies not to be then releasing them into the street without any training or place to go so they have a 70 percent recidivism rate because we just let out 5,000 people that means 3500 will be going back to gerald and we wonder why the crime rate goes up . I could not agree with you more that is a terrific summation of what people dont understand you can reform the police they can get better and have the impact but unless he looked up the structural problem that you were talking about, all the issues you mentioned are not being taken care of or even talked about because we dont want to spend the money and people dont understand that we have not even started to do that but once we start we may not see the results 15 years because the problem has been going on so long. There are riots 1964 . Things are repeating now as in the past to create big crime and i am shocked. Synthetic marijuana. It doesnt cost 10 it is a Mass Marketing<\/a> drug taking people with any sort of mental issues to put them up two or three levels but people in other cities their answer to the homeless problem is to give them a bus ticket to los angeles. Just go down to the bus station but i will leave that alone because lapd has to do things better prepare everybody talks about the word transparency. I think it is over use the word we need to focus is the escalation. How do we keep things from occurring and these happens into with three seconds. So we have to go back to retrain these officers. And it isnt like a vaccination for your whole life, we have to keep going back and training and double down. What worries me is the cynical officers. But he joins the force they do wear their seat belt and understand that is a bunch of bull should. And we all get a little cynical i am smart enough that i am quite you dont have to spread your cynicism to somebody else. I dont want to save the problems at lapd is perfect because policing is changing dramatically. I do the Community Like<\/a> the back of my hand. I love their diversity and their people so we asked a number of you. What should i focus on . I read the descent decree and the transition agreement led to the need to focus on . Over and over is these cameras can really be important because the preliminary results is a 90 decrease. 50 or 60 decrease with officer use of force and that is only half of that. The other half is what doesnt escalate because they are no there being filled . I am not saying some things are now because i know all your films. Take every Single Person<\/a> that is stopped but it changes the mentality to keep things from happening. I am too old to let the world the fine meet because it takes too long so i will get the cameras your id 18 months because of 18 years because it took that long. And i think it will be an important factor. [inaudible] had one of the things we saw with the Christopher Commission<\/a> with Community Policing<\/a> to have the of very small part of it to talk about gender and a the discrimination within the department but also the excuse of women in larger numbers because they show extraordinary ability but it in the book we able to follow women or to get those issues in the book . The answer is no. I want to be a cop. We have these times, a couple times a year, when we buy guns back. Two things that are just off limits as far as cops are concerned, when somebody has a gun on the streets, number one. Number two, theyre selling drugs to kids. Our guys dont go for that. Theyll Community Police<\/a> it up but when cross the lines we had a buyback, 700 guns purchased. Semi automatic weapons, unbelievable. The people who war driving in kind of lye like in n out, were moms and grandmas, because they would wait my kid is asleep. I took it right out from under the bed. They have this ability to just go in and be to very very strong, and i find that the Women Officers<\/a> we have can relate a lot of times, in intervention and understanding the psychology and be very, very helpful, and you got to respect charlie for promoting people that deserve to be promoted, and keeping diverse balance in the department. His daughter is an l. A. P. D. Officer, as you know. Let me ask a question for both of you. In in 1992, there were over 1,000 murders in the city of los angeles. The party one Violent Crimes<\/a> were over 300,000. And before this recent uptick in the last couple of years, murders have gotten down to close to around 250, part one Violent Crimes<\/a>, down to about 100,000. And now were seeing a fairly significant uptick, and you both identified some of the reasons why were seeing that. Let me ask this question. In the reaction to the crime that we saw in the 1980s and year 1990s, california passed threestrikes law, federal government passed mandatory minimums. Jurisdictions throughout the country started to enhance the sentences, many more people, particularly minority, and africanamericans, went to prison for minute longer periods of time. And then more recently we have seen the 47, which has resulted in the reduction of many of the crimes and as steve pointed out, some of the revolving door. We have ab109, the solution to overcrowding to force the nonviolent offenders back into the jails who then get out because the jails are overcrowded. They then commit property crimes which they dont get punished for, et cetera, et cetera. Have we gone too far in that direction and did those significant what many people call draconian penalties, have any impact on the reduction in crime from then 1990s to 2012 . Its hard to know. What criminallologists will tell you is 15 of the reduction in crime we have seen might be attributed to that, but you know, new new yorks crime rate new york citys crime race has fallen every year for 20 years, and that has happened prisons are closing in new york state. The prison population is much lower than it was ten years ago or 20 years ago, while california was building up their prison system, so we were spending 11 billion a year to put people in jail under three strikes laws for things like walking into a safeway and opening a bottle of vodka, taking a sip and walking out. That was a third strike and that person wound up sentenced to 25 years before he could be released or go on parole. So, threestrikes law i dont think had any effect other than to just destroy more lives without doing anything to make the situation better but making it worse because when people get out of prison, they are so screwed up. They are its just a horrible experience if you go into apron and see whats going onment very difficult to come out of that with your sanity intact. Now, defelonnization of possession of socalled hard drugs i think is a good thing. I dont think people should go to prison because they have some cocaine in their pocket or their doing other drugs. Even though i drug problem in this country is very severe. Its very severe. But its a Mental Health<\/a> issue, and its a socialogial issue in terms of all of the stress that we live in, in this society, and the more the poorer you are,ow more stress that youre under, and the more you want to do drugs. So, drugs are a very difficult thing, but i think it was very good about the defelonnization of hard drugs. So, im a big fan of prop 47. You dont see any correlation between the drop in crime and the kinds of draconian sentences, which if somebody is in prison theyre not committing crimes on the street, and then the reaction that we have seen, and there are good reasons for the reaction, but at the same time, we have also seen an uptick in crime. Not sure i answered your question. A very good one. I dont have much to add to what joe said, except for a couple of things in l. A. , its going to take another year or year and a half because the the times did an expoe showing the classifications in some cases werent 100 . Now the classifications are better, even nationally people are more in tune to that. So well see. So, a lot of our uptick may have been through reclassification. I think thats one issue. Could i please comment on that . One of the things that shocked me when i was writing my book, and really pointing out all the good things that beck was doing with the Community Policing<\/a>, et cetera, how he had done everything right in the first years, was that this occurred what occurred was due to an incredibly fine investigation by the Los Angeles Times<\/a>. I dont know how many of you remember that. But what the Los Angeles Times<\/a> found out that was doing 2013, the l. A. P. D. Had missclassified 1200 violent felonies. The kind of crimes we fear the most. Getting mugged and beaten up, man beating a woman almost to death. Who he is living with, et cetera. They weremy missclassified as misdemeanors and that made it appear that crime was going down when in fact it was going up. And i think that was a severe break in the trust between our Police Department<\/a> and our public, and i agree we still dont know we still dont know what is being reported now with the crime going up, that may have been covered up in 2008 and 2009 and 2010. The think that is different now, because of the iphones and everything else, that the public feels empowered to wise off at the officers. Over and over officers, every single officer will tell you, every time they give somebody what do you mean, its my word againstor word. Im going to take your veining from the privileged all the way down, people with cam ares and trying to goat the officers into doing something, and theforfeel like theyre under siege from the general public and thats new, and that is not i think its not good. And so we have to train they have to live with it. Thats the way it is. But establishing legitimacy in these poor communities of color, for the l. A. P. D. , is their task, and you dont establishing trust is a longterm project. You cant if you pull away from it at all, then they start to mistrust the officers again and they start to hate them. The best thing that ever happened, and im sure their these other cities should wish they were put under Consent Decree<\/a>s. Gives the chiefs and the mayors the chance to say, its my my fault. Its the feds doing this. I think the Consent Decree<\/a> was a great thing. Now we dont have it, and now the commission is not under the transition agreement. Now there isnt that role. So we have to guard against slippage and that makes everybody let me ask that question. I got president of the Police Commission<\/a>, president of the Police Commission<\/a>, and is the Police Commission<\/a> an effective model for oversight, civilian oversight of the Police Department<\/a> . We were all parttime, were all volunteers, we all have other jobs, we all are restricted by the brown act so we can only talk to one of our fellow commissioners. Is that really an effective model to ensure we dont have the slippage that charlies lack of transparency suggests maybe were seeing. Well, history has proven in los angeles that its not effective, although, since the Christopher Commission<\/a>, we have seen some Police Commission<\/a>s who were effective. Gary greenbaums Police Commission<\/a>. Focused on Willy William<\/a> and in effect fired willie williams. I think that was right. Same thing with chief parks. 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