To build the infrastructure to allow that to happen. Thank you, shanae. I want to thank dale [applause] i want to thank Dale Russakoff for a very accessible treatise on what has been going on in the Public Education sector in newark over the last several years. Her book is a very interesting read, and i think the opportunity to meet her here and to hear her talk about her book was also very, very important. Dale will be signing in the gallery, so if you will line up the righthand side you will be in line for the book signing. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] you are watching the tv, television for serious readers. Watch any program you see here online at the tv. Org. Next on the book tv, investigative journalist joe domenick chronicles americas policing from the 1990s. Follow the beating of rodney king in the late rights through 2014, that even some new york city and ferguson, missouri. We are here today to talk about and interesting and extremely important subject, policing and the relationship to read i cannot think of anything that is more timely. You cannot pick up the paper or watching the news about learning more about things in wondering about, you know, where things are going. One of the things i my previous life, i was a historian at the university of wisconsin and the university of ucla in one of the reasons i like history is because i always used to look at history in the past to try to figure out whats going on in the present and maybe get a sense of where we are going in the future and i think we will be able to do that right with a great book by joe domenick, the book blue. We will hear from joe and the Police Commissioner in 2010 in 2013 and they will talk a bit about lapd in the history of it and then im going to bring my friend in, might favorite mayoral candidate who is the current commissioner and steve will, but we will talk about the present in the future and im sure you have a lot of questions and a really great session, so with that let me introduce our author, joe domenick. [applause]. I have been asked to say a few things about the look and i think the best thing i can do is to read you a bit from the authors know, which will kind of tell you how i got involved in covering the lapd rights. I was so fascinated with it when i first came to los angeles. I moved here in 1975, so i have a bit of an alley accent, but you cant tell where i moved from just by listening to me. So, i will start with this. I first became interested in the lapd when i moved from manhattan, to los angeles, in the mid 1970s i was a Public School teacher working at a Junior High School deep in the south bronx. Where the frenzied halls reflected both the chaos of the time and that wild discourse desk discord of the streets outside. On a subway ride back to manhattan the five turned edgy as my subway car grounders on the citys most violent neighborhoods without a cop in sight then, nypd officers and their counterparts seem never to be around when you wished they were. When they were, you could not help but notice the wary slump of their shoulders and their disheveled appearance that announce their disillusionment with their job. When i arrived in los angeles, i was astounded by how different lapd officers were. First, it was clear that they had not given up. That apartment superbly tailored motorcycle officers had the look and daring of the prototype model that they actually work for the film robocop and acted the part. The lapd had been trained to aggressively seek out crime and to quote confront and command a suspect in an aloof intimidating and often arrogance matter. Even if that suspect had committed only a minor infraction or done nothing at all wrong. That attitude alone seem to start more trouble than it stopped and if you are black the experience was astonishing and worse and exponentially more frequent peer it every politician in town moreover, seem to count out to the lapd, afraid of getting into a public spat with the succession of chiefs who paradoxically were not afraid of offending anyone. I wanted to understand the source of the departments extraordinary power and wrote my first book about the lapd called protect and serve, as a way of finding out an understanding, protect and serve is different from this book in this respect. Insert was essentially a narrative history of the lapd, written in the same way that this book has been written. Through characters who i talk through the entire book, but it started when the lapd started in 1977 i forget now. This book starts with the los angeles riots in 1992. I about the first 70 pages i use the riots as it unfolds to talk about the people who were around and in some ways caused the riots, mayor tom bradley and other people and i talked about them in their careers and i introduce my characters, charlie beck, for example and he was a sergeant during the riots, so i pick him up there and all the way through till he becomes chief. So, i think thats about it. If you want to know more, get the book. [laughter] host when my friend asked me to appear it was to really interview joe, so i went to the book and i got a few questions that im going to post to him. But, 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 till the presence and how it has evolved over that. Back of time. I have lived in los angeles my entire life, so i was here for the 66 riots as some of you may have been as well. My First Encounter with the lapd was getting a ticket when i was 18 and that has been the only real contact i have had with lapd. I was going bit too fast. The pled guilty to that would. So, let me in your book you say and i am quoting you, now four years later the book really goes from 1992 through 2011. Then, the epilogue brings it sort of current through 2015. But, the history part of it is really through 2011, and he really addresses some of the problems we see everyday on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, so in the epilogue he says, up four years later people continue to ask me if the lapd is really reformed. To that, i answered, compared to what. He you then compared it to daryl gates, which you call the arrogant comparative years as chief and what you call the decade of drift under Willie Williamson, bernard parks and then you compared to many other Police Departments and your reply is, yes emphatically yes. So, why dont you summarize for us how lapd has changed from 1992 to 2011 in the present . See to their own the inheritor of an attitude part of me, in a succession of lapd chief starting with William Parker who became chief of Los Angeles Police department in 1950, and when he became chief he was heralded as a great performer and he was indeed a reformer. At that time los angeles, like many bigcity Police Departments lapd like many of those Police Departments was a department on the take. If you are stopped, you would pay a curb side side. There were bagman going around and taking money from gamblers and prostitution etc. It was a corrupt department in that way. Bill parker said, no, no, we are not going to do that. This stops now and the credo was within the lapd after parker. If you get in trouble, if you are involved in a bad shooting, you beat up someone that needed to be beaten up, we will protect you. But, if you take money you your is ours and thats 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 Police Department on the cheap and that Police Department would be mobile, go cover these what is it . 470 square miles of los angeles and to be faceless, be in a patrol car looking around, not truly making contact anyone him as they saw someone they suspected of doing something and very very often in ghettos and berrios, thats where they suspected people of doing something all the time. That was an attitude of policing that we are going to stop people and we are going to really put the fear of god into them. Bill parker firmly believe that if people were nice to the police it meant that they wanted something, so police were not supposed to be nice to you and they were to be aloof and be better than you and believe that they were better than you. So, that brought us can you repeat your question please . Host im rambling here. Guest from the. Of time in 1992 which is the last year of gates tenure of chief to the department has received today under charlie beck. It changed and you say its reformed and obviously you believe it has changed for the better. Host it has changed and is due to a number of reasons. One, the Christopher Commission reforms carried to the Christopher Commission reforms did not go far enough, but one thing that they did do is they enabled the police the chief of police to be not rehired after five years. Prior to that time, there are gays, for example, was chief of police for 14 years and he had no intention of going anywhere until he was finally forced out. So, under the Christopher Commission reforms, the chief service for five years and then the Police Commission decides whether they want to rehire him or not. In the 1990s, after that past both Willie Williams and bernard parks were not rehired. Pose for various different reasons, so that was an important form. The lapd so, the chief of police had to be more politically aware and astute and be willing to deal with the rest of the power structure of the city, which he had it been willing to do in the past. Secondly, the Inspector General came into the picture. Before that, there was no one internally that was really watching the lapd. The Inspector Generals job was to be the eyes and ears of the Police Commission and to tell them and the public what was going on in terms of malfeasance and abuse within the department. It has worked sometimes and sometimes it has not. Depending on who the Police Commissioner is, the president of the Police Commission and the ig is. But, that has been important. But, i think probably the two most important things that finally brought the lapd to heal and started some of the reforms was the rampart scandal occurred and that caused so much attention, the lapd put it on the front page day after day after day, deliberately because they wanted people to pay attention. There were editors there who had lived through decades of the lapd and really wanted this to matter. Instead of just doing some story over a weekend, uninvestigated story of the weekend and then everyone forget about. That brought in the Us Department of justice, and they forced the city of los angeles into a Consent Decree to create. That tikrit was very important because it had very strong met metrics but the lapd had to me in terms of not violating civil liberties. They had to improve that and improve that immensely and there was a judge who some of you might know, and gary freese, who had been on the Christopher Commission and acutely aware that the Christopher Commission had not gone far enough. He really held the city and lapd fee to the fire in terms of getting them to make these changes that were necessary. Then, finally, the mayor and Police Commissioner hired bill grattan, the most Famous Police performer of the 20th century to commence and complete the job. So, to get back to your question , the biggest change, i think, was attitude change. The way they policed their mission as i saw it before bratton was to keep africanamericans and poor people and latino people who were poor in their place, deal with the scourge of the gangs, which they clearly do because they just double down on what they had been doing and it had not worked for decades. So, bratton came in and he started he he went visited the aclu. He went and visited all of the prominent africanamerican leaders and essentially said to them, i understand the situation. I know whats been going on. My doors open to you. I will listen to you. If i think something should be done i will be happy to do it, so he opened up to a lot of different people who never got a hearing, so that was important, also. When it came time for him to be reappointed the aclu actually wrote a letter favoring his reappointment, thats how well he did that. He also did something that was very important. He encouraged innovation, not Just Innovation that he thought up, but the innovation that his captains in the field thought of and the captains he told the captains in the field, i want you to prevent crime. No one in this department is preventing crime. All we are talking about is putting people arresting people, as many people as you can, get a reputation for doing that and youll get promoted. But, that does not work and bratton understood that. So, he pulled his captains in the field to do what they thought they needed to do to get both the lower crime and to get the permission to get the legitimacy for the offices to police in those neighborhoods, to try to start to do that. A number of captains, most prominently charlie beck in south bureau started to do that. They came up with their own Community Policing plans can and Community Policing pray god it is the future of american policing. Trolley beck did a really fantastic job in south bureau. So, Community Policing is a big legacy of the lapd and bratton and it beck. That continues and under bratton and then under back gang interventionists, gang Intervention Academy was started. Made up almost primarily of ex gang members and not just ask king members, but famous, series players who were gang members at the time in prison etc. And the lapd said we are going to support this Intervention Academy and we are going to we know how to use them and we will use them so that they are not snitches because they can be effective if they are snitches going to the police, but we will use them. When there were gang wars and a lot of what happens is that a shoots b and then b once retaliation and he gets this gang and they should another person from that gang. With interventionists did was they stopped those retaliatory killings, which had resulted in so much crime and so much death, so those were, i think, the major accomplishments and i think that the training, everyone tells me that the younger officers back amount and certainly the captains really get it. They really get what needs to be done within the framework of the kind of Police Department that we have, which are really agents of containment. They need to be more than that, so thats how, i think, the lapd has been reformed. How has it not been reformed . Well, we have had 25 people shot by the lapd this year, 13 who have died. Chief beck has promised transparency and he started off when he was chief to being very transparent and seemingly making every move instinctively that was right. You could tell it. This was the right thing to do and it brought joy to my heart because i had been criticizing the lapd for so long and i knew charlie and interviewed him many many times for this book and i have the highest respect for him. More respect than i have ever had for any public official. But, now we come with these shootings and he is has trouble with the Police Commission. He is not being transparent. We look at, for example, body cameras. He introduced them to the Police Commission, a body camera policy that is not transparent. The people you cannot find out what happened. If theres something caught on tape the lapd will decide whether they will release it or not. The offices are allowed to view the tape before they make their official statements to internal affairs, and then we hear nothing about these shootings. Shooting in venice, shooting here, shooting where a guy waved them down and had something on his arm or something and he got shot, so the tactics are not being in force and charlie beck is caught between a rock and a hard place between pacifying the troops who feel that they are under siege and pacifying people like me who want them to be accountable and want them to be transparent guest let me ask you a question about the shootings. I think if you go back and look at the last 20 years, you will find years in which the number of Police Shootings were higher on many elements. We all have nine months, but on an annualized basis and there will be years in which they are lower and it varies. Do you think things are worse today in terms of the police use of force then say 10 years ago or 20 years ago . Host note, i think its better because previously under chief parks, under Willie Williams who really didnt care and did have a position anything and under daryl gates, daryl gates was automatically you know, telling the press what this civilian did to get himself shot by the police. That was the attitude of the lapd and so there was a lot more of that. There was a lots less accountability. But, la has really changed. As a native los angeles and is literally the complexion of the city has change dramatically. As has the income gap between the wealthy and the very poor, so what we are seeing, i think, with the crime rates crime rise is that people are getting desperate. And a lot of the crime in central bureau, for example, is caused by the homeless. No one is doing anything about the homeless. The lapd should not have to deal with the homeless. They are the least prepared by their training and