- [Host] We're here for
the Players Coalition
Policing the Future event.
We've got three panels,
and we're just gonna sort of dig into,
we hear so much about
tension between our community
and the police department,
police forces across the country.
And so we're gonna sort of dig into that
and see what the causes
of those issues are
and what we can do
about it moving forward.
And so this is our first panel here,
being moderated by Anquan Boldin,
former NFL Walter Payton Man of the Year,
multi time NFL Pro Bowler
and founder of the Players Coalition.
We have Aramis Ayala,
who is the state's attorney for the
ninth district in Florida.
Represent for Florida, we got Jim Trainum,
who is retired, a former 27 year
veteran of the Metropolitan
Police Department in New York
and a detective, he's now retired.
And he's spent the time
since his retirement
working as an expert talking about
primarily issues related
to false confession,
but just generally police reform issues.
And we have Jeffery Robinson,
who is the deputy legal
director at the ACLU,
and director of The Trone
Center for Racial Justice
within the ACLU.
We're all gonna sit and
sort of dig into this issue
and the root of this issue,
and the root causes of this
issue and take it from there.
- [Audience Member] Could
I ask a quick question,
do you mind?
Is this going to be an open dialog?
- [Host] So yes, I'm sorry,
I meant to tell you, thank you, sir.
So the way this is gonna happen
is it's gonna be a conversation,
about halfway through,
we're gonna take questions from folks,
and we'll sort of switch to
that format before going back.
- [Audience Member]
Well, not only questions,
but will the audience have
an opportunity to present
ideas in regard to how to stop
the black killings in this country?
- [Host] There will be an open discussion,
we'll have questions that
we present to the panelists,
and it will be a discussion that way, yes.
Thank you.
- Like he said, I'm Anquan Boldin,
one of the co founders
of the Players Coalition.
Happy that you guys came out to join us,
because I think this is
a very important topic,
it's something that
we've discussed at length
as a coalition.
And everybody has a number
of different opinions
when it comes to policing
an African American community,
so we'll just jump right into it.
My first question to you guys is,
is there a problem when
it relates to police
in low income communities,
African American communities?
And if you think so,
what are those problems,
and why do they exist?
- Well, I'll start, thank you very much.
And I really appreciate the work that
the Players Coalition is doing here.
And I guess I will start
with something I read
in Sports Illustrated
about seven years ago.
A young man named Marquis Weeks
had run back a kickoff
return for a touchdown,
about 101 yards in an NCAA game.
I think he played for Virginia Tech.
And when he was
interviewed after the game,
he was asked, how did you do that?
And his response was, "Well,
that was just instinct,
"kinda like running from the cops."
And when I read it, I started laughing,
and then I stopped laughing,
'cause I thought this is
not actually very funny.
And I think his comment
touched on something that is
important when we talk
about policing in America.
And that is that the history
of policing in America,
going back to colonial days,
has always had as one of
its core requirements,
the control and suppression
of black communities.
That is simply the history in our country.
Starting in 1669,
when Virginia passed a law saying,
if a master kills an enslaved
person who is resisting,
it's not a felony.
There is no law like that on the books
in any state in the country.
But if you wanna go back
over the last 10 years,
and look at the number of unarmed
black and brown people killed by police,
and then compare that to the number of
police who are prosecuted,
and then compare that
to the number of police
who are actually convicted,
that law may not be on the books,
but that reality is still a reality.
And I think one of the important
things is to understand
the police didn't come up with
this mission on their own.
This is not something
where the police said,
this is what we wanna do.
This is what our country
asked the police to do,
and has asked them to do
throughout our history.
So you can go through
numerous points in our history
to show why a badge and a gun
have represented some
of the most terroristic
and frightening things possible
in the black community in America.
That's why what Mr. Weeks said,
it's kinda like instinct
running from the cops.
This goes back generation from
generation from generation.
And so I think understanding that reality
of how police forces were formed,
what their initial purpose was,
and how that has worked
out through our history
is important to understanding
how we got to this place in 2019,
where there is so much of a lack of trust.
Last thing I'll say is, please remember,
throughout the history
of lynchings in America,
an average of one black
person a week for a century,
between 1868 and 1968.
You can't lynch someone
in the middle of town
without the police knowing about it.
The Tulsa massacre in 1921,
300 black people shot, killed and buried,
not one person prosecuted.
You can't burn down 35
square blocks of a city
and kill 300 people without
the police knowing about it.
And when you think of separate but equal,
and those kind of laws,
it was the police that we
asked to enforce those laws,
it was the police that took
Rosa Parks off the bus.
So part of the problem with policing
is what we have asked the
police to do as a country,
and I think that's an
important place to start.
- You know, I think that we can start
adding to that conversation,
in addition to the
historical implications,
you're also looking at
the media and the images
that you deal with black
and brown communities.
And a lot of times we're
perpetuating this concept
that they need to be
controlled more than protected.
When you're looking for
the need to control,
when you're looking for
individuals out of control,
you then begin to find
individuals out of control.
And when you have cultural differences
between how they
communicate with each other,
it's easy to think that
an average conversation
that is elevated begins to be the pre,
I'm sorry, it's something that
begins a process of violence,
so they need to step
in earlier to control.
And when we continue to see
the concept of black and brown communities
needing to be controlled,
it's law enforcement
who, from historically,
that's their responsibility to do it,
then you also have the
timeline of us as a country
beginning to balance,
at least trying to balance
some of the rights,
some of the equality,
and then every encounter
ends up being a power pull,
who has the power here.
And then you have individuals,
young black men who are
like, I do know my rights,
I do have my rights.
And then they have that
officer who's in blue
that's going to remind
them who's in control,
and it begins to elevate, then ultimately,
it's that firearm being discharged
that shows who's in control.
- And really the issue begins
with the recruitment process.
If you watch a recruitment
video for law enforcement,
if you see the posters,
it's not the detective poring
over mounds of paperwork,
it's not the officer dealing
with somebody in the community
who has a social problem, whatever,
it's the SWAT teams, it's the drug teams,
it's the people that you're
rappelling out of helicopters.
So we're recruiting people
who are more action oriented,
we're looking to the military a lot more
than I think we should, now
military service is great,
but it doesn't always transfer
to the policing of a civilian population.
Military's much more
into order maintenance,
and we have to be much more flexible.
It then goes into our training.
When we are trained,
we're typically trained on
the worst case scenario.
We're not trained how to
effectively interact with people
who are different from us,
as much as we are trained
for self preservation.
Just as an example,
I remember being trained
in how to do traffic stops.
A very simple procedure, you know,
where you pull the car
over, officer walks up.
The first scenario that they ran, though,
the officer got shot.
So every time after that,
everybody's approaching
the car with the guns,
with their hand on their
gun, expecting the worst.
And that's what they trained us to do.
And third, is how we're judged.
We judge ourselves
and we judge our officers based on stats.
And those stats are
manipulated, they're false,
they're numbers, they don't
look behind the numbers.
Just as an example,
if you have a department that says
that they have a 97%
closure rate in homicides,
all that means is that
they've either made an arrest,
or that they were able
to close it out on paper
because they thought the suspect was dead.
The public thinks that, oh my God,
that means that we've
convicted 97% of the people
who were responsible.
But we manipulate those numbers
because we only look at arrests,
we don't count what happens after that.
And that's where the
community is missing out.
We're not looking behind the scenes,
we're taking the numbers at face value.
So if a community has a spike in crime,
we send a drug unit in,
and then we can tout to the media,
that, yeah, we took care of the problem,
we made 15, 20 arrests, recovered 20 guns,
but we don't look at the underlying
facts behind those arrests,
and we don't look at
the damage that's done
because we're just seeking stats.
- So Jim, what do you suggest,
because a lot of your work
is based on bad police
interrogation techniques.
- Yes.
Well,
it's funny, because in this country,
we primarily use what is
called the accusatory approach.
It's a guilt presumptive approach
where we're not supposed to use it
unless we are convinced that
you're guilty, which of course,
contributes to confirmation
bias throughout.
But the people who developed
and taught this approach,
they actually say, well,
part of the approach
is that we're allowed
to lie about evidence,
we're allowed to use implied threats
and promises of leniency.
And they say that, they admit that
these techniques in any
normal social setting
would be considered unethical.
But as they say in their textbooks,
because we are dealing with
people on a lower moral plane,
we're allowed to use those.
Now in the UK, it is totally different.
They're not allowed to
use any of the techniques
that we typically use in this country.
And in fact, they're considered to be
human rights violations.
And what they emphasize is
by treating the person with respect,
by treating them fairly,
one, you're gonna get more information,
but two, you know,
today's suspect is tomorrow's witness.
If you treat people fairly,
then their families will remember,
they will remember and it mushrooms out.
The suspect that you don't treat fairly,
the witness that you don't treat fairly,
you're not only not treating them fairly,
but also their families, their friends,
everybody who's associated with them,
and it comes back to haunt you in the end.
- So when it comes to
police community relations,
I know a lot of times
our main focus seems
to be police shootings,
and acts of violence against
people in the community.
Are we right to look at it that way,
or should we have a different viewpoint?
- So when you look at
some of the Pew Research,
the numbers show us 60% of police officers
believe that those shootings
are isolated incidents,
while 30% of the community
believes that that is
representative of a deeper problem.
So we're already starting
from a very different vantage point
trying to understand what the problem is.
And if you see it as an isolated incident,
our natural instinct is to dismiss it.
So you're on a pattern of
dismissals of these incidents,
because you're saying it
doesn't represent anything,
just kind of, that was an accident,
you know, overlook it.
While for the community,
it is a consistent process
of starting with the level of disrespect,
for example, when officers go to,
if I live in a community
where there's a lot of police presence,
and someone has broken into my home,
when law enforcement arrives at the scene,
they're automatically engaging me
as if I have done something wrong.
Are there drugs in the
home, did you do this,
do you know the people,
versus really embracing me as a victim.
So the level of disrespect
begins at the first encounters
that aren't dangerous,
that aren't violent,
that are not threatening,
and it begins to grow then
with the stops that no one talks about.
With the disrespectful conversations,
with the demeaning and dehumanizing
way that people start treating each other,
then it elevates to the encounters,
and those encounters behind it
has a lot of the memories and the pain
and all of the angst
that goes towards that.
Then that encounter has a
firearm that is withdrawn,
and then the firearm is discharged
and you have a dead person
who had been mistreated the entire time,
so on and on and on, you
have a pattern of conduct
that for the community, they
are seeing this constantly,
and they are saying, listen,
I need to know this is consistent
with how I've been treated
since I lived here.
And the police officers
who aren't in that community policing,
who may be blind to it because
they may be policing the tourist district,
for example, in Orlando, or
they may be the higher echelon,
they're not recognizing that
this is a pattern of conduct.
So they say this is just
an isolated incident
and they begin to dismiss it.
That is the starting point
of dissension, in my opinion,
between the police and the communities,
is how we perceive this.
The framing of the issue
determines how we ultimately
answer the question.
(audience applauding)
- Well part of the thing
that we're missing out on
with these isolated incidents,
as we like to claim that they are,
is that typically, there's
many, many more incidents
that could have turned
out that way that didn't,
fortunately.
And we're missing out on
a learning opportunity.
If a airplane crashes,
we don't say that that's
an isolated incident,
we get in there and we
study all the causes,
everything that contributed
to that airplane crashing.
And we then develop policies
and procedures and training
in order to prevent it
from happening again.
Typically, in law enforcement,
we close ranks, for a lot of reasons.
One is liability issues, we're
concerned about liability.
And as a result, once
everything's resolved,
we haven't learned anything,
we haven't studied the problem,
and so we have no solutions whatsoever.
I will say that's one thing
that the National Institute of
Justice is trying to promote,
that law enforcement embrace
reviews of what they call sentinel events.
A shooting is a sentinel event,
it means that there's
something that happened
that points to a bigger problem
within your organization.
By reviewing everything
that contributed to it,
you're able to learn from it,
teach others and all that,
but we're not doing that.
And that's really,
that's really where we're missing out
on helping the community
understand what happened,
and also preventing it
from happening again.
- I think one of the things
that is interesting here
in terms of what Aramis was
saying about the perception,
and the perception coming
from police officers
or police departments in general,
the perception coming from communities
about what is actually happening.
And one of the things that I
think police officers need is
a significant education
about the history of
policing in this country.
So they understand when they
walk into this community,
what people are seeing,
as a police officer,
I may think I'm walking in
with a badge on my chest
and a gun on my hip,
and I'm here to do good.
And they don't understand that
what the people in that
community are seeing
is that badge and that gun
and what that has represented
for decades before these officers
were even thinking about
being police officers.
They do not walk into
communities with an open book,
there is a history there.
You've talked about, both
of you have talked about
the way police officers
deal in communities.
The Milwaukee Police
Department had a procedure
which they called the train.
They would send seven
cars into a neighborhood
to make a quote unquote, felony arrest,
sirens and lights going.
They go into the house with SWAT teams,
they pull people out, they
throw 'em on the ground,
they kneel in their back,
they're screaming at
'em to stop resisting,
put your hands behind your back.
And I will say,
I don't know how many of you have ever
been thrown on the ground
and had somebody kneel in your back.
I guarantee you your
body will react to that.
And so the concept stop resisting is,
well, if you would get
your knee out of my back,
maybe the pain that you're causing me
would stop and I would
stop frisking so much,
frisking around so much.
These police officers
come into the community
and they make these kind of arrest,
and then two days later,
when they come in looking
for witnesses to a homicide,
they're saying, these
people just don't care.
They're not here to help us
when we're here to help them.
And it's like, don't you remember
the personality and the part
of yourself that you showed
when you came into this
community the last time?
So I think a reckoning is necessary
for police in America to understand
there is a reason
why there is a lack of trust
in the black community,
and it's not that we're making shit up,
or that we're too sensitive.
- Well, in my own experience, I mean,
I came from a white community,
I didn't have a lot of contact
with the African American
people when I was growing up.
My perception of a police officer
was what I saw on Adam-12.
I did have more experience
before I became a police officer
as I was a paramedic for
many years and all of that.
But still, I had no idea of the history,
what you were talking about,
during most of my career.
And so that was a wall.
But it's so funny.
A lot of what law enforcement does
is it likes to create the perception
that we're doing something.
And I remember when the Holocaust Museum
first opened up in DC.
My chief had all of us go
and take a special tour
just so that we could
understand how in Germany,
the police helped to
facilitate the Holocaust.
I've never had anything like
that for this country here.
And I think that is an excellent idea.
And would really, really go a long way
of sensitizing the officer
to what they're walking into
in some of these communities.
Because I've been on both sides,
where I have actually been
part of the tactical units.
But then I've had to go back
and try to gain the
cooperation of somebody
in critical investigations,
and just having that wall there
that it would take forever to get past.
- And that is, if I may just for a moment,
that is one of the most
important parts of,
that I've added to my office
is a level of community engagement.
Because we often look at crime
as if it's cross cultural,
when the numbers show us that it is not.
Black on black crime is a crazy concept,
because most white on white
crime is the same thing.
Like you don't have a lot
of cross cultural crime,
according to the research--
- 'Cause we're in a segregated country.
- Ah, hello.
So when it comes to having to
prosecute or complete an investigation,
you actually need that same community
who has been marginalized, neglected,
mistreated, you need them.
So it's important for us
to engage our communities
in ways that we didn't historically,
when we're dealing with
some of these root issues,
so that we understand that
there's an ongoing relationship,
and I'm not just using you,
but I'm also helping to serve you,
we forget to use the concept of service.
That is what prosecutors do,
that is what law enforcement does.
And then the flip side of it
is one thing that we haven't touched on,
and I hope I'm not jumping ahead.
But one of the things
that we keep forgetting
is there has to be an understanding
and a weighing of it, right?
A lot of times we have the conversations
and I'm adamant, I mean,
I have been stopped, I
understand the concept, I get it.
I mean, I grew up black, right?
I've been black my whole life,
so I understand what it's like.
The flip side of it, though,
is that when you go on a ride with police,
you have to understand that
they do face some dangers.
And unfortunately, that is frequently used
as a whole card,
to slap it down on the
table when it's convenient.
And if we can get away from
the convenient arguments
that help us prove our point,
and we can have candid discussions
about the fears that we
both have on both sides,
I think that moves us towards
a more productive engagement
encounter in safety for everyone,
because where we are right now
is not that it's just not safe for police,
and it's not that it's not safe
for black and brown communities,
we also leave out poor communities
who are included in this
conversation as well.
It's not safe for anyone.
- And I get that part,
because for me it seems,
that's frustrating, because I can...
I've been on the side where,
you know, you're pulled over.
And it's almost like,
you have to go by a manual
whenever you're being pulled over.
But there's sometimes where
you're being pulled over,
and you know it's for the wrong reason.
So I'll give you an example,
so my first year in the NFL.
After my first season, I came back home,
and I shipped my car back home,
it was a Mercedes Benz at the time.
And where I'm from, you don't
usually see Mercedes Benz.
So I'm riding,
and the cop was actually in front of me.
And
I'm riding behind him,
obviously I'm not speeding,
because I'm trailing him.
And I'm trailing him at a,
you know, a decent space.
For some reason, he
looks in the rear-view,
he sees this car, he
pulls over to the side.
I continue going, he
pulls right behind me,
and then puts his lights on.
And I knew immediately
once he pulled over,
here we go.
I knew I was getting pulled over.
And he pulls behind me,
puts his lights on, I pull to the side.
And he comes up to my car,
and in my head, I'm like,
you're stopping me because you wanna know
who's driving this car.
Like I already know
why you're stopping me.
And as a human being, you're ticked off,
because you have no
reason for stopping me.
So he stops me and he gives me,
"Do you know how close you
should be trailing a car?"
And like I wanted to
get slick and be like,
I have my driver's license,
like I passed the test.
So of course I know.
But I'm like, "Yes."
And then he asks me the real question,
like, "Whose car is this?"
And I'm like, "It's my
car, what do you mean?"
"License and registrations."
So I give it to him and he
goes back, he checks it.
And then I guess he realizes who I am.
"Oh, Mr. Boldin, I'm so sorry."
And I'm like, "Are you serious," but like,
for me, I know why you're pulling me over,
and like I know my rights,
obviously, but like,
for us, it feels like we have to have
some type of restraint.
Even though we can be violated at times,
we still have to have
some kind of restraint.
When too often officers
never have to show that type of restraint.
They're the professionals.
- What you just said is so,
they're the professionals.
And in those kind of situations,
what is put on to us
is the responsibility to de-escalate.
I am 62 years old,
and I have gone home where I am cursing,
practically punching the wall
because a 25 year old police officer,
somebody that's young
enough to be my grandson
has pulled me over with
his hand on his gun,
and I am saying, yes, sir.
No, sir.
Yes, officer, may I do this?
Because I don't want to get hurt.
And I'm thinking,
why do I have to treat
this young man this way
when he should be treating me
with a little bit of respect?
But it's because of the situation
that Aramis has talked about,
that our ex police
officer has talked about,
in terms of the culture of policing,
and culture trumps training.
You can train officers to
not have stops like that,
you can train officers not
to do this, not to do that.
But when they leave the academy,
if they get into a car
with a senior officer
who says, forget that stuff
they taught you at the academy,
that's going to get you killed.
- Each and every time.
- This is the way you do it.
Training is always trumped by culture.
And so when you have, and let me be clear,
there are leaders in police
departments around the country
who are trying to turn this around.
You can see a video online
of the Camden, New
Jersey Police Department
confronting a black man who has
an eight inch butcher knife,
who has been swinging it at
people, not just holding it.
And they come in, he is
clearly out of control,
and what do they do?
They walk with him for 10 minutes.
They clear the street in front of him
so nobody's gonna get hurt,
and the officers following
him are not saying,
hey scumbag, drop the knife,
they're saying, sir,
please put down the knife,
sir, put down the knife.
They're clearing so
nobody is gonna get hurt.
They're saying to
themselves, if we tase him,
he has a jacket on, it may not work.
Other officers not in the
Camden Police Department
have also responded.
You can see on the videotape,
they are pulling their guns,
and the Camden cops are saying,
"Don't do that, we've got this."
They walk with this guy for 10 minutes.
And one of the times he
was swinging the knife,
he dropped it.
And they jumped on him.
And there was a police dog there as well.
The dog didn't bite him.
The man had a boo boo
right here on his chin
'cause he scraped it when he fell.
He was not a felon,
he was a man who was off his medication.
He went home, the cops went home,
nobody got hurt, nobody got killed.
And those officers were promoted
in the Camden Police Department
because they didn't shoot that man.
And so if you're gonna
start promoting officers
for not shooting someone,
for treating people with respect
and not treating them with disrespect,
for going the extra mile
to de-escalate a situation,
if you are going to change a culture,
you've got to start
rewarding the behaviors
that you want to see.
- All right, so Aramis,
let me ask you this question,
because I know that prosecutors
play a huge role in this
when it comes to holding
police accountable.
And I know in the black community,
a lot of times it's frustrating.
Unfortunately, my family
just went through this,
for like the last three and a half years,
my cousin was killed by an officer,
plain clothes officer.
And only thing he did
was break down on the side of the road.
And while on the phone
with roadside assistance,
he was killed by a police officer.
And the officer was just convicted.
And I was happy.
Elated that the officer was convicted
and he was held accountable.
But he was the first officer in 30 years
to be convicted
in regards to on duty shooting.
And I know he isn't the first officer
that was in the wrong when it comes to
killing of a civilian.
I was happy that he was convicted,
but the first thing I thought about
when I heard that he was the first officer
convicted in 30 years was
how many other families
didn't get the justice that my family got?
And not only get the justice,
but there's a lot of families
that don't even get their date in court.
So how do you as a prosecutor
go about holding these guys accountable?
- So there's,
that's a whole 'nother panel, right?
But it's a good question,
because it's very, it's real.
And the real question is,
are we recognizing the impact
and what that does each time
we either convict or
we acquit that conduct?
Because while you're
thinking how it impacts you,
what you should be,
personally your family,
the right to be in court,
I think on the other side,
how empowered prosecutors feel,
that we are able to do the right thing
under the circumstances,
with or without a uniform.
I think the chilling message
that can be sent to departments
to be mindful how you interact.
So the level of justice
is not just limited
to the people who are directly impacted,
it is that pebble in the water
that begins to permeate all
the way and impact everyone.
So what has happened in your situation,
that there's that level of justice,
but inside you're still hurting,
because you know that it didn't
reach the highest places,
you know that it's still being,
other people are still
being shot and killed.
And the message that
was sent to your family
is a secret, right?
You know, like it's just
well, it kinda happened,
and then it doesn't begin to
impact us exponentially as it should,
there are dead people over this.
And we have lost sight of humanity,
we've lost sight of the real
impact of what is happening
because we're protecting safety,
or because people are doing their job,
there are dead people.
There are human beings,
there are families that are hurting,
and the minute that we
begin to dismiss this,
we have dismissed our own brethren,
we have dismissed the loss of life.
So when we start talking about it,
this is why this dialogue is so important.
It's not necessarily
because they're shooting,
it's because people are laying dead
in the middle of the road,
and if we don't care about a dead body,
then what do we care about?
So I think that we have
to not just look at,
you know, how we do it as prosecutors,
that's part of the process,
but the real conversation is
what message is being sent.
And I can look at families
and I look at you,
I am so sorry, like no one
should have to deal with that.
I'm broken down, I'm hurting,
I need help, and I get killed.
And that is the conversation that
I think we never get to,
and I am so grateful for
the work that you do,
and that you all do in order
to open up this conversation,
we can't end it in a day.
And I think when it goes back to
some of the stuff that
he talked about earlier,
discussing the root causes of it,
until we recognize and admit
this didn't happen in one day,
it didn't happen in 10 years.
It's not going to be fixed in one day,
we have to chip away at it,
we have to chip away at it,
and then ultimately,
hopefully there will be less
bodies laying in the middle of the road.
- You got a conviction.
Did that police department
ever acknowledge
that what happened was wrong?
- And that's part of it.
Because here I am, prior to that,
I was working with the
sheriff's department.
Right?
And I've had my charity,
I started it my first year
while I was in the NFL,
so my charity has been
around for about 17 years.
We serve
underprivileged kids here in Florida.
Everywhere I've played,
California, San Francisco,
Baltimore, Arizona.
So my foundation has been very active
in the communities that I've
been in, where I come from.
I do a mentoring program every Wednesday
out in the glades, I'm from Pahokee.
So I'm very involved in my community.
I do what we call a Q-Fest,
and it's a week long
celebration of the community.
So I always felt it was important to
allow the kids who come
from where I come from,
see their idols.
So I would invite 30 NFL guys,
we would do celebrity golf,
we would do fun day in the park,
we would do celebrity basketball games,
but I would allow them
to be in my community
and just interact with the kids and stuff,
and I would always have
police officers out.
Great.
A lot of the police officers
that I was dealing with.
When this happens, I'm in a courtroom,
and they're supporting this guy.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Well, that's the whole...
One of the things that other high risk
occupations have discovered
from doing these reviews
that I'm talking about,
where you actually find the
root cause of all the problems
is the power of an apology,
the power of admitting that you are wrong.
And that's what we're really
lacking in law enforcement,
we don't want to admit that we're wrong,
we don't want to admit
that we make a mistake.
We want to be, you know,
the Superman all the time.
And we need to be able to bite the bullet
and admit honestly, that
what happened to you,
what happened to your family was wrong.
This is why it happened.
We're taking steps now
to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
And until we start doing that,
one, these situations will keep occurring,
and two, you and others like
you will have unnecessary pain
that you're going through
because nothing's changed.
- There is the end of
one of the best western
movies in American history,
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
And at the end of this movie,
the man who has made his
entire political career
on the theory that he shot
and killed this evil man
Liberty Valance, he admits
that he didn't do it,
he didn't kill the guy.
And the newspaper reporter who
is listening to this story,
tears up his notes and
throws them into the fire.
And he says, "This is the west, sir.
"When the legend meets
fact, print the legend."
And that is the problem
that America has had
with policing throughout our
entire history of our country.
We want to portray the police as
the officer IB Friendly,
the officer that you can trust,
officers who are here
to help the community.
And we have ignored the fact
that despite the fact that
there are many police officers
who want to be that officer
and who are that officer,
this is not an isolated problem.
There are police officers on
forces in the United States
who are in white supremacist groups.
There are police officers
who have been disciplined
time and time again,
and then they go to another force.
The officer that killed
Tamir Rice in Cleveland
is now employed by a
different police agency.
And so the unwillingness
to have that moment,
the thing that William
Burroughs in his book,
Naked Lunch, called,
that moment when everyone has to look
at what is really on
the end of their fork.
Our refusal to have
that look in the mirror
at what policing in America has become,
is at the root cause of
changing this dynamic.
Those officers who shook your hand,
who I'm sure were absolutely genuine
when they were expressing friendship
or collaboration with you.
And then this thing
happens in your family,
and all the sudden, you're the other,
because you're asking that
they be held accountable.
Every politician in America
has run on a theory of accountability.
Every parent in America
would be horrified at the concept,
if your child does something wrong,
just pat 'em on the head and say,
that's no problem, just keep doing that.
We all talk about accountability
until it comes to our police.
Holding our police accountable
is not disrespecting police.
It's not saying that they
don't have a difficult job.
But if we give you the authority
to come into people's
homes against their will,
to pull a gun on them and to require them
to behave in a certain way,
and if they don't, you can
use deadly force against them.
If we give somebody that authority,
then you better be prepared
to be held accountable
if you misuse that authority,
I don't see that that's an issue.
- You know, Jeff, I think
that we also have to
acknowledge when we're
talking about roots,
the history of this country.
It's about money.
You know, everything is,
the decisions are made about money,
and that's relevant in this conversation
because the reason people
don't admit they're wrong
is because they get sued,
and it makes them lose money,
it's an entire process.
If I admit I shouldn't
have killed that person,
the next thing that happens
is there's a lawsuit.
- You have just put your finger on it.
In the last three years,
the four largest police
departments in America
have paid more than $1 billion
in police misconduct cases.
How can you pay that much money
and not have officers
being convicted of crimes?
And so you are right,
when the officers are
looking at you and thinking,
man, I feel really bad about
what happened to your cousin.
But they know if I say something like,
hey, it shouldn't have happened,
I may end up in a deposition somewhere,
my department may be held accountable,
so I can't do that,
I've got to defend our department.
- Well, not only do they feel like
they have to defend it for that reason,
but also, you know, cops have
a lot of physical courage.
I mean, it does take
courage to go out there
and do some of the stuff,
face some of the things
that they have to do.
And they get acknowledged for that.
What is not acknowledged, in
fact, what is extremely hard
is it's that moral courage
to be able to go against the status quo,
to be able to stand up
and say, this is wrong.
Because where physical courage
takes a matter of seconds,
you know, it's there, you do it,
it's over with, that moral courage,
it's a much more long term process,
where you're badgered by your co workers,
you're ostracized.
You may not get that
promotion or that transfer
that you want because
you're not a team player.
And so there's that wall there that,
it would take an awful lot of courage
for that officer to walk across that aisle
and tell you, this was wrong.
But, and there are some
that want to do it,
and I fought those who don't.
But I also acknowledge that
it's a lot harder to do that then,
like I said, that physical courage thing.
And they are definitely punished for it.
- So let me ask you this,
because I'm glad you brought that up,
because my question is,
how do we protect those officers
that are willing to stand
up to the status quo?
Because
I've had officers who've acknowledged
that not only was that officer wrong,
but the department was wrong.
But I think a lot of times, like you said,
if they speak too loudly about that,
they'll be ostracized,
lot of times demoted.
Lot of 'em won't even feel comfortable
going back to that department,
and working in that same force,
if they speak out against the
wrongs of that department.
So how do we protect them,
and ensure that they can speak out?
- Part of that's upper management,
which is a major sell right there,
because remember, upper management--
- So what if you were speaking out
against upper management?
- Came from lower ranks.
I'm sorry?
- What if you were speaking
out against upper management?
- You're screwed.
No, but I mean,
that's where people like prosecutors,
like your politicians and all have to
try to put in some kind of protections.
But also,
I've done a lot of innocence work,
and actually doing innocence work
when I worked on my department
got me in a lot of trouble.
But one of the things that
I've been trying to promote is,
I get calls every so often about
TV shows about cold cases.
And I keep trying to plug
these producers telling them,
look, you need to do shows about cops
who go out and stand up
and help to overturn wrongful convictions.
Because that way you show,
you encourage that sort of activity.
Making it,
trying to get some system
to reward these people
for doing that, and I tell you the truth,
I don't think I have an answer for it.
- Well, it's culture change.
And that is the most
difficult thing to accomplish.
It has to start with people in leadership,
so if you have a chief of police
that's telling his officers,
if you pull your gun and
point it at somebody,
you're gonna be in my office
telling me why you did that.
And if it's not a good enough reason,
there's gonna be consequences for that.
You have to have people in Aramis's job
who are willing to say,
if this information comes to my office,
and I think you've done a bad shooting,
your ass is getting prosecuted,
whether there's a conviction or not.
- The thing we're not talking about though
are police unions.
- Oh my God, yeah.
- I mean, that's a whole 'nother issue
and a layer of protection
that guards them,
I mean, if I get in line
with the chief of police
that we're not going to do this,
we create, like MLUs and
we're moving forward,
and then they're no longer,
they're on our Brady list,
we're not calling them,
they lose their job, then
the minute they get back,
the police union president's
looking at the chief like,
you see your new guy,
you know what I mean?
And they understand that,
so the legislation that
allows police unions
to have the power is a bigger issue
than the actual police departments
and those who head it up.
- I found it interesting that politicians
are always seeking out the support
of the local police union,
because they think it makes them
look like they're Law & Order.
- Not all of them.
- Okay, granted.
However, you have to remember as voters
that the police union is
not looking out for you.
It's not looking out
for your neighborhoods
or your community,
they're looking out for the
welfare of the officers.
In DC, we had a very
progressive city council member
who was pushing for mandatory
videotaping of interrogations.
She was extremely supportive
of good investigations,
but she was hard on cops
who didn't do their job.
The union went against her heart.
And I think that was part
of the reason that she lost.
But this union also represented,
90% of its members lived outside the city,
and in my opinion, they had no business
in this fight whatsoever.
But yeah, when a union
supports a politician,
think twice about that being
a reason to vote for them.
- I think we have a question
from Adalius Thomas.
- Okay.
Jim, how do you take the blue line,
approach to blue line officers,
and get them to see that
this is an important issue to address.
(Jim laughing)
- I think we need to come up with a way,
and I mentioned this before,
and I have no idea how
to do it in the long run,
of rewarding the positive behavior.
Part of it is going to be
changing the way that we judge ourselves
and we judge officers.
Such as, like I said, the
number of arrests that you make,
the number of tickets that you write,
things along that line,
because there's so many
things in law enforcement
that you cannot put a number to,
but are critical when it
comes to building strong ties
with the community and things like that.
It's going to take, like
we were talking about,
there's a few progressive chiefs out there
that are really supporting
these new innovations
and these new approaches.
But just like on what
you were talking about
with that department,
I know the department
actually fired an officer
because he didn't shoot somebody.
- An officer in South Carolina
that the ACLU actually represented,
and he won reinstatement of his job,
although he didn't take it.
He took some money and he left,
but he was literally fired
because he responded to a
domestic violence event.
And the woman who had called said,
he's in the yard, he has a gun,
it's unloaded, I think he's
trying to kill himself,
please be careful.
And when the officer pulled up,
he's looked at the guy
in the eye and he said,
"Brother, I'm not gonna kill you tonight."
Two minutes later, two
other officers arrived
and they shot him dead.
I think that what you're talking about
in terms of moving that blue line,
it is very difficult.
My view is that what is
required is a reckoning.
It is going to be impossible
to get people to change their behavior
in the short term or the long term
without them understanding
the history that's been behind it.
I believe that for people of good faith,
police officers of good faith,
if they understood the
way that this country
has asked police forces to control
black and brown communities with violence.
If they understood that history,
if they understood what people are seeing
when they walk into those communities,
things would start to change.
We are talking about changing a culture
that is literally hundreds of years old.
This is not gonna happen overnight.
But the only way it will happen
is for these incidents to
be brought to the public,
for people to continue to see them,
people are saying, do we have
to keep seeing these videos,
they're so difficult,
and I understand that.
But I will remind people
that the civil rights
movement in the mid 50s
was literally kick-started
when Emmett Till's mother decided,
I am not going to
let my pain at losing my son
take away from the
importance of this moment.
And she had Jet magazine
come into that funeral parlor
and take pictures of
what they did to her son.
And they put those pictures
all over the national media,
and I believe that in the 50s,
when that picture got published,
most, many white Americans
had this reaction.
I know those colored people
down there are causing problems,
but I didn't sign up for this.
And I think the more we
can make people in America
look at the reality of what
is happening with policing,
people of good faith will come to a point
where they have to make a decision.
And if we try for solutions
that don't deal with that,
we're going to be taking two steps forward
and three steps backwards.
- But you know, one of the
biggest problems that's out there is that
we have like 18000
different police departments
here in this country.
That's 18000 different kingdoms,
with 18000 different kings and queens
that want their things done their way.
So when it comes to reform,
and like there's really
no national standard,
there's no hiring standard,
there's no training standard
like with other professions
that may have national board certification
and training requirements.
We don't have any of
that in law enforcement.
So that's something that
really needs to be--
- Well, let me just make
one plug about that.
In the next several months,
the ACLU will be coming out
with a 21st century policing document.
This is a document that has been vetted
by people all across the country,
police professionals, community leaders,
trying to come up with,
it's easy to tell police don't do this,
don't do that.
But what has been lacking
is an affirmative vision
of what do we want our police to do,
and that's part of what the ACLU
is going to try and format discussion with
with this document that will be coming out
in the next several months.
And we hope that it will be a vehicle
for both police officers
and community members
to start talking about
what we actually want
our police officers to do.
