 Good afternoon, I'm Christian Davenport, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. On behalf of Dean Michael Barr, as well as the students and faculty at the Ford School of the Policy, it's my pleasure to welcome you to this policy talks at the Ford School event on policing. The title of the panel today is Police Reform or Revolution, given the racist violence that rocked the country this summer and continues to the present day. In many ways, we as a society sit on somewhat unclear foundations, not sure of the path forward. On the one hand, we have reform, minor and or major changes that could be made to the personnel practices and governing policies employed by law enforcement as they interact with the citizens of this nation. On the other hand, we have revolution and that is transformative changes that could be made to dramatically restructure how or even if the police interact with the citizenry. My fellow panelists today would have a wide range of experience relating to policing and police policy. I wanna be clear today though, that I'll be pushing the panelists because I believe that there are many who are done with discussing reform and they are advocating revolution. We do not have the latter position well represented on the panel in part because of this sentiment, but also because activists are also just too busy being active. So as a consequence, I will give the voice to this particular position as deemed necessary. To the panelists, Lisa Dogard is director of the Public Defender Association in Seattle where she's been leading an independent effort on police reform. I hope I did not destroy your last name. Notably, she is the recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award. David Klinger is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Prior to pursuing his graduate degrees, Professor Klinger worked as a patrol officer for Los Angeles and Reverend Washington police departments. Frederick Johnson is a Towsley policymaker resident of the Ford School and a partner in the Washington office of Ryde Cave. Recently served as assistant to the president and cabinet secretary to President Obama. There he launched the White House as my brother's keeper task force where he still serves as chair of the organization. A couple of quick notes about the format. We lost some time at the end of the day for audience questions. We received some in advance but you can also submit questions to the live chat or live YouTube, tweet your questions to the hashtag policy talks with that to the panel. Today we're gonna do something a little unorthodox. We're gonna walk through the thinking of our panelists concerning the policing problem at hand. Essentially with the desire and willingness for revolution in the background as a backdrop to the conversation. As we discussed initially, you will provide your diagnosis of the problem. Move toward your conception of what policing would look like in your ideal situation and then discuss your suggested path from getting from one to the other and take about 10 to 12 minutes to do that and at 12, I will stop you. With that in mind, Lisa, David, Browderic, welcome. Lisa, why don't you get it started and then we'll move to Dave. Am I, can you hear me? Okay, great. Really appreciate the chance to be here and I really appreciate your frame, Christian. I will dispute upfront though, the sort of the typology. I think the common framework of radical transformation spans sectors, spans those who self-identify as advocates for abolition and revolutionary change and many who have been working to mitigate or essentially engaged in harm reduction for our existing system. Those people are both outside the realm of policing and inside the realm of policing. So I think there's actually much less disagreement than these sort of X or Y frameworks might suggest and that truly a lot of the realm for debate is around how and what works. So I would do wanna imagine the possibility that there's actually much more consensus around the scope of needed change and that the area for debate is really what is the most meaningful, efficacious, sustainable way in order to make profound change. Certainly that's my own story. I have worked on police reform to be clear. That is not however, the work that I'm here to talk about is not, I would not consider that to be police reform work. I have spent, I have logged my time for 15 or more years in the project of police accountability work as have many people. And I will say I'm pretty done with that. I do not regard that as particularly effective, useful or even interesting area anymore. There are still lots of people laboring in those vineyards and I don't wanna, good luck to them. I hope that it goes better than it has in my experience but in my experience that realm is one of kind of cleaning up after a system plays itself out in the way that it inevitably will because the job of policing is generally framed up in a way that it necessarily produces results that cannot be rectified through formal accountability processes. As well in general, the world of police accountability tends to be one of individual retribution and ironically the whole framework of restorative justice and a lot of the rethinking that we've done about harm by people who are not in law enforcement would dictate a very different approach to mistakes or misconduct that police employees engage in. But those of us who have learned that lesson about other people's misconduct have a hard time applying it in the realm of policing. And as a result, you get this culture, this activist culture and this is a self critique. I mean, I was there for many years myself of essentially what I call heads on pikes. So like we show that we don't like something by punishing an individual person but very, very often that those individual people are almost random manifestations of a system that itself has never helped to account. And I think that that practice of let's eliminate the rights of police officers, let's punish individual police officers, tends to drive a large sector into a very defended place and into a corner where they're not available as system transformation partners themselves and they feel that they're being treated very unfairly. The system may not be being treated unfairly but these individuals as sort of exemplars may legitimately feel that they're being individually made to carry the weight of hundreds of years of racist systematic oppression through many, many institutions. So anyway, I stepped off of our community police commission in Seattle last year in 2019 because I got to my own personal end of the road on that. There are details about that in Seattle that are fascinating but not relevant to the sort of meta conversation nationally. I chose for reasons that are specific to Seattle I had to make a choice between remaining in that sort of accountability world or concentrating my efforts on our work with lead which when it was born was called law enforcement assisted diversion. Now recognizing that some communities are decentering police from response to the kinds of problems that lead was originally designed to respond to, law violations committed related to behavioral health conditions or poverty. We have created an alternate name for the program which is let everyone advance with dignity which decenters but does not exclude police from a role in response to those kinds of problems. In any event in my view lead and similar efforts lead is not lead as an example of a methodology it is not the only way that you could apply certain values but what it was meant to be was a transformational vehicle to accomplish a paradigm shift in a system change where we number one kind of like an underground railroad allowed as many people as possible who had no business going to jail and prison related to but their participation in illicit economy that they were forced into due to lack of choice or lack of options or substance use disorder or other behavioral health issues prevent as many people as possible from being prosecuted going to jail, going to court. So like I said, underground railroad type of model but at the same time teaching everyone the constituents of standard public safety models law enforcement, lawyers, prosecutors the criminal legal system and community members affected by and suffering harm related to drug use and drug sales teach everybody that it would work better to accomplish their goals to respond in a way that made police a vanishingly small component of that response because there was something else. And in my view, I decided that if I had to choose I would invest my time there because I think that actually has much greater potential for revolutionary impact and it accomplishes that in a way that builds the greatest possible consensus and base of support for a new way of doing things and does not alienate us from potential allies all around the landscape public safety groups people who thought of themselves as constituents of the old order and but are available to support a new way of doing things. And importantly, also making space for those who are in law enforcement for all kinds of valid reasons and would happily participate in a very different role for law enforcement and really support that. I'll stop there. That's my own personal arc and what I see is the most fruitful way of trying to engineer maximum possible change. Lisa, thank you very much for that. David. Yeah, it's really interesting that Lisa was emphasizing the word that always pops up in my mind about stuff in that system and focusing on the police officer if she said either misconduct or mistake is one way to look at it and it doesn't get us very far. And that's because if you start looking deeper into what's going on there are systematic problems. When I say systematic problems, I mean problems within how police officers manage conflict. And so let's assume for the moment that we can't get rid of police. Let's assume for the moment that we need some institution in our society that is there to deal with people who are non-compliant where there's gonna need to be some entity that has the capacity to use force. So sort of a Vibrarian notion that the state exists when the state has a monopoly on violence. And so we're gonna need something and I'm gonna keep calling it the police. We talk about reform versus revolution. I would argue that what I and a small number of other scholars have been dealing with in terms of this systems approach is a revolutionary way to approaching the issue of police from the flashpoint. And when I say the flashpoint, I mean those situations that create most of the consternation and conflict in society. And I'll go through it pretty quickly to make a very long story short. In 1979, there was a near disaster on the Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania when a nuclear power plant went sideways. And this very smart sociologist by the name of Charles Perot in looking at that talked about why it happened. He made a very simple argument. You have things that are very, very complex and things that are tightly coupled systems that are tightly coupled and very complex. Bad things are gonna happen and these bad outcomes are what he called normal accidents. Well, I and some others have built upon that notion. And if you think about what a police citizen interaction is, police citizen interaction is an opportunity for a system accident. That is something going wrong in the moment where bad things happen. And so the notion of trying to say, well, this officer was wrong and so we're gonna punish him. What we're gonna punish her doesn't get us very far because we then don't look at what led to that mistake. And let's talk about a mistake right now. A police officer engaged in some behavior that didn't need to happen when he or she uses force. What we wanna do is we wanna step back and look at the entire event from how the information was brought to the officer's attention through dispatch, the information that the dispatcher got from the citizen who called in will say, it's a radio call, so on and so forth. How are officers trained to interpret this information? How are officers trained to communicate with other officers as they approach as they get to the location, so on and so forth? And this leads us to another literature that came after Perot's notions of normal accident is called high reliability theory or high reliability organizations. There are things that we often need in all the time that are very, very dangerous. We don't think about them as dangerous. Most of us have been in an airplane at least once or twice. Why in the world would you get in an aluminum can and fly 500 plus miles an hour, five miles above the earth? Because you trust the people that build it. The plane, you trust the people that are flying the plane and you trust the system of air traffic control so you don't crash into each other, so on and so forth. And civil aviation became very, very safe by virtue of a series of mistakes and then learning from those mistakes and not looking at pilot air but looking at how the system broke down. And so if we start applying that to policing, we can look at what went wrong prior to the event and I'll very briefly talk about the Darren Wilson, Mike Brown encounter that happened a little bit over six years ago, not very far from where I live here in the St. Louis area. And most people think about that and they think white officer, black suspect, unarmed, death by definition, awful situation, no doubt about it. But if you think about how that encounter started, Darren Wilson approached Mike Brown and his partner and got very tightly coupled, got very close and that's where the initial encounter occurred that led to the whole thing. Well, sound police work dictates that you don't approach somebody who you might have a confrontation with in that fashion. What you do is you keep your distance, you don't couple, you decouple, you keep distance, you get out of your car after you've called for a backup, now you have a different micro-social system with two officers, most people are not gonna be willing to take on two officers, but if they are, the officers are able to manage that with a far lesser use of force. So I don't wanna get too deep into the weeds but what I've done over the years and some academic pinheads like me as well as police officers, we sit down and we critique shootings and other uses of force where officers did stuff and we say, why didn't they do it this way back here? Why did they let it spin out of control to the point where it escalated? And so if we think about police officers as experts, that group in our society who we believe should be dealing with non-compliance, we want them to be expert. So the question is, why are they not expert? Why do police officers all around the country keep making mistakes of the elk that Darren Wilson made that led to the Mike Brown shooting? Why is it that if you watch YouTube videos of police shootings, you'll see time after time after time, police officers getting too close. Multiple police officers yelling and screaming as opposed to having one officer doing the talking so on and so forth. So there is a literature and this notion of higher long building organization that says that you need to radically transform the culture of an organization or an institution in order to develop a mindset and a skill set so that you can deal with the tough job that you have to do. Probably the most dangerous four or five acres in the world is a nuclear aircraft carrier in the United States Navy. Anybody who knows anything about naval flight operations, incredibly, incredibly dangerous. In very tightly coupled space, you've got tons and tons of jet fuel, ammunition, ordinance, all sorts of stuff. The US Navy hardly ever has a loss of life in a aircraft launching and recovery operation. Why? Because they have built a highly reliable system. And there's another thing that goes along with this, talking about safety culture, about how it is you develop a safety culture. And once again, I don't wanna go into the weeds now, but suffice it to say that there's a well-developed theoretical literature and a ton of empirical evidence in realms outside of police, that if the police adopted, they would be able to deal with non-compliance in a far more restrictive, for lack of a better term right now, fashion. There are going to be times and places where police officers have to shoot people. There is no doubt about it. Someone runs into your house and starts shooting at you. You don't want the police to show up and say, hey, excuse me, we're out here and we're just gonna stay out here. You want the police to come in and protect you. So somebody who does that and then is running down the street shooting wildly through the neighborhood, you want the police to stop that person, many times the only option they have is gunfire. So you can't take that completely off the table, but what you can do is you can expect the police to do better. And the only way that line officers are gonna do better is if all the way up and down the chain of command, there's expectation for excellence in dealing with non-compliant people. And when the review process from the sergeant, the lieutenant, the captain, the chief, whatever, identifies something, they then drive it back down and retrain the officers or remind the officers, here's how we need to do this stuff. And so my argument is that this requires a radical cultural shift about how police officers deal with non-compliance, how police agencies train officers to deal with non-compliance, and how the institution of policing deals with these situations and prepares officers. And then I think this piggyback's back again to what Lisa was talking about, having honest reviews so that we can honestly identify where the problems are and then start wiping them out. So that's my quick down and dirty on it. Okay, we're setting up a nice conversation. Browder it. Well, thank you. I'm here, by the way, in my capacity wearing hats, for example, of a former Obama administration official, the continuing chair of the My Brother's Keeper Alliance, it started as a task force in the White House, which I ran in the last three years of the Obama administration and now as part of the Obama Foundation, and then also in my capacity as a professor at Michigan at the public policy school and also from time to time at the law school as well. So with those various hats on, let me just sort of start with how I got to this focus over the last several years especially. And I wasn't among the people who day-to-day worked on policing reform in the Obama administration, but because of course of the overlap with the MBK related work and recommendations we did, I certainly looked at these issues. Let me say first, revolution, reform, reimagining. And so I come at this from that other word, reimagining police and the reforms can be characterized in that context as radical or as incremental, but there's just a whole series of things we can do to reimagine the relationship between police and the communities, especially communities of color and especially the relationship and interaction between police and African-American male and females. And by the way, any kind of reform or revolution or training has to of course taken to consideration the fact that we live in a nation where systemic racism is profound, it has been profound, it continues to be profound, it continues to affect everything about our society. We have indeed made progress, there's no question, but we still have a lot more progress to make. So any systems, any individuals who are involved in major systems like police departments, like universities, like financial institutions, we have to acknowledge the role of race and the importance of addressing race, identifying it, addressing it and trying our best of course to eradicate the harmful effects of racism, whether they be in terms of emotion or whether they of course have to do with life and death issues. President Obama, just a little bit going back in terms of the history on this, recognized these important issues around community policing and relationships between the police and communities and as a result started a task force. It was the 21st century, or the task force on 21st century policing. And he brought together police officials as well as activists, as well as policymakers and academicians from across the country. And we then of course released a series of recommendations. It was sort of in the middle of our second term, many police departments embraced those recommendations. But of course, when we left office, there were many that hadn't even started and there were many that stopped along the way. But that work has continued. The recommendations have continued. They've been adapted to by many other organizations. There are police departments that continue to embrace those recommendations and then to extend those recommendations and to look at new things as certainly events have warranted. In terms of the work of President Obama continuing on this, just in June of this year, he issued sort of a challenge to cities and counties across the country to make a pledge to reform their police departments. There are over 300 cities and other communities across the country that have done that, that have made that commitment. That's very, very, that makes us optimistic again about the sense, the broad sense that there are many communities and police departments that in fact want to make change. And so we've seen communities, for example, in Madison, Wisconsin, that have embraced changes that are very progressive as well as in Washtenaw County right there, close to Ann Arbor and many other communities as well. And the view that we can, that better is good is something that in so many ways continues to affect the way we view the changes that need to be made. There's no question, no question at all that there's been a real backtracking of the kind of progress that we had been making before. But at the same time, because of the, sadly because of the tragedies that have happened, but also because of the activism that has happened throughout this country, especially going back to the summer, there's a significant appetite for change. We almost saw change at the federal level with the policing reform legislation that was considered and passed in the House of Representatives that would have banned no-knock warrants and would have ended qualified immunity. There was, as folks know, there was a Senate bill that didn't address qualified immunity but had a lot of the elements in it that were also in the House bill and politics and timing being as they are. It all came to, unfortunately, the clock ran out, but I believe that when we look to the next Congress and potentially the next administration, that things will get back on track at the federal level as well. But I would sort of end my opening comments with this. Change happens significantly at the state and local level. And again, whether it's major reforms or whether it's incremental reform, that's where those things happen the most and where communities can embrace the changes that have to happen. So that is, those are my opening comments and I look forward to a dialogue here. Excellent, thank you very much for getting us started, everybody. Okay, so let's dig in a little bit. Let's, the rubber reached the road in many respects. Paul Tilley used to say the devil's in the details and so that's exactly the devil a little bit. So, Lisa, if I'm fair with the characterization, let me know, you see the problem basically is a misapplication of police power. You see an end of non-militized force as being the end objective you see and the means getting there is retraining. No, so I think that... See it then, oh yeah. Yeah, no, I think that what's been important over the last few years is to notice that in communities where that have heavily invested in, any number of accountability strategies, training, policy change, the fundamental dynamics between a police department and the community remain problematic because it is not only, and I really don't wanna, I do not wanna overdraw this. Of course training is important, of course policy is important and of course accountability is important in any for a public defender office, that's the sector I came out of, for teachers, for a sanitation department, you need all of those things as a sort of public, you know, public asset, but the core dynamic is I think not reachable through training policy or accountability and the core dynamic is that officers are asked to do things that necessarily set them in an adversarial, unhelpful relationship with people who are struggling for reasons that have to do with other systems failures, but officers tools necessarily place them in a problematic relationship with those problems and that is not the fault of any individual officer and there is no way to train your way out of that. You have to make a different set of options that officers then have, you know, guidance around like how do they relate to that if they get called to a thing, how do they let go of that problem in a way that is not abandoning the situation but transferring it to a place where it really belongs. That has been the work in that area which has the greatest potential for transformation is the most starved. So in my book, that is the place that we need to spend our time because it will necessarily reduce the weight that training policy and accountability have to carry. We want to set up those situations in the first place. So where is your opinion that you think the unreasonable act could not happen? Couldn't hear. Yeah. I'm sorry, we used to have to have to do everything. Lisa, where do you think the unreasonable act came from? I didn't get that either. Where did I think the something came from? Unreasonable act. Oh, reasonable act? No, no, the unreasonable act. Thank you. The unreasonable act. I'm still like, I'm still. Getting an echo, Christian. Yeah, if everybody else can mute, then give me a second. Everybody else mute. Yes. Where did the unreasonable ask come from? Right, I mean, this is a nation so pervaded by interlocking failures and interlocking abandonments of large segments of our population, that, you know, and mass incarceration has definitely fed into that. We have, you know, so many people who are now on the downslope of intergenerational trauma that it was engineered by public policy that everybody now says they regret. And it's so, it's so, it's so, it's so, it's so, it's so, it's so, it's so, it's so, and it's gonna take a long time for healing to, for healing to catch up to the harm that we've intentionally done, but not only did this harm come out of, you know, the sort of world of the criminal legal system. We've also done a poor job of educating people. We've done a poor job of housing people. We've done a very, very poor job of attending to the medical needs and the behavioral health needs of people and as a result, the, you know, you have a landscape full of very serious problems and a very underdeveloped public architecture of response. So there are other countries where, you know, it's just as easy to call other systems of response as it is to call police, but in America, the only thing that people are taught we can call and have come on demand is policing. So that's why, and because there does need to be, this is where I would like to say I'm as revolutionary as they come, but I do not believe that mutual aid and entirely voluntary and organic responses are sufficient. I believe that there must be systems of public response that everyone isn't, no matter what their network or identity, everyone has a right to call on those. And unfortunately, we have a country that has not developed those except in this one column, policing, which is the poorest match to many, not all, but to many of the problems that we will, that the public institutions are rightly gonna be asked to solve. Thank you. Dave, I definitely see some overlap. I think you need to do you. Yes. Thank you. So Dave, I definitely see some overlap with regards to what Lisa was discussing and what you were discussing. So two things, one, am I fair with the problem are kind of like systematic mistakes. The objective is to have a well-trained police force that is not making these mistakes and your means is radical change in the tactics or techniques. That's question one. Question two is many people in the current conversation are discussing something like racial animus, right? But you've taken us in a very different direction with regards to kind of a concatenation of errors that result in violence. And so why are we still stuck on this animus thing and how and why should someone accept your, it's a concatenation of mistakes that results in the violence? Let me handle two first and hopefully I'll remember to go back to one. I think that unfortunately a narrative, once a narrative catches with a group or a narrative catches about an issue, we tend to run with that. And so the argument that I'm making decouples from issues of race and gender and social class and whatnot and says there are, and this actually goes back to point one a little bit, there are known ways of managing difficult situations without having them spin out of control. And the police, the institution of policing, the history of policing, we know how to manage most things. The problem is that oftentimes we don't, when I say we, I mean the guys and gals that are the cops now, they're not able to apply that in the right way. And it's not going back to what Lisa was saying, the line officer's fault, it's that they haven't been taught how to think systemically. And this also goes back to Lisa's point. So one of the things I was talking about is the notion of having deep reviews of situations. If you look at quick narrative accounts of officer involved students around the country, for example, fatal encounters, Washington Post, whatever, you will see time after time after time. It's someone who's in a mental health crisis who ends up getting killed. So the question is, among other things, that systematic review shouldn't just look at the police, but what about other institutions in society that could have been brought to bear? Maybe what should have happened in this case is a mental health worker should have showed up, perhaps paired with a police officer, because maybe there was some threat. But a mental health worker or a mental health crisis counselor, whatever you want to call him, who truly knows how to manage this. And then that changes the dynamic of the event. It changes the dynamic of that encounter from the start. Now, did I cover them both? Or do you want me to go back to either one or both? I'm good, that was good. So, Broderick, a couple of things from, these are three, but they're separate, they're related questions. In a sense, what happened to our imagination? Did we ever have an imagination? And how do you cultivate an imagination regarding these issues? And who needs to have the imagination, actually, with regards to what to do? Is it the citizens, the police, politicians, movements, lawyers, all? Well, look, we've clearly imagined it wrong, right? So, reimagining is not to say that we had this wonderful imagination about it, and now we need to look at it again. We, I mean, it's been wrong for a long time. So reimagining is, I would sort of see that term differently, right? But I want to actually go back to something that David said, and this notion of the mental health crises and in many of the police-involved shootings, there are mental health crises of the person who gets shot and killed by the police. There's no question there are instances like that. What apparently happened in Philadelphia was the case. But that was not the case with Tamir Rice. That was not the case with Elijah McClain. That has not been the case in so many circumstances, certainly, what happened in Minneapolis this past summer with George Floyd. And so, you know, the notion that somehow, you know, if we just had different people come to the circumstances, they could handle it differently. You know, that has the potential to make people think that if we do that but don't address deeply the issues of bias around policing, then we're not going to solve this situation the way we need to. We need to acknowledge that there's deep biases in the systems that we have, including in the police systems. So, anyway, I wanted to say that just in terms of the victims of a lot of these shootings around the mental health crisis issue. I think that for a lot of our officers, though they do need to put this in a different perspective, they do need the availability of, you know, counselors and mental health crisis folks and others who can help many of them with the PTSD symptoms that some of them experience because of the day-to-day stresses of the jobs that they have or where they've come from. And I think that is a very important part of any kind of effective, you know, reimagining of police is to acknowledge that for a lot of police officers, there are some tremendous, you know, mental health challenges for some of them as well. Fantastic. Can I respond back to one thing real quick? I was about to say, Dave, quick response and then we open up, yeah. Yeah, I didn't want Broderick or anyone else to think that I was just saying that this notion of rejiggering the system and whatnot applies to the mental health piece. I was simply pointing out that that's a non-trivial aspect of the challenge. Now, you mentioned Tamir Rice. As soon as I saw that, I said to myself, normal accident, that's the term Charles Perot talked about in terms of coupling and complexity. And what happened is the driver officer in the Tamir Rice case gets so close, two or three feet away, why did he do that? I read the officer's statement and basically they completely misinterpreted what they had because they didn't have sound training and they thought they needed to get up close and then you had this weird situation with the ground and the brakes and he got too close. But the bottom line is there's other video out there of a police officer getting a call and this was two black men, two young black guys outside in a very similar setting. And what he did is he didn't rush in, he stayed back, he contacted them from what we call behind cover, radio got all the information and was able to resolve it. So my point is that when I talk about these notions of complexity and changing the system, it includes far more than the mental health piece that I was talking about. And so many times, as I was saying, when I and guys and gals that I know that no police work look at these officer involved shooting videos, we're just shaking our head, why did they kick the door? There was no need to go in. And this goes, I think back to something Broderick was talking about with no-knock warrant. Is there a time and a place? Sure, there's a time and a place for everything. But routinely, why are they doing that? When you've got somebody who is hiding inside a bathroom by themselves with a knife to their own throat, why would the police think it's a good idea to kick in that door? Makes zero sense, but these are the sorts of things that happen. And so I'm not trying to downplay that there are other things or say that the mental health piece is the only thing. I'm saying that that mental health piece is one way for us to think about the sorts of problems that the police are confronting and how we could change the system so they can do that. Sure. Actually, I'm definitely hearing some similarities across folks as we're dealing with it, a greater kind of like empathetic understanding of the conditions and the circumstances that people are finding themselves in and how that relates to kind of like coercive-wielding individuals and what institutional responses should take place between these. Many of us were speaking about this issue of kind of like how police and civilians should be interacting with one another. Opening up for a second though, we've been asked to what extent do you feel that the defund the police label has injured the path to meaningful, thoughtful, and sustainable progress, or seems to be speaking to many of these points, Lisa? I think it's been very helpful to force, it's really been an overton window contribution, if you will, of posing the question, what is the proper scope of the police responsibility and how do you write size resources for the proper scope of police responsibility and what's missing? There is, I think you can separate the defund framework which poses that question, like where should we be putting our resources as a society with the manner in which that conversation is being advanced? And I have real regrets about the way in which that conversation is being advanced in that. I think that there is an understandable and completely legitimate anger about the failure of accountability systems and so on to prevent such profound, such profound harm that it's just kind of manifested in a way of communicating that is driving potential allies and partners away and probably fracturing potential alliances for a generation. So, but you know what, like there's no point and that's happening for a reason and it's not something that anybody gets to control or design, that anger is there and that almost sort of lack of concern about alienating potential allies is there because of a failure to make the big paradigm shifts when we should have and that was a long, long time back. So I don't think it can be avoided. Thus, again, for my work, I look for places where we can actually find one another again, not withstanding both sides feeling so hurt and so misunderstood. That's a reality, we can't undo that. So how can we make a space where willing partners can eventually find one another again? I mean, what's, sorry, at least I believe. What's interesting is this desire for folks to kind of like understand exactly how people mobilize around different things. I thought that the idea of rather than defund the police, it should be let's reprioritize America, but that doesn't sound the same way. It's not focused in the same manner, but what we're asking for is a consideration as Broderick was going towards. We need to reimagine exactly what that world would look like, what it is we're trying to push for, not the beloved community might be one way you're trying to frame it or think about it, but we're trying to reimagine this relationship between people in a space where we really haven't had an opportunity to reflect on what we would like to live with and what we would accept and understand everyone's positions. I'm not one necessarily as a black male in America. I'm not one necessarily to automatically take a police position, despite the fact I have many relatives on the job. I'm more likely to be antagonistic to the whole dynamic given exactly how that power has been used against me. Dave, one of the reasons we got along in the first place was he was able to kind of break things down to me from a different perspective that I was able to kind of see for a moment. But once you start understanding, as Lisa was suggesting that the police are in many respects placed in an untellable situation, they're forced to basically deal with the vagaries of political economic inequality and they're the front person for representing the state in this war against what we're gonna do with these people that have been disenfranchised and left to their own devices in many respects. And so without the support for that, we're left in a very complex and distinct situation. And as people are more alive to the best of their ability, defund the police was like an idea that they came up with, but really they're talking about let's reprioritize and let's rethink exactly where we are. Lisa, you had something before we got a priority. Yeah, I just wanted to name that many sectors are called upon to notice when that you need to give way because, and it's not against you. So in climate work, right? There are economic sectors that need to transform in order that we survive as, so that the planet can survive. It doesn't mean that the people who did that work are not honorable people. Public defenders need, my sector, public defense needs to become smaller. There need to be fewer people who are assigned lawyers because we need to play, handle fewer kinds of problems in that way. And stewards of each area, including police, need to be able to say, yeah, I think we're the progressive police leaders that are really quite courageous right now are saying like, I am fine with a reduced scope of police responsibility. And yes, that necessarily does mean a reduction in resources, but I need the resources for the job that I'm gonna be left with, that is, that's the enlightened self-interest position to take. And so, yeah, just naming that all sectors ultimately must ought to recede when they're useful, when the role that they need to take transforms. That's the natural course of things. It's just very hard for people. Well, it's a natural course of things in terms of logic, but not necessarily in terms of organizational survival. It's a broader, have you had something? Yeah, I was gonna make this on the defunding the police language. Our college age daughter, just we were at dinner, this is in the summer, she said, dad, what do you think about defunding the police? And of course, my initial comment back to her was, what do you mean? I mean, that's crazy, that won't happen. And so we had a back and forth and it was so important that we both listened to each other, right? Because what she was saying to me was, we need to consider the priorities and redirecting priorities. And it was a much, it was well beyond, right? A brand or a few words, it was much deeper than that. And on the other hand, I needed to help her understand that throwing out a term like defunding the police in many situations was gonna shut down the conversation. That was it. There was not gonna be any dialogue between she and the person who objected to what it was that she had thrown out there. And so that is such a big part, especially in the kind of political and news environment, social media environment we live in now where when a term gets used, before you know it, it is blown up, perhaps well out of proportion, well out of what was actually intended in the first place. And so this listening, and this is where police officials need to listen, a rank and file officers need to listen and then, you know, citizens do as well to understand. Very true. Okay. Question two, are we able to identify things that cause or encourage a particular kind of culture within police departments? What about the culture? What about that culture makes it hard for police organizations to reform from within anybody? I would argue once again, going back to the normal accident nature of things, police leaders haven't really thought about it in this way because they don't understand these basic notions of systems. But when I start talking to folks in law enforcement and explain to them what I'm talking about or have them read something that I've written, they're like, yeah, this makes perfect sense. This is the type of stuff we need to do. And by the way, this is part of a much broader move in the American criminal justice system. I'm sure Lisa is quite familiar with, for example, on things like wrongful convictions, we can go ahead and we can say we've got a bad prosecutor or somebody lied or there was a bad, you know, bite mark testimony, whatever the case might be. But the real question is typically what happens is there's going to be a series of mistakes. And the theory of the case that the detectives have when they first went out looking for the guy or gal that they thought did the heinous crime, that's where it starts. And so this notion of reviewing a wrongful conviction to try to figure out, not pointing a finger necessarily, but what's wrong with the system? That's the way to get at this. Now we also have to remember there's gonna be bad cops, there's gonna be bad prosecutors, there's gonna be people that are gonna lie to get out of a sentence in terms of trying to finger somebody, all that stuff happens. But if you start from the notion that the people in the criminal justice system generally the workers are trying to do their best but they don't know how to think about it and they don't have the tools, that's the problem. So there are folks around the country that are promoting this systematic review of policing of prosecutors' offices, of public defenders' offices, so on and so forth to try to figure out how to get rid of wrongful convictions. Exact same principle applies, but law enforcement executives by and large haven't been taught to think this way. They've been taught to think about what Lisa was talking about early on about accountability and policy and so on and so forth. And that's why my argument is that we need to radically shift the culture of policing towards one that puts safety, when I say safety, not just the safety of the suspect, the safety of the officer, but we don't want wrongful convictions, we don't want to arrest people, we don't go to jail and we certainly don't want to shoot people that don't need to be shot. But Dave, quick before we go to Lisa, what is your mechanism of that shift? Mechanism of the shift is to put out there into the realm of the law enforcement leadership community how to think about things in this new and fresh way. And I and some others have started to do that. Larry Sherman wrote a piece a couple of years ago, there is a group at the University of Pennsylvania law school that is working on this. So it's a matter of getting out the message that this is something that works elsewhere, we should do it in law enforcement as well. I'm like, Thomas Kuhn wasn't too happy about the possibility of a paradigm shift, man. So forgive my pessimism on that one. Lisa, you had something though. There are a few people trying to lead police departments in the direction of culture change. And I just think that it's incredibly important to listen to them, inventory the obstacles that they have faced in my own city. There was a genuine reformer who was interim chief back in 2014 and he was shown the door due to the resistance to profound change from within the department that played itself out in just a textbook way where the institution, the culture defends itself against profound change even when led from within. So I know Sheriff Clayton and Moshna there are just a few people who, what problems do you encounter? External political forces that put pressure on you to do things that are not helpful. The constraints from union contracts, the difficulty, any manager managing a large workforce has challenges, all the more so when the labor agreements sharply constrain visionary managers' efforts to do what needs to be done. There are huge barriers and even when a lot of progress is made, it's hard to sustain and hold it. So this is one of the reasons where I've just decided I feel like the more we can write size policing and not rely so heavily on changing the institution but match it to problems that it is uniquely equipped to solve the better off will be because it's just always gonna be hard. Radar, can you hear something? Yeah, you mentioned, Lisa, you mentioned Sheriff Clayton and he was one of the headliners on our Obama Foundation, my brother's keeper, reimagining police workshop the other day. He as well as a number of other African American police leaders including a black woman who is the police chief in Charlottesville, Virginia, which is interesting, her experience is very much, I'm sure model what is the case in Washington County with the University of Michigan having its own force and all that but the thing that Sheriff Clayton said that really stuck with me the most is that we have to look at reforming things, making changes, addressing the relationship issues between particularly African American males and the police when we're not in a crisis, when it's not the result of something, some horrible tragedy or other things that have happened but to do it in times when things are more relatively calm. And as we know, often that's not the case, people respond to crises rather than they do to more calm waters. But I think that's extremely important observation by him and wish him really well there in Washington County with that perspective. Thank you very much, Roderick, we're basically at time. What I find interesting about this is, I'd like Lisa's idea of this right sizing of policing and Dave's idea of the right calibration of what tactics need to take place and Roderick's conception of kind of like rethinking through how exactly we get to where we get to. What I find interesting is, we had some initial ideas about what policing were and then they got institutionalized and that got diffused across space and time and then that developed momentum. And so then the question is, are the people that are in these things able to get themselves out of this problem or do they need the shock or something from outside to bring it or is it this dynamic interaction between the two? And unfortunately, what we know from org theory, change rarely happens from within. And so there's going to be a dynamic necessity for the populations that occupy the country to assist in the restructuring of exactly how we wish to live and how we wish to specifically deal with individuals that carry weapons officially for the state. But I wanna thank all of you for participating today. This has been quite an interesting conversation and definitely hopefully we're allowed to continue this in this particular venue, but I'm sure everyone will be continuing to do what they're doing, where they're continuing to do it because this is clearly beyond the scope of one conversation. I'm sure we've all been in a million zooms addressing these issues as we've been proceeding and moving forward, but everyone be well. Thank you very much for that. It was very interactive and a lot of fun actually. Thank you very much. Nice to meet everyone. Nice to meet you all. Thanks so much. Thank you.