Transcripts For CSPAN3 Politics Public Policy Today 2015041

CSPAN3 Politics Public Policy Today April 13, 2015

Not every black congregations issue is that we dont want it to be. Were shamed. What we have done is we have taken a real life situation that is jermainegermane to every congregation in american and turned it into an issue. And folks dont deal with issues. They deal with people. One of the things were trying to surface is how many of us as human beings are impacted by this system . Whether it is as victims and, by the way, the new language is not victim, it is survivors. Because if youre a survivor that means you made it through something. And so were talking now about survivors. Whether youre a survivor of a situation, or whether you are someone who has a son or a daughter who is actually in the system, because one of the things we dont talk about much is that 80 of all young black males who are incarcerated are also crime survivors. They dont think of themselves that way but the very institute who has done research and we have discovered that when you interview young men who have been incarcerated, come home and say, if youve been the victim of crime survivor of crime, they say no no, no, never. How many of you have been jumped by somebody with no cause . They all put their hands up. How many of you had something taken from you by force . They all put their hands up. How many of you had your house burglarized . They put their hands up. They have been victimized. They have survived trauma. And unless we are engaged in helping them deal with the trauma theyre bound to repeat the trauma. The problem is we see them as someone out there. We dont see them as our children. We dont see them as our grandchildren. But i guarantee you if you were to do an altar call like i will this sunday here in washington, and ask for every parent and every grandparent who has a child that has been impacted by the system, whether it is by a wrongful incarceration, wrongful arrest or whether by an incourse ration orin incarceration or an arrest, i guarantee you that between onethird and one half of the congregation will come forward. This is our issue. I used to try to distance myself from it until i was incarcerated. I dont have one of those rags to riches things where we grow up in the hood and you go to jail and you meet jesus. I met jesus before i went unlike those of you who have not sinned since you became religious. And i drank the shame koolaid. I didnt want anybody to know that i was in trouble. So i gave them a phony nickname. Told them, call me doc. That meant i was the only inmate that had a monogrammed jump suit. That took a while. And so i it was okay for two weeks until a young man came up to me and said, pastor i said i dont know you. He said, i used to play drums in your choir. I said, i dont know you. He told me his mothers name. She was on my staff. Before i got out of that facility, i met . i15 seven young men whose mothers sisters wives, and cousins i had pastored. Every single one of those kids on our streets are connected to us. And the way that we turn this from a moment to a movement, i could tell you about my time at Cuyahoga County juvie working with the churches in cleveland but ill save that for another time because we did some of this work with them because we had to get the church to understand that those are not somebody elses kids. The way you turn a moment into a movement is by turning it from an issue to a face. Attorney martin called me a theologian. Im not a theologian. My students will tell you im not a theologian. Im a sociologist. They just let me teach here. One of the things we know from research is that congregations, the Faith Community is not motivated by issues. You can tell the Faith Community to do this because it is right until youre blue in the face, and they wont budge. But if you can link the issue to a face if you can shift from narratives to names, if you can move from numbers to names if you can move from statistics to stories, then you can move the Faith Community to get involved and invested put a face on it. And now we have got faces. We have got eric garner. We have got trayvon martin. We have got tamir rice. We have walter scott. We have faces. The civil rights moment, one day boycott, in montgomery, became a longstanding movement because it had a face. Read Martin Luther kings speech, launching the boycott in montgomery and youll find that onethird of it is look what they did to miss parks. Segregation had been wrong for a long time, but look what they did to miss parks. Discrimination had been wrong for a long time but look what they did to miss parks. And youre right, attorney martin. This isnt new. We had lynchings. We had had Police Brutality. We had bad cops doing bad things to good people. Thats not new. But todays the day we say look what they did to tamir. [ applause ] we told you we would have some interesting thoughts for you and some comments and we have saved our best for last. And the reason i say we have saved our best for last is the concept of Community Policing is a concept that once was believed to have been one of the best techniques for controlling conduct in a community. Not crime conduct. If somebody is selling dope down the street, everybody between the houses knows who is selling that stuff. If somebody has committed a crime in your neighborhood, Everybody Knows who is committing those crimes. The best way to figure out what is going on in the community is to ask the community. So with that, im going to bring in an assistant attorney general from new jersey up who has put a lot of her efforts into understanding these crimes and not just accepting that they have occurred, but trying to see what happens tomorrow with either reentry, community aspects, or Second Chances. So with that, assistant attorney general moore, will you share some thoughts with us . Absolutely. Thank you. So i just want to start with thanking the Howard Family for having us here and to all our distinguished guests. I particularly wanted to thank you, dr. Harris for allowing us to be a part of this process. I also want to thank Jennifer Nash who is joining me now who will help me. We have a quick power point were going to share with you because i think it tells the story better than i ever could. But the first thing i want to share with you is that we have been engaged in doing some wonderful things around Community Police partnerships. We have been figuring out what needs to be done by having conversations with community, talking to noble, talking to Law Enforcement, having the conversations with neighbors talking to youth understanding what the issues are and then we take a look at the data and put all of those pieces together and we think about some strategies that we think make sense. So there are a couple of strategies. One im going to get to im not sure ill get to all. I want to share first one and particularly these are being raised here today because these involve our Faith Partners. We do a lot of work with clergy all around the state. But we have one in particular called fugitive safe surrender. It was a program started by the United States Marshals Service when an officer was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop. As a result, the United States marshals came to the Faith Community and said we need you to help us. What we would like for you do is we would like for you to bring in folks who are wanted on misdemeanor, low level matters, lets see if we can clear up those matters. So if you would jennifer, were going to walk you through some of that. So as we did fugitive safe surrender, well show you, we did it around the state. We began to do first a look at what we knew where the numbers how many warrants are we talking about, how many people were involved. We then began to look at communities that would help us and we started by going to the Faith Community and working with them to say, hey, listen, would you help us . And that brings me back to a comment that was just said moments ago, and one of the things that was said was that faith communities are not motivated by the issues as what you said. What we found is that when we knocked on the door, we said we need your help, we would like for you to help us and really get this ready, they actually opened up the door and began to work with us. So much so that we were able to help almost 18,000 people over a fourday period come into the church, meet and greet us and go through a process where their warrants were cleared up and resolved on the spot. We did it over a fourday period, thank you. It was 18 to date. We have 17,800 individuals. We know that approximately twothirds of those individuals were male. Most of them had two to three outstanding warrants and we were able to resolve them. Ill stop them and see if i can have so while jennifer keeps moving, ill tell you about some of our other programs. And ill stick to some of those in our Faith Partnerships because i really think that they really bring home how you can Work Together and then well get back to you when we can when the screen comes back up for us. The other programs that we have been able to establish, one is called the chaplinsy program. What we have been able to do is working with our local Police Departments, our established chaplincy programs where the chaplains work with community partners, particularly help young people who are encountering the juvenile Justice System and figuring out ways to wrap themselves around that young person as well as their families to make sure that they get the support they need that they get the encouragement they need, so the Chaplaincy Program has been pushed by one of our legal departments in the Vineland Police department in particular and the chaplaincy group and well share that with you actually has the opportunity to travel around the state and working with departments to really look at how we can support families in the neighborhoods and on the grounds. So i think were ready . Okay. You can go to the next slide, please. I just want to share with you this slide here, fugitive safe surrender. The arrow is where we start right above the church. This particular slide is showing what we did in Atlantic City at Grace Assembly of god. So next, please. We advertise. One of the things we found when we did this work is that people didnt trust us as Law Enforcement, so they wouldnt necessarily come out and turn themselves in and surrender. For the first half of the day, people would stand across the street from the church before they came in and they would wait for people to come back out. When they saw people came back out, they started to come back in. So that was one of the reasons why we began to do this. What was really important is that it is really through word of mouth. So we got it out there and the message, youll see our new Jersey Transit telling the story for us. Please, jennifer. Of course, we also have worked in various communities, particularly our Spanish Speaking communities and making sure that everybody really understood that they could be a part of it based on the requirements of the program. Over the past few years, special Law Enforcement program called safe surrender has seen 18,000 mostly nonviolent fugitives turn themselves in peacefully in a dozen cities. And how safe surrender changed lives. Wanted for gun possession, after skipping with his probation officer. Pretty dangerous situation. Potentially dangerous for him and his family. I was afraid that probation parole would come and kick my door in. Please take it back to your vehicle right now. The richardsons were among hundreds who came to what was called fugitive safe surrender, a u. S. Marshals program run with state and local authorities to clear up standing arrest warrants. This opportunity is a cost saver to the courts, to Law Enforcement, and quite a help to the communities. It took place over four days. With judges attorneys and even all under one roof of a church. We didnt come to be hustled. We came to be helped right . The support of local leathery y clergy is a key part of the program. Folks are coming because they trust the faith leaders. People also trust their outstanding arrest warrants will be treated favorably. Mostly theyre looking for peace of mind. Dave had a warrant for theft. Wake up in the morning you think about it think about it during the day worry about people recognizing your face. He came with his wife to get a fresh start. How it can destroy your marriage and your family when you have this heavyiness hanging over you. He was able to leave with probation. And after paying 589 in fines, tramon will no longer be living under the radar. To the marshals and police, the program eliminates risk to them. Anytime a person surrenders it is one less car chase and we see this too often where somebody gets injured or killed as a result of a car chase. A handful of traffic violations. By the end of the day with a smaller than expected fine his tickets were cleared. Thats what i got. Over the past four days, more than a thousand people surrendered, clearing over 4,000 cases and only six of those people were arrested. So a little bit about fugitive safe surrender. Less than one half of 1 of the people that we encounter are taken into custody and thats usually because they are wanted on a felony or an indictable matter which is outstanding. What it looks like in camden, the program was run in philadelphia a week or two before we began the program in camden, new jersey. We thought since they had a few hundred people that ours would be a little smaller. We actually had that many people waiting on line when the doors opened at the church. Next. And that is Bethany Baptist church in newark new jersey. We had people in line four or five across and for blocks. Next. Reverend sores at First Baptist in somerset was able to host this for us. And, again, that line actually wraps around the entire building. There were torrential rains one day. People were still there. People were also very enterprising. They began to sell umbrellas the next day, but they did wrap around. Next please. Grace assembly of god church. One of the things we needed to do in Atlantic City is that although people initially surrendered here, one of the things we had to do in our program was to make sure that our Court Personnel actually in a different location and so when you see us in the church you know there is Court Personnel, we resolve cases there is Law Enforcement, were doing the lookups, looking at the state and the federal databases, and so we then move folks. So the next slide please from this church, which you see, which is b to a, the Convention Center that agreed to host us and we brought in in thousands of people and resolved their warrants over a fourday period. Next. The last one we did year before last was in jersey city. Thats the jersey city armory. Again, 4,700 people showed up in that fourday window allowing us to resolve tens of thousands of matters. Then we were able to get featured on due process a little bit about the work and how we were talking about our Community Engagement and what communities thought were important. So i wanted to share that with you because that was a part of what we were asked to do is to talk about the role of Law Enforcement, how communities can be engaged. So there are a lot of different efforts were working on. I thought this one might bring with you particularly since our Faith Partners really have been a tremendous asset to us and partners, and we simply brought the issue. And i think thats part of the dialogue and conversation that we have to have when you sit down and talk the issues and youre breaking bread together and understand what the issues are, i think together as a community, we really can make a difference in the lives of all of our communities. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you. The way we tie in the video and the discussions you had from the Attorney Generals Office is there are crimes that are committed. There are people who commit those crimes and people we want to be locked up. There are programs that address that. And i think the purpose of our lecture today and discussions that we have this is that we want to find a way for Law Enforcement to separate those two groups as opposed to putting the sheer physical presence and the look of a person as a predominant factor. And theyre reacting to what is going on. I would like to take a very brief minute and tell you that when we fought we in america, we as africanamericans fought for civil rights in the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act which was one of the key pieces of legislation, along with the Civil Rights Act came a section of law in title 42 of the United States code section 141414. That section allows investigations of Police Departments by the department of justice. And they have that investigation in cleveland. They have that investigation going on in philadelphia. They have one, i believe, in newark. They have had them in new orleans. I was the attorney of record representing the city of cincinnati in 2003. Cincinnati had those investigations. The reason i raise that and i know that we all have seen attorney general former attorney general eric holder when he

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