Cleveland Police and Crime Commissioner

Transcription

MARTHA MINOW: Hello, everybody. We're going to start. And so please continue to, those of you in line, to be in line and get your food. But we are going to start, because we're going to have to stop, I think, promptly at 1:00. I'm just so pleased that we're able to have this event, one in a series, looking at criminal justice and criminal justice reforms in light of not just the recent events-- Ferguson, Staten Island, and so forth-- but frankly, for as many people on this panel know from firsthand experience, issues that have gone on for decades. And so I thought that one thing that we have not had sufficient time to talk about here, and I really want to see if we can make some progress, is to talk about concrete reforms. I'm going to introduce our panelists and then ask each one-- put them on the spot-- what is a concrete reform that you think could be adopted and could make a difference? And maybe, I'll even soft pedal the first one, could be adopted, but make a real difference on issues of racial justice, racial injustice, and making sure that the policing and law enforcement processes of this country serve everybody in the country. So that's the concrete question. We have a terrific group of people here and we'll go in the order in which they're sitting. We have right here, Professor Andrew Crespo, who comes to us recently from his service at the amazing and wonderful public defender service in Washington DC, which you'll see is well represented on this panel. And Professor Crespo has just started here as an assistant professor. And we're so pleased that he's returned to his home at Harvard and Harvard Law School, where he was a distinguished student. Next we have, Charles Ogletree, who also was a major figure at that same office in Washington, DC, but has, I think since that time, clearly assumed a position as a leader in the whole country when it comes to criminal justice and when it comes to racial justice. Next we have, Paul Evans. Paul, we are so, so delighted that Paul Evans was able to join us. He served as commissioner of the Boston Police Department between 1994 and 2003, widely praised and understood for his emphasis on community policing and development of community patrols. He then went to become a director of the Police Standards Unit of Britain's home office. And so he has a cross-cultural comparison here, which I think will be very, very helpful. And so, Paul, thank you so much for being here and for making our panel not just alums of the public defender service. Carol Steiker. Professor Steiker is one of the country's leading experts in many areas of criminal law and she runs the criminal law workshop here as well as being a beloved teacher of criminal law and is an alum of that same office. Ron Sullivan. Professor Sullivan, who also worked at that same office as the director of that office and as an initiator of many great training programs in that office that produce so many great people runs our criminal justice institute here. And also has among his many, many current activities, he's been called in to review the practices-- is it Brooklyn? RON SULLIVAN: Brooklyn. MARTHA MINOW: Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Law Enforcement Practices. And so he's involved in law reform right now. So let's start with Andrew. ANDREW CRESPO: Thank you so much, Dean Minow, for bringing us all together. And thank you, everyone, for being here. I'm just going to focus my comments and my reform proposal on policing, not because I think that policing is necessarily the biggest problem in our criminal justice system. I actually don't think it's the biggest problem in our criminal justice system. I think that mass incarceration and racial disparities in the system are an enormous problem, but I think that policing is also a very important issue. And it's the issue that is the front and center of our national discussion right now. And we have the police commissioner here with us, so I thought it would be valuable when talking about concrete reforms to focus my contribution at least on policing. And in thinking through concrete reforms, I thought it'd be helpful to start at least just identifying for me what I think of as the root problem. The root problem as I see it is fundamentally a democratic problem that we seem to have gotten a disconnection between the way that policing operates in some of our major urban cities and the community being policed. A mentality that has appeared to develop, and I want to stress that I don't think that this is a mentality that is shared by all police officers or that police officers are fundamentally flawed or bad in how they're approaching their work. I think this is an systemic issue. But that there is a cultural problem of an us versus them mentality at least in urban policing, and that we've gotten to a place where it seems that the People with a capital P who live in the community being policed are not necessarily thought of as the people who are in control of the police as an institution of our government. I think that one of the major problems in how we try to conceptualize and execute oversight of the police is that we focus almost exclusively on individual, after-the-fact accountability-- suppression hearings, internal affairs, complaint boards, civil lawsuits, very rarely criminal prosecutions, as opposed to structural ex-ante type ways of redesigning some of these institutions. So one of my proposals is to try to work on that democratic accountability problem by thinking differently about the way that we regulate the police and to start that by exposing what I would call the secret law of police governance. Big urban police departments, my understanding is, have actually pretty detailed internal rules or orders. My experience obviously is with the DC police system. They have hundreds and hundreds of pages of what are called general orders. And if you read these as law students, you will see that they look very much like a statute or regulation. They have a definition section. They have multiple sub-parts. You can get to part 4A(i), then it keeps going in these police regulations. And they cover an enormous part of the waterfront of policing from whether property should be ceased to whether a warrant should be requested, how it should be executed, what civilian interaction should be like. They cover policing as a practice. What is startling to me is that this is in many ways secret law. You can go, for example, to the Washington Metropolitan Police Department's website and see a small percentage of these regulations published. The largest collection of them I've ever seen is actually on a computer server at the office you've heard so much about, the public defenders office, because they're just saved and archived when they come up in litigation. But the public does not actually have a way of interacting with this body of law, that in my experience, police officers actually treat as important law, as meaningful law for their behavior. The officers who I encountered in my work internalize these rules and seem to think of them as in many ways the most important set of norms that was governing their behavior-- the most immediate, the most proximate, and the ones that they seemed to care about the most. But the policy decisions that went into making the substance of that wasn't ever part of any sort of democratic discussion. So one reform would be first off sunshine. Make a requirement that these things are public. But not just public that they are subject to some sort of democratic process. Treat them like regular law in that you could have your local city council actually go through these systematically and decide after some debate with a room full of people. Your council is sitting up on a table like this one and a room full of people who care about this in the audience, like we do for other types of local law. Have them debate it and then either modify it or ratify it by your local government. Or at a minimum, you could have the police do something like notice and comment or an opportunity to have input from a broader array of perspectives than just the police themselves writing these rules and keeping them internal where there's no opportunity for a discussion about what those policies actually are. MARTHA MINOW: Thank you. Charles Ogletree. CHARLES OGLETREE: Thank you very much. I am very happy to be here, and I'm not happy to be the oldest member of the public defender service, but I'm glad to see that folks from Washington are here and see the importance of academic career. I'm going to say a little bit about police, and I'm going to say a lot more about the specific communities and what the communities need to do. When I went to law school here, I was thinking about the first job, work in the law firms or work in the public defender service. And I had long conversation with my mother and told her, I said, I'm not coming back to California. She said, OK. That's fine, Jr. I said, I'm going to probably practice in Washington, DC. That's great. Which firm? I said, well, I'm going to be with the public defender service. She said, oh, that's great. I'm glad, because the public finally needs somebody to represent them against all these criminals in the world. She had no idea that's what we did, and I wasn't going to tell her. But I think it was very important to understand that. And my best friends-- I say this very seriously-- my best friends were police, because I understood how they worked, where they worked, where they lived. I knew how difficult their jobs were. My sister was a police officer in the sheriffs department in California. And so I had this sense about them and that made a big difference and that made it much easier for my job as a public defender. Before Andrew and I think Ron was at the public defender office. I'm not sure if Carol was there or not, but our offices were right across from the police department. And what was amazing, I always worked Monday through Sunday every day. And my investigators would come to my office and meet with me on Saturday. What would we do? We would see who would be driving up to see the police on Saturday, and then we would have our car follow this person back to their home, some place in Washington, or Maryland, or Virginia, and we'd get a statement. Why were we able to do that? Well, because-- and maybe it's changed, but the police only would see victims, alleged victims, once. That is the date of the incident or right after the incident when somebody was killed, robbed, or injured and then see them at trial. And so they would open the doors and talk to us, and that made a big difference for what we were doing in Washington. And that's made a big difference for the students who are in court here in Boston. So it helped to understand what that meant to be able to interview people. My sense is that, even though, there's a focus on police departments, I've talked to a lot of chiefs. We've talked about reforms and things like that and diversity and how important that is, but the real thing is where is the community. And I'm looking at the community. We have a lot of communities listed. But looking at Ferguson, it just amazes me that it's almost 70% African-American. They have very few people on city council, very few people on the police force, very few people running the city. And they're charged with most of the crimes in Ferguson. And my sense is to the people of Ferguson and St.Louis turn things around. You have to be in charge. You have to make things happen. You have to run for office. You have to vote. One out of five people in Ferguson voted in the recent elections. So that to me is the ground work. It's not criticizing police. It's trying to figure out what can we do as a community that makes a big difference. And that's what I've been trying to do the many years. And you'll hear from Police Evans and his brother that my relationship with police, the first thing I always ask, can I do a ride along? Can I go and visit the stations? And every student should do that. Every person should do that, because it's open and you should have a sense of that. And I don't have a view whether students are defenders or prosecutors, whether they're police, whether they're going to pursue business or law. It doesn't matter to me. Whatever you want to do, it makes a big difference. But just be concerned about justice and equality that makes a big difference. Final thing, I'll say this. I thought looking at the-- and I was born then in the '60s and the '80s and '80s that we were through with all the issues. Everything was changed. The law was changed. We didn't have segregation. We had opportunities to participate. And now 2014 and '15 reminds me of what we already went through. We're having a sense of the same thing happening again. Poor communities. People can't find jobs. People are not getting an education. People are not taking care of their families the way that they should and a lot of recidivism in the criminal justice system. So I'm hoping that the focus will be on, our focus, will be not just on making the police a better department, and I think that's important, but also making people better people to take care of themselves so that we don't see the separation that has been a big problem in America. And I hope that we can be the place that most countries around the world will look, there's a place that is concerned about justice and equality. Everybody's included. And so that's what I hope will happen going forward. Commissioner? MARTHA MINOW: Thank you. Commissioner. PAUL EVANS: It's a pleasure to be here. Just some concrete things. I joined the police department in December of 1970. I was one of 66 white males who went into a department that was probably close to 98%, 99% white. OK. The department today is probably closer to 35% to 40% minority, women, and what have you. The department changed dramatically. That was a direct result of federal intervention. The department in the late 1970s entered into a consent decree, which required the department to hire for one white applicant we had to hire a minority applicant. Now we are a better police department now because we represent the community we serve. There is diversity, and initially in those first days when we were hiring minority officers, it was very difficult to get people that wanted to come onto a police department where the community saw it as an occupying force. Now you look back almost 30 years later, second and third generation minority officers' children coming on the department. No shortage of applicants from the minority community. But yet if you continue to look at the classes, we struggle to get the type of minority representation we need. And a lot of that has to go with what are the civil service rules. OK. It's disabled veterans get preference, veterans get preference. It's all about who gets the highest marks. So when you're looking to get a class, you just can't pick. You have to go off a list, and sometimes that list handcuffs. Now that consent decree was in place for probably 15, 20 years. It's not in place now. And how do you continue to maintain that? Now some of the things we did over the years is do special certifications. We need officers who speak Spanish, French Creole, Chinese, Mandarin, you name it, to try to represent it. But increasingly it becomes difficult in maintaining and making sure that the system, the civil service system, allows you do that, I think, is important and increasingly not just in the big cities but also in other communities. If there's one buzzword, I think in policing, it's accountability. There has to be accountability in police agencies. Now as far as the use of deadly force, as long as I've been a police officer, when an officer uses deadly force, you can count the next day's newspaper front page above the fold and probably stays there for three or four years. Community what's going on? What do we have to do? So there always has been oversight in concern both from the media and the community about the police use of deadly force in the police department, and that is as it should be. The police are given no greater power than to use deadly force. And there should be all kinds of oversight, and we've had a lot of that oversight. But I think that oversight contributes to the culture of organizations. You look at some of the east coast departments. I'll say Boston, New York. You look at the amount of offices, the population it serves, the use of deadly force is relatively small. Now the professor, I think, mentioned he was from DC. I don't know if he remembers, but back around 2000 or so, the Washington Post did a large expose on the Washington, DC police department and their use of deadly force compared it to other departments. And we were at the lowest, but their numbers were way out of whack. Nobody was paying attention. Now if you look at that piece and then go back to what is happening now, I bet you it's dramatically different-- the leadership. There's no bigger catalyst for unrest between the police and community then the use of deadly force. OK. So if a police leader wants good community relations, good community policing, he need to take care of that. The other thing I'll talk about is the accountability. It's data analysis. If policing has been successful reducing crime-- Bill Bratton started it in New York, this whole CompStat. What does the data say? Where is the crime? Where do we need to be and what do we need to be doing about it? Now when you look at issues of deadly force the more information you can get about that, the better. Analyze, analyze the data. Back around maybe 2001, I was looking at data around how much deadly force I had. What were the circumstances? What are the conditions? I had an inordinate number of people that were firing at vehicles and I had a young lady killed and I said, no more. We're going to stop firing at vehicles. And that type of data analysis of what's going on, and what do we have to change, where do we have to change policies, where do have to do better training. Training, policies, decision making are all absolutely critical, but that whole data analysis. And the other thing is we hire people. Hopefully, we do a better job of getting the right people into our organizations. But once they're in their organizations, we have to continue to hold them to account in the same manner that we do for crime analysis meetings. When we were doing crime analysis meetings, crime was going dramatically down. So I started saying, we're going to do personnel analysis meetings. We're going to look at our people. We're going to sit down with my command staff. I'm going to go into each police district. I'm going to sit with their supervisors, and I'm going to go through every officer in that district. And we're going to talk about how they use their sick time, how they use injure time, how many IAD complaints they got, how many use of force complaints they got, how many motor vehicle accidents they're in, what type of arrests are they making. Are they making an inordinate number of arrests around route disorderly person A and B? But that constant analysis holding your officers to account, holding your supervisors account. You know, one the things we said for years about our defendants is, we've got a disproportionate amount of people out there that are committing crimes. When police forces look at it-- when I do these personnel analysis meetings, I get the same thing. I get a disproportionate amount of officers that are at the top of some of those categories-- IAD complaints, use of force complaints. And it's my responsibility as a commissioner to make sure that I identify those people and train them. So that whole accountability, embedding systems, looking at where are things happening, what has to be done differently. You've got more than 17,000 police departments and you probably have as many as 17,000 policies across the US. When I was in the UK, they had 43 police forces and all the policies for all of them emanated right from the UK. Now that system won't happen, but there are accreditations of police forces, and there are good policies and those as best they can should be implemented. MARTHA MINOW: Thank you. Can I just ask what's and IAD? PAUL EVANS: IAD is Internal Affairs Division. I'm sorry. MARTHA MINOW: Thank you. Thank you. OK. Professor Steiker. CAROL STEIKER: Thank you, Dean Minow. Thank you all for being here. I'd like to follow up the commissioner's comments, which I thought were excellent, on accountability with some thoughts about criminal justice accountability for police use of deadly force. Because after all, the events in Ferguson and Staten Island were in response to grand juries failure to indict the police who use deadly force in those cases. So internal accountability within police departments huge. But also criminal justice accountability for police officers who use deadly force and kill people is really important. Especially, because the police are holding others to account in the criminal justice system, and there's a lot of very interesting work about how law enforcement and law abidingness is produced by people's belief in the legitimacy of the criminal justice system of the law that regulates their communities. And nothing breeds lack of legitimacy when the same system that regularly holds members of the community criminally responsible for their conduct appear to evade criminal responsibility for their own conduct. Now this connects to another point the commissioner made, which is something that's unusual in Western democracies is the incredible local control of criminal justice institutions. Boston has a police department. Cambridge has a police department. Springfield has a police department. Criminal justice is run on a local basis. Similarly, prosecutorial offices are local. They're county wide-- Middlesex, Norfolk, Suffolk County, locally elected police departments. It's not like the UK. We don't have a top down national police department, and we don't have a top down national prosecution. As a consequence of this, local prosecutors and local police officers work very closely together as a relatively small and local unit. Prosecutors absolutely must maintain good relationships with the police officers with whom they work to investigate crimes and prosecute them. Therefore, when there's a potential criminal case against a police officer in the very same department that the prosecution must work regularly with, it creates a difficult conflict of interest. Now many urban prosecutor's offices create special units within their prosecutorial offices to deal with criminal complaints against police officers. But here's my suggestion, I maintain that's not sufficient independence in terms of the investigation of especially the use of lethal force by police officers. One solution would be to have an independent prosecutor, a prosecutor outside of the local prosecution office that works hand in glove with the police department every day investigate those particular cases and perhaps set up a special grand jury, not the grand jury that the county prosecutor's work with every day to investigate and decide on charges in such cases. In fact, in the wake of Eric Garner's death on Staten Island, the New York Attorney General suggested that his office, his statewide office based in Albany, not in Staten Island, not in New York City, be the investigating office for lethal force used by police officers. I think this is an excellent idea, whether it's a statewide attorney general or simply whether it's an independent prosecutor appointed, but from outside of the prosecutorial office that works hand in glove with the local police department. I think this would assure the independence of these investigations, the independence of the grand jury's decision in such cases, and this would promote the legitimacy of the criminal justice system in the eyes of the community who have every reason to expect such independence when these very important and disturbing events take place. MARTHA MINOW: Thank you. Professor Sullivan. RONALD SULLIVAN: Thank you, Dean Minow. So let me start with a general observation. I think that we can approach this question, how do we make our system of policing better, by looking at the three registers, or looking at the question along three registers. The first is legal reform. What can you do about the laws? How can you change laws in a way that incentivizes good behavior and disincentivizes bad behavior? So something like what Professor Steiker just suggested. A law that says that police-involved shootings have to be investigated and potentially prosecuted by a special counsel or independent counsel. So that's one register. The second register is civic engagement. Professor Crespo touched on that a bit in his remarks. I was shocked. I've been obviously speaking about this a lot over these last couple months. I was shocked at how many people in audiences, obviously not like this, not law students, but had no idea that a prosecutor could bring a case before a grand jury a second time or a third time. There are some constraints, but people say, oh, I thought it was done. I thought it was done. All right. I thought it was finished. I thought it was over. Right? So we might think of civic engagement along the lines of teaching people about how their democracy works. And I could foresee a prosecutor running in some jurisdictions, say Ferguson, on the platform that if elected, I'm going to do this thing correctly. I'm going to actually present a competent case before the grand jury and have people vote up or down. The third is policing reform, the third register, policing reform. And this will be my concrete suggestion. So I'm working on a large document with two other law professors about policing reform. And we're taking this approach that I just outlined along these three registers. And here's one of the more controversial ones. And I'm, admittedly, a bit ambivalent about it, but I'm going to throw it out and see what people think. So here it is. So again, this notion of incentivizing good behavior and disincentivizing bad behavior. So I had a friend who used to say, one way to incentivize behavior is just to keep adding zeroes, keep adding zeroes. So this in the context of a civil suit. So we thought, well, in what way might a police officer feel personally fiscally responsible for bad behavior? Well, here's an idea that police departments would have to buy some form of liability insurance. That is, if an officer in a particular department is found liable for excessive force then the insurance would pay out whatever the proceeds are. But here's the thing, that the officer be personally responsible for any increase in liability insurance as a function of that officer's misbehavior. So that's one level. The second level is that the department itself would have to bear some cost if an officer is found liable for excessive force and this would get at the cultural problem that Professor Crespo spoke about. That is there would be a self interest from police officers not to have money come out of their pockets. But also, there would be a departmental interest in constraining the activity of police officers in a particular sort of way, in a rational sort of way. So you have these dual interests at stake. Now the push back is when I've run this by police officers is they say, well, then there will be just a massive slowdown. They won't do anything. They'll say, money out of my pocket, I'm not risking it. And then everybody is going to be in danger, because police officers are going do a slow down like what we saw in New York a few weeks ago. So that's a whole other story if we're only going to arrest people when absolutely necessary. So what are these other arrests for? What were they for? I never quite understood that. I certainly understand that critique, but I think the benefits of what I'm suggesting would outweigh the costs. MARTHA MINOW: What a disciplined panel. This is so good. I'm going to invite people to come up for questions and comments. A lot of people here, so I'm going to ask you to keep them brief. But while I do this, I'm going to ask Commissioner Evans a follow-up question. You said the important task is to take care of misuse of deadly force. And I wonder, what does that mean in the era of the increasing militarization of the police-- the sale of just remarkable military-type equipment. There are studies that show that young police officers that have been trained with this much more elaborate equipment are much more likely to use it, higher use of tasers by young police officers compared with older police officers and down the line. So what does it mean to take care of it in this era of a highly militarized police? PAUL EVANS: Again, a lot of it is police departments are on very limited budgets. OK. Almost 80% to 90% of their budgets go. So when somebody's giving out free equipment, they'll stand in line whether they need it or not. Your SWAT teams probably need that. I can remember after 9/11, we talked about, do we do a show of force similar to what happened in New York? And the then Mayor Menino said, absolutely not. We're not going to have offices out there with rifles and machine guns. Now that changed a little bit after the marathon bombing and what have you. But I think his concern and I think the police concern has to be is the community. We don't want to be an intimidating force, but there are going to be occasions. Tactical occasion, where you're going to bring that out. It's not something that you want on a day to day basis out on the street. MARTHA MINOW: Thank you. Aaron. Please say who you are. BRANDON: My name is Brandon. I am [INAUDIBLE], and I have a very direct question for the Professor Sullivan, but I want to preface my comments by acknowledging the fact that I've been very critical of the HLS faculty for what I've perceived to be a lack of community engagement. While I feel like a lot of you all are all too willing to sit in this ivory tower and pontificate about the solutions and initiatives that need to be implemented, I very rarely see you guys engage with the direct victims of this theoretical problem we're talking about, because for a lot of us, it's not theoretical. So having said that, I want to take this time to publicly acknowledge Professor Sullivan for taking that step and going beyond his Harvard bubble. Over J-term there was a town hall meeting held at Roxbury Community College, and Professor Sullivan was on that panel and he spoke power to truth, similar to what he did today. And I just want to take this moment right now to acknowledge you for that and just kind of report back. Because I can't tell you how many people I spoke to personally that appreciated your presence on that panel. You brought so much justification and validation to a lot of the firmly held grievances we had in that community, [INAUDIBLE]. So I want to thank you for that. That being said, I want to it a step forward and ask you-- [APPLAUSE]. With that being said, I want to pose a challenge to you. I want to know if you're willing to go beyond words and put some action behind your words. So what do I mean by that? The community has collectively gotten together and drafted a letter to the DOJ to try to launch an investigation into the BPD for a number of grievances, one of which has been the use a deadly force. Because if you look on average dating back to 1988, we've had on average one homicide committed by them a year since then. So we want to look into that. We want to look into the gross instances of corruption within their ranks, and obviously we want them to look into the stopping first issues, just to name a few. So as I said, the letter has been drafted. I would like to know if you would be wiling to put your signature on that letter? MARTHA MINOW: I think he's got to read the letter. RONALD SULLIVAN: I would obviously have to. BRANDON: And I know you're a lawyer, you know what I saying. I understand [INAUDIBLE] anything you haven't you read. So obviously that's assumed, but are you willing to consider it? RONALD SULLIVAN: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. MARTHA MINOW: Say who you are. KATHERINE WALECKA: My name is Katherine Walecka. I'm [INAUDIBLE]. Next year, I will be working in an appeals unit in Philadelphia, working for the district attorney there. I wanted to thank you all for being here, and I had a few questions for Commissioner Evans. My first question was, you had talked about the importance of personnel review. And I understand, I don't know how accurate this report was, but I understand that in the Tamir Rice case the officer who shot the young boy, I think he was 12 years old, had actually received negative evaluations before from previous units. Not in his final assignment in Cleveland, but in others saying that he had, quote ''poor judgment and should be assigned to desk duty that he was likely to shoot unnecessarily.'' So I wondering first, what you thought about that? And then my second question was, what is the BPD's approach to the failure of police to appear for a trial's-- because I've seen in the courts where I practice that we've had to dismiss for want of prosecution when police officers don't show up, and that's deeply disappointing to us. PAUL EVANS: On the Cleveland case, I mean when I was commissioner I did not do-- the candidates to be hired by the police department were done by what they called a recruit investigation unit. OK. I took it away from the recruit investigation unit and gave it to my internal affairs unit. In essence, I did not want individuals coming in with problems to become bad cops. So I put the people who investigated upfront to make sure we didn't do it. Now again, we deal with the civil service system. I may say, I don't want you, but I've got to have good cause or our civil service is going to say that person gets hired. So not knowing what the hiring system is in Cleveland, I couldn't tell you. But bottom line is if we found that there were backgrounds that, that type of report from another department, we wouldn't hire that person. OK. And if there's a lot of say motor vehicle violence, domestic violence, any of that type of things, if they're arrested for those, they're not even considered in this day and age. So there is scrutiny, intense scrutiny before they become police, but we're not the final out of it. If they appeal a decision and we bypassed them on the civil service list, they can become police officers. So again, once they come, they're probationary officers for 13 months. Any time during those 13 months, they can be terminated for the slightest reason. So you've got a good chance to monitor, see what they're doing. But after that, they become members of the union, and it's incredibly difficult to dismiss officers for anything but egregious misconduct. MARTHA MINOW: And the second question was about officers not showing up at hearings. PAUL EVANS: Yeah. In the old days, officers use to make an arrest and be in the court the next day. OK. Part of the problem is the notification system, when they're needed, when they're not. It's been a problem for as long as you can remember. Officers make an awful lot of money going to court. When is the case going? When doesn't it go? The globe spotlight team did an extensive look at officers not showing up for court probably back in the early 2000s. It continues to be a problem of making sure you have a notification system where we know the officer, or not we, but where the department knew that the officer was properly notified and they didn't show up, they're disciplined. KATHERINE WALECKA: OK. Thank you. SAM: Hi, I'm Sam. I'm a 2L. I think we've heard really great suggestions about accountability and legitimacy. It seems like there's been a major problem, a major rift between law enforcement and the communities that they serve. Do any of you have any suggestions or know of any initiatives that can kind of fix that problem which seems to be at the heart of some of these issues? MARTHA MINOW: So who would like that? Sullivan? Yeah. RONALD SULLIVAN: I mean, one thing that-- I mean this is nothing new or original, but one thing that people talk about a lot is the notion of community policing and if you drill down with that so it is not just a label, it's the notion of police officers being involved in a community, knowing a community so that they exercise discretion responsibly. So all of our dear departed friend Bill Stuntz would say, what's the speed limit on I-90? Well, it's whatever the state trooper sets the gun at, the radar gun at. It's a huge degree of discretion on the street, in on the street encounters. Do police exercise discretion the way HUPD does? You know, underage alcohol, pour it out, go home, don't do it or hand cuffs? You know my son's school, if they get into-- boys get into a scuffle they get from talking to by the administrator. A couple miles west, they're in handcuffs, right? How do we get them to exercise discretion in a more rational way? So a lot comes under this rubric community policing, but I think we have to be-- right now color is a proxy for criminality in so many ways. The way Professor Ogletree is dressed right now, don't go too far, Ogletree. You know he might get stopped, right. And I'm being very serious, right. So you know, but if you're in a community, you know people, and you can begin to exercise discretion in a more meaningful, and fair, and equitable way, ANDREW CRESPO: Sam's question sort of prompts a question for me that I wanted to ask the commissioner to help just our understanding a little bit. I grew up about an hour north of New York City, and a large number of people in my community were police officers for New York City. An hour an half drive to get to the city that was being policed. And you can contrast that to DC where at least the judges and I think some of the prosecutors have residency requirements where you have to live where you are enforcing the criminal law. Do you have a sense in big cities how many people are living in the communities that they're policing and whether it be practical to have residency requirements that you live in the precinct or at least the territorial jurisdiction? PAUL EVANS: Yeah. Boston had a residency law. Before you take the test be a police officer, you had to live in the city for a year. OK. For the longest time, I forget when that law would have-- it maybe would've been the late 80s, had to remain a resident, OK. And in essence, I think there was real value to that. When I was in the 70s, cops would roll up to a call and say, what are you living here for? Move out to the suburbs, because they lived in the suburbs. And I think our offices had more vested interest in the communities they serve when they live in those communities. But Boston required that for an awful long time. It had to be, I'd say late 2000s where they allowed officers to move out of the city, but they could only do that after 10 years. And it was I think just a matter of collective buy in. The city couldn't afford the benefits they were asking for, the monetary benefits, and they gave that benefit. So I think residency is terrific. I was a big fan of it. I vigorously enforced it. And I think the hope is 10 years, after 10 years, your kids are in school and hopefully you stay you don't move out after 10 years. But right now for the city of Boston it's 10 years. ALICIA STEWART: Hi. Thank you so much for your leadership, Dean Minow, and putting this panel together. I'm Alicia Stewart. I'm a Nieman Fellow. So not law school student, but I have a lot of questions. I am really curious. It strikes me and this is just to build on the previous question a bit. Everyone's kind of approached this from a kind of multi-disciplinary if you will kind of approach. Whether that's community, whether that's policing, whether that's from from an independent look at the various police that are kind of in bed with prosecutors understandably to move things forward. I am really curious to hear what are the young community policing, which we've heard a lot about. What are the district are local policing efforts that are successful that one would deem successful from a racial, equitable, and effective in terms of actually solving crimes and policing the community that you've seen in your various research, that you've seen across the pond, perhaps, obviously it's different system more tapped down. I'm really curious to hear what the those solutions that you've seen are that's worked well in America in this recent era. PAUL EVANS: When you talk community policing, my definition of that is a comprehensive approach to policing. OK. That's prevention, intervention, and enforcement in partners, in all of those areas, prevention. I mean, as commissioner I use to say, the best crime prevention tool is a good education for these kids, OK, so they don't turn to crime. But when we were doing community policing, I think we're doing it pretty well. We had grants with community groups were we give them say, $10,000. It wasn't a lot of money, but to partner with us on youth related issues. Now when we started in some of our difficult districts, where we had the most problems, we had two non-profits that were willing to work with us. I think when I ended there I had 24 non-profits in those areas. Then our gang unit, they really got to know kids on a personal basis. They said, we need to get these kids jobs. Mayor hires, gains kids, puts them to work during the summer, keeps them busy. Every year the mayor hires thousands of kids to put them busy, get them jobs. We work with John Hancock to get kids internships at John Hancock. But that full sense of there's other-- we're not going to arrest our way out of this problem. But it becomes a question of, OK, we've got a problem. You sit down with all your partners, the clergy, community groups, street workers and you start saying, OK, what's the approach? And it's not always an enforcement approach. It's a comprehensive approach. I mean, you look right now. I mean, that's been Boston's model for an awful long time. But Bill Bretton, when he first went into New York did the enforcement piece. Now he has gone back and is committed to the community policing piece. And I think again, when you have these issues, community policing, everybody's in it together. I mean sometimes I said, when the police say, OK, what are priorities? Reducing crime. Well, the community may have all kinds of different priorities and they may be very small things, but the police have to pay attention to those. For instance, when I was commissioner, I let each police district do their own strategic planning. Sit down with the community, decide what's important in those communities. OK. There was one community, Jamaica Plain. Loud boom boxes were a real issue for that community. So we started going around enforcing the noise ordinance. Well, you know that was something that was never on our radar screen, but out in that community that was-- and we had to listen to those people, OK. And we measured fear with crime. What was driving fear? Pay attention to those issues and it's not always robberies and those types of things. It's other things that drive fear. So being in tune with the community, listening to the community, and being responsible. MARTHA MINOW: Can I ask the panel to address two things that I've heard that have been effective in the past. One is the 10 point coalition. The commissioner mentions clergy. I'd like to hear did that work? Why has it not been working more recently? And secondly, more controversially, women as police officers. Research shows that women deescalate when they're on the force rather than escalate confrontations. Is that true? Should there be more women police officers? CHARLES OGLETREE: Let me answer both questions to that. Women make a big difference, Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, because they know how to in a sense stop the violence and they're-- pulling a gun is the last thing, to have a conversation, talk to somebody. I think getting more women involved, I think that makes a big difference. The second part is a little bit more complicated when you think about the clergy. I was very impressed with what the clergy did. I was here as a young faculty member when the 10 point coalition had this idea. We're going to go out and meet the kids who were in gangs when they [? were ?] preteens and teenagers and we're going to take them out and have a meal, have a conversation. But going out at 11 o'clock at night on weeknights and weekends and being with them until one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning, that made an enormous difference. And the commissioner would tell you, the crime dropped dramatically. But those things are expensive. Then you've got to figure out where are we going to get the ministers. Where are we going to get the youth supporters, people like that. That's going to make an enormous amount a difference and that hasn't happened. And we have to think about it to. You rarely see police officers arresting anybody at a place like Harvard University, or Spelman, or Morehouse, or you can name the college around the country. It just doesn't happen and the same things are happening. People are drinking. People have weapons. People are assaulting other people, but police don't get involved in the campuses. And we need to at least have a conversation, why are we doing that? I had a great talk with President Faust, and her point is that the problem is not just guns and gangs. It's alcohol. Every weekend-- I hope it's only weekends-- folks are-- all the beer, all the wine, all the alcohol people are absorbing it and a lot of things happen because of that and we need to figure out how to make that happen to so the folks aren't involved in some serious way. I think the other thing that the police officers who are here are very much understanding to students and friendly with the students, get a chance to know the students, and I think that more people need to-- everybody needs to visit the police department. Everybody needs to go to the police ride along. Everybody needs to understand the challenges that they have. Everybody needs to make sure that their church are involved in one respect or another with law enforcement when things aren't working when things are working, because we have problems, but we need to figure out ways to solve them. ANDREW CRESPO: Just to your question, Alicia, kind of combining two of the things that the commissioner and Professor Ogletree said that I've seen anecdotally at least is encouraging, are these sometimes called last chance interventions or something where the police community does all of the investigation you would expect if there was about to be a big take down of key actors who are thought to be essentially involved in crime in the community. And then everyone's brought to a community center instead of a jail and you read these reports where the police chief walks in with just a cart of all the evidence they have against them. And says, you guys are going to go to jail. We have an open and shut case. This is your last chance. We are here as a community-- and it's not just the police who are in this room. It's the clergy, it's the mothers, the parents, the school. They come in and they say, you will go to jail, because this is the evidence we have against you. But this is your last chance, we want to give you this mentoring. We want to give you an opportunity, and we are all here to support you through that. We're all committed to that. And some of North Carolina has done some of this. There have been jurisdictions where they've tried this in a very targeted way. I think the initial sort of reports on this seem very encouraging. That it's produced some good results. And that's a way to have the police involved in that and everybody involved as stakeholders and to make it really at this do or don't moment for the people involved. ALICIA STEWART: Thank you. REYNA CERVA-JOHNSON: I just want a ask a question that ties it together a little bit. MARTHA MINOW: Say your name again. REYNA CERVA-JOHNSON: Oh, I'm sorry. My name is Reyna Cerva-Johnson. I am a 2L. Professor Sullivan said kind of this idea that colors become a proxy for criminality. And I liked what Professer Crespo was saying as least about ex ante kind of solutions, because when were talking about accountability especially in that case of deadly force it's often to late. I kind of visualize a lot of the attention in what's happening in Black Lives Matter movement with this idea that police have dangerous jobs and they need to be empowered to keep themselves and the community safe, but also we're now hearing the voices of people saying, that it can't be right that just the fact that you feel afraid of me is enough to justify you pulling me over, you frisking me on the side of the street of in the worst case scenario like being shot-- [INAUDIBLE], the Tamir Rice. So given that pattern, we now have a body of social science that can test bias. People can answer questions and we can start to see what types of bias they have against different groups, why aren't we testing police on their biases and perhaps maybe making a space for evaluating whether people that have extraordinarily high biases on certain communities should be allowed to police those communities? RON SULLIVAN: They actually are in Boston. There's a new police chief now. I'm not sure if they're testing, but they are training on implicit bias and encouraging officers to expose and come to terms with the fact that each of us walk around with priors. I've got four or five right behind me as I'm sitting here. We all have these priors that we bring with us and to recognize them, and the notion is that behavior would be changed. So I think it's a great idea and more departments should very aggressively do that. REYNA CERVA-JOHNSON: But just to kind of ask the question to you and Commissioner Evans, given that we do actually have a way to kind of test like a metric, do you think there's a space for really using that to evaluate which cops should police where beyond training, but really just testing and then using that data to control the way we police. RON SULLIVAN: Commissioner? PAUL EVANS: Again, a lot of-- when you're about to hire an officer he goes through a large series of psychological exams and testing and what have you. And Hopefully, you weed them out then, and as I say during probation. As far as-- again, you get down to, they have unions. They have protections and they're difficult, but if you start seeing officers that are exhibiting some problems like that, you either discipline or get them out of there. You get them to another police district. You take them of the streets. There's a lot of things. Sometimes, I've talked about us versus them, police versus community. There's a lot of internal struggles particularly in big city police departments, between police management and the rank and file police as to what you can do and what you can't do. So there's an awful lot of things we'd like to be able to do, but that's violation of contracts and what have you. So yeah, we used to do testing and I think we worked with, I forget the name of the organization, but it had to do with the Holocaust and bias and we trained all our officers with that when I was the commissioner as to where does bias take us in that type of training. Absolutely critical to it and every officer went through that. But the ability you can transfer people can you discipline them. I mean we do that if we find an officer a place where he's causing more harm than good then we get him out of there. I shouldn't say to we, but when I was there, I did. MARTHA MINOW: Sounds like civil service reform should be on the agenda. I know that the Harvard Police uses work with Mahzarin Banaji and her work on explicit bias. And I think it's an interesting proposal to think about actually using it for placing people. It is interesting the commissioner was, Maureen, maybe you'll appreciate this, some of the most effective efforts have been in the military. Where the patrol leader, the commander who's closest to the ground is held responsible for creating a racially not biased environment. And so I think one of the things is where do you put the responsibility? Not just on the individual who may be misconduct having misconduct, but the person who's supervising them. They should be responsible for creating the training, and the oversight, and accountability, and the atmosphere. I think we have time for one more. CHRIS MEONI: My name's Chris Meoni. I'm a third year law student and I wanted to ask the whole panel I guess about Professor Steiker and the suggestion that heard before about having an independent prosecutors rather than local people with conflicts of interest. I just wonder about the idea of a state level prosecutor. It seems to me that a lot of these urban communities are in states that look very different than those communities. And that might be politically even more difficult for a state appointed officials or elected official to prosecute a police officer. I mean I think like with [INAUDIBLE] was indicted in the Bronx by a local Bronx prosecuter grand jury but all the shooters were acquitted in upstate New York. And I understand that there's a concern about conflict of interest, but my concern would be about taking it away from the community when it seems like the communities are already not represented. And then my second concern about it is also it's sort of a kin to the concern that some people on this panel have sort of voice about Title IX thing is that if you create a prosecutor that's job it is only to prosecute police officers will that prosecutor feel like it's their job to convict get police officers and will it make it harder for them to be fair in ways that some people thought that appointed someone to be a Title IX sexual assault adjudicator will make them unfair and then they'll prejudge cases to think that their job is to find people guilty. MARTHA MINOW: Who would like to take this? CAROL STEIKER: You certainly raise good points, and I'm sure it depends on the demographics of the state how much your first concern. I mean the main concern is just that there be an independent prosecutor and that independence could be achieved just by going to a prosecutorial unit outside of the one that works with the local police officer. It doesn't have to be a statewide unit. That's one possible proposal, because there is a statewide prosecutorial system that could step in. And I think you want to assure independence from whatever kind of bias there would be. And so you're right. You might swap one kind of bias for another, but I think the key is to look for independence along whatever dimensions you can. And it's obviously context specific in terms of enforcing those laws. But I think there are obvious conflicts of interest in having local prosecutors prosecute the local police with whom they work. And there are any number of possible solutions to that that would solve that particular problem. PAUL EVANS: A life is a life, and there should be an awful lot of oversight as to how it happens. Right now, I mean, I think the Suffolk County DA just released his findings on the deadly force case probably 15 months after it happened. OK. And then you'll have prosecutors in other parts of the state who will release their findings within two or three weeks. It depends on where you are. I was in circumstances where the bottom line is the state district attorney comes out and right away they go to the feds. For a while there, both the district attorney, the Attorney General, and US Attorney were all overseeing and looking at deadly force. But there's got to be a better way to do it. So there's somewhat a life is a life. There should be the utmost emphasis on those type of investigations. And if it takes a while to investigate then, and you ensure the integrity and transparency of that because the community deserves that, but right now I'm not sure the system works the way it should. And that's probably not just Massachusetts. It's everywhere. Again, at the time it takes to investigate what have you. Where it's happening, what is the culture there, that type of stuff has a lot with the type of investigation. MARTHA MINOW: We're going to have to end. I'm going to ask three questions. One is, how many people think we should have another panel soon? OK. We will do that. A second is, will the panelists stay a little bit longer to talk with people who didn't get a chance to ask their questions? Yes, they well. And the third is, will everybody join me in thanking both the people who asked questions and the panelists? [APPLAUSE]