 So if you aren't concerned about policing in America today, you should be. And if you are concerned after reading Barry's book, you'll be even more concerned. We think about the government surreptitiously collecting our e-mail data, text messaging. What you describe in the book as the crazy stuff, right? People searching our cavities. There's real concern, especially in the era of police violence especially. But as you mentioned in the book, you've been focusing on these issues for a very long time. So I have to ask, you know, why this book, why now? Well, the why now is because it took me a very long time to write the book. But you know, I've taught in this area for a long time, for decades. And all through the 1990s in particular, I got increasingly concerned about the permissiveness of the Supreme Court toward policing and what it was doing in the middle of a war on drugs, the toll on people's lives, the toll on our liberties. My lack of belief that it was making us safer necessarily, but that it was really having an impact on people. And then 9-11 happened. And all of a sudden everybody was talking about how we had to cut back on our liberties in order to make ourselves safe. Sandra Day O'Connor came to NYU and broke ground on a building and said, sitting Supreme Court justice and said we're going to have to cut back on our liberties and I was astonished. And I started to talk to people and everybody would say we have to cut back on our liberties. And I'd say, well, what is it that you think that the police should be able to do that they can't do? And if they could think of anything, they'd tell me and I'd say they can already do that. They can do way more than that. And people were surprised. And I realized we needed to have a way to get people to understand what was happening. And I started to dig out the stories that you've read in the book. And, of course, it did take me a long time to write the book and many more people are concerned about policing today. One of the key themes here in your book is this idea of democratic policing. What exactly is democratic policing? So I'm going to explain it in terms that are not in the book because I didn't think about them until after I published the book. So as long as it took me to write the book, I still didn't think about it. So, you know, if you think about accountability and government, democratic accountability, what we usually mean is what I now call front-end accountability. And this is going to sound so familiar to people. Your reaction is going to be a little bit like, duh, but it's not what we do around policing. So we have rules. We put those rules in place before we let officials act. They're transparent. We all know what the rules are. And the public is involved in writing the rules and we try to make sure that the rules do more good than harm. A little bit of cost-benefit analysis. And then we have back-end accountability. We have courts to make sure all of that works. But in policing, instead of doing front-end accountability, we do back-end accountability. We try to step in after things have gone wrong and fix them with civilian review boards, inspectors general, judicial review, body cameras are a form of back-end accountability. Let's try to see what happens afterwards. And democratic policing is the idea that we ought to move accountability and policing. We need a back-end, too. You can't get anywhere without a back-end, but that you need to move policing accountability to the front-end. We've got to get people involved in writing the rules, knowing what the rules are, having a say in how policing happens. Sherlyn, that idea of front-end accountability and back-end accountability, from your vantage point, where is the most conflict in terms of pushing for reform and really, you know, and sheathing that accountability when it comes to policing? Well, thank you. So I love the book because I think what Barry just described about how we have allowed policing to develop in this country without any real rules or accountability on the front-end is really the crux of the problem. It's the crux of the problem in terms of who it attracts to policing, who's allowed to be a police officer, how long they're allowed to stay in, what the public's expectations is of those who are supposed to protect and serve. And so it means we have kind of a warped view of what that public safety function should be because we're not, we're talking about police officers as though they're professionals, but we're not treating them as if they're professionals. I'm a professional, I'm a lawyer, and there are things, and Barry's a lawyer, there are things that you have to do in order to become a lawyer on the front-end. You can't just walk up and say, I'm a lawyer, and then later on you practice and then we try to figure out whether you practiced correctly or not. You have to actually, you know, hit some hurdles that, and there's a code of professional responsibility, and there are all kinds of things that govern our conduct that anybody can look at. And if you want to find out whether I've ever been, you know, suspended or disbarred or admonished, you can go right to a website and you can pull it up, and all of that's available to you. And yet for the people that we equip with a taser and a night stick and a gun and a shield and with the authority of the state to take life, we don't do that. And so that, that just conception of policing is so way off. However, what is also problematic is that the back-end is broken, right? And so, you know, I do the back-end, right? The back-end is about accountability and the legal system. You know, just last week the Florida, the Florida legislature apologized to four men known as the Groveland Four, who were caught up in a kind of lynch mob in Florida, in Lake County, Florida in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Two of the men were actually killed, one by a police officer, Sheriff Willis McCall, who basically controlled the county. And two of these men were LDF clients. They were represented by Thurgood Marshall and Jack Greenberg, and this was at the same period that they were working on the Brown cases. And the book about these, about this incident, when the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, Devil and the Grove, if you haven't read it, you should read it. It will be a motion picture. But in any case, it's really an amazing account. It's called Devil and the Grove, the Groveland Four, Thurgood Marshall, and the Donning of a New America. So the Florida legislature just apologized for, you know, what happened and what Sheriff Willis McCall just did in Lake County. So how many years later is that? Like, the back-end is so broken that, you know, apologies come in, you know, 65 years later for things that should have been resolved and should have been dealt with. So the back-end of what our legal standards are, that govern when somebody does something wrong. If a doctor commits malpractice, we know what's going to happen. If a lawyer engages in malpractice, we know there's a set of punishments in the process. Police officers have really become kind of routinely immunized from the legal system that could have made things better, you know, to make that back-end sharp. It wouldn't change the fact that the front-end is necessary and the conception is wrong, but it would at least ensure that there's some accountability which could drive the conduct of those who are police officers. But unfortunately, that accountability piece just doesn't happen. I just want to echo something which is the way that the system is supposed to work is that the front-end and the back-end talk to each other. So the front-end is a clear set of rules and then we know on the back-end what we're going to reprimand, what we're going to punish. And by the same token, when the back-end works and it doesn't, you couldn't be more right, it tells us where there are problems that we can then write rules for on the front-end, but we don't have that transmission belt in policing at all. Picking up at that point right there, let's look at, you know, how it actually happens in the real world. Let's take a police shooting, for example, say Tamir Rice in Cleveland, a 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed by police. Someone called 911 said there's a man with a gun in a park. They say that, you know, the gun may be a fake, right? He said it may be a fake. The responding officers and their police cruiser rolled up within just feet of Tamir Rice in a park. And shoot and kill him before the car even comes to a stop. Later on, we find out that the police officer who fired on Tamir Rice had this terrible record. He was fired from the former department. No one had any of these details. His accounting of what actually happened contradicted itself time and again just yesterday or the day before, I believe, they released some of the video. When you talk about front-end accountability, even before we get to the back-end, in a situation like this, what should it look like? We know what happened, but what should it look like? You know, when I do a PowerPoint, I showed Tamir Rice as one of the examples about what's gone very wrong because there's no front-end. So again, Sherylen's right the back-ends deeply in trouble, but what we'd all like to see happen is not to have to be on the back-end. We'd like things to go right on the front-end so people aren't shot. And so, you know, what's supposed to govern this situation, a use of force policy. Departments have use of force policies, but they're not always public. In fact, there was a fight in Chicago because the superintendent said to the public, here's our new proposed use of force policy, and I have this email sitting on my desk in my office from the union saying, the world's gone upside down. We're asking people what the use of force policy should be, and I'm thinking, yes, we should not have any say in how force is going to be used on all of us. You know, that makes no sense. So a good use of force policy, one that's publicly vetted, you know, doesn't get to that point. It tells officers they have to de-escalate. It tells officers that they have to use distance and time, which they could have used in that situation. There was no need to go flying up so close to him and jump out and shoot to say, you know, keep your distance, pull out a bullhorn, tell him to get his hands in the air, and then we don't get there. And so you need the policies like that, and they need to be transparent, so we all know what they are. If they're transparent, then we all know that they're broken, and instead, and I'm sure Sherilyn has a very strong view on this, you know, what we get as we go to grand juries with this very vague Supreme Court standard that just says, was it objectively reasonable and people fight about that and you don't get indictments. And so you need those clear rules on the front that say this is the conduct we expect out of you. We've all bought into that conduct. That's what we're going to judge your behavior against. So just because you brought up Tamir Rice, let me just say this one is the low-hanging fruit. And thus, I don't even want to credit it with the wonderful regime that Barry has set out in his book for how we would work the front end. Because, in fact, there are already policies in place that should have prevented that from happening. One of the things that we did in our office last year was we invited three police officers to come and spend the day in our office and talk with us about what they see and what they face. And for one part of the day, we looked at videos. And, you know, we controlled ourselves, because I figure I know what I'm thinking when I see it, but I want to know what are you thinking? And we just kind of did a frame by frame. And any police officer who's being honest with you will tell you that when they roll that car up on Tamir Rice I mean what the officer said to us is, that guy has no training, right? So they didn't need a use of force protocol. That was bad policing. You don't actually roll up that close even if you thought that was a real perpetrator. That actually would be dangerous. That's not what you do. So you already have a situation in which that clearly goes contrary to whatever most police officers have been taught. Then you have Timothy Lohman, the shooter, who was actually fired from another police department because he was regarded as immature, because he broke down, I think actually in the shooting range was like where he had the problem. Police chiefs, if they are, again, being honest, and that means you have to be behind closed doors with no union person present, they will tell you several things. They will tell you, one, they would like to have better screening for who they hire as police officers. Two, they would tell you, and many have told me, they would love to have the age raised. They actually don't want kids. With all due respect to the young people, when I was 19, I should not have been armed with the power of the state. Okay, I'm just being honest with you, 20. So they would love to raise the age to 25. Most of them would want that if they could attract people at that age. They would also tell you that they would like to know when they're hiring who they're hiring. So they would love to have a database that they could go into that would show them officers who had been fired and so forth. They're managers, right? They're building an employee staff. Who wouldn't want to know that? They do want to know that. The tension happens with, are they willing to say that publicly? Are they willing to be transparent about the fact that they know that the way in which the gate is not kept is actually producing some of these problems, the recycling of bad officers. There was so much anger about the officer who killed Ramali Graham being able to resign because the fear that the officer goes someplace upstate and gets another job and so this issue of officers actually getting fired and then where is that information and are police chiefs readily getting access to a centralized database that would tell them about it? That seems to me like you don't need a regime for that. What you need is transparency and honesty about the fact that this is something any employer who was hiring someone who was going to be able to use lethal force would want. Beyond the mechanics of the way it works and the rules and policies I wonder how much of this is actually about race. At least in the last 200 years we've seen black men especially and black women the victims of this kind of extrajudicial killings and violence and abuse. The idea of democratic policing has allowed a lot of abuse especially among our most vulnerable. Are we not going to fix the system, fix policing because we're dealing with black folks bearing the brunt of it? So that's a terrific and super important question and I raised it at the beginning of the book and I come back to it at the end of the book and then in the middle of the book where I talk about constitutional policing I devote several chapters to race and racial profiling, stop and frisk so I have two very very different answers that I'll give you. One of them is without democratic policing we're not doing so great on race we're not even coming close to doing great on race and I believe that a lot of things that go wrong with race could be better if we in fact have the policies in place. So Sherilyn for example is right about policing and use of force and there are and cops will tell you that it was as they say lawful but awful which is that under the Supreme Court precedent it might have been fine but it should never have happened. But the policing project that I started is working in Cleveland working on the use of force policies and you know what Cleveland has is just archaic in place and so and there's 18,000 police departments so you know you got to go to 18,000 different places and bring things up to date. But then when you get there it's true we've just had a terrible history in this country about race and you have to worry about the fact that the rules are going to be race disadvantaged. Now one thing is if they're public rules they're less likely to be race disadvantaged and if we had public rules that would help but then I'm quite clear in saying you know I point fingers in the book and one of the fingers that I point is at the courts which I think have done just an awful job of protecting us and particularly of dealing with issues of race and it's extraordinary when it comes to policing the Supreme Court forgets everything that it knows about race in every other context. So any you know students who's had sort of this much constitutional law knows that if race is a factor in what the government does we get what's called strict scrutiny which is we look very closely at what happens and I mean if race is just a drop of what went on we look very very closely and usually what happens is invalid and in policing the Supreme Court says as long as race isn't the sole factor it's okay it is the only place in American constitutional law where you can reach out to race and say it's okay to use as a factor. No this is this is you know the question actually really takes us into the heart of some of this because theoretically there are rules on the back end right I mean there's a Supreme Court standard of some sort so there's a rule right and if you actually go back into the case that created the rule Tennessee versus Garner and I've had some and I've been dealing with it a lot over the last two weeks because we just took a staff retreat down to Memphis and we actually represented Eugene Garner's father Cleem Tree Garner and this is a case we litigated over 20 years so Edward Eugene Garner was killed he was 15 years old and he was killed in Memphis he was the police officers received a call about someone trying to enter a home be a burglar in a home the officers came two officers that went to two different sides of the house they saw a kind of box underneath a window and then the officer on the other side saw somebody running towards a back fence and then one of the officers saw him running recognized that he was a kid said he was a youth thought he was about 5'2 weighed 130 pounds actually turned out that he weighed between 85 and 100 pounds saw him running for a back fence identified himself as the police saw him running for the back fence and the officer admitted that he shot him because I thought I probably wouldn't be fast enough to catch him that's how he was killed so what does the Supreme Court say? the Supreme Court actually when you read Tennessee vs. Garner you feel like this is a good decision the Supreme Court saying hey you can't just shoot a fleeing felon just because you can't catch them they're saying some really good stuff and in the absence of race that decision interpreted by subsequent courts should not have produced the result that it produced the reason that it produces the result that it has produced is because when we begin to interrogate this unless the officer feels that he was under threat or this person was a threat to others and we don't interrogate the way in which the word threat is racialized if we don't interrogate the way in which all the studies that show that an African American child is regarded by police officers as being 5 years older than his actual age so a 13 year old would look like a 18 year old for example if we don't deal with why an officer would say that or why an officer would believe that I remember when Rodney King was beaten how they interviewed the jurors and the jurors said he was in control of the whole situation and the officer said he was like a Tasmanian devil there was all this racialized so if we don't if we just use a word like threat because that doesn't sound illogical that the officer has the right if he believes that his life is being threatened or that the perpetrator is a threat to the lives of others are crazy unless you know that the way in which officers interpret that is that an African American man is going to be regarded as a threat in a different way than a white man will be all other things being equal and that's how Garner gets killed and that's how in these subsequent cases the interpretation by courts ends up exonerating police officers all the time and so just this week we had a case involving qualified immunity for police officers that was denied review in the Supreme Court denied cert and Justice Sotomayor wrote just an extraordinary dissent as she has been doing in a number of these cases really focusing on these cases of police brutality and talking about why this is the kind of case that needs to go to trial because if you just kind of do it on the paper if you do it summarily it allows the infusion of all these racialized tropes if I say the word burglar to you the image in your head is probably racialized I don't even care what race you are we manage our racism by slowing things down that's how we manage our bias and probably everybody in this room does it it's not that you don't have bias you have bias but you manage it because you have a certain ethic that tells you that you want to manage it because of the way you were raised to be in the world you decide that when somebody walks in a room even if my mind says who that person is I'm going to have that conversation and allow myself to be persuaded differently but that only happens with time and so to have police officers making split second decisions and pretend that race has no part in that split second decision is crazy but that is what the law allows and so that's how it can be lawful it can be lawful because we have removed the consideration and the element that without question influences how an officer sees threat either to himself or to the public which is why you need a set of rules that keep you as much as you can and it's not always going to happen away from that split second moment so that you're not having it happen at that moment where we know that fear kicks in that officers aren't trained well enough and something bad is going to happen if I could just pile on because I on the race issue I want to pile on and I'll just case out of Anyanta, New York which most of you probably know nothing about but it's unbelievable so a woman reports that she's been attacked and nearly raped in her home it's an elderly woman and it's dark she doesn't know but she thinks from the timbre of his voice that he might have been black that he moved quickly across the room so he might have been young and there was some indication that the person that doesn't have very many folks of color there's a college nearby and then there's the town the police instantly go into high gear they go into the college, they get a list that's been called the black list of every African American student on the campus they're given the list by one of the administrators absolutely and then they go knocking on all the dorm rooms to ask people to show their hands and then they go to everybody in town some people get stopped a couple of times they're not even just men that get stopped there's a woman who works at the college who's African American and stopped asking everybody to show their hands and a case is brought saying this is clearly race discrimination and the court says they had a victim description that involved race so it was reasonable to stop this many people and you just kind of scratch your head and think in what realm could that possibly have been reasonable and the court even says in that case that you can do it because there's so few African Americans in the town African Americans only constitute 1% of the population this is something that could be done this is kind of a rational law enforcement and Barry's right the truth is and for those of us who have really leaned into this in the last few years and the videos keep coming and I know a lot of Americans aren't paying attention anymore but I get videos every day and what you don't want is for the encounter to happen and this is what Barry's talking about you know the energy that we put into like hoping that an officer is going to be held accountable for me that energy is not just about wanting the justice system to work but it's about officers telling me that if officers were held accountable it would change behavior right so because what I really want is for the front end to change because I want the kid the person the man the woman not to be dead I want them not to be assaulted I want them not to be brutalized I want them to change the front end but it turns out and police officers will tell you this that the accountability piece on the back end is a key part of making sure that the front end actually works so my next question is kind of layered and touches on a lot of what both of you have talked about you know a garner but not the garner you're talking about the one in Staten Island captured on video being choked by a group of police officers now the choke hold is not illegal it's captured on video many would say it's a result of stop and frisk or aggressive encounters between the police and communities of color especially so I guess my first question is how have we handled this idea of implementing technology it's captured on video in response to the Walter Scott killing Eric Garner, Tamir Rice all on video many in the community have called for body cameras right but also it brings the question to stop and frisk nature of policing in terms of descending upon these communities and stopping every person of color you see with the hope that your suspicions are right that this black body that's already criminalized will in fact you know carry some criminality and so one I guess how have police handled how we in this idea of democrat policing handle the use of technology but also touch on this idea of stop and frisk and where that fits in democrat policing so I was going to let you go first but at any turn to democrat you want to go first anyway okay I'm going to say something so there are actually three huge topics there there's technology generally, there's body cameras and then there's this question of aggressive policing, proactive policing is what it's politely called I'm just going to pick one thread of that and then we can circle around to the rest so partly what drove me to write the book and to care so much was in the minds of some people the more policing there is the safer we are but I became convinced and more and more convinced the more I worked on the book that that isn't true so if you're looking under every rock for something you're never going to find it, that's a ridiculous strategy and you have to have a strategy that's thoughtful on the front end and it doesn't involve just jacking up as many people as you can but that's the road that we went down and the toll's been terrific so I mean terrible but terrific in the sense of how huge it's been this is a question of whether you move policy you know how did we get there I mean it's unclear how we got there but the one thing that we didn't have was any serious thoughtful conversation about what the policy would look like so let me just throw in one of the words the policing project that I've started is focusing a lot on cost benefit analysis of policing and cost benefit analysis of policing asks let's think about what we're about to do and try to figure out whether what we're doing is going to make sense down the road with the benefits but we're also going to look at the costs and when I started to investigate this literature the most extraordinary thing occurred to me I mean I'd say to my research assistants go out and get me the literature on cost benefit analysis of policing and they come back and they say well there isn't very much and finally I'd sort of stomp off myself and found out there wasn't very much but not only was there not very much literature about cost benefit analysis of policing nowhere in the literature I mean nowhere in the literature other than well I'll tell you where because it's remarkable what social costs of policing are no one ever asks what are the social costs of stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of people what about the loss of community trust and if you lose community trust then you don't have cooperation for the police to deal with the gun violence that you really care about and the only time anybody ever talked about a social cost was one study about drunk driving roadblocks that said well what about the value of the time for the people that were stopping at a roadblock all the rest of it never even considered and so that's the kind of you know one thing we'd like to get police departments to do is that they had a template to say let's think through this before we do something like let's think about who it's going to affect let's think about the downstream costs let's think about all the folks that we're going to arrest for small amounts of marijuana and then you know then we're going to be talking about mass incarceration so thinking about it on the front end is a way to say is what we're doing sensible well I guess I want to say something provocative which is that I think there are thoughts on the front end about aggressive policing so we're like you know we're back in this conversation again with the attorney general and he you know lives in amber in 1985 amber and so we're having like these crazy retro conversations about law and order and you know and you heard what he said about New York you know the other day is the murder capital and with soft on crime I mean just these crazy words that really are just kind of taken up from the 80s but actually don't have anything to do with reality to the point that he had to be rebuked by commissioner O'Neill I guess you know what I want I want to just kind of tie it into the stop and frisk piece because you know so first of all I want to acknowledge the the progress that we've made that we really should acknowledge right so the mere fact that we say stop and frisk and everybody in this room knows what we're talking about that's like a term of art right that was created just like mass incarceration and I know we love to say oh gosh the right is so good at this we're not that bad at it either and to challenge stop and frisk in New York took a very serious multi-disciplinary effort right that involved litigation the Floyd case we were the lawyers and the companion case that looked at stop and frisk in public housing it took this incredible community organizing around the community for just policing and so forth and really extraordinary people and a communications apparatus that would tell the stories of people who were stopped and frisk I'm sure many of you probably read that op-ed by Nicholas Perth that Sunday about how many times he had been stopped by police and really became kind of a conversation piece in the city and then you had the research by the NYCLU showing how many stops there were and the percentage of those stops that actually produced a weapon which is what they were supposed to be for but that effort from start to finish probably took about 10 years right to get to the point of the litigation and to get to the point where it really had an effect on the mayoral race and transformed that and where you know we are now in the process of monitoring and we're you know something new is happening so that took 10 years but it did happen and it shows you how you can put all those pieces together and happen. Well how did we end up with such a crazy policy in the first place I guess I want to suggest that there was a calculation not explicit I don't think people sat around in a room and said I know what we can do you know we can do 600,000 stops a year that yield virtually no weapons and let's just do it you know I do think and I was in conversations with the commissioner Ray Kelly and mayor Bloomberg who really stood by Stop and Frisk to the bitter end you know right they were just true believers and I do think that Stop and Frisk was designed not only to be a true effective law enforcement policy but it was also designed to send a message of comfort to the particular electorate that they were talking to which were white people in New York if we're honest there was a sense of we are in control and when you hear this kind of aggressive talk about policing when you hear the words law and order which is like you know it's Nixonian right it's supposed to trigger something in the electorate it's supposed to trigger something in the psyche of the conversation that's why Jeff Sessions is using that term that's why President Trump used that term when they say law and order this has been my challenge so I've been saying well you know there are lots of laws right the voting rights acts of law the law enforcement misconduct statute which is what governs the ability of the attorney general to investigate police department that is a law right so you'll get to pick and choose though if you're law law and order let's go for it you know but they know what they mean when they say that and that very term carries with it something that is meant to send the message to a particular part of the electorate so I don't think we should fool ourselves into suggesting that it's entirely unthinking it's wrong thinking it's not it's not and I can't even say it's irrational because it is sending that message and the message is received and I think that's why again unless we're prepared to actually engage and interrogate the question of race and policing and control what it means to control black people really we end we're going to leave something on the table but what I what I the reason I love unwarranted is because the only way you defeat that is by putting as much public involvement and transparency and structure in place you know lawyers like structure because we like to be able to say you didn't do this you didn't do this you didn't do this you know and when you just have this kind of amorphous regime that we have now it's all about feelings it's in it allows for the manipulation particularly the racial manipulation of tropes about you know who police are and who that kid was and who's a hell razor and who's and who Mike Brown was and who right it really allows all that in because there's no real regime to point to to say no you've got to actually talk within the contours of this requirement or that requirement and we always lose when we don't have contours for that story amen and then kind of to pick up on a question I kind of buried in there and you talked about this idea of feelings and transparency and many of those people who are on the other end of police targeted police harassment what we'll call it that they have hurt feelings hurt bodies sometimes there's abuse that they've been complaining about for years so people have wanted receipts right they want some sort of something written down about account what would the encounter itself many people have called four body cameras the use of body cameras it's been kind of controversial as more and more police departments are adopting the use of the body cameras people are now questioning whether you know are people getting exactly what they want when they get body cameras well so this has always been a fairly controversial issue and should and should be and should continue to be so in many ways I support body worn cameras but I also recognize that they're not a panacea and we have to be really concerned about what they mean we should remember that that camera is always facing out to the community right and you know for those of us who have lived in places as I did in Baltimore where the blue lights you know on the corner and you're being surveilled at all times these things are deeply deeply problematic the perspective of that camera is on the police is on the community you know the NYPD's pilot program for example we issued a statement you know this week expressing our objections with the pilot program which officers can turn it on and turn it off when they want a program in which officers are allowed to see the video before they make a statement which essentially allows them to fix their statement around the video that's kind of not what we had in mind and so I think we have to we have to be really really serious about what you know everybody wants to just say well it's body worn cameras and I think the implication in your question is so important because we have seen these killings you know we saw Tamir Rice and we saw Eric Garner and we saw Walter Scott and there's still no accountability right so it's not like seeing it means something's gonna happen right it does mean that what it what it meant and I don't want to minimize this first of all it was a way to bring the community in the community forced its way in in the absence of democratic policing by taking these videos often at risk to themselves I don't know about you but when I saw the Walter Scott video I couldn't move and I couldn't move because I was in real time scared to death and what I was scared for was the guy taking the video I kept I thought as I watched it oh my gosh this police officer is gonna turn on him get out of the way like that's what I was thinking so we should not minimize the risk of those who take the videos we should recognize it as a very powerful moment of democratic demand right you know when when Diamond Taylor sitting there and videotaping and narrating the death of her boyfriend Philando Castile in that car this is powerful this is not just personal this is a this is a this is a democratic moment in which people are saying I want somebody to see this I can't stop it they're not putting the camera because they think they're gonna stop it they're saying I'm I'm inviting the public into witnessing with me this injustice and so I want to suggest that that is really powerful and important that's of course in the hands of the of the community and I have concerns about that too I know that they're you know the ACLU had done a whole project where people were taking you know videos and my own view the reason I preferred the camera on the police officer is because of what I just said because I am I think that those people who are taking those videos are doing it at risk to themselves and we shouldn't forget that we shouldn't pretend that they're just you know community videographers and that police are okay with it they're not okay with it and so all of these are the things we have to work out as we as we as we deal with body-worn camera and I'm just going to connect that with the technology question because we are doing a very very bad job as a society of regulating the use of technology by law enforcement generally and because we're failing to do that we are enhancing a surveillance of a society and doing very little to make sure that it's one that's going to keep all of us safe so I've I've been buried in body cameras since it all began and I share all of Sherilyn's concerns I you know and you pick the two shootings that I think affected me in some way the most which was Walter Scott and Flando Castile in fact the second you know I thought this is going to be a game changer and it was looking like it might and then that was right before the officers were shot in Dallas and the entire narrative flipped in the other direction again you know what we have done is invested in unbelievable amount of money it's almost incomprehensible in enhancing the surveillance of all of us by putting body cameras on officers now you know my guess is that the bet will pay off in a particular way which is that when people know they're being observed it tends to cool down all transactions and so the hope is that we're going to have less use of force and better conduct but body cameras are only as good as the rules that we have in place to make sure that for example there's access to the video on those body cameras that it's being put to the use of accountability and I worry about that a great deal and I don't know whether to step in this or not but I'm going to because I very much appreciate LDF's comment on the New York body cameras so the policing project was asked by the NYPD to get public input into its body camera policy and we thought this is remarkable this is terrific this is an exercise in democratic policing we worked very hard over a five week period with all of the lawyers and the plaintiff groups from the stop and frisk litigation we heard from 30,000 folks 25,000 New Yorkers and 5,000 random people around the United States of America that just felt like they wanted to say something about the NYPD's body cam policy or hadn't filled out enough surveys that week and we heard from 50 organizations and we did a lot of work to write a report to the NYPD and the NYPD then responded to that public input with the policy so all of that story is great but as Sherlyn's comment and other organizations have pointed out the NYPD did not go in the direction that the public wanted them to go now we could talk about how to feel about that it's more complicated than it might look but there are aspects of that policy that we do need to worry about and of all departments policies in terms of when officers view the video how the public gets access to that video and we all ought to be engaged in those questions and making sure that the policies are in place reflect what it is we think ought to be the policies for many of us I think when we think about body cameras we're thinking about recording those encounters between the police and African Americans who have so much contact with the police but you know in your book that really the use of technology and adopting these different forms of technology to surveil Americans and police Americans goes well beyond race right can you speak to how we're being policed using these advanced technological so I have something to say that may be controversial about race and something to say about how we're all being policed and I'm just going to say both of them so it's very hard to know with policing how to talk about it in the following way so my former colleague Derek Bell African American male and critical race theorist had a view about race in the United States that he called his interest convergence theory and his theory was we're not going to deal with problems of race until we get people to see that all of their interests are implicated and and so you know it's important for me to realize for people to understand both that policing does not fall equally on all of society by any measure whatsoever but also that we are all liable to being policed and it's interesting that technology is actually changing that story because so this is the perfect example of the Supreme Court in the GPS case which is that you know law enforcement goes and they slap GPS on a car and they don't get a search warrant and the question is is it a search to you know slap GPS on somebody's car and follow them all around and the Supreme Court after just one terrible decision sort of permissive toward policing after another all of a sudden crack down and one of the questions that oral argument is you mean they could have put that GPS on my car and it's like oh hello this can affect me and we're seeing that around technology and it's important because policing has changed over the last two or three decades tremendously in ways that we have not taken account of so in an older version of techno of policing very much of it was driven by suspicion is somebody suspicious I'm going after the suspicious person and I agree with Sherilyn how we construct suspicion is complicated but that's the notion the notion of policing now is let's just keep an eye on everybody and we'll keep everybody in place it's a surveillance society and it's one happening without rules but it is interesting that you see these outbreaks of democratic policing happening around technology particularly out west so Oakland and Santa Clara and places that have thought well we need privacy boards now privacy boards by the way not use of force boards you know not stopping for sports but privacy boards but it is getting people focused on the fact that we need to pay attention to what's happening of policing and we need to do something about it and the one thing I'll say to bring that into a circle is but we shouldn't be naive about even the technologies because they too are going to be raised in just the same ways so if you're talking about license plate readers or you're talking about predictive policing that's all built on either algorithms that are using past crime data that it's going to be raised or license plate readers well you know these are these things on police cars that go around and suck up license plates I mean huge numbers of them and put them in a database that nobody's regulating how long those license plates are held there and you can sort of record where everybody's been well where are those police cars driving around the most and that's the license plates that are ending up in the system yeah and it's interesting in the context of privacy I'm always kind of interested in the Supreme Court and inconsistency on this right so the moments where the Supreme Court breaks out and recognizes that you know police officers have gone too far right so one is the cell phone issue of you know can you go through my cell phone no that seems like a problem right can you put the GP on my car that seems like a problem then you think about other privacy context that to me seem much more invasive the Supreme Court upholding the use of cheek swabs for people who are arrested right so they can get your DNA I mean look you can have my cell phone between my DNA and my cell phone which one do I you know it feels most private to me it's the DNA right but that's for people who are arrested right or the strip search the Florence you know free holders case from New Jersey right with the African American man driving the Jaguar he's actually a Jaguar dealer right who was arrested in strip search twice and the Supreme Court says well that's okay you have to make sure he's not a gang member or whatever right so what you see is the Supreme Court much more willing to address issues of privacy as you say Barry in context where they could see it happening to them or where it's in the home right and the privacy context for African Americans actually occur quite differently they occur on the street right they occur in the stop and frisk context they occur after arrest and those are places that the court can't see itself or in which the context just maybe is more unfamiliar and therefore they don't feel the sense of intrusion in the way they do in these other contexts and so even as we develop technology again we're always talking about closeness and proximity to understanding issues of invasion of privacy you know even of assault and brutality and that's going to require us opening up the stories which is why I'm really loving and I think people should really pay attention to what I actually think is a quite intentional project of Justice Sotomayor to in these dissents in these cases where she doesn't have to write them describing what this really means in Utah vs. Strife and then just the other day in the Salazar case and the reason I think it's a project worth paying attention to is because the case the other day Salazar Lamone was a case in which the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case so it wasn't a decision it was a substance so they denied cert in the case and usually don't have any decisions around you know grants or denials of cert but she took the you know made the decision to write out her dissent from in other words she wanted the Supreme Court to review the case so that's a step that she's taking that she doesn't have to take this is a case that involved a Mexican American man who was stopped in a car and he was here legally he was unarmed he had committed no crime but as he started walking back to his truck the officer shot him in the back and he lived and he but he was critically injured and the question is was whether or not the officer was you know immunized because he was reasonable and so forth so so she writes this dissent what was interesting to me was that justice Alito decided to write a concurrence to the decision to deny hearing there was no reason for him to do this so I thought it was Alito and Thomas and so I thought uh oh he's about to go in he's got something to say or he's gonna try to put Sotomayor in her place here we go you know sorry about her dissent and I said let me go back and read this this is about I braced myself and won really nothing it was like why did he write this it was short he said I write this to put this case in context and then he said this is of course a tragic set of circumstances the first thing I want to say is that the trial court tried to do the best it could I mean it was just very short and extremely polite and very much not what I expected and what I believe is that he felt the need to write it because her words in these cases it's starting to have resonance she may not be winning in terms of the votes but she's putting something out there that's why I'm calling it a project she's putting something out there she's putting a counter narrative out there that's what she's trying to do because they knew something that other justices on the court don't know and that narrative has power even when you're not necessarily winning the votes she's telling stories and stories are incredibly powerful and that's part of the reason it took me so long to write the book because getting the stories to tell people so that you read them and you just cringe and think that can't possibly be right the beginning of the book I think it's the beginning tell the story because you know how long ago I read the book but the story that you tell about a couple who are pulled over and who are searched after they're driving home from helping their daughter or son I don't remember one of the things I love about the story is that it's devastating actually just reading the story you just get drawn in because it's so devastating and can I to be honest I found myself hoping that these will not be black people that's what I thought I knew but I said Barry's going to switch it up on me because I was hoping beyond hope and so you should tell the story because people may not have read it and it is so powerful I'd love to tell the story but I do want to say there are a lot of stories in the book and they're not all black people the third chapter of the book chapter 2 you can figure that out at home is the story of a couple who are subjected to a SWAT raid and the police come in because I'm going to tell this quickly and then tell that horrible story federal express drops off a package and the cops are told that it's got drugs so they get a warrant to go in and search for the drugs and they have a SWAT raid and they go in after the box and the police know this when they do this that drug dealers are sending packages across the country leaving them on porches to get picked up by the drug dealers and anyway they kill the inhabitants dogs they lock up the mother-in-law by the stove who's cooking pasta sauce and what they don't know is that it's the mayor of the town and you can just imagine that who damn moment when somebody taps somebody on the back and says and you can just see them creeping out of the house so that there's kind of nobody in there by the time that happens