 Hello, everyone. My name is Lydia Khalil. I'm a research fellow here at the Lowy Institute. Welcome to this edition of Need to Know. Today, we're really pleased to have with us Ed Davis to give us his expert thoughts on some very timely issues that have exploded in the United States and is capturing global attention, policing, and the Black Lives Matter movement. He's here to talk us through what's really an extraordinary moment in America right now, where we have protests calling for systematic police reform and there's been a huge shift in mainstream support, particularly among white Americans for the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, Ed has a particular perspective for us because he's worked in law enforcement for 35 years. He spent most of his career in U.S. policing. He started out as a patrol officer at the Lowe Police Department and rose up to became superintendent. He also served as head of the Boston Police Department as its commissioner from 2006 to 2013. He was also commissioner during the Boston Marathon bombings and led its response. But Mr. Davis' policing experience is also international. He's worked on policing issues in Singapore, London, Northern Ireland, Jordan, and Israel, and has been a board member of the police executive research forum, the International Association of the Chiefs of Police, and Major City Chiefs Association. And currently, he heads his own business strategy and security services firm. So Mr. Davis, Ed, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Lydia. So great to see you again. So the first thing I want to ask you is your views on systemic racism within U.S. police departments. So it seems like now, particularly since the killing of George Floyd, there seems to be this widely held view that's not only reinforced by his killing, but subsequently by recent compilations of acts of police on video showing police using excessive force in the subsequent protests, that the police are systematically racist in the United States. You've been in policing for a long time. Do you hold this view? Where is this view coming from? Can you give us some context on why so many people are thinking this way of U.S. police forces? Sure. I welcome the opportunity, Lydia. So I reject the view that police are racist. I will say that we still recruit from the human race, and systemic racism is a problem in every institution. We're seeing it in the health field. We're seeing it in schools. We're seeing it in the boardrooms. So we're no better or no worse than any other group in the United States. As a matter of fact, our hiring policies over the last 20 years, usually driven by court decisions, but they've resulted in a significantly more diverse force than what it was when I went on the job in the late 1970s. So we've made a lot of progress. So on the issue of racism, sure there are problems. Sure, we have to work on this every day, but so does everybody in this country. So I guess what you're saying is that policing in police departments in and of itself is not systematically racist, but rather it's a reflection of American society. Absolutely. Police officers go out there to keep the peace. That's the primary job that they have. I've been a big advocate of community policing. And a lot of people think of police as one sort of monolithic group that we all think the same way we all do the same things. And that couldn't be further from the truth. I've been part of a real large number of progressive police chiefs in the country that have been pushing for community policing model and pushing away from the militaristic model that some police departments still employ. And so I'm sorry, we've made a lot of progress in that. And I don't think people understand that there's been a lot of change in police departments over the last 20 years. Well, I was going to say this is a good moment, I think, to step back and perhaps explain to our audience, which is a bit more globally focused rather than US focused, how policing works in America. Because in so many other countries, as I'm sure you've known, there's only a handful of police departments. They're often either state based or federal. Whereas the system in the United States is incredibly diverse and complex. I'm wondering if you could give us a bit of a background on that how policing works in the US. I'd be happy to. So there are 18,000 separate police agencies in the United States. Almost everyone is controlled locally, some with just one or two police officers in it. So the concept of policing in the United States was transferred here from London in the middle to late 1800s. And we followed the Peel philosophy, which was about maintaining the peace and the public of the police and the police of the public. And it worked like that for many years. For a lot of different reasons. The model began to change in the 20th century. And with the advent of police cars and the idea of law enforcement as being the main responsibility of police. Before that, police did any number of social services. They ran food kitchens. They housed people who were new immigrants to the country. I mean, it really was a wide range of responsibilities. They started to move away from that. Corruption drove that sometimes political corruption. But the bottom line is there was this whole mentality. Sort of simply is this an arrest or is this not an arrest? If I can make an arrest here, then this is a police matter. If I can't, then you have to call your own attorney. It's a civil matter. And when I first came into policing, that's the way I was trained. But in the early 1900s, it started to change. So you pointed to something really interesting about how policing had served a whole lot of other social service functions, rather than just you know, criminal investigations in long order. And you know, there's I've been having a lot of conversations lately with some, you know, police colleague friends of mine about the protests that have been going on and it's really interesting to me because they themselves have complained that to police departments over the years have been asked to take on more and more functions that are not a part of the core functions. So police have been called out to handle issues that they're not necessarily equipped to handle issues that might be better left to social workers, counselors. And now a lot of the police officers that I know saying, well, they're asking more of us and we're being responsible for the failures of society because we're the ones who are at the pointy end of the sphere. And it seems to me that that's actually what a lot of the defund the police movement people are also saying. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are about the defund the police calls or what reforms need to be made. And what do you think about this idea that policing is just taken on not only is militarized in some instances, not all departments, but some departments, but are taking on too many functions that are better left to other other agencies? There's no doubt that's a problem. And it was best mentioned by a colleague and friend of mine, David Brown, who was the police chief in Dallas when five police officers were murdered there by an active shooter. And David said, you're asking too much of us. And he's absolutely right. When I was brand new on the job. We had a very robust mental health system. It had its problems. But if we ran into somebody who was acting out and had mental health issues, we'd call an ambulance for them and they bring them to the local mental health center. That center no longer exists. Those hospitals would have been defunded. And, and nothing else has been put in their place. So there was a conscious effort to fix a problem that the mental health system had problems in it. But instead of fixing it, they disbanded it. And the the outcome of that is that police and emergency rooms now are doing that job. And just that issue, dealing with mentally ill individuals, results in violence, and there's got to be a way to fix that. Yeah. You've been a police commissioner, you know, throughout your career, you've called for some reforms, you've steered the Boston Police Department toward community policing. It seems like major city departments or other departments who have done the community policing model have been far better at at not only community relations, but also in law and order and law enforcement. But I'm interested in your views on what might be standing in the way of reform. And here I particularly remember an op ed that you recently wrote in the Boston Globe about how police unions can sometimes stand in the way of reform. So I wonder if you could elaborate on that and in other ways that you think that reforms have have been blocked. Sure. You know, I come from a police family, my father was a union official when I was a kid. And I was a I was a steward stop shop steward is when I first came on the job. So I'm very sympathetic to unions. Years ago, police were very badly mistreated in pay and hours and things like that. They needed to that needed to be fixed. But as time has progressed, the unions have eaten more and more into management rights. And you know, they call it quality of life for the officers. But it's got to the point now where offices are picking their own cars, they're picking their own shifts. There's no, there's no concept of putting diverse offices in diverse neighborhoods. There's just some real serious issues that have been gobbled up by the union. They're also the biggest impediment we have to effectively disciplining an officer that quite frankly doesn't deserve to be on the police department. Those there's not a lot of them. But boy, when you get one, and it sounds like this guy Chauvin was one. These are the kind of things that can happen. We've got to be very aware of that and we got to fix that. Yeah. So I guess my last question that that we can end on I want to bring it back to the Black Lives Matter movement. You know, the world is kind of waking up to this movement in this moment after the recent killing of George Floyd. But this is a movement that was started in 2013 in the United States. So this is not the first time that we've seen Black Lives Matter protests we had it after Ferguson, you know, Eric Gardner, Philando Castile, and other black men that have been killed protests. And the movement led by the Black Lives Matter movement has has shown itself calling for accountability and calling for reform. But I don't know about you. But to me, this moment feels very different. Not just because the protests are larger, but there just seems to be really a widespread embracing of what that movement is calling for. What do you think makes it different this time? And do you think that this could be a moment for change, serious changes in policing in the US? Well, I think there's a few things that make this different. And I'm actually happy that we are moving towards solution to some of these problems. The brutality in the inhumane act that occurred that set this off. It was just incomprehensible that someone would treat another human being like that. So I think that that that being caught on videotape and showed to everyone in the country and throughout the world. Really really did trigger something about the inequity that is occurring in the treatment that some people receive. And so if we can boil down some of these injustices that have happened for centuries into this one moment into crystallizing this and making people act on it, then some good comes out of this horrible tragedy. And that's really what I'm seeing here. Lawmakers who for years have supported unions and not been involved in solutions are starting to think about the decisions that they've made and change those decisions. Police officers who suffer with these, you know, people that are on the job and make life difficult for them and actually intimidate some of them in their actions. They're going to feel relieved about this if we can start to remove them. So there's a lot of very positive things coming from this. I hope we end up with a better society. Me too. And Davis, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate your perspective. Thank you,