scientists barbara walter with our civil war start and how to stop that which examines the warning signs that often receipts civil war to masts, quite another one happened in the u.s.? interviewed by smith college at middle east studies chair. watch book tv every sunday on c-span2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. ♪♪ >> attorney general charles ramsey pump former police chief or washington d.c. and philadelphia joint mayors from around the country for u.s. conference of mayors discussion on law enforcement initiatives and reforms. >> i'll turn it over -- [inaudible]

>> have had a chance to talk with many of you on gun related issues in your language is correct, recover a lot of illegal firearms from across state lines. as we discussed, there certainly substantial problems but we truly see substantial problems. part of what i want to discuss today, we appreciate you being here, federal collaboration. we cannot do it alone. we are not only looking out federal collaboration, we are having efforts for long-term transformational waste. in chicago were anywhere, we are

the team on this conversation. he didn't come here to listen to the mayor of kansas city. >> it is truly great to be here, i love coming to these, it's been a long time since we've been in persons . thank you for your leadership and i want to congratulate you on the on operation. i am delighted to be here with all of you this evening. you are omicron lines of complex problems and decisions made every day rural communities. over the last few years we've crossed unprecedented challenges between the pandemic,

large-scale demonstration in our community, gun violence, public safety for the department of justice and substantial resources to supporting state and local partners experience in research for enforcement alone is not enough to prevent crime. ... violent crimes and the department had vigorous law enforcement assistance, financial support to fight violent crimes, strengthen communities and build police-community trust. last year the department awarded over $4 billion in grants

including $6 billion last month to support a wide range of programs across the country. president biden requested $7 billion for the departments in f.y.2022. i want to talk about the department's highest priorities, gun violence and hate crimes. fy 22. hate crimes [inaudible] entire communities and you all know all too well hate crime has surged in the last few years. can you all hear me by the way?

which increases resources and programs and the investigations across all 50 state bureaus and officers i want to emphasize in the wake of that, the department's commitments and hate crimes [inaudible] and protect houses of worship. we've also been elevating to provide security for the houses of worship across the country. of course getting to the point

the department has been very focused to prevent firearm traffickers from providing weapons from previously convicted and other purchasers. last spring the attorney general announced the state and local law enforcement network in washington, d.c. and we are using our authority to strengthen and propose the use of accessories so we can keep out of the hands [inaudible]

we also have substantial programs and initiatives that increase the state and local by helping jurisdictions hire personnel and protect to tackle the climate crime. in the programs to enable over 1,000 additional officers. we are looking to increase that next year. it's shouldered by the state and local and territorial partners and at the department should

then have the violence intervention programs. one of the priorities right now i look forward to hearing from you all how your jurisdictions are engaging in that. as many of you have seen the intervention focuses on reducing the crime between the community leaders, service providers and the sectors in the communities. incredible messengers to intervene on the highest threats becoming victims of violence and as effective family complement.

to report crimes and service witnesses. carry it from law enforcement and elected officials [inaudible] to protect the communities they

need to promote those efforts the department wanted new initiatives to protect that supports law enforcement. for the most vulnerable members of society to refocus the criminal justice resources meaning also they want in the process. we want to be able to scale goes up with assistance to jurisdictions that are implementing thedi law enforcemt reforms whether they receive grants from the department were not. with a number of different law

enforcement agencies providing a wide range of services to agencies. [inaudible] without ensuring that our police officers have that a stigma on reporting with a smaller region of things [inaudible]

several of you are also aware of the authority that we have for the dissent decree and about 15 jurisdictions around the country with a plan of establishing the use of the monitors in the dissent decree to make sure they are effective and at the jurisdictions therein. we are also working right now in an indicative program for law enforcement for all thear best practices of learning from the dissent decree from research to

develop the resources. and we saw amazing policing around the mass demonstrations. we've been doing meetings with cities and chiefs and we are going to be putting out a set of resources and we hope that that

will be [inaudible] but i just wanted to thank you again for your leadership and service and i hope that we will find even more ways for the department to work with all of you. folks have a lot of questions [inaudible] i feel like every year i say this is the hardest time to be a

police officer. let me start with chuck ramsey. what are the things we can be doing at thehe local level to hp support the police on holding the constitutional. i think we see survey after survey not in this difficult time but they want the job in a way that is constitutional and respectful and a lot of narrative when you are not allowing us to doo our job. first of all, don't fall into the trap. if they want good policing and what they don't want is abuse.

it goes up and comes down. inl their own communities do this, do that. in the emergency management and so forth it's much broader than thei public safety. did you have the power, you are the only ones that have the power to bring these agencies

together. to hold people's feet to the fire this is a policing issue but not the only solution. if we sit down and talk this through. it's always been a tough job. i've spent 47 years in active service as a police officer. i would do it all over again if i had the opportunity. too old now, but i wanted. [laughter]

for the positive you make a difference. you are mayors because you make a difference in the communities. every interaction they are making a difference in somebody's lives and that's worth it, and that's what we have to kind of get across when we are recruiting. one last thing you are short a police officer. do not sacrifice quality and the background checks and everything else. don't compromise on that issue. it's too important. you're stuck withu' it for the next 20 or 30 years, so you want to get it right. >> that is a good point.

how do we reach millennial's, a continuing question. that question is a bit challenging when you talk about law enforcement because it's a different breed of young people coming into the profession. what are you seeing from the perspective and what tips can you do to help us with supporting our police? >> thanks, mayor and go to to see you. i had the opportunity to work with you a number of years ago in the police department. before i answer that, a shout out because if you listen to her speech, she touched on a number of things that are important.

she talked about guns and violence and morale she said something about monitoring. we've been watching that for years. let me ask you all a question. raisee your hand if you're havig trouble hiring police officers. okay. raise yourur hand if you're not having trouble hiring police officers. let me hear from the mayors who said t they are not having trouble. it keeps them up.

oitell us what you're doing that the one or two things that's making a difference. >> to be honest, i don't know. we had no trouble recruiting folks. it's something we have done for a while we've made an effort ten or 15 years ago that we needed to diversify so there is been a long-standing partnership between the police department police departmentand the polices doing a lot of proactive outreach to the minority community getting them to apply and we've carried that forward. i've got 100 police officers and we've been working very much when i came in office years ago we were 91%, and we are down to

80% and working in that direction. rt we were alsol, working in a consortium with six or seven different police departments. some testing would go through all these different groups and now we have gone on our own and people that want to work with ua come directly to us and then we maintain really good communication with them and try to also build them up. the final thing i'm really excited about that hasn't started we started a public safety academy in our city high school but we still have that three year gap between 18 to 21 when they can become police officers so we started a police cadet program basically an internship where we are paying thepe young people between unard and the community so they get to build upan the community trust r three years and trust with the other officers before they are

ever given the honor. my friend here was like an 18-year-old kid in chicago and he's working in a grocery store and asked where do you want to be the next five years that's the effect of things the departments are doing..ng they are also looking at what do we have to do to incentivize like baltimore. baltimore is looking at how do we get good people and help them with education. you say things like make a difference, be the change. other cities are not doing that. other cities are going the other direction. why do we have to do to get more

people to apply. you appeal to people's better instincts and make it more selective to get in. some people go the other direction but you just have to have a high school education. we are talking about life and death decisions. you have a 20-year-old kid making life or death split second decisions the next couple of years so incentivizing cadet programs, going upstream. the country i feel like is changing. i feel like the mayors arere getting it. this administration i think is understanding that but this is

the biggest challenge who are going to be police officers of the future. >> we didn't call on jane castor. first of all promising a photograph [inaudible] do you want to weigh in on this question? >> very briefly. if your organization is looked upon as a great law enforcement agency people will want to work there and will want to try to get in. they could tell 100 stories of someone that walked in and said have you ever thought about law

enforcement. so we have youth academies where we cultivate through high school. we have scholarships, scholarship academies to diversify. to go and talk to the students and again there are a lot of steps that can be taken but i agreean wholeheartedly with everything. you cannot lower your standards if we go through about 100 applicants for every two to four hires. it's difficult and should always be difficult to be a police officer. >> i think that's helpful. let's talk about the issue for

many of us in a city like chicago and the dissent degree and many others that are on the front lines. what arere you seeing in terms f police reform and accountability as well as balancing that with criminal justice reform? we went to the u.s. attorney's office in tampa and got our u.s. attorney to the meetings. there are aa lot of things we've worked hard to get them on.

so that's worked out real well. he walked in and said i'm not a thief and i'm about to rob someone i need some help so we are doing a lot of the right

things but we just have atf came to us and said we've got about 25 border rangers not doing anything and we can go to you for about three or four months while you hire police officers to deal with that violent crime. t one of the things that we foud and i'm sure all of the mayors here within the policem department, taking people off of one unit to deal with something else once you deal with that you've got to stay on it and it isn't going away. it may go up and may go down but you just have to focus on it each and every day but congratulations. responses to criminal issues and

also responses to the reform conversation. how are you balancing it right now and as we are facing a number of situations where folks wants to have better constitutional policing, but also want to make sure the violent offenses are reduced to the communities and so we welcome that discussion and i will go to the end here. i listened to this conversation the father of modern-day policing. the police being the only

members of society incumbent upon every citizen and i think it's important to think about that because we often put all of the responsibility on our law enforcement it we need to get back to working together with our communities. we use to have things like the wait and see an initiative into the institutes where we were training the police right together with our citizens. you talked about building the trust. to me it's about building the relationships of partners and friendshipin sentiment worships because if we are all talking together we are working with people on our side and a lot less violence happens. one of thes things we have been

working on is a camp for kids whose parents have been incarcerated in kids pay nothing. they go zip lining and serving and they do something the churches haven't seen each day. we work with inmates and people in the community. there's been a lot of hugging but it's looking at those people and saying you are valuable. it's investing in our kids because those kids are the same kids if you don't do anything over 50% of the kids of

incarcerated parents are going to end up in the criminal justice system. we keep looking at a this is the police. we need mayors to bring everybody to the table. as a community we say that's the police job, let's focus on the police. i think we've gotten away from those initiatives. let me do this for the sake of argument. i don't know the nature of the police in your community, but for many of us, who engaged in efforts to have these additional programs that cost money and sometimes there is a very clear

debate between do you want to investt in other programmatic efforts or more law enforcement officers and rank-and-file and how have you looked toat reconce that, knowing that in some ways there is a national tension? >> we are never going to get out of that. we work with the police and officers and they often tell you it's the most satisfying position that they've had in the department and those officers luckily for places like hawaii have moved all the way to the upper limits and started working in some of those positions. so for our union, the head of my union, the whole state was one of my community police officers and --

>> thank you so much. i have a note that mayor keller wanted to chime in and then we will come back around. i wish the world was like you described. in albuquerque new mexico i think we've given up on that approach. what we are saying is we ask for officers to do too much. at some point they can to be everything. we now have a third department with response to 911. it's got about 40 social workers just starting out. there is a 10 million-dollar reoccurring fund, so we've built

a whole new way to address 20% of the 911 calls but i do just want to ask a quick question while she's here in the doj because for those of us trying toil balance that response and dissent degree the memo i thought that came out was so refreshing about how every city is so different, and i'm just kind of curious what is the next cities looking intond dealing with this and also for where the doj wants to take us with balancing reforms. >> every city is different. dthe demographics are differen, the challenges were different and it's for the justice department to view the jurisdiction. the number you are referring to

the goal of that was to be able to provide some consistency, transparency, benchmarks, training for monitors and inside dissent degree. the approach on violent crime that the attorney general announced last may is very intentionally going to what chuck ramsey was saying for the enforcement only strategy and recognize how important the police community. and cities that have dissent decrees creating the states for

those supporting and getting constitutional policing going oband we put all these problemst the feet of police the last several decades and expected the police to be able to have all the answers h to these problems and you will hear it from the police chiefs and from every one of us here so it isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all and it helps support a whole range focused on getting to constitutional policing but we can talk about the baltimore where it is help to support a lot of behavioral health programs out of recognition that we were just asking as we have been in cities around the country just asking officers to do everything. so there isn't an easy answer, but the goal for the justice department is recognizing with

the police community trust as well. >> we will go to you and then mayor scott. >> we had a real culture problem and that has been exacerbated by the risingve crime because you have those thatto do think stop and frisk is the way to go and you throw a bunch of kids up against the brick wall then you feel emboldened. it's not just among the rank-and-file. it's saying exactly what you're saying. i have others that have this idea so i don't expect an answer

in the time that we have, but for those of us that were in law enforcement, changing that culture and trying to build those relationships within a policeen department that is very fractured and where some voices are starting to win versus those that want to be on that path where we were in the city we were one of the top recognized by the obama administration with community policing and the policee department. i'm putting it out there that battle is happening right now and i'm worried that we are losing it. >> you've got to stay the course. we are going through the same thing in the city of chicago where we are reversing decades of a lot of bad culture and things that have protected the

status quo that was abusive to residents of color. we have a very strong police chief that asked me how they were doing but he's trying to move around and incentivize our officers and command staff to think about their job as protecting residents. it's very difficult i have the second largest force in the country forcing officers to do positive community content, talk to residents, go into businesses, build relationships and there are some that absolutely hate it.

you've got to stay the course andhe support the chief. if you are lying about what needs to happen to improve the quality of life and that legitimacy in a way that they haven't before, you can't get there without the community on your side. having the community as your urmost powerful tool. >> i couldn't agree more and i will just say this for all the folks that want to go back to the days ofto zero-tolerance in the early 90s, i think for me and for those in baltimore i remind everyone that i'm the first mayor that had to live throughit it all. it's a different when you had to dodge the bullets and get sat

down because you were breathing while black outside on the curb in the rain. it didn't work the first time, why when we had a zero-tolerance we had it without. in fact the only time we didn't. have it is when we didn't do that so it's about having that a balanced approach. guess the reality is for far too long we've looked at policing as aa deal. you call 911 and the police come. he is one of the monitors for us to be in the position that we are evolving as a city looking at public safety as a public health issue and seeing the first conversation i had with any human being about the 911

callss from police was a police commander who said to me because him and im were friends i am te commander of the district that has johns hopkins hospital. why emi is sending police officers out to deal with this person having behavioral health issues, the best medical people in theth world are right down te street. we have to evolve but as may years i think we have to have a lot of courage because people are going to demand we have to stick to it because it's the right thing to do. just the reality is it is going to cost some of us our jobs and people are going to get mad but at the end of the day when the book is written about what we did in our time and we do things in a different way because it's not an either or.

my grandmother, rest her soul never said she wanted -- she didn't want me to get knocked up side of the head every time i left the house. growing from ten to 30 while at the same time alleviating so they have time to do that proactive work in a constitutional way so like in chicago we are increasing the homicide clearance rates by 6%.

thank you, mayor for what you said. i guess i wants to have a litte reality check here and to give you the opportunity to talk to may years because the reality is at this moment they are fearful of doing their job. i mean, that they are cautious, they are not going too be proactive. there's more guns on the street in this country at this moment than in the last two years and at the very moment that we want to do something about violent crime it means getting those good cops and honestly i don't see that message enough in the vecountry from may years or even

washington here. viral hits, condemnation, people saying that wouldn't happen here. you've got to find ways to reach your good cops or you're going to continue to see good cops leaving andd not joining. you have to think hard about finding ways of capturing the imagination and knowing if they go out there and do their job and go beyond their job and make a mistake that they won't be hung out to dry. it's a tough message. i'm not saying anything more than you already know about it toooften it's about that videoe where someone screwed up and everyone is in line to condemn it. how many times do you find anar opportunity where somebody does something really good and it's just on par with the course.

the country is changing. we haven't seen this kind of violent crime in 20 or 30 years and it's going to continue. the cops right now are on the sidelines. you have to figure out how to get them back. one more thing i might add, with some of the communities tragically it isn't worse. it's been consistent. this conversation shows its meeting that level of reform. to do our officers trust us, does the community trust the police department.

i feel like we just scratched the surface. i will be invited back to dig in. there's just too much to discuss. you all know i'm a very accessible person if you don't know how to reach me, the mayor knows how to reach me. i'm pleased to be in touch and how the justice department can support but i'm always grateful to be among you. i know how hard the jobs are and my focus is being of the justice department can increase the partnership these are the questions of the day and we've only scratched the surface. [applause] i'm going to pick up the challenge. let's have this conversation again. like most of us that have been

experiencing a surge in crime over the last few years, this is the issue. a lot of great things are happening all over the country and american cities and we are leading on a number of different fronts. for me it is the primary i wake up every morning, go to bed every night and spent almost every hour through the day worrying about public safety and thinking about innovative ways to which we can bring the whole of government. but this is the issue and the mayor ofn mount vernon on the

earlier panel. the scale may be different but the challenges are the same and one way we can move forward is to stay united on this across the country. we really just scratched the surface and i think there's lots trof layers that we can talk abt but thank you all for joining us and good luck everyone out there. [applause]

in fact they were the ones who made sure the conversations were taped as johnson would signal to them through an open door between his office and there's. i want to report on the number of people assigned to kennedy and assigned to me now. i promise i won't go anywhere i will just stay behind these black gates.