Transcripts For CSPAN3 Key Capitol Hill Hearings 20160115 :

Equal. Sunday night, Aviva Kempner talks about rosenwald and the partnership of the africanamerican communities in the south to build schools and bring Elementary Education to children in rural america. So first he said, oh, you know, sears puts together the kit houses. Why dont we just use the kit houses . And the best thing booker. The washington ever did was sa, i want, just like we do, i want the communities to build it. So first these six schools were built. And thats amazing. But from that it morphed into 5,000 schools, all over the south, including maryland. Sunday night at 8 00 eastern on cspans q and a. Monday is Martin Luther king jr. Day. With congress not in session we have featured programs on all three cspan networks. Live coverage of the british house of commons debate on whether to ban donald trump from their country. That debate is expected to last three hours. Coverage will reair at 8 00 eastern. University of wisconsin Professor William p. Jones and his book the march on washington. Jobs, freedom and forgotten history of civil rights. When randolph went to reorganize this march that he had called off back in 1941, everybody said, well, you better get Martin Luther king. You better get his support. He went to Martin Luther king and Martin Luther king said, i will support you but lets expand the goals of the march. The march is not just about winning equal access to jobs, fighting employment discriminati discrimination. Its also about winning the rights of vote in the south. At 8 30 georgia representative john lewis recalls his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in his book march, book two, the second part of an illustrated adaptation of his life. And on American History tv on cspan 3 at 2 00 p. M. Eastern alvandi, professor at the London School of economics and political science, on a irans cold war partnership with the United States. Iran had to look to a third power to preserve its independence and its sovereignty against the imperial ambitions of brit tacain and russia. In the 1930s iran looked to germany to play that role. After the second world war, a whole generation of iranian states men including the shah looked to the United States as a country that had no imperial ambitions and no history of colonialism in the region. At 8 00 on real america 1963 interview with reverend Martin Luther king jr. His comments on president kennedys civil rights how gandhi influenced his work. For the complete Holiday Schedule go to cspan. Org. Police, sociologists and representatives of the Muslim American community discuss the role of local Law Enforcement and preventing violent extremism. The discussion took place at Duke Universitys washington, d. C. Campus. This is just over an hour. That sounds better. Yeah. Okay. We will start promptly and try to close on time. Thank you so much for coming to those in the audience. My name is david shanser, the leader of this project. And were here to discuss a report that we are issuing today called the challenge of promise of using policing strategies to prevent violent extremism. Very glad to see a lot of friends and colleagues in the audience. I think its because all of us share a mutual interest in this topic. How do we prevent acts of violence like took place in San Bernardino last month and in charleston, North Carolina, last summer . You know, these acts account for a very small percent of the violence in america, but they generate a disproportionate amount of fear, they undermine confidence in our institutions. They tear at our social fabric, they cause a government reaction. Some would say government overreaction. So its really in our National Interest to prevent these types of acts of terrorism. I think its a very Noble Pursuit that i know many of you are engaged in on a daytoday basis to try to prevent these this violence before it occurs. Before we just dive into the subject matter, i do want to say a couple of quick thank yous. Jeff harris and melissa dac at duke and d. C. Office who put this together. Our research was funded by the National Institute of justice and the United States department of justice, friend, colleague, and our grant manager john pickerelli is here and hes been a great person to work with and i thank him for the support and effort he put in. Of course the report is the opinions of authors alone, not any representation of the government. But its very helpful to have fund that we received to do this research. Also, i have brett steele from the department of justice has been a big supporter as well. My coauthors, charles kournlgman, professor of socialology at unc chapel hill. Friend and partner in this for many years. Working together. Jessica to ver to his right from the Police Executive Research Forum, director of Technical Assistance there has been a wonderful colleague. Our other coof author Elizabeth Miller is in the front seat and elizabeth did a lot of interviews and work on this report and did a terrific job. And on behalf of all of my coauthors i want to thank our guests for being here to comment on the report. We have chief jay thomas manger from the Montgomery County Police Department. Were very honored to have him taking time out of his important duties to talk with us today. And we have dia mogahead, Research Director of the institute of policy and understanding which is a think tank with offices here and in michigan. And she is straight from an appearance on the daily show with trevor noah, so she is officially the coolest person in the room. Certainly on the standards of any College Student which charlie and i are very familiar with. And also dahlia and chief manger did not participate in the report. Again, theyre here to comment on it, but the findings and the conclusions, theyre not responsible for them. Let me just make a quick few overarching points and then im going to turn it over to my colleagues. So in 2011 president obama issued a National Strategy which was called empowering partnerships with Law Enforcement to counter violent extremism. And really a key element of that strategy was to have police and communities build partnerships and together find ways to try to prevent these kinds of acts of violence. So what our project did, starting many years after the strategy was issued, was really to try to assess how this concept was being implemented in the field by local Police Departments and also how the communities that were going to be partnered with, how they were responding and what they thought about the policing efforts to do outreach and engagement. Now, were well aware and all the authors are well aware that there are multiple forms of extremism in the United States, extremism inspired by first al qaeda and now isis, maybe both of them, and also extremism inspired by antigovernment, racist, anticapitalists, and other ideologies. So we fully understand that. Now, this project was focused primarily on prevention of al qaeda and isisinspired terrorism because, frankly, we found that this was the core focus of the policing programs that we were able to identify in our field work. So what you will hear today is about the results of our discussions with police about their efforts to engage with Muslim American communities and our focus groups with Muslim American Community Members in the eight cities around the country. Now, you will see in our recommendations, we discussed that a lot more work needs to be done on prevention efforts with respect to the antigovernment, racist, and other forms of extremism, and im sure well get some questions from you and some discussion from our panelists on this pop tick topio along. Thanks very much. Again, im charlie kearseman, professor of socialologies at the university of North Carolina at chapel hill and codirector of the Carolina Center for the study of the middle east and muslim civilizations. Id like to say a few words about the methods that we used for this research project. The first method was a survey conducted with the help of our partners at the Police Executive Research Forum of 382 state, county, and municipal Law Enforcement agencies. We were able to get a Response Rate of over 70 . We got a huge portion of the large municipal agencies around the country, and a good number of state agencies as well. Covering all told, 86 of the United States population in their cumulative jurisdictions. We asked them a series of questions, including what forms of Community Engagement were they involved with in the prevention of violent extremism and found that more than 3 4 of these Law Enforcement agencies were engaged in at least one form of community out reach in this area. Among the large municipal agencies, the percentage was even higher. Almost nine out of the ten of the agencies that responded to our survey. We followed that up with indepth interviews with Law Enforcement officials at 19 agencies around the United States as well as with field visits to hold focus groups and interviews with Muslim American Community Members in eight sites around the u. S. And five site visits for conversations with Law Enforcement officials. What we found in these conversations is a fir bit of mistrust between some Community Members and some members of Law Enforcement. But we also found numerous models of Community Partnerships such as Sports League in one city where young Muslim Americans saw Police Officers as coaches and mentors. In another city, officers were working with muslim shopkeepers who had concerns about theft in their neighborhood as a problem there, criminal problem. In another area, there was a volunteer project where Law Enforcement officials in their free time helped partnered with local mosques to clean up vacant lots in the neighborhood that were being used for criminal activities and Police Officials and Community Members got to know one another through this activity. In another area we heard about a relationship with the police that helped put mosque members in touch with the social Service Agency in order to help homeless member of their congregation who needed assistance. That personal relationship with Law Enforcement turned out to be a really useful avenue to find out what kind of services would be available. So one of the central recommendations that comes out of our report is that the full range of these kinds of activities and engagements with Community Members can be a real boon to building relationships of trust, overcoming whatever bad media, bad press, and poor experiences may exist out there and are worth replicating we believe in communities and jurisdictions around the country. Thank you. Turning over to jessica. Hi, my name is jessica toly ver. Im with the Police Executive Research Forum. For those of you not familiar with purv we are research and Membership Organization and in addition to research reprovide management services, Technical Assistance and executive leveled indication to support Law Enforcement agencies. So ill try and keep it short. Theyve given you a lot of background. Im going to tell you about the site visit we conducted. The 19 agencies we spoke to on the phone, we chose 7 sites to travel to, spend a few days there, and we spoke with the executive of the agency, the supervisors, the line officers, and the outreach and Engagement Team members as well as the Community Members that they worked with. And for each of these agencies and folks we met with, we signed a confidentiality agreement because we think it was very important that they be able to speak frankly with us. Not so we could identify not only these promising practices but also the Lessons Learned. We wanted to know about them as steps as well so we could help and form agencies to implement these similar programs. So the key findings based on the site visits and conversations, first is that it has to be a whole community approach. This means that the Outreach Program actively engages with all subsets of the community, not just a particular group. Similarly this program should address the whole spectrum of Public Safety concerns and quality of life concerns. So, for example, if youre reaching out to a community and youre having these corporationcorporation conversations, youre not just asking them for information, youre explaining them. Hopefully youre introducing them to other Government Agencies that can help them with quality of life issues. If theres a problem with speeding near, say, in their neighborhood near a mosque, then you can help them figure out how to get speed bumps in the area and thats a quality of life issue that will help. You can also help with getting lights installed in a stretch of the street thats too dark and makes them feel unsafe. So these are ways that you can build communication and trust with these Community Members, showing them that you have an actual interest and ability to help them with their quality of life issues. We also found that cultural competency of course is important when First Recruiting Outreach Team members, but what really matters most is personality. So of course we say you should have a diverse Outreach Team and to the extent possible it should reflect the communities that youre conducting outreach with. But really the individuals you choose to be part of that team have to have not necessarily an outgoing personality thats going to, hi, nice to meet you, whatever, they can be shy. They can be reserved. They just have to have a genuine interest in making the connections and learning about the culture and the people that theyre working with because everybody senses that. And they have to be willing, like curious to learn. Tell me about your community. Tell me about your concerns. We really found the most Successful Team members were those that didnt have any qualms about asking questions and making mistakes maybe but just so they learn. Theyre open to learning. Theyre curious. So our Research Also showed Language Training and cultural Awareness Training are very important. Some of the Lessons Learned for cultural Awareness Training we met with an executive whose first attempt to engage the community was to host a town hall and invite Muslim Americans from a subset of their community to attend. And as an ice breaker they decided to bring their bombsniffing dog. Well, dogs are considered impure for this subset of the community and they were horrified. They didnt want to go near the dog. This did not break the ice. This made everybody uncomfortable. It was a big lesson learned. If they had done some kur churl background they would have known. There is also another example where a male officer was trying to introduce himself to female members of the town hall audience and trying to shake their hands not realizing that its inappropriate to shake the hands of the opposite sex unless youre related. So, you know, Little Things like that make a big impact. If you have some sort of cultural awareness, a great way is by conne